Tim Oren's Due Diligence

A Family History Interlude

Back in the mid-90s I self-published a book "Dearest Sattie: Civil War Letters of Capt. Charles Oren, 5th USCT", which as you might suspect from the title is the war correspondence of an ancestor, who was an officer of black troops KIA at Petersburg. It found its way into the bibliography of at least one work on related topics, and as a result about once a year someone tracks me down looking for a copy. The original stock has been exhausted long ago, but thanks the advent of net-based publishing, I've now got it back in print in a new edition, including two additional letters and further family and historical background. So once the Google crawler comes through here again, there's an answer to the question of how to get a copy of "Dearest Sattie":

You order a copy of "Dearest Sattie" at lulu.com, right here.

Sherlock

(Spoiler alert!)

Thanks to the good folks at Cubachi, I found out about PBS' scheduled airing of the BBC's reinterpretation of Conan Doyle's great detective, Sherlock Holmes, just in time to catch its first West Coast showing. I was quite prepared to hate it. As a long time fan of the original canon, one who regards the early Jeremy Brett portrayals as definitive, the notion of modernist reinterpretations (even those set in Victorian times) makes me twitchy. Instead, I adored "Sherlock".

The one word for this version of the canon is 'wit'. Not too surprising, since its producers - Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis - are doing double time from managing the current version of the venerable "Dr. Who" franchise (where they labor under the shadow of Tom Baker). The current Holmes version pays due homage to the original, from the obvious (the initial title "A Study in Pink" borrowed from the "Study in Scarlet" novella, along with several of its plot points, the note perfect first Watson/Holmes encounter) to the subtle (the murderous cabbie is no longer an American, but his innocent and bemused passenger is). For those familiar with the canon, "Sherlock" makes great play with things in common with Victorian times (Afghan wars, the maze of London) and those in contrast (the optics of two single men living together, drug related mores). Watch for Holmes' deductions to run aground on "Harry".

Moffat and Gattis also amuse by importing tropes of modern suspense and action. We have the obligatory scene in a deserted parking garage, plenty of crime scene tape, and mad dashes through traffic. If there's risk here, it's in too liberal quoting from current culture, particularly technology. Blogs, mobiles, notebook computers and GPS, it's all there, and could feel very dated in ten years. On the other hand, the blur of 120 years conceals the reality that Conan Doyle did the same. Submarines, telephones, the complexities of the railway timetables, and the latest pop psychology were all pressed into service to keep the Victorian readers of The Strand engaged enough to miss the often enormous plot holes in the canon. "Sherlock" recapitulates both the holes and the contemporary references, and is a fitting tribute to the original. It will be very interesting to see what sort of historical patina it may accumulate in 30 or so years.

If you missed the first episode, PBS has it available for viewing on the net (this link will rot) for a few weeks. I'm planning on catching the next two episodes in real time as well.

Review: Joel Kotkin's "The Next Hundred Million"

(This blog has been suffering its usual fate during California's spring. Neglect, that is. I've been out putting some miles on my hiking boots, thereby completing my rehab from getting the metal out of my leg. I'll try to unload a few things from the blogging queue before heading East to Virginia for vacation in a couple of weeks.)

I first noticed Joel Kotkin through bumping into links to his regular Forbes column. That led me on to the New Geography blog, where he's a frequent poster. A feed well worth following for those, like myself, looking for data and analytic points of view on location options.

For any who follow Kotkin at all, the main theses in this book - subtitled "America in 2050" will come as no surprise:

• Unlike other developed nations, America is still growing its population, and this is a good thing if we take advantage of it.


• The suburbs and exurbs are alive and well, will continue to prosper from the growing population, and are shifting from strictly bedroom communities to multi-faceted hubs in their own right.


• There is little sign of an aging population moving back to the urban cores.


• Locales that welcome development are growing and prospering, while those with regulatory land rationing stagnate.


• The American Heartland may be poised for a resurgence, due to overall population growth coupled with regulatory ossification of the coastal states.


• Race is diminishing as a factor in American life, while class and social mobility remain important.


• The biggest challenge facing America is finding work for the growing population which permits class mobility, while retaining the benefits of healthy seniors who wish to continue to work. The biggest threats to that future are centralized planning and overcommitment to foreign adventures.

