alt Hacker NewsJanet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)
Comments
https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequen...
Example (for both functions):
/* Emits a 7-Hz tone for 10 seconds.
True story: 7 Hz is the resonant
frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
This was determined empirically in
Australia, where a new factory
generating 7-Hz tones was located too
close to a chicken ranch: When the
factory started up, all the chickens
died.
Your PC may not be able to emit a 7-Hz tone. */
#include
int main(void)
{
sound(7);
delay(10000);
nosound();
return 0;
}
Reminds me of Gödel, Escher, Bach in which there is a phonograph dubbed "Record Player X", which destroys itself by playing a record titled I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X.
Just a small nitpick: the Tacoma Narrows bridge didn’t collapse because of resonance but because of flutter. It’s a common misconception.
For resonance the external driving force must match the resonance frequency of the system, but wind is rarely/never purely sinusoidal.
> And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!
That’s about the time I would have given up on the investigation and called in an exorcist.
Reminds me (tangentially) of the story of the Raspberry Pi 2 and Xenon flash. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/xenon-death-flash-a-free-ph...
according to this video [0] the frequency was 84.2. that-s not unplausible.
a known problem in cutting vinyl records are sudden bursts of high volume frequencies around 100 hz, that have the potential to make the needle skip with a normal amount of weight on the tone-arm.
-------
Similary story from Apple: https://youtu.be/C5d151lqJsA?t=108
For a F1 drive axle the critical resonance frequency is around 2400 rpm. That's why you need to turn it up fast at start over the safe 4000 rpm, and never go down.
Without the ECU you can easily break it by starting too slow
Related. Others?
Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534483 - Sept 2024 (79 comments)
Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32483211 - Aug 2022 (12 comments)
Why didn't they mute the volume to see if it was the video or audio stream causing problems?
I've had a similar case before but for a much more boring reason: a certain YouTube video somehow triggered a spike in power draw and caused my Google Pixel to reset.
Google's response after looking at the crash dumps: "WAI, your battery is degraded" (IIRC my phone was less than 3 years old).
Extra points for people who avoid gratuitous clickbait
> And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!
Reality must have been falling apart for someone for a brief moment there.
Weird. Digital recording and mastering was definitely a thing at that time. You’d think they would have been crashing the HDDs of PCs in the recording studios.
https://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html is a similar story from IBM in the 1960s. Except that there was nothing accidental about the problem.
That’s a heck of debugging.
This gives new meaning to Rhythm Nation.
reminds me of the captain crunch whistle and 2600
I'd love to know whether that story is actually true.
Some dude hears somebody tell a story about sth 20 years ago, puts it in a blog, and here we are on HN, nobody questioning whether it's actually accurate. Of course Raymond Chen isn't just any random person, but the more important it would be to actually check? I mean, who hasn't heard people tell stories from decades ago, including colleagues reminiscing about the good old times "before y'all were born" only to realize later that it was vastly exaggerated or even outright made up.
Anybody around here with some actual first-hand info or at least another source besides this blog entry? I'd love to hear!
[dead]
Another reason to step away from spinning rust.
Thank dog for SSDs
I love this story! Ha
> certain models
Why the weasel words? Does Raymond Chen not know which models? Or is it actually apocryphal.
Very funny, reminds me of how Jennifer Lopez created Google Image Search when she wore a very deep cut green dress in 2000. So many people searched for "Jennifer Lopez Green Dress" that the search team realized they needed to include images in the search results. https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/google-european-c... https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/jennifer-lopez-walks-in-versa...