The Basement in the Attic

My random meanderings on lived experiences & the thoughts they generate.

I’ve put in all my entries from a friend’s old blog. (Thanks Glen!) That blog was themed: an eatery/bar as far from Starbucks but always right around the corner, with a proprietor of some mystery. There are a LOT of them, so check back: I ranted about some weird stuff like GWOT and polarized glasses. Oh, and if you wanted to know, the way my .mac account got this rather interesting name is because that’s what you get when you pound both fists into the keyboard in frustration: every possible combination I could think up was used.

What cancelled missile program embodied the 3 most significant improvements in rocketry:

  1. rigidity provided by pressurized tanks, instead of the ribs-and-stringers of airplane fuselages, used in the V2.

  2. gimbaled nozzles, instead of carbon vanes in the exhaust stream of the V2.

  3. separable warhead

Who was the contractor, when was it cancelled? Did any fly? Were any built?

Answer: Awarded to Convair in 1946 by the Army Air Force, it was designated MX-774, it was cancelled in July, 1947 in a large postwar defense rollback. None were built, none flew. A smaller demonstrator program grew out of this, the HIROC (HI altitude ROCket) RTV-A-2. They were flown from 1947-8 at White Sands Missile range, there is one on display at the Air Force Museum. Unbelievable. The USAF Museum site says this missile was developed with Convair’s own money in the 1940’s. At the tail-end of the Big Egos of Aviation, we all think of the excesses of the industry. Then little jewels like this appear when you sift through the sand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTV-A-2_Hiroc

Source: “To Defend & Deter: The legacy of the United States Cold War Missile Program.” John C. Lonnquest & David F. Winkler, USACERL Special Report 97/01, November 1996.

Well, I was melting my head by reading the Global Guerilla blog (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/) which I ran into from Defense Tech (http://www.defensetech.org/). If you're reading this, you need to read those. Them. Whatever. The former is spawning my scribbling now, that, and Charly's excellent chicken sandwich. Try it, you'll like it.

The point here is, as a professional net-geek, I seek out my superiors at all times, to learn. And this guy's so wildly beyond my understanding that I am reminded of sitting in the hall listening to Murray Gell-Mann at the Nobel Laureates Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College. (1976, I think) You really need to read this, but here's the quote that got me: “A failed state is worse than a rogue state.” Because a failed state becomes a “Temporary Autonomous Zone” where the Global Guerillas can train.

So our leadership in Washington has not only failed to make any inroads in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), they've managed to make it worse in a way they couldn't even imagine. Think about it like this: everyone in the world hates the US now more than ever. In addition, we have now manufactured the best training ground for the bad guys. Where else could they learn that our soldier's armor is useless against low-angle blast-fragmentation effects from the side? Where else could they learn that the Hummers are paper-thin? Where else could somebody find out that the reactive armor of the Stryker is worthless? Or that the Bradley is still an aluminum can full of soon-to-be-killed soldiers? And the Abrams has still got less than 70 hrs MTBO? That's “major overhaul”, capital “O”.

All this tech, all this treasure we've spent because we're so afraid to spend blood. And it's gotten us exactly nowhere because someone wielded the sword with inaccuracy. And this from the lady who cut my hair recently: Did you know that, apparently, the US Embassy & consulates in Mexico are crowded with young males applying to enter the US via service in the Armed Forces? I believe the Marines would be the preferred route, but I may be wrong.

It would make sense that we'd adopt a “Foreign Legion” without overtly doing so. One of the admirable things about the Foreign Legion is that it is plain old publicly just that. Perhaps we ought to adopt a similar honesty. Heck, ours could be the first US-funded force that actually follows the international treaties on human rights. (Couldn't risk Colin sitting in a War Crimes trial, no, nor Rumster, Halburton-Cheney, or the Cowboy President hisself.)

We could create this new force to actually participate in the UN peacekeeping, taking orders from them ferriners as the commitment may require. Anyway, go off and wrap your head around the concepts at Global Guerillas, it will be enlightening and depressing. It shows you how frickin' vulnerable we are (4% of electric-nodes taken out would darken 60% of the US) and all the while conveying that this newfound understanding is a 1st step to fixing the problem. Oh, and read up on “stigmergey.”

I worked in Museums for nearly 20 years, 3 of 'em. I've been working on tradeshows for almost 10. And in conversation today, it was brought to my attention that my employers suck, but the job's ideal. So true.

We're currently in the 2-week load-in for a week-long show devoted to very large machinery. For your benefit, even a big show loads in about 5 to 7 days, and a long show is 4 days. Got it?

