Quotulatiousness

July 4, 2023

It’s not “bullying” for corporations to act in their own (and their shareholders’) best interests

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The weekly round-up from The Line editors wasn’t happy reading for fans of the Canadian mainstream media:

The Canadian government approached this as if it was “Big Tech” who were reaping all the rewards … when in fact it was the Canadian media companies getting most of the benefit from the arrangement. No wonder “Big Tech” chose to take their bat and ball and go home.

There are two major items up for consideration, and we’ll deal with each in turn. The first is a proposed merger between Postmedia and the Torstar/Metroland newspapers. The second, and most significant, news item, is that following on Meta/Facebook’s decision to stop featuring news on its feeds, Google is promising to drop the Google News Showcase feature, and to stop surfacing Canadian news links on its search feeds. All of this is in response to C-18, the Online News Act.

This law is trying to force Facebook and Google to compensate news organizations for the links that appear on their platforms; so the companies reacted in an entirely predictable way after the bill received Royal Assent last week — they announced they are going to absent themselves from the scope of the bill by no longer providing those links.

The government, its supporters, and many in the media itself reacted to this announcement with the same inane bluster that has come to dominate the conversation around this byzantine and poorly conceived bill. The Liberals promised to stand up to “Big Tech”; and the media organizations that pinned their survival on milking this new revenue stream are now accusing Google et al. of “bullying”. We at The Line don’t consider this rhetoric to be rational or in good faith. We are annoyed — we are horrified — by these companies’ decisions, but we understand them.

Both Facebook and Google made it clear that C-18 was untenable from a business point of view; they both warned that they would consider pulling news links in response. From Big Tech’s perspective, the decision-making tree is real simple here: does the revenue generated by news outweigh the potential uncapped financial liability that C-18 would present? Further, would complying with C-18 in Canada present a greater risk to the company globally if the bill were replicated in larger media markets? Or are the companies better off to withdraw from a low-priority market pour encourager les autres. We can scream about the evils of Big Tech all we want, but ultimately, these are just math conversations.

No one ought to be surprised that the math didn’t go our way. But almost everyone was. Because — and there’s no nice way to say this — this country’s media industry is both painfully parochial and embarrassingly self-important. For people whose job it is to understand and explain the world to Canadians, it often astonishes us at how incompetent we are at understanding and explaining that world to ourselves. Canadian journalists have an unshakeable faith in our vocation; we genuinely believe that our work is a vital service to democracy. Therefore the fruits of that labour — the news content — must be valuable to the digital platforms that we now depend upon to distribute it. This is why many in the industry were so unshakeably convinced that Facebook and Google were bluffing during the course of C-18. Incredibly, many seem to remain convinced that Big Tech will capitulate to their demands for capital, even now. To quote this old gem: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.

The flaw in this reasoning ought to be apparent, yet the industry lacks the digital savvy to understand the risk it is courting. “What about Bing, amiright?” Denial and self-importance are now sucking Canadian journalism straight into the maw of an existential crisis. To lose Facebook is a major set back; to lose Google is death.

The thing our colleagues and peers need to come to terms with is that Canadian journalism just isn’t that important in the global scheme of things. Facebook and Google aren’t out to get us — they are indifferent to us. Canadian news comprises a small and un-lucrative segment of even Canadian traffic flows. And Canada is a mid-tier market, at best. Optics aside, global tech oligopolies simply don’t lose very much by cutting us off. Facebook and Google are in the business of advertising, not journalism. They share neither our self regard, nor our democratic mandate; as a result, there is no internally coherent reason for them to take losses in order to save our industry. We just don’t matter to them.

On her Substack, Tasha Kheiriddin doesn’t blame Google for the impending destruction of what’s left of mainstream Canadian media:

The funeral has begun. The pyres are lit; the mourners are weeping. RIP, Canadian media industry, we hardly knew ye. Between mergers, acquisitions, closures, and layoffs, you didn’t stand a chance. And then came Bill C-18.

The legislation, passed last week, compels internet behemoths Meta and Google to compensate Canadian news outlets in exchange for featuring links to their content. Bill C-18 is modeled on an Australian law that saw the two tech giants enter into financial arrangements with media outlets in that country. Here in Canada, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates similar deals could produce annual revenues of $329 million, a juicy sum for the cash-strapped news business.

Instead, Meta and Google announced that they would no longer include Canadian news links. Rather than reap a profit, Canadian media companies now face the prospect of far fewer eyeballs on screens – and the decimation of their ad revenue. Meta also cut its funding to CN2i, the Coopérative nationale de l’information indépendante, which supports six print publications, including La Presse, further damaging media companies’ bottom line.

