It's too bad that Elon Musk and Kelly Johnson never met. Both are engineers' engineers doing impossible things, and I bet they would have had a blast.
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Hats off to the Engineers Engineers that Engineered the chopsticks catch, there were quite a few getting into the technical weeds:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2...
P.S. I've read full length biographies of both, and am an ME/AE engineer myself. I think I have at least some grasp of what they have accomplished.
I dont know what the general solution is here.. make sure (organizational) Hierarchies are as fluid as the Recompense (including, by reputation) & Responsibilties, i suppose
nu_H = nu_RR
where nu has units of viscosity
Failing so, i’d prefer to defer judgement after we’ve had blood samples from both Kelly n Musk. (For lead, fluoride, other psychoactives etc)
(IMX rapidly expanding Hierarchies do not [pace Landau] relax on a negligible time scale)
Length scales are impt too, we are obsessed with highly localized organizations like Musk’s (other than X) & Kelly’s because they seem so effective but the most insidious ones tend to rely on (the discrepancy bewtween?) long (or even mid) range info/materiel exchanges..
(Wuz thinking how the revolutionary structures (i.e. artillery stds?) were mostly already in place for decades before NB)
Q: how did these not diffuse to french navy? [Boudriot-Berti]?
> Napoleon would dictate to his secretaries exactly what he wanted published in the Paris newspaper [p22]
> « Je redoute trois journaux plus que 100.000 baïonnettes. » (I fear 3 newspapers more than 100'000 infantry) —NB
There's a nice (but very long) soviet joke that concludes with Bonaparte admiring Pravda.
> the Emperor makes war not with our arms but with our legs [p28]
As in the days of the Renaissance Condottieri; oddly enough the same is true in fencing: whoever has the stronger legs controls the distance (I wouldn't be surprised if 膝行 had been meant as leg training in the land of 間合い).
I wonder if the reliance on foraging for manoeuvre was part of his defeat by General Winter? Early canning (jarring in champagne bottles, I believe) had been developed under his version of ARPA, but I don't know if he had had that logistical element in 1812, nor if it would have been available much beyond metropolitan france.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia#Logi... suggests french planning had assumed russia would be nearly as dense as poland.
EDIT: when in high-functioning global teams, I've noticed how time zone diversity allows development to proceed nearly continuously; B's habit [p24] of sleeping from 19h00-01h00, in order to process yesterday's reports and get the new Orders of the Day out (~03h00) before his army woke up, seems similar.
EDIT2: (a) no such thing as foraging for a blue-water cruising naval vessel, (b) navies already operated with admirals using flag signals to coordinate their fleets, and (c) before modern comms, navies were already nearly "relativistic" in that news travelled about as fast as they did and so, eg if you sent a captain to the indies you had to have great confidence in them, because it'd take on the order of a year to close the accountability loop.
