Proofiness - Charles Seife [25]
Callipygianness = (S + C) × (B + F) / (T - V)
where S is shape, C is circularity, B is bounciness, F is firmness, T is texture, and V is waist-to-hip ratio. This formula was devised by a team of academic psychologists after many hours of serious research into the female derriere. Yes, indeed. This is supposed to be the formula for the perfect butt.
In fact, it’s merely a formula for a perfect ass.
3
Risky Business
In each case, the companies and their executives grew rich by taking on excessive risk. In each case, the companies collapsed when these risks turned bad. And in each case, their executives are walking away with millions of dollars while taxpayers are stuck with billions of dollars in costs.
—Henry Waxman, Hearings on the Causes and Effects of the AIG Bailout, October 7, 2008
The chances of a disaster were stunningly large.
On July 18, 1969, two days before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on the moon, a speechwriter in President Nixon’s office penned a speech for an all too probable situation:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. . . .
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
It’s hard to fathom just how risky the moon missions really were. In the early days of the Apollo program, NASA asked General Electric to calculate the chances of successfully landing men on the moon and bringing them back to earth in one piece. The answer they got was shocking: less than 5 percent. According to the (admittedly crude) numbers, a moon landing was so risky that it would be foolhardy to attempt. If NASA had paid attention to the calculations, the Apollo missions would have had to be scrapped—a horrible political disaster for NASA and a humiliation for the nation. So NASA did what NASA tends to do under such circumstances: it crumpled up the calculations, tossed them in the garbage can, and went ahead with the program anyway. In this particular case, it happened to be the right decision. Even though there was an extremely close call—the Apollo 13 mission came within a hair of killing three astronauts— the moon landings would never have happened had NASA not disregarded the risks.
NASA engineers were famed for their “can do” bravado. No task was too difficult for the scrappy rocket scientists. The agency sneered at even the most daunting odds. Even if the numbers were dismal and the risks were enormous, NASA administrators disregarded them and plowed onward—with good reason. If Congress got wind of just how risky NASA’s human spaceflight projects were, the programs could well have been canceled. It was in NASA’s interest to disregard risks to keep their projects alive. On occasion, they even diddled with the numbers to make it look like their rockets were much safer than they actually were.
In 1983, the air force commissioned a study to calculate the risk that the brand-new space shuttle launch system would explode during launch. The study found that there was a dangerously high probability of disaster. As two of the study’s authors wrote, “The probability