Rolling death

Yesterday marked the 100^th anniversary of the first use of tanks in warfare. The British Army sent 49 Mark I models into action against the Germans near Flers-Courcelette as part of the Battle of the Somme.

They were slow (maximum speed in optimal conditions, 4 MPH), cumbersome, and their eight-men crews were in almost as much danger from various gases generated by the beast (including carbon monoxide, fuel and oil vapors and cordite fumes) as they were from enemy fire. The noise from the engine was deafening, and that was before they began firing its various cannon or machine guns.

The Mark I’s metal armor protected against small arms, but it was vulnerable to armor-piercing bullets and grenades. And remember: at 4 MPH it could be outrun by determined infantry.

At any rate, by mid-September of 1916, the Battle of the Somme had dragged on for two and a half months with no discernable change in the lines. Adding tanks to the mix of artillery bombardment and infantry attacks was the Brits’ attempt to achieve the mythical breakthrough on the Western Front. However, of the 49 brought to the front, 17 broke down before they could enter the battle and only nine made it to the enemy lines.

They did not accomplish their goal. As so often happened during the war in general and on the Somme in particular, the army failed to exploit any holes punched in the enemy’s line, and things reverted to status quo.

It would take years for military leaders to understand how to use tanks effectively. They were deployed with better results a year later at Cambrai, and then again in 1918 at Soissons. But their real capabilities weren’t appreciated until the interwar years. J.F.C. Fuller of Britain and Heinz Guderian of Germany laid out the framework for deploying bigger, faster and more powerful tanks, which led to Blitzkrieg in the early years of World War II, and monster battles like Kursk, Caen and El Alamein.

To mark the centenary of Courcelette, a Mark IV tank replica spent some time yesterday in Trafalgar Square, next to one of its great-grandchildren, a present-day Challenger 2. (The Mark IV began service in 1917; this replica was used in the film Warhorse.)

This amateur video shows it arriving at Trafalgar. I don’t think it does justice to the amount of noise that an original would have generated, but still:

Have a look at this photo (from The Scotsman) of two soldiers from the Royal Tank Regiment, and imagine them and six other men crammed into that cacophonous, poisonous metal crate, clanking blindly and slowly into enemy fire.

It would be like being strapped inside a moving MRI machine that was pumping carbon monoxide and petrol fumes into your lungs, and taking you directly into the worst place on the battlefield. God have mercy.

Definitely Dahlesque

Tuesday was the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Roald Dahl, a man who used language to both expose and cushion the darkness of childhood experience. In books (many of which became films) like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox, and James and the Giant Peach, Dahl some very dark environments where children had to pick their way carefully on the path to happiness.

I mean, things always turned out okay. But getting there could be perilous indeed. The worst kind of bullies and monstrous authoritarians populated his characters’ world, so they needed all the cleverness and courage he could give them.

But Dahl also armed his young protagonists with really great words, and this week the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added six of them to their lexicon in his honor. They’re not necessarily words that originated with him—even “scrumdiddlyumptious” was documented as far back as 1942. But they’re phrases that Dahl put on pretty much every tongue.

Like “golden ticket”, from Charlie, which the OED defines as: “Ticket; one that grants the holder a valuable or exclusive prize, experience, opportunity, etc.” Or “Oompa Loompa,” which has actually changed its meaning over the years. It originally meant an industrious worker, but since the 1971 film, it just as often refers to the “Day-Glo effects of some fake tanning products,” according to the OED.

No mention of hand size.

I personally get a kick out of the fact that Dahl was so fearless in painting his language-scapes, especially since one of his school report cards had this comment: “I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended.”

One final OED honor to Dahl’s imaginative use of language is the addition of the word “Dahlesque”, an adjective defined as “resembling or characteristic of the words of Roald Dahl.”

Absolutely splendiferous.

Corporate matters

My job is to guide ideas for new revenue streams through a vetting process not unlike that of a product manager. I find it interesting (and not a little frustrating) that my colleagues are not enthused by the notion of new business innovation.

Well, actually—they don’t particularly welcome the notion of anything new.

I do get it—I don’t think there’s any organization that volunteers to change much of anything. The usual motivation to do so is some kind of gun to the head. You don’t change unless you have essentially no alternative. Change means uncertainty, and it’s not for nothing that there’s that saying “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.”

Well, anyhow, acknowledging that I myself am not packing enough firepower to entice my colleagues to think in terms of either new products or new markets, I’m researching how other organizations implement this sort of new business innovation.

Which of course means that I’m researching innovation consultants.

I’m just the teensiest bit jaded about this prospect. Yes—it’s sometimes worth money to have outside subject matter experts (what one of my colleagues self-importantly calls "SMEs", pronouncing them "SMEES") explain to folks in words of one syllable what you’ve been telling them for months to no avail. On the other hand: “thought leader”.

