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There you are, dumbfounded, staring at the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).  You know the screen: the one with the Microsoft-blue background, and the cryptic message followed by indecipherable strings of numbers and letters.  You’re stuck.  Your computer has “crashed.”  You have no choice but to reboot or turn off the computer, losing the document you’d been slaving over.

You imagine a scrawny fellow sitting in a dimly-lit dungeon-like office far beneath Microsoft headquarters, dressed in a dingy pocket-protector equipped lab coat, with scruffy hair, thick glasses and bad teeth, rubbing his hands together and cackling wildly, “Excellent.  Everything is going according to my plan.  Only I know the meaning of the error message!  Only I know the secret!  Only I!”

This scenario may not be too far from the truth.  I’ve talked to many good computer technicians over the years, and very few of them can tell you the precise meaning of most BSOD messages.  To be fair, the cryptic messages can be deciphered, after a fashion.  However, Microsoft makes you jump through a ridiculous number of hoops to do so, and even then, you usually glean only unspecific hints as to what actually brought on the BSOD.  Many technicians can develop a sort of instinct as to where the BSOD messages are leading, but it’s a hard-won ability.

Modern computers are so complex that it’s amazing that they even work at all — microprocessors containing billions of microscopic switches cycling on and off millions of times per second; millions of lines of computer code, often written, not by humans, but by other computers, with the true meaning of vast sections long forgotten, and filled with openly-acknowledged flaws; hardware and programs built to confusing specifications by thousands of competing manufacturers, all allegedly capable of holding hands and working together.  All of these things combine to make computer systems that are accidents waiting to happen.  If cars crashed by themselves as regularly as computers, most car manufacturers would be sitting in prison.

Computers, and the people who build them, are imperfect.  But, to me, the most interesting cause of computer malfunctions comes not from human error, but from an act of nature known as the “single event upset (SEU).”  Defined by NASA as “radiation-induced errors in microelectronic circuits caused when charged particles (usually from the radiation belts or from cosmic rays) lose energy by ionizing the medium through which they pass, leaving behind a wake of electron-hole pairs.”  We’re talking about atomic-level particles (protons, ions and the like) traveling at high speeds, and literally smashing though a computer, causing one of those microscopic switches to flip the wrong way, and the computer crashes.  Heavy radiation shielding protects spacecraft computers, and natural shielding protects the earth, but there are many documented cases of SEUs occurring at ground level.  Just think, your next computer crash may be caused by atomic particles from another galaxy!

And then, you reboot.