A few points on Willy Ley and "the Conquest of Space"

To understand the 21st century narrative around technology and progress, you need to go back to two eras of extraordinary advances, the late 19th/early 20th centuries and the postwar era. Virtually all of the frameworks, assumptions, imagery, language, and iconography we use to discuss and think about the future can be traced back to these two periods.

The essential popularizer of science in the latter era was Willy Ley. In terms of influence and popularity, it is difficult to think of a comparable figure. Carl Sagan and Neil Degrasse Tyson hold somewhat analogous positions, but neither can claim anywhere near the impact. When you add in Ley's close association with Werner von Braun, it is entirely reasonable to use his books as indicators of what serious people in the field of aerospace were thinking at the time. The excerpt below comes with a 1949 copyright and gives us an excellent idea of what seemed feasible 70 years ago.

There is a lot to digest here, but I want to highlight two points in particular.

First is the widespread assumption at the time that atomic energy would play a comparable role in the remainder of the 20th century to that of hydrocarbons in the previous century and a half, certainly for power generation and large-scale transportation. Keep in mind that it took a mere decade to go from Hiroshima to the launch of the Nautilus and there was serious research (including limited prototypes) into nuclear powered aircraft. Even if fusion reactors remained out of reach, a world where all large vehicles were powered by the atom seemed, if anything, likely.

Second, check out Ley's description of the less sophisticated, non-atomic option and compare it to the actual approach taken by the Apollo program 20 years later.

I think we have reversed the symbolic meaning of a Manhattan project and a moonshot. The former has come to mean a large, focus, and dedicated commitment to rapidly addressing a challenging but solvable problem. The second has come to mean trying to do something so fantastic it seems impossible. The reality was largely the opposite. Building an atomic bomb was an incredible goal that required significant advances in our understanding of the underlying scientific principles. Getting to the moon was mainly a question of committing ourselves to spending a nontrivial chunk of our GDP on an undertaking that was hugely ambitious in terms of scale but which relied on technology that was already well-established by the beginning of the Sixties.

________________________________________________

The conquest of space by Willy Ley 1949
Page 48.

In general, however, the moon messenger [and unmanned test rocket designed to crash land on the moon – – MP] is close enough to present technological accomplishments so that its design and construction are possible without any major inventions. Its realization is essentially a question of hard work and money.

The manned moonship is a different story. The performance expected of it is, naturally, that it take off from the earth, go to the moon, land, takeoff from the moon, and return to earth. And that, considering known chemical fuels and customary design and construction methods, is beyond our present ability. But while the moon ship can make a round-trip is unattainable with chemical fuels, a moon ship which can land on the moon with a fuel supply insufficient for the return is a remote possibility. The point here is that one more attention of the step principle is possible three ships which landed might have enough fuel left among them for one to make the return trip.

This, of course, involves great risk, since the failure of one ship would doom them all. Probably the manned moon ship will have to be postponed until there is an orbital nation. Take off from the station, instead of from the ground, would require only an additional 2 mi./s, so that the total works out to about 7 mi./s, instead of the 12 mi./s mentioned on page 44.

Then, of course, there is the possibility of using atomic energy. If some 15 years ago, a skeptical audience had been polled as to which of the two "impossibilities" – – moon ship and large scale controlled-release of atomic energy – – they considered less fantastic, the poll would probably have been 100% in favor of the moon ship. As history turned out, atomic energy came first, and it is now permissible to speculate whether the one may not be the key to the other.

So far, unfortunately, we only know that elements like uranium, plutonium, etc., contain enough energy for the job. We also know that this energy is not completely accessible, that it can be released. He can't even be released in two ways, either fast in the form of a superexplosion, or slowly in a so-called "pile" where the energy appears mainly as he. But we don't know how to apply these phenomena to rocket propulsion. Obviously the fissionable matter should not form the exhaust; there should be an additional reactant, a substance which is thrown out: plain water, perhaps, which would appear as skiing, possibly even split up into its component atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, or perhaps peroxide.

The "how" is still to be discovered, but it will probably be based on the principle of using eight fissionable element's energy for the ejection of a relatively inert reactant. It may be that, when that problem has been solved, we will find a parallel to the problem of pumps in an ordinary liquid fuel rocket. When liquid fuel rockets were still small – – that was only about 17 years ago and I remember the vividly – – the fuels were forced into the rocket motor by pressurizing the whole fuel tank. But everybody knew then that this would not do for all time to come. The tank that had to stand the feeding pressure had to have strong walls. Consequently it was heavy. Consequently the mass ratio could not be I. The idea then was that the tank be only strong enough to hold the fuels, in the matter of the gasoline tank of a car or truck or an airplane, and that the feeding pressure should be furnished by a pop. Of course the pump had to weigh less than the saving in tank wall weight which they brought about. Obviously there was a minimum size and weight for a good home, and if that minimum weight was rather large, a rocket with pumps would have to be a big rocket.

