David Foster

Worthwhile Reading and Watching

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The Middle Ages may have been more colorful than usually thought, based on an inventory of garments belonging to people in medieval Valencia.

Memnon of Rhodes says “There is a subset of the US precariat class that is quickly becoming the new face of genteel poverty — characterized by a combination of high academic achievement and poor financial prospects (think post docs, academics, journalists, nonprofit staff).”. Noah Smith opines “This is the Bernie base. They are people who *could* get high paying jobs thanks to their general intelligence and education level, but are downwardly mobile due to some combination of emotional problems, chasing “cool” professions, disdain for the business world, and laziness.”

I note that to the extent these people earn over $150K and lives in dense urban areas, they will be categorized as ‘elites’ according to a categorization used in a widely-circulated Rasmussen survey of political attitudes.

(I never heard the term ‘precariat’ before, but it seems useful)

Bad election narratives, by Musa al-Gharbi, summarized and discussed at the Assistant Village Idiot’s blog.

Glenn Reynolds: Is AI Coming for Your Kids?  The example of the kid asking ChatGPT about how cars are made, and then talking with it about counting, is impressive, and there is obviously a lot of value in this kind of thing. But, the possibilities for the ‘nudging’ of political, social, and philosophical attitudes, in the direction desired by the creators of the system, is immense. See my post Stories and Society for some related thoughts.

Canada: the ongoing disaster and the possibilities for change, at Stuart Schneiderman’s blog, along with several other interesting items.

Several discussions going on about the the prospects for manufacturing in America:

Andrew McCalip says “We have an existential manufacturing problem in America.”

Zane Hensperger writes about reindustrialization and especially about machine shops.

Bill Waddell has several essays at LinkedIn, including Manufacturing in the Age of Tariffs, The Ethics of Free Trade, and 12 Million Middle Class Jobs Sacrificed on the Altar of Globalization.

Marc Andreessen says “From near total dominance in manufacturing to near total dominance in technology. What happens if we dominate in both? Let’s find out!” 

For contrast, a WSJ article: Factories Aren’t the Future.  I do wonder whether, when thinking about factories, the economist who wrote the article visualizes processes like this.

And finally, watch this mountain lion experimenting with a swing.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Lighted Airways and the Radio Range (updated)

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When airplanes first started to be used for serious transportation purposes, sometime after World War I, the problems involved with flight at night and in periods of low visibility became critical. Transcontinental airmail, for example, lost much of its theoretical speed advantage if the plane carrying the mail had to stop for the night. Gyroscopic flight instruments addressed the problem of controlling the airplane without outside visual references, but there remained the problem of navigation.

An experiment in 1921 demonstrated that airmail could be successfully flown coast-to-coast, including the overnight interval, with the aid of bonfires located along the route.  The bonfires were soon displaced by a more permanent installation based on rotating beacons. The first lighted airway extended from Chicago to Cheyenne…the idea was that pilots of coast-to-coast flights could depart from either coast in early morning and reach the lighted segment before dusk.  The airway system rapidly expanded to cover much of the country–by 1933, the Federal Airway System extended to 18,000 miles of lighted airways, encompassing 1,550 rotating beacons. The million-candlepower beacons were positioned every ten miles along the airway, and in clear weather were visible for 40 miles. Red or green course lights at each beacon flashed a Morse identifier so that the pilot could definitely identify his linear position on the airway.

Lighted airways solved the navigation problem very well on a clear night, but were of limited value in overcast weather or heavy participation. You might be able to see the beacons through thin cloud or light rain, but a thicker cloud layer, or heavy rain/snow, might leave you without navigational guidance.

The answer was found in radio technology. The four-course radio range transmitted signals at low frequency (below the AM broadcast band) in four quadrants. In two of the quadrants, the Morse letter N (dash dot) was transmitted continuously; in the other two quadrants, there was continuous transmission of  the Morse A (dot dash.) The line where two quadrants met formed a course that a pilot could follow by listening to the signal in his headphones: if he was exactly “on the beam,” the A and the N would interlock to form a continuous tone; if he was to one side or the other, he would begin to hear the A or N code emerging.

The radio range stations were located every 200 miles, and were overlaid on the lighted airways, the visual beacons of which continued to be maintained. The eventual extent of the radio-range airway system is shown in the map below.  All that was required in the airplane was a simple AM radio with the proper frequency coverage.

The system made reliable scheduled flying a reality, but it did have some limitations. Old-time pilot Ernest Gann described one flight:

Beyond the cockpit windows, a few inches beyond your own nose and that of your DC-2’s, lies the night. Range signals are crisp, the air smooth enough to drink the stewardess’s lukewarm coffee without fear of spilling it…Matters are so nicely in hand you might even flip through a magazine while the copilot improves his instrument proficiency…

Suddenly you are aware the copilot is shifting unhappily in his seat. “I’ve lost the range. Nothing.”

