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Silliest things poeple believe

Keith&Co. said:
My second Leading Petty officer, a guy trained in the maintenance of nuclear weapons and their guidance systems, maintained that people act crazy during the full moon because of the increased gravitational attraction... The moon's bigger, so it pulls harder on the human brain and... And... um.

Same guy... We used to get weather reports for the conditions over our targets. Wind speed, direction, air density. Funny thing was, the computer that generated the messages sometimes sent out a -000 value. I came to understand that if a value was negative, it would stay negative until a positive value was entered. So if a -002 wind stopped blowing, it dropped to -000, then might became +001 the next day. If it dropped again, it would go from +001 to +000

But the computer on board the sub wasn't programmed for negative zero. If we typed in -000, it would change it to +000. . PO Idiot did a spot check of my procedure one day, caught that the reader said 'minus zero zero zero' and when I went to verify, I said 'plus zip zip zip.' Ordered us to start troubleshooting the problem.
There was no problem. Nothing to troubleshoot. The system was working. This issue Had quite literally ZERO impact on the missile's flight. A zero velocity wind meant the missile made zero flight corrections to reach the target, whether or not it was positive or negative zero. And it wasn't a rounding error, the computer ONLY got the numbers we typed in, not like there was a value behind the decimal that we just couldn't see.
He threatened to pull my supervisor quals because I refused to troubleshoot a NOTAPROBLEM condition. I pointed out that if I was off the watchbill, he'd have to cover more hours, and his leisure time would be cut in half. He didn't punish me, but he did grumble quite a bit...
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In Unreal engine, a video game development tool, it is possible to end up with an internally calculated value of -0.0 for one or more vector dimensions. It happens quite a lot when rotating a 3d object... sounds like it is the exact same deal you observed in your system... both are doing vector math and arriving at 0 from a negative value. It causes no harm in UE.. .it is equivalent to +0.0. HOWEVER, when calculating offsets in animation sequences, if you ENTER -0.0 as the value of one of the dimensions of an origin point, unexpected behavior results. so, in this particular engine, entering a value of -0.0 is invalid, but deriving an internally calculated number through a transformation as -0.0 IS valid. It's one thing to have a display error, and another to have a math error.
 
Keith&Co. said:
My second Leading Petty officer, a guy trained in the maintenance of nuclear weapons and their guidance systems, maintained that people act crazy during the full moon because of the increased gravitational attraction... The moon's bigger, so it pulls harder on the human brain and... And... um.

Same guy... We used to get weather reports for the conditions over our targets. Wind speed, direction, air density. Funny thing was, the computer that generated the messages sometimes sent out a -000 value. I came to understand that if a value was negative, it would stay negative until a positive value was entered. So if a -002 wind stopped blowing, it dropped to -000, then might became +001 the next day. If it dropped again, it would go from +001 to +000

But the computer on board the sub wasn't programmed for negative zero. If we typed in -000, it would change it to +000. . PO Idiot did a spot check of my procedure one day, caught that the reader said 'minus zero zero zero' and when I went to verify, I said 'plus zip zip zip.' Ordered us to start troubleshooting the problem.
There was no problem. Nothing to troubleshoot. The system was working. This issue Had quite literally ZERO impact on the missile's flight. A zero velocity wind meant the missile made zero flight corrections to reach the target, whether or not it was positive or negative zero. And it wasn't a rounding error, the computer ONLY got the numbers we typed in, not like there was a value behind the decimal that we just couldn't see.
He threatened to pull my supervisor quals because I refused to troubleshoot a NOTAPROBLEM condition. I pointed out that if I was off the watchbill, he'd have to cover more hours, and his leisure time would be cut in half. He didn't punish me, but he did grumble quite a bit...
Click to expand...

Was he so thick-headed that one of your missiles couldn't penetrate?
 
There came a point about 20 years ago, when Boulder CO, the sleepy little college/ranching town where I had had a place since 1972, suddenly seemed like New York City (but more yuppified). Now both my wife and I wanted to head for more rural climes.
3½ Southwest we found a idyllic valley surrounded by 14ers, bought a piece of riverfront and made plans to build and move - ourselves and our Company. I was shuttling back an forth, overseeing the house-building and the office building, and Mrs Elixir stayed home in Boulder the whole time. She began to make noises like "where will I be able to shop?" ... so I reassured her there was a mall, right outside town. Boy, was she excited about that! A couple of months later she accompanied me on a trip to the new place - I had forgotten about the "mall", but she hadn't. "Where is that mall?" she asked, with incredible timing. "Coming right up on your right!" I informed her. And sure enough, there was the sign - NATHROP MALL, and there was the "MALL" :

Nathrop Mall.jpg

Much anger ensued. Mercifully, the Nathrop Mall burned down about a week later, so we never got a chance to experience its disappointments. But Mrs Elixir hasn't let me forget it... 20 years later !
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Was he so thick-headed that one of your missiles couldn't penetrate?
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Not OUR missiles...
But on one patrol, his technician plugged a soldering pencil into a socket in the overhead. It swung there, in mid-air. If Supervisor got up out of the chair he was allowed in, the tech threatened to burn his eyes out.
"I'll tell the weapons officer!" Supervisor complained.
"Whose idea do you think this was!?" Tech replied.
 
My M-I-L used to think that the "no candy" checkout lanes at the grocery store meant she had to use another lane if she was buying candy.
 
So, Walmart has the scanners located throughout the store where you can find out the price of anything by scanning the bar code.
At a store in Jacksonville, Florida, a woman checked a price and decided she didn't want to buy it. As I walked by, she was asking a store employee to help her remove the cost of the item from her account, in a belief that the scanner would remember her and tell the scanners at the checkout lane to charge her for this item.
He was trying to explain reality to her LONG after I'd have just said, 'turn the item upside down and scan it again.'
 
I heard one lady tell another..."Ewww, I could never use recycled toilet paper"... she thought, well never mind.
 
After Brexit and Trump, minor sillinesses shrink to nothing, alas!
 
"Minor Sillinesses" (such as these wonderful tales) are the spice of life.... even amongst a disaster, one must still strive to live happy.
 
Someone PMed me regarding my first story... and it totally reminded me of another.... The sender said, "Happy divorce"...
So, background... my family is full of divorce... no one in my family has been married less than 3 times... seriously... my parents, all of their siblings... all of my cousins... my second cousins are too young to have been married... and my grand parents stayed together until my grandfather died fairly young.

So. At the family dinner the night before our wedding, My Aunt (married 3 times), made reference to my Soon-to-Be-Wife as my "First Wife". Right in front of her. No one at the table of over a dozen people caught that except me and her. We looked at each other and furrowed our brows to each other as if to say "did we just hear that". I stopped my aunt in the middle of whatever she was talking about and asked, "did you just call her my 'first wife'"?
No one at the table understood what I was asking... my aunt said, "why, were you secretly married before?" I said, "no, but most normal people don't enter into marriage under the assumption that it will be just one of many". The family looked around at each other... and then broke into hysterics. Eventually, one of my uncles got out, "ah, to be young again"... and revived the hysterics.
Anyway, my marriage is still fine, even after 8 years now.
 
bilby said:
Malintent said:
"Minor Sillinesses" (such as these wonderful tales) are the spice of life.... even amongst a disaster, one must still strive to live happy.
Click to expand...

You've obviously never visited Wales. It's monumentally depressing.
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If the internet is accurate, Wales is a land of sheep and the men who breed with them.
 
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