Here’s a possible example:

If you’ve just nouned an adjective to describe your value proposition, is that a sign of being terrifically innovative, or just really ignorant?

(In addition to the consultants I’ve also researched the usage of “corporate” as a noun. By digging past the first SERP page, I have found that it has very limited use in the financial world, and in the production of films for internal business use. In both those cases “corporate” is still implying an unarticulated noun—“corporate [bond]”, “corporate [film]”—and those usages are not applicable in this instance.)

So I’m calling bullshit, and this crowd moves to the bottom of my contact list.

Fiscal reality

Someone retweeted this recently, and it quite took my fancy:

You’re welcome

Gratitude Monday: The rule of law

We’re 15 years on from the September 11 attacks, and it’s Gratitude Monday. It’s also the last two months of the most vicious and divisive presidential election I’ve ever experienced, so my prevailing emotions are disgust and anger.

So today I’m grateful that I recently came across this story in the Washington Post about a man the reporter calls a legal giant, Benjamin Ferencz.

Ferencz, who emigrated with his family to the United States from what’s now Hungary to escape anti-Semitic persecution, grew up in New York City and went to college at CCNY. He graduated from Harvard Law School and served the 3^rd Army from 1943, seeing action in Normandy and Bastogne, and present at the liberation of several concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Flossenburg and Mauthausen. He wanted to be a pilot, but at 5’2”, his feet wouldn’t reach the pedals.

After the end of the war he joined the legal team that was trailblazing international law with the concept of prosecuting war crimes. Telford Taylor was his boss. At age 27, he drove the investigation and prosecuted 22 Einsatzgruppen commanders. Einsatzgruppen were the units that followed in the wake of the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe; their job was to eradicate Jews—and commissars, and gypsies, and some others; but primarily Jews—from the conquered territories.

In what the Associated Press called the “biggest murder trial in history”, and Ferencz’s first prosecution, he called a single witness, who certified the sheaves of ledgers that documented the murdered. All 22 were convicted. Ferencz told the judge, “If these men be immune, then law has lost its meaning, and man must live in fear.”

Take a few minutes to watch this video; Ferencz describes his work at Nuremberg.

From that very first case, Ferencz has worked for the rule of law; his achievements include the establishment of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He’s 96 years old, now, living in retirement in Florida, and he’s given more than a million dollars (renewable annually up to ten million) to the Holocaust Memorial Museum for an international justice initiative.

This year we’re bombarded by politicians and their supporters strutting across the media stage proclaiming how the time has come to pursue our enemies with all our military might without regard to that pesky law. Carpet bomb! Take the oil! Lock them in camps! Anything is legal in war! And I am reminded of two things:

In A Man for All Seasons, playwright Robert Bolt gives Thomas More and his son-in-law Will Roper this exchange:

Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

Roper: “Yes. I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

And in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who had been Ferencz’s ultimate ETO commander) warned, “In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.”

As a civilized society, you don’t bomb them into the Stone Age, you hold them accountable according to the rule of law.

The day after our annual remembrance of 9/11 and in the fetid pool of the presidential race, it brings me to tears to know that there are some men and women like Benjamin Ferencz, who understand that if we do not live by the rule of law, we are not alive at all.

Slouching towards...

This is the view from the park next to the building where I now live. Of the restored Pentagon, with the Capitol building in the distance. I’m just across I-395, one Metro stop, from the nexus of American military power. Many of the very long-time residents here are either serving or retired officers.

As I sit in the living room, drinking a latte and listening to NPR this morning, I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like here 15 years ago. Standing on the balcony watching black smoke fill the air; making frantic calls to colleagues, friends, family; returning to the balcony; watching TV.

My daily commute takes me past the Pentagon twice a day. It’s morbid, of course, but at least once a week I wonder what that morning must have been like for the people on Yellow and Blue Line trains headed through that corridor.

I was far away at the time, working in the UK for a company crumbling under its own arrogance, preparing for a last holiday to Florence and Siena before I was to be returned to Northern Virginia and laid off. The canteen manager told us, “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center”, and all I could think of was a civil aircraft must have got terribly off course. I could not have created the picture of a 767 flying deliberately into the WTC.

When we found out the enormity of the first strike, I thought, “Busboys are setting up for lunch at that restaurant. Who hurts busboys?”

And then there was the second hit, and the one here at the Pentagon. I couldn’t get to any US news sites—Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, NY Times—the sites were all crashing from the traffic.

One of the telecoms spinoffs on the second floor had a wall of TV screens, and I watched the same video loops again and again, all across that wall. Finally I went home, where again I watched the same video loops again and again. Colleagues from France, Wales, England and Ireland called to check on me; they told me to call them whenever I needed to talk.

It was the next day, when driving home to pick up my luggage and head to Gatwick for the flight to Italy, that the tears came. The Glaxo-Smith-Kline headquarters in west London had lowered its three flags to half-staff; seeing that I began to sob.

