mike's web log

Of giants and fossil fuels

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:20:36 GMT

Recently I finished The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson, which is a book about the English scientist Joseph Priestley, who is best known as the discoverer of oxygen. Johnson shows how Priestley had a strong influence on both science and politics (he was a close friend Jefferson and Franklin). But Priestley also sat at a historical confluence that was conducive to, basically, Enlightenment thinking, and Johnson ties together many threads in a way reminiscent of James Burke: coffeehouses and efficient postal delivery, which fostered open and fast communication; innovations in scientific technology, which let Priestley engage in the experiments he did; the wealth of the industrial age, which indirectly provided Priestley with the time to do research; and so on.

At times the chains of connections go quite far indeed -- for example, from Priestley's simple experiment with a mint plant all the way to the field of planetary ecology. A continuing theme is energy: sunlight to feed plants, coffee to feed scientific minds, oxygen to feed animals, coal to feed the industrial revoltuion, and so on. To discuss these last two, Johnson takes a side trip way back in Earth history to the Carboniferous era, where he tells the following story.

Many of the fossils that Brongniart uncovered shared a defining characteristic: compared to their modern equivalents, they were massive. He discovered ferns the size of oak trees, and flies as big as birds. In 1880 he unearthed his most startling find: a monster dragonfly (Meganeura) with a wingspan of 63 centimeters [2 feet]. Subsequent fossils have been discovered with a wingspan of more than 75 centimeters.

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Is college the only path?

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:38:23 GMT
Among people I know, the discussion for the most part is not whether a kid will go to college, but how this college business is going to be paid for. People start college funds for their toddlers. A college degree is seen as the minimum entry point to a career, or was back when people still talked about careers.

But between the mania for outsourcing that started in the 90s (or thereabouts) and the current economic downturn, the golden ticket of a college degree is looking a little tarnished.[1] A person with a pessimistic POV might wonder why we're training all these kids to jump into a job pool that, at least for the moment, seems to be drying up.

Assuming I'm reading trends correctly, we therefore seem to be undergoing a little bit of a, um, adjustment in how we view the skilled trades. Back in March, the NPR correspondent Adam Davidson appeared on the radio program "This American Life." His mission, he said, was "to save his cousin DJ's life, to make his life better." Save it how? Cousin DJ had dropped out of college. By dropping out of college, Davidson maintained, you are making a conscious decision "to not partake in the economic growth and possibilities of the coming decade." The program then featured a three-way conversation between Davidson, his cousin DJ, and the economist Pietra Rivoli, whom Davidson had enlisted to help him convince cousin DJ of his folly.

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Shakespeare's editors

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:17:48 GMT
A short while ago, a guy strolled into the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., which is one of the, or the, preeminent repository of Shakespearean stuff. He wanted to know if the First Folio he was carrying was the real item. As it happens, it was; it was a volume that had been stolen 10 years ago from the University of Durham in England. The dude is currently a guest of the state in the UK while they sort out the story.

The First Folio is an edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, plus some other plays. That the First Folio exists at all is unusually good luck; that we have so many copies, doubly so. Much of the work of other Elizabethan playwrights has vanished, since their work was either never written down, or written down and not printed, or printed but lost. As Bill Bryson points out in his Shakespeare Lite study:
Only about 230 plays survive from the period of Shakespeare’s life, of which the First Folio represents some 15 percent, so Heminges and Condell saved for the world not only half the plays of William Shakespeare, but an appreciable portion of all Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
The First Folio was printed after Shakespeare’s death, but it was assembled by people who had worked with him. This gives you an idea of what we might have had:
To aid recollection, they had much valuable material to work with—-prompt books, foul papers (as rough drafts or original copies were known) in Shakespeare’s own hand, and the company’s own fair copies.
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The green, green grass of home

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:18:04 GMT
Where I live, a homeowners association keeps tabs on your groundskeeping.[1]. They don't insist that you have a lawn, but if you do, you have to make sure that it's looked after.

In the current issue of the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert examines the lawn, its history, its upkeep, and its possible future. Such interesting things we learn.

