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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
After completing more than two years of basic training, the six women and seven men were chosen from a record-breaking 18,000 applicants representing a wide variety of backgrounds and specialties, from experienced pilots to scientists, engineers and doctors.
The group includes two candidates from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which has participated in a joint training program with the US since 1983. "They are the best of the best: they are highly qualified and very diverse, and they represent all of America," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. They include five people of color, including the first Iranian-American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli who flew combat missions in Afghanistan and holds an engineering degree from MIT.
The group, known as the "Turtles", wore blue flight jumpsuits and took turns approaching the podium to receive their astronaut pins, as one of their classmates paid tribute to their character and shared playful and heartfelt anecdotes.
After being selected in 2017, the class completed training in spacewalking at NASA's underwater Neutral Buoyancy Lab, robotics, the systems of the International Space Station, piloting the T-38 training jet and Russian language lessons.
They are the first to graduate since NASA announced the Artemis program to return to the Moon by 2024, this time on its south pole, as the US plans to place the next man and first woman on lunar soil and set up an orbital space station.
-- submitted from IRC
Related: Eyeing Moon, NASA hosts first public astronaut graduation ceremony
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @04:59PM (1 child)
Also as one tangent on the chess thing. You don't need to be just a little better to skew the statistics. The ELO is a probabilistic predictor based on relative performance. Here [fide.com] is a list of the top 100 chess players in the world. What you'll find is extremely peculiar, yet repeats constantly in chess in other fields. The #1 player in the world is better than the #2 player in the world by a much larger margin than any other two players in the top 100.
#1 > #2 by 50 points
#2 > #3 by 17 points
#3 > #4 by 28 points
Literally every other player is separated by the next closest player by single digit differences. This is not some quirk in the rating system - it's a quirk in humans. For some reason the best don't tend to be a little bit better than the second best, but way way better. It's dangerous to underestimate how much damage we are inflicting on ourselves by moving away from what was already a meritocracy in shambles to an openly discriminatory system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @07:13PM
ok. my comment on chess and "best" wasn't that good.
let me try something else:
please check record sprinters/swimmers etc and compare times. this is very different from comparing number of medals of elite athletes.
check record height jumps (value of height). again very different from number of medals.
what I was trying to say is that in practical situations you don't need the person with the highest number of medals, you just need someone who is very good.