Why Did Air India Flight 171 Crash?

 

That is the question that investigators will be asking in the coming days, weeks and months to come.  On Thursday June 12, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner took off from Ahmedabad in northwest India, bound for London.  On board were 242 passengers and crew.  It was a hot, clear day.  Videos taken from the ground show that after rolling down the runway, the plane "rotated" into the air (orienting flight surfaces to make the plane take off), and assumed a nose-up attitude.  But after rising for about fifteen seconds, it began to sink back toward the ground and plowed into a building housing students of a medical college.  All but one person on the plane were killed, and at least 38 people on the ground died as well.

 

This is the first fatal crash of a 787 since it was introduced in 2011.  The data recorder was recovered over the weekend, so experts have abundant information to comb through in determining what went wrong.  The formal investigation will take many weeks, but understandably, friends and relatives of the victims of the crash would like answers earlier than that.

 

Air India, the plane's operator, became a private entity only in 2022 after spending 69 years under the control of the Indian government.  An AP news report mentions that fatal crashes killing hundreds of people involved Air India equipment in 1978 and 2010.  The quality of training is always a question in accidents of this kind, and that issue will be addressed along with many others.

 

An article in the Seattle Times describes the opinions of numerous aviation experts as to what might have led to a plane crashing shortly after takeoff in this way.  While they all emphasized that everything they say is speculative at this point, they had some specific suggestions as well.

 

One noted that the appearance of dust in a video of the takeoff just before the plane becomes airborne might indicate that the pilot used up the entire runway in taking off.  This is not the usual procedure at major airports, and might have indicated issues with available engine power.

 

Several experts mentioned that the flaps may not have been in the correct position for takeoff.  Flaps are parts of the wing that can be extended downward during takeoff and landing to provide extra lift, and are routinely extended for the first few minutes of any flight.  The problem with this theory, as one expert mentioned, is that modern aircraft have alarms to alert a negligent pilot that the flaps haven't been extended, and unless there was a problem with hydraulic pressure that overwhelmed other alarms, the pilots would have noticed the issue immediately.

 

Another possibility involves an attempt to take off too soon, before the plane had enough airspeed to leave the ground safely.  Rotation, as the actions to make the plane leave the ground are called, cannot come too early, or else the plane is likely to either stall or lose altitude after an initial rise.  Stalling is an aerodynamic effect that happens when an airfoil has an excessive angle of attack to the incoming air, which no longer flows in a controlled way over the upper surface but separates from it.  The result is that lift decreases dramatically.  An airplane entering a sudden stall can appear to pitch upward and then simply drop out of the air.  While such a stall was not obvious in the videos of the flight obtained so far, something obviously caused a lack of sufficient lift that led to the crash.

 

Other more remote possibilities include engine problems that would limit the amount of thrust available below that needed for a safe takeoff.  It is possible that some systemic control issue may have limited available thrust, but there was no obvious mechanical failure of the engines before the crash, so this possibility is not a leading one.

 

In sum, initial signs are that some type of pilot error may have at least contributed to the crash:  too-early rotation, misapplication of flaps, or other more subtle mistakes.  A wide-body aircraft cannot be stopped on a dime, and once it has begun a rollout to takeoff there are not a lot of options left to the pilot should a sudden emergency occur.  A decision to abort takeoff beyond a certain point will result in overrunning the runway.  And depending on how much extra space there is at the end of the runway, an overrun can easily lead to a crash, as recently happened when Jeju Air Flight 2216 in Thailand overshot the runway and crashed into the concrete foundation of some antennas in December 2024. 

 

The alternative of taking off and trying to stay in the air may not be successful either, unless sufficient thrust can be applied to gain sufficient altitude.  Although no expert mentioned the following possibility and there may be good reasons for that, perhaps there was an issue with brakes not being fully released on the landing-gear wheels.  This would slow down the plane considerably, and the unusual nature of the problem might not give the pilots time enough to figure out what was happening. 

 

Modern jetliners are exceedingly complicated machines, and the more parts there are in a system, the more combinations of things can happen to cause difficulties.  The fact that there have so far been no calls to ground the entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners indicates that the consensus of experts is that a fundamental issue with the plane itself is probably not at fault. 

 

Once the flight-recorder data has been studied, we will know a great deal more about things such as flap and engine settings, precise timing of control actions, and other matters that are now a subject of speculation.  It is entirely possible that the accident happened due to a combination of minor mechanical problems and poor training or execution by the flight crew.  Many major tragedies in technology occur because a number of problems, each of which could be overcome by itself, combine to cause a system failure.

 

Our sympathies are with those who lost loved ones in the air or on the ground.  And I hope that whatever lessons we learn from this catastrophe will improve training and design efforts to make these the last fatalities involving a 787 in a long time.

 

Sources:  I referred to AP articles at https://apnews.com/article/air-india-survivor-crash-boeing-e88b0ba404100049ee730d5714de4c67 and https://apnews.com/article/india-plane-crash-what-to-know-4e99be1a0ed106d2f57b92f4cc398a6c, a Seattle Times article at https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/what-will-investigators-be-looking-for-in-air-india-crash-data/, and the Wikipedia articles on Air India and Air India Flight 171.

Science Vs. Luck: DNA Sequencing of Embryos

 

"Science Vs. Luck" was the title of a sketch by Mark Twain about a lawyer who got his clients off from a charge of gambling by recruiting professional gamblers, who convinced the jury that the game was more science than luck—by playing it with the jury and cleaning them out! Of course, there was more going on than met the eye, as professional gamblers back then had some tricks up their sleeves that the innocents on the jury wouldn't have caught.  So while the verdict of science looked legitimate to the innocents, there was more going on than they suspected, and the spirit of the law against gambling was violated even though the letter seemed to be obeyed.

 

That sketch came to mind when I read an article by Abigail Anthony, who wrote on the National Review website about a service offered by the New York City firm Nucleus Genomics:  whole-genome sequencing of in-vitro-fertilized embryos.  For only $5,999, Nucleus will take the genetic data provided by the IVF company of your choice and give you information on over 900 different possible conditions and characteristics the prospective baby might have, ranging from Alzheimer's to the likelihood that the child will be left-handed. 

 

There are other companies offering services similar to this, so I'm not calling out Nucleus in particular.  What is peculiarly horrifying about this sales pitch is the implication that having a baby is no different in principle than buying a car.  If you go in a car dealership and order a new car, you get to choose the model, the color, a range of optional features, and if you don't like that brand you can go to a different dealer and get even more choices. 

 

The difference between choosing a car and choosing a baby is this:  the cars you don't pick will be sold to somebody else.  The babies you don't pick will die. 

 

We are far down the road foreseen by C. S. Lewis in his prescient 1943 essay "The Abolition of Man."  Lewis realized that what was conventionally called man's conquest of nature was really the exertion of power by some men over other men.  And the selection of IVF embryos by means of sophisticated genomic tests such as the ones offered by Nucleus are a fine example of such power.  In the midst of World War II when the fate of Western civilization seemed to hang in the balance, Lewis wrote, " . . .  if any one age attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power."

 

Eugenics was a highly popular and respectable subject from the late 19th century up to right after World War II, when its association with the horrors of the Holocaust committed by the Nazi regime gave it a much-deserved bad name.  The methods used by eugenicists back then were crude ones:  sterilization of the "unfit," where the people deciding who was unfit always had more power than the unfit ones; encouraging the better classes to have children and the undesirable classes (such as negroes and other minorities) to have fewer ones; providing birth control and abortion services especially to those undesirable classes (a policy which is honored by Planned Parenthood to this day); and in the case of Hitler's Germany, the wholesale extermination of whoever was deemed by his regime to be undesirable:  Jews, Romani, homosexuals, and so on. 

 

But just as abortion hides behind a clean, hygienic medical facade to mask the fact that it is the intentional killing of a baby, the videos on Nucleus's website conceal the fact that in order to get that ideal baby with a minimum of whatever the parents consider to be undesirable traits, an untold number of fertilized eggs—all exactly the same kind of human being that you were when you were that age—have to be "sacrificed" on the altar of perfection. 

 

If technology hands us a power that seems attractive, that enables us to avoid pain or suffering even on the part of another, does that mean we should always avail ourselves of it?  The answer depends on what actions are involved in using that power. 

 

If the Nucleus test enabled the prospective parents to avert potential harms and diseases in the embryo analyzed without killing it, there would not be any problem.  But we don't know how to do that yet, and by the very nature of reproduction we may never be able to.  The choice being offered is made by producing multiple embryos, and disposing of the ones that don't come up to snuff. 

 

Now, at $6,000 a pop, it's not likely that anyone with less spare change than Elon Musk is going to keep trying until they get exactly what they want.  But the clear implication of advertising such genomic testing as a choice is that, you don't have to take what Nature (or God) gives you.  If you don't like it, you can put it away and try something else.

 

And that's really the issue:  whether we acknowledge our finiteness before God and take the throw of the genetic dice that comes with having a child, the way it's been done since the beginning; or cheat by taking extra turns and drawing cards until we get what we want. 

 

The range of human capacity is so large and varied that even the 900 traits analyzed by Nucleus do not even scratch the surface of what a given baby may become.  This lesson is brought home in a story attributed to an author named J. John.  In a lecture on medical ethics, the professor confronts his students with a case study.  "The father of the family had syphilis and the mother tuberculosis.  They already had four children.  The first child is blind, the second died, the third is deaf and dumb, and the fourth has tuberculosis.  Now the mother is pregnant with her fifth child.  She is willing to have an abortion, so should she?"

 

After the medical students vote overwhelmingly in favor of the abortion, the professor says, "Congratulations, you have just murdered the famous composer Ludwig von Beethoven!"

 

Sources:  Abigail Anthony's article "Mail-order Eugenics" appeared on the National Review website on June 5, 2025 at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mail-order-eugenics/.  My source for the Beethoven anecdote is https://bothlivesmatter.org/blog/both-lives-mattered. 

AI-Induced False Memories in Criminal Justice: Fiction or Reality?

 

A filmmaker in Germany named Hashem Al-Ghaili has come up with an idea to solve our prison problems:  overcrowding, high recidivism rates, and all the rest.  Instead of locking up your rapist, robber, or arsonist for five to twenty years, you offer him a choice:  conventional prison and all that entails, or a "treatment" taking only a few minutes, after which he could return to society a free . . . I was going to say, "man," but once you find out what the treatment is, you may understand why I hesitated.

 

Al-Ghaili works with an artificial-intelligence firm called Cognify, and his treatment would do the following.  After a detailed scan of the criminal's brain, false memories would be inserted into his brain, the nature of which would be chosen to make sure the criminal doesn't commit that crime again.  Was he a rapist?  Insert memories of what the victim felt like and experienced.  Was he a thief?  Give him a whole history of realizing the loss he caused to others, repentance on his part, and rejection of his criminal ways.  And by the bye, the same brain scans could be used to create a useful database of criminal minds to figure out how to prevent these people from committing crimes in the first place.

 

Al-Ghaili admits that his idea is pretty far beyond current technological capabilities, but at the rate AI and brain research is progressing, he thinks now is the time to consider what we should do with these technologies once they're available. 

 

Lest you think these notions are just a pipe dream, a sober study from the MIT Media Lab experimented with implanting false memories simply by sending some of a study group of 200 people to have a conversation with a chatbot about a crime video they all watched.  The members of the study did not know that the chatbots were designed to mislead them with questions that would confuse their memories of what they saw.  The researchers also tried the same trick with a simple set of survey questions, and left a fourth division of the group alone as a control.

 

What the MIT researchers found was that the generative type of chatbot induced its subjects to have more than three times the false memories of the control group, who were not exposed to any memory-clouding techniques, and more than those who took the survey experienced.  What this study tells us is that using chatbots to interrogate suspects or witnesses in a criminal setting could easily be misused to distort the already less-than-100%-reliable recollections that we base legal decisions on. 

 

Once again, we are looking down a road where we see some novel technologies in the future beckoning us to use them, and we face a decision:  should we go there or not?  Or if we do go there, what rules should we follow? 

 

Let's take the Cognify prison alternative first.  As ethicist Charles Camosy pointed out in a broadcast discussion of the idea, messing with a person's memories by direct physical intervention and bypassing their conscious mind altogether is a gross violation of the integrity of the human person.  Our memories form an essential part of our being, as the sad case of Alzheimer's sufferers attests.  To implant a whole set of false memories into a person's brain, and therefore mind as well, is as violent an intrusion as cutting off a leg and replacing it with a cybernetic prosthesis.  Even if the person consents to such an action, the act itself is intrinsically wrong and should not be done. 

 

We laugh at such things when we see them in comedies such as Men in Black, when Tommy Lee Jones whips out a little flash device that makes everyone in sight forget what they've seen for the last half hour or so.  But each person has a right to experience the whole of life as it happens, and wiping out even a few minutes is wrong, let alone replacing them with a cobbled-together script designed to remake a person morally. 

 

Yes, it would save money compared to years of imprisonment, but if you really want to save money, just chop off the head of every offender, even for minor infractions.  That idea is too physically violent for today's cultural sensibilities, but in a culture inured to the death of many thousands of unborn children every year, we can apparently get used to almost any variety of violence as long as it is implemented in a non-messy and clinical-looking way.

 

C. S. Lewis saw this type of thing coming as long ago as 1949, when he criticized the trend of substituting therapeutic treatment of criminals as suffering from a disease, for retributive fixed-term punishment as the delivery of a just penalty to one who deserved it.  He wrote "My contention is that this doctrine [of therapy rather than punishment], merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being." 

 

No matter what either C. S. Lewis or I say, there are some people who will see nothing wrong with this idea, because they have a defective model of what a human being is.  One can show entirely from philosophical, not religious, presuppositions that the human intellect is immaterial.  Any system of thought which neglects that essential fact is capable of serious and violent errors, such as the Cognify notion of criminal memory-replacement would be.

 

As for allowing AI to implant false memories simply by persuasion, as the MIT Media Lab study appeared to do, we are already well down that road.  What do you think is going on any time a person "randomly" trolls the Internet looking at whatever the fantastically sophisticated algorithms show him or her?  AI-powered persuasion, of course.  And the crisis in teenage mental health and many other social-media ills can be largely attributed to such persuasion.

 

I'm glad that Hashem Al-Ghaili's prison of the future is likely to stay in the pipe-dream category at least for the next few years.  But now is the time to realize what a pernicious thing it would be, and to agree as a culture that we need to move away from treating criminals as laboratory animals and restore to them the dignity that every human being deserves. 

 

Sources:  Charles Camosy was interviewed on the Catholic network Relevant Radio on a recent edition of the Drew Mariani Show, where I heard about Cognify's "prison of the future" proposal. The quote from C. S. Lewis comes from his essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," which appears in his God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970).  I also referred to an article on Cognify at https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/62983/1/inside-the-prison-of-the-future-where-ai-rewires-your-brain-hashem-al-ghaili and the MIT Media Lab abstract at https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/ai-false-memories/overview/. 

NSF and Women in STEM: Removing Barriers or Chartering Jets?

 

Anyone even remotely connected with the academic world knows that the Trump administration has recently been playing Attila the Hun to the Italy of the government-funded research establishment, slashing billions in already-granted money, firing staff, and generally raising Hades.  A recent article by Andrew Follett in National Review highlights the shakeup at what many academics consider to be the crown jewel of such funding, the U. S. National Science Foundation (NSF).  Follett points out that the long-established woke-diversity-equity-inclusion slant at the agency may be repressed for the moment, but making permanent changes will require Congressional action. 

 

Follett may well be right regarding the correct political strategy, but what I would like to focus on is one particular goal which the NSF holds dear to its bureaucratic heart:  expanding participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) for women. 

 

It is not quite the case, as Follett says it is, that NSF is abandoning this goal completely.  Rather, according to some updated guidelines on the NSF website, investigators may pursue it, but only "as part of broad engagement activities" that are open to all Americans, regardless of sex, race, or other "protected characteristics."  Even if Congress gets involved, I suspect NSF will keep doing what it wants to do while staying within the letter of the law, because I've seen up close how they do it in the case of a specific grant aimed at increasing the participation of women in engineering.

 

I state categorically that women should not be barred from pursuing degrees or jobs in engineering, either de jure or de facto.  As recently as 1970, women were not admitted to many all-male engineering-intensive schools, and many engineering programs at coed universities refused to take women.  Accordingly, the U. S. Dept. of Labor reports that only 3% of engineers were women that year.  Second-wave feminism, equal-employment laws, and other societal changes knocked down virtually all the legal and cultural barriers that kept women from being engineers by around 1990, and the percentage of engineers in the U. S. who were women rose to around 16%, where it has hovered to this day. 

