Tag Archives: hitting the books

Hitting the Books: How to huck a human into low Earth orbit

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Astronauts may get the glory for successful spaceflights but they’d never even get off the ground if not for the folks at Mission Control. In Shuttle, Houston: My Life in the Center Seat of Mission Control, Paul Dye vividly recounts his 20-year caree...

Hitting the Books: What astronauts can learn from nuclear submariners

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We’ve dreamt of colonizing the stars since our first tenuous steps across the moon, yet fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, the prospect of living and working beyond the bounds of Earth remains tantalizingly out of reach. In his latest book, Spa...

Hitting the Books: The media’s role in history’s most damaging data dump

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We humans are a deeply gullible bunch, willing to credulously believe any half truth, even outright lie, so long as it aligns with our existing opinions and preconceptions. The rise of modern media — especially the anonymous world of social media — h...

Hitting the Books: Can golf evolve and survive in the 21st century

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If a childhood of watching Caddyshack on loop has taught me anything, is that golf is a game of zen. “Stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball,” as Ty Webb famously told Danny out on the links. But can meditative nanananana mantras really st...

Hitting the Books: A fully-connected future means you’ll never be alone

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Humans may be social animals but any introvert will tell you that having too much company can seem even worse than isolation. Yet throughout history, people who enjoy spending time by themselves have been looked upon with a sense of pity. In his late...

Hitting the books: The ancient technology behind astronaut ice cream

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It’s been one week since astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley made history by successfully riding SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket up to the International Space Station. This calls for a celebration! And what orbital party would be complete without t...

Hitting the Books: Do we really want our robots to have consciousness?

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From Star Trek’s Data and 2001’s HAL to Columbus Day’s Skippy the Magnificent, pop culture is chock full of fully conscious AI who, in many cases, are more human than the humans they serve alongside. But is all that self-actualization really necessar...

Hitting the Books: How to be active on social media and still keep your job

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With large swaths of the country still stifling under quarantine from the COVID-19 pandemic, more people than ever are supplementing their meager IRL social interactions with online alternatives. But but doing so can become a proverbial minefield wit...

Hitting the Books: Without glass, we’d have never discovered the electron

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From the dawn on time, humans have manipulated the material world around us to suit our will. We started off banging rocks together before moving on to wielding bronze and then iron tools. We parlayed iron into steel and built an industrialized exist...