I’ve got a whole lot of stuff to read this time around, so I will get right into it.
“Miss Piggy Has a Mother”, by Neil McShane Wulfhart
This is a short profile of Bonnie Erickson, who designed Miss Piggy, as well as Statler and Waldorf (the critics who give Fozzie a hard time), Zoot (the saxophone player in The Electric Mayhem), and many sports mascots, including the Philly Phanatic. There isn’t a whole lot of detail here, but it’s a start; as a major part of Jim Henson’s operation for many years, she should be better known.
“The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet”, by Ferris Jabr
Ferris Jabr is a nature and science writer whose work I’ve been following for a while; his article on beauty and the theory of evolution is one that I still think about all the time, and he has a really good piece on forests and mycelial networks, as well. So, I was excited to see that he has a new book, called Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. This piece is an excerpt from the book, focusing on science’s increasing awareness of the quantity and variety of microbes living under the earths surface, including miles beneath, where it was long assumed that life was impossible.
More broadly, though, here and in the book Jabr is interrogating a dichotomy that we generally take for granted: there are living things, and then there are the non-living environments in which those things live— environments shaped by geologic forces, by weather, and so on. One of his points is that living things can create those forces, or alter them, reshaping their environment. There is no foreground or background; “The history of life on Earth is the history of life’s remaking Earth.” The planet was, in a very real way, terraformed over millennia by trillions of living things. For instance, most of the continental surface of the earth is made of granite, which may have been created out of basalt (a much more common mineral), in part by bacteria dissolving the basalt to extract nutrients. Literally, the ground on which we stand is a by-product of biological processes. Obviously, human beings, in living on that ground, are also constantly reshaping and reconfiguring it.
Jabr links all of this with the Gaia hypothesis to suggest that, given the complex interlinking of all of these systems, maybe it makes sense to think of the earth, as a whole, as a living thing— and that if our definitions of life seem to exclude such an understanding, then maybe the problem is with those definitions. There’s another excerpt from the book in The Guardian, focusing on plankton, which doesn’t explicitly mention this idea, but does describe the way that these organisms (the label “plankton” includes many different kinds of living things) circulate in a kind of global respiratory system, capturing and releasing carbon and thereby helping to regulate earth’s climate. (Needless to say, climate change has all kinds of implications for that way those processes work).
I’m not 100% sold on this idea, but he makes a compelling case; if nothing else, thinking of the planet as a living thing might make us treat it with more care, and give more thought to the ramifications of the things we do.
“The Thin Purple Line”, by Jasper Craven
This is a fascinating piece about private security guard firms, like Allied Universal, who sell the “optics of security” more than anything else. Craven’s focus is on how their massive growth reflects increasing feelings of anxiety and insecurity among Americans, despite crime rates that have fallen more or less continuously for a almost three decades.
For a decade, researchers at Chapman University have conducted annual surveys tracing the growing prevalence of anxiety in America. Their data suggests a cascading effect in which tangible concerns, such as those about polluted drinking water or government corruption, prime the mind for more remote ones about, say, illegal immigration or large volcanic eruptions. And Americans’ fear of crime is particularly disconnected from reality. Gallup’s most recent annual crime survey found that 40 percent of Americans are afraid to walk alone at night near their homes, the figure marking a thirty-year high that runs counter to plunging violent-crime rates.
The prevalence of private security reflects these perceptions, but statistically it is inevitable that a number of the guards themselves will share it, as well. It seems likely, in fact, that the job would appeal to people who feel both alarmed and powerless, since it gives them the ability to “do something” about the problems they (think they) see. Craven’s training instructor seems to fit this description:
He wore a sweat-wicking gunmetal-gray shirt, black combat boots, and brown cargo pants. Knives peeked out from two pants pockets, and a Leatherman sat on his belt next to a small, swinging bottle of hand sanitizer. There was also a first aid kit strapped to his leg under his pants, or so he said. Rodriguez was prepared for bad things and convinced the worst was soon to come. “I have two to three flashlights on me at any one time,” he said. “And I take about forty vitamins a day.”
