Mirrors. How the heck do they work?



  • One of the things our vehicle simulator trains users to do is back up to a trailer or load so it can be attached to the tractor cab. This, of course, requires the use of a 'virtual' person on the ground to guide the vehicle back with hand signals. Fairly straight forward stuff, right?

    A week or so ago, we received a bug in JIRA from the 'lead' tester for the project. Apparently the simulated guide was using the wrong hand for his signals. According to the requirements, he should use his right hand, and the tester was claiming he was using his left.

    In fact, he went on to claim, the guide was using correct hand when driving towards him, but apparently in the process of turning the vehicle around, he switched to the other hand. Helpful screenshots were attached.

    So... we have a room full of engineers in our iteration planning meeting, staring at these screenshots. For a full 30 seconds, silence reigned...

    "He does understand how mirrors work, right?", asked the lead, as he typed, 'Works as designed, because mirrors' and bounced the issue back to test.

    The next morning, the issue was back in our queue, with the comment of, "It doesn't work that way on my truck"

    A groan echoed through the room. This was the same truck that he'd used to determine that our implementation of an Allison Heavy-Duty transmission was incorrect, claiming that he had one (he does not, I looked it up). Several people face-palmed, and one engineer started to laugh nervously. This was going to be one of those cases.

    "What the actual...", the lead sighed and started typing again. "Go find a mirror and check it, this works correctly", and kicked the issue back.

    A few hours later I see the tester in question stalking the cubical farm, and ask him who he is looking for. He replies that he is looking for a mirror, to which I direct him to the rest room. "No, that mirror is broken..."

    "What do you mean?", I ask.

    "It shows the wrong hand!"

    "...", my brain refuses to parse the statement for several seconds, "I... don't know what to say. Good luck?"

    I hear later that he did finally find a mirror, and spent several hours dragging various people into a meeting room to test how a mirror works. He apparently got somewhat pissy about it, and even accused one person of swapping the hand his watch was on when he wasn't looking.

    On the up side, he did finally, grudgingly, close the case. Of course, when he did so, he closed it as 'cannot reproduce' and commented that we'd 'fixed it with the latest software'.


  • FoxDev

    Sounds like the guy who reported the issue is a total


    For those who have the misfortune of not being British: it's a British slang term for 'idiot'…



  • Is wrench now an insult?



  • Nice... fiction... right? Maybe the guy has some unknown disorder. There are some weird neural disorders like:


  • FoxDev

    @mott555 said:

    Is wrench spanner now an insult?

    It is if you're British ;)



  • @RaceProUK said:

    it's a British slang term for 'idiot'…

    "Made in France"?



  • @Eldelshell said:

    Nice... fiction... right? Maybe the guy has some unknown disorder. There are some weird neural disorders.

    Ha! I wish it was fiction, what I related was 99% accurate, short of the quotes, which I may have misremembered. It was a few days ago, I wasn't originally going to write it up.

    I suppose it's possible he has a neural disorder. The only neural disorder I know he has is that he's an idiotic ass, but perhaps there is a medical reason for it. If there is, I wouldn't know. Other than being an unrepentant prick to everyone in software, he seems to be a normally functional human being.



  • @RaceProUK said:

    >Is wrench spanner now an insult?

    It is if you're British

    And even if you're not, it's still a tool. Which this guy is oh-so-much.



  • @nullptr said:

    normally functional human being

    Except for the whole "mirrors are broken" thing. Anyway, your office hasn't been attacked by a bear lately right? I would keep all the shotguns away from this wacko.



  • I refuse to believe this is possible. I think this guy is long-haul-trolling you.

    No pun intended.



  • @Eldelshell said:

    Except for the whole "mirrors are broken" thing. Anyway, your office hasn't been attacked by a bear lately right? I would keep all the shotguns away from this wacko.

    Nah, last confirmed bear attack was last year. It destroyed a picnic table. 😄



  • You should have asked him why the mirror only flipped things horizontally.



  • @xaade said:

    You should have asked him why the mirror only flipped things horizontally.

    I wish I'd thought of this...



  • This post is deleted!


  • Hey, I was reading that!



  • @mott555 said:

    Hey, I was reading that!

