Three Recs: October 15, 2024
It's 2004 again, so let's catch a skyscraper and listen to Coldplay.
Hey there. In case you’re unaware, I have a weekly email called The Funnies, which is a collection of funny pieces of the internet I find throughout the week. It’s been around for about four years, and it’s totally free. You can subscribe here and get your first edition on Saturday morning.
Here’s some stuff I recommend checking out.
SpaceX Catches 230-Foot-Tall Super Heavy Rocket Booster
Look, I know Elon Musk has become a lightning rod of controversy in the last couple of years. I get it. And his conduct (particularly in his management of Twitter) has frustrated me because I think it causes people to brush off some of the amazing work going on at his space travel company, SpaceX.
Whatever you think or feel about Elon Musk, you should watch the video below. The Super Heavy Booster is the largest object ever launched into space (I think), and will be the rocket that eventually takes people back to the Moon and to Mars for the first time. I love hearing the engineers going bananas in the background of the video below.
The booster is 230 feet tall. And in an attempt to make space travel as cost- and energy-efficient as possible, the engineers at SpaceX have figured out a way to CATCH THIS ROCKET OUT OF MID-AIR and re-use it again.
One commentator said something like, “We launched a skyscraper into space, it came back and parallel parked.” Amazing.
As one who is ever-interested in all things space, I can’t get enough of this achievement. So, so cool.
Welcome to 2004 Week
This is a neat project from The Verge. Some cool articles linked in here. I especially enjoyed the quiz asking if various events happened in 2004, 2024, or both.
In so many ways, the digital world in which we now all live was created 20 years ago. Google went public and began to ascend to rule the web. Facebook, Gmail, Firefox, Flickr, and Digg all launched — the year Web 2.0 became the web. “Blog” and “the long tail” were on no one’s radar before 2004, and since then, they’ve been everywhere. The United States went through a contentious election, a bunch of sequels dominated the box office, and Apple launched a new product that looked very cool but was ultimately eclipsed by a better product a year later. Okay, some things never change.
Coldplay’s New Album: Moon Music
I’m a big Coldplay fan, which is kinda funny because the lead singer and I share a first and last name. To date my favorite concert ever was the Viva La Vida tour in the summer of 2009, which I saw in Indianapolis the night before I graduated from high school. I tried and failed to get tickets to see them in Nashville next summer. Sad.
Anyway, their new album released a couple of weeks ago. It’s called Moon Music. I like it! Here’s one of my favorite songs from it—it’s the one I think feels most purely Coldplay: