Mark Svendsen

Victor Glover failed an engineering class his sophomore year of college. His dad talked him out of joining the Navy SEALs and told him an engineering degree and pilot wings might make him an astronaut someday. Right now Glover is somewhere between the Earth and the Moon. He grew up in Pomona, California. Played quarterback in high school, wrestled well enough to place sixth at the state championship, won Athlete of the Year. Went to Cal Poly for engineering and played both sports at the college level. He got his Navy wings in 2001 and started flying F/A-18 fighter jets off aircraft carriers. His squadron deployed on the USS John F. Kennedy to fight in Iraq, the carrier’s final deployment ever. Twenty-four combat missions. His commanding officer gave him the callsign “Ike,” short for “I Know Everything.” He became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base and over his career flew more than 40 types of aircraft, 3,000 hours in the air, everything from a Korean War-era Soviet MiG-15 to the Goodyear blimp. More than 400 landings on a moving carrier deck. He earned three master’s degrees in three years. He once told Cal Poly’s president that the hardest thing he ever chose to do was walk in space. The second hardest was wrestling practice. He applied to NASA in 2009 and got rejected. Applied again in 2013 while working in the U.S. Senate for John McCain. NASA’s head of flight crew operations called him. He missed the call. Frantically dialed back. Eight people got in that year out of more than 6,000 applicants. NASA put him in the pilot seat for the first operational SpaceX Crew Dragon flight in 2020. He spent 168 days on the International Space Station and walked in space four times. Last June he went back to Cal Poly to accept an honorary doctorate. His wife Dionna and their oldest daughter Genesis both walked across the stage at the same ceremony to pick up their own degrees. Three days ago Glover launched from Kennedy Space Center. The crew will fly past the far side of the Moon on Monday and travel about 252,000 miles from home, breaking a distance record that Apollo 13 set fifty-six years ago. They come back at roughly 25,000 mph. He has four daughters. His callsign is still Ike.

1/ Insane: A single injection into the inner ear reversed deafness in all ten patients. Some started hearing again within weeks. Gene therapy just crossed a threshold we thought was still years away. Lets dig into this breakthrough and how it works 🧵

There are corrections and there are CORRECTIONS.

I member.

These two images were taken by @astro_reid only minutes apart. The stark difference is the result of camera settings. In the first, a longer shutter speed let in much more light from Earth, while the shorter shutter speed in the second emphasizes our planet's nighttime glow.

This looks like it's a daytime shot, but, it's actually taken from the dark side of Earth, with the planet illuminated by moonlight. This lets faint details like the aurora, stars and the sodium layer show up without over exposing the planet.

When I commute to Orlando now from Jacksonville to go flying. I literally press the button and 2.5 hours later I am at the airport. Its like riding the train .. almost. Not exactly .. but its a commuting game changer. I literally make commutes later at night than I ever would have without FSD.

•Be this kid. •Tell CNN we're going to the frickin moon. •Random guy posts a video of you on X. •@NASAAdmin sees the clip and wants to send you a bag of NASA gear. Epic victory.

@HarveykJones @SpaceAbhi @johnkrausphotos NASA TV, also on YouTube, is exactly what you want

@SpaceAbhi @johnkrausphotos I just wish they had a stream that was purely just Mission Control audio without all the cheesy over the top American commentators

Wow. The transparency on the voice loops here is…really good. Trust me: This is a real treat for all those that are not Mission Control operators. You are listening to the heart of the action.

Seattle mandated higher per-task pay for app drivers—but tips dropped, unpaid idle time rose, and drivers completed fewer jobs. Those offsets wiped out the gains, leaving monthly earnings unchanged. Price controls on wages do not work, explains Cato's @jeffreyamiron. ow.ly/Kosk50YAVU4

