The String Theorists and the Loop Quantum Gravitators are busily chipping away at the problem what space-time actually is. For some time, my concern has been that if people can figure out how space-time is put together, then somebody might be able to figure out how to take it apart. In other words, the next paradigm shift in theoretical physics may have weapons implications, just like the last one, which gave us nuclear weapons. The atomic nucleus is not Nature's last word on explosive energy release.
That last word is actually the First Word - the Big Bang that began the Universe as we know it. The question is whether some yet to be discovered physics can yield intentional explosions between the intensity of a nuclear explosion and the Big Bang.
On the other hand, our astronomers are finding that planets orbiting around stars are commonplace. With all those planets out there, surely some are home to technological civilizations, and surely some of them have already discovered physics that is several paradigms beyond our own. If there were any explosive technology based on such physics, and if any extra-terrestrial civilization had used it, our astronomers would have seen it. So far, all the observable explosions and other energetic phenomena in space look natural. Or so we think.
Maybe theoretical physics isn't such a dangerous pursuit after all. Maybe.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
03 March 2012
20 April 2011
Cyber Alert for Apple Products!
Take a look at this post on O'Reilly's Radar blog. It turns out that Apple's iPhone (with IOS 4.0) and iPad 3G keep an internal file that tracks everywhere you've been while the device is turned on. Call me old-fashioned, but that's a big privacy concern for me.
17 November 2010
Small Worlds, Must See!
A friend alerted me to the small wonders of Creation. Have a look at Olympus Bioscapes, an international competition for beautiful images made with microscopes of living creatures.
14 February 2010
MTS
MTS stands for Member of Technical Staff. I first heard it at the old Bell Labs, where I was an MTS and an MTS-Supervisor. Since then, the label has propagated to tens of companies where scientists and engineers (aka S&Es) develop hardware and software for new products and services. It is now industrial "best practice," to call industrial scientists and engineers MTSs instead of by their actual specialties, such as plasma physicist, solid state physicist, electrical engineer, nuclear engineer, inorganic chemist, mathematician, spectroscopist, etc. The bland designation "MTS" gives the illusion that it is easy to compare the contributions of these uniquely trained and experienced individuals across disciplines. That way one can have a uniform compensation policy across disciplines, which simplifies salary administration and avoids litigation.
The risk of such an industry best practice is that management can actually come to believe that it represents some kind of ground truth. At the old Bell Labs, my management actually told me that any MTS should be able to do any other MTS's job. As a corollary, they also told me that a good manager ought to be able to manage anything, no matter what it is.
It should be obvious that neither of these statements are true. And if they weren't true at the old Bell Labs (which is now defunct) it is even less true at the US National Laboratories, particularly those involved in maintaining the US Nuclear Weapons Stockpile. And yet, the US National Labs are adopting the MTS designation, and abandoning job classification by discipline. Why? Because the Labs have been privatized. They are no longer run by the University of California as a service to the nation and under contract to the US Department of Energy. They are run by Limited Liability Corporations, of which the University of California and Bechtel Corporation are senior partners.
You can't blame the Obama Administration for this. The delusion that everything will run better if it's run like a business is a Republican delusion, and this one was foisted on the National Labs under the Bush Administration. The first problem with this is that nobody, especially nobody in Congress, thought through the implications of privatizing the National Labs. As a result, the Labs lost many millions of dollars in federal, state, and local tax exemptions, and incurred millions of dollars in additional management fees - all of which resulted in thousands of layoffs, because the Lab's budgets were held flat. The second, longer term problem is that Research and Development (R&D) is not a business. It is a cost of doing business, and most businesses minimize that cost by not doing R&D. Or at least by doing only D (development) and not R (Research). This is because the only one thing in the Universe more inefficient than Research is ignorance.
Now the bean-counters, the efficiency experts, are forcing the National Labs to conform to industry best practices by adopting the MTS designation for all members of its scientific and engineering workforce. At first, this will be harmless. But, by making the members of the National Lab workforce look superficially like everybody else's workforce, it may enable the delusion that they can be managed by "more professional" executives from outside corporations who don't really understand what all those MTSs do. Who believe they don't have to understand, because "a good manager can manage anything." And then, with that lack of understanding, they may begin to mixmaster the workforce whenever they need to move people around to save jobs, because "any MTS should be able to do any MTS's job." It took about 20 years for that mentality to destroy Bell Labs. The risk is that the same mentality may be allowed to creep into the National Labs, which are part of what maintains our National Security in terms of both defense and energy.
Now the National Labs may fare better than Bell Labs, because Bell Labs was funded by a competitive business (once the old AT&T was broken up in order to settle a lawsuit by MCI). And as I said, industry survives competition by doing as little research as possible. The National Labs are funded by the US taxpayers, as represented by their President and their Congress. That should give us all confidence, right?
Oh, well. I might as well close with some levity. Imagine these words sung to the tune of the "M.T.A Song," (better known as "Charlie on the MTA," written in 1948 by Jaqueline Steiner and Bess Hawes, and made famous by the Kingston Trio's recording of it in 1959:
The MTS Song
Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
Who was put to a fateful test.
He used to be a chemist,
A very good chemist
'Till they made him an MTS.
Charlie lost his uniqueness
When bean-counters from Bechtel
Forced him to make a change
When he balked his boss told him,
"They need you in Lasers.
Your transfer has been arranged."
Chorus:
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may lurk forever
'neath the beams of Lasers
He's the man who never returned.
Now all day long
Charlie sits in his office
Crying, "What will become of me?
I wanna be a chemist
But now they tell me
To do Plasma Spectroscopy!"
Chorus
Charlie's colleagues go down
To the diagnostics station
Every day at quarter past two
And in between shots
They hand Charlie a sandwich
As the data come pourin' through.
Chorus
Now employees of LLNS,
Don't you think it's a scandal
That our titles are meaningless
Get our uniqueness back!
Go talk to George Miller!
Charlie's a chemist, not an MTS.
Chorus:
Or else he'll never return,
No he'll never return
And his fate will be unlearned
He may lurk forever 'neath the beams of Lasers.
He's the man who never returned.
He's the man who never returned.
He's the man who never returned.
See also: Leviathan, Inc.
The risk of such an industry best practice is that management can actually come to believe that it represents some kind of ground truth. At the old Bell Labs, my management actually told me that any MTS should be able to do any other MTS's job. As a corollary, they also told me that a good manager ought to be able to manage anything, no matter what it is.
It should be obvious that neither of these statements are true. And if they weren't true at the old Bell Labs (which is now defunct) it is even less true at the US National Laboratories, particularly those involved in maintaining the US Nuclear Weapons Stockpile. And yet, the US National Labs are adopting the MTS designation, and abandoning job classification by discipline. Why? Because the Labs have been privatized. They are no longer run by the University of California as a service to the nation and under contract to the US Department of Energy. They are run by Limited Liability Corporations, of which the University of California and Bechtel Corporation are senior partners.
You can't blame the Obama Administration for this. The delusion that everything will run better if it's run like a business is a Republican delusion, and this one was foisted on the National Labs under the Bush Administration. The first problem with this is that nobody, especially nobody in Congress, thought through the implications of privatizing the National Labs. As a result, the Labs lost many millions of dollars in federal, state, and local tax exemptions, and incurred millions of dollars in additional management fees - all of which resulted in thousands of layoffs, because the Lab's budgets were held flat. The second, longer term problem is that Research and Development (R&D) is not a business. It is a cost of doing business, and most businesses minimize that cost by not doing R&D. Or at least by doing only D (development) and not R (Research). This is because the only one thing in the Universe more inefficient than Research is ignorance.
Now the bean-counters, the efficiency experts, are forcing the National Labs to conform to industry best practices by adopting the MTS designation for all members of its scientific and engineering workforce. At first, this will be harmless. But, by making the members of the National Lab workforce look superficially like everybody else's workforce, it may enable the delusion that they can be managed by "more professional" executives from outside corporations who don't really understand what all those MTSs do. Who believe they don't have to understand, because "a good manager can manage anything." And then, with that lack of understanding, they may begin to mixmaster the workforce whenever they need to move people around to save jobs, because "any MTS should be able to do any MTS's job." It took about 20 years for that mentality to destroy Bell Labs. The risk is that the same mentality may be allowed to creep into the National Labs, which are part of what maintains our National Security in terms of both defense and energy.
Now the National Labs may fare better than Bell Labs, because Bell Labs was funded by a competitive business (once the old AT&T was broken up in order to settle a lawsuit by MCI). And as I said, industry survives competition by doing as little research as possible. The National Labs are funded by the US taxpayers, as represented by their President and their Congress. That should give us all confidence, right?
Oh, well. I might as well close with some levity. Imagine these words sung to the tune of the "M.T.A Song," (better known as "Charlie on the MTA," written in 1948 by Jaqueline Steiner and Bess Hawes, and made famous by the Kingston Trio's recording of it in 1959:
The MTS Song
Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
Who was put to a fateful test.
He used to be a chemist,
A very good chemist
'Till they made him an MTS.
Charlie lost his uniqueness
When bean-counters from Bechtel
Forced him to make a change
When he balked his boss told him,
"They need you in Lasers.
Your transfer has been arranged."
Chorus:
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may lurk forever
'neath the beams of Lasers
He's the man who never returned.
Now all day long
Charlie sits in his office
Crying, "What will become of me?
I wanna be a chemist
But now they tell me
To do Plasma Spectroscopy!"
Chorus
Charlie's colleagues go down
To the diagnostics station
Every day at quarter past two
And in between shots
They hand Charlie a sandwich
As the data come pourin' through.
Chorus
Now employees of LLNS,
Don't you think it's a scandal
That our titles are meaningless
Get our uniqueness back!
Go talk to George Miller!
Charlie's a chemist, not an MTS.
Chorus:
Or else he'll never return,
No he'll never return
And his fate will be unlearned
He may lurk forever 'neath the beams of Lasers.
He's the man who never returned.
He's the man who never returned.
He's the man who never returned.
See also: Leviathan, Inc.
04 February 2010
Change You Can Believe In
Michael Barone has published this article claiming that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been putting out junk science. Well, it has. It has also published real science, some of which has been based on careful work done by people I know. He also states that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has become a religion, complete with Original Sin (carbon emissions) and the sale of Indulgences (Carbon Credits). That is also true, and that part of the reason why the junk science was allowed in.
Now, I'm not a climate scientist, but I am a physicist, and a former theoretical type who has become sort of Swiss Army Knife kind of generalist. I'm also religious, specifically Christian. With these two attributes in my background, I have these observations to make.
First of all, the climate is changing. It has always changed, and it always will will. See The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization, by Brian Fagan. Briefly, the world has been getting warmer ever since the last Ice Age ended some 12,000 years ago. This warming has been punctuated by some impressive cold (and dry) snaps, one of which turned the former Fertile Crescent into a desert. But the long-term trend has been ever upward. The short name for this is "good weather," as it has contributed to the development of agriculture and with it the origin and growth of complex civilization.
Second, atmospheric carbon dioxide has been a lagging indicator in all the previous upticks in global warming. As the world warms, CO2 is outgassed from the oceans and the tundra, possibly forming a positive feedback loop which strengthens the warming trend. If the current increase in CO2 is a leading indicator, it will be the first time. On the other hand, this could indeed be the case, because a significant fraction of the CO2 has been injected into the atmosphere by humans burning fossilized carbon. We know this, because we can do carbon-14 radioisotopic dating of the carbon in atmospheric CO2.
Third, we now have coupled Ocean-Atmosphere General Circulation Models (OAGCMs) that, together with their component models for clouds, dust, natural biological effects, etc., mimic the long term historical climate pattern pretty well, and produce predictions that are more-or-less consistent with one another, and look like Earth, not Mars or Venus. That is to say, modern climate predictions are no longer based on how quickly or slowly the climate models diverge from what looks like Earth. The predictions are reasonable, but noisy.
