text:
Page 1 2
The Work of a Chronic Typhoid Germ Distributor, George A. Soper, Ph.D.
In the winter of 1906 I was called on to investigate a household epidemic of typhoid fever which had broken out in the latter part of August at Oyster Bay, N. Y. The epidemic had been studied carefully immediately after it took place, but its cause had not been ascertained with as much certainty as seemed desirable to the owner of the property.
The essential facts concerning the investigation follow:
At Oyster Bay in the summer of 1906 six persons in a household of eleven were attacked with typhoid fever. The house was large, surrounded with ample grounds, in a desirable part of the village, and had been rented for the summer by a New York banker.
The first person was taken sick on August 27 and the last on September 3. The diagnosis of typhoid was positive. Two of the patients were sent to the Nassau hospital at Mineola. The others were attended by capable physicians at Oyster Bay. None of the subsequent cases apparently resulted from the first, although the interval from the first to the last might permit of this assumption. But whether the disease was transmitted from one person to another after the first case occurred was not a matter of great consequence. The most important question was how the first case occurred.
Typhoid fever is an unusual disease in Oyster Bay, according to the three physicians who share the medical practice there. At the time of the outbreak no other case was known. None followed.
The milk supply of this house was the same as used by most of the other persons in the village, all of whom [remained well.] The cream also was from a source which supplied several other families in the vicinity.
To the first investigators it seemed that the water must have been contaminated. They were unable to ascribe the fever to food, flies or milk, whereas if they could discover that the water had been contaminated they would be able to account for the epidemic.
The water supply for the house was from a driven well said to be 167 feet deep. The well was at a distance of 210 feet from the house, within 60 feet of a stable drain, 115 feet from a privy behind the stable, and 224 feet from two cesspools which received the drainage of the house. The cesspools and privy had been cleaned out in April. The house was provided with one water closet, situated on the second floor. This was used by the family. The sic servants used the privy. The sewage from the house was carried by a tile pipe to the two cesspools just referred to. The soil is sandy and gravelly throughout this region.
The water was pumped from the well by a gas engine to a covered wooden tank situated 186 feet from the stable and 320 feet from the house. Water ran from this outside tank to an open tank in the attic of the house, removed from the nearest living rooms by a steep and narrow ladder.
Samples of the water were taken and subjected to careful chemical and bacteriologic analysis. They were collected direct from the pump, from the outside tank and from a faucet in the house. There were five samples taken in all. Four were examined by E. E. Smith, M.D., Ph.D., the well-known analytic expert, and the other by D. D. Jackson, Ph.D., director of the laboratories of the New York City Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity.
The essential facts concerning these analyses, including the condensed statements of the resulting opinions, follow:
1906 Source of Sample Opinion of Analyst
Sept. 12.Faucet in house . "Sanitarily pure."Dr. Smith.
Sept. 12.Outside tank .. "Probably safe."Dr. Smith
Sept. 13.Pump over well . "No evidence of pollution."Dr. Smith
Sept. 27.Outside tank .. "Typhoid from this source impossible."Dr. Jackson
Sept. 29.Outside tank .."Evidence does not show pollution."Dr. Smith
In addition to these examinations, an experimental study was made of the possibility that the typhoid germs might have percolated through the ground to the well from some receptacle of excrement. On September 29 Dr. Smith put fluoresein in the bowl of the water closet in the house, in the cesspools, in the stable manure vault, in the privy vault on this property and in another on adjacent property and in the bowl of the water closet in a neighboring house. He looked for traces of this fluoresein in water from the well, obtained after much pumping, two days and five days later. Six samples of water were collected during this test. They entirely failed to reveal pollution.
Even this thorough work on the water supply did not entirely destroy local confidence in the theory that the water had been the cause of the outbreak. A contamination of the outside covered tank of such nature as to escape detection by analysis was suspected as offering a possible explanation of the trouble. According to this idea the tank, which had been cleaned early in the spring, might have received typhoid bacilli from the cleaners who, perhaps, carried typhoid excreta on their boots. It was supposed that a gradual accumulation of organic matter from the water and dust from the air, aided by the continued warmth of the summer sun, might have led these germs to multiply until at last they escaped to the water and infected the household.
It did not seem to me that the water theory was tenable. The analyses proved that the well was not continuously polluted. The fluoresein tests showed that occasional contamination was not likely. An inspection of the premises and inquires concerning they way the outside tank was cleaned made it seem unlikely that this tank became infested in the way supposed.
It would have been more probable to suppose that the tank in the house, which was without a cover and accessible to occupants of the house, had become polluted. Such contamination was not without precedent. Had typhoid existed in the house at the time, it was possible that the tank could have become contaminated in this way. But there had been no case. Moreover, inquiry made it seem unlikely that the tank had been visited all summer. It was much more convenient for persons to get water otherwise than by climbing the narrow ladder to the attic. It seemed more probable that they infectious material had been carried to the house by some person or some article of food.
I was led from the proper track for a time by being assured that no person who had had typhoid, at least within many months, had lived in the house or visited it during the whole summer, and by discovering that the family was extremely fond of soft clams. My suspicion for a time attached to clams. It was found that soft clams had frequently been obtained in the summer from an old Indian woman who lived in a tent on the beach not far from the house. It was impossible to find this woman, but I made inspections of the sources of soft clams at Oyster Bay, which showed that they were sometimes taken from places where they were polluted with sewage.
But if clams had been responsible for the outbreak it did not seem clear why the fever should have been confined to this house. Soft clams form a very common article of diet among the native inhabitants of Oyster Bay. On inquiring closely into the question of the food eaten before the outbreak it was eventually found that no clams had been eaten subsequent to July 15. This removed the possibility that they epidemic had been caused by clams. From July 15 to August 27, six weeks, was too long a period for an outbreak of this character to remain undeveloped. The infectious matter which produced the epidemic had been taken with food or drink, in my opinion, on or before August 20.
The supplies of vegetables and fruit were next considered. It was found that they persons attacked had not eaten any raw fruit or vegetables which had not also been eatene by menay persons who escaped the fever.
The history of the house with regard to typhoid was inquired into. It was found that but one case of typhoid had occurred on the premises or been nursed there in thirteen years. This case occurred in 1901. Care seemed to have been taken to destroy the infectious nature of the discharges. The case produced no secondary cases at the time. The house had been occupied every summer since without typhoid.
Attention was now concentrated for a time on the first cases to determine whether the infection could have occurred during a temporary absence from Oyster Bay. It was found that those persons who were taken sick at the outset had not been on a visit, or picnic, or, in fact, away from Oyster Bay on any account for several weeks prior to the onset of the illness.
The social position of the persons attacked differed decidedly. Among the first to be taken sick were a daughter of the head of the family and two maid servants, one of which was colored. Following in a quick succession were the wife and then another daughter of the tenant and, finally, the gardener who lived permanently at Oyster Bay and had worked on the place for years.
Believing that some peculiar event might have occurred in the family on or shortly before August 20, which, if studied, might give the necessary clue to the cause of the epidemic, careful inquiry was made into the immediate history of the household at this time. The key of the situation was thus discovered.
It was found that the family had changed cooks on August 4. This was about three weeks before the typhoid epidemic broke out. A cook who had been with the family several years had been discharged and a new one employed. Little was known about the new cooks history. She had been engaged at an employment bureau which gave her an excellent recommendation. She remained in the family only a short time, leaving about three weeks after the outbreak of typhoid occurred. Her present whereabouts were unknown. The cook was described as an Irish woman about 40 years of age, tall, heavy, single. She seemed to be in perfect health.
Here was by all means the most important possibility in the way of a clue which had come to my notice. If this woman could be found and questioned, it seemed likely that she could give facts from which the cause of the epidemic could be ascertained.
When, after much difficulty, she was found, this hope was destroyed. No information of value was obtainable from her. She refused to speak to me or any one about herself or her history except on matters which she knew were already well known.
It became necessary to work out the cooks history without her help. This effort has been only partially satisfactory. Her whereabouts for only a part of the time in the last ten years have been ascertained. About two years of time among the last five years remain unaccounted for. In the last ten years she has worked for eight families to my positive knowledge; in seven of thse typhoid has followed her. She has always escaped in the epidemics with which she had been connected.
The most interesting features of the other outbreaks of typhoid with which this cook has been connected follow:
|>>continue to next page
|Page 1 2


