If one side unilaterally disarmed, nuclear weapons would suddenly become useful

August 24th, 2023

Nuclear deterrence can be an odd topic to discuss with people outside of the security studies space, Bret Devereaux notes:

As we’ll see, there is a certain inescapable logic to many of the conclusions of deterrence theory, but the conclusions themselves viewed without considering that logic seem absurd (and occasionally are, even with the logic). Nevertheless, outside of those security studies fields at the college level, we generally don’t teach nuclear deterrence theory in school and so while this is actually one of the most studied and theorized concepts in the modern world (note that this doesn’t mean the theory is necessarily correct, but it does mean that a lot of very smart and well informed people have been grappling with these ideas for a while now), in my experience there is a tendency by the general public to assume that they are the first to notice this or that absurd-seeming conclusion. Everyone has an opinion about nuclear weapons, but the gap between having an opinion and having an informed opinion is both massive and rarely spanned.

Or to put it very briefly: Dr. Strangelove is a great movie, but if you only have your deterrence theory from Dr. Strangelove, you are dangerously under-informed (though while we’re here it seems worth noting that the Soviet automated-launch doomsday device of the film mostly actually exists, as a system called Dead Hand in the West and Perimeter in Russia and still in use by Russia. Presumably, since Russian nuclear forces are currently on high alert, Perimeter is active, which should be a chilling thought. I am going to say this several times because it is a fundamental truth about nuclear weapons: if you aren’t at least a bit worried, you aren’t paying attention).

The atomic bomb allowed the US and its allies to maintain parity with the USSR while still demobilizing:

US airbases in Europe put much of the Soviet Union in range of American bombers which could carry nuclear weapons, which served to ‘balance’ the conventional disparity. It’s important to keep in mind also that nuclear weapons emerged in the context where ‘strategic’ urban bombing had been extensively normalized during the Second World War; the idea that the next major war would include the destruction of cities from the air wasn’t quite as shocking to them as it was to us — indeed, it was assumed. Consequently, planners in the US military went about planning how they would use nuclear weapons on the battlefield (and beyond it) should a war with a non-nuclear Soviet Union occur.

In 1946, three years before the USSR successfully tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949, Bernard Brodie published The Absolute Weapon, which set out the basic outlines of deterrence theory:

  1. The power of a nuclear bomb is such that any city can be destroyed by less than ten bombs.
  2. No adequate defense against the bomb exists and the possibilities of such are very unlikely.
  3. Nuclear weapons will motivate the development of newer, longer range and harder to stop delivery systems.
  4. Superiority in the air is not going to be enough to stop sufficient nuclear weapons getting through.
  5. Superiority in nuclear arms also cannot guarantee meaningful strategic superiority. It does not matter that you had more bombs if all of your cities are rubble.
  6. Within five to ten years (of 1946), other powers will have nuclear weapons. [Of course this happened in just three years.]

Brodie concludes:

Thus, the first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind. The writer in making that statement is not for the moment concerned about who will win the next war in which atomic bombs are used. Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.

By 1959, both the USA and the USSR had mounted nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which had effectively infinite range and were effectively impossible to intercept.

In The Delicate Balance of Terror (1958), Wohlstetter argued that deterrence was in fact fragile:

Any development which allowed one party to break the other’s nuclear strike capability (e.g. the ability to deliver your strike so powerfully that the enemy’s retaliation was impossible) would encourage that power to strike in the window of vulnerability.

[…]

Like Brodie, Wohlstetter concluded that the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike.

[…]

This is the logic behind the otherwise preposterously large nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Russian Federation (inherited from the USSR). In order to sustain your nuclear deterrent, you need more weapons than you would need in the event because you are planning for scenarios in which some large number of weapons are lost in the enemy’s first strike. At the same time, as you overbuild nuclear weapons to counter this, you both look more like you are planning a first strike and your opponent has to estimate that a larger portion of their nuclear arsenal may be destroyed in that (theoretical) first strike, which means they too need more missile[…]

If one side unilaterally disarmed, nuclear weapons would suddenly become useful — if only one side has them, well, they are the “absolute” weapon, able to make up for essentially any deficiency in conventional strength — and once useful, they would be used. Humanity has never once developed a useful weapon they would not use in extremis; and war is the land of in extremis.

[…]

Because different kinds of systems would have different survivability capabilities, it also led to procurement focused on a nuclear ‘triad’ with nuclear systems split between land-based ICBMs in hardened silos, forward-deployed long-range bombers operating from bases in Europe and nuclear-armed missiles launched from submarines which could lurk off an enemy coast undetected. The idea here is that with a triad it would be impossible for an enemy to assure themselves that they could neutralize all of these systems, which assures the second strike, which assures the destruction, which deters the nuclear war you don’t want to have in the first place.

Posted in Policy, War, Weapons | 6 Comments »

Hitler had to decide between two alternatives

August 23rd, 2023

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II by Bevin AlexanderWith America’s entry into the war, Hitler had to decide between continuing the attack on the Soviet Union or going on the defensive there, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), and keeping American and British forces away from the continent of Europe:

For Admiral Erich Raeder, the choice was easy. On February 13, 1942, he proposed that Germany’s primary military tasks should be for Rommel to drive through Egypt to the Middle East, while the army in Russia did only two things: capture Murmansk and close that ice-free port to Allied convoys, and drive into the Caucasus to seize Soviet oil wells. After that the way would be clear to cross into Iran, close off that supply line to Russia, and join up with Rommel. Meanwhile, German war production should be shifted over predominately to the navy and air force to build more submarines and other vessels and aircraft to interdict the flow of supplies from America.

