A question about the accuracy of science

[jc456]

Pretending to be even stupider than you actually are will not get you off the hook. You claimed that Mamooth's answers to SiModo's question, scientific observations that the warming the world has experienced has been caused by the greenhouse effect acting on human GHG emissions, was not evidence - that observations do not constitute evidence. I have then asked you the simple question "what constitutes evidence"? You seem to be doing your very best to avoid answering.

FRANK, WHAT CONSTITUTES EVIDENCE?

Evidence, how hot 120PPM of CO2 is. You got it?

 

[Crick]

Evidence that you deserve anything from me. You got it?

 

[jc456]

Evidence that you deserve anything from me. You got it?

Didn't you ask the question? I answered. What's your move? Leave?

 

[whitehall]

A couple of years ago the most important scientific tool ever created by mankind ....was off by a couple of degrees and blurry. The freaking Hubble telescope was a multi billion dollar scientific endeavor and they ground the glass wrong. If the big stuff can be off by a couple of degrees what happens to minor stuff that is funded just as heavily (but for a different reason) by the federal government?

 

[Old Rocks]

Yes, the private contractor that NASA hired should never have been allowed to bid on that project. They had been on a 'do not use' list for a long time for similiar failures. Political influence got them the job.

However, since you must bring this up as evidence that scientists and the government are failure, Voyager is still sending back data. long, long after the it was supposed to have expired. And our Mars Rover, and Curiosity are both well beyond the period for which they were supposed the have worked.

Everything that we do today involves technology the scientists have developed. Yet we have people like you that constantly denigrate them. Perhaps is because you cannot compete with their intellect.

 

[flacaltenn]

Yes, the private contractor that NASA hired should never have been allowed to bid on that project. They had been on a 'do not use' list for a long time for similiar failures. Political influence got them the job.

However, since you must bring this up as evidence that scientists and the government are failure, Voyager is still sending back data. long, long after the it was supposed to have expired. And our Mars Rover, and Curiosity are both well beyond the period for which they were supposed the have worked.

Everything that we do today involves technology the scientists have developed. Yet we have people like you that constantly denigrate them. Perhaps is because you cannot compete with their intellect.

We are probably never leaving this planet again because we've LOST the engineering skills that made Voyager such a worthwhile endeavor. A lot of this (and possibly the Hubble SNAFU) are because of CAD tools and modeling that is never "sanity checked" with a calculator and a pencil. E.G. -- Excel doesn't make you smarter or more efficient -- it INCREASES the chance of errors -- UNLESS you recognize results that are outside the realm of possibility by estimation or experience with the math..

 

[flacaltenn]

Your crap about an AGW hypothesis is just that: crap. And EVERYONE here knows it. I told you you could quote the dictionary. My hope was to show you how wrong it was to state that observations weren't evidence. Do you now understand now how wrong that is? Your lab experiment showing 120 ppm increasing the warming of the planet would consist of nothing but observations.

Actually CrickHam -- I believe CFrank is correct. Evidence is not a generality. It is specific to proving a certain hypothesis. This is true in law as well. Evidence is inadmissible unless it address the charges in the case. It has to have RELEVANCY. Just like posts in Zone2...

So it would be great if you stated the GW Central Theorems for us -- so we could determine the relevancy of any evidence requested or submitted.

I can cheat here and tell you that one of the MAIN tenets of GW theory -- the one that states there is a "tipping point" past which any temperature forcing will IRREVERSIBLY destroy the planet --- Well that Tenet of Theory is gonna be REAL HARD to provide Exhibit A or Exhibit B... Dontchathimk?

 

[Old Rocks]

Yes, the private contractor that NASA hired should never have been allowed to bid on that project. They had been on a 'do not use' list for a long time for similiar failures. Political influence got them the job.

However, since you must bring this up as evidence that scientists and the government are failure, Voyager is still sending back data. long, long after the it was supposed to have expired. And our Mars Rover, and Curiosity are both well beyond the period for which they were supposed the have worked.

Everything that we do today involves technology the scientists have developed. Yet we have people like you that constantly denigrate them. Perhaps is because you cannot compete with their intellect.

