C Standard Regarding Null Pointer Dereferencing

B

blmblm

sounds like a recipe for disaster. In fact it *is* the usual recipe
for a disaster. I bet that oil rig in the gulf was stuffed with people
who couldn't admit they might be wrong.

Is this where someone should, or could, mention Feynman's remark,
in his part of the report on the Challenger disaster? quoted
from memory and I hope approximately right:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Not exactly the same thing, but along similar lines, maybe.

All of this stuff about not admitting mistakes makes me think --
oh, never mind, something that would indicate that I have just
as many gender stereotypes as the next person, maybe. Sort of
a :).
 
B

blmblm

[*] I put it this way because sometimes there *have* been
non-public good results -- sometimes I've learned a lot in the
process of trying to find out whether some particularly irritating
claim might actually be true!

True. On the other hand, I think that per hour of time spent, there are
probably better ways to learn stuff.

Very probably. Whether one is as strongly motivated without
the desire to win an argument is maybe best left undiscussed.
But there's also, for me at least, a significant serendipity
factor, meaning that sometimes in the course of arguing about
topic A someone will mention topic B, which I hadn't thought to
wonder about before and which turns out to be interesting.

[ snip ]
 
S

spinoza1111

http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Lurkers_Support_Me_in_Email

:: To the tune of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean":
::
::     The Lurkers support me in e-mail
::     They all think I'm great don't you know.
::     You posters just don't understand me
::     But soon you will reap what you sow.
::
::     The lurkers support me in e-mail
::     "So why don't they post?" you all cry
::     They're scared of your hostile intentions
::     They just can't be as brave as I.

And it's easy to create a pseudonym, as I do, to prevent being
harassed and stalked in the real world, or other fora, by obsessive
loonies.

No, you use a pseudonym because any decent company would fire your
fucking ass for your online behavior.
You claimed, specifically and by name, that it was "Hitler". And the
"elegant shits"? No names given, you just put whatever words in their
mouths you like.
So again, you were lying.

Edward Prince of Wales, Ezra Pound, Charles Lindbergh, Anne Morrow
Lindbergh, Klaus von Stauffenberg (before he wised up)...and the
senior class of Princeton University in 1938.

Crack a book.
So after you changed all the inoffensive words to something offensive,
it was offensive.

The way you use it, "troll" is offensive.
Next you can change the letters in my name to numbers, add them up and
divide by your age and get 666, thus proving I am the Anti-Christ.

You're confusing me with your redneck friends in the shithole in which
you live.
Again "troll" as a noun is a back formation from the verb, derived
from a method of fishing. As is well documented, in e.g. the Jargon
File.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html
1. v.,n. To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable
responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase
“trolling for newbies” which in turn comes from mainstream “trolling”,
a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot
hoping for a bite.

Cutting and pasting is a child's game. Grow up.
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/troll
1a To fish for by trailing a baited line from behind a slowly moving
boat.
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English trollen, to wander about, from Old French
troller, of Germanic origin

So you are lying about this.

No, you lack the cultural literacy to use a dictionary, because when
the indigenous peoples of Western Europe were pushed aside they were
wanderers. This usage is mirrored in the German word for Gypsies,
Siegourner.

You sit in whatever basement in which you're living, whether your
Mom's or your ex wife's and cut and paste.
By the way, how about you actually cite the Nazi propaganda that uses
the  word "troll" as you claim?

Hey, Reading Rainbow, I didn't say, did I, that the Nazis used
"troll" (although they did assault the Siegourner/Roma/Gitane/Gypsies
and they did celebrate, through the medium of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the
Germanic and Ayran victory of warlike conquerors over the troll-like
Alberich, a symbol of the inferior and indigenous.

Of course, the whole fucking point is that "trolling" is a behaviour
that you exhibit. Nothing to do with your race, which as you enjoy
giving us rundown of your life story, is:

1) American
2) White
3) Christian (at least by upbringing)
4) German Anglo Saxon heritage.

For you to claim this is racial discrimination comparable to the
Holocaust is grossly offensive to anyone who has suffered real
discrimination.

