Review: Enterprise Thinking, Part II

Day two of the class consisted more of "war stories" of "non-enterprise-thinking" companies and success stories than Socratic questioning. My problem, again, was a lack of theoretical grounding in the Deming material. What specific problems is Deming trying to overcome? What specific activities does he want to have happen? Those are the things the facilitator should have grounded us in before diving in to practice. My manager suggested that this wasn't a "beginners' class." Maybe, but if so, why was there not a prerequisite?

And now, for real fun, I have to figure out if NASA is doing any of this sort of behavior. And, if not, what sorts of process and culture improvements IS it making?

Gonna take awhile to get this one researched and written.

Review: Enterprise Thinking Class

In connection with my job, I've been asked to attend a class on "Enterprise Thinking." It's two half-day sessions; I just finished day one, and I'm trying to understand the material. The facilitator is using mostly a Socratic method of teaching, asking us questions about how businesses should or should not operate. He is an advocate of W. Edwards Deming, author of, among other things, The New Economics. Deming's business philosophy seems to focus on quality without the emphasis on piece-part quality, like Six Sigma.

Deming's "big message" is a concentration a "System of Profound Knowledge," which he defines as follows:

1. Appreciation of a system: understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers (or recipients) of goods and services (explained below);
2. Knowledge of variation: the range and causes of variation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements;
3. Theory of knowledge: the concepts explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known (see also: epistemology);
4. Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature.

My narrative so far has included a lot of "seems" and quotation marks. There are problems with using the Socratic method to teaching Deming's methods. If you come from organizations that do not think the way Deming would have them act, it is nearly impossible to arrive at Deming's answers by questioning the audience, even when using leading questions. Thus I'm having to do a little more after-work reading to get the straight talk on what we were supposed to get out of this method of business philosophy.

Wikipedia offers the following regarding Deming's four points:

"The various segments of the system of profound knowledge proposed here cannot be separated. They interact with each other. Thus, knowledge of psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.

"A manager of people needs to understand that all people are different. This is not ranking people. He needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in, the responsibility of management. A psychologist that possesses even a crude understanding of variation...could no longer participate in refinement of a plan for ranking people."

The Appreciation of a system involves understanding how interactions (i.e. feedback) between the elements of a system can result in internal restrictions that force the system to behave as a single organism that automatically seeks a steady state. It is this steady state that determines the output of the system rather than the individual elements. Thus it is the structure of the organization rather than the employees, alone, which holds the key to improving the quality of output.

The Knowledge of variation involves understanding that everything measured consists of both "normal" variation due to the flexibility of the system and of "special causes" that create defects. Quality involves recognizing the difference in order to eliminate "special causes" while controlling normal variation. Deming taught that making changes in response to "normal" variation would only make the system perform worse.

Understanding variation includes the mathematical certainty that variation will normally occur within six standard deviations (thus six sigma: the symbol for standard deviation) of the mean.

This is all still Adminispeak to me, so I will probably have to break down and buy one of Deming's books to see how his thinking operates in practice. The points the facilitator kept harping upon were:

• Organizations need to be team-focused, and that "team" needs to include the entire organization, not just localized areas or departments.
• Organizations often react badly to normal variations of output.
• Organizations should not just focus on what's broken, but look for ways to improve what's good.
• There are times when "black and white" (good or bad) judgments are acceptable measures of outputs, but there are also times when it would be better for organizations to use a continuum of "gray" (levels of quality) to measure results.
• "Instead of paying attention to how good the parts are, focus on how good the relationships (between the parts and the people who make them) are."

The facilitator began the session with the same question he hit me with when I first talked to him about signing up for this class: "How would it feel to work in an organization where it was always the last straw that broke the camel's back?" This was such an incongruous analogy that it took me awhile to understand what he meant. My rewording of the question could be summed up this way: "How would it feel to work in an organization where the recognition for a success or blame for a failure was always leveled upon the last group or individual to handle a product?"

One problem I'm having with this content is that the facilitator is not coming right out and saying what Deming means: that an organization focused on quality instead of cost is more likely to succeed. I would even go one level deeper than that: an organization that understands its mission and concentrates on performing that mission well is more likely to succeed than one focused on bare survival. Another challenge I'm having with the class is the lack of structure. Again, you can ask questions until you're plaid in the face, and if people don't get it, they don't get it. You might hit all of Deming's points eventually, but you might not get how they all hang together. Thus you end up (like me) doing more research until you DO get what the teacher expects, or you walk away in disgust because you didn't see the value of the class.

We closed the class by watching the opening of a movie called Mindwalk, a 1991 movie starring Sam Waterston (one of my favorite actors) and William Heard. The movie is pure dialogue, set at Mont St. Michel in France. Waterston, an American senator who has become burned out by Washington, calls his poet friend, played by Heard, to ask if he can fly in for a visit and get some perspective. As the two men talk through Waterston's ennui, they encounter a retired physicist, who is at Mont St. Michel with her daughter who walks off because all the physicist wants to do is sit and read. The physicist joints the conversation as the two men are discussing the alienation modern man feels compared to people in the Middle Ages. We had to end at that point, but the dialogue was sufficiently interesting to me that I put the movie on my ever-growing wish list. The poet and the physicist were trying to shake the politician out of his apathy, and so I could kind of get where the movie clip fit in with the class.

However, again, the facilitator did not debrief the clip by explicitly tying the message of the movie to the message of the class. Some of us need the obvious stated for us, or maybe just reinforced by having it repeated aloud. I think the facilitator expects too much of his audience sometimes. He just assumes that we'll all walk away with the same message, and so far, the pieces aren't fitting together for this audience member so well. I'm hoping he'll be more direct when it comes to wrapping up the class, but I don't have high hopes. The homework consists of coming up with anecdotes for discussion and a self-directed list of suggestions for what we can/will/should do with this content when the class is over. Well, I will probably try to read a little more Deming directly to see if I can grasp his entire system of thought in a linear fashion, since the hop, skip, and jump method of education obviously doesn't work with me. And if I find that Deming himself is this disjointed, I'll give up and move on to more rigorous, methodical, and straightforward business systems.

Additional Thought(s):

I just realized that I do, in fact, use the questioning method in my job. However, that is my primary problem-solving method. I ask questions to accomplish work. If I'm trying to learn knew knowledge, I want to ask questions, not have questions asked of me. I already know I'm ignorant of a particular topic. That's why I'm in a class--to learn from the instructor--not to have someone verbally prod me into a corner until I say any old thing in the hopes of guessing the right answer. My other reaction to this type of "teaching" is to just shut up and let other people guess what the instructor is getting at. After awhile, I get discouraged by being told too often that I'm getting the wrong answers. To which I say, again, "Of course I'm getting the wrong answers! I don't know what you're trying to teach here!" Good lord, if this is how the Greeks got educated, it's a wonder they made as much progress as they did.

Book Review: Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

It has taken me five years to get around to reading this book, and shame on me for neglecting my uncle's recommendation for so long. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War investigates the life of one of the U.S. military's most unsung, complicated, frustrating, and brilliant warriors.

A child of the Depression, John Boyd's early childhood and youth give no hints to his eventual influence. Brought up in a family of five by a stern mother, Boyd received mentoring assistance at critical points in his life, channeling first his physical prowess as an athlete and later as a thinker in the military. He joined the Army Air Force in 1944, and missed out on combat in World War II. Eligible for the G.I. Bill, he went to the University of Iowa to study economics to get a better grounding in mathematics. There he met his wife, Mary, who had hoped for a quiet future in Iowa somewhere. Her wishes were not to be met, though, and despite giving birth to five children and hanging on through all of her husband's later travails, the narrative and the pattern of Boyd's life would clearly show where the man's true love was to be found: his career.

