<p>opps, menlopark had my space mission example</p>
<p>what about paperless voting machines</p>
<p>yeah, that makes us feel confortable</p>
<p>Ahhh hanging chads!!!</p>
<p>Zimmer-
The yearbook editor caught the typo when he proofed the galleys, so the typo never made it to final print! My last name was near the end of the alphabet, and apparently he’d been up til the wee hurs of the night proofing all the yearbook stuff when he ran across this typo! He called me early that next morning to tell me about it. It was classic, though never went to final print in its original form (it does say “flattening pennies on traintracks” under “hobbies” under my photo) It didn’t wreck the editor’s long term career opportunities in any way. Hes now the pres. of the Kennedy Center!</p>
<p>I think that the adhesive that make sticky notes “sticky” was a mistake by the chemists working to devise some other type of glue stuff…could be some detail that they didn’t do that caused them to come up with it???</p>
<p>yes, you are right astrophysics mom. We talked about that one too. Decided that was a “make lemons into lemonade” type example. The glue for postits was supposed to be a stronger adhesive, but didnt work for its original intent.</p>
<p>So have we got any examples of success? Mies van der Rohe famously said “God is in the details”. His building are models of perfection if you like spare. (He also said “Less is more.”)</p>
<p>Funny O-Rings was my very first thought of a failure too.</p>
<p>Leonardo Da Vinci realized that a man’s height equals the span of his outstretched arms (you’ve seen that picture), and from this understanding, the smaller, humanistic proportions of the Renaissance arches were developed in Florence. Check my facts, but that’s my memory of the lesson.</p>
<p>Or Leonardo’s development of 2-point perspective, to show 3-dimensional space in his drawings and paintings. THe convergence of the table lines in The Last Supper would come together right behind the head of Jesus.</p>
<p>No risk there, however. I guess it was riskier when Michelangelo used the face of the Pope who hadn’t paid him as the face of Moses, and then popped two horns upon the head of the statue. Kinda risky.</p>
<p>^^^ I didn’t know that about Michelangelo, paying3tuitions</p>
<p>I was always told those horns were the result of a mistranslation, but I like your story better.</p>
<p>Ahh, mathmom, I am aware of your biblical mistranslation theory. It got directed at me as a child (a new neighbor - a kid about 6 or so, asked me where my horns were. I will never forget that). I like the pope story. </p>
<p>I’ve shared these ideas with ds. He mentioned that he’d thought of the mars lander as well. He liked the oj/glove idea and the electronic voting and/or electronic chad, though wasn’t sure if they were too political. He’d forgotten about my yearbook story. He roared.</p>
<p>Good luck with the project! On Michelangelo, yes the mistranslation was rampant in those times (in Hebrew, Moses had ‘kerenim’ or ‘rays of light’ from his head descending Mt. Sinai, but an alternate translation of that is "horns’).
However, Michelangelo was a very sophisticated fellow and is know to have had Jewish friends, and knew well above and beyond this medieval stereotype. So he truly knew that Moses didn’t have horns, and was harassing the Pope when he put them on. Pope owed him money --I think for the Sistine Ceiling, but have to check my dates on that if that was the piece under debate for payment. Anyway, the Pope ran him around between Florence and Rome to finish several projects at once, all the while not paying on time, which M. resented.
