I took my daughter to a nature preserve lake where they let you rent boats.  It was a scorching hot summer day but she was determined to get out on the lake.  I got her in the boat first and then got ready to get in myself when she screamed snake and pointed behind the boat.  There was a log in the water and all I saw were branches until one of them turned and looked at me.  A water snake sat not ten feet from my daughter and we were clearly interrupting his dragonfly lunch.  We all froze.  Seeing that he was not moving towards us (phew!) I grabbed the camera hanging around my neck and snapped a quick picture before he eerily slipped back into the water.

At the time, I was reading Eric Larson’s book In The Garden Of Beasts:  Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.  I felt that the picture was a good metaphor for the book.  I picked up the book simply based on the author’s ability to warp the reader right into his scenes like he did in The Devil in the White City.  In Beasts, Larson examines the much told nightmare story of the Nazi’s through an interesting vantage point, the US Ambassador William Dodd and his family residing in Berlin during the rise of the Nazi’s in the thirties.

The book is organized into many short chapters or vignettes on the comings and goings of Ambassador Dodd and his family.  My favorite chapter was entitled “Only the Horses” near the end of the book.  Hitler had just completed his June 30, 1934 murder spree which would come to be called The Knight Of The Long Knives.  Hilter addressed the Reichstag openly saying things like:

Only a ferocious and bloody repression could nip the revolt in the bud… If someone asks me why we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently, it was I alone who, during those twenty-four hours, was the Supreme Court of Justice of the German People.  I ordered the leaders of the guilty shot … The nation must know that its existence cannot be menaced with impunity by anyone, and that whoever lifts his hand against the State shall die of it.

Sadly, as Larson observes, “No government recalled its ambassador or filed a protest; the populace did not rise in revulsion.”  Ambassador Dodd for his part observed in his diary an equally sad irony:

At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting … One might easily wish he were a horse!”

While I much more prefer the World War II era book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, I do also recommend Beasts in the Garden by Eric Larson.  While at times limited and meandering because of the singular focus on the American Ambassador and his family, the focus seems rewarded in the end by humanizing what was such an insane chapter in human history.

Copyright 2011 King Mediary, Inc.

OK it's a Goose but it could be a BLACK SWAN!!!!

This is Part 3 of my 3 part book review post entitled, The Rock, The Wave and The Swan.  In Part 1, I examined The Rock by reviewing Tom Zoellner’s book Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped The World.  In Part 2, I examined The Wave by reviewing Susan Casey’s book The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean.  Now in Part 3, I review Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan, The Impact of Highly Improbably Events.

The Black Swan is an entertaining and important book to read.  Entertaining because Nassim quite frequently builds his voice into crescendo’s of witty and biting criticism against the mind numbing intellectual status quotient.  Important to read (in my opinion) because Nassim’s mistrust of experts, facts and averages represents a critically unrepresented perspective in today’s midbrain driven world of 24 hour news ‘certainty’.

Nassim continually assails purported experts, forecasts and projections that are wheeled about, quoted from and relied upon to the tune of trillions of dollars.  As Nassim writes, “What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecasting errors, but our absence of awareness of it.”  Nassim especially attacks the averaging and normalization that has lobotomized modern intellect writing:

Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the ‘normal,’ particularly with ‘bell curve’ methods of inference that tell you close to nothing.  Why?  Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty.  Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.

A “Black Swan” is a consequential shock with three attributes:

First it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.  Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird).  Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us conduct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

A Black Swan can apply to all facets of human life.  For me, the scariest Black Swans are those that result from the collision of Mother Nature’s natural disasters with mankind’s industrial systems, what I refer to as Father Nature.   When I see highly improbable disaster events like the Fukushima meltdown, the Katrina levy breaks, Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan book comes to mind.  As he writes:

We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.

On the one hand, we are all lucky to be here.  On the other, we are not here by chance alone.  We are here directly because our ancestors individually and collectively were lucky, innovative and tenacious enough to survive, be fruitful and multiply.  In fact, our ancestors were so lucky, innovative and tenacious, that they not only came to survive, they allowed us to thrive.

Modern man has “thrived” so much that we have largely tamed mother nature on a “normal” day to day, week to week or even year to year basis.  The problem is, however, that Man has long been, and remains at the ultimate mercy of Mother Nature to establish new normals when she sees fit.  The “hundred year flood”, the” act of god” will always remain largely out of Man’s control.  The disturbing thing however about man’s incremental taming of Mother Nature, is that he has done so by creating man made infrastructure, “Father Nature” if you will, that risks compounding new normal events of Mother Nature.  Like we saw in New Orleans when Katrina caused the bursting of the Levy (the Hurricane missed the city) and saw in Japan with the nuclear meltdown caused by the tsunami (the earthquake only caused a minor percentage of damage), it is the lapse in father nature that causes as much or more damage than the act of mother nature.

