========================================================================
Cybernetics in the 3rd Millennium (C3M) -- Volume 3 Number 6, Jul. 2004
 Alan B. Scrivener --- www.well.com/~abs --- mailto:abs@well.com
========================================================================

[Note: you are receiving this issue of C3M 4 weeks late because I found
a problem with my bulk mail program that was failing to deliver about
15% of messages, and you were in the unlucky group.  Hopefully I have
resolved the problem.  Stay tuned for part 2 in afew days.]

Goof Gas
~ or ~
Holding the Dream Hostage
(Part One)

    "Sorry we haven't been able to bring you up-to-date, but very soon
    now the Cape will be shut back, terminating the North American
    Effort in Space. Except, of course, for you..."

                -- recorded message for returning astronaut
                   in the audio comedy "How Time Flys" (1973)
                   by David Ossman and the Firesign Theatre

        ( shop.store.yahoo.com/laughstore/daoshowtifl.html )

Thirty three years ago today, July 26, 1971, I saw a Saturn 5 rocket
lift off from Cape Canaveral, carrying Apollo 15 to the moon.

Today I showed my daughter a Quicktime movie of the science experiment
done by astronaut David Scott on that mission, proving that a feather
and a hammer fall at the same speed in the moon's vacuum.

    ( lisar.larc.nasa.gov/BROWSE/apollo.html )

It seems like I've always been a huge fan of space travel.  I grew
up with the Space Age: I was 4 when Sputnik launched, 8 when Alan
Shepard flew, and 16 when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.
I have a battered red backpack that has sewn onto it the mission
patches of the four manned space missions I have seen launch or land:

    

    ( www.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047/backpack.jpg )


Apollo 15, Saturn 5 launch, July 26, 1971,
Kennedy Space Center

Columbia mission STS-1, space shuttle launch, April 12, 1981,
Kennedy Space Center

Columbia mission STS-2, shuttle orbiter landing, November 15,
1981, Edwards Air Force Base

Columbia mission STS-28, space shuttle launch, Aug. 8, 1989,
Kennedy Space Center

    ( science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions )

Or I should say the first four.  On June 21, 2004 my family, some
friends and I witnessed the test flight of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne,
and pilot Mike Melvill's becoming the first person to reach outer
space (100 km) in a vehicle that wasn't launched by a government.
(This vehicle will competing in September for the Ansari X Prize,
a $10 million prize for the first vehicle to carry three humans up
to 100 km twice in two weeks.)

    ( www.xprize.org )

For most of my life I have also been evolving towards a Libertarian
political perspective.  Perhaps it began with my love of the feisty
science fiction of Robert Heinlein, in novels like "The Moon is a
Harsh Mistress" (1966).

    ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312863551/hip-20 )

I remember in high school when I began learning the physics of heat
transfer, what they call "thermodynamics," and I came to understand
that 50% energy waste was the theoretical maximum efficiency of any
engine that turned heat to other forms of energy.  Even then I had
the intuition that taxing people and then having the government pay
for things they could be buying directly was highly inefficient, like
those heat engines.

This point was subtly underlined by the comedy album "I Think We're
All Bozos On This Bus" (1971) Firesign Theatre.

    ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005T7IT/hip-20 )

At an EPCOT-like "future fair" an animatronic politician demonstrates
a "model government," powered by a "ton of coke," and then explains
"half a Watt comes in here, must go out there."  Or -- punsters that
they are -- did he say "half of what comes here must go out there"
instead, completing the analogy between governments and heat engines?
What I gleaned from this was government = entropy.

Lately I have been casting about for an analogy that explains why
I am always nervous when the government tries to solve a problem.
Here's what I've come up with: suppose you're stuck someplace
with a room full of people and you have a migraine headache which
intensifies when there is a loud noise.  "Please don't make noise,"
you ask of your companions.  One of them stands on a chair and shouts
"Nobody make any noise!"  You ask them not to do that, and then another
person starts banging garbage can lids together.  "Don't stand on
chairs and shout!" they bellow.  And so on.  This is the way government
works, but instead of making noise, they spend money.

Maybe I'm getting this from a story line on the old "Rocky and
Bullwinkle" show in the early sixties called "Goof Gas Attack."
Master spy villain Boris Badenov gets ahold of a gas that makes
people stupid, and sprays it on Wasssamatta U., Bullwinkle's alma
mater.  All of the professors are turned to idiots.  Then he goes
on to Washington to spray the congress.  But upon arriving he hears
a congressman say, "I propose a thirty million dollar study to find
out why the government is spending so much money."  Boris decides
someone has beat him to it, telling his assistant, Natasha Nogoodnik:
"That IS goof gas."

