Frances Perkins, Joe Hill, and the Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting

"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history, Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. . . . The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
     The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1979
     Milan Kundera, Czechoslovakian, born 1929.

The Governor of Maine, a small and unaccomplished man whose name shall not be documented here, has chosen to pursue his sponsor's agenda by stripping artwork and renaming conference rooms at Maine's Department of Labor. This is no different from the Soviet manipulation of history by doctoring official photographs to remove the fallen from the public's eye, so that the public will forget about them and move on.

These are the offensive murals the governor is having removed:


This demonstrates the old maxim that while it takes a skilled craftsman to build a house, any idiot with a sledgehammer can knock one down.

From the inestimable Robert Reich,

[The] Maine Governor... has ordered state workers to remove from the state labor department a 36-foot mural depicting the state’s labor history. One panel shows my predecessor at the U.S. Department of Labor, Frances Perkins.

The Administration is also renaming conference rooms that had carried the names of historic leaders of American labor, as well as former Secretary Perkins. The Governor’s spokesman explains that the mural and the conference-room names were “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.”" ...

Frances Perkins was the first woman cabinet member in American history. She and her boss, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came to office at a time when average working people needed help – and Perkins and Roosevelt were determined to give it to them. Together, they created Social Security, unemployment insurance, the right of workers to unionize, the minimum wage, and the forty-hour workweek.

That’s why the current Republican assault on workers – on their right to form unions, on unemployment insurance and Social Security, on public employees, and even (courtesy of [the] Governor) on our common memory – is so despicable. ...

Governor, you might be able to erase some of Maine’s memory, but you’ll have a hard time erasing the nation’s memory – even if it’s not in keeping with your pro-business goals.

The Maine Governor's intention is to erase the memorials to labor leaders, to erase the memory of a labor movement, in order to advance his sponsor's agenda. When you remove the names, the artwork, and the statues; when you revise the history and the schoolbooks, as the generations pass the memory fades. He would like the memory of Frances Perkins to fade away.

Frances Perkins, RIP

From Wikipedia:

With The Social Security Act [Frances Perkins] established unemployment benefits, pensions for the many uncovered elderly Americans, and welfare for the poorest Americans. She pushed to reduce workplace accidents and helped craft laws against child labor. Through the Fair Labor Standards Act, she established the first minimum wage and overtime laws for American workers, and defined the standard 40-hour work week. She formed governmental policy for working with labor unions and helped to alleviate strikes by way of the United States Conciliation Service.

She achieved statewide prominence as head of the New York Consumers League in 1910 and in that position she lobbied with vigor for better working hours and conditions. In 1911 she was an eyewitness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a pivotal event in her life.

Having earned the cooperation and respect of various political factions, Perkins ably helped put New York in the forefront of progressive reform. She expanded factory investigations, reduced the workweek for women to 48 hours, and championed minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws.

The Frances Perkins Building in Washington DC, the headquarters of the United States Department of Labor, was named in her honor in 1980. Perkins is also honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on May 13.

Holy Laity, Batman, She's got a Feast Day named after her!

Repositioning Child Labor

Maine's Republican legislature is developing legislation to reduce child labor protections:

The minimum wage in Maine is $7.50 an hour, and there is no training or subminimum wage for students. But under a new piece of legislation introduced in the state's House of Representatives, employers would be able to pay anyone under the age of 20 as little as $5.25 an hour for their first 180 days on the job.

The bill, LD 1346, also eliminates the maximum number of hours a minor 16 years of age or older can work on a school day and allows a minor under the age of 16 to work up to four hours on a school day during hours when school is not in session.

I would like to restate for clarity: Frances Perkins worked for the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and overtime; she was against workplace accidents and child labor. The Republican governor wants to remove all traces of her memory, set wages for young workers below the minimum wage, and let under-16 kids work up to four hours every school night.

The Governor may rename the building and the rooms, and the task of preserving the memory of the labor movement and the memory of Frances Perkins may fall upon others who do not have the means to name buildings and offices. We can only hope that the Streisand Effect will perversely thwart the governor's intention.

There are other ways to preserve a memory. A song can be an effective means of memorializing a person or a movement. "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

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Let's consider the story of union organizer and song writer Joe Hill.

Joe Hill

Joe Hill (1879 – 1915) was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He learned English during the early 1900s while working itinerant industrial jobs across America.

