Areoform

On Saturday afternoon, I held a technical session on Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) with a friend. He’s working towards his Ph.D. in the space, working on the material’s end of the problem. We went over why this was an important focal point for future research and explained the history of NTP in general, including its natural outgrowth from the Manhattan Project. Somewhere along the way, we started attracting conspiracy theorists.

You know the type. The person in question started out by asking us whether this would get us to another solar system. There are very few questions that get under my skin. But this was one of them. He asked in a way that dismissed all of the work being done and the progress that has been made. After all, yes, of course, this won’t get us to Alpha Centuari, but that doesn’t matter. Each little step we take, each foot we gain, is another step on the path forever outward bound.

By saying that, I foolishly fell into this individual’s trap. Because the minute I finished my answer, they responded with,

“We already have the technology do this [go to other solar systems]. They don’t want us to know about it.”

– conspiracy theorist

In the moment, I did what I had to. I shut the theorist down and brought the focus back to our technical discussion. However, his remark stayed with me. It crystallized the problem with conspiracy theorists; they lack a sense of scale. I suspect because there’s a disconnect between what is taught in schools across the world and the mechanics of how systems – human or machine – work. Most people seem to be entirely unfamiliar with systems theory and are unable to model the effects of even simple systems in their minds.

As an exercise in systems thinking, let us assume that the conspiracy theorist is correct; there indeed is magical technology out there somewhere that can take us to Alpha Centauri and back. Let us take it as a given that Captain Picard was thrown back into history thanks to the Borg, and we captured the Enterprise while he was in the middle of a stirring and inspiring speech about the history of humankind.

Okay, cool. What’s next?

We can’t just put the Enterprise in a warehouse and call it a day. We’d have to work to understand its secrets. And that’s where systems thinking comes into play. To extract its secrets and to keep its existence a secret, a conspiracy would have to exist. A conspiracy that we can model and understand.

The Enterprise is a formidable vessel capable of warp travel. Its functioning involves advanced physics that isn’t well understood currently. The “Heisenberg Compensator” itself would re-write much of our current understanding of physics and upturn the foundations of quantum theory on its head. To understand a machine that advanced it would mean hiring hundreds of professional physicists as well as legions of graduate/Ph.D. students and training them for several years as they teach each other and themselves the basics of its functioning. We are essentially talking about the NSA’s mathematics program on steroids. To make any significant progress, we’re talking about thousands of academics and the start of an enclosed world with all of the trappings of academia, including papers, talks, lecture series, etc.

How would you prevent this from leaking to the outside? All of those physicists will have friends outside of their pocket universe, people they went to school with, ex-colleagues, professional correspondents, conference friends. Will you bar all contact forever between them and their personal networks? If that’s the case, then how will you recruit? How will you get new physicists and mathematicians as your hiring needs expand?

For the sake of argument, let us make a further assumption. Let’s assume that there’s a magical, ill-defined means through which sharing any knowledge from the pocket academic universe leads to instant death. If you talk about it, you die. Instantly. No questions asked. Does this mean that they’ll have to spend their entire lives with the program? How would you acquire the great minds you need if you have such a ridiculous requirement? Why would the next or current Nobel prize winner want to work with you if they can’t work on anything else ever again?

Will you pay these people forever to just sit there and work on this tiny thing whose derivatives you can’t share? What if they could lead to better, life-saving technologies elsewhere? Would you, the architect of the conspiracy, perhaps embark on the Men in Black conceit and start sharing things every now and then? In that case, then how will you explain where the newfound knowledge came from? And over time, as you share more and more downstream work from the insights that you’ve gained, what’s stopping clever people on the outside from making progress towards your secret work?

You may dismiss these concerns and say that you will completely wall off your pocket universe. But then what happens when you encounter a problem that you can’t solve? And it’s a small, but narrow, critical problem that you don’t have the skills to approach. Will you call in consultants? Will you police their derivative works too?

We have a real world example of this. In 1957, a report was written by someone at the NSA about mathematics in the NSA,

FINDING RT-c. The Agency has not been able to carry out enough long-range research directed.toward the identification and development of special fields of mathematics and statistics of particular interest to the Agency.

This has been due partly to a reluctance on the part of some Agency personnel to encourage such activity, and partly to the unusual susceptibility of a cryptanalytic organization to the extreme pressures of immediate problems. Such fields as. abstract theory of rotor maze information, Bayesian statistics, theory of stochastic search, and theory of special iterative convergence schemes might have been, and still should be, further developed as basic mathematical research with a good expectation of eventual dividend in cryptology.

– A Study of the Mathematical Effort in the National Security Agency, 1957 [PDF]

For those who might not be familiar, Bayesian statistics is a thriving field now and forms the basis of many AI/ML algorithms. I am not a mathematician, but stochastic optimization/search and iterative schemes are thriving fields as well 60+ years into the future. Whatever special knowledge that the NSA guarded back in 1957 is almost certainly public domain in one form or the other by this point. Enough clever minds have worked on these fields that they’ve likely stumbled across most of the NSA’s areas of interest independently.

Once upon a time, the NSA used to be decades ahead of everyone else in the field of cryptology. Perhaps they still are, but due to the internet and the need for secure digital communications, there are more people working outside the NSA in the field than ever before, and I suspect that the gap has narrowed considerably.

If They (it’s always a “They”) have some magical propulsion technology, then given enough time, the world will catch up. Eventually. Nothing has to leak. Just the downstream implications and work products will eventually lead to breakthroughs that feed towards our broader goals

I have dealt with a very pointed, vertical slice of this problem, but the scope of the problem expands as you look outside the slice. After all, where will you house the Enterprise? In a giant underground facility somewhere? That facility will need custodians, cooks, maintenance personnel, IT people, receptionists, engineers, administrators, security, construction workers, supply chain managers, procurement experts, etc.

All of these people will come from somewhere, and they will go somewhere. When they drive their cars in during shifts, the cars will be visible from space. Enemy nations will know that there is a secret facility in that location where something significant must be going on, given how heavily guarded it would be and the number of vehicles coming and going.

If you propose that all of these people should live on base, then you’d have to construct accommodations, handle sewage, etc. It would be an entire town, with all the infrastructure that it implies. Even if you decide to make it underground, the displaced earth will have to go somewhere during construction, the town would need energy from somewhere else, and it would need ways to send waste out.

In an age before spy satellites, the US Military built entire cities focused on an advanced technology project that would forever change the world. It was called the Manhattan Project. It involved some 125,000 people who lived in secret cities across the US. An extremely expensive feat of logistics and planning helmed by General Leslie Groves. If you read articles about it today, you’ll find all of them talking about how impressive the secrecy was and how only a few hundred people knew about the Bomb before it was dropped. Here’s a quote from one of these articles,

Moeller guesses that just a few hundred people in the country knew about the bomb before it was dropped. Nothing was explained to the tens of thousands who lived and worked in the cities that produced them, working “like moles in the dark,” as Life magazine put it in 1945.

“Obviously people knew something was afoot, but they didn’t really know what it was,” Moeller said.

– The secret cities where the atomic bomb was built

They’re wrong. And we have historical evidence to back this up. From Alex Wellerstein’s excellent blog, Restricted Data,

[…] Fission had been discovered in 1939, chain reactions were talked about publicly a few months later, and by the early 1940s the subject of atomic power and atomic bombs had become a staple of science journalists and science fiction authors.

– Death dust, 1941

In his post, Dr. Wellerstein describes how in 1944 — a year before they dropped the Bomb — a science fiction story was published talking about an Atomic Bomb made out of U-235! The author had guessed the existence of the Bomb, entirely independently, earning him and his editor, the science fiction great, John Campbell a congratulatory visit from the FBI.

