@JoeVargas When Taco Bell is stronger on diarrhea than the US Government, you know you elected some absolute morons that really couldn't give a shit about you.
@SethAbramson The current GOP is composed of:
a) those who want to win at *all* costs (ie hold onto power + corruption)
and
b) those too cowardly to stand up to it or do anything about it
That’s what we’re witnessing.
@Ellechemy BRAIN FOG is overwhelming, an All-time Favorite. Listened yesterday upon rising, was dazed and confused and aching for hours, even fireworks didn’t clear the fog.
The fact that Todd Blanche has refused to comply with the court order to release the Epstein files following Katie Phang's lawsuit, should be a more significant story.
The fact that the Epstein Estate ACTUALLY PAID a settlement to one of the women who alleged that Donald Trump raped her as a minor, and it was paid AFTER Epstein died, as told under oath by Epstein's longtime accountant, should be a more significant story.
The fact that Trump said he wasn't ever on Epstein's plane and now we found out he was, should be a more significant story.
The fact that senior officials gathered in the Situation Room to concoct and coordinate an Epstein coverup should be the most significant story of all.
And when you combine ALL these stories and add to it his hiring of Alex Acosta, the birthday card, the movement of Maxwell to a more lenient facility, and then - especially - his panicked behavior on all things Epstein, it really should be the end of his presidency.
A 33-year-old woman at MIT wrote the code that ran inside the Apollo 11 lunar lander, and 20 seconds before Neil Armstrong touched the moon, her program made a decision the astronauts didn't know was happening that was the only reason the mission didn't crash.
Her name was Margaret Hamilton.
She led the team writing every line of code that would fly humans to the moon and back. The part almost nobody knows is that she had to fight to be allowed to do the work at all.
Code in 1965 was not treated as real work.
Rockets were serious. Circuits were serious. Writing code was something the men at NASA thought secretaries could do on the side. Hamilton was told this to her face more than once.
So she started calling what her team did "software engineering."
She used the phrase on purpose. In meetings. In memos. To force people to treat it as a discipline instead of a chore. Colleagues laughed at her the first few times she said it out loud.
That phrase is now the name of the biggest engineering profession on earth.
The story of what her code did on July 20, 1969 is the one every kid should be taught.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 3 minutes from touching down when the computer inside the lunar module started flashing an alarm.
1202.
Then again. Then 1201. Five alarms in four minutes. The computer was telling the astronauts it could not finish everything it had been asked to do.
The computer they were flying with had less memory than a modern microwave.
Someone on the checklist had left a switch in the wrong position, and a radar the astronauts did not even need right then was flooding the computer with data. It was eating around 13% of the machine's brain at the exact moment every second mattered.
In almost any other system, that overload would have frozen the machine.
A frozen machine 30,000 feet above the moon means a crash. It means two dead astronauts and a third one orbiting alone above them, waiting for a signal that would never come.
Hamilton's code did something else.
She had built the software with a rule almost nobody in her field was using at the time. When the machine ran out of room, it would not treat every task as equally important. It would look at the list of jobs it had been asked to do, throw out the ones that could wait, and keep running only the ones keeping the crew alive.
The radar was the low priority job.
The landing was the highest.
So the computer did what she had told it to do. It dumped the radar. It kept flying. The alarm was not a failure. It was the machine reporting that it was handling the overload exactly the way she had designed it to.
Down in Houston, a 24-year-old engineer named Jack Garman recognized the alarm from a test his team had run months earlier. He shouted "Go" to the flight controller. The controller shouted it up to the crew. The landing kept going.
Armstrong touched the surface with 25 seconds of fuel left.
The part that gets lost in every retelling is why Hamilton had built that safety net in the first place.
NASA had not asked for it.
She had added it on her own, years earlier, because her 4-year-old daughter Lauren had once crashed the simulator by pressing a button during a test. The button was one the astronauts had been told they would never press.
Hamilton wanted the code to survive that button press anyway.
Her bosses told her it was a waste of time. Astronauts do not make mistakes.
She insisted. The safety net went in.
Two years later, on the way to the moon, an astronaut left a switch in the wrong position. The exact class of mistake she had been told would never happen.
There is a photograph of her from that period.
She is standing next to a stack of paper as tall as she is. Every page in that stack is the code her team wrote for the mission. She is smiling at the camera like she knows something the rest of the aerospace industry has not figured out yet.
In 2016, Barack Obama put the Presidential Medal of Freedom around her neck and said the astronauts did not have much time, but thankfully, they had Margaret Hamilton.
