I think it's not entirely surprising, and here's why:
I've worked with good managers, but I've also met at least one person whose idea of management was showing everyone who's the boss, full time. He seemed to have some deep seated belief that _noone_ and _nothing_ works unless you keep reminding them that you're watching them. He literally used to keep clicking on Netscape's title bar (this was in the 90's) to show Netscape that he's watching it. He actually believed that Netscape actually loads a page faster if he does that.
So, well, yeah, I can't see someone like that trusting that someone can actually work from home.
Well, it seems you are somewhat behind the times. It's pretty well established that there is a warming trend, so we hardly need the network of sensors you propose. There is some questions about how to set and interpret the errors bars, and the statistical significance of the warming trend depends on how you answer those questions. But sticking weather stations around the globe isn't going to make any difference to how those questions are answered.
I'm not going to argue with that, but I'll kindly refer to context. Namely, the message I was answering to. Since it seems to have dropped to -1 Flamebait, and thus pretty much cloaked, it says, literally:
Translation: Apparently big oil can't disprove the overwhelming evidence which proves global warming, so they've turned to the only alternative they have. Get Bush to make NASA stop collecting the evidence.
That is really _all_ that I was arguing with: the silly notion that some conspiracy tries to stop people from getting the evidence. You can't stop people from plotting that graph even if you tried, and even if you disbanded NASA entirely. That's all I'm saying.
Other than that, being that it's fairly orthogonal to what I was trying to say, sure, I'm not going to argue with everything you wrote. In fact, we can argue pretty quickly. Being partially from a physics background, I can certainly understand the need for models and experimental data. Also considering the occasional messages I wrote deploring the dumbing down of schools and of the western culture generally, I'm certainly not going to argue for less education:)
Good enough for me. Or the article itself has a quote that IMHO conveys that idea perfectly well: "[The growth of IE 7] seems to be exclusively at the expense of IE 6," says Johnston. "It's not eating into the Firefox share at all."
So basically this is such a useless revelation, that I can only hope that it was some attempt at manipulation.
Which, the 100 million downloads that the IE team reported? Or the fact that it hasn't shown any signs of slowing Firefox adoption? Because it doesn't take a genius to realize Microsoft was hoping IE7 would reverse or at least stem that tide.
No, the awful "nearly all of IE7's growth has been upgrades from IE6" truism in the summary.
- IE7's requirements say it will only run on XP or Windows Server 2003. Hence you'd expect that (most) people who downloaded IE7 are indeed on XP or Win 2003 machines.
- all XP and Windows Server 2003 computers came with IE6
I'm sure you can fill in the blanks there, because it's a simple case of "X => Y, Y => Z". If X="you upgraded to IE7", Y="you're on XP or Win 2003", Z="you had IE6". Did anyone really need a statistic or study to tell them that, surprisingly, unexpectedly, those who upgraded to IE7 had IE6 on their machine before?
Pretty much the only mildly interesting word in there is: "most". Did some people actually go through the trouble of making IE7 install on a system that doesn't run it? E.g., on Win 2000? I can only hope there weren't too many.
So basically this is such a useless revelation, that I can only hope that it was some attempt at manipulation. Because the depressing to think that someone was genuinely stupid enough to think they're onto some brilliant discovery and market trend.
It seems to me that for global warming all you need are the temperatures everywhere. Since, you know, that's how they came up with that idea in the first place. Someone looked at the (incomplete) temperature data for about a century and noticed, basically, "Hey, wait a darn minute, the averages rose by a whole 1C." Some of that data is from the 1800s, before anyone had even figured how to do a good ballistic rocket, much less launch anything into space. All that later satellites and scientists added to that was more data, as we started to know the temperatures in other parts of the globe too. The original data was lacking, say, such stuff as what were the temperatures in China in the 1800's, but now the Chinese too do meteorology.
So it seems to me that to keep plotting that you don't even need one single space mission. You just need to take the temperatures from all those meteorology stations all over the world, take an average, plot it. How can the big oil stop you from doing that? No, seriously. I'm curious. And even if you need data from meteo satellites, why do you need NASA there? By now there are enough sensors up there to forecast the weather, which starts by telling you exactly what is happening with the weather right now. (Forecasting then just feeds that into a model and tries to predict what will happen tomorrow.) How can the big oil stop you from using data from those?
I'm sure there must be some other science data that we're going to miss, maybe even for modelling the atmospheric phenomena, maybe even something that might help understand better _how_ that global warming is or isn't happening. But stop you from collecting the evidence? How would they possibly do that, anyway? Shoot every single meteorologist on Earth, or what? Bear in mind that that doesn't only include the mouthpieces presenting the weather forecast on TV. The Air Force in every country, for example, is extremely interested in the weather too, because their air missions depend on it. Plus a lot of other commercial and government stuff. Even if you shot all meteorologists, the air force and governments and everyone else will just train more, because they really need that data.
That's what annoys me about conspiracy theories, including the trolling in the submission: they propose that the big bad conspiracy is doing something impossible, pointless and stupid to even try.
Assault rifles are for ASSAULT - as in close-range. You use them for anything else only when you don't have large-caliber battle rifles.
That is, of course, technically correct. But you probably also realize that in practice:
1. They're accurate enough at 1km range to at least be usable for suppression. But even then, they're not really used at those ranges, because:
2. The vast majority of infantry fights happen under 300m. And "ARs are for close range" doesn't mean 50m. We'd still use SMGs if that was the case.
3. You have bigger guns for long range fighting. Machineguns, artillery, aviation, tanks, etc. We have other stuff that can shoot at 1km, or even 40km for that matter. Giving soldiers big rifles for that kind of range is a waste.
Even in WW2, you'll notice that points 2 and 3 created the machinegun teams with SMGs. If there's anything that WW2 was famous for, was SMGs. The Thompson, MP-40, or the Soviet PPS or PPSh are as stereotypical as it gets. In practice Germany never could produce as many SMGs as the war movies would like you to think, but the Soviets went pretty much all SMG. (Though with the more powerful TT cartridge, again we end up with a bit of a longer range SMG, so already slightly closer to a low range assault rifle.) Fighting _real_ close is where the rest of the squad mattered much more than at 1 km, so giving them SMGs instead of rifles actually made them more deadly.
The assault rifle is actually a step up there, since it's just as usable up close as an SMG, but it can shoot farther too if needed.
4. A soldier can only carry so much, so giving them _both_ a big gun for long range _and_ an a assault rifle for up close, _and_ the ammo for both, is an unneeded pain in the ass.
And there are better uses of that weight than two kinds of rifles. You can give that squad an extra bazooka, or an extra SAW, or whatever. Giving everyone a long range rifle _and_ an SMG counts towards that maximum weight a soldier can be effective with, so it's something else that they won't get. You have to weigh it against that, not in a vaccuum. It's not just a case of "but they lose long range shooting", but more like "they get X instead of long range shooting". Even if X might be mobility, extra ammo, a couple of grenades, or a belt of ammo for the squad machinegun.
And those big long-range rifles in WW2 ended up creating exactly that kind of a situation: you also needed a weapon for up close. Germany for example issued pistols liberally to a lot of people who also had a rifle. It wasn't just officers that got a 9mm pistol, but even a lot of soldiers. Because when it got up close and personal, a pistol would help a lot more than that big rifle.
5. Here's one callous little secret that the army doesn't like to tell you: wounding is better than killing. It's not for humanitarian reasons, it's not for political correctness, it's the kind of of callous thinking that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. See, if you kill a guy, the others just chuck him in a hole and push some dirt over. That's it. But if you wound or cripple a guy, he'll need surgery, medicine, people and cars/vans to carry him, he still needs food, etc. It's a bigger drain on the enemy's economy than killing him. Plus, it's actually more demoralizing both on the front and back at home to have lots of cripples.
That's one thing where your intuition and hunting experience can lead you astray. When shooting deer you want that deer dead, not just to wound it and let it limp and bleed its way home. If you even heard of someone practicing crippling deers, you'd call that guy deranged and avoid him. But when shooting humans you actually prefer them just badly wounded or crippled.
Snipers NEED large rifles to get range and penetration.
That much we can quickly aggree on. Also, snipers never shoot bursts, and snipers tend to shoot to kill. Yeah, it's not the same situation as for the regula
I just have seen much to make me believe that the AR round doesn't have much killing power beyond two hundred yards and fragmentation velocity is near the three thousand feet per second for the lightweight bullet and is lost beyond that hence why the marines moved to higher weights of bullets in their carbines, of course the heavier bullet was slower hence it lost much more of the fragmenting capacity at long range, being already slower than the original 5.56 (hey, at least once you pass 60 grains, you can't claim its a 22 anymore since the 22 LR has a tough time pushing a 60 grain bullet, to my knowledge)
And exactly that kind of statements are what gives me the idea that you have no clue what you're talking about.
The.22 Long Rifle shoots a 2.6g lead bullet at 330 m/s, or a 2.33g bullet at 405 m/s. That's half the bullet weight, with half the freakin' velocity, for an _eight_ of the energy.
In a nutshell: the M16 _doesn't_ shoot.22 LR ammo. It's _not_ putting a bigger bullet on a.22 LR case.
How can you be caliber crazy and claim shit like that to my face?
You mean other than that uninformed rant you made about guns being designed for political correctness, and other such talking out the ass? Kinda hints at lack of actual knowledge. Ok, maybe it's not about calibers, maybe you're just completely clueless. My apologies.
Sure you googled the wiki for 'Assault Rifle' but I wonder how much of that you knew off bat.
I could rant and rave about being a reserve AA sergeant. But I'll just say: you mean as opposed to your being unable to even google "5.56mm NATO" and ".22 Long Rifle"? It would have cleared a lot of mis-conceptions before even doing that anti-political-correctness rant.
I actually prefer accuracy over range (50 bmg) since i hunt occasionally
Then surely you don't object to the 5.56 NATO round, or the Soviet 5.45 round, as they have _both_. The problem with the M14 was precisely lack of accuracy when shooting bursts. So your problem with moving to a more accurate round is?
Auto fire is for people fighting at short range.
