Sidewinder engineering stoy/divide by zero

What idiot would attempt to divide by zero?
There is no "figure it out" as its not definable.
Every high school student is taught that.


"leadfoot" wrote in message
news:50une.14524$7p.11605@fed1read06...
I was told by one of my college math teachers that there was an engineering
calculation in the early sidewinder days that involved a division by ZERO.
No one could figure it out so they ignored it. The missile when launched
destroyed itself in flight and the fix was to place a cross member in the
body of the missile which then made the equation work properly

Can anyone confirm or or deny this srory?

Could have been sparrow but I'm pretty sure he said sidewinder. Instrucor
was often freelancing as an emgineering consultant

niceguy wrote:
What idiot would attempt to divide by zero?
There is no "figure it out" as its not definable.
Every high school student is taught that.

You can be pretty sure it wasn't intentional. When you're programming
with variables, it can happen that one of them becomes zero due to
unforseen conditions. Of course, a wizardly programmer will both forsee
the possibility of those conditions and also include tests to trap
errors (like zeros in embarrassing places), but sometimes in the old
days memory was extremely tight, not permitting such "luxuries," and
then not all programmers are wizards.
--
Noah

You don't have to be a wizard.
Any programmer should ensure that a zero denominator can "never" happen.
Whoever did that should have been fired as well as whomever was contracted
to review and test the code.

"Noah Little" wrote in message
...
niceguy wrote:
What idiot would attempt to divide by zero?
There is no "figure it out" as its not definable.
Every high school student is taught that.

You can be pretty sure it wasn't intentional. When you're programming
with variables, it can happen that one of them becomes zero due to
unforseen conditions. Of course, a wizardly programmer will both forsee
the possibility of those conditions and also include tests to trap
errors (like zeros in embarrassing places), but sometimes in the old
days memory was extremely tight, not permitting such "luxuries," and
then not all programmers are wizards.
--
Noah

Noah Little wrote:

You can be pretty sure it wasn't intentional. When you're programming
with variables, it can happen that one of them becomes zero due to
unforseen conditions. Of course, a wizardly programmer will both forsee
the possibility of those conditions and also include tests to trap
errors (like zeros in embarrassing places), but sometimes in the old
days memory was extremely tight, not permitting such "luxuries," and
then not all programmers are wizards.

I'm inclined to think early marques of the AIM 9 used analog
computing rather than 1s and 0s.


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niceguy wrote:
What idiot would attempt to divide by zero?

God. That's how we get black holes.

In article , nafod40 wrote:

niceguy wrote:
What idiot would attempt to divide by zero?

God. That's how we get black holes.

I'd like to see that equation.

--
Harry Andreas
Engineering raconteur

Harry Andreas wrote:
In article , nafod40 wrote:

niceguy wrote:
What idiot would attempt to divide by zero?

God. That's how we get black holes.

I'd like to see that equation.



I think its not to hard to derive. If gravity is so high that escape
velocity (eg for a missile) excedes the speed of light you get it. The
fitgerald-lorentz contraction equations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FitzGer...tz_Contraction

Square root of (1-(v^2/C^2)) produces infinit contraction at this
speed. I.E. light can't escape and objects have zero lenght and
infinite mass.

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005 19:21:58 -0700, Eunometic wrote
(in article .com):

I think its not to hard to derive. If gravity is so high that escape
velocity (eg for a missile) excedes the speed of light you get it. The
fitgerald-lorentz contraction equations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FitzGer...tz_Contraction

It isn't the black hole solution that gives the error. The radius of the
event horizon (the place where the speed of light equals escape velocity) is
the same when calculated classically or with Einstein's gravitation. The
problem comes with the singularity, or what happens after that. You get the
equivalent to a division by zero in the center, like with anything where you
divide by a radius and you try to see what happens at the center. Radius is
zero -- oops, condition red -- global causality error! The universe does not
allow division by zero. Perhaps it falls in the realm of the absolute
elsewhere, or perhaps not. Nobody knows.

-- Charlie Springer