I suppose we will never know for absolute, positive, no other possibility that there wasn’t election fraud during the last election. There are many things like this, including every theory in science and every “belief” in every religion. That is just the way that the world works – and the nature of “proof.” Theories are presented, investigated, tested and considered from every point of view that we can think of. If we find evidence that the theory is wrong, if we test it and find it doesn’t “pass” the test, then we can definitely “prove” that the theory is false. However, we can never be certain that the next positive test isn’t followed up with a negative one, we can’t “prove” that every avenue has been investigated, that every test has been tested, or that we didn’t miss something important. As some point we finally say that while we can’t be certain that new information won’t turn up we accept the findings as “true” (which is different than proven). We think gravity works and will continue to work, we think aerodynamics will continue to keep airplanes in the sky, all of the things that have come from science and engineering are based upon “unproven” but “true” theories. So while it is not possible to “prove” that there was no significant fraud, enough investigations, observations, considerations and evidence has been found to show that it is “true”. It is true in the same sense that almost every election since the founding of the Country has been shown to be fair and the results have been accepted as being true.

That is not to say that there no major problems with our election system. There are. For example, the archaic electoral college system has opened the way to massive and pervasive disenfranchisement of millions of voters, almost all of which traditionally vote Democratic, by Gerrymandering districts in ways that award more electoral college votes than are supported by the population of the States. The Republicans have abused this to the point were it will heavily bias the outcome in favor of Republicans for decades into the future. It has gotten to the point where it is almost impossible to elect Democrats in many districts even when the popular vote would prevail for Democrats.

There are also often reports of highly illegal activities at the level of the precincts. For example, during the election between Gore and Bush, there were many reports of entire mail bags full of ballots from predominantly Democrat precincts being thrown into creeks and rivers, never being reported or counted. Did this actually happen? Probably. It probably happens during all Presidential elections. Is it enough of a problem to swing the outcome? Who knows? We have no evidence one way or the other.

Perhaps the worse problems that we have are associated with various successful efforts by the Republicans to disenfranchise poor voters through various means such voter ID laws, voter registration restrictions, unfair or illegal voter purges, felony disenfranchisement, and voter suppression by making it difficult to vote by the location or numbers of polling places. By far the worst of these types of voter restrictions apply to black and other minority populations, resulting in a massive under representation of votes that are historically cast for Democratic candidates. Some of this falls under the heading of “fraud”, but most is legal, but ethically and morally reprehensible.

We need to find a way to stop the impacts of Gerrymandering, makes sure that all people have ready access to polling places, eliminate the abuses of purges preventing millions of votes from being counted. We also need to find ways to prevent bags of votes being dumped, and we need a way for every citizen to have an easy way to verify that they vote was counted, and counted in accordance with the way that they marked their ballot. We need to find a way to get visibility into the entire voting process so that challenges such as Trump’s unsupported insistence in massive voter fraud is no longer possible. Basically, we need a complete overhaul into the voting system in the United States rather than continuing to rely on the current mix of outdated, archaic, fragile systems. If we don’t do this we will continue to have situations where the Supreme Court appoints the winner of the Presidential election, we will continue to have election after election where the Democrats win the popular vote but lose the election, where millions of eligible voters are prevented from voting, and where fraud remains a viable possibility.

That was an interesting trial of the impeachment of Trump. It seems that it was called in support of providing political cover for those who voted to acquit – at least is what it seemed to me. It all seemed pretty obvious to me, and had seemed that way for months – especially those days after he had used up millions of dollars in taxpayer’s dollars chasing after an obviously failed attempt to find evidence of fraud when none existed. What a farce! I don’t think anyone honestly doubts the House’s contention that Trump was instrumental in setting it up, and then sending the crowd down the street in strict violation of the terms of the permit that had set the location and boundaries based the known threat profile of the event. That one thing should have been more than enough to result in his impeachment, but there was so much more.

The defense centered around a lot of procedural issues because while they knew perfectly well that Trump was responsible for creating the environment, anger, support, direction and lack of timely efforts to stop the riot after it got started they were there to provide cover for the Republicans. That cover consisted of being able to tell their constitutes that the process was flawed, rather than having to tell them that they thought what Trump had done as somehow “appropriate”, “innocent” or “Patriotic.” If they hadn’t been provided with that cover they would have been forced to admit that they voted to acquit because they are also in alignment with Trump’s rhetoric and position that there is a need to “take back America” and “Make America Great Again” – which are both code phrases meaning re-instate the old ways of white supremacy and Christian dominance. But even though they support those values, they needed an alternative story – and the procedural one was fit the bill nicely because they didn’t have to face the actual question of whether or not they think Trump was actually innocent of the changes. They know he was guilty, but they couldn’t afford the political blow-back from their “base” to say so in a public forum. So they hid under the cover of a weak procedural argument. Shame on them!

