Open and honest ...

Ethics training talks about this subject a lot. As we know, our world isn't just black and white; how the grays (and other colors) are handled speak a lot to the interests of truth engineering.

A quote from today's telecon (a paraphrase (flightblogger notes from 9/5/07, 787 Status teleconference (9/22/07, will be offline until further notice)), of course): "Tell the world exactly what's going on with the program. You won't know what you have to deal with until you have to deal with it. We'll get this airplane in the air, and we'll get to flight test."

First, there is no doubt about the seriousness of the effort and probably little doubt about the eventual outcome. How the eventuality will map to time has gripped our minds. Some postmortem analysis could be done now (if one has the time and energy). At some future point (probably not too far out), there definitely will be more data.

It's the journey and details thereof that seem to have everyone's attention (as it should). Yet, we on the outside can only surmise (isn't that a normal human endeavor). How 'exact' any report may be deals with several issues that will be discussed further as we go along.

Naturally, as on any journey, there is discovery, except perhaps when one is retracing steps in a cow pasture ad infinitum. Yet, the thing-in-itself way of the world would suggest that even something so mundane as that retracing could be considered new (think of Blake).

There was discussion that going through the processes that were defined in the abstract (a necessity, since they were before the fact) causes one to adjust. Perhaps, our wonder is that process seems to change in every way except as movement of the EIS (first delivery).

We'll stay with the polls and try to make them more objective. As of 6:30 EDT on 9/5/2007, of 43 votes on the EIS, 34 (78%) say that most likely (or stronger) that there will be a slide. It might be interesting to ask how far the slide is expected. Only 3 are positive definite (6 are wishing, as most of us are, that things work).

Expect more polls as we go along. Hopefully, they'll contribute to the discussion.

Remarks:

01/27/2009 -- At the time of this post, engineering was the main focus. Then, other areas become of interest due to overlaps in the problems: map-territory, computation and being, and much more. There will be more integrating posts to bring some cohesion, such as leveraging and fiction.

Modified: 01/27/2009