Fourth, the noise. One major source of noise is the ENSO, or El Niño Southern Oscillation in the Pacific Ocean, which is dumping so much rain on the US right now. The uptick, El Niño, actually temporarily warms the entire globe a bit. Conversely, the downtick, La Niña, cools it a bit. So, you have to look for trends in noisy data, and match them to trends in noisy predictions. It's a little tricky, especially if you don't have a deep understanding of the statistical techniques available. And even for decent scientists, it's easy to make a mistake and draw a wrong conclusion. This is what some of the critics of the IGPP have done. As they say, "Mistakes were made," on both sides of the climate debate.
Fifth, the ersatz religion. As G. K. Chesterton said,
Here I think Barone is on point. AGW has become a matter of perverted faith for some people, and therefore, they become disinclined to scrutinize anything that supports their agenda. They are willing to pass on whatever sounds like it agrees with them, in order to stir the people to repentance and reform before Nature visits catastrophe upon them. But stating something as fact without checking it out is what Harry Frankfurt calls bullshit. And it does real damage to the study of climate change, its causes, its effects, and what we can do about it, because it obscures the real science that has been and is being done.
Sixth, what to do about it. The AGW religionists want to put clamps on the global capitalism by Cap and Trade policies that would create markets in carbon emissions offsets. There are precedents for this other than the sale of Indulgences by the pre-Reformation Church. All governments sell or lease the Radio-Frequency RF Spectrum to broadcasters and telecom companies, for example. But the goal of Cap and Trade is to force (not foster) innovation to generate energy in other ways than burning fossil fuels.
We could skip the whip of Cap and Trade, and jump to its goal: innovation. We could try to figure out how to foster innovation to develop and investment to implement alternative energy technologies. Under Cap and Trade, we will have to do that anyway, but why not cut to the chase, and skip the bad economic consequences? After all, we have another incentive to stop burning fossil fuel: most of the world's known remaining petroleum reserves are under control of petro-dictatorships that are ultimately hostile to the peace of the whole world, not just that of the United States. Given that there are real and credible indications that anthropogenic carbon emissions may be accelerating global warming faster than humans can accomodate without an increase in warfare (and we don't need that, do we?) developing alternatives (including nuclear energy) to carbon burning energy is the prudent thing to do.
Finally, there is real religion, and its temptations. In order to guard against idolatrous faith, one must embrace doubt of one's own opinions no matter how cherished. That is why I'm reading the latest volume of Fr. John P. Meier's A Marginal Jew: Re-thinking the Historical Jesus. Look for me to expand my review of the first three volumes when I'm done.
Note Added: See climatologist John R. Cristy's view of the climategate scandal at the University of East Anglia.
Now, I'm not a climate scientist, but I am a physicist, and a former theoretical type who has become sort of Swiss Army Knife kind of generalist. I'm also religious, specifically Christian. With these two attributes in my background, I have these observations to make.
First of all, the climate is changing. It has always changed, and it always will will. See The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization, by Brian Fagan. Briefly, the world has been getting warmer ever since the last Ice Age ended some 12,000 years ago. This warming has been punctuated by some impressive cold (and dry) snaps, one of which turned the former Fertile Crescent into a desert. But the long-term trend has been ever upward. The short name for this is "good weather," as it has contributed to the development of agriculture and with it the origin and growth of complex civilization.
Second, atmospheric carbon dioxide has been a lagging indicator in all the previous upticks in global warming. As the world warms, CO2 is outgassed from the oceans and the tundra, possibly forming a positive feedback loop which strengthens the warming trend. If the current increase in CO2 is a leading indicator, it will be the first time. On the other hand, this could indeed be the case, because a significant fraction of the CO2 has been injected into the atmosphere by humans burning fossilized carbon. We know this, because we can do carbon-14 radioisotopic dating of the carbon in atmospheric CO2.
Third, we now have coupled Ocean-Atmosphere General Circulation Models (OAGCMs) that, together with their component models for clouds, dust, natural biological effects, etc., mimic the long term historical climate pattern pretty well, and produce predictions that are more-or-less consistent with one another, and look like Earth, not Mars or Venus. That is to say, modern climate predictions are no longer based on how quickly or slowly the climate models diverge from what looks like Earth. The predictions are reasonable, but noisy.
Fourth, the noise. One major source of noise is the ENSO, or El Niño Southern Oscillation in the Pacific Ocean, which is dumping so much rain on the US right now. The uptick, El Niño, actually temporarily warms the entire globe a bit. Conversely, the downtick, La Niña, cools it a bit. So, you have to look for trends in noisy data, and match them to trends in noisy predictions. It's a little tricky, especially if you don't have a deep understanding of the statistical techniques available. And even for decent scientists, it's easy to make a mistake and draw a wrong conclusion. This is what some of the critics of the IGPP have done. As they say, "Mistakes were made," on both sides of the climate debate.
Fifth, the ersatz religion. As G. K. Chesterton said,
When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.
Here I think Barone is on point. AGW has become a matter of perverted faith for some people, and therefore, they become disinclined to scrutinize anything that supports their agenda. They are willing to pass on whatever sounds like it agrees with them, in order to stir the people to repentance and reform before Nature visits catastrophe upon them. But stating something as fact without checking it out is what Harry Frankfurt calls bullshit. And it does real damage to the study of climate change, its causes, its effects, and what we can do about it, because it obscures the real science that has been and is being done.
Sixth, what to do about it. The AGW religionists want to put clamps on the global capitalism by Cap and Trade policies that would create markets in carbon emissions offsets. There are precedents for this other than the sale of Indulgences by the pre-Reformation Church. All governments sell or lease the Radio-Frequency RF Spectrum to broadcasters and telecom companies, for example. But the goal of Cap and Trade is to force (not foster) innovation to generate energy in other ways than burning fossil fuels.
We could skip the whip of Cap and Trade, and jump to its goal: innovation. We could try to figure out how to foster innovation to develop and investment to implement alternative energy technologies. Under Cap and Trade, we will have to do that anyway, but why not cut to the chase, and skip the bad economic consequences? After all, we have another incentive to stop burning fossil fuel: most of the world's known remaining petroleum reserves are under control of petro-dictatorships that are ultimately hostile to the peace of the whole world, not just that of the United States. Given that there are real and credible indications that anthropogenic carbon emissions may be accelerating global warming faster than humans can accomodate without an increase in warfare (and we don't need that, do we?) developing alternatives (including nuclear energy) to carbon burning energy is the prudent thing to do.
Finally, there is real religion, and its temptations. In order to guard against idolatrous faith, one must embrace doubt of one's own opinions no matter how cherished. That is why I'm reading the latest volume of Fr. John P. Meier's A Marginal Jew: Re-thinking the Historical Jesus. Look for me to expand my review of the first three volumes when I'm done.
Note Added: See climatologist John R. Cristy's view of the climategate scandal at the University of East Anglia.
06 November 2008
VCBC's Political Platform
A Work in Progress
2004, revised 2008
It is not enough to criticize
Republicans (the party of rural districts) and Democrats (the party of
urban districts). One must offer a positive agenda. I steal from both
camps to gather the planks our DogPAC Political Platform, which I offer
to any party that has the imagination to take them on.
Abortion.
Write and pass a law providing limited use of abortion similar to the
provisions of the Roe v Wade decision. This would move abortion out of
the realm of mere judicial opinion, and free up the minds of Congress,
the President, and the public to examine other criteria in the appointment of federal judges.
Affirmative Action. Bring it back, but base it on socio-economic class rather than race. This makes it fair, broadens its base of support, and plays to the American spirit of wanting to give the poor of any race, both native-born and immigrant, a leg-up into the middle class. To the extent that it works, it will also help poor people "buy into" middle-class American values.
Balanced Budget. Establish a feedback system for Congress and the White House in which the elected officials and their staffs forgo their pay when appropriations bills are late, and get pay cuts or bonuses depending on whether the federal budget shows a deficit or a surplus.
Bi-lingual Education. Bring it back, too, but stand it on its head. Require that every school-child demonstrate competency in at least two living natural spoken languages, one of which must be English, in order to advance beyond 6th grade. (If an immigrant kid is older than 6th grade, require that he or she demonstrate competency in English to advance beyond whatever grade he or she is in.) Use English-Immersion to teach immigrant kids (because it works best with most kids), with English-as-a-Second-Language classes available for those who want it. This will make America more immigrant-friendly: if you need a translator, just ask a kid. It will also make America more cosmopolitan — our whole population will be able to listen to and read non-English news broadcasts. We will also gain a broader class of international business people, and more people to work in foreign intelligence and defense for national security.
Defense. We need to execute the next revolution in military affairs — we need to build Thomas Barnett's "sysadmin" force that can move in and run a country after our Rumsfeldian fast strike force has knocked down its military and government. And we need to augment that force with a policy change — leave as many employees and administrators of the old system in place as possible, and supervise their training of replacements for the people that can't be left in place. We also need to change our policy of war and peace: we need to get involved in fewer wars, and to be much more forceful when we do get involved. Ever since WWII the US has fought wars by doing the moral equivalent of punching a man in the face hard enough to knock him down, and then helping him get up and waiting around until he hits us back. We need to do the equivalent of stepping on his neck, and then telling him to do what we say. This will be expensive, because we will have to invest in people - both in terms of a larger military and in terms of paying the locals until their tax base can support them.
Energy and Environment. Create a long-term bipartisan energy policy that provides progressively more energy for more Americans with fewer environmental consequences. Part of this means an all-out effort to solve two problems: the efficient conversion of sunlight to electricity, and the efficient, safe, and economical storage of hydrogen as a pollution-free fuel to power cars. How to distribute hydrogen? Don't! Distribute electricity generated from nuclear and solar power and use it to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen at the pump. That way we can cut pollution, decrease the human contribution to global climate change, and get the price of oil to fall — and as the price of oil goes down, the level of freedom in the Arab world will go up (because the governments there will have to turn to their populaces for money), which in turn will improve the quality of Islam and the peace of the world.
Free Trade. US jobs go overseas not because US wages are too high, but because non-US wages are too low. The American Labor Movement needs to internationalize itself and organize labor worldwide. The US government may be able to smooth the way a little, but the drive must come from labor itself.
Health care. Streamline the laws, regulations and procedures in order to reduce the administrative overhead costs of health care, and to reduce the time and cost of the process to develop, approve and distribute new medications. We need to develop a free market in health care by making most health-care outcome statistics (by facility, by practitioner) easily accessible public knowledge. We also need to develop an "assigned risk pool" in which all health-care insurers must participate in order to do business in this country. And yes, it needs to cover the cost of health care and mental health care for the indigent, the working poor, and aliens, legal and otherwise. It's just bad public health policy to let groups of people be sick — i.e., reservoirs for emerging diseases. We should also develop a list of diseases endemic to the developing world, that major pharmaceutical companies must work to cure or prevent, in order to participate in the US market, and encourage all other countries to do the same. Also, a technical detail: we need to develop a uniform electronic medical care record that will follow a person anywhere in the world.
Homeland Security. Let's encourage cities to figure out how to help neighborhoods defend themselves (with the aid of the police and other departments) and use federal funds to propagate the successful models (community policing, Neighborhood Watch, etc.). Let us reinforce the practice of busting local criminals on local charges who may be involved in supporting or committing terrorism. We also need to leverage work to reduce the consequences of natural disasters (epidemics, etc.) to "shrink the targets" we present to international terrorists.
Homelessness. Put more money and people into setting up and running group homes with psychiatric and social services. This is what we said we would do in the 1950s when we began shutting down large state-run mental institutions. We did not follow through. The result was a surge in both the homeless and the prison populations. Of course we would need to require that residents get and stay clean of drugs and alcohol.
Illegal Drugs. Legalize them just like we legalized alcohol, in order to drain the profit out of the drug trade. But create a "bottom tier" of health care for people who are addicted to them. This would emphasize drug and alcohol rehab and palliative care, the goal being to minimize the lifetime cost of care.
