A Tale of Two Companies: Information Unlimited and Edmund Optics

 

I'm going to address a branch of engineering or business ethics that you don't see discussed very often.  The question it answers is:  what obligation does a company founder have to see that the business continues after his or her passing?  To help us think about this question, I'm going to give two examples at opposite extremes:  Information Unlimited and Edmund Optics.

 

In November of 2008, I ordered three high-voltage capacitors from a company I'd never heard of before:  Information Unlimited.  The company's website had an edgy vibe and featured high-voltage equipment and components that are hard to find in one place.  Whoever was running the site clearly had fun in their work:  many of the items appealed to the teenage-mad-scientist types and were more like semi-safe toys than serious equipment. 

 

Over the years, I ordered hundreds of dollars' worth of supplies and devices from their website, which was simply www.amazing1.com.  The most expensive item I ever bought was a 40,000-volt DC power supply which cost about $500.  The main reason I favored Information Unlimited over more orthodox suppliers was cost.  You can buy similar equipment at a number of other places, but for that kind of unit you can't touch the standard suppliers for under $3500 or so. 

 

The expensive units mount in a standard relay rack and come equipped with all kinds of aluminum enclosures and safety interlocks and so on.  The Information Unlimited unit was made out of a piece of PVC pipe wired to a plastic box that you had to be pretty careful with.  All high-voltage equipment can be fatal if you're not careful, so the people at Information Unlimited just assumed their users would be careful with their units.  And I was, mostly, until one day I overloaded it and it broke.  I mailed it back and they fixed it for less than half of what I paid for it, and only in a couple of weeks.

 

The other day, I wanted something from Information Unlimited, but their website had vanished.  It turns out that their "resident genius,"  as one chatroom called him, was Robert Iannini, who had passed away just a few months before.  A Wired  profile of him from 2012 described a teenager so intent on experimenting with explosives that he blew off his left hand in high school and never quite graduated.  But he talked his way into Northeastern University, graduated with an electrical engineering degree, and in the early 1960s invented the bug zappers that you now see everywhere in restaurants and grocery stores.  With the $60,000 he got from that invention, he founded Information Unlimited and sold blaster guns, Tesla coils and a series of project books with titles like Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius.

 

And that's how Iannini made a living right up until he died on April 3, 2023 at the age of 85.  Sometime between then and August, his company folded—the website disappeared and no one on the Internet seems to know anything about what happened to it.  Whatever good talents Iannini had for running a business, planning his succession was not one of them.  Not only hobbyists, but serious scientists on a budget, plasma physicists, and educators around the world are going to miss the products that only Information Unlimited carried.

 

Back in 1942, a man named Norman W. Edmund took out an ad in Popular Photography for his company Edmund Salvage, which sold factory-second lenses for amateur telescope makers.  Following the end of World War II, the market was flooded with surplus military gear, including expensive-to-make but now dirt-cheap optics, and Edmund capitalized on this availability and moved his operation to Barrington, New Jersey.  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Edmund Scientific catalog was a kind of milder-mannered pre-Internet version of Information Unlimited, offering scientific kits, toys, and inexpensive surplus items for both hobbyists and professionals.

 

The firm turned a significant corner in 1970 when Norman retired and his son Robert Edmund became CEO.  By 1984, the optics end of the business had become so large that Robert made it a separate division, keeping Edmund Scientific as an educational and hobby sales organization with a retail store in Barrington.  Over the next fifteen years, Edmund Optics expanded globally, adding sales and manufacturing facilities in Germany, China, Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere. 

 

In 1998, Marisa Edmund, a granddaughter of Norman, joined the company, and she is now CEO of a worldwide original-equipment-manufacturer supplier of state-of-the-art cutting-edge optics.  It is still privately held, and its market share is miniscule, but it is a good example of an extremely specialized niche-market firm which, while perhaps insignificant from an economic point of view, is a key player in many specialty firms' supply chains.

 

Character is a hard thing to pin down, and anything I say about Robert Iannini should be tempered by the goodwill I hold for his memory and for the many useful and cost-effective items I bought from his firm. 

 

But the kind of personality it takes to start a company is often different than the personality or character needed to let it grow in ways that will serve a wider public.  The fact that Information Unlimited was unable to outlive its founder by more than a few months tells me that it was in some sense an extension of Iannini's personality.  Some leaders are unable to change the way they do things to adapt to changing market conditions or the need for competent staff who can run and even grow the business in your absence. 

 

Clearly, this was something that Norman Edmund understood, as he stepped aside in favor of his son Robert when Norman was only 55.  Not every founder has offspring who are interested in the family business, but Norman was fortunate in this regard, and now the firm he began continues to serve thousands of customers around the world.  I wish I could say the same for Information Unlimited, but Iannini's legacy will live on in the Tesla coils and high-voltage power supplies he made.  Still, I kind of wish I'd bought a blaster gun while I had the chance.

 

Sources:  I referred to the 2013 Wired profile of Robert Iannini at https://www.wired.com/2013/01/information-unlimited/, Iannini's obituary at https://www.smith-heald.com/obituaries/Robert-E-Iannini?obId=27660790, a blog mentioning the end of Information Unlimited at https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/what-ever-happened-to-amazing1-com-(aka-information-unlimited)/, Norman Edmund's obituary at https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/n-w-edmund-founder-of-iconic-south-jersey-scientifics-firm-dead-at-95/, and the Edmund Optics timeline at https://www.edmundoptics.com/company/about-us/80years/. 

What's Unjust About Floods?

 

Torrential rains had turned the normally placid Connecticut River into a turbid brownish-yellow lake.  The sun was out and the water was calm now, but the edge of the water where we stood watching our friend Dori was about thirty yards uphill from her house, which was a former fishing cabin on the bank of the river.  It was all she could afford, and when she bought it she knew the place was in a flood plain.  The house itself was on pilings and undamaged, but she had left her cats behind in her haste, and now Dori was wading out to rescue them.  When she got back to shore with the felines, we asked her how the rescue went.  She said it was okay except when she got her hands in the water, she could feel that the electricity was still turned on. 

 

A new discipline called "flood justice" seeks to redress wrongs done to people like Dori who live in areas where flooding is more likely than in more wealthy regions.  Last April, the first Flood Justice Symposium was held at the University of Arizona.  Geophysicists, ethicists, urban and regional planning experts, and other interested parties discussed how floods often disrupt the lives of the poor much more than the higher socioeconomic classes, and what can be done to alleviate this injustice.

