There are reasons to suspect that science and engineering took a very different path over there: their limited understanding of nuclear weapons—they seem to think that nukes are roughly as easy to build as bottle rockets—suggests that nuclear fission may never have been developed on their timeline. – Twilight Zone by Gregory Cochran, on evidence that members of the Bush Administration are from a parallel universe.
Just how hard is it to build a nuke? And what is the smallest amount of plutonium needed to build one?
The smallest nuclear weapon ever designed was the Davy Crockett, aka the W54 warhead, weighing 51 pounds with a variable yield supposedly from 10 to 250 tons of TNT equivalent. It was the last weapon ever atmospheric-tested by the U.S. and in its two tests, (Little Feller I and II) it yielded 22 and 18 tons of explosive power. At those yields, however, the explosive power was pretty much unimportant compared to the radiation the blast produced, lethal to 50% of unshielded personnel at 400 meters, 100% lethal at 300 meters.
There’s not a lot of unclassified information about the actual design of the W54, but some conjectures can be made about it just from the nature of the nuclear chemistry involved. A “bare critical” mass of plutonium, for example, weighs roughly 10 kg, but a neutron reflector reduces this by maybe a factor of two. A uranium reflector/tamper can also increase yield because some fast fission will take place in the reflector itself (at the cost of a time delay in the return of the neutrons to the explosive core). Beryllium also multiplies neutrons, undergoing “light fission” on exposure to high-energy particles of any kind, including neutrons, to produce, well, more neutrons. This is also at the expense of slowing the neutrons and thus retarding the rapid increase in neutron population that make a bomb go ka-boom.
But slowing neutrons is called “moderation” and slower neutrons tend to react more easily with nuclei (have a higher capture cross section) than fast neutrons. This is a consequence of quantum mechanics, where fast particles have a more certain position than do slow ones. Think of the slow neutrons as being more “fuzzy,” virtually bigger, if you will. So if there is a nearby nucleus that is “sticky” for neutrons, a slow neutron is more likely to glom onto it.
That is pretty much the principle of nuclear reactors, where neutrons are slowed down to better react with the fissile elements in the reactor. A mass that is sub-critical for fast neutrons can be more than critical for slow neutrons.
The result is that, with a thick beryllium reflector, the critical mass of normal plutonium can be reduced to less than 20% of its “bare” critical number. The thickness of the reflector in the Davy Crockett was probably dictated by the limit that is reached when adding more reflector increases the overall mass of the design rather than reducing it.
The variable yield of the W54 looks like a signature of a variable fusion boost, but I’ve seen statements to the effect that D-T fusion doesn’t get going until you reach the 100 ton range, so the W54 may have had multiple fission core compositions. Still, the upper limit of the W54 is within the fusion boosting range, so a design modification could possibly have boosted its potential yield to a full kiloton.
A reasonable question arises, is the implied 2 kg core the minimum amount of plutonium (or U233, which has a bare critical mass of about 16 kg) that can be used to make a nuclear weapon, even one of such a low yield as the W54?
Advanced implosion techniques can produce such high core densities that the critical mass for plutonium can be reduced to as little as 1 kilogram, but the tradeoff is a much more complicated design. Besides, if we’re talking terrorists or a small belligerent state with limited technical resources, we’re much more concerned with basement bomb makers, aren’t we? What’s the least amount of bomb grade stuff necessary to be dangerous?
In one sense, the answer is…none. Nuclear reactors can be made from materials that are not considered bomb grade material. There was a nuclear accident in Japan a few years ago that occurred when workers added water (a moderator) to some highly enriched uranium and accidentally produced a critical excursion. The HEU was only 20% U-235, which is considered far below bomb grade, and there was only 35 kilograms of material involved. Nevertheless, the radiation release killed several workers and put an entire town into panic mode.
Ordinary reactor fuel, on the order of 7% U-235 could also serve as a terror weapon, especially if it were moderated by heavy water, which, unlike light water, does not absorb neutrons very effectively. However, hundreds of kilograms of such fuel would be needed.
Suppose, however, that a hypothetical bad guy had some amount of plutonium, just not enough to build a “conventional” nuclear bomb. How much would he need to cause some havoc?
Based on various published figures, plus some conjectures from reactor design principles, I guesstimate that a “prompt critical” device could be built from as little as 50 grams of plutonium, though you’d also need on the order of several hundred kilograms of natural uranium for a reflector/tamper, and a substantial amount of heavy water. Both of those components, however, are relatively easy to procure, although you might need a cover story to get them (maybe a potter with a hobby of trying to build a cold fusion device). In any event, the tamper/casing of the bomb could be produced from materials that one can obtain within the United States; no smuggling would be required. The explosive yield of such a device could be anywhere from a few pounds of TNT up to something approaching the Davy Crockett. In all cases the local radiation would be lethal to some distance, with significant fission product contamination. A full Davy Crockett yield could almost certainly bring down a building or two; the Oklahoma City bomb was about 2 tons in yield, 10% of the Davy Crockett.
Obtaining plutonium, of course, is a difficult matter, but it’s sobering to realize how much MOX (mixed oxide) fuel is around and about, not to mention the fact that waste nuclear fuel rods become less dangerous with each passing year. We’ve already gone through almost two half lives of the most dangerous intermediate isotopes (cesium and strontium). The rule of thumb is that ten half-lives is sufficient for a radiation source to become safe. That reduces the radiation by a factor of 1000. For intermediate fission products, that is about 300 years; 240 now that we’ve passed the first two half-lives, and the spent fuel is now only ¼ as reactive as it was in 1950.
Some fuel rods have been or will be buried in what is called “geological storage” or, as I like to call them, future plutonium mines.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Patch 22
The lawsuit of the ACLU against warrantless wiretaps was dismissed in Federal Court yesterday. The ACLU could not prove that they were being subject to secret wiretaps that lacked warrants, so they did not have the standing to sue.
Patch 22 could take care of this problem. Patch 22 includes the capability of detecting all secret wiretaps on any telecommunications device, including cell phones, land lines, and semaphore. The device itself need not use the Patch 22 download, but the results are only available on a machine running Patch 22.
