Is Lee Harvey Oswald Writing NASAs Software?
Assuming hand calculations using the same 16-decimal digit precision available in the IEEE-754 double-precision floating-point numbers used in most scientific calculations, it takes me more than a minute to write down two numbers, 16 digits long, and add them together. Since I don’t practice that operation often, I will estimate that I could eventually do the same function in approximately 20 seconds. I estimate multiplication (16-digit precision) at a practical rate of five minutes, and division of an eventual six minutes. For an average hand-calculation time, I assume an even mix of operations for an average of approximately 225 seconds per operation or 0.004… FLOPS. For an average lifetime, I assume 60 years of work (starting workers at age 15 and retiring them at age 75) and 10 hours a day for six days a week (they got to choose the day to rest), or 11,262,857 seconds of work per year (I used the fractional part of the extra 0.14… week per year) or 675,771,428 work seconds in a
