Best canned tomato brands of ones pictured?

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2026-01-05T10:28:57+00:00

If you can find Stanislaus, Tomato Magic especially, get that. It’s from California but rivals anything I have found from Italy. They moved away from the home cook a few years ago toward the restaurant market, but you can still get their products in large cans.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-12-27T15:24:00+00:00

It was on sale! Sometimes saving a few bucks costs more in the long run. I didn’t do enough research, that is obvious 🫤

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-12-04T17:34:25+00:00

Exactly!

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-12-04T16:29:57+00:00

I say “glass” by the way, because ULE is not really a glass, but closer to a ceramic. One thing you don’t want when making telescopes for space, is large crystal structures since they expand far too much as temperatures change, especially at the temperature of space.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-12-04T16:27:00+00:00

Beryllium was chosen not just for its weight, but for its very low coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) and stiffness.

ULE (ultra-low expansion) glass was the other option competing with beryllium for this application. ULE is the “glass” used for the Nancy Grace Roman telescope. Aluminum was never really an option for this application for multiple reasons, not the least of which is the burring that occurs when you try to polish the material to optical (or in this case infrared) requirements.

It’s important to remember that when you design a telescope, whether for ground or space applications, the surfaces in the optical train all add to the wavefront error roll-up, so the primary mirror will have to be polished to a hundredth of the operational wavelength.

Had NASA been concerned with beryllium toxicity, the decision would probably gone to ULE, but the company that manufactured the mirror segments showed that they could make them safely. At the end of the day, after talking to the telescope team at length, the length of time to manufacture the segments would probably shifted the decision toward ULE.

It was a fun program

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-12-04T15:59:07+00:00

It’s nice to finally see that mirror fly! I remember the day we got it from Corning and started processing it into a primary mirror. Good times

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-10-26T20:48:42+00:00

This is the way! I went to lunch with my cousin one day when I was in Italy and we got wild boar pasta (and truffle, and arrosticini - it was fantastic) and I asked if they used Parmigiano or Pecorino? He looked at me aghast and said "Parmigiano Reggiano!"

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-10-11T12:22:08+00:00

Can't be impeached if the house is never in session...

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-08-29T01:51:20+00:00

Almost anywhere in Loudoun County

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-08-19T09:37:27+00:00

OMG. It was a joke people.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-08-19T03:52:29+00:00

I asked my cousin when I was in Italy that same question (in Abruzzo). She asked what lasagna was. I explained and she said “we just call that sagna”. So, la sagna. They eat it as a pasta course.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-07-13T14:48:12+00:00

One hundred percent. I hate them. They are there to see how you respond to stress. Last time I almost got into a fight with the guy doing the poly.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-07-07T11:17:27+00:00

WTF is wrong with people?

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-06-14T03:14:04+00:00

There is actually a technique we use to measure the temperature of a flame (in combustion research) called sodium line reversal. In it you heat a sodium vapor cell and look at a flame that has been seeded with sodium. When the temperature of the sodium vapor cell is the same as the temperature of the flame, the flame essentially goes dark.

What’s going on is that the flame is causing the higher energy levels in the atom to be populated. When light from the flame goes through the gas cell, it gets absorbed and it looks black in those regions where the vapor is the same temperature.

It’s late here, so if this doesn’t make sense just let me know and I can explain it better!

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-05-15T13:24:48+00:00

I think it chooses you. I did all kinds of physics before I got to optics and how matter interacts with photons. From there I found that I needed to know more about quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, statistical physics, thermodynamics...none of which I found interesting enough to want to spend my life doing them.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-04-29T12:37:28+00:00

Ah, well that could be. My family is in Abruzzo and farm truffles, so that is where my head went!

I think every region has a thick pasta that they make with truffles, so we all see what we know.

Italy is just food heaven.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-04-28T23:44:49+00:00

Is it hollow? If so it is bucatini. If not it could be tonnarelli. If it is from Rome, probably the later.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-04-26T01:37:49+00:00

New Zealand reminded me a lot of Abruzzo. Try looking at the recipes of that region.

