Moving Fast and Breaking Starships

Not being retired, I can't drop everything I'm doing and run down to Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas and wait till Elon Musk's SpaceX organization decides to launch a Super Heavy booster with a Starship on top of it.  But I'd like to, as it's a shorter trip than the drive to Florida to watch launches at the Cape. 

 

But it turns out that if I was looking for a spectacular aeronautical display, Florida would have been the better place to watch last Thursday's launch from, which took place after sundown that evening.  The Super Heavy booster did its job, successfully separating from the Starship second stage, and even returned safely to the launch pad as designed.  But an "energetic event," as the controllers termed it, happened inside the Starship shortly thereafter, shutting down several of its engines, destabilizing it into a spin, and causing it to explode.  Numerous posts to social media from Florida and the Caribbean show a constellation of flaming objects streaking across the night sky.  According to Reuters, a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands was slightly damaged by a piece of the rocket that fell out of the sky.  But not to worry—SpaceX says there were no toxic materials in the debris.  Nevertheless, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped flight takeoffs from several Florida airports briefly because of "space launch debris," and launched its own investigation into the failure. 

 

According to a Wikipedia article on the Starship, there have been eight flight tests so far of the integrated Super Heavy booster and Starship orbital vehicle, beginning in 2022.  Three (the fourth, fifth, and sixth) were entirely successful in the sense that both rockets took off and landed intact under control.  The first three and the last two, including last week's test, ended with at least the Starship blowing up, although the booster seems to be working more reliably. 

 

Characteristically, Musk termed the latest test a "minor setback."  Maybe it's minor to one of the world's richest men, but to people in Florida and the Caribbean, a small but non-zero chance of having a piece of rocket come down on your head is perhaps something more than minor. 

 

Comparisons between SpaceX's exploits and the NASA manned spaceflights of the 1960s are inevitable, at least to someone like me who lived through them both.  The Falcon 9 spacecraft, which was the first significant rocket to be introduced by SpaceX, was first launched in 2010, and it was not until ten years later that the company risked putting people on it.  By then it had proved to be one of the most reliable orbital workhorses ever designed, so the risks were reasonably well known. 

 

Although the U. S. space program started off with an embarrassing failure—the December 1957 attempt to orbit a satellite after the Soviet Union beat us into space—it quickly recovered and to my knowledge, there were no major rocket explosions, certainly none with people aboard, until the famous Apollo 13 lunar-orbit service-module failure, which almost left the astronauts stranded. 

 

So we can regard the last two Starship failures as growing pains, perhaps, and look forward to many more before the track record improves to the extent that anyone smart enough to train as an astronaut will be willing to step aboard for a ride.  The question now is whether we should put up with falling space debris indefinitely while SpaceX works the bugs out of its rockets.

 

So far, no one seems to have raised any show-stopping objections.  SpaceX and Musk are formally at the mercy of the FAA, which has to approve each launch and has the power to shut down the entire operation if they decide that the hazards to the public are too great.  Fortunately for Musk, Floridians are used to having rockets around, and there are enough former space-business employees and military personnel in Florida that having a few fireworks fly over now and then doesn't seem to bother them in any major way.  If SpaceX had chosen an orbital path over New York or California, on the other hand, we would probably have heard a lot louder protests and a call to cease and desist.

 

As long as Musk doesn't run out of money, SpaceX will keep trying with the Starship, and once the bugs are worked out the rocket's built-in advantages will come into play.  The goal is to get the cost of each launch down to $10 million or less, which is a factor of ten less than it currently costs.  But there are a lot of fundamentals in place already.

 

Take fuel, for instance.  Instead of using exotic and hazardous fuels such as hydrazine, the engines burn liquid oxygen and liquefied methane, which is the same stuff that people with natural-gas hookups burn in their stoves.  Both the fuel and the oxidizer are relatively cheap and common industrial products. 

 

The rockets themselves are reusable, and ideally will return to the launchpad like all the old sci-fi stories said they should.  What isn't commonly appreciated these days is the spectacular recent advances in automated control systems that both make autonomous drones possible, and amazing feats like rockets landing themselves on launch pads without human intervention.  Such tricks simply weren't safely possible in the 1960s or 1970s, but we have the technology to do it now and SpaceX is using it.

 

I hope that the SpaceX engineers figure out exactly what's making the Starship blow up, and remedy things so that we can have a row of ten or more flawless takeoffs, orbital trips, and landings.  I suspect something on the order of that kind of track record will be required before any humans are allowed on board.  By then, maybe I'll be retired and have the time to go down to Brownsville and hang out for a few days, waiting to see the next successful launch of a Starship.  And if I want to see any fireworks, I'll just buy them myself.

 

Sources:  I referred to the Reuters report on the latest Starship launch and failure at https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-launches-eighth-starship-test-eyeing-ships-mock-satellite-deployment-2025-03-06/, and the Wikipedia article "SpaceX Starship."

A Psychologist Advises Parents About Smartphones

 

Jacqueline Nesi is a professor of psychology at Brown University whose specialty is how technology use affects children, and how parents can deal with this issue.  She has published over fifty peer-reviewed papers and writes a Substack blog on technology, and appears to be one of the best-qualified social scientists to advise a parent when children should be allowed to use smartphones.  In this month's Scientific American, she had the opportunity to summarize the best of her findings in a page or so, and I'm here to tell you that according to her . . . it all depends.

