Unfortunately, this is not true. I have, on multiple occasions, had to sprint across several concourses of ATL at the approximate speed of a NASA rocket to make a connecting flight.
Newark is an epic travel experience. You can meet people from every part of the world in one walk through the terminal. And some beings who exist only in space. Terminal is a terrible word to use during a conversation about airports.
Actually, the solar system is not made mostly of rocks. It's made mostly of gas. Which gives added urgency to solving the commode problem.
Another problem is knowing whether one should write "made mostly" or "mostly made." And if that turns out to be a useful idea for a column by Mr. Language Person, I would expect more tupperware (which, not incidently, also has a gas issue, making it necessary to "burp" the container - although I guess it could be worse.)
In addition to the gas, there might be some space-turds floating around out there. And as I write this, it occurred to me that The Floating Canadian Space Turds might be a good name for a band.
I know people say that toilet jokes are childish, but damn they’re funny!!! I laughed so hard at this column, “nature called” (I’m told this phrase is more respectable than “I tinkled”.)
As the late, great, very much missed Carl Sagan said, we are made of star stuff. I myself am made of rocks (in my head) and gas (I don’t think I need to spell out where the gas is, especially as I age—it makes itself known, in no uncertain terms 🙁).
>> In fact scientists now believe that the solar system is pretty much entirely made up of rocks.
> As the late, great, very much missed Carl Sagan said, we are made of star stuff. I myself am made of rocks (in my head) and gas
As the late, great, and nearly as much missed Isaac Asimov noted, “The solar system consists of Jupiter, plus debris,” and Jupiter is (I am not making this up) a gas giant. (Also check out his pseudonymous book, which I am also not making up, The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.)
>> The space center is of course located in Florida, which is considered the best state to launch rockets from because, as this chart shows, it contains relatively little gravity.
This is (perhaps unintentionally) accurate. As Anthropic’s Claude (not yet conclusively ruled to be a military supply chain risk) corrected my query:
> a quick correction first: the Coriolis effect is not what causes weight to vary with latitude. …
> The actual causes of latitude-dependent weight variation are:
> Centrifugal force from Earth's rotation — greatest at the equator, zero at the poles. This directly reduces effective gravity.
> Earth's oblate shape — the planet bulges at the equator, so you're farther from Earth's center there, experiencing slightly weaker gravitational pull.
> Location Approx. Latitude g (m/s²)Central Florida~27° N~9.791
> Central Alaska~64° N~9.820
> The difference is roughly 0.03 m/s², or about 0.3%.
> Practical example: A person who weighs 200 lb in Anchorage would weigh about 199.4 lb in Orlando — roughly half a pound lighter.
> So the effect is real and measurable (precision scales used in commerce actually need calibration for latitude)…
Disclaimer: My wife (unlike me, a respectable biochemistry professor) and I organized the Asimov Centennial Meetup at her university, http://tiny.cc/asimov100/)
Well now … at last … at long long last … I understand (1) why the US Space Force was established and (2) why it is manned mostly by former US Airforce personnel. Thank you, Mr. Barry.
Key fact from the space toilet video: astronaut pee gets vented to space. Think of these emissions as breadcrumbs left along the way to guide future missions towards the moon, which can be hard to find on cloudy nights in space. Portions of the frozen contrails will be barely visible from earth, leading some night sky watchers to sing: “Tinkle, tinkle, little star.”
When you started talking about "a turd floating in the air" I thought you were referring to the Oval Office. Silly me. As someone born on the day of the first lunar walk, I'm gonna have a Moon Pie in honor of your piece.
When the Mars Sojourner landed on the Red Planet, someone noted that it was being powered Intel286 chips at time when most computers shipped with Pentium processors. When NASA was asked about this, the response was that was all they needed. "After all, we not running WIndows 95"
I asked a shuttle commander about their computers, and they said they used older technology (the processors and boards). Even though they knew something was wrong with the boards they were receiving, they knew what it was, and how to deal with it. It makes sense, but I was pretty surprised.
