^zhurnal - v.0.13

"... It has amazed me how many of these writers --- who don't apparently know each other --- resort to the world of physics, which I don't understand, to explain these phenomena: physical theories of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, and chaos theory. Perhaps we have some physicists among us who would be willing to help out with the strategic planning effort, or join us in some Forecasting in the Db. ..."

I was once a physicist (actually, I was a half-astrophysicist; see ^zhurnal 14 May 2000) and obviously would be happy to volunteer to translate techno-dweeb metaphors and otherwise assist in any way I can ... but personally, I think that a lot of the physics-related language one sees is just a convenient way to:

1. appear smart if you can't come up with any relevant allusions to literature or history (^_^); and
2. try to jog people into thinking in different ways about a situation, perhaps a bit more quantitatively or experimentally oriented than we usually do.

Most of the organizational and human issues that we've been discussing aren't amenable to hard-science-style solutions ... but S&T stuff can, occasionally, shed light via loose analogies (as can quotes from Shakespeare and Gibbon). Reading around in math and physics and biology and so forth sometimes helps put things in perspective (on a cosmological scale, our problems are rather minor), and there are probably relevant parts of evolution-by-natural-selection that can apply to some issues we face. See, for instance, Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene, Paul Colinvaux's Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare, and the Daniel Dennett tome Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Check out these sorts of books, plus some Scientific American figure captions, and you too can throw "impedance mismatch" and "ultraviolet catastrophe" into your writings, win friends, influence people, and get big advances from publishers! (^_^)

(slightly edited from the original; cf. ^zhurnal 3 January 2000)

- Wednesday, April 11, 2001 at 05:50:47 (EDT)

When somebody sensible says "You can't prove a negative" what s/he really means, most of the time, is "This is a complicated open-ended problem and you can't claim complete knowledge of all possibilities." That's reasonable. To demonstrate rigorously that "There are no white crows" would require examining every crow in the universe and confirming that not one of them is white. Not an easy task.

- Tuesday, April 10, 2001 at 05:52:40 (EDT)

• If you woke up after a 100-year-long nap, what questions would you want to ask first?
• What's the rôle of the "Public Intellectual" in society?
• Is there a stylistic contrast between the USA and Europe --- as caricatured in the advice, "Go to America to get something done" --- e.g., real-world engineering versus theoretical formalism? Practical problem-solving vs. intellectualism?
• Two ways to rate a "philosophy" (from Richard Hooker):
  • Does it help you understand the world?
  • Does it help you live your life?
• Must one keep promises made to a dying person after that person is dead?
• On war: Are there "Just" wars? Is "Total" war moral? How about the "Mutual Assured Destruction" strategy of deterrence? Is war just a word for "organized murder"? What differentiates a "police action" from war? When is the initiation of force justified? Is capital punishment ever OK? How about assassination? Or "assassination from a great distance" via bombing or missile attack?
• Can there be a Global Social Contract? When may one country impose its values on another? Or is all morality relative?
• Can one design a morality around entropy minimization? --- that is, assign high weight to preserving historical artifacts, endangered species, human life, etc.?
• What is the trade-off between privacy and safety?
• When faced with a bureaucratic threat, is the archetypal response to "Boldly Reorganize!"?
• When should "sub-cultures" be respected and preserved? When do they become disruptive of the greater social web of trust?
• What makes someone convert from one religion to another? How true is the aphorism, "When you've lost your goals, you become a fanatic and redouble your efforts!"?
• What are the dangers of fame --- the downside of becoming a Nobel Laureate, say?
• What's the distinction between charisma and leadership? Can a leader really cause significant social change, or does s/he more likely simply get in front of a trend that was happening anyway? Is "leadership something that adheres in a person that s/he can use to any purpose"?

(Thanks for ideas & comments to JB, JC, BD, GdM, JJ, KM, AP, LR, BW, and others. See also ^zhurnal 6 October 2000, 2 & 1 August 2000, and 27, 25, 22, 18, 12, & 11 July 2000.)

- Monday, April 09, 2001 at 06:01:59 (EDT)

(as seen on the "CypherPunks" discussion group, ca. 1996)

- Sunday, April 08, 2001 at 10:34:42 (EDT)

• What is the proper balance, in his judgment, between putting out today's fires v. long-term investment? (And don't accept the answer that "we need both".)
• What are the precise areas in which we need to learn to "Just Say 'No'"? That is, what must we stop doing, given our limited resources today? (And laugh if you hear "work smarter, not harder".)
• Who are our key customers? Why? How does he plan to measure "success" in serving those customers?
• What are his suggestions for bridging the gap between the "two cultures" in our organization --- and what dichotomies does he come up with which exhibit such a gap for us to resolve? (e.g., humanities v. sciences, or civilian v. military, or ...)
• What are the most critical workforce problems that he anticipates worrying about during the next six months --- e.g., issues of racial or sexual harassment, lack of headroom, loss of key personnel to outside jobs or retirement, excessive turnover or churning of people among projects and accounts, or something else entirely?
• Trick question: How important does he think it is to make us a "learning organization", and what is it worth spending (in time, not dollars) to do so? Specifically, how much time does he think that we should fence off for thinking and learning and getting out of our box(es) and consciously exploring new ideas? 5% (= 2 hours/week)? 10%? more? less? (Get as precise a number from him as possible.) Does he believe that we will generally do OK if we kinda keep going the way we have been, with sporadic training during gaps between crises, and with a trickle of new people coming in to inject freshness in rapidly changing areas? Or is a significant change in priorities needed, so that the outfit can survive to 2010 and beyond?
• What's his favorite color? If he could be any kind of tree, what kind would he be? What not-directly-work-related books has he read lately that he would recommend to others? Who's his favorite writer these days? (These are serious questions! (^_^) )