A typical moron's misunderstanding of identity politics. FYI,
confessional Lutherans were also in the concentration camps. What you
really can't stand is that I'm a "race traitor".

And by the same "logic":

Hitler was a vegetarian, Gandhi was a vegetarian. Therefore Gandhi was
a Nazi.

Crack a FUCKING book, asshole. In fact, before WWI, the new generation
of Europeans and Euro-educated youth were tired of the 19th century
world and in a proto-New Age search for new thought, but they absorbed
the rhetoric of the superiority of white western civilization. They
felt that their elders had betrayed this superiority.

Ghandi, in fact, believed in apartheid with respect to South Africa's
blacks. He felt that educated men of whatever race should be treated
with respect because his own tradition, as he was to realized, was
also based on a racial-religious founding myth of Ayran superiority.
He soon outgrew this viewpoint. Hitler, of course, did not.

You project your identity thinking on me. But you're a subliterate of
the sort that in Ghandi and Hitler's youth got his information from
the yellow press. And you're closer to Hitler than to Ghandi.

Actually, that's more logical than your conclusion, because I didn't
have to use search and replace to change any words to make my analogy.




The return of Mr Collegial.

Damn right. People come in here, like Shao Miller, and they post
respectfully. But when they fail to repeat the shibboleths of the self-
appointed regs, they are mistreated, with the self-appointed regs
posting reams of abuse, knowing full well that the employers of the
marks may find this material and they will be damaged by it.

Real men, like Afghan hill tribesmen, are courteous to strangers. But
if those strangers kill them from the air, those real men fight back.
Only little Western shits have learned cowardice.

So, **** the Christ off, you rotten piece of shit.
 
S

spinoza1111

Is this where someone should, or could, mention Feynman's remark,
in his part of the report on the Challenger disaster?  quoted
from memory and I hope approximately right:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Feynman was talking about the fact that the performance of alloys in
unprecedentedly low temperatures could not be predicted in the
Challenger lift-off. He wasn't talking about some tentative procedural
rule.

Nor was he talking about the scientific fact that C semantics aren't
science, and that neither K&R nor the standards writers ever addressed
the scientific fact that they didn't do their homework, here, defining
pointer to void.
Not exactly the same thing, but along similar lines, maybe.  

All of this stuff about not admitting mistakes makes me think --
oh, never mind, something that would indicate that I have just
as many gender stereotypes as the next person, maybe.  Sort of
a :).

You need the phallus of authority, but at the same time you don't want
to take responsibility for it, merely to go along for the ride. But
this means that you have no firm foundational beliefs, like so many
people, male or female, who betray their dreams.

When you meet a more old-fashioned person, his or her beliefs,
grounded for them, are to you bad behavior, and trolling.

I worked at a company in the early 1980s which had nearly self-
destructed because earlier, it was dominated by opinionated male
techs. In order merely to continue to make money, its principal had
hired former academic women who'd failed at their major life goal
already: to become tenured English professors.

To them, the mission was to extract billing hours from as many large
companies as possible. They found programmers very amusing to the
extent that the latter seemed to have firm beliefs, because they'd
learned, not only from the (deeply misunderstood) "deconstruction"
they'd superficially learned in PhD skool but also from the weltgeist,
that nothing meant much of anything except personal gratification and
a Yuppie lifestyle.

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used

Sorry, blm. The whole inchoate world-view, that one can through words
split the difference and reconcile opposing positions, without
enabling Fascism, dates from the conquest of Nature, and Nature is as
I write taking her revenge.
 
C

Colonel Harlan Sanders

No, you use a pseudonym because any decent company would fire your
fucking ass for your online behavior.

Edward Prince of Wales, Ezra Pound, Charles Lindbergh, Anne Morrow
Lindbergh, Klaus von Stauffenberg (before he wised up)...and the
senior class of Princeton University in 1938.

Crack a book.

You said "Hitler", not "Lindbergh, et al.".
You were lying.

You don't have a citation for Lindbergh either, do you?

Which book and which page should I "crack' to see this specific
quotation?

You won't answer that, because you can't, you just make up whatever
"quotes" you imagine someone might have said.