 

As one would expect, her command of the literature is superb.  She starts out by describing the present situation:  at what ages do kids these days get smartphones?  You might be surprised by the results of one study she quotes from an outfit called Common Sense Media.  Over four out of ten ten-year-olds have their own smartphone.  Or at least they say they do.  (Nothing is said about how reliable a ten-year-old's survey response might be.)  71 percent of 12-year-olds have one, and by age 14, 91 percent do. 

 

She then makes the entirely reasonable statement that while these stats show what parents are allowing their kids to do, it doesn't say anything about whether it's good or bad.  Dr. Nesi's goal is to muster research responses to let parents make the right decision "for your child and to help you feel more confident in your decision-making."

 

There's lots more statistics about phones and teens, and she describes some of the flaws in realistic surveys, and then winds up saying a gradual approach might be the best:  first a family-shared iPad, then a dumb flip phone, and then if the teen has proved to be responsible, maybe a smartphone at last. 

 

Leaving aside the expense of this graduated approach, this might not be a bad idea, although I've never personally heard of anybody using it.  But beyond all the statistics and data, there is an underlying philosophical flaw in Dr. Nesi's approach which she never addresses.

 

The word "best" implies a scale of values.  If there is a best, there are good and bad solutions, and presumably even a worst one.  But what Dr. Nesi leaves almost completely alone is the question that motivates this whole issue:  Good and bad according to what scale of values?  Producing 21-year-old fodder for the economic machine?  Leading your teen to Christ?  Or just keeping him or her out of jail until they're on their own? 

 

The closest Dr. Nesi comes to addressing any issues of moral values is when she says ". . . smartphones offer an in-your-pocket portal to everything on the Internet—some of which we'd rather they not see." 

 

Now in a one-page essay, it's unreasonable to expect a social scientist to delve into the depths of moral philosophy and come up with gems of wisdom, or indeed anything at all.  The elephant in the room here is that "science" (which is to say, scientists speaking as scientists) cannot tell us what is right or wrong.  That's not what science is for, at least not as presently practiced.  The science of psychology tries to describe what goes on in peoples' minds, but strictly speaking, it has nothing to say about the morality of thoughts, words, or actions—including giving your ten-year-old a smartphone, which four out of ten parents apparently do. 

 

To be fair, Dr. Nesi respected the boundaries of science in writing this mostly helpful and insightful piece.  She refrains from laying down absolute prescriptions, and says that each case is different.  A very mature and self-controlled ten-year-old (a thing I cannot recall having encountered) might be able to handle a fully-functional smartphone without anything bad happening, but it would be unusual.  And there are fully-grown adults walking around with smartphones that I wish someone would take away from them. 

 

But fundamentally, Dr. Nesi cannot go very far with the parents who are agonizing about what is right to do with regard to smartphones and children.  She can only say, "Well, here's the data.  Best of luck in figuring out what is right for your kids."  And while she's wearing her scientist hat, that's all she has a right to do.

 

There's a reason that as of this writing, 13 states have laws or policies enacted that limit K-12 classroom or school cellphone use.  While relatively few experts have called for a universal ban on underage cellphone use, as it would intrude into the privacy of the parent-child relationship, there are some who argue even in favor of that.  Why do you suppose these movements are happening?

 

One can think of the problem as an iceberg with the tip showing and a whole lot more we don't know much about underneath.  The tip of the iceberg are the cases of smartphone-enabled bullying that lead to suicides, and other smartphone-enabled deaths of teens and children.  Just underneath those cases are the vastly greater number of depressed, anxious, and sleepless children and teenagers whose lives revolve around how they look to others on social media.  And farther out of sight, but perhaps most important of all, lies the issue of how smartphone-mediated pornography, social media, and even news and educational material coming through smartphones molds the character and abilities of an entire generation.  Science can maybe help us a little here, but we need a moral compass to navigate these iceberg-fraught waters, to overload a metaphor.  And you can't find moral compasses in the social-science stockroom.

 

I will close with an anecdote, which has no scientific value as a single data point but spoke volumes to me about the state of smartphone-saturated society at the time.  When we were test-driving what became our new car in 2020, my wife and I exchanged random conversation with the twenty-something salesman who was hoping we would buy the car.  Somehow we got onto the topic of how life was when we were his age, and he spontaneously offered the following, which is the most accurately I can remember what he said from five years ago:  "Sometimes I wish I'd been born back then, and you know why?"  He pulled out his smartphone and said, "These weren't around." 

 

Sources:  Dr. Jacqueline Nesi's article "Kids and Smartphones" appeared on pp. 83-84 of the March 2025 Scientific American.  The statistic about states with smartphone bans in schools is from https://ballotpedia.org/State_policies_on_cellphone_use_in_K-12_public_schools. 

Close Call for Flight 4819 to Toronto

 

A saying among pilots reportedly goes, "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing."  By that criterion, the landing of Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Toronto on Monday afternoon, Feb. 17, was a good landing, at least for most of those on board who did in fact walk away under their own power.  But those who watched the plane land and saw what it looked like afterwards might disagree.

