Take that, Nigel Farage, you smug ignorant git.

https://instagram.com/p/BHPlTPIBAEk/

H/t David Colquhoun

For some reason I’ve been thinking about bad management decisions and when employees get to “disobey” management. One of the classic examples of recent times was NASA managment’s overruling of the Morton Thiokol engineers who told them that the O rings wouldn’t work in cold weather. I went looking and found a post I wrote on the subject back in January 2007.

A remark in Thomas Kida’s splendid book Don’t Believe Everything You Think (Prometheus) snagged my attention yesterday. Page 193:

However, overconfidence can also cause catastrophic results. Before the space shuttle Challenger exploded, NASA estimated the probability of a catastrophe to be one in one hundred thousand launches.

What?! thought I. They did!?! They can’t have! Can they? I was staggered at the idea, for many reasons. One, NASA is run by science types, it’s packed to the rafters with engineers, it couldn’t be so off. Two, I remember a lot of talk – after the explosion, to be sure – about the fact that everyone at NASA, emphatically including all astronauts, knows and has always known that the space shuttle is extremely risky. Three, the reasons the shuttle is extremely and obviously risky were also widely canvassed: a launch is a controlled explosion and the shuttle is sitting on top of tons of highly volatile fuel. Four, a mere drive in a car is a hell of a lot riskier than a one in one hundred thousand chance, so how could the shuttle possibly be less risky?

There was no footnote for that particular item, so I found Kida’s email address and asked him if he could remember where he found it. He couldn’t, but he very very kindly looked through his sources and found it: it’s in a book which in turn cites an article by Richard Feynman in Physics Today. I knew Feynman had written about the Challenger and NASA, but no details. The article is not online, but there is interesting stuff at Wikipedia – interesting, useful, and absolutely mind-boggling. They can have, they did. Just for one thing, my ‘One’ was wrong – NASA is apparently not run by science types, it’s run by run things types. Well silly me, thinking they’d want experts running it.

Feynman was requested to serve on the Presidential Rogers Commission which investigated the Challenger disaster of 1986. Feynman devoted the latter half of his book What Do You Care What Other People Think? to his experience on the Rogers Commission…Feynman’s account reveals a disconnect between NASA’s engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA’s high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. In one example, early stress tests resulted in some of the booster rocket’s O-rings cracking a third of the way through. NASA managers recorded that this result demonstrated that the O-rings had a “safety factor” of 3, based on the 1/3 penetration of the crack. Feynman incredulously explains the gravity of this error: a “safety factor” refers to the practice of building an object to be capable of withstanding more force than it will ever conceivably be subjected to. To paraphrase Feynman’s example, if engineers built a bridge that could bear 3,000 pounds without any damage, even though it was never expected to bear more than 1,000 pounds in practice, the safety factor would be 3. If, however, a truck drove across the bridge and it cracked at all, the safety factor is now zero: the bridge is defective. Feynman was clearly disturbed by the fact that NASA management not only misunderstood this concept, but in fact inverted it by using a term denoting an extra level of safety to describe a part that was actually defective and unsafe.

Christ almighty.

Feynman continued to investigate the lack of communication between NASA’s management and its engineers and was struck by the management’s claim that the risk of catastrophic malfunction on the shuttle was 1 in 10^5; i.e., 1 in 100,000…Feynman was bothered not just by this sloppy science but by the fact that NASA claimed that the risk of catastrophic failure was “necessarily” 1 in 10^5. As the figure itself was beyond belief, Feynman questioned exactly what “necessarily” meant in this context – did it mean that the figure followed logically from other calculations, or did it reflect NASA management’s desire to make the numbers fit? Feynman…decided to poll the engineers themselves, asking them to write down an anonymous estimate of the odds of shuttle explosion. Feynman found that the bulk of the engineers’ estimates fell between 1 in 50 and 1 in 100. Not only did this confirm that NASA management had clearly failed to communicate with their own engineers, but the disparity engaged Feynman’s emotions…he was clearly upset that NASA presented its clearly fantastical figures as fact to convince a member of the laity, schoolteacher Christa McCauliffe, to join the crew.

That’s one of the most off the charts examples of wishful thinking in action I’ve ever seen.

After writing that post I read Feynman’s report. It’s a great, educational read.

Read Appendix F.

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 indeed?