Hitler made it clear that he wanted first to destroy the Red Army and eliminate its sources of strength:

After that, other courses might be followed. But for now, the Ostheer — or army in the east — was to receive priority, and the German economy was to be directed at rearming this army, not at building a great U-boat fleet and air force, and not at reinforcing Rommel.

Posted in War | 6 Comments »

Weak states come to depend on strong states and, in the process, become client states

August 22nd, 2023

French President Emmanuel Macron has been attempting a large-scale “reset” or “refoundation” of relations with Africa and has explained that “there is no longer a French policy for Africa”:

In August 2020, the military of Mali overthrew the government in a coup d’etat. Since then, in quick succession, four of Mali’s regional neighbors have experienced coup attempts, including successful ones in Guinea and Burkina Faso. The Central African Republic, meanwhile, has become a client state of Russia.2 This unprecedented wave of coups is a consequence of decisions made in Paris to pull back long-standing French troop deployments in French-speaking Africa.

The French military has been actively deployed to West Africa since January 2013, when an offensive was launched to defeat armed separatists in northern Mali who threatened to overthrow the government. Initially successful, the deployment was formalized as Operation Barkhane in 2014 and expanded to neighboring countries, including Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad. At its peak, Operation Barkhane involved 5500 French soldiers. A United Nations follow-on peacekeeping mission involved about 15,000 UN peacekeepers, including over one thousand German soldiers.

In early 2020, the French government loosened its commitment to military involvement in the region. French President Emmanuel Macron, newly elected in 2017, was unwilling to send more French troops to Africa to bring an end to the ongoing insurgencies, which had multiplied rather than subsided. Macron believed that France’s relationship to Africa needed a “reset” or “refoundation” from its colonial past and, as part of that, France should allow African countries to solve their own problems. French military intervention, therefore, would be scaled back.

[…]

Although formal French colonialism ended in the decades after World War II, France nevertheless maintained a notable sphere of influence in its former African colonies, especially in West Africa. This informal empire was maintained through elite social and business ties with France, as well as through the large-scale involvement of the French military, which was deliberately designed to be capable of rapid intervention in Africa.

[…]

Weak states that cannot suppress insurgencies or alleviate privation on their own necessarily come to depend on strong states and, in the process, become client states. If France will not provide this support, perhaps the U.S. or Russia will.

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

Throw on a brace for support, though, and suddenly the high-aspect ratio concept becomes plausible

August 21st, 2023

A truss-braced wing can be much thinner and narrower than usual:

By making the wings longer and narrower, and thus higher in aspect ratio, the wing tip vortices generated by the wing are weakened. This reduces drag on the plane, and quite significantly so.

For a glider, which has no forward propulsion of its own, minimizing drag is a must. Hence, high aspect ratio wings are very useful. Similarly, the high-flying U2 spy plane had excellent range because its high aspect ratio wings were very efficient. Both of these types of planes have fairly limited payload requirements, and are specialized enough that high aspect ratio wings can work as-is.

Airliners have other concerns that make high aspect ratio wings impractical. They must carry huge payloads in order to make lots of money per flight from paying passengers. It would be great to have high aspect ratio wings on airliners, as the efficiency would slash fuel bills significantly. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to make them strong enough for such heavy-duty purposes. There simply isn’t room for the structure and material required.

Instead, where a glider might have an AR of 30 or more, an airliner will feature wings with an AR closer to 7 to 10. High-end gliders achieve lift-to-drag ratios of over 50. Airliners do much poorer in this regard. The original Boeing 747 achieved a L/D ratio of 15.3, for example. Decades of development have seen today’s modern airliners push that number closer to 20, like the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 777.

Throw on a brace for support, though, and suddenly the high-aspect ratio concept becomes plausible.

IMG_0038

The current concept in development is called the Boeing Transonic Truss-Braced Wing, or TTBW, with a full-scale demonstrator expected to fly in 2028. It’s also been designated as the X-66A within US aviation circles. In development since 2010, the concept involves a plane with an ultra-thin, high aspect ratio wing, supported by a truss underneath. The demonstrator is being built on a shortened airframe from a McDonnell Douglas MD-90, and will be tested at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center. The concept is intended to suit either 130-160 passengers, or 180-210 passengers, depending on the exact configuration Boeing lands on.

The demonstrator is on the scale of single-aisle aircraft, albeit with a far larger wingspan, at 51 meters. This is still far narrower than dual-aisle aircraft like the 747, at 68 meters, but much greater than a single-aisle Boeing 737 MAX at 36 meters. To accommodate this extra width in existing narrowbody facilities, Boeing may explore the use of folding wingtips. These have already been used successfully on the Boeing 777X, to ensure the wider-than-usual type could access as many airports as possible. Thus far, the concept is primarily being considered a proposition for smaller narrowbody, single-aisle airliners.

Wind tunnel tests have suggested that the higher-efficiency design could reduce fuel burn by up to 10%, based on the gains from the wings alone.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

Each pixel in the experiment was labeled with three thermal physics attributes

August 20th, 2023

Researchers at Purdue have developed HADAR, or heat-assisted detection and ranging:

Because thermal waves constantly scatter, infrared cameras capture “ghostlike” images with no depth or texture:

For their experiment, the researchers chose an outdoor space in a marshy area, far from roads and urban illumination. They collected thermal images in the infrared spectrum across almost 100 different frequencies. And just as each pixel in RGB images is encoded by three visible frequencies (R for red, G for green, B for blue), each pixel in the experiment was labeled with three thermal physics attributes, TeX—temperature (T), material fingerprint or emissivity (e), and texture or surface geometry (X). “T and e are reasonably well understood, but the crucial insight about texture is actually in X,” says Jacob. “X is really the many little suns in your scene that’s illuminating your specific area of interest.”

