Some people have always found it valuable to hide the contents of messages from others. A common method is Cryptography, or Crypto for short. Crypto methods date back to the ancient Romans and probably even further back than that. And for a long time writing was good enough in most cases. Most people couldn't read so whatever you wrote was safe from the prying eyes of a large percentage of the population. Only the elite members of society could read so only members of the elites figured into your calculations.
And the two elite groups who were most interested in Crypto were the military and the diplomats. Both were interested in communicating reliably with their friends while keeping their enemies in the dark. And this led to a variety of systems. Simple systems just scrambled the order of the letters or substituted one letter for another. But by the middle ages the most common method was the Nomenclator. It consisted of a long list of words or phrases organized into two columns. The word or phrase in one column replaced the corresponding word or phrase in the other column. The system was clunky so it was mostly used by diplomats who had embassies that employed code clerks. The military, who needed systems they could use in the field under combat conditions, pretty much stuck with letter substitution schemes.
The population of people who found Crypto a part of their life got wider with the introduction of the telegraph. Traveling representatives of companies needed to communicate over long distances and they didn't want competing companies to know what they were up to. So Nomenclators morphed into Telegraphic Codes. And there was another reason Telegraphic Codes became popular. They could save money. The coded message was cheaper to send then the "plain text", the term of art for the original message, because it was shorter. This got to be a hassle for the telegraph companies so they ended up restricting people to using one of a small number of approved "Commercial Codes". The telephone eventually doomed all this.
And up to this point all the work was being done by people. This restricted the options to things people could reliably do in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of effort. That all changed with the introduction of Crypto machines in the 1930's. The most famous of these is the Enigma machine used by the Nazis during World War II. Mechanical Crypto machines quickly evolved to become computer based Crypto machines. But for a long time the use of Crypto was, with the exception of the Telegraphic Commercial codes, restricted to the elites in general and the military and the diplomatic corps in particular.
That all changed when the general public got access to the Internet. By this time computers were very powerful and capable of implementing very powerful Crypto systems. And all of a sudden pretty much everybody used Crypto whether they knew it or not. You care whether your credit card transactions are secure and reliable or not. And that security and reliability depends critically on Crypto. Thus endeth the history lesson.
And so far I haven't said a word about the ostensible subject of this post. Here's where I start.
I am using the words "offensive" and "defensive" the way a military person would use them. If you are attacking the enemy you have gone on the offensive. If you are implementing measures to make it more difficult for the enemy to attack you, or for the attack to succeed, you are on the defensive.
So how does this translate into the world of Crypto? Well, if you are encrypting your messages you are making an attempt to protect them from the other guys. That is a defensive move. If you are attempting to decode the other guy's encrypted messages that is an offensive move. And there is a war going on here. One side may make a defensive move by deploying a new and hopefully improved Crypto system. The other side tries to counter this by upping their offensive game. One side typically has the advantage at any given point. But the "move - countermove" game goes on and on. It is commonly referred to in other contexts as an arms race.
I want to get at the question of whether we are striking the appropriate balance between offense and defense. And this question has been around for a long time. How much time and effort do you put into developing or enhancing the Crypto systems you use versus attempting to crack the other guy's Crypto systems? This question was important to ordinary people only at one remove before. You usually had some investment in some army or another or in some government or another. So Crypto success for those people you were invested in was a good thing and crypto failure was a bad thing. Now the impact is more direct.
Recently we had a new computer virus outbreak. This was different. It was a "ransomware" attack. Just like other arms races virus attacks change over time. Originally a virus attack would wipe out data on your computer. Then virus attacks evolved into ones that stole data. Your credit card information (or military and diplomatic secrets) is very valuable if it can be gotten into the right hands. The value to the attackers of a successful ransomware attack is very direct. You pay them money.
And the core of the ransomware attack is Crypto. Your files get encrypted. Now if this was a movie or TV show at this point we would cut to a shot of one or more people frantically typing, typically onto laptops. This might be intercut with shots of photogenic arrays of computer screens or of worried people. All the while dramatic music would be thumping so we would know that something VERY IMPORTANT AND DRAMATIC was happening. But never fear. After not very long (we audience members get bored quickly) someone would shout something equivalent to "Eureka". The Crypto had been cracked and we were all saved. Happy endings all around.
But in the real world things didn't and don't go that way. Nobody cracked the virus. If you didn't send the ransom payment you never would be able to read the files that had been encrypted again. In short, the offense won and the defense lost. Why?
Looked at from another perspective this ransomware attack contains some good news. And the good news is "Crypto works". (That's something I have noted previously. See: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/02/digital-privacy.html). So if Crypto works and (being the pedantic kind of guy I am I feel the need to repeat myself) it does, then why isn't it used more widely? And the answer to that question feeds directly into my thesis.
For a very long time the arms of the US government that deal in Crypto have chosen to invest a lot of effort in offensive Crypto and have criminally neglected defensive Crypto. Governments, including ours, keep deciding it's more fun to crack the other guy's systems than it is to make sure the other guy can't crack their own systems. They have convinced themselves that their own Crypto systems were unbreakable but that with the proper amount of effort the other guy's systems weren't. And more and more the arms of the US government have decided that literally any system that is not a US government system is an "other guy" system.
And there is a direct connection between the two. If everybody is using poor Crypto systems then it is much easier to crack them. Crypto systems have been cracked going all the way back to the Romans (and probably before). But somehow the fact that we have succeeded in cracking the other guy's systems (at least some of the time) does not lead to the obvious action of looking hard at our own systems.
There is a trap that governments have been falling into for millennia. "Our systems can't be cracked". And there is usually a good reason to believe this. There is a universal system for cracking Crypto systems. It is called the "brute force" approach and it consists of trying all the possibilities. Let's say that it takes a minute to try a possibility, a reasonable figure during the middle ages. Then if a person lives to be a hundred years old and never stops to eat or sleep they can try about fifty million possibilities in a lifetime. But let's say our system has a billion possibilities. Then it can't be cracked using a brute force approach. It was easy, even a thousand years ago, to come up with a Crypto system that allowed for a billion possibilities. So these systems were completely secure, right? Obviously not.
So what's the secret? The secret is what the British called a "crib", something a student would do to cheat on a test. The most obvious crib in the Crypto world is to steal the key. You now have not a billion possibilities to try but one. But cribs come in lots of different flavors. Let's say you could find something out or figure something out that reduces the possibilities from a billion to a thousand. Then the system can be cracked after less than 24 hours' worth of effort. Cribs that powerful are hard to come by. But cribs can be combined. And maybe they only reduce the list to ten thousand or a hundred thousand possibilities. That's still a big improvement. Governments tend to assume that they are crib-proof. But they rarely are. And the fact that they succeed in developing cribs with which to attack the other guy tends to not have the obvious effect, namely a thorough and careful review of their own Crypto systems.
And the whole Enigma business with Bletchley Park and Magic and all the rest of it is a classic example of this. Lacking the appropriate cribs it turns out the Enigma machine couldn't be cracked. Enigma was used by many branches of the Nazi government. But messages were never cracked for many of those branches. There is a thing called "Cypher discipline". This is where you religiously follow all the proper procedures and protocols. Some Nazi departments were very careful and other departments were sloppy. But wait, there's more.
Bletchley was a British show but the Americans were heavily involved. And the Americans ran a parallel operation against the Japanese with considerable success. Again, some departments of the Japanese government were softer targets than others due in large measure to the degree of adherence to Cypher discipline. And one of the big beneficiaries of what was cracked was the US Navy. So did the Navy learn the obvious lesson and make sure they were using good Crypto and good Cypher discipline? Nope! The Japanese had a great deal of success cracking US Naval codes and using what they learned effectively.
So has anything changed since World War II? Yes! Things have gotten worse. Various Crypto responsibilities can be found in many parts of the US government. The NSA, officially the National Security Agency and unofficially "No Such Agency", is a big player in all this. And the NSA is all offense and no defense. It turns out that the basic code for the ransomware attack was stolen from the NSA. It us unclear whether the NSA developed it or just obtained it from elsewhere. But what they definitely did not do was notify Microsoft of the vulnerability the attack exploited so that a fix could be issued. Microsoft found out about the vulnerability when leakers posted an NSA list of vulnerabilities and the code that could be used to exploit them on the Internet. Microsoft immediately issued a fix but a lot of computers were left unprotected for one reason or another.
But wait, there's more. As I indicated above, there are lots of ways to do Crypto. For decades the NSA has seen it as their right to decide which systems people can use. And they want those systems to be easy for them to crack. Then some civilians came up with a system called RSA, which turns out to be completely secure if no cribs are handy. And this was a Crypto system that the NSA could not control. This forced the NSA to respond by issuing a pretty good Crypto system called DES. But we wouldn't have DES if we hadn't had RSA first.
And this policy of doing their best to keep good Crypto out of the hands of anybody but the US government has been a long standing policy of the US government with the NSA often taking the lead. A couple of decades ago the "Clipper" computer chip was announced. All computes were supposed to use a Clipper chip to do their Crypto. But the Clipper came with a back door that the NSA, the FBI, and other government agencies could use. Fortunately, that proposal died quickly.
9/11 produced the USA Patriot Act. It in turn produced the most complete gag order in history. Agencies like the NSA and the FBI can ask you for any kind of data they want and you are forbidden from even disclosing that a request had been made. Companies like Google and the mobile phone companies were ordered to disgorge vast amounts of data about literally everyone. At the same time they were forbidden from even telling anyone about the existence of the order let alone its contents. This was all revealed by Edward Snowden. The Snowden revelations have caused these kinds of provisions to be dialed back but only to a modest extent. The main provisions are still in effect.
The FBI was in the news a few months back because they were asking Apple to hack their own phones. This is because newer versions of the iPhone use better and better Crypto to effectively keep the data on them private. Various government agencies, including but not limited to the FBI and the NSA, have repeatedly asked for legislation mandating back doors into consumer devices like phones. They have also asked for back doors into data centers run by Google, mobile phone companies, and others.
There is an obvious value in letting the appropriate agencies in the appropriate circumstances get access to the appropriate data. But it's the whole "appropriate" thing that is the problem. It turns out that you can't draw a bright line indicating where the boundary between appropriate and inappropriate should be. And even if you could the boundary is not a real boundary. If the appropriate agencies can get appropriate access then inappropriate agencies will also be able to get inappropriate access.
The news has been littered with these stories for the past few years. Credit card data gets stolen so routinely that it now hardly qualifies as news. And if the NSA can get into Iranian computers the North Koreans can get into the computes at Sony Pictures studio. And Russian hackers can get into the computers of the US State Department, campaign committees belonging to both the Democrats and the Republicans, and so on. Apparently the only place they couldn't get into was Hillary Clinton's home email server.
These systems could be much more secure. But various US government agencies have been doing what they can to keep them insecure. It is beneficial to these agencies for them to be able to get into the systems of other countries. But the cost is great because it means that our systems are vulnerable to other governments like Russia, China, and even the likes of Iran and North Korea. They are also vulnerable to criminals both domestic and international. It even means that our systems are vulnerable to amateurs interested in celebrity sex tapes, gossip, and the like. It's gotten to the point where even some kid who wants to cyberstalk another kid can break into a surprising number of places.
All of this is the cost of the policy pursued by so many in the government of keeping our online systems vulnerable. And the big problem is it is an unacknowledged cost. It affects us all in ways we notice and ways we don't. Is the benefit really worth the cost? I don't think so. Reasonable people may disagree with me. But the big problem is that almost nobody knows that this tradeoff is being made on out behalf. So they don't even know that it is a question that needs to be investigated.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Saturday, May 6, 2017
Residential Real Estate
This is one of those subjects that I like to tackle. Why? Because there is so much nonsense and half baked analysis out there. Straightening all that out is one of the reasons I write this blog.
I live in Seattle. If you are part of the government of a city this is one of those "I wish I had that problem" problems. Real Estate prices in Seattle are literally skyrocketing. For several years now prices in Seattle have gone up more quickly than pretty much anywhere else. The well respected Case Shiller index has rated Seattle as the place where prices have gone up the fastest for several months in a row now. It has now been going on long enough that people are shouting "something has to be done". But what?
Rather than doing my usual historical backgrounder at this point I am going to do a "fundamentals" backgrounder.
Residential real estate is a "market". It is the very thing economists are talking about when they talk about a markets. As such it is subject to the rules of supply and demand. In an unconstrained market (more about this later) if there is more demand than supply prices go up. If there is more supply than demand prices go down. And that's what has been happening in Seattle. Little new supply has come online. Meanwhile Amazon, the web retailer, has been hiring like mad for jobs in buildings located in Seattle. A lot of these are high paying jobs. So these new hires have money in their pocket and they are looking for a convenient place to live.
And it's not just Amazon. Business in Seattle is doing well. So employment has been skyrocketing. That in turn has driven up demand for housing. That in turn has driven up prices. And so far that has not resulted in a bunch of new housing getting built. And that takes us to the whole "unconstrained market" thing.
Consider Houston, Texas for a moment. Houston is in the middle of nowhere. And by "nowhere" I mean it's surrounded by cheap flat land as far as the eye can see. If Houston needs bare dirt on which to build houses it just annexes a big chunk of land adjacent to city limits and tell developers to get on with it. And Houston has essentially no zoning laws. Developers cna build pretty much anything they want and they do. Houston has been growing very quickly for a long time now. But housing is still cheap. And this is because increased supply keeps up with increased demand. Houston is a classic example of an unconstrained market. And it demonstrates how supply and demand works in one situation.
Let's look at another situation, Detroit, Michigan. Detroit is a big place. It sprawls over 140 square miles. That's big. And back in the day Detroit had a large enough population to fill all that land up. But the auto industry declined. And production moved to the south. And automation drastically reduced the number of people it took to build a car. So good paying jobs went away. And eventually so did the population. Detroit has plenty of supply. You can literally pick up a nice house for $10,000. But there is no demand. People with no jobs and no other source of income can't afford a house even if it only costs $10,000. So a plentiful supply coupled with a total lack of demand has driven housing prices in Detroit effectively to zero.
There is something else going on here, something mostly ignored by economists. That is the rate at which the market can respond to supply/demand pressures. Economists generally look at the situation as a static one. They can use the supply/demand curve to calculate what direction the market is being pressured to move toward. But they generally ignore the rate at which the market can respond. If, for instance, we are talking stock prices then things can move quickly. With high volume computerized trading large moves can happen in less than a second. That is not true with the housing market. It takes years for the market to respond.
Detroit grew relatively slowly from the start of the twentieth century to roughly the middle. There was a steady growth in jobs. So there was a steady demand for more housing. Developers could see not only the current state of the market (favorable toward additional construction) but also the trend (also favorable to additional construction). So the city annexed land and developers developed it and Detroit has a housing market that stayed in balance.
But in the last few decades Detroit has suffered shock after shock. And they have turned the pressure for housing from positive (build more) to negative (we already have too much). And while the methods for adding housing are well understood by all the players (cities, developers, consumers) the methods for reducing housing are not well understood by the same set of players. So nobody has responded well. The city has gone bankrupt. Developers have either gone broke or moved somewhere else. Consumers have been stuck with houses they can't afford and can't sell. Lots of Detroit housing stock has been foreclosed on or abandoned. It has turned from an asset into a blight.
But hope springs eternal. So the sensible idea of bulldozing the dangerous derelicts and consolidating the city down to a size more consistent with the actual population, a move that would save the city tons of money by reducing the footprint of utilities, street maintenance, police/fire, bus service, etc. has, in the short run, proved impossible. Detroit and Seattle are opposites. The market has changed drastically. In Seattle's case it is for the good and in Detroit's case it is for the bad. But in both cases the market has not been able to change quickly enough to put things back in balance. This fundamental unwillingness to understand that the problem in both cases is a slow response to changed market conditions has generated a lot of anguish in both cases.
But back to the whole "unconstrained market" thing. It has been more than 50 years since Seattle has been able to add undeveloped land by annexation. It is now too late. Seattle is surrounded on all sides now. It is bounded by water on two sides and by other municipalities on the other two sides. Even if it succeeded in annexing land that annexation would not help. Houston can still annex undeveloped land but all the land surrounding Seattle is already developed. So the Houston solution is unavailable to Seattle. Here's where math kicks in.
