Apple, Google, and the Mystery of Music

Back in the dark ages of music reproduction, when state-of-the-art was a plastic box called a cassette tape, yours truly worked for a few summers between college semesters at an audiovisual repair shop.  Most of my time there, I spent in the back room trying to fix recalcitrant tape recorders and players, but once in a while we were short-handed and I actually had to deal with a customer.  One guy I remember in particular.  He had brought in a strange-looking cassette player shaped and colored more or less like a volleyball, and its guts were not cooperating with my attempts to fix it.  One day he stopped in and demanded to see the guy who was actually working on his unit.  I came out to the front counter and tried to explain the problem to him.  He listened patiently, and then all he said was, “Man, I gotta have my music.”

Multiply him by the seven billion or so people on this planet, and you can realize some of the consequences of the fact that music is a universal feature of human culture, and the scale of money to be made by whoever provides music to these masses.  Before mechanical sound reproduction was possible, this was by necessity a retail operation.  Either you made music yourself, which is still the main way to hear music in many parts of the Global South, or you supported a few specialists called musicians, who could entertain as many people at once as could hear the sounds they made—a few thousand at a time at most.  Then came the phonograph, radio, magnetic recording, digital audio, the iPod, and most recently, according to Wired.com, Google and Apple’s attempts to dominate the global supply of streaming music to smartphones. 

Wired reporter Matt Honan admits that music is now a commodity, like gasoline or pork bellies.  The important thing about a commodity is the bulk price that  the distributors pay to the suppliers, which Apple reportedly offered to set at six cents per 100 songs streamed.  If Apple prevailed, that would mean for every song streamed to an individual listener, the entity formerly known as the record label would receive six ten-thousandths of a dollar.  Just a few years ago, when 45-RPM discs were still being sold, royalties might have amounted to as much as a tenth of the cost of a record, say maybe sixty cents.  Of course, you could listen to a record over and over again, but the same is often true of streaming audio.  The point here is that the cash return to the label for each listen has diminished almost to the vanishing point. 

It is not clear that Apple’s low bid will win out, but something close to it probably will.  And in the nature of digital distribution, we will probably end up with one major worldwide supplier of music to the masses, just as Google is the major supplier of search-engine technology.  Is this a bad thing?

It depends on what you think music is for.  Many people I know, especially younger ones, but even including my wife (who turns 57 next Tuesday), view music as a sort of background accessory to their lives, like certain styles of clothing.  The music they listen (or listened) to in their 20s and 30s becomes a part of them, and they select it to accompany or even induce certain moods of relaxation, pleasure, and so on.  For many people, like the gentleman I waited on at the repair shop, life without music is unimaginable, and it forms a continuous undertone to their lives at work and home.  If this is all that music means to you, then it doesn’t matter that much who supplies it, just as the name of your electric utility company probably doesn’t matter to you as long as the price is reasonable and the delivery is reliable.  That’s what dealers in commodities do:  deliver the goods reliably at a reasonable price.

But if you believe music is the most direct path to one’s emotions, in a manner of speaking a direct line to the soul, and can represent the abstraction called beauty, which is one of the “three roads to God” (the other two being truth and goodness)—well, then, the matter becomes a little more serious.  While it is unlikely that Google, Apple, or whoever ends up in charge will discriminate against particular styles of music if such discrimination reduces the bottom line, we can expect censorship to become an issue, especially in countries or regions where restrictive regimes hold power.  In the past, revolutionaries and freedom fighters have used music to great advantage.  In the classic World War II film Casablanca, no one can forget the stirring cafe scene in which a group of German soldiers singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” are drowned out by the French patriots singing “La Marseillaise.”  Say Google becomes the music supplier of choice in China, and the government decides that anything with religious or political overtones is not allowed?  Google and Yahoo and other high-tech firms have already kowtowed to the demands of governments for censorship with regard to search-engine results, and why should songs be any different?

Fortunately, anyone with a pair of lungs and vocal cords can make some kind of music or other.  And even now, in secret house churches, in African villages, and anywhere two or more people decide to sing together, the mysterious thing called music is doing its work in putting human beings in touch with the transcendent.  And we don’t need Apple's or Google’s help with that.

Sources:  The Wired.com story “Why There Are So Many Streaming-Music Rumors Right Now” appeared on Mar. 8, 2013 at http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/03/why-there-are-so-many-streaming-music-rumors-right-now/.  My thoughts on music drew inspiration from a talk (downloaded from iTunes!) by Peter Kreeft entitled “Beauty,” which is available at http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio.htm.  And the name of the 19th-century patriotic song that the Germans sing in Casablanca is disclosed at http://www.vincasa.com/indexwacht.html.

Obama’s Brain Project: A Hall of Mirrors?

One of the famous line drawings of the artist M. C. Escher portrays a realistically drawn hand holding a pencil.  The line drawn by the pen turns out to be the cuff of a shirt sleeve, from which emerges a second hand. . . which grows out of the paper somehow and holds a pencil, whose line is the cuff of a shirt sleeve, from which emerges the first hand.  Escher’s “Drawing Hands” came to mind when I read of a planned initiative by the Obama administration to promote a decade-long project to map the human brain.

Officially, the project is still under wraps until the President announces his budget priorities later this month.  But according to a New York Times report by John Markoff, plans include increased federal funding for neurological research directed at mapping increasingly complex brains, ranging from those of a fruit fly up to the world’s smallest mammal, a type of shrew.  But the ultimate goal is to learn how essentially every neuron in the human brain is connected, and how the whole thing works:  a wiring diagram of the brain, if you will.  Hopes are that such knowledge could lead to new therapies for presently incurable brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

Inevitably, this project has been compared to the Human Genome Project, which was completed about a decade ago at a cost of under $4 billion.  Some estimates say that the information gained from that project has returned up to $140 for every dollar spent.  Aside from the purely economic results, the mapping of the human genome was a landmark scientific achievement in its own right, which has led to further questions and discoveries in an already burgeoning field.

Does the human-brain mapping project hold the same amount of promise, either economically or scientifically?  The first question that should be asked is, “Can it work?”  And some scientists are already voicing doubts.