The U-235 Bomb story has nothing on the piece that Campbell himself wrote in 1941,

With all the world seeking frantically for the secret of that irresistible weapon, what are America’s chances in the race?

It is a question of men and brains and equipment. Thanks to Hitler’s belief that those who don’t agree with him must be wrong, America now has nearly all the first-rank theoretical physicists of the world. Mussolini’s helped us somewhat, too, by exiling his best scientists. Niels Bohr, father of modern atomic theory, is at Princeton, along with Albert Einstein and others of Europe’s greatest.

The National Defense Research Committee is actively and vigorously supporting the research in atomic physics that seeks the final secrets of atomic power. Actively, because the world situation means that they must, yet reluctantly because they know better than anyone else can the full and frightful consequences of success. Dr. Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the Committee, has said: “I hope they never succeed in tapping atomic power. It will be a hell of a thing for civilization.”

– “Is Death Dust America’s Secret Weapon,” 1941 [PDF]

It’s really impressive that he’s quoting Dr. Vannevar Bush in 1941, one of the main architects of the Manhattan Project. Campbell even manages to mention exiled European scientists and Dr. Bohr, who were instrumental in the success of the program.

He got all of this from the scant public information available at the time. If random science fiction authors, without the benefit of any real access, could figure it out, do you really think that at least some of the many trained professionals who worked on the program didn’t piece together the reality? Especially those charged with refining Uranium who had to be told not to stack highly enriched Uranium lest it explode?

If only Uncle Sam knew,

All of this is my extremely long-winded way of saying that conspiracies don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in a context, the chaotic, wider arching system. Any attempt to create a parallel system away from the broader human endeavor is both expensive and formidable. For every resource you need, for each person you hire, it increases the cost and complexity. As the conspiracy grows so does the effort of maintaining it. A well functioning conspiracy needs coordination and communication between all of its parts.

Personally, I suspect that the effort increases exponentially, especially for more complicated knowledge work. To elaborate, work cannot be carried out in narrow silos, as each team working on a particular problem will need added context supplied by other teams. This need for context necessitates continuous communication that can easily lead to clever folks piecing together what’s going on. So you must create mechanisms that somehow allow for sharing some of the theory behind the secret information without sharing all of it.

And that burden increases as you start creating systems to bring new people on. It’s very much like a startup. You’ll have to onboard the new people, initiate them into the project’s culture, teach them what they need to learn to be effective, mentor them etc. Sooner or later you’ll need HR, which is when the complexity really mounts.

Two can keep a secret if they’re both dead.

What is truly funny is that I have never heard conspiracy theorists talk about real conspiracies with any depth or understanding. There are real conspiracies out there. Wild, incredible conspiracies that are backed by a large amount of documentation and data. Conspiracies with multiple points of collaboration that meet most evidentiary thresholds. They aren’t discussed much, but they are of significant import to history.

To keep it relevant to conspiracy theories, here’s one potential conspiracy that I’ve never heard conspiracy theorists mention. (I hope that I don’t set off some form of avalanche with this — this is purely conjecture and there is a distinct likelihood that I am incorrect.),

Gen. Groves, Gen. Curtis LeMay, and the others involved with the bombing of Hiroshima may have committed some light treason along the way. And why we need to re-evaluate President Truman’s legacy.

This conspiracy comes to us by way of Dr. Alex Wellerstein (more here) and Robert McNamara. To appreciate it, we need some context. Gen. LeMay, a self described war criminal, commanded the strategic bombing campaign of Japan. He is responsible for the firebombing of most Japanese cities. And — according to the statement given by Robert McNamara — was the one who pushed to drop the Bomb (McNamara says that it was “dropped on his command”, but I am assuming that to be a figure of speech).

Most people are taught that President Truman was the one who gave the command, but this is inaccurate. He was given options and told to approve them by his generals. He wrestled with his conscience and decided to go ahead. But here’s where it gets mildly tricky and treasonous. It seems that the generals involved may have misled him about the targets.

In his personal diaries, drafts of the speech he gave after dropping the Bomb, as well as the final speech he gave, he identifies Hiroshima, a city, as a military target. In his personal diary entry, President Truman writes about taking Kyoto off the list, emphasis is Alex Wellerstein’s,

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.

He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful. 

– President Truman’s Diary, July 25th, 1945

And then during the speech he gave after the Bomb had been dropped, President Truman says, (empahsis mine)

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction. […]

– Radio Address Given by President Truman on August 9th, 1945

The language in his original drafts is even starker,

Draft #2: The world will note that the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima which is purely a military base.

– President Truman and his speech writers

Purely a military base.

Dr. Wellerstein states, and this is conjecture on his part, that Truman revised the speech that he gave on the 9th after seeing the reports of casualties and aerial photographs on the 8th. But he still may have thought that it was a military target and that only some innocent people died.

Here’s my proposed conspiracy; President Truman may have developed this misunderstanding on his own, but his advisors made sure that they did not disabuse him of it. That’s very important. He must have stated his preference that the US shouldn’t target civilians and to minimize harm during the meetings. Someone must have realized at some point that he thought that Hiroshima was a military base or a “purely military target.” Why didn’t they correct him?

Why didn’t anyone say, “Sir, Hiroshima is an industrial city with a military base, but it is not a military base“?

I would like to go even further and pose the question. He walked away from his meeting with Stimson assuming that they wouldn’t target civilians, when Stimson meant something completely different; did that mean that he was being misled before that day?

On its own the evidence is inconclusive, but where it gets really interesting is when you take what happens next into account. Truman was so horrified by the outcome that he stopped the further use of the Bomb,

[…] On August 10th, he told his cabinet that “he had given orders to stop atomic bombing” because, as Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’”

Crucially, President Truman didn’t know about Nagasaki, and was surprised when he learned about the bombing. He immediately gave the order to discontinue using the bomb without his express consent. It’s a good thing he did, because further targets had already been selected. General LeMay was raring to go.

What if, and this is conjecture, the Generals knew that President Truman would be horrified by the idea of killing so many civilians and would have never given his assent if he knew that they would kill so many innocent people. What if they kept him in the dark? Either on purpose or via an implicit strategy to never detail what the casualties would be.

If any of this is true, then a few generals lied — explicitly or via omission — to the POTUS and usurped some of his power as Commander in Chief. That’s not exactly treason in the legal sense, but I like to think of it as a dash of light treason.

What really gets me is that it’s somewhat likely to be true, McNamara’s recollections of LeMay are particularly illuminating on the kinds of people we’re talking about,

If you notice, the above conspiracy theory is fairly “boring.” It is endlessly fascinating to me. But I’ve watched people fall asleep to my tales. Who can blame them? It is, at end of the day, office politics writ large. The “conspiracy” involves pushing a decision maker into a favorable decision for their faction. And the questions involved revolve around who knew what and when as well as what they did with that information. There is no magical technology. No blood drinking. Or, any of the usual fare. It’s conjecture related to court politics and the dynamics of the Presidency in the mid-20th century.

Even more disappointingly (to the conspiracy theorist), there is no one mastermind, there is no grand secret group in charge. It’s a chaotic group of people, all playing telephone with each other. A group of people with the weight of history on their shoulders, doing their best in the moment. There is no hint of any real coordination or grand machinations.

It is what it is. And that must be really disappointing for most folks.

These efforts will evolve and expand over time.

- Apple on their "Expanded Protections for Children"

I am broke “non-liquid” right now. Normally, that sentence doesn’t have geopolitical ramifications on the creation of hybrid private-public surveillance state. But in my case it does.

It started rather innocuously. Someone couldn’t send me money. No matter what they did. They couldn’t transfer any money. Curious. We started experimenting with different friends, companies, and acquaintances. None of them could send me money. Wise wouldn’t provide any explanation. My business had been a paying customer for more than ~4+ years. And now, I was locked out. Okay. They’re hardly the only fish in the sea.

Except it happened again. This time with our bank, Mercury†. Okay, that’s strange. They asked for more details. We sent them details. Scans of my documentation. They’d revert back a few days later for more details. And we’d send it to them again. On and on we went chasing each other around the maypole. A few weeks passed, and Mercury’s team finally cut to the chase, they asked if I was affiliated with Entity X. We said no. But it didn’t matter. They froze me out anyway.

In some ways, we’re lucky that they flagged the transfer, because they gave us the first clue of what was going on. A friend ended up having the insight to search for Entity X (thanks Nick!) and found that they’d been sanctioned. Okay. What did this have to do with me?

On further investigation, we found that I shared my legal name with someone working with Entity X. Great. It’s a common name, like Robert Brown or Mary Johnson. Shouldn’t it be easy to prove that I’m not person X? A little Googling later, I found that the United States Department of the Treasury has an Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and they have an email address for “reconsideration” if you’ve been mistakenly placed on the sanctions list. As I’m clearly not the person they were looking to sanction, I decided that the most logical course of action would be write to them, and get their assent that I am indeed not the human that they’re looking for.

We wrote something up (once again, thanks Nick). And we sent it in.

The OFAC replied, to their credit, quite promptly with a link for false positives, and they told me to send this to the bank. Okay. Done. Except, it didn’t matter. Mercury blocked me anyway. The saga finished with me getting nada.

I wrote back to the OFAC requesting them to write something, anything on an official looking letterhead stating the simple fact that I, Person X born on such and such date with an ID number of Z, am not the person who has been sanctioned. I offered to provide them with additional details if there was any hesitancy on their part.

They haven’t replied. And I still can’t get any cash.

What’s amazing about this saga is that I have a statistically common legal name. There are thousands of people running around with this name. And effectively, they’ve all been barred from the global financial system.

To their credit, the OFAC publishes additional details for each person to prevent this exact scenario from occurring. However, these details seem to vary across individuals and countries. It doesn’t seem to be a neat dataset to model. In fact, the lists are available online in .PDF and .TXT files, and it’s a mess. Also, there isn’t one list, but rather multiple lists, with different details. As far as I can tell, there is no official API. There is no efficient way for programmers designing, say a “[bank] built for startups” to comply with the Treasury. Consequently, someone decided, in a meeting room somewhere, to punt the problem.

If it’s a pain to code this thing and it seems like a box to tick, then why not just run a simple match against the name – the one element of the dataset guaranteed to be there – and then punt it to our underpaid and understaffed KYC department to deal with? And the KYC department punted it to legal. And legal took one look and went, “hrm, what’s our downside risk if we approve this? Do we know this person is indeed the one being sanctioned? Oh, I see. Well let’s just block them. There’s not much they can do about it.”

And so, I am currently broke non-liquid. Kafka would have been proud.

(for connoisseurs of dark humor, I find it particularly hilarious that more likely than not the person they’re targeting will never be affected by this. This person, with whom I have the misfortune of sharing a legal name, doesn’t seem to perform many international transactions. She lives in a cash-first developing country, where the sanctions have no reach. She’s but a lowly piece in a very big game)

In other news, Apple has decided to scan images on your phone. For child porn, of course. There aren’t enough people (nor PR capital) to look through all of your photos. So, they’ve done the efficient thing instead. They’re simply going to match all of your photos, on your phone, against a hash of child porn images. What could possibly go wrong?

Other, more eloquent commentators, have pointed out the danger this poses. Apple often bends over for authoritarian regimes like China, going so far as to remove apps that help pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong avoid police violence. Or, that the company doesn’t allow adults to view adult content on the devices that they own. Or, in more conservative countries, removing any apps that mention the inconvenient existence of LGBTQ+ people. Wikipedia has an exhaustive list.

However, it is not my purpose to repeat what these commentators have already said. Nor to write a polemic for its own sake. My goal is to use my experience to peer into the future. To predict, through inevitability, the chain of events for poor souls in days yet to pass.

Just like the programmers who chose to match names against the sanctions list, while the KYC and legal departments handle the rest, Apple is matching all of the private photos on your phone against a list. This list is generated using something called a hash function. It turns an image into a number that a computer can then use to make the comparison. The process looks a bit like this,

Please note this is an example from a lovely blog that goes through this process. Apple’s process is different, but inherently similar.

In most cases, when we’re dealing with hashes in computer science, we’re looking for exact matches. But this case is different. Criminals aren’t stupid. They’re often not clever, but not all of them are stupid. What if they add a filter? Or, change the image somehow? Maybe add in a blur? What then?

Well, clearly, they can’t make every variation possible of every image that the police are looking for. If it’s a pain to code this thing and it seems like a box to tick, then why not just look for similarity instead and then punt it to law enforcement to deal with? To put it another way, the question Apple is asking isn’t, “is this image exactly like this photo from the child porn database?” No, the question Apple is asking is, “is this image similar to this photo from the child porn database?” Where the “similar” question is answered by a very clever, but very dumb algorithm.

In my case, when the programmers punted to the KYC department and legal, a bunch of transactions were cancelled. In this case, the police will raid your house and arrest you for “child porn.”

The image they will raid you for wouldn’t even necessarily have to be an adult one. Computers are strange. They are very literal beings. They do exactly what they are told, which is both their greatest asset and weakness. For example, this neural network thinks that this cat is guacamole,

Apple’s algorithm is very different, but it is susceptible to the same problems. In this case, noise was added into the image to make the neural network classify the cat as guacamole. In your case, it could be just happenstance. Random noise due to lighting conditions that takes an innocent photo (or, more likely, an intimate photo of you or your partner) and makes the algorithm assume that it is similar to a restricted photo.

Just like me, one day you’ll wake up and notice that something weird might be going on. Maybe it’s a car parked outside your street. Maybe it’s a feeling like people are following you. You won’t be that alarmed at first. You’ll dismiss it. But, eventually, it will come crashing in. Your door will be knocked open by SWAT. And you will find yourself facing armored people in guns to your confusion. They’ll scream for you to raise your hands and put them behind your head. They’ll say, “ma’am we have a warrant for your arrest.” And confused, you’ll be walked out to a waiting squad car.

Your local newspaper will write, “[You] has been arrested for possessing child pornography.” But you won’t read the headline. You’ll be in an interrogation room. Waiting for them to come in. Maybe the officer is letting you sweat it out. Maybe not. But eventually they’ll come in and they’ll start interrogating you. “Ma’am do you consume pornography that has minors in it?”

And you’ll deny it. They’ll put your phone in front of you. It’ll be in one of those bags. You’ll unlock it for them. And you’ll know that they’re going to go through everything. Including that embarrassing pic you took for K.

They won’t find anything. So they’ll return to question you. Maybe you’ve deleted the photos, who knows? Let’s pass it on to forensics and see what they come up with.

Eventually, you’ll end up being detained in jail. Your bail will be set high. You’ll have to plead and explain to everyone around you that you don’t know what’s happening. You don’t know why this happened. And those near you might believe you, but there will be this doubt that crosses through their mind. Just for a second. They’ll have this doubt, and that doubt will always be there for the rest of their life.