The researchers fed all the collected TeX information into a machine-learning algorithm to generate images with depth and texture. They used what they call TeX decomposition to untangle temperature and emissivity, and recover texture from the heat signal. The decluttered T, e, and X attributes were then used to resolve colors in terms of hue, saturation, and brightness in the same way humans see color. “At nighttime, in pitch darkness, our accuracy was the same when we came back in the daytime and did the ranging and detection with RGB cameras,” Jacob says.

The biggest advantage of HADAR is that it is passive, Jacob adds. “Which means you don’t have to illuminate the scene with a laser, sound waves, or electromagnetic waves. Also, in active approaches like lidar, sonar, or radar, if there are many agents in the scene, there can be a lot of crosstalk between them.”

As a new technology, HADAR is in a fairly nascent stage, Jacob says. At present, data collection requires almost a minute. By comparison, an autonomous vehicle driving at night, for example, would need to image its surroundings in milliseconds. Also, the cameras required for data collection are bulky, pricey, and power hungry: “Great for a scientific demonstration, but not really for kind of widespread adoption,” according to Jacob. The researchers are currently working on these problems, and Jacob predicts another few years of research will be directed to address them.

Posted in Science, Technology | 1 Comment »

Their electronic warfare systems weren’t very agile, they weren’t very fast, and they weren’t very numerous

August 19th, 2023

In the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, experts were surprised at how poorly the Russian army’s electronic warfare units performed:

Expecting a walkover, Moscow may have thought they wouldn’t need to fully deploy electronic warfare systems. But Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, a US think tank, says another problem was that electronic warfare units couldn’t keep up with the rest of the troops.

“Russian systems are large unwieldy, vehicle-borne systems that are designed to be on the defensive,” he says. “And as a result, their electronic warfare systems weren’t very agile, they weren’t very fast and they weren’t very numerous.”

But Russia has learned from its mistakes, he says. Instead of using large equipment that can be easily spotted and destroyed, it is now increasingly relying on smaller, more mobile devices.

Bryan Clark says Russia has managed to deploy hundreds of mobile electronic warfare units along the front line in an attempt to slow down Ukraine’s counter-offensive. These range from GPS jammers to systems that suppress radar and prevent US aircraft identifying targets for Ukraine to attack.

Russian systems such as Zhitel and Pole-21 are proving to be particularly effective to jam GPS and other satellite links. They can disable drones that direct artillery fire and carry out kamikaze attacks on Russian troops.

Many of the sophisticated weapons provided to Ukraine by Nato countries are vulnerable to such jamming too because they use a GPS signal for navigation.

“Zhitel can jam a GPS signal within 30km of the jammer,” says Mr Clark. “For weapons like [US-made] JDAM bombs, which use just a GPS receiver to guide it to the target, that’s sufficient to lose its geolocation and go off target.”

The same applies to the guided rockets fired by the Himars multiple rocket system, which made a big contribution to Ukraine’s successful offensives last autumn.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

Oh, yes, we’re expecting Dmitri! Send him on up!

August 18th, 2023

I was watching Declassified — Season 3, Episode 5, “The Spy Game: Russian Espionage” — on Max, when it explained how the Russians took advantage of the US State Department’s naïve openness right after the fall of the Soviet Union.

State decided to allow Russians in, unescorted, to the building, so one Russian intelligence operative would come into the lobby and wait in one of the lounges outside the security checkpoint. Later, another intelligence operative would come in and present himself to the receptionist with a phone extension to call to confirm that he was welcome to come through.

That phone extension belonged to the phone in the waiting area lounge. “Oh, yes, we’re expecting Dmitri! Send him on up!”

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

When contemporaries describe Gagosian, they tend to summon carnivore analogies

August 17th, 2023

Patrick Radden Keefe channels Tom Wolfe as he explains how Larry Gagosian reshaped the art world:

It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water. Gagosian sat down on a leather sofa in the living room, his back to the ocean view, and faced a life-size Charles Ray sculpture of a male nude, in reflective steel, and a Damien Hirst grand piano (bright pink with blue butterflies) that he’d picked up at a benefit auction some years back, for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. On a coffee table before him was a ceramic Yoshitomo Nara ashtray the size of a Frisbee, decorated with a picture of a little girl smoking and the words “too young to die.”

Gagosian is not a household name for most Americans, but among the famous and the wealthy — and particularly among the very wealthy — he is a figure of colossal repute. He is dubious of art dealers who refer to themselves as “gallerists,” which he regards as a pretentious euphemism that obscures the mercantile essence of the occupation. He has always favored a certain macho bluntness, and calls himself a dealer without apology. With nineteen galleries that bear his name, from New York to London to Athens to Hong Kong, generating more than a billion dollars in annual revenue, Gagosian may well be the biggest art dealer in the history of the world. He represents more than a hundred artists, living and dead, including many of the most celebrated and lucrative: Jenny Saville, Anselm Kiefer, Cy Twombly, Donald Judd. The business — which he owns without a partner or a shareholder or a spouse or children or anyone, really, to answer to — controls more than two hundred thousand square feet of prime real estate. All told, Gagosian has more exhibition space than most museums, and he shuttles among his outposts on his sixty-million-dollar Bombardier Global 7500 private jet. He’s been known to observe, with the satisfaction of Alexander the Great, “The sun never sets on my gallery.”

