The Blog I'm Not Writing

Department Of First Things First, As In:
This Date Should Be A National Holiday

♫   It was twenty years ago today,
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play…♫

And it was sixty years ago today – February 9, 1964, that, all over the world but especially in America, aspiring musicians who didn’t even know they were that, or that they wanted to be in a rock n’ roll band, watched the Ed Sullivan Show…and the rest is history.

 

 

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Department Of Cheese Is Supposed To Be
Whatever You Want It To Be

Dateline; Sunday 12:45 PM-ish; MH and I are waiting to order lunch at Schmizza Public House in Orenco.  The couple seated at the table next to moiself  (a father and his non-custodial daughter, which I gathered from their ensuing conversation, which I overheard due to the volume with which they spoke   [1]   ) is giving their order to the server.  The man is asking to have the blue cheese crumbles excluded from a dish which includes them; he also wants a different dressing.  He says this three times; each time the server repeats it back to him, to confirm she’s getting it right:  “You want ___ instead of ___, and no blue cheese?”  At the final confirmation, she says “Got it,” and as she leaves to put in their order I hear No Blue Cheese man mumble under his breath, “Cheese is not supposed to be blue.”

 

 

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Department Of Stealth Bombs

Dateline: Monday morning, circa 10 am.  MH comes into my office to tell me something, and quickly gets sidetracked.  “Hey, he says, pointing to the carpet behind where I am sitting in my chair, “cat barf!”

Earlier in the morning moiself  had already cleaned up a hairball-involved spew from our cat, Nova, near her food bowls upstairs.  Had she also, unbeknownst to moiself,  done the deed downstairs at the same time, or was this a new deposit – series of deposits as it turns out (there were three small spots; two on the carpet and one on the carpet protector underneath my desk and chair    [2]  )?  Either way, I’d been in and out of my office several times and hadn’t noticed.

“Don’t roll back!” MH warns, as one of the barf blobs is right behind my office chair – “Oh, I think you already rolled into it.”  He goes and gets some paper towels; I follow him to the laundry room and get a wet rag, muttering, “She makes no noise, all of a sudden, it’s just there.”   In exasperation I blurt out to MH, “How can she do that, without me noticing?!?!?!  She barfs like some people fart: silent, but….”

 

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Department Of Cool Scientists We Should Remember

Last week moiself  listened to the first of what will be a series of Freakonomics podcasts about the late great renowned physicist, Nobel Prize winner, Caltech professor and member of The Manhattan Project, author and bongo drum enthusiast, Richard Feynman.  That episode, The Curious Mr. Feynman, featured memories of Feynman shareby by family, friends and colleagues, and most specifically focused on the venture for which most non-scientist Americans know Feynman: for serving on the commission ordered by President Reagan to investigate the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

What most Americans don’t know is that Feynman did *not* want to serve on the commission.  The majority of its members were political and/or military appointments, and after working on the Manhattan project, Feynman was convinced that the military and scientists were not a good mix.  Suffering from cancer (which he kept private), Feynman’s strong impulse was to decline the invitation, especially when he found out that President Reagan had instructed former secretary of state William Rogers, whom Reagan had appointed to chair the commission, “Whatever you do, don’t embarrass NASA.”

 

 

I know; really.  How alarming is that?  But Feynman ‘s wife kept reminding him that if he were not to serve on the commission it would just be “the rest of them” (i.e., politicians and the military), and so he finally agreed.

Looking back, especially after hearing some of the  notes Feynman kept as he served on the commission, I find it highly creepy to think of what might’ve happened had Feynman (or another scientist like him    [3]  )  not been on the commission. 

Once he agreed and got on the commission, he was again reluctant to serve with the others, so Feynman did what he did best.  He went on his own, finding out from the ground up, just how is the space shuttle constructed? And he was aided by this in being able to consistently and meticulously question the scientists and engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory who’d designed and built the shuttle, many of whom were willing to talk with him rather than someone else, because he had been their professor at Caltech!

My takeaway from the episode:  as much as Feynman loathed politics, he evidently understood the political mind and the value of PR, for had Feynman not pulled that “stunt” with the O-ring, it is highly possible that his findings would have been ignored or buried by the others on the committee.

 

 

 

Which brings up the major area of creepiness: Reagan’s instructions to the commission that they were not to embarrass NASA.  That stayed with moiself  for hours after having heard about it (via the podcast).  Consider the times:  when the Challenger exploded our country was still in the midst of the Cold War, and the USA’s space program was lauded by many as a prime example of our “victory” in that conflict.  Reagan in particular championed how our successes in space exploration were just one example of the proof of how the innovation and openness of American democracy triumphed not just politically, but scientifically, over the closed and stagnating system of the Soviets.  I get that that was a factor.

What blows moiself’s  mind is how Reagan could then turn around and use the very tactics of the regime he famously touted as the “evil empire” and the “focus of evil in the modern world.”   Reagan’s commission was, supposedly, appointed to find out the facts  of the Challenger tragedy – why did the shuttle explode? – and yet in doing so they were not to “embarrass NASA.”  If the commission discovered that the shuttle had a design flaw which was not detected and/or minimized, that would embarrass NASA.  However, given their Prime Directive from the president himself, re any such discoveries the commission would be under pressure to act as if:

* this fact is not a fact

* we are not seeing what we are seeing

* we cannot discover what we are discovering, because even if we discover it, we were instructed, “whatever else” we do, *not* to embarrass NASA.
And the facts show that NASA fucked up…so we cannot discover the facts.