 

I must admit that my first reaction to the phrase "flood injustice" was "Huh?  How can floods be unjust or just?"  The juxtaposition of a rain-related word and "injustice" brought to mind the phrase from the Book of Matthew, where Jesus says, "he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."  (5:45)  But the context of this statement is that Jesus is calling on his listeners not simply to love their neighbors and hate their enemies, but to treat everyone fairly, just as God does in providing his natural blessings of sun and rain for everyone.

 

The problem addressed by the concept of flood justice is an ancient one.  Some areas of land are more likely to flood than others.  In a free-market economy, the more flood-prone areas will be cheaper than average, and people without much money can't afford anything better.  In some countries, flood plains are occupied by so-called "informal housing" which is a polite name for squatters who cobble together hovels with discarded lumber and cardboard.  Such places become instant scenes of misery and death in a flood, as you might expect.

 

In an online article on the website of the American Geophysical Union, organizers of the symposium described a long-established policy method that tends to perpetuate flood injustice:  the cost-benefit analysis, or CBA for short.  Engineers are familiar with the CBA, which is based on the simple idea that when you face an array of choices that can each provide some benefits, it is only good sense to figure out what each choice will cost and pick the cheapest way to get what you want.  In the context of planning flood-prevention civil-engineering improvements—dikes, spillways, drainage systems, etc.—this means that the most valuable properties will play an outsize role compared to flood-prone areas where land and improvements are cheaper.  A CBA-guided improvement plan will naturally spend a fixed amount of money to protect the most expensive property in the region, because otherwise you would lose more value if the rich folks got flooded out compared to what the poor folks would lose. 

 

Put that way, it does sound injust, but CBA thinking is deeply ingrained in engineer-dominated organizations.  One way to widen the scope of planning is to include more community input from the poorer sections of a region, and to consider factors that are not as easily quantified as property values.  The symposium organizers say that "recognizing the wider socioeconomic, cultural, ecological, psychological, and health effects of flooding is not enough.  We must also integrate these considerations intentionally and responsibly into tools, metrics, and measures that inform flood risk management policy."

 

Another need that flood justice requires is better data.  Many maps of the so-called 100-year flood boundaries have coarse resolution, are based on outdated data, and are deficient in other ways.  Even if accurate data is available, real-estate developers have been known to conceal the fact from customers that a given property is in a flood-prone area, and not all U. S. states require that such information be provided to the buyer. 

 

Governments can be the problem more than the solution in alleviating injustice with regard to floods.  Floods don't respect boundaries, but local jurisdictions, especially in highly populated areas, tend to be a hodge-podge of finely divided authorities who are reluctant to share information with each other, let alone cooperate on a regional planning effort that would require working with rival jurisdictions.  This is a government-policy matter, not engineering, strictly speaking.  But engineering has to take place in the real world.  Working out political differences and encouraging cooperation among different jurisdictions is part of the job, or at least it should be.   

 

I will admit that I was skeptical when I saw the headline "Five Key Needs for Addressing Flood Injustice."  But in fact, engineers as well as geophysical scientists have a lot to contribute to making flood damage and casualties rarer in the future, for the less fortunate as well as for the middle and upper classes.  As more people crowd into urban areas, the way those areas are engineered will have a lot to do with the fate of the poorer classes, and whether they will lose everything in the next flood, possibly including their lives.  Our friend Dori was philosophical about her losses, because she knew flooding was a possibility.  But as soon as she reasonably could, she moved out of that fishing cabin into a house that was well away from the nearest flood plain. 

 

Not everybody can afford to do that, though, and everyone who is involved in flood prediction, abatement, and management should consider more factors than simply the market value of land and improvements when making their next set of plans. 

 

Sources:  The article excerpted above appeared on the website EOS, operated by the American Geophysical Union, at https://eos.org/science-updates/five-key-needs-for-addressing-flood-injustice. 

Alaska Airlines Plane Had Bolts Missing

 

Last month, we blogged in this space about the Alaska Airlines flight that lost a door plug and decompressed at 16,000 feet on January 5.  The aircraft involved was a Boeing 737 Max 9, and the door plug was recovered in the back yard of a Portland, Oregon resident.  Fortunately, no one was killed, although several minor injuries resulted, and the plane landed safely.

 

On last Tuesday, the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that its investigators determined that the four bolts which retain the door plug in place were missing before it blew out.  Documents obtained from Boeing and its supplier Spirit AeroSystems show a sequence of events that points to a serious manufacturing problem, if preliminary indications are borne out by subsequent investigations.  At this point, here is what we know, based on news reports and a preliminary report by the NTSB.

 

The 737 fuselages are manufactured at a Spirit facility in Wichita, Kansas, which used to be owned by Boeing.  In 2005, Boeing spun it off to an investment firm, but it still makes fuselages and ships them via extra-long railcars to one of the main Boeing assembly plants in Renton, Washington State.  The fuselage of the plane in question arrived in Washington in August of 2023.

 

At the Renton plant, it was found that five rivets near the port-side door plug were damaged and had to be replaced.  To access the rivets, it was necessary to remove the door plug.  Except for the fact that it has no handle and other fittings that would make it a usable door, the door plug fits in the fuselage like a regular door.  There are twelve "stop pads" which engage with fittings on the plug, but in order for it to move like a door, the plug must be free to move away from these pads.  A regular door has a separate locking mechanism to keep it attached to the plane, but in the door plug, it appears that instead of a locking mechanism, four bolts retain it in place.  Without these bolts, the only thing keeping the door plug in place is the mechanical integrity of the stop-pad pins and other machinery that is not designed to keep it there, but to let it move when needed.

 

After the defective rivets were replaced by Spirit personnel at the Boeing plant, a photo was taken of the completed work.  This is the photo that shows three out of the four door-plug bolts were definitely missing (a fourth location was concealed by insulation, but that one was probably missing too, based on evidence from the recovered door plug). 

 

These events took place in September of 2003.  The aircraft was delivered to Alaska Airlines on Halloween of 2023, the end of October.  Somehow the door plug managed to stay in place for a number of flights through November and December, but by January 5, the stop pads and associated parts had fatigued with repeated pressurizations enough to fail at 16,000 feet.  If the plane had been at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet when the plug blew, the depressurization could have sucked many passengers out and possibly crashed the plane.  So this incident was an extremely close call.