text:
Sunday, March 18, 2012
The Valve - Closed For Renovation
It's probably past time I made such an announcement. Not that there's been anything wrong with what Bill B. has been up to on his own lonesome for some time hereabouts. But the Valve was never intended to be Bill Benzon's personal blog. Best he relocate to his own digs if it's to be a solo operation.
I want to keep the site up. I would be sad if the archives disappeared. Lots of good stuff. But keeping the place up? ... well, we'll see. Maybe I'll get around to organizing some of those good old book events again soon. Best of luck to all our past authors, wherever they have wandered to by this point. And thanks to all the readers and commenters who made it such fun while it lasted. But nothing lasts forever.
Happy Trails to You
I first heard of The Valve back in late Spring or early Summer of 2005 when I caught wind of an up-coming discussion of an anthology entitled Theory's Empire. The idea, it seems, was to look at what had by now become capital "T" Theory and, perhaps, hope! hope! lay it to rest.
So I showed up in early July and joined the commentariat. I soon found myself playing an unaccustomed role, that of the old timer who says, "Now, back in my day . . . " Now, I'm not that old, and it wasn't that long ago in calendar years, but it WAS before the personal computer and internet. I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins when the French landed in 1966 and I'd lived the ferment in literary studies that had been occasioned by those ideas. I also encountered developmental psychology, through Mary Ainsworth, and psycholinguistics through James Deese. And so I added Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky to my repertoire while studying semiotics and comp lit in English translation under the tutelage of Dick Macksey, one of the organizers of the (in)famous Structuralism conference.
The upshot of all that is that I shuffled off to Buffalo and joined the cognitive revolution under the tutelage of David Hays in the Linguistics Department. But my degree was in English and my dissertation was on cognitive science and literary theory. I'd decided that structuralism led, not to post-structuralism, deconstruction, or postmodernism, but to cognitive science. The profession did not agree with my assessment of the situation; we parted ways several years after I got my degree.
But I kept up my intellectual program anyhow, publishing this and that, here and there. I showed up at the Theory's Empire event to see how things were going in the literary academy and to engage that part of it that might, I thought, just might, be looking for something new. Later in that year I was asked to try out for the masthead and was accepted early in 2006. Since then The Valve has been the closest thing I've had for an institutional home base.
Up into the second half 2010 or so The Valve functioned as a vigorous group blog, more vigorous at some times than others, but strong and interesting. In the Spring of 2010 I set up my own blog, New Savanna, mostly so I could post on a wider range of topics than I felt appropriate to The Valve. By the end of 2010 it was clear, however, that, as a group effort, The Valve was dying. I continued to post here, as well as at New Savanna, because it was easy enough to do and because there seemed to be constant traffic from somewhere out there in the ether.
All things change, however. John Holbo, The Valve's progenitor, informs me that it's time for The Valve to go the way of the Phoenix and be reborn. To do that, however, it must first die. Really and truly. Dead.
And so I will cease posting at The Valve in order that this plot of cyberspace may lay fallow for awhile.
It was a good run.
I'd like to thank John and the other Valvsters for the good intellectual company and you, our readers, for your kind and generous attention.
I will, of course, continue to post at New Savanna, and elsewhere.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
What's an Encyclopedia These Days?
I remember browsing through the encyclopedia when I was young. We had an Americana, to the Britannica, which just announced that it will cease print publication, and I would spend hours reading from one entry to another. The volumes were heavy and substantial and the set of them gave a visible and tactile sense of complete knowledge. That sense, of course, was an illusion, but it was there.
The Wikipedia affords a different experience. Of course, I come to the Wikipedia as a mature adult with a great deal of intellectual sophistication; how it would appear to a bright 11-year old, I don't know. But there's no way to get a sense of all-knowledge-complete from the Wikipedia; you can't see it on the shelf, you can't handle it volume by volume. It just trails off into the ether, in many many different directions.
There is, of course, the question of accuracy and authority. I know that comparisons have been done between Wikipedia entries and, I believe, Britannica entries. And Wikipedia has come out well in these comparisons. But that's not all there is to IT.
By IT I mean both authority and, well, accuracy, I guess. They're closely related, but not quite the same. In the case of conventional encyclopedias, such as the Britannica, the authority resides in the institution itself. Where the entries themselves came from, who wrote them and what sources they consulted, that's pretty much a mystery.
Not so with the Wikipedia. Every article has a Talk page, where editors, as Wikipedia contributors are called, and others discuss the article. In some cases these discussions can be quite extensive. Moreover, each article has a History page as well. This page logs every change to the article from its beginning to the present state. The change may be minor, such as the addition or deletion of a comma, or major, the addition or deletion of several paragraphs. Whatever the change, it's logged. And, if you wish, you can view the article as it was at any stage in its history.
Strolling through that material can be very tedious, of course. The important point, though, is simply that it's there. The article no longer has to stand alone, pretending to be a philosophical unmoved mover. It has an accessible pedigree, a visible origin. It is grounded.
THAT is an important difference. VERY important.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Encyclopedia Britannica to Shut Down Print Operations
From today's New York Times:
In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.
"It's a rite of passage in this new era," Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. "Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it's much more expansive and it has multimedia." ...
Sales of the Britannica peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in the United States. But now print encyclopedias account for less than 1 percent of the Britannica's revenue. About 85 percent of revenue comes from selling curriculum products in subjects like math, science and the English language; 15 percent comes from subscriptions to the Web site, the company said.
About half a million households pay a $70 annual fee for the online subscription, which includes access to the full database of articles, videos, original documents and to the company's mobile applications.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Intimate Enemies: What's Opera, Doc?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that What's Opera, Doc? is one of the finest cartoons ever made. It satirizes opera, Wagner in particular; it parodies Disney's Fantasia, and, for that matter, it parodies the routines of its stars, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The production was, by Warner Brother's standards, lavish, and the layouts, by Maurice Noble, are inspired.
All of that's obvious. What's not so obvious is that the film plays on the nature of reality in a way that's reminiscent of Dance of the Hours from Disney's Fantasia. As I've argued in Animal Passion? Hyacinth Hippo and Ben Ali Gator, that episode depicts the inability of animal dancers to stay in role with the result that, when Ben Ali Gator courts Hyacinth Hippo we don't know whether they're acting roles or whether their passion is, well, real. Something like that is going on in What's Opera, Doc? Elmer Fudd is in role as, well, Siegfried I guess, from beginning to end, but Bugs is not.
Note: I'm not going to comment on the design. But you should pay attention to it. Note the colors, the camera angles, and the use of lines. It's really exquisite.
Kill the Wabbit
Let's start at the beginning. As the title card and credits roll we hear an orchestra warming up. We thus know that, yep, as the title says, this is going to be opera. The opening music is wild and stormy and we see a stormy sky, and then a large hulking shadow appears projected against a cliff. More sky and lightening, and then we see that the large shadow is projected by a rather small fellow:
It this point a simple, and rather old, point has been made: things aren't always what they seem to be. The camera zooms in and it's Elmer Fudd, in heroic costume as a Nordic warrior, informing us that he's "hunting wabbits."
As Elmer sings "Kill the wabbit" while poking his spear into a rabbit hole, Bugs hears him and is rather distressed. Bugs approaches and delivers his classic line, "What's up, Doc?" Bugs, however, is not in costume and so not, presumably, in role. He's just Bugs.
For whatever reason, Elmer is completely oblivious to the identity of this character, which has us, the audience, wondering what indeed is up? When Bugs asks the mighty Nordic warrior just how he expects to kill the rabbit, Elmer replies that he'll use his spear and magic helmet. The spear, of course, is just a standard weapon, the Nordic warrior equivalent of Elmer's more usual shotgun. But a magic helmet, that's something else entirely and gives the Nordic warrior powers that Elmer never had. Note how the helmet glows when Elmer mentions it:
Perhaps sensing a challenge, Elmer offers to demonstrate the helmet's powers and climbs to the top of a tall promontory and summons up foul weather in a scene reminiscent of the dream sequence from The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Lightening strikes a tree next to Bugs, who's OK. But he starts running.
It's then, when they're far apart, then Elmer realizes that that creature, that's the wabbit!
True Love
Elmer sets out in hot pursuit until he comes to a halt at the foot of another promontory, atop of which he spies, and is smitten by, Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde, we see instantly, is Bugs in drag, and she's plunked atop an enormously overweight horse, as though the horse had to make up for the lack of fat on the proverbial operatic Fat Lady as played by Bugs. We assume, of course, that Bugs knows full well he's in costume, playing a role.
They dance a pas de deux, Elmer looking rather boyish, at the end of which Bugs retreats atop another tower, this one with steps up the side and a gazebo at the top. They sing a passionate duet as Elmer climbs the steps. He reaches her, she falls into his arms, and her helmet falls away, revealing rabbit's ears. The jig is up!
Elmer is enraged. As Bugs flees, the Nordic warrior invokes his powers again and conjures up a powerful storm, leaving Bugs apparently dead from a lightening strike.
Upon spotting Bugs' body, Elmer is suddenly filled with remorse. He rushes to the body, picks it up, and carries it off to, well, it's not clear exactly where, Valhalla one presumes. As he does so the camera zooms in on Bugs, who reveals that he's alive, asking: What did ya' expect in an opera, a happy ending?
Comparative Wabbitology
According to the Wikipedia article on What's Opera, Doc? this is one of only three cartoons in which Elmer gets the "upper hand" on Bugs. The others are Rabbit Rampage and Hare Brush. Neither of them is, shall we say, a "standard" Bugs and Elmer cartoon. And in neither of them does Elmer think that he's killed Bugs.
Rabbit Rampage is an exercise in meta-level surrealism comparable to Duck Amuck. Bugs is the lone on-screen character addressing himself to an unseen artist who keeps redrawing both the setting and Bugs himself. The camera pulls back at the very end to reveal that Elmer's the animator. Far from being Bugs' killer, Elmer is, in a sense, the one who creates bugs, who gives him, if not life, at least visible substance.
In Hare Brush, Bugs and Elmer switch roles. As the cartoon opens Elmer is a wealthy industrialist who thinks he's a rabbit; he hops on all fours and munches a carrot. His board commits him to an asylum, where we see him in his room in a rabbit suit. This that and the other happens; Bugs takes a mind-altering pill; and voilà! bunny-suit Elmer gets chased around the countryside by Bugs-as-Elmer with a shotgun and wearing hunting clothes. A tax agent nabs Bugs-as-Elmer and hauls him off to prison, with bunny-suit Elmer basking in his triumph. But: he doesn't think Bugs is dead and there's no mourning.
So, in one case, Rabbit Rampage, Elmer has had the upper hand from the beginning, but we don't know that because we aren't aware of his role until the end. In the other case we have, if not quite role reversal from the beginning, certainly role confusion; Elmer thinks he's a rabbit and Bugs hunts him. The point is that Elmer having the upper hand at the END isn't just a matter of the final moves in the plot. Rather, it seems to entail a reconfiguration of the whole cartoon from beginning to end. We're in the intellectual territory Lévi-Strauss entered in his studies of myth, where he showed how a large body of South American myths was based on the strategic rearrangement and transformation of a relatively few underlying elements (see my posts From Bollocks to Lévi-Strauss on Myth and The King's Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss).
And that reconfiguration certainly includes playing with the conventions of reality. In Rabbit Rampage the so-called fourth wall is destroyed from the very beginning. At every step of the way we are told, in one way or another, that this is a cartoon. In Hare Brush Elmer is crazy and Bugs is drugged.
Things aren't what they seem.
What's Up, Really?
That's certainly the case with What's Opera, Doc? From the beginning to the end, Elmer is caught up in a role in an opera; he never appears as ordinary Elmer. When he enters, Bugs does not appear to be playing a role. But he's worried about this Nordic warrior who's after him. At first he's just Bugs. But, when Nordic warrior sees him as "the wabbit" he dons a costume and takes a role in the opera. He becomes Nordic warrior's beloved Brünnhilde.
The two then dance together and serenade one another. That is quite unlike anything that happened in either Hare Brush or Rabbit Rampage. And this, I suggest, is why, at the end, Elmer mourns the dead Bugs¬—who isn't really dead. Yes, when he realizes the deception he goes into a rage and, in that rage, conjures up a storm that lays Bugs/Brünnhilde out for dead. When the storm dissipates and he sees Bug/Brünhilde there, well his rage is gone too and so he mourns the wabbit, the wabbit with whom he'd danced a dance of love and sang a song of love.
What else could he do?
We're in the land of myth logic and the rules are different from those in the real world. In myth logic mourning is the necessary answer to passionate love, as destructive rage is the necessary answer to deception. And perhaps that's it, it was the deception that angered Elmer/Nordic warrior and it was the deception for which he sought revenge. That is, he wasn't merely hunting a wabbit, as he was at the beginning, he was exacting revenge.
And that's different from simply hunting rabbits.
At this point I see a pile of questions which I'm not prepared to address. For one thing, Elmer vs. Bugs had been a staple of Warner Brothers cartoons for years. Most people in the audience would know this. But how would What's Opera, Doc? play for those who didn't know that? And what about relatively young children who had not yet absorbed the conventions of cartoons, such as the fact that, no matter how much violence we see, no one is injured?
Not only is the Bugs/Elmer conflict a known item, but it's almost always presented as an on-going conflict. Elmer and Bugs have a long-standing relationship. Elmer's not hunting any arbitrary rabbit, he's hunting this particular wabbit. It's personal, and has been for some time.
Family Matters
What does it mean to be locked into THAT kind of conflict? It's as though a significant component of Elmer's identity is invested in his conflict with Bugs. That kind of conflict is steeped in ambivalence. The love duet in this cartoon was no mere act; it revealed an aspect of the relationship between Bugs and Elmer that's otherwise been completely masked in standard-issue cartoon violence and conflict.
While Bugs and Elmer aren't even the same species, much less the same family, that is only appearance. Or, if you will, that's art. The response these cartoons evoke in us, the audience, that response speaks to close personal relationships. It's about family. Wife and husband, parent and child, sibling and sibling, that's what we're dealing with. Those relationships are fraught with ambivalence, ambivalence that's on full display in What's Opera, Doc?
Now all I need's a good explicit argument to that effect, rather than a few paragraphs of tap dancing and hand waving. That argument, that's going to take more than a blog post, much more.
BTW, did you look closely at those screen shots, the color and layout?
* * * * *
Bonus points: As you know, Michael Barrier insists on the importance of animate acting. That is extraordinarily important in this cartoon. Pick one scene an explicate the acting subtleties it displays.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Alphonso Lingis talks of various things, cameras and photos among them
A new journal, Singularum, has an interview with philosopher Alphonse Lingis, who translates Merleau-Ponty, writes, travels, and takes photos.
I had long resisted buying a camera, thinking that there was something false about collecting images of things seen and people encountered and who have passed on, trying to retain the past. I thought that what was real was what from a trip left one changed. I started taking pictures when a friend who was taking me to the airport gave me a camera on the way.
I soon realized that the camera had changed my perception. The light: it was no longer just cleared space in which things took form; it had direction, it led the gaze, its shafts excavated situations isolated in the dark, sometimes it spread in a scintillating, dazzling, blazing medium without boundaries. Shadows took on substance; they stretched, flowed, condensed things in themselves. It occurred to me that I saw them that way when I was a child. Things looked different: the contours of shadows and of things that overlapped other things pushed out the contours that contained things in themselves. Flat surfaces showed corrugations, grain, stubble and texture, and sheets of gleam. And the continuity of the landscape drifting by would be abruptly broken by momentary events—the spiraling neck of a heron probing the space, the poised pause of an antelope, the legs of a child in an arabesque she will never be able to do once grown up, the grin of a passerby at something inward. The landscape is abruptly splintered, a segment isolates, magnetizes and pulls the glance into it.
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Feynmann, John von Neumann, and Mental Models
Since George Dyson's recent history of modern computing, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, was written in part to restore John von Neumann to prominence, I thought I'd republish a double review, lightly edited, I wrote some years ago: "A Tale of Two Geniuses," Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 17(2): 227-230, 1994. Richard Feynman was one of the geniuses and John von Neumann was the other.
* * * * * *
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick, New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, 532 pp.
John von Neumann, by Norman Macrae, New York, Pantheon Books, 1992, 405 pp.
Students of cognitive evolution and of twentieth century thought are fortunate in the simultaneous appearance of these two biographies. No doubt the simultaneity is mostly coincidence. The physicist Richard Feynman is most widely known, alas, for two autobiographical collections of anecdotes which reveal him to be a waggish and riggish anti-establishment sort; he is most deeply known for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics. John von Neumann was a thoroughly establishment sort - soldiers guarded his hospital room as he lay dying of brain cancer just in case he let out defense secrets in his sleep - and is most widely know as the name which appears in phrases like "computers using the von Neumann architecture." The two men crossed paths in Los Alamos, where they worked on the atomic bomb. That crossing is a reasonable place to begin our review.
Los Alamos
Feynman was recruited to Los Alamos while still a graduate student. He was in charge of group T-4, Diffusion Problems. The problem was to figure out how neutrons, which drive the fission reaction, diffuse through the explosive core. Knowing the rate and pattern of diffusion was essential to determining the mass and configuration of fissile material. Since the late 30s von Neumann had been working on similar problems in connection with shock waves and explosions in general and so was able to help the Los Alamos effort between 1943 and 1945.
The difficulty was that the relevant equations could not be solved analytically. Rather, it was necessarily to simulate neutron diffusion numerically by calculating the step-by-step motion of individual neutrons. That requires lots of calculations, which were performed by a group of people operating calculators. The problems would be broken into components; each person would be responsible for one component, with each problem being passed from person to person as individual components where calculated.
Computing and von Neumann
That, of course, is the general way computers solve problems, with the computational plan being an algorithm. But, they did not have computers at Los Alamos. Computers came after the war and von Neumann was central to the effort. He understood that the computer is essentially a logical device and clarified that logic with the concepts of the stored program (Macrae, pp. 282-284), the fetch-execute cycle (pp. 287), and conditional transfer (see Bernstein 1963, 1964, pp. 60 ff.). That is to say, von Neumann clearly differentiated between the physical structures and connections of the devices from which the computer is constructed and the logical requirements which those devices have to fulfill. For that he is the progenitor of the computer.
Later on von Neumann initiated the use of computers in weather modeling. This, plus his earlier work on shock waves and the atomic bomb, makes him one of the founders of numerical analysis, a loose collection of techniques important in many scientific and technical fields. While pursuing the conceptual foundations of life, he worked out the concept of the cellular automaton, a highly parallel kind of computational device which is much favored by current theorists of chaos and dynamical systems. His work on game theory created a new field of economic and strategic analysis. Before the war von Neumann did important work on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics.
Feynmann and Quantum Mechanics
And so we segue to Feynman, whose most important work was that which he in the late 1940s on quantum electrodynamics. The quantum world is notorious as the domain where the fundamental stuff of the universe acts sometimes like a wave, sometimes like a particle. Particles and waves are readily visualized. But how can you visualize something which is both and neither? And, if you can't visualize it, then how do you get the physical intuition which is, for many, so important to scientific thinking (cf. Miller, 1986)? It was Feynman's genius to create diagrammatic conventions for quantum interactions which made physical intuition much easier and facilitated calculation as well. The so-called Feynman diagrams became ubiquitous once Feynman introduced them and, in 1949, Freeman Dyson [father of George Dyson] proved the diagrams to be equivalent to the more rigorously mathematical, and less intuitive, axiomatic approach of Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itoro Tomonaga.
Feynman went on to do important work in superfluids, weak nuclear force and, while on sabbatical, did some creditable molecular biology. In the wake of the Challenger disaster Feynman received a great deal of attention by performing a simple demonstration with ice water and a rubber ring. That simple demonstration unmasked the self-serving bureaucratic disregard for reality which led to the Challenger disaster. He also served on the board of directors of Thinking Machines, Inc., whose massively parallel computers are often used to implement models based on von Neumann's concept of the cellular automaton.
Mental Math, Computing, and Late 20th Century Thought
With this return of von Neumann we get to the point of this review: When taken together, what do Feynman and von Neumann give us? Their intellectual lives crossed paths only once, albeit in a caldron whose intellectual fecundity may, in the long run, outlive the bomb which was its immediate purpose. For the most part, they worked in separate arenas. But taken together those various arenas encompass much of the deepest and most rigorous scientific and technical thinking of our century. Perhaps by looking at their work we can gain some insight into the basis of that thinking.
Mental mathematics is a motif which crops up in both books. Feynman and von Neumann worked in fields were calculational facility was widespread and both were among the very best at mental mathematics. In itself such skill has no deep intellectual significance. Doing it depends on knowing a vast collection of unremarkable calculational facts and techniques and knowing one's way around in this vast collection. Before the proliferation of electronic calculators the lore of mental math used to be collected into books on mental calculation. Virtuosity here may have gotten you mentioned in "Ripley's Believe it or Not" or a spot on a TV show, but it wasn't a vehicle for profound insight into the workings of the universe.
