Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

After two days of touring Wales, a country that apparently has yet to discover the mixing faucet, it has become apparent that there is better mobile phone coverage in the remotest sheep pasture or coastal outcrop than in downtown Boston. How can such an otherwise backward place be so far ahead of the U.S. technologically?

Most folks are familiar with the story: in Europe the governments mandated that all cell phone systems be built using the GSM standard. Thus you can make or receive a call any time that you’re within range of any antenna from any provider In practice this means nearly 100 percent coverage of the land area of Europe.

One of the advantages that the U.S. had over Europe in the days prior to European Union was an absence of trade barriers. In feudal times every local duke or prince was able to levy tariffs on goods traveling through his town. Thus it became cheaper to undertake the hazardous sea voyage round the horn of Africa rather than pay all the toll collectors on the land route. Pre-Union Europe retained some of the vestiges of that feudalism and her economic growth was inhibited.

The U.S. by contrast was a model of efficiency. The government built roads from coast to coast and you could drive a truckload of goods from Virginia to California without paying a toll. True free marketeers will argue that it is better to charge road users every time they set their tires on pavement and this may indeed be the case in our congested cities. But most of the time the cost to society of an additional car on the road is too small to bother collecting and the road generates economic growth for all, thus justifying the role of government in paying for it.

Let’s look at wireless Internet for a moment. The ability to send a few packets of information from Point A to Point B without laying expensive cables can spawn a tremendous variety of new computer applications. Using computers intelligently saves energy, cuts pollution, increases security, and generates wealth. What do we see when we open the newspaper? Our politicians trying to figure out how to ameliorate the pernicious effects of feudalism in the Arab world. Occasionally there will be an article about T-Mobile or some other company building an 802.11 network in the U.S. There are going to be lots of competing networks apparently. For any given network you’ll pay $30/month for spotty coverage. While our politicians fret about old-style feudalism in the Muslim world they ignore neo-feudalism springing up in their midst.

Per capita, American citizens pay some of the highest taxes on the planet. 802.11 infrastructure is ridiculously cheap (e.g., $50 base stations). The public is allegedly the owner of the electromagnetic spectrum. Why can’t we combine these facts to conclude that every U.S. citizen ought to be entitled to transmit and receive a certain number of bits per year? Perhaps one’s free entitlement wouldn’t be enough to watch streaming video 24/7. But it would certainly be enough that your car could receive a text message from your wife while you were halfway to the grocery store: “The smoke alarm needs a 9V battery; add it to the list.” It would be enough that your car could notify your apartment that you were on your way home and to turn the heat up. It would be enough that your car could notify your palmtop or wristtop that it was being attacked by thieves. It would be enough that a medical monitor attached to your grandparent at home could transmit measurements and alerts to a doctor.

Surfing the New York Times before departing on a trip (don’t expect too many updates until my return on June 7), this article on blogs mentioned my 2nd cousin Eric Alterman, who appears to have his own blog on MSNBC (kind of ironic because he styles himself a figure of the official counterculture yet his writings are surrounded by constant flashing ads that remind us that one can never escape the corporate voice in American media).  I haven’t seen Eric for at least 10 years but thanks to his blog I’m learning some things about him.  He seems to be an expert on contemporary music (our side of the family typically concentrates on the Bach to Bartok/Stravinsky period, which requires a lot less effort to maintain because you don’t run the risk of some punk laughing at you for having BeeGees albums; classical music nerds today listen to the same stuff that I listened to in the 1970s).  I’ve never heard of most of the people mentioned in Eric’s blog, though the implication is that they’re somehow important, which can make it tough to read for someone as ignorant as myself.  Still it is worthwhile because he finds fun links such as this BBC story.