It's all about density. If the population goes up the fact that Seattle can't get any bigger means the density goes up. It really is that simple. So one solution is to freeze or decrease the population. But before you do that it might be a good idea to ask Detroit how that worked for them. And in fact, Seattle's population actually stayed nearly constant from 1960 to 1990. That means the housing stock stayed the same, right? Well, actually no. By 1960 Seattle had pretty much developed all the land that existed within its city limits. Oh, there was the odd lot here and the odd lot there. But there were no large tracts of undeveloped land. And that means that construction of your standard stand alone house on its own lot contributed little or nothing to the increase in housing stock. But housing stock did grow.
Year by year multifamily development took place. This was a mix of apartments, condominiums, and town houses. So pretty much every year the number of square feet of space available for residential use went up. And mathematics demands that the average resident kept consuming more space on average. In 1960 most houses were occupied by families. So two, three, four, perhaps more people occupied each house. By 1990 the average number of people in a house had declined a lot. I live alone in a house that that in the past has hosted between two and four people.
There are now many houses with one or two people in them. This large decrease in the total number of people living in houses has been balanced by a large increase in the number of people living in apartments, condominiums, and town houses. The two changes, the decrease in the population living in stand alone houses and the increase in the number of people living in multiple family dwellings, pretty much exactly balanced each other out.
At least that was the story through 1990. The 2000 census showed for the first time in a long time a significant increase in Seattle's population. The 2010 census showed a big jump. And all the numbers say that since 2010 Seattle's population has been skyrocketing. For a couple of generations the Seattle political establishment operated in an environment where the population of Seattle was very stable. They had no experience with what to do when things changed and the population started to grow and then started to explode.
Standard market analysis tells us what the solution is. If demand is growing the proper response is to increase supply. And, as noted above, adding undeveloped land and then developing it (the Houston solution) is not an option. And, assuming we take the "drive the population down" option off the table, the only option is to increase density. And that means more apartments, condominiums, and town houses. It's really that simple.
But that clashes with Seattle's vision of itself. Seattle sees itself as some kind of suburb where single family houses on generous lots sprawl as far as the eye can see. So a few years ago Seattle put in an ordinance limiting the heights of residential buildings and constraining where they could be built. "Multifamily is just not Seattle." And it worked in that far too little multifamily residential development has taken place. And that's why supply and demand are currently so far out of whack.
And so we are back at it. The Seattle City Council has recently been raising allowable building heights in several neighborhoods. This has created lots of unhappy people. "You are destroying the neighborhood." But it doesn't matter how good or bad a neighborhood's ambience is if you can't afford to live there. And that's what is happening.
People are getting priced out. Renters have seen rents skyrocket. I have already mentioned that home prices have shot up so more and more people are being priced out of the market. So we are not talking about whether things are going to change. They are. It's inevitable. We are talking about how things are going to change. Pretty much nobody has figured that out. So a lot of what I hear boils down to "I want things to stay the same." That's not an option.
So among the actual alternatives how do we want things to change? Take increased density as a given. We are going to see more apartments, condominiums, and town houses. And the most basic question revolves around economics. How expensive do we want these units to be? There is a lot of hew and cry that Seattle needs more low income housing. Say that is so for the sake of argument. How do we proceed?
Well the consensus among low income housing advocates, and they are a large and well organized group in Seattle, is that developers should be required to create lots of units that are priced below market so that low income people can afford them. This is a variation on rent control. The rent on some units is artificially controlled to be below market. You can argue about the specifics for decades, and people have, but that's the basic idea. So right now in Seattle certain projects are required to include a certain number of these units. But the demand always vastly exceeds the supply. So a big bureaucracy must be put in place to decide who gets to actually occupy the units. And there are always lots of deserving people who don't make the cut. What do you do with them? Nobody's figured that out yet.
And there is lots of experience with rent control. New York City started out doing it a long time ago on a small scale. Then since demand always vastly exceeded supply they kept expanding the program and making it more bureaucratic and baroque. And it never quite worked. And it produced the New York of the '70s. You had large numbers of buildings that were falling down because they were badly maintained. Landlords decided that it was better to let the buildings fall apart than maintain them. Why? Rent control.
And for one reason or another there was a benefit to the owners to frequently selling the buildings so they did. The result was a long term downward spiral in the condition of a very large amount of what had initially been perfectly good housing stock. New York has gotten rid of a lot of its rent control and lots of new residential construction has been the result. But they haven't figured how to get rid of the last vestiges of rent control. So it limps on. And it's not like they figured out how to do rent control right somewhere else. The New York experience is particularly extreme but it hasn't really worked anywhere else either.
You can probably tell I am not a fan of rent control. So what's the alternative? It is a variation on the Houston plan. If developers can make money developing inexpensive housing that relatively poor people can afford they will. But the profit margin on expensive housing is higher. So builders will only develop inexpensive housing if the market for expensive housing is already saturated. That is definitely not true in Seattle. And that's reflected in the fact that there is a lot of housing going up. But it is all aimed at the high end of the market. Advocates are correct in the short run in saying that developers are tearing down relatively inexpensive housing in order to build expensive housing and that's making the problem for poor people worse. But I suggest taking a longer view.
Lots of the people moving into the new expensive housing are currently living in less expensive housing. As they move up it will free up mid market housing. Now the market in Seattle is so hot that this will not help much in the short run. But short run thinking is what got us where we are now. Developers always overbuild if given the chance. So the first thing that needs to be done is to give them a chance. The amount of housing coming on line this year (2017) and next will set records. That should depress prices. That is unless the market is so out of balance that this massive amount of additional supply still doesn't put us in balance. And in Seattle's case that is a significant possibility.
But that just means that the developers of the current slate of projects will make a ton of money. And that will just encourage more and more developers to build more and more projects. At some point they will get ahead of themselves. That is if they are allowed to. And the city's recent actions of increasing allowable building heights is a step in the right direction. The first step is allowing developers to develop. That is pretty straight forward.
The next step is much harder. Once they have saturated the expensive end of the market they will look down market toward the inexpensive part of the market. And a lot of crap inexpensive housing has been built at one time or another in one place or another. Housing advocates are almost as worried about this as they are about pricing people out of the market. So they tend to react by advocating for complex zoning whose objective is to force developers to build "nice" projects. The problem is no one has figured out how to write zoning rules that mix nice with inexpensive. Lots of zoning rules promote expensive. But they have a poor track record of promoting inexpensive buildings that are also nice.
My brother is an expert in this sort of thing. He hasn't figured out how to do it. He argues that it is possible to make a development both nice and inexpensive. He can show you a whole bunch of examples of this being done. But he hasn't figured out how to write zoning or other codes that makes it happen. And neither has anybody else. My recommendation is one of those that no one will like. I think zoning should focus on safety and that sort of thing. If developers want to build ugly buildings, let them.
And I think my recommendation will eventually fix Seattle's problem. If developers build enough supply then eventually it will outrun demand. At that point prices will moderate. But the soonest I can see my recommendation fixing the problem is five years and I have to admit it might take longer. And no one wants to wait that long. So we will probably screw things up in Seattle by doing some kind of idiotic variation on rent control. That will discourage developers from developing and put off the day when supply outstrips demand and prices moderate.
So I fear we are in for a lot more nonsense and half baked on this subject. Oh, well.
I live in Seattle. If you are part of the government of a city this is one of those "I wish I had that problem" problems. Real Estate prices in Seattle are literally skyrocketing. For several years now prices in Seattle have gone up more quickly than pretty much anywhere else. The well respected Case Shiller index has rated Seattle as the place where prices have gone up the fastest for several months in a row now. It has now been going on long enough that people are shouting "something has to be done". But what?
Rather than doing my usual historical backgrounder at this point I am going to do a "fundamentals" backgrounder.
Residential real estate is a "market". It is the very thing economists are talking about when they talk about a markets. As such it is subject to the rules of supply and demand. In an unconstrained market (more about this later) if there is more demand than supply prices go up. If there is more supply than demand prices go down. And that's what has been happening in Seattle. Little new supply has come online. Meanwhile Amazon, the web retailer, has been hiring like mad for jobs in buildings located in Seattle. A lot of these are high paying jobs. So these new hires have money in their pocket and they are looking for a convenient place to live.
And it's not just Amazon. Business in Seattle is doing well. So employment has been skyrocketing. That in turn has driven up demand for housing. That in turn has driven up prices. And so far that has not resulted in a bunch of new housing getting built. And that takes us to the whole "unconstrained market" thing.
Consider Houston, Texas for a moment. Houston is in the middle of nowhere. And by "nowhere" I mean it's surrounded by cheap flat land as far as the eye can see. If Houston needs bare dirt on which to build houses it just annexes a big chunk of land adjacent to city limits and tell developers to get on with it. And Houston has essentially no zoning laws. Developers cna build pretty much anything they want and they do. Houston has been growing very quickly for a long time now. But housing is still cheap. And this is because increased supply keeps up with increased demand. Houston is a classic example of an unconstrained market. And it demonstrates how supply and demand works in one situation.
Let's look at another situation, Detroit, Michigan. Detroit is a big place. It sprawls over 140 square miles. That's big. And back in the day Detroit had a large enough population to fill all that land up. But the auto industry declined. And production moved to the south. And automation drastically reduced the number of people it took to build a car. So good paying jobs went away. And eventually so did the population. Detroit has plenty of supply. You can literally pick up a nice house for $10,000. But there is no demand. People with no jobs and no other source of income can't afford a house even if it only costs $10,000. So a plentiful supply coupled with a total lack of demand has driven housing prices in Detroit effectively to zero.
There is something else going on here, something mostly ignored by economists. That is the rate at which the market can respond to supply/demand pressures. Economists generally look at the situation as a static one. They can use the supply/demand curve to calculate what direction the market is being pressured to move toward. But they generally ignore the rate at which the market can respond. If, for instance, we are talking stock prices then things can move quickly. With high volume computerized trading large moves can happen in less than a second. That is not true with the housing market. It takes years for the market to respond.
Detroit grew relatively slowly from the start of the twentieth century to roughly the middle. There was a steady growth in jobs. So there was a steady demand for more housing. Developers could see not only the current state of the market (favorable toward additional construction) but also the trend (also favorable to additional construction). So the city annexed land and developers developed it and Detroit has a housing market that stayed in balance.
But in the last few decades Detroit has suffered shock after shock. And they have turned the pressure for housing from positive (build more) to negative (we already have too much). And while the methods for adding housing are well understood by all the players (cities, developers, consumers) the methods for reducing housing are not well understood by the same set of players. So nobody has responded well. The city has gone bankrupt. Developers have either gone broke or moved somewhere else. Consumers have been stuck with houses they can't afford and can't sell. Lots of Detroit housing stock has been foreclosed on or abandoned. It has turned from an asset into a blight.
But hope springs eternal. So the sensible idea of bulldozing the dangerous derelicts and consolidating the city down to a size more consistent with the actual population, a move that would save the city tons of money by reducing the footprint of utilities, street maintenance, police/fire, bus service, etc. has, in the short run, proved impossible. Detroit and Seattle are opposites. The market has changed drastically. In Seattle's case it is for the good and in Detroit's case it is for the bad. But in both cases the market has not been able to change quickly enough to put things back in balance. This fundamental unwillingness to understand that the problem in both cases is a slow response to changed market conditions has generated a lot of anguish in both cases.
But back to the whole "unconstrained market" thing. It has been more than 50 years since Seattle has been able to add undeveloped land by annexation. It is now too late. Seattle is surrounded on all sides now. It is bounded by water on two sides and by other municipalities on the other two sides. Even if it succeeded in annexing land that annexation would not help. Houston can still annex undeveloped land but all the land surrounding Seattle is already developed. So the Houston solution is unavailable to Seattle. Here's where math kicks in.
It's all about density. If the population goes up the fact that Seattle can't get any bigger means the density goes up. It really is that simple. So one solution is to freeze or decrease the population. But before you do that it might be a good idea to ask Detroit how that worked for them. And in fact, Seattle's population actually stayed nearly constant from 1960 to 1990. That means the housing stock stayed the same, right? Well, actually no. By 1960 Seattle had pretty much developed all the land that existed within its city limits. Oh, there was the odd lot here and the odd lot there. But there were no large tracts of undeveloped land. And that means that construction of your standard stand alone house on its own lot contributed little or nothing to the increase in housing stock. But housing stock did grow.
Year by year multifamily development took place. This was a mix of apartments, condominiums, and town houses. So pretty much every year the number of square feet of space available for residential use went up. And mathematics demands that the average resident kept consuming more space on average. In 1960 most houses were occupied by families. So two, three, four, perhaps more people occupied each house. By 1990 the average number of people in a house had declined a lot. I live alone in a house that that in the past has hosted between two and four people.
There are now many houses with one or two people in them. This large decrease in the total number of people living in houses has been balanced by a large increase in the number of people living in apartments, condominiums, and town houses. The two changes, the decrease in the population living in stand alone houses and the increase in the number of people living in multiple family dwellings, pretty much exactly balanced each other out.
At least that was the story through 1990. The 2000 census showed for the first time in a long time a significant increase in Seattle's population. The 2010 census showed a big jump. And all the numbers say that since 2010 Seattle's population has been skyrocketing. For a couple of generations the Seattle political establishment operated in an environment where the population of Seattle was very stable. They had no experience with what to do when things changed and the population started to grow and then started to explode.
Standard market analysis tells us what the solution is. If demand is growing the proper response is to increase supply. And, as noted above, adding undeveloped land and then developing it (the Houston solution) is not an option. And, assuming we take the "drive the population down" option off the table, the only option is to increase density. And that means more apartments, condominiums, and town houses. It's really that simple.
But that clashes with Seattle's vision of itself. Seattle sees itself as some kind of suburb where single family houses on generous lots sprawl as far as the eye can see. So a few years ago Seattle put in an ordinance limiting the heights of residential buildings and constraining where they could be built. "Multifamily is just not Seattle." And it worked in that far too little multifamily residential development has taken place. And that's why supply and demand are currently so far out of whack.
And so we are back at it. The Seattle City Council has recently been raising allowable building heights in several neighborhoods. This has created lots of unhappy people. "You are destroying the neighborhood." But it doesn't matter how good or bad a neighborhood's ambience is if you can't afford to live there. And that's what is happening.
People are getting priced out. Renters have seen rents skyrocket. I have already mentioned that home prices have shot up so more and more people are being priced out of the market. So we are not talking about whether things are going to change. They are. It's inevitable. We are talking about how things are going to change. Pretty much nobody has figured that out. So a lot of what I hear boils down to "I want things to stay the same." That's not an option.
So among the actual alternatives how do we want things to change? Take increased density as a given. We are going to see more apartments, condominiums, and town houses. And the most basic question revolves around economics. How expensive do we want these units to be? There is a lot of hew and cry that Seattle needs more low income housing. Say that is so for the sake of argument. How do we proceed?
Well the consensus among low income housing advocates, and they are a large and well organized group in Seattle, is that developers should be required to create lots of units that are priced below market so that low income people can afford them. This is a variation on rent control. The rent on some units is artificially controlled to be below market. You can argue about the specifics for decades, and people have, but that's the basic idea. So right now in Seattle certain projects are required to include a certain number of these units. But the demand always vastly exceeds the supply. So a big bureaucracy must be put in place to decide who gets to actually occupy the units. And there are always lots of deserving people who don't make the cut. What do you do with them? Nobody's figured that out yet.
And there is lots of experience with rent control. New York City started out doing it a long time ago on a small scale. Then since demand always vastly exceeded supply they kept expanding the program and making it more bureaucratic and baroque. And it never quite worked. And it produced the New York of the '70s. You had large numbers of buildings that were falling down because they were badly maintained. Landlords decided that it was better to let the buildings fall apart than maintain them. Why? Rent control.
