Outrunning The Subway, Building the “Lunar Gateway”, and Bricking ChromeOS With A Single Typo
I help you procrastinate with this week’s “Linkfest” of reading material
It’s Monday; time to procrastinate!
I’m here for you, with this week’s “Linkfest” — crammed to the rafters with the finest material I can find …
1) 🏃♂️ A track star outraces the NYC subway
Jon Diaz is a track star at NYU; apparently he’s also as fast as a subway train. In that video above, he jumps out of the 2/3 train at the Chambers Street stop and runs to the next stop — Park Place — and catches up to the same train.
His total race time is 1 minutes and 35 seconds, and it’s weirdly thrilling to watch: Check it out!
As someone who rides the NYC subway, it was fascinating to see the parts of his race that I identified with. When he was hurtling along the sidewalk, that was the aberrant part; people in NYC walk quickly but don’t generally run at full tilt on the sidewalk. But when Diaz was racing up and down the subway stairs in panic, trying desperately to make the train? Now that felt familiar.
2) 🧱 A single-character typo bricks Chrome OS devices
Google pushed out an update to Chrome OS devices and, boom, it bricked them, locking the users out of their devices. What went wrong?
A Google programmer made a single-character typo. There was a conditional “if” statement that was checking to see if two things were true — if this and that were true. The way you do that is with two ampersands: “&&”, kind of like, “is this thing && that thing true”.
But the developer working on that update goofed, and only used a single ampersand.
When I was writing my last book Coders, I heard a ton of similar bug stories from programmers — incredibly tiny errors that brought massive enterprises to a screeching halt. As the developer Rob Spectre told me …
“The distance between looking like a genius and looking like an idiot in programming? It’s one character wide.”
3) 🎨 Bauhaus art generator
Here’s a Bauhaus art generator that uses the principles of the famed art movement — bold shapes, vivid colors, geometry porn — to autogenerate little Bauhausian cards. You can pick different sizes of card and hit “generate” over and over again until you find ones you dig. I lost about 10 minutes in a haze, and am probably going to flood my Instagram feed with these now …
4) 🧮 An old version of Excel makes 16,000 COVID-19 cases vanish
The UK has a contact-tracing system for COVID-19 cases, and it relies on a massive Excel spreadsheet. They recently discovered that, whoops, 16,000 cases vanished. What happened here?
They used an outdated file format in Excel. The most up-to-date version of Excel’s file format, XLSX, can handle 1,048,576 rows — or, 2 to the power of 20.
But the older version, XLS, can handle only 2 to the power of 16 rows — or, 65,536. So the UK authorities apparently shoved a too-big dataset into the older, smaller file-format and it overflowed the allowed number of rows. About 16,000 contact-tracing cases got dropped, which is a serious affair: As Tim Hartford notes, it may have led to as much as 125,000 more COVID-19 infections.
Powers of two are serious business, folks.
5) 🚶🏿♀️An exoskeleton that harvests energy from your stride, yet makes it easier to walk
This is wild: Researchers have created a lightweight exoskeleton that attaches cords to your legs, and removes energy from your stride (PDF of the academic paper). The weird thing is that they remove energy from the part of the stride that involves using your muscles to rebalance — so they actually make it easier to walk, not harder. When they measured the metabolic activity of people wearing the backpack, it went down by 0.8 of a percent.
Not much! But, as they suggest in this news story, an improved version of this device could make it easier for people to walk for a long time. Plus, they could harvest the energy they’re removing from your stride, and store it in a battery — not much energy, but a low trickle charge.
Harvesting energy from your stride while making it easier to walk sounds almost like some nutty free-energy device you’d see advertised in the bug-eyed precincts of Outbrain clickbait, so I’d want to see this replicated, heh. But the lab that did the work seems pretty legit.
6) 🎣 A final, sudden-death round of procrastination material!
📣 Using emoji for passwords. 📣 Hacking a standing desk so it rises and lowers on a schedule. 📣 Locally produced solar panels. 📣 They’re building the Lunar Gateway, a space station that’ll float halfway to the moon. 📣 Tree canopy and income. 📣 A laptop that has been designed to be repaired. 📣 Why the eye can’t see blue very well. 📣 Whisky tumblers made from oak wood. 📣 Customizable ambient sounds for chilling at your desk. 📣 Low-code tools considered as “hyperautomation.” 📣 Gorgeous physical artwork that reminds me of James Bridle’s “The New Aesthetic”. 📣 China bans super-tall buildings. 📣 A study suggests influencers are good at propagating simple ideas, but not complex ones (study and layperson’s writeup). 📣 Galleys of the novel showed up with the warning “Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read”.
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram
