Sometimes I'm tempted just to rerun all of our 2016 posts

From TPM:

Brian Kemp Is Blocking 53K Applicants From Registering To Vote, Most Of Them Black
By Cameron Joseph

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s (R) office is blocking 53,000 people from registering to vote, according to records obtained by the Associated Press, a huge number that could sway his gubernatorial race against Democrat Stacey Abrams.

As TPM laid out this morning, Kemp has used a controversial “exact match” program to approve or block voter registrations that disproportionately impacts minority voters.

Now we know exactly how many people that might affect this election. According to the AP, fully 70 percent of the voter applications that are being held up by Kemp’s office are from black people.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Context only counts if it shows up in the first two dozen paragraphs

The New York Times has a good piece on the impact of voter ID laws but I do have a problem with a few parts (or at least with the way they're arranged).

Stricter Rules for Voter IDs Reshape Races

By MICHAEL WINES and MANNY FERNANDEZ MAY 1, 2016

SAN ANTONIO — In a state where everything is big, the 23rd Congressional District that hugs the border with Mexico is a monster: eight and a half hours by car across a stretch of land bigger than any state east of the Mississippi. In 2014, Representative Pete Gallego logged more than 70,000 miles there in his white Chevy Tahoe, campaigning for re-election to the House — and lost by a bare 2,422 votes.

So in his bid this year to retake the seat, Mr. Gallego, a Democrat, has made a crucial adjustment to his strategy. “We’re asking people if they have a driver’s license,” he said. “We’re having those basic conversations about IDs at the front end, right at our first meeting with voters.”

Since their inception a decade ago, voter identification laws have been the focus of fierce political and social debate. Proponents, largely Republican, argue that the regulations are essential tools to combat election fraud, while critics contend that they are mainly intended to suppress turnout of Democratic-leaning constituencies like minorities and students.

In the third paragraph, we have two conflicting claims that go to the foundation of the whole debate. If election fraud is a significant problem, you can make a case for voter ID laws. If not, it's difficult to see this as anything other than voter suppression. This paragraph pretty much demands some additional information to help the reader weigh the claims and the article provides it...

More than twenty paragraphs later.

Mr. Abbott, perhaps the law’s most ardent backer, has said that voter fraud “abounds” in Texas. A review of some 120 fraud charges in Texas between 2000 and 2015, about eight cases a year, turned up instances of buying votes and setting up fake residences to vote. Critics of the law note that no more than three or four infractions would have been prevented by the voter ID law.

Nationally, fraud that could be stopped by IDs is almost nonexistent, said Lorraine C. Minnite, author of the 2010 book “The Myth of Voter Fraud.” To sway an election, she said, it would require persuading perhaps thousands of people to commit felonies by misrepresenting themselves — and do it undetected.

“It’s ludicrous,” she said. “It’s not an effective way to try to corrupt an election.”

I shouldn't have to say this but, if a story contains claims that the reporter has reason to believe are false or misleading, he or she has an obligation to address the issue promptly. Putting the relevant information above the fold is likely to anger the people who made the false statements, but doing anything else is a disservice to the readers.

Immigration and talent

This is Joseph

This says so much in so little space:

In 2017, 608,000 students went abroad and 480,900 returned. China is proud of a return rate of 79 per cent; in 1987, the return rate was about 5 per cent, and in 2007 only 30.6 per cent.

Some of this is undoubtedly driven by better conditions in China.  But there is clearly a change in appeal for staying in the United States, as you do not see these kinds of massive shifts without something quite important changing. 

At the very least, it undermines the US as a magnet for international talent.  In some ways this might be good, by creating other clusters of talent across the globe and diversifying the intellectual frontier.  But it does suggest that it is timely to consider why this change has been quite so dramatic and whether it might be below the optimal rate for driving American innovation. 

XKCD on what your curve-fitting choices say about you

In case you missed it.

The tyranny of the mean or why most of the analysis you're about to hear on Kavanaugh's impact on the election may be wrong.

[Corrected the title. Everything else is the same.]


This is not a prediction.

This is not a counter analysis.


I don't want to get sucked up into predictions and subjective probabilities or whether my priors can beat up your priors. Instead, I want to make a point about the framework and the assumptions generally used in these conversations and the way they often overlook the obvious.

