365

In 1964, in response to the New York World's Fair, Isaac Asimov made some predictions about 2014.

• Your kitchen will automatically make breakfast.
• Underground houses will be commonplace.
• No electric cords on appliances, since radioisotope batteries will take care of power needs.
• Short-range travel will include moving sidewalks and compressed air tubes
• High school students will all be experts in computer languages and binary arithmetic.

He does better in some areas, such as where he predicts "wall screen" TVs, phones that make video calls, and using those same screens to read books and view photographs.

As someone who is trying to make predictions as well - and not nearly as far ahead as Asimov-  it is humbling to see how far off some of them could be. We haven't colonized the continental shelf, we don't have moon colonies - there wasn't even a World's Fair this year.

Still, I thought it a good one to round out the year, sort of a bookend to the earlier post.

A year ago, I made a new year’s resolution, to write a blog post a day. My intention was to get this blog going, as there’s no point in having a blog that isn’t updated regularly. There are a couple of problems with this idea, though, as noted at the 30, 100, and 300 day marks: A post requires research, identifying a topic, drafting the post, editing the post, and deciding that it is good enough to post. The only real adjustment that can be made is the length of the post, which can reduce some of the time on parts of the process.

Adding to the difficulty in this case was the subject of the blog, This Current Crisis. In effect, this was a daily history essay, requiring a relevant daily topic, a draft that had some connection to the goal of the blog, and references to other texts that supported any allusions noted and predictions made. Plus some occasional explanation of the terms behind the analysis and predictions.

Or, to summarize: It was not easily done.

But I did it, with a post every day, almost always before midnight, and generally relevant to the blog, as described.

What else was learned:

• There aren’t that many big stories. Probably the only topics that are returned to - mentioned, that is, more than once - are the Russia / Ukraine conflict and the Sony hack. Most items of interest stay interesting for only a couple of days. 
• It’s not easy to go viral - or to be more general, it’s not easy to get a critical mass of people interested in a creative product. A blog, a song, a video, an app - in any case, you need something appealing to a  large enough group, a way to get it in front of them, and a value proposition when trading their time or money for your product. As of the last day of 2014, this blog has had 3250 views - less than 10 a day, The page with the most views has 48.
• Having an achievable daily goal can help to get a process or project started.
• Achievable, however, has to incorporate “what you have time to do.” Two hours a day - minimum - for this has taken up most of my free time - indeed, it has been fully ten percent of all my time over the last year. 
• Having a backlog of "articles" is only temporarily helpful: If you don't set aside enough time to do what you plan to do, you will eventually work through that backlog.
• I was able to complete the Grid project I had initially thought of five or six years back. Having a goal to do writing every day - no matter what - helped

I plan to continue with this blog. It won’t get guaranteed daily updates any more, although I’ll keep them going for at least a couple more days. It turned out that searching for Crisis in the news - along with Collapse, catastrophe, apocalypse,  or Cloverfield - can lead to interesting results that support the letter and spirit of its title, so this will move in that direction. As many posts analyzed entertainment - movies, literature, music - from a generational perspective, that will get spun off into its own separate site.

It's been worthwhile, though, and it has helped me be aware of what sort of activities I enjoy. Which is a worthwhile result on its own. Happy New Year.

Favorites

Yes, there are favorites I have from over this last year, whether for content or style or just interesting-ness.

Unionization: (January) Wherein I am completely wrong about Union Station.

Synthococcus Novae: (February) The Space Hippies episode of Star Trek was more insightful than I realized.

Camelot: (March) It wasn't about JFK until Jackie made it so.

Astronaut Corvettes: (April) I hadn't known that most Apollo astronauts had Corvettes.

The Data Wars: (April) There's a tag, too, but this was where I first started thinking there might be a real correspondence between data and what happened in the early 1940s.

Carry On: (May) Not surprisingly, those "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters have a history going back to the last Crisis.

Runaway: (June) Explaining why a Seth McFarland joke isn't funny and, literally,  probably wasn't ever funny.

The Ramones: (July) Why they also indicated the peak of the Awakening.

Antibiotics: (August) Did you know penicillin works by allowing bacteria to divide in half (as they do to reproduce) but then prevents the resulting new bacteria from sealing their shells afterwards? Oh, and it was a long time until it was commercially ready, but a relatively short time from then until it was mass-produced.

Annie:  (August) From finding out that the cartoonist was NOT an FDR fan, quite contrary to the musical.

Research: (August) Is Google the new planning department for the human race?

Trinity: (September) Some times just fly.

Deadline : (September) Something about the last minute rush for such an important thing - of so much happening that people at these high levels still sound human.

1968: (October) This came out well, even though it was a one-night special even for a Grid entry.

The Force Awakens: (November) A fun analysis where some prediction turned out as expected.

1990: (December)  Because it finishes up The Grid (I've been working on that for a long time) and also because of an insight about the Web being successful because it was text.

Start doing this and you'll find others to like. There are a few others near the start of April, for example...but enough. Bad enough having a clip show post, anyway.

1990

1990 - Third (Unraveling) - Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web

That the internet is used interchangeably with the World Wide Web is perhaps the most telling fact about Tim Berners-Lee's contribution.  It wasn't always that way.

The Internet is a collection of computer networks, each able to communicate with each other by using IP, the Internet Protocol. When you connect to the internet, you are really connecting your computer to a local network, then using the local network to connect to at least one other network, through which you will access another computer that has something you want to see. It might be a video, it could be a game server  - but chances are, it's a web page.