Immigration. We need to work with the government of Mexico to create a special status that recognizes and helps the population that washes back and forth across the US-Mexico border. We also need to work with US and Mexican employment agencies to arrange transportation, housing and employment for temporary (or guest) workers. That way the employment agencies pocket the money that currently goes to criminal organizations that smuggle people into the US. In other words, we should try to regulate the flow of immigration, which could be profitable for all concerned, rather than to stop it, which could be both costly and impossible.
Nuclear Weapons. We need to recognize that the abolition of nuclear weapons will not make peace, rather, making peace will lead to the abolition of nuclear weapons. To test this proposition, let's start by working to end the decades old state of war on the Korean peninsula. And until there is peace on earth, let us commit to keeping the US nuclear arsenal safe, secure, and sustainable.
Space. Return the US space program to exploring our solar system using robots and space-based robotic telescopes. Redirect the manned space program to spend most of its efort developing (both internally at NASA and externally by means of grants and competitions) a way to get humans safely to Low Earth Orbit and back to the ground for less than $100 US per pound of body weight. This would re-vitalize space science, spur developments in robotics, and make manned space exploration commercially viable.
Welfare to Work. Its a great idea for many people, but let's streamline it so that it gets people on their economic feet without wasting their time trying to figure out the bureaucracy. Let's also make sure that the bureaucracy provides "one-stop-shopping" for access to all the support a prospective or beginning wage-earner needs: including but not limited to child and elder care, health care, help with managing and planning finances, arranging transportation, social services, psychological services, marriage counseling, parenting counseling, drug rehabilitation services, etc. Let's remove all disincentives to getting and staying married, while we are at it.
Affirmative Action. Bring it back, but base it on socio-economic class rather than race. This makes it fair, broadens its base of support, and plays to the American spirit of wanting to give the poor of any race, both native-born and immigrant, a leg-up into the middle class. To the extent that it works, it will also help poor people "buy into" middle-class American values.
Balanced Budget. Establish a feedback system for Congress and the White House in which the elected officials and their staffs forgo their pay when appropriations bills are late, and get pay cuts or bonuses depending on whether the federal budget shows a deficit or a surplus.
Bi-lingual Education. Bring it back, too, but stand it on its head. Require that every school-child demonstrate competency in at least two living natural spoken languages, one of which must be English, in order to advance beyond 6th grade. (If an immigrant kid is older than 6th grade, require that he or she demonstrate competency in English to advance beyond whatever grade he or she is in.) Use English-Immersion to teach immigrant kids (because it works best with most kids), with English-as-a-Second-Language classes available for those who want it. This will make America more immigrant-friendly: if you need a translator, just ask a kid. It will also make America more cosmopolitan — our whole population will be able to listen to and read non-English news broadcasts. We will also gain a broader class of international business people, and more people to work in foreign intelligence and defense for national security.
Defense. We need to execute the next revolution in military affairs — we need to build Thomas Barnett's "sysadmin" force that can move in and run a country after our Rumsfeldian fast strike force has knocked down its military and government. And we need to augment that force with a policy change — leave as many employees and administrators of the old system in place as possible, and supervise their training of replacements for the people that can't be left in place. We also need to change our policy of war and peace: we need to get involved in fewer wars, and to be much more forceful when we do get involved. Ever since WWII the US has fought wars by doing the moral equivalent of punching a man in the face hard enough to knock him down, and then helping him get up and waiting around until he hits us back. We need to do the equivalent of stepping on his neck, and then telling him to do what we say. This will be expensive, because we will have to invest in people - both in terms of a larger military and in terms of paying the locals until their tax base can support them.
Energy and Environment. Create a long-term bipartisan energy policy that provides progressively more energy for more Americans with fewer environmental consequences. Part of this means an all-out effort to solve two problems: the efficient conversion of sunlight to electricity, and the efficient, safe, and economical storage of hydrogen as a pollution-free fuel to power cars. How to distribute hydrogen? Don't! Distribute electricity generated from nuclear and solar power and use it to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen at the pump. That way we can cut pollution, decrease the human contribution to global climate change, and get the price of oil to fall — and as the price of oil goes down, the level of freedom in the Arab world will go up (because the governments there will have to turn to their populaces for money), which in turn will improve the quality of Islam and the peace of the world.
Free Trade. US jobs go overseas not because US wages are too high, but because non-US wages are too low. The American Labor Movement needs to internationalize itself and organize labor worldwide. The US government may be able to smooth the way a little, but the drive must come from labor itself.
Health care. Streamline the laws, regulations and procedures in order to reduce the administrative overhead costs of health care, and to reduce the time and cost of the process to develop, approve and distribute new medications. We need to develop a free market in health care by making most health-care outcome statistics (by facility, by practitioner) easily accessible public knowledge. We also need to develop an "assigned risk pool" in which all health-care insurers must participate in order to do business in this country. And yes, it needs to cover the cost of health care and mental health care for the indigent, the working poor, and aliens, legal and otherwise. It's just bad public health policy to let groups of people be sick — i.e., reservoirs for emerging diseases. We should also develop a list of diseases endemic to the developing world, that major pharmaceutical companies must work to cure or prevent, in order to participate in the US market, and encourage all other countries to do the same. Also, a technical detail: we need to develop a uniform electronic medical care record that will follow a person anywhere in the world.
Homeland Security. Let's encourage cities to figure out how to help neighborhoods defend themselves (with the aid of the police and other departments) and use federal funds to propagate the successful models (community policing, Neighborhood Watch, etc.). Let us reinforce the practice of busting local criminals on local charges who may be involved in supporting or committing terrorism. We also need to leverage work to reduce the consequences of natural disasters (epidemics, etc.) to "shrink the targets" we present to international terrorists.
Homelessness. Put more money and people into setting up and running group homes with psychiatric and social services. This is what we said we would do in the 1950s when we began shutting down large state-run mental institutions. We did not follow through. The result was a surge in both the homeless and the prison populations. Of course we would need to require that residents get and stay clean of drugs and alcohol.
Illegal Drugs. Legalize them just like we legalized alcohol, in order to drain the profit out of the drug trade. But create a "bottom tier" of health care for people who are addicted to them. This would emphasize drug and alcohol rehab and palliative care, the goal being to minimize the lifetime cost of care.
Immigration. We need to work with the government of Mexico to create a special status that recognizes and helps the population that washes back and forth across the US-Mexico border. We also need to work with US and Mexican employment agencies to arrange transportation, housing and employment for temporary (or guest) workers. That way the employment agencies pocket the money that currently goes to criminal organizations that smuggle people into the US. In other words, we should try to regulate the flow of immigration, which could be profitable for all concerned, rather than to stop it, which could be both costly and impossible.
Nuclear Weapons. We need to recognize that the abolition of nuclear weapons will not make peace, rather, making peace will lead to the abolition of nuclear weapons. To test this proposition, let's start by working to end the decades old state of war on the Korean peninsula. And until there is peace on earth, let us commit to keeping the US nuclear arsenal safe, secure, and sustainable.
Space. Return the US space program to exploring our solar system using robots and space-based robotic telescopes. Redirect the manned space program to spend most of its efort developing (both internally at NASA and externally by means of grants and competitions) a way to get humans safely to Low Earth Orbit and back to the ground for less than $100 US per pound of body weight. This would re-vitalize space science, spur developments in robotics, and make manned space exploration commercially viable.
Welfare to Work. Its a great idea for many people, but let's streamline it so that it gets people on their economic feet without wasting their time trying to figure out the bureaucracy. Let's also make sure that the bureaucracy provides "one-stop-shopping" for access to all the support a prospective or beginning wage-earner needs: including but not limited to child and elder care, health care, help with managing and planning finances, arranging transportation, social services, psychological services, marriage counseling, parenting counseling, drug rehabilitation services, etc. Let's remove all disincentives to getting and staying married, while we are at it.
01 November 2008
It Takes a Tribe to Raise a Teen
I remember Hillary Rodham Clinton asserting that, "It takes a village to raise a child." And various right-wing commentators saying "No, it takes a family."
I have a alternate aphorism. It takes a tribe.
From infancy to adolescence the formative unit in the child's experience is indeed the family. But modern society progressively dis-empowers the family with regard to controlling the child's reality. First there are public and private schools, which teach in loco parentis, in the place of the parents. Unless you home-school, the state begins driving a wedge between your experience and your child's in Kindergarten.
This was not much of a problem in small, insular communities where everyone knew everyone else, and mothers stayed home. The gossip network was all it took to keep tabs on your kids. And your informal network of acquaintances, from neighbors to the police, could give a lot of support when it came to discipline. But, in parallel with the feminist movement's successful integration of women into the workplace came the economic necessity for families to do so. The result was that in the 1980's an anti-drug slogan circulated asking, "It's five o'clock - do you know where your children are?" Families began losing their grip on their kids at earlier and earlier ages.
As this was going on, technology made possible a mass media-culture, which promptly mutated into the world's first mass youth-culture. Youth-culture provided an identity-group, a tribe, in which adolescents could do what adolescents must always do - develop an identity that is their own instead of their parents'. Their first way-station to becoming their own persons is the tribe. The tribe used to be local, civil society, which exerted a powerful influence toward adopting the values that would sustain civil society, which were more or less the values of the parents.
But the youth-culture offered a tribe that had more tenuous connections to society-sustaining values. And then, another technological revolution brought the fragmentation of mass-media and mass-culture. Now you can see a group of ten kids with ten iPods listening to ten different genres of music at the same time. As there are now a plethora of music genres, there are a plethora of youth cultures, sub-tribes waiting to receive the adolescent, to be consumed by the adolescent, to reward the adolescent for consumption, and eventually to consume the adolescent. The result is the relative (to past history) dis-enfranchisement of parents when it comes to shaping the development of their adolescent children.
Some of these sub-tribes are beneficial or at least benign. Some are not, like criminal gangs, extremist groups, and radical-religious terrorist cells. In their combination of false confidence that they know what they are doing and their fear of being rejected by their chosen tribe, adolescents are primed by nature to fall prey to seductive yet superficial ideologies. Ideologies that offer a quick fix to the problems of identity and maturity: help kill the Zionist occupiers and be a man, kill them yourself and be a hero, get killed killing them and be a martyr.
What civil society lacks is a deliberate and lengthy "tribal" initiation into adulthood. To the extent that we fail to provide it, our kids will find tribes of their own. And some of them are profoundly uncivil.
I write these thoughts in the abstract, but I have a concrete example in mind. It is the autobiography of Ed Husain, a British-born Muslim of Indian/Pakistani descent, entitled The Islamist, reviewed here.
I have a alternate aphorism. It takes a tribe.
From infancy to adolescence the formative unit in the child's experience is indeed the family. But modern society progressively dis-empowers the family with regard to controlling the child's reality. First there are public and private schools, which teach in loco parentis, in the place of the parents. Unless you home-school, the state begins driving a wedge between your experience and your child's in Kindergarten.
This was not much of a problem in small, insular communities where everyone knew everyone else, and mothers stayed home. The gossip network was all it took to keep tabs on your kids. And your informal network of acquaintances, from neighbors to the police, could give a lot of support when it came to discipline. But, in parallel with the feminist movement's successful integration of women into the workplace came the economic necessity for families to do so. The result was that in the 1980's an anti-drug slogan circulated asking, "It's five o'clock - do you know where your children are?" Families began losing their grip on their kids at earlier and earlier ages.
As this was going on, technology made possible a mass media-culture, which promptly mutated into the world's first mass youth-culture. Youth-culture provided an identity-group, a tribe, in which adolescents could do what adolescents must always do - develop an identity that is their own instead of their parents'. Their first way-station to becoming their own persons is the tribe. The tribe used to be local, civil society, which exerted a powerful influence toward adopting the values that would sustain civil society, which were more or less the values of the parents.
