112
submitted 1 year ago by partybot@lemmy.ca to c/til@lemmy.ca
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[-] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think literally every time I had a science teacher want to drill into student's heads the importance of including units in one's physics or chemistry calculations, they brought up this story. I wonder what example they used before this

[-] Iapar@feddit.de 21 points 1 year ago

None, that's why it happened to NASA.

[-] technohacker@programming.dev 15 points 1 year ago

I coulda swore NASA did account for that and wrote unit conversion subroutines, and that the bug was that a conversion was missed, rather than not knowing the unit mismatch at all

[-] Vilian@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago

why don't just use metric??????

[-] Blizzard@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You know how much effort would it take for Americans to change their habits? At least a couple of football fields of effort!

[-] isgleas@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Three eights of a teafuck if you ask me

[-] delirious_owl@discuss.online 2 points 1 year ago

The US has required metric for all federally funded contracts since before NASA was founded.

[-] trk@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago

What, and open USDM to international competition??

[-] fubarx@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

My favorite cautionary tale whenever someone tries to rush a work schedule.

[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It was because multiple people fucked up by not validating data.

The question is, given the meticulousless of an org like that, how is it multiple units didn't perform data validation?

The project plans and validation steps I've seen for relatively simple, multi-million software deployments would've caught something like this.

Yea, I'm suspicious that this is used an an excuse for another failure.

[-] delirious_owl@discuss.online 5 points 1 year ago

The US has long required metric for all federal contracts

[-] unphazed@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I remember this on the news as a kid. Oh how I laughed... now as a taxpaying adult - "#$$#@!!!!!"

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

They will never let that down!

[-] delirious_owl@discuss.online 4 points 1 year ago

Live* this down

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

Wow. What an incredible fuckup.

this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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