In 1976, we had just completed what turned out to be the first urban airshed simulation using a grid model with realistic photochemistry. By "realistic" I mean that it had a close to accurate estimation of the primary source of photo-oxidizing radicals (from carbonyl compounds rather than what was previously thought to be the primary source: oxygen atoms reacting with hydrocarbons), thermal decomposition of PAN, and a strong nitrogen oxide sink related to aromatic hydrocarbons.
One interesting thing about this particular simulation was that it did not involve Los Angeles. It just so happened that a project involving Denver had coincided with several model upgrades, including the new chemistry, so Denver got the goodies before LA did.
The project team consisted of a goodly fraction of the employees of the (rather small) research consulting firm that had originally won the main EPA follow-on work for developing a photochemical grid model: Systems Applications Inc., not to be confused with Science Applications Inc., or several other firms that went by the initials SAI. Systems Applications no longer exists as such, having been part of the merger and acquisitions whirligig in the 1980s, followed by a breakaway group going to start up a unit of Environ, though not many of those at SAI in 1976 are with either the ghost of SAI or Environ now. That's the biz, you know?
Anyway, part of the SAI business model was to do these government research and consulting gigs, which did not have much profit margin, followed by environmental impact work for other groups, usually corporate, which did have decent profit margins—sometimes. And thereby hangs this tale.
After the work for the Denver Regional Council of Governments (pronounced "Dr. Cog"), we got a request for an impact statement for a facility that had a natural gas turbine power source. Natural gas burns without much in the way of hydrocarbon emission, but the combustion temperature creates some nitrogen oxides, NOx in the lingo, and we were charged with determining the air quality impact. The thing only emitted a few kilograms of NOx per day or thereabouts, barely enough to register on the meter, as it were, but part of the song and dance of environmental impact statements is to do your "due diligence" and if you can get the cutting edge of science on your side, well, good on you and here's your permit.
I'd been the primary modeler on the DRCOG project, for a lot of reasons that I'll describe some other time, and there was a computer programmer/operator who worked with me, and a project manager above me. This was back in the days of punch cards and CDC 7600s, and pardon while I get all misty eyed, okay, that was plenty, because, really, feeding cards into card readers to run programs sucks.
I asked the programmer how much time he expected the job to take. The only thing that needed be done was to add one single point source to the point source input deck, then a bit of analysis, AKA subtracting several numbers from each other and maybe drawing a picture or two. He estimated the time at something like three days, but said, "Call it a week."
I knew how much a week costed out at, so I got the dollar figure, then doubled it, and reported that as my estimated cost of the project to the Denver Project lead. He doubled my estimate and gave it to the Comptroller.
The Comptroller doubled that number and gave it to the company President, who then doubled it and made that offer to the company that wanted to hire us. They signed without blinking.
Okay, so that's between 16 and 32 times what the programmer had expected the thing to cost, a nice profit margin, and good work if you can get it.
Then the programmer added the emissions to the program, ran it, and compared it to the original "base case" or "validation" simulation. They were the same.
Okay, really small emissions source. It's not surprising that the effect was minor, miniscule even. But he expected something. I think he was looking at like five or six digit accuracy in the printouts. There should have been some differences in the numerical noise at least. So he multiplied the source strength by ten, then by a hundred.
Still no difference.
Well, a programmer knows a bug when it bites him on the ass. He went into the code and found an array size limit that basically meant that any point source greater than #20 didn't get into the simulation. The impact source we were looking for had been added to the end of the list, so it didn't show up.
But.
The Denver region at that time had one major power plant that was responsible for something like 30%-40% of all the nitrogen oxides emitted into the Denver airshed. And, wouldn't you know it, that power plant was like, #45 on the list, or whatever. Higher than #20, that's for sure.
Oops.
So now we had to go back and redo our base case. We also had to redo every single simulation in our original study, and rewrite every report, and all the papers that were in progress, and notify the nice folks at DRCOG, who, it should be noted, had already paid us for all of the above when we did the original study, so they weren't about to pay us to do it again. We were lucky in one way: large, elevated point sources (like power plants) don't have nearly the impact of ground-based sources like automobiles, so the omission hadn't had that much effect on our original simulations, at least not near the air quality monitoring stations that we'd used to test the veracity of the model. There were some differences, of course, and tables changed, future impact projections were modified, etc. etc. Oh, and we got to use the original base case as a "what if" scenario, as in "What if Denver's largest point source of NOx emissions were switched off?"
Fortunately, we had some money to do all these things with: the environmental impact contract. I was told that we did actually wind up making a profit on it. I think it was in the low triple digits.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Friday, November 9, 2007
Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was born in 1743 to Jean-Antoine Lavoisier, a prominent lawyer, and Emilie Punctis, who belonged to a rich and influential family, and who died when Antoine-Laurent was five years old. He was basically raised by his maiden 
aunt Mlle Constance Punctis, who arranged for his education at the College Mazarin, which was noted for its faculty of science.
Although young Antoine completed a law degree in accordance with family wishes, his true calling was in science. On the basis of his early scientific work, primarily in geology, he was elected at the age of 25—to the Academy of Sciences, France’s most elite scientific society.
In the same year as his election to the Academy, in order to finance his scientific research, he bought into the Ferme Générale, the private corporation that collected taxes for the Crown on a for profit (as you can see, “privatization” is hardly a new idea). A few years later he married the daughter of another “tax farmer.” Her name was Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, and she was not quite 14 at the time. Madame Lavoisier learned English, in order to translate the work of British chemists like Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish for her husband. She also studied art and engraving and illustrated Lavoisier’s scientific experiments.
