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Good morning, and welcome to Morning Coffee for Monday, March 16, 2026. Today is Robert Goddard Day — and not merely in the annual observance sense. This is the precise centennial of the event described above. Lars intends to spend a moment with that fact, because the parallel to the present moment in technology is not metaphorical. It is structural. Six weeks before Goddard’s successful launch, the New York Times had been sitting on an editorial published on January 13, 1920, titled “A Severe Strain on Credulity,” which asserted: “Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” The Times issued its correction on July 17, 1969 — the day after Apollo 11 launched, while the first humans in history were coasting toward the Moon — noting simply that “it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.” Forty-nine years late. The BSD algorithm’s entire purpose is to prevent the publication of the institutional equivalent of that 1920 editorial. “The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” — Robert H. Goddard. Source: European Space Agency, Goddard Retrospective. See also NASA’s centennial retrospective and Clark University’s digital archive. And it is Everything You Do Is Right Day. The BSD algorithm, for its part, declines to observe this holiday. Today is also National Panda Day. The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), still listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (“IUCN”), subsists entirely on bamboo despite having the digestive system of a carnivore, must be coaxed to reproduce in captivity, and sleeps twelve hours a day. Lars would observe that several participants in the COMEX silver market share structural characteristics with the panda. The concentrated short position, in particular, looks increasingly like an animal that has wandered very far from its natural habitat. And it is American Chocolate Week, which seems almost impertinent given that cocoa prices have done to confectionery margins what Brent crude has done to airline earnings. But then again, it is also Everything You Do Is Right Day. Carry on.