Challenger, Columbia, and the lies we tell ourselves

 

 

 Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the Challenger explosion. Today is the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the Challenger story. By the morning of January 29, 1986, recovery efforts had already begun. The New York Times described the disaster as “The worst accident in the history of the American space program.” Later in the same story, the Times notes, “Officials discounted speculation that cold weather at Cape Canaveral or an accident several days ago that slightly damaged insulation on the external fuel tank might have been a factor.”

Liftoff. That smoke is Challenger’s O-rings vaporizing. The Shuttle would’ve exploded on the pad, but aluminum oxide residue from the solid rocket booster temporarily plugged the hole.

There’s no way to tell if the anonymous NASA officials quoted above knew the truth or not, and it’s more than a little eerie that a NASA official dismissed a foam strike as problematic when it was a foam strike that doomed Columbia 17 years later. Either way, it didn’t take long for the agency’s explanation of events to come under fire.

On February 7, NASA officials acknowledged that they’d previously seen O-ring degradation when launching in cold weather, and that they’d held a call with rocket design firm Morton-Thiokol to discuss whether or not to launch the mission. By mid-February, NASA had admitted that it waived the requirement for effective backup safety seals on the space shuttle’s booster rockets.

T+58.77 seconds. 15 seconds to go.

The technical and safety evaluations that led to the launch failure were inexcusable. The NASA engineers that pushed for delay due to the unusually low temperatures and the effects this could have on the Shuttle’s O-rings were overruled by managers eager to complete the mission. What happened to the crew was even worse.

The fate of the Challenger crew

In the wake of the disaster, it was widely believed that the crew cabin was destroyed in the explosion. NASA never made an official statement on the matter, but heavily implied that the crew was killed instantly — a view reinforced by other astronauts and experts who spoke on-record at the time. This Washington Post story, written when the crew cabin was located, describes how “the explosive force of the initial fireball virtually shredded much of the orbiter into scores of pieces” and “tore open the crew cabin.” While the article doesn’t claim to know exactly when the crew died, the implication is clear.

This pleasant fiction was derailed by two events. First, the recovery of the crew cabin, with the remains of some astronauts still aboard, and second, high-speed footage of the explosion itself. NASA only released the footage when compelled to do so through the Freedom of Information Act.

The crew cabin of the space shuttle was made of reinforced aluminum and designed to withstand extreme flight tolerances. Footage of the explosion shows the cabin exiting the cloud more-or-less intact. Contrary to popular belief, Challenger was destroyed by aerodynamic stresses far beyond its design tolerance, not an explosion.

Challenger’s crew cabin

Challenger was torn apart at 48,000 feet, but the crew cabin arced higher, reaching a maximum altitude of 65,000 feet before it began to descend.

The crew of Challenger didn’t wear bulky pressurized space suits during lift-off, but they did have access to Personal Egress Air Packs, or PEAPs. PEAPS could provide crewmembers with approximately six minutes of air (albeit unpressurized air) in the event of a mishap. When NASA discovered the wreckage of the crew cabin, it found that three of the PEAPs had been activated, including the one belonging to Shuttle Pilot Michael Smith. Because Smith’s PEAP was mounted on the back of his chair, he could not have activated it himself.

Whether the crew was conscious would have depended on whether the cabin was breached. But the damage from hitting the ocean at 207 mph with a deceleration impact of more than 200 g destroyed a great deal of evidence.

The air reserve found in the activated PEAPs matched consumption expectations if the astronauts had remained conscious for the duration. Electrical switches on Smith’s chair had been moved as well. The switches in question were protected with lever locks, making accidental actuation impossible. Tests showed that neither impact with the ocean or the initial explosion could have shifted them. NASA’s formal conclusion was that “It is possible, but not certain, that the crew lost consciousness due to an in-flight loss of crew module pressure.”

A report from the Miami Herald in November 1988 details the steps NASA took to prevent civilian doctors from examining the remains of the recovered crew members. The organization was already under heavy fire for its safety procedures and practices. The simple fact was, the Space Shuttle design didn’t prioritize crew safety. Once the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) ignited, there was no way to abort the liftoff until approximately two minutes after launch. The Challenger disaster occurred well before this point, at ~73 seconds.

If a catastrophic problem occurred during the black bars, you died.

The vertical axis shows various abort strategies that might be employed. The horizontal axis measures the time since ignition. White areas of these graphs indicate which aborts were considered survivable, black means the total loss of both crew and vehicle.