    Heh, sorry, realized that someone could identify who he was and who I was from it, and that I do enjoy being employed. 😄


  • Garbage Person

    What kind of diseased wrench has a 14mm on one end and a 17mm on the other? 15 and 16 are important!



  • You can use a slightly larger hand than the nut and still twist it.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @nullptr said:

    >Anyway, your office hasn't been attacked by a bear lately right? I would keep all the shotguns away from this wacko.

    Nah, last confirmed bear attack was last year.

    It was a reference to Barely Broken In.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @mott555 said:

    Is wrench now an insult?

    Yeah, I read it as "tool."


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    Yeah, I read it as "tool."

    'spanner' in the UK. 'tool' works too...


  • Garbage Person

    Geometrically yes. With any torque whatsoever, not on your life.


  • FoxDev

    @Weng said:

    What kind of diseased wrench has a 14mm on one end and a 17mm on the other? 15 and 16 are important!

    It'd be part of a set, so there's also be a 15/18 and a 13/16 as well, I guess?



  • There are some terrible neural disorders indeed that can cause things like that. Like Stupidity or Narcissism. Sadly medicine has yet to find a cure :( .



  • @Bort said:

    "Made in France"?

    Could be worse.



  • A very large dose of many different medicines can permanently cure Stupidity and Narcissism.


  • FoxDev

    @DCRoss said:

    https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/c0/3b/f6/c03bf6b3649e756f47a3726baedb4fb1.jpg

    I'm not sure the Americans are any better:
    Uh, This is a Pickle | Robot Chicken | Adult Swim – 00:06
    — Adult Swim

    @mott555 said:
    A very large dose of many different medicines can permanently cure Stupidity and Narcissism.

    Many things can do that. Sadly, they tend to be slightly totally illegal.



  • @PJH said:

    'spanner'

    [quote=clearly you mean this definition]
    A Type of role player that God-modes beyond belief, and calls it "Being Literate". Anyone using the name Spanner is a god-moder, Illiterate, does not know the difference between a coma and a period, Copies everyone else's bloodline abilities, "Tears" open portals and pops out behind you (Of course to rape you), uses magical powers from space to destroy your base, will leave the leader of the good guy organization to die and won't care, and most of all, because he is a mother ef-ing piece of crap from Australia.

    Can also be used to name someone that always has to be right, never wrong.

    Dalco - ((Logs onto gaia)) "Oh god, I hope that Spanner didn't post... Oh god he did... ((Reading)) EF! SPANNER! MOTHER EF-ING SPANNER! I JUST THREW A PLANT AT YOU! HOW THE EF DIG YOU ABSORB IT AND BECOME THE UNIVERSE! EEEEEEEFFFFFFF SPANNNNERRRRR!!!!!"

    Spanner - "I am SO smart. I am SO Literate. I am THE best role player EVER. I eat squash."
    [/quote]

     



  • reply to spanner?

    "You've been pre-emptively stoned. Everything you just described was all in your imagination".

    Every action you continue to use will simply be you speaking that action in a slightly disturbed tone as you rock back and forth.

    NOTE: Stoned can describe the use of drugs or the pre-medival practice of hurling stones, both result in the same outcome. In each case, take 1d6 damage, unresistable, cannot use a save.


  • BINNED

    @Keith said:

    No pun intended.



  • Hey if you're British explain to me the series Hyperspace. Is it making fun of British patriotism or playing it straight?

    (The plot of the show is there's a spaceship going around the universe trying to promote British interests, mainly convincing rubber-forehead aliens to set up trade agreements. Being a comedy, obviously everybody on it is incompetent in various ways.)


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    Hey if you're British explain to me the series Hyperspace. Is it making fun of British patriotism or playing it straight?

    It's doing what we do best: taking the piss out of ourselves 😆



  • @RaceProUK said:

    It's doing what we do best: taking the piss out of ourselves

    It kind of is but then sometimes it isn't. Like the super-cheesy sci-fi show is clearly American, or basically a British person's conception of an American sci-fi series from the 1980s (probably Buck Rogers.)

