Comments for sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/post/humble-pi

Comment #4437

2021-02-20T00:21:46Z

I wonder if you could have held them to the 0.85% offer. Maybe a lawyer could have made it stick. But then again, the lawyer would no doubt have taken more than the difference in fees. :(

Comment #4436

2021-02-19T23:22:14Z

I received notice about a CD renewal and the offer was for .850%. I had checked online and knew it was not correct, but called. He told me the renewal rate was a "special" of .2% rather than what had been advertised online as .1%. I said that .2 % was fine, unless he wanted to give me what their letter had offered me, which was .85%. He said no this is a special, a much better rate. I repeated what I said, and he still didn't get it. Sigh...

Comment #4435

2021-02-19T21:41:57Z

Thanks, Kathy. Great stories.

Comment #4434

2021-02-19T21:32:48Z

About the Swiss cheese model - if you read Lovell's book about the Apollo 13 disaster, he makes it clear that the problem was caused by the combination of many errors, no one of which alone would have been a serious problem.

Comment #4433

2021-02-19T21:30:39Z

When Gaunce was stuck in the Navy, he was in charge of the computer geeks on the Wainwright, which underwent a major overhaul in Gitmo. Afterwards, they were trying out the new gun-shooting software and realized they could not hit any of the overhead targets. Absolutely none! Gaunce read through the code and realized there was a factor of two error in the targeting software. This was easy to fix and solved the problem. But it would have affected a whole class of ships getting the new software. The difficulty was convincing the higher-ups of the problem. His commanding officer sent a message to the relevant people and then waited for many days for an answer. In the meantime, Gaunce regularly got asked "Lewis, are you sure you're right about this?" One day the CO handed him a piece of paper with a message instructing all ships of this class to correct the code by the factor of 2. No acknowledgement of Gaunce of course, but his CO was happy with him after that.

Comment #4432

2021-02-19T21:23:11Z

I thought of several things when I was reading this:

A story from my colleagues when I was teaching at Suffolk. They had a student whose BASIC program refused to run properly. It produced no output, but did not produce any error messages. After much agony trying to find an error in the code, this was what they discovered: This being in the "old days," all variables were single letters. For reasons appropriate to the meaning of the program, the student was using S and P. At some point in the program, he had a do-loop reading

FROM S TO P DO ......

Think of how the computer parsed that.