Or maybe they just liked really big things

In our discussions of social and cultural impact of the technological explosion of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that probably haven't discussed enough was amend his level of ambition and hubris. In particular the United States and France seemed to have been in a fierce competition to see who could outdo the other in massive feats of engineering, be it transatlantic cables...

Huge statues...

 The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; French: La Liberté éclairant le monde) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor in New York City, in the United States. The copper statue, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and built by Gustave Eiffel. The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886.

The Statue of Liberty is a figure of a robed woman representing Libertas, a Roman liberty goddess. She holds a torch above her head with her right hand, and in her left hand carries a tabula ansata inscribed in Roman numerals with "JULY IV MDCCLXXVI" (July 4, 1776), the date of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. A broken chain lies at her feet. The statue became an icon of freedom and of the United States, and was a welcoming sight to immigrants arriving from abroad.

Bartholdi was inspired by a French law professor and politician, Édouard René de Laboulaye, who is said to have commented in 1865 that any monument raised to U.S. independence would properly be a joint project of the French and U.S. peoples. Because of the post-war instability in France, work on the statue did not commence until the early 1870s. In 1875, Laboulaye proposed that the French finance the statue and the U.S. provide the site and build the pedestal. Bartholdi completed the head and the torch-bearing arm before the statue was fully designed, and these pieces were exhibited for publicity at international expositions.

The torch-bearing arm was displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, and in Madison Square Park in Manhattan from 1876 to 1882. Fundraising proved difficult, especially for the Americans, and by 1885 work on the pedestal was threatened by lack of funds. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World, started a drive for donations to finish the project and attracted more than 120,000 contributors, most of whom gave less than a dollar. The statue was built in France, shipped overseas in crates, and assembled on the completed pedestal on what was then called Bedloe's Island. The statue's completion was marked by New York's first ticker-tape parade and a dedication ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland.

 or ever taller buildings.

The Washington Monument is an obelisk on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., built to commemorate George Washington, once commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and the first President of the United States. Located almost due east of the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial,[2] the monument, made of marble, granite, and bluestone gneiss,[3] is both the world's tallest stone structure and the world's tallest obelisk, standing 554 feet 7 11⁄32 inches (169.046 m) tall according to the National Geodetic Survey (measured 2013–14) or 555 feet 5 1⁄8 inches (169.294 m) tall according to the National Park Service (measured 1884).[A] It is the tallest monumental column in the world if all are measured above their pedestrian entrances.[B] It was the tallest structure in the world from 1884 to 1889.


...


Constructed from 1887–89 as the entrance to the 1889 World's Fair, it was initially criticized by some of France's leading artists and intellectuals for its design, but it has become a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognisable structures in the world.[3] The Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world; 6.91 million people ascended it in 2015.

The tower is 324 metres (1,063 ft) tall, about the same height as an 81-storey building, and the tallest structure in Paris. Its base is square, measuring 125 metres (410 ft) on each side. During its construction, the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument to become the tallest man-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years until the Chrysler Building in New York City was finished in 1930. Due to the addition of a broadcasting aerial at the top of the tower in 1957, it is now taller than the Chrysler Building by 5.2 metres (17 ft). Excluding transmitters, the Eiffel Tower is the second tallest structure in France after the Millau Viaduct.

As I've argued before, this combination of optimism and arrogance often contained more than a suggestion of manifest destiny. All of these elements came together in the following proposal. Nothing came of it (the project isn't even mentioned in Palacio's Wikipedia entry), but it did make the cover of Scientific American in 1890.

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An alternate narrative of JFK's commitment to the moon

[I would love some pushback on this. The following goes very much against the conventional narrative which always makes me nervous. If I missed something obvious, I'd rather it gets pointed out here before I build on it.]

The standard story centers on how the nation's imagination was captured by an audacious dream of sending a man to the moon. You've all heard the words of the speech that inspired the country, “We choose to go to the moon...” Except it didn't. The speech was an attempt at drumming up support for a not-that-popular program. As best I can tell, it was a fairly minor and underwhelming effort. It only achieved greatness retroactively due to the tragedy and triumph that came afterwards.

