One reason math is so satisfying is that it allows you to see order in what is otherwise the randomness of life. For instance, the famous Fibonacci sequence, which shows up in countless natural patterns like this:
Math is also satisfying when it helps you understand what parts of life truly are random or "chaotic," rather than adhering to patterns you haven't yet figured out. The most obvious example is the minute-by-minute movement of weather systems. The world's vast weather-forecasting computers can assess the layers and eddies of heat and moisture in the air and tell you where "convective activity" -- thunderstorms -- is more and less likely to occur. (An example from NOAA here. I spent hours looking at such stuff in my pre-China piloting days.) But a day before landfall, they can't really be sure whether a hurricane will hit New Orleans or someplace in the next state.
So I was grateful to discover, via Michael Ham's Later On blog, another mathematical tool with surprising usefulness in daily life -- and one that, to my chagrin, I had never heard of before. It is called Benford's law, and it has to do with the distribution of numbers we use to count many naturally-occurring phenomena.
I've received a request from Barbara Kaye at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville for participants in an online survey of how the Internet affects political activities and views. Like any online survey, this one is by definition non-random. But I believe it is legit, and is a continuation of surveys done after the past three presidential elections. Here is an abstract of a paper based on a previous survey.
She says she is "specifically looking for liberal/progressive respondents." If you're interested, the survey site is here. Survey is open until November 26.
Every day is different from every other -- and every month, and every year. But the past 12 months have been more unusual than most for my wife and me. Family events both happy (weddings and engagements) and sad (the loss of both of our fathers, and other issues) have meant that we've repeatedly left China at short notice, for open-ended stays in America, after having barely set foot in the US the previous year. I have been on United Flight 888, Beijing-San Francisco-LA, more often than I would have thought possible.
This is as it should be; these are the most important life obligations. But while trying -- as I also should -- to keep up my day-job duties with the Atlantic, I've made up the difference by basically neglecting everything else. Specifically: I watch email pile up, unviewed and unanswered, in the inbox. I have a big pile of phone calls to return. There are manuscripts to read, invitations to respond to, people I'm supposed to keep up with and organizations for which I'm supposed to play a role -- and especially in the past eight months none of that have I done.
I actually feel most alive and engaged when juggling challenges on all fronts, a trait clearly inherited from my father. I believe in the David Allen gospel of feeling freest and calmest when not burdened by long lists of overdue chores. So while having no doubt about the rightness of setting these tasks aside in recent months , I look forward to "catching up," and re-engaging. I am not ready to give in to the temptation to declare email bankruptcy, just pushing "archive" or "delete" for the thousands of unanswered messages and "to-do"s to start afresh. But I wanted to say two things "in public," this way.
First, if you sent me a suggestion, a manuscript, a comment, an invitation, a question in the past eight months and never heard back, it was nothing personal, nor was it haughtiness. I was otherwise occupied.
Second, if you sent in the last two weeks a note about my father, please know how much I appreciate that, and that I will try to respond. It is truly heartening to me to think that people who never knew him could have some sense of the kind of life that he lived. I am grateful for these kind thoughts.
And I will close this note, and wind up public remembrances of my dad, after the jump with an anecdote from my close childhood friend Steve Jensen, who conveys what it is like to grow up in a doctor's family -- or at least this doctor's family. Then, back to work. _______
Reading the NYT on line just now, I see a review of a "historical documentary" movie of something I can remember vividly but that apparently happened forty years ago this week: the Harvard-Yale football game in which Harvard scored 16 points in the last 42 seconds to "win," 29-29. (Touchdown with 2-point conversion; onside kick with recovery; another touchdown as the clock ran out and 2-point conversion.) Tick-tock footage of the game, from a Harvard athletic department perspective, here:
I mention this dawn-of-time occurrence for two reasons: I was excited during the game itself because one of the big stars for Harvard was tight end Bruce Freeman, who caught two crucial touchdown passes. We had grown up and gone to school together in the Western hinterland, where our fathers were doctors in the same small clinic. Also, I was about to take over as the editor of the Crimson and so was part of the squadron responsible for our post-game special edition.
