Weekly Roundup: March 17-23, 2019

737 MAX:

A single faulty sensor — a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane’s “angle of attack,” the angle between the airflow and the wing — triggered MCAS multiple times during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash.

[…]

When time was too short for FAA technical staff to complete a review, sometimes managers either signed off on the documents themselves or delegated their review back to Boeing.

Spotify vs. Apple \

Speaking of Apple, hold your brains: WWDC19 is on its way!

Those little yellow dots on sidewalk corners are called Tenji Blocks. I like telling people that they’re foot massagers installed by kind-hearted municipalities.

Otaku’s closest translation from Japanese to English would be geek. I hadn’t given much thought to what “kotaku” means though:

Since 2005, Kotaku has unabashedly covered Japan from Japan, breaking news and providing a boots-on-the-ground look at the country’s gaming and geek culture. The site’s name, “Kotaku”, is even from a made-up Japanese word with “ko” (小) meaning “small” and “otaku” (オタク) meaning “geek”. Voilà, Kotaku!

The Cloud is just another Sun. What a title! 😂 Interesting comparison between the UNIX wars and where we are today.

Are 47% of us (2 billion Internet users) using ad blockers?:

The market is sending a massive message. That message is that advertising online has come to have massively negative value. Ad blocking and tracking protection are legitimate and eloquent messages from demand to supply.