 

But since 1990, NSF has expended probably a total of billions of dollars trying to raise that percentage above 16%, with the presumed goal being "equity":  that is, a percentage of women in engineering equal to their percentage in the general population.  We can say several things about these efforts.

 

The most obvious thing is, they have failed.  If NSF had poured billions of dollars into a pure-science project—just to take one at random, say, the nature of ball lightning—and gotten precisely zip results by now, one would hope that common sense would prevail and they would turn their attention to other matters.  But that is not how these things work.  This is not to say that all the money was wasted.  In a grant I was familiar with at my own university, special scholarships and academic support networks were set up in a way that mainly attracted women, although when I asked the principal investigator whether a male student could apply, she said technically yes, although they weren't getting any to speak of.  And scholarships are good for students, other things being equal. 

 

But in terms of NSF's original goals of funding science research that otherwise would not get done, paying for scholarships that are legally for everybody but (wink-wink) are really focused on women is a classic example of politics corrupting science.

 

I use the word "corrupting" deliberately, in the sense that betrayal of an agency's stated purpose for political reasons—any political reasons, right, left, or slantwise—is a step down a long road that led to distinctions such as "Aryan science" in Germany before World War II. 

 

As a wise junior-high civics teacher once told me, politics is just the conduct of public affairs, and of course it's not possible to keep any human institution, let alone a governmental one, completely free of political considerations. 

 

But as in so many other ethical situations, the intent is the key.  If Congress manipulates an agency's budget to favor certain regions, there's not much the agency's director can do about it other than jawbone.  But that is vastly different from setting up entire divisions directed not at the discovery of new knowledge, but at the changing of certain demographic statistics such as the percentage of women in engineering. 

 

It is entirely possible, but in the nature of things it cannot be proved, that about as many women as want to go into engineering today presently do so.  As we said, most legal barriers that kept women out of engineering were gone by 1990, and since then the two professions that are even more prestigious than engineering—law and medicine—have become thoroughly feminized.  And the stereotypical engineering image has changed radically from the 1940s, when a clipart drawing of an engineer would depict a rugged guy wearing work boots and toting a transit tripod on one shoulder and a big hammer in his hand.  Nowadays, your typical engineer does exactly what I'm doing now—sits at a computer, something that women and men can do equally well. 

 

I agree with Follett that the NSF, along with other federal agencies, will require extensive Congressional action and supervision in order for it to reorient its intentions and priorities.  Old habits die hard, and old bureaucrats die harder.  But some such sea change may be necessary if we are to avoid a wholesale turn away from government support of science research, which from the 1940s up to at least the 1990s enjoyed the benign support of most citizens.  In a democracy, if most people no longer want a thing done by the government, it shouldn't be done, generally speaking.  And if the science establishment has betrayed its origins and allowed itself to be corrupted by political winds that inevitably go out of fashion, the day of reckoning we are currently seeing the dawn of may go on longer than we think. 

 

I'm glad there are women in engineering.  I miss them when I don't have any in my undergraduate class, which happened last semester.  But I think it's time NSF quit trying to move political needles and go back to funding science.

 

Sources:  Andrew Follett's article "How Republicans Can Actually Defund Woke Science" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/05/how-republicans-can-actually-defund-woke-science/.  I also referred to the Dept. of Labor site at https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/occupations-stem for women-in-engineering statistics, and the NSF website https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities for their updated priorities. 

Parents and Children: Breaking Down the Technoference Barrier

 

No, I never read the word "technoference" before today, either.  But according to some sociologists, technoference is what happens when a parent pays more attention to a mobile phone than to their children.  And the results are not good.

 

An article by Clare Morell on the news website The Dispatch points out that even if children don't have mobile phones or screens themselves, their lives are significantly affected when their parents do.  A study that compared rates of parental mobile phone use with how well their children do when starting school found that kids whose parents used their phones a lot had deficits in language and interpersonal skills. 

 

Another problem comes when children try to learn new life skills.  It turns out that parental "scaffolding"—basic support and encouragement—is vital for children to control their emotions when dealing with new situations.  If Mommy is off in cyberspace when Junior is trying to color within the lines for the first time, she can't provide the reassurance and guidance which, however trivial-seeming for the parent, can make an earthshattering difference for the child. 

 

I'm pretty sure I remember the first time I rode a bike without training wheels.  And it was when my father held the bike for me to get on, and then gave it enough of a shove that it would stay upright no matter what I did.  Suddenly I could make it go on my own.  This was about three decades before the advent of mobile phones, and while my upbringing was not without problems, mobile-phone technoference wasn't one of them.

 

Full disclosure:  I have never been a parent, so I can't speak about childraising from personal experience.  But there is one childraising principle I have observed in action over many years, which the article terms "over-imitating."  I prefer to state it as follows:  "Whatever Daddy (or Mommy) does is OK."  This is a deep and profound, even subconscious, tendency in children to accept, embrace, and imitate whatever they see their parents doing.  It plays out in everything from such minor habits as habitual finger-tapping to major malfeasances such as adultery.  And I'm sure it applies to mobile-phone use as well.

 

One interesting study found that even babies are affected by a parent using a mobile phone within the child's field of view, even if the baby doesn't need anything in particular at the time.  If you observe the expressions of people while they are looking at their phones, it's a kind of passive, zoned-out look that showed up a lot when a sociologist decided to install a camera on a TV and take pictures of people as they watched television.  The researchers call this a "still face."  It turns out that showing a still face to an infant isn't good, because it gives the infant no positive feedback or assurance that the mother or father is paying attention to the child.  This passive look often inspires the infant to cry or otherwise try to attract attention. If Mommy stays glued to her phone, Junior escalates provocations until he gets some kind of reaction, which by this time will probably be a negative one. 