    ( www.toontracker.com/bullwink/bulleps.htm )

But the two areas where my Libertarian politics seemed to have a
blind spot were the environment (more on that in another issue of
this e-Zine) and space.  For too long I have gone along mindlessly
with the assumption that our government should be in the space
exploration business.

Of course everyone with an awareness of history knows that John
F. Kennedy got us started down this road.  He addressed a joint
session of congress on May 25, 1961, to ask for the money for the
moon shot, saying:

    First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to
    achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing
    a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
    No single space project in this period will be more impressive
    to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration
    of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

(Was he using the expense of the project as a selling point?)

But if you've seen any of the many documentaries and museum kiosk
displays that deal with this challenge, what you have usually seen
is an excerpt from another speech Kennedy gave on September 12, 1962,
at Rice University.  He said:

    But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal?  And
    they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years
    ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

At this point the Rice attendees gave a big cheer.  But the football
reference is usually edited out of the kiosk versions.  Over the
roaring crowd (a far cry from his reception in congress, where they
had to figure out how to pay for it), he goes on:

    We choose to go to the moon.  We choose to go to the moon in
    this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy,
    but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to
    organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,
    because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept,
    one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to
    win, and the others, too.

        ( www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/j091262.htm )

(Yay!)  This revisionism isn't too big a deal in and of itself, but
it is worth noting that NASA has been manipulating history for a while
now to inflate its perceived support.

[Aside: I almost wrote this month's e-Zine on the topic of "All I
Know About Operations Research I Learned from Theme Parks," about
my lifelong obsession with the Walt Disney Company and what it has
taught me about organizational cybernetics, but I decided the topic
at hand was more pressing, when I realized we'd just had the 35th
anniversary of the moon landing on July 20, 2004.  I noticed a
coincidental connection between the two topics.  John F. Kennedy
wen to Florida on November 16, 1963, to inspect progress on the moon
program at Cape Canaveral.  A week later he was dead.

For more details see "Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities
and Operations" by Charles D. Benson and William Barnaby Faherty.

    ( www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4204/ch7-7.html )

On the day of JFK's assassination, Walt Disney was flying over Orlando
and saw the freeway interchange of Florida's Parkway and Interstate 4,
and made the final selection of Orlando for his new Disney World
resort.

Walt Disney went to Florida in December of 1966 for a groundbreaking
ceremony for the new theme park.  A week later he was dead.

For more details see "Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and
Orlando" (2003) Richard E. Foglesong.

    ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300098286/hip-20 )

In both cases I am reminded of Moses getting to see, but not enter,
the promised land.]

Some of the most significant and formative events of my 20s were
the times I became disillusioned with ideas and institutions.  
In the early 1970s I became disillusioned with politics, after
working on the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign, which
he lost by a landslide to Nixon, and then finding out from Woodward
and Bernsteins's "All the President's Men" (1975) that McGovern
was the opponent Nixon wanted to run against.

    ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671894412/hip-20 )

In 1976 I became disillusioned with the Walt Disney Company, by
becoming one of their employees at Walt Disney World.  That story
I will tell later, but I do want to mention that on my first visit
to the Magic Kingdom I was quite astonished at the political content
of the Hall of Presidents attraction.  The show, in a large, wide
theater, began with what looked like a multiscreen slide presentation
that stretched across five screens, covering 180 degrees, showing 100
color paintings of historic events, along with music and narration.  

The first event highlighted was the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.

    ( www.americanrevolution.com/WhiskeyRebellion.htm )

From the show script:

    Narrator: The first test was not long in coming.  It occurred in
    George Washington's second term as president, an incident known
    as the Whiskey Rebellion. In colonial times, corn was an abundant
    crop but difficult to transport.  And for convenience was often
    converted to distilled spirits.  Since this important byproduct
    was shipped from state to state, the federal government saw fit
    to levy a tax upon it.  But the people objected in principle, and
    before long their opposition had flared up in riots.  Here was the
    first challenge to the federal authority.

    Governor Mifflin: The question remains whether the President has
    any legal right to use force.

