It's easy to second guess NASA's decision making but, when you are in that moment, it's a hard trigger to pull. I've no doubt that engineers were concerned about the integrity of the O-ring seal. However, when they launched, they were within published spec.
The spec said "NO EROSION OF THE PRIMARY O-RING". But they continued to fly despite the fact that said erosion was ocurring.
Ultimately it was the erosion that was the problem - the cold made what happened (a full burn-through) more likely, but it could have happened at much balmier temps as well. The real cause of the accident is yet another step back from the obvious - the joint rotation which had been occurring, and seen as a potential problem, since very early in the program.
In that situation, it becomes your (expert) opinion vs. established data. You might be right, but it's hard to push through.
The dilemma that management faced was this; the engineers (the experts) has been telling them it was safe to fly, despite erosion problems, while they (the experts) sought a fix. Then the experts suddenly reversed themselves on the eve of the launch and starting claiming that it was not in fact safe to fly - but they couldn't produce an engineering justification for that claim.
Personally, I believe that the origin of 'put your management hat on'; it was shorthand for "look at it from my point of view [as a manager], would you trust a bunch of guys who can't get their stories straight, or back their stories up with documentation?".
"but no one stepped forward and said, 'Stop this train until it's fixed.'"
And if anyone had, we would have never known about it, and they probably would have been fired.
Nope - in twenty years of looking nobody has found any evidence or come forward to tell how they tried. Roger Boisjoly tried to make out that they tried - but changes the subject to how browbeaten they were by Managment when asked what precisely they did to stop the train.
His excuse boils down to "we did what we were told". So did the concentration camp guards.
The "Failure is not an Option" program that ran on the History Channel this evening (in the US, just so I don't piss off those reading overseas) Glossed over it, but at least made mention.
That particular program is pretty unreliable when it gets beyond the personal experiences of the guys who are featured in it. (Pretty much the low level front line guys.)
There were grand plans for NASA that reached beyond Apollo and the Moon. Lunar Bases, Manned Missions to Mars, Space Stations, Reuseable Shuttles, the whole shebang. Unfortunatly at the same time, we were stuck at a horrible point in our history.
I wouldn't go so far as to call them 'plans'... Those were the things that NASA hoped to convince Congress to fund, nothing more. Despite the impression the NASA PR machine attempted to create (and the media conspired to help them, to the point that today it's difficult to seperate fact from fiction), they were at best what today would be called a pre-alpha demo.
Unfortunatly at the same time, we were stuck at a horrible point in our history. Nixon was taking a savage (and deserved) beating over Vietnam. The country had little faith in its government, and just a few years later we were hit with an Oil Embargo that did a nice job of slamming our economy.
Congress started looking for places to cut the budget and, just like in Civ 3, Science took the hit. NASA's budget took a massive beating over the next few Fiscal years.
The reality is that the first big cuts were in fiscal year 67 - two years before Nixon even took office. The cuts after that were ongoing and much less severe.
They were thrown a bone and allowed to put together Skylab on a shoestring budget, then (late 70's early 80's) were saddled with the proverbial "good idea at the time" of the Shuttle program.
NASA saddled *themselves* with the Shuttle. Development on the Shuttle started in earnest about 1967. NASA was asked by the Nixon Administration in 1971 for a post Apollo plan, and NASA presented an ambitious scheme involving Shuttles, moonbases, space stations, Saturn V's, nuclear powered boosters, etc... etc... The total cost would have been about 5-8 times that of the Apollo program. (Note carefully the dates - NASA proposed this in spite of the fact that their budget has been steadily cut for four years!) The Administration (and Congress) took one look at this plan, considered NASA's (even at that early date) infamous ability to properly estimate and susequently control costs - and tossed it back into NASA's face.
Despite the resulting political train wreck, NASA convinced themselves that the blank checks would soon be flowing again - and *they chose to develop the Shuttle* on the theory that since it was the basis for the whole system, they needed to get a head start for when those checks came.