You make me glad I majored in Art History 
Good luck with the project. I love the pennies story, toooo much!</p>
<p>There was an incident… oh man, I’m short on the details, but I saw a thing about this on TV… well the end result was that this commercial aircraft, loaded with passengers, RAN OUT OF FUEL in midflight and coasted in to land on an airstrip at an abandoned airfield that was being used for some sort of amateur racing. Luckily everyone got out of the way, the plane landed safely. It might have been Air Canada? There was something about the jet being in the USA and then in Canada, and it was supposed to be filled with X GALLONS of fuel and they put in X LITERS instead… a little detail, gallons or liters, almost cost the lives of 100+ passengers and possibly people on the ground. I’ll see what I can find on Google.</p>
<p>^^well, this won’t be a famous story but the one about liters or gallons reminded me…
IN college, I had a job baking bread for our cooperative housing unit. Fourteen tables served at each meal, so we took recipes for 2 loaves of bread and multiplied them x7 as we assembled ingredients. </p>
<p>I turned “2 tsp salt” into 14 tablespoons salt, thus wrecking the dough. I thought maybe it would pass as Irish Soda Bread, but no, and I just threw the dough away into the garbage, and tried to start over without 'fessing up to my mistake. </p>
<p>A few hours later, the guys came whose job it was to throw out the garbage. They opened the door to the garbage room and screamed…this THING had risen, overflowed the cans, and was crawling towards them, occupying the entire room. So I had to admit it.</p>
<p>Here’s the story:
<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider</a></p>
<p>It was Air Canada Flight 143, and happened when the Boeing 767 was en route from Montreal to Edmonton in July, 1983. “The incident occurred during a period when Canada was converting to the metric system.”</p>
<p>Here’s a perfect example of the risk/reward in paying attention to details:</p>
<p>When IBM set out to enter the personal computer market that Apple had created, it contracted out the design of the operating system to a small company in Seattle. Since this was just anonymous background software, invisible to consumers, no one bothered to make certain that IBM, not the contractor, owned the software design.</p>
<p>IBM’s entry into the PC market was tremendously successful. Within a year or two, it dominated a market that it had expanded considerably. IBM was at that point the largest, most important technology company on Earth, an emerging rival to the great industrial businesses. Everyone agreed the operating system was pretty deficient, but it was relatively easy to write applications for. And part of IBM’s brilliant marketing plan – it really was brilliant – was to enlist the creativity and marketing support of a world full of software developers in order to make their machines more attractive. IBM’s initial margins on the equipment it was selling were great. The whole project was a triumph of planning and marketing brains AND brawn.</p>
<p>Except, of course, that you could build the same machine anywhere for 10% of what IBM wanted to charge, and as long as you had the same operating system as the IBM PC your computer would run the same programs and feel pretty much the same to users. And IBM didn’t control the operating system.</p>
<p>Microsoft did. And no one has to guess which is the most important technoliogy company on Earth now, the rival (and superior) of the great industrial businesses.</p>
<p>all great stories. Yes-- If I recall, JHS, IBM was trying to negotiate with someone down the street from Gates. Gates didn’t haggle over the legal mumbo jumbo. He took the deal. Too bad for the jerk down the street.
I guess his dropping out of Harvard to start his own software co is a bit of a risk, eh?</p>
<p>Concerning IBM, I think the young Microsoft actually bought the disk operating system
from someone else, and then licensed it to IBM</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Successes:
A. Electric light bulb filament
B. Giving away razors and selling razor blades</p>
<p>Failures:
A. Overlooking the determination of Japanese Car manufacturers
B. There were no WMDs</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I can see mythology sneaking into the birth of the personal computer. I was working in the business at the birth of the industry in 1977 and would like to clear up a couple of things posted earlier:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>In 1977, three personal computers were introduced in the consumer market place: the PET Commodore, the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1, and the Apple II. For the first three or four years, the TRS-80 was the world’s best-selling personal computer. Early Apples had really poor text quality (only 40 columns, even if it was color) and really indifferent retail support. Radio Shack’s distribution channels and the 64-column text in the Model 1 were their advantage. The biggest difference was that by the early 80’s Tandy was backing off from manufacturing, and IBM’s PC launch in 1981 was changing the industry radically.</p></li>
<li><p>The IBM PC launched with two OS options: MS-DOS (marketed as “PC-DOS”) and CP/M-86. CP/M was a leading OS for personal computers in the late 70’s. Since Digital Research wanted a better licensing deal than Microsoft asked for, CP/M-86 cost a couple of hundred bucks more than PC-DOS and Microsoft’s version won the sales war. IBM and DR were involved in legal hassles for years, but Gates and company had already won the day by buying an OS from Seattle Computers and modifying it for IBM. There is a persistent rumor that DR could have had the same deal that Microsoft ended up with, but they refused to sign the world-famous notoriously oppressive IBM non-disclosure agreement. I’ve been asked to sign that NDA myself (I refused) because it pretty much says that IBM owns whatever you tell them, and they have no obligation to protect your trade secrets.</p></li>
<li><p>IBM never charged 10 times more than the competition for its personal computers. In the early days, when the market was shaking out, they had massive market-share advantage with prices that were higher than the competition. IBM went wrong when the focused on making their computers proprietary with wrong-headed initiatives like OS/2, the PS/1, token ring networks, and various attempts to make PCs into dumb terminals for mainframes and AS/400s.</p></li>
<li><p>It’s kind of Microsoft’s cross to bear, but the only really huge successes it has had have been DOS, Windows, and Office. To one extent or another everything else they’ve tried has been a disappointment. They keep getting eggs from their golden goose, but the gaggle still only consists of one bird.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>How about the discovery of penicillin? Who would have thought to look in a fungus? (And to think we have sloppy housekeeping to thank…)
<a href=“Alexander Fleming - Wikipedia”>Alexander Fleming - Wikipedia;