Encyclopedia Britannica Goes Out of Print

A couple of weeks ago, the Chicago-based firm that publishes the Encyclopedia Britannica announced that it will no longer publish a print edition of that venerable work, which was first published in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1768. Sales had dwindled from a high of 120,000 sets in 1990 to a measly 8,500, and in the meantime the firm had moved on to a variety of educational software products anyway. There is an online edition which will continue, but accessible only by payment of an annual subscription of $70 a year for individuals.

I will miss the print version of Britannica, though I confess it has been many years since I consulted one. I go back a long way with encyclopedias, being one of those peculiar children who preferred to spend recess in third grade curled up in a corner of the classroom with an encyclopedia article on oil refineries rather than going outside to play. Along with thousands of other upwardly-mobile middle-class families, my parents bought a set of the World Book encyclopedia around 1965, complete with yearly updates mailed in a separate supplementary volume for several years. My favorite article was the one on electronics, though I had many others. In a peculiar twist of fate, a few years ago I was approached by an editor of the same World Book to revise their article on electronics, so if you happen to glance into any edition after about 2005 in a public library, you will find your humble scribe’s byline at the end of the electronics entry (that is, unless they’ve revised it again). But as Britannica is now acknowledging, print encyclopedias are a thing of the past, and so in the future, only historians will occasionally rummage around in dusty encyclopedia volumes stowed away in the corners of library storage warehouses.

It’s important to distinguish between the medium and the message here. While the medium has changed from print to bits, the message that an encyclopedia sends is still the same one that Denis Diderot and his Enlightenment colleagues wanted to send with their great Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers in the years 1751 to 1772, which was how long it took for them to complete the twenty-seven-volume work. Their message was that everyone had a right to know the best and the latest about everything, and the encyclopedia they put together was their effort to share knowledge (especially scientific knowledge) with the entire (literate) world.

At the time the French Encyclopédie and the Edinburgh Britannica were published, print was the very latest and best way to propagate knowledge to the largest number of people. When Wikipedia came along, it showed how an online community of interested parties could create a living, continuously revised encyclopedia that in breadth of coverage far surpassed anything that could be printed. As far as accuracy and quality of authors go, Wikipedia is occasionally spotty, as compared to the carefully selected writers of articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica. But since I have begun using Wikipedia (and I probably consult it at least an average of once a day), I have found it to be an invaluable reference with regard to scientific matters, and pretty good on most other types of subjects.

Engineers have played a vital role in this transition from print to electronic media, and it is no coincidence that modern scientific engineering as a profession dates back to around the same time that the first encyclopedias were published. Engineering depends on the free exchange of scientific principles rather than the carefully-guarded and often poorly understood trade secrets that were handed down from generation to generation during the Middle Ages. “Looking it up” is as natural an action for an engineer as breathing, and without electronic access to technical information from both public and proprietary sources, modern engineering would be much more difficult. Any engineer over 40 or so remembers the piles and piles of print catalogs and data manuals published by manufacturers and distributors, most of which have also turned into websites by now.

I try to think of a downside to all this, and the only ones I can come up with are two: (1) encumbrances to historical research and (2) the unlikely global disaster scenario. Shortly before we left Massachusetts in 1999, I went to a tag sale on the common in Belchertown and found somebody selling a complete set of the Columbia Encyclopedia for some ridiculously low price like fifteen dollars. I bought it and it has an honored place in my bookshelves, though it is years since I looked at it either. But if I ever want to know what the general perception of a certain subject was around 1980, I can look in that encyclopedia and find out. You can’t do that online, not easily, anyway, although with projects such as Google’s attempt to put every non-copyrighted page of print online, that problem may soon go away too.

That leaves the global-disaster scenario, one in which all Internet service and servers are so disrupted that we basically all go back to pre-Internet days for an indefinite period of time. No Wikipedia, no Facebook, and no TV or phone service either, probably, if things got that bad. In such a dire situation, I suspect we would all have more urgent things on our minds than looking up encyclopedia articles, such as where our next meal is coming from. But the chances of something this awful happening are pretty small, I hope.

So as we bid the print version of Britannica farewell, I hope there is some third-grader out there who can look up oil refineries, or the biology of the eggplant, or some equally obscure subject online during recess. But I don’t know if they let you do that these days.

Sources: I used information from two news articles on the Encyclopedia Britannica’s ceasing print publication: one from the Financial Times at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7382302e-6d1f-11e1-ab1a-00144feab49a.html#axzz1qDVJfnUk and an Associated Press article carried by the Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/encyclopaedia-britannica-to-stop-publishing-print-editions-will-continue-digital-versions/2012/03/13/gIQAtKSRAS_story.html. And I also consulted Wikipedia on Denis Diderot.

Photography, Christianity, and Modernity

Ever ask a fish what water is like? Even if fish could talk, they probably couldn’t give a very good answer, because water is such a basic, constant, and unchanging part of the existence of a fish. Some of the hardest things to notice are all around us, all the time, and shared by everyone we know, and it takes a lot of effort to disengage yourself mentally from your surroundings in order to see assumptions or underlying ideas that have powerful effects.

We have Craig M. Gay to thank for making this effort. Author of the 1998 book The Way of the (Modern) World, he has asked why modern life makes it so easy to act as though God doesn’t exist. I cannot pretend to summarize in a thousand-word blog what took Prof. Gay 314 pages to say, so I will use a personal example to give you a flavor or sampling of his findings. For the full meal, see the book.

I have been an amateur photographer since my teenage years, when I rigged up a crude darkroom in a disused garage apartment and developed and printed my own black-and-white photos of things like my home laboratory, my cat, and my cousin, who posed angrily for the camera as he wielded a baseball bat. You can go about photography in various ways, and I will attempt to describe two possible extremes that express a contrast or polarity that keeps coming up in various forms all through Gay’s book. The polarity is between modernity, meaning the way we in the U. S. have done things since, say, 1900 (if not earlier); and something that doesn’t have a simple name, but let us call it historic Christianity, although that doesn’t really capture the totality of the other pole.

