movies

Worthwhile Reading

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Academia Versus Civilization, at Quillette

A talk by Jensen Huang, founder & CEO of NVDIA, at Stanford.  Very, very good.  Related post and discussion.

Ruxandra Teslo notes that student protestors in the 1960s wanted less bureaucracy and more freedom…today, most of them seem to want less freedom and more bureaucracy.

It’s not the phones, says Marc Andreessen, referring to the psychological dysfunction that seems to afflict so many of today’s young people.  He’s responding to a post by Jash Dholani, who says “the young aren’t driving, f******, and drinking because high energy activity is fundamentally incompatible with modern ethics. If you’re always told to be harmless (but also guilty!) then your innate will to power withers. You vegetate. Man, the greatest animal, turned to plant.”

Elon Musk says:

Many movies exist about a lone inventor in a garage having a eureka moment, but almost none about manufacturing, so it’s underappreciated by the public. Compared to the insane pain of reaching high-volume, positive-margin production, prototypes are a piece of cake.

(Not many such movies,  but one that comes to mind is Valley of Decision, a 1945 film centered around family-owned steel mill in Pittsburgh.  I reviewed the movie, and the book on which it is based, here.  Also, there’s Executive Suite, a film from 1954 which involves executive succession at a furniture manufacturer…mentioned in a batch of reviews that I posted here)

In a comment at an earlier version of this post at Ricochet, Gary McVey noted that

“the eastern Europeans (in other words, the Communists, if not always the Soviets) were pretty good about trying to publicize the drama of start-up, the challenges of production. When we mock those days for films “about a couple falling in love at the tractor factory”, we are mocking something that, if you actually see the films, is in fact objectively a good thing. Some of them, by the Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs, were good. The best of them had little or nothing to do with Marxist theories, just the everyday achievements of construction, engineering, and metalwork that sated Western audiences found dull as dishwater.

A tractor factory’s a good thing to have, if you care to eat. There was nothing contemptible about making movies about it.”

Ashwin Varma argues that the usual narrative about WWII industrial production is defective, in that it does not give sufficient credit to the role of government.

The Department of Education embarked on a project to modernize and simplify the process for applying for student aid.  It is not going well.

The Biden administration is supporting the reopening of a nuclear plant in Michigan.  As Stephen Green says, it’s the right thing to do, but the Democrats doing it reeks of desperation.

gCaptain is a good source on the Baltimore bridge disaster and on all matters nautical.

In my post Visit to a Noteworthy Robot, I described a trip to a store equipped with Amazon’s no-check-out system.  Now, Amazon has decided to drop this system in most of the stores in which it is being used…problem is that too much human intervention (1000 people in India reviewing images that the AI can’t reliably interpret) to be cost-effective.

Cultural Theory of Mind and the consequences of not having it, especially the foreign-policy consequences.

Interesting chart: the ratio of commodity prices to the S&P 500.

An argument that the theft of national sovereignty at the Euro level was orchestrated entirely by legal elites – not political, much less economic, ones.

What kind of people tend to block (what they think are) sources of misinformation?

GE’s energy business has now been spun off as a separate corporation, GE Vernova.  They seem to be pretty well-positioned in nuclear; it will be interesting to see how much emphasis they put on this sector vis-a-vis their gas and wind businesses.

Speaking of nuclear, here’s a chart on the temperature ranges required for various industrial processes versus the temperature ranges available from various types of reactors.

Movie Review: WarGames

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I want somebody on the phone before I kill 20 million people.

This 1983 movie is about a potential nuclear war instigated by runaway information technology–a military system inadvertently triggered by a teenage hacker.  I thought it might be interesting to re-watch in the light of today’s concerns about artificial intelligence and the revived fears of nuclear war.

The film opens in an underground launch control center, where a new crew is just coming on duty…and as just as they are getting themselves settled, they receive a Launch message.  They quickly open the envelope which contains the authentication code…and the message is verified as a valid launch order, originating from proper authority.

To launch, both officers must turn their keys simultaneously. But one balks: unwilling to commit the ultimate violence based solely on a coded message, he wants to talk to a human being who can tell him what’s going on.  But no one outside the underground capsule can be reached by either landline or radio.