I have never been 100% sure of exactly who in the small group was first to say that the special-edition headline needed to be: HARVARD BEATS YALE, 29-29. It wasn't me; and I think it was my classmate Bill Kutik. But everyone instantly recognized a stroke of genius, and so it was set in hot lead, on Linotype machines, and was on the streets in a matter of minutes:
Maybe if the movie makes its way to Beijing's pirate video stores I'll find out what really happened.
(I have seen the image above on several sites. Somewhere in the attic of my real house in the US, I have the special edition itself, which I suppose I should scan or preserve in amber someday, given its status as a treasured antiquity.)
UPDATE: I have heard from Bill Kutik, who was indeed centrally involved, and even more so was the person I thought to name, but didn't: Tim Carlson. Further background (complete with Rashomon-like conflicting memories and accounts) here.
Here is exciting news. The (state-run) China Daily may be opening a US edition!! Clues here, with thanks to Michele Travierso. If you're an experienced but job-threatened native speaker of English who can see the wry possibilities in writing headlines like the front-pager below, your time may have come. I might look into it myself.
A few other keeper headlines shown here, here, here, and here; and an exploration of the thinking behind this form of journalism here. (Update: via Charlie McElwee of Shanghai, more info from the China Daily-USA web site.)
Time and again I've praised (or eulogized) DayJet, the radically innovative but now out-of-business air taxi company based in Florida. And I've praisedVMware, the still-in-business California company that lets you run Windows and Mac software seamlessly side-by-side on a Mac.
Now it turns out that one of VMware's main backers is... preparing to invest in the software from DayJet!
In my Atlantic article on DayJet earlier this year, I emphasized that it was, in its founders' view, a software company that happened to operate airplanes. That is, its real strength lay in the sophisticated algorithms for matching airplanes, passengers, pilots, and destinations. The weakness was the real-world big-ticket cost of the airplanes, which brought the firm down when the credit crisis began.
Paul Maritz, a Microsoft veteran who is now CEO of VMware, is according to this TechFlash report, interested in DayJet Technologies, a spin-off company designed to apply the DayJet systems elsewhere As the TechFlash story said:
There are some interesting clues as to why Maritz and others in the technology industry are excited about DayJet.
Georgia Tech professor George Nemhauser, who helped develop DayJet's
technology, said via phone that the system could help airlines,
trucking firms and other transportation companies plan more-efficient
routes between locations. Or, he said, it could be used by government
agencies to plan evacuation routes during public emergencies. The
original promise of the DayJet airline, he said, was to allow travelers
to book flights when they wanted them rather than relying on an
airline's set schedule.
"The whole idea is disruption
technology," said Nemhauser. "You get a plan for something, and then a
disruption occurs -- weather or something else -- and you have to make
a new plan very quickly."
What's left for me to dream of, in the convergence department? Maybe news that a craft-beer company is investing in software that will make it easier for me to speak Chinese.
It's conventional chattering-class wisdom to say that Terry Gross of Fresh Air is a "great interviewer." In the early days I think that wisdom originated to some significant extent in male-listener fascination with the sound of her voice. But a broadcast I just heard was not only a reminder that she is, in fact, truly a great interviewer but also a demonstration of what that means in practice.
The broadcast in question was her 43-minute session yesterday with Ayers, the person presented by GOP campaigners as Barack Obama's closest and most influential friend. Ayers himself came across, inevitably, as a more complex character than the campaign caricature: more sympathetic in some ways, not necessarily in others. But much of what Ayers "reveals" comes out precisely because of the way Gross posed and sequenced the questions. If he had just been parked in front of the microphone by someone who said, "Well, how can you hold your head up?" or "So, tell us about Barack Obama," the results would have been much duller.