    George Washington: As to the legality of it, Governor Mifflin, I
    have here an opinion from Justice Wilson advising that the courts
    of your state are unable to deal with the crisis through ordinary
    judicial proceedings.  Under the law this would empower me to use
    the federal militia. 

    Narrator: Fortunately, the rebellion ended without bloodshed.
    The mere size of the militia overawed all further opposition.
    Washington had shown his people that the government was prepared
    to ensure domestic tranquility when necessary. 

        ( burnsland.com/hallofpresidents/script.html )

What surprised me was that rather obscure historic occasion -- when
George Washington first led federal troops against American citizens
-- was being trotted out as a great event in our nation's history.
(Interestingly, this was also the first time our citizens were called
"terrorists" by their government -- for harassing tax collectors.)
Immediately afterward the show embraces the bloodbath of the Civil
War as more evidence of increasing federal power, and that's a good
thing.  The slide show ends with a clip of film, revealing that we
were watching underutilized 70mm projectors all along.  Offered as
the ultimate justification for all this federalism is a movie, spanning
all 5 screens, of a Saturn 5 launching.  Not a word is spoken, we are
just left to draw our own conclusions.  It seemed to me similar to
the Fascists argument that we must form a bundle of sticks to be
strong enough to whack our enemies.

[This show has since ben "fixed" according to web sources:

    In June 1993, the program was closed for a major overhaul in
    program content.  A new script, narrated by poet Maya Angelou
    focused more on matters of racial tension through the years
    than the original program had and was praised by some for
    being more enlightened about the negative aspects of American
    history.  Others criticized it for being too politically correct.

        ( waltdatedworld.bravepages.com/id223.htm )

I suppose that Civil Rights make a better justification for Civil
War than do feats of Civil Engineering.]

This stint at Disney World was in the middle of a bicycle journey with
my wife across America, and when the time came to quit our jobs and
hit the road again, we next made our way to Kennedy Space Center,
my first real visit.  (The Apollo 15 launch had not included a tour.)
Since this was 1976, the Saturn had stopped flying and the shuttle
wasn't ready yet, so there wasn't much going on.  In honor of the
US Bicentennial, they'd set up some geodesic domes in a parking lot
and invited representatives from industry in the present their visions
of the future.  I remember a lot of hydroponics, and later when the
EPCOT theme park opened at Disney World it seemed like about the same
stuff.  After a small dose of this future boosterism we went on the
KSC facility tour.  I remember we were in the launch control room
(not mission control, that's in Houston at JSC) and we looked out over
the salt marshes at pad 39A, where the Apollo missions had blasted
off.  Our tour guide pointed out that there were giant metal vertical
shutters on the windows.  At the push of a button they all slammed shut,
protecting the launch controllers from the rocket's blast.  "Boy,"
said my wife, "America has the most expensive hobby ever!"

While NASA was redesigning the shuttle to meet congress's repeated
demands that it be cheaper to build even if it would later be more
expensive to operate, The People were coming up with some pretty
interesting ideas about space.  Most notably Princeton physicist
Gerard O'Neill and his students figured out that we could build
giant cities in earth orbit, also solar power satellites form about
the cost of the Alaska pipeline.  His first published work on the
subject was in the magazine "CoEvolution Quarterly," published by
Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Catalog" crowd.  "CQ," which had also
published Paul Erlich of "Population Bomb" fame, and covered the
"limits to growth" waterfront, had an article in the Spring '76
issue by Peter Vajk called "Space Colonies, Ethics and People,"
which reran some of the earth simulations in "Limits to Growth"
with the addition of space colonies, turning our closed system
of planetary resources into an open system.

    ( www.l5news.org/L5news/L5news7605.pdf )

Apocalypse was averted.  I can't find the original article on-line,
but there is a follow-on as part of a book published by "CQ" in 1977
called "Space Colonies" which is now archived on-line by NASA!

    ( lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/CoEvolutionBook/LIFES.HTML#Limits%20to%20Growth-wronger%20than%20ever )

[Also, the first thing I ever got published, a letter to "CQ," is in
the same archive under the title "Juvenile Space."]

    ( lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/CoEvolutionBook/DEBATE1.HTML#Juvenile%20space )

                              *  *  *  *  *  *

    "If we can put a man on the moon, travel to Mars, examine the
    intricacies of DNA, shouldn't we be able to figure out how to
    get good teachers in hard-to-staff schools?"

