New Pico2

Hohmann worked out the details of travel around the solar system using the computing power in his head and the storage afforded by a pencil and paper. The computing requirements for space travel are not that large.

High quality engineering is a major requirement of space travel. NASA in the sixties had an effectively infinite budget and a culture of careful engineering going back to Edward Murphy of Murphy's law.

Boeing are busy acquiring a reputation of careless engineering.

Primarily due to acquiring beancounters from the ruins of McDonnell Douglas who promptly inserted themselves into the culture of Boeing and stated taking shortcuts to make more profit without understanding the importance of having an engineering safety culture. It's cost them billions now.

In the USA, Big Data is either buying-up the full output of nuclear plants, or buying the nuclear plants themselves.

Throttling in tune with renewable generation, maybe not, but "herding" multiple virtual servers onto a reduced number of physical hosts in tune with demand and shutting down some of the physical hosts is done.

He was only able to come up with “minimum energy” transfer orbits that went fairly directly from body A to body B. Since then, we have worked out more complicated low-energy “slingshot” orbits that involve bouncing around the Solar System to match velocities with difficult-to-reach target bodies like comets. That required real computing power: there’s no way anybody could have worked that out with pencil and paper, even with a slide rule.

And what about “halo” orbits, like at Earth-Moon L2, where the Chinese put their relay station for maintaining contact with their far-side rover, and where the James Webb telescope is located? You think you could work out the right numbers for those without a modern digital electronic computer? They’re not even properly stable, for a start.

True, that. But are they too big to be allowed to fail?

But there are multiple Chinese languages. I know they are commonly called “dialects”, but it is also pointed out that, say, Mandarin and Cantonese are more different from each other than, say, English and Norwegian.

There is the saying “a language is a dialect with an army”. I suppose there is a corollary to that: China ceased being a bunch of independent states around 220 BC.

Diagonal colored sharpie stripes across the top of the deck, and periodic repunching with fresh sequence numbers on cols 73-80.