DROP TABLE 01;

I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).

The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.

What the fuck was going on?

In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.

This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.

I hadn’t heard of that, thank you! That trailer looks amazing. I’m excited for it now, too.

This physically hurt me.

Who can I sue? Any lawyers in the chat?

Your man card wasn’t forfeited, it’s gilded. Only real men can appreciate art.

Have you seen Sondheim’s Into the Woods? It’s a masterpiece. It’s on Prime if you haven’t seen it. It stars Chip Zien, Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, Tom Aldredge, and other big names. I’d like to see anyone say Zein, Aldredge, and Sondheim aren’t ‘real men’.

Yes, and the man who proposed the theory retracted it later, saying it would be like basing human behavioural theory on observations made in a supermax prison.

That actually makes sense that these losers would venerate it, since the behaviours they idolise are very like what you’d see in prisons: machismo instead of real manhood, narcissism and subjugation instead of empathy, and hatred instead of compassion.

It doesn’t have to be in the name, just in the ingredients list. In this case it is, so it’s perfectly above-board for the US.

It seems not to be as well known as I thought, but most commercial honey sold in the US is not actually honey:

But the honey industry is hiding a secret. There’s a high chance that your store-bought honey is fake. While fake honey usually includes some amount of real honey, it is often mixed with other corn, rice, or sugar cane syrup to reduce its cost. These fillers are far cheaper than raw honey and are used to produce more honey, quicker. In fact, up to 76% of honey sold in the US is not really honey, at least not entirely.

There were a bunch of stories about this several years ago after a minor controversy, but it didn’t stay in the news long, so I guess it fell out of public consciousness.

If you want real honey, you’ll want to buy from small, local dealers.

Oh, is that how I triggered that?

It was like having a clingy boyfriend for a while.

This shouldn’t have made me laugh so much.

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The poetry contests were great. I miss that.

Perhaps. It still seems odd to me that this board was mounted vertically inline with the heating element and the bad parts I identified line up with that, before I knew that was the case:

Strange that all the bad points are in the lower half of the board, and that most points in that half are bad, then.

e: could a malfunction make it heat beyond 370f?

Oh, that makes more sense. The heat from the malfunctioning cooker may have resoldered these points badly.

I was curious how like half the points were bad, and that could explain it.

e: especially since they’re all at the bottom half of the board. That was closest to the heating element, right?

I feel like I still missed a few. Why was this board disrespected so badly? Is it a student learning board?

Hey fascist lurkers: fuck everything about your fascist ideology. Stop being slaves to your overlords and fucking learn a thing.

You can think for yourselves, I promise. It may be hard and uncomfortable at first, but you’ll like yourself a lot more if you just put in a small bit of effort. You’re better than this.

Thank you.

I got that reference.

It must be exhausting to go through life saddled with so much mental bullshit.