I read a scholarly article back then (I was a programmer) about the redundancy built into the shuttles' onboard computers. There was a main flight-control computer, and a duplicate backup in case the main one failed. BUT there was also a backup-backup; the idea was that if both of the main ones failed, it probably wasn't a hardware failure, but a SOFTWARE failure, or possibly a joint hardware/software one. So the backup-backup was a completely different computer -- different architecture, different chips, etc. -- loaded with software to accomplish exactly the same purposes, but running a different operating system and written in a different language by a different software development team. I've always wondered if the shuttles ever had to fall back to that level during a flight.
That system would be anathema to trumpII - they don't even have backup I, much less 2. Geez, they have NO plan, other than throwing their $#!t up against the wall; then pete rages and prays over the turds (live ones, not floating) until trumpII gets pi$$ed because the mission is getting higher ratings than his Apprentice team.
This seemed like the perfect setup for an AI inquiry. So I asked my preferred AI, Claude, "Who is funnier, PJ O'Rourke or Dave Barry? And how much funnier?"
Reply:
"Both are genuinely funny, but this is a real debate worth having.
"Dave Barry is probably funnier in raw, immediate impact. His humor is more accessible — absurdist escalation, physical comedy in prose form, a kind of gleeful silliness that reliably produces laughs. He's remarkably consistent across decades of work, and the Pulitzer committee agreed he was doing something worth recognizing. Barry is the better joke machine.
"P.J. O'Rourke is funnier if you're in the right mood and share his sensibility. His best work — Parliament of Whores, Holidays in Hell — has a sharper edge, more genuine wit, and a higher ceiling. When he's on, he's producing sentences you want to read aloud to someone else. But he's also more uneven, and his political commitments occasionally crowd out the comedy.
"As for how much funnier — it depends on what you're measuring. On a laughs-per-page basis, Barry probably wins. On the occasional transcendent paragraph, O'Rourke has the edge. Call it Barry by a modest margin overall, with O'Rourke taking the peaks."
I was fortunate to hang out with PJ at the 10th anniversary of Vermont's Ethan Allen Institute. I was setting up photo shoots, and he was stuck with men. He was a nice guy who was in a friendly crowd. We talked about the famous "kill this dog" cover and humor in general. It was before Substack, but PJ saw my newspaper carried Dave Barry and made the remark. It was offhand but sincere, I think. Your AI analysis is splendid! Of course, I love 'em both!
I thought the AI did pretty well, but the opening salvo which ended, "...this is a real debate worth having" made me LOL.
Wonderful story about meeting O'Rourke! The National Lampoon (and some of the Harvard predecessor's products -- yearbook, Bored of the Rings, etc.) profoundly affected my sense of humor, I think for life (and I think for the better, but that's probably a debate not worth having😉).
I had a translunar injection once… it was very painful.
I’m glad that NASA was able to overcome the floating turd issue in the last 5 decades. And while the special space commode probably cost billions of dollars (I hope it was still under warranty), you can’t fool me, that’s just a shop vac from Home Depot painted white. Which would probably accomplish the same task with a higher degree of success.
When I lived in Utah Dad and I got up early one morning to watch the re-entry. Just before dawn this neon purple line was drawn across the sky. It was awesome.
I used to watch every launch when I was in high school...friends would stay overnight, sleeping in the living room, so we wouldn't miss a moment of those B&W blast-offs. So now when I read posts from flat-earther/moon trip deniers, I seethe. Don't tell me it's all done with CGI... I was THERE, dammit!
Oh Rob..you don't read the correct infuriating posts from flat-earthers. See, our CURRENT CGI is able to manufacture grainy black and white transmissions from the 50s, as well as the current Hubble shots (which are made
in Spielberg's basement - or Pixar's back lot.). Sigh. I miss the days when I could join Dave's gang live-blogging "24". THAT was real.
Well, after doing my somber Good Friday morning meditations, reading this essay (especially the Space Toilet section) had a slightly different tone -- and I couldn't stop laughing. You da man, Dave!
Did you know that all those men differed to the woman to fix the toilet and NBC complemented her by adding "Plumber" to her resume? You can't make this stuff up.
I’m wondering if the woman and black guy on the mission will be fired by Trump before re-entry…. The Canadian will be taken into custody and not released until Carney agrees to making Canada the 51st state.
This is a work of fiction, because there is no such thing as "a brief layover in Atlanta".
Good point.
