Barstools

This post is going to make me sound like an alcoholic if I'm not careful. But the thing to remember is that this is not a blog about drinking, or indeed about bars. Rather it is a blog about a particular arrangement of people, furniture, and objects.

That said, drinking will figure in to it, but feel free to make that coffee, water, or a smoothie if you prefer. Move it out of a drinking establishment and into a coffee house or

What, in my roundabout way, I am trying to get to is this: I love sitting on a barstool, at a bar, watching the world go by (or participating in it -- barstool does not mandate or even imply passivity). The personal geography of the stool and the bartop are nearly perfect. A great height (if it is not too tall) for working on laptop. A great height for a book or magazine or some old fashioned pen-and-ink notepaper. There is enough space to spread out -- but not so much as to enable uncontrolled sprawling. A plate, a drink, and a book/laptop/magazine fit perfectly. This forces a tidy work habit and the selection of essential resources. The height of the surface also enables a pleasant multitasking -- the sharing of time between food and drink and whatever form of work (or recreation -- for a laptop computer or a book or some notepaper could imply either for me) is at hand.

But almost all of this could happen at a table. The relationship between the tabletop and the body is not too different from that between the bartop and the body. But it is a significant difference. The bartop encourages a leaning, relaxed, elbows-on-the-table mood. The table is a rigorous place, both by arrangement and psychology, where posture must be maintained, children should be seen but not heard, and knife and fork must be used properly.

There is something else about the bar that works well, and that is the back bar and the (almost) inevitable TV playing the news or a sports show. First, the back bar, that glorious collection of multicolored, multistyled bottles against a mirrored backdrop. Cognacs, Scotch whiskies, and super-premium vodkas and bourbons on the top row. Then the blended whiskies, the more commonplace vodkas and bourbons and a necessary range of tequila. Finally, one step above the well, the more ordinary vodkas and rums as well as the additives: the vermouths and the liquors.

I'll admit, right now, that your favorite bar may not exactly mirror that arrangement. This is just (roughly) how I'd do mine.

It is a wonderful visual stimulus -- something to gaze at when you need to look up. Unlike other diners across (or at an adjacent) table, it never looks back (if it ever does, seek help). Unlike an office wall, it is more than eighteen inches away and gives your eyes some sort of a break from the relentlessly myopic staring of the modern knowledge worker.

The TV plays the same role. A quick look away to Larry King or Wolf Blitzer or Keith Olbermann can refresh a stuck thought process or just provide a break from a monotonous task. The intermezzo of a highlight reel can provide a quick break between catching up on work email and diving into the framework of an intricately planned project.

And here, for the first time, we will also encounter the alcohol. From ancient Sumer on, people have found that properly treated fermented grains can produce a relaxed state, inducing of creativity, conversation, risk taking, and even, in the right situations, considerable productivity. In the classic pattern of the "if you mean whisky" fallacy, it can also produce excessively abrupt emails, poor proofreading, a tendency for summary resignations, misuse of Britney Spears crotch shots in PowerPoint presentations, and worst of all corporate Karaoke. But a little self restraint, here, and the benefits out weigh the risk of accidentally showing board members a photograph of Brit's underwear.

Here is a place where you can sit and work and take a moment to rest and someone will bring you (almost) everything you need. What, then, of the noise and the other people there? For starters, I'm the kind of guy who has no problem grabbing a spot at the bar, pulling out his laptop, ordering a beer, and getting to work. If the rest of the patrons are all meeting up and actually watching the game or flirting, so what! If they think I'm an oddball, then that is their problem and not mine -- and if you are uncomfortable with this sort of attitude then you might actually find this whole working-at-a-bar thing isn't for you. But read on, we'll get on to this interpersonal contact stuff soon enough.

The crowd, though, becomes another optional distraction, something to take your interest away when you need (or choose) to let it do so. The rest of the time, it is white noise. Stare at an overly complex scene -- say one of those ultra-hard German crossword puzzles based around an oil painting of a cluttered used bookstore or else a day care center. Then let your eyes loose focus for a moment and suddenly the visual stimulus retreats to manageability. Crowd noise does the same thing. It helps focus by forcing you into yourself. And when you want to, look at the bored girl and the desperate guy hitting on her, or the bachelor party group, or the silent couple, or the would-be executives or... And if you catch enough of one of the conversations, and it should be sufficiently close by, say hi, drop in, offer some advice, tell them the easiest way to the freeway or what you thought of Mama Mia. It is (to gracefully paraphrase Fight Club) a single serving friendship. If you laugh and they laugh, great, everyone wins. If you laugh and they laugh -- at you -- then at least you brought a little joy to the world and you will never meet these people again.

But we do not always come to bars solitary, with laptop. Sometimes we come with another person or even a people. And then the whole barstool thing takes on a new role. It is splendidly isolating -- the crowd noise again. You can say anything, things you wouldn't say at a quiet restaurant, things about each other and what you'd like to do later, things about your friends, things about your co-workers, the economy, or the Large Hadron Collider. Which, by the way, will completely fail to destroy the Earth or even the universe when it switches on. The Large Hadron Collider, that is. But when the things to say run out or need refreshing, there is the full spectrum of human drama there, from the TV screens to the other patrons (tastefully watched in the back bar mirror if there is one). Take a break, look around.

The posture -- remember the posture? Perch in couples holding hands, turn your wonderfully swivelable barstools towards each other for intimacy, turn back to the bartop for food or to read the menu or new magazines or to stare at the liquor bottles. If you are there in a group, lean in, lean out, arrange yourself as needed to talk to the person next to you, or n+1 spaces away. Raise your voice if necessary, scrum together as four for a laughing and shouting shared comment. Its all good, it all goes.

When you're on a barstool.

(Aero)space is a Harsh Mistress

Q3 has not been pretty for the little guys in aerospace.

First Space-X looses their third Falcon 1 rocket.

Thilert proves that corrupt and fraudulent management and leaving your creditors and customers in the lurch is not an American speciality but rather that the Germans can do quite well at that game too.

Grob, to absolutely no one's surprise, files for insolvency and protection after managing to fatally crash the prototype of an already underfunded and overambitious project.

Columbia Aircraft's subsumation into Cessna (or did that happen in Q2?).

A few other dreamers fell by the wayside, too, unnamed and already forgotten.

And then finally there has been the slow, bitter meltdown of Eclipse Aviation. At some point, I stopped believing and saw this as something that was bound to come. But not always. Five years ago, Vern's promises sounded good. Revolutionary, almost. A personal jet, a family flivver of the air. At long last Lewis Black and I would have our flying cars.

The marketing materials made that little jet seem so much like that vision of the future. Not quite The Jetsons but pretty damn good. In the post 9/11 world of increased aviation security it seemed like a great idea to get the heck out of the controlled gate-check world and start flying via air taxi or personal jet. The milage was even pretty good -- and the price? Fantastic.

The prototype flew -- did about one turn through the pattern from what I gather, and promptly landed. The engine, Vern insisted, was to blame. I'm willing to believe them. If Williams had, in fact, not completely failed to produce a viable super-mini turbofan then someone else would be trying to put that powerplant back into the air. How's that for a sentence construction, eh? But the FJ22 appears entirely moribund, off the website, almost a memory. Like Keyser Söze, perhaps the FJ22 is now a spook story that jet propulsion engineers tell their kids. Over reach the state of the art...and the FJ22 will get you!

It would not be fair to forget about this debacle of the powerplant. Ever revolution in aircraft design has been preceded or accompanied by a similar advance in engine technology. Without Williams' promised miracle, a quick substitution had to be performed in the form of Pratt & Whitney Canada's glorious little PW610. This was also a baby -- not quite the super-midget of the rejected motor, but still going deeper in to miniature-jet-engine technology than anyone (certainly anyone with the cred of P&W) had gone before. The timing was perfect, even though the fuel consumption, weight, and cost were all going to be higher.

Now I'm not going to let anyone start to toss a bunch of blame onto Pratt & Whitney. There's a genetic thing at work -- my grandfather would pretty much only fly things with P&W motors in them, possibly for superstitious reasons, but the point is the same. They build tanks. P&W Canada's been building miniature turbines in the form of helicopter engines since the 1950's and probably has more operational experience with this size class of jet than all the rest put together. So they know of what they speak and, while the end result may not have been quite as spectacular as was hoped for, it remains an excellent motor.

And perhaps more to the point, the press out of Eclipse was confident and smooth. The new engine would have greater thrust (a feature!) and only slightly higher fuel consumption (a bug) requiring tip tanks (that, I believe, had been planned anyway). No problem, a bit of a delay, just a flesh wound, everything is fine. Flight testing pretty much ground to a halt until a series of design revisions produced more production-like prototypes. These, in due time flew, obtained certification, and appeared on a lot of magazine covers.

And then things started to get a little icky. Customers were obtaining their jets, but with some of the much-vaunted Eclipse features omitted. FIKI (Flight Into Known Icing) certification seemed to draw on forever. Avionics features were placarded off. Blown tires started to become a frequent occurrence (Eclipse blamed operator error but I don't need to spend much time pointing out that a systemic spike in a particular sort of operator error can point to a design flaw that encourages this error...).

Then things got weird. Eclipses were going to be built in Russia. The single engine Eclipse 400 started playing the air show circuit. The hyped avionics architecture was being scrapped in favor of a less integrated system including a couple of off-the-shelf Garmin units. Blogs and chat rooms populated by frustrated, venting customers faced unprecedented legal threats. You'd think that one of the landmark cases on Internet anonymity would revolve around some huge megacorp, but apparently Amazon and Microsoft and General Motors and Delta Air Lines know well enough to let cranky customers have their space and not try to shut them down.

I wonder if they'll try to shut down this blog?

Then, in a so-shocking-it-wasn't-shocking move, Vern Raburn the founder, mouthpiece, and driving force of Eclipse was gone. Forced out by investors. He was to be in charge of "internationlization of production" or something like that. The Russia thing, in other words. Then 100 temps got pink-slipped. Then Vern was gone -- completely. Then a few hundred more got their thank-you-and-goodby (and not all of them temps, I hear).

