Eric Houck

LFG! #704

@jwhitey98 @GCKUSSfan Well written. Abt is looking down, smiling.

A piece I always wanted to write, but never knew if I would. Wout Van Aert wins Paris-Roubaix, finally, thanks to absent friends, the scars that came before, and a nation that never stopped believing. Free to read: nytimes.com/athletic/71911…

So happy for Wout.

RIGHT INTO MY VEINS

Soviet bombs?

@JudgeBobOrr @kellymccullen Here's her take; would love to know your thoughts... ednc.org/perspective-wh…

@eahouck @kellymccullen Of course. Ann is very knowledgable. It's really unfair to put non-lawyers in a position to analyze 244 pages of legal jargon and 30 plus years of case history, so I can give the State Line panel some slack.

In all due respect to the panelists on State Lines from PBS NC @kellymccullen, none of whom are attorneys, the discussion about the NC Supreme Court decision in Leandro, was simply out of left and right field and barely in the ballpark. No one really understood the decision.

It me!

This mission gives and gives.....

OK, I committed to ride in 24 Hours of Booty in Charlotte this summer to raise cancer-fighting money. Check out my fundraising page - events.24foundation.org/fundraiser/714… . I'd honor any donations.

@JudgeBobOrr @kellymccullen Right but she’s a voice I’d trust on this. Wonder if you feel the same?

@eahouck @kellymccullen She wasn't on the show.

@SMASEY Swan swan Hennessy.

Kind of insane that I’ve worked at four different places where I named every drink on the menu after an R.E.M. song and no one has noticed

Never change, Moon Pie; never change.

@ElectricQuantX The Springer series is excellent. I still have my multiple regression text!

These showed up early. Now I have to show up. Next up: - Probability review, properly - Information & Conditioning - σ-algebras included - Tighten up Brownian motion - Then right into Stochastic Differential Equations No shortcuts from here.

I love watching people learn stuff in real time; I'll probably learn something, too!

If you're under 53 years old, you have never once been alive while a human was farther than 250 miles from Earth. Tonight, four astronauts are heading 252,000 miles out. That's a thousand times farther than any person has gone in your lifetime. The 250-mile ceiling is where the International Space Station floats. Every astronaut since December 1972 has been stuck in that zone. Spacewalks, science experiments, cool photos from orbit, sure. But nobody left the neighborhood. The last crew to go farther was Apollo 17. December 1972. Nixon was president. The internet didn't exist. Cell phones were 11 years away. The youngest member of that crew is now 90 years old. The farthest any human has ever been from Earth is 248,655 miles. The Apollo 13 crew set that number in 1970, and they didn't mean to. Their oxygen tank blew up, and the emergency route home took them farther out than anyone before or since. Tonight's crew will break that record on purpose. And the crew itself. Victor Glover becomes the first Black astronaut to leave Earth's neighborhood. Christina Koch becomes the first woman. Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian fighter pilot, becomes the first non-American to do so. When they come home, they'll slam into the atmosphere at 25,000 mph, faster than any human has ever traveled. The Moon's south pole has ice. Water ice, sitting in craters so deep that sunlight hasn't hit them in billions of years. A 2024 NASA study found way more of it than anyone expected. You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which gives you rocket fuel, breathable air, and drinking water, all made on the Moon instead of hauled up from Earth. George Sowers at Colorado School of Mines calculated that Moon-made fuel could shave $12 billion off a single trip to Mars. The Moon is a gas station on the road to Mars. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced last week a $20 billion plan to build a permanent base at the South Pole over the next seven years, with landings every six months. China is developing its own lunar lander and spacesuit, aiming for a crewed landing by 2030. The Artemis program has burned through $93 billion so far, and the first actual surface landing is penciled in for 2028. There's a real question of who gets there first this time around. Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon in December 1972 as part of Apollo 17. He's 90. Asked about it this week, he sounded pretty relaxed. "Mars is attainable," he said. "We're humans. That's what we've always done."

Unicorn pride! #ncssm

Every time Duke loses, an angel gets his wings.

“To hate like this is to be happy forever.”