Posted by Tim Harford
https://timharford.com/2025/06/am-i-boring-you-good/
https://timharford.com/?p=9315
A good columnist is never unintentionally tedious, but this week’s effort is about obsolete telephone directories, binary counter overflow, and the alternating current waveform. The boredom is the point.
Start with alternating current. As most of us once learnt and have since half-forgotten, mains electricity is supplied by an oscillating current whose direction changes rapidly. In the UK, for example, the current flips back and forth 50 times a second.
This system is highly efficient but suffers from a serious downside: if the frequency slips outside a tightly defined target range, both the system and many of the appliances plugged into it can be damaged. That almost sounds interesting, but of course it is boring after all, because electricity is generated by power stations that all but guarantee a stable, reliable waveform: heavy, rapidly spinning hunks of metal powered by steam heated by burning hydrocarbons or a nuclear reaction. Or so it used to be, but thermal generation is rapidly going out of style in favour of wind turbines that do not spin at a predictable rate, and solar panels, which produce direct current instead.
“Thermal electricity generation provided system stability so effectively and so transparently that we forgot it did that,” says Paul Domjan, one of the founders of Enoda, an electricity grid technology company. We are going to have to remember again, and quickly, because we are rapidly moving to grids that are far more prone to wobble off the target frequency, as recently happened in Spain, with dramatic consequences.
We are all familiar with renewable energy’s problem that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine, but only the real nerds worry about the stability of the AC waveform. This is a problem that can be solved, but not if it is overlooked.
Just in case alternating current starts to seem too interesting, let’s move on to obsolete telephone directories, or more precisely to the diocesan directories published by the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. An up-to-date directory is useful, if hardly riveting. A decade-old directory describing the former addresses and positions of priests seems good only for the recycling bin.
Yet in 2001, investigative reporters at the Boston Globe suspected that the sexual abuse of children by priests was widespread, and realised that the apparently useless old directories provided a vital clue. In the 1990s, after the church had begun to quietly remove offending priests, there was a sharp increase in the number of priests listed as on “sick leave”, “awaiting assignment” or at the “clergy personnel office”.
Carefully combing through the old directories, the Globe’s reporters assembled a list of priests with unexplained movements through the Archdiocese organisation. That list closely matched their growing list of accused priests, strongly suggesting the church’s complicity.
Because outdated directories turn out to be Pulitzer-prize-winning levels of not-boring, we should turn to binary counter overflows, surely a reliably tedious topic. A computer armed with a three-digit binary counter can count from zero to seven: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111 — and then the counter overflows back to zero. A 32-digit binary counter will get you to nearly 4.3bn before overflowing — 4,294,967,295 to be precise.
This is fairly boring stuff, unless you are working at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center and your radio system simultaneously disconnects from each of the 800 aircraft flying over southern California. This happened on September 14 2004, and whatever adjectives sprang to the minds of the air traffic controllers and the pilots, “boring” was not one of them.
The culprit? A binary counter overflow in the traffic control computer clock: it was counting down milliseconds from 4.3 billion, which takes just under 50 days to do. When it hit zero the system shut down. Standard procedure was to forestall any problem by rebooting every 30 days, but in the summer of 2004 that evidently did not happen.
As Matt Parker explains in his book Humble Pi, this wasn’t a one-off error. Windows 95 computers would crash for the same reason, while the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had a similar issue and would lose all electronics if somebody left the computers running for more than 248 days.
The boring things in life will shut down your electricity grid, identify paedophiles in the priesthood and crash your computer — or maybe even your aeroplane. Might we attempt a grand unified theory of boring things?
Perhaps. Here it is: smooth, successful operations are uninteresting, and uninteresting matters tend to be neglected. Eventually they stop working well, at which point they become interesting again.
This is certainly true of the AC waveform. It seems boring because it has felt like a solved problem. Yet, as with low inflation or herd immunity from measles, if we allow the foundations of a success story to be eaten away, we find that the problem isn’t quite as thoroughly solved as we assumed.
This is true also of archives. Even celebratory accounts of the Boston Globe team’s use of diocesan directories usually neglect to mention that if those directories hadn’t been available in library archives, the investigation would have hit a dead end.
Archives have a particular problem. If an archive fails — fails to save the right things, fails to preserve old documents or fails to maintain digital information in a format modern computers can interpret — then the fact of that failure may take years or even decades to emerge.
Success leads to boredom. Boredom leads to neglect. Neglect leads to failure. Failure is no longer boring. But if we don’t show more interest in the successful systems we have built, they may suddenly become far too interesting for comfort. By the time these boring topics start seeming interesting, it’s too late.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 May 2025.
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https://timharford.com/2025/06/am-i-boring-you-good/
https://timharford.com/?p=9315
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