 

Yet another study showed a correlation between a four-times-greater incidence of depression in teenagers and high rates of mobile phone use among parents.

 

Now, as we should constantly remind ourselves when reading about research like this, correlation isn't necessarily causation.  The crisis in reproducibility of scientific studies means that statistical methods are often misapplied in an illogical way.  That is a topic for another blog.  But even if we disregard all the statistics and simply ask, "Can a parent's mobile-phone use get in the way of their attempts to be a good parent?" I think the answer is obvious.  Of course it can, but what can we do about it?

 

Morell has a number of recommendations, some of which are easier to do than others.  She suggests having a "phone box" to put phones in at the end of the day, so parents and children are both freed up to interact without distractions.  How one would define the day's end is up to the individual, but it sounds like a good idea.  I have a phone you can actually turn off, and I set it in my study and leave it there overnight.

 

She suggests putting away your phone whenever you are with your children.  For some people, especially single moms, that is a big ask.  But at least consciously setting aside a no-phone interval each day might be a good idea.  The only time these days I am around parents with a lot of children is when I go to church, and except for the stray ringtone during the sermon, you might otherwise think that my church is a phone-free zone.  That's an unusual situation, though, and I have no idea what these parents do with regard to mobile phones when they are home with their kids.  A good many of them homeschool, however, and you can bet the phone is put away during those times.

 

Morell says she uses something called a Wisephone.  A visit to that firm's website shows that their product has "no social media, no explicit content, no web browser" but can do basic stuff like maps, calling for rides, playing music, dealing with money, and checking the weather.  That's two or three more things than I use my phone for, so I'm ahead of her already in that regard.

 

I'm also in sync with her recommendations to go analog (or at least not use your phone for everything):  get a separate alarm clock (check), use a paper calendar (check), use a real camera instead of your phone camera (check), and use a notepad and pen (check).  I claim no particular virtue for doing these things:  I just never quit doing them when I got a mobile phone.  Others may have more of a problem transitioning.

 

So even if kids don't have mobile phones themselves, their parents' phones can cause problems.  Parenting is a huge responsibility, and my metaphorical hat is off to anyone who attempts it.  Just be aware that your smartphone may get in the way of being the best parent you want to be.

 

Sources:  Clare Morell's article "Parents, Put Down the Phones" is on the (paywall-protected, unfortunately) website The Dispatch, which some may be able to access at https://thedispatch.com/article/parenting-phones-screen-time-kids-development-imitation/.  I also referred to the Wisephone website at https://wisephone.com/. 

Did Renewables Contribute to Spain's Blackout?

That's the question that still has not been definitively answered as of today (May 11), almost two weeks after the April 28 power outage that plunged much of Spain and Portugal into darkness for almost 24 hours.  Why could renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power have contributed to the blackout?  The answer isn't simple, but as more and more countries derive more of their energy from renewables, it's a question that deserves examination.

 

What we do know about the blackout is this.  The Iberian Peninsula is a little like Texas in that its power grid is nearly autonomous, with only small interties to the rest of the European continent.  A little after noon, some "oscillations" appeared in the grid and were "detected and mitigated."  Operating a large power grid is a delicate balancing act in which the fluctuating demand must be met by appropriate generating capacity at all times.  And across the entire grid, all the generating plants must produce power in synchronism at a rate of 50 Hz (in Europe—60 Hz in the U. S.). 

 

A prime indicator of the health of the grid is how close the grid's frequency is to its nominal frequency.  The grid is like a symphony orchestra in which all the instruments are tuned to the same pitch.  The entire system is designed for optimum efficiency at 50 Hz, and as little as only 1 Hz deviation above or below that can lead to serious problems and ultimately damage or destroy millions of dollars' worth of transformers and other gear.  So grid operators have both automatic and manually backed-up systems to keep the grid frequency near its nominal value, and to vary the amount of power being generated as demand varies.

 

For reasons that are not yet clear, at 12:33 PM three generators tripped off the grid.  This meant that the system lost 2.2 GW of capacity instantly.  In response, the grid frequency began to fall from 50 Hz, and when it reached 48 Hz, automatic protection circuitry began to disconnect more generators from the grid, leading to a cascade that shut the entire system down in a matter of seconds. 

 

Once a thing like this happens, it takes hours to communicate among the now-isolated generating plants and organize an effort to re-synchronize and reconnect parts of the grid in a way that will not lead to further problems.  In the meantime, most communications and transportation systems in Spain and Portugal were severely crippled, thousands of people had to be evacuated from electric trains, and seven people died as a result of the blackout.

 

At the time of the grid failure, over half of the grid's power was being produced by solar, wind, or hydroelectric plants.   Assuming most of this was wind or solar, the grid was therefore missing something that power grids used to have an abundance of:  "spinning reserve."  And spinning reserve is an important way that grids can stabilize themselves.

 

Simply put, spinning reserve is the energy stored in the mechanical momentum of the turbines and generators used to produce power at nuclear, fossil-fueled, and hydropower plants.  A generator-turbine shaft, armature, and blades weighing many tons cannot be stopped on a dime, and the fact that it's spinning, typically at thousands of revolutions per minute, means that there's a lot of energy stored in it. 

 

When a sudden increase or decrease in load occurs on such a generator, the spinning reserve means that its speed (which directly determines its frequency) does not change instantly.  If the load increases (as it would if generators elsewhere suddenly tripped off the line), the spinning reserve automatically keeps the frequency from dropping instantly.  This factor can be used in designing stability into the grid, and historically spinning reserve has been an asset in making grids stable.