I perhaps should have called this "the tyranny of central tendency" or possibly even thrown in something about expected value. The argument here is not limited to statements about means but they are the most familiar and by far the most often abused example.

One of our long-standing concerns here at the blog is that while journalists and commentators are far more likely to talk about data these days, they have not gotten any more sophisticated in how they think about statistics. We've already discussed naïve reductionism, the implicit and often completely inappropriate assumptions of linearity, non-interaction, and stability.

This is a good time to add a couple more to the list. When people talk about the impact of some treatment or event, there is a strong tendency to assume that the mean (or in some cases the median) has changed but everything else has remained the same. You still have a nice, symmetric Gaussian with the same variance. You've just shifted it from here to there.

These assumptions are particularly likely to bite you in the ass when the point of interest involves a quantile other than the median. For example, when rent-controlled housing in an expensive neighborhood is torn down and replaced with high density market priced apartment buildings, it is entirely possible for both the average price and the amount of low-cost housing available to go down at the same time.

This brings us to the impact of the Kavanaugh confirmation. Over the next couple of weeks, when you hear people discussing the chances of the Democrats retaking the House, you will notice that many, probably most, of the answers will be to an entirely different question: what are the projected totals for the election?

Once again at the risk of stating the obvious, if you keep the mean the same and increase the variance, the probability of passing some cut off that is between the max and min possible values will approach 50%. Even if you shift the mean away from the cut off, it is still possible to increase the probability of passing that point by increasing the variance.

At the moment (and that's an important qualifier), it is entirely possible that we are seeing this situation with Kavanaugh and the midterms. While we can argue about what the polls are telling us, I think it is reasonable to claim that Kavanaugh has been through most of this process and an increasingly unpopular choice and that most news outlets outside of conservative media have raised serious questions about his fitness. At the same time, his confirmation has unquestionably enraged and energized voters on both sides. This possibly unsustainable level of enthusiasm almost inevitably increases variability. As a result, it is entirely possible for the expected number of Republican House seats to drop while the chances of the Republicans holding the house increases.

This is likely to be short-lived phenomena. A week from now, I expect we will have both a clearer picture and a more stable situation. For now although, this is a good time to remind ourselves to be more careful about how we frame analytic questions.

If you're tired of the Mars rants, just skip to the Rocket Man cover

This Neil Degrasse Tyson segment from the Tonight Show was amusing – – both he and Stephen Colbert are good at this sort of thing and play well off of each other – – but I'm including it because it hits on a point that I've alluded to in previous conversations of space exploration and the vanity aerospace industry.

Much, arguably most, of the 21st century discussion of man's expansion into and utilization of outer space is based on an implicit and often explicit colonial era framework. This includes such respectable news organizations as the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, and most recently and egregiously the Atlantic.

Any time you see the term "Mars colony," you know you are in trouble. Almost inevitably what follows will assume that the second half of the 21st century will basically just be a remake of the 17th and 18th, despite causes and conditions being all but completely non-analogous. I have neither the time nor the knowledge to go into detail here, but if you will forgive the oversimplification, the original system was based on habitable, arable lands which generally offered significant potential for trade and were easily accessed and conquered and which required a great deal of labor in order to pay off for the colonizing power.

None of this applies to Mars or any other body in the solar system. Outside of certain research questions, there are for the foreseeable future very few economically sound arguments for a human presence in space. Even if something like Martian mining proves viable, any work on the surface of the planet will be done largely, perhaps entirely, by autonomous and semiautonomous robots. This is true now and it will certainly be more true with the AI and robotics of 2050. Based on purely practical considerations, there will be no way to justify more than the most minimal of human presences on the red planet.

This leaves us with various romantic arguments about man's need to reach out to strange lands. [Insert super cut of inspirational Star Trek speeches here.] 100 or so years ago, you might have been able to make a reasonably convincing argument for the explore and settle model. Multiple high profile polar expeditions dominated the news while scientist were for the first time probing the depths of the ocean with dredges and other specialized instruments. The idea of cities in previously inhospitable or even impossible places captured the public imagination.

But this is not 1918. This is 2018 and, as Neil Degrasse Tyson points out, no one is lining up to colonize Antarctica, nor do we have undersea settlements or subterranean metropolises. Hell, we have trouble getting people to move to North Dakota.

