I'm using POPFile. So far it's processed over 10,000 incoming emails and has given me exactly 3 false positives. There are always a handful of false negatives, but it's a whole lot better than sorting through >100 spam messages a day by hand. It was a bit of an effort to train up, but no more effort than you're going through right now.
This is what happens when you oversimplify a physics problem. The danger isn't that the window will be forced into the vehicle by a flying particle. Just to begin with, you can't pretend that the force of the impact is spread evenly over the window's surface.
Yes, a very small amount of window material will be carried into the vehicle along with the particle, if it passes completely through. But the main danger is the structural weakening of the window, or its actual shattering. In the former case, if it's weakened enough it will give way over time -- possibly a very brief time, but not necessarily -- and will certainly explode outward. In the latter, the initial vector and angular momentum for each fragment will be impossible to predict, but becuase the energy is transmitted via a wave that passes through the window (see Doc Edgerton's photos of glass shattering, for example; this is also why glass often shatters in a circular "spiderweb" pattern) it depends on the fragment's position along the wave. On average, it will tend to either side of the pane roughly equally. But now the pressure differential takes over, and the fragments will tend to get sucked out rapidly. This is also an explosion outward.
From the article. I've compressed the quote; in the original, each sentence inexplicably occupied its own paragraph. It's about the paint chip that struck a window on the Space Shuttle.
A closer look revealed radiating webs of damage in the outermost of three layered panes of heavy glass. When the window was removed back on Earth, the embedded mote was found to contain traces of aluminum and titanium. It was a fleck of paint, most likely from a derelict rocket casing. If it had been slightly heavier, the window could have imploded, killing the crew, experts concluded.
"Imploded"? I'll bet the "experts" concluded no such thing, if they were worthy of the name. With 1 atmosphere of pressure inside the vehicle and 0 pressure outside, the window would have exploded, not imploded. The writer was probably thinking by analogy with a CRT, which will indeed implode if shattered because there's a vaccuum inside. On orbit, the vaccuum is outside.
Tron wasn't that far off for its day, at that time there were a lot fewer large programming projects and as such a lot fewer teams of developers. It was much more common for a programmer to work by himself or herself than it is today.
Sorry, no. Programmers have been working in teams to deal with medium-to-large sized projects for a very, very long time. I got my first professional programming job about the time Tron came out. It was for a small computer VAR operating out of a storefront in Bayonne, NJ. Most of his business was in CP/M machines, and his killer app was to be a software package for manufacturers' representatives. (I know that doesn't sound very exciting. Deal with it, that's the real world.) His shop went out of business before any significant work could be done, but even in this case there were two other programmers besides myself who were to be working on this project. When I graduated college and entered a large corporation, I was almost always part of a team, and never worked by myself except for brief stretches. This was not innovative, not even at the time. It was the usual way of doing your work.
If anything, my experience was atypical as I almost always worked on medium-sized projects that didn't require a large team. (I refer only to the specific component of the system on which I was working. This was always a piece of a much larger project involving a great many more people.) Large-scale projects would have required much larger teams. My products were also always used in-house; products that actually shipped to customers would have had a more complex design phase because the users wouldn't have been around to contribute directly to the requirements.
If you're referring to games, that's a different story. Sierra and EA built their businesses back in the CP/M and early PC days by making stars out of individual programmers. But back then, computer games were a very small segment of the market, even smaller than it is today. They were also much simpler than they are now. But even then, you saw games produced by teams of programmers as soon as you started to see anything more advanced than, say, Ultima III. And arcade games were pretty much always produced by teams.
If anything, it's more common for a programmer to work by himself today than it's been in the past. The Unix approach to systems, building complexity out of numerous small components, combined with the ubiquity of *nix in the Open Source community, means that a great deal of very useful (but small) software is written and maintained mostly by a single person. This is a relatively new phenomenon, at least as far as the sheer number of people involved, and could not have happened had computers not gotten cheap enough to be commodity items. Back when Tron came out this was not true. The only people who would have had computers at home at the time would have been dedicated hackers like Jeff Bridges in Tron or kids with indulgent parents like Matthew Broderick in War Games. Programming was otherwise the domain of either academia or large corporations. Teams were the rule in either case.
My point was how fragile the tiles are, you could push your finger through one with little trouble. If your finger touched a tile, you would reduce it's effectiveness greatly, just because of the oils on your skin. That hardly seems like a robust material to use for a vehicle.
