Another conference break, for Lileks, from yesterday:

...we had a Road Runner marathon. I was heartened to see that she didn’t laugh at the gags that weren’t funny. Many of them aren’t. She has sympathy for the Coyote; if he was a pup, he would be so cute. But she roots for the Road Runner. I keep telling her that the Road Runner gets by on speed alone; at least the Coyote is using his brain. On the other hand, the Coyote is often paralyzed by imminent doom, particular if it’s a result of something he set in motion. If he set a boulder rolling south, and a minute later it appears behind him from the north, there is always a moment of complete understanding in his face, braided with fear and horrible anticipation. He always knows who’s really to blame, but it never stops him from the next invention.

The Coyote's problem is he gives up when his prototypes fail instead of attempting to fix them.

Yes, that's NASA's problem as well.

I don't know Rand, they keep on trying to fix the Shuttle well beyond reason.

Lileks is a national treasure.

Because somehow they think of it as an 'operational' system, rather than an X-vehicle, or a 'prototype' of anything. Even though it takes more people and time to turn around, than probably any of the latter.

Yea I always rooted for Wile E. Coyote myself. The Road Runner would eventually frustrate me and I wish he had one moment of redemption to throttle his scraw-ny neck into oblivion. Although I liked the episodes where Wile E. would face of against Sam the sheep dog. In those Wile E. was the legitimate under dog because he would literally dug a tunnel under the dog to get to the sheep.