What else does the standard narrative get wrong?

1. Despite everything you hear about the tensions between JFK and LBJ, Kennedy knowingly committed his administration to what was probably Johnson's most cherished policy objective going back to his days in the Senate. Kennedy even put Johnson in charge of National Aeronautics and Space Council. Increasing the budget for manned space exploration was deeply controversial with in the administration. Kennedy's own science advisor, Jerome Wiesner was strongly opposed to it. One of Kennedy's last acts as president was dismissing Wiesner.

2. Of course, administrations failed to deliver on commitments all the time. It could very easily have been pushed aside and things turned out differently.

3. Is also worth noting that while we now see this as a bold objective, the goal did not seem as wildly ambitious at the time. [This is where I veer sharply from the conventional narrative, so this would be a good place to focus your objections.] It is essential to remember where the country's attitudes and expectations toward technology and progress were in the early sixties. As I have said probably too many times, like the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the postwar era was a period of explosive ubiquitous change. As with the turn of the century, there was a sense of constant acceleration. Everything seemingly came faster and easier than the experts predicted. Kennedy was being ambitious, but probably not as ambitious as we tend to remember him being.

4. While modern commentators choose to emphasize soaring rhetoric and the importance of visionary leaders, the overwhelming driver of the space race was the Cold War. There were very real and disturbing consequences to losing this race, both strategic and symbolic. What's more, there was a strong symbiotic relationship between the military and programs like Mercury and Apollo.


5. The Apollo program proved to be far more expensive than expected and quite controversial. Even with the impetus of the Cold War, the decision not just to see it through, but to make the deadline owes a great deal to a series of events breaking in its favor, particularly the assassination and the '64 landslide. Both the legend of JFK and the political power of LBJ meant that Apollo would get what it needed.


Today the very term “moonshot” has become one of the most reliable red flags for bullshit in the 21s century. We tell ourselves lies about what happened than hold up a fabricated past to justify the lies we tell ourselves about the present.

I love the part about machines coming with their own fire extinguisher

We've been talking a lot about the ubiquitous changes in people's lives wrought by technology around the turn of the century and in the postwar era, but I still keep coming across seemingly obvious examples I managed to miss. This is a big one.

Over the next decade, Haloid scientists and engineers refined xerography (from the Greek for “dry” and “writing”) into a working machine. The result was the Xerox 914. Introduced in 1959, it had a knob to set the number of copies and a big “PRINT” button, weighed 650 pounds, and could make a copy in less than 10 seconds. Paper jams were frequent and paper fires not infrequent (it came with a small fire extinguisher), but its success shocked even Haloid: The company’s first customers began making thousands of copies a day. By the mid-’60s, the number of copies made nationwide had shot past 10 billion. Haloid changed its name to Xerox and minted a generation of “Xerox millionaires.” [Chester] Carlson’s royalties accrued into a huge fortune, most of which he would give away.

There had been other duplicating technologies before Xerox, but they were all crude, inconvenient, limited in application, or prohibitively expensive. Xerography redefined the way we handled and even thought about documents. I suspect that the evolution of the modern "paperless" office was heavily influenced by a demand for documentation that started in the mid-20th century.

"We put a man on the moon. How hard can this be?"

Another crowdsourcing project for the science and technology historians in the audience.

The postwar era (roughly defined here as 1945 to 1970) was a period of such rapid and ubiquitous technological and scientific advances that people naturally assumed that this rate of progress would continue or even accelerate. This led not just futurists like Arthur C Clarke but also researchers in the fields to underestimate the difficulty of certain problems, often optimistically applying the within-a-decade deadline to their predictions.

I'm trying to come up with a list of big, high profile goals that proved far more challenging than people had anticipated circa 1970. Here are some examples that come to mind.

The war on cancer. I suspect that the celebrated victory over polio significantly contributed to an unrealistic expectation for other major diseases.

