comp.sys.mac.advocacy

On Apr 10, 11:48=A0am, Alan Baker wrote:
> In article
> <052fdb20-dd9d-4dac-8822-f18a7d1e8...@u69g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,

> > the body of knowledge that they did have showed that they clearly
> > couldn't come close to predicting yields- castle bravo's missed
> > predictions was not even close to an isolated incident- it's only the
> > shear magnitude of it that's astounding (looking back in retrospect-
> > not THAT surprising to those there).
>
> I'm sorry, but you haven't actually shown that.
> You threw in the "10 million times" remark, but it wasn't in relation to
> anything that mattered.

it's in relation to an explosion that is considered large by most, and
most people have an idea of the damage caused. if i compared it to a
moab for instance, people wouldn't typically have any grasp of what
that meant.

> What matters is how much they predicted and by factor the actual event
> was in relation to those predictions; a figure you haven't provided.

sure, if you prefer- they were off by about 300%. but the reason i
provided the absolute value instead of the percentage is that
depending on the context, one can be much more meaningful than the
other- concerning the repurcussions of the atomic bomb (the
conversation was talking about vaporizing the atmosphere early on), a
figure stating estimates were "10 million metric tons of tnt" off is
much more instructive than "300%" off. for example, a device meant to
be .000001MT that yielded 1,000x more than expected wouldn't be nearly
as much of a threat as castle bravo's relatively palty 3x miss in
expectation.