The Challenger Disaster’s Minority Report

Following the space shuttle Challenger disaster, a committee was convened to determine both the cause of the accident and how future accidents could be prevented.  One of the committee members was the iconoclastic scientist Richard Feynman.

Feynman challenged the whitewashed report officially sanctioned by the committee and insisted on including his own “minority report” regarding the accident.  I think it’s important to reflect back on the importance of this report and the warnings it imparted to NASA and the manned space program.

Feynman was appalled at the apparent willful ignorance of the NASA management team and their reliance on imaginary statistics and fanciful reasoning.

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask “What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?”

What was most upsetting to Feynman was the obliviousness of the management team to the risks they were ignoring.

The phenomenon of accepting for flight, [solid rocket booster] seals that had shown erosion and blow-by in previous flights, is very clear. The Challenger flight is an excellent example. There are several references to flights that had gone before. The acceptance and success of these flights is taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blow-by are not what the design expected. They are warnings that something is wrong. The equipment is not operating as expected, and therefore there is a danger that it can operate with even wider deviations in this unexpected and not thoroughly understood way.

The report continues to detail problems with the main engines in addition to the solid rocket boosters.

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

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

One has to wonder if the Challenger disaster represented an inevitability given NASA’s culture of conformity at the time.  Rocking the boat was punished and keeping the shuttles flying (and the dollars flowing into NASA’s coffers) was seen as paramount.

I think I need a new title…

You must now refer to me as your “Ideational Barista.” That is all…
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Note to self…

If you’re in a room full of people and you still feel lonely, there’s nothing wrong with you – you’re just in the wrong room.
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Spotted on Reddit:

The following exchange is offered verbatim (or as near to it as I can remember):

HER: That suit would look great on you.
ME: (Checking the price) Too bad I don’t have $900.
HER: Just use your credit card.
ME: I still wouldn’t have $900.
HER: What are you talking about?
ME: I try to pay off my balance in full when I use my credit card. $900 is more than I can afford right now.
HER: (Irritated) That makes zero sense. Nobody pays for credit cards! They give them to you!
ME: Not the card; the balance. The bill.
HER: What “bill?”
ME: … The credit card bill? The one you have to pay every month?
HER: No, you don’t.
ME: Okay, well, I guess you can make minimum payments, but…
HER: (Interrupting) What are you talking about?! You are making zero sense. If you don’t like the suit, just say so!
ME: I do like the suit, I just can’t afford it. Using my credit card wouldn’t magically make it so I wouldn’t have to pay.
HER: You don’t pay for credit cards. God, what is wrong with you?
ME: Wait. Do you mean that you’ve never paid your credit card bill?
HER: There’s no such thing! Credit cards are so you don’t have to pay.

It eventually came to light that the young woman had been given her credit card by her parents, who paid the balance for her whenever they received a bill. This revelation only occurred after I’d been accused of trying to make her feel guilty for buying sweatshop clothing, though I never did figure out where that connection occurred.

[Ed. “THE STUPID, IT BURNS!!!!!”]
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Blogging Again

Here we go again…

Beyond the Limits of Endurance

I just finished reading Enemy at the Gates: The Battle of Stalingrad.  It was an inspired piece of historical writing.  The Battle of Stalingrad was the most brutal event in the history of warfare.  Beyond the facts of the battle itself where both sides suffered incalculable losses of men and material, the postscript was even worse.

It is estimated that the Axis forces suffered 850,000 casualties (killed, wounded or captured) while the Russians endured 1,129,619 casualties of which 478,000 were killed.  In addition, anywhere from 25,000 – 40,000 Russian civilians, residents of the besieged city, were also killed.

Following the defeat of the Axis forces (German, Italian, Romanian and Hungarian) at Stalingrad in early 1943, the prisoners were  force-marched under horrific conditions to camps in Siberia and the far Eastern provinces with little food or warm clothing during the brutal Russian winter.

Tormented by their Russian captors, some Axis prisoners resorted to the most unspeakable survival tactics.

Machines That Kill

In the latest issue of Radical Philosophy, Susan Schuppli attempts to define the brave new world of autonomous system which are programmed to take human lives.  How shall we react?  What of morality?  What of law?  Who is accountable?  What is accountability in this context?  Her commentary, Deadly algorithms: Can legal codes hold software accountable for code that kills? is well worth a read.

