The Politics of Spying

I have been following spying and the intelligence business for a long time.  And there are two kinds of spying:  fictional spying (fake spying?) and actual spying.  They are quite different.  Actual spies do not drive Aston Martins and hang out with gorgeous babes in sexy dresses.  It makes them conspicuous and being conspicuous makes you ineffective.  And, in spite of the fact that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, actually worked in Intelligence during World War II, James Bond was a terrible spy.  With that I leave the realm of fictional spies and focus exclusively on spying in particular, and the intelligence business in general, as it is conducted in the real world.

Real world spying goes back thousands of years.  And even if we narrow our focus to the US, which I intend to do, there were spies during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.  But these efforts were not organized and institutionalized to any extent.  George Washington, for instance, would designate an underling to create a pretty informal network of agents.  When the Revolutionary War ended Washington moved on and whatever network had been built was allowed to fall apart.

In the US this behavior changed, at least temporarily, with World War I.  The US did not have an elaborate intelligence operation during the War but various efforts were undertaken.  And to some extend this continued on after the War.  This consisted primarily of talking the international telegraph companies into providing whatever government intelligence group existed at the time with copies of diplomatic telegrams.  All of these were encrypted so the bulk of the effort consisted of trying to crack the various codes used.

This change in behavior arose in large part due to the famous Zimmermann telegram.  The British intercepted a telegram from a German official named Zimmermann who was trying to get the Mexicans to enter World War I on the German side.  This had a substantial effect on the US decision to enter the war.  And this incident also convinced a number of government officials that having some kind of intelligence operation was a good and important thing to do.

Then Henry L. Stimson became Secretary of State in 1929.  He famously opined that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail" and set things back in the US almost to zero.  So before World War II intelligence was not a big deal and, to the extent it existed, it certainly had no clout.

In the mean time J Edgar Hoover got himself put in charge of the FBI.  He was a consummate political operative.  So he spent a lot of time and effort playing the politics game.  He famously collected dirt on politicians and then blackmailed them into providing the FBI with a nice budget and leaving him in charge and giving him a free hand to run the FBI as he saw fit.  But blackmail was not the only card Hoover played.  Blackmail was the "stick" part of his strategy.  He also had a "carrot" component.  He would provide politicians with dirt on their enemies and adversaries.  So being in Hoover's good side could prove very beneficial.

And one of the things Hoover did with his power was make sure the FBI was in charge of "domestic" intelligence.  If it happened inside the borders of the US then the FBI had primary jurisdiction.  And his success at playing the political game meant that the manifest failures of the FBI to do anything about the mob (presumably their primary focus) or communists (the intelligence part of the FBI's portfolio) didn't matter.  Politicians loved him and/or feared him so he went on his way.  And there's a lesson in all this.

Another thing Hoover was good at was the public relations side of things.  There were innumerable movies made featuring intrepid FBI agents busting crime and, when World War II got underway, breaking up numerous spy rings.  It was mostly complete fiction (or a great deal of exaggeration) but the public didn't notice.  So it worked.  The FBI's reputation with the general public was generally high.

And that brings us to World War II.  This was the real start of large bureaucratic intelligence organizations in the US.  And the poster child for all this was "Wild" Bill Donovan and the OSS.  Serious analysis of the track record of the OSS (see for instance, "The Secret War" by Max Hastings) indicates it was none too good.  They were good at making noise.  But blowing up the odd train was often very hard on the locals and produced little short term benefit and no long term benefit at all.

And the OSS was terrible at providing consistent, reliable, useful, intelligence.  The best source of intelligence turned out to be operations like the one at Bletchley Park.  The work was terribly hard and terribly unsexy but also terribly important in the end.  So why was the OSS so celebrated and, more importantly supported by astute politicians like Roosevelt?  Because it served an important purpose.

It was great for PR.  This was especially important in the early and middle part of the War.  And the best way to explain this was with something that was not an intelligence operation.  I'm talking about the Doolittle air raid on Tokyo early in the War.  The raid itself did almost no damage.  And we lost a bunch of planes and trained pilots at a time when there was a real shortage of both.  But Roosevelt was able to say "see -- we are doing something".  And, in the case of the Japanese, they severely over-reacted.  So from a strategic military sense the operation was a big success.