The stereotypical suburban lawn is a product of entirely unnatural horticulture. None of the grasses used for lawns are native to the US. If left alone, grass goes through a natural life cycle in which it develops seeds. We thwart this natural lifecycle in various ways. One is to mow:
Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction. From the gardener’s perspective, the result is a denser, thicker mat of green. From the grasses’ point of view, the result is a perpetual state of vegetable adolescence. With every successive trim, the plants are forcibly rejuvenated.
Grass also goes dormant when conditions are not favorable. In its dormant state, it gets brown. People don't like that, so we have a way to prevent that. One is to pour hundreds of millions of gallons of water onto the lawn. Another is to use chemicals:
[...] repeated applications of synthetic fertilizer could counteract turfgrasses’ seasonal cycle by, in effect, tricking the plants into putting out new growth. Sensing a potential bonanza, lawn-care companies began marketing the idea of an ever-green green. The Scotts Company recommended that customers apply its fertilizer, Turf Builder, no fewer than five times a year.
Fertilizer is non-discriminating; it will happily feed grass, weeds, whatever--in short, anything that can use nitrogen. But wait; we want grass, but we don't want "weeds". (Further) better living through chemistry:
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Single-celled organisms

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:42:32 GMT
I've been reading The Canon by Natalie Angier, which she calls a "whirligig" tour of science. It's not 100% clear to me what she means by whirligig, but I might go with "giddy" (#). Angier has a style that features a lot of wordplay; think, dunno, Anthony Lane, maybe, but about science, not movies. The book tours physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy—the usual suspects. It's an exuberant piece of writing, although I'm not sure I'd hand it out as an introductory textbook.[1]

I didn't want to let the book slip back to the library unmentioned, and as an inducement for you to check it out, I wanted to set something down. In the chapter on biology, I learned something that I had never thought about and that I found quite surprising. Here 'tis. (I'll note that this is an unusually subdued bit out of the book, but it was one of the more remarkable things I learned.)
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The vacation getaway

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:54:42 GMT
I promised (myself, anyway) a while back that I’d find some more fun cites from David Owen’s book Sheetrock & Shellac. If you’re just joining us[1], Owen is a writer who bought a 200-year-old house, and in the course of maintaining and improving the house, has learned and written a lot about home improvement. That is, specifically from the perspective of a guy who writes for a living as opposed to, you know, doing construction. As noted before, the book Sheetrock & Shellac is an enjoyably wandering tour through Owen’s adventures in building (having someone build him) a cabin.

So. With summer nearly here (except in Seattle, it appears), one’s thoughts turn to things like vacations. Are you thinking of going away this summer? Sounds like fun. But maybe you dread the hassle of packing everyone and everything up and spending hours in the car. Let alone the sharp pain you know you’ll feel when you refill the gas tank.

Here’s a novel feature of David Owen’s cabin: it’s in the same town where he and his family live. That’s right; their vacation home is something like 20 minutes away from their normal home. Owen observes the following:
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Houses: TCO

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:29:09 GMT
David Owen, an author I particularly like (and an alum of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harpers, and Golf Digest[1]), years ago wrote an article on sheetrock (that is, Sheetrock[2]), which he expanded into the book The Walls Around Us, accurately subtitled "The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works." I've read the book multiple times, and I've pressed copies of it onto every homeowner I know (not always with the success of an appreciative recipient, alas). Even with the Great Purging of Books 'round here, I still have, like, three copies of it on the shelf.

Owen's interest in houses and home improvement did not end with that book, and he expanded some subsequent writings about houses into the book Sheetrock and Shellac[3]. This book describes, among other things, his adventures in building a cabin, a topic of some interest to me at the moment.

David Owen is the writer I'd like to be when I grow up. On every page I find stuff that makes me poke the person closest by and read out loud to them. At the moment, you're that person. Listen to this, a story that I'll pick up in medias res:
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Roundup

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:49:06 GMT
I realized belatedly that as of last Thursday, I've officially been an editor for three years. Unofficially, of course, it's more like 40 years.

How to read the New Yorker in 10 Easy Steps. Much-needed advice on how to keep up. [via grow-a-brain]

(Some) Computer Technicians Are Creepy. Leon Bambrick, author of TimeSnapper, a logging program, discovers what's been happening on his computer while it's in the shop. Yikes.

On the crossword. Michael Covarrubias on linguistic tactics for solving crosswords.

Algebra, Geometry, Functions: At 38, Taking the SAT Is Tough. How do you think you'd score on the SAT today, 20 (or 30, or 35) years later? This is sort of topical for us at home, coz we've been looking at GRE study materials. The math stuff has long since evaporated, and a surprising amount of the English seems more ambiguous and open to interpretation than it did in (ahem) 1978.