Markoff quotes neuroscientist Donald G. Stein as saying, “I believe the scientific paradigm underlying this mapping project is, at best, out of date and at worst, simply wrong.”  Apparently, the old analogies of the brain as a massive kind of telephone switchboard, or even a “wet computer,” fail to capture essential aspects of an organism which can develop new neurons in response to external stimuli, and has recently proved to be much more plastic than earlier theories supposed.  To the extent that the project imposes an outdated brain model on researchers, it will not succeed.  But every researcher knows that what you say you are going to do in order to get research money, is not necessarily the thing you actually end up doing, so this concern is probably not as great as you might think.

What is of greater concern now is the question of basic feasibility.  When Dr. Rafael Yuste of Columbia University was asked at a September 2011 conference about what he would really like to be able to do with the brain, he replied, “I want to be able to record from every neuron in the brain at the same time.”  Simply storing the data that would result from such an instrument is a brain-boggling proposition.  One estimate is that you would need the data-storage equivalent of about 600 million hard drives the size of the one on my personal computer (500 gigabytes) to store all the neurological activity that goes on in only one brain for a year.  The next time you say “nothing’s on your mind,” think about that.

Of course, data storage has been getting more efficient for decades, and it will probably continue to do so for a while.  But storing the data is nowhere near as hard as obtaining it in the first place.  Right now, the only way to monitor individual brain neurons is to connect wires to them, which requires opening the skull.  There are various means to monitor the brain non-invasively, but at present they have a fairly poor resolution, on the order of a millimeter at best.  And there are thousands of neurons in each cubic millimeter of brain.  Futuristic plans to send molecule-size data recorders into the brain and record the results on DNA are still purely drawing-board notions, and it is not clear they will ever work.

When the Human Genome Project began, we knew that DNA sequencing was possible—it was just very slow and tedious.  Rapid advances in technology enabled the project to finish ahead of schedule.  It is by no means clear that massive monitoring of individual brain neurons is even theoretically possible.  And unmentioned so far is the question brought up by the Escher drawing:  can the brain really understand itself?  In particular, what would happen if Dr. Yuste gets his wish and one day he sits down at a computer monitor that shows him the output of his own brain in some meaningful way.  If you’ve ever pointed a TV camera at a monitor showing the camera’s own field of view, you have seen some weird patterns show up.  It’s not pleasant to contemplate what it might mean for your own brain to watch itself in action.

As with any great leap in scientific knowledge these days, the rationale for it is that it may lead to practical benefits such as cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s and autism.  While we can’t discount these possibilities, neither can we discount the notion that once it’s possible to exhaustively monitor the activity of the human brain, it may be possible to read thoughts in a way that would amount to the ultimate invasion of privacy.  At the very least, this possibility raises concerns that should be taken seriously.  So far, everyone whose brain has been monitored has given consent to the process, we hope.  But the molecule-size brain monitors could be delivered without the patient’s knowledge or consent. 

So far, this kind of thing is in the realm of science fiction rather than fact.  But before it becomes fact, let’s hope that we have a full public discussion of the potential downsides as well as the benefits of a map of the human brain, assuming such a thing is even possible.

Sources:  John Markoff’s article “Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain,” appeared in the online edition of the New York Times on Feb. 17, 2013, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/science/project-seeks-to-build-map-of-human-brain.html.  He followed it with an analysis piece on the same subject on Feb. 24 at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/science/proposed-brain-mapping-project-faces-significant-hurdles.html.  I relied on both of these pieces for this article.  The M. C. Escher work “Drawing Hands” can be viewed at http://kafee.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/drawing_hands.jpg

The Downsides of DNA Testing: Law Enforcement Versus Rights

Your DNA uniquely identifies you with far more potential certainty than a fingerprint, because it is the chemical signature of your genetic makeup.  And because technology has been developed to produce measureable quantities of DNA from as few as six skin cells, DNA testing has become a must-have tool in the toolbox of law enforcement agencies ranging from the county sheriff’s office to the FBI.  Because DNA evidence is relatively easy to collect, even from unsuspecting suspects, it has proved invaluable in thousands of criminal cases, both to exonerate the innocent and to convict the guilty.

So why would anyone want to put any restrictions on the use of DNA for law enforcement?  Prof. Erin Murphy, of the New York University School of Law, comes up with a host of reasons in a recent article in Scientific American.  Most of them have to do with protecting the rights of innocent people, including the right not to be convicted of a crime you didn’t commit.

How could that happen, if DNA testing is so accurate?  For one thing, the ideal precision of DNA testing assumes ideal conditions:  a “clean” sample uncontaminated by the DNA of anyone other than the criminal, a perfectly conducted error-free laboratory analysis, and flawless record-keeping practices.  In the real world of limited budgets, limited training, and messy crime scenes, none of these conditions can be guaranteed. 

Murphy cites a research study in which researchers submitted the same samples to seventeen different DNA labs for analysis.  Some labs said yes, the defendant was quite possibly the one who committed the crime.  Others said in effect “No way!”  So for whatever reasons, the results of DNA testing in that case were cloudy, to say the least.

Even if labs are run properly and samples taken carefully, DNA data contains a great deal more potential information about a person than the old-style fingerprints ever did.  After all, DNA is the genetic code for making your body.  It contains information about your sex, your heritage (which can often be interpreted in terms of race), and a host of other data which is only now beginning to be accessible through tests that are becoming easier and cheaper all the time.  Murphy points out that it may soon be possible to screen DNA for a person’s potential to commit violent crime.

The last possibility raises the disquieting specter of predictive law enforcement.  We have already seen what happens to those convicted of sex offenses with minors.  Because there is a scientific consensus that recidivism in this particular population is almost 100%, such people are subject to the modern-day equivalent of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter:  they are prevented from living in certain areas, their addresses are matters of public record in many cases, and their civil rights are infringed to a degree that is unprecedented for most other types of crimes. 

Nothing I have written exculpates sex offenders from their often heinous crimes.  But the way we treat them sends the message that we hold the deliverances of science to be of far more importance and predictive power than an individual’s will or intent to reform. 

