James L Adams—People and Products

A belated merry christmas and Happy New Year

 Post Friday January 13, 2021:

We are following the California holiday lock down rules, and for Christmas we have traditionally invited all the family members to our house,, including several that live on the East coast.  That not being practical, we just invited those in the area, which still consisted of 16 people.  How do you get 16 people together and allow them to have an uproarious day without breaking the social networking rules? A partial answer is by breaking the group into small groups,  A final one is by careful control of presents.  Another is to not think you are going into cramming it into one day. Here it is well past New Years Day, and I am still looking forward to celebrating with a couple of my sons, who will hopefully be delighted with some rather large machinery, which will not only make them happy, but help me in my ongoing (but failing) attempt to gain more space in my shop and garage. But the Covid and that are not the only reasons I have been delinquent in adding to my blog.

My computer system is seriously screwed up, and there seems to be nobody available to help me figure out what is wrong with it.  I am able to send messages and other things, but it is acting like there has been another upgrade that I have missed (consciously).

And finally, I am at least temporarily  stumped on the issue of creativity in large populations,  I have been reading my head off and talking to lots of people. but remain baffled.  The last book I have read (re-read actually) is Ill Winds; Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency., written by Larry Diamond a year or so ago. He is a brilliant and very likeable Senior Fellow at both the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford,   and has spent his very successful career studying and comparing different national governments.  He has consistently come down as a fan of democratic ones.  But after a sharp increase in the number of countries that at least claimed to be democracies in the past, there is a distinct fall off. And he fears that at least some of this is because the U.S, which has for years acted as a model for many countries, is having problems, one glaring one being Trumpism, which has recently sunk to new lows. Trump will lose the presidency in a few days, but will not disappear nor will his fans.  To me the fact that almost 1/2 of the voting public voted for him in the last election is a worry for U.S. democracy, and a threat to creativity.

The Diamond book is an easy read, and if you are really interested in what is happening to us, I definitely recommend it. After being the flagship for democracy for many years, the U.S. seems to be falling behind in many ways.  The Covid19 virus is definitely not helping, but the increasing complexity of technology, the inequality between the very rich and very poor, and the increasing recognition of ethnic and gender unfairness are major players.

I have been slowly feeding you characteristics of us humans that while useful 10,000 years ago, are now dangerous.  I do not know of any pills that can make them go away.  The only way  is for us is to be more aware of our limitations —Homo Demi Sapiens, rather than Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  Also that we who live in the U.S. are only a tiny fraction of the world’s population.  One I have not dropped on you is that we want simple answers,even to difficult problems. A  good exercise is to pick what seems to be a simple problem in the U.S., and think of a realistic answer to it.   Tell the problem and answer to your spouse. a couple of friends and a few people you work with.  Notice some disagreement even among people who are close to  you?

You (and I) have a rare opportunity to watch creativity in large groups.  The world will probably never return to its previous self.  The shake ups that it seems like most countries are going through right now and the Covid-19 pandemic are bound to result in rethinking many aspects of our lives.  This is not necessarily all bad.  We have going through a large period of relative calm in the U.S. Maybe it is time to contemplate some changes . But there will be resistance! Talk it over with your friends, and then with people who have often disagreed.  I sure don’t know the answers, but I will be watching and learning a great deal more about creativity in large groups.  

Barriers to innovation in large groups – “fond” and “warped” memories and fear of change.

 

Post Nov.13, 2020          

We Homo Demi Sapiens are fortunate, because our minds seem to lighten bad memories over time. I grew up on a small orange grove near to Rialto California, then a town of 1,000, now a town of over 100,000.  I remain in contact with my brother, who still lives there.   I visit him once in a while and usually drive there and entertain wonderful memories of the smell of orange trees in bloom, helping my parents and grand-parents work the grove, playing around the citrus packing house, and spending time in the nearby mountains.  But as I near Rialto, complete with Southern California traffic, I begin to recall other memories —bullies at school, extreme racial bias toward people of Mexican descent, including several of my good friends, few people my age to play with until I entered school, and few people who seemed to be intellectually motivated.  Although there were no homeless people in town, there was not much money, and many people living in minimal housing.

And I would then begin to recall the “car clubs” when I was in high school, who specialized in fights after football games, and worse yet, the Hells Angels, who flourished in Fontana, another adjacent town.   I hid my enjoyment of classes and skill at playing classical music on the piano  to  keep my  social standing intact.  There were movies, and the first MacDonalds stand, which opened right next to my high school, and I did acquire a car, but why are my memories of growing up in Southern California when I was in my teens, so different than those when I visit the scene when in my 80’s?  Aging? The brain seems to smooth out the bumps in the road  as one ages. This may be one reason why people seem to have fond memories of the past.  And why they try to maintain/rebuild it. Listen carefully to the many extreme conservatives in the world.  They did well, by their own values, and want their children to do the same. We all want changes of some sort, just not the same ones. And we all want a mixture of the new and the old, but not the same mixture .

A good example of this is my love of rescuing old machinery, even though I have dedicated much of my life to encouraging creativity and innovation, which are essential to change.  I have written books on the topics. taught classes on them, consulting for companies on them, and enjoyed working as an engineer on problems requiring them. I have many interests, and continue to add more, and often wonder why I am trying to do more than I have time to do.  But now I have enough experience to realize  I need both.  An example is my need to work with my hands and rescue old un-loved machinery as well as write books and keep up with what’s happening in Silicon Valley, and hang around  Stanford University, even though I have been “retired” for 20 years.  I have found I need a mix of the old  and the new, and working with my mind and my hands, even though I could get more of one done if I cut down on the other.

 Right now, while working on an overload of new writing, I have  finished the major work on the Peterbilt Truck, a friend of mine and I are hung up on a non-co-operative carburetor for my huge  1930’s road roller.  The carburetor is a very large casting, and looks quite simple, and we have successfully freed all of the frozen parts, gotten the necessary compression and spark, and figured out the timing, but as yet, no response —a fuel problem.  I occasionally give my wife a hard time because she is fond of complicated picture puzzles, but at least they offer a photograph on the cover of the box. We can’t find any information on the carburetor on the roller. My friend has spent many hours looking for other specimens of the roller, but has only found two in the U.S., and they have cheated by using alternate starting techniques.

Another example of the numerous machines waiting for my attention is a Fordson tractor, also from the 1930’s.  It was given to me years ago in non-running condition, and I happily accepted it because a Fordson belonging to my grandfather was the first tractor I ever drove.  My memory of it was that it was an awful machine, loving to over-heat and waiting for opportunities to kill the driver.  And yet I am eager to get it running.  Nostalgia?  Insanity? Rather a challenge, and yes—a memory of the past. And I now know that when I attack it, I will run into great frustration and wonder why I am doing so but very pleased as I solve the problems.

When we look at very large groups of people, we see an amazing example of them wanting the known, but also the potential of the unknown.  This is understandable because people forget the bad parts of the past, and remember the now-simple solutions to problems.   And we are wired that way.

The  secret to overcoming this inertia is to experiment, but large groups of people tend to try to stop it.  I was astounded during the last election that rather than become close to violence on which medical care we should all have, none of the candidates seemed to encourage trying several and picking the ones that worked the best. Large and successful companies attempt new products, even though some will fail.    If accused of having a monopoly, they seem to enter different fields. I  am particularly impressed with Elon Musk, who when accused of having too large a piece of a market, simply  starts another enterprise focused on related products..

Looking at other areas, I know several devout Catholics who believe that the church is very much out of date, in particular in its treatment of women. One of them happens to be the father of two of my favorite daughters in law.  I agree with him whole heartedly, even though I am somewhat of an atheist and probably should not be having opinions on such things.  One of his complaints is that women who have dedicated their lives to the church do a disproportionate amount of the work, but receive a minor amount of the recognition.  True?  I If so, it would be wise of them to not only allow but encourage a few women who are married and have children to be priests. How about a woman pope?  And what’s this anti-abortion stance?  I am old enough to clearly remember the days when abortion became illegal in California.  But did it continue to exist?  You bet it did, dressed up as everything from D.& C.‘s, to short visits to other countries, to worrisome procedures by non-M.D.s.

And change for the better is always possible, although it is sometimes slow. Another example of slow change is in militaries.   I used to teach a class entitled War and Technology, amply backed by a number of military people working on advanced degrees at Stanford.  I would also make use of people on the faculty who had served in the Defense department.  One of my favorites was Bill Perry, a statistician who served as Secretary of Defense under Bill Cllnton. He would make arguments that nuclear weapons were bargaining chips, rather than weapons, because anyone dropping one would have a short future. But yet we keep putting resources into larger  bombs, even though few of us know what a megaton of T.N.T really means (Russia exploded one of approximately 50 megatons on 1961 and apparently quit making bigger ones because they could think of no practical purpose for them— I witnessed the explosion of an atomic bomb in the 1950’s when over 100 tests were run north of Las Vegas, and it was enough for me, even though people were then only speaking in terms of kilotons .

 I was in the U.S. Airforce in the 1950’s, and had a job that also put me in contact with many people in the army and navy. I quietly (I was a lowly lieutenant) noticed a strong bias among many hjghly ranked officers toward World War II (or even World War I) weapons they had served on during World War 2 (Battleships rather than submarines in the Navy, machine guns in fighters flown by humans rather than missiles, etc.) There have been tremendous changes in the military since then, much of it due to coming up against militaries of different countries and other groups,  with their different weapons  and different beliefs.  Women can in fact fly fighters and  be astronauts.  But we don’t seem to be “winning “wars. Many changes in large groups require a change in attitudes, often requiring changes in generations.  Think of issues now looming large in the world.  More of this later. 

A photo of my Austin road roller is below.  Beautiful, isn’t it, even though it doesn’t move under its own power yet. But it is good exercise just turning over its engine by hand (its flywheels  measure five and a  half  feet in diameter ).  Maybe next week.

 

Block to Innovation in Large Groups —Mis-Understanding of Science and Technology

Post - 9/19/2020

In my last few posts, I have brought up several blocks to creativity in large groups, such as nations, religions, and armies.  These blocks may have  served us thousands  of years ago, but are not serving us as well now .  I would like to bring up one that was not an issue then, but is large and increasing now.  That is poor understanding of science and technology,.  

One reason is that the two are tightly linked, but can be separated.  Dictionaries have no problem.  The two below are among the many definitions on the internet.

Science—The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

Technology:—The entities, both material and immaterial, created by the application of mental and physical effort in order to achieve some value. In this usage, technology refers to tools and machines that may be used to solve real-world problems.

Consider the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) spacecraft built to go to Mars. Scientific data is what they are after.  Technology is the process of designing and building the machinery and instruments necessary to do this, and the data that is measured and returned to earth is for science. When JPL was founded as part of Caltech in 1936, it was to do research on rocketry, which was obviously coming in the future, but poorly understood.  Scientific research was needed.  This is somewhat still the case, but the principles of jet engines, military rockets, and boosters for spacecraft, are well enough understood that they fit the definition of technology.

The first block to innovation in large groups, is the natural confusions between what the two words mean.  I studied engineering at Caltech (very sciency), worked for years in the “techy” part of JPL, taught in the engineering school at Stanford for years, and also chaired a program formerly named Science, Technology, and Society, which attempted to explain the nature of each of these.  I fact I wrote a book named Flying Buttresses, Entropy, and O-Rings, which among other goals attempted to explain the nature of each .The book  sold pretty well.  But then I began to feel that the book overly simplified the difference, so I started another one called Heroes, Hustlers, Nerds, and Normals, using people involved in these activities to demonstrate the difference and interactions between people who call themselves engineers and technicians, and science and scientists. I thought it was probably better than the first one, but my publisher didn’t like it, and I was tired of trying to push the nature of technology and science, so I did not further push it. But I may revive it.

But if I look at the world now, or even the U.S., I can see some large blocks due to lack of understanding of what these are. Scientists are driven to better understand their topic, and tend to work in relatively narrowly defined areas, with colleagues who may be spread all over the earth who are interested in the same area.  They often choose their area through personal interest. And are valuable adding to knowledge, even if nothing instantly results.  But eventually something will.  Two of my favorite professors at Caltech were Linus Pauling, a chemist who was very interested in molecular structure, and Richard Feynmam, a theoretical physicists, who was known for his sense of humor among other things.  Both were headed for the Nobel Prize, and I was honored to be a teaching assistant to Pauling and take a beginning class from  Feynman. The classes were both mind-blowing.  Most of os students thought we had missed a couple of .lasses somewhere.  But Pauling was one of the big names in determining the structure  of

RNA and DNA, and look how far we have come in those years.  And Feynman,was

obsessed with quantum theory, which violated everything we thought we knew about atomic structure.  Now we are facing having computers based on quantum theory all over the place, and most of us are still running rapidly to keep up with old fashion ones.  The message is that the work of outstanding scientists often does not reach the public for many years (I graduated from college in 1955) and I am still trying to get my head around quantum theory what the life scientists at Caltech are up to.

The pace of science will not become less in the future, because we have major problems in areas such as understanding and attacking problems such as climate control, disparity of income, pandemics, and how to use our rapidly increasing knowledge in genomics. There are many more, all involving words we are not comfortable with, and capable of resulting either in wonderful steps forward in the human condition, or not so wonderful steps backward.

Since everyone seems to be obsessed with the present pandemic (coronavirus 19) and thinking about it, let us use it as an example.  It is obviously having extremely negative effects in the world.  There are many highly educated specialists working on the problem, but we cannot be expected to understand what is going on, because most us went through an education that spent very little time on pandemics, even though they are not all that rare.  So we are incapable of understanding the mechanisms that the virus utilizes to kill us, or even to spread.  President Trump has neither a background in science or technology, so he follows his “instincts” and backs them up by surrounding himself with people who are “experts”. He recently added a new face to his growing band of such people.  This is a physician named Scott Atlas, whose specialty is neuro-radiology, and agrees with Trump’s theories (let time do its work).  They do not agree with physicians who have studied infectious diseases and pandemics, and spent their lives in public health care (Fauci).  Trump seems to think that by showering money on drug companies, a vaccine will be developed in record time.  Maybe, but the distribution and usage will not be instant.  The anti-vaccine movement in the U.S. is unfortunately growing rapidly, with respect to such well tested and known diseases of measles and common flu, but they are lying in wait to return. 

We have a huge variation in our attitude about and approach to science and technology.  Trump seems to think he is smarter than the scientists, so he is in good shape if he surrounds himself with people who agree with him (not experts) Most people I know are following the basic rules (social distancing, wearing a mask when social distancing is not possible, avoiding crowds, avoiding indoor crowded spaces, and washing or sanitizing hands frequently.)

Many people are clearly flaunting these rules.  But most people are having less fun.  Some people are just not thinking about the whole situation. 

What is up?  First of all, we have not been educated as to the nature of science and technology.  We see a few of the tools used in such activities, but spend most of our “science” time with some of these  basic tools, and get little exposure to the process that new ideas go through to become available to the public.  I am biased, of course, but I think that we can no longer just assume that some group out there will do what is best for us.  There is no such group.  Capitalism alone no longer leads us in a direction that is best for us.  We all need to get more involved in the process of being more creative as large groups.  It is okay for some members of a country to disagree about scientific and technological directions, but not if they affect us all.  Religions can set about to try to enlist more and more people to their beliefs, but not through violence.  Armies seem to be necessary, but not if equipment and expectations are built on the last war.

Enough ranting.  More of us need to get a bit deeper about what’s going on with science and technology, or our kids and grand-kids may have a much less rewarding life than we have been privileged to have.

I will send out a post on present progress on my attempts to rescue worthy but unloved machines.  If I can get adequately organized, I may even put together a past history for those who are interested.

Large Groups of People, Leadership. and Creativity

Sept. 15, 2020

 

Although it is difficult for very large groups of people (countries, religions) to be creative because of comfort with the past, and a tendency to not go through the process of change, it is the key to what we are, for better or worse. The larger the group, the more resistance, and this resistance is often based on our  tendency to forget the bad parts and view it as better than it was, But it does and must occur.  and outstanding leadership is necessary. Let me give a couple of  examples I have been aware of in my lifetime.

One was the number of changes that occurred in the U.S. when Franklin Roosevelt was president. The U.S. pulled itself out of a deep depression and  turned itself into a world power. Part of this was the leadership ability of Roosevelt, the people he surrounded himself with, a congress that worked, and the productive capability of the country. The other part was based on a number of problems that could be clearly defined, and the where with all to solve them.  Not everyone liked the directions the country was taking (I still encounter Roosevelt haters even though he has been dead for 75 years). I was 7 years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed and 12 years old when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, so I experienced WWII as a kid. and swallowed our propaganda, although I also swallowed my family's anger when our Japanese friend and neighbor and family were hauled off to Manzanar for the duration (they never did get their farm back),  And the U.S.  did do it's bit at winning the war.  We paid a price in men and materials, but ended with a very healthy economy, no damage in the property in our 48 states , relatively few casualties compared to Russia, a large amount of pride, and the beginning of our realization that women could work in factories.  We also developed stronger ties with allies such as Australia, India, China, and other countries on the same side as we were.  It also was probably one of the reasons for the European Union.  The future of this Union will tell us something about the feasibility of creativity in large groups of people in the future.

Another, and very different example of creativity in large groups was the "space race" beginning with the U.S. and Russia, and is still underway, with many more participants.  I was involved in this between 1958 and 1966, first as a graduate student at Stanford working on remote control, and later as an Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.  This was, and is, a very sophisticated technology contest now involving not only countries, but now, as you know,  private companies. The majority of the people involved are motivated by the challenges in reaching increasingly difficult technical goals, plus a bit of vicarious glamour.  When I worked as an engineer at JPL, the goal of NASA was first to fly by the moon and take photos (Ranger), then to land on the moon and get a feel for the nature of the surface (Surveyor)  and then to land people on the moon (Apollo).  Now JPL is finishing an even more sophisticated Mars lander that will take more data on the Martian environment and includes a small helicopter.  People on Mars are next.  Meanwhile there are many communications and scientific instruments in Earth orbit, and exploring other planets.  In fact two spacecraft launched in the 1970's (Voyagers 1 and 2 ) are still communicating to JPL and have left the influence of the sun and are officially in interstellar space.  

This endeavor has come to involve a large number of people, and although a technically sophisticated game, necessarily requires a great deal of equipment and team work.  The leaders are generally not after wealth and fame.  The head of JPL when I worked there was Bill Pickering, a quietly speaking professor at Caltech, and the division and group leaders were all technical people. But the committment to the work was extreme.  If you watch the behavior of the workers as their machine lands (or crashes), you will get the picture.  I left the lab because the air pollution was getting annoying in Southern California, and because Stanford made me a very nice offer. But even though I haven't visited JPL in years, when I watch a launch or landing on TV, tears come to my eyes.  The same is true of others in the space game, whether carrying people or not, headed for earth orbit, other planets, or deep space, and U.S., Russian, Chinese, E.U., or whatever..  The people in the group share knowledge and experience (assuming it isn't classified of course), tend to know people throughout the "business", and are proud of being part of the game.  Even though I haven't played full time in the game for over 50 years, I miss it and the teamwork.

Both of these two activities have or had leaders that were or are committed to causes that help large groups of people lead better lives.  The first type becomes known and broadly loved (F.D.R.).  The second  may not be as likely to dominate the media and end up in the history books.  Their lives are devoted to helping their followers, not seeking to become famous and wealthy (Bill Pickering).  They may get there , but are focused on their colleagues and their mission.   And they know how to recognize and attract the right helpers, and listen to them, rather than considering themselves omniscient.  I worry that modern accumulations of wealth,  power and communications may be causing a shortage of such leaders in the world. We seem to be accumulating "strong men"  as heads of large populations and projects who act as though they know all the answers and usually are backed up by weak followers who are selected because they agree with the boss. They usually are heading toward becoming dictators, and historically come to no good end, as do the large populations,

Enough about creativity in large groups.  To say a few words about a less lofty topic, the Peterbiilt project continues on its way.  The cab is free of rust and most of the bumps and scars it had collected over its life and is mostly painted.  The electrical and mechanical systems are working well.  Some work is still needed on the frame and brake system, but it is beginning (it has been delayed because it requires lying in dripping oil and old grease). My friend Loren and I are now beginning to do another layer of restoration on a very large Austin road roller I own.  It is a rare machine for a number of reasons, and now almost mechanically complete —but its engine does not seem to want to run.  I will keep you informed.  I will send you some photos with my next post, but not unusually, I am having trouble with my computer right now.

Major creativity block for large groups – We don’t change when we should and do when we shouldn’t 2.

Post August 16, 2020

I seem to have been stymied on this one for quite a while. Maybe for most of my life.  I have collected a large number of “gimmicks” that enable individuals, groups, and even large organizations to help them vary the amount and character in creativity in their lives.  But at some level of population I seem to not have many answers that even I believe.