Ah but what about the persistent internet rumors of it having occurred once for one traveler in 1984?
Unverified!
Unfortunately, this is not true. I have, on multiple occasions, had to sprint across several concourses of ATL at the approximate speed of a NASA rocket to make a connecting flight.
That was normal in the 80s, certainly in Pittsburgh.
They were comparing it to Newark.
Newark is an epic travel experience. You can meet people from every part of the world in one walk through the terminal. And some beings who exist only in space. Terminal is a terrible word to use during a conversation about airports.
I can attest to that
Especially if a storm cloud is 20 miles (or less) away.
It’s said that if you die in the South you have to go to Atlanta on your way to heaven. Haha
Actually, the solar system is not made mostly of rocks. It's made mostly of gas. Which gives added urgency to solving the commode problem.
Another problem is knowing whether one should write "made mostly" or "mostly made." And if that turns out to be a useful idea for a column by Mr. Language Person, I would expect more tupperware (which, not incidently, also has a gas issue, making it necessary to "burp" the container - although I guess it could be worse.)
In addition to the gas, there might be some space-turds floating around out there. And as I write this, it occurred to me that The Floating Canadian Space Turds might be a good name for a band.
I'm voting for "The Bounding Petes" as this week.
Especially if they perform intergalactically, or at least internationally.
I know people say that toilet jokes are childish, but damn they’re funny!!! I laughed so hard at this column, “nature called” (I’m told this phrase is more respectable than “I tinkled”.)
You are my target demographic.
Please don’t say “target” in an article about floating turds.
Mine too. My wife tells me too many of my stories feature either fecal matter or testicles.
You know what song Nature sings around our house when it calls?
"I am calling [deep breath] YOOOOO-HOOO-HOOO HOO-HOOOOOOOOO-HOOO-HOO-HOOOOU,
Come and do a [even deeper breath] POOOOOOOOOOOO-HOOOO-HOOO-HOO-HOOO-HOOOOOOOOO-HOO-HOOO-HOOOO-HOOOOOOOOO....."
Actually, dang, I got the number of HOOs wrong.. in case you need the tune, it's Indian Love Call from 1924's Rose Marie. It helps if you can yodel.
Do people of the male persuasion tinkle??
Yes, but they don’t like to talk about it.
In my observed experience, the answer to your question is, "Yes.".
Indeed, when they're 2, 3 yrs old and some years later once the prostate gets larger than a baseball ... or so I'm told.
As the late, great, very much missed Carl Sagan said, we are made of star stuff. I myself am made of rocks (in my head) and gas (I don’t think I need to spell out where the gas is, especially as I age—it makes itself known, in no uncertain terms 🙁).
>> In fact scientists now believe that the solar system is pretty much entirely made up of rocks.
> As the late, great, very much missed Carl Sagan said, we are made of star stuff. I myself am made of rocks (in my head) and gas
As the late, great, and nearly as much missed Isaac Asimov noted, “The solar system consists of Jupiter, plus debris,” and Jupiter is (I am not making this up) a gas giant. (Also check out his pseudonymous book, which I am also not making up, The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.)
>> The space center is of course located in Florida, which is considered the best state to launch rockets from because, as this chart shows, it contains relatively little gravity.
This is (perhaps unintentionally) accurate. As Anthropic’s Claude (not yet conclusively ruled to be a military supply chain risk) corrected my query:
> a quick correction first: the Coriolis effect is not what causes weight to vary with latitude. …
> The actual causes of latitude-dependent weight variation are:
> Centrifugal force from Earth's rotation — greatest at the equator, zero at the poles. This directly reduces effective gravity.
> Earth's oblate shape — the planet bulges at the equator, so you're farther from Earth's center there, experiencing slightly weaker gravitational pull.
> Location Approx. Latitude g (m/s²)Central Florida~27° N~9.791
> Central Alaska~64° N~9.820
> The difference is roughly 0.03 m/s², or about 0.3%.
> Practical example: A person who weighs 200 lb in Anchorage would weigh about 199.4 lb in Orlando — roughly half a pound lighter.
