Deficit Mania

The 2010 election spawned the whole political movement of the Tea Party and now the interpretation is that these are strict constitutionalists with a strong aversion to big government and a desire to drastically cut spending.

In fact, the main stream Republicans can talk about little else than the deficit. I consider the Tea Party to be a radical subset of the Republicans, more conservative, more militant and insistent in their beliefs.

The Republican Political Playbook has for years used the phrase "Tax and Spend" as a way of tarring and feathering their opposition. Some within the Republican ranks will tell you that cutting taxes puts more money into the hands of people and makes them spend more and therefore stimulates the economy. This lately has translated into a full blown concern for the deficit, which is a different thing. Democrats may argue that money should be spent by government to stimulate the economy, and really they are doing just the same thing as Republicans. The only difference is that they are unbalancing the budget by adding debits while the Republicans are unbalancing the budget by reducing credits. Both are poor accountants.

The Republicans felt that deficit spending was justified to fight a war in Iraq (which some said was not justified in and of itself, much less not justified to spend that much money). The Democrats are willing to run deficits to pump money into the economy in order to shore up the unemployed or stimulate the economy. No one has ever been willing to actually address the deficit in a truly decisive manner. In the 1990s we had a surplus, partly because the end of the Cold War freed up a lot of money we had been pouring into the military, but also because the economy was cranking along nicely and energy prices were low. What did our friends in Congress argue about when there was a surplus? True to form, the Republicans argued about cutting taxes and the Democrats argued about increasing spending.

No one tried to pay down the debt. No one tried to adjust entitlements, which is best to do when times are robust than when times are lean.

Politicians are not fiscally responsible and they are not serious about wanting to be fiscally responsible. You don't diet by eating whatever you want and trying to exercise all day and you don't believe that a healthy way to lose weight is to starve yourself and never exert yourself. This doesn't make sense. You work on both ends of the equation in order to keep yourself healthy and on the right track.

It's the same way with the federal budget. We need modest tax increases coupled with modest spending cutbacks to meet in the middle in the least painful way. We need to do simple things to balance the books on entitlements, which means looking at each system and making them balanced. Social Security is easy to fix, you float the retirement age to the neutral revenue point. This would mean raising it up a few years now, but then letting it float so the change would be gradual. Eventually, the age would come back down when the baby boomers started to exit the system at the other end of retirement (how's that for a nice way to say it?).

I've heard many people argue that big government programs and federal spending were working to reverse the Great Depression and one year FDR went along with the deficit hawks and cut spending and the depression started to come back. People argue that WWII got us out of the depression and I have to ask, how is that not a program of unprecedented government spending, as well as high taxes? The Keynesian Economists swear that you need a lot of government spending to reverse economic downturns. While it's impossible to know if the bailouts and stimulus bills staved off utter collapse of the economy, it's hard to argue that they didn't work to improve things. People have largely forgotten that the bailout/stimulus spending began under a Republican administration and was widely supported by both sides initially. Now the Democrats are left holding the blame for rising the deficit and debt, but get no credit for saving the economy.

Many people believe that one role that big government does well is to fund basic research and development. Many assert that this spending is like an investment with very high payoffs in the future, which I believe, but find hard to prove. Some people think that private industry should be doing the research and development, but Corporate America is less and less willing to spend money on the future in this way any more. If big government really wants to put their thumb on one side of the scale to help tilt this, I wouldn't mind if we tied tax incentives for big corporations to the amount they pour into R&D (or hiring people and creating new jobs for that matter). If you're going to burden the taxpayers with an expense, at least pick something that will work like an investment and earn you something down the road.

I do not believe that the general public or our elected officials have a good idea of how to manage government spending and I see nothing on the horizon that will change that.

The Value of Voting

During a recent Freakonomics Podcast, which I listened to on 1/26/11, the host stated that you should not feel bad about skipping voting because it does you no good. I wrote the following letter to them:

"Ignoring my visceral response to your comment that it is a waste of time to vote, it doesn't ring true to me. If the premise of the question is whether or not your individual single vote makes any difference, I can understand the answer. Voting is not an individual act, but a collective one. Choosing not to vote as an individual may have little impact, but encouraging individuals not to vote (I should say dissuading people from voting) has a large collective impact. Further, failure to research issues prior to going into the voting booth to cast a vote, I believe already has an adverse collective impact, as seen by the government we get. A self-serving (or special interest serving) group of elected officials with a 98% incumbency re-election rate is a disservice to our country and a danger to any true progress or problem solving.

"To test the validity of the premise that voting makes no difference, please substitute other activities for voting, such as polluting. Those who grew up in the 60's and 70's, like me, probably remember the polluted lakes and streams and the roadsides littered with garbage. Your individual effort of throwing trash out of your car window or picking up trash a single piece of trash alongside the road might be meaningless, but the collective efforts of the nation to change our behavior has made for a cleaner and better world. The same would be true for voting if we took it more seriously and did it more consistently and with more care.

"I realize your intent was to analyze a particular question without any moral bias, but I couldn't help but hope as I heard you tell people that their votes did not make any difference that this would not influence people to give up their right to vote.

"Could you please re-address the original question with the thought in mind of the results of collective actions? Your coverage of the savings account lottery is another example of collective behavior making a difference when individual behavior seems insignificant. Without all the investors, there is no prize in the savings account lottery."

But I have to say, voting today is a lot more like cleaning up stinky garbage. I might argue that it's worthless to vote because it doesn't ever seem to change anything or fix any of our problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

The History of Torture

I honestly do not remember why I put the search term torture in the search bar that day. I was in my public library's catalog, where I get most of the books I read, and something in the news or some minor thing that came to mind made me put the term in. It came up with The History of Torture by Brian Innes at the first hit. There were two other books in the search that I will discuss further on, but first, an overview of the title book.

This book was written in 1998, before the recent Bush era forays into torture by the United States came up.

I personally have had many arguments about torture with people. The gist of the argument always seems to me to be that if we are doing it, it isn't torture, or these people that were rounded up are guilty, or it's not that bad, you could hardly call it torture.

While our efforts against radical fundamentalist terrorist do bring up unique challenges, they do not justify torture in my mind. The problem with declaring a war on terror is that there is no President, Prime Minister, Emperor, or Fuhrer to surrender, thus winning the whole contest. Each hostile enemy individual is his own war effort, in effect his own country. He's certainly not taking orders from any country recognized by the U.N. and would not surrender unless individually captured. For this reason, declaring war seems to me to be inappropriate. This is individual people not acting under any government direction, so it is criminal activity. You never stop fighting crime, but wars are costly, require a lot of people and effort, and you want to be able to end them at some point. A guerrilla war is similar, although in that case, fighting groups may be supplied and may take direction from a government group.

