Douthat: Sci-Fi Optimism and Worldly Pessimism

Ross Douthat at the Times passes on Boston and terrorists in favor of musing about extra terrestial worlds.

He finds optimism in the 1950's science fiction--we confidently expected to visit other worlds and other galaxies--which has faded today and hopes that some of that optimism can be refound.

I was a reader of the old-time science fiction: Clarke, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, et. al.  I loved it.  And I agree we were optimistic then, at least if we didn't blow ourselves up (see "A Canticle for Leibowitz).  Remembering those times though  I think we were more pessimistic about the fate of the "Third World", as we used to call the recently freed colonies, at least we were by the middle 60's when the first flush of enthusiasm about decolonization had passed.  The feeling led into the gloom and doom of the running out of resources crowd, the fear that we'd never feed the booming population, etc. 

So the passage of 50 years has produced surprises: we've not been to the moon for many years, humans have never visited Mars.  On the other hand the progress made by developing nations is still startling to me. 

Old Timers Are Forgetful: George Will

George Wills is one of several whom identify as close contemporaries (i.e., born within a year or two of me).  We tell kids not to put on the Internet anything which they'll regret later, but the same could be said to geezers like me and Wills.

The other day he had a nice column taking off from the PBS broadcast of "The Central Park Five", which tracks the history of how five minority youths were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park.  He writes: "Journalism, like almost every other profession relevant to this case, did not earn any honors. Until now."

Fine.  Good for George.  But today, Mr. Steve Dutky of Takoma Park throws Wills' words of 1989 back in his face: "In his May 1, 1989, op-ed column, “They went ‘wilding,’ ” George F. Will called “The Central Park Five” boys “evil.” He went on to write: “Punishment in this case will be interminably delayed and ludicrously light. The boys know that; that is one reason they were singing rap songs in their jail cells.” The nastiness of this column has stuck with me these 24 years."

He suggests Wills should apologize.  I agree.

Furloughs for FSA?

That's discussed in this Government Executive piece.

Driverless Bus Drones?

Had a thought today--suppose you put drone software and Google driverless car software in a bus?  So the idea is, the bus follows a standard route, which cuts the complexity of the job the software has to do.  The Google software works to get the bus around the route, but is set to put the bus in "safe" mode if there's any problem (i.e., a problem on the bus, a road situation it can't handle).  Meanwhile the "drone" software enables a remote operator  to monitor the bus and to step in to resolve problems. 

Digital Public Library Goes Live

The Digital Public Library of America (dp.la) is going live this week, today in fact.  Remember Google Books--this is more ambitious.  From the announcement, it will be: "

• First, an easy-to-use portal where anyone can access America’s collections and search through them using novel and powerful techniques, including by place and time.
• Second, a sophisticated technical platform that will make those millions of items available in ways so that others can build creative and transformative applications upon them, such as smartphone apps that magically reveal the history around you.
• Third, along with like-minded institutions and individuals the DPLA will seek innovative means to make more cultural and scientific content openly available, and it will advocate for a strong public option for reading and research in the twenty-first century."

One thing which bugs me is all the information which is not easily available, even though it's public. For example, trying to access the Congressional Record for years before roughly 1990 is difficult.

A Great Epitaph for Lady Sale

Via The Best Defense, a 10 best list of books on Afghanistan .  The entry for Lady Sale's book says:

Lady Sale was possibly the only Brit to come out of the first Afghan war with her reputation enhanced. She arrived with an unmarried daughter, seeds from her Agra garden and a grand piano. She survived the retreat from Kabul, with a musket ball in her shoulder and in due course led a jailbreak of her fellow hostages. Her tombstone reads: "Here lies all that could die of Lady Sale."

Big Apple Men Are Gentlemen

According to the NYTimes, a study of subway manners showed that more men stand than women, indicating that  New York city men are gentlemen.

What We Don't Know About the Globe

Joel Achenbach explains the vanishing island in the Pacific, and throws in the fact the Navy still has seven ships exploring the oceans, simply because we don't know where all the islands and sea mounts are.

Some People Are Too Talented

From the bio posted here of Gregory Mankiw

Mankiw is best known at Harvard for his work in economics and for his immensely popular Introduction to Economics class — or Ec 10. His parallel profession as one of the world’s leading interpreters and conductors of Beethoven’s oeuvre is less well known in Cambridge. A child prodigy, Mankiw studied piano at the Universität für Musik in Trenton, N.J., not far from where he grew up. While earning a B.A. at Princeton University and Ph.D. at MIT, the ambitious conductor concurrently earned his M.M. in orchestral conducting from Carnegie-Mellon. At the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors, he garnered special recognition for his micro attention to detail and macro approach to sound.
Before joining the faculty at Harvard, Mankiw studied with the esteemed Fritz Frockenstem in the Orchestral Conducting Division of the London School of Economics. Museconominsts and arts critics used the word “revolutionary” to describe the 1980s world tour during which Maestro Mankiw performed with every major orchestra including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, London Symphony and the Dresden Staatskappelle. Stateside, he has led orchestras in Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York and at the Metropolitan Opera.

 Strangely, his wikipedia entry doesn't reflect all this.


I'm sure Harvard and Boston will give a big turnout for the event (Arts Fair).

Disappointing Obama Bureaucrats

I saw somewhere that the HHS Secretary expressed surprise at the difficulty of implementing Obamacare.  And there was an op-ed somewhere suggesting VA Secretary Shinseki should be ousted because of the backlog in VA claims.  (See this related article.)

Based on what I know, or rather read, which may be wrong, I'm not impressed with either secretary--one of the primary jobs of a managing bureaucrat is to foresee the future and plan ahead.e.

The VA is always a downstream agency; it gets DOD's output. So it shouldn't have been hard to look at DOD operations since 2002 and foresee a rising workload over the years.