You even libel Hitler in this way. As well as all your "enemies" in
this and other fora.

The way you use it, "troll" is offensive.

It's meant to be. You are a troll.
And an asshole (used metaphorically, not anatomically, in case you are
confused by a word's meaning depending on context, as you seem to be).
You're confusing me with your redneck friends in the shithole in which
you live.

Some demonise more literally, you use Hitler.
Cutting and pasting is a child's game. Grow up.

Yes, Real Men just duke it out to decide on etymological questions.
Only a child would use a dictionary.

No, you lack the cultural literacy to use a dictionary, because when
the indigenous peoples of Western Europe were pushed aside they were
wanderers. This usage is mirrored in the German word for Gypsies,
Siegourner.

You're just playing a dictionary version of "Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon".
Given any word you can connect it to Nazism through a series of tenous
links.



You sit in whatever basement in which you're living, whether your
Mom's or your ex wife's and cut and paste.


Hey, Reading Rainbow, I didn't say, did I, that the Nazis used
"troll" (although they did assault the Siegourner/Roma/Gitane/Gypsies
and they did celebrate, through the medium of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the
Germanic and Ayran victory of warlike conquerors over the troll-like
Alberich, a symbol of the inferior and indigenous.

Yeah, I did hear that the Nazis weren't nice.
A typical moron's misunderstanding of identity politics. FYI,
confessional Lutherans were also in the concentration camps. What you
really can't stand is that I'm a "race traitor".

No, I can't stand what a self-regarding hypocritical jerk you are. You
are an American white male. University educated. Not a Jew. Not a
black.
You are a member of the most privileged race and class ever to walk
the planet.

That you have failed in your life despite being advantaged by birth
over 99% of the human race is your own fault and yours alone.

For you to equate someone contradicting you in a newsgroup with
genocide is just so outrageous that it makes my jaw drop.
(And waste my time replying to it.)

People don't like you and no one wants to work with you because you
make every disagreement a war. Because when you are wrong your tactic
is to viciously attack the character of anyone who points it out.

The regular attempts you make to "speak for" various disadvantaged
groups in your usual patronising way are clearly just a pretext for
you to attack your personal adversaries. For the same reason you
occasionally and ludicrously "defend" female posters, until they
express their own opinions and you turn on them.
Crack a FUCKING book, asshole. In fact, before WWI, the new generation
of Europeans and Euro-educated youth were tired of the 19th century
world and in a proto-New Age search for new thought, but they absorbed
the rhetoric of the superiority of white western civilization. They
felt that their elders had betrayed this superiority.

Ghandi, in fact, believed in apartheid with respect to South Africa's
blacks. He felt that educated men of whatever race should be treated
with respect because his own tradition, as he was to realized, was
also based on a racial-religious founding myth of Ayran superiority.
He soon outgrew this viewpoint. Hitler, of course, did not.

You project your identity thinking on me. But you're a subliterate of
the sort that in Ghandi and Hitler's youth got his information from
the yellow press. And you're closer to Hitler than to Ghandi.

translation:
Everyone who disagres with you is a Nazi.
Anyone who quotes from a book rather than just free associating is
"subliterate".


By the way, you can't spell "Gandhi". Crack a book.

< garbage elided>

Good luck with the Nazi hunt, I'll leave that in your capable hands.
 
S

spinoza1111

You said "Hitler", not "Lindbergh, et al.".
You were lying.

You don't have a citation for Lindbergh either, do you?

Which book and which page should I "crack' to see this specific
quotation?

You won't answer that, because you can't, you just make up whatever
"quotes" you imagine someone might have said.

You even libel Hitler in this way. As well as all your "enemies" in
this and other fora.







It's meant to be. You are a troll.
And an asshole (used metaphorically, not anatomically, in case you are
confused by a word's meaning depending on context, as you seem to be).





Some demonise more literally, you use Hitler.









Yes,  Real Men just duke it out to decide on etymological questions.
Only a child would use a dictionary.





You're just playing a dictionary version of "Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon".
Given any word you can connect it to Nazism through a series of tenous
links.





Yeah, I did hear that the Nazis weren't nice.  









