Archive for the ‘news’ Category
Playstation 3 leap year bug
March 1st, 2010 at 9:46 pm
As a big fan of Reingold & Dershowitz’s Calendrical Calculations, I’m always on the lookout for calendar-related programming news. This morning I heard (via @jamesthomson) that the Playstation 3 has a leap year bug that screwed up a lot of users yesterday when it became midnight GMT and the calendar flipped from February 28 to March 1.
In addition to my nerdy calendar interest, there was a family angle. My son plays Modern Warfare online with many of his friends. Last night he told me that a few of them were locked out because they couldn’t get online. It seemed weird that 3-4 kids would have network problems simultaneously, but now we know it wasn’t a coincidence.
Unless there’s a leak out of Sony, we may never learn the precise cause of the bug, but it must have acutely embarrassing for an international electronics giant to have to post this:
We are aware that the internal clock functionality in the PS3 units other than the slim model, recognized the year 2010 as a leap year.
Let’s first note that recognized is the wrong verb; you wouldn’t say you saw Ernest Borgnine in a restaurant and recognized him as Brad Pitt. How about mistook? More to the point: can you imagine spending millions of dollars to develop a product that can’t figure out whether a given year is a leap year or not?
My guess is that the firmware takes every even-numbered year to be a leap year. The PS3 came out in late 2006, too late for the bug to have an affect that year. 2008 was, of course, a real leap year, so the faulty code worked. Yesterday was the first time in the PS3’s product life that the bug would cause a problem.
I’m pretty sure that Sony has no real fix. The solution, like Microsoft’s solution for the Zune’s leap year bug back in 2008,1 was to simply wait until the calendar flipped again. Now that February 29 March 1 is over in the GMT zone, the bug is safely tucked away. If my guess is right, it won’t resurface until 2014, by which time most “fat” PS3s will be out of service.
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Yes, that was a self-link. I’m positioning myself as the go-to blogger on leap year bugs. ↩
Tags: bug, leapyear, playstation3, ps3
Post #1186 in entertainment, news, software | No Comments
Chile’s earthquake
February 27th, 2010 at 9:59 pm
I’m not surprised that—so far, at least—the death toll from Chile’s earthquake is so low compared to Haiti’s, despite the much stronger quake. I was trained as a structural engineer, and my department was loaded with graduate students from South America. Latin American countries tend to take earthquakes very seriously, and their engineers are highly educated, both at home and abroad.
News reports will, of course, focus on the devastated areas, but most of the buildings must have done an excellent job of protecting the people within. This is not to say that the buildings weren’t damaged; there’s too much energy in a big quake to expect most buildings to escape unscathed. But I would expect to see most engineered buildings1 to have absorbed the energy without large-scale collapse.
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Buildings that were designed by engineers, like office and apartment buildings. Older, smaller residences are typically not engineered and usually suffer the most damage. ↩
Tags: chile, earthquake, engineering
Post #1184 in education, news | No Comments
Afghanistan and Iraq, November 2009
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:20 am
November was a relatively good month. Military deaths underwent a big drop in Afghanistan and stayed low in Iraq.
November was also the month in which the right wing pushed hard on its talking point that “Obama’s dithering is endangering the troops.” You can always count on the right to be out of step with the facts.
Post #1123 in news, politics | 2 Comments
A little background on the Bay Bridge failure
October 29th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
You probably heard about the structural failure on the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge earlier this week. When I went looking for information on the nature of the failure, the news articles I found were disappointing. It’s not that the reporters did a poor job, its just that their focus—which was, quite rightly, on how the failure would affect their local readers and viewers—didn’t match mine. I wanted to know exactly what failed, and although that information was in the stories, I had to tease it out of the photos and certain tidbits in the text. This is what I found.
The failure occurred in the eastern portion of the bridge, between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island. This section is in the process of being upgraded; on Labor Day weekend, workers found a crack in a steel member of the bridge, and temporary reinforcement was added to that member.
