The Turn (1993) | Hacker News Reader

The Turn (1993)

theatlantic.com

103 pointsjs223 comments

> Veterans of the military and the airmail service still insisted they could fly "by the seat of the pants," and they thought less of those who could not. Their self-deception now seems all the more profound because the solution to the problem of flying in clouds and darkness -- a gyroscope adapted to flying -- was already widely available.

Reminds me quite a bit of programmers who insist that any formal developments process (including lightweight agile ones) is a crutch needed only by mediocre developers (which they of course don't need) and invented by companies who can't hire only the best (where they of course would never work).

When you say "formal" you are being a bit vague. Perhaps you can be more specific about which techniques you found to have a measurable difference? Is "light agile" the new thing?

The whole point of agile has always been to be lightweight, pretty much by definition (read the Agile Manifesto). If it feels oppressive or constricting, you're either doing it very wrong (every good thing can be perverted into its opposite) or need to get over your primadonna issues.

By "formal", I just mean that there's a written process for what to do when that everyone follows as long as they do not have a very good specific reason to deviate from it (and if that happens too often you try to find the reason and fix it, possibly by adjusting the process).

Things that make a big difference to me: continuous integration. Time-boxed releases focused on fully-working incremental business value. Regular reviews of the process itself. Rigid rules for what should and should not be discussed in meetings (at least the recurring all-hands ones).

Measurable differences? No, just heaps of anecdotal evidence. There's damn little quantifiable evidence for anything at project scale, no matter which industry, probably because differences between projects are so large and controlled experiments at that scale almost impossible.

Why in the world would it remind you of that? A development process is just a way to improve collaboration over basic informal communication. Without gyroscopes you are literally incapable of sensing your orientation. It would be like being unable to see anyone else's code.

It's the reaction of "veterans" that reminds me of it, the conviction that their vaguely-defined "skill" trumps everything - not the details of the thing they're rejecting.

Though there are similarities in that area as well: without any kind of coordinated planning, measurement of progress, and feedback-gathering, you're unable to see in what state the project really is, whether you're able to meet deadlines, stay in budget, and actually building the right thing.

But they do have skill. And you can plan, measure, and get feedback without any kind of formal process. The similarities are shallow and misleading.

Everyone believes themselves to be skilled, and the strength of belief correlates not much with actual skill. But even those who are still need to coordinate with others.

And while you can do all that without a formal process, can you do it repeatably (so results are comparable and composable) across time and team members? Can you be sure you won't forget doing some of it when you're busy? How often and when should you ideally do it?

Once you've thought about that, discussed it with your team members and come to an agreement with them, what you have is a formal process. The only thing left to do is to write it down so you'll still remember it next month.

Or doctors who insist they don't need checklists, when these have demonstrably improved patient outcomes. The phenomenon is widespread, I think.

His book _The Outlaw Sea_ was extremely good -- going into some depth about the ways that government try but have not succeeded in regulating the ocean in the ways that they control law on land.

He's a great writer especially on aviation. For example, his writeup of the mid-air collision of an Embraer regional jet and a 737 over Brazil (http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/air_crash200901) was nothing short of fantastic. It's well worth a read.

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006784.html Here's a video of iced tea in a barrel roll.

Nice.

BTW, the relevant scene starts at 2:08.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZBcapxGHjE&t=2m8s

I guess it's aviation week on HN? There's also test pilot Tex Johnston's famous 707 barrel roll - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vHiYA6Dmws - but unfortunately the video quality is poor.

If he had dangled the pen from a string, it would have hung at a ninety-degree angle with respect to the tilted floor.

For enormous fun, dangle your earbuds from their cables during the large maneuvers during take-off and landing. The wires seem to have a life all their own. People around you will stare, mesmerized. For some reason you really seem to want that wire dangling to match what you see outside.

The whole point is that the earbuds won't seem to have a life all their own. They'll continue to point straight to the floor of the plane, no matter what the wings are doing relative to the earth out the window.

You would think that, but in practice the effect is weird. You want them to point at the ground outside your window. When they don't its very strange. I guess its why the people in the plane lean into the bank even when they should be feeling it to be unnecessary.

Edit: On thinking about it, it might be double strange because you're "feeling" the bank from what you see outside and feeling the accelerations/decelerations (which may or may not match the plane's pitch which you also get from sight) that big planes do as they fly their patterns. These run together in your brain. It sometimes responds to pitch seen outside, sometimes to acceleration you feel, but never to the roll you expect from what you see. So it seems oddly, randomly broken.

I don't think that's the case when you are rolling in and out of the bank, only when you are in a stable banked turn (or flying level). So you'll actually see them move left and right measuring the rate of roll of the airplane.

The Bob Hoover maneuver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4BpzIY62xE

(1993)

Does this diminish or enhance the value of the article in any way?

It's customary.

Oops. Looks like the mods added it.

Also, apparently previously discussed - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1503860

I'm glad that set of comments called out the pendulum staying in a plane as being wrong. Like the article says about gyroscopes, tilted pendulums move in an odd but predictable way. For example, a pendulum set up on the surface of the earth rotates at a speed proportional to the sine of the latitude.

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