Fusion reactors. It took about a decade to go from atomic bomb to nuclear power compact and reliable enough to deploy in submarines.

Artificial intelligence. We've already mentioned the famously overoptimistic predictions that came out of the field at the time.

Artificial hearts.
From Wikipedia:

“In 1964, the National Institutes of Health started the Artificial Heart Program, with the goal of putting a man-made heart into a human by the end of the decade.”


Not sure whether they meant 1970 or 1974, but either way, they missed their target.

Does anyone out there have additional items I should add to the list?

(Not so) reecent developments in wind power

An interesting bit of historical perspective on the challenges of relying on wind as an energy source. The full article complete with date can be found after the jump, but I'd recommend taking a moment to guess the age before you click through.

Treating recently of the possibility of utilizing the wind power which now so constantly goes to waste everywhere about us, mention was made of two means for accomplishing the object-electrical storage batteries and reservoirs for compressed air. It is worth while to state that the article was written with the full conviction, and for the purpose of bringing presently to fair understanding the fact that neither of these will do the work, and to urge inventors and active minds to work out the problem by which something better may become available.

Muskification

Theranos was claiming to be able to revolutionize medical testing with having many upper level people who knew much about medicine. 

From New York Magazine.

But Holmes didn’t have any medical experience, and for years neither did her board, until former heart surgeon and senator Bill Frist joined in 2014. “Sources who worked with her, even some recently, said that she never really showed any curiosity about what was going on in academia and industry,” Carreyrou told me. Balwani, who ran operations at Theranos day-to-day, “was essentially a computer programmer at first, and then mostly a salesman. And he had zero training or knowledge in medicine or blood diagnostics. So you have both the lying and the outright fraud combined with this hubris that’s in large part founded on ignorance. It’s incredible in that sense.”

Holmes' attitude toward expertise could be considered another example of what we might call the Muskification of the modern CEO. Other traits include exaggerating claims far beyond the credible, putting style, particularly personal style, about substance, building a cult of personality associated with almost magical powers (and sometimes you can leave off the "almost").

Just to be clear, Elon Musk didn't start all these trends – – I'm not even prepared to say he actually promoted them all that much – – but he has become almost iconicaly representative. He has the misfortune of being the ideal example.

So when Musk expresses his disdain and disinterest toward non-Silicon Valley experts --  blithely promising to solve in months problems that have confounded the world's best civil engineering minds for decades -- he is simply expressing the attitudes of the culture, the same culture that didn't blink an eye (or question a multibillion-dollar investment) when a company started by a twentysomething college dropout claimed to be on the verge of revolutionizing medical testing despite having no top-level people with relevant expertise.

Likewise, the tendency toward exaggeration that borders on compulsive lying, taking reasonable estimates and routinely multiplying them by a factor of five or ten to make them sound even more impressive, is pervasive throughout the industry. Consider the following paragraph from a very good piece that ran recently in Ars Technica:

"We target a vehicle that gets from point A to point B faster, smoother, and less-expensively than a human-driven vehicle; can operate in any geography; and achieves a verifiable, transparent 1,000-times safety improvement over a human-driven vehicle without the need for billions of miles of validation testing on public roads," Shashua wrote on Thursday.

Keep in mind, this is a big, successful company that makes real things, highly sophisticated technology used around the world. This executive could have made his point by claiming a tenfold or even a fivefold improvement in safety, but he felt compelled to add the extra zeros that pushed his claim safely into the realm of the unbelievable.

A few days ago, we ran a piece about something we call the "hype economy," -- UPDATED

 Here was the key section.

The hype economy works along similar lines. The ability to get people talking about something (preferably but not always necessarily in a positive way) is tremendously valuable by most traditional standards. For entertainers, it can bring in large audiences. For goods and services, it can drive sales and help maintain customer loyalty. For politicians, it can be votes. For public policy initiatives, it can generate and shore up support.