No, I can't stand what a self-regarding hypocritical jerk you are. You
are an American white male. University educated. Not a Jew. Not a
black.
You are a member of the most privileged race and class ever to walk
the planet.

That you have failed in your life despite being advantaged by birth
over 99% of the human race is your own fault and yours alone.

You're the failure, bothering people anonymously (often known as
"trolling").
For you  to equate someone contradicting you in a newsgroup with
genocide is just so outrageous that it makes my jaw drop.
(And waste my time replying to it.)

Gape away, fool. My father served in the US Army of Occupation in
Germany after the war, and before the events in Greece caused the
Truman administration to reorient US policy to strengthening the
Western zone, my Dad was under orders to manage trivial affairs, for
the small fascisms made the big Fascism...not a single Devil-figure
like in the Indiana Jones films which seem to be your major source of
information.

During my father's service, US troops enforced a ban on playing
Wagner, a trivial rule meant to de-Nazify. They were also commanded by
Patton to use Berchtesgarden for wild parties in which my Dad was an
enthusiastic participant.

Later, the Nazi refugee Adorno returned to a Germany and tried to talk
about "trivialities" such as the bad manners of Germans and how their
"emotional coldness" was micro-Fascism. He was informed that this was
to equate the "good Germans" with the "monsters" despite the fact that
there were Nazis (such as John Rabe, the "savior of Nanjing", crack a
book, ASSHOLE) who were good.

Read Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: read Shirer: read Arendt
unabridged: read the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Then come back, you
worthless filthy little piece of ignorant white trash.
People don't like you and no one wants to work with you because you

How would you know this? Ah, the secret contour of your weakness. As,
in all probability, a little "computer programmer" like Seebs, who is
without serious academic preparation like Seebs, you are probably a
glorified clerk, and it merely costs more to fire you than to keep you
on, for now. You live in fear of this secret being exposed, and
"troll" the internet in hopes of finding an Other who is "really" like
you, for in your primitive, ape-like mind, if this Other is "rilly"
the Loser you feel yourself to be, then you are not a Loser.
make every disagreement a war. Because when you are wrong your tactic
is to viciously attack the character of anyone who points it out.

The regular attempts you make to "speak for" various disadvantaged
groups in your usual patronising way  are clearly just a pretext for
you to attack your personal adversaries. For the same reason you
occasionally and ludicrously "defend" female posters, until they
express their own opinions and you turn on them.

Thugs, like Elijah Muhammed and Chief Buthulezi of South Africa, love
Fascist identity politics in which they reject alliances. And for this
reason, they are regularly funded, as was Buthulezi, by the real
Nazis; a vicious racial war was deliberately sponsored in South Africa
by the outgoind Botha administration. You are of course not aware of
jackshit, but you're a typical tool.
translation:
Everyone who disagres with you is a Nazi.
Anyone who quotes from a book rather than just free associating is
"subliterate".

You don't, I'm willing to bet, quote from "books". No, you cut and
paste from moron sites on the Web, don't you.
By the way, you can't spell "Gandhi". Crack a book.

Sorry, I can make ten, a hundred "typographical errors" per post, or
have my own way of spelling, and still be far ahead of you. That's
because what you think is "knowledge" is clerical work, cutting and
pasting from moron sources such as Wikipedia. I have long known that
most English speakers spell the Mahatma's name your way, but (see
below) you're not worth a proofread of my ripostes, and probably, at
some level, I am trying to reproduce the well-known fact that English
letters are completely impoverished with respect to English sounds
alone, let alone names and words from other languages.

You make elementary blunders in reading comprehension of original
texts (such as your belief that I said that Hitler used the word
"troll" and not "Jew" in a grammatically isomorphic way). Here,
looking things up and cutting and pasting doesn't help you, and you
**** up laughably. You're clearly of the clerical subliterate class
whose subliteracy is useful, since you can be trusted not to
understand texts, merely to transcribe them uncritically, allowing
your masters to do what they want.

You see, you're not worth proofreading. You're the original killer
ape. You use cut and pasted words as a club, probably because in real
fights, with your employers or ex-wife, you're a nasty little coward
who backs down. I'll kick your ass anytime.

