You are implying the engineer(s) who design this plug were irrational because they made different design choices from you? What is wrong with you, can you not discuss differences in design philosophy without dismissing anybody daring to disagree with you, the oracle of all engineering, as some kind of hysterical crank?
Also, you fail at maths. If there was a 0.001% chance of an injury, lets say per person per year, there would be 500 such injuries annually in the UK. Which could be prevented by a pennies worth of plastic in each device. Is this too much of a price concern for you, or are you one of those libertarians?
Anyone who uses the phrase 'nanny state/political correctness/health and safety run wild' is an irredeemable cretin - and even worse, probably reads the Daily Mail of the Daily Express.
Why is it unacceptable to put large safety margins into a device, when doing so only costs pennies? As for concocting some bullshit theory about the 'nanny state' - would you rather trust some Chinese sweatshop to dictate electrical safety standards, simply because it is party of the private sector?
Actually, there was kind of a national vote on plugs; a democratically elected government decided that this would be the standard plug design. And frankly, it is something to be proud of; an engineering problem was solved nationwide and that solution has lasted us decades without any real hiccups.
Its because Americans are reflexively proud of everything with a US flag stamped on it, yet at the same time are culturally unable to make a better, standardised design widespread.
Having visited the US, and used both US and UK plugs, I say what you call overengineering, I call engineering. US plugs are a step above crimped wires.
And don't get me started on US vs. UK road signs. Ours are works of art in comparison...
I said 'evidence or STFU' and you cited what a Kindergartner would 'understand'. If your point of reference is a 5 year old child, no wonder your worldview is so laughably simplistic.
a clear situation in which myself, or you, or anyone else would act psychopathically: starvation
Evidence or STFU. I can provide an example of humans behaving *more* empathically in stressful survival situations: The people who during the 7/7 attacks stayed behind, in pitch black smoldering underground trains, to help others.
you bring further proof for my position by citing the milgram experiments, where two thirds of people act psychopathologically... under the influence of authority. right, because acting under the influenced by authority is such a rare and exotic occurrence in modern life. pfffft
Again, evidence or STFU. Where in psychological literature is it suggested that people who 'failed' the Milgram experiment are psychopaths? It may well be the case that modern western society conditions people to authority and that perhaps makes them dangerous, but that says precisely zero about the human condition in general.
you accuse me of projecting. rather, i think it strange you have so much resistance to the idea of a straightforward universal simple ugly truth about the human condition. i think you have a lot invested in the concept that human empathy is stronger than it really is. this naivete on your part or willful blindness
The fact you are using 'straightforward' and 'simple' as power words to push your utterly unsubstantiated theory of human behaviour shows your abject ignorance in the fields of psychology and cognitive science (I have some training in the latter, for reference). Any theory of human behaviour that is either simple or straightforward is also wrong.
one need only look at the state of the world and see that empathy is in short supply, that lack of empathy is not some strange rare condition that requires special mental illness labelling, but very common and just under the surface in all of us
It is not possible to look at the 'state of the world' because the state of the world contains far more variables than a human being is capable of thinking of. If you are convincing yourself that you have 'looked' at the world then you have only seen a childlike simplification of the world constructed by your own mind.
but don't mind me. no need to change your theory that businessmen are strange exotic agents under the influence of a special mental condition which renders their behavior completely alien and completely criminal. zzz
And you finish off this over-simplified, evidence-free misanthropic tantrum with 'zzz', perhaps to indicate I'm sleepwalking through existence unaware of the 'The Truth' which is so clear to you that you don't need to trouble yourself verifying your grand pronouncements with stuff like 'facts' or 'scientific studies'.
You are nothing more than a conspiracy theorist, one of the most pathetic lifeforms ever to walk upright.
Again, you are projecting either your own psychopathy, or more likely your own misanthropy, on to other people. Yes, some people are capable of turning off their empathy for other beings - that was shown in the Milgram experiment. However, that experiment only showed a) how people respond to authority and b) that a full third of the population would say 'fuck off I wont do that to someone'
Wrong, we are not all psychopaths. Only 1% of the population are psychopaths. You might well be amongst them, but do not project that onto the rest of us.
I'm sorry, but did this retard just suggest that people in European nations no longer receive health care when they reach a certain age? Gee, that means I must've been tripping my tits off when I visited my 90 year old grandfather in an NHS hospital. I can't possible have seen a taxpayer-funded healthcare system looking after someone that old, because Fox News says the 'death panels' have them killed!
