The Pace of Writing

Posted on April 27, 2013 by

The United States has the highest worker productivity on the planet. That is, the average American laborer will produce more widgets, or process more paperwork, or cook more burgers, or design more aircraft than their equivalents elsewhere.

How does an author measure his or her productivity? One way, of course, would be to point to the number of books written, or the number of articles generated, or the number of short stories or movie scripts that have your byline.

But more often, if writers are talking amongst themselves, or neophytes are seeking insights from their already published brethren, the question come down to the practical: what happens on a given work day? How many hours per week does an author write? And how does that translate into written documents? That is, what is considered normal in the writing world when it comes to daily page count, or word count?

Most authors, if they are full time, have a normal work day, like anyone else who works in an office. Although one can make one’s own hours, a schedule and rhythm is very helpful if you want to be a real writer and not just a hobbyist. Real writers, as the saying goes, write. More than that, they develop a certain amount of self-discipline. If you don’t have self-discipline, your chances of ever being successful are slim and none—even more slim and none than your chances from working hard and regularly.

So, for myself, I work five days a week, for about eight hours every day, usually nine to five, with time off for lunch. On occasion—like the time I had to write two books in about four months—I wind up working far longer hours and my weekends become virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the week. During those sorts of marathon sessions, I forget what color the sun is and my children see me so seldom that they wonder “who is that strange hobo I just saw in the kitchen getting another cup of coffee?”

But, during the vast majority of my year, I am writing only forty hours per week. For almost a year, I was finding it very difficult to focus and accomplish anything during those hours, as my dysthymia was getting worse. But following diagnosis and the proper medication, my ability to concentrate has returned—and thus my productivity has gone back to where I expect it to be.

Some authors merely set for themselves the goal of spending a set number of hours each day sitting in front of their computer. Others set for themselves word counts. For instance, the science fiction author John Scalzi tries to write a minimum of 2000 words per day. He has an amusing posting on his blog, Whatever, where he explains how his mind works in this regard. If he writes less than a 1000 words, he tells himself that he is a toad who doesn’t deserve to eat. If he reaches his minimum goal of 2000, then he pats himself on the back and eats a donut. 3000 words, he’s on fire. 4000 words, he’s in danger of blowing a brain lobe. At 5000 words he’s reduced to a babbling idiot. He posted that the most words he ever did in a day was 14,000 and that he had to sleep for three days afterwards. I think the most I’ve ever written in a day is around 10,000 words. Most of the time I’m producing half that.

For myself, I prefer to set page count goals. I’m currently working on three novels, a new science fiction novel with the working title, Cold and an old novel, Hacker’s Apprentice, that needed heavy rewriting, and a newer novel that I’m rewriting and needed some additions with the working title Bent Anvil. For the last month I’ve been maintaining a pace of at least thirty pages per day—ten pages in each book—five days per week (for the books I’m rewriting, I often cover many more pages than that). I now estimate, barring any life crises, that I’ll finish those books to a level I can let someone read around the end of summer.

For some authors, that sort of schedule would seem nightmarish. For others, they’d wonder how it is I can be such a lazy goof-off. Isaac Asimov, the late science fiction author, worked upwards of ten hours a day—and he worked seven days a week. Consequently, he authored about 500 books in his lifetime, not counting all the short stories and magazine articles that he also wrote. Romance novelist Barbara Cartland holds the Guinness World Record for the most novels written in a single year: in 1983 she produced 23 of them! I’m a complete slacker–or to use Scalzi’s word, “toad”–compared to that.

And I have no desire to try to emulate that sort of productivity. I like to write well enough—it’s a wonderful job. But it’s still a job and frankly, it’s not the only thing I like or want to do any more than ditch diggers enjoy working more than 40 hours a week.

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The Coin

Posted on April 26, 2013 by

Recently I went through a box of loose coins from my coin collection: coins I hadn’t had time to sort or organize up until that moment. One of the coins I chanced upon was a 1913 10 pfennig piece from Germany. It’s in Very Fine condition—VF-35 or so, for those readers who might be numismatists. Not worth very much. I found several examples of the same coin, with the same date and in similar condition going for about a dollar on EBay.

What fascinated me about the coin, however, was not its rarity or lack thereof, but rather the moment in time it represented. Germany had become a unified nation barely four decades earlier, in 1871, when Bismarck had finally succeeded in unifying, sometimes by force of arms, the majority of the German states. Within a year of this 10 pfennig coin being issued, Germany would start the First World War—a war that would destroy both it and a world and set the stage for the coming of the Nazis.

