And... where is the pilot?

[Sus_pilot]

Bravo, Jay... That's the question I ask my students on a daily basis.

Do you want the real answer or the simple one.

They don't yet know how complicated their intended field of study is.

Sounds like me at work:  "Do you want the book answer or the one you can use to write a capital budget?"

[JayUtah]

They don't yet know how complicated their intended field of study is.

Few do.  The keepers are the ones who, at first, say "The easy one," and then come to you later, cap in hand, to solicit the real answer.  The joy of your profession is watching these youngsters immerse themselves in the reality.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an auction of 4,192 words of erasable core memory used on one of the Gemini flights.  The bids are expected to finish around $2,000.  I'm looking at my bank account and credit lines.  And I owe it all to my professors and original professional mentors, all of whom worked on those projects.

[Zakalwe]

[Zakalwe]

I also like this Feynman video as I think that it describes very well the position of not only hoaxies, but also many members of the general public. They ask, what they think is a very simple question, without realising that to answer the question one has to have a base of common understanding on which to stand on.

[Allan F]

Like a guy in a desert who stumbles over a rock, decides to dig it out, and ends up with a pyramid where his original rock is the point.

[Zakalwe]

Like a guy in a desert who stumbles over a rock, decides to dig it out, and ends up with a pyramid where his original rock is the point.

That's a nice analogy, thank you. I'm  borrowing that one! 

[Peter B]

"Leave it up to an engineer, they can never give you a straight answer!"

Reminds me of sitting with the producer of the unaired History Channel pilot.  "So how powerful are the Van Allen belts really?" he asked.  Through my mind went the variables that go into the AP8 and AE8 models, their geometry, and the vast array of possible departure orbits.  "It really depends on quite a number of factors."  Keep in mind this guy is a friend, and completely sympathetic to my cause.  "Well, you know, just on average."  I debated trying to sketch them and showing how the differences in zones are exponential.  I debated throwing out a straw man.  In the end the latter is what I did.  "For a typical interplanetary departure,..."  Still I'm firmly convinced that this producer -- an intelligent and conscientious man -- will cite my figure (which I do not even recall) as that established by the aerospace engineering community.

These days I ask in advance:  "Do you want the real answer or the simple answer?"

You've reminded me of a section of Mike Gray's Angle of Attack, the book about Harrison "Stormy" Storms and North American Aviation's involvement in Apollo. It's Gray's description of the House of Representatives inquiry into the Apollo 1 accident:

What followed over the next few days was the inevitable clash between alien cultures. The engineers and the politicians spoke different languages and worshipped different gods; throughout the hearings they would give the impression they were communicating, but they were not. The politicians wanted answers to simple questions like "Who did it?" The engineers misinterpreted the questions and then responded in detail with maddening precision. At one point, Pennsylvania's Jim Fulton got tired of the blizzard of facts; he wanted to get down to cases. "Would this wiring pass the ordinary town's wiring standard for homes?"
   There was an interminable silence as Max Faget stared at the ceiling. Finally he said, "Yes sir, I think it would."
   Fulton wanted to know why it took so long for an answer.
   "I was trying to recall all the towns I knew."

[onebigmonkey]

I've found it myself when people ask what they think is a simple question that they expect will get a simple answer, when in reality the answer is invariably "it depends..."