So have I. I have, for example, actually held a space shuttle tile in my hand. They simply aren't as delicate as you say they are.
I don't know what aspect of their effectiveness might be altered by contact with skin oils, so it would have been interesting if you'd chosen to be more explicit. It might be nothing more than the usual concern for outgassing of volatile materials on flight hardware, but I don't see how that could be a problem on the shuttle.
It is my personal opinion that the question is not if the tiles were part of the problem, since they protect the shuttle from heat, they clearly failed.
Then RTFA. The tiles are not the only heat shielding on the shuttle. The leading edge of the wing is made of a different material entirely, and is attatched by a completely different method. Since the leading edge of the left wing is very possibly the point of failure, the possibility of a problem with something other than the tiles can't be dismissed out of hand.
More reading would correct some of your other faulty assertions, such as that a single failure in the tiling must lead to disaster. This is false. Tiles were routinely lost before an improved method for testing how well they were attached was developed. I also think you'd have to do a lot of work to show that a cooling system such as that on the SR-71 would be able to cope with the heat of a shuttle re-entry. If it's true, it's not obvious.
Have you ever hooked up a washing machine? They have two -- count them, two -- hoses going into them. One is for cold water and one is for hot water. You can tell which is which by the temperature of the water running through them. The washing machine mixes them in various proportions depending on the water temperature you've selected.
Is all that obvious? Good! You seem to be so fond of explaining the obvious I could only conclude it was actuallp pretty mysterious to you, so I thought I'd be explicit.
Now here we have a guy making beer in a washing machine. Consider: Is it very likely at all that he's running water into it? No indeedy! Instead we find him regulating the temperature of the mash (I think -- as I said, I don't read German) using a computer hooked up to heating elements -- pay attention now -- inside the washing machine. Heating elements such as this are totally unnecessary in washing machines where hot water is supplied to it because (follow closely here, this is important) the hot water is already hot when it gets to the machine and doesn't need to be heated any further!
There. I hope that made everything clear for you. I may have accidentally used words of more than 2 syllables, so if there's anything you don't understand, please feel free to reply and I'll do my best to explain in simpler language.
American washing machines generally expect to have hot water supplied to them. If I understand this guy's process correctly -- and I might not; I don't read German -- the machine here maintains its own temperature settings. Does anyone sell a machine like this here?
This must be a wonderful story. It's been up for several minutes now, with nary a First Post to be seen. I guess even the trolls love a good beer story.
The decision to use fragile thermal tiles for the Shuttle is one that has faced much criticism over the years. It is a decision that is at the core of what happened to the Shuttle on re-entry, whatever the reason that some of those tiles were damaged or lost.
You must not have read the Spaceflight Now article very carefully. It's still not at all clear where or how the failure happened. Yes, it may well have been the tiles. But the fact that the failure seems to have occurred at the leading edge of the wing also implicates the RCC structures there that provide its aerodynamic shape, or perhaps the interface between the RCC structures and the tiles. Or maybe it was something else; I can think of one or two other possibilities without much effort. Let's not prejudge the issue before all the data is in hand.
I can't tell if you're asking seriously, but given the current economic climate I'll answer seriously anyway.
I'm in the defense industry. Not all the jobs here are so secure. The plant where I work used to employ 25,000 people; now we're down to about 12,000 and are selling off land. (Yahoo's main offices are built on land they bought from us.) But I lucked into a job in a very long-term project, survived all the downsizings in the meanwhile because they let the incompetent people go first and retained the competent, so here I am. Great benefits, a 401(k) and a pension plan, and a salary that's almost competitive for a software guy. Give me another 25 years or so here, and I'll be set for whatever pitiful number of declining years are left to me.
Yes, of course. Users shouldn't ask for specific features, they should describe tasks they want to be able to perform. This is what mine do, and any well-thought-out scheme for gathering requirements will enforce this kind of behavior. It's obvious to anyone who's been programming in the real world for any length of time. The point is that your requirements need to be driven by what the users need in order to do their jobs, not what some marketing drone wants to sell them or some PHB only thinks they want. That seems obvious too, but as the article should have made clear, it's not often what happens in many industries.
I'm fortunate enough to be working in an environment where we have ample opportunity to do just that. Our product is used strictly in-house, and I'm the one primarily responsible for the user interfaces. In the 10 years I've been on this project, there has been exactly one major interface redesign, and that happened only because it became apparent that most of the features the users were asking for could not be accomodated using the existing design. The result is that we have a solid, stable product with an experienced user base that hasn't needed intensive hand-holding for many years.
