Edgar "Ka-Boom" Montrose

Earlier today I finished reading Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Though it’s a cliché to say, I believe everyone ought to read this book. Rhodes not only goes through the physical conception of the bomb, but also the efforts and motivations of the scientists, politicians and industrio-militarists who tried to encourage either a new world order based on peace because of the destruction the bomb promised. We all know which way that argument went.

What I find more interesting is a discussion in the final pages of the book:

Rather than a guarantor of sovereignty the arms race has proven a reductio ad absurdum of sovereignty. Though they bristle with holocaustal weapons, the superpowers confront each other today totally vulnerable, totally dependent for their continued survival on mutual and reasonable restraint, their sovereignties so thoroughly compromised that they can exercise their military ambitions only through third-world skirmishes that seldom find conclusive end. The bomb, the final word on the accumulation of power – that matter properly arranged is all power – has saturated national sovereignty and burned it out.

Boy does that sound familiar, with Russia meddling in Georgia and the United States meddling, well, wherever it seems to please. Not to mention the collapse of the Soviet economic system in the 1990s and what appears to be the collapse of Western capitalism in these days.

Rhodes goes on to say, however, that the superpowers have done some good, working together – good that could be expanded if only the political will were there. He mentions a Soviet-led effort helped amply by the United States and the World Health Organization to eradicate smallpox. “The eradication of smallpox will represent a major milestone in the history of medicine,” Rhodes quotes the director of the campaign, Donald A. Henderson, as saying. “It will have demonstrated what can be achieved when governments throughout the world join an international organization in a common purpose.” It did, Rhodes goes on to say, end the most devastating and feared natural pestilence in human history. And this was all done with the cooperation, rather than the militaristic conquest, of third-world nations, who nevertheless had to learn to trust the Big Boys coming in to help.

Individual scientists reacted differently to ambivalence toward using the bomb as a bargaining chip for world peace, favoring instead the beginnings of the arms race. Oppenheimer became an advocate for what Niels Bohr proposed. “We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,” Oppenheimer said, “then you are in a very weak position.” Which is true, given what Rhodes wrote about the subjugation of national sovereignty in regards to the bomb. Oppenheimer and others, however, went on to produce the hydrogen bomb, a bomb Bohr hoped would be “big enough” to push nations toward peace. Perhaps it did, but only decades later. Leo Szilard, however, frustrated with the continued production and militarization of atomic bomb and nuclear physics, left physics entirely and began studying virus biology.

Killing with atomics, some realized, had become too easy. “By the time we reach the atom bomb,” wrote Gil Elliot, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ease of access to target and the instant nature of macro-impact mean that both the choice of city and the identity of the victim has become completely randomized, and human technology has reached the final platform of self-destructiveness. The great cities of the dead, in numbers, remain Verdun, Leningrad and Auschwitz. But at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the “city of the dead” is finally transformed from a metaphor into a literal reality. The city of the dead of the future is our city and its victims are – not French and German soldiers, nor Russian citizens, nor Jews – but all of us without reference to specific identity.”

This seems to be the desensitized version of war today, with even conventional weaponry or unconventional weapons in the form of airliners loaded with passengers and jet fuel. Anyone can be a victim, and, indeed, many have.

Most horrific in the book – and what I recommend reading – are descriptions of Hiroshima after the bomb it. Absolutely awful, summed up thus: "Those scientists who invented the atomic bomb,” Rhodes quotes a woman who was a fourth-grade student at Hiroshima, “what did they think would happen if they dropped it?”

They knew. The American government knew. We know today. But we still possess these weapons, still wage war, with innocents like this fourth-grader caught between belligerents.

Ezra the Scribe

When I was a student at the University of Idaho, I ran across Ezra the Scribe. Ezra is an earnest, balding, bearded gentle giant of a man who advertised in local papers as a wordsmith. His logo was that of a Medieval monk, sitting at a table, writing. His ad copy insisted he could write resumes, personalized short stories and poems, and could be a great help on grants, term papers and research papers. I often wondered how much business he got, working as a scribe out of some hole in the wall in a small North Idaho town. Probably not much. Though his approach at advertising might appeal to the Ur-writer in the writers which abound in North Idaho, the image hardly portrays the kind of person a harried students, researcher, job-seeker or grant-seeker might turn to for help.