Patch 22 will run on all computing devices, including those running Windows, MacOS, Linux, AIX, Unix, DOS, and CPM. Patch 22 is available as a set of function calls in Forth. It contains a series of properties and methods available as identical objects in Java, C++, and Smalltalk. Patch 22 features a library for Fortran, Algol, PL-1, Pascal, Cobol, Simula, Snoball, Lisp, Dynamo, Ada, and Basic. Patch 22 allows disassembly to universal assembly language.
With Patch 22 you can square the circle, trisect the angle, and duplicate the cube. Patch 22 is subject to neither Russell's Paradox, nor Gödel's Proof. Patch 22 solves the halting problem and can find a solution to NP complete problems in linear time.
Patch 22 can crack any code, and create codes that cannot be broken. Patch 22 is not subject to the law of diminishing returns. Financial calculations done with the Patch 22 Portfolio Manager replace the Invisible hand with an Iron Fist.
Patch 22 can bring order from chaos and solve the turbulence problem. It can create branches of Government where none have previously existed. It can allow the simultaneous determination of position and momentum, even of virtual particles, quantum foam, and Vice Presidents.
Patch 22 allows the creation of alternate realities and the negation of prior facts without loss of verisimilitude or candor. Patch 22 makes previous statements inoperative. Patch 22 is new and improved, while it is also from an ancient tradition. Patch 22 is from an ancient tradition of new and improved products.
Patch 22 exists in the realm of Platonic Non-Contradiction. It is part of a large database of Platonic algorithms. Patch 22 contains the entire database of Platonic algorithms. But wait, there's more.
Patch 22 contains a physical and biological interface. Patch 22 can clean your kitchen floor, cook a meal, mind the kids, and cure cancer. Patch 22 can let you work while on vacation, and sleep while you are wide awake. Patch 22 can halt the aging process and kill every man, woman, and child on Earth.
Patch 22 can go faster than light. Patch 22 can achieve Absolute Zero. Patch 22 can accessorize.
Patch 22 can be downloaded via the Platonic Empiricizer. The Platonic Empiricizer is option 22 in the 22nd function library in Patch 22.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Death Rays and Disintegrators
Sometimes they were called "blasters, ray guns, or even zap guns," although that last one was sometimes also used for the "stun gun" the puny sibling to the much mightier Death Ray. Asimov had one called a "Disinto." Hugo Gernsback was sure they’d be either radio waves or powered by radium. Fritz Leiber imagined the "fission pistol," that had all the nuclear reactions in the gun going in the same direction. A. E. van Vogt used light to "conduct" nuclear reactions to the target, at least on the Space Beagle. In Slan, it was just raw atomic power. Once in a while the death rays were "sonic." More frequently they were "electron guns" which actually exist in television sets, but for something else entirely (though one may argue that TV is something of a stun device). H. G. Wells began the whole thing with the "heat ray."
And we wanted them, maybe as much as we wanted to go into space (which is maybe why I wasn’t as interested in the things as my fan boy brethren). And it wasn’t just us. During WWII, the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground offered a standing reward to anyone who could demonstrate a death ray capable of killing a tethered goat. Britain's Air Ministry put up a similar prize to the inventor whose ray could kill a sheep at a range of a hundred yards. There’s a story that radar was invented partly because of a 1934 rumor that Germany had invented a microwave-based death ray.
Because hell, nobody messes with you if you’re packing a Death Ray.
So when lasers were announced in 1960, and we all heard that one could punch a hole in a diamond, or a metal plate, well, in a lot of manuscripts the word "blaster" got crossed out and "laser" got inserted.
Trouble was, they didn’t work like that. They were made of light.
Remember all those tales about the magic spell that is deflected by the mirror? Well, dang, you could do that to a laser, it turned out. Also, fog, smoke, not so good.
Moreover, they were damned inefficient. You had to put in kilojoules to get out joules. Later, some of them got more efficient, and some, like the CO2 laser, could be pumped by chemical reaction. I read about a 4000 watt laser in the late 1960s, from Raytheon, as I recall. It was powered by a gas turbine, basically a jet aircraft engine, and it was chemically pumped. But notice, a jet engine to pump a laser that has the output of—a couple of hair driers. (I’m talking continuous power here, the pulsed ones can put out more power than the whole U.S. power grid—for a picosecond).
CO2 lasers can get up to pretty high efficiencies these days, about 20% and some of them are upwards of a hundred kilowatts. But consider, to get water from room temperature (about 20 degrees C) to boiling, you need top put about 330 kilojoules into it for every kilogram (about a half gallon). The heat of vaporization of water is about 2260 kilojoules per kilogram. So to boil a half gallon of water, you need around 2600 kilojoules. It takes even a 500 kilowatt laser 5 seconds to boil a half gallon of water.
You're also boiling four times that much water in your cooling system, incidentally.
Yeah, it’ll hurt you plenty quick if you stick your hand in a laser beam that powerful, but we’re sure not in disintegrator ray territory. Not by a long shot. Was James Bond about to get his testicles cut off and be severed in two? Probably not; the thing would have set his clothing on fire, though.
So the "laser death ray" future turns out to be one that dated faster than just about any other sci-fi gimmick ever. Still, the "phaser" was a brilliant neologism. It took the "-aser" suffix, which still has some mysterioso power, even now, and added, well, what? More mysterioso. Something to do with "phase" probably. So soon it was "phaser" and "plasma rifle" and "hypervelocity rail gun," as everyone took a quick swing back into fantasy land, which is what Space Opera is all about anyway. Nobody took the Laser Death Ray seriously after that.
Except, it turns out, for the Department of Defense. I think they’re still pushing space-based laser missile defense systems. These have the positive aspect of being largely harmless hogwash, good for tech pork and not much else. Physicists still love them some laser macho, and between the space lasers and attempts to use lasers to light fusion reactions, they get to keep playing, I’ve Got the Big One.
Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?
Then there is the saga of the Gamma Laser or X-ray Laser, but I’ve already written about that one.
And then there’s the one about using an ultraviolet laser to conduct a taser current (there’s that –aser mojo again). Look ma! We have a stun gun!
