"Alarm fatigue": is the Facoder a solution?

A recent Boston Globe story related how a patient died at Mass General because various monitors were either beeping and unheeded, or had been turned off.

When alarms are going off constantly for non-critical matters, you become desensitized to them, or even interfere with their function just to have some peace and quiet.  Then, when the real critical matter comes up, you ignore it, and your patient dies, or the reactor overheats, or the train goes through a switch and crashes.

To improve things, you'd have to decide ahead of time which things are critical, and which aren't, and make sure the alarms reflected this priority.  Only a few problems would qualify: the mind can't pay attention to more than a couple of things at once.  You'd need to make sure less-critical but still important problems get bumped up for investigation periodically.  But if one of those "non-critical" problems then causes a death, you, the alarm designer, are in real trouble. And you know that somewhere, at some time, that will happen. What really matters is not what makes sense, but what you can be sued for.

The problem, however, was solved years ago by David E. H. Jones, who wrote a wonderful column for New Scientist called "Daedalus", about bizarre yet plausible devices created by a company called DREADCO.  I have a collection of these columns, long out of print, called The Inventions of Daedalus, which includes a column on the Facoder, from 1973. My copy is not inscribed, but I remember it being given to me by my old friend Dave Platt, with whom I have recently reconnected.  Thanks, Dave!

Here's the principle of the facoder.

Unless they have some autism-spectrum disorder people respond to human faces with subtlety and complexity. They instantly gauge moods, even with limited cues. Even simple caricature faces can convey these emotions.

Using the example of a control panel for a complex chemical plant, Daedalus proposed a "facoder": a display of schematic faces, instead of dials or other readouts. As a specific system started to malfunction, the face would look more and more alarmed, instantly attracting the attention of the monitoring engineer. The entire mood of the plant could be gauged with a quick glance across the display, much as a performer gauges the mood of an audience (this is my analogy, not Daedalus's, BTW). A bank of happy faces would be the reward of good management.

The same thing could be installed a a nurse's station, with faces standing in  for patient vital signs. In a hospital setting, unlike the chemical plant or nuclear power plant, these would be competing with real patient faces, so it would have to be used with due consideration for the human desire for emotional shortcuts.

I'm actually surprised some version of the facoder hasn't come to pass.  I think its time has come.

If commuting is so terrible, why do people do it?

In his Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer points out that when they weight house cost and commuting time, people tend to overvalue extra features of the house and underestimate the misery of extra commuting. He cites one estimate that a person with an hour commute (I presume driving) has to earn 40 percent more money than someone who walks to work to be as satisfied with life.

That's because driving is a gigantic waste of time. No wonder people talk on the phone, text, and try to use their computers while driving. And they have plenty of time for it, if they buy a big house in the exurbs that is guaranteed to have nothing much anywhere near it.

The choice for me was obvious.  I live in a small house close in to town rather than a larger house elsewhere, and have bicycled to various jobs over the past decade.  We own one vehicle.  I loathe commuting. But this choice is not obvious for most people.  Maybe they don't like the small space:  believe me, every time my growing children visit a Midwestern relative with a gigantic suburban house, I hear about it.

But commuting isn't only soul-sucking.  It's expensive.  You have to buy another car just for getting to work (think about how weird that really is), and then pay to maintain it.  According to the the H+T Affordability Index some people are touting, my choice of location may even seem reasonably priced.

But when you fiddle the metrics to show that you're doing things the smart way after all, it starts to seem a bit more like a Smugness Index.  You have to beware of that particular metric.

Now, someday I may need to get a job that requires an auto commute.  I've certainly interviewed for them.  What will I do if I have to take one?

Get a travel mug and become best friends with the reporters on NPR, I suspect.  We do what we must.  But my Smugness Index is going to go into the toilet.

Classical architecture standing on one leg

I recently wrote a story in which one of the characters, a woman named Andrea, is an architect who has some distinct positions on the history of Classical architecture. My workshop colleague, Steve Popkes, suggested that this particular potted history overloaded the story, and, on revision, I decided he was right.  The story is about public spaces and some particularly high-tech ways of formulating them, not about architecture per se.

Steve also suggested I put it in the blog, and I decided he was right about that too.  Read it here, because you won't be able to read it there.

Andrea had always insisted that the original Greek style had never travelled as well as people thought.  It was developed with foursquare structures supported by forests of columns, with a big cult statue inside.  Sacrifices and divination rituals took place in the open air out front:  once you’d stuck in enough  columns to hold up the roof, there wasn’t a lot of room left.

The Romans had conquered Greece, taken their graduate students as slaves to teach them literature and history, and mushed up their architecture to spread as a paste over triumphal arches, circular arenas where people were murdered for entertainment, and vaulted concrete baths.

