The Ethics of Deadly Quarrels

by Alan B. Scrivener

(c) 1994 

At last I pulled in "the coyote," a sort of new-age-jazzy-Hispanic- indigenous music mix combined with a lot of astrology ads. Some South American folk instrumental was plinking and thumping as I decided to skip the saloon tonight. I pulled off the interstate at the cut-over to a parallel route, Business 85, one of the few remaining old alignments of Route 66 in these parts. I stopped at a Circle K store for today's paper, to get the latest on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Ahead of me in line was a thirty-ish fellow in a dark blue suit with slicked back hair, buying toothpaste. (Being self-employed I was of course more sensibly and comfortably dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. I figured this guy must be on a business trip.)

"Do you know where I can get a beer on tap?" he asked the clerk.

"Gosh, I dunno, everything closes up so early around here, and there's not much to begin with. I hate it here myself. I moved here for my girlfriend and then she dumped me. You know what my mom said when I told her I was moving to New Mexico? She said, 'Why go out of the country? You won't even be able to speak the language.' That's my mom. She --"

At this point I interrupted. "You want a draft beer? I know the best place in town to get one."

"Open now?" asked the traveller. He'd finished paying for his toothpaste so I just dropped my paper back on the rack and opened the door.

"Follow me. It's about ten minutes away."

"Thanks!" He stepped out into the night, and then extended a hand as I joined him. "I'm Al Bosch, Celestial Computer Corp. I really appreciate this."

"No problem. I needed the excuse. I'm Wes Silverman, freelance author. Are you driving the red Ford Probe?"

"Well, I'm not picky and that's all they had at Dollar Rent-A-Car this morning," he said as he hopped behind the wheel.

He followed my camper into the unpaved fringes of Santa Fe, and up the unmarked gravel wash that lead to the plain adobe building I'd practically made my second home.

"Are you sure it's open?" he wondered as we approached the plank door, but I just pushed it open and pointed inside, in the universal gesture of "after you." I wanted him to have first shot at the delicious smell of the place, that leather and wood and sour something smell I could never pin down, but that felt so homey.

* * * * * * * * *

I'd introduced him to the others at the bar. There was Santos, the proud Spaniard who had finally landed that external faculty position at the Santa Fe Institute and was now doing his artificial life research there. Bruce (a.k.a. Bingo) was the Australian chemist and former surf bum who worked up on the plateau at the Los Alamos National Labs, getting a technology transfer program rolling in the composite materials area from a little Quonset hut in a fern-filled canyon "outside the wire." Jack was the great big half Pueblo Indian, moonlighting as a Santa Fe cop to help pay his ranch loan off. And of course Brook tended bar in his Uncle Bud apron with an air of crusty pride, as if he owned the place -- which of course he did. The white stag head on the far adobe wall wearing the dime-store Indian headdress -- that reflected Brook's taste.

"So what is you do that brings you to this stinking desert, Al?" Bingo had asked with an Aussie half-wink.

"I'm what you call a systems analyst, which means I'm a technical expert attached to a computer sales force. My work brings me to both the New Mexico labs, Sandia and Los Alamos, a couple of times a year. We sell them what are called 'graphics supercomputers,' which are desk-side computers with the power of a small supercomputer, such as a Cray 1, combined with very fast interactive three-dimensional graphics hardware, and all priced and packaged so a single researcher or small team can use it in an interactive mode." While he was answering, old Hector had come in and sat down at one of the tables. Later I would wonder why I didn't butt in and introduce him, too. But at the time I just turned on my stool with the others to see his old-timer's scowl as he hopped right into the conversation.

"You call a Cray 1 fast? They've got one gathering dust in that atomic museum up there, the ah, ah, --"

"The National Atomic Museum?" I offered, having just lost a day there.

"No, that's in Albuquerque. Sandia does that one, it's all empty fuselages and bomb casings." He grinned, and the warts around his eyes wrinkled momentarily. "I mean the science museum up at Los --"

"The Bradbury." My other black hole for research days.

"Right. There's a Cray 1A unplugged and under glass up there because it's not worth the maintenance costs to keep it running anymore. It's a boat anchor!" This seemed a little hostile even for Hector, but our guest took it in stride.

"Of course it isn't worth it," he agreed. "The thing has cryogenic cooling! You need liquid nitrogen and compressors, special environments, armies of systems people. And each wiring harness is hand assembled. It's very fragile -- it was really a custom computer in its day, costing many millions of dollars. Our box fits in a standard office environment, looks like a small refrigerator, uses 110 Volts out of the wall, no computer floor, no special air conditioning requirements..."

"And it's only as fast as a Cray 1?"