The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:04:40 GMT
Reading history has many rewards. One is learning things that you either didn't know, or as often happens to me, that you thought you knew but ain't necessarily so. Another reward is that history writers can be an unexpectedly entertaining lot. For example, consider this informative passage from Inventing a Nation by Gore Vidal:
A month before Second Continental Congress assembled [in May 1775], British troops fired, at Lexington in Massachusetts, on some American armed "minute men." Although eight Americans were killed, the British discovered to their no doubt horror, that American farmers and backwoodsmen did not fight fair. Instead of wearing bright red uniforms, visible for miles around, they tended to hide behind trees, bushes, and rocks, and, if nothing else, America was extraordinarily rich in these rustic objects. Where British soldiers strutted into battle in well-drilled ranks, the Americans slouched from bush to protecting wall and then, invisibly, fired at will. They were like ... well, no other word for it, indians.
Dang. This put in motion some events that ultimately had a profound effect on American history, altho not in the way that was initially intended.
This sickening discovery was swiftly relayed back to London. King George III, who had made the monumental mistake of learning English, was very much the head of the war party, and so, more in anger than in sorrow, he dropped the mask of Mr. Nice Guy.[1] He would now use his indians, some thirty thousand German soldiers, mostly from Hesse, a Rhineland province bordering his family's Hanoverian place of origin. The Hessians turned out to be more generally effective than the American or, indeed, the British troops.
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Roundup

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:24:53 GMT
Do you remember when it was always "Batteries not included"? That seems to have changed -- I've gotten all sorts of things where a couple of AAs have been packaged up right with the device. Or more common yet, things that require various types of button batteries.

250,000 digits of the square root of 9. "Below you will find the first 250,000 digits of the square root of the integer 9. In the spirit of Project Gutenberg's 1 million+ digits of pi, I have decided to provide this valuable service to WWW users worldwide." Alas, no source code is provided for generating this number. Also: First 50,000 Random numbers.

10 day survival pack for your vehicle for just $25. Around here this week, it might also be handy if "your cushion acts as a flotation device." Note also that no one says this has to be just for your car. In a similar vein, see Scott Hanselman's extensive post from a couple of years ago on how to emergency-prepare your whole life, basically. [car kit via Raymond Chen]

How to Secure Your Computer, Disks, and Portable Drives. In light of Yet Another incident in which a laptop was stolen that had millions of confidential records on it, Bruce Schneier describes how he secures his laptop, thumb drives, and external drives. [via the daily grind]

That Time, at Christmas, When Dad Shot Santa... [more]

Two cats

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 10:09:09 GMT
When I was packing up my house, I had the care of, nominally at least, four cats. Having a house had unleashed in me the Crazy Old Lady Who Collects Cats, and I'd been a soft touch for cats who needed homes, with a changing population of up to five at a time. At the time of the move, I had two girl cats who were real housecats, a tortie with a Zen disposition, and a tiny tabby who was so skittish that some of my friends had never managed to lay eyes on her. I also had two boy cats, a near-feral long-haired cat and a big orange male who had once been the alpha animal but had largely decamped to the out of doors for reasons unknown.

The move presented some quandaries. Moving cats is tricky; you never know how they'll react. In the end, I moved the two girl cats to the new place, and did that thing where you lock them into a room until they seem calmed down. As for the boy cats, good fortune intervened in the form of a cat-loving neighbor. It turns out that the two males had taken up residence in his yard (tho not his house), and supped at the bowl he puts out for any neighborhood cat that wants a snack. When he learned that I might be moving the cats, or worse yet, might have to find new homes for them, he was adamant that they should remain with him. And so they have, having, as sometimes happens, much more fondness for their locale than for any ol' supposed owner. I have visited and learned for myself that they're perfectly content where they are.

In the new place, Zen cat settled in. After an encounter or two with a new household dog, protocol was established. But the skittish cat remained skittish and would slink into and out of the house warily. Her jumpiness excited the dogs' instincts, even the two dogs she'd been living with for years, and when she would run, they'd all give chase and out she'd go, over the fence, only to come back hours later.

[more]

Roundup

Thu, 17 May 2007 01:13:20 GMT
Motley stuff. Haven't been reading so much recently.

