Section I Information And Instructions: Fill & Download for Free

As a police officer, have you ever made your supervisor or commander look foolish?I can recall two occasions where I have made a higher rank look foolish. The first time was when I was in patrol. This incident would have been around 10 years ago.I was called into my lieutenant’s office, because he had gotten a complaint that my tickets and arrests were racially motivated. Apparently, someone, somewhere, pointed out that as a white male, I was only targeting blacks. That’s a serious charge and smacks of racism or bigotry, if I do say so myself.So, as the Lt. was going over this thing, I just stood there in silence. He finished with his speech (aka ass chewing), and started to explain the piece of paper that was in front of him. Apparently, I was being written up for profiling. Before he asked me to sign it, he wanted to know if I had anything to say for myself.I replied, “Yes sir, I do. Why are you writing me up for racially motivated profiling, when you are the one that assigned me to that beat? The only people that live there are blacks, so, every contact I have, whether it be a call, a traffic stop, or whatever, will be with blacks. Are you asking me to stop writing tickets and making arrests? I can’t magically produce other ethnicities where I am assigned.”He just looked at me in bewilderment. His gaze went to the piece of paper, back to me, and then “off into space.” He finally managed to say, “You’re dismissed. Get out of here.”That write up never made it to my file.The second incident was more recent. As a CSI, I have a marked police vehicle that I get to drive home, because I am subject to being called out at anytime. One of my biggest pet peeves while driving, is the person on the interstate that is in the far left lane, going slow. That is actually in violation of a state traffic law. Studies have shown that faster traffic, having open access to the left lane while slower traffic stays to the right, results in fewer accidents because the faster vehicles don’t have to continually switch lanes to get around slower vehicles.My former sergeant (now retired) called me into his office, because someone complained that I flashed my blue lights at them, forcing them to move out of the left lane. When asked about it, I admitted to doing that quite often. His reply was, “Well this will be an easy write up!”As he was opening the PDF document to do the write up, I asked him a question. I said, “Sergeant, are you instructing me to not enforce state traffic laws?” He turned to look at me and said, “What are you talking about? Yes, you are supposed to enforce state traffic laws. Why?” I nodded in agreement and then stated, “Then why are you writing me up for enforcing Alabama traffic code 32–5A-82?”He stopped typing and actually said, “I’m not familiar with that one.” At that point, I informed him about that particular state traffic law. I even pointed out that most people won’t hear the required-by-law audible signal (horn) from the car behind them, because modern vehicles are designed to reduce outside/road noise, especially on the interstate. By forcing slower drivers to move over with visual signals (blue lights), I was actually making the road safer for all drivers, not to mention doing my job as a law enforcement officer.That write up never made it to my file either.Alabama traffic law source: Section 32-5A-82

I had a C-section in 1982. So I was swathed in bandages, on an IV for 24 hours, etc. I finally got the IV out, but I was still very sore from the surgery and it was difficult to get up. I would push the call button for the nurse to come help me get out of bed to go to the bathroom. They refused. Said I could do it myself. I said bed was too high. When I put my feet over the side of the bed they were still over a foot from the floor. I asked if they could lower the bed. I was told no. I was to “climb down the bed rail like it was a ladder.” At one point, some woman came in and insisted I needed to cough. I tried, but it hurt too bad. She proceeded to fuss at me. I wasn't trying hard enough. She informed me that when I had surgery the gas they gave me might cause a fluid buildup in my lungs, and I could get pneumonia if I didn't cough. In fact, she said, she could hear the congestion in my throat already. I informed her that I'd had an epidural, not gas. And furthermore the congestion in my throat was from the cold I had when I was admitted. She looked at my chart and stormed out like I had done something to her. The nurses continued to deride me for not doing enough. They said that all the other mothers were up and walking around and not having all the problems I was having. So when my husband came in he helped me out of bed and walked me up and down the hall. As we passed the nurses station, my doctor was standing there. She saw my pale, ashen face, and said “You look horrible! What are you doing out of bed?” I pointed to the nurses and said “According to them I'm supposed to be running foot races up and down this hall.” She ordered me back to bed, with the instructions that I was to take it easy. I had just had surgery and needed to recuperate. Fortunately I went home a couple of days after that, so that I didn't have to suffer the derision of the caring professionals at the hospital.A couple of years later I had a friend who was a nurse. She said that in the hospital she hated working with women that it had a C-section. “We have to wait on them hand and foot!” she said. I think she had forgotten that I had had a C-section. But it did shed some light on why I was treated so badly in the hospital.On a side note: My treatment in that hospital was disheartening. But it was nothing to the treatment that a friend of mine had in the same hospital, at the same time. She had to deliver her own premature baby in the emergency room, because the emergency room staff insisted she was having false labor, and they refused to help her.It was just a rotten rotten hospital.

The shortest answer is that it doesn’t know anything. It is a machine, pure and simple.How does a light bulb know to illuminate when you turn on a light switch?It doesn’t. It’s a simple circuit, connected from the power source, through the switch and the light bulb. When you turn on the light switch, you close the circuit and the bulb lights up.Maybe you have a fancy light bulb controlled by two light switches, like the ones they put at opposite ends of a stairwell. You throw one switch, and the light turns on. Walk to the other end of the stairs and throw the other switch, and the light turns off. That behavior forms a simple logic function—exclusive OR—but it’s still all just wiring.There’s still no knowledge involved. It’s a mechanical circuit that does what it’s designed to do.Let that sink in: No knowledge involved. At least not in the human sense of the term. Light switches have no awareness even if they implement logic functions.A computer’s logic has more in common with light bulbs and switches than a human brain. In the end, CPUs are collections of switches and logic gates. The outputs of some switches feed logic gates that control other switches.Now, we’ll often talk about computers “knowing” things. “My computer knows my WiFi password so it can connect to the network.” This isn’t knowledge in the sense that you and I experience or process it. This is just raw data, encoded in a form that the computer can process by driving its various switches on and off.That phrasing is a short-cut. Computers don’t know anything. They may contain information, and operate on that information, but in the end, they are a complex series of logic-driven switches.Take a look at the Visual6502:The picture above is based on an actual CPU, the venerable 6502. If you go to the link above, you can watch the various wires energize and de-energize as switches open and close in that design while it executes some code. The simulation is based on the actual wiring and logic of the 6502, reverse-engineered from the original silicon.The dense array at the top is a Programmable Logic Array (PLA) structure. This is a particular method of wiring circuitry such that when you energize (or de-energize) its inputs in certain patterns, various matching entries in the PLA energize their outputs. You can think of it as a pattern-matching circuit.The middle section below it is control logic. It, combined with the PLA, is responsible for sequencing most of the behaviors of the chip.The section at the bottom holds the 8-bit ALU and registers. Some of the switches and logic there perform various computations (addition, subtraction, Boolean functions), while others hold data values for the CPU to work on.All of these are circuits composed of switches that open and close based on the logic rules of their inputs. Some of the logic gates form storage elements and state machines. Others form buses to ferry data between the ALU and registers. Still others move data to and from the I/O pins.And yet, this chip doesn’t know a darn thing. Its wiring and logic gates cause it to behave in a certain way in response to its input clock and whatever it’s connected to.And that behavior happens to correspond to fetching instructions and performing computations according to a program stored in memory, because that’s what its logic was designed to do.But crucially, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.