By the early 90s, these connected networks of computers enabled activities such as sending email, reading newsgroups and accessing files from File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. Taking into account the comparatively slow connections, it was a useful and interesting place. For the most part, though, it required a technical mind to bring it all together.

Then, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN,  formulated a more convenient method of sharing information. Specifically, what he was working with was “hypertext,” text that included links to other texts. Expanding on this, consider if Computer A could make a hypertext file available to other computers on a network.  The file might include a link to another file - select the link, and the other file would open. That other file could be on Computer B, and it wouldn't matter whether the file was  across the room, or across the globe. As long as a connection could be set up to Computer B, a reader of the text would not have to care what distance separated the two files.

Unlike some previous hypertext implementations that had required documents using proprietary formats, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) documents are all text documents. Any text editor could be used to create one, and so there was no barrier to entry for anyone who wanted to set up a page, another page, a link between them, or links to other computers. To view the files and easily navigate the links, a "web browser" was needed, such as the one Berners-Lee coded, or the more advanced versions from Marc Andreesen's team at the University of Illinois.

Perhaps the most useful attribute of web browsers was that they needed to show the text, so any page created could be easily read. Web browsers such as Mosaic (released in 1993) made accessing text files easy. Type in a URL and the text appeared in your browser; click on a link and a new page of text appeared. One could bring up one page, click on a link, and nearly instantaneously be shown a page from a different server, a different country, a different continent. Mosaic contained a spinning globe that made manifest the idea that information from around the world could be made available almost as easily as clicking on a descriptive phrase.

When looking at the impact the Internet has on lives in the 21st century, it is too common to identify connected computers as the primary innovation. Nonetheless, while email addresses were relatively common in 1990,  the Internet was still used primarily by the technically savvy.  It was the appearance of the Web starting in 1990 - an easily available, freely usable, cheaply used user interface for text files - that made those networked computers really valuable. In short order, the Dot Com era began, and the expectation that information could be made available to anyone, everywhere, was born.

1927

1927 - Third (Unraveling) - Lindbergh's Non-Stop Flight from New York to Paris

Prizes in support of technologically feasible but financially uncertain goals had previously been able to push advances.  The Orteig Prize intended to do so for intercontinental flight. This $25,000 prize was first made available in 1919 - less than 16 years after Wilbur and Orville's Wright's first flight - and would be paid for the first successful nonstop flight between New York and Paris.

(While crossings of the Atlantic had been completed by a number of aircraft, they had covered shorter distances or required intermediate stops.)

Originally, the prize had a five year time limit, but the limit was extended for another five years in 1925. Between then and May 1927, six were killed in attempts to win the prize - two when their overloaded plane caught fire, two more on a crash on takeoff during a test flight, while another plane attempting a Paris to New York flight disappeared somewhere past the coast of Ireland. 

This last flight had departed Paris less than two weeks before Charles Lindbergh's attempt began.  He had learned to fly starting in 1922, barnstorming over the next few years to gain flight time. In 1925, he completed a year of flight school with the Army Air Corps, becoming a reserve officer.  Over the next two years, he would be a U.S. Air Mail pilot until he started to consider the possibility of winning the Orteig Prize. 

While not as well financed as other prize contenders, Lindbergh had particular ideas about how he might be able to win. One of his initial design decisions was that the flight would be solo: One person (the pilot, himself) meant less weight, so more range for the same amount of fuel. The plane would be single-engined: Where others saw multiple engines as increasing survivability through redundancy, he saw increased chances of failure through complexity. (Three engines would mean "three times the chance of engine failure.") Additional fuel tanks were included to increase range. To reduce weight further, anything that could be was removed from the aircraft - extra maps, radio, parachutes - and the aircraft's seat was a wicker chair. 

He departed New York from field at 7:52 AM on May 20, 1927. The flight would take 33.5 hours, arriving 10:22 PM Paris time. This include time flying past the Paris airfield, which was so jammed with automobile lights from spectators that he had originally thought it was an industrial zone. When he landed, he was spontaneously pulled from his aircraft by the mob and carried aloft for half an hour.  Lindbergh became one of the most famous people in the world, which had become much smaller that day, as aviation would soon allow rapid transportation almost anywhere.

1852

1852 - Third (Unraveling) - Uncle Tom's Cabin is published by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Slavery had been an issue of concern to the United States of America since before it began. Discussions by delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had to navigate concerns between those who considered the use of slave labor a legitimate part of the economy, and those who thought a country based on liberty should not have human beings bought and sold. For most of the next 60 years, the process of determining the role of slavery in the country consisted of compromises between free states and those supporting slavery. 

And then, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a fictional story about the life of a slave. Initially a weekly serial, the complete story was published in book form in 1852.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the discussion of slavery from an abstract view of economics and morality to one involving characters that people could care about. 

The following year Twelve Years a Slave would be published, the memoirs of a black man from the North who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. This described as fact not only the wretched lives of slaves - and acted as additional factual confirmation of Stowe's work - but the possibility that free men could also be trapped only because of the color of their skin. Over the rest of the decade the slavery question expanded until the entire country went to war over it.  According to Stowe's son, Abraham Lincoln said, upon meeting Stowe in 1862,  "So this is the little lady who started this great war."