FSD Supervised is 7x safer than the average US driver tesla.com/fsd/safety

To my American friends, I want to speak from the heart, because this moment truly moved me as a Japanese citizen. When President Trump made that Pearl Harbor joke, it wasn’t just humor to us. It felt like a weight I’d carried my whole life was suddenly lifted. My chest tightened, and honestly, tears came close. For 80 long years, we Japanese have lived under a heavy shadow — the constant expectation to apologize, to reflect, to stay in “guilt mode.” Even though we’re the closest of allies, that old wound never fully healed. We felt bound by the past, by the Constitution America helped write for us, always a little smaller, always needing to prove we were sorry enough. But in that single joke, Trump did something powerful. He turned a painful history into a shared laugh between equals. It was like he was saying: “Hey, it was a long time ago. We’re good. Let’s move forward — as brothers.” No more endless atonement. No more living in the shadow of being the “former enemy.” The curse broke. Japan feels free to stand tall again. Right now, cherry blossoms are blooming beautifully all across Japan. 🌸 This spring, the sakura feels like a perfect symbol — a fresh beginning. Not two nations stuck in old roles, but true equals, proud brothers, shoulder to shoulder, ready to build the future together. To the American people: We don’t want to be subordinates forever. We want to be your real partners — strong, proud, and loyal. The kind of allies who ride or die together. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, America. The strongest alliance in the world is rising again — as equals, as brothers, forever. #PhoenixRising 🇯🇵🤝🇺🇸🌸

This is such an unbelievably dark timeline. Would have been too marcabre and far-fetched an episode for Black Mirror in 2012.

The US and Japan have the most underrated mutual obsession on the planet. Japan worships American BBQ culture. Texas-style brisket restaurants in Tokyo have 3-hour waits. American Barbeque, a chain in Osaka, charges $80 a plate and sells out nightly. Japan's wagyu beef revolution was literally built by importing American cattle genetics in the 1800s. Americans worship Japanese food culture in the exact same way. Omakase spots in NYC and LA run $300-500 a head with 6-week waitlists. Ramen went from a $7 lunch to a $22 "experience." Every serious American pitmaster now studies yakitori technique. This tells you everything about why the US-Japan alliance is the most durable in geopolitics. Trade agreements and military bases hold countries together on paper. Genuine cultural admiration, where both sides look at the other's food and think "I want to be part of that," is what makes it stick. A Japanese creator looking at a photo of guys grilling steaks in a backyard and saying "someday I'd like to join" is the most honest expression of soft power that exists. No government program produced that. A grill and 40 pounds of meat did.

If you’re seeing a bunch of Japanese posts, here are some fun facts: Japan has more daily active users and more time spent on X than any other country in the world. Over two thirds of the country is monthly active on X. X in Japan has one of the highest penetration rates of any social network in history.

The @SeattleTimes article says: "Q: What can WA lawmakers do to lower gas prices? A: Not much." That is FALSE. WA Lawmakers could repeal the Climate Commitment Act, and lower the direct gas tax. Combined, these account for more than $1.18 on every gallon of gas paid by Washingtonians.

Jevons paradox is happening in real time. Companies, especially outside of tech, are realizing that they can now afford to take on software projects that they wouldn’t have been able to tackle before because now AI lets them do so. We’re going to start to use software for all new things in the economy because it’s incrementally cheaper to produce. Marketing teams at big companies will have engineers helping to automate workflows. Engineers in life sciences and healthcare will automate research. Small businesses will hire engineers for the first to build better digital experiences. And as long as AI agents still require a human who understands what to prompt, how to review when an agent goes off the rails, how it guide back, how to maintain the system that was built, how to fix the ongoing bugs, and more, we will still have humans managing these agents. This is why all the advice you get of not going into engineering is wrong. The world is going to increasingly be made up of software, and the people that understand it best will be in a strong economic position. This will happen in other roles as well where output goes up and demand increases.

Americans really, really do not like progressive ideology. They liked liberal ideology. When liberalism gave way to progressivism, Americans started to walk away.

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.

The Star Trek brand has been damaged this last decade, under Alex Kurtzman 's watch, due to three major failures: -A distortion of Roddenberry's vision. -A major emphasis on the message rather than on the story. -A rejection of the built in fanbase in favor of a fanbase that ultimately did not exist. In the future, I'll write an article to explain in detail how things like bad writing and the change of aesthetics and whatnot fall into these three categories.