Then people had to let the whole thing slide for a while.  The one thing the sight of Classical architecture did tell you was that there was a powerful state around, with some taxing power.  When the Renaissance decided the previous thousand years or so had been a big mistake—a horrendous job, a terrible marriage—and demanded a do-over, they fell on Classical remains and the notes of Vitruvius and then wrote their own stories about them in stone:  architectural fanfic.  Through analysis and experiment they created tight ratios of proportion:  column height, arch width, bay spacing.  Mess with the ratios, and whatever you built became a drunken slur.  Like any language created rather than evolved, it said some things much better than others, and some concepts were inexpressible.

The following Baroque loved the implied hierarchy of the language, the austere discipline not so much.  They stretched the triumphal arch into entire cathedrals, cut the pediments into pieces, and covered everything with swollen swags and simpering cherubs.  As long as the pastry cart included an acanthus leaf or two, they were happy.

After some screwing around with Gothic, Chinese, Egyptian, and Indian pastiches, there had been a renewed period of more academic revival--not stringy-haired fanboys scribbling late at night but grad students grimly bucking for tenure with heavily footnoted articles—that had dominated the offices of government departments, banks, and other bureaucratic institutions across the European and American national states.

Then it ended altogether, and everyone forgot about it, except as random details on suburban office parks and drivethrough banks…and except for Andrea.

The problem of loyalty in District 9, Avatar, and Alice

Loyalty is an essential human motivation that has always played a major role in fiction. Divergences between different logics of loyalty, as between friendship and family, or between military duty and personal faith, are major power sources for compelling plot and character.

So why has every recent science fiction or fantasy movie I've seen not only ignored any possible conflict of loyalties, but seemingly denied the very existence of loyalty as a virtue, or even a meaningful personality trait? Note that I don't see a lot of SF movies, except when accompanying offspring.

Let's take a look at three examples:  District 9, Avatar, and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

District 9 I've gone off on before. But to summarize, Wikus, a resettlement bureaucrat, has an evil job. That's not so bad, even a good setup for some personal growth.  Something awful happens to him. In his struggle for survival, he kills many of his former office friends and colleagues, without any sign that this has any effect on him at all.  Then he betrays a new friend and kidnaps that friend's son in a desperate attempt to save himself. He does miss his wife, so he betrays only two of three of his loyalties. The new friend is the worst, because it sits right at the narrative spot where Wikus would build a new connection and find his true loyalties--but his loyalty remains himself.

In Avatar, Sully, a former marine turned mercenary, bonds with two other former marines turned mercenaries: his commander, Col. Quaritch, and a tough female pilot, Chacon. That they are all mercenaries, not serving military officers, does make some of the subsequent betrayals easier to understand: mercenaries certainly have loyalties, but they often get chewed up in the incompatabilities between the military and commercial ethos. (Mercenaries are popular heroes of a certain type of SF I used to really like to read, but it was implicit in those stories that military ethics are superior to commercial ethics, a point I'd rather see argued than asserted. In Avatar, both are found wanting.)

Sully falls for the native people the military force was hired to eliminate, and turns against his former colleagues.  He switches his loyalty to the Nav'i, and works to fit into their status hierarchy. Plot spoiler here.  Once he switches loyalties he and Chacon kill many of the mercenaries, without any sense that either of them ever cared about or was friends with any of the people they served with.

Of course, Sully's grotesquely incompetent military decisions lead to the deaths of huge numbers of his new buddies as well. Pyrrhic victory comes, but just barely, and through luck.  His new tribe properly should hang him from the nearest giant glowing tree once all their dead family members are sent on to the Great Server. But that's another story.

But at no point is there any conflict of loyalties, despite the fact that the human race seems to be facing some gigantic crisis that the mining company and mercenaries are here to help solve, however corrupt and incompetent they may be at it.  These are desperate people, and desperate people don't usually behave well. My children liked it.

Finally Tim Burton's Narnia remake, Alice in Wonderland.  Alice is the young unmarried daughter of an impoverished widow in late Victorian Britain. She is slated to be engaged to a dim but wealthy man. In case you were wondering, that's actually the happy ending of many novels of the period, but here it starts things off. 

Within Wonderland Alice herself has no problems of loyalty.  But consider the bandersnatch, serving the Red Queen.  His loyalty is easily turned: just give him back the eye that got gouged out when he was trying to capture you.  You'd think a beast like that would at least have the virtue of devotion to duty.

Then, when Alice returns, all is well. Despite the fact that she has learned nothing and brought back nothing from her adventures, she can dispense with marriage, with family, and with everything else, and make her fortune the way late-Victorian adventuresses so often did:  by finding China on a map.  "Yes, just look on the other side of the fold". Why didn't she just decide to discover America? This is too dumb to be called a spoiler.

But now I'm whinging on something else altogether. I'm not saying that the loyalty you are discarding is right, or deserves to be kept. Should Alice give up a chance at happiness and marry a wealthy but tedious lord so that her mother doesn't end up in the workhouse? Should Sully help despoil Pandora so his own race can survive? Should Wikus let himself get killed just because he has a honking ugly but magic hand?

Hey, it's fiction, there are no wrong answers. But do you value a character who does not show loyalty? I'd never thought about what an important personal virtue that is until I saw its lack. Is it any wonder than none of these characters have close personal friends?

