Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
19 January 2020
As we move away from the Christmas festivities, news is starting to ramp up again, but it’s still a little on the thin side. Boeing (and the fawning FAA) grab all the updates this issue with a collection of employee emails and a massive drop in airplane orders.
Then we have material on the world’s largest Lithium-Ion battery, a load of stranded trains after a power outage, an advance look at what events are worth watching the sky for in the coming year, and a theoretical piece on space exploration.
There’s a classic video of a volcano eruption in the pictures section and an interesting quote on discovery. In the scanner section URLs point to material on social media surveillance, a particle accelerator on a chip, smog eating concrete, 4G networking, the worst tech of 2019, and a robot cat (ick!).
I hope you find something of interest!
Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
Boeing... Maybe I should just give Boeing updates their own special section in Winding Down...
Well, the latest news is that Boeing have handed over a whole slew of employee emails and messages to the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA ) about the design issues on the 737-Max aeroplane. Seems that the engineers were warning management about problems long before the plane started flying commercial flights.
Among the inter-employee emails is one that makes clear the employee wouldn’t allow his/her family to fly in a 737-Max. Perhaps even more damming is the employee view on the FAA inspectors. One email describes them as watching company presentations “like dogs watching TV.”
Undaunted, the FAA’s response? “While the tone and content of some of the language contained in the documents is disappointing, the FAA remains focused on following a thorough process for returning the Boeing 737 MAX to passenger service,” Yes. I guess it must have been pretty ‘disappointing’ for the relatives of those who died in the 737-MAX crashes as well...
Clearly the FAA has learned no lessons from the debacle it oversaw.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/11/boeing_737_max_emails/
And what of Boeing itself?
Well, it’s discovered that the drive to increase shareholder value is perhaps best performed by listening to what the engineers have to say, rather than cutting costs. This year its deliveries of new planes have slumped to an 11 year low – 54 Aircraft as opposed to 893 in 2018.
It also suffered cancellations of more than 200 737-MAX aircraft during 2019 – that’s US$10.6 billion down the drain. Somehow I don’t think this is going to increase shareholder value...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/15/boeing_sales_slump_after_737_max_omnishambles/
Power:
Hackaday has a great story about the world’s largest Lithium-Ion battery. It’s called the Hornsdale Power Reserve, and its main purpose is to store electricity for times when solar and other renewable energy isn’t available. And it actually works, something which has interesting implications for the future of renewable electricity.
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/16/the-hornsdale-power-reserve-and-what-it-means-for-grid-battery-storage/
And on a less happy note, here is a tale from last year of a cascade of electricity grid outages which spread across the UK, and caused a drop in the frequency of the supply. The result was a blackout in large parts of England, Wales and Scotland. That was bad enough, but the frequency drop triggered a failure mode in a bunch of commuter trains in south east England. And it was in the middle of the rush hour so the trains were packed.
After a while power was restored.
Unfortunately, that didn’t help the 22 trains stranded around the English countryside. Why not? Because there was a bug in the design of the trains’ software. It seemed that the procedure to get the trains running again required a technician with a laptop! Needless to say, none of the stranded trains had such a technician on board, so they had to be sent out to each train. Once they finally got there it was the work of a few moments to perform the resets, but getting there took time. No one got home till very late that day.
In the event there were a further 371 trains cancelled that evening. I bet the commuters involved were cursing, but they were the lucky ones. At least they weren’t stuck crammed into a packed train for hours.
Two interesting things emerged from the affair. One is just how fragile the electricity grid is, and how fast the engineers have to react to keep it stable. That at least is well known among electrical engineers. Even more interesting from my point of view as a programmer is the problem with the train software.
Most significant is the fact that it wasn’t a coding bug – the code did exactly what its specification said it had to do. Stop the train and wait for an engineer to come and do a reset when it’s safe again.
What we have here is a software design bug. The design of the software didn’t include facilities for the train driver to reset the train! Presumably, whoever wrote the design document assumed trains would only be subject to power fluctuations when it was in the depot.
And, no, the trains weren’t designed by Boeing...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/03/thameslink_trains_software_design_error_2019_lightning_strike/
Space:
Those of you who like watching the night skies will find the latest issue of the online Smithsonian Magazine worth taking a look at. It has a piece on ten of the more interesting celestial events during the next year. And the great thing is that you don’t need a telescope to see most of them – just a clear, dark, night sky (Londoners need not apply...).
Events forecast include Venus at its brightest – reprising its role as ‘the evening star’, an annular solar eclipse visible in parts of the southern hemisphere, the annual (and spectacular) Perseid Meteor Shower, not to mention the Geminid Meteor Shower. There is also, right at the end of the year, a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.
A conjunction occurs when two stellar objects’ orbits around the sun makes them appear particularly close in the night sky. The last time Jupiter and Saturn were this ‘close’ was in 1623. And no, for fairly obvious reasons, we don’t have any photographs of that occasion!
Although, come to think of it, I suspect that photos purporting to be of the 1623 event will turn up on the social media to fool the less well informed...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten-biggest-celestial-events-night-sky-2020-180973956/
Hmmm... This is a difficult decision, but I think some readers will be interested in an attempt published in ‘Centauri Dream’ to develop a theory categorising space travel and exploration. It’s one, furthermore, that copes with the hiatus that started after the Apollo moon landings finished, and that has lasted until recently.
It isn’t a news piece, and it isn’t all that light reading, but I found it interesting. So, if you have the time and the inclination, I recommend the article ‘Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift’ by J.N. Nielsen.
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2019/12/27/bound-in-shallows-space-exploration-and-institutional-drift/
Pictures:
Just one little video this week.
We often see pictures of volcanoes with lava running down the slopes, or a steady stream of smoke and ash being emitted, but videos of actual eruptions are much more rare. However, when Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano erupted recently Mexico’s National Centre for Disaster Prevention, (CENAPRED) managed to get some very impressive footage of the event.
Take a look for yourself.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/watch-spectacular-eruption-one-mexicos-most-active-volcanoes-180973957/
Quotes:
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.”
Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi – biochemist – 1893-1986
Scanner:
Social media surveillance drives 2019 drop in global internet freedom
https://newatlas.com/computers/social-media-surveillance-2019-global-internet-freedom-reduction/
New particle accelerator fits on a silicon chip
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-particle-accelerator-fits-on-a-silicon-chip1/
Graphene-titanium catalyst lays foundation for smog-eating concrete
https://newatlas.com/materials/graphene-catalyst-smog-eating-concrete/
GSMA report: Sorry, handset makers, 5G is not going to save the smart phone market
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/08/gsma_5g_wont_save_the_smartphone_market/
The absolute worst tech of 2019
https://gizmodo.com/the-absolute-worst-tech-of-2019-1840724975
Interactive robotic cat hits Kickstarter
[Ick! Why would anyone want a robot cat... Real cats are quantum animals. And real cats refuse to obey instructions... AL]
https://newatlas.com/robotics/marscat-robotic-cat/
Footnote
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
19 January 2020
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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