A saga of Churchill, family and defiance during the blitz, WW II.

This in an interesting read, a view of what was happening on the ground in England during the bombing by Germany in WWII. I find “war history” to be vaguely interesting because it fills in a lot of the gaps in my mind concerning questions along the lines of, “What happened to cause this war and why did it go the way that it did?” This book takes a bit of a different approach than most that I have read that are focused on the “big picture” while The Splendid and the Vile is a much smaller, more personal view into what was happening within the leader’s close world of home and personal relationships. One of the things that I found entertaining, and somewhat surprising, is just how quirky many of the powerful leaders are. Several of the leaders described in this book are so “quirky” that I would consider them fairly deranged if I knew them personally. Churchill was certainly no exception to that “rule” (if there is actually a rule of some sort). I really makes me wonder if perhaps being pretty far “off the tracks” isn’t a necessary component of wanting to be in place of great power and great risk.

One of the main points of interest to this book that makes it stand out in the crowd of books of just about every aspect of WWII is the descriptions of how people (the general public as well as the leaders) reacted to being bombed on a regular basis, with the cities crashing down around them amide piles of broken bricks and windows, and mountains of dead bodies to be picked up and identified each morning. Because of the difficulty of effectively repelling bombers and fighters in the dark, almost all of raids were nighttime events during clear and moonlit nights (they locals called them bombers moons).

Apparently, when the bombing first started the English realized that it was next to impossible to hit enemy aircraft with their anti-aircraft guns at night, so they did very little shooting in order to conserve ammunition. This approach amounted to just sitting and letting the bombs drop made people feel like helpless sitting ducks (which is what they were), and caused much fear and anxiety. Realizing the stress this was causing, Churchill greatly increased the number of cannons “protecting” the cities (especially London) and told the gunners to fire away with abandon. This didn’t help defend the city, having little or not impact on the enemy, but it made people feel much better. So much better it seems, that they just started going about their normal business as much as they could what with the broken infrastructure and rubble everywhere. The cities were busy and bustling in the day, and at night folks either went to their shelters, or went partying in the black outed restaurants and bars. Many of the diaries from the time talk about how joyous it was, with nobody being scared or terrorized. There were lots of parties, including going onto rooftops during raids to watch the “fireworks” created by all of the bombs, fires, emergency vehicles, search lights, and anti-aircraft guns blasting away and nothing in particular.

It seems that for a lot of folks they came to the realization that if they were still alive, that was good and life it fine. If they weren’t alive, then that was just that. They lost their dread, and at the same time opened up to much of the beauty of life that we so often miss because we just take it for granted. This carefree attitude extended to personal relationships, where it became the norm that if it felt good and was fun, why not? One-night stands became a thing that had to be entered in your personal calendar to make sure you had set aside time for your new friend. People were able to get together and enjoy/appreciate each other in ways that were not possible during times of peace. Churchill’s daughter fretted about what she would be losing when the war was over because she could no longer be free to follow her will during times of peace. During the war time events nobody particularly cared to interfere with other people’s lives and great freedom came with that lack of interference.

The book is interesting because of the behind the scenes nature of the leadership roles and actions, but perhaps more so as an interesting view into how people adjust to great danger and trauma. It reminds me a little bit of what many are saying about the current pandemic being a time of reflection, change of pace, and enjoying many aspects of life more than had been the case.

My daughter gave me this book for Christmas and once again knocked it out of the ballpark. Based upon the books she has gifted me over the past few years I am pretty convinced that she knows my likes and tastes much better than I know myself.

My background includes a degree in physics, and spending some time as an astronomy teacher at Humboldt State University in Northern California. Being on the foggy, rainy coast of Northern California might not have been the best place to teach astronomy, or introduce students to our little observatory on Humboldt Hill, but it was a great place for me to play with such fascinating subjects. I didn’t follow my education to a PhD in physics, so my understanding of the more complex and mind boggling aspects of the field is best described as an informed/interested amateur. This book is written at exactly the correct level for someone such as myself (even if they don’t have a strong mathematics background). This is a great book for anyone interested in physics, generally keeping up with the “popular” accounts of advancements in physics, but not steeped in the extremely difficult mathematics that serves as the language of the field.

For me, Dr. Mack hit just the right blend of casual, lighthearted, and funny, while making extremely complex (and weird) cosmological considerations approachable by shining light on the subject without dumbing it down so much that the juicy parts are missed. I found myself balanced between wanting to race ahead in the book because it was so much fun, and slowing down to avoid missing nuggets of insight. I suppose I will have to go back and read it again because I just had too much fun reading it.

