☞ The Edges Cases Where Computing and Physics Intersect

Glitches that result when we forget the physical nature of computers. Or, office chairs, iPhones, and helium.

DEC PDP-1.

Computation is a complex and fickle process. Which means that, particularly as our technologies get more complex, glitches and failures are an inevitability.

But just as humans are not merely brains in vats but messy and supremely physical creatures—we think better when we aren’t hungry or when we have a good night’s sleep!—neither are computers abstract Turing machines. Computers are physical devices, and their sheer physicality can be a source of weird glitches and failures (as long-time readers know, I am a big fan of the glitch).

Therefore, I’ve been collecting examples of bizarre errors that are due to the edge cases where computing interacts with unexpected parts of the physical world (and if you know other examples, please let me know!). Here they are:

A new MRI gets installed in a hospital and starts making iPhones go wonky—and Apple Watches—but Android phones are just fine. Why? Well, apparently it was due to a minor helium leak in the MRI machine and it only affected the specific oscillator used in Apple devices, necessary for chips to keep time and operate: “Like an incredibly tiny grain of sand, the helium molecules are small enough to get inside the device, physically stop the clock, and turn your phone temporarily into a paperweight.”

Or in the 1980’s when a tape drive would apparently randomly stop working. Why? It all came down to a floor tile: “one of the aluminum tiles was warped. When an attendant stood on the corner of the warped tile, the edges of the tiles rubbed together. As the plastic connecting the tiles rubbed together, they produced microsparks, which in turn caused RF interference.”

Or there is the now-classic story of someone only being able to send emails about 500 miles away. Far from this being impossible and kind of insane, it turned out that it was due to a timeout that would happen after about 3 milliseconds. Which, based on the speed of light, means messages could only travel about 500 miles before failing.

There is even a known issue with some computer monitor cables and their use around certain types of office chairs. From one manufacturer: “Surprisingly, we have also seen this issue connected to gas lift office chairs. When people stand or sit on gas lift chairs, they can generate an EMI spike which is picked up on the video cables, causing a loss of sync. If you have users complaining about displays randomly flickering it could actually be connected to people sitting on gas lift chairs.”

We should not forget that computation, far from being divorced from the world, is very much a part of it. The weirdness of the world, and its fractal boundaries with the world of computing, can in fact be a source for never-ending delight (and frustration). ■

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The Systems Thinking Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on systems thinking and the complexity of our world (both built and natural):

🜹 Making DNA: The Quest for Synthetic Life: We have come a long way when it comes to synthesizing DNA: “In 1972, Har Gobind Khorana, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used chemistry to assemble just 77 base pairs of DNA”

🜸 Funny Programming Languages: Programming languages can be weird: “Famous examples include Shakespeare, where programs look like plays, and Chef, where programs look like recipes”

🜳 Geek Mythology: The Religious, and Spiritual Folklore surrounding Programming: “Sometimes the code is doing something particular complex or obtuse, and even when it's actually written by a fellow human being, it’s not always clear what exactly is going on.” Shades of Overcomplicated…

🜛 Folk practices with Omar Rizwan: Fun interview with Omar Rizwan on ‘the impact of Dynamicland; what it means to create “wiggly” computer systems; and the idea of trying to unlock latent demands of the end-user in order to enhance our ability to control computers’

🝳 Natural language is the lazy user interface: “It puts all the burden on the user to articulate good questions. What to ask, when to ask it, how to ask it, to make sense of the response, and then to repeat that many times. But a user may not know what they don't know.”

🜚 Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation: “In Ritchie’s description of his educational path, you will notice that he does not explicitly say that he earned a PhD based on his 1968 dissertation. This is because he did not. Why not? The reason seems to be his failure to take the necessary steps to officially deposit his completed dissertation in Harvard’s libraries.”

🝯 The True Origins of Lorem Ipsum: ‘Nothing screams “Renaissance humanism” more than inventing a practice and then assigning it a venerable pseudo-archaic origin. Imitation here is genuinely the sincerest form of flattery.’

🜑 God’s developer console: Some wild stuff in here.

Until next time.