dunmalg

Probably a better example from the opposite end of the spectrum would be the design changes between the F/A-18C/D and the F/A-18E/F. The initial plans were to stretch the C/D model to add fuel and improve the abysmal range, but this increased weight which required larger wings which required all sorts of major design changes. In the end, the E/F ended up with only 40% parts commonality, and was now a medium weigh fighter like the F-15, rather than the cheap light fighter like the F-16 it began life as. Engineers I know who worked on the E/F design have told me it would arguably have been cheaper to design a new plane from scratch, but the Navy was so afraid of another failed project that they were only able to sell it to the Navy as an "upgrade" of a plane design they already had. Dubious in an engineering sense, but absolute genius in marketing.

>* I do not agree with a lot of the premises of the literature---- But that being said........It works! *

From the article:

"Lance Dodes, a retired psychiatry professor from Harvard Medical School, looked at Alcoholics Anonymous’s retention rates along with studies on sobriety and rates of active involvement (attending meetings regularly and working the program) among AA members. Based on these data, he put AA’s actual success rate somewhere between 5 and 8 percent."

According to that, about the best you can say is that "it works when it works", which isn't saying much. I'm glad it worked for you, but the fact that for evey one of you there are 10 who go back to drinking doesn't do much to recommend the program as the legally mandated cure-all it currently is.

>What's the difference between this argument and "why should I have to pay for the insurance of others who get sick? should we all have to pay because a few can't live a healthy life?"?

Accepting universal drug prohibition is not anything like accepting mandatory insurance. Mandatory insurance results in nearly everyone being covered by insurance. Conversely, universal prohibition doesn't result in people NOT using drugs, it simply results in drugs being expensive and unregulated. Over a century of of strict prohibition has demonstrated this extensively.

>the speaker should try and emphasize INorganic or say it in a clearer way

The root problem here is that while the speaker may have been an expert in handling nuclear materials, they were not ALSO an expert in communication. The failure was the presumption that an expert can clearly communicate their domain knowledge across an expertise gap. Communication is a skill unto itself, one that often gets handwaved. People just assume they're good communicators because they can assemble a grammatically correct sentence. My wife is an editor. If I had a nickel for every time she's come home with a story about yet another coworker who claimed they "already edited their own paper and it just needs a quick look-over" and then handed her an incomprehensible mess, I'd have a lot of nickels.

The struggle is real. Letting go of my local data structures was a surprisingly difficult psychological hurdle. I sometimes wish there'd been someone there to tell me that the easiest paths are basically "all" and "nothing". Unfortunately I was the only programmer in the entire organization so I was making it up as I went along. I struggled for WEEKS playing pull-change-push games with huge duplicate local data structures before it even occurred to me there was a better way.

Thousands of years of violent human history suggest that designing a better helmet to mitigate TBI is likely to help more people than wishing war would go away.

"What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly."

Isn't this sort of a chicken-egg problem? I have horrible sleep issues, but they're caused by PTSD related anxiety, and yes, the insomnia then exacerbates the anxiety. I sleep better when my anxiety is under control, but it's not the good sleep that reduces my anxiety--- it's stuff like Xanax and meditation.

When speaking in terms of populations, "better" is generally used in terms of outcome, i.e. the sense of "increasing odds of survival". Quality of life and survivability tend to align, but in the cases where they don't, evolution will obviously tend to select for the latter.

I think part of the overarching problem is that there's a tendency by some to frame the move from hunter-gatherer to agriculture as some sort of choice, when really the move has been pretty solidly dictated by circumstance. Expanding population drove the development of farming and became a feedback loop with it. The only way to "choose" to remain a hunter-gatherer society would be to either forbid farming, or to impose an artificial limit on population, neither of which are really possible in a decentralized tribal society.

They actually have a pretty good idea of what they ate. Interesting article on it here:

http://www.ravensgard.org/prdunham/irishfood.html

The TLDR of their diet is "mostly pottage and soups, heavy on meat and dairy. Some oats and barley were grown, but a lot of that ended up being made into alcoholic beverages."

Cherry picking the MANNED Saturn V missions conveniently leaves out the unmanned Apollo 6 test where pogo vibrations borked two of the second stage engines and caused third stage relight to fail.

And if you want to consider the whole Saturn V STACK then you're going to have to consider counting Apollo 13 as a failure. The "payload" for Apollo is, in the end, really just the Command Module.

Actually, I suspect the internet has all but killed the real value of the Concorde.The only thing it had to offer was NY-London in 3.5 hours instead of 7.5 hours. There are so few cases where those 4 hours make any difference, particularly with the advances in telepresence, that there's just no real market for the service. The seats are all technically First Class, but First Class in a Concorde was really not that much better than coach in a subsonic aircraft. Personally, I'd take an 8 hour flight in a 747 with a seat that lays flat rather than pay the same price for a leather coach seat for 4 hours.