It is not much of a stretch to imagine a future in which everyone, without exception, is required to submit a DNA sample to a nationwide database, much as you now have to be photographed to obtain a driver’s license.  If experts develop a consensus that certain DNA data is a good predictor of the potential for violent crime, we could move well down the road to the creation of an instant criminal class whose only crime is being born with the wrong DNA.  In some respects, that already happens with race, but at least most people admit that it is wrong for a law enforcement official to pull someone over merely for “DWB” (driving while black).  If scientists and crime labs tell legislators that pre-emptively watching, or even locking up, certain people with certain kinds of DNA would lead to greater good for a greater number of people, the rights of those born with the wrong kind of DNA could be toast.

It can’t happen here, you say?  In a society whose basic judgments of right and wrong are increasingly based upon nothing greater than the deliverances of the legal system, anything can happen if the lawyers and the judges say it can.  And if such a system passed muster by the U. S. Supreme Court, we’d be stuck with it.

Murphy ends her article with a call for an accounting of the full costs, as well as the benefits, of the DNA database that government agencies have accumulated so far.  While there is a widespread impression that DNA testing has been a boon for law enforcement, there are few studies that try to discover exactly what kinds of investigations benefit the most and what the overall error rate is when DNA evidence is used.  Furthermore, she favors a ban against indiscriminate taking of DNA samples from persons who have not formally been charged with a crime.  Because it’s so easy, some law enforcement agencies routinely take DNA samples from almost anyone they stop, whether they are charged or not.  I agree with Murphy that these are probably unconstitutional “searches and seizures” that violate Article 4 of the Bill of Rights.  Once again, the rapid advance of technology, this time in the form of inexpensive DNA testing, has outstripped the ability of the legal system to keep up with it, and to protect the rights of the general public against a small but determined cadre of officials.  

DNA testing is truly a marvelous tool, but as with many other technological advances, it needs to be used with care.  Now is the time to implement regulations and controls to ensure that the rights of both the innocent and the guilty are guarded from its improper use in the future.

Sources:  Prof. Erin Murphy’s article  “The Government Wants Your DNA” appears on pp. 72-77 of the March 2013 edition of Scientific American.  In preparing this piece I referred to a Wikipedia article on the Houston DNA crime lab, which was shown to be in scandalous shape in 2003 in a series of news reports.  It has since been reformed and obtained national accreditation a few years later.

Engineering the Future: Do We Know What We’re Doing?

I assume many of my readers are either engineers, or interested in engineering and its effects on society, so what I am about to say may surprise you.  It is simply this:  engineers are playing a role in American society that may end American society as we have known it up to now.  Let me explain.

George Friedman runs a consulting company in Austin called Stratfor, which keeps an eye on geopolitical trends and charges what are no doubt hefty fees to corporate clients for doing so.  Something—possibly altruism—moved him to write a piece for the Austin American-Statesman that offers his considered opinion (for free) on a subject of interest to all Americans:  the future of American society. 

His argument hinges on two numbers:  the percentage of U. S. gross national product (GNP) going to wages, presumably to lower- and middle-class wage earners; and the percentage of GNP going to corporate profits after taxes.  Statisticians have been keeping tabs on these numbers since 1947, shortly after World War II.  Both of these numbers are currently at extreme levels, smashing all records since the collecting of these statistics began.  But they are going in opposite directions:  the fraction of GNP going to corporate profits is now the highest it’s ever been since 1947—about 11%—and the portion of GNP going to wages is the lowest it’s ever been. 

Rather than taking a simple cheap shot at excess profits, Friedman sees in these numbers support for a contention that corporate America is becoming a victim of its own success.  In 1947, lifetime employment of wage-earners working for large corporations was the norm, and over that lifetime the average hourly worker with only a high-school education could expect to get married, buy a house, a couple of cars, have some kids, and maybe put one or two of the kids through college.  And that is pretty much what happened.  Today, by contrast, a person starting out even with an advanced college degree can expect during one’s career to work for many companies, most of which will get bought out, restructured, or moved offshore at some point, and even engineers with good starting salaries will be fortunate to be continuously employed without large gaps in employment or having to do extensive retraining at several points.

The cause of job instability and rapid change is the streamlining that corporate America underwent in the 1980s, when foreign competition wrought havoc with the old-style gray-flannel-suit world of lifetime employment.  The new-model corporation emerged leaner, meaner, and more efficient, if you measure efficiency (productivity, really) by the return on investment in capital and labor.  Engineers made these productivity gains possible with all the technology, communications systems, and automation improvements that have come online in the last several decades. 

But the labor involved in a typical firm today is vastly different than the labor of sixty years ago.  In 1947, a healthy young man with a tenth-grade education and good hand-eye coordination could get one of those lifetime jobs I mentioned earlier.  Today, to earn the money that would make that 1947 lifestyle possible (upgraded to 2013, of course), he would have to compete with “symbolic manipulators” (in George Gill’s phrase) who hold Ph. Ds and still have to change jobs every few years to get a raise.  That is simply not possible.

Not only is the high-school dropout of today unable to get a decent job; he can’t afford many of the things that today’s economy makes.  That drying up of the domestic market is what Mr. Friedman sees as the really ominous cloud on the horizon.  Already, many U. S. companies are finding that their growth markets are mainly overseas.  We assume that this is because domestic markets are simply saturated, but maybe they are actually shrinking because the less-employed U. S. workers can’t afford to buy the things that the corporations make.   The result?  Millions of young people who can’t get a decent job, can’t afford stable relationships and the other promises of the American dream, and who may turn America into something closer to one of those countries where mobs of unemployed young men create continual civil unrest.

Mr. Friedman poses no solution in his article.  But another writer poses something that, while not exactly a solution, is a clearer diagnosis of the problem.  In The Ways of Judgment, Oliver O’Donovan talks about a different kind of “communication” than the one that engineers are used to discussing.  Way back in the 17th century, the word used to mean “anything good that two or more people have in common.”  Communication meant not just talk, but trade, education, the town or country where people live together, institutions of all kinds—in short, the whole social fabric of benevolent interaction among human beings. 

The essence of this meaning of the word “communication,” O’Donovan says, is work. By “work,” he means “every human activity that enhances the material of communication, developing its social meaning, converting material goods into spiritual forces by the alchemy of communication.”

To O’Donovan, just as “work is the essence of social communication, unemployment is the paradigm of social breakdown.”  O’Donovan means by unemployment not simply being out of a job, but not having a job that makes the world a better place.  Mr. Friedman’s underlying basis for his discussion is GNP—in other words, the economy—as it is for most politicians these days.  But every discussion that starts by assuming economics is the highest good, mistakes a means (money) for an end.  That end, in O’Donovan’s view, is not making money, but social communication, the fruitful interaction of people who have something in common.