 

 

Wasn’t that attitude – ideology trumps reality – a hallmark of closed, repressive, totalitarian systems?   By giving the commission chair that instruction, Reagan was borrowing a move from the playbook of the “evil empire.”  By giving the commission chair those no-embarrasing-NASA  instructions, Reagan showed that in his zeal to maintain the impression of (what be believed to be) the USA’s scientific and moral superiority to the Soviets, he was willing to employ the *exact* strategy of the Soviets, and later the one employed by the Russians , most egregiously in their sham investigation a major tragedy of their own – the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Y’all should really check out the episode.  Fascination, and a bit frightening.

Feynman grew concerned that this “investigation” would be more of a show trial — political propaganda meant to save face….

Most of the 12 members of the Commission were political or military appointees; Feynman worried that Chairman Rogers would try to sideline him, maybe even withhold information….

In Washington, the Commission began to interview witnesses. Feynman didn’t think Chairman Rogers was trying very hard to get to the true cause of the explosion. So Feynman began asking questions — sharp, unrelenting questions. Questions about the science. During a break, Chairman Rogers was overheard, in the men’s room, complaining to the astronaut Neil Armstrong, who also sat on the Commission. He said: “Feynman is becoming a real pain in the ass.” Feynman…felt the investigation was becoming a whitewash.

Serving on the commission had been as dreadful an experience as Feynman had feared. But he kept digging. By now he had come to believe that the Challenger exploded because of the failure of what are called O-rings — small, circular seals designed to prevent fluid or air from leaking during a mechanical process….

Richard Feynman was a patriot; he loved NASA, he loved adventure and exploration; he even loved risk-taking — as long as the risk had been properly calculated. What he hated was any attempt to paper over the truth; as a scientist, all he wanted was to find out true things. Here are some other things he hated: hypocrisy, B.S., and the use of unscientific thinking to make important decisions….

So, he now decided to pull a stunt.  This stunt, on a Presidential commission investigating a national tragedy, would be in public, on television….

It would later be revealed that NASA had known about the O-ring problem, but had downplayed the risks. The Rogers Commission, in its published report, went easy on NASA, as President Reagan had asked. But the report did include an appendix written by Richard Feynman. He didn’t go easy on NASA. Here is his final sentence: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

( excerpts from The Curious Mr. Feynman, Freakonomics  )

 

 

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Department Of Interesting, And Revealing, Choice Of Words

On the subject of PR trumping reality….  I recently came across this scary article:

At Hopdoddy Burger Bar near the University of Florida campus in Gainesville recently…  he menu advertised the usual gluten-free and vegan options, as well as something more unusual: beef purporting to “save the planet, one bite at a time.”

The Austin-based chain buys the meat from ranchers who use eco-friendly agricultural techniques. The burgers — about $4 more expensive than the traditional ones — are designed to appeal to a fast-growing, desirable demographic of climate-conscious omnivores. But the extent to which such premium-priced beef patties are helping cool the earth is hotly disputed.

“We want to change the narrative that eating meat is bad for the planet, or that eating plant-based is better,” said Chad Edwards, the on-duty manager, explaining the company’s “just eat a Hopdoddy burger” solution to climate change…. The stakes, or perhaps steaks, of this effort to rewrite the science-backed narrative that cows are a climate menace are bigger than this 46-restaurant chain. The company is at the vanguard of a contentious push by meat and dairy industries trying to rebrand as climate solutions.

( excerpt from “How meat and milk companies are racing to ease your climate guilt
A climate-friendly hamburger? A carbon-neutral glass of milk? As companies make bold claims, a heated debate erupts.”
By Evan Halper and Laura Reiley, The Washington Post  ; emphases mine  )

 

 

Interesting, and revealing, choice of words.  Can’t change the facts? Change the narrative.

 

 

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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [4]

 

 

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Parting shot: I love it when/I hate it when…

I hate it when word games apparently have a Word Cop curating them. I’ll explain.

Letter Boxed is one of the series of New York Times puzzles  [5]   I do each morning. The objective of Letter Boxed is to use all of the 12 letters around the box in 5 words or less, sequencing the letters to spell words that are at least 3 letters long (no proper nouns or hyphenates or contractions).  Letters can be reused, but consecutive letters cannot be from the same side (for example, in today’s puzzle, pictured below, the letter W in your word cannot be preceded or followed by an E), and the last letter of a word becomes the first letter of the next word.

 

 

Dateline: Thursday, 5:30 am, playing Letter Boxed. I have two of the three words necessary to win by *my* standard, which is to solve the puzzle in three words at most.  My remaining, #3 word, must start with the letter S and use up the letters L and U, which have not been used in my first two words.  I attempt to enter the word slut, and get the curt rejection, “not a word.”

 

 

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May we all live by the maxim that reality must take precedence over PR;
May we smugly know when a word is a word,
no matter what the NYTimes games curator apps decree;
May we change the narrative to fit the facts, and not the other way around;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

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[1] They were speaking loud enough for me to overhear them, whether I wanted to or not (it’s kind of a sports bar atmosphere), and the details he asked about and the routine things she had to explain to him – he’s obviously her father, but was playing catch-up in her life – made me think she does not live with him.

[2] I hope you’re enjoying all the details.

[3] Although, has there ever been another scientist like Richard Feynman?

[4] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. 

No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[5] The NY Times games I play are (in this order):  Connections; The Mini; Letter Boxed; Wordle.