The Space Shuttle had been sold to the American people as safer than Apollo-era vehicles. Had the public learned that pre-Challenger missions had almost no chance of survival in the event of an emergency, it could have completely destroyed what was left of the agency’s reputation. So NASA papered over the truth, and defended its actions as being on behalf of the astronaut’s families.

The Columbia connection

One of the reasons NASA went ahead with the Challenger launch was due to what sociologist Diane Vaughan deemed the “normalization of deviance.” NASA had observed a burned O-ring during the second Shuttle mission and was well aware of the problem. At that point, the organization had two options: Ground the nascent Shuttle fleet and design a fix for the problem, or keep flying the rockets and see what happened. Grounding the fleet wasn’t believed to be politically tenable; the Shuttle was already late and over-budget.
Over the next few years, multiple boosters showed signs of O-ring damage, yet performed flawlessly on-mission. This pattern was interpreted as proof there was no danger. Over time, NASA managers began to push the envelope further, believing that the degraded O-rings posed no threat. This continued until the combination of freezing weather and poor design destroyed Challenger.

Whatever lessons NASA managers learned in the aftermath of Challenger did not last. The loss of Columbia in 2003 happened for a very different reason — foam strike, not O-ring burn-through — but again, the issue was known long before the orbiter was damaged. In Columbia’s case, NASA investigators decided (erroneously) that the impact had done minor damage and refused the Department of Defense’s request to use high-resolution ground cameras to image the damaged part of the wing.

Columbia’s re-entry, as photographed by Kirtland Air Force Base. Debris from the left wing is clearly visible. Columbia would disintegrate 3-4 minutes later.

The one small mercy of the Columbia disaster is that there truly is no chance that the crew were conscious of what happened to them. The orbiter disintegrated hundreds of thousands of feet in the air, and the astronauts weren’t wearing pressure suits. The Columbia investigation found that the crew would only have been aware of a problem for approximately 41 seconds.

The lies we tell

I was a few weeks shy of seven when Challenger exploded. I don’t recall the specifics of President Reagan’s address, but I distinctly remember the shape of the smoke, thick divergent columns twisting in the sky.

Research any tragedy or disaster, and you’ll almost always find that someone knew about the problem beforehand. From the lead in Flint’s water to the levy collapses in Katrina, from Challenger to the Titanic, it’s a rare calamity indeed that truly strikes without warning. Sometimes, these failures occur because our technological abilities have outstripped our understanding. Often, they occur because we fail to follow our own best practices.

The most sobering lesson of Challenger is that Challenger wasn’t unique. The managers and engineers who ultimately signed off on the launch weren’t trying to deliberately gamble with the lives of the seven astronauts who died that January morning. It would be more comforting if they had. It’s easier to declare people evil than to sit and grapple with how organizational culture can lead to such catastrophic failures.

We all cut corners. We all make compromises. We all skip our own best practices, whether that means a full eight hours of sleep every night, or sticking to a healthy diet. We all lie to ourselves in little ways, and because the majority of us are tiny fish in a very large pond, we don’t see much in the way of consequences.

The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that bigger fish than us automatically make better decisions than we do. Challenger, Columbia, and the hundreds of tragedies large and small that have played out in the intervening thirty years are proof they don’t. All too often, the wrong people end up paying for the failure.

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Newly discovered Babylonian tablets just rewrote the history of astronomy

 

 Ancient astronomers were highly sophisticated observers of the night sky. Though they lacked telescopes or any kind of magnification device, stargazing is one of the only things you could do at night, particularly if your spouse was tired and the kitchen slave let the fire die. Five of the eight planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn — were well-known to ancient astronomers.

Now, a new discovery suggests that the ancient Babylonians didn’t just track the planets — they used geometric methods that foreshadowed the development of calculus to accurately model how far Jupiter traveled over a 60-day period. Up until now, Europeans in the late-Medieval period (1300s) were thought to be the first astronomers to use this type of model.



The time-velocity graph described in the cuneiform tablets accurately models how Jupiter’s displacement changes over time. The planet’s motion appears to slow from Earth before finally pausing and reversing course.

While we knew ancient Babylonians had a thorough understanding of geometry, this is the first time we’ve seen it applied to astronomy. Mathieu Ossendrijver, of Humboldt University, put the pieces of the ancient puzzle together by combining the information on four tablets housed in the British Museum with a photo of a tablet fragment given him by an Assyriologist. This fifth tablet fragment was tiny, at roughly two inches by two inches, but it proved critical to deciphering the puzzle.

