“For a decade or so, a major threat to your laptop wasn’t a virus, malware, or hacking — it was Janet Jackson’s hit song, “Rhythm Nation.”

…

somehow, playing back “Rhythm Nation” over a laptop’s speakers would crash the laptop. In fact, it could crash nearby laptops as well.”

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2767927/a-janet-jackson-song-killed-laptops-for-nearly-a-decade.html

Now I wonder whether my laptop kept crashing while writing my thesis because I was accidentally cursing at the right frequency...

Don't have any laptops with magnetic drives anymore, but do have some external USB 1TB 2.5 in drives storing old 'stuff'.
Could not get a crash of the external hard drive on an older i3 laptop with Win10..
Don't know if the OS needs to be on the drive, or if it's particular to WinXP, which I don't have any installations of anymore.

All I found out is that I'm still tired of hearing 'Rhythm Nation', but still fond of Janet Jackson.

The resonance might be set by not only the drive but how it’s mounted to the laptop.

1 hour ago, swansont said:

The resonance might be set by not only the drive but how it’s mounted to the laptop.

Also, I think newer HDD have implemented vibration detection and related safet features, which might have been absent in older systems.

This idea is used as an illustration of Gödel's incompleteness theorem in 'Gödel, Escher, Bach'. Gödel, Escher, Janet Jackson'?

Contracrostipunctus

In this funny dialogue, Tortoise tells Achilles how he always succeeded to produce a record that could not be played on one of Crab's Hifi record players.