Probably because most people who do "engineering" and "technology" these days do one-off software jobs that, when they break, cause a minor website outage or some other inconsequential glitch. People who cut their teeth that way don't develop the kind of discipline that comes from working on software that, when it breaks, damages expensive equipment or endangers lives. People who work on the latter don't screw with anything unless absolutely necessary. People who work on the former just don't understand that there can be consequences from indiscriminate "upgrades" because those consequences are outside of their areas of expertise. It's like people who've never seen electricity not knowing not to pull *and tag* the breakers before working on wiring: not stupidity or malice, just uninformed thinking.
I'd split the hair a bit finer: the original mandate/aspiration/hope of the UN was to create a world body of adult supervision in the aftermath of WW2. It was crafted by the last breed of the Western politicians for whom 'elitist' wasn't a dirty word (think Churchill, Roosevelt, and their contemporaries). Folks like the aren't so much left vs right as they are patricians vs plebs. And that attitude leads to wanting to control things "for the greater good." The fact that the Internet is successful and effective and is a cash cow but isn't under UN control is just human nature piled on top of the founding principles of the UN.
Not to say the UN is justified in wanting it--I'd sooner hand the internet to the mafia than the UN.
It's all about matching the product to it's expected life cycle. Why over-engineer a product if it's expected to only last x number of (years, cycles, uses, etc) Anything more is a waste of raw materials.
Because when a man builds a machine, it is a sacred thing. It's what separates us from lower forms of life and is the physical manifestation of our God-given intellect. To build a shoddy machine that can't be relied upon to perform its stated function when you had the choice to build a good one is an abomination against nature.
I've worked both types of jobs... Engineering is easy work if you have the mind for it.
That's the thing. There's a perception among older engineers (my opinion as a young engineer is that it has roots in reality) that most people don't have the mind for it, and many people who think they do have the mind for it in fact do not. So they can get away with claiming to work miracles and demanding six-figure salaries.
Depends. Is it the difference between a product up to spec as per contract and an emergency fix that costs 90k to implement or a schedule slip with a 90k lateness penalty?
You're right, I should have qualified my statement about moral qualms.
Let me see if I can refine my statement:
If I can be made to believe, by my criteria in Objection 2 (uncertainty estimates, etc etc), that driving my Escalade with the AC blasting does cause other people's coastal property to be flooded AND that if nobody drove Escalades to work, the flooding would be averted, then I would have difficulty calling these people socialists. But because I don't trust the certainty of these predictions AND because certain fashionable elements of the global warming crowd (head of the IPCC, for instance) have called for measures that would severely restrict my freedom to travel, not just by oversized SUV, I reiterate my initial suspicion that these guys are socialists who have found a nice and tidy excuse.
In order for a scientist to build a relationship with non technical people, he necessarily has to dumb down and prune information from the raw data and from the analysis. Books like "Don't Be Such a Scientist" specifically proscribe against getting bogged down in the details of uncertainty analysis and the like in order to facilitate more effective communication. That's a slight simplification of what Olsen actually says, but the message is: step 1: build rapport, step 2: deliver a simple talking point.
How you do this, and with whom you do this is a choice. And it's a choice informed by your understanding of the sympathies and inclinations of the target audience.The anthropogenic global warming clique phrased their argument in such a way that it could only appeal to people who don't have any moral qualms against creating policies to modify the behavior of their fellow citizens.
That's what makes it hard not to accuse these guys of nefarious motives. Not the fact that some of their limousine liberal cheerleaders actually do fly around in private jets.
I haven't spent a career studying weather and climate and such, but I do know enough about thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and numerical analysis to be really suspicious of claims of causality for CO2. One cursory look at something like http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/radiative-physics-yes-co2-does-create-warming/, Fig 4, tell me that water, ozone, N2O, etc add up to a hell of a lot more absorption of IR from the earth's surface when you consider that the planet is NOT a uniform sphere at 250 kelvin and when you remember that the concentrations of H2O and the like trump the concentrations of atmospheric CO2 by orders of magnitude.
That's one gut reaction, informed by pictures and not calculations.