I have a desire to thank Dr. Mack for finally clearing up a confusion that I have been chewing on for almost 60 years – how can we just be seeing light after is has traveled for about 13 billion years from a point (singularity) where everything started out at the same place? It turns out to be easy; space expands faster than the speed of light! Things within space don’t go faster than the speed of light, but space itself expands faster than light once you get far enough away from the observer (and this applies to every point in space, not just us). This means that light that is far enough away can get here because space through which it travels is expanding faster than light can travel. However, since the expansion of space has slowed over the last few billion years to a leisurely pace that is less than the speed of light, that old light that was unable to come into our field of view has finally “caught up” and is now visible. It is coming through the edge of visibility (the event horizon) from the back side. (I told you things get kind of weird.) The thing that makes space grow like this is “Dark Energy” – and it accounts to something like 80% of the total energy/mass of the universe. It is also totally mysterious – a “pressure” causing space to expand. Sometimes it is called The Cosmological Constant (perhaps the same one that Einstein included in his equations and then spent the rest of his life trying to get rid of).

I have now replaced my question of how could light just be getting here from the beginning of the universe with another question, “What makes the universe expand?” So far nobody knows the answer to that question – but oddly enough I have been working on a project that is intended to get answers to that very question, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and its amazing LSST telescope. It turns out that this project may well be one of the most important physics “tools” ever! I am blessed to have accidentally fallen into such an interesting project, after I had thought I was retired. So much for retirement!

The subtitle of this book is “The End of the World as We Know It,” meaning the societal and governmental aspects of “the world.” There is a “bragging” banner on the cover informing us that the book is soon to be banned in Canada. As far as I am concerned, it should be banned globally – but perhaps mostly in the USA. It is a terrible, insulting, “white supremacist”, highly prejudiced, despicable piece of trite. This is the type of book that is intended to inflame the “Alt-Right”, energizing them for acts of violence such as the recent insurrection at the Capitol in Washington D.C.

Basically the author’s rant is all about that our “most dangerous enemies” (“the Muslims”) are taking over the world, destroying our freedoms and forms of government by way of out-breeding all of the rest of us. According to the author, the only way that we can possible win this war is by ramping up our sex life until we are having enough babies to overcome them. If we are to win, we must increase the world population three or four fold – quickly. In his opinion, we are losing everything because we just don’t try hard enough to have as many children as possible. The main tools that the author uses to make his points are half-baked propositions supported by a continuous volley of insults and slurs. I slogged though to the end because a neighbor, and friend, thought is was something that I needed to read in order to help get my thinking straight.

However, in the midst of a totally vile spewing of inanities the author does bring up a few important points that deserve consideration. One of the points that he makes is undoubtedly correct – in a world where there is a very large difference in population growth between groups of people it doesn’t take long before the balance of populations, and with it the balance of power, shifts in dramatic ways. If, in fact, the “Western World” continues to be as unbalanced as it current seems to be, then dramatic changes are inevitable. The author points out that the fertility rate of around 2.1 is required to maintain a constant population size. The EU average is 1.38, America’s rate is about 2.11 and Pakistan’s is about 5.08 children per couple. If this continues for very long, these very large differences will change the face of the world. The author’s position is that it isn’t just that some country’s have excessive fertility rates, but those rates are directly related to religious beliefs and systems of laws – with the implication that majority rule will quickly result in legal and societal systems aligning with the Muslim beliefs – possibly including Sharia Law.

The author proposes that the introduction of Sharia Law into the western legal system would include things such as beheadings for what we consider minor offenses and all of the rest of things that we keep hearing about. I have idea what all of this would (will?) turn out to look like, but it seems pretty obvious that things will be changing because our legal system is built based upon the concept of equal voice, meaning that the group with the largest population has a chance of “winning” or at least changing things to agree with their point of view.

The author then goes on to talk about all of the terrible things that will transpire as what is used to determine “truth” changes, and as groups become more polarized. I think he did a pretty good job of describing the process and the dangers of truths being based on opinions (or belief) rather than facts. I think he is describing what is happening in America today based upon the polarization of opinions, the lack of a clear direction concerning how we want our country to function, and the dangers inherent in defining “truth” in whatever way supports a political opinion – disregarding evidence, science, and facts that might paint a contrary narrative. In the end, I think he does a pretty good job of describing the dangers and those that are most dangerous, and his is squarely in the middle of the most dangerous. The dangers he is describing aren’t so much about too many Muslims, but instead the positions and approaches taken by the “alt-right” or far-right groups already in America.

