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[ 20031031 ]
The Mathematics of Wildfires (II)
Frequent correspondent and contributor Kevin Munden suggested I re-check Joseph Hertzlinger's math. Notwithstanding that Southern California is something of an acquired taste, it hardly seems fair to say that it looks like it's been hit by thousands of small nukes. ;)
But how does the (chemical) energy released by the wildfires compare to other things -- like, for instance, the solar energy falling on the same area over the same time?
Kevin sent a link to this table, which, while not the most intuitive, has lots of useful information; notably, it tells us that ~4.2 kW sec = 1 kCal. Elsewhere, we learn that the solar constant s = 1.37 kW m-2. Actual insolation at Earth's surface and latitude ~33° N, some weeks after the autumnal equinox, will of course be less than this; let's call it an even 1 kilowatt per square meter.
So the 48-megaton (that is, 4.8 × 1013 kCal) estimate works out to 2 × 1014 kW sec (56 billion kilowatt-hours). If the fires have burned 6 × 105 ac = 2.4 × 109 m2, then this works out to 84 kW m-2.
(I note that Joseph's estimate was 20 tons of fuel per acre = 5 kg m-2 and 4 kCal per gram of fuel, implying 20,000 kCal m-2 = 84 kW m-2.)
So, okay, take a cheap magnifying glass about 2½ inches in diameter, with a focal length of about 6 inches, and focus the Sun on a bit of dry wood. The image size will concentrate the sunlight by about the factor we've just derived. Imagine the "hot spot" 35 miles across; that's the Southern California wildfires. Ouch.
Jay Manifold [9:18 PM]
The Four Horsemen of the Arcturcalypse are on display over at Alan Henderson's blog, along with various other luminaries. Something about Sasha Castel's picture seems a little out of proportion, but I'm not sure what it is. ;)
Jay Manifold [9:13 PM]
-- as forwarded by Bill Walker, is here.
I should add that an All Saints Day story -- one we get to write -- is here.
Jay Manifold [8:14 PM]
Judging by this, there will be something very much like 1972's "Democrats for Nixon" forming soon. Meanwhile, the inimitable Ted Rall describes why public revulsion at rampaging anti-Bush rioters outside next year's GOP convention will produce a huge backlash and guarantee W's re-election. Of course, that's not quite how he puts it.
Nonetheless, I can imagine an uphill climb for the present-day equivalent of CReEP. My conservative Republican friends -- and in spite of my obnoxious posts on this blog, I still have a few -- are, as far as I can tell, unanimously disgusted with W's profligacy and weakness. All a Democrat would have to do to win is avoid frightening such people, thereby keeping them away from the polls.
Over on BuzzMachine, Dann (of Dain Bramage) has a comment about Bush's real failings, few of which will get attention next year. A possible list:
- Hundreds of billions in new spending, mostly on Medicare.
- No privatization of Social Security.
- Wish-list "anti-terrorism" legislation.
- Ludicrous stunts like this.
- Imposition of steel tariffs and failure to lower trade barriers.
- Failure to confront Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
- Continued destruction of civil society in South America.
- Indirectly, through continuing interventionist economic policies, failure to improve the labor market.
Jay Manifold [3:32 PM]
Inspired by this earlier post and the example of Alphecca, I've decided to make this a regular weekly feature.
This week's quaggers are (emphases added) ...
- Leading off, the ever-popular Justin Raimondo: "Unlike the Southeast Asian quagmire we managed to drag ourselves into, without much prior public debate, the Iraqi quagmire was jumped into head-first, of our own volition, after a short but intense and very public discussion."
- In the Detroit Free Press, Rochelle Riley quotes Detroit native Lawrence Mencotti "... of Meadville, Pa., [who] said the debate dismayed him because, 'as a lifelong Democrat, this group offered little except foreign policy posturing. Yes, of course, hold President Bush accountable for this preemptive quagmire that Iraq has become," he wrote ...'" Wow! A preemptive quagmire! I guess that's one where you don't wait for the quagmire to suck you in ...
- Over on Al-Jazeera, the Grauniad's Jonathan Freedland frets about "... the twitchy wing of the Republican Party, which has seen the latest polls and dreads the prospect of Bush going into next year’s election as the body-bag candidate, the president who led US troops to their deaths in a Vietnam-style quagmire ..."
- But wait! There's more! Also on Al-Jazeerah, Edith Archer writes -- in a column somewhat tellingly headlined "Who is really running our American Foreign Policy, Ariel Sharon or Dick Cheney?": "In Iraq, the war-turned-guerrilla-quagmire is mired in unabated attacks ..."
- We should all take special note of the creative William Hughes, writing in the Palestine Chronicle, who imagines George Washington writing, among other things, "... the latest polls that reveal growing disenchantment with the Iraq quagmire." Really, you should read that entire piece; it's priceless.
- Over on Capitol Hill Blue, which after all does have an admirable slogan, Ann McFeatters of the Block News Alliance writes: "Bush is optimistic that Iraq will never be the quagmire Vietnam was. But the example of an arrogant, corrupt Roman occupation could be more apt." A Roman Empire analogy and "quagmire" -- two cliches in one!
- Moving further afield, Tim Wheeler, writing in People's Weekly World Newspaper, quotes "[t]he Rev. Graylan Hagler, pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Washington, [who] told the World, 'This war is costing us in lives lost and budgetary expenditures that could be better spent here at home. Iraq has become a quagmire.'"
- Ari Melber reports in Forward: "Democrat Bob Filner recently stood on the House floor and explained: 'We were in a quagmire then. We are in an "Iraqmire" now.'" Watch for that neologism to start popping up on signs at protests like this one.
- Finally, a topical entry: Bharath Parthasarthy of the Emory Wheel Online writes about "Trick — An Iraqi quagmire."
That's all for this week. Be sure to check in every Friday to see who's been quagging!
Jay Manifold [3:02 PM]
Over on Winds of Change, Joseph Hertzlinger left a comment that led me to this post:
If 600,000 acres were scorched and the fuel load is 20 tons ac-1 and the energy release from wood is 4 kCal g-1 (typical of carbohydrates) and the energy in a megaton is 1012 kCal, then the total energy release is 48 megatons so far.
From a purely energetic standpoint, if this was terrorism, it wasn't very efficient. Tens of megatons to destroy a couple of thousand residences? That's well over 10 kT per house. But any such strike would be tremendously nonlinear in its effects -- a handful of people, with almost no preparation, causing billions in damage and drawing down thousands of emergency personnel. Consider also the logistical impact of road closings and the psychological, if not physiological, effects of days of breathing and smelling smoke, all inflicted on millions of people. This is the kind of pinprick, nuisance attack (relatively speaking) that is arguably our greatest post-9/11 risk.
Jay Manifold [11:01 AM]
[ 20031030 ]
New Frontiers in Initiatives & Referenda
-- are being explored in Bolinas, California (hat tip: Beth Elliott):
... the advisory measure in Bolinas ... has everybody's attention. It asks whether the Bolinas Community Public Utility District should adopt the following statement as its policy:
"Vote for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful."
Jay Manifold [5:37 PM]
Well, not really. I dumped four weeks' worth of blog entries in; results:
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)
Female Score: 8020
Male Score: 21236
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
Jay Manifold [4:07 PM]
Why The Kyoto Treaty Isn't Worth Fighting Over
-- or even worth discussing, has been diagnosed by Virginia Postrel.
I'm not so sure about that fires vs quakes thing, though. You can see fires coming. (The real answer, of course, would be provided by their respective insurance rates, if purchased separately.)
Jay Manifold [4:06 PM]
[ 20031029 ]
A reminder from Kris Murray:
Every single woman of your acquaintance spends time alert to her physical situation for safety’s sake. Every single woman of your acquaintance has been accosted in some way at least once in her life. Every single woman of your acquaintance has at least one experience of discrimination under her belt.
Rather than dismiss what I am saying and simply disbelieve me, ask the women in your life.
Jay Manifold [8:01 PM]
Heh.
Jay Manifold [6:34 PM]
[ 20031028 ]
Can the Saudis Reform After All?
Unfortunately, registration is required to read this article by Bill Tammeus from Sunday's KCStar:
When I visited Saudi Arabia in June 2002, talk of reforming the brutally run kingdom was muted at best. Now, even amid continuing and embarrassing questions about Saudi Arabia’s widespread and destructive support of terrorism, talk of reform is everywhere there.
Believing as I do that the Saudis are uniquely dangerous and that the risk they pose is not being adequately managed by the Bush Administration, it is incumbent upon me to pass along any good news from that part of the world, however unlikely it seems that the threat can be forestalled by mere diplomatic pressure or internal reform.
Jay Manifold [6:35 PM]
Excellent post over on Belmont Club (which Instapundit linked to about something else) highlighting the tragedy of today's world:
The contrast between the youth at Caltech, striving to touch the face of God and the illiterate Muslim boys in a French suburb striving to touch the underpants of their neighbors is a consequence, not of the difference in their natures, but of the contents of their minds. Nothing in the US Army arsenal has been half so devastating to the Muslim world as the Saudi-funded Wahabi madrassa. For where one can injure the body, the other can destroy the mind. Nor is there help in the land of France for those who have managed to leave Arabia yet are never quite permitted to arrive in Europe. The dole for food and a policeman's truncheon, maybe; but never a candle for the dark; nothing whatever from the condemned store of Western values.
Read, follow the links, and recommit yourself to making your country the best place it can be.
Jay Manifold [5:42 PM]
Andy Cline pipes up with a retrospectively brilliant idea: "What if newspapers left the old headline ethos to TV, stopped competing with electronic media, and provided deep, contextual second-day coverage?"
This suggests that newspapers -- at least the parts of them that perform this function -- and blogs may largely converge, especially once their technologies converge. It seems to me that "deep, contextual second-day coverage" requires either 1) an enormous amount of text or 2) hyperlinks. So do newspapers turn back into the vast expanses of gray newsprint they were when I was little? Not likely; the advertisers, whatever else we may think of them, won't stand for an aesthetic rout like that.
I think it far more likely that display technology and wireless distribution will combine to create something like Clarke's Newspad, but physically flexible -- capable of being folded or rolled up -- perhaps even disposable. Assuming the requisite hardware and software to exist, what would be the economics of a publication offering primarily "deep, contextual second-day coverage" and leaving immediate reportage to television (or its equivalent)?
Assume labor costs on the close order of $100 hr-1, support by subscription only, and a subcriber base and rate similar to that of the Kansas City Star -- that is, 270,000 (380,000 on Sundays) at, well, let's just average it out to 50¢ a copy. Total revenue would then be $52 million yr-1. Divide this by 2,080 working hrs yr-1, then by $100 hr-1, and we obtain 250 full-time-employee equivalents. Interestingly, this is less than 30% lower than the current newsroom staff of 348.
My scenario assumes, however, that upwards of a quarter of a million households in the KCStar's market would subscribe to something that offered, mostly, news analysis (and had no "dead tree edition" whatsoever). If sports reporting, comics, and classified ads could be added with relatively little overhead, this might be do-able. But another giant step toward feasibility would be provided by farming out the analysis to people something like today's bloggers, but responsible <g>. Labor costs could be significantly lower, thereby either driving down subscription charges or freeing up resources for other areas.
