I know Elon Musk and others are working on it, but remembering this tragedy also makes me feel especially sad that the U.S. doesn't have independent human space flight capability right now.

When I was a senior in high school, I read Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne and gave a presentation on it for my Honors Physics class (incidentally, in the same classroom that Jake Gyllenhaal attempts to have a cosmological discussion with Noah Wyle in "Donnie Darko")

There's really no point in pandering to white supremacist neo-Confederates in the 21st century because there's no chance they'll vote for a Democrat anyway

I honestly don't understand why everyone uses exponential curves for their models when sigmoidal curves seem to better model reality for lots of phenomena: population growth, language change, diffusion of innovation… and perhaps even the growth of capitalist economies.

I have no idea what I'm doing. The world just swirls and loops all around me, and I stand mesmerized, mouth agape, drool oozing from the corner of my mouth, all sense gone.