By comparing the information on the fifth tablet against the data on the other four, Ossendrijver discovered that the five tablets described a method of calculating the distance Jupiter had traveled over time. Most ancient astronomers had exhaustive charts and tables that described the position of planets relative to one another based on the time of year. The idea of describing a planet’s motion over time as a geometric shape, in which the space under the curve equals the distance traveled, was unheard of at the time.

The fifth tablet fragment

Little is known about why the Babylonians developed geometric astronomy, and the tablets contain no data on their motivations. One thing we do know is that the planet Jupiter was associated with Marduk, the head of the Babylonian pantheon of gods. It’s possible that the calculations were related to a ceremony or religious rite. But it’s impossible to know what motivated these ancient astronomers to make an enormous intellectual leap from describing the motions of planets relative to each other to deriving the distances they traveled over time by using geometry.

 

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What happens when the Windows 10 free upgrade timer runs out?

 

 

 When Microsoft launched Windows 10, it announced that all existing Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 customers could receive a free upgrade to Windows 10, provided they took advantage of it within one year. So far, that strategy has paid dividends. Earlier this month, Microsoft reported that more than 200 million users had upgraded to Windows 10, double the number of Windows 8 users that adopted that operating system over the same time frame.

Data from the Register suggests that home users are upgrading more quickly, which makes sense — businesses and government offices deploy new operating systems more slowly. The graph below shows each operating system’s relative market share for three months, ending on January 10. This data was gathered by measuring OS market share on systems used to access US government websites.



The regular dips are weekend periods when Windows 8.1 and 10 increase, while Windows 7 decreases. Interestingly enough, most of Windows 10 marketshare gains appear to be at the expense of Windows 8.1, not Windows 7.

Even at this relatively rapid pace, there will still be millions of Windows 7 and 8.1 users when Microsoft’s one year timer expires. Over at ZDNet, Ed Bott discusses what Microsoft might do next. The company could simply stop giving Windows 10 away and start charging for the privilege, it could simply extend the deadline indefinitely, or it could set a new deadline — say, the end-of-life deadline for Skylake systems we reported a few weeks back.

All of these are reasonable options, and I think Bott is right when he says Microsoft probably hasn’t decided what it’s going to do, yet. The one thing Ed doesn’t mention is what additional steps Microsoft might take to encourage users who don’t currently want to upgrade.

Our coverage of Windows 10 has often touched on privacy concerns, software controls, and the mandatory telemetry logging that Microsoft implemented with its latest operating system. The mandatory feature updates are another issue — security updates should be mandatory, but feature updates are a different story. Developers are vocally unhappy about the current state of the Windows 10 Store as well.

By next summer, most of the people who wanted to upgrade to Windows 10 will have done so, while less-technical users who left “Recommended” updates enabled will be upgraded whether they like it or not. The major holdouts at that point will be enterprise and business customers on their own refresh cycles and individual users who, for various reasons, don’t find Windows 10 attractive enough to switch.

Microsoft, of course, can choose any upgrade policy it wishes — but if it wants to actually move customers off earlier Windows versions, it could do worse than to give those customers more control over certain areas of the operating system.

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NASA releases new Curiosity selfie at Martian dune field

 

 NASA’s Curiosity rover has been an unqualified success from the moment it arrived on Mars aboard a rocket sled in 2012. It has driven more than 10 kilometers, helped confirm the existence of ancient lakes on Mars, and collected data on Martian geology that could be invaluable for future missions. Still, Curiosity isn’t too busy to stop for a quick selfie, the fourth such image released by NASA/JPL.

This new Curiosity selfie was taken on Sol 1228 on Mars; the Martian day is slightly longer than Earth’s. It’s in a region called the Bagnold Dune Field, and in the background you can see a structure called Namib Dune. When it wasn’t taking selfies, Curiosity used its wheel to loosen sand from Namib Dune, which it then scoped up for analysis.

As with past images of the rover, you can’t see the arm that was used to position the camera, because this image is actually a mosaic of more than fifty individual photos. They were all taken with the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). This is a true color camera with a maximum resolution of 1600×1200 — roughly 2 megapixels. That’s not a very high resolution, and wasn’t even back when Curiosity was built. However, the sensor is hardened to withstand the harsh Martian environment. Your fancy 16MP smartphone camera wouldn’t last a day.



