Submission + - WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton was once rejected by both Facebook and Twitter (networkworld.com)
His co-founder, Jan Koum, was also reportedly denied for a job at Facebook as well.
From human perception, there is no difference between these statements, and that's the problem addressed. The fact that something is statistically likely to "someone" (i.e.: not you) does not make something "probable" for you, which is included in the SA summary of the book.
Same information, but the visual aspect of the animated GIF is somehow much more accessible. One more data point on how the human brain is so poorly adapted to statistical inference as compared to our natural abilities with visual information like "is that tiger going to eat me", or "can I make it across the gap between this tree and that tree when I jump".
When the core is "shut-down" to prevent accidental thermal runaway (aka meltdown, or "china-syndrome") the system still contains a rather significant amount of heat for quite a while due to the secondary radioactive products, but this heat is not nearly enough to drive the normal steam turbine dynamos which generate the utility load - it takes a rather large amount of torque to generate megawatts of electric current. Until the heat is removed and the reactor core, fuel rods, and associated secondary decay radio-nucleotides reach a lower level, something needs to provide the power for the cooling pumps, and to ensure that the trapped hydrogen gas (byproduct of fission) is recycled and contained. There are various schemes to create "fail-proof" nuclear reactors, one of which happened to be the Chernobyl design (and we all know how well that one worked). It was supposedly "impossible!" for Cherynobyl to melt down because of the built-in systems, and the smart, but not smart-enough, engineers wanted to test those "fail-proof" systems...
Many years ago I used to think that programming was easy, as the years have passed I have have realized that programming is not easy. This is due to a slow perceptual shift in what I think programming is and what it is that a programmer does. At first I thought programming just involved telling a computer what to do, this part of programming is relatively easy. After practicing for twenty odd years I reckoned that this part of programming was pretty easy.
How can a huge number of opportunities occur without people realizing they are there? The law of combinations, a related strand of the Improbability Principle, points the way. It says: the number of combinations of interacting elements increases exponentially with the number of elements. The “birthday problem” is a well-known example.
Now if only we could harness this to make an infinite improbability drive!
Testing can show the presense of bugs, but not their absence. -- Dijkstra