It happened just that way. Efficient pumps were large and heavy and the rocket with pumps was the 46 foot the two. The "atomic motor" for rockets may also turn out to be large, the smallest really reliable and efficient model may be a compact little 7 ton unit. This would make for a large rocket – – but the size of a vehicle is no obstacle if you have the power to move it. Whatever the exhaust velocity, it will be high – – an expectation of 5 mi./s may be conservative. With such an exhaust velocity the mass ratio of the moon ship would be 11:1; with an exhaust velocity of 10 mi./s the mass ratio would drop .3:1!

The moon ship shown in the paintings of the second illustration section is based on the assumption of a mass ratio of this order of magnitude, which in turn is based on the assumption of an atomic rocket motor.

Naturally there would be some trouble with radioactivity in an atomic propelled rocket. But that is not quite as hard to handle as the radioactivity which would accompany atomic energy propulsion under different circumstances. A seagoing vessel propelled by time and energy could probably be built right now. It would operate by means of an atomic pile running at the center high enough to burden and water steam. The steam would drive a turbine, which would be coupled to the ships propeller. While all this mechanism would be reasonably small and light as ship engines go, it would have to be encased in many tons of concrete to shield the ships company against the radiation that would escape from the pile and from the water and the skiing the coolant. For a spaceship, no all-around shielding needed, only a single layer, separating the pilot's or crew's cabin in the nose from the rest of the ship. On the ground a ship which had grown "hot" through service would be placed inside a shielding structure, something like a massive concrete walls, open at the top. That would provide complete shielding or the public, but a shielding that the ship would not have to carry.
The problem that may be more difficult to handle is that of the radioactivity of the exhaust. A mood ship taking off with Lee behind a radioactive patch, caused by the ground/. Most likely that radioactivity would not last very long, but it would be a temporary danger spot. Obviously moon ship for some time to come will begin their journeys from desolate places. Of course they might take off by means of booster units producing nothing more dangerous in their exhaust them water vapor, carbon dioxide, and maybe a sulfurous smell.

Transportation cost overruns are nothing new

From Scientific American 1896

If you need me, I'll be voting

This nearly century and a quarter old discussion about rapid transit has a remarkably contemporary feel to it, starting with the phrase "rapid transit."

I always assumed it was a 20th Century term, but...



It's this paragraph, however, that struck me as particularly modern:

 

You should be concerned about the quality of the polls, but it's likely voter models that should worry you the most.

I've been meaning to do a good, substantial, well reasoned piece on fundamental misunderstandings about political polling. This is not that post. Things have been, let us say, busy of late and I don't have time to get this right, but I do need to get it written. I really want to get this one out in the first five days of November.

So here's the short version.

When the vast majority of journalists (even most data journalists) talk about polls being wrong, they tend to screw up the discussion on at least two levels. First because they do not grasp the distinction between data and model and second because they don't understand how either is likely to go kerplooie (okay, how would you spell it?).

The term "polls of registered voters" describes more or less raw data. A complete and detailed discussion would at this point mention weighting, stratification, and other topics but – – as previously mentioned – – this is not one of those discussions. For now, we will treat those numbers you see in the paper as summary statistics of the data.

Of course, lots of things can go wrong in the collecting. Sadly, most journalists are only aware of the least worrisome issue, sampling error. Far more troubling are inaccurate/dishonest responses and, even more importantly, nonrepresentative samples (a topic we have looked into at some depth earlier). For most reporters, "inside the margin of error" translates to "revealed word of God" and when this misunderstanding leads to disaster, they conclude that "the polls were wrong."

The term "likely voter" brings in an entirely different concept, one which is generally even less well understood by the people covering it because now we are talking not just about data, but about models. [Quick caveat: all of my experience with survey data and response models has been on the corporate side. I'm working under the assumption that the same basic approaches are being used here, but you should always consult your physician or political scientist before embarking on prognostications of your own.]

First off, it's worth noting that the very designation of "likely" is arbitrary. A model has been produced that attempts to predict the likelihood that a given individual will vote in an upcoming election, but the cut off between likely and unlikely is simply a number that the people in the field decided was reasonable. There's nothing scientific, let alone magical about it.