Now the FAA is conducting a review of the certification process to ensure that the E500 is, indeed, fit to fly and (perhaps more to the point) that the agency followed its own procedures and didn't, like a lot of us, get a bit too excited reading the marketing white papers.

Alright now, this isn't a history lesson or a debrief. I'm not an aerospace engineer or a business analyst but I know a little about both fields. I am a blogger, and therefore have staked out my little piece of the Internet, opinions and all. Eclipse may pull itself together. God knows, when I was among the 25% of Amazon.com staff who got their notice one February afternoon seven years ago, I knew that they were making a necessary move. So this double-pass downsizing at Eclipse may be just such a necessary consolidation of forces. But Amazon was a hugely successful company -- one that had built success by throwing resources (mostly people) at problems and which needed to adapt to a sustainable, profitable architecture. They made the hard choices and did re-architect into something that is doing very well now.

Well, this is a history lesson and a debrief in another sense. I find myself, for the second time in less than a month, writing about over-promising aerospace revolutionaries. I find myself thinking about the seduction of a "better way to do things" and the danger of ignoring the lessons of history. Vern and Elon both knew that the established players were doing things wrong and that they could do it in a different way. So they built teams of like-minded individuals -- doubtless very talented teams with excellent theoretical and practical backgrounds.

I've been part of such teams -- and the Amazon.com thing is going to have to come up again. They/we were a team of folks with brilliant qualifications -- vastly over qualified in many cases -- but just little enough experience to not know that we couldn't do what we are doing. Yes, by the way, I know I'm really working the multiple-negatives here. And yet there was a solid business plan and vision lying on top of all of that. There was a solid financial base -- willing to give enough rope (particularly early on) to run at a staggering loss for a staggeringly long (but ultimately necessary) time.

I used to have a little saying, back in those days, about why Amazon survived when so many struggled and died: some Internet startups were begun by people with good business plans but little grasp of the technology. Others were the products of people with good technological backgrounds and innovative ideas -- but a flawed understanding of the business world. Naturally, there were a few that failed in both regards -- but they didn't usually make it long enough to discuss. Amazon, by contrast, was one of the first (and now the few) to combine a solid business plan with solid technology. Through ups and downs, bad decisions and good decisions, they held close (enough) to the original vision, adapted when necessary, and managed to make it work.

And now back to Eclipse (and perhaps Space-X). Where is the flaw? Business plan? Technology? Both? Neither? I lean to both -- a technological product that was designed with enough giddy naivety as to be brittle and intolerant of setback and failure -- the failure of the FJ22 and the original avionics system -- and enough cut corners as to generate problems once in service. A business plan that depended on successes in volume production and demand generation that have, so far, eluded them. Eclipse isn't the first to fall to this error -- of assuming or expecting a demand that fails to appear. McDonnell (now Boeing) made the same sad error in planning the Delta IV rocket. Externally a beautiful vehicle, the Delta's approach to cost-effective launch pricing was based around generating a large demand and benefitting from economies of scale in production and launch. For various unfortunate reasons, this failed to appear.

So now how do I wrap this up? Eclipse has problems -- big problems. I don't think that their layoffs are that sort of "thinning the herd" that can bring a troubled company back. They made big promises and generated and promulgated a lot of enthusiasm. So should we fear companies or products that generate too much enthusiasm? "Woah, there, let's not get too excited..." Should we mistrust companies that promise great change and revolution?

Any of these ideas are naive and simplistic. The reality is, yet again, caveat emptor. When dramatic promises are made -- read the fine print and run your own numbers. When someone promises just a little too much more than everyone else -- make sure you understand how they plan to (or already have) achieved this.

And be sad, at least a little sad, that promise has once again faded into cynicism, layoff, and frustration.

Cirrus is out there, with a successful line of piston singles and a sexy little jet on the drawing board. Cessna's managed to keep true to their word and move from strength to strength -- including the wonderful little Mustang that just might have contributed more than a little to Eclipse's troubles. Orbital is building a larger-yet rocket from their well understood and consolidated base. So the startups can continue and grow secure. The big guys can show some flexibility and innovation.

So a little sad, but not too much.

Desert Island Books

This goes back to the style of 105 Things About Me -- a self-indulgent look at, well, myself. Not quite myself -- but instead at one of the best ways I've ever found of getting a look at a person from the outside: the books I read. It is, then, half self-indulgence and half suggested reading.

I used to listen to a radio station that played the seminal "Desert Island Discs" program. Well known (or as the show wore on, progressively less well known) artists would list the ten disks that they would, if trapped on a desert island, want to have with them. I don't listen to all that much music, and my tastes are with little exception confined to relatively mainstream singer-songwriter stuff.

If trapped on a desert island, then, what ten books would I take? I'll admit to a certain degree of practicality: I've opted for long books and books with a high "contemplation" value. I've kept in mind the idea that this reading list will potentially have to tide me over for a while and have included a bit of variety even if that action meant I'd have to leave a couple of strong favorites at home. There are, however, a couple of emotional inclusions, books in there because they should be or because I know they bring me an odd sort of comfort.

I'd also like to apologize to the people at Amazon.com for, in some cases, borrowing their cover art in order to make this article have some visual appeal. For what its worth, those pictures all link back to Amazon if you are interested in exploring one of the titles a little further.

Neuromancer
You knew this would be in here. This is, without a doubt, my book. It is the book I take with on airplanes, read about every year just to keep in touch, write essays about when I can't think of anything else. It is the drug soaked future vision of techno-hippie-curmugeon William Gibson. As the product of a man with more experience with psychedelics than CPUs, it is in many ways a shockingly prophetic vision of the future. Granted, the Rise of the East that so dominated future visions of that era (anyone remember Crichton's hideous Rising Sun?) has generally failed to come to pass. Neither did World War Three. Nor did the space colonies, for that matter.

But what makes Neuromancer interesting as a work of vision are the computers. Artificial intelligences and neural connections may still be the stuff of sci-fi dreams, but Gibson saw perhaps more dramatically than anyone the rise of pervasive computing and connectivity. While everyone else was preoccupied with hard science fiction -- precisely understanding how the things o their future would work -- Gibson ignored the details and painted with his broad noir brush strokes. As a result, he was one of the few to look far enough ahead to see what would come to pass in a few decades. Granted, there are anachronisms such as the bank of pay phones that are essential to the book's most creepy moment or the non-standard multi-pin connectors that briefly frustrate Case just shy of the climax. But overall Gibson offers no clue as to how things work (how exactly are Molly and Case able to stay in touch during the Straylight run, for example?), but just lets them happen. And as a result, he saw (in some senses quite literally) the future in a way few others ever did.

The writing is as dark and imagistic as is the universe. The crumbling derelicts of Western Civilization are described not through sweeping panoramas but through isolated, vivid scenes. Sometimes the prose rambles on -- particularly towards the end, during the 2001: A Space Odyssey-like descriptions of Case's final hallucinatory flight through the joint defenses of the Wintermute and Neuromancer AI's. As I said, sometimes I think Gibson really did see his future...


The Diamond Age
A stark contrast from Gibson's seat-of-the-plants imagination, The Diamond Age is a product of the methodical, well informed, and carefully considered work of Neal Stephenson. Here is a future cast deep into a vision of nanotechnology and digital divide. In many ways it is starkly different from Gibsons -- certainly much more of a post-Cold War work, steeped more in Huntington than in Reagan. Where Neuromancer presents it's future with a damn-the-details disregard for implementation and infrastructure, Diamond Age very nearly presents a complete course in the ideas of Alan Turing. Indeed, some of the book's most charming passages are those excerpts from the Primer devoted to Nell's technological education (I've actually done "Primer only" readings of the book -- skipping the mainline action in favor of that belonging to Princess Nell.

It is a much more hopeful book that Neuromancer, even though the social and technological divide is, if anything, more dramatic than in the earlier book. Whereas Neuromancer presented an undeniably dark vision of humanity, Diamond Age somehow shows a future where, while there may be crime and corruption and war and poverty, and while the seemingly limitless power of nanotechnology has failed to fulfill more than a fraction of its promise (at least for most of the world!), the better angels of our nature still seem to have a fighting chance and the reader is left believing in heroes (and even more so in heroines, since Stephenson is just about the most feminist of science fiction authors).

Granted, the book does occasionally suffer from logical inconsistencies, but I am willing to put this off to my incomplete understanding of the world (one could, for example, look at an incomplete narrative of events in our world and wonder why some people have amazing handled directions that instantly supply them with directions to any point on Earth...and others don't). The book (and Stephenson's work in general) has also been widely criticized for its abrupt ending. I agree -- it sometimes feels as if Stephenson felt like "alright, I'm done here, let's get this thing wrapped up" and pushed the pace in the final few dozen pages. But the fact is, the events of those pages are told with what I think is a deliberately synopsizing style. We know the characters, we know the action. In a sense, the main stories have ended. The last chapter (or two) is more like those wrap-up title cards that used to be popular in movies (and still are for docudramas) which tell the audience what characters went on to do hard time and what characters went on to found successful aerospace firms. I'm picturing the end of HBO's superlative rendition of Band of Brothers, by the way, where just about everyone ended up doing something amazing -- except for Dick Winters who I guess pretty much returned to farming and then quietly retired and I vaguely believe may not live too far from here. So if you view it as a wrap up, of a realization that the story is over, we're just tying off a few loose ends -- and that the story isn't over -- then it feels a lot better.

I also recommend the audiobook, superbly read by Jennifer Wiltsie (incidentally that controvertial ending flows very nicely in her reading). The voice is primarily that of Princess Nell, though the characterizations are all superbly done without any of the drama or histrionic over-acting that some readers seem compelled to include.


The Name of the Rose
Those of you who know me knew this was going to be here. It has to be, after all. It is the only medieval (I hope I spelled that right) mystery about codebreaking written by a semiotics professor I know of. It is also without a doubt the peak of Umberto Eco's willfully obtuse and esoteric writing. The very conceit of the book -- that it is a translated reconstruction of a manuscript written by a dying monk hundreds of years ago -- is pure Eco. And with his absurd range of knowledge (and feel for the styles of that age), he pulls the trick off as convincingly as Rob Reiner and Christopher Guest do in This is Spinal Tap (which is a great deal funnier, by the way).