Then we turn to David Hailey the Scribe. But not a scribe in this Medieval sense. I absolutely agree with the suggestion that it is not enough to let students be creative. “We think students should be taught how to make innovative decisions – it is not enough to permit students to make the decisions and solve the problems on guesses and unsupported opinions,” Hailey writes. One of the greatest resentments I bear after earning a bachelors degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Idaho is that, as I look back, too great an emphasis was placed on creativity. Write, write, write, the professors said. Same when I entered the work force – except that they anticipated I’d pick up skills like reading and analyzing court documents, dealing with difficult people (sources and editors) and finding and selling good enterprise story ideas through the magic of osmosis. That I could write was expected. That I struggled with these other, more technical aspects of the job caused tongues to wag about the state of education today and sprouted promises of help to come which never arrived. In each case, the emphasis remained on the creativity, with the decision-making and problem-solving skills left to each individual to struggle with alone. Some, of course, did not struggle – they either learned these skills or were born with them. They became the ones doing innovative things and earning the praises and raises, while for the rest of us rabble, the editors could only say, “Why can’t you be more like them?” (I’m bitter about my journalism experience, as you can probably tell. I’m faring much better now, thank you, because I’m becoming more aware of my own constraints and shortcomings.)

So what do we do?

Collect advocates. Once and a while, as we stumble through our daily jobs, we make a difference to another professional. As we perform the job we love – writing texts that are useful, understandable and valuable – we demonstrate competence beyond that of crossing I’s and dotting T’s.

For example, last year I worked closely with an expert in nuclear criticality safety and two equipment operators to write a procedure the operators would follow to operate a new piece of equipment. By closely, I mean sitting next to these experts as they worked on the actual equipment. We worked together to find the best possible wording and we asked questions of each other, them working to understand the writing process and the standards writers go by, me working to understand their processes and science in order to write with economy and value.

The true test, however, came when the process and documentation had to be demonstrated for a team of auditors, led by an auditor with whom the criticality safety expert had frequently butted heads in the past. But because we, as a cross-disciplinary team had spent so much time working together and writing the document together, the audit passed with only minor bumps – a first in this criticality safety expert’s experience.

Since then, this expert has come to me not with questions about grammar (though those still come from time to time) but with questions on approaches to new problems, with the expectation that some kind of innovation will be forthcoming. A truly happy customer which, in many cases, is hard to come by where I work.

Analyze successes (and failures). Because of the success with the nuclear criticality safety expert, I have spent a lot of time analyzing that success – because in the past processes that mirrored that successful experience to the nth degree did not meet with the expected, successful outcome. The consistent shortcomings I see in these “near-successes” help me plan approaches to new problems and expected innovations more carefully before the work begins, in order to help me guide the process to a more successful completion.

Part of this analysis is in line with Hailey’s admonition to anticipate constraints. “Even the most brilliant ideas are of no use if they are not relevant to the specific situation,” Hailey writes. In analyzing the success with the nuclear criticality safety expert, for example, I seized upon the innovation (for me, at least) of creating a routing table in a procedure at a point where we were struggling with a long series of IF/THEN statements that would make the operators have to swim through three pages of dense text in order to perform rather simple tasks. I took that approach to another document, but did not anticipate constraints that document entailed. The first was a normal operational procedure. The second was an emergency operational procedure, which bears the constraint of bare-bones simplicity. The approach at simplifying one text did not go far enough in the second – a text I struggled with for over a year before one of our shift operations manager sat with me and outlined the various constraints these emergency procedures carry with them. Once aware of those constraints, he, another writer and I were able to take an innovative approach to this particular procedure, simplifying the approach and reducing its bulk from three pages to one – meeting another constraint, that of requiring operators to memorize these emergency procedures. That simplified procedure has been in the field, and in use, for three months now. Significantly I can count it as a success, because in the past after each use it was back on my desk with the order for more revisions. No longer. I know it works because it hasn’t come back.

In these analyses I do not focus on writing or language. I know I can do that already. What I focus on is looking at what decisions were made that helped the text be better or worse, and what processes led to making better decisions. I have decided – no big revelation – that working hand-in-hand with those who will use the text is better than working a text while keeping an imaginary audience in mind. For the imaginary audience, constraints can be outlined, but for the real audience, constraints can be more clearly understood. I’m not an ace at these kinds of analyses, but I’m getting better. I know they’re helping me find ways to be more than just a scribe.

My Election Prediction

We're now less than a month from the presidential election. Thank Heaven.

Now it's my time to predict the winner:

Obama/Biden, by a margin of at least 5 to 8 points in the popular vote, and ample margin in the Electoral College.

Why?

1) The economy. Everyone is getting hammered by this, but it's going to hurt Republicans more. As evidenced by market turmoil, the bailout -- now totalling more than $800 billion -- is not going to cure the crisis. Perhaps a one-bill cure-all is impossible. But guilt by association is going to fall on the free-market, deregulatory Republicans, including McCain.

