J. Storrs Hall is impatient

Something prompted me to look up the recent book “Where is My Flying Car?” by J. Storrs Hall. I found an ebook copy in our local library (the Libby App is awesome), and it seems to be the 2021 “Stripe Press” edition rather than the self-published version from a few years before. While the topic of the title is covered from many different angles, this is mainly a “book of futurism” as the author admits in the last chapter. Hall has clearly been inspired by science fiction stories - the text is liberally sprinkled with references to and quotes from The Jetsons, Tom Swift stories, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, and perhaps especially, H. G. Wells.

Hall references Wells in describing the conflict he sees between “Doers” and “Do-Nots” foretold by Wells in the movie “Things to Come”, and in referring to the “Eloi” of Wells’ “Time Machine”. The Eloi were the degenerate descendants of humanity in the far future, with their every need attended to and no desire to  exert themselves. Wells’ “Do-Nots” are well-to-do people who feel they have enough and don’t want new accomplishments and change going on around them, an updated and closer to present-day version of the Eloi. Hall sees these as his enemies: essentially, the baby-boom generation that became dominated by Do-Nots and Eloi, stopping the progress that seemed inevitable to the early science fiction writers, and the amazing machines (like flying cars) we could have had by now.

We are missing “the future we were promised”, from the late 1800s to post World War II; though not all of it. Hall claims “science fiction writers were roughly on target […]  in most fields except transportation and space exploration”. He points to the “Henry Adams Curve” - a pattern of exponential growth in energy use per capita which continued at 2% per year until the late 1970s in the US, since which it has flatlined at about 10 kW/person. Where science fiction went amiss was in those technologies that used a lot of energy:

The extent to which a technology didn’t live up to its Jetsons-era expectation is strongly correlated with its energy intensity. The one area where progress continued most robustly - Moore’s Law in computing and communications - was the one where energy was not a major concern.

Hall believes in “The Great Stagnation” (referencing Tyler Cowen) - “Progress has slowed to a crawl. Or is that merely perception? … the second half of the 20th century didn’t seem to bring nearly as many major, valuable advances as the first half.” But he sees different causes than Cowen’s, in part through his interest in aviation. “Another thing that happened right around the end of the ‘70s was that the private airplane industry […] mysteriously disappeared.” Airliner cruising speed flatlined around 1960 (at just under Mach 1) - Hall notes that physics explains why going faster than sound is expensive, but:

It turns out that, for long international flights (eg., Los Angeles to Sydney), the energy used by a jetliner dragging its way through the atmosphere is just as much as would have been needed to put it into orbit - and make the trip in less than an hour.

Actually that would technically be a suborbital ballistic flight, but close enough. Private space companies do seem to be looking into this sort of market now, in the 21st century. It seems to be technically harder than Hall imagines here but it still is a good question why it has taken so long (and the suborbital tourism that has begun is still very minimal).

We can reasonably use the plateau in air travel as an iconic, if perhaps exaggerated, example of the general plateauing, flatlining, and stagnating of life-improving technology that began in the 1970s and ‘80s.

So what is to blame for our stagnation? Hall’s text conjures up several villains to some of which he attaches colorful names (as he does for several futuristic technology ideas we’ll get to later). There is the “Machiavelli Effect”, from Machiavelli’s comment that “… the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”

One possibility is that there is an Overton window effect in technology, a window into the world of ideas that frames what people are prepared to entertain, where ideas outside the window are not seriously considered. Really revolutionary ideas simply roll off men’s minds like water off a duck. Machiavelli described the effect as ‘the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.’

Hall refers to the concept of “Baptists and Bootleggers”- different groups who are on the same side of preventing change, with differing motives (idealism on the one hand, maintaining a monopoly on the other). These are both surely real effects, though he doesn’t address how some technology developments have managed to happen anyway, despite being unfamiliar or even unexpected (all the things that have come about thanks to lasers for instance). Clearly there are real opposing forces to change, but changes that are useful enough seem to bubble up anyway. But maybe there’s an exception here for the high-energy technologies Hall prefers.

The culture shift of the 60s and 70s was also real:

… Western culture had succeeded in supplying the needs of the lower levels of the hierarchy, including the security of a well-run society. And with these levels attained, the modern Eloi could be thought of as all those Americans who became able to take certain things […] for granted. This means that they began to be able to spend more of their energy, effort, and concern on the love, esteem, consciousness-raising, and self-actualization levels.

Here we find Hall calling out the “Eloi of the Age of Aquarius” who are interested in anything but technological progress, and worse the “Eloi Agonistes”, continually inventing imaginary crises because they have no real threats to their comfort. Among the imaginary threats Hall attributes to these modern Eloi are “Radiophobia”, the nuclear hysteria of the 1970s, and a general “Ergophobia” - fear of energy - “… the almost inexplicable belief that there is something wrong with using energy per se.”

Hall includes climate change in this list of hysteria - interestingly the same 2% cut to GDP he treats as insignificant when associated with climate (and that number is rather uncertain given debates over the associated economic models) he treats as catastrophic when the cause is our American legal system and the growth in the number of lawyers. Clearly while he bemoans “virtue signaling” there are other signals he is making in his text in some other direction than pure logic.

But despite the snark and frequent utopian visions there is a lot here to ponder. Has over-regulation stymied technological development in transportation since the 1960s? “The Great Stagnation coincided with a rise, nay, a flood, of federal regulation.” This was the Nixon administration that started a “regulatory explosion”. Product liability became a concern for all manufacturers, since all those lawyers had to earn their keep. Aircraft may have been particularly affected by this.

Then there is the role of government spending itself. Hall mentions the Wright (private) vs Langley (government funded) feud in the early days of flight, and quotes a 2003 OECD report that I haven’t been able to locate myself, where he claims “A survey and analysis […] in 2005 found, to the researchers’ surprise, that although private R&D had a positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government-funded R&D had a negative 0.37 correlation!” And he claims this makes sense: “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field, and by their nature they are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas.”