At the most obvious level, Terry Gross succeeds in this interview simply by avoiding the two most common, and laziest, styles of today's broadcast interviewers: surplus aggressiveness, long ago made familiar by Mike Wallace and now lampooned by Stephen Colbert; and lapdogism, most recently on display in Greta Van Susteren's sessions with Sarah Palin and the default mode of Larry King Live. Both of these extremes reflect the confusion of toughness of manner -- do you interrupt, are you scowling, are you borderline impolite -- with toughness of inquiry, which is something altogether different and can happen under the most polite and civil auspices.
She also avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.
What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview, is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads ("Now, that's an intriguing idea, tell us more about..."), to look for interesting tensions ("You used to say X, but now it sounds like..."), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said ("It sounds as if you're suggesting..."). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.
If you have this standard in mind -- is the interviewer really listening? and thinking? -- you will be shocked to see how rarely broadcast and on-stage figures do very much of either. But listen to this session by Gross to see how the thing should be done.
A Chinese fighter plane! At least, a 1:48 scale model of one, the domestically-produced 歼-10, or J-10, courtesy of a friend at AVIC, China's giant aerospace company. Click for larger, including a glimpse of the teeny blue-suited model pilot inside:
And just down the street, at the main AVIC building, the full-sized J-10 itself, in a static display that I watched workers prepare shortly before the Olympics:
No larger theme for the moment; I just like having the model, which is made of metal rather than plastic and feels surprisingly sturdy.
I won't do this systematically, because that would mean I'd have to include bad reviews too!, but for the record here is an early, nice PW note on my forthcoming collection of China writings, Postcards from Tomorrow Square. It's a "starred" review about halfway down the page that this link brings up. Actual text of the review after the jump. The book is a Vintage paperback original (bargain!) and has a pub date of January. (Links through Amazon, B&N, Powell's.)
Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.
I've just seen this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China.
This is a subject easily misunderstood in the United States, where people tend to assume either that the cleansing power of the Internet will ultimately make government efforts at info-control pointless, or, on the contrary, that the bottling-up effectiveness of the Great Firewall will protect the government from the power of an informed citizenry. (My own Atlantic article on the subject here.)
Soong elegantly illustrates why such categorical assumptions miss the complexity of what's going on. The whole speech is worth reading, but the passage below is especially important for Americans. First he describes the way info would flow when bloggers and net connections first became significant in China, around 2003:
1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).
2. The local government suppresses all information.
3. All media reports are censored. (But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.)
4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice. The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.
5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case. But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities. (Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information within this time window.)
6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through. This creates an international scandal.
7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.
Then he describes what has changed in the past five years, in this 2008 update:
A mere 22 hours after we started driving toward LAX at 4:15am through what seemed to be snowfall but in fact was ashfall from Yorba Linda version of the recent SoCal fires*, my wife and I are back in our apartment in Beijing. And reassuringly, we have the joys of the English-language Chinese press to welcome us home. Front page of today's (state controlled) China Daily:
Apart from the picture of the baby-holding Premier Wen Jiabao in his now-iconic role as Beloved Grandpa of the Nation, I invite attention to the headline in the top right corner of the front page:
On line and in print, I have oftenmarveled at why Chinese organizations make so many careless and unintended errors when rendering material into English for foreigners to read. (Locus classicus, discussed here: the huge signs outside an art museum in Shanghai last year. They announced a big exhibit of photos from the Three Gorges dam area and read: THE THREE GEORGES.)
With the China Daily and sister publications, it's a different matter. Judging from the result, it's obvious that native English speakers have a final pass at the stories, headlines, and captions there. They have very few unintended, "Three Georges"-type errors. But it also seems obvious that the British, Canadian, American, Australian, Indian, South African, Singaporean, etc subeditors hired for this role can have a slyly subversive bent. Often little touches show up in the publication that will seem Onion-like to any native speaker but that even very capable English-speaking Chinese supervisors would likely miss. At least that's what I hope is going on here -- intentional wry precision rather than unaware imprecision. I'm applying an Intelligent Design model in my newspaper reading. ______ * For those who know the LA Freeway system: this was along Highway 91 west of I-605, which we were detoured onto because signs said that I-105 was closed, apparently for fire reasons. The fires were of course aggravated by the hot, dry Santa Ana winds. On the weather report we heard while passing through the ashfall, the reported atmospheric humidity was six percent.