 

As a teacher, I am continually impressed with the need for an ability that is unique to humans:  the ability to pay attention.  I impress this need upon my students, but every time I grade exams, I discover what happens when attention is not properly directed, or directed on the wrong things.  Boeing and Spirit obviously have extensive procedures in place to manufacture, assemble, and inspect aircraft.  And nearly all the time, these procedures work.  But every procedure is useless if the human minds carrying them out do not perform them according to the rules. 

 

Clearly, it was someone's duty to document with a photograph the rework of the five damaged rivets.  But it is so easy to see how someone, even an inspector whose main job was to certify the correctnesss of a repair, would have his or her attention focused on the rivets, and not on the door plug only a few feet to the rear of the rivets.  The NTSB inspectors, focused as they were on the door plug, saw immediately from that photo that someone had forgotten to install the retaining bolts before the insulation and interior finish materials were installed.  And probably the first time the bolts were put in, before the rework procedure, somebody checked to make sure they were there.  But this time, because things were slightly out of the ordinary during the rivet rework, that small but critical act of looking to see if the bolts were in place was omitted.  And once everything was buttoned up, nobody could tell from outside that the bolts were missing.

 

This raises a question that occurs to a person who has disassembled and reassembled many pieces of equipment over the years.  When a technician removed the bolts to take out the door plug and gain access to the rivets, where did those bolts go?  On a workbench?  In a pile of similar bolts?  It seems like if they were just sitting around after the job was done, that would get somebody thinking about where they belonged.  This is the kind of seemingly unimportant detail that suddenly becomes significant, and I'm sure that some NTSB personnel are asking similar questions of the people involved in the rework.  I would not want to be one of the technicians who get grilled.

 

Modern technological means of documenting manufacturing processes have made it easier to trace actions such as the ones the NTSB is investigating.  In the old pre-digital-camera and pre-email days, investigators would have had to rely only on recollections of mechanics, and it's very unlikely anyone would have taken pictures at every step of the process or produced documents with as much detail as electronic data can include these days. 

 

Still, it's not robots who assemble airplanes, it's people.  And people (and robots) can make mistakes, especially when they are doing something out of the ordinary such as rework, where it is impossible to write procedures for every contingency and people are trusted simply to do the common-sense good thing.  The only problem here is, that wasn't quite good enough.  Fortunately, the consequences were a lot more benign than they could have been, and the accident can serve as a warning, or encouragement if you like, that no matter how trivial an inspector's work may seem, it can save lives—or lose them.

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press report on the NTSB findings which appeared Feb. 6 at https://apnews.com/article/boeing-emergency-landing-report-alaska-airlines-8543c90b68b4d932a700cf57ff8f1b8e.  The preliminary NTSB report itself is at https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA24MA063%20Preliminary%20report.pdf.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Spirit AeroSystems.

Will Apple's Vision Pro Be the Next iPhone?

 

Back in June of 2023, Apple announced its Vision Pro, which the Wikipedia article about it calls a "mixed reality" headset.  This week, in some parts of the world you can now buy your own Vision Pro—for $3,500.  While this will not be an obstacle for wealthy early adopters, the rest of us will probably wait until the beta-version bugs are worked out and the price comes down.  In the meantime, we can think about what this means for the future of humanity.

 

That sounds either presumptuous or silly, but there is no question that the advent of the smartphone has changed the course of world history, especially cultural, social, and political history.  Combined with the AI-fueled algorithms that maximize profits for Facebook, X, and their ilk at the expense of rational political discourse, we have seen the smartphone severely damage democracy in the U. S. and other places.  Yes, there are advantages to smartphones as well, but a serious debate over whether having them is a net gain or loss to society is one that we will probably never have, because they are here to stay. 

 

That is not yet the case for the Vision Pro, so let's spend a little thought on imagining what life would be like if Vision Pro headsets or their upgraded equivalents become as common as smartphones.  My speculations are aided by my watching an 8-minute video made by Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, who went to a cabin at a ski resort with some video producers and wore a Vision Pro for most of 24 hours.

 

When you wear a Vision Pro, your entire visual field is mediated, in a literal sense.  You can't see anything directly.  All you see is a projection of two high-resolution video screens that go directly to your eyeballs.  In order to see anything, including the ordinary world around you, you have to use the multiple cameras mounted on the Vision Pro.  Everything you see goes into the cameras, through Apple's proprietary software and some of the 600 apps now available for the device, and only then do you get to see anything.

 

And it works the other way too.  Physically, the Vision Pro looks like a pair of unusually bulky ski goggles, with a headstrap to keep it on and a fanny-mounted battery pack that has to be recharged every two or three hours.  The outer surface of the goggles is also a video screen, and in order to present something other than a blank shiny surface to someone the wearer is talking with in person, the screen presents video images of the wearer's eyes.  This is after the wearer has taken a photograph of her or his entire face, so the system knows how to present a somewhat reasonable facsimile of the wearer's visage.

 

Videoconferencing is one of the big intended uses of Vision Pro, but you can't just point a camera at a roomful of people wearing bulky headsets that cover their faces.  Apple to the rescue—the 3-D photos of the wearer stored in the system are used to create "avatar" faces to present to the other people in the videoconference.

 

From all the reactions to Stern's avatar that she accumulated in her video calls using the Vision Pro, there was one unanimous opinion:  her avatar looked terrible.  Even Apple has not yet overcome the "uncanny valley" effect in trying to use computing to simulate the human visage.  According to the uncanny valley hypothesis, unless a human simulation is extremely authentic (the good side of the valley), people will sense that something is off and have a negative reaction to it.  At the other side of the valley, a cruder image is seen as merely cartoonish and not uncanny.  Maybe Apple should have gone that route, as most people would prefer to see an obviously artistic caricature of a friend, rather than an image that is like something that an undertaker might manage to do with a corpse.

 

That was probably the worst experience Stern had with the device.  Although Apple doesn't recommend cooking while wearing the Vision Pro, Stern went right ahead and chopped onions, and was delighted to find that the airtight seal around her eyes prevented her eyes from watering.  (Chopping onions in a pan of water, I am told, is just as effective, and $3,500 cheaper.)  And the 3-D movies available from some (not all) streaming services were impressive. 