I wonder what will now come of this. Does this tell the folks that support the MAGA movement that they were correct, that the “Country” supports them, that they are actually “Patriots” for fighting that way? Does this mean that there will now be an escalation of that sort of activity and boldness? I suspect it does. I also suspect that Mr. Trump will be front and center in that new wave of atrocities. My prediction is that we are now taking a deep dive into domestic terrorism, insurrections, and just plain nasty activity. It appears possible that this will now roll right into an actual fighting revolution, but with no goal except to take as much as possible from as many people as possible. There is no offering of a better union, of anything like democracy, or anything like freedom for anyone except those that have the most weapons and are the most aggressive. It looks to me that a band of criminals has just been handed the keys to the kingdom. It looks exactly like the path that Hitler (and other dictators) took to power, I certainly hope I am mistaken about that, but I see no other obvious next step.

After about three hours, the defense rests its arguments about the impeachment. (I am still looking forward to the Q&A sessions and the closing arguments). It was all pretty amazing. They showed a long montage of video clips showing many of those present in the act of using the word “fight” in their political activities. That is extremely obvious, one video would have made the point. They seemed to be attempting to use this to numb the minds of watchers as if that had anything whatsoever to do with the allegations. Clearly the question was never the simple one of the word “fight” being so incentive as to incite the riot. It is clearly all in context, and their arguments along those lines were childish at best.

And then there was a huge and lengthy discussion about the first amendment. Once again, they presented a specious argument at best. Generally, what they had to say was more or less true, but none of it applied to the case at hand. An interesting point was the political speech has a little “extra” protection, and that is they are not required to tell the truth or to not lie. Obviously Trump has made extensive use of that exception, he has told a record number of lies over the past five years (including the time leading up to the last election) and in no instance was there ever any attempt to punish him or make any contention that he had somehow done anything illegal in doing so. His lies were discussed a lot, and many people on all sides howled and complained about then, but everyone accepted that he was within the letter of the law to do so. That was never a contention, and still isn’t. Once again, the defense spent a lot of time presenting something that is generally agreed to – in the apparently hopes that agreeing with those points somehow had something to do with the trial. They did not, it was just a bit of hot air.

There was also an attempt to make the timeline for inciting the riots narrowly confined to the hour or so that Trump was addressing his crowd. There point was that the charge is only limited to determining if what he said was sufficient to spark the riot – which it clearly would not have been if he hadn’t primed it beforehand. The issues is setting up the situation, bringing in the powerkegs, and then lighting the fuse. It is true that if he hadn’t done what he did to set it up, he could probably have given his speech and nothing much would have happened. But that is not the case. He set it up, he knew what others were doing with regard to bringing the set and setting (and figuratively the barrels of powder), he made sure that all was set and not only did he not try to minimize the possibility of an explosion, but actively and continuously attempted to make sure the energy and anger continued. He picked the timing, the location, the people attending, and he (him personally plus the other speakers) fanned the mood of the crowd. That is all very obvious and true – but the defense lawyers elected to take a few carefully chosen words out of context to “prove” that similar speeches are common and don’t result in the kind of reaction that this one did.

A lot of the defense’s “evidence” that Trump is a long time supporter of what we might like to think of a “truth and justice” is that he uses the term “law and order” as a center piece of his rhetoric. I suppose the defense is hoping that most of the listeners and audience haven’t recognized that this is a highly charged “code word” harking back to racism, white supremacy, the abuses of people like George Wallace, the klu klux klan and other hateful and disturbing parts of America. He uses those terms specifically because they are powerful and important code words to his “base” – there is no doubt that they know exactly what he is talking about – and it doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with “truth and justice”, peace for all, equality, or anything else that his defense team was pretending that it pointed to. It points to hate and intolerance, it does not point to equality, peace, or justice for all.

And finally there was the evidence that Trump did everything he could in the hours during the event to provide support (by way of the national guard or others), attempted to message the group sufficiently to get them to stop. That was a hollow defense. The most that he did was after four hours of rioting was to suggest that they go home, adding that he really thanked them, loved them, and they were true patriots (I am paraphrasing here, he used slightly different terms).