[…]

When contemporaries describe Gagosian, they tend to summon carnivore analogies: a tiger, a shark, a snake. His own publicist once described him as “a real killer.”

The languid calm that he exuded on the eve of the Amagansett party was that of a predator between meals. At seventy-eight, he remains tall and broad-shouldered, with a full head of white hair that he keeps trimmed close to the scalp, like a beaver pelt. Gagosian has blue eyes, which often flash with mirth — he has a quick, salty sense of humor — but they can just as suddenly go blank if he feels threatened or wants to be inscrutable. In conversation, these abrupt transitions from easy bonhomie to enigmatic hostility and back again can be jarring.

(Hat tip to Byrne Hobart.)

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

In the desert, surrounded motorized forces nearly always could mass at a single point and break out

August 16th, 2023

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II by Bevin AlexanderRommel had learned something the British had not grasped about desert warfare, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), that attrition or wearing down of an enemy force and destruction of the enemy’s organic cohesion had to be the tactical aims:

In other environments where few units were mechanized, like Poland in 1939 and western Europe in 1940, the greatest danger a force could face was being surrounded. When encircled, and subjected to fire from all sides, a force tended to disintegrate, and could be destroyed or forced to surrender.

In the desert, surrounded motorized forces nearly always could mass at a single point and break out, thereby nullifying what elsewhere would be a devastating trap.

Rommel accordingly concentrated on winning battles of attrition and shattering the enemy’s organization. He came up with a five-point method of doing this. A commander, he wrote, must (1) concentrate his forces, while trying to split the enemy forces and destroy them at different times; (2) protect his supply lines, while cutting the enemy’s; (3) attack enemy armor with antitank guns, reserving his own tanks for the final blow; (4) operate near the front so as to make immediate decisions when tactical conditions change; (5) achieve surprise, maintain great speed of movement, and overrun disorganized enemy formations without delay. Speed is everything, Rommel wrote. And, after dislocating the enemy, he must be pursued at once and never be allowed to reorganize.

Rommel had only one “secret” weapon, the 88-millimeter antiaircraft (AA) gun that he and other German generals discovered in the 1940 campaign could blast through 83 millimeters of armor at 2,000 yards. This made the 88 the most formidable antitank weapon on either side. The British had a comparable high-velocity AA gun of about the same caliber (3.7 inches), which could have been as effective, but they did not use it against tanks.

Rommel also had the 50-millimeter antitank (AT) gun, which slowly replaced the poor 37-millimeter gun developed before the war. The 50-millimeter gun could penetrate 50 millimeters of armor at 1,000 yards. Although the Matilda with its heavy frontal armor was largely invulnerable to this gun, the more lightly armored cruisers could often be stopped, especially at close range. Both the 88 and the 50-millimeter AT gun could fire solid shot, to cut through armor, or high explosive, which could destroy or neutralize British AT weapons or crews.

By comparison, the British two-pounder (40-millimeter) AT gun was ineffective. It fired only solid shot, requiring a direct hit to destroy enemy AT weapons, and could penetrate merely the thinner side plates of armor at ranges below 200 yards. The British 25-pounder (87-millimeter) gun-howitzer, a superb field artillery piece, had to be pressed into service as an antitank weapon, though often at the expense of protecting infantry. Only in the spring of 1942 did the British begin to receive the six-pounder (57-millimeter) AT gun, which fired high-explosive as well as solid shot and had 30 percent greater penetration than the German 50-millimeter gun.

The British took a long time recognizing that Rommel was sending antitank guns against their tanks. In offensive or attack situations, Rommel leapfrogged the comparatively nimble 50-millimeter AT guns from one shielded vantage point to another, while keeping his tanks stationary and below the horizon. Once the AT guns were established, they protected the tanks as they swept forward.

In defensive situations, Rommel tried to bait or lure the British. He sent light tanks forward to contact the enemy, then retire. The typical British response was to mount a “cavalry” charge. But since visibility was obscured by stirred up dust and sand, British tankers usually did not see the 50-millimeter AT guns waiting in ambush in hollows and draws, nor the “gun line” of 88s drawn up at the rear. The 50s picked off British tanks that got within range, while the 88s took on the advancing enemy armor at distances far beyond the capacity of the tanks’ two-pounder (40-millimeter) guns to respond. The British added to the success of Rommel’s tactics by usually committing their armor piecemeal, mostly single units, instead of full brigades, and never massed brigades.

[…]

The British dispersed their tanks because it was impossible to conceal armor in the desert from the air. Rommel tried to practice the opposite policy, drawing together every possible tank and gun to work against a single objective—which, because of British dispersion, was often a fragment of total British armored strength.

Finally, the British failed to copy the Stuka dive-bomber, which was in effect mobile artillery that could deliver fire on the point a forward force wished to destroy, or through which it wished to advance. The dive-bomber offered the vanguard of an attacking force a way to eliminate an enemy strongpoint shortly after its discovery without having to bring up more weapons.

[…]

Consequently Rommel repeatedly caught British armor dispersed. As he remarked to a captured British officer after the battle: “What difference does it make if you have two tanks to my one, when you spread them out and let me smash them in detail?”

Posted in War | No Comments »

If you’re banging your head against the wall for 20 years trying to be an actor, maybe you shouldn’t be an actor

August 15th, 2023

Hollywood will tell you what you’re supposed to do, Taylor Sheridan says, if you listen:

”If you’re banging your head against the wall for 20 years trying to be an actor, maybe you shouldn’t be an actor. But the first thing I ever wrote [the pilot for Mayor of Kingstown in 2011] got me meetings at every major network, at every agency. I had multiple people trying to buy it.”