The world that existed when this coin appeared was radically different from the one that existed barely a year later on the July 28, 1914 when World War I began. Most intellectuals and leaders in 1913 believed that war was no longer even possible, that the complex economic relationships between the nations, the rule of law, the advancement of technology had at last rendered war obsolete. Jack Kegon wrote that just before war broke out, “Europe in the summer of 1914 enjoyed a peaceful productivity so dependent on international exchange and co-operation that a belief in the impossibility of a general war seemed the most conventional of wisdoms. In 1910 an analysis of prevailing economic interdependence, The Great Illusion, had become a best-seller; its author Norman Angell had demonstrated, to the satisfaction of almost all informed opinion, that the disruption of international credit inevitably to be caused by war would either deter its outbreak or bring it speedily to an end.” The world of 1913 was a marvelous place: prosperous, full of wonderful new technologies. Telegraph cables stretching across the oceans meant instant communication anywhere on the planet. The radio was making ocean travel safer; soon news and entertainment would be available anywhere day or night. The telephone allowed people on opposite sides of the country to converse as easily as if they were sitting side by side. The airplane, ten years old in 1913, was a wonder whose effect on the world could only be imagined.

The future seemed bright. Everything seemed possible. The Europeans were colonizing the world, bringing the benefits of modern life to the people of Asia and Africa. It seemed that nothing stood in the way of everlasting wealth and ever better lives: everyone would live in peace and harmony.

But within a year of the coin being issued, World War I brought the deaths of more than sixteen million people, military and civilian. It represented a loss of nearly two percent of the world’s population between 1914 and 1918. Between June 1917 and December 1920, somewhere between 50 and 100 million others would die from an influenza pandemic known as the Spanish Flu—one of the deadliest natural disasters in history. At least three percent of the human race died from the illness, while over twenty-eight percent of the world’s population was infected by it.

Eugenics, the belief that “undesirables” should be bred out of the human population went mainstream, leading to the forced sterilizations of those deemed physically or mentally imperfect in both the United States and Europe. Anti-Semitism was promoted by such luminaries as Henry Ford, while it was regularly preached on the radio in America and Europe.

A worldwide depression hit starting in 1929, with the collapse of the American stock market. Runaway inflation devastated Germany; within months a postage stamp that went for a fraction of a German Mark cost more than a million of them. The Nazis and other extremist parties seemed reasonable options to a desperate population seeking to solve its economic disaster.

A century now has passed since that ten pfennig coin was minted in the German Empire. The people who used that coin have all long since died. The Empire the minted the coin is history. The hopes and dreams of those who carried it in their pockets have long since turned to ash. Their future was nothing at all like they imagined or wanted.

On the other hand, their future was not all bleak. The century that saw two devastating world wars, also saw women gaining the right to vote in the United States. It saw the rise of the civil rights movement, the marginalization of racism and the discrediting of notions of eugenics. It saw technological marvels that the people of 1913 couldn’t even have imagined, from improvements in transportation and communication, to medical advances, and revolutions in agriculture that have made food so cheap and abundant that the biggest problem facing people today is obesity rather than hunger. Barely five decades passed from the manufacture of that coin before people were walking on the moon. The motion pictures that were silent and in black and white had become colorful and full of sound—and could be watched in the comfort of our living rooms.

So how do we expect our new century to unfold? As we hold a coin from 2013, how naïve are our hopes and fears about the next century? There will be wonders we can’t imagine, and probably—given history as our guide—horrors we can only dread. As Charles Dickens wrote in his tale about the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” His words apply to every era.

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Tesla Coil

Posted on April 25, 2013 by

When I was growing up I came upon an old 1940 Popular Science magazine (and yes, it was old even when I was growing up). Inside, I read an article that gave detailed instructions on how to build something called a Tesla Coil. It described all the incredible things it could do, such as spitting out lightning-like sparks and making fluorescent tubes glow even when you were just holding them in your hands. And the article made it look very easy to build. You just needed a cardboard tube of the sort that you might find holding a role of aluminum foil, a cigar box, a bunch of copper wire, and a transformer. Unfortunately, though cardboard tubes were easy enough for me to get a hold of, cigar boxes were impossible—no one I knew smoked—and the other bits that were required, such as copper wiring and the transformer were beyond the financial resources of a twelve year old. Worse, I had no idea at the time where to go about finding transformers and some of the other electronic bits described in the instructions. Nevertheless, I periodically pulled the old magazine off my shelves and studied it, imagining that someday I would find a way to build such a thing.

Nikola Tesla, the inventor of the coil, is responsible for giving the world much more than a fascinating object for twelve year olds to fantasize about. Every time you flip a switch to send electricity to your lamp, TV or radio, it’s thanks to Nikola Tesla.

You see, Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current power systems. Without him, there would be no 110 volt AC power in your home.

Born in Serbia on July 10, 1856, he moved to Paris in 1882 to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company. Within two years he had moved to the United States, where Thomas Edison himself hired him, offering him 50,000 dollars to redesign Edison’s inefficient motors and generators. After doing the work, however, Edison refused to pay him, creating a permanent breach in their relationship.

So in 1886 Tesla formed his own company: Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. In 1887 he constructed the first brushless alternating current induction motor. Then in 1888 he began working with George Westinghouse, who listened to his ideas for a polyphase system allowing for the transmission of alternating current electricity over long distances—and more importantly, bankrolled it.

At the age of 35 in 1891 Tesla became a naturalized American citizen. His first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted the next year. At the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the World’s Columbian Exposition, Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the exposition. On display were Tesla’s fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs.

Edison, meanwhile, promoted the use of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution. The problem with DC distribution however, was that it worked only over very short distances—of no more than a mile—meaning that a generating plant had to be built within a mile of any customers. That would have made Edison’s system prohibitively expensive. With an AC system, in contrast, one power generating plant could supply electricity for hundreds of square miles.

Edison didn’t want to lose his customer base, however, and did everything he could to try to prevent the adoption of Westinghouse and Tesla’s idea, including publically electrocuting animals with AC power to try to convince people that AC was too dangerous to use. He was also instrumental in inventing the electric chair for executions.

The conflict between the two almost drove both Edison and Westinghouse into bankruptcy. Tesla ultimately released Westinghouse from his contract so that he didn’t have to continue paying him for using his patents. Tesla’s—and Westinghouse’s—AC power distribution system ultimately won out, and today all the plugs in your house, and all houses around the world, are AC powered.

When Tesla was 41 years old, he filed the first radio patent (beating Marconi) and a year later demonstrated a radio-controlled boat to the US military. The same year, he also devised an “electric igniter” or spark plug for internal combustion engines. It is thanks to Tesla that we don’t have to turn a hand crank in order to start our cars.

Had Tesla not torn up his contract with Westinghouse, he would have become a billionaire. Instead, he sank into poverty and lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the thirty-third floor of the Hotel New Yorker. He died with significant debts on January 7, 1943. Later that year, the US Supreme Court upheld his radio patent in a ruling that served as the basis for patented radio technology in the United States. Of course, that was too late to help Tesla financially.

As to building my own Tesla Coil, I’ve gone back and looked up the instructions. The cost is minor—less than thirty dollars—for building a small one. But although I now know where to go about getting the parts I would need, I find that I no longer really have the time to devote to building one.

Of course, the kind of Tesla I’d really like to get now isn’t a coil, it’s a car. And it costs a whole lot more than a coil: the Tesla Model S.

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Telescopes

Posted on April 24, 2013 by

As a child I had wanted to be an astronomer. Instead, I became an author and a theologian. But I’ve never lost my love of astronomy.

My first telescope was made of plastic; it was a reflector and was supposed to be a replica of something that Isaac Newton had built. Thinking back on it, I have my doubts about that. Although I enjoyed putting it together and playing with it, it never really quite worked right. I think I managed to see the moon through it once.

Later, when I was a little older, my parents gave me a 3 inch reflector telescope with a wobbly tripod and a sort of ball joint alt-azimuth mount. It too, never worked very well and was terribly difficult to aim. I was lucky to see the moon through it once or twice. The same can be said of a small 2.4 inch refractor they gave me some time later. It also came with a wobbly alt-azimuth type of mount. Like the previous reflector, it was always difficult to use and I never saw much more than the moon with it. My experience with those three telescopes taught me a lot, however. For instance, one thing I learned was that the sort of mount a telescope has is very important. I promised myself that I would never, ever buy a telescope with an alt-azimuth type of mount again.

Despite all the trouble I had with relatively inexpensive telescopes over the years, I never lost my love for astronomy. So, about five years ago, I bought myself a small telescope that did not have an alt-azimuth mount. Specifically, I found a Meade 3.5 inch Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope on sale for about half its normal price. I thought it was a good deal. It came with two eyepieces, a 26mm Plossl and a 6mm. It has a yoke-type equatorial mount with a clock drive. But it came with only a tabletop tripod. A field tripod was an option that I didn’t purchase at the time. Since it was a small telescope, the idea was that if you also had a small tripod it would be easy to pack up and carry with you; it came with a nice little carrying case. Its portability was certainly unmatched, and I took it with me whenever I traveled, but in practice I found the tabletop tripod made the telescope a pain to use. If I put it on the ground, then I had to lie on my belly to peer through it and that was not always particularly comfortable. If I didn’t want to lie on my stomach, or crouch in a weird position, I had to find a table. That usually proved to be a problem. Often times, for instance when I was camping, there simply were no tables around. After all, portable tables, such as folding card tables, are rather bulky and defeated the purpose of having a small, easily transportable telescope. Worse, portable tables tend to be a bit wobbly and wobbly is the enemy of any telescope since wobbles in the table are magnified to the degree that images in the telescope are magnified. It was hard to really see Mars or Jupiter when they bounced around like burning billiard balls every time I happened to brush against the table.

