The Zero Effect

Beetle Bailey is a well-known anachronism, its characters stuck in sort of slightly post-WWII time warp boot camp, with all the familiar Hollywood stereotypical characters, the hapless protagonist Beetle and his antagonist, Sarge, the bookworm, Plato, the lothario, Killer, the kiss ass Lieutenant, the out-of-touch General, and so on. And there’s the ignorant country bumpkin, Zero, the butt of many jokes because he takes everything literally, not knowing any better, or maybe because he’s simply stupid.

While it’s a popular strip, it’s also lame, or maybe it’s popular because it’s lame. Nevertheless, I remember one strip from many years ago that reached some sort of (possibly accidental) transcendence.

The guys are all ragging on Zero, as usual, including Sarge. Suddenly, Zero bursts out, “Hey Sarge! Are you fat, or what?”

There follows a momentary stunned silence, and Zero cracks up. “Ha!” he says. “I turned the tables on you there, boy! Ol’ Zero doesn’t do it often, but sometimes he gets a real zinger off. Ha, ha! Bet you never saw that one coming, did you, Sarge?” Or words to that effect.

And with each self-congratulatory remark, a few more of the guys leave, until finally, Sarge is also gone, leaving Zero all alone, still with a self-satisfied grin on his face. He turns and faces out at the reader and says, “They really hate it when you turn the tables on them.”

I view the entire thing as a sort of Zen fable. Did he “turn the tables on them?” Well, no, not in the sense of actually making a clever remark at their expense. So the ending is ironic; the joke is still on Zero.

Except, no, it isn’t. Many of the jokes at his expense are really no more clever than his. Moreover, they did leave the room when confronted with…what? Joyful innocence? Impenetrable obliviousness? The Fool, in the archetypical sense?

Hard to say, really. But Zero turned what was supposed to be his own humiliation into something else, and he did it by virtue of the very qualities that were the object of derision. It’s hard to see that as anything other than poetic justice.

Because we really do hate it when you turn the tables on us.

Knock Knock

Theodore Sturgeon was very taken with his own four word description of the four stroke internal combustion engine: Suck, Squeeze, Pop, Fooey. I do admit, it was pretty clever. He then went and spoiled it by asking why a heat engine would need a cooling system, as if that were some sort of profound insight. Actually, automobile engines need both a cooling system to keep the engine block from overheating, and also a heat sink (which, in the case of automobiles, is the outside air), just like every other heat engine. “Heat engine” is, in that sense, a misnomer, since they are actually “heat flow engines,” and need for heat to flow from a higher temperature to a lower one in order to do work.

Still, Suck, Squeeze, Pop, Fooey. In the Suck (intake) stroke, the piston moves out from the cylinder head, pulling in external air in the case of diesel engines, or an air fuel mixture, in the case of gasoline engines. Both diesels and modern gasoline engines use fuel injection, but the diesel engine doesn’t do the injection until the top of the compression stroke.

For the Squeeze (compression) stroke, the intake valve closes and the piston rams the column of air/fuel toward the cylinder head. That compresses the air and heats it up. Compression ratios for gasoline engines go from about 10:1 as high maybe 18:1; for diesels, it’s more like 25:1, and diesels have to be much more ruggedly constructed to avoid being damaged by the higher pressures and temperatures.

At about the top of the stroke a spark plug triggers the ignition of the air fuel mix in a gasoline engine; in a diesel, the fuel is injected at high pressure, and ignition occurs because the air is already hot enough to ignite the fuel. The increase in temperature and pressure in both engines then pushes the piston away from the head. That’s Pop, or the power stroke.

Once the piston has reached its limit, the exhaust valve opens, and the final stroke (Fooey or exhaust stroke), clears the combusted gases from the system, which is now ready to start all over again.

All well and good. But it turns out that things don’t always work so well on the compression/ignition side of things for the gasoline engine. Because gasoline is easier to ignite than diesel fuel, sometimes the heat of compression alone will ignite the air/fuel mixture on the compression stroke, before full compression is achieved. That’s bad, because then some of the engine power winds up fighting itself, which reduces efficiency. Moreover, it puts more strain on the engine parts, and can damage the engine.

You could just back off on the compression when this sort of thing occurs, but then you’re also reducing efficiency, because lower compression ratios mean lower peak temperatures for your heat engine, and thermodynamics always wins in the end. So typically, you tune an engine to as close as you can get to the pre-ignition point.

Pre-ignition is also called “knock,” and it’s why we have “octane ratings” for gasoline. The name derives from an isomer of octane, 2,2,4 tri-methylpentane, and it’s defined as the ability to resist knocking of a fractional mixture of this octane isomer and n-heptane, heptane having a defined octane number of zero. The octane isomer has a good ability to resist premature detonation of an air fuel mix.

Real fuel mixtures are much more complex, of course, and the octane rating isn’t just a summation of all the individual components of the fuel. Instead, each component of gasoline has a “blending number” that better describes how it changes the octane rating.

Then there are “octane boosters,” things that are added to gasoline specifically to bring up the octane rating, despite your having put a lot of other low-octane trash into the fuel.

As higher compression IC engines began to really move in the 1920s, the need for octane boosters became apparent. Previously, when high compression engines were primarily for motor racing and aviation, specially blended fuels were used, but mass markets meant mass solutions.

There were two hydrocarbon octane boosters that were first suggested for fuels, alcohol and benzene. Alcohol was the better of the two. Benzene required almost 40% in fuel to really allow for high compression engines; ethyl alcohol only 20%. For a while, it looked like the fuel of the future was “Ethyl” meaning ethyl alcohol.

But then research showed that a number of inorganic elements could reduce engine knock. Iodine and selenium were too corrosive, but lead did the trick. Eventually, tetra ethyl lead (TEL) was developed, and it had the additional advantage that it was patentable, and thereby under corporate control for corporate profit. At first, TEL was blended in with gasoline at garages, or by the motorists themselves, but that wound up with a few too many cases of lead poisoning. After that, it was done at refineries, where it also produced lead poisonings, but those could be hushed up better. It also helped that the public health services helped to suppress the idea that there was a danger.

In other countries, particularly European countries, TEL had something of an uphill battle, because ethanol production was tied to farm policy. But with the weight of the U.S. Government behind it (and then, as now, U.S. foreign policy was at the disposal of those making money), TEL became the octane booster of choice.

Time passed and a lot of airborne lead got emitted into the environment. Fact is, tailpipe lead was in the form of very fine particles that stayed suspended for very long periods, under the right circumstances. Those circumstances were common enough so that detectable amounts of lead wound up in the Arctic even.

Then, in the 1970s, California passed some very tough clean air laws, and suddenly, automobile manufacturers were having trouble meeting them. In fact, the only way to meet them seemed to be to install catalytic converters on automobiles. (Actually, there was a while when lean burn engines such as the Honda CVCC could still meet the California regs, but, I mean really, you couldn’t hold Detroit to standards that the Japanese could meet, could you?).

Lead is toxic to people, but that’s nothing to the way it poisons catalysts. A single tankfull of leaded gasoline would reduce a catalyst’s efficiency by more than 50%. So unleaded fuel was born (fun fact: in Mexico, unleaded fuel is called Magna Sin).

The oil industry fought it, but maybe not as much as you’d think. I suspect that what they were doing was to manage the changeover, and to profit from it as much as possible. And they did profit, largely because the elimination of lead created a squeeze on refining capacity, and any time there is a capacity squeeze in the industry, profits increase, owing to the magic of inelastic demand. Sell less, make more money. Such a deal. They also get so squeeze out some independent refiners and distributors when expensive regulations take effect.

But the industry was also working on alternative octane boosters, again ones that weren’t ethanol, because, well, ethanol is evil, isn’t it? I mean, after all, demon rum.

Anyway, in the nick of time, they began producing MTBE, another oxygenated hydrocarbon, an ether instead of an alcohol, and it had all the good aspects of ethanol, with the added benefit (from an oil industry perspective) that it was made from natural gas.

Oxygenated fuels like ethanol and MTBE also have some interesting combustion characteristics in that they reduce the amount of carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen oxides that come from automobiles before the catalysts warm up (after they warm up you don’t even get enough CO to kill yourself in a closed garage). So some localities, like Denver, had been mandating oxygenated fuels in winter, in order to reduce their CO problem.

Then MTBE began to leak into the water supplies of some cities.

Refinery operations are a lot more sophisticated now than they were in the 1920s, and can generally turn almost anything into almost anything else – for a price. The oil industry has also become pretty good at using whatever comes their way, be it hurricanes, environmental regulations, or war to their advantage. I knew that the cheap oil prices in the late 1990s were transient and that there would be a big windfall coming, though I had no idea it would be built on so much blood. Even so, I didn’t put any money into oil stocks, because it just seemed like bad karma, and I can be such a prig sometimes.

Spock

In the character of Mr. Spock, the creators of Star Trek hit a vein of pop culture gold. A little google-estimation suggests that Spock is not as well known as Bugs Bunny, but is better known that Daffy Duck. That’s impressive.

In trying to understand the phenomenon, the first thing that we can dismiss is the notion that Spock is actually what he’s claimed to be: a representative of an alien species that exists sans emotion. It’s pretty obvious from canon that neither Spock nor Vulcans generally are devoid of emotion. My favorite example of this comes from the first Trek movie, where Spock undergoes a ritual that supposedly cleanses him of the last vestiges of emotion. At the end of it, he receives…a medal! I’m sure that every Vulcan who gets the medal cherishes it forever.

A remarkably sly critique of the “unemotional” trope came through in the obscure (and very brief) TV show, Quark, created by Buck Henry. In that show, the character of Ficus Pandurata is without emotion, being a “vegeton,” i.e. seemingly human but actually a plant. In one scene, Ficus is being tortured by being subjected to dry heat and no water. He’s saved by “Princess Libido” who has a crush on him. “Tell me you love me,” she asks as she unties him. His reply:

“Princess, as a Vegeton, and I think you’ll find this interesting, not only do I not love you, I’m not even grateful for your having rescued me.”

Within the context of Star Trek, it is quite obvious that Vulcans possess plenty of emotion; they simply repress them, just as humans do. Vulcans simply repress their emotions better, because they do everything better. Spock is, in every respect, superior to humans, being smarter, stronger, longer-lived, and at least somewhat telepathic. In short, Vulcans are Slans without the tendrils, and in full control of those messy emotions that adolescents have such a lot of trouble with. You may think of Spock as Gary Cooper with pointy ears.

The “without emotion” trope has a substantial pop culture resonance, no doubt for the reason I’ve just suggested, that male adolescent fantasies like to turn teenage awkwardness into an ideal image of “the strong silent type,” and female adolescent fantasies imagine the goodies that accompany the proper unlocking of repressed desire. That seems to have given way to K/S (Kirk/Spock) fiction, also known as “slash fiction,” where predominantly female writers/audiences imagine hot boy-on-boy action between the two Trek protagonists.

Other variations on “unemotional” abound, one of my favorite being the Marvel Comics Tales of the Zombie, where the character lacks emotions because he’s, you know, dead. Hannibal Lector offers another example, being described as having bitten someone’s tongue off while his pulse rate never goes above 70. Both Lector and the Zombie seem like unappealing characters, yet each have their fans, a lot of them in the case of Lector.

The fact that an adolescent fantasy tends toward idolizing the sociopathic (or worse), is not, in and of itself, pathological. Fantasy is not reality. But there are those who try to live in dream castles, and there are those whose day-to-day existence is informed by pathological ideals. To those, I’d suggest that maybe Sulu or Checkov might make better role models, funny accents and all. Certainly would be better than thinking you’ve found Spock and discovering that he’s actually Lector.

It's also worth noting that, in the original pilot for Star Trek, the "unemotional" character was the female, "Number One," played by Majel Barrett. The character tested very poorly with audiences in the late 1960s, and it took several further iterations before the cold analytical female Trek character became acceptable, with Seven of Nine and T'pol being the exemplars. I strongly suspect that this is part of the "Battle Babe" phenomenon, where the lady's ability to kick your ass takes those pesky adolescent qualms about propriety and renders them moot.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?

When I was a regular on the old Compuserve Science Forum, the I.Q. debate came up fairly frequently, and one of the standard tangents was to start talking about sports and athletics. It is, after all, easier to see the consequences of athletic ability, and there are many, many statistics that are generated in sports as a matter of course, without having to create special tests to gather them.

One of the participants in one discussion reported that there was a considerable literature attempting to attribute success in sports to some separately testable ability, or even to correlate cross-sport success, to account for Bo Jackson, for example, although the case of Michael Jordan was also mentioned.

At any rate, our correspondent reported that all such statistical studies of sports yielded one primary component that correlated with success: the amount of time spent practicing and playing the sport in question. Everything else just vanished into the noise.

Now the "talent" side of the talent vs practice argument can come up with a quick explanation for the practice effect: self-selection. People who are naturally gifted at a given sport tend to enjoy playing and practicing that sport, so they practice more, etc. The difficulty with that explanation is that it is devilishly difficult to predict who is "talented" at a particular sport a priori, at least insofar as creating a testing matrix that will give a good prediction of later success.

There is a similar argument that has recently been made by the authors of Freakonomics.

Dubner and Levitt cite data that suggests that children who are some months older when they begin to play soccer (football to you Euros), owing to what time of the year the children were born, tend to be more heavily represented in professional teams. The argument here is that those few extra months of growth make the children a bit larger and quicker (on average) when they begin to play, so they have an extra edge, tend to do better from the beginning, and, hey, who doesn't spend more time on something that they're better at?

Notice, however, that we're talking about some pretty slim differences in ability here, equivalent to a few months worth of extra maturity, with the differences diminishing over time. So what you're really getting is a very strong feedback loop, where a little extra preliminary edge translates into huge differences in training and practice over time.

The Freakonomics source for this material is K. Anders Ericsson, who was probably the source for my original correspondent on Compuserve (thus do loops close on the Internet). Ericsson has been studying the practice effect phenomenon for several decades, and he's quite convinced that there is much less to talent than commonly believed. He does note that there are some sports that have physical constraints (no one has ever had to make the choice between being a Sumo wrestler or a jockey, for example), but other than that, Ericsson seems to believe that it's all about practice, and, more importantly, effective practice.

Again, drawing from sports, records are still being broken in most sports, on a regular basis. At some point, the total time spent on practice fills all available time, so there must be some improvements in how athletes practice in order for improvements to continue. And even if the improvements are such things as the use of anabolic steroids and HGH, there are still more (and less) effective ways of using those things. Weight training without steroids is more effective than the other way around, for example.

There's one other phenomenon that is often overlooked in the talent/practice debate, however, and that is the random factor. In sports, that is most obvious in how injuries can derail careers. Certainly some of the improvements in training over the past century involve learning how to train with less risk of being injured, but in the heat of the game, injuries happen. Then, later, great pressure is placed on the athlete to "play through it," and thereby increase the severity of the injury. It takes a really tough-minded coach to demand that a player wait until fully recovered before resuming competition. Most are going to go for the appearance of tough-mindedness; after all, there are always plenty more guys who want to play the game. Besides, it's hard to keep up the practice from the sidelines.

The Lurgy

It's been a strange couple of months. People getting sick, getting biopsies, getting tested. Berkeley legend Betty Ann Webster died, disappointing all of us who believed she was immortal. I've wondered whether it's just a sign of aging; I'm just more likely to know sick people now. But four months ago I was only four months younger, and everybody was doing fine. And some of the recently sick people in my life are, sadly, way younger than I.

It's just my turn in the barrel of fear. I've heard the word "stent" used in conversation way too much recently. It gives me the jimjams; it gives everyone the jimjams.

So I talk to the afflicted, and almost always I say, "Please let me know if there's anything I can do." It's a thing that people say. They say, "I'm sorry for your loss," if an actual loss is involved - would that include amputations? They say, "Everything happens for a reason," and then a large bolt of lightning turns them into a mound of charcoal, and a ghostly voice says, "What have we learned from this experience?" -- Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 28, 2008

I began to get sick in the late summer of 1984, with a series of days where I just felt “off,” nothing terribly specific, but a feeling of not being well.