The Name of the Rose is a book to submit to. Before picking it up (and periodically during the reading process, whenever one of Eco's page long comma-laden sentences threatens to drive you to drink) repeat this special variation on the serenity prayer to yourself:

Grant me the intelligence to understand the parts that can be understood.
Grant me the patience to make it through the parts that cannot be understood.
And the wonderment to enjoy it all anyway.

(And, if necessary, go ahead and drink)

Once you decide to take this ride, it is a little bit like a hiking trip through a strange and exotic land (right now, Erica is reading a book about someone's adventure of just this sort in China). There will be times you have no idea what is going on, but eventually frantic hand-waving will help you find the bathroom or the teahouse or the place you can buy DVD's really cheap. There will be times you are lost, confused, and worried the train that just left was the last one out for the winter. There will be times you will follow a group of people who look similar to you (and therefore must know what is going on) only to discover they are from the Ukraine and are also lost. But in the end, the trip and its memories will be an amazing collection of thoughts and experiences so rich that they have to lie in your head for months or years -- and be revisited through photographs, storytelling, and dreams -- before they form a coherent picture and their full impact is felt.

This is how The Name of the Rose feels. It is a trip back to a time so different from our own that it is, in many ways, nearly incomprehensible. An Italian monastery during the time of the Papal Schism, as seen by a young boy apprenticed to a mysterious (and intentionally Sherlock-Holmes-like) monk. A mystery that explores murders that weave the most base of human desires with the most erudite. A code that, while ultimately not-so-difficult, forms one of the diverse hearts of the story. And everywhere, the complex and layered symbolism not just of Eco's own mind but that which permeated the 14th century itself. Roll with those overly-long descriptions and witch off the hyper-paced superficiality of the modern age, when beauty is just beauty and function just function. Instead get yourself thinking about the symbolism that is inherent in any object (and I take a broad definition of object, essentially using it as a postmodernist would use text). Today, we rarely plan symbolism, it tends to just happen as a side effect of more banal choices. Back then, it was the essential and driving design consideration.


Smiley's People
Welcome to the 20th century. The year is, well, sometime in the late 1970's (the book was written in 1979). The cold war is at its peak, rising to a final dramatic crescendo that, though no one knows it, will suddenly flare into stillness and the end of that movement of the symphony of history. The spy game is the sweaty place of men working alone, relying on cool wit and awareness. The men who were honed in the tumult of the Second World War are now at that time in their lives when they are either pensioned retirees or string-pulling masters. John Le Carre wraps up a long and wonderful thread of two such men -- George Smiley and his Soviet foe Karla -- in a book that is, I believe, the single finest piece of spy fiction ever written.

If you are thinking of picking it up, don't worry that you need to go back and pick up the two other books of the "main" Smiley/Karla trilogy (or the two prelude books that introduce Smiley or any of the other books in which me makes bit or major appearances). Smiley's People stands on its own as a single and wonderful work. I actually consider it to be significantly superior to any of the other Smiley books, to be honest. One of the joys of the book is the reunion value. To put it in a nutshell (I've deliberately avoided plot summaries here, but need to do a little one for this to make sense), retired and somewhat defeated British spymaster George Smiley is dragged out of his somewhat head-in-the-sand retirement for one final battle against his seemingly victorious rival from the Soviet Union (that's why I avoid plot summaries -- they always sound like that "back of the book" prose). Along the way, Smiley brings together an entire cast of characters from the old books, from the obvious (Toby Esterhase) to the obscure (Inspector Mendel). The result is a book that resonates with a "let's see what this old girl still has in her" sort of drama that I'm an admitted sucker for. It's part of what makes some of the Star Trek franchise so appealing (the Enterprise speeding away from the sabotaged Excelsior, for example, or the refitted Enterprise coming to the rescue in that glorious final episode of TNG, All Good Things). But you needn't actually know those stories to appreciate this aspect of the book. Indeed, I read them out of sequence since, when I picked each of them up, I had no idea the book was part of a larger whole.

Narratively, Le Carre does one of the most masterful jobs of perspective management that I have ever seen. He shifts his focus from that of a marginally omniscient narrator to an internal monologue from a mentally troubled Russian girl with such grace that the dramatic changes in tone are entirely seamless. Some of the book has a delightful dramatic irony, where the narrator almost seems to be the author of an official Circus history looking back on the event with the perspective of months or years, breaking aside for discussions of events taking place after the conclusion of the mainline story and limited in knowledge by official records. At times the narrator seems to know Smiley's deepest thoughts and musings, but at times those same thoughts are protected and only accessible through observation and speculation. Throughout runs a dry and very English wit, the wry observations of a narrator as world-weary and cynically perspicacious as is his protagonist. The result is one of the most unique and entertaining narratives I have ever read. I suspect a purist would complain that it was gimmicky, inconsistent, and unprofessional. But I am not a purist and enjoy a good story, well told, by any appropriate means.

The moments when the book does give is a look into Smiley's mind are a fantastic look into the mind of a man with (to use the book's own phrase), "many heads under his hat": retiring academic, veteran spy, civil servant, conscientious leader, failed husband, defeated warrior, and finally and most tellingly, a man who is in a position after years of frustration, failure, and inadequacy to finally gain the upper hand over his foe.


The Lord of the Rings

There are, in sports such as diving and gymnastics, certain obligatory moves that must be displayed during a competition or a routine. And, for some people, there are certain obligatory books that must be put on lists such as this one. Lord of the Rings is one of those. If I didn't include it, I'd have to hand in my Science Fiction & Fantasy Fan card and walk away in shame. But the thing is, it is a good inclusion. I've never been quite the fan that some become. I never tried to make my own dictionary of the Elvish language or write a fanfic (footnote: the spell checker on my blogging software, presumably the one built into OS-X 10.5, knows the word "fanfic." Tells you something, doesn't it?) or draw maps of Middle Earth. But I'm not necessarily given to such acts of devotion.

But for richness of world, complexity of narrative, and degree of unspoken backstory, it is hard to beat Tolkien. One of the things that really does make all of his work so enjoyable is the feeling that it isn't a work of fiction, but a work of history. And just as even the most thorough of historic works can touch only a fraction of what went on (be it in a day or a few hundred years), The Lord of the Rings clearly touches only a fraction of what went on during those final days before the fall of Sauron. Tolkien's vast and very English scholars mind created a depth of detail that one can revel in.

It is also the wellspring of all other "quest" books. The fellowship gathers, embarks, divides, divides again, bifurcating into multiple anfractuous plot lines. Indeed, after Fellowship of the Ring it is entirely possible to read LotR (I just did it, I used the fanboy shorthand, sorry) as several concurrent novels, picking and choosing story lines. "Hm...today I think I will read just the story of Pippen..." But, gloriously, everything comes together at the end as, through nearly independent action (or the smooth hand of fate) the principles come back together, one at a time, until the final tearful reunion.

The dialogue may, at times, be heavy handed. I find Tolien's insistence on those interminable songs profoundly irritating (granted, he's trying to build a viking-like character, but this didn't need to turn so Wagnerian!). Sometimes the exclusion of backstory can leave the new reader staggering along for a few dozen or a few hundred pages (but you always know that exclusion is deliberate and not the product of the author not knowing what happened outside the story). The number of named characters defies counting, and little guidance is initially provided as to the potential importance of a newcomer.

But for all that, for all of the flaws it does possess, the work is a true epic. Sweeping, grand, and beautiful in scope.


The Codebreakers

Somewhat tongue-in-cheekishly, I credit this book with my marriage to Erica. To give it full credit is obviously absurd, my willingness to eat the deep fried shrimp heads clearly counted for something. But despite later culinary adventures, our shared ownership of this book was one of the first "hey, this guy/gal looks interesting!" moments. At least we knew we'd have one thing to talk about on a date.

Simply put, The Codebreakersis a seminal work that has yet to be even remotely equaled. It is, without a doubt, the best single volume telling of the history of code-making and code-breaking up through the first third of the 20th century. Later than that and it starts to run into the constraints of secrecy -- the Enigma decrypts of the Second World War weren't made public until several years after its first publication -- and of a slapdash effort by Kahn to update the text with such modern technologies as the DES standard. But he is out of his element here, and that's why Applied Cryptography is on the list in any case. For the eras when ciphers were produced by men laboring with pencils, paper, typewriters, and perhaps primitive collections of wheels and rods (he does a decent job with technology up to about the Hagelin machines), for the era when the field was more intuition and art than the rigorous solving of equations that XXXX turned it into, this is simply the text.

As many historians do, Kahn does sometimes write for his time, implying that the reader should have familiarity with events and people now rendered obscure by the three and a half decades since the text was produced. There is also a definite conservatism in the work, something that the eccentric nature of those drawn to cryptography inescapably draws out. But for telling the human tale of an intensely technical field, Khan's book is without equal (just ignore the moments when his reporting turns to judging). To hear how Georges Painvin broke ADGVX through a single immense act of will, loosing a dozen or more pounds in the process, The Codebreakers is the book. To hear about eccentric Victorian gentlemen-scholars inventing cipher systems between dabbling in natural philosophy and at attending hunts, it is the book.


A Distant Mirror
You're probably starting to realize how much I enjoy history. I read, at least partially, for a sense of escape. I want to get away from my corporate day job where people feel the need to invent replacements for perfectly good words (e.g. saying "we'll go ahead of the ask succeeds and we get funding" rather than the perfectly good and well seasoned word request). But I digress. No world is more bizarre and alien than the 14th century. And given that I just pushed through a few science fiction novels, that is saying something!

In all seriousness, Tuchtman writes a great history here. It is a history of a time so distant in time and values that it really does feel, at some times, alien. She brilliantly structures the work around the armature of a single man's life, using this structure to organize the background and the primary narrative. Instead of only giving us the distant, dispassionate perspective of typical histories, she illustrated the sweep of the times through what is essentially a massive and recursive work of biography, always sweeping aside to cover a tangent and then flying back to the main story, grounding the dramatic events of that age in the life of a single blading man.