And for one reason or another there was a benefit to the owners to frequently selling the buildings so they did. The result was a long term downward spiral in the condition of a very large amount of what had initially been perfectly good housing stock. New York has gotten rid of a lot of its rent control and lots of new residential construction has been the result. But they haven't figured how to get rid of the last vestiges of rent control. So it limps on. And it's not like they figured out how to do rent control right somewhere else. The New York experience is particularly extreme but it hasn't really worked anywhere else either.
You can probably tell I am not a fan of rent control. So what's the alternative? It is a variation on the Houston plan. If developers can make money developing inexpensive housing that relatively poor people can afford they will. But the profit margin on expensive housing is higher. So builders will only develop inexpensive housing if the market for expensive housing is already saturated. That is definitely not true in Seattle. And that's reflected in the fact that there is a lot of housing going up. But it is all aimed at the high end of the market. Advocates are correct in the short run in saying that developers are tearing down relatively inexpensive housing in order to build expensive housing and that's making the problem for poor people worse. But I suggest taking a longer view.
Lots of the people moving into the new expensive housing are currently living in less expensive housing. As they move up it will free up mid market housing. Now the market in Seattle is so hot that this will not help much in the short run. But short run thinking is what got us where we are now. Developers always overbuild if given the chance. So the first thing that needs to be done is to give them a chance. The amount of housing coming on line this year (2017) and next will set records. That should depress prices. That is unless the market is so out of balance that this massive amount of additional supply still doesn't put us in balance. And in Seattle's case that is a significant possibility.
But that just means that the developers of the current slate of projects will make a ton of money. And that will just encourage more and more developers to build more and more projects. At some point they will get ahead of themselves. That is if they are allowed to. And the city's recent actions of increasing allowable building heights is a step in the right direction. The first step is allowing developers to develop. That is pretty straight forward.
The next step is much harder. Once they have saturated the expensive end of the market they will look down market toward the inexpensive part of the market. And a lot of crap inexpensive housing has been built at one time or another in one place or another. Housing advocates are almost as worried about this as they are about pricing people out of the market. So they tend to react by advocating for complex zoning whose objective is to force developers to build "nice" projects. The problem is no one has figured out how to write zoning rules that mix nice with inexpensive. Lots of zoning rules promote expensive. But they have a poor track record of promoting inexpensive buildings that are also nice.
My brother is an expert in this sort of thing. He hasn't figured out how to do it. He argues that it is possible to make a development both nice and inexpensive. He can show you a whole bunch of examples of this being done. But he hasn't figured out how to write zoning or other codes that makes it happen. And neither has anybody else. My recommendation is one of those that no one will like. I think zoning should focus on safety and that sort of thing. If developers want to build ugly buildings, let them.
And I think my recommendation will eventually fix Seattle's problem. If developers build enough supply then eventually it will outrun demand. At that point prices will moderate. But the soonest I can see my recommendation fixing the problem is five years and I have to admit it might take longer. And no one wants to wait that long. So we will probably screw things up in Seattle by doing some kind of idiotic variation on rent control. That will discourage developers from developing and put off the day when supply outstrips demand and prices moderate.
So I fear we are in for a lot more nonsense and half baked on this subject. Oh, well.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
50 Years of Science - Part 8
This is the eighth in a series. An index to the entire series can be found at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-links.html. I take the Isaac Asimov book "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences" as my baseline for the state of science as it was when he wrote the book (1959 - 1960). More than 50 years have now passed but I am going to stick with the original title anyhow even though it is now slightly inaccurate. In these posts I am reviewing what he reported and examining what has changed since. For this post I am starting with the chapter Asimov titled "The Shells of the Air" and then moving on to "The Gasses in the Air". These chapters are from his section entitled "The Atmosphere".
Asimov starts with Aristotle. He is one source for the idea that everything is composed of four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. To this traditional list Aristotle added ether, some kind of "fifth element" that was what the heavens above the earth were composed of. This place above the earth is where the celestial spheres of classical astronomy resided, for instance. And, as Asimov notes, the ancients had no notion of a vacuum, an absence of everything. And the ancients, at least those who followed the Greek way of thinking, subscribed to the idea that in some sense perfection existed. The celestial spheres were perfectly spherical for that reason, for instance.
The fact that nothing actually seemed to be perfect was some kind of perceptual failure on the part of humanity. But this led to a lot of arguments along the lines of "it has to be that way because 'X' is perfect (or the best or whatever). Anything that is less than perfect is obviously wrong. So we can discard without further debate any idea that requires the perfect to be replaced by the less than perfect." This line of thinking took a long time to overcome and held progress back for a goodly length of time. Replacing circular orbits (circular = perfect) with elliptical orbits (actually mathematically and geometrically very similar to circles but still less than perfection) was one of the critical nails in the coffin that buried this argument. But back to the air.
In spite of massive evidence to the contrary there were supposedly concentric shells of earth, water, air, and fire (with a super shell of ether at the top of the hierarchy). One of the problems with these ideas, Asimov notes, was that it should have been possible to use a pump to raise water to any height. But it turns out there was some kind of magic 33 foot limit. Investigations of this problem led to the conclusion that air had a small but definite weight and that there must be a limit to the height of the "air column". Further investigation led to Boyle's law that doubling the pressure halved the volume of a fixed amount of air (and later, any gas). This in turn led to the Montgolfier brothers inventing the hot air balloon. Others replaced hot air with other gases like Hydrogen. These gas balloons could rise to greater heights and this in turn led to the idea that the atmosphere has various layers. The first two to receive names were the troposphere and the stratosphere. Since these early days various other layers have been defined and named.
World War II saw the discovery of the jet-stream, actually jet streams. At the time Asimov was writing his book there was little thought about the interaction of jet streams and weather. But we now know they play a critical role. They are meandering flows of high speed winds, winds often reaching 500 miles per hour. The streams themselves but also the locations of the meanders have a powerful influence on the pattern of movement of air masses. This in turn heavily influences the tracks storms follow and, even more importantly, precipitation patterns.
Until roughly a year before I write this California suffered severe drought conditions for four years running. In the most recent year the weather has changed completely and the state is now experiencing higher than usual amounts of rain and snow. In both cases the reason behind these patterns are changes in the shape and intensity of the jet stream. With the jet stream meanders in one configuration all wet air was routed away from California resulting in a severe drought. With them in another configuration a greater than usual amount of wet air was directed over the state. The drought in California ended when the jet stream meanders switched to a new configuration. Jet stream patterns now figure heavily into medium and long range weather forecasts.
In 1960 the first weather satellite, Tiros I was launched. Since then the number and sophistication of weather satellites has grown by leaps and bounds. It is unimaginable that a modern TV weather forecast would be without "satellite photos" showing cloud patterns. A large amount of other data of meteorological significance is now also collected via satellite observation. And in the past decade or so this has been joined by Doppler radar images.
The technology requires sophisticated radar equipment, possibly available in 1960. But it also requires massive amounts of computer power to process the data from the radar. Computers of that time were not anywhere near capable enough to do the job. And Doppler radar allows not only the amount of water vapor in the air to be measured but also the direction it is moving in. When I was younger I remember the occasional large storm emerging from out of the North Pacific with little or no warning and wrecking havoc far and wide. Somehow the satellite pictures did not allow the weather people to accurately gage the size of the storm. But a Doppler radar unit pointing out to sea was installed on the coast a few years ago. It should make those kinds of surprises a thing of the past.
Up to and including the time of the book balloons were an important tool in the weather man's arsenal. And that continues to be true today. But their days are probably numbered. Thousands of weather balloons are currently being launched each day. But they are a single use package and that makes them expensive. Drones and other techniques are now becoming available that can gather more data at less cost. So the routine use of weather balloons will probably end within a decade.
The Tiros I satellite mentioned above was launched on a rocket. Modern rocketry, the kind not associated with fireworks, only dates back to 1801. And the scientific foundations of rocketry were laid down by an American, Robert Goddard, and a Russian, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in the first half of the twentieth century. Very little has changed since, Elon Musk not withstanding. The latest SpaceX rocket differs little from the Russian Lunik III rocket that returned the first pictures of the far side of the moon in 1959. The instrumentation and guidance computers have advanced by leaps and bounds but the motors and fuel have changed little.
The era of manned spaceflight had not begun at the time of the book's writing. The first man in space was a Russian, Yuri Gagarin. But his flight took place in 1961. The Russian 1957 launch of Sputnik I, the first "artificial moon", initiated the "space race" between the US and the USSR, as Russia was then constituted. The high point, at least in US eyes, was the "Apollo" moon landings between 1969 and 1972. But since then, without the political and propaganda necessity of "beating the other guys", manned space exploration has languished. The computer of 1960 was, by modern standards, a small crude affair with extremely modest capabilities. Modern computers are literally a million times more capable. This has made the robotic space probe possible. And the results have been spectacular.
In outer space electronics are much easier to keep healthy than people. So long duration missions based on equipment that consumed tiny amounts of power and no air or food became possible. One or more missions have now been sent to every planet, including the dwarf planet Pluto. Long duration missions to Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, comets, and the asteroid belt have all been successfully undertaken. Meanwhile, the International Space Station flounders along and nothing much of interest, either to scientists or to the general public, happens there. There is talk of tourist flights to the edge of the atmosphere (arbitrarily defined as 100 miles up) and even a publicity stunt manned flight around the moon. Various schemes are also afoot to colonize Mars. But all the "man/woman in space" stuff looks like wishful thinking to me.
Asimov then moves on to the composition of the atmosphere in "The Gases in the Air". The ancients considered the atmosphere to be a simple, homogeneous substance. That started changing in the seventeenth century. The first component discovered is a minor one, Carbon Dioxide. Next up to be discovered were Oxygen (a little less than 20%) and Nitrogen (roughly 80%). Much later Argon was discovered. Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Argon combine to make up 99% of what air consists of. Carbon Dioxide and the other trace components together add up to less than 1%.
At the time of writing the small amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air did not seem to make much difference. We now know better. Carbon Dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. Sunlight is a combination of many frequencies of light. The visible light that we can see is only one part. The air is transparent to visible light. It is also somewhat transparent to infrared light. The way a greenhouse works is that the glass passes sunlight light in so that it can be absorbed by plants, etc. But this causes things inside the greenhouse to warm up. Warm things emit infrared light. The glass traps the infrared light inside and the greenhouse gets warm.
The earth as a whole works the same way. Sunlight of many frequencies hits the earth. This warms things up and infrared light is emitted. The temperature of the earth is governed by the balance between these two processes. If the earth emits a lot of infrared light it cools down. If it emits very little it warms up. Carbon Dioxide behaves like the glass in a greenhouse. It traps the infrared and doesn't let it escape to space. So the more Carbon Dioxide in the air the less infrared light escapes to space and the warmer the earth gets. Scientists have been measuring the average amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air since about 1960 and it has been increasing. It goes up during parts of the year and down during other parts. But on average it goes up. And if you average out the temperature of the air over a reasonable amount of time, it is going up too.
There are confounding factors. But scientists have studied them all. Volcanoes emit Carbon Dioxide. But their influence is easily measured. The earth is closer to the sun at some times and further away at other times. This too is easily measured. There are complex techniques for figuring out where the Carbon Dioxide comes from. More and more of it every year comes from burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas.
There are other greenhouse gasses besides Carbon Dioxide. The two most common ones are water vapor and Methane. But there are weather processes that keep the amount of water vapor in the air relatively constant when averaged over time and space. Methane in actually a much more powerful greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide. A pound of Methane gas traps much more infrared radiation than a pound of Carbon Dioxide. But Methane flushes out of the air relatively quickly and Carbon Dioxide doesn't. When you factor "residency time" in Carbon Dioxide has a much bigger impact.
All this and more have been carefully investigated by scientists and by far the biggest contributor to global warming in the burning of fossil fuels. But all this was in the future and not even imagined when Asimov was writing. The basic mechanisms (i.e. the greenhouse effect of Carbon Dioxide) were understood at the time. But there didn't seem to be any reason to investigate further because there was no perceived problem.
So far we are talking about the lower atmosphere. It didn't take scientists long to figure out that the composition of air changed with altitude. Initially there was a lot of speculation and not much data. One theory had it that the upper atmosphere might contain large amounts of Hydrogen and Helium. It doesn't, a fact established before the book was written. If you go high enough you do find something interesting, Ozone. This is a highly ionized form of Oxygen. Other atoms and molecules that are generally not found at sea level were also discovered. In general the upper part of the atmosphere is bombarded with high energy particles. This causes strange things to happen. And some of those strange things are dangerous. But fortunately other lower layers of the atmosphere shield us from this bad stuff.
One of the contributing factors to understanding the upper atmosphere was the discovery of ions. These are molecules that do not have the usual number of electrons. If the molecule is short electrons it will have a positive charge. If there are extra electrons it will have a negative electric charge. The discovery of ions predated the discovery of electrons. Ions only made sense, however, after electrons were discovered.
All of chemistry boils down to the interactions between the electrons of different atoms. There are different kinds of chemical bonds but these are fundamentally just different ways for electrons to interact with ions and other electrons. The basics of this were understood by the time the book was written but at best they could handle simple cases. At about the time the book was published a theory called Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) was being developed. It allowed more complex situations to be analyzed. Since then advances in theory (i.e. QCD - Quantum Chromodynamics) and the available of massive amounts of computer power have allowed more and more complex situations to be handled.
Experiments with radio, starting about 1900 in at least in some cases produced surprising results. Radio waves normally travel in a straight line. Yet sometimes they will sometimes bend to follow the curvature of the earth. This lead to the naming of the Heaviside layer and investigations of what we now call the Ionosphere. At the time it was assumed that other than the odd radio nut this was of little interest to anybody else. We now know better. Decades later the effect of CFC chemicals on the Ozone layer was discovered. The Ozone layer is critical to our health and CFC chemicals were damaging it. So they were phased out. And the problems caused by CFCs are now much reduced and on their way to total elimination.
And while we associated Ozone with the upper atmosphere it turns out to also occur in trace amounts at sea level. And it has the nasty characteristic of combining with car exhaust to produce smog. At one time the problem became particularly acute in Los Angeles. As a result various regulations governing car exhaust have been put in place and ground level Ozone is now routinely monitored. Here too we have a success story. The smog problem in Los Angeles and elsewhere is pretty much a thing of the past.
Other problems are caused by some components of exhaust from Diesel cars. This has resulted in various rules and regulations that have gone a long way to reduce these negative impacts. But there are costs involved. And Volkswagen decided the costs were too high. So they engaged in an elaborate scheme to cheat. They were caught and forced to pay billions of dollars in damages and penalties.
In Asimov's time that last 1% seemed of primarily academic interest. That has definitely turned out to not be the case. It is yet another example of a situation where "useless" scientific investigations eventually turn out to be critical.
Asimov starts with Aristotle. He is one source for the idea that everything is composed of four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. To this traditional list Aristotle added ether, some kind of "fifth element" that was what the heavens above the earth were composed of. This place above the earth is where the celestial spheres of classical astronomy resided, for instance. And, as Asimov notes, the ancients had no notion of a vacuum, an absence of everything. And the ancients, at least those who followed the Greek way of thinking, subscribed to the idea that in some sense perfection existed. The celestial spheres were perfectly spherical for that reason, for instance.
The fact that nothing actually seemed to be perfect was some kind of perceptual failure on the part of humanity. But this led to a lot of arguments along the lines of "it has to be that way because 'X' is perfect (or the best or whatever). Anything that is less than perfect is obviously wrong. So we can discard without further debate any idea that requires the perfect to be replaced by the less than perfect." This line of thinking took a long time to overcome and held progress back for a goodly length of time. Replacing circular orbits (circular = perfect) with elliptical orbits (actually mathematically and geometrically very similar to circles but still less than perfection) was one of the critical nails in the coffin that buried this argument. But back to the air.