Most OSS operations were decidedly less successful.  But in the period before D Day in June of '44 it allowed Roosevelt to say "see -- we are doing something".  Now the Germans did not over-react so the strategic military "benefit" of these OSS actions was negative.  But look at France after the War.  The French Resistance was always a pretty small operation that was generally ineffective.  But after the War a lot of French could claim, whether it was true or not -- and usually it was not, that they had been on the side of the good guys and not a dirty collaborator.  This helped heal a lot of wounds after the War.

Donovan always ran an effective PR operation.  He hoped it would be enough to allow him to stay on after the War but he came up short.  But the people who ran the intelligence organizations that rose from the ashes of the OSS and can be traced back to the "National Security Act" of 1947 did pay attention to how Hoover and Donovan had conducted themselves and tried to do better.  They paid careful attention to the political side of things.

And let's be clear about something.  There is something sexy about the intelligence game to politicians.  It's called "plausible deniability".  Going back to "The Prince" by Machiavelli, powerful people know or quickly find out that their power is limited.  Even dictators don't have complete power.  There is always something they want to be able to do that for one reason or not they can't do.  And often the problem is that there is some kind of accountability that's getting in the way.  So there is always appeal in an "off the books" operation or organization.  A term of art is "unvouchered funds".  You can spend money and you don't have to tell anybody what it was spent on.

So in the same way that Hoover would provide untraceable dirt on an opponent or adversary to a politician intelligence organizations provide a way to go "off the books" when it comes to something a politician wants done.  And, oh by the way, as these intelligence organizations are going about their entirely legitimate business they might, just might, find out dirt on a politician.

The intelligence services were very popular with both politicians and the public in the '50s.  At one time the head of the CIA was the brother of the Secretary of State.  And the two got along very well together.  The CIA could (and often did during that period) meddle in ways that the State Department, which was accountable to both the US public and the rest of the world, couldn't.  The State Department had and frequently asserted total "plausible deniability".  To quote Sergeant Shultz, a character on the old "Hogan's Hero's" TV show:  "I know nothing - nothing!".

And the CIA saw it as part of its job to be the fall guy.  "It was the CIA's fault, not that politician or very important person."  The CIA put out the word that they were willing to play patsy but they expected something in response.  And, in exchange for services rendered, they got a fat budget and little oversight.

And this all worked fine until the Vietnam War blew up.  The intelligence community was made to shoulder a great deal of responsibility.  And in general, their scope of action was reduced as were their budgets.  And then the Soviet empire, the great villain in the intelligence melodrama, fell apart.  In the aftermath the whole justification for giving the intelligence community a lot of money and freedom seemed to no longer exist.  It was lean pickings for a long time.

Then 9/11 came along.  And the intelligence communities showed how well they could play the politics game.  If you have only weak cards in your hand and everyone knows it you are in for a tough night.  But if someone deals you some good cards and you play them well things can change for the better in a second.  And one result of 9/11 was to hand the intelligence community some very nice cards.  And they took full advantage of them to massively improved their situation.

A case could be made that 9/11 was an intelligence failure.  But that was not the story the Bush Administration wanted to tell and the Intelligence community smelled opportunity (some decent cards for a change) and pounced.  The Bush Administration was extremely interested in "off the books" and "plausible deniability".  So the NSA in particular said "if you give us a lot more money, a lot more authority, and a lot less oversight we will promise you this will never happen again".

This narrative supported the idea that 9/11 was not a Bush Administration screw up.  And it was not an intelligence screw up.  It was those bad old laws that are hamstringing us.  This was total baloney but the Bush Administration and the Intelligence community quickly locked arms and sold the hell out of this "new and improved" narrative.  And it worked.

The result is that the intelligence community got a lot of money to play with.  It got a lot of authority to play with.  And it got essentially no oversight.  As an executive, what's not to like about this situation?  So starting in about 2002 the intelligence community has been riding high.  The heads of the various organizations have tons of money and little restraint on how they spend it.  The fact that this has delivered very little doesn't matter as long as the PR keeps working.

And it kept working just fine during the Obama Administration.  Their authority got dialed back a little.  But this was okay because various excesses that tend to result from too much money and too little oversight was damaging the reputation of the intelligence agencies with the public.  So a little pull back was good for keeping the gravy train rolling for a long time.  And it wasn't totally one sided.  The intelligence community did get Bin Laden.  So the Obama people were happy with the intelligence community and the intelligence community was happy with the Obama people.