 

Although the Toronto area had recently received as much as 20 inches of snow, airport officials report that the runway was clear when Flight 4819 began its approach to the Toronto airport, which is in the suburb of Mississauga.  The main weather problem was wind, according to a report by CNN, which was gusting from 26 to 38 MPH at a 40-degree angle to the runway.  Landing with even a steady crosswind is a tricky proposition, because the pilot relies on the wind and adjusts his (or her!) controls to keep the plane lined up with the direction of travel.  But if the wind suddenly changes, or drops to nothing, as could conceivably happen, the pilot's carefully calculated orientation and velocity can change just as abruptly.  And something like this evidently happened to the Bombardier CRJ900, which was carrying 76 passengers and four crew members at the time.

 

Normally, just before landing the pilot will "flare" the aircraft, tilting the nose up and slowing the descent until the landing gear contact the runway, ideally without the passengers even noticing they're now on the ground.  That wasn't what happened in this case.  Both reports of passengers on the plane and a video clip taken from a nearby plane show that the jetliner never flared, but hit the ground so hard that the rear (main) landing gear collapsed.  Almost immediately the right wing hit the ground, sheared off, and a fire began where the missing wing exposed fuel. 

 

Then a curious thing happened.  The plane was still going so fast that the remaining left wing was producing plenty of lift.  While sliding along the runway in flames, the plane executed a half barrel roll, turning completely upside-down, until the left wing hit the runway, ending this unique maneuver.  As the fuselage finally slowed down and stopped, the fire did too, leaving 80 passengers and crew members "upside-down hanging like bats," according to one passenger.

 

Not everyone on board was a trained athlete, so getting down off the floor (now the roof) posed problems for several people and resulted in some 21 injuries.  But by week's end, everyone was out of the hospital and in receipt of an offer of $30,000 from Delta for enduring what has to be one of the weirdest landings in aviation history.

 

Most news reports covering this story inevitably mention the previous air accidents that have happened since the New Year, and just to be perverse, I won't (you can find the other two big ones in my previous blogs).  While this one had a happy ending for all concerned, it does make you wonder if something systematic is going on with regard to air safety. 

 

Even with the accidents we've had already, though, flying is per mile one of the safest modes of travel, much safer than driving the same distance in your car.  But psychology is not statistics, and my wife has already asked me with concern in her voice whether I'm going to drive or fly on a business trip I have scheduled later this month.  The logical and more safe thing is to fly, but I understand her concern.

 

Officially, the investigation into this crash has just begun.  I'm sure the pilots will be grilled thoroughly, and the black-box recordings pored over.  We can imagine that there are two extremes of responsibility.  On one extreme, the pilot simply messed up the landing, and the same thing might have happened even if it was a bright sunny day.  On the other extreme, even the best pilot in the world couldn't have dealt successfully with the bizarre and unique wind turbulence that was encountered, and despite all the piloting skills available, the plane failed to flare, hit the runway too hard, and flipped over. 

 

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.  Weather remains a not-completely-predictable factor in aviation, despite technical advances such as CAT (clear-air turbulence) detection, wind-shear sensors around airports, and other instrumentation that can help pilots make safe landings, or decide to delay a landing if things are just too dicey. 

 

That may have been the case here, but figuring out that the world's best pilot couldn't have landed in those particular conditions is not something we can presently do.  You can imagine peppering every runway with tiny anemometers that would give some artificial-intelligence system second-by-second updates on the wind conditions, but most of the time it would just be wasted effort, and it might give bad advice anyway, telling the pilot it's okay to land when it wasn't and vice-versa.  And circumstances can change so fast that the warning might come too late for the pilot to do anything about it. 

 

I will keep my eyes on this investigation and when results are announced, I will try to do an update on what has to be one of the closest near-miss crashes on record, in terms of fatalities.  The investigation should go pretty quickly as all the passengers and crew are around to tell us what they saw, the pilots survived, the black boxes survived, and we have a video of almost the whole thing.  What may be missing are fine-grained data on wind conditions, but even that data may be recoverable from video cameras on site if some cleverness is exercised in that direction. 

 

We can all be grateful that every person on that plane survived, even though the landing was more than anyone bargained for.  I'm not sure whether I would take such a ride myself even if I knew there was $30,000 waiting for me on the other side.  The payments to passengers are chicken feed compared to the loss to the airline represented by a functioning airliner that is now turned into scrap metal. But those payments bought the airline more than what they cost in good will. 

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP report carried by WHEC-TV in Rochester, NY at https://www.whec.com/national-world/plane-that-flipped-over-in-canada-highlights-some-of-the-dangers-of-holding-kids-on-your-lap/, a CNN report at https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/us/what-we-know-delta-plane-crash-canada/index.html,

and the Wikipedia article "Delta Connection Flight 4819." 

The Sierra Club Vision for Texas Energy

 

Matthew Johnson is the deputy director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.  Last week on Valentine's Day, the Austin American-Statesman published in its opinion section Mr. Johnson's thoughts about the state of the Texas energy situation.  If his piece was a valentine to the state's energy interests, it was one that had a lot more thorns than roses.

