Memorial Day 2013

We attended the Memorial Day ceremony at Bayboro this morning.

It is always a rewarding experience to talk to older veterans. But I have noticed some developments in recent years worth pondering.

The first thing that stands out is the age of attendees. They tend to be older and older each year. As if the whole enterprise of recognizing and remembering veterans has less and less connection to our youth.

In a way, that's not surprising. There was a time when we were all in this together. Seventy years ago, war and rumors of war affected the entire population.

Now fewer and fewer people are involved in the sacrifices and inconveniences of war.

On the one hand, that's a good thing. Fewer casualties.

On the other hand, military service has long since ceased to be a shared experience - a common effort for the good of the nation. There would be benefits in recapturing the idea of common effort for the common good.

Global Water Shortage?

The past couple of weeks, one of the topics at Oriental Town Hall has been budgeting and planning the management of the Town's water system. Last Friday, at one point, Town commissioners gathered around the table redesigning the water treatment plant.

It might be better to turn that task over to experts.

In the meantime, we need to deal with the reality facing mankind: we are running out of potable water and water for irrigation. Here's the bad news.

A little over two centuries ago, economist Robert Malthus examined the problem of constant population growth and limited resources. He is best remembered from pointing out that population grows geometrically, while food production grows arithmetically. In the intervening two centuries, food production has increased at a more rapid rate than Malthus predicted, especially in the 20th Century.

Nevertheless, other factors of production essential to population growth may assume a limiting function.

It looks like water may soon play that role.

Elections In North Carolina: Twenty Years Of Progress

Today's News and Observer prints an informative article about the outgoing Executive Director of the State Board of Elections, Mr. Gary Bartlett.

In his two decades as Executive Director, Mr. Bartlett has moved the North Carolina system of elections from a chaotic system where each of the 100 counties did its own thing to a system with uniform equipment and procedures across the state. Bartlett's focus has always been on the voter. "Respect for the process starts with respect for the voters," he has written."Partisan influences must take a back seat to the very basic premise that individuals who are qualified and eligible to vote must be given the opportunity to cast a ballot and have their ballot counted."

During his tenure, North Carolina has moved to head of the pack of states operating fair and effective voting systems.

It has been my pleasure over the past three years to work with Mr. Bartlett. He has served the state of North Carolina and its voters well and faithfully.

Seventy Years Ago: May 24, 1942: Admiral Doenitz Removes Submarine Force And Concedes Battle Of The Atlantic

By 1943, expansion of Allied antisubmarine force, improvement of Air operations against submarines, including aircraft operating from small escort carriers, were making life difficult for German submarines. Admiral Doenitz, the German submarine commander, explained his withdrawal of the force by improvements in Allied ASW weapons and organization. Here is his report.

Doenitz' list is incomplete. How did the Allied ASW forces know where to look for German submarines? It's a big ocean out there.

The Allies knew where to look because of their great successes in communications intelligence. They intercepted and decrypted German orders to submarines, even orders encrypted by Germany's latest Enigma machines. When Germany began changing their communications keys several times a day, cryptanalysts kept up.

They tracked submarines using the extensive Allied High Frequency Direction Finding network ("Huff-Duff"), even when the submarines began compressing the messages and sending them in "burst" transmissions.

The war was fought and won not only on the high seas and in the air, but more significantly in the back rooms of headquarters, using the black arts of cryptanalysis.

Seventy Years Ago: May 23, 1943, Secret Weapons Test

May 23, 1943, the US Army tested a new secret weapon: incendiary bats.

Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry exposed the whole story in a column printed in 1990. I would simply copy and post the relevant portion about the bat project as blogger Brad DeLong did, but I read the Miami Herald's warning about copyright. What might be called the bloodthirsty copyright notice. So I followed their instructions and put a link to the entire column here.

I recommend you pay no attention to the part of the column about air dropped trout and go right to the interesting part about incendiary bats. Hey, there was a war on.

Oriental Water Treatment Plant

Yesterday morning the Town Board and a number of citizens visited Oriental's water treatment plant. The Town Manager gave a briefing on new regulatory requirements including increased testing.

The tour began with an outside tour and explanation of the major components of the plant. Many questions were raised both by the commissioners and the citizens attending.

Following the outside briefing, attendees went inside the water treatment plant to view its condition and to receive information on maintenance and repair that needs to be accomplished.

First impressions: too much deferred maintenance.

Tornadoes In Oklahoma

The people of Oklahoma, my home state, are strong, patient and persistent. They live in tornado country. After every big tornado comes through, they pick up the pieces and start over again.

Tornadoes aren't like hurricanes. No weather service can predict the path of a tornado, how big it will be, how long it will be on the ground. No house of mere wood and brick can withstand a tornado as strong as the one that struck Moore, Oklahoma yesterday.

It has been always thus.

That's why, when I was a child in rural parts of the state, every farm, every large building, every school, had a storm shelter.

I once attended a two-room, four grade school, a large white-painted frame building with an out house in the back. We had a storm shelter.

Another school I attended, East of Oklahoma City, held eight grades in six classrooms, and had an underground storm shelter big enough for all the students, the teachers and the residents of about a dozen nearby houses.

It was good to know which of your neighbors had storm shelters.

When the weather was right for tornadoes (and we could tell) we would stand outside and watch the gathering clouds, especially those of a greenish hue with tendrils reaching down toward the ground. As the clouds approached, we would debate whether to go to the school and seek shelter.

I remember photographs in the Daily Oklahoman in 1947 when a massive tornado destroyed the town of Woodward, west of Oklahoma City. The town rebuilt.

I was living in Tulsa in 1999 when the last big twister hit Moore and damaged other towns all along the Turnpike between Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

That being said, while admiring the pluck of the people, I am appalled at the indifference of their elected leaders.

Why did the two elementary schools in Moore that Monday's tornado decimated not have storm shelters?

This is inexcusable.

Sixty-five years ago, Oklahomans knew how to protect their school children.

This is not the sort of thing a state's leaders should forget.

More On Robots And Humans

Norbert Wiener, a mathematician at MIT six decades ago, wrote down what we need to know about what he called "the new machine age." In other words, the world of robots.

He wrote an essay to be published in the New York Times, but the essay never saw the light of day. Now, six decades later, at least a portion of it has been found and is published here.

In a burst of clarity, Wiener foretold the likely effect of computerization by comparing the computer to a genie. "These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry," Wiener explained,  "and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty."

He described what must be done to avoid this cruelty. "We must be willing," he emphasized, "to deal in facts rather than in fashionable ideologies if we wish to get through this period unharmed. Not even the brightest picture of an age in which man is the master, and in which we all have an excess of mechanical services will make up for the pains of transition, if we are not both humane and intelligent."

"Finally," he warned, "the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales [that is, of genies and bottles}, has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists."

We should let that be a warning to all.