After the first day of the impeachment trial an interesting question has emerged. It is pretty obvious that there was a riot, and the riot was pretty darned scary. It was in fact a really big deal. It is also pretty obvious that the riot would not have happened if Trump hadn’t done all that he had done on that day and the weeks beforehand. His insistence that the election was a fraud, his insults, his working up “his base” for weeks, months and years all contributed to and eventually led to the riot. His order to match on the capitol and fight like hell created the set and setting for what followed. His failure to do something once it was started perhaps let it go on for too long, which is hard to actually know because he didn’t try to stop it therefore there is no way to know if he had the power to do that or not.

So now the question is did he “incite” it, or was it just political theater that went crazy? If it was political theater, while it was really obscene and stupid, that might not equate to “incite”. If it was within the definition of “inciting a riot,” then it looks to me like most of the Republicans were at least partly to blame since they kept up the fake election drumbeat with him, they supported all of his claims of being cheated and his claims that the future of America was at stake. The only real difference is what was done on that stage, and Trump was only a small part of that – his lawyer and family were as involved as he was.

It is going to be an interesting couple of days to see how this unfolds, and if he is eventually impeached how the Republicans get their dirty hands out of it. My guess is that they can’t find a way to wash their hands of their culpability, and thus will stand united behind him. However, we will see. It is clear that it happened, it is clear that it would not have happened but for his actions and words, that it was really bad, that he knew that it was probably going to happen when he told them to march to the capitol, he knew what was happening throughout the afternoon, and it is also clear that he did next to nothing to attempt to stop it. In addition to this, it was a planned event (including the plans to violently attack the capitol), and Trump almost certainly knew about the details of the plans because they were posted in plain sight on the social platforms that Trump is known to monitor. He knew they were dangerous, he knew that they planned on a violent confrontation at the capitol, and he specifically “invited” (ordered?) them to attend. He then proceeded to tell them to march to the capitol and fight like hell. Not only was that all true, but the people following his orders understood that they were explicitly following his orders. He told them that they were his soldiers and they accepted the role (and he knew that was the case).

But does this all add up to something other than the lies, insults, crazy political rhetoric that had become the norm during his Presidency? Does “inciting a riot” involve more than getting a bunch of people together, get them worked up into a frenzy and then telling them to fight like hell? Does inciting a riot mean giving explicit, detailed, orders to do bad things in the frenzy of a riot, or is it enough to set it up, light the fuse, and let it take whatever course is taken after that? Is the crime one of being responsible for the outcome, or is it in the very act of setting the mob into motion? Is it necessary for there to be a prior conspiracy between the inciter and the rioters? I think not, I think the riot can be completely extemporaneous (which clearly was not the case in this event) and the charge of inciting the riot be valid. If a conspiracy was involved, is that a separate crime for a future date?

It should be an interesting few days.

Last night was one of those times of laying awake for hours thinking about … well just thinking about all sorts of things.

A particularly scary thought came up with my wondering if it is possible that we are actually in the middle of something like an armed insurrection, something along the lines of those old novels such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or George Orwell’s 1984. I wondered how we would know, and what would it take to get us to do something about it. Perhaps more importantly, if there is an ongoing effort at an insurrection, what is the purpose?

One thing that seems to be common with all of this is a desire to be rid of government in all of its forms. Get rid of regulations, get rid of taxes, get rid of social support systems, get rid of bothersome laws concerning the separation of church and state, and of course outlaw abortion – just get it all out of our lives. What is never discussed is whether this also means getting rid of roads, schools, social security, research into health care, various forms of incentives to support things like job creation, efforts to ensure safe foods and other products, municipal water and sewage systems, the military, protection of the environment, etc. I wonder to what end the apparently push to eliminate the United States of America might be. (If we eliminate government we will at the same time eliminate the USA because it consists of the government). Obviously the point isn’t to eliminate everything, rather it is to overthrow the parts that are “bothersome.”

There are a lot of people in the USA and beyond that have an “insurrectionist bent” given what happened at the capital last month. We have been hearing about large numbers of people buying vast numbers of guns and ammunition, stockpiling weapons for some dangerous future. We see changes in the make up of the Supreme Count and the Republican side of congress, and we just experienced a rather unusual President. We are also trapped in a world where it is almost impossible to sort fact from fiction, and where many politicians have given up having even the pretense of being truthful – doublespeak and outright lies are the order of the day in some powerful positions.