We will continue to see these Mother Nature – Father Nature cascades and that to me is why Nassim Taleb’s book is so important.  Not to fall in Nassim’s gun sights, I don’t try to predict Black Swan’s.  That is the paradox here – they are not predictable.  What I do suggest though is that everyone living in an age of Father Nature should come to understand Nassim’s uncertainty playbook because almost by definition, where there are so many survival systems now provided by Father Nature, any severe Mother Nature event carries with it a Father Nature Black Swan.  It is like fall out after a tsunami, flooding after a hurricane, anarchy after a solar flare…

Copyright 2011 King Mediary, Inc.

Homo sapiens – the anatomically modern humans who emerged in Africa – is the first mammalian species that has voluntarily spread itself out to every corner of the globe and begun what we have come to call globalization.

On September 23 & 24, 2011, I got to observe a one of a kind example of just how bound together humanity is past and present in our global march.  I witnessed descendants of Captain William Clark deliver a specially built 36 foot canoe to the Chinook Nation at Fort Campbell, Washington near the mouth of the Columbia River.  The Clark descendants made the delivery as a 205 year old amend for a canoe stolen in March, 1806 by the Corps of Discovery lead by Lewis and Clark.

Clark Descendants and Friends Present Canoe to the Nation

For me the journey to witness this event began, well, right by where Lewis and Clark started their journey in St. Charles, Missouri. In the early 1990s, my fraternity great grand big brother (that is fraternity speak for my big brother’s big brother’s big brother) showed me his favorite trail a few miles up the Missouri river from St. Charles in Weldon Sprints, Missouri when we both were in town visiting our girl friends. The trail started out as a gravel road and then wound along forested hilltops to eventually make it to tall bluffs overlooking the Missouri River.  I didn’t know the name of the trail or any history around it, I just found the views stunning.  Here is a picture I took just weeks ago when on a hike.

Lewis and Clark Trail, Weldon Springs Missouri

As it turned out, my fraternity brother and I were hiking on the “Lewis and Clark” trail inside the Weldon Springs Conservation Area.  The Corps of Discovery spent their second night near the base of the cliff pictured (the river channel itself was in a different location 200 years ago).  In fact, even this early in their journey, the Corps of Discovery received aid near this spot when a band of Kickapoo appeared to trade 7 deer in 1804.  Today there is a plaque commemorating the exchange:

After my initial hike in the nineties I all but forgot about the trail until life moved me back to St Louis. Fate then found my technology company acquired by Verizon and my local office moved to Weldon Springs only a few miles from the trailhead.   Pretty soon I found myself hiking/running the trail regularly after work when I wasn’t traveling.

A couple of years later, I was shocked to find that the “Weldon Springs Conservation Area” was in fact part of a munitions plant site that not only manufactured TNT for World War II but also later processed Uranium during the cold war.  I learned the truth about the site when speaking to a friend, Rick Holton Sr, who knew of the site’s history and was active across the country in River protection thru the organization American Rivers (see www.AmericanRivers.org).

My obliviousness to the history around my favorite hiking trail helped shake me awake to just how much change modern man has wrought on the earth.  I wrote some state senators, went to the next public hearing and from what I could tell, an immense amount of money and time had been put into actually cleaning up the Weldon Springs Conservation Area.  The irony of the name really speaks for itself however.  It is either a Well Done Spring or a Well Done Spring.  On the one hand, it could be so Well Done, that it is ok to have a very large high school only half a mile away from the containment dome.  Or on the other, it is so Well Done (as in well cooked), that it will be years before we really know how much radioactivity is leaching into the underground water table.

The irony of the mound however also speaks for itself.  The first thing I thought of when hiking up the giant rock pile mound (yes you can hike on it) was that it looked like a bigger, creepier version of monks mound in Cahokia, IL just down the Missouri river a few miles in Illinois.  Cahokia Mounds is the site of the largest prehistoric Indian city north of Mexico which at its height had approximately 20,000 residents.  In fact, while at Camp Du Bois the winter of 1803-04 preparing for the expedition, Clark and another member of the group visited some of the outlying cahokia mounds before journeying up the Missouri River to meet the Kickapoo.

Weldon Springs Containment Dome

Steps up Weldon Springs Containment Dome

Monk's Mound, Cahokia, IL

It was with these places stirring in my head and heart that fate then had me bump into Rick Holton Sr and Ray Gardner of the Chinook Nation when on a business trip to Washington DC.  Rick and Ray had just met for the first time at an American Rivers board meeting and were sitting on the steps of The George Hotel getting to know each other.  Rick’s family includes several Clark descendants and Ray is a 7th generation descendant of the Chinook leaders who helped Lewis and Clark survive the long winter at the mouth of the Columbia river in 1805-06.  The two met as part of Lewis and Clark bicentennial activities.  I sat down in my business suit, lit a cigar Rick Sr handed me and found myself magnetized by the stories and presence of Chief Ray.  I felt like I was looking up the Missouri River from my bluff across the continent and time to see through the eyes of the first people living by the pacific ocean that greeted the ragged expedition.  Ray also told story after story about the lands, traditions and history of the Chinook.  Ray told one story though which stood out.  This was the story of how Lewis and Clark had stolen a Chinook canoe to get home.  Rick acknowledged that it was a very unfortunate chapter in the Corps of Discovery’s journey.   I knew of the Chinook and their aiding of the expedition but I did not know of a canoe being stolen!