How would a historic Christian go about being a photographer? He or she would, I think, approach photography as an art form, a way of helping others to see things that they might not otherwise notice. Art which is historically Christian in spirit somehow glorifies God and His creation by showing naturally beautiful, good, or true things, or by using elements of creation in new ways that help others to see God’s actions and achievements. Does this mean that all such photographs would be “pretty” in a conventional sense? Hardly. But photography, if pursued in the way I mean, would connect the viewer to something important in the divine scheme of things: a holy person, perhaps, or a story reflecting the divine nature. If this sounds restrictive and censorious, you misunderstand me. God created human bodies, for example, so people in all stages of dress or undress could conceivably show up in an exhibit of photographs taken in this historic Christian sense. The technology (chemical, digital, whatever) would be wholly subsumed in the God-to-person and person-to-person communication that the photographs enable to take place.

Now, how would a modern person go about being a photographer? More or less the way I do it, as it turns out, because despite my best efforts in some areas I am in most ways a typical modern. The focus (pardon the pun) would be on the technology: more megapixels, more convenience in file sharing, higher resolution, more levers to pull and knobs to turn, etc. What to photograph would be way down the list. Ease of control and reliability and uniformity of result would be important, as well as the possibility of mass duplication and broadcast to as many people as possible, regardless of whether the picture would mean anything to them or not. Lots of money would change hands because of this process, if possible. The machinery used would be as complicated and up-to-date as you can get, and would work exactly the way the user plans it all the time. There would be impersonal criteria by which photographs would be judged, with a grand hierarchy of amateurs at the bottom, then lower-paid and higher-paid professionals toward the top. The higher-paid people would get a lot of money, fame, and the other universal desirables of modern life.

Do you see the difference? Some words that relate to what I am inadequately terming historic Christianity are: hope (not certainty or assurance), creative making (not mass production), hand tools (not sophisticated machines), faith and trust (not rational thought ruling everything), one’s career viewed as a calling (not just work or a job), obedience (not being an autonomous self-definer), and patience (not impatience). The words in parentheses all describe modernity in its many and various guises, as Gay portrays it. The great irony he points out is that much of what modernity urges on us was originated by Christianity: the concept of the individual, the notion of science as the pursuit of truth, and many other tropes as well. But Gay shows how when these things are ripped out of their Christian context and set up as absolutes, they start banging into each other, and in order to please first this modern demand, then that one, we run around like ants on an anthill that’s been knocked down, never finding our place in the world and never being truly satisfied with anything.

As I said, you can’t summarize a three-hundred-page book in a blog. But Gay is on to something in this book, and as I let his ideas soak in I may have more to say about this in the future.

Sources: Craig M. Gay, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Regent College International Graduate School of Christian Studies, is author of The Way of the (Modern) World, or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist (Eerdmans, 1998).

Has Chevy’s Volt Shot Its Bolt?

Excuse the poetry, but on March 2, General Motors announced that it was suspending production of its Chevy Volt, a nearly-all-electric car that was one of the most ballyhooed recent achievements of the government-resurrected (and still partly government-owned) firm. Earlier last year, GM announced its hopes to sell as many as 45,000 Volts in 2012. But after anemic sales of only about 1600 in January and February of this year combined, GM’s management decided they had plenty of Volts on hand and shut down the single production line in Michigan.

The last time the Volt was in the news was also not favorable. In some side-collision crash tests, some coolant apparently spilled onto the giant lithium battery in the vehicle and the battery caught fire. If you poke around YouTube and look for “lithium battery burning” you can see why this might have scared off a few consumers. Once lithium gets going, there’s not a lot that can stop it. Of course, the same can be said for gasoline. We’re used to people being incinerated in fiery gas-powered collisions, but not lithium-powered ones. Whether GM will really resume production in five weeks, as they say they will, only time will tell.

At somewhere north of $40,000, purchasing a Volt is nobody’s rational economic decision. I think it is safe to say that most, if not all, of those who have bought Volts have done so for reasons other than economy. Someone estimated that even if gas goes up to $8 a gallon, you would have to drive a 90-mpg Volt for nine years in order to make back your investment in fuel savings. There are 90-mpg motorbikes around, and they don’t cost near as much as an underwater house.

No, the main reason anyone would buy a Volt—and the main reason GM makes the car in the first place—is that it counts as a virtuous act in the Canon of Worldly Virtues. A person driving a Volt has significantly, and rather ostentatiously, reduced his or her carbon footprint, thus infinitesimally postponing the looming climate-change apocalypse which is an article of faith for millions around the world. There are other reasons for buying a Volt which are less globally conscious. You may be an electrical engineer who simply thinks driving an electric car is cool. And fortunately for GM, a good number of such people are rich enough to spend $45,000 on a car that does basically what other cars do for $20,000. But rich people have all sorts of hobbies, and the government doesn’t subsidize giant corporations to cater to all of their whims.

The problem with the Volt is not technical—I’m sure they’ll fix the battery-fire problem to where the Volt is as safe in a collision as an all-gas-powered vehicle, if not safer. In trying to sell the Volt, GM is doing something analogous to pushing water uphill. It is in the nature of water to run downhill unless rigidly contained in a pipe. And it is the nature of people to spend their limited funds on vehicles that deliver the most performance—meaning reliability, reasonable fuel economy, and a certain level of comfort and safety—for the fewest dollars.

This is why the fastest-growing automotive markets in the world are in places like China and India, where most people don’t yet have cars and want to buy one. And it so happens that today, given the availability of fossil fuels and the state of the propulsion art, the most economical way to power a personal motor vehicle is with gasoline. So in emerging markets, gas-powered cars practically sell themselves. Government subsidies or tax exemptions are not needed.

Not so for electrics. Discounting the few hobbyists, driving an electric car makes sense only to people for whom ideology counts more than economy. To make this more realistic, I will use an example from my own moral rules. Suppose one day we woke up and all the grocery stores except for a few pricey mom-and-pop operations were taken over by the porn industry. To buy a loaf of bread, you would now have to walk through the equivalent of a sex-toy store. I am morally opposed to the porn industry, so in such a circumstance I would accept almost any inconvenience and even pay several times the porn-store food prices, to shop in an expensive mom-and-pop grocery store that didn’t also sell porn. (Yes, I know about Cosmopolitan—but try and find a grocery store anywhere that doesn’t carry it.)

The best I can make out is that to some people—and I suppose these are the kinds of people who buy Volts—burning fossil fuels is as repugnant to them as porn is to me. So they leap—or at least walk—at the chance to buy a car that burns much less gas than your typical car does. The problem GM faces is that there are simply not enough of those kind of people, at least not enough of them who are rich enough to put their money where their ideology is.

