usenet weirdness

The internal reality

After the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the Rogers Commission uncovered a huge gap:

NASA management often cited failure odds around 1 in 100,000 (extremely optimistic)

Engineers and some contractors believed the real risk could be closer to 1 in 100 or even worse

That enormous mismatch shows that even within NASA, there wasn’t a single honest, agreed-upon number—so it certainly wasn’t clearly communicated to McAuliffe.

She wasn’t told specific odds—and if she had been told the most realistic internal estimates, it might have sounded very different from the "safe routine flight" image the Shuttle program projected at the time.

That teacher was murdered. NASA needed the money...

But, it's okay to look the other way...

Everytime they send a rocket up...everybody looks the other way...they gots mouths to feed.

Indeed. <snipped the rest of frantic barking of fanatic, lying scum>

In 2 days you will write the opposite, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that you're a knight of The S*it of Einstein and you expect some obedience. Right, trash?

In 2 days you will write the opposite, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that you're a knight of The S*it of Einstein and you expect some obedience. Right, trash?

In 2 days you will write the opposite, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that you're a knight of The S*it of Einstein and you expect some obedience. Right, trash?

That's highly unlikely, but the chance that you will misrepresent something I've written as contradicting something else I've written is a cast-iron certainty.

Defective reading comprehension is pretty much your stock in trade.

Anybody who goes in for rational argument is going to look like that to you.

Congratulations. You have found a new insult, and are now going to work it to death. It's not wildly different from the rest of your stock in trade, and - as usual - too fatuous to be taken seriously, but at least you can still manage to come up with minor variations.

The third example of the new - or at least slightly modified - insult. Variety is the spice of life, and you haven't got one.

McAuliffe could count. NASA had killed a number of astronauts over the years.

Don't be silly. They sincerely didn't want her dead, but bureaucracies put a lot more emphasis on meeting schedules than they do on avoiding disasters

It most certainly isn't

Far from it. But when the whole organisation is focussed on staging impressive events and getting them to happen when promised, concerns about safety get a lower priority.

In 2 days you will write the opposite, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that you're a knight of The S*it of Einstein and you expect some obedience. Right, trash?

Posting the same abuse three or four times in succession, this time in a context where it really isn't relevant, is classic troll behavior. But - as an ignorant idiot - you don't know any better.

Subduction is a hypothesis.

But it also blatant nonsense. It is actually the lie that plate tectonics depends on, hence cannot be questioned at all.

But it is nonsense, however.

Subduction would assume thing, which violate simple logic.

For instance plate tectonics is based on the assumption, that Earth would NOT grow. That's why the obvious spreading needs something to balance that spreading and that is the alleged subduction.

But spreading zones are large and obvious and subduction zones far less and in most cases at the 'wrong' locations (not opposite to spreading zones).

To make that nonsense somehow plausible additional blunder is need and actually introduced into 'science'.

In effect pt assumes, that continents kind of 'swim' through the ozeans.

But that assumption is insane, because the ozeans are above plates, too, because if there were no plates beneath the ozeans, the water would boil instantly.

So, more or less the entire planet is covered with plates and many are thinner and are covered with water, what we call 'ozeans'.

Now the plates below the ozeans are still thick plates, even not as thinck as the continental plates.

Now the question: how would you move any plate at all, if the entire planet is covered with thick plates?

As a relatively good 'model' you could use a water melon.

The 'crust' of the watermelon is relatively stiff and has equivalent thickness (a little too thick, but that doesn't matter).

Now we take a sharp knife and cut the 'crust' into 'plates' and name them like the plates on our planet.

Now we have a 'planet', covered with 'plates' and could try to move the 'plates' around.

But there are two things, which would hinder the movement:

Same with tectonic plates:

Plates are also extremly rigid, because they are made of rock.

So, any movement would cause a collision and that not only in the middle of the moving direction, but also sideways, where also collisions could occur.

In effect the only option, that would actually allow spreading would be a growing planet.

TH

...

I don't think, that playing an instrument was a part of the job description for physicists in Germany.

Am Dienstag000017, 17.03.2026 um 08:42 schrieb Thomas Heger:

To understand this you should think about the people behind science as human beings.

Human beings like wealth, power and status.

And former scientists climb the social ledder atuomatically, once they remain at their position in the system called 'academia' and get older.

