Two Deadly Sins

In secular contemporary societies, does the notion of sin still have a bearing on morality?

We should distinguish between “wrongdoing” and “sin.” Sin is a religious term. Every society has its own list of rights and wrongs, but when we sin the main offended party is not society or even the victim , but God. God sees our every transgression. In post-industrial societies the view of God as Big Brother has lost much of its appeal. People began to suspect that it was a religious mechanism to spoil their fun.

As for the “deadly sins,” they are not crimes at all, but passions. We now like our passions. We want to pursue happiness rather than the Kingdom of Heaven. Even when we’re not quite proud of our passions, we have grown accustomed to thinking about them in psychological rather than legal terms. Surely lusting in our heart does not deserve hell fire. We are not really evil. We have problems.

“We have problems.” Mmmm. Yes, we do. That quote is from an interview, How sins lost their sting  by Iain Marlow in thestar.com(Dec 6, 2008). He’s talking to Aviad Kleinberg about his new book, Seven Deadly Sins: A Very Partial List. I’m going to give you two of the sins, below. You’ll have to go the the linked page to get the other five. Be sure to take a look at Lust (as if you wouldn’t).

On Sloth:

Is contemplative sloth less sinful than unthoughtful action?

“Spiritual sloth” – that is despair leading to inaction and even to suicide – has been to a great extent medicalized in our world. With the discovery of effective anti-depressants, our whole understanding of depression and melancholy has changed. We realize that very often a person cannot just “snap out of it,” that the old remedies of hard work and fervent prayer can be ineffective when one has become chemically off balance.

If by “contemplative sloth,” however, you mean the inclination to prefer contemplation to action, then finger-pointing might still be in order. The opposite of thoughtful inaction is not unthouhtful action, but thoughtful action. There is a rule in the Bible: “You shall not stand upon the blood of your neighbor.” It means that in our world there are no innocent bystanders. Moral indignation is not enough. When not accompanied by action it is a deadly sin.

On Anger:

Where is the balance between anger and cowardice?

I’m not sure that anger is a prerequisite for courage. Courageous people can be calm, and angry people can be cowards. It is true though that quite often anger does move people to action. When we are outraged we tend to take risks that we might not take in a more composed state. Anger brings to mind the tension not between courage and cowardice, but between reason and unreason. The old epic poems recount with great admiration the divine rage of the hero. The whole Iliad revolves around the rage of Achilles. The hero is beautiful when he is angry. He is no longer ruled by the reason of gain and loss like the rest of us, but by the heroic unreason of testosterone and adrenalin. But both in myth and in real life the consequences seems to be quite disastrous.

You know you want to read about the other five… [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Blast From the Past

The bit, quoted below, reminded me of a long inter-blog exchange from last summer about alternate histories  with Ray Girvan (JSBlog) and Felix Grant (The Growlery). In approximate order, the posts were:

Ray: Newman Byrne: Alternate Histories
Felix: Alternate Histories
Me: Audience vs Participant
Felix: Oxologies … *#!
There were more, after these, but I think that’s enough…

Here’s the new quote. It’s from an interview, The Language Deep, Deep in Chabon’s Ear, with Michael Chabon by Todd Hasak-Lowy on JBooks.com. They’re talking about his new book, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union:

I’m guessing that there will be some comparisons made between your novel and another recent “what if” novel of Jewish history: Philip Roth’s
The Plot Against America. Yet whereas Roth’s book is a historical novel set during a transformed version of the 1930s and 1940s, your novel takes place during the early years of this century. What was it like to imagine a present different from our own? How much while constructing this imaginary society did you find yourself simultaneously trying to understand the historical moment that we are actually living through right now?

I tried to be very deliberate and careful in my reconfiguring and reimagining of history; I constructed maps, charts, plans, mock-histories. It felt like a much more accessible, a more possible, way of looking at the world that we live in now, than actually trying to sit down and say, “I’m going to write a novel about the current state of the Jews and the world as we know it.” Like most writers, like most people, I guess, I have this intuitive sense of the might-have-been, the how-did-I-get-to-this-point, the midnight impulse to lie in bed, run over your life, and see where the turning points were. We are all wired to ask, what if? But that question is always in the service of trying to get a-hold of how things came to the pass they have arrived at. So I had this intuitive certainty that if I told the story well, and figured out the world I was trying to imagine, and did a good job of that, then inevitably it would reflect on our world, make certain aspects of it stand out more clearly than they might if I just took them on directly.