So, about four years ago I finally sprang for a field tripod for my little telescope. It is solid, it is well-made, and it does not wobble. And the tripod folds up nicely and turns out to be much easier to carry with me than a card table. For the first time in my life I now have a telescope that is actually fully usable.

On the first Saturday after getting the field tripod, I took my little telescope outside, carefully set it up so the equatorial mount was aligned properly, and took a look through the eyepiece. I was able to see several things besides the moon. Jupiter on that particular evening was a late evening object, arising around 11 PM that particular night four years ago. (Tonight, if you go outside and look east before midnight, the brightest thing you’ll see in the sky–besides the moon or a passing airplane–will be Jupiter).

What was especially interesting about Jupiter that first night I used my scope after getting the new tripod, was that on that evening Jupiter’s position made it remarkably easy to also see the planet Neptune. In fact, it was positioned near Jupiter on that night very similarly to the way Galileo saw it in 1609 when he was looking at Jupiter. Although recently some scholars have suggested that Galileo might have realized he was seeing something other than a star, that seems unlikely. Certainly there is nothing in any of his documents that have survived indicating that he paid any attention to the dot he drew, along with some other stars, around Jupiter on the nights he observed that planet. Therefore, Neptune wasn’t officially discovered until 1846 by Urbain Le Verrier.

So, on that Saturday, besides seeing Jupiter, I also saw Neptune for the first time in my life. The 5th-magnitude star Mu Capricorni was 1/4° north-northwest of Jupiter, and the 7.8-magnitude Neptune was 1/4° north of that. I could also see all four Galilean satellites scattered around Jupiter and a bit of banding on the planet. Neptune was just a bluish dot that looked just like a star–but unlike Galileo I knew what I was seeing.

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Storage Space

Posted on April 23, 2013 by

My now old second generation Kindle, the electronic book reader made by Amazon.com, has a about 1.5 gigabytes of space that is available for storing the books that I purchase for it. How many books can I fit into this device that is only about five and a half inches wide, by eight inches tall, by less than half an inch thick—and which weighs about the same as a single paperback book? It can hold the contents of 1500 books averaging about 300 pages each.

I have an office in my home which is lined on all the walls, floor to ceiling, with bookcases. The room is about ten feet by ten feet. Those shelves hold about that many books on them. Moving those books would be very unpleasant: I would have to fill dozens of cardboard boxes and would work up quite the sweat hauling them around. Each fifty pound box, perhaps two by two feet in size, would hold at best fifty or so books. I obviously would not carry even one such a box around with me when I went to the doctor’s office. But I can easily carry my Kindle, with the contents of my whole office, anywhere I go.

And if I finish all the books I currently have on my electronic book reader? Kindle allows me to find and purchase any of more than three hundred thousand books wirelessly. They range in price from free to less than twenty dollars; most are cheaper than a paperback. I can purchase a book and download it to my device any time night or day, wherever I happen to be: in my house, at the park, on the beach, riding in a car or sitting in my doctor’s office. Within sixty seconds after pushing the button that says “purchase” I can start reading.

Thanks to digital technology, we can cram an incredible amount of information into remarkably small spaces. I have in my pocket what’s sometimes called a thumb drive; it is smaller than a tube of lipstick. It has twice the storage capacity of my Kindle. I have a small netbook computer about the size and weight of a hard back book. It has a hard drive with a 160 gigabyte capacity—more than eighty times the capacity of my Kindle: it could store at least 120,000 books—more than the number of books you’ll find in most public libraries.

The Library of Congress is currently the largest library in the world, with about 530 miles of shelving. It holds about 130 million items, of which 29 million are books. It has been estimated that if all those books were put into digital format, they would fit in on about 20 terabytes worth of hard drive space. A terabyte is about 1000 gigabytes. Today, many desktop computers that can be purchased for less than a thousand dollars come with a 1 terabyte hard drive. However, it is now possible to find some with 2 terabyte hard drives for not much more. Thus, all the books in the Library of Congress currently sitting on 530 miles of shelves would fit on on ten desktop computers that would easily fit in my office at home. Doubtless within the next five years or so it will be possible to buy a single desktop computer that has a big enough hard drive in it to contain all the books in the Library of Congress, with room to spare.

The amount of information available on the internet is literally astronomical by comparison to the contents of the Library of Congress, however. Just now, there are over 500 billion gigabytes worth of information on the internet. If all that digital content were printed and made into books, it would form a stack that would stretch from the Earth to Pluto ten times—that is, about thirty billion miles. In fact, the world’s digital output is increasing so rapidly every day that if it were instantly being converted into books, that stack would grow faster than a space shuttle could zoom.

Of course, not all that digital content is particularly interesting. Much of it would be email, twitter feeds, Facebook pages, cat videos, and porn. Still, the amount of information available on the internet is remarkable. Google is currently digitizing all the books it can get its hands on—thousands of them a year—and putting them on the internet where they can be easily accessed.

