artdiamondblog.com – Page 497 – Art Diamond's web log

An Environment Where Long-Term Hunches Could Thrive

An environment in which long-term hunches can be pursued, is important not just to science and invention. I speculate that it is also important to entrepreneurship.

(p. 74) If great ideas usually arrive in fragments, a partial cluster of neurons, then part of the secret to having great ideas lies in creating a working environment where those fragments are nurtured and sustained over time. This obviously poses some difficulty in modern work environments, with deadlines and quarterly reports and annual job reviews. (The typical middle manager doesn’t respond favorably to news that an employee has a hunch about something that probably won’t see results for twenty years.) But Priestley had created an environment for himself where those long-term hunches could thrive with almost no pressure, and his habit of simultaneously writing multiple documents (on multiple topics) kept the fragments alive in his mind over the decades. In the final pages of his memoirs, he mentions a lifelong habit of writing down “as soon as possible, every thing I wish not to forget.”

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

Global Warming Makes Arctic Less Hostile

“Statoilhydro’s pioneering liquefied natural gas plant on an island off Hammerfest in Norway has encountered an array of problems.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) HAMMERFEST, Norway — A Norwegian oil company has gone to the ends of the earth — almost literally — to get at some of the world’s last untapped energy resources.

StatoilHydro ASA operates a pioneering venture deep inside the Arctic Circle, energy’s final frontier. The company pumps natural gas from under the freezing waters of the Barents Sea, cools it into a liquid and exports it to Europe and the U.S.

The project, called Snoehvit, has taken StatoilHydro and the entire oil and gas industry into uncharted territory. Before, no one had ever produced liquefied natural gas in the Arctic — or in Europe, for that matter.

. . .
The oil companies are being aided by climate change. Lashed by storms and strewn with icebergs, the Arctic is one of the most hostile environments on earth. But global warming is melting the polar ice cap, opening up new shipping routes and unlocking once-inaccessible mineral deposits.

. . .
(p. B4) StatoilHydro, . . . , is upbeat. The plant is currently running at 80% to 90% of capacity, up from around 60% last year, company officials say. Outages are typical for the run-in period of a big LNG project, and flaring will soon be a thing of the past. Sure, they say, the start-up period has been troubled, but this is a field with a production life of up to 40 years.

For the full story, see:
GUY CHAZAN. “Norwegian Oil Firm Goes to Energy’s Last Frontier.” Wall Street Journal (Fri., FEBRUARY 13, 2009): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: LNG in the quotes is the abbreviation for liquefied natural gas.)

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

How Democratic Presidents Save Us

Andrew Jackson was the first in a long line of populist Democratic presidents:

(p. 24) He relished the roles of protector and savior. Just after dusk on a cold March day in 1791, when Jackson was practicing law on the circuit around Jonesborough, Tennessee, he and his friend John Overton were traveling with a small group through dangerous territory. Reaching the banks of the Emory River in the mountains, the lawyers spotted a potentially hostile Indian party. “The light of their fires showed that they were numerous,” Overton recalled to Henry Lee, and “that they were painted and equipped for war.” Under Jackson’s leadership (Overton credited him with a “saving spirit and elastic mind”), the travelers scrambled into the hills on horseback, riding roughly parallel to the river–which they had to cross to make it home. Pursued by the Indians, Jackson, Overton, and two others pressed on through the night, coming to a place where the water looked smooth enough to allow a hastily constructed raft and the horses to make it to the other side. Jackson look charge of the raft piled high with saddles and clothes. Overton would follow with the horses.

There was immediate trouble. The waters were not as smooth as they had appeared; a powerful undercurrent swept the boat–and Jackson– downstream, toward a steep waterfall. “Overton and his companion instantly cried out and implored Jackson to pull back,” Lee wrote. But he either not being so sensible of the danger, or being unwilling to yield to it, (p. 25) continued to push vigorously forward.” Jackson struggled with his oars; disaster was at hand. He and the saddles could he lost, and the Indians were still on their trail. “Finding himself just on the brink of the awful precipice,” Lee recounted, Jackson extended his oar to Overton, who “laid hold of it and pulled the raft ashore, just as it was entering the suck of the torrent.” Catching their breath on the bank of the river, Overton and Jackson looked at each other.