The key here is that new features are user driven, not techie or marketing department driven. When you do business this way, the users get exactly what they want, and they're a whole lot happier. The problem with the systems mentioned in the article is that the users are never consulted. The software buying decision-makers allow themselves to be dazzled by the marketing drones and never stop to reflect that the system currently in place is well-matched to their actual requirements. Certainly they never ask their employees if they want something new. The marketing drones are interested primarily in sales --that's how they make their livings, after all. What they demand in new features is driven less by what their customers actually need thay by their own need to have something, anything, that they can take and convince those customers they really want. The techies who actually implement the requirements are now at three removes from the end users, and so it should come as a surprise to no one that they don't have much of a clue as to what those users might want.
In other words, the way business is mostly done in the IT industry is broken. While at first glance it might seem reasonable for the users' ire to land on the techies who do the work to create the new systems they despise, the techies are in a way the people least responsible for what's in them. About the best they can hope to do is to implement what they're told to implement as best they can.
I'm so glad I don't have to live with this kind of thing myself.
3. Most likely cause of destruction was damage to heat shield.
More likely from my point of view is that they were flying a spacecraft where the basic structures were over 20 years old. Columbia was the oldest Space Shuttle, and a vehicle starts to wear out after a while. How long can we reasonably expect one to last, anyway?
A question was asked. An honest answer was given. This part of the discussion may well be offtopic, but it certainly wasn't flamebait. The US is far more likely now to lose a major city to a nuclear attack of some kind than it ever was during the Cold War. Ashcroft, for all his faults, is taking this threat seriously. I can't help but think that a great many, possibly most, of the people who object to him so vociferously are not. They certainly don't seem to want to take what appear to be at present the only prudent measures to mitigate it.
And if it does happen and we lose millions in one day instead of thousands, count on this: Bush and Ashcroft will look like pussycats compared to the regime that will follow.
This was actually Finderne, but I figured many more people would have heard of Manville. We moved out of that house when I was four, so I never got to enjoy that much of the local culture.:P
Heh. By that age, lots of boys are large enough to do serious damage to an unwary adult. You dad's just lucky your first reaction wasn't to pop him one. Probably would have served him right, too.;)
Humans cannot physically remember events that happen before the age of two.
Nonsense. I'm uncertain of my age at the time the earliest event I can remember occurred, but I was almost certainly younger than 2. I might even have been younger than 1.
It happened in the first house I remember living in, which was in a small community near Manville, NJ. It was a small Cape Cod, two floors, with a front door that opened up into the living room right before the stairs. Against the wall beneath the stairs was a desk, and looking straight towards the back of the house from the desk you could see into the kitchen, where the back door was. In the living room hanging on the wall that seperated that room from the kitchen and above the couch, was my mother's old violin. This approximately dates the memory; the violin was replaced by a picture by the time I was 2.
The memory is admittedly an isolated one, but based on certain features of it I may even have been an infant at the time, which would mean that my parents had been living in that house for less than a year. That would explain the primitive state of the decor. I was laying down near the desk, in a cradle of some kind, and from where I was I could see the violin over the couch and the entrance to the kitchen.
Now, my Dad has always had a somewhat twisted sense of humor, and enjoyed the effects his magnificent (at the time) bass voice could have on people. He had a trick where he'd make a growling noise through a paper towel tube. The tube would add resonance to the growl, and it really would sound like a large animal snarling. While he'd do this, he'd roll his eyes back a little. When I saw him doing it later in life, he was using it to freak out the cats and the dog. They're reaction was pretty funny, I guess.
This is what I deduce he was doing to me, but that's not precisely what my memory conveys. What I remember is that his mouth elongated into a cone, with the wide end near me, and the snarling with his eyes rolled back. It scared the bejeezus out of me. I think my brain was at the time still too immature to process extreme perspectives correctly; thus the illusion of the tube as a cone. I also recall a kind of helpless feeling, as if I was unable to move myself away.
This literally gave me nightmares for years afterwards. The figure of my father, his eyes rolled back and his mouth distorted into a cone, was a stock monster in my childhood nightmares, only disappearing with puberty. The early memory that was the germ of it remained however, and it was only relatively recently that I put 2 and 2 together and figured out what exactly that memory meant and what my Dad must have done. I haven't done this kind of thing to my own kids, not until they were old enough to understand it was a joke and would laugh at it instead of becoming frightened.