Lavoisier has been called the “father of modern chemistry” for good reason. He established the principle of conservation of mass in chemistry and physics, and performed a series of experiments which, combined with the work of Priestly and Cavendish, overthrew the theory of phlogiston as an explanation of combustion, and thereafter the swept away the classical theory of the elements (earth, air, fire, and water). Lavoisier’s replacement table of the elements ran to some 33 “irreducible substances” most of which were what we today recognize as elements, such as mercury, sulfur, and oxygen, which he renamed from “dephlogistonized air.” He also performed such flashy experiments as demonstrating that diamond is made from carbon by burning one in an atmosphere of pure oxygen.
During the Reign of Terror in 1794, Antoine Lavoisier was arrested, along with 27 others, by the French Revolutionary Tribune for abusing the office of Ferme Générale by adulterating tobacco with water. They were guillotined the same day. When asked for his defense, Lavoisier is famously said to have remarked, “I am a scientist,” to which the tribunal replied, “The Revolution has no need of scientists.” Then “snick” went the head of Lavoisier. That’s the famous part of the story, anyway, usually given as a cautionary tale about the anti-science nature of revolutions.
Popular accounts often omit the predatory nature of the Ferme Générale, which was, after all, basically a protection racket, there being no limit to the taxes collected except what the tax collectors could gouge from the populace. The Crown got its share, but everything above that was pure profit, and the agency was very profitable, profitable enough to finance the purchase of diamonds to burn, something which was probably well-known to the revolutionaries.
So Lavoisier, despite actually being a politically liberal who had worked for many reforms, was vulnerable to the revolutionary fervor of the times. Still, he might have survived, were it not for the fact that he had a famous enemy, one Jean-Paul Marat. Yes, that Marat. 
Why did Marat hate Lavoisier? Because, years before, Marat had applied for membership in the French Academy and had been rejected, with Lavoisier being a major factor in the rejection. It seems that Marat had taken to the idea of “animal magnetism” as propounded by Franz Mesmer, a process also called Mesmerism, and which is now called hypnosis. The French Academy had appointed a commission of scientists, which included Lavoisier, and also the American Ambasador, one Benjamin Franklin to look into the matter. The commission concluded that animal magnetism was “the product of mere imagination,” thus dashing Marat’s hopes for acceptance.
Think of it perhaps as being denied tenure.
So fate set up Laviosier for the perfect storm of vengeance, from Marat, over the professional slight, from the revolutionary tribunal over the tax farming business, and perhaps even from those who had been outraged by the extravagance of burning a fabulous gemstone simply to prove that it was just another form of coal.
The story doesn’t end there, though. Lavoisier’s widow remarried, to an Englishman whose language she spoke (in more ways than one) because of her service to her brilliant husband. The Englishman’s name was Benjamin Thompson, also known as Count Rumford. Thompson had been born in America, and was a Tory who fled the colonies after the American Revolution, leaving his wife behind (forever, as it turned out). He conducted studies on the physics of gunpowder explosions and manufactured munitions. During the course of boring out cannons, he took careful measurements of the heat generated. On the basis of those experiments, using the same methods whereby Lavoisier had overthrown the theory of phlogiston he established that one of Lavoisier’s proposed elements, caloric, could not be an element, and must be for form of energy, of motion (albeit, motion at the smallest scale). This was published in 1798.
What part did Marie-Anne play in all of this? She and Thompson were married in 1804 (Thompson’s wife having died some time before), and separated shortly thereafter. So Marie-Anne came too late as Thompson’s wife to be said to have played a role in his earlier researches. Still, there might be more to it all than that, but I’m not sure I can get through all the layers of irony in the stories of these interwoven lives, to say precisely what.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
The Right Formula
In the numerical solution of complex, dynamic systems, you often run into what is called the stiffness problem. If there was ever a sentence designed to lose readers, that may be it. Nevertheless, onward.
Imagine a spring connected to a mass. If you pull on the mass, the spring stretches and exerts a force on the mass. The stronger the force caused by a given extension, the “stiffer” the spring.
Now imagine a lot of different size masses, interconnected by a lot of springs of differing stiffness. Some of the mass-spring combinations will react quickly to any change in the system; other combinations, those with a severe mismatch between mass and spring, will react more slowly. Each combination has what is often called a time constant or a characteristic time for its reaction to change.
When you’re doing a numerical solution of the system (the only option if the system is complex and non-linear), you have to solve the state of the system for one point in time, then for another point somewhat later, a “time step” later, and so on. Some of the mass-spring combinations will require shorter time steps than others, because they have different time constants.
If there are connections between mass-spring combinations of very dissimilar time constants, you have a problem, the stiffness problem in fact. If one part of your system has a time constant of a microsecond, while another has a time constant of an hour, you are going to need billions of time steps to calculate your system for each time step you’d need if you didn’t have that short time step piece to it.
There are some fancy solution algorithms that can deal with the stiffness problem. One of them is called “Gear-Hindemarsh,” and was developed at Lawrence Livermore Labs, originally to facilitate the calculations used in designing thermonuclear weapons. We used it for chemical kinetic calculations in simulating smog chamber experiments. Gear-Hindemarsh is the gold standard for that sort of thing, but it has some problems, especially when you give the system a kick, like turning the lights on or off, or otherwise messing with the boundary conditions in an unsmooth way. Then it becomes pretty inefficient. The first atmospheric smog model produced by Livermore was called LIRAQ, and it spent much of its computing time on the few seconds after sunrise and sunset.
The development group I worked with on the EPA Urban Airshed Model used a different approach to the stiffness problem, called the quasi-steady state approximation. The QSSA makes a few reasonable assumptions, such as the idea that a chemical species that you are treating as being at “steady-state” doesn’t have so much mass that it affects the rest of the system. Imagine an automobile with a bunch of bobble-heads inside. The bobbing of the heads doesn’t affect the behavior of the whole system because their mass is small, relative to the auto itself.