This book is focused upon the personal and societal impacts of mass incarceration in the United States. The author’s contention is that the “War on Drugs” has resulted in changes to policing and incarceration so impactful that they have recreated most, or perhaps all, of the evils of the Jim Crow era. In brief, the idea is that putting people in prison for long periods of time ruins the lives of the prisoners while in prison and for also for the rest of their lives, but also their families and ultimately the society as a whole. Alexander does a very good job of putting it all into perspective, including making the case that the negative impacts are mainly to the black and brown communities while the financial rewards are enjoyed mostly by white “middle class” people and businesses.

I found much of the book to be tedious reading because it rehashed the same ground several times, and partly because I am already aware of many (or most) of the problems that she describes. For readers that haven’t thought deeply about these kinds of issues perhaps it remains fresh and interesting. That said, I did find the last chapter to have many very interesting, and new to me, ideas where the author offers some suggestions for a path forward to a future where Jim Crow no longer has a welcome home, and where all castes, or classes, get fair and equitable treatment. One of the interesting ideas that she puts forward is that perhaps the way we are currently implementing “civil rights” has become more of the problem than a solution. Maybe the idea of being “color blind” is the wrong way to look at the problems and the solutions. The problem with being color blind is that it changes the focus from “fixing” the entire system (including solutions for disadvantaged whites, blacks, and browns) and instead focuses on individuals who make individual mistakes (or choices).

An example is the problem of long term, mass incarceration for drug use. The prevailing narrative is that individuals make poor choices by using drugs, get caught, and are then punished for their evil ways. Another point of view might be that there are societal reasons why some many disadvantaged people use drugs and why so many more of them get arrested and incarcerated than a similar population of “advantaged” people. Maybe the causes both of use, and of the use of prisons to solve so many crime problems, has deeper roots than the badness of individuals.

It is apparent that improvements created by civil rights and individual exceptionalism does not float all boats – it floats a few special cases, but it sinks many more, including whites that are bypassed on the social scale and therefore end up paying the very real costs of things like affirmative-action. I ended up at the end of the book wondering what sort of changes to Society will be required to move to a truly more equitable situation for all. Obviously, we need to figure out how to work together to find a joint solution rather than break up into special enclaves where we are all protecting our part of the pie under the mistaken idea that there it is a zero-sum game where the advancement of one necessarily results in the demotion of another. Continuing on the current path is far too dangerous, and too expensive in terms of tax supported dollars and lost resources.

The Wall Street Journal had this to say about the book: “A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them.” This is a pretty good description of the book. Dr. Wilson’s main professional background was as a biology professor at Harvard, specializing in entomology. Wilson has been called “the father of sociobiology and “the father of biodivesity for his environmental advocacy. His book explores relationship between biology (as it has evolved through the process of natural selection) and theories of the mind, culture, human nature, the Social Sciences, art as well as ethics and religion.

I think his basic point is that we are animals that have evolved over millions of years to be compatible with a particular environment. This evolution has not only directly the obvious, outward characteristics of people such as the shape and placement of our arms and legs, but the way that our brain is constructed and “wired”. However, cellular evolution is a slow process occurring over hundreds of thousands of years. However, the social environment that we current inhabit is only a few thousand years old, meaning that while we have “instincts” built into our genes that have been tailored for fitness in one environment, there is a question concerning their “fitness” and utility in the current social environment. His idea is that in order to work the “best” our laws, morals, art, and all of those “social” things need to have consilience (be in agreement/alignment) with our biological roots. When they are, things work smoothly, when they are not – not so much.

I think this is all very interesting and “sounds correct” to me. However, it has stirred some thoughts in my mind about a need for consilience at a much larger scale than “merely” a match between our society and our biological being. My profession is as a “system safety engineer”. That means that I work as part of a team to develop processes, products and operations in such as way as to be effective, efficient, useful, and safe. everyone on the team is concerned about all of these things, but I focus my attention specifically on “safe.” One of the interesting aspects about “system safety” is that there are very few specific criteria about what that means, it is an open question that hinges around the concept of “safe enough”.

One of the first questions that comes to mind with considering what “safe enough” means, is safe enough for what, or safe enough for whom? For the designer? For the company creating a new widget? For the purchaser? For the user? For the maintenance person? For the general public? For the environment? It is clear that there is no one point of view for deciding if it is “safe enough” – that all depends upon the point of view. In some mysterious way, being safe enough means that it has been judged to have benefits that outweigh the costs. In this sense the “costs” are not just in terms of dollars, or perhaps schedule – it is in terms of everything that we, as humans, consider “costly” including many things that cannot be monetized. Determining whether or not a design is “acceptable” includes considerations of things such as “asthetics”, “view”, “noise”, “smell” “damaged environment” – the list is very long and in many cases include the defining component of the judgement of “safe enough”.