If you're a believer in American exceptionalism, this is all good red meat. If you're an adherent of the 'New Urbanist" school, you'll hate it. What makes this book worth having, even if you've already ingested Kotkin's ideas elsewhere, is his exhaustive footnoting of analysis and forecasts, including both primary demographic and other data, and more accessible secondary sources. That's a luxury tough to fit into the blog post or opinion column formats, and if you're doing your own analysis, you'll almost certainly find something new in Kotkin's massive bibliography.

This also serves to highlight another valuable distinction of Kotkin: His work is largely descriptive and evidence based, grounded in both demographic fate and observable aggregate behaviors of people, rather than polls and theories. When he uses 'is' or 'will be', he's earned that formulation by observation. Contrast the futurist schools whose works are studded with 'should' and 'must', and are willing to lend their credibility to those who would use coercion to make it come out their way. (I consider it highly ironic that while 'progressives' of a century ago agitated to get the working classes out of tenements, those with the same label today seem determined to put them back there.)

Kotkin builds his theses of (sub)urbanism, ethnic blending, class, and Heartland resurgence brick by brick. In the his final chapter, titled the same as the book, he both sums up and inevitably ventures into politically-freighted territory. While he's no friend to GWB-style interventionism, and repeatedly cites the election of Obama as a positive in the decline of race consciousness, his conclusions on demographic outcomes, and what can be done to benefit from continuing American growth, are all at odds with the instincts and policies of the current administration, and the nanny-state Democrat majorities in DC and Sacramento.

Retirement and Relocation Data Sources

Now for something a bit off the beaten path for this blog. A couple of years ago, during my enforced period of inactivity, I began a personal due diligence project that I mentioned in passing: Building a database of information on potential retirement spots. With California continuing its descent into a nanny state tax hell for both business and individuals, that information may get used sooner than later, so I've taken advantage of the current recuperation (which is going well) to revisit and update that database. I'm sure I'm not the only one engaged in such a thought process, so for those who are starting or in the middle of the job and find they way here through Google, here is an annotated list of some of the more generally applicable data sources that I've used, roughly sorted by category. General caveat: I am a spreadsheet-wielding, database wonk, computer scientist and systems analyst trained, libertarian venture capitalist and manager. The types of data and their application are biased accordingly. Season to taste.

A Child's First Necronomicon

This is an absolute hoot. You've got to wonder what HPL would have made of the 21st century.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh Wgah'nagl fhtan! Via Gormogons.

The Roving Eye: Power Sources, The Future of Tanning, Amazing Mazes

Aluminum smelters and data centers. Are alike in needed abundant and reliable electrical power. So the Columbia River valley is growing a crop of server farms. The Economist article notes that virtualization technology can be applied to migrate processing to where the juice is cheaper, as well as optimize the number of servers powered up to handle the given workload. Indeed, virtualization management startups are being reflagged as 'green' as fast as the PPT decks and web sites can be rewritten. Remapping the network connections, storage and other resources used by virtualized processes could sink any savings into a sea of management overhead if not optimized as well.

RIP, Robert Asprin. John Scalzi reports the passing of the well-known fantasy author. His Thieves' World was one of the more enjoyable multi-author sword and sorcery creations. Some few us also remember him as "Yang the Nauseating" in days gone by. I can think of far worse ways to go than on a couch, reading an SF novel.

All that time video-gaming was not wasted. At least if you want to join the Army or Marines and use the real thing. Designers of weapons and other interactive systems can now take facility with game controllers, computers, and networks for granted. We've come a long ways from the days when we tracked down (still abundant) naive users to try out our latest designs.

Hope for the pasty white? Perhaps for future generations: While I was paying attention to other things, the genetics behind human skin pigmentation were figured out. Seems that crosses between the melanin endowed and those less so 'average down', towards the paleface end. Not to fear, given the worldwide genome pool, a few more generations of 747s, migration and out-marriage, and everyone will come with a decent base tan pre-installed. It will be a more boring but perhaps more peaceful world, and fewer engineers will have to brave carcinoma to lose their hacker's pallor.

Speaking of microloans for mobiles. Here's a report by Kevin Kelly on a talk by Iqbal Quadir, founder of the original loans for village and family mobile phones program in Bangladesh.

Concrete Spaghetti. You think the MacArthur Maze is a mess? Check out these feats of civil engineering in Japan.