How the 2003 OECD report included a 2005 survey I don’t know - most likely this is another of the book’s many minor typos (I was quite surprised at the table referring to U208 and nearby text U308 when presumably both meant U238). OECD and other sources I’ve seen generally argue for the need for investment in R&D, so I’m quite surprised at this conclusion and perhaps it was a unique result in this report. Obviously there are cases where government spending has been wasted - but there are plenty of cases of private waste as well (how much effort and energy - real gigajoules! - has gone into the wasteland of blockchain and crypto “investments” by private actors these last few years?)

Along with the flood of government funding Hall points out that higher education has flourished in the second half of the 20th century, coinciding with stagnation. Shouldn’t more education produce more innovation? Maybe we’re doing it wrong?

A final villain in Hall’s list of reasons for stagnation is the recent absence of war among the most technologically advanced nations - we have only battled by proxy, at arm’s length starting with Korea in the 1950s. This is of course thanks to the devastating power of nuclear weapons which have kept the major powers out of direct conflict. Hall doesn’t seem to think it would have been better had direct conflict happened, but nevertheless one can see how the lack of testing of our best technologies on the battlefield could lead to some stagnation.

One could imagine other causes - after all many things happened in the 1960s, and 70s. TV became ubiquitous in American households - is the dumbing down of discourse that came with the boob tube to blame? What about the fall in union membership and the resulting stagnation in worker benefits that could have paid for things like flying cars? What about the end of anti-trust action - the last major one was the AT&T breakup in 1982 - which meant that large corporations have only grown in their power to prevent changes they don’t like? What about the growth in the wealthiest 1% and stagnation in ordinary people’s income especially after Reagan’s tax changes in the early 80’s? Hall doesn’t raise any of these possibilities, perhaps because they would tell against the non-virtue-signaling posture he seems to prefer.

Hall complains about “cost disease” but doesn’t explain how it comes about. The actual problem is similar to one I ran into years ago in computing - “Amdahl’s law”, which notes that the maximum possible speed-up of any computer program through parallel processing is limited by those parts of the program that cannot be parallelized. The issue with human work is that some parts of it can be automated - replaced by machines - and some cannot. The limit to which a job can be made more productive is the fraction of the work that cannot be automated. Over time that changes, but for now those jobs that are subject to “cost disease” are simply those for which automation is not currently possible for most of what they do. Manufacturing, farming, and most work relating to creating physical stuff can be made less and less expensive through automation. Teaching and medical work cannot (as yet). So the relative cost of the latter types of work rises over time. And indeed when Hall suggests the workforce can be envisioned as a line of people stretching across the country of which only a tiny fraction are needed to provide for basic needs, it’s clear that most people are employed today providing goods or services nobody expected to have 100 years ago.

The book delves into speculative or outright pseudo-scientific domains at times. Hall claims there’s something interesting going on with “cold fusion” or whatever it’s called these days, but that seems very unlikely - it’s been well over 3 decades now! Hall seems doubtful about quantum mechanics and thinks some revolution in basic physics is imminent. That would be interesting, but whatever happens there it’s not going to change the things we already can calculate and observe matching to high precision. Hall talks about vast quantities of energy needed by nanotech (which he distinguishes from run-of-the-mill Machiavelli Effect “nanotechnology”) but doesn’t seem to account for how that energy would be dissipated. If you are pairing nuclear energy sources with small molecular machines, those machines are going to melt quickly without an adequate cooling system - not to mention the effect stray neutrons or other energetic particles may have.

I’m not an expert on nanotech and Hall has been at least writing on the subject for years. I do know how electrons in atoms and molecules work though - atoms are very far from billiard balls, and Hall’s proposal (the Feynman approach, he claims) to simply scale the same system down repeatedly cannot work once you get anywhere close to atomic scale. Maybe that leaves some room for what he’s hoping to do, but the flights of fancy regarding making quintillions of diamond-shelled aerostats, separating isotopes one by one at mass scale, rebuilding American infrastructure in a week - well speculation is fun, but these are just not likely to ever be possible. Despite his repeated assertions that “It is a possibility”.

The promise of nanotech is that … Things that now take us a year’s work could be done in a day. And your $3,000,000 flying car would cost just $10,000. It is a possibility.

Maybe those things will happen, but I don’t think this vision for nanotech is likely to be the path to it.

There is much more in this book, some of which will surely fire the imaginations of real innovators and lead to some fun technologies down the road. Hall describes some interesting ideas for reimagining cities (if we could all get around with flying cars) - not unlike some cities from Sci-Fi stories. He describes a possible “Space pier”, a set of towers 100 km high with an electromagnetic launch platform to efficiently get things into orbit (and presumably back down as well). His “Weather Machine” is a collection of a vast number of nanotech sunshades, aerostats that cover the Earth 20 miles up, which can through their control of downwelling sunlight accomplish a wide array of miraculous things. And which would be a natural prelude to a sun-encompassing Dyson sphere in the longer run. And of course nuclear-powered spacecraft (which NASA is seriously looking into).

On robotics and AI Hall seems to think we’re on track, but not there yet. He describes the “Wozniak test” as an interesting challenge for robotics: to “walk into an unfamiliar house and make a cup of coffee”. “I claim that this test addresses the bulk of the aspects of general intelligence that are missing from AI today.”

The book starts with and repeatedly returns to the title question and the challenges with having personal air transport. There’s a lot of discussion of how flying works, requirements like runway length to take off, flying speed, stall speed, energy usage and limitations with chemical fuels. There are many different designs for flying machines - Hall seems to favor the early work on autogyros (which eventually led to the helicopter). The main point of doing this is that flight allows much faster travel than on the ground, so the major value in flying would be long trips - you would make a lot more long trips than you do now. These are higher-value trips, but “too expensive in time to make very often with a ground car.”

… the unexpected empirical finding from travel studies is that people in all societies spend about an hour a day traveling, whether they are in Zambia walking barefoot or in the U.S. riding in an air-conditioned car. […] the average across a given society is just over an hour per person per day- apparently a human universal.

So your flying car needs to be able to get you as far as possible in that daily hour of travel time. Ideally vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), and fast, so a jet with 400 knot+ speed. This is rather hard to do.

Which might really be the underlying reason for our “stagnation” - we’ve done easy things, and the things we haven’t done are actually hard. This is Tyler Cowen’s low-hanging fruit argument. Hall doesn’t buy this, and maybe he has a point - there are a lot of complex pieces of technology we have access to these days that are inexpensive thanks to mass production. Could something similar have happened with aircraft? Maybe?

