NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Brad Morris
Date: 2013 Mar 19, 19:20 -0400
Hi Robert
Having been an engineer for a really long time, I can tell you the secret. We guess!
We guess very conservatively and based upon detailed equations. Most folks just guess without analysis.
The better engineers are eliminating all the guesses that have been shown to be wrong in the past. That is, I've already screwed up that way before, I'm not going to do it that way again! We cannot be afraid to make mistakes.
Brad
Gotta love the practical nature of engineers!----- Original Message -----From: Tom SultTo: enoid---netSent: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 1:51 PMSubject: [NavList] Re: Lies, damn lies, and statistics...
A mathematician and an Engineer are in a room with a beautiful women. The women calls to them. The scientist says "no point in moving one can never get their". The Engineer walk across the room giving the women a familiar hug and says "close enough for all practical application".
Tom SultSent from my iPhone
Not just beginning math students Frank. These sorts of paradoxes have had me thinking for decades. Now, at least, I can put a name to the madness.Robert----- Original Message -----From: Frank ReedTo: enoid---netSent: Monday, March 18, 2013 8:38 PMSubject: [NavList] Re: Lies, damn lies, and statistics...
Robert,
That is a slight variant on one of Zeno's paradoxes which were first recorded some 2500 years ago. In short, you can never reach any destination because you have an infinite number of steps of being halfway there. The mathematics of infinite series and summations and eventually calculus itself, starting centuries ago, have largely left such paradoxes as puzzles used to get beginning math students thinking...
-FER
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The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.
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