What I've Read On My Involuntary Vacation

Those who've followed this blog for a few months know that I broke a leg around the end of January and have since been recuperating. I'm driving again, but getting off crutches must await regaining flexibility in the ankle of the injured leg. Rehab is under way - all too slowly.

I didn't realize how much time was being occupied by outdoor recreation and hobbies, and other activities requiring mobility, until I suddenly had it all back on my hands. That's resulted in more blogging activity here, but I've also devoted a lot of it to catching up on the reading queue, expanding into some topics that I might not otherwise have tackled, and beginning a few projects that are on the personal 'bucket list'. For your possible amusement, my 'vacation' reading list so far:

Rereading the entirety of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. In the hospital, while more or less under the influence of a Dilaudid drip. Somehow this was perfectly compatible with the adventures of Miles.

Reread all 20 volumes of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels, one after another. Could be the Vicodin helped keep me on track through the entire sea-borne adventure and comedy of manners. Sailing, sailing. When I graduated to plain old Tylenols, I took on some new material.

Timothy Hornyak, "Loving The Machine". Robotics and culture in Japan. I reviewed it here.

Walter Russell Mead, "God and Gold". How the maritime economies of the Netherlands, Britain and the United States came to global power. Not as good as his "Special Providence", but superior to Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" which at times treats the outcome as just a big accident. Yes, I believe in American exceptionalism.

Robert Zubrin, "Energy Victory". Why we should be investing in flex-fuel transportation. Reviewed here.

Neil Shubin, "Your Inner Fish". Human evolution and developmental biology, though the lenses of paleontology and modern genomics. Good sauce for evolution deniers. Found via Clive Thompson and Ole Eichhorn.

Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer, eds., "Counterpoints". Essays from the New Criterion magazine. I had bought this largely for the political and foreign affairs related essays. I had already read through them and put the book on the back burner before the fatal day. The remaining 'free bonus' cultural pieces turned out to be a welcome and stimulating goulash of things I might never have otherwise noticed.

Ira Brodsky, "The History of Wireless". How you got your personal Star Trek communicator, a few centuries early. Reviewed here.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water". The travels of a young Briton in 1930s Europe from Holland to Rumania, just as the Nazis were coming to power. Written many years after the fact, and well salted with cultural details. A fortuitous train wreck of travel writing and history. This pick was due to one of the "Counterpoints" essays.

Jonah Goldberg, "Liberal Fascism". While Goldberg spends too much time apologizing for his analysis, and goes off on some tangents sparked by his conservative cultural views, this is a useful antidote to the highly selective memory of the Left. In an odd sort of synchronicity, I was reading this book in parallel with Fermor, and reached Goldberg's reference to Fermor's visit with a young German Communist who had just converted to Nazism, while I was only pages away from that scene in "Time of Gifts".

Michael Yon, "Moment of Truth in Iraq. In the autographed edition. As those who follow his blog know, Yon is a war reporter who doesn't hunker down in the Green Zone compiling reports from stringers of unknown loyalties. He's been out on the lines, in the sh**, and has the combat photographs to prove it. This is based on the experiences reported on the blog, but isn't just a compilation. He's added some details that were likely too sensitive at the time, but also rewritten to provide lessons learned and a narrative backbone. Yon is brutally critical of what he sees as bungled efforts in the invasion and aftermath, and thereby gains credibility for his current assessment. There's a good review (not my own) here.

Still in progress, I have:

Rereading all of Shakespeare, for the first time in at least thirty years. I'm through most of the Historicals and have started nibbling at the Comedies.

A volume of European history from 1648 to 1815, back story for O'Brian and also Fermor's travels in the former Habsburg Empire.

A recent personal finance book, along with rereading some I've used in the past, as a review on my own planning.

Got any suggestions? Put them in the comments, which I've opened up for once.

The Roving Eye: Bad Debt Decoded, Stories From The Front, Is No Media Cow Sacred?

Debt Crunch In Plain English. Many of the indirect consequences of the subprime mortgage meltdown have become so arcane and obscure that investors can be surprised when a bit of not-so-prime toxin turns up in a part of their portfolios they thought was safe. DLA Piper has a nice page with a (fairly) plain English explanation of the auction rate securities market meltdown.