What really popped into my head was the question of whether perhaps the covid-19 pandemic is being used as a type of terrorist activity. I wonder if it is possible that the “super spreader” events aren’t intentional actions in support of some sort of planned insurrection along the lines of Al Quaeda or other terrorist groups using germ warfare in place of terror in the form of suicide bombers, booby trapped bombs, beheadings and the like. This type of apparently random terror attacks are used as weapons in support of their efforts to overthrow their governments. The pandemic could provide a very convenient weapon with a similar outcome. I don’t think anyone intentionally started the pandemic, but perhaps since it is here it might as well be weaponized. That would account for the anti-masker/anti-distancing movements, as well as the continuing occurrence of superspreader events, that have combined to result in about 500,000 deaths (2.5 million deaths worldwide so far), and a similar number of ICU patients in the USA. We knew enough to stop the pandemic long ago using well known and proven actions to stop it by eliminating the spread, but many people have elected to take actions to prevent that from occurring. Killing that many people with suicide bombs would be impractical and might catch people’s attention, but doing it by subtle germ warfare is a lot more difficult to prove – although it is having similar impacts on people’s lives and the economy. Do these superspreader events represent loosely affiliated terrorist cells? Do the folks in their big pickups with giant American flags, and large groups with MAGA hats and Trump flags represent local cells? I wonder if many of those people are armed and ready to fight?

If the pandemic is in fact being used as a weapon in an ongoing insurrection, what is going to happen when it is finally brought under control with vaccines? Will this result in an escalation using real weapons, or will it continue in the form of legal battles in the halls of governments? And if it is an actual insurrection, what might the goals be beyond getting rid of government “interference?” It appears pretty clear that two major goals have something to do with furthering the causes of white supremacy and fundamentalist Christianity. If this is actually happening, how it is being funded? Does the funding come mainly from “regular” individuals, or are there a few major contributors, perhaps some of the richest people in the world believe they have something to gain by an insurrection. Maybe they see the possibility of not only having control of the money, but also have control of everything else as well. If there is an underground of insurrection with the goal of overthrowing our government, I wonder how long it has been going on.

Today my wife and I got the first covid-19 vaccination. I was willing to wait for awhile because my wife and I have been isolating so completely that I feel pretty safe. However, she was anxious to start the process so we can once again see our children and grandchildren, and there is no point in one of us doing so and not the other.

It was an amazingly simple process once we actually decided to do it. The county announced openings for people over 65 years old, which describes both of us. My wife went on line to the announced website and signed us up about ten days ago. The directions for getting there left a little to the imagination. They provided a time and a street address – but the street address didn’t show up on any maps or our GPS thing because it turns out it was just a parking lot, not an actual “place.” I figured that the street address must be enough to find signs directing us to the location. No such luck, there were no signs. However, once we got close enough we could see tents in a parking lot with lines of cars. Obviously that was it, but it took a couple of fairly long loops around long blocks to finally get to the entrance going in a direction that we could actually enter from. It turned out to be the parking lot of the local minor league baseball team – that information would have been a handy hint about where we were going. A non-existent street address wasn’t very informative, especially since we didn’t have any clue about whether it was a drive up affair, or an indoors event like that had been doing at the local basketball arena.

Once we managed to stop going down dead-end roads and found the correct one-way entrance it went amazingly smooth. There were traffic directors everywhere – seemingly dozens of them. We went through something like eight check points making sure we had a “ticket” appointment, had our paperwork filled out properly, asked about allergies, scanning our paperwork, etc, etc. Everyone was very pleasant, there were absolutely no waiting in line, and then we were through – sitting in a parking space while we waited for 15 minutes to go by so we could be on our way. The entire thing took perhaps thirty minutes total, but most of that time was spent being occupied with driving a hundred feet or so, being interviewed yet again, and moving on – we were distracted enough that the time wasn’t even noticeable. We even got a reservation for the next shot in three weeks.

I sure hope these vaccines work as advertised, and that new variants don’t show up that start it all up again. It is really too bad that people have been unable to control themselves enough to stomp it out at the very beginning. All of those who refused to take the simple precautions are directly responsible for most of the 450,000 deaths in America, soon to be over 500,000. In my mind, they are all guilty of the widespread impacts of the virus in America – pure and simple. They are aware that they are engaging in “super spreader” events, with the explicit intention of spreading the virus. If that wasn’t going on we could have been past this whole thing sometime in April 2020 and we all knew it (including the anti-maskers). We had the resources and knowledge necessary to stop the pandemic in our country – just like it was in those countries that actually followed the simple recommendations for six weeks and avoided the deaths, illnesses and huge financial impacts of being “free” to be stubborn.