The absolute bare minimum every programmer should know about regular expressions. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the absolute bare minimum required to use regex in any meaningful way is still confusing as hell. Not because the explanations are bad, but because I think that regex syntax was dreamed up by the same guy who designed the spelling system in English. [via Gunderloy]

The Post-Rapture Post, "Postal Service of the Saved". You can send letters to those who are Left Behind after the Rapture. Guaranteed delivery because the site is run by atheists. FAQ for those with questions. [via Colleague Kim]

Live Ink offers better way to read text online. "Live Ink works by analyzing written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material." I suspect there will be scoffing, but I think there might be something there. [via the editors' alias at work]

Requirements. Erik Sink with another in his occasional series on running a software business, this time on the care and feeding (or despair and bleeding) of requirements/specifications. He's one of those writers you read no matter what he's writing about. What's not to like about this? [more]

Bryson on the 50s

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 02:15:25 GMT
Like about everyone else I know, I just finished Bill Bryson's book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, his memoir of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s. "Memoir" here is a little loose, and the book might have been subtitled "(With imaginative embellishments)", though only the most literal-minded would accuse him of being a James Frey, one hopes.

Bryson has many observations to make -- civil defense drills, McCarthy hearings, the excitement of color TV, his much-beloved comic books -- all of which he describes in his trademark bemused style. Here is one observation that also sort of sums up the decade:
I don't know how they managed it, but the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you. Drinks before dinner? The more the better! Smoke? You bet! Cigarettes actually made you healthier, by soothing jangly nerves and sharpening jaded minds, according to the advertisements. "Just what the doctor ordered!" read ads for L&M cigarettes, some of them in The Journal of the American Medical Association where cigarette ads were gladly accepted right up to the 1960s. X-rays were so benign that shoe stores installed special machines that used them to measure foot sizes, sending penetrating rays up through the soles of your feet and right out the top of your head. There wasn't a particle of tissue within you that wasn't bathed in their magical glow. No wonder you felt energized and ready for a new pair of Keds when you stepped down.

[more]

Roundup

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:52:58 GMT
Stuff I've run across.

Why marketing should make the user manuals! The Creating Passionate Users blog muses on jazzy marketing vs. boring manuals. (Also previously discussed here on this blog.)

19 pieces of "advice" for entering 1Ls. The Superannuated1L blog proposes how to get through your first year of law school. (Or, I add, through most of life.)

Revenge on Stingrays. "... concerned that the rays, which are usually docile creatures, were being hunted and killed in retaliation for [Steve] Irwin's death."

I like like. Matthew Baldwin aka defective yeti manages, like, the world's most compact disquisition on like. Excerpt (and summary): "Call it the 'Past Approximate.' If someone tells you they once ate fourteen eggs in one sitting, you recognize that is a boast; if someone says they ate, like, fourteen eggs, you know instinctively that the number was probably closer to five."

Why the _______s Hate the _______s. A non-denominational, trans-national guide to ... uh, pretty much most of human history.

Pluto mnemonic device contest. Actually, the results. Jason Kottke ran a contest to come up with a mnemonic for the order of the planets, now that Pluto no longer counts. One of the runners-up: Many Very Earnest Men Just Snubbed Unfortunate Ninth Planet.

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Parent poems

Mon, 22 May 2006 13:36:37 GMT
In a small moment of synchronicity, a few days back we were exchanging poems about children growing up. And the next day, Terry Gross interviewed Billy Collins, who talked about the collection Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006. During the interview, they mentioned poems that talk about parents.

So here's a small collection of poems about parents and children.
A Little Tooth

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

-- Thomas Lux
Eighteen and Adieu

She’s straddling the cusp.
Likes to linger over things.
Some days a dizziness that neither speaks nor replies
is lured by the aroma of Chinese roses,
still water & a small white candle.

She’s the flutter of a single confetti
trailing in a tumult, a gala,
like the ships in great grandma’s day embarking.
Bellow of their horn fattening

the air, gliding imperceptibly
into new reality. Embryonic awkward
swelling between shore and vessel.

We wave we smile we sigh, ambivalent
as we hear in the distance
she’s still got her giggle.

-- Carol Levin
Those Winter Sundays

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Rummaging around

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 13:02:30 GMT
I just finished the book Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, which I liked a lot. This bit struck me as ... familiar:
There were so many facts that Amelia no longer felt certain about (or perhaps she had never known them). She would soon be nearer fifty than forty, and she was sure that every day she could feel more neural pathways disappearing -- fusing and arcing and dying -- leaving her unable to retrieve information. Right up until the end, her father's mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken Hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there -- a five-amp fuse, a tin of shoe polish, a Phillips screwdriver -- would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn't lay your hands on.