 

When renewable sources began to be connected to power grids, the approach taken by designers was that the renewables would always be a small fraction of the total power generated.  So when they designed the devices to interface solar or wind power to the grid (called "inverters") they simply designed them to follow whatever frequency the grid was producing at the time.  Electronics has no mechanical momentum, so renewable sources can adjust their frequency instantaneously.  As long as they represent a small fraction of the total power generated, like a few monkeys riding on the back of an elephant, the fact that renewables do not contribute spinning reserve was not important.  The monkeys go where the elephant goes, and they're just along for the ride.

 

But reports say that at the time of the blackout, the fraction of power being made by renewables was on the order of 58%.  So the monkeys outweighed the elephant in this case.  Engineers have studied and modeled these situations, and presumably know what they're doing, but there is an undercurrent of suspicion that under some circumstances, having too large a fraction of renewables on a power grid that is isolated, like the Iberian Peninsula's is, can lead to trouble.  The question is, was last month's blackout an example of the kind of trouble renewables can cause?  We will have to wait on the results of the investigation to find out.

 

There is a way to make renewable power sources act like they have spinning reserve, but it's not cheap.  That energy has to come from somewhere, and either the renewable source has to hold its maximum capacity in reserve (which is wasteful), or you have to add capacity in the form of batteries.  But with suitable inverter design, a wind or solar source with batteries can be made to act like it has a certain amount of spinning reserve.

 

If we find that the blackout was in fact worsened by inverter-based renewables, something like the battery-spinning-reserve idea may need to be implemented as a safety precaution.  There are other good reasons to put battery storage on grids with a lot of renewable energy.  A windless night produces no wind or solar power, and it's handy in such cases to have energy stored up somewhere that you can use in such situations. 

 

Batteries are improving steadily and may come in very handy to avert the next blackout.  If it turns out that renewables contributed to the problem, we have a solution, but it's not going to be cheap.

 

Sources:  I referred to an article in Wired at https://www.wired.com/story/what-caused-the-european-power-outage-spain-blackout/, an article on batteries supplying spinning reserve at https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/energy-storage/battery/spinning-reserve-displacement-using-batteries-for-a-more-efficient-and-cleaner-way-to-back-up-power/, and the Wikipedia article "2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout."

She Did Not Turn Left

 

Those are the last words of a New York Times story on the helicopter-airline crash that killed 67 people last Jan. 29 in Washington, DC.  While there is no official word yet from the National Transportation Safety Board on the cause of the crash, the in-depth Times report has material from interviews with numerous experts, and pieces together the final minutes leading up to the crash.  As with so many avertable tragedies, this one combined multiple factors, each one of which might have not been fatal by itself.  But the combination proved deadly, and as is often the case in modern aviation accidents, human error played a large role.

 

The basics of what happened are well known.  American Airlines Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas to Washington's National Airport was on its final approach to land when an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter flying a training mission collided with it short of the runway.  All 64 people on the commercial flight died in the crash, as did the helicopter pilot, Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach; the instructor, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, and the third member of the crew, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O'Hara. 

 

When I blogged on this crash shortly after it happened, we knew that the helicopter was flying higher than FAA regulations allowed.  At the location of the crash, it was supposed to be lower than 200 feet, but the crash occurred at an altitude of about 300 feet.  Also, the helicopter was equipped with an improved navigational aid called ADS-B, which updates air traffic controllers every second on the aircraft's location, but the device was not turned on at the time.

 

The Times article adds important information about the interaction among the air traffic controller, Capt. Lobach, and Warrant Officer Eaves.  The main purpose of the flight was to practice evacuating important members of the Federal government in time of emergency.  As a part of that practice, it was customary not to operate easily-detected navigational equipment such as the ADS-B.  The helicopter had a standard radar transponder on board which was operational, but it provides updated location information only about every five to twelve seconds, according to the report. 

 

Such a time gap between updates could have been critical.  For one thing, the runway that Flight 5342 landed on that night was seldom used, and it's possible that Capt. Lobach had never been in a situation where she had to avoid a plane landing on that runway.  For another thing, it seems that critical information the controller tried to tell the helicopter crew may have been "stepped on" when the crew pressed their push-to-talk button to transmit words to the controller. 

 

A third factor is that a few minutes before the crash, after being alerted that there was a commercial flight nearby, the helicopter pilots requested "visual separation" from the controller.  This meant basically, "We want to be responsible for avoiding a crash by looking around us and getting out of the way of anything we see in our path." 

 

This relieves the controller from essentially micro-managing the flight's actions, but puts a heavy burden on the pilot to know exactly what is going on and what to do to avoid a collision.  At night, with night-vision goggles on, it is quite possible that Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves had difficulty seeing the approaching Flight 5342, or at least gaining enough information about its path to avoid the collision.

 

At about 40 seconds before the crash, when the two aircraft were about a mile apart, the controller asked the helicopter pilots if they had the CRJ passenger jet in sight.  He received no response, and then transmitted an order to them to pass behind the jet.  Analysis of the recordings indicates that the helicopter crew might have been transmitting at the time and didn't hear this order.  The last exchange between Warrant Officer Eaves and the controller came a few seconds later, and affirmed that the helicopter crew had "the aircraft" in sight and wanted to be okayed for visual separation, which was again approved. 

 

Then, the instructor Eaves told the pilot Lobach to turn left, which would have brought the helicopter farther away from the jet's flight path and might have averted the accident.  But she kept flying straight, and the collision happened a few seconds later.

 

No one knows what was going on in the minds of Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves in those last few seconds.  But some aspects of this tragedy remind me of the crash of Korean Air flight 801 in Guam in 1997.  Analysis of the voice recorders in that crash revealed that the  captain of the flight evidently became confused about the plane's location.  But when the junior-ranked copilot tried to correct him, his suggestions were ignored.