The second gut reaction comes from experience trying to predict the future with uncertain models and noisy, incomplete data. Before I believe the global warming alarmists claims, I need to understand the uncertainty propagations in their predictions given the noise statistics of their data collection efforts to date. This is subtle and delicate math that most people don't know how to do, and the certitude with which the alarmists and their cheerleaders make their pronouncements lead me to suspect they don't know how to do it well either. Climategate's "Harry Readme" file furthers that suspicion.
The last and most subjective objection I have is that the people screaming loudest for decarbonization tend to do so in a way that makes it hard for me to distinguish what they are saying from
"blah blah blah Socialism Is Great blah blah blah I get to ride in private jets but you have to ride a bike to work and turn down your thermostat in the winter blah blah blah"
I work in a place that makes you sign an NDA. Betcha he had to sign one too. Whether blueprints or code, industrial espionage is a real crime, both morally and legally.
The issue isn't the kind of work (euphemism) the military is doing. It's killing, plain and simple. It's the degree of certainty (beyond one's ability to fool oneself) that the killing prevents an attack on American lives, wealth, or way of life (not just goin' to church and watchin' football, I mean going to work without worrying if the guy on the train in the trenchcoat is about to blow himself up).
It's a continuum. Taking a shot at bin Laden in 1998, as Clinton did, though half-assedly. Retaliation, yes. In retrospect, had it worked it would have been a good bit of pre-emptive defense, where 'defense' is not a euphemism.
You're joking, but I've worked with some robotics guys (in academia, admittedly) who built self-driving cars, and based on my experience with the personality types who do this sort of thing in academia (and get hired by Ford and GM to do it for real) is that I wouldn't put it past them to think their discrimination algorithm is God, at least until the first round of uncommanded steering maneuvers causes a fatality or three.
No no no. America brain-drained Russia in the 90's for engineers. China brain-drained America in the 00's for manufacturing talent. And now, no one can get into space reliably.
Hopefully Russian space engineers are all well-paid so they can give their all when it comes to building quality space tech. But I doubt it, otherwise why would NASA outsource their space program.
They are...by American companies for working in America as naturalized American citizens who were "refugees" from the former Soviet Union in the early 90's.
Not all circumstances, per se, but for something as limited as an airplane autopilot, we can reasonably expect design and testing to cover all *classes* of circumstances, such as "this sensor is flaky" or more insidiously, "the wind sensor reading is slowly drifting and starting to disagree with the INS and/or the GPS".
We can also assume that it's never safe to assume that real data from real sensors is perfect.
Is this like other waveguide phenomena, where the first or second-order approximation says the energy vanishes exponentially within a fraction of a wavelength around the waveguide, but if you don't want your radar set (or microwave oven) to explode, you still need to invest heavily in ventilation and/or liquid cooling?
True, but your nose can tell if your gas tank is punctured. This is (possibly) a new failure mode that you can't smell, so it merits investigation. Incidentally, is the battery in the Volt different from other EV batteries? Wouldn't this have been an issue for Priuses (Prii?) for years now?
You don't. At least not in the real world. In the world where physics begins and ends at closed-form first- or second-order approximations around the trim point, I'm sure there's a way.
Most people don't have the temperament to do the kind of work required for a career in math, physical science, or engineering. It requires a rod-up-your-ass level of attention to detail, and the ability to keep a lot of facts, relationships, and dependencies straight in your head.
You don't need that to go about your day-to-day life, and I would wager that most people never really think that way, ever in their lives. It's very difficult to learn start thinking that way at age 18 if you haven't been raised to think that way, and given the massive misperception of what engineers and scientists do that proliferates in the mass media, most entering freshmen have no clue that they need to begin learning to think that way until it's 2/3 of the way through the semester and they don't know what hit them.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because most people who do "engineering" and "technology" these days do one-off software jobs that, when they break, cause a minor website outage or some other inconsequential glitch. People who cut their teeth that way don't develop the kind of discipline that comes from working on software that, when it breaks, damages expensive equipment or endangers lives. People who work on the latter don't screw with anything unless absolutely necessary. People who work on the former just don't understand that there can be consequences from indiscriminate "upgrades" because those consequences are outside of their areas of expertise. It's like people who've never seen electricity not knowing not to pull *and tag* the breakers before working on wiring: not stupidity or malice, just uninformed thinking.