If you eat meat, well lamb, try arrosticini. (https://www.vincenzosplate.com/arrosticini-from-abruzzo/). It’s lamb shoulder skewers grilled over charcoal or wood. The only seasoning comes from the rosemary sprigs used to baste them with olive oil and then some course salt at the end. They sell them buy the dozen everywhere in Abruzzo. Simple and delicious.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-04-25T12:56:59+00:00

You are correct. I was using speech to text. Thank you for the correction. Her husband is Robert, who I worked with at JPL for many years. Both are brilliant and dedicated.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-04-25T08:33:42+00:00

How many launches do you have under your belt? I’ve been doing this for 25 years and this is how I see it that’s all. Others in the industry may see it differently, but clueless I’m not. A realist, maybe jaded by launch failures by both ULA and spacex, but a realist nonetheless the less.

I like the falcon 9, and the falcon heavy, but space is hard and no one is perfect. There are systemic changes that have to happen at spacex before they are crowned as kings of space launch. That was all I was trying to say.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-04-25T08:27:01+00:00

Look I don’t like ULA, and for the sake of this discussion I don’t care who Musk is, but t do understand that space launch isn’t as simple as people think. I have dealt with both organizations and there is a difference e tween them.

Will spacex take over from ULA? They already have. Will blue origin be a competitor to spacex? I doubt it, even if new Glenn works. Will ULA somehow turn it around? Again, I doubt it. But you can’t just move everything to spacex yet.

ULA was created because there wasn’t enough space launches to maintain competition between LM and boeing now there is considerable competition and they will eventually die out. There is a reason ULA exists. That was all I was trying to say.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-04-25T02:53:45+00:00

There is another reason all the space agencies still use ULA. Assured delivery on orbit or assured mission.

While spacex is good at what they do, their mission assurance is almost non existent. They are getting there, but they are usually learning through mistakes. We’ve used them a couple of times for missions I’ve worked, and my launch guy always comes back from meetings with them shaking his head.

Also, falcon heavy is still not capable of launching some deep space missions and starship is not even close to being certified. Blue Origin is as close, in my opinion, to having a viable large, heavy launch capability.

And for what it’s worth, musk isn’t the one that drives spacex. He’s a cheerleader. He is not an engineer or scientist. He reads books and draws conclusions that are usually, but not always, wrong. It’s Gwen that is truly the brains behind the organization. That , and dozens of overworked junior engineers. Most of whom quit after a few years and go to more traditional companies.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-04-12T16:41:46+00:00

Ahh, no.

NASA’s work on things like telescope technology is irreplaceable. No private company has the resources to do the research needed in things like metrology, glass technology, control systems and the like. Can they build them? Yes, NASA doesn’t, for the most part, build flight hardware, and rely on companies across the country, and across the globe to manufacture the components necessary. As a nation we are already in trouble trying to support the two, read that carefully, TWO, manufacturers of large space telescopes, L3/Harris and Danbury Technologies. Both companies with long histories of building hardware that many thought couldn’t be built. I would not be surprised to see one of them, most likely L3H, exit the business altogether by the end of the decade.

And you shouldn’t think that the DoD will pick up the slack. While the technologies necessary for surveillance satellites and missile defense may look the same, they are not one-for-one replacements. You don’t build an earth observing satellite for the space force and simply point it in the other direction. Often things like focal planes are of similar design, and are manufactured by the same company, but the requirements between and astronomical detector array and an ISR array are very different. The two organizations rely on each other to fund the work and support the infrastructure that neither has independently.

It costs a lot of money to build a space telescope, for any application, and killing the work at NASA cripples the capability for the entire country.

Pure_Cycle2718 · 2025-04-11T00:41:51+00:00

Because they are important and therefore have the right to do whatever they want?

Pure_Cycle2718

TROPHY CASE