1752

1752 -  Third (Unraveling) - Benjamin Franklin and the Kite Experiment

Make a small Cross of two light Strips of Cedar, the Arms so long as to reach to the four Corners of a large thin Silk Handkerchief when extended; tie the Corners of the Handkerchief to the Extremities of the Cross, so you have the Body of a Kite; which being properly accommodated with a Tail, Loop and String, will rise in the Air, like those made of Paper; but this being of Silk is fitter to bear the Wet and Wind of a Thunder Gust without tearing. To the Top of the upright Stick of the Cross is to be fixed a very sharp pointed Wire, rising a Foot or more above the Wood. To the End of the Twine, next the Hand, is to be tied a silk Ribbon, and where the Twine and the silk join, a Key may be fastened.

This is Benjamin Franklin's description of how to construct a kite that could be used to extract electricity from clouds. It comes from a letter written to Peter Collinson, with whom he corresponded on matters of electricity and other subjects. It was theorized that lightning was an electrical discharge.  Franklin and others had studied electricity using Leyden jars - early storage devices that were used like batteries, although technically  they are capacitors. Electricity was normally generated using electrostatic generators, which rubbed cloths against solid objects. This created static electricity in much the same way that walking on a carpet can.  Franklin was able to confirm that clouds carry an electrical charge that could be stored  and handled exactly as if it was the electricity extracted through their usual methods. 

Joseph Priestley, another friend of Franklin, set the actual date of the experiment as June 30, 1752. Franklin is said to have flown a kite from the steeple of Christ Church in Philadelphia, with the assistance of his 21-year-old son. The description indicates that a few small clouds could be used to pull a significant amount of electricity from the sky.

This Kite is to be raised when a Thunder Gust appears to be coming on, and the Person who holds the String must stand within a Door, or Window, or under some Cover, so that the Silk Ribbon may not be wet; and Care must be taken that the Twine does not touch the Frame of the Door or Window. As soon as any of the Thunder Clouds come over the Kite, the pointed Wire will draw the Electric Fire from them, and the Kite, with all the Twine, will be electrified, and the loose Filaments of the Twine will stand out every Way, and be attracted by an approaching Finger. And when the Rain has wet the Kite and Twine, so that it can conduct the Electric Fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the Key on the Approach of your Knuckle. At this Key the Phial may be charg’d; and from Electric Fire thus obtain’d, Spirits may be kindled, and all the other Electric Experiments be perform’d, which are usually done by the Help of a rubbed Glass Globe or Tube; and thereby the Sameness of the Electric Matter with that of Lightning compleatly demonstrated.

It has since been determined that Franklin was not the first to do an experiment such as this.  There are, indeed, those who doubt he ever did it at all, that he may have only proposed what was necessary for this experimental proof.  Still, this was one of the ways he made his name as a meticulous and noteworthy scientist and philosopher. Drawing lighting out of the clouds and into bottles made him famous enough, two decades later, to be a great help to the cause of the American Revolution.

Wrapping

It always seemed to be the older folks who wanted to save the wrapping paper. Not all of them, but a few, who wanted significant care taken when removing the paper from presents. This would allow it to be taken home, saved, and eventually reused.

Which didn't seem to make any sense to those below a certain age. Paper was there to be ripped off. While being festive, and concealing the contents of the presents, it also was inexpensive. Tape had been used to attach segments, and that wasn't easily removed, anyway. Even if the paper was treated carefully, additional processing would be needed to make the product usable again - more time spent on a low-value result.  Even after all that, it would be limited for use to presents smaller than those previously used. What could possibly make such behavior worthwhile?

Certainly, something similar to the Great Depression could change inputs to a Buy or Reuse decision, which would align with those "older folks" trying to save and reuse. And the truth is, I have found myself trying to save more paper as I have become older. As an economic decision, this has made more sense since the 2008 banking crisis, but the original reason was probably more about environmental impact: reusing the paper so it didn't end up in a landfill for the next million years. 

Still, despite these personal impressions that  Crisis has made this behavior normal again,  it's still not uncommon for folks today to unwrap presents with abandon and toss the paper in the trash without a second thought.  Perhaps it's not a Crisis indicator, after all.

Streaming

Sony is releasing The Interview, in their own way. Which is either a victory for free speech or a victory for something else.

One possibility about its relationship with the Fourth Turning: The problem people want to solve  isn't about North Korea itself. There's no groundswell of support for invading in order to bring them under the control of the  United States, South Korea,  or NATO. Nonetheless,  nobody is happy about the perceived submission to them. Instead,  this is about control. People want the freedom they are accustomed to and will resist efforts to attack it. If the Feds try something, similar reactions are likely.  That might be what's going on in our collective heads, which could mean that this Crisis will be very different from WWII.

There are those who think the cycles are part of larger cycles, with consecutive Fourth Turnings not being quite as similar as alternate ones.  One justification is that there are people alive from the previous Fourth Turning, who might both remember the triumphs and recall the difficulties of that particular fight.  If so,  this next one could we will be more like American Civil War or even the Glorious Revolution - not a war against an external enemy, but an internal fight over the power and abilities of government. (Which, perhaps, was the case with the American Revolution as well.)

Cookies

Bill: You can't buy the necessities of life with cookies. You can't buy a car with cookies - am I right, Jim ?
Jim: Yes, sir, that's correct.

The above is from the almost-a-Christmas movie Edward Scissorhands. Bill, the husband of Edward's "rescuer" Peg Boggs, is attempting to convince Edward of getting better value for his varied services. (Jim is their daughter's boyfriend, kissing up to his girlfriend's dad.) Cookies contain mostly common ingredients - flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla - so they don't cost much to make, are easily given and easily accepted. This didn't make them a particularly good trade for Edward's exceptional haircuts and topiary skills.