If you react a hydrocarbon with an HO radical, for example, the HO pulls an H off of it to make water plus what is called an acyl radical, a hydrocarbon missing the H. The acyl radical then absorbs an oxygen molecule to form a peroxyacyl radical. This takes a very short time to occur, and we don’t worry about the behavior of the system during the time it takes for the radical to absorb the oxygen. We’ve treated the acyl radical as if it were in steady state.
Of course when there are multiple sources and multiple reaction paths for a QSSA species, the algebra can get more complicated, but it’s not too bad. At least not until the QSSA species begin to react with themselves and each other. In the smog equations, the first place this happened was when we included the reaction of the hydroperoxyl radical, HOO, with itself. That yields oxygen plus hydrogen peroxide (and that’s where the peroxide came from to bleach the guy to death in SunSmoke). The QSSA equations for HOO are quadratic. Fortunately, we have an equation to solve quadratic equations, one we all learned in high school. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong equation.
As you’ll recall (said the character in the pulp novel), the solution to the quadratic equation
aX^2 + bX + c = 0
can be written:
X = -b + [or minus] sqrt(b^2 - 4ac) / 2a
What they don’t usually tell you in high school is what happens when this equation is used on a quadratic that sometimes has the value of “a” as zero. If that happens, we get the dread “divide by zero” condition, and your computer tells you that you’ve just done a Very Bad Thing, and refuses to continue, you naughty person.
It so happens that there is another form of the quadratic equation that they don’t tell you about in high school, or in most colleges, either:
X = 2c / (-b + [or minus] sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))
A little checking tells me that the Wikipedia now gives the alternate formula, no doubt because so many programmers have run into the same problem I did, ‘way back when. I forget exactly where I got the alternate quadratic formula from; it’s penciled into the margins of a handbook I have. Anyway, I used it when I coded the chemistry module for the UAM.
Later, we wound up with more radical-radical cross reactions, and the algebraic QSSA went from quadratic to fifth order. There is no general fifth order solution, so we used a numerical solution called “Newton-Raphson.” I didn’t code the first implementation we did of that, and the program kept blowing up in the QSSA solver. I looked at it and realized that the programmer had used a constant term as the initial value for the Newton-Raphson calculation, and N-R is notoriously sensitive to the initial value. For the best results, you need to start somewhere near the final value. The clever lad that was I realized that if I stripped out all but the HOO quadratic, it was going to be very close to the final value. Using that as the initial value, the N-R calculation usually converged in one or two iterations.
* * *
In 1984, I got very sick. The words “chronic fatigue syndrome” screw up your ability to get health insurance, so I never say that I had CFS on an insurance form, and besides, I was never diagnosed. Nevertheless, I had what was basically a bout of ‘flu that lasted for several years. I was unable to work full time; in 1985, working as a consultant, I averaged maybe 5-10 hours a week working.
I was no longer the go-to guy for working on the kinetics solver, and one person took our module for use in an acid deposition model, Mary, a PhD chemist recently graduated from Cal Tech. She took one look at my “quadratic formula,” saw that it did not conform to what she’d learned in school and replaced it with the “right” version. Of course, it promptly blew up. So she spent the next several weeks putting in all sorts of tests for when the “a” in the formula got too small, switching it over to the linear solution etc. I’m not implying that it took her a lot of effort; she just spent some number of hours over the next few weeks working the bugs out.
When I heard about it, I was, of course, annoyed. It’s one thing to have someone else catch your mistake; it’s quite another when it wasn’t a mistake in the first place.
More recently though, I’ve been working as a technical writer, and I’ve come to understand that I did, in fact, make a mistake. I did not document the tricks I used in the chemical kinetics solver, even the most basic documentation, which is to put comments into the code explaining what was done and why.
I never confronted Mary about the thing in the first place, and she unexpectedly died of a cerebral aneurysm many years ago, so there’s no closure in the cards, unless this essay counts.
Imagine a spring connected to a mass. If you pull on the mass, the spring stretches and exerts a force on the mass. The stronger the force caused by a given extension, the “stiffer” the spring.
Now imagine a lot of different size masses, interconnected by a lot of springs of differing stiffness. Some of the mass-spring combinations will react quickly to any change in the system; other combinations, those with a severe mismatch between mass and spring, will react more slowly. Each combination has what is often called a time constant or a characteristic time for its reaction to change.
When you’re doing a numerical solution of the system (the only option if the system is complex and non-linear), you have to solve the state of the system for one point in time, then for another point somewhat later, a “time step” later, and so on. Some of the mass-spring combinations will require shorter time steps than others, because they have different time constants.
If there are connections between mass-spring combinations of very dissimilar time constants, you have a problem, the stiffness problem in fact. If one part of your system has a time constant of a microsecond, while another has a time constant of an hour, you are going to need billions of time steps to calculate your system for each time step you’d need if you didn’t have that short time step piece to it.
There are some fancy solution algorithms that can deal with the stiffness problem. One of them is called “Gear-Hindemarsh,” and was developed at Lawrence Livermore Labs, originally to facilitate the calculations used in designing thermonuclear weapons. We used it for chemical kinetic calculations in simulating smog chamber experiments. Gear-Hindemarsh is the gold standard for that sort of thing, but it has some problems, especially when you give the system a kick, like turning the lights on or off, or otherwise messing with the boundary conditions in an unsmooth way. Then it becomes pretty inefficient. The first atmospheric smog model produced by Livermore was called LIRAQ, and it spent much of its computing time on the few seconds after sunrise and sunset.
The development group I worked with on the EPA Urban Airshed Model used a different approach to the stiffness problem, called the quasi-steady state approximation. The QSSA makes a few reasonable assumptions, such as the idea that a chemical species that you are treating as being at “steady-state” doesn’t have so much mass that it affects the rest of the system. Imagine an automobile with a bunch of bobble-heads inside. The bobbing of the heads doesn’t affect the behavior of the whole system because their mass is small, relative to the auto itself.