As I mentioned, the only way to make water run uphill is to pump it into a pipe where it has no choice but to go that way. And the only way in the present economic environment that GM, or anybody else, is going to sell a lot of mostly-electric cars is if the government forces people to buy them, either through expensive subsidies or quotas or some other form of compulsion. We have already experienced a form of government compulsion in the automotive sector in the form of the ethanol mandate. Gasoline has to have a certain amount of ethanol in it now, and while this was a short-term boon for the farmers, it severely distorted the food economy and some studies have shown that, when you include the extra trouble and expense of making ethanol, it may not save fossil fuel anyway.

As an electrical engineer, I’m sorry to hear that GM won’t be making Volts for a while. But in the larger scheme of things, it seems like the only sensible thing to do.

Sources: An AP story about the suspension of Volt production can be found at http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VOLT_PRODUCTION_HALTED.

Google’s New Privacy Policy

Like it or not, Google, in its sixty or so manifold services and its status as the six-hundred-pound gorilla of the Internet industry, is a part of the life of anyone who uses the Internet. So when Google changes the way it deals with information it obtains from its millions of users, it is a big deal. Starting last January, Google began announcing a major policy change to be implemented March 1, to consolidate the various privacy policies and information it gathers from users. In a nutshell, Google said it was knocking down a lot of walls that had been in place between its different services. Just to keep things specific, I will use as examples three of the services I often deal with.

Google’s search engine is my default on all my browsers, and I rarely use anyone else’s engine. I also view YouTube occasionally, which was purchased by Google several Internet eons ago, way back in 2006. And the blog you are reading operates through Blogger, also owned by Google. All we have to go on is what Google says, but presumably before the change in policy went into effect on March 1, the things I inquired about on Google’s search engine were known to the search-engine division, but not the YouTube or the Blogger divisions, and likewise with information on me in the other two divisions. Now, however, Google has merged all the lowdown on Karl David Stephan into one dossier, which contains information on everything I do with any of Google’s five dozen services. Why did they do this?

There are nominal reasons and real reasons, and the two probably overlap. The nominal reasons, which Google touted in its announcements, are that it is silly for people to have to deal with upwards of sixty different privacy policies when Google can come up with one uniform policy for all its services. Also, sharing information among services can improve their quality. One commentator said that for example, while you are doing a Google search, maybe now you’ll come across a little item reminding you that in half an hour you have an urgent appointment that you put on your Google calendar. To some people this would be a welcome reminder, but for me it would be both annoying and a little creepy, like a ghostly secretary I never hired.

The real reasons stem from the fact that at bottom, Google is a profit-making enterprise. This is in itself neither necessarily good nor bad, but it is a very useful fact to bear in mind whenever one is trying to figure out why Google does anything. From this viewpoint, one of the real reasons is that the change will allow Google to be more effective in selling advertising. Instead of telling Joe the Plumber (or whoever) about a new kind of pipe wrench only when he does a Google search for pipe wrenches, Google can now put ads for pipe wrenches next to the cat videos Joe likes to watch on YouTube. I blogged on this sort of thing some time back when I started seeing ads for a particular kind of hardware I had searched on previously, showing up in a totally unrelated web search of mine. But you get used to it, I guess.

Google’s revised policy is not without controversy. In Europe, for example, where laws regarding privacy are typically much more restrictive than in the U. S., the European Justice Commissioner has stated his opinion that Google’s new policy violates European laws. And even in the more easygoing U. S., some senators and state attorneys general have raised their eyebrows at the changes, although things haven’t moved to the point of formal hearings or lawsuits yet.

This kind of issue has arisen before in many contexts: with regard to privacy of a person’s mail, or phone conversations, or bank account. As I understand things, it is a federal crime for a postal employee to divulge information about what kind of mail a person receives. As for private telecommunications and banking networks, it is in the interests of those organizations to protect their customers’ privacy, because significant violations would result in a loss of business, especially in today’s deregulated world.

The case is somewhat different with Google, which is as close to a monopoly as I can think of for any modern industry. Historically, the Internet has thrived on minimal government interference, either positive or negative. The industry grew largely without government support (except for some very early R&D work), and has remained largely free of regulation or taxation, which may partly account for its generally efficient and benign presence in most peoples’ lives. It would be a shame if the U. S. government adopts some heavy-handed attitude that would stifle the mostly good job that Google has done in exploiting business opportunities while benefiting its customers in many ways.

On the other hand, any major policy change by Google affects all of us whether we like it or not. As long as the changes stay at the level of advertisements and little enhancements of services, I personally do not have much of a problem with them. I can imagine a dystopic scenario in which Google is taken over by some evil Big-Brother-type dictator, who uses information from Google’s databases to wipe out all left-handed red-headed libertarians, for example, or some other group. But such a thing is hard to imagine, and it was the late R. J. Neuhaus who liked to say that a person (or a corporation) is seldom more innocently employed when they are simply making money.

So I have decided to live with the new Google privacy policies, because I have little choice to do otherwise. But it is appropriate that we at least examine them closely and be aware of any signs that they are being used in a way that is inimical or unfair. So far, however, I haven’t noticed anything like that. Five days isn’t much to go on, though.

Sources: Besides the official announcements Google has been posting about its privacy-policy changes, I consulted articles published in TechWeek Europe at http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/reding-google-privacy-policy-is-illegal-64637 and cnet. com at http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57388626-285/five-ways-googles-unified-privacy-policy-affects-you/.

Train Crash in Argentina Claims 51 Lives

Last Wednesday, an eight-car commuter train headed into a station named Once in Buenos Aires at the normal speed of 21 kilometers per hour (about 16 miles per hour). The track ahead dead-ended past the platform, so it was even more important than usual that the train slow down and stop at the right place. On a CCTV recording, you can see that the train simply keeps moving at the same speed until the lead car hits the buffers at the end of the track. A cloud of brownish dust flies up to obscure what becomes all too clear seconds later: the second car telescopes inside the first car, killing a total of 51 people, and injuring about 700—about half of all the people on the train. Saturday, after relatives of a man who was not officially listed as missing kept up intense pressure on rescue workers, the man’s body—the 51st victim—was finally pulled from the wreckage, touching off riots in Buenos Aires.