I don’t understand the impulse of setting an alternate history novel in the past the way Roth did. The whole point of alternate history, to me, is to concoct, thereby, an alternate present. To set off the present by means of comparing it to its hitherto unknown freakish twin. I thought Roth pulled his punch at the end of that novel, spent too much time in the past. I wondered if he was aware of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and was afraid that if he came too far forward into the scary “reality” of a judenrein America, he would bump up against Mr. Dick.

I find his bit about “I have this intuitive sense of the might-have-been, the how-did-I-get-to-this-point, the midnight impulse to lie in bed, run over your life, and see where the turning points were. We are all wired to ask, what if?” — to be interesting because it ties in, very much, with the artistic impulse; the urge to create stuff. The previous blog dialog didn’t seem to touch on why we would want to consider alternate histories (if there could be such a thing, strictly speaking).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Toward a New Equilibrium

All of the below are taken from Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II: “Newspapers have discovered civic function awfully late to be taken seriously” by Russ Juskalian in the Columbia Journalism Review (Dec 22, 2008). I quoted Part I in a recent post. I think Part II is quite a bit more interesting, so if you didn’t like Part I you still might want to take a look at this one. He focuses on journalism (the interview is in a journalism publication). From somewhere in the middle:

The example I always return to, because I think it’s so emblematic and so crazy, is Alisara Chirapongse, who I’ve written about in Here Comes Everybody. She was blogging under the name gnarlykitty, and she was a fashion-obsessed college student in Bangkok. And so she was blogging about cute shoes and going out dancing, and then there was a coup in Thailand. And so she started blogging about the coup. And Thailand shut down the regular media, but they didn’t shut down Web logs. So she took her little camera out, she took a picture of tanks in front of a government building, and it was one of the first pictures to come out of Thailand during the coup. And so, all of a sudden, she’s committed an act of journalism.

And then a couple of days later she starts blogging about this Hello Kitty phone she’s got, and all the commenters who had come in to read her work were like “No, no, no! Get back to the coup!” And she posted this wonderful post. She said, “Look, this is my blog. This is about things that are happening in my life. One of the things happened in my life is that there has been a coup in my country, but another thing is I just got this new phone! And if you don’t like it, don’t read it.” And there was zero sense of obligation to her audience or journalistic mission or anything. And yet, she was, in those days, one of the earliest producers of real news and information inside post-coup Thailand. So if journalism is going from being a profession to an acitivity, then it all goes on a spectrum. There will be professional journalists, there will be journalists who practice journalism all day long for their jobs. And there’s going to be people like Chirapongse, for whom a single act of journalism may just define how they participate. But at that moment it’s pretty critical. So, I think news organizations are going to have a much harder time making a distinction between what it is they do.

Here are  two exchanges with Juskalian:

RJ: So are you at all afraid of, you know, a scenario where there’s not as much “serious journalism” going on? Or is that just something that’s a crazy idea?

CS: No, I don’t think it’s a crazy idea at all. When you talk about nightmare scenarios, here’s my nightmare: that for the print journalists, in particular—there’s a great Hemingway quote, I forget who it’s about: “He lost his money the usual way: slowly and then all at once” — that this is the all-at-once year. Right? That for four, maybe five, of the last few years, print ad revenues have been in moderate but monotonic decline. And so everybody’s been sitting around waiting around for it to reverse, and then glumly realizing it won’t reverse. And then wondering how long they have. And then, suddenly, we get this financial meltdown. So my nightmare is that every city with less than a quarter of a million people in it sees its only daily newspaper vanish. And that a good portion of those cities turn to 1950s-style, you know, 1950s New Orleans-style corruption. Which is to say because there’s no one watching, no one will be held accountable. So L.A. will be fine. Chicago will be fine, New York will be fine. You know, you can imagine Wichita just getting hijacked by its own city council. And it will take some time, as it took some time during the print journalism days to move from yellow journalism into some idea of serious reporting that isn’t beholden enough to the powers that be to be swayed. I don’t think that this is an easy transition at all.