I'd split the hair a bit finer: the original mandate/aspiration/hope of the UN was to create a world body of adult supervision in the aftermath of WW2. It was crafted by the last breed of the Western politicians for whom 'elitist' wasn't a dirty word (think Churchill, Roosevelt, and their contemporaries). Folks like the aren't so much left vs right as they are patricians vs plebs. And that attitude leads to wanting to control things "for the greater good." The fact that the Internet is successful and effective and is a cash cow but isn't under UN control is just human nature piled on top of the founding principles of the UN.
Not to say the UN is justified in wanting it--I'd sooner hand the internet to the mafia than the UN.
It's all about matching the product to it's expected life cycle. Why over-engineer a product if it's expected to only last x number of (years, cycles, uses, etc) Anything more is a waste of raw materials.
Because when a man builds a machine, it is a sacred thing. It's what separates us from lower forms of life and is the physical manifestation of our God-given intellect. To build a shoddy machine that can't be relied upon to perform its stated function when you had the choice to build a good one is an abomination against nature.
Then they came for the lightbulbs...
I've worked both types of jobs... Engineering is easy work if you have the mind for it.
That's the thing. There's a perception among older engineers (my opinion as a young engineer is that it has roots in reality) that most people don't have the mind for it, and many people who think they do have the mind for it in fact do not. So they can get away with claiming to work miracles and demanding six-figure salaries.
Depends. Is it the difference between a product up to spec as per contract and an emergency fix that costs 90k to implement or a schedule slip with a 90k lateness penalty?
You're right, I should have qualified my statement about moral qualms.
Let me see if I can refine my statement:
If I can be made to believe, by my criteria in Objection 2 (uncertainty estimates, etc etc), that driving my Escalade with the AC blasting does cause other people's coastal property to be flooded AND that if nobody drove Escalades to work, the flooding would be averted, then I would have difficulty calling these people socialists. But because I don't trust the certainty of these predictions AND because certain fashionable elements of the global warming crowd (head of the IPCC, for instance) have called for measures that would severely restrict my freedom to travel, not just by oversized SUV, I reiterate my initial suspicion that these guys are socialists who have found a nice and tidy excuse.
In order for a scientist to build a relationship with non technical people, he necessarily has to dumb down and prune information from the raw data and from the analysis. Books like "Don't Be Such a Scientist" specifically proscribe against getting bogged down in the details of uncertainty analysis and the like in order to facilitate more effective communication. That's a slight simplification of what Olsen actually says, but the message is: step 1: build rapport, step 2: deliver a simple talking point.
How you do this, and with whom you do this is a choice. And it's a choice informed by your understanding of the sympathies and inclinations of the target audience.The anthropogenic global warming clique phrased their argument in such a way that it could only appeal to people who don't have any moral qualms against creating policies to modify the behavior of their fellow citizens.
That's what makes it hard not to accuse these guys of nefarious motives. Not the fact that some of their limousine liberal cheerleaders actually do fly around in private jets.
I haven't spent a career studying weather and climate and such, but I do know enough about thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and numerical analysis to be really suspicious of claims of causality for CO2. One cursory look at something like http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/radiative-physics-yes-co2-does-create-warming/, Fig 4, tell me that water, ozone, N2O, etc add up to a hell of a lot more absorption of IR from the earth's surface when you consider that the planet is NOT a uniform sphere at 250 kelvin and when you remember that the concentrations of H2O and the like trump the concentrations of atmospheric CO2 by orders of magnitude.
That's one gut reaction, informed by pictures and not calculations.
The second gut reaction comes from experience trying to predict the future with uncertain models and noisy, incomplete data. Before I believe the global warming alarmists claims, I need to understand the uncertainty propagations in their predictions given the noise statistics of their data collection efforts to date. This is subtle and delicate math that most people don't know how to do, and the certitude with which the alarmists and their cheerleaders make their pronouncements lead me to suspect they don't know how to do it well either. Climategate's "Harry Readme" file furthers that suspicion.