If you react a hydrocarbon with an HO radical, for example, the HO pulls an H off of it to make water plus what is called an acyl radical, a hydrocarbon missing the H. The acyl radical then absorbs an oxygen molecule to form a peroxyacyl radical. This takes a very short time to occur, and we don’t worry about the behavior of the system during the time it takes for the radical to absorb the oxygen. We’ve treated the acyl radical as if it were in steady state.
Of course when there are multiple sources and multiple reaction paths for a QSSA species, the algebra can get more complicated, but it’s not too bad. At least not until the QSSA species begin to react with themselves and each other. In the smog equations, the first place this happened was when we included the reaction of the hydroperoxyl radical, HOO, with itself. That yields oxygen plus hydrogen peroxide (and that’s where the peroxide came from to bleach the guy to death in SunSmoke). The QSSA equations for HOO are quadratic. Fortunately, we have an equation to solve quadratic equations, one we all learned in high school. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong equation.
As you’ll recall (said the character in the pulp novel), the solution to the quadratic equation
aX^2 + bX + c = 0
can be written:
X = -b + [or minus] sqrt(b^2 - 4ac) / 2a
What they don’t usually tell you in high school is what happens when this equation is used on a quadratic that sometimes has the value of “a” as zero. If that happens, we get the dread “divide by zero” condition, and your computer tells you that you’ve just done a Very Bad Thing, and refuses to continue, you naughty person.
It so happens that there is another form of the quadratic equation that they don’t tell you about in high school, or in most colleges, either:
X = 2c / (-b + [or minus] sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))
A little checking tells me that the Wikipedia now gives the alternate formula, no doubt because so many programmers have run into the same problem I did, ‘way back when. I forget exactly where I got the alternate quadratic formula from; it’s penciled into the margins of a handbook I have. Anyway, I used it when I coded the chemistry module for the UAM.
Later, we wound up with more radical-radical cross reactions, and the algebraic QSSA went from quadratic to fifth order. There is no general fifth order solution, so we used a numerical solution called “Newton-Raphson.” I didn’t code the first implementation we did of that, and the program kept blowing up in the QSSA solver. I looked at it and realized that the programmer had used a constant term as the initial value for the Newton-Raphson calculation, and N-R is notoriously sensitive to the initial value. For the best results, you need to start somewhere near the final value. The clever lad that was I realized that if I stripped out all but the HOO quadratic, it was going to be very close to the final value. Using that as the initial value, the N-R calculation usually converged in one or two iterations.
* * *
In 1984, I got very sick. The words “chronic fatigue syndrome” screw up your ability to get health insurance, so I never say that I had CFS on an insurance form, and besides, I was never diagnosed. Nevertheless, I had what was basically a bout of ‘flu that lasted for several years. I was unable to work full time; in 1985, working as a consultant, I averaged maybe 5-10 hours a week working.
I was no longer the go-to guy for working on the kinetics solver, and one person took our module for use in an acid deposition model, Mary, a PhD chemist recently graduated from Cal Tech. She took one look at my “quadratic formula,” saw that it did not conform to what she’d learned in school and replaced it with the “right” version. Of course, it promptly blew up. So she spent the next several weeks putting in all sorts of tests for when the “a” in the formula got too small, switching it over to the linear solution etc. I’m not implying that it took her a lot of effort; she just spent some number of hours over the next few weeks working the bugs out.
When I heard about it, I was, of course, annoyed. It’s one thing to have someone else catch your mistake; it’s quite another when it wasn’t a mistake in the first place.
More recently though, I’ve been working as a technical writer, and I’ve come to understand that I did, in fact, make a mistake. I did not document the tricks I used in the chemical kinetics solver, even the most basic documentation, which is to put comments into the code explaining what was done and why.
I never confronted Mary about the thing in the first place, and she unexpectedly died of a cerebral aneurysm many years ago, so there’s no closure in the cards, unless this essay counts.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Jamais vu
The 1987 World Fantasy Convention was held in Nashville, Tennessee, at the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel. The building has changed hands and names several times since then. I think it goes by the name of Sheraton, now. It sits on Union St. between Capitol Blvd. and Seventh St., the former site of the Downtown Nashville YMCA.
As I’ve said before, the downtown Y was my “secure beachhead” (to borrow the concept from von Clausewitz’s “On War”) in my exploration and assault upon the world that existed outside of Donelson, Tennessee. Save for the year we lived in Kentucky, I attended YMCA gym and swim classes more or less continually (three times a week or more) from when I was 8 until 16, after having attended every summer from 6-8. It took me longer than usual to learn to swim, so I overcompensated to the extent that I was a lifeguard at the Y pool, beginning at about age 15 and continuing until I left for college.
The building cornerstone said 1912, as I recall, so it stood for well over half a century. It’s gone now, and I have a right to be nostalgic about it, dammit.
Whippersnappers.
Union St. near the Tennessee State Capitol is a fairly steep incline, such that the short block between Capitol and Seventh amounted to almost an entire floor of the YMCA building, with the first floor being below ground level as seen from the front of the building on Seventh. The Seventh St. entrance was the lobby for the Y hotel, as well as being the level of the main locker room. The dormitory rooms, as the men’s hotel rooms were called, were tiny, with barely enough space for a bed and a small desk. I don’t recall seeing the inside of any of the dorm rooms for more than a glance from the hall, and then only on the second floor. It does cause me some puzzlement, these many years later, as to why I had the curiosity to wander over so much of the downtown city, yet remain completely oblivious to a large section of the Y building. I suspect it had to do with the idea that, within that building, I was under its rules, not all of them known to me, so I was much more timid in my explorations there. The reason for the timidity should be apparent: I didn’t want to do anything that annoyed anyone enough to banish me.