This is obviously not a stock happening; not only is it too specific and idiosyncratic, but I remember details about the house that put an upper limit on my age at the time. Nor was it implanted by anyone. My Dad never mentioned it and I don't think my mother even knew about it. It's purely visual, with nothing verbal about it at all except for the snarling, and required a certain amount of thought to decipher in a meaningful way. No later verbal description could possibly have implanted the images I recall.
As poorly as the brain's chemistry is understood, psychologists ought to be more cautious about declaring some phenomena "impossible" than they evidently are.
Not the last hope for personal flight
on
The End of Solotrek
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Moller International is still developing it's Skycar. We'll have our flying cars yet!
That does seem to be next, doesn't it? We'll probably hear it the first time an element of the crop circle investigation industry finds some circle-making equipment left behind by the (for want of a better word) artists.
VMS + 1 = WNT, in the same way that IBM - 1 = HAL.
I think that was the intent all along. The programmer in my group who wrote all our device drivers looked into WinNT internals once, and comparing it to VMS called it "deja vu all over again."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using POPFile. So far it's processed over 10,000 incoming emails and has given me exactly 3 false positives. There are always a handful of false negatives, but it's a whole lot better than sorting through >100 spam messages a day by hand. It was a bit of an effort to train up, but no more effort than you're going through right now.
Yes, a very small amount of window material will be carried into the vehicle along with the particle, if it passes completely through. But the main danger is the structural weakening of the window, or its actual shattering. In the former case, if it's weakened enough it will give way over time -- possibly a very brief time, but not necessarily -- and will certainly explode outward. In the latter, the initial vector and angular momentum for each fragment will be impossible to predict, but becuase the energy is transmitted via a wave that passes through the window (see Doc Edgerton's photos of glass shattering, for example; this is also why glass often shatters in a circular "spiderweb" pattern) it depends on the fragment's position along the wave. On average, it will tend to either side of the pane roughly equally. But now the pressure differential takes over, and the fragments will tend to get sucked out rapidly. This is also an explosion outward.
A closer look revealed radiating webs of damage in the outermost of three layered panes of heavy glass. When the window was removed back on Earth, the embedded mote was found to contain traces of aluminum and titanium. It was a fleck of paint, most likely from a derelict rocket casing. If it had been slightly heavier, the window could have imploded, killing the crew, experts concluded.
"Imploded"? I'll bet the "experts" concluded no such thing, if they were worthy of the name. With 1 atmosphere of pressure inside the vehicle and 0 pressure outside, the window would have exploded, not imploded. The writer was probably thinking by analogy with a CRT, which will indeed implode if shattered because there's a vaccuum inside. On orbit, the vaccuum is outside.
Sheesh!
Sorry, no. Programmers have been working in teams to deal with medium-to-large sized projects for a very, very long time. I got my first professional programming job about the time Tron came out. It was for a small computer VAR operating out of a storefront in Bayonne, NJ. Most of his business was in CP/M machines, and his killer app was to be a software package for manufacturers' representatives. (I know that doesn't sound very exciting. Deal with it, that's the real world.) His shop went out of business before any significant work could be done, but even in this case there were two other programmers besides myself who were to be working on this project. When I graduated college and entered a large corporation, I was almost always part of a team, and never worked by myself except for brief stretches. This was not innovative, not even at the time. It was the usual way of doing your work.
If anything, my experience was atypical as I almost always worked on medium-sized projects that didn't require a large team. (I refer only to the specific component of the system on which I was working. This was always a piece of a much larger project involving a great many more people.) Large-scale projects would have required much larger teams. My products were also always used in-house; products that actually shipped to customers would have had a more complex design phase because the users wouldn't have been around to contribute directly to the requirements.
If you're referring to games, that's a different story. Sierra and EA built their businesses back in the CP/M and early PC days by making stars out of individual programmers. But back then, computer games were a very small segment of the market, even smaller than it is today. They were also much simpler than they are now. But even then, you saw games produced by teams of programmers as soon as you started to see anything more advanced than, say, Ultima III. And arcade games were pretty much always produced by teams.