Volatile? While the fuel is a bit more volatile than tire rubber, it isn't a great deal more so. The fuel itself resembles a soft rubber. The one issue is that once the fuel ignites, it doesn't stop burning until all of the fuel is consumed.
That doesn't mean that there are not ways of terminating the thrust of a solid with reasonable safety - there are. Shuttle doesn't use them because the parallel staging system it uses renders the use of those methods problematic.
OTOH, jst before the first flight of Columbia, NASA and Rockwell engineers discovered a trick circuit that could lead to simultaneous SRB ignition and separation. THAT would ae left one hell of a mess on the area around the launch pad.
The entire problem with the Shuttle was that it abandoned the vertical stack design of previous spacecraft in favor of a "paralllel" stack. The Apollo program had the escape tower because the humans were on top.
No, the Apollo stack was designed the way it was because at the time "that was the way it had always been done" (even though the US experience base consisted only of Mercury flights).
Apollo - in it's original incarnation as a general purpose earth orbiter - had it's basic design largely frozen even before Gemini was designed. This was one of the things that lead to the Apollo 1 accident, very few 'lessons learned' could be implemented - because they hadn't been learned yet. In this particular instance, the lesson was to acess stuff from outside the capsule rather than inside. This leads to less damage to other components because you don't have to push them aside to get to the component you want.
"They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward and said, 'Stop this train until it's fixed."
Oh I'm sure someone tried, and probably was shut by the long arm of politcs [sic]
Nope, the article summary is correct - nobody tried to stop the train, nobody even tried to frame a coherent warning to those who could have made a decision to stop the train.
Why not just deduct the rebate at the cash register? We all know that's doable. No, their dream is to extract from each customer the maximum personal price. Those willing to pay full price do, and those only willing to pay a lower price get it. Willingness to do senseless work determines who falls in what camp--it's just like coupon clipping.
Money saved via rebates on a new (2wks old today) computer system, games, and other software: $500
I've read the CAIB report, both when it came out and a few times since. I'm not familiar with it on a word-by-word basis,
It's quite obvious that you are not familiar with it at all - and believe that fantasies and what if's substitute for such familiarity.
You're right that the honeycomb was identified as the culprit in the 2003 F-15 crash, but I am not so confident as you that the interaction of honeycomb and composite outer layer is unimportant.
In other words, in this accident - like the Columbia accident, you believe that your handwavings substitute for actual knowledge. Nobody ever claimed that interactions are unimportant - just pointed out that your believed cause of the accident and makeup of the wing were incorrect. When one is so sloppy as to not even read and understand a document your quote in support - it indicates not knowledge but ignorance and bias. When one does says that he is not confident in something the other never said - well the conclusion is similiar.
The facts are simple: There is no evidence whatsoever that aging effects had any bearing on the loss of Columbia. Period.
I worked as a contractor to NASA from STS-6 (well before Challenger) through the disaster and for several years afterward. I was an engineering manager on the payload side rather than the oribiter itself but I was heavily involved in all phases of prepration and launch. That qualifies me to say: this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
Well, knowing JimO, and his resume, qualifies me to say: You are an ass with less clue than the average pencil eraser. Mr Oberg was a flight controller from the Skylab era until well after Columbia. Unlike you, who was out on the periphery, he was there.
There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin.
BS. I worked at NASA at the time, and I knew that there were politcal pressures on the flight schedule before the launch. One thing that he conveniently doesn't mention is that the State of the Union address was that night. It is a fact that Reagan wanted to salute the first teacher in space. That was common knowledge.
Being common knowledge doesn't make it true. Both the Rogers Comission and twenty years of subsequent investigators have looked for evidence to support this claim - and there is none.
NASA managers made a bad call for the launch decision, and engineers who had qualms about the O-rings were bullied or bamboozled into acquiescence.
That's the bit that annoyed me most.
The very idea that non-technical management can override or disregard technical advice provided by professionals in their specialist technical area is a complete travesty.