We are probably never leaving this planet again because we've LOST the engineering skills that made Voyager such a worthwhile endeavor. A lot of this (and possibly the Hubble SNAFU) are because of CAD tools and modeling that is never "sanity checked" with a calculator and a pencil. E.G. -- Excel doesn't make you smarter or more efficient -- it INCREASES the chance of errors -- UNLESS you recognize results that are outside the realm of possibility by estimation or experience with the math..

Well, I still have my fancy sliderule. LOL

 

[flacaltenn]

Yes, the private contractor that NASA hired should never have been allowed to bid on that project. They had been on a 'do not use' list for a long time for similiar failures. Political influence got them the job.

However, since you must bring this up as evidence that scientists and the government are failure, Voyager is still sending back data. long, long after the it was supposed to have expired. And our Mars Rover, and Curiosity are both well beyond the period for which they were supposed the have worked.

Everything that we do today involves technology the scientists have developed. Yet we have people like you that constantly denigrate them. Perhaps is because you cannot compete with their intellect.

We are probably never leaving this planet again because we've LOST the engineering skills that made Voyager such a worthwhile endeavor. A lot of this (and possibly the Hubble SNAFU) are because of CAD tools and modeling that is never "sanity checked" with a calculator and a pencil. E.G. -- Excel doesn't make you smarter or more efficient -- it INCREASES the chance of errors -- UNLESS you recognize results that are outside the realm of possibility by estimation or experience with the math..

Well, I still have my fancy sliderule. LOL

Good idea in case of an EMP attack. The slide rule people will rule the world.. Science will be MUCH more accurate with only a couple decimal places..

 

[Searcher44]

Many people here bring up instances in which the majority opinions of scientists in a number of fields have been found incorrect. Peptic ulcers were once thought to be caused by acidic food. The universe's expansion was once thought to be slowing. These posters have used these sorts of instances to argue that we have no reason to be influenced by the fact that the vast majority of climate scientists in the world today believe that the world is still warming and that the dominant cause since at least the middle of the last century is human activity. They believe that history tells them that we have no reason to trust such opinions - that their universality simply makes them more suspect.

So, here is the question. Let us look at all the positions held by all the world's scientists since the development of the modern scientific method. If we rule to the best of our knowledge on which of those positions have since been shown to be incorrect, will we find that individual scientists or small groups of scientists have been wrong LESS often than majorities, or MORE often wrong.

The answer, of course, is that there is a very strong and direct correlation between the numbers of scientists (percent or absolute) who hold a given position and the likelihood that it is found correct - that it is not falsified. Thus the logic of rejecting the common opinion for that of the lone wolf fails its most basic test.

The Earth is getting warmer and the dominant cause is human GHG emissions and deforestation. The effects of that warming will be consequential and a committed human response is required.

I lean towards accepting the reality of unnatural climate change happening now and that the "the dominant cause is human GHG emissions and deforestation. The effects of that warming will be consequential and a committed human response is required" I'm swayed by the commitment of so many scientists to that paradigm but I don't think I have the same level of confidence that you have. For instance the discovery in 1998 that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating overturned the great majority of scientist's belief in a slowing of expansion. Majority opinion in science is worth zero in empirical terms. It cannot be used as evidence for the theory in other words, correct? Also "since the development of the scientific method" is a very subjective characterization of some period in time. Did you have, say, a particular decade in mind?
Karl Popper was still tinkering with the definition of the method in the first half of the 20th century. He's probably the most highly regarded philosopher of science in history.
Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method" was published in 1975 and released in a new edition in 2010. If you're trying to build a case for an idea that people are attacking with any potential retort, even resorting to ridiculous conspiracy theories and having counter-intuitive success with such fiction, I'm wondering if we should give them ammunition by using wobbly unscientific arguments even if those arguments are perfectly logical.

 

[Searcher44]

Yes, the private contractor that NASA hired should never have been allowed to bid on that project. They had been on a 'do not use' list for a long time for similiar failures. Political influence got them the job.

However, since you must bring this up as evidence that scientists and the government are failure, Voyager is still sending back data. long, long after the it was supposed to have expired. And our Mars Rover, and Curiosity are both well beyond the period for which they were supposed the have worked.