"Only as fast? C'mon." Al was begoning to wave his arms. "Usually dozens, maybe hundreds of people share a Cray. You can wait all day for a few seconds of CPU time. I've seen it. You can burn $100,000 in time charges on a bad run over a weekend. That's what they used to do at Rockwell. It was funny money, but it came out of their division's budget and went into another division. For $100,000 they bought one of our boxes outright, for the exclusive use of a group of four researchers, and now they have 90% of a Cray 1 completely under their group's control, 24 hours a day. Plus they get the graphics."

"So now it's only 90%." Another Hector scowl.

Al's voice was getting a wee bit shrill. "We have beaten a Cray 1 on some benchmarks, and we average 90%. But compare that to a VAX! That's about 26 typical VAXes. Compare it to a Sun workstation, or a PC! We've got the most cost-effective system in its class -- if you divide price into Livermore Loop performance, y'know, the bang-per-buck curve? We max it out!"

"C'mon, retract your ballpoint there mate," Bingo jumped in. "He's just playing rattle-the-salesman. And you're falling for it!"

"Okay, okay. But can I tell you what the key to the thing is? The key to the thing is a very fast data bus connecting the supercomputing engine to the graphics pipeline. You want to crunch the numbers in parallel vector processors and then squirt them out as fast as possible as pictures on the screen with no bottlenecks in-between." Now his fingers waved as he painted this image in the air. "If you hung a more traditional graphics workstation off of a big supercomputer, the network connection would slow everything down. It couldn't keep up. That's why we have this 1.22 Gigabyte internal data bus. It --"

"So what do they use these number-cruncher picture-maker half-breeds for? The world's fastest video games?" I flinched when Hector said this. Was he being calloused or cruel? Jack drained his soda water as he stood up. towering over us, and wordlessly found the door. I think Hector realized his slip, because he put his face down almost into his mug. But our visitor apparently missed the whole thing. He jumped back in to the fray.

"We don't have very many games yet. But our list of applications is growing very quickly."

"Such as," I prompted.

"Our primary markets are chemistry and CFD."

"CFD?" Hector raised his head again.

"Computational Fluid Dynamics. Simulating wind tunnels, computing the patterns of air flow over a space shuttle re-entering at high Mach. Or figuring out how mixing and burning occur in a toxic waste incinerator. Or weather prediction."

"Weather prediction?" Hector wrinkled up his forehead, then broke into a chuckle.

"Don't laugh. They're getting close. I think it was NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research... or maybe it was NOAA. Anyway, somebody successfully predicted a storm pattern three days in advance just a few months ago. They called it the Inauguration Day Storm, because it was heading east towards the Washington a few days before Bush's inauguration and they thought it might rain on the swearing-in ceremony."

"Well don't keep us hanging, guy," said Bingo. "Did George get drenched?"

"No. And the model said he wouldn't!" Al grinned in momentary triumph.

Hector crossed his arms over his light plaid shirt, faded almost to white. "Kid, this is Buck Rogers stuff. Who in their right mind thinks a computer can predict something as flat-out squirrely as the weather?"

"Well, there was a Norwegian physicist named Vilhelm Bjerknes who had that goal around the turn of the century. People though he was crazy. But he did convince the Norwegian government to vastly increase the number of weather monitoring stations on the ground."

Now Santos looked suddenly interested. "Yes! He knew that the atmosphere is a whole system.. You can't just predict the weather in one spot. You need a large, fine-grain model."

"Yes, exactly!" Al's finger stabbed upwards. "He was a visionary. He said something amazing once, about the merit of his research. Let me see if I can remember it..." He closed his eyes, and began almost to recite:

"'It may require many years to bore a tunnel through a mountain. Many a laborer may not live to see the cut finished. Nevertheless this will not prevent later comers from riding through the tunnel at express-train speed.'"

"Oh, so you're a scholar as well!" grumbled Hector.

"I remember it because I've read it aloud about a dozen times in the last six months," said Al slightly defensively.

Bingo slurped some foam off of his Foster's. "All right, I'll bite. Why's that?"

"Because it's part of a talk on scientific visualization I've been giving. We get frequent requests from schools and professional societies to send speakers, and I like to give these kinds of talks so I volunteer. I put together a talk on the history of the field, from about 400 years ago until now." Al's hands seemed to mark off 400 years in the air in front of the bar.

"So who was doing scientific visualization 400 years ago?" Santos wondered.

"Nobody, but that's when Galileo invented the scientific method." One raised finger again. "First: come up with a mathematical model of a physical system." Two fingers. "Second: use the model to make calculations, which yield predictions." Three fingers now. "Third: design an experiment to test the prediction." And he held up the flat of his hand. "Then lastly: revise the model or refine the experiment as necessary.""Or both!" snorted Santos, and he began to laugh so hard he sprayed some Bud Light in the general direction of Hector's table. Then there was a pause while Brook tossed the feisty old barfly some napkins, and Santos began to choke with laughter.