Well, bingo. Give that man a cigar. Because unlike shooting deer, 99% real military infantry fighiting happens under 300m. And a lot involves storming houses or whatnot, which is even more cramped. Go figure. _That_ is why the interest in Assault Rifles.
So, again, your problem is? You take your shooting at the range and against deer and don't even stop to think that maybe the army fights a bit of a different fight.
Personally I wouldn't waste cash on either an AK74 or 47, they're both shit guns for mudholes.
So you singlehandedly know better than a whole super-power's army, not to mention better than every army who's bought them (since you mention sales figures later, the AK-47 was pretty much the most exported gun ever), exactly which weapons should their soldiers use. Amazing. They actually fought wars with them, but, nah, they should have asked a random civillian guy who reads Soldier Of Fortune. I'm sure right now someone at the Kremlin smacks his head and goes "doh, we should have asked DaedalusHKX instead of wasting all that time and money on research, and asking the soldiers who actually used them. That's where we went wrong." Heh. I'd make a nastier comment, but let's just leave it at "heh."
Prime example. Minutemen fired 4 shots per minute in the revolutionary war, and hit 100% at 200 yards on british officers. Americans in Vietnam hit once in 300 shots on the 50 yard range (read this sometime ago when resear
Heh. Where shall I even begin, in that awful mess of uninformed judgment of weapons?
The "Assault Rifle" concept wasn't invented in Vietnam, it was invented in WW2 over here in Germany. The existing doctrine was that, yes, you need big real-man's rifles and machineguns most of the time, or pistols and SMGs for when it gets close and personal. Then someone noticed that most fighting, yes, happens under 300m. A place where pistols and SMGs are too short ranged, and those powerful real-man's weapons are too unwieldy. The world's first assault rifle was the Sturmgewehr 44. "Sturmgewehr" means _literally_ "Assault Rifle."
It was originally called "MP-43" to disguise it from Hitler who officially forbade researching anything except SMGs and big real-man's rifles. So they gave it a SMG designation instead.
The higher party officials got wind of it only when a test batch found its way to an SS unit, and troops started _begging_ and using political favours to try to get the new weapon. That already says something that the average big guns nut doesn't seem to understand: actual frontline troops _liked_ them, and preferred them to those good ol' real-man's weapons.
It has _nothing_ to do with political correctness. Nazi Germany was the least politically correct place on Earth. And soldiers on the brutal East Front didn't give a fuck about political correctness by now. They just wanted a weapon which would keep them alive.
Or have you ever heard of the AK-47? You must have. Well, that was an almost shameless copy of the StG-44. It's also useless beyond 300m, because of the low muzzle velocity. And it wasn't for lack of bigger, more macho weapons to copy, since they could have copied the much more powerful Fallschirmjägergewehr 42 instead. And you know what the USSR replaced it with? With the AK-74 in 5.45mm caliber.
And again, if you're trying to tell me that the Kremlin leaders were the US kind of "politically correct", then that's _major_ revisionism. Even as women in the army goes, the Soviets used a lot in WW2, but after the war they were mostly in a hurry to get rid of them and return to a more paternal army structure. Women were always exempted from draft, and post-war mostly used by the army as propaganda pieces, as in "hey, looky, we're so egalitarian, we even let a few dress in uniforms once a month and do some mock drills." They certainly _didn't_ design their main infantry weapons around attracting women in any form or shape.
I know that the average gun nut looks only at caliber, so the 7.92mm StG-44 and 7.62mm AK-47 look like a macho real-man's weapon. Guess what? They're short, low-velocity cartridges. The 7.62x39mm AK-47 round is a _lot_ weaker than the 7.62x51mm NATO round. In fact, the NATO round is closer to the Soviet 7.62x53mm round used in medium machineguns and sniper rifles. (E.g., the SVD, a.k.a., Dragunov sniper rifle.) So even the politically-incorrect Soviets, yes, used much less macho ammo in their main infantry weapon. (The original German StG-44 used an even shorter cartridge, at 7.92x33mm. That's right, a whole 33mm case.)
The problem with big cartridges in rifles, like the NATO 7.62mm round or the German Mauser round the Germans initially experimented with, is _not_ semi-auto fire. Yes, your grandma can shoot them one at a time. Very astute of you. The problem is _automatic_ fire. When you shoot 10 of them per second, with a powerful round and without a bipod, your accuracy goes straight to hell. Shot one by one, yes, you can aim them, but in salvoes it shakes your gun all around. And blimey, even that good ol' powerful M-14, it got a bipod for the models that were kept capable of automatic fire. _That's_ why everyone moved to less powerful cartridges in their assault rifles.
And again, the Soviets too moved to a 5.45mm round instead, because of the flatter trajectory and actually having more stopping power. Both the NATO 5.56mm round and
Very valid point, and no arguments there. I've mentioned the pencil-shaped bodkin tips and firearms a few times as reasons for the changes in armour over time. Still, thanks for making it even clearer.
Thanks for the correction, it is very much appreciated.
Still, I don't know of any historical one-hander weapon that resembled the massive 5-10 pound sledgehammers portrayed in video games. And some would realistically weigh a lot more, judging by the hideously oversized metal head. Iron is quite heavy. I've seen the blunt side of warhammers (ok, picks), for example, but it's still a relatively small surface and a relatively lightweight weapon. Even two-handed swords rarely weighed more than 5 pounds and some weighed as little as 3. I've tried swinging a 5 pound smith's hammer as a one-handed weapon, and while it would be very much possible, it's entirely too unwieldy and slow as a weapon IMHO. So I really have trouble imagining that someone would actually go into battle swinging a 10 pound sledgehammer in one hand.
Mjolnir is a mythological weapon, same as Zeus wielding lightning as a spear, or Odin riding an 8-legged horse. It's supposed to show off how powerful those gods are, compared to you puny mortals. Mjolnir is described as killing giants or indeed crushing whole mountains with one blow, which is a testament not only to how great (and massive) the hammer was, but also how awesomely strong was the god wielding it. I wouldn't exactly take it as representative of an actual weapon wielded by mere mortal soldiers.
I'm sure you know these things better than I do, so please don't take it as a lecture. All I'm trying to say is why I find the hammers in video games to be, well, unrealistic.
It's not entirely constant, because in a hard enough impact the wooden shaft of the lance would break. (And that already gives an idea of the forces involved: those were thick wooden rods.) See the non-lethal tournament rules where they kept the score in broken lances. The guy whose lance broke had scored a direct hit, so whoever broke more lances won.
Still, you do have a point there. For a while that tip would indeed get extra push.
On yet another hand, though, the main point was that people considered armour useful even though they knew of various ways to pierce it. Whether it was because of different forces, is an interesting physics consideration, but they probably didn't think that much about it back then:)
I want to say that the rifle (an elephant gun or not) was fired straight into the chest plate. The joints might not be so well armored (and in the 40 pounds version, they are not even be protected).
Even then it would still work better than most stuff that humans ever used as body armour. If you look back into history, humans have been quite happy with a lot less before.
Humans settled for a chain byrnie (basically, inaccurately: t-shirt) for a long time, until basically everyone was already trained to slash at the legs. Then they basically just made it longer. When bodkin tips and primitive firearms made maille useless, people just came up with a thin plate armour, but even that wasn't as invulnerable as you'd think. Then eventually guns got more and more powerful and all the weight was concentrated in a super-thick breastplate and helmet... at the price of leaving the arms and legs completely unprotected again.
(As a side-note, that's one of the factors that confuses people about medieval armours. They see a late musket era breastplate that weighs a lot, and get ideas like, "man, the whole suit must have weighed 100 kilos." In fact, at that point the breastplate and the helmet were the whole suit.)
At no point was the armour supposed to make someone 100% invulnerable. Something like a lance during a cavalry charge was nigh impossible to reliably stop, because with an armoured man and a destrier horse behind it, that was a helluva lot of energy and momentum pushing that tip. So armour never really tried to be invulnerable to that. Estocs could do a pretty good job of penetrating a knight's armour, and so could warhammers (think a thin sharp spike perpendicular to the handle, much like a pickaxe, not the massive hammers portrayed in video games), and so could back-spikes on axes, spiked maces/morningstars and flails. Even if it didn't penetrate, a mace or flail hit could crush articulations.
And in the age of chain armour, it was even more funny. A good hard hit with a straight sword could easily crush tissue and break bones even if it didn't penetrate the mesh of iron loops. Padding helped a bit, but only so much.
Basically the purpose of armour in all ages wasn't to make you invulnerable, but to give you better odds. If on the average you could hope for 1-2 disabling blows deflected by armour before one finally got you, that was advantage enough. Anything more than that that would have been impractically heavy and ultra-expensive. The weight was especially a factor, as they actually had to be able to fight in those suits.
So basically what I'm saying is that if this suit's only vulnerability are the joints, well, then that's already head and shoulders over what has been considered good armour before.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled"
I guess your hatred of neologisms and 'buzzwords' doesn't extend to manager-speak.
First of all, the quote is by Feynman, who was a physicist, not a manager.
Second, I'm not sure where you see buzzwords in it, because I can't. It's a simple idea expressed in plain English, which is something a lot of PHBs and PR drones seem to have forgotten how to do.
Third, it's a very sane and simple advice to everyone (including scientists, engineers, managers, marketting, etc): you can't make technology by PR announcement. You can run the PR machine as long as you want that water really runs uphill, it won't convince nature to actually behave that way. You can't just rewrite the laws of physics, and if you try, don't be surprised if nature still behaves the old fashioned way. So if you want to build something that works, put your faith in how the world actually works, not in how much PR crap you can churn stating the opposite.
At any rate, it actually has a meaning.
Most of us have a beef with buzzwords that really don't have any meaning, or no extra meaning over a simpler everyday word. Whole paragraphs or whole memos, mission statements, etc, get written that don't actually tell you anything. That is the problem.
I guess the devil is in the details, as usual. It could be that there was some detail that I don't know that made it horribly inapropriate, but judging from just the post I was answering to, it's not obvious.