If you follow what  is going on in the world right now, you get an excellent view of this limitation.  In fact when I do, I really believe that we are Homo Demi Sapiens, and need to evolve where we can make some major moves, and I don’t think one person (me) has the answer

 I have been watching the tug of war between those who want the past , and those that want a major change in the future , and how this division seems to have increased in the past years, and think this is an excellent time to view the tug of war.  There seem to be a number of apparently insurmountable problems.

As the number of people involved in making major changes, even if a majority agrees, the number of people who do not grows.  If three of us, or even ten of us, disagree on what TV channel to watch, those who disagree will either go find another TV set, go drink a beer and talk, or go home.   If millions of people disagree with the direction  a larger number of millions want to take, we have a problem.  A logical answer is a compromise.  Another possibility is a yet another direction that more people accept, either because it is “better”, or because they are tired of disagreeing. But as the number of people on each side of the change tends to equalize, the result seems to be paralysis.  As an example, I give you the U.S. government and medical care. 

There seems to be agreement that we have a problem.  The rich seem to get better care than the poor.  Some of our people cannot afford care at all. Some changes need to be made.  There are no perfect solutions, but we can do better with what we spend.  How do we do this? No simple answers, but people seem to demand simple answers.  Scandinavian countries have better medical care, but devote more of their economy to it.  England  is pretty good, but they have been tuning their program since 1948.  The U.S, chose a program some eight years ago (The Affordable Care Act)  and has made some changes, but there is no program that will please everyone, so we should be working on what we want.  Instead we elect a president whose platform included stopping the Affordable Care Act, and going to a terrific new health care act.  Could he define that in detail?  He didn’t even try.  Could anyone define and implement a “perfect” act?  I think not one that would please everyone.  We are stuck.

We are stuck across the board.  We have allowed the U.S.  government, and in fact our population, to divide themselves into two warring groups.  This is happening more and more around the world.  We are getting more and more “strong man” leaders, who historically do not last very long, and typically do not listen closely to people who have spent their lives understanding difficult   We have a large population of smart people who reached a high degree of understanding of problems that we must solve –saving our  environment, poverty, controlling pandemics, etc— but we do not seem to give control  of solving  such things to the people who have spent their lives working on them. 

This is not a problem restricted to problems that the press and the media like to flaunt.  Change is endemic to our species, and we are lucky that it is, because we have done well by it.  But we should change at a rate that is consistent with what our population can handle.  Too fast, and there will be resistance.  I have noticed that even my friends specialize in things digital are starting to fight the constant changes in software.  Too slow, and we lose our ability to take advantage of our ability to improve our lives.

I stress change in nations, but there are other large groups of people that should be able to change without internal wars.  Very large religions often lag behind the values of the flock.  A few members of my family are Catholic, and it is interesting to see how the church handles practices and beliefs that have been part and parcel of their beliefs for many years —no women in the priesthood, no contraception, —and either ignored or viewed negatively by members of their flock.  There are also the militaries of countries who equip themselves with weapons, tactics, and other beliefs and tactics for the last war.  I got a taste of that because I was in the U.S. Air force, and stationed at Edwards Air Force Base.  Next door was the Naval Air Test Station.  They were working with heat seeking rockets and radar operators in the back seat.  Many of the high ranking Air Force Officers were World War II ace and enraptured by machine guns that had a higher rate of fire..  We younger folk sometimes pointed out that you couldn’t guide bullets after they left the gun barrel.  We were not popular.  Donald Trump gained wide distribution of a photo of a pro-military celebration with  him standing between two tanks.  Tanks? 

I’ll let you know if I have any insight on this one.  But don’t hold your breath. In my next post  I will talk about the “ space race” and the U.S. in the 1950,s during which I was a young engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.  We were responsible for the first unmanned missions to the moon. Venus and Mars.  It was a wonderful experience, supported by most people, cost the country a great deal of money, and resulted in a large amount of creativity.from a large number of people.  I’ll also say a few words about Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the U.S. during World War II, two examples in which the U.S, got together made some major changes,  and fixed some big problems. Such things happen.

We resist change when we shouldn’t, but not when we should

 

Post July 23,2020

Many of the changes we face, or at least should face, do not have a single right answer.  Yet we individuals develop  strong beliefs on what should happen.  Should we change at all?  What directions should we take? If we are going to change, should the change occur rapidly or slowly?  If relatively  few people are involved, decisions like this are comparatively simple. With large populations, they are not, since we are equipped to reach decisions and hang on to them because of our beliefs.  If  there is little or no data to back up these decisions, we sometimes become even more passionate. 

Since I am reporting on my  present truck restoration as well as talking about human characteristics that make it difficult for large groups to sometimes be able to agree on decisions, let me begin by describing a decision that is easy. The truck project is going well. The first photo below shows another fuel tank that has joined the “restored” category.  But much remains.  The next two photos show a detail of the back end before and after I removed a damaged cross member made of aluminum, which is consistent with seeking light weight, and adds rigidity to the frame.  It became damaged because over time the drivers have occasionally not jacked up the trailer enough that the hitch on the trailer clear this cross member when the truck leaves it parked and moves away . What to do? I must do something because I hate looking at it.

For a number of reasons, I am sure the truck will never be put back into service.  But I have several choices, ranging from doing nothing, which would cost some rigidity in the frame, to making a duplicate of the original out of aluminum. My options include welding a steel  cross member to the frame, which is steel, cleaning up the torn edge of the existing piece, straightening it, and welding on a replacement aluminum top piece, or a myriad of weaker solutions (bolt a replacement piece to the frame and fill the resulting crack with something like JB Weld, or even Bondo). I  have gotten inputs from a number of people, ranging from people who question “why  are you wasting your time on that big pile of junk” to “come on, you owe it to the truck to make a new replica of the old piece from aluminum.  People seem to come rapidly to a direction I should take, and the directions differ widely.  But reaching the final answer is easy, since it is my truck.  After thinking a bit, I have decided I am going to build an aluminum replica, mostly because I like to do true restorations and to build things in my shop.

But now think about the worlds’ response to the Covid 19, or even that of the U.S. This is a very large problem with many people many unknowns, and urgency involved due to the costs of a pandemic, both in terms of lives and economies. With large groups of people, there is no single owner.  Although some people ranked highly in governments act like they are, they are fooling themselves because the number of people who will disagree with their decision is uncomfortably large to those highly ranked people. They may even be able to cause these people to lose their ranking. Often people search for  solutions to complex problems  that are cheap, easy to put in place, and please everyone,  but changes do not tend to be that easy.  There are hopes, such as the present search for a vaccine that is affordable, quickly discovered, effective for all, and therefore solve the problem. But history implies things won’t be that easy.  In  fact there is already a reaction against such a break through by people who are against vaccination in general, and those that are not about to take a vaccine that has not been tested in many usages over time. And there are extremists who feel that the individual should be free to do what they want in life.  You can identify them in a crowd, because first of all they  are in a crowd, and secondly they are not wearing masks.

The result of all of this is that decisions are slow and controversial, and some times pushed off because people don’t want to face the downside, especially those who must make the decisions. Consider global warming, nuclear weapon development, medical care, and the effects of the internet  on society. There are no simple answers to problems such as these, so people create a simple answer, or borrow one from others, and may end up in a situation in which these problems become more severe, but nothing happens. The longer action is delayed, the worse the problem becomes, and at some point such things as deadlocked governments and outrageous expenditures can no longer be avoided.  But unfortunately, at that point taking the wrong action may be worrisome enough that adequate resources are not available to solve the problem. 

TRUCK PHOTOS    

   

Creativity, Large Groups, and Tribalism

Post June 20,2020

The history of the human is tribalism.  Still is.  Certainly a tribe is easier in which to communicate, sell common values, and flaunt, or try to flaunt superiority. But it if gets large enough, even it will break up into tribes.  An example is the tribe of white males, which is getting a lot of attention these days, but so large it has been breaking into pieces for some time, in this case for the better. 

But a good example of large scale tribalism can be seen in the Covid 19 situation.   The U.S.and China are trying to blame each other for it.   The leader of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, is trying to get the country to ignore it.  The surprisingly large tribe of “anti vaccine groups in America and the rest of the world are seizing on the pandemic to try to further their cause. There also seem to be  a fairly large informal group of “screw the deaths, let’s worry about the economy” people and an equivalent “screw the economy, let’s worry about the deaths”.

A Pandemic such as this is a time for international  cooperation, not competition and blame. Many  drug companies are working on developing a vaccine, but do we think they are sharing their “secrets”?  That they plan to share their profits”?  The statistics on Covid 19 and poor people, “people of color” and old people are frightening.  Are the rich, the white, and the young sharing the “wealth”? Come on human tribe members, let’s share the cost and the benefits.  From that will come the greatest rewards.

The same is true of the “cost” of damage to the environment, wrangling about  ownership of territory and resources, and other areas where very large numbers of people are involved, and moroe creative solutions to the problems could be reached  if tribes  joined together to define and solve them. 

Truck Progress   

 We are now in what I will cause the “cosmetic” phase of restoration.  The vehicle could now play the role of being a truck (although a few law changes in California will cause it to forever be a “Historical” vehicle, but that’s fine with me, because I have no intention of starting a trucking company). After pressure washing off the grime and grease, and sanding the exterior surface, It seems to  be in pretty good shape, except for the scars, bends, bumps, rust patches, and other marks of 50 years of hard usage on a farm, followed by 25 years of neglect out of doors.  My friend and I are therefore spending our time armed with hammers and dollies, clamps,  Bondo (a magic “filler” material) different grades of sandpaper, so-called “orbiter” sanders, which sand under power without leaving pronounced sanding marks,  and various grades of primer paint, needed to avoid rust while we do our attempt to nullify damage and give the finish paint something to hang on.to

I sent you a few photos of the rescue job on the air filter of the truck.  Here are a couple of photos of a fuel tank, one of them with the damaged paint and rusted areas cut down to the metal, and one with a bit of Bondo added,primed. and ready for paint. Is this fun?  We think so.

 

 

Creativity and Leadership

June 4,2020

I realize that I have been talking about the creativity of large groups in previous posts, but I have delayed on writing this post because of the difficulty to grasp the mess we are in due to the juxtaposition of the Covid 19 pandemic and the very believable insights in the still existing racism in the country—ranging from the much larger toll of the pandemic among poor. old people, and people of “color”, to continuing homelessness. Are we never going to grow up, recognize our weaknesses, and work together to better our lives? As an example of the cause of our problems,  I spoke a bit previously about the need for outstanding leadership in situations in which change was needed in large groups.  I think it is safe to say that we are sorely lacking  such at the highest levels.

Jim Mattis is a highly decorated Marine general, who was Trump’s first appointment to be secretary of defense.  I thought it was an excellent choice, knowing Mattis by reputation. He left his job in a relativley short period and I and was impressed at a vow he took to at least in the short term say nothing negative. about Trump, since after all Trump was his Commander in Chief, and Mattis was a good Marine. He has written a few books about his life and none of them have attacked Trump.  He is now in residence as the Davies Family Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, a well known conservative think tank. But he has obviously decided “enough already”

He wrote an essay, recently published in The Atlantic Magazine, which is getting a great deal of attention in the press.  In that paper he points out that U. S. strength has always relied on hanging together ( In Union There is Strength). As opposed to the Nazi Slogan ( Divide and Conquer).  It is a short paper and well worth reading.  A statement from the paper that is often being quoted is “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not ever pretend to try.”.  “Instead he tries to divide us.  We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.  We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”(

I served my time in the U.S. Air Force and in many profit-making and non-profit making organizations, and taught a course at Stanford for many years entitled ‘War and Technology’.  Leadership was a constant topic we discussed, and I was amply aided by several graduates of the military academies,  who had studied leadership and then practiced it in combat, and in other activities under their responsibility.  Leadership is more than an abstract concept. Many books have been written about it and it can be clearly described. And if creativity is wanted, one key is to pull a wide variety of thinkers together, not push them apart.  

I recently watched Ken Burn’s excellent series on the Roosevelts, and could not help but try to compare Trump with FDR, both leaders in times of international crisis.  I could not even come close.  Roosevelt and his staff were not only extremely inventive, but capable of seeing their ideas blossom into reality and communicating them to unite the country.  Boy, do we need that now——less effort to self-aggrandize, and more to make things happen.  The latest “strategy” that Trump is playing with is to send the military, a proud force of people dedicated to uphold the nation’s constitution, out into the streets to punish people  of whom Trump disapproves .  Hopefully, he will see the difference between the army and the police, and war and civil disobedience, and realize that his present instincts will fuel the flames, rather than put out the fire.

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Back To Conceptual Blocks in Large Populations

May 12, 2020

We have discussed a few conceptual blocks in very large groups—short term thinking, desire for power and order, selfishness and competitiveness, and our desire for other people to think like we do.  The result of this results in tribalism and resistance to change, two powerful forces acting against creativity.  Successful leaders of large profit making businesses, governments , religions, armies, etc .realize the need for actively combating these, and focus on getting the tribes to join their creative thinking.  But they cannot always seem to do that, often because of their own mind set. Leaders must be decisive, but they must also draw on the thinking of a large number of people at all levels. 

Look at the handling of medical care in the U.S. We seem to have many people in the country who cannot afford modern diagnosis and cures, yet we spend more money on the problem than many other countries.  If you look at comparisons on the internet, we are definitely ranked #1 in per patient expenses, but vary between #11 and # 18 in quality of health care, which is of course more difficult to measure. We recognize this, and it has been the case for some time, but we but seem to be blocked from a solution that pleases most of our population .  Certainly action has been taken relatively  recently through the willingness of former President Obama to seek many inputs and push through a result, but this was certainly not eagerly backed by all members of Congress.  Now we have a leader (Trump) whose stated goal is to dismember the Affordable Care Act (even though I have not heard about him having a better solution ). 

Medical care in the U.S. is a very complex problem, and in the case of complexity, a large amount of thinking is necessary from representatives of all the areas involved, willingness to compromise, and time to make the necessary changes to improve the product. We consider Britain to be full of bright people, and their National Health Service is highly regarded, but it was begun in 1948 and has been  continuously fine tuned ever since. But the U.S. seems to be tied up in tribes with different ideas of what should happen, an unwillingness to compromise, and resistance to experiment with fresh approaches—call them the “conservatives”, the “liberals” , and what we will call the “Trumps”.

 Our government seems to be increasingly unable to act in such situations.  Think of our present problems handling the Covid 19 pandemic. We have  a congress consisting of people representing red states and blue states, change and tradition, science and  skepticism, and torn between continuing to battle the problem at large cost of money, or “re-start the economy” at increased cost of life. We have a large population of people who want the pandemic to go away. and have ideas, but have neither the background or knowledge to know how to make that happen. I have a technical back ground and guess I qualify as a scientist, but find it difficult to believe the low level of scientific and technical background in most government offices and our present leadership.  When large successful companies have problems, which they do, they seem to have more ability to “solve” complicated problems, probably through the combined thinking of a knowledgeable subset of people with an experienced leader. They certainly don’t subdivide themselves into “conservatives” and “liberals” and spend their time criticizing and letting the courts make their decisions. 

I will talk more about this, using very large profit making organizations, the military and religions as examples of tribalization and resistance to change, in my next post.  I hope you are enjoying the good sides of staying home because of the virus.  As I have said, my wife and I live on a university campus and had forgotten the joy of quiet and the ability to catch up on what seem like hundreds of unfinished projects. And we all should be happy we have the internet out there.  Yesterday  was the birthday of Naushad Forbes, an ex student of mine from India who has quite a bit of international visibility, a wonderful family, and many friends I have gotten to know.  They are spread all over the world. We were privileged to attend a Zoom birthday celebration including many of them.  It might have been more of a peak experience for us had we  been there in person, but it would never have happened due to the fact that India is also locked down.

Covid 19 and Spare Time (whatever that is).

April 29, 2020

My wife and I are following the rules of behavior for living in Santa Clara Valley to the letter, for a number of reasons,the virus is very active here, we are both over 75, and everything seems to be shut down in the area including Stanford, which is usually a main source of amusement for us.  Also  we are very fond of the Health Officer and Director for the Public Health Department in California's Santa Clara County, Sara Cody, who is the daughter of a wonderful family we have been close to for a number of years.  Her father Tad, was an architect and one of my best friends who unfortunately died a number of years ago.  Sara has successfully worked herself into her dream job, but probably didn’t realize that the likes of Covid 19 would follow.  We trust her absolutely.  If she told us that there was a new rule demanding that we empty our refrigerator, pull the plug, and crawl inside until she gave us permission to emerge, we would do it.  Well maybe not quite, but we certainly do trust her advice.

We do communicate with our friends, who also are following the rules, and they usually want to know what we are doing, in the tone of voice which implies that perhaps we have trouble filling our time. We both have enough projects underway to easily outlast us for several dozen years, and are getting a great amount of pleasure from working on them full time.  Marian is spending huge amounts of time on her exploding garden, being involved in various Zoom sessions, attending the now relatively few but high quality talks being given at the university, buying our food, and wringing everything she wants to out of the internet, her backlog of  books, and TV. I am organizing 20 years of paperwork for the Stanford archives (or trying to), replacing rotten beams in her greenhouse, being very aware of things that need attention in the house (sash weights with broken cords, screen doors that stick, leaks in our main drain pipe, and I should be prepping it for painting, if not painting it.  I am also making sense out of my work spaces, which are overflowing with tools in the wrong place, many surplus, and wood and metal projects I have started and am frantically trying to finish.  And there are my machines, which we just uncovered and are definitely needing some tender loving care (as always)

One of the joys of the machinery was that Loren Bryon, a person of great curiosity and knowledge of old (and new) machinery and who I have mentioned in past was spending one day a week helping me restore them (or as he says, rescuing them to be restored —he does have very high standards.)  And he is a joy to work with.  But he too is living by the rules, and his rules are much tighter than mine, because for three days a week he works in a hardware store.  But we keep in contact by phone and internet, and he too has a shop and can work at home.

As to the Peterbilt, I consider the wiring to be in great shape (the old wire was a confused mess and Loren re-did it) and the interior to be beautifully redone (a two person job).  It now requires a bit of cleaning and body work (quite a bit, including a paint job) and we can justifiably be pleased.  He is able to take parts home and work on them (he is presently redoing the headlights, which were in terrible shape), and I am working on the body itself.  At present I am working on a very large air cleaner which protrudes on the passenger’s side, and the main parts received a huge amount of damage.  Below are a few photos of it before, after I stripped the old finish off, after I applied some Bondo, after I applied more Bondo and sanded it, after I primed the surface again (I ran out of red primer and switched to gray), and after I applied paint to the parts.  Not perfect, but better, and very satisfying to me.  Maybe some day I will shoot for perfection, but probably not—it is a 1957 truck, for God’s sake.

And apologies for the photo placement.  I will spend some of my spare time figuring out how to get the program to let me place them where I want them, rather than using its feeble brain!

 

 

Quick Creativity

April 21, 2020

I had a personal insight, yesterday.  I have gotten so fascinated with the difficulty the human race is having as a whole in working on problems requiring worldwide creativity, that I  have come to overlook many simple opportunities to improve life as an individual. As an example, a couple of days ago,  I was happily working on my truck all alone, as is often the case, when I ran into a couple people who had dropped into my yard to see how I was doing.  They were both wearing masks, one looking official and the other handmade.  I was not wearing a mask, and in fact do not own a surgical one. I have made myself a couple of masks consisting of bandanas and rubber bands, but I keep misplacing them.  Obviously, I was letting down the team.

Later, my wife, Marian, dropped by and invited me to take a walk with her.  Since I had given her the responsibility to make sure I was getting some minimum amount of exercise, I happily accepted.  But once we hit the street, I realized that everyone but me was wearing a mask. Including Marian, who had made herself one that said Stanford University.  I did not want to go back to the house and grub for my bandanas—what to do, what to do? 

This time of the year I often wear a sweat suit when working outside on my machinery.  That day  I was wearing an old pair of fatigue pants and what is called a hoodie (hood attached to the top part of the sweat suit).  She quickly told me to turn it around so it was  backwards,.  I laughed, she said "no, do it".  I did at which point she stepped behind me, pulled the hood drawstring fairly tight, and said that I now had a mask.  And I did, and very wonderful one, two layers of thick dry cloth obviously thick enough to trap evil liquid droplets, porous enough to let me easily breath, , and resulting in a slightly swashbuckling look. The photos below show me in my sweat shirt in backward configuration, with mask up, and from the rear. 

Forgive the haggard look, but I had put in a long days work.  Another advantage to this system is that the front of my sweatshirts always trap the major amount of grease and other stains, and I never use the large pocket on the back. Reverse the shirt, and it becomes a wonderfully useful feature, as well as making the sweatshirt look much cleaner.

This is a wonderful discovery for me, because I have several sweatshirts with hoods, and hardly use this feature of them.  This was an instant piece of creativity on Marian’s part, and I was flabbergasted.  We went walking on a street with other people, all wearing masks, and rather than thinking less of me, they  smiled approvingly, and I could see several of them  taking mental notes.  The sad thing to me is that without Marian's quick creativity, I would have spent my walk brooding about national governments and Covid, collecting negative feelings because I was not wearing  a mask  probably tripped and fallen down, and who knows, perhaps joined the Covid ranks.