You're the Nazi, who hates culture, and wants to replace it by correct
answers to the drill sergeant. Conveniently, you're everything I
despise. And, unlike myself, you're too much the coward to reveal who
the **** you are.
 
B

blmblm

[ snip ]
Is this where someone should, or could, mention Feynman's remark,
in his part of the report on the Challenger disaster? quoted
from memory and I hope approximately right:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Right except for the capitalization of "Nature", and perhaps the
source. Here's an online version of the document I have in mind:

http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html

Mostly putting this in for the convenience of anyone who wants
to compare the actual text I had in mind with spinoza1111's
(apparent?) interpretation of it. ("Apparent" since perhaps
he has some other document in mind.) It's interesting reading
in any case.

[ snip ]
 
C

Colonel Harlan Sanders

You're the failure, bothering people anonymously (often known as
"trolling").

No, that would be your definition of "trolling"
The bald faced hypocrisy of you using this word after spewing out
reams of rambling anecdotes prose "proving" (to your satisfaction)
that anyone who does so is a Nazi, is not, sadly surprising.
Gape away, fool. My father served in the US Army of Occupation in
Germany after the war,
<blah blah blah>

Yes, I do know who the Nazis were. And I suspect your father would not
appreciate your trivialising the events he witnessed by applying the
label to the people who offend you in newsgroups.

There certainly was and is real evil in the world. For you to equate
genocide with, say, my calling you an asshole is ... insane.

How would you know this?

You've told your life story over and over.
It doesn't take a genius to read between the lines.

You were made redundant, let go, whatever reason was found to get rid
of you, from every professional job for being a jerk, but not being
smart enough for it to be excused, till you ended up teaching English
to Asian kids, for which the only qualification you need is your
passport and the ability to turn up. Maybe you get your bile out here
rather than in the workplace now. If so, maybe you can keep that job
for a few years till you inevitably lose it and abuse your boss.

You don't, I'm willing to bet, quote from "books". No, you cut and
paste from moron sites on the Web, don't you.

Whatever the medium, I cite real references. Moron sites like the
Oxford University Press. You can check them.
You make up shit and descend to abuse when asked to back it up.

Sorry, I can make ten, a hundred "typographical errors" per post, or
have my own way of spelling, and still be far ahead of you.

Because you're right even when you're demonstrably wrong.

because what you think is "knowledge" is clerical work, cutting and
pasting from moron sources such as Wikipedia. I have long known that
most English speakers spell the Mahatma's name your way,


Curiously, so did he, at least in his autobiography, which I read some
time ago.
http://www.garretwilson.com/books/gandhiautobiography.jpg
As does the Indian government: Here's a 100 rupee note:
http://blog.lookindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/indian-100-rupee-note.jpg

But you'd rather be wrong than admit a typo. Idiot.


Anyway, this is getting repetitive.

Feel free to keep spewing out page after page of the same old rants,
abuse and conspiracy theories, but I'm getting bored.

So I'll give you my responses to your next ten messages now to save
time. Just choose the appropriate one, paste it in and continue
ranting.

================== Choose one or more:

You're a liar.
You're a troll.
You're insane.
No, disagreeing with you does not prove I'm a Nazi.
No, the lurkers do not support you.
No, Adorno does not support you.
No, John Nash does not support you.
No, your father does not support you.
You're an idiot.
No, you're not going to "see me (or anyone) in court".
 
S

spinoza1111

No, that would be your definition of "trolling"
The bald faced hypocrisy of you using this word after spewing out
reams of rambling anecdotes prose "proving" (to your satisfaction)
that anyone who does so is a Nazi, is not, sadly surprising.



<blah blah blah>

Yes, I do know who the Nazis were. And I suspect your father would not
appreciate your trivialising the events he witnessed by applying the
label to the people who offend you in newsgroups.

There certainly was and is real evil in the world. For you to equate
genocide with, say, my calling you an asshole is ... insane.



You've told your life story over and over.
It doesn't take a genius to read between the lines.