Reading this, I was reminded of Mike Rugnetta’s excellent two-part series on the idea of the “tactical,”as in “tactical gear.” You should definitely read the whole thing, which is fascinating, but one part in particular has stuck with me since I first read it. It is the discussion of a series of posts on something called GlockTalk by a mall security guard; in particular, one post in which he addresses (apparently) people mocking his level of…concern about his personal security (typos sic):
I do not understand the “joke” or the “Rambo.” I am in a high-risk job. It is not the Mall of America, but Ill tell you what its no podunk mall either.I am a responsible citizen who has made the choice to carry at all times. I defend others. If something happens at the Mall then I would be the hero, not those of you who are making fun of me for no reason. Yes Im not a Green Beret but guess what neither are you and unlike you I have to face unruly shoppers every day.My REAL problem is that, like any LEO, I have enemies because of my job. They may have access to high-powered rifles. My job starts and ends at the same time every day. Although I use four rotating routes to drive to and from work, I am still vulnerable during the walk to and from my car. This is the time that I load up on the trauma plates because I DO NOT WANT TO BE SHOT DEAD!Also, someone said that my Tac Team doesn’t get training. Not true. We meet at the range every night and shoot 400 rounds each through weapons that closely resemble our duty setup. We also practice unarmed combat. I am a Master of three martial arts including ninjitsu, which means I can wear the special boots to climb walls. I don’t think any of you are working as hard as I am to be prepared. I asked a serious question about tactical armor and I wanted a serious response. If you want to laugh at somebody, try laughing at the sheep out there who go to the mall unarmed trusting in me to stand guiard over their lives like a God
(LEO, btw, is “law enforcement officer,” which this person definitively is not.)
It is hard not to find this ridiculous, but it is just as obviously troubling. This is a person with not only a vastly inflated sense of his job’s importance, but who is going to work everyday both heavily armed and very, very anxious— a dangerous combination. Despite his assurances that his “tac team” is well-trained, a person in his position will receive very little formal training, and is not publicly accountable for their actions to anything like the degree that police officers are (as inadequate as that often proves to be). His response to the claims about training seems to be that he is equipped and prepared to use force, but that is really missing the point. I’m not worried that he isn’t ready to draw his weapon; I’m worried that he is.
Private security guards are, in general, poorly paid, poorly trained, and poorly supervised. “The job is notoriously low-paying and physically taxing, contributing to an annual industry turnover rate that has been estimated to be as high as 600 percent,” which if nothing else means that few people will accrue much experience or expertise. At the same time, “average annual wages nationwide remain low, at around $40,000, even as some guards are stationed in hot spots, leading to a slight but steady increase in physical threats, injuries, and deaths across the profession.” This means that the job is probably going to be filled either by people who are desperate for income, or by paranoid fantasists like the author of the above post.
There’s a lot more here, of course, including a description of “one occasion in which a police car was stationed on the [Verrazzano] bridge manned, in its driver’s seat, by a mop wearing a hat.” The main point, though, is that private security guards, if only because of the lack of training and meaningful authority, are really part of a “security theatre,” selling the illusion of safety that they cannot provide, because no one can. As Craven puts it, “We were not guardians against fear but expressions of it, human markers placed in uneasy environments, providing permission for society to ignore the underlying issues that make them that way.”
And, speaking of performative actions: Leigh Claire La Berge’s “The Contingency Contingent” describes her work for a consulting firm, hired by the accounting company Arthur Andersen (later infamous for their role in the Enron scandal) to help companies prepare for problems created by the Y2K bug. There are already so many layers there: the fact that the company for which she is doing the work is not actually the company that employs here; the fact that the former company would later be known primarily for its failures of oversight; the fact that the work itself is intended to deal with a problem that, as we now know, didn’t really exist. On top of all of that, it becomes clear to her pretty quickly that the work does not actually address this hypothetical problem in any meaningful sense, and probably isn’t meant to.
THE ANDERSEN POSITION was that “Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem.” One could not know the magnitude of the technical problems we would face on January 1, 2000, with complete certainty until that revelatory day arrived, and so 1/1/2000 functioned as a kind of horizon of contingency: would we all be launched, Back to the Future–like, into a new stone age, or would a few rest-area vending machines conk out and everyone get on with it? To contend with this range of possible futures, we focused on the past. Instead of fixing things with the hope that they would function later, we would document the anti-Y2K efforts the Conglomerate had already undertaken, necessarily more knowable than those events not yet in existence. We would not, for legal reasons, promise things to come; we would certify that things that had already transpired had been appropriately recorded.