Too bad all you have to do is wear a wetsuit or a rubber raincoat to be immune. There’s a reason why real tasers have little sharp barbs at the end.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Some Knurdly Background about Lasers II
So the trick of getting “amplification through stimulated emission” is the “inverted population,” having enough excited atoms or molecules in your mix that they predominate, rather than having the “ground state” atoms or molecules absorb your photons and shut it all down.
The first gizmo that worked got its inverted population by separating out the excited molecules. Then this guy, Townes, obviously obsessive about the matter, got even more clever. He had the idea of using a “metastable state.”
I’ve been talking as if there were only two states, a ground state and a single excited state. But atoms and molecules actually have a lot more quantum states than that. And some of them are what’s called “metastable,” which just means that they take a long time to decay, relatively speaking.
If you hit an atom with enough energy to put it into a state higher than the metastable state, say state 2, or 3, or whatever, with the metastable state being state 1 and ground state being 0, then it will quickly decay from the higher states, but will linger in the metastable state. Presto, an inverted population.
Then Townes’ brother-in-law (okay, it was the respected Bell Labs’ physicist Arthur Schawlow, but he’d married Townes’ sister) had the idea of putting mirrors at the two ends of a lasing cylinder. This increased the path length of the photons going through the laser medium, but only in the direction at right angles to the mirrors. Moreover, if properly adjusted, the mirrors could be used to “tune” the laser to a single frequency, just like a microwave cavity. Finally, because Bell Labs was very big on solid state physics in those days, Schawlow suggested using solid state materials for the lasing medium.
By this time, Townes’ work had attracted attention and a lot of other bright guys had been added to the mix, guys like Gordon Gould, Nikolay Basov, Aleksandr Prokhorov and Theodore H. Maiman. Some of them had overlapping ideas, some had novel ideas, and pretty much all of them got involved in priority, patent, and other kind of squabbles over the next years and decades. They also won a lot of prizes, made a lot of money, got famous, the usual, and there were plenty of it all to go around.
The result was the first laser, made by Ted Maiman at Hughs Research Labs, which used a synthetic ruby as the lasing medium and was “optically pumped” via a flash tube wrapped around it. Within months, the Iranian physicist Ali Javan, working with William Bennet and Donald Herriot, made the first gas laser using helium and neon. Laser diodes were developed within two years, though we had to wait into 1970 for some that worked at room temperature.
When the laser was first announced, practically every news story referred to it as “a solution looking for a problem.” That was about as ignorant a statement as has ever been made. A strong, monochromatic, coherent light source? Man, there were scientists and engineers who had been making do with crappy things like sodium light through a pinhole for decades. Holography had been invented in 1947, but it needed lasers to make it work. There’s a patent that was filed in 1961 using a technique called a “two-dimensional fourier transform” (ask me how I knew to do a search on that phrase sometime) to interpolate between images in an animated film, that calls for a “small, coherent, monochromatic light source.” God only knows how long the inventors had been sitting on that one, waiting for the laser to be invented.
But that wasn’t the really big deal. No, the first thing we all heard about lasers doing was punching holes in a diamond. And fan boys everywhere went, “Hurrah! We have a Disintegrator! Or a Death Ray!” Frankly, we didn’t much care which. ‘Cause the ghosts of Hugo Gernsback and Amazing Stories were yelling, “Hot damn!”
And yes, Gernsback didn't technically die until 1967, and Amazing Stories has died and been resurrected so many times I've lost count. But their ghosts still walked the land in 1961, because you don't have to die to leave a ghost.
The first gizmo that worked got its inverted population by separating out the excited molecules. Then this guy, Townes, obviously obsessive about the matter, got even more clever. He had the idea of using a “metastable state.”
I’ve been talking as if there were only two states, a ground state and a single excited state. But atoms and molecules actually have a lot more quantum states than that. And some of them are what’s called “metastable,” which just means that they take a long time to decay, relatively speaking.
If you hit an atom with enough energy to put it into a state higher than the metastable state, say state 2, or 3, or whatever, with the metastable state being state 1 and ground state being 0, then it will quickly decay from the higher states, but will linger in the metastable state. Presto, an inverted population.
Then Townes’ brother-in-law (okay, it was the respected Bell Labs’ physicist Arthur Schawlow, but he’d married Townes’ sister) had the idea of putting mirrors at the two ends of a lasing cylinder. This increased the path length of the photons going through the laser medium, but only in the direction at right angles to the mirrors. Moreover, if properly adjusted, the mirrors could be used to “tune” the laser to a single frequency, just like a microwave cavity. Finally, because Bell Labs was very big on solid state physics in those days, Schawlow suggested using solid state materials for the lasing medium.
By this time, Townes’ work had attracted attention and a lot of other bright guys had been added to the mix, guys like Gordon Gould, Nikolay Basov, Aleksandr Prokhorov and Theodore H. Maiman. Some of them had overlapping ideas, some had novel ideas, and pretty much all of them got involved in priority, patent, and other kind of squabbles over the next years and decades. They also won a lot of prizes, made a lot of money, got famous, the usual, and there were plenty of it all to go around.
The result was the first laser, made by Ted Maiman at Hughs Research Labs, which used a synthetic ruby as the lasing medium and was “optically pumped” via a flash tube wrapped around it. Within months, the Iranian physicist Ali Javan, working with William Bennet and Donald Herriot, made the first gas laser using helium and neon. Laser diodes were developed within two years, though we had to wait into 1970 for some that worked at room temperature.
When the laser was first announced, practically every news story referred to it as “a solution looking for a problem.” That was about as ignorant a statement as has ever been made. A strong, monochromatic, coherent light source? Man, there were scientists and engineers who had been making do with crappy things like sodium light through a pinhole for decades. Holography had been invented in 1947, but it needed lasers to make it work. There’s a patent that was filed in 1961 using a technique called a “two-dimensional fourier transform” (ask me how I knew to do a search on that phrase sometime) to interpolate between images in an animated film, that calls for a “small, coherent, monochromatic light source.” God only knows how long the inventors had been sitting on that one, waiting for the laser to be invented.
