Unsound
May 11, 2026 at 2:17 PM by Dr. Drang
I mentioned last week that some wording in a news article struck me as odd. A similar thing happened when I read this Scientific American piece (that’s an Apple News link—I don’t have a SciAm subscription). In this case, I didn’t even have to read the article; the oddity is right there in the headline: “A SpaceX rocket booster is on track to hit the Moon at several times the speed of sound.”
I know what the writer means, of course. He’s telling us that the SpaceX debris will hit the Moon at several thousand feet per second, 1,000 fps being about the speed of sound we’re used to here on Earth. But the Moon isn’t the Earth, so it’s kind of a weird comparison, don’t you think? It’s not as if the booster is going to create a sonic boom. I’d find this less odd if the story were in a normal newspaper or magazine instead of Scientific American.
Again, I realize that the writer is just giving his readers a point of comparison, but is the speed of sound (on Earth) really something most people have an intuitive feel for? I remember learning as a kid to count off the seconds between a lightning flash and the resulting thunder to get the distance to the lightning strike in thousands of feet, but that doesn’t mean I have a strong sense of the speed of sound. Other than “really fast,” which isn’t all that helpful.
It’s mentioned in the body of the article that the speed of the booster at impact, which will be on August 5, is estimated to be about 5,400 mph. That’s about 100 times the posted speed limit on a two-lane highway, which is something most Americans do have a feel for.
By the way, if you have any interest in the problem of space debris coming back and striking the Earth (where the speed of sound might be relevant), you should follow Sam Lawler on Mastodon. She’s a professor of astronomy at the University of Regina and also has a keen interest in the clogging of near-Earth orbital space by the huge number of satellites launched in recent years. Her Mastodon feed is also a great source of farm animal photos, most recently a crop of baby goats.
A Key followup
May 8, 2026 at 8:26 PM by Dr. Drang
Earlier this week, I saw this article in Apple News. It’s from the San Francisco Chronicle and discusses a recent report on the safety of the Golden Gate Bridge. The report is one of several reports spurred by the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse a couple of years ago.
Image from Wikipedia.
Spoiler: the report finds the Golden Gate Bridge safe—quite unlikely to suffer damage from the impact of a ship. This has to do with the Golden Gate’s two towers:
- The south tower (in the foreground) is surrounded by a reinforced concrete protective structure that a ship would have to strike and destroy before coming in contact with the tower and affecting the bridge’s integrity. We discussed the lack of protective structures around the piers of the Key Bridge.
- The north tower is right up against the Marin County shoreline, where the water is shallow. A large vessel would run aground before striking the tower, scrubbing away most, if not all, of its kinetic energy. A ship that wouldn’t run aground before hitting the tower would be too light to bring it down.
A striking omission from the Chronicle story is a link to the report itself. But that appears to be the fault of Apple News. I can’t read the story on the Chronicle’s website because I’m not a subscriber, but this reprint on Yahoo! News includes the report embedded as a PDF and available to download. So it looks like Apple removed the report itself, which is pretty poor form.
The nice thing about finding the actual report, written by HDR, Inc., is that it confirmed some suspicions I had regarding this paragraph in the Chronicle story:
The resilience of the Golden Gate Bridge partly comes from sheer strength. The south tower, on the San Francisco side, is described in the report as a “robust structural feature like no other” and is surrounded by a reinforced concrete protective shell up to 28 feet thick. It can withstand about 50,000 kips of force, or roughly 25,000 tons. In many cases, engineers found, a ship would crumple and absorb its own impact energy before it could seriously damage the structure.
First, it’s not “sheer strength,” it’s “shear strength.” HDR calculated the strength of the protective structure around the south tower to be at least 50,000 kips when that force is attempting to shear through the reinforced concrete wall. They specifically mention shearing capacity, shearing interfaces, and shearing area when discussing this calculation on pp. 59–60 of the report. While it’s true that engineers tend to be crummy writers, we definitely know the difference between “shear” and “sheer.”
Second, I suspect the writer, Brooke Park, doesn’t know what a kip is. When writing for a general audience1 most people wouldn’t use the word “kip” without saying it’s short for “kilopound.” Which is to say,
There’s no “roughly” about it.2
Still, this oddball paragraph doesn’t affect the overall story and provides the engineers who read it some amusement. Too bad about Apple’s redaction of a link to the report itself, though. That’s sheer incompetence.