Boyd comes across as a "typical fighter jock"--loud, brash, egotistical, and firmly convinced of his own invulnerability. Returning to the Air Force during the Korean War, he again missed any opportunity for combat, but began flying jets more impressively and aggressively than any of his peers, and so received additional training, including the USAF's Fighter Weapons School (the original "Top Gun").

What made Boyd unique early in his career, aside from his proficiency as a pilot (he was known as "Forty Second Boyd" for his ability to beat anyone in air-to-air combat within 40 seconds), was his intense desire to codify and quantify his theories about aerial combat tactics. In the first of several critical relationships, Boyd found friends and superiors willing to support first an aerial tactics manual and then a mathematical method of explaining how to win dogfights. This work Boyd undertook at a time when Strategic Air Command--heavy bombers and the generals who flew them in World War II--were ruling the USAF. As a result, Boyd ended up engaging in a series of aggressive and sometimes underhanded personal wars with the Air Force bureaucracy. Boyd was hardly subtle, either: he got into arguments with superior officers, contractors, and civil servants, sometimes absconding with then-restricted computer time to confirm his equations. He eventually succeeded in developing what he called the "Energy-Maneuverability Theory," and codified it into an equation:

[ T-D ]
--------- V = Ps
W

Where the specific energy of an aircraft in flight (P sub s) is defined as thrust minus drag over weight, multiplied by velocity. This might not seem like a big deal, but this equation allows a pilot to calculate the amount of energy the aircraft has at a given moment, how much an opponent has, and what the mathematically correct maneuver should be to gain an advantage over the opponent's aircraft. This equation revolutionized aerial combat because now there was a science to dogfighting, not just "art," as had been practiced from World War I through Korea.

That might have been enough, and most people could be satisfied with such a contribution to aeronautics. However, Boyd was not satisfied. Through the assistance of a variety of "Acolytes" (the name is capitalized throughout the book), Boyd would then try to make certain that his air combat tactics were made the law of the land in the Air Force. Boyd's work was not accepted by most of the Air Force generals, and American pilots paid dearly for it in Vietnam. And it wasn't just a matter of tactics needing to improved. While several of Boyd's students put his theories into practice in combat over Vietnam, Boyd wanted to improve America's jet fighter designs as well.

This is the part of the book that would most have benefitted from additional illustrations--if only some comparisons between Boyd's ideas and the actual aircraft that eventually rolled off the drawing boards: the F-15, F-16, F/A-18, and (through one of Boyd's Acolytes) A-10. These planes did not come out quite like Boyd wanted, but close enough that they have allowed American designs to rule the air for the last 30 years--and to be decisive in both Gulf Wars. A great deal of Boyd's time from the 1960s to the 1980s was spent bucking the Pentagon bureaucracy. More concerned with "doing something than being somebody (i.e. promoted)" kept Boyd hard at work fighting the design and procurement processes at the Pentagon.

Boyd's story is a case study in how to not win friends or influence people in Washington, DC. Loud, profane, animated, cigar-chewing, blunt to an unfailing degree, and willing to go over the heads of people in his way, Boyd more than once found himself the target of bureaucratic sabotage, only to avoid court-martial through a higher-ranking protector. He was also a pain to his Acolytes, who he would call at all hours of the night to discuss his latest "breakthrough." Most of Boyd's Acolytes were people of like mind or temperament, with rebellious, reform-minded, or stubborn streaks that often resulted in similar attacks. However, they were also right in their assessments of misconduct, which further infuriated the generals. Boyd and his acolytes suffered professionally thanks to their single-mindedness.

Retirement did not end Boyd's battles. He waged war through hundreds of long briefings on procurement, aircraft design, and eventually strategic doctrine. It was in this last incarnation as a scholar that Boyd and his Acolytes made their most important contributions to the Department of Defense. While Boyd began developing theories of creativity and military strategy, his Acolytes remained in the ranks, determined to fight the good fight in a variety of bureaucratic battles. Boyd's fingerprints can be found on the doctrine of "Fourth Generation Warfare," the Marine Corps' Amphibious Warfare School, business practices like the OODA Loop, and the strategies of Gulf Wars I and II.

This book is worth reading, both as an insight into the defense establishment and as a testament to the relentless pursuit of ideas by a handful of dedicated military officers. It is also amazing and entertaining to see how Boyd managed to escape scrape after scrape with the bureaucracy and managed to triumph. The professional and personal costs to those who fight these types of wars is instructive as well for anyone seeking to "do something instead of being somebody" in the military establishment. The Pentagon is not the only hidebound bureaucracy in our government, it is merely the most visible. Given all the Boyd was able to accomplish within that bureaucracy, he is truly someone worth knowing about. Few men can lay credit to such a wide-ranging influence.

“Future City” Competition

On Saturday, January 26, I attended the “Future City” competition, a science fair of sorts where middle school students write about, construct, and then simulate in SimCity 3000 a model future city.

According the Teacher Handbook, the projects had six parts to them:

• Computer design of the future city in SimCity 3000 (80 points).
• Computer evaluation of the future city (20 points).
• Model of the future city (120 points).
• Research essay (70 points).
• Future city design abstract (20 points).
• Oral presentation (90 points).

Other rules for the models included a size constraint of 25” X 50” X 20”, at least one moving part, and a parts value of less than $100, presumably to keep parents from “helping” through the use of work business materials.

Some of the kids’ ideas were downright ingenious. There was an underwater city, a city on another planet, and a city that depended on cloning the gland of a fictional fish to produce an alternative fuel. Mass transit systems were popular, as were nanotechnology, solar power, and wind power. Only a couple groups dared use nuclear power. None of them discussed politics directly, though that might have been a limitation of the SimCity game or the nature of the assignment itself, which focused on engineering more than social sciences. Two cities were located off Earth, one on the Moon, one in another star system completely. This was somewhat surprising, given these schools’ proximity to Marshall Space Flight Center. Only the lunar city, “Moontopia” by the Academy for Science and Foreign Language, used space resources.

As a political junkie, one thing I wish had been emphasized more was the social impact of these various technologies. For example, people love their cars. How would these aspiring city founders get people to take only mass transit? The Teacher Guide does address the social aspects of the technologies in the lesson plans, but most of the kids talked about the technologies only.

One exception to this tech-heavy fair was a little creepy because of the way it addressed social issues. The group has positioned a camera at the highest point in the city to monitor the citizens for any signs of pollution, littering, or violence. In this way, they seemed to support a “Big Brother” (or “Big Teacher”) type of surveillance to have a world without violence. Someone needs to talk to their teacher about the tradeoffs between security and freedom.

The mix of students—both by sex and race—was interesting and refreshing. There was only one “typical science fair geek” with glasses and acne.

The presentations had a strong emphasis on environmental improvement, pollution reduction, and “clean” energy; there wasn’t much emphasis on capitalism, culture, or, again, space. I did not get to talk to all of the students. I left for lunch, and when I came back, some new entries appeared, but everyone was awaiting the judging. Nevertheless, I talked to as many of the groups as I could. The entries included:

“Moontopia” – Academy for Science and Foreign Language
This is one of the groups that set up while I was out. The city comprised a variety of cleverly made domes and enclosed city structures (my personal favorite was the CD container with the CDs inside acting as platforms supporting houses from a Monopoly game). The city obviously included solar power--though I was unable to determine if they had any other source--as well as a spaceport.