The real concern, it seems, is actually to avoid future legal liability; to show that Andersen and its various clients had taken reasonable steps to anticipate possible problems— or, failing that, that Andersen had advised its clients to do so, in specific ways, and thereby absolved itself of responsibility. (A lot of that involves sending those client companies questionnaires about what steps they have taken; those questionnaires rarely received a response). After a meeting ostensibly summarizing the team’s efforts to that point, an Andersen executive tells them:
“When January first of the year 2000 hits and a floodgate of Y2K lawsuits descends, and [we’re] being sued by everyone, and the firms who aren’t suing us, we’re suing, the indemnification issues, the claims of fiduciary responsibility and accusations of abandonment thereof. What are we going to need? Proof. They’re going to want to know what we did and how we did it. So that’s what this Council is concerned with, proof, paper, documentation. And that’s why our battle plan is simple: keep documenting, team.”
There’s nothing there about the actual harms that might affect people or property following any system failures resulting from the bug, or how those harms might be avoided or mitigated. It is about assuring that Arthur Andersen and its clients will be able to avoid blame for those harms, whatever they might be. They will be equipped with reams of spreadsheets documenting the fact that they did what they could— even though, by their own estimation, what could be done was nothing. What is needed is a performance of vigilance, of diligence— highlighting the irony of the fact that the company instigating all of this will, only a couple of years later, collapse as a result of its failure to perform “due diligence” in its auditing of other companies, leading to massive financial losses for investors in those companies.
I also have to emphasize that this is really just a great piece of writing, worth reading for that reason alone.
“The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It”, by Vince Beiser
I post a lot of stuff here about the environment, and one theme that has emerged for me from all of that is that any time many millions or billions of people all want to do the same thing at the same time, it will cause problems. It doesn’t matter what that thing is; coordinated or simultaneous action at that scale is, pretty much by definition, unsustainable in the long term. The move toward electrification as a way of ending fossil fuel use is a good example. On one level, this is obviously a good idea; burning fossil fuels is driving climate change, and on a more immediate timescale it pollutes the air and harms human health. On the other hand, though, the speed and scale at which we are now trying to make this shift will have, and is having, its own consequences. One of those is the soaring demand for copper, which has led Goldman Sachs to declare it “the new oil” (though it must be said that the list of things that have been “the new oil” in recent years is a long one). Unsurprisingly, one of those consequences is that prices for copper are much higher— high enough to make it worth taking by force, in some cases, as in South Africa, where armed gangs out to steal copper have made working at power plants a very dangerous job.
Even without such dangers, though, mining is always destructive, and copper mining has done its share, leaving “colossal pits full of toxic waste and has fouled enormous swaths of land and waterways”; Beiser describes one mine, in Chile, as “swathed in dust and smoke like an industrial suburb of Mordor.” (Trains carrying copper from that mine are also robbed regularly). Conditions for workers are dangerous and grueling in the best cases, and the wealth that mining generates rarely trickles down to those who will bear the brunt of the environmental and health consequences. Moreover,
The risk of more disasters is in some ways getting worse, because most of the world’s richest and most easily accessed copper deposits have by now been mined. “All the low-hanging fruit has been picked,” says Scott Dunbar, a Canadian former mining engineer. The quality of the remaining ore in many major mines—that is, the percentage of metal within the rock—is falling fast. That means ever larger tracts of land have to be torn up to extract the same amount of copper, generating ever larger amounts of waste.
(This point made me think of this excellent Geoff Manaugh essay on gold mining, as well, which describes how gold “is now more often mined as particles, not blocks or even nuggets. Like glitter, it is scattered throughout the rocks around it.”.)
This is an excerpt from Beiser’s forthcoming book, so it really only scratches the surface. As he points out, though, this is only one of the material problems that will have to be solved if a global electrification is going to be achieved. Lithium, for instance, presents just as many concerns.
“Revolution in the Air: How Laughing Gas Changed the World”, by Mark Miodownik”
This is about nitrous oxide and its use as an anesthetic, among other things, but it’s also about anesthesia generally, which is a topic that highlights the non-linearity of historical change. One might expect the story to be: surgery and other medical procedures hurt; we don’t like pain, so we look for ways to avoid or reduce it; it takes a while to find the right substances and safe ways to administer them, but eventually we did and everything was better. In fact, there was resistance to the idea of anesthesia from doctors due to “a belief among western surgeons that pain might be important to the success of the surgery. They thought it might be required for nature’s healing powers to be triggered.” A bit later, when the obstetrician John Simpson gave chloroform to women in labor to ease their pain (without, it must be said, any idea of what was a safe dosage), he encountered outrage from a “mostly male medical establishment [who] argued that alleviating the pain of childbirth was morally wrong, and that God had ordained that women should suffer while giving birth.” (Side note: could there be any clearer illustration of the power of patriarchy than medical authorities telling their patients— and their wives—that it was right for them to suffer in a way that they themselves would never need to?)