Everything that we do today involves technology the scientists have developed. Yet we have people like you that constantly denigrate them. Perhaps is because you cannot compete with their intellect.

We are probably never leaving this planet again because we've LOST the engineering skills that made Voyager such a worthwhile endeavor. A lot of this (and possibly the Hubble SNAFU) are because of CAD tools and modeling that is never "sanity checked" with a calculator and a pencil. E.G. -- Excel doesn't make you smarter or more efficient -- it INCREASES the chance of errors -- UNLESS you recognize results that are outside the realm of possibility by estimation or experience with the math..

I'm not sure that this Apollo story from NASA supports your proposition but it is a fascinating story about the early days of integrating computers with complex technology, from Wired,

Her Code Got Humans on the Moon—And Invented Software Itself


MARGARET HAMILTON WASN’T supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math.

But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly—and digitally—possible.

As a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual; but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4-year-old Lauren
slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo’s command module computer.

“People used to say to me, ‘How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?’” Hamilton remembers. But she loved the arcane novelty of her job. She liked the camaraderie—the after-work drinks at the MIT faculty club; the geek jokes, like saying she was “going to branch left minus” around the hallway. Outsiders didn’t have a clue. But at the lab, she says, “I was one of the guys.”

Then, as now, “the guys” dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today’s diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.

As Hamilton’s career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton says.

This was a decade before Microsoft and nearly 50 years before Marc Andreessen would observe that software is, in fact, “eating the world.” The world didn’t think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days. The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn’t even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. “Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget.” Not at first, anyhow.

Margaret Hamilton inside a mock-up of the Command Module
But as the Apollo project unfolded, the centrality of software in accomplishing the mission started to become clear. In 1965, Hamilton became responsible for the onboard flight software on the Apollo computers. It was an exciting time, and the US was depending on the work that she was doing. But sometimes the pressure kept Hamilton up at night. Once, after a late-night party, she rushed back to the computer lab to correct a piece of code she’d suddenly realized was flawed. “I was always imagining headlines in the newspapers, and they would point back to how it happened, and it would point back to me.”

By mid-1968, more than 400 people were working on Apollo’s software, because software was how the US was going to win the race to the moon. As it turned out, of course, software was going to help the world do so much more. As Hamilton and her colleagues were programming the Apollo spacecraft, they were also hatching what would become a $400 billion industry.

For Hamilton, programming meant punching holes in stacks of punch cards, which would be processed overnight in batches on a giant Honeywell mainframe computer that simulated the Apollo lander’s work. “We had to simulate everything before it flew,” Hamilton remembers. Once the code was solid, it would be shipped off to a nearby Raytheon facility where a group of women, expert seamstresses known to the Apollo program as the “Little Old Ladies,” threaded copper wires through magnetic rings (a wire going through a core was a 1; a wire going around the core was a 0). Forget about RAM or disk drives; on Apollo, memory was literally hardwired and very nearly indestructible.

Apollo flights carried two near-identical machines: one used in the lunar module—the Eagle that landed on the moon—and the other for the command module that carried the astronauts to and from Earth. These 70-pound Apollo computers were portable computers unlike any other. Conceived by MIT engineers such as Hal Laning and Hamilton’s boss, Dick Batton, it was one of the first important computers to use integrated circuits rather than transistors. As Mindell tells the story, it was the first computerized onboard navigation system designed to be operated by humans but with “fly-by-wire” autopilot technology—a precursor to the computerized navigation systems that are now standard on jetliners.
The computer stored more than 12,000 “words” in its permanent memory—the copper “ropes” threaded by its temporary, erasable memory. “It was the first time that an important computer had been in a spacecraft and given a lot of responsibility for the mission,” says Don Eyles, who worked on the lunar module code while at MIT’s IL. “We showed that that could be done. We did it in what today seems an incredibly small amount of memory and very slow computation speed.” Without it, Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have made it to the moon. And without the software written by Hamilton, Eyles, and the team of MIT engineers, the computer would have been a dud.