Management is not always right. Sometimes in an emergency an employee will have better information. Sometimes in an emergency an employee has to do the right thing as opposed to obeying a supervisor.

Another in the continuing series, Weird Bullshit From Religious Fanatics Who Think They Need to Tell Everyone How to Live: meet Fix the Family.

It has a blog. The blog has a picture.

What do they tell us? It’s pretty simple really. Man the boss. Woman the obeyer. The end.

Here’s their most recent post, which claims to be about American Catholic Marxism. It’s a transcript of a guy talking, and I’m not going to watch that. There’s a limit.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Fix the Family. My name is Raylan Alleman, and we are bringing you truth without compromise for the family. Welcome to our blog edition. A little Quick Fix for you, the unplugged edition of Fix the Family here on this May 26, 2016. And if you’ve followed us for the past six years or so you realize that the crux of our message pretty much is that God has a design for the family.  And that is a traditional lifestyle of the traditional roles of male and female, the husband being the head and the wife being the heart, and she is submissive to him, and the whole matter of the mother raising her own children and all those things.  When we follow that design, it’s just amazing. We have so many families we know across a wide spectrum of people, that when you follow that design, you’re going to have some good success. And whenever you decide to go opposite, you’re going to have some problems, pretty much no matter who you are or what financial class you’re in or any of those things.

So simple. So easy. Let the man be the boss and everything will be perfect. Fall down on letting the man be the boss and everything goes wrong.

Amen.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the Momentum guy said in the Q&A that prompted Ruth Smeeth to say “How dare you?!” and a few seconds later walk out. There are videos but all the ones I’ve seen start with her “How dare you” so you don’t get what the guy said. Like this one for example.

https://youtu.be/IPt6vfBzqF0

It’s not that I think anyone’s lying, it’s that I can’t find the details. The reporting is frankly rather muddled.

A tweet by a Telegraph journalist who was there (and who is on video asking the Momentum guy if he’s going to apologize) helps some:

Then Momentum man gets Q, accuses @RuthSmeeth of colluding with Telegraph journo (me) despite Corbyn warning that Jewish/media tropes banned

— Kate McCann (@KateEMcCann) June 30, 2016

Then Momentum man gets Q, accuses @RuthSmeeth of colluding with Telegraph journo (me) despite Corbyn warning that Jewish/media tropes banned

So I guess Momentum guy claimed that Ruth Smeeth was colluding with Telegraph reporter Kate McCann in…anti-Corbyn reporting? Something like that? And it’s an anti-Semitic dog whistle?

I suspect it’s a lot more recognizable to people who’ve been closely following the controversies around Corbyn than it is to me.

Updating to add: someone I know was there and says Momentum guy suggested she was in cahoots with the Telegraph journalist in a ‘we know what’s going on’ way and that people were shouting at him in response (which you can hear in some of the videos – the shouting starts before Smeeth says “How dare you!”).

Helen Lewis delicately points out that marketers of quack remedies aren’t allowed to tell lies but marketers of quack politicians and quack policies are.

If there is one sentence that explains the referendum result, though, it’s this one from the website of the Advertising Standards Agency. “For reasons of freedom of speech, we do not have remit over non-broadcast ads where the purpose of the ad is to persuade voters in a local, national or international electoral referendum.” In other words, political advertising is exempt from the regulation that would otherwise bar false claims and outrageous promises. You can’t claim that a herbal diet drink will make customers thinner, but you can claim that £350m a week will go to the NHS instead of the European Union.

You can see why that is, but all the same it can be infuriating.

It was noticeable how quickly the twin planks of the Leave campaign – extra money for the health service, and the implicit promise to cut immigration by “taking back control” of our borders – fell apart. On Good Morning Britain just hours after the result was declared, Nigel Farage decried the NHS pledge as a “mistake” (he was not part of the official Leave campaign that made it).

…

The first few days after the referendum felt like an extended period of gaslighting – being told that things you could distinctly remember happening had not, in fact, happened. How could anyone think that the Leave campaign had promised an extra £350m for the NHS? The money was “an extrapolation . . . never total”, said Iain Duncan Smith on the BBC. It was merely part of a “series of possibilities of what you could do”. My eyes flicked from his pious face to Twitter, where someone had posted a picture of him standing next to the campaign bus. Its slogan read: “We send the EU £350m a week. Let’s fund the NHS instead.” Then I looked at the pinned Tweet for the chief executive of Vote Leave, Matthew Elliott, which reads: “Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week.” These people promised us a unicorn and now claim they merely hinted at the possibility of a Shetland pony.

