February 2003

Hello friends,

This time I'll start with sports. Canadians like sport activities. That warms them up. For example, occasionally you can see people running in the streets in shorts, at below-zero temperatures. The nice thing in Canada is that you can run without sweating. On December and January there was the hockey junior (under age 21) world championship in Halifax, Canada. The Canadians were crazy about their team. The TV had promos with the slogan: "What if our children were pressuring us the way we pressure them? Relax, it's just a game". Canada ended second, after Russia. So they know playing hockey. Why not take advantage of that? Four Jewish hockey players from the Toronto area were chosen to join the Israeli junior team for the world under-18 championship. The four got half a page on the Toronto star newspaper. One player says he becomes an Israeli when he wears Israel's uniform. The paper didn't mention the hundreds of disappointed young Israeli hockey players who found themselves out of our national team because these four took their place. By the way, the couch is from the country who took the gold.

From Hockey to basketball: Last month I went to watch an NBA game of the Toronto Raptors. The arena contains "only" 20,000 seats. Surprisingly, you can see the ball ten rows from the end (with glasses). Unlike in Israel, the game doesn't seem like two communities sending there team to a world-war of representatives, although they sing the national anthems of USA and Canada before the game (which is a regular league game). It really looks different from what you see on TV. The game is more like a circus. During the break, a bicycle acrobat did an unbelievable show. He stood on his head on rolling bike. That is, he put the head on the seat, his two hands on the handles of the bike, and his legs went straight in the air.

Last month Michael Jordan visited our department. He gave a lecture on statistical graphical models. How come Michael Jordan gives such a talk? This Jordan is a professor of computer science and statistics at Berkley. He published more than 170 papers, which makes him a superstar in his area. That makes you wonder how important the name of a person to his success is.

Three weeks ago we had another interesting special talk, on bugs in the space program. The interesting fact is that even successful missions had bugs. For instance, mars pathfinder was rebooting several times a day (because of priority inversion of threads). Another interesting story was the explosion of Arian 5 (French), which happened due to unhandled floating point exception in ADA, that propagated from sub-system to another until it reached the navigation computer. The software was reused from Arian 4, where this overflow exception was proved to be impossible. In Arian 5 it was possible. Even with all the documentations, specifications, procedures and tests NASA is losing satellites and spaceships once in a while. When they investigate accidents they can trace which lines in which documents were misinterpreted or missing. The point is always that people who should have known or pay attention to something don’t know that at the right moment, even if other people inside the organization had the information. For example, in the Challenger case, parts of the problems in the mechanical design were found few years before the accident and somehow this information was unknown. The conclusion was that these accidents will continue to occur…


Ady.