Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Lost in the news coverage of the Toyota acceleration debacle is the value of a good programmer. Consider that Nissan and the German car makers (perhaps because they use components from Bosch?) all have a line of a code that says “IF the brake is pressed THEN ignore accelerator input and set throttle to idle”. It wasn’t a top executive who put that line of code in, but a humble computer programmer. The Toyota programmers didn’t do this and now their company is losing perhaps billions of dollars in long-term sales and profits (the value of the company in the stock market has dropped by approximately $20 billion).

In http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/business/global/18toyota.html, the Toyota top executive is reduced to characterizing the already proven-to-fail system as “fail-safe”:

“Toyota uses many sensors to ensure its electronic throttle systems are fail-safe,” Mr. Toyoda said. The company has conducted “rigorous tests” of the system to make sure it did not trigger sudden acceleration, he said.

Is it possible that we’ll see more respect given to programmers when the dust settles from this?

[Separately, I experimented with my 2007 Nissan sedan, touching the brakes while flooring the accelerator. This is the one time in three years that I have looked at the huge tachometer hogging dashboard real estate! It slowly rolled from 2500 RPM to 1200 or so.]

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I’ve drafted a review of I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. This is an explanation of the financial collapse of 2008-? by an English novelist that has gotten excellent reviews in newspapers and magazines.

Comments/corrections would be appreciated.

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This month marks the one-year anniversary of the stimulus act of 2009. How has it worked out for the U.S.? Beyond the explicit stimulus package, government at local, state, and federal levels have been acting in a stimulus-like fashion, continuing to grow as though the private economy had not contracted.

One element of stimulus that I think might not work as planned is infrastructure investment. Let’s look at the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis and was rebuilt in 2007-8. According to Wikipedia, the original bridge cost $5.2 million to build in 1964-7, which is roughly $35 million in today’s dollars (admittedly not a bargain, given that it collapsed, but the collapse was due to a design flaw, not faulty construction or shoddy materials). The replacement cost $234 million. Public infrastructure, employing as it does an army of civil servants (and their pension obligations), union labor, and drawers full of lawyers, turns out to be one of the most expensive things in the world to buy. A sensible consumer, faced with a 7X increase in the real price of a good, would purchase less of that good rather than more. China is managing to grow quite nicely with a much smaller amount of public infrastructure per person (admittedly the country has been famous for its bridges since the time of Marco Polo (example; history)).

So… are we better or worse off than if the government had not kept spending for the last year? (The federal deficit alone is approximately 10% of GDP and state/local governments are probably adding another 2% via underfunded pension commitments, bond issues, and clever accounting, which brings up right up to parity with Greece, a country that supposedly is in tough shape due to its 12 percent deficit.)

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The editors of boston.com asked me to judge a photo contest involving nearly 200 mostly macro images. My thoughts are posted in two places:

• introducing the Top 40
• selecting the Top 10

Let me know what I should have chosen and what I should have said!

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We visited three car dealers today: Mazda, Honda, and Subaru. All three of the manufacturers have priced their factory navigation systems at $2000. Selling a $100 product for $2000 should be yielding tremendous profits for these guys… except that none of the dealers was interested in selling it. “I tell all of my customers to go to BestBuy instead of spending $2000,” the Mazda sales guy noted. Among all three dealers there might have been two or three cars in inventory with factory nav.

We saw no cars with an RFID key; all of the cars had mechanical keys that you turn. We saw no cars with navigation, and certainly none that had replaced the dashboard real estate consumed by the tach and speedo with a flexible LCD screen including nav. We saw no cars with remote start. We saw no cars with any ability to use WiFi or a 3G Internet connection. We saw no cars that could accept a music input via Bluetooth.

I’m wondering now if the inability of mainstream car manufacturers to take advantage of modern electronics is harming their profitability. Since the cars themselves mechanically are not very different from a 5-year-old car, and the electronics are the same as those on a 5-year-old car (unless the consumer wants to spend $5000 extra), a lot of potential customers will decide to keep their 5-year-old car. Since all of companies seem equally unable to do anything interesting with electronics, it might seem that incompetence with electronics/software is not a competitive disadvantage. But the car companies still have to compete with the cars that they made five years ago. And the Chinese and Indian new entrants to the market might prove more innovative.

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I’ve started using Google Buzz. I was never a Twitter user, except that someone created a Twitter account that is linked to this Weblog and I have no control over it. I can’t figure out how Google Buzz is better than Twitter.