Hall states “We are not living in the future of Robert Heinlein; we are living in the future of Philip K. Dick.” But is our present state really so bad? Realistically we are somewhere between the two - as always partway between utopia and dystopia! His claim that “The Great Stagnation was the Qing Dynasty self-strangulation, rerun at internet speed.” actually feels somewhat hopeful to me: China has been rather successful in overcoming that period of stagnation in its history; maybe our “stagnation” will be that much more temporary. The developments in private space transportation in recent years are certainly one encouraging sign there. I also find the recent amazing growth in deployment of solar and other renewable power to point the same way - if much of our “ergophobia” actually stemmed from disgust at the pollution of old energy technologies, these new ones may pull us out of it and make more energy available to everyone, letting us get back to Hall’s “Henry Adams Curve”. It is a possibility.

Hall briefly discusses Kevin Kelly’s concept of the “technium”, a way of thinking about our technology in the landscape of possibilities. “Where the technium would have spilled into the fertile valleys, we have instead built up a theoretical, scientific overhang.” I think there is some real truth there. We may have overemphasized basic science for the last few decades, and created a large number of opportunities for new technology development just waiting to be taken advantage of. And what better way to tackle them than by opening some new frontiers:

Frontiers, in turn, suppress self-deception […] we should also get positive feedback by going in the opposite direction, opening new frontiers and pitting our efforts against nature instead of each other.

Yes, J. Storrs Hall is impatient that the future he was promised hasn’t happened yet. I’m impatient for needed change too. But at least some of it is coming. Whether or not it includes flying cars, I’m confident it will be amazing.

Vaclav Smil yells at cloud

I recently read Canadian energy expert Vaclav Smil’s 2022 book “How the World Really Works”, subtitled “The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going”. Highly ambitious one might think, but Smil is not one for modesty. As always with Smil, the facts laid out (and there are a vast number of these - the book is full of all kinds of numbers) are well-referenced and seem largely correct, though I’ll quibble with a few things below. While he raises many good points, many of the implications drawn from those facts and the frequently expressed opinions of the author seem far less reliable. The repeated motif of the book is an attack on what Smil refers to as “gullible” people disconnected from the material world engaging in “wishful thinking” and focused on “streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices”. The book is an attempt to remind these people that all their comforts depend on essential supplies of food and water, minerals and metals, and energy, and we can’t just wish away the challenges involved in sustaining those supply chains.

Smil tackles the energy situation first. The historical review of energy sources for human society is useful and mildly enlightening. Smil waxes particularly eloquent on the benefits of oil - specifically its flexibility and energy-density. Though why do we need to hear in this section about the many non-energy uses for crude oil like lubricants, asphalt, or synthetic materials? Perhaps because a “poor understanding of energy has the proponents of a new green world naively calling for a near-instant shift from abominable, polluting, and finite fossil fuels to superior, green, and ever-renewable solar electricity.” Unlike the many numeric quantities in the text, this straw man group of “proponents” comes with no citation. If Smil thinks a few decades is “near-instant” then that could surely be supported; however the groups I’m familiar with oppose only the burning of fossil fuels; using them for non-energy purposes ought to be fine. In my view (and that of others I’ve talked with) we should save them from burning so we don’t run out of this critical material feedstock for our synthetic materials!

Smil repeatedly states his opinion that a transition from fossil energy to renewables must take longer than two or three decades. But the book is filled with examples of previous major changes in the energy landscape on similar timescales. For example on oil: “European demand had nearly doubled between 1965 and 1973, and Japanese imports became about 2.3 times higher.” Surely a doubling in less than a decade is a pretty good precedent for this sort of change being possible on short time scales? And there’s more: “Between 1950 and 2000 […] China saw an astounding, more than 120-fold, increase [in useful energy per capita].” and later on “… the supply of new renewables (wind, solar, new biofuels) rose impressively, about 50-fold, during the first 20 years of the 21st century …”, while in the same paragraph Smil moans that “… even a tripling or quadrupling of the recent pace of decarbonization would still leave fossil fuels dominant by 2050.” Why is tripling or quadrupling the best that can be hoped for when we have a 50-fold increase from the preceding two decades? We have clear precedents in this very book of energy transitions with fast exponential growth, but Smil somehow doesn’t believe this is possible for decarbonization. I don’t follow his logic. Exponential growth always looks small at first, before it explodes. The many numbers included in the book seem intended more to intimidate than to enlighten us on what is actually possible. Isn’t the point of the vast resource use in our modern world to make us more capable of doing things than we were in previous decades?

When discussing food, concrete, and steel, Smil makes some excellent points. What are the prospects for carbon-free sources for the nitrogen-based fertilizers essential to our food supply? There are some projects along these lines - a fuel cell for making ammonia electrically (which could also make ammonia a useful energy storage medium), or perhaps just using the standard process with “green hydrogen” but scaling up such experiments and trials seems a daunting prospect, and the economic and policy incentives to do this seem missing up to this point. Smil traces the energy inputs to our food supply through a series of comparisons - bread, tomatoes, chicken, and seafood as examples. He invariably converts these energy inputs to diesel fuel equivalents, which seems odd when some of them are already electric (baking, some transportation) and could be carbon-free, with clear pathways for further growth. Including the quantities of plastics that are part of this supply as if they were also energy-based also seems odd - yes they are derived from fossil fuels, but not through burning them, so it’s not an energy cost. In any case, Smil is perfectly correct in arguing that (a) food is essential, and (b) we’re not making good progress as yet on decarbonization of our food production systems.

The story is similar for the vast quantities of structural materials - concrete and steel specifically - which we use. Smil argues clearly for our continued need for these things - particularly with much of the world still developing. Somehow we will need to decarbonize or capture carbon dioxide emissions in the processes that make these materials if we are to achieve world net-zero goals. There are surely technical mechanisms to do this, but where are the economic or policy incentives needed to make it happen?