Learn some facts before you open your mouth, you ignorant twat.
Oh, and by the way, people in the UK have a longer life expectancy than those in the US. Bite me.
Too true. The Peggy Noonan article just sticks to the traditional "government bad, market good" dogma that got America and the rest of the world into this mess in the first place. If anything, she accidentally proves her own point even more deeply by showing that the opposition to the current US administration doesn't have a fucking clue either.
Personally, I think the problem is that value has become divorced from reality. Used to be, you could mine some coal, or manufacture a sprocket, and that was value. Now the big money is in squeezing money out of intellectual properties and trying to sell off dodgy debt packages. Its not clear anymore, at least to the layman on whom the economy ultimately depends, what if any value there is here. If you lobby to have the law changed so the same IP makes twice as much profit, that registers as economic growth when measured by GDP, but what value have you created?
I have to question the received wisdom about the net being entirely full of dross. It has the tendency to grow in breadth before it grows in depth, but that does not mean that the depth is entirely lacking. You slam Wikipedia, but it is generally considered reasonably accurate for non-contentious technical subjects, and compared to a set of search results from, say, 10 years ago, often goes into quite a bit of depth.
Its still just encyclopedia articles, but those are supposed to be brief. If you bother to look beyond Wikipedia there is a large and growing body of in-depth information on many subjects. For instance:
focus.ti.com/lit/ug/slau049f/slau049f.pdf
This is a >400 page user manual for the MSP430 micro-controller, provided as a free and legal download from the manufacturer. Having worked on a device using the MSP430 for over a year now I can attest to the fact it is pretty in depth information.
Oh, and a Google search for 'free journals' turned up this list of scientific journals that make the full texts of their archived articles, not just the abstracts, available online:
http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl
I've clicked on a few of those and confirmed they do indeed supply free, peer-reviewed, scientific papers online. Exactly how much depth do you require?
I know it is popular to slam the Internet as being a shallow resource, but it is only so if you are lazy and just go directly to Wikipedia. Just because something is free does not mean it has no value.
I'm not misinformed; the designers themselves favored a smaller design (which probably would've resembled other US shuttle proposals, for aerodynamic reasons as you suggest) but the Soviet leadership wanted to maintain parity with US space capabilities and therefore ordered a similar kind of shuttle.
They copied the aerodynamic shape of the orbiter on orders from the politburo, but otherwise its a completely different craft. One of the most notable differences is moving the engines from the orbiter to the stack, which means if they had that thing flying regularly and decided they needed a shuttle-derived launch vehicle, they simply removed the shuttle. This was a configuration proven (sort of, the stack worked but the payload ditched through a flaw in its own construction) by the Polyus flight. IMHO the west should've given Russia funds to maintain that project after the collapse of the USSR, just as we supported the rest of their rocket industry through the ISS project.
No, they lost because their project management broke down when they got to something as large as the N-1. US project management, after a very shaky start, got the the point where every Saturn V that was launched placed its payload in pretty much the correct orbit.
There is also the possibility that the finished rocket, with the full 5-segment booster, will separate at a higher altitude and thus the tumble won't be a problem.
If Proton, Ariane 5, Delta IV and Falcon 9 are considered heavy lift (they are), then Ares I certainly fits in that category. Ares V is classified as super heavy lift.
I noticed that too. I think its because the upper stage is literally a dummy and has no active control. We've known all along the design is not aerodynamically stable, so it isn't surprising it started tumbling. The same thing will likely happen with Ares 1-Y as its upper stage still has no engines, and you will have to wait till the first Ares I flight proper to see it separate 'nicely'.
Whilst it is true, that in the highly competitive environment of Olympic sprinting, small differences in regional genetics can have a big impact, for anything outside such a specific test of a handful of physiological factors they don't matter. Also, these regional genetic variations do not correspond to what most people think of as 'race' that well.
Also, in everyday life any broad genetic differences between people from different regions are vastly outweighed by differences between individuals within those regions.
I also have a heavy brow and deep set eyes, although I am not very hairy. I am also 1/4 Scottish but I think the rest of my ancestry is (distantly, i.e. a few centuries according to my grandfathers research) central/eastern European.
I heard that as well, and it would be consistent with the current hypothesis of Spain being the last hold out of Neanderthal populations. However, I can't stress enough that what we consider 'ethnicity' has no real correspondence to actual genetics.
1. Ethnic groups are a sociological classification and have little or no bearing on actual genetics. They are an artificial and unscientific way of dividing up the species.
