Group Seven

This morning, the very first thought I had was (to the tune of 'Hollywood', no less) Its SAT-urday...which means it's doesn't MAT-ter-day.... Which is good, because the last dream I remember from the preceding night included the phrase "Group seven was headed to Russia."

I may have the words wrong, but that's a quote from a novel of the early 1960s named Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick. During a routine alert, an American nuclear-equipped strike force, Group Seven, is erroneously given orders to attack and destroy Moscow. The failure of a single electrical component in a complex piece of equipment has led to the generation of a false GO signal. The question then is: what next? Do they make it? If they do, will war necessarily follow?

I never saw the movie, but I read the book, and it scared the bejabbers out of me -- which made it ironic that years latter I went to work for that same organization, doing the same thing -- though my job was down in the hole, one of a two man crew for the Minuteman missiles. I remember being taught the real-world version of Fail-Safe (we called it Positive Control), wondering if there were any hidden glitches, bad assumptions, or the like that could lead to our very own Fail-Safe. I did see one of two 'that can't possibly happen' things actually happen, but so far as I know, we never launched, never struck, never sent our own Group Seven to Russia.

I had the opportunity to tour the NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs -- the hollowed out mountain that you see as the headquarters for the Stargate organization on the TV series of the same name. I saw the huge blast doors, the thick steel springs under the buildings, the massive status displays. It was all very impressive. I even recall that they said that the blast doors at one location were in a pair, with one set always closed... except that while we were there they were both open so that a visiting television crew could trail their power cables through them. Ahem.

The organization I work for now is developing a concept that they call 'autonomic computing', also referred to as 'self-healing' computing -- computer systems and networks that can recover from a failure, so that functionality and effectiveness is not lost when a component fails. It may be degraded, but not lost. Of course, that could mean that a computer system which should have failed catastrophically instead continued to work, using bad data, making bad assumptions, taking bad actions. Well, no, of course not -- such effects are the realm of science fiction, not reality. In reality, systems work. In fact, we even have a phrase for it: "Working as Designed". Usually, that phrase pops up when someone is complaining about the output of the system, saying they don't like it, its wrong, or something like that. Well, yeah, but its Working As Designed.

I don't advocate packing it in and going to live in a shack in Montana, but there are times when I understand why there are people who do.