Railway fatalities have nearly as long a history as railways. One of the first successful steam locomotives, George Stephenson’s Rocket, was responsible in 1830 for the death of William Hoskisson, a well-known member of Parliament who failed to notice the approaching train until it was too late and fell on the tracks. Stephenson himself drove the train carrying the dying Hoskisson to hospital, but to no avail. Ironically, Hoskisson’s death was so widely reported that it served to draw worldwide attention to the beneficial aspects of the new railway technology as well as its dangers.

An investigation will be needed before all the essential facts are known about the Argentine disaster. But the driver survived and told reporters that the brakes failed, and that he had tried to contact supervisors by radio earlier about brake problems but was told to “carry on.” Earlier accidents have happened in the same area, and poor maintenance has been cited as a contributory factor in the past. Recordings, inspection of equipment, and other evidence will either confirm or contradict the driver’s claims. But a lot can be learned already from the way the Buenos Aires commuter rail transportation system is operated.

Privately owned companies contract with the government for the privilege of operating the trains, but apparently they are restricted by regulations governing fares and fare increases. It is often useful in engineering-ethics situations to list the interested and affected parties in the case. In this situation the major players are: (1) the commuting public, which has only indirect control of the system through their elected representatives’ regulations, but has to use and pay for the system; (2) the railway workers, including operating and maintenance personnel; (3) the management and owners of the private firms that run the railway concessions; (4) the Argentine government agencies and officials who regulate, deal with, inspect, and investigate railways and incidents such as this accident; and (5) the general Argentine public which does not ride the Buenos Aires commuter-rail system, but which elects government officials, pays taxes, and shares in such national tragedies as railway accidents of this kind.

Worldwide, rail-based public transportation systems are rarely profitable on a strictly private-enterprise basis, despite the superficial attractiveness of monopoly status and large customer bases. Despite economies of scale, the personnel, maintenance, and upkeep costs of rail systems would price them out of the market they are intended to serve—namely, the poorer populace who can’t afford cars—if they charged enough to both make a reasonable profit and reinvest sufficiently to allow for depreciation of equipment and so on. This is why, after a disastrous experiment with private ownership of subways in New York City around the turn of the 20th century, the city government took over all of them and now operates the subways with a deficit made up with general tax revenues.

The Buenos Aires system went the other way a decade or so ago: the national railway system was largely privatized. Faced with a situation where raising fares is not an option, a private firm compelled to make a profit is going to cut costs by deferring maintenance and improvements. But you can only do that so far until something dreadful happens such as the accident of last week.

The particular question of what immediately caused this accident will very likely be cleared up in a matter of months, if not weeks. But that leaves the larger problem of how to make sure that accidents like this don’t happen again. For every major accident with a mechanical cause, there are usually dozens of near-miss incidents that serve as warnings to perceptive engineers and operators, unless their hands are tied by lack of resources. It looks like major changes will be needed in the economics and management of Argentine commuter rail lines if we can hope to avoid another such disaster in the future.

Sources: I used several articles on the accident, specifically these: from the BBC news services at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-17169315 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-17149814, Britain’s Daily Mirror at http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/buenos-aires-train-crash-violence-743309, and Yahoo News at http://news.yahoo.com/argentine-train-crash-kills-49-people-hurts-600-162519779.html.

Half a Century After Glenn’s Flight, NASA Tries to Make Up Its Mind

In February of 1962, I was eight years old. That was plenty old enough to watch Walter Cronkite on CBS-TV narrate the countdown for astronaut John Glenn’s attempt to be the first American to orbit the earth. I say “attempt” because at the time, nobody knew for sure if it would work. When the rocket fired up and sailed safely into the sky, Cronkite dropped his objectivity enough to say, “Go, baby!” The world of space flight (and journalism, for that matter) would never be the same.

By that time, NASA had gotten on the one track to the moon, passing by logical waystations during the sixties: the Mercury single-man capsule, the Gemini two-man unit, and the Apollo, which became the way we ultimately got to the moon. There was a breathtaking simplicity about the program, which belied the infinite technical complexities of manned spaceflight. We were going to land men on the moon before the Russians did—it was that simple. Even an eight-year-old could understand that. And we succeeded.

Now I’m 58, John Glenn is 90, and NASA—well, I hate to admit it, but NASA is no longer the stripped-down, single-minded Cold-War-by-other-means fighting machine it was. Try explaining the current NASA budget to an eight-year-old, or a twenty-eight-year-old. Unless he has degrees in accounting and political science, he’s not likely to see much to be excited about.

There are two main initiatives at NASA these days concerning manned space flight (all of which, incidentally, is anathema to many scientists who would rather see dollars go to more efficient unmanned robotic flights). One initiative is called the Commercial Crew Program. This is aimed at developing not only crews, but an entire program, that commercial firms design and build with NASA’s “guidance.” NASA has always had contractors—it has never been in the business of manufacturing major flight hardware without commercial help—but the Commercial Crew Program is intended to move the entire enterprise closer to a free-market model, somewhat like the airlines. Of course, the average profit margin of commercial airlines over several decades is about zero, so that may not be a good model. Add to that the fact that there are not a lot of customers for manned-space-flight services, other than the U. S. and some other governments, and you have a very strange economic proposition, to say the least. This has not kept lots of companies from flocking to NASA’s information sessions to see how they can get a piece of the pie, but when Congress cut the 2011 allocation for this project to only $400 million, the schedule stretched out and it is not clear that NASA will get the $830 million it’s asking for in the present budget cycle.

One big reason for that is the Obama administration is proposing an overall flat budget for 2013 for NASA, which means the increase for the Commercial Crew Program might have to come out of the other big initiative for manned space flight, the Orion/Space Launch System. Orion (for short) is intended for deep-space activities, to asteroids or beyond. It has gone through several transformations, but clearly needs a lot of money (around $1 billion a year) to go anywhere anytime soon, which means probably ten to fifteen years. Orion is the logical extension of the quasi-religious feeling that man is destined to keep on exploring farther and farther reaches of space. Its supporters include hard-core spaceniks and a lot of Congressmen and contractors (many in Texas) who want to keep NASA’s existing facilities busy and its employees employed. If all NASA did was to contract out manned space flight to commercial firms, you could do that out of a couple of buildings in Washington, and what would we do with all those other labs and things?

I am sympathetic with people who do not want to lose their jobs. But I would also like to know that their jobs are worth doing, and will issue in some meritorious achieved goal within the foreseeable future. The way NASA is thrashing around like a canvas bag full of cats fighting does not encourage the belief that we will see strong, clear, directed effort come from the agency or its contractors any time soon.

