Escapable Logic

Here are photographs that someone has decided are the scariest airports on earth to land an airplane. I look at these pics and ask, what are the physics of these situations that make these airports more scary than they would be if they were surrounded by Kansas wheatfields? Answer: nothing. Every landing made on these runways is based on the physics that would be in play in Kansas. Get over it. Most of these scary airports are surrounded by water. For people who have never landed short of, or beyond the runway, why would you care about the water in front of or beyond the runway?

I like these pics of “scary” runways, but the premise is useless. Every one of these runways has a particular length, width, slope and surface and, at the moment of landing, a particular wind angle and gust component. The surroundings are laughingly irrelevant. This gets to the point that the random imaginings of the uninformed sometimes overwhelm the craft of people who know what they’re doing. A technical or unfamiliar situation, especially when freighted with potential danger, is rarely what the novice assumes it is. This is the curse of the onlookers imposing their uninformed fears on the everyday, reliable craft of others. While we all know that “war is too important to be left to the Generals”, it’s also true that the fears we carry around any activity or phenomenon deserve to be moderated by what the experts in those domains have learned to be determinative. So it is here: The conditions that surround a runway have nothing to do with the suitability of the runway.

But I gotta say I love that runway at the Courcheval ski area, memorialized in the James Bond thriller, Goldeneye:

The aviator in me wishes that, like Courcheval, every runway was downhill, and granted me 3 or 4,000 feet of altitude under its takeoff leg (right-to-left in this picture). As aviators like to say, there’s nothing more worthless than the altitude above you, the runway behind you, or the altitude you don’t have. So 3 or 4 thousand feet of altitude under the takeoff leg of a runway is a divine gift. As for landing (left-to-right here), every pilot likes an uphill runway in front of you on landing - saves a lot of wear and tear on the brakes - for the same reason that most exit ramps are uphill on Interstate Highways. Of course, it’s not such good news when you carry just a little too much speed and float just a little too long and find yourself driving straight into the side of a hill with a runway pasted on its side. No day is perfect.

“Equipment near the Runway”

I remember a sunny afternoon in the spring of 1968, when on final approach to land at Vung Tau field, Vietnam. The field is next to a terrific beach, where Americans and the Viet Cong both went for R&R, and both knew all of them were there. Everyone was OK with that: it’s one of the aspects of war that armchair warriors don’t get.

About a minute before landing that day, Vung Tau Tower advised:

“Homey 303, cleared to land Runway 36. Be advised, there is heavy equipment near the runway, in the ditch on the right side of the runway.”

Any aviator assumes he’s obligated to process every piece of information. Immediately. Correctly. Precisely. From that standpoint, information that cannot be acted on is distracting and vexing. This is especially true for junior officers. Like me, that day.

What the hell were we supposed to do with that factoid? I accessed my database of all the landings I’d ever made, seen or heard of, and I found no record of a landing that involved the ditches on the side of the runway. Well, what if something went horribly wrong on this particular landing, and we veered uncharacteristically off the runway and found ourselves bouncing down a grassy knoll at 80 knots toward a yellow earthmover? Which of our checklists were we supposed to consult at that moment? None. No checklist for that one, and no controls on the aircraft that could alter our fate. In other words, Why would the tower distract us at that moment with such a phenomenally useless piece of information?

My answer surely sounded cynical: “Roger, Vung Tau. As usual, we shall restrict our landing to the runway.”

Do you remember the disruptive behavior of the Aardvark (”ZOT!“) that totally ruled the ants in the great comic strip, B.C.? That’s what our friends at Zaah Technologies are doing to a problem that’s been keeping America from being… well, America!

Yesterday, I mentioned the posts last week by Dave Winer and Doc Searls that really grabbed my attention because of dramatic coincidences of calendar and personality. My little company, ORGware LLC, would not exist without a blog post triggered by a dinner arranged by Dave Winer, three years ago tomorrow. On January 16, 2005, at 3 in the morning (yeah, like this one), my friend Harish Rao wrote The progressive movement is screwed (technologically, at least):

“Tonight, Nicco and I had dinner with Dave Winer. We talked about our podcasts, and a little bit about what we’re up to. Our conversation was at a cheap Italian place, over dinner. The conversation quickly turned to the core business of EchoDitto, and one of the main issues that we face:

“There is no good (i.e., comprehensive, inexpensive, and easy-to-use) web platform that does content management, blogging/podcasting, credit card processing/fundraising, bulk email management, event management, metrics & reporting, CRM, and voterfile management (yes, all of these things should be integrated) properly. Now, there are several solutions and vendors that have some of the pieces. But none of these solutions are comprehensive, and they certainly don’t play nice with one another (i.e., data sharing is non-existent).