At some point though (and it's a point we passed quite a while back) the ability to generate buzz becomes disconnected both from the attributes which are supposed to drive it and the objectives it is supposed to serve. It then takes on a life of its own. Hype becomes the primary if not sole metric by which anything is judged. The television show that no one watches, the business with no real prospect of turning a profit, the research claim that collapses under scrutiny are all seen as successful and important as long as you hear enough about them.

A few days after that, I saw the following:

Netflix Market Cap now 5% above Disney$NFLX $155 billion$DIS $147 billion

Prices Intraday via Bloomberg’s @TheTerminal pic.twitter.com/7VabZ8nT5l

— Rich Greenfield (@RichBTIG) June 1, 2018

Just to review, Disney is a massive and highly profitable corporation. Through a fortuitous bit of timing, Michael Hiltzik recently wrote a nice summary to provide context for the cancellation of Rosanne.

Disney, of course, is a preeminent entertainment conglomerate comprising theme parks, a film studio, cruise ships and, oh yes, television networks. Altogether, the company collected $55 billion in revenue in 2017, and recorded a profit of about $9 billion. The company’s media network segment contributes a bit more than 40% of revenue and perhaps half of profits, according to Disney’s most recent quarterly report.

By comparison, Netflix is a fraction of the size of Disney in terms of revenue, profit, and assets (which may be overvalued – – unless they been making some very quiet purchases, the company's real content library, rather than the shows they simply licensed or a limited time, isn't that deep). And there are serious questions about the company's debt.

Possibly even worse for the company's prospects, its growth is potentially bounded by an increasingly fierce competitive landscape including such deep pocketed competitors as Amazon, Google, and possibly even Disney.

If you are buying stock in the hope that it will make enough profit and accumulate enough assets to justify the price of the purchase, then it is next to impossible to justify the price of Netflix. If, on the other hand, you are functioning in the hype economy, the market cap of Netflix is not at all surprising.

The company is capable of generating mind-boggling amounts of buzz. It's true that much, perhaps most, of that comes from the billions of dollars that the company has spent directly and indirectly for marketing, PR, and brand building, but that doesn't really matter. Hype is fungible.


_________________________________________________

UPDATE

The market cap of Netflix just passed Citigroup...
Netflix # Employees: 5,400
Citigroup # Employees: 209,000 pic.twitter.com/Mz45ekuw3t

— Charlie Bilello (@charliebilello) June 19, 2018

Elon Musk -- Then you will know the pravda, and the pravda will set you free.

You probably heard about Elon Musk's recent plan to push back against all of those journalists on the automotive beat with a crowd sourced (read fan boy-based) website called "pravda" that promises to rank the credibility of reporters and editors. Assuming you already know all of the gory details (if not, we'll wait here till you catch up), here are a few quick thoughts from someone who has spent more time than is healthy following this story.

1. As Kai Ryssdal noted on Marketplace, even Tesla admits that its business plan, particularly its lack of traditional marketing, relies heavily on the company's ability to generate tons of press coverage. Inaccuracy was not a concern as long as the stories were positive.

2. He likes to focus on the coverage of recent safety issues with Tesla's autopilot, an area where you can make an argument about autonomous vehicles being safer than traditional cars. It is still an open question as to whether or not the argument is true, but it is at least convincing enough for a sympathetic audience.

In many ways, the more damaging thread has been the coverage of Tesla's business woes. You can take pretty much every number the company would like to see and double it or cut it in half, whichever is worse. Production targets continue to fall far behind. The reasonably priced versions that are supposed to be necessary for the company's future are nowhere to be seen, and the latest reports on quality have been horrible. There too, Musk prefers to focus on one aspect, namely software problems that can be updated from a distance. He spends remarkably little time talking about complaints that the cars are falling apart.

3. Worse yet for Musk, investors are starting to worry about all of this and also about things like financing.

4. It's possible to make too much of the echoes of other current attacks on the credibility of the press but it's possible to make too little of them as well 

5. Pravda?

As usual, with all matters Tesla, Hiltzik is the go-to guy

As my colleague Russ Mitchell reported last month, "Musk originally planned to be building 500,000 cars a year in 2018 at its Fremont, Calif., assembly plant, the vast majority of them Model 3s. Even if Tesla hits all its current targets, no more than 150,000 Model 3s will be produced this year."