We may be facing a future in which the coming generation increasingly cannot find work that allows them an adequate means of social communication.  A big factor in this problem is the deterioration of the family structure, which is both a cause and an effect of economic changes.  The family is probably the most vital and intimate form of social communication of all.  Any nation which neglects the preservation and encouragement of the family will sooner or later end up running on fumes, because mentally and physically healthy, disciplined, competent workers capable of long-range planning do not simply grow on trees.  They typically come from healthy families, and the fewer of those there are, the fewer upstanding citizens we will have to work with in the future.  

I have no grand plans or solutions that will give enough meaningful, remunerative work to enough people that we in America can continue to hope for a better future for most, if not all, of our children.  But if we find a way to do this, I have a feeling it will be the kind of thing that happens not with a government program, or a clever academic insight, but by changing one soul at a time.

Sources:  George Friedman’s article “Crisis that afflicts middle class threatens root of U. S. power” appeared in the Feb. 17, 2013 print edition of the Austin American-Statesman.  The quotations from Oliver O’Donovan’s book The Way of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005) appear on pp. 250-251.

Close Calls with Asteroids: The Burden of Knowledge

When something blew up over a remote part of Siberia near a river named Tunguska on June 30, 1908, the news took days to reach the rest of the world.  More than a decade later, expeditions to the area found that entire forests of trees were flattened over hundreds of square miles.  The scientific consensus of the cause of the “Tunguska event,” as it came to be called, is that an outer-space object roughly 100 meters (300 feet) in diameter exploded in the atmosphere with a force equal to a medium-size hydrogen bomb.  If you were a benevolent Deity wishing to give mankind a wake-up call without doing serious damage, it would be hard to find a less-populated land mass over which to blow up a fast-moving meteorite.  But the next one may not be so relatively harmless.

This week, we will have a close call with something similar.  Asteroid 2012 DA14 is going to zoom within about 28,000 kilometers (roughly 17,000 miles) of earth about half past one in the afternoon on Tuesday (Central Standard Time).  This is closer than the orbits of some satellites, although due to the object’s south-to-north trajectory, we don’t have to worry about losing any DirecTV shows.  We know this thing isn’t going to hit us, and we know so much about its trajectory, because advanced radar tracking systems have defined its orbit precisely enough to allow such predictions.  Although the object was discovered by optical telescopes a year or so ago, the last time it was in our vicinity, radar tracking provides the best information on orbital parameters because it gives you continuous direct readouts of distance and direction. 

While we don’t have to worry about 2012 DA14 hitting us this time, there’s always the possibility that either it or another larger object will some day show up on our doorstep, so to speak, and head directly towards us.  This leads to the intriguing question of how scientists who first figure out such dire news should handle it.  

Seismologists in Italy can serve as an example of what can happen if you keep quiet or minimize something that later turns out to be a genuine hazard.  Back on Oct. 29, 2012, I blogged about the conviction of some seismologists who were held responsible for the deaths of victims of the L’Aquila earthquake of Apr. 6, 2009.  So downplaying a collision with an asteroid, for instance, can lead to trouble if you can be charged with understating a known danger.

On the other hand, suppose you calculate that the thing is going to hit a populated area—New York, say, or Mexico City.  If even an object as small as the Tunguska meteorite headed toward one of these places, it would definitely lead to millions of fatalities, because the blast effects are similar to a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb.  You call a news conference, announce the dire news, the authorities order mass evacuations (in which some panic leads to fatalities, incidentally)—and then the thing hiccups and lands in the Pacific Ocean in pieces so small that we don’t even get a tsunami out of it.  Now you’re in hot water for being the worst Chicken Little of all time.  You said the sky was falling, and it didn’t.  Nobody wants predictions of mass disaster to be realized, but in this case if you as a scientist reach conclusions that point that way, it’s your obligation to speak out.  But you’d better seek out some advice about dealing with the media first.

Once such a disaster appears to be in the offing, humanity would face the question of what to do about it.  A science-fiction movie called “Armageddon” (1998) posed one answer, which has actually been studied for real in some detail:  send a mission to the oncoming rock to blow it into an orbit that will miss the Earth.  There are a lot of technical problems with this idea.  For one thing, we have no experience with blowing up extraterrestrial objects, and we could easily make things worse if the attempt went awry.  Instead of one large rock wiping out one city, we could have dozens of smaller radioactive rocks wiping out lots of cities.  For another thing, depending on how soon we figured out the object’s presence and trajectory, there might simply not be enough time to mount our defense.  Once the space race wound down, our ability to do space projects fast and correctly lagged, and it’s not clear we as a species could get our collective act together fast enough to agree on a path to pursue, let alone carry it out. 

If it looked like a truly mega-scale ending-life-as-we-know-it event was coming, the social effects would be interesting, to say the least.  The title “Armageddon,” of course, is from the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, which refers to a battlefield on which “the kings of the earth” gather, presumably for a final contest with the people of God, although the context does not make it clear exactly what goes on.  But if you believe in Biblical prophecy, you will have to admit that there are clear indications of some kind of astronomical goings-on that are supposed to happen toward the end of the show:  the sun being darkened, the moon turning to blood, and so on.  It is probably a waste of time to try and figure out exactly what kind of orbital mechanics is required to produce the effects described in an apocalyptic work such as Revelation.  But the basic message—that history will end with some sort of widespread natural cataclysm on Earth—is still clear, and worth considering.

Tomorrow, unless the calculations were way off, we can watch video coverage of the flyby of 2012 DA14 and wipe our collective brow and say, “Whew!  That was close.”  But it’s a gentle reminder that, no matter how clever we are with our doings here, there are some things that are still beyond our control. 

Sources:  I found descriptions of the asteroid 2012 DA14 and its near miss on the NASA website http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news177.html.  I also referred to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) for information on “Armageddon,” and to Wikipedia’s “Tunguska event” for information on that phenomenon.  The single reference to Armageddon in the New Testament occurs in Rev. 16:16.

The Worth of Work

Most professional engineers work for pay, and that leads to an interesting question:  which is more important, the work or the pay you get for it?  I bring up that question after reading an essay on work by the well-known medievalist C. S. Lewis. 