Man, this show is cool. I wish I had pictures, but I've never thought Kodak made anything more understandable to the audience than a good explanation. A picture is worth a 1000 words, but the words make more sense.

There are cranes to move some of this stuff that are unimaginably strong. They are clearly designed to pick up heavy things under relatively low ceilings. They'd look right at home on the hangar-deck of an aircraft carrier. The exhibitors bring in machines that are 30 feet tall, and will shave a ton of aluminum into a mountain of chips in an 8-hour shift.

Ever seen what a 1-ton block of aluminum looks like? It's not as big as you think... But taking off 1/10000th of an inch at a pass, you've gotta move to make that deadline. There are booths with multiple examples of multiple-million dollar automated thingies that can make widgets without human intervention for years. Some of these beasts run, once installed, 24x7. In fact, they're all mostly intended for that duty-cycle.

The age-old image of the drill, mill or lathe with the various sprayers or squirters spewing oil or coolant onto the work as the removal process goes along are passe. Long passe, to ask the salesmen. Nowadays, the cool folks get rid of all that heat in the chips. Concentrate on that: the tool flies so fast and whacks off so much material that the waste-heat is carried away in the waste-material.

And you may've heard of the on-line service that you upload the CAD file for your part, and FedEx brings it tomorrow. Takes an extra day (I think) if you want it in metal. Well, $24,900 and you've got that at home: A “solid” printer, produces a 3-D part in couple of hours.

Just incredible, I think I want to get back into older cars with one of those: I'll just build the godammned part instead of waiting for it to arrive from Sweden. A week after the last of these monsters is loaded onto it's low-boy (count the wheels, buckaroo, that thing's heavy.) we'll have a room full of people trying to sell the tools, practices, and incentives to motivate employees to frenzies of productivity. And then radiologists, then hardware, then dentists, and drug companies, and telecom-geeks, and... It's like a museum that changes every couple of weeks. I strongly suggest you visit your local exhibit-hall frequently. You'll find a way in, do it: there's always something to learn from any of these things.

I've been catching up on the blog of a midwestern journalist, see for yourself at www.lileks.com. Star Trek fan (weren't we all?), mac-nut, parent, and a returned-to-the-midwest boy. And somehow, he became a conservative. Good liberal upbringing, now he's the token-right at a paper I used to read. Odd. *

The thing is that reading more than a couple at a time, you start to think you know the writer. I suppose that this is like the fans who think the actors are the characters. This maybe a bit more immediate, since you're bonding with the author. I get this creepy feeling like I'm eavesdropping or stalking him and family after a while. While I hate that feeling, I DO want to interview him. I'd dig the chance to ask about that conversion, why did he start to think the way he does? In part, because I see his point many times in his stories, though I reject the conclusion or over-arching philosophy.

Every time I think I've got the big picture, I realize how disjointed my thinking is, and hence the motivation to understand his. My belief is that we could spend HOURS waxing on about architecture (see his site), and agree on oh-so many things, and then end with us still polar opposites. (I am a returned-modernist, after living by every word of Tom Wolfe's “From Bauhaus to Our House”) So I want to understand this politco-economic shift.

There is no conceivable way I'd ever stop thinking that gov't is for the people, and privatize (outsource) every service needed to keep society going. But then, I really like Ayn Rand. Karl, my audio-engineering friend, was the first Libertarian I ever met, and so much made sense, it's just that I wasn't buying it all. I still try to understand and explain the value of money according to his beliefs. (The labor standard instead of the gold standard.) So this Lileks guy just seems like we've been chatting for a while, so we know each other, right? I mean, look at all I've learned about him, this is two-way, right? Ahh, the ape-descended life-forms discover again the subtleties of “seeing you doesn't guarantee that you see me” of modern technology. All communication is not two-way. You need to thin

k about that for a while, because when we spent time foraging and grooming, all communication was two-way and immediate. Line of Sight (LOS) defined everything, and our broadcast-senses (smell & hearing) allowed a very limited deviation from that scheme. Considering the size of our visual cortex, we can be forgiven for forgetting those broadcast-senses' significance. Do you suppose a dog thinks the same way? Sure, good eyes, but compared to us, extraordinary nose and ears. Would a dog-invented internet be better comprehended by its creators? Would a hawk-invented one seem utterly incomprehensible to its end-users? So I'm wresting myself away from the unilateral intimacy that reading a month of columns by one author has formed in me. I have naught to offer the dinner-conversation anyway. And I can't hang around cigar-smokers without O2 handy...