The first serious symptoms were episodes of what I now identify as smooth muscle spasms, abdominal cramps, esophageal and bronchial spasms, that sort of thing. I saw a doctor, who prescribed donatal. Later, I was given tagamet, for acid reflux. These were entirely symptomatic palliatives, and are distinguished as being the only things that any physician ever gave me to positive effect. Everything else, including diagnosis, was completely futile.

The phrase “chronic fatigue syndrome” is close to pernicious. It sounds like your only problem is being tired. Well, hell, everybody is tired. That’s just modern life. I lost count of the number of people who told me how tired they were. Sometimes I was perverse enough to ask them if they also had the feeling that someone was driving an ice pick into their solar plexus, or what they did when they woke up at night with the sweats so bad that it pooled in their ears, or dripped from their nose if they got up to use the bathroom.

Usually, though, I just didn’t have the energy.

I made a mistake in my first interactions with physicians. I responded to their questions about stress by admitting well, yes, I had been under a lot of stress, job, romantic entanglements, various amounts of high end partying. So that made my malady “stress related.” It took me a long time to decode that. Stress related = psychogenic = psychosomatic = mental = it’s all in your imagination and in any case, it’s your own fault, so get out of my office and start living right.

That’s one of the lessons learned. Doctors hate their patients when they don’t get better. All those phrases like “taking control of your own health” and “the importance of attitude in health,” are actually ways to make it okay to blame people for getting sick.

There were other lessons learned, few of them happy. It’s okay to be sick if you get well quickly. It’s also okay if you “tough it out,” if you “play injured,” if you don’t inconvenience too many people, in other words, and if you demonstrate the proper “mind over matter” attitude. But don’t stay sick for long; people might think there is something wrong with you.

A long term illness brings in the jackals. There are plenty of people who will take the opportunity to tell you all the things they don’t like about you, or use the occasion to get even for whatever you’ve done that they don’t like, sometimes for slights you don’t even remember committing. You think that you’re so well-liked that no one would do that to you? Try having an extended illness and find out for sure.

A lot of people simply can’t handle others’ illness, so they just stop calling. That’s one of the more benign manifestations, of course, since a bad illness leaves you without the energy to be sociable. Worse are the people who feel compelled to “help,” said help consisting of giving you advice on how to deal with the illness. I noticed that such “advice” frequently consisted of telling me things to do, the best ways (according to them) to spend my limited resources of money and energy, and that it often (who would have imagined?) involved trying to be more like them. After all, they weren’t sick and I was. Clearly they were doing something right and I had done something wrong.

Eventually I whittled it all down to practically nothing. I found that I had the energy to do maybe one thing per day. Pay bills. Go shopping. Clean my room. Do the laundry. Go to the doctor. Each one took a day. It was that realization that caused me to give up on seeing doctors. It took energy I didn’t have and it never helped, so I quit.

My typical day became one of getting up in the morning, having breakfast, then going back to bed. Around noon, I’d get up and have lunch. Then I’d watch television or read for a few hours. On “accomplishment days,” I’d then do one of those tasks. Then I’d have dinner. Maybe another hour or two of television, then back to bed. I was sleeping maybe 16-18 hours a day.

That was pretty much the entirety of 1985, excepting one six week period when I went to Georgia to stay with my folks. The daily rhythm was about the same, though.

Slowly, very slowly, I got better. Less and less sleep was needed. I could get more and more done. I went for long walks to get reacquainted with exercise. I also took up various projects that could be done in my bedroom, like learning about personal computers. Professionally, I managed to attach myself as a subcontractor to several projects, including some more smog chamber modeling and atmospheric data analysis. I think my average workweek was down around 10 hours a week in 1986, but that was enough for my, as it were, restricted lifestyle.

Over the next several years, my health slowly improved. The flexibility that I needed for work made it possible to travel a bit, and I spent more time with my folks, and also time visiting old friends “back East” including high school and college buddies. This flexibility also allowed me to be home after my father was diagnosed with cancer in 1989, and I was there when he died. I was still sick, sleeping maybe 12-14 hours a day at that point, but seeing my father die put it into perspective.

I also spent substantial amounts of time in New York City, at one point spending several weeks following a scholarly tic that involved my reading several years worth of newspapers from 1910-1912. My time flexibility allowed me to court Amy when the time came, and to marry her and kidnap her back to California.

Everything is connected, of course. Even minor events change the future; major events change who you are. I have no idea what life would have been like without the illness. I got sick; I got better. It took a long time. I went to sleep when I was young and I woke up middle aged.

I don’t actually remember what it was like. Selective forgetting is one of the things we do to protect our sanity. Occasionally, when I get a cold or a stomach bug, I’ll catch a flicker of a memory of some long departed symptom of the long illness and I will briefly fall prey to a Fear. Then it will pass, and I’ll remind myself that we’re mostly in the hands of Dr. Time, who cures and kills with equanimity.

Nowadays, when someone I know gets sick, or has some difficult period, I seldom offer advice. I do ask them if there is anything I can do to help, but there's more to it than that general question leading to avoidance of the issues. I ask if they need some grocery shopping done. I offer to do some housework. I’ll take food over and give it to them so they don’t have to cook.

Compassion? Altruism? I tend not to think of it in those terms. I’m more inclined toward the notion that while I don’t remember what it was like to be that sick, I do remember the anger at having been treated so badly by so many people who thought they were well meaning. I look on it as the dues I pay to not betray that anger, and to maintain my own high opinion of myself.

Muggings

When Jack Dempsey was in his 70s, he was the subject of an attempted mugging. Dempsey broke the man’s jaw. All such stories have a tinge of apocrypha, even those gleaned from newspapers, so I have some latitude for embellishment. In my version, the would-be mugger wakes up in a hospital bed, his jaw wired shut. He manages to say, “What happened?” through his wired jaw, and the orderly cracks up. “You tried to mug Jack Dempsey, asshole!”

Mugging is a high risk occupation, without much upside potential, so muggers tend to be pretty stupid. There was a locally famous student at the New York Aikikai many years ago, “Harry, the Muggers’ Mugger” as he was known. Harry was in his 60s, and liked to dress like a “pigeon,” mugger bait in other words, and go out walking in Greenwich Village late at night. He had decorated a wall of his apartment with switchblades, ice picks, and sharpened screwdrivers that he’d taken away from would-be muggers. I don’t know whether he did more than remove their weapons. Aikido, as I have said before, offers the option of being kind and gentle, but there are other options as well.

Dennis, who was a member of Aikido of Berkeley back when I first began the practice, was once standing at a bus stop in the rain with his umbrella over his head. A guy sidled up beside him and put a knife to his ribs, saying “Don’t make any sudden moves.”

“You mean like this?” Dennis said, and raised the umbrella up higher. The guy’s eyes went up to follow the umbrella…

The way I remember the story is that, after Dennis took the guy’s knife away from him, he remarked that the guy was lucky to still have all four limbs still attached, and possibly that such attachment remained optional. Again, as I recall, the guy then politely asked for his knife back. You may imagine the laughter that this produced.

As I say, mugging is not a career for the intelligent.

My friend Dale and his wife Susan were out walking one day, along with a friend of theirs. Susan was six months pregnant at the time. Two men jumped out of the bushes and tried to snatch Susan’s purse. Dale and the friend tried to pull Susan back out of harm’s way, but Susan was having none of it. She was a) holding onto her purse, and b) defending herself with what she had in her other hand, which was a folded umbrella.

She got one of them in the eye.

As the two fled, blood streaming from the one, his buddy called back over his shoulder, “You didn’t have to be so rough about it!”

Mugging is not … oh, hell, you know.

Rethinking Communism

"Communism didn't fall. It was pushed." – George H. W. Bush, July 2, 1992

I've noticed that, whenever anyone wants to give the devil his due, they first must stand up and announce in a loud voice that it is, in fact, the very devil we're dealing with, so bad, bad, bad, old devil, and then they can say what they set out to say. I've seen this in action where people analyze the infant mortality rates in Cuba, which are far lower than any other country in Latin America and close to those of the U.S., but Castro is a bad, bad man, so let's be sure we get that in. Similarly, if one wishes to locate where in south central Asia the USSR has occupied, now or in the past, one can find a very good map of it by just looking at literacy rates, as compared to the neighboring countries, with the former USSR countries having over 97% literacy rates. The outlier is Afghanistan, which, despite a violent and unsuccessful occupation by the USSR in the 1980s, nevertheless saw large increases in both male (increasing from 30% to over 40%) and female (6% to about 15%) literacy during that time.




But communism, especially in the Russian and Chinese models, was an authoritarian political form that demanded a single Party state, censorship, secret police, and all the trappings that gave George Orwell the heebie jeebies. Bad old Commies.

So let's pretend, somehow, that it's possible to divorce communism from those things. What do we have left? Can we somehow rewind the tape and start all over again from the French Revolution and the Paris Commune and somehow get it to work better? Ah, that seems pretty dubious, so that's probably a dead end.

Still, from my recent review of the French Revolution (granted, more the Cliff Notes version than anything deep or substantive), one of the things that stuck was the degree to which foreign intervention kept the pot on the boil. The monarchies in the rest of Europe felt that they could not afford to let the French Revolution succeed; the American Revolution was bad enough, and that was just a slaveholder rebellion as far as many Europeans were concerned. The Americans were half a world away, besides. But this new French thing…no, best to nip it in the bud.

And even Napoleon, who rose like a cork from the stormy sea, well, he named himself Emperor and put his cronies in charge of things. They may have despised the little twerp, but at least Napoleon they understood.

So what about Soviet Russia? Well, again, was there ever a time when the Western powers just let it ride? The Red and White armies marched all over hell and gone in the 1920s, and not without plenty of outside interference and support for various factions. In the twenty years before the Second World War, Europe looked like a tossup match between Communism and Fascism, and liberal democracy was hardly considered worthy of a seat at the debate. The Hitler/Stalin pact looks insane at this distance (and was a head bender at the time, as well), but I've seen it explained as the natural outcome of Stalin's actually being a real Communist. He considered England to be the real enemy, and it was trivial for Hitler to play on that. Hitler had his own delusions, of course; he viewed England as a natural ally, and thought the British royalty (who were "racial Germans," after all) would swing his way.

Then, big war, one that wiped out almost an entire generation of Russian males, followed by the Cold War. England had spent itself in the war, and divested itself of its colonial empire, in a series of moves so ham fisted that they guaranteed several generations of blood and conflict in the former colonies. But hey, that's the White Man's Burden, isn't it?

The United States took up the great cause of anti-communism, though, and wasn't that a peach? We built up an Armageddon arsenal of nuclear weapons, and then, when the Russians got themselves a bomb or ten, the U.S. went absolutely batshit berserk, seeing Communists under every bed, with neighbor denouncing neighbor, lives ruined on rumor, and drunken old Joe McCarthy scaring the pants off of everyone. In college I knew a few old lefties who'd been through that wringer, and it's not something I ever want to see up close and personal. After 9/11 people were killed for just wearing turbans. Imagine how it would have been if the mark of Cain had been belonging to some club in college 10 or 20 years ago. In other words, imagine if it could be _you_ under the hammer.

It also makes me wonder what sort of derangement would have resulted if the U.S. had actually been _invaded_ in WWII, or if the first ones with the nukes had been some other country, which is to say, if the U.S. had experienced even a fraction of what the USSR went through. But, of course, trying to imagine the world from the perspective of a "godless communist" is exactly the sort of thing that could have gotten you blacklisted in 1950.

Exactly what is it that created the Cold War? The Russians grabbed a lot of land in eastern Europe, I get that. They supposedly threatened Western Europe militarily, I get that, too. But it's not as if there wasn’t a "vice versa" there as well.

And as nearly as I can tell, nothing justifies the general plan that seems to have been in place for "containment" of communism, which, in practice, worked out to replacing democratically elected governments with authoritarian dictatorships that were "friendly" to the West, which is to say the U.S., which is to say U.S. commercial interests. The list of those is long and brutal, and we all know who they were. The other option seems to have been putting a lot of U.S. soldiers into the place, as hostages. That was pretty much how it was for Germany and South Korea.

For the life of me it looks like the United States and the European democracies simply didn't believe in their own forms of government. Democratic principles were (and still are) considered "weak," things to be replaced by authoritarian command-and-control whenever things got tough, or scary, or even hard to understand.

My own belief is that the USSR fell because of the generation gap. The War Generation (the Russians had a "greatest generation" of their own, after all), got old, and boring, and the young elites of Russia saw the cool stuff that was going on elsewhere in the world and they wanted a piece of it. They wanted sex and drugs and rock and roll, just like every other younger generation in the history of the world. So as the new technocrats took over, they just let the whole communism thing slip away. I imagine the same thing happened in China; Tiananmen Square was an urban youth rebellion, put down by soldiers drawn from the countryside—the Chinese Red States, if you will.

From time to time, I see someone writing about the "internal contradictions" of Russian Communism, and the "inefficiency" of the Soviet economic system. I think that there are truths buried in there, but I have to observe that an oligarchic command-and-control structure is the model for every corporation in America. And yes, corporations do go bankrupt, and they do get bought out, but the same can be said for the USSR. And corporations generally don't have to have their own armies, and they don't have foreign governments trying to subvert their every move.

I do believe in those things that we all wave at when we talk about "freedom" and "democratic principles." I just wish that I were more certain that the rest of my countrymen did.

One Tank Counted a Million Times

My friend Murray is Jewish, as are a lot of friends of mine from RPI, because RPI gets a lot of smart kids from the northeast, especially New York City, Long Island, and Philadelphia. Murray’s father, Meyer, was originally from Poland, spent the last part of WWII in a Soviet labor camp (a lucky thing, considering the alternative), and had the sense to stay on the last train out of Poland at the end of the war, rather than going back home to the last Polish pogrom. You thought that only the Nazis were killing Jews in 1945?

Once, during one of my extended visits with Murray, his brother Sol decided to do an oral history of the family and got out a tape recorder to get some of Meyer’s stories down for posterity. Because I was the only one in attendance who hadn’t heard the stories, Meyer basically told them to me, which I’ve always considered quite a privilege. One of them, for reasons that will be obvious, always stuck in my mind.

It was from the Soviet labor camp, a frontier post out in a Siberian forest, cutting trees to supply wood for the war effort. The conditions were as brutal as you might imagine, though, since timber output was the main purpose, the camp wasn’t deliberately for the purpose of killing people. Nevertheless, no one in authority cared much when someone died, and sometimes the prescribed rules had that effect.

One particularly pernicious rule was the timber quota/food ration rule. Basically, if a work gang didn’t meet their timber quota, their food rations were cut. Since the rations were barely subsistence anyway, cutting them would render the workers even weaker, more sluggish, less able to work, than before, which would result in more lost quotas, more cuts, etc. spiraling downward into starvation and death. So the quotas had to be met at all costs.

The problem was that the quotas kept being increased, until finally, even fully healthy workers would have been unable to meet them. Again, this wasn’t done with the express purpose of killing anyone; it would just have had that effect.

However, Meyer was the straw boss, and he concocted a plan. The crew would work until noon, cutting as many trees as they could. During the brief lunch period, Meyer would count how many trees had been cut, and calculate how many more they needed after lunch to meet quota. Then, after lunch, the crew would go back over the previous day’s cut logs and saw off the very ends of the logs—where the inspectors had stamped the previous day’s logs with a mark to indicate that the logs had been counted. The log ends would go onto the camp fires, and the inspectors would go over the day’s cut and double count the trees whose marks had been removed.

Now obviously there were probably some inspectors who figured out what was happening, but no one said anything. It wasn’t their jobs to say anything; their jobs were to count the logs with no stamps and to stamp the logs. Nothing more. If they piped up, they risked having their superiors get angry, since all their superiors were interested in was making the quotas as well.

“The whole system was like that,” Meyer said. “If they tell you they have a million tanks, don’t believe them. They have one tank; they count it a million times.”

Anaphylaxis

Most of my first 18 years on this planet were spent in Donelson, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville. If you’ve heard of Donelson, it’s probably because it is home to Opryland, a theme park area built to hold the Grand Old Opry country music icon, after it moved from the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. I spent only two years of my childhood not living in Donelson; I started grammar school with a year in Summerfield, NC, and finished grammar school with a year in Russelville, KY, both honest-to-god small-town-America towns. I’ll no doubt write more about those places sometime, but not now.

One major feature of my early existence was bible thumpers. There were and still are several in my mother’s family, mostly Methodists, which is actually a pretty progressive religion, having come out against slavery before the Civil War. My great-grandfather in fact was a Methodist minister until he was read out of the church for “gambling,” which is to say that he bought some shares of stock. Or at least so the family story goes. But I have kin who are creationists, and worse, with all the small-mindedness that comes along with it.

In “Inherit the Wind” the writer Hornbeck refers to the town (Hillsboro in the play, Dayton, TN in the actual Scopes trial), as “the buckle on the Bible Belt.” But the town of the Scopes trial is too small to actually be a buckle. If you want something big and brassy that holds chinches the belt to hold the pants up, that would probably be Nashville. When I was young, country music was actually the third largest industry in Nashville, the first being insurance and the second being religious publishing. I’ve been told that a majority of bibles printed in the U.S. are printed in Nashville, and it’s easy to believe.

In Nashville, Methodists were the “liberals.” Baptists were the moderates. Then you had the Church of Christ. A few miles from Donelson is a town called Mt. Juliet. There was an ongoing battle in Mt. Juliet High School each year as to whether or not to hold the Senior Prom. Dancing was considered sinful by the Church of Christ, so about every other year—no prom.

Once a year, when my mother was working for an otherwise sane and sensible photographer, said photographer would sit her down and try to convert her to Church of Christ. Doctrine for C of C was very specific: if you are not a member of the Church of Christ, you are going to Hell. It wasn’t enough to be good; it wasn’t even enough to be Christian; it was C of C or burn forever. So my mother’s boss thought it his duty to try to save my mother’s soul. From his point of view, what else could he do?

I mean, look, you can talk about Dover, PA and the Kansas school board all you want, but when (and where) I went to high school, the Scopes law was still in effect. It was illegal to teach evolution in my high school. School prayer wasn’t just legal; it was mandatory. We had Blue Laws that were still in effect, so no stores were open on Sunday. Some of my teachers were also ministers, and saw no particular conflict in using biblical arguments in class.

And yes, I hated it, and got out as fast as I could. Because there is a world of difference between a religious nut, and a religious nut with power. You may think that the religious right has too much power in government at the moment (and I do agree), but try living in a place where they are the government, and most of everything else.

On the other hand, stripped of power and majority status, many religious groups become less obnoxious. For example, I’ve heard that the Church of Christ, outside of it cradle area, is more benign.

A few years back, a Worldcon (in Philadelphia, I think), happened to occur at the same time as a United Church of Christ conference. At one point, Amy and I were watching a table for someone in one of the foot traffic areas, I’ve forgotten the what and why, but it doesn’t matter. Some of the passers-by were fans, and some of them C of C, with some of the latter obviously fascinated by this strange collection of people they were sharing some space with.

At one point a Sweet Young Thing of probably 16 or 17 came over and began asking us questions about the convention. Amy was in here Madame Ovary persona and doing a bit of her act, showing the SYT her tools, some of the soft sculpture puppets and running a line of patter. Eventually, SYT began doing a pretty good Margaret Hamilton Wicked Witch of the West impression, and I began to wonder when the girl was going to run off to join the circus.

More likely, of course, she’d wait until college, join the local theater group and what came after that would be a matter luck or destiny. Or maybe she’d find a corner of fandom to play around in. Fandom also can be mighty seductive.

In the early 80s, the Church of Scientology decided to burnish founder L. Ron Hubbard’s reputation as a science fiction writer. To that end they established a publishing house, Bridge Publications, and hired A. J. Budrys to manage their connections to science fiction fandom. A. J. cut a pretty good deal and enforced it with some determination: benefit writers and artists, don’t interfere, and if you ever try to proselytize, it’s over.

So in addition to the Battlefield Earth series, we got the Writers/Artists of the Future project, which I’ll argue is a pretty sweet deal. At least it has the money flowing toward the writers and artists, which is a good start. A. J. also told them how to have an appreciated presence at conventions (low key parties with plenty of good food). Initially, there were two key Bridge personnel at conventions, Simone and Fred. I’ve heard rumors that Simone was the model for the original cover of Fortune of Fear, one of the Mission Earth series, and I can’t argue against it. She was tall, blonde, very striking, and just the sort of fan boy bait to work a crowd.

Fred was another thing entirely, neither smooth nor particularly memorable. But he was giving it his best shot, and I liked his nerdy little persona in a way that probably bespoke nostalgia for my younger, nerdy little persona. In the early days of Bridge there were all sorts of reactions from the fans, mostly negative, because, well, it was Scientology, after all. Scientology has always been a bit of an embarrassment for fandom, as well it probably should be, since its early days of Dianetics had a number of fans (and writers) behaving quite foolishly. Besides, they were Up to No Good. Some rumors had them plotting to hijack the Hugos by having a lot of Scientologists join the Worldcon and block vote for Battlefield Earth, etc.

All of which I found amusing. I was actually sort of hoping they’d do the block voting thing. How much would it have cost, $50-100K maybe? If they’d wanted to do it, they could have, and I've even heard rumors about someone giving it a bit of a try, but given the result, it was at best half-hearted, and probably not officially sanctioned.

In any case, I was more interested in the reaction of fandom to the “interlopers,” and the mental gymnastics that were coming into play as a result. I also thought that A. J. was doing a fine job of managing the dance and told him so. I also decided to be nice to Fred, because he had a tough job and didn’t deserve to be excoriated just because he was trying to do it.

Besides, I was interested in watching the effect that fandom was having on the Bridge personnel.

Some years later, at a Worldcon in Boston, I was at one of the Bridge parties. Simone was no longer attending conventions; I heard a few rumors as to why, but none from sources I trusted and I never asked A. J. about it. But Fred was still there, hosting the party, flitting about, smiling, actually Having a Good Time. The initial reactions had settled down by this time, and plenty of fans now knew that the Bridge parties were where to go for dessert, if nothing else. That particular night, Edgar Winter (another Scientologist) was over in the corner, having just finished a gig. I was sitting on one of the couches, talking to A. J.

So I said to Fred, as he came around for the nth time, “You know, Fred, when you first started coming to conventions you were pretty stiff, almost robotic, meaning no insult. You’ve loosened up quite a bit. You’re a lot more relaxed these days. Easier to be around.”

Fred smiled and looked over at A. J. “Is that right?” he asked. “Have I gotten a lot looser?”

A. J. nodded and said, “Yes, pretty much.”

Fred’s smile got a lot wider and he continued on his way, making sure that the strawberries were out, and that the dipping chocolate was in the right place.

I leaned over to A. J. and whispered, “I’m not sure that he understands that I meant that as a warning.” A. J. just nodded.

That was the last time I saw Fred. I expect he’s okay. I hope so, because I’d grown quite fond of him.

Helix #7

I don't detect much of a theme in this outing for Helix, which is fine. There are a couple of recurring chords, so I'll get to those.

First, however, let me recommend "Drooling Wizards" by Laura J. Underwood. This story has no redeeming social value that I can detect, but who cares when you have an opening like this:

The chronicles of Drooling Proper state that in the history of Upper Drooling, the village had never been without an idiot. This, of course, was before Dumb Willy went off and got himself trampled to death by an irate ram of large proportions. (We shall refrain, dear reader, from listing the more sordid details as to why this occurred and assume that all imaginations will come up with their own). Naturally, the folk of Upper Drooling were aghast to find themselves void one idiot. It left open far too many assumptions about the rest of the good citizens of that fair haven. Besides, how could a proper village function without a proper idiot?

"To this end, the mayor of Upper Drooling, the most Honorable Joseph Dribbling (yes, indeed, he was related to the founders of Dribbling-By-The-Brook several leagues to the north, but there was a nasty falling out within the family, the culmination of which was that Joseph's ancestors left the rest of the Dribblings behind to find sanctuary in Upper Drooling) took it upon himself to declare a state of emergency, and most hastily wrote a letter to the Idiot's Guild in the city of Greater Drooling on the River Drowning.

Mistaken identity, magic gone awry, true love, what more does word candy need?

"Night of the Living POTUS" by Adam-Troy Castro is also slight, albeit with what I suspect is a real visceral horror at the American political landscape, a zombification of the past (personified by American Presidents), and possibly a comment on how the future betrays the past and vice versa. There may be some satire to it, but satire is fragile, and I'll let other readers make their own judgments on that one.

"Suicide Drive" by Charlie Anders and "Family Tree" by Vaughan Stanger may be considered to share a theme, old #1, in fact, Space Colonization. "Family Tree" takes place in an alternate universe where the Apollo Program went a little faster, had a later accident, and wound up putting a colony on the Moon. There is a substantial amount of symbolism and possibly even sub-text operating, with the protagonist, a teacher hitting mandatory retirement torn between immigrating to the Moon or tending to her (objectified via SF trope) memories of her dead husband. This is past vs future again, with the dice loaded for the future.

"Suicide Drive," on the other hand, paints a bigger canvas on the space colonization side (an extra-solar colonization attempt), with a much bigger price, and a smaller canvas for memory: a hidey hole for the son of the Leader who made the colonization attempt, and an unseen interviewer. The old Campbellian future suggested that the world would suffer nuclear war, but that was an acceptable price to pay for nuclear powered space travel and interstellar empire. "Suicide Drive" notes that the alternatives are seldom known in advance. What then?

The implied risks and rewards are more prosaic and personal in "Salvager's Gold," by Selina Rosen. This is a story that could have fit into an issue of Galaxy or F&SF in 1950s, though it wouldn't have made the Year's Best in either. Happy ending, though, and I like it when the trashman gets a happy ending.

"The Last Man's First Year on Earth," by David W. Goldman is far and away the most creepy story in this issue of Helix, and has a pretty good take on what "alien" means as well. It also has some good new drugs that aren't just another kind of speed (I've complained about SF's limited imagination in drugs in the past, and wrote "Tranquility" to try to make up for it), and, if I'm not mistaken, a new sexual perversion, which is something any author can be proud of.

"Seraphim" by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is a hard story to characterize. One might compare is to "A Matter of Muskets" by Berry Kercheval in Helix #4, but the latter was slight, and not as difficult an effect to achieve. "Seraphim" might be an "ancient astronauts" story (although "ancient" here is only 1896), or a Mad Scientist story, or a Secret Society story, or any combination thereof. I will note that it gets the style and tone of a circa 1900 newspaper story almost exactly right, and that is mighty damn difficult and my hat is off to Ms Bohnhoff for that and more.

As always, I remind my readers that Helix is reader-supported, and your contributions give you advance peeks of new issues as well as that familiar warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that your money is not going to the Great Fascist Insect.

Malleus Maleficarum

I’ve been groping for a suitably pithy phrase to describe the Malleus Maleficarum. “Vile Epic?” “Tribute to psychosexual projection?” “Classic Hate Screed?” “Grim grimoire?” I admit defeat on this point.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), was written by two Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, sometime between 1485 and 1487. Kramer and Sprenger had been named as witch hunters in a Papal decree in 1484 and they seem to have made a job of it. However, their work was not without controversy, and the Malleus itself was first condemned by the University of Cologne, then later put on the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the banned book index. Despite this (or possibly because of it), the Malleus became an early bestseller, and served as a bible for witch hunters in Europe for the next several centuries. It should be noted that, because of the Church’s condemnation of it, the book was used more by Protestant witch hunters than Catholics.

I doubt that there is any reading of “cultural relativism” that would concede that the Malleus can be taken at face value—as an objective portrayal of the habits and practices of witches. On the other hand, there are probably at least 20% of the inhabitants of the U.S. who would declare that the Malleus is true (and I shudder to think of the degree to which the 20% may be an underestimate).

However, I’m obviously not writing anything for that fraction of the populace, so we’ll begin with the observation that most of the text is just made up. So here we bring to bear the notions of projective psychology. Invented text (including fiction by me and thee) is projective in nature, and so displays a great deal about the interior landscape of those who are inventing it, by whatever means.

In the case of Kramer and Sprenger, the analysis is complicated by the manner in which they produced the text. Much of it was reportedly the result of their inquisition and the methods used. To put it bluntly, a good part of it was probably produced by persons under duress, torture in other words. So here you have an unusual collaborative process. Those who are tortured attempt to tell the torturers what they want to hear, but that in itself adds yet another projective layer into the process.

Jung seldom writes of the “collective unconscious” as the product of torture, but there it is. Indeed, the folk process in all its forms requires more psychic energy than is required to merely dream or view an inkblot. Communication must occur and the impetus for communication is often more violent than we’d like to think.

The book itself is ugly and humorless, a compendium of misogynistic sadomasochistic projection. It is also a record of tales of the witch inquisition itself, and, given our own beliefs that people cannot actually raise hailstorms by pissing into a trench or fly through the air on demonic power, the record of persons being burned at the stake for these activities does cause revulsion. In such cases, one tends to cling to the hope that the entire matter was entirely fictional.

Generally speaking, witches in the Malleus seem to spend an ungodly amount of time raising hailstorms, roasting and eating babies, and copulating with the devil or his incubi and succubae. Interestingly, there don’t seem to have been many homosexual witches; Lucifer apparently didn’t tumble to that bit of fun until modern times, or maybe the monks didn’t consider it to be as essentially sinful as women.

In any case, the Malleus virtually demands the classic Freudian interpretation of repressed sexuality getting all gnarly, then escaping in all sorts of projective behavior. Our recent dance with “repressed memory” and “Satanic Ritual abuse” contains practically all of the important parts of the fantasies contained in the Malleus, right on down to the baby eating. It’s worth noting that such fantasies play a big role in the psychopathology of anti-Semitism as well, and Protocols of the Elders of Zion makes an interesting companion piece to the Malleus Maleficarum. If I wanted to write a really sick and twisted horror novel, those two are where I’d start.

Justifications II

In the early 1980s, the California Air Resources Board proposed some stringent rules on how much NOx (nitrogen oxides) could be emitted from power plants. The new regulations were meant to be “technology forcing,” which means that the control technology to meet the regs either had not yet been developed, or it had never been used on a large scale. Moreover, the required control factor was proportional to current emissions, rather than the usual method of allowing X amount of emissions per Y amount of power generated. So any utility that had controlled emissions beyond what had been previously mandated would actually be penalized by being required to clean up more than if they had only just barely met previous regs. Call it a penalty on being good.

CARB had been trying to set stringent NOx controls for years, believing NOx to be the real culprit behind smog. In fact, the relationship between NOx emissions and smog formation is _very_ complex, with fresh NOx emissions, which are mostly nitric oxide (NO) combining with ozone to form nitrogen dioxide (NO2), thereby reducing the level of the main smog constituent – temporarily. Also, NO2 is a radical scavenger, so it slows the smog oxidation process at elevated levels. On the other hand, without a minimal amount of NOx, the smog formation process basically stops, so if you eliminate all NOx emissions, you also stop smog formation. The question in NOx control is always whether or not you can reduce NOx to low enough levels to be effective.

In any case, the consulting firm I worked for was hired by Southern California Edison (SCE) to do an impact study on the proposed regulations, to see if they were properly “grounded in science.” I was selected to be the technical lead on the project.

The project manager wanted a quick result. We had plenty of simulations of various days in Los Angeles, where SCE had its power plant that would be affected, and he wanted a simple reduced-emissions scenario run for some of those days. I wanted to extend the simulations to multiple days.

Part of the reason I wanted this was because it had never been done before, and I wanted to extend the science. That was self-serving in the sense that it would certainly enhance my reputation (and the company’s), and also, I was curious about a number of things that simply couldn’t be examined with single day results, such as the importance of day-to-day carryover of pollutants. But it was also true that such a simulation would be in the best interest of the client, since providing an answer to those unanswered questions greatly reduces the amount of wiggle-room for policy makers.

Anyway, there were argument, loud ones, but eventually my position carried the day. With hindsight, I now suspect that the project manager in question developed a grudge against me, a grudge that explains some of his later behavior, but that’s another story.

In any case, having won the argument, it was then up to me to deliver, which I did. I had to write a different chemical kinetics module to do night time chemistry, one that used a lot of heuristic reasoning and various other tricks of the trade, but it did work, and I had smog chamber data to validate it against, so we were in the clear on that point. I also did some fairly significant work on what “clean air” looks like, that has been used (and misused) by a lot of other people since.