2) Palin. McCain and other Republicans spent many a fine hour hammering away at Obama's lack of experience. Though I noted at first that McCain's pick of Palin was shrewd, it's evident that the lacquer has worn off. A Republican feminist pick may play well with the base, but the undecideds (like me) aren't as thrilled. And her presence in the campaign has given the Democrats (and the Democratic-leaning media, let's face it) more fuel.

3) The Democrats. After eight years of Bush and what looks like, to them, the possibility of another similar four years with McCain, the Democratic base is riled up to an extreme. This riling is also going to influence voters in swing states and undecideds like myself.

4) Republicans' shying from the media. I'll be the first to say that all media is biased. Most of it leans Democratic. But avoiding the press and fleeing to Fox News is going to make the Republicans look scared. Which they probably are. Which they're right to be, because they're losing this election.

5) My raise. A measly 87 cents this year, though, bless her, our administrator is pushing for more. While the extra $68 every two weeks will be welcome, it won't dig us out of the hole gas and food prices have dropped us into this year. I'm just glad our mortgage is a reasonable one, and that we didn't buy more than we could afford. We'd like a vacation this year. Can't afford one. We've lost thousands in the stock market, and only had thousands invested. McCain is starting to sound like the same old thing. I'm ready to give Obama/the Democrats a chance. They seemed to do pretty well pulling the country out of the Depression.

6) Reublican overreliance on moral issues/the Iraq war as reasons they should stay in office. I am a moral person. But as a moral person, it's my opinion that the country has more pressing needs than someone who'll rattle sabres about Roe V. Wade if they're elected. That's not going to go anywhere anyway, so why bother? I want to hear from the candidates what they're going to do to end the Iraq war. I'm not convinced a victory a la World War II is possible.

I look forward to people who can refute these arguments. Now's your chance. Because I'm a voter who can't take this any more.

Dreams and Unity, Unity and Dreams

Had an odd dream the other night. Started out with me owning one of those ridiculous two-passenger electric cars people drive around in France, the ones that feel like they’re a car shell built around a golf cart. I drove it into a rather muddy place, as Pooh might put it, and it got stuck. I got out, pushed it like a shopping cart, and voila, it was unstuck. Then I proceeded to load the trailer it was hauling with an enormous stockpile of firewood, mostly junk taken from around a housing development, where building scraps and tree stumps abounded, and then from behind a dais where George W. Bush was busily explaining his economic policy and the reasons behind the nearly trillion-dollar bailout passed last week. A few of his advisers (and I appeared to be one of the minor ones, else why would I be there, behind the dais) tried to get me to stop the scrounging, as having someone picking through debris behind the president while he was trying to reassure millions might not look good on television. Not as bad as wasting a couple of news guys, but close.

Conference, as usual, was uplifting. I was particularly struck by Elder Uchtdorf’s talk at the priesthood session Saturday night, in how he applied the story of a group of men trying to move a grand piano to unity in moving the gospel – or any worthwhile endeavor, to that matter – forward with unity. Each person has to lift where he or she stands, and things will work out for the best. There was a lot about unity at this conference, which I found strengthening. I imagine some of it is coming due to differences in opinion over the gay marriage initiative in California, with some members questioning why the church is getting involved in the situation. I, too, had my questions, but over the past few months, through study and prayer, those questions have been answered, and I’m ready now to support the church’s position on the matter. I also found it interesting the President Monson is asking us to answer attacks on our faith with peace. Too often, we see attack answered for attack, and that does nothing to invite the spirit or to solve any difficulties.

The audible audience gasps at the announcement of a temple for Rome, Italy, were also entertaining.

In regards to the other matter: It has ended, and not in the way I had hoped. In the way I had expected, yes, but not in the way I had hoped. My only hope here is that a business relationship, not a friendship, has ended.

Facebook

Just a couple of weeks ago, I joined the crowd on Facebook. Now, I've been aware of Facebook for a long time; I'm not an Internet rube. But the utility of the whole thing eluded me (forget the irony that I've been blogging for nearly a year now and that the futility of that enterprise is only of fleeting concern).

But because it seemed like the thing to do at the time (we're out of onions at home, so I don't have any to hang from my belt), I joined up. Immediately found a few friends, ranging from people I'm working with at Uncharted, to people I worked with at the Standard Journal and the Scroll, plus a few random high school friends and associates, including the fellow who's running, I think our 20th reunion coming up in 2010.

Shortly after joining, I was talking about Facebook to a friend of mine. He agreed that the utility isn't obvious.