But the youth-culture offered a tribe that had more tenuous connections to society-sustaining values. And then, another technological revolution brought the fragmentation of mass-media and mass-culture. Now you can see a group of ten kids with ten iPods listening to ten different genres of music at the same time. As there are now a plethora of music genres, there are a plethora of youth cultures, sub-tribes waiting to receive the adolescent, to be consumed by the adolescent, to reward the adolescent for consumption, and eventually to consume the adolescent. The result is the relative (to past history) dis-enfranchisement of parents when it comes to shaping the development of their adolescent children.
Some of these sub-tribes are beneficial or at least benign. Some are not, like criminal gangs, extremist groups, and radical-religious terrorist cells. In their combination of false confidence that they know what they are doing and their fear of being rejected by their chosen tribe, adolescents are primed by nature to fall prey to seductive yet superficial ideologies. Ideologies that offer a quick fix to the problems of identity and maturity: help kill the Zionist occupiers and be a man, kill them yourself and be a hero, get killed killing them and be a martyr.
What civil society lacks is a deliberate and lengthy "tribal" initiation into adulthood. To the extent that we fail to provide it, our kids will find tribes of their own. And some of them are profoundly uncivil.
I write these thoughts in the abstract, but I have a concrete example in mind. It is the autobiography of Ed Husain, a British-born Muslim of Indian/Pakistani descent, entitled The Islamist, reviewed here.
15 October 2008
Right and Wrong on Energy
Yes, we are in a short-term (a few years) financial crisis. The slowdown in the housing market created a shockwave in the credit markets due to the securitization of too many bad loans, which had been pushed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the Clinton Administration, which wanted to extend the opportunity of home ownership to classes of Americans who were previously underrepresented among homeowners, in itself a laudable goal, even if the approach is proving to be self-defeating. The following Bush Administration was distracted by need to pump up the economy with cheap money (low interest rates) after the slump following the 9/11 attacks. This accelerated the run-up in housing prices, which was stopped only when the average American family could no longer afford to buy the average American home. In other words, both parties get the blame on this one.
But we face a long-term financial crisis caused by our inability to produce our own energy. Again, we turn to the Clinton Administration, which cancelled the Integral Fast Reactor. The IFR is able to take almost any fissionable material as its initial fuel, including natural (unenriched) uranium, spent nuclear fuel, and weapons grade uranium or plutonium. Whatever the fuel, it burns it up leaving only short-lived "fission fragments" that decay within days to a few decades. The long-lived radioisotopes like plutonium are simply burned up to create energy. And the IFR is passively safe (meaning without the intervention of electronics or active systems). In the case of a loss of coolant accident (LOCA) the IFR simply shuts down and uses natural conduction and convection to reject its waste heat. In hindsight, it's hard to believe that the Clinton Administration cancelled the IFR and that the Bush Administration did not revive it.
To be fair, the IFR is not a panacea for the world. Given non-plutonium fuel, it first breeds plutonium, which it then burns up. IFR proponents claim that since the bred fuel contains really hot (radioactively and thermally) fission fragments, the bred fuel would be "self-protecting." However, I think a nation-state sufficiently determined to extract the plutonium before it gets consumed could build robots that could handle that fuel.
Now there is another concept that could generate similar amounts of clean, safe energy - LIFE, or Laser Ignition Fusion Fission Energy. The idea is to use lasers to implode a pellet of deuterium/tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) fuel, causing it to undergo fusion, which yields helium and neutrons. The neutrons irradiate a blanket of fissionable fuel (the same fuels as IFR) which breed up to plutonium, which then burns up to provide energy.
Both concepts drastically reduce the need for burial of waste in a facility like Yucca Mountain. Both offer the possibility of completely destroying excess nuclear weapons material. Both could produce huge amounts of energy without the possibility of nuclear meltdowns. It's time to pursue them, together with the technologies that will enable ground transportation to operate on either the electric power these reactors could produce, or the hydrogen that the electricity could be used to make.
We need to stop sending $7B to countries hostile to our interests to buy petroleum, only to burn it up and dump the excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And new reactor technologies like IFR and LIFE are the way to do it.
The difference between Obama and McCain is that nuclear power is a minor component of Obama's plan. It is a centerpiece of McCain's plan. In that Obama is wrong and McCain is right. There is just no way to concentrate the energy of non-nuclear sources enough to provide the power that America and the world will need in the long term. (Not because we haven't invented the ways to concentrate them - it is thermodynamically impossible to do so, for reasons similar to why it is impossible to build a perpetual motion machine.)
The world knows this. The rest of the developed countries in the world have built or will build safe, clean nuclear power plants, whether we do or not. If we do not, we will fall behind economically, making future generations of Americans ever poorer with respect to the rest of the world. We will no longer be able to champion the advance of liberal democracy, and will have to rely on the good will of others. As you look at the others around the world, this prospect should not inspire your confidence.
But we face a long-term financial crisis caused by our inability to produce our own energy. Again, we turn to the Clinton Administration, which cancelled the Integral Fast Reactor. The IFR is able to take almost any fissionable material as its initial fuel, including natural (unenriched) uranium, spent nuclear fuel, and weapons grade uranium or plutonium. Whatever the fuel, it burns it up leaving only short-lived "fission fragments" that decay within days to a few decades. The long-lived radioisotopes like plutonium are simply burned up to create energy. And the IFR is passively safe (meaning without the intervention of electronics or active systems). In the case of a loss of coolant accident (LOCA) the IFR simply shuts down and uses natural conduction and convection to reject its waste heat. In hindsight, it's hard to believe that the Clinton Administration cancelled the IFR and that the Bush Administration did not revive it.
To be fair, the IFR is not a panacea for the world. Given non-plutonium fuel, it first breeds plutonium, which it then burns up. IFR proponents claim that since the bred fuel contains really hot (radioactively and thermally) fission fragments, the bred fuel would be "self-protecting." However, I think a nation-state sufficiently determined to extract the plutonium before it gets consumed could build robots that could handle that fuel.
Now there is another concept that could generate similar amounts of clean, safe energy - LIFE, or Laser Ignition Fusion Fission Energy. The idea is to use lasers to implode a pellet of deuterium/tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) fuel, causing it to undergo fusion, which yields helium and neutrons. The neutrons irradiate a blanket of fissionable fuel (the same fuels as IFR) which breed up to plutonium, which then burns up to provide energy.
Both concepts drastically reduce the need for burial of waste in a facility like Yucca Mountain. Both offer the possibility of completely destroying excess nuclear weapons material. Both could produce huge amounts of energy without the possibility of nuclear meltdowns. It's time to pursue them, together with the technologies that will enable ground transportation to operate on either the electric power these reactors could produce, or the hydrogen that the electricity could be used to make.
We need to stop sending $7B to countries hostile to our interests to buy petroleum, only to burn it up and dump the excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And new reactor technologies like IFR and LIFE are the way to do it.
The difference between Obama and McCain is that nuclear power is a minor component of Obama's plan. It is a centerpiece of McCain's plan. In that Obama is wrong and McCain is right. There is just no way to concentrate the energy of non-nuclear sources enough to provide the power that America and the world will need in the long term. (Not because we haven't invented the ways to concentrate them - it is thermodynamically impossible to do so, for reasons similar to why it is impossible to build a perpetual motion machine.)
The world knows this. The rest of the developed countries in the world have built or will build safe, clean nuclear power plants, whether we do or not. If we do not, we will fall behind economically, making future generations of Americans ever poorer with respect to the rest of the world. We will no longer be able to champion the advance of liberal democracy, and will have to rely on the good will of others. As you look at the others around the world, this prospect should not inspire your confidence.
23 September 2008
Blame and Fixin's for the Financial Meltdown
An old Soviet joke goes like this.
So now the world is in a deep financial crisis. There is plenty of blame to go around, and I'll let the usual pundits spread it. Here I note that quite a few physicists and mathematicians have got into analyzing the financial markets. They are the ones who invented all kinds of fancy and obscure classes of "derivative" investments, which are a big part of the current mess. They did it because they were being paid by investment houses to figure out how to make more money for them.
But there is something very big and very obvious (to a physicist) that they failed to do. I can prove it to you very simply. All you need do is go to Amazon.com and search inside the contents of Johannes Voit's The Statistical Mechanics of Financial Markets for the word, "stability."
You won't find it, because it's not there. Physicists, the people who can spend lifetimes studying the stability or instability of dynamical systems when perturbed by physical influences large and small, have largely neglected the stability or instability of financial systems.
Why? Because they were paid by investors, not regulators. All the while the investment houses were developing more intricate investments, the regulators were asleep at the wheel.
There are many things that must be done to stabilize the financial markets. Nationalizing parts of them and creating a US sovereign wealth fund may or may not be one of them. But surely, one of those things is for the regulators to hire physicists and mathematicians to understand what makes markets stable or unstable, and to help craft regulations to stabilize them.
Upon becoming Premier of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev finds two envelopes on top of his new desk. The handwriting on them is from his immediate predecessor, Krushchev. On the outside, one envelope says, "Open me during your first crisis." The other says, "OPen me during your second crisis."
In due time, Brezhnev faces his first crisis, opens the first envelope, and unfolds the paper inside. It reads simply, "Blame me." Naturally, Brezhnev takes the advice and weathers the crisis.
When his second crisis occurs, Brezhnev consults the second envelope. Inside it reads, "Prepare two envelopes..."
So now the world is in a deep financial crisis. There is plenty of blame to go around, and I'll let the usual pundits spread it. Here I note that quite a few physicists and mathematicians have got into analyzing the financial markets. They are the ones who invented all kinds of fancy and obscure classes of "derivative" investments, which are a big part of the current mess. They did it because they were being paid by investment houses to figure out how to make more money for them.
But there is something very big and very obvious (to a physicist) that they failed to do. I can prove it to you very simply. All you need do is go to Amazon.com and search inside the contents of Johannes Voit's The Statistical Mechanics of Financial Markets for the word, "stability."
You won't find it, because it's not there. Physicists, the people who can spend lifetimes studying the stability or instability of dynamical systems when perturbed by physical influences large and small, have largely neglected the stability or instability of financial systems.
Why? Because they were paid by investors, not regulators. All the while the investment houses were developing more intricate investments, the regulators were asleep at the wheel.
There are many things that must be done to stabilize the financial markets. Nationalizing parts of them and creating a US sovereign wealth fund may or may not be one of them. But surely, one of those things is for the regulators to hire physicists and mathematicians to understand what makes markets stable or unstable, and to help craft regulations to stabilize them.
29 January 2008
Supervising the National Laboratories
Whenever I begin to prepare his dinner, my dog Pongo is underfoot."He's making sure you stay focussed and get the job done on time," said my wife. "He's supervising you."
In other words, being in management does not guarantee that you are a higher order of being than the workers you supervise. The most talented managers realize this, and actively recruit people who have talents that they themselves may lack. This is because they are confident in their managerial talent, a constellation of abilities that involves intellect, psyche, and soul. There simply is no human activity more demanding and engrossing than managing well.
The rewards are more than monetary. The biggest reward is that you can change the world, at least for those people within your sphere of influence. And sometimes you can change the world, period.
If these statements about management are true of ordinary enterprises, they are much more true of the Research and Development (R&D) enterprises known as the US National Laboratories. But the National Laboratories are under pressure. Los Alamos and Livermore, once supervised by the University of California under contract to the US Department of Energy, are now run by Limited Liability Corporations (LANS, LLC. and LINS, LLC., respectively). The idea (traceable to David Lee Hobson, Republican Congressman from Ohio) was that the National Labs would operate more cost effectively and with fewer security problems if they were supervised by real businesses.
The National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA, a part of the US Department of Energy) was forced to put the contracts to manage the labs up for bid. I think the desire to minimize discontinuity and disruption to the labs and their workforce weighed in the NNSA's decisions to award the contracts to two consortia, both of which include major participation by the University of California.
