Quote Originally Posted by mklotz View Post
Nevil Shute Norway was an aeronautical engineer and author. Trustee from the Toolroom is one of his best books, IMO, but his most compelling work is On the Beach.

He worked on the R100 British airship. It was scrapped after the accident of its sister ship, the R101. The paragraph below, from the Wikipedia article on Shute, offers insight to the man that will resonate with most of the forum members involved in technical work.


Shute gives a detailed account of the development of the two airships in his 1954 autobiographical work, Slide Rule.[5] His account is very critical of the R101 design and management team, and strongly hints that senior team members were complicit in concealing flaws in the airship's design and construction. In The Tender Ship, Manhattan Project engineer and Virginia Tech professor Arthur Squires used Shute's account of the R100 and R101 as a primary illustration of his thesis that governments are usually incompetent managers of technology projects.[6]
Those are bells rung frequently, here on HMT.net and elsewhere.
How are we surprised, though? The same brilliant group of minds cannot understand meanings of perfectly clear linguistic and legal statements; while offering new-think interpretations. What on earth is there to misconstrue in "Shall not"?