- Friday, April 06, 2001 at 05:47:19 (EDT)

This brings me to the department of writing. I am a writer by profession; but I do not think I have any prejudices in favour of the exercise of writing. Indeed, I say to myself every morning that if there is one exercise in the world which I hate, it is the exercise of writing. But I must assert that in my opinion the exercise of writing is an indispensable part of any genuine effort towards mental efficiency. I don't care much what you write, so long as you compose sentences and achieve continuity. There are forty ways of writing in an unprofessional manner, and they are all good. You may keep "a full diary," as Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson says he does. This is one of the least good ways. Diaries, save in experienced hands like those of Mr. Benson, are apt to get themselves done with the very minimum of mental effort. They also tend to an exaggeration of egotism, and if they are left lying about they tend to strife. Further, one never knows when one may not be compelled to produce them in a court of law. A journal is better. Do not ask me to define the difference between a journal and a diary. I will not and I cannot. It is a difference that one feels instinctively. A diary treats exclusively of one's self and one's doings; a journal roams wider, and notes whatever one has observed of interest. A diary relates that one had lobster mayonnaise for dinner and rose the next morning with a headache, doubtless attributable to mental strain. A journal relates that Mrs. -------, whom one took into dinner, had brown eyes, and an agreeable trick of throwing back her head after asking a question, and gives her account of her husband's strange adventures in Colorado, etc. A diary is All I, I, I, I, itself I (to quote a line of the transcendental poetry of Mary Baker G. Eddy). A journal is the large spectacle of life. A journal may be special or general. I know a man who keeps a journal of all cases of current superstition which he actually encounters. He began it without the slightest suspicion that he was beginning a document of astounding interest and real scientific value; but such was the fact. In default of a diary or a journal, one may write essays (provided one has the moral courage); or one may simply make notes on the book one reads. Or one may construct anthologies of passages which have made an individual and particular appeal to one's tastes. Anthology construction is one of the pleasantest hobbies that a person who is not mad about golf and bridge --- that is to say, a thinking person --- can possibly have; and I recommend it to those who, discreetly mistrusting their power to keep up a fast pace from start to finish, are anxious to begin their intellectual course gently and mildly. In any event, writing --- the act of writing --- is vital to almost any scheme. I would say it was vital to every scheme, without exception, were I not sure that some kind correspondent would instantly point out a scheme to which writing was obviously not vital.

• meditate for ten minutes daily
• memorize 20 lines of good poetry or prose a week
• read interesting, well-written books in some area of literature or science, concentrating on a topic for several years

(Cf. ^zhurnal 4 April 2000 for other musings on journalling, posted on the First Anniversary of this experiment, and 19 March 2001 for an Arnold Bennett comment on diaries.)

- Wednesday, April 04, 2001 at 20:51:30 (EDT)

To answer, look more closely at the edge
    Between the land and air. Atop this arc
One tiny figure stands upon a ledge,
    Tensing to jump. An angel? Beast? The dark
Obscures its face. In which direction will
    It leap? Upward, to add a shy new voice
Of meaning to the night? Or down the hill
    Again? A universe awaits the choice.

- Tuesday, April 03, 2001 at 05:46:36 (EDT)

• sequential optimizers, who tend to work their way, flowchart-fashion, step by step through highly structured procedures, and who focus their attention somewhat narrowly on technical skills rather than on learning or teamwork;
• interactive optimizers, who try to understand and control a system as an interwoven set of feedback loops, and who value learning and teamwork significantly more than do sequential optimizers; and
• customer optimizers, who incorporate the mental modeling and systems thinking of the interactive optimizers, but who see the real goal of their job not from the production side but rather from the viewpoint of the ultimate user --- the person who is going to receive the system when they have finished working on it.

- Sunday, April 01, 2001 at 19:09:57 (EDT)

"But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious."

- Saturday, March 31, 2001 at 19:21:59 (EST)

• I visited Bela Szalai, an IBM computer engineer, on Saturday, 23 August 1980. His country home near Manassas battlefield (aka Bull Run in northern Virginia) is Logical Games Incorporated (LGI). He and his family comprise the employees.
• Bela first saw the Cube in August of 1978, during a trip to visit his relatives in Hungary. After many delays he was able to get some Cubes wholesale from the Hungarian government --- but the Communist bureaucracy wanted $1 million for exclusive rights to distribute the things in the Western world.
• Ideal (a major toy company) may have learned of the Cube from Bernie DeKovon, a Games magazine editor who is also a toy consultant for them. Ideal paid the $10^6 in September 1979.
• The Cube is not patentable in the USA because it was sold publicly for over a year in Hungary before patents were applied for. In England, however, it is "copyrighted" (equivalent to US patent + trademark) and Ideal has a legal monopoly.
• Ideal will run nationwide TV advertisements for the Cube beginning in a month or so. The campaign theme is rumored to involve Isaac Newton and to include an animated Cube which solves itself.
• Bela took out a second mortgage on his home to pay for the plastic molds for his Cube parts. He uses white plastic so that it will be possible to print the colors on via "pad printing", the same process whereby labels are put on some shampoo bottles. If all goes well LGI will start making printed-color Cubes within a month.
• Bela ordered 300 copies of the 4th edition of David Singmaster's booklet on the Cube in June 1980; Singmaster informed him in July that the 4th edition was out of print, but that he could have 300 of the 5th edition for the same price as soon as they come out. LGI has ~90 orders already pending, and while the remaining ~210 copies of the 5th edition last, Bela is willing to sell them for $4 each ... whenever they arrive.
• LGI wholesale prices start at orders for 12 Cubes, $6 each plus shipping. Individuals may want to consolidate their orders to save money.
• Rubik himself has said that he developed the Cube partly as an aid to teaching three-dimensional visualization in his students.
• Cube manufacturing is quite labor-intensive:
  • 4 minutes to tap in and glue the caps to cover the internal 6th face of edge and corner cubelets for the 20 pieces necessary to make one 3x3x3;
  • 1 minute to assemble with screws and springs five out of six swivels (central Cube faces) onto the middle cross;
  • 1 minute to assemble the pieces and screw in the last central face;
  • 4 minutes to perform final adjustment: apply silicone grease, torque up all the screws evenly, rotate the Cube every which way to test it out, and then tap in and glue the six central face caps over the screws; and finally
  • 6 minutes to apply the color squares to the faces.
• Bela can read while performing most of the final assembly, now that his hands have had several thousand Cubes' practice! The color application step will be eliminated if and when LGI begins to use pad printing for face coloring.
• About 4% of LGI's Cubes are rejected for mechanical reasons after initial assembly.
• LGI could work without gluing in internal faces of sub-cubes, but then about one Cube in every 20 would eventually fail. Bela won't accept that.
• Readers' Digest phoned Bela not long ago to confirm some data, presumably for a story on the Cube some day.