A friend of mine, who was working at the Pentagon on that day (and still is), posts an essay on his experience every year. Every year I weep.

What cuts me the most deeply today is wondering what progress we might have made in these 15 years, as opposed to where we are now. In this decade and a half it seems like we’ve become entrenched in our fragmented viewpoints; everyone shouting and shoving to proclaim their truth. September 11^th has been reduced to a week’s worth of intensely painful media focus and an occasion for political photo opps and fundraisers. Starting the next week, it’s shelved for another year.

Meanwhile, London, Madrid, Brussels, Paris and Istanbul have experienced the same kinds of attacks; we’ve become enmired in wars that have lasted longer than even Vietnam (with not dissimilar results); and the Middle East (extending through Afghanistan and Pakistan) is an indescribable nightmare.

So here’s my question. How do we turn this around?

Barriers to communications

Okay, I’m ending this week with one more piece of Twitter drollery, in which a large corporation demonstrates once again that it doesn’t quite get social media.

On the other hand, it could also be an instance where a millennial once again demonstrates that social media isn’t always your best choice for communicating time-critical information. If you’ve got a phone signal, why not try, you know, calling someone? Like 911? (Yeah, there is text-to-911, but it’s not available in all areas.)

Also, it turns out that the former communications advisor to Ted Cruz may not be quite the social media maven that you’d expect. If she’d used Amtrak’s Twitter handle (including the at-sign) she might have got a response sooner than seven months on.

Names matter

On Twitter I follow not a few parody accounts. One of them is a Los Angeles comic purporting to be a childcare provider in one of the trendier LA neighborhoods:

Los Feliz Daycare tweets exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a bastion of Left Coast correctness. Here’s one of my favorites:

Not Schrödinger

Taking a break from heavy-duty political issues, let’s move to the world of science, which—truth be known—can be just as red in tooth and claw as presidential campaigns.

Do you doubt me? Well, for instance, it turns out that a cat co-authored a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, an arm of the American Physical Society (APS).

Okay, the paper, “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He” was published in 1975, so you might have missed it, even though it was an in-depth exploration of atomic behavior at different temperatures. Pretty riveting stuff, I’m sure, to a physicist.

It seems that the human author, Jack H. Hetherington, professor of physics at Michigan State University, had written up his research findings using the editorial first person plural. But then he realized that the journal to which he was submitting it would view it as fishy (which, in the academic world means “unpublishable”) if the paper was littered with “we”, “us” and “our”, but had only one author listed. This being back in the 1970s, Hetherington did not have word processing software, so he was faced with either retyping the entire paper or coming up with a quick fix on the front end.

So he added his Siamese cat Chester as a co-author, granting him rather more gravitas by giving him the nom de plume “F.D.C. Willard”, viz.: Felix Domesticus Chester Willard, the alleged surname referring to Chester’s father, so a legitimate patronymic.

Based on my experience with felis catus, I’ve no doubt that Chester was a contributor to the creative process. In fact, I’m betting that the hard copy submission had more than a few cat hairs on it.

Evidently when the Physical Review Letters editors found out about Chester’s antecedents, they were not amused. But by that time they’d already published the paper. And how is it that they didn’t ask for academic bona fides at the time of submission? Hetherington’s department, on the other hand, offered Chester a full-time position.

Eventually the APS found its sense of humor. Two years ago they announced that all cat-authored papers would be open-access. No word on dog-authored papers, but I guess these things take time.

Como si fuera algo malo

I learned a couple of interesting things last week, thanks to social media. First, Trump has what the media refer to as “Latino surrogates”: men (and, like the vast preponderance of Trump campaigners, they are all men) with brown skins and surnames ending in -ez, who have the unenviable job of representing to the Latino electorate (the ones who haven’t been denied registration by voter ID laws) that—everything he’s said to the contrary—Trump really doesn’t despise them as subhuman, and that he’s not planning to ruin their lives in any way.

At least not until 9 November.

And apparently these surrogates—at least the ones who’ve been allowed to speak publicly—share the Donald’s speaking style as well as his political goals. Because one of them, a guy named Marco Gutierrez, got on MSNBC and announced that if we the American people do not elect Trump, we’re going to be overrun by Mexicans, and before you know it, we’re “going to have taco trucks on every corner.”

No, I am not making that up.

I do not know who this Gutierrez person is, but I’m guessing from the way Twitter lit up that he’s every bit as out of touch with the American people as his master. Because the hashtag #TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner about broke the Interwebz. Basically we have a new manifesto for the American people, replacing that "A chicken in every pot" jobber from another Republican nominee.

It’s hard to choose a sampling from such an embarrassment of riches but they’re all variants on wonderment around how taco truck proliferation could possibly be considered a bad thing. Viz.:

And:

One of my favorites is this meme:

via GIPHY

But in the end, here's one of the things that makes America already great:

And this: