Postblogging Technology, September 1948, II: Go A-Viking

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Ronnie emphatically did not miss the Standard Oil strike riot,
but doesn't want Reggie to feel guilty.

Well, here I am! It has been a long summer, full of exciting paper work and two fashion shows, which are something else when you are there as a Real Professional Buyer ('s assistant who is mainly there to fetch coffee). 

But you've heard all about my adventures, and about Miss K., because you have been in town every weekend ferrying mysterious packages (of boring five pound notes). Have I mentioned how honoured I was to fill in for you on the last one? 

In case you are wonder, Wong Lee and I missed the riot squad and the strikers by a good hour or so, although a vagrant wind carried some tear gas to us where we were having lunch. on the Embaradero. 

We would regret the time later, as I scheduled my trip for the last day of our lease, and picked up the last of my things to take them down to Stanford, and I do not know if you have ever moved household with nothing but your own labour, and rather more thanks to Wong Lee, who is such a dear, but it takes a long time, and once again I was on the road after dark, and, once again, the Lincoln developed hurt feelings over my driving on the highway, and, once again, I had the distinct pleasure of being towed into a service station, and after a ridiculous wait while the mechanic was summoned from home --for which, do not get me wrong, I am hugely grateful-- my old car's hurt feelings were relieved by kind words, a gentle hand, and, not to put too much faith in beside manners, a new fuel line. 

I was also relieved of my parting bonus, which has me grumpy. What's worse, and the point of this anecdote, I had my bundle of magazines helpfully located just below the suspected leak in the trunk, covering your little package, because the family business is my business, and we do not want our money to get wet. As a result, two issues of Henry Luce's organ were too soaked to be read, and you are being treated to two issues of Newsweek below. The Lincoln is not being treated to the scrap yard, although men I have never met are coming forward to volunteer the advice that it should be. 

Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie

Too proud to admit to having been put in harm's way, not too proud to hint that she wouldn't mind some help getting a new car. We'll hear more about this, as another uncle steps up. 

Postblogging Technology, September 1948, I: First Farnborough

(A little early, but Fortune follows up on the home heating industry this month.)

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada.

Dear Father:

Bet you didn't expect to hear from me! Don't worry, Ronnie will be back next week. I've been delayed in Arcata for an extra week. The Institute knows that I am on urgent Navy business. 

Now if I could only convince myself! I know that I have to share some of the blame, but this whole landing-with-radar thing is Not Working Out. This last week of flying is simply to find out if the radar can spot torpedo boats inshore, because Admiral Burke has nightmares about Guadalcanal. Whatever. It means I'm out on the field at all hours, making sure that the damn gadget doesn't catch fire from not working for too long. 

Ronnie is back to Stanford this week. She'll be living at the hall again, as she says her budget will just support it, if she can keep up her tips. Last year for her, then we have to figure out law school somehow. I'll be out, but tuition will be tough to scrape up on a lieutenant's pay. There might be scholarship help, or we have to face up to family facts. Somehow. Do not read that as saying that I have any idea how to bring her parents around! 

So, a few more days of flying, and then it is "Gaudemus Igitur" and two more semesters, then goodbye to old college days, and say hello to your son the Dashing Aviator. (I promise, no actual dashing.)

I am sorry I missed you in your flying trip to San Francisco, and look forward to seeing you in Boston next month. 

Your Loving Son,
Reggie.

The Bishop's Sea: Brattahlid

This is Tasiusaq, Greenland, from Google Maps. Tasiusaq is a settlement of 90 people, surrounded by three sheep farms, and not exactly full of amateur photographers with Internet access, but  "Monica T.," and her friends went there in 2015, and took some awesome pictures, of which this is one. 

If I had to guess why some outsiders might have been in Tasiusaq, it would be its proximity to Qinngua Valley, about fifteen kilometers away. Qinngua Valley is a 15 km long river valley terminating at Tasersuag Lake, which drains into Tasermuit Ford, and is an honest-to-God Greenland National Forest.

By Th. N. Krabbe, Copenhagen, Photographer - Greenland in the late 19th-early 20th century (Th. N. Krabbe Collection), National Museum of DenmarkUploaded by palnatoke, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34728037

The actual woodland is only a few acres in extent, and not unique in Greenland, as the Wikipedia article claims.  Somewhat surprisingly, the Greenland Norse-era history of the area is unknown, in spite of the weather, agricultural possibilities, and its centrality in the old Eastern Settlement, but there is a large Norse site at the bottom of the valley. I was directed to it by Dr. Dayanna Knight's recent Viking Nations: The Development of Medieval North Atlantic Identities, which several times obliquely refers to a contrarian thesis that Erik the Red's Brattahlid was located there, rather than the traditionally accepted Qassiarsuk on Tunulliarfik Fjord.

Repeated, unexplained, oblique references in a monograph derived from a doctoral dissertation inspire me with the suspicion that Knight is keen to tell a story that couldn't get by her committee. My subsequent investigation leaves me less confident of this first assumption, but, what the heck, it is what directed me down this road, and Knight's commitment to "practice theory" archaeology is interesting, if not well engaged below. I have some photos and maps to post, so here we are. Specifically, we are at the page break. 

Postblogging Technology, August 1948, II: Fall Is Coming

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada.

Dearest Father:

You will perhaps notice the lack of a 16 August Time. A funny story about that --but I don't care to tell it, because, well, Ronnie and I --I know everyone disapproves, but. . .


Your Loving Son, Reggie.

PS: Will call with details.