...

On May 2, the company disclosed that Model 3 production had hit 2,270 cars a week in April "for the 3rd straight week over 2,000," obviously missing its first-quarter target. It's proper to note that the $35,000 Model 3 remains largely a dream; the company is focusing on higher-priced versions, including a $78,000 Model 3 that it says will become available this summer; buyers who put down $1,000 deposits hoping to have basic transportation from Tesla this year are likely to be disappointed.

...

Among other missed targets listed by UBS in a recent report were a coast-to-coast drive using the company's autonomous drive system by the end of last year (Musk said in February that it was then set to happen within three to six months); a doubling of North American supercharger capacity in 2017 (only 120 superchargers were added, UBS calculates, an increase of 35%); and storage battery sales of $2 billion to $5 billion by the end of last year. UBS estimated sales of only $140 million last year.

...

The most important unfulfilled promise by Tesla may be an implicit one: to deliver a quality product. Recent reports on Model 3s purchased at retail by professional reviewers have been brutal. Consumer Reports this month declined to recommend the car, citing inordinately long braking distances, distracting controls and poor riding comfort. The most gruesome review came from the respected auto shopping site Edmunds, which has been subjecting a $56,000 Model 3 to routine usage for four months.

"We put down a $1,000 deposit to get on a two-year waiting list for this car," Edmunds reported this month, "and it's falling apart." Parts are broken and falling off, the all-important internal control screen is full of bugs, and the smartphone app that locks and unlocks the vehicle is unreliable, among other problems.

Signs are emerging that the investment community is getting wise to Musk's habits. When he claimed in April that Tesla would not need to raise money in the capital markets this year, analysts were quick to point out that in February 2012 Musk asserted that the company would "not need to ever raise another funding round." Since then, Tesla has raised nearly $9 billion in financing. Tesla's high-flying stock price, meanwhile, may be coming down to earth. It's lost more than 25% of its value since peaking in June 2017. At midday Thursday it was trading at about $278.50.

A bit of Samuel Clemens to close out the week.

The following is taken from the end of  "How I Edited An Agricultural Paper" by Mark Twain.

The story describes the narrator's attempts (or more accurately, various people's reactions to the narrator's attempts) to edit a newspaper devoted to a topic he knows nothing about. While most of the jokes revolve around Twain's spectacularly wrong ideas about farming, the tale closes on a more general (and generally applicable) note.

He surveyed the wreck, which that old rioter and these two young farmers had made, and then said, "This is a sad business—a very sad business. There is the mucilage-bottle broken, and six panes of glass, and a spittoon and two candlesticks. But that is not the worst. The reputation of the paper is injured—and permanently, I fear. True, there never was such a call for the paper before, and it never sold such a large edition or soared to such celebrity; but does one want to be famous for lunacy, and prosper upon the infirmities of his mind? My friend, as I am an honest man, the street out here is full of people, and others are roosting on the fences, waiting to get a glimpse of you, because they think you crazy. And well they might after reading your editorials. They are a disgrace to journalism. Why, what put it into your head that you could edit a paper of this nature? You do not seem to know the first rudiments of agriculture. You speak of a furrow and a harrow as being the same thing; you talk of the moulting season for cows; and you recommend the domestication of the pole-cat on account of its playfulness and its excellence as a ratter! Your remark that clams will lie quiet if music be played to them was superfluous—entirely superfluous. Nothing disturbs clams. Clams always lie quiet. Clams care nothing whatever about music. Ah, heavens and earth, friend! If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day. I never saw anything like it. Your observation that the horse chestnut as an article of commerce is steadily gaining in favor is simply calculated to destroy this journal. I want you to throw up your situation and go. I want no more holiday—I could not enjoy it if I had it. Certainly not with you in my chair. I would always stand in dread of what you might be going to recommend next. It makes me lose all patience every time I think of your discussing oyster-beds under the head of 'Landscape Gardening.' I want you to go. Nothing on earth could persuade me to take another holiday. Oh! why didn't you tell me you didn't know anything about agriculture?"