I'll have to remember to check this semi-prediction in about another 20 years. ;)
Jay Manifold [3:38 PM]
Tribulation in Alta California Sur
Over at Purple Tricycle, Carrie recounts a very Californian instantiation of Mark 13:24 -- "with all the smoke blocking the sunlight .... [i]t feels like eclipses feel, a strange level and quality of light."
UPDATE: For the view from Mount Wilson Observatory, click here.
Jay Manifold [3:34 PM]
[ 20031026 ]
Well, this ought to rattle some cages: in A Cultural Scorecard Says West Is Ahead (registration required), we find Murray in the role of Hari Seldon, asserting in his latest book that "Europeans and North Americans account for 97 percent of scientific accomplishment" -- which is sufficiently lopsided to place cultural relativists in a difficult position, that is, one where they start denying the value of scientific accomplishment. ;)
But it's Murray's identification of the element that "provided all the incentives people need to achieve: not only a sense of autonomy and purpose but a coherent vision of what he calls 'the transcendental goods' — truth, beauty and the good — as well" which is guaranteed to earn him denunciations from the PC mob.
Four comments from a state of relative ignorance, that is, before I buy and read the book:
- I think the crucial variable is the ability of societies to create functioning, autonomous institutions, of which the Royal Society (see also here) is the canonical example; but disestablishment of the Church in the US may have been nearly as important. Once those institutions are in place, and for as long as they work well, anyone joining the societies which nurture them is a potential contributor to progress, irrespective of ethnicity -- or religion.
- Verges between cultures, and among subcultures, engender progress. See, for example, Vikings vs peasants, 800 AD et seq, drastically (and inadvertently) reconfiguring agricultural plots to make them more suitable for tilling by ox-drawn moldboard plows, thereby multiplying food production.* The modern example that Murray cites is the enormously disproportionate contribution of Jews to Western well-being, occurring within a frequently hostile Christian matrix.
- I wonder how great the disparity between the West, which increasingly means the Anglosphere, and the rest of the world can grow before arousing opposition from the "do-nots." Of course, this may be what's going on right now. But what happens when the median US citizen is, say, 5 times wealthier than the median EU citizen?
- If you haven't already, read Guns, Germs, and Steel.
As for the predictive part of the model: "Equally provocative, he maintains that the rate of Western accomplishment is currently in decline." By which Murray means that Europe is in decline.
* "... heavy moldboard plows could not work effectively in small, squarish fields such as were usual in the older agricultural parts of Europe. Few peasants could put a complete team [of oxen] into the field; and only a pooling of draft animals (together, often, with a reorganization of field shapes and shift of land-management rights) could sustain the improved type of cultivation. It was, therefore, in times when rapine and robbery destroyed established relationships on the land that men became willing to pool their resources and redistribute land rights according to new patterns. In circumstances such as these, the introduction of the more efficient plow and the establishment of co-operative tillage had everything to recommend them. Thus it was precisely in the ninth and tenth centuries, when northwestern Europe was most cruelly harried by Viking and Magyar raids, that the type of agriculture known as 'manorial' achieved the technical basis that soon made it possible for European peasants to produce a considerable grain surplus on lands that had lain waste in earlier ages." -- William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, II.IX.C (p 452 in the Gryphon edition)
Jay Manifold [7:08 AM]
For most of us, it's coming on the night of Tue/Wed 18/19 November; this article has a good overview.
This applet appears to indicate a spike in meteor flux between local midnight and 2 AM on Wednesday the 19th, at least for locations in the central US, which means going out late Tuesday night the 18th. The peak time for KC (user input as 39° N, 94°30' W) is 1:26 AM CST, and the peak rate is 32 meteors per hour (with "Countryside" viewing conditions).
Jay Manifold [7:07 AM]
Lunar Eclipse, Saturday 8 November
For Western Hemisphere observers, this will be a very child-friendly event, occurring in early evening shortly after Moonrise. As always, Fred Espenak has the scoop; for locals, here's the schedule (all times CST):
Event | Time |
Moonrise | 5:06 PM |
Beginning of Umbral Phase | 5:32 PM |
Beginning of Totality | 7:06 PM |
Greatest Eclipse | 7:18 PM |
End of Totality | 7:30 PM |
End of Umbral Phase | 9:04 PM |
End of Penumbral Phase | 10:21 PM |
Locally, ASKC members are being encouraged to bring their telescopes down to Powell Observatory and set them up on the lawn outside the main dome for the public; a Scout troop has the observatory itself reserved for the evening. Not sure whether I'll go down there (it's almost 40 miles from my house) or just set my 'scope up in my driveway for the neighborhood kids.
Jay Manifold [7:06 AM]
[ 20031025 ]
(Ref this earlier post.) Hermes is turning out to be the first near-Earth binary asteroid: "The two objects together would cover an area approximately the size of Disneyland." Uh, how does that compare to Worlds of Fun? Seriously, as for the risk of impact, our sister planet may take this bullet for us:
Hermes travels on an elliptical orbit and reaches deep into the inner solar system, crossing Venus' orbit. The new research has made it possible to extend the time interval over which the trajectory can be computed reliably, said Jon Giorgini, a senior engineer at JPL and member of the team.
"As far as impact risk, there is no cause for worry in our lifetimes," Giorgini said. "Over hundreds of thousands, or millions of years, Hermes could impact the Earth, but only if it doesn't hit Venus first."
This statement includes the radar images themselves, which appear to depict a larger, elongated body perhaps 400 m in greatest dimension, and a shorter, rounder body perhaps 200 m across, separated by about 600 m. I will defer my eyeball estimate, however, to that of IAU Circular #8227, which says: "Preliminary estimates of the diameters, based on visible range extents, are 300-450 m. Upper limits to the spin period of each component are 13-21 hr for the above size range."
Let's check that. Suppose that the two components, which I hereby dub Mysteries and Mayhem, are as follows (setting the bulk density r of both to 103 kg m-3):
- Mysteries is the larger, prolate spheroid, 450 m × 250 m × 250 m; applying V = 4/3 p r1 r22 and multiplying by the supposed density, we find M1 = 1.5 × 1010 kg.
- Mayhem is the smaller, spherical component, 300 m in diameter; applying V = 4/3 p r3 and multiplying by the supposed density, we find M2 = 1.4 × 1010 kg.
Now we need the gravitational parameter m of the overall Hermes (Hermetic?) system. This is simply the gravitational constant G multiplied by the total mass:
(6.7 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 sec-2) × (2.9 × 1010 kg) = 1.9 m3 sec-2
Now we apply P = 2p √(a3 / m), where a = 1000 m, and mass is as above.
Answer: 140,000 sec = 39 hours. So, okay, I'm off by a factor of 2.
Once again, this is where I ask my readers to do the math on their own to get a better answer. Hints: try making both Mysteries and Mayhem spherical, and the maximum diameter as per the IAU Circular; or increasing the density; or both. Send your results here.
The statement linked above also includes the following historical tidbit from Giorgini:
Using radar, the position and velocity of Hermes has been measured to within 300 meters and 50 mm/s; much more accurately than with optical telescopes. Including those measurements in a new orbit solution suddenly allowed us to accurately predict Hermes motion over many centuries, from 1561 to 2103.
During those 542 years, it makes 23 close approaches to the Earth, 29 to Venus, 7 to Mars, and 7 to a large asteroid called Vesta. Hermes' closest approach was in the skies over the Earth in 1942, as World War II was fought underneath, when it passed about 1.8 times further away than the Moon. However, no one noticed it at the time.
Harry Turtledove, call your office.
Additional radar observations are underway at Arecibo today and tomorrow, and more will be conducted from Goldstone over the next couple of weeks.
Jay Manifold [4:33 PM]
[ 20031024 ]
Why Power Lines, High Latitudes, Volcanic Rock, and Solar Storms Don't Mix
Over on ABCNews.com, the generally excellent article Space Weather: How Intense Solar Activity Can Upset Earth-Based Technologies left something partially unexplained:
Researchers believe that portions of the North American power grid that happen to be situated in more northerly latitudes (which is closer to the ring where aurorae are most likely to occur) and atop geological formations that consist largely of igneous rock (which has high electrical resistivity) are especially vulnerable. That would include most of eastern Canada, a good deal of New England, and a big swatch of the Pacific Northwest.
What's electrical resistivity? Why is it higher in igneous rock? Is there a map of the affected areas?
Well, the last question's the easiest: there's a map here; it indicates that a sufficiently severe event could affect not only Montreal but virtually the entire northeastern US megalopolis, and in the west, Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland.
Continuing to work backwards, we find this imperfectly translated article (warning: 214 kB *.pdf), which says:
Electric current primarily flows through the underground water found in the gaps (pore) between the minerals that compose the ground. Igneous rocks, which are hard and fresh with fewer pore, indicate a high resistivity, while, sedimentary rocks that are comparatively young in terms of geological age indicate low resistivity, because of more pores filled with groundwater. Furthermore, the lower the resistivity of the groundwater (pore water) in pores, the lower the resistivity of the rock.
So we see that it is a physical, rather than chemical, property of igneous rock that gives it high resistivity. Indeed, the chemical composition of some igneous rocks tends to lower the resistivity; as Delius, Bartetzko, and Pechnig note (warning: 763 kB *.pdf):
The highest density, velocity and electrical resistivity values are recorded from the massive lava flows and gabbros. [but] In-situ physical properties of oxide gabbros are controlled by the mineralogical composition of the rocks. The high amount of heavy and electrically conductive iron and titanium oxide minerals in the rocks causes the electrical resistivity to decrease and density to increase.
Measuring electrical resistivity in soil and rock turns out to be quite useful. But what is it, exactly?
I found a definition here, one that distinguishes it nicely from "resistance":
Both are measurements of the extent to which the flow of electricity is hindered when passing through a substance. The difference is that resistivity is a property of a kind of material while resistance is measured for a particular object.
More formally, resistivity is defined as the resistance of a 1 meter path through a cubic meter of a substance.
Resistivity is the resistance of a conductive material 1 meter long with a cross-sectional area of 1 m2.
It is measured in ohm-meters (not ohms per meter!) -- well, that's the SI unit; 1 ohm m = 1011 Abohm cm. This source notes that "[t]he reciprocal of the electrical resistivity [of a substance] is [its] electrical conductivity."
In short, power lines strung over especially non-conductive (ie, insulating) rock and near the "auroral zone" 10-20° from the magnetic poles are more prone to buildup of induced currents in the event of big solar storms. Fortunately, on this occasion, the effect seems to have been modest. The geomagnetic storm scale mentioned in the Reuters article is defined here; for a G 3 ("Strong") storm like the one in progress as I write this, the effects are:
Power systems: voltage corrections may be required, false alarms triggered on some protection devices.
Spacecraft operations: surface charging may occur on satellite components, drag may increase on low-Earth-orbit satellites, and corrections may be needed for orientation problems.