Repost -- some thoughts on poll volatility and self-selection

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Life on 49-49

[Following up on this post, here are some more (barely) pre-election thoughts on how polls gang aft agley. I believe Jonathan Chait made some similar points. Some of Nate Silver's critics also wandered into some neighboring territory (with the important distinction that Chait understood the underlying concepts)]

Assume that there's an alternate world called Earth 49-49. This world is identical to ours in all but one respect: for almost all of the presidential campaign, 49% of the voters support Obama and 49% support Romney. There has been virtually no shift in who plans to vote for whom.

Despite this, all of the people on 49-49 believe that they're on our world, where large segments of the voters are shifting their support from Romney to Obama then from Obama to Romney. They weren't misled to this belief through fraud -- all of the polls were administered fairly and answered honestly -- nor was it a case of stupidity or bad analysis -- the political scientists on 49-49 are highly intelligent and conscientious -- rather it had to do with the nature of polling.

Pollsters had long tracked campaigns by calling random samples of potential voters. As campaign became more drawn out and journalistic focus shifted to the horse race aspects of election, these phone polls proliferated. At the same time, though, the response rates dropped sharply, going from more than one in three to less than one in ten.

A big drop in response rates always raises questions about selection bias since the change may not affect all segments of the population proportionally (more on that -- and this report -- later). It also increases the potential magnitude of these effects.

Consider these three scenarios. What would happen if you could do the following (in the first two cases, assume no polling bias):

A. Convince one percent of undecideds to support you. Your support goes to 50 while your opponent stays at 49 -- one percent poll advantage

B. Convince one percent of opponent's supporters to support you. Your support goes to 50 while your opponent drops to 48 -- two percent poll advantage

C. Convince an additional one percent of your supporters to answer the phone when a pollster calls. You go to over 51% while your opponent drops to under 47%-- around a five percent poll advantage.

Of course, no one was secretly plotting to game the polls, but poll responses are basically just people agreeing to talk to you about politics, and lots of things can affect people's willingness to talk about their candidate, including things that would almost never affect their actual votes (at least not directly but more on that later).

In 49-49, the Romney campaign hit a stretch of embarrassing news coverage while Obama was having, in general, a very good run. With a couple of exceptions, the stories were trivial, certainly not the sort of thing that would cause someone to jump the substantial ideological divide between the two candidates so, none of Romney's supporters shifted to Obama or to undecided. Many did, however, feel less and less like talking to pollsters. So Romney's numbers started to go down which only made his supporters more depressed and reluctant to talk about their choice.

This reluctance was already just starting to fade when the first debate came along. As Josh Marshall has explained eloquently and at great length since early in the primaries, the idea of Obama, faced with a strong attack and deprived of his teleprompter, collapsing in a debate was tremendously important and resonant to the GOP base. That belief was a major driver of the support for Gingrich, despite all his baggage; no one ever accused Newt of being reluctant to go for the throat.

It's not surprising that, after weeks of bad news and declining polls, the effect on the Republican base of getting what looked very much like the debate they'd hoped for was cathartic. Romney supporters who had been avoiding pollsters suddenly couldn't wait to take the calls. By the same token. Obama supporters who got their news from Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews really didn't want to talk right now.

The polls shifted in Romney's favor even though, had the election been held the week after the debate, the result would have been the same as it would have been had the election been held two weeks before -- 49% to 49%. All of the changes in the polls had come from core voters on both sides. The voters who might have been persuaded weren't that interested in the emotional aspect of the conventions and the debates and were already familiar with the substantive issues both events raised.

So response bias was amplified by these factors:

1. the effect was positively correlated with the intensity of support

2. it was accompanied by matching but opposite effects on the other side

3. there were feedback loops -- supporters of candidates moving up in the polls were happier and more likely to respond while supporters of candidates moving down had the opposite reaction.

You might wonder how the pollsters and political scientists of this world missed this. The answer that they didn't. They were concerned about selection effects and falling response rates, but the problems with the data were difficult to catch definitively thanks to some serious obscuring factors:

1. Researchers have to base their conclusions off of the historical record when the effect was not nearly so big.

2. Things are correlated in a way that's difficult to untangle. The things you would expect to make supporters less enthusiastic about talking about their candidate are often the same things you'd expect to lower support for that candidate

3. As mentioned before, there are compensatory effects. Since response rates for the two parties are inversely related, the aggregate is fairly stable.