In the essay, Lewis distinguished between two types of work.  The first type is work that is worth doing for its own sake.  Some professions are automatically included in this classification:  teachers (Lewis was a professor at Oxford), doctors, pastors, and other members of the helping professions, for instance.  As long as members of these groups do their work faithfully and competently, they should have no problem looking themselves in the mirror and saying, “I’m glad I do what I do, because it makes the world a better place.”  There are other types of work that can fit into this first category, and I’ll get to those in a minute.

The second kind of work is done merely to get a paycheck.  The thing you do for the paycheck is almost irrelevant:  it is simply a means to the end of getting money.  Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong about earning money.  In a fallen world, money and economics are inescapable aspects of existence.  But if you make money your No. 1 priority and aren’t too particular about how you get it, you can end up doing things that, at best, are unnecessary for the world’s betterment, and at worst, positively harm others.  Scam operators, burglars, and drug dealers all get money, but the legal system has objections to their methods.

Where do engineers fit into all this?  There is no easy general answer to that question.  I think the question of pay is high on the list of most young engineering graduates early in their careers.  It’s the first thing they often mention when you ask them what they’ll do after graduation:  “go out and earn some bucks!”  But with their special expertise and competencies in design, engineers at least have a chance to wind up doing the first kind of job:  one that is intrinsically worth doing on its own merits, regardless of the pay scale. 

Besides engineering tasks that serve the obvious helping professions, I think a wide variety of other kinds of engineering jobs are worth doing on their own.  What if the thing you help create doesn’t directly help people, in the sense of medical treatments and so on, but is a thing of beauty—an artistic creation that helps others see the world in a way they had not seen it before?  Take, for example, the platoons of engineers needed to make an animated film these days, the kind that takes the natural world seriously and attempts to portray it the way it really looks and acts. 

If you peruse the output of the Association of Computing Machinery’s annual SIGGRAPH conferences (many examples of which are on YouTube), you will find an amazing array of animations of everything from hair blowing in the wind, to cannonballs blasting through realistic curtains, to ribbons tying themselves into realistic knots.  These things wind up in almost unnoticeable corners of animated films, but they add realism and depth as the engineers behind the scenes overcome the challenges of using great but limited computing power to portray the way physical objects really interact with each other.  The audience gets to see only those simulations that worked.  The ones that blow up or produce screen confetti end up on the digital cutting-room floor, and serve as stepping stones along the way to success. 

A less straightforward example of engineering that is worth doing is the work of engineers who create machines that do work formerly done by people.  The chairman of Foxconn, the company that makes iPhones and employs over a million people worldwide, says that he wants to replace as many of his workers as he can with robots.  Three-dimensional printers that turn CAD drawings into working machines with moving parts are on the market now—my school is thinking of buying one, so you know they can’t be that expensive.  The story of technological unemployment is at least as old as the Industrial Revolution, but signs are that it’s going to be a huge factor in the worldwide economy in the next few years.   And engineers are behind all the technology that will let Foxconn run with more robots than people, if that ever comes to pass.

Does this mean that engineers will eventually work themselves out of a job, like the mythical snake that started eating its own tail until it disappeared?  Some people think so.  A group calling itself the Transhumanists believe computers will soon become smarter than people and basically take over the world, leaving behind the old-fashioned “meat-cage” models of people who are based in natural biology.

Those of us with a Christian worldview know this isn’t possible, however, because machines don’t have spirits.  You could in principle have a world full of machines busily making other machines and exchanging bits and so on, but without humans there would be no spirit and no life.  There might be a great deal going on in that world, but without anyone to see it, it would be a dead world, as dead as the moon. 

The thing called a human being is an amalgam of spirit and matter, and exists because of love.  To the extent we recognize that fact, we are guided into the right occupation and work for the right reasons.  To the extent we forget it, we play into the hands of those for whom money is everything, and for whom love is simply another overhead expense to be eliminated.

Sources:  C. S. Lewis’s essay “Good Work and Good Works” appears as chapter 5 in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1959).  I learned of Foxconn’s plans and interesting facts on 3-D printing from an article by Michael Ventura that appeared in the online edition of the Austin Chronicle on Jan. 25, 2013 at http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2013-01-25/letters-at-3am-what-are-human-beings-for/.

Boeing’s 787 Battery Eggs: All in One Lithium Basket

Excuse the tortured metaphor, but the old advice about not putting all your eggs in one basket applies to engineering as well as to other fields.  The implication is that if the basket with all your eggs slips and falls, you’ve lost everything.  Boeing hasn’t lost everything, but the battery troubles besetting its new 787 Dreamliner could not have come at a worse time.

The 787, the latest-model wide-body jetliner from Boeing that seats up to 290 passengers, has been in commercial service since October 2011, less than a year and a half.  It boasts the latest high-tech advances such as a mainly carbon-fiber airframe for reduced weight and fuel consumption, and mostly electrical control systems, rather than the older pneumatic or hydraulic actuators.  Consequently, its electrical power requirements are about triple that of earlier comparable airliners, and so the electrical power system of the 787 was boosted accordingly.  Like a car, the engines (or turbogenerators driven by engines) provide most of the electrical power in flight, but for emergencies and times when the generators aren’t running, the 787 needs batteries, also like a car.  But lead-acid or even nickel-cadmium batteries were seen to be too heavy for the advanced jet, so designers chose to use two 60-some-pound auxiliary power units (battery banks) that employed lithium-cobalt batteries.

Now, lithium batteries have both virtues and vices.  Their main virtue is that they have the best energy-weight ratio of just about any commercial type of battery, meaning you get more stored energy in a 60-pound lithium battery than you would in the same weight of nickel-cadmium or lead-acid batteries.  So far, so good.  But lithium is one of the more reactive metals, and the chemistry of lithium batteries is very touchy with regard to storage temperatures, charging rates, and defects such as little metal needles that sometimes grow through insulating layers and short the things out.  When any of these problems happen to a severe enough degree, the battery can catch fire.  And once a lithium battery is on fire, there’s very little you can do except to wait till it burns itself out, because all the ingredients for the fire are already inside the battery.  Even the FAA recognizes this because it doesn’t require any fire-fighting equipment to put out lithium-battery fires—just adequate ventilation to make sure the hazardous fumes from the fire don’t harm passengers or crew, and don’t spread the fire to other parts of the plane. 

