triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Engineering Analysis

There was a time when Steven Den Beste would have written an essay describing the methods an engineer might use to determine whether anomalous research data was valid, and then tie it into a discussion of the validity and significance of the election outcome. The emails picking nits out of his secondary points have taken the fun out of blogging for him, so he distilled it all into a three word essay. I understand that this still wasn't perfect enough for everyone.

Much of my time at work over the last several weeks has been spent working with others on chasing down what we thought were two separate problems regarding mobile call handovers between our network and our roaming partner to the north. Everything fell into place yesterday, and the process is functioning correctly as of today, but if we had paid attention from the beginning to where I was when initiating test calls, we would have seen that both issues were part of the same problem, and solved it much sooner. No doubt the uncertainty in the pre-election polls and the utter inaccuracy of the exit polls have been due in part to similar failures to track essential but seemingly trivial and irrelevant details. This happens when people are too rigid in their assumptions as to how a system functions. I'm just not up for turning all this into a coherent explanation.