4. The effect of embarrassment and elation tend to fade over time so that most are gone by the actual election.

5. There's a tendency to converge as the election approaches. Mainly because likely voter screens become more accurate.

6. Poll predictions can be partially self-fulfilling. If the polls indicate a sufficiently low chance of winning, supporters can become discouraged, allies can desert you and money can dry up. The result is, again, convergence.

For the record, I don't think we live on 49-49. I do, however, think that at least some of the variability we've seen in the polls can be traced back to selection effects similar to those described here and I have to believe it's likely to get worse.

Fixed costs, marginal costs, and the Zeno project management rule of thumb.

Having spent a long time now chronicling bad journalism, one of the conclusions that keeps coming up again and again is that 21st-century journalists have a serious problem dealing with the obvious, particularly when it goes against the story being told by the subject of a piece. This inability to address these naked emperor situations shows up in every area of news coverage – – political examples alone would fill volumes – – but let's focus on one egregious example, high-speed intra-city rail, best illustrated by a recent proposal from, to no one's great surprise, Elon Musk.

There's a very good rule of thumb when you're trying to devise complex solutions to get you as close as possible to some upper bound: if you think of your progress in terms of a succession of steps that take you halfway from where you are to where you want to be, you should assume that each step will cost more than the previous step. In other words, getting halfway to your goal will be cheaper than going from half to one fourth and going from half to one fourth will be cheaper than going from 1/4 to 1/8, and so on. (I'd probably start using the word "asymptote" here if this were the kind of post where I was going to use words like "asymptote.")

Clearly, this is closely related to the concept of diminishing returns and it immediately suggests that plans which promise complete solutions to thorny problems should be viewed with great skepticism. Recent case in point, the vague pitch for a vague proposal for a vague plan for getting pedestrian deaths in Los Angeles down to zero. With a well-functioning press corps, offers of perfection should be a hard sell.

Unfortunately, this takes us into the bullshit territory of aspirational language and various other magical heuristics. The willingness to commit to the impossible has increasingly come to be seen as a sign of seriousness and visionary thinking. Playing by these rules, the very fact that a claim is unbelievable actually makes it more credible.

While it is possible to come up with exceptions to the Zeno rule, it holds for an exceptionally large number of cases, particularly when you take into account fixed and marginal costs. Let's get back to the subject of transportation.

Consider two flights, one from Los Angeles to San Francisco, the other to some city east of the Mississippi. LA has a fair number of major airports, but they all tend to be understandably on the outskirts so that, if you are starting from a fairly central location, it is easy to find yourself a considerable distance away from the closest option. Between driving, parking, and getting through security, let's call it two hours from stepping out your front door to stepping on the plane (to simplify things, we'll treat the other airport as your final destination).

We'll round up the flying time from Los Angeles to San Francisco to an hour and call the flying time to our unnamed East Coast city eight hours, giving us a total of three hours and ten hours respectively. In terms of travel time and airspeed, those two hours are fixed cost while the rest are marginal. Increasing airspeed would decrease the second but leave the first unchanged, thus paying extra for a much faster airplane would make a great deal of sense for the long flight but almost none for the short one.

Once again, apologies for spending this much time making obvious points, but it's good to have these things in mind when we consider the following:

Elon Musk's company proposes 3.6-mile tunnel to Dodger Stadium
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s tunneling company on Wednesday announced a proposal to build another tunnel in Los Angeles, a 3.6-mile underground route that would carry fans between Dodger Stadium and a nearby Metro subway station.

The Boring Co. said the Dugout Loop would be a “zero-emissions, high-speed” transportation system that could carry fans in about four minutes between Elysian Park and a Metro station along Vermont Avenue, at Beverly Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard or Sunset Boulevard.

Pods carrying passengers would whiz through the tunnel at speeds of up to 150 mph, resting on self-driving platforms called “skates,” the Boring Co. said. The trip would cost about $1, and riders would purchase tickets in advance through a mobile app.

In 21st-century journalism, being completely debunked is no reason to drop the narrative.

As previously mentioned, there is much to object to in this recent Atlantic monthly piece "How Mars Will Be Policed" by Geoff Manaugh – – if I have the stomach for it, there is easily enough material here for a half dozen highly critical posts – – but perversely enough, it is the one really good part that best illustrates one of the worst aspects of modern journalism.