- Thursday, March 29, 2001 at 05:54:22 (EST)

"His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

- Wednesday, March 28, 2001 at 12:06:48 (EST)

- Tuesday, March 27, 2001 at 05:45:10 (EST)

• "Communication is human nature; knowledge-sharing is human nurture." (BB, quoting Alison Tucker)
• "I actually believe that information gains value when we give it away." (EB)
• "We have a spectacular tool for looking into the future. It's called history." (BF)
• "The world is changing, and the notion of closed proprietary systems coming up with the right answer isn't going to work any more." (EB)
• "The real state-of-the-art is people .... We are the most sophisticated technology in the world today." (BF)
• "Let everyone be CEO!" (BB)
• "Keep the meaning moving! How quickly can you figure out what something means, and how quickly can you get that to the people who need to know?" (EB)
• "An individual without information cannot take responsibility. An individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility." (BB, quoting Jan Carlson)
• "Do you design systems to prevent the 0.1% [of employees] who will do something wrong, or to help the 99.9% who will do the right thing? ... When you give people freedom to do things, it seems that they do the right stuff." (BB)
• "The answer to most important questions is 'Both'!" (EB)

- Monday, March 26, 2001 at 05:54:41 (EST)

- Saturday, March 24, 2001 at 13:58:38 (EST)

"I learnt how to obtain the best I could when I could not obtain everything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear with complete equanimity the being overruled altogether. I have found, through life, these acquisitions to be of the greatest possible importance for personal happiness, and they are also a very necessary condition for any one, either as theorist or as practical man, to effect the greatest amount of good compatible with his opportunities."

- Friday, March 23, 2001 at 19:24:31 (EST)

A few years ago Jonathan Yardley (in a Delta Airlines inflight 'zine article, February 1998) wrote about our society's fixation on obscenely wealthy sports figures and the common tendency now to call them "heroes". Quite a contrast, Yardley observed, to the serious heroes of past generations: Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., et al. Today's idols are virtual pygmies --- "... famous for being famous..." and little more. Their shadows will soon fade.

- Thursday, March 22, 2001 at 16:43:33 (EST)

But it's a mere fantasy, and potentially quite a damaging one. What's more likely, based on all of human experience, is that worthwhile advances will come not from playing games --- but through dedication and extended thinking and wrestling with tough problems and creative collaboration and hard work, on timescales of many years. That's not a pretty picture for those of us who dream of magic ... but on the brighter side, take a look at all the nifty math and science and literature and engineering and art that we've got, after only a few millennia of sweat!

And there are occasional stories about the flip side, though they tend not to be best-sellers. (Wonder why?) Remember the Asimov tale about the rediscovery of long division in an over-computerized future? Or the '50s SF yarn about a kid who apparently was an utterly learning-disabled failure, got thrown out of the standard fun-and-games hypermedia-training curriculum, and had to study from books (gasp!) and work out hard problems by hand (ugh!) --- only to much later find out that he was one of the happy few who had the potential to actually discover something new? It's not easy to make such a story be dramatic and exciting. Too bad...

- Wednesday, March 21, 2001 at 05:40:34 (EST)

- Tuesday, March 20, 2001 at 05:43:01 (EST)

Why should one keep a diary? Part III of "The Diary Habit" advises:

Having discouraged, I now wish to encourage. Many who want to keep diaries and who ought to keep diaries do not, because they are too diffident. They say: "My life is not interesting enough." I ask: "Interesting to whom? To the world in general or to themselves?" It is necessary only that a life should be interesting to the person who lives that life. If you have a desire to keep a diary, it follows that your existence is interesting to you. Otherwise obviously you would not wish to make a record of it. The greatest diarists did not lead very palpitating lives. Ninety-five per cent. of Pepys's Diary deals with tiny daily happenings of the most banal sort --- such happenings as we all go through. If Pepys re-read his entries the day after he wrote them, he must have found them somewhat tedious. Certainly he had not the slightest notion that he was writing one of the great outstanding books of English Literature.