Our baseline simulation ran for over three days. What we found, essentially, was that the near-field ozone suppression effect of NOx emitted by the power plant was greater than the amount of ozone that was eventually attributable to that NOx in smog formation reactions. Moreover, the highest concentration difference in ozone attributable to the power plant was 1 part per billion, less than 1% of the smog standard, and on the baseline day, less than ½ of 1% of total peak ozone at the impacted area.

We presented our results at a CARB hearing, and the result was that they sent the proposed regulations back for reanalysis, pretty much the best possible result for our client. Eventually, more stringent NOx regulations did come into effect, but they were not technology forcing, and no doubt had other aspects that were less unpleasant to SCE, because that’s the way things work. That particular plant, incidentally, was retired a couple of years ago.

There are a lot of “anti-environmentalists” in the conservative movement, and in the fellow-traveling wing of the libertarians who decry all environmental regulations as being anti-business, or an infringement of their rights as individuals. There are also a lot of industry-funded think tanks tasked with muddying the scientific waters, denouncing things they don’t like as “junk science” and working against the proper use of science as a policy tool. I’ve lost count of the number of occasions where one of the other of these folks has sneered at me for being in favor of some “environmentalist” policy.

There are also some environmentalists who would condemn the preceding story as being another case of big business trampling the regulatory process, but I don’t buy it anymore than I buy the anti-environmentalist narrative. I believe our results, and our results said that this particular issue wasn’t worth the price. The amount of smog reduction, if there was any at all, was immeasurable. The actual population exposure to ozone quite possibly would have gone up. And in any case, the primary health effects from air pollution turn out to be from fine particulates, with ozone, even now, after another couple of decades of study, being still problematic from the standpoint of assigning it a specific level of toxicity at urban smog levels. The effects of ozone on plants is better established than its effects on human health.

And what would have been the price or the proposed regulations? Well, the CARB staff said that it would amount to a small amount of money per rate payer per month. Calculated out to the total number of rate payers, it came to $50 million per year. I don’t think that CARB staff had any incentive to overestimate the cost, incidentally. Typically it’s the other way around.

That was over 20 years ago. A cost of $50 million a year, ignoring all present value calculations, etc. comes to over a billion dollars. I always figured that we probably only bought SCE maybe 5 years, thought the later regulations were probably better thought out. I always guesstimate the savings to Southern California rate payers at more like $250 million.

Too bad I couldn’t have held out for a percentage.

Hefner

“I’m not a doctor; I play one on television.” –Robert Young (Marcus Welby)

I sometimes find myself feeling a little sorry for Hugh Hefner. Not much, of course. He’s rich, famous, successful, powerful, and he has a situation that enables, hell, it positively encourages him to have sex with many young, attractive women. He’s old, of course, but we’re all going to be old if we’re lucky, and he’s lived a long and interesting life. So he surely doesn’t need any of my sympathy.

Still, there it is. He’s in a polygamous situation, with multiple women attending to his various needs and desires, and yet he chooses to surround himself with what are virtually clones, all blonde, all with similar body types (augmented if necessary), with similar backgrounds, education, etc. As a confirmed xenophile, my inner adolescent wants to say, “What’s the point?” Or possibly, “Where’s the red-headed Asian ballet dancer?”

It’s probably the case that Hef’s girls do individuate if you get to know them well, and a good many of his past girlfriends have demonstrated brains, talent, and personality to burn (I’m thinking of you, Shannon Tweed). Moreover, it’s a really, really, bad idea to base one’s opinion of anyone on what is seen on television, especially reality television, which is the part of the entertainment universe that “The Girls Next Door” inhabits.

I read an exchange a while back on how Paris Hilton had become the poster girl for those against the estate tax. One commenter basically stipulated that their assessment of Hilton was based on “The Simple Life,” believing that to be an accurate portrayal of Hilton. Frankly, I think that’s only one step away from cornering Hugh Laurie at a party and asking Gregory House to diagnose the pain in your side. The important word in “Reality Television” isn’t “Reality.”

Paris Hilton: “I’m not a dumb blonde; I just play one on television.”

In any case, Hugh Hefner has been a bete noir to many feminists at least since Gloria Steinem’s famous article about being an undercover Bunny. It’s hard to get an analytical, rational handle on the reasons for this (and analyzing emotional arguments is dangerous). I mean, Hefner has been busted at least a couple of times in his life, but never, to the best of my knowledge, for being an agent of the patriarchy. As nearly as I can tell, Playboy itself has always been pro-choice, in every possible meaning of the term, and has supported progressive politics throughout its history, including progressive issues that favor women.

Then there is the matter of equal job opportunities for women. Christie Hefner has been a major success story in the demanding world of magazine publishing, yet I’ve seen scant credit given to her for all of that. The fact that she’s Hugh’s daughter may have made it easier to get the job, but it didn’t make the job easier to do, except possibly in negating stories about her fucking her way to the top.

There may be a little bit of a halo effect in my admiration for Christie Hefner. I paid some attention to her when she was just getting her feet wet in the Playboy empire, specifically as a features writer for the adjunct magazine Oui. There she was, the boss’s daughter, so she could write her own ticket, or so I figured. And her first project was an interview with Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a good interview.

In any case, Hugh Hefner does seem to have a privileged private/public life, and he does appear to have some old-fashioned, double-standard views in his relationships with women. Yes, and Playboy publishes pictures of naked women that are sometimes used by adolescent boys (of all ages) to assist in masturbation. It also glorifies youth, a certain circumscribed ideal of beauty, and sex. Like practically every other element of modern popular culture.

But I imagine that the existence of Playboy does make some women feel bad, in some not-quite-expressible way, and the magazine does serve as a symbol of, well, something or other. Adolescent male fantasies? The objectification of women? The primacy of superficial appearance? A lot of projected anger, in other words.

Joanna Russ in her two critical books, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts and What Are We Fighting For? noted some of the authoritarian threads that wove through the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s. The Women’s Movement was one of the fracture planes of the “New Left” (there were so many), and progressive politics in the U.S. basically foundered on the sclerotic nature of the Old Left, and the fractious behavior of the New Left. A good many of the authoritarians in both camps jumped ship and formed the nucleus of what are now called “Neo-cons.” “Authoritarian” is a personality type before it is a political philosophy.

I had a friend in college who said that whenever he found himself agreeing with a John W. Campbell editorial, he knew it was time for some soul searching, because that meant that there was still some establishment pig left in him. Leaving aside the rhetoric of “establishment pig,” and the specifics of who he was using as his negation template, the principle remains. When you find yourself agreeing with James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, it might be time to engage in some self-analysis. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a photo of a naked woman is just a photo of a naked woman.

Crimes Against the Humanities

The destruction of the Library at Alexandria is often attributed, by Christians, to Muslim Caliph Omar, who supposedly ordered that all the books in the library should be destroyed because, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." It is also said that the legend of Caliph Omar was promulgated by Saladin, who found the precedent convenient when he himself needed to destroy a library.

Earlier, however, in 391, Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all pagan temples, and the Christian Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria is said to have complied with this request. There were also anti-Persian riots in the city at that time, which may have produced the real destruction.

The first personage accused of the library's destruction, is Julius Caesar, more or less by accident, when he sacked and burned Alexandria harbor.

Iconoclasm (Eikonoklasmos, "Image-breaking") is the name of the heresy in the eighth and ninth centuries primarily affected the Eastern (Byzantine) Church. It was among the last of the breaches with Rome that prepared the way for the schism of Photius. There was a lesser outbreak of idol smashing/art vandalism in the Frankish kingdom in the Western (Roman) Church.

Later, during the Reformation, iconoclasm was one of the many new/old facets that Protestantism presented to the world. Iconoclastic riots took place in Zürich (in 1523), Copenhagen (1530), Münster (1534), Geneva (1535), Augsburg (1537), and Scotland (1559). And event called "Beeldenstorm" took place in what is now the Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Northern France. This outbreak of iconoclasm included such acts as the destruction of the statuary of the Monastery of Saint Lawrence in Steenvoorde after a "Hagenpreek", or field sermon, by Sebastiaan Matte; and the sacking of the Monastery of Saint Anthony after a sermon by Jacob de Buysere.

Significant destruction of artworks and manuscripts also took place in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Some were anti-religious and anti-clerical; many were directed at more secular targets, especially tax and debt records.

Upon the death of Sir Richard Burton, his widow proceeded to burn most of his notes, diaries, and some unknown number of manuscripts, including a translation of "The Perfumed Garden." Some say it was for fear of his soul and as part of a campaign to portray him as a good Catholic. Others say it was on Burton's own instructions. Either way, we'll never read his translation of The Perfumed Garden.

There is an apocryphal tale, probably started by Mark Twain, that in the latter part of the 19th Century, steam engines in Egypt were fueled by burning mummies. Whether or not ancient (or modern, the desert is still used for mummification) mummies were every used for fuel or kindling, there was a painter's pigment of the time called "Mummy Brown," which was, in fact, made from powdered mummy. Also, mummies removed from the dry climate of Egypt tend to grow rot, and such was the fate of many that made their way to Europe during the Colonial Era.

Twain also described American tourists taking chips off of the Pyramids and other grand artifacts as "souvenirs." That one has the ring of truth to it.

In 1687, the Venetians, under Francesco Morosini attacked Athens, and the Ottomans fortified the Acropolis and used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine. On September 26, a Venetian mortar, fired from the Hill of Philopappus, blew the magazine up and the building was partly destroyed. Francesco Morosini then proceeded to attempt to loot sculptures from the now ruin. The internal structures were demolished, whatever was left of the roof collapsed, and some of the pillars, particularly on the southern side, were decapitated. The sculptures suffered heavily.

Historically, the greatest cause of damage to existing marble sculptures in Europe has been acid rain and fog during the middle to late 20th Century.

Most of the golden artifacts of the Aztecs and Inca peoples were melted down for their metal content.

Thomas Bowdler was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work that he considered to be more appropriate than the original for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His name is now associated with prudish censorship of literature, motion pictures and television programs.

Some estimates place the number of languages in Pre-Columbian America as high as a thousand. Only a handful remain.

In the early days of talking pictures, the older silent films were considered useless, and many of the highly combustible films were used as kindling for the bonfires and similar events.

In the early twentieth century, Zionist immigrants in Palestine tried to eradicate the use of Yiddish amongst their own population, and make its use socially unacceptable. State authorities in the young Israel of the 1950s went to the extent of using censorship laws inherited from British rule in order to prohibit or extremely limit Yiddish theater in Israel.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two monumental statues of standing Buddhas carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley of central Afghanistan, situated 230 km (143 miles) northwest of Kabul at an altitude of 2500 meters (8,202 feet). Built during the sixth century, the statues represented the classic blended style of Indo-Greek art. They were dynamited by the Taliban in Afghanistan in March 2001.

In 1969, when I was away at college, a combination of foundation work and an untimely storm flooded the family basement. My mother saved my comic book collection

Pyramid Scheme

Zinc sulfide forms the basis of many scintillation detectors, dating from practically the beginning of the science of radioactivity. The old radium dial clocks mixed radium with the zinc sulfide, to provide that "glow in the dark" wonderfulness. Few modern scintillation detectors use zinc sulfide, however, because other crystalline compounds such as NaI are better suited to electronic detection.

When doped with various elements, the color emitted by zinc sulfide scintillation varies, with silver (blue emission), manganese (reddish orange), and copper (green) being most common.

Suppose you were to mix a zinc sulfide powder, properly doped, with nuclear waste material. It would, of course, glow in the dark. Actually, it would glow all the time, but it would be most noticeable in the dark.

One way to do this would be to do the mixing at an intermediate step in a process of nuclear waste vitrification. One typical way of doing this is to convert the liquid waste into a silica gel, which is then and dried, followed by heating to melt the gel into a glassy substance. If zinc sulfide were added to the mix at the dry gel stage, the resultant glassy substance should scintillate with the radiation of the waste.

Now let's imagine surrounding the glassy material with fused quartz, a clear, hard substance. I'm figuring on getting a block that's maybe two meters on a side, which would weight around 24 tons, but one could easily create larger or smaller blocks if there were practical reasons to do so.

It's said that nuclear waste needs to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years, but that's waiting for the long-lived actinides to decay. Without the actinides, several centuries would do. Either way, stone pyramids in the middle of a desert have been shown to last for thousands of years to date, which is a good start. And it's always a good idea to keep things where you can keep track of them.

Imagine glowing pyramids in the middle of the Nevada desert. Any breach in containment would be easy to detect; the radiation has its own glowing tracer that would follow it. The radiation penetration through the blocks could be engineered to be minimal; if the quartz isn't enough, put a few layers of leaded glass around the center. God knows, we have plenty of leaded glass around from old CRT screens.

I figure it would be a tourist attraction. Properly managed, you might be able to build a casino or two nearby, where the gamblers could sit at night and watch our nuclear legacy glower in the dark. Just a little reminder of some of the other ways there are to gamble.

Speech to the Creationists

Hello, thank you for having me here today.

I’ve heard it said that one of the ways of classifying people into two groups is between the “educational” and “adversarial” view. In the educational view, someone is less concerned with whose side everybody is on, and more concerned with whether or not everyone understands what the issues are about, and what the facts of the matter are. For the adversarial view, facts and understanding are not so important. If someone is one your side, they don’t need to know the facts, and if they are against you, you don’t want them to know the facts.

That may sound like a loaded distinction, and it may be, given that my own orientation is decidedly educational, but I do admit that there are times when the adversarial view is useful, like during a war, or in a court action. A lawyer doesn’t do well if everyone understands what the case is about but he loses, and a soldier cares even less.

Nevertheless, I’m going to go for the educational view here; I think it’s important for you to understand what the real issues are, what the real facts are, and what I think is important. How you then deal with that information is up to you.

So I want to clear up some misconceptions, and let me also say at the outset that many of these misconceptions are common to both sides of the evolution debate, so I’m not saying “Nyah, nyah, nyah, you’re ignorant and we’re educated.” I am going to be saying that the real issues are not what you think they are, but by the same token, I don’t think that the real issues are what most people think they are.

Take the word “evolution” or the words “theory of evolution.” Most people use those words as shorthand for “Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection,” but that’s both oversimplified, and it misses important historical facts, so let me review a few of those.

A couple of hundred years ago, as the science of geology was laying down its foundations, one of the things that kept hitting people who studied rocks and such was how old so many things seemed to be. To take a trivial example, stalactites that grow from the mineral calcite grow very slowly, yet there are caves that have very large such structures. If you look at the current rate for stalactite growth and compare it to those big growths, you wind up with an estimate that it took millions of years for them to grow. There are, incidentally, types of stalactites that grow more quickly; in fact, icicles are a kind of stalactite, and there are others that rapidly grow from gypsum, but no one has ever found or fast growing calcite stalactite, nor has anyone ever demonstrated a way to grow one quickly, because the process seems to be intrinsically slow.

There were a lot of these sorts of things that were found almost as soon as geology became a science, things like sedimentation rates, weathering by water and wind, and so forth. Later we found things like the rate at which the very ground beneath our feet slowly moves, which, over time, creates mountains, buries sediments, and moves the continents around. We also found things like radioisotope dating that corroborated some of the other geological age estimates, and often even extended them, taking our estimates of the ages of the oldest rocks into the billion years range.

Now it should be noted that most of the early geologists were religious, Christians even, but they weren’t what is called Biblical literalists. They didn’t believe each and every word in the Bible was true, and educated men hadn’t really done so since at least the days of St. Thomas Aquinas, who recognized both that the world is round, and that a literal interpretation of the Bible would pretty much require that it be flat. That had been argued by the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes based on the Biblical references to the Earth’s four corners, and the fact that there were evenings and mornings on each reported day of creation, when a round world always has a morning and evening somewhere, and “day” depends on where you are on the globe. So the early geologists were willing to say that the “days” of creation couldn’t be literal, and couldn’t be just 24 hours long.

In any case, the Earth looked to be substantially old to the geologists, and they had no particular problem with this, at least not on the grounds of religious doctrine. Furthermore there seemed to be a lot of strange bones in among the rocks.