It might be thought that “safety” is only about things that can cut, crush, smash, burn or otherwise cause bodily injury to someone. I disagree with that point of view. I think “safety” includes things that negatively impact people’s “well being” and “mental health”. Perhaps these additional items come under the heading of “comfort” or free from pain/discomfort – including things like the loss of a treasured view. The concern with things like “global warming” and “sea level rise” are clearly in the realm of “safety” even though a design that adds to those kinds of global concerns might not immediately impact the safety of the user.

However you define “safety”, however narrow or broad you cast the net of safety concerns, there is always the same problem of determining what is “safe enough” from the point of view of multiple points of view. I think the idea of “consilience” applies nicely to solving this rather complex problem. I propose that if all of effected players are brought into the decision making process, and if they all know the potential impacts (positive and negative) from their point of view then it is “safe enough” when they all agree that it is so. If it is not “safe enough” for one or more of the points of view, then it is not safe enough. Period. Full stop. There needs to be consilience or it isn’t acceptable, and that will often come back to be shown to be true in all types of ways, not the least are future litigation, loss of market share, disgruntled employees, high accident rates or otherwise.

The point is that not only designs be “consilient” with how people are (human factors), they also have to align with all of the sciences, company needs, financial concerns while accomplishing what it is that was the purpose of the project. System Safety has been defined as the application of engineering and management principles, criteria, and techniques to achieve acceptable risk within the constraints of operational effectiveness and suitability, time, and cost throughout all phases of the system life-cycle. I am of the opinion that this points to a much larger definition that includes not just “engineering” (including environmental engineering) but “science” (including the life sciences), and “cost” in the broad sense that includes all negative impacts.

System safety is the “big” picture view, seeking consilience with the various scientific domains, but also the environment and the needs of humanity (individually as well as globally).

Stick and Rudder is a book describing the art of flying, published in 1944. I have no intention of learning to fly, but was once again drawn to the book because of it’s interesting explanations of what keeps an airplane in the sky. The author’s opinion is that “angle of attack” is the key element in producing lift on a wing. Basically this means that air hitting the bottom surface of a wing “pushes” it up. This is in direct contradiction to the aeronautical engineers story that high wind speed above the wing creates a vacuum that “pulls” the wing up. This is supposedly caused by Bernoulli’s principle which states that as flow velocity increases in a fluid, the pressure drops. This applies on a wing where the air flow over the top is faster than on the bottom, resulting in a lower pressure on top, “pulling” the wing up.

The problem is that there is nothing to pull – things to not move toward regions of lower pressure because they are “pulled”, they move because they “pushed” by the region of higher pressure. The universe does no “suck” but it does “push.” The logic behind this is related to the fact that particles in a fluid generally do not have any connection between themselves, therefore they can’t pull on each other. The don’t act like a chain where all of the links are attached to each other, allowing the chain to be pulled. It is more like a line of individual blocks where if you pull the first one you get the first one, not all of them. However, if you push on the end one, the entire line of blocks moves.

It turns out that the forces created by the angle of attack are exactly the same magnitude and direction as calculated by using Burnoulli’s principle, so in fact the aeronautical engineers are not “wrong” but perhaps they aren’t “right” either. The difference is not about how you design a wing or airplane, but it does make a difference in how you fly it. Not an actual difference, but a vastly different “mental model” of what is going on. It is my contention that an important element in operating high speed machinery safely is having a correct mental model of what is happening so that when things are not happening as expected there is an enhanced opportunity to quickly, and accurately, take unplanned steps to get out of trouble (or better yet, avoid getting into trouble). Perhaps there is something about these two models that make one superior to the other in the mind of the pilot. A recent problem with the Boeing 737 Max crashing during takeoff was in a large measure due to unexpected behavior of the flight control system, and the pilot’s mental model not matching what was actually happening. The crashes almost certainly could have been avoided in the pilots had a better/clearer understanding of what was happening to the lift on the wings given the flight conditions.

Besides the idea of lift being created by increased pressure created by the angle of attack of the wings, I came upon a couple of other interesting ideas that were new to me until I thought them through. One idea that the author presented is that the thing that causes an airplane to go up or down is not the “elevators”, but rather the throttle. If you speed up, the plane will go up, if you slow down, it will go down. If you stay the same, it will stay the same. Somehow I had the idea that pulling the “stick” back, thus pointing the nose higher into the sky, caused the plane to go up. Actually, it causes the lift to decrease because the increased angle of attack slows the plane down, so the lift is less and the plane goes down (depending upon various characteristics of the plane). The thing that adjusts the speed of the plane is the stick, but adjusting the angle of attack and hence the “friction” on the wings. Pull back on the stick and you slow down, push forward and you go faster. Increase throttle and you go up, decrease it and you go down. The ailerons can, and usually do, similarly unexpected things. Tip the plane to the left as if you want to turn to the left and it is likely to turn to the right (while tipped to the left). Spins, stalls, and all sorts of other highly undesirable outcomes can easily result from the disconnect between the pilot’s expectations based upon their mental model of what is happening, and what is actually happening.

