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> And of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.¹ Yes it can because it turns out it wasn't an issue with resonant frequencies & it's just promulgating an incorrect (but catchy) story. > Just four months later, under the right wind conditions, the bridge was driven at its resonant frequency, causing it to oscillate and twis…
5400rpm laptop hard drives were notoriously sensitive to external force because of their thin metal construction and low power motor. I remember having a MacBook Pro with a Toshiba 5400rpm hard drive that failed shortly after I rested it on an HVAC unit in our server closet (the HVAC unit happened to be the perfect height off the floor for doing work while standing). Just to be sure that was the cause, I had the driv…
“ I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.” Then what is it?
A desire to generally not listen to one song loudly over and over? I think after the 1000th time, anyone is going to fall out of love with any song.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a footnote indicated by the superscript 1 in your quote: > ¹ Follow-up 2: Yes, I know that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was not the result of resonance, but I felt I had to drop the reference to forestall the “You forgot to mention the Tacoma Narrows Bridge!” comments. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, and damned if you do both, even.
It's closer to "damned if you knowingly make grossly incorrect statements even if you put a small footnote saying OK, I know it is not correct". And damned right that you are damned in this case :) I would much prefer a reference to the event with the clarification, in the same paragraph, that it is due to a different phenomenon. My 2c.
> And of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.¹ Yes it can because it turns out it wasn't an issue with resonant frequencies & it's just promulgating an incorrect (but catchy) story. > Just four months later, under the right wind conditions, the bridge was driven at its resonant frequency, causing it to oscillate and twis…
There's a footnote indicated by the superscript 1 in your quote: > ¹ Follow-up 2: Yes, I know that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was not the result of resonance, but I felt I had to drop the reference to forestall the “You forgot to mention the Tacoma Narrows Bridge!” comments. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, and damned if you do both, even.
So it's good a commenter here posted about it, because this might have led to the clarification being put in in the first place.
5400rpm laptop hard drives were notoriously sensitive to external force because of their thin metal construction and low power motor. I remember having a MacBook Pro with a Toshiba 5400rpm hard drive that failed shortly after I rested it on an HVAC unit in our server closet (the HVAC unit happened to be the perfect height off the floor for doing work while standing). Just to be sure that was the cause, I had the driv…
We noticed that the macs were rebooting unexpectedly when certain people were in the room. After a bit of observation we worked out that the call button on our walkie talkies could trigger a reboot from a couple of feet away, which turned out to be an awesome superpower if you'd had a gobful from an especially obnoxious student.
My first thought was that filtering a set of frequencies out from the laptop's sound output doesn't seem to be a good solution that addresses the root cause. This only corrects it for those laptops running that OS software, and does it at the cost of reducing the quality of the device's audio for all applications. What about other laptops playing the song, or just living room speakers playing it? What if I, as a user…
Getting good audio out of a laptops speaker in 20% hardware and 80% audio filtering anyway. No laptop speaker (even Macs[1]) sounds good without significant processing to workaround the physical limitations of tiny speakers mounted in a non-ideal chassis.
As for other speakers, sound pressure drops off following the cube law. So a speaker millimetres away from the hard drives which have substantially greater impact than speakers outside of the laptop. Of course if you crank the volume enough it’ll eventually cause an issue, but given there doesn’t seem to be widespread reporting of this issue, it looks like that wasn’t too much of an issue.
[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio?tab=readme-ov-file...
This is a fun article but seriously lacking in details... musical frequencies crashing hard drives, including hard drives of laptops within earshot? That's a pretty extraordinary bug so I hoped there would be more elaboration. I also wonder if that patch to block those frequencies is still in effect.
Shouting in data center increases disk latency: https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4