It may also have come from the gradual way I encountered the place. At the beginning, I didn’t even know that there was a front entrance. The Capitol Blvd. entrance was the one nearest the bus shelters (all Nashville public transit buses converged on a square in front of the State Capitol), and it was also the entrance to the lobby of the Boys Program lobby.
The lobby of the Boys Program had several ping pong tables, some card tables, a small vending machine nook, plus a couple of glassed in offices and the Program Desk. Past the lobby, through double doors was another large meeting room, with several smaller rooms on the periphery. To the left was a stairway (up to the Main Lobby), an elevator, and a cafeteria. Behind the elevator was a door that led to the pool, not the main doorway, but rather the one that the lifeguards used to dash over, place an order at the cafeteria, then, when it was ready, dash over to retrieve it. During slow periods, of course.
The main entrance for the Boys Program was just to the left of the Desk, and it led to the boys’ locker room and the pool showers. Past the showers was the pool, of course, the main reason why I was going downtown all those years. I mean, when I overcompensate, I overcompensate.
Still, there was a lot more to the Boys Program than swimming, and a lot more to the Y than the pool. Another door from the boys locker room went to the “small gym,” a half court basketball space, plus various gymnastics equipment, like an overhead bar, even parallel bars, rings, and a full size trampoline. I topped out fairly early in all the standard gymnastic endeavors. I managed a floor pike exactly once, though I managed to get proficient at both the overhead bar and p-bar kips, and could manage one on the rings when the stars were aligned. But full floor gymnastics were pretty well beyond my reach; I never got past the roundoff to the back flip. Back flips on the trampoline were not a problem but I was scared of the back ¾ for good reason: half the time I tried it I overshot and knocked the wind out of me.
I could, perhaps, have obsessed my way into becoming a competitive gymnast, but I had neither exceptional native talent nor burning desire. We did have one guy, nicknamed “Cotton” (even blonder than I was, which is hard to imagine) who once managed to place 5th in a regional tournament all by himself (if you totaled up his scores alone). The team as a whole placed 3rd.
Next to the small gym was a weight room. I learned to use the free weights (this was well pre-Nautilus), but again, not my obsession. Past the weight room were stairs that led to the Men’s Locker Room and then to the Big Gym.
And it was mighty big, you betcha. It had a full basketball court and three stories of overhead space. There were various extras on the sidelines, like an overhead ladder. One flight up was a mezzanine, for spectators during basketball games, and at the top was a circular track. I think the gym occupied most of three stories of the building, because I remember outside widows on two facing sides.
To the left as you entered the gym from the stairs were offices, a sun(lamp) room, a massage room, a dry sauna, and (I think) a steam room. This was the heart of the Men’s Athletic Club, which offered daytime exercise and such to Nashville Businessmen. Some while after I’d joined the “Leader’s Club,” a group of teenage boys that served as cheap semi-volunteer labor to assist the teaching of the boy’s classes and as a later source of lifeguards, I realized that the AC was the “connected” part of the enterprise, with links to the business and political community of Nashville.
Still farther up in the building there were three handball courts, which fulfilled every bit of the old Bill Cosby routine, with old men routinely beating the young ones by precision shots into the corner. We also played something called “paddle ball,” which had no relation to the ball-on-a-string thing. It was something of a precursor to racketball, only the ball used was a bit larger than a tennis ball and hollow rubber. The rackets were similar to tennis rackets but had a shorter handle. Sometimes we’d play handball with the paddle balls, especially if someone had forgotten his handball gloves. It was still a good way to pop a blood vessel in your hands, though.
The building was 8 stories, and the roof was tar and gravel. I know because we also went up to the roof a lot in summertime to get at least the hint of a tan. It was a little strange, after all; for a collection of teenagers in ongoing athletic pursuits, we were indoors almost all the time, save for the summer camps and later the Blue Ridge Leaders’ School (more on that some other time), where we’d get sunburns because, well, again, pale from the indoors.
For quite a few years in the 1950s and early 1960s, by far the tallest building in Nashville was the L&C Tower, a whopping 23 stories high. It was downhill from the Y, but of course the 23 stories meant that it was well above the roof of the YMCA building. But for years, it was the only one. Every other building in town was either below us or more or less at eye level. We could go as high as anyone else around. Almost.
As I’ve said before, the downtown Y was my “secure beachhead” (to borrow the concept from von Clausewitz’s “On War”) in my exploration and assault upon the world that existed outside of Donelson, Tennessee. Save for the year we lived in Kentucky, I attended YMCA gym and swim classes more or less continually (three times a week or more) from when I was 8 until 16, after having attended every summer from 6-8. It took me longer than usual to learn to swim, so I overcompensated to the extent that I was a lifeguard at the Y pool, beginning at about age 15 and continuing until I left for college.
The building cornerstone said 1912, as I recall, so it stood for well over half a century. It’s gone now, and I have a right to be nostalgic about it, dammit.
Whippersnappers.
Union St. near the Tennessee State Capitol is a fairly steep incline, such that the short block between Capitol and Seventh amounted to almost an entire floor of the YMCA building, with the first floor being below ground level as seen from the front of the building on Seventh. The Seventh St. entrance was the lobby for the Y hotel, as well as being the level of the main locker room. The dormitory rooms, as the men’s hotel rooms were called, were tiny, with barely enough space for a bed and a small desk. I don’t recall seeing the inside of any of the dorm rooms for more than a glance from the hall, and then only on the second floor. It does cause me some puzzlement, these many years later, as to why I had the curiosity to wander over so much of the downtown city, yet remain completely oblivious to a large section of the Y building. I suspect it had to do with the idea that, within that building, I was under its rules, not all of them known to me, so I was much more timid in my explorations there. The reason for the timidity should be apparent: I didn’t want to do anything that annoyed anyone enough to banish me.