However, we are still being stubborn as a nation, so we will drag out the costs and the deaths for another few months. It is so comforting to me to know that we are “free” to infect our family and neighbors, and to destroy the livelihood and savings of local businesses and friends. Freedom from being held responsible for the consequences of stupidity seems to be part of the American value system. We didn’t need any vaccines, and the deaths and illnesses weren’t foreordained – we just needed to have a sliver of caring for each other and as Trump said, “poof, as if magic it would have been gone,” but action was necessary to make that “magic” happen. Hopefully enough “anti-science” folks are willing to be vaccinated to get us beyond this whole event. I don’t have much confidence that they will do so and their behavior will drag this whole mess out for months more – but perhaps the vaccines will work and my wife, my family and my friends won’t die excruciating deaths. I understand that death is just around the corner for us, but I would rather not hurry it up so a bunch of stubborn people can proclaim their “freedom” to take “their” chances (along with those of mine and my loved ones). Perhaps we are turning a corner back to “normal” sometime this year.

I have been noticing an uptick in the number of articles comparing the relative cost and environmental impacts of “sustainable” energy and hydrocarbon energy that attempt to “prove” that hydrocarbon fuels are much less expensive and have a tremendously smaller environmental impact than wind or solar power. Some of these point to the fact that these technologies require mining for raw materials and end up with lots of waste at the end of their lives – as if none of that applies to gas, oil or coal. I think this is a pretty brazen attempt to make total poppycock somehow “make sense.” Sure, all sources of power have negative environmental impacts, but to say that hydrocarbons have none while wind and solar are so bad as to be unacceptable is unconscionable.

However, as is so often the case – there is a grain of truth in the warnings that wind and solar aren’t exactly “clean” – they come with their own set of problems. Depending upon how they are integrated into the overall power supply system, these “green” technologies are not only far from “green” but can have negative impacts as to be totally unacceptable. As currently use, large wind turbines fit into this category because they produce no net renewable energy. They require so much backup support from low efficiency hydrocarbon power plants (“peaker plants”) that the overall output is the same as if neither they, and their backup support power plants, were ever built. With regard to energy and production of carbon dioxide, they are a push and do nothing useful for the environment, the use as much hydrocarbons as would be the case without the wind turbines because much higher efficiency power plants can be used. When you add the impacts of making these devices, making the cement to mount them, the number of birds they kill, and what they do to the local environment it is very clear that they should never have been built and should be removed ASAP. Maybe they will eventually produce a positive amount of energy if, or when, sufficient electrical storage capabilities are provided. So far that hasn’t happened, and it is very likely that the current crop of wind turbines will be torn down and replaced before sufficient storage is provided.

This type of tit-for-tat discussion about the relative merits of various sources of power misses the real point, which is that instead of trying to replace the hydrocarbon fuels with “sustainable” sources of energy, we should be reducing our energy footprint so we don’t need so much power. If an argument doesn’t start there, but instead only talks about how to match (or exceed) or current energy demand from a different source of power there is never going to be an acceptable solution.

The interesting thing about reducing energy demands is that it does not include a requirement to reduce the benefits that we get from using energy. It doesn’t mean hotter, or colder, homes. It doesn’t mean going to back to model T cars (which were gas guzzlers 1927 models got an average of 7.6 mpg), but rather forward to cars that are even better, more comfortable, quieter and safer than today’s models (which are pretty darned good when compared to any cars made in the past). It doesn’t mean that production, or construction costs of buildings or machinery costs are higher to pay for the new much higher efficiency, in fact it means much lower costs in almost all cases. For example, we currently have the technology to produce light bulbs that use less than 1 watt to make as much light as an old fashioned 100 w light, but costs the same to manufacture – with the additional bonus that the average life is similar to the new “long life” LED lights that use 10 watts but cost $6 (or more). Everywhere you turn there are similar savings in energy use and initial cost, coupled with better products.

It is hard to be positive about why this situation exists, but I have a suspicion that it has something to do with the fact that the savings associated with energy efficiency go to the user, not to the power producers or distributors. It looks to me like we have enough opportunities to reduce the amount of energy that we need to do what we currently do with less than 25% of what we are using. The thing is that this requires building things with that in mind rather than just continuing to do what we are doing and wondering why it doesn’t change. It means taking the big look to keep the “big system picture” in view while looking at the microscope view of specific technologies at the same time. Instead of subsidizing large scale “renewable energy” we should be assisting efforts to increase efficiency. The goal is to meet our needs, not to make power (unless you are in the business of selling power).