But then to a certain extent greed set in on the part of the intelligence agencies.  Hillary was likely to be pretty compatible with them.  But one of the techniques that worked with Obama was to scare the shit out of him in the briefings.  Being inexperienced he is not as able from his own experience to sort through what he is being told and figure out what was real and what was scaremongering.  I think by the second term he could do a better job of sorting the wheat from the chaff but the intelligence communities were well entrenched by then.

But Hillary had been in government for a long time.  So she had been around the intelligence block a few times and was in a much better position to detect scaremongering.  Trump on the other hand was a total greenie.  He should be easy to manipulate so from an intelligence community perspective he looked like far the better candidate.  Well, that has not worked out as well as they thought it would.

What they did not count on was that Trump trusts Alex Jones of "Info Wars" fame and various other people like him who peddle conspiracies for a living.  And it should be noted that they make a very comfortable living doing so.  Now if the intelligence community doesn't tell Trump what Alex Jones is telling him then they are suspect ("fake").  And if the do tell him what Alex Jones is telling him then why does he need them when he already has Alex Jones?  So Trump is not the intelligence community's friend.

The standard vehicle for coopting the President is the PDB, the President's Daily Briefing.  That's the vehicle they used to get to Obama.  But Trump doesn't even get them.  He lets Vice President Pence receive them.  And Pence has very little policy influence on Trump or the people that surround them.  So that's what's been going on with the "foreign" part of the intelligence community.  What about the "domestic" part, the FBI?  That question now pretty much answers itself.

I have not been a fan of James Comey for a long time.  But I am not part of the FBI establishment.  They love him.  Why?  Because he obviously would take a bullet for them.  Whatever flaws the man has, and I think he has many, he is fiercely loyal to the FBI.  And the FBI is fiercely loyal to him.

A lot of people in the FBI have, for a lot of reasons (most of them bogus in my opinion), not liked Hillary Clinton.  So when Comey misbehaved with respect to the Email "controversy" that lost him few if any points within the FBI.  And conservatives are generally pro "law and order" and that stand is good for the FBI as an institution.  So if Trump is a true conservative he should be good for the FBI.  But what is becoming obvious to even the most politically conservative FBI agent is that he is not their friend.

And my point is that these people, both the "foreign" and the "domestic" arms of the intelligence community know how to play the politics game and they are very good at it.  If Trump has people experienced in politics and governance around him they could tell him "don't mess with the intelligence community".  But he doesn't.  And even if he did he is poor at taking advice from experts.  So he has done a lot of things to make all parts of the intelligence community unhappy with him.

And, as I said, they know how the game is played.  And you can watching them play it right this very minute.  There are very careful to be reserved and diplomatic and temperate in public.  Except Comey, that is, who got fired and is pissed.  But still the habits of a lifetime in the trenches are evident in his actions.  He has been very careful to go only so far and no farther.  But that "only so far" has included calling Trump a liar in public.

The usual way these people operate is in the shadows.  So you are seeing a steady drumbeat of leaks.  And, with the exception of a very small fry who was obviously freelancing it, no one has been caught.  Expect the leaks to continue.  Expect no one of significance to be caught.  Expect the leaked information to be devastating.

One final observation.  The FBI's remit includes organized crime and drug rings.  They have a tool called RICO.  RICO means that if you can prove something is the "ill gotten gain of a criminal operation" it can be seized.  If they choose to, and at some point they very well may, they can go after Trump for a variety of financial crimes.  If they succeed they can begin seizing assets.  And these assets don't have to be closely linked to the crime.  They can sweep up all kinds of assets.  In drug cases they have seized cash (obviously), cars and boats (also assets with a pretty direct connection to the crime), but also homes, even if no criminal business was transacted in the home and even if the home is in the name of an ex-wife, oh, and businesses, even if the business was a legitimate front unconnected with criminal activity.

So, if the FBI got mad enough at Trump, and if they were successful, they could turn him into a pauper and throw him into jail.  And if the rest of the intelligence community is mad enough at Trump they can feed all kinds of evidence to the FBI.  Some of it might not be usable in court.  But it could point the FBI in the direction of evidence that they could use in court.  Is it likely to come to this?  At this point the answer is no.  These organizations are mad enough at Trump to make life uncomfortable for him but not mad enough to try to do what I am suggesting is possible.