And what a collection of events the 14th century provides us with. I've already talked about A Distant Mirror in regards to its totemistic value as a perspective provider ("It can't be that bad...") whenever the nightly news gets a little depressing. And it was indeed a motivation similar to this that inspired Ms. Tuchtman to write the book. But here, in one book, we have the papal schism, the black death, and the hundred years war. It is enough tumult to satisfy a millennium's worth of tragedy, all packed into a hundred years. Given the drama (and most of it bad) contained in this history, it could easily turn maudlin and depressing. But the pervasive perspective is the ability of humanity to adapt and survive. It is, as such, a profoundly motivating and reassuring book, in addition to being densely informative.


The Fabric of the Cosmos
One day, before I die, I would like to understand everything in this book. I suspect that, when that happens, I will quietly dissolve into a vaporous cloud of disassociating particles. Fortunately, it will take quite a long time for that to occur.

Brian Greene, everyone's favorite vegetarian string theorist, tackles not his particular specialty (and despite Roger Penrose's characterization of him as a hedgehog, Greene certainly knows enough of a breadth of physics to pull this off) but rather the entire scope and wonder of the leading edge of physical understanding. Several ingredients contribute to ming Fabric of the Cosmos so wonderful to read. Greene's brilliant analogies (usually involving The Simpsons) not only clarify concepts but are amusing in their own right (the whole book has a dry and subtle wit). The physics discussed is profoundly interesting, even disturbing if you don't accept the idea that our reality may well be quite a bit more subtle and bizarre than generally expected. But finally, and perhaps most significantly, is Greene's own fascination with the material he is coming. The book brims with his own energy and enthusiasm, sense of wonder and amazement. In many ways, despite the enormity of the material covered, the book is very personal, opening as it does with an anecdote from the author's childhood and moving on to discuss the very researches that fill his day job (and what a day job) at Columbia University. This comes through most clearly in the final chapters when Greene quite admittedly takes the current state of the known and speculative art and plunges headlong into the visionary realms of where this knowledge could take us.

The entire book is set as a wide-ranging tour, a grand sweep across the most fundamental infrastructure of the universe. The big bang, inflation, the kinky activities inside the Planck limit, the quantum and the Einsteinean, all get some time. Unlike The Elegant Universe, Greene's first book, this is not an evangelism of String Theory. Obviously this approach to answering the fundamental questions and contradictions that currently arise in physics figures prominently, being Greene's area of research and specialization. But the book only graces this area when appropriate and necessary. I actually wish that it spent more time here -- I truly like the ideas of String Theory (as much as it might currently be caught in a physical backlash), but can always pick up the adjacent and equally well thumbed copy of Elegant Universe when I need to.


On Food and Cooking
What could be better than a book that is simultaneously about science and cooking? Very few things, I tell you that, when the book has the lucid explanations, beautiful production, and sweeping scope of On Food and Cooking. As an aside, you many have noticed just how often the word sweeping shows up as a word of praise in this entry (at least I think it does!). I tend to like my non-fiction that way: broad, epic, profound. I'm a generalist, I suspect, and like situations that let me see as broad a scope as possible. I also relish the moment of connection when seemingly disparate threads merge into a single coherent story.

Part of the appeal of On Food and Cooking is its fearless willingness to actually tackle some organic chemistry. I've often characterized this branch of the sciences as the one that I simply don't get. And it is true. Those who understand it tell me its easy, I just need to memorize few things. I think they possess some strange gift. Organic chem (or "Orgo") isn't like, say, the way-out-there physics of The Fabric of the Cosmos. That's like reading a complicated story that is in a language you know. Organic chemistry is like reading a complicated story in a language you've never seen before. For me at least! McGee manages to tackle the fundamentals of orgo pretty clearly -- probably partially because he has a clearly defined upper bound of complexity and partially because the topic he's working with (food) is more motivating than that of most organic chemistry texts. The explanations are also lucid and engaging, trust me, so it is not entirely the appeal of the topic that is at hand.

But beyond the orgo, this is a book about food, abut how food happens, about what food does, and about why all of these things happen. The popularization of food science owes a lot to Alton Brown, The Food Network's geek-cook extraordinaire (though I will say that I've liked Alton's shows less and less -- as he seems to rebrand from a geek into more of a welding-glove-wearing-man's-man-chef character). Now it doesn't take much exploration to realize that Alton learned everything he knows about food science from periodic guest Shirley Corriher and her fantastic book CookWise. This book is, in its own turn, a more conversational and applied version of On Food and Cooking. I've obviously chosen to go straight to the most pure source I know, skipping the intermediates.

On Food and Cooking is as endlessly interesting (and entertaining) as is the world's unending variety of food.


Applied Cryptography

I keep trying to replace Applied Cryptography in my collection. It is, after all, more than a decade old in a field that has seen shockingly rapid advancement in that time. Most of the algorithms discussed in the book are obsolescent in today's security world. Perhaps even more critically, an awareness of system design now permeates security thinking, and not just a building-block approach. But nothing, and I mean nothing that has come out since 2001 has offered more than the slimmest threat to Schnier's classic. Practical Cryptography comes close, really close. And, if a second edition were to come out that updated it to include the latest and greatest, it would stand a real shot at taking the crown of Modern Cryptography Book On Nick's Island.

But enough about its superficial obsolescence, what has Applied Cryptography done so well that it still shows up on the list? The answer is that, like no other book on the topic, it builds an actual understanding of how the processes of security work. It contains both the mathematical rigor required to construct (or deconstruct) a security system and even more profoundly an ability to explain...to clarify...how these mathematical components operate. It takes the time to step, conceptually, through the now iconic cases of Alice, Bob, Mallory, and the various other characters of Schnier's explanations. It backs these cases up with some of the underlying constructs and mathematics. The recently maligned weak point is that the focus is on explaining individual systems and not on overall processes -- but as someone who does not intend to actually design a cryotpsystem, the clarity of these explanations makes their omissions entirely forgivable.

Much of the content, then, is timeless. Most of the great message passing schemes remain unchanged, or at least still valid. The ciphers discussed may not be fighting in the front lines anymore, but that does not make them unworthy of study. The knowledge in this book has not been replaced, merely supplemented. Now if I were heading off to a desert island, I'd like to take my copy with me just as it is -- broken spine and all -- for the sake of the half dozen printouts I've stuck in between various pages, updating the content with some current state-of-the-art examples of cipher algorithm design. Let me stick in a few sheets of paper and, no reservations at all, Applied Cryptography will beat all comers, hands down and no reservations: Rijndael/AES, of course, the flawed but endemic mobile communications ciphers of A5/1, E0, and KASUMI, the fascinating but flawed Roo/Py and Phelix, the phenomenal elegance of Trivium and Grain, and the enigmatic Don Coppersmith's suspiciously rotor-like Scream. That's nine ciphers...might as well make it ten and throw in Camellia for a look at Japan's stylings in the area.

But this is the sort of book that should have a busted spine, dog-eared pages, notes and highlights, and random pieces of paper sticking out of it. In the way that comic book readers show their love in a carefully bagged-and-boarded book, readers of Applied Cryptography should show their love love in a manner more akin to that scene in the sauce stained, water wrinkled, footnoted pages of cook books.

The Reunion Book

So something interesting arrived in today's mail. It was sitting at the door (so it may actually have arrived by UPS, I don't know, I didn't pay attention) in a big fat fluffy envelope. The kind with the irritating tendency to emit small clouds of a substance that appears visually and texturally similar to blow-in insulation. As, in fact, this one did.

It was stickered as coming from the Stanford Alumni association and turned out to contain an interesting object called a "Reunion Book." I'd never heard of one of these before, so I assume that some of you are as ignorant as I was. It is a sort of reverse-yearbook, a "where are we now" of all the people you entered college with. Or graduated with. Or should have graduated with. I haven't really explored the details.

Everyone got a little one page spread of a then-and-now photo pair, a brief bio, a personal timeline, and a photo of their choosing. It turns out that if I'd done the conventional thing I would have graduated from college fifteen years ago. Wowsers. So I couple of interesting things: I'm not in it. I feel vaguely resentful that the alumni association apparently was able to track me down to get me a copy of the book but didn't get in touch with me in time to fill out my form or whatever was required to get my own page. Now, in all honesty, this omission was probably my fault. I tend to regard mail from the alumni association with a sort of irritated inevitability. I tend not to open it. I assume, based on my sample of the times I actually do open and read mail from them, that they want me to subscribe to something or donate something or attend an event.

It may shock those of you with a great deal of college pride that could do something so profoundly heretical. But the reality is that I regard college as sort of "a place I was for a while." This wasn't some sort of chemically induced stupor at work. I didn't discover alcohol until a few years into my education and even then played fairly lightly. And I never decided to pursue studies in Advanced Controlled Substances or anything.

College just wasn't the earthshaking, life changing event, for me, that it was for some others. No comment or criticism on either perspective, by the way. I actually wish I'd gotten a little more out of Stanford academically than I did. I pretty much treated the place as a big, hard high-school. I took my classes, did my work, and called it at that. By contrast, it amazes me how much Erica got out of her studies, capturing absolutely everything that school could provide. And sometimes I wonder what I could have gotten out of the Stanford experience if I'd had the realization (a) what an amazing place it was and (b) college isn't just a big, hard high school.

I also didn't graduate on time, but took a winding and indecisively exploratory path from start to finish. So I ended up loosing track with a lot of those freshman year friends that everyone tells you you'll never forget. I made new friends on the way, but by that time was living off campus and separated by a few crucial years (at that age) from most of those I was in classes with. Then, after spending too long there, I bolted for the Pacific Northwest and an all consuming few years at Amazon. I really only took two good friends from those days with me -- and neither of them from the freshman gaggle. It occurs to me, now that I think about it, that I might have dropped off the radar. And I suppose that'd be a fair thing to say.

I've tracked a few folks down from high school and Amazon via my Facebook presence, but had little luck with people from the college years. To at least some extent it was too large of a pool, and too long ago, to bring up any names. I knew I was missing something of this opportunity to reconnect, but could think of no way to drag all those names back from the dust laden vaults.