But there is no war: it was a drill–an assessment of personnel reliability. The results indicated that about 20% of the missile crews refused  to launch.  A proposal is made: take the men out of the loop–implement technology to provide direct launch of the missiles from headquarters, put the control at the highest level, where it belongs.  Against the advice of the relevant general, the proposal is taken to the President, and the missile crews are replaced by remote-control technology. There will be no more launches cancelled by the qualms of missile officers.

At this point, we meet the Matthew Broderick character, David Lightman.  He is a highly intelligent but not very responsible high school student, whose his first scene involves smarting off in class and getting in trouble. David is an early hacker, with an Imsai computer: he rescues his grades by logging on to the school’s computer system and changing them.  (He does the same for his not-quite-yet girlfriend, Jennifer, played by Ally Sheedy)

Searching for a pre-release bootleg copy of a computer game he wants to play, David happens on what looks like a game site: it has menu items for checkers, chess, tic-tac-toe, and something called Falken’s Maze.  Also, a game called Global Thermonuclear War.

To play that last game, David needs to know the password, and thinks he may be able to guess it if he can learn some personal data about the game’s creator, a researcher named Steven Falken.  Library research shows Falken as a man who appeals to David very much, not only because of his scholarly attainments but also his obvious deep love of his wife and child–both of whom are reported to have been killed in an auto accident.  Research also shows that Falken himself has also died.

Using a very simple clue (the name of Falken’s son), David is able to gain entry to the system, to select which side he wants to play (the Soviet Union), and to start the game.  He launches what he thinks is a simulated attack on the United States…a very large-scale attack. He has no idea that the events of the simulation are somehow bleeding over into the live warning system, and appear at the NORAD center as an actual Soviet attack.

It gets worse.  Although Falken turns out to be still alive and living under an alias…and he and David are able to convince the NORAD officers that what they are seeing on their screen is not real and to cancel any retaliatory stroke, the control computer at NORAD, a system known as WOPR, continues playing its game…and, with humans at the launch sites taken out of the loop, begins trying to initiate a strike at the Soviet Union with live nuclear missiles.

The above is just a basic summary of the action of the movie.  There’s plenty wrong with it from a timeline and a technology viewpoint…for example, WOPR in the movie can launch missiles by repetitively trying launch codes at high speed until it finds one that works–pretty sure no one would have designed such a cryptographic system in such a simplistic way, even in 1983. But the movie works very well as cinema, the characters are interesting and the acting is good–definitely worth seeing.  But how might this movie relate to the current concerns about artificial intelligence?

In discussing the movie, I mentioned that the NORAD staff originally thought that what they saw on their screen was real, even though it was really just a simulation.  Which reminds me of a real-life event that happened to the cruise ship Royal Majesty back in 1995. The crew was navigating using GPS: the screen showed a very convincing portrayal of the ship’s position with surrounding land, water depth, obstacles, and navigational aids such as buoys and markers. But the portrayal was wrong.  The GPS antenna cable had come loose, and the GPS unit had gone into Dead Reckoning mode, simply calculating the current position based on the last known GPS position carried forward based on course and speed. Which was bound to become increasingly inaccurate over time.

Asaf Degani, in his book Taming Hal, describes the scene:

As the gray sky turned black veil, the phosphorus-lit radar map with its neat lines and digital indication seemed clearer and more inviting than the dark world outside. As part of a sophisticated integrated bridge system, the radar map had everything–from a crisp radar picture, to ship position, buoy renderings, and up to the last bit of data anyone could want–until it seemed that the entire world lived and moved transparently, inside that little green screen. Using this compelling display, the second officer was piloting a phantom ship on an electronic lie, and nobody called the bluff.

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Nautical Book Review: To the Last Salute, by Georg von Trapp (rerun)

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If you’ve seen The Sound of Music–and who hasn’t?–you’ll remember Captain von Trapp.  The real Captain’s real-life children were not thrilled with the way he was portrayed in the movie–according to them, he was by no means that rigid disciplinarian who summoned the children with a bosun’s whistle and required them to line up in military formation.  (The bosun’s whistle was real, but only for communication purposes on the large estate…no lining-up involved.)