2. I believe Neanderthals were more prevalent in Europe anyway.
My sister-in-law and her family were nearly killed on a motorway when a car in the adjacent lane suffered a spontaneous mechanical failure of its wheel (i.e. it came off at 70+ mph)
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You are implying the engineer(s) who design this plug were irrational because they made different design choices from you? What is wrong with you, can you not discuss differences in design philosophy without dismissing anybody daring to disagree with you, the oracle of all engineering, as some kind of hysterical crank?
Also, you fail at maths. If there was a 0.001% chance of an injury, lets say per person per year, there would be 500 such injuries annually in the UK. Which could be prevented by a pennies worth of plastic in each device. Is this too much of a price concern for you, or are you one of those libertarians?
Anyone who uses the phrase 'nanny state/political correctness/health and safety run wild' is an irredeemable cretin - and even worse, probably reads the Daily Mail of the Daily Express.
Why is it unacceptable to put large safety margins into a device, when doing so only costs pennies? As for concocting some bullshit theory about the 'nanny state' - would you rather trust some Chinese sweatshop to dictate electrical safety standards, simply because it is party of the private sector?
Actually, there was kind of a national vote on plugs; a democratically elected government decided that this would be the standard plug design. And frankly, it is something to be proud of; an engineering problem was solved nationwide and that solution has lasted us decades without any real hiccups.
Its because Americans are reflexively proud of everything with a US flag stamped on it, yet at the same time are culturally unable to make a better, standardised design widespread.
Having visited the US, and used both US and UK plugs, I say what you call overengineering, I call engineering. US plugs are a step above crimped wires.
And don't get me started on US vs. UK road signs. Ours are works of art in comparison...
I have never in my 28 years seen a British plug fall out of a socket, no matter how old. The pins, as mentioned, are very chunky and do not bend.
Your pissiness proves nothing. For the last time, evidence or STFU.
I said 'evidence or STFU' and you cited what a Kindergartner would 'understand'. If your point of reference is a 5 year old child, no wonder your worldview is so laughably simplistic.
So once again, evidence or STFU.
Evidence or STFU. I can provide an example of humans behaving *more* empathically in stressful survival situations: The people who during the 7/7 attacks stayed behind, in pitch black smoldering underground trains, to help others.
Again, evidence or STFU. Where in psychological literature is it suggested that people who 'failed' the Milgram experiment are psychopaths? It may well be the case that modern western society conditions people to authority and that perhaps makes them dangerous, but that says precisely zero about the human condition in general.
The fact you are using 'straightforward' and 'simple' as power words to push your utterly unsubstantiated theory of human behaviour shows your abject ignorance in the fields of psychology and cognitive science (I have some training in the latter, for reference). Any theory of human behaviour that is either simple or straightforward is also wrong.
It is not possible to look at the 'state of the world' because the state of the world contains far more variables than a human being is capable of thinking of. If you are convincing yourself that you have 'looked' at the world then you have only seen a childlike simplification of the world constructed by your own mind.
And you finish off this over-simplified, evidence-free misanthropic tantrum with 'zzz', perhaps to indicate I'm sleepwalking through existence unaware of the 'The Truth' which is so clear to you that you don't need to trouble yourself verifying your grand pronouncements with stuff like 'facts' or 'scientific studies'.
You are nothing more than a conspiracy theorist, one of the most pathetic lifeforms ever to walk upright.
Again, you are projecting either your own psychopathy, or more likely your own misanthropy, on to other people. Yes, some people are capable of turning off their empathy for other beings - that was shown in the Milgram experiment. However, that experiment only showed a) how people respond to authority and b) that a full third of the population would say 'fuck off I wont do that to someone'
Wrong, we are not all psychopaths. Only 1% of the population are psychopaths. You might well be amongst them, but do not project that onto the rest of us.
I'm sorry, but did this retard just suggest that people in European nations no longer receive health care when they reach a certain age? Gee, that means I must've been tripping my tits off when I visited my 90 year old grandfather in an NHS hospital. I can't possible have seen a taxpayer-funded healthcare system looking after someone that old, because Fox News says the 'death panels' have them killed!
Learn some facts before you open your mouth, you ignorant twat.
Oh, and by the way, people in the UK have a longer life expectancy than those in the US. Bite me.
Too true. The Peggy Noonan article just sticks to the traditional "government bad, market good" dogma that got America and the rest of the world into this mess in the first place. If anything, she accidentally proves her own point even more deeply by showing that the opposition to the current US administration doesn't have a fucking clue either.
