Anecdotally, my success in the dating world went up dramatically when I started using OKCupid; to put it simply, it got me past the "is she even interested in dating, much less dating me?" hangup that I tended to have, and led to a lower fear of rejection. Basically, I no longer worried about whether the attention was undesirable, something that I had a really hard time telling from in-person interaction back then (I've gotten better at it; this was years ago).

Also, while it's certainly true that there are tons of guys on such sites and women tend to get a ton of attention (mostly undesirable, as in looking for dating but gets mostly messages along the lines of "your hot lets fuck"), it's really not that hard to stand out from the herd. It might take a while to figure out what works and what doesn't, but online dating is a much easier (in my experience) place to try things out (with regard to getting a date) than face-to-face. Also, online dating is a really good way for less-social types of people to meet other less-social types of people.

Now, with that said, even once you start getting first dates you should expect a lot of them to not go anywhere. That's the way the world works. Learn from them, both what your partners didn't like and what you didn't like. Don't assume it's always something you can change about yourself except by refining what you look for in a partner. Again, this might take a while to find somebody who is into you, and you're into them, and neither of you scares away or turns off the other... but it'll happen, and being in a relationship is a huge emotional, self-esteem, and confidence boost... even if the relationship doesn't last.

That exposes the maximum surface area for combustion, I guess (the surface area actually increases as the propellant is burned, interestingly) so blowing the top would work, yeah.

Whoops, you're right. I thought the gimbaling was just on the SSMEs (attached to the orbiter) but in retrospect it's obvious that the SRBs had to have some control of their flight path. I'm now actually rather curious about the range safety stuff for the SRBs - one of the dangers of an SRB is that there's basically no way to shut it down, and indeed they kept going for some time after Challenger blew up - but the gimbaling is indeed an obvious sign that I should have checked my memory/assumptions. Thanks.

Anecdotal, but I know of one case where the beggar got angry about being given food (I think it was something like a grocery store deli sandwich, still wrapped and unopened) and ranted at my friend about thinking they know better than the recipient about what they need and how the giver must not trust beggars with money and so on. It's kind of funny in retrospect, but at the time it was disturbing and confrontational and (of course) extremely ungrateful, so there were definitely no warm fuzzies derived therefrom (more like a highly unpleasant fight-or-flight moment plus public embarrassment) and it really did feel like a waste of money. If your goal is warm fuzzies, or even just to convince yourself you're doing some good, triggering an experience like that is utterly counterproductive. I can't imagine it's a common thing, but so far as I know, my friend has never again tried giving food directly (as opposed to donating to a food drive).

Best guess, it's simply because Typical Mind is overwhelmingly more common (though this could be an example of TMF at work right here!). Humans are social animals, who value the agreement of others with their own views. It's easy and comfortable to assume that other people will think similarly to you. There's an even deeper level than that, though: you are the only person whose mind you are truly familiar with, and so there's a huge availability bias in favor of your own thought processes on any subject. It requires more thought to consider what other people - either in particular, or generally - would think of a situation than it does to form your own thoughts; you do the latter automatically just be considering the situation at all. Many people will never put forth the extra effort without being prodded to do so.

Even those who claim to be their own special snowflake actually commonly do value commonality with other people. Hipsters (not saying you are one, it's just a convenient category of identifiable people who, ironically, share a useful set of criteria) may proudly claim to think differently from the rest of society, but even then they are agreeing with each other about what to think differently about, and are frequently thinking different in the same way. If you drink PBR but claim to do so "ironically", you're a hipster; you belong to a society that may have some differences from the dominant one, but is internally relatively consistent. If you only drink micro-brewed craft beers of at least 7% ABV and made with organically-grown hops then you're a couple different kinds of beer snob, but in a way that people can relate to; maybe they also prefer stronger beers, or stick to organic produce, or whatever, and they know other people who have those other preferences too so they can visualize you as the intersection of those groups, and you can be a member (a "special" member, but one nonetheless) of groups such as "craft beer snobs". If you drink Bud Light and Coors Light but only when mixed with pear juice and Tabasco sauce, you're actually a special snowflake... otherwise known as being just weird. People won't really be able to relate to your tastes, and (except when trying to signal your different-ness) you probably won't talk about your atypical taste when you're at a bar and somebody strikes up a conversation.

I'll admit I've had AMF moments myself, though. Topics I avoid talking about because I don't expect anybody else to be interested, or situations where I think literally everybody must think some way except me because I don't see any other counterexamples. It's rare, though; at 28 I probably experience as much TMF in a week as I can recall AMF experiences in my life.