* * * * * * * * *

We at the bar had turned back to face Brook, and were silently nursing our drinks for a while, until I was the one to break the quiet. "It's too bad you didn't come on a Tuesday night, Al. That's when the action is."

"What kind of action?" For a moment I think his imagination was running wild.

"I call it the Lair's Club," Hector interjected from his table. And sure enough, we all turned to face him again.

"Now, Hector," Santos countered, "you don't have any evidence that anything Shep has ever said is a lie."

"Hah! That man stretches my credulity when he tells me the time of day!"

"That's the beauty of it, though," I offered. "He stretches it, never breaks it. Almost like an art form. Plus I think he throws in unbelievable strange-but-true facts just to throw us off."

"And mixes them with unimpeachable-sounding lies, I'll bet," Santos laughed, a little more carefully this time.

"Couldn't one of you horses asses give him an illustration?" suggested Brook. "Maybe just a short tale, something barely plausible?"

"Well," Hector complained, "I sure can't think of anything off the cuff. Of course I could steal some of Shep's material."

"Repeat a story already told in this bar?" said Bingo in mock outrage. "Sacrilege!"

* * * * * * * * *

"Okay then," offered our new guest after a thoughtful pause, "how about if I tell you gentlemen a story?"

"Certainly!" I agreed. "Visitor's privilege. Maybe even beginner's luck."

Al slurped his Miller Draft and began. "I've been thinking about this a lot, and I do believe it wants to become a story. 'The Weirdest Thing That Happened To Me In 1989' is its name."

"Well 1989's not over yet!" Hector interjected.

"Let him tell it!" Santos shot back.

"Okay. Where to begin. I actually need to go back a few years for some groundwork."

"How much time do we need to budget for this retrospective?" asked Hector.

Now Bingo growled, "Oh, put a sock in it, Hector. You got some urgent business? I want to give this guy a chance. Maybe we can groom him to be a new contender, have him knock Shep out of his spot."

"Alright, alright," Hector assented. "Brook, another Rattlesnake please. I'll drink and he can spin his yarn."

"Okay, I think first encountered the name of Lewis Fry Richardson in the late sixties. I was in high school, and I was reading a terrific speculative fiction novel --"

"Not science fiction?" I interjected.

"Call it what you want," he allowed, "it was well researched and well thought-out speculation. Not a fantasy piece. Hard science fiction if you will. With lots of sociology. The book was called Stand On Zanzibar by John Brunner, written, oh -- about 1968, and it predicted a lot of social trends we are already seeing. The title comes from the expectation that by the year 2010, when the story takes place, there should be about 10 billion people on Earth, and if you packed them together with about a square yard apiece they would all barely fit on the island of Zanzibar."

Santos looked dubious. "You say this is hard science fiction about social systems?"

"There is such a thing as mathematical sociology," insisted Al, "and it was invented over fifty years ago by L. F. Richardson. But I'm getting ahead of the story. Okay, late sixties, I read Stand on Zanzibar, and right in the middle of it was a book review of another book, just kind of stuck in a chapter by itself. The review was supposed to have been written by a character in the book, in the year 2010; this pop sociologist named Chad C. Mulligan. So Mulligan said that if you want to read the most frightening book ever published, get ahold of Statistics of Deadly Quarrels by Lewis F. Richardson, which reports that war follows a stochastic distribution."

"Meaning..." I said, to get him to clarify this obscure mathematical term.

"A quasi-random process. It mostly depends on the length of the borders two countries share, and some cultural factors. There is a pattern, but direct causes cannot be established. Forget diplomacy, forget vision, forget the better side of human nature." He was waving his arms again. "The incidence of war is a loaded crap shoot, and always has been. And now, thanks to the boys up on the plateau, we could really crap out."

Hector looked up from his Rattler. "Hey, you make your bread and butter off those guys. If they're villains, so are you!"

"Okay, I'm drifting. Sorry." Al shrugged. "But hold that thought -- who are the villains? Okay, late sixties, that was reference number one. Fast forward to the early seventies, when I was in college. I had a roommate who was exceedingly literate, name of Jim. I loaned him Stand On Zanzibar. When he got to the book review, he asked me if it was for real. I mean, we knew that Mulligan was a fictitious character, but what about this Richardson guy? I didn't know. Well, one day Jim came in with a copy of Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Told me he just went down to the bookstore and ordered it. And what a piece of work it was. He dealt with an interval of time from 1820 to 1949, and classified every 'deadly quarrel' during that period by the common log of the number of deaths.

"The logarithm of death," Santos said spookily. "And what did he call this ghastly unit?"

"Well, he sorted conflicts into different classes. If 10,000 people died it was a class four conflict. A hundred thousand made it class five. And ten million would be..." Al pointed at Hector.

"Six, uh, seven," the old man blurted, and then frowned.

"Let's give it to him, he caught it on the first bounce," proposed Bingo.Did he half-wink again?

