aeronode

Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle’s huge rocket boosters could fail … [H]e had paid the stiff price often exacted of whistle-blowers. Thiokol cut him off from space work, and he was shunned by colleagues and managers … He later said he was sustained by a single gesture of support. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, hugged him after his appearance before the commission. ‘She was the only one.’

(Source: The New York Times)

People seem to have a strange concept of how luck works and how the universe/some deity/karma/their lucky shoe or how ‘they deserve it’ will mean that things will eventually fall into place for them. You are ‘due’ to win the lottery or will get swept away by prince charming any day now. ‘You deserve it’ (as if others don’t).

(Source: fluentin3months.com)

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance to such a degree that he feared suicide, and at the same time firmly laying down his own particular, definite path in life.

The atmosphere [Saturn’s moon Titan] is so thick and the gravity so low that humans could fly through it by flapping ‘wings’ attached to their arms

(Source: Wikipedia)

My boss won’t let me make espressos. I need a year more, maybe two, before he’s ready to let customers drink my shots undiluted by milk. And I’ll need another whole year of practice after that if I want to be able to froth milk for cappuccinos.

(Source: The Wall Street Journal)

Some of Warren [Buffett]’s proposals on taxes strike people as extreme. What’s interesting is that people who disagree with them rarely think through them from the perspective, ‘This guy must know something, he’s pretty smart, maybe I can learn something that would augment my knowledge.’ Instead you read letters to the editor that start out ‘What Warren Buffett can’t seem to understand is…’ Believe me, he understands the other side’s point of view. If anyone ever understood taxes it is Warren Buffett. Assuming that someone who disagrees with you must be dumb can lead you to seriously underestimate people and make really dumb decisions yourself.

(Source: aliceschroeder.com)

[There exists] a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.

(Source: Wikipedia)

As Google has demonstrated, computerized systems that replace human drivers are now largely workable and could greatly limit human error, which causes most of the 33,000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries that now occur each year on the nation’s roads.

(Source: The New York Times)