27 ms·

Feynman mentions the physicist Julian Webb in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" [1]. The staff at Oak Ridge were generally kept in the dark about their role i

• AceJohnny2 8y ago
  Offtopic, but a couple pages later is the most memorable passage of the whole book to me, a software engineer: (about setting up the IBM machines to perform calculations for the Manhattan Project) "Well, Mr Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. [...] After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly-- while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arctangent X [...] Absolutely useless! We had tables of arc-tangents. But you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease-- the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease." I try to keep this in mind when I'm working. I must admit I'm not very good at avoiding that disease.
  • pytyper2 8y ago
    I'm 90% disease, 10% real work. Edit: But the 10% real work, I work real real hard :)
    • kbenson 8y ago
      Well, the good thing is that generally that 90% of disease can make that real work much more efficient. After a few years of 90% disease, you're probably able to knock out the equivalent of at least 60%-80% of real work in just that 10% of time.
    • int_19h 8y ago
      I wonder if anybody has ever tried to do a study on where "peak efficiency" lies on this spectrum (i.e. how much do you need to allow people to goof around, such that the subset of their time they spend on being productive yield the most value).
  • abraae 8y ago
    Very familiar with that disease. I admire people who have immunity.
  • felipemnoa 8y ago
    >>I try to keep this in mind when I'm working. I must admit I'm not very good at avoiding that disease. It is a disease in the same way that a painter or writer has a disease where he cannot stop painting or writing. Frankly, I think those that have it should count themselves among the lucky ones.
    • nikanj 8y ago
      I think he was talking about procrasti-coding. “Should be working on X, but really captivated by a well-defined and elegant Z instead” Printing arctan tables sounds like a seminal example of a Advent of Code kind of problem, which have been known to nerd snipe countless programmers.
      • 8y ago
• mcguire 8y ago
  Wasn't that the trip where Feynman discovered they were stacking radioactive materials against the same wall in two storage rooms and were in danger of achieving criticality?
• code_duck 8y ago
  If you review the safety and environmental procedures and precautions for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, and the US military and federal government in general, they were rather lax through the 70s or 90s depending on your perspective. The scientists at Los Alamos hardly seemed to understand how dangerous are the chemicals they worked with - all of the wastewater was dumped untreated into the pond in the center of town until 1962. Same with all the water from the world’s first plutonium milling facility - dumped untreated into the desert. That created a pollutant plume ~550 feet deep. All of the waste from the Manhattan project (plutonium, uranium, beryllium, lead, PCBs, solvents, radioactive rubble of all sorts) was put into unlined landfills in Los Alamos with little documentation. This happens to be upstream from 90% of the population of New Mexico, on sandy soils 2-5 miles from the largest river in the region.