It may also have come from the gradual way I encountered the place. At the beginning, I didn’t even know that there was a front entrance. The Capitol Blvd. entrance was the one nearest the bus shelters (all Nashville public transit buses converged on a square in front of the State Capitol), and it was also the entrance to the lobby of the Boys Program lobby.
The lobby of the Boys Program had several ping pong tables, some card tables, a small vending machine nook, plus a couple of glassed in offices and the Program Desk. Past the lobby, through double doors was another large meeting room, with several smaller rooms on the periphery. To the left was a stairway (up to the Main Lobby), an elevator, and a cafeteria. Behind the elevator was a door that led to the pool, not the main doorway, but rather the one that the lifeguards used to dash over, place an order at the cafeteria, then, when it was ready, dash over to retrieve it. During slow periods, of course.
The main entrance for the Boys Program was just to the left of the Desk, and it led to the boys’ locker room and the pool showers. Past the showers was the pool, of course, the main reason why I was going downtown all those years. I mean, when I overcompensate, I overcompensate.
Still, there was a lot more to the Boys Program than swimming, and a lot more to the Y than the pool. Another door from the boys locker room went to the “small gym,” a half court basketball space, plus various gymnastics equipment, like an overhead bar, even parallel bars, rings, and a full size trampoline. I topped out fairly early in all the standard gymnastic endeavors. I managed a floor pike exactly once, though I managed to get proficient at both the overhead bar and p-bar kips, and could manage one on the rings when the stars were aligned. But full floor gymnastics were pretty well beyond my reach; I never got past the roundoff to the back flip. Back flips on the trampoline were not a problem but I was scared of the back ¾ for good reason: half the time I tried it I overshot and knocked the wind out of me.
I could, perhaps, have obsessed my way into becoming a competitive gymnast, but I had neither exceptional native talent nor burning desire. We did have one guy, nicknamed “Cotton” (even blonder than I was, which is hard to imagine) who once managed to place 5th in a regional tournament all by himself (if you totaled up his scores alone). The team as a whole placed 3rd.
Next to the small gym was a weight room. I learned to use the free weights (this was well pre-Nautilus), but again, not my obsession. Past the weight room were stairs that led to the Men’s Locker Room and then to the Big Gym.
And it was mighty big, you betcha. It had a full basketball court and three stories of overhead space. There were various extras on the sidelines, like an overhead ladder. One flight up was a mezzanine, for spectators during basketball games, and at the top was a circular track. I think the gym occupied most of three stories of the building, because I remember outside widows on two facing sides.
To the left as you entered the gym from the stairs were offices, a sun(lamp) room, a massage room, a dry sauna, and (I think) a steam room. This was the heart of the Men’s Athletic Club, which offered daytime exercise and such to Nashville Businessmen. Some while after I’d joined the “Leader’s Club,” a group of teenage boys that served as cheap semi-volunteer labor to assist the teaching of the boy’s classes and as a later source of lifeguards, I realized that the AC was the “connected” part of the enterprise, with links to the business and political community of Nashville.
Still farther up in the building there were three handball courts, which fulfilled every bit of the old Bill Cosby routine, with old men routinely beating the young ones by precision shots into the corner. We also played something called “paddle ball,” which had no relation to the ball-on-a-string thing. It was something of a precursor to racketball, only the ball used was a bit larger than a tennis ball and hollow rubber. The rackets were similar to tennis rackets but had a shorter handle. Sometimes we’d play handball with the paddle balls, especially if someone had forgotten his handball gloves. It was still a good way to pop a blood vessel in your hands, though.
The building was 8 stories, and the roof was tar and gravel. I know because we also went up to the roof a lot in summertime to get at least the hint of a tan. It was a little strange, after all; for a collection of teenagers in ongoing athletic pursuits, we were indoors almost all the time, save for the summer camps and later the Blue Ridge Leaders’ School (more on that some other time), where we’d get sunburns because, well, again, pale from the indoors.
For quite a few years in the 1950s and early 1960s, by far the tallest building in Nashville was the L&C Tower, a whopping 23 stories high. It was downhill from the Y, but of course the 23 stories meant that it was well above the roof of the YMCA building. But for years, it was the only one. Every other building in town was either below us or more or less at eye level. We could go as high as anyone else around. Almost.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
A Quick One about Intellectual Property
I know several intellectual property lawyers, so let me apologize to them in advance. Most of this isn’t their fault.
I once worked for a fellow who was all gung ho about IP, mostly patents and trademarks. Patents are tricky, and so, to a certain extent are trademarks, but there are a few simple things about trademarks. The most important thing about trademarks is that trademarks are usually lost through abandonment. This should be distinguished from “failure to protect.” By “abandonment” I mean that the trademark owner simply ceases using it, fails to continue to file the paperwork, and so forth. It’s basically someone saying “Hey, this trademark is completely worthless; I’m not putting any effort into it at all.” Often, the owner was some corporate entity that simply ceased to exist.
On the other hand, there have been some famous cases where trademarks went generic. Usually, that happened when there was no good alternative name. The yo-yo was originally the “Yo-Yo Brand Return Type Bandolero Top” which kinda tells the whole story, doesn’t it?
The thing is, my intellectual property-minded boss was full of stories about all the trademarks that had been lost because the trademark owner failed to file a ton of lawsuits to protect the brand. I checked the trademarks he named; every single one of them is till in effect. One of them was particularly interesting. In the early 1980s, the FTC petitioned to have Formica declared generic. This petition failed when Congress explicitly defunded the FTC group handling the case. Hmm.
