Francis X Govers III

My new book is #1 (print) and #4 (kindle) on Amazon!

I'm honestly SHOCKED at how the general public has NO IDEA Artemis II is taking humans out to the moon and will be the furthest humans have ever flown. Every non-space nerd I've talked to has no idea. WE GOTTA GET PEOPLE STOKED!!!! THESE FOUR HUMANS ARE FLYING TO THE MOON!!!

@alt_w_v_g I live in the country. No cell phone service. Sirius works there.

Ran some diligence on SiriusXM this weekend Not because anyone asked Because my 14-year-old nephew connected his phone to my car via Bluetooth, played a Spotify playlist, and asked me what the "SXM" button was for I didn't have an answer So I pulled the 10-K SiriusXM is an $8.56B revenue company with nearly $10B in debt and a $7.4B market cap Read that again The debt is larger than the company Their business model, simplified: 1. Pay automakers to install radios nobody asked for 2. Give every new car buyer a free trial they didn't request 3. Hope they forget to cancel 4. Charge them $25.99/month for something their phone does for $10.99 That's it. That's the model. They have 33M subscribers. Sounds impressive until they lost 301,000 self-pay subscribers last year. And hundreds of thousands the year before that. Revenue has declined three consecutive years The average subscriber is 35-64, male, household income over $150K. Over half have been paying for 10+ years. These aren't loyal customers These are people whose spouses haven't noticed the $25.99 charge on the Amex yet The crown jewel of the portfolio is Howard Stern. They pay him roughly $100M a year. He works three days a week. His show averages 125K daily listeners. That's $800 per listener per year My analyst did the math three times because he thought he was wrong He wasn't For that price, you could buy each listener a Spotify family plan, an Audible subscription, and still have enough left for AirPods Speaking of Spotify. Nearly 290M premium subscribers. Growing double digits. $10.99/month. Available on every device ever made. SiriusXM. 33M subscribers. Shrinking. $25.99/month. Requires a satellite. Spotify's full-year revenue grew 19%. SiriusXM's declined 2%. Spotify trades at 74x earnings. SiriusXM trades at 5x. The market is not confused about which direction these businesses are headed Their growth strategy is called the "trial funnel." There are 7.3M people driving cars with free SiriusXM trials. The conversion rate is not publicly disclosed. Probably because it's embarrassing They have 180M "enabled vehicles" in the U.S. They have 33M subscribers. That's an 18% attach rate on hardware they already paid to install. 82% of the cars with their radios in them are generating zero revenue In any other industry an 18% hit rate gets you fired In satellite radio, it gets you a seat on the NYSE Adjusted EBITDA margin is 31%. Looks healthy. Until you realize "adjusted" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in a company that posted a $2.08B net loss the year prior. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.73B that same year The distance between those two numbers is called addbacks And they're working overtime 2026 guidance: flat revenue, flat EBITDA, slightly fewer subscribers. The CEO called this stability and meaningful progress. On Wall Street, we call this managed decline Warren Buffett owns 35.4% of this company. This is the most confusing part. The man who said "be fearful when others are greedy" bought a satellite radio company in the age of Bluetooth. His entry was a Liberty Media arb play that accidentally became a long-term hold. The stock is down over 50% from its highs. I don't know why he's still in. You don't know why. His shareholders definitely don't know why. The bull thesis: SiriusXM has 33M people who have been paying $15/month for a decade and have no plans to stop. That's $6B in recurring revenue from people who may not even remember they're subscribed. Churn is 1.5%. Lower than most SaaS companies. The bear thesis: Every teenager alive today has never used a car radio Both are probably right SiriusXM's competitive moat is not content. It's not technology. It's not brand. It's the 47 minutes it takes to cancel over the phone SiriusXM isn't a bad company. It's a case study in what happens when your moat is consumer apathy and your growth strategy requires General Motors. Plz fix. Thx. Sent from my iPhone

🇺🇸🇯🇵 Everyone in Japan knows "Take Me Home, Country Roads" by John Denver. We cover it all the time so I hope our American friends can appreciate it.

@PollSter_Mike1 Darby O’Gill and the Little People

Can you name ONE movie for Sean Connery that is NOT Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 1989, The Rock 1996, or James Bond Franchise'?

@DannyDrinksWine I loved this movie. Lots of fun and Garner pulls it all off perfectly

On this day, 57 years ago, Burt Kennedy's "Support Your Local Sheriff!" (1969) was released in the USA. James Garner was initially warned that comedy westerns won't make any money, but he went ahead and made "Support Your Local Sheriff!" (1969) with a shoestring budget of $750,000. It was considered a "bomb" as it didn't do much business in the first week of its release. United Artists wanted to shelve it. But James Garner said to them, “You put up $10,000 and l will put up $10,000, and we'll run it in one theater.” The result was impressive. it ran on Wilshire Boulevard for one month. The movie gained audience through "word of mouth" within the end of the week. Then they re-released it and the movie did well everywhere. It was the 20th most popular movie in the US box office in 1969.

@yinyang_yo_ @h_thoreson How about we live the the house we paid off

"Property taxes will push grandma out her house!" The way the suburban model was supposed to work is that retirees sell their houses to downsize, and younger working professionals buy their house This was supposed to help drive support for the development of smaller houses

The Pinwheel galaxy. Picture taken with a seestar S50 bortle 4. 3 hours of 30 second exposure. Got my EQ mount working now

Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild. A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute. Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home. So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room. The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely. The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running. Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.

