Steven Hoying

1. Ham is always overrated. It pairs poorly with mashed potatoes. 2. If your main protein on Easter Sunday is something you'd be allowed to eat on Good Friday, you're doing it wrong.

@tedfrank The combination of (1) the online Anytime Test widely expanding the pool of potential players and (2) the availability of online resources (even J! specific ones) has greatly increased contestant quality overall, even in the last few years.

The Jeopardy players used to be much worse.

Robot umps have been lonnnnnng overdue.

𓅓𓂋 𓊪𓂋𓅂𓋴𓇋𓂧𓅂𓈖𓏏…

Let pitchers hit again.

Hey look it's Rollie Fingers.

Those wheels you’re looking at are 0.75 millimeters thick. That’s half the thickness of a US dime. Each one was carved from a single block of aluminum, and NASA sent six of them to Mars knowing they’d eventually shred. Curiosity was built for a 2-year mission. It landed in August 2012, and by December that year NASA had already extended the mission indefinitely. Thirteen years and 35.5 kilometers later, the rover is still going, but the wheels started cracking just 14 months in. The damage came faster than anyone at JPL predicted. Sharp embedded rocks were punching straight through the skin between the treads. So NASA assembled a Wheel Wear Tiger Team (a crisis problem-solving tradition that goes back to Apollo 13) and got to work. In 2017, they uploaded a traction control algorithm from Earth that adjusts each wheel’s speed in real time based on the terrain, reducing force on the front wheels by 20%. They rerouted the rover to softer ground and started driving backward when possible, because pulling wheels over rocks produces less force than pushing them into rocks. The wildest part: if enough treads snap off, Curiosity is designed to find a sharp rock on Mars and use it to deliberately rip out the damaged inner section of its own wheel. JPL tested this on a replica rover and found Curiosity can keep driving on just the outer third. They predict this won’t be needed until around 2034. Every 1,000 meters, the rover pulls over and uses the camera on its robotic arm to photograph its own wheels so engineers on Earth can count every crack. Each wheel also has tiny holes that spell “JPL” in Morse code, which Curiosity uses to measure distance by photographing its own tracks in the dirt. These photos directly changed the next rover. When NASA built Perseverance, engineers 3D-printed about 70 different tread designs before landing on 48 curved treads instead of Curiosity’s 24, with thicker skin. They tested the new wheels over 60 kilometers and got zero damage by Curiosity’s original failure definition. “A boring graph with no data on it,” as one JPL engineer put it. A $2.5 billion machine doing self-surgery with rocks on another planet because the mission outlasted its design by 6x.

@JohnDDraper Congrats on the big win for your neighborhood.

Could be worse....we could have lost to an optimum #wiskysucks

Cheer up, Buckeye Nation, it could be worse.

.........what?

Back in the NCAA Tourney AND we get Raftery? Double win

this is actually insane > be tech guy in australia > adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live > not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4 > pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA > feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold > zero background in biology > identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets > design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch > genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own > need ethics approval to administer it > red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine > 3 months, finally approved > drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection > tumor halves > coat gets glossy again > dog is alive and happy > professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?” one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline. we are going to cure so many diseases. I dont think people realize how good things are going to get

We are so proud of our Lady Raiders on an amazing season! It’s been a record breaking year with our first ever State Runner Up Title and the most wins in a season!

If Louisiana Tech runs the table but then loses their conference championship (one of them anyway), I would say 7-5 Auburn gets in ahead of them.

Coming soon from id Software: Pregnant Doom! Knee-Deep in the Diapers Chores of Hell Infernal Racket Thy Milk Consumed

Ayn Rand's heroes were fantastical übermensches but her villains were very, very real.

@geoffschwartz Did you watch the 2011 national championship?

I can confidently say this is the worst half of college basketball I’ve ever watched.

Fun fact: if you make the SAT really tough and make it the primary criterion for admission to elite colleges, it's harder for rich folks to game the admissions system.

Parenting hack: always reset the clocks before bed when you fall back, but never change the clocks until everybody's up after you spring forward.

The '90s were a foreign country.