 

As the disastrous power-grid failure during the February 2021 freeze demonstrated, all was not well with the Texas energy infrastructure, and Mr. Johnson notes that in 2023, Texas voters approved spending $5 billion on grid improvements.  But in his view, the trusting voters of Texas, who simply wanted more reliable electricity at lower costs, were betrayed by "greedy industrial corporations," who directed the money into "risky, polluting, and unnecessary gas-fired power plants."  According to Mr. Johnson, this was a betrayal of public trust.  Instead, during the current session the legislature is once more considering funding both fossil-fuel and nuclear plants.  Mr. Johnson thinks nuclear plants are a bad idea, because they have suffered delays and severe cost overruns in the past.

 

What should have been done, and what he hopes the legislature will do instead, is to put our money into energy-efficiency measures and renewable energy such as more wind and solar power.  He favors a regulation that would require electric utilities, "while they don't generate electricity," to "produce energy efficiency savings that offset 1% of the energy they sell."  And he mentions practical consumer measures such as improved insulation, smart thermostats, and retrofitted water heaters.  He concludes with this rhetorical flourish: "Together we have the power to forge a sustainable path forward that benefits all Texans—not just a select few."

 

I agree with Mr. Johnson on some of his points.  Energy conservation is a good thing.  In fact, without any special regulatory incentives such as the one he promotes, the energy consumption per capita in Texas actually went down by more than 6% from 2019 to 2022.  This is part of a long-term national trend that results from a number of factors, including more efficient industrial processes, the changing nature of energy-intensive industries, and replacement of old housing units by newer and better-insulated ones.  Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson's hopes that even more energy savings will occur, the fastest way to make people and corporations save energy is to make it cost more.  And that directly conflicts with one of Mr. Johnson's other hopes:  that energy would cost less.

 

If Mr. Johnson wants our Texas grid to be more reliable, let's consider the one thing that those desperate power dispatchers wished they had on that cold February night in 2021:  rapidly dispatchable emergency generators, robustly insulated for cold weather.  The type of generator that starts up the fastest—in a matter of minutes—is exactly the kind that Mr. Johnson deplores:  gas-fired turbine plants.  Why Mr. Johnson calls them "risky," I'm not sure.  While any process involving flammable gas can go awry, I'm not aware of any special hazards associated with them.  The only significant pollution they produce is carbon dioxide, but they make less CO₂ per kilowatt than coal or oil-fired plants. In fact, a big reason that CO₂ emissions are not higher than they are is the replacement of coal and oil by natural gas. 

 

Reading between the lines, I think Mr. Johnson's vision for our energy future would be as close to a 100% renewable grid as we can get, and the shuttering of all fossil-fuel plants, and no new nuclear plants.  If we could wave a magic wand and turn his vision into reality today, I would currently be typing in the dark until my laptop battery ran down.  It is nighttime in Texas, and the wind is not blowing much, at least in San Marcos.  While for brief moments, the abundant wind generation capacity of Texas has supplied a third or more of total Texas electricity consumption, the average is much less, and the same is true of solar power.  An all-renewable grid would require storage of power that could keep us running for days with little or no wind and long, cold nights. 

 

A surprising amount of battery-based energy storage has already been connected to the Texas grid.  As of 2024, there was almost 10 GW of storage available.  That's nice, until you realize that Texas' electricity consumption has peaked historically in the range of 80 GW.  And those batteries could supply 10 GW for only a short time—a few hours, perhaps.  So even if we had enough renewables to theoretically supply all our needs, we would need about an equal amount of battery storage to keep us going, at an expense that would lead to a lot of energy conservation, no doubt—but there goes Mr. Johnson's hopes of low electric bills again. 

 

And that's the fault of those "greedy industrial corporations," no doubt.  But by its nature, a modern energy grid is a large-scale industrial project, and the best institution we have found so far for organizing and developing such things is the corporation.  As for "greedy," I doubt that energy companies, or solar-power and wind-turbine companies, for that matter, are any greedier than other industrial sectors.  They have to make a profit of some kind to stay in business.  And while I'm sure that the details of how the Texas legislature interacts with energy companies might not bear public scrutiny too well, in my view spending $5 billion on gas-fired turbine generators was about the best way it could be spent.

 

By the way, some electric utilities do generate their own electricity, contrary to what Mr. Johnson says.  Some buy power from companies that only generate, some both generate and sell, and about the only part of the grid that nobody wants is the most essential one:  the transmission lines themselves.  But even that problem is being addressed with so-called "smart grid" developments, which promise to deliver some of the energy conservation that Mr. Johnson wants.

 

Opinion pages are for expressing opinions, and we are all now more enlightened than we were concerning the opinion of a Sierra Club spokesperson about the Texas energy grid.  All I can say is, I'm glad Mr. Johnson isn't in charge of it.

 

Sources:  The opinion piece "Texas needs more renewables—not fossil fuels" ran in the Friday, Feb. 14, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.  The statistic on Texas energy consumption is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states, and on Texas energy storage capacity I used https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states. 