 

You can record your own 3-D videos with either the Vision Pro or the latest iPhone (15, I believe), and Stern tried this feature out while skiing, another activity that Apple doesn't recommend for Vision Pro wearers.  But nothing bad happened on her bunny-run venture down the slopes, and the overall impression Stern left with her viewers is that this is still a prototype, but if they work out some bugs and get the battery life up and the power consumption down, along with the price, Apple may have finally found what Google tried to find with Google Glass and failed to do back in 2015:  a mass market for what most people still call virtual-reality or augmented-reality headsets.

 

Apple avoids both of those terms and insists that what the Vision Pro allows is something they call "spatial computing."  To my ears, this is a singularly unfortunate phrase, because it implies that the computer uses space somehow to calculate things.  Well, every computer that takes up space does that, so it's just going to be a label for the 3-D techniques that the Vision Pro allows you to use for setting up your workspace. 

 

Wearing a Vision Pro really cuts you off from ordinary reality in a much more radical way than using a smartphone does.  Everything that you see passes first through the guts of the machine, rendering your entire visual field subject to the whims of the Vision Pro designers.  Perhaps that sounds benign now.  But put this device in the hands of criminals, or even well-intentioned entertainers who simply want to thrill people, and it may open entirely new fields of horrors.  It's too early to tell, but there will be downsides, especially if the Vision Pro proves as popular as Apple hopes.  Let's just hope the downsides aren't too low.

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press article on the commercial introduction of the Vision Pro at https://apnews.com/article/apple-vision-pro-spatial-computing-augmented-reality-7ec545a42403cf12e799200864e47d94, Joanna Stern's video report on it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xI10SFgzQ8, and the Wikipedia article "Apple Vision Pro."

The Ethics of Disposable Earbuds

 

Over the Christmas holidays, we stayed at a nice Texas motel that had an exercise room.  I usually take a daily bike ride for exercise, but as I didn't bring my bicycle with me, I did the next best thing and used a stationary bike.  The bike had a video screen connected to the cable-TV system of the motel, and for the convenience of exercisers, the motel provided free disposable earbuds, so if you wanted to watch Metallica music videos, you wouldn't disturb the lady next to you who was tuned to PBS.

 

The earbuds worked fine, but I had never come across an establishment which provided them free of charge.  It got me to thinking about how a thing which was once a high-tech piece of specialized and uncommon equipment has become a commodity so inexpensive that motels can afford to give them away.

 

The first device that transformed electrical impulses into audible speech was Bell's telephone receiver.  You have probably seen old movies in which characters use the "candlestick" phone, consisting of a vertical stand with a transmitter that the user spoke into, and a "potato-masher" receiver that was held to the ear.  The reason the potato-masher was as long as it was—several inches—wasn't for convenience in handling.  All electromagnetic transducers (the technical term for a device that converts electric waves into sound waves) need a magnetic field, and producing a strong enough magnetic field to make the device work efficiently has always been one of the defining challenges of making receivers, headphones, and earphones.

 

In the 1890s, the best magnetic materials were lousy by today's standards.  It took a U-shaped piece of iron about three or four inches long to make a strong enough magnetic field to work well as a telephone receiver, and so that was why the potato-masher was as long as it was. 

 

By the early 1900s, materials had improved to the extent that the magnet was small enough to fit into a round can, and thus the headphone came to be developed.  By 1930, you could buy a good pair of radio-quality headphones, the kind that fit over your head with a spring strap, for $1.09.  I have an Allied Radio catalog published in Chicago which describes them as "[u]nusually sensitive headphones carefully designed with aluminum shells and genuine moulded caps."  It's not clear why an imitation moulded cap would be a problem, but a certain amount of vivid writing was expected by the catalog reader of the day.

 

In 2024 dollars, those phones would cost $19.43, so how does a motel get by with giving their modern-day equivalent away?  Advances in manufacturing, of course, and the most significant advance has been in the technology of magnetic materials.

 

Around 1990, it became possible to make what are called neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets, which produce the same magnetic field intensity as previous types but with a small fraction of the weight and size.  Magnets made of NdFeB are why we can have excellent sound quality in tiny packages, and also why we can have small battery-powered drones (one of the reasons, anyway—lithium batteries are the other).  And China, which bought the NdFeB technology from General Motors in the 1990s and ran with it, according to the economics website MacroPolo, makes the vast majority of all NdFeB magnetic materials today, although Japan and Germany still have toeholds in the high-end parts of the market.  The U. S. is no longer a significant player in the technology, although we are one of the largest consumers.

 

The reason why the motel didn't provide a single public set of earbuds, the way nineteenth-century railroads used to provide a single public brush and comb chained to the washroom wall, is sanitation.  I haven't seen any actual statistics on diseases known to be transmitted by reusing somebody else's earbuds, but I suppose it could happen.  And there's the yuck factor of just thinking that somebody else's earwax is getting into your ear.  Even if the motel provided more expensive non-ear-penetrating headphones with padding, there would still be skin-to-pad contact around the ear area, and so the easiest out is just to supply cheap disposable earbuds.

 

So what is the harm, if any, in using some inexpensive earbuds once and throwing them away?  

 

For one thing, that decision adds to the stream of waste electronics flooding our landfills daily.  As pollutants go, a pair of earbuds isn't that big a deal, but they are yet another example of the disposable society that is one of the driving themes of modernity.  Magnets aren't exactly biodegradable, but it turns out that one of the more significant growth industries in the U. S. is the enterprise of picking through garbage to find NdFeB magnet material to recycle.  An economic report by MacroPolo tells me that in the next few years, there may be a crunch in the NdFeB magnet supply chain.  China can't make the best ones, Japan and Germany are maxed out, and the demand for magnets to go in everything from electric cars and wind turbines to drones and earbuds is increasing rapidly.  So magnet material may become recycling gold if new sources of supply aren't found soon.

 

The libertarian economists among us would say, "Hey, if earbuds are cheap enough to throw away, don't worry about it.  If it gets to be a problem, the price will go up and we'll do something else, maybe rent them and sterilize them."  And they would have a point.  But just because something is cheap doesn't mean that it's fine to throw it away after one or a few uses.  Turns out that I kept my earbuds after we left the hotel, and now I have my own private set in my shaving kit if I ever come across another motel which isn't as generous with earbuds.  And if the coming NdFeB magnet crunch comes to pass, I may be glad I kept mine.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report "The Impermanence of Permanent Magnets:  A Case Study on Industry, Chinese Production, and Supply Constraints" at https://macropolo.org/analysis/permanent-magnets-case-study-industry-chinese-production-supply/, and an original Allied Radio catalog for 1930 in my collection of antique catalogs. 