"Tell you, you cornstalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower? It's the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on 14 years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man's having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper. You turnip! Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticize the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to run a foot race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with. Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave. Who edit the agricultural papers, you—yam? Men, as a general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow-covered novel line, sensation-drama line, city-editor line, and finally fall back on agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the poorhouse. You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands. Heaven knows if I had been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent instead of diffident, I could have made a name for myself in this cold selfish world. I take my leave, sir. Since I have been treated as you have treated me, I am perfectly willing to go. But I have done my duty. I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to do it. I said I could make your paper of interest to all classes—and I have. I said I could run your circulation up to 20,000 copies, and if I had had two more weeks I'd have done it. And I'd have given you the best class of readers that ever an agricultural paper had— not a farmer in it, nor a solitary individual who could tell a watermelon tree from a peach vine to save his life. You are the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant. Adios."

I then left.

I have to admit the school-within-a-school scam is a new one on me

A while back, Andrew Gelman and I wrote a piece for Vox discussing how the focus on a small set of standardized tests was, consistent with Campbell's law, affecting schools behavior in ways that undermined the value and reliability of the metrics. In some of the cases, the ways in which the changes in behavior undermined the metrics was so subtle that the administrators were probably not aware of the statistical implications (such as the use of pep rallies and other test prep techniques that did not improve students mastery of the material). In other cases, the actions were clearly questionable and rules were obviously being bent (such as the practice of "counseling out" low performing students, particularly those with learning disabilities).

I don't believe we discussed any cases of outright fraud, but then, we didn't talk about Florida.

Several days before the Florida Standards Assessments began near the end of the school year, 13 third-grade students suddenly transferred from the Palm Harbor Academy charter school to a newly created private school on the same school campus, run by Palm Harbor Academy governing board chairman the Rev. Gillard Glover.

With one exception, all of those 13 students had one thing in common: They were at least one full grade behind grade level. Many of the children were multiple grades behind grade level. Another five students in other grades, all at least two grades behind grade level, were also transferred out of Palm Harbor and into the private school at around the same time.

The students’ transfer to a private school meant that they didn’t take the state assessments required of public school students — and, therefore, didn’t drag down the school’s state scores and school grade. A failing school grade would have meant shuttering the school, School Board Attorney Kristin Gavin said, because the school got a D last year.

"The Telephone as a Promoter of Science"

I've been meaning to open a thread on how some technological advances lay the groundwork for future advances by cultivating enthusiasm and expertise in relevant disciplines. This was particularly true with the telephone since it brought the technology into the home.


Scientific American 1878-08-10

Theranos was not representative but it was indicative

Yet another example of how dysfunctional Silicon Valley venture capital culture has become. To be ball-peen hammer blunt, the combination of huge piles of money with credulity, hype, a flawed narrative, and magical heuristics has caused us to waste billions of dollars on incredibly stupid ideas and outright fraud.

Holmes and Balwani never allowed investors or anyone else from the outside to scrutinize the Theranos technology. Even staff who asked questions were ostracized, fired, and/or threatened. Investors were told they wouldn’t receive regular reports about the status of the company and that Theranos wasn’t going public anytime soon. And because nobody wanted to miss the opportunity to have a stake in the next Uber or Facebook, the questions always stopped. “In Silicon Valley over the past five years, it was easy to have that attitude,” Carreyrou said. “Money was flowing in from an area where it was so easy to get. So the second she got a question she didn’t like, or too many questions, she just shut off and was basically like, ‘If you don’t want to go by these rules, then I’ll just walk.’”

That's Mark W, Palko to you

Marginal Revolution recently ran a post entitled "Do middle name initials enhance evaluations of intellectual performance?"

I didn't click on the link, but it did remind me of this..



Which in turn reminded me of one of my all time favorite bits of casting.

