For execs they are responsible for monitoring key indicators and deciding on what to do.

When things go wrong it could be they weren't monitoring the right things and missed it or the direction the took initially was wrong (either right away or as things changed and they didn't see it).

That's their entire job, more or less. Not trivializing it. The stakes are high pretty often.

I was driving the Gaspe coastal road once after an ice storm and we were on the road with a bunch of semis early in the morning. The switchbacks had massive sheets of ice coming off them over the sides. It was wild.

It wasn't so thick that driving over the shattered pieces was an issue but it was a sight to behold and turned a white knuckle drive into a real jaw clencher.

Was there for a family issue and had to be somewhere otherwise I wouldn't have been on the road that day at all, let alone first thing.

But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if.

There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?

He's also a well respected and very accomplished person who has acknowledged this is a comet.

If it happens to slow down and change trajectory after it passes behind the sun, he might change his tune but he's pretty focused on the science at this point.

I found out that the green was probably nickle content and the sizzling sounds also has an explanation which I don't recall.

What amazed me was that until I understood what I saw was a natural phenomenon, it seemed absolutely mind blowing and still stands out as one of the coolest things I've experienced yet no one I talked to saw it, there was no mention of it on the city subreddit, etc.

This was before the age of everyone having dashcams and doorbell cameras but something that remarkable happening over a densely populated suburban area at around 9pm not even being noticed by a single person I knew or was in contact with on socials suprised me.

Anyone taking a cursory interest knows that the US government routinely sends out disinfo on the subject and uses it to cover up their own secret aerospace development. That was never contentious.

However, sightings and reports of strange phenomenon go back very far in recorded and oral history and they are not limited to the United States.

My personal feeling is people are terrible eye witnesses and historical sources are prone to be misinterpreted through a biased, modern lens. But I also know that if you read the Wikipedia article on von Neumann probes, it doesn't seem that far fetched to think one might have found its way here especially considering we are not that far away from being able to build them ourselves.

Poaching liquid was evaluated based on the quantity and rate of bubbles rising from the bottom of the pan.

Milk was scalded (e.g. for bechemel) when the milk foamed but was shut off before it boiled over.

A knife inserted in a steak, chop, or roast could be tested for temp against your lower lip or wrist (yes, yes, hygiene and so forth).

The techniques you are talking about all came about because of all understanding of food that led to science asking "why does cheese happen the way it does". The precise techniques leading to a sharp, hard cheese or a soft, fresh cheese were well understood long before instant read thermometers.

I also help them get to the heart of problems quickly simply because I'm not stuck in the code all day. For example, if I see a developer taking too long to identify the source of a bug, I'll get on a call and get them to take me through that code and get them prove any assumption ("ok, show me the code that checks that value is greater than zero").

By doing this I'm using my coding experience directly without actually coding. I'd consider coding a huge waste of time for me, but spending 30 minutes to unstick a developer when I am sure they should have found the problem by now seems like a really good use of my time.

It also lets people know they can't just spend three days on something that should take a couple hours without someone checking in, which I don't live having to do but it's a reality for some teams I work with.

It would not do any of the things they thought (lots of parsing and file renaming that it took a while for them to articulate). We also discussed how the corporate IT would not be installing a Python interpreter on their computer. Oh what's that? Let me explain. And so on.

ChatGPT didn't help, in this situation, as it turned out.

I used to participate in some subreddits where support is offered for a couple of chronic illnesses I have but even those are "doctor says it's X, am I cooked".

Just over it.

Also, I am thinking about all the ocean factors beyond salt corrosion. There's tons of crap in the water beyond salt and minerals. Like fine grit suspended in it. Plus the tidal forces etc.

I'd file this under the same category as fast food burger advertising images and move on?

During a bad storm one night, they heard a buzzing sound at the window by their bed and saw an intense light outside. The ball lightning then entered their room at the window (I have no idea how that would work) and followed the wall out to the hallway. The whole time, they could hear a sizzling noise and the light was blinding.

Where it had entered the room, there was a fire outside where the electrical supply connected the house that entered the room. They took off out the door and down the the stairs. The fire damaged their house but did not spread (they think the rain put it out).

I have also heard that there was a family that had ball lightning enter their house down the wood stove chimney and emerge into their kitchen, followed the wall around the room, and the fizzled out.

Both incidents were a very long time ago. Other than that, I don't know anyone who has seen this phenomenon personally (my father passed away a couple of years ago).

I had been programming in C for a while, learning from K&R, to build ray tracing input files and that sort of thing so I was kind of disappointed but whatever, I was a mature student who had rediscovered computers a couple of years before (had a C64 in the 80s) and was just happy to be there.

Anyway, this guy in the back yells out "I could do that in 2 lines of Q-BASIC" or something to that effect (Q-BASIC was definitely part of his pithy one-liner). Little did I know he was representing so many of the people I would encounter over the next decades.