You were made redundant, let go, whatever reason was found to get rid
of you, from every professional job for being a jerk, but not being
smart enough for it to be excused, till you ended up teaching English
to Asian kids, for which the only qualification you need is your
passport and the ability to turn up. Maybe you get your bile out here
rather than in the workplace now. If so, maybe you can keep that job
for a few years till you inevitably lose it and abuse your boss.



Whatever the medium, I cite real references. Moron sites like the
Oxford University Press. You can check them.
You make up shit and descend to abuse when asked to back it up.





Because you're right even when you're demonstrably wrong.


Curiously, so did he, at least in his autobiography, which I read some
time ago.http://www.garretwilson.com/books/gandhiautobiography.jpg
As does the Indian government: Here's a 100 rupee note:http://blog.lookindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/indian-100-rupee-...

But you'd rather be wrong than admit a typo. Idiot.

Anyway, this is getting repetitive.

Feel free to keep spewing out page after page of the same old rants,
abuse and conspiracy theories, but I'm getting bored.

So I'll give you my responses to your next ten messages  now to save
time. Just choose the appropriate one, paste it in and continue
ranting.

================== Choose one or more:

You're a liar.
You're a troll.
You're insane.
No, disagreeing with you does not prove I'm a Nazi.
No, the lurkers do not support you.
No, Adorno does not support you.
No, John Nash does not support you.
No, your father does not support you.
You're an idiot.
No, you're not going to "see me (or anyone) in court".

In a humane group, this guy would be asked by others to stop his
trolling in public and by email assuming he has a working email
(according to Jaron Lanier in "You Are Not A Gadget", anonymous abuse
is trolling). But they won't because people today are cowards and
enablers. Therefore I will have to continue to confront this guy on my
own, up to and including threats of violence, threats of legal action
and foul language, and this situation may at any time go non-linear.

This guy may be a psycho resident in Hong Kong; one of the moderators
at the dysfunctional site www.lamma.com.HK qualifies and already has a
record of stalking.

But, of course, nobody here cares. You're all too busy living your
fantasies of being "engineers". But I think I can count on myself to
win any physical confrontation with this psycho on my on.
 
S

spinoza1111

[ snip ]
Is this where someone should, or could, mention Feynman's remark,
in his part of the report on the Challenger disaster?  quoted
from memory and I hope approximately right:
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Right except for the capitalization of "Nature", and perhaps the
source.  Here's an online version of the document I have in mind:

http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html

Mostly putting this in for the convenience of anyone who wants
to compare the actual text I had in mind withspinoza1111's
(apparent?) interpretation of it.  ("Apparent" since perhaps
he has some other document in mind.)  It's interesting reading
in any case.

I read Feynman's appendix. I don't think YOU have read Diane Vaughan's
complete book on the Challenger disaster, and once again you're being
quite the enabler by falsely implying I interpret it wrongly.

Your job has nothing to do with science or the laws of nature. It is
administration and indoctrination, along with enabling. It is utter
pretense of you to cite Feynman in defense of your enabling of people
who practice a science-based profession without any academic
preparation or continuing education and re-certification.
 
N

Nick Keighley

Is this where someone should, or could, mention Feynman's remark,
in his part of the report on the Challenger disaster?
[/QUOTE]

I'd thought of but I thought a more recent example might be better.
Feynman was talking about the fact that the performance of alloys in
unprecedentedly low temperatures could not be predicted in the
Challenger lift-off.

I thought he was talking about O-rings. They're made of rubber.
He wasn't talking about some tentative procedural rule.

who was?
Nor was he talking about the scientific fact that C semantics aren't
science,

no. They're mathematics, in so far as they are formally defined
and that neither K&R nor the standards writers ever addressed
the scientific fact that they didn't do their homework, here, defining
pointer to void.

The semantics of pointers seem fairly well defined to me.

<snip>
 
T

Tim Streater

Nick Keighley said:
I'd thought of but I thought a more recent example might be better.


I thought he was talking about O-rings. They're made of rubber.

He was. He did a simple demo to show that, at low temps, the rubber in
the O-rungs lost its flexibility. It became rigid, IOW, and and allowed
gaps to open up as the solid-fuel booster flexed during takeoff - just
the problem the O-rings were supposed to alleviate.
 