What annoys me is the continued myths about the engineers. (And JimO knows better - he's participated in the debates over their roles, but instead he goes for the sound bite.)
The engineers approved flights despite evidence of O-ring erosion (even though the specs said no erosion). The engineers approved flights when the temperature at launch time hovered near or below the lowest temperature allowed by spec. Thus when managment questioned them about their reticence over the 51-L launch - they hemmed, and hawed, and did everything to avoid making a clear and straightforward call.
And imposing a flawed managerial direction by applying social pressures (bullying/bamboozling) to brush dissenters under the carpet just made it worse. All highly unprofessional.
Unfortunately, it's not as simply as them being bullied and bamboozled. The engineers insisted that the launch was potentially unsafe, and when the managers asked for evidence - the engineers were unable (unwilling?) to make their case clear. *That* is highly unprofessional - making a claim (this launch is unsafe), and then failing to back it up.
In the end, when the engineers were polled for their reccomendation, not one stood up and called for the launch to be halted. Not one.
To this day they insist they were overruled and that they 'just did as they were ordered'. That's what the concentration camp guards claimed too... Mighty poor company for a 'professional' engineer.
The notion that the crew died immediately was "common wisdom" following the disaster. It's what everybody said to comfort each other: "At least they didn't suffer" "It was all over before they knew anything was wrong" etc. I remember being chilled by a report shortly afterward that the captain had opened his mike to talk just before the break-up, because it meant that he did know something was wrong, which took the gloss off that presumption that they'd died blissfully unaware of their peril.
The problem with that theory is reality. From aft strut failure to total breakup of the shuttle was less than two seconds - not nearly enough time to realize something was wrong, frame a sentence, and then key the mike. There were no possible instrument indications in the cockpit to show the impending accident and no significant movement of the cabin prior to breakup.
It wasn't until much later (memory's admittedly hazy on the timeframe), as the investigation into the disaster progressed, that it was reported that the crew had survived the booster failure, and possibly even the whole way back down, and that news was generally buried and ignored, because people really didn't want to hear that.
They were 'alive' in the technical sense, but odds are they were unconcious within a few seconds at most.
And a picture of a white dove with a palestinian demonstration in the background. They are both in focus... how did the photographer get them to stand still?
It's called a camera - they've had exposure down under thirty seconds for years now.
Columbia's crew died because small pieces of foam falling off tanks got to be routine, and eventually after 100 missions a big one fell off...
You know, I've always wondered what part composite aging might have played.
That's an easy one: None, zip, nada, zero.
Materials scientists tend to know little about how composite materials like the RCC panels age, especially in the harsh environment they had to endure -- radiation, violent temperature swings, et cetera -- and especially over the 20 years or so between Columbia's fabrication and the accident.
Read the CAIB report - the RCC panels were routinely inspected and replaced.
Here for example is a story about some of the problems the USAF is running into now with the F-15 wing, which is composite and approaching 20 years old in many aircraft, e.g. the linked article notes an F-15 coming apart midflight in 2003 because of a sudden failure of the wing, and yet routine inspections every 200 hours had shown no signs of incipient failure.
Read your own linked article. What failed was the honeycomb inside the wing (not the composite material), which can't be reliably inspected. (I.E. the failure was a material that isn't in the Shuttle's RCC panels and can't reliably be inspected the way the RCC panels can.)
If Columbia's accident was the result of this kind of failure,
Since it wasn't... (The CAIB ruled out RCC failure due to aging.)
Indeed, I think one of the lessons of Columbia should probably be that these things still happen, that materials and systems can fail in totally unforeseen ways, even with the best engineering talent and the best management will in the world.
Right. Except for the mountains of evidence that the foam shedding was ongoing and causing damage *and* the mountains of evidence that engineers and management chose to turn a blind eye to those facts... Except for those two teensy weensy utterly unimportant things this accident is proof that 'things just happen'.
Listen to your customers. Or maybe I'm just being naive.