2025 Note: Mr. Lileks is now quite the backroom mover-shaker in the conservative party. At least here in the midwest, he’s rubbing elbows with the local high-and-mighty. No idea what his opinions are on the MAGA-in-chief, or SCOTUS’ work. Given he has a college-aged daughter, he might surprise me.

Wired has a review of the book “Dear Valued Customer, You are a Loser” by Rick Broadhead <http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64734,00.html> And I know I must check this book out. But the mere theme of the review—that humans are losing “the fight” with technology—seems awfully Wimbeldon-esque.

Not everything is a competition. It just seems to me to be keeping situational awareness of the energy and information density of our toys. Remember the “dangers” of rechargeable batteries? I think it was at Woodstock 2 (gack, but for another time) that the big producer-type of a local radio station stocked up on spare batteries to go do interviews. And the chain on his wallet was a tad conductive... I think he might have a chain-scar on his butt, though I may be unclear on the story.

And info-density is like paint: you can cover more floor (stretch the boundaries of the performance-envelope) but the coat will be thinner. So we have cell phones that have wildly variable alerting systems, sometimes grouped in the UI for easier selection, but have not one clue how to deal with the alerting either per-incident or per-circumstance. (Why can't I silence all incoming notifications unless they're from so-and-so? Why can't the ambient-volume determine the type of notification used, based on other priority-rules?) We have enough programming to reach the new feature-sets (variable alerts) but not enough to employ those new features with ease. Now I should speak in my own offense here, I am notoriously bad at thinking a cool new feature is nowhere to be found, while the guy sitting next to me has had it for a year. So if you're Moto'kia-Ericsony-Glorkdiible-foomwanger-and-Vought cellphone has had all and more than what I described, I'll not be surprised. It doesn't change my basic point. For example: look at the control room of a nuclear plant. Or an airplane. (Let's pick Airbus for their commitment to “envelope protection”) How does that display come even close to informing the naked ape operating it that choice A is correct and choice B is disaster? Let's take the Airbus, shall we? There was a notorious (and horrific video to watch) crash wherein the pilot was essentially fighting the autopilot. The plane dragged along and barely tree-top height, nose pointed to the sky, engines turning, and just finally crashed when (treetops-3 feet) meant so much drag as to pull it down. In other words, over a desert, the plane probably would've flown on for hours in that ridiculous attitude/state until someone noticed the position of a rotary switch on the glareshield. My point? There are a lot factors including human-factors in design and production of something, and currently the cost of producing those human-factors related features are too expensive to apply in sufficient depth to eliminate these racial errors. Should the Space Shuttle be flyable by an 8 year old? Ok so this is not entirely possible, I am thinking of the revised version of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in the last book (#5 of the trilogy). It proceeded to ask the user certain questions about the frequency of light the user was sensitive to, which direction of time the user perceived as forward, how many spacial dimensions the user lived in, and so on. Now that's pretty extreme on the usability scale, but great if you can. No, I expect that the Space Shuttle will always take some training. It's just that I expect that a lot of the training CURRENTLY needed will someday be judged as concessions toward the limits of the user-interface. Hopefully we can produce as much improvement in the overall info-density of current products as we spend on pushing the leading edge out over new territory. (There was a slashdot article on this, talking about fixing the UI as a priority in programming, not just adding capabilities.) How unglamorous, the objective is to wrap the entire sphere of possibilities like Christo, not to spend the time making repairs to the parts already covered. Why doesn't your desk-phone have the same features as your cellphone? Try dialing a 10 digit number on your kitchen phone and see what happens... For the vast majority, the network will reject the call as too many or too few digits. {{UPDATE 2007: Try dialing a US number from overseas: put + in front of the 1, a PRESTO! Works like magic.}} Why? It works on my cell phone 100% of the time. Is it merely dumb instruments? Do IP telephones have these features? How much smarts do we have to imbue our telephones with before we can make them universally useable? Oh I'm out of caffeinated fuzzy-water, I need to go find Charlie for a refill. Sorry to putter off in mid rant (or mid-whine) but one must keep RL in proper perspective to asynchronous-text-messaging. Cheers, and join me at Charlie's, I'll buy.

Most people would live in fear of the rise of a global hegemon, if they could eliminate the future dictator in his/her youth, they would. Me, I'm kissing up to the first (future) world leader, like Lex Luthor, but instead of Australia, I'm angling for the post of “Minister of Cool things.” The future dictator in question is a cat named Miu-Miu.