If you’re lucky enough to have money, you’ll get a lawyer. They’ll work on getting you out. Eventually, the forensics will return nothing. Your lawyer will succeed in getting you to walk free. And you’ll walk back to your home, with stares from your neighbors.

In a few months, it’ll come out that no, Apple’s algorithm screwed up here. Apple will blame law enforcement. Law enforcement will blame Apple. It doesn’t matter. That newspaper will put up a small story on their site about how you’re really innocent. It won’t get many clicks. And the one about you getting arrested for possessing child porn will stay up forever. With a note added to it, if you’re lucky.

Maybe you’ll get your life back. Maybe not. But you’ll spend the rest of your life under this cloud, because some programmer somewhere wrote this code. And everyone else assumed that it just works.

PS – This has already happened many, many times. Except not for something as incendiary as child porn, nor with the exact same technology. However, these examples are included as they are illustrative;

• Bad software sent postal workers to jail, because no one wanted to admit it could be wrong. – “information from it was used to prosecute 736 Post Office employees between 2000 and 2014, some of whom ended up going to jail”
• Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm – “faulty facial recognition match led to a Michigan man’s arrest for a crime he did not commit”
• Is facial recognition too biased to be let loose? “The software flagged 42 people over 6 trials that the researchers analysed; officers dismissed 16 matches as ‘non-credible’ but rushed out to stop the others. They lost 4 people in the crowd, but still stopped 22: only 8 turned out to be correct matches.”

† Per chance, if employees of Mercury or Wise see this, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, @_areoform.

He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. [...] there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing — not much, but enough that they miss fame.

- You and Your Research, Richard Hamming

Everyone has a take on ClubHouse. The social media app du jour. Steven Levy has gotten involved. Chronicling the early days of a project, arguably, too early to have early days. As have The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, Le Parisien, The New Yorker, The Economist, and that person you follow on Twitter for unknown reasons. Most write from a place of reservation. Others from caution. A few from optimism. But no matter what the angle, all of them are vying for a slice of the public’s fascination.

It is difficult to add to such a crowded public conversation. Harder still to be profound. However, I have noticed that, by and large, most of the writing approaches the application from the view of cultural fascination. Some approach it from a professional angle. I’ve heard some call it the audio LinkedIn. None of these accounts approach it from a maker’s fascination with creation. Or, a scientist’s curated curiosity. Or, an artist’s desire to create. In an age of filter bubbles, this is a mistake.

Our respective mileages vary. The app that they experience isn’t the one I use. The “rooms” they walk into are far removed from the ones I’m invited to. In their drive to understand the most newsworthy aspects of the site, what they see isn’t what I get. ClubHouse for me is a generator of profound experiences. ClubHouse for them is the place where a celebrity nearly bullied a young doctor to suicide. Both exist in the same place. But each is invisible to those looking at the other.

I feel like I did when I first went to college […] my brain literally hurts right now from all the new information

– Tom C.

I am a proud social media luddite. I grew up with it. And I don’t want anything to do with it. When it came to ClubHouse, I vacillated. I asked my sister for an invite when she signed up. When I randomly got one, I sat on it for a month before signing up. I signed up not out of curiosity, but grief. An older maker had just died; a wonderful man who had spent his life bringing joy to others. Consumed by grief, I needed to talk about it, but I had no one to talk to. I didn’t want to call my sister. Nor, bother anyone else. But still needing human connection, I tried out ClubHouse instead.

On a day when I needed kindness, people were kind (thanks Noor AH!). I haven’t stopped using it since.

Before the pandemic hit, I was working on the testing a hypothesis: In the long run, the shackle preventing humanity from flowing outwards to the stars isn’t going to be technological, but psychological.

Currently, crews in spaceflight are carefully chosen for psychological fitness – the “right stuff”. A heady mix of preternatural calm in the face of extreme stress, empathic connection and co-existence with other people in cramped conditions, unusually high long-term psychological stability, the ability to psychologically integrate difficult experiences, rapid adaptation to harsh environments, and resilience to prolonged isolation.

“Once, I was evaluating astronaut applicants” says psychiatrist Nick Kanas. “I asked them to give me some examples of things that might cause stress.” One applicant, a test pilot, recalled the time he was flying an experimental aircraft and it spun out of control. As the plane spiraled down, he took out his manual, calmly thumbed through it, and figured out how to pull the plane to safety. “His ability to temporarily control his emotions was striking,” laughs Kanas.

- Psychology of Space Exploration, Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective. NASA

Out of the mix, the last one is likely to be the hardest. Long-term isolation is damaging to a significant majority of the human population. In my would-be experiment, I wanted to see just how damaging it could be, at scale. It was a rare opportunity. Made rarer by the fact that subjects would respond to a consistent stressor across cultures and continents. A perfect storm, drenching up the deep seated needs present within our psyches through suffering and misery.

I have lived in isolation for over a decade. There have been stretches, lasting months, where I have gone without speaking to another human being. As it started when I was very young, my psyche has been able to adapt and develop coping mechanisms. However, in retrospect, some of these coping mechanisms were rather unhealthy.

I was wise enough to stay away from substance abuse, but I wasn’t wise enough to do so for the internet. I’ve wasted some of my youth arguing online. For a long time, I believed that the precipitating factor was me. But now, I’ve come to realize that it is as much the medium as it is the interlocutors and messages.

ClubHouse is a generator of profound experiences not just because of its audience, but because of the medium. Voice is an exceptional medium for connection. When we talk to one another, we can make out how the other person is doing from the prosody of their voice. We can feel their emotions through their intonations. And we can connect to them through their affect. It is much harder to be rude to someone face-to-face. Harder still over voice.

Disintermediation, i.e. the lack of physical cues like relative size and posture, combined with the enhancement of one set of cues, the human voice, makes it exceptionally difficult to be the asshole. If you hurt someone, you can hear their hurt. And so can everyone else. Without mediating factors such as attractiveness, posture, gestures, physical size, facial cues etc.

ClubHouse, through a mix of accident and wisdom, removes these factors and creates a unique medium for higher fidelity communication.

I have never had an long, drawn-out, snarky argument on ClubHouse. There have been difficult moments. But I have never experienced an analog of the furious, keyboard-mashing arguments that we get into over the web. And that’s remarkable. As it creates space for expression (and disagreement) without constant energy-sapping argumentation.

At first, I thought this was due to a change in me, but recently I tried to re-engage in Discord, Slack, and IRC style forums, and I found that it was much more the medium than the message. When people can hear me, they can hear me giggle. Or, they can hear me smile as we talk. They can hear my being and know I’m coming from a well meaning place, and they are much more willing to hear me out than they would be without those cues. The same is true vice versa. I’ve found myself listening to perspectives I’d never have seriously considered before, if it hadn’t been for ClubHouse.

Which brings me to the role of ClubHouse as a generator of profound experiences. Some nights ago, an ex-TLA (Three Letter Agency) officer walked into the room, sparking a conversation about strategic elicitation (brought up by me) and empathy for difficult people (brought up by him). Our conversation was interrupted by an admittedly troubled person angry about the “plandemic,” spoiling for a fight. In text, we would have ignored him – he had been banned from most social media platforms. Or, given in and argued with him, but it was clear that he was deeply upset. And so we talked.

He was a struggling musician. Who had lost his living when the pandemic hit and the symphonies shut down. The world was a harsh place for him. He was also one of the few people in the world who had mastered a very particular instrument brought into prominence by Beethoven. And so we begged him to play. To share his gift with us. He obliged by playing a beautifully complex piece of music that demonstrated his mastery over the instrument. We thanked him. Said our goodbyes, and went to sleep.