But that wasn’t the really big deal. No, the first thing we all heard about lasers doing was punching holes in a diamond. And fan boys everywhere went, “Hurrah! We have a Disintegrator! Or a Death Ray!” Frankly, we didn’t much care which. ‘Cause the ghosts of Hugo Gernsback and Amazing Stories were yelling, “Hot damn!”
And yes, Gernsback didn't technically die until 1967, and Amazing Stories has died and been resurrected so many times I've lost count. But their ghosts still walked the land in 1961, because you don't have to die to leave a ghost.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Some Knurdly Background about Lasers I
A lot of people link Einstein to the Atom Bomb because of the E=MC2 thing. This is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding, because mass/energy equivalence is a general property of nature. Every chemical reaction also has E=MC2 going on; it’s just that the change in mass from a chemical reaction is too small to measure, while for nuclear reactions the change is measurable.
No, the go-to guy for the Atom Bomb was Enrico Fermi; Einstein’s primary contribution to the deal was that he wrote that famous letter to Roosevelt, ironically, a political contribution that drew on Einstein’s celebrity status, but had little to do with Einstein’s contributions to science.
Lasers, however, are a different thing entirely.
In 1916, Einstein wrote a letter to Michael Angelo Besso that included the poetic line, "A splendid light has dawned on me about the absorption and emission of radiation." He documented his insight in a paper that was published the following year, describing the absorption and emission of photons by atoms in a gas, but which went further and described a third process, stimulated emission.
This insight of his was an “Einstein Special.” From the large-scale macroscopic properties of gases, Einstein deduced a phenomenon that occurs at very small, quantum mechanical scales. This is not something that just leaps out at you from staring at some equations for a bit. It’s one of those things that makes some people think that Einstein had God’s phone number (although, realistically, God sometimes made prank calls, like that “God does not play dice with the universe” thing. It turns out that, not only does God play dice, He uses dice with so many sides to them that they might as well be ball-bearings. Also, He uses a lot of dice).
The stimulated emission phenomenon says that, if you have an atom or molecule in an excited state of a particular energy, if you hit it with a photon of exactly that same energy, you will stimulate the emission of energy by the atom or molecule. So now you have two photons, of exactly the same energy. Moreover, they are identical in all other respects, same phase, polarization, everything. They are coherent.
The closest thing I can come up with by way of a large, mechanical analogy is, suppose you have a ledge on a pool with some ball on it, and a wave that is exactly the same height as one of the balls slaps it off the ledge and it falls into the water. And only a wave of the correct height will do that, and when it does, the ball makes another wave, exactly the same as the first one.
Yeah, I know. Crummy analogy. But it was the best I could do.
So anyway, suppose you had a huge number of these excited atoms, and you sent a single photon into the mass of them. Bingo! Now you’ve got a chain reaction, with each photon setting off two more, and so on and on. That’s the “Amplification” part of “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER).” All very cool. The only problem is, “how do you get all those excited atoms in a mass?”
Suppose you try to do it by shining a light on them. At first, you’re creating excited atoms, but as time goes on, more and more the atoms you are hitting are already excited, and whoops, you’ve just stimulated them into giving photons. In fact, you can never get to the point where you have more atoms amplifying the photons than absorbing them. I think that’s actually part of the thermodynamic argument that Einstein was using in the first place.
Well, it nevertheless turns out that there are ways to do it. But it took almost 40 years after Einstein’s “splendid light” for someone to do it. And man, what a Rube Goldberg device it was.
It was called a Maser Amplifier, and the “M” stands for “Microwave.” The gas in it was ammonia, which has a nice emission line in the microwave spectrum. Also, and this is very important, ammonia has a large dipole moment that is different for its excited state as compared to its “ground state.”
The guys who did it were J. P. Gordon, H. J. Zeiger, and C. H. Townes, with Townes going on to later invent the Laser as well.
They started out with a “molecular beam” of ammonia. When you release a gas into a vacuum, eventually the atoms in it stop banging into each other because the gas pretty much stops being a gas; the atoms in it are too diffuse to bump into each other. So they follow “ballistic trajectories,” and if you’ve put the whole thing through slots and holes, all the atoms are moving in more or less the same direction. You get a beam of atoms.
Some of those atoms had been excited by some prior microwave treatments, as it were, and the difference between the dipole moments of the excited vs. ground state ammonia allowed them to be separated by a series of magnets and electrodes. The excited molecules went into a “resonant cavity,” the sort of things that radar guys had gotten really good at building in WWII.
But Rube Goldberg is only warming up. While the ammonia molecules weren’t bumping into each other very often, them being so rarified and all, they were banging off the walls like bikers on a meth bender. And there was a big problem. If the excited ammonia interacted with the walls in anything other than a purely elastic collision, then there was a high probability that it would lose its energy and revert to the ground state.
So the walls had to be chemically inert. I mean really inert. Fortunately, Teflon had been invented. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite enough. Commercial Teflon still has a few chemical bonds remaining in it; it’s hard to get a 100% chemical reaction product formation, so some of the Teflon ingredients were still unreacted, and still reactive (just don’t ask me about the story of the first experimental attempts at making Teflon condoms, where it turned out that there was just a little smidge of unreacted fluorine remaining, and God, do I hope that story is apocryphal).
So what one of the intrepid threesome did (I haven’t been able to learn which one), was to put fluorine gas into the resonating chamber and shine some light on it. Fluorine gas photolyzes into fluorine atoms and if there is something in the universe more reactive than fluorine atoms, I do not know what it is. So those super-reactive F atoms located every remaining chemical bond in the Teflon and glommed onto it with a vicey grip. Then, (I expect) after multiple flushings and other treatments to get rid of the last bits of fluorine, the walls of the resonating chamber were passivated.
[Brief aside: smog chambers, the experimental device of choice for much of my career in science also had Teflon wall, and my colleague Gary Whitten tried a few times to get the smog chamber guys to do a similar passivation on them, as wall effects were a known problem. No one ever did it. I’m of mixed feelings about it. It would have made the experiments more reliable. On the other hand, it’s fluorine!]
