What clearance level do you have?

If you live in the southern hemisphere most pictures of the Moon that you see online look upside down compared to ones that you take yourself.

One would hope they’re still in Earth’s orbit - if they’ve achieved escape velocity they’re not coming back.

What does it look like to human eyes? Is there enough light for a person up there to see colour, or would it look like black and white (like a moonlit scene on the ground).

No color, I’m pretty sure.

They’re not circling the Earth, but they’re still orbiting it. Their orbit is highly eccentric, and will be near the Moon at apogee.

in WWII they had to avoid serving gassy foods to bomber crews because at high altitudes intestinal issues could go from uncomfortable to lethal.

I didn't know that! But I do know that crews got eggs before flights. Nobody else did.

When RAF pilots went to the Soviet Union to help the Soviets, when the first frost came the pilots were horrified when the women brought out big vats of fat and ladled it out. But after flying in those cold temperatures, they realized the fat was just the thing to keep them warm!

Most of the F15 upgrades have been against other aircraft. The F15 is primarily an air superiority fighter, it isn’t designed for attacks or defence against ground forces. The F15E is modified to attack ground targets, but ideally they would be targets without any air defences.

The F-15E Strike Eagle variant is definitely designed for attacks and defense against ground forces, but overall air defense is a probability game so it's not too surprising that it eventually happened

Yes, although it’s designed for interdiction, rather than primarily a ground attack aircraft, the difference being that it’s intended to be used against defenceless ground targets (like supply lines), not on the front lines.

> The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.

Most everyone else? Only about two percent of the Earths population live above the 55th parallel. There’s a big gulf between that and the ‘subtropics’.

I don’t disagree that solar/battery isn’t the answer for 100% of power needs, let alone 100% of heating needs, but if we got to even 50% we’d be in a lot better situation than we are now.

> the battery capacity isn't large enough

This. You have enough generation to keep a mansion toasty, but you don’t have enough storage to last a long winter night.

> just by porting SQL to your language

You make it sound like writing an SQL parser and query engine is a trivial task. Have you ever looked at the implementation of a query engine to see what’s actually involved? You can’t just ‘build on SQL’, you have to build a substantial library of functions to build SQL on top of.

Also it's not like dplyr is anything close to a "port" of SQL. You could in theory collect dplyr verbs and compile them to SQL, sure. That's what ORMs typically do, and what the Spark API does (and its descendants such as Polars).

"Porting" SQL to your language usually means inventing a new API for relational and/or tabular data access that feels ergonomic in the host language, and then either compiling it to SQL or executing it in some kind of array processing backend, or DataFusion if you're fancy like that.

dplyr straightforwardly transpiles to SQL through the dbplyr package, so it's semantically pretty close to a port, even though the syntax is a bit different (better).