Since then, we’ve had the “Trademark Dilution Act,” which was expressly written not to protect current trademarks on specific products, like Coke, the beverage, but to strengthen “super-trademarks” on things like Coke, the knapsack. And isn’t that interesting?
So on the one hand, you have businessmen paying lawyers to write “cease and desist” letters to anyone using the trademark in any way that doesn’t stand up and shout “Yes! I acknowledge your grand and awesome power over these letters arranged in this way!” then, on the other hand, you have congresscritters writing up laws to make that grand and awesome power even grander and awesomer.
Howard Hughes once trademarked his own name, in an attempt to keep books from being written about him. It didn’t work then.
It might now.
[No trademark symbols were harmed in the writing of this essay].
I once worked for a fellow who was all gung ho about IP, mostly patents and trademarks. Patents are tricky, and so, to a certain extent are trademarks, but there are a few simple things about trademarks. The most important thing about trademarks is that trademarks are usually lost through abandonment. This should be distinguished from “failure to protect.” By “abandonment” I mean that the trademark owner simply ceases using it, fails to continue to file the paperwork, and so forth. It’s basically someone saying “Hey, this trademark is completely worthless; I’m not putting any effort into it at all.” Often, the owner was some corporate entity that simply ceased to exist.
On the other hand, there have been some famous cases where trademarks went generic. Usually, that happened when there was no good alternative name. The yo-yo was originally the “Yo-Yo Brand Return Type Bandolero Top” which kinda tells the whole story, doesn’t it?
The thing is, my intellectual property-minded boss was full of stories about all the trademarks that had been lost because the trademark owner failed to file a ton of lawsuits to protect the brand. I checked the trademarks he named; every single one of them is till in effect. One of them was particularly interesting. In the early 1980s, the FTC petitioned to have Formica declared generic. This petition failed when Congress explicitly defunded the FTC group handling the case. Hmm.
Since then, we’ve had the “Trademark Dilution Act,” which was expressly written not to protect current trademarks on specific products, like Coke, the beverage, but to strengthen “super-trademarks” on things like Coke, the knapsack. And isn’t that interesting?
So on the one hand, you have businessmen paying lawyers to write “cease and desist” letters to anyone using the trademark in any way that doesn’t stand up and shout “Yes! I acknowledge your grand and awesome power over these letters arranged in this way!” then, on the other hand, you have congresscritters writing up laws to make that grand and awesome power even grander and awesomer.
Howard Hughes once trademarked his own name, in an attempt to keep books from being written about him. It didn’t work then.
It might now.
[No trademark symbols were harmed in the writing of this essay].
Friday, November 2, 2007
Blind Item
Some say it's only a matter of time before an actress blows the whistle on this middle-aged moviemaker. When casting his last project, the silver-tongued, not unattractive manipulator went so fast from flirtation to outrageous passes to outright lewd behavior it left a couple of performers' heads spinning. The guy's tendency to unzip and demand all sorts of hanky-panky has become so talked about around town that many hot young performers are refusing to work on his movies because they're afraid they'll be branded as desperate and easy. – Movieline
In Nashville, when I was a teenager, there weren’t many places you could buy comics. There were a couple of drugstores in Donelson with comics racks, and that was about it. In Downtown Nashville, the pickings were even thinner, with the only comics sales venue within walking distance of the Downtown YMCA being the bus station.
I was told not to go to the bus station, my mother having heard a lurid tale or two. That’s a little funny in retrospect, knowing what I now know about the reputation of YMCA hotels as homosexual assignation spots. For the record, no one ever approached me at the bus station, and in all the years I was at the “Y” I received a total of one single proposition, when I was somewhere around 16-17. I politely declined, the fellow not being the type I’m attracted to, that type being, well, female.
Drugstores also carried the Hollywood gossip magazines, mostly tame things by today’s standards. I must have glanced through some of them from time to time, because I remember two stories that caught my eye. The first was cover billed as about “Jim Nabors’ Secret Heartache,” and the second concerned, “The Pain in Raymond Burr’s Past.” In the first case, the article divulged that Nabors had asthma, and the second noted that Raymond Burr had struggled with a weight problem when he was young. They were bait-and-switch articles, in other words, promising something scandalous, but delivering only yawns.
Much later, I learned that both Burr and Nabors were closeted homosexuals throughout their careers (Burr also married and apparently had a relationship with Natalie Wood, so we’ll leave the veil covering the full nature of his sexuality). So the bait-and-switch was also a wink-wink, nudge-nudge for anyone in the know.
I’m uncertain as to whether or not the magazine in question was the notorious Confidential Magazine, in which case the stories may have been blackmail threats as well, although that sort of thing was mostly early on in the magazine’s history, before they got sued to hell and gone by almost everybody. I mean, they lost a libel action to Liberace. How sloppy do you have to be, to call Liberace a homosexual, get sued, and lose?
The bait-and-switch articles only work if you have a cover for the lurid title as the bait, then the tepid story inside for the switch. If you only have a column to work with, or something too small for a full article, or if you really, really want the salaciousness but don’t want to get sued, you go with the blind item.
This TV superstar is young, pretty and living high on the hog, but she doesn't want to live alone. So she moved a platonic male friend into her fancy digs. He seems like a nice guy, but little does she know what he does when she's away working! First he gets himself high as a kite on drugs. Then, since he has a fetish for call girls, he calls sex magazine ads for the kinkiest gals he can find. He loves pain and pays extra for the girls to bring big sex toys. Where he gets the $300 and up to pay for these sessions is a mystery! Worst of all, the guy gets so drugged up he doesn't realize the call girls are getting into his famous roommate's private things and helping themselves. –Star
The blind item may not have been invented by Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, and Hedda Hopper but they elevated it to an art form. It’s perfect, really. Totally libel-proof, since there are no names attached, and there need not be a grain of truth in it, just a touch of “truthiness,” scandalous behavior amongst the rich and famous.
