Tuesday Trash Day Roundup
Well, Tuesday has rolled around again. Trash Day. The single black plastic bag is out on the curb already. Oh, yes; we have a curb now. When we moved here, the road just sort of trailed off into the lawn. They repaved the street last year, and installed a sidewalk. Everyone still walks in the street. There are many mysteries in Maine.
Anyway, let’s clean out the browser bookmarks, with an eye toward additional mysteries:
Mechanical computers are cool. It’s a mystery why we’d ever rely on software to do this. If you had a watchmaker on board, you could fix this under fire. And he’d only take up one extra bunk. If the software went on the blink, you’d have to sail to India to pick up forty guys to patch the code. Wrong.
How Bad Design Killed 10 Sailors and Wrecked a Destroyer
In older ships, speed is basically controlled by a forward/backward joystick. Push it forward and the ship accelerates. Pull it back and the boat slows or goes in reverse. Less than a year before the accident, the McCain’s controls were replaced by a digital system that swapped out manual controls with touchscreens.
It’s a mystery why they didn’t have 40 coders from the Punjab onboard.
NASA acknowledges it cannot quantify risk of Starliner propulsion issues
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched inside Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 5. Their mission is the first crew test flight on Boeing’s capsule before NASA clears Starliner for regular crew rotation flights to the space station. But after software setbacks, parachute concerns, and previous problems with its propulsion system, Boeing’s Starliner program is running more than four years behind SpaceX’s Dragon crew spacecraft, which flew astronauts to the station for the first time in 2020.
Hmm. Software setbacks. It’s a mystery why Boeing doesn’t just install 40 extra seats on the next rocket to sort all that out. Er, 39. Someone named Suni is already up there.
The Feds Are Skirting the Fourth Amendment by Buying Data
The Supreme Court ruled in 2018’s Carpenter v. United States that the government must have a warrant to track people’s movements through their cellphone data.
But governments are increasingly circumventing these protections by using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to spy on citizens. Government agencies have found many creative and enterprising ways to skirt the Fourth Amendment.
It’s a mystery why anyone is surprised by this. I’m sure people will put this article on their Facefriends page, to complain about privacy some more.
‘Rare species’ not seen in the area for 50 years spotted on Arizona trail camera
While many associate the ocelot with “rain forests and maybe South America or Central America,” the felines do roam all the way north into Arizona and Texas, Ragan said.
It’s a mystery why I didn’t know that ocelots used to live in Arizona, then they didn’t, and now they do again, apparently.
The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud
These cloud-based management platforms could, by accident, after a hack, or intentionally, simultaneously shut down all their millions of solar panels (permanently). And then the entire European electricity grid would collapse. Given the recent findings of fine ethical hackers (DivD) and the confirmation from Dutch electricity network manager (TSO) TenneT, this is not a theoretical scenario.
It’s a mystery why people don’t understand that when you hook up solar panels to the grid, the grid owns you, not the other way around.
Genghis Khan, born under the name Timüjin, was an unlikely candidate to unify the warring Mongol tribes of his homeland, much less found a vast empire. The future emperor was the son of an outcast family — a family abandoned by its clan to die on the steppes. Yet it appears that he came to believe that he was divinely destined to unify the world — all the land under Tengri, the sky god of his shamanistic religious tradition. In an ascent marked by incredible political and military savvy, he proceeded to defeat a long string of ever more powerful enemies.
It’s a mystery why more people get their info on Timujin by watching John Wayne and Susan Hayward movies, and don’t watch Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol movie instead. Especially since the whole thing’s on YouTub:
Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.
Another niche upcoming TV set is the Telly. The company’s TVs are free but allow the startup to track their owners, and they have a secondary screen for showing ads, including when the TV is off (the secondary screen can also display information like the weather or sports scores). Telly’s prospective owners must answer a long series of questions, like if they’re registered to vote and who their cell phone provider is, with the data used for ad targeting. Telly has discussed further potential ways to commercialize TV watching, such as letting people earn gift cards by filling out surveys (also to help targeted advertising) on the TV.
It’s a mystery why anyone would allow this into their home. But plenty of people will. By the way, this is part of a real Sony patent:
It’s a mystery why you don’t just stream It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World from an mp4 file from a desktop hard drive, and ponder why the title of the movie was too optimistic.
Happy Tuesday, everyone. Don’t forget to put out the trash.
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