Clarity of communication is a very important part of any human undertaking, especially so for technically difficult things like spaceflight where precision to seven or eight decimal places is the bare minimum for numerical quantities and ambiguity in written or verbal communication can be the difference between success and failure for machines and life and death for people.

I wouldn't say that politically-mandated homophones are innocuous here. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

If we are mature enough as human beings to understand the importance of clarity of speech, then we are also mature enough to not change our vocabulary every few years to keep with with the euphemism treadmill or to keep ahead of an ever-shifting list of taboos defined by a small minority of people whose incentive structure has word games at its base and mission success as an afterthought.

I try not to make my profession or my job into my entire identity for my whole self, but when I am on the clock I do take professional exception to bullshit that stands in the way of the mission objective while adding nothing objective toward its completion. The higher paygrades can argue about the subjective stuff so long as they stay out of the way of the real work.

Probably because they can't afford to pay for the launch themselves.

I'm spitballing here but I'd guess a launch to mars requires a falcon heavy fully expendable...something like $200m or more?

Rounding error if you're the US military and even NASA but not so much if you're ESA with 1/3 the budget of NASA.

They may also need to use the DSN. Not sure if ESAs network has the same 360 degree coverage in longitude as NASA does.

The natural antonym of unmanned is manned.

The natural antonym of uncrewed is crewed.

"Crewed" sounds identical to "crude" in every accent of English I am aware of.

And it has always sounded dumb for a premier space agency to speak of "crude missions" to anywhere.

Doubly so when some of the most famous words uttered by said agency's astronauts were "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Only the pathologically offended or the pathologically misogynistic would interpret that statement to apply to only half the planet.

It's pbs, not npr. I blame millionaires and billionaires for swapping those letters around right under your nose.

None of it is accurate unless the writer's job/life/whatever depends on it. And even then accuracy comes in shades at best.

I've seen fundamental errors of fact slip into legal proceedings. They weren't material to the argument, just context, in the instance I saw. And it wasnâ(TM)t worth anyone's time to try to get it fixed. But it was probably the only official record of that backgrounf context that was ever going to be made. And it was factually wrong.

Reality is either experienced directly or read about indirectly. And both ways are squishier and less rigid than you might like.

I have (and you probably do too) enough stuff under your kitchen sink and in your garage to cause unfathomable trajedies if you out your mind to it and were so inclined.

And yet the world is not a cavalcade of catastrophes.

Similarly, there are more guns than people around here. And yet people getting shot is a rare event confined to a few places with lots of other problems already present.

There is no problem. There are only gullible and/or power hungry control freaks in government.

Being in the firearms business without an FFL will make you a human doing illegal things. Even if you do it with a file and hand-crank drill.

The problem, as you may have guessed, is not that off-the-books firearms manufacturing is illegal. The problem is that the state is getting lazy and doesn't want to enforce its laws. It wants shortcuts, and consequences be damned.

The charitable explanation is that the people who comprise the state are also lazy. They therefore believe the designated scapegoat (phones, social media, ai, cnc machines) are indeed the source of their problems. Not cultural rot, not lax standards in schools, not anything that's hard to fix. So attack the easy target and all will be well.

The conciseness of C and terse C++.

The performance of the former. Perhaps by excising some aspects of the latter.

Introspection. Generics. Named function parameters (honestly zero impact on run time since this entirely solvable at compile time and no changes to abi required).

Curly braces and semicolons. Because I'm not writing code for 80 column punch cards and occasionally it is useful to place two statements onto one line for conciseness and readability.

Deterministic memory handling and bare metal access when needed.

Rust doesn't check very many of those boxes. Python checks almost none of them (though the seamless lists are quite pretty).

That's why I'm still writing C++ and see absolutely no reason to port my half a million lines of code to the new hotness of the day.

Star trek is not fundamentally "left wing".

In its glory days it had left-wing elements and rightwing elements. Starry-eyed communist utopia and downright nazi racialism. But it was fundamentally apolitical and not partisan. Not team red or team blue. Not even team human either. Just team hard work, perseverance, and optimism in the face of danger or of the unknown.

At its best it was good because it set you up to think interesting thoughts. It did not tell you which thoughts you must think.

Strange new worlds I genuinely enjoy watching. I liked the first two seasons of discovery as well. I thought the title sequence was an absolute work of art. But then they went really really dumb around season 3, and by the time they literally had a whole scene about whats-her-face whining about her pronouns In The 32nd Century! and other inward-looking teenage angst (as opposed to ya know...an optimistic outward-looking future of human growth and exploration), I just turned it off for good.

Colloqual "bounce" = irl "fail to get captured, and go around one more time, and probably die of resource depletion along the way.

What's that you say? Scapegoating some designated bogeyman is a smokescreen and a red herring? No one is immune to the dark side of human nature, even if they're on team blue or on team red? Liberty and self-rule require eternal vigilance against not only the enemy without, not only the enemy within, but also again the enemy within oneself?

Naw.

Blame the fox news/the billionaires/the iphones and the facebooks instead. Burn them at the stake and eternal paradise on earth is right around the corner. Pinky swear.

Only if someone bothers to read the article *and* understand it *and* care enough to call out the publication.

A lot of predicates there.

The guy who wrote The Americans was supposedly asked specifically when he joined the CIA after college if he was in it just for getting ideas for a writing career. He lied. Obviously.

End result? Nice yarn. Total science fiction with regards to the omnidisciplinary genius spy stuff, but a good way to scratch an itch for 80s nostalgia.

and has a lot of empty space...very lightweight.