Just in case, I shot back, "Good eye, Bruce."

"Okay, and I won't throw out any more trick questions," promised Al, continuing. "So, Richardson did a fanatical job of statistical research for this book. There were foldout pages for the big complex events like the world wars. There was a matrix of who fought who in the Mexican Revolution."

"Everybody fought everybody," Santos muttered. We all knew better than to get him going on the topic of Mexicans. All but our guest; Al didn't know how lucky we were Santos didn't end up shouting "My father was a Spaniard!" on this occasion.

"Well, maybe they wanted to all fight each other, but they couldn't if they didn't have transport to get close enough," Al explained. "Richardson put X marks in the matrix for each actual clash. Same thing for the Russian Counter-Revolution, World War Two, all the complicated cases. And for the smaller class events, where thousands, hundreds, tens or ones died, he used statistics, for gang wars, murders, massacres, whatever he could find. He found that accurate records had not been kept of a lot of things he wanted to know, and worse, there was no chronological index of wars in his day. He spent of lot of time looking through the encyclopedia..."

"When was this written?" I queried.

"Early fifties I think," shrugged Al. "So, late seventies, Jim found this book, I glanced through it. Mostly I was amazed that it was real. I think Jim bought the book partly to impress me, which he did, and partly for the historical combat information. He was big into King Arthur legends, Celtic knives, and the glory of the warrior in better times gone by."

"Chivalry!" said Brook in recognition. He'd had quite a knife collection on the wall of the bar until that nasty incident with the drunken sheep herders.

Al went right on. "Yes. Okay, next stop a year or two later. I think it must have been 1974... yeah. I remember Nixon resigning. Anyway, this new professor named Dr. Gregory Bateson showed up on campus just before my senior year. His biggest claim to fame -- in the celebrity fame sense -- was that he was once married to Margaret Mead. He also came from a long line of scientists. His father coined the word 'genetics.' Gregory trained as a an anthropologist and started out in the thirties doing field work in New Guinea, then Bali, but eventually over the course of his career he made his mark on a number of fields. He sort of 'wandered into' biology, ecology, ethology -- the study of animal behavior -- and psychology, and started some quiet revolutions. A good example is his double-bind theory of schizophrenia."

"Double what?" came out of Hector's mouth.

Santos softly added, "Damned if you do and damned if you don't," almost to himself.

"Yes!" That galvanized our storyteller. "Like a Catch-22, a no-win situation. It can drive some people crazy. He invented family group therapy to treat it. You can't just fix the crazy person, who have to heal the whole situation that made them that way. That was probably his most famous discovery. But anyway, there was a common thread to all his work, and that was the science of cybernetics. It's the study of communications pathways and control loops, and it comes from the Greek for 'pilot,' as in 'auto pilot' or 'pilot light,' though it usually --"

"Yes, we know about Norbert Wiener's baby," Santos blurted.

"Right," said Al. "Wiener was one of the mathematicians at the Macy Foundation conferences on feedback in New York in the forties where it all started. You know Macy's, the department store that has the Thanksgiving parade? Well, somebody in that family must gave died of some dreaded disease because the Macy clan set up this well-funded foundation for medical research. They'd done conferences for years on different organs and problems, the heart, the liver, polio, or whatever, and they started getting pressure to do a conference on the nervous system."

"Stands to reason," offered Santos.

"So they got a prestigious neuropsychology researcher to set up and chair a series of meetings on feedback. The format was, they'd meet for a few days every six months over a period of two years. Was it two years? Maybe three."

"So they had some time think about the next meeting," Brook reasoned, trying to hurry the narrative along a little.

"Right. And to apply the new ideas to their work and really see if they were on to something. That series of meetings is where the new field of cybernetics was actually developed by the collaborating participants. Wiener made up the word 'cybernetics' and wrote his book in the six months between two of the meetings, and then came back and said, 'Hey! This is what this new science is called.'

"No wonder they all thought he was an arrogant son of a something," said Santos.

"Well, he probably was. Anyway, Bateson was at these meetings too, with Margaret Mead, representing the anthropologists." The arms began to wave again. "And there were also psychologists, sociologists, medical doctors -- neurosurgeons, and even electronics engineers... specialists drawn from just about every field that the organizers thought might be able to use -- or make a contribution to -- a new theory of feedback control."

"Or not," added Hector with a snort, clearly pleased with his own wit.

"Hector," snapped Brook, "will you shut the fff... Sam Adams up?"

"Well, damn it to blazes, barkeep, this kid's gone on so many tangents it makes me have to piss."

"That or the beer," corrected Bingo.

"Well take your leak then," Santos added. "You don't need our permission, and you certainly know where it is."

"Hurry back!" said Al diplomatically. "Okay, I'll try to focus."

"Don't on my account," insisted Santos, "I think this is great stuff."