Cue the sound of “Taps” and political outrage. Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez had this to say:

    Big tech would rather spend money to change their platforms to block Canadians from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations … This shows how deeply irresponsible and out of touch they are, especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users.

No, this shows how deeply out of touch the government is with the business model of these companies – and with internet technology in general.

July 3, 2023

Nuclear power

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk, by Thomas Wellock. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

Let me put Wellock and Rasmussen aside for a moment, and try out a metaphor. The process of Probabilistic Risk Assessment is akin to asking a retailer to answer the question “What would happen if we let a flaming cat loose into your furniture store?”

If the retailer took the notion seriously, she might systematically examine each piece of furniture and engineer placement to minimize possible damage. She might search everyone entering the building for cats, and train the staff in emergency cat herding protocols. Perhaps every once in a while she would hold a drill, where a non-flaming cat was covered with ink and let loose in the store, so the furniture store staff could see what path it took, and how many minutes were required to fish it out from under the beds.

“This seems silly — I mean, what are the odds that someone would ignite a cat?”, you ask. Well, here is the story of the Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Plant fire, in March 1975, which occurred slightly more than a year after the Rasmussen Report was released, as later conveyed by the anti-nuclear group Friends of the Earth.

    Just below the plant’s control room, two electricians were trying to seal air leaks in the cable spreading room, where the electrical cables that control the two reactors are separated and routed through different tunnels to the reactor buildings. They were using strips of spongy foam rubber to seal the leaks. They were also using candles to determine whether or not the leaks had been successfully plugged — by observing how the flame was affected by escaping air.

    The electrical engineer put the candle too close to the foam rubber, and it burst into flame.

The fire, of course, began to spread out of control. Among the problems encountered during the thirty minutes between ignition and plant shutdown:

  1. The engineers spent 15 minutes trying to put the fire out themselves, rather than sound the alarm per protocol;
  2. When the engineers decided to call in the alarm, no one could remember the correct telephone number;
  3. Electricians had covered the CO2 fire suppression triggers with metal plates, blocking access; and
  4. Despite the fact that “control board indicating lights were randomly glowing brightly, dimming, and going out; numerous alarms occurring; and smoke coming from beneath panel 9-3, which is the control panel for the emergency core cooling system (ECCS)”, operators tried the equivalent of unplugging the control panel and rebooting it to see if that fixed things. For ten minutes.

This was exactly the sort of Rube Goldberg cascade predicted by Rasmussen’s team. Applied to nuclear power plants, the mathematics of Probabilistic Risk Assessment ultimately showed that “nuclear events” were much more likely to occur than previously believed. But accidents also started small, and with proper planning there were ample opportunities to interrupt the cascade. The computer model of the MIT engineers seemed, in principle, to be an excellent fit to reality.

As a reminder, there are over 20,000 parts in a utility-scale plant. The path to nuclear safety was, to the early nuclear bureaucracy, quite simple: Analyze, inspect, and model the relationship of every single one of them.

July 2, 2023

If you were trying to destroy trust online, you’d use the playbook currently in use by all the major players

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia calls it the “Information Crap-pocalypse”:

People keep telling me that we’re living on an Information Superhighway. But that’s not true.

The flow of information today is more like a river. A very polluted river.

Folks have been dumping their crap into our information flows for a long, long time. Big corporations and institutions are the worst offenders — they actually get rich by polluting our data streams. But individuals are adding to the raw sewage too.

Some of them do it just for kicks.

It’s gotten worse lately. A whole lot worse. Just look at the polluted streams of information in your own life, and try to find a single safe space where the data stream is fresh and clean.

Some of us have stopped even trying.

This is how the Information Age ends, and it’s happening right now.

In the last 12 months, the garbage infows into our culture have increased exponentially. As a result, nothing is harder to find now than actual information — which I define as “knowledge based on demonstrable or reliable facts”.

The result is a crisis of trust unlike anything seen before in modern history.

We are bypassing the Web 3.0 we were promised — which was supposed to deliver trust-based systems and validation tools. Instead we’ve gone straight to Web 4.0, which is like the worst kind of Wild West Web. Outlaws and desperados contol all the data highways and byways. Trust and reliability are scarcer than gold nuggets.

Do you think I’m exaggerating?

Let me ask you a question. If your job was to destroy access to reliable information in our society, how would you do it?

You would start with the 30 steps outlined below.