The result: Since they are now run by private corporations, the National Labs incur about a half-billion dollars more in expenses that they did before - from additional taxes, costs of pension benefits, etc. It will take an awful lot of gains in efficiency to make up for that added burden. In particular, since the Labs are not getting any more funding than they did before (in fact their budgets are being cut), the labs have to make up for that shortfall by laying people off.
How many people? The lab budgets come from Congress by way of the Departments of Energy, Defense, and Homeland Security. Since Congress is always slow in passing a budget, the lab managers never know how much funding they are going to have until well past the beginning of the fiscal year. This means that when they have a shortfall, they have less time to make it up, and therefore the more extensive the layoffs.
I'd like to see Congress run like a business. Deliver a balanced budget, on time, every year. Maybe they need better supervision. Maybe I should sic Pongo on them.
27 January 2008
Three Ways to Kill the National Labs
Suppose you want to improve productivity at the US National Laboratories, to give the taxpayers more value for their money. Here are things that people are actually doing to achieve this, and the consequences of their efforts.
1. Take control. Apply project management techniques such as the Earned Value Method to all R&D activities, large and small, without exception. The intent is to empower managers to track every project's progress, and to identify and correct problems before they become unmanageable. The problem is that with all the overhead charges for facilities, support staff and management, a laboratory charges between $300,000 and $400,000 per year for each full-time equivalent (FTE) scientist or engineer. (No the scientists and engineers don't get that as salary - they are lucky to see 1/3 of that.) Doing all the tracking and reporting necessary to fully implement the Earned Value Method will take about 1/4 of a FTE. In other words, if you insist on using the full project management apparatus for a $100,000 project, you won't get anything but reports on the work the FTE hasn't done. Putting the burden of project management techniques on small projects paralyzes them. This leads to the next item.
2. Think big. When bringing in new projects, only go for the ones that are big in terms of dollars. The intent is to only take on projects big enough to not be crushed by the burden of project management activities. Indeed to take on only those big enough that project managements technique are absolutely necessary. The problem is that some small projects can have a big impact. A small project that finds a way to defeat improvised explosive devices (IEDs), for example, would completely turn around the situation in Iraq, where IEDs are the weapons of choice for the insurgents. In other words, doing only big projects doesn't guarantee that you are making a big difference.
3. Go for the payoff. Apply return on investment (ROI) analysis to everything the labs do. The intent is to pare away the R&D investments that aren't bearing fruit for the taxpayers. The problem is that there is no known way of determining what that return will ultimately be. Consider ARPANET, the little network that was put together so that universities doing research under the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) could collaborate and communicate their work to their contract sponsors. By any known accounting method, it would have been considered a dead loss at the time. But ARPANET grew into the internet, which grew into the world wide web, which is the medium over which you are reading this article. The value of internet commerce is now in the billions of US dollars. The taxpayers got an enormous return on their investment, but it took twenty years and did not accrue directly to the original agency that funded the groundwork.
Or for a more individualistic example, ROI analysis, the Earned Value Method, and the Six Sigma method (used for quality control and improvement) would all dictate that you fire the researcher who does experiment after experiment, which all fail, month after month. That researcher might say something lame like
That researcher might be quoting Thomas Edison.
So, while getting value out of the R&D investments in the National Laboratories is a national necessity, we need to be careful how we go about it. The techniques above work well and are indeed necessary for a large project in which the path forward and the individual steps to achieve it are well enough known to make a realistic projection of how and when the steps can be achieved. Such a project is not research and invention. It is development and innovation.
Research is inquiry into the workings of the natural world. Invention is discovering how to make something useful out of previous research. Development is the process of reworking the invention so that it can be manufactured in quantity. Innovation is the business process taking the newly manufactureable product into a real world application.
Research and invention can easily be stifled by inappropriate controls applied by people who don't themselves understand the research they are managing. Yet this is what is beginning to be imposed on the National Laboratories by the new Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs) that Congress (a Republican Congress at that) has mandated to run them.
The nation runs the risk of getting good looking balance sheets from the Labs for a while, but an ever diminishing return of new ideas, discoveries, inventions and analyses.
Rather than just thinking big bucks, the lab managers need to think big impact. The labs need to do what is important, and if that means learning to manage a mixed portfolio of large and small projects with techniques appropriate to the size and content of each, then so be it. The national labs exist to empower the nation to change the world - for better, not worse. Let that be our guide as we dialog with our funding agencies and our government about what we should do and how we should do it.
1. Take control. Apply project management techniques such as the Earned Value Method to all R&D activities, large and small, without exception. The intent is to empower managers to track every project's progress, and to identify and correct problems before they become unmanageable. The problem is that with all the overhead charges for facilities, support staff and management, a laboratory charges between $300,000 and $400,000 per year for each full-time equivalent (FTE) scientist or engineer. (No the scientists and engineers don't get that as salary - they are lucky to see 1/3 of that.) Doing all the tracking and reporting necessary to fully implement the Earned Value Method will take about 1/4 of a FTE. In other words, if you insist on using the full project management apparatus for a $100,000 project, you won't get anything but reports on the work the FTE hasn't done. Putting the burden of project management techniques on small projects paralyzes them. This leads to the next item.
2. Think big. When bringing in new projects, only go for the ones that are big in terms of dollars. The intent is to only take on projects big enough to not be crushed by the burden of project management activities. Indeed to take on only those big enough that project managements technique are absolutely necessary. The problem is that some small projects can have a big impact. A small project that finds a way to defeat improvised explosive devices (IEDs), for example, would completely turn around the situation in Iraq, where IEDs are the weapons of choice for the insurgents. In other words, doing only big projects doesn't guarantee that you are making a big difference.
3. Go for the payoff. Apply return on investment (ROI) analysis to everything the labs do. The intent is to pare away the R&D investments that aren't bearing fruit for the taxpayers. The problem is that there is no known way of determining what that return will ultimately be. Consider ARPANET, the little network that was put together so that universities doing research under the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) could collaborate and communicate their work to their contract sponsors. By any known accounting method, it would have been considered a dead loss at the time. But ARPANET grew into the internet, which grew into the world wide web, which is the medium over which you are reading this article. The value of internet commerce is now in the billions of US dollars. The taxpayers got an enormous return on their investment, but it took twenty years and did not accrue directly to the original agency that funded the groundwork.
Or for a more individualistic example, ROI analysis, the Earned Value Method, and the Six Sigma method (used for quality control and improvement) would all dictate that you fire the researcher who does experiment after experiment, which all fail, month after month. That researcher might say something lame like
"If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward".
That researcher might be quoting Thomas Edison.
So, while getting value out of the R&D investments in the National Laboratories is a national necessity, we need to be careful how we go about it. The techniques above work well and are indeed necessary for a large project in which the path forward and the individual steps to achieve it are well enough known to make a realistic projection of how and when the steps can be achieved. Such a project is not research and invention. It is development and innovation.
Research is inquiry into the workings of the natural world. Invention is discovering how to make something useful out of previous research. Development is the process of reworking the invention so that it can be manufactured in quantity. Innovation is the business process taking the newly manufactureable product into a real world application.
Research and invention can easily be stifled by inappropriate controls applied by people who don't themselves understand the research they are managing. Yet this is what is beginning to be imposed on the National Laboratories by the new Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs) that Congress (a Republican Congress at that) has mandated to run them.
The nation runs the risk of getting good looking balance sheets from the Labs for a while, but an ever diminishing return of new ideas, discoveries, inventions and analyses.
Rather than just thinking big bucks, the lab managers need to think big impact. The labs need to do what is important, and if that means learning to manage a mixed portfolio of large and small projects with techniques appropriate to the size and content of each, then so be it. The national labs exist to empower the nation to change the world - for better, not worse. Let that be our guide as we dialog with our funding agencies and our government about what we should do and how we should do it.
Blogged with Flock
08 February 2007
Flying Low
Speaking of technology, have a look at this video of low flying jets.
If you can't see anything, click Flying under the radar.
If you can't see anything, click Flying under the radar.
04 February 2007
Name Your Fear
Since the previous post mentioned fear, here is a post from my MySpace page.
The other evening, we got together with friends for a "Bring Your Own Barbecue." We talked about law school, career changes, psychotherapy, religion... And then we talked about the future. We must be in a time of great transition, because the dominant mood was not hope. It was fear.
I talked about how genetic engineering, implants, and other high tech "enhancements" could make the people of the future so different from us that they might not consider "non-enhanced" or "natural" people like us to be fully human. And how, by tinkering with human nature itself, we would undermine the basis of Natural Law.
Our host spoke of Global Warming, and how climate change could wipe out agriculture in some parts of the world, and sink coastal cities.
My wife talked about how the melting of the North Polar Icecap could decrease the salinity gradient in the North Atlantic that drives the Gulf Stream. If the Gulf Stream were to stop, that would almost shut down the transfer of heat from the equatorial to the polar regions. The result could be a rapid re-freezing of the northern latitudes resulting in a new Ice Age. In other words, our climate is metastable, with tipping points beyond which large and sudden changes may occur.
I suppose we could have mentioned asteroid impacts, and global thermonuclear war while we are at it. Or maybe the day some terrorist organization gets hold of a nuclear weapon and detonates where you would least like it.
So I'm just curious. Was it just us, or are other people having anxious thoughts about the future. What sort of thoughts?
The other evening, we got together with friends for a "Bring Your Own Barbecue." We talked about law school, career changes, psychotherapy, religion... And then we talked about the future. We must be in a time of great transition, because the dominant mood was not hope. It was fear.
I talked about how genetic engineering, implants, and other high tech "enhancements" could make the people of the future so different from us that they might not consider "non-enhanced" or "natural" people like us to be fully human. And how, by tinkering with human nature itself, we would undermine the basis of Natural Law.
Our host spoke of Global Warming, and how climate change could wipe out agriculture in some parts of the world, and sink coastal cities.
My wife talked about how the melting of the North Polar Icecap could decrease the salinity gradient in the North Atlantic that drives the Gulf Stream. If the Gulf Stream were to stop, that would almost shut down the transfer of heat from the equatorial to the polar regions. The result could be a rapid re-freezing of the northern latitudes resulting in a new Ice Age. In other words, our climate is metastable, with tipping points beyond which large and sudden changes may occur.
I suppose we could have mentioned asteroid impacts, and global thermonuclear war while we are at it. Or maybe the day some terrorist organization gets hold of a nuclear weapon and detonates where you would least like it.
So I'm just curious. Was it just us, or are other people having anxious thoughts about the future. What sort of thoughts?
23 January 2007
Search Sucks, Too
While we're at it, search sucks, too. Sure, once you've got the hang of using a computer, it's easy to type search terms into, say, Google. But finding what you're really looking for? That's hit and miss. Partly it's because there is no agreement on standards for making content findable.
But a huge part of it is because search engines don't really understand the language of the documents they are searching. This is about to change. Cognition Technologies has designed and built a search architecture that actually understands language, and that has been initialized for several subject areas in English. Stubs exist to initialize it for a wide variety of languages and subject areas.
But if someday we could put all the pieces together - standards for findability, natural language query and understanding, and learning the intention of the searcher (the shared computer-user state space of yesterday's article) we might actually have a search capability that finds what we're looking for.
Of course, that may doom VCBC. Most people find us by accident. In other words, we have a growing audience because search engines turn up unintended stuff. Oh, well. Nothing we do lasts forever.
But a huge part of it is because search engines don't really understand the language of the documents they are searching. This is about to change. Cognition Technologies has designed and built a search architecture that actually understands language, and that has been initialized for several subject areas in English. Stubs exist to initialize it for a wide variety of languages and subject areas.
But if someday we could put all the pieces together - standards for findability, natural language query and understanding, and learning the intention of the searcher (the shared computer-user state space of yesterday's article) we might actually have a search capability that finds what we're looking for.