Other systems: intermittent satellite navigation and low-frequency radio navigation problems may occur, HF radio may be intermittent, and aurora has been seen as low as Illinois and Oregon (typically 50° geomagnetic lat.).
Finally, just for fun, graze on over here for near-real-time images of the Sun at lots of different wavelengths.
Jay Manifold [8:31 PM]
Inspired by this earlier post and the example of Alphecca, I've decided to make this a regular weekly feature.
This week's quaggers -- fewer but more verbose -- are (emphases added) ...
- James Conachy in Pravda: "... the answer is contained in the final of seven reports on the investigation, published on October 21. It amounts to a blunt warning to the Bush administration that the Army is in a quagmire and measures must be taken to get it out."
- Christian Parenti in The Nation: "Win Without War, a self-described 'mainstream voice for peace,' is a coalition propelled primarily by the online organizing of MoveOn.org. It favors 'an end to the quagmire' or a transformation of the occupation into an internationally controlled affair rather than an immediate withdrawal of US troops. WWW led the charge against Bush's request for $87 billion to fund the disastrous occupation."
- Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect: "... it was not foreign-policy extremists but the best and brightest of the mainstream that led America into a disastrous quagmire. The familiar faith in American technology and contempt for facts on the ground, echoed today in Iraq, produced a calamitous overreach, which was reversed only by a public groundswell."
- Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post: "Establishing the normality of a day in Iraq is critical. It may decide the next presidential election. It could influence American foreign policy for a generation. If normal looks like a quagmire, if the choice for war is ultimately regretted, America will tend away from the president and his politics."
- Last for this week but certainly not least, the inimitable Justin Raimondo over at antiwar.com: "The leak of a memo written by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld confessing that the Iraq war is going to be "a long, hard slog" has dealt a body blow to the War Party – and signals a new level of desperation on the part of the radical clique that lured us into the Iraq quagmire."
That's all for this week. Be sure to check in every Friday to see who's been quagging!
Jay Manifold [8:41 AM]
[ 20031023 ]
Last weekend, I traveled to another nation to witness this event. Impressions:
- It's the only wedding I've been to (out of a medium-two-digit number) where the groom got choked up. But then, it's also the only wedding I've been to that used The Rainbow Connection for the procession of the bride, or used this for the recessional, or had regency dancing at the reception.
- Which is how I wound up dancing with Dave Trowbridge. It's OK -- his wife was right there next to him.
- California is Matthew 13:24-30 on crystal meth. Drop 34 million people into the most variegated topography on the planet. Make half of them xenophobes, and the other half xenophiles. Divide the economy between frenzied entrepreneurs and enervating bureaucracies. Send the cost of living into the stratosphere. See what survives. If you're smart, watch all this from a safe distance (like the Breadbasket or Dixie, ref the map linked above).
- In the interest of equal time, Dave's apologia for California: "As one would expect, the strangeness of California is in large degree an unexamined background to Deborah's and my lives. She has lived here since she was 11, I am second-generation Californian, so we are used to living in the strange pastiche of future imperfect and subjunctive that is the West Coast. For better or for worse, much of what in California is so strange to the rest of the country is merely a foreshadowing of that unknown country towards which we all progress at 60 seconds/minute. Or, to look at it another, more hopeful way, it's a laboratory where we the people can try out what we are becoming, and thus the source of a second chance for all of us. Or a horrible example! <g>"
- Fellow blogger Armed Liberal, whose real (first) name I now know but must not divulge, is lots of fun to hang out with. John and Charlene Weidner are delightful people -- I reminded John that due to a certain interest of his, they should visit KC sometime to see the Liberty Memorial. I hope to get together with all of them again -- preferably not quite so close to a plate boundary.
- It all worked astonishingly well: the tripartite service (Jewish engagement, Christian wedding, Jewish breaking-of-glass and period of seclusion); the reception, which included barbecued marinated sirloin (my reaction: "They are civilized!") among many other delicious goodies; the dancing, which turned out to vaguely resemble square dancing and at which we were all (except Dave and Deborah, who clearly knew what they were about) roughly equally incompetent, thank God; the conversation afterward, which included (for me) finding a small group of people who had all read the Garreau; but mostly the fact that everyone clearly enjoyed it, and one another, immensely -- without getting trashed, I might add.
Besides an unpayable debt to Dave and Deborah, I owe a good deal of hospitality to Beth Elliott for providing crash space (not to mention dinner) and Jon Osborne for taking me on a tour of Stanford and introducing me to his 20-month-old daughter.
Jay Manifold [3:55 PM]
[ 20031022 ]
This (currently tied for #16 on Blogdex) is such incredibly bad news that even though it reinforces my existing prejudices, I'm unwilling to believe it without substantial additional confirmation. But if it holds up, forget all the other "scandals" getting whomped up out of next to nothing by desperate Democrats. The only question that will matter in the 2004 election is: are you safer now than you were four years ago?
It's the civilization, stupid.
UPDATE: We've got a domestic problem, too. See Me and My Muslim Friends Neighbors (hat tip: Glenn) and If You're On The Lookout For Anti-Semitism .... Grim but necessary reading. "It takes but one foe to breed a war, not two ... and those who have not swords may yet die upon them." - JRRT
Jay Manifold [9:55 AM]
[ 20031021 ]
By way of answering several inquries over the past couple of months: the occasional odd redirect you may experience when grazing in here -- well, it's the outfit that provided the snippet of code that makes the "Special welcome to our visitors from [wherever]" message appear over in the left sidebar. They want money from me to make the redirects stop: "Remove the advertisement from your GeoPhrase .... Pricing starts from just $9.95 for 10,000 requests." My initial reaction to this is not favorable. More developments as (or if) they occur ...
Jay Manifold [1:50 PM]
Space Elevators vs Linear Accelerators
In a comment to this post over on Transterrestrial Musings, Alan Henderson continues to demonstrate an ability to ask the right questions:
How does the space elevator concept compare to building a linear accelerator large enough to launch payloads? Is that comparing apples to apples, or would each be useful for different purposes?
Heinlein may have been right about building rail guns on the Moon. No sonic boom problem there, and only one-sixth gee. Sound would travel through the crust - would that present a problem for lunar colonists?
I've heard that a rail gun could be suitable for (survivable) human launch if it were built long enough. Assuming that the launch site is on the equator in the Ecuadoran Andes (and not without seismograph-triggered shutoff switches for that tectonically active location), how far east would the rail gun have to extend?
The hint that space elevators and linear accelerators are economically complementary is correct. Space elevators can lift large, finished assemblies (with people in them if desired) at relatively long intervals (hours to days) and low accelerations; linear accelerators are best for inserting small amounts of raw materials into orbit at short intervals (seconds) and high accelerations.
I would expect a lunar railgun to be entirely inaudible, as the items being launched are themselves in physical contact neither with the ground nor with the railgun's structure while they are being accelerated. There might be some low background noise associated with the power consumption of the overall device. In any case, safety concerns are likely to require that railguns be placed well away from habitation, analogous to (new) airports on Earth. Machinery would have to be pretty loud to be heard through several kilometers of rock.
Alan's final question may be answered by imposing an upper limit on acceleration and doing a bit of math. Historical manned launches have demonstrated a steady decline from Mercury (8 g) to the Shuttle (3 g); this source (warning: 694 kB *.pdf) notes that jet airliners accelerate at 0.2-0.7 g at takeoff. So suppose we work two cases: existing capability, that is, 3 g; and mass-market comfort, that is, 0.5 g.
Not to overlook the obvious, what's a g, anyway? Well, here's what:
g = G M / R2
G = 6.673 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 sec-2
M = 5.976 × 1024 kg
R = 6.378 × 106 m
g = 9.803 m sec-2
Now we need to know the orbital velocity at Earth's surface:
Vorb = √(G M / R)
with values as above
Vorb = 7.907 × 103 m sec-1
This result may slightly overstate the actual requirement, since the payload will be several kilometers above sea level when it is released from the linear accelerator. Other complications I'm ignoring are air resistance, which by introducing drag would effectively increase the velocity needed, and Earth's rotation, which by providing some velocity to start with would reduce the velocity needed (at the equator and high altitude, these come close to canceling each other out).
In any case, with final velocity established, here is how much time it takes at our selected accelerations to reach that velocity:
T = Vorb / A
A1 = 3 g
T1 = 268.9 sec
A2 = 0.5 g
T2 = 1613 sec
The final step is to apply the distance formula:
s = ½ a t2
s1 = 1.063 × 106 m
s2 = 6.376 × 106 m
So the 3 g linear accelerator would have to be over a thousand kilometers long, and the 0.5 g one would span the US. Neither of them are going to fit in Ecuador, I'm afraid. Working the problem backwards -- starting with the length of the accelerator and deriving the necessary g force -- is left as an exercise for the reader.
(Looking at the topography of the area around Cayambe, it seems unlikely that less than 60 g would suffice, and the true figure may be much higher. Feel free to let me know what you come up with.)
Jay Manifold [1:34 PM]
[ 20031017 ]
Thanks to Professor Hall over at Spacecraft for the link, and for helping me fix the high-order character display problems in Dance of the Moons. He sent me a tip in e-mail about how to make the degree symbol show up, and eventually I thought to Google "ampersand character codes." Here are some useful sites for anyone needing to display diacritical marks, mathematical symbols, etc:
- HTML Ampersand Character Codes
- (more) Ampersand Character Codes for HTML Pages
- Latin 1 and Unicode characters in &ersand; entities
- Rtftohtml map for RFC2070/HTML4.0 conversion
Jay Manifold [10:09 AM]
Inspired by this earlier post and the example of Alphecca, I've decided to make this a regular weekly feature.
So let's see who's been quagging, as of late morning Central time today (emphases added) ...
- Pepe Escobar in Asia Times Online: "National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's Iraq Stabilization Group is now officially to blame for anything related to the enduring quagmire."
- Nelson W. Hall, in a letter to the editor in The Salt Lake Tribune: "How can these people who lied to us about the imminent danger from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction be so cruel to the men and women who have been put into the quagmire of Iraq?"
- Jim Lobe, also in Asia Times Online: "While the package is expected to be approved with only minor modifications, it has provoked substantial unhappiness, even from Bush's fellow Republicans, who worry that the occupation could turn into a quagmire."
- Ameen Izzadeen in the Sri Lanka Daily Mirror Online: "Problems such as this coupled with the military quagmire that the US is facing now in Iraq and the resistance groups' resolve to fight the occupation, indicate that a solution to the Iraqi crisis is not near."
- Chip Ramsey in The Tullahoma News: "Charges that the media is being unfair to Bush now that his war has bogged down in a stagnant quagmire are nothing short of ridiculous."
- Rick Yencer in TheStarPress.com: "'I am not worried about a military quagmire, but a financial quagmire in Iraq,' [Congressman Mike] Pence said during a teleconference with reporters."