If anything, it's more common for a programmer to work by himself today than it's been in the past. The Unix approach to systems, building complexity out of numerous small components, combined with the ubiquity of *nix in the Open Source community, means that a great deal of very useful (but small) software is written and maintained mostly by a single person. This is a relatively new phenomenon, at least as far as the sheer number of people involved, and could not have happened had computers not gotten cheap enough to be commodity items. Back when Tron came out this was not true. The only people who would have had computers at home at the time would have been dedicated hackers like Jeff Bridges in Tron or kids with indulgent parents like Matthew Broderick in War Games. Programming was otherwise the domain of either academia or large corporations. Teams were the rule in either case.
That's Letterman as in Letterman Army Medical Center, a hospital and resesearch center which stood on the site until recently.
So have I. I have, for example, actually held a space shuttle tile in my hand. They simply aren't as delicate as you say they are.
I don't know what aspect of their effectiveness might be altered by contact with skin oils, so it would have been interesting if you'd chosen to be more explicit. It might be nothing more than the usual concern for outgassing of volatile materials on flight hardware, but I don't see how that could be a problem on the shuttle.
Then RTFA. The tiles are not the only heat shielding on the shuttle. The leading edge of the wing is made of a different material entirely, and is attatched by a completely different method. Since the leading edge of the left wing is very possibly the point of failure, the possibility of a problem with something other than the tiles can't be dismissed out of hand.
More reading would correct some of your other faulty assertions, such as that a single failure in the tiling must lead to disaster. This is false. Tiles were routinely lost before an improved method for testing how well they were attached was developed. I also think you'd have to do a lot of work to show that a cooling system such as that on the SR-71 would be able to cope with the heat of a shuttle re-entry. If it's true, it's not obvious.
Is all that obvious? Good! You seem to be so fond of explaining the obvious I could only conclude it was actuallp pretty mysterious to you, so I thought I'd be explicit.
Now here we have a guy making beer in a washing machine. Consider: Is it very likely at all that he's running water into it? No indeedy! Instead we find him regulating the temperature of the mash (I think -- as I said, I don't read German) using a computer hooked up to heating elements -- pay attention now -- inside the washing machine. Heating elements such as this are totally unnecessary in washing machines where hot water is supplied to it because (follow closely here, this is important) the hot water is already hot when it gets to the machine and doesn't need to be heated any further!
There. I hope that made everything clear for you. I may have accidentally used words of more than 2 syllables, so if there's anything you don't understand, please feel free to reply and I'll do my best to explain in simpler language.
Sheesh!
Nope! Just my proxy server's cache acting up again. Now I can see all the other replies!
This must be a wonderful story. It's been up for several minutes now, with nary a First Post to be seen. I guess even the trolls love a good beer story.
You must not have read the Spaceflight Now article very carefully. It's still not at all clear where or how the failure happened. Yes, it may well have been the tiles. But the fact that the failure seems to have occurred at the leading edge of the wing also implicates the RCC structures there that provide its aerodynamic shape, or perhaps the interface between the RCC structures and the tiles. Or maybe it was something else; I can think of one or two other possibilities without much effort. Let's not prejudge the issue before all the data is in hand.
I'm in the defense industry. Not all the jobs here are so secure. The plant where I work used to employ 25,000 people; now we're down to about 12,000 and are selling off land. (Yahoo's main offices are built on land they bought from us.) But I lucked into a job in a very long-term project, survived all the downsizings in the meanwhile because they let the incompetent people go first and retained the competent, so here I am. Great benefits, a 401(k) and a pension plan, and a salary that's almost competitive for a software guy. Give me another 25 years or so here, and I'll be set for whatever pitiful number of declining years are left to me.
Yes, of course. Users shouldn't ask for specific features, they should describe tasks they want to be able to perform. This is what mine do, and any well-thought-out scheme for gathering requirements will enforce this kind of behavior. It's obvious to anyone who's been programming in the real world for any length of time. The point is that your requirements need to be driven by what the users need in order to do their jobs, not what some marketing drone wants to sell them or some PHB only thinks they want. That seems obvious too, but as the article should have made clear, it's not often what happens in many industries.
The key here is that new features are user driven, not techie or marketing department driven. When you do business this way, the users get exactly what they want, and they're a whole lot happier. The problem with the systems mentioned in the article is that the users are never consulted. The software buying decision-makers allow themselves to be dazzled by the marketing drones and never stop to reflect that the system currently in place is well-matched to their actual requirements. Certainly they never ask their employees if they want something new. The marketing drones are interested primarily in sales --that's how they make their livings, after all. What they demand in new features is driven less by what their customers actually need thay by their own need to have something, anything, that they can take and convince those customers they really want. The techies who actually implement the requirements are now at three removes from the end users, and so it should come as a surprise to no one that they don't have much of a clue as to what those users might want.