And then this giant book arrives, full of (almost) everyone from my freshman year. Now granted, all of those transitory friends from later aren't covered -- but this is at least a break in the case! I've just flipped through it a little and have yet to embark on some great quest, going page-by-page and launching Facebook/Internet searches for everyone who looks or sounds familiar. But here are a few interesting observations.

None of the people I looked at have gotten divorced -- in many cases they are still married to people they were dating when I knew them.

At least one person from my freshman class included a photo posing between Barack Obama and Oprah. I do not, however, think she was someone I knew.

Most of the people I looked at have families (kids) now. The rest have pets.

Almost everyone I looked at listed "hiking" or something similar as an interest.

Based on the photos, if I met most of them, now, I'd probably do a better job recognizing them that I would have expected.

How did we ever think the hair styles of that era looked good? Particularly the women's hair...

I really want to track some folks down and say hi...

Memories can come back when given a proper trigger.

Everyone seems to be doing well -- practicing in whatever profession or field I recall them as interested in when the left, and practicing successfully and at a fairly (or very) high level.

By and large, I found the lives to be pleasantly (and to some extent surprisingly) similar to my own. I'm not quite sure what I expected, but I think I harbored this belief that everyone I'd gone to school with had gone on to found startups, cure diseases, found countries, or win Nobel Prizes or Oscars or Olympic medals or Booker Book prizes. I think it is a continuing thread of insecurity I suffer whenever I look at some of the people I worked with at Amazon -- the ones who really got the bug and leveraged that experience and those contacts to remain (and climb) in the aggressive startup-founding-mandhouse of entrepreneurship. Whenever that hits me I have to remind myself that's not me. I'm a guy who works because he has to -- to provide for himself and his family and to enable the things that we really want to do. I don't fight the fight because I love the fight. I do what I have to -- and I'm fortunate enough to enjoy what I do and be good at it and to have the opportunity to work very hard and be well rewarded. And then I look at (and think of) those one-time co-workers of mine who went down the other path, my path, and raised families, went to school, traveled, and worked when they had to. Again, no judgement. Thank god for the compulsive entrepreneur. They are there to build companies, take risks, hang it on the line day after day. The world would be a very dull place without them.

But yet again, dear Reunion Book, I am pleased to see the world populated with (extremely) intelligent, hard working people who are out there doing what they do. And, I hope, loving what they do and finding themselves well rewarded for it. And, I hope, finding the time to go hiking or traveling or back to school or to write books or to make par at Pebble Beach or to chase down all of the extraordinary and wonderful dreams and goals that people should have. If you found a few companies, cure a disease, or win a couple of prizes on the way, then more power to you! But if you're working the day job, doing something fun on the side, and coming home to share nap time with your kids, congratulations just the same.

I'm a guy who loves nothing more than to come home and sit on the back patio with a glass of whisky, a laptop computer, and a cool breeze blowing by. And that's just exactly what I'm doing. Now I just need to start going page by page and searching Google and Facebook for everyone who looks or sounds familiar... See you soon, I've missed you more than I realized.

If you got here first (I can't be the only person with the "I'll Google people!" brainstorm), then leave a comment or drop me a line (strauss.nick@gmail.com).

The Little Man

So I've been reading, finally, about something called Direct 2.0.

It is not a piece of software. Rather, it is an attempt to re-architect (yes, that is a valid use of the word "architect." I know, even a linguistic curmudgeon like me will accept the verbing of nouns in an appropriately aerospace context) the deeply flawed plan to return people to the moon that NASA has drawn up in the past few years. It was begat by some guys I hang out in newsgroups with. Newsgroups, you know, those internet communities that I usually rail against ("Its all been downhill since AOL gave the hoi polloi access..."). But this one is something special -- nasaspaceflight.com. Together with virtual sister site unmannedspaceflight.com these two are the places I hang out when I want to hear real spaceflight professionals argue and/or get the inside scoop/speculation on what is going on Out There...

Direct 2.0 is an interesting plan to take the same basic ground rules that the Constellation office bungled into the Orion capsule and the Aries booster family: re-use hardware, be fast, be cheap, be safe, be political. For some reason, they appear to make work what ATK and the guys at JSC have turned into one of the most profound cases of "throwing good money after bad" that I've seen since Pets.com collapsed. Now granted, when it first showed up on ATK's website, the Aries idea, the stick and the...well...whatever the other thing is called...seemed like potentially elegant approaches to getting people into space. And since the my, oh my, what a pattern of unrelenting growth and going-to-hell-ness. For the big boy, four engines...then five...now six...and ever more segments into the solid rocket motors. For the stick first rampant weight growth, then the oddly Mercury/Redstone like non-sustainable orbit that requires a service module boost almost immediately after separation, and now the crisis of ensuring that the astronauts are not jiggled into jelly by some sort of multi-million dollar paintshaker. Solve by...what...putting the parachutes on springs so they damp out the oscillations? OK, I'm perfectly comfortable with the theory and accept that the paradamper is a better idea that the absurd notion of the highly scarfed OMS engines firing in time to damp the oscillations, but this sort of solution is what I'm using to prevent my washing machine from shaking the house when it hits a spin cycle.

I'd like a little more robust planning going into my rockets, thank you very much!

And all of this -- weight growth. And no margins to begin with, so the moment Orion swelled at all...well...the rest is well documented in the PowerPoints you can download from nasaspaceflight.com. I'll leave it at that.

So some guys on the board got together and tossed out some ideas and did two things: they re-architected the overall plan and then they developed a new vehicle (singular) to support it. The result is, generally, a whole lot more elegant and efficient and cost effective. I'll be cynical enough to say "it'll suffer the same growth and problems as Aries did as it transitioned from ATK paper study to possible flight hardware." And I believe it will -- but the crucial difference is that the guys behind Direct 2.0 actually have enough margin to accommodate the unexpected without the whole thing turning brittle and shattering into a million thrust-oscination-induced pieces.

Direct 2.0 (and I'm intentionally avoiding a long, technical discussion of the designs and their merits) also has the look-and-feel of something well conceived and well planned. It does not have the square-peg-round-hole feel that the Aries rockets do. It smacks of actual synergy in the design.

Now here's the crux of the thing: it doesn't take a genius to see that there are some deep flaws in NASA's current plans. But government agencies are notorious for not wanting to admit that they Had A Bad Idea and then needing to go back and rework things. But we are about to have a presidential election. And those inflection points can be useful. Either of the two incoming presidents has the positioning that they could mandate a re-examination (and in the background mandate the change) of NASA's space exploration architecture. McCain's the rebel (after a career in the Navy?), Obama's the change guy. Either one can pull off a dramatic shift in space strategy (either one is likely to do so, actually, though not necessarily at the level I am advocating) while staying true to image and policy statements. In reality, Direct 2.0 wouldn't really change the suppliers at all, its just a loss of face at NASA.

So whomever you end up being, Mr. President, take advantage of the demise of the Bush regime and among the changes you make in the direction of American space exploration (many of which, whomever you end up being, I fear I will not like). Pick a decent, robust, well planned approach to getting people into space. Even if the whole Moon thing falls apart (as it probably will) or the Mars thing falls apart (as it almost assuredly will), we'll end up with a decent, supportable way to put Things And People Into Space. And I wouldn't like to lose that capability, subcontracting it to other nations and entirely sacrificing an enormous (and hard to recover) body of institutional knowledge.

Regarding institutionalized knowledge -- just look at SpaceX. They can read the same textbooks and technical papers as the guys at Lockheed Martin and end up 0-for-3. That's experience, judgement, and culture talking. That's what you loose when you stop building something for too long.

But above the practical NASA-like issues here, there is a phenomenal message that an official endorsement of Direct 2.0 would send. It would signify, perhaps more than anything, the Coming Of The Internet. The flattening of the world that has been written about so often would splash down in the waters of the American space program. Already us out there on the Internet have helped out those who will listen, starting with the incomparable Alan Stern and his New Horizons team who gratefully accepted the suggestions of several fans as to how to construct the Kodak Moment shots as their little probe sped through the Jovian system.

The science team was understandable busy focusing on the real scientific observations. Knowing this, they listened when folks at home punched the probe's trajectory data into computer simulators and came up with the times and pointing angles necessary to get the spectacular shots of Jupiter and its moons that made the front pages. The tools are no longer beyond the reach of the ordinary, interested, outsider. The interest has always been there. If you will let us in, you'll find that we are not just a nuisance but a powerful, useful force. Welcome us.

New Horizons gave us the tools we needed, we offered suggestions, they listened. The result was synergy -- very happy amateurs (all any of us on that board want to do is to get to do what Alan and his team do!). Great PR photos -- and great PR about the outreach and inclusion.

What kind of an upset would it make, what kind of an "Only In America" free-enterprise message would it send if a few folks using freely available data and commercially available software designed the method that this nation uses to get into space?

The fading of the blogasm

I have to apologize to my erstwhile readers who, numbering about six I think, I greatly thank for their attention. What forces this apology is the comparative quiescence of The Noodlebook over the past couple of weeks. When I started writing this blog, I was going like crazy -- often putting up two posts per day, back-dating one of them, and trying to make it look like I did this regularly and reliably. It seemed obvious that this phase, the blogasm as I called it in my usual way of creating portmanteau words, would fade.

In fact it held on a lot longer than I expected. I kept encountering things in my life that inspired entries. I kept thinking of interesting things that I wanted to explain. I wanted to write and write and write. So why the drop-off in postings, then? Time, frankly. The exegesis of my job have kept me away from the train, my usual blogging spot, for most days on the past three weeks. The train/bus combo from Edmonds to Bellevue is a rather tightly planned commute -- and it imposes some constraints on my timing. So when things get really busy or I know I will have to start early or work late (such as for a scheduled training class I'm teaching or taking) I am forced to drive.

