Room Full of PhDs Really Excited by Things That Go in Circles
HOUSTON, USA — Dogs, merry-go-rounds, Loop 373. Nature is full of things that go in circles. Now we can add one more item to that list: a giant, flaming bucket filled with computers that talk to other computers, shooting over our heads 16 times a day as it makes a giant, repeating circle around the Earth.
The mood was one of intense elation in the NASA control room at Houston this morning, where nearly three dozen highly-paid PhDs, most of whom got here by studying humanity's most arcane mathematical and scientific principles for at least 15 years a head, gathered to watch something of their own making go in a circle.
At a salary rate of roughly $1 to $2 dollars per minute per person, the several hundred dollar outburst of enthusiasm was a veritable steal compared to the $380 million dollars that it had taken these same individuals 18 months to get to this point with the GOFAST Earth Circler Satellite, NASA's premier Earth-circling device and the latest human triumph in circulogical engineering after Mrs. Beasley's Lazy Susan kitchen aid was installed last week in Michigan.
"This will certainly make the Chinese think twice about challenging us in the mastery of circles," speculated Chief NASA Scientist Dr. Jorge Galilei. He added, "Apart from the roughly 62,000 Earth circlers that have previously been put into circles around the Earth, no one has ever done anything like this before."
Minutes after the initial jubilation, the mood at NASA was dampened somewhat when a circulator engineer reported that the GOFAST Earth Circler Satellite was actually making a slightly imperfect circle, a geometric abomination known as an "ellipse," where one side of the circle is longer than the other side. But Chief Scientist Galilei took it in stride:
"The pattern is so close to a perfect circle that it's practically a rounding error," he said. "The difference we're talking about is narrower than a basketball in Miami hitting a split end on a human hair in Los Angeles." When asked what that meant, Galilei replied, "We struggle to put these sophisticated concepts into lay terms sometimes. But we're talking about a circle that is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly circular."
In Washington, D.C., the news was less warmly received. "I hear it's costing a lot of money," said President Scroob, who has frequently been dismissive of his own, recently-renamed Department of Platonic Geometry, formerly the Department of Circles. "I think triangles are a lot more efficient," he said. "I make really good triangles, and it's just...really the best...some people even call me 'The Triangulator.' They say, 'Sir, make me a triangle,' and I'll do it for them. It's amazing. And they say, 'Nobody makes better triangles.' Which, to be fair, is something I've heard all my life, so maybe it's true; I don't know. But all you crooked media people want to report on is circles, but behind closed doors you're always telling me, 'Sir, you make such good triangles.' It's unbelievable."
Back at the NASA control room in Houston, the scale of the day's accomplishment was best captured by a relatively new hire: a Junior Radius Technician named Millie Chester.
"I know a lot of people don't think it's all that impressive anymore that we can make circles," she said. "They look on TV and they see AI-generated circles that are mathematically perfect. But the difference is that our circles are really there. It's not easy to put a circulator in the sky. It took this entire room of highly-paid circle experts, and hundreds more at our other laboratories and factories around the nation, to get to this point. Nature makes circles so easily, but humanity really has to work for it."
And work for it they shall: Despite presidential misgivings, the next NASA Earth Circler is scheduled to launch in 2027, with the ambitious goal of making circles around the Moon—itself a noted maker of circles around our planet.
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