"Well... I have drifted again," Al admitted. "As I was talking I realized the next bit, which I personally heard about in the mid seventies, must've happened before the Macy thing. Let me think..." He buried his chin in his hand and stared off at the white stag's headdress.

"Did you say this is the first time you've told this story, guy?" asked Bruce, exaggerating his accent.

"Okay, I'll get it together. It wants to be a story, I can feel it fighting to get out. The bottom line is I latched onto this professor and he told me tales of his academic youth, when a lot of the concepts we take for granted had not yet been invented, or at least articulated. In the thirties, before the word 'feedback' was borrowed from electronics, 'homeostasis' was a hot new idea. An M.D. named Cannon had written The Wisdom of the Body and introduced the word in a medical context. Today we'd call it a point attractor in the state space, and go on to look at loop, torus and strange attractors as well. But they were just trying to break out of their old model of INPUT, PROCESS, OUTPUT, which never lets you close the loop."

Hector emerged from the men's room door. "What tangent did I miss this time?" he asked loudly.

"Hector, I think we need to tie your weemus in a slip knot, force-feed you beer and watch you explode," answered Brook. Hector took his seat.

"Okay, what Bateson told me about Richardson one day was that he had a very hard time getting his ideas accepted. He was interested in using the mathematical tools of what we now call cybernetics and dynamical systems theory to study diplomacy. He was interested in ideas of stability and instability. Before the Statistics of Deadly Quarrels he'd written Arms and Insecurity, and before that his first book on the subject was Generalized Foreign Politics, which unfortunately was published in the middle of 1939. In it he proposed some ordinary differential equations, ODEs, to describe several nations in an arms race. He concluded that neither disarmament combined with appeasement, nor arms buildup followed by aggression would lead to a stable peace. In fact both lead inevitably to war. But he was misunderstood. People thought he was advocating surrender. Actually, he proposed free trade and mutual inter-dependence to prevent hostilities from ever building up to begin with. But, like I said, he was misunderstood. Bateson personally thought Richardson's work was on the right track, but it seemed hardly anyone else would agree.

"People challenged Richardson's ideas philosophically with the doctrine of free will. Men cannot be governed by equations. But far worse for his ideas, his book appeared right when Europe was at the end of a massive arms race that had started probably back before the turn of the century, was boosted by the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and had continued right up to the Great War, as they quaintly called it, during which they paused the arms buildup and used up a lot of ammunition. Then the belligerents, in the twenties and thirties, went back to producing more and more weapons which would end up being used in World War Two. Diplomatic efforts at arms control treaties had been only partially successful. Everybody'd agreed to stop building so many battleships, but the joke was that battleships were obsolete anyway since aircraft bombing had been introduced; and the Navy brass on both sides of the Big Ditch just refused to believe it. Germany had been building unconventional weapons to evade the Treaty of Versailles, a treaty they'd been forced to sign after World War One -- they claimed illegally. They also gradually began breaking that treaty outright, secretly at first but then more and more openly through the late thirties. I think it was in early 1938 that the Germans had annexed Austria by force. From then until late '39 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had been meeting with Hitler and offering appeasement, which meant offering to let Germany keep what they'd taken so far and promising that England would not attack them as long as they didn't invade anybody else. And Chamberlain thought this was working, though it was really only a ruse by the Nazis to buy time. He insisted he was achieving 'peace with honour.' Most people of Bateson's generation remember the radio broadcast of the Prime Minister stepping off of his plane in London after having abandoned part of Czechoslovakia to the Germans in return for a new promise of peace. How did it go... 'I have in my hand...' No --"

And, to our surprize, Hector piped up with a perfect rendition of Chamberlain's upper-class British accent: "This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler . . . and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine. We regard the agreement signed last night . . . as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again."

"Wow, you do a great impression of him," Al allowed. "Did you hear the original broadcast in '38?" Hector made an almost inaudible grunting noise.

"He's sensitive about his age," Bingo was happy to point out.

"And then of course Hitler invaded Poland at the end of the summer of '39," Al continued. "Bateson had just arrived in New York City from field work in Bali with Margaret, who was now pregnant. They were worried about how risky it would be to return to England on the brink of war. That morning a colleague burst into his office holding the New York Times with a banner headline: POLAND INVADED! 'There's your bloody Richardson,' the man sneered as he tossed the paper on Bateson's desk. And after that..."

"After that, both Chamberlain and Richardson were disgraced," said Hector.

"Right!" Al beamed. "Richardson's books seem to have made very little impact on the practice of diplomacy, and he is hardly remembered as the father of mathematical social science. Okay, like I said, I heard this story in the mid-seventies. Fast forward now to 19... 86 it must have been. Yeah, the space shuttle fleet had just been grounded by the Challenger explosion when I started as a computer programmer for Rockwell's Space Division, where the orbiters are built. The best thing about that job was their well-stocked technical library. I still miss it. They had the entire history of space flight chronicled in detail. The Rockwell library was where I found A Computer Perspective, a book version of a fascinating museum exhibit set up for IBM by some terrific designers, Charles and Ray Eames and their staff."