But there is evidence that in the two lithium-battery fires that occurred on 787s in the last couple of months, even these safety systems didn’t work properly.  After these fires in Boston and Japan, the FAA and most other national air-safety agencies grounded the entire fifty-plane fleet of 787s until the battery problem is resolved. 

This problem clearly could have been worse.  The planes could have crashed, but in the incidents so far, the pilots discovered the problem in enough time to land the planes safely.  In the past, lithium-battery fires in a plane’s cargo compartment have caused the loss of the plane, and that is why you are not allowed to carry loose non-rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in checked luggage on air flights.  (Didn’t know that, did you?)  But anybody who owns or leases a multi-million-dollar investment like a 787 knows that every day you can’t fly it is a big hole in your pocket, and also seriously disrupts flight schedules that were made assuming the new 787s would be available. 

It looks like the planes were designed almost in the expectation that the batteries would catch fire some time or other, even though the ventilation systems apparently didn’t work as well as planned.  The fix is likely to be a challenge, because the plane’s entire electrical system is designed around lithium batteries.  Substituting an older type of battery is feasible, but will involve a major redesign, adding weight and probably space and a lot of certification tests to ensure that the fixes aren’t worse than the original problem. 

We may be getting ahead of the game if we assume the lithium batteries are going to come out of the 787s altogether.  The fact that the fires happened so close in time, after over a year of service, says to me that there may have been some kind of well-controlled slipup either in the manufacture of those particular batteries, or the design of those particular planes.  If engineers and investigators can isolate—and ideally, reproduce—the cause of these fires, and it turns out to be fixable, then it may be a simple matter of making sure those particular conditions don’t happen again, and the planes can fly safely again with the lithium batteries they were originally designed for. 

The trouble with these investigations is that once you get a lithium fire going, there isn’t a lot left to pick through to see what started it.  In the “Sources” section at the end of this blog, I’ve put a URL for a little video that I must say about at the outset, “Kids, don’t try this at home.”  It shows a guy taking apart an ordinary consumer lithium battery and setting fire to it.  After you watch that video, you may have second thoughts about buying a lithium anything, though most people don’t go around taking propane torches to their batteries.

We can be thankful that the battery incidents did not result in any fatalities, and I for one hope that the problem turns out to be discoverable, reproducible under controlled conditions, and fixable.  But in any case, Boeing has some lithium-colored egg on its face for the time being, and has about fifty reasons—equal to the number of 787s sold—to get to the bottom of the problem and solve it to everyone’s satisfaction.

Sources:  I referred in the preparation of this piece to an article in the Tacoma, Washington News-Tribune by John Gillie published online on Jan. 27, 2013 at http://www.thenewstribune.com/2013/01/27/2451132/787-battery-fire-correction-may.html.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Boeing and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  The lithium-fire-from-battery video can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BliWUHSOalU.

Ethical Lessons from Lance

Trying to learn a lesson in ethics from bicyle-racing star Lance Armstrong’s public confession last week is a little like trying to learn a lesson in cooperation from the U. S. Congress.  Neither Mr. Armstrong nor Congress has recently demonstrated a good understanding of the concepts involved.  But as many engineers know, you sometimes learn more from things that go wrong than from unqualified successes.  Mr. Armstrong has given us a personal perspective of what it is like to violate rules for personal gain, and to maintain for years that you’re not violating them until the evidence to the contrary became overwhelming.  Before you say to yourself, “Well, I would never do such a thing,” recall Solzhenitsyn’s words that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”  And hear what it is like to do things that even Mr. Armstrong himself now can hardly believe he did.

In his two-part interview with Oprah Winfrey aired last week, Mr. Armstrong contrasted his extraordinary public image with “the truth.”  The “mythic perfect story” of his overcoming advanced testicular cancer to win the Tour de France seven times, while in reality violating the sport’s rules against artificial means of enhancing performance (collectively called “doping”) leads to lesson No. 1:  what look like small or routine compromises with the truth early on in a process may lead to unforeseen consequences that are huge.  Most of the time, most of the things that we average people do have little or no effect outside a small circle of influence.  But sometimes, what looks at first like a small act of wrongdoing can cascade into a major disaster.  For example, the I-35W bridge collapse on Aug. 1, 2007 in Minnesota was traced largely to a small error in the size of gusset plates that held joints together, although overloading by construction machinery also contributed. 

Ms. Winfrey probed into Mr. Armstrong’s feelings at the time he was winning Tour de France prizes over and over again while knowingly violating the sport’s rules against doping.  She asked, “Was it a big deal to you, did it feel wrong?”  His reply:  “No. Scary.”  “It did not even feel wrong?”  “No.  Even scarier.”  “Did you feel bad about it?”  “No.  The scariest.”  When I teach engineering ethics modules, I usually ask students how they can tell the difference between right and wrong actions.  One of the most common responses is that they have a “feeling” or intuition that a thing is wrong, and that feeling is what they depend on.  While this feeling, called conscience, is quite often a good guide to what in retrospect turns out to be the right choice, consciences can be overpowered by other feelings or motivations.  In Mr. Armstrong’s case, he admits to being a competitiveness junkie and a control freak, putting it bluntly.  The desire to win at all costs was richly rewarded by the increasingly prominent sports competitions he entered, and whatever qualms he may have had about doping were swept away in the practical realization that doping was just a part of what it took to win races.  Lesson No. 2 is:  don’t always trust your feelings about an ethical matter. 

As many readers know, while allegations of doping have been made against Mr. Armstrong and others for many years, it took the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s multi-year investigation to produce results that convinced the Union Cycliste Internationale (the world body governing professional cycling) to revoke his Tour de France wins retroactively.  Despite Mr. Armstrong’s legal challenges to the process, the USADA’s nearly exhaustive thousand-page report contained enough testimony from enough people to convince the UCI, and gradually even most of Mr. Armstrong’s supporters, that the doping charges were basically true.  Only after losing all commercial sponsorships and being forced out of the leadership of his charitable Livestrong Foundation did Mr. Armstrong decide to make an extensive public statement about the matter, in the form of his interview with Oprah Winfrey. 

