112
submitted 6 months ago by partybot@lemmy.ca to c/til@lemmy.ca
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[-] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 34 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months 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 6 months ago

None, that's why it happened to NASA.

[-] technohacker@programming.dev 15 points 6 months 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 6 months ago

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

[-] Blizzard@lemmy.zip 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months 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 6 months ago

Three eights of a teafuck if you ask me

[-] delirious_owl@discuss.online 2 points 6 months ago

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

[-] trk@aussie.zone 3 points 6 months ago

What, and open USDM to international competition??

[-] fubarx@lemmy.ml 9 points 6 months ago

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

[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months 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 6 months ago

The US has long required metric for all federal contracts

[-] unphazed@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

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

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 4 points 6 months ago

They will never let that down!

[-] delirious_owl@discuss.online 4 points 6 months ago

Live* this down

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 6 months ago

Wow. What an incredible fuckup.

this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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