"Eames, yeah. Are they the ones who did that movie about zooming through the different size scales of the universe?" Santos asked.

"Uh-huh, that was Powers of Ten. Everything they've done is great."

"They invented a process for making curved surfaces out of plywood, too," added Hector, "just so they could build these goofy Danish-modern chairs. Ended up revolutionizing airplane manufacturing."

"Now who's drifting?" Brook wanted to know, and he shot Al an encouraging glance.

"Okay. Focus. I loved this book especially because they started way back with Pascal's calculating machine, really the first odometer, and then the first slide rule, and of course Babbage's 'difference engine,' the steam-powered brass-gear computer. They took a real running start on the evolution of computing devices, and described not only the gadgets but the whole scientific and engineering context happening at the same time. And they devoted several pages to the life's work of Lewis Fry Richardson. It turns out that he started his career as a mathematician in the field of weather prediction at the beginning of the 20th century. Bjerknes had already put forth -- remember, the Norwegian with the express train metaphor? Yes?" Silence. "How long have we been here?" Al quickly went on before Hector could answer him. "Okay, Bjerknes had already put forth the idea that it was possible to model the atmosphere with equations taking into account geography, temperature, wind, moisture content, and all other relevant variables over a wide area, and then make accurate predictions using the model. That's why Bjerknes had pushed for so many weather stations, so they'd have all the initial condition data to put into the model before evolving it forward."

"Integrating it forward," corrected Hector.

"Right, pardon me." Al stopped and just looked at him for a moment, as if mulling something over. At last he continued, "So then Richardson figured out the model. Basically, he got just about everything right. He was a brilliant mathematician, with an incredible intuition for dynamical systems and their differential equations. All he lacked was the compute capacity to calculate the answers from his equations. And he dreamed about the day that capacity would arrive. I photocopied the pages on Richardson from the book and stashed them away somewhere. Okay."

"Excuse me, mate," said Bingo, "mind if I get another brewski?"

"Go ahead. But we're in the home stretch," Al assured.

"Great!" Santos blurted out.

"Home stretch!" Brook added with a trace of sarcasm. (Or was it gas?)

"Okay." Al spread his fingers for emphasis. "Now we fast forward to this year, 1989. Now I'm working for this graphics supercomputer company, Celestial Computer Corp."

"90% of a boat anchor," Hector snapped.

"Oh, hush!" Santos snapped back. "It's the home stretch, man!"

"And as I said, I've been getting these requests to give talks. So I sorted through some notes I had and found the photocopies about Richardson. The first time I gave the talk was for the USC honors program about six months ago, and I've given it ten or fifteen times since. The most recent was about two weeks ago at an engineering society meeting. By now I've got it down to a shtick."

"A what?" I asked.

"A canned routine. I guess you guys don't hear much Yiddish out here," Al explained. "Okay, my shtick always starts out with that quote I recited from Bjerknes. Later comers moving through the tunnel at express train speed. After covering Galileo and some others I go on to tell the story of Lewis Fry Richardson. I give each audience about the same run-down I gave you on what his research was, what he accomplished, and then I add these two stories taken from the Eames book:

"First, I quote from a speech he gave in which he indulged what he called a 'flight of fancy.' Imagine a great hall with a map of the world on the floor. A grid of tables spreads out over the map. At each table sits a 'computer,' actually a person with the job title of computer. Each computer has a mechanical adding machine, a sheet of instructions, some initial data from a weather station, and four neon numeric display lamps facing away from that table in the four compass directions. A conductor with a baton synchronizes everyone. (Richardson said the conductor would have a ruby light on the baton.) With each beat, all of the 'computers' read the four numbers off the four lamps facing in toward their tables from their four closest neighbors, then they punch those numbers into an equation, compute a result, and display that result on their four outward-facing lamps. The conductor shines the ruby light on those falling behind. So, over time, the army of clerks in this flight of fancy integrates the Richardson equations for the atmosphere, and the weather is predicted -- though probably much more slowly than it actually happens. I tell my audiences that this was a brilliant vision of a massively parallel computer architecture, such as the modern-day Connection Machines which uses 65,000 processors for the same exact task." He paused and looked around, but none of us interrupted the flow.

"Then I tell them this: Richardson was a Quaker and a pacifist. He was having trouble getting support for his research, and the only people interested were the British Army's poison gas experts. They were eager to fund his work, but Richardson was aghast. According to his wife, he burned all the notes that he had not yet published, and abandoned forever his work on weather prediction and atmosphere dynamics. She later said to a reporter, 'What this cost him, none will ever know!' So, this now you can see why Richardson got interested in using his math skills to analyze arms races, and to try to prevent wars..."