Hill became a respected song writer for the workers' association. His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave", "The Tramp", "There is Power in the Union", "Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones: Union Scab", which generally express the harsh but combative life of industrial workers.

In 1914, Hill was accused of the murders of two prominent citizens. Hill, who had a gunshot would, declined to give an alibi; he explained the wound as the consequence of a dispute. Contemporaries suggested that Hill declined to make public his alibi (an assignation with a married woman) in order to protect her. He was convicted in a controversial trial with changing testimony. Following an unsuccessful appeal, political debates, and international calls for clemency, Hill was executed in November 1915.




The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Don't let them re-write history and erase the memory of the labor movement.

The Habituation of Routinized War and the Return of the Draft

There are wars that Americans felt good about in that they were considered just and right. These appropriate wars where the wars that somebody else started, where they attacked us and we declared war against them. WW1, WW2: you can quibble about who knew what/when, and the extent to which we built the provocative scenario, but they were understood as responses to an attack. Americans willingly sacrificed their children and their treasure for those kinds of war.

During the second half of the 20th century, and particularly in the context of the Cold War, a tenet of American military policy was the "second strike" - the United States wouldn't make the initial attack (the first strike), but we would be completely ready for the second strike. Nobody talks about second-strike capability any more. Second Strike is so 1992.

The First-Strike Paradigm

These days we don't attack countries that attacked us first (because countries don't attack us; only small groups of fanatics attack us). We attack other countries because we want to; these are optional wars that we choose to make.

Proficiency at Starting Wars

Proficiency means that things get easier, and your performance improves, the more you do something. We've gotten very proficient at starting wars. Starting wars must be much easier than ending wars, because we've started several lately and we haven't ended any. The Dept. of Defense is in at least three wars right now; the CIA has got one going in Pakistan, too.

We don't declare war any more, or at least we don't do it by the book. We're bipartisan in this willful disregard of the Constitution. Being attacked is no longer a prerequisite for starting a war, and neither is Congressional declaration; we've become clever, we're into War 2.0, and we've developed new excuses justifications for starting a war. Don't fetishize the old ways.

Prophylactic War The opportunistic use of 9/11 as justification for extension of American hegemony moved America from second-strike to first-strike, justified by the dubious philosophies of preventive war or preemptive war

*

: we don't need to wait for mushroom clouds over American soil; bring it. The hubris of George w. Bush / Dick Cheney / Donald Rumsfeld / Paul Wolfowitz was that we could do this surgically, quickly, and with a downsized force.

Humanitarian War As President Obama remarked in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize speech: “I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That’s why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.”

The Daily Globe and Mail explains today's philosophy of humanitarian war:

This doctrine is known as the “responsibility to protect” (R2P or RtoP) and was endorsed by the United Nations in 2005. It mandates that the “international community” is morally obliged to defend people who are in danger of massive human-rights violations. R2P is the moral underpinning of the war in Libya, and it’s the reason why people have been so amazingly eager for us to rush into battle.

The hubris of Barrack Obama / Hillary Clinton / Samantha Power / Susan Rice was that we could do this surgically, quickly, and without boots on the ground. At the United Nations, RtoP is considered an achievement of Kofi Annan which is embraced by Ban Ki Moon.

The 1.5 Political Parties

In a blog post today, EBM points out that there's not a significant difference between America's "1.5 political parties", and she's quite right. Consider the similarities between the wars of our last two Presidencies:

U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) writes,
"So why did we invade Iraq? I believe it was the triumph of the so-called

neo-con

ideology, as well as Bush administration arrogance and incompetence that took America into this war of choice. . . . They obviously made a convincing case to a president with very limited national security and foreign policy experience. . . "

Take Hagel's statement, change the names, and see if it's still valid:
"So why did we invade Libya? I believe it was the triumph of the so-called

neo-lib

ideology, as well as Obama administration arrogance and incompetence that took America into this war of choice. . . . They obviously made a convincing case to a president with very limited national security and foreign policy experience. . . "

Routinized War

Mickey Kaus writes,

In a true empire – in this case, the empire of UN approved human rights enforcement – war never really ends. Always someone to protect somewhere. Imagine living in imperial Britain in the mid-19th century. There would almost always be a war or police action – actual shooting and killing – going on.

For a true empire to work – even, or perhaps especially, a humanitarian empire – war has to be routinized. You’ve got two wars going already? No need to change the president’s schedule to start a third war. Tour Latin America. Talk about your NCAA brackets. Don’t give a big speech – I mean, you don’t call a press conference every time the police run a sobriety checkpoint, do you?