Today’s theme is nostalgia.  We start by renting the 1955 Picnic, starring William Holden and Kim Novak.  This provides a fascinating portrait of early 1950s small-town Midwestern life as a backdrop to some ageless tensions (rich/poor, intellectual/ignorant, natural/stuffy).  Move next to the 1996 When We Were Kings, which documents the 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in the then-new nation of Zaire (now back to its old name of “Congo”).  The subjects of the documentary can’t foresee that the new leader, Mobutu, will become one of the 20th century’s most notorious kleptocrats (though as discussed in the Israel Essay, he actually did not steal as much from his countrymen as the average Fortune 500 executive team steals from its shareholders).  Nor can they foresee that many of the dancing and singing children among them will be dead of AIDS by 2003.  At some level the movie is about two guys who hit each other really hard but the innocence of the time and optimism about Africa’s future is what really touched me.  Some favorite lines:  “I’m so mean, last week I murdered a stone–I killed a rock”; “No Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger’” (Ali served a prison sentence rather than be drafted into the Vietnam War).

[Warnings  This film’s clips of Ali’s efforts to influence his fellow Americans may make you see our current crop of leaders, black and white, as intellectual and spiritual midgets.  When We Were Kings is also marred by a few minutes of interviews with Spike Lee, the movie director, who tries to sound profound while stating the obvious.]

Factory schools teach science, math, and computers to students with the justification that “this stuff will help you, somehow, someday, maybe by getting you into the right college.”  Some students are happy with this amount of motivation and some students love these subjects for their very purity, their disconnection from the concrete world.  These are the students that we see at MIT and Harvard so in theory this approach is successful.

As evidenced by terrible average scores on standardized tests covering very basic material, the average high school student is not learning science, math, or computer programming to any perceptible degree.  And realistically why would we expect a kid to be motivated to learn these things?  They read newspaper articles about CEOs giving themselves $50 million/year salaries but flunking exams in basic accounting at their Stanford Business School refresher course.  They watch television broadcasts of politicians’ speeches and there is never any reference to principles or ideas taught in their science, math, or computer programming classes.

The combination of a high degree of an abstraction and the apparent ability of people to reach the highest echelons of society in perfect ignorance of these subjects makes it tough for a lot of kids to hit the books.

Why not make it all concrete?  Suppose that starting in 8th grade the kids were told “Each of you is going to design and build your own bicycle over the next 4 years.  To help you do a better job, you’re going to learn some math, some physics, and how to use computers to simulate and model.”

At least 50 percent of what is taught in high school math and science can be motivated by the engineering challenge of making a bike that functions properly and weighs less than 100 kg.  In particular one can dream that this project-based approach would rescue computer instruction from its current abyss.  Instead of teaching the kids how to use Microsoft Office and write lame little graphics programs in VB or Java, we’d show them how computers can become analytical tools.

For the hands-on oriented kids we can let them machine their own parts and maybe do some welding, thus combining math and shop in one period!  To keep the klutzes from killing themselves, though, you’d probably want a design option that included only pre-cut tubes bolted together (you could never make a commercially viable bike this way; it would be too heavy and expensive to manufacture but it would be fine to ride around flat areas and for teaching).

The actual change in the curriculum would be minimal.  It is more a question of spirit and always having a concrete answer if a kid asks “Why do I need to know this?”

Now that Edward Tufte’s name has come up it seems natural to start thinking about information design.  A very strange set of graphics regarding media industry ownership is available at http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html (click on a company, e.g., AOL, after the page loads).  It is unclear why this information is presented graphically at all or what one is supposed to infer from two blobs overlapping.  Contrast with the market maps at http://www.smartmoney.com/ (click on “maps” and choose one), which make it easy to visualize how important an industry is and whether the stocks in that industry are going up or down.

If you visit http://www.edwardtufte.com/ you’ll see a new publication from the great man:  “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”.  This is first notable for its format:  a 24-page essay on full-size paper with very high quality color printing.  This is not traditionally a commercially viable format.  Normally one must write short enough for a magazine or long enough for a 200-page book in order to get into the mainstream distribution systems.  High-quality printing is, of course, generally not on the menu except at some university presses.

