NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Sumner's Line (Navigation question)
From: Ken Gebhart
Date: 2006 Feb 8, 22:11 -0600
From: Ken Gebhart
Date: 2006 Feb 8, 22:11 -0600
On 2/7/06 4:27 PM, "Bill"wrote: > Frank wrote: > >> Bill wrote: >> "An ID 10-T question." >> >> First, thank you for making me look this up. To save anyone else the effort, >> if you write out ID-10-T, and drop the dashes... and make the "1" look more >> like an "I", you get IDIOT. > > Sorry about that. It is in such common use as an error description by > programmers and alpha geeks in the the Purdue area, I thought it was > universally known. Another common acronym in the software industry, > especially with support folks, is "DSO Error." DSO being "dumb sh-t > operator." > > Thank you for the excellent description of the process. As other list > members have mused, I too find it rather amazing that it was almost a > century after the on-board chronometer was invented that Sumner stumbled on > and published the concept of the celestial LOP. One would think that since > it was in most cases a running fix, and latitude was often determined by DR, > that someone would have done a couple of "what ifs" with different latitudes > long before and noticed the relationship. A great case of mind set blinding > one to options. My feeling has always been that creativity is a momentary > cessation of stupidity. > > Bill > Bill, I think you are exactly right. Arthur Koestler's book "The Sleepwalkers" (30 years old) explores humanity's blindness to the obvious throughout history. After reading it, I have never said "why didn't they think of that sooner". Ken