 

The Potomac Mid-Air Collision: The Role of ADS-B

 

That headline is supposed to make you wonder what ADS-B is, as I did the first time I read about it.  The mid-air collision, of course, is the tragedy that happened last January 29 when American Airlines flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, was coming in for its final approach to runway 33 of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.  About half a mile from the end of the runway, the plane collided with a Black Hawk helicopter.  Both aircraft crashed into the Potomac, killing all 64 on board the airliner and the three crew members on the helicopter.  It was the worst U. S. air disaster in terms of fatalities in over twenty years, and the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is continuing its investigation following a briefing held Feb. 6 for members of Congress.

 

As reported in a piece from CNN, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said at the briefing that it was not clear whether a system called ADS-B in the helicopter was working at the time of the crash.  The critical nature of this question becomes clear when we realize that the height of the helicopter at the time of the crash is something that hasn't yet been explained.

 

Airliners coming in for a landing have to follow a definite glide path in order to reach the runway, and so there are strict restrictions on where other aircraft can go near airports as busy as the Reagan National.  The Black Hawk helicopter was flying something called Route 4, and was practicing what are called "government continuity operations."  In other words, if the President and other key government figures have to get out of town in a hurry, they are going to travel by Black Hawk helicopter, and the people flying the helicopters have to keep in practice. 

 

Presumably, the routes flown by these helicopters are height-restricted so planes approaching the airport will pass above the helicopters.  Whether the Black Hawk involved in the mid-air collision was too high is a critical question, which is where ADS-B comes in.

 

That acronym stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance—Broadcast, and it is a souped-up version of the transponders that commercial aircraft have had for years which tells air-traffic controllers what height a plane is flying.  And that system was a step up from the old follow-the-blips technology that traffic controllers had to use in the early days of radar-assisted air traffic.  Knowing how high an aircraft is helps a controller decide whether two converging blips just mean a harmless intersection of two flight paths at different altitudes, a scary near-miss, or a disaster like the one that happened last month.

 

When fully operational, an ADS-B unit in the Black Hawk would have updated air traffic controllers every second with a GPS-determined three-dimensional location data burst.  This is vastly superior to what the controllers' radar can tell them on its own.  And knowing that the helicopter was high enough to collide with the American Airlines plane would have at least allowed the controllers to alert the pilots to the problem.

 

That is exactly what happened only a day before, when an air traffic controller warned an Embraer ERJ 175 to abort a landing at a different runway at Reagan National because a nearby helicopter was flying at 300 feet.  Although there appeared to be enough altitude difference between the two aircraft, the controller alerted the passenger plane's pilot anyway, who flew around and landed successfully later.  Whether the helicopter in this incident was a Black Hawk or something else is not clear from published reports.  But near-misses like this can provide warning flags for safety-conscious operators, who can apply lessons learned and prevent major disasters such as the one that happened January 29.

 

Late last week, crews successfully recovered all the major pieces of both aircraft involved in the accident, and the hope is that among the rubble is information about whether the helicopter's ADS-B system was working, malfunctioning, or turned off.  The signal that ADS-B transmits is readable by anybody, so in an actual emergency flight carrying the President to parts unknown, it's likely that the system might be turned off for security reasons.  In peacetime it's fine to announce your exact location to all and sundry, but in a combat situation it's the last thing you want to do.

 

The bottom line on this accident remains to be discovered, as we still don't have critical questions answered such as the one about the ADS-B system.  Speaking statistically, if one decided to stage a mid-air collision, one would have quite a challenge, because the volume of air occupied by a Black Hawk is not that large, and exquisite timing and aiming would be required.  Unfortunately, the statistics were not favorable on that deadly evening.

 

According to a Wikipedia article on the ADS-B, the U. S. somewhat lags behind other countries in requiring adoption of the system by most aircraft.  I suspect it is a fairly costly piece of avionics, involving data links to a plane's GPS system and a 1-GHz-range microwave transceiver and antenna.  Both aircraft were definitely equipped with ADS-B, but as mentioned above, it has not been determined whether the Black Hawk's unit was operational at the time of the crash. 

 

More generally, this incident provides a good reason to speed up the adoption of ADS-B, which provides faster and more accurate data to air traffic controllers, who need all the help they can get.  Another issue unearthed at this early point in the investigation is that the control office in charge of the airspace was understaffed at the time, and one controller was handling situations normally dealt with by two individuals.  Whether this understaffing contributed materially to the collision remains to be seen, but the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees air traffic control operations, is not exactly a poster child for governmental efficiency.  Other countries such as Canada have transformed their FAA equivalents into private non-profit organizations, paying for them by user fees, and sometimes this makes things run better and cheaper.  But that is an argument for another day.

 

We will keep an eye on the investigation of Flight 5342's crash, and hope that lessons learned will be applied to keep anything like this from happening again.

 

Sources:  I referred to an ABC News article on the ADS-B question at https://6abc.com/post/washington-dc-plane-crash-major-pieces-helicopter-deadly-midair-collision-recovered-ntsb-says/15882589/, an NBC news article on the helicopter's route at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/black-hawk-helicopter-investigation-pilots-flight-path-dc-plane-crash-rcna190031, and a CNN article on the day before's near-miss at https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/us/dca-plane-helicopter-crash-invs/index.html, besides the Wikipedia articles on "2025 Potomac River mid-air collision" and "Automatic Dependent Surveillance—Broadcast."