Yet, this kind of skill was so widespread in the scientific and engineering world that one has to wonder whether there is some connection between mental calculation, which has largely been replaced by electronic calculators and computers, and the conceptual style, which isn't going to be replaced by computers anytime soon. Perhaps the domain of mental calculations served as a matrix in which the conceptual style of Feynman, von Neumann, (and their peers and colleagues) was nurtured.
Enter, Piaget
Piaget (1976, pp. 320 ff.) talks of higher mental processes which operate on lower level processes; perhaps the world of calculations is the lower level world over which all these thinkers built their higher level processes. In the terms David Hays and I introduced in our account of cognitive evolution (Benzon & Hays, 1990), these higher level processes implement models. Earlier science had been based on theories, while philosophy is grounded in rationalization, with modeling, theorizing and rationalizing understood as distinct types of abstract conceptualization. I'm suggesting that these conceptual models, which are central to 20th century thought, were originally constructed in a mental space richly populated with the tricks and procedures of mental calculation. It is in such a mental space that von Neumann and Feynman made their contributions to our thought.
If so, does the advent of the electronic calculator and computer mean that we have just thrown away the possibility of such deep thought by raising a generation of thinkers who routinely turn to calculators and computers for tasks that Feynman, von Neumann, and their many colleagues would peform in their heads? It is possible. But, another possibility is more interesting, and not nearly so depressing in its implications.
Yes, the models of Feynman and von Neumann are built on a foundation of calculational wizardry. But most of that wizardry was irrelevant to that genius. It turns out that the relevant component is not only required in programming computers, but is used there in a form unadulterated by a vast collection of mere facts and details. Thus programming, with its own collection of tricks and procedures, provides a much more effective basis for creating the conceptual matrix required to understand particle physics, game theory, and, of course, computing itself. A student who has learned to program need not be a Feynman or a von Neumann to grasp matters which, not so long ago, only Feynman and von Neumann and very few others, could grasp. Thus, far from destroying the necessary conceptual matrix, computers may make that matrix more readily available.
This is, of course, only a speculation; not even that, it is that most fragile of conceptual objects, a Mere Speculation. Disreputable as they are, Mere Speculations are nonetheless unavoidable, for they are starting points. One can only wonder at how many Mere Speculations von Neuman and Feynman must have considered as they worked their way toward their more substantial contributions.
Benzon, W. L. & Hays, D.G. (1990) "The Evolution of Cognition." Journal of Social and Biological Structures, 13, 297-320.
Bernstein, J. (1963, 1964) The Analytical Engine. New York: Random House.
Miller, A. I. (1986) Imagery in Scientific Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Piaget, J. (1976) The Grasp of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Support Michael Sporn's Film about Edgar Allen Poe
Several years ago I spent a delightful evening at New York City's Museum of Modern Art viewing retrospective of Michael Sporn's films. Everyday I check his blog, which is a treasure trove for those interested in animation. Now I'm asking you to support his Kickstarter project, which involves a biography of Edgar Allen Poe that he's been working on for several years.
Here's how Sporn describes the film:
The Animatic, above, is a rough representation of animation in progress. It helps us tell the story. We hope to turn the many segments started into completed animation to be able to thrust the feature film, POE, into complete production. The Kickstarter money will do that for us and help satisfy the needs of the possible distributors and financiers who are already interested.
What's the story?
Edgar Allan Poe was a brilliant writer who lived a very short and eccentric life. He died at the age of 40 and in that time created literary genres including the detective mystery, the sci fi epic, the horror story, and many of the most beautiful love poems imaginable. Within this life there is a very dynamic story to be told.
The film opens with baby Edgar dragged from theater to theater by his ever-squabbling actor parents. They travel to cities up and down the East Coast performing, as their marriage falls apart. Edgar's father disappears, and his mother dies of consumption. The three year old watches the last theater his mother performs in burn to the ground. He's left an orphan, and the film begins.
Poe's life was destroyed not by drugs or alcohol, as is often stated, but by absolute poverty, and this is the crux of our film. Many of the women in his life died of consumption and illness as he was too poor to be able to care for them properly.He, himself, died in a poorhouse hospital.
Our film will show various biographical key points in his life and will use selections from his great fiction to depict this dramatic story.
The film is now completely scripted and story-boarded and 20 minutes of an animatic have been completed. Four Poe stories will be set in counterpoint to the biography: The Premature Burial, Murder in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat, and Ms. in a Bottle.
Now's you chance to step into film history by supporting this project.
Monday, March 05, 2012
Philosophy, Ontics or Toothpaste for the Mind
Writing in, of all places, The New York Times, Colin McGinn, a distinguished philosopher—for only distinguished philosophers get to appear in "the paper of record"—has called for a rebranding of the discipline of philosophy. No, "rebranding" isn't his word, though it was astutely used by one of the commenters. McGinn just called for a name change. "Ontics" is his suggested alternative.
McGinn notes that the name is misleading to non-philosophers, who "immediately assume you are in the business of offering sage advice, usually in the form of unargued aphorisms and proverbs." And when you try to explain, well, they just don't get it. Whatever this discipline is, "lover of wisdom"—the etymological meaning of the name—is too generic.
Well, sure, yeah, it is. But then, is what McGinn does, or what most academic researchers do, is that wisdom in any meaningful sense? Thomas Kuhn famously argued that what most scientists do is rather like puzzle-solving, and he did not mean the term at all pejoratively. The point of the term was to suggest that most scientists—and McGinn thinks of philosophy as science, in a broad sense of the term—work within fairly well-specified conceptual boundaries.
Which they do. And so it is with most academics. That's just the nature of the enterprise.
There is tremendous respect for the mythology of "going boldly where no man has gone before," but little on-the-ground tolerance for that activity in the flesh. I rather suspect that McGinn wouldn't recognize one of the bold ones if she bit him in the ass. Whatever it is that McGinn does, is there any reason whatever to suspect that he gives a fig about wisdom?
Not, mind you, that I think "wisdom" a particularly good term for "going boldly where no man has gone before."
But it's not a bad term for that, not at all. And, yes, I know the phrase comes from the cheesy opening of a cheesy classic TV science-fiction program. That cheesy TV program, Star Trek, spoke to a deep need for adventure. We can argue about how well it spoke to that need, but the need is real and I'm willing to grant that the Gene Roddenberry's animating impulse was a desire to speak to adventure, and that he was sincere in that.
On the other hand, a senior academic who whines about his discipline's public image in, yes, the paper of record, The New York Times, can't possibly know or have known intellectual adventure. This, as Graham Harman has noted, seems to be the core of McGinn's plaint:
Our current name is harmful because it posits a big gap between the sciences and philosophy; we do something that is not a science. Thus we do not share in the intellectual prestige associated with that thoroughly modern word. We are accordingly not covered by the media that cover the sciences, and what we do remains a mystery to most people.
In the words of Rodney Dangerfield, "I don't get no respect."
Dangerfield is a comedian. McGinn is not, nor is he a philosopher. He is, at best, an ontician, whatever that is.
Perhaps one reason so many people hold the academic world in contempt is that they sense that those who run it have utterly given up on the quest for truth, for, yes, wisdom. Those words from Star Trek mean something to people—they mean something to me, something very important. People want to believe that those privileged to live the academic life believe in and support the questing for truth. Perhaps the public senses, if not quite knows, that academicians have lost site of the truth. And so the public has little respect for the intellectual life.
They want to see something higher, something noble, something worthy of sacrifice and respect. What does McGinn do? He treats his professional work as though it were toothpaste for the mind, that's what he does. How can anyone respect that? McGinn surely doesn't.
I mean, really! Kvetching in the NYTimes about not getting respect? He gets THAT pulpit handed to him and that's what he does with it?
With mouthpieces like that, the academy doesn't need enemies.
Friday, March 02, 2012
Nazi Rules for Regulating Funk 'n Freedom
J.J. Gould has a short piece in The Atlantic that lists Nazi regulations for dance orchestras on Czeckslovakia:
- Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
- in this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
- As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
- so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
- strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
- also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
- the double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
- plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
- musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
- all light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.
H/t Graham Harman.
Monday, February 27, 2012
The Early History of Modern Computing: A Brief Chronology
This chronology is from a Guardian interview with George Dyson, who's just written Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. One of the central features of the book is to restore prominence to John von Neumann, the great Hungarian polymath.
1936 Alan Turing submits his paper 'On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungs problem' to the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society.
1941 Konrad Zuse working in isolation in Germany, builds the Z3. He knows nothing about Turing's work.
1944 The first Colossus computer is operational at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, significantly contributing to the allied war effort by doubling the codebreakers' output. It contained 1,500 thermionic valves, was the size of a room and weighed around a ton. In all, 10 Colossus computers were in use by the end of the war.
1945 John von Neumann publishes a paper setting out the architecture of a stored-program computer.
1946 First public showing of the Eniac computer built in the preceding three years at the University of Pennsylvania.
1952 Von Neumann's IAS computer becomes operational and is extensively cloned – there is no patent.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Computing Encounters Being, an Addendum
As soon as I finished yesterday's post on Brian Smith's On the Origin of Objects, I had a thought: Ahh...so THAT's why the philosophy of computing leads to metaphysics. If your intuitions about computing are dominated by your practice of arithmetic, well, that's calculation, and calculation is only an aspect of computing has it has evolved since World War II.
Consider the opening paragraph to the Preface of Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans (xiv):
Leading software designers have recognized domain modeling and design as critical topics for at least 20 years, yet surprisingly little has been written about what needs to be done or how to do it. Although it has never been formulated clearly, a philosophy has emerged as an undercurrent in the object community, a philosophy I call domain-driven design.
In that paragraph the object community is not a fellowship of philosophers, it's a bunch of computer programmers using languages such as C++ or Java and working in a style that came to be called object-oriented long before the philosophers re-coined the phrase for their own purposes.
But that's a side-note.
What I want you to think about: "domain modeling" and "domain-driven," about that "domain." The point is that programs are ABOUT some world, aka the domain. Programs are written to perform some useful task, e.g. inventory control in a liquor store, simulating fluid flow around an airfoil, formatting strings of alpha-numeric characters in text documents (a word processor), moving fictional characters and objects through fictional worlds as in, e.g. video games, and so forth. To write such programs one must model the application domain: What kinds of objects, relations, and processes are in that domain? One then writes software that not only embodies that model, but also gives human users the ability to control and manipulate that model. That is, the software itself embodies, enables, translates an interaction between humans and the world.
Programming's a very difficult job, and one that's not often done well. There's lots of lousy software in the world and the failure rate of custom software projects is ferocious. But that's another side note.
So, here we have this complex and difficult task, writing software. And now Brian Cantwell Smith wants to philosophize, not about the writing of software, or even about the software itself, but about what the software does: computing, in the largest sense of the word. How can he NOT engage in metaphysics? If computing, in that largest sense (as opposed to the more restricted notion of calculation), is always about the world, then a philosophy of computing must also be a philosophy of the world.
So, it's inevitable then that, properly engaged, a philosophy of computing must be metaphysics of the deepest sort.
Now, how do we get from that to the observation I made two months ago that reading some current philosophers seems, in places, very much like reading computerists thinking about knowledge representation? Both kinds of talk are very abstract probings about basic things, relations between them, and processes among them all. And there seems to be some kind of deep rift between these folks HERE who want to make objects the basic stuff of the world and those folks over THERE who see processes and relations as the basic stuff. What I'm wondering is whether or not, at a sufficiently abstract level, these competing views aren't mutually interconvertible?
Saturday, February 25, 2012
On the Origin of Objects (towards a philosophy of computation)
While crusing the web I came across a 1996 book by Brain Cantwell Smith, On the Origin of Objects. Smith is a computer scientist who was, in fact, in search of a theory of computation but found himself smack in the middle of metaphysics. Interesting, no? Just what computing is, is not exactly clear. And with folks, such a Stephen Wolfram (and he wasn't the first), proposing that the universe is, beneath it all, a giant computer of some sort, well, you can see how chasing down the nature of computation could be interesting.
The publisher's blurb was provocative:
Everything that exists - objects, properties, life, practice - lies Smith claims in the "middle distance," an intermediate realm of partial engagement with and partial separation from, the enveloping world. Patterns of separation and engagement are taken to underlie a single notion unifying representation and ontology: that of subjects' "registration" of the world around them.
That had just a whiff of object-oriented ontology about it, though the book's date puts it before the term was coined.
I found an ontology site that had excerpts from the book, from critics, and from Smith's reply. It had this bit from the book's conclusion:
Overall, the project was to develop what I called a successor metaphysics, one that would honor the following pretheoretic requirements (345-246):
1. Do justice to what is right about:
a. Constructivism: a form of humility, or so at least I characterized it, requiring that we acknowledge our presence in, and influence on, the world around us; and
b. Realism: the view that adds to constructivism's claim that "we are here" an equally profound recognition that we are not all that is here, and that as a result not all of our stories are equally good.
2. Make sense of pluralism: the fact that knowledge is partial, perspectival, and never wholly extricable from its (infinite) embedding historical, cultural, social, material, economic and every other kind of context. The account of pluralism must:
a. Avoid devolving into nihilism or other forms of vacuous relativism, and in particular not be purchased at the price of (successors notions of) excellence, standards, virtue, truth, or significance; and
b. Not license radical incommensurability, provide an excuse to build walls, or in any other way stand in the way of interchange, communion, and struggle for common ends.
Two additional criteria were applied to how these intuitions are met:
3. Be irreductionist—ideologically, scientifically, and in every other way. No category, from sociality to electron, from political power to brain, from origin myth to rationality to mathematics, including the category "human," may be given a priori pride of place, and thereby be allowed to elude contingency, struggle, and price.
4. Be nevertheless foundational, in such a way as to satisfy our undiminished yearning for metaphysical grounding. That is, or so at least I put it, the account must show how and what it is to be grounded simpliciter - without being grounded in a, for any category a.
Along the way, the account should:
5. Reclaim tenable, lived, work-a-day successor versions of many mainstay notions of the modernist tradition: object, objective, true, formal, mathematical, logical, physical, etc."
That site, in turn, sent me to an interesting and curious review of the book by R. P. Loui, that appeared in Artificial Intelligence, 106: 353-358, December 1998. Early on we find this:
ORIGIN OF OBJECTS is thus an important book, even a beautiful book. It reasserts its author as one of the deepest and erudite thinkers of computing. It is also, to this reviewer, an intellectually uninteresting book and thoroughly frustrating to read. These are two separate points: First, the book is a meditation on some metaphysical questions posed by symbol systems, and the author admits repeatedly that this is a purely metaphysical exercise (I would have demanded an apology rather than an admission). The problem is that metaphysics is a love-it or hate-it area of philosophy that has no practical implications (unlike, for example, epistemology which is crucially involved in explicating formal criteria for knowledge and belief). Second, the book frustrates this reviewer because the author, as is his reputation from prior work, is incapable of getting to the point. It is not just that Brian Smith seems to lean toward the semi-literary style of, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche. It is probably due to a mismatch of interests between writer and reader (a mismatch I suspect Brian Smith will have with most readers in AI). Both of these points are developed below.
The remarks about not getting to the point and writing a literary style, they might prick up the ears of my continental philosophical friends. Smith's problematic appears to be this:
What is the idea? Basically, Brian Smith believes that there is one "real world out there" (his "metaphysical monism") while there is an apparent arbitrariness in how we symbolize it (our "ontological pluralism" p. 375). He feels that this mismatch of monism and pluralism is an intolerable situation which must be remedied.
To deal with this problem Smith has recourse to the aforementioned middle distance:
At this new level, there is "registration." It is a level at which reference to the world can be made, but not through linguistic commitment or through symbols that have intentionality (reference). It is the level that philosophers of science might call pre-theoretic: there is an observer, but there are not yet data, since data are not theory-neutral. This level is made possible by the embedding of anobserver in the "real world", and of course, Brian Smith aims to permitthat observer to be an AI program as well as a biological system.
And so forth and so on. I can't keep going on like this because I'll end up quote most of the review, which doesn't make much sense when you can go there and read it for yourself. Loui concludes by asserting that the book "has catapulted Brian Smith, for a time (as long as the philosophy of computing is mistaken to be the modern philosophy of mind), ahead of all who would today claim to be computing's principal philosopher." He is surely correct in his parenthentical; whatever the philosophy of computing is, it cannot be considered to be a philosophy of mind, real or artificial.
I'll conclude with three (from over a dozen) quotations Loui culled from the book:
... designers, playwrights, artists, ... are drawn into the act ... . Few fields, if any, are being left behind; ... it would be a mistake to think that these people are just users of computation. On the contrary, they are participating in its invention. ... The line between specifically computational expertise and general computational literacy is fading ... (p. 360)
... notions of mathematical proof [are] being revised ... . Other distinctions are collapsing, such as those between and among theories, models, simulations, implementations ... (p. 360)
... we are post-Newtonian, in the sense of being inappropriately wedded to a particular reductionism of scientism, inapplicable to so rich an intentional phenomenon. Another generation of scientists may be the last thing we need. Maybe, instead, we need a new generation of magicians. (p. 361)
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Symposium on Graeber's Debt
Crooked Timber is running a symposium on David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years. Contributions so far:
- Seminar on David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years – Introduction, Chris Bertram
- The unmourned death of the double coincidence, John Quiggan
- The World Economy is not a Tribute System, Henry Farrell
- Debt Jubilee or Global Deleveraging, Barry Finger
- The end of debt, John Quiggan
- The Return of Grand Narrative in the Human Sciences, Neville Morley
- The Dangers of Pricing the Infinite, Malcolm P. Harris, on student debt
All are worth reading, as are many of the comments. I'll end with the last paragraph from Bertram's introduction:
Does Graeber find in utopian and democratic resistance to the Axial empires an historic precedent for the Occupy movement to emulate? Perhaps our best possibilities lie not in grand schemes of societal transformation but in developing the "baseline communism" and the democratic instincts that persist even in the heart of modern capitalism. The anarchist writer Colin Ward used a phrase from Ignazio Silone – "the seed beneath the snow" – to make a similar idea vivid. We cannot take the beast on in a direct assault, and nor should we, but we can work together to develop a more human society within the nooks and crannies of the commercial one.
Sounds a bit like a plug for the Transition Movement, which originated in England and has since spread around the world.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
The Nightmare of Digital Film Preservation
I have distinct memories of the days when the prospect of digital media everywhere led to thoughts of how easy it would be to preserve everything: Digital Will Never Die! The basic idea was that, as digital is All or Nothing, the signal is strong and clear and so resistant to degradation. All we have to do is just keep transferring it from one substrate to another as the substrates wear out.
Piece of cake.
That's not how things have worked out. David Bordwell has written a useful essay on the nasty problems of digital preservation: Pandora's digital box: Pix and pixels. The law of unintended consequences strikes again, and again; as Bordwell observes: "It seems likely that digital projection has, in unintended and unexpected ways, put the history of film in jeopardy." There are many problems, more than I care even to list, much less summarize. Let one little paragraph stand for many:
Storing 4K digital masters costs about 11 times as much as storing a film master. You can store the digital master for about $12,000 per year, while the film master averages about $1,100.
For that's what it all comes down to, cost.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Get Rewarded To Eat Fresh
Use your Speedy Rewards card when you fuel up on freshness at Speedy Cafe and earn extra rewards for your purchases. You can redeem your points for items like Gift Cards, Beverages, Food, & Fuel Discounts. The rewards you love just got fresher with Speedy Café.
Speedy Café Clubs
With every purchase of your favorite items, you're one step closer to earning a coupon for FREE product, bonus points or discounts! You're automatically a member of a Speedy Rewards Club when you purchase the qualifying items below.
Beverage Club
Register and choose your reward. Buy any 6 Coffee, Fountain, Speedy Freeze, tea or specialty drink and receive a reward of your choice. Restrictions apply.
Krispy Kreme Club
Buy 6 Doughnuts and receive a coupon for your 7th FREE.
Food Court Club
Buy any 6 Food Court Club items (Hot or Cold Sandwiches, Pizza, Roller Grill, Nachos, and Speedy Treats) and receive a coupon good for 1,000 Speedy Rewards Bonus Points.
Speedy Café Redemptions
Redeem Points For Free Stuff
1. Earn Points Everyday
Start earning points immediately in-store or at the pump with your Speedy Rewards Membership.
2. Redeem points
Redeem your available points with the mobile app or at the in-store kiosk, and receive a coupon for your selected reward.
3. Get Your Free Stuff
Present your digital or printed coupon at check-out to get your free stuff.All Redemptions


