fabulous book

Good point. "Harry Nyquist" could have been an alias.

You could show up at the same time every day and you'd think he never went for lunch.

That would be equivalent time snacking.

No. Stephen Hawking, in 1975, was originally responsible for that particular intellectual exercise

Bell Labs - at its peak - employed about 15,000 people, 1200 of them with P h.D.s. That's a lot of Dunbar numbers - Dunbar says that your face-to-face social circle is about 150 people.

Susan Pinker makes the point that that 150 people changes with time, and ha ving a lot of people to choose from meant that project teams could be assem bled - or assemble themselves - to exploit a wide variety of talents.

Of course Dunbar's number is just an average. The "six degrees of separatio n" people found that a lot of their connections went through unusually well connected people with circles of acquaintances that could go as high as 15

It was, regretfully, a highly unrealistic story in one respect.

There are *very* few organizations in which an engineer can punch a PHB into unconsciousness and get away without being fired... even if the idiot PHB did deserve it. :-)

(I'm still searching for a capacitor of the sort that the Venus Equilateral researcher developed...)

Bumper sticker

QUESTION AUTHORITY

better bumper sticker

IGNORE AUTHORITY

What's better about that? There are lots of legitimate authorities around, and picking the wrong one to ignore could start a plague or poison a neighbourhood.

John Larkin ignores the authorities that tell us that anthropogenic global warming is a real problem. He thinks of this behaviour as being sceptical, but in reality it's being gullible about denialist propaganda (which he lacks the wit to recognise).

;-)

Phone bill? What's that?

True, but then there are very few organizations in which a PHB can put the lives of *every* employee in immediate peril in one swell foop.

The unrealistic bit for me was that none of the "workmen" told him "Wait, that's the airplant- you'll kill us all, you maniac!".

Just apply the physical constants...

Mark L. Fergerson

It was said, at the time, that IBM's problem was that it had too much real estate; one too many Akers. He had been borrowing money to pay the dividend for a decade. After '92, it wasn't much fun anymore. The company had been pretty much run into the ground and the morale reflected it.

Reality:

Work around authority

If I recall correctly, that was the incident which actually got the PHB relieved/fired. It was the last straw (the straw being dead Martian saw-grass).

The one which got the PHB punched (by Channing) was when he decided to save money by laying off all of the skilled long-distance-beam operators, and replace them with automated electronic optical beam-followers (an approach that had been tried years earlier, and which had failed to work). The switchover (which the PHB made without consulting any of his technical experts) pretty much knocked the station "off the air" and put them in violation of their charter. When Channing found out about it and started protesting, the PHB accused him of having taken bribes from the beam operators to keep them on the job... >>SMACK"Wait, that's the airplant- you'll kill us all, you maniac!".

Yeah, there was that. Maybe he grabbed the first five ignorant low-level janatorial droids he saw (to minimize the book-cost of doing the "trash removal")...

Wow.. Spehro and JL thanks for that! (I have tears...) George H.

I heard the alias Nyquist only have lunch once few weeks.

George H.

Woah... seriously bad English....

I heard the alias Nyquist only had lunch once every few weeks.

(much too late for me..)

"Workplace violence" would typically result in instant termination for cause these days. Even for a star like Jeremy Clarkson.

A bunch of apocryphal narrative to wow the masses...cheap entertainment.

I thought the two books were respectively profound and fun. Read them any give us your valuable opinion.

But masses? Neither book will have the audience of Stephen King or Harry Potter.