I haven't read the entire thread and I don't intend to. The whole
concept is so bizarre that I could not read it without thinking of the
worst most evil bosses and environments I have worked on, and none of
them even come close.
It does remind me a bit of what I have read about "computers" back in
the 1930s, and especially on the atom bomb projects. There would be a
project leader who would have to break some formula down into little
bitty steps which could be famed out to people running calculating
machines. There would be a page of steps. The first few numbers
would be filled in; each computer (being a human at this time) would
follow one specific line, say 17 being the sum of 10 and 6, and pass
the sheet on to someone else. Presumably hard problems had many
pages, and someone would copy final numbers from one page to beginning
numbers on another page.
Not only did the steps have to be simple, they had to parallelize as
much as possible, so multiple sheets could start at once, only coming
together for the final calculations.
But what really made it fascinating was that for anything secret,
whether the atom bomb or mere commercial trade secrets, one of the
goals was to make sure that no one who worked on any single sheet
could have any idea of the overall project. You never put units on a
sheet, never used familiar constants (5280 feet per mile), never ever
ever let anyone have any idea what they were doing other than
repeating line 6 + line 10 yields line 17. I would imagine that if
you wanted to multiple miles by 5280 to get feet, you could split it
into two steps on different sheets; one multiplied by 264, the other
by 20, but probably more obfuscated.
That is what Grant wants here, and it requires that the people he hire
be mere mechanical monkeys. Anyone with any intelligence will run
away from such a project faster than kryptonite diarrhea thru Superman.
Grant, you need to stop being paranoid. I am surprised you even
worked up the courage to let slip on here, in public, that you even
have a sooper dooper sekrit project.
--
... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / [email protected]
GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E 6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933
I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o