text:
We need to open our hearts to God, to till the soil of our souls until it is fertile and ready to receive the word. If we allow God to speak to us, even in the smallest and most mundane ways, we will find that God is hardly ever silent, but is telling us always which way to turn, which choice to make, and which path to tread to be within God's will.
Sometimes we mistake the silence of God as an absence,
which it is not.
Sometimes we hear silence when the Spirit is most fully present, interceding in
sighs too deep for words.
I am a gay woman of faith who is feeling loneliness and longing in the
midst of a silent time.
Even in my loneliness and longing for the Spirit of Love and Life, I
know I am not alone.
I don't believe for one moment that God is ever silent. I truly, in
my heart of hearts, believe that it is we who are simply not listening to
what God is telling us, in such a myriad of wonderful and unexpected ways,
mostly because the Love, mercy, forgiveness, acceptance, and Grace seems far
too good to be true for us.
Carl furrowed his eyebrows and Narendra felt a pang of regret that perhaps
he had intruded too far into Carl's personal life. "This is hard to talk about,
but I'm glad you asked." He studied his hands, as if he were talking to them
instead of his friend. "Narendra, do you ever feel like God isn't listening?"
How do I answer those who would condemn me to hell in your name and in
the name of love?
The Silence of God grew louder and longer, confusion was mine all alone- with no way to see where I was headed and surely finding no way back home.
The problem is not that God doesn't answer our
prayer but in our lack of faith in believing that God knows what's best for
God's silence is not necessarily a negative response. He speaks to us at
will - His will, not our own. Our faith must assure us that God the Father
listens to our every word, and no word is ever forgotten.
How many times have I prayed to God, "Hey, are you really there?
How come you won't hear me?" Yet, I Know He is there because He
always answers my prayers in time. Just because God is sometimes
silent, doesn't mean He isn't listening!
The idea of my bisexuality as a gift from God was overwhelming. And yet, that cold winter night in the middle of Advent, I realized for the first time in my life that God really did love me, "just as I am" as the old hymn says. And my sexuality was part of the me that God accepted.
I would like the readers of
Whosoever to know that God does answer prayer and you are not alone. There
are heterosexual, Bible-believing people who are hearing from God about these
things and who stand with you in love and in prayer. I am proud to be one of
them. Please forgive me for taking so long to get here.
Wicca not only accepted us as a couple, it encouraged us to think about the values and ideals we had been raised to believe. The Wiccans we met were willing to accept us as a couple and welcomed our questions. We were encouraged in the studying the faiths of various peoples and times. Our goal was to find a blend of beliefs that met our needs and guided our path.
The idea for the "First Rhubarb" arose from an interminably long and punny debate about the unpalatableness of a certain vegetable -- a vegetable whose color is reminiscent of the Pink Triangle the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear in the concentration camps, and which homosexuals today have co-opted for themselves as a badge of pride.
Many "AIDS experts," though many perhaps quite well meaning, are
putting people into bondage to a paradigm that rewards them, virus hunters,
drug companies, and assorted organizations quite handsomely. I hope that
this article serves to liberate many from the bondage to which we have been
exposed regarding the connection between HIV and AIDS.
I am going to present several scriptures that will help on reconciling our homosexuality and also to prove that homosexuality isn't a sin.
Recently I received e-mail from a 14-year-old lesbian who is struggling
with rejection from her parents and her fundamentalist church. Where do
GLBT teenagers turn for spiritual help when their own parents and
churches turn against them?
What I am discovering is that my greatest sin has
nothing to do with cross-dressing but is my failure to love enough. The word
sin carries lots of negative baggage, so rather than using the word sin I
have begun to think of it more in terms of an opportunity to improve my
character. That makes it something to work on in a positive sense rather than
feeling the guilt and anxiety that is often present with the word sin.
Sixty-seven United Methodist ministers will not face trial for participating in a holy union of two lesbians in Sacramento, California. After a three-day hearing, an investigative committee decided on February 11, 2000, not to pursue further action against the clergy members.
Refusing to be intimidated by a rare winter thunderstorm,
twenty-six Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis waded through the flooded
streets of West Los Angeles on their cold, wet march to the international
headquarters of the Fox Family Channel.
I can identify with Job,
admiring him as he holds on to his integrity. Faith is a difficult
enough enterprise for many of us, isn't it? Hard enough, without being
blasted by the righteous trance channellers of God; the Gary Bauers,
Alan Keyes, James Dobsons, Pat Robertsons, and Jerry Falwells who give
us a god at "his" worst.
In the
arms of Jesus we rediscover ourselves while looking into the eyes of him who
loved us to the point of death, and who will allow no one and nothing to
snatch us from his hands, let alone his arms, wrapped tightly around us.
I am a piece of glass and if you'll listen, I'll tell you my story.
As far as we know from the Scriptures, Jesus said nothing about gays and lesbians. He did speak against those who judge others [Matthew 7:1]. He seems to have a special love for the outcasts of society.
Comments? Please fill out our Reader Survey!