I won’t say much about Smil’s chapters on globalization and risks. It’s an interesting historical review of globalization and efficiencies in transportation, but also of the degree to which these effects have gone up and down over the years. It’s possible that after COVID (and Russia’s war in Ukraine) we may see a period of declining global trade. The discussion of risks attempts to put different risks on the same footing one way or another, but with some odd calculations that I’m not sure really help to enlighten the situation. Life is risky, and trying to make it less so is one good driver of innovation, though whether it’s the major one that Smil claims I am not so sure. 

The environment chapter tells us that yes, we won’t run out of oxygen, nor food and water (though see above on the challenges relating to decarbonization). Yes the greenhouse effect is real and we are warming the planet by burning fossil carbon. Smil likens our response to climate change to the initially incompetent global response to the COVID-19 pandemic: something completely predictable but with a lot of uncertainty on timing and specific impacts, and things that could have been done to prepare were largely ignored. While there are unfortunate references here to the “climate change religion”, Smil provides a good account of where we have fallen short and the opportunities that are there already:

… we do not need an endless stream of new models in order to take effective actions. There are enormous opportunities for reducing energy use in buildings, transportation, industry, and agriculture, and we should have initiated some of these energy-saving and emissions-reducing measures decades ago … [these] should be perennial imperatives, not sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe.

Most remarkably, we have largely ignored taking steps that could have limited the long-term impacts of climate change and that should have been taken even in the absence of any global warming concerns because they bring long-term savings and provide more comfort. And as if that were not enough, we have deliberately introduced and promoted the diffusion of new energy conversions that have boosted the consumption of fossil energies and hence further intensified CO2 emissions. The best examples of these omissions and commissions are the indefensibly inadequate building codes in cold-climate countries and the worldwide adoption of SUVs.

I was hoping that at some point this book, with all its quantitative assertions, would actually justify Smil’s pessimism about decarbonization by looking at, for example, the capital costs of creating enough photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, electric storage and transmission facilities, new plants for green ammonia, concrete, steel, etc. I don’t see that, and I think the truth is that while these capital costs will be large, the global economy can absorb them easily if spread over several decades. But the real source for Smil’s pessimism, I think, is more a political and historical one - the following captures an essential challenge:

Dealing with this challenge will, for the first time in history, require a truly global, as well as a very substantial and prolonged, commitment. To conclude that we will be able to achieve decarbonization anytime soon, effectively and on the required scales, runs against all past evidence. The UN’s first climate conference took place in 1992, and in the intervening decades we have had a series of global meetings and countless assessments and studies - but nearly three decades later there is still no binding international agreement to moderate the annual emissions of greenhouse gases and no prospect for its early adoption.

Yes, this is true that as a global community we have not yet made the necessary commitments to solve the problem. But there are a lot of signs of progress, even if still inadequate. I think the line between pessimism and optimism here may be between those who can envision only linear change in the future, and those of us who think change can be nonlinear. I’ve long liked Al Gore’s comment on this:

Sometimes, the political system is like the climate system, in that it’s nonlinear. It can seem to change at a snail’s pace and then suddenly cross a tipping point beyond which it shifts into a shockingly fast gear. All of a sudden, change that everybody thought was impossible becomes matter of fact.

There is real reason to hope here. Even Smil admits in several places that future projections are hard - many things have happened in the past that would have been hard to predict in advance. It would have been nice if he had then added a little humility to his repeated assertions that decarbonization in a few decades is impossible.

On numerical quibbles - Smil repeatedly refers to the small share of renewables in “primary” energy supply and the relatively little progress made in reducing “primary” energy from fossil fuels. But this is misleading at best - to quote a section early in the book: “Global primary energy supply usually refers to total (gross) production, but it is more revealing to look at energy that is actually available for conversion into useful forms.” Most burning of fossil fuels is at best 30-40% efficient in converting that primary energy to useful form, due to inevitable thermodynamic losses in heat engines. Meanwhile solar and wind power is electric from the start, requiring only the minimal losses associated with transmission before being put to use. So every unit of solar or wind energy is generally worth 2.5 to 3 times the same quantity of thermal primary energy. As with the risks chapter, translating quantities into perfectly comparable units is tricky, but Smil doesn’t even really attempt to do so here.

There is similar confusion in comparing intermittent renewable electric supply to steady sources like nuclear reactors. Yes Germany’s photovoltaics may only average 12% capacity factor, but why should that matter? Electric power from solar panels or wind farms is power that doesn’t have to be supplied by other sources, and we should build as much of them as is needed to cover demand. Capacity factor really doesn’t enter in except as an element of capital cost vs energy generated (so that economically of course you want to put these facilities where they will generate the most energy).

Anyway, despite some faults I did enjoy Smil’s book. It is informative and thought-provoking in places and does point out some real challenges we face in overcoming our reliance on fossil fuels. I guess the real test of his claims will be how the next few decades actually do turn out. I for one remain optimistic that the world will do what is necessary, in the end.

Looking back

After 16 years I finally pulled the plug on my other blogging websites (altenergyaction.org, shumwaysmith.com). I had done almost nothing with them for the last 6 years, except for occasional rescue efforts to address failing software components. The cost to maintain them was not high (I think I was paying around $100/year) but keeping them running added a mental burden - thinking I *ought* to go in and start fixing them up and using them properly again - which I had no prospect of actually accomplishing. Better they be gone. From latest stats the sites were accessed by a couple of thousand people per month, but I suspect most of that was bots and not actual users. I'm hoping anything useful to others in them has been picked up by the internet archive (https://archive.org/) - it does have some record of the sites and their subpages.

The altenergyaction site was initially created to start an organization - the Alternative Energy Action Network - which for a while consisted of a half-dozen or so of us (including my father, who I miss dearly these last 4 1/2 years he's been gone) who would regularly exchange emails discussing alternatives to fossil fuels. Several members of the group sent me articles to post on the blog, and for a while we had public comment sections that further discussed particular topics. The group had a wide variety of enthusiasms, and was not necessarily all in agreement on things (though we largely agreed that using hydrogen for ground transportation or heating did not make much sense). I had hoped that one of the other people who inspired me to set up the website would take the reins, recruit lots of people, and start getting our message out more broadly, but that didn't happen. In the end we were one of probably hundreds or thousands of similar little blogging efforts that faded with the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other "big social" media as the 2000's turned into the 2010's...