    Then there's the episode where their British-built ship is better-built than the alien's, so they can hide from them in a gas giant, it was played straight there, unless I missed something.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    British-built ship is better-built than the alien's

    Why do we assume they'll find us first?



  • @xaade said:

    You should have asked him why the mirror only flipped things horizontally.

    As this is a common "nerd sniping" question, let me try to post an explaination here

    [spoiler]
    Imagine a transparent sheet of paper with text. If you hold it normally so you can read the text, and go in front of a mirror, you will still be able to read it in the mirror. It has not reversed anything!
    Now you want to turn the sheet towards the mirror, as if showing it to someone. What do you do? You flip it horizontally. YOU flip it horizontally. You are looking at it from the back side, with the right side on your left, and this is exactly what you see on the mirror too. You could instead flip it vertically and it would be flipped vertically. So the mirror does not reverse, it is you who are "turned around".
    [/spoiler]



  • @xaade said:

    Why do we assume they'll find us first?

    The British? Huh? Who is "they"? Who is finding who? How is this a reply to a scenario in a British sci-fi sitcom? I have never been so confused over a single sentence.



  • so is this guy new? have you posted other stories about him? this type of thing can't be an isolated incident for this guy.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @hungrier said:

    does not know the difference between a coma and a period

    How hard is that? Asleep vs bleeding.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @anonymous234 said:

    As this is a common "nerd sniping" question, let me try to post an explaination here

    Bah! Just tell him to tilt his head.



  • Achievable unlocked!

    DisBlakeyficated!

    My comment meant: Why do we always assume aliens will find us first (implied by them having better technology)?



  • @xaade said:

    My comment meant: Why do we always assume aliens will find us first (implied by them having better technology)?

    Who was assuming that? I'm still lost. Have you even seen the show I'm talking about?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Who was assuming that

    It's profoundly rare when you see a sci-fi scenario that didn't end up with humanity getting into the fray because some alien visited us.

    Ok, so star trek at least waits until we have warp. But then proceeds to have some race say, ok here's a bunch of tech you don't have yet, and here's where to find everyone.

    Independence Day
    Pacific Rim
    War of the Worlds
    Star Trek
    Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    E.T.
    Dark City (heavily implied, but not confirmed)
    Men in Black
    Mars Attacks (well, technically we discovered them, but they knew about us first)
    Transformers
    Signs
    Predator
    Doctor Who
    Hitchhiker's Guide
    Everything Marvel.

    Fiction that doesn't assume that aliens find us first
    Aliens (until Prometheus retconned aliens finding us first)
    Battlestar Galactica (technically doesn't have aliens, but progenitor races)
    Stargate (technically its progenitor again, and they have some tech that's better, but I'd still say a full scale Earth invasion would kick their asses)
    Robotech (again progenitors)

    Wait, I'm getting the notion that the vast majority of stories where we find them first, turns out they are just us anyway.



  • @fwd said:

    so is this guy new? have you posted other stories about him? this type of thing can't be an isolated incident for this guy.

    No, he's not new at all. He's been here almost as long as I have (10 years in a few months, which is entirely too long). There are a lot of stories related to our test team, but I haven't written them up. This one, though, really needed to be shared.



  • ... ok? And this has what to do with Hyperspace, or the specific scene you were replying to?


  • BINNED

    Red Dwarf: A single alien encounter, humans found the ship, aliens long dead / gone
    Farscape: A single human finds a bunch of alien civilizations first

    Off the top of my head, there's probably more I could think of.



  • that scene.

    It was tangential commentary.



  • And for each one, I have 10 in the reverse.

    I know there are some out there...

    But I'm making the point that, for how much we think we're the center of the universe, it's weird that we expect other aliens to find us first.... as a rule (which can be broken).

    I think it's a result of the fact that we can imagine things much greater than we have.

    We very well may spend eternity in a universe with many sentient species that will never find each other.


  • BINNED

    Well, I guess it's harder to write a goodprofitable story about a human ship that finds a planet filled with lizards banging rocks together...



  • @Onyx said:

    Farscape: A single human finds a bunch of alien civilizations first

    Technically, that one fits both categories.


  • BINNED

    @Gurth said:

    Technically, that one fits both categories.

    Eh. I guess. The human character is the one who traveled to them though.


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