¶ Navy Sequence
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Index Entry
Navy Sequence:
"the Navy remained in the Navy and the commander in the Navy had to make decisions way away from home. After Abraham Lincoln decisions were made by telegram: all the land controls went into central position. Only in the Navy were decisions made way out there. After the war we then learned to scramble messages and from this time on they no longer needed to have comprehensivists. … They wanted specialists. Men became Naval aviators or submarine, and so forth. I was the last of the breed of the comprehensivists being trained in that way. This is very relative to the problem you’re up against now.
“I was fascinated with the things that some people improved on the firing data. They introduced theis and they introduced that and I said I wonder if some of these things aren’t redundant. We put them all in to calculate. So I tried firing where you dropped this out; and if the answer was so badly altered that you could fire anywhere in the sky with equal success, then I put that one back in. When I found it really hardly varied at all, I said which one of these should be dropped out. And I could weed out. I feel that’s what brought me down to Earth, (hmm - eja), down to what I called min-max-fam-fax-- the minimum-maximum family of facts.”