        -- Governor Mark Warner, Commonwealth of Virginia, speaking
           at the 2004 National Forum on Education Policy, Orlando, FL

    "The clear logical writings of Von Mises, Hayek, Bastiat and other
    free market advocates convinced many people that politics was a
    useful tool in the fight to reverse the encroachment of socialism
    into our lives. The popular saying at the time -- 'If we can put
    a man on the moon, we can eliminate poverty'-- terrified those of
    us who realized the havoc unlimited social spending could cause."

    -- "Gathering in the Name of Freedom" by Kathryn Augustin, Hostess, 
       Libertarian Party of Michigan Founding Convention

        ( www.mi.lp.org/history/25thann.htm )

I wish I could track down the reference, but it was pre-web; somewhere
I read an "op ed" piece in a newspaper in the late 1970s that pointed
out that NASA was the poster-child for activist government, that is,
government out solving new problems.  Every bureaucrat with a plan
needs NASA to be there, serving as the prototypical example, "If we can
put a man on the moon..."

But it didn't all sink in.  Finally in 1981 the shuttle showed up, and
I had stars in my eyes again.  My wife, three friends and I rented
a motor home and drove from San Diego to Florida to see the first
space shuttle launch.  At the end of the ten day trip I had a better
understanding of what is what like to be cooped up in a capsule.

Our trip included space-related stops in Arizona,

    ( www.noao.edu/kpno )

New Mexico,

    ( www.spacefame.org )

Texas,

    ( www.jsc.nasa.gov )

Florida,

    ( www.ksc.nasa.gov )

North Carolina,

    ( www.outerbanks.com/wrightbrothers )

Virginia,

    ( www.larc.nasa.gov )

Washington, D.C.,

    ( www.nasm.si.edu )

and Alabama,

    ( www.msfc.nasa.gov )

but looking back 23 years one of the most memorable events occurred
on the second day out, at a little spot then called the Pima County
Air Museum, which wasn't even open when we stumbled on it.

    ( www.aero.com/museums/pima/pima.htm )

You see, in preparation for the trip we had all re-read "The Right
Stuff" (1979) by Tom Wolfe,

    ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553381350/hip-20 )

and so we knew that the first people to reach outer space weren't
astronauts but test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base, in the later-
canceled X-15 program, a vehicle which dropped from a larger airplane,
flew to the edge of space and then landed under its own power.

There on the Arizona desert, in an aircraft scrap yard that wasn't
even on display, on the other side of a chain link fence, we found
an X-15 fuselage.  It looked so small.  We videotaped it in the
twilight.

In 1983 I went to work for a company that traditionally had made
capacitors, but was branching out into high-tech.  Three small
divisions had a telephone hold product for consumers, an
experimental ceramics oven for the space shuttle, and a 3D real-time
computer graphics system.  I went to work for the graphics division,
which had about 4 people.  The space oven group had about 20.  Then
the CEO decided that the shuttle oven was a lost cause, because not
enough customers in industry wanted to use it, and he dissolved that
division.  The graphics people moved into the space that the shuttle
oven people had occupied.

Later that year the CEO sent me to a local San Diego conference on how
to sell to the government.  Most of the day was devoted to selling to
the Department of Defense (DoD), but there was one session on selling to
NASA.  Here I learned something very interesting: that NASA was seen by
the aerospace community as a useful deflector of scrutiny for military
work.  One speaker said: "Why do work for NASA?  We usually only build
one or two of something, so you're not going to make money doing large
scale manufacturing on the back end.  But every now and then you have
to let your guys out into the light.  Give them a project they can talk
about to their wife and kids.  Let them design something you can put
a model of it in your lobby."

I had no desire to do military work at this point, so I was perfectly
poised for my next disillusionment: with computer graphics.  We were
working on a system with potential applications in Computer Aided
Design (CAD), entertainment, games, architecture, and education.
After an exhaustive marketing research project, management decided
the only viable near-term market for this box was military simulators.
Suddenly I was doing military work after all.  I also remember that 
1983 was the year Reagan announced the space station (I was exuberant)
and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), called "Star Wars" by the
press, a potentially space-based missile defense (I was dismayed).

The company eventually sold boxes to the military airccraft divisions
of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas, and the military avionics divisions
of Hughes and IBM.  The only outfit not working directly on better
ways to kill people was Rockwell, who needed to simulates space
shuttles.

And so, in 1986, when I was choosing between which of GTI's customers
to go to work for programming one of the boxes, it was obvious I should
go to Rockwell, and work on the space station project; and so I was
to begin the process by which I became disillusioned with the space
program.