Of course, that may doom VCBC. Most people find us by accident. In other words, we have a growing audience because search engines turn up unintended stuff. Oh, well. Nothing we do lasts forever.
22 January 2007
Why Personal Computers Still Suck
We have had personal computers for over a quarter century, and they still suck. Yeah, I know, they can play music and video now, and that's cool, but think about all the little steps you have to go through to get a computer to do what you want. Point here, click once there, double click that, drag down this menu which, by the way, is completely different from what it was before you did that other click...
What you are doing is navigating the large, but finite internal space of states that the computer can be in so that you can finally get to that last command that triggers the desired response. You do it using that part of your brain that lets you navigate through familiar and unfamiliar real spaces, like shopping malls, and lets you find your car in the parking lot when you're done shopping. If you have a stroke in your right vertebral artery, which keeps this region alive, you may be able to walk and talk, but you won't be able to use your computer. At least not until after a long period of retraining.
Which makes me wonder: why after all these years are we still navigating the computer's state space? Don't computers now have the processing power to start navigating our state space? After all, there are only a finite number of commands you can give a computer. Therefore, there are only a finite number of commands you can want to give a computer - at least from the computer programmer's point of view.
Why do we have to remember where to find the obscure command that formats the margins the way we what, or go through three click-and-drags to get a Greek letter? Computers now have keyboards, mice, microphones, and cameras. It's time for operating systems programmers to make computers that understand typing, points, clicks, scrolls, and some words and gestures - and that use those inputs to figure out what we want them to do.
It's time for the computational burden of learning and remembering the shared computer-user state space to shift from the user to the computer.
What you are doing is navigating the large, but finite internal space of states that the computer can be in so that you can finally get to that last command that triggers the desired response. You do it using that part of your brain that lets you navigate through familiar and unfamiliar real spaces, like shopping malls, and lets you find your car in the parking lot when you're done shopping. If you have a stroke in your right vertebral artery, which keeps this region alive, you may be able to walk and talk, but you won't be able to use your computer. At least not until after a long period of retraining.
Which makes me wonder: why after all these years are we still navigating the computer's state space? Don't computers now have the processing power to start navigating our state space? After all, there are only a finite number of commands you can give a computer. Therefore, there are only a finite number of commands you can want to give a computer - at least from the computer programmer's point of view.
Why do we have to remember where to find the obscure command that formats the margins the way we what, or go through three click-and-drags to get a Greek letter? Computers now have keyboards, mice, microphones, and cameras. It's time for operating systems programmers to make computers that understand typing, points, clicks, scrolls, and some words and gestures - and that use those inputs to figure out what we want them to do.
It's time for the computational burden of learning and remembering the shared computer-user state space to shift from the user to the computer.
09 March 2005
Bleep my VCR!
If there is one thing that serves as the quintessential icon of bad human interface design it is the VCR. I mean, in my time, I've programmed everything from micro-chips to supercomputers. I can handle computers. But I fat-fingered the wrong button on the remote control to my VCR and got it into a state from which it would not exit.
The "Cancel" button would not cancel it. The "Menu" button brought up inappropriate menus. After dinner, I found the manual and turned to "Trouble Shooting." To my surprise there were two entries that mentioned something like what was on my VCR's front panel display. Both entries said the same thing: "Read Chapter 3." The longest chapter in the manual. Like I don't have enough to read.
Thumbing through Chapter 3 for a half-hour, I found that there was a button on the remote I should push. Nothing happened. A little experimentation soon showed that nothing on the remote did anything at all. I changed the batteries. Ah, success! Finally.
There used to be only one group of people whose minds I longed to illuminate with a flamethrower: the designers of the Application Programming Interfaces to ArcGIS. To them let me add the people who designed the user interface to my VCR.
Oh, yeah. And the twits who did the user interface to my long-discarded sports watch.
The "Cancel" button would not cancel it. The "Menu" button brought up inappropriate menus. After dinner, I found the manual and turned to "Trouble Shooting." To my surprise there were two entries that mentioned something like what was on my VCR's front panel display. Both entries said the same thing: "Read Chapter 3." The longest chapter in the manual. Like I don't have enough to read.
Thumbing through Chapter 3 for a half-hour, I found that there was a button on the remote I should push. Nothing happened. A little experimentation soon showed that nothing on the remote did anything at all. I changed the batteries. Ah, success! Finally.
There used to be only one group of people whose minds I longed to illuminate with a flamethrower: the designers of the Application Programming Interfaces to ArcGIS. To them let me add the people who designed the user interface to my VCR.
Oh, yeah. And the twits who did the user interface to my long-discarded sports watch.
11 March 2003
Making a Killing
"This briefing is unclassified, but it does contain graphic violence," warned the speaker. Lights dimmed, and the screen showed what looked like an SUV driving down a country road, viewed from above. A fireball exploded in front of the SUV, blowing its front tires. The six men who bolted from it sprinted at world-record pace back down the road they had just driven, not stopping until they reached a vehicle that had been following them at a discreet distance. From their arm movements, they seemed to be warning the occupants of the second vehicle that there were landmines in the road ahead. But there were no landmines. Another cluster of fireballs engulfed the men and the second vehicle.
The audience snickered, encouraged by the briefer's enthusiasm for his subject. I felt myself smile, too. The dead men had been "illegal combatants" fighting in Afganistan for al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. They had been killed by an AC-130 gunship, flying at night so they couldn't see it, so high they couldn't hear it. The violence of their demise seemed cartoon-like through AC-130's black-and-white, night vision enhanced telescopic gun camera, but there was no doubt that the little dark lines flying out of the bright fireball were their body parts. There was also no doubt who they were — the conversation between the pilot, the gunner, and ground control indicated that they had been carefully identified and specifically targeted for what they had done, and were about to do again. It should also give you an idea of what will happen if the US and its allies go to war in Iraq — there will be no "carpet bombing," but Saddam's army won't be able to move.
Still, someone's brothers, husbands, and sons had just been blown to bits. The smile left my face. I had been tempted into enjoying the deaths of men. Again.
What we had watched was a "hit" carried out by a joint operation of the US Air Force and (most likely) US Special Forces operating on the ground in enemy-controlled territory. The idea was to inflict maximum damage with minimal loss of US personnel in a situation where the US personnel were outnumbered, and our allies out-gunned. Attempting to capture rather than kill the enemy would only have gotten our people and our allies killed.
Of course, there is the option of non-pursuit. We could have just let them continue down the road. So that they could kill more of us. Of anyone who seriously advocates that notion I have a request — pick someone like me who thinks you are personally enabling terrorism and become a human shield for him or her 24/7 until all the terrorists go away.
Or maybe we could negotiate with their leaders — Usama bin Laden and company. Here is their opening position. They want you dead. Period. Now, you bargain with them, if you can find them.
But there is another aspect to the aerial gunship attack that I must mention before I close. If it were to have occurred over the US instead of Afganistan, we ourselves would have been as terrorized by the air-strike as we are by the terrorists. Which means that it sets about the right tone. The terrorists use "asymmetric means" to bypass our defenses — so we use our own form of "asymmetric means" to bypass theirs. They slaughter indiscriminately, yet they wind up being killed by precisely, personally targeted bolts from the sky, with each shot planned to get them to react the way their killers want them to, in order to minimize the expenditure of ordnance in achieving the objective. This is precisely why we use war as a paradigm for US (and when it stands with us, the world's) actions against terrorists. If we restricted ourselves only to the law enforcement paradigm, the means described above would be unavailable to us, because it would be illegal, which would give the terrorists the advantage. They know how to beat the law enforcement paradigm.
In sum, I'm afraid the evil action I saw on the film was the best we could do. I am not proud of my initial reaction to it, but neither am I ashamed. Rather, I think that our enemies should realize that they can stimulate even nice, introspective, anti-capital punishment types like me to say "yes" to graphic violence against them.
Maybe our enemies should consider negotiating with us. Once they stop fighting us, we can be quite reasonable. Just ask the Germans, or the Japanese, or even (if you count the Cold War) the Russians.
Still, if anyone can offer a more Godly suggestion, something realistic that would so amaze the hearts and minds of the terrorists and their supporters that they would forgive us our trespasses against them (both real and imagined) and let us live in peace, I would love to hear about it. The whole world is waiting.
The audience snickered, encouraged by the briefer's enthusiasm for his subject. I felt myself smile, too. The dead men had been "illegal combatants" fighting in Afganistan for al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. They had been killed by an AC-130 gunship, flying at night so they couldn't see it, so high they couldn't hear it. The violence of their demise seemed cartoon-like through AC-130's black-and-white, night vision enhanced telescopic gun camera, but there was no doubt that the little dark lines flying out of the bright fireball were their body parts. There was also no doubt who they were — the conversation between the pilot, the gunner, and ground control indicated that they had been carefully identified and specifically targeted for what they had done, and were about to do again. It should also give you an idea of what will happen if the US and its allies go to war in Iraq — there will be no "carpet bombing," but Saddam's army won't be able to move.
Still, someone's brothers, husbands, and sons had just been blown to bits. The smile left my face. I had been tempted into enjoying the deaths of men. Again.
What we had watched was a "hit" carried out by a joint operation of the US Air Force and (most likely) US Special Forces operating on the ground in enemy-controlled territory. The idea was to inflict maximum damage with minimal loss of US personnel in a situation where the US personnel were outnumbered, and our allies out-gunned. Attempting to capture rather than kill the enemy would only have gotten our people and our allies killed.
Of course, there is the option of non-pursuit. We could have just let them continue down the road. So that they could kill more of us. Of anyone who seriously advocates that notion I have a request — pick someone like me who thinks you are personally enabling terrorism and become a human shield for him or her 24/7 until all the terrorists go away.
Or maybe we could negotiate with their leaders — Usama bin Laden and company. Here is their opening position. They want you dead. Period. Now, you bargain with them, if you can find them.
But there is another aspect to the aerial gunship attack that I must mention before I close. If it were to have occurred over the US instead of Afganistan, we ourselves would have been as terrorized by the air-strike as we are by the terrorists. Which means that it sets about the right tone. The terrorists use "asymmetric means" to bypass our defenses — so we use our own form of "asymmetric means" to bypass theirs. They slaughter indiscriminately, yet they wind up being killed by precisely, personally targeted bolts from the sky, with each shot planned to get them to react the way their killers want them to, in order to minimize the expenditure of ordnance in achieving the objective. This is precisely why we use war as a paradigm for US (and when it stands with us, the world's) actions against terrorists. If we restricted ourselves only to the law enforcement paradigm, the means described above would be unavailable to us, because it would be illegal, which would give the terrorists the advantage. They know how to beat the law enforcement paradigm.
In sum, I'm afraid the evil action I saw on the film was the best we could do. I am not proud of my initial reaction to it, but neither am I ashamed. Rather, I think that our enemies should realize that they can stimulate even nice, introspective, anti-capital punishment types like me to say "yes" to graphic violence against them.
Maybe our enemies should consider negotiating with us. Once they stop fighting us, we can be quite reasonable. Just ask the Germans, or the Japanese, or even (if you count the Cold War) the Russians.
Still, if anyone can offer a more Godly suggestion, something realistic that would so amaze the hearts and minds of the terrorists and their supporters that they would forgive us our trespasses against them (both real and imagined) and let us live in peace, I would love to hear about it. The whole world is waiting.
02 February 2003
Farewell, Columbia
The Second Space Shuttle Tragedy
 |
| Spontaneous Columbia memorial, courtesy of NASA |
On the television screen was an image of clear blue sky with a cluster of white streaks. It was the Space Shuttle. "Oh, shit," I said. "It broke up. They're dead." I had seen something like it seventeen years ago, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded during its ascent.