In spite of massive evidence to the contrary there were supposedly concentric shells of earth, water, air, and fire (with a super shell of ether at the top of the hierarchy). One of the problems with these ideas, Asimov notes, was that it should have been possible to use a pump to raise water to any height. But it turns out there was some kind of magic 33 foot limit. Investigations of this problem led to the conclusion that air had a small but definite weight and that there must be a limit to the height of the "air column". Further investigation led to Boyle's law that doubling the pressure halved the volume of a fixed amount of air (and later, any gas). This in turn led to the Montgolfier brothers inventing the hot air balloon. Others replaced hot air with other gases like Hydrogen. These gas balloons could rise to greater heights and this in turn led to the idea that the atmosphere has various layers. The first two to receive names were the troposphere and the stratosphere. Since these early days various other layers have been defined and named.
World War II saw the discovery of the jet-stream, actually jet streams. At the time Asimov was writing his book there was little thought about the interaction of jet streams and weather. But we now know they play a critical role. They are meandering flows of high speed winds, winds often reaching 500 miles per hour. The streams themselves but also the locations of the meanders have a powerful influence on the pattern of movement of air masses. This in turn heavily influences the tracks storms follow and, even more importantly, precipitation patterns.
Until roughly a year before I write this California suffered severe drought conditions for four years running. In the most recent year the weather has changed completely and the state is now experiencing higher than usual amounts of rain and snow. In both cases the reason behind these patterns are changes in the shape and intensity of the jet stream. With the jet stream meanders in one configuration all wet air was routed away from California resulting in a severe drought. With them in another configuration a greater than usual amount of wet air was directed over the state. The drought in California ended when the jet stream meanders switched to a new configuration. Jet stream patterns now figure heavily into medium and long range weather forecasts.
In 1960 the first weather satellite, Tiros I was launched. Since then the number and sophistication of weather satellites has grown by leaps and bounds. It is unimaginable that a modern TV weather forecast would be without "satellite photos" showing cloud patterns. A large amount of other data of meteorological significance is now also collected via satellite observation. And in the past decade or so this has been joined by Doppler radar images.
The technology requires sophisticated radar equipment, possibly available in 1960. But it also requires massive amounts of computer power to process the data from the radar. Computers of that time were not anywhere near capable enough to do the job. And Doppler radar allows not only the amount of water vapor in the air to be measured but also the direction it is moving in. When I was younger I remember the occasional large storm emerging from out of the North Pacific with little or no warning and wrecking havoc far and wide. Somehow the satellite pictures did not allow the weather people to accurately gage the size of the storm. But a Doppler radar unit pointing out to sea was installed on the coast a few years ago. It should make those kinds of surprises a thing of the past.
Up to and including the time of the book balloons were an important tool in the weather man's arsenal. And that continues to be true today. But their days are probably numbered. Thousands of weather balloons are currently being launched each day. But they are a single use package and that makes them expensive. Drones and other techniques are now becoming available that can gather more data at less cost. So the routine use of weather balloons will probably end within a decade.
The Tiros I satellite mentioned above was launched on a rocket. Modern rocketry, the kind not associated with fireworks, only dates back to 1801. And the scientific foundations of rocketry were laid down by an American, Robert Goddard, and a Russian, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in the first half of the twentieth century. Very little has changed since, Elon Musk not withstanding. The latest SpaceX rocket differs little from the Russian Lunik III rocket that returned the first pictures of the far side of the moon in 1959. The instrumentation and guidance computers have advanced by leaps and bounds but the motors and fuel have changed little.
The era of manned spaceflight had not begun at the time of the book's writing. The first man in space was a Russian, Yuri Gagarin. But his flight took place in 1961. The Russian 1957 launch of Sputnik I, the first "artificial moon", initiated the "space race" between the US and the USSR, as Russia was then constituted. The high point, at least in US eyes, was the "Apollo" moon landings between 1969 and 1972. But since then, without the political and propaganda necessity of "beating the other guys", manned space exploration has languished. The computer of 1960 was, by modern standards, a small crude affair with extremely modest capabilities. Modern computers are literally a million times more capable. This has made the robotic space probe possible. And the results have been spectacular.
In outer space electronics are much easier to keep healthy than people. So long duration missions based on equipment that consumed tiny amounts of power and no air or food became possible. One or more missions have now been sent to every planet, including the dwarf planet Pluto. Long duration missions to Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, comets, and the asteroid belt have all been successfully undertaken. Meanwhile, the International Space Station flounders along and nothing much of interest, either to scientists or to the general public, happens there. There is talk of tourist flights to the edge of the atmosphere (arbitrarily defined as 100 miles up) and even a publicity stunt manned flight around the moon. Various schemes are also afoot to colonize Mars. But all the "man/woman in space" stuff looks like wishful thinking to me.
Asimov then moves on to the composition of the atmosphere in "The Gases in the Air". The ancients considered the atmosphere to be a simple, homogeneous substance. That started changing in the seventeenth century. The first component discovered is a minor one, Carbon Dioxide. Next up to be discovered were Oxygen (a little less than 20%) and Nitrogen (roughly 80%). Much later Argon was discovered. Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Argon combine to make up 99% of what air consists of. Carbon Dioxide and the other trace components together add up to less than 1%.
At the time of writing the small amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air did not seem to make much difference. We now know better. Carbon Dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. Sunlight is a combination of many frequencies of light. The visible light that we can see is only one part. The air is transparent to visible light. It is also somewhat transparent to infrared light. The way a greenhouse works is that the glass passes sunlight light in so that it can be absorbed by plants, etc. But this causes things inside the greenhouse to warm up. Warm things emit infrared light. The glass traps the infrared light inside and the greenhouse gets warm.
The earth as a whole works the same way. Sunlight of many frequencies hits the earth. This warms things up and infrared light is emitted. The temperature of the earth is governed by the balance between these two processes. If the earth emits a lot of infrared light it cools down. If it emits very little it warms up. Carbon Dioxide behaves like the glass in a greenhouse. It traps the infrared and doesn't let it escape to space. So the more Carbon Dioxide in the air the less infrared light escapes to space and the warmer the earth gets. Scientists have been measuring the average amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air since about 1960 and it has been increasing. It goes up during parts of the year and down during other parts. But on average it goes up. And if you average out the temperature of the air over a reasonable amount of time, it is going up too.
There are confounding factors. But scientists have studied them all. Volcanoes emit Carbon Dioxide. But their influence is easily measured. The earth is closer to the sun at some times and further away at other times. This too is easily measured. There are complex techniques for figuring out where the Carbon Dioxide comes from. More and more of it every year comes from burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas.
There are other greenhouse gasses besides Carbon Dioxide. The two most common ones are water vapor and Methane. But there are weather processes that keep the amount of water vapor in the air relatively constant when averaged over time and space. Methane in actually a much more powerful greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide. A pound of Methane gas traps much more infrared radiation than a pound of Carbon Dioxide. But Methane flushes out of the air relatively quickly and Carbon Dioxide doesn't. When you factor "residency time" in Carbon Dioxide has a much bigger impact.
All this and more have been carefully investigated by scientists and by far the biggest contributor to global warming in the burning of fossil fuels. But all this was in the future and not even imagined when Asimov was writing. The basic mechanisms (i.e. the greenhouse effect of Carbon Dioxide) were understood at the time. But there didn't seem to be any reason to investigate further because there was no perceived problem.
So far we are talking about the lower atmosphere. It didn't take scientists long to figure out that the composition of air changed with altitude. Initially there was a lot of speculation and not much data. One theory had it that the upper atmosphere might contain large amounts of Hydrogen and Helium. It doesn't, a fact established before the book was written. If you go high enough you do find something interesting, Ozone. This is a highly ionized form of Oxygen. Other atoms and molecules that are generally not found at sea level were also discovered. In general the upper part of the atmosphere is bombarded with high energy particles. This causes strange things to happen. And some of those strange things are dangerous. But fortunately other lower layers of the atmosphere shield us from this bad stuff.
One of the contributing factors to understanding the upper atmosphere was the discovery of ions. These are molecules that do not have the usual number of electrons. If the molecule is short electrons it will have a positive charge. If there are extra electrons it will have a negative electric charge. The discovery of ions predated the discovery of electrons. Ions only made sense, however, after electrons were discovered.
All of chemistry boils down to the interactions between the electrons of different atoms. There are different kinds of chemical bonds but these are fundamentally just different ways for electrons to interact with ions and other electrons. The basics of this were understood by the time the book was written but at best they could handle simple cases. At about the time the book was published a theory called Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) was being developed. It allowed more complex situations to be analyzed. Since then advances in theory (i.e. QCD - Quantum Chromodynamics) and the available of massive amounts of computer power have allowed more and more complex situations to be handled.
Experiments with radio, starting about 1900 in at least in some cases produced surprising results. Radio waves normally travel in a straight line. Yet sometimes they will sometimes bend to follow the curvature of the earth. This lead to the naming of the Heaviside layer and investigations of what we now call the Ionosphere. At the time it was assumed that other than the odd radio nut this was of little interest to anybody else. We now know better. Decades later the effect of CFC chemicals on the Ozone layer was discovered. The Ozone layer is critical to our health and CFC chemicals were damaging it. So they were phased out. And the problems caused by CFCs are now much reduced and on their way to total elimination.
And while we associated Ozone with the upper atmosphere it turns out to also occur in trace amounts at sea level. And it has the nasty characteristic of combining with car exhaust to produce smog. At one time the problem became particularly acute in Los Angeles. As a result various regulations governing car exhaust have been put in place and ground level Ozone is now routinely monitored. Here too we have a success story. The smog problem in Los Angeles and elsewhere is pretty much a thing of the past.
Other problems are caused by some components of exhaust from Diesel cars. This has resulted in various rules and regulations that have gone a long way to reduce these negative impacts. But there are costs involved. And Volkswagen decided the costs were too high. So they engaged in an elaborate scheme to cheat. They were caught and forced to pay billions of dollars in damages and penalties.
In Asimov's time that last 1% seemed of primarily academic interest. That has definitely turned out to not be the case. It is yet another example of a situation where "useless" scientific investigations eventually turn out to be critical.
50 Years of Science - Links
Normally I do not update posts after they are initially published. I feel it is only fair that you be able to go back and see what I said then and judge how it stands up in light of subsequent developments. This post will violate that policy.
For some time I have been publishing a series of "50 Years of Science" posts. The best way to read them as a group is by reading them in the order I published them. But I publish installments on an irregular basis so that is hard to do. I can link the current entry to the previous entry. And you can follow the chain all the way back to the first entry. But that means you end up reading them in reverse order.
You can, of course, start with the first one. But it does not contain a link to any of the subsequent ones. So, in general, you must hunt around to find them all. And it's hard to know if you have found all of them. I have decided to fix that problem.
The sole reason for the existence of this post is so that it can contain links to all the posts in the series. That way you can use this post as your home base and read any or all of the posts in the series in whatever order you want.
But I expect to add additional entries to the series from time to time. But from here out when I add a new entry I will update this entry to include a link to that new entry too. This will necessitate updating this post from time to time, perhaps long after the initial version is published. And that's my justification for making this a living post.
I will periodically update this entry on an "as needed" basis. At the time I am creating the initial version there are 7 official entries. I am also including a link to a closely related entry. (See below for details.) But I expect to create an eighth official entry in the series soon. That will necessitate updating this post shortly after the initial version is published. Subsequent additions to the series will necessitate further updates. So there will probably never be a final version.
Here are the links:
Part 1 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/07/50-years-of-science-part-1.html
Part 2 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/08/50-years-of-science-part-2.html
Part 3 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/09/50-years-of-science-part-3.html
Part 4 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/09/50-years-of-science-part-4.html
Part 5 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/03/50-years-of-science-part-5.html
Part 6 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/03/50-years-of-science-part-6.html
Part 7 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/08/50-years-of-sceince-part-7.html
Predictions -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/09/50-years-of-science-predictions.html
Note: This isn't technically part of the series. But it is based on Asimov's writing. In 1964 he published an article in the New York Times in which he made a number of predictions about the state of Science 50 years in the future. This post discusses his original story, an interesting commentary by the noted Science Fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, and, of course, my observations on both. If you are interested in the series I think you will be interested in this post too.
Part 8 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-part-8.html
Part 9 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2018/02/50-years-of-science-part-9.html
Part 10 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2018/07/50-years-of-science-part-10.html
Part 12 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2018/10/50-years-of-science-part-12.html
Part 13 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/03/50-years-of-science-part-13.html
Bonus -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/05/rare-earth-20-years-of-science.html
Note: This isn't technically part of the series. But it falls within the spirit of the series. So I am including it as a bonus.
Part 14 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/06/50-years-of-science-part-14.html
Part 15 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/08/50-years-of-sceince-part-15.html
Part 16 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/02/60-years-of-science-part-16.html
Part 17 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/03/6-years-of-sceince-part-17.html
Part 18 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/05/60-years-of-sceince-part-18.html
Part 19 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/07/60-years-of-science-part-19.html
For some time I have been publishing a series of "50 Years of Science" posts. The best way to read them as a group is by reading them in the order I published them. But I publish installments on an irregular basis so that is hard to do. I can link the current entry to the previous entry. And you can follow the chain all the way back to the first entry. But that means you end up reading them in reverse order.
You can, of course, start with the first one. But it does not contain a link to any of the subsequent ones. So, in general, you must hunt around to find them all. And it's hard to know if you have found all of them. I have decided to fix that problem.
The sole reason for the existence of this post is so that it can contain links to all the posts in the series. That way you can use this post as your home base and read any or all of the posts in the series in whatever order you want.
But I expect to add additional entries to the series from time to time. But from here out when I add a new entry I will update this entry to include a link to that new entry too. This will necessitate updating this post from time to time, perhaps long after the initial version is published. And that's my justification for making this a living post.
I will periodically update this entry on an "as needed" basis. At the time I am creating the initial version there are 7 official entries. I am also including a link to a closely related entry. (See below for details.) But I expect to create an eighth official entry in the series soon. That will necessitate updating this post shortly after the initial version is published. Subsequent additions to the series will necessitate further updates. So there will probably never be a final version.
Here are the links:
Part 1 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/07/50-years-of-science-part-1.html
Part 2 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/08/50-years-of-science-part-2.html
Part 3 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/09/50-years-of-science-part-3.html
Part 4 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/09/50-years-of-science-part-4.html
Part 5 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/03/50-years-of-science-part-5.html
Part 6 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/03/50-years-of-science-part-6.html
Part 7 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/08/50-years-of-sceince-part-7.html
Predictions -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/09/50-years-of-science-predictions.html
Note: This isn't technically part of the series. But it is based on Asimov's writing. In 1964 he published an article in the New York Times in which he made a number of predictions about the state of Science 50 years in the future. This post discusses his original story, an interesting commentary by the noted Science Fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, and, of course, my observations on both. If you are interested in the series I think you will be interested in this post too.
Part 8 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-part-8.html
Part 9 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2018/02/50-years-of-science-part-9.html
Part 10 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2018/07/50-years-of-science-part-10.html
Part 11 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2018/10/50-years-of-science-part-12.html
Part 13 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/03/50-years-of-science-part-13.html
Bonus -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/05/rare-earth-20-years-of-science.html
Note: This isn't technically part of the series. But it falls within the spirit of the series. So I am including it as a bonus.
Part 14 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/06/50-years-of-science-part-14.html
Part 15 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/08/50-years-of-sceince-part-15.html
Part 16 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/02/60-years-of-science-part-16.html
Part 17 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/03/6-years-of-sceince-part-17.html
Part 18 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/05/60-years-of-sceince-part-18.html
Part 19 -
https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/07/60-years-of-science-part-19.html
Part 20 -
Part 21 -
Part 22 -
Part 23 -
Note:
With the addition of the link to Part 23 the series is complete. That means that no more updates will be made to this post.
Saturday, April 15, 2017
Vaudeville
I went to a Vaudeville performance a couple of weeks ago. Well, not exactly vaudeville, but more on that later. Vaudeville was a hot thing from about 1880 until about 1920. When it first started it seemed very forward looking and modern. That's because at the time it was.
Vaudeville was invented by a fellow named Keith in Boston. At the time entertainment options were very limited. In big cities like New York there was an active theater scene. New York provided a large enough audience pool to make theaters providing a variety of entertainment a paying proposition. The same was marginally true in a place like Boston. But the question for potential theater owners in markets smaller than Boston was how to make a go of it?