Does Diversty Make United Less Safe?

 

Steve Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, drew a lot of flak this past week for two things.  One of them raises serious questions about the tradeoff between so-called diversity hiring practices and safety.  The other concerns one of Kirby's hobbies and can probably be dismissed as irrelevant, although it contributed to the overall attention level he's been receiving lately.

 

Some videos alleged to be showing Kirby—a 56-year-old married father of seven—performing as a drag queen went viral, amassing 2.7 million views in only a few days.  As I have no means of knowing whether these videos are authentic or when they were made, and I can't find any evidence that either confirms or denies their provenance, I fall back on a policy I once read which the manager of an ice-manufacturing plant told his employees in the 1920s:  "As long as you do your work well during the day, I don't care what you do at night."  While the CEO of a major multinational corporation may regret a time years ago when he dressed up in drag, I see no reason to draw any far-reaching conclusions from that fact, if indeed it is a fact. 

 

Its chief use by certain media organizations has been to serve as eye candy for the related story, which should be considered seriously:  whether United Airlines' stated diversity-hiring intents are so extreme as to cause their passengers unnecessary safety risks.

 

While I have not been able to locate the original June 2021 interview that is the basis of this charge, the closest I can find to a direct quote from Kirby is from something called "The Patriot Oasis" on X:  "We decided that 50% of the aviation academy students would be women or people of color.  Today, women and people of color make up only 19% of our pilots."     

 

The issue here is whether a prestigious and demanding profession—that of airline pilot in this case—should be allowed to compose and propagate itself according to criteria that are strictly professional-merit-based, or whether one should also consider what for the lack of another phrase I will call identity-based factors.  Questions like this are made clearer by extreme cases, so I will use an example to show what I mean.

 

In 1960, less than 5% of lawyers in the U. S. were female.  Many law firms would hire women only as secretaries and legal assistants, and many law schools either had a policy of not admitting women at all, or making it very difficult for a woman to obtain a law degree.   But things changed, and today, 38% of U. S. lawyers are women. 

 

Similar things can be said about the professions of medicine and engineering.  For a variety of reasons both historical and political, barring women from entering professions simply because they were women became something that was both frowned upon, and eventually made illegal by Federal and state laws.  What once seemed part of the nature of things now seems highly prejudicial and arbitrary.  In retrospect, the custom of banning women from the professions of law, medicine, and engineering seems to have few if any redeeming features, and undoubtedly lost the talents of many otherwise qualified women.

 

Lifting bans is one thing.  But setting numerical goals for percentages of various identity groups is a different thing.  Is it justifiable to arrange selection and admission processes to shift the percentage of various identity groups (women, ethnic and racial minorities, social classes, etc.) in directions that appear to be desirable, not for the intrinsic good of the profession itself, but for an extrinsic good such as distributing the benefits of highly-paid prestigious professions among identity groups who have previously not enjoyed them? 

 

If Steve Kirby's stated goal of his "aviation academy" students being 50% women or people of color is achieved, what are the consequences for the distribution of pilot quality among the graduates?  Qualitatively speaking, if the total number of slots in the academy is fixed, and the selection rules are changed so that the fraction of women and people of color rises from whatever it is under strictly professional-merit-based criteria (presumably less than 50%) to the stated goal, some people who would have otherwise been admitted can't get in.  I have no idea how hard it is to get into United Airlines' aviation academy, or what criteria one must meet in order to be admitted.  Presumably, it includes a track record of flying experience and education, and perhaps some tests of professional ability. 

 

The critical question is, does United Airlines maintain their professional-merit-based standards of admission and graduation and hiring while also managing to admit more women and people of color?  To answer this question in detail would require months or perhaps years of research and access to information which is probably proprietary.  But the answer is critical to our query. 

 

If United raises their fraction of discriminated-against minorities by admitting and hiring them with lower professional criteria than those applied to other applicants, it is clear that quality is being compromised.  But if they achieve their diversity goals only by extensive and intensified recruitment efforts, for example, and maintain the standards they held before the diversity initiative started, then there is nothing to worry about safety-wise.

 

There really is no other way to answer this question that I can see.  And of all the various places I've seen or heard this topic discussed, no one seems to have carried the inquiry to the depths it needs to go in order to answer it with fairness both to United Airlines and to the flying public.

 

Maybe some investigative reporter is busily digging into the records as we speak, but somehow I doubt it.  The drag-queen videos combined with a two-year-old interview quote have done their job of increasing Internet traffic to certain sites that are more interested in traffic than truth or objectivity. 

 

In order to remain professions and merit the respect and prestige they receive from the public at large, professions, including that of airline pilot, must maintain their professional standards, and must also be perceived as maintaining those standards in order to retain the public's trust.  This Internet-based kerfuffle about Steve Kirby has undoubtedly eroded that trust, but has left the real question of pilot quality unexamined.

 

Sources:  I referred to a Fox Business report at https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/pilots-hired-based-merit-not-diversity-safety-top-priority-aviation-expert-says, the quote from Patriot Oasis at https://twitter.com/ThePatriotOasis/status/1747584074175107488, and for statistics on women in law at https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers.html, in addition to the Wikipedia article on Steve Kirby, United Airlines CEO.

The Door Plug Blowout on a 737 Max 9: Another Headache for Boeing

 

When Alaska Airlines flight 1282 took off around 5 PM Friday, Jan. 5 from Portland, Oregon, few if any of the 171 passengers suspected that anything unusual was going to happen.  But at 5:11 PM, as the Boeing 737 Max 9 was climbing through 16,000 feet, passengers heard a loud bang followed by a roaring wind noise that made conversation impossible.  Where a normal porthole window had once been, a gaping two-by-four-foot hole had appeared next to a row of seats on the left side of the plane.   One passenger, Kelly Bartlett, didn't realize what had happened until a teenage boy moved into an empty seat next to her.  He was sitting in the row next to the hole, two empty seats away from the window, and the blast sucked the shirt off his back.  If he hadn't been wearing his seatbelt, he might have gone with it.

 

Oxygen masks deployed all over the plane, and the passengers remained calm amid the chaotic noise.  The pilot immediately returned to Portland and landed the plane safely.  No one other than the boy next to the hole was injured. 