Thanks to high speed connections, both wired and wireless, you don’t even need to have gigabytes or terabytes worth of storage in your computer. On a small handheld device like a cell phone, one can access all that astronomically massive amount of data anywhere and anytime you happen to be. In our pockets, we now have at our disposal the knowledge of the human race: we can read any book, find any answer to any question we might have, any time that we might take a notion to find out. I can stream music from the cloud and listen to anything that has ever been recorded. With Netflix or Amazon Prime, or Hulu, I can select from thousands upon thousands of television shows and movies any time I take a notion to watch them.

Though most of the time, all people do with that wonderful opportunity in their pockets is to play solitaire, text emoticons, or look at cat videos.

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SETI

Posted on April 22, 2013 by

SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is now more than fifty years old. In 1959, the Cornell physicists Giuseppi Cocconi and Philip Morrison published an article in the journal Nature proposing the idea that it might be possible to use microwave radio to communicate between the stars. The next year, in 1960, Frank D. Drake, a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginian carried out the first attempt to detect such interstellar radio transmissions. Drake named this first attempt Project Ozma, after the Queen in L. Frank Baum’s land of Oz. Oz, he said, was a place “very far away, difficult to reach, and populated by strange and exotic beings.”

Drake chose to listen to two nearby stars, Tau Ceti, which is located in the Constellation Cetus and Epsilon Eridani in the Constellation Eridanus. They are both about 11 light years away and are similar to the sun in age and brightness.

Unfortunately, no radio waves were actually detected during the time that Drake listened to those two stars, from April through July of 1960. Of course, he only listened to one channel during that time, the 1420 MHz line of neutral hydrogen because of its supposed astronomical significance. In fact, no artificial radio waves have ever been detected from anywhere in the sky during any SETI project.

The first scientific conference devoted to SETI research took place at Green Bank, West Virginia the next year, in 1961. Later, throughout the 1960’s, the Soviet Union performed a number of searches with omnidirectional antennas in the hope of picking up powerful radio signals. In 1966, American astronomer Carl Sagan and Soviet Astronomer Iosif Shklovskii wrote the pioneering book in the field entitled, Intelligent Life in the Universe.

In 1971 NASA funded a SETI study that involved Rake, Bernard Oliver of Hewlett-Packard Corporation and others. The resulting report proposed the construction of an Earth-based radio array with 1500 dishes known as Project Cyclops. The array was never constructed.

In 1974, after a major renovation of the radio dish, a largely symbolic attempt was made at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to send a message to other worlds. It was aimed at the globular star cluster M13, which is 25,000 light years away. If that message is detected by anyone out there, we still have about 50,000 years to wait before we’ll receive their reply.

Most SETI research in the United States has been done by universities and private organizations. For one year in 1992 the U.S. Government funded the NASA Microwave Observing Program (MOP) which was planned as a long-term effort to conduct a general survey of the sky and to carry out targeted searches of 800 specific nearby stars. Congress soon eliminated the funding, but the project was resurrected by the nonprofit organization, the SETI Institute of Mountain View, California. MOP was renamed Project Phoenix and was directed by Jill Tartar. Project Phoenix observed about 800 stars over the frequency range of 1200 to 3000 MHz from 1995 through March, 2004. The search was sensitive enough to pick up alien transmissions of a gigawatt or more up to a distance of about 200 light years. The Arecibo message of 1974 was sent at that power level, for instance.

Today, the SETI Institute is still busy. It is collaborating with the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at UC Berkeley to develop a specialized radio telescope array for SETI studies. It is called the Allen Telescope Array, named after Paul Allen, the project’s primary financial benefactor. Paul Allen was a founder of Microsoft and he financed SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004. When completed, the full radio telescope array will consist of 350 or more radio dishes, each about twenty feet in diameter. The first portion of the array, made up of forty-two dishes, became operational in October, 2007. Unlike the first Ozma search in 1960, the Allen Telescope Array monitors hundreds of millions of radio channels all at once.

Detecting signals at interstellar distances will not be easy to accomplish. And even if there are civilizations out there, they may not be purposely transmitting. For instance, the Earth has been radiating radio signals, radar, and television signals for more than seventy years now, meaning that the earliest signals form a bubble out from Earth seventy light years in diameter, enveloping hundreds of stars. However, even if there were a civilization similar to ours within that distance of Earth, none of the SETI instruments currently operating would be able to detect such radio or television signals. At interstellar distances, they are just too weak to separate from all the more noisy radio signals put out by stars, dust and gas. They are lost in the static.

This is not to say that SETI is a waste of time, however. But it is to say that the absence of any detectable transmissions from beyond Earth thus far doesn’t prove that no one is out there. Given the size of the universe, it would seem an awful waste of real estate if we really are the only intelligent beings in it.