The way I understood it from the post I was answering to, they weren't sent alone with a bolt action rifle on patrol, but together with other soldiers, presumably with assault rifles. In which case it's basically just being given the role of designated marksman for that squad. Hardly an unusual role in any modern military doctrine, and certainly not a Hollywood invention, so I'm hard pressed as to why that would be inapropriate. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact even developped weapons especially for this role, and I don't think someone in the Kremlin was watching Rambo movies and went, "doh, that's what we were missing, we must develop the Dragunov right away."
Second, I'm not reading it as that they were necessarily sent on a patrol with a long-range bolt-action sniper rifle. Just that they sent snipers on patrols. It could just as well be with a semi-automatic designated marksman rifle. The general public would call both a "sniper rifle", because anything with a scope on it is automatically a "sniper rifle", but a designated marksman rifle is really more of a squad support weapon, like the SAW, only for a different role. It's actually designed for someone who goes around with a squad or platoon, not for the lone sniper surgically elliminating a strategic target from half a mile away.
But I don't have to tell you all that anyway. You folks at mech infantry are more qualified than I am when it comes to infantry weapons and tactics:)
Oh yes, let's reduce any kind of debate to "if you disaggree, you're criticizing science as a whole" and for that matter "anyone disaggreeing is just a habitual malcontent."
Heh. Science doesn't work that way. Science is actually based on _skepticism_ and in actually showing the experimental data. I _still_ haven't seen any post of yours actually addressing the question of how do you put a number on those variables, or what are the groups (including control group) on which they and the formula were validated, and what was the error bar. It's not some outrageous malcontent act, it's just normal scientific norm.
Science is _not_ religion, it's _not_ about authority figures telling you "if you dare disaggree with me, you're attacking science as a whole", etc. Those are the domain of the religion and of pseudo-science snake-oil peddler. Even the biggest authority figures you can think of, still have to show their reproductible data. And still were occasionally wrong.
And frankly, if you have the time to post that much about how anyone disaggreeing with you is just a habitual malcontent, you'd have time to actually address the questions too. Is it really a maths formula? As in, you feed actual numeric values, and get a hard numeric output? Yes or no. It takes just a sentence to address that. What are the units for the variables and how do you measure them? It's at most a paragraph to give the basic idea. Was the formula actually validated statistically on enough people? How and how many? It doesn't take a novel to give that basic idea. "Yes, we validated it in a study on X people, this is what the setup was like, it would be a 1 in 20 chance of it being coincidence." (Which is really the minimum in science.) It's at most another paragraph.
So it's not even asking anything impossible, nevermind unreasonable. It's actually less effort to, yes, follow the accepted intellectual standards in science, than to handwave and do "don't dare attack science as a whole" tricks.
So, yes, the GP post had high enough intellectual standards. Doubting anything until proven _is_ the proper scientific standard.
Now I'm not a sniper and my service wasn't with the US army, but then it sounds to me like either that's hyperbole or the US is doing something else very wrong.
I'm one of the AA guys. You know, those who in a war would get to jam a SA missile down someone's tailpipe or put a helluva lot of 30mm holes in a helicopter or low flying plane. Specialized troops too, with specialized (big) guns, lots of electronics and radar dishes, specialized training, etc, not your average infantry grunt.
But guess what? We had assault rifles too, and we were trained to use them too. We also did our own guard duty (in a visible guard tower, too), patrols, etc.
Not only that, but it was pretty much assumed and understood that in a pinch we could and would have to fulfill other roles too. We had our own light machineguns, our own rocket launchers in case we have to deal with a mess of tanks, we were trained to chuck a grenade, storm a hill, or dig a foxhole and defend that hill.
Wars aren't neatly organized affairs, and you don't always have exactly what you need in exactly the right place. And sometimes having exactly what you need of everything in every place is a waste of manpower and material. For example, you don't dig in two brigades of infantry around your big guns brigade, just so the big guns guys can be so ultra-specialized that they never have to touch an assault rifle. It's easier to just put them somewhere where normally they won't be assaulted, but if shit hits the fan and they do, they'll have to fight like everyone else. You also don't give them a company of infantry for guard duty, they get to post their own guards.
Also war isn't so neatly organized as to always have a designated target in advance. I know I wouldn't expect a designated airplane to surgically shoot and then go home, so I'm not sure why these guys would absolutely need a strategic target designated in advance. Most of war is dealing with unplanned stuff. Some guys appear from where you didn't expect. You shoot them. If you're a sniper or designated marksman, you do your best to put a hole in someone while the other guys pin them down. And add your own suppression factor, because the fear of a sniper ranks up there with fear of heavy machineguns in a fight, when it comes to keeping people with their head down.
So if you're telling me that US snipers are so ultra-specialized that they absolutely can't function as anything else, and can't possibly shoot anyone other than as strategic target designated in advance, then methinks the USA badly needs to rethink their training and logistics. But I doubt that the US military is _that_ inept, or that indeed officers coming from a military academy and various training courses would use Hollywood action movies to learn tactics from. It's a bit like saying that programmers use Hollywood movies to learn how to use a command line.
Being sent together with a squad of other soldiers, also isn't the end of the world like you make it sound. It's not being sent with a group of civilians, it's normal military procedure anywhere in the world. The designated marksmen, SAW guys, anti-tank guys, etc, actually train for that. Sure, a sniper rifle or designated marksman rifle isn't raw firepower, but it's not there as raw firepower in the first place. That's what the other soldiers around you are for. They'll do the spraying lead job. You do yours.
Now I'm as anti-war as it gets, and, yes, I'm against the war in Iraq. I could understand ideological or humanitarian reasons against it. But "waah, they're making me work together with a squad, like in Hollywood movies!" is just awful mis-understanding of basic military tactics.
Also, it seems to me like the apex of hypocrisy, if someone is indeed against war for oil and influence, to advocate instead being a hired assassin for some equally corrupt dictator or cocaine baron. At least the army does have some democratic checks (just vote against the guy sending them there), just taking money from the highest bidder doesn't have any
That's a very sane post, and it's refreshing to see that kind of rational thinking. Thanks.
My problem with it is precisely, well, if it's clearly not meant as a formula, then he shouldn't write it as a formula. I don't have a problem with saying, basically, "people procrastinate less whe they do stuff they think is useful and/or easy. And, oh, some procrastinate more than others anyway, we don't know why, it might be genetic", as it at least sounds like common sense. (Though even common sense can lead one astray without a proper study validating it.) But then noone got famous for saying common sense stuff, that 1000 other people said before, while "scientist discovers the exact formula for procrastination" makes headlines. And maths just wasn't meant to be abused as a poor man's mnemonic or quick way of getting a headline. Unless he can mathematically say that this guy will procrastinate 1.5x longer than this other guy, then it shouldn't be a formula.
As for procrastination and perfectionism, I'm thinking he might be missing the point. Technically it's true, but only technically and missing the point. Because what most people find to complain about perfectionism (as in, OCPD, since, as you say, merely having high standards isn't a problem) isn't procrastinating starting, but having problems finishing. An OCPD case may start earlier, but the problem is that he'll never consider it perfectly finished. It's precisely that worrying (irrationally, disproportionately) more, that often ends up preventing just calling it good enough and moving on to the next task.
Or what looks like procrastinating the main task may actually be being unable to finish the perfect framework/design/algorithm/whatever that he needs for it. I've actually seen one guy spend months on writing the perfect XML parsing framework, while the program he intended to use it on was already overdue. Or one architect spending months designing the perfect class hierarchy in UML, while the actual program was already overdue. (And funnily enough later it was completed by someone else in a month with a less baroque design when his perfect class hierarchy still wasn't ready.) It's stuff that's not technically procrastinating, but it doesn't really help with finishing on time anyway.
How about selling management and/or management courses and/or snake oil for managers? His CV list him, among other things, as a HR consultant. (Which, with a background in psychology, he may even be very qualified to do. The bogus pseudo-science maths is probably there to make the sell easier to PHBs.) And member in several groups keen on telling you what to do for the right price. There _is_ a whole industry centered around selling snake oil to PHBs, and making them feel better and more competent, so I have no trouble imagining that industry using marketting and PR like any other industry does.
Plus, PR is really a very perverse thing. Sometimes it actually peddles a product, but sometimes it's just an idea that happens to fit someone's agenda. Actual examples include stuff like that wearing a suit is good for business, that unless you move your pension immediately to a private fund you'll starve in your old age, or that global warming doesn't exist. In this guy's work the central theme seems to be that management is a hard science, that you can put a number on anything from procrastination to how well a prospective employee fits your job and organization, and I can just see a bunch of CEOs and the like keen to sell that idea to the masses.
But it could also be that there's really no PR conspiracy, and he's just peddling his own snake oil. When you sell yourself as a HR consultant, claims that you can measure in hard numbers exactly how much someone will procrastinate, or exactly how well an employee (or for that matter a date) fits, is, well, excellent CV padding.
Or just being a media whore, really. The press loves an outrageous pseudo-science story. The more it makes Joe Sixpack thing "durr, some scientists just have too much time and money" (and I must confess it got me thinking that, too, before reading about what's really happening there), the more some journalists will love it. Silly formulas are like striking gold there. It's like getting a scientist to take a pie in the face in public. Joe Sixpack loves that kinda reassurance that those eggheads in universities and the like are just a bunch of clowns.
What's wrong with that? Well, the moment that you claim it does it in 1/1000 of the time, let's make one thing clear: it means doing in 2 hours what you could do in about a year (at 40 hours a week.) You have to throw away any attempt at interviews, checking references, etc. You just feed the computer the CVs or the dating profiles and it spits out the "Rambo employee" that'll wipe out the competition, or the perfect lover for you.
(Note that that by itself is a camouflaged way of touting "the formula for the perfect X". But let's not get hung up on that.)
The problem there: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
CVs range from 100% honest, to padded, to complete bullshit. We had one guy who couldn't even program, in spite of his impressive CV. After a while of obviously doing nothing, he started just randomly changing files and checking them in to look like he does something. Only to prove how stupid he was, his changes didn't even compile. Then he got fired. Then one of his team mates found his updated CV online, in which he claimed he was the chief architect of that project, single-handedly improved performance by an unrealistic factor, etc. Not only, as said, he couldn't even program, but he never had that kind of responsibility. I personally know the guy who was the actual architect of that project.