………

RJ: And do you think this is a problem for the quality of work that’s being done?

CS: It’s always a problem in the short term. It’s almost like when Web sites came out. I don’t know if you were around in the middle of the ‘90s, but, oh my God, it was just like a giant step backwards for graphic design. Or look what happened right when Mac came out. Remember when the Mac came out in ’84, and then in ’87 they announced this sort of “desktop publishing” thing, right, and all the Linotype operators laughed until milk came out their noses. Twenty years later, the Linotype operators’ union votes itself out of business. Because when the Mac shipped with desktop publishing, it certainly wasn’t very good, right? Quality took a hit, everybody’s getting these birthday invites with nine fonts on them and so forth. But over the course of twenty years, quality got sorted out, because in a more competitive landscape, there were more positive returns to high quality.

So I think that’s going to happen here. The average quality of something written is going to fall to the floor because of the volume of written material. But the competition will mean that the premium for having something especially interesting is going to rise. And then, over the course of the next ten years, we’ll sort ourselves out into some sort of new equilibrium. Five years ago, I think I would have bet on the newspapers as they exist today being a big part of that new equilibrium — but, you know, they’ve done very, very little and been really unimaginative. So now, I think, if I had to make the same bet, I’d say most newspapers aren’t going to survive. Every bit of concern around the Web is, “How can we raise revenues to our existing cost structure?” rather than “How can we lower our cost structure to meet our existing revenues?”

The full interview is really good. Highly recommended. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Objects In The Rear-View Mirror

As a shameless and prolific (heh!) user of  quotes, I can’t resist the delicious opportunity to quote from an entire article about quotes, within which there are many quotes, even quotes about quotes.  The bit below is taken from near the end of Notable Quotables: Is there anything that is not a quotation? by Louis Menard in the Feb 19, 2007 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

“You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye,” the younger Holmes [Oliver Wendell Holms, Jr.] once wrote. He thought that you could find wisdom and felicity even in advertisements if you knew how to tweak them properly. And when you start taking phrases out of context and recasting them as quotations, you begin to feel (Shapiro must have undergone this sensation) a little vertiginous. What is not, potentially, a quotation? The dullest instructional prose, with the right light thrown on it, can acquire the gleam of suggestiveness or insight. “Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are”: that one has been appropriated many times. Whenever I take a plane, I am struck by “Secure your own mask before assisting others” as advice with wide application. And I have often found myself imagining ways of fitting tab A into slot B.

Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority. Quotations are prostheses. “As Emerson/Churchill/Donald Trump once observed” borrows another person’s brain waves and puts them to your own use. (If you fail to credit Emerson et al., it’s called plagiarism. But isn’t plagiarism just the purest form of quotation?) Then, there is a subset of quotations that are personal. We pick them up off the public street, but we put them to private uses. We hoard quotations like amulets. They are charms against chaos, secret mantras for dark times, strings that vibrate forever in defiance of the laws of time and space. That they may be opaque or banal to everyone else is what makes them precious: they aren’t supposed to work for everybody. They’re there to work for us.

That last bit is especially true of song lyrics — often whether you like it or not. I find myself compulsively singing along with the radio all day long, and often get some inane refrain stuck in my mind after I’ve turned the radio off.

Addendum: Ray Girvan has an excellent post on the many ways that quotes can go astray, Hillfinger quotes, in the JS Blog.

-Julie (brain wave borrower)

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Unlearning

CS: You know, “Life was better when I was younger” is always an acceptable narrative. Right? And so for anybody who was brought up genuflecting to the literary culture and the virtues of reading Tolstoy — and essentially Tolstoy is a trope in these things, War and Peace is the longest novel in the sort of Euro-centric canon — you could always make the argument that the present is worse than the past by simply pointing to the virtues of the past. And so, what the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what’s available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. So, the only thing surprising about the Web, in a way, is that it’s been a long time since we’ve had a medium that increased the amount of production of written material this dramatically.