text:
The times are set for London, UK. Venus is dignified by domicile and thus very strong.
1. 16 October, 5.33am. Venus is rising, it's Venus hour. Moon is in triplicity but in waning phase.
2. 23 October, 5.55am. Venus is rising, it's Venus hour. Moon is peregrine but makes an applying sextile to Venus. Moon is also waxing here.
3. 30 October, 5.17am. Venus is rising, it's Venus hour. Moon is in triplicity, waxing, and makes an applying trine to benefic Jupiter.
Good for Venus talismans, all Venus things like love, luxury, etc.
I will put up the charts on my website later. They shouldn't be too hard to modify for your location. Just draw up a chart for your location at that time and aim to get Venus on the ascendant, then check it's Venus hour.


text:
It's Girl Scout cookie time again, and Mancos Girl Scout Troop 4403 is ready!
The scouts' goal for selling cookies is 334 boxes each, they said. While that seems like a lot, they are using the money to go to Girl Scout camp in August, which will cost them $200 each. The Girl Scout camp is in Durango, Hale said. They will be busy with horseback riding, swimming, hiking, rock-climbing and other outdoor activities.
The nine junior scouts in the troop have all been involved in scouting for a few years and they love it. Leader Brandy Hale has been with the girls for three years now and enjoys watching them grown and learn. She has had up to 12 girls in her troop.
In addition to going door-to-door to sell cookies, said the girls, they also do a lot of booth sales, setting up a table in front of stores that allow them to be there, such as Wal-Mart, Walgreens, P & D and City Market. They also go to Durango and Telluride to hawk their cookies.
"The most popular cookie is the Thin Mint," they said. At $3.50 per box, they seem to sell a lot, but the troop itself only gets $.60 per box, said the girls.
If, for some unknown reason they don't make enough money to go to camp, they will add to their money with other fundraising efforts such as bake sales.
Cadette scout Jessalyn Bay-Voit is also selling cookies, but is in troop #2310. Her goal is to raise enough money to go to Europe in 2015 with other scouts.
What do they learn while they're selling cookies? Each of the girls had a different answer. "We learn to be nice and respectful!" "We learn people skills!" "We learn to count money!", they said. Business ethics, decision-making and goal setting are also things that the girls learn as they market their product.
"It's always a good opportunity to teach them," said Hale.
As the Girl Scouts go through their year, they do many service projects. One of them this particular troop has chosen to go along with their cookie-selling is called Hometown Heroes. Each troop has a different Hometown Hero, and this hear Troop #4403 has chosen to concentrate on the fire and police departments.
"Anyone can donate to them, or they can buy a box of cookies and tell us that they want the money to go to the fire or police department," said the girls.
The Mancos troop will be selling cookies from Jan. 27 through March 3, and they start their booth sales on Feb. 8.