Working on the SLAM Handbook has been one of the highlights of my career — I’m grateful to have collaborated with such an incredible group of co-editors and contributors. The handbook is now free and open-source: dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/… [1/n]

@AuthorGFAllen I generally have the first scene and the ending. In one case the ending was in book 2…. Its the in between stuff that flows from that. Sometime in surprising ways.

When writing your book, do you already have the ending in mind, or do you just go with the flow?

@TigerBites About eight. Or Nine. I think. Ten. Definitely 10.

Cavendish Experiment, conducted in 1798, worked on the principle of force-torque equilibrium. By using a torsion balance, Henry Cavendish measured the incredibly weak gravitational attraction between lead spheres in a laboratory setting.

@lady_valor_07 Oh not divorced. 42 years of marriage

@lady_valor_07 Have not bern to Australia or New Zealand. Or broken a bone. No elephant. But all the rest. Plus flown in an airship, been in an airshow, attended five shuttle launches and met five people who walked on the Moon

7 for me!

@KristinFisher open.spotify.com/track/0ICAdw4z…. Witnesses waltz space launch song

I’ve been kinda quiet because I’ve been cooking up something special for NASA’s upcoming Artemis II. Today I’m finally announcing Launch Party — a cinematic livestream built to restore rocket launches to their rightful place as pop culture events. Produced with founding sponsors Lockheed Martin, Firefly Aerospace, Courtyard by Marriott Titusville, Playalinda Brewing Company, and Core Surf. We’ll be broadcasting live from The Space Bar — a rooftop venue overlooking the launch pad — for Artemis II, humanity’s first crewed voyage to the Moon in more than half a century. This is live launch coverage reimagined: No anchor desk. No scripts. No acronym soup. Because space doesn’t need to be explained. It needs to be EXPERIENCED Press Release → launchpartylive.com/press-release.… @LMSpace @FireflySpace

14 Brutal Mistakes New Authors Make in 2026 1. A bad book cover. It will kill your sales before anyone even reads the first sentence. 2. A bad first sentence. Or first paragraph. Or first page. Or last page. Or any page. Don't write shit. 3. Trying to find an agent. Don't waste the time and energy. I had 500 rejections before I found my agent. This was in 1997, ten years before Amazon created the Kindle. If it's a good book, self-publish it on Amazon. Sell a ton and agents will seek you out. 4. Entering writing contests. Don't. Just don't. You should never spend money to be read, especially by folks who make money running contests. I say this as a former Writer's Digest judge. 5. Signing deals with vanity presses. A real publisher doesn't charge you for anything. If a publisher wants money, run. Which circles back to: 6. Don't pay for help. Self-pubbing on Amazon is free. Formatting can be challenging, so pay for that if needed, or take a day and learn how to do it yourself. Exception; unless you are a graphic artist, you should find a pro to do your cover art. Everything else is a slippery slope. Editors for hire? Join a local writers' group instead. Proofreaders? They're helpful, but AI is free. Manuscript doctors? If they were good, they'd be making money selling books, not charging authors. 7. Reading your reviews. I've had thousands of bad reviews. Everyone has an opinion. Don't take it personally. But if you aren't averaging at least 3.5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads, then maybe your book isn't ready for readers and you need to work on getting better. 8. Going wide. You should stick with Amazon KDP and enroll in KDP Select. You earn more than selling on all the other platforms combined. It's annoying that Amazon KU requires exclusivity, but that's the way it goes. 9. Going to writing conventions and conferences and expecting to sell enough books to pay for the trip. If you want to travel and get on some panels and hang out with peers, have at it. They're fun. But unless you are already a name author, you're not going to move many books. 10. Book signings. They are soul crushing. If fans want an autograph, offer signed books for sale on eBay. I signed at over 700 bookstores. It was great to meet readers and booksellers, but it was brutally hard and did not move the sales needle much. 11. Hoping for awards. You don't need the approval of your peers. Respect the fans you make, treat everyone with kindness, but don't worry if the cool kids clique doesn't accept you. They actually aren't that cool. They are frightened, needy, and riddled with self-doubt; just like you. 12. Making bookmarks. No one wants your bookmark. Have you ever bought a book because the author gave you a bookmark? No. Stop spending money on bookmarks and postcards and business cards and giveaways. They don't work. 13. Comparing yourself to other authors. Envy is the enemy of self-worth. You are unique in the world, and your journey is yours alone. The only one you should compare yourself to is the person you were a year ago. Are you a better writer? Have you gotten more words on the page? Are you working even harder? Compete with that person, not your peers. 14. Giving up. Life is hard. Everyone has been telling you that your whole life, because it's true. Writing is a brutal career, and it has ups and downs... mostly downs. You only lose if you stop trying. Don't be a loser. Work like this shit matters, because it does. You can't expect readers, and the world, to care if you don't care. Fight like hell.

Most drones and robots are "blind" the moment they lose GPS. If they’re off by even 10cm, they crash. I built a Sensor Fusion engine from scratch in C++17 that tracks 3D movement with just 3.23cm of error—completely in real-time. Here is how I used an Error-State Kalman Filter (ESKF) to solve the "drift" problem: 👇 #Robotics #Tech

You may be old But are you this old

Took this photo of the Rosette Nebula in my backyard. Bortle 4 sky.

Jut got a new telescope. The Seestar S50 is a robot telescope that self guides. This is a 40 minute exposure of Bodes Galaxy