NASA was once a great organization, and achieved great things. It still has pockets of high-quality and unique talent that we should keep around in some form for reasons of national pride and capability. John Glenn was once a strong, brave, 40-year-old astronaut. And in 1998, at age 77 he became the oldest person to go into space, on a Space Shuttle flight. But even Glenn has wisely put space flight behind him, personally, and long ago passed the torch to younger people.

As some commentators have proposed recently, perhaps NASA in its present form has outlived its ability to achieve simple, clear goals, and has become such a battered political football that it would be easier to start over with two or three different agencies, each directed at a specific goal that you could explain to an eight-year-old. But the way things are going with political paralysis in Washington, the chances of this getting done are small.

Manned space flight is a novel activity in historical terms, deeply tied to technology, which I think deserves to continue on some basis. It is so costly that turning the whole thing over to private hands is practically to give up, so the government needs to be involved at some level. But trying to do too many things at once, especially when you’re older, is a recipe, if not for disaster, at least for a lot of wasted effort. And engineers hate to waste effort.

Sources: I consulted two articles on recent NASA activities in the Commercial Crew Program, one published by Aviation Week at http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=space&id=news/awx/2012/02/14/awx_02_14_2012_p0-425174.xml&headline=Commercial%20Crew%20Push%20Has%20Some%20Concerned

and another at a website that promotes the space industry called www.spacefellowship.com: http://spacefellowship.com/news/art27725/commercial-crew-program-introduces-ccicap-initiative.html.

For those of you who never saw it, YouTube has a clip of the actual launch of John Glenn’s three-orbit flight on Feb. 22, 1962 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whSYzSbJvsc.

Discovery Channel Seeks a Top Engineer

Writing a blog attracts many kinds of responses, some of which are more interesting than others. A few days ago I got an email from someone at an outfit called Pilgrim Productions. Turns out they are looking for cast members for a new reality show, and the reason they contacted me, I suppose, is because the reality show has the tentative title of “Top Engineer.” This fact filled me with mixed emotions, and while poetry is allegedly the best way to express mixed emotions, I will forego any attempts at verse and try to say how I feel in ordinary prose.

Part of me is glad to see this. A few years ago the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, my 300,000-member professional society, sponsored a discussion of how to get a popular TV show going whose theme would be connected with engineering. This was back when most TV shows were still scripted, and so the ideas that came out were pretty feeble, along the lines of “My Three Sons” only we follow Fred MacMurray to his engineering office instead of staying home. But now that reality shows are all the rage, I can easily picture some kind of built-it challenge carried out in a well-equipped design lab. The Discovery Channel has procured the cooperation of an outfit called WET, which makes fancy servo-controlled fountains for places like Dubai, so they probably have plenty of toys in their labs to do fun things with. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, I recently had a small personal experience with the way TV deals with intellectually challenging concepts, and I am not optimistic about how that aspect of engineering is going to fare on the small screen. And face it, engineering of any sophistication has to involve some intellectually challenging concepts. What happened was that I agreed to be interviewed for a TV show called “Weird or What?” Outside the U. S. it’s hosted by William Shatner, but some legal tussle or other prevents it from being shown in the fifty states. So sometime last fall, those of you reading this in certain English-speaking countries might have had the privilege of seeing yours truly talking about ball lightning, which is a current research topic of mine.

As is always the case, they taped far more of me than they used, and I expected that. I even rigged up a demo to show them that small burning spheres of liquid silicon looks sort of like ball lightning, I made a joke on camera that was so funny the cameraman laughed, and I tried to be as serious and clear as possible when they asked me specific questions. The silicon didn’t fit into their narrative, and as for the joke, all I can figure is that the only person on that show who is allowed to be funny is William Shatner. And how funny he is, I will allow the unbiased viewer to decide.

What they used me for was one side of a conflict between wild-and-crazy theories of a certain incident on a Canadian island in the 1960s, and the “sober-scientist” view. I played the sober scientist, and they found some other folks with interesting backgrounds to propose the wild-and-crazy theories. And believe me, when I saw the final DVD of the show, I was halfway embarrassed even to be seen in the same segment with some of those people, even though I was presented as saying reasonable, scientifically-based things that countered their wackiness.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. TV has to have conflict, movement, and surprises, or its viewers fall asleep. Sometimes they fall asleep anyway, but the kind of thing I give to my students every day in the lecture room would not make good TV, unless you could give all the viewers a grade for comprehension at the end. And the sponsors wouldn’t like that.

Judging by some of the legalese on the Pilgrim Production website and the casting call, they are not looking for your standard-issue behind-the-keyboard type of engineer, which, for better or worse, describes most engineers today. They want “visual effects experts, accomplished home shop machinists, contractors and engineers with backgrounds in electrical, civil, structural, or mechanical engineering.” And in all caps near the bottom we find this interesting section: “As part of your participation in and/or in connection with the program, you will engage in activities that may be considered dangerous, including without limitation activities involving electrical and hydraulic equipment, power tools and machinery, heavy objects, combustibles, and other potentially hazardous materials and fire.” I like that “and fire” at the end. Some legal intern probably put that in.

I can also tell you this. If you are physically unappealing, without being so ugly that it’s funny, you probably won’t get in either. For a TV show designed merely to entertain, that’s not so bad, but it’s too bad that TV is so heavily involved in the way we choose politicians today. If you look at a photo album of congressmen from the pre-TV era, you will notice that a good many of them, including some of the greatest ones, were simply not much to look at. In particular, Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday we celebrated yesterday, was described not entirely inaccurately as homely as a baboon. He never would have made it if they had had TV in 1860.

So I wish the best to the producers of “Top Engineer” and hope that the image of engineering which emerges from their labors bears at least some slight resemblance to what real engineers really do most of the time. If they do their job right, the show will be fun to watch, nobody will get killed (although it will look like someone might be), and maybe some young people watching will get the idea that engineering is fun as well as remunerative, and it certainly can be both. But be forewarned: most engineers aren’t that good-looking.

Sources: The best rundown on what Pilgrim Productions is looking for can be found at their website, http://pilgrimstudios.com/casting/topengineer/. If you’re interested, check it out soon because their deadline for submitting applications is March 7.

Bad Apple in China?