You're also talking about fundamentally different kinds of rocket boosters. The Space Shuttle used solid fuel boosters, which are basically nothing except a tube packed full of energetically burning material, an igniter to light said material, and a nozzle for the generated gases to come out. They couldn't throttle, couldn't gimbal, couldn't shut off or restart, didn't use cryogenic fuel so didn't need insulation, didn't rely on pressurized fuel so they didn't need turbopumps... In fact, as far as I know they basically didn't have any moving parts at all!

You ever flown a model rocket, like an Estes? That little tube of solid grey gritty stuff that you use to launch the rocket is basically a miniature version of the solid fuel boosters on the Space Shuttle. The shuttle boosters were obviously bigger, and were a lot tougher (which made them unacceptably heavy for something like the Falcon 9's first stage) so they could survive the water landing, but fundamentally they were basically just cylindrical metal tubes with a nozzle at the bottom.

Despite that, reconditioning them for re-use was still so expensive that it's unclear if the cost was worth it. Now, of course, they cost a lot less to build than a Falcon 9 first stage, but every one of the Falcon 9 first stage's nine Merlin 1D engines is many times as complicated as the entire solid booster used on the Space Shuttle. Even the first stage tank is much more complicated, since it needs to take cryogenic fuels and massive internal pressurization.

I think part of the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of what parachuting into the ocean does to a rocket motor. The motors are the expensive part of the first stage; I don't know exact numbers, but they are the complicated, intricate, extremely-high-precision parts that must be exactly right or everything goes boom. The tank, by comparison, is an aluminum can.

The last landing attempt failed because a rocket motor's throttle valve had a bit more static friction than it should, and stuck open a moment too long. SpaceX's third launch attempt - the last failed launch they've had, many years ago with the Falcon 1 - was because the motor didn't shut off instantly before stage separation, like it should have. As far as I know, people still don't know why Orbital ATK (FKA Orbital Science)'s last launch attempt failed, except that it was obviously an engine failure. We talk about rocket science, but honestly the theoretical aspects of rocketry aren't that complicated. Rocket engineering, though, that's a bloody nightmare. You get everything as close to perfect as you can, and sometimes it still fails catastrophically and blows away more value than most of the people reading this thread will earn in their lifetimes, leaving virtually nothing to tell the tale of what happened.

What does all that have to do with parachute recovery of booster stages? Well, once you've dunked those motors in saltwater, they're a write-off. They can't be trusted to ever again operate perfectly without fairly literally rebuilding them, which defeats most of the purpose of recovering the booster.

There's nothing you could coat a rocket motor with that would both survive that motor operating and make it economical to re-use the motor after plunging into the ocean. The closest thing I can think of would be some kind of protective bubble that expands to protect the motors from the ocean once their job is done. It would need to be watertight, impact-resistant (the rocket still hits the water pretty hard, even with parachutes), able to deploy around the motors reliably, avoid causing a bending moment that collapses the tank (which has minimal pressure, because its fuel is depleted and any excess pressurizing agent you carry is wasted weight to orbit), and able to operate after being exposed to the environment in close proximity to a medium-lift rocket's primary launch motors. Maybe it's possible, but I can't think of how to do reliably enough to be worth the added cost on launch.

The hypothetical scenario stipulates that the illusion is perfect so long as you're driving the car. That may be an unrealistically difficult goal to achieve, but if you take its success as given, it means that the illusion really is as good as the true thing... so long as the illusion is never pierced. The problem, of course, is that with a car the illusion would be all too easy to pierce; just pop the hood. Even if the actual goal is not to drive an internal combustion car but merely to *believe" you drive such a car, one glance beneath the hood (or having once been told the truth) still means a loss of value.

For the record: I'm not sold on "completely reasonable to prefer just that" at all. It may be simply because I experience almost no jealousy - the only "rules" in my relationship are about the things that could actually hurt me (whether I knew what she was up to or not) - but I really don't see the cheating itself as a problem. Now, it does indicate that your partner is less trustworthy, less true to their promises, than you might have expected. That could be a problem. But in the hypothetical situation that my partner only breaks promises in ways that A) I won't know, and B) won't hurt me, I really don't care. Who am I, to control my partner's life that way? Of course, I'm highly unlikely to ever enter into an arrangement as described in the first place, so I'm not the hypothetical alternative Gal being discussed in any case.

However, there's another difference: with the car, Gal can - at need, or simply for fun - pop the hood and see the thing that pierces the illusion. In order for the illusion to persist, she needs to literally never look at the gasoline engine that she "thinks" powers the car. Whereas with the infidelity, so long as one doesn't stalk one's partner or compel them to tell the truth about their faithfulness, one would never be the wiser. The illusion of faithfulness really is as good as the real thing, and that's just not true of the car unless you're some weird sort of internal combustion fanatic who would never actually try to look upon their own engine.