So anyway, after all that, the microwave excitation, the molecular beam, the dipole separation into a passivated resonant cavity, and I hesitate to think how many other minor kludges along the way, in 1954 James P. Gordon rushed into the class that Townes was teaching and announced that they were getting microwave amplification from the damn thing, a mere 38 years after Einstein had pointed out the basic theory.
Oh, and the thing about having enough atoms or molecules in an excited state to create amplification through stimulated emission? That’s called an “inverted population.” It’s a Boltzmann thing.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
WRPI
(Funny sounding noise, much like someone imitating a squeak toy)
“What was that?”
“That’s a Werpi.”
“A Werpi?”
“Yeah, small musical animal, eats electricity and vinyl.”
“A Werpi, huh? How do you spell that?”
“WRPI, Troy, New York. The Troy, New York is silent.”
(groan) -- Legal station ID break on WRPI, circa 1974.
WRPI was, and is, the student run (and financed) radio station of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I’ve known several people over the years who were in student radio when they were in school, but WRPI was something else again.
I got to RPI in the fall of 1968 (remind me to sometime just do a laundry list of what the country was like in 1968). WRPI was in the middle of its metamorphosis.
Up until the late 1960s, FM radio was the step-child of broadcasting, seen as a fit place for only classical music, maybe a little jazz, maybe a little folk, and other “educational” stuff.
But as rock became more “album centered” in the 1960s, a “progressive” or “free format” radio form emerged at stations like WOR and WNEW in New York, and WMMR, in Philadelphia. On the west coast, KSAN in San Francisco was also doing it, but that had no influence as such, on WRPI and I didn’t hear KSAN until I moved to California in 1974.
RPI had students who’d been listening to the northeastern progressive stations while still in high school, and these students eventually wrested programming control away from their elders (also students, but “old school,” as it were), sometime just before I got there. This was often referred to as “the Sophomore Coup.” They also plotted to upgrade WRPI from a 1 kilowatt monaural station with a small antenna behind their studios on the RPI campus to a 10,000 watt stereo station with a large antenna that they’d bargained away from a commercial station basically by being non-threatening. Commercial broadcasters don’t like their surplus equipment winding up in competitors’ hands; much better to give it to a school, take the tax break and not worry that the kids will take any audience share.
Or so they thought.
The Arbitron ratings of the time didn’t split out the non-commercial audience; it was just lumped under “other.” So by the time anyone actually realized what was going on, WRPI had the largest FM audience in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area. And this was just when FM rock was taking off.
Some of us listened to WRPI all the time. Or, we listened to WRPI, then played records that we’d bought because we heard them on WRPI. The station was that influential.
Of course, some of the WRPI guys got a little full of themselves; quite a heady feeling doing a show on the biggest station in New York’s capitol district. Some comeuppance was bound to follow.
I always referred to it as “The Great Music Drought” of the early 1970s. For several years, it had been possible to just walk into a record store and buy a record – sometimes just based on the cover – and it would be good. Seriously, I had a friend who bought the first It’s a Beautiful Day album and Taj Mahal’s Take a Giant Step just because he liked the covers.
Then stuff happened. I’m not sure what. Maybe it was the rock star deaths, Jimi and Janis; maybe it was the bands breaking up (“Say it ain’t so, John and Paul); maybe it was the formation of a host of over-hyped super-groups. Whatever it was, there was suddenly a lot of crap music around. And progressive radio suffered.
The other thing that happened was that the tastes of the WRPI djs (and the djs have almost total programming power under the progressive rock format) diverged from their audience. It’s almost inevitable, actually. I watched it happen over and over again (including to myself). You start off liking what everyone likes, but over time, as you tire of the same-old-same-old, you start craving novelty and variety. Oops, suddenly you’re a connoisseur, with a taste for out-of-the-ordinary music.
What started getting to the more musically conservative part of the audience was the jazz and the wolf howls. Some of the station jazz aficionados had become enamored of John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders. Coltrane is a slightly easier sell, but sheets of sound on the saxophone are a bit rough on untrained ears. Then there was the Smithsonian recording “The Language and Music of the Wolves” which is basically wolf howls. I like it. Many didn’t. One dj used it as his theme. There was also a syndicated show from the ZBS foundations called “The Fourth Tower of Inverness” that was surreal and had a wolf howl in its intro. Turned out that many of the conservative listeners didn’t care for surrealist fantasy melodramas. Who knew?
What happened was pretty ironic. WRPI was the most popular radio station (not just the most popular college station, the most popular station) on almost every college campus in the Capitol District, with the exception of RPI itself. The corporate programmers had figured out that you could get an audience nearly as large or larger than the free format stations by playing what came to be called MOR (middle-of-the-road) rock in a restricted playlist format. This came to be called “familiar” music at WRPI, and many of the djs were agin’ it.
During my undergraduate days at RPI, I was a publications knurd. When I moved over to graduate school, I switched over to WRPI and became one of the djs, then a member of the programming committee, and, briefly, its PR officer and member of its board. I’m sure I had some idea of showing everyone How It Should Be Done. Popular, familiar music? Sure, but put it together with some connoisseur music, mix it right, and people will respond.
Ultimately, the joke was on me, when a group that included the WRPI station manager tried to seize control of programming at the station during a pretty hellish week that resulted in every dj who wouldn’t go along with it, including me, getting booted off the air, often in mid-show. The coup attempt was dropped after a week, owing to bad publicity, rumblings from the Student Union Executive Board, the inability of the coup meisters to find enough people to keep the station actually functioning, and the two to three hundred letters a day the station was getting from listeners saying “How Dare You?”
They did get a certain amount of revenge a few months later, targeting someone who was perceived as being a “ringleader” of the resistance to the format changes. That someone would be me, actually, but that’s a story for another time.
“What was that?”
“That’s a Werpi.”
“A Werpi?”
“Yeah, small musical animal, eats electricity and vinyl.”
“A Werpi, huh? How do you spell that?”
“WRPI, Troy, New York. The Troy, New York is silent.”
(groan) -- Legal station ID break on WRPI, circa 1974.