 

The Boeing 737 Max 9 can be configured for various numbers of seats, and for more than 200, an emergency exit is required in the location where the hole appeared.  But for smaller capacities, the emergency exit is replaced by a panel, basically a plug the shape of the exit door, that blocks the exit opening.  From inside the plane, the window and trim make this plug almost invisible.  But all that was holding it against the differential pressure of over a ton as the plane rose through 16,000 feet were four bolts, at least if the plug had been installed correctly.  This particular Max 9 was delivered to Alaska Airlines only last October, so the problem may have existed since it was built.

 

A Portland high-school teacher found the door intact in his back yard, so investigators are looking at it closely to determine the cause of the failure. 

           

In the meantime, the U. S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has grounded all Boeing 737 Max 9 planes, which affects some 171 aircraft.  It has ordered inspections of the bolts and other structures around the door plugs, and United Airlines has already found that some bolts on its door plugs are loose. 

 

Only last week, we described in this space how all passengers on a commercial flight involved in a runway collision in Japan survived with only minor injuries, and we can fortunately say the same about this accident in Portland.  But things could have been much worse.  In similar incidents involving sudden holes in fuselages, passengers or flight attendants have been sucked out bodily.  If the boy sitting next to the hole hadn't been wearing his seatbelt, that probably would have been his fate.  And if the plug had waited to fail at a higher altitude, the pressure differential would have been greater, possibly tearing a seat off its mounts. 

 

Although we can rejoice that nobody was seriously injured, the big question now is why the plug blew out.  The fact that at least one other plane has been found with loose bolts holding the plug says that this may not have been an isolated incident.  That is why the FAA has wisely grounded the Max 9s until a thorough investigation shows exactly what the problem was.

 

We can only speculate at this point, but already some things are fairly clear.  The fact that the plane suffering the accident was so new points to a possible manufacturing problem.  Nuts on airframes must be torqued to a specific tension, because the proper amount of torque represents a compromise between not enough tension on the bolt, which might leave it subject to vibration loosening or fatigue in some cases, and too much tension, which could lead to bolt failure.  Many bolts on aircraft have locking cables, cotter pins, or other means by which the nut on the bolt is prevented from turning.  It's not clear whether the four bolts that hold the door plug in place had such provisions, but even locking devices can fail, or be improperly installed.

 

Another 737 Max series, the Max 8, was the subject of an extensive and expensive investigation involving defective software that intentionally crashed the plane when it received faulty data from attitude sensors.  This problem cost Boeing billions of dollars and lost prestige, and the last thing the company needs right now is another expensive and embarrassing safety problem.

 

In a statement to employees that was also released to the public, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun promised "100% and complete transparency every step of the way" during the investigation.  He can hardly promise less, because Boeing's reputation is on the line with every accident that points to a manufacturing cause. 

 

As airlines which own 737 Max 9s wait impatiently to begin using their millions of dollars of investment again, both the FAA and Boeing have big incentives to figure out why the plug blew out and how to make sure it doesn't happen again.  The recovery of the intact door will be very helpful in the investigation, and I expect we will know something definite within 60 to 90 days. 

 

In the meantime, air flight remains a safe mode of travel for the vast majority of passengers.  The incredible number of things that all have to work flawlessly for a typical flight to be completed goes completely unnoticed by most passengers, but it is the product of the efforts of thousands of engineers, technicians, service people, pilots, crew members, air traffic controllers, and others who do their jobs without public recognition. 

 

We are fortunate that the last two attention-grabbing commercial aircraft accidents have resulted in relatively few casualties.  But grounding the Max 9s was the right thing to do, and everyone looks forward to the time when we can know what happened, why it happened, and how to keep it from happening again.

 

Sources:  I referred to the FAA website at https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/updates-grounding-boeing-737-max-9-aircraft and the following news reports:  https://abcnews.go.com/US/alaska-airlines-emergency-fittings-top-door-plug-fractured/story?id=106218951, https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223517098/door-plug-boeing-737-max-portland-ntsb-faa. and https://abc7ny.com/alaska-airlines-flight-emergency-boeing-door-plug/14298712/.

The Mostly Good News of the JAL Flight 516 Crash

 

Any air transportation fatality is tragic, and our sympathy is extended to the loved ones of the five crew members of the Japan Coast Guard plane who died in a collision with Japan Air Lines (JAL) flight 516 on Tuesday Jan. 2.  But considering that the JAL Airbus 350 had 367 passengers and 12 crew members on board, and every single one of them survived, this accident could have been so much worse.

 

Investigation of the crash will continue for months, but initially it appears that while the JAL flight was cleared to land on runway 34R at Haneda Airport, one of the two international airports in Tokyo, a much smaller Japan Coast Guard De Havilland turboprop was supposed to be waiting to enter the runway.  However, possibly due to a misunderstanding or communications error, the De Havilland was already on the runway as the JAL aircraft was landing.

 

The two aircraft collided, killing five of the six crew members on the Coast Guard plane and sending the Airbus 350 skidding down the runway.  It eventually ground to a stop with the right engine still running. Dramatic video footage of the wreck shows passengers escaping down inflatable ramps in the red glow of the engine's fiery exhaust.

 

The JAL flight crew were unable to use the plane's PA system, so they resorted to megaphones in order to direct the passengers to usable exits amid the smoke that quickly filled the cabin.  The wide-body carbon-fiber-composite A350 was designed for quick evacuation, but until now the evacuation procedure had only been tried out in drills.  Eyewitnesses say none of the passengers appeared to be carrying luggage, which probably helped evacuate the plane quickly.  The plane's captain was the last person to leave the aircraft.  Despite the presence of over 100 fire trucks and the efforts of firefighters, the A350's fire spread throughout the plane and completely destroyed it.  But other than bruises and minor injuries, all the passengers and crews made it out safely.

 

According to a BBC report on the crash, after a 1985 accident in which a JAL aircraft collided with a mountain and killed 520 people the company pledged that they would "never again allow such a tragic accident to occur."  And a look at commercial aircraft fatalities over the years shows a generally declining trend since the 1970s, with a low of 59 deaths worldwide in 2017, for example. 