An example of what I am talking about with regard to the big picture is with the new fleet of electric cars that GM promises to deliver by 2035. Electric cars have the potential for many great efficiency savings, with average energy use of the equivalent of 60 mpg or more (probably quite a bit more by they time they have made the transition). This means using about 1/3 of the energy for cars as we do now without changing or driving needs. But …. this means using a lot more electrical energy for transportation, and it also means that the energy has to be stored onboard the car. Not an inconsequential question is related to deciding how do to store the energy? Batteries are quick, easy, available – and a terrible solution because of the vast amounts of rare and difficult to obtain metals required in their production. Perhaps by 2035 some other type of battery will be available that minimizes the mining footprint, but perhaps not. Maybe fuel cells would be a far better solution. They use far less rare materials, are much less expensive to create, are much lighter, and are a proven solution. However, that means making hydrogen for the fuel, and transporting it from wherever it is made to where it is used. Currently, almost all hydrogen is made using hydrocarbons. It is possibly to electricity from solar, or perhaps hydrocarbons produced by bio-reactors using “waste” plant matter from land fills, logging processes, agriculture and others. But that requires building an efficient infrastructure. Maybe the hydrogen can be made locally using solar electricity. All of these problems have solutions, most of the micro-view solutions are known and in place, it is the larger big-system picture of how to create the required infrastructure that stands in the way of this approach. Creating a complete revision of our transportation energy supply seems like a daunting task, but it has been done before and can be done again. The first automobiles got their petrol from drug stores in quart containers – in many countries that is still how it is purchased, but from curb side stalls instead of drug stores. We can provide the infrastructure once we know what is needed, and that takes a decision – not new technology.

Assuming we have the will to reduce our energy footprint to something like 20% of our current use, then the question of how do we provide it becomes very different. In California, the necessary energy if efficiency is embraced can be provided by continuing to use the current hydroelectric dams, the current geothermal power plants, increasing the harvest of plant based hydrocarbons from landfills and other types of plant “waste” at the same time creating vast quantities of highly valuable compost for agricultural use and expanding the use of local “rooftop” solar generation. At that point we won’t need fossil fuels, wind generators, or nuclear power plants – and we will have almost zero green house gas production from our energy sector.

Because I am a system safety engineer it seems appropriate to write about safety now and then. This post is one of those times.

A couple of events over the past few days have gotten me to wondering. One event was a meeting with system safety engineering friends of mine. The topic of “software system safety” came up for discussion. This issue is concerned with how to deal with the safety aspects of software that controls machinery – all types of machinery including missiles, aircraft and the current hot topic of driverless automobiles. Obviously there can be a few safety considerations with software controlling this type of equipment, especially with the newer “smart” software that teaches itself! The question is along the lines of “how do we ensure that the software will control the machine in a way that is safe?”

When boiled down to the basic bottom line, system safety is a process of analyzing and/or understanding a system (thing, product, operation – whatever), figuring out what bad things could happen, figuring out what could cause those bad things, figuring out how to prevent them from happening, and then doing what is necessary to implement the control measure(s) (as well as verifying that what you think will work is actually in place and actually solves the problem). This is not an easy task, but luckily there are a few techniques to help with this.

There is general agreement that the process that I sketched above works for “hardware” because it is relatively easy to visualize the parts and interactions, and it is apparently relatively straightforward to test and simulate whatever needs to be tested. It is usually judged to be “simple” in comparison to the situation involving complex software controlling critical systems. Software is considered more complex because it is not unusual to have millions of lines of software code written by a large number of individuals (and computers in some instances) and all of which is highly interconnected in ways that are extremely difficult to visual in sufficient detail to have much confidence that all of the potential logical “paths” through the code. It is extremely difficult to ensure that all such paths have been analyzed, designed and tested to prevent some sort of safety problem during operation. One advantage of software is that it doesn’t exactly “fail” – it does the same thing given the same input every single time – unless something changes in the hardware system that runs the software. These “somethings” can be bit changes because of cosmic rays, speed differences in various components changing the order of information being processes (referred as “race conditions”), various ‘hiccups’ where a portion of the hardware (perhaps a microprocessor” stalls for an instant (think about having to reboot windows because it “hangs up” – which would not be such a good thing while landing a jet liner), dropping data, and many many more potential “hardware” problems that change how the “software” operates.

Because of the apparent increase of complexity and a decrease in visibility for software controlled systems, there has been a strong push to do “something different” for software than for hardware. (I use the world “apparent” because I don’t think any system is as obvious as it appears to be.) The software folks insist that their stuff is so different that an entirely new approach is required, one that somehow does follow the model that I sketched out in a previous paragraph.

