Utah recently passed a bill that requires a warrant for access to electronic information. This bill essentially makes electronic information, no matter where it’s stored or by who, the equivalent of our physical possessions. For example, if I write a document and store it on DropBox, law enforcement in Utah must obtain a warrant to use that document as evidence, even if they are able to acquire the document from DropBox. In addition, the law requires that law enforcement notify me when they obtain my electronic information via a warrant.

This law creates a reasonable expectation of privacy for electronic information. I wish all other states had the same protections.

On Oct 29, 2018, Lion Air flight 610 from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang crashed into the ocean, killing all 189 people on board. On Mar 10, 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi crashed, killing 157. Equipment on both flights was the Boeing 737 Max. Within days of the second crash, airline regulators around the world grounded all of these planes.

Details are now starting to emerge about the design, certification, training, and software used in these troubled aircraft. Gregory Travis, who has been a pilot for 30 years and a software developer for 40 years, writes a scathing indictment of the many compromises and mistakes made to bring this aircraft to market. It’s a great read for both aviation enthusiasts and software developers.

We have collectively learned how to design tangible objects to be safe, when required: buildings, cars, airplanes, even hover boards. We have devised systems and protocols for testing and validating these physically designed objects. We build in healthy safety margins.

Our practice, methods, and rituals in software lag far behind these proven design patterns in the physical world.

In a worldwide effort, we now have our first picture of a black hole. “You’re basically looking at a supermassive black hole that’s almost the size of our solar system,” or 38 billion kilometers in diameter, said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam.

Capturing and generating this picture required collaboration from scientists around the world. Jason Snell explains

To capture this image, the EHT used seven different radio telescopes all around the world in order to use something called interferometry, which combines data from telescopes spread out over a wide distance to essentially create a virtual telescope the size of the distance between the telescopes. The result is a telescope that’s basically the size of Earth. (Among the telescopes used is one at the South Pole, which needed to be retrofitted to make these measurements.)

Then the telescopes have to capture data simultaneously, which means the weather needs to be good in Hawaii and Spain and Chile and the South Pole and other places simultaneously. And when that data is captured, it needs to be brought back to a correlation facility to process it and generate a single data set.

The telescopes captured 5 petabytes of data: when stored on high capacity hard drives, it would fill up the back of a pickup truck. Andy Tanenbaum’s quote from 1985 is as true today as it was 30 years ago: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." When you have petabytes of data to move from place to place, even fast internet connections aren’t fast enough. To beat an airplane carrying several dozen hard drives to the MIT Haystack processing facility near Boston, the data captured at the Kitt Peak telescope in Arizona would have to be transmitted at a rate of approximately 14 gigabytes per second. That’s like downloading 3-4 high definition movies per second.

I love the space and computer parts of this amazing project. But my favorite part is Katie Bauman’s response. She got a lot of attention yesterday because she is female and she was a major contributor to the algorithmic processing required to generate the image that we have all been looking at the last couple of days. It’s great to have another role model of a woman in STEM. But it’s even better to see (no link because I hate Facebook) how she gracefully reminded us that it was a large team with many contributors.

All the parts of this story make me feel good inside.

In September 2017 Apple announced AirPower, a wireless charging mat that would be able to charge multiple devices at the same time. Apple said it would ship sometime in 2018. 2018 came and went. Last week Apple made several hardware announcements describing updated iPads, iMacs, and AirPods. These were done via press release in advance of the big March 25 event that was focused on services. No mention of AirPower.

Today Apple canceled the product, saying "AirPower will not achieve our high standards". The twitterati, almost none of who are hardware engineers, are saying that physics makes this an unsolvable problem.

Lemme tell you about the multi-device wireless charger I have been using for more than a year. The Nomad Base Station has dual 10W wireless charging, a 18W USB-C PD port, and a 7.5W USB-A port. It can charge four devices at the same time. The tasteful black rounded rectangle is covered with a padded leather charging surface. Charging my iPhone, AirPods with wireless case, iPad Pro, and my Bose QC35 headphones simultaneously is no problem. It costs $99 and has been out for more than a year. They have another version of the same product that drops the USB ports for a MFi-certified Apple Watch charger. The Nomad Base Station has small, unobtrusive LED’s that emit an orange glow when charging, and turn white when charging has completed. It’s a well designed, beautiful product that perfectly does what it’s supposed to do.

This problem can be solved. Something went horribly wrong with AirPower, and it wasn’t bumping into the limits of physics.

Colin O’Brady, an American adventurer, has completed a solo, unsupported, unaided crossing of Antarctica. That’s 925 miles of human powered travel in an inhospitable environment with only the supplies you can drag behind you on a sled. That’s an average of 18 miles a day, for 54 days in a row.

Two days later, a 50 year old British Army captain named Louis Rudd completed the same journey. He had an unusually casual approach to food:

My grazing bag is a tropical mix that I bought from Asda – I just grabbed what was available every time I went in, until I had 70 bags. Then there are Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bars, and some cheese and salami I bought in Chile.

When Rudd stopped at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, he couldn’t go inside or accept even a cup of tea, or he would lose "unsupported" status. Image having lived in subzero temps for weeks, and knowing there was a warm bed nearby, and having to walk away to weeks more in the cold. And it’s really cold, the all time high temperature ever recorded at the South Pole was a balmy −12.3 °C (9.9 °F). Just in case you think Antartica is flat, the south pole is actually 2,835 meters (9,301 feet) above sea level.

Colin O’Brady calls this trek "The Impossible First". He’s also fond of saying "We all have reservoirs of untapped potential."

Indeed.

Today we mourn the passing of André Previn, one of the great musicians of the last century. An incredibly versatile musician, he regularly was both soloist and conductor for a piano concerto, led four major symphony orchestras including 11 years with the London Symphony Orchestra, won four Oscars (he was nominated for three different films in 1961, the only person to ever receive three nominations in the same year), played to sold out jazz clubs, and wrote the music for several broadway productions. He was also cool enough to get Mia Farrow to leave Frank Sinatra and marry him.

Dizzy Gillespie said of Previn, "He has the flow, which a lot of guys don’t have and won’t ever get." When he recorded his 1996 release "Ballads: Solo Jazz Standards", he showed up at the studio with a stack of sheet music and nothing planned. He later recalled, "Every track was take one. If I couldn’t think of anything, I just went on to another song.”

He personified Duke Ellington’s words "Categories don’t matter and the first thing to be said about music is that if it sounds good, it is good."

Your goodness will be missed.