News You Can Bruise

I was reading to Sumana the most interesting bits from Washington Goes To War, a book by David Brinkley about the changes to Washington D.C. over the course of World War II. It's full of interesting historical tidbits, including:

• The attempt to notify essential personnel of the attack on Pearl Harbor, without notifying the other 27,000 people in the same football stadium watching the Washington Redskins game.
• An entirely legal scheme by which a Washington columnist and the Spanish ambassador arranged payoffs in exchange for "the columnist [writing] about previously unknown virtues he saw in Francisco Franco."
• The controversial origins of having taxes automatically deducted from your paycheck.

But the thing Sumana wanted me to record verbatim was the policy that Washington D.C.'s Casino Royal put into place for dealing with the inevitable fistfights between soldiers and sailors. "Night after night," these inter-service resentments boiled over, and so the Casino Royal wrote down these rules and posted them "on a wall backstage under the heading TO STOP DISTURBANCE."

1. Lower the house lights
2. Turn the spotlight on a large American flag hanging from the ceiling
3. Start up an electric fan aimed at the flag, causing it to flutter
4. Have the band instantly stop playing dance music and strike up "The Star-Spangled Banner".
5. Call in the military police and the navy's shore patrol

It always worked. The soldiers and sailors stopped swinging at each other, faced the flag and stood at attention while the band played. There was no way a uniformed military man in wartime could refuse to do this, however angry he was. Before the anthem was finished, the military police and the shore patrol were walking up the steps from Fourteenth Street.

The one that really gets me is #3. I can see how this behavior would be drilled into you as a reflex action, but #3 makes it feel like they're trying to inspire you, remind you what you're fightin' for. And then the MPs show up.

How To Write Telegrams Properly.

Officials felt that the vital orders of the Government must be definite and clear cut, and they therefore used not only the word "stop," to indicate a period, but also adopted the practice of spelling out "comma," "colon," and "semi-colon." The word "query" often was used to indicate a question mark. Of all these, however, "stop" has come into most widespread use, and vaudeville artists and columnists have employed it with humorous effect, certain that the public would understand the allusion in connection with telegrams...

"Stop" is of course never necessary at the end of a message.

What's the standard science fiction term for densely packed computing matter, the stuff you use to build an upload civilization? I thought it was "computanium" but that only gets a handful of search results, and I know there's a standard term for it.

This was a weird book to read because I'd already internalized much of it. It's the standard narrative of Turing's life I grew up with, and if you read it for the details you can actually see Neal Stephenson coming up with the plot for Cryptonomicon. So unlike the Licklider book I don't have a whole lot to say about this one, except that it was definitely worth reading.

One thing that jumped out of me was, reading the WWII sections, how much of the codebreaking relied not on abstract mathematical ingenuity but in ingenuity applied to exploiting the adversary's mistakes. For instance, the Germans often used a less secure version of Enigma for unclassified things like the weather report, not realizing that if Bletchley cracked the weather report they'd be 80% done cracking the secure cipher for that day. Not surprising that this got largely left out of Cryptonomicon, because fiction is usually more interesting when the adversaries are competent.

I mentioned a while back that I was reading Steven Levy's book about the development of the Macintosh. I guess that triggered something in my to clear out my stock of books about computer history, because then I read The Dream Machine, a book about ARPA by M. Mitchel Waldrop (almost as ponderous a name as J. C. R. Licklider), and Andrew Hodges's famous Alan Turing: The Enigma. And there was also the matter of the intermittently fascinating Whole Earth Software Catalog.

I bought the Waldrop book as a biography of Licklider (actually I bought it because of the BRIGHT YELLOW COVER that blocked out all other books in the bookstore), but it really strains to fill a whole book with his life and make it interesting. Fortunately the book's method of straining is to bring in all the other characters of American computer science from the 1940s through the 1970s, with a theme of Licklider as the networker between them, and that was very entertaining. Though I admit part of the entertainingness was the celebrity-spotting equivalent of those old Looney Tunes cartoons that feature charicatures of all the Warner Bros. contract stars of the 1940s. Oh look, it's {Peter Lorre,John McCarthy}.

The most interesting new information I found in the book is the history of ARPA, specifically of the Information Processing Techniques Office (Licklider was IPTO head twice). The major theme is the Vietnam-era mission anticreep that slowly pushed ARPA from advanced research projects, to the more circumscribed realm of advanced research projects that we can use on the battlefield within two years without fundamentally changing anything (somewhat parallel to the problems Xerox PARC had). Meanwhile Licklider's trying to scrape together a couple million to fund his crazy "Intergalactic Network" project, and his office is sticking boilerplate defense justifications onto incoming grant proposals so they can get ARPA money.

"All that language about military rationale wasn't in the Stanford version of the proposals," explains Ed Geigenbaum: it was slapped on at the very end by the ARPA funding officers back in Washington. "The only people who ever saw it were the students who would later dig it up under the Freedom of Information Act. Then they'd bring it on campus and say, 'See, McCarthy is working on such and such.' McCarthy would say, 'What do you mean? I never heard of that!'"

But the book also ties together things that I learned about in college with no that they were connected. For instance, ALOHA and Ethernet use the same collision resolution mechanism not because it's an obvious fact about the universe, but because Bob Metcalfe read a paper slamming ALOHA and decided to prove it could work. And multitasking came directly from time-sharing, as cheaper computers made time-sharing less of a selling point.

Fun fact: the book made it sound like ARPA was originally planned to encompass space research, and that NASA was created as a separate agency after a bureaucratic turf war. So the space program could have been part of ARPA.

Understanding the book requires no technical knowledge, but I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much if I didn't already have all these pieces in my mind ready to be connected. The book made me more interested in another item on my wishlist, John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said.

This entry got kind of long, so I'll talk about the Turing book in another entry.

Someone at the picnic-party saw the book I'm reading, Philosophy Before Socrates (I got it from Zack) and asked if I was reading it for a class. In the way that implies that no one would read that kind of book unless someone was forcing them to. But actually I'm reading it because it's interesting. Before there were standards for judging hypotheses, how did philosophers explain the world? Phase 1: myths. Phase 2: coming up with stories and then kind of discussing how plausible they are.

A lesser known fact is that pre-Socratic philosophy is freaking hilarious. Both phases yield funny results (Everything is made of water! No, earth and water! No, air!). They sound ridiculous now but "everything is made of air" was actually a pretty sophisticated model; it supposed that you got other materials by compressing air to greater or lesser densities. Occasionally the book gives out kudos: "[Anaximenes's] view that the stars give no warmth because of their great distance contradicts Anaximander's theory that the stars are closer to earth than the moon and sun are. It is also true." I believe this author was the first to discover that Anaximenes and Anaximander were actually different people.

I just got to the chapter on Pythagoras, who is portrayed as an L. Ron Hubbard/Paul Bunyan/Chuck Norris figure of folklore and Internet meme. Here are some useful Pythagoras Facts (p79):

His followers were devoted to his sayings, which they collected, memorized, and passed down. He was a charismatic figure who became the subject of legends: he killed a poisionous snake by biting it; a river hailed him by name; he made predictions; he appeared simultaneously in two different places; he had a golden thigh. The people of Croton addressed him as Hyperborean Apollo. Pythagoreans identified three types of rational beings: gods, humans, and beings like Pythagoras.