… Whenever you let more people in, things get vulgar by definition. And people who benefited under the old system or who dislike or distrust vulgarity as a process always have room to complain. But, the interesting thing is, when you say so many people believe this, in fact almost no one believes this, right? There’s a tiny, tiny slice of the chattering classes for whom “Life was better when I was younger” is an acceptable complaint to make, and they have these little conferences or whatever and agree with one another about that phenomenon. But when you look at the actual use of the Web, it is through the roof. And it has continued in an unbroken growth from the early ’90s until now. So, in fact, almost everybody thinks it’s a good idea because they’re embracing it and they’re experimenting with it and they don’t really care what we think.

… If you want to point to more proximate harms, it would be very hard to argue, for example, that innovation, inventiveness, new intellectual discoveries had slowed as a result of the Internet, and so people are left with these kind of mealy-mouth cultural critiques, because nostalgia becomes the only bulwark against change. The actual effects of making more information available to more people have been enormously beneficial to society, yet not to the intellectual gatekeepers in the generation in which that change happened.

“CS” is Clay Shirky and that’s taken from Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I: “There’s always a new Luddism whenver there’s change.” by Russ Juskalian in the Columbia Journalism Review (Dec 19, 2008). More from that interview: 

RJ: What’s your response to people who say that all this information that’s out there, all this knowledge that we’re producing is great, and there’s all this access that we didn’t have before. But we also risk information overload alongside, and we don’t —

CS: Oh, those are the stupidest people in the entire debate because they, I mean, almost all of the people arguing that this is the Dark Ages are narcissists, because they’re essentially trying to preserve a particular piece of it. But the information overload people are the most narcissistic because information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. And the first deep attempt to categorize knowledge so that you could subset; the first take on the information filtering problem appears in the library of Alexandria.

By the time that the publishing industries spun up in Venice in the early- to mid-1500s, the ability to have access to more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime is now starting to become a general problem of the educated classes. And by the 1800s, it’s a general problem of the middle class. So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right? Which is to say the normal case of modern life is information overload for all educated members of society.

If you took the contents of an average Barnes and Noble, and you dumped it into the streets and said to someone, “You know what’s in there? There’s some works of Auden in there, there’s some Plato in there. Wade on in and you’ll find what you like.” And if you wade on in, you know what you’d get? You’d get Chicken Soup for the Soul. Or, you’d get Love’s Tender Fear. You’d get all this junk.

And, finally, near the end:

CS: … the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything.

… It’s not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It’s that young people don’t have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it’s easy to understand why people don’t want to sign up for it. But it’s also kind of pathetic that the people going around talking about information overload don’t stop to factor in the idea that if the twenty-year-olds aren’t complaining about information overload, it probably isn’t the problem we think it is.

… I mean, really, I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on. It’s in part because I grew up in a generation that benefited enormously from not doing that. Right? The baby boomers, when we were young, we had zero, zero patience for the idea that people who are in their fifties in the ’70s and ’80s should somehow be shielded from cultural changes because somehow the stuff that we were doing was upsetting them. So, now it’s our turn and we ought to just suck it up.

Read the full interview if you’re interested. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Art Without Ambiguity

The review that I am going to be quoting from below should set off all your “nobody’s this perfect” alarm bells. It did mine. I can’t decide if that’s the entire reason why this thing has pissed me off so royally, or if I really disagree so strongly with what he’s saying. Whichever it is, prepare for major grumbling on my part.

The review is As good as Heaney by Julian Gough in the Jan 2008 issue of Prospect magazine. It claims to be a review of two books by Clive James (The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958-2003 and Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003-2008). Here are bits and pieces, followed by my comments:

… He [James] needed a base in truth and clarity, because he didn’t yet have a base in self. He would have floated away — as so many young poets do — in a second-hand drunken boat, down an endless, meandering river of bullshit. But it takes a precocious wisdom to realise that. Instead, he mastered the art of writing brilliant poems that contain no ambiguity (much harder work than it looks). There is a clear line of ethical argument running through each of them, superbly expressed. They look playful, but the words are always doing a specific job.