Far more important, particularly in the upcoming election, is the idea of range of data. Certain concepts somehow managed to be both painfully obvious and frequently forgotten. Perhaps the best example in statistics is that a model only describes the relationships found in the sample. When we try to extrapolate beyond the range of data, we can only hope that the relationships will continue to hold.

By their very nature, this is always a problem with predictive modeling, but it becomes a reason for skepticism bordering on panic when the variables you included in or perhaps more to the point, left out of your model start taking on values far in excess of anything you saw on the sample. 2018 appears to be a perfect example.

Will the relationships we've seen in the past hold? If not, will the shift favor the Democrats? The  Republicans? Or will the relationships break down in such a way that they cancel each other out? I have no intention of speculating. What I am saying is that we are currently so far out of the range of data on so many factors that I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about likely voters at all.

Our regular repost on drinking from the wrong pipe

From Josh Marshall:

I managed to involve myself this weekend in a tiny eddy in the storm around the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. As you can see below, early yesterday evening I happened upon this interview on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business News show in which a guest, Chris Farrell, claimed the migrant caravan in southern Mexico was being funded and directed by the “Soros-occupied State Department.” This is, as I explained, straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the foundational anti-Semitic tract, first circulated and perhaps authored by the Czarist secret police in the first years of the 20th century.

If you’re not familiar with this world, “ZOG” is a staple of white supremacist and neo-Nazi literature and websites. It stands for “Zionist Occupied Government” and is a shorthand for the belief that Jews secretly control the US government. Chris Farrell’s phrasing was no accident. All of this is straight out of the most rancid anti-Semitic propaganda. Rob Bowers, the shooter in the Pittsburgh massacre, appears to have been specifically inspired by this conspiracy theory. Indeed, Bowers had also reposted references to “ZOG” on his social media accounts.

All of the conspiracy theories around the caravan, particularly those involving George Soros and voter fraud, have a weird underwear gnomes quality to them. They make emotional sense for those deep in the conservative media bubble, but there's no way to make any kind of plausible argument for any of them.

It can be useful for the Republican Party if certain segments of the population believe these fantasies, even disseminate them as long as the discussion remains far enough on the recognized fringe to allow party leaders plausible deniability. It is not useful to have ranking politicians and influential conservative voices saying these things out loud on what are supposed to be respectable outlets.

Or as we said exactly two years ago...

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

In retrospect, it's surprising we don't use more sewage metaphors

A few stray thoughts on the proper flow of information (and misinformation) and a functional organization.

I know we've been through all of this stuff about Leo Strauss and the conservative movement before so I'm not going to drag this out into great detail except to reiterate that if you want to have a functional  institution that makes extensive use of internal misinformation, you have to make sure things move in the right direction.

With misinformation systems as with plumbing, when the flow starts going the wrong way, the results are seldom pretty. This has been a problem for the GOP for at least a few years now. A number of people in positions of authority, (particularly in the tea party wing) have bought into notions that were probably intended simply to keep the cannon-fodder happy. This may also partly explain the internal polling fiasco at the Romney campaign.

As always, though, it is Trump who takes things to a new level. We now have a Republican nominee who uses the fringier parts of the Twitter verse as briefings.

From Josh Marshall:

Here's what he said ...

Wikileaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling democrats, a voter suppression technique. That's happening to me all the time. When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I'm leading. But you see these polls where they're polling democrats. How is Trump doing? Oh, he's down. They're polling democrats. The system is corrupt, rigged and broken. And we're going to change it. [ Cheers and applause ]
Thank you, thank you. In an e-mail podesta says he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling. It's called voter suppression because people will say, oh, gee, Trump's down. Folks, we're winning. We're winning. We're winning. These thieves and crook, the immediate, yeah not all of it, not all of it, but much of it -- they're the most crooked -- they're almost as crooked as Hillary. They may even be more crooked than Hillary because without the media, she would be nothing.

Now this immediately this grabbed my attention because over the weekend I was flabbergasted to see this tweet being shared around the Trumposphere on Twitter.

Todays Wikileaks dump revealed the DNC works w/ pollsters to skew polls in their favor by over-polling Democrats & under-polling Republicans pic.twitter.com/tVA8K6n79T

— Taylor Egly (@TaylorEgly) October 24, 2016

I don't know who Taylor Egly is. But he has 250,000 followers - so he has a big megaphone on Twitter. This tweet and this new meme is a bracing example of just how many of the "scoops" from the Podesta emails are based on people simply not knowing what words mean.
Trump had already mentioned 'over-sampling' earlier. But here he's tying it specifically to the Podesta emails released by Wikileaks. This tweet above is unquestionably what he's referring to.
There are several levels of nonsense here. Let me try to run through them.
...