As a writer, all I can do is the opposite.

Steam engine time for intelligence?

Friend and helpful commenter Jim Cambias comments, on my speculations on whether the highest possible intelligence in any era is getting higher or not, that

it seems to be steam-engine time for intelligence. We're smart, but so are cephalopods, dolphins, crows, parrots, raccoons, and of course the great apes. Humans just got across the finish line first. It's not surprising, really. Darwinian selection puts a kind of "ratchet" on random variations in brainpower, so I'd expect the trend to be generally in the smart direction. Especially since there's no "half a wing" problem with intelligence -- being smarter than the average annelid is just as much an advantage as being able to master language and tool use.

 Is the smartest example of any phylum smarter now than in past eras? How gains in smartness transfer across great extinction boundaries isn't completely obvious. Being smart is no defense against getting hit by an asteroid, or having the seas turn anoxic, or whatever global cause kills almost everything. The smartest don't survive in that case--though those that do may gain some advantage in the disordered environment following the catastrophe. So I'm on the fence about whether you'd always expect the next era to have higher peak smartness than the previous one.  If you drop primates out of the analysis as an outlier, are the remaining peak smartnesses higher than they were in the Cretaceous?

Are we really in a world ripe with smartness? If so, is there any reason for it aside from ratchet effects?

But who are you going to shoot at?

As I've mentioned before, I'm pretty much a wimpy blue stater who favors gun rights. Not that I'm likely to own a gun myself, though my teenage son learned to shoot at summer camp and likes to go to the shooting range. Believe me, that's a real Cambridge conversation starter. But the recent Michigan militia arrests have led me to consider how useful guns actually are.

I believe they are a constitutional right, but I have trouble regarding guns as some kind of a means of preserving political freedom.  Say you oppose the recent healthcare reform bill. Great.  I happen to be a wimpy blue stater with a free-market bias, so I might even agree with your position.

Say you even think the whole thing was an incredible abuse of government power, a creeping coup, an example of what elected representatives do when they start to ignore poll numbers--something you used to encourage them to do, by the way.

Anyway, the government is illegitimate, and its actions illegal. Fortunately, you have guns.

OK, great. Who are you going to shoot at? And if you just threaten someone, who do you threaten and what do you want them to do?

Politically motivated people with guns in our society are like drivers caught in traffic. They have immense theoretical power, but that power is chained by circumstance. It doesn't matter how much horsepower you have, or how big your vehicle is.  You're stuck, watching the traffic light creep a little bit closer with every passing minute....

You just hate that damn traffic! That's the problem you want to get rid of. But no matter how many other cars you smash into, it doesn't seem to go away.

So, while in movies, a tattered but proud resistance with comfortable facilities in a remote area holds off an oppressive government whose sexually perverse agents obligingly wear ominous black whipcord uniforms so you can pick them out, here we sit instead, listening to those nattering idiots on drive time radio, wishing we could just shoot someone, anyone.

It's enough to make you turn to fiction.

How likely is intelligence?

On The Big Questions, Steve Landsburg addresses a perennial SF question:  how likely is evolution to evolve? He quotes a review by an astroscientist Charley Lineweaver of a book called Intelligent Life in the Universe, where Lineweaver eloquently denounces what he calls the "Planet of the Apes Hypothesis", or convergentism.

In the movies "Planet of the Apes", humans are wiped out, and various great apes evolve toward intelligence, making it seem inevitable that intelligence will evolve.

Lineweaver cites what he calls five natural experiments whose result oppose this conclusion:  the island continents of South America, Australia, North America, Madagascar, and India. Intelligence did not evolve on any of them.  There is nothing convergent about the evolution of intelligence, nothing inevitable.

Let's leave aside the fact that "Planet of the Apes" is more satire than investigation of evolutionary process (talking animals, like Jonathan Swift's intelligent Houyhnhnms, are a staple of satire), and consider what might or might not be convergent in evolution.

Certain things seem to be widely applicable.  Eyes, for example.  There are so many eyes in the world, working so many different ways, that you can say evolution converges on them.  Wings too.  Birds, bats, insects...the damn things are so useful, that they often evolve.  Not everything needs them, so not everything has them.

Intelligence...not so much.  It's clearly not as useful a gadget as eyes or wings. But, leaving various hominins aside, has the outer edge of intelligence been pushing upward over time?  Hominins are a statistical outlier, but can we say that the most intelligent species on the planet in, say, the Oligocene was more intelligent than the most intelligent species of the Jurassic, which was more intelligent than the most intelligent species of the Ordovician?

Hard enough to tell what body parts those things had, much less what their behavior must have been like. From my limited knowledge, I'd say that Jurassic beats Ordovician, but it's harder to prove that Oligocene beats Jurassic.  If there was another mass extinction, including us, would the next go-round create an even more intelligent species, or are we just a fluke?

Can anyone think of a way to confirm or deny the hypothesis that the "smartest thing on the planet" has been getting smarter through time?

Can admirable characters get it wrong?

What's the easiest way to make a character seem smart?

