We are entering an epoch where it may become easy for small pieces of self-replicating code to permanently infest Internet-connected devices in a way that is hard to undo. Such a world would be annoying to live in and we should take steps to forestall it.
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On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
Introduction A Note on Apollo I. The Rocket II. The Capsule III. The Orbit IV. Gateway V. The Lander VI. Refueling VII. Conclusion Notes
Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can’t get gluten-free toast.
Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
It was a dark day when Islam met the loudspeaker. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB.
“From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go…
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…