A Meta-Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, August 1948, I: Productivity, Again

Fortune's August, 1948 article on working in August, which couldn't have been written in August, but might have been inspired by a June heatwave, because the writer and the staff artists threw their heart into it. The results are still a pretty inconsequential story. As far as it is about anything, it is, perhaps, a mild recommendation to not be so liberal with the salt pills. (Remember salt pills?) Or, it is an impressionistic account of air conditioning's ongoing penetration of American life. 

That said, looking back from 2018, it is a reminder that, seventy years ago, they sometimes had to close factories and even offices because it was too hot to work. Distant times! The same issue carries Ala'i's tone-deaf efforts condeming Iran's ongoing dam projects for diverting the "one-tenth" of Iranian agricultural labourers who were  healthy enough to work, and the ongoing "Deutschmark miracle," in which the miraculous recovery of the German economy somehow happens around and behind the miraculous recovery of German agriculture, which provided the key ingredients for a steady rise in the average German caloric intake in the summer of 1948. 

While I am not going to argue Ala'i's public health credentials here, this is perhaps a good place to bear in mind that, in much of the world in 1948, the amount of work done by the hand had a lot to do with the amount of food the economy chose to spare its labour. Heat waves aren't that different from famines in some ways. While offering horse sense on the subject of salt, Fortune is unaware, as most people were, that the body is also quickly depleted of phosphorus and especially potassium. It offers the common, but incorrect, idea that people eat less at very high temperatures as an explanation for the ubiquitous low-grade heat stroke supposedly inflicted by "over-eating" during a hot spell.

Taken together, "laziness" is a great explanation for low productivity if you're using your monopsonic power as an employer to deny your labour force enough food. The coal crisis tended to bring European economies face to face with the limits of this logic. I'm not sure that other people took it on board, and that particularly applies to the United States. 

This is important because, through the Marshall Plan, Americans were in a strong position to dictate terms of aid; and the idea that European socialists were lazy was ubiquitous. It would also be irrelevant, since the class of American business leaders who could be found to express opinions about these things seems to have overlapped fairly strongly with the class of American business leaders who were underemployed due to their extrusion from actual management duties. It is not irrelevant because the theme was taken on board by British thought leaders. The echoes of the theme of perennial low British productivity have been heard on this blog before, but with the formation of the Anglo-American Council of Productivity, they become the story of the day, and invite some investigation. 

. . . And then there's this.

Postblogging Technology, August 1948, I: Robots Have No Nerves

R_. C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada

Dear Father:

Well, here we are, back in the good old Western Hemisphere. Or as close to it as Arcata comes. What a strange little town. At least I am doing something useful. As predicted, we ended up installing Bill and Dave's little bit of electronics in a Catalina amphibian. It may not be the most likely plane for the job, but it can land on an airfield, and it has room for the contraption, and for someone to do whatever the heck it is we're doing with it. Distracting me, it seems. But here I am, with a summer job to do with the Navy, and the airlines are in charge of testing out the landing lights. They're in the pocket of "Big Lightbulb," they say, leaving me in the hands of "Big Electronics." The Navy is set on the notion that radar and autopilots and such are the key to better landings, without autolanding. The Air Force's recent embarrassment with their robot C-54 letting down the gear and settling in for the landing, still 70ft above tarmac at Los Angeles, underlines some peoples' claims that you  have to have the human decision maker "in the loop."

Please don't get the idea that I'm taking a position, here. The Brits are pretty sure that autolanding is the way to go, but I can also see the arguments against it. It is pretty hard to see how it could work for a busy airport, because it imposes a five minute delay between landings. Even if you can get that down, you would be doing it with more, expensive machinery, and there are thousands of airports in America. On the other hand again, there's an article about a robot television factory in this issue of Fortune that just blows my mind. Maybe we will all be put out of work by robots next week. 

I handed your package off to Uncle George in San Francisco on the weekend when I was down state visiting Ronnie and the gang and concentrating on not smacking Miss K.'s boyfriend in the face. Well, ex-boyfriend, now, as pretty much everything everyone predicted, happened. Her mother knows, but they're keeping Dad in the dark.

As for Uncle George, he  groused, but agreed that it has to be done. He did draw the line at flying, however, and has booked passage for Nagasaki in September, then on to Davao. We should have something by Thanksgiving --real Thanksgiving, not American. 

Your Loving Son,
Reggie.

A Technological Preface to Postblogging Technology, August 1948, I: Certain Grand Schemes of Improvement

For reasons having to do with layout and marketing, customers have difficulty finding the "breakfast aisle" at the store at which I usually work. The particular arrangement means that this aisle, adjacent to the bakery at one end of an irregular lozenge, actually contains pancake mix, pancake syrup, diabetic candy (no, I don't know, either), and pretty much every kind of spread. But as far as it goes, when I am working in the high traffic central aisles, I might as well wear a t-shirt that reads, "The peanut butter is in Aisle 13." No other item is so often sought for, and so hard to discover. I have no idea what that says, but I do know that the 3 August, 1948 Engineering covered the same talk on the theme of "How We Are Overcoming the Unexpected Difficulties of the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme" as did The Engineer, along with several other subjects that, it seems to me, deepen and enrich our understanding of the absolutely bonkers issue of Fortune that  I cannot talk about this week for the usual reasons of schedules-altered-on-the-fly. (And, to be fair, my failure to think through the implications of a day-to-night swing that has essentially cost me a weekend day this week, and given me an extra one next week.)

I hope I'm building up anticipation for the August, 1940 issue of Fortune. Bonkers. I promise you. In the mean time, this is pretty much a peanut-butter-and-jelly technological appendix, except it comes before the subject. 

It's also a little timely, given that I am talking about the Tanganyika Groundnuts Scheme, which we're going to need in the next few years as the Tanzania Biofuels Scheme, if we're serious about long term survival as a species.