The eastern section has a truss structure, and some of its members are eyebars, which are used to carry tension loads. It was one of these eyebars that was (and apparently still is) cracked.
Eyebars are flat plates cut into a sort of dogbone shape with a hole at each end.
Two or more of these plates are arranged parallel to each other to make a complete eyebar assembly (the word eyebar can refer to either a single plate or an assembly). In the Bay Bridge, the eyebar assemblies consist of four plates, as you can see in this photo taken from the side (the photos I’ll be using here are from this San Francisco Chronicle set).
This photo might be a bit confusing because it shows two eyebar assemblies, one in the foreground and one in the background. Ignore the background assembly and note that foreground assembly has four eyebar plates: two closely spaced plates on the left side and two closely spaced plates on the right.
Eyebars are connected to each other and to other parts of the structure via large steel cylinders, called pins, that are driven through the holes in the ends. The reason the eyebars are widened at the ends is to make up for the material lost by the holes.
(Take another look at the photo above. See the dark triangle in the innermost right eyebar plate under the pin? I can’t decide whether that’s the crack that led to the repair or just an oddly-shaped discoloration on the surface of the steel. If it’s the crack, it’s a nasty one—running all the way from the outer edge to the hole.)
Update 10/31/09
The fourth photo on this page confirms that what we’re seeing in the photo above is the crack that led to the repair, not just a rust stain. Scary.
If you’re thinking that an eyebar is like a giant, highly elongated link in a bicycle chain, you’re thinking right.
(Image from bike-parts-direct.co.uk.)
The reinforcement consisted of a set of long steel rods and a pair of anchorages, called saddles. The saddles are attached to the structure just beyond the ends of the cracked eyebar, and the rods are anchored in the saddles.
The rods were meant to reduce the load carried by the eyebar itself. Installing reinforcement like this in an existing structure can be tricky. If you don’t tighten the rods enough, they won’t reduce the load on the eyebar and will be ineffective. If you overtighten the rods, you can cause a premature failure in them or in a saddle or in the structure to which the saddle is attached. Overtightening can also distort the original structure.
According to the Chronicle article, two rods (out of what looks like four) and part of a saddle broke and fell onto the roadway. Don’t assume this means that the rods were overtightened; failures can come from lots of sources, and the current thinking is that vibration-induced fatigue—or possibly abrasion; the article mentions rubbing—led to the failure of the rods. Fatigue is failure due to repeated loading and unloading of a part. The classic example (mentioned by the Caltrans chief engineer in his explanation) is that of a paper clip being bent back and forth until it breaks.
If fatigue is the cause of the failure, the stresses in the rods must have been very high for them to have failed in less than two months. Hard to imagine a repair with such high stresses was allowed.
Post #1081 in mechanics, news | No Comments
Good riddance
August 18th, 2009 at 9:18 am
When newspaper and network reporters are feeling full of themselves, they like to talk about their importance to a functioning democracy, how it’s their work that informs the public and allows it to make decisions on the important issues of the day.1 With the ongoing collapse of the newspaper business and the movement of viewers and readers to the internet, there’s been both an increase in this sort of self-important talk and a shift to the attack. “Bloggers don’t gather news, they just comment on what we provide.” “Google can never replace an experienced bureau chief.”
All of this is true in theory, but not in practice. The public is not well informed, and it’s because the news business has failed us. What will happen when the big dailies stop printing and the evening news gets pushed aside for more reality shows? Not much. The news business doesn’t deal in real information anymore, so why worry about what will happen when it’s gone? I just wish they’d pack up now so we can move on to whatever it is that will replace them.
It’s the coverage of health care reform and the death panels that’s pushed me over the edge. I suppose I should put the phrase death panels in quotes, but what’s the use? They’ve become a reality because reporters have allowed it. There are, of course, no provisions in the health care bill for death panels, either explicitly or implicitly. There is no requirement for Grandma to go get advice on how to off herself. There isn’t even a requirement for her to make a living will.
