Musical Messes

problem solving steps

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.

I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.

Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.

There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:

1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.

2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.

3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.

The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.

Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.

A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.

We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.

Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:

"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."

The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.

I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.

We had some absolutely criminal negligence in the building of the Quebec Bridge, with multiple engineering firms ignoring real signs of structural issues.

There is some debate about this, but most engineers in Canada agree this started a new ritual upon graduation with a B. Eng from any Canadian university. You attend a ceremony upon graduation and are given an Iron Ring.

You wear it on the pinky of your dominant hand, so it touches any paper you are asked to sign. Every time you sign off on something in your capacity as an engineer, you are reminded of your duties and obligations.

I have engineers in my family, and it is considered a sacred oath. Much like doctors, Canadian engineers have an ethos to do no harm.

if you read just the guardian article, it sounds like something that is a) happening currently, and b) that the cable was actually in place when the changes were made.

neither of these things are true. this whole thing comes from a podcast episode which released recently, where simon ludlam talks a bit about the process of working on interconnector cables, and mentions that during the community consult phase of planning for the greenlink interconnector, in 2019, people sent in harry potter related complaints that led to them altering the cable location by a few metres. again, this was entirely in the planning phase, the cable had not yet been placed. he also makes it pretty clear that he is talking about it because he thought it was silly and a bit surreal, not because it was any huge imposition on the project.

the environmental impact statement for the greenlink cable is freely available online, and outlines much more serious issues with its placement due to environmental concerns, stating that "The shore crossing at Freshwater West would extend through sand dunes approximately 3m high at the northern extent. The sand dunes are environmentally sensitive areas and installation through this area would require environmental permitting."

now, is this situation ridiculous? of course! but it's not that hard to talk about it being ridiculous without resorting to clickbait and misinformation, and it's genuinely alarming to me how many people are sharing these headlines without questioning them in the slightest. in this particular case it doesn't really matter that much, but the normalisation of inaccurate, sensationalist headlines and fact poor articles that are at best under researched and at worst deliberately misleading is a dangerous trend.

"There's something weird going on with this Dobby pipeline story and I just cannot figure out what. I've seen so much discussion about it and there's just absolutely zero evidence for this actually happening aside from one little anecdote from a podcast.

It seems to have originated from this interview at 16:55 with Simon Ludlam, who was the project director for Greenlink. I've searched and searched and can't actually find any evidence of this interview he mentions, let alone any indication of there being backlash.

First of all, this happened years ago. The consultation was in 2018, the cable was laid starting in 2022, it was tested at the end of 2024, and it's been in use since the start of 2025.

The cable wasn't dug into the top of the beach, it was drilled horizontally underground (point 7 here). This has evidently been the case since at least October 2018, and from what I can tell the route under the beach did not change between then and October 2021 when it was finalised.

The archaeological survey was done in 2019, and the commitments to not go close to any of the archaeological sites was made in October 2020. From what I can tell it was also offshore, so it was more about the routing before the beach.

And finally, the part that imo makes this whole thing nonsense - Dobby's grave is on the south side of Freshwater West, and right from the earliest proposals I've been able to find (page 63, October 2018) the interconnect has come in through the north side.

From everything I can tell, this story is just completely false and it's all stemmed from one guy's embellishing of the truth for an anecdote on a podcast.