He didn't say "cosmic rays" anywhere in the article.
voodoo-style fixes
They're not voodoo, they're sledgehammer to smash a nut fixes. A reboot reinitializes every part of your system into a mostly-known-good state. If you knew what, you could say "restart this service" or "reinitialise this driver like that", but a reboot gets all of it.
If you actually stabbed a doll with a pin and your program started working, that would be ... scary.
His actual criteria for taking the time to find a bug is reasonable, but I take issue with the assertion that its not a bug in code he wrote most of the time.
voodoo-style fixes
They're not voodoo, they're sledgehammer to smash a nut fixes. A reboot reinitializes every part of your system into a mostly-known-good state. If you knew what, you could say "restart this service" or "reinitialise this driver like that", but a reboot gets all of it.
If you actually stabbed a doll with a pin and your program started working, that would be ... scary.