I was trained by the U.S. Army in the Geneva Convention. We were taught that nothing justified mistreatment of a prisoner. It didn't matter if their side mistreated our guys or if an attack was imminent, or if we caught someone in the act of some war crime, you can never abuse a prisoner. Once captured, he is no longer a factor in the armed struggle. At that point, you may interrogate him, but it never seemed to me that there would be much information of any use that they would offer freely or give up under simple questioning. Often, during the Civil War, captured prisoners would reveal much, but only accidentally, after being tricked, and usually because both sides had a common culture and could goad or enrage prisoners into talking. I always believed that torture was wrong, and often worried about how I would stand up to it if I was ever captured in a conflict. I have always assumed that I would be singing like a canary in a very short time. To me, avoiding being a torturer was necessary in order to keep up the edge we had for decades of being the honorable opponent. In a close situation, soldiers will sometimes surrender rather than fight on if they know they will be treated well, so it was always better to foster that way of thinking in the enemy. Plus, we always talked about how much better and how much more moral we were than then. This is what steeled many people of my generation for the decades of the cold war. We deserved to win because we cared about people and were better human beings.

One of the things I learned along the way was that torture never works. Under a painful interrogation, the prisoner will quickly decide that the pain must end and therefore, the people asking the questions should be told what they want to hear. It's the only reason they'll stop asking questions, when they believe they have the answers. I've always known that I would tell someone whatever they wanted to hear if I was being hurt in a terrible way. The information gained from torture is always suspect. You cannot assume that any of it is true.

The History of Torture talked about how the ancients used torture and brought that forward to the Middle Ages. Just as the Romans occasionally tortured a Christian (before The Roman Empire was a christian empire), the Christians didn't take long to adopt as an instrument of state during the middle ages. A depressingly large swath of the middle of the book is about the inquisitions. I did not realize there were more than one, or that they were started over such trivial matters. Does God interfere in day to day events or has he kept his hands off since shortly after creation? This question was responsible for kicking off the inquisition. I'm guessing that many churches today have people that believe both ways in the same congregation. Can you imagine being accused of something as trivial as this and being disfigured under the hands of torture until you gave over the names of others that were thinking or doing as you did?

It kept striking me throughout the middle of the book that elaborate and widespread torture was mostly religiously motivated and taken out by members of the church or their agents. Religion has been responsible for more torture than anything else over the years. How do you believe? Be careful, the wrong answer could give you a trip to the rack.

I thought that by reading the book, I would become numb to the thought of torture, and I must say that this was the case. After hearing dozens of details of pain inflicted on individuals in order to change their beliefs, I found myself unimpressed by the procedures. I never did lose my sense of unfairness at all the poor people that were unjustly accused, who later confessed to belief or acts which they did not hold or did not commit.

The next book I checked out was Barry Eisler's Inside Out. Mr. Eisler was an actual ex-CIA covert agent. He only did it for 3 years, but even so, you get the feeling that you're hearing things you're not supposed to know. He had fictional government agents that used to torture and now were trying to bring down the government by revealing the extent of their torture. Mr. Eisler had a character in his book state something that I believe he believed himself. He said that people don't use torture because they think it works, they use it because they want to hurt people.

The last book I checked out was The Torture Memos by David Cole. It went over the legal justifications for torture during the Bush administration. The book had a description of an interrogation of a terror suspect, and it did not look easy to endure. It amazes me that there was no one prosecuted over the affair.

Also mentioned in The History of Torture is another older book not available through the library, called: A History of Torture by George Riley Scott. I have not yet checked out or purchased this book (they did not have it at the bookstore), and I may not. It seems to me that everything that needs to be said on torture already has.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

I must have originally heard about the Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond on the radio or in a podcast, I can't remember. It was published in 1997 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

This is a book about how humans colonized the planet, with particular emphasis on discoveries and inventions - how we developed.

There are many aspects of the book which I was already familiar with, in the broad strokes. I knew roughly how we came out of Africa and swept across Europe and Asia, and how we domesticated plants and animals and settled into more and more civilized cities with more and more specialized technology and pursuits.

So you might wonder how much more you can learn from 440 pages of heavily footnoted text. The short answer is not a lot of basic broad historical strokes, but a lot of nuance. Some surprises on human migration, like the colonization of Madagascar from southeast Asia were completely unexpected and fun to learn. The isolation of Australia after it's initial colonization and the self-enforced isolation of China were two things that I had never heard about before, and were fascinating.

There were some very interesting broad concepts, like the wide stretch over the same lattitude of Eurasia being the perfect developing ground for the spread of domesticated plants, while the north south axis of the Americas were a hinderance to spreading of advances.


It was interesting to see how scholars and scientists have shed light on the spread of humanity by analyzing language similarities and by tracking genetic studies of populations. While these were not particularly surprising methods, it was fascinating to see how some details they illuminated were unexpected. For example, we think of Africa as this melting pot where humanity emerged and then changed as they spread out, but Africa used to have more diversity, and studies have shown that other groups of humans with other cultures and languages had been subjugated and absorbed in some migration that occurred after humans had already spread out of Africa.

Since reading the book, I have heard the results of some recent studies that touch on the same subjects that Jared Diamond touched on in his book. He stated that he thought that the megafauna extinctions, particularly of Australia, but of North and South America, too, were the result of overhunting by humans. The megafauna were large mammals that existed on those continents up to the time man migrated in, and then were extinct shortly after the appearance of man. Many people are familiar with the woolly mammoth and the saber toothed tiger, but there were all kinds of other large mammals that used to exist that became extinct right around the time man showed up. Recent studies have drawn the opposite conclusion, stating that the extinctions had climatic or other reasons, but could not have been by overhunting given the time frame that they occurred. Scientists currently disagree on this point.

The other theory that I have heard was that the migrations of humans out of Africa did not originate from the area around Kenya, but from North Africa. The Sahara Desert was a jungle not too long ago, and humans inhabited it. There is evidence that suggests that these are the groups that first migrated off the continent into what is now the area around Israel. Each year brings on new discoveries to flesh out our understanding of this time period.

The main question he is addressing in the book is why some bands of humans were able to out-compete others. The main answer is right in his title. They had guns (superior warfare tactics), they had diseases which they were more resistant to, and they had steel (better developed technology).

The interesting thing that came out of my version of the book, which has an afterword added some years after the original book was released, was that many large corporations were looking at the book and seeing if it applied to corporations and companies. What makes one company out-compete another.

While dense with information and difficult to plow through, the book is also rich with interesting details and well worth the time to work through it.

Privacy

The recent Wikileaks controvercy had me thinking about privacy and how it is applied to certain groups.

When the accessibility of the internet grew, several phenomena grew with it. We have the explosion of social media and the ability of simple online searches to expose a lot of your personal information to anyone with an internet connection. Law enforcement agencies started putting cameras on police cars, and sometimes drove with camera crews - like the show Cops. They put surveillance cameras more and more in public places and then started thinking about putting them on roadways as speed traps or red light enforcers. When 9/11 hit, government officials started to devise ways to improve security. Some of these ways involved not just more intrusive searches on people at airports, but the possibility that your email might be read by someone in the government. Some people see no problem with this increased scrutiny. You will often hear proponents of increased government power of surveillance of individuals saying that we live in a different world and you shouldn't expect as much individual privacy today.