It has been my contention that there is nothing particularly new or different with software safety engineering than what I sketched out in a previous paragraph. We still have to do the same things, but we might do them a little differently because of the nature of the system under investigation. I have lots of ideas about how to approach that, but in general they are all just more of the same thing that I do for all systems. One point that the software folks seem to ignore (or maybe don’t recognize) is that almost all systems depend critically upon inherently invisible “software” logic systems – it is just that a lot of the software is embedded in the squishy matrix of people’s brains. Ultimately, almost all safety is not only dependent upon hardware acting as it should, but that the control “systems” do the same. Unfortunately people’s minds are not nearly as predictable from person to person, or within the same person at different times. Including the impacts of people in the system is a MUCH more difficult problem than anything that software controls can generate. So at a basic level, it is all based upon some sort of unanalyzable control system.

One of the things that the software folks like to point up as being inherently different from hardware is that there are so many possible paths through the logic that it is extremely difficult to identify the possibilities, and even harder to test all of them out. This is where the “hardwood” part of my story comes in.

A couple of days ago I was outside preparing for a “hard freeze” forecast by the weather guessers. In central California this means putting towels or other coverings over exposed water pipe and covering delicate plants. While doing that I turned a corner around a post and ran smack into a short piece of 2×4 wood that had been screwed onto the post at head height. I am a slow learner, but being smacked in the head with a 2×4 woke me up enough to check out the safety of the situation. Upon inspection, it was obvious that the 2×4 had been installed many years ago (probably by me) for some long forgotten purpose. This “hazard” was on a predictable path (similar in concept to the software logical paths) to causing an accident. I find it interesting that the “hazard” had been created long ago, had been what should have been an obvious issue at that time, when the original purpose had been abandoned the hazard “should have been” identified and removed. the identification and removal process could have been applied each time someone (such as myself) walked down the path past the obvious hazardous condition.

It was very much like one of those “special” software “features” that everyone is so worried about. My board was similar to something that was put into the code for some sort of good reason, but then was abandoned – but not removed or “disarmed.” Once the situation changed, it “all of a sudden” came back to life. The thing that changed in the case of my head banger was that it was raining making the ground muddy and slippery, Therefore, I was looking down to avoid tripping and slipping instead of looking up where I would have seen the board just like I had for many years previously. It was never a problem (“hazard”) before because it was in plain sight, obvious, easy to avoid – and I avoided it.

The point it that almost all system safety problems have features like; otherwise they would not exist because they would have been recognized and fixed. What appears to be obvious in hind sight isn’t so obvious in the moment. Software has a similar problem, and so do simple things such as that board that didn’t actually “do” anything, it was just there – as an innocuous “feature” of my barn. I see no reason to treat software as anything special, or something that has unusual properties other than it can become involved with turning “hazards” into “accidents” – just like has happened with all accidents. Of course that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require special tools, techniques and knowledge to “solve” the safety problem, just like most everything else in the universe of system safety requires special tools, techniques and knowledge. Rather than spending a lot of time and effort attempting to figure out what is “special” about software safety, I think it is best to figure out how it integrates with hardware and people, and in finding engineering and management tools capable of ensuring that hazards are identified and controlled.

I have been noticing a troubling development with regard to people’s thoughts about how protective their measures to avoid infection have been. I first noticed this with myself, which “tuned up” my ears so I am now recognizing a major problem everywhere. In the early days when the nature of the covid threat was unknown, those of us that were concerned enough to take the need for protection seriously were very careful. We wore masks, washed our hands, sanitized surfaces, sanitized groceries, sometimes wore gloves, etc. We tried to learn how long the virus lived on various surfaces, how far it would spread in the air – and for how long, etc. Over time we were told that perhaps some of this isn’t quite as important – maybe social distancing is good enough sometimes, maybe we don’t need to be quite so fussy about surfaces, maybe we can relax a bit. And for most of us, we haven’t gotten sick – so obviously our lower measures are effective. Clearly we don’t need to “always” wear masks, don’t need to wash our hands after touching anything outside of our homes, don’t need to scrub down the cereal boxes.