Well you see it’s like this – saying “Let’s” isn’t a promise, it’s a we-imperative, i.e. a suggestion. Of course most people will read it as a promise of sorts, but that’s how this kind of trickery works – the marks understand it one way, and after all the dust has settled the con artists get to say innocently “but that’s not what we said.”

Let’s go to the beach.

Also in news from UK / English/Welsh politics today –

A Jewish Labour MP has left Jeremy Corbyn’s launch of an antisemitism report in tears after being accused of colluding with the right-wing press.

I watched the video clip in which she leaves and I didn’t see any tears or signs of tears.

…a man handing out leaflets linked to Momentum, an activist group that supports Mr Corbyn, then verbally attacked Ruth Smeeth.

Witnesses said the campaigner accused the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North and Kidsgrove of “colluding” with the right-wing media, after refusing to hand a leaflet to Ms Smeeth and taking down her name.

Ms Smeeth said she was “verbally attacked” and accused of being part of a media conspiracy.

“It is beyond belief that someone could come to the launch of a report on antisemitism in the Labour Party and espouse such vile conspiracy theories about Jewish people, which were ironically highlighted as such in Ms Chakrabarti’s report, while the leader of my own party stood by and did absolutely nothing,” she added.

“People like this have no place in our party or our movement and must be opposed.”

…

Footage showed the man – Marc Wadsworth –  calling a journalist from the Daily Telegraph a “trouble-maker” after she asked him whether he wanted to apologise.

His press release, claiming to be from Momentum Black Connexions, called for the deselection of Labour “traitors” who are calling for Mr Corbyn to resign in the wake of the EU referendum.

Mr Wadsworth told The Independent he did not know Ms Smeeth was Jewish, adding: “I’ve never been called antisemitic in my life.”

I’m frankly not sure I understand what happened, unless “media conspiracy” is unmistakable code for “Jewish.”

107 Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging Greenpeace to stop fighting GMOs.

The letter asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block introduction of a genetically engineered strain of rice that supporters say could reduce Vitamin-A deficiencies causing blindness and death in children in the developing world.

“We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against ‘GMOs’ in general and Golden Rice in particular,” the letter states.

The letter campaign was organized by Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs and, with Phillip Sharp, the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of genetic sequences known as introns. The campaign has a website, supportprecisionagriculture.org, that includes a running list of the signatories, and the group plans to hold a news conference Thursday morning at the National Press Club in Washington.

“We’re scientists. We understand the logic of science. It’s easy to see what Greenpeace is doing is damaging and is anti-science,” Roberts told The Washington Post. “Greenpeace initially, and then some of their allies, deliberately went out of their way to scare people. It was a way for them to raise money for their cause.”

If that’s why they’re doing it I hope they’re ashamed of themselves…but then they didn’t seem to feel much shame about stomping on the Nazca lines last year.

Nobel laureate Randy Schekman, a cell biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Post, “I find it surprising that groups that are very supportive of science when it comes to global climate change, or even, for the most part, in the appreciation of the value of vaccination in preventing human disease, yet can be so dismissive of the general views of scientists when it comes to something as important as the world’s agricultural future.”

Oh well, it’s only food. I’m sure 7 billion people can easily find something for lunch.

Another one:

Well now I too have witnessed my very own racist incident. In London. An angry old 6’3″ white man shouting at a BME university lecturer (apparently Muslim, I didn’t bother to ask), and one of his BME students. He didn’t seem to mind much about the white female student.

After finishing his rant about all the Muslims coming over here to impose Sharia law, and being challenged on it, he asked why they’d all done 7/7. At that point we left, which is when he tried to become violent.

‘Glad’ (?) to say I’d got involved in the ‘discussion’ ten minutes before to offer support and will be reporting it to the police. If you find yourself a victim or witness to race hate crimes, you should too.

Ben Riley-Smith at the The Telegraph reports a febrile atmosphere in Labour politics at the moment:

Labour MPs have been forced to call in the police over death threats in the last 48 hours after they refused to back Jeremy Corbyn, The Telegraph has learnt.

Vicky Foxcroft, a Labour whip, received a call to her constituency office which said: “If she doesn’t support Corbyn I will come down to the office and kick the fuck out of you.”