- Last but certainly not least, someone or something called "The Plaid Adder," on (where else?) Democratic Underground: "Yes, they are both quagmires. Vietnam was a quagmire that we entered into gradually, as each successive administration made a number of decisions that drew us further and further into the swamp. Iraq is a different story. This is a quagmire that Team Bush jumped into all at once, with both feet, gleefully, because - why? Because they thought there was gold at the bottom of it? Because they thought it would be fun? Who knows; but the fact is that if you go back and look at the months leading up to the war, you see a dialogue between a chorus of voices saying, 'Don't go in there, that's a quagmire,' and Bush, Wolfowitz et al. yelling, 'Quagmire, quagmire, I want my quagmire! I'm going into that quagmire right now and you can't stop me!'"
That's all for this week. Be sure to check in every Friday for your quagmire update!
Jay Manifold [10:07 AM]
[ 20031016 ]
The asteroid, that is, which went missing shortly after its initial discovery in 1937, when it flew by Earth at only twice the distance of the Moon; Bill Hanson of the Space Frontier Foundation writes:
The Halloween season has produced other notable asteroid encounters in the past. Perhaps the most dramatic of these took place several decades ago when, on October 28, 1937, Karl Reinmuth at the Konigstuhl Observatory in Heidelberg, Germany, discovered a very fast-moving asteroid on a photograph he had just taken. This object showed up on a handful of photographs taken elsewhere in the world -- the earliest of these being on the 25th -- and it was detected for the last time on the 29th. This handful of observations over a span of only four days could not produce an especially accurate orbital calculation, but these were enough to show that the asteroid had passed just over 450,000 miles from Earth -- slightly less than twice the moon's distance -- on the 30th, and then had moved into the daytime sky. Reinmuth christened the asteroid Hermes, after the fleet-footed messenger of the gods in Greek mythology.
And S & T senior editor Roger Sinnott recalls:
Shortly after the Hermes flyby of October 1937, the American Museum of Natural History created a spine-tingling exhibit for public display. Poised above a model of New York City was Hermes, represented by a ball the size of Central Park. Pictures of the scene appeared in many astronomy books of the day.
NewScientist.com has the scoop; congrats to Brian Skiff (whom I met at the Texas Star Party in the '90s) on the rediscovery.
Jay Manifold [3:27 PM]
Time to return to my roots and do some spaceblogging. Today we're going to visualize the sky from the Uranian moon 1986U10, whose orbit lies between that of two other moons whose orbits are themselves less than 500 kilometers apart!
First of all, an excerpt from the news item that got me started:
The newly discovered moons are temporarily designated as S/2003 U 1 and S/2003 U 2 until the IAU formally approves their discovery. S/2003 U 1 is the larger of the two moons, measuring 10 miles (16 km) across. The Hubble telescope spotted this moon orbiting between the moons Puck, the largest satellite found by Voyager, and Miranda, the innermost of the five largest Uranian satellites. Astronomers previously thought this region was empty space. S/2003 U 1 is 60,600 miles (97,700 km) away from Uranus and whirls around the giant planet in 22 hours and 9 minutes.
The smallest Uranian moon yet found, S/2003 U 2, is 8 miles (12 km) wide. Its orbital path is just 200 to 450 miles (300 to 700 km) from the moon Belinda. S/2003 U 2 is 46,400 miles (74,800 km) away from Uranus and circles the planet in 14 hours and 50 minutes. The tiny moon is part of a densely crowded field of 11 other moons, all discovered from pictures taken by the Voyager spacecraft.
A brief search led me to this table, which I quickly converted to a spreadsheet to which I added the newly-discovered moons. Uranus (which we all learned how to pronounce recently, remember?) has three groups of satellites, the innermost of which contains 13 moons with orbital radii ranging over only 48,000 km. So they routinely approach within 4,000 km of each other (Earth's Moon is nearly 100 times that far away from us).
But some of them are much closer; quoting again from the article:
"The inner swarm of 13 satellites is unlike any other system of planetary moons," says [Jack] Lissauer[, a research scientist at NASA Ames]. "The larger moons must be gravitationally perturbing the smaller moons. The region is so crowded that these moons could be gravitationally unstable. So, we are trying to understand how the moons can coexist with each other."
All the members of the inner swarm are in almost perfectly circular orbits and are quite dark:
Astronomers stretched the limit of Hubble's ACS to find the tiny satellites. "These moons are 40 million times fainter than Uranus," Showalter says. "They are blacker than asphalt, if their composition is like the other small, inner moons."
The members of the inner swarm frequently appear the size of a Full Moon from one another -- though of course far darker; Uranus is over 19 times farther from the Sun and therefore receives only about 1/370 the sunlight Earth gets, and the moons themselves reflect only about half the light that our Moon does. So a typical close approach would have one of the moons shining at about magnitude -5, still brighter than any star in the sky, but much fainter than the moonlight we're used to seeing. Uranus itself, by comparison, could shine as bright as magnitude -17, over 50 times as bright as a Full Moon seen from Earth.
By far, the three moons closest to one another are 2003U2, 1986U10, and Belinda. The interval between the orbital radii of 2003U2 and 1986U10 is only 200 km, and from the orbit of 1986U10 to that of Belinda is only 260 km. Their orbital velocities differ by only about 12 and 15 meters per second, respectively.
So stand at the "north" pole of 1986U10 (the entire Uranian system is tilted 98° to the plane of Uranus' orbit around the Sun), and what do you see?
The "north star" is Sabik (h Ophiuchii), which is one-third fainter than Polaris; but Antares, the 15th-brightest star in the sky, is only about 14° away.
Uranus is on the horizon; you are circling it every 14 hours and 53 minutes -- faster than its own rotation of 17:14, so you would "lap" any point on its (somewhat arbitrarily defined) surface every 5 (Earth) days or so. It is, as noted above, some tens of times brighter than a Full Moon, but it is nearly 40° across, so its surface brightness is over 100 times fainter, and you can look directly at it without discomfort.
If 1986U10's density resembles that of Miranda, the smallest of the five main satellites whose mass was established by the Voyager 2 flyby on 24 Jan 86, then it's about 1,200 kg m-3. Assuming it to be spherical and applying V = 4/3 p r3 and g = G M / R2, we obtain V = 2.7 × 1014 m3, M = 3.2 × 1017 kg, and (with G = 6.673 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 sec-2) g = 13 cm sec-2, which is just about 1/740 of Earth's gravity. You'll only weigh a few ounces. In fact, you'd probably need crampons in order to walk. An object dropped from waist height would take almost 4 seconds to fall to the ground (on Earth, a 4-second fall is over 250 feet!).
Also, the surface temperature is down around 80° Kelvin, colder than liquid oxygen, and perhaps needless to say, there is no atmosphere. So you're wearing a pressure suit with somewhat better thermal control than is necessary on Earth's Moon, where it only gets down to about 120° K at night.
The surface itself, as noted above, is quite dark, but it's just a thin coating of something like soot over ice. Not slushy -- at these temperatures, ice is the consistency of concrete. Since 1986U10, like most other small solar system bodies, is probably a rubble pile, however, you're not walking on a solid slab; more like gravel. The horizon (X = √[h2 + 2 h R]) is less than 400 meters away.
The orbital velocity at the surface of 1986U10 (Vorb = √[G M / R]) works out to all of 23 meters per second, and its escape velocity (Vesc = √2 [Vorb]) is 33 m sec-1. You could probably throw a chunk of ice completely off it into an independent orbit around Uranus. Do it just right, and you might be able to hit one of the nearby moons.
And nearby they are. 2003U2, at closest approach, is only 200 km away and, being 12 km in diameter, subtends nearly 3½° of sky, almost 7 times the size of a Full Moon, but -- for reasons described earlier -- only about 1/15 as bright. With the unaided eye, you could spot details on it only about 40 meters across.
Since its relative velocity is only 12 m sec-1, it would take over a quarter of an hour to move its own length across the sky -- silhouetted against Uranus (which would appear more than 10 times larger) at closest approach. An "inferior conjunction" like this would happen about once every 250 orbits, or 155 Earth days. 2003U2 would take about 4 hours to transit the disk of Uranus as seen from 1986U10.
Belinda is only 260 km farther out, and at 68 km in diameter would subtend just under 15° of sky. Due to its diameter, which is more than one-fourth the minimum separation between it and 1986U10, its peak brightness would be about that of a Full Moon in spite of the dim sunlight falling on the Uranian system.
Belinda is moving only 15 m sec-1 slower than 1986U10. Superior conjunction should occur about every 200 orbits of Belinda, or 125 Earth days. At closest approach, you could see details 55 meters across with the unaided eye, and Belinda would be moving across the sky at 12° per hour.
All the other moons in the inner swarm, plus the five main satellites farther out -- totaling at least 17 -- would at least occasionally be close enough to 1986U10 to appear as disks; even the innermost moon, Cordelia, should subtend 3½ minutes of arc at closest approach, the size of a dime at 57 feet. Besides 2003U2 and Belinda, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, and Puck in the inner swarm, and Miranda (mentioned above) and Ariel among the main satellites, would occasionally appear larger than a Full Moon as seen from Earth.
Ironically, the rings would most likely be invisible, since they are only ~100 meters thick; seen edge-on from nearly 24,000 kilometers away, this thickness translates to less than 1 second of arc.
But from your viewpoint on 1986U10: an enormous gas giant, 8 large moons, and 9 small moons, all in the sky at once!
Jay Manifold [10:22 AM]
[ 20031015 ]
Regular contributor and Friday lunch bunch attendee Leo Johns read this earlier post and promptly got to work:
Interestingly enough, "quagmire" is the rare amplified-by-self-redundancy English word. Roget's says that quag = mire; Thesaurus.com says quag = mire = quagmire.
Slightly ironic, because it's a word usually chosen in a weak attempt to amplify the strength of a sentence - usually a lead or headline.
quag (NOUN) A usually low-lying area of soft waterlogged ground and standing water
mire (NOUN) 2. A usually low-lying area of soft waterlogged ground and standing water
Now, let's Google the synonym ...
Jay Manifold [7:46 PM]
Trains, Planes, and Actual Distances (Reader Reaction - II)
Marc of Lay Lines writes (after pointing out various complications in trying to figure the exact delays associated with train travel; this is a slightly edited excerpt):
One other problem with both flying and trains is that you won't have your car with you at the far end of the trip. When I used to live in Los Angeles, I would visit my brother in the Bay Area. To fly there, I would have to drive 45 minutes (on a good evening with minimal traffic) away from my destination, to waste 1½ hours at the airport (and pay for parking), to fly to Oakland to wait 25 minutes for my bag, and then drive 40 minutes to my brother's house (which is on near the driving route I would take), and then be dependent on my brother and his wife to get around. I only did that once.
UPDATE: It's a first-ever readers' spat on Arcturus! Brett writes:
I've written to you before, so if you don't know who I am, I'm a forgotten reader, not a new one. :)
Regardless, I just thought I'd pass along that, Marc, with all due respect, is on crack. My in-laws live in San Diego (which is about an hour and a half south of LA). I live in the Bay Area. The first year we lived here, my wife and I drove to San Diego for Thanksgiving - about twelve hours. The second year we lived here, I realized that for $95/person (thank you Southwest!) and $200 for car rental, we could cut that to about five hours. If you time everything right, that's an extra day of work. If you make a reasonable wage in the Bay Area, an extra day of work pays for the travel. It's even better if we don't rent a car and spend our spare time sitting by my in-laws' pool, but that's a relatively unique perq.
