Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Cool!
Take a short length of ordinary copper pipe, and a small stack of powerful neodymium magnets. Drop the magnets through the pipe, and watch them fall far more slowly than usual. Why? Magnetic braking due to the induced eddy currents in the pipe. Awesome!
Chipping Away at Our Freedoms...
The Department of Justice is going after three blogs: the three blogs that first published the release of the ClimateGate2 emails.
Our Founding Fathers wouldn't even recognize their country today. The freedom of speech that they so carefully bequeathed to us is eroding in front of our faces...
Our Founding Fathers wouldn't even recognize their country today. The freedom of speech that they so carefully bequeathed to us is eroding in front of our faces...
A Marine's Christmas...
Master Sgt. Allen, currently on duty in Afghanistan, sings to his family back home:
I can't find the words to express my pride and admiration for the finest warriors the world has ever seen...
I can't find the words to express my pride and admiration for the finest warriors the world has ever seen...
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Bad Code Can Kill...
Most of the time, we software engineers can safely think of our code as not life-threatening. But the proliferation of computers into devices of almost every kind is changing that.
The first time I ever ran into an example of code that could kill, it was a very straightforward example: I interviewed a fellow who had just quit his job at a medical device manufacturer here in San Diego. When I asked him why he had quit, he told me that he had worked on the firmware for an automated insulin pump his company was making. This pump would be worn by severe diabetics, and it would automatically maintain their blood sugar levels at an appropriate level – no matter what the person ate, or how he exercised. Firmware that he wrote had a bug in it, one that wasn't detected during normal testing. One of the patients trialing the device did something to provoke the bug – and the pump flooded his body with insulin, killing him. My candidate quit his job that afternoon, and vowed to work for a company where that couldn't happen.
At the time, I was working for Stac Electronics. The team I lead was building Stacker, a disk compression product. We didn't think of that product as life-threatening – but suppose someone used Stacker in a computer that ran some vital piece of equipment. If Stacker had failed, causing the computer to crash, then conceivably that could result in harm to a patient. We had language in our license agreement designed to avoid this situation, but still...
These days, such situations are far more common. Computers (which necessarily have software or firmware to run them) are embedded in just about anything you can imagine. Here's a story about computers in a passenger airliner's flight control systems, and a software bug that nearly caused a crash. In this case, it's obvious that the computer could potentially cause life-threatening malfunctions – but that's not always the case...
Interesting world we live in. Flight control bug story via reader Doug S.
The first time I ever ran into an example of code that could kill, it was a very straightforward example: I interviewed a fellow who had just quit his job at a medical device manufacturer here in San Diego. When I asked him why he had quit, he told me that he had worked on the firmware for an automated insulin pump his company was making. This pump would be worn by severe diabetics, and it would automatically maintain their blood sugar levels at an appropriate level – no matter what the person ate, or how he exercised. Firmware that he wrote had a bug in it, one that wasn't detected during normal testing. One of the patients trialing the device did something to provoke the bug – and the pump flooded his body with insulin, killing him. My candidate quit his job that afternoon, and vowed to work for a company where that couldn't happen.
At the time, I was working for Stac Electronics. The team I lead was building Stacker, a disk compression product. We didn't think of that product as life-threatening – but suppose someone used Stacker in a computer that ran some vital piece of equipment. If Stacker had failed, causing the computer to crash, then conceivably that could result in harm to a patient. We had language in our license agreement designed to avoid this situation, but still...
These days, such situations are far more common. Computers (which necessarily have software or firmware to run them) are embedded in just about anything you can imagine. Here's a story about computers in a passenger airliner's flight control systems, and a software bug that nearly caused a crash. In this case, it's obvious that the computer could potentially cause life-threatening malfunctions – but that's not always the case...
Interesting world we live in. Flight control bug story via reader Doug S.
NGC 253...
AKA the Sculptor Galaxy, one of the brightest and most beautiful spiral galaxies visible from Earth. Via APOD, of course...
This is a Big Deal...
High coercivity magnets without rare earth elements. If this discovery turns out to be scalable to industrial volumes, it will remove a huge strategic natural resource advantage that China has today...
Monday, December 19, 2011
Mainiac Humor...
Mainiacs are those who hail from the state of Maine. They have a strange sense of humor:
Via my mom...
Via my mom...
Kim Jong-Il is Dead...
Apparently of a heart attack at age 69. His twenty-something son, Kim Jong-Un, is his annointed successor.
Kim Jong-Il's death means the fight for succession is on. Kim Jong-Un, from everything I've read, is unlikely to be capable of holding onto power. We should be cautious about such outsider assessments, though: I remember very similar things being said about Assad before he took over from his father. Perhaps Kim Jong-Un will be similarly surprising. If not, however, then we could be in for a stretch of ugly on the Korean peninsula.
The Onion already has its take on Kim Jong-Un...
Kim Jong-Il's death means the fight for succession is on. Kim Jong-Un, from everything I've read, is unlikely to be capable of holding onto power. We should be cautious about such outsider assessments, though: I remember very similar things being said about Assad before he took over from his father. Perhaps Kim Jong-Un will be similarly surprising. If not, however, then we could be in for a stretch of ugly on the Korean peninsula.
The Onion already has its take on Kim Jong-Un...
New Photos Released...
Some of these, like the one at right, are in color. This always throws me, as in my mind WWII was entirely in black-and-white...
Sunday, December 18, 2011
'Twas the Night Before a Non-Denominational Holiday...
Larry the Cable Guy skewers the politically-correct squashing of Christmas...
Cyberwar Legalized...
Here's an announcement that certainly didn't get much attention: cyberwar is now legalized, meaning that our military is now free to respond to a cyberwar attack against us...
America's Debt, Explained...
I just love Bill Whittle's video series – but this time, he's outdone himself in this beautiful take down of Michael Moore's assertion that “America isn't broke!” In the process, he makes terrific use of IowaHawk's analytics. This is a video that absolutely anybody can fully understand:
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