 

P. S.  This blog lost one of its most faithful and long-standing readers with the passing of David Jenkins, K4COG, on Feb. 1.  I met David in 1980 at a lecture I gave at the Bible translation organization Wycliffe Bible Translators, and being fellow amateur-radio operators, we hit it off and kept in touch for the following 45 years.  He will be sorely missed by his family and many friends.  To Dave, I say "God bless and 73."

The Pros and Cons of Cancer Blood Tests

 

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott made the news the other day without ever touching a football.  He came out in favor of federal legislation that would require Medicare to pay for a blood test that can detect 20 different types of cancer.  Prescott's mother died of cancer, as did the mother of Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, who is sponsoring the legislation.

 

A recent article in the Austin American-Statesman describes how two million people a year are diagnosed with cancer, but often too late to do anything about it.  Prescott believes in the test so much that he had the Cowboys' entire staff screened at his expense, which was considerable as the tests range between $2000 and $3000 a person.  Cowboys staffer Tad Carper is glad he did, though, because it caught his case of cancer of the tonsils.  Presumably, he had his tonsils removed and that took care of the problem. 

           

This particular test has not yet been approved by the Federal Drug Administration, but if the proposed legislation passes it would automatically be paid for once approval is given.  It's not hard to figure that this would add several billion dollars to the annual cost of Medicare, which is already one of the primary budget-busters in the federal budget.  But who cares if it saves lives?

 

We all care, or should.  From an engineering point of view, this is a classic tradeoff, in the sense that we face a decision which will favor one good at the expense of a different good.  On the one hand, more cancer screening will help us find, and hopefully treat or cure, more cancers, leading to longer lives.  On the other hand, more money spent by the federal government that it doesn't have will lead to less money somewhere else, or inflation, or some other less well-defined but nevertheless negative fiscal consequence sooner or later.  And there's always the possibility that the tests may turn out to be, if not a total boondoggle, at least a lot less effective than we hoped. 

 

Paralysis in Congress (legislative, not literal) being what it is, the chances of this bill getting approved are iffy at best, as it has come up several times in the last few years and never made it into law.  But let's take this idea to the limit. 

 

Suppose we found some genetic test that would not only predict cancers, but would outline our entire medical history, to the extent possible.  Obviously, it couldn't predict things like a person taking poison at the age of 43, but there are many diseases, the main killers of heart disease and cancer among them, which have a strong genetic component.  This pipe dream is already somewhat realistic today and will only become more so in the future.  Wouldn't it be a great idea to profile every baby at birth and lay out his or her entire medical life history at the get-go?

 

On the one hand (here we go again), you could take steps to forestall diseases that a person might be especially prone to.  My wife had breast cancer, which was treated, and now she is cancer-free.  But some women carry genes that make them especially susceptible to breast cancer.  And some of those, on discovering this fact about themselves, decide to undergo pre-emptive double mastectomies. 

 

But what if you find out you'll die of lung cancer at the age of 43, say?  At this time, most lung cancer is basically untreatable except in a palliative sense.  Or what if you're going to get Alzheimer's when your 72 and die at 85?  There's no treatment for that either. 

 

I once read a short story whose author or title I can't recall (what if your memory starts to fade when you're 71?), but the gist of it was a dinner party at which a magician told the fortune of everyone at the table, and they believed him.  He laid out exactly what was going to happen to them from that day forward.  I forget the rest of the story, but the point was that knowing the future is a two-edged sword.  Yes, you can forestall some things that would be good to know about in advance.  But other things are truly inevitable, and knowing them would cast a pall over one's entire future and possibly lead even to depression and suicide. 

 

Pancreatic cancer rates are increasing for unknown reasons, and it is one of the most insidious and deadly types of cancer, often being asymptomatic until it's far too late to treat.  And even if caught in the early stages, it spreads so fast that surgery usually doesn't help.  The most famous recent victim, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was accidentally diagnosed with pancreatic cancer as a result of an examination for something else, and following her surgery for it she survived for an extraordinary eleven years, far above the norm for such a situation.  So having a blood test for pancreatic cancer under the present conditions of treatment protocols would in most cases just let you know earlier that you were going to die of it.  Sometimes ignorance truly is comparative bliss.

 

This brings to mind what the 18th-century wit Samuel Johnson said when he heard that a former acquaintance was going to be executed soon.  "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."  Perhaps it would be a good thing to have a populace with minds concentrated by the knowledge that they are going to die at a future date certain.  But we all know we're going to die sometime anyway, and there's all the difference in the world between knowing that, and knowing when and how.

 

It's up to Congress to decide whether a blood test for many types of cancer should be made available for everyone on Medicare.  But if that does come to pass, you can depend on it to have unintended consequences, some of which we may regret.

 

Sources:  The article by Nicole Villalpando, "Dak Prescott:  Medicare should cover cancer test" appeared on p. 1 of the Saturday Feb. 1, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman. 

Attention Must Be Paid—But To Whom?