Yes, you are being naive - in the extreme. First off, when you are talking a semi-popular MMORPG like SWG, you are talking tens of thousands of customers - who speak with thousands of different voice. Secondly, a consensual alternate reality like SWG isn't like McBurgerWhopper where one can have extra onions and the next a fish sandwich - it's really and truly one size fits all. Lastly, most MMORPG players confuse playing the game with understanding the 'nuts and bolts' behind the scenes - t'ain't so.
The moment one decides to put something on the Internet, he loses a large chunk of control over that content. Caching is an inherent, and necessary, component of Internet technology.
Not quite. Caching, in it's original form as a means of short term storage, is an inherent and necessary component of Internet technology. Long term (essentially permanent) storage like Google and the Wayback machine provide isn't caching (temporarily storing a local copy), it's copying - something else entirely.
No, you are being an ass - because you insist on repeating Trekkie/stoner philosophies and 'what everyone knows', in defiance of the facts.
That being said, life depends on a certain level of chemical activity (I.E no thinking rocks) and a large degree of predictable organization (I.E. no intelligent vapor). Anything else requires repealing the laws of physics and chemistry as they currently understood. (The former is possible on the cosmic and subatomic scale, I.E. outside the realms of life. The latter is unlikely in the extreme.)
With your rigid (and in my opinion intelligent) view of life, you may be overlooking other forms of intelligence or even life...
It's not rigid - it's firmly bound in a strong grounding in physics and chemistry rather than wishful thinking.
Handwave all you want, but the laws of physics and chemistry say that life is not possible in liquid lead or liquid methane.
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Tongue-in-cheek it may be, but it holds a measure of truth. We define life as some sort of carbon-based organism.
If you define 'we' as meaning 'folks who spend way too much time watching Star Trek and reading Slashdot, and almost no time actually studying exobiology', then yes you are correct. However exobiologists and chemists don't.
And please, stop speaking of physics and chemistry as if we knew everything there is to know about either.
At the levels relevant to the chemistry and physics of life and life like systems, no we don't know everything - but there are unlikely to be significant surprises.
Physics alone holds an amazing number of mysteries that no current theory can resolve, which by default means current theories are wrong or at least incomplete.
And none of those mysteries are at any level relevant to life. They are all on the macro scale ("how was the universe born") or on the sub atomic scale ("how does this particle mediate interactions anyhow").
So long as there are holes in our knowledge, you are being amazingly presumptuous to claim that life can only exist according to said laws. You can speculate, you can pontificate, but you cannot rule it out of the game because you cannot accurately define the rules of the game itself.
Except at the relevant scales - you can accurately define the rules of the game itself. No matter how much you handwave and invoke Trekkie philosophy - that is rock solid truth.
I've gotta say, I think this is an awesome tactic to get kids back into the library. I know they won't be playing the games there, but they actually have to go in, take out the game, and leave the place.
If the goal was to get kids back into the library - yes this would be an awesome tactic.
But is the goal to get kids back into the library, or to produce increased circulation numbers so the library looks good when budget time comes? Is the goal to provide a resource to the community, or to make the librarians feel good about themselves because they see lots of kids circulating about? "We must be doing something right, we must be relevant - look at our numbers, look how crowded we are!
It's not a numbers game.
Left unadressed in the article are two large questions;
Should the library (a goverment funded organization) be competing with commercial organizations?
Is making video games available furthering the historical goals of a library as a repository of learning?
The last disturbs me greatly because I've been watching a worrisome trend in my local libraries away from research material and toward entertainment. Over the last five years, on average, for every dollar they spend on non-fiction - they spend ten on fiction. (They bought 500 (!) copies of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.) Even that dollar spent on non-fiction isn't spent very well. Over the same period, they bought over 200 diet cookbooks (mostly Atkins) - and only 20 volumes of food history. (And 18 of those were lightweight 'pop' histories.) For every dollar spent on books, they spend 35 cents on videos and DVD's - and just like the books, they vast majority of the money was spent on flavor-of-the-month recent hits. (And they consistently replace the flavors-of-the-month when they are lost or damaged, while classic and important movies wait months or years to be replaced - if they ever are.)
