Yes, I did notice “dripstick”. I wonder, has that been left uncorrected deliberately for humorous effect?

On 3 Jan 2024, at 17:06, jimrobertson via <jimrobertson@...> wrote:

I mentioned that tale because it’s a truly AMAZING example of what can happen when written or electronic communications are imprecise or misunderstood. You don’t need to read beyond the first several paragraphs to be amazed by what went wrong and what (entirely capriciously) went right. The Air Canada 767 that plummeted (OK, glided, but I’ll bet no one on board enjoyed that 15% glide slope) from 41,000 feet was brand new and “state of the art,” but because ONE electronic fuel measuring instrument malfunctioned, calculations that involved using a dipstick (hilariously misspelled in the article as “dripstick”) to measure the fuel on board, then confusion among US gallons, imperial gallons, and metric units recording volume, or column height of fuel in the tanks, or some bizarre combination thereof led to a horrendous overestimate of the amount of fuel on board. A number of fortuitous factors saved potentially hundreds of lives that day, including:

1. The Air Canada Captain was a highly skilled glider pilot, and used those skills to control an enormous airplane during the 17 minutes it “flew” with no engine power (or electronic instruments that required engine-generated electricity, or manually movable aircraft control surfaces).
2. The no-longer-registered military airfield the crew used to land the 767 was familiar to a member of the flight crew who had used that airfield when in the RCAF.
3. The amateur drag-racing event happening on the airfield as the jumbo jet plopped down onto what was now a “drag” racing event was staffed by weekend recreationists who had safety training to put out fires on garage-modified race cars, but they leveraged those skills to douse flames on a machine capable of transporting hundreds of passengers.?
4. Some of the “missing feature” failures caused by the engine flameouts actually enabled the plane to stop on the shortened runway. For example, there was no electrical or hydraulic power to lock the nose wheel into the down position, and a “gravity drop” didn’t do so, so the plane skidded to a stop more quickly than it would have had the nose wheel locked in place.

When I was younger and more reckless, I sometimes pretended I was a racecar driver at amateur events held on famous California racetracks. Being prepared to handle a jumbo jet plummeting out of the sky onto the “back straight” of the racetrack was something I never, ever considered.

But you’re right; it’s not necessary to read beyond the first few paragraphs to get the essence of the story.

_________________________

?Not really mentioned in the article is that one thing contributing to the absence of mass death was that there were only 67 passengers on the plane. If this happened today, the plane would have been at least 95% full, weighing many many tons more and would probably have not made it to the field.

On Jan 3, 2024, at 9:13?AM, Otto Nikolaus via groups.io <otto.nikolaus@...> wrote:

I’m too impatient/lazy to read every character in that article. Please enlighten me.

1. The Air Canada Captain was a highly skilled glider pilot, and used those skills to control an enormous airplane during the 17 minutes it “flew” with no engine power (or electronic instruments that required engine-generated electricity, or manually movable aircraft control surfaces).
2. The no-longer-registered military airfield the crew used to land the 767 was familiar to a member of the flight crew who had used that airfield when in the RCAF.
3. The amateur drag-racing event happening on the airfield as the jumbo jet plopped down onto what was now a “drag” racing event was staffed by weekend recreationists who had safety training to put out fires on garage-modified race cars, but they leveraged those skills to douse flames on a machine capable of transporting hundreds of passengers.?
4. Some of the “missing feature” failures caused by the engine flameouts actually enabled the plane to stop on the shortened runway. For example, there was no electrical or hydraulic power to lock the nose wheel into the down position, and a “gravity drop” didn’t do so, so the plane skidded to a stop more quickly than it would have had the nose wheel locked in place.