But who knows what the investigations that are already under way will turn up?  The intelligence community is definitely mad enough at Trump to impede efforts he might undertake to derail these investigations.  And who knows what Trump will do from here?  I certainly don't.

Ground truthing

I have liked the phrase "ground truth" since I first encountered it.  It comes from the early days of the space age.  I was a kid when Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was launched.  The phrase "ground truth" comes from a little later.  Sputnik was primarily a publicity stunt.  It just beeped.  And it beeped in such a way that amateur radio enthusiasts could pick the beeps up and tell what direction they were coming from.  This meant that there was never any doubt that the Russians had launched an artificial satellite.

But Sputnik was quickly followed by satellites that actually did things.  And one of  the big things they did was measure things.  But what did the measurements mean?  That's where "ground truth" came in.  Scientists would take a look at some satellite measurement of something happening on the ground.  Then they would go out and see what was actually happening there.  That allowed them to be able to say "if the result of some satellite measurement is X then that means this specific thing is happening on the ground".  They were establishing the ground truth behind a satellite measurement.  That way they didn't have to assume they knew what a certain measurement meant, they would actually know.

And the business of being able to actually know is important tome.  So I periodically go out and try to establish the "ground truth" of something.  And this is not limited to satellite measurements.  It relates to anything.  If it looks like this what is it actually?  If you have performed a ground truth then you know.  So let's look at some of the ground truth efforts I have made.  You will see that this can be applied very broadly.

And let me start with an embarrassing but very enlightening moment that happened at about the time I was introduced to the phrase "ground truth".  At some point I learned that Galileo was the first to demonstrate that if you can ignore air resistance and the like then the flight of a cannonball follows a parabolic curve.  And the teacher put up a proof on the blackboard that this was true.  And the proof was pretty simple and straightforward.  Then he gave us Galileo's proof.  How hard could it be?

Well, it turned out to be extremely hard.  I never did really figure it all out.  Unlike the proof the teacher put up it was very complex, difficult, and hard to follow.  So what was going on?  It turns out that the mathematical tools Galileo had access to were very primitive.  They consisted primarily of Euclidian geometry.  If that's all the tools you have to work with then you have to be brilliant and persistent to come up with a proof.

In general this is a common situation.  The ancients look dumb to us.  They believed stuff we now know to be wrong and their "brilliant achievements" now seem pretty obvious and trivial.  But that's because we have a modern perspective.  And part of that modern perspective includes a lot of tools the ancients didn't have.  If you have Analytic Geometry then proving a cannonball follows a parabolic trajectory is pretty easy.  But Galileo didn't have Analytic Geometry.  So the most obvious thing I learned was Galileo was a really smart dude.  And that's a really important point.

Besides Galileo having only primitive mathematical tools at his disposal teachers have had hundreds of years to come up with a simple and straightforward way to prove something and that's what they now give us students.  But a whole lot of work has been put into these "simple" proofs by a whole lot of smart people.  There was no one before Galileo so if he didn't come up with it, it wasn't going to happen.  It is much easier to refine something someone else has created than it is to come up with it in the first place.  So since then I have had tremendous respect for whoever does something for the first time.  It's really hard.  If it was easy it would have already have been done.

I am not great at math but I am better than most people are.  So trying to make sense of Galileo's proof is definitely not most people's cup of tea.  But there are ways to ground truth things that are not so math heavy.  But before I get to them let me go to what I would call a "math light" example of ground truthing.

The Protestant Revolution is usually dated from when Martin Luther posted his "95 theses" on the front door of the that church in Wittenberg Germany. English translations of the document (it's not very long -- each thesis is just a sentence or two) are readily available on the Internet.  So I took a look at them.  And it was very instructive.  The document was a "proof" of a position Luther was taking.  Basically he was saying that the Catholic Church was doing something wrong (selling indulgences, if you care).

Now I agree with Luther that selling indulgences is bad and contrary to what the church has to say about good and evil.  But that was not what I wanted to know.  I wanted to know if Luther had proved what he set out to prove.  And much to my disappointment I decided he didn't.  And the problems were technical.  There is a certain way you operate when you are trying to prove something.  I thought his argument was incoherent and disorganized.  So its technical flaws meant it was not a proper proof.