The "shumwaysmith.com" site was similarly afflicted by the rise of social media. I'd intended for my wife and children to get involved, but it ended up being just me with a personal blog ("Not Spaghetti") that also did a lot of climate science-related blogging. And basically nothing in the last 6 years. So I'm back here.

Twitter was a huge distraction, but I'm trying to give it up now. I'm also on mastondon - @apsmith@fediscience.org - if you'd like to comment please do it there! Hoping to post a bit more often here in the new year.

Another year (and a bit) with yet more books

2021 and the first part of 2022 have been considerably busier with regular life mostly returning and, as expected, have left me somewhat less time to read. Though looking through this list, my pace wasn’t so different for these 16 months from the 12 months of 2020. I didn’t tackle anything with the scope of the Malazan books this past year+ though, and the fiction collection was heavily weighted to authors I’d heard of long ago but never got around to reading before. The biggest thing for our family was our first grandchild, born in February. Spending time with grandchildren is definitely something I’d recommend! We traveled to visit (or they came to us) just about every month last year, which got a little harder when they moved to Los Angeles…

I did get a nice surprise relating to this blog earlier this year with an email from somebody who’d actually tried some of the books I suggested and was enjoying them. So - time for a new edition. The following is I believe a complete list of what I’ve read in the way of books and e-books since my last post.

Non-fiction

• Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli - I listened to this in audiobook format on a very long drive, and there were definitely parts where I missed something and had to go back and re-listen. The book is wonderfully poetic but also quite precise both in describing the history of Werner Heisenberg as a pioneer of quantum mechanics and of Rovelli’s own understanding of some of what still seems mysterious about it. I don’t think this book is for everyone, but those who read it and understand even a little will come away with a greater appreciation for some useful ways of thinking about the quantum world.
• Mission Economy, by Mariana Mazzucato - As a follow-on for some of the economics/government books I read in 2020 (and earlier). Mazzucato here gives many examples where governments have fostered innovation within capitalist economies and helped to accomplish both a desired “mission” (she focuses particularly on Apollo and the moon landing) while also promoting economic growth and prosperity for their people. The suggestion is that many modern democracies have lost that sense of “mission” in recent decades, but it could be restored and their economies revitalized, for example in a focused fight against climate change. But just about any challenging “mission” that the country really wants to achieve could work.
• Open Management by Rob England and Cherry Vu - I’ve followed Rob England on Twitter for a while, so when I saw he had a new book I thought I’d give it a try. The book is on their approach to managing complexity in organizations and how to foster continuous improvement. In brief, rigid hierarchies don’t work any more in a world that is “VUCA” - volatile, uncertain, complicated, and ambiguous. Organizations need to become open, transparent, trusting of their employees - let the work to be done guide staff in what to do, not management dictates. The first part of the book is the theory of all this while the lengthier remainder is a series of interesting case studies, I think all from Vietnam. Hard to summarize adequately; this is a pretty short book and one I expect to reread.
• This is Vegan Propaganda by Ed Winters - this book arrived in the mail addressed to one of our sons who’s not living here any more, so it was a bit of a surprise. But I decided to read myself it before getting it to him. Some of the arguments seem a little forced or over-dramatic, but the author makes some excellent points concerning abuses and substandard behavior by the meat and dairy industries. It didn’t quite convince me yet to become vegan, but I can see much better the reasons for that choice now.
• When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone - another recommendation from our offspring. This is an old book on the topic of religion, and I think has been largely superseded by more nuanced telling of the history, but it was definitely an interesting read. The author seemed to think ancient societies where women were in charge were somehow better, despite them being apparently just as full of oppression and murder and the like as male-dominated ones. Different societies have definitely been organized in different ways over the millennia of human civilization. The hypothesis of a widespread and relatively uniform “original” religion seems generally unlikely though.
• Inferior by Angela Saini - also on the subject of women and their oppression (in more modern times), though I came about this book through a diversity book club at work, and we actually had a chance to hear from and talk with the author. The book covers a wide range of different areas in which society, with “scientific” claims to back them up, has determined women to be inferior to men over the years. And then goes into how that “science” has in most cases been found to be itself biased by those doing the studies, so that what seem like real effects often disappear with better research. While men and women do differ in some real ways, most of what we think we know about these differences is probably wrong. Interesting to learn about.

