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The 20th Century: Loser Style
Ant wrote to us with Wired's depressing end of the century list. Reasoning that all of these "best of the eons" lists need to have an ugly relative, they commisioned the folks at Ig Nobel to come up with a list of notable failures.
So instead he said that he was flying to California, with CAA's permission, and then after take-off he just flew to Ireland.
Afterwards, to keep the CAA off his back he said "oops, I made a mistake"...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
The windows popping out of the Hancock tower were NOT due to the movement of the building, if I remember correctly. They were caused by a MUCH more subtle cause -- a design flaw in the double-paned construction of the windows.
Check out the following link:
http://www.sgh.com/hancock.htm
...for a report on the failure. A summary of this appeared in the Boston Globe a few years back. I would have thought that the IgNobel people (at MIT no less) would have known abou this.
I believe it is true, however, that the sway dampener in the Hancock was put in after its construction -- but I could be wrong, and can't find verification on the web.
The Finlandia House in Helsinki is covered with big bricks made of Italian Carrara marble. It is a beautiful building, a masterpiece by Alvar Aalto.
However, over the years the bricks started bending and falling because the marble couldn't take the weather and air pollution. As the building is the most important congress center of Finland, the problem had to be solved and so the city started searching for a better material that would last. Lots of money was used and they found a few materials that would solve the problem. This only took many years, lots of meetings and money. But finally it was time to choose and solve the problem.
The City Council chose the same Italian Carrara marble again.
The nuclear hand grenade?
1. Pull Pin
2. Throw twenty-five miles
3. Duck and Cover.
If I recall correctly the History Channel show I saw on the Tu-144, there is no proof that its failure had any relationship to unstable design. To this day a number of engineers from around the world maintain to this day that its design (though stolen from the Anglo-French group) was improved upon to the point that it was superior to Concorde. The cause of the accident seems to be disputed, but it seems to be a tossup between pilot error (the pilot putting the plane in a position no commercial airliner would ever hold up to [the 144 made it further in than the rest would've]) or the interference of a mirage fighter put in the air by France. Tu-144s are still flown today, admittedly not widely (but neither are Concordes) in Russia, with a flawless safety record.
More info on the Tu-144 "Konkordsky":
The 144LL Initiative
More 144LL
Tu 144 specs
A guide to Russian Airplanes
Q:Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A:All my autopsies have been performed on dead peop
This has nothing to do with the English/metric thing; I just felt that this should go in the space-probe-thread rather than start a new one.
/completely different/ blocks of code, both legal.
:-)
IIRC, the punctuation mistake they're talking about was an instance of the now-infamous DO LOOP constructs in FORTRAN. You can alternate between a period and a comma, and the result is two
With the comma, you actually get a loop. With the period, you get a funky-looking initialization statement and some useless labels. When I was a freshman in college, my introductory CS professor showed us this piece of code, explained the screwup, and added, "We lost a rocket in the 60's because of this."
(I've never formally studied FORTRAN. If I've messed up the explanation above, oh well, mea culpa.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The Slashdot Purchase (1999): Andover.net buys out slashdot.org, and while Rob swears that nothing will change, slashdot.org gradually transforms into a hardcore porn site.
..
"We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
My other nomination is the Honest John, a short range missile developed for the U.S. military in the 1950s. Although a very capable weapon when carrying a conventional warhead, in 1954 the Pentagon insisted on deploying a nuclear-tipped version with a warhead of over 100 kiloton yield. Unfortunately, with a warhead that size, the blast radius of the missile exceeded its range.
So, any other nominations?
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This is not my sandwich.
This rumor is complete bullshit. Iranians never had the F-16, although the US had made the blunder of selling them 80 F-14 Tomcats during the Shah era, 6 or 8 of them equipped with the ultra-powerful AN/AWG-9 radar that comes standard with the US Tomcats. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranians used these aircraft as fast and agile AWACS aircraft, figuring out that using the radar's long range capabilities will be much more useful and safer than sending it into direct combat. Even after almost 20 years of US embargoes, several F-14s still fly with the Iranian Air Force, despite US intelligence officers' claims every year "that existing F-14s have been cannibalized to provide spares to the flyable ones over the years, and none can fly as of today". Actually the Iranians get their kicks by flying them over Tehran every year in anniversary celebrations in front of US reporters and camera crews. They apparently can build some spare parts and expendables for F-14s, but mostly the aircraft are kept flyable by cannibalizing the others.
This blunder has been haunting the US military for a long time. Not wanting to miss the chance of shooting down an F-14 and get a nice, shiny medal, a trigger-happy commander on USS Vincennes shot down the Iranian airliner with a Standard missile, killing 290 people. One of my friends, an Iranian grad student here in the US, happens to be a distant relative of someone killed aboard the plane.
Loading an aircraft full of dead people and let it be shot down? Give me a break.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
The objective behind the Tu-4 project was not to "increase their egos", rather, to kick-start Soviet large bomber design and production process. Your post reflects some shallow comments made by some authors in the aviation history literature, but from many points, the Tu-4 Bull project was immensely successful.The Russians, even though they once pioneered the heavy bomber concept with the early "Ilya Muromets", never had long range, heavy bombers during World Word II; and they suffered because of this. The USAAF and RAF had four-engined, heavy bombers throughout the war and used them effectively; but the Russians had to make do with Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik and a host of other light attack aircraft, and some slightly larger designs like the Petlyakov Pe-2. Several attempts at producing larger momber designs flopped miserably.