The movie was indeed correct that Captain von Trapp was a former naval officer whose services were much desired by the Nazis after their takeover of Germany and, later, Austria…and that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with them. His memoir, To the Last Salute, was originally published in German in 1935 and later translated into French; an English translation is now also available  This post is a rerun of my earlier review, inspired by a WSJ article about the movie and its continuing large fanbase.

Captain von Trapp could not be called a brilliant writer, but he does achieve some nice descriptive and reflective passages. Here, he is returning from a patrol very early in the First World War, when he was commanding a torpedo boat:

We had been out all night searching for enemy ships that had been reported, but once again, had found nothing.  Far out in the Adriatic we had investigated, looked, and looked, and again came back disappointed through the “Incoronate,” the rocky, barren island,s that extend in front of the harbor at Sebenico…These islands look bleak; nevertheless, years ago people found them and still live there…It is a heavenly trip there between the islands with the many large and small inlets swarming with fish. But it is most beautiful in the wind still nights, which are uniquely animated.

From one place or another, red and white lights flash on and off. They are the beacons that flash their warnings to the ships. Out of the many inlets merge innumerable fishermen’s boats. Some are under sail, hauling big nets; others, sculled about almost silently by heavy steering rudders, search the water with strong lanterns…As they put out to sea, the people always sing their ancient folk songs: ballads with countless verses, wild war cries, soft, wistful love songs…

The war broke into this peaceful world. Traveling between the islands changed overnight…The singing has become silent, for fishing is forbidden, and the men are fighting in the war…Mines lie between the islands.  At any moment an enemy periscope, or a plane with bombs, could appear, and the nights have become exceptionally interesting; there are no more beacons. The war has extinguished them.

Soon, Captain von Trapp was reassigned to command of a submarine,the U-5.  This boat was one of a type that was extremely primitive, even by WWI standards. Propulsion for running on the surface was not a diesel but a gasoline engine, and gasoline fumes were a constant headache, often in a very literal sense.

The Captain seems not to have thought a great deal about the rights and wrongs of the war.  As a professional, at this stage he also felt no animus toward the men it was his duty to attack; quite the contrary. Here, after sinking a French cruiser:

I quickly scan the horizon. Is there absolutely no escort ship? Did they let the ship travel all alone? Without a destroyer? WIthout a torpedo boat? No, there is nothing in sight, only five lifeboats adrift in the water.

After discussing the matter with his exec and determining that there was no feasible way to take the survivors on board:

With a heavy heart, I order the engines to be turned on, and I set a course for the Gulf of Cattaro. “They let our men from the Zenta drown, too,” I hear one of the men say.  The man is right, but I cannot bear to hear that yet.  With a sudden movement I turn away. I feel a choking in my throat. I want to be alone.

I feel as if something were strangling me…So that’s what war looks like! There behind me hundreds of seamen have drowned, men who have done me no harm, men who did their duty as I myself have done, against whom I have nothing personally; with whom, on the contrary, I have felt a bond through sharing the same profession. Approximately seven hundred men must have sunk with the ship!

On returning to base, von Trapp found numerous letters of congratulation waiting for him, one from an eighth-grade Viennese schoolgirl.  To thank her for the letter, he arranged to have a Pruegelkrapfen from a noted confectioner to be delivered to her.  “The outcome of all this is unexpected. Suddenly it seems all the Viennese schoolgirls have gotten the writing bug because it rains little letters from schoolgirls who are sooo happy and so on.  But such a Pruegelgrapfen is expensive and, at the moment, I don’t have time to open a bakery myself.”

On one patrol, U-5 met up with an allied German U-boat, and von Trapp had an opportunity to go on board.  He was quite impressed with the diesel engine, compartmentalization of the boat, the electrically-adjustable periscopes, and even creature comforts like tables for dining.  “It’s like being in Wonderland…”  The German commander’s comment, on visiting U-5, was “I would refuse to travel in this crate.”