If this is such a good idea for individual people, why is it not a good idea for governments or large corporations? What's fair is fair, right? After all, if you're not doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide? That's what I'm being told as a justification for losing my privacy, so shouldn't that apply to government and industry too?

We are expected to vote for people and then re-evaluate their performance during the next election and decide whether to re-elect them or not. It's like a performance review for a job. If we don't know what they are doing or how they are doing it because they get to classify their actions and hide their activities behind a veil of security, then we really can't judge the job they are doing and cannot in good conscience decide whether to vote for them or not. I'm not talking about exposing CIA operatives, and endangering secret agents. I figure that the best kept secrets like that are already better protected and will be the last secrets to be exposed anyway. The exception was the Valerie Plame affair, and that was done from the inside. What I am talking about exposing is why we go to war, what corporations are pulling government strings, and why decisions are being made. I don't need to know the name of or get a picture of a field agent doing his job, but I want to know if the government sent him out to perform assassinations or subvert governments or abduct people for interrogations.

Secrecy allows you to torture people, imprison them without cause, assassinate inconvenient rivals, start wars, and ignore festering problems. Secrecy allows you to conspire to fix prices, put unsafe products into the public's hands, continue to practice unsafe procedures in the workplace, and pollute without any control. The worst an individual could do with secrecy might be to defraud someone, injure an individual, or do drugs. The harm anyone as an individual can do is so much less than governments and corporations can do, yet why are people arguing that my secrecy must be sacrificed to protect the rest of the public and they aren't arguing that the big players that have much more impact and can do much more harm need greater protections from public scrutiny?

Some have expressed disappointment in President Obama, feeling that he has not lived up to his campaign promises (obviously, his opponents express disappointment just that he's in office). I have heard a defense of Obama that speculated that if you knew what he knows, if you saw all the inside information that he now has access to since he went into office, you'd understand why he is acting the way he is. This justification is not acceptible. If every new elected official gets to go to Washington and disappear behind a veil of secrecy and ignore what they were sent to office to do, their campaign promises mean nothing. If we can't expect anyone we elect to do the things they say they are going to do, then it doesn't do any good to vote for anyone. We as voters are responsible for our leaders actions, and how can we evaluate how they make decisions if we can't even see what they see?

There were serious misuses of privacy in the previous administration, and the hope in electing Obama was that things would roll back and revert to times when government was more accessible. Vice President Cheney in particular used to claim executive privelige in order to do his job unencumbered, unquestioned, and without interference from the public. That started with his work with energy corporations in drafting policy in his energy task force. The particulars of those meetings never did see the light of day. In the absense of hard evidence, I assume that energy corporations were given the ability to effect legislation and enforcement in ways that circumvented restrictions and benefited the bottom line of the company at the expense of the general public. The result was an unneccesary war in Iraq and $4 per gallon gasoline. The other assertion that Cheney used to make was that our security measures had prevented many terrorist attacks. When asked for specifics, he couldn't tell us about them for "security" reasons. This supposedly justified torture, detainment, rendition, and the erosion of individual privacy. If you were able to rip away this veil of secrecy and found that there were no attacks repelled and the questionable actions made no difference in our security, you would have a clear case to remove the perpetrators from office. But since they got to say what it was we got to see, it was easy for them to simply restict this information, which gave them more freedom to do whatever they wanted.

I say we should open up the files and look at the information. People in government and industry should always act in a way that they will not be ashamed of when it comes to light in the public. What they do has a broader effect and they expect no less from us.

Lame Duck Session

I was listening to an interesting exchange on the Slate Political Gabfest about the lame duck session of Congress.

Emily Bazelon explained that some people were so incensed about lame duck sessions that they were thinking of making them illegal, and at least the laws that came out of them had the feeling of something that was unconstitutional, because these people had just been voted out. She commented that this time the lame duck session might be a good thing because cooler heads could prevail and decisions could be made without regard for re-election prospects.

In repeating the other's complaints, she described the session as an undemocratic time, but I believe we are seeing a political calculation-free zone. Our elected officials are, during these interludes, able to make decisions divorced from political machinations. For a while, the motivation can be what's good for the country and not their next election. Instead of paying back their small group of core campaign contributors they can do what’s right for the majority. The irony is that more campaign promises that usually amount to nothing more than rhetoric seem to be fulfilled during the lame duck session than during the regular session. Actions that are for the greater good of the country can be openly considered in this brief period where there are no glaring klieg lights of politics that do not allow for any political cover.

This tells us that politics and the things politicians do to get re-elected are distorting the way they govern. Additionally, the political calculations did not work for the Democrats. All the issues that they would not make a stand on before the election were avoided because they felt it would make them un-electable. These were exactly the issues that their core supporters expected them to address all along. The irony is that their political second guessing and maneuvering was counterproductive. If they had worked toward some of the legislation they've been free to approach during the Lame Duck Session, I believe they would have had better chances at being re-elected. Showing some backbone and tackling issues that the right painted as completely unacceptible would have energized their base.

The independent swing voters who turned to the Democrats in hopes that they would be anti-Republicans were sorely disappointed by their behavior since the 2008 election. The gutless way that Democrats wouldn't even consider legislation and make their agenda happen during a sweeping supermajority is what hurt them and caused the enthusiam gap among those swing voters. The behavior of the Democrats during this lame duck session proves that they had the ability to get some things that needed to be done completed despite Republican blustering. If they had exhibited some courage over the last 2 years, I believe the election would not have been as successful for the Republicans.

Prior to the election, the Republicans were taking advantage of a situation where obstructionism and not cooperating meant they were not working for the good of the country, and yet this put them back in a position of power. They were rewarded for bad behavior. The lame duck lesson that should be transmitted to the regular session is to do what’s right, not what you think you should do because of election politics.

The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel that is now a movie staring Viggo Mortensen. The movie came out last summer and I heard a review on the podcast Seen/Unseen Movie Reviews. The host said that he loved the book and was fearful that the movie would screw it up. There was something about his passionate description of the book that stuck in my mind, and made me decide that I had to read it. I purchased the book some time back, and I have a paperback that came out since the movie, so it has a picture of Viggo Mortensen and the actor who plays the boy, Kodi Smit-McPhee, on the cover. I used to be a read the book first purist, but I've relaxed on that account somewhat. I realized that in this case, it was too late, just seeing the movie trailers would have been enough to put Viggo Mortensen's face on the man when I read the book. I do like that pure book experience where you have these vague, fantasy-like visions of the characters in your mind. I'm always afraid that putting an actual face on the character distracts you from accepting the character as a pure person, whom you can relate to and understand their motivations and desires. When the movie arrived in the mail from NetFlix, I realized I had to get off my butt and read the book.