The most topical item in the essay regards the PowerPoint slides used to guide thinking about the Columbia’s wing while the shuttle was still up in space.  (A sad echo of the poor presentation materials used to decide whether or not to launch Challenger, a theme discussed in Tufte’s earlier book Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.)

Remember how horrified you were at your first slide-based presentation?  The disaffected civil servants who stood up in front of you in public school at least tried to get you to pay attention to them, rather than darkening the room and insisting that you focus on one disembodied sentence at a time.  By now most of us are used to PowerPoint, however, and we need something like the Tufte essay to bring back the outrage.

Slides are useful when you need to show everyone in a room a graph, a photo, or some other item for discussion.  Somewhere in the 1960s and 1970s things went horribly wrong, however, as bullet points began to make their way onto the slides.

A modest step back from the PowerPoint culture is to limit one’s PowerPoint slides to charts and photos.  If you can’t resist some text, limit yourself to an opening outline slide dense with structure and a closing summary to remind everyone of what they heard.

Why not step back more dramatically, though, to an age before the computer and the overhead projector?  Color printing has never been cheaper and society has never been richer.  Why not print up materials in advance of the talk and hand them out?  If you need to refer to a chart or photo during your talk, ask people to “turn to page 3 of the handout”.  You can leave the room lights on, people will focus their attention on you, the discussion and flow need not be constrained by the tyranny of the bullet points.  The one disadvantage of the handout approach is that you can’t use a laser pointer.

The number of science and engineering students in the United States peaked in the early 1990s.  Despite substantial population growth and a big influx of foreign students, our country is producing fewer scientists and engineers.  Why is this a problem?  Economic growth comes from technological innovation.  A lot of wealth can be skimmed off by managers, lawyers, etc. (e.g., Carly Fiorina, the CEO of HP, majored in medieval history as an undergrad) but the wealth is created to begin with by engineers and scientists.

Why don’t Americans want to study engineering and science?  Look at today’s newspaper.  Chances are that you’ll find stories about Shiite clerics, Islamic fundamentalism, illiterate warring tribes in Third World nations, government bureaucrats directing American forces in benighted corners of the globe, etc.  These might inspire young readers to study medieval history, Islam circa 680 AD (when the Shiites began hating the Sunnis and vice versa), and law or government.  But when our enemies are essentially pre-industrial it is tough to see how engineering and science could be central to American society’s needs.

It was not always so.  Consider World War II, one of the fastest periods of technological innovation.  Our enemies were the Japanese and Germans, who were sophisticated enough to, during WWII, develop novel communications codes (inspired the development of electronic computers), state-of-the-art airplanes (inspired the development of RADAR), state-of-the-art submarines (inspired the development of SONAR, the mapping of the seafloor, and the consequent discovery of mid-ocean ridges and therefore plate tectonics and continental drift), nuclear weapons, rockets, guidance systems, etc.

After the war our enemy was Russia and her enormous pool of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.  The Russians kept us on our toes with things like their early lead in the exploration of Space.

After the Cold War we didn’t have enemies anymore (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we didn’t realize that anyone hated us).  The focus changed to economic competition against the Japanese and Europeans.  If you want to build cars that are as good as Honda’s you need to hire some pretty clever engineers.

Ever since September 11th we as a nation have been focussed on our Muslim enemies.  They don’t invent the jet engine, like the Germans did; they buy Chinese-made copies of the Russian AK-47.  They don’t build cars better than Detroit; they use Saudi oil money to buy Toyota pickup trucks.  They don’t invent new military tactics (hijacking commercial airline flights was a specialty of Yasser Arafat’s PLO 30+ years ago).

At some level it makes sense to focus on our enemies.  After all, our friends aren’t trying to kill us.  Furthermore the population trends imply that in the long run our friends are going to fade into demographic insignificance–the groups that are most enthusiastic about killing  us have among the world’s highest rates of population growth:  nearly 5 percent per year for the Palestinians, 3.27 percent for the Saudis; a friendly country such as Japan grows 0.15 percent per year.  Perhaps if we all study these folks carefully enough somehow we can predict when and where the next attack will come.