The last and most subjective objection I have is that the people screaming loudest for decarbonization tend to do so in a way that makes it hard for me to distinguish what they are saying from
"blah blah blah Socialism Is Great blah blah blah I get to ride in private jets but you have to ride a bike to work and turn down your thermostat in the winter blah blah blah"
I work in a place that makes you sign an NDA. Betcha he had to sign one too. Whether blueprints or code, industrial espionage is a real crime, both morally and legally.
The issue isn't the kind of work (euphemism) the military is doing. It's killing, plain and simple. It's the degree of certainty (beyond one's ability to fool oneself) that the killing prevents an attack on American lives, wealth, or way of life (not just goin' to church and watchin' football, I mean going to work without worrying if the guy on the train in the trenchcoat is about to blow himself up).
It's a continuum. Taking a shot at bin Laden in 1998, as Clinton did, though half-assedly. Retaliation, yes. In retrospect, had it worked it would have been a good bit of pre-emptive defense, where 'defense' is not a euphemism.
You're joking, but I've worked with some robotics guys (in academia, admittedly) who built self-driving cars, and based on my experience with the personality types who do this sort of thing in academia (and get hired by Ford and GM to do it for real) is that I wouldn't put it past them to think their discrimination algorithm is God, at least until the first round of uncommanded steering maneuvers causes a fatality or three.
Testing can start as soon as I can find a source for thousands of goat heads!
Duh. Thousands of goats. Distributed over influential congressmen's districts, of course.
That's brilliant. I wonder if it'll work again...assuming of course it already didn't happen in the future.
No no no. America brain-drained Russia in the 90's for engineers. China brain-drained America in the 00's for manufacturing talent. And now, no one can get into space reliably.
Hopefully Russian space engineers are all well-paid so they can give their all when it comes to building quality space tech. But I doubt it, otherwise why would NASA outsource their space program.
They are...by American companies for working in America as naturalized American citizens who were "refugees" from the former Soviet Union in the early 90's.
Not all circumstances, per se, but for something as limited as an airplane autopilot, we can reasonably expect design and testing to cover all *classes* of circumstances, such as "this sensor is flaky" or more insidiously, "the wind sensor reading is slowly drifting and starting to disagree with the INS and/or the GPS".
We can also assume that it's never safe to assume that real data from real sensors is perfect.
Instead of what is it now: "what are the odds that we should be in a nose-dive? well, nothing else seems better."
Probably more like, "the sensor spec sheet says it's right 99.99999% of the time. may as well assume it's right all the time".
The devil almost surely lives on a set of zero measure.
Is this like other waveguide phenomena, where the first or second-order approximation says the energy vanishes exponentially within a fraction of a wavelength around the waveguide, but if you don't want your radar set (or microwave oven) to explode, you still need to invest heavily in ventilation and/or liquid cooling?
I thought it ran on the phone itself.
True, but your nose can tell if your gas tank is punctured. This is (possibly) a new failure mode that you can't smell, so it merits investigation. Incidentally, is the battery in the Volt different from other EV batteries? Wouldn't this have been an issue for Priuses (Prii?) for years now?
You don't. At least not in the real world. In the world where physics begins and ends at closed-form first- or second-order approximations around the trim point, I'm sure there's a way.
Also why the GM version of this (two wheels side-by-side) is a giant load of stupid unsuitable for high speeds (faster than walking) on real roads.
Calendars calendars calendars...
Most people don't have the temperament to do the kind of work required for a career in math, physical science, or engineering. It requires a rod-up-your-ass level of attention to detail, and the ability to keep a lot of facts, relationships, and dependencies straight in your head.
You don't need that to go about your day-to-day life, and I would wager that most people never really think that way, ever in their lives. It's very difficult to learn start thinking that way at age 18 if you haven't been raised to think that way, and given the massive misperception of what engineers and scientists do that proliferates in the mass media, most entering freshmen have no clue that they need to begin learning to think that way until it's 2/3 of the way through the semester and they don't know what hit them.