That was three days ago, and I finished the book last night. It's that good. You sit down and read it from front to back. In contrast, I've been plugging away at Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond for 2 years (with long gaps where I put it aside), but can never seem to read more than about 10 pages in a sitting (after which, I fall asleep).

The book reminds me of the perfect subject for a high school essay. The themes are numerous, and the old thesis style of finding the hidden meanings in the book is a perfect way to view the novel.

The style is almost more poetry than prose. It follows a simple pattern alternating stream of consciousness with simple dialog and spare descriptions.

I had no idea where it was going. There are a few things that you realize they have left out of the novel. They never say what part of the world the characters are in. I kept thinking they were in California, but it could just as easily been parts of Georgia. The point is that it's not important because the world has been so radically changed that nothing is recognizable anymore. The cause of the end of the world or the downfall of civilization is not clear, but I suspect it was meant to be nuclear war and the ensuing nuclear winter. However, why were there not more references to radiation? I suppose it could have been a comet or asteroid strike.

They never say the boy's name or the man's name, and it doesn't matter. He's "the man" and his son is "the boy".

The novel sets up a good versus evil theme. This is not some underlying message you have to guess at, the boy is often questioning the man about whether people they encounter are good people. Unfortunately, they do not encounter any good people, only victims and predators. The struggle between the boy and the man is to remain good and survive. The boy's watchfulness keeps the man from devolving into savagery and the man's example gives the boy a clear idea of good and evil.

You find yourself asking why they keep going on. You wonder what it is that they are hopeful for. Is there some unscarred territory where people are still normal and life is going on with something resembling order?

You get the sense that the desolation following the original conflagration went in stages. This is what makes the novel interesting. There are no explicit narrative explanations, just bits and pieces that you pick up along the way. You begin to understand that the survivors have swept over the landscape in waves, with each successive wave being diminished. At some point, people began to turn on each other, and when we see the boy and the man on their journey, they have reached the point where they can't trust anyone. They will either be attacked or robbed by anyone they meet, and some bands will slaughter them for food if they can.

You get the sense that the man was once a police officer or a soldier, but he was also well read and intelligent, so there's no telling what he might have been. One thing is clear, he's been very lucky. He was lucky to have survived the initial collapse, and then lucky to have been able to raise the boy, who it appears was born after the disaster. He was lucky to have had someone to be with him and help him survive, and he was lucky to always be able to find food or shelter or evade attackers when they came after him.

At one point in the book, they encounter an old man who is so defenseless and impoverished that he poses no threat. He turns out to be somewhat blind, and you wonder how in the world he survived for as long as he did. At the boy's insistence, they give him some of their food, even though they don't really have the food to spare. It is interesting how the man defers to the boy on these matters. He actually lets him make the decisions. In some ways, it seems that the man is realizing that many of the decisions they might make are random and there is no way to foresee where they will lead, so he might as well let the boy decide. In another view, you might say that he is using the boy as a moral compass. The old man asks about the boy and the man says that the boy is a god. When I read this, I thought that the man was being a smart ass, but then I thought that even if he was, it was a telling remark. What if the boy was somewhat of a god. What if the whole point was that the boy had to survive because some day he would be instrumental in rebuilding civilization? Or maybe the boy was a god in the sense that you don't question why you believe in him, you just do.

After a while, I began to realize why the book was resonating with me so much. I was identifying with the man. His way of consulting and deferring to the boy reminds me of the way I approach my son. I often let him do or try things when it doesn't really matter one way or the other. I figure he's going to learn to be an independent and thoughtful adult quicker if he is allowed to work things out himself. The man also has a curious way of trying to tell the truth and not sugar coat bleak realities, while at the same time explaining why that's not necessarily bad to face reality, it helps to deal with reality if you are fully aware of it. Yet the man wants to give a hopeful view to his son, so he is more ready to tell him when he doesn't know what the truth and reality of the situation is, but what he hopes it is. The boy responds to the honesty and openness by accepting the bad things in life, but not being absorbed by them. They say something to the effect that once you see something, you can't unsee it, you can't make it go away. Once you let it in, it stays in. And yet they come to understand that this is better than not seeing the bad things. They see to have been able to be exposed but not tainted by all the bad things they see. Perhaps this is part of their survival. By understanding what forms of evil they will be confronting, they are able to avoid them.

Despite the fact that the story had no hope, that the world was irreparably damaged and there did not seem to be anywhere to go to get away from the cruel fate that the changed world imposed on them, you found yourself having hope for the boy and the man, wishing them well and wanting them to make it to safety.

Upon further reflection of the book, I have decided that I really relate to the man because of the way he would lose sleep worrying about and protecting the boy. He would listen late at night and his own health probably suffered in order to stay vigilant and protect his son. It was interesting how the transition to a post-apocalyptic setting changes how you raise your son. While he still spent time teaching him to read (not in the time of the novel, but there were flashback references to the fact that he had been teaching him even while they struggled to survive), he had long since come to grips with the fact that he could not shelter and protect him from the realities of life. They had a saying about how once you see something, it's in your mind. They were seeing some fearsome and gruesome things, from the overall destruction of the world to the painful and cruel ways that people suffered and died. The man decided to let the boy see these things, and then talk about them and understand them for what they were. These things were horrible, but they were reality, and should be faced if a person was going to be better able to survive.

The result was that the boy was often struggling with accepting the horrible things in life, but never accepting that these things were right. He had a keen sense of right and wrong, and in his moral universe eating other people or even just hurting or taking from them to get ahead or survive was always wrong. He lit his father know this in many ways, subtle and overt. The man refers to him as a God to one old decrepit traveller that they shared food with. I think this was a telling moment in the book because the man did use the boy as a God in the sense that he was a being that the man had to live up to, he had to please the boy that he was a one of the good people, much the way religious people seek to do good to be in the favor of God and gain entry to Heaven. In the end, I think the man made it to Heaven with plenty of room to spare. His last parting gift to his son was to give them hope, "you've always been lucky - you will find some good people to be with" was his last message to the boy before he died. This depressing novel ended with a strangely bittersweet assurance that the boy would be OK when the good people found him as he stood vigil over his dead father, wondering what to do next. It was a strange emotional mixture that I have rarely seen in a writing, where the sadness of the loss of the man is tempered with the relief that the boy would be safe and would still have a chance to hopefully find something good in life. You kept wondering if there was an untouched place out there with good people in it, shelter and a lack of hunger, and you hoped they would find it. Someone has to carry on the human race.

