Re: Deep Impact Kicks Off Fourth of July with Deep Space Fireworks



George William Herbert wrote:
> <spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> But Rand, you snipped the best part:
> >>
> >> > ...could very well make one Earth strike into many Earth and
> >> > Moon strikes, where the latter through tidal effects could have further
> >> > bad effects.
> >>
> >> Hee hee! It's good to start the day with a laugh.
> >
> >Especially if the rest of the day you spread cheek to people who think
> >like a manager and not an engineer. OK, a Moon strike would not change
> >the tides. As a layman who pays your goddamn salary, I find this a
> >surprise and I await your answer, for that is what usenet is for.
>
> The amount of cooperation you can expect in getting answers
> is directly related to whether the questions you are asking,
> and your assertions, are reasonable or insane.
>
> It is neither sane nor reasonable for you to keep making
> crazy assertions about effects you are afraid of happening,
> after everyone else here has repeatedly told you that you
> don't understand what's going on and don't know how to
> assess real risks.

The problem here is that you define "sanity" and "reasonability" as the
randomly gerrymandered views which define mine as out of the loop.

You are confusing the views of a small set of Internet posters, who
probably know science but who aren't scientists but technicians, with
any sort of community that could define "sanity".

Furthermore, you seem unaware that risk assessment, a part of
operations research, is equivalent neither to ethics or the law.

In risk assessment you pronounce a system "safe" when an equation is
satisfied and (in the usual case) the probably of an event defined as
bad (where the very definition lies outside risk assessment and
operations research) is inverse six sigma.

This mathematics is very "powerful" and dazzles its adepts. But its
power is the problem. It can put a value on a human life from the
standpoint of aviation safety and is in fact used in law to assign
damage awards.

But the very math is dependent for its limited coherence on the law and
on ethics outside the math. The math like a computer has to be
"programmed" with assumptions, each of them arguable and in some cases
disturbing, such as the proto-mathematical assertion that a baby's life
is "less than" (<) in value than an adult male earner.

Furthermore, the adepts by marginalizing the pre-quantitative decision
create a sort of infernal machine in which the non-quantitative
assumptions can be changed, for example in the program code.
>
> When you understand that you don't understand it, and ask
> nicely, you'll get some reasonable answers...

Bull***. I've done so, and the "reasonable" answers, far from
manifesting anything like "sanity" expose the posters as the typical
geek with anger management issues. The "reasonable" answers are blanket
and unrefutable claims that the poster "knows" something like orbital
mechanics which do not take the risk of showing how that knowledge
changes the ethics of a destructive stunt, or addresses NASA's safety
culture, which is broken in the words of the 2003 report.

The "reasonable" answers are pathetic attempts to restore a broken
self-esteem in an engineering culture wherein technicians and
scientists are subordinated to managers who know even less orbital
mechanics than me. The "reasonable" poster has anger management issues
because he is the person who has been told since Reagan was elected to
think like a manager and not an engineer.
>
>
> -george

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