Susan

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”
― Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

“Under the section heading “Experiments with Human Subjects” – a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased –”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep.

To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing.”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void