Concerned wrote, “JPL–smack middle in the congressional district of the ubiquitous Rep. Adam Schiff.”

Now that is a fact I was totally unaware of, which certainly provides a bit of important context. Though it shouldn’t be surprising, because our intellectual class today are almost routinely Democrat, almost brainlessly.

The tendency towards irreducible number of errors –
The author makes the observation that in a suitably complex system there is a certain irreducible number of errors. Any attempt to fix observed errors tends to result in the introduction of other errors.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer. This idea is known as Brooks’s law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping.

Brooks’s observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had added more programmers to a project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would later conclude had, counter-intuitively, delayed the project even further. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project—involved in writing an ALGOL compiler—would require six months, regardless of the number of workers involved (it required longer). The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is called “The Bible of Software Engineering”, because “everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it”

And the classic on measuring progress by man months – “You don’t assemble nine women in a conference room and tell them they have a month to come up with a baby”