I started watching the local library after a customer of mine (I owned a book store) died and left a large collection of military history in outstanding condition to the library. Not one single one was added to the libraries collection. The library staff never even looked at them - they handed them straight over to the Friends of the Library. (Worse yet, when questioned, they weren't even interested in trying.) The old ladies that ran the Friends priced them like they were the usual discards they were given by the library to sell - they were sold for pennies on the dollar. They raised about a quarter of what they could have raised for the library to misspend on other books.
The article concludes with:
So at the end of the first year, having games in a library has been a complete success. They are popular with adults, children and teens and I've only heard the faintest of grumblings (mostly from older patrons) questioning why a library would carry, scoff, games. They are an accepted part of the collection now and it's hard to ask for anything more than that.
Yes, we can ask for more than that. We can ask the Game Librarian to justify his decision in terms of the role libraries play in our society. We can ask the Game Librarian whether placing games in the library is a positive example for society. We can ask the Game Librarian whether games in the library leave it a better place (not a 'cooler' place, not a 'more relevant' place, but a better place) than it was without games.
Libraries are like doctors. Their role is to give us what we need - not what we want. If we seek reasons why our society is providing fewer engineers, fewer critical thinkers, fewer educated people - one significant piece of the puzzle can be found in the attitude of the Game Librarian.
Now, let's open the bets. Which will sink first: New York or Venice, Italy?
Contrary to screams of enviromentalists and others, Venice isn't sinking because of global warming.
Venice has been sinking for centuries. But across most of those centuries, when a building became flooded - it was knocked down and a new one built higher than the previous one. For a variety of reasons this process was slowed, and then halted, across the 19th century. As a result, it appears (by eyewitness testimony) that Venice is sinking, or sinking faster, where it had never sunk before. On the other hand, recent archeological evidence shows (everywhere they look) a steady sucession of buildings replacing their predecessors (on average) every 75-150 years.
Do the math; the historical average replacement rate has been 75-150 years. It's been 150-175 years since Venice began freezing itself in the past, and about 125 years since it was frozen solid.
Good examples: alpine glaciers. The extent of an alpine glacier in any given year depends directly on how much snow falls on it (how much it grows) vs. how warm it has been (how fast it melts).
Very true - but the analysis is much less simple than that.
Alpine glaciers throughout the world are in retreat. This means that either less snow that recent historical average is falling on almost every glacier in the world, or almost every glacier in the world is melting faster than its recent historical average.
No, this means that less snow is falling than is required to replenish the glacier. The historical average is meaningless in this instance.
But wait, you can measure precipitation separate from the glacier--you can control for that variable.
That requires accurate measurement of precipitation across (sometimes) many square miles of glacier - something we are not doing. So your 'control' is loose at best.
And when you do so it becomes clear that for most glaciers the issue is a higher melting rate. Alpine glaciers are melting faster than they used to, all over the world. This is a pretty good clue that something is changing in the climate as a whole.
Certainly it's a clue that something is changing. The question confronting scientists is this; what is changing in the local enviroment and is it representative of a change in the global enviroment? Is is part of a trend? Is it part of a cycle? Once cannot simply say; "the glaciers are retreating! the sky is falling!"
And, as an extra bonus, it's visible to the layman's naked eyes. In fact there have been hundreds of news stories over the last 5 years about the retreat of the glaciers world wide. Or you can just ask mountaineers or local villagers.
And in the Year Without A Summer there were hundred of reports of crops freezing, rivers frozen in unexpected places and times, etc... Layman's testimony is essentially meaningless as human memory is extremely plastic.
Are we causing it? That's a tougher nut to crack. We know of a mechanism that can contribute to greater global atmospheric heat storage--greenhouse gases. We also know that human systems create and store an unnatural amount of heat (car exhaust, AC exhaust, plus the urban "heat island" effect). And we know that global overall temperature is going up.
