{"id":208,"date":"2005-07-16T12:39:52","date_gmt":"2005-07-16T17:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/?p=208"},"modified":"2025-09-20T18:29:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T23:29:11","slug":"entry-53","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/?p=208","title":{"rendered":"Shut Up and Take the Next Call"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You know, I\u2019m not sure why I bother, but for some reason I just can\u2019t help myself. When I\u2019m in the truck and the local NPR affiliate<\/a> is playing something I\u2019m not interested in, I\u2019ll sometimes flip over to a talk\/sports radio station out of Birmingham. Inevitably, I end up turning the radio off in disgust (if not full out anger) within about 15 minutes. The people I hear on the air on this station represent possibly the most consistent collection of what I call \u201cdetermined ignorance\u201d that I know of. On the way out to lunch today I flipped over there, and this one was so bad I decided I had to post about it when I got back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I thought at first I was going to be okay. The show that was on was a call-in car repair clinic show (think Car Talk, but without the college-educated hosts). It\u2019s usually pretty good. The people on the show really seem to know what they\u2019re talking about, and their advice usually sounds very reasonable to me. Unfortunately, today the host decided that answering car questions wasn\u2019t enough. I guess he felt like he needed to liven up the show a bit. I didn\u2019t hear the beginning, and I turned it off before the end, but the gist of it was him asking the question, \u201cWhy does the shuttle need a gas gauge?\u201d Imagine a redneck asking that question in a REALLY sarcastic tone, and you\u2019ll be somewhere close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He, of course, is referring to the fact that Discovery\u2019s launch is currently delayed because NASA discovered that one of the shuttle\u2019s four hydrogen fuel gauges was malfunctioning. This guy went further to make some kind of crack about how he has a 20-year old Fiat, and its gauges still work. He then made a comment that started something like \u201cWhat are they gonna do, get the thing up in orbit and\u2026\u201d I turned it off right then, but I can imagine that the joke he was going for involved something about the shuttle pulling over at the closest filling station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Determined ignorance. This guy knows machinery. He works on cars. If he had stopped and thought about it for about 1 minute, he could have answered his own question. He didn\u2019t, though, because that wasn\u2019t the point. The point was to make a cheap shot and get his audience to nod their heads, self-congratulate their wisdom, and say how much they like listening to the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know absolutely nothing about the details of the sensor failure, but with about 1 minute worth of thought, I think I already have some pretty good ideas about why the shuttle \u201cneeds a gas gauge.\u201d You\u2019ve got a giant space truck being propelled into orbit by some of the most powerful engines known to man. There are so many things that can go wrong, that it\u2019s impossible to predict all of them (though NASA in general seems to do a pretty damned good job of preparing for most of them). If something goes wrong, the folks in the cabin can\u2019t just pull over and open up the hood to see what happened. It\u2019s imperative that the crew (and, more importantly all the countless trained support people on the ground) know exactly what happened as quickly as possible. Since humans can\u2019t get out and look, the telemetry is all they have. Personally, I want as many sensors and gauges on that thing as they can possibly justify. If they want to put in a sensor that measures the frequency at which the cup holder is vibrating, then I say more power to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder how our ignorant friend would react if confronted on the air with the fact that one of the most important reasons we know what happened to Columbia is because it was packed with more sensors than shuttles usually are? Would he crack wise about \u201cWhat does the shuttle need a temperature gauge for?\u201d if he knew that it was the large number of temperature sensors in the wing that allowed us to figure out EXACTLY how Columbia\u2019s demise progressed? The astronauts going up in Discovery are almost certainly safer because of that information. The answer is, of course, that this guy wasn\u2019t thinking. I can only hope that his listeners were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stick to cars, and keep your mouth out of things you aren\u2019t even willing to try to understand. NASA has problems, but the last thing they (and we) need is the kind of cynicism that your remarks inevitably produce in your listeners. Shut the fuck up and take the next call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know, I\u2019m not sure why I bother, but for some reason I just can\u2019t help myself. When I\u2019m in the truck and the local NPR affiliate is playing something I\u2019m not interested in, I\u2019ll sometimes flip over to a talk\/sports radio station out of Birmingham. Inevitably, I end up turning the radio off in disgust […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,8],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-geekiness","tag-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1702,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/1702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}