Fiction

• Brightness Reef, Infinity’s Shore, Heaven’s Reach by David Brin - following on from the first part of this “Uplift” saga that I read in 2020. This second trilogy in the same universe is in a new setting - a planet of refuge for six interestingly developed alien races, where the human-dolphin crew of the previous trilogy arrives seeking their own place of refuge, but unfortunately pursued by other galactic species who are after the treasures they found. All a very enjoyable read though some of it is rather far-fetched by the end.
• Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler - since Butler was in the news and I hadn’t read any of her stories before, this seemed like a good place to start. These books are full of violence in a world descended into drug- and selfishness-fueled horror. A young girl escapes the destruction of her home and loss of (most of?) her family, and in her travels recruits strangers to her cause: a community and new religion, “Acorn” that speaks of hope and a destiny beyond this planet.
• Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark and Patternmaster, also by Octavia Butler - I read Patternmaster first as I had heard some recommendation of it, and I believe it was also the book written first. The others were I guess prequels to set up the world of Patternmaster. All intriguing stories in themselves, they share a common theme of a never-ending fight between compassion and selfish abuse of power in a world where inherited psychic traits grant both unusual capabilities but also bring all kinds of trouble.
• Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling - a rather crazy mix of characters pursues the fabled “EF-6” tornado, with some very different goals in mind between them. I’ve known Bruce Sterling via online interactions for a very long time, but I hadn’t got around to reading many of his books; this was definitely a fun one to read.
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. A rather famous novel, I guess it came to mind last year because I’d heard it was set in 2021. I’d never gotten around to reading it before, and I’ve never watched the movie based on it (Blade Runner) all the way through, though I’ve seen parts of it in snatches on TV over the years. The setting is a post-apocalyptic world where natural animals are rare and treasured but much more common are electronic replacements that can be quite convincing. Electronic replacements for humans (the androids) also exist, but are forbidden on Earth; nevertheless some have infiltrated the world. The protagonist is tasked with finding the androids and destroying them, but telling android from human is a tricky thing. A fascinating world with a challenge to all of us on what it really means to be human.
• Consider Phlebas (#1), The Player of Games, (#2), Use of Weapons (#3), Matter (#8), Surface Detail (#9), The Hydrogen Sonata (#10) by Iain M. Banks - books from his “Culture” series. Once again, an author I had heard about for years but never got around to reading. These books are all extremely different from one another, with very different characters, but set in the same universe of somewhat peaceful galactic harmony and abundance - except for the wars in peripheral or lower-level civilizations that most of these books focus on. My selection of which books to read was based on what our library had available, not any particular other recommendations - if anybody has a strong feeling for another of these I should read please let me know! I was a bit shocked by the first novel’s (spoiler alert!) killing off almost all major characters, and Banks doesn’t hesitate from the same sort of fate for his characters in the other books either. I think my favorite of these is “Use of Weapons”, where successive chapters step forwards and backwards in time following two different narratives, culminating in an astonishing revelation at the book’s end. The human characters are in many ways intriguing and often deeply flawed; the AI’s have their own quirks, including their choice of names (for spaceships). And the settings are spectacular - Banks imagines space environments of vast scale and variety. Some of the stories get into deep philosophical questions - for example in “Surface Detail” the meaning of identity and punishment when an artificial “afterlife” can be all too real. Imaginative and thought-provoking, I’m glad I finally got around to reading these.
• Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, Halting State, and Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Again books I’d heard of previously but never got around to reading until last year. The first three I’ve listed are grouped in a series but only the first two seem connected really in the same universe, with some shared characters. Stross has written on other topics, but these books all share the concept of high technology and its consequences for societies and for ordinary people caught up in the changes. “Halting State” was the most near-term of the books (along with the first part of Accelerando) and quite a fun romp through a world where the real and the virtual intermingle a bit too much. All of these are thought-provoking in their own way, on where our technology may be headed and what we ought to do about it, if there’s anything we can do.
• Cytonic by Brandon Sanderson and also the three related novellas co-written with Janci Patterson. These are Young-Adult material (Cytonic is third in a series of I think 4 books), so not very sophisticated but as usual with Sanderson books there are fun interactions between the characters and some secrets of this universe revealed along the way.
• The God is Not Willing by Steven Erikson - a follow-on to the Malazan Book of the Fallen featuring a new crop of Malazan marines and some minor characters from the earlier series, in a new adventure featuring a massive climate-change-related disaster. Despite nominally being about Karsa Orlong he doesn’t actually feature as a character - I’m guessing the sequels (this is first of a trilogy) will involve him more directly.
• Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey - long-awaited 9th book in the Expanse series. This is a rare case where I watched the TV (actually Amazon Prime) series first, then started reading the books - back during season 4 of the TV series a few years ago. Now the last book is out, and the TV series ended with season 6 - both of which came to immensely satisfying conclusions (the TV conclusion was roughly where the 6th book ended, so I guess that makes sense). The premise of the whole series is human expansion through the solar system and discovery of ancient alien technology that allows travel to other star systems (and more!), but otherwise constrained roughly by the laws of physics we know. The roughly realistic depiction of travel between asteroids, moons, and planets and settlements among all those were well done generally, and the way in which the human communities in those different parts of the solar system (and later beyond) interacted was I think very well conceived. A great series to read, with a well-written ending.
• Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. I’ve read most of his books and enjoyed them for the most part, so was quite intrigued at how he would handle the subject of climate change. There are some fascinating characters here, along with beautifully detailed depictions of several chunks of the world from Texas to the Netherlands to the mountainous disputed boundary between India and China. But the whole premise that a rich guy can solve the problem while the nations bicker turned me off a bit, and the “solution” - not stopping burning fossil fuels at all, but modifying the atmosphere to reduce incoming sunlight is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, I know people talk about geo-engineering and Stephenson here has put together a plausible near-future scenario for it to really come about, but that doesn’t make it a good thing for anybody. It also seemed quite ironic that the main opposition to the rich fellow’s project, from India, is the place that triggered everything in Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future” - not that that was a better book (at least Stephenson has a rousing mostly coherent narrative), but I’m wondering if Stephenson wrote this book as a rebuttal in some sense. Anyway, whether you like his plan or not you’ll learn some interesting things as always from a Stephenson novel, so I won’t tell you to stay away. But it’s not a book I will return to I think.
• The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves (Gentlemen Bastards series) by Scott Lynch - another recommendation from a son. Stories of lovable scoundrels and scam artists set in a sort of Renaissance Italy except there’s powerful magic (not wielded by our protagonists) and some strange remnants of (alien?) technology dotting the landscape, and the waters seem particularly dangerous. Each novel is in a very different setting, but with our hero (Locke Lamora) risking his life to win at whatever escapade he has set himself on. There are mysteries not yet revealed in these books, and the third strongly hints at more to come - a fourth book “The Thorn of Emberlain” is rumored and a German translation is listed at Amazon (to be released February 2023) so I’m hoping we’ll see that out soon!

Well, that’s the list as far as I can remember or have records. I have a new iPad for reading e-books, and not all my old book records migrated from the old one so I may well have forgotten something.

And since I have had at least one reader of one of my articles here, maybe I’ll make more of a habit of posting things to this site now. Until next time!

A Year of Reading

Note: My other home-spun blog platform(s) seem to have died of software rot - at least I haven't figured out how to post there after a multi-year hiatus. Meanwhile Google seems to keep this platform running, so I guess I'll try again here.

Of course it's been a weird year in many respects. Difficult in some ways. Working from home and other forms of confinement have their benefits though - in particular I've had lots of time to read. A while ago I set myself a goal of finishing at least one new book every month; 2020 allowed me to greatly exceed that! And I think I learned a few things. Below is a list of (I think) all the books I "finished" (not necessarily reading every word, but getting to the end in a way that I don't think I'll need to go back to it for a while) in the year that just recently ended. This (and the mini reviews) is mostly to have a record for myself, but I'd recommend any of these books to others too if you find yourself with free time! Most are available as ebooks on Amazon Kindle or (even better) free from your library with apps like "Libby", which I've been very grateful for this past year.

