He is, as always, correct.

Fair.

Oh no. You can get close to any star of your choosing with only minuscule amounts of reaction mass if you start out in vacuum away from significant gravity wells - eventually. Granted, the star in question may or may not have gone supernova or collapsed into a black hole by the time you arrive, but I doubt that’ll make a lot of difference to the person doing it at that point.

With that said, I’m not about to discourage anybody from taking an interest in fusion of the up-close-and-personal-kind. And if people aren’t into the math of Magnetohydrodynamics? Well, first off, sucks to be them, but second: Then donate to the cause to pay those who are. Fusion is fucking awesome, and we desperately need it.

That or the right job application and a lot of propellant and oxidizer - but seriously, don’t do that. It didn’t end well for Icarus. Gravitationally-driven open-core fusion reactors are best admired from a safe minimum distance.

“It’s always nice to get a customer who can appreciate the finer points of palaeoenvironmental conditions. I swear, some days I have clients without even the most basic epistemological awareness. Then again, I suppose someone needs to watch all that so-called reality TV they’re producing. Let’s get you all fixed up, hun.”

“He was a genius, but then he turned to evil.”

Yes, it’s a pity the last term is occluded. We might have solved cat-faces for ever if not for that blunder.

Yeah, I’m going to have to remember that one.

Damn. It’s like watching meme’d videos with humorously wrong subtitles when you actually speak the language used in the clip. I just can’t ignore what’s actually on the blackboard.

Sounds very effective though. And it should ensure a snake-like length to diameter ratio in short order, so at least it’s more truthfully advertised than most diets.

Yeah. It’s pretty useless. I presume Politico is referring to the EU Space Act, but it’s hard to be sure when they don’t even name the damn proposal they’re writing an article about.

Oh? Must be good legislative work then. I’d be hard pressed to think of a much better endorsement.

Nah. They’ll all be needed to clean up the inevitable mess.

“I’m afraid someone checked out our only copy and returned it in tatters. We had to bin it.”

Uh, I suppose you could do that in very simple situations where you don’t need any layout control or advanced typography and just want to nicely typeset some text for print or distribution.

As for the only thing missing from markdown being comments: Sorry, but I can’t follow you there. CTAN currently hosts 6827 packages written by 3105 contributors, all of which covers things markdown cannot even remotely do.

Similarly, Typst currently has 478 contributed packages.

Don’t take that as criticism. Markdown isn’t meant to do any of those things.

Oh, I quite agree. Always use the right tool for the job. As Einstein put it, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”.

If you’re thinking of jumping back into typesetting because you have the occasional need for that too, you might want to have a quick look at the aforementioned Typst, which aims to be a modernized successor to LaTeX. It can’t compete with the sheer volume of work people have done in TeX over the years to typeset everything from manuals to orchestral note sheets, but it is considerably more humane to work with. In the simplest use cases, it’s not that far from markdown, really. It’s also very nice that content and presentation is entirely decoupled.

I think chances are good that you’d like it.

Sure, markdown is great for basic formatting and simple structure. Actual typesetting is a completely different problem domain though.

It’s not exactly the appropriate tool for having your math-heavy doctoral dissertation or latest book published. I wouldn’t base my printed business correspondence on markdown either.

Sounds like you got lucky. We never did find out what happened to Hannah after she got sucked through that rift in the time-space continuum.

And that’s why we use LaTeX, kids. Or Typst.

“Shit! We have to get rid of the evidence!”

“Yes, but where do we dump it? It’s already literally in the environment!”

“We’ll just have to eat it. No wait! Better idea: Make other people eat it!”

Her husband’s death? If only… Oh, you were talking about Kirk’s widow? I wasn’t.