The article doesn't do the slides nor the evidence justice. It might be more illustrative to study the original article by Edward Tufte, which the writer (and I) learned about the issue from,
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2238.gifhttps://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2239.gif
I think it's why I think teaching engineers how to draw and do good design is important. How big is a cubic inch? How big is the crater in the heat shield that we're talking about?
It would have been better to draw comparisons and explore things. Here's a simple sentence that could have done better;
"Sir, our test database was for objects the size of an average icecube. The thing that hit the wing was the size of seven and a half footballs. It's 640x larger!
[chart that shows just how much kinetic energy we're talking about]
We're looking at somewhere between 640x to 1000x more energy than we've ever seen. We have a problem."
A friend and I did an interview with Don Eyles a while ago and he said something that haunts me, "if you see something, say something" https://twitter.com/_areoform/status/1501589762599112704
I'd like to go a bit further. If you see something, design and explain something. Challenger is a great example of this; Dr Tufte covers it extremely well, just laying out the boosters and the blowthrough they experienced from left to right on a chart that has temperature as the X axis, you can see clearly that it gets worse as the temperature drops. But no one at NASA or Thiokol thought about doing that.
No one thought about humanizing the data. They knew how important it was. They tried to say something. But they couldn't express it.
It's not enough to just show people the data. We need to get people to understand it. And that's often social suicide.
It's easy for people to want to remain stuck in their status quo, no one likes the "negative person", but that's what ends up getting people killed in safety critical environments. And that's how we get messes like the ones we're in today.
One particular one that comes to mind is climate change, I am unsure if most people are aware of this, but it's very similar to the failure expressed here. Most of the scientists whose work is consumed by the IPCC and the models that are published by the IPCC know that the "consensus" is wrong. Except, it's wrong in the opposite direction to what certain people want it to be.
The reality is far worse than what the models suggest. The models still don't include the loss of permafrost - what's worse is that they don't model the non-linearity of permafrost loss, methane emission, that then sparks more warming and more permafrost loss etc, https://www.woodwellclimate.org/review-of-permafrost-science... nor do they include effects of how the climate would change of ocean conveyor currents shut down (AMOC in particular is of significant interest, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/12/concern-grows-over... ). They also don't model the melting and release of clathrates from the ocean, or the effects of ocean acidification, and several other non-linear processes.
I had a very polite, but heated argument with one of the scientists involved and he told me that they aren't going to include that, because if they do, the numbers will look much worse and they'll be dismissed as apocalyptic loons.
Which brings us, elegantly, back to the point that Dr Feynman made in his remarks about the Challenger disaster,
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