And most dating profiles are useless tripe. They'll tell you generic stuff like "likes to have fun", as if that many others would write "I like to moan and bitch and sob on someone's shoulder."
Even if you forced people to put everything into numbers, on a 0 to 10 scale, CVs will still include a random amount of padding (that guy I mentioned would certainly give himself 10s in a lot of stuff), and so will dating profiles. And different people will interpret that scale differently. Does for example 10 in "likes cats" on a dating profile mean they like to play with a cat, or total obsession, or being a furry, or what? Different people will interpret that differently. Does a 5 mean "I don't care about cats either way" or "I totally hate the fucking things"? For some people 5 is center, but there are a lot of people whose scale is basically logarithmic: anything they like at all must be between 9 and 10, and anything lower is interpreted as about the same as giving someone an F. See the many fanboys sending hate mail to review sites if a game scores less than 90%.
So how _do_ you put such garbage in without getting garbage out? Traditionally the check was actually talking to that someone, checking if they really know their stuff, or in the case of dating, actually dating them and seeing if you really fit. How does a standardized computerized system do that?
And more importantly, what ever happened to it? Such a gold mine, you'd expect to see it being used by now.
It reminds me of a story about an alchemist in the middle ages, who tried to sell the formula for converting lead into gold to some king. So the king gives him an empty bag and tells him something like, "well, you already know how to make gold, so fill it for yourself."
Same thing here. If you have a standardized way of picking a Rambo employee that will wipe out several squads of the competition (his hyperbole, not mine), you take a loan, hire 20 of them, and be the next Microsoft or whatever. Ok, maybe he's not the risk taking type, even when the win is (or he makes it sound) 99% guaranteed. Who else used it and made a fortune then?
Did you read _even_ the summary it linked to? Or his web site? (Ok, so it just parrots the exact same text.) Because he certainly doesn't claim to have done more than a meta-analysis of other people's papers. In fact, googling him, he never claimed any other experience other than meta-analyzing other people's papers. And even that, a whole 1 time, resulting in 4 publications. (I assume the rest of his papers didn't even have that much research.) At any rate, he claims credit for the equation, but not to have validated it in any way. Nor any error bar.
And before we go any further, let's look first at what meta-analysis means.
Since that formula didn't exist before, it would be damn hard to directly combine samples to validate it. Noone made the statistics specifically for that. But maybe we can do that for the variables.
Was there some standardized way of measuring "resistance to procrastination"? Units? Because combining statistics that don't even use the same units is enough to invalidate any attempts at meta-analyzing them. And blimey, there seems to be nothing on the topic except vague motivational texts. Noone except him even proposes to put a number on _that_ kind of a fuzzy concept, so I'm not sure where he'd find the hard numbers to validate that formula by meta-analysis.
And wth is a "temporal motivational factor" which he calculates there? There are a number of theories as to what might affect motivation, but I'm not aware of anyone ever putting a number or units on _that_. So where do you get the data you can feed into that meta-analysis to validate the formula? No, seriously. I want to know.
Etc.
And since you seem to be hung up on credentials, who is this guy? He's "professor" only by virtue of teaching at a business school. And let's say it again: a business school. And It's not a medical or psychology institute. According to everything I could find googling quickly, he teaches human resources and operation dynamics there, so a lot more towards the business side than anything resembling genuine psychology research. Much less the kind of hard science kind of thing that would give confidence in using such maths as more than a piss-poor metaphor. One of his courses is "Individual Differences". No doubt a useful thing in HR, but hardly something you could put in hard numbers. (And I'd worry even more if anyone even tried.) There _are_ things in a business school that genuinely need maths and use maths correctly, but human resources is as soft and fuzzy as it gets. So the whole "university" there is a bit of a false authority factor, no more.
The only things I could find attributed to him other than, yes, 10 years of philosophising about procrastination (bit of a running joke, I guess), are such stuff as claiming to have invented a system that can select exactly the right man for any task, in 1/1000 the time and for 1/1000 the cost. Whether it's for a job or, literally, your prospective spouse. You use his system to pick up the right employee, and you end up with a rambo that can wipe out several platoons of other employees. Or, again, you could use it to select exactly the right spouse for you off a dating site.
And if _that_ kind of bullshit assertion (or the fact that we haven't heard of it ever since, despite it's obvious value and applications, if it really worked) doesn't peg your bullshit meter, heh, the accusation rests.
Literally, that's the kind of bogus pseudo-science that this guy puts his name on. If it's not signing someone else's PR texts, then he is a genuine con-man.
Yes, dear, so are the other bullshitters signing their name on on PR agencies' formulae. It's invariably Dr Wossname or Prof Watsisface that get to sell their name to such PR agencies. Because making a mockery of science for PR works better when it's someone in a white labcoat taking the pie in the face for the media. It makes Joe Sixpack feel better about himself.
At any rate, where is the study and control group for, you know, testing that formula? Identifying finite variables is good and fine, but when you put them in a maths formula, where's the experiment that tests it, and what is the error bar? What are the units used? _How_ do you measure those variables?
Without that, it's pure bullshit pseudo-science at its finest.
Identifying variables is good and fine, but just making up a formula involving them isn't. Not without the experimental data.
E.g., let's do gravity the bullshit way he does this maths. Mass seems to be a factor. Distance seems to influence it somehow, but let's not actually do an experiment or use a telescope to find out by how much. The density of the medium seems to influence it somehow too, since objects immersed in water seem lighter. (Ok, it doesn't work that way, but that's the way a thoroughly uninformed non-scientific guess would probably end up like.) So let's guess that F = mass / (distance + density). Hmm, wrong units summed up below (though the average PR bullshitter wouldn't spot that), so maybe it's F = mass / (distance * density).
That's the kind of utter bullshit you can arrive at, if you just make up a formula with some variables you don't even understand or know how to measure. And that's the kind of guess this guy does.
You don't need some Ph.D. in anything to understand why just guessing a formula bogus. You just need to have paid even minimal attention to the science classes in school.
It's not even something new. You can head over to "badscience.net and find a few more such examples in their archives, including the formula for the perfect football match, the perfect vacation, the perfect ice cream, the perfect beach, perfect day to book a vacation, most depressing day of the year, etc.
The way at least those invariably happened is: some company, let's call it Moraelin Tobacco Ltd, contacts some PR agency to drum up interest in smoking a bit. Tobacco taxes are up, people have made new year's resolutions to quit smoking, etc, and I could use a bit of reminding them to light one. Remember, PR isn't marketting: marketting tells you "buy Moraelin's cigarettes", PR works in more insidious ways, like telling you "boffins discovered that smoking is actually good for your health." It's marketting's evil stealthy brother. It loves to disguise itself as news.
So the PR agency concocts some stupid formula, say, "the formula for the perfect smoking experience." It's usually a stupid formula: for example the ones at badscience.net routinely do stupid stuff like add numbers that don't even have the same units. (E.g., one adds time to time squared.) They also invariably don't even tell you how to measure any of the factors involved, don't have any studies to prove it (and never a control group), etc. But the purpose of that formula isn't to be scientific, but to get Joe Sixpack's attention to whatever I'm selling, and/or to undermine whatever he had against it. Marketting will take it from there.
Ok, now they have a formula they can disguise as news, but if it comes from a PR agency, noone will take it seriously. Even Joe Sixpack isn't usually _that_ stupid. So the next round there is to find someone with some "Dr", "Prof" or whatever important sounding title, and preferrably from some university (sounds all smart and stuff to Joe Sixpack), who's willing to sell his name for some money. A lot will tell them where to shove it, but eventually they find, say, Prof Jack Conman from the university of East Bumfuckistan, who wasn't doing any research anyway and doesn't give a damn about getting a bad reputation among his peers. Sure, he'll take the PR agency's money and sign his name on their pseudo-science "paper."
And now we have all we need to send that "news" to every major newspaper, disguised as academic research.
Does it start to sound like TFA yet?
Because that's exactly what we have here: a stupid formula where they even admit that they don't even know how to measure the variables involved. Nor have any statistical data to show that that's how it works. Did they take two groups, told them to do the same project, but group A got told it's a critical, while group B was told it's unimportant? Was the time difference really linearly proportional to the value difference in dollars? Well, I don't see any such study, much less the values and error bar that would accompany real research.
And how about the elementary issue that all tasks are ultimately split into smaller sub-tasks. Any program you ever wrote, you didn't deal with it as one monumental indivisible task, but broke it up in packages, modules, functions, etc. Do you become automatically demotivated and likely to procrastinate for weeks, just because next on your list is a sub-task like the file input dialog (low V in his formula) than going after the whole program in one step (high V)? Well, blimey, wonder why we've been doing it then, in all these decades of structured design and project management.
And how about other factors, like morale, stress, or being overworked? Shouldn't they be at least mentioned in a real scientific study? Doing a big "we don't know why, it might possibly be genetic" shrug doesn't strike me as particularly clued.
And does procrastination really work that way? Really? Because the RL cases I've seen weren't as much a case of adding a fixed number of days, as a case of expanding to fill the deadline and then some. I.e., more of a case of "ah, I s
Well, maybe it's not impossible to work with the real world in a movie, but I'd say it's at the very least considerably harder in essentially an action movie. In other kinds of movies (e.g., dramas), sure. In an action movie, I'm not really that convinced that it can be done well. You don't really have time to both show Superman kicking Lex Luthor's rear _and_ get into the whole history and moral debate that maybe it's Lex who's really right after all.
Plus, it's appealing to different parts of the brains, IMHO. You're either leaving your higher level thinking at the wardrobe and cheering for Rambo sooting down a helicopter, _or_ go into intellectual mode and considering that maybe it was the Russians who were really right there, and maybe it was wrong for Rambo to go and start shooting there. I'm not sure both can be mixed at the same time.
Basically I'm not saying that _all_ movies must be clear cut good-vs-evil exercises, of course, but when you have lots of action and flashy special effects, IMHO it's best to keep everything else simple.
At any rate, at least we seem to aggree that it's beyond Lucas's ability to do it well.
Plus, the annoying part is that it's re-writing an existing universe. I could see a point in a moral dillema universe, if it's a sequel or prequel to that kind of universe and that kind of movies. But not when it's re-writing the very fundaments of an existing universe that just didn't work that way. It doesn't just change the setting, it effectively changes episodes 4 to 6 too, because suddenly a lot of assumptions just no longer fit.
