Safety cut rope axe man In the first nuclear reactor, constructed by Enrico Fermi in 1942 under the bleachers of the University of Chicago football stadium, the control rods were held up by a manila rope. A man with an axe was told to cut the rope if the reactor got out of hand. This "safety cut rope axe man" is supposedly the origin of the term SCRAM for an emergency shutdown procedure. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape wordsacronymsenergy
Monkeys testing random designs A Tweet by Jared Spool twitter.com A/B testing is an effective approach to use science to design and deliver deeply-frustrating user experiences. A/B testing without upfront research is just random monkeys testing random designs to see which of those designs do “best” against random criteria. If drug testing was actually implemented like most A/B tests, you’d give 2 drugs to 2 groups of people and pick the “winner” by whichever group had fewer deaths. uxresearch