 

In Arthur Miller's famous play "Death of a Salesman," the salesman Willy Loman's wife Linda cries out at the climax, "Attention, attention must be paid to such a person."  If we love someone, we honor them with attention, which is something only a conscious being can pay.  In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr takes a look at current concerns that our attention spans are growing shorter because of social media and smartphones. 

 

Some academics see the crisis as real.  Immerwahr quotes theologian Adam Kotsko, who teaches at a small liberal-arts college, as saying ". . . in the past five years, it's as though someone flipped a switch . . . . Students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding."  On the other hand, media that use modes other than just text are getting longer.  Immerwahr notes that one of the most award-winning films of 2024, "The Brutalist," runs well over three hours.  And a highly popular video game called "Baldur's Gate 3" takes a dedicated player about seventy-five hours to play.

 

As Immerwahr points out, every new medium from the printed novel to radio and television gave rise to similar concerns that people will no longer be able to pay adequate attention to things they should attend to.  Interactive media such as TikTok, Facebook, and the like have added a new factor:  the carefully-honed algorithms that profile user preferences and give them more of what they like.  That is how you can pick up your smartphone to check the weather forecast, finally shake yourself forty-five minutes later and ask, "What have I been doing?" and not be able to come up with a satisfactory answer.

 

Overall, though, Immerwahr concludes that if attention spans are in trouble—a concept he says even psychologists can't satisfactorily define—we are still able to devote long unbroken spans of time to things that we are interested in, or things that attract us.  At the end of his essay, he concludes that the real problem is not so much that we can't pay attention, but that what we pay attention to is often overhyped, inflammatory, divisive, or false. 

 

Rod Dreher couldn't agree more.  In his new book Living in Wonder:  Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Dreher calls for a recognition that modern societies have adopted a set of undebated underlying assumptions about the world that derive from the fact that we are, in a pungent phrase, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—conveniently abbreviated WEIRD.  This combination of background factors is highly unusual in world history, and has led us into a materialistic, scientistic worldview that excludes the supernatural from practical consideration.  That, Dreher points out, is a real problem, because the world simply isn't that way.

 

Attention is a kind of love.  One cannot love something, or someone, to whom one pays no attention.  Dreher makes no secret of the fact that he is a capital-O Orthodox Christian.  The Orthodox family of churches sat out the Reformation, and preserve an unbroken tradition of acknowledging the supernatural in worship and theology that goes back all the way to the time of Christ.  His book is full of stories of dreams, visions, apparently coincidental meetings, and similar phenomena that support his contention of God, and demons too, being all around us. 

 

His chapter most relevant to our topic is "Aliens and the Sacred Machine."  In search of meaning, we will pay attention to all sorts of things that don't necessarily fit into the materialist worldview.  With the advent of artificial-intelligence companions (AI girlfriends, for example), some men find that they are more comfortable talking to a machine, or even doing other things with it, than with going through the effort to meet and get to know a real woman. 

 

But that isn't all.  According to Diana Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina Wilmington, many influential people think that AI reveals "nonhuman intelligence from outside our dimension of space-time."  In other words, the "I" that software like ChatGPT uses isn't just a function of the program—there's a non-material personality at work in there somewhere.  And according to Dreher, if it's not God, it's from the other place—in other words, demonic.

 

Reading this section of Dreher's book reminded me powerfully of C. S. Lewis's 1945 science-fiction dystopia That Hideous Strength.  In that book—which has a sketchy outline of what is recognizably the Internet, 45 years before its advent—scientists manage to revive the decapitated head of an evil genius so it serves as a medium of communication between them and certain forces which turn out to be demonic.  Their regard for what they call the Head can only be described as worship, and when people cease to believe in God, they will end up worshiping either themselves or something outside themselves that eventually enslaves them. 

 

When the first caveman painted the first cave painting, he was probably tempted to sit and admire his work instead of paying attention to his fellow cave-dwellers, so in a sense, the problem of distracted attention has always been with us.  But not until recently has it been super-powered by AI algorithms that insidiously lead us away from God and the human beings who deserve our attention, and into the rabbit-holes and dungeons of distraction that wastes the only thing all of us have the same amount of every day—time. 

 

Dreher relates how he was rescued from a near-suicidal focus on his own misery by the ancient practice of reciting the Jesus Prayer, five hundred times a day.  This forced his attention away from himself and his distractions, and while he still has plenty of problems, he was able to get moving again and write a remarkable book. 

 

Those of us who grew up in a less distraction-prone age—the 1960s, say—have no idea what younger people struggle against in trying to pay attention to those objects and people which they know deserve it.  If you believe in such things, say a prayer for them as we face the assaults of AI-powered social media, and be aware that, as Dreher begins his book, "The world is not what we think it is."

 

Sources:  The article, "Check This Out" by Daniel Immerwahr appears on pp. 64-69 of the Jan. 27, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.  Rod Dreher's Living in Wonder was published in 2024 by Zondervan.  C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength is available in numerous editions.  And a description and explanation of the Jesus Prayer is at https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/prayer-fasting-and-almsgiving/the-jesus-prayer.

Did IBM Help with the Holocaust?