It is standard in medium to long form reporting, particularly in stories with a speculative or subjective element, to have an article that consists of a string of quotes from experts who are, if not in complete agreement, then are at least taking complementary positions. This chain is broken up by one or two dissenting voices who are completely ignored through the rest of the article.

Manaugh is nothing if not true to the form. Here is the relevant passage that occurs well into the piece.

For David Paige, worrying about crime on Mars is not just ahead of its time, it is unnecessary from the very beginning. Paige is a planetary scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as a member of a team selected by NASA to design a ground-penetrating radar system for exploring the Martian subsurface. Crime on Mars, Paige told me, will be so difficult to execute that no one will be tempted to try.

“The issue,” Paige said, “is that there is going to be so much monitoring of people in various sorts of ways.” Airlocks will likely record exactly who opens them and when, for example, mapping everyone’s location down to precise times of day, even to the exact square feet of space they were standing in at a particular moment. Inhabitants’ vital signs, such as elevated heart rates and adrenaline levels, will also likely be recorded by sensors embedded in Martian clothing. If a crime was committed somewhere, time-stamped data could be correlated with a spatial record of where everyone was at that exact moment. “It’s going to be very easy to narrow down the possible culprits,” Paige suggested.

It is difficult to overstate how effectively this point demolishes most of what has come before. It is completely reasonable to assume that, at least in the near future, any humans living or working on Mars will be constantly tracked. Barring some kind of hack or system failure, we would have a record of the exact position and vital signs of both perpetrator and victim of any crime on the planet. This doesn't preclude the possibility of robbery and murder on extraterrestrial bases, but it does effectively rule out the scenarios spelled out in the rest of the article.

One of the stranger and more malignant tenets of modern journalism is that simply mentioning a counter argument is sufficient for balance. You don't need to adjust your argument or explain why the criticism does not hold. In this case, Manaugh completely ignores the devastating main point, raises some weak and logically questionable objections (we'll go into the absurdity of the space roughnecks claim in another post), then goes back to his stories of mining camp murders and daring bank heists.

Hiltzik's Musk/Trump post is looking pretty damned prescient right about now.

A couple of weeks ago, we discussed a Michael Hiltzik column that looked at some similarities between Donald Trump and Elon Musk and suggested that institutions which rely too heavily on charismatic but erratic con artists are likely to have extremely rude awakenings at some point.

Subsequent events have not undercut his thesis.

Tesla stock drops almost 14% as SEC tries to force Elon Musk out of company leadership
by Samantha Masunaga


Tesla Inc. stock closed sharply lower Friday as investors worried about a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit that seeks to bar Elon Musk from continuing to lead the electric-car maker.

Shares of Tesla closed at $264.77, down 13.9% Friday afternoon.

The SEC filed its complaint against Musk after markets closed Thursday, alleging that the chairman and chief executive committed securities fraud by issuing a series of “false and misleading tweets about a potential transaction to take Tesla private.”

On Thursday evening, Tesla’s board of directors defended Musk, saying it is “fully confident in Elon, his integrity, and his leadership of the company, which has resulted in the most successful U.S. auto company in over a century.” It did not say what metric it was using for auto-company success.

[This is a good place to note that the LA Times, perhaps due to the influence of Hiltzik, was one of the first major news organizations to start seeing through the real life Tony Stark hype around Tesla – – MP]

Musk also issued a statement, calling the SEC lawsuit unjustified. “I have always taken action in the best interests of truth, transparency and investors,” he said.

The SEC complaint, which asks the court to ban Musk from running any public company, seeks a jury trial.

A request to bar an individual from serving as an officer or director of a public company is not unusual for SEC enforcement action, said Tom Gorman, a partner at law firm Dorsey & Whitney. But he believes a judge is unlikely to agree to force out Musk because of the likely impact it would have on Tesla, its workforce and shareholders.

“Mr. Musk is this company, in many ways,” Gorman said. “If you just say, ‘We’re not going to let you be an officer or director of a public company anymore,’ you could destroy the company and millions of dollars of shareholder value.”

...

Musk’s possible exit is likely one of the reasons Tesla’s stock fell the way it did, said David Whiston, stock analyst at Morningstar.