How can you make “a base in truth and clarity” if you don’t have “a base in self”? Where would the truth come from? And who would want poems — or works of art of any kind — that “contain no ambiguity”? Art that is “doing a specific job”? Blech. Sounds like eating Brussels sprouts.

… Both [James and Heaney] are morally scrupulous — careful not to be intoxicated by the ferment of their feelings. They have given up some of their power in order to be certain they are not doing evil. If, on many days, I prefer the wilder poems of more morally reckless poets (poets with far higher failure rates), I nonetheless always return — a little sulky and hungover — to Heaney and to James. Their murmur and boom are the voices of my conscience.

Wouldn’t want any “ferment of feelings” in art, would we? Stick to those “morally scrupulous” finger wagging sermons. Watch out for those “morally reckless” poets (who gets to decide who is “morally reckless” and who is “morally scrupulous”?) As for wanting to have somebody else be the “voices of my conscience,” then is it my conscience after all?

… Many critics would refuse the comparison and call James superficial. They’re wrong. James is an absolute master of surface, and the great critic of surfaces, not because he is superficial but because he believes that the distortions on the surface tell you what’s underneath. Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth.

Ummmm. No. Trust me, if the surface told you “what’s underneath,” we wouldn’t need art — it would all be there for everybody to see without our help. (I’m still puzzling over “his clarity has depth”.)

“I haven’t really published anything as a poem that I didn’t thoroughly believe in. I try not to finish anything that isn’t coming from a really solid idea. I don’t write poems for the sake of it.” And how. Because (and it took me too long to realise this) his poems are not built to dazzle, they’re built to enlighten. The poems are the special ops troops of his criticism.

Of course most other poets are publishing poems they don’t believe in and always finishing poems based on unsolid ideas. And why can’t we have both dazzle and enlightenment? Poem as “special ops troops of his criticism”? Brussels sprouts, again.

… [Gough speaking] Your emotional territory has really opened up in the last few years.

“Yes. Yes. That’s why I need more time. Because you get into what my friend Bruce Beresford calls the Departure Lounge, and two things happen: suddenly time really matters, you can hear the clock, and also you have all these freedoms, because you’ve got more of life to reflect on. There’s no young man’s version of the stuff I’m writing now.”

Yeah. And there’s no old man’s version of the “ferment of feelings” available to the young.

If you want to read this full homage to James, be prepared to ingest lots of sugar-coated  content. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Gatekeepers

“… the Internet is not eliminating exclusivity in political life; instead, it is shifting the bar of exclusivity from the production to the filtering of political information.”

That’s from the first chapter (posted online) of the book, The Myth of Digital Democracy by Matthew Hindman. Here is a bit more from that free chapter:

… For many of the observers above, from Benkler to Williams, Hewitt to Trippi, the Internet’s most important political impacts come from the elimination of ‘‘old media’’ gatekeepers. The concept of gatekeeping itself is credited to sociologist Kurt Lewin (1947) who suggested that social ‘‘channels’’ often had many points at which ‘‘gatekeepers’’ filtered out some items, while other items were allowed to pass. Initially applied to the food supply (where food products faced a gauntlet of gatekeepers from farmers all the way to households), Lewin pointed out that the theory could be especially helpful in explaining information flow.

… This book argues that gates and gatekeepers remain a critical part of the information landscape, even in the Internet age. Some ways in which online information is filtered are familiar, as traditional news organizations and broadcast companies are prominent on the Web. Other aspects of online filtering are novel. Search engines and portal Web sites are an important force, yet a key part of their role is to aggregate thousands of individual gatekeeping decisions made by others. Ultimately, this book argues that the Internet is not eliminating exclusivity in political life; instead, it is shifting the bar of exclusivity from the production to the filtering of political information.

Read the full chapter, if you’re interested. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Utterly Crazy

It may be because it’s late and I’m tired, but for some reason the book review quoted from below had me laughing all the way through. I hope the book is not really as bad as this grumpy reviewer found it to be.

