Division Chief, OCIO @usopm Previously at @whitehouse @nasa Views mine. Non-partisan civil servant.
Washington, DC
Joined July 2020
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In my expert opinion from watching television for 50 years, nothing else comes close.
Connections by James Burke.
The greatest TV series of all time.
I quote this show daily. It has changed my life.
The first episode in particular is the most brilliantly written, produced and directed episode of television I’ve ever seen.
Shawn G. Chittle 🎃👻 retweeted
We lost one of the greats of stage and screen today. And, in my book, a tremendous friend and man. I learned so much from him. I will miss you, Patrick Stewart, all of my days. @mang0ld
I love speech and languages as someone who had to code switch often multiple times a day in NYC.
He’s missing the 1980s “dude” and “fer sure” that originated in California and made it’s way east like a virus. Not just valley speak, it affected all of us.
1990s was laid back but 1980s was frenetic, energetic and full of wonder and awe.
Captured in music and film, its best personified by Keanu Reeves and others.
You can hear all the 1980s vocal variants in the movie Summer School (1987).
Fred Armisen breaks down the fascinating evolution of conversational accents and speech patterns decade by decade on The Tonight Show.
"I've been working on some impressions of accents through the decades"
1900s: "the manufacturer and the farmer, people thought it was very British, but it's actually very Dutch and German"
1920s: "They start getting very aware of the microphone"
1950s: "It starts to flatten out a little bit. I'd like to on a Friday night, I'd like to read a book on a Friday night"
1960s: "Diverges a little bit where there's an official sort of news hour... and then the sort of people in interviews looked like they were in shock"
1970s: "There's a whisper to it. There's a sort of confusion as to what's going on, there's a whisper"
1990s: "Very kind of laid back, wow, the nineties laid back, yeah, very sarcastic and ironic, wow"
2000s: "You start to hear the vocal fry... guys are in a meeting and they can sort of hear that throughout when they're talking on a conference call"
Shawn G. Chittle 🎃👻 retweeted
We mourn the passing of Patrick Stewart, who inspired countless individuals at NASA (and beyond) to boldly go where no one has gone before.
ALT Image description: A packed, sparkling starfield captured by our Hubble telescope — with strange new worlds potentially awaiting. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, R. Cohen
🥰
You are moving to a different point now, which is fine. But I want you to know that I was respectful in my reply, as I have been to the critics. You were not correct about the public display of the Moon rocks or about prior presidents having rocks in the Oval Office. Now you have pivoted to the budget request.
The President submitted a budget request that challenged NASA to do more with less. I provided testimony on the budget because, as you would see in OIG reports, there are examples where NASA was not the best at resource allocation and outcomes suffered. But ultimately, Congress appropriated funding, as is its responsibility.
Then we had a year like 2026: the Artemis II mission went very well and we immediately press on to Artemis III, not wasting time or money, six astrophysics missions set records; we held “too big to fail” programs accountable for being over budget and behind schedule; and we launched new initiatives in a logical, iterative way, like Moon Base and SR-1 Freedom. A flagship mission like Roman launched ahead of schedule. X-planes are actually flying again (and on their way to KSC at this moment). We have dramatically rebuilt the workforce, added thousands of civil servants, and put our machine shops back to building hardware. We have taken control of our destiny and put NASA back in the driver seat. And as a result, we have a President who has clearly taken notice and is showing a lot of interest in America’s space program, from Artemis to Roman.
This is how you go from being asked to do more with less to being asked to do more with more.
So good.
Interesting that you should mention that. Since I took over as Administrator, we put three Moon rocks on display in the lobby of NASA HQ. They are there now, and anyone can walk in and see them. We also brought Moon rocks to multiple public events, including America’s 250th birthday celebration on the National Mall and NASA fan engagement zones in Cleveland, New York, Pittsburgh, and Tuscaloosa.