WRPI was, and is, the student run (and financed) radio station of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I’ve known several people over the years who were in student radio when they were in school, but WRPI was something else again.
I got to RPI in the fall of 1968 (remind me to sometime just do a laundry list of what the country was like in 1968). WRPI was in the middle of its metamorphosis.
Up until the late 1960s, FM radio was the step-child of broadcasting, seen as a fit place for only classical music, maybe a little jazz, maybe a little folk, and other “educational” stuff.
But as rock became more “album centered” in the 1960s, a “progressive” or “free format” radio form emerged at stations like WOR and WNEW in New York, and WMMR, in Philadelphia. On the west coast, KSAN in San Francisco was also doing it, but that had no influence as such, on WRPI and I didn’t hear KSAN until I moved to California in 1974.
RPI had students who’d been listening to the northeastern progressive stations while still in high school, and these students eventually wrested programming control away from their elders (also students, but “old school,” as it were), sometime just before I got there. This was often referred to as “the Sophomore Coup.” They also plotted to upgrade WRPI from a 1 kilowatt monaural station with a small antenna behind their studios on the RPI campus to a 10,000 watt stereo station with a large antenna that they’d bargained away from a commercial station basically by being non-threatening. Commercial broadcasters don’t like their surplus equipment winding up in competitors’ hands; much better to give it to a school, take the tax break and not worry that the kids will take any audience share.
Or so they thought.
The Arbitron ratings of the time didn’t split out the non-commercial audience; it was just lumped under “other.” So by the time anyone actually realized what was going on, WRPI had the largest FM audience in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area. And this was just when FM rock was taking off.
Some of us listened to WRPI all the time. Or, we listened to WRPI, then played records that we’d bought because we heard them on WRPI. The station was that influential.
Of course, some of the WRPI guys got a little full of themselves; quite a heady feeling doing a show on the biggest station in New York’s capitol district. Some comeuppance was bound to follow.
I always referred to it as “The Great Music Drought” of the early 1970s. For several years, it had been possible to just walk into a record store and buy a record – sometimes just based on the cover – and it would be good. Seriously, I had a friend who bought the first It’s a Beautiful Day album and Taj Mahal’s Take a Giant Step just because he liked the covers.
Then stuff happened. I’m not sure what. Maybe it was the rock star deaths, Jimi and Janis; maybe it was the bands breaking up (“Say it ain’t so, John and Paul); maybe it was the formation of a host of over-hyped super-groups. Whatever it was, there was suddenly a lot of crap music around. And progressive radio suffered.
The other thing that happened was that the tastes of the WRPI djs (and the djs have almost total programming power under the progressive rock format) diverged from their audience. It’s almost inevitable, actually. I watched it happen over and over again (including to myself). You start off liking what everyone likes, but over time, as you tire of the same-old-same-old, you start craving novelty and variety. Oops, suddenly you’re a connoisseur, with a taste for out-of-the-ordinary music.
What started getting to the more musically conservative part of the audience was the jazz and the wolf howls. Some of the station jazz aficionados had become enamored of John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders. Coltrane is a slightly easier sell, but sheets of sound on the saxophone are a bit rough on untrained ears. Then there was the Smithsonian recording “The Language and Music of the Wolves” which is basically wolf howls. I like it. Many didn’t. One dj used it as his theme. There was also a syndicated show from the ZBS foundations called “The Fourth Tower of Inverness” that was surreal and had a wolf howl in its intro. Turned out that many of the conservative listeners didn’t care for surrealist fantasy melodramas. Who knew?
What happened was pretty ironic. WRPI was the most popular radio station (not just the most popular college station, the most popular station) on almost every college campus in the Capitol District, with the exception of RPI itself. The corporate programmers had figured out that you could get an audience nearly as large or larger than the free format stations by playing what came to be called MOR (middle-of-the-road) rock in a restricted playlist format. This came to be called “familiar” music at WRPI, and many of the djs were agin’ it.
During my undergraduate days at RPI, I was a publications knurd. When I moved over to graduate school, I switched over to WRPI and became one of the djs, then a member of the programming committee, and, briefly, its PR officer and member of its board. I’m sure I had some idea of showing everyone How It Should Be Done. Popular, familiar music? Sure, but put it together with some connoisseur music, mix it right, and people will respond.
Ultimately, the joke was on me, when a group that included the WRPI station manager tried to seize control of programming at the station during a pretty hellish week that resulted in every dj who wouldn’t go along with it, including me, getting booted off the air, often in mid-show. The coup attempt was dropped after a week, owing to bad publicity, rumblings from the Student Union Executive Board, the inability of the coup meisters to find enough people to keep the station actually functioning, and the two to three hundred letters a day the station was getting from listeners saying “How Dare You?”
They did get a certain amount of revenge a few months later, targeting someone who was perceived as being a “ringleader” of the resistance to the format changes. That someone would be me, actually, but that’s a story for another time.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Talking the Talk
A colleague of mine does not write very well, in large measure because his father always condemned what he called "twenty dollar words," and was willing to back up his condemnation with the occasional act of corporeal punishment. So my colleague grew up with a limited vocabulary, and a substantial uneasiness with the written word. It didn't stop him from becoming a world class researcher, but it does dog him to this day that he sometimes gets the language wrong in a report or paper, sometimes to serious disadvantage.
On the other side of the coin are those among us who revel in complex and complicated language, not to mention technical jargon and outright obfuscation. There are plenty of reasons for it, not the least of which being that the phrase "peer review" is shorthand for saying that your paper is sometimes sent to your worst professional rival before publication. Many are the scientists who have discovered that a hard-to-understand paper presents less of a target for a referee's slings and arrows. You'd think it would be the other way around, but life isn't always rational.
More often, however, jargon creeps into our writing because scientists are rarely writers, and the ability to write clear and precise prose isn't all that common even in professions where writing is paramount. To put it bluntly, writing well is hard work, though there are plenty of writers who make it look easy. God bless them; for some of them it may even be easy, though I can't recall anyone ever confiding to me that it was.