On 3 Jan 2024, at 14:57, jimrobertson via <jimrobertson@...> wrote:

I’m assuming that the glyphs assigned to keys on Apple devices are encoded in the OS, and likely in firmware rather than software. I THINK there are iOS and macOS apps that permit one to query what’s actually being pulled from wherever such items are stored, but haven’t yet looked for them. I’m aware that NOT caring what’s “meant” by what’s on the screen or on paper so long as it LOOKS correct can lead to errors in scientific publications (I discovered a few in the pinnacle of weekly medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine, several years ago, when I requested electronic pdfs of a few articles from the publisher. Very early on in my romance with the Mac, my then primary school-aged son discovered the mischief he could wreak on me by changing the assigned language for my keyboard, and delighted in doing so for the few hours it took me to figure out what he was doing.

Does anyone here have recommendations for apps that inform the user what glyphs actually are being entered when one presses one or a combination of keys, either on the Mac OR on an iOS device (or better, on each of them)? I’m assuming that wherever that electronic lookup table resides on each platform, what appears on screen will be an accurate bitmap image of what’s been encoded.

On Jan 3, 2024, at 3:42?AM, Otto Nikolaus via groups.io <otto.nikolaus@...> wrote:

Mail > Message > View Message > Raw Source shows me that hold-0 on the iPhone is indeed the same character as shift-?-8, *not* ?–0, on the Mac. I thought that hold-0 on the iPhone might be because that is how Android does it but we have an Amazon Fire Tablet and that is not the case: ° is in the special characters tab.

On Jan 2, 2024, at 4:53?PM, Otto Nikolaus via groups.io <otto.nikolaus@...> wrote:

?0 on the Mac gives me ?, which *looks* like a degree symbol but is actually the “masculine ordinal indicator”. I suppose it doesn’t really matter because it's obvious what is meant.

I’ve noticed that many people don’t bother; they just type C or F instead of ° (or ?).

On 3 Jan 2024, at 10:42, Otto Nikolaus via <otto.nikolaus@...> wrote:

On 3 Jan 2024, at 00:14, Jim Saklad via??<jimdoc@...> wrote:

Otto wrote:

I’m not sure what symbol the “0” key gives me, but it looks like a degree symbol. I can’t get the “8” key to do anything other than 8.

I find it interesting that Apple’s own version of the iPhone keyboard does let you do special symbols by holding down keys, but *different* symbols that they associate with those same keys on the Mac keyboards.

Meanwhile at least one 3rd-party keyboard gives you what I think of as the “correct” pairing of symbols to keys – in agreement with the Mac keyboard.

What I have done on my Mac for several years, is to go into the Character Viewer, look up several characters I might want to use, and save them in “Favorites”:

<Screenshot 2024-01-02 at 7.11.02?PM.jpeg>

I’ve done something similar on the Mac. In System Preferences > Keyboard > Text I’ve set up fractions, exponents, some symbols, and a few text abbreviations:

<PastedGraphic-1.png>

Mail > Message > View Message > Raw Source shows me that hold-0 on the iPhone is indeed the same character as shift-?-8, *not* ?–0, on the Mac. I thought that hold-0 on the iPhone might be because that is how Android does it but we have an Amazon Fire Tablet and that is not the case: ° is in the special characters tab.

On 3 Jan 2024, at 00:14, Jim Saklad via <jimdoc@...> wrote:

Otto wrote:

I’m not sure what symbol the “0” key gives me, but it looks like a degree symbol. I can’t get the “8” key to do anything other than 8.

I find it interesting that Apple’s own version of the iPhone keyboard does let you do special symbols by holding down keys, but *different* symbols that they associate with those same keys on the Mac keyboards.

Meanwhile at least one 3rd-party keyboard gives you what I think of as the “correct” pairing of symbols to keys – in agreement with the Mac keyboard.

What I have done on my Mac for several years, is to go into the Character Viewer, look up several characters I might want to use, and save them in “Favorites”:

<Screenshot 2024-01-02 at 7.11.02?PM.jpeg>

I’m not sure what symbol the “0” key gives me, but it looks like a degree symbol. I can’t get the “8” key to do anything other than 8.

On Jan 2, 2024, at 11:06?AM, Jim Saklad via groups.io <jimdoc@...> wrote:

When I switch to the native iOS keyboard, the 8 key no longer has the degree sign, and the 0 key does.