Oroville Dam: Photos reveal extensive damage | Hacker News Reader

Oroville Dam: Photos reveal extensive damage

mercurynews.com

3 pointsmolecule7 comments

Full title: "Oroville Dam: Photos reveal extensive damage as operators stop flow down spillway"

The dam is undamaged, as far as we know.

From a systems perspective, spillways are part of what constitutes 'the dam.' Systems perspectives form the basis for life-safety decisions. The definition of 'is' in 'What is a dam' might make for interesting legal arguments, but the spillway and the bedrock and the water are all part of the operational definition of a dam.

The title was changed by the submitter to make it less accurate.

  $ echo 'Oroville Dam: Photos reveal extensive damage as operators stop flow down spillway' | wc -m
  82

Something had to be left out to meet the 80 character limit for submission titles. (82 is 81 + null). Omitting the subordinate clause seems not unreasonable to me. YMMV.

  $ echo 'Oroville Dam: Photos reveal extensive spillway damage as operators stop flow' | wc -m
  77

Pretty obvious solution.

Not very Pythonic, however.

I'm guessing the emergency spillway was originally implemented in BASIC.

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