Thread: Green Thumb?
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Old 23-07-2020, 01:47 PM posted to uk.rec.gardening
AnthonyL AnthonyL is offline
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On Tue, 21 Jul 2020 13:56:57 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 21/07/2020 12:49, AnthonyL wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 17:27:28 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:




It somewhat reminds me of what I learnt as an engineer "Safety factor
is simply ignorance factor".


Sounds ******** to me. Safety factor is the margin to known problems.
Says nothing about unknown problems, but how could it?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety
or more precisely the "Margin of safety"

That has nothing to do with unknown problems and has everything to do
with the uncertainty of the anticipated behaviour of the materials in
question.

Albeit a long time ago I also spent a lot of time calculating (before
ready access to calculators) Mean Time Before Failure and Operational
Reliability of sub-systems in an engine.

No doubt any safety factor applied nowadays would be much more refined
than in those days as the manufacturing and build processes improved
and the ignorance factor decreased.

--
AnthonyL

Why do scientists need to BELIEVE in anything?