Combining all the smaller images taken with MAHLI allowed NASA to crop the arm out of the final image and obtain a resolution of 5623×6000. JPL has the full resolution JPEG and uncompressed TIFF available for download, as well as cropped versions suitable for wallpapers. The full image has a ton of detail; you can even see the rut where Curiosity used its wheel to loosen up the sand.

You might also notice Curiosity is looking a bit haggard these days. The wheel closest to the camera has an easily identified hole, and the formerly white chassis of the rover is now caked with red Martian fines. If you look back at some of the earlier selfies, Curiosity looked so shiny and new. However, it still works perfectly after three and a half years on Mars — twice as long as the original design spec. JPL really built this robot to last.

Curiosity’s design will serve as the template for NASA’s still-unnamed 2020 rover mission. That rover will examine Mars in an effort to determine if it ever supported life, or perhaps still does. Maybe Curiosity will still be trundling around the planet when the 2020 rover lands, much in the same way Opportunity is still going 12 years later. NASA extended Curiosity’s mission indefinitely, so as long as it’s functional, it’ll keep doing science.

 

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Facial recognition study sheds new light on threat response and the ‘spidey sense’

 

 Normal, everyday function in the brain demands a bit of filtering. This is what’s happening when we learn to tune out the noises our own house makes at night, but lay awake when staying with relatives for the holidays, because all the little noises their house makes keep us from falling asleep.

Neuronal circuits in the brain called the default mode network maintain a sort of cognitive cruise control, analyzing the input streams to the brain in real time and deciding what should make its way into our conscious attention. Thoughts or sensations that don’t make it through the default mode network never get assigned to memory; instead, they’re discarded as irrelevant when decision-making interneurons fail to pass on rejected firing pattern. That way we don’t have to remember every single thing we’ve ever experienced, which is evidently exhausting.

But how do we make sure we don’t miss the important things? Humans are social creatures, and social threats have the potential to do real harm. How do we make sure that we don’t ignore a rustling in the bushes, only to find out too late that it was a tiger? It turns out that anxiety presents an advantage, in the form of a “sixth sense” for danger (read: spidey sense!).

Reports that study participants radiated black lines while under observation remain unconfirmed.

Researchers from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in France have just released a study that used computational modeling and EEGs to reveal the ways that the human brain manages its own threat responses. Their EEG findings suggest that threat level tunes cognitive and subconscious processing, whether or not the subject is aware of the threat — and that emotions that signaled a threat to the observer are better represented in motor cortical regions within a fraction of a second after the facial expression was shown to the volunteer.

Fearful or angry faces represented social threats in this study

Participants in the French study were presented with images of human faces expressing fear or anger to varying degree. As the perceived threat level increased, face-selective regions in all of the participants’ brains lit up faster. But for those subjects with higher anxiety levels, the signal was also rapidly passed to motor-specific brain regions — possibly representing a hardware pathway for the fight-or-flight response. And these effects were independent of whether or not the subject was paying attention at the time.

In other words, more anxious people react faster to the same amount of perceived threat. And they don’t even have to be paying attention to get that decreased latency. Their motor circuits are already warmed up and ready to fire.

There’s an obvious evolutionary advantage to this kind of subconscious processing. In a fight-or-flight situation, fractions of a second can make the difference between escaping or evading an attack and being caught off-guard. This new research illustrates that while we may think of social scenarios as playing out within our conscious mind, an enormous amount of background processing goes on below that threshold.

Who knew anxiety might actually be a superpower?

 

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77 Movies and Shows Coming to Netflix in January

 
January is the time for you to follow through on all your resolutions and start a new life, right? Who are you kidding? That's for spring or maybe September. For now, how about you catch up on some movies and TV shows courtesy of Netflix? Here are the titles coming to the streaming service in January.

Drone – January 20
They share a name but there's a big difference between the capabilities and controversies surrounding those quadcopters you fly around the neighborhood and the drones that buzz Waziristan. This documentary delves into both sides, the pilots and the people living under the shadow of drones.

 
Chelsea Does – January 23
Chelsea Handler's four-part documentary series for Netflix takes on four topics, one of which is Silicon Valley.

 
Degrassi: Next Class – January 15
Drake has long since graduated from Degrassi High, but a whole new class of kids is starting the school year on this Netflix Originals reboot.