A charged situation was transmuted into the magical.

It’s why Twitter Spaces and the other clones have their work cut out for them. They’re trying to reverse engineer lightning in a bottle. And while the team, having spoken to them, are undeniably competent and insightful, it will take some doing to recreate the magic not because of a lack of technical skill, but because of it. They lack the same constraints that created ClubHouse, and as such they’ve focused on adding rich media features to the minimalistic, meditative experience. They’ve decided to add animated reactions, video, and more in an effort to stand out. And while everyone who has used it has praised it, they haven’t stuck to it.

ClubHouse is the largest and longest running mansion party in human history

– Dylan W.

Ever since I have joined, my newfound friends have worried about the impending doom. The point at which the platform inevitably crosses the chasm, becoming yet another monetized and trivialized saccharine social media hellscape. There have been worried rumors about a drop in engagement. There have been rooms fretting about its demise. Because while we all love the party, we’re all terrified that it must come to an end.

But for now, the sun still shines. And the water is just fine.

† Unless you choose otherwise.

Pro-tip: Do not follow anyone on their suggested user list (thanks Sarah!). All you’ll find is rage, sadness, and madness.

Whom you follow. Whom you talk to. And how you engage governs your experience. I grew up with the internet. And that gave me the education to avoid the clickbait, curate my timeline/hallway, and approach engagement with great intentionality.

This is crucial, and it’s the missing link between my experience and that of most cultural commentators. They seek the spice & validation. I (try to) seek serendipity & sincerity. They run towards the large rooms run by the hyper-famous who loathe public disagreement. I run away from them.

Your mileage will improve if you focus on finding subject matter experts, thoughtful people, and folks you would want to be stuck alone on an island with. Talk to them and their friends. And run away from extremely large rooms, conventional celebrities, and intention-less conversations.

If you can’t tell within 5 seconds if something is a nourishing space, run away.

Everyone has a take on Apple’s M1. These range from the professional to the “enthusiast” to the computing equivalent of people-on-the-street. Some of the takes that made it to the HN’s front page include,

• Apple Silicon M1: A Developer’s Perspective
• Apple CPU tricks: memory reordering, JavaScript support, ref counting
• Running Docker on Apple Silicon M1 (Follow-Up)
• Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery
• Apple’s Shifting Differentiation

Admittedly, it is hard to reduce takes this entertaining, enlightening, and engaging into a few bullet points – as they’re all worthy of a reader’s perusal – but they more or less evolve/discuss the following things,

• Apple Silicon can do X because of Y, where Y is a discussion of memory or CPU architecture
• Apple Silicon has amazing implication A, B, and C.
• Will Such and Such run on Apple Silicon?
• Why is Apple Silicon so fast?
• Seriously, why is Apple Silicon so fast?

These are educated takes on the topic, but while these takes talk about the same object, they fail to delineate what part of the object they are talking about. Apple’s M1 isn’t just a CPU. It’s a CPU and a GPU and the system controller and DRAM and a “Neural Engine” and an Image Signal Processor and a hardware digital encoder and all the other things we haven’t understood yet. This becomes quickly apparent when you look at its sister chip under the microscope,

As the A14 and M1 have many similarities, including their “Neural Engine” and “Firestorm” CPUs, it is reasonable to assume that we’ll see similar results for the M1. Under the hood, only a fraction of the M1 is a general purpose CPU or GPU; the rest is either memory or Application Specific silicon. And it is this Application Specific silicon that is the subject of so much interest and misunderstanding.

When the average enthusiast or software professional hears a claim that the M1 can export 4k footage in Final Cut Pro at faster than real-time and X times faster than their most expensive Intel Mac, they are subconsciously assuming that Apple has built a general-purpose CPU in the classical-sense of the word that is faster than what Intel is offering. However, this isn’t the truth; what is being compared here isn’t Apple to Apple. It’s the region on the die that Apple has specifically designed for doing limited manipulation/processing with a pre-defined set of codecs that have been hard-coded on the die versus a general-purpose CPU that’s executing instructions. Apple touts this advantage as a feature,

High-performance video editing

Apple’s Keynote Slide (shown above)

The difference here isn’t the difference between any two computers. It’s between a Bitcoin Hash Miner and Bitcoin running on your computer. One is dedicated silicon designed to accomplish a specific task as efficiently as possible, and the other is silicon designed to execute any task or program. This is also true for unintuitive parts of the platform like Rosetta2’s X86 emulation. As Robert Graham points out,

Commentators mistakenly assume that Rosetta2 is executing X86 instructions in a manner equivalent to which you or I may emulate a retro-console on our machine. They assume that the performance displayed in video export, image processing, video encoding, audio processing, or x86 emulation is a general speed-up that is abstract-able to all tasks that one might do on the CPU. However, this isn’t (necessarily) true – your mileage and performance will drop once you step outside what’s supported by application specific silicon. There (simply) Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

As a community, as developers and as hackers, we are committing a category error when we talk about the M1. We talk about its performance and make comparisons as if it were any other CPU. It isn’t. The magic is that Apple has blurred the line between what is an ASIC and what isn’t. They’ve blurred the line between general computation and custom logic. And they’ve done so successfully. It is a great achievement, but it is important to emphasize and delineate this fact from our tendency to believe that it shall perform this well for all computation, especially scientific or numerical compute tasks that aren’t explicitly supported by the SoC.

The M1 isn’t a CPU like the 8086. It’s a new beast. And that’s a great thing.

For developers, it means new possibilities, what if the enterprising hacker could abuse the custom silicon to their end? What if the silicon meant for video processing can be re-hacked to search for asteroids or run real-time video hazard avoidance on a robot? If it truly can process 4k at faster than real-time speeds and there’s silicon right next to it for ML, then why can’t we marry the two together towards some new wonderful end?

For artists, it makes professional, high-quality content creation more affordable. The M1 has an “Image Signal Processor” as well, does that include some silicon for vector drawing? Would that mean that Sketch and other state-of-the-art vector design software suites are now 2x faster and consume half as much battery on a sub-$1,000 computer? Can a kid wait 2 years and buy an iPhone 12 and a 2020 MacBook Air and start making 4k movies in their backyard? Will the next Tarantino grow up making movies on this silicon?

For more general end-users, is this the greatest “Facebook and Email Machine” ever made? The silicon is designed to improve battery life, does that mean this is the greatest road warrior computer ever made? Can you hop on a plane in SFO route through HND to ICN without charging once?

And what price will these wonderful things come at? What does the M1 mean for your ability to own a computer? Does it mean that the best performance is now restricted to a single OS running on what’s essentially proprietary blobs of silicon that other OSes can’t use? Does this mean that the M1 just won’t be as interesting as a Windows or Linux machine? Is Cory Doctorow’s vision coming true? Have we gone from binary driver blobs for WiFi cards and GPUs to SoCs/CPUs?

Understanding that the performance gains made by Apple aren’t “black magic fucker-y,” as one article cheerfully put it, frees us to understand the engineering tradeoffs that have been made. It frees us, as consumers and creators, to understand their sacrifice of broader utility in exchange for performance of narrower utility, so that we can put it to use towards our ends.

Just remember,

Note: Since publishing, a user on HN submitted another excellent write-up that discusses “my” take in far more exhaustive detail, I highly recommend giving it a read, Why is Apple’s M1 chip so fast? (HN discussion)

TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally.

Trump’s campaign was trolled by TikTok users in Tulsa.