Another less emotionally satisfying aspect of the book was the parallels this charred and wrecked world has with our relatively pristine world. I kept thinking about the way that the people that they encountered had no problem getting ahead (or staying alive) at the expense of the boy and the man. Their entire journey was one of not letting the others capture or harm them, or at least steal their meager possessions that they owed their life to. I realized that this is how nations act toward each other, this is how governments look at other nations. How do I get on top? What does that other group have that I need? This is in some ways the essence of how capitalism works. Stick it to the other guy and get ahead. This type of gain at the expense of others is shown in stark relief in the world of The Road, but really, it's present in the world around us today. Sure, we're well fed and dry and warm in the cold winter, but we still claw to the top of the pack standing on the backs of others. I've always felt that this was not right, in some way. I'm not a communist, one who thinks that all things go into a big community pot and then everyone pulls back out from it equally. I just believe that a higher form of success would be possible if we thought about ways to get ahead that pulled those around us or those we are dealing with up with us. Why can we not find mutually beneficial solutions to the problems we all face? Why must my success come at your expense? Why would I deserve to succeed if I knew it was hurting you? While The Road shows this in stark relief, I believe that in life, this is the road we are all travelling.

The Real Da Vinci Code

While visiting my in-laws in Des Moines recently, we were told about an exhibition on Leonardo Da Vinci at the Science Center of Iowa.

You would not think that Des Moines would have much to offer when it comes to museums, but this exhibit was pretty decent. Snaking through the tour, we saw many models and mock-ups of inventions that Da Vinci came up with.

People don't realize that many inventors (what we might call scientists today) were in those times usually employed by royalty and usually valuable if they could add to the military advantage of their king. It's not clear to me how much of Leonardo's work was done as under patronage, but he had a lot of inventions that were for military use.

One thing that struck me was that most ideas cannot come from nowhere, they are usually an accumulation of previous ideas. I was surprised how many of da Vinci's ideas had earlier sources, as many were taken from earlier Greek philosophers. His strength was understanding the underlying principles inherent in the things he studied. He was able to figure out many complex system by understanding what drove them. For example, there was a self supporting bridge that he developed that allowed soldiers to quickly put together a way over a stream given a pile of tree trunks. He was able to see the forces each piece would exert on the adjacent pieces and devise a way that the result was a self-supporting span. It was ingenious in its simplicity.

Part of the reason that he was in touch with all these underlying principles was because he took the time to observe and study things from scratch. He was interested in flight and spent a lot of time studying birds. His most famous set of observations were anatomical. He was a meticulous and obsessive chronicler and his volumes of notebooks contained beautiful sketches of the human body, among other interests. Of course, being an artist helped make the sketches easily readable and an amazing aid to comprehension of the systems he was exploring, describing, and explaining.

His art was also dissected in great detail in the exhibit. Everyone is familiar with his last supper and all the speculations about Mary Magdalene and Judas, but the picture is also diagrammed showing the way all lines in the drawing point to Christ's head. The big focus of the exhibit was the Mona Lisa. That drawing has been analyzed to a degree that I find unbelievable. They showed colorized versions of it and all kinds of different versions with various methods of analysis showing various aspects of the painting or construction. She used to have eyebrows and eyelashes that have since faded. One thing I did not notice was the speculation that it was actually a self-portrait, feminized.

The amazing thing about an exhibit like this was that you go through it and feel overwhelmed by the breadth of his work, and you realize that this is just a little taste of the whole amount of works that he has done. They call him a Renaissance Man because of his variety of interests, but he was also a river that ran deep as well as broad.

Government Balance

I wrote an entry back on 10/25/10 entitled Negativity Cascade. It described how a small tilt or lean in one direction can often cause an enormous shift to start.

I was watching a recent Daily Show episode with Philip K. Howard, the founder of a group called Common Good. He is a lawyer that believes government needs reform. He discussed how our government is being hamstrung by our political parties to the point where it is unable to react quickly or decisively. His point was that our government is rendered ineffective by the weight of the bureaucratic system as well as the inertia to continue to do things the way they always have and is in need of reform. He talked about how our politicians often argue about things that are not relevant and how they get tied up in distractions and don't get things done.

When I talked with my wife about the Negativity Cascade effect, she did not see the point of the mental construct. I tried to convince her that knowing this balance and cascade effect was there could be useful. In government, if a leader could always work to tilt the field their way, he might be able to do what is needed to fix our problems. In other words, create a cascade that pushes things their way.

One of the problems with America right now is that there are two main factions that each believe that the other side is actively trying to ruin the country. At the same time, both sides are not at all concerned that their own actions might actually harm individual members in their opposition. Rather than thinking and believing that any gains we can make would come primarily by defeating the other side, we should realize that we are all Americans and that the best course of action should benefit everyone, not a small group of citizens.

On the business side, Dan Carlin was talking about instituting a new entrepreneurial concept to teach people capitalize on their ideas. Capitalism, or I should say capitalistic ideals seem to concentrate on competition and defeating others involved in the same industry It does not teach any of the benefits that come from competition. In reality, competition is good and we benefit from having strong competitors. The goal should not be to crush competitors, but to divide your market with customers that fit your style of doing business and leave the rest to your competitors. Another benefit of competition is that it spurs innovation, ratcheting up the development of new technology and efficiency in production. We must learn to compete in a way that allows for multiple winners. We need to learn to see that we are not threatened by others earning success in a similar way, but allowed to carve out areas of strength within a competitive arena.

I've had some interesting discussions with colleagues lately about competition and globalization. We've seen examples of U.S. companies protecting their ideas and then having Chinese companies steal them and copy them. Sometimes this occurs before the U.S. companies can even fully develop and deploy technologies, sometimes it happens with mature technologies, where plans are stolen, or equipment is procured and copied.

We talked about the entrepreneurial spirit that takes ideas to a successful business model and whether or not we could assist innovators to be good businessmen, too. Although there are a few people that are excellent entrepreneurs, few people with big ideas are also the type that could make those ideas work. One opinion was that this kind of successful formula could not be taught. Many big successes were mostly luck. It was the general consensus that Chinese competition comes from a massive labor force, not from innovation. We've seen few examples of great ideas originating in China. Perhaps this is healthy for the world as a whole, but it's a major disincentive for innovators and inventors to develop the next big idea if it's just going to be ripped off and make someone else wealthy.

One thing is certain, recent events have everything going China's way. So the cascade effect is favoring them at this point. However, with a little bit of wisdom and finesse, we can be ready to ride this tide when it flows back out in the other direction.

Cooking for Geeks

I just listened to a great Science Friday show from back in September. It was a new book author interview, Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks. The book is about the science behind the cooking. Potter is a computer science type that interviewed well. It wasn't as if he was a typical geek that might be uncomfortable with people. He approached cooking the way a scientist would approach it, and found that few people had really studied it to understand many aspects of it.

One of the firt things he did was get an IR (infrared) thermometer. I've seen these in industrial settings and always assumed that they were horribly expensive. They often look like a little gun, you point it at what you want to measure and press a button and get a digital readout. Using this tool, Potter could actually learn what temperature things happen at. I remember him discussing carmelization or browning happening at 130 degrees, but I'm sure there are other things to know, like the boiling and melting point of major ingredients.

He said that he would take a recipe and remake it several times in a row, changing one variable each time and learning what the result were for each change. From this description, you can see that he was approaching cooking like it was pure scientific experimentation. I could really relate to this myself.

