June 30, 2004
The vig
Today, with great fanfare, Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board announced that interest rates would be raised. Greenspan's role in the world would have seemed remarkable to any number of past generations. Thirty years ago, Greenspan's visibility might have been surprising, but Paul Volcker's importance in breaking the back of inflation in the Seventies (and Greenspan's near-deification during the Nineties boom) vastly improved the Fed Chairman's visibility. Eighty years ago, it might have shocked government officials that interest rates would be used as a tool of economic policy to manage growth, but we're all Keynesians now. Two hundred years ago, the very idea of a national bank -- a series of federal reserve banks, in fact -- was a controversial one; Andrew Jackson fulfilled his election promise to decharter the Second National Bank (the first's charter having expired in 1811), and the reserve bank system was not established until the twentieth century. And a thousand years, the mere act of charging interest could have gotten Alan Greenspan excommunicated or worse; following the various dictums of Aristotle, Leviticus, and the Koran, usury was prohibited.
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June 27, 2004
Boomtown rats
In its prime, US Route 40 was America's Victory Highway. It ran from New Jersey to California, its dusty signs and roadside attractions -- from the muffler men to metaphors rising in the desert -- providing an American iconography. Along with its sibling, Route 66, Route 40 provided an echo of the American frontier; the nation's families could pile into their tailfinned chariots and stick a thumb in Frederic Jackson Turner's eye, if only for the space of a vacation. But at the end of June, 1956, Dwight Eisenhower created the interstate highway system with the stroke of a pen, and Route 40 began its slide into irrelevance. In 1964, California decommisioned Route 40; it was a national highway no longer. The diners and flyspecked tourist traps remained to be examined by students of Americana, but the towns that relied on the commercial traffic of Route 40 were doomed. Brownsville, Pennsylvania is a ghost town in a way that not even the distressed steel towns like Alliquippa can quite match up to; its attractive downtown has simply been boarded up and abandoned, perhaps in hopes that its stretch of US 40 will one day hum with commerce again. But when cities lose their commercial reason for being, when jobs go away, they tend not to come back. Mining towns out west and in the Far East don't have much reason to exist once the mines aren't being worked. Diesel engines killed the need for pump towns along the railroad lines of rural America. Engines have been the lifeblood of Motor City, USA since Buick started making them there in the nineteenth century, but as industry has moved away from Detroit and Flint, little has sprung up to replace it. Ruins can coexist with a thriving city, but the slow depopulation of postwar Detroit (dramatically accelerated by white flight after the riots of the '60s and '70s) has left a hollow city, and neither the population decline nor the disappearance of the city center has stopped yet. A thousand years ago, the Fremont people vanished, leaving their ruins -- whole towns, in some cases -- behind them. Five hundred years ago, the Khmer empire began to disintegrate, with the amazing ruins of Angkor Wat remaining as a remnant of their power. Living cities don't have abandoned lots taken over by farmland, because living cities have a reason to exist. When the reason goes, the people go, and the weeds and the rats move in. Without their purpose, cities revert to jungle and prairie. If Detroit's fate will be that of Angkor Wat and Pumpville, Texas, what stories will we tell ourselves to explain where it went?
June 23, 2004
Thinking machines
Many people can lay claim to the title "father of the computer": John Mauchly, Atanasoff and Berry, even Charles Babbage, who died in 1871. But British mathematician Alan Turing's claim is as good as any. Turing's university studies under Max Newman led him to study the "halting problem", the question of whether one could tell in advance whether any formally defined problem in mathematics could be solved by a given algorithm in finite time. For instance, an algorithm could be written to test every possible factorization of a number to determine whether it was prime, which would take a large but finite number of steps. An algorithm attempting to find an odd perfect number, however, might run forever or it might not; while mathematicians haven't been able to find one and can demonstrate that none smaller than 10300 (a number many orders of magnitude higher than the number of atoms in the universe) exist, they haven't been able to prove that there are none to be found. Solving the halting problem for the odd-perfect-number-finding algorithm (which can be written in just 43 characters of C code) would prove the existance or non-existance of such a number, enabling mathematicians to solve an enormous number of currently intractable problems. But through a similar jujitsu involved used by Gödel in his incompleteness theorem, Turing demonstrated that it couldn't be done. There is no general solution to the halting problem; we can wind up a mathematical clock without knowing whether it will wind down. Turing's proof led him to develop the concept of the Turing machine, a sort of idealized computer (back when the term was used to describe people with adding machines), the building block of theoretical computer scientist. But a hugely important proof, even one linked to Gödel's (beloved and often misunderstood) theorem, doesn't always result in one getting namedropped in Neuromancer and used as a character by Neal Stephenson. Alan Turing's fame in popular culture comes not from his mathematical work but from a bit of philosophy.