Our guy of type

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 14:22:50 GMT
A recent (5 Dev 2005) edition of The New Yorker has an article on Matthew Carter, who according to the article is one of the, or just the, most prolific typeface designer around. In the article, it notes that Carter was the designer of Verdana, the font included with Windows and the designated font for this blog.[1]

Here's some interesting history:
Carter enjoyes designing type for inhospitable environments. "Many of the projects that have interested me most," he says, "have involved somehow the instruction, Make a typeface that will work at tiny size when printed on newspaper at very high speed in ink composed of kerosene and lampblack--all the lowest standards of production." Before he designed Verdana for Microsoft in 1993, the typefaces on computers were adapted from type used in magazines and books and newspapers. Because the resolution on computer screens is so imprecise, the letters look scrawny and thin.
It surprises me that people continue to work with typefaces that don't look so hot on computer screens. The default font for Internet Explorer appears to be Times New Roman, which of course is a typeface derived from print. How many Web pages have we seen where no effort is made to specify a font, and it ends up with serif 12-point Times? According to my research, the answer is: many.

Screen font legibility is an issue when you work on-screen most of the time. Jeff Atwood, who thinks about programmer productivity and human factors a lot, has written a couple of blog entries on the issue of fonts for programmers. In one [more]

Only you can prevent Kundera

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 22:39:46 GMT
Maciej Ceglowski muses on what makes a good dating book:
... that is, the carefully selected work you lend a prospective lover sometime in the golden honeymoon period between your second cup of coffee together and the first time you spend a night in the same bed without touching. In that short window of time, your partner is still a delicious mystery to you, an enigmatic and discerning being, and to her you are a dark continent of adventure and excitement, waiting to be explored. And so you lend her books that are funny, playful, and good subway reading, but also complex enough to hint at your Hidden Depths. Something unusual is a plus, as are lots of sexy bits, to serve as a reminder of the animal fires that burn within. And since you don't yet know one another too well, you try to choose a shotgun of a book that fires a wide pattern, thematically speaking. Like an early physicist studying the atom, you will hurl little bits of culture at your new love and collect valuable data about her inner life by observing the way they bounce off.
He readily acknowledges the "panty-melting" qualities of literature from exotic Eastern European countries. But he's perplexed about why for their dating book so many people select Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Ceglowski is, shall we say, no fan of Kundera's, let alone of this book: "Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book."

So! What's a body to do, then, for a dating book? Why, Ceglowski provides a nicely annotated list of candidates from the "A-team of Slavic authors". The Master and Margarita. Pushkin. Nabokov, when he was still writing in Russian. And people that you've never heard of, unless you have deeply investigated the subject of Slavic dating books.

[more]

The color of cats

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 22:13:36 GMT
Ok, yeah, this is a blog entry about cats. But it's not cute, so there.

I'm reading The Character of Cats by Stephen Budiansky, which is about … cats. I ran across this that pertains to cat coloration:
Among domestic cats, various color mutations appears in a considerable percentage of the population. The most important color variations controlled by single genes are the blotched tabby (the mc, or t^b, gene), in which the tabby stripes are intensified and often fuse together to form black whorls or blotches; Abyssinian tabby (T^a), in which tabby stripes are reduced to a vestigial ticking on the legs; non-agouti (a), in which the pigmentation of the hairs is uniform along its length, resulting in a solid-colored cat, typically all black; dilute, in which the color pigments are scattered in in clumps in the hairs, resulting in a smoky blue or fawn or cream color; or orange (O). The mutant O gene has the peculiarity of being carried on the X chromosome, and because females have two X chromosomes while males have only one, this so-called sex-linked trait produces a sexual divergence in color possibilities. A male with an O gene is just orange. A female, however, can carry an O gene on one of her X chromosomes but not on the other, resulting in the expression of both orange and non-orange coat colors simultaneously; this gives rise to the combined orange and black patterns of the (almost always female) calico- or tortoiseshell-colored cats.
I had also heard colloquially that white cats and dogs are often deaf. Budiansky explains why this is:
[more]

The myth of vacation

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 14:39:54 GMT
From Dusty Scott:
Why does it seem that spinning up for vacation is the most intense thing ever? You have to get a whole pantload of work finished so no one will need you while you are gone, coordinate how and when you are getting there, make extra sure all of the work crap is done, figure out who is going to feed your damn cat, freak out about a tradeshow detail you forgot, finish drawing that portrait, wake up in the middle of the night obsessing about it…

Tuesday at 4 am I came to the conclusion that vacations don't really exist.