text:
The National Automobile Dealers Association, also known as NADA, is the recognized authority in loan and trade-in information, vehicle mileage calculations, Model/Manufacturer cross references, VIN look-ups, dealer information, pricing on retail and wholesale and much more for:
Official Used Car Guide
NADA's Used Car guide gives you seven years (1999-2006) of trade-in, retail, and loan values for cars and light duty trucks. This guide updates monthly.
Official Older Used Car Guide
The Older Car guide gives you trade-in, retail, and loan values for cars and light duty trucks from 1987-1998 twelve years. This guide updates quarterly. (January, May, September)
Manufactured Housing Appraisal Guide
Manufactured Housing guide offers forty years of appraisals starting from 1967-2006 with over 6,000 trade names and over 750 manufacturers! This guide updates three times a year. (January, May, September)
Recreational Vehicle Appraisal Guide
The R.V. guide offers NADA used wholesale and retail values and suggested list prices as far back as 1989 and as recent as 2006. This guide also updates quarterly.
Motorcycle/Snowmobile/ATV/Personal Watercraft Appraisal Guide
Average retail values and suggested retail from 1986 to 2006 (21 years) make up the Motorcycle guide. This book also offers mileage charts, Model/Manufacturer cross references and more. Updates quarterly.
Marine Appraisal Guide
The Marine guide gives you 14 years (1993-2006) of marine appraisal for boats 7-75 feet long, yachts, houseboats and more. Updates every three months.
Title and Registration Textbook
The Title book contains state-to-state information such as proof of ownership, listing of registration fees, repossessions, sample documents to reference from, Lien Perfection, etc. This guide updates once a year. (January)
Classic, Collectible, and Special Interest Car Appraisal Guide
The Classic Car guide is designed to give eighty years worth of classic car values! 1926 to 1986, for all car models and sixty years (1946 to 2006) for exotic makes. The Classic guide updates quarterly and contains over 650 pages of information.
Van/Truck Conversion and Limousine Appraisal Guide
The Van/Limo guide gives Credit Unions 23 years (1984-2006) of van and truck values and 17 years (1990-2006) of limousine values, it offers NADA used wholesale and retail values as well as suggested list prices for van and truck conversions. This guide updates three times per year.
This product consists of all the online guides listed below.
Features and Benefits:
NADA's business-to-business website is fast becoming our Credit Union's primary source for car loan valuations nationwide. There are many good reasons, including:
Clarifications about pricing and lookups:
Connect: ©
Contact Us
6801 Parkwood Blvd.
Suite 300
Plano, Texas 75024
Phone: (469) 385-6400
Toll Free: (800) 442-5762
Online Form