Then came this week. I think I begin to see a bit of the light. It's a way for people who should be working better together can actually share, in a casual fashion, a casual, non-work moment. It's a way for people who are associated together to get to know each other better, and perhaps become better friends. I don't know why this is so revelatory this week. Perhaps because I've been thinking a lot about how to build up those relationships of trust I learned about waaaaay back at the MTC. Now if only I could remember how to HOFRS . . .

So I see the utility in Facebook now, or at least the beginnings of an inkling of a glimmer. That's good. I'll stick with it.

I still don't understand texting, though. And I don't want to understand.

Keyboarding is Essential

I'm trying to convince my son that keyboarding is a skill that he's going to need for the rest of his life. He's only eight, and, as such, has a rather impatient view of the world. Using his fingers in such a way isn't new to him; he's been learning piano for the past two years. He's pretty good. Of course, when he sits down to the piano, he knows has has to play the piano. When he sits down at the computer, the expectation is that he can launch immediately into Lego Indiana Jones. The new rule here is that in order to play on the computer, he has to use his typing tutor (featuring Sponge Bob Square Pants, so it's not like he's staring Mavis Beacon in the face) for ten minutes before he plays. This always brings on a lot of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I remember in junior high being a fairly fast two-fingered typist, and I thought that would be enough. Then I got to take a typing class -- yes, it was typing back then, on electronic typewriters, but typewriters nonetheless -- and figured out that learning how to type with all ten fingers would make the whole thing go a lot faster. With practice, I've increased my typing speed to 79 words per minute, no errors. Even in the past ten years, the speed has gone up ten words per minute. I'm known as one of the fastest typists at work. Typing fast can get you in trouble, though. More on that later.

The Best Cartoon Ever

Ah, the memories this brings back . . .

Ahimsa

As I’ve mentioned, I’m reading Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, having set aside The Federalist Papers for the time being, as I have other people where I work curious to read the Rhodes book and I’m too selfish to give it up before I’ve read it.

Rhodes paints an absolutely fascinating picture of the men and processes – both political and scientific – involved in creating the atomic bomb. Here, I’d like to present a few snippets from the book. Understand that since they’re snippets, they’re lacking some context; if you’re curious to know more about them, please read the book.

Upon realization that the fission bomb would not break any of the laws of physics, Enrico Fermi experienced the following:

(Rhodes, p. 275): Fermi was standing at his panoramic office window high in the physics tower looking down the gray winter length of Manhattan Island, its streets alive as always with vendors and taxis and crowds. He cupped his hands as if he were holding a ball. “A little bomb like that,” he said simply, for once not lightly mocking, “and it would all disappear.

Writing of “modern warfare” to describe the impact of the firebombing of Hamburg, Germany, Rhodes writes:

(Rhodes, 475-6): Extend war by attrition to include civilians behind the lines and war becomes total. With improving technology so could death-making be. The bombing of Hamburg marked a significant step in the evolution of death technology itself, massed bombers deliberately churning conflagration. It was still too much a matter of luck, an elusive combination of weather and organization and hardware. It was still also expensive in crews and materiel. It was not yet perfect, as no technology can ever be, and therefore seemed to want perfecting.

(Continued): The British and the Americans would be enraged to learn of Japanese brutality and Nazi torture, of the Bataan Death March and the fathomless horror of the death camps. By a reflex so mindlessly unimaginative it may be merely mammalian, the bombing of distant cities, out of sight and sound and smell, was generally approved, although neither the United States nor Great Britain admitted publicly that it deliberately bombed civilians. In Churchill’s phrase, the enemy was to be “de-housed.” The Jap and the Nazi in any case had started the war. “We must face the fact that modern warfare as conducted in the Nazi manner is a dirty business,” Franklin Roosevelt told his countrymen. “We don’t like it – we didn’t want to get in it – but we are in it and we’re going to fight it with everything we’ve got.”

Writing of a proposal to use radioactive elements to poison German food supplies, Rhodes quotes Robert Oppenheimer as writing:

(Rhodes, 511): I should recommend a delay if that is possible. (In this connection I think that we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men, since there is no doubt that the actual number affected will, because of non-uniform distribution, be much smaller than this.)

Rhodes goes on to write:

(Rhodes, 511): There is no better evidence anywhere in the record of the increasing bloody-mindedness of the Second World War than Robert Oppenheimer, a man who professed at various times in his life to be dedicated to Ahimsa (“the Sanskrit word that means doing no harm or hurt,” he explains) could write with enthusiasm of preparations for the mass poisoning of as many as five hundred thousand human beings.