This became clear on July 20, 1969, just minutes before Apollo 11 touched down on the Sea of Tranquility. Because of what Apollo software engineer Don Eyles has termed a“documentation error,” the Apollo computer started spitting out worrying error messages during this critical phase of the mission. But here’s where the technical arguments won by Hamilton and others saved the day. The error messages were popping up because the computer was being overwhelmed, tasked with doing a series of unnecessary calculations when, in fact, it was most needed to land the module on the surface of the moon. Back in Houston, engineers knew that because of Apollo’s unique asynchronous processing, the computer would focus on the task at hand—landing the Eagle on the Sea of Tranquility. When the software realized it didn’t have enough room to do all the functions it was supposed to be doing, it went through its error detection process and focused on the highest priority job, Hamilton says.

‘That would never happen’
One day, Lauren was playing with the MIT command module simulator’s display-and-keyboard unit, nicknamed the DSKY (dis-key). As she toyed with the keyboard, an error message popped up. Lauren had crashed the simulator by somehow launching a prelaunch program called P01 while the simulator was in midflight. There was no reason an astronaut would ever do this, but nonetheless, Hamilton wanted to add code to prevent the crash. That idea was overruled by NASA. “We had been told many times that astronauts would not make any mistakes,” she says. “They were trained to be perfect.” So instead, Hamilton created a program note—an add-on to the program’s documentation that would be available to NASA engineers and the astronauts: “Do not select P01 during flight,” it said. Hamilton wanted to add error-checking code to the Apollo system that would prevent this from messing up the systems. But that seemed excessive to her higher-ups. “Everyone said, ‘That would never happen,’” Hamilton remembers.

But it did. Right around Christmas 1968—five days into the historic Apollo 8 flight, which brought astronauts to the moon for the first-ever manned orbit—the astronaut Jim Lovell inadvertently selected P01 during flight. Hamilton was in the second-floor conference room at the Instrumentation Laboratory when the call came in from Houston. Launching the P01 program had wiped out all the navigation data Lovell had been collecting. That was a problem. Without that data, the Apollo computer wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get the astronauts home. Hamilton and the MIT coders needed to come up with a fix; and it needed to be perfect. After spending nine hours poring through the 8-inch-thick program listing on the table in front of them, they had a plan. Houston would upload new navigational data. Everything was going to be OK. Thanks to Hamilton—and Lauren—the Apollo astronauts came home.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Your crap about an AGW hypothesis is just that: crap. And EVERYONE here knows it. I told you you could quote the dictionary. My hope was to show you how wrong it was to state that observations weren't evidence. Do you now understand now how wrong that is? Your lab experiment showing 120 ppm increasing the warming of the planet would consist of nothing but observations.

So what is the AGW Hypothesis?

 

[Old Rocks]

Very simple, Frankie Boy, you add GHGs to the atmosphere, the atmosphere warms.

 

[elektra]

Very simple, Frankie Boy, you add GHGs to the atmosphere, the atmosphere warms.

yet there is zero proof, just bombastic lies

 

[Old Rocks]

John Tyndall : Feature Articles

Elektra, that above is proof of your ignorance.

 

[Dot Com]

Ah, philosophy of science questions.

First rule of thumb. If someone quotes Popper or Feymann non-ironically to back their position, you're almost certainly looking at a pseudoscience crank, as that's a favored tactic of those who have no evidence for their own position.

Popper had some problems. He said that falsifiability defines science. To show the problems with that, consider ...

"Vaccines do not cause autism."

Now show what could falsify that.

It's pretty much impossible to absolutely falsify that statement with any realistic data. Yet it's still clearly science.

Real science is more defined by coherence, consilience, and consensus.

Coherence. Internally consistent. Real climate science is coherent. Denialism cobbles a dozen conflicting conspiracy theories together.

Consilience. Multiple independent evidence streams converging on the same result. Real climate science has that, which is why it's so peculiar that deniers think obsessively nitpicking a single minor point means anything.

Consensus. Scientists share a common set of theories, observations and models, and can talk to each other, find flaws in any points, and work forward from it. Real climate science has that. Denialism has no consensus of its own, just a religious belief that requires hating the opposition.

"yabut do an experiment in your gararge!!!" is the usual retort to that from the resident deniers. Sad indeed

 

[flacaltenn]

Yes, the private contractor that NASA hired should never have been allowed to bid on that project. They had been on a 'do not use' list for a long time for similiar failures. Political influence got them the job.