July 1, 2023

The Trudeau plan to eliminate Canada from the internet is going great!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Wait, you mean that wasn’t the plan? It must have been, if you judge the plan by the amazing results:

The damage caused by the government’s Bill C-18 continues to grow as Meta has started to cancel its existing agreements with Canadian publishers. The move should not as a surprise since any deals that involve facilitating access to news content would bring the company into the legislative framework and mandate payments for links. Indeed, Meta said earlier this week that its 18 existing deals “did not have much of a future“. When this is coupled with a reported “impasse” between the government and Google over its approach to Bill C-18, the risks to the Canadian media sector look increasingly dire.

This was entirely foreseeable, yet Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez never seemed to take the risks seriously. It raises the question of whether the government developed estimates of the cost of its legislation if Meta and Google chose to comply by stopping news sharing or linking. While there were estimates for the benefits of new deals that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars, did it conduct a risk assessment of the economic costs that would come from Internet companies exiting the news market in Canada?

There are obviously costs that extend far beyond the economics that include reduced access to news, increased prominence of low quality news sources, harm to the Canadian Internet, and the reputational damage to a government that handled this about as incompetently as possible. But from a pure economic perspective, the risks were always understated as they extended beyond just the value of increased traffic to publishers from the links they were themselves posting. Both Google and Meta have deals with Canadian publishers reportedly worth millions of dollars. As Meta’s step to begin cancelling deals suggests, those agreements are unlikely to survive the decision to exit news in Canada.

And of course, Google doesn’t want to set any kind of precedent by accepting a shakedown from any two-bit hoodlum country like Canada:

The worst case scenario for Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, the Canadian news sector, and the Canadian public has come to pass: Google has announced that it will block news links in Canada in response to the mandated payment for links approach established in Bill C-18. The decision, which the company says will be implemented before the law takes effect, will cover search, Google News, and Google Discover. The decision – which government seemingly tried to avoid with last minute discussions with Google executives after it became apparent that the risks of exit were real – will have lasting and enormously damaging consequences for Canadians and represents a remarkable own-goal by Rodriguez who has managed to take millions away from the news sector and left everyone in a far worse position than if he had done nothing at all.

If you’re in any way interested in Canadian government … machinations … when it comes to digital policy, you really should be following Michael Geist‘s reporting. He’s been doing a great job and deserves the support.

June 29, 2023

When “flashy” became “constantly flashing”, the user experience got significantly worse

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander on the irritating advance of meaningless flashing elements on so many web pages where they serve no real purpose, but successfully generate anger in their users:

Everyone hates flashing banner ads, but maybe they’re a necessary evil. Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine. But what’s everyone else’s excuse?

A few days ago I needed to look up an obscure point of Jewish law, as you do, and found this Jewish law website:

The background toggles every few seconds between a picture of a rabbi and a picture of … a different rabbi? There’s no conceivable benefit to this and it makes it almost impossible to concentrate on the text.

I used to think I must be the only person who worried about this; maybe it was a weird OCD thing. But I asked about it on the ACX survey …

… and 88% of people find them at least a little annoying! 16% of people go all the way, and say they wouldn’t use a website that has them!

Yet websites have been adding them to more and more parts of the user experience. Most aren’t as blatant as the Jewish law site, but they’re still there.

June 28, 2023

“I’ll forgive Dartnell for not writing ‘Lest Darkness Fall’ For Dummies“

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

Jane Psmith reviews The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell, despite it not being quite what she was hoping it would be:

This is not the book I wanted to read.

The book I wanted to read was a detailed guide to bootstrapping your way to industrial civilization (or at least antibiotics) if you should happen to be dumped back in, say, the late Bronze Age.1 After all, there are plenty of technologies that didn’t make it big for centuries or millennia after their material preconditions were met, and with our 20/20 hindsight we could skip a lot of the dead ends that accompanied real-world technological progress.