> So the effect is real and measurable (precision scales used in commerce actually need calibration for latitude)…
Disclaimer: My wife (unlike me, a respectable biochemistry professor) and I organized the Asimov Centennial Meetup at her university, http://tiny.cc/asimov100/)
Wow! I bet you're fun at a party (look it up).
If I'm not mistaken, future moon missions will require astronauts to burp the facilities after using them.
Well now … at last … at long long last … I understand (1) why the US Space Force was established and (2) why it is manned mostly by former US Airforce personnel. Thank you, Mr. Barry.
Nerd alert!
Key fact from the space toilet video: astronaut pee gets vented to space. Think of these emissions as breadcrumbs left along the way to guide future missions towards the moon, which can be hard to find on cloudy nights in space. Portions of the frozen contrails will be barely visible from earth, leading some night sky watchers to sing: “Tinkle, tinkle, little star.”
I was picturing some future astronaut doing a space walk and being hit by frozen pee.
Future astronauts to their space-walking children: "Don't eat yellow space snow."
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻Bravo.
I’m surprised to learn that Artemis doesn’t have a poop deck!
... from which you could witness a moon shiting?
🤣 Good one!
When you started talking about "a turd floating in the air" I thought you were referring to the Oval Office. Silly me. As someone born on the day of the first lunar walk, I'm gonna have a Moon Pie in honor of your piece.
POTUS is too heavy - much too heavy - to float thru the air. Lardlocked folks waddle, they do not float.
Is that why he moved from NY to Florida, where, according to Dave, there is relatively less gravity?
I love how TRUMP owns you!! Your friends think you're an idiot....
At least he HAS friends . . .
Friends are overrated.
A Moon Pee?
Almost forgot ! Did you read that the astronauts ran into problems using Outlook while on the flight? Seriously! It’s in the news.
That update is going to take a long time. Sure hope the space capsule doesn’t run on windows… they’ll have to reboot the capsule.
When the Mars Sojourner landed on the Red Planet, someone noted that it was being powered Intel286 chips at time when most computers shipped with Pentium processors. When NASA was asked about this, the response was that was all they needed. "After all, we not running WIndows 95"
I asked a shuttle commander about their computers, and they said they used older technology (the processors and boards). Even though they knew something was wrong with the boards they were receiving, they knew what it was, and how to deal with it. It makes sense, but I was pretty surprised.
I read a scholarly article back then (I was a programmer) about the redundancy built into the shuttles' onboard computers. There was a main flight-control computer, and a duplicate backup in case the main one failed. BUT there was also a backup-backup; the idea was that if both of the main ones failed, it probably wasn't a hardware failure, but a SOFTWARE failure, or possibly a joint hardware/software one. So the backup-backup was a completely different computer -- different architecture, different chips, etc. -- loaded with software to accomplish exactly the same purposes, but running a different operating system and written in a different language by a different software development team. I've always wondered if the shuttles ever had to fall back to that level during a flight.
That system would be anathema to trumpII - they don't even have backup I, much less 2. Geez, they have NO plan, other than throwing their $#!t up against the wall; then pete rages and prays over the turds (live ones, not floating) until trumpII gets pi$$ed because the mission is getting higher ratings than his Apprentice team.
This is kind of cool to know. Thanks.
All those boards and chips are specially built to be radiation hardened.
Hell I run into problems using Outlook fairly regularly. Recently it ate every single contact.
PJ O'Rourke told me that he is a Dave Barry fan because Dave was three times funnier than he would ever be.
He was my friend, and I miss him.
This seemed like the perfect setup for an AI inquiry. So I asked my preferred AI, Claude, "Who is funnier, PJ O'Rourke or Dave Barry? And how much funnier?"
Reply:
"Both are genuinely funny, but this is a real debate worth having.
"Dave Barry is probably funnier in raw, immediate impact. His humor is more accessible — absurdist escalation, physical comedy in prose form, a kind of gleeful silliness that reliably produces laughs. He's remarkably consistent across decades of work, and the Pulitzer committee agreed he was doing something worth recognizing. Barry is the better joke machine.
"P.J. O'Rourke is funnier if you're in the right mood and share his sensibility. His best work — Parliament of Whores, Holidays in Hell — has a sharper edge, more genuine wit, and a higher ceiling. When he's on, he's producing sentences you want to read aloud to someone else. But he's also more uneven, and his political commitments occasionally crowd out the comedy.