Apple Inc. currently enjoys one of the most positive consumer perceptions of any company in America. A New York Times poll last November revealed that more than half of those surveyed couldn’t think of anything negative about the firm, and when pressed, the worst thing they could say was that their products cost too much. So when the same paper came out with a long, carefully researched story about hazardous and onerous working conditions in China where Apple products are made, it was a little bit like reading that Santa Claus was hauled in for heroin possession.

Full disclosure: My wife and I have been Macintosh fans since the early 1980s, and I bought her an iPad this last Christmas. But when I told her about some of the things I read about how they were made, she may never view her iPad in the same light again.

First, the salient facts. Most consumer electronics products are made in China in factories that are Chinese-owned and operated. But the ties between Chinese manufacturers and U. S.-based firms like Apple are very close. When Apple chooses a new supplier, they ask all kinds of nosy questions about costs, facilities, numbers of workers, and so on, and allow only a small profit margin. Since 2005, they also inform the supplier about Apple’s “Supplier Code of Conduct” which reportedly requires adherence to basic standards of safety, worker rights, and other good things. And commendably, Apple actually conducts audits of its suppliers and has found and publicly reported many violations of the Code—so many, in fact, that some former Apple executives say it is largely window-dressing, and Apple may not be that serious about enforcement. Apple says it will drop a supplier if too many violations are found, but in the case of a firm such as Foxconn, which makes about 40% of all the consumer electronics manufactured in China, alternative suppliers simply may not be there. So in some cases it’s a matter of either Foxconn or no (or fewer) iPads. And in the highly competitive and fast-paced world of consumer electronics, an entire generation of products can come and go in a few months. Supply delays can mean not just reduced profits, but complete failure.

How bad are conditions for workers in Chinese consumer-electronics factories? It depends. If you picked up a well-paid auto worker from his production line making Toyota pickups in San Antonio, say, and plopped him down so he was making less than $7,000 a year working ten- to twelve-hour days, five or six days a week, and living in a dorm with nine other guys in a three-room apartment, and nothing to eat but Chinese food—well, he’d scream bloody murder. On the other hand, if you were like Times-profiled worker Lai Xiaodong, taking the same job would seem at first glance to be a stroke of good fortune, because you likely grew up in a small farming community where city life in Chengdu looked like Heaven, even with the long hours and crowded living conditions (Xiaodong could afford a single apartment, tiny as it was). Unfortunately, Mr. Lai was one of two workers killed in an apparent aluminum-dust explosion last May at a plant that makes iPad cases. That beautiful smooth-grained aluminum finish is not easy to make, and the plants where the cases are finished are potential firetraps. The firm where the explosions happened has since made safety improvements, but there are millions of other Chinese workers at hundreds of other plants where similar accidents may be just waiting to happen.

Back when most products sold in America were also made in America, you could sometimes buy an item that was made by someone you knew personally. But even by the 1800s, this was increasingly not the case: first raw materials, then later low-tech manufactured goods such as toys and clothing began to be imported from abroad in large volumes. Geography textbooks from the 1930s showed photographs of supposedly happy natives carrying bushels of raw rubber so that Mr. Ford could sell more cars with rubber tires. The happiness of the natives was assumed, not verified, and in fact, exploitation of workers of all kinds has been a chronic problem ever since exchange economies came into being.

Apple may have to join the ranks of Nike and other firms who have squirmed in the spotlight of exposure when maltreatment of workers making their products became public knowledge. A new and positive trend in the retail economy is the practice of buying according to conscience rather than just price or performance. With commodities such as clothing or coffee, sometimes the fact that one supplier can guarantee his product was made by genuinely contented workers in safe, comfortable factories gives him the only edge he needs over a similar product with no guarantee. However, Apple is not anywhere close to that situation. There is literally nothing like an iPod, or an iPad, at least for many consumers, and Apple wants to keep it that way. But part of the way they keep it that way is by squeezing the last drop of fast, agile production out of their (largely Chinese) suppliers, and so you get clouds of aluminum dust and an explosion here and there.

We may be seeing part of what can be regarded as a normal maturing process for Apple Inc. They began as the small, impudent upstart against IBM, and played the underdog role for years. Underdogs don’t have time to get all self-conscious and introspective—they’re too busy fighting. But the underdog label no longer fits Apple, and these latest revelations are a kind of loss of innocence. We will still probably buy Apple products as long as they are good ones, but I sure hope Apple slows down enough to do the right thing by its suppliers. It would be a shame if they don’t.

Sources: The New York Times article “In China, Human Costs are Built Into an iPad” appeared on Jan. 25, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html.

Engineers, the Public, and Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment was completed in 1866, but even that long ago there were signs of the coming upheavals that would lead to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the USSR, a government founded on the principle that the coming future utopia of fulfilled Communism justified any amount of butchery in the present. This idea was presaged in miniature by Raskolnikov, the protagonist of the novel. A failed law student in whom noble idealism waged a constant struggle with depression and anger, Raskolnikov tried his hand at journalism and wrote an essay on the idea that humanity could be divided into two types: ordinary and extraordinary. For the vast majority of ordinary souls, obedience to law and custom was obligatory and kept the wheels of society turning. But for a few rare extraordinary individuals—Keplers, Newtons, or Napoleons—rules and morality itself were things to be overcome along the journey to break new ground for the ever-upward progression of history. Here is Raskolnikov explaining his idea to a friend:

"I believe that if circumstances prevented the discovery of a Kepler or a Newton from becoming known except through the sacrifice of a man’s life, or of ten, or of a hundred. . . Newton would have the right. . . to remove these ten men, or these hundred men, so he could make his discoveries known to all mankind."

His point is that if a person has something of great enough worth to give to mankind, its value to later generations is worth the sacrifice of a few lives, if killing a few people makes the gift possible.

Raskolnikov’s academic speculations turn to grim reality when he later finds himself actually carrying out the murder of an old pawnbroker woman and her sister. The rest of the novel is a brilliant exploration of Raskolnikov’s complex psychological turmoil as he struggles with the burden of his crime and what it means to himself and others.

The lessons of this novel should be borne in mind by engineers who participate in ambitious projects that propose to reshape the way people live. The 19th-century world that Dostoevsky lived in was just beginning to be changed by technological innovations such as the railroad, steam power, and the electromagnetic telegraph. Physics and chemistry transformed the world of the twentieth century, and technologists are now learning how to use biological knowledge to meddle with things that former generations viewed as immutably fixed by evolution—or God.