“You were within an ace, Sir, of being dashed to pieces,” Overton told him. Jackson waved him off, replying, “A miss is as good as a mile; it only shows how close I can graze danger. But we have no time to lose–follow me and I’ll save you yet.” They eluded the Indians, arriving home exhausted but safe.

Source:
Meacham, Jon. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. New York: Random House, 2008.
(Note: the semi-colons in the above passage were hard to distinguish, in the online version, from colons. I judged them to be semi-colons from context, but I could be wrong.)

Life Thrived When Earth Was Far Warmer than Now

“An artist’s rendering of the prehistoric snake Titanoboa cerrejonensis, which was 42 feet long and lived 60 million years ago.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A7) Some 60 million years ago, well after the demise of the dinosaurs, a giant relative of today’s boa constrictors, weighing more than a ton and measuring 42 feet long, hunted crocodiles in rain-washed tropical forests in northern South America, according to a new fossil discovery.
. . .
But the existence of such a large snake may also help clarify how hot the tropics became during an era when the planet, as a whole, was far warmer than it is now, and also how well moist tropical ecosystems can tolerate a much warmer global climate.

That last question is important in assessments of how human-driven global warming might affect the tropics.
. . .
The team examined how warm it had to be for a snake species to be that large by considering conditions favoring the largest living similar tropical snake, the green anaconda, said Jason J. Head, the lead author of the paper and a paleontologist at the University of Toronto. They concluded that Titanoboa could have thrived only if temperatures ranged from 86 to 93 degrees.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW C. REVKIN. “Fossils of Largest Snake Give Hint of Hot Earth.” The New York Times (Thurs., February 4, 2009): A7.
(Note: ellipses added.)

More Accurate Measurements Reveal Previously Undetected Anomalies

(p. 69) This is a standard pattern in the history of science: when tools for measuring increase their precision by orders of magnitude, new paradigms often emerge, because the newfound accuracy reveals anomalies that had gone undetected. One of the crucial benefits of increasing the accuracy of scales is that it suddenly became possible to measure things that had almost no weight. Black’s discovery of fixed air, and its perplexing mixture with common air, would have been impossible without the state-of-the-art scales he employed in his experiments. The whole inquiry had begun when Black heated a quantity of white magnesia, and discovered that it lost a minuscule amount of weight in the process–a difference that would have been imperceptible using older scales. The shift in weight suggested that something was escaping from the magnesia into the air. By then running comparable experiments, heating a wide array of substances, Black was able to accurately determine the weight of carbon dioxide, and consequently prove the existence of the gas. It weighs, therefore it is.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

Philanthro-Capitalism Is Inefficient, and Betrays Shareholders

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) One of the more interesting ideas found in this somewhat rambling book contends that “philanthropic” business activity is in fact at odds with what is best about capitalism itself and thus counterproductive.

Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary, states the difficulty succinctly: “It is hard in this world to do well. It is hard to do good. When I hear a claim that an institution is going to do both, I reach for my wallet. You should too.” He offers as an example Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-created corporations that were supposed to achieve a social goal — affordable housing — while operating as businesses. They did neither well, eventually leaving their catastrophic debts for taxpayers to pay.

U.S. Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner, along with other contributors, notes that companies often suffer losses when they set out to address a social problem. If they could really make a profit by doing good works, the argument goes, they would no doubt already be hard at it. But if they do good works at the expense of profit, they will become less efficient, making themselves more vulnerable to competitors. Economist Steven Landsburg suggests that companies sacrificing profit to accomplish philanthropic goals end up betraying their shareholders, who rightly expect the best return on investment. Sometimes acting philanthropically will result in an indirect business benefit, such as improving worker skills. In that case, philanthro-capitalism might be in a company’s interest — but Judge Posner and others of like mind suspect that such instances are rare.

Their skepticism echoes Milton Friedman’s objections to “corporate social responsibility,” expressed in a 1970 article that is usefully reprinted in the book’s appendix.

For the full review, see:

LESLIE LENKOWSKY. “Bookshelf; The Do-Good Marketplace; Reducing poverty, improving lives – maybe ‘philanthro-capitalism’ is just another name for capitalism.” Wall Street Journal (Fri., JANUARY 2, 2009): A13.