No Editor, No Spin The US Army has put up a fascinating archive of debriefings of personnel returning from Iraq and other combat locations. (Click GWOT Oral History Program on the sidebar). There are hundreds of items from the top generals all the way to front line infantrymen. I've only dabbled in the archive, but there's some fascinating stuff there, like this story of the Thunder Run into Baghdad. This should be incredibly valuable for the historian, or for any pundit who's actually willing to read something from those on the ground before spouting off. Anyone up for correlating these reports against the MSM stories of the time?

Last As It Was First. The book was the first medium to go 'mass', back in the day of Gutenberg. Ironically, the advent of the net and the Long Tail phenomenon typified by Amazon, along with well-entrenched habits for print consumption, may have provided an Indian summer for the medium. But the distribution chain was in trouble, first the independent book shops, and now the big boys are being squeezed. (Update: More at the WaPo.) Along with all the time displaced to reading Web pages, we may finally have a successful electronic book with the Kindle. In common with vested interests from other old media, old style authors have noticed, and are screeching about the end of the world as we know it. Labels Studios Publishers are being squeezed as well, and cutting back on their risk-reducing activities of fronting advances to authors and absorbing returns from the channel, leading author Roger Simon to wonder "what's the point of the publisher?"

Sea-borne Owl. This place needs a Friday animal post occasionally. Aw, isn't that cute?? Every carrier group needs a licensed falconer on board.

Review: Ira Brodsky's "The History of Wireless"

I first got into wireless in my early teens. Kit-built an Allied 'Knight Kit' regenerative receiver. Then the obligatory Heathkit superhet shortwave set. Held an amateur ticket for a while, and scratch-built a small transmitter. All vacuum tubes, of course. Bread-boarded a few transistor circuits as well.

Wireless technology was still fairly transparent back then. Once you'd built that much gear, you knew the basic designs. If a neighbor or relative brought over a defunct radio or TV for the kid to mess with, it would have big fat wires that you could easily trace to figure out the circuits and deduce what was probably cooked. A multimeter and surplus oscilloscope were sufficient test gear. Tubes unplugged and could be tested separately. More basics and a lot of the history were available from ARRL publications, my father's old textbooks, even Boy Scout merit badge materials. The whole field of consumer level wireless was then about 50 years old, and much of its history still featured in general science texts.

A kid or curious adult interested in wireless today has a much harder task. Take apart the most easily accessible sample - a dead mobile phone - and you've got a bunch of parts opaque to all but experts. Just try to figure out a RAKE filter by staring at a few IC packages and a multilayer circuit board. With the advent of digital signal processing, even getting a start in comprehension involves understanding a very complex two-way system. No one bothers fixing the gadgets. If they flake out, they're eWaste. As far as a beginner building one, just forget it.

The existence of wireless is taken for granted, being over a hundred years old, with the start of effective use now beyond living memory. You may get some mention of twitching frog's legs and spark gaps in a science text these days, but the path from there to the Star Trek communicator you can get for nearly free at the local mobile store has become obscure.

Ira Brodsky's recent History of Wireless is meant to fill the gap between initial discovery and today's mobiles that (along with the Internet) are remaking global communications. The author is a long time technologist and consultant in the mobile phone arena, but he reaches all the way back to the discovery of electricity itself to begin his story. From there we go through the interaction between electric and magnetic fields, the first instances of wireless transmission, and into the vacuum tube era that made it practical for everyday use.

Review: Timothy Hornyak's "Loving the Machine"

This book about robots in Japanese culture has been out since late 2006, so I'm coming to it somewhat late. My goal with the book was to fill in background of one of the major non-US innovators in robotics development, both in both cultural and technological terms.

The book succeeds admirably in framing the cultural context for one type of robotics in Japan. While beginning with an OED definition of robots inclusive of non-humanoid 'bots, Hornyak self-admittedly spends almost all of his attention on anthropomorphic devices, which he refers to as 'real robots'. In fact, the swath through humanoid representations is so broad that it includes pure fictions such as Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) and Gundam juxtaposed with actual mechanisms. The device succeeds well, however, in keeping the story moving in the direction of the book's central thesis: The cultural backing for humanoid representations of devices in Japan will mesh with actual social needs to drive robotics development in a more anthropomorphic direction than in the West. Hornyak succeeds in building a solid case for this cultural framing of bots in Japan.