Submarina Isle – Discovery Middle School
This was the underwater city. It was located near a geothermal vent near the Mid Ocean Ridge and was roofed over with a dome capable of supporting 30,000 pounds per square inch. The interior included housing, horticulture, and a mass transit line.

Raiderville – Oak Park Middle School
Aside from being specifically located in the Pacific Northwest, this town could have been anywhere in America, including as it did a baseball field, basic utilities, and hybrid cars. The primary industrial power sources were solar and wind. I asked them if they were concerned about the lack of sunny days in Seattle; one of the boys, thinking on his feet, pointed out that it didn’t have to be near Seattle. “It’s further inland.” Ten points for quick thinking.

Faith City – Faith Christian Academy
This was the group that included the fish cloning energy source. One of the kids explained to me that scientists had found a deep-sea fish in the Arctic that had a gland that produced the organic equivalent of antifreeze to survive in the deep ocean. “We just sort of extrapolated from there.” Ingenious. However, I’m curious they got away with the cloning aspect. Most of the opposition to cloning has come from Christians.

F.C.A.ville – Faith Christian Academy

Aquaville – Alexander City Middle School

Gran Tierra – Haleyville Center of Technology

Eastwood – Eastwood Middle School
This was the creepy one with the surveillance tower. It also included monorails, parks, and solar power systems. Very neat, very pretty, very pollution-free, and very controlled. The goal, the kid who talked to me said, was “to have a place without violence.” At that age, I probably would’ve seen that as utopia, too.

Chicoville – Episcopal Day School
This city was set in Central Mexico, near old Mayan territory. It featured a lot of composting and biofuels. It was named after an environmentalist named Chico, possibly Chico Mendez. One remarkable aesthetic feature of Chicoville was that all the buildings were gold in color. As one girl explained to me, “When you think of the Maya, you think of gold.”

Rosevilla – Huntsville Middle School
This city featured solar, natural gas, and fusion power sources.

Eagleton 2 – Challenger Middle School
This one was kind of fun, as the town featured a canal with ball-like vehicles that were driven around by magnets. The transport system featured a Batman logo and its own acronym: BAT – Ball and Air Transport. Eagleton 2 also sported health systems incorporating nanotechnology.

Eagle City – Challenger Middle School
These boys were the ones who included a nuclear power plant in their design. They stood out as well because they had a primary industry and source of income: a toxic waste conversion plant that both incinerated trash for fuel and converted said waste into non-allergenic peanut butter. Sign me up!

Challengeville – Challenger Middle School
The young ladies in charge here decided to place their domed city in Siberia, “where there’s unused land available.” Unlike some of the cities, Challengeville included private automobiles. They also featured egg-shaped monorail transports between living quarters and work places.

San Marino – Huntsville Middle School
These kids rebuilt or made off with the city of San Marino on the Italian peninsula. They featured several energy sources and declared that they were energy exporters. The specific source of energy now eludes me, but included solar I believe. The team was also rather proud of their desalinization plant for obtaining clean drinking water.

Novus Atlantis – Chambers Academy
This was another fun design—a floating city that moved through the ocean to keep the city at just the right temperature (68 to 72°F). The city had a small population. Given the energy requirements for moving an entire city, I believe their system included nuclear power.

Westropolis – Duran Junior High
Westropolis was set on a plateau out west. They relied heavily on solar power, which they pointed out was more abundant because they had less atmosphere over their heads. As I recall one of the kids was very adamant about using mass transit only. "No cars?" I asked. "No."

Nano Nation – Life Christian Academy
Aside from a rather decorative presentation (there was a giant mobile of the inner solar system hanging over the center of town), Nano Nation also featured some rather clever uses of nanotechnology, including earthquake protection.

Miranda – Hampton Cove Middle School
This group won me over originally by their rather ingenious water reclamation and purification system. However, they also had more things to share. Miranda is located in the Hawaiian Islands, atop an extinct volcano—the name of which escapes me—near Maui. Its technologies included lightweight hovercraft (“LHCs,” I was proudly informed), nanotechnology, and teleportation to get around the city. The place also featured a research park, hospital, lighthouse, shopping mall, radio tower, and a “House of Worship” that served the world’s four largest religions (“We don’t want to offend anybody”). Their library featured holodeck-like “books” for reading experiences. They even had a restaurant that featured “open kitchen” style dining.

I guess you can tell which one was my favorite. The Hampton Cove kids impressed me by their attention to so many aspects of life in their city, including commerce, education, and transport. I wish them luck.

I didn’t get to talk to the teachers (this was the kids’ show), but I got an impression of the sorts of things the kids were being taught by their content. I don’t like all of it, but at least they’re being asked to think about and plan for the future. Of course if I don’t like what the kids are imagining, perhaps I’ll need to take a more active role in the sorts of dreams they are being fed.

Biographical Matters

I’m finishing up with a book on tape, Ken Burns’ Mark Twain. I usually pick up these items when I have a road trip to accomplish, like helping a friend get back from Atlanta after he gets hosed by his travel agent (but I digress). I was struck by Twain’s detailed memories of his childhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, but the quantity and quality. I guess the reason they made such an impression was because I did not particularly romanticize my childhood. Quoth Yoda: “All his life has he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, what he was doing!” It wasn’t that I had a particularly bad childhood, though as a sensitive (i.e. wimpy) child, the bad I took more personally and allowed to make a bigger impression on me. Anyhow, I'll give this walk down memory lane a shot. The rose-colored glasses are not on--what I see is what you get.

Lombard, Illinois: what can one say about it, aside from Wikipedia’s pithy blurbs? Located near the center of DuPage County, it was mostly a conservative Republican town. The street I grew up on featured a mix of Victorian, Depression-era, and 1960s homes of varying styles and levels of maintenance. On the north side of the street, marking the back border of my yard was the Chicago and Great Western Railroad, which was a single-track freight line that shut down sometime during my high school years. The track lay abandoned for years until it was torn up and turned into a paved bike path, much to my mother’s dismay. The town already had a packed-gravel “Prairie Path,” and that path had seemed to attract one of the town’s three major crimes: indecent exposure (the other two being B&E and DUI). Mom was afraid the path would attract “weirdoes.” The track was on a high berm, which had been covered by trees. It made a great adventure, exploration, and hiding area.

My family's home was one of the later models on the block, built in 1966. It was a white-sided split-level ranch with basement and two-car garage. Mom and Dad had the garage added after the house was built. The doors were on the sides of the house, with the "front" door being the one by the mail box, while the "back door"--the one we used most often--was on the side with the driveway.

The house had three bedrooms, one bath on the upper floor, with the kitchen, living room, and dining room on the ground floor. For most of my early childhood, the downstairs and hallway carpets were a rather rough, flat green pile. When my parents divorced in 1976, Dad had a choice between the TV and the stereo. He took the TV, so my sister and I grew up on a POS TV.

Dad was a sales manager for Eastern Airlines. He came from a loud, raucous, hard-drinking Irish family from the West Side of Chicago. He was the third of four boys, and his very strong Irish-German mother's favorite. Mom worked at the rate desk of the Eastern reservations office. She grew up in Lombard, the third of four girls, the daughter of a very strong German mother and somewhat passive postal worker. The Leahy brothers and Goodney sisters, plus their various children, led to rather large family gatherings, which were some of my happiest moments from early childhood.

My parents met, as I understand it, when EAL was based at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Before they got married, they headed for the suburbs. I was born in August 1969. After suffering through a Midwestern summer pregnant, Mom insisted on getting central air conditioning when she became pregnant with my sister.