It's, if you will, like growing up on super-hero comics and seeing someone come along and retro-fit it to be a murky case of an asshole Superman bullying an otherwise not too bad (if maybe just a little mis-understood and not too good at explaining his intentions) Lex Luthor. Or He-Man (if you were into that guy, I wasn't really) being suddenly just a self-righteous asshole tyranizing poor Skeltor who was really just wanting a fair election. Or Spiderman becoming a wanker living in his parents' basement, and half the time using his powers to stalk females he fancies.
It's not that such heroes can't be turned into good stories on their own right, for whoever prefers their stories that way. It's just, well, a case of: why rewrite everyone's childhood memories in the process? It's not like one can't start a new hero and story for that.
Same here. Lucas could have made his moral ambiguity points without violating everyone's childhood memories of SW.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's not entirely surprising, and here's why:
I've worked with good managers, but I've also met at least one person whose idea of management was showing everyone who's the boss, full time. He seemed to have some deep seated belief that _noone_ and _nothing_ works unless you keep reminding them that you're watching them. He literally used to keep clicking on Netscape's title bar (this was in the 90's) to show Netscape that he's watching it. He actually believed that Netscape actually loads a page faster if he does that.
So, well, yeah, I can't see someone like that trusting that someone can actually work from home.
Eh, I meant we can AGGREE pretty quickly. I should really proof-read before submitting :)
I'm not going to argue with that, but I'll kindly refer to context. Namely, the message I was answering to. Since it seems to have dropped to -1 Flamebait, and thus pretty much cloaked, it says, literally:
That is really _all_ that I was arguing with: the silly notion that some conspiracy tries to stop people from getting the evidence. You can't stop people from plotting that graph even if you tried, and even if you disbanded NASA entirely. That's all I'm saying.
Other than that, being that it's fairly orthogonal to what I was trying to say, sure, I'm not going to argue with everything you wrote. In fact, we can argue pretty quickly. Being partially from a physics background, I can certainly understand the need for models and experimental data. Also considering the occasional messages I wrote deploring the dumbing down of schools and of the western culture generally, I'm certainly not going to argue for less education
Good enough for me. Or the article itself has a quote that IMHO conveys that idea perfectly well: "[The growth of IE 7] seems to be exclusively at the expense of IE 6," says Johnston. "It's not eating into the Firefox share at all."
No, the awful "nearly all of IE7's growth has been upgrades from IE6" truism in the summary.
Let's consider the following facts:
- IE7's requirements say it will only run on XP or Windows Server 2003. Hence you'd expect that (most) people who downloaded IE7 are indeed on XP or Win 2003 machines.
- all XP and Windows Server 2003 computers came with IE6
I'm sure you can fill in the blanks there, because it's a simple case of "X => Y, Y => Z". If X="you upgraded to IE7", Y="you're on XP or Win 2003", Z="you had IE6". Did anyone really need a statistic or study to tell them that, surprisingly, unexpectedly, those who upgraded to IE7 had IE6 on their machine before?
Pretty much the only mildly interesting word in there is: "most". Did some people actually go through the trouble of making IE7 install on a system that doesn't run it? E.g., on Win 2000? I can only hope there weren't too many.
So basically this is such a useless revelation, that I can only hope that it was some attempt at manipulation. Because the depressing to think that someone was genuinely stupid enough to think they're onto some brilliant discovery and market trend.
So the one-word wisdom there is: duh.
It seems to me that for global warming all you need are the temperatures everywhere. Since, you know, that's how they came up with that idea in the first place. Someone looked at the (incomplete) temperature data for about a century and noticed, basically, "Hey, wait a darn minute, the averages rose by a whole 1C." Some of that data is from the 1800s, before anyone had even figured how to do a good ballistic rocket, much less launch anything into space. All that later satellites and scientists added to that was more data, as we started to know the temperatures in other parts of the globe too. The original data was lacking, say, such stuff as what were the temperatures in China in the 1800's, but now the Chinese too do meteorology.
So it seems to me that to keep plotting that you don't even need one single space mission. You just need to take the temperatures from all those meteorology stations all over the world, take an average, plot it. How can the big oil stop you from doing that? No, seriously. I'm curious. And even if you need data from meteo satellites, why do you need NASA there? By now there are enough sensors up there to forecast the weather, which starts by telling you exactly what is happening with the weather right now. (Forecasting then just feeds that into a model and tries to predict what will happen tomorrow.) How can the big oil stop you from using data from those?
I'm sure there must be some other science data that we're going to miss, maybe even for modelling the atmospheric phenomena, maybe even something that might help understand better _how_ that global warming is or isn't happening. But stop you from collecting the evidence? How would they possibly do that, anyway? Shoot every single meteorologist on Earth, or what? Bear in mind that that doesn't only include the mouthpieces presenting the weather forecast on TV. The Air Force in every country, for example, is extremely interested in the weather too, because their air missions depend on it. Plus a lot of other commercial and government stuff. Even if you shot all meteorologists, the air force and governments and everyone else will just train more, because they really need that data.
That's what annoys me about conspiracy theories, including the trolling in the submission: they propose that the big bad conspiracy is doing something impossible, pointless and stupid to even try.
That is, of course, technically correct. But you probably also realize that in practice:
1. They're accurate enough at 1km range to at least be usable for suppression. But even then, they're not really used at those ranges, because:
2. The vast majority of infantry fights happen under 300m. And "ARs are for close range" doesn't mean 50m. We'd still use SMGs if that was the case.
3. You have bigger guns for long range fighting. Machineguns, artillery, aviation, tanks, etc. We have other stuff that can shoot at 1km, or even 40km for that matter. Giving soldiers big rifles for that kind of range is a waste.
Even in WW2, you'll notice that points 2 and 3 created the machinegun teams with SMGs. If there's anything that WW2 was famous for, was SMGs. The Thompson, MP-40, or the Soviet PPS or PPSh are as stereotypical as it gets. In practice Germany never could produce as many SMGs as the war movies would like you to think, but the Soviets went pretty much all SMG. (Though with the more powerful TT cartridge, again we end up with a bit of a longer range SMG, so already slightly closer to a low range assault rifle.) Fighting _real_ close is where the rest of the squad mattered much more than at 1 km, so giving them SMGs instead of rifles actually made them more deadly.
The assault rifle is actually a step up there, since it's just as usable up close as an SMG, but it can shoot farther too if needed.
4. A soldier can only carry so much, so giving them _both_ a big gun for long range _and_ an a assault rifle for up close, _and_ the ammo for both, is an unneeded pain in the ass.
And there are better uses of that weight than two kinds of rifles. You can give that squad an extra bazooka, or an extra SAW, or whatever. Giving everyone a long range rifle _and_ an SMG counts towards that maximum weight a soldier can be effective with, so it's something else that they won't get. You have to weigh it against that, not in a vaccuum. It's not just a case of "but they lose long range shooting", but more like "they get X instead of long range shooting". Even if X might be mobility, extra ammo, a couple of grenades, or a belt of ammo for the squad machinegun.
And those big long-range rifles in WW2 ended up creating exactly that kind of a situation: you also needed a weapon for up close. Germany for example issued pistols liberally to a lot of people who also had a rifle. It wasn't just officers that got a 9mm pistol, but even a lot of soldiers. Because when it got up close and personal, a pistol would help a lot more than that big rifle.
5. Here's one callous little secret that the army doesn't like to tell you: wounding is better than killing. It's not for humanitarian reasons, it's not for political correctness, it's the kind of of callous thinking that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. See, if you kill a guy, the others just chuck him in a hole and push some dirt over. That's it. But if you wound or cripple a guy, he'll need surgery, medicine, people and cars/vans to carry him, he still needs food, etc. It's a bigger drain on the enemy's economy than killing him. Plus, it's actually more demoralizing both on the front and back at home to have lots of cripples.
That's one thing where your intuition and hunting experience can lead you astray. When shooting deer you want that deer dead, not just to wound it and let it limp and bleed its way home. If you even heard of someone practicing crippling deers, you'd call that guy deranged and avoid him. But when shooting humans you actually prefer them just badly wounded or crippled.
That much we can quickly aggree on. Also, snipers never shoot bursts, and snipers tend to shoot to kill. Yeah, it's not the same situation as for the regula
And exactly that kind of statements are what gives me the idea that you have no clue what you're talking about.
.22 Long Rifle shoots a 2.6g lead bullet at 330 m/s, or a 2.33g bullet at 405 m/s. That's half the bullet weight, with half the freakin' velocity, for an _eight_ of the energy.
.22 LR ammo. It's _not_ putting a bigger bullet on a .22 LR case.
The 5.56x45mm NATO round shoots a 3.95-5.18g bullet at 772-930 m/s.
The
In a nutshell: the M16 _doesn't_ shoot
You mean other than that uninformed rant you made about guns being designed for political correctness, and other such talking out the ass? Kinda hints at lack of actual knowledge. Ok, maybe it's not about calibers, maybe you're just completely clueless. My apologies.
I could rant and rave about being a reserve AA sergeant. But I'll just say: you mean as opposed to your being unable to even google "5.56mm NATO" and ".22 Long Rifle"? It would have cleared a lot of mis-conceptions before even doing that anti-political-correctness rant.
Then surely you don't object to the 5.56 NATO round, or the Soviet 5.45 round, as they have _both_. The problem with the M14 was precisely lack of accuracy when shooting bursts. So your problem with moving to a more accurate round is?
Well, bingo. Give that man a cigar. Because unlike shooting deer, 99% real military infantry fighiting happens under 300m. And a lot involves storming houses or whatnot, which is even more cramped. Go figure. _That_ is why the interest in Assault Rifles.
So, again, your problem is? You take your shooting at the range and against deer and don't even stop to think that maybe the army fights a bit of a different fight.