When someone else discovers that you have run aground ethically, what should you do about it?  For a time that even Mr. Armstrong now admits is too long, he continued an almost knee-jerk reaction to charges of doping by either threatening or filing lawsuits, including one against the USADA itself.  But losing the lawsuits, losing the money from sponsorship contracts, and losing his credibility even with former supporters finally convinced Mr. Armstrong to change tactics and to admit that what he was doing for so many years was a big lie, and involved lying and calling truth-tellers liars on a regular basis.  When a person is held up to millions as an ideal to strive for, an example of noble achievement against tremendous obstacles, that person has more than the usual obligation to keep his nose clean. 

Mr. Armstrong’s nose was not clean.  And now everybody knows it.  He himself points to a moment when he learned that the USADA was going to pursue its case against him.  He now wishes that he had simply asked them for three days in which to confess the truth to his family, his sponsors, and his foundation, and then he would have admitted to the rest of the world that the charges were true.  But even Mr. Armstrong can’t get in a time machine and go back and play that scene differently:  “I wish I could do that but I can’t.”

So we end with Lesson No. 3:  Fighting the truth once it is revealed usually hurts more than admitting you were wrong.  I’m reminded of a case in which some researchers analyzed the Citigroup Center tower in Manhattan in 1978, shortly after its completion.  They found that under some types of wind load, the unusual architecture of the building could cause oscillations that might lead to its collapse.  When its architect William LeMessurier recalculated the wind loads himself, he found that the researchers were right, and voluntarily contacted Citicorp to warn them of the problem.  Without any publicity, the owners worked with LeMessurier to correct the difficulties, but the story was not revealed in public for another twenty years.  LeMessurier came in for both criticism and praise, but the story is basically one of an honest engineer correcting his mistakes at the risk of his reputation.

Sources:  I used two sources for the transcriptions of Lance Armstrong’s interviews with Oprah Winfrey: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/cycling/lancearmstrong/9810801/Lance-Armstrongs-interview-with-Oprah-Winfrey-the-transcript.html for Part 1 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/21087586 for Part 2.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Lance Armstrong, the Citigroup Center, the Missisippi I-35W bridge collapse, William LeMessurier, and for the Aleksander Solzhenitsyn quote, the site http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/10420.Aleksandr_I_Solzhenitsyn. 

Mines of Tears: Uranium Mining and the Navajos

Suppose you are a member of the Navajo Nation living on a reservation near Shiprock, New Mexico in 1960.  You hear of a great opportunity to earn money and help the United States besides.  Uranium has been discovered in many locations in and around the reservation, and a private company has opened a uranium mine in Shiprock.  The work is hard and dirty, but the pay is better than anything else you can find without leaving your land and your people.  You apply for the job and you’re hired.

Something like this was the story for one hundred and fifty Navajos who worked at the Shiprock uranium mine at various times from the 1950s through 1970, when it closed.  A decade later, a public-health researcher managed to track down records of these 150 miners.  By that time, as little as ten years after some of them finally left their jobs when the mine shut down, 133 of these men had died of lung cancer or various forms of lung fibrosis.  That’s 88 percent mortality—a pretty big chance to take for earning a decent wage for a few years.  And it’s even worse when you realize that most of these men had no idea of the chance they were taking by working in a uranium mine.  The 150 Navajos studied are just a sample of the thousands of native Americans affected by uranium mining and its aftereffects.

Mining is dangerous, uranium can be dangerous, and uranium mining can be one of the most risky occupations of all in terms of long-term health hazards unless extraordinary precautions are taken to protect the miners from radon and its products.  Radon, a heavy, odorless, highly radioactive gas, is produced by the decay of U-238, the major constituent of uranium.  Breathing radon and its decay products is one of the best ways to get lung cancer, which is why basements with even very slight detectible levels of radon are a health hazard.  Extensive ventilation of uranium mines and continuous monitoring of radon levels can reduce the risks of uranium mining to reasonable levels, but in many of the mines in and near Navajo land in the American West during the “uranium-boom” period of 1948 to 1970, these safety precautions were neglected in a rush to exploit domestic sources of uranium for both peaceful nuclear reactors and nuclear armaments.  And worse, the miners—many of them Navajos who spoke little or no English—were not informed that they were working in conditions that would very likely shorten their lifetimes.  The Navajo language did not even have a word for “radiation.” 

Even after most of the mines closed following a global decline in uranium prices, the hazards continued.  In 1978, the same year that the Three Mile Island nuclear plant suffered a contained meltdown, a containment dam broke that was holding back 93 million gallons of radioactive and poisonous tailing solution.  This hot muck ran into the Puerco River and contaminated miles of the river and acres of aquifer recharge zones.  Judging by the total amount of radioactivity released, this was arguably the worst accident involving radioactive materials in U. S. history, far exceeding the radiation that Three Mile Island put into the biosphere.  But no official disaster declaration was made, few news outlets mentioned the Puerco River disaster, and only in the last few years has some effort been expended on investigating the full extent of the damage and cleaning up the contaminated areas. 

This story is not one of unmitigated gloom.  Because many of the mines and Navajo miners were in Utah, in 1989 congressmen of that state sponsored a Federal bill to provide monetary compensation for uranium-mine workers whose health was affected by their employment in mines and related processing industries.  This measure was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, and by 2009 over 20,000 workers had received a total of over $1.4 billion in reparations.

But no amount of money will bring back the lives of those who died early deaths because they only wanted to earn a decent living doing something they thought was helping the nation that had treated them so shamefully in the past.  This situation echoes the dismal conditions imposed by early Spanish explorers on the native Americans who were forced to work in gold mines under circumstances that amounted to slavery.  A person of a different color who speaks a different language than you do is easy to regard as a different species, unworthy of the consideration and justice that you give to your own kind.  Some of the earliest protests against Spanish exploitation of the natives were lodged by Catholic missionaries who saw the maltreatment of mine workers as a blasphemy against the God whom they served. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, I first learned of the Navajo experience with uranium mining from a brochure I happened across which was published by the Maryknoll Missioners, a group of lay persons, religious sisters, and priests who devote their lives to serving the underprivileged of the world.  One of the sisters was featured in an article about her activities in trying to establish the extent of radioactive pollution from uranium mining in areas where Navajos live today. 