Now, unlike in the Galileo case, I didn't have any problem following Luther's logic.  And I found no individual thesis problematic.  I just thought there were gaps in the proof that possibly could have been filled in but weren't.  To the extent that I could follow Galileo's proof I found no gaps.  It was a properly constructed proof.  I just couldn't follow it, at least given the amount of effort I was willing to invest.

What was enlightening about all this was that no one cared whether Luther's proof was flawed or not.  They only cared that it existed at all.  So at least on the Catholic Church side they didn't really think the truth of the matter was very important.  And unfortunately I find that the attitude of the Catholic Church at that time applies to pretty much all religious people pretty much all the time.  They just don't think the truth is very important.  Other things, typically faith, are far more important.

Now let me move on to something profoundly scientific but almost completely free of mathematics.  And that's evolution, at least the aspects of it that I am going to talk about.  The foundational document on the scientific side is On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.  This book is NOT a technical treaties designed to be read only by experts with specialist knowledge.  It was explicitly written to be read by average people who knew about things people of the time knew about like animal husbandry.  But understanding the book required no specialized expertise at all.  There is absolutely no scientific mumbo jumbo or high falootin math or anything else that would put off the average person. The language is now slightly archaic but not so much so that anybody living today can't read and understand what he has to say.

So I read the book a few years ago.  Well, I actually skipped past a number of portions.  (I'll explain why in a minute.)  Darwin was very clear about what he was saying and why he thought he had the right of it.  And most people don't know that the book went through several revisions.  Why?  Not because he bungled things or got them wrong.  Instead he carefully listened to people's objections and added additional material to clarify points that were being misunderstood and adding further evidence to show why this or that objection was wrong. And that's why I skipped large portions.  He went on and on belaboring a point just to make sure that people could see the amount of evidence available to back up what he was saying.  So I would go through the first part of the evidence, be convinced, and skip the further evidence he piled on at great length after that.

And a revelation to me was that the anti-evolution people have not come up with anything new in the roughly 150 years since the book was published.  Every few years somebody comes out with a "new" reason why Darwin was wrong.  But over and over you will find that Darwin addressed that point in nauseating detail either in the original version or in one of the updates.  But since the anti-evolution people don't bother to read the book they don't know this.

Let me move on to another example of "they didn't bother to read . . .".  What I'm talking about is gun rights and the whole Second Amendment thing.  The definitive case law on the subject is a US Supreme Court case called "Heller".  I wrote about all this in detail in a post all the way back in 2013.  You can find it here:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/01/second-amendment-rights.html.
It turns out you can read Supreme Court decisions online.  There is a link to the full text of the Heller decision in the previous post.  The majority and therefore prevailing opinion was written by Justice Scalia.  And the guts of his opinion, in my opinion, is a 2 page section (Section III) in which Justice Scalia says it is completely constitution to regulate fire arms.  He just says the regulations must be reasonable and then outlines what he sees as reasonable regulation.

So the Heller case is one of those "I know it when I see it" cases.  It is settled law that it is constitutionally permissible to reasonably regulate fire arms.  The whole argument is about what is "reasonable" and what isn't.  One person's reasonable is another's unreasonable and vice versa. So when I listen to someone on either side I try to determine if they understand this.  Unfortunately, I find very few people on the pro-gun side that understand this.  So I conclude that they haven't read Heller and don't know what they are talking about.  In other words, I ground truth them and they come up short.

I recommend everyone read the odd court decision.  I'm sure that there are obscure cases having to do with some arcane or obscure corner of this or that where I would have no clue as to what's going on without specialist expertise.  But I don't read those kinds of decisions.  Judges in the cases whose decisions I read are trying very hard to make what they have to say accessible to the general public and I think they almost entirely succeed.

I do cheat but only in one small way.  Decisions are littered with "citations", references to a decision on some earlier case.  I don't pay attention to the actual citation.  After making the citation the Judge will tell us why some aspect of that case is important to this one.  I just take it on faith that the Judge is honestly and correctly interpreting the previous case.  I have found that generally Judges do play fair on this.  And if they don't then I depend on the dissenting opinion to point this out to me.  By taking this shortcut I may get misled but if it happens it doesn't happen very often.  And that's good enough for me.