We'll probably never know the exact percentage of our responsibility vs. sunspots. But the point is we know there's a trend and we know we probably are contributing to it to some degree.
If scientists were really as responsible as they claim - there would be calls from them for $MEGA dollars for increased research. There would be concrete plans being laid for a global monitoring network in order to provide the fine grained data we need.
Instead we get articles about Kyoto and simulations. No wonder even intelligent people don't trust them anymore.
Let me put it this way if you told a 19th century biologist that on earth there were creatures who live at 400 Bar of pressure at +130C in extreme saline conditions they would say it was impossible, that life could not exist under these conditions.
Of course he would - because he had no idea of what those conditions were like. On the other hand, we know what the conditions are like at -220C.
It is silly to make a prediction of probabilities with a data set of a single sample.(In this case life on earth)We have not even looked properly for life on any of the other planets in our solar system.
We are looking quite hard in all the places life is likely to be - and even with the various critters in extreme enviroments discovered here on earth in the last few decades, that only opens the span a tiny fraction compared to the span of temperatures and pressures that occur across the solar system. We (as a species) also study chemistry and physics, and can thus make a reasonable determination of where life is, and is not, likely.
Handwave all you want, but the laws of physics and chemistry say that life is not possible in liquid lead or liquid methane.
Who is to say that there isn't intelligent life in the form of a vapor, or a thinking rock somewhere in the universe? [...] I hate to use a middle manager term, but what we need is a paradigm shift. To assume intelligent life would warm blooded and bipedal may be a mistake. Who knows what forms are out there?
Nobody is assuming that intelligent life would be warmblooded and bipedal. In fact, nobody said anything about intelligent life in the first place, just that there was little likelihood of this planet harboring life.
That being said, life depends on a certain level of chemical activity (I.E no thinking rocks) and a large degree of predictable organization (I.E. no intelligent vapor). Anything else requires repealing the laws of physics and chemistry as they currently understood. (The former is possible on the cosmic and subatomic scale, I.E. outside the realms of life. The latter is unlikely in the extreme.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately it was the erosion that was the problem - the cold made what happened (a full burn-through) more likely, but it could have happened at much balmier temps as well. The real cause of the accident is yet another step back from the obvious - the joint rotation which had been occurring, and seen as a potential problem, since very early in the program.
The dilemma that management faced was this; the engineers (the experts) has been telling them it was safe to fly, despite erosion problems, while they (the experts) sought a fix. Then the experts suddenly reversed themselves on the eve of the launch and starting claiming that it was not in fact safe to fly - but they couldn't produce an engineering justification for that claim.Personally, I believe that the origin of 'put your management hat on'; it was shorthand for "look at it from my point of view [as a manager], would you trust a bunch of guys who can't get their stories straight, or back their stories up with documentation?".
His excuse boils down to "we did what we were told". So did the concentration camp guards.
Despite the resulting political train wreck, NASA convinced themselves that the blank checks would soon be flowing again - and *they chose to develop the Shuttle* on the theory that since it was the basis for the whole system, they needed to get a head start for when those checks came.
Apollo - in it's original incarnation as a general purpose earth orbiter - had it's basic design largely frozen even before Gemini was designed. This was one of the things that lead to the Apollo 1 accident, very few 'lessons learned' could be implemented - because they hadn't been learned yet. In this particular instance, the lesson was to acess stuff from outside the capsule rather than inside. This leads to less damage to other components because you don't have to push them aside to get to the component you want.
Time to fill out rebate forms: 15 mins
Senseless?: No.
The facts are simple: There is no evidence whatsoever that aging effects had any bearing on the loss of Columbia. Period.
The engineers approved flights despite evidence of O-ring erosion (even though the specs said no erosion). The engineers approved flights when the temperature at launch time hovered near or below the lowest temperature allowed by spec. Thus when managment questioned them about their reticence over the 51-L launch - they hemmed, and hawed, and did everything to avoid making a clear and straightforward call.
