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Comment by john_b | Hacker News Reader

It's a press release, not a post-mortem. Its only purpose is to inform the public of what they know with confidence.

While dispelling any possible notion of "blame" or "responsibility". Instead, some out-of-this-world power caused the satellites to "experience" an "orbital injection anomaly".

I think that's the part that annoyed me most about the whole thing. It's pretty obvious someone screwed up somewhere even if we don't know exactly where yet. Whitewashing the whole thing by saying there was an "anomaly" during deployment seems pretty weak. I would rather they be more upfront about it and say there was a failure of unknown origin that they're still investigating. Calling it an "anomaly" strongly implies that there was some sort of unexpected natural phenomena to blame, which although that might be the case is so incredibly unlikely as to not even be worth considering.

No, it's just the normal language you use for those things. Anomaly means exactly "the failure of unknown origin".

Anomaly means an event (failure, in this case) that should be expected only once given a relatively large number of repetitions. To brand it an anomaly does indeed act to dispel notions of poor design because the suggested assumption that goes into it is that if they repeated the launch everything would be hunky dory, which would not be the case if there is a design flaw.

> Whitewashing the whole thing by saying there was an "anomaly" during deployment seems pretty weak. I would rather they be more upfront about it and say there was a failure of unknown origin that they're still investigating.

But ... that's what "anomaly" means -- a failure of unknown origin. It's just a concise way of saying it.

> Calling it an "anomaly" strongly implies that there was some sort of unexpected natural phenomena to blame ...

No, the word "anomaly", at least as used in space science, doesn't suggest that at all. In this context, anomaly means what idiopathic means in medicine -- an outcome of unknown origin.

'Calling it an "anomaly" strongly implies that there was some sort of unexpected natural phenomena to blame [to people who've mostly encountered the term watching too much Star Trek]'

Calling it an "anomaly" strongly implies that there was some sort of unexpected natural phenomena to blame

No it doesn't. You should really look up the definition of the word, because you'll find it's being used correctly.

It doesn't have to be natural for it to be an anomaly; but anomaly does indeed specifically means that it's not normal or expected. If there is a failure in the design, then it would be 'normal' (and 'normal' would be wrong) without an adjustment.

That's exactly what adults do when they encounter such situation. Talking about blame or looking for someone responsible is not a way to tackle problems of unknown origin that most likely will turn out to be a failure somewhere in the system. Such problems are almost never attributable to a single person.

The Japanese have a saying about this -- "Fix the problem, not the blame."

I can't resist adding that I've always described this quote in just this way (as do others), but it's never far from my mind that it relies on an English idiom, one in which "fix" has two meanings. It's not the same in Japanese.

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