 
January 1
2 Fast 2 Furious
Along Came Polly
American Girl: Grace Stirs up Success
Angry Birds Toons: Season 1
Bring It On: Fight to the Finish
Bring It On: In It to Win It
Catwoman
The Celebrity Plastic Surgeons of Beverly Hills: Season 1
Constantine
Forensic Files: Collection 2
Friday Night Tykes: Season 1-2
The Good Road
House of Wax
How to Change the World
Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
Intolerable Cruelty
Journey to Le Mans
Loins of Punjab
Meet the Fockers
Meet the Parents
Nanny McPhee
Piku
Pooh's Heffalump Movie
Pride and Prejudice
The Rundown
Shout Gladi Gladi
Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball
Something New
Stephen Fry Live: More Fool Me
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: Season 3
Swordfish
The Tale of Despereaux
Under Arrest: Season 1: "Put Some Clothes On"
We Need to Talk About Kevin
The Wedding Date
The Whole Ten Yards

January 2
30 for 30: Four Falls of Buffalo
I'll Have What Phil's Having: Season 1

January 3
Sofia the First: Season 2

January 4
Blunt Force Trauma
Training Day

January 5
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Season 10
New Girl: Season 4

January 8
Adult World
Dragons: Race to the Edge: Season 2
Tom Segura: Mostly Stories

January 10
Dos Hermanos
El Hombre de al Lado
Esperando La Carroza
The Marziano Family
Rosario Tijeras
Un Oso Rojo

January 11
Littlest Pet Shop: Season 4

January 12
The Ladykillers

January 13
Parks and Recreation: Season 7

January 14
The Testimony

January 15
Degrassi: The Next Class: Season 1
The Last Five Years
Moonwalkers
Occupied
The Overnight
Sirens: Season 2

January 16
Hyde Park on Hudson

January 17
Z Nation: Season 2

January 19
Curve

January 20
Drone

January 21
When Calls the Heart: Season 2

January 22
Sharknado 3

January 23
Chelsea Does

January 25
From Dusk Till Dawn: Season 2
Turbo Kid
 
January 28
Frozen Planet
Frozen Planet: On Thin Ice
Frozen Planet: The Epic Journey
The Making of Frozen Planet

January 29
Ever After High: Dragon Games

January 31
Words and Pictures

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Square Enix to Launch Updated Final Fantasy IX for PC, iOS, Android

If you're a big Final Fantasy fan, then Square Enix just made your day: The popular FInal Fantasy IX game is going to be released on the PC, iOS, and Android at some point in 2016. While Square Enix didn't specifically say that the game is being launched in North America, it stands to reason that it'll arrive there at some point as well. We're most happy about the game's official website having an English translation, which certainly looks like a little bit of a tease for a wider release of the game.

That said, we don't know exactly when Square Enix will launch the game in Japan, nor what the time delay will be (if any) between that launch and the North American / European launch. We also don't know all of the changes coming to the game with its remake, but we do know a few: Square Enix is going to be updating the game's graphics and adding in a few more modern conveniences, like autosave and high-speed modes.

It'll also come with achievements, for those who like showing off everything they do in a game, and various other "game boosting features," reports PC Gamer.

If you're looking for more clues from the remake's first trailer, good luck: It's mostly cutscenes, with a slight highlight of visual differences for the game's combat system—nothing major is changing to the raw mechanics as far as we can tell, but it does look a bit better.

Interestingly enough, Square Enix has seemingly decided to skip any kind of remake for FInal Fantasy VIII at the moment—having last announced the much-anticipated update to Final Fantasy VII in June of 2015.

We're not sure why Square Enix decided to overlook the title (especially since this writer particularly enjoys it), and we haven't heard any rumors that the developer might go back and revisit this one at some point, but it's certainly possible.

The Final Fantasy IX remake will require iOS 7.0 or Android 4.1 at minimum—and Square Enix warns that the game might not run on certain Android devices. (It neglected to specify, which is fair given just how many Android devices there are.) You'll need at least an iPhone 5s, fourth-generation iPad, iPad Mini 2, or sixth-generation iPod Touch to play on iOS.

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Valve explains Steam’s Christmas Day implosion

 

 

 On Christmas Day, Steam users woke to a bewildering series of problems. Users reported seeing wish lists, game libraries, and personal account information that wasn’t their own. Email addresses, partial credit card numbers, and phone numbers were all shared, with no explanation of why or how. Steam has published an update on what happened, and explained the bizarre behavior.