So you singlehandedly know better than a whole super-power's army, not to mention better than every army who's bought them (since you mention sales figures later, the AK-47 was pretty much the most exported gun ever), exactly which weapons should their soldiers use. Amazing. They actually fought wars with them, but, nah, they should have asked a random civillian guy who reads Soldier Of Fortune. I'm sure right now someone at the Kremlin smacks his head and goes "doh, we should have asked DaedalusHKX instead of wasting all that time and money on research, and asking the soldiers who actually used them. That's where we went wrong." Heh. I'd make a nastier comment, but let's just leave it at "heh."
Heh. Where shall I even begin, in that awful mess of uninformed judgment of weapons?
The "Assault Rifle" concept wasn't invented in Vietnam, it was invented in WW2 over here in Germany. The existing doctrine was that, yes, you need big real-man's rifles and machineguns most of the time, or pistols and SMGs for when it gets close and personal. Then someone noticed that most fighting, yes, happens under 300m. A place where pistols and SMGs are too short ranged, and those powerful real-man's weapons are too unwieldy. The world's first assault rifle was the Sturmgewehr 44. "Sturmgewehr" means _literally_ "Assault Rifle."
It was originally called "MP-43" to disguise it from Hitler who officially forbade researching anything except SMGs and big real-man's rifles. So they gave it a SMG designation instead.
The higher party officials got wind of it only when a test batch found its way to an SS unit, and troops started _begging_ and using political favours to try to get the new weapon. That already says something that the average big guns nut doesn't seem to understand: actual frontline troops _liked_ them, and preferred them to those good ol' real-man's weapons.
It has _nothing_ to do with political correctness. Nazi Germany was the least politically correct place on Earth. And soldiers on the brutal East Front didn't give a fuck about political correctness by now. They just wanted a weapon which would keep them alive.
Or have you ever heard of the AK-47? You must have. Well, that was an almost shameless copy of the StG-44. It's also useless beyond 300m, because of the low muzzle velocity. And it wasn't for lack of bigger, more macho weapons to copy, since they could have copied the much more powerful Fallschirmjägergewehr 42 instead. And you know what the USSR replaced it with? With the AK-74 in 5.45mm caliber.
And again, if you're trying to tell me that the Kremlin leaders were the US kind of "politically correct", then that's _major_ revisionism. Even as women in the army goes, the Soviets used a lot in WW2, but after the war they were mostly in a hurry to get rid of them and return to a more paternal army structure. Women were always exempted from draft, and post-war mostly used by the army as propaganda pieces, as in "hey, looky, we're so egalitarian, we even let a few dress in uniforms once a month and do some mock drills." They certainly _didn't_ design their main infantry weapons around attracting women in any form or shape.
I know that the average gun nut looks only at caliber, so the 7.92mm StG-44 and 7.62mm AK-47 look like a macho real-man's weapon. Guess what? They're short, low-velocity cartridges. The 7.62x39mm AK-47 round is a _lot_ weaker than the 7.62x51mm NATO round. In fact, the NATO round is closer to the Soviet 7.62x53mm round used in medium machineguns and sniper rifles. (E.g., the SVD, a.k.a., Dragunov sniper rifle.) So even the politically-incorrect Soviets, yes, used much less macho ammo in their main infantry weapon. (The original German StG-44 used an even shorter cartridge, at 7.92x33mm. That's right, a whole 33mm case.)
The problem with big cartridges in rifles, like the NATO 7.62mm round or the German Mauser round the Germans initially experimented with, is _not_ semi-auto fire. Yes, your grandma can shoot them one at a time. Very astute of you. The problem is _automatic_ fire. When you shoot 10 of them per second, with a powerful round and without a bipod, your accuracy goes straight to hell. Shot one by one, yes, you can aim them, but in salvoes it shakes your gun all around. And blimey, even that good ol' powerful M-14, it got a bipod for the models that were kept capable of automatic fire. _That's_ why everyone moved to less powerful cartridges in their assault rifles.
And again, the Soviets too moved to a 5.45mm round instead, because of the flatter trajectory and actually having more stopping power. Both the NATO 5.56mm round and
Very valid point, and no arguments there. I've mentioned the pencil-shaped bodkin tips and firearms a few times as reasons for the changes in armour over time. Still, thanks for making it even clearer.
Thanks for the correction, it is very much appreciated.
Still, I don't know of any historical one-hander weapon that resembled the massive 5-10 pound sledgehammers portrayed in video games. And some would realistically weigh a lot more, judging by the hideously oversized metal head. Iron is quite heavy. I've seen the blunt side of warhammers (ok, picks), for example, but it's still a relatively small surface and a relatively lightweight weapon. Even two-handed swords rarely weighed more than 5 pounds and some weighed as little as 3. I've tried swinging a 5 pound smith's hammer as a one-handed weapon, and while it would be very much possible, it's entirely too unwieldy and slow as a weapon IMHO. So I really have trouble imagining that someone would actually go into battle swinging a 10 pound sledgehammer in one hand.
Mjolnir is a mythological weapon, same as Zeus wielding lightning as a spear, or Odin riding an 8-legged horse. It's supposed to show off how powerful those gods are, compared to you puny mortals. Mjolnir is described as killing giants or indeed crushing whole mountains with one blow, which is a testament not only to how great (and massive) the hammer was, but also how awesomely strong was the god wielding it. I wouldn't exactly take it as representative of an actual weapon wielded by mere mortal soldiers.
I'm sure you know these things better than I do, so please don't take it as a lecture. All I'm trying to say is why I find the hammers in video games to be, well, unrealistic.
It's not entirely constant, because in a hard enough impact the wooden shaft of the lance would break. (And that already gives an idea of the forces involved: those were thick wooden rods.) See the non-lethal tournament rules where they kept the score in broken lances. The guy whose lance broke had scored a direct hit, so whoever broke more lances won.
:)
Still, you do have a point there. For a while that tip would indeed get extra push.
On yet another hand, though, the main point was that people considered armour useful even though they knew of various ways to pierce it. Whether it was because of different forces, is an interesting physics consideration, but they probably didn't think that much about it back then
Even then it would still work better than most stuff that humans ever used as body armour. If you look back into history, humans have been quite happy with a lot less before.
Humans settled for a chain byrnie (basically, inaccurately: t-shirt) for a long time, until basically everyone was already trained to slash at the legs. Then they basically just made it longer. When bodkin tips and primitive firearms made maille useless, people just came up with a thin plate armour, but even that wasn't as invulnerable as you'd think. Then eventually guns got more and more powerful and all the weight was concentrated in a super-thick breastplate and helmet... at the price of leaving the arms and legs completely unprotected again.
(As a side-note, that's one of the factors that confuses people about medieval armours. They see a late musket era breastplate that weighs a lot, and get ideas like, "man, the whole suit must have weighed 100 kilos." In fact, at that point the breastplate and the helmet were the whole suit.)
At no point was the armour supposed to make someone 100% invulnerable. Something like a lance during a cavalry charge was nigh impossible to reliably stop, because with an armoured man and a destrier horse behind it, that was a helluva lot of energy and momentum pushing that tip. So armour never really tried to be invulnerable to that. Estocs could do a pretty good job of penetrating a knight's armour, and so could warhammers (think a thin sharp spike perpendicular to the handle, much like a pickaxe, not the massive hammers portrayed in video games), and so could back-spikes on axes, spiked maces/morningstars and flails. Even if it didn't penetrate, a mace or flail hit could crush articulations.
And in the age of chain armour, it was even more funny. A good hard hit with a straight sword could easily crush tissue and break bones even if it didn't penetrate the mesh of iron loops. Padding helped a bit, but only so much.
Basically the purpose of armour in all ages wasn't to make you invulnerable, but to give you better odds. If on the average you could hope for 1-2 disabling blows deflected by armour before one finally got you, that was advantage enough. Anything more than that that would have been impractically heavy and ultra-expensive. The weight was especially a factor, as they actually had to be able to fight in those suits.
So basically what I'm saying is that if this suit's only vulnerability are the joints, well, then that's already head and shoulders over what has been considered good armour before.
First of all, the quote is by Feynman, who was a physicist, not a manager.
Second, I'm not sure where you see buzzwords in it, because I can't. It's a simple idea expressed in plain English, which is something a lot of PHBs and PR drones seem to have forgotten how to do.
Third, it's a very sane and simple advice to everyone (including scientists, engineers, managers, marketting, etc): you can't make technology by PR announcement. You can run the PR machine as long as you want that water really runs uphill, it won't convince nature to actually behave that way. You can't just rewrite the laws of physics, and if you try, don't be surprised if nature still behaves the old fashioned way. So if you want to build something that works, put your faith in how the world actually works, not in how much PR crap you can churn stating the opposite.
At any rate, it actually has a meaning.
Most of us have a beef with buzzwords that really don't have any meaning, or no extra meaning over a simpler everyday word. Whole paragraphs or whole memos, mission statements, etc, get written that don't actually tell you anything. That is the problem.
I guess the devil is in the details, as usual. It could be that there was some detail that I don't know that made it horribly inapropriate, but judging from just the post I was answering to, it's not obvious.
:)
The way I understood it from the post I was answering to, they weren't sent alone with a bolt action rifle on patrol, but together with other soldiers, presumably with assault rifles. In which case it's basically just being given the role of designated marksman for that squad. Hardly an unusual role in any modern military doctrine, and certainly not a Hollywood invention, so I'm hard pressed as to why that would be inapropriate. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact even developped weapons especially for this role, and I don't think someone in the Kremlin was watching Rambo movies and went, "doh, that's what we were missing, we must develop the Dragunov right away."
Second, I'm not reading it as that they were necessarily sent on a patrol with a long-range bolt-action sniper rifle. Just that they sent snipers on patrols. It could just as well be with a semi-automatic designated marksman rifle. The general public would call both a "sniper rifle", because anything with a scope on it is automatically a "sniper rifle", but a designated marksman rifle is really more of a squad support weapon, like the SAW, only for a different role. It's actually designed for someone who goes around with a squad or platoon, not for the lone sniper surgically elliminating a strategic target from half a mile away.
But I don't have to tell you all that anyway. You folks at mech infantry are more qualified than I am when it comes to infantry weapons and tactics
Oh yes, let's reduce any kind of debate to "if you disaggree, you're criticizing science as a whole" and for that matter "anyone disaggreeing is just a habitual malcontent."
