The Off Topic Topic

[Tamas]

Since its so in fashion to be all doom and gloom about technology, stories like this should get more attention:
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/spinal-implants-allow-paralysed-people-to-walk-swim-and-cycle-again/21807596

It's pretty awesome. Hopefully still early days in the field -as its more like an amplifier used to brute-force signals through the damaged area, not a proper restoration, but must be such a dramatic improvement for the patients.

[crazy canuck]

Since its so in fashion to be all doom and gloom about technology, stories like this should get more attention:
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/spinal-implants-allow-paralysed-people-to-walk-swim-and-cycle-again/21807596

It's pretty awesome. Hopefully still early days in the field -as its more like an amplifier used to brute-force signals through the damaged area, not a proper restoration, but must be such a dramatic improvement for the patients.

My son got a job working as a student in a lab helping to develop the next generation of neural interface for those sorts of devices.   Then COVID hit, lab closed, and he went another path.  Timing sucked for him, his friend who got the same position the next year went on do some pretty interesting doctoral work.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I have a friend who works in robotics, which occasionally gets picked up by the BBC (for example new ways of wings working or robotics that can help increase mobility for the severely disabled) and this stuff is super exciting and fun.

[Syt]

Today, in cyberpunk dystopia news:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thanks-to-a-glitch-some-seattle-mazda-drivers-cant-tune-their-radios-away-from-kuow/

Thanks to a glitch, some Seattle Mazda drivers can't tune their radios away from KUOW

It was on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 30, driving in Ballard, that Dave Welding entered the world of car computers gone amok.

He drives a 2016 Mazda hatchback. It turns out that about the same time, the same thing was happening to other local Mazda owners who had this in common:

They drove a 2014 to 2017 model Mazda, and they had tuned into KUOW, 94.9 on the FM dial, the NPR station.

That's all it took.

Somehow the signal the station sent to the modern HD Radio that's part of the Mazda infotainment center had, as Welding puts it, "fried" a major component.

That frying made the radios only play KUOW. No chance of catching a little classic rock or some Dori soliloquies. KUOW. Forever.

Also gone from the infotainment center were such features as Bluetooth, navigation, the clock and vehicle stats — "Many of the features I paid for when I bought it new," Welding says.

It was as if the infotainment center had decided to team up with the ghost of HAL. You remember that malfunctioning, soft-spoken and ultimately sinister artificial intelligence computer from "2001: A Space Odyssey"?

That movie was released 54 years ago; now, there are just more HALs out there.

As the radio remained frozen, the rebooting visuals on the screen in the middle of the dashboard were just too distracting when he was driving. Welding ended up covering the spot with cardboard.

"The lower right field of my vision was seeing like a TV screen going on and off," he says. Over and over, the screen showed the Mazda logo, then there would be a flash, then the logo split into five new logos.

As he checked a Reddit Mazda site, Welding found he wasn't the only one with such problems — and all were KUOW listeners.

That's all it took. That signal somehow affected older software in 2014-2017 Mazdas, says Mazda North American Operations.

Welding says that when he contacted Lee Johnson Mazda of Seattle, "They told me that there's nothing they can do about it, that I needed a new CMU unit, that it cost $1,500 and that they didn't have the part."

The Mazda dealer referred calls for comment to Mazda corporate headquarters.

Lorenzo Pieruccioni, service manager at Mazda of Olympia, says he's had seven to 10 customers with the rebooting problems. He tells them their CMU is corrupted.

That stands for "Connectivity Master Unit," and it controls the video and audio signals to that infotainment system. That's the $1,500 gizmo that is not available and who knows when it will be.

His assessment: "It's just weird."

On Tuesday evening, Mazda emailed that it had "distributed service alerts" to dealers, that "impacted customers" should contact their local dealer "who can submit a goodwill request to the Mazda Warranty department on their behalf, order the parts, and schedule a free repair when the parts arrive."

About when the parts might arrive.

Supply chain!

Who knows, especially with the semiconductor shortage.

Stephanie Marquis, of Olympia, a 2015 Mazda hatchback owner, posted on Reddit about the complaints, "Seattle dealer said they've had tons since last week. I find it hard to believe it's the cause of one station."

In an interview, she said the rebooting began two weeks ago. She had hope one night that the infotainment center had fixed itself.

Sure.

"One night I was driving and my back camera came on for a few minutes. I thought this is awful driving with this on," she says.

Then the system shut down completely. Then it came on and she could change radio stations. She parked the car and when returning a couple of hours later, was hopeful the infotainment center would work. But, no dice. "It doesn't work. Hasn't worked since."

As to how KUOW got involved in all this, that's not quite clear.

Dane Johnson, director of operations at KUOW, says the station has been in contact with one those companies with one of those names that don't quite explain what they do. It's called Xperi Holding Corporation, of San Jose, California, and it's the parent company of HD Radio.

The latter is the technology that allows for digital radio broadcasting, and is at the heart of an infotainment center such as the one in Mazdas. Somewhere in transmission between KUOW and HD Radio something happened.

Xperi issued this one statement: "KUOW has made us aware of this and we are assisting in addressing it promptly."

Want a perspective on all this?

It's from professor Dan Tappan, of Eastern Washington University's Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

He says he's planning to use the fiasco as an example in his software classes.