However, since you must bring this up as evidence that scientists and the government are failure, Voyager is still sending back data. long, long after the it was supposed to have expired. And our Mars Rover, and Curiosity are both well beyond the period for which they were supposed the have worked.

Everything that we do today involves technology the scientists have developed. Yet we have people like you that constantly denigrate them. Perhaps is because you cannot compete with their intellect.

We are probably never leaving this planet again because we've LOST the engineering skills that made Voyager such a worthwhile endeavor. A lot of this (and possibly the Hubble SNAFU) are because of CAD tools and modeling that is never "sanity checked" with a calculator and a pencil. E.G. -- Excel doesn't make you smarter or more efficient -- it INCREASES the chance of errors -- UNLESS you recognize results that are outside the realm of possibility by estimation or experience with the math..

I'm not sure that this Apollo story from NASA supports your proposition but it is a fascinating story about the early days of integrating computers with complex technology, from Wired,

Her Code Got Humans on the Moon—And Invented Software Itself


MARGARET HAMILTON WASN’T supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math.

But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly—and digitally—possible.

As a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual; but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4-year-old Lauren
slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo’s command module computer.

“People used to say to me, ‘How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?’” Hamilton remembers. But she loved the arcane novelty of her job. She liked the camaraderie—the after-work drinks at the MIT faculty club; the geek jokes, like saying she was “going to branch left minus” around the hallway. Outsiders didn’t have a clue. But at the lab, she says, “I was one of the guys.”

Then, as now, “the guys” dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today’s diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.

As Hamilton’s career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton says.

This was a decade before Microsoft and nearly 50 years before Marc Andreessen would observe that software is, in fact, “eating the world.” The world didn’t think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days. The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn’t even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. “Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget.” Not at first, anyhow.

Margaret Hamilton inside a mock-up of the Command Module
But as the Apollo project unfolded, the centrality of software in accomplishing the mission started to become clear. In 1965, Hamilton became responsible for the onboard flight software on the Apollo computers. It was an exciting time, and the US was depending on the work that she was doing. But sometimes the pressure kept Hamilton up at night. Once, after a late-night party, she rushed back to the computer lab to correct a piece of code she’d suddenly realized was flawed. “I was always imagining headlines in the newspapers, and they would point back to how it happened, and it would point back to me.”

By mid-1968, more than 400 people were working on Apollo’s software, because software was how the US was going to win the race to the moon. As it turned out, of course, software was going to help the world do so much more. As Hamilton and her colleagues were programming the Apollo spacecraft, they were also hatching what would become a $400 billion industry.

For Hamilton, programming meant punching holes in stacks of punch cards, which would be processed overnight in batches on a giant Honeywell mainframe computer that simulated the Apollo lander’s work. “We had to simulate everything before it flew,” Hamilton remembers. Once the code was solid, it would be shipped off to a nearby Raytheon facility where a group of women, expert seamstresses known to the Apollo program as the “Little Old Ladies,” threaded copper wires through magnetic rings (a wire going through a core was a 1; a wire going around the core was a 0). Forget about RAM or disk drives; on Apollo, memory was literally hardwired and very nearly indestructible.

Apollo flights carried two near-identical machines: one used in the lunar module—the Eagle that landed on the moon—and the other for the command module that carried the astronauts to and from Earth. These 70-pound Apollo computers were portable computers unlike any other. Conceived by MIT engineers such as Hal Laning and Hamilton’s boss, Dick Batton, it was one of the first important computers to use integrated circuits rather than transistors. As Mindell tells the story, it was the first computerized onboard navigation system designed to be operated by humans but with “fly-by-wire” autopilot technology—a precursor to the computerized navigation systems that are now standard on jetliners.
The computer stored more than 12,000 “words” in its permanent memory—the copper “ropes” threaded by its temporary, erasable memory. “It was the first time that an important computer had been in a spacecraft and given a lot of responsibility for the mission,” says Don Eyles, who worked on the lunar module code while at MIT’s IL. “We showed that that could be done. We did it in what today seems an incredibly small amount of memory and very slow computation speed.” Without it, Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have made it to the moon. And without the software written by Hamilton, Eyles, and the team of MIT engineers, the computer would have been a dud.

