""It's very clear that all they were getting were in effect the executive summaries of the Boeing reports, even a filtered executive summary," he said. "It was like a double filtering."

The summary lines on the slide were "way more sanguine about the Columbia than the actual report," he said. "The summary lines don't reflect a lot of the doubts and uncertainties and error possibilities in the report itself."

The Boeing report, if read carefully, "raises real uncertainties and poses rather threatening issues" about whether the impact was on tile or on reinforced carbon carbon, he said. Anybody looking at the figures describing the size of the foam chunk should have known the problem was beyond any test data, he added.

"In a sense, the real fault of upper management is they didn't look beneath the optimistic surface of the reports of their subordinates," he said."

I can only guess (and hope) that the Boeing folks really wanted to believe that their conclusions as to the impact of the foam were right and that bringing up the uncertainties in their analysis might lead to places that no one wanted to even imagine. But there needed to be someone who would ask the hard questions about how the conclusions were arrived at...and it doesn't sound like anyone was willing (or able) to ask those questions. Where were the knowledgeable managers when you needed them?
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"A couple of pints of cask-conditioned brew and a shared pitcher of Alesmith Speedway Stout was all it took to spend one night heaving bile and most of a day lost in bed with a raging headache."

No way. I did a little more research into this newbie's story and come to find out it was the pint of wanna-be Newcastle brown, 2 too-sweet margaritas, and a plate of greasy race-track fish and chips that did him in.

Long live good beer!
8:45:29 AM    comment []  trackback []  Google It!  
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"Hope was a fool, and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian."

Chris asks a lot of rhetorical questions ("...what was your favorite Bob Hope gag?") that get you thinking a bit about Bob's place in comedic history. I grew up in the Bob Hope TV special era and if it wasn't the audience, then the laugh track dude at NBC was mostly definitely busy during those shows. But Chris does make a good point in that a big part of the Hope funny was that dead-pan look after a one liner, followed by that big cheesy (clowny?) smile...kind of hard not to laugh.

And Chris goes definitely into non-PC ground when talking about this weeks remembrances of Bob's USO tour contributions,

"Nobody had the bad taste to recall the moment at which Hope was openly booed by the grunts in Vietnam: He was to the comedy of the war what Nixon was to its negotiation and what Billy Graham was to its husky religiosity."

Thanks for the mammaries.

BTW, for those wanting a behind the curtain look at VO websurfing, the Daypop Top 40provided the above link and many others being blogged on a minute to minute basis. Kind of a what's interesting to others looking for something New. Oh, and they also pull up an old VO link when you search for Jazz.

BTWW, I checked and the plural for mammary is mammae, but I always wanted to use that line anyway.
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