There was a big enough audience to keep a theater profitable if enough acts of high enough quality could be found. But playing in the "sticks" seemed like a crap shoot to many acts so often so they didn't try. From their perspective it looked expensive for a single act to put together the publicity and absorb the other expenses necessary to attract a big enough crowd to make it a paying proposition. So almost nobody tried and many that tried lost money on the deal. The result was that outside of a few large markets like New York there was just not much going on.
But technology had marched on. Specifically the telegraph and the railroad had achieved penetration into many small to medium sized markets. Keith was the first to really figure this out. Using the telegraph he could organize a string of theaters in small and medium markets to act as a group. And the acts could use the railroad to move around reasonably inexpensively and in reasonable comfort at reasonable speed. And they could stay, again reasonably comfortably and reasonably inexpensively, at the "railroad hotels" that sprang up close to railroad stations.
Keith was the first to put it all together. He organized a number of theaters in the northeast into a "circuit". He promised them a series of quality acts. They provided the local marketing. After all, it was in their interest to fill their theaters. Then he could talk to various acts. Sure, it wasn't New York but he could promise them six, twelve, eighteen weeks of continuous employment as they traveled the circuit from theater to theater. All they had to do was show up and do their act. All the rest of it would be taken care of "for a modest fee" by the Keith organization.
Keith made one other decision. He promised "family friendly" entertainment. Men could take their wives and girlfriends, even their children, to a Keith Vaudeville show and be guaranteed "good clean fun". This formula was an almost immediate success. The locals knew that the "Vaudeville show" at their local theater would be a good entertainment value even if they had heard of few if any of the performers. And the show was a "variety" show. It consisted of a number of acts, each lasting five to ten minutes and each different from the preceding act and the following act. The idea was that most acts would appeal to most people. But if you really had no interest in a specific act it would be over soon. And the next act would be "something completely different" that was more appealing to you.
A vaudeville show was a success for a patron if they liked a few acts a lot, thought most of the acts were okay to good and really didn't like only a few acts. In many marriages the tastes of the couple might be quite different. But they could both go to the same vaudeville show and enjoy themselves. The wife might hate a couple of the acts that the husband loved and vice versa. But they could both find enough to like in the entirety of the show that they both enjoyed themselves. And they probably felt that sitting through a couple of relatively short performances that they really didn't like was a cheap price to pay to maintain marital harmony.
On the other hand, to be a successful vaudeville act all you needed was between five and ten minutes of popular material. This might consist of anything. Many opera singers did well in vaudeville. Opera is not for everybody but it is as good as it gets for some. And even if you really didn't like Opera you could put up with it for five or ten minutes and then score major "culture" points later. But the bulk of the acts were singers or dancers or story tellers. Will Rogers got his start in vaudeville telling jokes and doing rope tricks. But if you had a good juggling act or magic act or whatever, you could be a hit on the "circuit".
And it turned out that a lot of different people had a lot of different and interesting ideas about how to entertain people for five to ten minutes. And if they could break into the circuit and attain some measure of success they could earn a very good living. So once vaudeville got established as a viable entity the acts started appearing seemingly out of nowhere.
And theaters were able to develop a reputation for providing a consistently good product. And the show was changed frequently, typically every week or so. So even if you had seen the vaudeville show just a couple of weeks ago there was reason to come back. The lineup would have changed and you would see a new set of acts. And then there's the lineup.
There is a famous song that has a line that goes "we were on next to closing". What's that about? Well, the strongest act was booked as the second to last act. It turns out that a significant portion of patrons like to "beat the rush". So they leave before the last act finishes. So the last slot is not the best slot. And people are finding their seats and settling down when the first act comes on. So you want an act that grabs people's attention and can survive a certain amount of commotion as your opening act. And the last act before intermission is a good spot. Performers and bookers quickly figured out which were the better and not so good slots in the bill. If your act was continuously being moved to a better slot your future was secure. If your slot kept getting downgraded it might be time to "freshen up the act". And so on.
Anyhow, Keith was the first one to figure this out. But others quickly caught on and emulated his technique. Keith was "east coast". The Orpheum circuit out of San Francisco was one of the early "west coast" Vaudeville circuits. It was quickly joined by the Pantages organization out of Seattle. Orpheum and Pantages battled it out for domination for years. But for a good long while there was enough business for several vaudeville circuits to do well simultaneously and they did.
But what technology make possible technology can often make obsolete. And that's what happened to vaudeville. For a long time it was pretty much the only game in town. Before vaudeville if you did not live in the big city then occasionally some kind of traveling entertainment might come through town. But it was intermittent and relatively expensive. One single act had to recoup enough from box office receipts to cover all the expenses. With vaudeville the economies of an assembly line that delivered act after act into town after town meant that the price of a vaudeville ticket could be relatively low. But the cost was only relatively low.
Movies, particularly the "talkies" could deliver quality entertainment much less expensively. And by about 1930 radio could do the same thing. A radio receiver was expensive. But once you owned one it was free. An argument could and often was made that vaudeville was "better" entertainment. But it was also more expensive entertainment. And people could opt to go to a vaudeville show every six weeks instead of every two weeks. And lots of people did. But as the audience shrank and the pressure on ticket prices increased it became harder and harder to keep vaudeville in the black.
At the height of the vaudeville period it was a good investment to build spectacular theaters. So lots of towns ended up with a Fox, or an Orpheum, or a Pantages theater, or perhaps all three. And the interiors of these theaters were spectacular. But by the twenties they were all converted to show movies. And both the Keith and the Orpheum vaudeville chains eventually got merged into the RKO (Radio, Keith, Orpheum) movie studio. And what RKO was buying was a string of theaters to snow movies in.
Technically, the show I went to was not a vaudeville show. It was a burlesque show. Remember the whole "family friendly" idea Keith incorporated into his business plan. Well, burlesque is the "adult oriented" version of vaudeville. A lot of comics could move freely between the two modes of entertainment. They could do family friendly material on a vaudeville bill. But for when people wanted an act with a little more bite, they could "go blue", add adult language and situations into their material. And since the movies and radio were aggressively family friendly burlesque outlived vaudeville by several decades.
And the other component we associate with burlesque is the strip tease. XXX movies effectively did in the old strip tease market. Why would you pay good money to see a pretty girl take most of her clothes off if you could see an equally pretty girl getting it on with some guy. And there was no "tease" in porn. Nothing was left to the imagination. But police departments prohibited full nudity in a strip tease act.
But it turns out this sells strip tease short as an actual art form. When strip tease was "as dirty as it gets in public" then all the focus was on the "dirty" part and people sneered at the idea that there was any art involved. And there were certainly a number of strip tease "artists" whose performance was almost entirely "strip", little if any "art", and often not much "tease" either. But that was not uniformly true. The most famous example is Gypsy Rose Lee. Her performances were actually performances. They contained a lot of entertainment. And the point was not how naked would she be at the end of the act but how entertaining she was able to make the path was that she took the audience down along the way.
So we went through the phase where it was a lot of vaudeville and not much burlesque. Then vaudeville was killed off but burlesque lived on. But it was all about the dirty. Then porn came along, first in run down urban movie theaters and then on home DVD players. And that killed off burlesque. But once it was completely dead it got resurrected, eventually
Gypsy had made an articulate case that there was an art to artfully taking your clothes off. There is a story that one time the only thing she took off during her whole act was one glove and the audience loved it. But by the '60s mostly strip tease was used as a cultural cue. The 1963 file "The Right Stuff" contains a sequence in which Sally Rand is performing her famous "Fan Dance" number in the background. The events in the 2002 film "Chicago" supposedly take place in the '20s. So there is a "fan dance" number executed by the chorus that is a complete steal of the Sally Rand performance. It's a great number in a family friendly film. And that more than anything makes the case for Ms. Lee and her modern acolytes.
The most famous of these modern acolytes is Dita Von Teese, who became interested in the subject in 1992. She got mainstreamed by appearing several times in Playboy. She used her exposure to, among other things, promote strip tease as an art form. Her performances included a Sally Rand fan dance. But among here other offerings was disrobing in an oversized martini glass, a dance with a large ball (actually a balloon), and a delightful number featuring a claw foot bathtub with about 6 inches of water in it.
The baton has now been passed from Mr. Von Teese to, among others, a local favorite of mine, Lily Verlaine. And this revival of strip tease as an art form is now established enough to go under the name neo-burlesque. Wikipedia now has a long list of where you can go to see these kinds of shows at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Burlesque_festivals. The show I went to is part of and annual event in Seattle called Moisture Festival (Link: http://www.moisturefestival.com/). It encompasses multiple performances, some vaudeville and some burlesque.
Porn is now only a few clicks away on the Internet. So the draw is no longer necked ladies doing naughty things. In some ways it is quite tame. The ladies strip down to pasties and a G-string but no further and that's now enough to make most police departments happy. And while most performances are designed to be erotic it's not always true. But there is never any overt sexual content. It's all about the artistry. Now more than ever, "You Gotta have a Gimmick", as the song from "Gypsy" tells us. Take it from me, a good gimmick is a thing of beauty and a joy to behold.
Vaudeville was invented by a fellow named Keith in Boston. At the time entertainment options were very limited. In big cities like New York there was an active theater scene. New York provided a large enough audience pool to make theaters providing a variety of entertainment a paying proposition. The same was marginally true in a place like Boston. But the question for potential theater owners in markets smaller than Boston was how to make a go of it?
There was a big enough audience to keep a theater profitable if enough acts of high enough quality could be found. But playing in the "sticks" seemed like a crap shoot to many acts so often so they didn't try. From their perspective it looked expensive for a single act to put together the publicity and absorb the other expenses necessary to attract a big enough crowd to make it a paying proposition. So almost nobody tried and many that tried lost money on the deal. The result was that outside of a few large markets like New York there was just not much going on.
But technology had marched on. Specifically the telegraph and the railroad had achieved penetration into many small to medium sized markets. Keith was the first to really figure this out. Using the telegraph he could organize a string of theaters in small and medium markets to act as a group. And the acts could use the railroad to move around reasonably inexpensively and in reasonable comfort at reasonable speed. And they could stay, again reasonably comfortably and reasonably inexpensively, at the "railroad hotels" that sprang up close to railroad stations.
Keith was the first to put it all together. He organized a number of theaters in the northeast into a "circuit". He promised them a series of quality acts. They provided the local marketing. After all, it was in their interest to fill their theaters. Then he could talk to various acts. Sure, it wasn't New York but he could promise them six, twelve, eighteen weeks of continuous employment as they traveled the circuit from theater to theater. All they had to do was show up and do their act. All the rest of it would be taken care of "for a modest fee" by the Keith organization.
Keith made one other decision. He promised "family friendly" entertainment. Men could take their wives and girlfriends, even their children, to a Keith Vaudeville show and be guaranteed "good clean fun". This formula was an almost immediate success. The locals knew that the "Vaudeville show" at their local theater would be a good entertainment value even if they had heard of few if any of the performers. And the show was a "variety" show. It consisted of a number of acts, each lasting five to ten minutes and each different from the preceding act and the following act. The idea was that most acts would appeal to most people. But if you really had no interest in a specific act it would be over soon. And the next act would be "something completely different" that was more appealing to you.
A vaudeville show was a success for a patron if they liked a few acts a lot, thought most of the acts were okay to good and really didn't like only a few acts. In many marriages the tastes of the couple might be quite different. But they could both go to the same vaudeville show and enjoy themselves. The wife might hate a couple of the acts that the husband loved and vice versa. But they could both find enough to like in the entirety of the show that they both enjoyed themselves. And they probably felt that sitting through a couple of relatively short performances that they really didn't like was a cheap price to pay to maintain marital harmony.
On the other hand, to be a successful vaudeville act all you needed was between five and ten minutes of popular material. This might consist of anything. Many opera singers did well in vaudeville. Opera is not for everybody but it is as good as it gets for some. And even if you really didn't like Opera you could put up with it for five or ten minutes and then score major "culture" points later. But the bulk of the acts were singers or dancers or story tellers. Will Rogers got his start in vaudeville telling jokes and doing rope tricks. But if you had a good juggling act or magic act or whatever, you could be a hit on the "circuit".
And it turned out that a lot of different people had a lot of different and interesting ideas about how to entertain people for five to ten minutes. And if they could break into the circuit and attain some measure of success they could earn a very good living. So once vaudeville got established as a viable entity the acts started appearing seemingly out of nowhere.
And theaters were able to develop a reputation for providing a consistently good product. And the show was changed frequently, typically every week or so. So even if you had seen the vaudeville show just a couple of weeks ago there was reason to come back. The lineup would have changed and you would see a new set of acts. And then there's the lineup.
There is a famous song that has a line that goes "we were on next to closing". What's that about? Well, the strongest act was booked as the second to last act. It turns out that a significant portion of patrons like to "beat the rush". So they leave before the last act finishes. So the last slot is not the best slot. And people are finding their seats and settling down when the first act comes on. So you want an act that grabs people's attention and can survive a certain amount of commotion as your opening act. And the last act before intermission is a good spot. Performers and bookers quickly figured out which were the better and not so good slots in the bill. If your act was continuously being moved to a better slot your future was secure. If your slot kept getting downgraded it might be time to "freshen up the act". And so on.
Anyhow, Keith was the first one to figure this out. But others quickly caught on and emulated his technique. Keith was "east coast". The Orpheum circuit out of San Francisco was one of the early "west coast" Vaudeville circuits. It was quickly joined by the Pantages organization out of Seattle. Orpheum and Pantages battled it out for domination for years. But for a good long while there was enough business for several vaudeville circuits to do well simultaneously and they did.
But what technology make possible technology can often make obsolete. And that's what happened to vaudeville. For a long time it was pretty much the only game in town. Before vaudeville if you did not live in the big city then occasionally some kind of traveling entertainment might come through town. But it was intermittent and relatively expensive. One single act had to recoup enough from box office receipts to cover all the expenses. With vaudeville the economies of an assembly line that delivered act after act into town after town meant that the price of a vaudeville ticket could be relatively low. But the cost was only relatively low.
Movies, particularly the "talkies" could deliver quality entertainment much less expensively. And by about 1930 radio could do the same thing. A radio receiver was expensive. But once you owned one it was free. An argument could and often was made that vaudeville was "better" entertainment. But it was also more expensive entertainment. And people could opt to go to a vaudeville show every six weeks instead of every two weeks. And lots of people did. But as the audience shrank and the pressure on ticket prices increased it became harder and harder to keep vaudeville in the black.
At the height of the vaudeville period it was a good investment to build spectacular theaters. So lots of towns ended up with a Fox, or an Orpheum, or a Pantages theater, or perhaps all three. And the interiors of these theaters were spectacular. But by the twenties they were all converted to show movies. And both the Keith and the Orpheum vaudeville chains eventually got merged into the RKO (Radio, Keith, Orpheum) movie studio. And what RKO was buying was a string of theaters to snow movies in.
Technically, the show I went to was not a vaudeville show. It was a burlesque show. Remember the whole "family friendly" idea Keith incorporated into his business plan. Well, burlesque is the "adult oriented" version of vaudeville. A lot of comics could move freely between the two modes of entertainment. They could do family friendly material on a vaudeville bill. But for when people wanted an act with a little more bite, they could "go blue", add adult language and situations into their material. And since the movies and radio were aggressively family friendly burlesque outlived vaudeville by several decades.
And the other component we associate with burlesque is the strip tease. XXX movies effectively did in the old strip tease market. Why would you pay good money to see a pretty girl take most of her clothes off if you could see an equally pretty girl getting it on with some guy. And there was no "tease" in porn. Nothing was left to the imagination. But police departments prohibited full nudity in a strip tease act.
But it turns out this sells strip tease short as an actual art form. When strip tease was "as dirty as it gets in public" then all the focus was on the "dirty" part and people sneered at the idea that there was any art involved. And there were certainly a number of strip tease "artists" whose performance was almost entirely "strip", little if any "art", and often not much "tease" either. But that was not uniformly true. The most famous example is Gypsy Rose Lee. Her performances were actually performances. They contained a lot of entertainment. And the point was not how naked would she be at the end of the act but how entertaining she was able to make the path was that she took the audience down along the way.