Heh. Science doesn't work that way. Science is actually based on _skepticism_ and in actually showing the experimental data. I _still_ haven't seen any post of yours actually addressing the question of how do you put a number on those variables, or what are the groups (including control group) on which they and the formula were validated, and what was the error bar. It's not some outrageous malcontent act, it's just normal scientific norm.
Science is _not_ religion, it's _not_ about authority figures telling you "if you dare disaggree with me, you're attacking science as a whole", etc. Those are the domain of the religion and of pseudo-science snake-oil peddler. Even the biggest authority figures you can think of, still have to show their reproductible data. And still were occasionally wrong.
And frankly, if you have the time to post that much about how anyone disaggreeing with you is just a habitual malcontent, you'd have time to actually address the questions too. Is it really a maths formula? As in, you feed actual numeric values, and get a hard numeric output? Yes or no. It takes just a sentence to address that. What are the units for the variables and how do you measure them? It's at most a paragraph to give the basic idea. Was the formula actually validated statistically on enough people? How and how many? It doesn't take a novel to give that basic idea. "Yes, we validated it in a study on X people, this is what the setup was like, it would be a 1 in 20 chance of it being coincidence." (Which is really the minimum in science.) It's at most another paragraph.
So it's not even asking anything impossible, nevermind unreasonable. It's actually less effort to, yes, follow the accepted intellectual standards in science, than to handwave and do "don't dare attack science as a whole" tricks.
So, yes, the GP post had high enough intellectual standards. Doubting anything until proven _is_ the proper scientific standard.
Now I'm not a sniper and my service wasn't with the US army, but then it sounds to me like either that's hyperbole or the US is doing something else very wrong.
I'm one of the AA guys. You know, those who in a war would get to jam a SA missile down someone's tailpipe or put a helluva lot of 30mm holes in a helicopter or low flying plane. Specialized troops too, with specialized (big) guns, lots of electronics and radar dishes, specialized training, etc, not your average infantry grunt.
But guess what? We had assault rifles too, and we were trained to use them too. We also did our own guard duty (in a visible guard tower, too), patrols, etc.
Not only that, but it was pretty much assumed and understood that in a pinch we could and would have to fulfill other roles too. We had our own light machineguns, our own rocket launchers in case we have to deal with a mess of tanks, we were trained to chuck a grenade, storm a hill, or dig a foxhole and defend that hill.
Wars aren't neatly organized affairs, and you don't always have exactly what you need in exactly the right place. And sometimes having exactly what you need of everything in every place is a waste of manpower and material. For example, you don't dig in two brigades of infantry around your big guns brigade, just so the big guns guys can be so ultra-specialized that they never have to touch an assault rifle. It's easier to just put them somewhere where normally they won't be assaulted, but if shit hits the fan and they do, they'll have to fight like everyone else. You also don't give them a company of infantry for guard duty, they get to post their own guards.
Also war isn't so neatly organized as to always have a designated target in advance. I know I wouldn't expect a designated airplane to surgically shoot and then go home, so I'm not sure why these guys would absolutely need a strategic target designated in advance. Most of war is dealing with unplanned stuff. Some guys appear from where you didn't expect. You shoot them. If you're a sniper or designated marksman, you do your best to put a hole in someone while the other guys pin them down. And add your own suppression factor, because the fear of a sniper ranks up there with fear of heavy machineguns in a fight, when it comes to keeping people with their head down.
So if you're telling me that US snipers are so ultra-specialized that they absolutely can't function as anything else, and can't possibly shoot anyone other than as strategic target designated in advance, then methinks the USA badly needs to rethink their training and logistics. But I doubt that the US military is _that_ inept, or that indeed officers coming from a military academy and various training courses would use Hollywood action movies to learn tactics from. It's a bit like saying that programmers use Hollywood movies to learn how to use a command line.
Being sent together with a squad of other soldiers, also isn't the end of the world like you make it sound. It's not being sent with a group of civilians, it's normal military procedure anywhere in the world. The designated marksmen, SAW guys, anti-tank guys, etc, actually train for that. Sure, a sniper rifle or designated marksman rifle isn't raw firepower, but it's not there as raw firepower in the first place. That's what the other soldiers around you are for. They'll do the spraying lead job. You do yours.
Now I'm as anti-war as it gets, and, yes, I'm against the war in Iraq. I could understand ideological or humanitarian reasons against it. But "waah, they're making me work together with a squad, like in Hollywood movies!" is just awful mis-understanding of basic military tactics.
Also, it seems to me like the apex of hypocrisy, if someone is indeed against war for oil and influence, to advocate instead being a hired assassin for some equally corrupt dictator or cocaine baron. At least the army does have some democratic checks (just vote against the guy sending them there), just taking money from the highest bidder doesn't have any
That's a very sane post, and it's refreshing to see that kind of rational thinking. Thanks.
My problem with it is precisely, well, if it's clearly not meant as a formula, then he shouldn't write it as a formula. I don't have a problem with saying, basically, "people procrastinate less whe they do stuff they think is useful and/or easy. And, oh, some procrastinate more than others anyway, we don't know why, it might be genetic", as it at least sounds like common sense. (Though even common sense can lead one astray without a proper study validating it.) But then noone got famous for saying common sense stuff, that 1000 other people said before, while "scientist discovers the exact formula for procrastination" makes headlines. And maths just wasn't meant to be abused as a poor man's mnemonic or quick way of getting a headline. Unless he can mathematically say that this guy will procrastinate 1.5x longer than this other guy, then it shouldn't be a formula.
As for procrastination and perfectionism, I'm thinking he might be missing the point. Technically it's true, but only technically and missing the point. Because what most people find to complain about perfectionism (as in, OCPD, since, as you say, merely having high standards isn't a problem) isn't procrastinating starting, but having problems finishing. An OCPD case may start earlier, but the problem is that he'll never consider it perfectly finished. It's precisely that worrying (irrationally, disproportionately) more, that often ends up preventing just calling it good enough and moving on to the next task.
Or what looks like procrastinating the main task may actually be being unable to finish the perfect framework/design/algorithm/whatever that he needs for it. I've actually seen one guy spend months on writing the perfect XML parsing framework, while the program he intended to use it on was already overdue. Or one architect spending months designing the perfect class hierarchy in UML, while the actual program was already overdue. (And funnily enough later it was completed by someone else in a month with a less baroque design when his perfect class hierarchy still wasn't ready.) It's stuff that's not technically procrastinating, but it doesn't really help with finishing on time anyway.
How about selling management and/or management courses and/or snake oil for managers? His CV list him, among other things, as a HR consultant. (Which, with a background in psychology, he may even be very qualified to do. The bogus pseudo-science maths is probably there to make the sell easier to PHBs.) And member in several groups keen on telling you what to do for the right price. There _is_ a whole industry centered around selling snake oil to PHBs, and making them feel better and more competent, so I have no trouble imagining that industry using marketting and PR like any other industry does.
Plus, PR is really a very perverse thing. Sometimes it actually peddles a product, but sometimes it's just an idea that happens to fit someone's agenda. Actual examples include stuff like that wearing a suit is good for business, that unless you move your pension immediately to a private fund you'll starve in your old age, or that global warming doesn't exist. In this guy's work the central theme seems to be that management is a hard science, that you can put a number on anything from procrastination to how well a prospective employee fits your job and organization, and I can just see a bunch of CEOs and the like keen to sell that idea to the masses.
But it could also be that there's really no PR conspiracy, and he's just peddling his own snake oil. When you sell yourself as a HR consultant, claims that you can measure in hard numbers exactly how much someone will procrastinate, or exactly how well an employee (or for that matter a date) fits, is, well, excellent CV padding.
Or just being a media whore, really. The press loves an outrageous pseudo-science story. The more it makes Joe Sixpack thing "durr, some scientists just have too much time and money" (and I must confess it got me thinking that, too, before reading about what's really happening there), the more some journalists will love it. Silly formulas are like striking gold there. It's like getting a scientist to take a pie in the face in public. Joe Sixpack loves that kinda reassurance that those eggheads in universities and the like are just a bunch of clowns.
Indeed. And here's the other bullshit claim of his that I mentioned: Selection tool could revolutionize
hiring, online dating.
What's wrong with that? Well, the moment that you claim it does it in 1/1000 of the time, let's make one thing clear: it means doing in 2 hours what you could do in about a year (at 40 hours a week.) You have to throw away any attempt at interviews, checking references, etc. You just feed the computer the CVs or the dating profiles and it spits out the "Rambo employee" that'll wipe out the competition, or the perfect lover for you.
(Note that that by itself is a camouflaged way of touting "the formula for the perfect X". But let's not get hung up on that.)
The problem there: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
CVs range from 100% honest, to padded, to complete bullshit. We had one guy who couldn't even program, in spite of his impressive CV. After a while of obviously doing nothing, he started just randomly changing files and checking them in to look like he does something. Only to prove how stupid he was, his changes didn't even compile. Then he got fired. Then one of his team mates found his updated CV online, in which he claimed he was the chief architect of that project, single-handedly improved performance by an unrealistic factor, etc. Not only, as said, he couldn't even program, but he never had that kind of responsibility. I personally know the guy who was the actual architect of that project.
And most dating profiles are useless tripe. They'll tell you generic stuff like "likes to have fun", as if that many others would write "I like to moan and bitch and sob on someone's shoulder."
Even if you forced people to put everything into numbers, on a 0 to 10 scale, CVs will still include a random amount of padding (that guy I mentioned would certainly give himself 10s in a lot of stuff), and so will dating profiles. And different people will interpret that scale differently. Does for example 10 in "likes cats" on a dating profile mean they like to play with a cat, or total obsession, or being a furry, or what? Different people will interpret that differently. Does a 5 mean "I don't care about cats either way" or "I totally hate the fucking things"? For some people 5 is center, but there are a lot of people whose scale is basically logarithmic: anything they like at all must be between 9 and 10, and anything lower is interpreted as about the same as giving someone an F. See the many fanboys sending hate mail to review sites if a game scores less than 90%.
So how _do_ you put such garbage in without getting garbage out? Traditionally the check was actually talking to that someone, checking if they really know their stuff, or in the case of dating, actually dating them and seeing if you really fit. How does a standardized computerized system do that?