As a child in the 1970s, it didn't seem that giving cookies at Christmas was a common event. They were around, perhaps made available by older ladies, but why would you bother? There wasn't anything to make them more worthwhile than store-bought. Fruitcakes were even less common, but there were still cultural memories of them that seemed part of an earlier era.

Are cookies at Christmas a sign of the Turnings? Or is it simply a matter of economics? Older folks who might have made cookies back then could have had a habit persisting since the Depression, of making inexpensive gifts rather than purchasing them. They could also, though, be on fixed incomes or have other incentives for this behavior. It does seem as though cookies are a bigger deal lately, presumably for economic reasons that are part of the Crisis. It could probably be proven or disproven by keeping track of how Christmas cookie recipes were available in newspapers and magazines over the last 80 or so years.

Confusion

If we accept that Second Turnings are very confusing periods when trying to comprehend them later, we might also recognize that they are confusing at the time.

If we accept that Russia and Ukraine are entering a Second Turning, we could then expect that right now is very confusing there. It's not an illusion or bounded rationality that is making it confusing: it IS a confusing place to be. 

This comes to mind while trying to understand what is happening there these days.

"Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than reality." If that's the case, what's the fiction here? Is it that the West is attacking Russia or that Russia is defending herself? In either case it may be worthwhile to take a moment, acknowledge the confusion, and consider the sort of period enveloping that corner of the world.

Evil

Even more than previous events involving The Interview, this suggests that there's something more going on here.
 

Consider for a second that each Saturday Night Live episode is created starting on Monday morning, eventually finishing up Saturday afternoon and early evening. Sketches are written up on Tuesday, then a read-through on Wednesday determines those that can be produced - which doesn't guarantee getting on the final live show. Sony pulled the movie from distribution on Wednesday. Mike Myers is no longer a regular cast member and really doesn't show up very often. So this was pitched, written, proposed to Mr. Myers, accepted by him, and set up as the cold open - a key part of the show, one that will impact the entire show's ratings for that night - between Thursday and Saturday.

It's possible that it had more of a head start - many of the jokes could have been written at any time in the last few weeks. It might have been in the planning stages earlier than Wednesday, with any specific jokes about the movie being added at the last minute. However, it does seem unpolished overall, as if it was a last minute addition to the show - the audience appreciation appears as much for the idea of the sketch as for its execution. Perhaps Lorne Michaels wanted to make a statement, as George Clooney did, and was willing to take some risks to do so.

That comment about killing a movie by moving it to January brought up a separate consideration, quite aside from North Korea's actual intentions or Michaels' desires: Imagine for a moment that, rather than looting data and leaving, the hackers had managed to subvert key points in the Sony information infrastructure. Perhaps an email goes out from the head of the studio saying that the date of the film will be changed because, oh, Seth Rogen preferred a staggered release that allowed interest to build up over time, or the Christmas slot was needed for a film with real Oscar potential. And suppose emailed responses came back from department heads that said, sure, we're all for it. It might be difficult for anyone to walk back what they said or agreed to, if there was [email] evidence that they had supported the change.

A skilled enough group might be able to take over communication networks, which could become equivalent to taking over the organization. If the Data Wars become reality, that could be the way they become worthy of the name.

1783

Connor opens the bottle, and inhales the vapors within. He speaks as if in a trance: 

Brandy, bottled in 1783. 1783 was a very good year. Mozart wrote his Great Mass. The Montgolfier brothers went up in their first balloon. And Britain recognized the independence of the United States. 

In the 1986 movie Highlander, antiques dealer Russell Nash is meeting with a lady at her apartment.  He knows that she is either trying to help convict him of a crime, or has guessed his secret: that he is a 450-year-old Immortal named Connor McLeod.  Despite this, he brings a bottle of brandy that he has evidently been saving for a special occasion, and inhales the air that was sealed within over 200 years before. 

One of the useful aspects of this is how it makes a particular year so memorable. Before seeing it, one  might know nothing about the 18th century or what happened during it.  After, it's easy to know the following almost as soon as someone mentions the year:

1) The Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the American revolution

2) Mozart was actively working, 

3) The first human flight, with balloons, was happening. 

Which shows how easy it is to trigger a lot of information based only on a year. It was part of the inspiration for The Grid: by knowing a small number of years, the flow of history can be seen. 

Fun fact: According to DVD commentary, this scene was based on something Jim Steinman once actually did with a bottle of wine: "I'm breathing in air from 1949." 

Assets

It's not a given that the Crisis is about Data Wars, and even less clear how something like that could really be the sort of event that people will be reverently honoring 80 years from now. Really, how valuable is data, really, and who would fight over it or because of it?

One way that might make sense is as a new Cold War  - cold as in without bullets or explosions. But by acting in secret, releasing data people believe secure, and acting on said data in other ways, you can affect policy and possibly demand terms. 

If someone could credibly attack and hold on to critical assets, they are engaging in warfare   We should be calling it cyberwar, though, if the assets are systems - it's only data wars if, well, it's about the data.  

Which means Sony's capitulation seems more of a cyberwar - unless it turns out specfic data was the key to forcing the issue. Which seems unlikely. It is worth noting that ,as an overall terrorist threat,  they gained credibility due to their other successes. 