“Frankly, we progressives are screwed unless we solve the technology problem (the lack of a decent integrated web platform), because technology should be the least of our worries. Topping it off, we don’t have a lot of time.

“I think we should create an inexpensive (i.e., open source) platform ASAP that draws the best features of all the products out there. And no, I don’t think that it’s bad business to open source software, especially in nascent markets.

“Who’s game?”

The comments were typical of the flash-and-flame-out nature of the blogosphere:

Long Post, but… my heart said, post it. It came to me just yesterday from OK. Already some smart people are commenting on it at our listserve. (It stretches yout topic a bit.) But, please, I want to encourage echo-ditto to GO FOR IT, create this open source magnet…
Submitted by geri on January 16, 2005 - 8:55pm

Harish–
Great point. Do you (and Nicco?) want to write something for Personal Democracy Forum elaborating on what you see the problems are with not having a comprehensive solution, and how none of the efforts currently underway to provide one do that?
Micah
Submitted by Micah Sifry on January 16, 2005 - 9:18pm

Micah -

I did write up a brief talking points memo (two-three) pages that discusses the issue. I’m too embarrased to put it up on this website (it’s very rough), but I will email it to you - send me your email address to MY_FIRST_NAME AT ECHODITTO.COM. I’d love to hear your comments.

Also, Dave suggested we put up a website to get a discussion of this issue going. I’m game for that; honestly, however, time is short, and we need to act quickly.
Submitted by HR Rao on January 16, 2005 - 10:28pm

Did anything come of this? Look around, and you know the answer. Please read all the comments. They will teach you all you need to know why there is yet no public utility to do what Dave asked for last week, almost three years later:

What the electorate needs is to hire someone to lead us for the four years between elections. It needs someone who will ground our collective behavior in something resembling reality, so we deal with the problems that are collectively in front of us:

1. The honor and prestige of our country (the equivalent of goodwill for companies, settle the wars we started, accept that we have to protect against terrorism, stop hyping it in terms of conventional warfare, that’s insulting).
2. The integrity of our homes (everything from disaster response to changing behavior on a global level to respond to global warming).
3. Caring for ourselves (health, education, protecting the Constitution).

…My advice to candidates going back to Dean was and is to start implementing the change you seek before the election, while you have the full attention of the electorate. Ask us to give money, not to buy ads, but to buy health insurance for 50,000 uninsured people in a particular state, so we can see how powerful we are collectively, how we can do good, starting right now. We yearn for this, to feel our muscles flex collectively, and individually to make a difference, not just in your hype, but in real terms. Hillary Clinton could have gotten up yesterday and said “There’s no time to waste. We can’t wait until January 2009 to solve the problems. Let’s start right now.”

Just one problem with all this exhortation: If we had the platform for this, we’d be doing Government By The People. Does anyone else feel the irony I experience every time a politician or strict constructionist or activist or enraged war widow exhorts us:

Tell the politicians this must stop!

Do something!

Don’t just sit there yelling at your TV!

WAKE UP AMERICA!!

Exactly what do the exhorters expect Americans to do? A million people marched in Washington before the Iraq war and no one noticed. Howard Dean’s real scream was “You Have The Power! You Have The Power!” Well, not exactly.

There are several missing components to the power that Dean tried to wish into being. There may be no demand for messages, but there’s plenty of demand for logistics. To paraphrase a great line, “What we’ve got here is a failure of logistics.”

• Logistics is a protected process to cast an informed vote for every American older than 17.
• Logistics is the objective counting of those votes.
• Logistics is the objective reporting of those votes, prospectively and as cast.
• Logistics is an analytical, not sports-minded, media, reporting substantive issues.
• In this century, Logistics is a comprehensive, voter-friendly way for people to aggregate their values and voices online, in advance of election day, and to roll up their determination into millions of auditable pledges to vote their values and conclusions.

There are a million reasons why no one has built this public utility for America yet. A few of the comments from Harish’s post 3 years ago explained why it is impossible. Here’s the best example of declaring the impossibility of building the only possible solution to saving the Republic:

No one company is ever going to provide the be-all, end-all solution for “content management, blogging/podcasting, credit card processing/fundraising, bulk email management, event management, metrics & reporting, CRM, and voterfile management”. Period. The problem space is just too big.

It’s especially not going to be provided by a small company which can’t throw hundreds or thousands of programmers for five years at the problem. (Not that a BigCo would have a better chance at producing a usable product — but they could at least write off the failure and survive.)

If you try to have one product that solves all those problems, what you’ll end up with is either a package that does one thing very well and a bunch of other things poorly, or that does everything with a kind of generalized mediocrity.

The solution is not to have a bunch of companies running around trying to build the One True Database. It is in developing protocols through which systems from different companies can interoperate and integrate. Then companies can build products that solve one problem within the problem space, and leave the rest to other vendors.