text:
The 19th of June is "Nineteenth," a holiday begun in Texas and originating from President Lincoln's proclamation that slaves were emancipated. He made the announcement New Year's Day, 1863, but in Galveston, Texas, the slaves didn't get the word until June 19, 1865, when 2000 Union troops came to town to enforce the Proclamation. Two years late is a long time for news to spread, even in the 19th century across Texas, and rumor has it that slaveholders didn't let them know until then. The slaves there began celebrations with barbecues and picnics at churches, and the tradition spread.
It waned for a while with the migration of African-Americans to urban areas, but during the Civil Rights era it gained prominence again. It's also known as "Emancipation Day" or "Freedom Day." It is recognized as a state holiday or observance day in 41 states, including Louisiana. However, we always had to do things different in New Orleans, and in many ways we started "Juneteenth" here, although Texas may take credit for it. A local historian named Malcolm Suber, claims the country's first celebration of emancipation was on May 1, 1862, in the city when General Benjamin Butler brought 15,000 Union troops to occupy the city. Slaves from the city and all surrounding areas filled the city, specifically Congo Square in Treme', to declare a day of Jubilee.
In NOLA, the January 1 date of emancipation was observed up until the 1960s, mostly by the local church organizations. 1913 was the year, the city held a mass parade on St, Charles Avenue, down to Canal Street, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of freedom. In 1918, the celebration drew hundreds of colored soldiers returning from World War I to participate. The Juneteenth "Modern Movement" started in 1994 when several Juneteenth leaders from across the country gathered at Christian Unity Baptist Church to plan for a greater recognition of a nationalized Juneteenth. This year in the city, celebrations were held June 16 and June 17, at Congo Square, the site of slave gatherings in the 18th and 19th centuries and the first New Orleans "Juneteenth," and also on Friday, June 15, at the African-American Museum on Governor Nicholls. The New Orleans Juneteenth Committee puts on the Celebrating Freedom Festival, celebrating African-American cultural heritage and educating the public about the achievements of African-Americans.
Our city and state's renowned culture would not be what it is without the African- Americans who were previously enslaved people. Juneteenth is a good time to reflect on a sad day in our country's past and the sacrifices so many made– and to rejoice in the future.


text:
A few days ago, I posted on a piece in Slate by Phillip Carter and Owen West arguing, without merit I thought, that Iraq in 2004 looks like Vietnam in 1966. Carter and West made one subsidiary point that I didn't address. They claimed that "U.S. losses in Fallujah [were] almost equal to those" incurred during the famously bloody Vietnam War battle of Hue. Carter and West stated:
In the three-week battle for Hue, 147 Marines were killed and 857 wounded. In the twin battles for Fallujah, more than 104 soldiers and Marines have been killed and more than 1,100 wounded.
And, they noted, the fatality numbers do not adjust for the fact that, in Iraq, advanced technology and medicine prevent many more wounded from dying than was the case in Vietnam.
This didn't sound correct to reader Helen Wells. So she googled the battle of Hue and obtained better information. It turns out that, yes, 147 Marines were killed at Hue. Along with 74 Army soldiers and 384 ARVN. Thus, total deaths on our side at Hue were nearly six times higher than in Fallujah. And even if, in Kerryesque fashion, one decides to exclude the deaths of our Vietnamese allies, the ratio is two to one.
Moreover, the claim of Carter and West that they are understating the comparative intensity of the fighting in Fallajuh by not adjusting for technological advances can't withstand scrutiny either. At Hue, Wells points out, we had a forward based surgery facility staffed with eight doctors. Wounded soldiers who made it to the facility alive had a 99% chance of surviving.
In my first post on the Carter-West piece, I wondered why the authors went through contortions to try to show that Iraq 2004 looks like Vietnam 1966. Now it may be fair to ask, in addition, why they engaged in distortions to make this point.


text:
Decision : 30 COM 8B.27
Extension of Properties Inscribed on the World Heritage List (Kvarken Archipelago / High Coast)
The World Heritage Committee,
1. Having examined Documents WHC-06/30.COM/8B and WHC-06/30.COM/INF.8B.2,
2. Approves the extension of the High Coast, Sweden, to include the Kvarken Archipelago, Finland, on the basis of natural criterion (i):
Criterion (i): The Kvarken Archipelago with its 5,600 islands and surrounding sea is of exceptional geological value for two main reasons. First, it is an area of rapid glacio-isostatic uplift with rates that are among the highest in the world. The uplift is ongoing and is associated with major changes in the water bodies in post glacial times. The Kvarken, along with the existing High Coast, its Swedish equivalent on the west coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, are key areas for the understanding of the processes of crustal response to the melting of the continental ice sheet. Second, the Kvarken area possesses a distinctive array of glacial depositional landforms, such as De Greer moraines, which add to the variety of glacial landscapes features in the region and reinforce the previous validity of the High Coast inscription.
3. Notes that the property thus becomes a serial transboundary property of both Finland and Sweden with the new name of Kvarken Archipelago / High Coast, Finland and Sweden. The total size of the transboundary serial property will be 336,900 hectares.
DocumentsDecisions Report
Context of DecisionWHC-06/30.COM/8B


text:
Kansas defensive lineman Marquel Combs has asked for and been granted a release to transfer to schools outside of the Big 12 Conference, Jayhawks coach Charlie Weis said on Monday.
"Marquel was a great factor in our recruitment of last year's signing class," said Weis. "We would like to wish him well in his future endeavors."
Combs, a native of Memphis, Tenn., came to Kansas from Pierce College in Woodland Hills, Calif. He did not see any game action during his time at KU. The 6-foot-3, 290-pounder was considered by Phil Steele to be the nation's top junior college recruit.
"I appreciate the Jayhawk community, as well as my teammates and the staff, for all of the support I have received during my time with the program," said Combs. "It has been an incredible opportunity and I wish them the best of luck the rest of this season and in the future."
Even though he didn't play a snap for the Jayhawks, Combs' departure is obviously a big blow. This is a program in need of as much talent as possible, especially in the trenches.


text:
Professional Candle Making Supplies Since 1972
Polyurethane Tea-light Mold
$117.79 per unit
Flexible polyurethane tea-light mold with pins.
(98-cavity mold pictured)
(98-cavity mold pictured)
Product Description
This mold makes 98 tea-light blanks with center hole. Just pour the wax into the openings with pins in place. After wax starts to harden, remove pins. After wax is completely hardened, remove from mold and turn upside down and tap on table for blanks to fall out. This is great for making white or colored tea-lights. There is a slight migration of color to mold material if oil soluble dyes are used. Use clean wax to pour and be sure mold is clean. Also available in 15-cavity molds.
People Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Shipping Information
To see shipping costs, proceed to checkout to get up-to-date rates. Orders are shipped by UPS or FedEx. View the Shipping Information page for more details.