I was a tiny and frail baby. I didn't grow much in my first 11 months of life, nor do the usual things babies do: roll over, crawl, sit up, or walk on my own. At month 11, Mom became overwhelmed by her concerns about my health, and brought me into the doctor for some tests. When her GP couldn't find anything obviously wrong, she referred me to Loyola University Hospital. After a month of testing, the doctors discovered that I had hypothyroidism, a glandular condition that was easily fixed through daily maintenance medication. I started growing normally at that point, but would end up in physical therapy (and curiously, the learning disabilities program) until I was 10. There was some financial impact from my condition, too, as my father returned to the Army Reserve at the time to pay for my medical bills.

My sister was born in 1971. She was perfectly normal and healthy. Despite my mother's insistence that I'm full of shite, my first memory is of she and Dad bringing my sister home. As near as I can recall, I was happy to have her there. As we got older, she and I would come to regret some of that initial optimism.

I attended a pre-school attached to the nearby Baptist church, as well as CCD classes at the local Catholic church until my parents divorced, and then switched over to Sunday School at Mom's Lutheran church. I would say that my sister and I got plenty of church growing up, Catholic and Protestant. The rituals differed, but Jesus was front and center. Despite the "mixed marriage" (as it would have been perceived at the time), the differences between the two denominations did not make much impact upon me.

I am unable to recall much about my parents' married life, except perhaps for fleeting memories, like my sister and I bouncing around and under Dad's legs while he was trying to watch a football game, and Dad shouting, "Kathy! Could you do something with the kids?" This was the early 1970s, and the father-as-breadwinner, mother-as-child-raiser expectations were very much in force. Dad traveled a lot for Eastern, and I can Mom packing my sister and I into her VW Beetle ("Betsy") to go pick up Dad at the airport, and at least one occasion when she got angry because he didn't inform her that his flight was delayed and he was coming home late. I can recall my father and mother going out to dinner one night and my asking Dad to bring me back "a matchbox." Of course, in child-speak, that meant "a Matchbox car." Dad took me literally, and didn't understand why I was disappointed when he brought back the requested item.

There was one family vacation I can recall at Walt Disney World in 1974. I remember being in an almost unbearable level of excitement when we were on Main Street--the sort of excitement that only kids can feel in such a surreal and wonderful place. We stayed at what was once called the Dutch Inn (now the Grosvenor Resort) in Lake Buena Vista. That might have been my first experience with staying in a hotel, and it made a grand impression on me, as did the theme park. Being the easily frightened child that I was, I refused to board Pirates of the Caribbean, which Dad had held off visiting on a previous trip to enjoy with his son. Disney World was the first place I can recall being lost. I wasn't paying attention while walking down the stairwell in the Polynesian Resort; I was following a woman with a similarly colored beige trenchcoat, but when I looked up, I'd called the wrong lady "Mommy." I was quickly located and called, but I remember that moment every time I walk up those stairs.

Those were some of the happier times, but change was on the way.

Energy for the Future

Jerry Pournelle has reiterated his thoughts on how to fix the energy problem: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view502.html#policy. It'll never happen, but one can dream.

He also has this: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail135.html#Watts2

And there there is this item from CNN about the potential problems with "biofuels": http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/01/23/biofuels.fears.ap/index.html.

Food for thought, anyway.

Heroes and Anti-Heroes

I've been looking at some of the hot movies for this year, and once again got annoyed. At least two of these acclaimed films feature anti-heroes. Quoth Wikipedia:

In fiction, an anti-hero is a protagonist who is lacking the traditional heroic attributes and qualities, and instead possesses character traits that are antithetical to heroism.

Okay, so I'm a traditionalist. Heroes are supposed to be "good guys," right? Wrong. Somewhere not so long ago (again, in the 1960s), people decided that evil was more intriguing than good. Screw this role model business, nobody's perfect so nobody is completely good. And thus we are now treated to film after film about mass murderers, serial killers, drug dealers, hit men, and for all I know, "hookers with a heart." This is the new redemption. Rather than a good man or woman overcoming some terrific odds to make sure that civilization is kept secure or made better, we now must accept, at best, a man or woman who is often at odds with civilization and who, by the end, might have made it a little better or a lower level of evil or more likely, even a little worse. Gosh, those are the sort of people I'd like to look up to!

The media and Hollywood love to talk about athletes as role models while ignoring the characters created on TV or in movies, not understanding that kids really absorb that stuff and take it into their hearts. My heroes while growing up, for better or worse, were Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Captain Kirk, Hawkeye Pierce, and later Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Not all of them are exactly squeaky clean, but you at least knew they were on the side of the angels. Who do people have now? Dexter? Yuck. More on this later.

Book Review: Maus

Okay, I cheated. I just knew I wouldn't take on the 800-page Decameron right away. So my book-shopping gene and I went to Barnes & Noble, and I picked up what few "wish list" items were to be found at the local book/crack-house. Among those items was Maus, a cartoon/graphic novel by cartoonist Art Spiegelman that is a memoir and biography of his father, who survived the Holocaust. You might ask, why was this on my list? And I can't give you a satisfactory answer. I can, however, tell you how affecting it is.

Instead of being a realistic depiction of Vladek Spiegelman's story, all of the human characters are represented by animals. The Jews are mice (embracing Hitler's depiction of them as vermin), the Germans are cats (the mouse's natural predator), the Poles are pigs (perhaps a comment on their character and treatment of Jews during the Holocaust), the Americans are dogs ("dog faces," if you will). A few others make appearances, but those are the "animals" that make up most of the story.

The narrative takes two paths: one, with Art the cartoonist (again, a mouse) talking to his father about his experiences during World War II, and the other Vladek's narrative. Vladek is a Polish Jew, and a garrulous one. Miserly, fiercely independent, neurotic, guilt-ridden, and a pack rat, he makes his son feel utterly worthless, guilty, and angry. During the war, we see how the Holocaust shaped and warped him, through the need to grasp at opportunities, learn new skills, think quickly, and just plain survive. As Vladek tells his tale, his son learns all sorts of things that his father had kept secret. It angers him to learn these things so late--Vladek is having health problems--but the revelations also help him and the reader develop some sympathy for the old man.

This is truly an amazing way to tell a story. The book comes in two parts, one of which was written during Spiegelman's original interviews with his father, and one after Vladek had died (in 1982). Animal characters manage to convey the horror, as maps and drawings bring to life the actual conditions of life in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and other places within Europe and America. The memoir is also intensely personal and painful. Spiegelman tapped into something painful in such a new way that the momentary discontinuities and mild humor of the piece swiftly pass away, leaving you with the narrative as it is.

We hear and read and learn these survivors' tales because we must. "Never forget" is the motto of those who did survive, and we owe it to them to do no less, especially as those who lived through the camps now die off from natural causes and old age. Spiegelman manages to turn his art into a method of catharsis unlike any other. As such, it deserves to be read and understood.

Book Review: Old Man's War

It's actually been awhile since I read any new science fiction. Too much nonfiction out there to captivate my attention. However, I work with a fellow SF geek who recommended John Scalzi's Old Man's War, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I was pleasantly surprised.

Old Man's War is a future war story along the lines of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Haldeman's The Forever War or Forever Peace, or John Steakley's Armor, with a much closer resemblance to Heinlein's work, just slightly more advanced technology. So what makes Scalzi's work different?

The future Earth milieu is typical space opera: interstellar empires, strange aliens, and spacecraft zooming between the stars at faster-than-light speeds. You can almost hear John Williams music playing in the background as you read some of the combat sequences. In fact, now that I think of it, Old Man's War, if made into a movie that was true to the soul of the book, would be one hell of a film, and would give the moviegoing public a much better idea of what Starship Troopers could have been.