In Marc's defense, he did say "I only did that once."
Jay Manifold [7:46 PM]
-- the pathbreaking essay by Vannevar Bush, may be found online here; thanks to PunditMania for the tip.
Jay Manifold [6:38 PM]
Really! So fellow Missourians are invited to raise a toast with me to the land of Twain, Truman, and Heinlein ...
Jay Manifold [9:20 AM]
I just thought this up. Help me 1) determine whether or not it's original and 2) in any case, spread it around:
Quagged it -- analogous to "blogged it," which means "placed a news item or personal communication in a weblog entry and posted for public reading." A journalist or commentator who has described an American military operation as a "quagmire" in a news story, column, or weblog entry has quagged it. Also, quagging means the regular practice of inserting "quagmire" in news stories, columns, and weblog entries.
To see who's been quagging recently, click here. Looks like I need to add "Israeli" to "American," above.
Jay Manifold [6:56 AM]
[ 20031014 ]
Trains, Planes, and Actual Distances (Reader Reaction)
Previously unknown reader (the best kind) Charles R Martin wrote in to tweak my coefficients:
My experience -- as someone who used to do 200,000 mile years, and who has lived in both NYC and out here in the middle -- is that the breakeven is around 400 miles.
I think the difference is accounted for largely by underestimating the amount of time spent dealing with airports. For example, when I lived in NYC, Penn Station was less than 15 minutes away, and I could depend on boarding within 15 minutes, so the total time was 30 minutes or so (plus whatever time I left myself for the news stand). On the other hand, LaGuardia was nearly an hour away, plus you needed to allow two hours for ticketing and check in, security, and so on. Time from arrival to destination was rarely less that 2 hours; thus the overhead is closer to 5 hours.
I expect that actual values vary widely. One variable is airport design; this one allows passengers to be dropped off less than 100 feet from the airplane itself, and a large portion of the parking facilities are immediately adjacent to the terminals. Airport accessibility is another issue; Midway and Love Field, for example, are quite handy, thanks to their location near their respective city centers. Denver, D/FW, Dulles, KCI, etc, are out in the sticks. On balance, yes, I underestimated the time penalty incurred by using an airport. Argument from observation beats algebraic estimation!
Meanwhile, equally previously unknown reader Joe Markham suggests a grim equalizer may be in the offing: "... as soon as some nutball blows up a train full of people in some highly public place, you'll have the same 2-hour penalty applied to trains." Virginia Postrel has made the same prediction, for buses as well as trains.
Jay Manifold [7:22 PM]
Proof That Brains Aren't Everything (II) - Free Riders
I got to thinking about this earlier post and realized that, due to the mobility of Americans, many of the states become winners and losers by virtue of the lack of correlation between their efforts at public education and the actual behavior of their economies. Big winners, defined as states in the bottom 10 of "smarts" but the top 10 of "dynamism," are Arizona, California, and Florida; big losers are Montana and Wisconsin. Locally, Missouri (28/14) is something of a winner, and Kansas (15/34) is something of a loser.
This is an argument for Federal imposition of uniformity in public education across all states. It's not a very good argument, unless they also do something to flatten out everyone's economic performance, which would be idiotically destructive (shades of Harrison Bergeron). But the question of "free riders" remains an interesting one, especially in light of voucher proposals. How much money should a state give parents to educate their children if most of them aren't going to stick around?
Jay Manifold [6:01 PM]
The depths to which some people will descend in their frantic attempts to distinguish Rush Limbaugh from the hundreds of thousands of other Americans who run afoul of narcotics Prohibition every year are nicely pointed out by Alan Henderson; some right-winger over on NewsMax extruded this:
In Rush's case the drugs were legal and prescribed for the management of pain. He had no reason to question his doctor about the propriety of their use. There was no need for him to wrestle with any moral question in the beginning. By the time morality became an issue, the drugs had pinned him to the mat.
Apparently junkies and alcoholics aren't experiencing pain, just having fun. Yeah, sure thing. No pain in their lives at all. And that's some fun, pal. Especially when you haven't eaten for a week or bathed for a month.
But Rush, of course, couldn't help himself. Of course.
I knew there was a reason I can't stand NewsMax.
This column, by contrast, is spot on (and has the additional virtue of an extra level of irony, given Clinton's pathetically inadequate impulse control).
I admire Rush's "I am not a role model" statement, which indicates a level of self-awareness we would all do well to emulate. The great question right now is whether an attitude of humility will carry him through being sentenced to 5 years in prison. The closest Rush has ever come to advocating anything other than the harshest Prohibitionist approach is this incoherent rant (thanks to Dave Tepper for the link) in which he appears to be attempting to criticize all the alternatives at once.
Thirty days of rehab will chemically detoxify him, but emotional sobriety takes much longer to achieve. I think the great test of his recovery will be his attitude at the trial. Will he, like Socrates, refuse to plead for clemency?
And will his fans learn the lesson of Prohibition?
Jay Manifold [5:36 PM]
There's an interesting insight over on Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka, and you don't have to care much about the Californian techno-sub-sub-culture in question (I certainly don't) to enjoy it. I think I understand, now, what's behind all the boneheaded "progressive" ideas about making private organizations subject to "public" (government) oversight. "Progressives" literally don't understand what "private" means -- they recognize only "public" and "secret," and, of course, consider all "public" things good and all "secret" things bad.
Jay Manifold [5:35 PM]
Currently tied for #29 on Blogdex, Robert McCrum of the Observer weighs in with The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list, which actually isn't nearly as bad as such things usually are, partly because it's chronological by publication date rather than an attempt at ranking by quality. I'll confine myself to commenting that it has a decent number of SF or fantasy entries (Pilgrim's Progress; Gulliver's Travels; Frankenstein; Alice's Adventures In Wonderland; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Brave New World; Nineteen Eighty-Four; The Lord Of The Rings; Lord of the Flies -- plus several children's books), but none from the past half-century or so.
In answer to the obvious question, I've read 13 of the 100. For my earlier remarks on the subject, and a much shorter list of my own (which if I were to write today, would probably include Niven's PROTECTOR somewhere), see this post. Enjoy!
Jay Manifold [5:37 AM]
[ 20031013 ]
-- a Jay Solo venture, is now in operation. Graze on over to BusinessPundit to catch the inaugural "issue," which just happens to include a certain book review that was itself reviewed elsewhere, earning the accolade: "Differential equations -- the sure route to a bestseller."
OK, I'm keeping the day job for now.
Jay Manifold [5:09 AM]
[ 20031011 ]
Trains, Planes, and Actual Distances
Recalling this post, I got the idea of figuring out the average and median separations of large US cities and comparing air travel with trains. This is by way of developing ammo against arguments for reviving passenger rail as a substitute for jets. Such arguments are surprisingly popular in the northeastern US. Unfortunately for their adherents, they don't work in the real world.
Here's a mileage table for the ten largest US metropolitan areas:
| Philadelphia | NYC | LA | Houston | Detroit | DC | D/FW | Chicago | Boston |
Bay Area | 2900 | 2930 | 390 | 1910 | 2400 | 2840 | 1750 | 2170 | 3130 |
Boston | 320 | 210 | 3020 | 1830 | 800 | 450 | 1750 | 1000 | |
Chicago | 790 | 810 | 2050 | 1090 | 280 | 710 | 920 | ||
D/FW | 1440 | 1560 | 1400 | 250 | 1160 | 1310 | |||
DC | 130 | 240 | 2650 | 1370 | 520 | ||||
Detroit | 610 | 650 | 2290 | 1280 | |||||
Houston | 1510 | 1610 | 1540 | ||||||
LA | 2700 | 2790 | |||||||
NYC | 110 |
The shortest distance is New York City to Philadelphia, 110 miles; the longest is Boston to the San Francisco Bay Area, 3,130 miles. The median is Washington, DC to Houston, 1,370 miles; and the average is just slightly greater than the Dallas/Fort Worth to Los Angeles distance of 1,400 miles.
Assume a 2-hour penalty for using air travel, due to security check-in procedures and baggage retrieval, and that travel times to and from airports and train stations are identical.
Assume that the aircraft averages 360 mph and the train averages 45 mph. I got these values by looking up an LAX-to-LaGuardia flight on Newport Beach Travel and a NYC-to-Chicago train on Amtrak.
Then Tair = 2 hours + (distance/360) hours, and Ttrain = (distance/45) hours. Algebraic manipulation establishes that the breakeven point is only 103 miles! No pairs of large cities in the US are this close together.
What could make it worthwhile? Cheaper rates -- if the traveler's time isn't worth too much. Taking median annual household income and dividing it by the number of working hours in a year yields a figure close to $20 hr-1. Every train trip longer than the breakeven distance would need to charge $20 less than plane fare between the same two points for each extra hour of travel.
So a Boston-to-DC train, at 10 hours, vs a Boston-to-DC shuttle, at 3¼ hours, would need to charge $135 less. That's pretty steep, and outside the Northeast, it quickly becomes impossible; at the median distance of 1,370 miles, the discrepancy is over 24½ hours and the cost of the extra time is around $490. That's close to the round-trip airfare for that distance, let alone one-way. Over typical intercity distances in the US, train travel would have to be free of charge to make up for the value of the extra travel time.
Now suppose we expand the Acela Express to connect these cities with 150-mph trains. So Ttrain = (distance/150) hours, and the breakeven point rises to 514 miles.
Better, but still not great: only 9 of the 45 combinations of the 10 largest metro areas in the US are closer together than that. And outside of the various Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-DC pairs, the only possibilities are Chicago-Detroit, D/FW-Houston, and LA-Bay Area. Total track to be laid would be about 1370 miles -- the existing Acela system is 450 miles, but its track is not optimized for high speed and would have to be replaced also. The Federal Rail Administration's cost estimate for such upgrades is $5 million per mile, implying construction costs of $~7 billion.
In the real world, this would barely get the project started. Here's another estimate, this time from Amtrak, of "$7 million to $12 million per mile," which pushes the cost of 1,370 miles into the range of $9.6 billion to $16.4 billion. (And comparisons to highway costs are misleading, since highways are used by orders of magnitude more people; a highway with an average density of only ten persons per mile in each direction will handle [at 60 mph] 28,800 persons every day. Actual densities are much higher; rush-hour traffic with three lanes in each direction and vehicles 2 seconds apart implies 10,800 persons per hour. But the Acela Express ridership is well under 10,000 per day.) The California high-speed rail segment alone, less than one-third of the overall system, could cost $20 billion (admittedly with some frills). Reasonable estimates for the total would start at $50 billion -- for something that would carry only about one-fifth of the passenger traffic between just the ten largest cities.
It all makes about as much sense as going back to these. Hey, they'd work fine for the Midwest ...
