--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > Your choice of metaphor is interesting, Jim. > Do you remember the *history* of the Hubble > telescope. It was delivered into orbit with > astigmatism, its main mirror suffering from > spherical aberration such that its perceptions > of the universe were useless. It took a service > mission to correct the problem so that the photos > it took had anything whatsoever to do with reality.
Fact-check time: Actually the Hubble pre-repair was far from "useless." It was *limited*, but still able to perform certain types of very useful observations with little difficulty. Interestingly, the mirror repair involved not fixing the flawed mirror, but installing new mirrors with the *opposite* flaws, so that the flaws in the first mirror were canceled out. What that may have to do with the appropriateness of Jim's metaphor or the validity of Barry's comment, I leave as an exercise for the reader...