Earth itself appears not much different from life in America today, though it's hard to tell. Scalzi doesn't spend much time dwelling on what life on Earth is like, except to mention that there was a war in India in which the U.S. used nuclear weapons to win. Overpopulation problems continue in India, however, so settlers from India are given precedence at interstellar colonies. Americans can go into space, but only when they reach 75 years of age.

So how does the main character, 75-year-old John Perry, become a member of Earth's Colonial Defense Forces (CDF? One of the most interesting parts of the book--how this future transforms old people into soldiers--is sufficiently different and intriguing that I won't provide any spoilers by giving it away. I can tell you that the future soldiers have nanotechnology and computers embedded in their bodies, seriously smart weapons, and remarkable physical endurance and abilities, and that still doesn't quite cover it. However, there is a strategic reason why it makes sense to use the wisdom and experience of older people.

One thing that's interesting about this book is the slow windup to actual combat. You're on page 115 before Perry and his crew of old people are into boot camp, and page 150 before Perry is put into actual combat. This slow progression from sad old man to recruit to fighting soldier is what make Old Man's War so similar to Starship Troopers. However, Scalzi is not quite as heavy-handed in some of his lectures. For those of you who have had grandparents who can spin a good yarn (I had a couple), you might recognize this pattern. The author/protagonist is in no hurry to tell his story, but once it gets going, the military SF fan will not be disappointed. Scalzi also has one of those deceptively effortless styles that makes his work easy to read. However, a caveat up front if anyone reading this takes these reviews seriously: the language is of the peppery variety.

Scalzi leaves enough clues and open hints for a sequel, and indeed has one on the market: The Ghost Brigades, which I'll have to get back to after I move through some more books on my "to do" list. Old Man's War gets four stars.

***

Speaking of the to-do list, my next book is The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, which is just over 800 pages, so it might be awhile before I get down to another review. Of course if I don't like the book, I won't make it all the way through, and I'll 'fess up to it. After that I've got The Historian on my list, and then I'll make another turn back over to nonfiction. One discouraging thing I'm discovering is that most of the books I want to read are not available at the local library or Barnes & Noble. I like "grazing" through the store: the only "shopping gene" I accept. Oh well, there's always Amazon.

Off to shower, read, and enjoy the day off.

Book Review: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming

I became aware of the idea of climate change when I saw (I think) an Analog science fiction magazine cover that depicted glaciers filling Manhattan. The concept seemed horrible to me then, as now.

I first got on the global warming band wagon when I was a junior in high school, when a different magazine cover caught my eye. Discovery magazine had a front-page picture of Manhattan (again), this time with boats cruising up and down the avenues as a result of the ice caps melting. I took that image, imposed it on Chicago, and wrote a drippingly bad science fiction story using the flooding premise. Then I moved my politics to the right, and someone reminded me of the global ice age fears of 30 years before. Mirable dieu! The solutions for addressing the problem were the same as for a global ice age: restrict fossil fuels, raise taxes, change our lifestyles, etc. This was an important issue, dammit, and who the hell was I to question SCIENCE?!?

Well, maybe. But since high school, the rhetoric has only gotten more heated, so to speak, and sometimes hysterical and scary. Bjorn Lomborg, a professor of statistics and environmental activist, decided to take a serious look at the claims of his fellow travelers, found their facts subject to question, and wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, which took the enviro movement to task for their overreach and hysteria.

The environmental movement has become entrenched as a movement of the left, and the left reserves a special hatred for apostates. Consider Leon Trotsky or, closer to our own time, David Horowitz. By questioning the environmental orthodoxy, which stated that the world was going to heck in a handcart and it is all America's fault, he has been roundly questioned or denounced in environmentalist circles. Lomborg has not backed down. His latest book is Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, which again takes on the environmentalists' orthodoxy by daring to suggest that global warming is, in fact, a problem, but not THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IN HISTORY! His attempt to moderate the language of the environmental debate ("cool it") is directed squarely at the enviros' new rock star, Al Gore. Lomborg has not made himself many more friends on the left, but his attempt at rational debate was welcomed by this gentleman of the right.

If you do not feel like reading the whole thing, here are some of his basic premises:

1. Global warming is real and man-made.
2. Statements about the strong, ominous, and immediate consequences of global warming are often wildly exaggerated, and this is unlikely to result in good policy.
3. We need simpler, smarter, and more efficient solutions for global warming rather than excessive, if well-intentioned efforts [e.g. Kyoto].
4. Many other issues are much more important than global warming.

...We need to remind ourselves that our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment.

Lomborg's biggest gripe with the Kyoto Protocol (also called the Kyoto Treaty) is that it imposes incredibly high costs--$180 billion a year--for very little improvement: just a .3 degree Fahrenheit drop in global average temperature. These figures are based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's and the United Nations' own numbers, so Lomborg is not just spinning for the oil companies. He is, rather, trying to get people to take a serious look at what else we could do to improve life on Earth without some magic, trillion-dollar bullet that doesn't do much anyway.

What Lomborg is advocating is a serious discussion of the potential impacts of global warming--rising seas, increased damage from hurricanes, heat-related deaths, and so forth--and suggesting that we look for other, less expensive ways to address these concerns. For instance, he notes that oceanic rising is only likely to be one foot over the next century, about what we've had since the end of the Little Ice Age 150 years ago--did anyone notice that? Instead of trashing our economy, which is politically infeasible as Al Gore and Bill Clinton realized, we could spend fewer billions improving levees, protecting homes, and ending government subsidies of insurance companies in the event of major events, like Hurricanes Andrew or Katrina. This is a social change rather than a technological change, but it would go a long way toward changing behavior on a micro- instead of a macro-level.

Another project Lomborg has been party to is a group called the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which is essentially a think tank of economists that was originally established to evaluate and rank the biggest societal problems on Earth--both by impact and our ability to fix them. The biggest problems the group identified were:

1. Unsafe water and lack of sanitation
2. Hunger and malnutrition
3. Lack of education

Global warming came near the bottom of the list. Water issues and malnutrition are much more easily resolved, as is education, though it requires more Peace Corps types of initiatives. Still: they're doable. Hunger could be reduced, Lomborg suggests, by ending subsidies to First World agriculture, opening the markets for Third World products. And one thing Lomborg makes clear, which is bound to drive the Marxists in the enviro movement crazy: the greatest way to reduce hunger, ignorance, and disease in the developing world is to increase free trade and make the citizens of those nations richer. And he makes the further point that Kyoto would create a massive financial drain on the West while in some cases making matters in the developing world worse.

This is activism of a sort that people of moderate or conservative disposition can accept. It doesn't require a great deal of money, from a Beltway point of view. Most of the proposals Lomborg suggests in his conclusion cost less than the NASA budget, such as HIV/AIDS education and condoms, vitamins, drinking water and sanitation solutions, levee improvements, DDT-based mosquito extermination, and agricultural reform. And each of these, I might add, would be more politically feasible, one by one, than the single, massive Kyoto Protocol. The end result of a series of smaller, less expensive and less "sexy" activities could do wonders for improving the quality of human life worldwide than a single, massive tax on the United States. If the choice was an increase in the foreign aid budget to accomplish all this in exchange for the wiping out of the U.S. economy, I'm all for it.