Saved from a box with her litter-mates, she's proven to be the most intelligent and positively evil creature to walk the earth. Really, Adolph has nothing on this little ghost-grey cat.

Ok, you want evidence.

You need convincing.

And you are seeking tales not of the “my cat's cuter than yours” variety. You want to know the utter ruthless cunning that this creature will employ to get her goals met. You quite rightfully need to know what singular aspect about a particular CAT could make it possible for such an animal (described as the only mammal without a long term memory) to rise in dominion over all of the might of humanity. Well, forget it, I want my eventual posting. If I cough up details now, what are my chances under her regime? See my dilemma? We have some good ancillary evidence that she's working on opposable thumbs. I'm sure she was dismayed to hear the anthropologists on “Scientific American Frontiers” describing that the REAL reason humans are the best tool-makers is our opposable PINKIES: a chimp or ape cannot touch pinky to thumb the way we can to hold tools. Still, the machine she's building under the bed will probably only require a slight mod to install the pinkies, after all the thumb's got the strength. No, there's more. I know, the stories of wreaking havoc then blaming it on the other 2 cats, that's old Disney material. The innocent act when discovered in the kitchen in the middle of the night because tipping the trash-can produced a tad more noise than she expected, that's the stuff of cartoons. Oh, the cute-and-cuddly lap-thing until one of the other cats comes within range; then out comes the really utterly evil slaughterer-of-innocents, well, if she had the launch-codes, that is. Oh no, you mark these words: no matter how much you anthropomorphize your animals, MINE is gonna rule the world FIRST. If you get on the bandwagon now—she seems to be distracted by kibble—you too can have a place in the new world order when it inevitably comes along.

Ok, so Caveat #1 applies here: I'm thinking this out as I go along. It's not perfect, it's not finished, it's just offered for your consideration. The US gov't has a number of competing information-classification systems, one for each telephone extension. We all know the easy ones like Secret, Top Secret, and Unknowable by Mere Mortals. And the classification czar is supposed to oversee the coherent classification and DE-classification of every piece of info. Said czar has little to do in the DE- part these days, mainly he oversees the occultation of ever more of the info of our gov't. Hey, we paid for that info! We the people have a right to ALL the info* of our gov't. It is an imperative, and should be inevitable. (*information, in this sentence, should be used in the broadest sense of the word, encompassing all counter-entropic results of all gov't activities.) So here's my thought experiment. We legislate a “classification budget” into all branches and offices. Every stinkin' piece of info that's got to be classified needs to have a cost and an AUTOMATIC expiration date. I propose something like this: The number of people who “need to know” times the number of years (to a maximum of, say, 50 or 100) is the classification-cost. So a really really secret thing—where only the five of us in this room—that needs to stay buried for as long as possible, should cost as much as an instruction-manual known to every corporal. REVISION 1: this formula is too lenient. We need to make the numbers grow faster. I propose an alternate: The unit is the “classified man-year.” (cmy) CMY=the number of years times (the potential audience-the permitted audience). For right now, the potential audience=total staff of that branch of government, defined at the cabinet-level, as published in the Congressional Record. So let’s go back to something really secret: 5 people at the state department only, and secret for 5 years. So 5x(100,000-5)=499975CMY for that one document. Compare that to an Army First Aid manual: 20*(1,000,000-1,000,000)=zero CMY. Then we give every branch a budget: X classification-man-years to dole out that year. We even make them expend CMY's on keeping that table secret!! When something reaches its “sunset date”, it can only be extended ONCE, and for 50% fewer CMY's than before. Since the various military branches hate each other (oh don't even TRY to prove otherwise) we'll let them each have idiosyncratic nomenclatures. The nomenclature, however, must be made public every year or so, to let us know where the CMY's are being concentrated. A population-distribution would be nice too. Once in place, I then propose we put INFLATION to work. It should become gradually harder to keep old secrets longer. So imagine an old piece of info is classed at the max (retroactively) and then reclassed at the 50% of the original max as permitted herein. I propose that the reclass should cost at least as much as the original, perhaps more, in real dollars. Oh, yeah, did I mention the money? This should all be to the end of simply quantifying the costs of classification. Total budget=10^10 CMY's, for let's say $10^9. Or some equally catchy little way. Now the people in the know are going to strike back by classifying my tax records at 1 CMY, guaranteeing they're available to the Wall St. Journal in about 7 minutes. Not so fast there, Conservative Buckaroo. My information is MINE, I may've submitted it to you (who are bound to the CMY accounting for EVERYTHING) but I am NOT. My information—all of it—is private for my life. I can bequeath it's privacy to ONE generation and it is assumed from the outset that that inheritance is given by default. (Anyone wishing to see two-generation-old info must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there is no 2nd generation to exercise the right to privacy.) Ok, this last part's a bit dodgy, I know. But with your help, I know we can work it out. There is a way to do this, and we need to. Guys like Aftergood are not always going to be around, and administrations like this one aren't going away. So go to your thoughtful spot and THINK about it, goddammit, we don't have all day.

