Ephemera

My father, a railroad man, spent most of his life investigating transportation accidents and potentially fraudulent claims. One of my cousins managed development of on-board software for several Apollo missions. These influences may account for some of the selection bias evident below.

Horror Stories

The Therac-25 accidents of 1985-87 killed three people and injured at least three others. Two causal factors were "overconfidence in software" and "confusing reliability with safety".
The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost on 23 September 1999 because part of its software did not satisfy its specification. This error cost about $125 million. According to an article in IEEE Computer (no longer online), this problem could have been corrected during the flight had JPL managers been more willing to consider the possibility of such errors.
A software problem that cost $1.2 billion dollars: the destruction of a Titan 4 rocket and its payload, 30 April 1999.
Ariane 5: the destruction of Flight 501, 4 June 1996.
My experience with using the local cable monopoly as my ISP.
My experience with the operating system that controls 90% of the world's computers.
A colleague's experience with an earlier version of that same operating system.
Yet another example of a critical security problem caused by undetected buffer overruns, which cannot occur in modern programming languages.
The airline pilot who thinks I'm a "paid Pentagon blogger" (because I question his conclusion that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon on 11 September 2001).
The music critic who sincerely believes that 112 equals 126.
Technical risks of shipboard systems.
Why you should check your bags when travelling through Des Moines or San Francisco.
The asteroid is coming.
Dead Whale Removal, by Dave Barry. "I am probably not guilty of understatement when I say that what follows, on the videotape, is the most wonderful event in the history of the universe."

Success Stories

How the on-board shuttle group develops software.
Not everyone views the on-board shuttle software as a success. For an opposing view, read "Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code" by Richard P. Gabriel and Ron Goldman.
ACL2 is one of the great success stories of computer science. (In 1975, as an undergraduate at the University of Texas, I used an early version of the Boyer-Moore theorem prover in a graduate course taught by Woody Bledsoe.)
Kevin Everett's recovery, as chronicled by Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated, is about science as well as football and medicine.
No list of success stories would be complete without mentioning the 43rd President of the United States.

Family and Friends

Places and Things

Horror Stories

Success Stories