Police officers had to rush her office, close the shutters and attempt to trace the call after the man said he was on his way and hung up.

Another MP received a threat to her or his child.

Lucy Powell, the former shadow education secretary, received a message telling her to kill herself after announcing she would leave the frontbench over frustrations with the leadership.

It was among a string of messages laden with expletives and personal abuse which have been passed onto police.

A fourth Labour MP said they had become so concerned with the torrent of online abuse that they have forwarded the messages to police, while scores of others raised concerns.

It’s the Twitter effect. People think this is just how you express dissent now.

Politicians and staff were said to be in tears over the abuse comes just weeks after the brutal murder of Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen who was shot and stabbed in her constituency.

A Labour source said: “Women MPs have been subjected to the most vile stuff – we’re going to rape you, kill you. There have been people in tears today.”

“Just weeks”? Not really – or only just: only just barely two weeks, which makes it not really “just weeks” but rather “just two weeks.” “Just weeks” sounds like at least five weeks. It was just the other day. It was recent. Way way way too recent to forget.

Jehovah’s Witnesses destroy an indigenous religious site in Mexico on the grounds that it’s not Christian.

Members of the Christian sect Jehovah’s Witness reportedly destroyed a sacred Indigenous archaeological heritage site in central eastern Mexico in an act of apparent religious intolerance, claiming the traditional rituals practiced at the ancient ceremonial place were “not Christian,” local media reported Monday.

I don’t suppose they claim to be Christian, either, but so what? Do other religions have to ask permission of Christian sects to practice their religion? Is that a general rule? I’d love to see what the JWs would make of some Hindu vandals smashing up their temples.

The attack on the more than 7,000 year-old Makonikha sanctuary in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo destroyed at least a dozen stone structures used as altars in the spirituality of the Otomi Indigenous people.

Apparently the JWs said yeah we did that.

Members of the Christian sect say the destruction was motivated by a belief that the ancient Indigenous religion involved devil worship. The perpetrators claim that they were following the word of god by destroying the temple site.

The ancient religion of the Otomi people traditionally holds sacred various deities including earth, water, and fire, and reveres their gods with offerings.

The Otomi people could just tear up the JWs’ sites and say they’re following the word of their gods in doing so, and how would the JWs like that? Not much, I should think.

Interesting.

Jonathan Warner ‏@JonathanRWarner 21 hours ago
London Young Labour chair took BME spot at LGBT conference because his dad’s girlfriend was black.

Christ…

Why are you currently occupying the Black member’s position when you do not have an experience of oppression on the basis that you are Black?

The open letter is from 2012 but the tweet is from yesterday. The question is a live one.

The vote to recall Harney County Judge Steve Grasty failed overwhelmingly, Peter Walker reports on Facebook.

Wham. Go home, Bundyites, you’re drunk.

Some guys have been arrested over that racist incident on the Manchester tram.

Police were made aware of alleged racial abuse at around 07:40 BST on a tram travelling towards the city centre after a video was posted online.

Two men, aged 20 and 18 and a 16-year-old boy, were detained on suspicion of affray, Greater Manchester Police said.

The video shows a man on a tram at Shudehill being called “an immigrant” and told “get back to Africa”.

The guy told them they’re young and none too bright.

One of the men continued to shout “get off the tram now”, as he spoke.

One of the group, who were holding beer bottles, then apparently approaches the man and flicks alcohol at him, as a passenger shouted: “There’s a baby there – there’s absolutely no need for that”.

As the youths got off, the victim said to himself: “Seven years in the military,” as other commuters told the three, “You are an absolute disgrace. A disgrace to England”.

Police said the suspects were being held in custody for questioning.

The guy they were shouting at is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan. He’s lived in the UK for 18 years; his daughter was born there.

Istanbul’s turn:

A suicide gun and bomb attack on Istanbul’s main airport, one of Europe’s busiest, has killed at lest 32 people and injured 60 more.

Three attackers were involved, with one reportedly firing a Kalashnikov as they targeted an entry point to Ataturk international airport.

The BBC reporter Mark Lowen is stuck in a plane at that airport.

Two South African tourists, Paul and Susie Roos from Cape Town, were at the airport and due to fly home at the time of the explosions.

“We came up from the arrivals to the departures, up the escalator when we heard these shots going off,” Mr Roos told the Associated Press news agency.

“There was this guy going roaming around, he was dressed in black and he had a handgun.”

Don’t they all.