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Which HDR isn’t, so I don’t blame them for using structural engineering terms without further explanation. ↩
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You could argue that Park’s “roughly” was meant to parallel the “about” in the previous clause. I think that’s an overly generous interpretation. Also, don’t write to me about long tons or metric tonnes—there’s no way Park was talking about those. ↩
Blocking sender addresses from list view
May 4, 2026 at 11:54 AM by Dr. Drang
After yesterday’s post, I got an email from reader Ron Sprague outlining two ways to block sender addresses from the list view in iOS Mail. Both of these methods are efficient, and neither starts with choosing a command with a stupid name like View Contact Card. I knew about one of these methods but not the other; this post will describe both.
(My first thought was that this would be an update to yesterday’s post, but I soon realized it was going to be too long for that.)
The first method starts with a swipe to the left on the message whose sender you want to block. This brings up three options:
The options are
- Trash, which deletes the message.
- Move…, which lets you file the message in a folder.
- More, which brings up the following set of commands:
You may need to swipe up to see the whole list.
Update 4 May 2026 2:48 PM
I am reminded by Leon Cowle that the buttons you see when swiping left may not be what my screenshot shows. The possibilities for the middle button are given in Settings→Apps→Mail→Swipe Options as None, Mark as Read, Flag, and Move Message. I have it set to the latter, even though I have no memory of doing so.
Two of these commands repeat what was in the previous screenshot, but a little redundancy never hurt anyone. What we’re interested in is the Block Contact command at the bottom, which does exactly what we want.1
This is a pretty efficient way to block the sender if you’re in list view and can tell that that’s what you want to do from just the first couple of lines of the message. The next method, which I didn’t know about before Ron’s email, gives you a chance to see more of the message before deciding to block.
Starting again in list mode, long press on the message whose sender you think you want to block. This will bring up two windows, a larger one with a more complete view of the message and a small one with a list of commands.
If you were unsure whether to block the sender from the list view’s abbreviation, you’ll probably decide after seeing this. Tapping on the small list of commands makes it bigger and reveals the Block Contact command.
Why Block Contact is red in this command list and not in the others is one of the wonderful mysteries of Apple interface design.
These blocking methods (thanks again, Ron!) prove that Apple can make reasonably efficient interfaces when it wants to. Too bad it didn’t put the same effort into the blocking method you have to use from message view.
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Yes, there’s a confirmation dialog after you choose Block Contact. There’s a similar dialog after the Block Contact command described in yesterday’s post. ↩
Blockheaded
May 3, 2026 at 11:59 AM by Dr. Drang
Complaints about Apple’s design choices usually involve transparency, color, and other legibility concerns. These criticisms are legitimate, but the poor design choices that usually set me off are the ones involving the mechanics of commands—what I have to do to get something done. I think of these as the “design is how it works” mistakes.
Yesterday, for example, I was going through my mail on my iPhone and came upon a piece of spam. I put it in the Junk folder with the hope that future emails like it would stay out of my inbox, but I also wanted to do something stronger. I wanted to block all future emails from that sender. I’ve done this with other senders many times before, so I know the steps to take, but I decided this time to document the process because it’s so stupid.
Tapping anywhere in the header turns the various fields blue, suggesting that a further tap on any of them will perform some other action. I’m not sure why these fields aren’t blue to start with, but that’s not my real complaint, so we’ll pass over that.
Since I want to block the sender, the natural thing is to tap on the From field. Indeed, a menu pops up with a set of commands associated with that person/address. You might think that one of them would start a new message (as opposed to a reply), but no, which I find kind of weird. More to the current point, though, is that a command named Block Contact or Block Address is also missing.
I know perfectly well that I can block contacts from my phone, so how do I do it? The Copy and Search commands are clearly wrong, and View Contact Card seems even more wrong, as I have no contact card for this person. Nor do I want one—he’s a spammer. But because I once tapped View Contact Card, possibly by mistake, I now know that that’s the choice to make because this is what appears:
It doesn’t show an existing contact card for the sender; it shows a potential contact card, one that I could add to my Contacts app. But also included in the list of things I can do with this potential contact is block him. Which is what I did.
But this process makes no sense. View Contact Card should not be the path you need to take to block someone you have no intention of turning into one of your contacts. It’s not just an extra step (like tapping the header to turn all the fields blue), it’s a step in the wrong direction. No reasonable person who has not already gone through this process would think that View Contact Card is the command you choose to ensure that you never see an email from this spammer again.
The natural place—the correct place—for a Block Contact or Block Address command is on the popup menu you see when you tap the From field. There’s plenty of room for it. Hiding it behind a command whose primary purpose is something else isn’t a matter of taste, it’s an error.
Apple used to think about things like this and put commands where they made sense. I know that Apple has many more products than it used to, but it also has many many more employees and much much much more money. Simple things like this shouldn’t be falling through the cracks.
Update 4 May 2026 11:57 AM
See the following post for more efficient ways to block senders if you’re in iOS Mail’s list view.