MORE Fun with Sunglasses 27 Jun 2004 Ok, I've written about my “Cross-Polarized Sunglasses” now I'll write about my “IGY Glasses.” IGY is the name of a song by Donald Fagen about a future that's right out of the retro-futurist movement. Look for the excellent short story “The Gernsback Continuum” (William Gibson) to see what I mean.

These glasses-another cheapy pair from my local grocery store-have a really subtle blue-shift in them. They remove all of the “brown” when you wear them. Everything takes on a cleaner, sharper twinge that allows one on a sunny day to think this really IS the future. The sky's bluer, the chrome's shinier, and there's none of that mundane rose-tinted nonsense that others think makes the world look so lovely. I figure the world's color-temp is pushed up a couple of k °K. Now we're not talking BLUE here, just “minus X% red-yellow.” Its pretty subtle, as I'm rather given to headaches by things like “blue blocker” and yellow lenses. Strong color-change, and I'm paralyzed. (Yep, wore B&L G-15 for YEARS) But these are great! They're a little modernist touch to the ride home. A one-notch twist on the harshness scale that makes things seem to be more edgy and efficient than they really are.

The spalling concrete on that bridge support loses its symbolistic show of decay, and becomes something to be fixed. The rusty Le Sabre bearing down on me changes to a dark burgundy. The glint off the officer's mirror shades has just that much more menace than she's intended, making the comic relief that much more immediately enjoyable. (Sadly, they took them from me, so the overnight in jail resulting from my uncontrollable laughter was devoid of their positivising effects.) Yeah, they'e probably not exactly good for my eyes, so kiddies, don't try this yourself until age-related myopia sets in. But once you're 35, ride the wild stallion baby!!

Ok, I'll admit this right off: I would no longer be considered a young person by any but my parents and their peers. And as we all know, our parents are older than dirt... I heard a young (<20) person on NPR interviewed about the Olympics' symbolism for world peace, and the first thought in my head was “PAH! Kid, you have no idea. When you'd see the East Germans whipping the US swimmers, or the US/USSR hockey matches (1980 notwithstanding), that’s when you'd realize that the Olympics were the only peaceful venue for international competition.” Then I shut up.

True, I haven't watched an Olympics since... Uh... Diligently? Thoroughly? since 1972, and we all know how that went... So I might be out of touch... But I paused, because though I am not “young” anymore* I am not so far from it that I've forgotten the feeling that all the world's leaders are old. Profoundly old. And that added doubt: maybe this kid is right.

Perhaps we've foiled an opportunity by thinking “Well, we're out of the Cold War, everything's peachy...” And how “out” of the Cold War are we really? There exists one homogeneous and a heterogenous bunch of Nuclear Arsenals with a significant percentage on high alert. How not-Cold-War is that? I think in fact the US has most of its triad in the same state of readiness that it always has been, right? If that's all correct, then us grown-ups have severly fucked up. If not one portion of the US triad can be disarmed (the air force would surely be the one to go, and the one to fight it tooth and nail) then what's Pakistan or ISRAEL to do? Or France? Who ya gonna follow? So maybe this kid is right.

The players have changed, there's one bigger team and a lot of smaller ones represented on the playing field of violence, but in point of fact, we are no better off than we were pre-1989. Now doesn't that just suck. So maybe an Olympic Truce is not such a bad deal after all. Be tough to implement in the kind of quagmires our military has been sent into, but not impossible. Just keep remembering the Christmas truce in WW1. Just keep thinking about a tree, some carols and crossing no-man's land. Just keep trying to push it forward, every two years (winter/summer games) a little bit. This time, I was sold on it. Maybe I can sell you on it. Next time, we both sell two or more people. Just keep it creeping up, because the lunacy will never stop, the rationality must keep spreading itself by will. “Peace. Please.” —me

*I've officially left the “18-44” demographic that Homer Simpson belongs to when he grabs the can of “Nuts & Gum: Together at Last.”