“Without Elon Musk, Tesla’s just an automaker that’s burning too much cash and has too much debt,” he said.

Of course, with Elon Musk, Tesla’s just an automaker that’s burning too much cash and has too much debt. Musk brings no special magic to this company he is extraordinarily gifted as a fundraiser, a promoter, and a motivational speaker, but he has shown absolutely no exceptional talent in any other area, especially engineering.

Weekend Flashback

[The Brett Kavanaugh hearings have touched on a number of threads we've had running in the blog over the years, so I thought I'd repost a few relevant pieces just to keep them in the conversation.]

Monday, October 17, 2016

Rabbit season! Duck season! Rabbit season!

I'm planning on coming back and elaborating more on this later, but, as frequently noted here and elsewhere, while most commentators have fared extraordinarily poorly over the past year, a handful (including, yes, your not-so-humble hosts) have had a good run. Though they may not have framed it in exactly these terms, pretty much everybody who has gotten it mostly right has approached the election as the final stages of a massive social engineering experiment conducted by the conservative movement.

A key component of this experiment involved setting up radically different information streams for different target audiences. We talked about this before but one aspect that I've always wanted to address but never managed to get to is the way that this dual stream can explain seeming paradoxes in the radically different reactions of different groups of people to the same information.

In order to get a handle on this, it might be useful to think back to that time in psych 101 when the professor brought out the ambiguous pictures.The standard example is the old woman and young woman (originally captioned in a cartoon as  "my wife and my mother-in-law"). For the sake of variety, let's go with another.

The psych lecture would go something like this. Half the class was told to cover their eyes, the other half was shown a series of slides of birds. Then that half of the class was told to cover their eyes and the other half was shown a series of slides of small mammals. After being thus prepared, everyone looks at the following picture and is asked to write down what they see.

For the commentators who took the time to dig through the various media streams and put themselves in the place of each target audience (most notably Josh Marshall), it has been obvious for quite a while that those in the right-wing media bubble have a strong tendency to interpret events in a way that is consistent with the information, framing and narratives of the bubble. Donald Trump succeeded in the primaries because both his arguments and his affect seemed reasonable in the context of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

I'll come back and fill in some more details later but, as much as I want to avoid oversimplifying, this really is pretty simple. The journalists who have come off as sharp and ahead of the curve, have all (as far as I can tell) looked seriously at right-wing media and have asked themselves, if I actually believed everything I just heard, how would I react to the different candidates and their proposals?

This begs loads of questions and I don't want to oversell the explanatory power here, but given all of the overheated rhetoric about how chaotic and unpredictable this election has been, it's worth noting when those getting it right have something in common.

Atomic airplanes and Kodachrome moments.

If was the sister publication to Galaxy Magazine, a bit less prestigious, but still well-respected and catering to the same hard-science audience. This 1957 issue brings up a couple of interesting points for our postwar technological expectations thread.

One is that, at least in the popular press, there was a widespread assumption in the 1950s that nuclear energy would come to play a large role in aerospace in the next few decades.. I'm not sure to what extent actual researchers in the field shared these expectations, but it is safe to say that the young science nerds of 1958 would be somewhat disappointed at how little much of the technology has changed.

Another thing that pops out from a 2018 perspective is the reference to Kodachrome on the cover. The idea that Kodak film would be used to document the first Mars expedition seems rather amusing in retrospect, though I'm not sure exactly where the art director.it wrong. Was he assuming that the iconic company would still be around well into the 21st century or did he believe we make it to Mars in the 20th?

"I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

While reading up on public perceptions of the space race during the postwar era, I was disappointed to learn that my favorite Mort Sahl line wasn't actually from Mort Sahl.

Satirist Mort Sahl has been credited with mocking von Braun by saying "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."[39] In fact that line appears in the film I Aim at the Stars, a 1960 biopic of von Braun.

Thank God we still have Lehrer.

"Wernher von Braun" (1965): A song written and performed by Tom Lehrer for an episode of NBC's American version of the BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was; the song was later included in Lehrer's albums That Was The Year That Was and The Remains of Tom Lehrer. It was a satire on what some saw as von Braun's cavalier attitude toward the consequences of his work in Nazi Germany

Ley on the pre-history of the space station

This 1953 piece by Willy Ley is interesting for any number of reasons, but there are a couple that are especially relevant to our recent threads.