First, Valve wants to reassure users that while an estimated 34,000 people found themselves with someone else’s account, none of the details that leaked were enough to allow someone to either steal an account or to complete transactions with the available credit card information. The concern here would be that addresses or other forms of personally identifiable information (PII) could be harvested from Steam and then matched against other databases of stolen personal data. Hacking groups have proven adept at finding and exploiting such opportunities.

Steam Winter Sale + DDoS? Bad idea.

Imagine that you use three different services, all of which are hacked. Hack #1 exposed your username and an encrypted form of password that can be cracked with sufficient effort. Hack #2 leaks your billing address, while Hack #3 leaked credit card information and a name associated with the account. Individually, all three are annoying. Combine them, and an attacker can do serious harm. Given that we’ve seen large corporations wait weeks or months before disclosing the extent of a data breach, it’s possible for your personal data to be compromised long before you’re aware to even look for a problem.

So what went wrong?

Here’s Valve explanation in its own words:

“Early Christmas morning (Pacific Standard Time), the Steam Store was the target of a DoS attack which prevented the serving of store pages to users. Attacks against the Steam Store, and Steam in general, are a regular occurrence that Valve handles both directly and with the help of partner companies, and typically do not impact Steam users. During the Christmas attack, traffic to the Steam store increased 2000% over the average traffic during the Steam Sale.

“In response to this specific attack, caching rules managed by a Steam web caching partner were deployed in order to both minimize the impact on Steam Store servers and continue to route legitimate user traffic. During the second wave of this attack, a second caching configuration was deployed that incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store responses which were generated for other users. Incorrect Store responses varied from users seeing the front page of the Store displayed in the wrong language, to seeing the account page of another user.”

Once Valve realized it was under attack, it shut the Steam Store down and manually configured a new caching configuration, tested it, and purged all of the previous data before bringing Steam back online. The company has promised to reach out to everyone affected by the problem and to continue investigating to ensure no critical information was leaked.

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AT&T Killing Off Two-Year Contracts

 
Farewell, phone subsidies. AT&T is killing off two-year contracts beginning Jan. 8.

Engadget, which first reported the news, got its hands on an internal memo sent to employees this morning outlining the change. After the first week of January, new and existing customers in need of a new phone will either have to pay the full price of the device upfront, or in monthly installments with an AT&T Next plan.

In its memo, AT&T calls the move a "pricing simplification effort." In a statement to PCMag, the carrier said most of its customers already opt for Next plans, which divide the price of a smartphone into monthly installment payments.

"With $0 down for well-qualified customers, the ability to upgrade early and down payment options available with even lower monthly installments, our customers are overwhelmingly choosing AT&T Next," the company said. "Starting January 8, AT&T Next will be the primary way to get a new smartphone at AT&T."

The change does not apply to business customers under a qualified wireless service agreement, AT&T added. According to Engadget, it will affect all AT&T phones—even flip phones and smartphones with keyboards—but it's unclear at this time whether it will apply to wearables and tablets.

The move isn't all that surprising, given that AT&T in June stopped offering contracts for smartphones sold through third parties like Best Buy and Apple. In addition, the nation's top wireless carrier—Verizon—ditched two-year contracts in August. T-Mobile got things started in 2013, while Sprint reportedly has plans to do the same soon.

With AT&T Next, you can opt to pay for your device in 30, 24, or 20 monthly installments and upgrade after you pay 24, 18, or 12 installments, respectively. Or, if you pay 30 percent of the device upfront, the remainder is divided into 28 installments and you can upgrade after 12.

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Storms that wreaked Christmas havoc across the US now supercharged, headed for the North Pole

 

 

 If you live on the East Coast, Christmas 2015 was one of the most bizarre on record. Temperatures were in the 60s and 70s across the Midwest and in the major coastal cities, with dozens of high temperature records broken across the United States. From December 21 – 28, at least 68 tornadoes were reported across 15 states, and the US collectively experienced more tornado deaths in December than in the entire rest of the year combined.

This is a dandelion in my front yard. Photo taken the evening of December 23, in Buffalo NY. Average temperature on that day is 28F.

The warm air that drove these events has moved on, moving over the Atlantic. As it shifts, it’s dragging more warm air from Spain and the Mediterranean northwards, creating one of the most massive North Atlantic storms on record. The image below shows the forecast temperature of roughly 33.8F (1C) at a time when the average temperature at the North Pole is -18F (-28C).