Show the character understanding something the reader knows, but that the rest of the people in the narrative don't.  An ancient doctor understands sterilization. A politician in 1913 Great Britain knows that a hugely destructive world war is just around the corner. One character knows another is going to die because of a dream, or a portent, or something his grandmother once said.  The hero knows what is going to happen because of an ancient prophecy, and only fools ignore ancient prophecies.

Note that I said "easiest" way, not "best".  This technique is the opposite of dramatic irony, where the reader knows more about what's happening than the characters do. In science fiction, in fact, the main character often not only knows more than the other characters, he knows more than the reader, and, when you look at it strictly, than the writer. I don't know what the rhetorical term for this type of negative irony is. I just know there is way too much of it.

No one knows the future. That fact is easy to forget, once it's the past. Then even fools know it.

To show a character being intelligent, you have to show that character...thinking. Taking pieces of evidence available to the reader and the other characters, putting them together in a new configuration, and formulating plans based on that.  The actions the character takes may turn out badly--one can only play the odds. There are no guarantees. In fact, showing a character make a plan, have something go wrong because of unanticipated circumstances, and then rework the plan to take those circumstances into account is showing a truly intelligent character.

Now add other intelligent characters trying to achieve their own goals, and you have something like literature.

The undiscovery of Vitamin C and financial crashes

The other day I wrote about the complex story of scurvy and Vitamin C. But, of course, it's not just an interesting story of the ambiguities of scientific discovery and the unobviousness of explanations, it's also a metaphor for the collapse of complex systems (like our financial system).

But what isn't a metaphor for the collapse of our financial system?

Consider:  when sailing journeys took months away from shore, and blockading ships might stay on station for years, the discovery that something in fresh citrus juice prevented scurvy was incredibly valuable, and gave the British navy a distinct edge in performance. No one was going to monkey with it, though no one really understood what the causes of scurvy were, or how the juice prevented it.
When steamships cut travel time, fresh food (which also contains Vitamin C) was more available, and there was no long-term blockade duty, the need to specifically protect against scurvy grew much less. No one still knew the causes, but they had other things to think about.

So they thought about buying from domestic citrus producers, and shifted from high Vitamin C Sicilian lemons to much less effective West Indies limes. They improved production and storage, using copper vessels, and reduced Vitamin C further.

The safety margin had been reduced, but it didn't become obvious until someone made another long trip away from fresh food--in this case, exploring the Antarctic.  And scurvy again became a problem. Fortunately, in this case, the problem was limited to a few self-torturers obsessed with testing human survival.

A few years ago, we opened up the wall of our kitchen to do some work, and discovered that someone (in our family mythology, "Uncle Louie"--many people have a relative who overclaims his ability, but gets used because he's free) had casually cut through all the studs to run a waste stack vent pipe.  The only thing supporting that corner of the house turned out to be the cast-iron waste pipe from the upstairs bathroom.  Undiscovered, this could have led to serious damage at that end of the house.

We're coming out of a period where we made a lot of things easier at the cost of unknowingly assuming huge amounts of risk. But, when times are good, those who carefully hedge against risks show lower returns. I don't have a solution to this, except to suggest a little humbleness as to what can be known ahead of time.  Everything that was a complete mystery before is obvious after. Try to remember how little was known before.  Vitamin C didn't get isolated until the early 1930s.

On the other hand, there was nothing "unknown" about the risk of cutting through support studs on a balloon frame house.  Uncle Louie has no excuse.

The difficulties of understanding Vitamin C (or anything, for that matter)

When you learn things from your science textbook, it all seems so clear that it's a complete mystery why no one figured it out right away.  Of course life doesn't spontaneously generate. Of course gravity accounts for the movement of the planets. Of course scurvy is caused by a lack of Vitamin C.

Maciej Ceglowski recently wrote a superb essay about Scott's tragic expedition to the Antarctic, and  the contribution of scurvy, among many other problems, to that disaster. What, you say the scurvy problem had been solved back during the Napoleonic wars by the British navy? Why then are these limeys losing teeth over a century later?

The story is much more complex than that, it turns out.  Preventing scurvy was a pressing issue in sailing vessels on long voyages, but seemed less important on faster steam ships. For a variety of reasons, including where the citrus fruit came from and how it was processed, the British ended up with less and less effective versions of their scurvy preventer, but access to fresh food (most of it containing some Vitamin C) concealed this.

Until people started exploring the polar regions, and coming down with scurvy. What was wrong?

What if it was a disease carried by germs? Many otherwise mysterious diseases were explicable by this mechanism, so scurvy might well be one too.

Well, "might be" to you.  Physicians always "know" the causes of what ails us. Always. It's their essential nature. So physicians knew that scurvy was caused by spoiled meat, despite the huge ambiguities in the evidence.

Now, in fact, the role of scurvy in the Scott disaster is minor, and not even completely demonstrated. But the story of how confusing and unobvious the evidence was for Vitamin C deficiency as the cause of scurvy is the interesting part. Recommended.

