Viewing profile — ChillyWater

Or, the system automatically keeps your car a specified distance from the vehicle in front of you.

Definitely not serious, but super fun: "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson

Nature finds a way :) (Door #2) I suppose if it was an alcohol poisoning situation or something like that, I have to get my stomach pumped.

I had acid reflux from the time I was 15 years old. By the time I was 22 it had eaten holes almost through my esophagus, so I had Laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication surgery. They b…

Not a single good place in the entire United States to move to? Miami, Savanna, Boston, NYC, Austin, Vermont, Minneapolis, Duluth, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Nashville, Colorado, Sco…

Red/Green/Blue Mars is authored by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Dream-killer. :P

If it is actually an average of one every 3 minutes 14.159265359 seconds ... now you've got something.

Without checking the interweb, isn't Stuart Smalley == Al Franken?

I worked for that organization from 1996-2005. Nothing earth-shattering: - Requirements Reviews with Customer, Requirements Analysts, and Testers all sitting around the same table …

38 Sioux in Mankato, MN 1862. This sounds like a lynching, but it was the sanctioned by the government, so maybe it doesn't fit the definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibley…

I'm thinking you would want to keep batting around the cycle of various meals. Seems like you wouldn't get the full nutrient coverage with only one or two (or five) different meals…

Exactly what I saw during my stays in Singapore for the last six months or so. How can there be so much retail? The only thing I could figure is that maybe there is nothing else to…

I'm sure there is a clever internet name for it, but in the absence of that information, let's call it Chilly's Postulate: "An online post pointing out a spelling error will inevit…

I used to be on the Space Shuttle Primary Flight Software team in Houston. Super motivating environment. There was another independent team in Huntington Beach that wrote the Backu…

I think the funniest thing about the books are the names of the ships. Things like: The 'Probably Not a Good Idea' dropped into orbit around the fourth planet.

"Song of Stone" was written in an interesting style to me. It is some sort of post-apocalyptic The Stand kind of situation. He alternates between normal modern prose and some very …

If they both succeed and NASA wants a third, SpaceX would seem to be sitting pretty. If they both do not succeed and we assume that SpaceX reached too far, then NASA still looks li…

Usually, with aircraft or spacecraft, this is a reconfigurable plumbing setup that allows engines/jets to use the fuel source from a different engine on the fly. For instance, the …

That is where I am. I work for and they pay for my phone. I can have any one I want as long as it is a BlackBerry Curve. This is my only chance at anything even resembling a cool p…

You see the same thing when laying tile. If you have a small field tile with fancy glass accents or whatever, the customer really wants random uniformity, not pure random.

It may close off an outside career, but it also opens it up within the huge company that you are doing the secret work for. I don't know of any reqs within my company (GlobalDefens…

I think elevators are usually counter-balanced so that the motor doesn't have to really lift anything except the occupants. Maybe not though ...

I brought my MacBook in the other day because an iTunes upgrade broke it. Didn't have an appt. so I just walked up to the bar. In a few minutes, a guy was helping me. Tried a few t…

If you haven't been around here, you may not have noticed that there aren't a whole lot of "Me too" or "First post!" type of comments. Some of the comments on HN could pass for sho…