Decision-making by automated systems will produce new relations of power for which we have as yet inadequate legal frameworks or modes of political resistance – and, perhaps even more importantly, insufficient collective understanding as to how such decisions will actually be made and upon what grounds. Scientific knowledge about technical processes does not belong to the domain of science alone, as the Daubert ruling implies. However, demands for public accountability and oversight will require much greater participation in the epistemological frameworks that organize and manage these new techno-social systems, and that may be a formidable challenge for all of us. What sort of public assembly will be able to prevent the premature closure of a certain epistemology of facts, as Bruno Latour would say, that are at present cloaked under a veil of secrecy called national security interests – the same order of facts that scripts the current DOD roadmap for unmanned systems?

Osama Bin Laden has done more damage to the future of our country than he could possibly have imagined.  He managed to tap into our innate fears and drive us to create the weapons of our undoing.

The end is nigh…

Cyberdyne Systems Latest Autonomous System

 

That Which You Think is Yours is Really Ours

One of the most annoying and abjectly wrong memes of the right is this idea that pre-tax income belongs to the earner.  This fallacy has been thoroughly debunked by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel in their treatise The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice.  It sounds remarkably dull but it’s actually a fascinating review of tax justice and the realities of pre- versus post-tax income.

There is no market without government and no government without taxes; and what type of market there is depends on laws and policy decisions that government must make. In the absence of a legal system supported by taxes, there couldn’t be money, banks, corporations, stock exchanges, patents, or a modern market economy-none of the institutions that make possible the existence of almost all contemporary forms of income and wealth.

It is therefore logically impossible that people should have any kind of entitlement to all their pretax income. All they can be entitled to is what they would be left with after taxes under a legitimate system, supported by legitimate taxationand this shows that we cannot evaluate the legitimacy of taxes by reference to pretax income. Instead, we have to evaluate the legitimacy of after-tax income by reference to the legitimacy of the political and economic system that generates it, including the taxes which are an essential part of that system. The logical order of priority between taxes and property rights is the reverse of that assumed by libertarianism.

 

The Banality of Evil

Russian author Vasily Grossman

Hannah Arendt describes how banal the realities of Nazi atrocities were, how ordinary they seemed to those carrying them out.  Her exposition on the trial of Adolf Eichmann entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem describes in detail how mundane evil can be.

But Arendt lacked the literary prowess to really bring the banality to the surface.  It took a literary masterpiece, Life and Fate,Vasily Grossman’s epic 1959 novel of life in Russia during World War II, to create an appropriate description of the origins of totalitarian horror.  This is one of the most amazing and moving descriptions of how totalitarianism happens I’ve ever read.  It’s Chapters 50 & 51 from his novel.

For me, it resonates strongly with the purity of ideology the current conservative movement in America attempts to achieve.  The Tea Party, the Libertarians and others who believe in ideology before facts, in purity before truth, in obedience before dissent.  Counter-revolutionaries all.  Reactionary to the core.  And a fertile ground for totalitarianism.

50

Before slaughtering infected cattle, various preparatory measures have to be carried out: pits and trenches must be dug; the cattle must be transported to where they are to be slaughtered; instructions must be issued to qualified workers.

If the local population helps the authorities to convey the infected cattle to the slaughtering points and to catch beasts that have run away, they do this not out of hatred of cows and calves, but out of an instinct for self-preservation.

Similarly, when people are to be slaughtered en masse, the local population is not immediately gripped by a bloodthirsty hatred of the old men, women and children who are to be destroyed. It is necessary to prepare the population by means of a special campaign. And in this case it is not enough to rely merely on the instinct for self-preservation; it is necessary to stir up feelings of real hatred and revulsion.

It was in such an atmosphere that the Germans carried out the extermination of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Jews. And at an earlier date, in the same regions, Stalin himself had mobilized the fury of the masses, whipping it up to the point of frenzy during the campaigns to liquidate the kulaks as a class and during the extermination of Trotskyist–Bukharinite degenerates and saboteurs.

Bourbon

It’s sometimes the only thing between me and a very poor decision…