Yet Sheridan refused to sell. The studios, he says, wanted to hire a room of more experienced writers to tackle the project — you know, make TV the usual way. Sheridan felt that he knew exactly how to write the show himself. So even back then, getting his first taste of success as a writer, Sheridan was reluctant to let others adapt his material and demonstrated a willingness to walk away. Some might call that stubborn or impractical; Sheridan sees it as trusting his instincts and sticking to his creative guns. He put Mayor of Kingstown in a drawer.

Over the next few years, Sheridan made a name for himself writing a trio of acclaimed films — Sicario (2015), Hell or High Water (2016) and Wind River (2017) — which he dubbed his “modern American frontier” trilogy.

Another of his scripts, Yellowstone, was likewise originally written as a movie. Sheridan pitched it as “The Godfather in Montana,” and it ended up in series development at HBO. Sheridan says then-programming president Michael Lombardo was supportive, but the rest of his team wasn’t.

“I thought Taylor was the real deal,” Lombardo says. “In a world of people who pose, he was writing what he knew, and he cared desperately about the show. The idea of doing a modern-classic Western was a great idea — we were always doing urban shows, and this felt fresh.”

The one thing they all agreed on was that Yellowstone needed a big star to play its uncompromising patriarch, John Dutton. Sheridan pitched Costner, but HBO executives “didn’t see it.”

“They said, ‘We want Robert Redford,’ ” Sheridan recalls. “They said, ‘If you can get us Robert Redford, we’ll greenlight the pilot.’ “

Being a can-do type of guy, Sheridan went to visit Robert Redford.

“I drive to Sundance and spend the day with him and he agrees to play John Dutton,” Sheridan says. “I call the senior vice president in charge of production and say, ‘I got him!’ ‘You got who?’ ‘Robert Redford.’ ‘What?!‘ ‘You said if I got Robert Redford, you’d greenlight the show.’ “

“And he says — and you can’t make this shit up — ‘We meant a Robert Redford type.’ ”

A crisis meeting was scheduled with the network vp (“whose name I remember, but I’m just not saying it”) to get to the bottom of HBO’s reluctance.

“We go to lunch in some snazzy place in West L.A.,” Sheridan says. “And [Yellowstone co-creator] John Linson finally asks: ‘Why don’t you want to make it?’ And the vp goes: ‘Look, it just feels so Middle America. We’re HBO, we’re avant-garde, we’re trendsetters. This feels like a step backward. And frankly, I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think anyone should be living out there [in rural Montana]. It should be a park or something.’ “

[…]

HBO typically retains the rights to scripts it develops and rejects, partly to prevent what happened next from happening — a project they spent time and money developing becoming a global smash for a competitor.

“When the regime changed, Lombardo called me,” Sheridan says about the longtime HBO exec’s exit in 2016. “To his credit, he said, ‘I always believed in the show, but I could not get any support.’ His last act before they fired him was to give me the script back.”

As for that nameless vp, Sheridan says he left HBO and landed a production deal. After Yellowstone took off, he emailed Sheridan to say congratulations — and to pitch him a family drama.

Sheridan says he wrote back: “Great idea. It sounds just like Yellowstone.”

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Children are not relegated to a child-only world nor deemed too fragile to engage in difficult tasks

August 14th, 2023

Contemporary parenting in postindustrial societies is characterised by the idea that early childhood experiences are key to successful cognitive and emotional development:

The idea of parental influence is nothing new and, at a first glance, it seems rather banal: who wouldn’t agree, after all, that parents have some sort of influence over their children’s development? However, contemporary parenting (call it what you like: responsive parenting, natural parenting, attachment parenting) goes beyond this simple claim: it suggests that caretakers’ actions have an enormous, long-lasting influence on a child’s emotional and cognitive development. Everything you do – how much you talk to your children, how you feed them, the way you discipline them, even how you put them to bed – is said to have ramifications for their future wellbeing.

This sense of determinism feeds the idea of providing the child with a very specific type of care. As a document on childcare from the World Health Organization (WHO) puts it, parents are supposed to be attentive, proactive, positive and empathetic. Another WHO document lists specific behaviours to adopt: early physical contact between the baby and the mother, repeated eye contact, constant physical closeness, immediate responsiveness to infant’s crying, and more. As the child grows older, the practices change (think of parent-child play, stimulating language skills), yet the core idea remains the same: your child’s physical and emotional needs must be promptly and appropriately responded to, if she is to have an optimal development and a happy, successful life.

Like other such parents, in the first few postpartum months I also engaged, rather unreflectively, in this craze. However, when my son was four months old, during a period ridden with chaos, parental anxiety, sleep deprivation and mental fogginess, my husband and I made the decision to leave Europe. We packed our clothes and a few other things and hopped on a flight to Ecuador. Our final destination: a small Runa Indigenous village of about 500 people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Our decision wasn’t as mad as it sounds. The Ecuadorian Amazon is where my husband grew up and where his family currently lives. It is also the place where I have been doing research for more than a decade. We wanted to introduce our newborn to our family and friends in the village, and we didn’t think twice before going. I could not yet imagine the repercussions this decision would have on me, both as a mother and as a scholar.