So we went through the phase where it was a lot of vaudeville and not much burlesque. Then vaudeville was killed off but burlesque lived on. But it was all about the dirty. Then porn came along, first in run down urban movie theaters and then on home DVD players. And that killed off burlesque. But once it was completely dead it got resurrected, eventually
Gypsy had made an articulate case that there was an art to artfully taking your clothes off. There is a story that one time the only thing she took off during her whole act was one glove and the audience loved it. But by the '60s mostly strip tease was used as a cultural cue. The 1963 file "The Right Stuff" contains a sequence in which Sally Rand is performing her famous "Fan Dance" number in the background. The events in the 2002 film "Chicago" supposedly take place in the '20s. So there is a "fan dance" number executed by the chorus that is a complete steal of the Sally Rand performance. It's a great number in a family friendly film. And that more than anything makes the case for Ms. Lee and her modern acolytes.
The most famous of these modern acolytes is Dita Von Teese, who became interested in the subject in 1992. She got mainstreamed by appearing several times in Playboy. She used her exposure to, among other things, promote strip tease as an art form. Her performances included a Sally Rand fan dance. But among here other offerings was disrobing in an oversized martini glass, a dance with a large ball (actually a balloon), and a delightful number featuring a claw foot bathtub with about 6 inches of water in it.
The baton has now been passed from Mr. Von Teese to, among others, a local favorite of mine, Lily Verlaine. And this revival of strip tease as an art form is now established enough to go under the name neo-burlesque. Wikipedia now has a long list of where you can go to see these kinds of shows at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Burlesque_festivals. The show I went to is part of and annual event in Seattle called Moisture Festival (Link: http://www.moisturefestival.com/). It encompasses multiple performances, some vaudeville and some burlesque.
Porn is now only a few clicks away on the Internet. So the draw is no longer necked ladies doing naughty things. In some ways it is quite tame. The ladies strip down to pasties and a G-string but no further and that's now enough to make most police departments happy. And while most performances are designed to be erotic it's not always true. But there is never any overt sexual content. It's all about the artistry. Now more than ever, "You Gotta have a Gimmick", as the song from "Gypsy" tells us. Take it from me, a good gimmick is a thing of beauty and a joy to behold.
Thursday, March 16, 2017
A Thought Experiment
Thought Experiments are one of the more interesting but underappreciated tools Scientists use. It has come into modern use through the Germans. Their term "Gedankenexperiment" is literally a mashup of the German word for "thought" (gedanken) and the word "experiment". The term and procedure first became popular among German scientists in the 1800's. Its international use became popular as a result of its frequent and very effective public use by Einstein. But the concept actually dates back to the ancient Greeks who called the same process "deiknymi".
But okay. None of us in the room are theoretical physicists. So how it this relevant to us? Like most scientific techniques anybody can use it. And anybody can find it useful in surprising ways. In fact, one of the principle attributes are the surprising things we can learn from a well constructed thought experiment. And that's what I am going to do. I am going to walk through the process of doing a thought experiment. I hope to demonstrate that using your imagination, which is all a thought experiment really is, a disciplined use of our imaginations, can be surprisingly useful.
So what are we going to do? We are going to build a large and complex piece of infrastructure. But since we are only doing it in our minds it will be quick, cheap, easy, and generate no pollution. And we can get a long way even though none of us really has the expertise to build the real thing. Trust me! It's going to be fun. So what are we going to build?
Before doing that, let's take a digression and figure out why what we are going to build is useful. We as a society have a problem. Well, we have lots of problems but I am going to focus on just one. We use a lot of electricity. Most of it comes from "the grid", a complex and elaborate set of equipment that shuttles electricity from here to there. In general the grid's job is to connect producers (power plants, etc.) to consumers (homes, businesses, etc.) You can all relax. I am not going to go into how all this works. I am just going to note one thing.
The whole thing has to work instantly. The producers have to produce exactly the right amount of electricity right now to meet the needs of consumers right now. Handling this very difficult problem is extremely difficult. But it has to be done. Why? Because batteries suck. Fifty years ago they really sucked. Now they only suck. Anyone who has had their smartphone die because the battery has run out of juice knows what I am talking about. Manufacturers are very aware of this. If they could put a much better battery in, they would. And its not a matter of cost. A battery that is much better than the ones they currently use literally does not exist.
I am going to use "battery" as a generic term for anything that can store electricity. In some cases the thing you use to store electr4icity is not literally a battery. But for the purposes of this discussion I am going to call all electricity storage devices batteries even if they are actually something else.
So something that would help with the whole "instantly" problem would be to hook a giant battery up to the grid. Then when you had extra capacity you could generate a little extra to charge up the battery and when you were short of capacity you could run the battery down to make up the difference. That would make the job of the people who manage the grid much easier. The problem is that batteries suck.
We know that the little batteries in our smart phones suck. But they must be small and light. So can we fix the problem with something that is big and heavy? No! Batteries suck. Look at Teslas and other electric cars. Why doesn't everybody buy an electric? Well the obvious problem is that they are expensive. Why? Enough batteries to do a decent job cost a lot of money. And they are heavy and take up a lot of space (not a problem in our "grid" situation but still . . .). But Tesla has to do a lot of tricks to get their cars to go as far as they do. And it takes forever to recharge them. If you could "fill up" the battery in a car in the time it now takes to gas up then go 400 miles between fill ups (and the car was affordable) we'd all be driving electrics. But we can't. Why? Batteries suck.
But we're still not talking industrial scale. But the Tesla experience is illuminating. Elon Musk, the Tesla guy, is trying to get into the electricity storage business using warehouses full of batteries. But the batteries are really expensive and they can't store industrial scale amounts of energy. Remind me again why it's a good idea to be able to hook a big battery to the grid.
Well, the cost of renewables has plunged. Solar panel farms and wind farms can and do produce industrial scale quantities of electricity. But they have a problem. They are intermittent. Wind farms can't produce electricity if the wind is calm or if the wind is blowing so hard the wind generators can't handle it. Solar panel farms can't produce electricity at night or when it's dark. And output is reduced by bad weather, the time of year, and other factors.
There is a clunky kind of solution. Buy lots. Then run only as many of them at a time as you need at that time. That, for the most part, is what the electricity industry does now. But this is inefficient. You have to build two or three or possibly more times the capacity you really need. This problem would go away if we had a good battery. We could run everything all the time. When we had more power than we needed we use the extra to charge the battery up. When we are short we drain the battery to make up the difference. If we have a good battery we need enough capacity to handle the average load plus a little more as an insurance policy.
So that's the problem. We need a ginormous battery. Now so far I have talked about "battery" batteries. These are chemical reactions at heart. That's why we refer to "lead acid batteries", traditional car batteries, or "carbon batteries ", old batteries for electronics, or "alkaline batteries", newer batteries for electronics, or "lithium batteries", modern batteries for electronics, cars, and (Musk would have you believe) industrial scale grid storage. Is there another way? Yes, of course there is.
This problem has been around a long time and smart people have been trying to fix it the whole time it has been around. You can transform back and forth between electricity and other forms of energy. So people have suggested using big heavy flywheels. You use a motor to spin them up (storage) and you hook them up to a generator to run them down (drain) by hooking them to a generator. And it turns out that compared to even a lithium battery flywheels work pretty well. They are relatively cheap, we know how to make them, and they store a lot more power than a similar amount of lithium batteries. But people haven't figured how to do flywheels at industrial scale.
Another idea people have had is to seal up a big cave. Then you pump air in to raise the pressure (charge). Later you discharge the compressed air through a turbine (first cousin to t jet engine) that is hooked up to a generator (drain). No one has actually tried to do this at industrial scale. There are lots of other ideas. But, like flywheels and caves full of compressed air, people for the most part haven't figured out how to make them work.
So is there anything that has been tried and works at industrial scale? Yes. It goes by the generic term "pumped storage". I live in a part of the country that has lots of hydroelectric dams. You dam up a river. Then you periodically drain the water through a penstock (a fourth cousin to a turbine) and hook that up to a generator. It works great if you have a nice river to dam up. And this has been done lots of times and works well.
There is a variation you can do. What if you have a lake high above a river? If you drain the lake into the river you can do the dam thing and make electricity in exactly the same way. But eventually the lake goes dry. But what if you use surplus power to pump water up to the lake when you have more capacity than you need? Then you can keep the lake from running dry. That's the idea behind pumped storage. There's an example of this not too far from me called Banks Lake. When there is extra capacity water is pumped from a nearby river up to Banks Lake. When capacity is short they drain the lake through the same kind of setup that is used for a dam and electricity comes out the end.
So problem solved, right? Unfortunately, no. You need just the right setup for an installation like Banks Lake to work. And there are only a few places where just the right setup exists. As a result only a few pumped storage facilities have been built anywhere. A Wikipedia article on the subject states that the total pumped storage capacity of the European Union is only 5% of total generating capacity. And 97% of US "grid-scale energy storage" is pumped storage. So at this time there is really no alternative to pumped storage when it comes to grid-scale, what I have been calling industrial scale, energy storage.
Enough already. We are finally ready to start work on our thought experiment. The Banks Lake pumped storage project is part natural and part artificial. The river and the lake were provided by nature. The artificial part, the pipes, pumps, generators, etc., had to be added before it would all work. As a thought experiment, let's build a completely artificial pumped storage facility. To do so we need to make some decisions. but first let's talk about the givens. We need a "high" reservoir that we pump water up to and a "low" reservoir that the water can drain down to. These will be big water tanks. We as a society know how to build big tanks so we'll just take it as a given that these tanks can and will be built. Then we need the between machinery. It will be the same sort of equipment that is used in the Banks Lake facility. So we will also take it as a given that this machinery can and will be built.
So what do we have to decide? We have to decide what the capacity will be. I am going to arbitrarily decide that the plant will have a capacity of one megawatt-hour. That means it can put out a million watts of power for a hour. So how much is that? My recent electricity bill says I used a little less than 1,200 kilowatt hours over a two month period. That's a rate of consumption of roughly a kilowatt-hour per hour. So out plant would be capable of powering about 1,000 homes like mine for an hour. That seems like a lot. But in 2010 the US had over 20 gigawatts of pumped storage capacity. So our plant's capacity would be 20,000 times less. Put that way. it seems like not very much.
But what I have in mind for my thought experiment is to come up with something that could be turned out in large numbers assembly line style. It turns out there are about 50,000 wind turbines in the US and the average capacity is about 1 megawatt per turbine. So our plant would be a close capacity match to one wind turbine. Is that a good choice? I don't know. But it is a starting point. And the nice thing about thought experiments is that you can easily tweak them.
So what else do we need to decide? We need to decide on the height difference between the two tanks. The height difference between the two reservoirs at Banks Lake is 280'. I'm going to go with 100 meters or about 330 feet. It is a nice round number. Is it the right number? I don't know. But as it is close to the Banks Lake number it follows that the kind of machinery necessary to do the pumping, draining, generating, etc. is readily available.
If we know this then we can size the tanks, pipes, pumps, etc. We also need some water. But this is a closed system. We move the water around. But once the system has been loaded up all we need to do is replace small losses. So we can't site our installation out in the middle of nowhere completely away from any water at all. But once we have done the initial fill we only need access to a little water. So lots of places can work. And we don't need drinking quality water. We are just going to pump it around. We don't want the water to be so nasty that it rots the machinery. But with the right kinds of paint and that sort of thing the water can be pretty nasty and still work just fine.
And we are building the whole thing from scratch. We are going to put the high tank on a tower so we don't need dramatic landscape. If we have dramatic landscape we can take advantage of it to reduce costs. But even flat landscape should do. The idea is to have a basic design that with little or no modification can be put pretty much everywhere.
A key item is how much it is going to cost. And I don't know the answer. But someone like a civil engineer who has experience with large construction projects should be able to quickly and inexpensively come up with a rough number, a "back of the envelope estimate". And for our thought experiment that's all we need.
We are not going to actually build it. We are just trying to answer two basic questions. The first and most important one is "can it be built at all"? The second question is "how much would it cost"? And this second question is actually two questions rolled into one. The first is "what is the construction cost"? And that is a question I really can't answer. The second question is "what is the operating cost"? Based on operations like Banks Lake the operating cost, exclusive of the energy costs is "very low". It should require very little effort to operate and the maintenance costs should be low too.
But this energy cost is important. To answer it we need to know the operating efficiency. The science of thermodynamics says that nothing ever operates with 100% efficiency. There are always losses. And that is true of pumped storage facilities. Most of them seem to operate with an efficiency in the 70% to 80% range. That is if you spend 100 kilowatts pumping water up you will get 70 to 80 kilowatts back when you run it down through the turbines. So between 20% and 30% of the energy you put in will be lost. But the idea is that excess wind farm capacity or solar farm capacity otherwise goes to waste. If we use this capacity to charge our pumped storage facility we will be ahead on costs in the end.
Given all the "I don't know"s we have racked up as we have worked through our thought experiment it would seem at this point that the whole thing was a waste of time. But surprisingly it is not.
Our thought experiment has shown that there is a proven method for creating as much grid-scale energy storage capacity as we want. That's good to know. It has never been clear that enough chemical battery based energy storage could be built to make a difference. The same is true of the flywheel, compressed air, and other approaches I have seen. Knowing that a problem has a solution is valuable information.
And a civil engineer could quickly come up with a "back of the envelope" quality estimate for what such a facility would cost. This number, whatever it turned out to be, also turns out to be useful information. Let's say the facility would cost ten million dollars. What that does is give us a benchmark against which to judge other potential solutions. How much would a similar sized chemical battery facility cost to build? If the answer is "a lot more" then we should forget about chemical based battery solutions. The same thing applies to other approaches. If it is obvious that they would cost a lot more they are not worth looking into further.
Now I just made the ten million dollar number up. What if the number was actually a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars? It is still easy to use whatever number eventually turns out to be the right one as a benchmark against which to measure other alternatives. Certainly the lower the cost of our "back of the envelope', "thought experiment" design is, the worse it makes possible alternatives look.
And what if the number looks expensive but not wildly expensive. Then it might just be a good idea to actually build one. The cost of wind turbines has dropped dramatically as more and more are built. The same is true of solar panel farms and many other things. If it turns out that out that the rough estimate of the cost of our first facility is high but not completely out of the question high it may turn out that the hundredth or the thousandth one might be quite inexpensive. So another thing this cost experiment does is give us a starting point for deciding whether the "artificial pumped storage" idea deserves a serious look.
And that's how it often goes with thought experiments. You can figure out a lot without having to invest a lot of time, effort, and money. And you often find out surprising things. And you can easily imagine doing something that would be either dangerous or flat out impossible. After all, it's all made up anyhow. Scientists often ask questions like "if I was inside a worm hole what would it be like"? Scientists who actually asked that question decided the answer was "I wouldn't know because I would be killed instantly".
So what that particular thought experiment told us was "don't bother even trying to figure out how to put people through worm holes because if you succeeded it would kill them". In our far less dramatic example we can safely conclude that "there are better approaches than warehouses full of chemical batteries or flywheels or tunnels full of compressed air" for solving the grid-scale energy storage problem. That's something that is important for the officials in government, industry, and the investment community to know when they are making the decision on whether to fund a project or not.
And thought experiments don't have to be technical or esoteric. They can be things like a "what would it be like if I want to Mazatlán on vacation?" thought experiment. This can be compared to a "what would it be like if I want to Paris on vacation?" thought experiment. Or it could be applied to picking a car or deciding on the route you are going to take to work today or any number of other things.
And the nice thing about a thought experiment is you are not confined to the practical or even the possible. You just come up with a scenario and try to answer "what would happen" or "what would it be like" type questions. Often a lot can be learned by getting an approximate idea of how things stack up. And the specifics of the thought experiment can be tweaked instantly. It's not like you are already in Mazatlán or Paris or wherever your thought experiment takes you. In a thought experiment if you change your mind all you are out is a little time and effort. And that's their beauty.