We do not intend to patent this wonderful discovery, so if you have sweatshirts with hoods you never use, dig them out and join the club. In order to show it off in a better light the two photos below show me in a clean sweatshirt after a shower with mask down and up. Dashing, what?

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Large Groups, Creativity, and Covid-19

April 5, 2020

I have been struggling against using the present corona virus pandemic as an example of the first few blocks to creativity in large groups of people I have mentioned in past posts, but it displays several of the blocks we will deal with in future posts. First, our friend the short term focus. The U.S. has gone through three memorable viral disease pandemics in my (and my parent’s) memory— the one we are in, the 2005to 2012  HIV/AIDS Pandemic (death toll 36 million), the “Hong Kong Flu” pandemic (1968- death toll 1 million), the “Asian”  Flu Pandemic (1956-1958 – death toll 2 million), and the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 (20-50 million people). There have been others, but were classified as diseases (polio, measles, etc.) or took place in Africa and Asia for which we were less tuned r. I was not alive during the 1918 to 1920 pandemic, but heard so many stories about it from my parents and grand parents that I am convinced that it was an earth shaking event.

So now we are in the middle of another one, with the world  death toll at approximately 70,000 and rising.  Although this death toll does not compete with the ones listed above, especially the pandemic of 1918-1950, it is rising rapidly, and is getting an immense amount of attention perhaps due to modern communications and the particularly fast moving character of this pandemic.  Is the U.S. responding in a creative way?  Perhaps, considering this rapidly moving and wide spread nature, but perhaps not as much as might be expected.  Last night my wife and I were drinking wine with a couple of senior and very smart doctors (over Zoom, or course), one who has specialized in epidemics for years and she was telling us that a major pandemic comes along about every 50 years.  Fits the data.  But the U.S. was clearly not prepared for this one —an example of short term thinking.  We live three miles from the San Andreus fault.  The last “big one” was in 1906, and caused major damage ,  We are aware of this, and sometimes tell jokes about it, but except for some upgrading of building codes, do not do much about preparing for it.  Short term thinking again. I grew up near a large dry wash that was formed from a major flood in a channel carved over the years by snow melt.  Some dams have been built, but the channel is filling with housing development.  A major tragedy waiting to happen. Major fires in California and Australia, etc.

Let’s think about a couple of more “blocks” we have talked about.  How about power and order.  The U. S. government is happily designed to be a democracy — power to the people, order kept by the people and laws.  But at the time of this writing it is pretty weak.  In times of crisis a strong leader is needed.  Trump is not one, if creativity is called for.  He is focused on the near term and economy, and lacks the skills and focus an elected leader needs in a situation such as Covid-19,  I do not want to do into the details, but he lies, does not stay focused, does not seem to leave medical strategy to medical professionals and does not understand the science involved.  I also decided I would not talk about Trump in this blog, so make up your own mind—is he pulling the country together in fighting this problem or not.  And how about congress and the courts?

And how about being selfish and competitive.  “Pan” means international.  Wouldn’t all countries, including the U.S. be better off sharing equipment and knowledge a bit better here? In my opinion, the U.S. buying medical equipment from Russia is a good move, assuming it is surplus in Russia.  The many scientists and medical people working world wide in a vaccine for Covid-19 is wonderful.  Any country or individual planning to solve this problem primarily to gain either a huge amount of money or power is not.

And let me finish by throwing in another conceptual block, which is the deep desire to have other people think as we do.  This has been the cause of countless wars, racial and ethnic clashes, and communication inefficiencies over time, and will hopefully not have a bearing on controlling Covid-19, although there seems to be a division appearing between people who want to see “business as usual” return as possible, and people who want to risk as few lives as possible.  And the U.S. government will continue to waste time with its non-cooperative political divisions.

What happened to Standardization?

March 29, 2020

When I was young, there was a great deal of standardization, some because of monopolies (remember the black telephone with the dial), but more to ease the processes of manufacturing and repair.  Boy is that gone.  In the U.S, a tremendous cost is involved by not using the metric system, so we start out with the need for two sets of tools and the need to remember two sets of dimensions to fit our dizzying choice of fasteners, metal thicknesses, and other such things. I complained about the number of screw configurations in a previous post.But this is true at many levels level.  A very good friend of mine died a few months ago, and I inherited a whole garage full of tools.  Among the material were several hoses for compressed air.  I have a compressor in my garage, but had always carried hoses around to get where I wanted my compressed air to go.  I decided to take my new wealth of hoses (which were better than mine) and install them permanently, with couplings where I needed the air. For this to work I needed more couplings, since I wanted to have one each location,  but playing around with the existing couplings, as I suspected, there were several models involved.   Compressed air hoses are usually l/4, 3/8/or i/2 in size in the U.S., and there is a large difference in air delivery, but for home use I have found out that the 1/4 size is adequate for me.  But I had forgotten that many products these days have slight changes over older ones, perhaps because the manufacturer thinks they have improved them, or possibly wants to get around existing patents.  A good example the resulting confusion and a heroic attempt to describe them all can be seen at https://toolguyd.com/quick-guide-to-air-line-couplers-plugs. The author of this explanation of different types of connectors did a heroic job of attempting to explain the differences, but did not convince me that there is much of a difference between brands.  In fact he drew many outraged stories about keeping track of connectors for compressed air. If the owner mixes the connectors, he/she is doomed, because  it is almost impossible to tell them apart by looking at them.  It is necessary to first see if they fit each other, and then turn on the pressure and see if (a) the connector stays connected, (b) it stays together but leaks, or (c.) miraculously it works.  The two photos below show  two of the old connectors.  Look similar?  They don't fit each other.

Since the connectors were not that expensive, I ordered a whole bunch of color coded ones over Amazon, and redid them all.  Nice for the capitalistic system, but a real pain in the neck for me.   I could not help but feel a fondness for people who make garden hoses, and have had the sensitivity over the years to standardize the couplings.  In fact I was so pleased with my garden hoses I bought them all new gaskets.

Too Fast or Too Slow

Post, Mar. 6, 2020

I finished the book by  Ross Douthat (The decadent Society – How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success) I mentioned in a previous  post, and found it more than interesting. Douthat is a splendid writer with impressive credentials.  He has written several thought provoking books as well as this one , is a columnist for the New York Times, was a senior editor for the Atlantic, is the film editor for National Review, and is cohost for  the New York Times op-ed podcast The Argument. One reason I like his writings is that if I had to describe him (I don’t know him), I would call him a liberal conservative (rare and refreshing in these days of extreme right or left).

Douthat spends many paragraphs explaining what the word “decadent” applies to in this book, and I am not going to attempt that here.  One sentence he uses is “Decadence, deployed usefully, refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development”.  He is definitely not thinking about “that’s really a decadent desert”

The world is unsettled these days, to put it lightly, and from my technological viewpoint, I tend to think one of our problems is that our technology, especially digital technology, is moving more rapidly  than we humans can comfortably change. Douthat has a different viewpoint.   He points out that historically, there have been periods of high excitement and change (1960), and we are presently suffering from being in a low period. He points out that these periods have occurred often in the past.  He uses the word decadence to describe them, and points out that in the past people have continued to live through these periods, some of them quite long,  relatively happily.  One of his examples is the Roman empire for four centuries – which W.H. Auden described as low in creativity, warmth or hope.  Apparently people were  not exactly unhappy (except for the slaves)—no barbarians, no major changes to worry about, just an established and accepted existence, even though some people were wealthy and famous, and some were very poor. 

He also compares shorter and more modern periods to apply his argument to the present.  For instance the period between 1970 and now, a period of only 50 years. At least on the technology side, it may appear that we have accomplished a great deal. We have built wonders such as the internet, the Global Positioning Satellite system, and the ability to place people in space and even on the moon. We have learned to read and alter DNA, made great strides in  medical treatments and  military strength, and increased  our understanding of our fragile environment and the nature of the universe. We have improved our wealth and health, but things seem to be about the same. These great accomplishments do not retain their miraculous nature very long. 

As a contrast, I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s during the “space race”  with the U.S.S.R. Even though the technology  is far advanced since then,  the public excitement has diminished. Then most people knew the names (and nature and background) of many of the astronauts. Do you know the names of any of the present ones? Are you really excited about Artificial Intelligence, 5-G, and the new Apple Smart Phone?  Are you finding traffic on the roads  improved over what it was before all the “road work” that is under way? Do you appreciate the U.S. political and economic position in the world?  If not, why not?  Maybe you are becoming decadent.

Read Douthat’s book and worry.  Or not. I found it re-assuring, in that it infers that we are in a period which will be followed by high excitement and pleasure about what we (and the rest of the world) are accomplishing to improve our lot.

On another topic, I read a very large number of relatively new books and other documents pertaining to creativity, innovation, and change while writing the 5^th edition  of my Conceptual Blockbusting book. Many of them are included in the text of the book. Others are included at the end of the book in the Reader’s Guide.  In the future I will be including them in my posts and on the book list in my blog.

Finally, I intend to write about the glory of working with the hands and my maybe too many machinery-rescue projects as soon as the weather cooperates.  But it has been too cold and windy to be much fun to work in the farm country in the Sacramento valley, where my targets are, and  because of the lack of rainfall, and its effect on the crops (and farmers).  But as a hint of the next couple of projects I have in mind (I will continue on the Peterbilt of course).  But the coming ones  are shown in the photos below— an excellentand complicated crane complete with dirt moving buckets, dating back to the 1930’s, and a very large road roller, dating back even further.  I acquired both of them many years ago in terrible shape and got them running (barely), de-rusted, and painted, but now I haven’t run them in years.  They now seem to not be eager to run,are missing a few parts, and the paint is peeling off.  Easy rescue.  I think (hope) they just want a bit of love and minor mechanical service.

 

Selfishness, Competitiveness, and Creativity

Post Feb 22, 2000

We homo sapiens, (and in fact many animals) are selfish and competitive.  This causes us to have access to works of great value and requiring creativity (Amazon, General Motors, The Ring of the Nibelung, the internet, portfolios and trusts).  But the process is not uniform —think of the homeless on the streets of San Francisco, the people who are displaced, or killed in the various power struggles in the world, those of us who die because of the expense of medical care, and those of us, who for one reason or another, are denied education.  The area where I live and used to work ( Stanford) is packed with “successful” people, Students have an excellent opportunity to mingle with these people (many of our faculty members have started successful companies and invented successful  products, and we have a highly ranked business schools and many classes in entrepreneurship), but many (most?) people have not been equipped with the tools necessary to be admitted, or the money necessary to attend the Stanfords of the world. We are truly animals that have and have not, and our history has shown that in such situations there is revolution.

In our first few million years, there were relatively few of us homo sapiens.  In our hunting-gathering days, although time, knowledge, and hard work were necessary to find it, estimates have been made that although life was difficult (no Pickups, TV’s, or electric cave cleaners), there was probably enough of what we needed to go around.  In families and small tribes, our tendency is to cooperate within the family or tribe, and compete with other ones. This is not completely true, because probably siblings always competed with each other, and people competed for mates and position,  but although traces of violence have been found in the remnants of cultures living hundreds of thousands of years ago, it is probable that selfishness and competitiveness grew in our species over time. Certainly the rapid disappearance of Homo Neanderthalis has traces of genocide. And when we settled down, invented money, and began growing food and making products compatible with spending time in one place, there were objects and supplies worth stealing, and therefore an incentive for more crime.

In times of scarcity, it is useful to have stored up necessities and be able to defend them— to be selfish— and competitiveness is a goad to storing up more.  The ant is perhaps more selfish than the grasshopper, and maybe even more competitive.  And we animals in general seem to be wired to compete for such things as status, mates, and such things as food and shelter if they are in short supply.  But how about money and power.  What is with Donald Trump?  He has both.  Why does he want more? The answer is complex – a combination of ego, insecurity, and lots of other psychological negatives.  He can no longer wander around killing his competitors, so he must do it through titles. net worth, and a lot of publicity.   Because of where I live and what I do, I have had the opportunity to mingle with a lot of wealthy and influential people.  In general, they are nice people, but one could not say they are happier than others.  In fact, many of them are , if not still earning money, working hard to figure out what to do with it before they die. I knew at least a couple of them, who were politically very conservative, wanted to start a foundation to help conservative causes.  But they were very aware that conservative people (Ford, Sloan, Rockefeller, etc.) who had done so before, had created foundations that had become what they considered liberal.  Worry, worry.  One of them finally donated a vast sum to various conservative study centers, but then realized that most of them were associated with universities—well known liberal enclaves.

I am a fan of individuals that have “earned” vast wealth, because it does eventually end up in liberal institutions,  where most of my jobs have been.  But what happens if this competition and selfishness happens on a grand scale?  Seems like it might lead to wars.  Japan and Germany in the 1930’s?  Wars of independence?  Russia in the future?  The costs here are enormous, and the results muddy the water for years.  The Russian desire to re-assemble the Soviet Union under a capitalist flag is an example.  They have the right to try to do that, but U.S. resistance might result in a mess.

And competition and selfishness  at a global scale may be good for business (if you win), but if a  “strong” leader or two are involved, competition and selfishness, may result in a dark cloud hanging over many people.  As mentioned before, the 1930’s are sometimes referred to as the age of dictators. Dictators are certainly motivated by competition and selfishness, and attract followers.  That can result in things such as World War II, with sixty million people killed, many cities destroyed, large numbers of people displaced, bankruptcy occurring, re-drawing of national lines, and a great loss of historical treasures.

I must admit I am biased by having lived a long and wonderful life beginning in post-depression Southern California in a small house (900 sq. feet) on a small orange orchard (20 acres) next to a small town (1000 people) living a then typical farmer life —lots of physical work, marginal schools, but in a beautiful setting). I am very aware of the tendency of people to look at the past  and remember the good better than the bad, since I am one of them.  But it was a time  of cooperation as well as  competition, covering the cost of living rather than trying to acquire net worth, and requiring a large amount of smaller scale creativity (building your house, making your tools and entertainment, killing insects and gophers that would destroy your crop, etc.). But it has been swept up in the rapid “development” of Southern California.  Needless to say, the orange groves are now gone (the last one was operated by my brother), many of them replaced by huge warehouses, and “low-cost” housing developments, and the town has grown to over 100,000 people rather rapidly, with associated increases in traffic, crime, and attractiveness in  the area.  Is this perhaps an example of  what happens to creativity when the competitiveness and selfishness in our country call the shots? 

Different Viewpoint

Post -Feb 15, 2020

I read a different viewpoint (at least different than mine) as to why there is so much angst in the world these days in the Feb 9th Sunday review section of the New York Times, in the form of an essay written by Ross Douthart and entitled The Age of Decadence.  It is based on a book Douthart has coming out later this month entitled The Decadent Society, which I of course have ordered.  It can be read on the internet at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/opinion/sunday/western-society-decadence.html

I will comment more about it in a future post after I have read the book.

In short, having a technical back ground, and therefore being sensitive to the high pace of change due to rapid changes in such things as digital electronics, transportation, food production, medical care, and a long list of things that affect human life.  But in his essay, Duthout suggests that  we are either in, or entering  an age of  decadence and stagnation, in which we will not seek change and innovation, and backs up  his argument by discussing periods the  past where this was the case ( the Chinese, Ottoman, and Roman empires) and quoting studies indicating that such things as innovation are actually decreasing in the world. Since I live in Silicon Valley, and have spent much of my life working with Stanford students who want to start companies and revolutionize the world, I find this an interesting argument.  And since I do study and write about creativity,  I am looking forward  to more of his argument.

On the hardware side, my Peterbilt truck restoration project rolls ahead.  The photos below show the completed interior and a couple of shots of the exterior including engine.  Lots left to do. Next on the agenda is to see if it still runs after our re-wiring and its sitting stationary for many months (it better), and then get busy on some long needed body work. A good way to stay out of trouble, and keep my chops as an all around mechanic (as well as an engineer)

More on Power and Order

I am not expecting the perfect world described in my previous post on power and order. But I would like to say a few more things about leadership of large masses of people. We need leaders and people who understand humans and make appropriate rules and regulations.  On the surface, libertarianism seems to have advantages, but not for three hundred and fifty million people, and definitely not for 7 billion. Nor in fact for any large numbers.  It takes work and a tremendous  insight into  human thought and behavior to hold a very large group of people together so that they can accomplish significant things, especially if radical change is involved..  Ask any general or CEO. But the best way to understand the  advantages and limitations of power and order is to look at the present, and even better, at history.

People who are too ambitious at acquiring power and order often end up losing their followers, if not their lives— Adolph Hitler comes to mind. My experience makes me believe that small groups and even large organizations are pretty good at choosing their leaders.  The task is made both easier and more difficult because individuals know more about each other.  But for very large groups of people, such as we are interested in here, the task is difficult, and in many cases very difficult indeed.  Nations who try to maintain a royal family often run into trouble, because heritage alone does not always result in the  knowledge of people, economics, and leadership ability necessary to lead a nation.  Very large groups who choose a president based on his/her record with another large group may end up with a mis-match.  The advent of modern communication (TV, the internet) in nations who elect their leaders often offers an insight into their ability to perform and their knowledge of the media rather than how they may perform if elected, which is why I encouraged you to follow the upcoming elections, and try to figure  out how successful candidates will be at what they say about accomplishing their stated goals, as well as stating these goals.

Another problem is that people who love power and order often are never satisfied with how much they have. In Paul Kennedy’ excellent book Rise and Fall of Great Powers, nations often grow under extraordinary leadership, and fade because of over-commitment —the leadership is never satisfied —think of the colonization of other lands by European countries.  Think of the Vatican, and its attempt to influence the behavior of 1.2 billion people, or for that matter, any large church.  In the case of the Vatican, the problem is particularly difficult because the  “rulers” tend to be old, and they want to influence people who are very young indeed. 

Also, in my travels I have found that most people are not eager for wars.  That seems to be a favorite sport of certain leaders, who gain their feelings of success from trying to increase the land area of their country, and/or influence the thinking of people in other cultures or just have "power" .  As we will discuss later, if one looks back at former wars, the hopes of the leaders are not usually fulfilled in the long term.  The world is not all communist (the Soviet Union), democratic (the U.S.), or fascist (Italy).  The leaders, who probably have to believe in their form of government and are generally unique at capturing the hearts and minds of the majority of their population, do not always get their wishes, and large numbers of people are killed in the process (often people who would just as soon not have been in a war, and often not the leaders). And wars being very expensive do not often result in as big a benefit to the combatants as they might have hoped. Those of you who have been around a long time probably remember a photo of Benito Mussolini, leader of the fascist party in Italy, and his mistress who were shot and their bodies hung in a plaza for all to see.

For such reasons, I believe that leaders who have power should also have experience in what they are elected/appointed/born to do.  Leadership positions vary widely in what they require, and these characteristics are not obvious.  Being the president of a large private university requires the ability to raise money, and this can best by determined by past performance.  It also requires a skill with people that is very different than that required to be the head of a workers union.  I was particularly impressed by two people I got to know who were extremely successful as company presidents.  One of these was Andy Grove, first employee and later long term president of Intel.  I knew him both professionally in his Intel position, and personally as the father of one of my son’s friends.  In the latter capacity, he was one of the nicest, most supporting fathers I have known.  In the former, he was regularly recognized as very tough indeed.  He seemed to be able to be two people.  The other was Don Petersen, who became a good friend.  He was CEO at Ford and is as nice and helpful a person as I have ever met.  But I heard from a Ford Employee once that his nickname at work was “The Smiling Cobra”.  Again capable of two lives?

Power also varies.  What backs up people skills?  Company presidents  can regulate their employees pay and benefits.  National presidents cannot.  Generals are backed up by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Cardinals are not.  Dictators can execute people  who disobey them, leaders of fashion can not. Leadership and capability for power can best be determined by past performance in similar positions.

One problem suffered by many leaders of large groups of people is that their self-image, which often is very high, makes them think they can accomplish things they cannot. That is why this post is well timed, because you can use the media coverage of the election campaigning to try to predict how well candidates for high offices are likely to do at accomplishing things they say they can.  That is  why I  tend to  be suspicious of the ones promising revolutionary change, and go for those that are obviously bright, personable, and seem flexible.   I will say no more.

The Short Term Thinking Trap

 Post Jan 20, 2020

The Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, Martin Luther King Day, whatever, holiday is over at the Adams household.  Marian’s outrageously large supply of decorations is back in the attic in the proper boxes, and our equally outrageous supply of normal interesting things (to us, at least) is back where it lives most of the year. It is a wonderful period for us, since we have eight grand- children  living close to us, all in school, and all having what they call  “vacations”.  But even though Marian and I are retired, play time must end. 