 

In a training flight, the protocol should be that the student, even if she is a five-star general, for the moment is under the authority of the instructor, even if he is just a warrant officer.  It's possible that cultural factors prevented Warrant Officer Eaves from being as forceful as he should have been in telling Capt. Lobach to turn left.  And we do not know how deferential Capt. Lobach was feeling at the time, and whether she was alert and cognizant of her surroundings, frozen with fear, or somewhere in between. 

 

But it is already clear that communications broke down in significant ways in the last few critical seconds before the crash.  The technology exists to enable pilots to both hear and talk to the controller at the same time.  I say that, not knowing the details of what would have to change about the old-fashioned AM VHF cockpit radio system still in use, but I suspect there would be some grumbling on the part of those affected and then they would go along with the change. 

 

Beyond technology, there is the vital issue of prompt and relevant communication among those who can do something to avoid a crash.  That didn't happen in this case, and I hope the lessons learned here are applied in every situation where they could help avoid the next accident.

 

Sources:  The New York Times carried the story entitled "Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash" by Kate Kelly and Mark Walker appeared in the Apr. 27, 2025 edition.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the 2025 Potomac River mid-air collision and Korean Air Flight 801. 

Waymo Comes to Austin

 

In March, the robotaxi company Waymo announced that it was teaming for the first time with the ride-hailing service Uber to provide rides in Austin, Texas.  Waymo traces its roots to a secret project started by Google in 2009, with some key staffers having participated in the 2004 Stanford Self-Driving Car Project.  It is now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.  Uber, along with Lyft, provides app-based ride-hailing services outside the usual taxi structure.  Waymo's driverless taxis operated commercially first in San Francisco, and now provide service in U. S. cities such as Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and now Austin.

 

Last week, I rode with a friend, who was driving, from north Austin to the University of Texas main campus just north of downtown.  Our route went along Burnet Road, which is in many ways the prototypical Austin street:  four lanes, a center median in some blocks, all kinds of one-story retail businesses along the way with multiple parking-lot entrances in each block, and fairly heavy traffic. 

 

We pulled up at a red traffic signal, and a few feet ahead of us in the lane to our right were two Waymo driverless cars, one in front of the other.  There were no passengers and of course, no driver.  They are easy to spot from a distance, even if you can't see whether anyone is in the driver's seat.  A thing like a black police gumball on top of the roof spins constantly, as do smaller gizmos on each side of the car, and it bristles with wide-angle camera lenses and less identifiable technology, as well as logos letting you know what it is.  The Wikipedia article on Waymo says the vehicles are equipped with 360-degree lidar (light-based radar) with a nearly 1000-foot (300-meter) range, radio-type radars, and an extremely sophisticated AI processing system.  Also, some stray comments on a Reddit page indicates there are human "remote monitors" who are responsible for several cars each.  So yes, they look completely autonomous, but somewhere in the background there's a human ready to intervene if something unusual happens. 

 

I didn't know all of that as I gazed at a technology that has been on the streets in some form for at least a decade.  But I have never actually seen a driverless car that close, let alone two of them. 

 

The car in front was facing the intersection when the red light changed to green, and sure enough, it knew to start going, just like somebody was driving it.  This is not a true-confession column, but I have to admit something here.  Seeing those driverless cars acting so normal gave me the perverse urge to try to mess them up somehow, to wave a hand in front of one of the cars or something just to see how clever it was.  It was only a brief stray thought, but its strangeness struck me.  I am normally a live-and-let-live type of person, not given to vandalizing-type ideas.  But there is a radical difference between reading about things and seeing them for yourself.

 

Philosophers make a distinction between two types of knowing.  Knowing by description is what you would learn about riding a bicycle, say, by reading a book on how to ride a bicycle.  You might understand the physics of bicycles, you could answer detailed questions on bicycle dynamics, but if you had never actually sat on a bicycle or tried to ride one, your knowing about bicycles is only the first kind of knowledge: knowledge by description.

 

On the other hand, knowing by acquaintance requires a personal physical encounter with the thing known.  Up to last Wednesday, I had known a lot about autonomous vehicles.  I have blogged about them probably dozens of times.  But all my knowledge was by description, not acquaintance. 

 

Seeing those two Waymo cars in the flesh, so to speak, was qualitatively different than any amount of reading or watching YouTube videos.  I was right there, not twenty feet away from them, and if something happened to go wacky with one of them, I could be personally in danger. 

 

Not that Waymo has had too much trouble along those lines.  Wary of how one spate of bad publicity can ruin an entire project, Waymo has been very cautious in choosing its operating locations and in keeping a nearly spotless safety record so far.  According to Wikipedia, the only fatal accident involving a Waymo driverless car happened when an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was involved in a multiple-car pileup set off by a Tesla driver who was going 98 MPH before the crash.  Waymo can hardly be blamed for that.

 

Austin is a good choice for Waymo's initial teaming with Uber, as it is full of technophiles who will take a driverless Uber ride just for the thrill of it.  The annual international futurefest called SXSW (originally South by Southwest) was held in Austin in March, and I'm sure many of the out-of-town participants were tickled to get Uber rides in Waymos, which was probably one of the main reasons they were rolled out that month. 

 

There are still some people like me who will have generally negative feelings towards robotaxis.  For one thing, you're not going to have the huge variety of interpersonal experiences that riding in a human-driven cab provides. 

 

Just for example, a couple of weeks ago I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, and the closest airport was in Kansas City, a 50-mile-or-so drive away.  The place I was visiting hired a limo service to pick me up at the airport, and for the hour or so drive to Lawrence I had a fascinating conversation with a native of Veracruz, Mexico, who was as full of local and international tourist-type info as he was curious about various exotic places I'd been. 