Non-fiction

• Newton's Principia - as a physicist I'd heard of this for a long time but had never actually read Newton's work in his own words. It was quite fascinating in the level of detail he managed to get to and the number of different observations he pulled together in his analyses. Also of course the geometrical argumentation, which I'd seen sketched out here and there before, but was quite unfamiliar in relation to the algebraic calculations that are more familiar to today's students (I did skip a lot of the detailed argumentation on this after the first few chapters). I was most impressed that he managed to estimate even the densities of Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and Earth (based on orbital period/distance relations), but then also extended that to an estimate of the Moon's density (based on an analysis of relative strength of solar and lunar tides). He didn't get the numbers quite right, but I think they were within a factor of 2 or so which I would call impressive. There were also some interesting (and quite strange) speculations about comets, and other aspects of other bodies in the solar system.
• Naturally I followed that with Newton's Opticks. Again full of data - this time from his own experiments. He was seemingly very systematic in setting up many different configurations of prisms, lenses, narrow apertures, etc. and recording his observations, following up in logical ways to test various ideas he had. He very clearly saw how light is made up of a spectrum of different colors with slightly different properties; it seems to me he was seeing hints of diffraction in his experiments, but his interest was focused on ray-like straight-line geometry.
• Huygens' Treatise on Light - I'd also heard of this long before as the origin of treatment of light as a wave rather than a particle, and was interested to see the contrast with Newton's approach. Interestingly Huygens seemed more theoretical in general, first focusing on the (finite but large) speed of light. His analysis of propagation of waves at interfaces (reflection and refraction) is, like Newton's, largely geometrical, but with differing assumptions about the nature of the phenomenon. In particular he showed that the refractive index is equal to the ratio of the speed of light in the two media; the related angles (law of sines) derive directly from his wave approach under that rule.
• A Memoir on the Physical Review, A history of the first hundred years, by Paul Hartman. I acquired this somehow at work, but I don't remember from what source. It had been sitting in my office for years (it's been 27 years since the 100'th anniversary of the journals). It is mostly focused on the early years of the journal at Cornell University, and many of the stories about locations on the campus brought back memories of my own time there (long after the events of the book). It also chronicles the rise of professional physics research in the United States, contrasting the rather mundane research of the 1890s when things started with the growing excitement in the field as American physicists absorbed new ideas like X-rays and Einstein's theories and quantum mechanics coming from Europe, and then started making their own new discoveries and advances. The financial and governance details on founding and growing the journal were also quite fascinating.
• JSTOR: a history by Roger C. Schonfeld. I also somehow acquired this at work, probably from my old boss Bob Kelly. This book is all about the early years of the JSTOR project - almost entirely focused on the financial and governance details from its initiation through the Sloan Foundation. Also quite fascinating for anyone interested in how large projects in scholarly publishing get supported and funded.
• The Born-Einstein letters 1916-1955 by Max Born. These very personal letters also include correspondence between them and their wives, through the end of Einstein's life. Much of the history of the early 20th century, both of physics, but also of the tumultuous world around them, is reflected in their concerns for one another and those around them.
• Masterworks of Technology by E. E. Lewis - a great review of the history of engineering from the earliest times - civil, mechanical, and all its various manifestations
• Crystal Fire by Michael Riordan - the intertwined story of Brattain and Bardeen who discovered the transistor, and William Shockley who managed their Bell Labs group and, for all his faults, ended up creating the Silicon Valley we know today. The general history is perhaps well known, but the details of the physics and the research motivations behind many of the paths taken (many of which were wrong turns) are brilliantly explored and explained in this book.
• Harmony by Arno Penzias - I had somehow thought this book would be more a technical work as Penzias was a major Bell Labs figure, but it is actually primarily on the topic of how (mostly business/managerial) life will change as we rid ourselves of paper... It is of course very dated now, yet interesting to see the perspective of somebody in the early stages of the transition that is (even more so thanks to COVID-19) now pretty well complete. And some of the lessons he draws may still be helpful to us today.
• Capital and Ideology by French economist Thomas Piketty. I'd read his previous book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and so thought a follow-on would be interesting. I may post a longer article later with some more thoughts on this book, but in general he seems optimistic that political "ideology" can change in a country quite quickly, and the details of that ideology make a huge difference on his primary issue of wealth inequality.
• The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. A much-ballyhooed explainer for "Modern Monetary Theory", this does do a decent job of showing how federal governments (at least of nations with their own currencies) should think about their fiscal policy differently than has been typical. However, it also felt like there was something significant missing here; I'm not an expert on this and not sure exactly what, but I think a more physics-style exploration of the ultimate limits of fiscal policy would be worthwhile, for example.
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. I'd had this in my office for a long time, and never quite got around to reading it. 2020 was the year! It was really worthwhile - although Tufte's opinions may sometimes seem idiosyncratic, he is really clear on what makes a good visualization of data, and has a lot of almost hilarious examples of the bad. He does seem to think pie charts are never a good idea. I'll probably be looking at this more (and some of his later books) in future.
• Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce. I'd long heard of lambda calculus, but this book really gets into it with mathematical definitions of a huge variety of typing systems and the associated functional behaviors. Typing is complicated. The detailed proofs I skipped here seemed not that different from the detailed geometrical proofs in Newton. Still worthwhile for a general perspective on the mathematics behind functional programming.
• A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Jenna Levin. Maybe this should go under the "Fiction" heading - it is a fictionalized account of the lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel - but the history of the computational implications of their work is certainly interesting, and the idiosyncracies and relationships highlighted in the fiction are not so far removed from the real history. Somewhat depressing for both in the end though.