After Trump rally falls flat, TikTok teens take a victory lap for fake reservation campaign

NYTimes, CNN, and NBC News Headlines

In the Platonic Dialogue, Protagoras, we meet a charismatic counterpart to the lifestyle-guru of today, the eponymous, Protagoras. He holds sway over a great crowd of influential Athenians and assorted listeners, whom he leads about in a crowd. So great is his hold that as he moves back and forth, the crowd parts for him like the red sea, dancing about him in synchrony. This greatly amuses Socrates who observes,

Nothing delighted me more than the precision of their movements: they never got into his way at all; but when he and those who were with him turned back, then the band of listeners parted regularly on either side; he was always in front, and they wheeled round and took their places behind him in perfect order.

Protagoras, Plato

It is clear from the moment that we meet him that Protagoras is a master of, what Alexander Hamilton called, the little arts of popularity. And this both the source of the central conflict in the dialogue and its cause. He is, as he claims to be, a merchant of knowledge, a purveyor of the undefined good of awareness, the creator of a self-proclaimed field of expertise that teaches “prudence in affairs private as well as public,”

Protagoras answered: Young man, if you associate with me, on the very first day you will return home a better man than you came, and better on the second day than on the first, and better every day than you were on the day before.

He is, in other words, a talking head and self-help guru all rolled into one. He is, in our modern context,

Protagoras, or Not Jordan Peterson†, seeks to teach people how to “order [their] house in the best manner”; or, to put it in more modern terms, to clean their room. Not Jordan Peterson also seeks to teach his pupils “to speak and act for the best in the affairs of the state,” i.e. how to be the top lobster to the benefit of themselves and others.

In the dialogue, the central issue raised by Socrates is whether such things can be taught, and whether they can be taught by someone who isn’t a specialist in any one thing. Or, rather what exactly are we gaining when we engage with such an individual. The debate devolves into whether or not virtues, in of themselves, are teachable (which they are), and it moves away from the observations about specialization and what we gain when we interact with someone who is an expert,

You are paying money to […] Hippocrates, […] tell me, what is he that you give him money? how would you have answered?

I should say, he replied, that I gave money to him as a physician.

And what will he make of you?

A physician, he said

While the majority of the dialogue focuses on pedagogy, i.e. whether such virtues can be taught and to what extent, the initial question is only tangentially addressed. However, this question may be the central question of our times. After all, what is it that we’re paying for when we flock to the modern Protagoras, Jordan Peterson? What do we gain when we engage with such personalities? What do we gain when we listen to a talking head on TV? What are they an expert in? What can they teach us?

Answering this question is difficult. Any expertise the talking head may have had often has very little to do with what they seek to opine on. The death of expertise has been breathlessly written about. Subject to treatises have been published by medical professionals, political theorists, public health experts, and climate scientists. Scholars have created a new field dedicated to the spread of misinformation and the perpetuation of ignorance. These works cannot be easily summarized. The authors drawn on many different threads to explain the rise of anti-intellectualism in the public sphere. Some of these threads focus on systemic incentives. Others on past missteps. Most on the listener and their relationship to the world around their selves. All of these threads are important. They are the threads that weave the whole.

However, the tapestry of ignorance could not be weaved without the crucial element that Plato seized upon two and a half thousand years ago,

there is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink: the one you purchase of the wholesale or retail dealer, and carry them away in other vessels, and before you receive them into the body as food, you may deposit them at home and call in any experienced friend who knows what is good to be eaten or drunken, and what not, and how much, and when; and then the danger of purchasing them is not so great. But you cannot buy the wares of knowledge and carry them away in another vessel; when you have paid for them you must receive them into the soul and go your way, either greatly harmed or greatly benefited; and therefore we should deliberate and take counsel

Our modern world treats the Not Jordan Peterson and the talking head with neutrality. After all, it is not our job to interrogate its harms or benefits for our collective souls; it is up to the individual, the listener, to decide what to expel and what to retain. It is a practice that may work in theory, but in practice, we imbibe what we hear, and allow the blödsinn to shift our gestalt. What is heard cannot be unheard. What is thought cannot be unthought. What we consume informs what we become.

In this equivocation of nonsense with the profound, we have created an environment where reason alone cannot stand. An environment where someone well versed with the little arts of popularity can thrive. Is it any wonder that this this is an age filled with Not Jordan Petersons? An age where their embrace of rhetoric and the emptiness of argument drowns out the profound? Furthermore, in an age where the “leading intellectual” of the day is a Protagoras by another name, is it a surprise that meaningful public discourse is shifted by the culture of “trolling”?

Before we examine trolling, we must ask ourselves, what insight do we gain when we listen to Sean Hannity wax poetic once again? Listening to Hippocrates would have made us understand medicine, for it was his craft, but what is Hannity’s craft? His craft is the amplification of messages. He is not an expert in policy. He is not an expert in history. He is not an expert in sociology. He is not an expert in any of the fields he opines upon. Then again, neither are the Instagram Influencer, the Self-Help Gurus, or the Armchair Lawyers. And yet, we listen when they speak. We assume that they are simply entertaining us. Or, that we are listening to learn how the craft of popularity, while we imbibe what they say We do not reflect upon it. We do not question it. We simply incorporate it.

If we are the sum of our gifts, burdens, and experiences. Is it fair to assume that we can arbitrarily decide what to keep and what not to? It is a fallacy to assume that what is once heard can pass through us without influencing us. It is, in my eyes, truer to assume that these words impact us and shape us in subtle ways. As those well versed in advertising and propaganda know, repetition remodels reality.

Trolling is an acknowledgement of this reality. At some level, the troll understands the nature of this fallacy. The troll understands that what is once said in discourse cannot be unsaid. And uses this as a mechanism to inject – for good or ill – nonsense into our minds and lives. Once trolled, we cannot be untrolled. It is a parasitic strategy that drowns out the rest. In the “marketplace of ideas”, where there is no fundamental mechanism to sift between the ideas, the only winning strategy is to be the loudest or the most amplified idea. And that is trolling at its core.

There is no easy way out of here. Socrates and Plato may have decried the sophists, and found equal ground, but the modern kind have proliferated, and we cannot eliminate them from the discourse without sacrificing far more important principles. There is sadly, nothing systemic that can be done.

Such a defeatist attitude may be surprising. It would be easy to advocate for personal restraint and control over what the knowledge we consume, but these acts shift the onus back onto the listener and do little to change the structural incentives at play. The genie is out of the bottle. The best we can do at this point is to observe the golden rule,

† Note: I’ve used Peterson as an archetype of the “self-help guru” and the “talking head” paradigm. My heart goes out to his family over his recent medical problems, and I wish him a speedy recovery.

For a long time, I earned my bread and butter by crafting words. I was a practicing wordsmith. Slaving over the sound of language, how it flowed, what it sounded like, and what each word implied. It was laborious, invisible, and frustrating. As ashamed as I am to admit this, writing for years while having my efforts go unappreciated slowly added to the feeling of burnout. I would spend more and more effort into becoming good at my craft, only to have people ask me why I couldn’t write at that level of quality faster, for ever more fewer dollars.

As much as I would like to emphasize my internal locus of control, and play the cool character, it is an undeniable truth, for me, that having my work appreciated is just as important as feeling satisfied for having done it. It is hard to admit this fact, because it feels like I am exposing a central part of my identity to the world, but it matters to me to do great work and be recognized for it. Especially from the people I love.

When I would spend hours writing just the perfect paragraph for work, something so astoundingly mind-bending that it would help us win a contract, it felt lonely, because few people would ever appreciate it. Fewer still would get the effort involved. And fewer still would be willing to talk to me about it. It is a very strange phenomena, but the appreciation of good writing is far more reserved than it is for other skills. And it was demoralizing to see my MB’s eyes glaze over when I presented her with my latest tour de force.

