The worst thing about this is that the drive usually has the worst kind of fails-silently behavior. It's too expensive for your computer to read every write so it trusts the drive controller to give accurate reports of its size and remaining capacity. Other than that, unless the drive reports an error it looks like a good write. Finally the drive needs to actually accept filesystem recordkeeping to show it can manage the filesystem, or it it's an obvious disk formatting error.

This means writing more than 64gb (or whatever true size it is in the drive) will have the drive say, "sure thing, OS, the write was fine" and even updates the file record to show a file of the right size is there but the data for the file actually goes... nowhere. Into the void. Silently. Until the user looks for it. I was curious about this scam back in the day and replicated the behavior with badblocks on Linux on a similar disk.

Yes, absolutely. This video with Adam Savage is a pretty good one for the visuals and walk-around experience, and they talk about the hand-made-ness feeling you get from seeing the orbiter. This is Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum but Endeavour (which I've seen) feels very similar to experience. I have a strong recollection of seeing Endeavour and really being impacted by the gimballing mount of the main engines; I don't know how I thought they worked before, maybe some sort of flexible rubber interface that would flex as the engines moved in order to ensure a seal around the engine, but they are ball joints that rotate in a socket and presumably have some sort of O-ring seal. And that's such a simple, straightforward, mundane solution for how to get the engines freedom of movement that it was a real "of course that's how they did it" feeling. It's a moment of "wait a second, that's the same thing as how my 25 dollar shower head moves around to adjust its aim" feeling. You can see details that you just don't get otherwise, like the wear on the inside of the engine bells from repeatedly spitting out hellfire.

tl;dr: definitely go see it if you can

But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation 🤔

> elements in a row all have similar properties. The row Hydrogen is in is all metals except hydrogen.

This might be nit-picking, but I think you mean "column" instead of "row", yes? I think you're talking about having similar properties due to their number of valence electrons, which is represented by the column.

Bite my shiny metal photovoltaics