I kept in touch with Rick and was thrilled to learn that Rick and the Clark descendants planned to give back a canoe to the Chinook to make up for the one their ancestors had taken.  The thought just struck me – a 200+ year amend!  I told Rick that I wanted to be there for the ceremony.  Even though I myself am not a Clark descendant, I felt bound together by places and fate to see the event, meet Ray’s people and see the Chinookan tribal land.

I was not disappointed for making the trip.  I was privileged to spend more time with Chief Ray and meet many of the amazing Chinook nation.  I was able to hike and see the timeless beauty of the Chinook homeland as I retraced Clark’s footsteps of November 18 and 19, 1805 along the pacific.  Even after the ravaging of centuries of logging, fishing, industry and development the whole area reverberates with energy of native peoples.  The river, wind, tides and ocean all move as one.  The park now called Cape Disappointment where Clark took a group of men to reach the pacific over land is far from disappointing.  The forests, low lieing salt marshes, coves and stunning ocean views are worth seeing (see below).

I met a host of precious people including Clark descendants, reenactors and sojourners like me as we toured the day before the canoe potlatch and the day of the event.  One such personalities was Roger Wendlick.  Roger dressed up in full elk skin on the first day as, George Drouillard, a half french / half shawnee member of the expedition.

Roger Wendlick dressed as George Drouillard

Roger spent 18 years collecting literally every written publication and artifact imaginable from the Corps of Discovery which is now part of the Roger Wendlick Collection at Lewis and Clark College.

Roger and the other historians in attendance impressed upon me that the “Lewis and Clark” expedition as it is commonly called even in this blog post at times should really be called the Corps of Discovery because it was a military mission.  The journals that Captains’ Lewis and Clark kept were military documents, not diaries.  These were serious men on a serious mission of enormous importance. Only in 1801, Napoleon had sent a military force to secure New Orleans after Napolean himself had bought the Louisianna Terrirory from Spain in 1800.   Jefferson adeptly navigated the constitutional, political and foreign policy obstacles to complete the Louisiana purchase with Napolean for $15 million.  Jefferson announced the purchased to the American people on July 4, 1803 (now imagine that state of the union today – ladies and gentleman, I just bought Mexico and and part of Latin America).

A proper mindset of the duty felt by Lewis and Clark might be conveyed by watching a military contemporary of the two played by Russel Crowe in Master and Commander, the Far Side of The World (a movie I watched one night at the hotel).  The British and French were in all out war as the Corps of Discovery traveled across the continent and even fighting in the very Pacific ocean that the Corps set out to reach.  Spain, France, England and even Russia eyed the Pacific Northwest and it was far from likely let alone certain that what we now see as the territorial map of Unites States would come to pass.

With the Indian tribes established within our newly acquired limits, I have deemed it necessary to open conferences for the purpose of establishing a good understanding and neighborly relations between us. So far as we have yet learned, we have reason to believe that their dispositions are generally favorable and friendly; and with these dispositions on their part, we have in our own hands means which can not fail us for preserving their peace and friendship. By pursuing an uniform course of justice toward them, by aiding them in all the improvements which may better their condition, and especially by establishing a commerce on terms which shall be advantageous to them and only not losing to us, and so regulated as that no incendiaries of our own or any other nation may be permitted to disturb the natural effects of our just and friendly offices, we may render ourselves so necessary to their comfort and prosperity that the protection of our citizens from their disorderly members will become their interest and their voluntary care. Instead, therefore, of an augmentation of military force proportioned to our extension of frontier, I propose a moderate enlargement of the capital employed in that commerce as a more effectual, economical, and humane instrument for preserving peace and good neighborhood with them.

~ President Thomas Jefferson, November 8, 1804

The Chinook are today “favorable and friendly” just like they were in 1805 when President Jefferson’s corps of discovery arrived.  So favorable and friendly in fact that they quite literally kept the Corps of Discovery alive through the winter of 1805-06.  David Simenski of the US National Park service superintendent of the Lewis and Clark park shared some insight on the Corps of Discovery encounter with the Chinook.

Instead of taking advantage of the ragged, goodless expedition, the Chinook provided assistance to keep the Corps of Discovery discovering.  The Chinook had been living and trading at the mouth of the Columbia for millennia according to the council elders and Archaeological discoveries.   Even today the Chinook take tribal canoe journeys which span from Alaska to San Diego.  The Chinook had also already been trading with the “tall ships” well before Lewis and Clark arrived (think back to Master and Commander).  As Chief Ray and the other Chinook council members I spoke with impressed upon me the perspective of the Chinook then and now:

The Clark descendants are today “deserved well of their country” because they have done all in their power to make an amend not only for their ancestors but also for their country.  The Clark’s ancestor was on a military mission of these United States and that military mission was so ordered not only by a President, but by one of the very Founding Fathers of this nation.  Again, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, in his State of the Union, the commander and chief was using military men to execute a virtuous, non militaristic strategy of expansion “especially by establishing a commerce on terms which shall be advantageous to them and only not losing to us…”

The said truth is that the United States Government and the States of Oregon and Washington that followed as aided by the return of the Corps of Discovery as aided by the Chinook have conducted “commerce” with the Chinook on terms advantageous only to the states and only losing to the Chinook.  So losing in fact that the very existence of the Chinook tribe is not even recognized by the United State Government.

