7 Noise Noise

Software if(!boundCopy) { printf(“No PhD for you”); }

Dennis Ritchie, creator of C and co-creator of Unix, never obtained a PhD. In itself, that’s not particularly remarkable. History is littered with geniuses who didn’t get around to writing a dissertation. The thing is: Ritchie did write a dissertation. It even was approved by a thesis committee at Harvard University. All he needed to do, was to submit it, but he never did. We’ll probably never know why. A Harvard contemporary of Ritchie’s told the Computer History Museum that it might have had something to do with the requirement of submitting a bound copy to the university library, which Ritchie thought the library should pay for itself. Another theory is that he simply didn’t care, since he’d already landed his dream job at Bell Labs. In any case, because it was never published, only a few copies of the thesis were ever circulated, and none of them have been available to the general public. Until very recently, that is. Historians of science can rejoice because two copies have surfaced and are now digitally accessible through the Computer History Museum. PvG

Energy Fusion hopeful puts cards on the table

Hoping to tap into an almost perfect source of energy, scientists have tried to unravel the mysteries of controlled nuclear fusion since the 50s. Their efforts have mostly merged in the international Iter project, which aims to produce the first full fusion reactions in 2035. From the 00s onward, however, privately backed companies started to appear, claiming they can do it faster, better or cheaper.

Credit: Ken Filar/CC BY-SA One of those companies is Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), an MIT spinoff betting on a different magnet technology than Iter to contain the super-hot plasma. This should result in more compact reactors – think tennis court instead of football field. Will it work? Reasonable people disagree about this. But what sets CFS apart from other fusion hopefuls is that it has disclosed its design and science in great detail. In a special issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Plasma Physics, the company’s researchers and collaborators laid out the evidence that their design will succeed. PvG

Consumer electronics Old TV doubles as e-bomb

Aberhosan, Wales, 7 AM. British Telecom’s Openreach engineer Michael Jones and his colleagues have been patrolling the village in the pouring rain for an hour when their spectrum analyzers detect a large burst of electrical noise. Tracing it to a nearby house, Jones inquires the unnamed residents about their electrical activities in the past few minutes. Turns out the occupants had turned on a very old, secondhand television set like they did every day. Finally, mystery solved! Responding to swaths of complaints, over the past 18 months, scores of engineers had visited Aberhosan, trying to figure out why every day, at 7 AM like clockwork, the village’s broadband internet connections would break down. The owners of the TV were “mortified” to find out they’d caused so many problems, reports the BBC. “They immediately agreed to switch it off and not use it again,” according to Jones. PvG

Automotive Better keep your hands at the wheel

The ‘driver’ of Uber’s autonomous test vehicle that fatally struck a woman in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018 has been charged with negligent homicide. According to the prosecution, Rafaela Vasquez is guilty of distracted driving, even though technically, the car was driving itself. Of course, the very reason she was behind the wheel was to intervene when the autonomous-driving technology failed. Legally, therefore, Vasquez needs to be considered the driver, with the same

responsibility to control and operate the vehicle safely as any other

Credit: Dllu/CC BY-SA

driver, the prosecution argues. According to a Tempe police report, Vasquez was streaming the TV program “The voice” while driving. Dashcam video footage shows her looking down at something just before the crash. Last March, the state of Arizona determined that Uber wasn’t criminally liable for the woman’s death. PvG