But diaries are the opposite of novels, in that time increases instead of decreasing their interest. After a reasonable period every sentence in a diary blossoms into interest, and the diarist simply cannot be dull --- any more than a great wit such as Sidney Smith could be unfunny. If Sidney Smith asked Helen to pass him the salt, the entire table roared with laughter because it was inexplicably so funny. If the diarist writes in his diary, "I asked Helen to pass me the salt," within three years he will find the sentence inexplicably interesting to himself. In thirty years his family will be inexplicably interested to read that on a certain day he asked Helen to pass him the salt. In three hundred years a whole nation will be reading with inexplicable and passionate interest that centuries earlier he asked Helen to pass him the salt, and critics will embroider theories upon both Helen and the salt and will even earn a living by producing new annotated editions of Helen and the salt. And if the diary turns up after three thousand years, the entire world will hum with the inexplicable thrilling fact that he asked Helen to pass him the salt; which fact will be cabled round the globe as a piece of latest news; and immediately afterwards there will be cabled round the globe the views of expert scholars of all nationalities on the problem whether, when he had asked Helen to pass him the salt, Helen did actually pass him the salt, or not. Timid prospective diarists in need of encouragement should keep this great principle in mind.

You will say: "But what do I care about posterity? I would not keep a diary for the sake of posterity."

Possibly not, but some people would. Some people, if they thought their diaries would be read three hundred years hence, or even a hundred years hence, would begin diaries to-morrow and persevere with them to the day of death. Some people of course are peculiar. And I admit that I am of your opinion. The thought of posterity leaves me stone cold.

There is only one valid reason for beginning a diary --- namely, that you find pleasure in beginning it; and only one valid reason for continuing a diary --- namely, that you find pleasure in continuing it. You may find profit in doing so, but that is not the main point --- though it is a point. You will most positively experience pleasure in reading it after a long interval; but that is not the main point either --- though it is an important point. A diary should find its sufficient justification in the writing of it. If the act of writing is not its own reward, then let the diary remain for ever unwritten.

- Monday, March 19, 2001 at 05:45:01 (EST)

"Dear Jefe de Oro,

If you say so, it will be my hourly concern to make it so. But before I sally forth in service of this, your latest cause, I must tell you with deep affection and respect that you're full of it again...."

- Saturday, March 17, 2001 at 19:22:54 (EST)

Back when Rubik's Cubes were a new invention, in early 1980, I got one and commenced messing around with it. (What's a Cube, you ask? The classic model, invented by Hungarian architect Erno Rubik, is a 3x3x3 block of cubelets; every face can rotate independently in 90 degree increments. The Cube begins with each side a single solid color. After a few quick twists the colors are scrambled, and it's highly nontrivial to undo the mess. Now you know enough to go on.) When they first encounter one, people react to the Cube in three disjoint ways:

• Some (most folks) are utterly disinterested.
• Some (engineering-personalities) see a physical artifact. They want to pry it apart and discover how the interlocking swivels and cubelets can possibly move about in three dimensions without coming unhinged.
• Some (scientist-personalities) see a mathematical artifact, a physical embodiment of a complicated set of transformations. They want to understand the idealized object and take control of it, so that they can "solve" the Cube: restore it to an initial state from any randomized configuration.

Finally, late one night before falling asleep I had an epiphany, a tiny Aha! moment. I had so concentrated on the Cube that I started visualizing what would change if I twisted one face, then an adjacent face, then undid the twist of the first face, and finally undid the twist of the second face. Hmmm ... not much happens --- three edge cubelets move, and so do four corners. OK, says I, what if I do that same pattern of twist-twist-untwist-untwist again? Well, the same edges and corners move another step. Do it again? Now the edges are all back to exactly where they started --- but two pairs of corners are swapped. Zowie!

At that point I had to get up (sorry to disturb you, Paulette!), take my cube from the nightstand, go into another room, and turn on the light to make sure I wasn't dreaming. A brief experiment confirmed the happy hypothesis. I returned to bed confident that the Cube was now, for all practical purposes, understood. I slept well.

The fundamental insight that cracks the Cube is ridiculously obvious (in retrospect): do something, undo it, and repeat until a simple result emerges. There's a whole branch of mathematics (group theory) which deals with such things. To somebody fluent in that language, the Cube is rather trivial. It took a fortnight of near-total immersion, however, for a group-illiterate (such as I was) to discover the key.

I went on to figure out other transformations that manipulate edges and orientations of cubelets, and then to read about Cube Theory in various magazines (thanks again, Martin Gardner!), online Internet/USENET fora, and pamphlets. No books had yet been published on the subject. The best early write-up was by British mathematician David Singmaster. (I still remember the name of his colleague, knot theorist and professor Morwen Thistlethwaite.) On 20 September 1980 I took part in a Cube competition held by a local department store. The store had offered $100 gift certificates to anyone who could solve a Cube in under five minutes. I was the seventh to succeed that morning; there were a bunch of students from the University of Maryland there ahead of me. The store didn't keep its promise ... all I got was a T-shirt.

But nothing ever came close to that midnight flash of lightning when, after weeks of struggle, insight came. Eureka!

- Friday, March 16, 2001 at 20:59:49 (EST)

In an earlier book (Sleeping On the Wing, (1981)) Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell wrote:

"Reading poetry is not a completely passive pleasure, as is sitting in the sun or watching television. It is more like the pleasure you get from playing tennis or listening to music. There is a difference between what you feel the first time you play tennis and the fiftieth time. Or between the first time you go to a concert and later on, when you know more about the music and are used to concerts. Poetry is like that. The more you know about it and the more you read it, the more at ease you'll feel with it, the better you'll get at reading it, and the more you'll like it. When you read a poem, the poet's experience becomes, in a way, your own, so you see things and think things you wouldn't see and think otherwise. It's something like traveling --- seeing new places, hearing things talked about in new ways, getting ideas of other possibilities. It can change you a little and add to what you know and are."