The skills I am learning now, design and programming are different, because the products of highly skilled work in the former and latter are far more apparent than my prior profession of smithing words. Unlike writing, the feedback loop for these is faster and better integrated both socially and practically to help keep me motivated in the long run. Or, so I hope. It is with this thought that I’d like to share what I’ve been doing in the design front.

I’ve signed up to do weekly design challenges via a lovely Discord group that I’ve befriended. They post one challenge per week and it’s our job to finish it before the week ends. My very first challenge was,

And based on this prompt, I tried to put together a brief set of branding documents for this fictional company. Now, of course, for it to mean anything, the company had to do something. And I decided to turn to an old trope,

I even created an entirely fictional “product” document for this company, using my former wordsmith skills to write up what they did, to help frame the development of their logo,

Intelligent Threat Detection and Mitigation

The next First Strike threat will not come from a rogue nation. It will not arise from an established nuclear power. It will come from non-state actors who possess rocketry and guidance technologies. In this new world, to face this new threat, a new approach is needed. A new SHIELD is needed.

– Personal note, this is something I can see an overtly eager defense firm writing.

And I tried to create a logo from the heraldry chosen for the original program. However, it didn’t go so well, and it took several iterations to get right. These iterations are far more visible than the subtle alterations I’d make to text, and help illustrate why learning how to do design feels far easier than learning how to write properly;

This was my first attempt at the logo, as you can see, it retains the stars and stripes from the original “Star Wars” program over laid with a gravity turn-style trajectory of the “kill vehicle.”

But, it’s clear that this logo isn’t quite right. It led to this iteration,

Oh yes, I added those grid lines to help guide the design and be pretentious. Absolutely, but even this wasn’t quite right. So I iterated,

And kept iterating, because there was a certain je ne sais quoi that was missing from this logo. It’s hard to pin down and harder to describe, but the motion of the eyes as it traced out the logo wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite there. It felt wrong, which is an equally less satisfying an explanation to receive as it is to give. But it was what it was,

I tried different colors, different variants. Tried removing some parts of the heraldry. Tried adding different elements. Tried using negative space. Tried a tweak here and a tweak there, until all I could see was this darned logo no matter where I’d go.

A very literal dozen variants later, everything kept being wrong. Nothing seemed right, until I was told about the trick behind achieving visual balance in complex scenes –

Apparently, all designers struggle to visually balance asymmetrical designs, which is why more skilled designers often include elements that are small, medium, and large to create a sense of “visual weight” that tricks the brain into a feeling of implied symmetry where there is none. It’s a trick that’s everywhere, once you start looking for it, such as Apple’s website. As you can see here, the relative sizing of these elements is crucial for this effortless, yet visually balanced, look;

And so, after several iterations and copious back-and-forth with the good folks at the Discord, I finally arrived at,

By leaning quite hard on the old red, white, and blue. After all, wouldn’t this be exactly the kind of color scheme that my hypothetical clients would appreciate?

Would they not want to use these strong colors in say, a one pager that they could send to a Four-Star General after a round of golf?

While having strong Typography to undergird their brand identity?

I know there’s further room for improvement, but I’m proud of how this turned out. And I’m happy to add these lessons to my repertoire.

• Visual “balance” isn’t just about symmetry, but the relative sizes and shapes of the pieces that comprise the work
• Color is often the difference between a good design and a bad one.
  • it is also surprisingly complex and difficult to get right
• Iterating quickly and often is more important than Getting It Right on the first go
  • it is better to kill your babies quickly than to let them languor on until they become zombies. No one likes zombies. Outside of books, movies, TV, video games, and all other forms of media
• US Military Heraldry can be awesome at times, but it’s something that doesn’t translate well outside of its original context
• Not asking for feedback early and often is, perhaps, the worst decision I can make when it comes to a creative project.

Sometimes when I feel contemplative, I start to think about the finer workings of our world, the sheer improbability of it all and the improbable happenstance of history. The long arc that encodes our hope, beauty, truth as well as our profoundly savage nature and despair. And it is at these moments I often arrive at language, the manner in which we describe our universe. Whether we know it or not, our language encodes history. It encodes a story. A story both beautiful and absurd.

Let’s take the word battery. Why are a group of electric cells called a battery? And what does that have to do with criminal law?

240. An assault is an unlawful attempt, coupled with a present ability, to commit a violent injury on the person of another.
242. A battery is any willful and unlawful use of force or violence upon the person of another.

California Penal Code § § 240, 242 (Enacted 1872 )

Our language has shifted and evolved over decades and hundreds of years. Originally, when we meant to evoke the act of hitting another, we would say X was battered by Y. However, the legal code sought to codify the threat of violence visited by one upon another by stating it as assault. For example, when X has a gun and tells Y that, if they don’t do such and such, they will be shot, this act would have been termed by the legal system as assault.

However, our language has evolved, and we now use assault as the term for battery, and the word battery for the aforementioned group of electric cells. It turns out that the how of how did this happen is far more fascinating than I anticipated. And it involves a few accidents of history that are now encoded into the story of the word itself. It starts off innocuous enough, there is some random exchange of pleasantries, sometime in the past, and presumably, some less pleasant dealings that lead the Romans to adopt a Gailish, or some “proto-indo-european” language’s, word for a blow, Behw as Battre.

I suspect this diffusion owes just as much to how it sounds in their pronunciation, harsh and unrelenting like a blow, as well as how the Romans treated the Gauls. Over thousands of years, the Roman empire disintegrates, but the Gauls survive, and they evolve. Their language fades away, but not before loaning some words to Old French, which then passes these words onto Middle French. And the Normans, those who spoke Middle French, use that word as a part of their efforts to wage war against their neighbours, and for their allies. And it is so, with the Norman invasion of England, and the following Anglo-French Wars that does Middle French come into contact with Middle English, giving it the word Batterie.

Where and when Batterie transformed into Battery, I do not know. But the act of hitting another takes on a new meaning with new weapons of war. Weapons meant to batter Castles and their walls. The siege weapons of the middle ages were powerful, but the Castles and their walls endured. The doctrine remained unchallenged until the discovery and import of gun powder, and the creation of cannons. Where once, walls and castle doors could be made thicker to survive Trebuchets, Catapults, and Battering Rams, they fell irregardless under barrage from the cannon. The siege technology of yore, though effective, could not compare to the smaller size, predictability, ease of use, and power of even the simplest of cannons. And it is so that the idea of Castle Walls faded away as cannons started making quick work of them, and War began to change.

War, it is said, is our engine of innovation. For, it is in the pursuit of efficient ways to kill one another that we have discovered Sanitary Napkins (and Tampons, as a result), the Internet, Rocketry, Night Vision, RADAR, Digital Photography, Jet Engines, and Duct Tape. Yes, our pursuit of killing our fellow humans with ever more frightening means led to the greatest invention of all, Duct Tape. (as an aside, Duct Tape has a fascinating history, and the one that we know today was invented thanks to a woman, Vesta Stoudt, who was worried that her two sons, serving in the navy, would die in combat because it took too long to open cases of ammunition. She experimented with such a tape at her factory, found her results satisfactory, and wrote to President Roosevelt in the heat of WWII. FDR forwarded it to Johnson & Johnson, which then prepared the final product)

It is through war that we have come to known Batteries as well. It starts with a General and Siege Engineer, Kazimieras Simonavičius, who wrote a seminal book about his experiments with artillery and rocketry called, Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima. Or, the Great Art of Artillery, Part One. Sadly, there was no Part Two as he is rumoured to have been assassinated before he could complete his second work. It seems quaint now, but secret knowledge was prized above all in the ancient world and, it is alleged, that he published one too many prized secrets of one too many powerful guilds. And so he was killed for his trouble. But there are many who argue otherwise,

It’s not known whether his book was a compilation of others’ secrets, entirely his work, or something in between. But what is known is that it was an absolutely fascinating read, and broke new ground in rocketry and artillery.