I have mentioned that I have taken a stab at reading Galileo's proof and had more success reading On the Origin of Species.  In general I like to dabble in the foundations of science.  I have read other documents from the history of science.  Some years ago I read Optics by Sir Isaac Newton.  I found it pretty readable.  It concerns the properties of light.  Newton did some experiments with prisms and lenses and was able to come to some profound conclusions.  I think Optics is pretty accessible to the average person.  His other and more important work is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually shortened to "Principia").  That is a heavy lift.  I am taking a second run at it but I do NOT recommend it to the average person.  I'm not sure I will be able to make my way all the way through it.  But I am going to give it a try.

Let me introduce my final suggestion by telling a story.  I used to read The Wall Street Journal In High School.  I know, that's weird.  But I did (and you don't have to).  But my point is this.  This was long enough ago that when I started reading the Journal the US ran a surplus balance of trade (flow of goods and services) and a surplus balance of payments (flow of money).  The Journal thought this was a good thing and got all up in arms when first the balance of trade and later the balance of payments went into deficit.  They argued that both of these were very bad.  And their arguments made perfect sense to me.

But then I waited.  The reason these were bad things was because they would inevitable result in other bad things happening to the US.  But somehow those other bad things never happened.  And the US has been running deficit balances with respect to both trade and payments for many decades now.  The bad things the Journal predicted never came to pass.  And that was a real lesson to me.  Remember their argument for why these developments (i.e. both trade and payments going from surplus to deficit) were completely convincing to me.  So there was nothing wrong with the argument except it ultimately turned out to be wrong.

So one of the things I look for is predictions.  The Journal predicted that bad things would happen.  That's good because that is a prediction and we can see if it comes to pass.  But it didn't come to pass and that means the initial argument has been cast into doubt.  I like predictions.  I mistrust anyone who believes so little in what they are saying that they will not make a prediction.  But a prediction is a two edged sword.  If it's right then kudos to the predictor.  But if it's wrong then a serious effort needs to be made to understand why the prediction didn't pan out.  I also mistrust people who won't admit it when a prediction goes wrong and then won't make a serious effort to understand why it went wrong.  I have seen little or nothing out of the financial community admitting that their predictions were wrong in these cases nor any analysis as to why they turned out to be wrong.

This thing I just talked about is something anyone can do.  All you have to do is note what predictions people make then let some time pass.  Then you go back and see whether the prediction panned out.  This is something the press should routinely do.  But they are erratic.  They sometimes will "go to the tape" and show someone predicting something that didn't pan out.  That's good but it is not enough.  They need to go the next step and that's no longer paying attention to someone who makes a lot of predictions that go wrong.  The press is about ratings.  They go with the people they think will generate ratings even if they have a demonstrated track record of getting it wrong.

This has gone on long enough that we are now in the situation where people flat our lie routinely.  Yet the press hangs on their every utterance because covering them is good for ratings.  And they don't contextualize them as known anti-experts (people who frequently get it wrong) or known liars.  People who don't have the time or inclination to keep track are left on their own.  And that has led to what can politely be called "confusion".

So everyone can engage in ground truthing.  In lots of areas it helps to have some mathematical ability.  But other areas do not require any mathematical ability.  No mathematical ability is required to read a legal opinion.  Reading legal opinions is a good way for figuring out who knows what they are talking about and who doesn't.  But you don't even need to do that.  You can jut play the memory game.  What did that person or group used to say and what are they saying now?  Republican back in the Cold War days were very proud of our open borders because walls are for oppressive Communist Regimes.  Now it's "build a wall" and "isn't Putin just great"?

But all this ground trothing is only important if knowing the truth is important.  If whatever your belief system tells you, what you have faith in, is more important than knowing what is true and what is false then ground truthing is counterproductive.  But if ground truthing is counterproductive then you don't get to use it to bolster your side of the argument.  You are either fact based or you are not.  You don't get to cherry pick.

Cyrpto: Offense or Defense?

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.

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.

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.

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 11 -

https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2018/10/50-years-of-science-part-11.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

Part 20 -

https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/08/60-years-of-science-part-20.html

Part 21 -

https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/10/60-years-of-science-part-21.html

Part 22 -

Sigma 5: 60 Years of Science - Part 22

Part 23 -

Sigma 5: 60 Years of Sceince - 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.

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.