- Thursday, March 15, 2001 at 05:43:49 (EST)

(Cf. ^zhurnal of 10 July 1999 and 3 May 1999 for early ^z mumblings re another Bohrism, and 26 Jan 2001 for a perhaps-relevant Charlie Mingus quote.)

- Tuesday, March 13, 2001 at 18:00:46 (EST)

This morning I finished the gentle book The Use of the Margin by Edward Howard Griggs (1907) --- quite nice in its suggestions that we should pay attention to & effectively invest the little margins of time between other tasks, where we have freedom to choose. He counsels art, letters, science, etc. --- but with conscious application of [their] uplifting emotions [to] action --- kindness & courtesy, esp. to family & friends. He also suggests investing in time alone [(solitude)], and in focused study over years on a chosen topic. (This book was a reference in Hazlitt's Thinking as a Science.) Grigg's two great "open secrets" are, he says, concentration and variety in intellectual activity --- focus on one thing intensely, & then when tired rest not by passive inactivity but rather by shifting the focus to something else.

- Monday, March 12, 2001 at 20:25:26 (EST)

"[This job] is a great privilege. Be worthy of it. Most of humanity spends its life doing boring repetitive tasks."

- Sunday, March 11, 2001 at 16:54:00 (EST)

- Friday, March 09, 2001 at 20:46:11 (EST)

- Thursday, March 08, 2001 at 21:42:04 (EST)

• Arthur C. Clarke - a handwritten note of 24 August 1966 on Hotel Chelsea (New York) stationery, politely thanking me for a letter of 28 June (which reached him that day). "I hope to be back in Ceylon next month," Clarke wrote, and in response to my question about whether he had produced as many books as Isaac Asimov, "Ike is far ahead of me now! I've lost count ...."
• Isaac Asimov - a card of 19 September 1966 postmarked from Boston, thanking me for a letter of 29 August and gently explaining how to pronounce Asimov: "First say the three English words has, him, of. Say them one after another in that order. Now leave out the h's and say them again. You are saying my name." (In 1980 I wrote Asimov again, re a physics error spotted in one of his Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction popular science columns. He replied most courteously, again via postcard --- but that card has not yet surfaced.)
• Harry C. Stubbs aka "Hal Clement" - a letter of 31 March 1967 from Milton Academy. I had seen a correction published in Sky & Telescope magazine over the name Harry Stubbs and wrote to inquire if he was the science-fiction writer. He replied, "Your guess was quite correct; I do write under the pen name of 'Hal Clement' and I am very grateful for your compliments. 'Mission of Gravity' is my own favorite among my books, though my wife likes 'Needle' better. 'Mission' was a great deal of fun to write; it kept me busy for quite a long time with a slide rule before any real writing could be done." Stubbs continued, "The reason for my using a pen name dates back over twenty-five years. I sold my first science-fiction story when I was a college sophomore. I was majoring in astronomy at Harvard, and had done some writing for 'Sky and Telescope' (actually, 'Sky' published at Harvard, and 'Telescope' pubished at Hayden Planetarium, New York, were separate magazines then; they combined just about that time). I was afraid the Harvard authorities would take a dim view of the same name appearing in 'Sky' and in a pulp magazine, so I decided to play safe and use a pen name. The choice of the name was simple enough --- 'Hal' is a standard nickname for Harry, and 'Clement' is my middle name. As it turned out, I needn't have gone to all that trouble; my faculty advisor, Dr. Menzel, proved to like science fiction --- he had written a little himself, he admitted to me; and Dr. Shapley was in the same situation. However, by the time I found this out, I had sold several stories under my pen name, and it was beginning to get a reputation that seemed worth keeping, so I stuck with it...."
• William F. Buckley Jr. - a short note on National Review stationery dated 1 February 1971 thanking me for a letter commenting on something unspecified (and of which I have not the foggiest recollection!) which his colleague Bill Rusher had said on the Firing Line television show.
• F. Paul Wilson - an undated letter, probably ca. 1973, replying to my postcard concerning libertarian themes in his science fiction works. Dr. Wilson wrote, "I had to give up writing for about a year and a half after [sf editor John W.] Campbell's death for two reasons --- my mentor was gone and my clinical studies were catching up to me. I'm an intern now and have managed to crank out a few pieces. The next issue of FICTION will carry a new novelette and REASON will publish an article on John Campbell in a few months." He went on to say, "Both of the above publications are part of the libertarian press that I discovered only recently. I've been a libertarian of sorts for a decade but never knew I had so much company until I stumbled across a copy of the 'A is A Directory' and found a list of a whole network of publications...."
• Vernor Vinge - a letter from San Diego dated 7 February 1973. Professor Vinge wrote, "Thanks very much for your card of 14 January. Getting praise on a story is always nice, but when the praise is as perceptive and as thorough [as] your comments, it is expecially wonderful." (I had expressed my enjoyment of "Original Sin", a short story which had appeared in Analog in 1972.) Vinge continued, "'Original Sin' was always one of my favorite jobs, yet it was discouragingly hard to sell. The published version differs only slightly from the original I wrote in 1969. By the time I sold it, I had come to the conclusion that either it was my 'most misunderstood' story, or else I simply had bad taste. So your card was extemely welcome...." (Over the years Prof. Vinge and I have sporadically continued the friendly correspondence; the basement midden-heap contained letters from him in 1984 and 1985 concerning physics issues related to other stories he wrote.)
• Jeremy Bernstein - an undated note on New Yorker stationery, envelope postmarked 30 August 1981, re my message concerning a minor and somewhat arcane mathematical error in one of his science articles involving map projections. He wrote, "As you may imagine I am swimming in letters about Mercator. Yours was one of the most enlightening. Dyson, who also wrote, did the calculation with metrics and got the same answer. I am preparing an amplification."