Returning to the topic of creativity,

In my last few posts, I have mentioned my interest in complex problems requiring many people  and creativity to solve , and  mentioned products in which creativity  is relatively straight forward—fasteners. computer apps, truck restoration, etc.  Usually relatively small groups of people are involved to ensure a good supply of concepts in these simpler problems, represent the disciplines involved, build the necessary prototypes, and converge on a solution to the problem, and where relatively small amounts of money are involved in the process. Certainly  the restoration of the truck mentioned in my Post of 11/19/2019  is a good example

 It is very difficult to find and purchase new parts for an old truck. There are people whose business is tearing down old machines and selling the parts, or running small businesses that restore old equipment. But it often is quicker  and more likely to result in a good result if a bit of creativity is applied. Examples are the wiring and the interior of this truck. They were both a mess.  But I have been working on it with a friend, and both of us have had a large amount of experience in restoring old machinery.  It was very easy for us to think of “creative” solutions to solve such problems. We would tear out the old stuff, discuss the problem a bit, agree on a solution, and put in the new.  It was clear to us when a good idea came along, and the two of us were capable of implementing it.  Was it the best possible solution?  It was good enough, and people who did not restore old machinery would often compliment us on how creative we were.  But this is the type of creativity that involves few people and relatively little money, and the type that appears in books about how to be creative. Could we progress more rapidly and perhaps come up with more elegant solutions if we hired more people to help?   Probably. We could take the truck to the Courtland Truck Works in Courtland California, which specializes in restoring old trucks, especially Peterbilts.  You can see the results of their handiwork at shows, if you are not blinded by the chrome and paint shine. Do we want to do that? No way. Their help does not come cheap, and we want the pleasure of being clever and solving small problems ourselves.

But let’s think a bit about creativity on very complex problems in very large groups of people—tens or hundreds of thousands or millions rather than two, as mentioned in the last pages of my last edition of Creative Blockbusting and in my post of 11/08/2019 .  Such problems occur for a number of reasons.  As I have mentioned, things change over time, partly because we change them through our increasing population, increased expectations, continually increasing technological ability, changing environment, and because, thankfully, creativity is integral to us.  But at times (now?) we don’t change as fast as our perceived problems do.  I view it as a case of not being at good as solving such problems as in producing them.  If you would, we seem to affect our world more rapidly than we evolve.

I have mentioned that one of our problems in solving complex problems involving many people, is our short-term thinking.    Let me say a few more things about this.  Now is a good time to think more about it, because U.S. elections are right around the corner, and because many other countries and other large groups of people. are seeking quick answers to difficult problems. We definitely have difficult problems, and unfortunately, there are no quick answers that please everyone involved.

An example is medical care in the U.S.  We pride ourselves in taking care of our citizens, and spend a very large amount of money on medical care.  But we do not rank high in the world in our success.  If you look through the internet you will find many surveys, and the U.S. never places first. In fact, we usually finish last among “developed” countries (20^th or 30^th overall), even though we spend more per capita. What is going on?  Many things, one of which is our search for a solution that pleases everyone, but can be put in place in a few years.  Britain  (and we think the Brits are reasonably smart} put a “National Health Program” in place in 1948, and is still tuning it. The the U.Sis trying one now,  (The Affordable Care Act), but it was  only begun in  2010.  But three highly ranked presidential candidates (Trump, Warren, and Sanders) are vowing to radically change it.  To me, this is crazy.  In a situation such as this, the ACA should be under improvement based on experience, but not trashed after only ten years of usage  I think there are many reasons for this desire for revolutionary change: our naivete on the difficulty of rapid change in a  large population, a competitive election, strong personal feelings on the part of the candidates, and perhaps a bit of an age problem —all three of these candidates are in their  70’s and would probably like to still be alive when  “their” health system takes over (yes I will probably vote for Buttigieg, who argues for fine tuning and choices for the individual).

As individuals, we tend to measure time not only by the sun, moon, and stars, but also by periods we have noticed , such as hours,  days, years, and especially by human lifetimes.  To us, 100 years is a very long period of time, since few of us will live that long. Of course, in what is sometimes called geological time, it is an instant. But during our lifetime, we focus on these shorter periods – the quarter of a year in which business people strive to make more profit than the corresponding quarter of the previous year, the time until Christmas or summer vacation, the time until dinner, the time we have to go to the grocery store, etc.  We don’t tend to focus as strongly on what will happen during the time after we die.  We figure we will have made  our contributions and have had our times by then, and our kids can solve earthly problem while we are in heaven, hell, buried in the ground, spread to the four winds, or just gone.

This short-term focus was adequate, and perhaps advantageous during our many years in a roving, hunting and gathering existence.  It was necessary to do such things as prepare for changes in the weather and seasonal foods, , and we probably had a good sense of this to define our roving, but we certainly did not need to save money to put our kids through college or design trusts and wills to define the distribution of our property after we die, nor did we have to worry about growing populations, nor the finite nature of the earth (climate change, pollution, nuclear explosions,    Better to focus on food and shelter for the next few days.

Short term focus is no longer adequate.  I have been a registered professional engineer for 60 years, and a professor in a university for over 50.  As I age I become more aware of the problems in the world becoming  more complex and more difficult to solve.  A good example can be seen in the present U.S. competition for president.  The issues  that seem to surface have to not only do with health, but income, expenditure of government funds, the U.S. role and position in the world, and other  extremely  complex problems involving large numbers of people.  Even though the statistics say that we have vastly improved our welfare during our lifetimes, it doesn’t seem like that is the case.

The rate of change seems different depending on many things; knowledge about the topic, perceived need for change, relationship to the change, personal involvement in the change, and so on.  Reading and watching the media in the U.S. is hardly an upper.  But it is necessary if one is to feel comfortable with change. There are no simple ways to solve complicated problems, and In many of these situations there are few or no perfect situations at all. But in any case for a stable society we must keep trying, and keep improving what we have rather than pretending we have miracle solutions.

I  have worked on  several problems based on change and requiring relatively long time periods and the participation of many  people .  Maybe that is why I have hobbies in which solutions can be rapidly and cheaply achieved (restoring an old truck).

As an example of what was thought to be a relatively short-term problem, but becomes longer as time passes, as I said in a previous post,  I worked on planetary spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory between 1958 and 1966.  John F. Kennedy, in a speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962, vowed that the U.S. would put a person on the moon within ten years.  There were several factors behind this, ranging from developments in technology and science during the Cold War that would allow it, the lead the Soviet Union had in space, and a wide spread feeling that the U.S. needed a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), to beat theU.S.S.R.  The first spacecraft to the moon were the Ranger series, and Ranger 1 was launched on August 23, 1961 slightly before Kennedy’s announcement, and I had connections to JPL for various reasons, and became a full time employee soon after. This was an unprecedented flight, and represented a very large amount of thinking, testing, knowledge, and risk (no one was actually sure exactly where the moon was in space), and there was no experience designing and building complicated lightweight devices that could endure the launch environment and operate successfully in space.  The first six spacecraft in the series failed for various reasons, and for that the Jet Propulsion Lab was awarded a very painful congressional investigation, demanding certain changes.  JPL met this by extreme simplification of the spacecraft, and backed by the experience learned through the first six shots, managed to make successes of the following ones.   You may remember the photos of the moon, which became larger and larger until the spacecraft successfully impacted the moon—good theater.

Ranger was followed by Surveyor, a lander that gathered detailed knowledge of the lunar surface, and then, of course, the Apollo program, that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969. Mission completed, President Kennedy.

 But in the interim, a large amount of knowledge was acquired, some in flight data, some in design. and manufacturing, and in people such as Werner Von Braun.  An example was the booster rocket necessary to place people and their return vehicle on the moon (Apollo).  Simultaneously to the exploration of the moon, many orbital payloads ranging from communication satellites to scientific and “spy” satellites were launched.  And now we have space stations, navigational systems “space force” (a debatable idea), and the various countries doing such work have put over 1000 “satellites” and many exploratory space craft into orbit. 

I worked on the first spacecraft to Venus, and then the first to Mars, both of which took advantage of the knowledge learned from the Ranger series and each other, and since JPL was much smaller, we worked and lived with the Ranger engineers in the same somewhat cramped building.  Putting people on the moon had been a hectic race, complete with frustrations and heart breaks, and  there was quite a bit of discussion of “why did we have to accomplish all of this in ten years, since all we had to start with were ICBM’s for boosters?”   One of the older, more cynical members or our group finally came up with a believable theory.  First of all, it was a “space race” with the Soviet Union.  But more than that, he claimed, if you wanted to get large amounts of money from the government, you had to propose an exciting project that would be completed while the members of congress, the President, and other influential people were still alive so that they could get pleasure from it. Perhaps wisdom there?

Many of us working on the problem of getting a few people to the moon and back thought it was a finite problem and we  did happily solve it as stated.  But its solution resulted in other problems to work on, resulting in increasingly complex problems.  Such is the case with complex problems with many people involved. Many problems we face will not be solved rapidly, and some will never be solved (free top  quality medical care for everyone – someone has to pay for it).  Certainly many large ones will be still existing when many, most of us, or all of us now living are dead.  And attempts to solve them within the few years in which elected officials are in office, may well fail. Such problems as assuring control of weapons of mass destruction, protection of the ecosphere, overseeing economies, decreasing poverty, and decreasing war may well take constant attention forever.  And we should be very suspicious  of politicians telling us that they will “fix” them in few years they will hold office, or even in their lifetimes.

What do we do about this short- sightedness?  I have no answer other than suggesting we think harder about how long it takes to make long term changes in large populations, investigate new directions for longer period of times before dropping them, and think hard about our great, great grandchildren and the world they will inherit. If you’re really good, think about changes over the last 300 years, and what the world might be like 300 years from now.

Holiday Greetings

Sorry for not writing posts more often,but the Holidays are overwhelming in our family —4 kids and spouses  and 8 grandkids in the area, all being fond of  each  other.  How lucky we are.

So for this post, I will merely send you our Christmas card. Follow the instructions on it!  Hail Photoshop!

 

Too much creativity #2?

Post  Dec. 10, 2019

I remember loving my TRS 80 "computer"(commonly called a Trash 80) distributed by Radio Shack in the 1970’s. It had a whole 4 kb of memory, expandable to 48 kb with so-called expansion cards. I was the Academic Associate Dean in the Stanford School of Engineering, and we gave one to any faculty member that could  do something useful with it.  But we could afford to do so, because the price was definitely right. I also remember the thrill of the Apple 1, and have used Apple products ever since then.  I am writing this on a relatively new desktop Mac, and its capability is enormous, compared to the early machines  - maybe more enormous than I want. I certainly don’t want to revert to a TRS 80, but neither do I want to spend as much time as I do learning slight modifications to what I consider tools.

As you probably have observed, computer manufacturers love to “upgrade” the software on their machines,  if not the machines themselves.  This is partly because it is relatively cheap to change software, and partly because of the mentality of the folk in the computer business and many hardcore users, who love more “advanced” capability in their machines..    In the case of Apple, much of this has also resulted from their ongoing effort to keep all of their many devices communicating.   But as I said in my last post, many of us consider computers and other  digital devices as tools that should make our life better, rather than something that should  require periodic and sometimes challenging effort to become familiar with changes. As an example, I recently finished  edition #5 of  a book I wrote some time ago, entitled Conceptual Blockbusting. I decided to definitely not “upgrade” my operating system, because I  had become familiar enough with it and the versions of applications that were on it.  It took me a couple of years to do the revision.  And by not changing anything I innocently thought I could focus on the text.  Didn’t work. 

My book went through several editors, each using a common and powerful tool named Track Changes, with which editors can send changes they recommend on top of what you have sent them.   More editors, more colors of changes.   Unbeknown to me, a new version of Word, which is the home of Track Changes, was needed to read one layer of changes, which left me and the editors working on different material.  Photoshop changed its format again, and my fairly well developed ability to use it had to be tuned up. After many inconveniences, the book finally came together, and I decided to “upgrade” the operating system, if for no other reason than to get rid of the constant reminders on my screen telling me I needed to.  I  am still  trying to get to the point again where I don’t have to think about how to use the  machine (tool),  but by now it has demanded  a couple more  “upgrades”

As an extreme example, when Apple switched from iPhoto, to Photos (I  considered iPhoto a much better program, maybe because I was used to it and the way it handled titles, organizing, etc))  without giving users much warning.  I had to go through some moves the machine and Apple obviously did not like  to stay on iPhoto.  Fortunately, with a little help from a friend who is a computer wizard, I figured out a way to stay with iPhotos, and my computer has gotten tired of threatening me,  but at some point it will  force me to change.

I write this because I am sure some of you will resonate with my problems. I do consider my computer  a powerful tool, but a tool  none the less.   I do not want to learn everything it can do. But if you look at my resume (people.stanford.edu/jla) it looks like I shouldn’t need as much help as I do. I understand the advantages of upgrading hardware and software to the producer, and hardcore computer lovers,but I wish I was not reminded (or forced) to change my digital tools so often.  I think most of us would do better if the people designing the hardware and software produced products that did not require as much care and feeding.  I want to use my creativity to produce creative material, not to constantly use it to operate my digital equipment .

Too Much Creativity?

Post 2 December,2019

Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.  We certainly did with lots of family around, and a full refrigerator with various containers of excellent food left over to keep us in holiday mode until Christmas.  It was so nice I became delinquent on writing posts.

But I continued to work on my antique Peterbilt truck with my friend Loren Bryson, and once again became aware of the amount of time I spend looking for tools and parts, in particular fasteners —screws, nuts, bolts, rivets, etc. and associated tools such as screw drivers, wrenches, and rivet guns.  Loren demands historical accuracy, and is somewhat of an expert in fasteners, since he works three days a week in a large hardware store, so the proper fasteners, and the necessary tools to install them must be found – as is the case of all of my restoration projects. Being a DIY person, I also need a large range of fasteners to work on the house, appliances, cars, and other such things.  Even as I write this, the remote control for an over head fan in the bedroom is not working. I know how to fix it, but can’t find the tiny Phillips screwdriver I need to take it apart.  I know it is somewhere, but its exact location doesn’t seem to be stored in my overloaded brain.

Think of screws.   There are a great number of types, sizes, and materials.  Put “types of screws” or “type of fasteners” into your computer, and you will be impressed. Over the years I have acquired a large collection of them, and the tools necessary to insert them, but have neither the space nor the patience to keep them nicely sorted in individual packages or drawers.   Hardware stores can do that, but if you buy such things, you find that even there, nuts, bolts, and screws sneak into the wrong container. At my home, they seem to wander randomly around my shop and my projects, even though I have assigned them to various places.

t seems to me that finding screws and related screwdrivers used to be simpler.  I remember my early experience with screws, which was working with either my grandfather, the blacksmith and carpenter, or my uncle, the machinist.  Granddad, in his shop had a single drawer full of different size flat head and round head screws.  My uncle had the same in his shop, but of course also “machine” screws, including both fine thread and coarse thread screws, mostly with  slotted heads. They of course each had several screw drivers, but mostly the classic types that fit screws with a slotted head.

Obviously a great amount of creativity has gone into the development of screws since my youth. And different types of screws better serve specialists for reasons ranging from the assembly process of machines to restricting usage to various specialists. Creativity!  But as you know by now, I am not only a hobbyist who encounters many type of screws, I am also often involved in repairing, or attempting to repair everything from yard furniture through automobiles and digital equipment.  I have a pretty complete set of standard, Phillips, hex and  Torx screw drivers, but do not have enough space in my shop to cover all of the other geometries with proper drawers and appropriate screw drivers.  A particularly maddening one is the Pozidrive, which looks very much like the Phillips head, but has a socket that is straight, rather than tapered.   The Phillips head will slip if a certain amount of torque is put on it. The Pozidrive will hang on until the screw driver is bent.  Much is made by the manufacturers that one should not use a Phillips screw driver on the Pozidrive  screw and vice versa. But at first glance, they appear identical.

But are we getting too creative with our fasteners?  I refuse to buy a Pozidrive screwdriver set.  I have so many sizes and types of screwdrivers already that they are already overflowing the magnetic bars I keep them on, and I want to focus my time on my job, not on finding the right screwdriver.  I am cutting down on the types of screws I use also, rather than drowning in screws and screwdrivers.

If one thinks about the totality of so-called hand tools, the same thing has happened universally, as well as in my shop. Before I went to high school, I owned a hammer, a couple of chisels, a drill and some bits, a pliers, a few screw drivers, a couple of crescent wrenches, and a couple of saws.  Granted I was given access to my Uncle’s and/or grandfather’s shops If I was drafted to work on the house or tractor.  When I went to high school, I inherited a quite used Chevrolet car, and added a minimal socket set, a depth gauge, and a few other tools that fit easily in the corner of the trunk of the car and carried me through college, although I began working summers in a machine shop, which introduced me to machine tools and dozens of “hand” tools I had not known existed.

But when I went into the Air Force  I bought a used Austin Healey, which required  pretty constant mechanical work, and which introduced me to the metric  system and the British system of nuts,  bolts, and such things, since they were all used on the car    Lots more tools. Jacks, body tools, electrically powered tools, etc. Since then I seem to have acquired at least one of every tool I have ever needed, or wanted and could afford, and have finally realized that I would be more productive with fewer of them.  

Is this in a sense an anti-creativity move on my part?  Maybe. but at this point in my life I need to hold still and focus on fewer tools that I can find easily and are well sharpened and ready to go , rather than constantly filling spaces with a wider variety of them. Part of creativity is making choices and ”paring down”, and that is a difficult thing for me to do.

Some years ago, I was a consultant to an interesting group of people called the National Inventors Council, which consisted of outstanding inventors, and acted as a sounding board for the U.S. Department of Commerce.  The person that held it together was named Dan DeSimone, and there was agreement in the group, and even in congress, that it was time for the U.S. to switch to the metric system of measurement, since most of the world had, and it is a far more reasonable system than we use. I became sensitized to cost of maintaining both the U.S. and metric systems of measurement. In the late 1960’s Dan directed   a large study entitled “A Metric America.  A decision Whose Time has Come”. The U.S. tried, but could not deal with it, so here we are, one of the only three countries in the world who do not use the metric system (the others are Liberia and  Myanmar}. I sometimes think about how much simpler life would be if I could get rid of my U.S .system  tools. But it won’t happen, any more than the QWERTY keyboard will.

 The cost to us in maintaining our weird and primitive system, based on things such as the length of a thumb joint of a long-forgotten king (the inch), and the length of his foot (the foot, of course,) is enormous. One small benefit of changing to the metric system, is that we could instantly cut down on the number of fasteners and associated tools in the country. This has little chance of happening, since we have all grown up with our ancient and silly system, but it would be an excellent example of “creativity by paring down” for us, even though the rest of the world is already there. Perhaps I will discuss this in a later post.

I shall continue this in my next post by making an analogy with computers, which after all, are tools.

 

 

 

 

Working With the Hands

Time for a break from shortcomings we homo demi sapiens have from changes that occur more rapidly than we evolve. I am sure that you realize that I am not opposed to thinking short term, power, and order.   All of the post Neolithic styles of thinking are still necessary.  They are just no longer adequate, as can be seen from following what is going on in the news (liberal and/or conservative..   I will return  to the topic from time to time.

As you may know from past blogs,  or knowing me, I am a commited fan of working with the hands.  I not only get great pleasure from this, but the house benefits,  I can make furniture and yard art for my wife (and myself), I can collect friends who recognize the same need,  and finally  I can keep from going nuts.  There are many arguments for this.  I have gone over a few in past posts, but suffice it to say that our hands are wonderful and the reason we humans have survived this long.

As you may also know, my favorite hobby is rescuing antique machinery from the furnaces.   My present project is perhaps the most difficult one I have picked on, but important because it has a history.  It is a 1957 Peterbilt truck.  A photo of it being driven by my son probably 40 years ago is below:

The truck belonged to my friend, Marc Faye, who I met in the Air Force, and who  when his tour was up,  took over the family farm on whose property I built a barn (with my hands, aided by quite a few power tools) to serve as a base for some of my machines. My older son, Bob, although he has worked as a musician,  a product designer, a consultant in several areas,and a teacher, has farming in his blood.  He became a friend of Marc’s son when too young to get a commercial license, but would spend his summers  working on the farm,  beginning with kid jobs (following the nut shaker and picking up  the nuts that did not get caught in the shaker), and working his way up through driving tractors and harvesters to getting his license to drive  highway trucks.  This was a big deal.  I road with him a few times when he was pulling 80 tons of fruit up to a dryer in a town north of their farm, and he clearly loved the work (and the truck).  In a sense, driving large trucks is the  ultimate  blue  collar job, and Bob has always loved big machinery, and has always loved blue collar work, although he is highly qualified for white

The truck saw lots of service and finally was replaced with a new  one, but during its life  received a lot of banging around and was repaired and “improved” by many people, including many people who were not professional at doing such things.  On my 60^th birthday, I heard the horn of an obviously large truck in my driveway,and there was Bob with  the truck. He had acquired  the truck  and was giving it to me as a birthday present. I was thrilled.