(via the everflowing Kottke)

Our rats are getting fat

Via everyone's favorite drug discovery blog, In the Pipeline, the news that the rats and mice we depend on to understand the effectiveness of drugs and other metabolically significant interventions are pathetic, out-of-shape, metabolically deranged lardballs.

The authors of the study paper describe your typical laboratory rodent as "sedentary, obese, glucose intolerant, and on a trajectory to premature death". This matters because almost every metabolic pathway is affected by this situation: "cellular physiology, vulnerability to oxidative stress, inflammation, and associated diseases".

Of course, as everyone instantly points out, this makes these rodents excellent subjects for testing drugs and procedures intended for our increasingly sedentary and obese population. But no one should be happy about that. At the very least, we should know when a drug has been tested on (or controlled against) a rodent with a stressed metabolism, because its effect in normal-weight humans might be quite different. And there are still some of us around.

This leads to several related thoughts:

• "Sedentary and obese" is a different state than "active and normal weight". The differences are many, sometimes unexpected, and often profound.
• Being sedentary and obese has many unpleasant side effects:  note the "trajectory to premature death" part. The differences between "sedentary and obese" and "active and normal weight" are negative, not neutral.
• It's easy to become sedentary and obese. It doesn't require television or ads by snack companies.
• As a result, changing from "sedentary and obese" to "active and normal weight" will no doubt entail a huge amount of work and cost from the managers of these animals.

What distinguishes us from lab rats is (presumably) our conscious ability to alter our circumstances.  Don't be a lab rat.

How's the weather inside?

The main point of a building is to keep the weather (particularly water) out. But as we gain control over airflow, temperature, and moisture, we might be seeing more things like this:

This is a movie about a tornado generated inside the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart.  It gets an award from the Guinness Book of World Records at the end, for some the insanely specific record of World's Largest Artificial Tornado, so the end of the video is a couple of German car executives holding plaques (more here).

Robert Heinlein once wrote an odd little story called "Our Fair City", which involves using an intelligent-seeming urban vortex called Kitten as a weapon against political corruption. Not worth seeking out, if you're wondering--I have it in a collection called 6xH. That whirlwind gets decorated with streamers and balloons, an addition the Germans haven't seemed to have thought of. So, the first step is for that tornado to be a permanent feature, a natural consequence of the ventilation of the building.

As buildings get duller and larger, it might be possible to spiff them up with all manner of localized weather patterns: mist pouring down the stairs, glaciers in the upper hallways, lighting storms enlivening the cafeteria. And the eternal tornado in the lobby, the tutelary diety of the company, mascot of the soccer team, to whom employees come with requests for promotions, window space, and office supplies. Going home will seem a comedown from the meteorological mysticism of the workplace. Employers seeking ways to retain and motivate employees take note.

(via BLDGBLOG)

The place of houses

Since I've been thinking about cities (and planning to fit realistic future cities into my fiction), I've also been thinking about buildings, more specifically domestic architecture.

Consider the humble single family house. In my town, Cambridge, single family houses are relatively rare: only 14% of the housing stock consists of them.  In Manhattan, obviously, the number is far lower.  But in much of the United States, single-family houses are the order of the day.

On my shelves are a number of architectural field guides. One I've used, both for touring and for realistic portrayal of period houses in fiction, is Virginia and Lee McAlester's A Field Guide to American Houses.

When you look through it, you see specific regions and periods of style that architects and builders worked within.  Some of this was based on the requirements of local climate (rain, snow, heat, etc.), as well as local material (brick, stone, wood), but much of it was just style.  One builder trained with another, clients saw houses they liked and demanded ones that were similar. And these styles lasted for quite some time.  You see a Greek Revival house in my neighborhood, you can peg it to the 1830s or 40s.  An elaborate Queen Anne Revival from the 1880s to the turn of the century.  What I learned to call a foursquare ("Vernacular Prairie Style" according to the McAlesters) is more common in the Midwest, where I grew up, than here in New England, but you're looking at something from the turn of the century through the 1920s.

The book peters out after the Second World War, leaving what the book somewhat wanly calls "Neoeclectic".  And so it has been ever since.

Now, I'm not writing this to bemoan the loss of classifiable domestic archictetural styles (or at least, not primarily). it's just that, once you see the consistency of these styles specific to certain times and places, their disappearance is worthy of comment.

That's not to say that a tract house in 1955 is the same as one in 2005.  Clearly there are differences.  But they are mostly in terms of size (both of living space and garage space) and function (bathroom equipment, indoor gyms, entertainment centers). The applique ornament of pediments, columns, and mansard roofs gets smeared on in pretty much the same way over that time.  Not a single one of these house's is worth a second's detour to look at--and I am an avid architectural hobbyist.

Fashions change more and more quickly as time goes by.  The reason there are so many "revival" styles in our popular culture, is that in the past a style had a few years to elaborate, sink into people's lives, get associated with events and personalities, and appear in literature, books, and movies. Do styles now change too quickly to influence houses?  You can get rid of a pair of jeans of outdated cut or a poster of a forgotten band, but what do you do with a house? It continues to proclaim your outdated taste for decades.  Better to have a generic non-style, one that has cut itself loose from any specific history.