Old Yorker

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 09:00:25 GMT
This is cool -- the complete New Yorker on 8 DVDs. Like, every edition ever. Guess I know what I want for Christmas ...

Update 22 Sept 05 Ok, so I ordered it. :-)

Via NPR.

The editing life

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:41:18 GMT
One of the books I read over the weekend was Stet: An Editor's Life by Diana Athill. Ms. Athill was a literary editor in London from the 40s through the 80s and wrote a book that's both about the thrills and chills of starting and running a publishing house and about working with various authors -- Mordecai Richler, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, and others.

She has many witty and amusing things to say. Here are just a few that I picked out, mostly about editing.
All I have ever been able to do with money is to spend it; I loathe responsibility and telling people what to do; and above all I am incapable of selling anything to anyone. Not being a fool, I was well aware of the importance of all aspects of my trade which I couldn't and didn't want to master, and even came to know a fair amount about them. But although I felt guilty about my own incapacities, the only part of the business that I could ever bring myself to truly mind about was the choosing and editing of books. This is certainly a very important part of the publishing process, but without all the rest of it, it would amount to nothing.

So I was not a publisher. I was an editor.

[...]

The book was by a man who could not write. He had clumsily and laboriously put a great many words on paper because he happened to be obsessed by his subject. No one but a hungry young publisher building his list would have waded through his typescript, but having done so I realized that he knew everything it was possible to know about a significant and extraordinary event, and that this book would be a thoroughly respectable addition to our list if only it could be made readable.

[more]

The March of Folly, Part 4

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 01:43:54 GMT
More cites from Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. (For background, read the intro post.)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Executive War 1964-68 (Part II)

The war was turning nasty with napalm-burned bodies, defoliated and devastated croplands, tortured prisoners and rising body counts. It was also becoming expensive, now costing $2 billion a month. [331]

In the American forces, short-term one-year tours of duty, intended to avoid discontent, prevented adaptation to the irregular jungle warfare, thereby increasing casualties since the rate was always highest in the early months of duty. Adaptation never matched circumstances. American fighting tactics were designed in terms of large troop formations making use of mobility, and in terms of industrial targets for the exercise of air power. Once in motion the American military machine could not readjust to a warfare in which these elements did not exist. The American mentality counted on superior might, but a tank cannot disperse wasps. [333]

[more]

The March of Folly, Part 3

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 01:42:51 GMT
Another slice o' cites from Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. (For background, read the intro post.)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Executive War 1964-68 (Part I)

Johnson felt he had to be "strong," to show himself in command, especially to overshadow the aura of the Kennedys, both the dead and the living. He did not feel a comparable impulse to be wise; to examine options before he spoke. He lacked Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking. Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contra-indications. [311]

No one in the Executive branch advocated withdrawal, partly in fear of encouragement of Communism and damage to American prestige, partly in fear of domestic reprisals. And for another reason, the most enduring in the history of folly: personal advantage, in this case a second term. [303]

Enormity of the stakes was the new self-hypnosis. To let North Vietnam win would give incalculable encouragement to Communists everywhere, erode confidence everywhere in the United States and arouse the right at home to political slaughter. [312]

[more]

The March of Folly, Part 2

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 01:42:10 GMT
Continuing with my folly-ful collection of citations out of Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. (For background, read the intro post.)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
"Married to Failure" 1960-63

One thing was left out of account -- the other side. War is polarity. What if the other side failed to respond rationally to the coercive message? Appreciation of the human factor was not McNamara's strong point, and the possibility that humankind is not rational was too eccentric and disruptive to be programmed into his analysis. [288]

All the talk was of "winning the allegiance" of the people to their government, but a government for which allegiance had to be won by outsiders was not a good gamble. [289]

Asia presumes an obligation of citizens to obey their government; Western democracy regards government as representing the citizens. There was no meeting ground nor likely to be one. But because Vietnam was a barrier to Communism, the United States, impervious to the obvious, persisted in trying to make Diem's government live up to American expectations. The utility of "perseverance in absurdity," Edmund Burke once said, "is more than I could ever discern." [290]

[more]