Hector piped up, "I just remembered I'm supposed to be holding a thought: 'who are the villains?' Here, you hold it now." He mimed handing a parcel over.

"Good, good," Al responded. "Now's when we need it. I want to tell you what I did last Thursday. My boss told me Wednesday that I needed to take a plane on Thursday afternoon from Los Angeles to El Paso, Texas, so I had to arrive at work Thursday morning packed and ready to go. Our work schedule is very hectic, and I didn't get any more details. When I left to catch the plane all he gave me was a pair of names to contact once I reached El Paso: I'll call them Rob and Ken. I landed at about nine at night and called them, and it turned out they were up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, about an hour to the north. They insisted on driving down and picking me up at the El Paso airport, and further insisted on taking me to dinner in Las Cruces. As we rode north into the cold New Mexico desert night I found out that Rob was a mathematician and Ken was his programmer. Then we talked about the cold and the winds for a while. Later, over our meal at the Las Cruces Dennys I asked them, 'So where is it that you guys do research in such a small town?'

"'Oh, we work over on the other side of the Organ Pipe Mountains at White Sands Missile Range,' Ken told me. 'It's an Army base.'

"'You have one of our graphics supercomputers, right?' I asked.

"'Of course. Two, actually. That's why we requested this visit,' Ken said. 'We need your help with the visualization stage.'

"'And what exactly do you do use the computers for?' I asked.

"'We work at the Army's Atmospheric Sciences Lab, doing weather prediction research,' said Rob.

"'Is it pure research or applied?' I asked.

"'Applied.' said Rob.

"'What's the application?' I asked nervously.

"'Mainly chemical weapons' said Rob. 'Poison gas. There are a couple of uses. White Sands tests Army missiles which pose a small risk of exploding and releasing toxic fuel fumes. If there's a test flight tomorrow morning you may get to watch; they fly right over US Highway 82. We close down the highway during tests as a precaution. Also, the Army has large stocks of obsolete chemical weapons which the Congress has mandated that we destroy; most of them are currently on an island in the Pacific, and these compounds get progressively more unstable as they age. We have to incinerate them, which again poses a small risk of toxic release.'

"I didn't say a word as he told me this.

"'Our overall charter,' Rob was telling me, 'is to do atmospheric modelling in support of our emergency contingency planning, so if we do experience a toxic release during any of these activities we can accurately predict wind patterns. We use terrain data, initial weather measurements and a mathematical model of the atmosphere to make these predictions, all coded into a simulation program which we originally wrote for our Cray. We've already ported our simulation code onto the new systems, and our test output seems to be just fine. Of course the next step is we want to be able to interactively visualize our results in 3D on a color graphics screen; hopefully with your help we can get that going first thing tomorrow morning.'

"I chewed my Dennys lemon herb chicken for a while and thought about what I'd just heard. Finally I asked, 'Do you ever use Lewis Fry Richardson's equations in your work?'

"'Of course,' said Rob. 'His equations are the math model.'

"And we chatted some more about the cold war, and civilian uses for their research such as pollution dispersion analysis, and they dropped me to at the Holiday Inn Las Cruces for the night.

"In my room I couldn't sleep, even though I was exhausted. I turned on the television, and a movie was on. A doctor and his wife were throwing a cocktail party, having a fun time hosting. A military officer came to the door unexpectedly. 'There's a fire,' he said, and wisked the doctor away at once. His wife was a Senator's daughter. She called her daddy to find out if he had an explanation. Before the call could be completed a voice came on the line, and said, 'This call is being terminated in the interests of national security.'

"It was then that I recognized the film. It was the Andromeda Strain."

"No kidding," said I.

"No kidding, Wes," said Al, looking straight at me. "I just sat there and watched the whole rest of it. I had to."

"I don't get it," complained Hector. "That was a book Michael Crichton wrote, right?" Al nodded. "Never read it. Never saw the movie either."

"It deals with an elite team of biological warfare experts," I explained quickly, "who are called in to handle a deadly plague in a small town in the southwest, a plague caused by an extraterrestrial disease carried on a satellite that accidently crash-landed during re-entry ."

Al added, "It deals with the question 'who are the villains?' These people are doctors, biologists and epidemiologists, dedicated to saving lives. They think of themselves as heros. Yet it turns out that this satellite had been launched on a top-secret mission to find deadly space germs for use as biological warfare agents. The heros find they are complicit in the villainy even as they ultimately save the day."

Hector put his hands flat on his table and sat straight up. "Al. Can I ask you something?"

"Ya."

"Did you help these guys at White Sands the next day? Or did you tell them they were evil and refuse?"