Off the top of my head, for example, there’s no reason you couldn’t do double-entry bookkeeping with Arabic numerals as soon as you have something to write on, and it would probably have been useful at any point in history — just not useful enough that anyone got really motivated to invent it. Or, here, another one: the wheelbarrow is just two simple machines stuck together, is substantially more efficient than carrying things yourself, and yet somehow didn’t make it to Europe until the twelfth or thirteenth century AD. Or switching to women’s work, I’ve always taken comfort in the fact that with my arcane knowledge of purling I could revolutionize any medieval market.2 And while the full Green Revolution package depends on tremendous quantities of fertilizer to fuel the grains’ high yields, you could get some way along that path with just knowledge of plant genetics, painstaking record-keeping, and a lot of hand pollination. In fact, with a couple latifundia at your disposal in 100 BC, you could probably do it faster than Norman Borlaug did. But speaking of fertilizer, the Italian peninsula is full of niter deposits, and while your revolutio viridis is running through those you could be figuring out whether it’s faster to spin up a chemical industry to the point you could do the Haber-Bosch process at scale or to get to the Peruvian guano islands. (After about thirty seconds of consideration my money’s on Peru, though it’s a shame we’re trying to do this with the Romans since they were never a notably nautical bunch and 100 BC was a low point even for them; you’ll have to wipe out the Mediterranean pirates early and find Greek or Egyptian shipwrights.) And another question: can you go straight from the Antikythera mechanism to the Jacquard machine, and if not what do you need in between? Inquiring minds want to know.3

But I’ll forgive Dartnell for not writing “Lest Darkness Fall” For Dummies, which I’ll admit is a pretty niche pitch, because The Knowledge is doing something almost as cool.4 Like my imaginary book, it employs a familiar fictional conceit to explain how practical things work. Instead of time travel, though, Dartnell takes as his premise the sudden disappearance (probably plague, definitely not zombies) of almost all of humanity, leaving behind a few survivors but all the incredible complexity of our technological civilization. How would you survive? And more importantly, how would you rebuild?

    1. I read the Nantucket Trilogy at an impressionable age.

    2. Knitting came to Europe in the thirteenth century, but the complementary purl stitch, which is necessary to create stretchy ribbing, didn’t. If you’ve ever wondered why medieval hosen were made of woven fabric and fit the leg relatively poorly, that’s why. When purling came to England, Elizabeth I paid an exorbitant amount of money for her first pair of silk stockings and refused to go back to cloth.

    3. Obviously you would also need to motivate people to actually do any of these things, which is its own set of complications — Jason Crawford at Roots of Progress has a great review of Robert Allen’s classic The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective that gets much deeper into why no one actually cared about automation and mechanization — but please allow me to imagine here.

    4. Please do not recommend How To Invent Everything, which purports to do something like this. It doesn’t go nearly deep enough to be interesting, let alone useful. You know, in the hypothetical that I’m sent back in time.

June 24, 2023

The Most Reliable and Versatile Sub-orbital Rockets Ever Made; the Black Brant Sounding Rockets

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Polyus
Published 31 Aug 2018

The Black Brant series of sounding rockets was a great success and a proud contribution to the global race for space. While not as glamorous as an orbital rocket, the Black Brants helped scientists from around the globe research and better understand the Aurora and the Earth’s ionosphere.
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QotD: The plight of miners in pre-industrial societies

Filed under: Greece, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Essentially the problem that miners faced was that while mining could be a complex and technical job, the vast majority of the labor involved was largely unskilled manual labor in difficult conditions. Since the technical aspects could be handled by overseers, this left the miners in a situation where their working conditions depended very heavily on the degree to which their labor was scarce.

In the ancient Mediterranean, the clear testimony of the sources is that mining was a low-status occupation, one for enslaved people, criminals and the truly desperate. Being “sent to the mines” is presented, alongside being sent to work in the mills, as a standard terrible punishment for enslaved people who didn’t obey their owners and it is fairly clear in many cases that being sent to the mines was effectively a delayed death sentence. Diodorus Siculus describes mining labor in the gold mines of Egypt this way, in a passage that is fairly representative of the ancient sources on mining labor more generally (3.13.3, trans Oldfather (1935)):

    For no leniency or respite of any kind is given to any man who is sick, or maimed, or aged, or in the case of a woman for her weakness, but all without exception are compelled by blows to persevere in their labours, until through ill-treatment they die in the midst of their tortures. Consequently the poor unfortunates believe, because their punishment is so excessively severe, that the future will always be more terrible than the present and therefore look forward to death as more to be desired than life.

It is clear that conditions in Greek and Roman mines were not much better. Examples of chains and fetters – and sometimes human remains still so chained – occur in numerous Greek and Roman mines. Unfortunately our sources are mostly concerned with precious metal mines and those mines also seem to have been the worst sorts of mines to work in, since the long underground shafts and galleries exposed the miners to greater dangers from bad air to mine-collapses. That said, it is hard to imagine working an open-pit iron mine by hand, while perhaps somewhat safer, was any less back-breaking, miserable toil, even if it might have been marginally safer.