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Serendipity

Posted on April 21, 2013 by

In 1945 Nazi Germany was finally defeated. One of the things that had helped bring about its defeat was the successful breaking of what the German’s thought was an unbreakable code.

At the end of the First World War a German engineer named Arthur Sherbius invented a cipher machine called Enigma. As children, many of us played with substitution ciphers using a kind of code machine consisting of concentric circles on which were printed the alphabet. I remember getting a plastic cipher machine out of a box of cereal. It was made of gold colored plastic and was about the size and thickness of a small jelly jar lid. There were two concentric circles, and the one on the outside moved. After twirling, when I compared the two rings, the A on the outside one might be aligned to the D on the inside, the B to the E, and so on. So I could write a “code” that could only be read if someone knew that when I wrote down the letter F it actually stood for the letter C and so on. Such a simple cipher could be broken in minutes, since there are but a small number of possible combinations and certain letters, such as E and the other vowels, are statistically more common.

The Enigma machine was a much more sophisticated and complicated cipher machine, consisting of at first three, and later, five circles or rings. The relationships between the letters on the rings varied with each keystroke. To know how to put a message back together, the recipient of the message would need to have the keycode that told the machine when and how to make the shifts in the rings. The complexity and shifting nature of the substitutions within a single text made the Enigma machine’s ciphers very hard to decipher. The Germans actually believed they were unbreakable.

Before World War II the Enigma machine was used commercially. It was later adopted by the military and government services of several nations. So in December, 1932 the Polish Cipher Bureau managed to break Germany’s military Enigma ciphers on some of the earlier Enigma machines. Five weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland gave what they had learned to the French and the British.
The British government then created a military intelligence agency called Ultra. Ultra obtained and broke high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School in Bletchley Park. The British called their program “ultra” because it was even more secret than top secret. Many of the participants in the war, ranging from Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that the decryptions obtained at Bletchley Park were decisive in the allied victory in World War II. One historian, Sir Harry Hinsley, believes that Ultra shortened the war by two to four years.

And how was it that the British were able to break the Enigma ciphers? It was mostly due to the work of two men: Polish mathematician, Marian Rejewski and British mathematician Alan Turing. In 1932 the Polish intelligence bureau received two German documents and two pages of daily key codes from the French. That allowed Rejewski to make a significant breakthrough in using the theory of permutations and groups to work out the Enigma scrambler wiring. He first worked it out using paper, but ultimately came up with an electro-mechanical device that was called the cryptologic bomb. It could sort through and determine which of the more than seventeen thousand possible keycodes was being used in a text in about two hours. This worked well on the Enigma machines using three rings, but not so well after 1938 when the Germans increased the complexity of their Enigma machines by adding two more rings.

Alan Turing, in 1939, designed an electromechanical “bombe,” building on the earlier work of Marian Rejewski. Turing’s machine was designed for the much more general approach to solving the ciphers. From this early system, the Colossus machine was later constructed in 1943. It was the world’s first electronic, digital, programmable computer. Its purpose was narrow, however, since it was tasked with only one job: decrypting the German codes. And unlike modern computers, Colossus had no internally stored programs. For each task it performed, its operators had to set up plugs and switches in order to physically rewire it.

It wasn’t until after the war, in 1946, that Turing presented a paper to the National Physical Laboratory Executive committee, giving them the first complete design of a stored-program computer. Although it still used vacuum tubes, Turing’s design was a computer of the modern sort: it was flexible and programmable.

The modern computer that is today ubiquitous, and used for everything from word processing to playing Angry Birds, is largely the serendipitous result of the need to find a quicker way to decode German cyphers that had been created by their Enigma machines.

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The Bartender Effect

Posted on April 20, 2013 by

If you are an authority figure in the life of people around you, you’ll likely wind up with them confiding their darkest secrets to you. Bartenders, I’m told, experience this. Certainly pastors certainly do. And sometimes administrators, teachers and college professors have it happen to them.

I’m an ordained deacon, an adult Sunday School teacher, and a college professor. It happens to me a lot. I need to point out that most of the people who unburden themselves to me are not my friends (though I have had friends do this to me, too). In fact, most of the folks who have told me the sad tales from their lives barely count as acquaintances. And yet they are happy to tell me details of themselves that are startling. I would be mortified if I had such struggles in my life, and I can’t even imagine why I’d tell someone I hardly know all about them.

Sometimes while I’m struggling to keep the look of surprise off my face while I’m being told an unexpected confession, I remember an old joke. Three pastors met one day for lunch. The first pastor looked at his companions and told them, “I’m burdened with my problems. Would you mind if I shared them?”

“Go right ahead, brother.”

“Ever since I became pastor, I’ve struggled with my greed. It would be so easy, some Sunday, to slip my hand into the collection plate and simply take some of that cash for myself.”

