bit flipping

Exercising in the gym is really, really, boring.  The huffing and puffing, I can put up with that, but watching the clock and thinking thirty minutes more, it seems like I've already been there for an hour walking fast to nowhere on that treadmill, it's so deadly boring.  I tried listening to CDs but they weren't strong enough to keep my mind away from what I was doing and how much longer I would have to be doing it.  I tried NPR but the show on at that time is not big on hard news and there is a lot of soft stuff like musicians and actors. 

But there is a show on NPR that I really like.  It's called Radiolab and it's kind of scientific, kind of sociological, thing.  Generally they pick some subject we think we know pretty well and then they dig into it and come up with all these unexpected conclusions.  I recently discovered a podcast app on my superphone and now I can listen to reruns of the show and the time on the treadmill just flies by.

Since there is nothing over the transom this morning I thought I would recap the podcast that I was listening to last afternoon as I power walked 2.24 miles to nowhere on the treadmill.

Some years ago there was an election in Belgium and a socialist candidate in a moderate district won way too many votes, more votes in fact than there were voters in the district.  What the fuck?  They couldn't figure out what was wrong, but when they consulted some IT people and said that the overage was 4096, they realized straightaway that that was two to the thirteenth.  Clearly the thirteenth bit had somehow been zapped, but how?  They checked the hardware and the software and found nothing.  Then somebody wondered if it was cosmic rays. 

It was a thing.  There have been problems with spacecraft having their computers zapped a lot when they venture outside the earth's magnetic field where cosmic rays abound.  Cars are run by computers.  When you step on the gas you are not stepping on the gas, you are activating a computer which then steps on the gas.  When they first started putting computers in cars there were instances of cars suddenly accelerating and there was no way the driver could slow it down because the car was listening to the computer and the computer was zapped. They finally solved that one by putting in three computers and if one computer was zapped it was overruled by the two computers that weren't.

As computers advance they become smaller and the bits that they run on use less power and are like a thousand times more susceptible to being zapped.  This is especial;ly a problem for superphones.  Just looked it up on the internet and yep, it is a big thing.