“Some tribes remained recognized, but the Chinooks for some reason or another fell between the cracks. Nobody can understand why we were not recognized any longer, so we’ve had a long fight…. I’ve been working on this for about twenty-five years” (Chief Cliff Snider interview: 2002).

http://trailtribes.org/fortclatsop/recognition-and-us-relations.htm

The unrecognized status of the Chinook reminds me of a quote of a fellow founding father and federalist rival of Thomas Jefferson uttered only 16 years before Lewis and Clark took the Chinook canoe:

States, like individuals, who observe their engagements, are respected and trusted: while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct.

It is time for the United States Government to observe their engagements and recognize the undaunted charity of the Chinook by restoring and recognizing the Chinook Nation.

It's sinking!

I just came back from a tour of Washington D.C. with my Mom, daughter and an exchange student from France.  We were blessed with two gorgeous Washington DC days as we walked amongst the Smithsonian Museums, monuments and the Capital.  The capital had an odd feeling with the debt crisis in full swing.  Never had the Treasury building loomed so large and somber next to the Whitehouse!  I like to think that perhaps Washington DC is starting to feel a little right sized.

As we toured congress with a young student from France, I could not help but think of De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

After a several decades of tax and spend, surplus and spend, cut tax and spend, spend spend spend and spend perhaps the binge is finally over.  As of the time of this blog post, the recent debt ceiling roller coaster seems to be notching to a stop (for now).   As summarized in an article on CNN.com on August 1st by Alan Silverleib and Tom Cohen, it is now the Senate’s turn to approve the legislation passed in the House which consists of two stages:

The first stage includes $917 billion in savings, including a roughly $420 billion reduction in the national security budget. The cuts would be accompanied by a $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling.

Because of the pending Tuesday deadline, Obama would have immediate authority to raise the debt ceiling by $400 billion, which will last through September, according to the White House.

The other $500 billion increase in the debt limit would be subject to a congressional vote of disapproval that can be vetoed by Obama.

In the second stage, a special joint committee of Congress would recommend further deficit reduction steps totaling $1.5 trillion or more, with Congress obligated to vote on the panel’s proposals by the end of the year.

The committee would comprise 12 members: Six from each chamber, equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. The panel’s recommendations would be due by November 23 and guaranteed an up-or-down vote without amendments by December 23.

The committee is expected to consider politically sensitive reforms to the tax code and entitlement programs, though Democrats and Republicans disagree on the likelihood of any eventual revenue increases.

I have not had and do not have time to research all of the nuances of the current “debt ceiling” crisis.  I live in a representative democracy with a House of Representatives and Senate that are elected to represent me and the rest of the citizens of the United States of America.  Americans have been a bunch of fickle voters of late and given the system of checks and balances we almost guaranteed ourselves the roller coaster ride of the past few months.  We put President Obama in office with Democratic majorities in a landslide in 2008 and then awarded tea party partisans in the 2010 midterms.  The Tea Party ‘extremists’ are actually doing exactly what they said they would obtusely do when elected – oppose any spending increases.

The reader may be thinking that I am some damn the torpedoes tea partier now about to brashly write that those who are fear mongering about the consequences of default are wrong.  Well, no.  I do think that citizen fear is healthy when elected officials who have the responsibility to represent play chicken with a great depression trigger like a default ceiling.  Any elected moron that thinks lightly of triggering implied market covenants on one of the largest debt pools in history should tour yosemite with a geologist and learn about the super volcano underground.  My point is that the electorate should stop being fickle (and uninformed) about fiscal and monetary policy if they expect the same from their elected officials.  America has gotten a hall pass from world markets for this recent roller coaster ride in large part due to the greater dysfunction and mishandling of the simultaneous Eurozone debt crisis.

The way to a healthy economy is not as simple as any one party (or country) would like it to be. One critical part of the recipe is confidence.  In a previous post I reviewed The World Is Curved by David Smick which did a good job of explaining the importance of confidence:

In essence, the survival of the world financial system depends on an elaborate global game of confidence.  The size of the financial markets, relative to the governments, has become so monstrously huge, there is no other means of maintaining stability than to establish a psychology of confidence.  The governments themselves cannot by edict restore order.  They can only project to the markets a sense that they know what they’re doing.

Another key component is intellectual honesty.  Just as the tea party has a point in observing the need to cut the deficit, those who express concern in reducing spending during a weak economy with high unemployment also have a point.  To accompany his Kindle book entitled Lords of Finance: The Banker Who Broke The World, Liaquat Ahamed wrote a short Op Ed in April of 2009 called “More Money, More Political Will.”  Both the Book Lords of Finance and the Op Ed are worth reading in light of today’s financial climate.  Liaquat writes:

between January 1930 and July 1932 the bottom fell out of the world economy.  It did so because the authorities applied the wrong medicine to what was a very sick economy.  They let the banking system go under, they tried to cut the budget deficit by curbing government expenditure and raising taxes, they refused to assist the European banking system, and they even raised interest rates.  It was no wonder the global economy crumbled.