“You’re not alone in having struggles,” confessed the second pastor. “I’ve had a problem with lust all my life. Sometimes when the organist is playing, it’s all I can do not to stare at her legs. And I can’t express how hard it is for me to avoid the porn sites on the internet.”

The third pastor by this time was grinning, barely able to contain himself. At last he burst out, “I’m sorry, but I have to confess that I have a terrible problem with spreading gossip!”

Thankfully, I don’t have a gossip problem. In fact, I find just the opposite: I have trouble remembering the details from what people tell me when they open themselves up like that. Which can be a problem if a week or two later they ask me what I thought, or start telling me what has happened next and I don’t remember what went before.

I think part of the way I handle all the unhappy information is that I don’t internalize it. Instead, I let is slip away from me: in one ear and out the other. I don’t dwell on what they tell me, I don’t contemplate and concern myself with any thought of what I would do in their situation. I don’t let myself focus on what they told me. It doesn’t keep me up at night.

I know, especially since this happens to me regularly, that most folks are just happy to have someone that they can talk to. They want someone who will listen calmly, without reacting negatively. Mostly, all people really need is a warm body to pour their words into.

As to why people feel comfortable unburdening themselves to someone that they don’t really know all that well, I’m not entirely certain. What leads them to trust a stranger with their intimate worries and problems?

I’m not unique in having it happen to me, though. My wife occasionally works with new teachers in her school district. It’s a mentoring position. She finds that it is not uncommon for them to open up to her—and not just about issues in their classrooms, but private matters as well.

Still, I think it happens to me a bit more than to most people. I’ve had strangers in stores, restaurants, and on street corners suddenly start talking to me about the oddest things. It even happens in the virtual world. Given the fact that I run the website for our seminary, I get email from random strangers. Most are simple requests for information, but every so often I’ll get an email that pours out the most heartrending information.

Thankfully, people who turn to me to talk about their misery are rarely, if ever, looking for solutions or advice from me. They just want someone to talk to. As to why they don’t talk to their friends instead, I’m not certain—particularly since I have friends who do the same thing to me that strangers do, but in that case, I don’t find it odd. Friends should be able to open up to one another. Life can be cruel. I can’t imagine facing it alone.

I wonder if there are simply a lot of people out there who don’t have any close friends or family to help support them through life, so they reach out in desperation. Perhaps some percentage of those in therapy are there simply because they don’t have anyone in their lives that they are close enough to, or comfortable enough with, to confide in.

Or maybe someone taped a sign on my back that instead of saying “kick me” says, “therapy for free.”

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No Moral Equivallence

Posted on April 19, 2013 by

The horrible events in Boston bring out the worst in some people.

I really do not understand those who believe that there is no difference between the actions of terrorists and the actions of the U.S. military. And I say this not just because my father spent 28 years in the Air Force and served in Viet-Nam twice.

On Facebook, someone recently posted a photograph of a row of dead babies supposedly killed by an American drone in Afghanistan and suggested that America is no different than those we call terrorists:

Matthew Keys, the social media editor at Reuters, posted audio of a reporter asking White House Press Secretary Jay Carney if U.S. bombings that kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan constitute an “act of terror” given the labeling of the Boston Marathon bombing as “terrorism”. She specifically refers to a U.S. airstrike earlier this month that killed 11 children, just the latest in a seemingly endless line of Afghan civilian deaths at the hands of the U.S. government.

Some people argue that we’re hypocrites for reacting with outrage over the events in Boston given that what we’re doing (through our military) every day in Afghanistan is just as bad, if not worse.

This all too common attitude is both incredibly offensive and flat out insane.

It is indeed awful when innocent civilians are injured or killed as a result of U.S. military activity (though not all reports of such things are true or accurate, but that’s another issue altogether). Such deaths are what are known as “tragedies.” Such deaths are not murder. They are not terrorism.

There is a significant difference both morally and legally between murder and manslaughter. This is recognized rather early in the Bible, for instance:

When the LORD your God has destroyed the nations whose land he is giving you, and when you have driven them out and settled in their towns and houses, then set aside for yourselves three cities in the land the LORD your God is giving you to possess. Determine the distances involved and divide into three parts the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, so that a person who kills someone may flee for refuge to one of these cities.

This is the rule concerning anyone who kills a person and flees there for safety—anyone who kills a neighbor unintentionally, without malice aforethought. For instance, a man may go into the forest with his neighbor to cut wood, and as he swings his ax to fell a tree, the head may fly off and hit his neighbor and kill him. That man may flee to one of these cities and save his life. Otherwise, the avenger of blood might pursue him in a rage, overtake him if the distance is too great, and kill him even though he is not deserving of death, since he did it to his neighbor without malice aforethought. This is why I command you to set aside for yourselves three cities.