At some point data would seem to be a subset of cyber. Still what on the data side alone would be more than intelligence and approach actual attacks? We have seen some of that so far - where's the line?

Frack

Strauss & Howe originally referred to it as the "Crisis of 2020." That was the initial estimate for the peak of the current crisis, as predicted in 1992.

When that date shows up unrequested, it's worth taking a second look. Especially when it happens to appear with words like "crisis" or "collapse" or "cloverfield." 

The original article describing the collapse of fracking around 2020 is on pbs.org, but it's mostly based on an article in Nature. An estimate by the Energy Information Association has natural gas production from fracturing shale growing until 2040, then flattening out. A separate estimate from the University of Texas at Austin, on the other hand, suggests that 2020 is a more likely date for production to plateau. The difference could mean that one estimate is too conservative. It could also result in more dependence built on natural gas than is sustainable.

(Not that this is likely to really be THE peak of the Crisis, although it could feed into whatever economic situations occur.)

There are enough different numbers there that it brings to mind the (yes) collapse of the Grand Banks fishery. There were estimates that said the cod schools there were very robust, except some that said they might be in trouble. It was a lot easier to keep fishing based on the good reports than to reduce based on the bad ones. This worked well enough until supplies collapsed so completely that in 1992 a moratorium on fishing had to be declared - one that continues to this day.

Reactions

An unexpected response to the Sony hack, and an unexpected response to the response....

First, Sony has pulled the release of The Interview, a comedy about the assassination of Kim Jong Un that was believed to be the original reason for the hack. To be fair, it's not in response to the hack as such: Sony is responding to terrorist threats made against theaters, some of which then decided not to screen the film themselves.

Surprisingly, a significant response to that has been that it's a bad precedent - to put it mildly. With all sorts of responses proposed:

• Mitt Romney and Slate (and probably others) suggests that Sony release the movie for free online.
• The Alamo Drafthouse is showing Team America: World Police
• On social media, people post recommendations to purchase the film when it comes out (online, presumably, although Sony has said that it's not planning any release at all.)
• The death scene has been leaked

Coincidentally, the U.S. federal government has officially named North Korea as the source of the hack. President Obama and others, meanwhile, have said the terrorist threats are not credible.

Nonetheless, there's a the sense of agreement, of being on the same side, that makes this time feel different, like something real might be happening.  Not sure what....

Rubles

Today in "Crisis" we see a massive drop in the Russian ruble instigating a jump in interest rates.

A post from March predicted that the situation in Crimea and the Ukraine wouldn't be a major part of the United States crisis. It's working out that way, although there is room for disagreement on why. Making the same mistakes? Underestimating economic sanctions? Overestimating the lessons of history?

In any case, NATO hasn't become involved - and hasn't needed to.  Several times this year Putin has had military advantages that were beaten down by financial realities.  While Ukraine isn't necessarily better off, the United States and the rest of the world would seem to be.

And all of this seems to be yet another advantage of cheap oil. Even if Wall Street can't seem to decide whether it's good for the economy or not, it's clearly not good for Russia, and seems to be reducing their ability to cause mischief.

Is it good overall? Signs point to yes, but we'll see.

Chocolate

The Christmas season is a time for Santa Claus and pine wreaths and Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. There are performances of the ballet, or at least the suite, all around. It's fine music, of course, but the plot isn't exactly a page turner. Girl gets nutcracker, girl defeats mouse king, girl gets prince, girl and prince watch dancing and more dancing.

Several of the dances are based on sweets, which one might get at Christmas time, and the countries from which they are sourced.  Like coffee, which is associated with Arabia, and so has dancers dressed like residents of a harem. And chocolate, which as everyone knows is associated with...Spain?

Well, yes, not so much anymore, but after Cortez brought chocolate beans back from Mexico (er, New Spain) chocolate was a big Spanish product. Churros served with hot chocolate are a traditional dessert in parts of the country. Hot chocolate has been part of Spanish culture since the mid-1500s. Although it evidently lost favor after the Spanish Civil War (i.e. early 20th century) , and coffee supplanted it.

(Can't go here without also mentioning Chantico, a short-lived chocolate drink available at Starbucks in 2005. Good, thick, rich....like espresso but made only with chocolate, maybe a bit much if you weren't an Aztec king.)

Heliocentrism

While looking into both the Copernicus and Newton posts, I had to remind myself of pre-existing knowledge of astronomical history. It ended up requiring fewer names than I expected, but still covers an extensive period. 1543 is about 50 years after Columbus' first voyage, and 1666 is 123 years after that. They are sequential Third Turnings, and so naturally they'll cover over a period equal to a single Saeculum, which is to say somewhere between 90 and 120 years, depending on where you start and end. (And in fact the former is very near the start of its Third Turning, and 1666 is near the end of that one.)

Galileo's place in the process was also of interest, particularly that he's the only one of these to be known for running afoul of the authorities by supporting heliocentrism.   Yet, he's in the middle of this process, and well after significant had been done supporting it. Why did he get in trouble?

I ended up doing a chart, not only to keep track of what happened when and who determined what, but to see where these events were happening in the Saeculum.

Name	Nationality	Lifespan	Born	Died	Generation (using Anglo-American generation periods)	Significant year(s)	Turning (Anglo-american)
Copernicus	Poland	19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543	1473	1543	Humanist (Artist)	1543 - On the Heavenly Spheres	Third
Tycho Brahe	Netherlands	14 December 1546 – 24 October 1601	1546	1601	Elizabethan (Hero)	1588 - Introduction to the New Astronomy	Fourth
Johannes Kepler	Germany	December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630	1571	1630	Parliamentary (Artist)	1605 - first law of planetary motion (Ellipses)	First
Galileo	Italy	15 February 1564– 8 January 1642	1564	1642	Elizabethan (Hero)	1610 - Telescope showed Galilean moons/1633 Trial by Inquisition	First/Second
Newton	England	25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726	1642	1726	Cavalier (Nomad)	1666 - his Miraculous Year	Third

One may note that each of these gentleman are from a different nation. That means they are not necessarily in the same place on the Saeculum - Germany could possibly be in its Third when England is in its First. Much of Europe is often synchronized, though, so I'll take it as given that they are the same or close.

And it appears that Galileo, unlike the rest, was active during an Awakening, which might have affected how aggressive the authorities were about suppressing teachings that didn't match with dogma. (Although his location near Rome may have had an effect as well.)

1666

1666 - Unraveling - Newton's Miraculous Year

A few decades after Galileo risked his life and soul before the Inquisition, it was becoming clear that the Ptolemaic model was not an optimal way of looking at the universe. Using observations from Tycho Brahe's observatories, Kepler had determine not only the advantages of Copernicus' view,  but that the planets rotated around the sun along ellipses, not circles.

Questions remained, however, that twenty-three-year-old Isaac Newton wanted to answer - like what was making the planets move, and what kept them moving, and where they would be next.

Knowing how fast they were moving, and confirming the type of curves they were following, and knowing how long those curves were all necessary to answer this. The input to these questions had to be the the discrete points in space that could be observed on each available clear night. Any proposed would need to work with the years of independent observations that already existed. 

Except that general tools for doing this did not exist. There were formulae for answering some questions in specific instances - such as parts of circles - but Newton needed to be able to handle less regular and less studied curves. He would need someone to invent these tools in order to answer his questions. 

So he did. 

Although his results were published later, it was in 1666 that Newton invented calculus, as an intermediate step on the way to confirming not only that the planets moved, but that they moved in ellipses not circles, and determining the relationship between their movement, speed, and distance from the sun. He further determined that gravity followed an inverse-square law, stronger when objects were larger, weaker as they moved away. The calculus alone would have been an astonishing achievement, only enhanced by the practical use to which it had been put.  During that year Newton also also made important discoveries in optics and fluid mechanics, making his mark as one of the most important scientists of all time.

Ripples

The aftereffects of the Sony hack are becoming more significant than they originally appeared. The initial impact was an embarrassing release of movie files, some employees getting spooky alerts on their computers, and the recognition that this was a major breach.

Then came the release of employee info, and the need to give people identity theft protection because of the scope of data that was pilfered and made available.

North Korea decided to deny that it had anything to do with it, while calling it a "righteous deed." The followup from the attackers demanding that The Interview be shelved made that denial seem disingenuous, though.

Now, emails are being released  make people realize how really un-private their email communications are. It might have been okay to know that your company could legally read whatever was sent over their system. Now, people are going to understand that ANYONE could potentially read anything sent over email. One executive may exit her job over private email comments about Obama. Other emails suggest an ongoing pay gap between men and women, even in the rarefied area of  actor's back-end points for A-list actors.

The initial idea of Data Wars was ill-formed, and might not actually happen. It might never be anything more than another form of asymmetrical warfare. It seems likely that the group that attacked Sony, even if state-funded, is not that large in numbers or in budget. So far the attacks haven't been life-threatening, even if some people's lives aren't as fun as they used to be. There's no reason, so far, to think that simple data access could really be physically dangerous to large numbers of people.

The ripple effects of this hack, though, are making it clear that our interconnected world is acquiring new vulnerabilities all the time, that there are ways to attack that don't depend on bloodshed and that  there are always those looking for creative ways to use new weapons.

Poverty

There's an article on Salon complaining about how unskilled labor doesn't get paid well enough to stay above the poverty line. (The article title isn't very descriptive, actually - it doesn't explain the thesis, but really only asserts it.) 

But of further interest is that it actually delves into how people tried to organize a union at Whole Foods.  Which is in line with other union activity at McDonald's and Uber. And as the latter article notes that it could be happening more often, it's worth a read. 

If only to see if this (Labor) part of the Crisis is coming through.

Cloverfield

A recent news article about antibiotic resistant bacteria used the word "crisis," as is very very common in the news these days. It brought to mind a post from earlier in the year about how having a post a day does not mean searching the news for "the terms Crisis, Collapse, Apocalypse, or Cloverfield."

Googling for Crisis in the news brought up so many records that moving to the last item in the list seemed more worthwhile - likely to get a smaller list, something manageable.

But, no: J.J. Abrams has an upcoming film that has a "Cloverfield feel," so it showed up a few dozen times in the news. And still nobody knows anything about it, except for what has been said here, which at least indicates it is not a sequel.

(Apocalypse, incidentally, only gets references to the upcoming X-Men movie. "Collapse" has a number of different entries across many news sources, with references to oil prices, the (probably related) ruble, and the Greek stock market drop. And maybe this isn't such a bad way to set up a blog. Perhaps next year... )

As for those "superbugs" in the New York Times article, they are particularly in India, blamed on a cavalier attitude toward the use of antibiotics. It's more frightening than such can be, though, because it doesn't even mention methicillin resistant staphylococcus aurae (MRSA). That's the one that usually shows up in these discussions, being a bacteria that causes infections in humans and isn't held back by methicillin or it relations in the penicillin-related antibiotics.

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Armies

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies had its premiere tonight. The expansion of the story into 3 movies isn’t bad, necessarily, since the expansions make it clear how much is really going on in there. What’s surprising is how the relatively light book, about a content although perhaps boring hobbit on an adventure, was turned into movies with a much darker tone. 

Certainly Bilbo and the Dwarves are in constant danger the entire journey, and keeping the possibility of sudden death accessible throughout the series naturally would make it darker.  It's also true that a lot of throwaway items in The Hobbit - the Ring, Gollum, the Necromancer - are very significant in Lord of the Rings, and only a little scraping away at the surface would reveal the fell events that really were happening. 

Then again, there’s nothing that said the filmmaker had to focus on that, and earlier productions - particularly the 1977 animated version - really didn’t. 

It’s the difference between, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Saving Private Ryan. We never expect Indiana Jones to get killed or even seriously inconvenienced, while anyone but Ryan could easily get hurt during that group’s quest. In the original story, Bilbo often appears surprised by the situation he finds himself in and what he should do next, but not especially fearful for his life. He's in an adventure and willing to go along with the logic that an adventure demands.  These movies, though, dig into the fears that would really happen to someone plucked from their home and made to engage in dangerous activities - which was, incidentally, rather well examined toward the end of LOTR. (When Sam and Frodo discuss their personal "story" as they head up Mount Doom, that is.) It’s as if the hobbit's story wasn’t appropriate to our current Turning and needed to be made relevant by making it more “realistic.” 

Moonman

I had planned on continuing on into the Third Turning, with another post that was mostly about the history of Astronomy.

Which lasted until a decision to look a bit deeper into a coincidence only noticed within the last few weeks: Galileo and Shakespeare were born in the same year, 1564.  There's nothing mysterious about this, they simply happen to have been born a few months apart. The search led to an article primarily about Galileo and the circumstances of his persecution (although it does mention Shakespeare a couple of times). It was interesting for a number of reasons:

• Bertolt Brecht - the 11th member of the Hollywood Ten - wrote a screenplay about Galileo that was produced in 1947 - so just ahead of his testimony to the HUAC.
• Brecht's "Hollywood exile" is mentioned,  referring to his time IN Hollywood after fleeing Nazi Germany. Soon after his testimony, he would be in exile FROM Hollywood.
• It appears that Galileo's trouble with the Inquisition - like Brecht's troubles in the U.S. - were during a First Turning, a time when organizations find it necessary to identify those unwilling to conform.
• Galileo's father, a lute player, wrote about the right way to tune musical instruments when his son was a youth. His writings show similarities to Galileo's, including a reliance on experimentation to confirm what actually happened, rather than relying on what existing books already said.

1543

1543 - Unraveling -  Nicolaus Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) 

Go outside, look overhead, and celestial objects will roll past. The sun will start its journey in the east and travel across the sky over the course of the day, disappearing to the west as the day ends.  The moon - whatever phase it is in - will do the same. At night the stars, if watched long enough, will seem to move as a unit, all traveling this same way.  Everything in the sky must be traveling in circles around the solid, unmoving earth. This had been so clear that it had been realized by the ancient thinkers like Ptolemy and incorporated in historical records, like the book of Joshua, where the sun stops overhead to allow the Israelites to overcome the Amorites. 

However, even those old records were from people who noted some discrepancies in what was perceived. The moon had phases, and did not move the same way as the sun. Sometimes one would be blocked out in an eclipse, but this did not occur every month or otherwise regularly. Even more significantly, a few of the stars moved on their own paths, not as part of the large group. These "wandering stars" - called planets from the Greek for "wanderer" -  would often even move backwards compared to the other stars and the sun - west to east, that is,  rather than east to west. Two of these planets were only visible early in the morning, as the sun rose, or in the early evening as the sun set, while the others moved through the night with the fixed stars. 

The solidness of the unmoving earth, though, meant those oddities must still be explainable by movement around it.  Astronomers proposed epicycles, circular movements of these traveling stars around points in space, which kept the perfection of circles and the solid earth in the explanation of what could be plainly seen. 

Nicolaus Copernicus was not the first to suggest that the problem was in the concept of an unmoving earth surrounded by celestial objects.  If the earth moved around the sun, the model became simpler overall, the epicycles unnecessary. Nonetheless, this proposed change was not immediately accepted. One problem was that the movement of the earth would cause the positions of the stars to change over the course of the year. This difference had never been noted, so how could it move? There were religious reasons to prefer the earth-centered view, often because the Bible, presumed infallible, described events that depended upon it. There would be additional refinements over the next century - requiring outright rejections of previously accepted concepts - before Copernicus' view would be recognized as the way our local universe really worked. 

  

Lego

Everything is awesome!

Everything is cool when you're part of a team!

Yes, I finally saw The Lego Movie. 

The above lyrics are so perfectly attuned to appeal to Millennials that I wonder whether they were set up that way - that someone read a generational or millennial book and wrote this song for them. A bit of research doesn't actually find anything like that, although it's made clear by producer Mark Mothersbaugh that it's also not-so-subtle mind control, pushing people to get working through their day.

What generational type for the movie? Hard to say because it plays with multiple levels of reality but  it does have success through teamwork and sacrifice (i.e. loss of the old mentor), so Hero seems right. 

