Thank you. That claim seemed implausible on its face, but I wasn’t motivated enough to look into it further.
From that Reddit post:
Surely, Dorothy Vaughn preceded her? I don’t think she ever held the job title of “programmer”, but that’s just a matter of the terminology not yet existing. But she started doing programming work for NASA in 1961.
Don’t call her Shirley.
Until 2002, it took a team of 50 men three years and 18 tons of paint to keep the 1890-built bridge corrosion-free and looking fresh, by which time the whole process had to be repeated. “Painting the Forth Bridge” became a well-known saying to describe any never-ending task.
In 2002, a new, more durable glass-based epoxy was introduced, which is expected to last 25 years.
In a way that’s almost a drawback. When maintenance is a continual thing the necessity of budgeting for it is inescapable. When maintenance is something done periodically and the next cycle isn’t until some time in the future it becomes tempting to defer maintenance “for now”. I don’t doubt the new painting scheme is more cost-effective but hopefully fiscal discipline will remain in place.
I’m reminded of something that came up a number of years ago where I live. My HOA is responsible for the upkeep of the exterior of all the duplexes in our development. When these were first built in the mid-1980s they had wood siding, and part of the HOA budget provided for periodic repainting. However over time on a number of units the siding was needing repairs, and the board decided to consider whether it was more cost effective to replace all the wood siding with vinyl. While this would eliminate the need for periodic repainting, it was also a major capital expense. I remember there was about a year of special meetings with the duplex owners regarding whether the costs should be covered by a special assessment or by an increase in the HOA dues. Eventually everything was settled, and I got to decide (along with the owner of the other half of my duplex) which color my house would be.
Mutant weed
“We launch cannabis seeds into space, exposing them to cosmic radiation and microgravity. This helps us study mutations…”
The UK scrapped over 16,000 steam locomotives between 1955 and 1962. Thr US scrapped about 160,000 during the 20th century.
This seems to be a favorite space experiment, but does exposure to cosmic rays and microgravity have any documented effect on seeds of any species?
Man-in-the-Moon marigolds, perhaps?
My alter ego is Joan Baez, but NASA’s Margaret Hamilton in that picture is my Platonic ideal of womanhood.
That is a relatively narrow band which, troublesome as it is to deal with, is probably not the dominant form of radiation in space.
Until sometime in the mid-1960s, most computer programmers were women. The view up to then was that explaining the task that a computer should do in a particular situation was the job of scientists and engineers. They would then explain the task to computer programmers with a general idea for the task and a few equations. They thought that the programming itself was just a secretarial job. So it should mostly be done by women and at a lower pay scale. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that computer programming began to be thought of as its own science and/or engineering field. So at that point men started flooding into the field. Now about 80% of computer programmers are men.
A similar thing can be said for computers. I’m not talking about a piece of electronics hardware here, but the occupation called “computer.” Calculations were mostly done by hand, and most were women. The film Hidden Figures is about them.
Don’t they realize that what they’ll get wlll be one very rubbery seed, one invisible see, one seed that bursts into flame and levitates, and one that develops a scaly, rock-hard carapace?
It’s already happened !
In the link by pjd just above the seeds are described as “feminized”, which means that the plants that germinate out of those seeds will all be female and not the usual 50% random mix of male and female. A fact I would find interesting to find out is whether those claims of feminizing seeds are true and if so, how they manage to pull it off.
I can’t say that this is a “fact,” let alone “interesting” or “random,” but a realization:
The Purina Cat Chow commercials that have aired since the 1970s (Purina Cat Chow! Chow, Chow, Chow!) are a riff on the “Cha-Cha-Cha” dance. In all my years, it only recently occurred to me.
Plants have many different ways of dealing with the sexes, so it’s hard to say, but my guess is that cannabis plants have genetically-determined sex, and they came up with some way to detect and discard the male ones. Or maybe they selected the pollen to pollinate them.
As I understand computing history, the profession was originally divided into ‘system analysts’ and ‘coders’. The former would break the task down, usually into things like flowcharts (remember those?), from which the coders would write a program. Then of course there were the punch operators who would transcribe that on to the 80-column cards.
The system analysts were the ‘real professionals’, of course: coding was thought of as a menial task.