 

This is the first total loss of a carbon-fiber-airframe A350, and the Airbus designers should be justifiably proud of the way the plane took the punishment of a crash landing without coming apart.  Carbon does burn, after all, while aluminum doesn't burn as easily, and one might be concerned that a carbon-fiber plane would be more dangerous in terms of flammability.  But the JAL 516 crash proved that under the particular circumstances of this accident, the Airbus managed to protect every human being inside from a fiery death.

 

Turning to the causes of the crash itself, increasing aspects of commercial flying have been computerized and automated.  But the processes of taxiing, takeoff, and landing are mostly still done manually by the pilots and copilots. 

 

Decades ago, railroads devised a system called "interlock" which helps prevent settings of switches that would put a train on a track occupied by another train.  Planes aren't trains, but it seems that with modern GPS systems installed on every commercial plane, some sort of coordinated alarm process could be designed to inform pilots when they are straying onto a runway that they have not yet been authorized to enter. 

 

Of course, such a system could cause more trouble than it's worth.  And cockpits are already overflowing with alarms, flashing indicators, and other distractions that sometimes encumber pilots more than helping them. 

 

But when you look into any multiple-fatality accident, regardless of the engineering field, you will typically find that there were precursors:  less serious non-fatal incidents that nevertheless resembled the big awful one, but for some reason turned out to be either harmless or only slightly harmful.  These near-misses are full of information about how to avoid the big awful accident, if only engineers and safety people will pay attention to them.

 

In the JAL-Coast Guard plane crash, five people died, but that was only a small fraction of the number who could have perished, had it not been for the excellent safety procedures and obedience of the passengers who evacuated Flight 516 so quickly.  So in terms of what could have happened, this crash was more of a warning than a full-fledged tragedy. 

 

If the cause does turn out to be due to pilot error, I think it's time to consider some sort of automated system that at a minimum, warns a pilot when he is about to stray onto a runway for which he hasn't been authorized.  Not being a commercial pilot, I may be speaking out of ignorance and there may be such a system in place already.  But it seems like if there was, we would have heard about it.  Warning systems can only do so much, but if a light or voice had warned the Japan Coast Guard pilot that he didn't belong on the runway yet, his crew members might not have died, and 379 other people might not have had to run for their lives before their plane burned up. 

 

It's good to know that those inflatable ramps are actually good for something, and that the practice evacuations in aircraft manufacturers' test facilities that some people make fun of ("Sure, try doing that with smoke in the cabin and screaming people everywhere") can actually be realized in a real-life emergency.  But what would be even better is if this accident encourages new safety features that would keep the precipitating cause from happening anywhere, ever again.

 

Sources:    I thank my wife for alerting me to the BBC article on this crash at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67870119.  I also referred to statistics at https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/

and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-million-passengers, and the Wikipedia article "2024 Haneda airport runway collision." 

California Cracks Down on Warehouse Pollution—Or Does It?

 

As the retail economy transitions from big-box stores to big-box warehouses supporting home delivery, the U. S. has experienced something of a warehouse building boom.  And the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) in Southern California is going to make sure that those warehouses don't pollute the air.

 

How does a warehouse pollute the air?  Good question.  A warehouse itself is just a big room full of stuff.  But getting the stuff in and out of the warehouse requires trucks and forklifts.  Never mind that those trucks are going to be going somewhere else and emitting pollution anyway if that particular warehouse isn't built.  The brilliant minds of the California regulators have determined that warehouse owners and operators are liable for the air pollution caused by any truck that delivers or picks up stuff at the warehouse. 

 

In order to be absolved of these sins, warehouses must either pay a fee that allegedly goes toward the air district's anti-pollution initiatives, or must install electric vehicle chargers or rooftop solar panels.  If the warehouse doesn't comply by the deadline (which varies from now till 2025, depending on the warehouse's size), the SCAQMD can assess fines of $11,700 a day.  And according to an LA Times article, only about half of the warehouses included in current regulations have complied so far.  In order to shame the noncompliant ones, the paper published a 109-line table of the warehouses that haven't complied.  The article noted that the regulators made warehouses in disadvantaged communities a special priority for enforcement. 

 

Nobody in their right mind is in favor of air pollution, other things being equal.  But other things are hardly ever equal, and this attempt on the part of California regulators to reduce pollution that is loosely associated with warehouses shows that the regulatory process has reached the outer limits of feasibility in this case.

 

Let's see if we can analyze the logic of the regulations, such as it is.  Californians need stuff that is typically shipped by truck.  Currently, that stuff is moving less through retail stores and more through warehouses owned by retailers, shippers, and manufacturers, and a lot of truck traffic is going to and from the warehouses. 

 

So far, electric trucks are not much of a thing, although in other regulations California is threatening to ban diesel trucks from the state altogether.  (That would certainly fix the truck-pollution problem, but would deprive most Californians of their stuff.)  The people building warehouses clearly have money to spend on building them, so they can certainly afford to pay either fees the regulators assess—so many dollars per truck coming and going—or they can afford to install lots of charging stations for the electric trucks which will surely materialize ("If you build it, they will come"), or force the warehouses to install solar panels on those nice flat roofs of theirs. 

 

Now suppose you're a poor person living in one of those disadvantaged neighborhoods near which a big new warehouse has been built, and you open your door to diesel fumes emitted by the many trucks that drive past your house on the way to the warehouse.  How is any aspect of these new regulations going to make your life better? 

 

If the warehouse is paying a fee per truck and that goes to the SCAQMD, that isn't going to help you directly unless you get a job at the SCAQMD.

 

If the warehouse installs hordes of electric-truck charging stations, that isn't going to help you until the electric trucks come along, which may be many years from now, if ever.

 

If the warehouse installs solar panels on their roof, there's just as many trucks going by your house as there were before. 

 

Unless you have the particular mindset that rejoices when any polluter is made to pay a penalty for their crime, and derive enough satisfaction from knowing that the warehouse operator is doing daily penance for attracting all those trucks that drive by your door, and that warm glow of vengeance or whatever it is outweighs the problem of all those trucks passing your house, you are no better off with these regulations than without them, at least for the foreseeable future. 

 

Yes, perhaps the regulations move us incrementally closer to the fossil-fuel-free utopia envisioned by many in our elite classes, in which the roar of diesel engines is replaced by the almost imperceptible hum of electric motors—except for the occasional boom of exploding transformers overloaded by too much demand on an outmoded power grid. 