Conditions were not always so bad though, particularly for free miners (being paid a wage) who tended to be treated better, especially where their labor was sorely needed. For instance, a set of rules for the Roman mines at Vipasca, Spain provided for contractors to supply various amenities, including public baths maintained year-round. The labor force at Vipasca was clearly free and these amenities seem to have been a concession to the need to make the life of the workers livable in order to get a sufficient number of them in a relatively sparsely populated part of Spain.

The conditions for miners in medieval Europe seems to have been somewhat better. We see mining communities often setting up their own institutions and occasionally even having their own guilds (for instance, there was a coal-workers guild in Liege in the 13th century) or internal regulations. These mining communities, which in large mining operations might become small towns in their own right, seem to have often had some degree of legal privileges when compared to the general rural population (though it should be noted that, as the mines were typically owned by the local lord or state, exemption from taxes was essentially illusory as the lord or king’s cut of the mine’s profits was the taxes). It does seem notable that while conditions in medieval mines were never quite so bad as those in the ancient world, the rapid expansion of mining activity beginning in the 15th century seems to have coincided with a loss of the special status and privileges of earlier medieval European miners and the status associated with the labor declined back down to effectively the bottom of the social spectrum.

(That said, it seems necessary to note that precious metal-mining done by non-free Native American laborers at the order of European colonial states appears to have been every bit as cruel and deadly as mining in the ancient world.)

Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.

June 21, 2023

Was Starship’s Stage Zero a Bad Pad?

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Practical Engineering
Published 20 Jun 2023

Launchpads are incredible feats of engineering. Let’s cover some of the basics!

Unlike NASA, which spends years in planning and engineering, SpaceX uses rapid development cycles and full-scale tests to work toward its eventual goals. They push their hardware to the limit to learn as much as possible, and we get to follow along. They’re betting it will pay off to develop fast instead of carefully. This video compares the Stage 0 launch pad to the historic pad 39A.
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June 19, 2023

1963: Mockumentary Predicts The Future of 1988 | Time On Our Hands | Past Predictions | BBC

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

BBC Archive
Published 17 Jun 2023

Russian moon landings, week long traffic jams, a workforce replaced by automation and above all, too much leisure time!

These are just some of the bold predictions made in Don Haworth’s 1963 BBC “mockumentary” Time on Our Hands – a remarkable film which projects the viewer a quarter of a century into the future.

Imagine how the futuristic inhabitants of 1988 — a society freed from the shackles of endless hard work — might reflect on the way people live and work in 1963. Its aim is to look back at the extraordinary, almost unbelievable, events of the intervening 25 years — referred to as “the years of the transformation”.

“This Buoyant programme could be repeated a dozen times and still intrigue, delight and disturb me”
Dennis Potter, Daily Herald TV critic, 1963

This footage is compiled of excerpts from Time On Our Hands, a faux-documentary film by Don Haworth.

Originally broadcast 19 March, 1963.

Patterns of incompetence

Filed under: Government, Law, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Palladium, Harold Robertson says that complex systems that we all depend on will not have the resilience to survive our society-wide failure of competence:

Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws — most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

H/T to Theophilus Chilton for the link.

June 16, 2023

QotD: Sailing ships in the real world versus sailing ships in Rings of Power

Filed under: History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are a bazillion ways to rig a ship (a lot of them with really fun names), but all sails function in one of two basic ways. First it’s worth noting every ship operates in both a “true wind” (the direction the wind is actually blowing) and an apparent wind, which is the combination of the true wind with the direction the ship is sailing and its speed; the apparent wind is what matters for sail dynamics because that’s the wind that the sails experience. If a ship is sailing at 8 knots and the wind is moving at 12 knots, but the ship and the wind are moving in the same direction, the apparent wind the ship experiences is just 4 knots. On the other hand, if the wind speeds remain the same but we have the same ship moving perpendicular to the wind, the apparent wind is going to actually be 14.4 knots and come from a direction between the ship’s heading and the wind’s source.

Square sails, which are rigged perpendicular to the direction of the ship work by having the wind strike the sail and pile up into it, which creates a high pressure zone behind the sail (because all of the air, blocked by the sail, is “stacking up” there) and a low pressure zone in front of the sail, which pushes the ship forward, technically a function of aerodynamic drag. The upside is that square sails can produce a lot of power, which is handy for big, heavy ships, especially in areas with predictable and favorable winds (such as the Atlantic trade winds). The downsides are two: on the one hand, top speed is limited because the faster the ship goes, the lower the apparent wind on the sails, which in turn reduces how much they can push the ship. On the other hand, square sails only work if the ship is moving in more-or-less the same direction as the wind is, within about 60 degrees or so (so the ship has a c. 120 degree range of movement relative to the wind). Moreover, for square sails to work, the air hitting them from behind needs to be substantially confined by their shape; this is why square sails are made to billow outward into an arcing shape as the wind hits them, instead of being held taught and fully flat against the mast.