No doubt, there were engineers involved in the design and operation of the U. S. uranium mines, and it would be easy to blame them in retrospect for the harms done.  In their defense, it must be said that the hazards of uranium mining were poorly understood as late as the 1950s, because until the advent of nuclear weapons and reactors, uranium was only one of a number of specialty metals, and experience with mining it was limited to a few European mines and scattered studies of uranium miners.  The first substantial U. S. Public Health Study of the subject was done with a sample of Navajo uranium miners, and by the time the results confirmed that such mining without proper ventilation was very dangerous, most of the damage had been done, because the lung cancer and other problems that radon causes take twenty years or more to develop.  Nevertheless, enough information was available as early as the 1950s to indicate that the mining of uranium was especially hazardous, and little or nothing was done technically to account for this fact.  At a minimum, the financial reparations paid to the Navajos and their families are a partial acknowledgment that they were deeply wronged, and teach us that long-term health effects are worth considering in any kind of employment.

Sources:  Besides the Maryknoll brochure from which I first learned of this issue, I referred to a Science Education Resource Center website maintained by Carleton College at http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/nativelands/navajo/humanhealth.html and the Wikipedia article “Uranium mining and the Navajo people.”

Texas’ Light Bulb Law: Not the Brightest Bulb On the Tree

Each January brings with it a slew of laws scheduled to take effect on the first of the year, and 2013 is no exception.  As of Jan. 1, for example, it is now illegal to make or sell new 100-watt and 75-watt light bulbs that do not meet the efficiency standards of the federal Energy Independence and Security Act (nicknamed ERISA).  The plain old tungsten-filament argon-filled bulbs that Edison would have recognized don’t make the cut, so if you like them you’d better scout around and scarf up any old ones in stock, because when they’re gone, you won’t be able to find any more—except maybe in Texas.

Why Texas?  Because a year ago, in defiance of the federal ERISA law, the Texas Legislature passed a kind of anti-ERISA bill that specifically allows Texans to make and sell the old-fashioned inefficient kind of bulbs.  According to one of the bill’s sponsors, however, so far no one has rushed to Texas to set up a light bulb factory—possibly because the only U. S. market would be Texas, avoiding the interstate commerce that would be illegal under ERISA.  Of course, if somebody does eventually start making them here, we might find bordering states setting up checkpoints at El Paso and Texarkana, where tough-looking customs inspectors tell you to roll down your window and ask, “Excuse me, ma’am, but did you buy any live animals, plants, or 100- or 75-watt light bulbs not meeting the ERISA standards while you were in Texas?”

The ERISA standard for light bulbs is an example of how legislating technology can be a hazardous occupation.  The law’s name implies that one of its goals was to lower U. S. energy usage.  There are many ways to do this, but it’s harder to think of a more visible one than to banish a device known to every consumer who has ever changed a light bulb.  Law is fundamentally about justice, and laws should be passed to remedy an existing injustice.  Using slightly more electricity for lighting by using an established technology strikes me as one of the more remote kinds of injustice, so I personally regard this part of ERISA as misbegotten and counterproductive.  The public antagonism and loss of respect for legislative wisdom it has aroused have been a price that seems awfully high compared to the benefits in energy savings it may achieve.

On the other hand, the Texas anti-ERISA law is more along the lines of entertainment, which is something you can count on with the Texas legislature.  We have a very part-time legislative body here in Texas, one that meets only once every two years for a few months.  But what it lacks in duration it makes up for in spectacle.  The late long-time observer of Texas politics, Molly Ivins, liked to recall the 63rd legislative session back in 1973, which started out to reform some campaign laws and other things that genuinely needed reforming.  She reports that the effort petered out about halfway through the session, on Apache Belles Day. 

The Apache Belles are the cheerleading team from Tyler Junior College, and Ivins gives this idea of what the show was like:  “The Belles, all encased in tight gold lamé pants with matching vests and wearing white cowboy boots and hats, strutted up the center aisle of the House with their tails twitching in close-order drill . . . .”  Then the emcee instructed the august assembly of legislators (back then virtually all male) to “look up at the House gallery, where, sure enough, six extra Belles were standing.  At a signal. . . the six turned and pertly perched their gold-laméed derrieres over the brass rail of the gallery.  Upon each posterior was a letter, and they spelled out R*E*F*O*R*M.”  I don’t know if the Lege still has an Apache Belles day, but if they don’t, I’m sure they replaced it with something just as interesting.

The irony of the federal ERISA law is that since its passage, private invention and development has done something that stands a much greater chance of bringing energy independence to the U. S. than throwing away slightly less efficient light bulbs, and without any new meddling whatsoever by the federal government.  Hydraulic “fracking” and horizontal drilling have led to a gas and oil boom in this country which some observers believe will allow the U. S. to produce more oil than Saudi Arabia in a few years, and possibly achieve true energy independence in a few more years after that.  Of course, oil producers get various tax breaks that have been in place for decades, and in that regard they indirectly benefit from federal largesse, but it didn’t take a new federal law to get the inventors drilling.  New governmental restrictions on drilling could slow down or stop fracking, though.

The point is that there is probably an appropriate pace and type of legislation pertaining to technical fields such as energy production and consumption, but figuring out what is appropriate in a rapidly changing field is hard for legislatures to do—even mature, responsible ones, which seem lately to be in short supply.  By far the most influential force in the energy field is economics:  the price of various energy commodities and technologies.  Short of draconian things like rationing, the most that regulators can do is to hobble or accelerate certain industries or technologies with the hope that the desired result is not overwhelmed by unanticipated effects that can make the situation a net loss.

ERISA has another shoe in its hand that will drop next year:  40- and 60-watt bulbs will fall under the regulations, so even the dim little bulb in your old refrigerator will become contraband.  Fortunately, the prices of compact fluorescent lamps and even all-LED bulbs is dropping, and so switching to the new kinds may not be as much of a jolt as you might think.  But if anybody has a bunch of old light-bulb-making machinery in their garage that you’d love to find a use for, come on down to Texas.  I’ll introduce you to a state legislator, and there’s no telling what will happen after that.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried a front-page article by David Barer on the Jan. 3, 2013 edition entitled “Texas lightbulb law fails to spark makers.”  Molly Ivins describes the Apache Belles visit on p. 12 of her book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (Random House, 1991).