Many thanks to all of the above correspondents! (And to the authors: if any of you would rather not see excerpts quoted from your letters, please let me know and I will remove them. My main reason for reprinting your words is to prevent them from being lost again!)

- Wednesday, March 07, 2001 at 06:00:59 (EST)

- Tuesday, March 06, 2001 at 05:45:36 (EST)

- Sunday, March 04, 2001 at 21:17:22 (EST)

It seemed likely to me then, and still does, that the real villian in our story was time. We didn't have enough time to think; we were all over-booked on tight-scheduled tasks. As a whole, I estimate that the office took on triple the jobs that it had people to handle. So instead of kindling fires, potentially creative sparks faded and then went out entirely. We had good bureaucratic reasons for trying to do too much at once: we were a new outfit and needed to establish ourselves with some quick victories. But spread so thin, and working so hard just to keep up, we failed.

- Saturday, March 03, 2001 at 07:32:10 (EST)

But from this flotsam of chaotic floes
Twin icebergs nudge their crests into the air.
Their domes ride diffidently, soft, scarce seen
Amidst the snowy scarps. They slumber. Yet
Beneath the jumbled and distressed terrain
Inverted massifs hang, hidden and huge.
Two giants veil their faces. No one knows
The benthic currents pressing on their keels ---
The forces that will stir their souls to wake.

We are those icebergs, you and I. Great hearts
Are snagged and smothered underneath the heaps
Of daily happenstance ... tangled and trapped
By this-and-that-ness piled upon our lives ...
Held fast by icy manacles ... until
One day --- crash! crack! --- the mountains move. Two minds
Trembling together can free themselves. We sail
South, to a proud and fearsome rendezvous:
To melt into the ocean of the world.

- Wednesday, February 28, 2001 at 20:07:41 (EST)

But it's a slow, difficult process, not likely to pay off quickly. We can make it harder on ourselves by prematurely granting monopoly rights --- patents, for instance --- on parts of the genomic library: giving ownership to early explorers who don't actually know what they're reading, but who glimpse a few key words and secretly hope to get lucky and stake out a claim to turf that will turn into a fortuitous gold mine. Yes, fencing off intellectual property encourages early investment. It also encourages misallocation of resources, general unfairness, and slower long-term progress in human understanding.

- Tuesday, February 27, 2001 at 06:05:47 (EST)

The big question to always ask with proposed new ways of life: what are we overlooking? A strongly-connected network will always exhibit new, unanticipated behaviors, due to the complex feedback loops that the network possesses ... and those feedback loops can suddenly transition from one mode to another under slight perturbation. Rare but catastrophic events will happen. These are uninsurable risks --- "once in a millennium" floods, unprecedented interest rate fluctuations, extraordinary infrastructure failures --- due to what seem to be incredible conjunctions of coincidence. By their very nature, it's impossible to gather enough data to predict such exceptional events, even in principle. They've never happened before, and by the time one could have seen the signs to anticipate them, conditions have changed. Another surprise is brewing, not the one you're watching for. Want to let your refrigerator monitor your food supply, your car decide your route to work, your software agent invest your retirement savings? Be prepared for a "whoops! - we never thought of that" meltdown.

The solution: go slow. Don't bet the farm on the newest new thing. Have a fallback strategy, suspenders and a belt, a buffer zone against surprise. Don't panic, and don't envy those who gamble and, in the short term, make big profits. This too shall pass.

- Saturday, February 24, 2001 at 20:03:22 (EST)

Bottom line: at ~$10,000 to get a pound into orbit on a manned mission, with a ~1% risk of catastrophe per launch, it's not a smart game to be in. And don't blame NASA's bureaucracy for the failure of space to get off the ground ... it's not likely that anybody else could have done any better, given real-world constraints.

A better challenge, if we need one, would be to colonize the oceans. The sea offers a hostile environment, but not impossibly so ... a wealth of known underexploited resources ... relatively easy and cost-effective access ... huge volumes to occupy ... and plenty of opportunity for new discovery. Shall we get down?

- Friday, February 23, 2001 at 21:26:55 (EST)

" ... Theories can be crudely organized in a family tree where each might, at least in principle, be derived from more fundamental ones above it. Almost at the top of the tree lie general relativity and quantum field theory. The first level of descendents includes special relativity and quantum mechanics, which in turn spawn electromagnetism, classical mechanics, atomic physics, and so on. Disciplines such as computer science, psychology and medicine appear far down in the lineage.

"All these theories have two components: mathematical equations and words that explain how the equations are connected to what is observed in experiments. ... Crudely speaking, the ratio of equations to words decreases as one moves down the tree, dropping near zero for very applied fields such as medicine and sociology. In contrast, theories near the top are highly mathematical, and physicists are still struggling to comprehend the concepts that are encoded in the mathematics.

"The ultimate goal of physics is to find what is jocularly referred to as a theory of everything, from which all else can be derived. ...

"A theory of everything would probably have to contain no concepts at all."

- Thursday, February 22, 2001 at 18:27:06 (EST)

• correspondence: human-to-human email and bulletin boards ("mail", "readnews", etc.)
• data sharing: retrieval from and contribution to archives ("ftp", etc.)
• tool sharing: remote login to computational resources ("telnet", etc.)