Jay Manifold [7:21 PM]
[ 20031010 ]
Astrology, Ronald Reagan, and Arnold Schwarzenegger
Most of my readers probably remember the Reagan astrology flap back in '88. It would be difficult to exaggerate the effect of both Ronald and Nancy's fascination with astrology on his Presidency. Reagan was otherwise, like nearly all other US Presidents, superficially Christian, but this ain't "dabbling":
Most of Quigley's scheduling recommendations were followed smoothly, but there were a few bumpy spots. For instance, Reagan wished in early December 1983 to announce that he would be seeking reelection, but Quigley judged the timing to be terrible. She forced the announcement to wait until January 29, a move that frustrated Reagan. What's more, she had him deliver the speech at 10:55 p.m., a late hour that had political commentators scratching their heads.
Can you imagine the effect if the astrology story had broken then -- just at the beginning of the primary election season?
But I digress. The actual point of this post is to backtrack on something I've brought up in conversation many times to annoy my conservative friends. This page quotes the NYTimes, Wed 4 May 88, p 1:
Early in his political career, Mr. Reagan scheduled his inauguration as Governor of California in January 1967 to take place at an odd time, 12:10 A.M. News reports at the time said the decision was made to take advantage of favorable astrological portents.
Great story. But it's not true -- or, rather, the astrologer's influence on the schedule only pushed it by nine minutes. Bill Whalen of the Hoover Institution explains why new governors of California have an incentive to get sworn in at 12:01 AM:
Arnold also called on Governor Gray Davis to stop signing bills and making appointments before he leaves office at a date yet to be decided--but about this he's wrong. Davis has to act on legislation between now and October 13. It's his responsibility, even if he is a lame duck, because otherwise the bills automatically become law. Besides, Davis' predecessor, Republican Pete Wilson, made appointments late in his administration (this practice is why Ronald Reagan took office after midnight on the day of his inaugural, back in January 1967, to stop Pat Brown from making last-minute appointments).
Reagan was a complex figure. Any criticism of him must therefore be that much more accurate to be useful. I've helped spread a wild rumor, but no more. Whatever else Ronald Reagan did, he didn't get inaugurated as Governor of California in the middle of the night as part of some occult ritual.
Jay Manifold [4:12 PM]
Over on Maximum Verbosity, a commenter notes that "Modafinil" could be taken as an anagram of "I, Manifold." Allow me to take this opportunity to ensure my readers that this is entirely coincidental. I have nothing to do with Cephalon, but if this takes off like I think it will, I'll sure be wishing that I had.
Jay Manifold [3:42 PM]
Proof That Brains Aren't Everything
-- may be found at Massachusetts Named Smartest State, currently tied at #45 on Blogdex. Bump it up against economic dynamism, and here's what you get:
State | Smart Rank | Dynamism Rank |
46 | 27 | |
Alaska | 23 | 39 |
Arizona | 45 | 5 |
Arkansas | 38 | 35 |
California | 44 | 2 |
Colorado | 35 | 4 |
3 | 15 | |
19 | 43 | |
40 | 6 | |
36 | 9 | |
43 | 49 | |
30 | 29 | |
27 | 16 | |
13 | 30 | |
9 | 31 | |
15 | 34 | |
37 | 33 | |
47 | 26 | |
6 | 32 | |
18 | 11 | |
1 | 3 | |
20 | 40 | |
12 | 19 | |
48 | 23 | |
28 | 14 | |
4 | 45 | |
11 | 41 | |
49 | 13 | |
26 | 25 | |
5 | 18 | |
50 | 37 | |
10 | 21 | |
21 | 20 | |
24 | 50 | |
22 | 44 | |
39 | 10 | |
32 | 17 | |
7 | 22 | |
16 | 42 | |
41 | 28 | |
31 | 38 | |
42 | 24 | |
34 | 8 | |
25 | 12 | |
2 | 36 | |
17 | 7 | |
33 | 1 | |
29 | 48 | |
8 | 46 | |
14 | 47 |
The correlation is modest, to say the least (ironically, Massachusetts is the only state with a high ranking in both categories; Hawaii is the only state with a low ranking in both categories). Next time somebody says that the economic future of your state depends on the quality of its public education system, show them this. Unless they're from Massachusetts or Hawaii, I guess. ;)
Jay Manifold [8:25 AM]
[ 20031009 ]
Obligatory Texas Redistricting Follow-Up Post
While I'm on a political kick, let's look at what Texas Democrats tried to stop. Graze over here and click on "PLANC01151" to see the current districts; or hit the "All Other Redistricting Plans" button, scroll all the way to the bottom of the window that pops up, and click on number 01374 for the approved plan for new districts.
Quite a few of them actually aren't too bad on either map, but of the present districts, eight -- one-quarter of the total -- look pretty screwy to me, and here they are, with data (warning: 420 kB *.pdf) from the Texas Secretary of State's office:
District | Incumbent | 2002 Victory Margin |
4th | D - Ralph Hall | 17.45% |
5th | R - Jeb Hensarling | 17.91% |
15th | D - Rubén Hinojosa | 100% |
18th | D - Sheila Jackson Lee | 55.52% |
24th | D - Martin Frost | 30.72% |
25th | D - Chris Bell | 12.8% |
29th | D - Gene Green | 90.26% |
30th | D - Eddie Bernice Johnson | 50.07% |
Indeed, we see that 5 of these districts are producing landslides; one incumbent had no opposition at all (the 16th and 20th Districts also were not contested, but they are reasonably compact). So is this a step in the right direction? Well, the Chronicle notes that "[a]t least five [Democrats] would find their new districts unwinnable. Three other Democratic incumbents also might lose their seats to Republicans." Did straightening out some boundaries produce this result? Unfortunately not.
Under the new plan, half the districts -- 16 out of 32 -- appear blatantly gerrymandered. By my eye, they are the 2nd, 6th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 22nd, 24th, 25th, 26th, 28th, 29th, and 32nd. To get rid of five Democrats, the Republicans screwed up half the Congressional Districts in the second-largest state in the Union.
Jay Manifold [1:52 PM]
-- may be at hand. Modafinil (Provigil) has far fewer side effects than caffeine, let alone amphetamines:
An advisory panel recently voted 6 to 2 in favor of Modafinil being used to treat chronic shift-work sleep disorder. They also voted 8 to 0 in favor of using the drug to treat daytime sleepiness caused by sleep apnea. A final ruling is expected to be made by the end of the month.
Joel Garreau reported on Modafinil last year:
In trials on healthy people like Army helicopter pilots, modafinil has allowed humans to stay up safely for almost two days while remaining practically as focused, alert, and capable of dealing with complex problems as the well-rested. Then, after a good eight hours' sleep, they can get up and do it again -- for another 40 hours, before finally catching up on their sleep.
That's quite a workweek: awaken at, say, 6 AM Monday; go to bed at 10 PM Tuesday; awaken at 6 AM Wednesday; go to bed at 10 PM Thursday. Without Modafinil, you'd have been awake for 64 hours (in four 16-hour increments) and asleep for 24 (in three 8-hour increments). With Modafinil, you're awake for all but 8 hours of the entire 88-hour stretch from Monday morning to Thursday night. And you feel fine.
What's going to happen when this gets loose amongst a population of workaholic Americans, of whom one-seventh are on alternate shifts and 6-7% have sleep apnea anyway? An 80-hour workweek would be easy with Modafinil.
What will happen to workers who don't use Modafinil?
Garreau took one and describes his experience. Needless to say, you should Read The Whole Thing.
Jay Manifold [6:30 AM]
[ 20031008 ]
Obligatory California Recall Follow-Up Post
The map says it all. Especially when you compare it to this map. California is two states, and it's not just an urban/rural split, as was largely the case with the pattern of support for the recall petition drive, or the Missouri Prop B vote.
Looking at the returns, we find that Schwarzenegger's likely final total of just over 3.7 million votes is nearly 7% higher than Davis' official 2002 total of 3,469,025.
But how will he fare? Digging around a bit further at the California Secretary of State website, we find that of 40 State Senate districts, only 3 -- the 5th, 12th, and 29th -- are not safe seats for their incumbents, and only 6 others did not experience landslides (> 20% victory margins) in the most recent election. Five were entirely uncontested.
Similarly, out of 80 State Assembly districts, 5 at most (the 30th, 78th, 80th, and possibly the 1st and 15th) are not incumbent-safe, and only 5 others were not landslides. Four were uncontested in 2002.
In other words, 92.5% of California's State Senators and 94-96% of its Representatives are practically undefeatable at any given election (obviously a result of gerrymandered districts). In game-theoretic terminology, this sets their "discount parameter" to a high value and encourages political logrolling. It does not, to put it mildly, encourage cooperation with a political outsider.
Yes, they have term limits, but with over three-quarters of all legislative districts experiencing landslides, their replacements are overwhelmingly likely to resemble the incumbents. I do not foresee legislative success for Governor Schwarzenegger, or early recovery of political sobriety by California.
Jay Manifold [4:12 PM]
[ 20031007 ]
The Substance of Style (I) - Dynamist Eye for the Midwestern Guy
The Substance of Style needs math, and I need to do something about the hair sprouting in my nose and ears.
But first, a disclaimer and a couple of personal notes.
Disclaimer: This is a review of the new book by Virginia Postrel. I'm new to this, so this review is likely to depart from convention, mainly because I don't know what I'm doing. Judge for yourself whether a charmingly amateurish quality is the result -- in any case, don't rely on what I say here to convey an adequate impression; for that, you'll have to actually, like, y'know, read the book.
Personal Note: In the subculture(s) I hang around in, Virginia is mainly known as the former editor of Reason magazine. I've met her once, at a Reason Foundation event when I lived in Dallas, and we've corresponded by e-mail intermittently for several years. I've been quoted a couple of times on her blog. Right now, I'm helping organize an appearance by Virginia in KC for her book tour, tentative dates Fri-Sun 6-8 Feb. So, yeah, I want you to scrape up $~18 and buy a copy.
Another Personal Note: During the (first) disastrous Harry Browne for President campaign, both Brown and Libertarian Party founder Dave Nolan attacked Reason for predicting (correctly) that things would go badly. Both Nick Gillespie and Virginia received harsh criticism, documented here, which was bizarre at the time and is ludicrous in retrospect. What I'm doing now is about proving that not all libertarians are flakes.
In spite of the above, this will not be a uniformly positive review.
TSOS makes far more than its share of excellent points about the 21st century economy. It deserves to be read, and its concepts internalized, by econometricians and policymakers everywhere (not to mention the hordes of arcadians* who think our standard of living is declining and that agriculture or manufacturing -- or, now, IT -- need to be propped up by State intervention). The effects of such an evangelization would be almost uniformly positive.
But I'm not quite as optimistic about, or bowled over by, the "aesthetic plenitude" (page 11) of present-day American life as Virginia appears to be. An abundance of available alternatives need not, in fact probably will not, result in an abundance of actual choices made, as I hope I'll be able to adequately explain below.
Besides, the book made me realize -- admittedly not for the first time -- that I'm basically a slob, and who wants to be reminded of that?