Habituation

We have become habituated to a state of continual warfare, our corporations have adjusted to the money stream, and our institutions have realigned their objectives and budgets to ensure their continuation for the foreseeable future. Habituation turns a goat-roping exercise into the new normal.

The military-industrial complex is motivated to encourage this habituation. What makes habituation more effective?

Two factors that can influence habituation include the interstimulus interval (ISI), or the amount of time between each successive presentation of the stimulus, and the stimulus duration, or the length of time the stimulus is presented. Shorter ISIs and longer durations increase habituation; longer ISIs and shorter durations decrease habituation.

We can expect more undeclared wars, occurring with shorter intervals and of increasing duration. Just saying.

How old is an American kid who remembers peace?

A sixteen-year-old probably remembers when the United States was at peace. In a few more years, that cohort will be nineteen years old. Then the draft-age kids will be 18, their country will have been at war since they were born, and it'll be just like the Oceania vs Eurasia vs Eastasia War.

I thought Charles Rangel was grandstanding when he called for compulsory conscription, but I see now that the Korean War infantryman

*

was exactly right. You ask a kid about the draft these days, and they're going to reply, "NBA or NFL?"

Mickey Kaus says the same thing in his post:

It helps achieve routinization if wars can be conducted by a distinct cast of professionals whom we hire to do the job, as opposed to ordinary citizens who are drafted. That way when soldiers start dying … well, that’s the business they have chosen, right?

And they’re largely drawn from a distinct geographic region, the South. Mothers don’t have to worry that their sons will sent to fight against their will, as happened in Vietnam – and if they’re Northern mothers in well-off suburbs they may not even know anyone who has a family member at risk.

Reintroduction of the Draft

What are the dynamics that might reverse this trend?

• Significant loss of American military personnel
• reintroduction of cumpulsory conscription
• Overextension and economic collapse (oops)
• an unforeseeable event that provides entry for a new political movement
• development of a domestic antiwar movement

If not a full reintroduction of the draft, we could at least restore the Draft Lottery. Let enough mothers know that their sons have low draft numbers, and all of a sudden war won't be routine anymore.

And yes, my children are eligible or about to become eligibile for the draft.

Working for Free: Absurd Anti-Mimesis

I understand anti-mimesis, the thought that Life Imitates Art. What concerns me is when Life Imitates Satire, and you can't distinguish the reality from beyond-the-Pale. These days I have trouble telling the actual from the absurd.

On Friday, Bill in Portland Maine blogs a series of George Carlin jokes that he finds timely:

There are caregivers and there are caretakers, and yet the two words are not opposites. Why is this?

Trade always exists for the traders. Any time you hear businessmen debating "which policy is better for America," don’t bend over.

I think they should have a hotline that never answers, for people who don’t follow advice in the first place.

Have you ever wondered why Republicans are so interested in encouraging people to volunteer in their communities? It's because volunteers work for no pay. Republicans have been trying to get people to work for no pay for a long time.

George Washington's brother was the Uncle of Our Country.

Ha ha, ho ho, very funny. Oh gosh, that would never really happen.

In Friday's Fortune Magazine: Unpaid Jobs: The New Normal?

"People who work for free are far hungrier than anybody who has a salary, so they're going to outperform, they're going to try to please, they're going to be creative," says Kelly Fallis, CEO of a New York and Toronto startup.


In the last three years, Fallis has used about 50 unpaid interns for duties in marketing, editorial, advertising, sales, account management and public relations. She's convinced it's the wave of the future in human resources. "Ten years from now, this is going to be the norm," she says.

I had no idea that working for free was a trend. My first impression was, that's immoral, and my second question was, that's illegal. I have heard of unpaid summer internships for college students, which I think is abusive.

Gurus encourage people to work for free. It'll help you build your personal brand 2.0, it'll get you out of the house (which is healthy!), you'll gain valuable experience, and if the money gets too tight, you can always get a paid night job after you work your free job.



What do we call somebody who works for free?

• A slave.
• A prisoner.
• A child around the house (oops).

Perhaps this is just the inevitable result of our current national economic policy where we destroy the middle class by bidding for work at lower and lower prices. Our state governments do this for us industry by adopting low wage laws, business friendly environments, and right-to-work policies.