"I helped them," sighed Al. "We made some beautiful pictures of their hypothetical toxic gas clouds spreading over southern New Mexico. Hey, I'm complicit. We're all complicit. I mean, they take money out of my paycheck, and everybody 's paychecks, to pay for the research into new technologies of mass destruction; in addition to the ABC weapons -- Atomic, Biological and Chemical -- there are probably lots of other horrible things I don't even know about that I'm helping to pay for ."

"And what if we have to go in to push this Iraqi madman, Whatsisname Hoosit, out of Kuwait? We know he has nerve gas, but he knows we have it too, and worse stuff. That deterrent may be the only thing that keeps him from launching gas attacks against us or the Saudis, or even Israel."

"Hey," Al shrugged, "I didn't say I had all the answers. I didn't say I had any answers. I said I'd tell you a story about 'The Weirdest Thing That Happened To Me In 1989.' I did. That was it."

"Pretty weird," I allowed.

"Well, I need to be going," said Al suddenly, hopping up. "Nice meeting you all, gentlemen. Thanks for taking me here, Wes." And he started for the door.

"Hold it! Hold it!" barked Hector. "Don't you have any answers at all? Or even a position? What was the point of this shaggy dog story then?"

"Okay." Al turned by the door and spoke with both hands. "Here was a man who was a brilliant genius and who made a potentially enormous contribution to humanity. He didn't even have a political agenda, just a moral position. He wanted no more war. And he wanted to have a say in how his discoveries were used -- that they would not be used for war- making. In his analysis of the dynamics of arms races he found that the two most popular political positions, appeasement and aggression," left hand, right hand, "were simply unviable. He wanted us to find a third approach that was viable. If nothing else, he hoped to spark an international debate. He wanted us to stop robotically doing what wasn't working and to take a fresh look at the problem." Al scanned our faces. "And he didn't get his wish."

Hector went on to ask, "And this professor you had. Dr. Bates..."

"Bateson."

"Yes. What advice do you think he would've given you last week: help them program their computer, or refuse on moral grounds?" Now Hector's hands were waving too.

"It's funny you should ask that," Al said thoughtfully. "I was just thinking about something that happened during my last year at school. Governor Jerry Brown appointed Bateson to the Board of Regents of the University of California. It turned out that Bateson's main agenda as a regent was to get the UC system to pull out of its association with Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Labs."

"Really," said Hector, almost to himself.

"He wrote an impassioned open letter to the other regents -- mostly corporate board-member types, Reagan appointees -- arguing that it wasn't so much immoral as insane. If Richardson's equations were an accurate model, the nuclear arms race can only end in total annihilation of both sides. He pointed out that nobody knew how we could get out of this 'deadly embrace,' and that for an institute of higher learning this was the worst possible example for the UC students." Al brushed his hair back out of his eyes.

"So I gather," asked Hector, "that the vote on this issue came out all hands in favor except for one against?"

"Actually, no," said Al. "After publishing the letter and entering into a lively debate with the other regents, Bateson voted for the continuing association. His explanation was that the UC system desperately needed the funding from the labs just to go on operating normally. The University of California was in a sense addicted to the labs. In the short term, he explained, the treatment for an addiction is another dose of the drug."

"What then is the bloody point of all this?" demanded Hector.

Al stood by the door for some time. I think he was carefully choosing his words. "Somebody has to stay awake and pay attention. I guess I'd call it 'bearing witness.' Somebody has to know the truth."

Now Senor Santos spoke. "May I offer a short parable gentlemen?"

"Please," Hector answered, sounding drawn. "Anything..."

So Santos told this tale: "There was a kingdom. It had no food, except for some rye bread that was contaminated with ergot poisoning. The king knew that if his people didn't eat the bread they would starve, but if they did eat the bread they would go crazy. So he decided to distribute the bread, but he ordered that a few of his subjects were to fast, so that there would at least be those who remembered that the rest were crazy."

"Yes," said Al, sounding relieved to be understood. "Yes. That is the moral of this story."

"Not bad," said Hector. "Not exactly a solution, but it's a start."

"Thanks, Santos" added Bingo.

"And thank you, stranger, for your story," I chimed in.

"The pleasure was mine, gentlemen. Thank you all again." He paused. "Let us pray that we do find a solution, some other way out before this arms race reaches its catastrophe point the way Richardson said it has to." He turned to go, and then turned back one more time.

"Hector, can I ask you something?" Hector nodded. "What is it," Al questioned, "that you do for a living?"

"I'm an applied mathematician. I work on fluid dynamics equations up on the plateau, behind the wire. I'm sorry but I can't tell you what the application is."

"Okay. Fair enough. Goodnight all." The door swung, and the travelling systems analyst was gone. We all looked at each other wordlessly for a moment.

"So," said Brook, "anybody need another cold one?"

Last update 26-Mar-1998 by ABS (HTML formats only).

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