Or is there some larger cultural change at work? Does architecture no longer speak of us to ourselves, and of ourselves to others?  If so, why?  Is it because we spend most of our time inside watching one screen or another?

Where do I live? The house I own was built in the 1930s and is of no particular style that I can detect.  It has side gables, and a slight overhang on the roof.  My invaluable Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge:  Northwest Cambridge classifies the houses on my little street as "suburban homes built in the Depression years", which isn't much more than I already know.

Before the house, I lived on the third floor of a 1920s triple decker (a local form of multifamily housing that has served as the first dwelling for many new families).  It had square columns separating the living and dining rooms, hexagonal panes in the bowfronts, elaborate door and window trim, and a built-in hutch (another common local feature). It was the most beautiful place I have ever lived, but too small for our growing family.  I love my little house, which I've done a lot of work on, but I still think of that sun-washed apartment.  An elegant space is not to be undervalued as a source of happiness.

The Fall of Which Rome?

When people talk about the Fall of the American Empire, they are usually analogizing the state of American now (we've been doing this from about 1950) to the state of the Roman Empire at some point in the 400s. In fact, most people's knowledge of that period tends to be murky at best, but what they mean is the end of a powerful and dominant empire, and its replacement by something else.  This will happen to us in the near future, they say...ignoring how long it actually took the western Empire to collapse, and the Eastern Empire to retrench and restructure.

But I don't see a collapse of that sort as a near-term possibility. The Rome I fear we are actually like is that of the 1st century BCE: the late Republic.  That Rome remained strong on the periphery, and collapsed in the center through vicious infighting through what was once called the Roman Revolution.  The old ramshackle republican system was replaced by a military dictatorship where "the image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence". That collapse doesn't have the clean (if misleading) visuals of barbarians streaming through the gates, and so doesn't get used as journalistic shorthand for what we face.

Interestingly, our fiction is more cognizant of the resemblance than our journalism.  Colleen McCullough's "First Man in Rome" series, Robert Harris's Cicero novels, Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder mysteries, and the TV series Rome have all been popular, and speak of the corruption and downfall that characterized the period.

Was the Roman Revolution inevitable?  Did the Republic have to end?  Was the price paid for the Republic's dissolution a good one?  Many citizens, cut off from public participation in any event, certainly must have thought the price was more than fair, giving them prosperity and personal security.

The growing deadlock of our own representative republic, with its gargantuan yet petty squabbles over self-inflicted wounds like absurd healthcare financing structures, unsustainable entitlement programs, and increasingly untouchable public sector employees, certainly seems bound for some tour de force "solution" that will lead to a state none of us expect, or want.

Reading about the pompous Marius, the sinister Sulla, the smart-then-surprisingly-dumb Pompey won't provide any kind of specific guide to our era, though it's fascinating. But it's important to see how choices can get made by default, how people can put exaggerated faith in institutions that don't maintain themselves without work, and how a loss of freedom can be greeted with relief by a people who don't see themselves as giving anything important up.

Long science fiction series and hypersystematization

At Boskone I was on a panel about long SF series (despite the fact that I have never written one). Fellow panelists were John Douglas (once an editor of mine), Rosemary Kirstein, and Alastair Reynolds.

To succeed, a long SF series has to keep showing you new facets of the world. Sure, people like to settle in with familiar characters, and, to some extent, relive past adventures. Still, a good SF series is more like a work of architecture, rather than a painting (I wish I'd thought of this while on the panel). You can't see it all from one vantage point. You have to move through it, and while you are seeing it from one angle, there are things you can't see, though you might remember them.

The totality of that integration is a genuine aesthetic pleasure, one that gets shared on a narrative basis with an integrated multivolume work like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  The first three books of the quartet show you the same time and place from different points of view, all of which are to some extent incompatible. You read them in order, so each one denounces and corrects the previous version.  It's all about love, one says. No, you got it all wrong, Balthazar says in his "great interlinear". No, it was actually all about politics says the third. Then the fourth book goes on, accepting all that but never resolving the various strands. It is that last element that is not like a work of science fiction.

Science fiction books provide the basic equation that moving through plot means acquiring knowledge, and that the knowledge translates into the power to move to another level, where you may well acquire more knowledge. SF narratives tend to have that open-ended structure, as each answer entails further questions.  That is one reason some personalities find it so compelling.

This penchant for systematic investigation does have its downsides. Systematizing science fiction authors often reach a state of hypersystematization, where, like conspiracy cranks, everything needs to be explained in terms of everything else. Isaac Asimov, for example, reached this phase late in his career, when he felt the need for a unified field theory of Isaac Asimov:  he tried to make out that every single one of his novels was actually a facet of a single universe.

Larry Niven seemed to get trapped inside his own creation of Known Space, and has long depended on collaborators to help him find a way out.  So science fiction is also the home of shared worlds, where collections of writers play in a single universe, sometimes created collaboratively, sometimes leased from a single writer, like Niven, who has grown tired of pushing narrative through the increasingly narrow holes left in his own creation.