In any case, I found the book to be an interesting study of what I thought I knew about flying and airplanes and what is actually going on with them. It got me almost, but not quite, interested enough to want to go flying in a small plane to see how it works “in the air.” All of this is very interesting, and important, from the perspective of my profession as a System Safety Engineer. It is often critically important that there is an alignment (consilience?) between what is happening within the mental model developed in the mind of a machine operator and what is actually happening with the machine. Even small differences can quickly lead to disaster.

I just read the book Ship of Fools, “How a selfish ruling class is bringing America to the brink of revolution”, by Tucker Carlson.  I read it because a neighbor friend of mine gave it to me to read. He claimed that it explains why “we (clearly not me) feel the way we do about liberals”.  I was excited to finally be offered insight into “their” point of view.  (I am not exactly sure who “we” and “they” are; sorting this out this seems to be one of the big confusions these days). 

It is a most amazing book.  I am stunned by how it twists and turns in a grand attempt to paint a picture that the “conservatives” are wrong but correct, and the “liberals” are correct but wrong.  Mr. Carlson clearly has a very specific story he wants to tell about how his side is right and the other side is wrong.  To do this he uses any support he can find.  He cherry picks quotes by leading people, taking them out of the original context and putting them into “his” context, ascribes statements by radical individuals as representing others, interprets actions and events from his odd perspective instead of the point of view of those doing the actions, and when he runs low on things to fill in the blanks in his story he just makes things up.  This seems to be a common approach taken by the conservatives these days; it is what President Trump does on an almost daily basis, and follows the script of some conservative talk show hosts and commentators, such as Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who informally seek to change the opinions of others and thereby influence government policy

As I was reading the book I was wondering what he is really attempting to say.  It seems to come down to a rather odd twist of logic that goes something like this: (1) At the time, he vehemently disagreed with the “liberals” and “environmentalists” in the 60s and 70s, but now agrees that they were correct. (2) He insists that the liberals and environmentalists provided a necessary check on the behavior of the “conservatives”. (3) The liberals and environmentalists have been unable to check the excesses of the “conservatives”.  Therefore, the liberals and environmentalists are the cause of the problems we are having because they have been unable to stop the conservatives.  Basically, the good guys weren’t able to stop the bad guys so the good guys ARE the bad guys. His position seems to gets down to the idea that there needs to be checks and balances, and the checks have not been sufficiently strong to provide balance. This is an interesting thesis, one that I think I might agree with.  

If I understand it properly, the logic is similar to Adam Smith’s description of the “invisible hand” as a metaphor for how, in a free market economy, self-interested individuals can promote the general benefit of society at large. In a nutshell, Smith’s contention was that the market is essentially a grand bargaining table where all prices are “fair” because they are arrived at by mutually selfish negotiations.  If everyone does the best that they can to get the “best” possible deal, then the deal that is finally arrived at is by definition the “fair” price.  The interesting part is that this means that it is the duty of everyone at the negotiating table to be as strong and ruthless as they possibly can.  For something like that to work, it is also necessary that everyone has equal access to information and knowledge, there is a fair negotiation (no hint of monopolies or related problems exist), and that an open negotiation actually happens – otherwise the deals become lopsided and a “fair” price is not achieved.  None of these conditions actually exist except perhaps in friendly “back yard” face-to-face negotiations.  Another side effect is that things that can’t be valued in terms of “dollars” are assumed to have zero value in the negotiations (they aren’t worth a plug nickel).  Therefore things like environmental protection, tradition, friendship, religion and many other concerns have little or no value. The result is that power begets power and the rest make do with whatever they can get.  From this point of view, if the economy isn’t working properly (meaning that prices are not “fair” and wealth is not appropriately shared to benefit the overall economy) the fault is with those that get the short end of the deal because they didn’t “try” hard enough. 

This approach to “fairness” either with political power, or financial success, means that political and financial battles are not only inevitable, but necessary – otherwise neither system can work properly.  It is based upon conflict and power rather than working together to solve problems.  It fosters the attitude that “I got mine, I stole it fair and square – and you are no welcome to any of it.”