But okay. None of us in the room are theoretical physicists. So how it this relevant to us? Like most scientific techniques anybody can use it. And anybody can find it useful in surprising ways. In fact, one of the principle attributes are the surprising things we can learn from a well constructed thought experiment. And that's what I am going to do. I am going to walk through the process of doing a thought experiment. I hope to demonstrate that using your imagination, which is all a thought experiment really is, a disciplined use of our imaginations, can be surprisingly useful.
So what are we going to do? We are going to build a large and complex piece of infrastructure. But since we are only doing it in our minds it will be quick, cheap, easy, and generate no pollution. And we can get a long way even though none of us really has the expertise to build the real thing. Trust me! It's going to be fun. So what are we going to build?
Before doing that, let's take a digression and figure out why what we are going to build is useful. We as a society have a problem. Well, we have lots of problems but I am going to focus on just one. We use a lot of electricity. Most of it comes from "the grid", a complex and elaborate set of equipment that shuttles electricity from here to there. In general the grid's job is to connect producers (power plants, etc.) to consumers (homes, businesses, etc.) You can all relax. I am not going to go into how all this works. I am just going to note one thing.
The whole thing has to work instantly. The producers have to produce exactly the right amount of electricity right now to meet the needs of consumers right now. Handling this very difficult problem is extremely difficult. But it has to be done. Why? Because batteries suck. Fifty years ago they really sucked. Now they only suck. Anyone who has had their smartphone die because the battery has run out of juice knows what I am talking about. Manufacturers are very aware of this. If they could put a much better battery in, they would. And its not a matter of cost. A battery that is much better than the ones they currently use literally does not exist.
I am going to use "battery" as a generic term for anything that can store electricity. In some cases the thing you use to store electr4icity is not literally a battery. But for the purposes of this discussion I am going to call all electricity storage devices batteries even if they are actually something else.
So something that would help with the whole "instantly" problem would be to hook a giant battery up to the grid. Then when you had extra capacity you could generate a little extra to charge up the battery and when you were short of capacity you could run the battery down to make up the difference. That would make the job of the people who manage the grid much easier. The problem is that batteries suck.
We know that the little batteries in our smart phones suck. But they must be small and light. So can we fix the problem with something that is big and heavy? No! Batteries suck. Look at Teslas and other electric cars. Why doesn't everybody buy an electric? Well the obvious problem is that they are expensive. Why? Enough batteries to do a decent job cost a lot of money. And they are heavy and take up a lot of space (not a problem in our "grid" situation but still . . .). But Tesla has to do a lot of tricks to get their cars to go as far as they do. And it takes forever to recharge them. If you could "fill up" the battery in a car in the time it now takes to gas up then go 400 miles between fill ups (and the car was affordable) we'd all be driving electrics. But we can't. Why? Batteries suck.
But we're still not talking industrial scale. But the Tesla experience is illuminating. Elon Musk, the Tesla guy, is trying to get into the electricity storage business using warehouses full of batteries. But the batteries are really expensive and they can't store industrial scale amounts of energy. Remind me again why it's a good idea to be able to hook a big battery to the grid.
Well, the cost of renewables has plunged. Solar panel farms and wind farms can and do produce industrial scale quantities of electricity. But they have a problem. They are intermittent. Wind farms can't produce electricity if the wind is calm or if the wind is blowing so hard the wind generators can't handle it. Solar panel farms can't produce electricity at night or when it's dark. And output is reduced by bad weather, the time of year, and other factors.
There is a clunky kind of solution. Buy lots. Then run only as many of them at a time as you need at that time. That, for the most part, is what the electricity industry does now. But this is inefficient. You have to build two or three or possibly more times the capacity you really need. This problem would go away if we had a good battery. We could run everything all the time. When we had more power than we needed we use the extra to charge the battery up. When we are short we drain the battery to make up the difference. If we have a good battery we need enough capacity to handle the average load plus a little more as an insurance policy.
So that's the problem. We need a ginormous battery. Now so far I have talked about "battery" batteries. These are chemical reactions at heart. That's why we refer to "lead acid batteries", traditional car batteries, or "carbon batteries ", old batteries for electronics, or "alkaline batteries", newer batteries for electronics, or "lithium batteries", modern batteries for electronics, cars, and (Musk would have you believe) industrial scale grid storage. Is there another way? Yes, of course there is.
This problem has been around a long time and smart people have been trying to fix it the whole time it has been around. You can transform back and forth between electricity and other forms of energy. So people have suggested using big heavy flywheels. You use a motor to spin them up (storage) and you hook them up to a generator to run them down (drain) by hooking them to a generator. And it turns out that compared to even a lithium battery flywheels work pretty well. They are relatively cheap, we know how to make them, and they store a lot more power than a similar amount of lithium batteries. But people haven't figured how to do flywheels at industrial scale.
Another idea people have had is to seal up a big cave. Then you pump air in to raise the pressure (charge). Later you discharge the compressed air through a turbine (first cousin to t jet engine) that is hooked up to a generator (drain). No one has actually tried to do this at industrial scale. There are lots of other ideas. But, like flywheels and caves full of compressed air, people for the most part haven't figured out how to make them work.
So is there anything that has been tried and works at industrial scale? Yes. It goes by the generic term "pumped storage". I live in a part of the country that has lots of hydroelectric dams. You dam up a river. Then you periodically drain the water through a penstock (a fourth cousin to a turbine) and hook that up to a generator. It works great if you have a nice river to dam up. And this has been done lots of times and works well.
There is a variation you can do. What if you have a lake high above a river? If you drain the lake into the river you can do the dam thing and make electricity in exactly the same way. But eventually the lake goes dry. But what if you use surplus power to pump water up to the lake when you have more capacity than you need? Then you can keep the lake from running dry. That's the idea behind pumped storage. There's an example of this not too far from me called Banks Lake. When there is extra capacity water is pumped from a nearby river up to Banks Lake. When capacity is short they drain the lake through the same kind of setup that is used for a dam and electricity comes out the end.
So problem solved, right? Unfortunately, no. You need just the right setup for an installation like Banks Lake to work. And there are only a few places where just the right setup exists. As a result only a few pumped storage facilities have been built anywhere. A Wikipedia article on the subject states that the total pumped storage capacity of the European Union is only 5% of total generating capacity. And 97% of US "grid-scale energy storage" is pumped storage. So at this time there is really no alternative to pumped storage when it comes to grid-scale, what I have been calling industrial scale, energy storage.
Enough already. We are finally ready to start work on our thought experiment. The Banks Lake pumped storage project is part natural and part artificial. The river and the lake were provided by nature. The artificial part, the pipes, pumps, generators, etc., had to be added before it would all work. As a thought experiment, let's build a completely artificial pumped storage facility. To do so we need to make some decisions. but first let's talk about the givens. We need a "high" reservoir that we pump water up to and a "low" reservoir that the water can drain down to. These will be big water tanks. We as a society know how to build big tanks so we'll just take it as a given that these tanks can and will be built. Then we need the between machinery. It will be the same sort of equipment that is used in the Banks Lake facility. So we will also take it as a given that this machinery can and will be built.
So what do we have to decide? We have to decide what the capacity will be. I am going to arbitrarily decide that the plant will have a capacity of one megawatt-hour. That means it can put out a million watts of power for a hour. So how much is that? My recent electricity bill says I used a little less than 1,200 kilowatt hours over a two month period. That's a rate of consumption of roughly a kilowatt-hour per hour. So out plant would be capable of powering about 1,000 homes like mine for an hour. That seems like a lot. But in 2010 the US had over 20 gigawatts of pumped storage capacity. So our plant's capacity would be 20,000 times less. Put that way. it seems like not very much.
But what I have in mind for my thought experiment is to come up with something that could be turned out in large numbers assembly line style. It turns out there are about 50,000 wind turbines in the US and the average capacity is about 1 megawatt per turbine. So our plant would be a close capacity match to one wind turbine. Is that a good choice? I don't know. But it is a starting point. And the nice thing about thought experiments is that you can easily tweak them.
So what else do we need to decide? We need to decide on the height difference between the two tanks. The height difference between the two reservoirs at Banks Lake is 280'. I'm going to go with 100 meters or about 330 feet. It is a nice round number. Is it the right number? I don't know. But as it is close to the Banks Lake number it follows that the kind of machinery necessary to do the pumping, draining, generating, etc. is readily available.
If we know this then we can size the tanks, pipes, pumps, etc. We also need some water. But this is a closed system. We move the water around. But once the system has been loaded up all we need to do is replace small losses. So we can't site our installation out in the middle of nowhere completely away from any water at all. But once we have done the initial fill we only need access to a little water. So lots of places can work. And we don't need drinking quality water. We are just going to pump it around. We don't want the water to be so nasty that it rots the machinery. But with the right kinds of paint and that sort of thing the water can be pretty nasty and still work just fine.
And we are building the whole thing from scratch. We are going to put the high tank on a tower so we don't need dramatic landscape. If we have dramatic landscape we can take advantage of it to reduce costs. But even flat landscape should do. The idea is to have a basic design that with little or no modification can be put pretty much everywhere.
A key item is how much it is going to cost. And I don't know the answer. But someone like a civil engineer who has experience with large construction projects should be able to quickly and inexpensively come up with a rough number, a "back of the envelope estimate". And for our thought experiment that's all we need.
We are not going to actually build it. We are just trying to answer two basic questions. The first and most important one is "can it be built at all"? The second question is "how much would it cost"? And this second question is actually two questions rolled into one. The first is "what is the construction cost"? And that is a question I really can't answer. The second question is "what is the operating cost"? Based on operations like Banks Lake the operating cost, exclusive of the energy costs is "very low". It should require very little effort to operate and the maintenance costs should be low too.
But this energy cost is important. To answer it we need to know the operating efficiency. The science of thermodynamics says that nothing ever operates with 100% efficiency. There are always losses. And that is true of pumped storage facilities. Most of them seem to operate with an efficiency in the 70% to 80% range. That is if you spend 100 kilowatts pumping water up you will get 70 to 80 kilowatts back when you run it down through the turbines. So between 20% and 30% of the energy you put in will be lost. But the idea is that excess wind farm capacity or solar farm capacity otherwise goes to waste. If we use this capacity to charge our pumped storage facility we will be ahead on costs in the end.
Given all the "I don't know"s we have racked up as we have worked through our thought experiment it would seem at this point that the whole thing was a waste of time. But surprisingly it is not.
Our thought experiment has shown that there is a proven method for creating as much grid-scale energy storage capacity as we want. That's good to know. It has never been clear that enough chemical battery based energy storage could be built to make a difference. The same is true of the flywheel, compressed air, and other approaches I have seen. Knowing that a problem has a solution is valuable information.
And a civil engineer could quickly come up with a "back of the envelope" quality estimate for what such a facility would cost. This number, whatever it turned out to be, also turns out to be useful information. Let's say the facility would cost ten million dollars. What that does is give us a benchmark against which to judge other potential solutions. How much would a similar sized chemical battery facility cost to build? If the answer is "a lot more" then we should forget about chemical based battery solutions. The same thing applies to other approaches. If it is obvious that they would cost a lot more they are not worth looking into further.
Now I just made the ten million dollar number up. What if the number was actually a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars? It is still easy to use whatever number eventually turns out to be the right one as a benchmark against which to measure other alternatives. Certainly the lower the cost of our "back of the envelope', "thought experiment" design is, the worse it makes possible alternatives look.
And what if the number looks expensive but not wildly expensive. Then it might just be a good idea to actually build one. The cost of wind turbines has dropped dramatically as more and more are built. The same is true of solar panel farms and many other things. If it turns out that out that the rough estimate of the cost of our first facility is high but not completely out of the question high it may turn out that the hundredth or the thousandth one might be quite inexpensive. So another thing this cost experiment does is give us a starting point for deciding whether the "artificial pumped storage" idea deserves a serious look.
And that's how it often goes with thought experiments. You can figure out a lot without having to invest a lot of time, effort, and money. And you often find out surprising things. And you can easily imagine doing something that would be either dangerous or flat out impossible. After all, it's all made up anyhow. Scientists often ask questions like "if I was inside a worm hole what would it be like"? Scientists who actually asked that question decided the answer was "I wouldn't know because I would be killed instantly".
So what that particular thought experiment told us was "don't bother even trying to figure out how to put people through worm holes because if you succeeded it would kill them". In our far less dramatic example we can safely conclude that "there are better approaches than warehouses full of chemical batteries or flywheels or tunnels full of compressed air" for solving the grid-scale energy storage problem. That's something that is important for the officials in government, industry, and the investment community to know when they are making the decision on whether to fund a project or not.
And thought experiments don't have to be technical or esoteric. They can be things like a "what would it be like if I want to Mazatlán on vacation?" thought experiment. This can be compared to a "what would it be like if I want to Paris on vacation?" thought experiment. Or it could be applied to picking a car or deciding on the route you are going to take to work today or any number of other things.
And the nice thing about a thought experiment is you are not confined to the practical or even the possible. You just come up with a scenario and try to answer "what would happen" or "what would it be like" type questions. Often a lot can be learned by getting an approximate idea of how things stack up. And the specifics of the thought experiment can be tweaked instantly. It's not like you are already in Mazatlán or Paris or wherever your thought experiment takes you. In a thought experiment if you change your mind all you are out is a little time and effort. And that's their beauty.
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Fake Boobs
Yes, I'm talking about breast implants. And since there is a political angle on everything today I'm sure there is one for this one too. But I am going to leave that part of the story alone and look at the subject from the perspective of Science. And, as is my custom, I use history as an organizational tool. Where to start?
I am going to start with the invention of the bra. There are a lot more "origin stories" about this item of clothing than most people realize. But I am going to stick with the one that is popular in the US. I choose it because it involves a direct line from invention to the manufacture and distribution of a commercially successful product.
The story goes that in 1910 Mary Phillips "Polly" Jacobs, also known as Caresse Crosby, was getting ready to go to a debutante ball. She initially struggled into a whalebone corset. This device cinches in the waist and pushes the boobs up and forward. If you add a bustle (think a fabric version of Kim Kardasian's butt) the result is an "hourglass figure", full through the bust and hips, thin at the waist. This had been the height of fashion for some time but we were about to move into the "flapper" era.
Anyhow, Polly was apparently a full figured gal so she didn't need any help up top. And the whalebone reinforced corset was very uncomfortable to wear. So she took two handkerchiefs, some ribbon, and a needle and thread, and fastened together a garment that provided coverage but not much support. It turned out to be an ideal match to the sheer gown with a plunging neckline she was wearing. And it was an instant smashing success (apparently both the gown and her invention).
The popularity of the garment was apparent from the start. This led her to get a patent for the design in 1914 and to begin to manufacture them. But her interests were elsewhere so she sold the rights to the Warner clothing company. Initially Warner did not make much of a success but they were smart enough to license it widely. In the hands of others it quickly became popular.
It became so popular so quickly that it became a standard of apparel for women in no time. Dorothy L. Sayers casually mentions one in a "Lord Peter Wimsey" murder mystery she wrote in the mid thirties. She was English and the book was set in London. As a murder mystery with a male lead the book did not concern itself with the minutia of women's fashion. But twenty-five years after the patent was issued everyone took it for granted that British women wore them as a matter of course. And so it quietly played its role as part of the ambience of a book whose focus is most decidedly elsewhere.
We would not recognize the initial design. But the standard band, cups, and straps design emerged quickly. Another innovation that showed up early was the underwire. And that sets the stage for the next subject I want to cover.
Not every woman is built like Polly. But many women feel it is important to put on a show, to appear to be built like Polly. The addition of the underwire made another innovation possible, the padded bra. Foam rubber, first manufactured in 1929 but widely available by the late '30s, could be used to fill the void between what nature provided and what a bra with a fuller cup presented to the outside world. And foam had the great advantage of being far lighter than the materials nature used.