Triangular or lateen or fore-and-aft sails work on a different principle. They are arranged parallel to the direction of the ship (that is, fore-and-aft of the mast, thus the term) and want to also be close to parallel to the wind (both square and triangular sails can, in some configurations, be moved around the mast to a degree to get an ideal direction to the wind). The way they work is that the wind hits the sail on its edge and the air current splits around the sail, but not evenly; the sail is turned so that the back side takes more wind, causing the sail to billow out, creating a wing-like shape when viewed from above. That in turn acts exactly like a wing, creating a high pressure zone behind the sail and a low pressure zone in front of the sail and thus generating aerodynamic lift as the wind passes over the surface (rather than pressing up behind it) the same way that an airplane’s wings keep it in the air. The clever part about this is that the lift generated doesn’t have to be in the same direction the wind is going, so a ship using these kinds of sails can move up to within around 45 degree of the wind (sailing “close hauled” – a ship rigged like this thus has a much larger 270 degree range of motion relative to the wind). Also – as noted above – depending on the ship’s “point of sail” (direction of movement relative to the wind), accelerating may not decrease the wind’s apparent speed (because you may not be sailing directly away from it), and so triangular sails often function better in light winds, sailing into the wind, and at very high speeds (but they provide less power for large, heavy ships sailing with the wind). And again, there is a lot of complexity in terms of the different functions of these types of sails, but we’re really just trying to make a fairly simple point here so everyone please forgive the simplification.

And that’s it: all sails work on one of those two principles (at any given time); the point in discussing this is to note that we’re dealing not with aesthetics here but with objects that need to interact in fairly fundamental ways with aerodynamics and so have shapes that are dictated by that function (and also, sails are cool). You can combine those two principles in a lot of exciting ways to create different “rigs” with different sailing qualities, but you those principles are your options – you cannot create some other kind of sail which works on different principles. Indeed, most of the more complex sailplans of larger ships use a combination of square and lateen sails, but each sail in the plan must be using one of these two principles; there are no other options.

And those of you looking back at what these ships [in Rings of Power] look like may have already guessed the problem here. These are clearly square-rigged ships; the sails are all perpendicular to the ship’s direction and the sail shape is symmetrical over the keel (that is, same shape on the port and starboard) and are unable to be angled in any event. But every single sail has a gigantic hole in the center because of the split mast. So the air you want to build up behind the sail is instead flowing through the hole between the masts. The sails even angle slightly, curling backwards at their outer edges channeling the air towards the gaps. But that air flowing through the gaps is going to lessen (not remove, but substantially lesson) the pressure differential over the sail which will cut the drag the sails generate which will make the ship much slower.

What is worse is that between the two masts and between the foremast and the bowsprit, the ships mount additional secondary sails. Now in a rig-plan that made any sense, these would be triangular sails in both shape and principle (e.g. gaff-rigged sails incorporated into a square-rig sailing pattern common for full rigged ships as well as staysails between the masts or between the foremast and the bowsprit, also common for full rigged ships), but the designers here have only managed one of those two things. The sails are triangular in shape, but are positioned perpendicular to the wind direction and then symmetrically matched. That means they both do nothing with the wind moving through that center channel we’ve created, but also their triangular shape is entirely useless because they’re functioning on drag instead of lift.

It’s not that this sail plan wouldn’t work: the big sails would create at least some aerodynamic drag which would push the ship forward. But this is a sail plan which would work much more poorly than a far more basic plan with just a single central mast mounting a single very large square sail. You could even keep the exotic junk-style sail supports (they’re called battens; everything on sailing ships has a funny name) if you wanted and just make the ships junk-rigged! Or, if you want a lot of fancy sails which aren’t in square shapes, you could go with a multi-masted dhow or xebec sail plan which would give you lots of overlapping triangular sails and also fit the Mediterranean/Roman vibe you were going for.

Moreover, while these sails aren’t square shaped, this is a pure “square sail” ship rig, which for ocean-going ships ostensibly used by great mariners is awful. Square sails only work well when running before the wind: they “tack” (zig-zagging from one close-hauled point of sail to another to climb up the wind) really poorly; some pure square-rigged ships cannot tack at all without the assistance of rowers. That’s is part of the reason why “full rigged” square-sailed age of sail ships nevertheless had triangular sails in gaff-rigging or as stay-sails or what have you, to enable the ship to tack effectively (the fancy term for this is how “weatherly” a ship is: how able it is to sail close to the wind; weatherlyness also depends on hull shape and a host of other factors). With a pure square-sail setup, these ships can only go in the direction of the wind, which is going to make it impossible to use them effectively as ocean-going ships because the prevailing winds on the ocean are very consistent: they will almost always be blowing the same way, which means these ships can sail out, but then can’t sail back. In short these ocean-going mariners have ships which cannot go on the oceans.