That huge surge of warmth hit the North Pole this morning, but the storm traveling behind it is expected to strike both Iceland and the already flooded areas of Northern England. Storm Frank is also expected to qualify as a “bomb cyclone” (a storm with a drop in pressure of 24mb or more within 24 hours).

Unprecedented warming

What makes this heat surge truly unusual is the total lack of sunlight at the North Pole. From late September to late March, the sun is completely below the horizon and the pole is shrouded in darkness. There’s a twilight period of approximately two weeks before the sun appears or disappears, but we’re deep in polar night right now, only days past the Winter Solstice.

According to Slate, winter temperatures have only crept above freezing during the Arctic winter once, and never between December and early April (winter begins when the sun falls below the horizon in late September).

If you’re familiar with air currents and weather patterns at all, you’re probably aware of the polar-night jet stream, which forms at 30,000 – 39,000 feet. These air currents shape weather in the northern and southern hemispheres; the East Coast deep freeze of 2014 was caused when the northern jet stream dipped much farther south than is historically normal, blanketing the eastern half of the United States in arctic air. This type of event has become more common in recent years; the jet stream’s course around the planet is wobbling more than it used to.

According to climate blogger Robert Scribbler, El Nino years typically reinforce the jet stream and would work to prevent this kind of storm from pushing warm water so deep into the North Atlantic, but that’s not the case this year. As always, the question of whether any single storm or event is “caused” by climate change is impossible to answer — but there’s no arguing that we’re seeing increasingly erratic winter weather. This week’s storm is just the latest example of how the old rules of what we considered “normal” increasingly do not apply.

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Transcend announces ‘SuperMLC’ as an SLC NAND alternative

 

 

 Transcend Information has announced a new type of SuperMLC (multi-level cell) NAND that it believes can satisfy the needs of enterprise customers who prize both speed and reliability, while offering the lower price points and mass manufacturing advantages that characterize conventional MLC memory.

Modern NAND flash can hold one, two, or three bits of information per cell. Single-bit NAND is called SLC (single-level cell), two-bit NAND is MLC, and three-bit NAND is TLC (triple-level cell). While the exact specifications and reliability ratings for each type of flash vary from company to company, SLC NAND is the fastest and most durable, followed by MLC, followed by TLC.

The graph below shows how this plays out in terms of programming voltage for MLC vs. SLC NAND.



Note that when writing, the voltage to write each cell has to be precisely calibrated for MLC, whereas SLC can happily swing across the 1V – 3V range. I couldn’t find an equivalent graph for TLC, but imagine eight distinct voltage squeezed into the same space as MLC’s four curves, and you’ve got the idea. It takes longer to program TLC cells, and the cells themselves degrade much more quickly.

As for endurance, the graph below shows how TLC, MLC, and SLC stack up. The EM-MLC line is for a specific company’s product, and isn’t necessarily relevant to this discussion without knowing a great deal more about what Transcend is implementing.



SLC NAND is very fast, very durable, and extremely expensive, MLC NAND is the middle-of-the-road consumer option, and TLC still offers significant performance improvements compared to conventional HDDs, but is unsuitable for heavy professional use or enterprise deployments.

Over the last 24 months, a number of companies have introduced hybrid drive management schemes to leverage the capabilities of SLC and the cost-effectiveness of either MLC or TLC. Samsung’s 840 EVO and 850 EVO drives use a slice of each TLC NAND chip as SLC, greatly improving performance. Crucial and several other companies also dynamically allocate part of their drive as SLC, adjusting this cache as required depending on how full the drive is.

What Transcend is doing is binning high-quality MLC, then treating it like SLC. In theory, this provides 4x the write performance and up to 30,000 program/erase cycles. That’s not identical to what the graph above illustrates, but it’s close enough for our purposes — specialized MLC-as-SLC can offer better performance and endurance than standard MLC, but at lower costs. Combine this approach with the additional reliability and performance we’ve seen from 3D NAND ,and manufacturers may soon be able to offer MLC-as-SLC products with capabilities that fully rival conventional 2D planar SLC.

For now, Transcend is confining this capability to its industrial hardware. But if the concept proves sound, we’re almost guaranteed to see it deployed in a high-end consumer drive. NAND flash technologies tend to debut in enterprise or industrial settings first, so the fact that Transcend isn’t jumping to push this tech into consumer hardware doesn’t mean we won’t see that happen within a year.

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