S

spinoza1111

I'd thought of but I thought a more recent example might be better.

Then read the official report on the Columbia disaster. Exactly the
same normalized deviance (as seen in this ng), exactly the same "macho
subservience" in which being a man and an engineer is turned inside
out, and means "no back talk". Nothing was seriously done between
Challenger and Columbia. Instead, Bush selected a twerp (Griffiths) to
run NASA, and more astronauts died.
I thought he was talking about O-rings. They're made of rubber.

Well, I was wrong...and so are you. They are (I checked)
"fluoroelastomers", not rubber, so it is wrong for you to call them
"rubber" and wrong for me to speak of alloys. I recalled Diane
Vaughan, in her book, calling them alloys, however. Since such a novel
material was used, "alloy" may have been an engineering metaphor.
who was?


no. They're mathematics, in so far as they are formally defined

Lousy mathematics, lacking elegance or even usability.
The semantics of pointers seem fairly well defined to me.

The test of being "well defined" is failed when you call one too many
things "undefined" out of laziness and because your mandate is not to
discommode vendors.
 
S

spinoza1111

He was. He did a simple demo to show that, at low temps, the rubber in

It wasn't rubber, but you are right. Again, it was a
"fluoroelastomer".

But I am willing to concede that it was a sort of artificial "rubber".
So many substitutes exist for the goo from trees. Therefore, you are
more right to use the word "rubber" that I was to use "alloy". Mea
culpa.

Condoms aren't made of natural rubber and yet are called rubbers in
the US.
 
S

spinoza1111

[ snip ]
Is this where someone should, or could, mention Feynman's remark,
in his part of the report on the Challenger disaster?  quoted
from memory and I hope approximately right:
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Right except for the capitalization of "Nature", and perhaps the
source.  Here's an online version of the document I have in mind:

http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html

Mostly putting this in for the convenience of anyone who wants
to compare the actual text I had in mind with spinoza1111's
(apparent?) interpretation of it.  ("Apparent" since perhaps

Spare me your enabling. You haven't read Diane Vaughan's 1999 study of
the launch which is far more in depth than Feynman's rhetoric. Any
fool can get the Feynman text with its ringing endorsement of the
scientific method. But not everyone understands how the scientific
method fails to apply to social theory.

Vaughn's central idea is something a natural scientist cannot even
understand, "normalized deviance", since he wants to measure
"deviance" using moronized mathematics as deviance from a statistical
norm.

The problem arises then by another set of norms, which may not be
realized, the norm itself can be deviant.

Feynman could have talked all he liked from his little perch, itself
an artifact of the labor of others who don't get tenure. But here and
in NASA, when people actually use the scientific method they are
(correctly) told that they do not have the data or the chops. Instead,
they are expected to conform to administrative rules, one of which was
"think like a manager and not an engineer" in the case of Challenger,
and "we know all about that problem [of falling foam chunks] and It
Has Been Decided that it's not a Showstopper, so shut the **** up".

The real problem is what Aristotle called the sorites: if you take a
plank from a warship at Salamis, it is still the same warship. If you
take another, it remains the same. Why, if you take ALL planks, is it
no more?

In modern society, the best people can be aspire to be is a plank at
Salamis, or a spear-chucker at Thermopylae. If they have jobs, outside
of direct commission sales, they often have them because it costs less
to keep them on than fire them. In layoffs, the absence of their
contribution in no more noticed than the absence of one spear-chucker
at Thermopylae.

And note: this was true of most people in Athens for the reduction of
the contribution of any one person may be a precondition of
"civilization". The problem is in its exacerbation.

No one engineer with a mortgage can pretend to be indispensable and
stand for the "scientific method". In programming, it simply doesn't
matter whether your code is "standard" or even buggy as long as your
incompetent work fits in. Actually good code that is elegant and
correct on a stand alone basis often offends for the same reason
correct grammar often is called "verbose", and all original poetry is
"unreadably bad".

Therefore, blm, do me the courtesy of not speaking for the scientific
method.
he has some other document in mind.)  It's interesting reading
in any case.

