greet = shake hands, sorry, to me it's practically a synonym. Doesn't matter if you go out to greet them or wait until they're in, just don't do it over the doorstep.

No idea about the genesis of it as bad luck superstition, but it was either a fashionable influence from the outside that made more sense in context of parent culture or one of those old-Polish customs that Mikołaj Rej would think archaic. 50:50 with those things.

Not greeting people over doorsteps and not turning back on your way from home. First is so ingrained in Poland, I thought it's good manners until someone mentioned it. The second is allegedly about bringing bad luck home with you, but IMO it's just common sense/punishing absent-mindedness away. Regardless of motivation, I consciously avoid doing either.

Seriously though I fucking love space. I have no mind for numbers, so pursuing anything with the cosmos as a career was out for me, but fuck I could read about this shit all day.

You didn't ask, but are you aware of Ask an Astronomer site? 'Cause it sounds right up your alley.

I'm firmly in the "maths = yey!" camp, but remember having fun reading The Story of Astronomy by L. Motz and J.H. Weave for an essay assignment in science education. It's been a couple years, but IIRC, they spend about half a page discussing the ellipse equation and go back to discussing hows and whys of humans probing space for data.

Yup, and that's a pretty standard density for meteorites. Depending on error bars on that corgi, it could be a chunkier/less porous type of chondrite (very common), but that's about all I'd be willing to put forward. Enstatites are less dense (3.5-ish), iron-bearing composites are denser (4.5-ish), and that's about the extent of my geological knowledge.

To put that in perspective: Chelyabinsk meteor was the size of a ball 30-corgi wide and weighing in excess 78000 baby elephants, moving remarkable 2100 times faster than an African swallow.

A corgi-sized meteor weighing as much as 4 baby elephants reads as metals to me.

It gets better. If that corgi-sized meteor was the size of Earth, its electrons would have 60 nanometre radiuses!

Between #humor and monks...

Immo, "ora et labora" regula bona fuisset! Et nos, viri docti, in linguam Latinam loquentur discentque denuo.

Cross-section of parachute, yes, sorry for confusing wording earlier. It mostly corresponds to 1.7-2.0 air resistance coefficient in all those plug-n-play calculators on the internet if you want to cut corners.

Foot's OK. What's puzzling is that I can jump rope and do dexterity ladders like it's nobody's business, but running gives me pins and needles progressing to stabbing pain. So kinda not doing that.

I will agree though that there's lots to slog through before you get to the juicy bits.

Sometimes a painful slog for exceptional bits. The setting and story are fun, but... eh, you know how in LotR, the everyone's favourite encounter with Balrog is about the same length as Tolkien yammering about brambles on a footpath or which capezios Legolas donned that day? Same thing here. I kinda just moved to reading excerpts on r/40klore or running wiki articles through TTS while doing something else, only picking up a book on recommendation or because synopsis/excerpt made me curious.

I will read Spears and Siege one of those weekends, though. You're not the first person praising them for what I like (mortal/ooutsider perspective), and they sound good by synopsis alone, but that's a push I needed. Thanks!

Dude how long do you think it takes to ride an ejected pilot's chair with parachute down from 70k+ feet? That's gotta be like something around 30 minutes.

For human-ish blob (edit: on a parachute) weighing 100 kg dropping from 20 km, I got around 14 minutes under the simple equation of motion, with drag proportional to speed squared. It'd probably be closer to 10 minutes for stratified atmosphere, but I can't be arsed to calculate it that precisely. :P

Have you read any of those Dark Imperium books post-Guilliman's awakening? HH grew lukewarm for me, but those new developments turned my head a bit. I don't care about spoilers, but only know the broad strokes so far.

Bram Stoker's Dracula, because it's embarrassing I didn't yet. So far, even though it's a very uneven burn, I like it more than any of the adaptations.

Danielle Cybulskie's How to Live Like a Monk, which, despite the title, is more about how monastics dealt with their life of deprivation, what they did for mental health, how they mitigated burnout, and more. Even though the author is a medievalist historian, it's a very light and approachable read. It's respectable to monks, but secular in lessons learned if that's your worry.

I've been trying to left-side read a couple Loebs', but my vocab isn't there yet. Damn you, Cicero, and your septuple-level puns!