McDonald's

Just a month after an article about Uber drivers attempting to get better pay through striking and other forms of negotiation, there's one about fast food workers at McDonald's.

One big difference is that the fast food workers are employees, so they have protections under labor law that Uber drivers lack (as they are"independent contractors.") McDonald's appears conciliatory by comparison, even interested in a solid management/labor relationship.

Still, it's worth noting that there multiple labor incident do seem to be happening, as proposed in that previous (Uber) post. .

Unbroken

There's a film out soon about a World War II prisoner of war in a Japanese camp, called Unbroken.

(Not Unbreakable - completely different, no war, no prisoner, mostly Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson)

Which is notable because there was one out last year, The Railway Man, with Colin Firth as one of the men working with Alec Guinness at the River Kwai. At least, it sounded like the same situation, even if it wasn't building a bridge.

Every once in a while, Hollywood brings out a few similar films. Assertions of plagiarism come up, although in plenty of cases it's only the basic idea that's the same. Antz and A Bug's Life both have computer-animated ants, but little else in common. Dante's Peak and Volcano were both released a couple of months apart in 1997. Deep Impact tried to be a scientifically correct meteor strike movie, but let's face it: Armageddon was a lot more fun. When a couple of films like these POW ones come out, the more interesting question is "Why was an investment made in them,now? Why did someone think people would want to see them?"

Fortunately an article from the New York Times expands the question to a quartet of World War II films, including Enigma exploration The Imitation Game and single-tank-against-the-Nazis Fury.  (The former includes "advanced math" as justification for it's PG-13 rating.) It even has a simple answer, from an author of the original book used as a source for Unbroken:"It’s the last great shot for the greatest generation." Which seems likely enough.

Races

If you've been around Disney people, at some point you may have seen this picture on an office wall.

There's another similar one showing Mickey racing automobiles, in the same style and at about the same timeframe. (That one has not been easily found, though, at least not using basic Googling skills.) Both of them appear to be showing early adoption of advanced technology by up-and-coming young people who were making money in a new medium - animation, that is, although motion pictures in general were new at that point. If one was involved in the dot-com era, one might even notice similarities between what was happening with those young artists and the people making the World Wide Web happen.

The problem, though, is the date on the above poster: August 1933. It's well past the Roaring Twenties, solidly into the Great Depression. Someone presumably is still doing well enough to race airplanes, at least out in California. (Mickey Mouse has been around for five years; Snow White is almost four years in the future.) It's not quite the same Turning as the dot-com era, which was solidly in the Third. Then again, one could point to a similar situation in the Internet space: Some new companies showed up after the bust, and even as late as the start of the Crisis, and continue to do well enough for themselves.

Another issue is that there's no other evidence of this event easily available - again, not via basic Googling skills. It's not a problem to find these images, or people selling original copies, or references to Burbank Air Field (now Burbank Bob Hope Airport). Actual references to what the Disney Studios Air Races actually involved - who flew, what the course was like, how common air races were - can't be found. If anyone knows more about them, please post.

Stop

There's a book out there, Stop the Coming Civil War  that will make anyone paying attention here say, "Why? You know you can't."

A perusal of the blurb on the back cover  indicates that it's all the librul's fault. Not that it makes any difference, really.

The possible - perhaps immediate - response is to imagine folks in 1859 saying the same thing. "These abolitionists are out of control! John Brown attempted sedition using a federal armory for supplies! We are doomed if we continue down this path! We cannot afford having these upstart Republicans in power!" Perhaps it was actually said, and ultimately it was true enough, and it was a bloody road they all trod 150 years ago. Some forces cannot be stopped. When the time comes they have to be released and either accepted, rejected, or fought over to the very point of blood and death. 

It appears, though, that Mr. Savage actually sees many of the same problems that folks on Daily Kos do. The difference - almost the only difference - is that he assigns the blame in another direction. Indeed, both Kos and Savage have similar solutions:  "We have too much concentrated power in the government! Giving even more power to the people I supports\ will fix it!"

Hack

It's difficult to take a story seriously when it sounds like the plot to a poorly-considered movie that still somehow managed to get green-lit because a huge star thought the script hilarious. It's more difficult still when such a movie is proposed as the actual starting point for the events. When the ultimate goal is a serious posting about the state of the world and how it is headed toward a dangerous and deadly series of conflicts, such a doubly-ludicrous starting point can make it even more difficult to manage a coherent proposal.

Nonetheless, that's where we are with the Thanksgiving hack of Sony Pictures. Rumors are circulating that North Korea was involved, because Sony is preparing to release a movie about news "personalities" who are first granted a chance to interview the leader of North Korea, and then tasked by the CIA to assassinate him. Whatever his failings as a leader or his country's failings as a fun place to live, basing a wacky comedy on an assassination is reasonably considered in bad taste. Malaysia had a similar issue with Zoolander, as did Roger Ebert.

Unlike Malaysia, North Korea has evidently decided to fight back with more than words. Several stories on the breach of Sony's computer systems - compromising everything from individual's computers to Twitter accounts to files containing completed digital copies of upcoming films - propose some combination of
1) Several U.S. agencies believe that North Korea was involved;
2) Multiple sources claim that The Interview is the reason that North Korea instigated the attack;
3) North Korea is not denying that they were behind it.

Another surprise is that such a sophisticated and successful attack was done by a nation that is not known for its prosperity. Still, it indicates that the data wars really could be asymmetrical, with economic robustness not being a requirement for success.