So why read it? Well, for one thing, it's easy. TSOS is under 240 pages, with less than 400 words per page. Reading slowly, 200 words min-1, it therefore takes under 8 hours to get through. And read slowly I did, because I worked my way through it in half-hour increments at bedtime every night for a couple of weeks. Then I read it again -- partly because reading while falling asleep isn't a great method for full comprehension of the material -- and stuck tape flags on possible quotes for this review. Then I typed all the quotes into a spreadsheet by page number and categorized them. Can you tell I'm a business-process-improvement project manager? ;)
Besides being easy to read, it's cheap, thanks to a clever tradeoff. Others might notice the odd absence of photographs in a book largely concerned with consumer product design and personal appearance. But they'd have had to be color plates to be at all worthwhile, and I can just imagine what that would have done to production costs. The resulting book would have been marginally more enjoyable but much more expensive, and Virginia herself has written about the surprisingly large negative effect on sales of small increases in the price of books (NYTimes, 3 Jan 02):
The question isn't how much the most enthusiastic customer is willing to pay. To that person, the difference between $22 and $23 may not matter at all.
But there are other people who would buy a book at $22 who wouldn't pay $23, or who would pay $19 but not $20. Whatever the price, there will always be incremental customers who would buy at that price but not a penny higher. That's why deciding how much to charge is the same as deciding how many units to sell.
So no pictures, and the book costs $18 instead of, I don't know, $30, and lots more people buy it. Now, that was just to get my readers into a slightly mathematical frame of mind -- though most of the people who graze in here probably already are. TSOS, to my moderately warped mind, needs a lot more math. Perhaps an appendix, in a later edition (hey, this is a blog; my ideas don't have to be realistic).
For an example, those of you who brought your copies may turn with me to page 45:
With its emphasis on shifting relative prices, microeconomics is a clearer guide than Maslow to understanding the increasing value of aesthetics. In a subtle variation on Maslow, the value of the next increment of what we consume changes depending on what we already have. It's the ever-changing mix that matters, not a hierarchical checklist.
(To refresh your memory about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, see this helpful visual; while in this post I refer to a related concept appearing in the book The Experience Economy.)
What I want to see is a method for quantifying this phenomenon. To a mind like mine, the phrase "the value of the next increment of what we consume changes depending on what we already have" fairly shouts differential equation! -- or perhaps partial differential equation; there may be an analogy here to Fick's Laws. But I would set up the problem by referring to a concept in project management, the triple constraint, "a framework for evaluating competing demands. The project triple constraint is often depicted as a triangle where either the sides or corners represent one of the parameters being managed by the project team." (PMBOK, p 29)
The usual three parameters are cost, schedule, and scope. We all have limited resources of money and time, so how best to allocate them among the "projects" comprising the hierarchy of our needs? When does satisfaction of one layer begin to significantly affect the layers above it -- perhaps by a "diffusion" of resources? It seems to me that careful analysis of consumption patterns could begin to place bounds on the numerical factors involved, and begin to identify thresholds of psychological interest.
One complication is that the introduction of mass production -- that is, getting the same scope for far less cost and time -- may initially limit aesthetics. In volume 4 of the Durant, we find (p 853):
Spain produced the greatest single chef-d'oeuvre of thirteenth-century illumination in a book of hymns to the Virgin -- Las cantigas del Rey Sabio (c. 1280) -- "The Canticles of [Alfonso X] the Wise King"; its 1226 miniatures suggest the labor and loyalty that medieval books might receive. Such books, of course, were works of calligraphic as well as pictorial art. Sometimes the same artist copied or composed and wrote the text, and painted the illumination. In several manuscripts one hesitates to decide which seems more beautiful -- the decoration or the text. We paid a price for print.
Another complication is that sometimes any substantial improvement in scope (or quality) requires unsustainable increases in cost or schedule, or both; as Virginia notes (p 46): "To a peasant in a subsistence economy, significantly better housing or faster transportation might require more than a lifetime's income ..." So when the easily attainable scope of one layer of the pyramid reaches a sort of plateau, resources can be diverted elsewhere, resulting in an unimaginably (to us) poor society like that of 13th-century France producing things like Chartres; some future society may marvel that ours sent men to the Moon before developing nanotechnology.
(On the same page, Virginia writes: "The cars they buy, often the third and fourth in the family fleet, have aesthetic personalities that express the driver's identities." What happens if you really get things out of order -- that is, go for expressing your identity first and getting the basic functionality later? Here's what: you end up in your highly expressive VW microbus with a malfunctioning starter, parked in the middle of the Cibola National Forest in New Mexico, 22 miles from the nearest paved road and 33 miles from the nearest town. After surviving this, you begin adjusting certain decision-making processes, leading to a less adventurous but more prosperous middle age. But I digress.)
I cannot leave this subject without quoting Virginia on the effect of cheap computing power on the triple constraint, specifically on the scope and quality attainable per unit time. From page 53: "'If I know I have a month to finish fall,' [fashion designer Jhane] Barnes says, 'even though with the computer I could finish it in a week and take a three-week vacation, I'm having too much fun -- I take the whole month. So the line is better than if I had to do it the long way.'"
Next: Aesthetic choices and actual decisions.
* Opposite of utopian; someone who believes that civilization is declining from an ideal past.
Jay Manifold [2:46 PM]
The Substance of Style (II) -- Aesthetic Profusion
-- or, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
Virginia rightly celebrates (p 108) "... today's aesthetic profusion -- the choice of thirty-five thousand colors of plastic, fifteen hundred drawer pulls, thirty thousand fonts, motifs from every culture that has ever existed ..." -- but does profusion equal utilization? This is, I suspect, the great non sequitur lurking at the heart of TSOS, and the source of my other great longing for mathematical -- or at least statistical -- treatment of its subject matter.
Lacking data, I am free to hypothesize, and I hereby suggest that the actual number of customers choosing a given product from four- and five-digit numbers of alternatives follows a power-law distribution. Take those fifteen hundred drawer pulls. Suppose their popularity follows a simple hyperbolic law, f(x) = cx-1, like the one in my silly little parable (or Zipf's Law). Then half of all sales are of just 29 varieties! Two percent of the available alternatives account for over half the actual choices made.
If my hypothesis is correct, then the effect of multiple-orders-of-magnitude increases in diversity of product designs is maybe a doubling in actual diversity of use. Now, being twice as well off as we were a generation ago is nothing to sneer at. No society on Earth prior to the Industrial Revolution even approached such an achievement. But having thousands of times more potential choices doesn't make us thousands of times richer.
Just as a side note, there is another way in which power laws relate to aesthetics. Turning to pp 107-109 of Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise, we find that Manfred Schroeder, after noting that the spectra of both the frequency intervals and the amplitudes of the music of J.S. Bach follow a f-1 hyperbolic power spectrum, asks:
Why does (at least some) interesting music have hyperbolic spectra for frequency intervals and amplitudes?
A partial answer may come from the "theory of aesthetic value" propounded by the American mathematician George David Birkhoff (1884-1944). Birkhoff's theory, in a nutshell, says that for a work of art to be pleasing and interesting it should neither be too regular and predictable nor pack too many surprises. Translated to mathematical functions, this might be interpreted as meaning that the power spectrum of the function should behave neither like a boring "brown" [that is, Brownian] noise, with a frequency dependence f-2, nor like an unpredictable white noise, with a frequency dependence of f0.
For some "1/f music," graze over here. Be sure to play all three types of "noise."
My other, somewhat tangential, disagreement with TSOS arises from my perception that it flirts with "blank slate" thinking -- that human beings have few or no innate preferences and therefore there are few or no constraints on aesthetic choices. On page 116, for example, we find "... aesthetic authenticity cannot lie in some preexisting definition of truth. It most come instead from the match between form and desire." Page 146 has: "... the impossibility of deducing from aesthetic principles what individuals will, or should, value." More specifically, on page 133, Virginia writes: "If our aesthetic preferences are good for us, we often assume they're good for everyone. Although we live in an age of aesthetic plenitude, we sometimes forget that our tastes may not be universal. The right house or neighborhood layout for me is not necessarily the right house or neighborhood layout for you ..."
I call my disagreement with this "tangential" because 1) I know perfectly well that Virginia does not believe in the "blank slate" in any case; 2) she mentions the role of "fundamental, biologically based human wants" on pp xiv-xv and "the biological origins of aesthetic pleasure" and "[e]volutionary theorists postulate explanations for these patterns, based on survival and sexual selection" on page 32; and 3) I'm not arguing that my tastes (or anyone else's) are "good for everyone" -- but I do argue that certain tastes are characteristic of large pluralities, even majorities, of human populations.
And houses and neighborhood layouts (broadly defined, to be sure) are certainly one of them. The suburban savanna is innately attractive. That's why most of us live there. Turning to this 577-page *.pdf (1999 data, and I've rounded them off to the nearest million) we find that of 115 million housing units in the US, 70 million are detached, single dwellings; of the 7 other possible categories, none has more than 10 million. Meanwhile, 53 million are in suburbs; 34 million are in central cities; and 28 million are outside metropolitan statistical areas (page 1, Table 1A-1. Introductory Characteristics -- All Housing Units). A pie chart (Figure 3 on page xi) shows 47% of occupied units in the suburbs, 30% in central cities, and 23% in small towns and on farms.
I note that a hyperbolic law distribution of three items, that is, 1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3, yields segments of 55%, 27%, and 18%. This appears to describe neighborhood preferences fairly well. Housing-type preferences look more like an f-2 function (1/1 + 1/4 + 1/9, etc), with over 60% of the entire population in the leading category.
In combination with "democratic" political simple-majority decision-making, such distributions all but ensure lopsided outcomes and the trampling of the rights of minorities. Virginia is at her best when making constructive suggestions about how to balance competing interests, beginning with using the right kind of process -- a point to which I will return. From page 153: "As anyone who's lived in a small condo complex knows, even small groups of people disagree. Governance rules simply provide processes for resolving disputes. And they help people know what to expect, avoiding the nasty surprises and bitter conflicts that result when aesthetic rules are imposed after the fact."
Again: "The more difficult it is to enter and exit -- to find design rules to their liking -- the more general the rules need to be." And (page 154) "... urban-design regulations should pay more attention to the urban forms that are hard to change and concentrate less on the stylistic details that are easily altered."
What about the reverse situation, where the public wants to preserve an existing building rather than require the inclusion of certain aesthetic features in new ones? Virginia calls such buildings "icons" and outlines an approach (page 161): "Giving the public a voice, making time for counteroffers (or, in predesignated cases, giving a city or preservation group the right of first refusal), and providing funds to buy or maintain particularly meaningful structures, while leaving the ultimate decision to the building owner, seems to strike the best long-term balance of rights in dealing with icons."
Next: "Look and feel" and a possible dystopia.
Jay Manifold [2:42 PM]
The Substance of Style (III) -- Smart, Pretty, and Miserable?
It's a short step from pointing out that most people fall into one or a few broad categories with regard to the kind of place they like to live in to pointing out that there might not be much variation as regards personal appearance, either -- assuming the technology and wealth become available to make altering one's looks relatively easy. On page 175, Virginia quotes literary critic Elaine Showalter: "... I wish [cosmetics] could be handled more technologically -- there should be pills for it."