It had been shined up before it  was given to me, but restoring it was clearly going to be a major job, and I have lived  all my life with a surplus of things I wanted to do, so I built it a lean – to on my garage and I am ashamed to say left the truck sit for 25 years, which did not help it’s health any, but it has amused and attracted a lot of people,  It is now on the operating table and with the help of a friend I have torn into it and we are putting it back together. We are approaching the job from the inside out. A few before and after photos below give an indication of where we are, and what we have to do.  I am shooting for next summer.

Radiator housing restored.  Rest of exterior not.

Before

Door before restoration

Top before restoration

Another shot at unrestored ceiling

Wiring under dash before restoration

Rewired and dashboard restored

New interior complete

Lots left to keep me off of the streets!

Power and Leadership

In my fantasies, I sometimes think of a single world, in which all nations , beliefs, and other large groups would cooperate to the benefit of all.  Unfortunately, this is probably  not going to happen in my life time, or the near future, without the threat of major damage to the human race (wreckage from climate change, massive over population, nuclear warfare, wide spread starvation or  plague, potential impact with another extra terrestrial body, attack  by the as yet unknown population of another planet, etc.). Hopefully it will not happen.

So we will continue to live in tribes, although they will be huge ones, not sharing the same beliefs and customs, and not restricted to a single plot of land. We will continue to need/want power and leadership for two reasons: they assure stability and the necessary collaboration to accomplish great things (if we cooperate), and it feels good to have power and we like both to lead and be lead (assuming we respect and admire the leader).

It would take a great deal of creativity to reach my fantasy world, and universal agreement and willingness to have, agree upon, and happily live within the agreed upon rules.  But it has happened in small countries (Singapore) and temporarily in large ones (The U.S., Britain, and France after World War II). There is a good bit of this in the Scandinavian countries, Australia and New Zealand,  and many other countries, usually smaller ones. But in the world  in general  there is widespread  discontent, much of it focused on leaders and their use of power.

In  my perfect world, there would be a perfect leader (which I don’ t think exists, although  Churchill  seemed to be pretty good in World War II, and Mandela seemed to  be  pretty good in South Africa). She/he would be likable,without strong political biases, and a combination wise person, model for the rest of us and firm final word. He/she would be rewarded by doing their job  well, and managing and rewarding the people who reported to them (rewards in the form of satisfaction in successfully doing an appreciated and valuable job). Using the U.S. as a potential model, this  leader (president) would  also manage the vice president, and the heads of the cabinet bureaus who would  do top level planning and policy. They would not always agree with the president, and would  represent points of view of diverse groups of people in the country. The president should be smart, but not think he/she has all the answers.

Cabinet leaders would be professionals, in that they would  have spent a number of years in the area of responsibility of the bureaus they headed.,  As an example, I agree that the Secretary of Defense should be a civilian, but I think it also preferable that he/she have spent a number of years on active duty in the military, and hopefully been exposed to combat. These would be the people  in charge of  developing policy and strategy, with the help of the people reporting to them, who would  in turn have experience in the area they were working in and not always agree with their boss or the President or Vice President.

Obviously I am looking for creativity here. The bureau heads should be creative and  in turn encourage  creativity among their people.  I think that we are going to be looking at a good bit of change in the next 50 or 100 years, and time tested approaches to solving problems will no longer work.  It will be a period requiring experimenting, open minds,  willingness to learn new information and approaches, and yes—creativity at all levels, reviewed by all involved, 

This is a dream, of course, of a government for which I would love to work.  But long term survival can not be built on the past, and a single person (president), cannot be expected to come up with solutions to the increasingly complex and multi disciplinary problems that will exist, and in fact already are here.

I think the above description of a hierarchy applies in any field involving a large population of humans,  If you would  like more of my thoughts on individual, group and organizational creativity, read my Conceptual Blockbusting book, and think about how it might apply to the leaders of your country or the Catholic church.

 

 

Homo Demi Sapiens —An Animal in Denial

.I am happy to be an animal.  It seems to be more fun than being either a plant or a mineral. 

Of course, I am biased being an animal, and being equipped with the ability to believe that I as an animal, especially a human animal, outrank other animals.  In fact, we humans  have officially designated ourselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens (wise, wise humans) That perhaps remains to be seen..  Dinosaurs ruled the roost for  about  130 million years. Termites have been around for 250 million years  We split off from the primate tree 6 million years ago, but  we lived as hunter gatherers until the Neolithic Revolution, which occurred about 15,000 years ago — a mere instant in geological time.  It is supposedly a good thing to be part of a species that is around for a  long time.  How long are we going to last?  Certainly not forever unless we change the way we act and get more honest about how smart we are.  We are smarter  than other forms of life, but not nearly as smart as we think we are.  Hence I prefer to think of us as Homo Demi Sapiens (Half Wise Humans)

We need to  think a bit more about our place in the grand pageant which is the planet Earth, and use our relatively powerful  ability to be creative to get more serious about  attacking some of the major problems involving large numbers of people (all of us?)— such things as exploding population and urbanization, rapid change in technology,  obsolete forms of government, climate change, and so on.  From the messages I get from residents of a broad selection of countries, these problems are large  and many.

W e need to use our creative ability  to better  think our way through such problems. I have studied creativity  since I was in college 65 years ago, but focussed on individuals, groups,  and such larger collections of people as companies,  universities, and non-profit organizations. Increasing the creativity of nations, religions, and cultures requires more than shows up in  books on how to manage creativity such as mine.  The conceptual blocks are more difficult to handle, as they have evolved over large spans of time, and evolution  is  slow, so many of them must be fought by intellectual effort.  I  gave you an example  of one ( short term thinking} in my last post, when I brought up our  reluctance to tackle problems that sneak up  on us and take a long time to solve (if ever).

Let me list a few more here. I will repeat our reluctance to tackle what I call long term problems. I  will throw in short term thinking again, since I think it is of major importanc, and follow each with a one line explanation about what was good about them before  the Neolithic revolution when we stopped being hunter gatherers, ,  and what may be troublesome about them now. I will continue  to touch upon them from time to time in this blog. I don’t want go deeply into all of them in this post, because  that would be a book, not  a blog, and I  am writing a book on such things and attempting to not become depressed. Feel free to add “blocks” and argue with my list.  There are more, of course,  so feel free to argue with mine and add your own.

 

1. We focus on the short term

Good then - Food and shelter for today and tomorrow

Bad now -complex problems such as carbon emissions, medical care, poverty 

2. We like power, and order

Good then - Following strong leaders, and becoming one

Can be bad now - Dictators, governments making more rules and laws than necessary, less freedom

3. We are selfish and competitive

Good then - More food in times of scarcity ,motivation

Bad now - Endless desire for growth and wealth, GNP fixation 

4. We want others to think like we do in large numbers

Good then - Reinforcement, social agreement

Bad now- Fights between Christians and Muslims, capitalists and socialists, liberals and conservatives

5. We are drawn to small tribes

Good then  - Strength, Identity, Sharing of values

Can be bad now - Hell’s Angels, Tea Party members, youth gangs, Ku Klux Clan

6. We resist change

Good then- Strong tradition and building of expertise, tradition, stable societies

Bad now – Resistance to getting rid  of nukes, preparing for cimate change, opposition to vaccinating children, retention of outmoded ethnic and cultural biases.

7. We rely too heavily on science and technology breakthroughs

Okay then - Not much science and yechnology

Bad now – reliance  totally on atmospheric engineering to stop global warming, driverless cars to solve traffic problems, etc in the future

8. We depend on faiths—religion,science, our political party,— to find answers to our problems

            Good then - We didn’t have to think about difficult problems

Bad now – Time to think more deeply about difficult problems,such as health cae.

9. We want simple answers, even to complicated problems

Good then  - We could rapidly implement the answer

Bad now - There are no simple answers to many (most important) problems

10. We ignore expertise if we do not like what it says

Good then - We might discover a better way to do things

Bad Now – Leaders ignoring opinions of people who have spent their lives seeking better understanding  (scientists, economists, psychologists, etc)

11. We have a limited feeling for big/small quantities— light years, national debts, nanometers—but throw them around anyway

Okay Then - Big/small quantities not as common in life

Bad now -We fool ourselves constantly

12. We depend on increasingly complicated and fragile systems

Okay then - Systems weren’t that complicated then

Bad Now – Failing systems  have high costs – Boeing Max

13. We take our environment and other resources for granted —open space, clean air

Okay then - Low population – no apparent problem

Bad Now - An increasingly critical problem, since we continue to place it low in our priorities

14. We kill each other with little improvement of our lives or species —war

Okay then - Casualties low and expected, economic cost low

Not okay now -Costs high, wars seem to no longer resolve issues in the long term , and we have weaponry capable of sending ourselves back to before the Neolithic revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Me and my Blog

As you may have noticed, I have changed the banner on this blog to include five books I have written. I began this blog when I had completed my Good Products, Bad Products book (briefly described on the left), and was teaching a class with the same name in the Stanford Engineering School.  with a good friend named Dave Beach. It focused on products of industry and important characteristics of quality that could not be quantified. If you look at my posts, especially in the early days of the blog, you will see lots of material on this topic.

My interests on quality had always gone beyond industrial products, and the last few posts I wrote and my return to creativity and innovation are an indication of that. I still have constant gripes about the products of industry, mostly resulting from industry's short term desire to make money.  I am in the middle of one right now, based on the software in my Mac computer. When I began working on my book a couple of years ago, I resolved  not to upgrade  my  operating system or various programs until I was done, because I wanted to focus on the writing.  But of course I could not get away with that.  My many editors did upgrade, which resulted in my having to learn different tricks in layout, track changes, and such things, upgrade Photoshop, etc.  Now that I am finished I have upgraded the operating system and seem to bump into continuous pesky little changes that reflect ideas software people had that seemed to them to increase the usefulness of the computer.  Phooey.  Computers are tools, like pianos or airplane controls. Once you learn how to use them, you don’t want to come up against minor changes.

But improving quality, whether it concerns can openers or the overall quality of life, depends on creativity and innovation.  And many problems these days involve very large numbers of people.  Evidence  is in your newspapers, and has to do with complex problems such as medical care, war, climate change, traffic, housing,  education, and so on. I have theories about why such problems are becoming so obvious, and I mention this in my last few posts.   They have to do with increasing populations, major changes in technology, and the relative slowness of evolution (which I believe in absolutely).  I have given talks on this and am writing a book with has the working title of Homo Demi Sapiens (half wise humans). I agree that we are the smartest form of life so far (assuming we define what “smart” means, but do not think that we are as smart as we think we are.  We are equipped with habits of many years ago when life was simpler, and not equipped well to  solve many contemporary  problems when it comes to change,  even though we are responsible for much of this change.  We have major blocks.

As an example, we respond to complex problems very slowly and underestimate the time, effort, and expense of solving them. Think of medical care, a properly demanded service these days involving a wide variety and large numbers of people on the care side, even more various and numbers of care seekers, and a relatively small number of people in the government that have practiced medicine or been seriously  ill.  We are now coming up on an election, in which few candidates or their advisers are actively involved in medical care. As you know, we have had a medical program entitled  Affordable Medical Care (Obama Care) for ten years.  It seems to be working, with some problems that can be diminished over time.  But two years ago, Trump was elected, vowing to stop Obama Care and put in place a Terrific Health Program (Trump Care?  For which he gave no details).  Now, as a comparison, we seem to have a high regard for the intelligence  of the British, and they have a health care program called the National Health Service.  It was put into place in 1948, over 70 years ago, and they are still working on improving it.

We seem to be wired to think in the short term.  That probably worked 30,000 years ago when we hunted and gathered in small tribes.  It does not work now.   It is a huge conceptual block in our solving major problems.  If  we wipe out species with our large numbers (including ourselves) they will not come back.  If we pollute our environment beyond a certain point, that species may be us.  Our kids are not going to solve these large problems, because they too will be  thinking in the short term (their life span)

As a rather amusing comment on this short term view,  I was working at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, When John F. Kennedy announced that the U.S. was  going to put a person on the moon in ten years.  JPL had  been traditionally occupied with rocket and jet propulsion for the army and was instantly made part of NASA  (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and told to perform a number of unmanned/womanned spacecraft missions leaning toward getting human passengers there and back.

This was an amazing challenge for the newly named NASA. No one was even sure of the exact location of the moon, much less how to control the temperature of a spacecraft, provide one  with power, control it over long distances, or build a system strong enough to people there and back and survive the necessary launch and landing. But it happened, partly boosted by the “Space Race” with Russia, partly by a nasty congressional investigation when the first six Ranger spacecraft failed in their  mission, and partially  because of amazing public interest in, and support of the mission

But one day,  early in the project, some of we then young engineers were talking  to a wise and elder engineer about how in the world the Aerospace business was going to accomplish this mission in such a short time,  He explained to us that it was an important and expensive project and if you wanted to get a lot of money from  congress, you should propose something heroic that members of congress could point to as a high point of their congressonal career.  There was wisdom there. Congress is probably a bit loath to commit large amounts of money for projects to be completed 50 years from now.

When  I am talking about such  things as global warming or polluted seas, people often tell me “let the kids worry about it”. A suicidal approach. We have to develop the skill  of pursuing large scale projects that outlive us as individuals and affect large groups of people—long term thinking about large populations.

 

 

 

 

I'm back

I apologize for dropping out of my blog.  As I remember, my last entry was my 2018 Christmas card.  There are several reasons I disappeared.  I guess after writing some 330 posts, I was a bit burnt out. I also was talked into doing a 5^th edition of a book (Conceptual Blockbusting — Basic Books—first published in 1972 by the Stanford Alumni Association).  And I became involved in new  interests and new projects. I have been an emeritus professor (retired) from Stanford for 20 years, and have definitely found out what retirement means —so many fun things to do you get further and further behind !!

I am glad to say the book is finished and on the shelf.  The cover is designed for Halloween (see banner above)                                                                                                        

 I wrote a short message to the people I worked with at Stanford,  who are faithful users of the book, and it is below.

Hi: A new edition of Conceptual Blockbusting (the 5th) is now in print. It continues to sell, be used in classes and executive programs,appear in different  languages, and  so on.  The publisher talked me into doing it by agreeing to do the marketing and giving me examples of  what  I considered to be worthy usages (parents  giving it to a kid  in college, etc). I  upgraded book references, since a ton of books have appeared since the last edition, and changed the text to reflect my own opinions of what is now happening in understanding and managing creativity and change. I spent a long time on the book because I became hooked on the impressive present advances in  the fields now calling  themselves cognitive science, in particular groups  calling themselves things like cognitive creativity. After reading a gazillion books and papers, renewing a friendship with Robert Sapolski ,my favorite cognitive scientist, reading his sensational latest book labeled “Behave”” sitting through his famous spring course (Introduction to Human  Behavioral Biology which everyone should take), I concluded   that there is a large amount of really interesting  stuff  being  discovered that bares on creativity and change, so the slip into  “neurodesign”, at Stanford is well timed. But  the bad news is that there  are some long standing gaps  on our understanding  of areas that  are vital in our attempt to understand the details of  functions in the brain and nervous systems as far as creativity and change are concerned (consciousness, curiosity, the emotions that guide our problems  solving, etc.). I  will continue to drink coffee with Sapolsky and try to convince  him to tackle creativity, and  to read what the  cognitive scientists are up to, but  hey, I am 85, have been retired  for 20 years, and have a continually growing and interesting bunch of projects and interests to  work on, especially rescuing unloved antique machinery. In a book written way back in 1992 by Finke, Ward,  and Smith, entitled Creative Cognition ( MIT press), I am classified as having a “pragmatic” approach to creativity.  Guess so. but as you can see in this new edition of Creative Blockbusting.,I am becoming lured a bit more toward the “scientific” approach. Have fun looking through the book,  Jim

 

 

I will continue to discuss the areas I have  in past posts, as in my mind they all interact. And I will  hopefully give you new things to think about and use to manage your own or other people's creativity and adaptability to change. I will initialy be writing a couple of posts a week in hopes of reaching people who have given up on me, and then revert to once a week.  The next post will explain how the various books I have written fit together, and the following one will bring up the topic of creativity  and change in large groups, for instance nations and religions. Now is a good time to witness its nature and problems.

 

It’s good to be back.

Holiday Greetings

Hello Again

Blog Restart:

I took a bit more time off from writing posts than I thought I would. The last one, announcing that I planned to do so in order to do some thinking, reading, and some work with my hands, was in March of this year. Here we are in November, and here I am again. As I will show you in future blogs, I definitely have done work with my hands.

I have been retired from active duty on the Stanford University faculty for 18 years, and am now 83 years old. I am amazed, and quite pleased to still be alive, because when I was born, the life expectancy for males in the U.S. was 59 years. And my interests seem to still be out of control, with the result that they have changed a bit recently. I am still interested in product quality, creativity and innovation, engineering and technology, business, and all of those good things. But the past year has been eventful, to say the least, including phenomena reaching from Trump to drones, and jihad to crispr-cas9.

In particular, I have become increasingly interested in what brain researchers and cognitive psychologists have been up to, and how that new knowledge helps explain we Homo Sapiens Sapiens (wise wise people) a bit better. As to what I am thinking, we should be calling ourselves Homo Demi Sapiens (half wise people) rather than believing that we can find answers to increasingly complex problems and increasing expectations that please everyone. I am even working on a book with the title of Homo Demi Sapiens.

But I am not yet exercising the degree of curmudgeonishness (how do you like that for a new word) that my age entitles me to.

Unsurprisingly, I am particularly interested in what we are doing to ourselves with the present relatively rapid changes in technology, and with overall rapid change (or at least our attempts to do so. My interests in creativity and innovation began many years ago with an attempt to better understand such things in individuals. But then I was swept along by expanding attention paid to creativity and innovation in groups, probably stimulated in the U.S. by Japan’s successful use of groups who were producing automobiles and electronics products that were giving us a run for the money. Then I became interested in creativity and innovation in organizations, especially as it is affected by growth and success. But then I really bit the bullet and began to try to understand creativity and change in very large groups of people, such as nations. cultures, and religions.

Here we run into some real barriers. I am a firm believer in evolution (which may make some of you less eager to read what I write). It is a slow process, and to the extent that we have deep beliefs, skills, and desires, they do not easily or rapidly change. I recently gave a talk to a 50^th reunion of a Stanford Business School class on change. In that talk I discussed with them 15 aspects of humans that were probably of value before the Neolithic Revolution, when we were hunter gatherers, relatively few in number, and living in tribes. Now they seem to be getting us into trouble Examples are:

1. We focus on the short term
2. We are tribal
3. We like others to think like we do
4. We want simple answers to complicated problems
5. We depend on faith and defend it viciously
6. We ignore expertise if we do not like what it says

And so on.

I was a bit worried when I gave the talk, but to my pleasure they became deeply engaged in the topic. There will be some of that in my posts.

Also I have reading a great deal about what’s going on in brain research that gives new insight to my old friends creativity and change. One book I wholeheartedly recommend is The Undoing Project – A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (W.W.Norton, by Michael Lewis. It is the story of the partnership of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israelis who have made a huge impact on our understanding of thinking and problem solving —Kahneman (author of the popular book Thinking Fast and Slow) to go on to recently win the Nobel Prize in Economics, even though he is a psychologist. Not only is the story well worth reading, it is beautifully written. Lewis has written books such as Flash Boys, The big Short, Money Ball, and Liar’s Poker. and to my mind is the best there is at explaining complicated concepts to a lay audience.

The other is Behave – The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst(Penguin Press) by Robert M. Sapolsky , a Professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, an incredible teacher, a true polymath, and a proven outstanding writer (A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble With Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers). He has studied everything from baboons to neurons, and is outstanding at explaining broad subjects (such as behavior) from many angles. This book is more technical than Lewis’s book, but is fun to read because of Sapolsky’s writing style and humor. His book is organized starting with the small and fast moving (neurons to the large and slow (Cultures) . And his empathy for the reader is unmatched. When one is tempted to quit reading because the content is becoming overly technical, he will often put in a foot-note advising the reader to continue because the discussion of that particular material is almost over, or before the content becomes difficult, warn the reader that it is for the very motivated and not needed to understand the rest of the book. My favorite foot-note referenced a truly difficult to read paragraph. It read “I have no idea what it is that I just wrote”.

One of the reasons I was so pleased to find Sapolsky’s book, is that I have been very interested in the brain and behavior for many years, and the book draws it all together from the viewpoint of many disciplines and many levels. It is not the easiest book I have ever read, but I read it twice and am in the process of going through it a third time. That, from me, is a very high recommendation.

More information on the books in recommended books column

 

 

New Venture

I seem to have written posts for this blog for over 5 years (over 300 of them). I began the blog to discuss product quality, since it is as topic that has always interested me, and after a heroic and successful effort in the U.S. to improve manufacturing quality (which of course reflects on overall product quality), industry drifted off into other traditional directions (profit, grow-the-organization, etc.). As I mentioned in my last post, the manufacturing quality goals were nicely described in a classic paper written by David Garvin and published by the Harvard Business review in 1987, when quality was the hot word.