Ultimately however, it seems that modern economy deficit reform will take political courage.  Again quoting Liaquat’s in More Money, More Political Will:

The Great Depression was largely caused by a failure of intellectual will – the men in charge simply did not understand how the economy worked.  The risk this time round is that a failure of political will leads us into an economic cataclysm.

American citizens need to start acting like shareholders watching their 529 plans (for we are playing with our children’s future) and elected officials need to study the issues like they raise money (for you are elected to REPRESENT!).    Two very good sources for citizens and elected officials alike are:

• THE MOMENT OF TRUTH – REPORT OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY AND REFORM, DECEMBER 2010.
• USA, Inc. A Basic Summary Of America’s Financial Statements, February 2011. 

The Moment of Truth is a relatively short, easy to read set of recommendations put together by a commission appointed by the President.  Since it is the job of Congress (not the President) to manage the purse strings, hopefully the second commission to be formed by the debt ceiling compromise will have some similarly enlightened members.

Then again, at the time of writing, we still don’t have debt ceiling legislation that has passed the Senate.  I dare post and be optimistic.  I believe in our democracy and agree with Winston Churchill’s fitting quote:

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

Not sinking, just waiting on the Senate!

Surf Warning in Carmel, CA "Surf Subject To Unexpected Life-Threatening Waves & Currents"

This is Part 2 of my 3 part book review post entitled, The Rock, The Wave and The Swan.  In Part 1, I examined The Rock by reviewing Tom Zoellner’s book Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped The World.  Now in Part 2, I examine The Wave by reviewing Susan Casey’s book The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean.

In her book, Collins builds a narrative following Tow Surfers globally.  Tow Surfers are the folks who surf waves so big they need a jet ski going at full throttle to get on the wave.  Tow surfers need jet ski partners to get them to the wave, a specially designed surf board with straps skill to ride it down and tenacity to survive the “hold-downs” under the monster waves when they fall “described as sprinting four hundred yards holding your breath while being beaten on by five Mike Tysons.”  Tow Surfers and their Jet Ski pilots wait for massive ocean swells at certain spots around the globe where extreme weather conditions and wind velocity over thousands of miles of ocean line up to just the right sea bed / shore conditions to produce utterly massive waves.

If you haven’t ever seen a tow surfing video, you need to do a google search for Laird Hamilton, the pioneer of tow surfing, and see what super human looks like on a wave (click picture to see video):

The stories of these brave and insane, intense and enlightened surfers is reason alone to read The Wave.  You can start to understand why these surfers go to such extremes to ride in the ‘barrel’:

a place that surfers regard with reverence, light and water and motion add up to something transcendent.  It’s an exquisite suspension of all things mundane, in which nothing matters but living in that particular instant.  Some people spend thirty years meditating to capture this feeling.  Others ingest psychedelic drugs.  For big-wave surfers, a brief ride on a mountain of water does the trick.

What I like most about The Wave, however, is that Collins creatively uses these adrenalin seeking tow surfers as narrative buoys to put ocean change in context. Collins observes that as more water gets into the global system, the waves get higher and freakier not only for tow surfers but for human society at large.  Collins writes:

In its 2007 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that ‘the ocean has been absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat added to the climate system.’ As the waters heat up, wind velocity increases; storm tracks become more volatile; polar ice and glaciers melt, causing sea levels to rise.

Collins explores the science behind waves and ocean currents.  She hops around the globe to different bays where massive tsunamis have repeatedly shredded everything in their paths.  Expanding beyond the exploits and perils of the tow surfers she recounts the scary journeys of vessels in 100 foot waves and the salvage operations attempting rescues in the same.  We tend to think of the most powerful waves like those several story monsters that Laird is riding above.  The truth, however, is that waves don’t have to be tall to be powerful.  Waves can move at the speed of supersonic jets below the horizon and cause horrific damage as the March 2011 tsunami in Japan captured in these helicopter videos.

What appears from the air to be a rather regular surf line (click picture to see video):

doesn’t stop until miles inland because of the energy in the wave from the massive earthquake (click picture to see video).

Beyond the direct threat of destruction inflicted by rogue waves, tsunami’s and rising sea levels, however, there is something even more ominous that Collins and her scientists explore: the indirect consequences of ocean change.  She interviews leading experts in ocean science who observe that ice is not only melting and increasing sea levels but land is also eroding to increase sediment levels in the ocean.  She briefly explores that all of this melting and erosion are also causing plate tectonic weight displacements (All people talk about is water rising, they don’t talk about water weighting!).

Not covered in Collins book (a rather disappointing omission), is the large plastic garbage patches growing in the oceans.  I believe Collins should have explored further the devastating ecological changes happening in part because of the currents and waves of storms have on land based debris.  Previous decades of plastic already floating in Texas size clumps will eventually add the Japanese tsunami to their sea mass.  According to a June 2011 article in the Telegraph:

The waste will move at a speed of between 5 and 10 miles a day, catching the North Pacific Current and crossing the ocean in as little as 12 months … ‘Over time plastic debris eventually fragments into tiny particles creating ‘plastic plankton’ or ‘microplastic,’ which is a serious long-term concern, particularly for marine food webs.’

I save this for another post when I find a book worthy of the topic.  Pangea of plastic deserves much more attention.

I started Susan Casey’s book The Wave over the 2010 winter holiday.  I looked forward to positively reviewing the book.  With the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency in Japan in early March, I decided to expand my review of The Wave into a three part book review I am calling The Rock, The Wave and the Swan.

• The Rock (reviewed in today’s post) is Tom Zoellner’s book Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped The World.
• The Wave is Susan Casey’s book The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
• The Swan is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
  

It is fitting that for my post on The Rock, I show a pictures of a giant rock pile.  Yet these are more than just pictures of a rock mound.  This pile of white rocks upon which nothing grows is actually a radioactive containment dome in Weldon Springs, MO.  This sublime structure which covers 45 acres and is 7 stories tall was built to clean up one of the first Super Fund sites in the United States.  Weldon Springs was a munitions plant that not only manufactured TNT for World War II but also later processed Uranium during the cold war.  An avid hiker, I was shocked to find a couple of years ago that this massive structure was right next to one of my favorite hiking trails – the Lewis and Clark trail along the Missouri River.  There were no signs on my trailhead describing the history of the site and I figured that since there was a highschool less than half a mile from the rock pile, that it must just be some construction site.  I figured wrong.  Like some version of the Simpsons (Homer works at the Nuclear Plant) not only is this rock pile a quarter mile from a High School, you can even hike right up it to take in a beautiful view (bottom picture).

Mr. Zoellner’s Uranium brings to life the history around the rock buried under this pile and helps explain the tragedy still unfolding in Japan.  He begins with an unsettling perspective:

Uranium.  The name seemed magical, and vaguely unsettling.  I remembered the periodic table of the elements, where uranium was signified by the letter U.  It was fairly high up the scale, meaning there were a lof of small particles called protons clustered in its nucleus.  So it was heavy.  It was also used to generate nuclear power.  I remembered that much from high school science.  But it had never quite registered with me that a mineral lying in the crust of the earth – just a special kind of dirt, really, – was the home of one of the most violent forces under human control.  A paradox there: from dust to dust.  The eartch came seeded witht he means of its own destruction, a geologic original sin.

From there, Mr. Zoellner begins to frame man’s history with Uranium from when Indians in the American Southwest used the colorful yellow soil as an additive in body paint and religious art to when Bohemian peasants cast aside the “bad-luck rock” as waste while they mined for silver.  From Utah to Africa, to the former Czech republic to Austrailia and Mongolia, Mr. Zoellner recounts wave after wave of Uranium mining booms until folks realized that “Uranium turned out to be more common than tin, and nearly five hundred times more abundant than gold.”

Mr Zoellner’s books is laced with almost impossible to conceive let alone believe anecdotes.  For example, in 1915, Radium, a radioactive cousin to Uranium, was the most valuable substance on earth.  ”American doctors were calling it a miracle cure for cancer, and some were counseling their patients to drinks a weak radium solution sold under the name Liquid Sunshine.”  Examples of the sheer power of nuclear forces such as “the amount of material inside the [Nagasaki] bomb that actually flashed into energy was but one gram – about one-third of the weight of a Lincoln penny.” Examples for optimism such as the Megatons to Megawatts program when “the uranium cores of old soviet weapons were pulled apart and shipped to the United States for conversion into a lower-enriched form that will provide 20 percent of the nation’s electricity needs through 2013. … Every time you turn on lights in America, there is a one in ten chance that the power is coming from an old Soviet warhead.”

For those seeking a broader understanding of what is going on at Fukushima, Mr. Zoellner’s book is a worthwhile read.  He provides an easy to read narrative of the physics and industry for better or worse behind radioactivity and radioactive elements like Uranium.  Ultimately, as we are sadly witnessing in Japan, Mr Zoellner is accurate when writing early in the book:

The mastery and containment of uranium – this Thing we dug up seventy years ago – will almost certainly become one of the defining aspects of twenty-first-century politics.  Uranium will always be with us.  Once dug up, it can never be reburied.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redpemtion by Laura Hillenbrand is a must read book.  Hillenbrand tells the unbelievable story of Lieutenant Louis Zamperini.  Without giving the story away, Zamperini was a track star from USC who ran in the 1936 Olympics. In World War II, Zamperini is a bombadier of a B 24 which goes down in the pacific.  Zamperini somehow manages to not only survive drifting thousands of miles in the open pacific but then goes on to survive even harsher Japanese POW conditions.

Like her previous magical book Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand takes the reader on a mesmerizing, soul searching first row journey.   One cannot help but feel being in and out of the raft with Louie when:

The bomber circled back for another go.  Phil and Mac played dead, and Louis tipped back into the ocean.  As bullets knifed the water around him, the shark came at him, and again Louie bumped its snout and repelled it.  Then a second shark charged at him.  Louie hung there, gyrating in the water and flailing his arms and legs, as the sharks snapped at him and the bullets came down…

Also like Seabiscuit,Hillenbrand’s scope of research and detail enable her to bring forward vivid details to build a narrative that leaves you deeply connected and moved with the characters in Unbroken.