Somewhere, in the pages of that book, Simonavičius, describes grouping artillery together to be used synergistically to batter an enemy. This battering would come from something he would term a battery.

Despite his untimely death, Simonavičius’ book is seized upon by others and spread across England and Europe, forever changing the practice of war. And it is through this practice that the word “Battery” eventually makes its way to an enterprising American, Benjamin Franklin, who thinks upon this analogy in his work on electricity. The august Franklin liked his science, but he also liked booze, women, and wine. He had a habit of throwing elaborate parties. And he had a habit of wanting to impress the ladies (and the gentlemen, as well). And so, during one of these parties, he decided upon a unique idea, an “electric feast,” where a turkey would be killed using electricity and then cooked on a spit rotated by a simple motor – showcasing the future of this technology to everyone and his cleverness to the ladies.

However, to achieve his goals, he would have needed a substantial amount of charge. More charge than any single cell, or pile, at the time could have mustered. And so, for this end, he looked to one of his inventions. It was an invention that explicitly borrowed from the concept of the Artillery Battery. Once where several cannons were used, instead of one, to much greater effect, Franklin decided to use many individual repositories of charge to a, similarly, greater effect. He used this concept to connect together several Leyden jars to produce a device for his experiments in electrocuting all things, including himself. He called this device a “Battery”.

And so it is so, borne from countless years of subjugation and pain at the hands of one another, a small part of our language was shaped and, finally, given form through two geniuses, who served as midwives. This idea, this chain of misfortune and hope that is encoded in this word, has already helped us to better our lot and reach for the stars. They could not have dreamed of what we would make. They could not imagine what we would use that same word for. But they can take heart that it has not gone to waste.

When asked, between 5% to 11% of children want to be astronauts when they grow up – a number large enough to make it a cliche. Of course, the number of boys who want to be astronauts far outweighs the girls, but, if you walk into any kindergarten class in the world, it’s a good bet at least one of them will want to be an astronaut.

We’ve all met that one kid. The one with the hopeful look. The one who wanted to be that astronaut. I wasn’t that kid. I was never that kid. When people asked me what I wanted to be as a little girl, I’d say herpetologist, a word that I couldn’t spell. In fact, in kindergarten, they did this thing where all the kids wrote what they wanted to be, and I wanted to write herpetologist. But neither I nor the teacher knew how to spell it, so we wrote out “snake scientist” instead.

* Or, more accurately, I want to be in a position where I can possibly be a good potential candidate for the AStronaut CANdidate application process.

That ambition lasted right up until I saw my first snake. I shrieked and ran in the opposite direction. Now? I’m terrified of snakes. Can’t even stand photos of them, let alone spending time with them. It’s funny how childhood works.

For a while, I decided that I’d be an egyptologist, be a Lara Croft. Then, it was volcanologist for a few months. But then I saw Dr. Cynthia Breazeal on the TV, and I decided that my real calling was making robots. Robots that could feel. Machines that I could bring to life. And this one survived contact with the enemy (Reality), and it was a retort I would use when people would tell that 10-year-old that she should do X in life. A doctor? No, I am going to build robots.

And I built robots. A lot of them. Most out of Lego; 5 out of aluminium, brass, acrylic and steel. It was my passion, my dream and the manifestation of my volition. I am proud of what I built in my productive years. My first patent was for fairly novel work, we had built a tangible surface before we knew that it was called a tangible surface. Our invention (in the strictest sense) is concurrent and predates the earliest known literature on this topic (to the best of my knowledge).

The initial highs were great. But then life happened. I kept trying to get back into it, but my obsessive passion had dissipated. The years went on, and it got harder and harder to care. I wanted to Care, and I did care, but I didn’t care enough to push past all obstacles and keep getting it done. My frustration mounted, but nothing else changed. At times, I’d utter the same kind of words I used to, but the je ne sais quoi that had led me to action had disappeared.

Paul Graham says that you need obsessive interest to do Great Work. And as Paul Graham is Paul Graham, I suspect he’s right. Right enough to snap my decade into focus; the knock of hard life slagged my old obsessive interests out of me. What used to drive me to spend 18 hours a day in front of a computer doing CAD simulations doesn’t get me out of the bed anymore. It never did. I could perversely enjoy it, but it was antithetical to what drives me – emotions, the idea of having touched lives, and the general warmth I feel when it comes to interpersonal relationships.

When I built robots, my mind projected this drive onto them; I wasn’t building a tracked robot, I was trying to bring what was inanimate to life. My favourite cheer during these days was, “it’s alive” whenever we’d get something to work. In my mind, my robots were just a step in the long, long road to a new kind of life. Or, helping life as it existed now.

Learning to adult robbed me of that. I don’t know how, but I just know that it did. I don’t get the same joy from that idea anymore. And there’s nothing I can do about it. At this point, I can either fight to nurse a wilting part of my soul, or grow a new one. I choose to grow a new one. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun–almost as hot as it is here today–and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.

John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, September 12th, 1962

However, my intentions were never so one dimensional. There has always been a shadow cast by my actions – a shadow made by my desire to be first. First, not in the “beating others” way, but in the “being a pioneer” way. Though the two can be related, the forge of obsessions was powered by the fuel of this bizarre ego.

I sought not dominion over other souls, but the desire to be the engine of progress. To do what others could not see. To be what others could not be. And to go where others would not go. I have been driven to do all of this to bring shining promise of Tomorrow to our present and make it manifest. “A Better Future, Today.”

My heart yearns to fly free. It yearns to see sights unseen. It yearns to build things unbuilt. And it yearns to learn things unlearnt. When my time is up, I want to have added to the great endeavour of humanity, instead of subtracted – and, loved and lived along the way. My original ambition can’t give me this anymore. I am not the little girl who wanted to be a roboticist nearly two decades ago. I’m the woman who wants to learn, build, and explore.

The only profession that I know of, or I’m aware of, where all of these divergent interests culminate and are celebrated, is Astronautics, or Human Space Flight. The Ideal Astronaut is physically fit, fluent in multiple technical domains including, but not limited to; orbital mechanics, aviation, mechanical engineering, rocketry, elements of computer science, medicine, biology, geology, robotics, teaching, and high energy physics. The Ideal Astronaut is a Type-A personality who can combine and synthesise this knowledge, with their training, to do what needs to be done under extreme stress. The Ideal Astronaut is like Sally Ride, who shook a satellite until its solar panels deployed, and then fixed it before release by manoeuvring its solar panels into sunlight.

In short, The Ideal Astronaut can calmly hang out over the edge, without ever missing a step.

I want to become that woman. More than anything else in my life, this is The One Goal where all of my passions become assets, and where sheer obsession takes over. But I know that there’s a lot left to be desired in me, for now (not to mention my hypothyroidism that would conventionally make me unfit for spaceflight), but I’m not giving up before I even see the starting line. Because that wouldn’t be the right stuff. And that’s not who I am.

So I am going to fight for my freedom to learn, build, and explore. And I’m going to document the projects that I take on over here, for posterity, so that I can laugh at myself whether or not I achieve my goal.

And that’s why I’m starting this blog and dedicating my life towards becoming a possible, theoretical good candidate to be a possible ASCAN.