Then I channeled the ShamWow guy and thought, But Wait There's More! Once you've driven the price down to zero, where does it go next? Zero is not a barrier, zero is an opportunity! Those people who are working for nothing are a potential profit center.

They need resumes, training, websites, help with their social web presence, positive referalls on their LinkedIn pages, they need to park somewhere, and -- how's this?? -- they have biological needs, so let's install pay toilets!



Unbelievable. Where have you gone, George Orwell?

New York Times Paywall Workaround

In a February post we discussed the upcoming New York Times pay wall, restricting non-subscribers to 20 views per month.

The subscription to the online content is not a trivial expense: $15, $20, or $35 every four weeks, depending on if you want web, iPad, or smartphone access. Clever how they've arranged for 13 monthly payments each year.




There's a few workarounds.


The Twitter Hack We're told that you'll be able to follow unlimited Twitter links to NYTimes content, and it's possible that some people might just post some very comprehensive links to that content on a Twitter page.

The Bing Hack (aka The BingHole) The Globe and Mail suggests:

• Browse The New York Times home page or any section front, which is free.
• Copy the headline of a story you want to read.
• Paste the headline into a search engine (but not Google) (ex: Bing)
• Clicking on the matching New York Times link will take you to the story, which you can read without charge.

The Bookmarklet Hack The Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard brings this article: Four Lines of Code to Break the NY Times Paywall. From the article,
Canadian coder David Hayes has just released NYTClean, a bookmarklet that, in one click, tears down the Times’ paywall. The code is elegant and clean, and consists of this:

$('overlay').hide();
$('gatewayCreative').hide();
$(document.body).setStyle( { overflow:'scroll' } );

In order to implement Hayes' hack, you need to display the Bookmarks toolbar in your browser. (View, Toolbars, Bookmarks). Then when you go to NYTClean, just drag the "bokmarklet" onto your browser Bookmarks toolbar. That's it, you're done.

When you go to the NYTimes and the paywall blocks access to read the page, just click on the NYTClean bookmarklet, and you should be able to view the content.

Bloomberg reports that the NYTimes is spending between $40M and $50M to implement the paywall.

Holy Assymetrical Conflict, Batman!

To be sure, as they say, these kludges work for the Canadian paywall, and it may be that there's a more clever paywall scheme for the United States. We'll see.

William Shatner, Rocketman, Turns 80

There is, perhaps, no universal standard of geek status as pervasive as being a Star Trek Geek, and so I would ask you to join me in commemorating William Shatner's 80th birthday.

Often imitated, never equalled

World War III

I wasn't here for the beginning of World War Two, so I'd like say that (1) it wasn't my fault, and (2) I'd like to suggest that in the buildup to WWII, probably nobody looked around and said, "Whoa, this is beginning to look like a nascent global conflict, maybe even (gasp) another Great War".

Look at the complexity of events leading up to World War Two:


And look at the Axis-Allies distribution in July 1943:


Are current conditions much different?

Let's talk about World War III

I'm thinking that Mohamed Bouazizi might be 2011's version of 1914's Archduke Ferdinand. Similarly, Saudi Arabia's recent excursion into Bahrain might be seen (in retrospect) as a repetition of Germany entering Poland.

How many wars does the United States have to be engaged in before we recategorize it as a global war?

(oops, somebody already used GWOT).

Could the world be in the first stages of WWIII?

• Japan is in an economic, food, and energy crisis.
• China is feeling its muscle in Asia and its influence globally.
• Don't even ask about Taiwan.
• Recession/ Depression in the First World.
• Global monetary conflict.
• Israel and Iraq would like the other to disappear, and they're both currying proxies.
• Pakistan and North Korea have nuclear weapons. Iran is working on it.
• Russia is in the tank.
• From the Straights of Gibraltar, across Africa and Asia to Indonesia, a new flavor of Islam is preaching holy war.
• Simultaneously, France, Britain, and the United States are restaging the Crusades.

Just to assert some small rationality on my part, I'm not going anywhere near the Mayan 2012 concept.

To be sure, other timeframes could have been seen as early WW3 and they weren't. Korea, Hungary in '56, Suez, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Pristina incident, etc. It would be okay if this was not the start of WW3. The possibility cannot be excluded.

It might be an interesting time. I'd like to ask: Why won't it end up as World War Three?

