engineering-limits

Especially since the Chinese were adopting a strategy which some argued the Americans should have followed all along: to drop any attempt at perfect reliability, to accept lower-cost, more practical solutions—and the heroic deaths that would inevitably accompany them.

risk compensation effect—the documented reality that when people add safety precautions, they become bolder in their actions. You don a helmet and ski more aggressively, negating the added security the helmet provides.

They gave him design parameters, but no details about use. He had been working in the dark. And now that the system was up and running, he wasn't surprised to learn there were bugs. What did they expect? And they'd ordered him down here in a panic, all hot and bothered about "his" bugs. It was annoying, Nedry thought.

"Computers were built in the late 1940s because mathematicians like John von Neumann thought that if you had a computer—a machine to handle a lot of variables simultaneously—you would be able to predict the weather. Weather would finally fall to human understanding. And men believed that dream for the next forty years. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been a cherished scientific belief since Newton." "And?" "Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. You can never predict the weather more than a few days away. All the money that has been spent on long-range forecasting—about half a billion dollars in the last few decades—is money wasted. It's a fool's errand. It's as pointless as trying to turn lead into gold. We look back at the alchemists and laugh at what they were trying to do, but future generations will laugh at us the same way. We've tried the impossible—and spent a lot of money doing it. Because in fact there are great categories of phenomena that are inherently unpredictable." "Chaos says that?" "Yes, and it is astonishing how few people care to hear it," Malcolm said. "I gave all this information to Hammond long before he broke ground on this place. You're going to engineer a bunch of prehistoric animals and set them on an island? Fine. A lovely dream. Charming. But it won't go as planned. It is inherently unpredictable, just as the weather is."

The problems with the security system were high on Jurassic Park's bug list.

Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture's philosophy."

Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.

Tail-call optimization is limited to situations where a method or nested function calls itself directly as its last operation, without going through a function value or some other intermediary.

Test to destruction: engineers like to do that. Only with a test to destruction can you find the outer limits of a system's strength.

kick the world, break your foot.

at least half the ideas on your roadmap are not going to deliver what you hope. (By the way, the really good teams assume that at least three quarters of the ideas won't perform like they hope.)

More than two million pounds of fuel, a treasure that had taken five years to haul up to Earth orbit, had burned off in sixteen minutes.

if you're sitting on top of those damn unstoppable Solid Rocket Boosters, it's not a question of if you go, just which direction.

There was one minor upside to running the molten sodium at above the rated temperature: Heat rejection through the heat sink wings was more efficient. Much more efficient. Heat flow via infrared radiation into the cold, black background of space went up with the fourth power of the temperature of the sodium . . . and yet, there was no such thing as a free lunch. If running the sodium loop hot had been without tradeoffs, then the Mackenzies who had designed the Gnon Does Battle would have just designed it to run its sodium loop at this higher temperature all of the time. But the "hot sodium" lunch was not free—it came with costs, extreme ones. At temperatures over 600°C even minute amounts of oxygen and carbon dissolved in the sodium—less than one part in a hundred thousand—would begin reacting with the pipe walls and dissolving the steel. This could have been worked around, of course, with extra purification of the working fluid, or with the use of esoteric (and very expensive) alloys in the pipes, or a dozen other approaches. But every dollar spent on optimizing for an unlikely edge case was a dollar not spent elsewhere, and Mackenzies were instinctually and continuously aware of opportunity costs in the same way that the Gnon Does Battle was aware of thermodynamics.

The invocation operator is a pair of parentheses that follow any expression that produces a function value. The parentheses can contain zero or more expressions, separated by commas. Each expression produces one argument value. Each of the argument values will be assigned to the function's parameter names. There is no runtime error when the number of arguments and the number of parameters do not match. If there are too many argument values, the extra argument values will be ignored. If there are too few argument values, the undefined value will be substituted for the missing values. There is no type checking on the argument values: any type of value can be passed to any parameter.

JavaScript does not have block scope even though its block syntax suggests that it does. This confusion can be a source of errors. JavaScript does have function scope. That means that the parameters and variables defined in a function are not visible outside of the function, and that a variable defined anywhere within a function is visible everywhere within the function.

One of the hibernation experts said, "You're talking about cryopreservation, not hibernation. The biggest barrier to reanimating a flash-frozen body is preventing cell damage from ice crystals during the thawing process. It's like what happens to frozen tofu: When you defrost it, it turns into a sponge. Oh, I guess most of you haven't had frozen tofu." The expert, who was Chinese, smiled at the confused Western faces around him.