I can’t comment on the northeast, but I can say I was one of the more fit guys around town when I lived in the south simply because I did the bare minimum of exercise. The food is incredible and the weather encourages you to sit inside and hide from the heat.

Then I moved to Denver, where I am now the fat guy in the neighborhood. I quickly lost 20 lbs doing nothing besides not living near southern food and going to the mountains on the weekends.

Sadly, getting more places with less money is absolutely possible, but the key to making it happen is abandoning planetary science. It’s a shift from a paradigm where engineering exists to support planetary science efforts to engineering for engineering’s sake

I went on a first date with a girl who ordered a slice of “big Mac” cheeseburger pizza with McDonald’s secret sauce and American cheese

She wanted me to try a bite. I did. It was terrible. She loved it

No accounting for taste, I guess

There is a very reasonable explanation for this: If we are a topic of research for them, they could have simply stopped studying us in the same way

Take our own science for example. We pull out of studies when the funding dries up. Maybe the aliens’ government grant ran out. Or, perhaps they have a policy of avoiding interference with the subjects. They could have changed methodology in response to the threat of high resolution recording equipment

Yeah there is a reason why plane spotters use 400+mm lenses