Fiction

• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Somehow I'd never read this, though we had a copy lying around the house. Yes I did skip some of the detailed discussion of whales. And of course I knew how the general story went. Still it was much more fun to read than I'd expected.
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Corey Doctorow. I once attended a conference where Doctorow spoke passionately on the issue of copyright (and its abuses); I haven't read many of his books but what I have read has been fun. This one was no exception, though a little wild at times in its speculations (restoring people from backup copies is a major theme).
• The Malazan Book of the Fallen - Gardens of the Moon, etc. by Steven Erikson. One of my sons started me on this by discussing some of the characters with me and how fascinating he found it. He actually discouraged me at first because of their length - also some of the action described is horrifically brutal. And Erikson's writing style almost forces you to skip ahead and back quite a bit to try to figure out what's going on. This is a ten-book fantasy series that has perhaps the most awe-inspiringly vast collection of characters I have ever encountered in fiction. Each of the books is lengthy in itself, and there are seemingly dozens of simultaneous near-parallel threads of action. With so many different major characters the characterizations are surprisingly diverse and interesting; there is occasional excess melodrama surrounding the actions of major characters, and occasional excess slapstick involving some side characters, but in general the pacing and scope of these novels really is awe-inspiring. Far from every thread is tidily wrapped up in the end, but that's sort of what real life is like, and these are the first novels I've read that seemed to create a world close in scale to the vastness of our own. If you have a LOT of spare time (as I had during some bouts of self-isolation this past year) these novels might be just the ticket.
• The "Broken Earth" trilogy by N. K. Jemison - The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky - I'd read a bit about Jemison somewhere online, and found these recent sci-fi novels quite interesting, with a creative take on how those with exceptional powers may be treated.
• The City We Became also by N. K. Jemison. New York City (and its boroughs) come to life, with interdimensional enemies to boot. The start of a new trilogy I believe; it should be fun. Stay out of Staten Island though!
• This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Also suggested by my son. An exchange of letters between combatants involved in trying to reshape history, back and forth through the ages. Some interesting temporal loops and paradoxes arise.
• Recursion by Blake Crouch. Also on the subject of messing around with time; this one is pretty hard to describe, but I really enjoyed it. A good ending to a very complex story.
• Dawnshard and Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson, part of his "Stormlight Archive" world (4 major novels and several novellas written so far). I'd read the previous novels in the series, so the November releases were much anticipated. Unfortunately much remains unresolved, but Sanderson is pretty reliable in bringing things to a tidy conclusion. A fascinating and well-thought-out world, though it seemed a little more contrived after reading Erikson's novels.
• The first three novels in David Brin's "Uplift Universe" - Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War. I've long admired and respected Brin's political views (he has an interesting blog of his own on this platform) but I hadn't read many of his novels. And while I had heard of the Uplift universe, it didn't seem to be one I was terribly interested in getting into. But with some spare time I thought I ought to at least try it. While some of these first three novels seem a little dated (written in the 1980s), they do make you think about our place as humans in the universe - and provide an interesting contrast to Cixin Liu's harsh universe in "The Three Body Problem" and its sequels. I've already started reading some of his later works in this same narrative world.

Of course I've read an awful lot of Twitter threads and blog posts and Apple News articles (and even unfortunately Facebook on occasion) and other online info sources this past year. Our church had us reading the Book of Mormon again this past year too, which I think counts as my tenth time through it. There are definitely things in there I hadn't noticed before, so I'm glad we spent a year focusing on it again. I also got to read some of my mother’s diaries after she passed away in November. Although not everything she wrote was positive, it really does bring back strong memories of things we went through as a family. She had some pretty strong opinions on many different subjects. And I was impressed by her expressions of faith, which she wrote much more there than anything she said in person. "Thank you God, for this gift", was a common phrase.

Well, 2021 is a new year. I probably won't get quite as much reading in, but that will be because life is at least somewhat back to normal. For which I also will be very grateful.

Wow, it's been a while - new site

I probably ought to figure out how to close down this blog and move the old entries over to the new one - anyway, following the title link to get to where I've been writing recently. Haven't really done anything with this site for years.

The Mormons

I finally got around to watching the PBS show last night, all 4 hours in one sitting (yeah, I was up rather late).

I thought overall it was quite good. The one bit of history I was not familiar with that I learned from it was Reed Smoot's history in the senate. I had heard almost none of Smoot's story before seeing the show. Though they didn't mention that Smoot was half of the Smoot-Hawley act that is blamed for the Great Depression. But history is history, and I thought they did the history bit about as fairly as they could.

I thought it was a little stupid that the show used excommunicated members to talk a lot about the church in the second half, without identifying themselves as such until they personally talked about their excommunications. On the other hand, what they said about the church generally (on subjects other than their issues) was very positive, so it's hard to complain much about that. The former member who served a mission and said he would have been a suicide bomber if his Mission Pres. asked him to was weird though. Is that supposed to be representative?

Some of the imagery seemed odd (where'd that red hairy Moroni picture come from?) and referring to Joseph Smith as the "alpha and omega" was just wrong from a Christian perspective. I think there was another spot similar to that that sounded ok in context but offputting by normal Christian connotation.

The one thing I really liked was the music. If you listened carefully most of the songs and instrumental music seemed to fit in very well with the topics under discussion, and the members singing and playing music were great. Did anybody else notice the choir singing "Oh My Father" and ending on the "I've a Mother there" verse at the end of the first half?

Things missing:
* no discussion of the Word of Wisdom - and weren't those "Mormon fundamentalists" shown drinking wine? They focused on tithing as a barrier to entering the church and the difficulties of modern members in being clearly distinct from the world, but I didn't see a mention of giving up coffee, alcohol, smoking. The wonderful convert sister who talked about being on drugs before the missionaries came, did they ever mention that that was a barrier to joining?

* I didn't see anything on the responsibilities given to young men in the priesthood. Or the relationship with scouting... Seemed like that might fit in with the whole women-having-the-priesthood issue, but no. Why?

* The discussion of missionary work was good, but I thought their examples of missionaries in action were a little atypical. They referred to the MTC as "boot camp", but didn't draw further on the analogies with military experience, which I thought would have been logical.

* They talked about the church as being exceedingly wealthy and owning lots of property, but not about some of the impressive buildings (like the tabernacle) we're responsible for, or other prominent achievements of the church members (no mention of the Mormon Battalion even!)

* They touched on all the "controversies" that I can think of except one - abortion and the way our faith informs related issues like stem cell research. Why's that?

In some respects the whole thing seemed a bit of a commercial for Mitt Romney. There he was in several places, and even his website address clearly listed...

Anyway, I don't think it hurt a bit, overall it was much better than I'd expected. Even testimony-building in parts.