In other words, the way business is mostly done in the IT industry is broken. While at first glance it might seem reasonable for the users' ire to land on the techies who do the work to create the new systems they despise, the techies are in a way the people least responsible for what's in them. About the best they can hope to do is to implement what they're told to implement as best they can.
I'm so glad I don't have to live with this kind of thing myself.
If that were true, everyone would have stopped watching after Five. I sure as hell did.
More likely from my point of view is that they were flying a spacecraft where the basic structures were over 20 years old. Columbia was the oldest Space Shuttle, and a vehicle starts to wear out after a while. How long can we reasonably expect one to last, anyway?
And if it does happen and we lose millions in one day instead of thousands, count on this: Bush and Ashcroft will look like pussycats compared to the regime that will follow.
I find it very surprising that there are no jobs listed at all for C programmers. Is he perhaps lumping C and C++ into one category?
And Lord, it wasn't good.
This was actually Finderne, but I figured many more people would have heard of Manville. We moved out of that house when I was four, so I never got to enjoy that much of the local culture. :P
Heh. By that age, lots of boys are large enough to do serious damage to an unwary adult. You dad's just lucky your first reaction wasn't to pop him one. Probably would have served him right, too. ;)
Nonsense. I'm uncertain of my age at the time the earliest event I can remember occurred, but I was almost certainly younger than 2. I might even have been younger than 1.
It happened in the first house I remember living in, which was in a small community near Manville, NJ. It was a small Cape Cod, two floors, with a front door that opened up into the living room right before the stairs. Against the wall beneath the stairs was a desk, and looking straight towards the back of the house from the desk you could see into the kitchen, where the back door was. In the living room hanging on the wall that seperated that room from the kitchen and above the couch, was my mother's old violin. This approximately dates the memory; the violin was replaced by a picture by the time I was 2.
The memory is admittedly an isolated one, but based on certain features of it I may even have been an infant at the time, which would mean that my parents had been living in that house for less than a year. That would explain the primitive state of the decor. I was laying down near the desk, in a cradle of some kind, and from where I was I could see the violin over the couch and the entrance to the kitchen.
Now, my Dad has always had a somewhat twisted sense of humor, and enjoyed the effects his magnificent (at the time) bass voice could have on people. He had a trick where he'd make a growling noise through a paper towel tube. The tube would add resonance to the growl, and it really would sound like a large animal snarling. While he'd do this, he'd roll his eyes back a little. When I saw him doing it later in life, he was using it to freak out the cats and the dog. They're reaction was pretty funny, I guess.
This is what I deduce he was doing to me, but that's not precisely what my memory conveys. What I remember is that his mouth elongated into a cone, with the wide end near me, and the snarling with his eyes rolled back. It scared the bejeezus out of me. I think my brain was at the time still too immature to process extreme perspectives correctly; thus the illusion of the tube as a cone. I also recall a kind of helpless feeling, as if I was unable to move myself away.
This literally gave me nightmares for years afterwards. The figure of my father, his eyes rolled back and his mouth distorted into a cone, was a stock monster in my childhood nightmares, only disappearing with puberty. The early memory that was the germ of it remained however, and it was only relatively recently that I put 2 and 2 together and figured out what exactly that memory meant and what my Dad must have done. I haven't done this kind of thing to my own kids, not until they were old enough to understand it was a joke and would laugh at it instead of becoming frightened.
This is obviously not a stock happening; not only is it too specific and idiosyncratic, but I remember details about the house that put an upper limit on my age at the time. Nor was it implanted by anyone. My Dad never mentioned it and I don't think my mother even knew about it. It's purely visual, with nothing verbal about it at all except for the snarling, and required a certain amount of thought to decipher in a meaningful way. No later verbal description could possibly have implanted the images I recall.
As poorly as the brain's chemistry is understood, psychologists ought to be more cautious about declaring some phenomena "impossible" than they evidently are.
Moller International is still developing it's Skycar. We'll have our flying cars yet!
That does seem to be next, doesn't it? We'll probably hear it the first time an element of the crop circle investigation industry finds some circle-making equipment left behind by the (for want of a better word) artists.
I think that was the intent all along. The programmer in my group who wrote all our device drivers looked into WinNT internals once, and comparing it to VMS called it "deja vu all over again."