But, readers, I think that things will be lightening up a little bit. Oh, I'm still busy, but for a few weeks I'll have some flexibility back and the ability to work on this little outlet of my energies. So here is a look at some of what I have planned:

A follow up to my why-I-like-Obama blog

The promised second part of my cryptographic advice for schoolchildren

An explanatory bit on hull length and some musings on how it might impact Olympic swimming

A thought piece on the design of rotor-based cipher machines and their sources of security as compared to modern ciphers

A tribute to the H-34 Choctaw and forgotten but historic aircraft in general

An explanation of my "I'd give a nut for an HP-65" statement (something that for possibly obvious reasons brings Erica endless amusement) and a brief history of HP calculators

Some sketches (tongue in cheek, of course) of some corporate personality types that I've been meeting

Some thoughts on the exploration of space and an outline of my (current) "If I ran my own space program" plan

So have faith and keep checking. I'll be back -- and in fact I guess that by putting up this post, I am back... The blogasm hasn't faded -- it has just been on pause for a while, gathering strength...

A SpaceX debrief (or, Hubris vs. Conviction)

Leadership is a good thing. And good leadership requires conviction. But conviction must be moderated by humility and thought.

This is all about rockets. Exploding rockets, to be precise. Rockets that collide with themselves and then proceed to fall apart, to be progressively more precise. Rockets that do so because of design errors that people on Internet chat sites are able to spot before the engineers who designed the rocket are. Granted, these are chat sites populated by rocket engineering professionals, but still!

The reactions form SpaceX and charismatic founder Elon Munsk were predictably glib. The problem was identified, verified, and easily corrected. If they had a rocket ready to go, they'd shoot it after tweaking a bit of software. Reliability has always been priority one, they have a better way of doing things, and everything will work out just fine. I like the idea of SpaceX. I like the idea of a dot-com punk showing up the established players. I like the idea of cheap, reliable access to space. I like that there have been a few glimmers of admission that this whole rockets-into-space business is harder than they expected.

But I don't like that every time we hear a new release, it is a reset back to the same old eager confidence, the Russel Crowe dialog (apparently South Africans and Australians swear with the same alacrity), the cheerful admission that wow we learned some lessons but now it is just an easy fix and everything will go great. It is always an easy fix -- it has been an easy fix for three unsuccessful launches and a host of less dramatic problems and failures.

To assert that a series of avoidable design errors is nothing more than a series of design errors -- bad luck or inexperience in effect -- is to ignore the fact that these errors could (and many would say should) have been caught at the outset. SpaceX is reinventing the wheel. Which means that there are a large number of photographs and public domain documents about wheel invention and construction out there. There are wheel engineers that you can hire away from folks who have been building wheels "the old way" for years.

But Elon chose to go it his own way, convinced that he had a better approach and that the paradigm could be changed. PayPal had, after all, been part of that great paradigm changing revolution: Ebay, Amazon, latecomers like iTunes and Wikipedia. I was there too, and I remember the culture (I'm banking that PayPal wasn't too divergent from Amazon). It took a certain degree of brass-balled self confidence to do what (1) no-one had ever done before (2) many were telling you couldn't be done (3) everyone else was trying to do before you could (4) was going to cost more money than you had (5) had the potential to be second-guessed by everyone. Bezos had the balls and the business plan (and, I might add, the personality to serve as our Charismatic Leader through a lot of tough and doubtful times -- an experience that played into more than a little of my president-as-personality theory as talked about in The Obama Post). Elon did for two successful business.

But physics is a harsh mistress. It won't reload a buggy web page, it can't be bought off with a refund and gift certificate, it doesn't stick with you just because you are better than the alternatives. If physics says you are wrong, your couplings corrode, your tanks buckle, your motors burn under thrust, your helium tanks underfill (more about that later), your GN&C algorithms don't converge, your stages collide, and your rockets fail.

Back in the day, when we launched, we pushed a key on a keyboard (footnote and company history moment: often this was actually done by the paw of an adorable pet Corgi) that flipped some symlinks and pow, the new feature/product/store was launched. Later, when it turned out that every single customer was told that John Grisham's The Street Lawyer was the absolutely perfect match for their buying habits, we realized what the testing flaw was, tweaked a few constants, and rolled out an update.

It was a software problem and we fixed it in software. We thought, almost every time, that the software was as perfect as we could make it. Whether we admitted it or not, there were going to be bugs when the launch occurred. There always were. But we knew, at a visceral level, that we could fix them through a quick roll back (more than once), raw human effort (most of the time), or a quick fix (pretty damn often). We always thought that we'd done enough testing. But knew that it wouldn't be enough.

You can't upload software to a rocket in flight and correct the mixture ratio of your main engine. Not in the 2:55 long first stage burn. You have to get it right, straight away. But the software mindset knows that you can debug. You have to debug. You code and test and code and test and launch and code and test and code and relaunch. The rocket mindset codes and tests and codes and tests and codes and tests...again and again and again and again. True mission critical software design involves parallel development teams (working in isolation to prevent communication and the formation of similar assumptions). True mission critical design involves multiple layers of check and recheck. Recheck checkers check the recheckers.

It is against the whole concept of a lot of "new business" models. It smacks far too much of the old Detroit assembly line where mechanic one didn't bother doing his job well because he knew that mechanic two, three, and four would catch and fix his laziness and that if they didn't checker one, two, or three would. And I do have complete contempt for this process -- when it has led to that kind of institutional diffusion of responsibility that means that neither mechanic 1, 2, 3, or 4 or checker 1, 2, or 3 are doing their job.

But when mechanics 1 and 2 cross check each other, shoot a digital snap of their work, and then submit it to checker 1 for sign off, that can be a healthy process. The mere presence of process does not mean unhealthy (overly rigorous, tedious, and stifling) process.

SpaceX is stuck with this "software mindset" of both assuming easy fixability and relying on sloppy planning and rushed decision making. Now all you coders out there, don't go thinking that I believe all software is tossed together willy-nilly with poor planning and launched with an expectation of fixing it in a service pack. No, only Microsoft software is. ;)

In reality, software projects can be well planned, well run, and produce excellent results with little trial-and-error debugging and tight schedules. It takes, however, very well thought out and carefully followed methodologies to ensure this. And it takes a team, from the top down, that buys in to the methodology in use.

Most of the aggressive software design methedologies (or system design, if you care to generalize) are designed to actually restrain the pace of development. Take your pick: scrum (my favorite), agile, RAD, TDD. All are essentially about providing a methodology that ensures or promotes a controlled, managed, organized cycle of communication, test, and development. The very idea is to prevent cowboy coding, to ensure that specifications are rigerously followed, communication channels are clear, and checkpoints observed.

I fear that enthusiasm, "there is a better way" self-conviction, and frankly arrogance (at least on Elon's part) got in the way of this process. Elon enjoys insisting that problems have been design problems and not cultural (and therefore systemic) problems. But he forgets (or hopes we won't realize) that designs are not born in isolation. The are born of a collection of people operating within a given culture. Now I don't want to sound all postmodernist here, but it is possible to examine the product of a design effort and gain an understanding of the culture that produced it.

Now I don't want to say that aggressive and independantly minded design schools are, by nature, out of question in the aerospace arena. By contrast, quite the opposite. Just look at Lockheed's Skunk Works, easily the most storied aeronautical design organization of all time. They were a small group, working on in many cases cutting edge processes, utilizing streamlined design, management, and accounting protocols. This does not mean they were sloppy. This does not mean they were careless. This does not mean they did not verify their work. On the contrary, the awarness of their responsibility (and knowledge that a company test pilot would be flying the thing) permeated the mind of every engineer. Speed, security, and economy are not at odds with rigerous procedure and quality design.

Today this attitude seems to be harder to locate. Some work in the happy playpen of a Google environment, toiling at aggressive projects for impossible hours but rewarded with perposterous perks including absurd amounts of personal and professional flexibility and freedom. Others toil in the rigor of Traditional Business, at a Boeing, reporting as scheduled, performing their duties as ordered, creating when called upon, and then freed to commute home with everyone else slagged in at the Boeing Access Road. But the two are entirely compatible. An elite group (like Elon thinks he has) working in isolation could do it but must be willing to:

(1) Embrace total, personal responsibility for individual and group actions
(2) Communicate and document regularly and clearly
(3) Establish minimum standards for documentation and then follow them rigorously
(4) Establish minimum standards for quality assurance and then follow them rigerously
(5) Admit areas of ignorance and weakness, calling for and accepting support when necessary
(6) Develop and adhere to procedures that ensure quality and safety of all mission critical steps of conceptualization, planning, design, test, and implementation
(6) Adopt in both hearts and minds philosophies and procedures that will ensure all of the above

A very telling moment that I know well is the pre-launch instructions that show up just before the release from final hold at, I believe, T-6:00 during an Atlas V countdown. The Atlas V is one of the most well engineered and well processed of "old school" boosters. Their countdowns are always flawless and their nearly always so (they had a one-time hiccup with a bad valve in an engine that resulted in off-nominal orbit injection). Even though everyone has done it probably a hundred times in rehearsal, the launch director runs through a litany of instructions, drills to cover launch, abort, recycle, and communications during the final seconds. They know it but it is repeated to remind and to ritualize.

I believe that Elon has created a company that fosters communication and innovation. But I believe that communication is likely too informal and the innovation too total. Unwilling to learn from the errors of others, possessed with a "software mindset" that accepts risks and tolerates sloppiness, and altogether too confident of their status as revolutionaries, I fear they will keep making avoidable errors, responding with glib solutions, and charging ahead with shotgun improvements.

This is somewhat tangential, but it is a little story that shows how subtle things can really effect the thinking within an organization. I currently work at a location that my employer dubs the "Field Service Center." Now when I started, I had a hard time understanding this name. "Field Service Center" (or FSC as we always calls it) sounds like the sort of place damaged products should be returned for repair, not a corporate headquarters. But this is a five building office campus. It is the corporate headquarters. The CEO works here -- four floors above me, in fact.

At first I wondered if this was some sort of legacy name. Perhaps these buildings once belonged to a repair station, exactly as the name had originally implied to me. But then I heard the official story. We call ourselves the FSC because it is our job to service (i.e. support) all of the company's field staff: sales, customer service, engineering, etc. It is a small but important issue of attitude. The "front lines" are the folks directly in contact with the customer and are, therefore, the ones directly and immediately effecting the customer experience (and therefore oh-so many of the all important financials). And so all of us at the FSC (from Mr. 9th Floor CEO down to a humble Analyst Three like myself) are there to back these people up. To supply them with information, policies, products, tools, and services that enable them to create the best possible experience for our customers. We are not, in other words, REMF's (or Fobbits, to use the epithet born of a more current war).