This was a simple one. The provisions in the bill regarding advanced care planning can be read and compared with these bullshit claims. The provisions are an amendment to Subsection (s)(2) of Section 1861 of the Social Security Act. This is the subsection that defines which medical and other health services are covered under Medicare. So what the bill does is
- define advanced care planning, and
- increase Medicare coverage to include it.
This puts advanced care planning on the same footing as:
- home dialysis supplies and equipment, (s)(2)(F)
- prescription drugs used in immunosuppressive therapy, (s)(2)(J)
- prostate cancer screening tests, (s)(2)(P)
- cardiovascular screening blood tests, (s)(2)(X)
- diabetes screening tests, (s)(2)(Y)
- kidney disease education services, (s)(2)(EE)
and over twenty other services covered by Medicare and described in Subsection (s)(2). Saying that Grandma will be forced to plan her death every 5 years is like saying she’s now being forced to go on dialysis.
Finding these links and reading them took me all of 20-30 minutes. It should take you less time, because I’ve already found the links for you. And when you read it, you will see that everything said by opponents to this provision is a lie. As I said, this was a simple one; everything is in black and white. But the news media, that great guardian of the public’s right to know, fumbled it, and the lies have become reality.
So I’ll shed no tears when Google runs the newspapers out of business. They haven’t been doing their business anyway.
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Trite but Very Important phrases like “issues of the day” seem to come naturally to reporters. ↩
Post #912 in media, news, politics | No Comments
Naperville biking
August 4th, 2009 at 8:00 am
An unusual bike accident occurred in Naperville last week. According to news reports, two high school-aged boys were riding their bikes on the sidewalk in the downtown business district. A cop told them they had to ride in the street. One of the boys was then hit by a car driven by an older woman. According to the boy, she gunned the engine and drove at him. He jumped off the bike just before impact, avoiding serious injuries. The car drove off, with parts of the bike still in the grill or undercarriage.
Several motorists reportedly used their wireless telephones to call police and report the car driving away with Peterson’s bicycle beneath its wheels.
The car and the woman were later tracked down and she’s facing felony charges.
In a followup story, the Naperville Sun interviewed three people, all of whom work at local bike shops, looking for advice on how drivers and cyclists can avoid accidents. I have nothing against the guys interviewed, and I understand that it’s easy for the reporter to find regular cyclists among bike shop staff, but I don’t think this group makes for a particularly balanced pool of interviewees. You’re likely to find pretty extreme cyclists in bike shop workers. For example, one of the three—presumably an adult—doesn’t own a car and was quoted as saying “Cars are evil.” Not your typical suburbanite. I happen to know one of the other guys; it wasn’t mentioned in the article, but he rides to work year-round. Over ten miles each way. In northern Illinois. I ride a lot, and even I think that’s crazy.
I’m in downtown Naperville fairly often—in my car or with my bike or on foot—and I’m quite familiar with its automobile, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic. More so, I suspect, than the three guys interviewed for the story, none of whom actually live in Naperville or work near downtown. Since the Sun didn’t bother to interview me, I’ll give my opinions here.
First, the driver has no business behind the wheel. Whether she hit the bike deliberately or not, it seems indisputable that she drove for over a mile with the bike tangled in her car. She’s either dangerously angry or dangerously oblivious and needs to be off the road.
Second, the kids shouldn’t have been riding their bikes on downtown sidewalks. Apart from what the law says, that’s just simple courtesy. There are too many pedestrians. Of course, courtesy is not a quality generally associated with teen-agers, so it’s not surprising to hear that they needed to a reminder.
However, if a police officer told the kids to ride in the street, he or she should be reprimanded. Naperville motorists aren’t used to seeing bikes on their downtown roads and aren’t likely to be good at sharing the lanes. Again, I don’t care what the law says about bikes having a right to be on the street; it’s dangerous to ride on the street in downtown Naperville.1 The cop should have told them to walk their bikes on the sidewalk until they were out of the crowded business district.
Overall, I think Naperville is pretty bike-friendly; there are many bike lanes and bike paths around town. But downtown is definitely bike-hostile. The only bike lane there I can think of is ridiculous.