It amazes me how far behind the curve the nonprofit tech companies are with this.
— Submitted by Jason Lefkowitz on January 23, 2005 - 11:55am.

Hot Damn!! I love being told I can’t do something! The assumption, even among the diehard liberals on this list, is that there is no force in America willing and able to build the comprehensive system that Harish Rao was, and still is, asking for. Can that really be true?

No force in America? Wow.

Sitting in the Front Rao

Above, I mentioned the coincidence of calendar, precisely three years having passed and little to show for it. Last Friday I sat down with the coincidence of personality, my friend Harish Rao. Those of us who poured our hearts into the Dean campaign, especially on the 2nd floor at 60 Farrel Street in South Burlington, VT, always have time for each other. Harish and his colleagues at EchoDitto are therefore willing to listen to my rants once in a while. It had been a year and a half since I’d assured Harish that we were still working on the platform that had, even then, been missing for so long, and that I’d get back to him when we were close to ready. That was last Friday.

Since then, I’ve worked my way through the justification that a single monolithic solution is indeed necessary, at least for now, and that a properly motivated, Goldilocks-type, just-right-sized team is the only way to get it done. I’m pleased that the ORGware platform is just now good enough to criticize (as the legendary Alan Kay said of the Mac OS in 1985). We have finished the heavy lifting and the answer to every demand I’ve seen is done or in our grasp. Most testers say that ORGware even has an answer to some needs not yet expressed, but will be, once people get through the feature set they thought they wanted. Users are funny that way.

I’ve talked a lot about ORGware the last three years, but never revealed our secret weapon. Zaah Technologies, Inc. Part of the reason is that there has been a procession of programmers and teams enthusiastic about the promise of ORGware, but none have delivered the resources required to build what was needed. Zaah seemed too good to be true, so I’ve withheld my excitement. If you’ve never heard of Zaah Technologies, don’t be surprised. They provide really big solutions for really big companies moving really big chunks of data and images around and making it all make sense to we poor users who have to make sense of it.

Zaah may process more photographs than anyone else on the planet, but you’ve not heard of them, because they do it for all those drugstores and gift shops, helping Mom & Dad celebrate another milestone in Jack or Jill’s life. You know, zillions of real people, not like we few Flickr users, so skilled but oh so marginal, compared to the big world out there. Check out Zaah’s portfolio for a glimpse into this company that Doc Searls concluded, is “the real deal.”

If you look on their home page, you’ll see that Zaah is incubating our little company, Open Resource Group/ORGware and just one other, StarStyle, the people who sell you the clothing and bling the stars wear on TV.

Over a year ago, Maurice Freedman and Sandy Fliderman of Zaah Technologies agreed to work with us to build the ORGware platform that otherwise would never see the life of day. It hasn’t been easy, but it looks like we really are close to a set of Democracy Logistics Good Enough To Criticize.

A True Fable:

I was recently introduced to Riane Eisler’s seminal work, “The Chalice and the Blade“. Isabel Allende described it this way:

Some books are like revelations, they open the spirit to unimaginable possibilities. The Chalice and the Blade is one of those magnificent key books that can transform us and…initiate fundamental changes in the world. With the most passionate eloquence, Riane Eisler proves that the dream of peace is not an impossible utopia.

The book reports that most of Europe lived in peaceful, undefended villages before a series of invasions from the area of the Caucassas mountains. Before the invasion, as far back as the archeological record reveals, these societies were matriarchies. After the invasions, Europe became a patriarchy, enthralled by competition and conquest and male superiority. Eisler had suggested that these models of peacefulness are yet attainable, if we can back away from the Dominant Father model.

The Horse Race vs. the Village

Last Wednesday, Dave Winer wrote What if our political process became conscious? Doc Searls declares it to be “the best post on politics I’ve read in a long while. It concludes”,

I’m not expecting very much from people who live “Inside the Beltway.” I don’t live there, never have, don’t even like visiting the place. To me it’s much like the arrogance of Silicon Valley. You can’t pop out every four years get us to vote for you and then go back into your nest. Politics belongs to all of us, in this country, the people are the government. We really lost our way, now it’s time to come back. It’s the change that’s happening in everything, decentralization, disintermediation. Obama speaks of a plurality, his campaign isn’t about a mere election, it’s about changing the way we do things.

My advice to candidates going back to Dean was and is to start implementing the change you seek before the election, while you have the full attention of the electorate. Ask us to give money, not to buy ads, but to buy health insurance for 50,000 uninsured people in a particular state, so we can see how powerful we are collectively, how we can do good, starting right now. We yearn for this, to feel our muscles flex collectively, and individually to make a difference, not just in your hype, but in real terms. Hillary Clinton could have gotten up yesterday and said “There’s no time to waste. We can’t wait until January 2009 to solve the problems. Let’s start right now.”

