Back on Tau Day (which is also my retirement anniversary), I posted about a scene in the superhero comic Invincible that involves a baseball orbiting the Earth at a very close distance (roughly airplane height). Regardless of superhero strengths, I found the scene impossible on multiple counts.
At the time, I could only calculate the velocity of the ball given the circumference of the Earth and some guesses about the length of the presumed orbit. Suffice to say the answers sufficiently demonstrated the impossibility.
Here, I’ll use orbital mechanics for some hard data on putative baseball orbits.

Often, the hardest part of Friday Notes (and, in fact, most) posts is writing the lede. Very soon after I began back in 2011, I settled on a three-part opening structure consisting of (as my template puts it): Intro… More… Punchline… followed by the page break that divides the lede from the body of the post.
For me, one of the challenges of writing a blog post is coming up with a title. A scan of my 