The first weird thing about working at Rockwell was that it was where
the shuttle orbiters were built, and they had their own "mission
control" room for launches, which I was hoping to get to see, but
two months before I was hired the Challenger blew up and the fleet
was grounded.  The whole 22-month period I worked there the fleet
remained grounded.

The second weird thing was that recently Rockwell had been "suspended"
from selling stuff to the military due to incidents of time card fraud
in Texas, and management was EXTREMELY OBSESSIVE about having us fill
out time cards correctly.  We had to attend mandatory training
sessions.  But nobody was concerned about what work we did, with what
goals and milestones, or how fast, on what schedule, or how effective
or efficient we were.  That's because Rockwell sold our time to the
government with a markup, and the longer we took, the more they made.
(That's where "cost overruns" come from.)

The third weird thing about working at Rockwell was that NASA had
asked us to put together an impossible plan.  Rockwell as trying to
win a piece of the space station contract, and in our proposal to NASA
we had to put together a plan based on a "reference configuration" that
was modified and amended many times, but finally ended up being called
"option CETF" which was a grab bag of payloads from the many NASA
centers -- all of whom had powerful friends in congress -  and as it
happened the total mass and volume were both beyond the shuttles
ability to carry to orbit.  Some humorist with some pretty good
cartooning skills sketched and posted a drawing of an overpacked
shuttle held together with strapping like a busted suitcase,
with the caption "WE CAN MANIFEST OPTION CETF" stoking our optimism.
In other words, the competing contractors were being tested as to
our ability to tolerate B.S., or what Mr. T. calls "jibber jabber."
It reminded me of "goof gas."

    

    ( www.well.com/~abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047/CETF.jpg )


TO BE CONTINUED...



Follow-up to last month's e-Zine, "Six Degrees of Buddy Hackett":

I meant to begin with this quote from "The Confusion (The Baroque
Cycle, Volume 2" (2004) by Neal Stephenson:

    "The only cure for it is to become a merchant prince," said
    Vrej Esphahnian, as they were sailing out of the Golden Gate
    on a cold, clear morning.  "And that is what we are working
    toward.  Learn from the Armenians, Jack.  We do not care for
    titles and we do not have armies nor castles.  Noble folk can
    sneer at us all they like -- when their kingdoms have fallen
    into dust, we will buy their silks and jewels with a handful
    of beans."

    "That is well, unless pirates or princes take what you have so
    tediously acquired," Jack said.

    "No, you don't understand.  Does a farmer measure his wealth in
    pails of milk?  No, for pails spill, and milk spoils in a day.
    A farmer measures his wealth in cows.  If he has cows, milk
    comes forth almost without effort."

    "What is the cow, in this similitude?" asked Moseh, who had
    come over to listen.

    "The cow is the web, or net-work of connexions, that Armenians
    have spun all the world round."

Here Stephenson is delighting in drawing parallels in the 1600s to
our modern high-tech webs and networks.

    ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060523867/hip-20 )

I also meant to work in this quote from "Excursions in Graph
Theory" (1980) by Gary Haggard (math subscripts changed to C syntax
due to lack of typesetting):

    DEFINITION 2.  Let G be a graph with p vertices, v[1], v[2],
    ..., v[p].  The p x p matrix A = a[i][j] is an "adjacency
    matrix" for G if and only if for 1 <= i, j <= p we have

                    1 if (v[i], v[j]) is an element of edges of G
        a[i][j] = { 
                    0 if (v[i], v[j]) is not an element of edges of G

    ...

    ...if A is an adjacency matrix for a graph G with vertices v[1],
    v[2], ... , v[p], then the (i,j-th) entry for A^n (the product of
    A with itself n times) is the number of walks in G of length n
    from v[i] to v[j].

I find this astonishing.  And it completely over-solves the Seven
Bridges of Konigsberg problem.

    ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0891010408/hip-20 )

I got email from Jeff Sale, SDSU, on this topic:

    After hearing you talk with Dave G. this past weekend about power
    laws and social networks, it occurred to me that you may not be
    aware of some ideas I've had for a long time about power laws in
    learning, related to some ideas behind self-organized criticality.
    ... If you have time, take a look at:

        www.banyantree.org/jsale/soc/

    and:

        www.banyantree.org/jsale/soc/critlrn6b.html

He finds some interesting patterns in how humans acquire skills.

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