So a woman could comfortably and inexpensively and inconspicuously wear a padded bra under the now more conservative clothes that came in when the flapper era ended with the end of the '20s. And a lot of women did. This was especially true of Hollywood actresses of the '50s. Clever work by skilled costume designers could even make it possible to maintain the illusion of a "full figure" in what would otherwise seem like quite skimpy outfits.
And this got taken to extremes. Mamie van Doren was a Hollywood fixture in the '50s and '60s. She was as well endowed or even better endowed than Polly had been. But in some situations "there's no such thing as too much". So she often appeared in a specially made padded bra that made her bust size appear to be not just substantial but literally awe inspiring. But the times, they were starting to change.
During this same period, the padded bra era, strip tease enjoyed a considerable degree of success. The problem was that the artists ended up wearing so little that a padded bra was not feasible. But there were always enough "full figured girls" who "came by it naturally" to provide a sufficient pool to fill the demand for ecdysiasts, as strippers were called in polite circles. But what if a less well endowed girl was interested in entering the business?
Carol Doda, initially a waitress at a club in San Francisco called "The Condor" was just such a person. She actually had a pretty good figure. But again on the theory that "there's no such thing as too much" she let herself be talked into being the first person to try a new procedure. Initially the new procedure took her bust measurement from 34 to 44. So she got the result she was looking for. But the procedure she underwent looks pretty barbaric from the perspective of the present.
She had silicone injected directly under her skin and into the breast area. Why silicone? Was this some kind of underhanded plot by scheming corporate executives? The exact opposite was true. No one in the business of manufacturing medical devices or producing silicone for use in medical procedures even knew what was happening. Instead people in the entertainment business were looking for a way to give strippers or potential strippers bigger boobs. A little research showed that medical grade silicone had a long track record of being safe. And it wasn't particularly expensive.
It was also obvious quickly that just injecting it was a bad idea. It didn't cause medical problems but it did tend to wander. So "shapely" quickly turned into lumpy, and lumpy in strange places. The solution was obvious and quickly adopted. Put the silicone in a bag and insert the bag. The bag would keep the silicone in place. This turned out to work very well and women started getting silicone breast implants in large numbers.
But it is important to note that even in this period when breast implants were flying off the shelf the companies that were making the implants saw the business as a small sideline. It was never a big moneymaker. They were just meeting a demand and making a few bucks along the way. But then some women noticed they all of a sudden were having strange medical problems. And these medical problems seemed to start when or shortly after they got breast implants. So it must be the fault of the implants, right?
Now a real problem did surface with a significant number of women who got implants. Their bodies manufactured scar tissue around the implant. This made their breasts hard and in some cases detracted from their visual appeal. But this scarring did not cause any serious medical problems. It was just not the result they wanted.
But what about all these mysterious medical maladies? The first thing to recognize is that many women had serious medical problems that were completely real. So the question was not: "had they suffered a serious medical problem?" It was: "was the cause of the serious medical problem the implants?"
Given the history of implants no serious research or testing had taken place. Putting the silicone in a bag was an obvious improvement over just injecting it. And both the silicone and the bags were materials for which a lot of experience existed. There was no reason to believe that they would cause problems. So the companies just went ahead and provided the product the public demanded. So early on there was a plausible argument to be made that the implants were the cause.
But it quickly turned out that women experienced a variety of problems. It wasn't just one thing. And all these problems were of the type that had always been happening. But they had only been happening to a few women. So the rarity of occurrence of any one of these illnesses had made it hard to draw much interest or attention to the illness. So there was not much known about them. That is before they all got lumped together and blamed on breast implants.
These women went to court and told their tale. The companies involved were big companies that had a lot of money. When it came out that the companies had done little or no "due diligence" and that the women were suffering horribly from one affliction or another juries awarded the women a lot of money. All of a sudden the companies involved found it in their interest to find out what was what.
By this time literally millions of women had gotten implants. So the first question to ask was "are these women getting sick more often than women without implants?" It turns out that the answer was no. The next question was "is there any evidence that the illness is being caused by the implants?" Here too the answer was no.
But big companies misbehave frequently. And the women really were sick. So juries kept making large awards. So the companies and others dug in and did more research. The research kept coming up with nothing. But the public was not interested in some scientific study. This was especially true if the study was funded by a big company. Over a period of years various large well done and very expensive studies were done. Nothing. And the jury awards kept rolling in.
Finally in desperation the companies replaced the silicone with saline, salt water. Eventually this put an end to the law suits. Everybody knows that disinfected salt water is not dangerous.
But then a funny thing happened. Women found they did not like the saline implants. They didn't jiggle right. So first a few and then more and more women said "I don't care if it is dangerous. I want my silicone." And people finally noticed that the vast majority of implant customers did not have any of the horrible problems that had started the whole circus.
Things have changed slightly. In the old days plastic surgeons made a large slit and inserted the bag with the silicone already in it. Various techniques were employed to hide the scar. But the size made it hard to conceal completely. So some doctors started inserting an empty bag. This could be done using a small incision which was far less noticeable in the first place and much easier to conceal. It was also easier on the body which improved the healing process.
They would then inject the silicone somewhat in the manner used on Carol Doda. But this time the silicone went into the bag. It was inflated just like a balloon. There had also been leaking problems with early implants. That problem was also fixed. But none of these "fixes" made implants any more or less dangerous. They just improved the user experience of women getting implants.
The result was that ultimately the science prevailed. Everybody figured out eventually that implants are safe. And the occasional law suit that someone still tries to file is routinely thrown out without even a hearing. And implants, who has them, are they safe, etc. is not something that gets anybody riled up anymore.
Science won, eventually. And it's the "eventually" part that is troubling. We are still going through the same kind of thing with the anti-vaxers. The science is in. Vaccines are safe and they do a lot of good. As was (and is) the case with implants, people get sick, sometimes horribly sick, at the time of or shortly after they get the procedure. But as was the case with implants it doesn't happen very often. And the science has looked thoroughly into the issue and concluded "it's a coincidence". This is exactly what was going on with implants. The difference is that with vaccination we haven't gotten all the way out from under the issue. There are still a lot of people who believe that the anti-vax people are right.
But whether a woman gets implants or not just affects the woman in question. But when parents fail to vaccinate their children the child can get very sick and perhaps die. That's bad. But there are others who for one reason or other can't or have not gotten vaccinated. And these people can also get very sick and perhaps die. So the anti-vax people hurt not only themselves and their loved ones but they hurt innocent strangers.
The breast implant controversy and the anti-vax controversy are part of a larger anti-science movement. The implant controversy hurt some companies and their stock holders. It amped up the anxiety level of a lot of women. But it ultimately had a small impact on society as a whole. The anti-vax movement has had a bigger negative impact on society as a whole. But the anti-science movement is a much bigger problem.
I wish I knew what to do. But people have proved over and over that they will find a way to believe what they want to believe. And they are proving every day that they are impervious to anything short of applying a two by four vigorously to side of the head (or so the old story about mules recommends), when it comes to what will change their minds.
I am going to start with the invention of the bra. There are a lot more "origin stories" about this item of clothing than most people realize. But I am going to stick with the one that is popular in the US. I choose it because it involves a direct line from invention to the manufacture and distribution of a commercially successful product.
The story goes that in 1910 Mary Phillips "Polly" Jacobs, also known as Caresse Crosby, was getting ready to go to a debutante ball. She initially struggled into a whalebone corset. This device cinches in the waist and pushes the boobs up and forward. If you add a bustle (think a fabric version of Kim Kardasian's butt) the result is an "hourglass figure", full through the bust and hips, thin at the waist. This had been the height of fashion for some time but we were about to move into the "flapper" era.
Anyhow, Polly was apparently a full figured gal so she didn't need any help up top. And the whalebone reinforced corset was very uncomfortable to wear. So she took two handkerchiefs, some ribbon, and a needle and thread, and fastened together a garment that provided coverage but not much support. It turned out to be an ideal match to the sheer gown with a plunging neckline she was wearing. And it was an instant smashing success (apparently both the gown and her invention).
The popularity of the garment was apparent from the start. This led her to get a patent for the design in 1914 and to begin to manufacture them. But her interests were elsewhere so she sold the rights to the Warner clothing company. Initially Warner did not make much of a success but they were smart enough to license it widely. In the hands of others it quickly became popular.
It became so popular so quickly that it became a standard of apparel for women in no time. Dorothy L. Sayers casually mentions one in a "Lord Peter Wimsey" murder mystery she wrote in the mid thirties. She was English and the book was set in London. As a murder mystery with a male lead the book did not concern itself with the minutia of women's fashion. But twenty-five years after the patent was issued everyone took it for granted that British women wore them as a matter of course. And so it quietly played its role as part of the ambience of a book whose focus is most decidedly elsewhere.
We would not recognize the initial design. But the standard band, cups, and straps design emerged quickly. Another innovation that showed up early was the underwire. And that sets the stage for the next subject I want to cover.
Not every woman is built like Polly. But many women feel it is important to put on a show, to appear to be built like Polly. The addition of the underwire made another innovation possible, the padded bra. Foam rubber, first manufactured in 1929 but widely available by the late '30s, could be used to fill the void between what nature provided and what a bra with a fuller cup presented to the outside world. And foam had the great advantage of being far lighter than the materials nature used.
So a woman could comfortably and inexpensively and inconspicuously wear a padded bra under the now more conservative clothes that came in when the flapper era ended with the end of the '20s. And a lot of women did. This was especially true of Hollywood actresses of the '50s. Clever work by skilled costume designers could even make it possible to maintain the illusion of a "full figure" in what would otherwise seem like quite skimpy outfits.
And this got taken to extremes. Mamie van Doren was a Hollywood fixture in the '50s and '60s. She was as well endowed or even better endowed than Polly had been. But in some situations "there's no such thing as too much". So she often appeared in a specially made padded bra that made her bust size appear to be not just substantial but literally awe inspiring. But the times, they were starting to change.
During this same period, the padded bra era, strip tease enjoyed a considerable degree of success. The problem was that the artists ended up wearing so little that a padded bra was not feasible. But there were always enough "full figured girls" who "came by it naturally" to provide a sufficient pool to fill the demand for ecdysiasts, as strippers were called in polite circles. But what if a less well endowed girl was interested in entering the business?
Carol Doda, initially a waitress at a club in San Francisco called "The Condor" was just such a person. She actually had a pretty good figure. But again on the theory that "there's no such thing as too much" she let herself be talked into being the first person to try a new procedure. Initially the new procedure took her bust measurement from 34 to 44. So she got the result she was looking for. But the procedure she underwent looks pretty barbaric from the perspective of the present.
She had silicone injected directly under her skin and into the breast area. Why silicone? Was this some kind of underhanded plot by scheming corporate executives? The exact opposite was true. No one in the business of manufacturing medical devices or producing silicone for use in medical procedures even knew what was happening. Instead people in the entertainment business were looking for a way to give strippers or potential strippers bigger boobs. A little research showed that medical grade silicone had a long track record of being safe. And it wasn't particularly expensive.
It was also obvious quickly that just injecting it was a bad idea. It didn't cause medical problems but it did tend to wander. So "shapely" quickly turned into lumpy, and lumpy in strange places. The solution was obvious and quickly adopted. Put the silicone in a bag and insert the bag. The bag would keep the silicone in place. This turned out to work very well and women started getting silicone breast implants in large numbers.
But it is important to note that even in this period when breast implants were flying off the shelf the companies that were making the implants saw the business as a small sideline. It was never a big moneymaker. They were just meeting a demand and making a few bucks along the way. But then some women noticed they all of a sudden were having strange medical problems. And these medical problems seemed to start when or shortly after they got breast implants. So it must be the fault of the implants, right?
Now a real problem did surface with a significant number of women who got implants. Their bodies manufactured scar tissue around the implant. This made their breasts hard and in some cases detracted from their visual appeal. But this scarring did not cause any serious medical problems. It was just not the result they wanted.
But what about all these mysterious medical maladies? The first thing to recognize is that many women had serious medical problems that were completely real. So the question was not: "had they suffered a serious medical problem?" It was: "was the cause of the serious medical problem the implants?"
Given the history of implants no serious research or testing had taken place. Putting the silicone in a bag was an obvious improvement over just injecting it. And both the silicone and the bags were materials for which a lot of experience existed. There was no reason to believe that they would cause problems. So the companies just went ahead and provided the product the public demanded. So early on there was a plausible argument to be made that the implants were the cause.
But it quickly turned out that women experienced a variety of problems. It wasn't just one thing. And all these problems were of the type that had always been happening. But they had only been happening to a few women. So the rarity of occurrence of any one of these illnesses had made it hard to draw much interest or attention to the illness. So there was not much known about them. That is before they all got lumped together and blamed on breast implants.
These women went to court and told their tale. The companies involved were big companies that had a lot of money. When it came out that the companies had done little or no "due diligence" and that the women were suffering horribly from one affliction or another juries awarded the women a lot of money. All of a sudden the companies involved found it in their interest to find out what was what.
By this time literally millions of women had gotten implants. So the first question to ask was "are these women getting sick more often than women without implants?" It turns out that the answer was no. The next question was "is there any evidence that the illness is being caused by the implants?" Here too the answer was no.
But big companies misbehave frequently. And the women really were sick. So juries kept making large awards. So the companies and others dug in and did more research. The research kept coming up with nothing. But the public was not interested in some scientific study. This was especially true if the study was funded by a big company. Over a period of years various large well done and very expensive studies were done. Nothing. And the jury awards kept rolling in.
Finally in desperation the companies replaced the silicone with saline, salt water. Eventually this put an end to the law suits. Everybody knows that disinfected salt water is not dangerous.
But then a funny thing happened. Women found they did not like the saline implants. They didn't jiggle right. So first a few and then more and more women said "I don't care if it is dangerous. I want my silicone." And people finally noticed that the vast majority of implant customers did not have any of the horrible problems that had started the whole circus.
Things have changed slightly. In the old days plastic surgeons made a large slit and inserted the bag with the silicone already in it. Various techniques were employed to hide the scar. But the size made it hard to conceal completely. So some doctors started inserting an empty bag. This could be done using a small incision which was far less noticeable in the first place and much easier to conceal. It was also easier on the body which improved the healing process.
They would then inject the silicone somewhat in the manner used on Carol Doda. But this time the silicone went into the bag. It was inflated just like a balloon. There had also been leaking problems with early implants. That problem was also fixed. But none of these "fixes" made implants any more or less dangerous. They just improved the user experience of women getting implants.
The result was that ultimately the science prevailed. Everybody figured out eventually that implants are safe. And the occasional law suit that someone still tries to file is routinely thrown out without even a hearing. And implants, who has them, are they safe, etc. is not something that gets anybody riled up anymore.
Science won, eventually. And it's the "eventually" part that is troubling. We are still going through the same kind of thing with the anti-vaxers. The science is in. Vaccines are safe and they do a lot of good. As was (and is) the case with implants, people get sick, sometimes horribly sick, at the time of or shortly after they get the procedure. But as was the case with implants it doesn't happen very often. And the science has looked thoroughly into the issue and concluded "it's a coincidence". This is exactly what was going on with implants. The difference is that with vaccination we haven't gotten all the way out from under the issue. There are still a lot of people who believe that the anti-vax people are right.
But whether a woman gets implants or not just affects the woman in question. But when parents fail to vaccinate their children the child can get very sick and perhaps die. That's bad. But there are others who for one reason or other can't or have not gotten vaccinated. And these people can also get very sick and perhaps die. So the anti-vax people hurt not only themselves and their loved ones but they hurt innocent strangers.
The breast implant controversy and the anti-vax controversy are part of a larger anti-science movement. The implant controversy hurt some companies and their stock holders. It amped up the anxiety level of a lot of women. But it ultimately had a small impact on society as a whole. The anti-vax movement has had a bigger negative impact on society as a whole. But the anti-science movement is a much bigger problem.
I wish I knew what to do. But people have proved over and over that they will find a way to believe what they want to believe. And they are proving every day that they are impervious to anything short of applying a two by four vigorously to side of the head (or so the old story about mules recommends), when it comes to what will change their minds.
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