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Book and Movie Review: The Valley of Decision

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This 1942 book by Marcia Davenport could be subtitled An Industrial Romance, as could the 1945 movie starring Greer Garson and Gregory Peck.

Pittsburgh, 1873. The Scott family owns a steel mill, and sixteen-year-old Mary Rafferty has just started work as maid in their home.  There are 5 Scott children, but 17-year-old Paul is the only one who truly values the mill as anything other than a source of dividends.  William Jr, the eldest, is  engaged to a young Boston socialite and wants to to maximize his take from the mill to support their joint social ambitions.  Elizabeth is “plain and angular and earnest, full of purpose and good works.”  The twins Constance and Edgar, 9-year-olds when Mary first meets them, are always into mischief–“known in the backyards and nurseries of Western Avenue as holy terrors and limbs of the devil”…as they grow older, Constance dreams of marrying an English aristocrats, moving to Europe to get away from what she sees as her boring famile, and meeting “all the wicked people,” while Edgar prefers life as a rather raffish gentleman of leisure than doing any kind of serious work.

Paul, though, shares with his father William a strong personal bond with the mill, the work it does, and the people who work there. Will Jr, who as oldest is the presumptive future chief of the mill,  has no desire whatsoever to be a part of scenes such as a Bessemer Converter blow:

And now excitement, familiar but primevally keen, swept everything else aside. The great bulbous brute towering above him began to rumble and belch. From its mouth high overhead a stream of scarlet flame threw itself at the acid winter sky. The blower gave a sign. The blow was ready, and suddenly the usual concert of barbaric noises in the shed was drowned in one fearful ear-crushing roar as the cold blast was shot into the converter’s belly.  Element grappled with element, oxygen in a death-struggle with carbon, a battle more terrible and wonderful than man had ever made before.  The flame, steady and fearfully red, began to change color, a descending scale of blinding flashes echoing from the death-and-birth agony of the elements. Inside the beast steel was being born, and from the vessel’s roaring mouth the solid fire changed from red to blue, to orange, to yellow…

Paul does see things differently from his father in that believes that a more scientific approach to steelmaking will be necessary if they are to compete successfully with giants like Carnegie Steel. When he returns from college he sets up a metallurgical laboratory at the mill, and an open hearth furnace is installed to help in the switch of focus to specialty steels.

There is an immediate strong attraction between Paul and Mary, but the are obstacles–not only the very different class positions of Paul and Mary, but the fact that Mary’s brother..a key skilled worker at the mill…is also a labor leader, attempting to organize a union among Scott employees. And while William Scott Sr does care about his workers, he will resist any attempts to interfere with what he see as his management prerogatives.

Mary quickly comes to share Paul’s emotional bond with the mill, and she also develops a strong sense of connection to and responsibility for the entire family..indeed, more of a sense of connection and responsibility that than felt by some of the family’s own members.

The book begins with Mary starting work for the Scott family, but the history of the mill goes back further, to its founding by Paul’s immigrant grandfather–and the book extends the story through multiple generations, up through the early years of World War II.  The mill played an important role in arming Union forces in the Civil War, and a similar role in later conflicts.  The importance of this exemplar of heavy industry to the national defense is played up strongly, as one might expect in a book published in 1941.

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Preference Cascade

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(Sorry for the lack of posting – I am trying to finalize A Fifth of Luna City, and Lone Star Glory — the follow-up to Lone Star Sons, and the days are just all too short. Herewith a rant about certain recent developments in pop culture for your weekend edification.)

Just to make it clear, I do not think that the NFL, or the So-Cal based movie-TV-media production industry usually described by the simple designation of ‘Hollywood’ are going to wither up and disappear in a puff of smoke and a puddle of goo like the Wicked Witch when Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her. No, likely the first will be diminished to relative insignificance over the insistence of many players to ‘take a knee’ during the national anthem, after a long train of other actions which increasingly put the well-reimbursed celebrity athletes of the NFL at loggerheads with the audiences in Flyoverlandia who watched games from the stand, or on TV, purchased season tickets, merchandise and premium cable service with the big daddy sports channel, ESPN.

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