Expanding on your point, a while ago I read a great book on 747 development (by Joe Sutter, who was the lead engineer for the 747) and one surprising thing for me was that Boeing was very much into the supersonic race at the time. The SST project was Boeing's darling. As such it got the top-ranked technical talent assigned to the project, as well as the best tools, management oversight, etc. In contrast, the 747 dev teams got pretty much less of everything, including being dispersed over a large area of corporate buildings. Despite all of that, it still succeeded beyond anyone's expectations at the time.
It's hard to over-estimate the tectonic impact the idea of spreadsheet had on the microcomputer scene at the time. Overnight 'programming' came to the masses. Someone with a problem (almost any kind of problem, scientific, financial, statistical, etc) could sit down, and easily start describing sequential flow, numerical manipulation and a ton of other things. It was the second coming of the International Business Machine.
I am such a fan of Patrick O'Brian's "Master and Commander" series of books that I could not let myself even consider the possibility of listening to audio book narrated version. I felt O'Brian's prose voice on the page was so powerfully distinctive that any attempt at putting a real voice to his material would be awful. Imagine my surprise when I found Patrick Tull's work shockingly good.
The most shocking thing to me about Blue Origin's New Glenn launch is that it didn't blow up. This isn't commentary on my opinion concerning Blue Origin's engineering expertise, just that I was expecting anything that big and complicated, on its inaugural flight, to fail fairly spectacularly. The historical trajectory of such space things is fail, fail big, fail less big, kinda work, kinda work, work mostly, etc.
If the second launch vehicle performs similarly, I might have to start watching them. We could use a decent alternative.
I'm 66, and when I myself was 10 or 11 my friends on my street and I were completely obsessed with the Estes rocket and Cox .049 U-control scenes. Most of us were lucky enough to have engaged fathers and once the standard craft were assembled and flown, we all browbeat them mercilessly for more information for mods, shortcuts, hacks etc. My dad grew very wary of the 'Why can't we' type questions. I had modified a C-type engine Big Bertha rocket with an extra long transparent payload module which set the stage for various kidnappings of lizards, frogs, praying-mantises, eggs, multiple 1 and a quarter inch sockets, etc (all returned to earth unharmed, if not un-rattled). The nichrome wire igniters were troublesome for most of the kids. Bulky and expensive (for 4th graders) lantern batteries were hard to come by. We found we could steal D-cells from flashlights, hack cardboard tubes from paper towel rolls, reinforce with electrical tape, and make passable energy sources from that, etc. But all of that required questions from the closest available parent about voltage and series/parallel connections, as well as other questions about CG when modding the rockets themselves, etc. I think your STEM comment is very much on-point. None of my friends thought we were learning anything at the time. We were mostly just jazzed about doing fun stuff that had the potential for tearing itself apart in mid-air. I know the advent digital everything makes modeling systems for kids [Kerbal,etc] probably pretty trivial now, but actually crashing things in spectacular fashion IRL had/has it's own visceral rewards.
My son enjoyed Kerbal Space program. But, fun[1] and educational as that is, it couldn't match the thrill of launching a real home-made rocket to ~1000 feet.
"“I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday."
I'm in the middle of reading Kurt Eichenwald's 'Conspiracy of Fools'. When Enron management described all the innovative ways they were 'making money' they weren't kidding. They were creating it out of thin air with complex, mirrored in and out transactions of all types in every utility sector they could find, and no one (except Arthur-Andersen only occasionally) was there to call them out on it until it was too late. Reading about it, it almost feels like a .9 release of Theranos, where management was complicit and clueless at the same time.
Make sure to watch "The Smartest Guys in the Room" as well. While reading something well-written is usually more insightful than film, the interviews, recordings and internal marketing videos are priceless.
Management was not clueless. They were greedy, and they hired and built a greed culture.
I'm not aware of how Eichenwald got access to the communications he uses in the book, but in addition to, yes, the highly complex, dare I say innovative structures they created to temporarily satisfy Wall Street's demands, he also cites example after example of Fastow and Skilling doing or approving actions and special projects that had fundamental flaws that were certain to eventually implode - it's not like they were playing 5 moves into a game and getting it wrong occasionally. They were playing 2 moves into the game, often getting it wrong, and then covering it up with some equally flawed fix that in turn itself would later become a grenade. It's easy to argue in reading the book that they definitely weren't the smartest guys in the game, just the most audacious.
