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Having worked at Yahoo, Nokia and now Amazon, I always am amazed at how much Machiavellian scheming is assigned to what is many times a bunch of techies making

Having worked at Yahoo, Nokia and now Amazon, I always am amazed at how much Machiavellian scheming is assigned to what is many times a bunch of techies making stuff up as they go along. Having made the sausage, I can't tell you how many times I've read some news and thought, "If they only knew." The financial crisis made me realize that this is pretty much true for most areas except, I hope, for bridge-builders and rocket scientists.

btilly 8y ago
Oh, the rocket scientists made it up as well. See https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... for an entertaining and enlightening history. All sorts of things, such as rocket fuel that was produced in large quantities and put into storage containers before discovering that after sitting on its own for a few years, it became dreadfully unstable. My favorite "WTF" experiment was a calculation that adding mercury to rocket fuel would result in better thrust. This went all the way to a full rocket test, proving that the calculation was absolutely correct. Then the line of research finally got abandoned because spewing horrible poisons into the air is not something that we want to do...
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Rockets seem to have all sorts of other toxic materials in them though: hydrazine comes to mind.
  - mmt 8y ago
    Presumably, when hydrazine is "burned", what's spewed into the air from the end of the rocket is relatively benign. With mercury as an input, there's no way of avoiding spewing mercury compounds, which have a much lower likelihood of being benign.
  - btilly 8y ago
    Yes, rockets do. However most of the really toxic stuff becomes much less toxic after it reacts. Mercury by contrast is bad, stays bad once it reacts with something, and once it gets in the environment quickly concentrates up the food chain to give you maximum odds of experiencing just how bad it is. Usual lethal doses are 1-4 grams, and occasionally less. See https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/mercury-compounds.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents... for more on that. Mercury compounds generally don't get better than that, but they do get worse. For example 0.3 grams of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury causes a bad death, and famously goes through things like latex gloves. Filling a rocket with 30% mercury by volume may make the rocket go faster, but spewing metric tonnes of mercury all over your environment at each launch is..not recommended.
- smsm42 8y ago
  I just saw the two first photos and I already feel I'll like this book. Good job for the authors.
  - hyperman1 8y ago
    Now read the footnote on page 171, about the little Dracula Types. Only Pratchett made a book with better footnotes than this one. Oh, and these aren't fiction. In fact, the whole book had a tendency to first severely stretch the brain. When understanding finally happens, you go OMG WTF what did I just read?
    - btilly 8y ago
      Wait, what? (Reads) ...And if you, gentle reader, have never seen a nervous rocket mechanic, complete with monkey suit, being buzzed by nine thousand demented bats and trying to beat them off with a shovel, there is something missing from your experience. (The omitted part explains how there came to be nine thousand demented bats attacking said rocket mechanic.) Oh. Yes. Indeed there is. He also has a marvelously understated style. Read between the lines of the following, I was against describing the nature of the inhibitor in the openly published specifications, since the inhibition was such an unlikely— though simple — trick that it might well have been kept secret for some time. I had friends in the intelligence community, and asked them to try to learn, discreetly, whether or not the trick was known on the other side of the iron curtain. The answer came back, with remarkable speed, that it was not, and that, in fact, the Soviet HF manufacture was in trouble, and that the director of the same was vacationing in Siberia. So I protested violently and at length, but the Air Force was running the show and I was overruled. And when the specs were published, the gaff was blown for good. The inhibitor in question was needed to keep nitric acid in storage and one can only imagine how unpleasant Siberia was as a vacation spot...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lliamander 8y ago
"The true optimists are the conspiracy theorists, because they believe the people in charge actually have a plan."
tomatotomato37 8y ago
I'm always amused how everything created on the market is most of the time thought of by their creators as some unholy kludge that by all purposes should not work at all.

btilly 8y ago

Oh, the rocket scientists made it up as well. See https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... for an entertaining and enlightening history. All sorts of things, such as rocket fuel that was produced in large quantities and put into storage containers before discovering that after sitting on its own for a few years, it became dreadfully unstable. My favorite "WTF" experiment was a calculation that adding mercury to rocket fuel would result in better thrust. This went all the way to a full rocket test, proving that the calculation was absolutely correct. Then the line of research finally got abandoned because spewing horrible poisons into the air is not something that we want to do...

saagarjha 8y ago
Rockets seem to have all sorts of other toxic materials in them though: hydrazine comes to mind.
- mmt 8y ago
  Presumably, when hydrazine is "burned", what's spewed into the air from the end of the rocket is relatively benign. With mercury as an input, there's no way of avoiding spewing mercury compounds, which have a much lower likelihood of being benign.
- btilly 8y ago
  Yes, rockets do. However most of the really toxic stuff becomes much less toxic after it reacts. Mercury by contrast is bad, stays bad once it reacts with something, and once it gets in the environment quickly concentrates up the food chain to give you maximum odds of experiencing just how bad it is. Usual lethal doses are 1-4 grams, and occasionally less. See https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/mercury-compounds.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents... for more on that. Mercury compounds generally don't get better than that, but they do get worse. For example 0.3 grams of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury causes a bad death, and famously goes through things like latex gloves. Filling a rocket with 30% mercury by volume may make the rocket go faster, but spewing metric tonnes of mercury all over your environment at each launch is..not recommended.
smsm42 8y ago
I just saw the two first photos and I already feel I'll like this book. Good job for the authors.
- hyperman1 8y ago
  Now read the footnote on page 171, about the little Dracula Types. Only Pratchett made a book with better footnotes than this one. Oh, and these aren't fiction. In fact, the whole book had a tendency to first severely stretch the brain. When understanding finally happens, you go OMG WTF what did I just read?
  - btilly 8y ago
    Wait, what? (Reads) ...And if you, gentle reader, have never seen a nervous rocket mechanic, complete with monkey suit, being buzzed by nine thousand demented bats and trying to beat them off with a shovel, there is something missing from your experience. (The omitted part explains how there came to be nine thousand demented bats attacking said rocket mechanic.) Oh. Yes. Indeed there is. He also has a marvelously understated style. Read between the lines of the following, I was against describing the nature of the inhibitor in the openly published specifications, since the inhibition was such an unlikely— though simple — trick that it might well have been kept secret for some time. I had friends in the intelligence community, and asked them to try to learn, discreetly, whether or not the trick was known on the other side of the iron curtain. The answer came back, with remarkable speed, that it was not, and that, in fact, the Soviet HF manufacture was in trouble, and that the director of the same was vacationing in Siberia. So I protested violently and at length, but the Air Force was running the show and I was overruled. And when the specs were published, the gaff was blown for good. The inhibitor in question was needed to keep nitric acid in storage and one can only imagine how unpleasant Siberia was as a vacation spot...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lliamander 8y ago

"The true optimists are the conspiracy theorists, because they believe the people in charge actually have a plan."

tomatotomato37 8y ago

I'm always amused how everything created on the market is most of the time thought of by their creators as some unholy kludge that by all purposes should not work at all.