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June 20, 2004
Forever and a day
Guy Ballard went up Mount Shasta a seeker after wisdom; he came down possessing the knowledge imparted to him by those who had manifested "Luminous Essence of Divine Love." Ballard, who had long studied the Theosophical writings of Madame Blavatsky and her followers, adopted the pen name Godfre Ray King and wrote bestselling books about what the Ascended Masters atop Mount Shasta had told him; first in Los Angeles and then in Chicago, New Jersey, Santa Fe, Ballard and his wife Edna began spreading word of the three-fold truth:
- the knowledge of the Individualized Presence of God which is known as the "Mighty I Am Presence," God in Action
- the use of the Violet Consuming Flame of Divine Love
- the Ascended Masters' use of God's Creative Name, "I AM"
Ballard's I AM movement still exists today, although the Great White Brotherhood's popularity has waned; there are a few practioners, but its cultural importance is largely in the past: an important First Amendment ruling about the rights of new religions; a passing mention in Curt Gentry's The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California; wholesale cribbing for Robert Heinlein's novella, "Lost Legacy". But the I AM movement is still out there, still publishing the truths revealed by its beloved ascended master, the legendary Comte Saint-Germain.
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June 17, 2004
The Mudville Nine
The Detroit Pistons just beat the Los Angeles Lakers in the biggest upset in the NBA finals in the last thirty years. Sharp-eyed observers may note that while there are plenty of pistons in Motor City, there are no lakes in Los Angeles. (There's is, however, a river; the description of it as "treated sewage and oily street runoff" can be used as a metaphor depending on how one feels about L.A.) How did the most successful profession sports team in the City of Angels get such an unrepresentative name? They brought it with them; like so many Angelenos, the Lakers are immigrants. The Minneapolis Lakers played in the land of a thousand lakes between 1947 and 1960, before leaving for the lights of Hollywood. The Lakers kept the name upon arrival in California. The Utah Jazz, similarly, get their name from the fact that they originally played in New Orleans, not from a secret fondness for Max Roach out on the Great Salt Lake. Team names used to simply be nicknames. The Pittsburgh Pirates got their name thanks to their success in snatching successful players from other clubs; the dreadful Cleveland Spiders became the Naps, after their Napoleon Lajoie, then the Indians in reference to Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot Indian from Maine (or, quite possibly, as a cheap marketing gimmick); the storied Brooklyn Dodgers were first the Trolley Dodgers, then briefly the Brooklyn Robins. But names are more stable now; basketball's Washington Wizards were unveiled in 1996, the owners having sensibly decided that the murder capital was a poor choice to host a team named the bullets (and having resisted the urge to go back to calling the Zephyrs). The Houston Colt .45s became the infinitely less bad-ass Astros in 1966. As a general rule, teams keep the same names; major league sports are a big business, and the brief uptick in sales when a name switches might not make up to long-term damage to the brand. (How many more Colt .45 jerseys would sell throughout America?) So even generic names that bear no real relationship to a team or its environs -- the New Orleans Hornets, the Tampa Bay Lightning -- have a long and happy life ahead of them. Or they will until the teams they are attatched to move elsewhere: wherever Macon's former minor-league hockey team is now, I wish them well, but when you're not in Macon, you're just not a Whoopie.
