watching right now
Season three of House of the Dragon,
finally almost caught up after a full rewatch of seasons one and two. And on the space side,
How the Universe Works,
which I rewatch on purpose. It is honestly shocking how fast the astronomy episodes go out of
date, because the discoveries will not slow down. That is how exciting a time this is.
reading
Jeffrey Kluger's
Gemini, from the same author behind the book that became Apollo 13. Absolutely
fascinating, the kind of book I could not put down, and I'm almost through it. His other
books are already in the queue.
every fall & winter
A full rewatch of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.
Comfort cinema, non-negotiable.
the comedies
Curb and Seinfeld, rewatched a million times each. Still laughing.
the dramas shelf
The Sopranos and Mad Men at the top, with Succession, Breaking Bad, and
Better Call Saul right behind. Recently finished Your Friends and Neighbors, and it was
great fun watching Jon Hamm be someone who is not Don Draper. Waiting on the next
season.
the racket
A Wilson Blade 98,
found on Facebook Marketplace. I got back into tennis a couple of months ago after barely
playing since I was a kid, which is exactly how SplitStep ended up existing.
hoops
I shoot around for fun, I am not very good, and that is fine. I got to
Chicago in the early nineties, right before the second Jordan three-peat, so basketball had
me early.
favorite moment in human spaceflight
Apollo 12, thirty-six seconds after liftoff, struck by lightning with its
telemetry scrambled into nonsense. A young flight controller named
John Aaron
remembered an obscure failure he'd seen once in a test and made the call: "Flight, try SCE
to AUX." One switch flip later the data came back, and the mission went on to land on the
Moon. On-the-spot thinking, teamwork, and total confidence under pressure. It earned him the
title "steely-eyed missile man," and it inspires me every time I think about it.
the apollo rabbit hole
Gene Kranz's leadership through Apollo 11 and the Apollo 13 rescue is a
permanent reference point for me, and the podcast
13 Minutes to the Moon
is one of my favorite things I have ever listened to. As a software engineer, the part that
gets me is Margaret Hamilton's
team at MIT writing the guidance software whose priority scheduling kept the computer alive
through the 1202 alarms during the landing, hardware and code that later became the first
digital fly-by-wire aircraft. And then Armstrong calmly taking manual control over a boulder
field with seconds of fuel to spare, while teams on two worlds coordinated in real time.
Every layer of it fascinates me.
space facts i bring up at parties
The one that reliably blows minds is Titan:
a moon with an atmosphere thicker than ours and actual lakes on its surface, except the lakes
are liquid methane. Runner-up is the theoretical diamond rain inside the ice giants.
And my favorite long game: Phobos
is slowly spiraling into Mars, and somewhere in the next few tens of millions of years it
should break apart into countless pieces and give Mars its own ring.
museum pilgrimages
The Museum of Science and Industry
in Chicago has been my favorite museum since I was a kid walking through the Boeing 727 they
have inside, and I recently went back for the Henry Crown Space Center, which was every bit
as great as I hoped. The actual Apollo 8 command module lives there. The bigger goal: see every corner
of the American space program in person. On the human-spaceflight side: Huntsville's U.S.
Space and Rocket Center, Kennedy, and Johnson. And the robotic and astronomy side deserves
its own pilgrimage list: JPL
and Goddard for the machines we send out there, then the great observatories, Griffith up
the road, Mount Wilson, Palomar, Lowell, and someday the
Very Large Array
out in the New Mexico desert.
where i'd bet on life
The ocean moons. If Europa
and Enceladus
really have the liquid oceans we think they do, and those conditions have held for as long as
they seem to have, I would be genuinely surprised if life never developed in them. I will
admit that is partly wishful thinking, because I badly want it to be true. The Venus
cloud-top microbe theory is a fascinating dark horse. And I have a soft spot for
Ganymede:
bigger than Mercury, a buried ocean, a thin atmosphere, and the only moon in the solar system
with its own magnetic field. What a crazy place to exist.
the teams
Bears, Cubs, Bulls, Blackhawks. Chicago forever, even from
Los Angeles.
✦still to be filed: music in rotation and favorite exoplanets.
Ask me about either.