A winter storm/extreme cold front has hit this weekend, with overnight temperatures falling into the ‘well-below-freezing’ range; rare indeed for this part of Texas. Our planting zone falls around “9” which generally means that warm-weather plants banana trees, citrus, ferns and the like generally do rather well. The occasional snow that stays for longer than a couple of hours after sunrise is a rare happening. Like about every twenty years or so. But one of those last long-predicted winter blasts hit a little less than two years ago and hit so catastrophically that everyone’s memories are still quite unpleasantly fresh … especially memories of how badly our civic power authorities bungled a long-predicted cold front which left much of suburban San Antonio freezing in the dark, and without tap water.
Nautical Book Review: To the Last Salute, by Georg von Trapp (rerun)
If you’ve seen The Sound of Musicand 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 movieaccording 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.”
The Social and Economic Influence of AI and Robotics
…some historical precedents.
There is currently much discussion of the impending effects of artificial intelligence and robotics on employment, the economy, and our society as a whole. (here, for example) I think it’s useful to look at some historical precedents, always keeping in mind the caution that ‘past results do not guarantee future outcomes.’
Peter Gaskell’s book Artisans and Machinery is about the effects of the industrial revolution, as seen by a contemporary observer. I reviewed and excerpted it here, along with some much later commentary by the British writer and scientist CP Snow.
My post Attack of the Job-Killing Robots (three-part series) is a 30,000-foot view of the history of automation over the centuries and of some resulting automation panics.
Your thoughts?
The Price Paid for DIE
So serial plagiarist and Professional Womyn of Color (Academic Division) Claudine Gay has been turfed from the comfy corner office at Hah-vaard, to the tune of much lamenting from The Usual Suspects. Frankly, I’m long past caring very much about what goes on in the hallowed halls of an increasingly overrated, intellectually debased institute of so-called higher learning. I was never in a position to be an Ivy student/alum, contribute monetarily to an Ivy, or in a position to hire a graduate from one of them, so the matter to me would be moot. Except…
Unfortunately, the ruling class, intellectual elite of this increasingly bedraggled nation have been overimpressed for decades with Hah-vaard and other enormous hedge funds with a finishing school of storied history attached, so willy-nilly, we must pay attention to the place. Apparently, MS Gay achieved her exalted position through the magical combination of possessing a vagina, a melanin-enhanced epidermis, and an expertise at vicious academic infighting, but no great intellectual shakes, literary skills, or any but the most banal insights into the human condition in evidence. Nice work, if you can get it, I suppose. A triumph of the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity industry, or as we like to abbreviate it around here, DIE.
Worthwhile Reading
Cultural Values and Productivity. “When I investigate which country-of-origin characteristics most closely correlate with human capital, cultural values are the only robust predictor. This relationship persists among children of migrants. Consistent with a plausible cultural mechanism, individuals whose origin places a high value on autonomy hold a comparative advantage in positions characterized by a low degree of routinization.” This ties in with Garrett Jones’ book The Culture Transplant, which I mentioned in my 2023 book roundup a few days ago.
Ruxandra argues that elite thought in our society has shifted toward excessive caution (safetyism), skepticism of technology, and zero-sum thinking and goes on to say ‘This shift poses what I believe to be the defining ideological challenge of our time.’ Also a continuation post, including an interesting chart showing the incidence of words related to progress versus those related to caution, in English, French, and German books.
Anna Mitchell suggests that “Westerners aren’t good at love because we’re unsuccessfully trying to reconcile two opposing love traditions. The first is a “passionate love” inherited from the Medieval courtly tradition that gives us a sense of spiritual transcendence that we’re desperately lacking in our secular age. The second is the Christian ideal of committed love in marriage, that makes us feel known as individuals. Retrofitting life-altering passion into the structure of marriage hasn’t worked well – as witnessed in sky-high divorce rates and a flood of negativity about dating”…”However, as social technologies have emerged over the past ~15 years, it also feels like “passionate love” of the 90s romcoms – where you meet someone in real life and get swept away – doesn’t hold the same cultural power. It’s not our only route to transcendence in a secular age. We already HAVE a reality-replacing option on a small screen.”
And from Justin Murphy: “I think dating and marriage are broken because people simply have too many ideas in their heads. Many of them are correct in certain contexts, but none of them is universally true. The calculation overdetermines the encounter and love simply cannot bloom. My evidence is simply that every man and every woman I know who is dating and looking for marriage has so many notions—what they’re looking for, what they’re trying to avoid, what is a deal-breaker, what is essential, but also rigid interpretations of what various behaviors mean, what certain body language means, and so on.” Reminds me of my old post about The Hunt for the Five-Pound Butterfly.
The personality and politics of 263 occupations.
A mental model megathread. Some samples…
Example #13: “Licensing Effect: Believing you’re good can make you behave bad. Those who consider themselves virtuous worry less about their own behavior, making them more susceptible to ethical lapses. A big cause of immorality is self-righteous morality”…and Example #14: “Preference Falsification: If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship is ultimately a request to be deceived.”
Digital Logic, Implemented Mechanically…atomic scale, smaller than the smallest conventional logic gates. Conceptually similar to classical railroad switch and signal interlocking; can apparently operate at speeds up to 500 MHz.
The history of videogame revenue. Shown as $185B in 2023.
From Samizdata: “The shift from “it’s immoral to tell another culture’s story” to “it’s impossible to tell another culture’s story, but in any case, one shouldn’t try for moral reasons” is part of a process Pluckrose and Lindsay describe as “reification”, which emerged after I’d left the ivory tower and commenced moving companies around and drafting commercial leases for a living. Once reified, postmodern abstractions about the world are treated as though they are real things, and accorded the status of empirical truth. Contemporary social justice activism thus sees theory as reality, as though it were gravity or cell division or the atomic structure of uranium.”
Ilya Bratman, a linguist and Hillel leader (originally from the Soviet Union) reports on what he sees among students at NYC public colleges.