... the innovative, Albuquerque-based small-jet company that appears to be in deep economic distress. Background here.
- An irate perspective from a New Mexico political commentator, here. (Sample: "Eclipse has been on the ropes for years, yet our political and economic establishment kept pumping it up.")
- An apologia pro mananagement sua from Eclipse's now-ousted founder, Vern Raburn, here. (Sample: "The reason I got fired was simple: I pissed off the investors.") Note: the link above, to the original AINOnline story, is sometimes slow to load. If it doesn't work, a text-only cached version from Google is available here.
- And after the jump, official word from the Eclipse PR department about the whole dicey payroll situation. (Summary: No one got paid on payday, yesterday. They "will receive their pay" by next Tuesday.)
Here endeth the Eclipse watch for now. Thanks to Mary Grady, Jim Terr, David Strip. _______
Background: the "air taxi" model, discussed in these posts, this article, this book, and this website, is showing viability around the world -- especially with companies using relatively inexpensive SR22 propeller planes from Cirrus, rather than faster-but-costlier small jets. Transportation of every kind is under pressure because of worldwide economic collapse and environmental concerns, but in the circumstances air taxis are doing OK.
And the "Very Light Jet" movement, discussed at all the places above and also here and here, has led to the development of several smaller, cheaper jets that are thought to have a commercial future, of which the best known is the Eclipse 500.
But oh, my, the poor Eclipse company that actually came up with these new planes. As chronicled here frequently in the past, it has had management struggles and financial crises and legal disputes that have called its existence into question. The latest discouraging news is here and here and concerns such ominous subjects as not meeting the payroll and employees emptying their desks. (Update: more end-of-days news here.)
The general economic and credit chaos that is felling older, stronger companies in more established industries is obviously doing no favors to these startups. And anyone who has seen the life cycle of, say, the computer business knows that Wang, KayPro, Eagle, Altos, Victor, Osborne, and other once-promising firms went down but that the computer industry itself surged forward. So it may be with the Eclipse company and the transportation systems it helped make possible. But this is another sad chapter in the era's economic contraction.
This is the book I mentioned yesterday, a very useful overview of the issues, challenges, constraints, and possibilities for America's defense policy. Two tech-related positive developments concerning this book.
- Hardcovers of the book will be available sometime soon. But if you would like to start reading it today, you can get an electronic copy, free, by requesting one from Winslow Wheeler, the book's editor. He has placed his email address on the Center for Defense Information web site, and (with his permission) I also give it here: WinslowWheeler@msn.com . UPDATE: free PDF download now available directly via this link.
- If, in addition to being interested in a sustainable defense policy for America, you use a Kindle, you will find that the emailed PDF version formats itself well for Kindle reading. (Thanks to Dave Finton on this point. For info and links about how to view .DOC and .PDF files on a Kindle, check here.)
At its site here, the Center for Defense Information announces the imminent release of its new book "America's Defense Meltdown." Really this is a guide on how to think about, pay for, reconfigure, equip, deploy, withdraw, modernize, simplify, support, strengthen, lead, motivate, inspire, and in all other ways improve America's military establishment.
I hardly need to mention why such a book is useful, at a time when the United States and its new Administration must figure out how to manage whatever comes next in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing challenge of possible terrorism, America's new financial realities, and on down a very long list.
What is most remarkable about the book is the array of authors who have joined to produce this anthologized volume. If I started listing a few, I would have to name them all (PDF of full list here.) They include the closest colleagues and collaborators of the late Air Force colonel John Boyd plus leading defense analysts and practitioners of the next generation. They have amply earned the right to be listened to. What I said in a blurb on the book's jacket* is, if anything, not enthusiastic enough:
The talent, judgment, and insight collected in this book are phenomenal. Over the last generation, the authors have been more right, more often, about more issues of crucial importance to American security than any other group I can think of. It is a tremendous benefit to have their views collected in one place and concentrated on the next big choices facing a new Administration. This really is a book that every serious-minded citizen should read.