The recent debate about the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research turns on the questions of what people are for, and who counts as a person. Raskolnikov liked to reassure himself that the old woman he murdered was of no more value than a cockroach, and that he was doing the rest of humanity a favor by exterminating her. Those who advocate the destruction of frozen embryos for embryonic stem cell research must believe that the potential good, in the form of possible cures and treatments for presently incurable illnesses, outweighs any harm to the embryos, which are only potential human beings, after all. And some philosophers have been outdoing Raskolnikov’s essay by proposing that some mature animals may be of more intrinsic worth than some immature human beings: it is permissible to kill certain disabled infants, for example, according to some schools of thought.

Engineers are extraordinary people, in the statistical sense. Out of the world’s population of some six billion, perhaps 15 to 20 million could generously be classed as engineers. That is less than one percent. But from Raskolnikov down through the abominations committed by dictatorships of the last two hundred years, we have seen what can happen when we start to view some elite individuals as exempt from the usual laws, rules, and moral strictures that most of us obey. Surely we can allow some moral license to those men and women in the white coats who promise us such wondrous treatments, and eventually biological enhancements, at the price of a few frozen embryos whose fate was probably annihilation anyway, can we not? We can, but we may not like what happens to the elites who get used to flouting the rules, or what happens to us when the elites take advantage of their privileges.

Without spoiling the novel for those who haven’t read it, I will say that Raskolnikov comes to regret his willingness to put his academic theory into practice. Dostoevsky being Dostoevsky, it is a complex regret, full of ambivalence and shot through with seemingly good things that could happen if Raskolnikov conceals his crime and tries to live out his dream that he is indeed one of the few extraordinary souls for whom ordinary law is nullified. Dostoevsky, ever the Christian artist, portrays both the simple trust of believers who have never questioned God as well as the convoluted thoughts of Raskolnikov, who at some points confesses belief in the miracles of the Bible, but at other times talks like an atheist from Central Casting. While fiction cannot directly teach us to be better people, a thoughtful reading of Crime and Punishment will challenge you to think about the meaning of life, the purpose of love, and the values of will and judgment.

Sources: The quotation from Crime and Punishment is from the Sidney Monas translation (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 257. The latest (Winter 2012) edition of The New Atlantis magazine carries a fine series of articles on the theme of “The Stem Cell Debates.” For more details about how some philosophers have valued mature animals over some immature humans, see the works of Peter Singer.

SOPA, PIPA, and the Wikipedia Blackout

As regular readers of this blog know, one of my favorite sources of online information is Wikipedia. While not perfect, this largely volunteer-maintained site is a generally reliable, up-to-date, and accurate source of many kinds of information. It is especially good for technical and scientific data where there is a general consensus of agreement, and even in controversial areas it tends to be pretty even-handed. So imagine my surprise last Wednesday when I clicked onto Wikipedia for something and was greeted instead by a blacked screen for 24 hours and a plea for me (if I was a U. S. citizen, which many Wikipedians are not) to contact my congressional representatives to protest the consideration of SOPA and PIPA.

What are SOPA and PIPA? Legislative acronyms for the Stop Online Piracy Act and the (get ready for this one) Protecting Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act. If you read the second title it sounds like they want to protect online threats, not do something to stop them, but I think PIPA comes from the informal title, which is just the Protecting Intellectual Property Act. SOPA is being considered by the House of Representatives and PIPA by the Senate.

Why is Wikipedia (and many other online service providers of various kinds) so upset about these proposed laws? According to the text on the blacked-out screen, the laws pose a potentially crippling threat to the freedom of information exchange. If they were passed in their present form and the Attorney General, or a civil court, or some bureaucrat somewhere, decided that Wikipedia was an internet search engine, then it would be Wikipedia’s responsibility not to link to certain nefarious websites, the list of which the government would apparently determine. (It is not clear to this non-lawyer exactly who would enforce the acts, but you are welcome to read the 10,000-word text of SOPA yourself and figure it out if you so choose.) And if Wikipedia (or any other website falling under the jurisdiction of the act) failed to do its court-mandated duty, the court would be free to impose penalties, probably in the nature of fines and/or injunctions to stop or start doing things.

Well, right there we have a problem. One of the better aspects of the Web is the way that it has grown to its present stature largely without government aid or regulation. True, there are many problems and illegal or immoral things that go on, some of which we have discussed in this space. But overall, Internet commerce and Internet entities such as Wikipedia have behaved pretty well and do no more than reflect the general makeup of society, which is made up mostly of fairly decent people with a few bad apples here and there.

In my limited, non-lawyer view, SOPA and PIPA would try to change that by putting a huge number of Internet entities under the watchful eye of the courts. It is probably not an exaggeration to say they might create for the Internet a regulatory regime not too different from what the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was for interstate commerce, which kept all kinds of business ranging from bus companies to railroads and trucking firms under its thumb for decades. The difference is that the ICC came to pass to curb genuine piratical abuses by monopolistic railroad companies, who shook down their customers (mostly farmers) shamelessly with exploitative and discriminatory rates. And when the deregulatory fad came to pass a few decades ago, the ICC bit the dust, and with the much greater level of competition in interstate commerce that prevails today, nobody much misses it.

Nothing much like monopolistic exploitation is going on with the Internet organizations targeted by SOPA and PIPA, with the possible exception of Google. The proposed laws’ supporters claim that their only targets are the truly bad actors: the crooks who set up phony or phishing websites, those who sell pirated software, child pornographers using the Web, and so on. But from my (again) limited reading of the proposals, that judgment call is left strictly up to the lawyers enforcing the act. Once power is created, bureaucrats seem to develop an irresistible urge to use it, and so I have concluded that it would be a bad idea to pass SOPA and PIPA in their present form. And I made that opinion known to my Federal legislative representatives here in Texas.

So did several million other people, evidently, because a few days after Wikipedia and many other sites did their blackout bit, Congress announced that it was “indefinitely postponing” consideration of the bills. At the rate Congress gets truly important work done these days, that means you can forget about SOPA and PIPA unless you run out of other things to worry about first.