There are certainly uglier things in this book, and in the world we live in. I suppose what I get out of this is that we all need to temper our enthusiasms to ensure the Ahimsa we believe we possess is truly there.

I write this not as a blast against science, nor a blast against Oppenheimer, nor a blast against anything except the fact that we need to be watchful that our love of humanity does not wax cold, nor that we surrender one good (ending a war) in favor of another (sparing the innocent).

The Way is Shut

I worry about my back yard.

We live on a narrow third of an acre, a city plot that has no wild corners, no overgrown bushes, no corner of the garden or flower bed hidden from prying eyes where our children could build roads for the cars, villages for the teddy bears, or otherwise poke around and discover the possibilities of dirt, water, old bricks and a few bits of cardboard, Styrofoam and other refuse swiped from neighboring Dumpsters or Dad’s tool shed.

I grew up with such a back yard.

It wasn’t much bigger than the one my kids have now. A half-acre where dad built a rambling, single-story brick house that housed eight children and numberless concourses of small dogs and cats, one of which gave birth on my older brother Albert’s chest while he was asleep. We had our own private power pole – it fed power to our house, and to the neighbors, through wires that snicked and snapped when it was cold outside. In the northeast corner, smelling of ethyl mercaptan, a valve lineup for Intermountain Gas, snug in the corner of our lot and bordering on the gravel backlot for Idaho Welding to the north and corrugated steel storage sheds to the east. South of the lineup with its hisses and stinks, a bramble of lilac, the chicken coop, a tiny shed Dad built of cinder blocks and lava rock, then the neighbors chickens.

It was a tiny, smelly and rather industrial place to grow up.

It was our world and we loved it.

Wedged between the lilacs and the steel storage sheds, a strip of weedy ground about six feet wide. We built villages there out of brick and travertine pilfered from Dad’s piles for the teddy bears – the Blueys – named after the blue teddy bear our maternal grandmother knitted for Randy, the youngest. We three youngest had similar bears, all of which lost eyes and noses as time wore on. Mine was Reddy, named for his red yarn. Maaike’s was Pinky. We had another Bluey and a Goldy (we tried calling him Yellowy; that didn’t work).

I should not say was. Nor had. We still have them. Reddy and the newer Bluey reside on a shelf in our bedroom, amongst some of my wife’s cherished childhood stuffed animals. Randy still has Bluey – now a bit tattered, his blue faded to grey – and Goldy. Maaike still has Pinky.

Their last name is Johnson. I don’t know why. Probably didn’t know then, though at the time we got the first bears, our bishop was named Johnson. Funny the things you don’t record as a child, not thinking at all that, twenty or thirty years hence, you might want to remember the reasons behind the things you did.

Their houses had windows. One summer, we built them with running water. And fireplaces. Working fireplaces. We played with fire. Nobody got burned. Nothing burned down. They made pies out of the little berries that grew on the bushes in the front yard. They planted flowers, soon had marigolds nearly as tall as their houses. They wore grass skirts that got eaten by worms. They dug in the dirt, made paths though weeds that were waist-high to us, lining the paths with gravel swiped from the driveway. They built streams, bridges over the streams, a lake where the stream water went to foam into Indian soap.

They kept us busy all summer. Some days, from dawn to dusk, when we left their homes reluctantly, watching the light from the lit birthday candles we left in their windows as we walked back into the house.

As we grew older, the games became more sophisticated. They became pilots in airplanes and space ships we built, still out of junk pilfered from Idaho Welding’s Dumpsters. Occasionally, we’d move their villages to other wild spots on the property, notably n the north side of the house where, between house and another strand of lilac, another narrow strip of land lay open to our machinations. This was their garden spot, where grass grew, and moss, and where the rain dripped off the house onto their roofs as they lay inside, snug and dry, under blankets made of washcloths we took from the bathroom.

And more sophisticated. We went through a Star Trek phase, making elaborate maroon uniforms for them out of felt and discarded dress socks.

Writing down these memories feels shallow. I look through my photo albums and find one picture of a village we built, and only a few others of us at play with these cherished teddy bears. Randy and Maaike may have more. But as I look at them and write these memories, I feel as if the door back to them is shut. There’s no magic wardrobe that can take me back to that time. I’m not even sure giving the teddy bears to my own kids would open that door. They have no wild place to build a village; it would be in the way of the rototiller, the lawn mower. I have cheated my children, buying this property. There are no madelines and tea for me.

There is no back yard here.

Logorrhea

My goodness. September was quite a month on this blog. Obviously, I suffer from logorrhea. At least in the babbling, useless sense of the term.

But that's not bad. A writer writes, always.