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Modeling Software Showed BP Cement As Unstable 160

Posted by Soulskill from the many-points-of-failure dept.
DMandPenfold writes "Advanced modeling software analyzed the cementing conditions for BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well as unstable, days before the blast that killed 11 oil rig workers and let millions of barrels of oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico. Halliburton, the company that carried out the cement job, used its own modeling software called OptiCem, to support arguments that more stability was needed for the piping and cement. ... An OptiCem test on 15 April, five days before the blast, stipulated that from Halliburton’s point of view, 21 ‘centralizers’ needed to be added to the well bore. The centralizers are used to provide space around the oil pipe casing within the well, as cement is poured around it, and are a vital part of safe drilling. BP initially adhered to the OptiCem software test and ordered 15 extra centralizers. But when technicians on the rig received the extra centralizers they mistakenly decided the new centralizers were the incorrect type. At this point BP proceeded with the drilling anyway, with the six centralizers, deciding another known technique of injecting cement in other places would work."

Comment Another use: (Score 1) 154

by LogarithmicSpiral (#31354594) Attached to: Researchers Convert Mouth Movements Into Speech
Find out what someone is saying across the room. See what people are talking about that they don't want you to hear. Or just be nosy. Sure, the camera probably has to be really close to a mouth to work correctly, but that doesn't prevent a determined snoop to surreptitiously video someone's face and then use some editing software to zoom in on the mouth and/or get rid of all the other useless information.

Comment Re:ti in the past never really supported assembly/ (Score 1) 88

by LogarithmicSpiral (#31307686) Attached to: TI-Nspire Hack Enables User Programming
True. It is also possible to program in z80 asm for at least the 83/84. I messed around with that a bit. Just download the appropriate software, assemble the code on your pc and send it to the calculator. It's really great if you can get an emulator working so you don't have to constantly mess with the TI linking software for every debug/test, and of course the possibility of bricking your calculator inherent with assembly. Ah, good times.

Submission + - TI-Nspire Hack Enables User Programming (ticalc.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Texas Instruments' most recent, ARM-based series of graphing calculators, the TI-Nspire line, has long resisted users' efforts to run their own software. (Unlike other TI calculator models, which can be programmed either in BASIC, C, or assembly language, the Nspire only supports an extremely limited form of BASIC.) A bug in the Nspire's OS was recently discovered, however, which can be exploited to execute arbitrary machine code. Today, the first version of a tool called Ndless has been released, enabling users, for the first time, to write and run their own C and assembly programs on the device. This opens up exciting new possibilities for these devices, which are extremely powerful compared to TI's other calculator offerings, but (thanks to the builtin software's limitations) have hitherto been largely ignored by the calculator programming community.

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