I looked out at my backyard early in the morning of November 5th. It had snowed the morning of November 4, but the sun came out that afternoon, melting most of the snow. This is the weird arrangement of snow that I saw.

An intelligent species (or confederation of species) might choose to use base 7 for their numeral system, no matter the exact number or nature of digits at the terminal end of their manipulative appendages.

Even entities with 8 terminal sub-appendages might use base 7.

A museum you should visit

If you’re in or around Denver, Colorado, you should visit Wings Over the Rockies. This museum has a flock of jets, airplanes, rockets and flying things.

You will see aerospace-related things there you can see nowhere else, and you’ll see them close up.

This is the book that led me to a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering:

I made a weird third guess due to coffee deficiency.

In my post about Lester Del Rey’s 1956 sci-fi thriller Mission to the Moon, I criticized Del Rey’s cis-lunar flight orbital mechanics. Del Rey had his moon missions leaving from a polar orbit around the earth. This struck me as very odd - all real lunar and interplanetary missions have left from a more-or-less equatorial orbit, or maybe even fly directly into an interplanetary orbit. I thought Del Rey had completely misunderstood orbital mechanics, or had mis-read von Braun.

I was wrong.

Have you ever tried to reproduce some text that contains a typo? That is, you try to type in some text that contains mistakes, for purposes of mocking whoever produced the original, mistake-laden rubbish?

You know how hard that is?

I read George Orwell’s 1984 sometime during “Junior High”, which in the 1970s was what we now call “middle school”. My district, Adair County R-III, had grades 7, 8 and 9 in their own building.

The school library had a copy of 1984. I was busy reading a lot my 7th and 8th grade years, so I read it.

Two more real fortunes, both from the same strip mall Thai and Chinese joint as my previous fortunes.