Nuclear Bombs and Automatic Wipers

As I was reading through some tiny articles in Popular Mechanics covering some noteworthy breakthroughs, I hit one regarding the new IBM Roadrunner super computer that proves a point I’ve been making for a couple of years now. The Roadrunner is the first computer to break the petaflop barrier. That means it can do more than 1 quadrillion calculations every second. While it’s hard to get comparative info on consumer CPUs (meaning it takes more than 1 minute of google searching), that’s about 100,000 times faster than any computer you own.

But guess what its main job is going to be. It will be simulating testing of nuclear weapons. It was built for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to simulate the effects of something we hope to never use. I guess it’s nice that they won’t be doing any live testing of nukes, but there has to be a better use of the most powerful computer on the planet.

And that is what proves my point. Everyone complains about how much money we spend on the military in this country. But some of the greatest inventions in our modern history have come out of it. No other organization, be it public or private, has the money to fund these incredible risky and financially unsound programs. No one except the Department of Defense. Jet engines, supercomputers, communication technology, artificial intelligence, control systems, etc. Sure, some of the technologies weren’t created by the military alone, but they were sure funded by it. The Darpa robotic vehicle challenge? It may be public and private companies doing the bulk of the work, but only because tax money is footing the prizes and forming the competition and doing the prep work.

But naturally, there is a flip side to our modern world of computer automation. Not 2 pages later there was a 1-page synopsis of the recent B2 (stealth bomber) crash at an airbase in Guam. These are aircraft that wouldn’t even be able to get off the ground without the advanced computer power they have on-board. That’s not a new concept for today’s jets, but it is allowing more and more aerodynamically unstable aircraft to fly. And taking more and more control away from the pilots, so that in the event of a computer malfunction there is less and less they can do to recover.

And that’s exactly what happened to the most expensive aircraft we have. You can check out the full piece here if you like:

B2 Crash And... Crash Read #2

In short, water got in 3 of the 24 air data sensors that tell the computer things like air speed and altitude and caused a malfunction. Techs on the ground “fixed” it by recalibrating the sensors and everything checked out. When the sensors’ heaters were turned on the water evaporated and returned the sensors to a pre-cal working state. But now they were reporting bad data because of the new calibration settings. This confused the computer, it reacted incorrectly as soon as they were off of the runway, the plane stalled out and crashed. There was nothing the pilot could do to stop it with so little time to react.

I personally don’t even like my car to automatically do anything outside of engine tuning, let alone take over major driving functions. Automatic wipers, lights, traction control, steering ratio adjustment, suspension adjustments, it’s not for me. I prefer to be in control of what my car is doing, not the other way around. Does that make me old? (Anyone that answered ‘yes’, get ready to have my orthopedic back pillow jammed up your ass!!)