Possibly one of my favorite articles on the subject with special emphasis on Sin #1 is detailed in an article from back in 2000 on Old Man Murray, titled Who Killed Adventure Games

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

It has given me my favorite phrase to use on coworkers who are engaged in unnecessary work:

"The first step in [disguising yourself as] a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache."

It's amazing how many managers to this day are hell-bent on repeating the Chiat-Day fiasco

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html

It's amazing how many managers to this day are hell-bent on repeating the Chiat-Day fiasco

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html

    >Of course it might depend on the definition of fitness. It was certainly true that
    >the wealthier teens had more opportunities to create offspring than I did

As far as mating fitness, that's actually all that matters. The weight of millions of years of biology are behind that drive. The fact that modern society has abstracted "success" to so many other things is a recent novelty.

The reason chimpanzees are indicative of an inherent propensity towards warfare rather than it being a learned culture trait is that chimps do not have an observed unified learned culture. Their habitat ranges from Guinea on the west coast to Uganda, and the bahavior is observed in chimp communities that have no contact with each other.

>I think you are confusing "universities" with "USA universities"

When the thread topic title starts with "Texas College Professor" on a US hosted web site, in English, not appending "in the USA" to every single assertion is not unreasonable.

Yeah, the Carter bit made no sense. I remember Carter, and a lot of his bad decisions were very much NOT the result of "engineer thinking". One that comes immediately to mind is his executive order outlawing breeder reactors, which has basically saddled us with being unable to cleanly reprocess reactor waste back into usable fuel. Never mind the fact that only a very specific type of breeder reactor produces weapons-grade plutonium, and never mind that as a nuclear enginner he SHOULD have known this, he still banned them in a bizarre attempt to ingratiate himself with the 70's "disarmament/anti nuke" movement that never seemed to fully grasp the distinction between nuclear WEAPONS and nuclear POWER.

>Appendix: Listing every word used in the book in alphabetical order and on which pages each was mentioned.

That's the Index. The Appendix is where they list FTP and web sites that are long defunct, sample code for interfacing with a discontinued piece of hardware, and of course an ASCII table.

Modern candles are not even remotely comparable, neither in composition, nor method of manufacture, nor in their former value as a primary source of light. Candles used to use valuable raw materials, were fairly laboriously made by hand, and weren't just a decoration for a romantic dinner, after which one could simply flip on a light switch.

...except in the case of an en bloc clip such as used in the M1 Garand, which goes into the magazine and is itself part of the feed mechanism.

My pet theory is that the M1 is a big source of the current conflation of "clip" and "magazine". Millions of men were conscripted for WW2 and Korea in the US and for a great many of them their first experience with a self-loading firearm was with the M1 they were issued in training. To many of them, no matter how many autoloaders they were exposed to aftward, that thing you shoved into the gun that held the cartridges was called a CLIP, because that's what the drill sergeant in training called it. These men then went on to spread this habit of using CLIP and MAGAZINE interchangeably, and at this point it is too ingrained in the vernacular to ever go away.

You have to consider what those surveys measure, i.e. people who WORK there, not people who HAVE worked there. Thing to remember about top-tier tech companies is that anyone who CAN get a job with them can also pretty easily get a job somewhere else. This means that people who are unsatisfied don't stay very long.

What really is ridiculous is the supposed agreement to limit bulbs to 1000 hours. Seems like GE and Sylvania weren't in on it, because before congress basically outlawed the common incandescent, I was buying long-life bulbs by those companies that were rated to last 20,000 hours. The only reason people's experience of light bulbs was that they only lasted 500-1000 hours was because they kept buying the 49-cent a bulb Wal-Mart crap.

Unlikely. Doesn't even come close to complying with DOT regs.

>People want shitty realtime moving colors because they look cool.

Sometimes we just want a moving graph that looks important, so the boss knows we're working on something.

>I, for one, fail to realize how can one design any half-complex app (gadget, whatever) to be stateless.

It's fairly obvious, isn't it? A keyboard with no shift key is going to need twice as many keys... but of course you'll also never find yourself accidentally typing with caps lock on. That's the trade off. The UI becomes more complicated.

>Why does adding English cost that much?

Localization in general adds a whole additional dimension of complexity. Every place you would normally just stick a word or phrase between quotes now suddenly has to pull that in from an array or database somewhere.

Yep. The flaw in the plan is right there in the quote from a NYC resident: “We live right up by 96th and people are getting killed left and right by cars going too fast". Lowering the speed limit from 30 to 25 has no effect on people who ignore speed limits and drive too fast.

Probably literally meant people from the US. In English, standard usage assumes "America" to mean "USA", and references to the region are referred to as "the Americas" (plural), with the north/central/south regions being considered largely separate. There's very little value in referencing the majority of the residents of the western hemisphere as "Americans", as there's really nothing they have in common beyond that.

The question is not whether any one lapel cam video might result in action where various random cell phone cam videos have not, but rather, how many such videos in how short a time frame will result in action? If the evening news had a 20 minute montage every night of the days police abuses, people would be calling for Bratton's head on a pike.