When I mention their workplace's anti-social habit of focusing the sun's rays into beams capable of scorching cars and buildings, its inhabitants look pained and point up to the shades now in place to stop a repeat performance.
The craft spent thirteen years reconnoitering the sun's outer planets, beaming back valuable data and images of incomparable beauty.
It is not the first time architects have fallen foul of the capacity of curved, reflective surfaces to focus the sun's rays into a beam concentrated enough to start a fire, a phenomenon that is apparently difficult to model, but whose effects are well enough understood to have been exploited – legend has it – by the ancient Greek inventor Archimedes.
The Walkie-Talkie, at 20 Fenchurch Street, hit headlines last year when its concave south-facing facade was found to channel the sun's rays into a lethal beam, capable of singeing neighbouring buildings and melting car bumpers.
That the curvaceous curtain wall has the simultaneous effect of converging the sun's rays into a magnified beam of heat, capable of melting cars, might be seen to be a fluke byproduct of this architectural flourish, an unfortunate consequence you could never predict.
But it was this week renamed the Walkie Scorchie when it was found that the concave shape of the building was channelling the sun's rays into a concentrated beam onto Eastcheap, capable of singeing carpets, blistering paintwork and even melting parts of a car's bodywork.
Before it was even open, it was found that its south-facing concave glass facade channelled the sun's rays into a deadly beam of heat, capable of melting the bumper of a Jaguar, blistering painted shopfronts and singeing carpets – with temperatures hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement.
Just up ahead, the sun's rays burst through the ceiling and beam down on your sweaty forehead.
It was Mayakovsky who taught Frank O'Hara to talk directly to the sun, and the book includes O'Hara's beaming account of their conversation.
The sun beams down on a tiny glen in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains-a radiant afternoon for an outdoor wedding.
