All credit goes to a bloggingheads commentor mysteriously known as AemJeff.
Click here to find out.
Addition: Original link at Pharyngula. A link to the site only. Could not find the original post. Apologies.
Month: August 2007
Hurricane Dean
A Category 4 now south of Jamaica and heading toward the Yucatan. Saffir-Simpson scale here.
I spent a season in Florida with four hurricanes, and maybe what I most remember as I while driving northeast to Orlando to escape Charley, was how anxious I was.
I sat among tens of thousands of cars jammed on I4, nosing east. I was flipping through even the am stations for updates. Will it be really bad? Will I find shelter? This land is so flat, I remember thinking, just a large spit of sand.
The weakened eye passed right near the Super 8 near Orlando where I luckily found a room. I stood near the breezeway for a few minutes with some teenagers, watching plywood and bits of plastic, a construction cone, and driving walls of wind and rain pass through.
I watched and listened in awe as a steady roar filled the night, then gradually died down.
Fortunately, I didn’t have a house or loved ones to lose.
Richard Feynman at NASA
After the terrible Challenger explosion in 1986, Richard Feynman was included on an independent panel to find out what went wrong. He discovered a profound difference between engineers’ and managements’ probability estimates for number of flights without failure. One potential (and very important) reason that a system-ending failure can go unnoticed is the tendency of managers to believe top-down explanations.
It’s vintage Feynman, inconoclastic, penetrating and brilliant:
“for whatever purpose, be it for internal or
external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the
reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.”
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Just a suggestion with NASA in the news lately…though it’s clear the space shuttles are getting older.
Tornado in Brooklyn!
Read about it here. They say it was an F2. Here’s the (F)ujita Scale if you need it.
Don’t forget about Miami. (minor damage, F1). It’s not often you see a tornado among office buildings.
And I guess if you live in Oklahoma City, you get used to it.