I am glad that I was able to read this book over Memorial Day weekend.  As a friend and veteran shared with me this special day, there is no “happy” memorial day – there is ONLY “THANK YOU” Memorial Day.  Thank you to all the men and women, past and present, of the armed services for your service.  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

I read Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work by Douglas Coupland as background for my Content In The Cloud keynote speech at the 2011 National Association of Broadcasters (aka “NAB“) conference  in Las Vegas.

Many will know Marshall McLuhan’s favorite quote “the medium is the message” first raised in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.  This quote was tweaked in a later book to become “the Medium is the Massage”.  McLuhan was ahead of his time in seeing a rapidly growing and global convergence between humanity and media or in his words, “the book is an extension of the eye… clothing, an extension of the skin… electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.”

In my NAB keynote, I started with ‘The Medium is the Massage’ to compare the recent internet era to the present day dawning of the cloud era.  For example, take the book of the internet era and now in the cloud era.  The internet as medium didn’t really ‘massage’ the book.  It was great that I could order a book on amazon and search hundreds of thousands of titles but I still for the most part was just buying a traditional book.

Fast forward to today’s ‘cloud’ world on top of the internet and new capabilites start to emerge.  One can read on one device and then “the cloud” knows the furthest page one has read to when picking up to read on another device.  One has a traveling library with them at all times.  One can see highlights that other readers thought interesting, one can even tweet out a book for goodness sake!  The medium starts to massage the book…

The point of my keynote was that Cloud Computing (not “the cloud” or “the internet”) is the medium to study because it is reshaping all messages since it is, using Mr. McLuhan’s words, ‘an extension of the central nervous system.’

I learned of Mr. Coupland’s book from a review by David Carr on the New York Times Book Review podcast.  In the first chapter, Mr. Coupland provides an elegant description how I think many of us old enough to remember VCRs might feel:

But somewhere around 2003 the texture of daily life inside Western media-driven societies began to morph, and quickly, to the point where, a half decade later, it’s now obvious to people who were around in the twentieth century that time not only seems to be moving more quckly, but is beginning to feel funny too.  There’s no more tolerance for waiting of any sort.  We want all the facts and we want them now.  To go without email for forty-eight hours can trigger a meltdown…  School reunions are beside the point because we already know what our old classmates have done.  Children often spend more time in dreamland and cyberspace than in real life.  Time is speeding up even faster…

Continuing, Mr Copeland observes:

…time has begun to erase the twentieth-century way of structuring one’s day and locating one’s sense of community.  People are now doing their deepest thinking and making their most emotionally charged connections with people around the planet at all times of day.  Geography has become irrelevant…  The voice inside you head has become a different voice.  It used to be “you.”  Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing.

Marshall McLuhan deserves extra study in today’s always on world.  McLuhan’s maxim that the medium is the message was intended to not speak to just songs on vinyl but to convey broadly how technologies and media not only change the message but the very structure of human being.  Mr Coupland writes, “technologies we use every day begin, after a while, to alter the way our brains work, and hence the way we experience our world.”

For those readers whom have children, just step back and watch how your kids are interacting with devices and media.  A coworker tells a story of how his 3 year old walks up to the flatscreen TV and instinctively drags two fingers across it to make it move like the iPad.  My own kids cry havoc when they go to pause a TV show they are watching on a TV that doesn’t have its own DVR recorder (how dare you Dad save $5/month with just a uverse repeater that doesn’t let me pause!).

Mr. Coupland writes beautifully at times but then seems to get lost in the confusing genius that is his subject.  Ironically proving how the medium changes the message, the kindle version that I read had these weird chapter transitions that did not make sense (perhaps they do in the printed version).  That said, Mr McLuhan is so relevant to today’s singularity shifting world that Mr. Coupland’s quick to read, mostly well written book is worth the investment.

While riding up a ski lift on a recent ski trip, I observed several bursts of wind that obscured everything within view.  Intrigued by the erie scene and looking for a fitting picture to describe Alberot-Laszlo Barabasi’s book called Bursts, I pulled out my camera and snapped a quick picture.  Sadly, a picture of a burst of obscuring snow is a good metaphor describing Mr. Barabasi’s book.

The tagline of Bursts is “The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do.”  In the opening chapter Mr Barabasi posits that “human actions follow simple, reproducible patterns govern by wide-reaching laws.”  But then for some reason in chapter 2, Mr Barabasi takes what could have been an interesting subject and obscures it with a medieval hungarian narrative which painfully bursts through the rest of the book (no I am not making this up).

Why an editor, friend or Mr Barabasi himself did not realize a need to focus on the subject of the book is beyond me.  I actually would have preferred reading a seperate hungarian history book written by Mr. Barabasi than the bizarre commingling that occurs in Bursts.  I suffered through to the end of the book hoping that by some mirracle the hungarian narrative would make sense but alas, it did not.

I generally only review books on jhking.com that I recommend others read.  I make an exception for Bursts to spare others the sorry pain of reading Bursts.  Out of respect for Mr. Barabasi, I hope to read his earlier book entitled Linked which others have positively recommended.