Even low-end vehicles these days are approaching 100 million lines of code, and 100 electronic control units, according to a June paper published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

All that computerization, says Tappan, is great for anti-lock brakes, air bags and stability control.

As for the infotainment side of things, well ...

"Most people don't use them, don't care," Tappan says. "Often they are the areas most vulnerable to failure."

Mazda headquarters says the problem was that KUOW "sent image files with no extension."

The files would be maybe the album cover of a song being played on the radio, or its release date, "to, quote, improve the experience," says Tappan.

What could have happened, says the professor, is that the station sent a file that didn't identify its format, whether a Word document or image such as a JPEG.

The computer in the car should not have ever opened the file.

But it might have tried, just trying to be a good computer, as HAL thought he was, misinterpreting the format, executing it badly and, well, $1,500.

Welding says he's thinking about decorating the cardboard on his infotainment screen. "Something calming," he says.

[Syt]

If your last name is Führer, and you take over the florist's shop from your mom, and then rename it to ...

[celedhring]

"The Empire of One Thousand Flowers"

[The Brain]

In the month of stormtroopers, flowers appear.

[Syt]

[Josquius]

Ouch.

[The Larch]

Sheilbh, another one for your "creative vandalism of artworks" portfolio. 

Russian painting vandalised by 'bored' gallery guard who drew eyes on it
Anna Leporskaya's Three Figures sent for restoration after guard doodled on it with a ballpoint pen on his first day

A valuable avant garde painting has been vandalised by a "bored" security guard who drew eyes on faceless figures in the artwork on his first day working in a Russian gallery.



Anna Leporskaya's Three Figures was painted between 1932 and 1934, and had been insured for 75m roubles (A$1.3m, £740,000). It was on display as part of an abstract art exhibition at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Ekaterinburg when the guard drew eyes on it using a ballpoint pen.

Alexander Drozdov, the executive director of the Yeltsin Center, did not identify the security guard in a statement, but said he worked for a private security company and had been fired.

The exhibition's curator, Anna Reshetkina, said the painting was vandalised "with a Yeltsin Center-branded pen".

"His motives are still unknown but the administration believes it was some kind of a lapse in sanity," she said.

"The ink has slightly penetrated into the paint layer, since the titanium white used to paint the faces is not covered with author's varnish, as is often the case in abstract painting of that time," Ivan Petrov wrote in the Art Newspaper, which broke the story.

"Fortunately, the vandal drew with a pen without strong pressure, and therefore the relief of the strokes as a whole was not disturbed. The left figure also had a small crumble of the paint layer up to the underlying layer on the face."

The vandalism was first noticed on 7 December by two visitors who raised the alarm with a gallery employee. The painting was removed from the exhibition and returned to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which had loaned the painting.

Restoration experts at the Tretyakov have estimated that the restoration work would cost 250,000 roubles (A$4,600).

The Yeltsin Center reported the damage to police on 20 December, but Ekaterinburg's ministry of internal affairs initially declined to press charges as the damage was deemed "insignificant". Russian media reported that the ministry of culture later complained to the prosecutor general's office about the lack of action, and last week police announced that they had opened an investigation. The suspect faces a fine and up to three months in prison.

The Yeltsin Center has since installed protective screens over the remaining works in the exhibition.

This is not the first time a painting has been vandalised in Russia: in 2019 a man was sentenced to two and half years in prison after attacking a painting of Ivan the Terrible in the Tretyakov, tearing it with a pole from the barrier protecting the work. The same work was also attacked in 1913 by a mentally ill man who slashed it with a knife three times.

[The Brain]

Well it was his last day on the job, may as well have some fun.

[Josquius]

The wordle fad continues

BBC News - A missing game of Wordle helps end a 17-hour hostage ordeal
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60312231

[Savonarola]

Usually I ignore the antics of The Squad and their Republican equivalents; but when I saw that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene had confused "Gestapo" and "Gazpacho" I had to go to the New York Post's site.  As I suspected this was their finest hour:

'Soup Nazi': Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confuses gazpacho with Gestapo

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene became a laughing "stock" Wednesday after confusing gazpacho with the Nazi Gestapo.

The Republican congresswoman mixed up the chilled tomato soup and Nazi Germany's secret police force while slamming the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

She first compared the "DC jail" to the "DC gulag," before ranting against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her "gazpacho police."

"Not only do we have the DC jail, which is the DC gulag," Greene said on One America News.

"But now we have Nancy Pelosi's gazpacho police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staffs, and spying on American citizens that want to come talk to their representatives."

The gaffe spread on Twitter and sparked several jokes, many of them invoking Seinfeld's infamous "Soup Nazi" gag.

"NO COLD SOUP FOR YOU!," one person joked.

"I guess revenge is not the only dish best served cold," another wrote.

One user quipped: "I'm all FOR the Gazpacho Police. It's my favorite soup, and dammit, someone needs to root out all the bad versions."

Greene spokesman Nick Dyer passed on the following statement from the congresswoman: "No soup for those who illegally spy on Members of Congress, but they will be thrown in the goulash."

In the words of Milo Bloom "Bad newspapers live for this kind of thing."

[Syt]

[DGuller]

How do you tell whether a dog that's been barking for a long long while in a neighbor's apartment is having a separation anxiety, or trying to tell other humans that their owner is dead?  Asking for myself.