The result of this is, that all people in the 'scientific community' are more or less conservatives and hate, if any changes were made upon the basis of their own life as a scientists.

Since it gets more difficult to learn with an age beyond, say, seventy, the people at the top of the hierarchy of 'academia' are essentially against any change in the set of laws, which we regard as proven facts.

Most would rather commit suicide than acknowledge an own error.

Therefore, the entire system cannot make any progress, because it gets stuck into a position, where its main members reject any changes with all the powers they have.

To even try any changes is actually suicide for any young scientist, who is brave enough to try.

That's why acceptance is impossible.

You siomply need to wait for a few new generations and promote better options in the meantime.

TH

I'm not asking you, I'm asking Maciej. He seems to believe there exists some sort of master clock that reigns the universe.

Anyway, I've decided he's not worth trying to reason with.

Jeroen Belleman

Am Dienstag000017, 17.03.2026 um 13:34 schrieb Bill Sloman: ...

Sure, English is a second language for me, because my nativ language is German.

But, as a matter of fact, I made a German version, too, where I have written comment in German into the German version of the text.

And I speak German far better than English, because English is actually a second language for me.

Well, possibly.

But I spent much longer on that paper than Einstein did for his entire university education.

I have also written several entirely new versions, from which the English version wasn't the best I could do.

But I will evetually publish the recent German version, too, but I'm insecure when I should do that.

So, now I'm kind of expert on that article of Einstein.

And still my error counting is a little less than 400, even if I have removed several comments (the older English version had 428 comments).

I have also discussed many comments here and elsewhere and used hints, to 'polish' my 'annotated version of SRT' a bit.

Now your duty would be to disprove all of my arguments.

But I can assure you, that this is impossible, because some of Einstein's errors were just stupid and obvious.

Like always.

People want to earn their bread somehow and prefer to do it in conditions, which are more pleasant then cleaning toilets or cutting stone.

So, 'good' students are those, who accept what they get told and bad students are those, who ask stupid questions.

Lighting a candle for the forefathers is also wellcome and obedience to the hierarchie required.

...

TH

quote:

"By the time of WWII, the United States had a large population of ethnic Germans. Among residents of the United States in 1940, more than 1.2 million persons had been born in Germany, 5 million had two native-German parents, and 6 million had one native-German parent. Many more had distant German ancestry. During WWII, the United States detained at least 11,000 ethnic Germans, overwhelmingly German nationals between the years 1940 and 1948 in two designated camps at Fort Douglas, Utah, and Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.[3][4] The government examined the cases of German nationals individually, and detained relatively few in internment camps run by the Department of Justice, as related to its responsibilities under the Alien Enemies Act. To a much lesser extent, some ethnic German US citizens were classified as suspect after due process and also detained. Similarly, a small proportion of Italian nationals and Italian Americans were interned in relation to their total population in the US. The United States had allowed immigrants from both Germany and Italy to become naturalized citizens, which many had done by then.

In the early 21st century, Congress considered legislation to study treatment of European Americans during WWII, but it did not pass the House of Representatives. Activists and historians have identified certain injustices against these groups. Unlike Italian Americans and Japanese Americans, German American internees have never received financial compensation or an official apology for these events. "

The mayor flaw was this:

there no ethnic group called 'Germans'.

German is a language and all speakers of that language a collectively called 'Germans'.

The ethncity of Germans is actually ver complicated, since about fourty different ethnic origins had been identified in the genes of people living in Germany.

To called Germans 'an ethnic group' is actually Naziism at it's best.

The US-citizens with roots in Germany were US-citizens only, because in most cases they spoke English only.

Their home country was also not Germany, because Germany was founded in

And German is and was spoken in other countries (other than Germany), too: Switzerland Austria Rumania Russia USA Lchtenstein Italy ...

So, the entire thing was propaganda at it's finest and conducted by a US-president, who came actually from a family of drug dealers and slave traders.

TH

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" Not literally Albert Einstein, but an adequate paraphrase of what he really said.

As for Ockham, his dictum should be taken as an heuristic principle, and no more than that,

Jan

What a pile of it.

Occam, verbatim: "Entia non sunt complicanda praeter necessitatem!"

Als gebildeter Mensch kann man das übersetzen.

Gerhard