Fake News As An Under-Appreciated Art Form

I've begun to contemplate an under-appreciated art form, and as hipsters and collectors will assure you, the time to get in on an under-appreciated art form is NOW RIGHT NOW before the market gets too hot and you can't get anywhere near it, believe me, and then you want to UNLOAD just before it goes mainstream and becomes widely accepted.

Let's talk about fake news as an art form. Pittsburgh recently went into a tizzy over a faux FOP press release; it seems to have accomplished exactly what its creators desired. The Onion is all about fake news. Also, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Fox News have all done well for themselves with fake news.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a doozy of a fake news story by Holman Jenkins, purporting to be from the year 2061, when litigation regarding the Japanese nuclear power plan problems is still continuing. The title: What GE Was Thinking in 2011.

I urge you to read it for yourself. Key moments include:

• Recovery Strategy: Sell Nuclear Business to Comcast.
• Japanese bloggers call GE's 1960 reactor design the "third nuclear attack on Japan"
• Nobody at GE needs to be reminded that there is no natural private market for nuclear reactors. All our customers are governments.
• a disturbing new correlation: Whenever President Obama endorses an energy option, disaster promptly ensues. His ringing support of expanded offshore drilling came just weeks before the BP oil spill. The Japanese reactor mess followed not long after he lauded nuclear energy as a weapon to fight global warming.

Timing is everything.

Is America Responsible for Japan's nuclear program ?

I can't recall the source - I think it's in the Analects - but an philosoper said: When you see somebody acting without wisdom, do not laugh at them but rather take it as a lesson and search for the same behavior in yourself. In that way, you can improve yourself on their dime.

I also believe that most contemporary problems are the result of what we once thought were really clever solutions, which we embraced and rewarded. When I see a problem, I try to ask what solution caused this problem?

Those are both good habits, but they're internal, ruminative, self-benefiting, and they are virtual in the sense that they do not engage the world; that is, they do not address the question of moral action.

I'm not nuanced enough for all this, so I've attempted to implement a shallower, more ego-centric version: when I see somebody (within my sphere, constrained by Dunbar's number) acting without wisdom in a significant thing, I ask myself, How might that be my fault?

If, on examination, I've contributed to the foolishness then I have an obligation to attempt to remedy the chain of events that I've caused. No blame, no guilt, just a duty.

Colin Powell said it much more elegantly when he described The Pottery Barn Rule: "You break it, you bought it".

Which is a very pedantic, verbose way of getting around to my topic:

Is Japan's nuclear crisis our (America's) fault?

From Bloomberg, today:

With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II, a conflict the country fought partly to secure oil supplies.

The American vs. Japan aspect of World War Two was largely about Japan's energy needs. In 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War began. Japan relied on energy imports, mostly from the United States. In an attempt to modify Japanese behavior through an oil crisis, the United States declared an oil embargo (in a way, we invented OPEC) and froze the assets of Japan. They couldn't get oil, and they couldn't pay for it.

The Japanese response was not as Washington hoped for. Japan met its energy needs by extorting concessions from the Dutch East Indies, coercing Vichy France into allowing Japanese occupation of northern Indochina, and beginning negotiations for an alliance with Germany and Italy.

It's a simplistic view of a complex scenario, but the US-Japanese conflict in WW2 was proximately caused by Japan's lack of native energy supplies and American constraint on energy imports.

After World War Two, Japan addressed her energy needs through nuclear power with American encouragement.

Who developed civilian nuclear power?

From President Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms For Peace speech,

"To the making of these fateful decisions, the United States pledges before you--and therefore before the world--its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma--to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life."

The United States then launched an "Atoms for Peace" program that supplied equipment and information to schools, hospitals, and research institutions within the U.S. and throughout the world. The first nuclear reactors in Iran and Pakistan were built under the Atoms for Peace program.

Which I think demonstrates my earlier point that today's problems are caused by yesterday's bright, clever solutions:

Iran and Pakistan got their first taste of nuclear reactors from the United States

. It's too facile to blame it all on A.Q. Khan

From Wikipedia:

The Shippingport Atomic Power Station, "the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses, was located near the present-day Beaver Valley Nuclear Generating Station on the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, USA, about 25 miles from Pittsburgh. The reactor went online December 2, 1957.

Who sold Nuclear Power to the Japanese?

We did. From Wikipedia:

In 1954, Japan budgeted 230 million yen for nuclear energy, marking the beginning of the [Japanese nuclear] program. The Atomic Energy Basic Law limited activities to only peaceful purposes.