Some clever industrialist (probably not Stalin himself) saw that the best starting point would probably be duplicating a successful long range bomber design, and the Soviets duplicated the B-29, as you correctly pointed out, to the smallest screw. Rumor has it that a hole in the tail section, caused by a flak hit, was exactly duplicated by the Soviets in hundreds of Tu-4s produced.
Now you might argue that the B-29 and hence Tu-4 was outdated by 1947, but the very valuable expertise gained by Tu-4 project allowed the Russians to design and built very capable bomber aircraft that scared the US military throughout the Cold War. After the Tu-4, Soviet aircraft industry produced many very good designs that held up very successfully against their Western counterparts.
Note to nitpickers: Yes, I know Ilya Muromets has been designed by Sikorsky, who later immigrated to the US. It's a Russian design nevertheless.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
IIRC, transport aircraft now have indicators to flag these failures to the flight crew.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Bhopal:
Union Carbide plamed for India's poorly educated workers refusing to follow safety proceedures and guidelines. UC paid dearly and mostly kept thier mouths shut.
Challenger:
Several Engineers had tried to stop the use of the material in the O-rings. Several Engineers had tried to stop the launch that morning. Some NASA bearucrat pushed the launch through for internal political reasons.
Another Shoot Down:
All of the bodies recovered from the water had been dead for more than 24 hours. Very little blood was present in the water. Suspected to be a ploy by the Iranian goverment to turn up the international Heat on the US. The approach of the "Irianian Jetliner" was wavetop and full throttle -- very un-jetliner behavior. It also failed repeatedly to respond to hails.
Cold Fussion:
To date, the results of Fleischmann and Pons have been replicated by 20-30 researchers -- Including Chemists at Texas A&M and Arizona State. There's something else going on here.
Y2K Bug:
I agree with the previous post about the cost of the Y2K bug.
Don't you think it's time to start communicating?
I served four years in the USN as an operations specialist. And at one point was responsible for tracking a very active air picture in the Persian Gulf. The area is known as the aluminum cloud due to the high volume of aircraft flying in a very small area. We were briefed about the Vincennes tragedy upon entering the theatre of operations. As I understood it and this is probably the most reliable information on the subject you will get. The tragedy was not necessarily the fault of the captain of the USS Vincennes. The tragedy was caused by several factors not the least of which being that the Iranians fly there military aircraft out of their civilian airports. In other words they don't have air force bases per se. Every civilian airport may share it runways with military aircraft. So you may have two aircraft taking off in a short period of time one an Iranian F-14 and one an Airbus. A Navy Operations Specialist can tell the difference based on which modes of IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) the plane is squawking. A civilian plane squawks two modes of IFF one that reports its altitude (mode charley I believe) and one that reports its flight number (mode one if I remember correctly) (in most cases). NATO aircraft like the F-14s we gave to the Shah can squawk up to two more modes 3 and 4. Mode 4 is US only and encrypted this is how we tell they are US. Mode 3 is NATO for interoperating with our allies. Now you have two planes coming off the runway one squawking modes 1 and Charley and one squawking modes 1,3 and Charley. You know the one squawking 3 is an F-14. By the way air warfare happens so fast these days that a computer does the actual tracking with a human operator double-checking it. A human is pretty much incapable of manually tracking the complex air picture over the gulf. So with these aircraft coming off the same runway it's a simple matter for the computer to mix up their IFF squawks as the two contacts radar blips separate. One of the tools you use in the gulf to keep things straight is a superimposed map of the civilian air corridors over your radar display. The planes in those corridors are usually civilian and not a threat. What we had in this case was a plane that looked like it was squawking a military code (due to computer human error) heading straight for the Vincennes in a fairly volatile environment (remember the USS Stark that got split in half by an Iraqi Exocet). It was also not any where near a civilian air corridor. And did not respond to three separate warnings on several different international frequencies. The captain of the Vincennes in this case was following the rules of engagement for the gulf when he pulled the trigger. They really thought they were in danger he had to make a decision. And something like this would never have happened had the Iranians not had a propensity for hit and run attacks on American ships in the gulf at the time. And also not have been flying F-14s out of a civilian airport. Even today if this where to happen again it might result in the same outcome. It perhaps shows a weakness in Military ID technology. Things like Doppler shift ID might improve this a bit in the future or may have already (I have been out of this line of work for a while now things change). Anyway that's how it went down.
This was supposed to save all our crops, AND protect us against disease! Some folks were even advocating adding it to drinking water, IIRC.
This one was so bad, it almost single-handedly started the environmental movement, as its evils were rooted out in Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring".
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
1) The friggin Ford Escort... man what a piece of unadulterated crap. Ford outta be ashamed of themselves
2) big baggie droopy drawers... for christ sake, just pull em up, you look like a damn idiot. PULL YOUR FUCKING PANTS UP YOU FOOLS
3) Packard Bell computers... heh...I don't even have to expound on this one
4) RITA - (Regional income tax authority) I know, this one is personal, but these fuckers have their heads so far up my ass it's pathetic.
5) Country music - Christ on a moped, It's so far beyond me how anyone can listen to this pathetic souless crap. Get a life you losers.
A genius writes code an idiot can understand, while an idiot writes code the compiler can't understand.