I flew out to California last Thursday night to work with coauthors over the weekend and give a talk on Monday.
My laptop worked just fine when I went to bed on Thursday night. But when I woke up on Friday morning and wanted to check email, my laptop just wouldn’t start.
This was going to be a long, unproductive weekend.
That is, until I ran a Google search for “lenovo t400 died when not plugged in” on my phone. I didn’t expect to find anything helpful, but the second link had an interesting enough title — “The Secret Thinkpad Power Button Code to Bring Dead Laptops Back to Life” — that I decided to check it out.
Here is what Mike Masnick, who runs the famous Techdirt blog, had posted on his personal blog in 2007:
I knew something was wrong when the “sleep” light wasn’t lit. I started to get worried when I plugged in the laptop and the battery light didn’t light up. Then I noticed that even though the machine had been asleep, it was really really hot. Pushing the power button did nothing. No lights were on and nothing seemed to get them to turn on. I pulled out the battery and put it back in and that did nothing as well.
So I called up IBM support and explained the situation. The guy on the other end then let me in on the secret power button code to revive your dead Thinkpad. After assessing the situation (totally dead laptop) he warned me: “Okay, this is going to sound totally bizarre, but I want you to give this a try…” He then had me unplug the AC adapter and take out the battery. Then, you push the power button 10 times in a row at one second intervals. Next, you push and hold the power button for 30 seconds. Then you put the battery back in and push the power button… and she lives. The computer came back, good as ever.
I asked the guy what the power button pushing incantation did and he said “static discharge” so apparently there was some sort of static that caused a short or something. I tried to get the guy to explain in more detail what happened, but he said “dude, you know as much as I do… but your machine is working.”
Readers from my generation probably remember the Konami code of yore, a cheat code — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start — one had to enter on the start screen of some Konami games to get more lives. Who knew there would be such a code to literally get an extra life for my laptop?
Coughing Tiger, Sickened Dragon
In dozens of rural villages in China’s western provinces, one of the first things primary school kids learn is what made their education possible: tobacco.
“On the gates of these schools, you’ll see slogans that say ‘Genius comes from hard work — Tobacco helps you become talented,'” said Xu Guihua, secretary general of the privately funded lobby group Chinese Association on Tobacco Control. The schools are sponsored by local units of China’s government-owned monopoly cigarette maker. “They are pinning their hopes on young people taking up smoking.”
Anti-tobacco groups say efforts to reduce sales in the world’s largest cigarette consumer, such as a ban on smoking in public places introduced in May, have been hampered by light penalties, a lack of education about the dangers of smoking and the fact that the regulator, the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, also runs the world’s biggest cigarette maker, China National Tobacco Corp.
This is from an article on Bloomberg.com in which I learned that China has 320 million smokers. Like Princeton’s Anne-Marie Slaughter replied over Twitter, that’s almost the size of the US population!
And regarding the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration owning China National Tobacco Corp., I think I’ve found the perfect counterexample for when I teach about incentive compatibility in the law and economics seminar I teach in the spring…