If the LORD your God enlarges your territory, as he promised on oath to your ancestors, and gives you the whole land he promised them, because you carefully follow all these laws I command you today—to love the LORD your God and to walk always in obedience to him—then you are to set aside three more cities. Do this so that innocent blood will not be shed in your land, which the LORD your God is giving you as your inheritance, and so that you will not be guilty of bloodshed.

But if out of hate someone lies in wait, assaults and kills a neighbor, and then flees to one of these cities, the killer shall be sent for by the town elders, be brought back from the city, and be handed over to the avenger of blood to die. Show no pity. You must purge from Israel the guilt of shedding innocent blood, so that it may go well with you. (Deuteronomy 19:1-13)

The U.S. Government does not try to kill children. Children are not targets of our soldiers. If children die or suffer injury as a result of U.S. actions in Afghanistan or elsewhere it is a tragic accident.

Terrorists, on the other hand—for instance Timothy McVeigh, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda and the like—do purposely target children. They delight in killing innocent people. Killing innocent people is their goal when they place bombs in office buildings, at the Boston Marathon, or fly aircraft into sky scrapers.

Beyond that, the terrorists of the world regularly and purposely place women and children around their installations, using the innocents as human shields in the hope that we won’t risk attacking them, but knowing that if we do, then their deaths can be used to demonstrate just how evil America is.

It strikes me as odd when I see the photos of people killed in drone attacks. Who would carefully line up dead children and then snap gruesome pictures of them? How do we even know that an American weapon was responsible for their deaths? And why are so many in the U.S. and around the world willing to take the word of people who gleefully kill civilians, take hostages and cut off their heads, stone women for the crime of being raped, hang homosexuals, and kill Christians and Jews simply because they are Christians and Jews? Are the Timothy McVeighs of the world really trustworthy sources of information?

Look, this is not hard. If a police officer accidently kills someone in his or her attempt to catch a criminal—as for instance in a hostage situation—that is tragic. But the police officer is not the moral equivalent of a criminal who takes a hostage and cuts off his head.

Why do some people find it so hard to tell the difference between Al-Qaeda and the United States?

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Seasons

Posted on April 18, 2013 by

Southern California does not have seasons like most of the rest of the country. The temperature in Los Angeles stays pretty even all year round. But we do have periods of the year where it rains, and periods when it usually doesn’t. We have periods when the winds blow harder than at other times, and we have times when we are more likely to suffer from wild fires. So while we may not have the radical changes of the traditional winter, spring, summer and autumn, there are still noticeable differences between July and January.

Life has seasons and like Southern California, they do not fall into four neat categories; nor do they follow any particular pattern. One cannot experience something in life and then think, well spring is coming or “after this, it’s going to be winter.” Still, the concept of “seasons of life” is a useful analogy.

We sometimes say, “Into each life a little rain must fall.” Sometimes that feels more like a flood, to maintain the Southern California analogy. And then we get hit with the mudslides and forest fires.

With any crowd of people, we can probably arrange them into three seasons: one section will be metaphorically sunning themselves on the Riviera, their lives near to perfect as they can get. Another section will be watching their umbrella tumble down the road as they get drenched in a monsoon. But the bulk of the people will simply be sitting in an office, a half drunk coffee gone to lukewarm on their desk, and a small stack of papers in their inbox: they are largely content, they have a few problems but nothing beyond managing, and life is sort of ordinary. That’s where we all live most of the time: bills to pay, children to get to soccer games, short of time and long on things to do. Everything is mildly hectic and we’re looking forward to a break on the weekend. Tonight we expect to kick back on the couch, watch some TV, and then head off to bed. And in the morning, we’ll do it all over again.

What is important to realize is that we will have to live through all three seasons, in no particular order. Most months will be the just okay place. The Riviera time we won’t have any trouble putting up with. It’s the monsoon season that’s the problem.

In the time of disaster, the comfort is to remember that it won’t last forever. Season’s always change. On September 30, 1859, Abraham Lincoln told a story in an address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee:

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”

For many, Lincoln’s words are so familiar that they barely register. They have become an empty platitude. But platitudinous or not, Lincoln’s words are still true and if we choose, they give us insight into how to keep life’s seasons in perspective.

In his poem “If,” Rudyard Kipling wrote that triumph and disaster were both imposters and that we should learn to treat them just the same. That is, we need to recognize how transient our seasons are and how to rise above them. “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a bit. It will change.”

Lincoln’s words are but one way to express the old truth of life’s seasons. When a Roman general returned in triumph from his conquests, he was granted a magnificent parade called a Triumph. His soldiers, their captured booty, their defeated foes were paraded down the street and at the end of the parade, in his chariot, rode the general, with a slave whispering words into his ear: “Look behind you, remember you are only a man” and “Remember, you are mortal.”

Similarly, Paul wrote in a letter to a church in the ancient city of Philippi:

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

“I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” (Philippians 4:8-12)

Life has seasons. We can get through them all. Over and over again.

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