5400rpm laptop hard drives were notoriously sensitive to external force because of their thin metal construction and low power motor.

I remember having a MacBook Pro with a Toshiba 5400rpm hard drive that failed shortly after I rested it on an HVAC unit in our server closet (the HVAC unit happened to be the perfect height off the floor for doing work while standing). Just to be sure that was the cause, I had the drive replaced under warranty, did the same thing again and it died again after only a short while of using it on that HVAC unit.

After Apple replaced the drive a second time, I instead used a crash cart as a laptop desk and put a sign on the HVAC unit that read "Don't put laptops on here."

Adam Neely has a good video on this effect, explaining why it is specifically the Janet Jackson song in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY

I know it's unrelated because this has an actual explanation, but I had an ex that stopped watches simply by wearing them for a while.

The model didn't matter, give them a few weeks, and they would stop. Put them aside for a while, they started back.

Never could figure out why, no particular behavior emerged, she changed jobs and houses and I couldn't see a pattern.

Fun that life is still full of weird stuff like this.

This is a fun article but seriously lacking in details... musical frequencies crashing hard drives, including hard drives of laptops within earshot? That's a pretty extraordinary bug so I hoped there would be more elaboration. I also wonder if that patch to block those frequencies is still in effect.

You know the cheesy ending in a dumb TV show where they play a song and the plot gets resolved? They should have had one where the evil guy is going to use his laptop to do something sinister and then they play "Rhythm Nation."

Shoutout to Raymond Chen, all of these posts are HN gold

I have another, different oddity. Whenever my colleague and I stand up (or also sit down?) on the desk, his Dell monitor would turn black for a few seconds. I don't remember the specifics, but I think it was mostly just the two of us, when other people say down if was fine.

Even if he's sitting on a different table, the moment I sit down his screen would blank for a few seconds then continue to work normally.

I also get electrocuted easily when I use the escalator. It almost doesn't matter what I wear, so it might have to do with my skin or it's conductivity? But that's just a wild theory that would need to be checked.

Edit: Some research seems to point to the static electricity from the chairs.

Adam Neely created a 15-minute video about this issue. It's redundant but a fun watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY

The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.

Too bad the manufacturer wasn't named; I quckly looked through a few laptop schematics from that era and didn't find anything that stood out as being a notch filter.

> And of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.¹

Yes it can because it turns out it wasn't an issue with resonant frequencies & it's just promulgating an incorrect (but catchy) story.

> Just four months later, under the right wind conditions, the bridge was driven at its resonant frequency, causing it to oscillate and twist uncontrollably. After undulating for over an hour, the middle section collapsed, and the bridge was destroyed. It was a testimony to the power of resonance, and has been used as a classic example in physics and engineering classes across the country ever since. Unfortunately, the story is a complete myth.

> You can calculate what the resonant frequency of the bridge would be, and there was nothing driving at that frequency. All you had was a sustained, strong wind. In fact, the bridge itself wasn't undulating at its resonant frequency at all!

I recommend reading the article but the long & short is it's something called "flutter" and they even have a video of the problem.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/05/24/scie...

Kind of an alternate version of "fus ro data loss": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

My first thought was that filtering a set of frequencies out from the laptop's sound output doesn't seem to be a good solution that addresses the root cause. This only corrects it for those laptops running that OS software, and does it at the cost of reducing the quality of the device's audio for all applications. What about other laptops playing the song, or just living room speakers playing it? What if I, as a user of the laptop, was doing audio processing and needed the sound card to faithfully output frequencies that I commanded it to play?

But there's a follow-up article that addresses all of that: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...

TLDR is it's cheaper to throw your audio quality under the bus than to recall the defective laptops/drives and replace them with a design that works. :(

Do read the follow-up, and maybe also the Adam Neely video about this, linked both there and in another comment here.

“ I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.”

Then what is it?