"As for how much funnier — it depends on what you're measuring. On a laughs-per-page basis, Barry probably wins. On the occasional transcendent paragraph, O'Rourke has the edge. Call it Barry by a modest margin overall, with O'Rourke taking the peaks."
I was fortunate to hang out with PJ at the 10th anniversary of Vermont's Ethan Allen Institute. I was setting up photo shoots, and he was stuck with men. He was a nice guy who was in a friendly crowd. We talked about the famous "kill this dog" cover and humor in general. It was before Substack, but PJ saw my newspaper carried Dave Barry and made the remark. It was offhand but sincere, I think. Your AI analysis is splendid! Of course, I love 'em both!
I thought the AI did pretty well, but the opening salvo which ended, "...this is a real debate worth having" made me LOL.
Wonderful story about meeting O'Rourke! The National Lampoon (and some of the Harvard predecessor's products -- yearbook, Bored of the Rings, etc.) profoundly affected my sense of humor, I think for life (and I think for the better, but that's probably a debate not worth having😉).
But I thought Claude had Dave dead?
Heh. I thought of that, too, and started to sneer until I hit this bit: "...the Pulitzer committee agreed he was doing something worth recognizing."
WAS. WAS doing something worth recognizing. RIP. 🤣
That's funny!
Florida's lack of gravity is caused by the nefarious lightness and levity of its most famous resident: Dave Barry.
Or his vacuousness?
Is that bad?
In the great vacuousness of space, they can hear you scream.
Nope. I just needed a word indicating a vacuum. I don’t spend 5 dollars a month on just anybody. You’re very special.
I think gravity just doesn't like the governor in Florida
Who does?
I had a translunar injection once… it was very painful.
I’m glad that NASA was able to overcome the floating turd issue in the last 5 decades. And while the special space commode probably cost billions of dollars (I hope it was still under warranty), you can’t fool me, that’s just a shop vac from Home Depot painted white. Which would probably accomplish the same task with a higher degree of success.
The visual is just stunning!!! 🤣🤣🤣
There was a full moon that night…
I’ll always be excited about space! We used to set our alarm to see the space shuttle take off at 3 am (it flew over our house in Jacksonville).
When I lived in Utah Dad and I got up early one morning to watch the re-entry. Just before dawn this neon purple line was drawn across the sky. It was awesome.
I used to watch every launch when I was in high school...friends would stay overnight, sleeping in the living room, so we wouldn't miss a moment of those B&W blast-offs. So now when I read posts from flat-earther/moon trip deniers, I seethe. Don't tell me it's all done with CGI... I was THERE, dammit!
Not to mention that CGI hadn't been invented yet.
Oh Rob..you don't read the correct infuriating posts from flat-earthers. See, our CURRENT CGI is able to manufacture grainy black and white transmissions from the 50s, as well as the current Hubble shots (which are made
in Spielberg's basement - or Pixar's back lot.). Sigh. I miss the days when I could join Dave's gang live-blogging "24". THAT was real.
That must've added a certain urgency to questions about, y'know, waste management on the Shuttle.
The Floating Turds would be a good name for a band.
Genre: Waste Emo.
Well, after doing my somber Good Friday morning meditations, reading this essay (especially the Space Toilet section) had a slightly different tone -- and I couldn't stop laughing. You da man, Dave!
MerryCatholic.substack.com
If Florida has such low gravity, what’s with that number on my bathroom scale?
You might have a metric scale.
Damn communists.
The reason they were going to the moon in the disco era was to 1) get away from disco and 2) to leave as many disco records on the moon as possible.
True heroes
Spoken like a white guy who can’t dance….
What did the moon do to make them hate it that much?
Did you know that all those men differed to the woman to fix the toilet and NBC complemented her by adding "Plumber" to her resume? You can't make this stuff up.
Artemis is the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, the wilderness, wild animals, and chastity. So NASA is still woke.
“Go for toilet”
https://www.threads.com/@jasonkd/post/DWqkEtjkZi3/media
I’m wondering if the woman and black guy on the mission will be fired by Trump before re-entry…. The Canadian will be taken into custody and not released until Carney agrees to making Canada the 51st state.