I shouldn't have to say this, but it's only a "proof of concept" if it demonstrates the parts of the concept that have not previously been proven.

Just hearing myself say it (that's one of the disadvantages of dictation software) feels a little condescending. I certainly don't believe that any readers of our blog have trouble with the idea that if you claim you can accomplish a task using certain technology or under certain constraints of time and cost, it's not enough to simply perform the task; you have to perform it using that technology or satisfying those constraints in order to have proof of concept. Early aviators were not allowed to show it was possible to cross the ocean in an aircraft by sailing a boat. (That last one was a bit of a stretch, but I had to set up the video clip.)

As obvious as this may seem, though, it still needs to be said out loud because most of the journalists covering Elon Musk either don't understand this or choose to ignore it.

From Wired

Six months after Musk went on a Twitter tirade about LA traffic in December 2016, he had created the Boring Company, and was digging a tunnel under the parking lot at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The internet payment maven-turned-carmaker-turned-space enthusiast-turned-infrastructure baron has promised to completely change the way humanity bores tunnels, pledging make boring as much as 15 times faster, and reduce its cost by a factor of ten.

Thus far, the Boring Company is leaning on two used tunnel boring machines, and has yet to unveil any novel tech. But Musk did recently show off a completed, 2-mile proof-of-concept tunnel in Hawthorne, which begins in the parking lot of SpaceX’s headquarters.

Though I suppose we can't say for certain, it certainly appears that the digging here was done in a completely standard way using conventional (and not even new) equipment. It is, therefore, not a "proof of concept" tunnel, but rather just a tunnel. It is not particularly wide or particularly long. It was not dug under notably difficult conditions. It is just a tunnel.

For those of you who follow the Hyperloop coverage, this is a familiar turn of events. Despite the "dawn of a new age" rhetoric of most of the reporters, all of the demonstrations to date have been entirely limited to mature, well-established technology. We already knew that maglev trains and linear induction motors worked because we've had them for years. There was nothing more groundbreaking in these displays than in your typical, second-place science fair exhibit.

Now on to the good stuff.

They weren't giving prizes for humility.

"It has been a gigantic tidal wave of human ingenuity and resource, so stupendous in its magnitude, so complex in its diversity, so profound in its thought, so fruitful in its wealth, so beneficent in its results, that the mind is strained and embarrassed in its effort to expand to a full appreciation of it."

Edward W. Byrn


As mentioned before, the 50th anniversary issue of Scientific American is an essential resource for anyone trying to understand the stories we tell ourselves about technology. 1896 was near the peak of arguably the most dramatic period of technological advances, particularly in terms of their impact on society.

This essay on the progress of invention during the second half of the 19th century provides a tremendously informative view into how educated people thought about the state of science and progress at the time, but before we get into that, I want to highlight the list of notable inventions discussed in the introductory column.

There are some notable omissions here. Arguably the most important development of the late 19th/early 20th century doesn't even make the list, but the internal combustion gasoline engine and its progeny (automobiles, airplanes, submarines) wouldn't have their greatest impact for a few more years. The omission of the phonograph is a bit more difficult to explain since Edison's first famous invention gets a large and glowing write-up a few pages earlier in the same issue. That said, the peak impact of recorded media was also a few years away.

As for the essay itself, there's far too much here to comment on in a single blog post, but there are a couple of points I want to emphasize. First, thee people of the time were well aware that they were living in a period of ubiquitous explosive change. It was an attitude remarkably similar to that of today, only more appropriate to the situation.

Second, I've argued in the past that the new frontier of late 19th century technology in many ways fill the hole left by the closing of the actual frontier. As you read through the following, you'll notice more than a hint of manifest destiny. As with the earlier doctrine, it was assumed that Europeans and those of European descent were destined to rule this New World as well.

How widespread were these views? We should probably talk with an actual historian before trying to answer that question, but they were apparently representative enough to win the approval of distinguished judges and be granted a place of honor in the magazine (not to mention the $250, which back then was pretty good money).

Scientific American 1896-07-25