There are some other reasons for obfuscatory writing and technical jargon that are less forgivable than those I've just mentioned, however. One of these reasons is common to language generally: it can be exclusionary. Language is one way to differentiate one group from another, a way of establishing who is "us" and who is "them." Wars have been fought over who speaks which language and who doesn't get to speak what language. Language, in short, can be exclusionary.
By the same token, sometimes language can be inclusionary. Let me tell you a story about that.
About fifteen years ago, I managed to land a brief consulting job with the World Bank. I was actually consultant to two back-to-back "missions" to Mexico, both of which involved the smog problem in Mexico City. A fellow smog researcher had originally been scheduled to go on these missions, but he wound up being dropped owing to a potential conflict of interest, not his, but the company he worked for. It's a common problem, having to pass up work because the people you work for might want some other, potentially conflicting work, and it's not the first time it has worked to my advantage. (It's worked against me often enough, too).
Anyway, the first part of the mission was unusual, even for the World Bank. Pemex, the state-owned oil company in Mexico, wanted to upgrade its refinery capacity to produce more "Magna Sin," their brand of premium unleaded gasoline. That was necessary because Mexico wanted to go to U.S. style catalytic converters on their automobiles. They wanted the catalysts in turn because Mexico City managed to have the worst smog in the Western Hemisphere with only three million automobiles. To be fair, Mexico City is also over a mile above sea level -- having less air to pollute does not give you less air pollution; it gives you more.
The Japanese Export Import bank wanted to make loans to Pemex to do the upgrade, but the Japanese Diet (Parliment), wanted an independent oversight. It seems that the Ex-Im bank had been caught making foolish loans just in order to boost Japanese exports. (No, really? Why would any country do that?). After more than one too many defaults, the Diet told them to get the World Bank involved.
So cut to a meeting with three groups of people: Pemex officials, speaking Spanish, Japanese Ex-Im bank representatives, speaking Japanese, World Bank mission, speaking English.
(In fact, the head of the World Bank mission was German, but he spoke fluent English, as well as three or four other languages, I believe. But most of us were like me. I've actually tried, at one time or another, to learn all of the languages I've just mentioned, including German. The net result is that I can occasionally catch the drift of a conversation in Spanish, I can read German provided I have a dictionary and half an hour per paragraph, and I can tell when a Japanese person is asking a question or counting. Which is to say that I'm completely useless for any language besides English, just like the rest of my countrymen).
There was one translator for the meeting, a Japanese woman living in Mexico. It was a virtuoso performance; I still get gooseflesh thinking about it. Someone would speak, and she would then translate, sequentially, into the other two languages. And I don't mean a sentence at a time. She did whole paragraphs, sometimes more. Imagine even doing that in English, listening to someone say several sentences, then tell what the person said to two other people, one after another. If you think even that limited version is easy, try it, and see how quickly you get tired and begin to forget the beginning of the paragraph before you get to the end.
As I said, a virtuoso performance, and grueling. We had to take a fifteen minute break every hour for her to rest. Even so...well, as I said, I get goosebumps. For quite a while, the translation went smoothly, Then, a couple of hours into the session, it broke down.
The culprit, if that is the right word for him, was the senior member of the Japanese delegation. He was nominally in charge, but that is because he was the senior person, literally the oldest. The Japanese have a reverence for age that it more attractive to me the older I get. The upshot of this social grace is that, no matter what the actual circumstances, the oldest member of the delegation is "in charge." The others in the group defer to him, even if he is not really the person who is running things, or the person who will write the final report (though it may well be in his name). It is both a courtesy thing and more than that.
In our case, the senior member was an old academic, a university researcher, a smog scientist, in fact. He'd once even run a smog chamber, which is a laboratory vessel for making synthetic smog, for research purposes. It's not that uncommon; there may be as many as a couple hundred people in the world who are familiar with their use. So our wise old man began to speak of his research. Some of it was reminiscing, some of it was germane, although tangentially so, to the problems we were there to talk about.
The problem was, the language that he was speaking wasn't Japanese. It wasn't English, either. It was, well, smog jargon. "Peroxyacetyl nitrate" for example, is not to be found in either English or Japanese (or Spanish) dictionaries. (I’ve made some changes to the Wikipedia entry because what I found there originally had a lot of errors in it).
But I knew what he was talking about, because I happened to speak that language.
So then things got a little comical. Between us, the translator and I could figure out what the wise old man was saying. Sort of like one person knowing the verbs and the other the nouns. And occasionally (very, very, occasionally) I'd pick up enough of the Japanese to get some of that on my own. The result was that I would translate the technical vocabulary into common English terms, which she could then translate into Spanish—and back into Japanese.
I noticed that some of the Japanese delegation were paying particular attention to that. They could not ask their senior member to explain himself in simpler terms in Japanese—that would be both impolite and embarrassing. It would be an admission that they themselves didn't understand. But when it was restated back in simpler terms, the professor would nod as say, "Yes, that is what I meant." Sometimes he looked over at me and smiled, the two of us sharing a private joke, perhaps, or at least a private language.
That experience recurred some time later, when we all visited an air monitoring site out in the suburbs, on the grounds of an elementary school. Very nice monitoring station, and if any of you reading this are knowledgeable about such things, you'll know what kind of day it was when I say that they were measuring ozone at 360 part per billion. Just for comparison, Los Angelese hasn't seen readings that high in almost two decades.
They also had a lot of potted plants near the station, I suspect also for monitoring purposes. I say that I suspect that they were for monitoring because they plants showed a characteristic yellow splotching. That stuff I mentioned earlier, "peroxyactyl nitrate?" It does that to plants. I looked at the spots, pointed, and said to one of our Mexican counterparts, "PAN?" He nodded. "PAN," he confirmed, in the language that was neither Spanish nor English and which both of us spoke.
On the other side of the coin are those among us who revel in complex and complicated language, not to mention technical jargon and outright obfuscation. There are plenty of reasons for it, not the least of which being that the phrase "peer review" is shorthand for saying that your paper is sometimes sent to your worst professional rival before publication. Many are the scientists who have discovered that a hard-to-understand paper presents less of a target for a referee's slings and arrows. You'd think it would be the other way around, but life isn't always rational.
