I now understand the difference between project and select, as they are very similar. Select actually has the more complicated criteria, while project just culls unnecessary fields from view. I like the compactness of the theta join operator, and the way Widom elegantly describes it. Now that I have the theta join, the unnecessary high dimensional garbage fire of a tensor that is created when taking the Cartesian product of two relations seems a bit more forgivable :)
I will be done with Widom's algebra course tomorrow, and I've been behind on the w3 course.
I have however made a good amount of progress with awk, however not to the degree that I've made a well formatted table. The main issue is that I can't get awk to change its field separator as often as I want it to. Otherwise, I've basically done what I need to do for awk to format brightest-stars.txt into a form that can have SQL run on it.