Oh, That Bug? "Resolved- Cannot Reproduce." I Blame Cosmic Rays.

From this month’s Scientific American, we have this sidebar:

Zapping Your Computer
A superstorm might well have strange effects on electronics. The high-energy protons that reach the ground produce neutrons that pass right through the shielding around satellite and avionics systems. (Most computer systems lack even this shielding.)

Extensive background radiation studies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically experience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month. If so, a superstorm, with its unprecedented radiation fluxes, could cause widespread computer failures. For­tun­ately, in such instances most users could simply reboot.

Based on that assessment I have 8 such events at home and 12 such events at work every month. Whenever something weird happens to my machine from now on I’m blaming cosmic rays. Which is cool with me since at some level I’m all about cosmic rays (being an admitted geek for Marvel Comics cosmic heroes.)

Hell yes. Happy Saturday. Comics + Science.

Yowza.