Now some of those bones were just that, bones. They were found in places like the La Brea tar pits, or ancient peat bogs, or even in the Siberian tundra, where we’ve found completely frozen dead animals tens of thousands of years old. Some of the bones, though, were even older, so old that they’d turned into stone, by what looked to be like a similar process that produces those stalactites, where dripping water slowly replaced the original bone with rock.

But what really got everyone’s interest was that the bones they found didn’t look like the bones of known animals. Some of the critters in the tar pits looked like big cats with huge, I mean, really big, teeth, that came to be called “saber toothed.” Some looked like really small horses. And some of the bones that had turned into stone were so big that the animals could never have fit into Noah’s Ark.

That was one of the theories of the time, as you might expect, that the bones belonged to creatures that had died in the Flood. They had to abandon Biblical literalism for that, though, since the Bible says that God told Noah to get male and females of “every living thing of all flesh,” not “every living thing except the dinosaurs and trilobites.”

Then too, a lot of the fossils that they found were fish, fish that probably wouldn’t have minded the Flood too much. They also kept finding one set of creatures in one rock formation, but if you went deeper, you’d find a much different set of creatures. No one really believed that sedimentation from a single event, be it the Flood or something like it, would also do a big sort on everything so that all the little horses and sabertooths floated to the top, while the trilobites went to the bottom and T. Rex wound up in the middle.

No, the fossils came in groups that were separated by geology, and the geologists figured that that was because they were separated in time. The animals that formed the fossils lived and died at different times, and those that lived at the same time wound up in the same geological formation and those that lived at other times wound up in different formations. Any yes, every now and then two geological formations would get jumbled up, the same way that when you knock all the books off the shelves, they aren’t in alphabetical order any more. But for the most part, they were separated.

Now as I said, different kinds of animals seemed to be in different times, and somebody had to figure out what to make of that. Realize, also, that while all this was happening, Europeans were fanning out across the globe, and periodically they’d stop off on an island, replenish their supplies, accidentally lose a dog, pig, rat or two, and move on. Then, sometimes, they’d come back later to discover that the island had “gone to the dogs,” as it were, and oops, you didn’t have any Dodos anymore. In other words, they discovered that species of animals can go extinct. And it occurred to people that, if species were going extinct, eventually we’d run out of species, unless there was something that replenished them.

A while earlier, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but there were some biologists who’d overturned the idea of “spontaneous generation,” the idea that animals are regularly appearing spontaneously out of mud, or rotting meat, or whatever. Some biologists had looked carefully at the mud and saw the eggs that had been laid there, or they kept the rotting meat in a closed container, and saw that no fly larvae came out when you did that. So biology got this idea that “like creates like” or “like comes from like” and that put them in opposition to the facts that seemed to be coming out of geology, where different things kept appearing.

Thus came the “theory of evolution.” There was no mechanism, just the idea that, somehow, over time, like didn’t produce like, but rather, some organisms, some part of a species, could slowly evolve into something else.

Then came all sorts of “theories of evolution.” Darwin’s mechanism was only one of them. Some believed that evolution occurred by animals “striving” to become better, and that in the striving, some of the things that they acquired, like stretched necks in giraffes, would be passed on to their offspring. There is a theory called “Panspermia” that holds that all evolutionary changes are preprogrammed by a rain of genetic material from space. There were even what could be called “theories of devolution,” which holds that, for the case of human beings at least, the original species was much more advanced than we are, and we are a sort of degenerate version. This is more or less what Disraeli was saying when he said, “Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels.” Given that Disraeli couldn’t fly, or work other miracles, he seems to have been at the most something of a devolved angel, don’t you think?

What Darwin suggested was that a plant or an animal that was a bit better suited to its environment than its neighbor would probably have a few more offspring than its neighbor, and that, over time, whatever it was that made it better suited would become more and more prevalent. Then he further went on that, over time, entire species might change, or sub-populations of a species might drift off from the rest of the species and become a new species in its own right. Of course there has been about a hundred and fifty years of thinking, observation, research, and modifications to this, and it’s a big subject, so big that I’m not going to try to go into it here. I will say that the theory of natural selection, as it’s called, is the cornerstone not just of modern evolutionary biology, but also of microbiology, biochemistry, biogenetics, paleontology, and a host of other scientific disciplines. I said earlier that I don’t care that much what side you’re on, and I don’t, but I will say that if you want to have anything to do with any of the related scientific fields, if you don’t know how the theory of natural selection works, you’re out of luck. You might as well try to get a job in a library without knowing how to read.

But there is another thing that I want to say here, and that is about some things that Darwin never said. But it does have Darwin’s name attached, and that, in my view is a tragic misunderstanding. What I’m talking about is what is called “Social Darwinism.”

We’ve all heard the phrase “survival of the fittest” and it’s usually applied to Darwinian natural selection, but in fact, Darwin didn’t invent the phrase, and it was not originally applied to animals, it was applied to corporations in 19th Century Great Britain.

It’s not uncommon to try to apply lessons from on field of learning to another, but it’s often a mistake. When Isaac Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, he created an elegant theory that seemed able to predict the motion of the Moon, Earth, and planets for all time. And some people took this to mean that everything could be predictable, even the affairs of men. So we got what has sometimes been called the “Clockwork Universe,” the idea that everything is predictable. More recently, science has pretty well demolished that idea, both with quantum mechanics and with what is called “chaos theory,” but I imagine that most of you will join me in a little chuckle at the expense of anyone who ever looked at human affairs and failed to see the inherent chaos there.

In any case, the 19th Century had a lot of misunderstandings in it. There had been a theory of economics put forward by a fellow named Adam Smith in the same year as the American Revolution, and he referred to the “invisible hand” of the market. Some people in the 19th Century, and, sadly, even today, mistake this invisible hand of the market for the invisible hand of God, to very bad results. Some of these people were in charge of the policy that had Ireland continue to export grain during the Irish potato famine. That was in the 1840s, and a couple of million people starved to death. No doubt had it been some years later, after the 1859 publication of Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, they would have cited Darwin as well as Adam Smith. But we all know the truth, don’t we? They just hated Irishmen, and the theories were just an excuse to let them starve.

What is called Social Darwinism actually began with the work of a man named Herbert Spencer, who believed that society was a struggle among individuals and that there was a “social evolution” that was equivalent to Darwin’s biological evolution. Actually, the ideas were even older, dating from a fellow by the name of Malthus, who did have some influence on Darwin as well, but the social stuff was all from the 19th century Victorians, who were looking for any excuse to justify their colonial empire. Plenty of people came to believe, because it was so comforting to their view of the world, that social evolution was the same thing as biological evolution, and that a person’s ranking in society reflected their rank in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, or as it was called, “the great chain of being,” another phrase that greatly predates Darwin. In this view, successful people, that is, the rich, the well-educated, the aristocratic were “more fit”, while people who were poor and uneducated were somehow “unfit.”

Well, when you make a mistake this big at the beginning, it just gets worse and worse. Darwinian natural selection talks about offspring, and it’s a general fact that poor and uneducated people have more offspring than do the rich and successful. In Darwinian terms, that would seem to make them “fitter.” Alternately, and this is my view, it says that social standing and wealth are irrelevant to evolution and vice versa.

You might think that this contradiction of the “fitter poor” would bring the idea of Social Darwinism into doubt, but the Social Darwinists weren’t having any of it. The fact that the poor were outbreeding the rich was taken as an indication that we just weren’t being harsh enough to the poor, or that we’d allowed the creation of civilization to get in the way of some biological imperative. The result of that thinking produced what came to be called the Eugenics Movement. In its saner moments, the Eugenics Movement merely advocated policies designed to get the well-educated to have more children. Unfortunately, the moments that weren’t so sane were more numerous, so we had advocates of brutal policies like laws against the “mixing of races”, the sterilization of “genetic inferiors,” various forms of discrimination and strange racial theories, and even outright genocide. We mostly managed to avoid the last one in this country, but the other policies were a matter of law for many decades at the beginning of the 20th Century.

And even now, one of the pitches that is made for the genetic engineering of human beings is that we could somehow “improve” people genetically, without anyone really knowing what that means.

And I mean that. Nobody knows what “genetically inferior” really means, because a person’s genetic makeup interacts with the environment, and what is “fit” for one set of circumstances may well be “unfit” for others. So it’s not something that you can establish from the outset. If aliens came down in spaceships and began to “intelligently design” a human being, the result would depend entirely upon what purpose the aliens had for humans and the environment that the humans were meant for. Frankly, I doubt that aliens would do a very good job of it, at least not from our perspective.

But people who have enjoyed worldly success want that success to be total and intrinsic. It’s often not enough for them to be rich and successful; they want to believe that it’s because of their basic virtue, that they are just plain better than other people. There are, in fact, some religious doctrines that hold worldly success to be the outward manifestation of inner virtue and godly grace. And if some people can enlist their ideas about God to justify themselves, it’s not very hard to imagine that some people, sometimes the same people, think that science will do that as well.

So let me say in conclusion, that, if some magic leprechaun were to give me a single powerful wish that it could be used to eradicate either Creationism or Social Darwinism, I’d get rid of Social Darwinism, because it has caused much greater harm than Creationism in this world. The idea that the day to day struggle for a decent life is part of some grand evolutionary struggle is pernicious at its core, and it does great harm. So if you see your fellow man in some distress, it’s okay to help them out. You don’t have to take every advantage at every step. Kindness is still a virtue; compassion does not harm the human race.

And Darwin is not your enemy, nor is evolution. We all know that we have an animal nature, but it need not define us. Disraeli may not have been an angel, nor are any of us, but it is not a bad thing to consider how you’d expect an angel to act, and maybe aspire to act like one every now and then.

Perspective

The first magazine that I edited at RPI was a thing called Perspective. It was a journal of politics and philosophy, founded by a couple of students named Ken Rothschild and Rick Kamens, both of whom were seniors my freshman year. They hadn't done all that much preparing a succession, so there was really no one to turn the thing over to except me, which they did in the spring of my freshman year.

Rothschild deserves a little tangent. He'd won some sort of prize in physics his freshman year, and he was one of those fellows who was always bursting with a hundred ideas at once. The problem was that, of those 100 ideas, 95 of them were crap, 3 were marginal, 1 was good, and 1 was excellent. But he didn't really seem to have a notion as to which was which, so he spent a lot of his time working on crappy ideas. I hope he�s found a good editor somewhere along the line.

Anyway, at a time of student unrest and the "New Left," Perspective had a very strong philosophical bias, and its patron saint philosopher was Nietzsche. This was the Walter Kaufman version of Nietzsche, who was a lot more interesting than the dreary man-into-superman-peering-into-the-abyss-will-to-power guy that most people think of when they hear his name. I once asked Amy about Nietzsche, and she said that she�d always gotten the impression that he was cold and humorless. So I read her a couple of my favorite passages, and she said, "Well, that's just hilarious, isn�t it?" Poor Frederich always had the problem of being too hip for the room.

Anyway, Kamens wrote an article for the first issue of Perspective that I edited, entitled "Science and Tragedy" using Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as a spring board for some ruminations on science. I changed the title, for layout and space reasons, and Kamens got pissed, as well he should have. My bad. He wasn't the last person I managed to alienate in my roles as editor during my college years, and I can't think of a single case that wasn't my fault. My only defense is that I don't think I made the same mistake twice.

Perspective was a camera-ready, photo offset print job, and we made good use of the cool fonts you could get with the IBM Selectric typewriter, though we did have to settle for ragged right justification. Later, on the Rensselaer Engineer, we got full linotype justification, though the printer then used the linotype to feed a photo offset. We eventually won some awards for things like layout and such. In fact, as nearly as I can recall, we won awards for almost everything except Editor and Editorials. In case you're keeping score, those would have been the awards that were specifically to me.

I managed to get out two issues of Perspective, plus a special little one-shot called Ellipsis, covering the Moratorium March on Washington. We did Ellipsis on a ditto machine, because I was fascinated by the ditto stenciling process, which allowed multi-colored printing. You were limited to maybe 25-100 copies, but it's not like there were thousands of readers clamoring to read more of the political musings of yours truly. Or even dozens, to be honest.

In the two issues of Perspective, I made maybe 2,000 lame jokes about the title of the magazine. Or maybe 2; memory is a tricky thing. I'd like to think that Perspective was where I first got to thinking about the point-of-view problem in philosophy, but I think it was more like just part of the general background. That was when I was learning about Special Relativity and quantum mechanics in physics, after all, and both of those have their own interesting (and differing) take on what observer means. I'd also taken mechanical drawing in high school, (front, side, top, and perspective views), and I'd been writing amateur fiction since grade school. Point of view was always on the list of interesting topics in each of those endeavors, and yet it still took me many, many, years to generalize the subject.

Ben is of the belief that the discovery of perspective in the graphic arts is one of the most important, if not the most important, ingredients to the Renaissance. He'll even go so far as to suggest that the camera obscura was the defining invention of the time, though he might backpedal a little if you mention moveable type.

Moveable type was an insidious invention. Without moveable type copyright law would never have come about, to mention one unobvious connection. The ability to mass produce books also led to the King James Bible and the Protestant Reformation. Without the ability to put bibles into the hands of the masses, common language translations were unnecessary, and without mass bible reading, why (and how) would the Reformation have occurred? Before general literacy, the Church told you what God said, and as long as they kept their stories straight, how would you ever think otherwise?

I've heard it said that Martin Luthor believed that if common people read the Bible, then they'd interpret it the same way he did. So Luthor had himself a bit of a viewpoint problem. Once people generally got to stick their oars in, all hell broke loose, as it were. The back and forth amongst those who were, each and every one of them, convinced of their possession of the real meaning of scripture, is the stuff of history, i.e. wars, torture, unrest, and revolution.

Then Descartes slipped one in on everybody with Cogito Ergo Sum. His little aphorism made "I" the test of existence, but only in translation, as it were, since there is no first person pronoun in the original Latin. Descartes elevated subjectivity to the level of a first principle, almost without anyone noticing that was what he�d done.

Nietzsche had his own take on the matter. If one's personal relationship to God is the important thing, how about if I relate to God as if he were past tense? "God is dead," Nietzsche wrote, doing a little Snoopy dance on the grave still haunted by the Holy Ghost. Nietzsche had mastered the art of being both humorous and serious at the same time.

Or, as I like to think of it, he had his own perspective on Author Omniscient and he was going to follow it to the vanishing point.

Blowback

I don't really know enough European history. It's long, it's complicated, and in the end, it often comes down to a some guys who really hated each other getting large numbers of people killed.

I admit that's something of an oversimplification.

In any case, much of what follows comes from some conversations I've had with Dave Stout, a fellow who knows his history far better than I do. However, all errors that follow are mine, because that's the way this goes.

The American Revolution was a wondrous thing from European eyes, reflecting (or at least seeming to) the ideology of The Enlightenment, with all the rights of man, scientific principles, etc. that were so much in fashion. There was also the "Nostalgie de la Boue" thing that Tom Wolfe has written about, literally, "Nostalgia for the Mud" but more figuratively, the "romanticizing of primitive souls." I remember a tale from high school history (and hence very suspect) that Ben Franklin's first appearance before the court of France came before he'd had a chance to unpack, so he could not wear his powdered wig. His naked head charmed the French aristos, him being a child of the wilderness and all. And so clever.

So old Ben became a Rock Star in his seventies, in Paris, and took to just a charming anyone who'd come around, including, it was rumored (and kinda said outright by John Adams) practically anyone in a skirt. I find it difficult to be shocked. Or, for that matter, surprised.

There was apparently something of an "egalitarian" fad before the French Revolution, with all sorts of aristocrats and privileged folk deciding that it would be a good idea to get to know their servants and others among the "little people." I'm bound to wonder if that helped or hurt their chances when the great guillotine lottery came to town. I can see it going either way. It's a "laws and sausages" thing from either side.

The French Revolution scared everybody in Europe, and by "everybody" I mean all the powerful folks whose necks began to itch at odd intervals. France itself was a mess; one of the features of the American Revolution was that, if things got too feisty in one area or another, a bunch of folk would just pull up stakes and move on. In France, there wasn't really any "on" to move to. It also turns out that all those principles of The Enlightenment, can squish around as much as Biblical text in producing whatever result one has in mind. Who knew?