And you do get clubs, cults, collections of obsessive fans. That's just the nature of the root psychology of our field. The prototype is probably fans of Sherlock Holmes, with their finicky attention to the Canon, and the contradictions in it. The commentary on Star Trek, Tolkein, etc., dwarf all other commentaries in literature. You could establish entire civilizations based on them.

So, in SF, long series are not just a lazy way of reusing a background that took a lot of work. They are a different literary experience, one that seems long, but is actually thick.  I don't think I have the stamina for doing one, but admire those who can manage it. It is a different type of work.

The cost of urban preservation

I like a nice old sandstone Richardsonian Romanesque office building, with columns, cornices, and elaborate entryways.  Like this one:

But I don't have to pay to maintain the thing, install modern fire-control equipment, remove asbestos, or try to rent to finicky commercial tenants who care more about the conformation of the space they lease than they do about architectural detail.

So I found the discussion about the Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building in Minneapolis, on one of my favorite sites, Shorpy, extremely enlightening.  The building was torn down in 1961, in one of those fits of urban renewal that characterized the era.  One hates the soul-sucking monstrosity that replaced it (as posted in a comment by bipto), while understanding the gigantic expense that would have been required to keep it operational, as pointed out by Minnie A. Politan and Anonymous Tipster.  If you've ever done even minor work on your house, you know how much things like that can run.

So I am a bit chastened, after my rambling rant yesterday about the beauty of cities.  No wonder city centers of older cities are somewhat theme-park-like.  How else can you pay to maintain all those old facades, while removing dangerously obsolete wiring and keeping the roof from falling in?  You have the pimp the buildings out to preserve them. No matter what structure you see, anywhere in the world, you have to reflect that the world is doing its best to destroy it. Keeping it standing takes vigilance, and money.  A lot of money. The struggle is eternal.

As my friend James Patrick Kelly pointed out on our Boskone panel about cities, most science fiction writers don't know any economics.  If you really want beauty, you have to be willing to pay for it.

The economic city vs. the political city

Several people have written cogent comments on my posts on science fictional cities (The city in science fiction and Charter cities).  I am intrigued by the concept of Charter Cities, or maybe Challenge Cities: the equivalent of "stadtluft macht frei" (city air makes you free) of the European Middle Ages, where you could escape bound status by fleeing to a city.

Of course, in that era, rulers had to do that to make sure cities were inhabited at all, because their death rates were so much higher than that of the surrounding countryside.  If there wasn't in-migration, their populations would have dropped.

So I really am thinking about the possibility of being able to escape to a jurisdiction with another economic system without having to migrate to some other continent.  It's the ultimate in diversity.  But, of course, cities are never purely economic entitities.  And, despite what some extreme libertarians would like to think, you can't build a public life on purely economic relations. Politics--power--always raises its head.  Coalitions form.  People regulate each other.  Each group tries to zone for the lifestyle it considers ideal. A successful city without significant political power seems unlikely.

And this is all to ignore the notion of the city as aesthetic object, which is an significant omission.  We have forgotten, since cities were always objects of power and of wealth, but are now seldom objects of beauty, save in fugitive and chance ways.  Beauty involves making a set of consistent choices, and that implies that other choices are not made.  There are many diverse beautiful objects, but each beautiful object is jealously non-diverse.  Just as, in the pre-modern era, tyrannies tended to permit women more freedom than democracies, so beauty depends, at least in part, in a constriction of freedom.

Of course, that might imply that there have been, somewhere, unfree cities that were beautiful.  I can't think of any.  Kim Jong-il's Pyongyang?  Ceaucescu's Bucharest? Stalin's Moscow?  Not promising notions.  Still, I think there is something to a constriction that requires a theme-and-variations approach to structure.  But it can't be imposed by some external force.  It may be a choice that can no longer be made.

Or is it just the need to deal with cars?  If so, that's another choice we're stuck with.  No one's building any cities that can't accommodate cars.  That would be like building a beautiful house without indoor plumbing.  And I say this as someone who seldom drives.

So, cities of wealth, cities of power, cities of culture.  A lot to play with here.

The artist and the real day job

At Arisia (a local science fiction convention) I attended a panel on living your creative dream. The people on the panel were musicians, clothing makers, and craftsmen who had found a way to support themselves with their art, sometimes with the help of a money-earning spouse.  Everyone on the panel seemed tremendously happy, and it was inspiring to listen to.

Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with my actual life. I earn very little from my writing. I don't have a freelancer's temperament. And while my spouse does many things, earn enough money to support the family is definitely not one of them.  I admire and respect those who make it on their art, whether it's writing, or sculpture, or music.  It's just that, after many years, I've been forced to admit that I'm not one of them.

So I have a real day job.  I am a marketing director for a financial services firm.  It's a small firm, and I lost my one staff member in a recent budget cut.  I'm good at my job, and try to devote my days to fulfilling its requirements, and selling our company's products. To all appearances, I am a regular middle-class office worker who keeps regular hours and goes to the gym at lunch.