[ snip ]
 
S

spinoza1111

sounds like a recipe for disaster. In fact it *is* the usual recipe
for a disaster. I bet that oil rig in the gulf was stuffed with people
who couldn't admit they might be wrong.

Actually, most of the workers were afraid of a supervisor who
assaulted people verbally and perhaps physically and resembled the
regs here.
 
B

blmblm

I'd thought of but I thought a more recent example might be better.


I thought he was talking about O-rings. They're made of rubber.


who was?

Who knows?

Replying mostly to clarify why I repeated the quote here:

Some years ago someone -- Wikipedia [*] says the source is
an unnamed aide to GW Bush, quoted in the press in 2004 --
spoke sneeringly about the "reality-based community", saying
"we create our own reality". In some fields (such as politics)
this may be true, but in science and engineering it is not, and
Feynman's words, though written earlier, are to me a succinct
statement to that effect.

He was talking about how badly things can turn out if one makes
decisions on the basis of what looks good to the people paying
the bills, or to the general public, rather than on the basis
of solid science/engineering. My thinking is that the general
principle applies equally well if one makes decisions on the
basis of what looks good to one's peers (i.e., if one is more
concerned with not admitting to error than with doing good work).

Just sayin', maybe, and maybe the connection was obvious to most
readers.

[*] Usual disclaimer about this not being an authoritative source,
but an easy-to-find first approximation, maybe.

[ snip ]
 
M

Malcolm McLean

Some years ago someone -- Wikipedia [*] says the source is
an unnamed aide to GW Bush, quoted in the press in 2004 --
spoke sneeringly about the "reality-based community", saying
"we create our own reality".  In some fields (such as politics)
this may be true, but in science and engineering it is not, and
Feynman's words, though written earlier, are to me a succinct
statement to that effect.
Marx was semi-right. In the English language version of the Jewish
prayerbook there's a footnote "what we are determines what we see",
which I think is true. A tramp is a very diferent object to a rich
businessman, and old lady, a member of one of Mother Teresa's
Missionaries of Charity, and another tramp.
Similarly the technology we have affects the way we do science and the
way we see scientific results. For instance most people think of a
"cell" as a schematic in a textbook. One computational biochemist
joked about showing images to medical doctors - the image rotates and
the sulphur has disappeared! - of course they are not used to handling
these programs, they see the images on the screen differently.

But you can't change reality itself. One of the major scientific
breakthroughs in the understnading of energy came when people tried to
build waterwheels to pump the water back uphill, thus securing an
endless supply of water to turn the wheel. Of course this didn't work.
The medieval model of motion had to give way to statistical
thermodynamics.
 
N

Nick Keighley

Some years ago someone -- Wikipedia [*] says the source is
an unnamed aide to GW Bush, quoted in the press in 2004 --
spoke sneeringly about the "reality-based community", saying
"we create our own reality".  

the version I've got:-

"The reality-based community is defined as "people who believe that
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality".
That's not the way the world really works anymore, We're an empire
now, and when we act, we create our own reality.!"
[unamed george Bush aide]

In some fields (such as politics)
this may be true, but in science and engineering it is not, and
Feynman's words, though written earlier, are to me a succinct
statement to that effect.

<snip>
 
B

blmblm

Some years ago someone -- Wikipedia [*] says the source is
an unnamed aide to GW Bush, quoted in the press in 2004 --
spoke sneeringly about the "reality-based community", saying
"we create our own reality". In some fields (such as politics)
this may be true, but in science and engineering it is not, and
Feynman's words, though written earlier, are to me a succinct
statement to that effect.
Marx was semi-right.

Marx? (Karl or Groucho? :) )
In the English language version of the Jewish
prayerbook there's a footnote "what we are determines what we see",
which I think is true. A tramp is a very diferent object to a rich
businessman, and old lady, a member of one of Mother Teresa's
Missionaries of Charity, and another tramp.
Similarly the technology we have affects the way we do science and the
way we see scientific results.

Yes, good point. Not a counterargument to the point Feynman was
making, IMO, but something to keep in mind.
 

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