Anyway, France had been at war with various other European powers for quite a while prior to the Revolution; the King's military spending was, in fact, one of the commonly cited factors for the country's near bankruptcy, which in turn gave the Revolution a good headlong shove. Add to that the fact that there was this grand social experiment going on (one which was explicitly rejecting the "divine right of Kings," and, for that matter, "the diving right of the Pope"), and the surrounding countries were not neutral observers.

So there followed a series of "Coalitions" amongst the Great Nations of Europe, sending armies to bite off as much of France as the situation would allow, and if the Revolution could be forced into collapse, so much the better.

The problem was, and here I specifically note Dave's excellent imagery, the "Coalitions" generally amounted to coming at France more or less the same way that ninja come at Bruce Lee in a Kung Fu movie, i.e. without much in the way of coordination. Britain could more or less kick anybody's ass at sea, but the land campaigns from Italy, Prussia, Austria, et al. were of the "our guys will just go in and brush them aside" (I'm unable to find a direct Dr. Strangelove link) sorts of deals. So they kept losing.

And as they were losing, the best commanders and tacticians in the French military (now cleared of a lot of deadwood by the aforementioned guillotine) were rising to the occasion. And rising in rank.

Napoleon is the obvious result, but there were a number of other pretty smart guys who gave a pretty good show, like Carnot, Jourdan, Moreau, and the like. Napoleon just happened to be the cream of the cream, and his nationality (Corsica being Italian, well, okay, Genoan, until it's purchase by France in 1768) made it easy for him to snap up Italy early on.

He eventually overreached, as so many do, and that story is pretty well known, what with the Russian winter, massive loss of men, and exile to palindromic Elba. Then there was the "over the hill boxer coming out of retirement" deal, and "The Hundred Days" ending in Waterloo, blah, blah, blah. There was also a thing called "The Holy Alliance" (catchy name; it got reused), that tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and managed to do pretty well, provided you ignored the fact that a number of the new kings and other royals weren't quite exactly who they would have been before Napoleon.

So we get the 19th Century, with the nations of Europe playing Risk with the rest of the world, all the while all the Royals looked over their shoulders, wary of the next mob, the next Commune, the next guillotine, or the next Napoleon. Actually, they didn't mind the next Napoleon so much, since he put scotch to the second French Republic. Besides it was those damned Republics that they really hated, and all those weird democratic notions that The Enlightenment had put out there.

The next grand "popular fashion" was a romanticization of war, an epidemic of war fever, and what was called at the time, The Great War.

Some didn't think it so great, but you've got to break some eggs to make some Dada.

In The Great War, aka WWI, we had the famous sealed train sending Lenin into Russia to make as much trouble as possible (they had a low estimate on what "as possible" meant). The Brits carved up the Ottoman Empire into what they considered manageable bites, and they missed that by a margin as well. The U.S. backed a lot of petty dictators because they were "bulwarks against communism" and for those efforts we got a theocratic Iran, after the Shah fell, theocratic Afghanistan (because, really, what kind of harm could a bunch or armed fanatical Muslims do to us?), and (in case I've been too subtle) a nuclear Pakistan teetering on the brink of collapse because it turns out that when you invade or otherwise meddle in other countries, there can be unexpected consequences.

Well, who would have expected that?

Lunacy

During my first Aikido involvement, I used to repair to a bar in Berkeley after training, to, um, replenish body fluids I’d lost from the exercise. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

The bar, Shattuck Avenue Spats, had two entrances, one in the front, the other leading out back to the parking lot. One evening I left by the back entrance and was confronted by a full moon in full “horizon effect,” its image close to the tops of the nearby buildings and looking close enough to reach out an touch.

I stopped dead in my tracks for several seconds, just marveling at it. Then, I noticed what I had just done and got curious.

I went over and got into my car, but I just sat there for another 15 minutes or so, watching people as they came out of the bar. Many of them stopped, just like I did, and gazed at the moon for a second. Others pointed it out to their companions. A few became very animated, even to the point of doing a little dance, or otherwise expressing physical excitement.

There have been a fair number of studies attempting to document the “full moon effect,” the notion that crimes get weirder, emergency rooms more crowded, and things generally just get stranger, around the time of the full moon. To the best of my knowledge, none of these studies has ever found a relationship between the full moon and abnormal behavior.

By the same token, and to the best of my knowledge, these studies never correct for whether or not the moon is actually visible on the nights in question. No one has tested the idea that it is the sight of the full moon that affects people, in other words.

Yet the sight of the full moon clearly does affect people. Songs have been written about it; it appears in art and literature.

This seems to be part of that unconscious, social bias in science that I’ve mentioned before. Certain hypotheses are more easily addressed than others. The bias extends to pseudo-science as well. People have a lot of water; the oceans are water; the moon affects the oceans by raising tides. Maybe the moon affects people the same way. That’s considered an acceptable hypothesis to test (and debunk).

The moon affects people through aesthetic influence does not seem to be a readily acceptable hypothesis. It’s subjective. Science is objective; it doesn’t like being reminded of the subjective.

It’s a blind spot, a lacuna. Rhymes with Luna.

Patience

I'm not a very patient man. The best I can do generally is to fake it with a mix of persistence and procrastination. But at least I understand the dimensions of my problem.

One of the difficulties of the democratic political process is how slowly it moves. This includes the criminal justice system, but I'm thinking here about the other parts of what we call "government." The designers of the U.S. Constitution very consciously put in a lot of time lags, plus those pesky things we call "checks and balances" in order to impede "popular enthusiasms" that they (rightly, in my opinion) feared.

One necessary exception to this was during emergencies, especially the time of war. But even then, the Constitution tries to parcel out the authority and responsibilities, again, fearing the tides that sweep nations into foolish conflicts. It's worth noting that two of our greatest Presidents who had first been Generals, warned of the pernicious effects of conflict. Washington's warning about "foreign entanglements" was directed at treaties that might embroil the U.S. in someone else's wars, and Eisenhower's criticism of the "military/industrial complex" was a warning about how those who profit from war may push a country against its own interests.

The other great President/General, Jackson, stands as something of a cautionary tale all by himself.

So now we're stuck in the middle of a post-colonial occupation, one of the most seriously wrongheaded maneuvers in the history of the Republic, and we've seen the entire set of warnings disregarded. Foreign entanglements, check. Military/Industrial Complex, check. "Popular enthusiasms," check. Oh, you want to tell me now that you were against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq from the beginning? Yeah, I believe you. Sure was lonely, wasn't it? Or are you one of the "Afghanistan was fine, but Iraq was a mistake?" Or maybe, "We're better off without Saddam, but the war was badly mismanaged." Yeah, you keep thinking that.

Many in the country are now sick of military "glory," though it's worth bearing in mind that even little minor changes in the ongoing slaughter are enough for hordes of people to begin spouting inanities like "The Surge is working!" Working at what? Have U.S. soldiers stopped dying? No, they're just dying at a somewhat slower rate than before. Iraqi citizens? Maybe the same thing, though is there anyone reading this who is naïve enough to take the U.S. military's word about that, to say nothing of the Bush Administration?

Besides, these conflicts are unwinnable. How do I know that? Because I have yet to hear someone give me a plausible theory of what winning would look like. The closest was on The Family Guy, where they had a sequence showing Iraqi women stripping off their burkas and opening a bikini car wash. It made as much sense as anything else I've heard, and at least it was concrete. Yeah, we'll have "won" when Iraq is a safe and stable democracy.

Just for the record: if you plan for "winning" depends on favorably changing the attitudes and behavior of some people who hate you, and who have hated you for decades, you're probably not going to win.

Oh yeah, and then there's that part about how Pakistan is destabilizing as we speak. Not that anyone could have predicted that a U.S. invasion the country next door, driving a pack of radicals with military training across the border could destabilize a country. I mean, after all, the corrupt military dictator said he was our friend. What could go wrong? And why would Iran want nuclear weapons just because it has a nuclear Pakistan to the east, and the U.S. military immediately to the West. I mean, really, why wouldn't they trust us? We only have their best interests at heart.

Anyway, so the American public is pretty sick of the matter, which I'm sure comes as a complete surprise to Islamic radicals in the Middle East, and we had an off-year election in 2006. Lo and behold, a lot of warmongers lost their seats in Congress and the Senate. Congress flipped, and everyone expected the whole foreign policy situation to change immediately.

Because George W. Bush had shown himself such a flexible guy up to this point. I mean, the people speak and he listens.

Besides, Congress is so very, very powerful. It's not like the President can just ignore what it says, right? And Bush never uses his veto power, well, at least he didn't up until the point when Congress stopped giving him absolutely everything he asked for.

Anyway, some people are pissed at Congress. How dare they not take the 51-49 vote mandate in the Senate and just stop the war? It's easy. Cut off the money, pass a law, impeach the bastard. Etc. Etc.

It has been my observation that it's very easy to tell other people how to do their jobs. Everybody's job looks easy from the outside. And maybe all it really would take is some "leadership," and some "courage," though I have to think that those aren't really that high up on the real talents required in Congress. And one might consider parsing that "courage" thing to remember that every member of Congress has to be thinking that their phones are tapped, that maybe their offices are bugged, and that there is a legion of political operatives ready to run with any hint of a scandal. Hell, in 2002 and 2004 we had two decorated war heroes lose elections because their patriotism was called into question. What do you think would have happened if there had been a real scandal to work with? Oh, and there's the part about how the U.S. Attorney's in Bush's Justice Department have been cooking up fake investigations of Democratic candidates just before elections.

But all it takes is a little courage—say internet bloggers and commenters who don't even use their real names online.

The Conservative Movement has been trying to take control of the country for at least the last 50 years, using the same fear-and-smear tactics all the while, but with a growing ideological base that allows them to paint a nice coat of rationalization over what is basically just Big Man Authoritarianism. September 11 gave them their chance and they glommed onto it and rode that puppy into the ground, feeding on the deaths long after the remaining bodies had been buried. The only thing that prevented the establishment of the Theocratic Plutocracy that they really, really want is that the whole enterprise is irrational and contradictory. Oh, and undemocratic.

But going off on a snit and blaming the current Congress for not cleaning up the whole thing immediately, that's also pretty undemocratic, too. We had a single election. That's not enough to usher in the Progressive Utopia. (I'm pretty much on record as not thinking Utopias are a good idea, anyway).

It has taken decades for the Conservative Movement to bring the country to its current miserable state. It will take that long (at least) to dig ourselves out of it. Those who want the overnight fix are setting themselves up for another ride on the Authoritarian roller coaster, or maybe just another big disappointment. I'm hoping for the last one, in fact. It's less of a betrayal of what I like to think my country is about.

Surfaces

Something in the smog biz that used to drive me nuts was when someone would look at some smog chamber experiment that had some unusual feature to it and remark, “Well, that’s just a chamber effect.” The subtext was “We’re studying gas phase kinetics, and that’s something having to do with a surface phenomenon, so we shouldn’t pay any attention to it.”

I didn’t think that should let us off the hook. What kind of surface effect was it? How did it behave? And were we absolutely sure that such effects didn’t occur elsewhere?

Eventually I wrote a paper, “Background Reactivity in Smog Chambers.” Google scholar tells me that it’s been cited at least 17 times, as recently as last year, so it did okay for a paper published 20 years ago.

In the 60s and 70s, there were a lot of smog chamber experiments done on all sorts of individual compounds; there was a belief that one could produce a “reactivity scale” that would let you reduce those things that had the most smog forming potential. As the complex nature of smog chemistry began to dawn on people, such experiments became less common, because “reactivity” has multiple components, sometimes 2 + 2 = 6 in smog chemistry, making the development of a single scale problematic. There’s a fellow at SAPRC in Riverside, Bill Carter, who has developed a much more complicated way of estimating “incremental reactivity,” which has its own problems, but it’s better than “one size fits all.”

Anyway, one of the “pure compound” experiments involved methyl chloroform, and I found it fascinating.

Methyl chloroform is also called 1,1,1 tri-chloroethane. If you start with ethane (CH3CH3) and replace all the hydrogens on one methyl group with chlorine, you get methyl chloroform. It’s pretty unreactive stuff; the only reaction sites for hydroxyl radicals are the ones on the methyl group and methyl hydrogens are bound pretty tightly. So for the first part of the chamber experiment, using very high concentrations of MCF with some added NOx, the thing just sat there.

Then, after a couple of hours of induction, something began to happen. The NO began to convert to NO2, some of the MCF began to decay, then suddenly, wham! The whole system kicked into high gear, NO went down like a shot, the MCF began to oxidize like crazy, and ozone began to shoot up. Then, just as suddenly, the ozone just disappeared, all of it, in just a couple of measurement cycles.

Everyone who looked at it said, “Ah, chlorine chemistry,” which was a sure guess. Chlorine will pull hydrogen off of even methyl groups with almost collisional efficiency (if a chlorine atom hits the molecule, it pulls off the hydrogen almost every time). Moreover, chlorine atoms destroy ozone; that’s the “stratospheric ozone depletion” thing.

But I was puzzled. Where did the chlorine atoms come from? Yes, there was plenty of chlorine in the MC, but that was bound. To get one off, you need to create a free radical and those ain’t cheap. If you create an HO radical, that can pull off one of the hydrogens, and that, after the usual reactions, gives you chloral, a tri-chlorinated version of acetaldehyde. Put in a high enough rate of photolysis for chloral in your simulation and you can get the whole system to react.

The problem was, it didn’t look right. With a high rate of photolysis for chloral, the simulation kicked off too quickly. Lower the rate and you never got the sudden takeoff. I’m pretty good at fitting the curves, and I could never get it to work.

So I started looking at the other actors in the system. The end result of chloral oxidation is phosgene (see why I was looking up all those post-WWI gas papers?), but phosgene itself didn’t fill the bill. So maybe the phosgene was converting to CO and Cl2 on the chamber surfaces like it does in someone’s lungs. No, that didn’t work either.

I kept returning to the problem over the years, trying yet another idea, each time getting no further.

In 1985, the “ozone hole” over the Antarctic was reported, and everyone in the stratospheric ozone community, including Gary Whitten, my boss at SAI, immediately suspected that it had something to do with the ice clouds that only form in the stratosphere over the Antarctic. In 1987, Mario Molina published a series of papers describing the surface reactions of stratospheric chemical species on ice crystal surfaces. The really critical reaction was the reaction of chlorine nitrate with hydrochloric acid to form nitric acid an molecular chlorine (Cl2). Cl2 photolyzes so rapidly that it might as well be two chlorine atoms.

I’m not sure when I first tried the Molina reaction on the methyl chloroform system, but it worked much better than anything else I’d tried. It makes the whole thing a very strong positive feedback system. It worked well enough to convince me that it was probably the missing factor; if I wanted to get a better simulation, I’d have to get very specific about some details of the original chamber experiment, and that one’s 35 years old. It’s pretty well moot at this point anyway.

Molina won the Nobel Prize for his work on stratospheric ozone depletion, and it was well-deserved. I was just looking at a single smog chamber experiment, one with a surface reaction that no one was interested in. The chance that I would have figured out the right answer to the peculiarities of that experiment is pretty small. The chance that I would have made the leap from the chamber walls to the stratospheric ice clouds is smaller still; I’d never heard of them before Whitten told me about them, and I certainly didn’t make the connection between them and the chamber experiment until Molina worked out the correct surface chemistry. So I’m certainly not trying to say that I coulda been a contenda.

But I will say that we all should have been paying more attention to the chamber wall effects. You don’t get to say beforehand what will turn out to be important.

Radio, Radium, and Ray Guns

Helix #7 is out, and I seem drawn to the same structure of review as I did for #6, which is to first comment on the John Barnes essay, then try to get an overview of the fiction (and, again, not critiquing the poetry because I am incompetent at it).

But here we get one of those little ironies of life, which is that it is hard to write much about things you agree with ("Here, here, I say." "What he said."), but disagreement sparks so many interesting little tangents. So many, in fact, that I've been having a hard time sorting them out. So I'm going to concentrate on a single theme, and maybe get to some of the other tangents later.