For a long time I was...I wouldn't say resentful of the need for a day job...but certainly not delighted by it. I figured that real artists, if they did have a day job, got one that indicated their denial of its necessity. They worked in a bookstore, or did fill-in design work, or something like that. They lived like graduate students and didn't give in.

I need to feed my children, have health insurance, and lay away money so I'm not impoverished in my declining years.  And I...OK, I might as well admit it...like living well.  I like not worrying about money, I like being able to go to out to dinner with friends, I like being able to afford car repairs, I like taking a vacation now and then.  So, I suspect, do you.

I also want to work on what's intimately important to me--in my case, my writing.  So (most likely, if you are reading this) do you.

Here's what I can tell you: it can be done. You can work a real grownup day job, with responsibilities, fellow employees who rely on your work, a 401(k), standing committees, office politics, and not enough time off.  And you can feel the passionate joy of creation.  I won't pretend it's easy. The occasional bout of despair is inescapable.

I just wanted to let you know you are not alone.

Charter cities

Yesterday, I talked about the place of the city in science fiction, as was discussed on a panel at Boskone.

A topic I did not raise was the Charter City, as proposed by Paul Romer, in Prospect . Nations are often stuck in development hell because of bad institutions. But because of skewed incentives, there is no way to incrementally improve those institutions.  You're stuck in a kind of local minimum, which takes too much energy to jump out of. Romer's proposal is to allow extraterritorial cities with good institutions (profit motive, rule of law, security of property rights, the kinds of things we take for granted and can afford to take lightly) to operate within territorial nations.  Allow free migration between those cities and their mainland, and see what happens.

Now we've really created a plot engine.  Because there is nothing straightforward about this.  Is this neocolonialism under another label?  Violations of national sovereignty "for your own good" are rightly regarded with suspicion.  But I'm a fiction writer, not a development economist. As far as a writer is concerned, a contradiction in a concept is a plot twist, not a bug.

I suppose the city of Todos Santos in Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty is, in a sense, a predecessor to this concept (I actually found the book dull and never finished it--but now that I'm thinking about it I will try again).  But there are any number of voluntary systems that could be set up, and set into competition.  Of course, national governments would play along, until such time as it did not benefit them to do so.

The model is Hong Kong, sitting right on the border of China and showing the benefits of capitalism. For one reason or another, it was never forcibly brought into the Chinese sphere. It did have the advantage of a well-structured state (thought given to occasional paroxisms like the Cultural Revolution) to serve as counterparty, not a failed or warlord state.

One interesting suggestion in the comments to the Romer article was to allow such a voluntary city near New Orleans, in the United States.  I think that makes perfect sense.  All jurisdictions should face the prospect of competition. If we are sponsoring charter cities abroad, we should accept them within our own national boundaries as well.

The issue, of course, is the use of coercion and force, when the territorial government loses that competition. States like to maintain a monopoly on the use of force, and they use it against entities that damage their interest. Stalin forced the collectivization of farming not because he thought it would increase productivity, but in order to assure political control of the countryside. He could extort enough food to feed the potentially volatile cities, and rely on the dispersed peasants to be unable to organize to resist. That there were alternative models that would have made everyone materially better off was not relevant to him.  Successful charter cities would face expropriation, invasion, blockade, and deliberately incented immigration, among other threats.

But wealthy, successfuly charter cities would also face the temptation to intervene in the territorial government to get themselves a better deal, instead of just outcompeting it. A capitalist is someone who competes to earn a profit so that he can afford to buy a way out of competition. The system that prevents businesspeople from being able to buy a pass from competition without also taking away the incentives to competition is a delicately balanced one. Subconscious cultuarl assumptions play a big role in how the balance is maintained.

So here's the story:  The Franchise State.  There are several collections of cities (Chinese state-guided development model, North American free competition model, maybe even a European social democracy model, plus a grab bag of other schemes) sometimes right next to each other.  They recruit not only from their hinterland, but from other areas as well, subverting immigration control.  Someone will need to protect them, and keep them from being taken over by conspiracies, combinations, cartels, and other extra-market organizations, as would be inevitable otherwise.  The wealthy city would be tempted to bribe local strongmen for protection, since maintaining your own military is expensive.  Such a city is like a natural resource, and would encourage rent-seeking and stationary bandits, recapitulating the rise of government in the first place.

Refugees crowd the approaches to the city, which has become fussy about who it lets in. Standards have increased, and those who got aboard first are anxious to maintain their favorable position. One can hypothesize a guild of Disruptors, secret officials specifically trained to break down cartels and mutual backscratching arrangements in favor of naked competition.

This all provides an alternate model to the national territorial state, which we have all be indoctrinated to value. But seeing the charter city folks as pure-of-heart libertarians devoted to pure competition runs up against the inevitable temptations of success.  On the panel I set down a challenge: can anyone right a genuinely complex science fictional city?  I think Romer's Charter City concept provides a good template for one, if not for an actual city existing in some actual location.