 

Waymo isn't going to do that.  All you're greeted with is an empty car with a few control buttons, and no conversation.  At least not yet, but maybe they'll add a Cab-Chat app for people who miss the old days of human drivers.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press carried an article describing Waymo's teaming with Uber in Austin at https://apnews.com/article/uber-waymo-robotaxis-austin-texas-988aba46988e649be8cf59979587a8e5.  I found a reference to human monitors of Waymo cars at https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1f3ur68/current_waymo_revenue_per_car/?rdt=36096.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Waymo and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/. 

The Dire Wolf Dilemma

 

Many readers will have learned by now that a company called Colossal Bioscience has bio-engineered a creature that resembles the extinct dire wolf.  The last true dire wolf died more than 10,000 years ago.  Fossils recovered from Los Angeles's La Brea tar pits show that they had a more powerful bite than modern wolves, and they probably subsisted on wild horses and other large quadrupeds of their time. 

 

Exactly how much the cute white-haired puppies in Colossal Bioscience's publicity photos resemble the extinct species is a matter of some controversy.  The more technical statements from Colossal Bioscience admit that the creatures' DNA is closer to being inspired by ancient samples of DNA of true dire wolves obtained from museums around the world, than it is a direct copy.  That is rather like a movie that is "inspired by" true events—you can trust that the idea wasn't original, but don't look for exact correspondence in every detail either. 

 

If this was just an expensive exercise in dog-breeding, why bother?  That and many other questions are investigated in an article by D. T. Max in a recent issue of The New Yorker.  Max interviewed the company's founder, a Dallas billionaire named Ben Lamm; George Church, a professor of genetics whose dream of resurrecting extinct species caught Lamm's fancy; and Beth Shapiro, a researcher of ancient DNA who was hired away from her U. C. Santa Cruz lab to become Colossal Bioscience's chief science officer. 

 

The 1990 Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park and the movie franchise that followed imagined what would happen if we were able to recreate million-year-old dinosaurs.  Shapiro admits that is impossible, because DNA deteriorates with time and we're lucky even to have enough DNA from dire wolves to make an educated guess at the complete genome of a species that went extinct less than 100,000 years ago.  The firm's most publicized goal is to re-engineer (probably the best term) the woolly mammoth.  One reason for that is that its DNA is abundant, as entire frozen carcasses have been discovered in Siberia and North America.  But even a billionaire's resources are limited, so why has Lamm spent a large fraction of his fortune so far on efforts that have gained him nothing more than publicity?

 

Among the reasons Lamm gives are altruistic motives, such as the restoration of ecologies that would be improved by the return of woolly mammoths.  It seems that they suppressed the proliferation of small shrubs, which would be stamped into oblivion by herds of mammoths.  It may be too late for the extinct dodo bird, but there are also species of endangered birds that could be assisted by genetic technology that Colossal develops. 

 

But bird species can't pay for such services, so is this nothing more than a rich man's hobby?  After all, the puppies receiving Kardashian-level publicity have DNA that started out from a living species, the gray wolf, and was modified with CRISPR technology to have traits that resemble what the scientists think the dire wolf had:  fluffy white hair, for instance.  And some genes from ancient dire-wolf DNA were inserted.  But no one has claimed that their DNA is identical to that of the dire wolf, because it isn't.

 

Even the piece's author Max can't come up with answers to questions such as whether these stunts will definitely lead to any sustained ecological changes.  There are no plans to breed the imitation dire-wolf puppies, for instance, and the longer-term goal of "resurrecting" the woolly mammoth is still in the future by a good bit.  The word "resurrect" appears in Colossal's PR material, but isn't used much by Shapiro, who is still trying to act like a scientist, although her company forbids her from publicizing intellectual property which in an open university lab would be the subject of many scientific publications.

 

And that may really be the main issue ethically with what Colossal Bioscience is doing.  Ever since the era of big-science projects began after World War II, and especially after biological science turned out to be massively profitable for drug companies, much research in the area has taken place under proprietary conditions.  This means that discoveries potentially beneficial to humanity are controlled by private organizations, and general knowledge of them is either delayed (in the case of trade secrets) or available only under license (in the case of patents).

 

Making money from a thing is a good way for the thing to become generally available, so this situation is not necessarily unethical.  It looks like Lamm is counting on his hundred or more scientists to develop methods and techniques that will turn out to be profitable, and that probably means human medical applications.  Letting one's imagination go leads to the so-far-forbidden area of human cloning, or the cloning of deceased individuals, which has rightly been banned outright in many countries, and highly regulated in others. 

 

But cloning is only part of what Colossal is doing—the ancient-DNA techniques they are developing are irrelevant to cloning recently deceased individuals. Perhaps Lamm really means what he says, and he simply wants to bring back extinct species as a way of atoning for the massive species destruction that humanity has been visiting on the rest of the biosphere since we developed minds that could plan attacks on other creatures, or simply plan new suburbs that wipe out whole ecologies.

 

The efforts to re-create extinct species are still in their early stages, and we will just have to wait to see what Lamm and his stable of scientists come up with next.  Maybe they will be able to take intact DNA samples from mammoths and do total-DNA cloning as they originally hoped.  But if Lamm is expecting to recoup his investments by selling live woolly mammoths to zoos, he's got another think coming.  Sometimes a hobby is just a hobby, even if it benefits the ecosphere as a byproduct. 

 

Sources:  The article "Life After Death" by D. T. Max appeared in the Apr. 14, 2025 issue of The New Yorker on pp. 30-41.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on human cloning, the dire wolf, and the woolly mammoth.