Every autopilot in every plane you have ever flown on uses a version of what she invented. Every pacemaker. Every self driving car. Every satellite in orbit.
The idea that a machine should know which job matters most and drop the rest when it runs out of room is now the foundation of almost every safety system on the planet.
She wrote it because a 4 year old crashed a simulator and nobody else thought it was worth fixing.
The men in the room laughed at her for calling it engineering.
Then her code was the only thing in the sky that did not fail.
Today’s attacks on humanitarian workers are war crimes. The world cannot accept this as normal. Too many aid workers have died like this around the world. Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council but it attacks UN and WCK vehicles in Kherson, Ukraine. While the aid workers survived unharmed, one resident died. This war needs to end now. The suffering needs to end now. We are an American-based NGO @realDonaldTrump@FLOTUS@SecRubio #ChefsForUkraine
On the night the Titanic sank, a 21-year-old college student watched his father die.
Hours later, doctors told him both of his legs would have to be amputated.
Instead, he got up and started walking.
His name was Richard Norris Williams.
And surviving the Titanic was only the beginning of his story.
In April 1912, Richard and his father, Charles Duane Williams, boarded the Titanic as first-class passengers in Cherbourg, France.
They were traveling to America so Richard could continue his studies at Harvard.
When the ship struck the iceberg on April 14, father and son made their way to the deck together.
Then disaster struck again.
As the Titanic sank, one of its massive funnels collapsed.
The falling structure hit Charles Williams and killed him instantly.
Richard was standing beside him.
He narrowly escaped the same fate.
Moments later, he was in the freezing North Atlantic.
The water temperature was around 28°F (-2°C).
Most people survived only minutes.
Richard spent roughly six hours in the water or clinging to one of the partially submerged collapsible lifeboats before rescue arrived.
When the RMS Carpathia finally picked up survivors at dawn, his condition was severe.
His legs were frozen from the knees down.
The ship's doctor examined him and delivered a grim verdict:
Both legs would need to be amputated.
In 1912, severe frostbite often meant gangrene, infection, and death.
Amputation was considered the safest option.
Richard refused.
He reportedly told doctors that he was going to need his legs.
Then he got out of bed.
Against medical advice, he began walking the deck of the Carpathia every two hours.
Day and night.
Step after painful step.
For four days.
By the time the ship reached New York, his condition had improved enough that amputation was no longer necessary.
He walked off the ship on his own.
Most people would consider that the defining story of a lifetime.
For Richard Williams, it wasn't.
A few months later, he enrolled at Harvard.
Then he returned to tennis.
In 1914, he won the U.S. National Championship, the tournament that would later become the U.S. Open.
In 1916, he won it again.
Over the following years, he became one of the best tennis players in the world, winning multiple major doubles titles and representing the United States internationally.
Then came World War I.
Williams served in the U.S. Army and distinguished himself in combat.
France awarded him both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor for his service.
After the war, he returned to tennis once again.
At the 1924 Paris Olympics, he badly sprained his ankle during the mixed doubles tournament and considered withdrawing.
His partner, Hazel Wightman, refused to let him quit.
Williams played much of the tournament barely able to move.
Together, they won Olympic gold.
Over the years, he became a Davis Cup captain, a respected figure in American tennis, and eventually a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
Yet people who knew him rarely heard him talk about any of it.
Not the Titanic.
Not the championships.
Not the war.
Not the medals.
Not the Olympic gold.
In fact, he disliked attention so much that later in life he had approximately 160 tennis trophies melted down into a single silver serving tray.
He used it to serve drinks to guests in his Pennsylvania home.
Most visitors had no idea what it was.
Or what it represented.
A Titanic survivor.
A two-time national champion.
A decorated war veteran.
An Olympic gold medalist.
A Hall of Famer.
All hidden inside an ordinary tray sitting quietly on a side table.
Richard Norris Williams died in 1968 at the age of 77.
If you had met him, he probably wouldn't have told you any of this.
And that may be the most remarkable thing about him.
Meanwhile, the photograph below is what the D.C. Reflecting Pool you paid a friend of Donald Trump's $20 million to clean—*16 times* what Trump originally promised—looks like today: filled with algae, more disgusting than ever before.
This man is a *blight* on the United States.
Do not doubt that if a major pandemic hits, millions of Americans will die because of this grotesque man. And not a single person better say that we didn’t know it was coming. Alarm bells have been ringing *nonstop* that this sick buffoon will kill people. https://t.co/PUXZBHP2h2