I swear this picture is not photoshopped, although a CSI-style outline of a body would be an appropriate addition between the dashed lines. There really is a bike lane that swings out from the right curb, crosses a lane of traffic, and then runs between two lanes of autos. It’s on one of the few streets downtown that cross the DuPage River, so car traffic is steady—it took me a while to get a photo with just one car (note also that the car has strayed into the bike lane). The idea clearly is to keep cyclists away from the right-turning cars at the intersection, but it’s a fair question to ask whether that was to make it safer for the cyclists or easier for the cars. Whatever the answer, you won’t catch me riding in that lane.
Post #893 in blogging, local, news | No Comments
Iraq, July 2009
August 3rd, 2009 at 9:54 pm
July—the first month after the redeployment to bases—had the fewest US and coalition military fatalities of any month since the Iraq war started.
In contrast, coalition fatalities in Afghanistan were an order of magnitude higher.
Post #892 in news, politics | No Comments
Graphic criticism
May 6th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Today the Chicago Tribune published this graph comparing the media coverage of swine flu to confirmed cases of infection.
(I had to take a photo of the damned graph because I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Tribune’s web site.)
The point of the graph, I guess, is to show that in the early days of the outbreak, the media coverage (the lines) was way out of proportion to the problem itself (the columns). And now that the coverage has died down, the problem is worse than ever1. But the graph is dishonest. Media coverage is plotted by rate, in stories per day; actual swine flu cases are plotted by cumulative total. So while the lines can rise and fall as the media coverage waxes and wanes, the columns can only rise. This type of plot comparison will, regardless of the numbers, inevitably lead to a divergence between the two parts of the graph. The two things cannot be compared2.
Helpfully, the caption says
While the number of confirmed cases continues to grow …
Totals have a funny way of doing that.
The best way to do this graph, and the honest way to do it, would be to compare the rate of media coverage to the rate of confirmed incidents. It still would have showed a difference, but I guess the difference wouldn’t have dramatic enough for the tastes of the Tribune editors.
So what do we have here? A news agency using exaggeration to tell us the story that news agencies use exaggeration when telling us stories.
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Well, actually, the point of the graph is to show how wonderfully self-critical the Tribune can be, but we’ll consider just the overt purpose. ↩
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If the phrase “apples and oranges” is floating around in your head, try to suppress it. In fact, you’d be better off eliminating that phrase from your bromide library entirely. There are all sorts of legitimate ways to compare apples and oranges (cost, nutritional value, percentage of total fruit crop, etc.), but there is no legitimate way to compare a rate with a cumulative total. ↩
Post #757 in media, news | No Comments
Drive My Car
August 6th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Can you imagine pulling into a gas station in central Illinois and seeing Paul McCartney at the next pump? Or going to a dull roadside museum in Joliet (a half-hour at the most from my house!) and having a Beatle in your tour group?
My favorite part of Mary Schmich’s column is this quote from one of the workers at the museum:
“And it was Paul McCartney,” she said. “I froze. It was like seeing Bigfoot.”
Exactly!
I fully expect a Google Maps-based picture of his trip to appear on the web with little McCartney head icons at the places he’s spotted. (Hofner bass icons would be better.)
Alternate obvious titles for this post:
- Helen Wheels
- Why Don’t We Do It In The Road
- The Long and Winding Road
Post #446 in entertainment, news | No Comments
AP writes good
July 12th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Here’s the lead paragraph from this AP story:
Doctors and family members say a 7-year-old boy who fractured his skull when he was struck by a foul ball at Wrigley Field was recovering and expected to live.
The boy “fractured his skull”? Really? I know we’re all supposed to avoid passive voice in our writing, but the boy didn’t fracture his skull, the ball did. AP makes it sound like he hit himself on the head somehow after the ball struck him.
I not sure why this weird phrasing annoys me so much—the AP has done much worse in its political coverage—but I think it has something to do with what the boy’s parents would think if they read the story.
Post #426 in media, news | No Comments