The most fun story that he told was about the way he discovered that the cleaning cycle for his oven would take it up to 900 degrees. He figured out how to disable the safety switch in the door so he could have it on and open the door. He learned that you can cook pizza in this was in about 45 seconds and it is delicious. The problem was that he shattered the glass in the oven door. He got on Craigslist and ordered a piece of special quartz material to replace his oven window. He said that this material was developed and used for the nosecones of rockets going into space. You can buy anything online, was his comment.

I bought the book, but I haven't read it or started using it yet. And still, I highly recommend it.

Robotics Laws

Anyone who has seen a Terminator movie or knows the old Battlestar Galactica story line knows that there is a fear of our own technology taking over or trying to destroy humanity. It's a common theme and makes for a great story line. Dune is another story that fits this bill. The original stories were in a future over 12,000 years from now, where the government was feudal and the technology was advanced in some respects and stagnant in others. The Dune story line was extended backwards after Frank Herbert died by his son. They took it back to the often mentioned Butlerian Jihad, where computers were banned. Underneath this over 30 year old novel was a baseline story about humanity after surviving a war with machines. If you continue to read the saga as it ran forward in time from the original story, you also see that the war was never really ended, just delayed for millenia.

Isaac Asimov, arguably the most prolific science fiction writer of all time, started writing short stories about robots in the 1940's and accumulated them into his classic novel in 1950. This was before computers that he was speculating that eventually we would develop autonomous machines that were self-aware. He wasn't the first. A Czech playwriter had coined the word about 20 years previously, from a root Slavic word for worker or serf, although the story you commonly hear is that the root word is slave. When Asimov attempts to flesh out the idea, he thinks it through very thoroughly, as only he could do. What if we build these thinking machines and we lose control of them? We could certainly make them more powerful or faster than a human, so how would we ever regain control once we lost it? He speculated that the human designers, in order to build in features that would prevent the loss control, would develop laws that would be hard wired into robots to prevent them from harming humans. These laws of robotics are well known to most Sci-Fi geeks and Tech-Heads. They are:

1.A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This would seem to insure that Robots stay "in their place", as willing and pliant servants of humans. I always thought that this was a little naive. What do you do about the rogue designer that decided that these rules were not good and didn't want to use them?

Well, it seems that more and more, that time is approaching. The use of drones in combat has increased markedly in the last 7 years since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the beginning, these were remotely piloted vehicles that would simply remove the operator from the airplane, but still have a person in control. As time has passed, more and more of the functions of these drones have been getting automated. Exactly how autonomous they are is a military secret, so the question is whether or not we are already at the point of having autonomous machines, probably not self-aware, but capable of action independent of human control. We know the drones were originally going to be used only for surveillance and now carry weapons. We see the use of other "robots" on the battlefield, machines used for surveillance or bomb handling. These machines are probably more primitive in the way of computer intelligence and control, but early stages of work toward mechanizing the battlefield.

With the prospect of human deaths being less and less acceptable to the public, we see more moves to put machines in harms way in lieu of humans. There are already attempts to build personal vehicles that are little more than mechanical assists for a human form. That easily develops into a robot body, which you might have a person inside of, or you might control remotely. Given manpower shortages for just about any task you could conceive on a battlefield, how long before you provide these robots with weapons system and computer controls and allow them to operate independently. Of course, their job would be to kill people, so the Laws of Robotics as Asimov envisioned them would be the farthest thing from the designer's mind.

I recently hear John Hodgeson make a comment about the inevitable robot uprising. While he mentioned it humorously, the matter of fact way he slipped it into the conversation as if it was inevitable is disturbing, if you think about it. Most religions have a future end-time built into their narrative. The devout and faithful often believe that things will end badly for humankind, they just don't know when. I've always felt that thinking like this was in some ways wishful thinking, and in other ways a guarantee of self-fulfilling prophecy. It doesn't matter if you don't want it to happen if you believe it will happen. Most likely, your actions once you believe in something will make it more likely to occur.

The actions of our government if they pursue combat robots virtually insures that we are heading in that direction. You would tend to build a strong self-preservation instinct into your combat robot, or else it wouldn't be much of a fighter. People would naturally try to hack into the controlling program to shut down the robot, that's a natural response to the threat. The defense would be to harder a robot's ability to resist being shut down or averted from their mission - a recipe for loss of control. If one nation developed combat robots, it would virtually insure that their enemies would try to develop them. In order to be competitive in some future theater where one country is sending its combat robots against another country with the same kind of robots, designers would tend to make the robots tougher and more brutal than their enemy's forces. Again, a perfect recipe for disaster.

Do I sound like a technological armageddonist? Well, I don't think I am, because I don't think this will happen. I believe that we usually error on the side of sanity, and societal checks and balances tend to be employed before most situations get out of hand. But the first step in creating a check or balance to an unstable situation is to realize how that situation could go out of control. Murphy was an engineer, after all. So our challenge here is to realize the worst consequences of our actions and provide regulation and oversight for groups working on this kind of technology. Also, it doesn't hurt to develop a strong defense. Anyone seen the EMP device in the Matrix series?

Savings Account Lotto

I heard a great idea in a podcast called Freakonomics. It was about a new way of gambling called a Prize Linked Savings Account (PLS). Technically, it's a lottery, but the way it works is that you put money in a savings account that has a "save to win" feature. The interest from the entire pool of these savings accounts goes to a lottery pool. Individuals get no interest from the account, but as long as they are in the pool by saving some money in their savings account, they are eligible for the monthly rewards which are the interest generated by the sum of the accounts. You can take your money back out at any time. So you save money, but while you keep it in the account, you are also eligible for winning a great deal more money. This provides an incentive and encourages people to save. It also provides an irrational hope that someone will win big, changing their life.

The problem is that it is illegal in most places. In the U.S., states run lotteries under a state law which also makes them a lottery monopoly. States make a huge amount of money on their lotteries, and the profit margin is huge. These states won't allow this good idea which is a win-win for the consumer, because they do not want the competition with these prize winning savings plans.

People don't get up-in-arms about this kind of thing because most people don't pay much attention to situations like this. The State Monopoly on lotteries is similar to the way that political parties do not allow good ideas because it threatens their special interests. I believe this is a form of corruption. Some good laws will never be enacted because it spoils the control exerted by their campaign contributors, that are often big corporations hoping that their contributions will keep the laws that favor them and insure that any new laws written will will provide them a benefit or at least not harm them.

You've seen examples of this. The trial lawyers always fight off tort reform. The unions work to insure that people do not have the choice to work for non-union companies in some areas. Large corporations are notorious for protecting their interests. Energy producing companies do not like price control or pollution restrictions or even conservation measures to be enacted into law.

This reminds me of the way that America became a big textile power. Around the time that the industrial revolution was kicking into gear, the textile trade in England was set up as a series of protected trades, where each step in making animal furs or plant fibers into cloth and finished clothing goods was controlled by a separate very powerful trade. Any attempt to make textiles in a new or innovative way was not allowed by law, because these powerful trades lobbied their parliamentary representatives to prevent any change in the way things were done.

