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The stark dark humor is just a way to cope with the crushing seriousness of reality. For instance, our undergrad reactor thermohydraulics class's professor was
by cjslep 9y ago
The stark dark humor is just a way to cope with the crushing seriousness of reality. For instance, our undergrad reactor thermohydraulics class's professor was notoriously strict because there's just no tolerance for failing to do the math for cooling a reactor. But one of the very few ways he would be humorous would be to call a meltdown an "uncontrollable rearrangement of geometry" with a wink and a nod precisely to both convey the seriousness of the issue and to use the needlessly absurd technical language to make us more empathetic to the common person, and therefore make us more readily internalize the seriousness.
- solotronics 9y agoa datacenter exploded due to fume build up in the backup power fuel tanks and we called it a rapid expansion of air
- lb1lf 9y agoDoesn't Elon Musk refer to it as a RUD - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly - event whenever a launch vehicle opts out of existence? I love these euphemisms.
- jballanc 9y agoNot just Elon Musk, that's a fairly common "euphemism" in the world of rocketry.
- lb1lf 9y agoIn my line of work - subsea handling equipment - the going phrase when things go really, really bad appears to be "EEE - Entropy-Enhancing Event" Looks much better in the post mortem reports than the equivalent "Sh-t just blew up on us!!!"
- user5994461 9y agoActually, that's how an explosion is defined in the dictionaries, it's a rapid expansion of air.
- Retric 9y agoNo, I actually looked at a few and Air is not part of the definition. Which is reasonable as a supernova is a large explosion without Air being involved.
- sturgill 9y agoI once sat through a presentation by a county medical examiner. Flipping through his slides, he made a remark that has stuck with me 20 years later: "this man died of what we in the industry call 'acute lead poisoning.'" The individual was a gunshot victim.
- Waterluvian 9y agoMy favourite euphemism comes from the Simpsons: "Meltdown?! No that's one of those buzz words. We like to call it a temporary fission surplus."
- Doxin 9y agoNot too far off from "power excursion"
- userbinator 9y agoI've noticed (aircraft) pilots are the same --- or at least the few I've met. Very very serious at work, but the exact opposite outside.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eternauta3k 9y ago> our undergrad reactor thermohydraulics class's professor was notoriously strict because there's just no tolerance for failing to do the math for cooling a reactor. How is this different from calculating any other design?
- kurthr 9y agoBecause, in a "normal" case of a large suspension bridge failing, you might kill 20-30, if a bus was going over as it failed. Fixing it might cost $Bs. In the case of a nuclear meltdown (or "temporary fission surplus") you might acutely impact 10-100s of million people and significantly shorten the lives of several 10s of thousand (see Chernobyl). Costs might range into the many $100Bs.
- rdiddly 9y agoIf structural engineering were a relaxed and informal field with a lot of trial and error and no entry requirements, your example we be a good one.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rdiddly 9y agoZero loss of life is considered acceptable in any non-military field of engineering or design that I'm aware of. (With the possible exception of automotive and highway design, where we have a huge blind spot, but that's a topic for another day.) Bridge collapses and nuclear accidents both tend to produce non-zero loss of life, and be considered shall-we-say "bad." So they are treated exactly the same by their respective fields; namely, zero such incidents are tolerated, allowed or expected. Which means your example doesn't demonstrate a difference or answer the question "How is this different from calculating any other design?" Nobody allows collapsing a bridge just because it "only" kills 30 people. (By the way, the Golden Gate is about 8,000 feet long, a car is about 25 feet long, let's say 30 including buffer space, and there are 6 lanes. So if traffic is bumper-to-bumper, everybody is in their car alone, and there are no trucks or buses, that means there are about 1,600 people on the bridge. More if there are buses and carpools, less if there are trucks.) If you wanted to show a difference, you would have to pick a field of design where catastrophic failures are tolerated and calculation accuracy isn't such a big deal, such as the shitty web apps we all work on. Unfortunately you picked structural engineering, where as far as I know they require 6 years of school, 4 years of mentoring and two all-day exams just for licensure, at least two engineers have to sign off on every design, and both of those engineers are held personally liable (read financially and professionally ruined) for any negligence resulting in an accident. It's a non-illustrative example.
- closeparen 9y agoIs nuclear safety actually dependent on individual people not making calculation errors? Because that might be the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. I’d hope that many people would have to screw up in the same way for a mistake to cause real-world harm.
- mtreis86 9y agoThese things happen regularly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1445_web.pdf http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1445_web.pd... http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Fairewinds_ContainmentFailures_Report_12-21-10.pdf http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Fairewinds_...
- walshemj 9y agoI seem to recall something called a WCA Whole Core Accident back when I worked in the Nuclear group at BHRA :-)