In the first weeks of our stay in my husband’s village, family and neighbours quietly observed how I took care of my son. He was never out of my sight, I was there always for him, promptly responding to (and anticipating) any of his needs. If he wanted to be held or breastfed, I would interrupt any activity to care for him. If he cried in the hammock, I quickly ran to soothe his cries. Our closeness soon became the subject of humour, and then, as the months passed, of growing concern. Nobody ever said anything explicitly to me or my husband. Most Runa Indigenous people – the community to which my husband belongs – are deeply humble and profoundly dislike to tell others how to behave. Yet it became clear that my family and neighbours found my behaviour bizarre, if not at times utterly disconcerting. I did not really understand their surprise nor did I, in the beginning, give it too much thought.

People, however, started rebelling. They did so quietly, without making a fuss, but consistently enough for me to realise that something was going on. For instance, I would leave my baby with his dad to take a short bath in the river and, upon my return, my son would no longer be there. ‘Oh, the neighbour took him for a walk,’ my husband would nonchalantly say, lying in the hammock. Trying desperately not to immediately rush to the neighbours’ house, I would spend the following hours frenetically walking up and down in our yard, pacing and turning at any sudden noise in the hope that the neighbours had finally returned with my son. I was never able to wait patiently for their return, so I often ended up engaging in frantic searches across the village to find my baby, under the perplexed stares of other neighbours. I usually came back home emptyhanded, depressed and exhausted. ‘Stop chasing people! He will be fine,’ my husband would tell me affectionately, giving me the perfect pretext to transform my anxiety into anger for his fastidiously serene and irresponsible attitude. At the end, my son always came back perfectly healthy and cheerful. He was definitely OK. I was not.

On another occasion, a close friend of ours who was about to return to her house in the provincial capital (a good seven hours from our village) came to say goodbye. She took my son in her arms. She then told me: ‘Give him to me. I will bring him to my house, and you can have a bit of rest.’ Unsure whether she was serious or not, I simply giggled in response. She smiled and left the house with my son. I watched her walking away with him and I hesitated a few minutes. I did not want to look crazy: surely she was not taking away my five-month-old son? I begged my husband to go to fetch our baby just in case she really wanted to take him away. When we finally found them, she was already sitting in the canoe, holding my son in her lap. ‘Oh, you want him back?’ she asked me with a mischievous laugh. To this day I am not sure whether she would have really taken him or whether she was just teasing me.

As an anthropologist, I admit, I should have known better. Scholars who work on parenting and childrearing have consistently shown that, outside populations defined as WEIRD (white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic), children are taken care of by multiple people, not solely their mothers.

[…]

If the idea of an exclusive, preponderant relationship between mother and son might have seemed alien to our Runa family, equally strange, if not plain wrong, was the idea that a child’s needs should be always and promptly met by her caretakers. This is another central idea of current parenting philosophies: children’s emotions, needs and desires should be not merely accommodated, but also promptly, consistently and appropriately responded to. This translates into a form of care that is highly child-centred, whereby children are treated as equal conversational partners, praised for their achievements, encouraged to express their desires and emotions, stimulated through pedagogical play and talk, often with considerable investment of time and resources.

[…]

What these accounts, which claim roots in anthropology, fail to reflect is that, outside of postindustrial affluent societies, no matter how cherished, children are very rarely the centre of adults’ lives. For instance, Runa children, while affectionately cared for, are not the main focus of their parents’ attention. In fact, nothing is adjusted to suit a child’s needs. No canoe trip under a merciless sun is modified to meet the needs of a baby, let alone of an older child. No meal is organised around the needs of a young child. Parents do not play with their children and do not engage in dialogical, turn-taking conversations with them from an early age. They do not praise their children’s efforts, nor are they concerned with the expression of their most intimate needs. Adults certainly do not consider them as equal conversational partners. The world, in other words, does not revolve around children.

This is because children are not relegated to a child-only world nor deemed too fragile to engage in difficult tasks. From an early age, Runa children participate fully in adults’ lives, overhearing complex conversations between adults on difficult topics, helping with domestic tasks, taking care of their younger siblings. Participating in the adult world means that sometimes children can get frustrated, or denied what they want, or feel deeply dependent on others. At the same time, there is so much that they gain: they learn to pay close attention to interactions around them, to develop independence and self-reliance, and to forge relationships with their peers. Most importantly, in this adult world, they are constantly reminded that other people – their parents, their family members, their neighbours, their siblings and peers – also have desires and intentions.

Posted in Education | 7 Comments »

Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?

August 13th, 2023

The most important question we can ask of historians, David Banks suggests, is Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?

It is intellectually embarrassing that this is almost never posed squarely — I can think of only two articles (Gray, 1958 and 1961) and two books (Kroeber, 1944 and McClelland, 1961) that tackle this directly. But Gray is a lunatic, Kroeber waffles vaguely, and McClelland veers off into a fascinating but incomplete assessment. The question has never been the focus of professional attention in social history, although its answer would have thrilling implications for education, politics, science and art.

[…]

When I beard social historians at cocktail parties, they usually dismiss the problem of explaining excess genius as complex and ill-posed. But when coaxed into conversation, several ideas for facilitating factors come forward: Prosperity. They submit that a florescent culture needs the economic wherewithal to support the arts. Peace. They suggest that a climate of peace is also conducive to philosophical, artistic and (perhaps) scientific progress. (But recall Welles’ comment on Switzerland.)

Freedom. They believe that artistic freedom from state or religious control enables new growth.

Social Mobility. They think that when class distinctions are relatively permeable, then there is greater inducement for artists to excel.

The Paradigm Thing. They suppose that when a new medium or perspective arises, then art flourishes until the vein of originality is worked out.

All of these are good ideas, and superficially plausible. But most contradict the historical record.