In "Who'll Save the Torchbearers?" Barnes returns to the notion that Science Fiction as a genre is dead ("walking dead" actually), and has been for a while. He's now speculating on whether or not genre SF was linked to what he calls the "Seventy-Five Years' War." Barnes' thesis seems to be that Science Fiction was a balm for nerds, during a time when "the goons took the nerds' toys and turned them into tools of horror," which is to say, weapons of war.

Now that's a pretty interesting tangent, because Barnes dates the end of the SFYW as the fall of the Berlin Wall. This glues together The Great European War, WWI and WWII, with the subsequent Cold War. That's far and away to complicated a subject for this essay. (Am I implying that Barnes' view is simplistic? I'll need more time to have an opinion about that). I will note that I've been doing some thinking about 20th Century Communism recently, and I'll suggest that, at the very least, Barnes' view overweights the importance of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain for at least a twenty-year period toward the end. I'd also like to see a comparison between aggressive wars and civil wars, since it looks to me like (the Great/World War notwithstanding) the real mass slaughters in the 20th Century were civil wars.

And all that would ignore science fiction though, wouldn't it?

Barnes and I seem to be in agreement that genre SF was a literature for certain sorts of people (let's call them nerds) trying to make sense of their lives and the world around them; it was especially an attempt to manage dislocation and change. I've taken a turn or two around that critical track myself.

Barnes concentrates on the war aspects of the transformative technologies, and maybe I would too if I wrote military SF. But I don't read the history of SF that way.

Let's look at the decade where most place the origins of science fiction, the 1920s, a year of comparative peace in the United States, and we're talking about the U.S. as the cradle of genre science fiction here.

The first commercial radio station went on the air in 1920; less than a decade later, radio had engulfed the country. RCA was the biggest and fastest growing corporation in history, the dot com of its day. Radio had spawned a host of subsidiary industries, including the recording industry, which only really took off when recorded music became a radio staple. Radio also gobbled up the remnants of vaudeville, and then merged with the motion picture industry when talkies came to power.

Back off a bit, and consider the necessary precursor to radio: electricity. Alfred Lee Loomis was a well-born son of a somewhat impoverished branch of the American aristocracy; his first cousin was Henry Stimson, secretary of war and secretary of state in the Taft administration, and Stimson took a hand in Loomis' upbringing and education after Alfred's father died. Loomis attended Yale in math and science, but on his family's insistence went to Harvard Law School, graduated summa cum laude, and worked for several years at a law firm until he enlisted in WWI, where he spent time at Aberdeen testing grounds, where those nerd toys were turned into weapons.

After the war, Loomis joined his brother-in-law in investment banking. The firm specialized in raising capital for the creation of public electric utilities. During the 1920s, the firm was responsible for the financing of a large fraction of the electric utilities that were created during that decade. Loomis saw the 1929 Crash coming, and cashed out at something on the order of a billion dollars.

Wealthy beyond dreams of avarice, Loomis retired to Tuxedo Park, New York, where he created a private industrial laboratory that was central to the U.S. side (the other side being British) of the development of radar.

Electricity. Radio. Radar. The electric light and the toaster. Toss in the automobile and the telephone. Put a few airplanes flying overhead. Then tell me that the dislocation was all about the warfare.

The early science fiction magazines used a fair number of reprints, because the "scientific romance" had already been established by the likes of Wells, Verne, Burroughs, and Conan Doyle. Hugo Gernsback was a radio buff. Ultimately, however, if you really want to get a taste of the imagination of the times, look to the Sunday Supplements. I once read a year's worth of newspapers from 1911. The Sunday Supplements were always going on about all sorts of scientific miracles. One was on how organ transplants (from gorillas, no less) were "just around the corner."

But nuclear energy was also a gleam in the eye, and radium was the new wonder material. New and wondrous elements had been discovered, and one need look no further for the origins of Dick Seaton and the rest of Doc Smith's menagerie. To judge from some of the stories of the time, radium was the new philosopher's stone; it was in tonics and elixirs, and it stared at you from the dials of your alarm clock.

It didn't stop at radium, of course. Vitamin D was discovered in the 1920s, and the link to sunlight and ultraviolet light helped create a fad for mercury vapor tube "health gadgets" including combs. That mercury vapor UV light also creates ozone was considered another plus, because ozone was held to be healthy; witness all the "Ozone Park" named suburbs from the early 20th Century.

So, radiation, rays of all kinds, those were part of the "science" mix at the dawn of science fiction.

Then you get Goddard and his rockets, and you get ray guns. Why do I link the two? Because the rockets are how you get to Mars or Venus and the ray gun is how you "tame the frontier." The early science fictions stories were "space operas," just as westerns were "horse operas." Many an early science fiction story is just a western hero with a ray blaster instead of a six gun, and bug-eyed monsters instead of Indians or wolves.

Science fiction was born in turmoil, sure enough, but not the turmoil of war, per se (people just do the war thing all the damn time). It was the turmoil of change, the usual suspects in other words. And pulp literature was just wide open for it. Cross breed an adventure story with a Sunday Supplement and you get Science Fiction.

That's the beginning. How about the middle? Why did science fiction outlive the pulps, when so many other forms died?

Well, let's not overthink this. The mystery story survived. The puzzle story led to the hard-boiled detective, then the procedural. They still do pretty well. The romance is still doing well, better than SF, actually, with a new crop of hybrids like "time travel romances," and "paranormal romances" and a flock of werewolves, vampires, fairy folk and monsters keeping the pot on the boil. Some SF folk hate the stuff, and say the same sorts of things about it that others have said about Science Fiction. Instant Karma, bub.

But there's another reason for the extended lifetime of Science Fiction as a genre, and it contains the seed of its demise.

Science Fiction was never simply romanticism, or escapist literature. It had a Program, a Cause. Actually it had several, but the Big One was the Colonization of Space. Again, it was right there from its birth, at the end of the Colonial Empires, the closing of the Frontier. It was easy for the writers to morph one narrative into an extraterrestrial counterpart, and it was easy for the readers to go along. Indeed, they were expecting it.

Later came the paranormal stuff, ESP, Psi, all the spiritual wish-fulfillment fantasies, and those translated pretty well for the counter-culture. I knew more than one fellow who believed that you could get ESP by taking enough of the right drugs. (Insert "he gained the power to cloud his own mind" joke here). And biological engineering, cyborgs, ecological engineering (for which read: terraforming) all the other transformative aspects of modern biology, all those have been enlisted in the space colonization fantasy.

The problem is that it just doesn't work out. There are no inviting frontiers in space, no place where a man can "live off the land," as it were, no place where the land is even as hospitable as the Antarctic, the middle of the Sahara, or the bottom of the ocean. Space is vast and harsh, miserably expensive to visit, with nothing in it that justifies the enormous cost of picking it up and bringing it back. It's a scientific wonderland

(As an aside, let me mention another one of the SF programs that failed miserably: artificial intelligence. We get no wonderful robot pals to keep us company, either. Dang.)

So the space colony dream is brain dead, kept alive on life support by deep denial and libertarians who blame "The Government" for screwing up the space program. Some have taken stock option lottery money and are trying to do it with private enterprise, the way Heinlein assured them would work. I hope something serendipitous comes out of it, because I'm pretty damn sure that it won't be a Mars colony that comes out the other end.

That's not me being pessimistic, incidentally. I think all sorts of great things came out of the Space Program (and, by implication, out of the Cold War, so maybe that's the connection that Barnes is groping for). We got microchips, Tang, and my college education. Those have got to count for something.

[Let's not forget the inevitable plug for Helix. It's reader supported, so put some money into the tip jar. You'll feel noble.]

Jealousy

Cause all I really want is to be with you
Feeling like I matter too
If I hadn't blown the whole thing years ago
I might be here with you
Tomorrow we can drive around this town
And let the cops chase us around
The past is gone but something might be found
To take its place...hey jealousy
-- “Hey Jealousy” Gin Blossoms

On a spring afternoon on a Saturday in 1984, I got a telephone call from my ex-girlfriend. She’d just broken up with her current flame and she wanted to talk, It seems he’d said something about “maybe seeing other people” and that was it for her, because she was always as possessive and jealous as a stereotypical Latina or Southern Belle, without being actually Hispanic or Southern.

That had been more or less the reason why we’d broken up, in fact. One of the phrases you can almost always count on as a hit in a cold reading is to suggest that someone “wants love but has a fear of commitment.” At least that works for anyone who is in his mid-thirties and has never been married. So sue me.

We spoke for a while, about all manner of things. Neither of us had any strong urge to get back together; that wasn’t what the call was about. But we’d been in love at some point at least, strong feelings linger, and we’d worked at staying friends, so there we were.

Then, after maybe a half hour on the phone, she said, “Uh, Jim, you’re going to have to help me out here. I’ve suddenly got a splitting headache,” Then I heard the phone clatter to the floor, and there was nothing but silence on the other end.

I like to think that I’m capable of rising to most occasions, but on this one I think I failed more or less completely. I couldn’t call her aunt and niece who lived in the same house with her, because the phone was off the hook. I should have called 911, but it didn’t occur to me, partly because I had no idea what had happened. I could have called a friend of mine, who lived only a few blocks away, and asked him to check up on her, but I didn’t think of that at all.

All I could think of to do was to run out to my car, hop in, and drive over. If I thought of any of the other things on the drive over, I didn’t think to stop the car to try to find a phone. Once you commit to a particular action (drive over as quickly as possible), you’re loathe to change direction.

The drive took about half an hour. I got there just as they were loading her into the ambulance. Either her niece or aunt had tried to use the downstairs phone and had gone upstairs to see why it was off the hook. They’d found her and called 911, like I should have done.

I pulled into what turned out to be an illegal parking space, thereby earning my one and only San Francisco parking ticket. I rode with the ambulance to the hospital. I don’t have lot of reliable memories of that evening but two stand out: watching the CAT scan results as they appeared on the screen, and, earlier, just as she was about to go into the MRI, holding a bedpan to her lips as she vomited into it.

The technical term for what I watched on the CAT scan is “hemorrhage of a sub-arachnoid aneurism.” The sub-arachnoid arteries are in the skull, but not in the brain, as such. A hemorrhage of one of these arteries produces the usual: pressure on the brain which causes extreme pain and nausea. An aneurism is a bulging weakness in a blood vessel, which makes hemorrhage more likely.

It turned out that it had happened to her once before, in college, when the only treatment was a week in a dark room, hoping that it would get better. It had, but it was still a ticking time bomb in her skull. It’s amazing how much people don’t tell you about themselves; she’d never mentioned it to me.

Since her college days, a surgical treatment had been devised: a metal sleeve to put over the aneurism to keep it from rupturing. I happened to know a neurologist who gave me the statistics on the matter. About 50% of patients never make it to surgery; they die either in the initial bleeding or from subsequent short term complications. Of those who manage to make it to surgery, the survival rate is 50%. I hope it’s gotten better in the intervening years.

I did not share those statistics with her, or anyone in the family as we all waited for her to stabilize sufficiently for surgery.

The boyfriend was there the next day, and he didn’t leave her side during visiting hours during the time leading up to surgery, nor during the week after it, while she was recovering to go home. Actually, that’s not quite true; he did leave whenever I was around. By the time she went home, he’d convinced her to get back together again.

They lasted about another year, as I recall, but I might have that wrong. By the time they broke up for the second time, I’d gotten my own illness and wasn’t paying much attention to the outside world.

His motives for the bedside vigil are too obvious to be worth analyzing, but I will note one thing. He’d always resented me, the ex-boyfriend, which is hardly a news flash on anyone’s terms. But it took me a while to realize the new element that the crisis had added. I’d been the one who held her head while she vomited into a bedpan. And he was jealous of that. It was an intimacy that he had been denied.

The Firesign Theater

I once remarked to a friend that for some people, myself among them, The Firesign Theater was as important phenomenon as The Beatles. A little web searching tells me that I wasn't the only one who had that idea.

When I returned home to Nashville after my freshman year at RPI, one of the first things I did was try to buy the first Firesign Theater album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him. I was initially unsuccessful; the album was not to be had in all of Nashville, Tennessee. I then ordered it and was told that the regional distributor, in Atlanta, would have to get enough orders for a case of albums (about 25) for them to procure it and then ship it to the record store. I placed the order and finally got my hands on it about six weeks later. That is what is called being an "early adopter."

The Firesign Theater records were, in the jargon of the time, mind-blowing. They essentially invented a genre that was sometimes called "rock-n-roll comedy," and also frequently called "drug humor." But the latter label was also applied to things like Cheech and Chong, which were basically retreads of "dumb guy" humor with a stoner gloss. Firesign was not like that at all. David Ossman, one of the four members of Firesign claimed that their comedy was surrealist humor, with its most identifiable antecedent being The Goon Show, a British radio program featuring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe. I once heard Ossman speaking lovingly of a Goon Show scene being described as taking place in "An Edwardian Ditch."

The Firesign Theater were David Ossman, Peter Bergman, Phil Proctor, and Phil Austin, and their first album was produced by James William Guercio, who also produced the second Blood, Sweat, and Tears album (the one that sold a zillion copies), The Buckinghams, and the band Chicago, and directed the movie, Electra Glide in Blue. He also produced a Chad and Jeremy album that included the Firesign Theater in some backing vocals. I did not know that when I bought the album, but figured it out soon enough.

The rise of Firesign Theater coincided with the progressive radio phenomenon and would not have been possible without it. Their success spawned a gold rush in record companies searching for comedy groups with a counter-cultural sensibility that could be put onto record. So we also got The Conception Corportation, The Congress of Wonders, National Lampoon's Radio Dinner, the Ace Trucking Company, plus the aforementioned Cheech and Chong. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the success of the National Lampoon was predicated on Firesign clearing the brush, but I'm sure there were some seeds planted in the broken ground and the same audience later made Saturday Night Live a success. Monty Python also had its U.S. acceptance already insured by the pre-existing audience that Firesign had grown. Quite fitting, of course, given the Goon Show antecedent.

I had some direct contacts with members of Firesign, mostly during the faux political campaign of the National Surrealist Light Peoples Party's candidate, George Papoon, in 1976. This was mostly through a member of a group in Berkeley in the mid-seventies that got together to screw around and make stuff up and record it. That group included a former neighbor of Ossman's, and some of our screwing around became part of the local Papoon campaign.

Another friend at that time had worked for KPFA, and had a number of tapes of the "Dear Friends" radio broadcasts (TFT began as a radio show on KPFK, the Los Angeles station of the Pacifica Network, while KPFA was the Berkeley arm), which he gave me. Excerpts from the radio show made up the compilation album, "Dear Friends" but many of them were even more interesting in context.

After "Waiting for the Electrician," the glory days of Firesign include "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once, When You�re Not Anywhere At All," "Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers," "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus," and "Everything You Know is Wrong." After that, various dissentions split the group into three parts, each releasing a solo album, Procter and Bergman, ("TV or not TV"), Austin, ("Rollermaidens from Outer Space") and Ossman, ("How Time Flies"). I think that "TV or not TV" was the only commercially successful one of the batch.

The breakup was described by Ossman as necessary for everybody's sanity, Ossman suggesting that the level of collaboration that they'd reached was hazardous to mental health. But commerce, and the relative lack of success of each of the individual members dictated that the group reformed and toured on an intermittent basis over the next decades, also releasing albums, CDs, an occasional single or EP, and the occasional low budget film or TV project. There are a large number of Firesign fan pages on the web, plus detailed descriptions of their projects since the 1970s. A fair amount of the energy behind both is, unfortunately, counter-culture nostalgia. My own place in the matter is probably best illustrated by the fact that the only Firesign CD I have is "Boom Dot Bust," a singularly unsuccessful offering that I liked quite a bit.

Still, it's nice to know that there is still a wealth of later Firesign material that I've not seen or heard. The Firesign shows I've been to over the past thirty years refreshingly refuse to pander directly to nostalgia, bringing in fresh material and referencing the old stuff as points of departure more than slavish re-creations. If I want the old stuff, I'll put Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers on the old turntable, find a way to get properly altered, and ponder whether the title refers to Shiva, crushed beneath Kali, reweaving the ply of reality, or the poor little guy on the rolling TV set with the vertical hold knob missing, whose only hope is for us to readjust the picture using the necessary tool.

