It is surprising to me that airports do not use an interlock system for deconflicting the various paths segments that may be occupied by a vehicle. Trains have used mechanical ones since the 1800s [0]. The story and comments seem to indicate the only thing preventing collisions is the mind of one person--that sounds insane.
While it's not as sophisticated, there is a technology called Runway Entrance Lights [0] that does somewhat the same thing in the specific context of this incident. LGA is one of 20 airports around the country where this system is installed, and you can clearly see that the system was functioning if you know where to look in the surveillance video that is circulating online. For whatever reason, the truck did not respect the indicator that they should not enter the runway. So in this specific incident, short of rail-like physical limitations on movement, I think it's unlikely that any amount of additional technology would have helped.
A runway light does not physically prevent a vehicle from entering a restricted area in the same way that an interlock would. Not saying it’s practical but an interlock would have indeed prevented an accident of this type.
Yes, I get that. But an airport is not a rail network. The question is how you would actually implement physical interlocks on an airport in a way that works and is safe while controlling movement of everything from a pickup truck to an A380? It's an incredibly hard problem to solve. And keeping in mind too that the Runway Status/Entrance Lights first started development over 30 years ago and are still only deployed at 20 airports, despite being a vastly simpler system than one controlling physical barriers.
I'm curious how much of a buffer there is between the time the sensors detect the airplane and it being safe to enter the runway.
Is it definitely safe to cross the runway in a vehicle moving a normal speed up to the moment before the lights turn red? Is it safe for a little bit afterward? Or is it unsafe even a little before the lights turn red?
If school busses can look both ways before crossing train tracks you'd think a firetruck would look both ways for airplanes coming down a runway. Don't want to blame the firemen though - this was a series of extrmeemly unfortuante scenarios and people trying to keep the airport running safely. For years people have been on soap boxes saying the FAA/NTSB needs to do better, and yet year after year they are poorly run and poorly funded.
A quick Google gives me that a 737 typically lands between 144 and 180 mph. I think that's quite a lot faster than most people are watching out for. Good news is they are bigger than cars and so easier to spot at a distance but I'm still skeptical that "look before you cross the runway" is sufficiently safe. Keep in mind that the planes may not even be on the ground yet - at the top end in 30s they could go from a 1.5 miles away in the sky (and up to 300-400ft in the air) to plowing through your position (iirc runways are about 2 miles long for jets).
I wonder if it'd even be reliable to see such a plane coming fast enough.
Now multiply that by the dozens of planes in your vicinity, and by the 100ish big US airports.
> I think that's quite a lot faster than most people are watching out for
That isn't even beyond the top speed of a car, which non-trained humans are very well capable of tracking by sight - to talk of airport workers that are specifically trained to look for air traffic. It really is not that hard to tell that an aircraft is on short final if you are actually looking at it.
With four miles of visibility in light rain at night, the aircraft should have been perfectly visible (in a vacuum); what remains to be determined is why the ARFF crew did not see it. The answer to that could range from "they didn't look at all" to "the orientation of the runway relative to the surrounding neighbourhoods meant that the CRJ's lights got lost in the city lights".
Edit: and while the parent comment and this are made in at least part jest, the discovery of bugs and emergence of adversarial and secondary uses will be interesting.
For example, imagine being able to run gait analysis for neurological disorders against yourself from your own security cameras.
Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:
As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the
waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink
satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold
crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without
the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times
story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security
risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene,
that it is hard to believe.
The chief who set up the WiFi network, dubbed “STINKY,” definitely knew
better. Then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero’s “background is in Navy
intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration
with a concentration in information security and digital management,
according to her biography,” Navy Times noted. She was later convicted at
court-martial earlier this year on charges related to the scheme.
For people who are unaware, "STINKY" was the default wifi ssid for at least a time. [0] It is a very distinct ssid, which plays into the discovery of the illicit Starlink: [1]
Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking
questions about it. Some of these questions came to Marrero directly, but she
denied knowing anything about the network… and then privately changed its
Wi-Fi name to “another moniker that looked like a wireless printer—even
though no such general-use wireless printers were present on the ship, the
investigation found.”
Yeah, I never got into DN3D, maybe b/c it was Windows only? I might be misremembering, but I played UT on Mac with friends by setting up AppleTalk using rj11 adapters. My now-spouse called it the game before the game and it was perhaps more social than the actual game.
> This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years has adopted many of these technologies.
At worst, it's just Anaconda II AI Boogaloo. The ecosystems will evolve and overcome, or will die and different ecosystems rise to meet the need going forward.
I anticipate OpenAI will get bored and ignore Astral's tools. Software entropy will do its thing and we will remember an actively developed uv as the good old days until something similar to cargo gets adopted as part of Python's standard distribution.
The officials say it could have been created to redistribute the pyramid's
weight around the entrance or another as yet undiscovered chamber.
From TFA:
Specialists have linked the corridor to the pyramid’s internal load
management. Its position near the entrance and behind the gabled stonework
suggests it may have helped redirect the immense weight pressing down from
above, much as the relieving chambers over the king’s chamber were designed
to protect spaces below.
Yeah, looks like a "relieving chamber" [0] to me. It'd be interesting to take the densities from muon tomography and plug them into finite element analysis. A recent paper using the muon tomography data to inform comparisons of ramp styles [1] says that further data is needed:
The possibility that the NFC functioned as a relieving chamber has been
previously suggested, though without consensus. . . . where the NFC’s gabled
vault—an architecture well known for load redirection—could act as a
stress-moderating feature, limiting transmission toward the Descending
Passage. This interpretation remains hypothetical and does not imply
intentional design integration; it is based solely on geometric compatibility
and structural plausibility. Verifying a load-management role will require
dedicated finite-element analyses constrained by ERT geometry and improved
characterization of internal stratigraphy.
Yes, iirc the concept wasn't to decouple content and presentation but to decouple semantics from presentation in order to re-present content in different media in that medium's native representation of a particular semantic. However, many things are not much different in different media, a headline is a headline. And other things like "emphasis" can have cultural differences even within the same media, like being bold, italicized or even double-quotes.
I suppose to a limited extent, that being “articles” in the typical sense, the strategy might be said to have some modicum of success. I’m sure many CMSs store articles as mostly “plain” HTML and regurgitate the same, directly into a part of the final HTML document, with actual normal CSS rules styling that.
Those are definitely not what you want for anything other than actual music production - they're designed for a flat frequency response which is really useful when mixing music, but awful for anything else.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking
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