The problem comes from out having no way to determine if, or when, there is an actual threat. We don’t know when viruses are present on surfaces, or in the air, or if a person is infected. The “positivity rate” in California is sometime like 2.6% meaning that 2.6% of people that get tested are positive (infected). Unfortunately, that is based upon those that get tested for some reason, meaning that most of them have concerns (or actual knowledge) that they might have been exposed. It is not a random selection, therefore it is almost certainly quite high. The real percentage of people testing positive is probably closer to 1% (one person out of a hundred), with pockets of much higher values and others that have rate that is much lower – but we don’t know where those locations are and they move so even if we knew it would be “yesterday’s” information, not necessarily reflecting what it is now. That means that perhaps less than 1 out of 100 people walking around are actively infected. The chances of encountering that person is slim. For example, I find myself in a building with other people perhaps once a month, potentially being exposed to maybe 5 people a month – and that exposure is while maintaining distance and everyone wearing a mask. Did the distancing and masks help? Who knows? It is highly unlikely that any of the people that I was remotely in “contact” with was infected – therefore I have zero knowledge or feedback on whether or not the protections were effective. But since I didn’t get sick I assume my protective measures worked. Perhaps they did, and perhaps they didn’t – I have no information to inform me on those topics.

After almost a year of performing my mini-tests, I find that I am getting pretty complacent – and I see a lot of other people getting extremely complacent. I often hear people say things like, “I see this person regularly, but we both take our precautions so it is very safe to do so.” Really??? Perhaps if you both really take all of those precautions, but I know you don’t because I watch and see that hand washing is seldom done, I see distancing much less than six feet (which is bogus in any case – it needs to be more like 30 feet to be marginally effective), I see nose-out masking, I see people spending time inside with others. All is well until one of the people that are assumed “safe” no longer are. When nobody is infected the protective measures appear to be highly effective (because they aren’t needed). Those same degraded protections might well not be effective once that situation changes and they are actually needed – but we have no way of knowing if, or when, that has occurred.

We are entering a period of much higher risks of being in the vicinity of infected people because it continues to spread. The number of cumulative “cases” in California has gone from 1 million at the end of November to 3 million at the end of January with a doubling time of about 1 month. That means that by the end of February it is likely to be 6 million and by the end of March perhaps 12 million cases. “Cases” means those that have been infected and become sick enough to need treatment. Those make up about 10% of the population of infected people. There seems to be no particularly great statistics available about this, but it is pretty clear that within a month or so it is reasonable to assume that almost everyone that has any exposure risk will be infected. It will no longer be 1 in a 100, it will be 1 in 1. So the question will then become whether or not you trust your life with whatever protective measures you are implementing.

The thing is that there is no possibility of vaccines having any appreciable impact on this in a statistical sense. Perhaps it will provide protection for those that are vaccinated, but those will not be available in anything like the numbers that will be needed as the infection rates spike in the coming weeks.

I think that this is the time to be ultra conservative, not a time to be complacent that since we haven’t gotten sick our approach to protection is good enough. Most likely we just haven’t yet been in the approximate vicinity of infected people. That will change quickly.

I have been practicing meditation for many years, trying out various approaches or techniques over the decades. It turns out that for me, they are just different ways of “practicing” to do something – the question is of course; “Practicing to do what?”

A common myth is that it is trying to learn to shut off “thinking” while staying awake. That seems to be close to it – but not quite right. This weekend I started wondering if it is perhaps something a little different than that. It seems that perhaps it is, in part at least, practicing to find that place between two thoughts (after watching one thought finally winds down and before the next one comes into focus) where there is no internal dialogue – and then practicing to expand the duration of that space. It isn’t exactly an experience of not thinking, but rather it is a place of experiencing, but not talking to yourself.

For many years I have been working on being able to experience observing myself without judgement – just observing what is happening, what I am feeling, my reactions – but not necessarily interfering, evaluating or judging. In the Buddhist jargon I believe this is referred to as “the witness”. The thing that I realized this weekend was that the practice of meditation where I observe and experience without dialogue is the same as the observer that I have been working with all of those years. Once I noticed that, I also noticed that it isn’t actually necessary to stop my internal dialogue to experience life from the point of view of the observer/witness. That point of view is always there, but it gets hidden from view because of all of the chatter, emotions, and activities in “normal” life. I noticed that I have been doing this so long that I am aware of the observer pretty much all of the time, not just during meditation, and not when I do something specifically to get myself to “stop and smell the roses.”

Maybe that is what we are practicing to do during meditation, practicing to become aware of the witness during sitting, and during all other times too. I think that is the path to personal freedom, freedom from all of the negative things we tell ourselves that are actually not true – they are just judgements of ourselves based upon experiences that we had over our lives, but none of the stories are actually true – they are something like our dream of what is really true. In many cases, we use someone else’s truth (or what they think is their truth) to reinforce negative judgments that we make of ourselves.