And of course this has been a theme of these posts but please, showrunners: when you are doing the visual design for a fantasy-historical society, you are not going to outsmart centuries of professional shipwrights with a brainstorming meeting and some concept art. So instead of trying to show that the Númenóreans are great mariners (“the sea is always right!”), which is the point of giving their super-cool ships so much screentime and is an essential thing to establish about their society, by making up a ship design that is going to end up invariably being much worse than historical designs, just go adopt a historical design that was successful. For my part, I’d have probably contrasted traditional Elven ships with a single sail-type (probably square) on a single mast with the advanced Númenóreans using lots of lateen sails.

That said, the fact that the Númenórean ships are terrible is fine because frankly, I wouldn’t want to sail to this battle either.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part III: That Númenórean Charge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-02-03.

June 11, 2023

Rewriting the well-worn story of how the steam engine was invented

Filed under: History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes pushes back against the story we’ve been telling for over 200 years about how the steam engine came to be:

3D animation of an aeolipile or Hero’s engine.
Animation by Michael Frey via Wikimedia Commons.

The standard pre-history of the steam engine goes a little like this:

  1. There were a few basic steam-using devices designed by the ancients, like Hero of Alexandria’s spinning aeolipile, which are often regarded as essentially toys.
  2. Fast forward to the 1640s and Evangelista Torricelli, one of Galileo’s disciples, demonstrates that vacuums are possible and the atmosphere has a weight.
  3. The city leader of Magdeburg, Otto von Guericke, c.1650 creates vacuums using a mechanical air pump, and is soon using atmospheric pressure to lift extraordinary weights. This sets off a spate of experimentation by the likes of Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, and Denis Papin, to create vacuums under pistons.
  4. As a result of the new science of vacuums, by the 1690s and 1700s the mysterious Thomas Savery and especially the Devon-based ironmonger Thomas Newcomen are able to develop the first commercially practical engines using atmospheric pressure. Steam engine development continued from there.

This is the narrative that had become set in the 1820s, if not earlier, and has been repeated with many of the same names and dates by book after book after book ever since. It’s a narrative that I have even repeated myself.

But, as I only recently discovered, atmospheric pressure and vacuums were actually being exploited long before Torricelli was even born, by people who believed that vacuums were impossible and had no concept of atmospheric pressure. Devices very much like Savery’s, which exploited both the pushing force of expanding hot steam and the sucking effect of condensing it with cold — what we now know to be caused by atmospheric pressure — were being developed far earlier.

I began to give a more accurate account of the development of the atmospheric engine in a detailed three-part series on why the steam engine wasn’t invented earlier (see parts I, II, III, which give more detail and the references). But I haven’t put it all together in one easily digestible place, and since writing I’ve continued to discover even more. So here’s a rough sketch summarising what really happened, based on everything I’ve found so far […]

The development of the atmospheric engine was thus significantly longer and more complicated than the traditional narrative suggests. Far from being an invention that appeared from out of the blue, unlocked by the latest scientific advancements, it started to take shape from decades and centuries of experiments and marginal improvements from a whole host of inventors, active in many different countries. It’s a pattern that I’ve seen again and again and again: if an invention appears to be from out of the blue, chances are that you just haven’t seen the full story. Progress does not come in leaps. It is the product of dozens or even hundreds of accumulated, marginal steps.

May 31, 2023

Alvin Toffler may have been utterly wrong in Future Shock, but I suspect his huge royalty cheques helped soften the pain

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the huge bestseller by Alvin Toffler that got its predictions backwards:

Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted the future. It was a disturbing forecast, and everybody paid attention.

People saw his book Future Shock everywhere. I was just a freshman in high school, but even I bought a copy (the purple version). And clearly I wasn’t alone — Clark Drugstore in my hometown had them piled high in the front of the store.

The book sold at least six million copies and maybe a lot more (Toffler’s website claims 15 million). It was reviewed, translated, and discussed endlessly. Future Shock turned Toffler — previously a freelance writer with an English degree from NYU — into a tech guru applauded by a devoted global audience.