The book being reviewed is Philosophy from a Skeptical Persepective by Joseph Agassi and Abraham Deidan. The reviewer is Charles Landesman and it’s in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews  (Dec 7, 2008).

Here’s a bit from the middle. It’s like this all the way through:

We get closer to the meaning of “skepticism” when the authors claim that no statement is certain or plausible or demonstrable or justified or corroborated or indubitable. (ix, 2) This is supplemented by related claims such as “No position is demonstrable” (ix), “Our ignorance is unavoidable” (x), “Humans are always prone to make mistakes” (11), “All statements are doubtful” (39) Just as it would appear that we are in pretty poor epistemic shape, being unable to get beyond the evil demon, we find a somewhat weaker version: “There is simply no way to guarantee that any discourse can be certain or plausible in the epistemological sense of these concepts.” The lack of a guarantee means, I think, to allude to the apparent lack of success from the time of ancient Pyrrhonism to the present day in finding a general criterion of truth that itself could be proven to be true by a line of argument that is neither circular nor generative of an infinite regress. One would think that consulting Descartes might be of interest here. However, the authors think so little of Descartes as to say that the “evil spirit hypothesis” and “the solipsist hypothesis” as well as the related brain in a vat hypothesis are “utterly crazy” and therefore need not be taken seriously unless one is insane. (25-26)

The last paragraph of the review reminds me of someone I know:

I do not want to sound pedantic, but I would like to protest the absence of footnoted references to the works of most of the philosophers discussed. The authors provide footnoted references to some of their own works and a few others besides. There appears to be no system at all as to what does and does not get documented. Some of their interpretive and critical remarks about major thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Descartes, and Freud, and about various topics such as empiricism, and logicism, and substance, seem so wide of the mark as to require the evidence of actual books and pages to support them. Since Popper seems to be the star of the show, it would be nice to have the titles and pages of his works mentioned. After having been called to order on this matter by editors of my own work, I am shocked that Cambridge University Press has allowed this book to be published without insisting upon adequate documentation.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Avoid the Phugoid and Stay on the Equilibrium Glide

That (the post title) is how a nerd says “Best Wishes for the New Year.” Or something like that….

Phugoid, for the non-aviators, refers to a long term longitudinal oscillation in the flight path of a flying machine. More precisely it is the exchange of altitude for airspeed with constant angle of attack. Whew, I had to look it up in my old textbooks to get it right. One of the on-line helps says that the engineer that invented the term “phugoid” took it from the Latin but got the translation wrong. That figures. Most engineers don’t know that the ancient Romans studied aircraft control.

We studied phugoidal motion a lot when analyzing shuttle re-entry. It is most pronounced on an abort entry where the shuttle’s forward motion doesn’t create enough lift until the vehicle falls into the denser part of the atmosphere and then there is too much lift so it bounces upward to where there is not enough lift and then it falls down to where the dense air creates too much lift and causes it to climb up to where there isn’t as much air where . . . . Well, you get the picture. Not exactly a roller coaster, but somewhat disconcerting.

If you are designing a re-entry vehicle with any lift at all, studying the aerodynamics so that lift and drag can be applied in the proper way at the proper time is crucial. During the early portions of the shuttle entry, phugoids are to be avoided since they can lead to high heating which is . . . not a good thing. Actually, the shuttle flies something called equilibrium glide for most of the entry phase. This term refers to a state where the lift generated is exactly equal to the orbital mechanics forces and gravity. In that state, the shuttle flies at a relatively constant altitude for a fairly long period of time, all the while bleeding off the incredible kinetic energy required to orbit the earth.

This is a good time of year to talk about how to fly through life: are you riding the phugoid or are you in equilibrium glide? I know where I am.

– from Riding the Phugoid on Wayne Hale’s NASA blog

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Realness Pecking Order

I earned an undergraduate degree in engineering from a prestigious and notoriously competitive university. After that I went on to do engineering research and complete a graduate degree in engineering from another major university with a reputation for excellence in engineering; along the way I wrote and defended a thesis and authored several papers which were published in professional engineering journals.