text:
What You Should Know About Home Appraisalshttps://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/12/home-appraisals.asp
An appraisal is an unbiased professional opinion of a home's value. Appraisals are almost always used in purchase-and-sale transactions and commonly used in refinance transactions.
How Home Appraisals Work | HowStuffWorkshttps://home.howstuffworks.com/real-estate/buying-home/home-appraisals.htm
A home appraisal also protects the bank from getting stuck with property that's worth less than they've invested. And it protects you from paying too much for a house simply because it was love at first sight. The home appraisal is a no-nonsense factor in a decision that is often emotional for the buyer.
Eppraisal - Official Sitewww.eppraisal.com
Free home valuation estimate on what your home is worth. View comparable real estate prices and recent property sales.
Appraisal - How You Can Avoid A Low Real Estate Appraisal ...https://www.bankrate.com/finance/real-estate/how-to-avoid-a-low-home-appraisal-1.aspx
A low appraisal can ruin the sale of a home. Here are tips to help you fight back.
The Home Appraisal Process - Discover Home Loans Bloghttps://www.discover.com/home-loans/articles/the-home-appraisal-process
Let us help clarify the home appraisal process. During the home-buying process, obtaining a home appraisal is a critical step. Let's take a look at some of the frequently asked questions.
Home Appraisal Headquarters | Quicken Loanshttps://www.quickenloans.com/appraisal-process
What are appraisals, and how do they work? An appraisal is an independent, professional opinion of value. An appraisal helps establish a property's market value - the likely sales price it would bring if offered in an open and competitive real estate market.
What You Need to Know About Home Appraisals | US Newshttps://loans.usnews.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-home-appraisals
How do home appraisals differ from home inspections? The two often get confused, but they aren't the same thing. Both an appraiser and inspector will walk around the house and take a good look at it (usually, the inspector comes first), but they're each at the house for different reasons.
Real estate appraisal - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_appraisal
Real estate appraisal, property valuation or land valuation is the process of developing an opinion of value, for real property (usually market value).Real estate transactions often require appraisals because they occur infrequently and every property is unique (especially their condition, a key factor in valuation), unlike corporate stocks, which are traded daily and are identical (thus a ...
Home Appraisal Methods - How Home Appraisals Work ...https://home.howstuffworks.com/real-estate/buying-home/home-appraisals1.htm
When you apply for a mortgage, your lender typically requires the property to be appraised by one of their approved appraisers. This practice helps create more consistent appraisals and gives you assurance that the appraiser is properly licensed and certified. Even though the home appraisal is the ...
Zillow - Official Sitehttps://www.zillow.com
The leading real estate marketplace. Search millions of for-sale and rental listings, compare Zestimate® home values and connect with local professionals.


text:
In Sauk City, Wisconsin
Where Service Is A Family Tradition!
Stihl, Simplicity, Ferris, Kubota, Husqvarna all names known for reliability and anything we sell can be serviced right here at our facility.
McFarlane Mfg. Co. Inc.P.O. Box 100, Sauk City, WI 53583Phone: 1.800.627.8569
Hosted and Maintained By USAgNetCopyright © 2019 - All Rights Reserved.


text:
"Protect your device against virus attack and eliminate all enemies" The game is build on solid base of modern engine, but respects classic gaming principles - easy control, clear graphics and fine-tuned gameplay. There are unique HW-inspired levels in the campaign mode and infinite number of generated levels in the quick play mode, so you will never play the same level again. You will encounter thousands of enemies of different kind. The game experience is crowned by original chiptune music and sound. The well known CRT screen look is a matter of course. The story takes place in your own device, which is currently under heavy attack of an unknown virus - A-droids. You as the OS Defender have to go down the way into the SW & HW and fight in various parts of your device - USB, memory, ... and lead a final battle in the microprocessor. If you fail, your device will be lost.
Only registered members can share their thoughts. So come on! Join the community today (totally free - or sign in with your social account on the right) and join in the conversation.
ASCII Shooter game screenshots


text:
On the 7th May 2009, the Royal Navy will be celebrating 100 years of Naval Aviation, on the anniversary of the date in 1909 when the Admiralty placed its first order for a Naval Airship.
National Events
Fly Navy 100
Windsor Castle Royal Tattoo
- The 2009 Tattoo will be held 13th – 16th May in the Private Grounds of Windsor Castle. This not-for-profit event is set to be as spectacular as ever in 2009 and all proceeds will go towards supporting military personnel through the Royal British Legion.
Black Cat Season 2009
- The 2009 season of the Royal Navy's Helicopter Display Team, "The Black Cats". Various dates between the 24th May and the 25th October.
HMS Collingwood Open Day
- The Royal Navy Field Gun Tournament for the Brickwoods Trophy will take place on Saturday the 6th Jun 09 at HMS Collingwood, Fareham, as part of the HMS Collingwood Open Day.
Mass Bands of The Royal Marines
- The Massed Bands of the Royal Marines are to perform their world-renowned Beating Retreat ceremony, in celebration of the birthday of their Captain General, His Royal Highness Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh..
National Armed Forces Day
- National Armed Forces Day will be held on the 27th June 2009 and the Historic Dockyard Chatham has been selected to host the main event which will be complemented by hundreds of smaller events in towns and cities across the UK.
The Chara Challenge
- 2 Jul 09 - As 3 Cdo Brigade returns from Afghanistan, their thoughts turn to those who will not be coming home with them. They have therefore set up the Chara Challenge.
Yeovilton Air Day 2009
- RNAS Yeovilton will be celebrating 100 years of Naval Aviation at their annual Air Day on Saturday 11th July.
RNAS Culdrose Air Day 2009
Navy Days 09
- Navy Days 2009 takes place at Devonport Naval Base in Plymouth, Western Europe's biggest Naval Base, over the weekend of Saturday 5th and Sunday 6th September.
Brighton White Air World Extreme Sports Festival
- 18-20 Sept 2009 Brighton White Air World Extreme Sports Festival! The Royal Navy will be exhibiting at the White Air Festival in Brighton.
Devonport Tours
- Welcome to the site for booking tours of Her Majesty's Naval Base Devonport. This is a pilot scheme run between the Royal Navy and Devonport Management Limited.


text:
Dave McGarry earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Florida in exercise science and an MBA from the University of Texas, Dallas. Along with his degrees, McGarry is certified through the NSCA as a certified strength and conditioning specialist and is the current fitness director for the Cooper Fitness Center at Craig Ranch. His experience consists of more than 12 years as a personal trainer and fitness manager. McGarry also is actively involved with the community as a public speaker and presenter to corporations for health and wellness. His most recent accomplishment is a self-published book for fitness professionals and personal trainers called "Anatomy of Sales." If you would like to learn more or read his blog, visit www.davemcgarry.com.
Is it possible for a personal training department to generate more than $1 million in revenue in this struggling economy? Of course it is. However, if you want to do so, then you must implement these three key elements into your business:
1. Strategy. Most clubs or businesses have a mission statement but do not have financial or strategic objectives defined for their business. To define these objectives, you need to go through a method called the strategic planning process, which involves asking yourself critical questions that will directly impact your success in carving out a profitable personal training department. Simply put, the strategic planning process asks questions such as:
- What is your competitive advantage over your competitors?
- What are your core values that are irreplaceable?
- What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? (SWOT analysis)
- What are your long-term objectives?
By using the strategic planning process and ultimately having a definitive strategy in place, your chances of succeeding in establishing a $1 million-per-year revenue-generating department increases dramatically.
2. Don't follow the herd. It is in our nature to naturally follow what is working with other business, but if this is your strategy and philosophy, you will have a challenging time creating a personal training department that generates $1 million in revenue. Earl Nightingale said it best: "Find out what your competitors are doing and do the opposite."
To stand out in the marketplace, you need to be different. Find your strengths and capitalize on them. In Jim Collin's book "Good to Great," Jim refers to the story of the hedgehog and the fox. The story shows how the fox tries to outsmart and outwit the hedgehog, but every time the fox tries to attack, the hedgehog just balls up and uses its pointy spikes to protect itself. The fox has no other option but to retreat.
This story needs to apply to your personal training department. Ask yourself, what is the one strength that you have that your competitors do not? Once you assess that strength, use it to your advantage and position yourself in the marketplace capitalizing on it. For instance, you may have personal trainers who have extensive experience with special populations. Market this to your current and prospective members.
3. Educate and train. Educating and training your personal trainers need to be high priorities and goals for your department. Any astute business owner knows that if you want to grow the company, you need to invest in resources that will contribute the highest return on investment, and unfortunately, often overlooked in the fitness industry, is the investment in your staff and personal trainers. Just satisfying the CEC requirements are not enough. You need to hold weekly meetings with your new staff, monthly meetings at a minimum with the entire department and bring in outside experts quarterly.
The first area most businesses want to cut is in staff training and development, but that is a mistake. More time and resources need to go into training and educating your team. Having a highly educated staff will do two things. One, it will position your business as the experts in training, and two, it will help keep your personal trainers from seeking out other employers. Trust me, anyone who has had one of their top-producing trainers leave to go to another club will tell you that it significantly hurts the bottom line. Don't let this happen. Spend the time to train and educate your staff, and you will see the top line increase to that $1 million mark.