Maybe she won’t get elected, but getting us organized now would make it more likely.

JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

See how that works??

You really should read all of Dave’s post and Doc’s last 3 paragraphs stressing the difference between elections and governance, quoting a point Dave made earlier in his post:

What the electorate needs is to hire someone to lead us for the four years between elections. It needs someone who will ground our collective behavior in something resembling reality…

In a conversation around this stage in the last presidential election, Phil Windley pointed out that democracies are about two things: elections and governance. We care disproportionately about the former, because elections make great stories, and are easy to explain with sports and war metaphors. But elections are how we hire those who run our governments. We need to care about what they’ll do in reality. Or what we’ll do in reality. The idea isn’t just to change how elections happen, but how governance works as well.

Easier said than done. But we need to do it.

In an email last week, a friend suggested that maybe the problem is that our society lacks the vocabulary and values to operate as a village rather than a sports event. Perhaps there’s a framework within which we can deploy ORGware to address the issues that Dave Winer and Doc Searls care so much about:

What if there were a council of remarkable women? By appropriately utilizing the natural talents and aptitudes of each gender, we strive to make sense of a world gone crazy.

A significant part of the impetus for such an initiative could be based on a broad consensus of the workability of the “partnership model” proposed by Riane Eisler, in the international bestseller, “The Chalice and the Blade” back in 1987. In this ground breaking work, Eisler suggests that much of the archeological evidence of prehistory (cave paintings, artifacts, etc) were interpreted by early scholars in an intellectual and philosophical atmosphere predisposed by their own cultural background to interpret their findings as a confirmation of the accepted view of Man as a dominating, warring animal. Eisler does a remarkable job of showing that the same physical evidence can be re-examined without that pre-conceived view of human nature and a very different picture emerges. The picture is of a partnership society, with men and women working together for the good of their families and their societies, doing best what each gender and each person does.

Such a council of wise women, supported by many other men and women, like minded and desperate to see America, as a world leader, could take up the mantle of caring about the continuance of humanity on our beloved earth and let it be known to our political institutions that we want them to do the same.

Sounds like an idea whose time has come. How do we know its time has come? We’ve tried every other idea and none of them work.

Doc Searls and a few other acolytes of flight were guests of Intel for a ride on the Zero-G flight experience. Here’s Doc, presumably praying to Saint Spew, the patron Saint of Puke, before the flight:

I never knew a military aviator who enjoyed zero or negative G forces. In fact, most engines’ oil pumps are not specified for more than 1 negative G. Not that it kept us from trying zero Gs in a C-130, while otherwise bored, flying from one place in Vietnam to a similar-looking other place. In those halcyon days, each aircraft dashboard sported a quaint plexiglass map holder, about 6″ by 9″. Meant to hold a Jeppesen approach plate book, it was one half of a terrific Zero-G indicator. The other half was a pencil. I kid you not.

The trick was to drop the pencil into the map holder and start the one maneuver that’s obvious after a few moments’ reflection. In order to attain the maximum weightless time, you want to spend as much time as possible pushing the controls forward into the zero G range. You could do this starting from a high altitude and just push the controls forward, but you’ll get more weightless time if you start at a medium altitude at high speed and then pull the aircraft up at a couple of positive Gs to set up for the negative G phase. From the nose-up position, the pilot pushes the controls forward until the Zero G state is reached. That’s where the pencil in its lucite cage came in.

I’m sure the folks at Zero-G Corp have more sophisticated instruments, but none more direct or accurate; or more analogue. But some subtlety is required. Surely unlike the Zero G 727’s instruments, as the pencil rises from the bottom of the holder, one must gently release a bit of the forward pressure, since it obviously required a slightly negative G force to move the pencil off the bottom of the map holder. I describe this distinction so my pilot friends don’t point out my oversights.

That’s it. Just keep the pencil in the center of the map holder as long as possible. In the Zero Gravity Corp’s Boeing 727, that lasts about 30 seconds. In the C-130, we probably pushed the limits a little further, though we did not have the range of airspeed available to their 727. Here’s how the profile looks using their 727:

It’s really a matter of the airspeed and altitude available to you. In an SR-71, I’ll bet you could get close to a minute of weightlessness, by starting at 60,000 feet and Mach 2.5, arcing up to 85,000 feet or so and pulling it out when pointed straight down at about 35,000 feet, which is where most real men would be staining their tutu.

So that’s it. 2/3 of the people “lose it”, literally, on the Vomit Comet. And that’s why I never want to experience Zero Gs again. Few smart people do it twice.