Bring back Steve Bong!
With such great articles as "My #95Theses of #Digital", "Project Gollum: Because NHS Caring means NHS Sharing" and "A statement from Steven P Bong concerning alleged CV inaccuracies" truly a man for our times!
88 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2011
This is an utterly lovely movie - inspiring, awesome and deeply moving all at the same time.
The devotion, ingenuity and sheer brilliance shown by this team of engineers is wonderful to see, and shows what humans are capable of. A great antidote to all the other stuff that’s going on in the world. Pale blue dot stuff.
Thanks for spreading the word about it, Michael!
Wasn’t previously aware of (am right-pondian, didn’t remember) this blackout, which has its own Wikipedia entry - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 according to which:
The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage.
Thanks for the story!
Unlike Boeing, I’m guessing* that NASA is not over-burdened by MBAs shoving in their sixpen’orth about how stuff should/must be done. Amazing, but not unsurprising, what engineers and scientists can accomplish in the right culture.
* evidence base includes but is not limited to no need to be concerned about the share price.
They’re in it for the money - dressing this up as politically-motivated is purely cynical - maybe it helps the sleep at night? Of course, they’re likely to be acting with impunity under a krisha (Russ: roof, metaphor for protection by someone with ‘influence’) of some kind, but that ain’t politics, it’s just bad actors.
There is a great video about the Voyager project and the team behind it.
“It’s Quieter in the Twighlight’ is a 2022 documentary which shows how “ In an unremarkable office space, a select group of aging engineers find themselves at the leading edge of discovery. Fighting outdated technology and time, Voyager's flight-team pursues humankind’s greatest exploration.”
https://itsquieterfilm.com
Daughter’s Chromebook has now been in use for 3 school years (UK secondary school = high school in US).* She’ll hand it in this coming September and the school has switched over to Surface Pros, for reasons we have not had fully explained to us, but she’ll be pleased to see the back of it, not least because of the browser-based versions of the Office apps.
* It’s stood up pretty well apart from one battery replacement and losing 50% of the screws on the bottom of the case, idk how.
Luigi Vercotti. : So I decided to set up a high-class night club for the gentry at Biggleswade. With international cuisine and cooking and top line acts. And not a cheap clip-joint for picking up tarts, that was right out, I deny that completely. And one evening, Dinsdale walks in with a couple of big lads. One of whom was carrying a tactical nuclear missile. They said I'd bought one of their fruit machines and would I pay for it?
Second Interviewer : How much did they want?
Luigi Vercotti. : Three quarters of a million pounds. And they went out.
Second Interviewer : Why didn't you call for the police?
Luigi Vercotti. : Well I noticed that the fellow with the thermonuclear device was the chief constable for the area. Anyway, a week later, they came back, said that the cheque had bounced and that I had to see... Doug.
When I worked at a provincial RG university in the UK, the work of university staff was universally headlined in the local rag as “University boffins [create/discover/{other verb}] …”.
And at school, those who - whether by dint of natural aptitude, hard work or both - excelled at STEM subjects were universally dubbed as “boffs”.
Neither usage seemed to be particularly gendered.