Toffler showed up on the couch next to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Other talk show hosts (Dick Cavett, Mike Douglas, etc.) invited him to their couches too. CBS featured Toffler alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Buckminster Fuller as trusted guides to the future. Playboy magazine gave him a thousand dollar award just for being so smart.

Toffler parlayed this pop culture stardom into a wide range of follow-up projects and businesses, from consulting to professorships. When he died in 2016, at age 87, obituaries praised Alvin Toffler as “the most influential futurist of the 20th century”.

But did he deserve this notoriety and praise?

Future Shock is a 500 page book, but the premise is simple: Things are changing too damn fast.

Toffler opens an early chapter by telling the story of Ricky Gallant, a youngster in Eastern Canada who died of old age at just eleven. He was only a kid, but already suffered from “senility, hardened arteries, baldness, slack, and wrinkled skin. In effect, Ricky was an old man when he died.”

Toffler didn’t actually say that this was going to happen to all of us. But I’m sure more than a few readers of Future Shock ran to the mirror, trying to assess the tech-driven damage in their own faces.

“The future invades our lives”, he claims on page one. Our bodies and minds can’t cope with this. Future shock is a “real sickness”, he insists. “It is the disease of change.”

As if to prove this, Toffler’s publisher released the paperback edition of Future Shock with six different covers — each one a different color. The concept was brilliant. Not only did Future Shock say that things were constantly changing, but every time you saw somebody reading it, the book itself had changed.

Of course, if you really believed Future Shock was a disease, why would you aggravate it with a stunt like this? But nobody asked questions like that. Maybe they were too busy looking in the mirror for “baldness, slack, and wrinkled skin”.

Toffler worried about all kinds of change, but technological change was the main focus of his musings. When the New York Times reviewed his book, it announced in the opening sentence that “Technology is both hero and villain of Future Shock“.

During his brief stint at Fortune magazine, Toffler often wrote about tech, and warned about “information overload”. The implication was that human beings are a kind of data storage medium — and they’re running out of disk space.

May 30, 2023

It might be time to consider getting a home generator … while you still can

Filed under: Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille in today’s The Rattler newsletter suggests that if you’ve been considering getting a generator to power your house in case of blackouts, now might be a good time:

The regulatory body that oversees the nation’s power grid cast a bit of a chill over the coming warm months when, in mid-May, it cautioned that the country might not generate enough electric power to meet demand. Coming after multiple warnings from regulators, grid operators, and industry experts that enthusiasm for retiring old-school “dirty” generating capacity is outstripping the ability of renewable sources to fill the gap, the announcement is a heads-up to Americans that they may want to make back-up plans for a power grid growing increasingly unreliable. It’s also a reminder that green ideology is no substitute for the ability to flip a switch and have the lights come on.

Unreliable Energy

“NERC’s 2023 Summer Reliability Assessment warns that two-thirds of North America is at risk of energy shortfalls this summer during periods of extreme demand,” the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nominally non-governmental organization with statutory regulatory powers, noted May 17. “‘Increased, rapid deployment of wind, solar and batteries have made a positive impact,’ said Mark Olson, NERC’s manager of Reliability Assessments. ‘However, generator retirements continue to increase the risks associated with extreme summer temperatures, which factors into potential supply shortages in the western two-thirds of North America if summer temperatures spike.'”

This is not the first time we’re hearing that the power grid isn’t up to meeting demand for electricity. Nor is it the first time we’re told that renewable sources such as wind and solar are coming online more slowly than power-generation capacity based on fossil fuels is being retired.

Dwindling Power Plants

“The United States is heading for a reliability crisis,” Commissioner Mark C. Christie of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) told the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources during a May 4 hearing. “I do not use the term ‘crisis’ for melodrama, but because it is an accurate description of what we are facing. I think anyone would regard an increasing threat of system-wide, extensive power outages as a crisis. In summary, the core problem is this: Dispatchable generating resources are retiring far too quickly and in quantities that threaten our ability to keep the lights on. The problem generally is not the addition of intermittent resources, primarily wind and solar, but the far too rapid subtraction of dispatchable resources, especially coal and gas.”

The federal Energy Information Administration foresees almost a quarter of coal generating capacity being retired by the end of the decade — a process already in progress. Just this month it announced “the United States will generate less electricity from coal this year than in any year this century.” Non-hydropower renewables are the only generating capacity sources really seen growing in the short-term.

In February of this year, PJM Interconnection, which manages grid operations in much of the eastern United States, warned of “increasing reliability risks … due to a potential timing mismatch between resource retirements, load growth and the pace of new generation entry.”

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