In the 1970s the first Light Water Reactors were built in cooperation with American companies. These plants were bought from U.S. vendors such as General Electric or Westinghouse with contractual work done by Japanese companies...

The nuclear industry in Japan has been highly affected by its United States counterpart. The industry has become confident that the U.S. will see construction of new nuclear plants. Joint [US-Japanese] venture agreements between the major nuclear fuel vendors occurred in 1999, 2006, and 2007, following from the legacy of co-operation that began when Japan imported Western technology to jump start its nuclear industry.

We continue to sell nuclear power to Japan

The United States-Japan Joint Nuclear Energy Action Plan is a bilateral agreement aimed at putting in place a framework for the joint research and development of nuclear energy technology. The agreement was signed on April 18, 2007. It is believed that the agreement is the first that the US has signed to develop nuclear power technologies with another country.

Is America responsible for Japan's nuclear program?

I think so. We caused the need, we sold them our solution, and we profited from it.

Japan Imports US Robots for Nuclear Duty

We (generally) only know what people are willing to tell us, and there are a lot of motivations for dissembling.

In the Cold War, we made estimates of Russian strength and they made estimates of American strength. Since funding only flowed to the military-industrial complex for projects in which the enemy held the advantage, it is not remarkable that each side's bureaucracy overestimated the strength of the other. It was in everybody's interest to escalate the arms race, with the possible exception of the citizens of either country — who might have preferred that the resources were used to, say, fight childhood malnutrition or cure cancer (which, if I remember, Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, forty years ago. We've built a lot more weapon systems than we've built cancer cures.)

We're told that the Japanese are eating America's lunch on robotics and technology. The demos are remarkable.

---

NY Times, pre-firewall:

At the request of the Japanese military,

a Massachusetts company, iRobot, said it put four robots on a plane for Japan on Friday

. Colin Angle, the chief executive, said it had sent two small robots that could measure radiation levels close to the reactors and two larger ones that could pull hoses to spray water on the fuel rods.

He said the robots might be able to tug the hoses for 200 to 300 yards. Japanese soldiers could operate the robots from a protected vehicle, he said.

From NECN: "iRobot is sending two of its packbots...and two warrior robots to Japan, along with six employees. The pack bots will be equipped with a hazmat sensor...the warriors will be fitted with a special gripper that can hold a fire hose. Both are able to go where humans can not."

From UberGizmo: "The team that consists of PackBots and Warrior robots have been designed to work in such situations... The robots can be sent out into the field, while the controllers can stay inside protected vehicles where they will be safe from radiation. The PackBot can be used to determine how dangerous the radiation levels are, and the Warrior could be used to pull hoses into “hot zones”, delivering cold water where it is needed inside the nuclear reactors."

Kirsten Korosec, in Why Japan’s Nuclear Plants Sacrifice Workers Instead of Robots, argues that it's not a technological issue as much as a cultural issue.

...there’s a competing culture in Japan, one that relies on humans for tasks that have given way to automation in the rest of the world. Add an ingrained worker culture that places extraordinary value on selflessness, modesty and consensus-building to the mix, and it’s easier to understand how TEPCO could see the low-tech human approach as the right choice.

Reuters explains that Japan is a world-leader in robotics in many fields, but that cultural issues inhibit Japanese systems engineers from considering worst-case scenarios, which involve a tacit loss of face.

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Lest we become smug, let me point out that this is the American military-industrial complex seizing an opportunity to extend military capabilities into the civilian market. We probably wouldn't have PackBots and WarriorBots if it weren't for our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.


Update: click here for WIlliam Saletan on Japan and nuke-plant robots.

Daylight Savings Time and the Yinzer Mullet

Daylight Savings Time is the temporal equivalent of
the under-appreciated   Yinzer   mullet hairstyle.


It's business up front (dark in the morning),

and party in the back (daylight at 7.30 pm).

Alternative Energy: A Call for Help, Looking for a 12-Step Plan

When people once capable of rational thought persist in counter-productive and even self-destructive behavior over long periods of time, there are a few possible explanations:

• insanity
• addiction
• greed

Often, family and friends wonder: what will it take to change this? Which 12-Step program is best?