When I came to work for NASA, I was fortunate to get a job in the operations area: mission control. A thorough understanding of engineering principles and practices was mandatory for my job.

So I was floored just a few months later when I first heard it: “you are not a real engineer”. I was just “an ops guy”.

That’s Wayne Hale, manager of the Space Shuttle program, talking about himself in his NASA blog post titled Real Engineers (Dec 2, 2008).

Realness is a tag that we all apply or withhold from each other, starting at least as early as our kindergarten comparisons of each others coloring books and expanding to permeate almost every aspect of our lives. Being famous, rich, or successful has nothing to do with being “real”. If anything, those are handicaps. (Think of Annie Leibovitz as a current photography example of being penalized for being famous/successful.)

Heroes have to be real. From heroes of science, the arts, of invention; to cult-of-personality religious and political prophets — with catastrophic or fantastic results, depending on your point of view. Tagging someone as “real” says as much about you as it does about them. That “you” ingredient gets into belief and commitment and that’s where things can sometimes turn nasty.

But I digress. Getting back to Hale’s description of the real engineers at NASA, here’s more about who is not a real engineer (at NASA):

… I have been privileged to watch the advanced concept boys at work. They are marvelous. Through the study of all past and current rockets they have developed a number of “empirical models” — rules of thumb if you will — that can help in the initial ideas about building spacecraft. If you want to lift a certain number of metric tonnes to low earth orbit, given a particular rocket type (solid, liquid, hypergolic, cryogenic, hydrogen, kerosene, etc.) the advanced concept boys can give you a variety of options based on known ratios of structure weight to propellant weight, burn out mass, etc. And they can give you a rough guess at the cost. And they can evaluate multiple options and compare them one to another in very short order.

In the summer of 2002, I got to participate in an exercise for about two months of possible design options of manned missions to Mars. The advanced concept boys generated a new heavy lift launch vehicle about every other day and could compare all the designs against each other on a number of figures of merit. Its heady work to invent new Saturn V class rockets in the computer lab. Taller, shorter, with solid boosters or not, using kerosene or hydrogen or whatever. One engine, two engines, five engines, twenty engines; two stages, three stages, four. Whew. At the end of two months the team had a great list of options and the pros and cons for every launcher. And I found out that the advanced concept boys have been studying this problem for 40 years! They have evaluated hundreds, thousands of various options. Then they refined their studies, re-examined the basis for their methodologies and started in again.

But you know what? Advanced concept folks, even with all their knowledge of engineering principles, they are not “real engineers”.

Real engineering starts after the viewgraphs stop. Real engineers take the concept — boiled down as it may have been from hundreds of starting options — they take the concept and start making it real. When you have to really design and build the rocket in its detailed glory; when you have to take the subsystems out to the test stand and start them up and see if they hang together; when you go from weight estimates to actual plans and find out what the gizmo really does weigh — that is real engineering.

He then defines what makes a real engineer. I think this can easily be extended to what makes a “real” anything:

First, they must have a superb grasp of the physics of their subject, a complete an total knowledge of the details of their specialty. This almost goes without saying. No nincompoops allowed; no fuzzy thinkers who are vague on the basic concepts. A “real engineer” knows his arcane stuff forwards and backwards and from the middle out towards both ends and can recite it in his sleep. “Let me tell you about the inviscid terms of the Navier-Stokes equation . . . ” a real engineer might say.

Second, a “real engineer” must create something, taking it from original concept to working, functioning reality. No view graph engineers ever get the title “real engineer”. If it doesn’t fly or move or compute or generate power, or do some concrete something, you haven’t built something real and without building something real, you are never going to be a “real engineer.” And the thing has to work; if it flops, then you are merely a tinkerer, not a “real engineer”.

Thirdly, “real engineers” are mild mannered; never needing to raise their voices, not loquacious, not given to long and convoluted discussions. No, real engineers are soft spoken and terse; they are recognized by their brevity and the ability to concisely summarize a technical point in a way that admits to no further discussion.

There are some excellent comments to his blog posting. Hop over and read them if you have a few minutes. [ link ]

Of course, none of this applies to me. I am Unreal.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/