Once the investigation was over, I put the blame for Challenger where the facts pointed, on managerial arrogance at Morton Thiokol and NASA. This time, it appears to be a different form of managerial incompetence, one more deeply ingrained in the human condition, expressed in the bromide, "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp." Under the pressure of dealing with day-to-day difficulties, things that are not critical to be solved this very day — things that can wait because they've waited until now — wait indefinitely. All of us who manage must let things slide in order to keep up with the stuff we know is critical. In this case, the list of safety upgrades to Shuttle technology may have slid too long. Time and investigation will tell.
I say these things, not to start a hunt for scapegoats — there are likely to be none this time — but to direct the attention of my fellow believers in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) to look to the Human Condition, rather than to Divine Judgement. In particular, I think of the Iraqi official who claimed that the accident was God's Judgement against Israel and the United States. By that same logic, one could attribute the decline of the Arab Islamic world with respect to the West since 1400 (as described by Bernard Lewis in his book What Went Wrong) to God's Judgement against Muslims. As I assume the official in question would hesitate to do that, I consider that he should hesitate to declare God's Judgement concerning the Columbia.
But now we must turn to the human cost paid by the Columbia's crew — Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel Blair Salton Clark, and Ilan Roman — and their families and friends. Their loss is the incalculable loss of seven worlds that might have been. Worlds that they all very much wanted. May God comfort the survivors according to their needs, and bring them in time to experience healing of their grief.
This human cost is also felt by the whole People of the United States, and by the peoples of India and Israel. The media will ask, is manned space flight worth the risk? Is it worth the money? Let me start with the second to answer the first.
Manned space flight has not been economically worthwhile since it began, and will not be economically worthwhile for the foreseeable future. We are not in it for the money.
Manned space flight has never yielded any scientific knowledge that could not have been gained by unmanned flight (other than the response of the human body to long-term weightlessness), nor is it likely to do so for a very long time. We are not in it for the science.
What manned space flight has yielded, is astonishing advances in engineering and engineering management — the twin arts/sciences/diciplines/practices of making and using things that work. But we are not in it for the engineering. We aren't in it even for the prestige — its no longer new enough to astonish the world with each marginal advance.
We are in manned space flight for just one thing — the adventure. If we turn away from that adventure, we turn away from a future as grand as the Universe to a smaller destiny sandwiched between the top of the atmosphere and the bottom of the sea. Never mind that we will tie the fate of humanity to the fate of one small, vulnerable planet — I'm thinking much shorter term than that.
If we turn away from manned space flight we will diminish our culture here and now. We will slip from a culture of boundless optimism to a culture of limits. We will achieve less, because we will attempt less. We will begin to stagnate. What the astronauts bought for us with their courage was Hope in this world.
Manned space flight is not worth doing in itself. It is worth doing because it helps make all the other things worth doing. Let us honor the courage, the drive, the spirit, and the sacrifice of Columbia's crew by doing what they would have us do — let us continue.
And some day, we will find a way up from earth's gravity well, and a way to fly through space, that will take us to the stars.
Editor's Note: The discipline required to do complex and dangerous things safely is practiced by High Reliability Organizations. NASA appears not to be one of them.
11 September 2002
One Year Later
A year ago on this day, Islamic blasphemers hijacked airplanes and drove them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and - due to the heroic actions of passengers who discovered their intentions - into the ground in rural Pennsylvania. What have they achieved? The Pentagon is whole again. The World Trade Center site is cleared and ready for reconstruction. Grass is reclaiming the site in Pennsylvania. America, its people and its economy are recovering.
At the same time, Afganistan is recovering, too. Not so much from the relatively bloodless and brief US intervention, but from years of oppressive rule by the Taliban, the bought boys of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. And bin Laden is dead or in hiding.
But we are not yet done with this episode. Islamic culture has been in decline for 500 years, and has yet to produce a legitimate — by which I mean elected — government in the Middle East. In fact, Israel is the only state in the Middle East in which an Arab woman can vote. What the world needs is not a defeated and crushed Islamic culture (although that can be arranged if Islamic culture insists), but a vibrant and forward-looking Islamic culture that respects its neighbors as it wishes to be respected. Note that I didn't say love — I said respect, and we must insist on that respect without exception, and back up that insistence with the willingness to use force.
We must also insist that our government and commercial sectors respect our individual rights and freedoms. This is problematic, given that over the long haul, technological advances increase the power of individuals and small groups to do great good as well as great evil. Unless there is a revolution in human affairs, human empowerment will come increasingly into conflict with human security, which will require the sacrifice of human freedom to achieve.
We must eventually pass a constitutional amendment to the effect that any information that specifically identifies a citizen is the inalienable property of that citizen, and may not be used for any purpose (with limited exceptions) without that citizen's consent. That will allow each citizen to finally participate in the market that already exists for his or her information (credit ratings, purchasing patterns, medical records, etc.). It will also allow each citizen to push back against the steamrollers of big business and big government. But ultimately, updating our legal protections will only slow the erosion of our freedom.
America is proving more than a match against those external agents who would take our freedom from us. The greatest threat to our freedom comes from ourselves, and our own fears. And the greatest guarantee of our freedom is for all of us to learn to use our freedom well.
In the short term, however, there are some things that can be accomplished by using various technologies to help thwart, apprehend, or kill terrorists. We in the scientific, engineering, computer science, and applied mathematics communities are ready to give it our best shot.
At the same time, Afganistan is recovering, too. Not so much from the relatively bloodless and brief US intervention, but from years of oppressive rule by the Taliban, the bought boys of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. And bin Laden is dead or in hiding.
But we are not yet done with this episode. Islamic culture has been in decline for 500 years, and has yet to produce a legitimate — by which I mean elected — government in the Middle East. In fact, Israel is the only state in the Middle East in which an Arab woman can vote. What the world needs is not a defeated and crushed Islamic culture (although that can be arranged if Islamic culture insists), but a vibrant and forward-looking Islamic culture that respects its neighbors as it wishes to be respected. Note that I didn't say love — I said respect, and we must insist on that respect without exception, and back up that insistence with the willingness to use force.
We must also insist that our government and commercial sectors respect our individual rights and freedoms. This is problematic, given that over the long haul, technological advances increase the power of individuals and small groups to do great good as well as great evil. Unless there is a revolution in human affairs, human empowerment will come increasingly into conflict with human security, which will require the sacrifice of human freedom to achieve.
We must eventually pass a constitutional amendment to the effect that any information that specifically identifies a citizen is the inalienable property of that citizen, and may not be used for any purpose (with limited exceptions) without that citizen's consent. That will allow each citizen to finally participate in the market that already exists for his or her information (credit ratings, purchasing patterns, medical records, etc.). It will also allow each citizen to push back against the steamrollers of big business and big government. But ultimately, updating our legal protections will only slow the erosion of our freedom.
America is proving more than a match against those external agents who would take our freedom from us. The greatest threat to our freedom comes from ourselves, and our own fears. And the greatest guarantee of our freedom is for all of us to learn to use our freedom well.
In the short term, however, there are some things that can be accomplished by using various technologies to help thwart, apprehend, or kill terrorists. We in the scientific, engineering, computer science, and applied mathematics communities are ready to give it our best shot.
15 April 2000
Latin in Anno Domini 2000
Liturgy meets Word™
contributed by Kay Goodnow
April 2000
And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever. — Luke 1:46-55, KJV
From time to time, I contemplate life on paper. Writing
‘exorcises my demons’ by letting my emotions run in a safe space,
indulges my humorous sense of the absurd, and gives final form to my
thoughts. I write so that I can move on.
I am old enough to remember Big Chief tablets and fat pencils, handwriting exercises intended to improve my script, the ‘blue books’ we used for writing examinations (utilizing my flowing handwriting) and calligraphy a' la quill pen and inkwell. This last was taught in an effort to "preserve an ancient art." (I did not live prior to the invention of the printing press!)
Through the years, I cut my teeth on DOS, WordStar and Lotus. Admittedly, I struggled with the new ways and the old ways until, at long last, the typewriter became obsolete.
Of course the information superhighway arrived on the scene, and the progress of computer technology, along with the evolution of the computer itself and all its appendages, gizmos and ‘must haves’ nearly exceeds the speed of light. It certainly exceeds the speed of my brain which, left to its own devices, would still be happily ensconced in WordStar. But I am almost current now that I have Windows 95 and Word.
Because my son is extremely adept at understanding computers (and making them do whatever it is he wants them to do) my computer and appurtenant equipment move from old to new via Dr. Frankenstein. My son understands that his mother does not want to know how he does these things or how the computer works. When I push the ON switch, it should work. With software, though, I will experiment for hours and hours. Hand me a manual and it will end up in a drawer. Push the ON button and let the software teach me… I am happy. I have two hard drives and the Internet. What more could I need?
From time to time I also contemplate my Catholicism, or what is left of my Catholicism. In all fairness, my Catholicism is mixed in with my Episcopal forebears; I choose to believe I got the best of both.
I am old enough to remember holy cards with gilt edges, scapulars and medals of assorted ilk, incense, nuns who wore long black dresses, the rules about patent leather shoes and wearing slips with zippers in them under my navy blue pleated uniform skirt and my light blue blouse. I remember holy water, Benediction with incense and chants, relics, statues, JMJ letterhead and what it meant to be a Third Order Oblate. I remember all of the Baltimore Catechisms (1942 through 1954). I can tell you about most of the virgin-martyrs, the movie and book Indexes, retreats that scared any evident demons out of me, and daily Mass.
The only difference between myself and any other Catholic raised in the 40’s and early 50’s is that my Catholicism came to me through French and Latin, while my Episcopal heritage was in English, King James, Rite I version. In short, I was an Episcopalian in a Roman Catholic all-girls French finishing school run by European nuns. I was there from Kindergarten through Grade 12. Ten years of that time I was an Episcopalian who wanted to be a Catholic. The last two years I was a Catholic. Then I went out into the world and learned about the reality of life. I lasted, as a Catholic, until I was about 24.
I walked away, due to my failed first marriage and my intent to marry again. I walked away, because I believed myself ‘excommunicated’ by Rome or whatever entity and/or ‘rumor’ excommunicated people back in those days. The Episcopalians asked that we go marry elsewhere and then come back to them. "Boggle!," I said to both denominations, and I ‘excommunicated’ them from me.
Suffice it to say that I spent many years as wife and mother of three children. I was busy, happy, immersed in mothering and growing up along with the kids. But I avoided church and I buried all of my treasured memories way down deep. Occasionally I would contemplate them, in the silence of my heart. In 1975 the voice that lives in my head (which of course is God, by any of His names) said, "Come home!"
So I surfaced into the world of religion. In the course of time I discovered that Vatican II had occurred, that there were no more Baltimore Catechisms, that there was a "Dutch Underground," that the Latin Mass was gone, and finally, that Episcopal churches more closely resembled my old Catholicism than the new Catholicism did. I devoured the Articles of Vatican II in its entirety and I kept hearing "conscience, conscience, conscience."
Light, I decided, Pope John XXIII had used Vatican II to share the light. My heart sang (in Latin, of course, and it didn't really sing, it chanted): Magnificat anima mea Dominum… [My soul magnifies the Lord... (Luke 1:46)]
But not so, not so! Just as the original uncomplicated message of Christianity has been boxed, broadened, defined, redefined, underdefined, smothered, altered and amended, made lawful and unlawful, waged wars and more wars over, made legal and illegal and, in spite of itself, evolved into the reverse of what it was intended to be, so has the complicated message of Vatican II been interpreted in reverse.
Yes, I tried to salvage my Catholicism and I tried to restore my Episcopal heritage. My first marriage was successfully annulled even though I called the procedure off twice as it was happening. My second marriage, which by this time had produced three children and had lasted more than 14 years, was convalidated by both denominations. The annulment procedure and the learning experiences provided by this procedure were devastating to me. There was no evidence of the message of the Christ anywhere, but there was a ton of evidence of church authority. I tried very hard for another five years and finally one day, from inside my heart and in silence, I contemplated my buried treasures and God said, "Rest, now."