You deposit the Saturday Evening Post in the aluminum bin which already holds the metal logbook and skid your headphones back in place…There are no signals of any kind or the rap of distance voices from anywhere in the night below. There is only a gentle hissing in your headphones as if some wag were playing a recording of ocean waves singing on a beach.

You reach for a switch above your head and flip on the landing lights. Suspicion confirmed. Out of the night trillions of white lines are landing toward your eyes. Snow. Apparently the finer the flakes the more effective. It has isolated you and all aboard from the nether world. The total effect suggests you might have become a passenger in Captain Nemo’s fancy submarine.

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What’s Wrong with this Meme?

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The above meme has been widely circulated, to the approval of people who think it’s an unanswerable response to those who question the unthinking acceptance of everything asserted by authorities and ‘experts’.  But I think it both reflects and encourages confused thinking.  Several points:

First, the pilot does not choose your destination.  You do that yourself…if you are an airline passenger, by choosing the airline and the flight, if you’re going by charter or are the airplane owner, by telling the pilot directly where you want to go.  But in neither case will you hear the pilot say, “Hey, you guys are kind of out of shape; forget Florida, we’re going to Minnesota for cross-country skiing and ice fishing.”

Second, there is nothing in politics analogous to the training and the practical and written tests required to be certified as an Airline Transport Pilot.

Third, it was identified many years ago in the aviation world that a significant number of accidents were being caused by excessive deference to (actual or perceived) authority…for example, when a First Officer (copilot) was concerned about something, but was reluctant to bring it to the attention of the Captain. The subject of ‘Crew Resource Management’, intended to address this problem, is now part of the training of people who fly aircraft with multiple crew members.  The message of CRM is the opposite of the uncritical acceptance of authority that the circulators of this meme seem to be advocating.

Fourth, although the pilot in command is responsible for and is the final authority as to the operation of that aircraft, he is also responsible for gathering information from multiple sources relevant to the safe conduct of the flight: weather information, fuel calculations, airspace restrictions, mechanical condition of the aircraft, etc.  He can’t just say well, the plane is in good shape and there’s plenty of fuel to get there, so let’s go.  Compare and contrast with the politician who in making a ‘lockdown’ decision chooses to rely only on the opinions of virologists and epidemiologists, while ignoring any information about the effects on schoolchildren and small businesses.

What else?

Formalism and Credentialism: Reversing the Trend?

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The Trump victory represents in significant part a popular reaction against the excesses of credentialism.  I’m remembering a 2018 post at the Federalist:  Our Culture War Is Between People Who Get Results And Empty Suits With Pristine Credentials….Donald Trump declines the authority of the cultural sectors that most assertively claim it. That’s  the real conflict going on.

The post reminded me of an interchange that took place between Picasso and Matisse as the German Army advanced through France in 1940.  Matisse was shocked to learn that the enemy had already reached Reims.  “But what about our generals?” asked Matisse. “What are they doing?”

Picasso’s response: “Well, there you have it, my friend. It’s the Ecole des Beaux-Arts”…ie, formalists who had learned one set of rules and were not interested in considering deviations from same.

It was an astute remark, and it fits very well with the observations of Andre Beaufre, who before the invasion had been a young captain on the French General Staff. Although he had initially been thrilled to be placed among this elevated circle…

I saw very quickly that our seniors were primarily concerned with forms of drafting. Every memorandum had to be perfect, written in a concise, impersonal style, and conforming to a logical and faultless plan but so abstract that it had to be read several times before one could find out what it was about… “I have the honour to inform you that I have decided…I envisage…I attach some importance to the fact that…” Actually no one decided more than the barest minimum, and what indeed was decided was pretty trivial.

The consequences of that approach became clear in May 1940.

In addition to the formalism that Picasso hypothesized (and Beaufre observed) on the French General Staff, the civilian side of the French government was highly credential-oriented.  From the linked article:

In the first days of July, 1940, the American diplomat Robert Murphy took up his duties as the  charge d’affaires at the new U.S. embassy in Vichy, France. Coming from his recent post in Paris, he was as impressed as he expected to be by the quality of the Vichy mandarinate, a highly credentialed class of sophisticated officials who were “products of the most rigorous education and curricula in any public administration in the world.”

As the historian Robert Paxton would write, French officials were “the elite of the elite, selected through a daunting series of relentless examinations for which one prepared at expensive private schools.” In July 1940, the elite of the elite governed the remains of their broken nation, a few days after Adolf Hitler toured Paris as its conqueror.  Credentials were the key to holding public office, but not the key to success at the country’s business.

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