Equivalation

The word "equilivation" and its parallel formations (equivalating, equivalated) seems to have a fairly long standing (albeit rare) usage in education, art, and law. If degrees from two universities are formally accepted as equivalent, the formal process for deciding this seems to be called "equilivation." Other traces of the word from art, academia, and the law all seem to come to the idea of "to assess as equivalent."

A couple of years ago, the word was applied to a more specialized arena: politics. Intriguingly, the first example I can find of it is from confederateyankee, a right wing blog:

Will all the liberals out there equivalating how Americans treat captured terrorists with how terrorists treat those unlucky souls they capture, please take the time to remind me when that last time was American soldiers did anything like this:

(from June 20, 2006)

The fellow then gives some horrible example of mutilation and murder by Iraqi insurgents. Then there follows a rosy picture of Guantanamo etc., where prisoners are judged to all gain weight in the tropical paradise while being subjected to the equivalent of fraternity pranks.

As I've said before, I'm pretty sure I could get someone like confederateyankee to change his tune if I could waterboard him. And we know it would be the truth, because waterboarding produces the truth, right? Just ask those who are in favor of it.

Nevertheless, some dastardly leftist types soon stole the word (because they have no respect for other people's intellectual property, I daresay), and gave it a twist.

From cubezoo:

Equilivation: To consider competing or opposite positions on an issue to be equivalent, despite a lack of evidence to support one of the sides.

Cubezoo links to Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy:

Let's define it thusly:

1. The knee-jerk assumption that competing sides, especially political parties, are equally extreme, equally guilty, etc.

This approach minimizes public outrage when one side has blatantly or repeatedly misbehaved. It is beneficial not only to wrongdoers and their supporters, but also to media outlets that thrive on continued argument, rather than on problem resolution.

2. Treating a dubious position as arguably equivalent to a legitimate one.

Dignifying questionable claims and disreputable agendas provides sensational fodder for an increasingly entertainment-focused news media. It also brings those claims and agendas within striking distance of acceptability.

There is much more, of course, particularly on such matters as evolution/creationism, global warming/it's-all-a-hoax (by communists, I've been told), and so forth. Equivalation is very much part of the toolkit in the ongoing war on Science.

"Opinions differ on shape of globe. Round or Flat? You decide."

It has, of course, gotten easier and easier to be accused of being left wing over the past few years. There is no question, for example, that Barry Goldwater would be on the Republican Party's extreme left; he thought that gays should serve in the military and that it was okay to regulate the sale of so-called "assault weapons."

"I've been a member of the NRA, I collect, make and shoot guns. I've never used an automatic or semiautomatic for hunting. There's no need to. They have no place in anybody's arsenal. If any s.o.b. can't hit a deer with one shot, then he ought to quit shooting." –Barry Goldwater

Hell, I'm accused of being left wing on a regular basis these days, which, given my support for Barry Goldwater in 1964 (when I was 14), there may be some merit in the charge. Same with my voting for Gerald Ford, G. H. W. Bush, and Pete Wilson (first time; his second campaign was a race-baiting travesty). These were all very left wing Republicans, at least by the current tilt of the landscape.

The best comment I've seen on the subject of Republican/Democrat Equilivation is from Bruce Wilder in a comment on Mark Thoma's Economist's View:

The Republicans advocate torture, perpetual war, overthrow of the Constitution, national bankruptcy, oppose science, and promote political and business corruption. The Democrats are at least divided on those issues.

I'm just hoping that there will be some pieces worth picking up after the Republican Party implosion that is proceeding in slo-mo as we watch. Also, I'm not sure if the "worth picking up" refers to pieces of the Party, or pieces of the Country. But I'm sure I'll be more cheerful when the days get longer.

Equivalation is an easy trap to fall into, the most notorious example being the reducio ad hitlerem, whereby someone is claimed to be as bad as Hitler, by noting all the similarities, except, of course, the part about rounding up millions of people and feeding them gas chambers.

It's also worth noting that the news media does have a liberal bias, in the sense that newspapers and TV news does not equilivate owning a house to owning slaves, that few pundits yearn for the days when a woman required a husband's signature to obtain a drivers license (that one's still in living memory). I see few calls for a return to lynching as a means of maintaining the social order, nor have I seen anyone in the media voice the opinion that chinamen have no souls. The idea that only owners of real estate should be allowed to vote doesn't seem to be currently on the table, nor is the idea of an hereditary monarch really big right now.

See, definite liberal bias. I'm sure that we're just a step or two away from nationalizing the oil companies. Really. Any. Day. Now.

If I Don’t Do It

"And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." - Luke 6:31


"If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?" – Hillel the Elder

The Golden Rule is a good first cut at ethics and morality, a sound bite in favor of compassion and reciprocity. We have a lot of words for the emotional underpinning of the admonition: compassion, empathy, sympathy, commiseration, fellow feeling, condolence, concord, consideration. Many of them have the Latin cum as a root, “with,” as in having one’s own feelings match with those of someone else.

Some people lack the ability to model other people in their own minds, certain kinds of autistics, for example, or sociopath personalities. Sometimes those with this sort of defect can nevertheless learn to behave according to a code of ethics by adhering to fixed rules of conduct. They don’t know why it’s a good idea, but they can recognize that it is a good idea, because it keeps them out of trouble.

On the flip side, there are any number of people who have functioning empathic abilities, who nevertheless expend enormous amounts of energy trying to behave as if they do not possess them, or at least that such emotions should not be acted on, they’re just a sign of weakness.

But your mental model of someone else is still a model, and as such, it lead you astray. I remember reading a letter-to-the-editor from someone on the eve of Ted Bundy’s execution, asking that people consider how it must make Bundy feel to hear all those people outside of the prison chanting for his death. My reaction was to try to imagine how Bundy must have felt when he was murdering a sorority house full of co-eds in Florida. I didn’t succeed.

John Douglas, the FBI profiler, argues that this lack of understanding of the minds of serial killers is why we should keep them alive for study. I alternate between agreeing with him and thinking that there are still guys I’d pull the switch on myself. I’d even charge up the capacitors for the electric chair by hooking up a generator to a bicycle if I had to. (This is not the same as advocating a legal death penalty, of course).

Bundy is an extreme case, but it illustrates the biggest loophole in the Golden Rule. What happens when the other people don’t want the same things that you want? There are plenty of people in this world who would be appalled to be treated the way I like to be treated, and vice versa. Sure, you can almost always reach some agreement at a high enough level of abstraction, but often the higher levels of abstraction interfere with the lower ones. It may have given Bundy a sense of accomplishment to kill those coeds, and who doesn’t like a sense of accomplishment?

Still and all, I’m not arguing for the abandonment of the Golden Rule. Far from it. I think that trying to understand how other people think and feel is critical to safely navigating the world, to say nothing of living a humane life. It’s only that even the Golden Rule has its limits.

Well, everything has its limits, and ethics and morality are certainly no exceptions to that rule. So it goes without saying that what I’m about to write should be taken with a grain of salt.

A while back I noticed and interesting pairing of statements, common statements, that have big moral and ethical implications. Here they are

If I don’t do it, someone else will.

If I don’t do it, nobody else will.

The truth or falsity to each of these is variable, of course. Actually, the first one may well be more factually correct in most situations. But I’m more interested in the moral implications of these statements, and their past tense equivalents:

If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have.

If I hadn’t done it, it wouldn’t have gotten done.

The first one is so often used as an alibi, isn’t it? I’ve always liked the story of the condemned man who said it to the judge, who replied, “And if they had, it would be them swinging on the gallows tomorrow and not you.”

It’s the “everybody else does it,” defense. I was just following orders. You can’t fight City Hall. What else was I supposed to do?

But if I don’t do it, nobody will. If I don’t take out the trash, no one will. If I don’t throw my litter into the street, no one will. Not necessarily true, but it’s the better way to behave isn’t it?

So maybe we should just the second test our standard, even when it’s probably not true. People exhibit all sorts of behavior that is based on things that aren’t true. This one looks like it might do some good. Maybe just try it out. Give it a shot. See how it works.

I don’t see much of a downside really. It looks a lot like personal responsibility to me.

Fierce Women

In Battle Babes and Warrior Women, I was writing about a pop culture phenomenon: women who could hold their own in a fight, said fight being a feature of adventure fiction of all sorts. Previously, the role for females in adventure fiction had been almost solely limited to "the damsel in distress," or occasionally, the Ruler of the Hidden Realm (e.g. Haggard's She).

Life imitates fiction, of course, and vice versa. History finds plenty of, for example, intrepid women of the Victorian era who spent their lives in rough country, in large measure because they could not bear, for whatever reason, the limited nature of the conventional roles available to them.

Time passes and some other things get added to the mix, most notably the growing awareness in the West of the nature of various Eastern martial arts. These seemed almost like magic when they were first being introduced (and there is indeed some magic involved), especially in that often a smaller combatant can defeat a larger one in bare-handed combat. The "smaller combatant" can be female.

I've seen it suggested that, while the average difference in upper body strength between men and women is on the order of 40%-50%, the difference in lower body strength (torso, hips, and legs) is more like 20%. For forms like Aikido and Jujitsu, which derive most of their power from lower body movements, women are not at a great disadvantage. Some women take to the striking forms such as kung fu and karate, of course, and there comes another part of the insight: a trained fighter can defeat an untrained one. Also, underestimating an opponent ("she's just a girl") can have serious consequences. "He didn't see that one coming" has been said over many a prostrate form.

Sometimes people are drawn to Aikido (the art with which I am obviously more familiar) by its "non-competitive" nature. Some even believe that Aikido is fundamentally "non-violent." So some beginning Aikido students, and even some that become fairly advanced, develop a romanticized notion of being able to subdue an attacker without injuring them. I admit that such a thing is possible, but I warn those students not to count on it.

Of course some people begin martial arts training out of belligerence, and I've heard some students noting that Aikido does leach that out of its students as well. But it does not eliminate ferocity; sometimes it enables it, although it does provide some measure of control, if control is desired.

I have encountered those who I would classify as "fierce" in Aikido, and many of them have been women. In some cases, over time, I have watched as the layers of inhibition are slowly peeled away: the fear of hurting someone, the fear of retaliation, the caution in movement, the fear of making a mistake. All these are slowly worn thin during long hours of practice on the mat. What remains is more direct, an encounter with a deeper self, and less of a social construct.

Not all of this is good, naturally. Some people find a bully within themselves, and they must learn to deal with that. Each of those aforementioned fears takes its toll, and fears often do not so much depart as temporarily step out of the way. Later, the sensible mind looks back on some particular example of ukemi and says, "What were you thinking!?"

And you hurt people. Actually, some of the techniques are designed to cause pain, abeit without lasting damage. But sometimes something goes wrong, and someone does take some damage. It's often not even your fault, and you didn't intend it, but they do get hurt, and you were a part of it, and then what? You may adjust your practice, or you may not. But having hurt someone that you like and respect makes it a lot easier to contemplate hurting someone who has attacked you, or otherwise created a conflict. It amplifies the ferocity. It creates a warrant.

The social norm is to expect physical ferocity to be confined to men. Even emotional ferocity in women brings on slurs like "bitch." I'll concede there are women who physically abuse their spouses, but that is more of the bullying that I wrote of earlier, and emotional abuse is more common—in both directions—and has little to do with what I'm driving at here.

Fierce women have broken yet another set of chains that bind "civilized" behavior. Once broken, the chains are often picked up and draped upon the self as decorations, as jewelry that can be shed in an instant if the situation calls from something different from the social norms. We live in a world of secret identities. That soft talking lady may be able to throw you across the room.

Dorms

RPI experienced the same post-War growth that every other college and university in the country experienced, as the GI Bill opened the spigots of pent-up demand for higher education in America. The “Korean Conflict,” which killed over 50,000 Americans without officially becoming a war, got its own GI Bill in 1952. Benefits became untethered to war as such with a further extension in 1966. The National Defense Student Loan Act also pumped money into the system as a response to Sputnik (Thank you, Comrade Khrushchev!), making up the difference for a lot of us.

The result of the influx was a lot of hasty construction. By the time I arrived, some more modern dorms had been constructed, primarily for upper classmen and graduate students, and the fraternity system had also risen to the challenge of providing housing for sophomores and above. So the post-War housing became the “Freshman Dorms” and all freshmen except women and students who lived locally was required to live there, and also to eat in the Frosh Dining Hall. Ostensibly this was for the purpose of “unifying the class,” but some suspicious souls thought it was to make sure that the resources were fully utilized (and reimbursed). The freshmen women, incidentally, wound up in the Freshman Dorms two years later, in the top two floors of Crockett Hall, but that’s another story.

If “The Graduate” had been made in the post-War period, it wouldn’t have been “plastics” that the guy said to the protagonist, it would have been “cinderblocks.” Everything seemed to have been built from them. My home in Donelson was made with the large sort; the RPI freshmen dorms used a narrower kind. The outside walls had a brick facing, but the main construction was cinderblock, as were all the interior walls, which were not load bearing. I know this because a reasonably large person could stand in the hallway and push on both walls, moving them by as much as an inch in some cases. People who pissed off their fellows sometimes found their rooms shrinking. Or it could have been just for laughs.

Another laff riot was to “penny” someone’s door shut. That involved two or three guys pushing against the dorm room door, creating a little space, and shoving pennies edgewise into that space. The resulting force on the door mechanism made it almost impossible to turn the doorknob. Absolutely the favorite thing to do to someone just before they had a date, though that required some stealth

The floors themselves were likewise thin, enough so that you could locate the ceiling light in the room below just by searching around for the warm spot on your floor. If the guys below got on your nerves too much, a dropped bowling ball would create enough of a shockwave to shatter the bulbs and sometimes the entire fixture. Ah, good times.

The rooms were steam heated; RPI had its own coal-fired steam plant at that time, and exploring the “steam tunnels,” the access tunnels for the steam heating system, was another rite of passage. The dorms rooms were alternately too hot or too cold and always too dry, at least from this southern boy’s perspective, and the windows seldom sealed properly. On really cold days, some enterprising freshmen would spray water on the windows, which froze, sealing them properly and also putting a bit of extra moisture into the air.

Over winter holiday breaks, ice hockey in the first floor hallways was the order of the day, at least in some dorms, and ours had a star goalie for the hockey team, the closest thing that RPI had to a celebrity athlete. Rags stuffed into the communal shower drains put water into the hallway, then opening up as many windows as there were unlocked doors and voila, improvised ice rink. The fact that the hallways were way too narrow probably helped the guys toughen up, and gave “bouncing off the walls,” an entirely new exemplar.

There was one guy in our dorm who was a climber; he headed to the mountains on weekends, but during the week he was perfectly happy to practice repelling down from the roof. I don’t think anyone ever tried to penny him in his room—that would be pointless—nor do I think he ever tried pennying anybody’s room shut from the inside, but it’s an interesting thought.

When I got to RPI, most of the dorms had been converted, “modernized,” or
Something like that. This meant thin wood paneling on the walls and covers over the bare radiators. I think the dressers/closets were better as well. One dorm, Nason, I think it was, hadn’t been upgraded, and visits to friends in Nason felt like a little trip to Sparta. Thin wood paneling doesn’t sound like much, but the difference felt huge.

A few friends of mine have, for years, made a point of getting a Frosh dorm room for reunions, putting all sorts of sixties stuff in it (blacklight with posters, lava lamp, stereo with period music) and basically having a weekend long dorm party. Beer would be available; I shan’t mention other possibilities. I considered it a nice service that they were doing for the rest of us alumni, few of whom retain the necessary hardware to run the software, as it were.

Reunions are held in early June, which isn’t quite the perfect time. The perfect time would be in mid-Fall or mid-Spring, when the temperatures are mild, but with just a hint of cool. In the early evening, after dinner, I could lay on my narrow bed with the window open, the wind rustling the leaves of the row of trees on the other side of the parking lot, and behind that, the ivy on the walls of the Troy Armory (okay, that's mostly gone now as well; modernization takes its toll). The light would slowly fade and someone would start up the music in some other dorm and the sounds would drift in and out of focus. Eventually I’d have to get up and either study, or read, or maybe I’d go down to the Student Union, or even just walk around the town. The possibilities seemed endless. I liked that feeling, though I don't get to feel it quite as often these days.