Some of the above is illustrated by ^z's checkered history on parts of the international network now loosely known as the Web. In brief:

• ~1976-79 --- on the ARPANET (aka DDN = "Defense Data Network"), 300 baud dial-in from the Caltech physics department via a local Terminal Access Controller (a "TAC", e.g. USC's Information Sciences Institute) and then through "telnet" connections to MIT-MC, the "Macsyma Consortium" machine, on which ^z derived and checked messy equations in his thesis (see "Spinning Sources of Gravitational Waves", the ^zhurnal entry of 11 April 2000); also faster dedicated connections from Caltech to UC Berkeley, to run FORTRAN programs on a then-supercomputer CDC-7600 in a vain attempt to simulate nucleosynthesis in stars with neutron-star cores (see "Soft on the Outside, Crunchy in the Middle", the ^zhurnal entry of 1 May 2000)
• ~1982-87 --- via the kindness of MITRE Corporation (mitre.org), dial-in access to the Internet and email services, mainly for correspondence with colleagues in academia, industry, and government labs (which led to an encounter with the "Hannover Hacker" and then Cliff Stoll, to be told at another time!)
• ~1984-92 --- via the kindness of the David Taylor Research Center (oasys.dt.navy.mil), email and other resources for software development and remote database access
• ~1985-90 --- less-than-glorious experiences with Prodigy, CompuServe, and America OnLine (as it was then known, a local and rather shaky service) each of which was a closed stand-alone mini-universe
• ~1985-93 --- extremely productive work on the "Twilight Clone", a FIDOnet node and one of the largest Macintosh-oriented bulletin board systems on the East Coast (the Clone was run from Paul Heller's basement, and evolved into his.com)
• ~1992-98 --- alumni.caltech.edu, which thanks to the Caltech Alumni Association offered email, programming facilities, and Web server space on a fine succession of machines. Here were hosted ^z's first Web pages ... including most notably the Shakespeare Stack Archive and the "Best of" Gibbon's Decline and Fall; alas, a hacker infestation forced the system off the 'Net for some months, and when it eventually returned the new security procedures for access made it too difficult to use remotely
• ~1998-now --- Tripod, an early free (advertiser-supported) Web hosting service, where ^z placed his pages for lack of a better solution when alumni.caltech.edu became inaccessible ... and, all things considered, Tripod has been one of the more satisfactory of the free services, though it lacks many of the advanced features which one might wish for in an Internet host (and it of necessity has all those obnoxious ads!)
• ~1999-now --- his.com at Heller Information Services, where the ^zhurnal project has been happily perking along for almost two years now ... wonderful service from real human beings --- thanks, Paul!

- Wednesday, February 21, 2001 at 19:36:16 (EST)

But moving from engineering to computer science, does the same rule apply? A common adage says, "Any field with 'science' in its name, isn't one!" This is usually quoted as a slur on political science, social science, etc. Does the proverb apply to the theory of computation? Donald Knuth suggests (in his essay "Computer Science and Mathematics", American Scientist 61 (1973), reprinted in Mathematics: People, Problems, Results Vol. III (1984)):

"One of my mathematician friends told me he would be willing to recognize computer science as a worthwhile field of study as soon as it contains 1,000 deep theorems. This criterion should obviously be changed to include algorithms as well as theorems --- say, 500 deep theorems and 500 deep algorithms. But even so, it is clear that computer science today doesn't measure up to such a test, if 'deep' means that a brilliant person would need many months to discover the theorem or the algorithm. Computer science is still too young for this; I can claim youth as a handicap. We still don't know the best way to describe algorithms, to understand them or prove them correct, to invent them, or to analyze their behavior, although considerable progress is being made on all these fronts. The potential for '1,000 deep results' is there, but only perhaps 50 have been discovered so far."

How much has changed during the three decades since that was written? Is CS up to 100 "deep results" now? (Who's counting?) A cynical thought: perhaps if the field moves out of the manaical money-making mode that it has been in during the 1990s, progress will be faster....

- Monday, February 19, 2001 at 18:12:38 (EST)

- Sunday, February 18, 2001 at 16:24:24 (EST)

• No surprises! --- keep everyone informed of all relevant developments, so nobody gets blindsided by bad news or needlessly thrown into an embarrassing situation
• No enemies! --- disagree when necessary, but don't hold grudges; today's adversary may be tomorrow's ally on a more important issue (Cf. "Scathing Remarks" in the ^zhurnal of 5 July 1999)
• No panics! --- don't over-react; take a deep breath and put the crisis du jour into a larger perspective

- Saturday, February 17, 2001 at 10:06:39 (EST)

- Friday, February 16, 2001 at 20:37:23 (EST)