In 2012 I wrote my book Good Products, Bad Products, published by McGraw Hill, to pay more attention to such critical “dimensions” of quality that even though difficult to deal with quantitatively, are very important to human users. It is also mentioned in my last post, and discussed at more length earlier in the blog.

 I wrote my book partly as a text that I used to teach a course in the Stanford Engineering school (Good Products, Bad Products), that was taken over by Professor Dave Beach when I retired, who did a wonderful job with it until last year, when the course too was retired. The book suffered from lack of publicity, and perhaps a decreased interest in product quality in the U.S. Surprisingly (or not), although the book’s sales in the U.S. have been disappointing, it is doing much better in India, China, South Korea, and Japan —countries that perhaps are presently more sensitive to the value of quality in products. After all, it was Japan that awakened us in the 1970’s and 80’s. China, India, and South Korea are coming up fast.

But over the years, I also wrote posts on subjects I was also thinking about which ranged from the fit between the directions of technology and people, the joy of working with the hands, engineering, management, and so on.

I never sought wide distribution of these posts, as I wrote them to force myself to think more deeply about my areas of interest, and I did not want to become involved in a full-fledged conversation with large numbers of people, although the responses to my posts were thoughtful and flattering. But now I have been talked into a project that sounds difficult, but worth doing, by Tim Keely, a friend of mine who is an IT person of amazing talent at Stanford. The project is for me to go through these posts, pick the ones I think are the best, organize them, edit them, and allow him to make an e-book (or several) from them. I am going to try.

This will make my posts even fewer in number and perhaps more wandering in nature as I come up with new thoughts for the book(s), but I am looking forward to the attempt and hope you will bear with me. I will continue to write posts when I need more material for this project, or when I can’t bear not to —like commenting on ridiculous wastes of technology and money such as Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexican border, which hopefully will never happen, but should it, will set an all time record for lack of overall product quality.

So wish me luck. I’ll post progress reports as I go.

Reliability and Quality

A bit over a year ago I ordered a microwave oven after looking at the ratings and comments on the internet. I didn’t spend a lot of time in research, since our old one had failed and a microwave has become very central to our lives, and I figured by now they would have become fairly standardized. When it arrived, it didn’t work. I therefore returned it, after a fair amount of hassle, and bought another brand, which was also highly recommended. The new one worked, but only slightly beyond the one year warranty, and after finding that repairing it would take more time, effort, and money than I considered it worth, I bought yet another brand, which so far is working beautifully—I do like to fix things, but I have to draw the line at some point.

In past posts I have spent a lot of time on product quality, and have mentioned the eight dimensions of quality discussed in a classic paper written by David Garvin and published by the Harvard Business review in 1987, when quality was the hot word, rather than innovation. They are :

PERFORMANCE

FEATURES (APPROPRIATE)

RELIABILITY

CONFORMANCE

DURABILITY

SERVICEABILITY

AESTHETICS

PERCEIVED QUALITY

The bottom two are not discussed in detail, because as Garvin pointed out, they are difficult to handle analytically and matters of personal feelings.

In 2012 I wrote my book Good Products, Bad Products, published by McGraw Hill, to pay more attention to critical “dimensions” of quality that even though difficult to deal with quantitatively, are very important to human user. The Chapter titles are:

PERFORMANCE, COST AND PRICE

HUMAN FIT

CRAFTSMANSHIP

EMOTIONS AND NEEDS

AESTHETICS

SYMBOLISM AND CULTURAL FIT

GLOBAL CONSTRAINTS.

 Although the oven came up short on my list, let us focus on Garvin’s list. As far as aesthetics, my short-lived oven, although not what one would call exciting, was probably okay, because microwave ovens seem to have adopted a clean, sterile, technological look, and, do have fairly standard approaches to turntables, transparent door panels, latches, and so on. As far as perceived quality, the product certainly is visible enough in stores and on the internet and the maker is an old established company, so that one would think that it is of high quality. One of Garvin’s other dimensions, conformance, has to do with whether the product conforms to various regulations, and here it has to follow the rules, or it would not be sold.

But on the others, it does not do well, because it failed (performance,reliability, and durability) is difficult to service, and like many “modern” appliances suffered from the ecstacy designers feel when they realize the power and low cost of modern electronics—trying to include too many features.

The photo  shows the control panel, and herein lies the problem. Forgive the reflections in the photo, because it is a shiny black surface that reflects confusing images at all times, which does not help the user read its relatively delicate script, To make matters worse, the text is not lit , which forced me to hang a battery-operated LED light on a wall at a weird angle so that the words could be read without being blinded by the light itself.

But I had two more major problems with the controls. The first had to do with the functions themselves. Of course, it is necessary to memorize the part of the manual describing the function of most of them (custom set, the difference between auto defrost and express defrost, soften, melt, less, more ) because they are not standardized across ovens or foods, and to experiment a great deal to find out what such pads as “potato”, “rice”, and “popcorn” actually accomplish, since they do not usually result in outcomes the user desires. But I am used to living with such things in these days when manufacturers are attempting to make products appear smarter than they are, and consumers have fantasies of perfect automatic machines and the fantasy is so important than they will accept poor performance. 

But my main problems with the controls was that they failed, and at a slow enough rate that I never returned the oven until it failed completely, at which point the warranty had expired. Very early the potato and reheat buttons quit doing their job, but it is easy to live without them. But over time the remainder kept failing. While the timer still worked we could still use it since we are experienced with these ovens, and when it failed, we could even go with start and stop, but finally they too gave up. At one point, I actually began looking for replacement parts, but by that time I hated the oven so much I thought it deserved to die.

While fighting this dying beast, I could not help noticing our gas stove, which I bought used in 1962 and that, does everything one would want to do as far as cooking is concerned —warming, boiling, frying, stewing, baking, broiling, and even keeping time and automatically turning things on and off— almost total control of cooking for over 50 years, with only occasional needs for cleaning and a bit of tuning up. Near to it is our 20 year old refrigerator, which has served us faithfully with no maintenance yet, and also a Kitchen Aid mixer that is not only 50 years old, but, if you would, has never missed a beat. 

So why do we accept this “digital device” attitude (everyone should have a new one every year)? Granted it makes money for companies, but give us a break. Products should be adequately tested during development, especially if they contain such things as touch pads. Tools should last long enough before failing that we can integrate them into our lives, or at least learn to use them well before they fail. I love our veteran stove, refrigerator, and mixture. And I loved the earlier microwave ovens we owned. We bought our present one (that we like a lot) because it had fewer control options and mechanical controls rather than a touch pad matrix. And the labels on the controls do not require the owner’s manual for interpretation. Assuming it holds up for several years, I will grow to love it.

I never did find out the difference between auto defrost and express defrost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Attraction of the Small

Why are we so attracted by small things? At one point in our marriage, my wife somewhat wistfully told me that when she was a little girl she never had a doll house. Well, this would not do, so I built her a doll house, complete with furniture and electric lights, and she crocheted tiny blankets and painted oriental rugs. I even had my mother, a water colorist, paint a few pictures at the proper scale (1 inch = I foot), and she loved doing that. Of course, I had a great time with the project and my wife loved it, so it was a win all around.. The doll house still lives in an honored position in our house (see photo), and now all of our woman friends, who tend to be in their 70’s, love it.

What is the attraction of small things. My wife collects folk art, and the next photo shows some tiny examples. But we have full size pots and such things. Why does she like little ones so much?

    

 

 

Gender thing? Not at all. I am writing this in my office at home surrounded by models I have built. The next photo is a British warship, made from plans available from the Admirably Museum in Greenwich, England – hand planked, rigged, and outfitted by me—no plastic. I do not even like oceans and ships that much, but I became entranced with the history of the British navy, decided to build a model of one of their historic ships, and  was hooked. I finally had to force myself to quit (after I built six or eight of them) because they take an unreal amount of time and I was getting behind in life. My insight came from meeting a  model builder who was building wonderful model ships in a glassed-in shop on the Queen Mary in Long Beach. His story was that he was a physician who had a large successful practice, but was ruining his health by staying up all night building ship models. His wife finally told him that if he didn’t quit building models he would have to give up the practice of medicine. To her amazement (and I guess unhappiness) he quit his practice.

I have made models of many other things,. The following photograph is of a shelf in my office and maybe in the middle you can see a small figure of a welder, which I carved years ago when I was working in an oil field. Why? I was surrounded by real welders!

As an extreme example of miniaturization, there are a large number of mostly men in the world making working models of engines, equipment, etc. The photo below shows a friend of mine who has been terminally bitten by model railroading. His train is a perfect replica, down to the stove in the caboose. If you look on the internet for "miniature running engines",  you will see more of the tip of the iceberg.

I have a working full size antique steam tractor dating from approximately 1900. A working model would be worth more than my real one, as well it should be, because it would be rarer and require an absurd amount of time to make. And yes, there are many people out there either owning or building one.

And this love of small things extends well beyond models. For a long time, I could not figure out why I didn’t get better at typing on my iphone. But I finally did a study and realized that my thumb overlapped six keys. I am good at typing with a full size keyboard, okay on a large pad, but still pathetic on my iPhone.   Also its screen size is ridiculously small, so it cannot deliver nearly as much as my desk top. But I like it because it is capable of doing so much for its size Also, it fits in my pocket, so I can break its glass protector with my keys. And flashlights, now that they sport LEDs and ion batteries, are shrinking so that they are easier to lose.

Maybe we like small things because they make us feel big and powerful. I used to love watching little girls reprimanding their dolls. Instant adulthood. And if I become really annoyed at my iphone I can throw it very far away.

2016 Christmas books

As I told you in my last post, I received a ton of books for Christmas and am going through them as fast as I can. But this is a report on one of them that is particularly pertinent to this blog, and one that is good for one’s perspective.

The first is Thank You for Being Late, subtitled An Optimist’s Guide to thriving in the Age of Accelerations, by Thomas Friedman (Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, NY, 2016). If you don’t read Friedman’s books, you should, because they are current, beautifully researched and referenced, and both entertaining and educational. He has spent his life as a journalist, columnist, and book author, heavily in the Mid East (he majored in Arabic in college) and Washington D.C., and has a strong interest in technology and economics, although he spent the last portion of this book extolling the virtues of growing up in a middle class family in Minnesota.

In this book Friedman makes a good case for the fact that technology is accelerating, and we are having trouble keeping up with it. Friedman’s writings includes a large amount of comments from interviews and interactions with people ranging from exalted to victimized, and his title stems from a point in his life a few years ago when he changed from being annoyed by people being late to meetings, to thankful because this gave him a few minutes to think and relax. He has a deep interest in the “digital revolution”, and does an excellent job of describing what it is doing to us, for good as well as evil. He ends by extolling the virtues of units smaller than national governments (he too thinks the U.S. government no longer is covering the bases, partly due to increasing population, expectations, and complexity, and partly because change is occurring at a rate greater than populations, especially large ones, can cope with. His answer is multi-directional, and includes such things as more education and thinking about what is going on, but includes his argument for more action from smaller units (not only states and cities, but parts of cities). A lot of such feelings are going around, but not usually discussed with the breadth that Friedman has.

The other book is entitled I Contain Multitudes, sub titled The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong Harper Collins NT, 2016, also beautifully written and researched, and entertaining as well as educational. It is well worth reading when one looks in the mirror and thinks that what one sees is the center of the world, a member of your culture, your family, or even you

I was an undergraduate at Caltech many years ago, and it was run by physicists, who were then receiving most or the press. As an engineering major, I  definitely did not feel in the front line, and in fact at one point was honored by being asked to visit the president (a physicist), whose agenda was to point out that my grades were quite high and had I considered switching my major to Physics. I had not. But I was flattered.

It has swung to more and more interest in the life sciences and lately has been consumed with what is called the microbiome—the microbes within the body, which number in the trillions (more than the “human” cells we have), and outnumber us in total DNA. I have received so much mention of these in the alumni mail and general media, that I consider myself as a life support system for these microbes, rather than what I used to think of myself (a large single entity). As the book points out, at one point we used to think of these microbes as bad germs, thanks to discoveries of people like Lister and Fleming , and that the goal was to get rid of them all. Consider the modern hospital. And in fact some of them are dangerous, and we have served ourselves well by our attention to getting rid of them. But as you may have been reading, we just may have gone too far. I recently had a bad experience with a bad G.I. microbe, which was finally controlled by a large dose of the drug we know so well that we call it “Cipro”, As those of you know who have gone through this experience know, the Cipro kills the bad bug, but also many, if not most, of the microbes that we need to digest food.

There is presently an evil bug called c-diff moving into the U.S. that likes to take over our G.I. tract while it is in its weakened shape from Cipro, requiring a different drug called Flagyl etc.etc.etc   This approach can eventually lead to death. As my Caltech mags and the media keep telling us, the answer is to quickly re-plant the various necessary microbes in the G.I. tract (there are many varieties, so just yogurt won’t do it). Where is a good source? Heard of the fecal transplant?) So far our overly toilet trained society can’t deal with it (some people call it it a “shit enema”) so we are willing to lose innocent people. But this is the tip of the iceberg. The balance of microbes in our body is being thought more and more to be the key to health, and imbalances responsible for many presently untreatable diseases.

You may know all about it (I thought I knew quite a bit until I read this book), but you will like the book anyway—and go away with a much more realistic self-image.

Happy (hectic?) holidays

I am behind on posts, but Christmas season becomes more and more of a big deal for us.  Marian loves it, has collected Christmas decorations ever since I have known her, and now covers the house with them. It is also the time of many parties and visiting friends.  In addition our family continues to grow and appears in our house Christmas Eve and Day.  But it is wonderful, even though it pretty much consumes us. 

Marian and I are compulsive book readers, and give each other many of them for Christmas, so we will also be consumed by them for the next few weeks.  In addition, as I mentioned in a previous post, I made Marian a take-some-leave-some book box to put in front of our house, because we were acquiring books at an unsustainable rate.  But it backfired, since people leave more than they take.  But we are fortunate in that they seem to have similar taste to us, so we are looking forward to the post-Christmas influx from that source.  I'll give you my reactions as I read them. 

Meanwhile, our Holiday card, with family,  is below.  Incidentally, I used to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,  and keep up with what is going on there, and Mars is expensive to get to and definitely not a fun place. Better to visit via Photoshop.

Social Media—Broadening or Narrowing?

 

Jenna Wortham wrote an article in the magazine section of the Nov. 27 New York Times that caught my attention, because the title is something I have thought about. It is “We’ve heard about the power of social media to help us empathize with others. But what if, instead, it’s just cocooning us with our friends? The article is here.

My answer to that question is undoubtedly cocooning us with our friends. As the article points out, sites that offer a broader look at the world (Vine, Snapchat, Tumblr) have either shut down, or are re-targeting to please their present and hopefully future customers by serving them what they would like to see and hear. If you were for Hillary in the last election did you see and hear much positive information about Trump, and vice versa? I think most of us who were for Hillary heard and saw mostly positive information about her, and little positive about Trump. I was for Hillary and never looked at a single example of Trump’s famous Tweets, and therefore, like most of my friends, was stunned when he won (still am).

The article makes some very believable points. Social media lives off of advertisements and the sale of big data. The more people that use their site, the more money they make and the more the network expands. It is easy for them to figure out what you like (on Facebook you even tell them). And seeking profit, it is reasonable that they like to feed you what you want to be fed. In fact this is true of all media.. Fox News flavors the news differently than CNN. The New York Times flavors it differently than the Las Vegas Review- Journal. I watch CNN and read the New York Times, as do my friends, who live in the same bubble.

Is social media helping unite the country after this very divisive campaign season? Is it helping us see both sides of the picture, or is it helping us continue to gather into increasingly narrow groups of like-minded people.

This is worth worrying about. Ms. Wortham concludes her article with the statement “if we can’t pay attention to one another, we might as well not live on the same planet.

Left Behind: The Digital World and Age

I have been a professional engineer, and I think a good one, for 60 years —more if you consider that I worked as one while in college —and have had a ton of education and experience, in industry, as a consultant, and as a professor. I also have spent some 55 years around computers, beginning with big mainframes and going through all the amazing developments to the present. But I am a user, and definitely not a computer expert. In fact, when I began, engineers did not solve their own problems on a computer. Rather we would take our problems to computer programmers, who would feed them into the machine and bring us our results. We after all, could not speak machine language, and therefore did not qualify to interact with these huge machines looming over us from their daises in their windowed white rooms.

I had a wonderful time with computers when so-called personal computers came along, and spent much of my life working with them, using the internet, and generally putting up with their foibles. But in the last few years, something has happened. I have been a long time Apple fan until recently, but now I no longer think it is fun to constantly screw around with their “upgraded” software, nor accept their thinly veiled attempts to totally control my hardware or software. Of course, they are not unique. I am tired of the messages that constantly appear on my screen enticing me to go all Google. Nor do I want to be on Microsoft’s cloud, or any others. Their clouds, after all, are huge servers panting away in giant, hot buildings and sucking electricity from the net in huge quantities. Nothing “cloudy” about them.

But such is not the case with my grandkids or the college students who surround me. They seem to revel in endless new apps, “upgraded” operating systems, and new digital gadgets that don’t seem to me to be that improved over the old ones. I am afraid that after fighting it all of my life, I must admit to a less flexible brain and an unwillingness (inability?) to keep up with digital technology. I had a rude example of that yesterday, when while working with my computer, it began misbehaving. I first noticed that when I downloaded my mail, it was inserting and then withdrawing duplicates of many messages, while making a strange noise. The cursor was also flickering, and it was trying to fill out the password boxes when I tried to open web sites.

Being knowledgeable, I rebooted it, but it became worse rather than better, and after a few trials it would not even accept my system password. After unplugging it from the wall and plugging it in again, and cursing at it with increasing vigor, it finally opened without any password and showed me the screen one sees on a new computer. At this point I panicked, because obviously either the machine had failed (not unusual in these days of disposable products) or someone had hit me with a horrible hack which not only had recorded everything on my computer, but had then destroyed what had been there. (I was backed up, but it seemed like a horrible enough hack could wipe that out also.)

The next day was a Sunday and I did not want to bother my favorite IT guy on a weekend, so I was telling a person who had been a student of mine, and is quite a bit younger than I, my strange set of what seemed unrelated problems, and he said “Oh, try another keyboard”. I laughed. Then I did try another keyboard and my computer came purring back to life. How could this be? To check I told my problems to another person, this one a graduate student, and he said the same thing, as did one of my grandchildren. So I went home and thought about it for a while, and of course, a stuck key could make the strange sound, make the mail messages and cursor hiccup , and definitely fill password boxes with dots that I could not do anything about. But how could these younger squirts instantly figure that out and I did not? This was an isolated case, but not the first.

Yep, age. You know that, and I know that, but somehow it is difficult for someone like me to admit that I am not keeping up with the game. I read an entertaining interview of a man who was well over 100 years ago some ago. He was bed-ridden, and at one point the interviewer pointed out to him how fortunate he was that computers allowed him to interact with the world and learn whatever he wanted through the internet. He replied that he didn’t know how to use computers. The interviewer, caught off guard, asked him why. His reply was that when he had turned 80 he decided that he had learned enough and he just wanted to use what he knew, so no way was he going to learn to use all this new silly stuff.

Maybe there is some of that in all of us, but it is hard to admit for a long-term professor.

The Dawn of Reason?

Post Oct. 30, 2016

In the November issue of The Atlantic I found an article entitled The Binge Breaker, that I hope signals a long overdue reaction against the amount of our lives we spend on digital communication. It is here. It features a man named Tristan Harris, who although he has traditional Silicon Valley credentials (dropped out of computer science graduate school at Stanford to found a start-up), is now the co-founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group (consisting mainly of him) that is trying to get people to become more sensible about the amount of time they spend on such things as their smart phone.

The article points out the obvious about digital communication—there are hundreds, if not thousands of highly trained and very intelligent people attempting to get us to spend ever more time interacting on our digital devices. And they are successful. I witnessed the ultimate yesterday on the Stanford campus, where students typically have their smart phone in one hand, and are often talking into it. While riding my bicycle to my office, I passed a girl riding her bicycle, talking with her phone in one hand, and using the other to simultaneously control the bicycle and hold a cup of coffee (four fingers for the cup, and a whole thumb for the handlebar). Miss Contemporary College Student. But this worship of constant interconnection does not stop when one leaves college.

Time Well Spent is simply attempting people to think about how much of their lives they are spending on the professionally designed seductiveness of their digital devices, rather than on other activities that might be more memorable, more important in the future, and yes—more fun.

I have never followed the sometimes-considered politeness of rapidly acknowledging the receipt of messages, especially by being seduced into a conversation or some kind of “snap” activity. I am guilty of not answering most of my e-mail messages, and in fact not even reading them, and even though I write posts for this blog, I read few blog posts, comment on almost none, and definitely do not take up invitations to become friends, contact, or whatever to many people. Am I a bad guy? I think I would be worse if I tried to keep up with all the people who want to communicate with me (I am a retired engineering professor and therefore highly visible to people who are engaged with activities such as Linked-In). Although incredibly entertaining, I try to limit my time on You Tube and never surf the web. I am not going to live forever, and there are many things I want to do more than be fastened to the internet.

