As a kid, there was absolutely nothing better than convincing my mom to buy some Lucky Charms brand frosted toasted oat cereal & marshmallows.

Conquest of the Moon (Viking Press, 1953, Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Fred Whipple) describes a lunar expedition that could be accomplished with the technology of 1950.

Von Braun and company left no detail unexamined. One of the less obvious categories that they put a lot of effort into is navigation, or in this context, astrogation.

I just read a short note, Earliest Triassic ichthyosaur fossils push back oceanic reptile origins, from Current Biology 33:159-179, March 2023, Benjamin Kear, Victoria Engelschion, Oyvind Hammer, Aubrey Roberts, Jorn Hurum.

Back when my kids were still young and innocent enough to want to go trick-or-treating, for a few years we went to some suburban friends cul-de-sac-filled neighborhood.

Bought some nail clippers from Amazon. The package had a SHIPPING SRAL

I ran across an engineering aphorism or principle called “Gall’s Law”:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

What an unbelievably stupid tie-in.

GPP is the General Purpose Preprocessor, a macro preprocessor for various forms of structured and unstructured text.

A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. There’s usually a few conditions on what the program can do, like not reading it’s source code during execution.

I wrote what I believe to be the first non-vacuous quine ever in the GPP language.

The summer I was 17, 1978, I was the staff cook at Camp Thunderbird, a Boy Scout camp.