Learning In a Flat World

Before you read any further, you may want to read this rather long article explaining the reasons behind the two Boeing 737 Max crashes. It is quite technical in nature and will surely appeal to engineers. A couple of quotes from the article should make you read it fully: A funny joke about the way automation (and now AI) is taking over our lives: Long ago there was a joke that in the future planes would fly themselves, and the only thing in the cockpit would be a pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job was to make the passengers comfortable that someone was up front. The dog’s job was to bite the pilot if he tried to touch anything. About the difference between a computer and a human: The flight management computer is a computer. What that means is that it’s not full of aluminum bits, cables, fuel lines, or all the other accoutrements of aviation. It’s full of lines of code. And that’s where things get dangerous. Those lines of code were no doubt created by people at the dire

This famous Belgian boy was in the news last week. He isn't really the one to seek attention while being listed as one of the major world tourist attractions. But there was something that everyone missed reading into over the last 400 years of his existence in Brussels. The little boy's statue was peeing 1,000 to 2,500 litres of clean drinking water into the drain every day! I do wonder why the huge variance in the daily figure though. I am sure statues don't exhibit this change due to seasonal temperature changes. Coming back to the point, it is quite surprising that nobody questioned the premise of the design of this utter wastage all these years. The discovery was made by Régis Callens, an energy technician, after a meter was installed in the 61cm (24in) statue. “We thought it was a closed circuit and that he wasn’t consuming anything,” Callens told La Dernière Heure. “Since the counter for Manneken Pis is just one out of 350 or 400, nobody paid much attention.”