Old fashioned? On the contrary, I think I reflect the future. Tristan Harris is attracting a large amount of attention from companies, venture capitalists, and the world in general. I went to a party the other night and ran into an old friend and computer person. I asked him what he was doing. Of all things, he recently started a small company that intends to help individuals, groups, and organizations increase their productivity, creativity, and the quality of their lives, by not being controlled by their digital devices. Coincidence? He knew of Harris. Maybe we are starting to wake up. A few people (Sherry Turkle as an example) have been awake for quite a while—read Alone Together (Basic Books)

Too Much Too Fast?

Yesterday I went to buy some groceries at a nearby Safeway Store. I first went through the usual heavy traffic to get there. After spending a great deal of time trying to find what I wanted, due to massive enlargement of the store, acceptance of “if you make customers wander around they will buy something not on their list” marketing, and lack of employees in the store proper, I went to the check stand and stood in slowly moving lines. These seemed to be due to many factors — the checkers trying to respond to the “no” answers to their asking if the customers had found everything they were looking for, the massive use of coupons and various “award” gimmicks, the lack of free bags and baggers, and confusion over swiping one’s card and shoving it into the newly purchased (and therefore subtly different —capable of either swiping or shoving and incorporating strange unexplained symbols) credit card device and leaving it until it said you can take it. I found the entire exercise frustrating, partly because I had only a few articles and the “under 15” aisle that was open was clogged with people having many more than their allotted number. And I was not looking forward to entering the traffic again to take my meager purchases home.

While standing in my line, I could not help but remember how simple it had been to shop at this store 30 or 40 years ago. Granted there was not such a staggering choice of products available. So what has happened? True, the population of the area has soared, and Silicon valley continues to offer jobs and wealth. But also, the seemingly small change in credit cards and associated devices to the EMV format which was bothering a few people in the grocery line is symptomatic of larger problems. This change is not confined to the stores in your town, but is a world-wide bank-sponsored attempt to decrease fraud. It will take some time to put into place. But when that has happened everyone will be faced with yet another set of devices which will no longer permit swiping, but will undoubtedly be able to handle other tasks having to do with the ongoing attempts to replace currency. And so it will go. And as is more and more true of many should-be-simple-to-operate devices which are involved in our lives, there will probably be little effort paid to standardization among different manufacturers of these devices . And this is true of many more complex products — home appliances, computers and peripherals including  software, automobiles, you name it. These things are tools to improve the quality of our lives, and we should not have to spend too much of these lives learning to deal with changes in the tools that are often trivial in the long term.

I am, after all, a veteran promoter of technological progress, creativity, innovation, change and such things. They are the essential to our success. But I am also very aware that if there is too much of such things too fast, the burden on the users becomes unacceptable.

I have had it with constant attempts to make me “upgrade” the digital products in my life. I was content with iPhoto on my Mac. It did everything I wanted it to. I could effortlessly get to other editing program, and it allowed me to organize things as much as I  desired. But mainly I had used it long enough not to have to think about it. I almost dropped Apple when they changed to Photos, because there were minor changes that took effort to learn, and for me, the change was  a negative one, not only in having to learn new tricks, but in the content of the software itself. But I admit my judgement may have been clouded, because at the same time I had to go to a newer operating system and my computer had to be encoded, causing it to be much slower (Stanford’s fault, not Apple). Apple continues to be making great profit by changing and attempting to find a universal operating system for all of its products, but although I held still for Photos, I am resisting the increasing pressure from them to again “upgrade” my smart phone, and if they keep trying to make me put stuff on my computer I neither need nor want, even though I have used Apple equipment from the start, I am out of there.

On a larger note, I think that technologically advanced nations like the U.S., and the businesses within them, should start to worry about the pace of change. Certainly computers have resulted in a large number of well-paying jobs, since people like me, who have used them for many years, are now dependent on IT people, who desperately try to keep up on them on a full-time basis. But the disappearing, well paid and rewarding “muscle memory” skill jobs will not come back. Repetitive white-collar jobs are following. The re-training of people to do more cerebral and people-skill jobs will be horrendous, and may require a couple of generations, by which time the game will probably have changed again. Perhaps the wide spread support of people like Trump, although seemingly a most unattractive person in all respects, is because he seems to be offering a simpler solution to the problems of life—let him call the shots and everything will be terrific. This has been the weapon of most dictators and revolutionaries over time, as has the promise to bring back the past (which was never as good as we think it was). But in the long term it has been shown not to work.

I, for one, am both amused and worried about the present estimates by technology visionaries, such as the one that the U.S. will be highly dependent on driverless vehicles in ten years. Maybe the people that work at Tesla and Google are eager to get there, and the cars are already being used for shuttles around their buildings. But the visionaries tend to forget that there are 320 million people living in the country, many of them dependent on people-driven cars (truckers) , and may of them simply liking to drive cars (me). And historically massive changes in large populations due to technological advances have taken more on the order of 50 years. Fifty years ago, I had been working on the first lunar and planetary spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Lab. The visionaries were predicting colonies on the Moon and Mars in 20 or 30 years. Hasn’t seemed to happen yet. Autonomous vehicles can be made, and are running around on streets in various places in small numbers. But designing and building the vehicles may be the easy part. And pushing the schedule too fast may result in incredible angst. After all, our present traffic mess has required well over 100 years to accomplish.

Swell Book —The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough

Sorry to be lagging in writing posts, but I am catching up on my reading. I just finished a wonderful book by David McCullough, one of my favorite writers, entitled The Wright Brothers (Simon and Schuster, 2015). He is not only an outstanding story teller, but an amazing researcher, although I expect he has help in his research because he typically gives credit to several people in the Library of Congress. But having won two Pulitzer prizes and twice received the National Book Award, he probably deserves it.

This book is an in depth look at the Wright brothers (Wilbur and Orville— there were two other brothers and a sister Katherine , who became a major supporter and cheer leader), their successful quest for flight, and their friends, family, and others who supported them, as well as those who competed with them. It is an American success story, and, in fact, after they became world famous and people would ask them how they did so, they would tell people to grow up in Ohio in a good family.

The difficulties they overcame were many, including Orville killing his passenger and almost himself in a demonstration flight.   People had wanted to fly like birds for most of recorded history, and at the time of the Wright brother’s effort, there were many people (Lillienthal, Moullard, Chanute, Langley, Cayley, Maxim, Bell, Edison) who were working on the problem, and many people applying for patents on flying machines, most so outrageous that they became a mainstay of humor, but the majority of people in the world simply felt that humans were not meant to fly, and those seeking the ability were perhaps a bit nuts. In the midst of this, the Wright brothers, by then proprietors of a bicycle shop, quietly set about to solve the problem—no wealth, no government support, no college, no brilliant insight, no desire to become rich and famous, just an obsession for flight and long hours of hard work. I could somewhat identify with them, because their life was somewhat like my grandmother prescribed, when sayings such as “the devil finds work for idle hands” and “people who don’t take care of their (garden, farm, horse, house, truck, etc) don’t deserve one” abounded and were laid on kids like me who were found lying in the sun. In fact their very supportive father was a minister, and later a bishop in their church.

I also identified with their ability to work with their hands as well as their mind. There is a quote in the book by a local resident after they built their “home” on Kitty Hawk, a desolate area far from Dayton chosen because of its constant wind. which is “They could do anything they put their hands to. They built their own camp, they took an old carbide can and made a stove of it; they took a bicycle and geared the thing up so that they cold ride it on the sand. They did their own cooking and washing and they were good cooks too.” My kind of guys (although my wife faults me on washing, but hey California is in a drought).

But not only were they wonderful people, but from an engineering standpoint they did everything right, even though not educated as engineers.  There was little usable theory, but they learned what existed and what had been tried, and started from there. Their competitors in the world were trying to concoct theory and arguing with each other, but only making simple fairly uncontrollable unpowered kites and gliders and flying them very little. The Wright Brothers started with a kite, gradually improved it until it could carry them, and flew in the result as much as possible. They continued after they added an engine, built from scratch in a short period by Charlie Taylor, a mechanic friend of the Wrights. The engine added a series of failures, but the process of fixing the problems, improving the machine, and flying continued, in spite of minor and major crashes and other setbacks. This constant testing and improving reminded me of my days working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, because that is how wonders such as the Curiosity Martian Rover are produced. And a major advantage that the Wright Brothers had on December 17^th, 1903, when they made their famous flight (actually they made four of them that day, the last one some 850 feet), was their skill at flying, because each of them had spent many days learning to control their primitive machines and a total of four years achieving this goal.

This experience and  approach to testing and improvement made extending the range of Wright “flying machines” straight forward, so that five years later, the brothers won the newly-minted Michelin Cup with a flight of 2 hours and 20 minutes. They were, by then, touring the world, flying all day to the delight of massive crowds, and taking royalty for rides. They did become rich and famous, but because they wanted to fly like birds, not because they particularly wanted to be rich and famous (although they didn’t mind being in that category.)

It is a feel good book, shedding light on how one of the many advances in technology in the early 20^th century happened, and how many still do —through dogged determination and evolution rather than from one brilliant idea.  The only thing that depressed me about the book was how much better McCullough can write than I can.

Steam Show—Roots of Motive Power Inc.

Willits California is a small town on Highway 101 a couple of hours north of San Francisco. It is perhaps best known as one end of the “skunk” train, a restored train engine and cars that run between Fort Bragg on the coast and Willits and is quite popular with tourists. As  explained here, Roots of Motive Power Inc. is a group of people that operate in conjunction with a fine little museum (the Mendocino County Museum) and that have space next to the museum and across from a small park on which they can and do run antique heavy equipment . They sponsor several events during the year, and over time have accumulated an excellent collection of old steam and diesel equipment, much of it restored, and more under way.   Their largest event (The Festival) just occurred, and I attended with my older son Bob and one of my older friends, Marc Faye, the owner of the farm in the Sacramento Valley to which I escape.   Lest you think age is required to attend, the group that attends includes large numbers of kids, partly because there is a restored train that runs continually around the property, and because kids like large dirty machines with whistles that make clouds of steam and smoke.

I attend this show for a number of reasons, including my love of old machines, my interest in the history of technology, and because people with rather unique hobbies and interests, who are not always understood by their friends and neighbors, are so happy when they get together with others of similar interests, that one cannot help but become swept away by it.   It is also a nice size (you don’t need a smart phone to keep track of each other), fairly close to where I live, and in beautiful country. And it’s even free.

A few photos might help. One of my favorite machines is a Bucyrus power shovel, often seen in photos of the digging of the Panama Canal. The photo at the left not only shows the shovel when not moving, but if one looks closely one can see the very clever way it is steered — by placing logs into one of the tracks, causing that one to slow down. The man standing by it is the log placer. The next photo shows it in action.

The photos below show a beautifully restored steam roller that is benign enough to be allowed to run on the city streets. a machine waiting to be restored, and a large crane I had not seen in action before

 

 

 

 

I have a friend named Loren Bryon who is very interested in and active in the restoration of old equipment and a superb craftsman, particularly if steam is involved. He is a regular at these activities and was busily conquering the details of how to control this beast which he had not driven. The controls of such machines do not include such things as steering wheels or other devices now normally used to control machines. But after an hour or two passed, he became confident enough to drive it down a street on the grounds with cars parked on the sides. The remaining photos show him at work.

An excellent day, and as usual, I came home much improved because of the experience—and highly motivated to work on my own restoration projects, because they seem to be so straight forward and easy compared to the ones being done by the Roots people. Tractors are much easier to handle than locomotives, and aren’t as likely to blow up and kill you.

 

     

Good Shoes and Bad Laces

Many years ago, a great break through was made in shoes, through the acceptance of athletic shoes (trainers in Europe) in circles that before had expected more formal footwear. They combine comfort, function, lower cost, and even fashion. Almost all people who work or study at Stanford or in what is called Silicon Valley, if not most people in the world, wear them. I took to them effortlessly, and have only one pair of shiny black shoes I wear when I figure that they are called upon. But complications set in even here because of fashion and the desire of companies to increase profit. The fashion angle occurs because of the desire to appear “athletic”, the profit from selling them to people who want to look like some one they admire (Air Jordans?).

Although at one time I was involved in sports, I no longer am, nor do I want to be. But I do walk a lot, engage in manual labor, ride my bicycle, etc. I lead an active life but not a competitive one. By rights I should be a perfect match to so-called walking shoes, and if I can find them wide enough and shaped somewhat the same as my feet (the front of my feet are somewhat square, not pointed) and in black instead of appearing that they belong to an endorsed professional athlete, they should be perfect.

But, why can’t the manufacturers figure out the laces to fit we amateurs. I don’t need extra long laces, because I don’t need or want a “heel lock”. And I don’t want to tighten them one set of holes at a time, so what’s with the little bitty holes through which the laces need to be pulled? I seem to remember that shoes had eyelets so one could simply haul on them from the top and tie them. Now they seem to want to be like runner’s shoes, where tugging them tight one crossing (or whatever) at a time makes them fit more closely. The photo below shows two different samples of my shoes, made by established companies. The lace on the shoe on the left has gone through all existing holes, and is still obviously too long. It is also obviously too fat to fit through the very small holes in the shoe. Like many of these types of fabric laces, it is on its way to losing the plastic tips that do fit through the holes. After both of these are gone, new laces will be required.

The shoe on the right uses wire loops to hold the laces except for the top holes (which an informal survey shows are not used by my friends). So for me, they are the proper length, but even though they are only three weeks old, the wire loops are stripping off the black covering, and even doing it in such a way that the covering ends up over the plastic ends, requiring a scissors to strip it away, and leaving what one of my friends calls “interesting looking” laces. So using the top holes, the left shoe laces are okay in length. The right shoe laces are okay in length if one does not use the top holes. But the stripable fabric laces make me look pretty indigent

I may seem overly picky, but I don’t want to buy new laces to fit the usage of ever pair of shoes I buy. I also don’t want to go through my vocabulary of curse words while tying and untying them. I want informal comfortable shoes that don’t pretend that I am an athlete. Been there, done that. I was pleased when it seemed that Velcro was taking over from shoe laces, but it didn’t seem to happen, leaving me often trying to stuff the unraveled end of a string through a hole of a lesser size, and spending more time than I want to fastening my shoes so I can get about my life.

Free Trade and Product Quality

Much is being made about such things as free trade and protection due to the upcoming election. Most of the discussion is about money and jobs, but very little is being said about product quality, a very important, and often overlooked variable that is extremely important to business and influenced by overseas interactions. As an example, some time ago India decided to build its industry through tariffs and other methods of protection to encourage its citizens to buy goods made in India. But of course, the quality of many of its industrial products slipped with respect to those made in other countries. When they finally realized this, they began tearing down such protective measures and more actively competing globally. They are in the midst of this process, and it is not an easy one. Such companies as Mahindra, a large manufacturer of tractors, and Tata, a large manufacturer of almost everything, are finally being recognized globally. And the quality of their products is improving, as it must if they are to do a better job of competing globally.

It is strange that those that are pushing for “protection” do not seem to think about product quality and how it is encouraged by free global competition, especially since those doing so (Trump) have an example right in their own back yard —the automobile business. Were it not for the Japanese, the Europeans, and now the Koreans, we might all be driving cars closer to 1970’s Pontiacs. They certainly would be more expensive, were it not for what is sometimes called the “Toyota Production System”. The U.S. automobile business had gotten trapped by complacency (U.S. cars are obviously the best, since they are designed and built by U.S. people in U.S. factories, U.S. citizens don’t like small cars, the big V-8 is the best of all engines, etc). It took foreign competition to wake it up and show it some new tricks.

But politicians are more comfortable dealing with complex situations that they can offer simplistic solutions to (medical care, taxes, immigration) than things like product quality, that encompass emotional and cultural factors as well as functional and economic. For the sake of our future, and our economy, we had better stay more in touch with what is going on in the world, rather than less, and one good way to do that is to compete through free trade. And as another argument, that is the future. U. S. business is not going to give up foreign markets, less costly labor, material, and services, and learning from the accomplishments of their overseas competitors. Nor are we consumers going to accept paying more for lower quality products.

The Mechanical Governor—A Very Good Product In its Day

Mechanical governors have been used with most engines since they were first developed until electronic devices took over the task relatively recently . Governors based on rotation were used to control the distance between wind-driven millstones in the 17^th Century. Later, with the advent of factories, regulated rotary motion was needed In the late 18^th century, and, James Watt invented what he called a conical pendulum, which operated on a principal similar to governors  to follow—balls attached to a rotating rod which was driven by the speed of the machine. As the speed increased, the balls tended to fly out (origin of the term “balls out”) which would cause levers to decrease the amount of steam entering the machine. A rough drawing is below.

Governors were primarily to guarantee a controlled output. You do not want the power in your machine (car, tractor, train, etc) to fluctuate with the fuel flow. You want to select the desired speed and make sure that the machine speed stays constant. They are sometimes thought to be speed limiters, and, in a way, they do stop excess speed, but they are much different than speed limiters contained in modern vehicles and other machines where limiting the top speed is required. Oddly enough, humans with political charge of states are called governors, and in a sense they are, in that they are supposed to smooth out the behavior of the state, but mechanical governors were not meant to cause radical change, as some human governors want to do. That was to be left to the humans in control of the machine—perhaps the analogue is the voters in the state.

I recently restored a Pickering Governor, shown in the photo to the right. Thomas Pickering was both the inventor and the name of the business he began in Portland, Connecticut, that was based on this governor. It was used widely on rotating steam machines in the U.S. for many years, and it still in use. It was a dominant fixture on steam locomotives, factory machines, and all manner of other steam-powered devices. And in fact, before electronics came along, devices operating on the same principal were installed in automobiles, trucks, tractors, and other machines powered by hydrocarbons.

As you can see from the photograph, the Pickering Governor has three balls mounted on spring segments, the bottom end of each being fastened to a collar that rotates but can not move up the central shaft, and the other end fastened to one that can move. As the speed of this unit (which is driven by a belt from the machine) increases, the balls tend to move out, which pulls the top collar down. This movement is somewhat resisted by the coil spring shown in the photo. The upper collar pushes on a rod that runs the length of the shaft, and moves a sliding gate in the piping ,which controls the amount of steam entering the machine. More speed results in less steam, and less results in more. Voila, constant motion, with speed controllable by compression in the coil spring. A drawing  is below, if you want more detail. But in spite of the complexity of the drawing, the operation of the governor is extremely simple—few moving parts, no tricky mechanisms, an elegant, reliable, and affordable product, which served our species well over many years, and could be understood and maintained by people with a minimum of training—A very good product indeed.

Why did I restore this governor? As you know by now, I love to restore old machines, especially if they were good products. In fact, I can hardly stand seeing such elegant and historical machines die on scrap heaps.

What am I going to do with it? Easy. I am going to put it on my desk beside my computer. It not only will represent a good contrast in modern and old technology, but will remind me that several large projects I have under way (writing books, etc) will proceed better if I work on them a bit every day. I tend to work on them in bursts, ending when I can’t stand to do so any more, and then ignore them, during which time I lose track of what I have done and where I am going, which in turn requires that I spend time reviewing what I have done and trying to recall hot ideas I had which I can’t quite remember. I need a better internal governor, and maybe this beautiful historic old external one will remind me. Also it is a more interesting object to look at than my computer (when the computer is simply showing me my desktop) and will not require constant upgrading and deleting of unwanted messages and advertisements.

Free Time, Productivity, and Making, Fixing, and Tinkering.

I am perhaps a bit late on this post because I have been down in Southern California helping my brother dig through three generations of stuff in several buildings. When we were kids we lived and worked in this series of buildings along with our parents, our grand parents, an uncle, and various dogs and cats (and before that horses and chickens). We were located on 20 acres of oranges, in the times when that and a few outside jobs were capable of supporting such a crew. After the death of our parents, grandparents, and uncle, the sale of ten acres, and my leaving for various vocations and locations, my brother John has been operating the remaining ten as a fruit and vegetable farm (Adams Acres). But unfortunately, the area has gone through hard times, and the customers for fruit and vegetables do not always match my brother’s desires in growing plants. He has an M.S. in botany, and a Ph.D. in soil science, and is a fan of fruit of a comparatively exotic nature compared to that bought by many who live in the area, who are motivated heavily by price and what they are used to. So he is selling most of the land to a developer and the need arose to "lighten up".

Although hard work, this sorting process has been both interesting and nostalgia producing. It graphically illustrates the difference in life in Southern California in 1907, when the grove was planted, and the present. I actively worked in the grove between the late 1930’s and the early 1950’s, when I went to college, never to return except for visits, and even in the 60 years since then there has been massive change. As far as agriculture, little remains in the area. As far as life style, the change is similarly complete. Work in the area at one time consisted mostly of manual labor. Now, work is scarce. Life was bucolic, with clean skies, little if any crime, and the sweet smell of orange blossoms, although the work was occasionally hard and money sometimes scarce. But compared to my present existence, and that of my friends, there seemed to be a lot more spare time.