In New England, innovators determined how to make textiles in a single big factory driven by water power. These new textile mills ran circles around the English industry and practically broke them. This is a perfect example of people stubbornly standing for keeping things the same while the world changes around them and almost crushes them. Sometimes it's very difficult to change the system without practically breaking it.

Freezing Towers

I was driving down the highway with my wife on the way to our in-laws' house a short time back and we passed a water tower. It was a cold day, below freezing, and I wondered for the first time why water towers do not freeze in the winter. It sure seems like a problem of exposed pipes to me, and they always freeze in your house if they are exposed to the outside in the winter.

I had no idea what the answer to that question was, but Andrea wanted to know why we even have a need for water towers in the first place. I knew the answer to that question, the water tower supplies what is called "head pressure" to the system (that system being the pipes going out to all the houses). You have a pump that is continually pumping water up to the tower. This pump is rated for just over the maximum average daily rate of water going out of the tank. People use water in surges during the day, just as they do electricity. Electricity is obvious, when it gets dark and everyone turns their lights on, the need for electricity increases. I was told by a power plant engineer once that in the winter right before Christmas when the sun goes down the electrical demand peaks, and it's all due to people turning on their Christmas lights. When it's really hot out, at mid-day when the temperature is the highest, all the Air Conditioners are cranked on full blast and electricity demand skyrockets.

For water, it's similar. Everyone gets up and takes a shower, people run their dishwashers around the same time of day and cook in the kitchen around the same time in the evening. People bathe their children in the evening around the same time. So there are these two spikes of usage with relative minimums of usage around them. The pump that feeds the water tower just cranks along at it's relatively low rate, just a fraction of the peak demand rate. The tower fills through the night and in the middle of the day and flushes out by gravity during peak demand times. The other reason to use water towers is to get higher pressure in your water pipes. If you've ever dived underwater, you've seen how the pressure on your ears gets greater as you go farther underwater. This is pressure head. The water in your pipes is at the same pressure (less friction losses in the pipeline) that you would be if you were underwater by that amount. The water level in the water tower minus your elevation is how far underwater you would have to dive to have the equivalent pressure on you. If you didn't have water towers, and expected to use a pump to create the peak demand flow at the pressures we get out of our facets now, it would be enormous. We save money and energy by doing it this way.

That explains why we have water towers and the pressure they create, now, why do they not freeze in the winter.

The answer to that is that the water is turned over too often in the tower. In the winter, they run the towers at lower levels, and the water going into the tower will be at ground temperature (usually about 55°F). This warmer water keeps the water tower from freezing. There is not as much demand in the winter, as people are not watering their yards or fields and gardens. Apparently, the water in the tank will freeze on top, like a pond. They prevent this from being a problem by cycling the level up and down in the tank. However, this is not as critical any more, because in our area we rarely have extended cold spells any more. The temperature might stay below freezing for a week or two, but then it would get above freezing, helping the tank to clear whatever ice is trying to build up. Farther north, they put mixers in the tanks to turn the water over and prevent the surface from freezing. The other exposed part that you have to be concerned with is the pipes going up and down from the tank. These are usually insulated so they will retain their internal heat, but sometimes they are heat traced or the space they are in is heated, but this is rare.

When you think about it, there are so many other things that work without us thinking about it or understanding. We take for granted electricity generation and transmission, water purification and distribution, and sewage treatment without even thinking about it.

It's not just big utilities that the average person is completely ignorant about, it's most of the things around your house. Obviously, the range of expertise about technology varies greatly from person to person. There are people out there that could probably fix anything and everything in their house. There are people that would be a wiz at doing their own plumbing, but would never touch anything electrical. Then there are those people that don't know what to do when their toilet keeps running or couldn't change a light bulb if they had to. I do wonder about some homeowners. If you don't know how anything in your home works, should you really be owning a house? If you have an endless supply of money, it's not a big thing, you can hire people to do the things you don't understand. But if you have a huge pile of money, you must have something going on upstairs, so home ownership can't be that much of a mystery. The thing that I don't get is someone that has a simple job, not making much and is challenged by most things technical. How do you justify buying a house? That's when you rent an apartment.

The same can be said for feeding yourself. If there weren't any grocery stores, could you figure out how to grow your own food or hunt and kill game to survive? We are so comfortably entrenched in civilization that we rarely realize how vulnerable we would be without it. The sudden reversal of civilization and rise of chaos and disorder is a common theme in science fiction stories. It's as if we've built a combination of a glass house and an ivory tower. Our glass tower, if you will. Shattering like an ice sculpture under a sharp blow.

Radial Tires

I had a slow leak in the driver's side rear tire on my car. I've had a new car for a little over a year, after having my last car for almost 15 years. I was not yet used to all the new technology since my last car was built, and since I waited so long between cars, it was as if I had skipped forward, like some kind of time traveller experiencing a mild case of future shock. There was a little orange warning light coming on intermittently on the dash, a circle with a smooshed flat bottom and an exclamation point in the middle. I had to look it up in the manual to learn that it was a low tire pressure warning light. I didn't know such a thing was possible. How do you put a sensor inside a rotating tire? How does it not get broken from the bumpy roads and all the spinning around and how does it send it's signal of collected data to the console? I still can't figure it out, but I trust that it is true, because I took the tire in and they found a screw or a nail embedded in the tire, patched it up and the light has gone away.

I was thinking about the fact that tire technology has certainly leapt forward in the last several years. I remember when you used to get real flat tires, where you would suddenly be struggling to keep control of the car and the tire was flopping around uselessly in the wheel well. Often, but the time you got pulled over to the side of the road, the tire was shredded to pieces. Now, you just get slow leaks. You often notice the tire is getting low by looking at it when you walk up to the car before you ever feel any difference in the handling of the car. I was thinking that we have radial tires, but I'm not sure why they are called that.

I found out that the radial tire was invented in 1946, but was not put into widespread use in cars until the 1960s. Before that there had been a time when tires were solid rubber, and there was a time when there was an inflatable inner tube in the tire. I knew that the pneumatic (air-filled) tire provided a great deal of shock absorbing. Even though the tire feels very hard and tough when you push on it when it's fully inflated, I have seen stop action photographs of a tire going over a curb or pothole and squeezing down almost to the point of touching the rim at the point of impact. I couldn't figure out what we called tires before they were radial tires, but found that there was a type of tire called a bias ply that was similar in construction to the radial, only didn't last as long or get as good gas mileage ratings. When I was little, I remember tire advertisements prominently mentioning that their tires were radial tires, expecting you to understand that you had the best tire money could buy. I remember feeling that the radial tire was a new thing, and an improvement over what we used before. Then I promptly forgot all about tires.