On the other hand, our military superiority is derived from economic growth.  If our economy stagnates because our heads are stuck in the 7th Century AD, so will our military power.  By contrast, if we had sufficient economic growth and technological innovation we could, for example, develop and deploy the army of robotic infantry of which a physicist friend dreams.  His robots would be shaped like centaurs with the body and four legs of a horse and a human-like head and arms.  The robot would have a Gatling gun in its chest.  Iraqis would presumably find something to do with their time other than looting if an infantry robot were standing in front of every building in Baghdad.

Putting military conflict aside, a focus on extracting oil from Arab countries takes resources away from the purely technical challenges of producing clean and renewable energy.  With sufficiently improved engineering we could run our society on wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal power.  (If we really wanted to have a go at a tough engineering problem we could try making nuclear power work.)  I.e., the only reason that our politicians have to spend so much time appeasing Muslim dictators is that our technology is insufficiently advanced.  The point of this blog entry is that there is some circularity here.  Our focus on the Muslim world, the most technologically backward portion of the globe, slows down technological development in the West and in Asia, thus forcing the modern societies to continue focusing on the Muslim world…

A new pet theory:  it is human nature that we can only “Give 110 percent” and the reference is the amount of achievement being put forth by our perceived enemies or competitors.  Until we shift our focus away from troubles in the Islamic world the U.S. economy will be stuck in the mud.

[Note that this blog entry does not presuppose that there is anything inherently superior in the Western way of life or Modernity itself.  It is quite possible that an illiterate Afghani with 10 kids is happier than a divorced childless MIT Aero/Astro PhD.]

According to this BBC article, a UC Berkeley study finds that personality can improve with age.  This might be construed as evidence against the theory, presented here just a couple of days ago, that undergrads are happier than old people.

Today was a flying day.  We departed BED, stopped to pick up a friend at MMK (Meriden, CT), crossed the Hudson River and landed on the 12,000′ runway at Stewart Air Force Base (SWF).  We made a detour so that our artist friend (let’s call him E.A. for Extra Aesthetic) could see Bard College’s Gehry-designed auditorium from the air.  E.A. said “What’s great about metal buildings, if they’re sited well, is that they pick up interesting light and reflections at different times of day.”  After landing at SWF and taxiing among the C-5 cargo jet behemoths, we stopped at the Rifton general aviation gas station.  Guys came out to help us park and actually spread a red carpet on the tarmac.  We borrowed a  ”crew car” (free) and headed over to the Storm King Art Center sculpture park.  Although it is only a 1-hour drive from Manhattan and it was a fine Saturday in May, the 500-acres of rolling hills was nearly deserted.  E.A. mentioned that they’d had some financial problems in the past and that sparked an idea:  the rolling hills that separated the sculptures from each other would also make for a fine, if challenging, golf course (with plenty of space in the bordering woods for the obligatory McMansions that accompany golf courses these days).

It became quickly apparent that this idea would not sell very well among people who take their sculpture seriously.  But what about the reverse idea?  The American landscape is being progressively uglified as golf courses supplant rustic farms and natural scenery.  In certain muncipalities there are requirements that people putting up office buildings spend a certain percentage of the total budget on art.  Why not have the same requirement for golf courses?  A golf course is a totally man-made landscape.  Why shouldn’t it be dotted with some interesting huge modern sculpture?  The presence of the pieces would add some additional hazards and challenge for the players.  There are plenty of living artists with cranes (e.g., Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, etc.) and there is a worldwide glut of steel.  If the golf nerds are absolutely committed to working only with natural materials, they could hire Andy Goldsworthy, whose wall at Storm King alone makes it worth the trip.

Any golfing readers care to comment, presumably from a position of greater expertise?

This week’s New Yorker magazine carries a wry story by E.L. Doctorow, which is available online.  If you’ve always been fascinated by the variety of American religious communities, you’ll enjoy it.