Tech

Worthwhile Reading and Watching

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Rearming warships at sea. In an intensive conflict, missiles can be expended very quickly. And reloading presently requires a trip back to a base, requiring weeks or months.  Reload-at-sea is challenging but development is being pursued.

It could make a major difference in ship/fleet effectiveness..it’s good that this is now being pursued, but…couldn’t this work have been started 10 years ago and now be operationally deployed or at least ready to go?

The electric air taxi company Joby Aviation has received FAA approval for a flight school to train pilots for its own aircraft and those of other companies.  See also plans for air taxi service in the UAE.

Why the symbolic professions tend to be highly unrepresentative of the societies that they purportedly serve.

David Brooks asserts that Ivy League admissions broke America. Here’s a transcript.  He doesn’t seem to even consider the possibility that elite-schools-as-a-gateway to key positions in a society is a really bad idea, as Peter Drucker argued 50+ years ago.

Alexander Hamilton tried to warn us about people like Obama, out of office and ‘wandering among the people like discontented ghosts.’

Real science:  Hacksawing your hypothesis.

There’s a report that OpenAI’s new model reacted to the threat of being shut down and replaced by a new model by copying itself into the new model.  Reminded me of the story Burning Bright in the collection of SF stories that I reviewed here.

Interesting comments at the X link for the story..not totally clear to what extent the model’s actions are reflective of truly emergent behavior versus ‘nudging’ in that direction.

Nice views of the restored Notre Dame cathedral, featuring the stained glass windows.

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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The Squirrel, the Raccoon, and the Bureaucrats

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The sad story of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon has inspired many people to think about the nature of bureaucracy.  I’m reminded of a few stories:

When the fire alarm went off at Como Park High School in Minnesota in 2013 , a 14-year-old girl was rousted out of the swimming pool–dripping wet and wearing only a swimsuit–and was told to go stand outside where the temperature was sub-zero and the wind chill made it much worse. Then, she was not allowed to take refuge in one of the many cars in the parking lot because of a school policy forbidding students from sitting in a faculty member’s car. As Bookworm noted:

Even the lowest intelligence can figure out that the rule’s purpose is to prevent  teachers  from engaging sexually with children.   The likelihood of a covert sexual contact happening between Kayona and a  teacher under the actual circumstances is ludicrous.   The faculty cars were in full view of the entire school.   There was no chance of illicit sexual congress.

But the whole nature of bureaucratic rules, of course, is to forbid human judgment based on actual context.

Fortunately for Kayona, her fellow students hadn’t had human decency ground out of them by rules: “…fellow students, however, demonstrated a grasp of civilized behavior. Students huddled around her and some frigid classmates [sic], giving her a sweatshirt to put around her feet. A  teacher  coughed up a jacket.”  As the children were keeping Kayona alive, the  teachers  were  working their way through the bureaucracy.   After a freezing ten minutes, an administrator finally gave permission for the soaking wet, freezing Kayla to sit in a car in full view of everybody.

As Bookworm notes, this sort of thing has become increasingly common. In England in 2009, for example, a man with a broken back lay in 6 inches of water, but paramedics refused to rescue him because they weren’t trained for water rescues. Dozens of similar examples could easily be dredged up.

In Sweden, also in 2013, there was rampant rioting that included the torching of many cars.  The government of Sweden didn’t do a very good job of protecting its citizens and their property from this outbreak of barbarism.  Government agents did, however, fulfill their duty of issuing parking tickets…to burned-out cars.  Link with picture. 

The behavior of these bureaucrats is very similar to the behavior of a computer program confronted by a situation for which its designers did not explicitly provide. Sometimes the results will be useless, sometimes they will be humorous, often they will be harmful or outright disastrous.

Here’s an essay written by a Spanish naval official in 1797, on the subject ‘Why do we keep losing to the British and what can we do about it?’  The pathologies that Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana saw in his country’s naval operations are now disturbingly present in many American organizations.

Thoughts from Peter Drucker, the great writer on management and society, on the nature of bureaucracy.

An old SF story, “Dumb Waiter,” by Walter Miller, is very relevant to the subject of mindless and destructive bureaucratic behavior.  (Miller is best known for his philosophical/theological novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.)

In the story, cities have become fully automated—municipal services are provided by robots linked to a central computer system.  But when war erupted–featuring radiological attacks–some of the population was killed, and the others evacuated the cities. In the city that is the focus of the story, there are no people left, but “Central” and its subunits are working fine, doing what they were programmed to do many years earlier.

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Fabs, Funding, Fashion, and the Future

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The new Arizona plant built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is now operational and is making A16 processor chips for Apple.  A lot of problems have been overcome in order to reach this stage, and congratulations are due to the American and Taiwanese workers, engineers, and managers who have driven this accomplishment.

This project has benefited from a $6.6B funding allocation under the CHIPS and Science Act, and I am sure that this plant will serve as a poster child for the kind of targeted industrial policy favored by Biden and Harris.  BUT:

When the opportunity to pioneer in advanced semiconductor manufacturing was emerging–an opportunity that TSMC took brilliant advantage of...would a US ‘targeted industrial policy’ have identified it as an opportunity worthy of focus and funding?  Highly unlikely, I think:  software, services, and marketing were what the Cool Kids talked about, manufacturing was viewed as something suitable for people with dull minds and countries with low-skilled populations.

“Targeted incentives” will go to the companies who are doing something currently fashionable and/or are politically well-connected. It seems likely that Schumer’s support of the NEPA permitting exception for chip manufacturers has something to do with Micron’s plan to build a new fab near Syracuse.

I’m certainly not arguing against the importance of US-based semiconductor manufacturing. But there are also a lot of other important product types and technologies and I’d much rather see a reassessment of NEPA criteria in general–as the above-linked article says, the rest of the economy needs a reprieve, too–rather than various exception bills.

Much of the genius of the US Constitution lies in the fact that it is short–it operates at the level of general principles rather than of endless specifics. We need more of this spirit in the design of legislation today.