Month: January 2018

We Americans resent the concept of government intervention into our lives.  We value privacy and have an almost immediate negative reaction to the concept of Big Brother.

My wife Susan always points to Kroger here in Atlanta who sends personalized valuable coupons out to us showing that they are keeping track of what we buy.  She points out that them keeping track of our buying habits is a bit creepy, but the free coupons for things we buy seems caring.

The balance between creepy and caring depends a lot upon what we know about how our activities are being tracked.  Perhaps it is going to freak you out … but you are now being watched.  Read Consumer Reports article here.

Pretty scary, isn’t it?

I lived in New York City and would see a guy holding a sign saying that most every day.  Of course, you know what the sign holder was implying:  Get right with God or you are going to hell.  Well, I guess I dismissed this well-intended message and just walked on.

However, if my cell phone went off with that kind of message along with indication it was from our government and it was not a drill … now that is quite a different matter.

You all must know I am referring to the false alarm in Hawaii as covered in this USA Today article.

As you read it, please note the real mistake wasn’t the release of the message as much as the inability to revise it and cancel the warning.  We engineers live to prevent these scenarios and get criticized for our focus on things that can go wrong.

This is not negativity … it is conservatism … it is risk avoidance … it is the wiser way to live and be sure you can survive catastrophe.

Asking the question: “What if … and what would we do about that?” is the key here.  It is not hard to design in checks, balances, protocols, etc. when you ask the right question.  It takes discipline to write out all the possibilities, as remote as they may seem to be and then communicate the procedures to the right people.

I began my career working with the nuclear Navy under Admiral Rickover’s leadership with the assignment of preventing another “Thresher incident” … the tragic loss in April 1963 of an entire nuclear submarine and its 129-person crew.  I spent the next six years of my professional career doing analysis, critical thinking, and getting procedures approved through the nuclear navy leadership.  They felt so strongly about that resulting work that it was printed on a placard and displayed in the control room of every nuclear sub from that point on so that no one would have to go looking for it in some manual … remember, we didn’t have Google back then …

 

I was always told that the optimist will describe the glass as half full while the pessimist describes the same glass as half empty.  My retort to that has always been “you appear to have twice as much glass as you really need!”

Well, I have now been fully redeemed according to this article in the Washington Post. Read more.

 

 

NASA has decided they need a Planetary Protection Officer.  Yep, we are truly seeing Men in Black recruiting here.  Maybe things out of hand in Area 51?  No, I am not making this up. Read this from USA Today.

I have long wondered how some cultures on earth developed so quickly compared to others.  When we visited Italy a few years ago, we heard about the unclear pasts of the people of Tuscany and how amazing their technology was for its day. As many of you know, there are all kinds of strange things in our past that fuel this line of thought.

But, it struck me as odd, with today’s emphasis on cost containment, that NASA would announce they are hiring a person with these credentials to do something rather nebulous at this time.

I can only imagine the kinds of people who are going to show up for this interview!