The book under review is:
Kinsley, Michael, and Conor Clarke, eds. Creative Capitalism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Stagnation Caused by “Depriving Creative Individuals of Financial Power”

(p. 164) The key to growth is quite simple: creative men with money. The cause of stagnation is similarly clear: depriving creative individuals of financial power. To revive the slumping nations of social democracy, the prime need is to reverse the policies of entrepreneurial euthanasia. Individuals must be allowed to accumulate disposable savings and wield them in the economies of the West. The crux is individual, not corporate or collective, wealth.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

A Person’s Bad Decisions Can’t Be Blamed on Capitalism

“Thomas Lee, one of the men featured in the documentary “A Father’s Promise,” watching a video of himself from 1996.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C11) The program, with Al Roker as host, follows up a “Dateline NBC” report from 1996 that recorded several births among black women at a Newark hospital and interviewed the unmarried fathers of the children as they earnestly vowed to be there as their babies grew up. The piece was an attempt to look at the alarming rate of fatherless households among blacks.

It is, of course, a problem that has not gone away since 1996, and Mr. Roker’s program tracks down three of those newborns and the fathers who promised to stand by them. That none did — jail, joblessness, depression and general irresponsibility intervened — somehow isn’t surprising.
. . .
. . . the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers of Azusa Community Church in Boston explains in very personal terms why he discounts the easy economic explanations that so often get the blame for fatherless households.
“I had a child out of wedlock,” he says. “That was a bad decision. I can’t say capitalism did it to me.”

For the full review, see:
NEIL GENZLINGER. “Television Review; ‘A Father’s Promise’; Old Pledges Are Broken, Young Hope Stays Intact.” The New York Times (Sat., February 7, 2009): C11.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Magdeburg Sphere Let Scientists “See” the Vacuum

(p. 68) When we think of technological advances powering scientific discovery, the image that conventionally comes to mind is a specifically visual one: tools that expand the range of our vision, that let us literally see the object of study with new clarity, or peer into new levels of the very distant, the very small. Think of the impact that the telescope had on early physics, or the microscope on bacteriology. But new ways of seeing are not always crucial to discovery. The air pump didn’t allow you to see the vacuum, because of course there was nothing to see: but it did allow you to see it indirectly, in the force that held the Magdeburg Sphere together despite all that horsepower.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

When Experts Picked California Wine Over French Wine

“Alan Rickman portrays Steven Spurrier, the British wine dealer who organized a famous blind wine tasting near Paris in 1976, in Randall Miller’s “Bottle Shock.”” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

Cultural pretension and conspicuous consumption are among the less admirable aspects of human behavior. So the blind wine tasting where California beat France, has always had appeal.
This, plus the inimitable Alan Rickman (aka Snape), put this movie on my “to see” list.

(p. B7) “Bottle Shock,” an easygoing little movie, made with more affection than skill, takes us back to the days when men wore loud plaid suits and people who were serious about wine sneered at the very mention of California. Sticking reasonably close to the historical record, the director, Randall Miller (who wrote the screenplay with his wife, Jody Savin, and Ross Schwartz), reconstructs a watershed moment in the wine world’s acceptance of the Golden State and, eventually, of many other non-French viticultural regions.

In 1976, at a gathering near Paris, a panel of experts conducted a blind tasting at which two California wines emerged victorious over their more pedigreed French competitors. That tasting provides the climax to “Bottle Shock,” and even if the potential surprise of its outcome were not already spoiled by history, the movie’s adherence to the clichés of the triumph-of-the-underdog narrative would be enough to remove any doubt.
There are, indeed, at least two underdogs hungering for triumph. The first is Steven Spurrier, played by Alan Rickman, whose parched low voice and air of beleaguered pomposity are never unwelcome.

For the full review, see:
A. O. SCOTT. “Plaid Suits, Prize Grapes and the Rise of Napa.” The New York Times (Weds., August 6, 2008): B7.

System of Capitalism without Capitalists Is Failing in Europe

(p. 164) The reason the system of capitalism without capitalists is failing throughout most of Europe is that it misconceives the essential nature of growth. Poring over huge aggregations of economic data, economists see the rise to wealth as a slow upward climb achieved through the marginal productivity gains of millions of workers, through the slow accumulation of plant and machinery, and through the continued improvement of “human capital” by advances in education, training, and health. But, in fact, all these sources of growth are dwarfed by the role of entrepreneurs launching new companies based on new concepts or technologies. These gains generate the wealth that finances the welfare state, that makes possible the long-term investments in human capital that are often seen as the primary source of growth.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.