Unfortunately, it's not as simply as them being bullied and bamboozled. The engineers insisted that the launch was potentially unsafe, and when the managers asked for evidence - the engineers were unable (unwilling?) to make their case clear. *That* is highly unprofessional - making a claim (this launch is unsafe), and then failing to back it up.In the end, when the engineers were polled for their reccomendation, not one stood up and called for the launch to be halted. Not one.
To this day they insist they were overruled and that they 'just did as they were ordered'. That's what the concentration camp guards claimed too... Mighty poor company for a 'professional' engineer.
But is the goal to get kids back into the library, or to produce increased circulation numbers so the library looks good when budget time comes? Is the goal to provide a resource to the community, or to make the librarians feel good about themselves because they see lots of kids circulating about? "We must be doing something right, we must be relevant - look at our numbers, look how crowded we are!
It's not a numbers game.
Left unadressed in the article are two large questions;
The last disturbs me greatly because I've been watching a worrisome trend in my local libraries away from research material and toward entertainment. Over the last five years, on average, for every dollar they spend on non-fiction - they spend ten on fiction. (They bought 500 (!) copies of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.) Even that dollar spent on non-fiction isn't spent very well. Over the same period, they bought over 200 diet cookbooks (mostly Atkins) - and only 20 volumes of food history. (And 18 of those were lightweight 'pop' histories.) For every dollar spent on books, they spend 35 cents on videos and DVD's - and just like the books, they vast majority of the money was spent on flavor-of-the-month recent hits. (And they consistently replace the flavors-of-the-month when they are lost or damaged, while classic and important movies wait months or years to be replaced - if they ever are.)
I started watching the local library after a customer of mine (I owned a book store) died and left a large collection of military history in outstanding condition to the library. Not one single one was added to the libraries collection. The library staff never even looked at them - they handed them straight over to the Friends of the Library. (Worse yet, when questioned, they weren't even interested in trying.) The old ladies that ran the Friends priced them like they were the usual discards they were given by the library to sell - they were sold for pennies on the dollar. They raised about a quarter of what they could have raised for the library to misspend on other books.
The article concludes with:
Yes, we can ask for more than that. We can ask the Game Librarian to justify his decision in terms of the role libraries play in our society. We can ask the Game Librarian whether placing games in the library is a positive example for society. We can ask the Game Librarian whether games in the library leave it a better place (not a 'cooler' place, not a 'more relevant' place, but a better place) than it was without games.Libraries are like doctors. Their role is to give us what we need - not what we want. If we seek reasons why our society is providing fewer engineers, fewer critical thinkers, fewer educated people - one significant piece of the puzzle can be found in the attitude of the Game Librarian.
Venice has been sinking for centuries. But across most of those centuries, when a building became flooded - it was knocked down and a new one built higher than the previous one. For a variety of reasons this process was slowed, and then halted, across the 19th century. As a result, it appears (by eyewitness testimony) that Venice is sinking, or sinking faster, where it had never sunk before. On the other hand, recent archeological evidence shows (everywhere they look) a steady sucession of buildings replacing their predecessors (on average) every 75-150 years.
Do the math; the historical average replacement rate has been 75-150 years. It's been 150-175 years since Venice began freezing itself in the past, and about 125 years since it was frozen solid.
Instead we get articles about Kyoto and simulations. No wonder even intelligent people don't trust them anymore.
This whole press release is just the latest in a long string of such nonsense from Russia.
Handwave all you want, but the laws of physics and chemistry say that life is not possible in liquid lead or liquid methane.
That being said, life depends on a certain level of chemical activity (I.E no thinking rocks) and a large degree of predictable organization (I.E. no intelligent vapor). Anything else requires repealing the laws of physics and chemistry as they currently understood. (The former is possible on the cosmic and subatomic scale, I.E. outside the realms of life. The latter is unlikely in the extreme.)