This is the kind of subtle mindset change that could help SpaceX, if Elon were willing to accept the situation and to start to make some changes. I'd love to be a fly on the wall for some of their internal meetings, to listen to the gestalt, the debate, and the planning. But since they are run by a secretive, arrogant, self-aggrandizing CEO, that is unlikely to ever happen. I will say this -- he's building and flying rockets. I wish I was building and flying rockets -- and so do a lot of other people who have never made it a fraction of the way there that Elon has. I'll also say that he's the general -- and some of that brash personality may be a construct, a Patton Speech to the troops to keep them going in the face of a third-strike-we're-out moment. But from what I see (and what I've heard) it is not just a show for the troops. Elon is that kind of personality that truly believes in the rightness of his or her actions. When that kind of personality gets it right, they are a rogue, a maverick, and a genius. But when they get it wrong, as SpaceX appears to have done so far, they look like a fool -- or worse.

In the meantime, despite my criticism, I wish them the best. I wish them the time to grow up and the success to keep flying. I wish them the maturity to admit their failures and the strength to make the necessary changes. I'd like nothing more than for Elon to take the punches, learn the lessons, make the changes, and emerge as rogue, a maverick, and a genius.

Reload the war!

So today I spent a non-trivial part of my morning monitoring the repair of a majorly blowed up database. I was the guy who found the problem, was the ticket owner for the fix, and was was front-ending all the user notifications and updates. So there was a good "business reason" as we like to say around here for why I was paying so much attention.

Plus, with the thing hosed, I couldn't do the work that I was actually trying to do.

Interestingly, there was a press conference going on at roughly the same time for Mars Phoenix which, despite having apparently discovered rocket fuel instead of life, was still worth paying attention to.

But what this meant was that I was fervently clicking "reload" (or refresh or whatever you prefer to call it) in at least four browser tabs: Unmannedspaceflight.com for Phoenix updates, the Remedy trouble ticket for updates from the DBA's, my email to try to get updates for various personal life threads, and the actual tool that I was trying to use to see if it could hit the databases OK.

Of course, anytime I hit "reload" and nothing had been changed I was quietly furious. Disappointed. Hurt. Resentful of the extreme negligence of the DBA's to not troubleshoot faster, of the people at NASA to not speak faster, of my friends to not write back immediately. Its an artifact of the modern world -- life at the speed of "reload."

People complain that we like our news in soundbite sized segments well suited to the 5:00 news. But I think that it is changing (or has changed) from that. We now expect our news to occur on demand. I get irritated when something happens at 2am -- so I can't watch it live. I get irritated when I wake up and find out that things happened several hours ago and there was all this time that I could have been posessing that knowledge, doing something interesting with it or just plain knowing it, but because those pesky Europeans live back there in Europe I missed the (pick one) Tour de France/Formula One race/ESA press conference/airshow.

But I'm not just craving immediate access to the latest information. I want that information to happen when, well, I'm in the mood for it. Hm, I could use a bit of juicy celebrity gossip...but wait, inconceivable, there's nothing! Hm, I wonder if John McCain has referred to The Ottoman Empire or Austria-Hungary or perhaps chosen to discuss Premier Bush's trip to The Orient...nope, no political gaffes! Things MUST happen! The MUST happen NOW!

And we don't just expect things to happen quickly or to have instant access to them ourselves. We seem to actually expect them to happen when we click on "reload."

I remember watching the invasion of Iraq (the first, fast moving, exciting part) as sort of an exercise in the rate at which CNN.com could update itself. Oh, the Marines are at such-and-such location trying to bridge a river...Reload...why haven't they crossed it yet? I KNOW better. I UNDERSTAND that the world is not actually a giant DVD recorded for my pleasure. I am not Adam Sandler in Click with my own magic web browser able to tell one group of people to stop producing news, just hold on guys, Mars is interesting right now. And then to tell another website to get moving, you've got audiences that demand satisfaction!

The reason I'm so convinced of this systemic change in our culture is that I believe it extends well beyond just news websites. In general, we have an expectation that everyone should be on call all the time -- and that we ourselves must be on call. When the phone rings, we answer it. When the text message arrives, we read it.

I'm not just talking about hipster kids or techno-tools who for social or professional reasons feel that they do have a need to be in touch 24x7. It is a pervasive situation (note that I do not say "problem" -- I'm not trying to pass judgement, just to comment) now. I see it in my friends, my family, and myself. We multitask at work and in our private time, and I often wonder (and here is where I stop saying situation and start saying problem) if this spreads our awareness too thin.

How hard is it, now-a-days, to get true quality time?

Getting up to watch the rocket

So Erica and I had C & J over for dinner tonight. The time was wonderful, we really haven't had the chance to just hang out with them without a care or a deadline (and with everyone relatively well rested and healthy) in a very, very long time.

Tonight was also the night of Elon Munsk's third attempt to get one of his potentially revolutionary Falcon 1 rockets into space. Unfortunately, it did not go as planned. But this is not (yet) to be a speculation into the causes for the failure of the Falcon launch (though, and this won't surprise you, I've got theories). It is about hanging out with people that let you feel totally comfortable just being yourself.

Within fifteen minutes of arriving, with two bottles of liquor, a dozen lemons and limes, and a few crucial culinary ingredients with them, they knew that for at least the first part of the party I was going to Be Distracted. Which is code for pinging my various space chat pages and probably watching the SpaceX webcast when things actually looked ready to go.

And, right as you'd expect, just as dinner was served, they hit the classic T-minus-ten point over in Kwajelan. So I wandered outside with the MacBook and reported on the update -- that the thing had shut itself down on the pad. C & J were happy to let me fill them in on they brief history of SpaceX and why this was sort of a big deal -- why I felt that if any of the alt.space crew was going to do it, it was Elon. A little blend of damn-the-torpedos, a little bit of willingness to take it on the chin and admit the hubris of their first vision.

By the time we were done eating and clearing the dishes in from outside (a nice day -- we thought we'd capitalize on it and dine al-fresco) they were ready to go again. We all gathered and watched the liftoff on my laptop. Things looked good. We remarked on the view. I remarked on the little bump in the steering as they passed through Mach 1. J. asked what that meant, I explained briefly. Someone commented on the now-much-discussed-roll oscillations. I said that it was moving about a bit, not like an Atlas or Delta that is as stable as a brick. But it seemed constant.

Then when the feed went dead and the very startled commentators came back to announce the dreaded words of "an anomaly" and the credits rolled. We all figured out what must have happened. Erica very graciously agreed to put Bella to bed and we finished clearing the dishes, I made another round of (very strong and very good) Margaritas.

Juice from one freshly squeezed lime
1 ounce orange liquor
2 ounces good tequila

Place in a glass with ice and stir. Salt rim (or sugar rim) is optional.

We settled in to play the very fun German style game "Settlers of Catan" that we had recently purchased. Erica went on to win both rounds -- though Colin gave her a good run for her money on the first one and I did a passable job of chasing on the second and might have come closer if Colin hadn't made a trade with Erica that basically gave her the game. But it was 1:20 and we were all tired. What was great was hanging out until that late with my favorite people playing a great game and having a lot of really good laughs.

But what this post really is about is about choosing the people that you tend to spend these times with. I don't have a lot of friends. Despite my gregarious teacher personality I keep a small circle of people around that I actually enjoy spending my precious off time with. And last night I realized a characteristic of these people that, when I am around them, I feel completely comfortable just being myself. Which often means being eccentric and obsessed with slightly odd things. They even join you, sometimes, and share in the emotion of events outside their personal scopes of interest. They listen and they understand.

Years ago we were out for a walk around Edmonds with these same friends. We'd stopped for coffee (and snacks) at a little independent coffee house not too far from the train tracks. We heard the whistle of an approaching train and I said, sort of without thinking about it "the train!"

J. looked at me and said, very seriously, "Nick, would you like to go outside and watch the train?"

That was a defining moment in our friendship. It was OK for me to enjoy watching trains go by. It was OK for me to care about things that might seem slightly odd.

I don't have a lot of friends that I put in this category -- but then again I don't have a lot of friends. And it isn't like I suddenly meet someone new and suddenly am pulling out my laptop at inappropriate times to surf the web. There is a boundary between politeness and geekiness, after all. But once I get to know someone, comfort being myself is what I look for -- and that's what I'm glad I've found!

Not with a bang, but with a whimper

Or, what Nick does on his day off...

So I often suspect that my tangential blog titling tends to screw up the searchability of my writings. Given my odd range of interests, this entry is as likely to be about an obscure German cryptosystem as it is to be about Aerojet's AMBR high-performance 890N deep space bipropellant engine, something which I have recently decided is an Important Part of my personal space program.

In this case, however, it is actually about something I did physically. Shocking, I know. There will be thoughtful musings on everything from gloves to the design of bike trails, but for the most part it will be a story of physical effort and, above all, physical woe. It will also, briefly, mention my groin, though I will give everyone fair warning if they want to avoid that part. It is a style of recounting-an-adventure that is familiar to readers of Erica's fitness blog.

Having realized that my "family vacation" centered month of August was upon us and that, between Erica's triathlon addiction and, even more dramatically, my increasingly complex work schedule, the "family vacation" value had been effectively reduced to three days, I took today off from work. I approached my boss and, very nicely, asked her for time off. She very nicely granted it. I love my job.

We decided to go for a bike ride, to try the Interurban trail from Edmonds (actually from our front door) all the way up to Everett. A distance of something like twenty miles each way. The motivation was that this was (1) very different from what I usually do on a weekday and (2) the Interurban was a place that would be hard to ride with Bella in tow and (3) that going on an adventure is a long standing tradition in our relationship and something we hadn't done in a while.

So off we set. I had three eggs (fried) and two cups of coffee. The scanty breakfast was motivated by my vision for the ride: a European cyclo-perambulation. The sort of thing I picture people in the Netherlands or other bits of that lovely collection of small countries in the Northwest corner of Europe doing all the time. Riding along in nice travelin' bikes, stopping periodically in cafés to enjoy coffees, sandwiches, beers, and moules frites.