June 13, 2004
Burning bright
Beaver stole fire from the pine trees. Man stole fire from Kondole the whale. And Prometheus stole fire from the gods. But every advance in illumination since has resulted more from hard work and a little bit of luck. Michel-Eugène Chevreul invented the clean-burning candle after years of studying the chemical composition of dyes. William Procter, candlemaker, and James Gamble, soapmaker, were two young craftsmen in the bustling river town of Cincinnati when they met; their wives were sisters, and on the back of that connection, a vast commercial enterprise was built; as the more interesting historical bits of Richard Powers' Gain lay out, the waste products of soap could be used to make candles and vice versa. Proctor & Gamble and their cousins (and the nineteenth century invention of the candle-molding machine) helped drive the practice of chandlery out of the home and into the factory. The discovery of spermaceti, the substance that gives sperm whales their name, provided gainfully employment to Melville's whalers, as they set forth from Nantucket and the rest of New England looking for sperm whales. Whale oil was used not just in lamps but also to make hard, sweet-smelling, long-burning candles. And when the Civil War disrupted the whaling industry, the men drilling for oil in Pennsylvania created a market beyond patent rheumatism cures; the invention of kerosene and kerosene lanterns vaulted fossil fuels ahead of whale oil as personal lighting technology. Then came Edison. Although the technology behind the lightbulb predated Edison's team, they created the first long-lasting carbon fillament, capable of lasting for hundreds of hours (and more; one bulb has lasted for a hundred years, meaning that Phoebus should be around to turn the poor thing off any day now). But the incandescent bulb generates light as a side effect of its electrical resistance; it might be better thought of as a heat source we can read by. Newer technologies, such as compact fluourescent bulbs, which are some four to six times more energy efficient, have become more popular; the energy savings that would be realized by a nationwide conversion are immense enough that Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, more usually associated with nuclear physics and supercomputer engineering, has a design lab for better lamps. But there's life in the incandescent bulb yet; bulbs using longer-lasting, more efficient "nanotube" filaments may hit the market within five years. That's five more years, at least, before the world faces a crisis even LBL's scientists -- even Gyro Gearloose -- might not be able to solve: when the incandescent lightbulb goes, what icon will the world use to indicate a bright idea?
June 11, 2004
Such an ancient pitch
In the fourth century, the former bishop of Avila, a man named Priscillian, was executed. He was a heretic; his beliefs were largely Manichaean, he asserted the accuracy and doctrinal relevance of apocryphal scriptures, and his claim that lying in service of a greater good was no sin roused Augustine to issue a rebuttal. These were not the crimes he was executed for. The crime that earned Priscillian of Avila the sword in the year 385 was sorcery. Priscillian was killed for witchcraft, and he would not be the last. In 1324, for instance, Alice Kyteler, the Witch of Kilkenny, escaped a death sentence with the aid of her family, but her maid, Petronella of Meath, became the accused witch burned at the stake in Ireland. Pope Alexander IV had ordered investigations limited to those witches who were also heretics; in 1398, theologicians had decided that all witchcraft was innately heretical. In 1486, two experienced witch hunters published a manual, the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), and a new day dawned for witch hunters across Europe.
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June 08, 2004
Venus inverse
A handful of people who got out of bed at dawn this morning and strapped on welders' goggles got to witness something no living person had seen: the Transit of Venus, a sort of miniature eclipse (as Venus appears to be much smaller than the moon from an earthbound perspective, the vast majority of the sun is not blotted out). Last observed in 1882, the Venus transits were once major events. Seventeenth century observers became astronomical icons; eighteenth century observers travelled the world in attempted to see what could be seen; in the nineteenth century, Congress put aside hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance the American Transit of Venus Expeditions and John Philip Sousa commemorated it with a march. But as the near-neighbor who writes Slate's "Chatterbox" notes, today's transit was largely a non-event. The nineteenth century was the high point of America's fascination with the sky; it was the dawn of American universities on the European model, with observatories springing up at colleges and even high schools. Drawings of the sun had been crucial pieces of data ever since Galileo first recorded a sunspot, and the 1882 transit was to be the moment when the art of photography could be wed to the science of astronomy. And it was; reams of data were recovered, and the accurate measurements allowed astronomers to determine the parallax of the sun, and thus its distance from the earth. But that was a hundred and twenty years ago; we now know the distance of the sun from the earth. Men have walked on the moon and robots have discovered evidence of water on Mars since then. In most cities, it's too bright at night to see the stars. The last time a large group of people eagerly awaited a rare yet recurring astronomical event, it ended poorly. So the event was largely ignored: a few brief mentions in the newspaper, a flurry of announcements and information from astronomy fans, and the Chatterbox family gathered out on a parking garage in suburban Washington to see a twice-in-a-lifetime event. But whenever there's a scientific anniversary or event, at least one highly influencial group can be counted on to successfully bring it to the attention of millions of members of the general public, along with references to expert opinion about just why it's important -- as long as it can be represented using the letter "O". John Philips Sousa would be proud.
June 07, 2004
Cartoonish supervillainy
In "Gaudy Night", his essay analyzing comic books as moral fables, Jim Henley asks whether superheoes are so far removed from real experience as to be sheer fantasy:
(more...)It is certainly true that, with few exceptions, "People don't dress in funny costumes and run around on rooftops beating each other up -- they don't gain superpowers and devote themselves to the common good -- they don't form clubs and societies to combat evil scientists and giant purple starfish." But would they if they could? If people gained superpowers (our speculative extrapolation), would anybody dress up and fight on rooftops, devote themselves to the common good, or try to take over the world?