.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

This picture makes me nostalgic for my two summers in Venice as a child. It also makes me wish we had better storms around here.

(Syndication available on LJ as risks_digest)

I think “quirk” is even better than “glitch” for wrecking a $133 million aircraft and nearly killing the pilot. Next time my boss is mad because one of my infrastructure maintenance setups doesn’t work I’ll say I have a “quirk”.

Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 11:10:34 +0200
From: “Peter B. Ladkin”
Subject: Details of F/A-22 crash December 2004

On 20 Dec 2004, an F/A-22 Raptor, the USAF’s new air-superiority fighter, crashed 11 seconds after takeoff from Nellis AFB, Nevada. It is the first production aircraft to be lost. They are said to cost $133 million each. The results of the investigation from the USAF Accident Investigation Board (AIB) are reported in this week’s Flight International (14-10 June, 2005, p9).

The pilot ejected with the aircraft near-inverted. The aircraft struck the end of the runway going backwards.

There are three rate-sensor assemblies (RSA), manufactured by BAE Systems in the flight control system (FCS). There is a known “quirk” in the RSA, which is “programmed so that it could interpret a momentary power loss [to the FCS] as an instruction to enter test mode, which freezes or “latches” the unit, according to the AIB report.”

The pilot shut down the engines during a maintenance check pre-take-off, thinking the FCS was continuously powered by the auxiliary power unit (APU). The FCS in fact loses power briefly during a shutdown, and that appeared to suffice to latch all three RSAs. “The AIB attributed the pilot’s mistake to “ambiguous” language in the aircraft’s technical orders.”

The manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, has returned about 20 RSAs to BAE Systems for suspected latching events. Before this crash, such events only affected one or two of the RSAs, not all three together. There is a pilot warning for partial RSA latching, but no warning if all three latch.

The RSA has been redesigned and is being installed on the fleet.

Peter B. Ladkin, University of Bielefeld, Germany http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de

Livejournal uses tags now, so you can tag an entry with things like: cats, politics, lolurinmybutt, etc.

I use tags on my delicious and on my flickr, not sure how much I’ll use them here. I have set my account so that others can tag my entries, in case you feel like CATEGORIZING ME.

Just ordered:

The shoe was not only about half off and what I needed, but had one of the best customer reviews yet:

Good working shoe – this shoe is comfortable and has great traction on most surfaces. I work in nuclear security so there is a lot of sitting with sudden bursts of intense activity.

VICTORY SHOES!

klikitak just revealed her childhood career as an interpreter of the music of Tiffany. Ask her about it today!

See my post in about the Polleys. Whoo-ee, that’s some quality.

mcbrennan sums up a lot of how I feel about my age group in this country. We were caught in between two times in American history and got SUCH a pinch.

Pop culture overload, cynicism, forced irony, and passivity are our demons.

Innervisions: go read this if you care about these things.

I just found out that my Flickr photos had been marked as “no one sees your tags” because I had stuff up there that wasn’t mine, grabbed from the web etc. They’re totally within their rights because you agree not to do this when you sign up, and I’m a doof for forgetting that and just using them as a generic image host.

Unfortunately you don’t find this out until you wonder why your stuff isn’t showing up in a tagged stream and you complain, and then they tell you that:

Your photostream has been marked NIPSA (Not In Publics Site
Areas) as you have a number of photographs in your stream that are lifted from the web (copyrighted). If you remove them, we can review your stream again.

So they stealthily scan your photos, or respond to complaints, or some other method they don’t reveal, and then they stealthily mark you as “not for public consumption” and don’t tell you until you ask why it is that you’ve been censored. That’s really flicked-up. My guess is that they decided that notifying people who are on that list would result in a shitstorm of complaints and customer service contact and expense and stress, so they’re just going to do it silently and only deal with the small number of people who notice.

You know, I bet a lot of Flickr’s customers don’t pay attention to that rule, and I bet a lot of them are “NIPSA” and don’t know it. And I bet that makes their whole system less effective.

Once again I agree completely that their terms of service make sense and that people should follow them. But can’t they come up with something better than the Homeland Security No-Fly List model? Way to inspire paranoia, guys.

As a consolation prize for not going out of town to friendly_bandit‘s wedding, I’m going to see Spoon at the Avalon in Hollywood on the 21st. I have an extra ticket. Anyone interested in going? Comments screened for privacy.

Sample of what Spoon is like: Me And the Bean (4.9M .mp3).