Technology is like that. You're busy with your life and not paying any attention, and then later you realize that some things changed, some new ideas were implemented, and you didn't even notice it happening. You don't notice it at the time, but over the years the changes pile up.

Dan Carlin's had an interesting idea in his recent Common Sense podcast of making great ideas happen by teaming up creative dreamers with no business sense with business savvy people without any spark of innovative ideas, or maybe even little understanding of science and engineering in general. His premise was that there would be a lot more innovation if nerds could dream and be creative, and money men would selflessly them realize their potential. It's a great idea in theory. I've always been a big fan of corporate and government sponsored R&D, because in my mind, there are almost limitless possibilities of new technologies waiting to be developed.

The problem that we face as a nation is that many of investors with large amounts of money are risk averse when it comes to technology. They also often show little understanding of how the technology could be used or its value to society. As with most investor and finance driven people they are rarely patient enough to spend the time necessary to develop a technology to maturity. That said, we as Americans do some of the best work in developing technology in the world. I just think we could do better. It's best to stay in front of this trend, like a surfer stays in front of a wave and it carries him along. If you don't, you get swamped.

VFD

I sell equipment, and often the equipment has a motor that needs a speed controller. We always refer to these speed controllers, whose technical name is a Varible Frequency Drive as a VFD. I was driving around the other day, frustrated with the performance of someone in a minivan, and I realized he was a Varible Frequency Driver.

I know it's cliche, I think of myself as this excellent driver and a lot of the other guys out there are morons. There are some very specific behaviors that do drive me nuts. Probably at the top of the list is drivers that speed up and slow down. Of course, they can't get you to do this too if you are on a 4 lane road, you just pass them. Inevitably, you get on a highway and someone is going at or below the speed limit in the left lane. I pass these people on the right. It's not illegal, and usually not at all risky, and it solves the problem rather than creating a new one. I've never understood the people that have an open right lane and get on someone's rear bumper, possibly honking their horn or flashing their brights. Sure, that guy should know better than to dawdle in the left lane, but I've got a news flash for you, Mr. Road Rage: You Can't Educate The World. Especially with confrontation and intimidation tactics. Do you really think that person is thinking, "Oh my, that person behind me seems most upset. I wonder why? Oh, I seem to be travelling too slowly in the passing lane. I will rectify that immediately and must remember not to do that again in the future. Lesson learned!" No, that's not what he's thinking. He's either not thinking because he's distracted, the closest thought being, "I like pie", or he's looking at you and thinking, "What an Asshole!" And he's right, by the way. Get over into the right lane and get around him. That way, if he's a problem, he's someone else's problem in your rear view mirror. Do you have a pregnant woman in labor in your car? Then you have no justification for being in that big of a hurry.

What really pisses me off when I'm in a hurry (no pregnant lady, just want to get where I'm going with no real justification for rushing - just a lifestyle choice) is what I call the rolling blockade. This is when two morons who must have just watched Top Gun or seen the Thunderbirds at an airshow, practice being some random SUV's wing man. That would be cool if they did a barrel roll and opened up on some bogeys, but usually this is accompanied by a matching of speed and an accumulation of admirers growing in their rear view mirrors. I think that this is something akin to not having or wanting to use cruise control and relying mindlessly on some random stranger to regulate your speed. This is dangerous if you overlap the car slightly and match their speed for a long time because YOU ARE IN THEIR BLIND SPOT. If they decide to change lanes rapidly (admittedly, a low probability, as these clowns rarely do anything quickly), or more likely, if a squirrel dashes out in front of them and they have to swerve to avoid little Sammy, you are in the danger zone. This is not the Tom Cruise Top Gun theme music by Kenny Loggins (why anyone thought Kenny knows anything about danger - other than fashion mistakes - is beyond me. This is the Danger Zone where you and your driving partner really get to get acquainted while you wait for the ambulance to arrive.

The biggest complaint I have about drivers is that they are much more inattentive than they used to be. We have all these safety features in cars from safety glass in the windows and seat belts in the old days to air bags and crumple zones in the newer cars. So it's getting harder to get injured in a car wreck. We've also made lanes wider, paved rumble strips into shoulders, and widened out medians and roadsides for less things to impact if you go off the road. I think some of the things that make us more safe could also lull us into a false sense of security and lower our watchfulness and caution. However, that is not what I think the main culprit is, it's cell phones. Specifically, the most dangerous thing you can do is texting while driving. It's impossible to pay attention to the road when you're staring at a little screen and hunting and pecking buttons. They say that anything that distracts or divides are attention makes us a worse driver. You could include iPods, car stereos, or even passengers as distractions, which means each of those factors makes you that much more dangerous behind the wheel. We don't even have to get into reading the newspaper or putting on makeup while you drive, the extreme versions of distraction. I've been running and walking along the country road I live on for years now, and I can testify that 10 years ago and back further in time, no one ever came close to hitting me. Now, they paved the shoulders (when they were gravel, I think people respected lane markings more) and people often point their cars right at me and don't figure it out until they are only a few seconds from hitting me. I've stepped off into the grass a few times, but more often, if I see the trend from a long way off, I step out into the road. This really snaps people to attention and they sometimes even overcorrect into the other lane. I am always safely back on the far side of the shoulder by the time they get closer, but it seems to make the point.

The science shows I listen to have been talking about robotic cars lately. The technology is slowly working its way to hands free driving. Right now we have automatic lane tending, collision avoidance warnings, and adaptive cruise control, and it can't be that hard to mate up the current GPSs that map out an exact route with some kind of navigation system. The technology will slowly increase to the point where you can get in a car and sit back and read the paper and not even look at the traffic. When I used to imagine computer controlled or autopiloted cars, for some reason it seemed like something that you would transition from fully manual to fully automatic in one big leap. Now I see that the transition will be gradual, in stages. I remember when cruise control came out. Some of the early versions would let the speed fluctuation quite a bit. Now they do a fairly good job of keeping you at constant speed. When it was first invented, it was an expensive extra and rare. Now it seems weird if a car does not have it.

I think things that make driving more automatic and less human-controlled will be sold to the public as way to make a drive safer and more leisurely. People used to balk at the idea of being in a car and not driving it, objecting to the loss of control and to the lack of fun. I think as these things get nearer to reality, people get enthusiastic about them and demand skyrockets if the innovations are seen as cool. Another benefit to automated driving is the thought that this may make clogged city drives less congested. Studies of traffic jams have concluded that they are started by small numbers of individuals and aggravated by the way most drivers react to the problem. If cars were automated and could communicate through a transportation network, they could coordinate their speeds and following distances in order to keep traffic moving smoothly. At best they could prevent accidents, which is the main thing that will snarl a commute into a standstill.

Overall, manual control will never go away completely, and I would have to say that I have evolved to the point where I am looking forward to it. I would love to nap during a long trip or read the paper during a busy commute. As driving is currently off limits to the very young and the aged and infirm, computer controlled cars will open up travel possibilities for people that are currently locked out of the driving arena.