First, there's the comparison of technologies that seem to catch everyone off guard compared with those that have a long history of antecedents in fiction/myth, serious speculation, and failed experiments before becoming viable. It can be difficult to sort these out from a modern perspective, so it is extremely useful to have the topic explored by someone like Ley who combines mastery of the science with extensive knowledge of the fiction.

Second, and even more applicable to our ongoing conversation, is the timeframe. As with many concepts in space travel, the idea of a space station was for all practical intents and purposes introduced by Hermann Oberth 30 years before the appearance of the following article. Within around a quarter of a century, scientists had developed the design into what we still think of today when we hear the words space station, a torus-shaped orbital platform where people and cargo from surface-launched rockets could be transferred to long-range spacecrafts.

This is very much consistent with the push into space of the period in particular and of the postwar science and tech spike in general. Most of the enabling technologies were either truly cutting-edge (like atomic power and transistors) or were developed during or between the two world wars.

By comparison, at least when it comes to 21st-century aerospace, the basic ideas behind most of our highly touted advances and "bold and visionary" proposals tend to be much older, often passing the 50 or even 60 year mark. This is not to say that impressive work is not being done or that major technical challenges are not being overcome, but the role of the cutting-edge and even the moderately recent discovery is far less than it used to be, and that might not be a good sign.

Or you could have just taken away the bullets

I have all sorts of problems with this Atlantic piece [How Mars Will Be Policed by Geoff Manaugh] but before I get into those big complaints, there is a smaller point that bothers me.

When I asked Kim Stanley Robinson—whose award-winning Mars Trilogy imagines the human settlement of the Red Planet in extraordinary detail—about the future of police activity on Mars, he responded with a story. In the 1980s, he told me, a team from the National Science Foundation was sent to a research base in Antarctica with a single handgun for the entire crew. The gun was intended as a tool of last resort, for only the most dire of emergencies, but the scientists felt its potential for abuse was too serious to remain unchecked. According to Robinson, they dismantled the gun into three constituent parts and stored each piece with a different caretaker. That way, if someone got drunk and flew into a rage, or simply cracked under the loneliness and pressure, there would be no realistic scenario in which anyone could collect the separate pieces, reassemble the gun, load it, and begin holding people hostage (or worse).

First off, I wonder if this really happen. It's told in an apocryphal, urban-legend style that makes me somewhat skeptical. More to the point, I'm trying to think of what dire emergency which was likely to occur in an Antarctic research base would require a gun of any kind. It's hard to imagine what external threats they might have been worried about and the "let's have a gun around in case someone goes crazy" theory has one of those flaws that you'd like to think smart people would catch in the planning stage.

If it didn't happen, there is an obvious problem with it being presented as fact, but if it did happen, there is almost as great a problem with the lack of identifying information or collaborating detail. Has anyone out there heard this story before?

On the plus side, the von Braun and Ley Zeppelin designs would make for some very cool steam-punk art

Sometimes, when wandering over what should be well explored territory you come across a pair of familiar facts that suddenly strike you as strange or even shocking when considered together.

I had one of those moments yesterday when thinking about our vanity aerospace thread, and specifically its relationship to the science-fiction and popular science writing of the postwar era. As previously mentioned, most of the "bold" and "visionary" proposals coming from billionaires like Paul Allen, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk are almost all similar and in some cases all but identical to the ideas being laid out by people like Werner von Braun and Willy Ley more than 60 years ago.

That alone is striking – – these are visions of the future are often older than the people making them – – but the full impact didn't hit me until I got to thinking about what looking back 60 or 70 years would've been like back when von Braun and Ley were first laying these ideas out for the public in popular magazine articles and Disney TV specials.

Take a minute to think about the technological gap between the world of the early 1950s and that of the late 1880s. The rocket scientists and their popularizers were discussing multistage rockets, radio communication and control, atomic energy. In the 1880s these subjects were, at best, the subject of speculation. In some cases, even the underlying physics was yet to be established.

When people in the 1950s looked back at how their grandparents imagine the future, the ideas seemed primitive and charmingly quaint. When we look back over a comparable interval, we see a view of the future which looks, or lack of a better word, futuristic. For me, at least, that's a rather depressing thought.