sequestering carbon, several books at a time XCVI

The latest batch:

don’t read before flying

Read the whole thing.  It makes for terrifying reading, if only because it’s going to happen again, and again, and again...

How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer

So Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max. That is big strike No. 1. Boeing then tried to mask the 737’s dynamic instability with a software system. Big strike No. 2. Finally, the software relied on systems known for their propensity to fail (angle-of-attack indicators) and did not appear to include even rudimentary provisions to cross-check the outputs of the angle-of-attack sensor against other sensors, or even the other angle-of-attack sensor. Big strike No. 3.

I believe the relative ease—not to mention the lack of tangible cost—of software updates has created a cultural laziness within the software engineering community. Moreover, because more and more of the hardware that we create is monitored and controlled by software, that cultural laziness is now creeping into hardware engineering—like building airliners. Less thought is now given to getting a design correct and simple up front because it’s so easy to fix what you didn’t get right later.

It is likely that MCAS, originally added in the spirit of increasing safety, has now killed more people than it could have ever saved. It doesn’t need to be “fixed” with more complexity, more software. It needs to be removed altogether.

view from a hotel window

At the Park Inn hotel, Heathrow, for Ytterbium, this year’s Eastercon.  We arrived yesterday, in beautiful sunshine.  It’s still beautiful Easter weather today.  Off to sample breakfast now.

Festschrift

400 pages of science: best birthday present ever!  Thanks so much, to everyone who contributed.  And special thanks to Andy and Viv, for pulling it all together.  Lots and lots of lovely reading ahead for me.  Yum.

TV review: The Good Place season 1

We’d heard good things about this, and it came up on E4, so we thought we’d give it a try. We were rapidly hooked.

Eleanor Shellstrop wakes to find herself dead, and in The Good Place. The boss, Michael, explains that she is one of only a very few who gets to be there, because of all her marvellous humanitarian works during her lifetime. The problem is, she’s actually a selfish unpleasant person, who has been mixed up with a different Eleanor Shellstrop, and isn’t supposed to be there at all. How to ensure she isn’t found out, and sent to The Bad Place? Well, her soulmate just happens to be a moral philosophy professor...

Every episode is interesting, funny, and ends with a twist we never saw coming. There are real ethical dilemmas, real philosophy lectures, people who aren’t nice but you care about, utterly absurd situations, and it’s all just beautifully performed. And the massive twist at the end of season one – well, how are they going to handle season 2?

Witty, funny, clever, and unexpected. E4 don’t seem to be showing season 2, so we went off and got the DVD.

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For all my SF TV reviews, see my main website.

dental turf

I haven’t had many of these for a while, but this one is a new one

We express our great pleasure to invite you for the "European Forum on Dentistry and Dental Materials" as a Speaker, scheduled to be held during Sep 04-05, 2019 at Paris, France.

Your expertise and knowledge in the concerned turf would surely unfurl the new insights.

As a leading researcher in the field of Dentistry, your opinions and expertise are valuable and important for the success of the conference.

I’m wondering just what the turf is concerned about?

I’m also concerned about the state of dentistry, if I’m considered “a leading researcher”, or even a researcher at all, in the field...

proof read your proofs!

I just got some proofs to correct back from a publisher.

In one place I had written:

In this section I discuss ...

It had been changed in copy-editing to

In this Sect.1 discuss ...

Fortunately I spotted it!