And then, laughing gas, specifically, was initially tested not as a way to reduce pain, but as a possible cure for diseases like tuberculosis; believing that all disease resulted from “bad air,” scientists hoped that breathing different gases might cure them. The discovery of its anesthetic properties was a happy accident— a hilarious accident, in fact.
This is also a story with some unexpected connections. Samuel Colt helped to fund the development of his famous revolver by staging laughing gas shows, in which, in essence, members of the audience came on stage and inhaled the gas, and then other members laughed at their behavior. (Colt pretended to be a doctor while he did this, and apparently people saw this is a reasonable business for a medical practitioner to be in). Later, the person who had the idea of selling liquid nitrous oxide in canisters, making it much easier to handle and administer, was George Poe, and cousin of Edgar Allen; he also helped to pioneer the use of face masks to administer gases to patients.
This also turns out to be an except from forthcoming book.
“When RAND Made Magic in Santa Monica”, by Pradyumna Prasad and Jordan Schneider
If you’re my age or a little older, you probably have a vague awareness of the RAND corporation as the shadowy center of various conspiracy theories, and maybe not very much else. It was, and is, a think tank, originally funded primarily by the US Air Force to do basic research with a military focus. It had a much larger impact than that might suggest, though; the first paragraph of the piece gives you a good sense:
Between 1945 and 1960, RAND operated as the world’s most productive research organization. Initially envisioned as a research arm of the Air Force, RAND made century-defining breakthroughs both in basic science and applied strategic analysis. Its members helped define U.S. nuclear strategy, conceptualized satellites, pioneered systems analysis, and developed the earliest reports on defense economics. They also revolutionized much of STEM: RAND scholars developed the basics of game theory, linear programming, and Monte Carlo methods. They helped conceptualize generalized artificial intelligence, developed the basics for packet switching (which enables data transmission across networks), and built one of the world’s first computers.
Prasad and Schneider’s starting premise, though, is that RAND, while still around and still successful, has much less of a fundamental impact on the world than it used to. Their point is to explain why it was what it was, and why it stopped being that.
Basically, the explanation is that, when it started, RAND had the money to hire the very best and brightest, created an interdisciplinary environment that encouraged collaboration and vociferous debate, and then let its scientists pursue their own agendas, more or less without interference. It accommodated eccentrics, and brought people in on whatever terms they would accept:
The top end of RAND talent was (and would become) full of past (and future) Nobel winners, and [mathematician John Davis] Williams worked around many constraints — and eccentricities — to bring them on. For instance, RAND signed a contract with John von Neumann to produce a general theory of war, to be completed during a small slice of his time: that spent shaving. For his shaving thoughts, von Neumann received $200 a month, an average salary at the time.
RAND was, in this way, very much a product of the Cold War, when there was money and support for nearly anything that could be justified in terms of national security. Once budget concerns and changing politics led to more scrutiny and less tolerance for open-ended inquiry, the organization became more cautious, more conservative (in the literal rather than the partisan sense), and needed to cater to a wider range of clients; all of that undermined the processes that had worked so well in the past.
The thing that gets me about this story is that we know this is how it works; the story of Bell Labs, for instance, follows a very similar trajectory. So, in a somewhat different way, does the story of the early days of companies like Google. Innovation can occasionally be directed from the top, but this is much less reliable than putting a bunch of smart and curious people together and letting them do their thing. Why that lesson seems never quite to penetrate, I don’t know.
“The World’s Most Popular 3D-Printed Gun Was Designed by an Aspiring Terrorist”, by Rajan Basra.
This is a shortish piece about the FGC semiautomatic, a 3D-printed gun that has become very popular among terrorists, drug cartels, and Neo-Nazis— as well as anti-junta militias in Myanmar. It was created by someone calling himself JStark1809, in reference to Major General John Stark, who fought in the American Revolution and coined the motto “live free or die.” That probably gives you a sense of where these people are coming from; it’s a little like that mall security guard, in terms of the inflated sense of his own position and tendency to self-aggrandize. Clearly, I can’t write about this with anything approaching objectivity, so you should probably read the piece for yourself. The real headline is that Basra seems to have figured out who JStark1809 is— or was, since it seems that he is dead.
I’ll wrap things up there. I hope you find at least a few of these as interesting as I did.