To be specific, the prosperity suggestion fails for Athens, Florence and London. Athens spent its boom period in combat with Sparta; the income from the Delian League went to the fleet. Athenian farmers could not tend their crops (cf. The Acharnians), and such staples as grain had to be imported. Similarly, quatrocento Florence was poor compared to pre-plague Florence. The Medici bank had about half the capital of the Peruzzi bank in 1340, and Lopez (1970) documents other indications of reduced standards of living. A symptom of this desperation was the revolt of the populo minuto, which pushed the Medici into prominence. And Elizabethan London suffered “dearness without scarcity” (inflation); this fell most heavily on the aristocracy and the very poor. Then the wool trade collapsed, England entered “the worst economic depression in history” (Wilson, 1965), and Parliament anxiously debated means of averting a Bellum Rusticum.

Regarding the peace hypothesis, it clearly fails for Athens. Florence was torn by internal factions (e.g., il popolo grosso vs. il popolo minuto, the assassination of Giuliano de Medici, Savonarola). London had to contend with the Armada, the war with Spain in Holland, and internal religious dissent.

Regarding artistic freedom, the Athenian plays were written for religious festivals, and the prize was awarded according to the taste of respectable, pious and civic-minded judges (this caused Aristophanes and Euripides no end of trouble). In Florence, art was commissioned largely by the Church, sometimes by a patron, and had to voice themes prescribed in the contract. In London, note that Shakespeare’s plays avoid all mention of religion and contemporary politics; Marlowe and Jonson were similarly cautious (in literature, not in their personal lives).

Regarding social mobility, this hypothesis seems borne out by our three primary examples. Athens and Florence were both devaluing the aristocracy and promoting mercantilism. In London, the early part of the period clearly shows the rise of the middle class.

Regarding the emergence of a new paradigm, this is difficult to judge concisely. Much of the problem involves distinguishing a perturbation from an innovation. Did the introduction of a second on-stage character in Athenian plays represent a new paradigm? Was Plato’s decision to record philosophical discussion a minor influence on the content of the debate? Similarly, in Florence, painting and sculpture were well-established before the peak occurred, but the invention of perspective and the rediscovery of the classical period may have constituted a paradigm shift. Finally, in London, the key change seems to have been that small groups of strolling players discovered they could pack a hall in a city, and people would stroll to them. This enabled more elaborate props and larger companies, while pressing the need for a larger repertoire. But this kind of change is not especially Kuhnian in spirit, and the problem merits more lengthy consideration.

One could propose other factors. It seems to me that each of the three societies under consideration enjoyed a substantial military victory in the generation preceding their florescence. Athenians whose names shine today are reported to have prided themselves on being the sons of the men who fought at Marathon. Florence was not a military force (the Italian city-states relied upon mercenary condottieri in time of war) but in 1254 they conquered Pisa and Lucca. This secured an outlet to the sea, which was essential to their economic expansion. And in 1588, England conquered the Spanish Armada. This made the seas safe for colonial empire, and was a watershed for British morale.

Also, the great minds in each of these societies tended to hang out together. Socrates spoke with everyone. The playwrights talked shop, and the orators honed themselves upon each other. In Florence, artists trained under an apprentice system that pulled talents together, and Vasari describes frequent visits by the greats to each other’s studios. Leonardo and Michelangelo held a public contest over The Battle of Anghiari; meanwhile, the poets and philosophers clubbed together at Lorenzo’s mansion. In London, much of the theater circle met for drinks at the Mermaid Tavern, and one expects that their common profession ensured their lives crossed even more regularly.

Aubrey reports that Bacon visited the Mermaid Tavern too, and doubtless Bacon knew Raleigh, who was sufficiently friendly with Marlowe to rise to the Shepherd/Nymph bait. Does the social intercourse of good minds produce great minds?

A third possible factor is education. In each of the three societies, education tended to be as personal as a punch in the nose. In Athens, the upper class had tutors and the lower classes shopped for their educations among various freelance teachers. In Florence, the upper class had tutors and the masses learned as apprentices. In England, the upper class had tutors and the commoners learnt to write plays and poetry from each other, insofar as I can tell. All three of these systems emphasize individual instruction over the currently popular cattle drive approach. And there is ancillary evidence (cf. the lives of Wiener, Maxwell, Dirac, Russell, Mill, Malthus, Arnold, Feynman) that tutoring is enormously effective.

One can postulate many other factors. For example, it is suggestive that all three of Athens, Florence, and London had populations near 300,000. Also, all three had relatively democratic styles of government, and all three’s florescences were ended by right-wing revolutions (the Rule of the 400, Savonarola, and Cromwell). Finally, each of the three were in the process of reinventing their language — Periclean Athens defined the conventions of Attic Greek, Dante made Tuscan the foundation of modern Italian, and the linguistic gap from Chaucer to Shakespeare is enormously larger than the gap from Shakespeare to us (but this could be due to selection bias, since language might gel around great writings, rather than great writings arise from volatile language).

There is never any shortage of hypotheses. The useful trick is to know how to test them. In this case, one could rank a sample of cities in terms of their cultural IQ, and then decide whether the hypothesized factor obtains for each of the cities. If the factor is more common for the florescent cities than for the average or below average cities, then the hypothesis is supported (this can be made formally statistical). To an extent, this style of reasoning is what is used in this section, except that I haven’t elaborated the comparison by listing cities which have made meager cultural contributions.

(Hat tip to Byrne Hobart.)

Posted in Education, Policy | 8 Comments »

The story of precision and mechanization is indistinguishable from an ode to Britain

August 12th, 2023

Misha Saul reviews Simon Winchester‘s Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, published in the US as The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, with an introduction that makes the case for getting the audiobook:

For a British analogy, Winchester is a kind of David Attenborough of the engineering world. Reading the audiobook himself, he shares the same gentle British tone of old-worldliness and authority, unveiling the story of man’s machine world just for you.