Well, someday there will be: "The technology underlying cell repair systems will allow people to change their bodies in ways that range from the trivial to the amazing to the bizarre. Such changes have few obvious limits. Some people may shed human form as a caterpillar transforms itself to take to the air; others may bring plain humanity to a new perfection."
So when Virginia notes (page 188) that: "We don't all dress the same. Why would we all want the same color eyes? The age of look and feel works against a single aesthetic standard ... because the aesthetic imperative itself has emerged from pluralism and the individual pursuit of happiness and meaning." -- My response is, once again, that there is all too likely to be a plurality aesthetic standard, perhaps a majority one, for outward human appearance.
And those of you who hang out over on Gene Expression will recognize it. Imagine you can take a single pill or get a single small injection and alter your appearance over the next few weeks. What you will do might well be trivial, or bizarre. But give the same technology to a million people, and here's what you'll see:
- Both genders will eliminate visual asymmetries, scars or other discolorations of the skin, and excess body fat. They will increase their general intelligence. They might tend to greater height.
- The most popular male phenotype will be middle-aged but fit and trim in appearance; rugged and with some gray hair, but with an athletic build. Dark skin and hair will predominate.
- Most women will look much younger -- think college co-ed or even high school. They will be fair-haired and light-skinned, at least relative to the men. They will be relatively slender, with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7 or lower.
We won't all look the same, but I expect at least half of any large population to follow the above guidelines. And it's important to remember however monoethnic (or, given the likely gender differences, bi-ethnic) a population might appear, that as Virginia points out, there will be, shall we say, strange attractors (page 75): "What if everyone wore drab Mao suits -- but one person dressed with color, tailoring, and flair? People would, of course, be drawn to the aesthetic deviant, even though that nonconformity might well offend the reigning status hierarchy." Fads and fashions in body style will come and go at the margin.
It all sounds a bit utopian, and while I would not deny looking forward to the world of nanomedicine, my optimism is tempered by two things: it's going to be a rough ride getting there, and it may turn out to be a visually attractive place without being very nice to quite a few of its inhabitants.
On page 2, Virginia points out that "... competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many manufacturers can no longer distinguish themselves with price and performance, as traditionally defined. In a crowded marketplace, aesthetics is often the only way to make a product stand out." There's an analogy here to Goleman's work, especially in the workplace. When all employees are technically competent at their jobs, their "emotional intelligence" becomes the deciding factor in relative success. Empathy and social skills are important elements of EI. So who gets ahead in an organization full of technically competent, nice people? If you guessed "the better-looking ones," go to the head of the class.
I made a snippy remark earlier implying that IT workers are starting to whine about their jobs leaving the country. Well, they are starting to whine about it, and those jobs are leaving -- and if Fred Turner is right, they won't be coming back. But I don't mean to express a complete lack of sympathy. Millions of people are going to have to reinvent themselves, developing competencies they've significantly lacked, including "emotional competence" -- and personal aesthetics. This isn't going to be any easier than it was for the farmers who migrated to the cities in the early 20th century or the factory workers who had to find new careers a generation ago.
The ultimate challenge of the 21st-century economy may have been identified by Virginia on page 180: "The difference lay not in 'information processing' but in 'affect,' in how full-color monitors made people feel about their work. By affecting neurochemicals in the brain, affective signals 'change the parameters of thought,' writes [usability guru Donald] Norman ..." What happens in a world where technical expertise, especially of the IT variety, is relatively unimportant, but "affect" -- how you make other people feel -- is much more important?
I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I suggest that today's high-technology workers are going to have a tough time. Physical appearance can already be altered, and such alteration will someday require only trivial expenditures and short amounts of time, however large its scope. But "affect" is another animal altogether. Nanotechnology may cure chemically-based paranoia and depression forever, but it will not confer social graces on the awkward -- or compassion on the intolerant.
I will not end on a somber note. What I suspect to be the most important passage in TSOS is at the very end of the first chapter, "The Aesthetic Imperative" (page 33; emphasis added):
... dynamic, emergent processes that begin in the personal -- in individual action, individual creativity, and individual desire .... in our era ... are accelerating aesthetic discovery.
Infer what you will of my mental state and internal priorities, because that reminded me of this (pp 360-361):
The laws of the Romano-Germanic family are coherent but, one may say, "closed" systems in which any kind of question can, and must at least in theory, be resolved by an "interpretation" of an existing rule of law. On the other hand English law is an "open" system: it has a method that can assure the resolution of any kind of question that may arise, not substantive principles which must, in all circumstances, be applied. The technique of English law is not one of interpreting legal rules; it consists, beginning with those legal rules already enunciated, of discovering the legal rule -- perhaps a new legal rule -- that must be applied in the instant case. This is accomplished by paying very great attention to the facts of each case and by carefully studying the reasons that may exist for distinguishing the factual situation in the case at hand from that in a previous case. To a new fact situation there corresponds -- there must correspond in the English legal mentality -- a new legal rule.
The freedom and openness -- and wealth -- of the Anglosphere may well rest on its ability to develop open processes for creation and discovery, as opposed to closed definitions of a tidier but fundamentally static world. And besides -- to quote an ancient principle of nonintervention -- the Anglosphere has learned not to gather the weeds, lest it uproot the wheat. An explosion of aesthetic alternatives will produce plenty of weeds. So ignore them, and enjoy the good stuff.
Jay Manifold [2:41 PM]
-- you might get it (this is #31 on Blogdex at the moment):
After a court battle over a similar monument in the city of Ogden, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that any city that displays a Ten Commandments monument on public property must also allow monuments espousing the views of other religions or political groups on that same property.
Of course, what Fred Phelps has in mind is a little different:
... the monument would be 5 to 6 feet tall and made of marble or granite. It would bear a bronze plaque bearing the image of Shepard and have an inscription reading "MATTHEW SHEPARD, Entered Hell October 12, 1998, in Defiance of God's Warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22."
For readers who have been living in seclusion for the past couple of decades, the definitive account of Fred Phelps et al is Addicted to Hate.
Jay Manifold [8:33 AM]
[ 20031004 ]
Will Huygens "Landing" Be A Splashdown?
Titan, a fascinating place to begin with, just got that much more interesting:
Lakes of methane could cover three-quarters of Saturn's moon Titan, according to radio echoes from this cloud-shrouded world. If so, ESA's Huygens spaceprobe could well be heading for a splashdown when it parachutes to the moon's surface in January 2005.
Ralph Lorenz, at the University of Arizona, says: "Liquid will collect in low places, and impacts are a good way of making low places." He estimates that Titan might reasonably be expected to possess 80 craters of 150 km in size and thousands of smaller ones.
Mindful of the possibility of a liquid landing, ESA have designed the probe to float and resist capsizing if necessary. It may be, thinks Campbell: "If you take this data at face value, I think that the probability is high that Huygens will splash down."
It also rains methane on Titan -- or drizzles, perhaps, as the gravity is only 14% of Earth's and the atmosphere is 50% denser than Earth's, which would result in a rather low terminal velocity for the raindrops.
For an idea of the distribution of lakes on Titan, compare this set of images -- the dark areas are probably liquid -- with the appearance of Rhea, the next largest moon of Saturn, whose distribution of crater sizes probably resembles that of Titan. Crater size distributions, incidentally, follow a power law.
A possible splashdown is actually good news:
To land on an ocean would probably mean better data from Huygens. Even if the probe lasted only a few minutes before sinking, it would at least stay in an upright position. Being the right way up is essential for sending the data back to the Cassini orbiter and to the scientists on Earth. Moreover, some of Huygens's instruments are better prepared to analyse liquids. If Huygens lands on a solid surface instead, there is a higher risk of falling in the wrong direction and not being able to easily communicate with Cassini.
The Huygens probe masses ~320 kg and appears to be about 3 meters in diameter and 1 meter tall. An oblate spheroid of these dimensions would occupy a volume of 4.7 m3, giving it an overall density of 68 kg m-3. Since liquid methane's density is 422.62 kg m-3, even if my eyeball estimate of the probe's size is wildly off, it should still be able to float with considerably less than half of itself submerged.
Jay Manifold [1:30 PM]
(Ref this earlier post.) Now A.E. Brain has developed comparable figures for Australia, which are somewhat sobering; it looks like the typical Australian's purchasing power is only about half that of a typical American's.
Caveats:
- Australia and the US are both physically very large and therefore provide a great variety of living environments; statistical aggregations tend to be misleading.
- A much better comparison, both within and across countries, would be provided by PPP data for major cities, in the form of comparing median incomes to the price of a market basket of goods -- house payments, utilties, transportation, groceries, clothing, etc.
- Looking at Chart 3 on page 3 of this document (86 kB *.pdf), we find that Australian GDP per capita is ~70% of America's -- closely comparable to most of Western Europe (see "Ranking May Be Misleading," p 4).
- Australian GDP per person employed is closer to 80% of America's (see chart at bottom of page 5).
- To return to point 3, most Americans have no idea how much better off they are than, say, most Canadians or Europeans; and I suspect that few Americans living on or near the Atlantic or Pacific Coasts realize how much less expensive the cost of living is in the middle three-fifths of the country.
While you're over at A.E. Brain's, don't miss the "swift digression" toward the end of this post. Priceless.
Jay Manifold [8:42 AM]
[ 20031002 ]
-- if you missed it -- on mighty Radio Rhetorica, which as a Class D station (KGSP 90.3 FM) transmits at a whopping 100 watts, if that, and is essentially inaudible outside of Parkville; that's what the web is for.
Topics included, but were not limited to:
- The power-law distribution in the value of objects looted from the Iraqi National Museum, and in news stories.
- Game theory and its effect on a certain politician about to (probably) be removed from office.
- Barbara Shelly, the Prop B vote (including a comparison to the California recall petition geography), and a less contentious solution -- namely, devolve CCW referenda to the county level, as was done to allow urban areas in Missouri to revoke the Blue Laws in the 1970s.
- The two cultures, including comments on how badly some engineers communicate; a presentation at a NASA meeting during Columbia's final flight was so poorly designed and written that no one present came away with an accurate notion of how serious the debris strike had been.
- What's killing us, according to a letter writer ("Nation's Priorities," 4th letter down), by lost life expectancy, and around the world.
- Some discussion of birth order and its effect on attitudes toward science.
I had a blast and will probably appear on the show again in a few weeks. Lots of the stuff I brought didn't get touched on, like cascading failures ... anyway, many thanks to co-hosts Andy and Joe. Radio Rhetorica is a great program that deserves a much wider audience.
Jay Manifold [5:24 PM]
[ 20031001 ]
Gun Control Swap (A Continuing Series)
As noted here some time back, there is a significant trend among Democrats to oppose gun control and among Republicans to adopt it. Jeff Soyer of Alphecca has uncovered the latest development in this direction, a pair of editorials in a major newspaper; the "conservative" columnist writes: "... the very knowledge of the dark side of human nature should make us watchful, careful and willing to both enact and enforce reasonable controls on deadly weapons ..."
Reasonable controls. That's how it always starts. And that's why I'm not a conservative.
Jay Manifold [7:42 AM]
