I have just been added to a thread I was already in.

Three short things, one longer one, no action items.

Scientists renamed human genes because Excel kept turning them into dates.

• Type the gene symbol MARCH1 into Excel and it becomes 1-Mar. SEPT1 becomes 1-Sep.
• A 2016 study checked the data behind 3,597 genetics papers. About a fifth had been mangled this way.
• In 2020 the committee that names human genes changed 27 of them. MARCH1 is now MARCHF1.
• Its view: Microsoft has little reason to change a feature everyone else relies on.

VICE →

Christchurch paid a wizard for 23 years.

• Ian Brackenbury Channell started holding forth in Cathedral Square in the 1970s. The council first tried to have him arrested.
• By 1990 the prime minister, Mike Moore, had asked him to become the Wizard of New Zealand.
• From 1998 the council paid him NZ$16,000 a year for “acts of wizardry and other wizard-like services”.
• It ended in 2021, $368,000 later. The council was going in a more modern direction.

NPR →

An Aussie and a Kiwi spent two years proving the pavlova was theirs. Both lost.

• It began as an online argument between Annabelle Utrecht in Australia and Andrew Paul Wood in New Zealand.
• They found about 150 meringue, cream and fruit cakes published before Anna Pavlova toured here in 1926.
• Their conclusion: it started as an Austrian torte, and German immigrants carried it to America.
• Their best guess for how it got here: a recipe on the back of an American cornflour box.

Atlas Obscura →

The longer one

Out of fuel at 41,000 feet

On 23 July 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 was cruising at 41,000 feet over northern Ontario when a fuel warning went off. Then the left engine stopped. Then the right one did.

The plane was four months old and among the first in the fleet to measure fuel in kilograms. Its fuel gauges weren’t working that day, so the tanks were checked with a dipstick and the sum was done by hand. To turn litres into kilograms the crew needed a conversion factor, so they asked the fueller. He read 1.77 off his paperwork. That is what a litre of fuel weighs in pounds.

Every step after that was correct. The captain checked the working. It was redone at the Ottawa stopover. Each time the same wrong number went in at the top and a confident answer came out the bottom. The plane had left Montreal with less than half the fuel it needed.

Captain Bob Pearson was an experienced glider pilot. First Officer Maurice Quintal had once been stationed at an air force base at Gimli, Manitoba, within reach. Neither knew the runway had since become a drag strip. They put it down there anyway, and all 69 people on board walked away.

The inquiry found the bigger failure further up. The 767 was built for two pilots instead of three, and working out the fuel had been the flight engineer’s job. When the role went, the sum wasn’t given to anyone. Air Canada demoted Pearson for six months. Two years later he and Quintal received an international award for airmanship, and the plane flew for another 25 years.

They removed the flight engineer. Nobody removed the flight engineer’s job.

CBC News →

Course materials

That’s it. Go home.

Professional Development  ·  sent Thursdays, when it stops mattering
Issue 06