People with experience say that (1) they have to hit bottom, and (2) they have to want to change. (and: nobody ever wants to change)

Thinking globally and citing locally

Coal is dangerous to mine and hazardous to the environment. Black lungs and acid rain. (see, Upper Big Branch and Quecreek Mine)

Oil is dangerous to store (see, Ashland), hazardous to the environment (see, Deepwater Horizon), and most of it belongs to other people who are disinclined to share (see, OPEC).

Natural Gas is dangerous to store, and collecting it through hydraulic fracturing is an ecological disaster. (see, Dimock, PA)

Nuclear power works real well unless until there's a problem and then it's a catastrophe. (see, Three Mile Island)

---

Hydroelectric. Works in Nevada. And Pennsylvania.

Solar. Works in Philadelphia and on the North Side.

Wind mills. Work in the Netherlands. And Somerset.

Geothermal. Works in Iceland. West Virginia's thinking about it.

What will it take?

What will it take to get us moving to alternative energy sources? Do we have to wait until Corporations figure out how to sell the wind?

If people don't start acting smart about this (and pretty quickly) I'm going to have to become an environmentalist, and that's really not my self-image. And it's all about me.

Daylight Savings Time Theory

From today's NY Times: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

The Saturday Evening Post asked, in jest, “why not ‘save summer’ by having June begin at the end of February?” And an Arkansas congressman lampooned the time reformers by proposing that we change our thermometers: move the freezing point up 13 degrees and a lot of folks could be tricked into burning less fuel to heat their houses.

The change is disconcerting. But more unsettling still is the mystery we’d rather not face: If clock time isn’t real, what is time, anyway? We don’t understand time, and we definitely don’t want to admit that our allotment is limited. We just want to get on with our day.

Alternative Theories of Daylight Savings Time

• There is one theory that daylight savings time was invented by college students who needed another hour to complete a report.
• Another theory is the government developed DST to convince the Russians we were "ahead" in saving time. The Russians freaked out and built nuclear weapons until they went bankrupt and lost the Cold War. It wasn't Reagan at all.
• Some indigenous cultures believe DST is a fallacy. "White man cuts off end of rug, sews it to other end, thinks rug is longer."

Winter Months: Work and Leisure, Light and Darkness

This graphic shows the presumed hours of "work" and "leisure", juxtaposed against the hours of darkness and sunlight, during the winter months:

Wasted Daylight in Summer Months

If "we" schedule our work and leisure in the summer months the same as we do in the winter months, we squander some hours of daylight, and (theoretically) spend more on fuel than the available daylight would require:

Saving Daylight Time by Shifting Work and Leisure

Rather than rescheduling all our activities (baseball is at 5pm in winter and 6pm in summer), we can shift our work and leisure activities in a virtual sense by resetting the clocks.

Marginal Benefit of Daylight Savings Time

This final graphic depicts the marginal benefit of daylight savings time - there is one additional hour of sunlight during the period considered "leisure hours".

Railroads, Aviation, and Time

We deal with "standard time" because of the railroads, who preferred to not deal with "local sidereal time" with each train station subject to the local definition of high noon. If the railroads gave us standard time zones, what did the airlines give us?



Aviation found accommodation of even standard time zones to be onerous, so pilots, airlines, and weathermen deal with "Greenwich Mean Time" (GMT) or "Zulu Time", for time-zone-Z. This is one global time zone based on high noon at Greenwich England. So when it's 0500 am here, it's 1000 GMT.


Politically, the use of the phrase Greenwich Mean Time was considered Eurocentric, and the term Zulu conveyed implications of colonialism, so the inoffensive term , or Coordinated Universal Time (UCT) is now used for Zulu time.

If you call up the National Observatory for a time check, you'll hear the time given in Coordinated Universal Time. (I would point out that the four-letter code for the UCT radio station is: WWVB)

ZULU or UTC Time and Dates

What really strikes me as being artificial, and the ultimate demonstration of how contrived the whole thing is, isn't the designation of Zulu time: it's the declaration of Zulu Dates.

For instance, when it's 9pm or 2100 here, it's 2am or 0200 in Greenwich.
But if it's 9pm on Tuesday the 5th here, in Zulu it's 2am on Wednesday the 6th.
That's just too wierd, and anytime anybody attempts to engage me in unnecessary discussion about Zulu time, I generally raise the ante and ask them about the Zulu date. It's generally a show-stopper.

Asking about Zulu dates is the chronological equivalent of injecting predestination into a discussion of religion -- which leads us back, full circle, to the question: Does anybody really know what time it is?




Of course, there are lots of ways to "save" time.