What is it with experts and quotes today?

From “How long will Americans be fighting the coronavirus?” by Christina Larson and Michelle R. Smith, AP News:

“The analogy of pumping car brakes on an icy road is what we should be thinking about,” [Michael] Levy said. “You push on the brakes to slow things down, then ease up – but if you skid, you have to pump the brakes again.”

This is clearly someone who has never recovered from a skid by their own actions, because the only way to do so is to regain traction, which means you must release the brakes. Though I should be less irritated than I am at this error, because anti-lock brakes have been required on cars for long enough that there are now people who have earned doctorates who were adolescents learning to drive only after the ABS mandate and dropping of manual brake management from drivers ed. Get off my lawn, Dr. Whippersnapper, there’s a shelter-in-place order in effect!

From Jobless claims jump by 70,000 as virus starts to take hold (San Francisco Gate, by Martin Crutsinger via AP):

“The more aggressive coronavirus containment measures imposed in recent days involving the near total shutdown of the retail, leisure and travel sectors in some parts of the country are clearly starting to have a dramatic impact,” said Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics.

Ya think?

To be a bit more upbeat than my last post… What will happen is the transmission rates of all communicable diseases will drop. We’ll have less colds, less flus. We’ve put the brakes on the spread of germs in general — at least until we go back to normal, and they go back to normal.

• The SARS-2 (COVID) virus will burn out.

SARS-2 has demonstrated its ability to linger in populations, so even if the SFBA manages to rid itself of SARS-2, carriers entering the area will restart the local spread.

• There will be effective prophylaxis available.

Vaccines take much, much longer than that to develop, so we’re not going to see one that quickly. If we had a vaccine to SARS-1, there’d be a slim chance that it’d also immunize against SARS-2, but we’re out of luck there.

• Treatment will be substantially better.

Same as above. Treatments tailored specifically to a disease take time to develop and improve. The potential exceptions would be already existing SARS, coronavirus-general, or broad-spectrum antivirals. But if any of those showed significant efficacy against SARS-2, we’d already know about it. So we’re not buying revolutionary improvements in treatment, but incremental ones.

• The shelter-in-place order will be honored.

People are going to get fed up as the days, then weeks, drag by, and even today I saw kids practicing soccer on the Eastshore field.

Don’t get me wrong — there are good odds that a vaccine will be developed or that better treatments will arrive, and combining those with natural resistance means there’s a very good chance that the disease will be stopped. But the new treatments and prophylaxis will take longer than three weeks to happen. And sadly, that means this disease is unlikely to be stopped before it sweeps through our population, and a three-week shelter-in-place won’t change that.

[I wrote this for another blog back in 2011, but it was lost to public view when that blog disappeared. It’s still valid today, though!]

In one of our datastructures, there’s an entry for a 64-bit unique resource identifier. This turned out to be a little too vague a description: Is it an 8-byte array, a 64-bit wide integer, or an instance of a 64-bit UUID class? One of our developers though one thing, and another thought another. No problem, right? The first compile by the one who chose wrong will show the type error. Except we’re using Python, so no type checking until the code runs. Still no problem, because our devs wrote unit tests, so the type error will show up on their first run, right?

Unfortunately, unit tests help not an iota in situations like this. The developer expecting UUID objects writes unit tests which consume UUID objects, and the dev expecting byte arrays writes unit tests which produce byte arrays.

So, integration tests, then? It turns out our devs did these too, verifying that their code integrated with the fancy datastructure class, but this still didn’t catch the mismatch! This is because the datastructure class doesn’t actually do anything with the resource identifier that would trigger a type check: it just accepts it as an entry in a slot when an item is inserted, and gives it out as one of the slot entries when items are looked up, and Python is happy to let an instance of any type pass through unchecked.

It’s only when we plug everything together that this trivial type mismatch shows up. So the moral: Make end-to-end tests early. You need them to turn up even problems as basic as this, and the earlier you find problems, the better.

Hi, I’m Mary and I’m an electron addict. I’ve been sustainable for 52 days.

I’d like to share my story. I first began to understand the gravity of my problem during the PG&E blackout in late October. For many of my friends it was an inconvenience, but for me it was an intervention. Within the first 24 hours I began to experience cravings. I craved hot coffee, hot water, any water, hot food; light to read by, light to find the bathroom, terrible TV shows, even terrible news. I became irritable, annoyed with my dog, my husband, even our cat just for being alive and invisible in the dark. I was anxious and jittery. How long could they legally turn power off? Where was the PUC when we needed them? Had Cliff repaired the voltage regulator on our generator correctly or were all our motors being ruined? Why did fires still start when power was supposedly shut off? How could we ever escape this dark prison?

Four and a half days I suffered acute withdrawal symptoms, and then, power was restored. I couldn’t wait to start using. I e-mailed. I showered. I washed and watered and cooked. The endorphins flowed. As frail woman I could wash clothes, send my thoughts across miles, provide hot food for my family and bring water to a parched garden with such ease. The electrons were my slaves.

At the end of the day I went to bed exhausted, but not at ease. I clutched the remote, never wanting the sound and light to stop. I fretted about my supply of electrons. I needed to recharge more batteries and stash more water. Another intervention could occur anytime. I ordered a better generator/inverter on Amazon. I emailed Tesla. What I needed was a fourteen thousand dollar wall of batteries. That Tesla wall looked so lovely in the advertisement. All the precious electrons generated by our solar array could be safely stored there.

Still I could not sleep. Thank God for EA. The ad popped up just after I left the Tesla site. I called and my life changed. My wonderful sponsor helped me to let go and trust my higher power. She helped me see how I had harmed the planet and future generations while using. I accepted Mother Nature as my higher power and my sponsor helped me see Mother Nature’s generous hand in the golden persimmons and scarlet pomegranates, the change of seasons and the arrival of an atmospheric river. My sponsor helped me live sustainably.

Still, as I mentioned, I am a fragile woman. My hands tremble at the dimming of the day. I come here with an urgent need for a sponsor. My first sponsor, my beacon of hope and true north, relapsed on Thanksgiving. Her family refused to believe that a solar cooker nestled in the snow could roast a turkey and sadly they were right.

[ This awesome story is by guest blogger Mary Myers.   — JLM ]