And more importantly, what ever happened to it? Such a gold mine, you'd expect to see it being used by now.
It reminds me of a story about an alchemist in the middle ages, who tried to sell the formula for converting lead into gold to some king. So the king gives him an empty bag and tells him something like, "well, you already know how to make gold, so fill it for yourself."
Same thing here. If you have a standardized way of picking a Rambo employee that will wipe out several squads of the competition (his hyperbole, not mine), you take a loan, hire 20 of them, and be the next Microsoft or whatever. Ok, maybe he's not the risk taking type, even when the win is (or he makes it sound) 99% guaranteed. Who else used it and made a fortune then?
Did you read _even_ the summary it linked to? Or his web site? (Ok, so it just parrots the exact same text.) Because he certainly doesn't claim to have done more than a meta-analysis of other people's papers. In fact, googling him, he never claimed any other experience other than meta-analyzing other people's papers. And even that, a whole 1 time, resulting in 4 publications. (I assume the rest of his papers didn't even have that much research.) At any rate, he claims credit for the equation, but not to have validated it in any way. Nor any error bar.
And before we go any further, let's look first at what meta-analysis means.
Since that formula didn't exist before, it would be damn hard to directly combine samples to validate it. Noone made the statistics specifically for that. But maybe we can do that for the variables.
Was there some standardized way of measuring "resistance to procrastination"? Units? Because combining statistics that don't even use the same units is enough to invalidate any attempts at meta-analyzing them. And blimey, there seems to be nothing on the topic except vague motivational texts. Noone except him even proposes to put a number on _that_ kind of a fuzzy concept, so I'm not sure where he'd find the hard numbers to validate that formula by meta-analysis.
And wth is a "temporal motivational factor" which he calculates there? There are a number of theories as to what might affect motivation, but I'm not aware of anyone ever putting a number or units on _that_. So where do you get the data you can feed into that meta-analysis to validate the formula? No, seriously. I want to know.
Etc.
And since you seem to be hung up on credentials, who is this guy? He's "professor" only by virtue of teaching at a business school. And let's say it again: a business school. And It's not a medical or psychology institute. According to everything I could find googling quickly, he teaches human resources and operation dynamics there, so a lot more towards the business side than anything resembling genuine psychology research. Much less the kind of hard science kind of thing that would give confidence in using such maths as more than a piss-poor metaphor. One of his courses is "Individual Differences". No doubt a useful thing in HR, but hardly something you could put in hard numbers. (And I'd worry even more if anyone even tried.) There _are_ things in a business school that genuinely need maths and use maths correctly, but human resources is as soft and fuzzy as it gets. So the whole "university" there is a bit of a false authority factor, no more.
The only things I could find attributed to him other than, yes, 10 years of philosophising about procrastination (bit of a running joke, I guess), are such stuff as claiming to have invented a system that can select exactly the right man for any task, in 1/1000 the time and for 1/1000 the cost. Whether it's for a job or, literally, your prospective spouse. You use his system to pick up the right employee, and you end up with a rambo that can wipe out several platoons of other employees. Or, again, you could use it to select exactly the right spouse for you off a dating site.
And if _that_ kind of bullshit assertion (or the fact that we haven't heard of it ever since, despite it's obvious value and applications, if it really worked) doesn't peg your bullshit meter, heh, the accusation rests.
Literally, that's the kind of bogus pseudo-science that this guy puts his name on. If it's not signing someone else's PR texts, then he is a genuine con-man.
Yes, dear, so are the other bullshitters signing their name on on PR agencies' formulae. It's invariably Dr Wossname or Prof Watsisface that get to sell their name to such PR agencies. Because making a mockery of science for PR works better when it's someone in a white labcoat taking the pie in the face for the media. It makes Joe Sixpack feel better about himself.
At any rate, where is the study and control group for, you know, testing that formula? Identifying finite variables is good and fine, but when you put them in a maths formula, where's the experiment that tests it, and what is the error bar? What are the units used? _How_ do you measure those variables?
Without that, it's pure bullshit pseudo-science at its finest.
Identifying variables is good and fine, but just making up a formula involving them isn't. Not without the experimental data.
E.g., let's do gravity the bullshit way he does this maths. Mass seems to be a factor. Distance seems to influence it somehow, but let's not actually do an experiment or use a telescope to find out by how much. The density of the medium seems to influence it somehow too, since objects immersed in water seem lighter. (Ok, it doesn't work that way, but that's the way a thoroughly uninformed non-scientific guess would probably end up like.) So let's guess that F = mass / (distance + density). Hmm, wrong units summed up below (though the average PR bullshitter wouldn't spot that), so maybe it's F = mass / (distance * density).
That's the kind of utter bullshit you can arrive at, if you just make up a formula with some variables you don't even understand or know how to measure. And that's the kind of guess this guy does.
You don't need some Ph.D. in anything to understand why just guessing a formula bogus. You just need to have paid even minimal attention to the science classes in school.
It's not even something new. You can head over to "badscience.net and find a few more such examples in their archives, including the formula for the perfect football match, the perfect vacation, the perfect ice cream, the perfect beach, perfect day to book a vacation, most depressing day of the year, etc.
The way at least those invariably happened is: some company, let's call it Moraelin Tobacco Ltd, contacts some PR agency to drum up interest in smoking a bit. Tobacco taxes are up, people have made new year's resolutions to quit smoking, etc, and I could use a bit of reminding them to light one. Remember, PR isn't marketting: marketting tells you "buy Moraelin's cigarettes", PR works in more insidious ways, like telling you "boffins discovered that smoking is actually good for your health." It's marketting's evil stealthy brother. It loves to disguise itself as news.
So the PR agency concocts some stupid formula, say, "the formula for the perfect smoking experience." It's usually a stupid formula: for example the ones at badscience.net routinely do stupid stuff like add numbers that don't even have the same units. (E.g., one adds time to time squared.) They also invariably don't even tell you how to measure any of the factors involved, don't have any studies to prove it (and never a control group), etc. But the purpose of that formula isn't to be scientific, but to get Joe Sixpack's attention to whatever I'm selling, and/or to undermine whatever he had against it. Marketting will take it from there.
Ok, now they have a formula they can disguise as news, but if it comes from a PR agency, noone will take it seriously. Even Joe Sixpack isn't usually _that_ stupid. So the next round there is to find someone with some "Dr", "Prof" or whatever important sounding title, and preferrably from some university (sounds all smart and stuff to Joe Sixpack), who's willing to sell his name for some money. A lot will tell them where to shove it, but eventually they find, say, Prof Jack Conman from the university of East Bumfuckistan, who wasn't doing any research anyway and doesn't give a damn about getting a bad reputation among his peers. Sure, he'll take the PR agency's money and sign his name on their pseudo-science "paper."
And now we have all we need to send that "news" to every major newspaper, disguised as academic research.
Does it start to sound like TFA yet?
Because that's exactly what we have here: a stupid formula where they even admit that they don't even know how to measure the variables involved. Nor have any statistical data to show that that's how it works. Did they take two groups, told them to do the same project, but group A got told it's a critical, while group B was told it's unimportant? Was the time difference really linearly proportional to the value difference in dollars? Well, I don't see any such study, much less the values and error bar that would accompany real research.
And how about the elementary issue that all tasks are ultimately split into smaller sub-tasks. Any program you ever wrote, you didn't deal with it as one monumental indivisible task, but broke it up in packages, modules, functions, etc. Do you become automatically demotivated and likely to procrastinate for weeks, just because next on your list is a sub-task like the file input dialog (low V in his formula) than going after the whole program in one step (high V)? Well, blimey, wonder why we've been doing it then, in all these decades of structured design and project management.
And how about other factors, like morale, stress, or being overworked? Shouldn't they be at least mentioned in a real scientific study? Doing a big "we don't know why, it might possibly be genetic" shrug doesn't strike me as particularly clued.
And does procrastination really work that way? Really? Because the RL cases I've seen weren't as much a case of adding a fixed number of days, as a case of expanding to fill the deadline and then some. I.e., more of a case of "ah, I s
Well, maybe it's not impossible to work with the real world in a movie, but I'd say it's at the very least considerably harder in essentially an action movie. In other kinds of movies (e.g., dramas), sure. In an action movie, I'm not really that convinced that it can be done well. You don't really have time to both show Superman kicking Lex Luthor's rear _and_ get into the whole history and moral debate that maybe it's Lex who's really right after all.
Plus, it's appealing to different parts of the brains, IMHO. You're either leaving your higher level thinking at the wardrobe and cheering for Rambo sooting down a helicopter, _or_ go into intellectual mode and considering that maybe it was the Russians who were really right there, and maybe it was wrong for Rambo to go and start shooting there. I'm not sure both can be mixed at the same time.
Basically I'm not saying that _all_ movies must be clear cut good-vs-evil exercises, of course, but when you have lots of action and flashy special effects, IMHO it's best to keep everything else simple.
At any rate, at least we seem to aggree that it's beyond Lucas's ability to do it well.
Plus, the annoying part is that it's re-writing an existing universe. I could see a point in a moral dillema universe, if it's a sequel or prequel to that kind of universe and that kind of movies. But not when it's re-writing the very fundaments of an existing universe that just didn't work that way. It doesn't just change the setting, it effectively changes episodes 4 to 6 too, because suddenly a lot of assumptions just no longer fit.
It's, if you will, like growing up on super-hero comics and seeing someone come along and retro-fit it to be a murky case of an asshole Superman bullying an otherwise not too bad (if maybe just a little mis-understood and not too good at explaining his intentions) Lex Luthor. Or He-Man (if you were into that guy, I wasn't really) being suddenly just a self-righteous asshole tyranizing poor Skeltor who was really just wanting a fair election. Or Spiderman becoming a wanker living in his parents' basement, and half the time using his powers to stalk females he fancies.
It's not that such heroes can't be turned into good stories on their own right, for whoever prefers their stories that way. It's just, well, a case of: why rewrite everyone's childhood memories in the process? It's not like one can't start a new hero and story for that.
Same here. Lucas could have made his moral ambiguity points without violating everyone's childhood memories of SW.