 More importantly, what Tom Matzzie is talking about is the campaign/DNC's own polls. Campaigns do extensive, very high quality polling to understand the state of the race and devise strategies for winning. These are not public polls. So they can't affect media polls and they can't have anything to do with voter suppression.

Now you may be asking, why would the Democrats skew their own internal polls? Well, they're not.
The biggest thing here is what the word 'oversampling' means. Both public and private pollsters will often over-sample a particular demographic group to get statistically significant data on that group.
...  You need to get an 'over-sample' to get solid numbers.

Whether it's public or private pollsters, the 'over-sample' is never included in the 'topline' number. So if you get 4 times the number of African-American voters as you got in a regular sample, those numbers don't all go into the mix for the total poll. They're segmented out. The whole thing basically amounts to zooming in on one group to find out more about them. To do so, to zoom in, you need to 'over-sample' their group as what amounts to a break-out portion of the poll.

What it all comes down to is that you're talking about a polling concept the Trumpers don't seem to understand (or are relying on supporters not understanding), about polls that are by definition secret (campaign polls aren't shared) and about an election eight years ago.

Halloween Greetings form College Humor

"The Internet Goes Trick-or-Treating"

We can't finish October without playing this at least once

The Danse Macabre (from the French language), also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance Macabre unites all.

The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or a personification of death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and laborer. They were produced as mementos mori, to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now-lost mural at Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425.

I think it's important to define subsidized journalism more broadly than just native advertising.

[This started out as a reply to Andrew Gelman's post "The Axios Turing test and the heat death of the journalistic universe," but when you break 500 words...]

First, there is the age-old problem of advertisers rewarding/punishing publications. If memory serves, Politico back in the Mike Allen days was notorious for questionable ethics along these lines.

Far more subtle and dangerous is the quid pro quo associated with access. While most news organizations have rules in place to prevent editorial influence from advertisers and generally avoid even the appearance of impropriety, giving favorable coverage to sources (often even to the extent of letting them set the narrative and distort the facts) is so widespread that many journalists don't even see the ethical problem. Politico and Axios both have bad reputations in this regard, but the worst offender may well be the New York Times.

This is both a carrot and a stick process. When Disney found itself the target of an LA Times exposé about its dealings with the city of Anaheim, they responded by publicly cutting off the paper's access to the studio's talent, even though that was an entirely different department of the paper dealing with entirely different Disney business lines. The good news is that, now that Disney has become by far the biggest and most powerful entertainment company in the world with the acquisition of Fox, I'm sure they will be much less inclined to abuse their position.

Particularly in fields such as entertainment, companies often go beyond merely providing journalists with the raw material and actually provide the stories themselves. Sometimes this is done by sending out press releases that can be repackaged as features with a minimum of work. Other times you have what can only be described as ghostwriting. Someone with the studio or one of the PR firms it employs will send a reporter an email about an upcoming project. The next day it will appear almost verbatim under the reporter's byline.

In addition to supplying money and content, companies can also provide an even more valuable service as promotion partners. That exclusive you just published about a new movie will get far more traffic because of the hundred million dollars the studio has spent on marketing the project, not to mention the effects of the SEO push and the social media blitz. If you write a story that the studios want to promote, you can literally see millions of PR dollars spent on getting you eyeballs.

While none of this is by any means new, Netflix and to a lesser extent the other streaming services have pushed things to a new level, spending billions on marketing and PR, even green lighting hundred million dollar documentaries and art-house projects for no other apparent reason than that they will generate lots of coverage and might snag a few awards. This unprecedented amount of money has distorted the narrative to such an extent that it is impossible to gauge the cultural impact or commercial viability of Netflix, but most of the journalists covering this story (virtually all of those on the East Coast) remain oblivious to this aspect, perhaps because ignorance of this particular detail makes their lives much easier.

More spooky stuff (In no way chosen as filler because I had a busy week)

Who better than Goldsmith and Hermann to send us off.

A Mercury Theatre Halloween

[repost]

The debut production of the Mercury Theatre of the Air, Dracula.




And, of course, the Mercury production of War of the Worlds.



While we're at it, here's a tour de force from Welles' favorite, Agnes Moorehead (don't let the corny intro turn you off) Sorry, Wrong Number.

We'll largely skip over the author's fixation on casual nudity.

When trying to understand attitudes toward and expectations for technology in previous eras, one needs to be especially cautious about relying on science fiction writers. Though they initially appear to be the richest source on the subject, numerous factors combine to make them unreliable. Most were attracted to the field by a fascination with the more dramatic aspects of the future and these tendencies are greatly heightened by working in a genre where the object was often to out geewhiz the next guy.