This is the year 2000. 25 years have passed (give or take one or two) since I last ventured forth into the world of organized religion. God suggested that it might be time to take another look.
I did. Among other encyclicals I located Ecclesia Dei. From there, it was an easy jump to the Latin Mass. I also located the Pius X Society. I learned too of the changes and schisms in the Episcopal Church. The Catholic Archdiocese in which I reside has a web page, which I read in detail. Unfortunately, the annulment forms I found there have not changed, not one word in 25 years.
God said, "I AM."
The joy and beauty of the Latin Mass recreated the wonderful, mystical feelings of my youth and I thanked God for allowing me to experience them again. In a lovely, old church (with two spires which are not twins) my Latin came back, completely, as did my French. I could remember and I could feel. The incense, the vigil lights, the statues, the vestments and the words, those glorious Latin words, were unchanged.
And yet there are changes. Or perhaps I have changed. The words, after all, are older than I am. I hear the messages in the epistle and in the gospel but my interpretation varies so dramatically with the words spoken in the sermon or homily that I find myself in conflict.
I have given those entities known as ‘authority’ in organized religion back to God. In so doing, I am free to keep my treasured memories of my Catholic past. I am free to keep her music and her beauty, her solemnity and her splendor and all the feelings that they create in me. I am free to experience her mysticism. In addition, I am free to wander through the Psalter and the Song of Songs and St. Luke. The words I hear are mine to keep, and they are simple. I am free to explore other religions, keeping only those values which are essential to me. Best of all, I am free to see the love and joy of God in others.
Sunday night, when I was listening to the silence in my heart and God revealed that every breath of life is sacrament, I again felt Magnificat anima mea Dominum…
On Monday, determined to retain Mary’s song of glory, I dug through several translations in four different sources to find the English equivalent to the Latin. None of them sounded right. Even St. Paul failed me. It is always difficult to translate feelings, even into English, with the written word. I wonder about the Hebrews and the original Greek and how they would sound, were I gifted enough to understand them.
On Tuesday, determined to retain what Latin I can recall, I began to record the words, through what is in the memory unit I call my brain and through what I own in musical arts, onto paper. I am rusty, but willing.
On Wednesday, having decided that the original Latin will outlast everything else that lasts at all, I decided to go into Word and begin my memory book.
Today, Thursday, it is painfully obvious to me that computer technology may, in time, control everything.
‘MAGNIFICAT ANIMA MEA DOMINUM’ I invoked as a title. Word went nuts! It underlined all four words in green squiggles. When I got that corrected, it went right back and underlined all four words in red squiggles. Red means (usually) that a word is not recognized. I typed every Latin word I know. I used eight single-spaced pages and I did not punctuate or use proper paragraph format. I just wrote.
I turned on spell check and I let it run. It went through all eight pages, word by word, and it let me have it in red and green. I could have used the printout for Christmas wrapping paper. Slowly and deliberately I pushed the "Add to" key. Immediately, Dominum was recognized. Then my software recognized Anima, and finally, all of those words, all eight pages of Latin phrases.
I turned on my edit program and began structuring for prose and for poetry and for something new that (I think) I invented called ‘psalming.’ Word doesn’t like ‘psalming’ but it recognizes it as a part of the way I say things. I have taught Word some Latin, but no grammar. It also recognizes French, and my personal dictionary is full to capacity.
I am happy! I have God and I have His Word. I have the Sacrament of Life to live and to share. I have what I believe to be this world’s most magnificent love song, and in Latin. My heart invokes: "Magnificat anima mea Dominum" and my soul, strengthened by the light, warmth, peace, joy and love that is God, hears Him in the silence.
I am old enough to remember Big Chief tablets and fat pencils, handwriting exercises intended to improve my script, the ‘blue books’ we used for writing examinations (utilizing my flowing handwriting) and calligraphy a' la quill pen and inkwell. This last was taught in an effort to "preserve an ancient art." (I did not live prior to the invention of the printing press!)
Through the years, I cut my teeth on DOS, WordStar and Lotus. Admittedly, I struggled with the new ways and the old ways until, at long last, the typewriter became obsolete.
Of course the information superhighway arrived on the scene, and the progress of computer technology, along with the evolution of the computer itself and all its appendages, gizmos and ‘must haves’ nearly exceeds the speed of light. It certainly exceeds the speed of my brain which, left to its own devices, would still be happily ensconced in WordStar. But I am almost current now that I have Windows 95 and Word.
Because my son is extremely adept at understanding computers (and making them do whatever it is he wants them to do) my computer and appurtenant equipment move from old to new via Dr. Frankenstein. My son understands that his mother does not want to know how he does these things or how the computer works. When I push the ON switch, it should work. With software, though, I will experiment for hours and hours. Hand me a manual and it will end up in a drawer. Push the ON button and let the software teach me… I am happy. I have two hard drives and the Internet. What more could I need?
From time to time I also contemplate my Catholicism, or what is left of my Catholicism. In all fairness, my Catholicism is mixed in with my Episcopal forebears; I choose to believe I got the best of both.
I am old enough to remember holy cards with gilt edges, scapulars and medals of assorted ilk, incense, nuns who wore long black dresses, the rules about patent leather shoes and wearing slips with zippers in them under my navy blue pleated uniform skirt and my light blue blouse. I remember holy water, Benediction with incense and chants, relics, statues, JMJ letterhead and what it meant to be a Third Order Oblate. I remember all of the Baltimore Catechisms (1942 through 1954). I can tell you about most of the virgin-martyrs, the movie and book Indexes, retreats that scared any evident demons out of me, and daily Mass.
The only difference between myself and any other Catholic raised in the 40’s and early 50’s is that my Catholicism came to me through French and Latin, while my Episcopal heritage was in English, King James, Rite I version. In short, I was an Episcopalian in a Roman Catholic all-girls French finishing school run by European nuns. I was there from Kindergarten through Grade 12. Ten years of that time I was an Episcopalian who wanted to be a Catholic. The last two years I was a Catholic. Then I went out into the world and learned about the reality of life. I lasted, as a Catholic, until I was about 24.
I walked away, due to my failed first marriage and my intent to marry again. I walked away, because I believed myself ‘excommunicated’ by Rome or whatever entity and/or ‘rumor’ excommunicated people back in those days. The Episcopalians asked that we go marry elsewhere and then come back to them. "Boggle!," I said to both denominations, and I ‘excommunicated’ them from me.
Suffice it to say that I spent many years as wife and mother of three children. I was busy, happy, immersed in mothering and growing up along with the kids. But I avoided church and I buried all of my treasured memories way down deep. Occasionally I would contemplate them, in the silence of my heart. In 1975 the voice that lives in my head (which of course is God, by any of His names) said, "Come home!"
So I surfaced into the world of religion. In the course of time I discovered that Vatican II had occurred, that there were no more Baltimore Catechisms, that there was a "Dutch Underground," that the Latin Mass was gone, and finally, that Episcopal churches more closely resembled my old Catholicism than the new Catholicism did. I devoured the Articles of Vatican II in its entirety and I kept hearing "conscience, conscience, conscience."
Light, I decided, Pope John XXIII had used Vatican II to share the light. My heart sang (in Latin, of course, and it didn't really sing, it chanted): Magnificat anima mea Dominum… [My soul magnifies the Lord... (Luke 1:46)]
But not so, not so! Just as the original uncomplicated message of Christianity has been boxed, broadened, defined, redefined, underdefined, smothered, altered and amended, made lawful and unlawful, waged wars and more wars over, made legal and illegal and, in spite of itself, evolved into the reverse of what it was intended to be, so has the complicated message of Vatican II been interpreted in reverse.
Yes, I tried to salvage my Catholicism and I tried to restore my Episcopal heritage. My first marriage was successfully annulled even though I called the procedure off twice as it was happening. My second marriage, which by this time had produced three children and had lasted more than 14 years, was convalidated by both denominations. The annulment procedure and the learning experiences provided by this procedure were devastating to me. There was no evidence of the message of the Christ anywhere, but there was a ton of evidence of church authority. I tried very hard for another five years and finally one day, from inside my heart and in silence, I contemplated my buried treasures and God said, "Rest, now."
This is the year 2000. 25 years have passed (give or take one or two) since I last ventured forth into the world of organized religion. God suggested that it might be time to take another look.
I did. Among other encyclicals I located Ecclesia Dei. From there, it was an easy jump to the Latin Mass. I also located the Pius X Society. I learned too of the changes and schisms in the Episcopal Church. The Catholic Archdiocese in which I reside has a web page, which I read in detail. Unfortunately, the annulment forms I found there have not changed, not one word in 25 years.
God said, "I AM."
The joy and beauty of the Latin Mass recreated the wonderful, mystical feelings of my youth and I thanked God for allowing me to experience them again. In a lovely, old church (with two spires which are not twins) my Latin came back, completely, as did my French. I could remember and I could feel. The incense, the vigil lights, the statues, the vestments and the words, those glorious Latin words, were unchanged.
And yet there are changes. Or perhaps I have changed. The words, after all, are older than I am. I hear the messages in the epistle and in the gospel but my interpretation varies so dramatically with the words spoken in the sermon or homily that I find myself in conflict.
I have given those entities known as ‘authority’ in organized religion back to God. In so doing, I am free to keep my treasured memories of my Catholic past. I am free to keep her music and her beauty, her solemnity and her splendor and all the feelings that they create in me. I am free to experience her mysticism. In addition, I am free to wander through the Psalter and the Song of Songs and St. Luke. The words I hear are mine to keep, and they are simple. I am free to explore other religions, keeping only those values which are essential to me. Best of all, I am free to see the love and joy of God in others.
Sunday night, when I was listening to the silence in my heart and God revealed that every breath of life is sacrament, I again felt Magnificat anima mea Dominum…
On Monday, determined to retain Mary’s song of glory, I dug through several translations in four different sources to find the English equivalent to the Latin. None of them sounded right. Even St. Paul failed me. It is always difficult to translate feelings, even into English, with the written word. I wonder about the Hebrews and the original Greek and how they would sound, were I gifted enough to understand them.
On Tuesday, determined to retain what Latin I can recall, I began to record the words, through what is in the memory unit I call my brain and through what I own in musical arts, onto paper. I am rusty, but willing.
On Wednesday, having decided that the original Latin will outlast everything else that lasts at all, I decided to go into Word and begin my memory book.
Today, Thursday, it is painfully obvious to me that computer technology may, in time, control everything.
‘MAGNIFICAT ANIMA MEA DOMINUM’ I invoked as a title. Word went nuts! It underlined all four words in green squiggles. When I got that corrected, it went right back and underlined all four words in red squiggles. Red means (usually) that a word is not recognized. I typed every Latin word I know. I used eight single-spaced pages and I did not punctuate or use proper paragraph format. I just wrote.
I turned on spell check and I let it run. It went through all eight pages, word by word, and it let me have it in red and green. I could have used the printout for Christmas wrapping paper. Slowly and deliberately I pushed the "Add to" key. Immediately, Dominum was recognized. Then my software recognized Anima, and finally, all of those words, all eight pages of Latin phrases.
I turned on my edit program and began structuring for prose and for poetry and for something new that (I think) I invented called ‘psalming.’ Word doesn’t like ‘psalming’ but it recognizes it as a part of the way I say things. I have taught Word some Latin, but no grammar. It also recognizes French, and my personal dictionary is full to capacity.
I am happy! I have God and I have His Word. I have the Sacrament of Life to live and to share. I have what I believe to be this world’s most magnificent love song, and in Latin. My heart invokes: "Magnificat anima mea Dominum" and my soul, strengthened by the light, warmth, peace, joy and love that is God, hears Him in the silence.
Editor's Note: Ultimately, Goodnow left Catholicism because she had been abused by the Church. See her writings elsewhere on this site.
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