But the blind item works best as a shroud for truth. I’ve slid into memoir quite a few times in these essays, and I’ve given some indication of my dancing around with the sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll crowd from time to time ‘way back when (Really, I’ve given all that up. Would I lie?). In fact, there was a time when S&D&R&R had a few other things often appended to it in the common culture, like science fiction or comics, both mainstream and underground (underground comix, boy, there’s a term from the past). I like hanging out with writers, artists, and good looking women and if cheap thrills were to be had, well, in Woody Allen’s immortal line, “It’s all I could afford.”
But discretion, yes, good point, that. People have told me things and short of waterboarding, I think it ill-advised to tell tales out of school. But some of the things were just so cool, and well, by knowing them that makes me cool, right?
And there’s the rub, because as soon as you start thinking that way, the cool just evaporates and leaves behind something rather tacky. Winchell, Parsons, and Hopper, like today’s gossip mongers may be feared, or fascinating, or even monstrous, but they’ll never, ever, be cool, at least not in my dictionary.
So I’ll just do my little dance in the dead of a moonless night, maybe whisper a few things to Amy, or to a close friend, and leave the rest as fiction fodder. That’s actually all they ever are, because even the truest blind item is still fiction, and not very good fiction at that. It fails to convey the true shape of reality that the best fiction can convey.
Still, if I were to mention the phrase “The Greater Bay Area Co-Prosperity Sphere,” there are a few people who would still get a chuckle or give a little snort or remembrance. The possibilities seemed endless once, but it turned out they were merely combinatorial.
A funny thing happened when the glam, famous young wife of the equally glam, famous guy struggling to control his well-concealed drug habit, started turning up at New York self-help meetings. Her intentions were all pure and good, of course, as she was trying to support her hunky hubby in his withdrawal from cocaine and other nasty vices. But insiders on both coasts are abuzz at how close she has become to a fellow attendee of that same self-help group, the sexy executive husband of a well-known, substance-addicted Manhattan A-list socialite. Sure, it all started out innocently, with just two lost, sad souls trying to help each other through some harrowing times. But now their two-person extracurricular support group has flared into a two-person extracurricular support grope. – Hollywood Life
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Afterlife
In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow there’ll be hell to pay
”Hell” – Squirrel Nut Zippers (CD: Hot)
Occasionally I scan back over the essays I’ve written over the past couple of years, and yes, there’s a lot of writing about death, one way or another, even before I had my intimation of mortality in the form of a fingernail-gone-really-bad. A friend of mine once observed that she thought that a lot of people considered me “morbid and macabre,” and who am I to disappoint my fans?
In the A&E Network show, the host, James Lipton has a question that he asks every guest: “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?”
My answer would be “Well done. You get a free replay.”
That can be taken as the reincarnation option, of course, but I have a few revisions I’d make to the standard version. I’ll get to those in a little while.
The first version of the “belief dependant afterlife” that I think I recall is from Mark Twain, but he may have been taking a page from James Branch Cabell (or given the dates, vice versa), who had the afterlife both dependant on the individual’s religion and beliefs during life, but also subject to clerical errors, allowing one character to get the wrong afterlife because of tombstone erosion, the ultimate in typos. Robert Heinlein borrowed the Cabellian view in Job: A Comedy of Justice.
Reincarnation figures big in religions that don’t cotton to heaven and hell. One way of looking at the “Great Wheel” that’s featured in Hinduism is that this world is hell, and you are condemned to stay on the Wheel until you do a good enough job of it to get off into Nirvana, a sort of joyful non-existence (I’m simplifying here because it’s important to be able to compress centuries of religious thought into facile one liners). I think the important thing about Nirvana is that you’re supposed to be beyond all the petty desires, annoyances, pleasures, and minutia that, to me, make life worthwhile.
One unexamined feature of most reincarnation beliefs is that the incarnations are sequential in time; previous lives are in the past. But really now, there’s no need for that to be the case, is there? If something can transcend death and invoke various heretofore unknown (and unprovable) principles of the universe, surely time shouldn’t be a constraint. So there’s no reason not to have a reincarnation that can work backwards in time, allowing your next incarnation to be Alexander the Great, or, more likely one of the guys Alexander killed on his twenty-third birthday as part of the celebration.
The usual end result of this is the “everyone is everybody” scenario, the Mystical Experience, We-Are-All-One, where there’s a single, universal soul that inhabits everyone, and it’s time to sing Kumbaya, dammit, the marshmallows are ready and so’s the camp fire.
But if reincarnation can go backwards in time, there’s no reason for it not to go sideways, into one of those parallel universes that we hear so much about (and that I’ve written about more than once). Alternately, you can view it as a really big version of the film Groundhog Day.
If we get our afterlife of choice, here’s what I want: When I die, I want another go at it. In fact, I want all the goes at it. Not all of everyone’s lives, all of my lives. I want every single quantum possibility of my life, starting at conception. That includes every variation on what happens during my life, of course, like this earthquake happened on a different day, that snowstorm didn’t happen so I get to go to the banquet where I get the short story award when I was 15, Lee Harvey Oswald trips and sprains his ankle and can’t climb the stairs of the Book Depository, even the one where that single atom of potassium decays one second later, to no significant macroscopic effect.
I have no idea how many lives that is, except that it’s a lot. Nor do I really know how many of them can be considered “mine” given the slippery nature of identity. And since there’s no way for there to be any memory or awareness of those other lives, there’s no way to know if I will get / have gotten what I want.
Is that any comfort in the face of the knowledge of personal mortality? Let’s just say I take at least as much comfort from it as from the prospect of singing in a choir for all eternity.
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