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I’ve always been perplexed that the Soviets bothered to copy our Space Shuttle. The shuttle was a terrible design, it made no economic sense, it was unsafe, unreliable, and a great example of design by committee and execution by democracy. The Soviets’ version, Buran, was way better than ours. It could fly unmanned and even land itself, something it did on its only flight. Ours theoretically had an autoland system, but the one time it was tried, it was clear early on that it was going to botch the landing, so the commander took over. Buran, although it only ever…
Today is my youngest nephew’s sixth birthday. A week before, I took a box to the dollar store and filled it up with toys I thought he might like. Then I stopped at the post office on my way home from work, proud of myself for planning so far ahead. I wanted to use the self service kiosk, so I didn’t bother to address the box, since the machine would print out a giant label that would cover up the address anyway. I simply wrote “Happy Birthday!” on the side of the box. It started pouring rain just as I…