That said, it's a mistake to ignore them entirely, both because of the close relationship between the scientific and the science-fiction community, and because of the influence SF has played on the way we think about technology today either directly through books, film, television and indirectly through writers who alternated between science fact and science fiction (Asimov, Clarke, and to a degree, Willy Ley and Carl Sagan).

This mid century essay by Robert Heinlein on his predictions for the year 2000 is worth a look for a number of reasons. First, people did tend to take the man seriously in the postwar era. Though his standing has arguably declined somewhat at least relative to contemporaries like Asimov, at his peak, he was the best known and best respected hard science fiction writer among mainstream audiences. (Bradberry also had significant mainstream following, but even when writing about spaceships and aliens, his work tended to fall more in the category of fantasy).

Second, this essay is of particular value because the author not only makes a great number of detailed predictions (including a notable amount of time spent on the appeal of socially acceptable nudity), he also explicitly spells out the assumptions that underlie much of the period's attitudes toward the future. He even states his axioms and provides a handy graph of human advancement.

As a serious attempt at describing the rate of progress, this picture is fatally flawed. The year 1900 came at the end of a huge technological and scientific spike. Extending it back a couple of decades would have completely thrown off the curve. (Interestingly, you actually can justify an exponential curve describing progress in the 19th century.) Furthermore, it is difficult to argue a steady acceleration from the naughts to the teens, the teens to the 20s, and the 20s to the 30s.

This graph, however, is tremendously revealing when it comes to the ways people in the 1950s thought about progress. Like the end of the 19th century, the postwar era was a period when conditions lined up to cause a number of very steep S curves to cluster together. The result was a time of explosive, ubiquitous change. There was also, as mentioned before, a tendency to look at the two world wars and the interval between (particularly the Great Depression) as anomalous. It was natural for people in the postwar era to see themselves as living on an exponential slope that was on the verge of shooting past the comprehensible.

Cult of the CEO

This is Joseph

This is a revealing symptom of the cult of the CEO:

If you have a CEO this dead to rights on securities fraud, why let him continue as CEO? According to the SEC, Musk was indispensable. In a statement, SEC Chair Jay Clayton said “holding individuals accountable is important and an effective means of deterrence,” but that he must take the interests of investors into account, and “the skills and support of certain individuals may be important to the future success of a company.”

One of the most pernicious myths is that of the irreplaceable man.  We know that nobody is really irreplaceable, because in the end we are all replaced by the natural force of mortality.  But it is a terrible sign of a society when it sees the importance of a person to a business enterprise as an excuse for leniency for poor conduct.  The pressure to cheat to reach the top has to be high because the stakes are so incredibly meaningful in terms of wealth and status.  That suggests more scrutiny, not less. 

Irreplaceable men often beget disasters.  Great leaders, like Napoleon, often get cocky and make grave mistakes that end up costing a great deal despite the attributes that made them successful for a long time. 

I think that this line of thinking isn't ideal. 

It is always useful to go back and read the contemporary accounts.

One of the nails I've pounded flush to the board recently (apologies to long-suffering regular readers) is that much of the standard 21st-century narrative of technology consists of things that were at best sometimes true in the past and are almost entirely false now. The best example is probably the idea that the advances of old invariably came as a thief in the night with almost no one imagining the magnitude of their impact and what now seem obvious applications going undiscovered for years.

There are, of course, technological developments that caught people off guard or that moved in unexpected directions, but in most cases, if you go back and read early speculations about the potential of breakthrough technologies in the late 19th/early 20th centuries or the postwar era, you'll generally find that people had a pretty good sense of what was likely to come.

The same can be said for the dawn of the personal computing era

.

In case the aerospace allusions are getting a bit obscure, here's a week in video recommendation.

The Mouse on the Moon is an easy film to overlook. Between Peter Sellers' spectacular turn in the Mouse that Roared and the general tendency of the time to look at sequels as second-class cinematic citizens, particularly when none of the original stars made a return appearance), it is easy to think of the 1963 film as "the other one."

That's too bad, because the second film can easily hold its own. It's sharp and funny and like its predecessor. Both get 3 1/2 stars in the Leonard Maltin guide. What's more, it features the direction of a young Richard Lester just before he broke through with Hard Days Night.

From Wikipedia:

The Mouse on the Moon is a 1963 British comedy film, the sequel to The Mouse That Roared. It is an adaptation of the 1962 novel The Mouse on the Moon by Irish author Leonard Wibberley, and was directed by Richard Lester. In it, the people of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a microstate in Europe, attempt space flight using wine as a propellant. It satirises the space race, Cold War and politics.