More often, however, jargon creeps into our writing because scientists are rarely writers, and the ability to write clear and precise prose isn't all that common even in professions where writing is paramount. To put it bluntly, writing well is hard work, though there are plenty of writers who make it look easy. God bless them; for some of them it may even be easy, though I can't recall anyone ever confiding to me that it was.
There are some other reasons for obfuscatory writing and technical jargon that are less forgivable than those I've just mentioned, however. One of these reasons is common to language generally: it can be exclusionary. Language is one way to differentiate one group from another, a way of establishing who is "us" and who is "them." Wars have been fought over who speaks which language and who doesn't get to speak what language. Language, in short, can be exclusionary.
By the same token, sometimes language can be inclusionary. Let me tell you a story about that.
About fifteen years ago, I managed to land a brief consulting job with the World Bank. I was actually consultant to two back-to-back "missions" to Mexico, both of which involved the smog problem in Mexico City. A fellow smog researcher had originally been scheduled to go on these missions, but he wound up being dropped owing to a potential conflict of interest, not his, but the company he worked for. It's a common problem, having to pass up work because the people you work for might want some other, potentially conflicting work, and it's not the first time it has worked to my advantage. (It's worked against me often enough, too).
Anyway, the first part of the mission was unusual, even for the World Bank. Pemex, the state-owned oil company in Mexico, wanted to upgrade its refinery capacity to produce more "Magna Sin," their brand of premium unleaded gasoline. That was necessary because Mexico wanted to go to U.S. style catalytic converters on their automobiles. They wanted the catalysts in turn because Mexico City managed to have the worst smog in the Western Hemisphere with only three million automobiles. To be fair, Mexico City is also over a mile above sea level -- having less air to pollute does not give you less air pollution; it gives you more.
The Japanese Export Import bank wanted to make loans to Pemex to do the upgrade, but the Japanese Diet (Parliment), wanted an independent oversight. It seems that the Ex-Im bank had been caught making foolish loans just in order to boost Japanese exports. (No, really? Why would any country do that?). After more than one too many defaults, the Diet told them to get the World Bank involved.
So cut to a meeting with three groups of people: Pemex officials, speaking Spanish, Japanese Ex-Im bank representatives, speaking Japanese, World Bank mission, speaking English.
(In fact, the head of the World Bank mission was German, but he spoke fluent English, as well as three or four other languages, I believe. But most of us were like me. I've actually tried, at one time or another, to learn all of the languages I've just mentioned, including German. The net result is that I can occasionally catch the drift of a conversation in Spanish, I can read German provided I have a dictionary and half an hour per paragraph, and I can tell when a Japanese person is asking a question or counting. Which is to say that I'm completely useless for any language besides English, just like the rest of my countrymen).
There was one translator for the meeting, a Japanese woman living in Mexico. It was a virtuoso performance; I still get gooseflesh thinking about it. Someone would speak, and she would then translate, sequentially, into the other two languages. And I don't mean a sentence at a time. She did whole paragraphs, sometimes more. Imagine even doing that in English, listening to someone say several sentences, then tell what the person said to two other people, one after another. If you think even that limited version is easy, try it, and see how quickly you get tired and begin to forget the beginning of the paragraph before you get to the end.
As I said, a virtuoso performance, and grueling. We had to take a fifteen minute break every hour for her to rest. Even so...well, as I said, I get goosebumps. For quite a while, the translation went smoothly, Then, a couple of hours into the session, it broke down.
The culprit, if that is the right word for him, was the senior member of the Japanese delegation. He was nominally in charge, but that is because he was the senior person, literally the oldest. The Japanese have a reverence for age that it more attractive to me the older I get. The upshot of this social grace is that, no matter what the actual circumstances, the oldest member of the delegation is "in charge." The others in the group defer to him, even if he is not really the person who is running things, or the person who will write the final report (though it may well be in his name). It is both a courtesy thing and more than that.
In our case, the senior member was an old academic, a university researcher, a smog scientist, in fact. He'd once even run a smog chamber, which is a laboratory vessel for making synthetic smog, for research purposes. It's not that uncommon; there may be as many as a couple hundred people in the world who are familiar with their use. So our wise old man began to speak of his research. Some of it was reminiscing, some of it was germane, although tangentially so, to the problems we were there to talk about.
The problem was, the language that he was speaking wasn't Japanese. It wasn't English, either. It was, well, smog jargon. "Peroxyacetyl nitrate" for example, is not to be found in either English or Japanese (or Spanish) dictionaries. (I’ve made some changes to the Wikipedia entry because what I found there originally had a lot of errors in it).
But I knew what he was talking about, because I happened to speak that language.
So then things got a little comical. Between us, the translator and I could figure out what the wise old man was saying. Sort of like one person knowing the verbs and the other the nouns. And occasionally (very, very, occasionally) I'd pick up enough of the Japanese to get some of that on my own. The result was that I would translate the technical vocabulary into common English terms, which she could then translate into Spanish—and back into Japanese.
I noticed that some of the Japanese delegation were paying particular attention to that. They could not ask their senior member to explain himself in simpler terms in Japanese—that would be both impolite and embarrassing. It would be an admission that they themselves didn't understand. But when it was restated back in simpler terms, the professor would nod as say, "Yes, that is what I meant." Sometimes he looked over at me and smiled, the two of us sharing a private joke, perhaps, or at least a private language.
That experience recurred some time later, when we all visited an air monitoring site out in the suburbs, on the grounds of an elementary school. Very nice monitoring station, and if any of you reading this are knowledgeable about such things, you'll know what kind of day it was when I say that they were measuring ozone at 360 part per billion. Just for comparison, Los Angelese hasn't seen readings that high in almost two decades.
They also had a lot of potted plants near the station, I suspect also for monitoring purposes. I say that I suspect that they were for monitoring because they plants showed a characteristic yellow splotching. That stuff I mentioned earlier, "peroxyactyl nitrate?" It does that to plants. I looked at the spots, pointed, and said to one of our Mexican counterparts, "PAN?" He nodded. "PAN," he confirmed, in the language that was neither Spanish nor English and which both of us spoke.
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