I am not a libertarian, and appropriate legislation to curb some of the more blatant abuses found on the Internet is a good idea if it can be enforced without an undue burden on the service providers or the public using the services. Most law enforcement has to take a “good-enough” approach, given limited resources. You want enough highway patrols to keep speeders and other vehicular misbehavior down to a reasonable level, but to get the public to obey the speeding laws 100% of the time would require something on the order of a speed-cop Reign of Terror. From my point of view, SOPA and PIPA moved too far in the Reign of Terror direction. I am sure that interested legislators will go back to the drawing board to craft something that will deal with the worst abuses without being so intrusive on the vast majority of sites and users who are behaving themselves, but I do not myself believe there is any big rush about the matter.

Reportedly, major Hollywood interests (copyright holders) were behind SOPA and PIPA, and were disappointed when the proposals went down in flames. It is a disturbing enough time for content providers these days, as file-sharing and online movies become more and more technically facile. The phrase “rent-seeking” has shown up a lot lately in editorials about how powerful business interests have influenced government so as to direct more revenue their way. One could view the SOPA-PIPA business in that light, with what fairness I’m not sure. But it looks like this time, anyway, a grass-roots effort by millions of users (admittedly led by organizations with influence, though not so much financial as merely relational) prevailed over the rent-seekers, if that is the right phrase for them. Unfortunately, Wikipedia can shut down their site for the first time in protest only once. Any more and it will get to be a drag. So the future will reveal how this continuing conflict gets resolved, if it ever does.

Sources: For those policy wonks dealing with a sleepless night or for other reasons, a website has posted the “markup” versions of both SOPA and PIPA at http://www.keepthewebopen.com/sopa and http://www.keepthewebopen.com/pipa, respectively. Though they are mostly of academic interest now, they show just how complicated modern legislation has become.

From Dreamcatchers to Soulcatchers

The day after Christmas, I was asked to contribute to a long paper on the past, present, and future of the social implications of technology. One of the other contributors cited an idea called the “soulcatcher chip” as something that would have profound social implications, if it ever comes to pass.

The phrase “soulcatcher” presumably derives from the word “dreamcatcher.” A dreamcatcher, at least in the original versions made by the Ojibwe and Sioux tribes of native North Americans, was a small frame or loop of willow twigs hung with feathers. Mothers would make dreamcatchers and hang them above their children’s beds to filter out nightmares and send only good dreams to their offspring. I am unaware of any scientific studies on dreamcatchers, but the idea has caught on in the commercial world and you can buy such things to hang on your rear-view mirror.

A soulcatcher chip, as envisioned by former Chief Technology Officer of British Telecomm Peter Cochrane, is a piece of silicon that you would implant in your brain. Early versions would simply be an interface between your brain and the Internet, bypassing all those old-fashioned electromechanical keyboards and eye-tiring display screens. Later versions of soulcatchers would do exactly that: the interface would be broadband enough to “capture all a human’s thoughts and feelings on a single silicon chip,” according to a 1998 posting on the website of Wired Magazine. In the same piece, Cochrane predicted that an external version of the soulcatcher would be available in about five years, that is, by 2003.

As far as I know, that prediction has fallen flat. While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology has advanced to the point that we can observe which parts of the brain get active when a wide variety of mental events happen, this is very far from directly reading a person’s thoughts in general, or being able to get onto Wikipedia by thinking instead of moving your mouse or typing.

The soulcatcher idea is basically a communications problem, and can be broken down into the parts of transmitting (brain to the external world) and receiving (external world to brain). While fMRI technology has made a fair amount of progress on the transmitting end, the receiving end is much trickier. Implanting stuff in the brain is a risky thing, even if the object you’re implanting is only a protective cover to replace a missing part of the skull, for example. And running wires into the brain, or even silicon-chip substitutes for wires, appears to be a very crude way of conveying data to one’s mental world. While some progress has been made in brain implants as a type of therapy for conditions such as epilepsy and even depression, this is a far cry from conveying novel detailed data into the brain.

The idea of a soulcatcher chip brings up a problem that has up till now stayed within the halls of philosophy departments. When Cochrane asked his wife how many parts of himself he could replace with synthetic components before she rejected him as a machine, she said she was revolted by the idea. This is an indirect compliment to Cochrane, because I can think of some marriages in which the wife would welcome the process (“Let me at that off switch!”). Of course, such speculations will remain hypothetical for some time, perhaps forever, because there is no hard experimental or theoretical evidence that it is even possible to simulate the workings of the human mind with a computer, or to do anything close to downloading all a person’s thoughts and feelings onto a computer.

This is just personal speculation on my part, but there may even be some sort of psycho-physiological uncertainty principle out there, analogous to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum physics. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that you cannot measure both the momentum and position of a particle simultaneously with arbitrarily great precision. If you get the momentum exactly right, you will have no idea where the particle was at the time, and vice-versa.

The soulcatcher analogue of that may be that it is impossible to go beyond a certain point in measurement (and especially in two-way communication) with the mind by means of physical actions related to the brain, without seriously disrupting or possibly even destroying the mind you are dealing with. Given the complexity of the brain and its interactions with the mind, any such uncertainty principle will also be more complicated and less straightforward than the physics principle first enunciated by Heisenberg. But that doesn’t mean no such principle exists. It may simply work out that way experimentally before we understand the brain well enough to realize theoretically what the true limitations are.

The dreamcatcher was a physical object constructed by people who wanted to change something the mind was doing, namely, giving their children nightmares. And in the nature of a placebo, it may have well had a good effect, if the mother felt she was doing something positive and became more reassuring to the child as a result. The hopes for a soulcatcher chip are more ambitious: nothing less than the direct connection of one’s mind to external data in a way that would be hard to ignore. If I get tired of surfing the Internet, I can always just turn off the computer and walk away. But if the thing was directly piped into my brain, all sorts of dire possibilities come to mind. So far, computer viruses have stayed outside the body, but what if one got into your brain and you couldn’t get it out? The ethical challenges alone would be enough to stop me from even contemplating such a project, but ethical considerations do not always stop researchers who are fascinated by an idea.

As we’ve seen, the soulcatcher is an idea that is already delayed in transit, if indeed it ever gets here. Even if it never comes to pass, it has given us a lot of mileage in the form of science-fiction tales and movies, and that may be the place where it does as much good as dreamcatchers, if not more.

Sources: The forecast by Peter Cochrane was published at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/wired25_pr.html in the Nov. 1998 issue of Wired Magazine. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on dreamcatchers. If all goes well, the May 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE will carry an article entitled “Social Implications of Technology: Past, Present, and Future.”