The photo at the left shows a small hooked wool rug made by my grandmother, who died in 1965, but spent a lot of time making rugs, quilts, lace tablecloths, blankets, and such things. My mother, meanwhile. In her early days was making furniture, also clothes, and helping build buildings. Both were doing the cooking, the cleaning, and other such chores. My father, my grandfather, and I were working on the grove and the buildings, and my uncle was working full time as a machinist. But we seemed to have a lot of  time beyond these duties. This rug was not intended to be walked on!

The hooked rug is beautiful, partly because of the texture that could only have resulted from hand work. It takes a long time to make hooked rugs, but somehow the time was available. The photo on
the right  shows me in a shirt my mother made me from sulfur sacks in high school. It still fits me! She didn’t have to make me fancy shirts, but she loved to and had time to do it, and I loved the result.  She also made everything in my room when I was a kid (see below). She later became a very successful water colorist —time again.

During our sorting, we continually found evidence of this startling fact. Although the family did essentially everything having to do with life —building the buildings, doing the maintenance, working the grove, growing and, hunting and fishing for food, and making furniture, machines, and even toys (the two photos at the end of the post show a horse made for me by my mother and a toy tractor made by me for my brother).

We had a lot of free time to do such things as learn about music (I was the town pianist), read a lot of books, magazines, and news papers, listen to the radio, and do well in school, And we did not only constrain ourselves to large and challenging tasks. The  photograph at the right shows a small welder I carved, and a delicate goblet my beefy grandfather turned from Manzanita wood, complete with imprisoned ring. I admit he did this because of my grandmother’s frequent challenge to him to make something pretty since he was usually doing blacksmith work, building buildings, spreading fertilizer, or driving the tractor., etc. etc. etc.

Now it seems to be more difficult to provide for free time in ones life. Why? For one reason, in the old days in rural areas there were no diversions such as television, the internet, social networking and computers, and highways and advertisements beckoning us off to adventures in other locations. There were few movie theaters, little if any night-life, and friends were widely spread. Looking back, it seems that life should have been quite boring. But at the time it did not seem so. One could always make covered wagon models, toys for kids (my brother and I) or goblets from Manzanita wood, paint pots, or just goof around with one’s dog. And we didn’t know that life could be made hectic by endlessly “improving” ourselves.

Would I like to go back there? No. Am I glad I grew up there? Yes. I learned an incredible amount from the do-it-yourself stages of my life and my very talented family members, and gained great confidence and positive feedback from what I did. I also learned to make time in my life for hobbies that I love, and for just goofing around. Working with my uncle and grandfather obviously set me on the path to becoming an engineer, and being expected by those around me to do well in school and in my work led me toward becoming a professor, a career I have loved. And since I did have free time (nothing to do and no one to talk to) I did learn to entertain myself by thinking—an excellent way to spend time. And finally, I learned the importance of making time in my life for learning, for my hobbies (mostly requiring use of my hands), and for just goofing around.

 

Things Break and People/Machines Screw Up

I don’t know how many times I have said the words in the title of this blog to people. I admit the “Machines” is a rather rather new, because in the past machines were not considered “smart” enough to screw up, but now we must admit them to the club (perhaps I should have said People/Robots}

This comes to mind because of two widely reported incidents in which Tesla cars, equipped with “Auto Pilot” capability were involved in crashes, one fatal to the driver, and the other consisting of two impacts with guard rails followed by overturning of the car. Both of these made the New York Times, the first on the front page, the other more buried within the paper. Had the cars not been harbingers of the much reported era of “Autonomous Cars”, they would in all probability not qualified for such notice. However, we have not only bought into the possibility that machines, especially computers, will take over more and more functions from people, but that they will do better at it—i.e. fewer “Accidents”.

I am a fan of Tesla Motors, who I think has made it plain to owners of cars with their auto pilot capability that this is an aid to drivers, not a replacement, and that the technology is,in fact, new. And someone had to take the lead in using some of this technology with real people in real traffic. People being what they are, it is not surprising that owners might, as they used to say in the Air Force, push the envelope. So I find the two incidents regrettable, but not surprising, and in spite of people’s wishes, examples of the title of this post. You can kill yourself (and others) in any car if you do not understand the limitations of the technology.

Ironically, I visited my farm escape in the Sacramento Valley a couple of days ago, and there in the midst of a partly-harvest vast field of rice, was a lonely looking big-time John Deere Harvester. I recognized it as belonging to my friend, the owner, since it was in his field, but it was unusual to find it looking abandoned in the middle of the field. I found that it was broken — in short, the mechanism holding one of the tracks had failed, resulting in breakage of a huge casting and other components. The reason was probably inadequate securing of a large nut, but that is not the point. It received emergency care, with the result that it is now in action again, with a maintenance bill of only $20, 000 dollars.

The point is that this is a very sophisticated and expensive machine (on the order of $700,000) built for very high performance (one of them will service hundreds of acres at high speed with great accuracy) and full of advanced technology (gps control, etc.), by one of the leading manufacturers of agricultural equipment and it failed, either because something broke and/or people/machines screwed up.

Although the present wave of optimism resulting from the amazing progress in technology may seem to be heading to a perfect future, in which people and machines, especially “thinking” machines, never fail, don’t believe it. I am confident that the title of this post will hold true as long as homo sapiens exist.

Artificial Intelligence—Blessing, Worry, or Both?

The Economist magazine of Jne 25^th to July 1^st, 2016, contains a special report on Artificial Intelligence. It is entitled The Return of the Machinery Question, referring to the major discussions that took place during what we call the industrial revolution and concerned the effects of mechanization on society_ in particular employment for the working class. It is well worth reading, as we will all be affected, and the first part of the report is here.

When I joined the Stanford faculty in 1966, I spent some time with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), led by John McCarthy and involved in what was later recognized as pioneering work. Since I was fresh from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and had been involved in the design of space craft, I was trying to define a research area for myself. My Ph.D. research, having to do with the remote control of vehicles, had moved to SAIL, and the new field of artificial intelligence was attracting a good deal of attention. It was not to be my main field of interest, since I have never been as excited about computers and software as maybe I should have been, but I have fond memories of my time there and the people involved.

At the time, SAIL had a couple of Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 computers wired together, relatively advanced at the time, but of course primitive by present standards. And the goals of the work were even more advanced, as has always been the case with the field of Artificial Iintelligence. And the work in which I was involved had to do with the control of machines. As time has passed, both digital hardware and software have advanced greatly, as has the amount of information available, but as the Economist report states, until recently the accomplishments in the field have seemed to be not as spectacular as might be expected.

But now, the field seems to be exploding, and as the report points out, impacting activities as varied as “improving internet search engines, blocking spam e-mails, suggesting e-mail replies, translating web pages, recognizing voice commands, detecting credit-card fraud, and controlling self-driving cars”. Rather than being disappointed in the progress in artificial intelligence, we seem to be becoming worried about its potential to replace people in large areas of employment. Some studies have shown that some 50% of all jobs are threatened by computed automation —white collar as well as blue.

The cause of this is a combination of radically increased computer power, new approaches to the use of computers, huge amounts of information becoming available, and large investments being made in the area. Such techniques as deep learning, which allow computers to use this information to find new patterns, develop new techniques for solving problems, and improve their own software are showing up in a wide variety of fields, from medicine to finance to education. And computers are increasingly beating humans at their own games —a recent example being DeepMind’s Alpha Go system’s defeat of champion Lee Sedol at Go, a board game considered much more complex than Chess.

The report in The Economist not only reviews the progress of Artificial Intelligence, but also discusses the possible effects of this progress on society. Here it is optimistic, relying on historical data that new developments in technology have always resulted in more new jobs than the developments have obsoleted. But the optimism is a bit offset by the emphasis on the power of these new developments, and by reference to such things as experiments in universal domestic income in Finland and the Netherlands in case they might be needed to keep economies going in the fact of major job loss—also by references to the unprecedented reach of computers as opposed to the manufacturing of the industrial revolution.

Life is never boring.

The World War II Jeep —An Outstanding Accomplishment

I have for a long time been the proud owner of a 1943 Ford GPW (Jeep). Some 600,000 of these vehicles were produced by Willys and Ford during the war. More information is here. My jeep, as originally procured, had seen hard duty on a friend’s farm, as can be seen from the old photo at the left, showing two of my kids being thrilled with our new possession. I thoroughly worked it over functionally and cosmetically, the result is shown in the photograph below.  The driver is my son Dan, who is the blonde kid in the older photo. The second photo was probably taken some ten years ago, and shows Dan and family out touring. The markings on the Jeep are for the 311 Fighter Group of the Tenth Air Force in World War II, in which Irv Doe, my boss when I was in the Air Force served. He was an outstanding boss and mentor, so I painted the Jeep to help him be nostalgic, even though he liked P-51’s better than Jeeps.

One of the more impressive aspects of the Jeep, was the speed of design and development. As World War II approached, the U.S.Army, realizing it needed a better light vehicle, put out requests for bids from some 135 companies, with then difficult requirements (4 wheel drive, etc.) and an 11 day response deadline. The schedule demanded a first prototype in 49 days, and 70 completed vehicles delivered for test in 70 days — a total of 130 days to design, build, and deliver the first finished products, contrasted with the years required to do the same to modern automobiles.

I own a bunch of vehicles, but the Jeep is probably the most fun to drive. It is by far the slowest, rattles and shakes, is generally uncomfortable, has lousy brakes, and I barely fit inside it. But it has CHARACTER, a dimension somewhat missing from many much more efficient, comfortable, and high performing cars. Modern automobiles (Toyota, etc.) are miraculous in function and performance compared to the Jeep, but so much so that perhaps they are becoming a bit boring. The Jeep definitely keeps one awake and gives one a feeling of moving, especially with the windshield and the top down in crummy weather. It is just plain fun, and even though perhaps not as reliable as a modern car, amazingly simpler to work on. If it mis-behaves, it is a cinch to repair, and wonder of wonders, all parts are easily available almost 80 years after it first hit the road—as well as the incredibly well done manuals produced during its origin.

Hand Tools— Changing Slowly

Hand tools (no engines, chips, electricity or compressed air) have changed over time, but very slowly compared to what are sometimes called “power tools”. Old tools (100 years ago and more) were interesting, and often beautiful. The photo on the left shows a drill probably used to drill holes for knob-and-tube wiring in a framed or even completed house, and an old wooden brace from the time when braces ruled the roost , well before drills powered by electric motors, and now driven by ion batteries took over. I seem to have accumulated quite a few such tools just because they are beautiful, and using them makes me realize how challenging woodworking used to be.

But many hand tools have changed very little. The photo on the right shows a “modern” pick, shovel, and rake, that have certainly not changed in my lifetime, and are still heavily used in the day of leaf blowers, bull-dozers, and jack hammers. The next one on the left shows three hammers, the top one having belonged to my mother, who was building furniture and helping on the house before I was born, and was given to me as my first hammer. I still use it. I recently bought the one below it, and it is surprisingly similar to the one made 90 years ago. The one at the bottom, also recently bought new, is obviously striving for recognition as high technology, and I am less likely to break the handle, but quite frankly, I am not convinced that it functions a whole lot better than the 90 year old one, and it definitely cost more.

But many hand tools have improved greatly, due to the availability of new materials and manufacturing processes. The final photo shows two “grabbers”. Some of you may remember the large one with the wooden handle, because it is typical of those used in grocery and other stores to take items off of the top shelves. It is fun to use, as it is large and clunky and gives you the choice of one of two handles to close the grippers, depending on how high the desired object is.

But the small one, given to me when I had knee replacements a few years ago in hopes that I would not climb on rickety stools to reach things, and that I could get my pants on before I became limber again without bothering my wife, is indeed impressive. I had not had experience with these things at all, but this one is strong, able to fold for traveling, and very grabby indeed. It is extremely simple, relying on a simple spring to keep it open, and a nylon cord to close the claw. It is very light weight, the structure being a simple square tube of thin aluminum, and the two surfaces that close on the target are brilliantly made. I tested it in the hospital on everything from glasses of water, through pillows and picking up pills, to a large vase of flowers that was in my room. And yes, I still have it.

A professor friend of mine, who had also gone through surgery and was given one, fell so in love with it that he decided that his world had increased in size by four feet (roughly twice the length of the grabber), and proceeded to add four feet to the width of the desk in his office, and two feet to the height of his bookshelves. He also claimed to have radically increased the usable storage space in his garage and closet at home, and loves to entertain himself by challenging his friends to games of skill with his grabber and trouncing them viciously.

Most hand tools have improved over time, but slowly, and that is part of the reason I love them. Using them gives me more satisfaction than power tools and in the long run allows me to keep more fingers, and I do not have to spend money and develop new skills because improvements occur (as with digital devices). They are generally easier on the environment, offer free exercise, and let you impress you friends, neighbors, and sometimes even your spouse with your skills. Although in all honesty I must admit I am fighting the temptation to buy a new drill motor and electric screw driver because they now come with lithium ion batteries, which produce more power and hold more charge than the nickel metal hydride batteries in my present one. And I use lots of machinery when working with metal.  Nobody is pure.

Spirit House Redux

Marian, my high speed wife, has spent considerable time studying world religions and designing a religion for herself. It is primarily based on being a good person. Although raised as an Episcopalian, she has dipped into many others, including the edge of Gnostic Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism. I am proud of her and the result, because it contains no jealous gods, but if you want as good a one, you have to design it yourself

At one time, in the midst of her search, we happened to be in Laos, and she discovered spirit houses, that are often seen in front of houses in Southeast Asia, and even inns and hotels, and act as a location to place offerings of various sorts to Buddha and local dieties. She decided she would like to bring the custom home, but since they are difficult to pack for air travel, and since there is no required design for them, I told her I would build her one.

Needless to say I procrastinated for quite a while, but finally built her one. That was six or eight years ago and in the interim it acquired many signs of the wear and tear of being outdoors, , including bird droppings, an interior of rotting leaves, missing parts, stained paint, and overall scruffiness. She felt bad about this.   After another bout of procrastination, I just redid it, as the photo at left shows, and I must admit, I am proud of it, and have regained the points I received from my wife for building it in the first place.

In order to establish the nature of her beliefs, it is located right next to her favorite statue of Ganesh, the Hindu lord of Good Fortune who provides prosperity, fortune and success, and is the lord of beginnings and the remover of both material and spiritual obstacles.A statue of Quan Yin, Buddhist goddess of compassion sits at the base of the spirit house.

 She is a member of a group of women with similarly broad beliefs, who meet regularly and discuss topics having to do with religion, spirituality, and philosophy. They call themselves the Pagelians, in honor of Elaine Pagels a Stanford classmate and friend of Marian’s, who is now a professor of religion at Princeton University and who wrote the definitive book on the Gnostic gospels, entitled, not surprisingly, The Gnostic Gospels. I sometimes overhear their meetings, which are often in our house, and feel a bit like a heathen, but I try to be a good heathen.

Bitcoin, Virtual Funds, and Unnecessary Technology

A couple of weeks to estimated tax time, a quarterly reminder of the painful yearly session of calculating income tax. I used to do this on Macintax, but a wonderful man who was somewhat of a surrogate father to my wife after her own father died young, generously gave her fractions of limited partnerships in pistachio orchards during a period when he was developing such things in the San Joaquin valley. Welcome to K-1 forms, and making decisions as to whether the money spent for many small quantities of such things as fertilizer, water, pesticides, machine maintenance, and labor, and therefore duelly reported to the government was tax deductible, and to what extent. So now for that reasons and others, our tax is no longer simple, and we have an accountant to help.

Why does everything having to do with money become more difficult over time? My brother, having sold a piece of property, is agonizing over delaying some tax through IRC 10-31, putting the money into an annuity or into U.S, or foreign investments, or whatever. He is not a financial type, and obviously needs help. I have taken to paying cash for purchases in stores because the lines have become longer since the chip-bearing credit cards, and had a cashier thank me recently because she didn’t have to explain the various moves her card machine required as opposed to those in other stores. Standardize? In this day and age?

And now we have Bitcoin and other so-called virtual capital. If you are not aware of such things, look Bitcoin (the largest of its kind) up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia offers magnificently simple explanations of almost everything, except you’ll probably agree that it leaves you a few questions as far as Bitcoin is concerned. For instant, can a currency be trusted if not guaranteed by the government of a large country?  And if you look you will see that there are a few wrinkles to be smoothed out before it becomes truly reliable, if ever. An article on a Bitcoin bankruptcy from the New York Times is here. A couple articles on other virtual funds are here and here. But humans being humans, there are more and more businesses accepting Bitcoin and other virtual money and agencies being willing to convert them to traditional coinage. Is it the future, or is it the largest scam in history?

I was talking with a successful relatively young farmer in the Sacramento Valley yesterday, and all he wanted to talk about was mining Bitcoin (Explained here). Apparently a very wealthy person in China, or some other country, had built a huge computer complex to do the job, and my friend was fascinated with this.   Hopefully he won't try it. Idtt is spring, and he should have enough to keep him occupied with his farm, his family, watching TV, drinking beer, making nasty comments about Trump, and other more pertinent activities.

I have spent most of my life in and around technology, but I do not believe that we should implement everything we know how to do (upgrading nuclear weapons, building a base on the moon). I am definitely not a believer in technological determinism, nor do I think that we have the responsibility to “feed” technology. In particular. I don’t think we need to develop technology that even if it  perhaps seems sophisticated, makes life more difficult. Down with such things as Bitcoin!

The Internet—Broadening or Narrowing

The internet is still young. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist. Historically, technological discoveries and inventions have taken at least 50 years to mature. There is no doubt in my mind that the internet will change appreciably in the next 24 years, and probably continue to change after that because of its complexity in content and in the things it is trying to achieve. And it should.

Most of us can remember the hopes that the internet would interconnect the world—a free and rapid means of communication for people of all countries, cultures, and values. It is doing some of that. But it also can bbe used to strengthen isolated tribes of people who would like everyone to think as they do. Rebel groups in many countries have used the internet to coordinate and fund their efforts. If we share their interest, we think that is good. If their interests are opposed to ours, we think it is bad.  

There was a good summary of this situation in a column written by Frank Bruni and entitled How Facebook Warps Our World in the Sunday May 22 Opinion Section of the New York Times. It is here.   He speaks of the ease of increasingly interacting with people with the same values, interests, and biases that we have, and in the process becoming isolated from people of different values, thus reinforcing our own. He worries that we will turn into narrow frustrated groups unwilling to accept or even try to understand the values of others. He does not blame Facebook or other social networking services. He blames us and our need to be part of a group that reinforces our beliefs — our tribe. Networking services simplify this process for us.

This can be seen building in the present Presidential election. At this point I know people who abhor Donald Trump, and others who abhor Hillary Clinton. In fact I know people who abhor both of them. None of these people have met either. They are operating on a bit of staged video and probably biased media and reinforced by their “friends”, both personal and incrfeasingly cyber. Finally there seem to be more moderate voices. I just read an article in The Atlantic Magazine entitled The Mind of Donald Trump written by Dan P. McAdams, a Professor of Psychology and director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University. It is definitely not a pro-Trump article, but he does go into characteristics of Trump that would help him as a president as well as those that would not. But it is a well researched 13 page article by an expert in a high quality magazine. It would probably not be read by many on the internet, and would certainly not fit into a tweet. It is here if you are interested.

I have for a long time been interested in and studied war, since although few people speak favorably about it, and it doesn’t seem to have much long term effect, it seems to have pretty much always been with us since we became numerous enough to disagree in reasonably large groups. But traditionally, wars have  been about such tangible things as land, treasure, and I suppose women. But now we are disagreeing strongly on such things as economics, religious beliefs, the value of human labor, education, and the rules of warfare itself.

And partly, thanks to the internet and modern media, groups taking different sides in these disagreements are spread widely. The ancient feud between Moslems and Christians, and even different branches of Islam are already established in different areas. Ethnic and racial battles are occurring, and arguments about race and gender are becoming more widespread. Traditionally enemies in war have either been adjacent to each other (the U.S. Civil War, England and France, Japan and China), and/or members of an established cultures who had access to sophisticated methods of transport (the U.S. and Japan during World War II). But now people who strongly disagree seem to more and more be geographically spread. The terrorist situation is perhaps an example.

Hopefully technology and societies will go in a direction that promotes conversation, cultural breadth, and world-wide understanding, rather than isolated nations or groups feeling that they are under attack and must respond, but I would not bet either way. We are already using drones to kill people overseas who lead causes we disapprove of— often causes who are using the internet to communicate and unite their bands. Will we import such behavior? Maybe the future use of drones will include not only delivering packages, but attacking groups of fellow citizens united by the internet involved in causes with which we do not agree.