The time perception of communications and information technology “progress” is paradoxical.  We feel the present day as master of invention with the pace of change ever increasing.  Moore’s Law, Kurzweil’s singularity all race forward (and approach) with logarithmic force.  Yet with a bit of reflection, however, we seem to forget that the base ability of man to communicate over wire has been around for quite a while.  The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage first struck me with the pervasiveness of the telegraph for much of the 1800s.  Nicholas Carr’s book The Big Switch added to this perspective by taking readers from water wheel to internet.  We seem to feel, like modern generations before us, that the current technical revolution is different, is going to change and uproot paradigms of the past, both end and begin anew life as we know it.

In his book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2010), Tim Wu examines this paradox by asking whether  the internet truly is different?  Mr. Wu is a writer and professor at Columbia law school somewhat renowned in technical, academic and policy circles for his defining position on ‘net neutrality’ (See http://www.timwu.org/network_neutrality.html).  Where The Big Switch provides a worthy introduction “to the cloud”, Mr. Wu brings forward his legal and policy experience to stand on The Big Switch’s shoulders and take it much deeper.

Mr. Wu starts his book in 1916 with a dazzling “Voice Voyages” technical display being put on by the head of AT&T at the time, Theodore Vail.  The display included, what is surprising to even think about this early in the century, a “wireless telephone.”  Mr. Wu takes the reader into this window pane in time to share his core theme which he calls “the cycle.”  Defining the cycle, Mr. Wu writes:

This oscillation of information industries between open and closed is so typical a phenomenon that I have given it a name: “the Cycle.”  And to understand why it occurs, we must discover how industries that traffic in information are naturally and historically different from those based on other commodities.

From there, Mr. Wu adeptly weaves a narrative covering over 100 years of media, communications and information technology history.  The book begins in the late 1800s and early 1900s with the inventions of telephony, radio broadcast and film.  The reader is brought through the progression of ‘the cycle’ to the 1940s when these information industries reach established form with communications by wire controlled by the Bell system, radio broadcasting dominated by NBC and CBS and film owned by major Hollywood studios. Mr. Wu stops to observe both the benefits (universal and dependable service) and detriments (censorship and innovation stifling) of centralization that prevailed in the mid part of the last century.  Mr. Wu then explains how new innovations and/or government intervention break up the established order in the 1970s and early 80s to allow for the next great period of openness in the 1990s with the arrival of the internet.

After this historical build up, Mr. Wu examines a question of our era.  ”Is the Internet different?”  Mr. Wu writes:

Would the Internet usher in a reign of industrial openness without end, abolishing the Cycle?  Or would it, despite its radically decentralized design, become in time simply the next logical target for the insuperable forces of information empire, the object of the most consequential centralization yet?

Building upon his previous examinations of how industries first start as open and distributed and then swing to closed and centralized, Mr. Wu describes how and why the internet’s founders invented an open network.  Mr. Wu goes through an easy to read progression of internet pioneers and how they evolved internet and IT Technology.  For example, Mr. Wu mentioned the work of Doug Englebart who a year before the eagle landed on the moon in 1969 demonstrated in 1968 the computer mouse making its first steps across the screen (below links to Stanford University page with the background on the demonstration).

Mr Wu’s second half of the book shifts to more ominous tones beginning in Part IV “Reborn Without a Soul” writing:

Yet in the rebuilt industries something is missing, like a part overlooked, and this is the sense of civic responsibility.  The old empires were suppressive and controlling in their ways, yet each had some sense of public duty, informal or regulated, that they bore with their power.

I will confess as a former executive and fan of Verizon, I do not buy Mr. Wu’s arguments hook line and sinker.  However, I do agree with his note of caution.  I see Mr. Wu’s concerns of media concentration akin to concerns of deflation or global warming, while remote, the consequences could be so severe (here the loss of fundamental liberties) that it is worth scrutiny.  Mr Wu writes:

In an age more reliant than ever on telecommunications media, the more concentrated the power over information and communications, the easier it is for government to indulge its temptation to play Big Brother.  Wither everyone in the country now connected, the fewer the parties that need to be persuaded to cooperate, the greater the risk.  With the convergence of all communications by virtue of interconnected networks (aka intermodality), the reconsistitued giants of telephony are close to possessing a master switch than Vail himself could have dreamed.

Stepping back in the last few chapters to provider some recommendations, Mr. Wu acknowledges after an ominous opening that the communications industry themselves deserve some credit in self regulation.  Mr. Wu suggests that new norms, not just more requlation, are required to enforce certain prudent separations to prevent the concentration of power leading to abuses. Ultimately, however, Mr. Wu places the burden at the door step of every reader in his last section entitled ”This Time Is Different” by ending his book with:

If we do not take this moment to secure our sovereignty over the choices that our information age has allowed us to enjoy, we cannot reasonably blame its loss on those who are free to enrich themselves by taking it from us in a manner history has foretold.

The Master Switch is an excellent read worthy of being read cover to cover by professionals and citizens alike who seek a deeper understanding of how media, communications and information technology have and continue to reshape our world.