This became clear on July 20, 1969, just minutes before Apollo 11 touched down on the Sea of Tranquility. Because of what Apollo software engineer Don Eyles has termed a“documentation error,” the Apollo computer started spitting out worrying error messages during this critical phase of the mission. But here’s where the technical arguments won by Hamilton and others saved the day. The error messages were popping up because the computer was being overwhelmed, tasked with doing a series of unnecessary calculations when, in fact, it was most needed to land the module on the surface of the moon. Back in Houston, engineers knew that because of Apollo’s unique asynchronous processing, the computer would focus on the task at hand—landing the Eagle on the Sea of Tranquility. When the software realized it didn’t have enough room to do all the functions it was supposed to be doing, it went through its error detection process and focused on the highest priority job, Hamilton says.

‘That would never happen’
One day, Lauren was playing with the MIT command module simulator’s display-and-keyboard unit, nicknamed the DSKY (dis-key). As she toyed with the keyboard, an error message popped up. Lauren had crashed the simulator by somehow launching a prelaunch program called P01 while the simulator was in midflight. There was no reason an astronaut would ever do this, but nonetheless, Hamilton wanted to add code to prevent the crash. That idea was overruled by NASA. “We had been told many times that astronauts would not make any mistakes,” she says. “They were trained to be perfect.” So instead, Hamilton created a program note—an add-on to the program’s documentation that would be available to NASA engineers and the astronauts: “Do not select P01 during flight,” it said. Hamilton wanted to add error-checking code to the Apollo system that would prevent this from messing up the systems. But that seemed excessive to her higher-ups. “Everyone said, ‘That would never happen,’” Hamilton remembers.

But it did. Right around Christmas 1968—five days into the historic Apollo 8 flight, which brought astronauts to the moon for the first-ever manned orbit—the astronaut Jim Lovell inadvertently selected P01 during flight. Hamilton was in the second-floor conference room at the Instrumentation Laboratory when the call came in from Houston. Launching the P01 program had wiped out all the navigation data Lovell had been collecting. That was a problem. Without that data, the Apollo computer wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get the astronauts home. Hamilton and the MIT coders needed to come up with a fix; and it needed to be perfect. After spending nine hours poring through the 8-inch-thick program listing on the table in front of them, they had a plan. Houston would upload new navigational data. Everything was going to be OK. Thanks to Hamilton—and Lauren—the Apollo astronauts came home.

What a great backstory.. Those were the days BEFORE "reusable code" and heavy dependence on hardware supplied "drivers".. Every line of code for that mission on all those primitive computers was HEAVILY checked and tested.. You cannot do that today.

As an aside --- A friend of mine OWNS the KSC Apollo Mission Computers. Bought them surplus. It's freakin' amazing how little they had to work with..

 

[IsaacNewton]

Probably the easiest thing to do if you have a problem with science of scientists is give up everything they have brought to your life.

Go sleep out back on the ground, no light, no weapons, forage for your food, no electricity, no car, no computer (turn it off now), no phone, and if you get sick let the local medicine man heal you with a chant.

Otherwise read the EULA that comes with modern life:
"By using any of this technology, medicine, or modern convenience you are whole-heartedly thanking every human being called 'scientist' that studied something and made it work better for humanity."

"If you don't accept this agreement click 'no' and do not download or use this software."

 

[jc456]

Very simple, Frankie Boy, you add GHGs to the atmosphere, the atmosphere warms.

And, we've been asking for how warm and you got crickets

 

[jc456]

Probably the easiest thing to do if you have a problem with science of scientists is give up everything they have brought to your life.

Go sleep out back on the ground, no light, no weapons, forage for your food, no electricity, no car, no computer (turn it off now), no phone, and if you get sick let the local medicine man heal you with a chant.

Otherwise read the EULA that comes with modern life:
"By using any of this technology, medicine, or modern convenience you are whole-heartedly thanking every human being called 'scientist' that studied something and made it work better for humanity."

"If you don't accept this agreement click 'no' and do not download or use this software."

So you're saying ignore other scientists who disagree? Like Judith Curry? Well that ain't happening pal!