As I understand it, Twitter can be easily updated and viewed via SMS from a mobile phone. I can’t find any of that in Buzz. Buzz seems to offer a richer environment to present content, hyperlinks, in-line media…. just like a Weblog. But I already have a Weblog. Google Buzz does give me a private Weblog, I guess, but it says that photos are uploaded to a Picasa album. Is that a private album or can anyone then view it?

I’m following most of my friends. Almost none of them have anything interesting to say, it turns out (except you, Andrew; thanks for linking me to this video).

Since I’m already a Gmail user, Google Buzz is convenient and I don’t have to log in separately.

The lack of context-sensitive help is aggravating now that Google offers so many services. If I’m in Buzz and click top right for “Help” I get a generic screen that offers help mostly with Gmail. They have tacked in a link to a video (sounds like it was narrated by one of the South Park creators), but the video is promotional rather than instructional.

I have no idea where I’m going with Buzz. You can follow me in this aimless voyage by searching for “pgreenspun”.

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Folks:

I’ve drafted a review of the 2011 Toyota Sienna minivan and would appreciate comments/corrections. The debut of the latest Sienna is interesting because it was almost entirely designed in the U.S. as well as built in the U.S. and the result is almost exactly like something that G.M. would have built. I fear for Toyota shareholders when the new Honda Odyssey is released in the fall.

Thanks in advance.

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Cessna announced today that it is planning to move some airplane production jobs to Mexico. Aerospace manufacturing has been one of the toughest things to move out of the U.S. due to regulatory hurdles, but it seems that a motivated company can overcome these.

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If you thought that career opportunities for women in science were unappealing, you’ll love the prospects for folks with humanities PhDs (described in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education).

The writer’s thesis is a bit similar to my explanation for why so many men stick with an academic career in science:

Some professors tell students to go to graduate school “only if you can’t imagine doing anything else.” But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there. They know how to navigate school, and they think they know what it is like to be a professor.

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A Public TV “Frontline” episode this evening was devoted to the crash of Colgan 3407. After my one-year FiOS deal ran out and they presented me with a shocking monthly bill, I canceled cable but the program is available streaming online.

The TV show was notable mostly for how much time it is possible to waste by watching TV. In a full hour of human life, one learns that it sucks to get paid $20,000 per year and work 16-hour days. We don’t learn anything about why the airplane crashed, except that the hero Captain Sully would not have crashed it.

Who crashed Colgan 3407? Actually the autopilot did. The crew told the autopilot to level the plane, but left the throttles back near idle. This caused a gradual speed decay. Then the pilots extended flaps and gear, resulting in a big increase in drag. They should have added power at this point, but did not. Acting less competently than the typical person on his very first flight lesson, the autopilot kept pulling the nose up in an attempt to hold altitude. Eventually it pulled the airplane past the “maximum lift/drag” speed in which it would hold the most altitude for a given power. And then it kept pulling until the airplane was just about stalled. And then it disconnected, dumping the trimmed-to-crash airplane into the laps of the sick and tired human pilots. Seconds later, everyone was doomed. See the NTSB animation of the flight.

The airplane had all of the information necessary to prevent this crash. The airspeed was available in digital form. The power setting was available in digital form. The status of the landing gear was available in digital form. The airplane had the ability to put synthetic voice announcements into the pilots’ headsets. Here’s what you’d expect to happen:

• autopilot is set to descend and then level off and hold altitude at 2300′
• human pilots neglect to push throttles forward
• after a few seconds, autopilot annunciates “leveled off but throttles are still at idle”
• pilots put landing gear down; speed decays very quickly
• autopilot annunciates “more power required to hold altitude and airspeed”
• speed decays below 1.3 times the stall speed
• autopilot stops trimming back and says, this time in a very sharp and loud voice “holding 160 knots, descending out of 2300′ due to inadequate power”

How come the autopilot software on this $27 million airplane wasn’t smart enough to fly basically sensible attitudes and airspeeds? Partly because FAA certification requirements make it prohibitively expensive to develop software or electronics that go into certified aircraft. It can literally cost $1 million to make a minor change. Sometimes the government protecting us from small risks exposes us to much bigger ones.

As many bricks as people are hurling at the memories of the crew of Colgan 3407, they probably would have landed safely in Buffalo if no autopilot had been installed in that airplane. Sometimes a really stupid autopilot is worse than none.

[As far as I know, Airbuses are the only airplanes that are any smarter than the Bombardier Dash 8 flown by the Colgan crew (see my Fly by Wire review). There is a glimmer of hope in the small airplane world, however. The new Avidyne autopilots incorporate “flight envelope protection”, which will put these $10,000 machines many years ahead of the competition (if the FAA ever certifies them).]

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