Personally, I think the problem is that value has become divorced from reality. Used to be, you could mine some coal, or manufacture a sprocket, and that was value. Now the big money is in squeezing money out of intellectual properties and trying to sell off dodgy debt packages. Its not clear anymore, at least to the layman on whom the economy ultimately depends, what if any value there is here. If you lobby to have the law changed so the same IP makes twice as much profit, that registers as economic growth when measured by GDP, but what value have you created?
I have to question the received wisdom about the net being entirely full of dross. It has the tendency to grow in breadth before it grows in depth, but that does not mean that the depth is entirely lacking. You slam Wikipedia, but it is generally considered reasonably accurate for non-contentious technical subjects, and compared to a set of search results from, say, 10 years ago, often goes into quite a bit of depth.
Its still just encyclopedia articles, but those are supposed to be brief. If you bother to look beyond Wikipedia there is a large and growing body of in-depth information on many subjects. For instance:
focus.ti.com/lit/ug/slau049f/slau049f.pdf
This is a >400 page user manual for the MSP430 micro-controller, provided as a free and legal download from the manufacturer. Having worked on a device using the MSP430 for over a year now I can attest to the fact it is pretty in depth information.
Oh, and a Google search for 'free journals' turned up this list of scientific journals that make the full texts of their archived articles, not just the abstracts, available online:
http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl
I've clicked on a few of those and confirmed they do indeed supply free, peer-reviewed, scientific papers online. Exactly how much depth do you require?
I know it is popular to slam the Internet as being a shallow resource, but it is only so if you are lazy and just go directly to Wikipedia. Just because something is free does not mean it has no value.
I'm not misinformed; the designers themselves favored a smaller design (which probably would've resembled other US shuttle proposals, for aerodynamic reasons as you suggest) but the Soviet leadership wanted to maintain parity with US space capabilities and therefore ordered a similar kind of shuttle.
They copied the aerodynamic shape of the orbiter on orders from the politburo, but otherwise its a completely different craft. One of the most notable differences is moving the engines from the orbiter to the stack, which means if they had that thing flying regularly and decided they needed a shuttle-derived launch vehicle, they simply removed the shuttle. This was a configuration proven (sort of, the stack worked but the payload ditched through a flaw in its own construction) by the Polyus flight. IMHO the west should've given Russia funds to maintain that project after the collapse of the USSR, just as we supported the rest of their rocket industry through the ISS project.
No, they lost because their project management broke down when they got to something as large as the N-1. US project management, after a very shaky start, got the the point where every Saturn V that was launched placed its payload in pretty much the correct orbit.
There is also the possibility that the finished rocket, with the full 5-segment booster, will separate at a higher altitude and thus the tumble won't be a problem.
If Proton, Ariane 5, Delta IV and Falcon 9 are considered heavy lift (they are), then Ares I certainly fits in that category. Ares V is classified as super heavy lift.
I noticed that too. I think its because the upper stage is literally a dummy and has no active control. We've known all along the design is not aerodynamically stable, so it isn't surprising it started tumbling. The same thing will likely happen with Ares 1-Y as its upper stage still has no engines, and you will have to wait till the first Ares I flight proper to see it separate 'nicely'.
Whilst it is true, that in the highly competitive environment of Olympic sprinting, small differences in regional genetics can have a big impact, for anything outside such a specific test of a handful of physiological factors they don't matter. Also, these regional genetic variations do not correspond to what most people think of as 'race' that well.
Also, in everyday life any broad genetic differences between people from different regions are vastly outweighed by differences between individuals within those regions.
I also have a heavy brow and deep set eyes, although I am not very hairy. I am also 1/4 Scottish but I think the rest of my ancestry is (distantly, i.e. a few centuries according to my grandfathers research) central/eastern European.
I don't think the heavy brow is a neanderthal trait. Your skull would be a very distinct shape if you were: http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/~zolli/CAP/comparingNeand.htm
I heard that as well, and it would be consistent with the current hypothesis of Spain being the last hold out of Neanderthal populations. However, I can't stress enough that what we consider 'ethnicity' has no real correspondence to actual genetics.
1. Ethnic groups are a sociological classification and have little or no bearing on actual genetics. They are an artificial and unscientific way of dividing up the species.
2. I believe Neanderthals were more prevalent in Europe anyway.
My sister-in-law and her family were nearly killed on a motorway when a car in the adjacent lane suffered a spontaneous mechanical failure of its wheel (i.e. it came off at 70+ mph)