Lomborg does also address the need for alternative energy. But whereas Kyoto does nothing to encourage or develop new technologies, Lomborg would propose an increase of research and development funding to .05% of the West's GDP. Again, to use the NASA example, our nation spends .13% of its GDP on federal spaceflight activities--and many people think that's too much. Others question if the government should be spending money on R&D. There is a solution for this problem. In the 19th century, most of the money spent on R&D was spent by private foundations. The U.S. allowed a 70% tax break for businesses's R&D expenditures to expire. That is easily fixed, especially if such a tax break was targeted toward alternative energies, including my favorites: space solar power and Helium-3, both of which are "carbon-neutral," to use the buzzword of the day.

What I appreciate about Lomborg's book is its desire to get to workable, affordable, and politically feasible solutions. And all of this is done in tones of rationalism (we need to follow the data and do reasonable cost-benefit analyses) and civility (no strident screaming or name-calling). What a shame that sanity and politeness don't sell in the current political climate. It's amazing what we could accomplish if they did. Lomborg's book deserves serious attention if they ever do.

Book Reviews: The Guns of August and Paris 1919

These two books deserve to be reviewed together, as they bookend the beginning and end of World War I nicely. The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman recounts the opening days of the war, while Paris 1919 by Margaret Macmillan covers the rather imperfect Versailles Peace Treaty that concluded but by no means ended the war.

World War I, referred to at the time as The Great War or The War to End All Wars, marks a sharp discontinuity in Western Civilization, and thus deserves our attention. Aside from being the first major European conflict using Industrial Age weaponry, WWI also marked a turning away from the Western beliefs in optimism and progress. That optimism was quickly dashed in the opening days of the conflict. Tuchman makes it quite clear that both sides expected the war to last, at most, six weeks, not the four years of combat that actually took place. Both sides had plans in place to ensure quick victory. Neither side counted on the toll of sheer violence that was to ensue from massive use of artillery and machine guns, or much later, poison gas and aeroplanes.

One thing Tuchman conveys very well is something we tend to forget today, with historical pictures of trenches and stalemate: the first six weeks of the war were, in fact, classic battles of maneuver, of the sort armies still prefer to fight today. These maneuvers very nearly led to victory for Germany on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. It wasn't until both sides had exhausted and slaughtered each other enough that stalemate became possible; and it would not be until the United States entered the fight in 1917 with its own large army that maneuver warfare again became possible. Suffering under German military superiority, totalitiarianism, a pre-industrial economy, and political incompetence at home, Czarist Russia collapsed in Marxist revolution.

In spite of this brutality, Tuchman's book is still mostly bloodless, especially when compared with many war histories to date. She also dwells almost entirely on the personalities, rivalries, and individual actions of the generals and the political leaders, only occasionally giving insight into the individual combat soldiers en masse, though she does detail more specifically the atrocities and brutal reprisals the German army inflicted on the people of Belgium and France for daring to fight back after being conquered. In addition to the initial violation of Belgium's neutrality (a trick Nazi Germany was to repeat in 1940), atrocities like these led to Great Britain joining and staying in the war--if only to put an end to such wanton violence. Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II was strictly authoritarian with a bully's mentality that Hitler was to only refine when he came to power. The war simply gave the world a taste of the true totalitarianism that lay ahead.

Just as the hopes at the outset of the war were met with bitter disappointment--and four years of deadly struggle--so too were the hopes of the peacemakers at Versailles dashed by the harsh realities brought about by that struggle. Paris 1919 provides, again, an engaging narrative of the great leaders and their assistants, with the great masses of the world, whose fates they were deciding, making appearances as spectators as Paris became, for six months "the capital of the world."

The great hope of the Versailles conference came in the form of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who set as the price for America's entry on the world stage "to make the world safe for democracy." Since America's army had been so decisive, he was to push hard for his Fourteen Points and League of Nations, which (as a precursor to the United Nations) was supposed to prevent the outbreak of future wars. This was to prove problematic, as Britain, France, and Italy were all constitutional monarchies or aristocracies with little interest in American-style representative democracy. Paris 1919 also makes it clear why peace-making is so messy and often disappointing to the publics being represented. France's President Georges Clemenceau wanted the harshest reparations possible, given that his nation had had had its territory invaded and demolished by Germany. Great Britan's prime minister David Lloyd George, fearing that a weakened Germany would lead to a communist takeover as happened in Russia, sought lesser reparations, but also had to appease a voting public back home that also wanted Germany punished.

One of the biggest problems created by Wilson's call for "self-determination" was his insistence upon creating nations based on national groups that, so far as many historians could tell, had never had their own independence. Most of the new European nations and borders born at Versailles were to be undone or drastically changed after World War II. Many peoples gathered in Paris to petition the Great Powers for their own nationhood, including many who had been promised the independent nations in the same area, like the Jews and Arabs in the former Turkish territory of Palestine. Some new incompatible nations like Yugoslavia were created from whole cloth, while other territories merely changed landlords, from the Turks to the British or French. Paris 1919 is worth reading today, if only to give a little historical perspective on the current problems in the Muslim world.

Macmillan addresses the various issues at Versailles by region, devoting individual chapters to the Balkans, creating new nations, dividing up old nations (especially Turkey and the Austro-Hungarian Empire), settling the reparations issue with Germany, establishing the League of Nations, and establishing standards for racial equality for new Asian powers like Japan. The author also makes it clear that all of these activities were overlapping, and thus affected each other at different times for different reasons.

Perhaps the most important political facts at the conference were the absence of Germany's representatives and Russia's. Britain and France had deliberately left the Germans out of the negotiations, leaving the German people to do naught but hope that Wilson would force the Allies to be merciful. For the most part, they were not, and Hitler would be able to use the Treaty as a convenient cause of Germany's problems in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the Allies were in an awkward position with regard to Russia, which Britan and the United States were in the process of invading or aiding the Mensheviks (liberals) to keep the Bolshevik communists from taking over. The Allies did not yet recognize the communist government of Soviet Russia as a legitimate government. As such, when Lenin and his people did become the recognized government, they saw Versailles as little more than an agreement among "capitalists." (By the way, for a more detailed examination of the struggle between forms of government, I highly recommend Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles, which makes the case that the war which began in 1914 did not really end until 1990.)

One thing Tuchman and Macmillan manage to do splendidly is put to rest any notions of great movements or Marxist "historical forces" in human events. The beginning and ending of World War I make quite clear that individual personalities, foibles, manners, words, and decisions matter in the shaping of historical events. In the end, it is people who matter, and we would be well advised to remember those lessons the next time we face the prospect of another war...or peace.

Thought Experiment

I had a fiction idea today, in response to a rather lengthy email discussion with a couple of liberal friends. You can probably guess the topic of conversation and who was making what arguments by the twists and turns of the scenario.

***

Imagine if you will a well-meaning American male going about his life. He's got a great job, a beautiful American wife, and a travel expense account. The wife, whom he loves dearly, is passionate about human rights abuses in the Middle East being perpetrated by America, and often goes on travels of her own to join a relief organization.

One day, this man comes home to find the FBI at his door. His wife is not home. The agents ask if he knows where she is. "Out on travel, so far as I know," the guy answers. The FBI guys inform him that, no, his wife is not in Hypothetistan. She's now a prisoner in one of those anonymous prisons elsewhere in Asia.

Flabbergasted, the guy stares in shock and denial as the FBI shows him pictures, documentation, all the cards on the table (as it were) proving that his wife is, in fact, a terrorist. She's been caught by U.S. Marines in a combat zone during a serious fire fight, and was stopped from blowing herself up with a vest lined with C-4 before capture. And yes, she's now undergoing interrogation because she has information about imminent attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, civilians in Iraq, and elsewhere. Perhaps, yes, even waterboarding might be used. The FBI wants to know if the man will help.

What what you do?