The first part of the ride was the hardest. Something like 250 feet of elevation gain in what feels like 250 feet. So I admitted that I wasn't up to it and just walked it. Then things got easier -- a little in the gentle undulation department and then we hit the entrance to the Interurban.

Now for those of you unfamiliar with the Interurban, it is a little like the Balkans. As in "Balkanized." The idea is of a trail that runs from Seattle to Everett, along the old Interurban trolly line. This would work great if all of the little communities on the way had gotten with the program and started building an actual trail before land development came along and swallowed up some stretches of the old line. Edmonds, I am sad to say, has an Interurban stretch on its N-year plan, but it always appears to be N years out.

So we hit the trail, right by a discarded shopping cart from the Ranch Market nearby. The trail was fine and fun, gently rolling and pretty well paved. It was punctuated by an irritating number of stops for crossing streets that involved varying degrees of slowing, stopping, and chicaning around bollards and horse gates of various descriptions. "Whee, my speed is getting up, I'm feeling good...and I'm slowing down..."

This was great for Erica who wanted to work on her shifting/starting/stopping/clipping drills, but was a little irritating for me who was trying to deal with my more-out-of-shape-than-I-thought-I-was issues. Momentum is the cyclists friend...

Then, with an almost cinematic lack of warning, we were at the Alderwood mall, or very near to it. Here, things got ugly. Someone thinks that the stretch of 200th Street SW that runs right by Buca di Beppo just before it turns into the Alderwood Mall Parkway is a bike trail. Presumably, this person has never ridden a bicycle outside of a spin class, if that much. The sidewalk is about three feet wide and punctuated by huge chunks of disturbed concrete where tree roots have pushed it up, entrances to parking lots, and various kinds of cryptic electrical boxes. Don't go calling me a wimp and saying I should have ridden on the street. Two fast turning lanes with no shoulder, lots of patches, and angry youths driving pickup trucks (I'd be angry if I was a youth driving a pickup truck and had to pay for my own gas, what with the salary of the average Red Robin busser...).

So we walked. Which was fine, but I'd actually been feeling pretty good. Bikeridus interruptus continues. Then there was an overpass -- nice gentle up, nice gentle down. And by that I mean ridable up and 28.5 mph down while pausing to drink some H20. And I'm riding a flat bar hybrid, mind you, so aero forces were definitely in play.

Whee fun and then that tossed us out right by Greg's Cycle where Erica picked up some new fingerless gloves (and gave me her old fingerless gloves which had stretched and become too bit) and some of some miraculous substance called Shot Blocks which have nothing to do with basketball but are instead not only the best tasting thing I've ever had (we got the black cherry) but are full of lovely electrolytes and the glorious giving power of caffeine.

You may notice at this point that my Eurocycling dream is fading in preference to scientifically designed energy foods. Well, Shot-Blocked and with new gloves we got back on the trail which suddenly got lovely. Yes, it was alongside a freeway but it was on nice pavement and was, for the most part, screened by some nice trees that kept the freeway noise down. A little.

First there was an awkward struggle up a Long Hill that took a lot out of me. In fact, at one point, I decided to pause and walk for a bit to catch my breath and get my rebelliously angry muscles back under control. Unfortunately something comically awkward happened. I couldn't get my left shoe out of my bike. It was stuck. I twisted and twisted and it turned out that the show twisted but refused to release from the cleat. Velcro is wonderful. I just got out of the shoe.

So we poked and prodded at the bike for a while and eventually determined that one of the Allen screws that holds the cleat fitting to the shoe had come off and the result was that the thing was just spinning around the one remaining screw. Somehow Erica gave the thing one godalmighty wrench and it came free. Much torque was then applied to the remaining screw so that it would hold. Suspense killer here: it did fine.

This part went fast. A lot of it went fast in a way that made me think "this will go slow the other way..." But I chose to not focus on dreading the future. I can be irritatingly-grounded-man enough as it is. There was a nearly terrifying interlude where we had to ride until it seemed like we were going on to a freeway onramp rather than a bike path entrance, but other than some poor signage (note: signage on the interurban is variable at best) this worked out fine.

Whee, this part went fast. Why is it that the fun part goes the quickest?

Hitting south Everett, we started to run into more Urb. Clearly, the sweet spot on this trail runs from the Everett Mall at the north to, ironically, the Alderwood Mall to the south. For your shopping pleasure, no doubt. For a few miles past the mall, where the kind folks at the Great Harvest Bread Company filled our water bottles for us. More trails, mostly nice, but again lots of this chicanery. Now with big metal poles to stop cars from squeezing through. I'm not sure if this stretch is newer or they have more problems with vehicular intrusions up north.

Another (and more terrifying) stretch where we got tossed out onto surface streets for a few miles because we missed a sign. This whole trip definitely had some fun navigation moments. Map reading, clever improvisation, turning around, all the good stuff. Actually, that adventure was part of what we wanted and it was one of the real joys of the trip.

Things sort of trended down here -- more stoppages, more street riding, and then suddenly we reached a point where the trail just ended. Not with a sign that said "you made it!" or a statue of some guy riding a bike, or even with a nice park where you could sit on a bench and eat Shot Blocks and hydrate. No, it just ended at a four way intersection, two lanes each way on each side. Fast food restaurants were present.

So we turned around and headed home after our own little congratulatory hi-five. We'd been thinking of stopping to get food at some place along the way. Remember the Eurocycling vision, right? Then the wind hit us. We'd noticed the wind at home, how much the trees were moving. But without really noticing, we'd been riding with it the whole trip so far. Suddenly my speed took about a 40% cut, and that was with me putting everything I had into it.

So we rode. Erica asked if I was waiting for her to catch up at one point after one of these crossing things. I gasped that I was going as hard as I could. So I rode and rode. I was starting to feel significantly not-so-good, but we had time against us: Bella's school would be ending in three hours and at current pace we'd need every minute of that time to get home, get the car, and pick her up.

We waved off getting lunch, but at one point around 2:00 our hunger was just too much and Erica wisely pulled us into a gas station to grab some grub. I wolfed a banana (I hate bananas) and 3/4 of a really bad sandwich. Erica wolfed the balance of the sandwich, a power bar, and her own banana. At this point, the romantic dream of moules frites was entirely dead, standing in a gas station parking lot wolfing a bad sandwich.

Getting back on the road, the humilitory lowpoint of the trip happened when I came up to a stoplight, unclipped my left foot, and promptly fell to the right. Result: scraped right knee, scraped left elbow (from the bike hitting it, actually), scratched bar ends. Back up, back riding.

Now the payback was really hitting us as we were going up the nice hills that had made the initial journey so fun. And we were upwind. I was hurting. The tank that is Nick was getting very, very empty. I think part of it may actually have been my body's brief distraction with the task of digesting that sandwich. I found even mild slopes were killing me. I have this image that I looked like those super-hillclimb guys in The Tour do when they are pushing up some "Beyond Categorization" climb in a breakaway with the peoloton screaming up behind them.

And so I fell. My muscles just decided that they were going to start making some of the executive decisions around here, thank you very much, and decided that pedaling was on the list of tasks that they were just going to set aside and worry about another day. The practical result was that I pretty much went straight, fell over, and landed supported in an odd semi-sitting position by a chain link fence. My bike was half on top of me and half tangled up in me. It felt very heavy. I pushed at it desultorily a little while watching Erica ride away around a corner. It was very, very heavy, and I couldn't quite figure out what to do with my legs. I took a nice break, cried for a short while, and then finally succeeded in crawling out from under it. Suddenly, without my deadweight on top, my bike felt manageable. I pushed it up. Then I climbed up. I found that I could mount and even pedal. And so slowly and carefully I did just that.

In my defense, I will say that by this point I'd ridden a few miles past the 25 mile distance that marked the longest single bike ride I'd ever taken. So I wasn't feeling horrible about myself, just horrible.

In just a minute or two I came across Erica riding back towards me, wondering where I'd gone. I related the story and for the next couple of hours we took things a little more slowly, a little easier, and just gave some of the pace away in the interest of long-term health. It was actually wonderful -- riding together and having the spare breath and energy to talk and chat. It was wonderful. And I'm not sure if it was the lower pace, a changed attitude, or what, but things started to feel better. The quick lunch might have caught and started to actually help instead of distracting the few resources I had left.

We rode up and through the Alderwood mall, back down the final few chicanes. I was playing it cool and walking a lot of hills that I felt like I probably could ride. But there was a bit of a technical excuse for that -- something in my 2nd crash had torqued my rear derailleur and I couldn't reach my lower three gears on the cassette. The chainring was shifting gimpy too, so getting down low without some nasty dragging sounds going on was tough.

So I walked up and rode down and didn't feel bad about it at all.

We made it back with about twenty minutes to spare, and Erica kindly went to pick up our kid while I staggered around the house looking confused for a while. Then I fell asleep and, forty minutes later, woke up feeling like I actually understood the words that people were saying to me.

WARNING GROIN DISCUSSION WARNING GROIN DISCUSSION

One of the big hits of the ride was this stuff called Glide that Erica ritualistically rubs herself with before putting on a wetsuit. It is intended to cut down on chafe for any sort of repetitive athletic motion like biking or swimming or running. She offered some to me and I went for it -- for the groinal area that even the most effective set of bike shorts seem unable to prevent from experiencing at least a little frictional rub.

The stuff works great. Even at rides of 25 miles I always had far more post-ride chafe-induced pain. Given the time and the distance, I'm absolutely thrilled at how little collateral damage I've suffered -- soreness in the back and shoulders, chafe, etc.

END GROIN DISCUSSION END GROIN DISCUSSION

40 miles in 3:55. Fifteen miles further than I've ever gone and easily the longest single athletic exertion I've ever done for as little break time as I had.

Now I'm going to eat sushi. A vast, vast amount of it since I burned somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 calories on that ride. And I'm going to have a beer, because I've earned it. It may not have been quite the idealistic ride I sought, but I'm happy as hell and I'm going to celebrate!