 

I put the regulations in terms of sin and penance rather than in more objective or scientific terms, because that is what they amount to:  a secular version of the religious concepts of sin and salvation.  As I have shown, the warehouse anti-pollution regulations are not going to reduce the diesel emissions from trucks going to and from the warehouse, at least not until most of the California truck fleet becomes electric.  But they punish people who have had the economic initiative to build warehouses in order to meet California's insatiable desire for stuff. 

 

It would make more sense to assess fines on the trucks each time they make a delivery.  But the regulators know they have pushed truckers about as far as they can stand, and so instead they go for large warehouse-owning corporations, which are richer and easier to shake down than individual truckers.  I use the term "shakedown" intentionally, because in some ways, these environmental regulations are taking on the look of the Mafia henchman who comes into a dime store and says to the owner, "Nice little place you got here—a shame if anything happened to it."  Because air quality has become such a sacred cow in California, almost anything can be done in its name, including the slapping of ineffective regulations that don't get at the root of the problem, but appease the gods of air quality. 

 

Perhaps these regulations are just rough spots on the road to a diesel-free future, but in the meantime, I'm glad I don't run a warehouse in California.

 

Sources:  The article "Crackdown on warehouse pollution results in more than 100 violation notices" appeared on the LA Times website at https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-12-22/warehouse-crackdown-results-in-over-100-pollution-violations. 

Predatory Sparrows in Iran

 

In the United States, fears of widespread hacking causing major national disruptions have so far been mostly unfounded.  There have been isolated foreign-based attacks on infrastructure here and there, but no one has so far been able to disrupt an important nationwide system deliberately for political reasons. 

 

Iran hasn't been so fortunate.  A hacker group calling itself Gonjeshke Darande, which translates as "Predatory Sparrow," claims responsibility for knocking out about 70% of Iran's gas stations in the last few days, according to an Associated Press report.  A related CNBC piece connects the Predatory Sparrows with Israel, although the connection is unconfirmed by the group. 

 

This isn't the first time the Sparrows have mounted cyberattacks in Iran.  The CNBC report recounts a fire in an Iranian steel plant in June of 2022 which the group claimed to have started.  The hackers say that they try to avoid inconveniencing civilians, but having 70% of a country's gas stations shut down is more than an inconvenience.  Iran reportedly disconnected most of its government infrastructure from the Internet after the Stuxnet virus damaged uranium-enrichment centrifuges in the late 2000s, but the hackers have evidently found a way around that obstacle.

 

Iran has been sanctioned for its support of terrorism in other countries, and these sanctions prevent hardware and software updates from being installed that might otherwise help the country defend itself against attacks such as these.  Reportedly, software pirating is widespread, but pirated software typically loses manufacturer support for security updates, with the result that such systems are comparatively easy to invade for nefarious purposes.

 

Iran is widely believed to be the power behind Hamas, the group which mounted the October 7 attacks in southern Israel.  Engineering ethics always has to operate before a background of cultural and historical events.  An action which can be construed as ethical in wartime, at least by some people, would be considered highly unethical in peacetime circumstances. 

 

As large-scale hacks go, the Predatory Sparrows' shutdown of most gas stations, which isn't the first time they've done something like this, is not life-threatening, at least to most people.  In tweets, the group claimed to have warned emergency services in advance, and so they at least appear to be trying to avoid serious harm to civilians.  Their idea seems to be that if the people of Iran get fed up enough with issues like not being able to buy gas for a time, they will rise up and throw off the chains of the present regime.  And that might happen, but the ayatollahs in charge have endured much worse challenges up to now, and unless their grip on power gets a lot shakier, they will probably shrug off this cyberattack as easily as they did the others.

 

Cyberattacks are still new enough to count as a novel addition to the warmonger's bag of tricks.  As with other forms of warfare, its success depends on how well-defended the enemy is.  For whatever reason, the United States seems to be doing a better job at defending itself against hacks than Iran has.  I suspect a large factor in this difference has to do with the wide range of systems employed in the U. S. compared to more top-down-governed places like Iran.

 

I have no way of knowing for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if nearly all the gas stations in Iran use the same kind of hardware and software.  That uniformity makes a system much easier to hack compared to an infrastructure built out of several different brands and designs of technology.  This is why theories of how a national election was allegedly hacked in many U. S. states hold so little water.  A hacker would have to master and invade dozens or hundreds of different systems and would have to gain access to literally thousands of machines through individual county election offices in order to swing millions of votes. 

 

While the rule can be extrapolated beyond its range of usefulness, it is true that in technological systems, diversity lends a kind of strength.  If one brand of system falls to a hacker, the others may not.  Iran would probably like to have a robust market for software, but sanctions and the general economic climate have militated against that.  So in addition to having to limp along with outdated machinery, they suffer from Predatory Sparrows who take advantage of the vulnerabilities of outdated and pirated software.

 

What can the U. S. learn from this situation?  At least two things.

 

First, money spent on cybersecurity is generally worth it.  Regular updates and security patches are simply good practice, and most responsible organizations follow these guidelines. 

 

Second, in technological diversity there is strength.  Highly centralized national mandates dictating the details of any kind of cyber-infrastructure are liable to produce security vulnerabilities.  The software industry is still one of the most lightly-regulated ones in our economy, and the resulting variety and dynamism is a security advantage as well as providing customers with the latest and greatest, other things being equal.  Any attempt by government to do heavy-handed regulation is likely to lead to a uniformity that would not be in the best interests of customers, and it might make life easier for predatory sparrows and their like.

 

It's too bad that Iranians are having to wait in long lines at the 30% of gas stations that still operate (a fraction apparently chosen deliberately by the hackers), but when your government fights a proxy war, you can expect the enemy to get back at it by both fair means and foul.  With cyberattacks, the line between fair and foul is especially fuzzy, and Iranians should be glad that the hackers are as relatively polite as they are.  Still, it's a pain, and we can long for a day when neither Iran nor Hamas nor Israel has to resort to hacking, because peace has at long last come to earth. 

 

And that's what Christmas is all about.  But that's a story for another time.

 

Sources:  The AP report "A suspected cyberattack paralyzes the majority of gas stations across Iran" appeared prior to Dec. 18, 2023 on the AP website at https://apnews.com/article/iran-gas-stations-cyberattack-a9ae33c352812e40ca3d255a2533fea9.  I also referred to a CNBC report at https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/18/pro-israel-hackers-claim-cyberattack-disrupting-irans-gas-stations.html.