Maybe I'll leave that one for Tom Clancy to write. I just throw it out there as raw meat for hypothetical consideration.

Book Review: The Two Cultures

C. P. Snow delivered a lecture to an audience of intellectuals at Cambridge in 1959 about the “two cultures” of the humanities and the sciences. His essential thesis was that the West was suffering—and would continue to suffer—from this disconnect between the two groups. He followed up this lecture with a second in 1963, responding to some of the criticisms and comments he received regarding the first lecture. These two lectures comprise The Two Cultures, and they are well worth reading today. The book also includes a long introductory essay, which I confess not to have read because I don’t like people explaining to me what something means if I can figure it out for myself.

As a technical writer, I have a special connection to this topic simply because my job is to translate between the two cultures. The other professionals that operate on the border between the two are science fiction writers.

When I was an undergrad pursuing a B.A. in English Lit, my peers didn’t seem to mind so much that I was taking science and history classes in an effort to become an SF writer (didn’t work, but what’d I know?). However, my experiences when going for a tech writing M.A. made the arts-sciences divide clearer to me. I noted the occasional distaste or fear that the literary types in the English department had for things technological, and can only second Snow’s findings.

The sad part is that the humanities-sciences divide has become, if possible, even more prominent than it was in 1959. Snow was speaking of his own Great Britain at the height of the Cold War, just as America was starting to get serious about science and technical education with the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act. This was before the social upheavals of the 1960s and the arrival of the environmental movement in 1970, which only sharpened the divide between the perceptions of scientific and arts-focused people. Science, in some circles, has been seen as a positive evil rather than a liberator from illness and toil that characterized most of humanity’s history. Of course Snow notes this tendency even then:

Did anyone think that, in the primal terms in which I have just been discussing the poor countries of the present world, our ancestors’ condition was so very different? Or that the industrial revolution had not brought us in three or four generations to a state thoroughly new in the harsh, unrecorded continuity of poor men’s lives? I couldn’t believe it. I knew, of course, the force of nostalgia, myth, and plain snobbery…

Now we know something of the elemental facts of the lives and deaths of peasants and agricultural laborers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France. They are not comfortable facts. J. H. Plumb, in one of his attacks on the teaching of a pretty-pretty past, has written: ‘No one in his senses would choose to have been born in a previous age unless he could be certain that he would have been born into a prosperous family, that he would have enjoyed extremely good healthy, and that he could have accepted stoically the death of the majority of his children.’…

The average length of life was perhaps a third of ours, and appreciably less, because of the deaths in childbirth, for women than for men (it is only quite recently, and in lucky countries, that women, on the average, have had a chance of living as long as men).

This longing for an innocent time is not so new, but it continues, especially in the light of the global warming movement, which seeks to dismantle our technological society (or tax it to death, which amounts to the same thing) because of the “evil” we are perpetrating on the environment. The real problem, of course, is that widespread technical and scientific ignorance is becoming rampant, leaving average citizens unable to logically or empirically judge the claims of a vocal group claiming to speak in the name of science. The people who win the global warming debate will most likely be those with the loudest voices and most political clout, not necessarily those with the best science.

As Snow notes, sometime during his lifetime, “intellectual” came to mean only the influential people in the arts community, not the sciences. Indeed, those who attained the title of intellectual have taken pride in the fact that they aren’t conversant in the methods and practices that make our technological civilization possible. This does our society no good if we intend to raise children who can continue build the widgets, gadgets, and doohickeys (note the technical jargon there—the sign of a true “intellectual”) that make life bearable, if complicated.

Here’s my take on the divide, having worked and socialized with both communities. The artsy among us are dealing with the universal emotions and experiences that every person can relate to. They speak or write in the common tongue, more or less, or portray their ideas in gripping visual and moving images. Their outcomes are stories or messages that tell other people what events mean in human terms. In these ways, they have an advantage. The technically inclined among us are able to analyze, visualize, and quantify how the universe changes around us. They, too, use English, but it is often of a specific, deliberately non-emotional sort to others of their kind because to do otherwise would be to interfere with their ability to learn what they set out to learn. The techies among us can use symbols and logic and numbers in a way that is as natural to them as describing two people falling in love might be for artsy folk. They have the ability to see, understand, and mold the basic forces that inhabit our universe, and our world would be much poorer without them.

It is my pleasure and privilege to translate the activities of NASA’s engineers into words that non-techies can understand. If Mr. Snow gets his way, more people will be educated to the point where the “non-techie” difference is negligible. Consider the characters of Star Trek as exemplars of Snow’s vision: they are all supra-competent techies, but they have the ability to remember, appreciate, and apply lessons from the artistic culture. Our future should be so lucky. Looks like I’ll have to do some more reading on education to try and find ways to implement Snow’s vision. It’s not like I’ve got any power, but I can at least offer some informed opinions.

Book Review: A History of Knowledge

Since I was in high school, I've been interested in the history of scientific thought, perhaps because of my science fiction reading, which began in junior high. Eventually, this led to other interests, like general ("universal") history and philosophy. It has been my experience that a book will cover one of these topics, but ignore the others. For example, texts discussing the history of philosophy will ignore concurrent developments in science; while histories of scientific knowledge will give short shrift to religious truths, except to show where religious authorities punished or withheld the progress of science. Imagine my unexpected delight, then, to find A History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren, which manages to cover most of the territory that intrigues me, and manages to give religion, philosophy, and science a fair hearing.

This History is an important book, akin to Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present. Why? Because Van Doren provides sweeping, clear descriptions of humanity's various religions and philosophies as well as insights into the implications of those knowledge systems on human behavior (i.e. Galileo believed X because of his insights into Y; meanwhile, Cardinal Bellarmine saw A because he held to belief B). This is an incredibly useful and compassionate history of thought, and is made all the more necessary given the stridency of today's scientific/religious debates on subjects born out of the Scientific Revolution, including evolution, psychology, and the Big Bang.

Doren's book probably won't lead to any compromises (despite his level-headed descriptions of religious thought, he leaves little doubt which side he's one), but his History does at least provide a means of understanding and civilized language for debate and understanding. He manages to provide a "meeting of the minds" in book form, if folks from either side of the debate are willing to sit down and read it.

Written in 1991, the History has already been overcome by events to some extent. For instance, he portrayed the 1990s as a potentially dangerous decade, yet it turned out--aside from terrorist attacks--to be almost a "vacation from history" compared to the Cold War '80s had proceeded it. He also missed the impact of the Internet completely.

His final chapter on "The Next Hundred Years" follows more or less logically from the rest of the book. He delves into the moral implications of intelligent machines and the implications of controlled eugenics in a democratic society. Oddly, this is the one of the few places in the book where he does not discuss religion and its potential impact upon or interaction with scientific truth.

One thing Van Doren makes clear is that the last 400 years of Western Civilization has been dominated by the scientific viewpoint, which is more focused upon understanding the physical world. He believes that this has led to incredible progress in our daily lives, and greatly prefers this sort of progress, but acknowledges that the moral questions of philosophy that so consumed most of human history have been neglected. Our belief in uninterrupted progress was lost in World War I, but the scientific project continues unabated. He makes few suggestions about how moral questions might be addressed in the future, save for some nods to the moralism of environmentalism (believers in the "Gaia" hypothesis) or a super-competent World State. He seems to believe, disappointingly, that humanity will either just get its act together out of pragmatism or under the threat of force. I don't believe humanity is necessarily that pragmatic or that the utility of force will cause human beings to behave better. Yet if we're left without religion or morals-based philosophies, what other restraints are left to us?

