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"I'm a fighter, not a quitter!"Liz Truss quoting Peter Mandelson during PMQs in the House of Commons, 19 Oct 2022 The question from the Leader of the Opposition Sir Keir Starmer that prompted that defiant response which included her slamming her briefing book onto the despatch box for effect was asking her if she would last in Number 10 until Christmas. I can't imagine he'd have ever reckoned that she barely lasted 24 hours after…

All Life. Every Life. We are all born as molecules in the hearts of a billion stars. Molecules that do not understand politics or policies or differences. Over a billion years, we foolish molecules forget who we are and where we came from. In desperate acts of ego, we give ourselves names, fight over lines on maps, and pretend that our light is better than everyone else's. The flame reminds us of the piece of…

A couple of weeks ago, NASA torpedoed the asteroid Dimorphos with the DART spacecraft with a direct hit. I'm still amazed at how well that went...a spacecraft that flew millions of miles to intercept a double-asteroid system and didn't even see it's target until 20 minutes prior to impact and still nail that rock dead centre blows my mind. The goal of the project was to see if they could alter Dimorphos' orbit round it's…

It's certainly been an eventful past couple of days with Hurricane Ian slamming into southwest Florida and then wreaking havoc all the way through Central Florida and out over the Atlantic Ocean before sweeping back in to Myrtle Beach and then passing just west of us. It is an old joke in Florida that no one takes hurricanes and tropical storms until Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel turned up in your city. That was…

NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Unit just scored a most extraordinary bulls-eye when they intentionally crashed the Double Asteroid Redirector Test (DART) spacecraft into the roughly 170m rock known as Dimorphos which orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos which is about 780m wide. The point of the test is to see if an impactor can significantly affect the orbit of an asteroid so that we might avoid the fate of the dinosaurs which…

The third response to the carpet bombing of official Washington about the Supreme Court's leaked first draft in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. case came from a rather surprising place a couple of weeks after the meh response from our senior Senator. When I saw the image of this envelope in the daily briefing from the US Postal Service which shows the letters destined for my postbox, I was genuinely shocked. When I…

The second response to the carpet bombing of official Washington about the Supreme Court's leaked first draft in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. case came from Senator Richard Burr, our senior Senator from North Carolina decidedly later than the response from our junior Senator. In fairness, he did actually respond for the first time in four official contacts to his office. And he did actually get my gender correct which Senator Tillis' staff…

The first response to the carpet bombing of official Washington about the Supreme Court's leaked first draft in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. case came from Senator Thom Tillis, our junior Senator from North Carolina fairly quickly after I had mailed off the letters. Shockingly quickly! It was almost as if his staff anticipated the likely negative reaction to the Court's decision and gender of those people who would contact his office and…

When I saw this post, I couldn't help but be reminded of a gent we had round in my last major project at BCBSNC where we were completely revamping the mailing and fulfillment system used to create and send out the subscriber ID cards, welcome kits, the dreaded rate notices, and essentially anything that was printed. Part of that effort was integrating a software package called "Thunderhead" which would take data from the back-end systems…

Just as my newest friend came round to the Nerdery to install Google Fibre, the BBC was reporting that Her Majesty the Queen has been placed under medical supervision at Balmoral. For the moment, she's reported as being comfortable and resting as the rest of the Royal Family make their way to Aberdeen in Scotland to be at her side. I'm hoping against hope that she'll pull through this medical scare but the reality is…

For the first time in the 15 times that Her Majesty the Queen has invited a member of the House of Commons to form a government in her name, the actual ceremony of accepting the resignation of the incumbent PM and the prospective new PM "kissing hands" was not at Buckingham Palace but rather Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire in Scotland. This was due in part to the Queen's comfort reported as "mobility problems" but even…