President Trump is the third president to have a Moon rock in the Oval Office. Presidents Clinton and Biden did as well, so you have your facts wrong. You should maybe try to put the obvious political bias aside for a second. If you love NASA, having a president who supports the space program and where we are going, the Moon, is a good thing.
And, as inconvenient as it may be for you, the facts are that POTUS established the Artemis program, the Artemis Accords, and the Space Force, and has now provided the National Space Policy calling for a Moon Base.
Shawn G. Chittle 🎃👻 retweeted
SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940-2026)
Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.
We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in 'Star Trek'. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”. Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes ('X-Men' of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.
America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.
His farewell performance in 'Avengers: Doomsday' is yet to be seen.
Ian McKellen 29 October 2026
Photo: University of Huddersfield
This morning I had the most memorable of D72 bus rides to work this morning in Washington DC.
A man in a wheelchair boarded the front using the ramp and a woman with a very large stroller did not want to wait, boarding from the back.
In doing so, she obstructed the entire aisle. I don’t mean “squeeze by” I mean completely obstructed. Fire hazard illegal levels of obstruction.
I boarded after wheelchair guy and headed for the open rear seats where I was met with the blocked aisle.
The woman just looked at me and exclaimed, "Exit the bus and go around" to which I said "C'mon Ma'am if you had just waited patiently like the rest of us, you could have boarded in the front."
The bus driver asked me if everything was OK. She peered back and yelled the aisle could not be blocked and was about to exit from her drivers seat and deal with what was surely to be a ugly situation.
I said "Tell you what, ma'am (driver), why don't we ask new passengers to board from the rear?" she readily agreed to that.
As we made a half dozen more stops, we told folks to board from the rear.
As we approached near the final stop, the stroller woman finally exited but of course required the entire front of the bus to exit first as she could not get past us.
She did say "...sorry for inconveniencing you." but it wasn't so much an inconvenience but a matter of public safety. The front of the bus is for strollers. Not the aisle in the back of the bus.
@wmata @wmataGM D72 bus driver #7121 handled this difficult situation with perfect class and grace, I thanked her on the way out and said "I think we handled that pretty well." and she smiled.
Just another day commuting in Washington DC.
Interesting point here.
Palmer Luckey says analysts claiming it's too expensive to manufacture in the US are lying to protect megacorps
"I think I have a more realistic view than almost anybody. One of the problems with all these analysts that are telling you that it's going to cost $37,000 to build an American iPhone or $100,000 to buy an American computer."
"They're trying to prop up a status quo that the megacorporations want to keep going. They want to outsource everything. They want to hire cheaper non-American labor."
"They are willing to say and do anything to convince you that it can't be fixed, that it can't come back, that America is this helpless, neutered, post-relevant empire, and it is just not the case."
"How do I know that? Because I have to make stuff in America every day because I work in the defense industry. The stuff that Anduril makes every day is not actually that different from a computer. My drones are basically computers. They have memory, a GPU, a CPU, sensors, batteries, a rugged integration."
"The only difference between an Anduril attack drone and a laptop is a keyboard and a screen. That is not that hard to figure out, especially for a guy like me who started Oculus and comes from the consumer electronics space."
"We're not going to let people lie about what America can and can't do anymore. We're just going to do it."
Shawn G. Chittle 🎃👻 retweeted
Now on America.gov: find senior, affordable, or public housing resources near you
Shawn G. Chittle 🎃👻 retweeted
Happy 35th Birthday HTML tags!
On October 29, 1991, the internet pioneer, Tim Berners-Lee, published a document entitled HTML Tags.
The document contained a description of the first 18 HTML tags: <title>, <nextid>, <a>, <isindex>, <plaintext>, <listing>, <p>, <h1>…, <address>, <hp1>…, <dl>, <dt>, <dd>, <ul>, <li>,<menu> and <dir>.
ALT On October 29, 1991, the internet pioneer, Tim Berners-Lee, published a document entitled HTML Tags.