Initially, he says, the story of precision and mechanisation is indistinguishable from an ode to Britain:

We are acquainted with leading figures of the Industrial Revolution, the minds behind the steam engine, the standardised screw, locks and pulleys and more, that preceded and then fed the British Empire’s zenith and allowed her shipyards to support the navy that once ruled the world. Even after her zenith, Britain birthed the jet engine (arguably jointly with Germany2). (Exactly makes for a wonderful companion to James Dyson’s memoir Invention: A Life, Dyson being a British descendent of this British tradition of tinkering and invention.) Some time in the early 20th century (and in some respects much earlier) the Americans pick up the baton in manufacturing and technology. Where the Rolls-Royce was the epitome of precision manufacturing no expenses spared, Henry Ford brought the assembly line and mass manufacturing to the world. And where it was a plucky general who first proposed and demonstrated the power of interchangeable components in a French dungeon,3 the French Revolution put a halt to that. But it was Thomas Jefferson, witness to the experiment, who brought it to the New World and to the gun manufacturers of New England. And it is the Hubble telescope — that American fountain of knowledge — whose first $2bn iteration was ruined by a lens manufacturer who was out by a mere 1/50th of a human hair. Winchester ends his book in Japan, the Mecca of precision engineering, in a charming meditation on the Japanese blend of venerable human craftsmanship and the power of humanless manufacturing.

(Hat tip to Byrne Hobart.)

Posted in Science, Technology | 3 Comments »

The Lorraine basin could contain 46 million tons of natural hydrogen

August 11th, 2023

While carrying out work to check the risk of firedamp pockets in the abandoned mines of the Lorraine region in May, FDE discovered a large deposit of natural hydrogen:

For years, researchers and businesses in the private sector have been looking for rare natural hydrogen, otherwise known as native or white hydrogen, due to its potential as a clean and renewable energy source.

“If confirmed, this would be the largest potential natural hydrogen discovered to date in Europe,” Philippe de Donato, co-director of research at the GeoRessouces laboratory at the University of Lorraine, told France 3 Grand-Est at the end of May.

Indeed, it is believed that the Lorraine basin could contain 46 million tonnes of natural hydrogen — equivalent to half the world’s current hydrogen production — and enough to contribute to the EU’s decarbonisation objectives significantly.

Natural hydrogen is naturally present in the Earth’s crust and mantle, explains Isabelle Moretti, a researcher at the University of Pau and the Pays de l’Adour. It can be found in several places: “at ocean ridges, in the mountains with ophiolites, remnants of ancient oceanic rocks, but also in iron-rich rocks,” she said in an interview with L’Usine Nouvelle in June 2021.

The resource, which can be harnessed when it degases on the earth’s surface or when extracted with boreholes, has been on scientists’ radars for some time. But a broader interest in the resource arose as world nations sought to replace fossil gas with a clean-burning fuel.

Unlike hydrogen produced from natural gas or electrolysis, its natural counterpart requires no water and little energy to extract while taking up very little land.

[…]

Indeed, the Earth continuously produces natural hydrogen through chemical reactions that are mainly related to oxidation of ferrous iron minerals.

All these advantages make natural hydrogen a much cheaper resource than hydrogen produced from electrolysis. The price of natural hydrogen is estimated at €1 per kilo, while renewable hydrogen currently reaches €6, according to a position paper published in February at the request of the European Commission by the Earth2 initiative, a French body bringing together industry and research groups.

Posted in Science, Technology | 7 Comments »

Glass nanolattice structures are four times higher in strength but five times lower in density than steel

August 10th, 2023

Researchers from UConn, Columbia University, and Brookhaven National Lab have created a material lighter and stronger than steel from two unlikely components:

Lee and colleagues report that by building a structure out of DNA and then coating it with glass, they have created a very strong material with very low density. Glass might seem a surprising choice, as it shatters easily. However, glass usually shatters because of a flaw – such as a crack, scratch, or missing atoms – in its structure. A flawless cubic centimeter of glass can withstand 10 tons of pressure, more than three times the pressure that imploded the Oceangate Titan submersible near the Titanic last month.

It’s very difficult to create a large piece of glass without flaws. But the researchers knew how to make very small flawless pieces. As long as the glass is less than a micrometer thick, it’s almost always flawless. And since the density of glass is much lower than metals and ceramics, any structures made of flawless nano-sized glass should be strong and lightweight.

The team created a structure of self-assembling DNA. Almost like Magnatiles, pieces of DNA of specific lengths and chemistry snapped themselves together into a skeleton of the material. Imagine the frame of a house or building, but made of DNA.

Oleg Gang and Aaron Mickelson, nanomaterials scientists at Columbia University and Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials, then coated the DNA with a very thin layer of glass-like material only a few hundred atoms thick. The glass only just coated the strands of DNA, leaving a large part of the material volume as empty space, much like the rooms within a house or building.

The DNA skeleton reinforced the thin, flawless coating of glass making the material very strong, and the voids comprising most of the material’s volume made it lightweight. As a result, glass nanolattice structures are four times higher in strength but five times lower in density than steel. This unusual combination of lightweight and high strength has never been achieved before.

[…]

The team is currently working with the same DNA structure but substituting even stronger carbide ceramics for glass. They have plans to experiment with different DNA structures to see which makes the material strongest.

Posted in Science, Technology | 9 Comments »

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