 

Edwin Black certainly thinks it did.  In 2001, he published the fruit of years of research he and dozens of volunteers conducted into the history of the International Business Machines Corporation and how its German offspring, called Dehomag, participated in Nazi Germany's highly organized wartime actions, including the execution of six million Jews and other "undesirables."  The resulting 520-page book, IBM and the Holocaust, has to be one of the most excruciatingly detailed and exhaustively researched books on any technical aspect of World War II.  But if you frame the issue in terms of a legal case, the book is more like an extensive set of notes for the prosecution, rather than the prosecution itself. 

 

To say anything meaningful about the book in the space of one column is presumptuous, but I'll try anyway.  Black provides useful context by briefly describing the corporate history of IBM, which formally begins in 1911 with the founding of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.  One of the founders was the German-American inventor Herman Hollerith, whose concept of storing information in the form of little holes in thin stiff cards gave rise to what we would now call the first data-processing machines.  Salesman Thomas J. Watson, who eventually rose to head the company, expanded IBM's customer base beyond the U. S. government, which used "Hollerith cards" as long ago as the 1890 census, and by 1930 Watson was in firm control of what was now known as International Business Machines, or IBM.  Almost in parallel, a German subsidiary whose full name was Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen GmbH (abbreviated "Dehomag") was established and provided punch-card equipment to Germany and other European customers.  Dehomag was owned 90% by IBM USA, which wasn't a problem until Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and the U. S. public perception of what became the Nazi regime turned sour.

 

Author Black accumulated tens of thousands of documents showing exactly how Watson and IBM USA kept Dehomag going throughout World War II, despite its being taken over by Nazi-appointed trustees once the war began.  Profits, which were substantial, built up in frozen accounts which were accessed after the war, and Black shows how IBM-designed and provided punch cards and processing systems allowed the Nazis to count, locate, and round up Jews and other disparaged types when the time came for the concentration camps to ramp up their killings. 

 

From the earliest IBM-facilitated census in 1933 to the last gasp of the Nazi regime in 1945, punch-card systems helped Germany keep track of trains, coordinate production, and account for every death in every concentration camp.  A secret government agency founded in 1937 and called the Maschinelles Berichtwesen (Office of Automated Reporting) kept track of punch-card equipment and supplies, and served as a central clearinghouse for all punch-card technology and operations, which consumed many millions of cards during the war.  And as Black shows, the U. S. minders at IBM kept tabs on Dehomag and other European subsidiaries all the way through the war, sometimes even with the assistance of U. S. diplomatic personnel.

 

That sounds bad enough.  But what is missing in Black's otherwise unimpeachable thoroughness of documentation is any consideration of alternatives, and a kind of moral summing up of exactly what IBM's culpability was.  His book is a classic case of not being able to see, or at least talk about, the forest because of all the trees in the way.  In the introduction, Black admonishes the reader to read the book all the way through, or not at all.  I did what he told me to, but this meant slogging through page after page of minutiae such as examples of bills of sale and machine serial numbers. 

 

Perhaps Black thought his job was simply to report the facts and let the facts speak for themselves.  But facts never do—historians have to say something about what they mean.  And what I kept wishing for was an examination of what Watson (who in a real sense was IBM at the time) could have done differently, and whether it would have made any difference.

 

For example, suppose Watson had simply sold Dehomag at a huge discount to whatever buyers in Germany were around in 1939, say, and walked away from the subsidiary, cutting off all communication with it.  One could argue that this would have been a dereliction of responsibility to IBM's shareholders, as Dehomag was using IBM's technology and patents.  But perhaps it would have been worth it for the war effort.  As it turns out, Dehomag probably had enough expertise to keep going without the parent company's help, but perhaps with less effectiveness.  The Nazis were not about to let go of the informational power that punch-card systems gave them, and the Maschinelles Berichtwesen would have kept the machines running somehow. 

 

As it happened, Watson tried to walk a fine line between not appearing to favor the Nazi regime on the one hand, and not abandoning Dehomag altogether on the other hand.  In 1937 Hitler awarded Watson the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, but in June of 1940, Watson publicly returned the medal, and nearly lost Dehomag in the process.  But intense diplomatic and other efforts kept Dehomag in IBM's orbit, however tenuously.

 

If punch cards had never been invented, Hitler would probably have killed a lot of Jews in World War II anyway, but maybe not as efficiently and thoroughly.  One frustrating aspect of Black's book is that he clearly has only a layman's understanding of exactly how IBM's 1930s punch-card technology operated.  He shows how the Nazis valued and used the technology and how much faster it allowed them to find Jews and track railroad cars, but comparisons between operations carried out with punched cards and modern-day computing are lacking. 

 

Nevertheless, Black has shown that IBM's machines were an essential part of the Nazi war machine, and that Watson and his underlings did nothing to slow down their use—in fact, they assisted to the extent possible, always refraining from asking exactly what the Nazis were doing with their cards. 

 

The IBM of today is a vastly different entity than it was in the 1930s, but the sordid record of its collusion with Nazi Germany is a moral lesson in the responsibilities of corporations in wartime.  Black has given us plenty of material from which to draw that lesson, but the job of learning it is up to us.

 

Sources:  Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust:  The Strategic Allliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation was published by Crown (a division of Random House) in 2001.