A History of Knowledge deserves to be read, and is not particularly complicated, given its lofty subject. Its examinations of religion, philosophy, and science are necessary, especially if we are to consider what sort of society we are to create out in space. Much as the scientific community would like us to take only our logical minds out into the cosmos, if we send more than machines, we are bound to need philosophy and religion as well. It would be good to know where we've been so we know where we might go in the future.

The 2008 Reading List

I went over my Amazon wish list to "get serious" about my reading plan for 2008. My goal is to focus on some of those books that have stayed on that list for awhile. Consider this a premiere of coming attractions, though other reviews might pop up as my "book habit" strikes me.

Fiction
To the Stars Robert A. Heinlein
The Historian Elizabeth Kostova
Mother of Storms John Barnes
The Shield of Time Poul Anderson
The Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio
Faust Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Inferno Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Fleet of Worlds Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner
The Crook Factory Dan Simmons
Maus: A Survivor's Tale Art Spiegelman

History
The Guns of August Barbara Tuchman
The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny Victor Davis Hanson
The Heritage of World Civilizations Albert M. Craig
Reflections on a Ravaged Century Robert Conquest
100 Decisive Battles: From Ancient Times to the Present Paul K. Davis
The Crusades: Iron Men and Saints Harold Lamb
The Great Frontier Walter Prescott Webb
American Diplomacy: A History Robert H. Ferrell
The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy Russell F. Weigley
The Influence of Sea Power on World History Alfred Thayer Mahan

Science, Technology, & Space
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming Bjorn Lomborg
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle John D. Barrow
The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy Peter W. Huber
Arcology: The City in the Image of Man Paolo Soleri
Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship George Dyson
The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System Bradley C. Edwards
Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon Mike Gray
Toward Distant Suns T. A. Heppenheimer
Colonies in Space T. A. Heppenheimer
Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments Martyn J. Fogg

Philosophy & Politics
The Two Cultures C. P. Snow
The Conscience of a Conservative Barry Goldwater
Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method Kenneth Burke
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Martin Fridson
Space and the American Imagination Howard McCurdy
Trans-Mambo Chicken and the Trans-Human Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge Ed Regis
The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism & Other Essays Roger Sandall
Ideas Have Consequences Richard M. Weaver
The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment Jacques Barzun
A Republic, Not an Empire Patrick Buchanan

Business
Strategic Planning for Public Relations Ronald D. Smith
Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness Robert K. Greenleaf
Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in Your Workplace Ron Zemke
Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It James Q. Wilson
Economic Principles Applied to Space Industry Decisions Paul Zarchan
The Handbook of Strategic Public Relations and Integrated Communications Clarke L. Caywood
Market Education: The Unknown History Andrew Coulson
Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands: How to Do Business in Sixty Countries Terri Morrison
Creating Public Value Mark Harrison Moore

Biography
Isambard Kingdom Brunel L.T.C. Rolt
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War Robert Coram
My Grandfather's Son Clarence Thomas
Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon James Harford
Tramp Royale Robert A. Heinlein
Grumbles from the Grave Robert A. Heinlein

The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man, Part II

Having digested that gobbledyguck, I will now attempt to respond to the late Ms. Arendt's rather lengthy comments. The original question was, more or less, "What has the conquering of space done to the stature of man?"

I think it is unquestionable that the exploration of space (conquering is a bit presumptuous at this stage) has improved humanity's stature as a whole. In addition to developing technologies that have taken our machines and ourselves to an entirely new and hostile environment, we have broadened the scope of human activity as well as our understanding of the universe. Furthermore, the machines, materials, organizational techniques, and knowledge gained from space exploration have been used to improve life here on Earth. All of those are positive goods.

However, the legacy of our exploration has been mixed, as it is with nearly any human activity. The glorious image of our home planet seen above the moon from Apollo 8 was both an inspiring image of beauty as well as an inspiration to the environmental movement, which has had many positive impacts upon the way we interact with our world.

However, extremists in this movement have stopped new technologies that might have led to additional advances or even activities that might have improved the environment further. Many people are convinced that we have only "one world" with limited resources, which is true, to a point. But this ignores the resources of the solar system we have only too briefly explored. We need both energy and materials to maintain our economic and cultural way of life; those resources are abundant in space, and yet space has been short-sightedly ignored and neglected since 1972. Some have said that we need to stop exploring space until we make life perfect here on Earth, an unlikely event in any number of human lifetimes. Indeed, the retreat from space has diminished humanity's stature, from a philosophical point of view.

Another viewpoint--not related to space, but affecting its future--states that "We shouldn't explore or settle other planets because we have already fouled up this one, and we shouldn't spread our nastiness throughout the solar system." This could be based in environmentalism ("We've polluted the Earth!") or traditional religion ("We're fallen creatures and cannot be trusted to make good just because we change locations"). It might also be true, as suggested by historian Jacques Barzun that Western Civilization truly lost its confidence and soul in the First World War. Whatever the origins of this line of thinking, the end results are a lack of belief in either man or his works. This, too, represents a philosophical retreat from human betterment, which certainly cannot be good for us as a people.

So the question becomes, 40 years after Arendt's essay, not what is the impact of space, but what human beings have done with themselves since they started exploring space? It's one thing to go boldly where no one has gone before and then live up to it. It's another to go boldly, take a few rocks and pictures, and then go back home. Arendt wondered what humanity would do with its new powers in space; I doubt she gave serious thought to the idea that we would go into space and stop. She might have responded with dismay: "How shameful, how cowardly."

Exploring space was a true leap into newness. As a government activity, the race to the Moon was truly a liberal adventure. Eisenhower and his presumed disciple Nixon were content to develop aerospace planes on a slow, steady track. Ballistic missile-powered spacecraft were distractions, government action was unnecessary. The NACA model of space development (government does the R&D, the private sector develops it) was just fine, thank you. So if the progressive, future-embracing liberal Democratic party turned its back on space, what then is the public to expect of the conservatives? Certainly not a gargantuan space program on the NASA model.

I must return once more to the failure of vision when it comes to the reasons people give for no longer exploring space:

1. We must make life perfect here, which has a subset assumption, i.e., the money spent on space could and should be used for more worthy problems here on Earth.
2. We've screwed up life here; we shouldn't pollute the rest of the universe.

Item 1 is a retreat from greatness and achievement. Perhaps the loss of faith in government (thanks to Vietnam and Watergate) caused progressives to give up on the idea that America could do good in the world. Or perhaps they just changed their priorities on what they meant by "doing good." But needless to say, the John F. Kennedy vision of "bearing any burden" in the pursuit of liberty--including the exploration of space--no longer holds sway.

Item 2 is self-indulgent nihilism: humanity is the ultimate evil. We've destroyed the planet; we'll destroy anything else we touch. We're scum. We'd all be better off if we were zapped by an asteroid and replaced with the cockroaches. The only way to expiate our sins of militarism, racism, sexism, capitalism, pollution, etc. is to withdraw from space, apologize to all our victims, and commit cultural suicide. What utter bilge.

The only way for cultural mores to survive is for enough people to believe in them. We've now got a second generation (or so) being raised not to believe in the West's values of personal betterment, capitalism, and scientific progress. A frightening number of young people don't even believe we went to the Moon in the first place (one astronaut's great retort to this: "Then why did we fake it six times?"). We have junk science and conspiracy theories in the place of science and engineering. Were I better educated, I might have had a better shot at understanding Hannah Arendt's essay in the first place. The stature of man has fallen since Apollo 11: philosophically, technically, and morally. Space exploration serves to uplift us and inspire the best in us. Turning our back upon it has only been to our detriment.