• money --- in the generalized sense of goods, things (tangible and intangible) that can be bought and sold. Some instances of such "stuff" that account for most of the worldwide Gross Human Product are:
  • food: not a big budget item --- nowadays, for most of us, in the wealthier parts of the globe --- but getting enough to eat has been the major preoccupation of people for eons, and remains so in many places
  • shelter: ranging from mere survival-necessary protection against the elements, to comfort and security
  • knowledge: science & engineering of all sorts ... problem-solving know-how inherited and shared among people, including language itself ... structured education and independent learning --- the wellsprings of modern society's productivity
  • entertainment & æsthetics: literature, popular music, sports, fine arts, etc. ... the entire spectrum from mindless time-wasting to the most profound products of the mind
  • matter & energy: natural resources including land itself ... materials raw and processed ... plus the transformational forces needed to work our wills on substances
  • transportation & communication: moving people and things from where they are to where they need to be ... likewise with voices, pictures, and other data
  • information storage & processing: in modern times, high-speed computing systems ... in centuries past, media such as clay tablets for inventories plus human scribes to tally the numbers and balance the books
  • health: the arts of medicine applied to keep body and mind in good working order ... which consume an ever-increasing fraction of social production, often spent in a vain effort to cheat death during the final months of a person's existence ... but which also have saved and lengthened and improved countless lives
  • peace: personal safety against attack by others ... prevention of assault, rape, murder, thievery, fraud, etc. ... and punishment (or other deterrence) of offenders, all aiming to help "keep the peace"
• mechanism --- how major human goals (such as those catalogued above) are acquired or achieved:
  • work: individual and group labor, both physical and intellectual
  • savings: the accumulated results of work, when not all that has been produced is immediately consumed
  • institutions & facilities: schools of learning, hospitals, libraries, factories, stores, roads, telecommunications networks, etc.
  • governments: organizations charged with making the rules and implementing them ... redistributors of resources ... peacekeeping (or warmaking) outfits such as police, courts, and national defense forces ... enforcers of the Social Contract
• meaning --- things that shine their light on all other human endeavors ... and that people look forward to with anticipation in youth, or look back upon fondly in old age
  • family: as animals we instinctively love and value our close kin, perhaps to an irrational degree (though evolutionary theory suggests some genetic reasons) ... and often we form new bonds through marriage and adoption
  • friends: our intellectual family --- comrades, colleagues, and others with whom we have shared experiences or common interests
  • freedom: liberty ... the right to choose, wisely or otherwise ... and to take responsibility for our actions
  • faith & philosophy: religious and secular beliefs concerning issues of deepest concern ... conceptions of good & evil, right & wrong, origins & destinies ... the ultimate foundations of existence

- Thursday, February 15, 2001 at 07:44:38 (EST)

• data compression --- packing more meaning into fewer bits
• stochasticity --- escaping from determinism via apparent randomness
• pattern discovery --- revealing new relationships among sound, rhyme, rhythm, and concept

The individual works exhibit a variety of styles and themes; an asterisk in the listing indicates an exceptionally short piece (often humorous), and a plus is a longer one. (I tend to like the more recent efforts better, but I'm biased.) In chronological order, they are:

• Trade-Offs ... contrasting meanings *
• Color Chains ... hues & time
• CaveThought ... geo-mind
• Down Danger Drive ... risky behavior +
• Uncivil Servants ... bureaucracy *
• Pyramid Peaking ... celebrity-worship *
• Right & Level ... justice +
• IncomParable ... isolation *
• Ascent ... togetherness *
• High Glider ... satellite imagery
• Suburban Deer ... four-legged locusts
• Cosmic Context ... large-scale evolution +
• Awaitingness ... early morning *
• Sundance ... street scene +
• Vidiocy ... gaming *
• Lifelines ... biographic trajectories +
• InfraStructure ... servants +
• Seven Manes ... hair

- Wednesday, February 14, 2001 at 07:42:19 (EST)

But now I've discovered a famous (more or less) Mark Zimmermann, via search engine. Last year, web pages began to appear in ever-increasing numbers for a professional soccer player: Mark Zimmermann, Stürmer for the Stuttgart Kickers. Compared to me, the German native MZ is about 21 years younger, less hairy, a little taller, significantly lighter, doubtless in far better shape, likes to eat Bratwurst (I'm a vegetarian), and clearly makes more money and has more numerous fans. But a career in sports is always risky --- so my advice, Mark, is to save every pfennig for the future. Viel Gluck, Herr Zimmermann!

- Tuesday, February 13, 2001 at 07:48:04 (EST)

Near a power center, judgment similarly becomes twisted. Even with the noblest of intentions one loses the ability to reason, to choose wisely, to act with justice. As Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It becomes impossible to release the reins of control. Thomas Jefferson wrote concerning slavery (in a letter to John Holmes, 22 April 1820) "... as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." A nation was trapped ... doomed to eventual Civil War.

(Cf. ^zhurnal entry of 21 February 2000, "For Your Own Good".)

- Monday, February 12, 2001 at 20:54:16 (EST)

Alas, my further digging has not yet been able to confirm Napoleon as a source of any version of this sentiment. Some trails lead to Robert A. Heinlein, and others to fragments of War and Peace --- which reminded me of a striking comment by Leo Tolstoy in Book I, Part 3, Chapter 7. (I'm slowly making progress through the excellent Ann Dunnigan translation of the novel, but still have ~80% to go.) It's hard to tell the truth, especially about complex events. As Tolstoy says:

"But Boris noticed that Rostov was on the point of making fun of Berg, and adroitly changed the subject. He asked Rostov to tell them where and how he had received his wound. This pleased Rostov and he began telling them about it, growing more and more impassioned as he talked. He described the Schöngraben action exactly as men who have taken part in battles generally do describe them, that is, as they would like them to have been, as they have heard them described by others, and making them sound more glorious, and quite unlike what they actually were. Rostov was a truthful young man and would on no account have told a deliberate lie. He began with the intention of relating everything exactly as it happened, but imperceptibly, unconsciously, and inevitably, he slipped into falsehood. If he had told the truth to his listeners, who, like himself, had heard numerous stories of cavalry attacks, had formed a definite idea of what an attack was, and were expecting to hear just such a story, either they would not have believed him, or, still worse, they would have thought that Rostov himself was at fault, since what generally happened to those taking part in a cavalry charge had not happened to him. He could not tell them simply that everyone had set out at a trot, that he had fallen from his horse, sprained his arm, and then had run from a Frenchman into the woods as fast as his legs would carry him. Besides, to describe everything as it was, telling only what had really happened, would have required great self-control. To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it. His listeners expected to hear how, fired with excitement and beside himself, he had swept down on the enemy's square like a tempest, cut his way in, slashing right and left, and how his saber had tasted blood and he had fallen exhausted, and so on. And these are the things he told them."

- Sunday, February 11, 2001 at 20:31:57 (EST)