Jim @sullybiker@sully.site

Today in 1976, 48 years ago: in Buenos Aires, the Argentine civil-military dictatorship (1976-1983) "disappears" (murders) Raymundo Gleyzer (1941-1976), a 34-year-old Argentine film director, critic and journalist.

#OnThisDay

Today in 1984, 40 years ago: The Danube–Black Sea Canal is opened, in a ceremony attended by the Ceaușescus. It had been under construction since the 1950s.

#OnThisDay

I was reading a very interesting presentation and technical article by LANL and Honeywell on "Thermal Neutrons in Airplanes"¹ which I remembered downloading a while back.

The reason was the recent incident with turbulence and I remembered that there had been an issue with SEE ("Single Event Effects") on a Quantas flight causing it to lose altitude abruptly.

The original reason for downloading it was somewhat historical - SEEs had been plaguing our first three DEC Alpha machines at Imperial College (1993…) over weekends or, rather, the machines were inexplicably crashing with a machine check error over the weekend, and only over the weekend. At the time it turned out that a particular experiment in the Physics department next door to us (Mathematics, proper stuff ;P) ran over weekends and "might produce some stray neutrons." We did not deploy tinfoil (hats or otherwise) but there was an "environmental change" to the experimental setup²

The bottom line is that if you have neutrons hitting your chips it is Not Good™

Now, in avionics and, in particular on the poor Quantas 72 flight, this had rather dire consequences³ but this can be expanded to other systems.

In a previous life I was loosely associated with the Centre for Software Reliability at City University and got a bit of a hammering on the subject matter of dependable computing (actually, this should be hammered in the heads of so many people we'd cause a hammer shortage world-wide) and this is still something very close to my heart: in everything I design I always try to include "fail safe" and "dependable" as parameters.

Now, as more and more data is moved into the cloud and with it the associated processing I think we have an interesting problem coming up.

__
¹ "TINMAN Thermal Neutron Detector for Aircraft", 2021 - https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1783494 - !!rabbit hole alert!!
² a particularly contrived combination of British understatement and burocratese.
³ see "Ghosts in the code: the near crash of Quantas flight 72" - https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ghosts-in-the-code-the-near-crash-of-qantas-flight-72-b4faebc90e27 (Medium, sorry)

holiday playland, point pleasant, new jersey, 1978

I have a rare gap in my work schedule while waiting for feedback and upcoming meetings... who wants me?

https://andycarolan.com

#icons #glyphs #design #illustration

#fedihired

40 Minutes in.
The #Google CEO is convinced that, *technically*, this is the correct way to fix a stuck camera back.

We are so fucked.

#ai
#enshittification
https://youtu.be/_8s4SuuMMj0?si=ZDK6uxr8Pp8e6gFD

I am trying to figure out a tough #math #maths problem in #combinatorics. Anybody into that kind of thing? Know anybody to tag?

the solar winds are only making me more powerful. watch out

Neither my dentist nor my optometrist sent me a Merry Christmas email this year. We used to be a society

Tesla is under a federal wire fraud probe for misleading investors
L: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/teslas-self-driving-claims-subject-to-federal-securities-and-wire-fraud-probe/
C: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40306837
posted on 2024.05.09 at 06:39:02 (c=0, p=5)