For more about the book, from one of its organizers, Chet Richards, see this. Check it out.
____
* On blurbs: I have a bias in favor of giving blurbs for books, because in my experience most books deserve a better chance and a broader audience than they're likely to receive. Obviously there are exceptions. But I try to be very precise about the aspects of a book I compliment and the kinds of readers I recommend it to. Thus this comment really does reflect my respect for the authors and their collective contribution.
This has been a good week for America but a rough week for certain Americans. Barack Obama's grandmother. Michael Crichton, and the book critic John Leonard. Many others, but of importance to me: my father, James A. Fallows, yesterday, November 7.
After the jump, an obituary prepared for his hometown newspaper (and my first journalistic outlet), the Redlands Daily Facts. His son-in-law, Jack Tierney, paid him an eloquent tribute here, and I previously posted a letter from one of his former patients, here. Below, images of the active, enthusiastic, joyful man I will remember, engaging in two of his favorite activities: camping out while trail-riding in the California canyons, and winning a tennis point.
I am sorry to be in a commemorative mode, but I can't let the day pass without saying something about Michael Crichton.
In the car this afternoon I turned on the radio and heard a news report ending ".... Crichton was 66." Was? That Michael Crichton has died in his 60s shocked me not simply because I'm now concentrating on the mortality of my father, in his 80s, but also because he always looked at least 20 years younger than his chronological age. I'd corresponded with him recently and didn't know he was sick.
Crichton had his enemies, especially after his recent anti-global-warming book (which I chose not to read). That he was married five times suggests that his personal life was not entirely tranquil. And he was hyper, hyper aware that in America he was regarded as a "genre" writer whereas in Italy, for example, he would be listed among the big names of Quality Lit.
But I was honored to have met him 20 years age, when I was living in Japan, and to have been a friend since then. He seemed unassuming, funny, charming in every way -- the unusual famous person who was genuinely considerate of one's spouse and kids. Very earnest about his political causes, including a very prescient argument fifteen years ago about the impending decline of the "Mediasaurus," now known as MSM. And, there is no way around it, incredibly talented. At one point in the 1990s, he was responsible for the #1-rated TV show (ER), the #1 box office movie (Jurassic Park), and the #1 best selling-novel -- and I'm not even sure now which of his novels it was. He must have been the only person in history to have paid his way through medical school by writing successful novels.
I loved hearing from him about oddball "practical" matters. For instance, height: he appeared to be nearly 7 feet tall, and explained to me (6'2") that up until 6'6" height was an advantage, but after that it was a big inconvenience -- door frames, beds, airplane seats. Or, getting ready for book writing bursts: He said he removed complications from his life while writing by having exactly the same food at every meal, so he never had to waste time deciding what to eat. He was a tech enthusiast, and the most passionate Mac advocate I have encountered.
The whole Grant Park pageant recalled Little Rock in 1992, when the crowd was swaying to "Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow" and the young-looking Clintons were in their full glory.
This was far more sober, as Obama has been throughout; and paradoxically both calming and inspiring. It's easier to sound inclusive when you have won than when you have lost, but Obama -- that is, President-Elect Obama -- did far more than the minimum with the "I will be your president, too" passage.
Performance expectations have been higher and higher for Barack Obama's set-piece high-stakes speeches, and so far he has not fallen short even once. This one was delivered with unusual poetic skill. This can't go on forever, but the string continued in a heartening way this evening.
Would things have been different if we had seen more of this man during the campaign? We will never know. But all congratulations and honor to him for comporting himself this way at this time.
A wonderful moment for America, which McCain did absolutely nothing to diminish. (The booing yahoos in his crowd are a different matter.) Going out on a high note.
Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China
Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel
Breaking the News
Looking at the Sun