“While we, Chani, we who carry the name concubine — history will call us wives.” Said Lady Jessica, a member of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood and concubine to Duke Leto of House Atreides, to Chani, the concubine of Paul Atreides in the last line of the book.
Good artists copy, great artists steal. Pablo Picasso
Back in October/November, I re-read Dune, the book, which I wanted to re-read in preparation for seeing Dune, the movie. The first time I read Dune, I must have been in my late twenties, early thirties and I didn’t remember much detail and the re-reading sucked me right in. Fortuitously, it turned out, by the time the movie came out, I was only about halfway through the book and that’s close to the point at which the movie ended. The half book and the movie are very different in feel but the plot and the characters are almost the same. I liked them both, but neither one seems groundbreaking.
In the case of the book, though, that’s deceptive, Dune, the book, was groundbreaking. It’s just that Dune’s ideas have been so copied that we’ve become used to them. The Star Wars Universe seems the most derivative, Arrakis (Dune) looks pretty much like Tatooine, there is a mysterious organization – that can tune into a deeper reality and control people with their voice, and the known Universe is ruled by a cruel emperor. In both Star Wars and Dune, the people that count are royalty. With the glaring exception of Star Trek, Science Fiction of this era is right wing if not outright Fascist, even those that aren’t, lean that way. Not all, I know but a lot. My current theory is that it is because Science Fiction is basically medieval fantasy without the princess but with space ships and quasi rational sounding explanations for the magic. Sandworms that produce spice aren’t that much different than dragons.
That is not to say that Dune isn’t a fun read, it is, even if it is somewhat dated. Dune was published in 1966 and I read it sometime around that date. At the time, I didn’t pick up on all the references and I’m sure I still didn’t get them all but the book still almost immediately sucked me in, much like Shogun or Lord of the Rings, or, recently, Reamde by Neil Stephenson. All four have interesting characters and all are episodic, even if the other three have better writing. Still, Dune is original and byzantine in its complexity moving the reader along. It is the kind of book I ended up reading whenever possible, like sneaking a peek at while waiting at a stoplight. It also has some interesting surprises that probably would be cut today, like the Fremen were, at one time Sunnis, their war is called jihad, and the goal of every woman is to be a wife.
Dune, the movie, does not seem at all dated, either in plot or sensibility. For me, it was a welcome relief from the comic book feel of so many huge science fiction or fantasy blockbusters. When I say comic book feel, I don’t just mean the Marvel universe, Star Wars has spaceships that cruise around like airplanes – with no visible source of levitation – and then pop over to the next galaxy. In the movie, Dune, the spaceships have weight and the ornithopters feel real, they actually seem affected by gravity. Sitting home, quarantined, with one day fading into the next and each quarantined movie fading into the others, Dune stands out.
Formula One is the most over-the-top car racing ever conceived of by man. No, really. It is what happens when guys with unlimited budgets race cars. It is nuts! And, for me at least, hugely fun to follow. the first line of a post from my blog dated February 4, 2010.
Sir Frank Williams was one of the kindest people I had the pleasure of meeting in this sport. What he achieved is something truly special. Until his last days I know he remained a racer and a fighter at heart. His legacy will live on forever. pic.twitter.com/NDIwIvzZCl
Michele and I spent a wonderful Thanksgiving at Richard and Tracy’s home and after a Disney perfect turkey with superb, potluckish, sidedishes, we talked a little about what each of us is thankful for this year. One thing I didn’t mention at first, but I am thankful for, is this year’s Formula One season and, it turned out I wasn’t the only one that had that on their list. This has been the most exciting season that I can remember. Now, we are down to the last two races with RedBull/Honda leading Patronis/Mercedes by five points for the Manufacturer’s Championship (for scale, a win is worth twenty-five points and a second is worth eighteen points down to tenth for one).
RedBull/Honda and Patronis/Mercedes are big organizations supported by even bigger organizations with yearly budgets capped at $145m (excluding according to the F1 website, all marketing costs, race driver fees/salaries and the costs of the team’s three highest paid personnel. I’m sure that last exclusion was needed to sell any budget cap.) Formula One wasn’t always like that, for a while, after Mercedes dropped out in the mid-50s, it was a bunch of small racecar builders from England against Ferrari.
The most successful of all of them was a young garagista1 named Frank Williams. Actually, he did so well that he was Knighted by the Queen. Sir Frank Willims passed away at 79 over the Thanksgiving weekend and the Formula One community will miss him, he was one of the giants. Williams was a great judge of talent and Williams Racing always fought above their weight being one of only four teams that have won nine Manufacturer’s Championships. But he was also the past, now Mercedes is back, Renault is in the fray and McLaren became a manufacturer, now a different set of skills are needed to have a winning team and the luster of the Williams Racing name has faded. When Williams finally sold his team in 2020, it had been in the cellar for something like five years. That and a horrendous one-car accident that left Williams so physically damaged that he was no longer physically independent make his story seem sadder than it was. It says more than a little about William’s constant optimism that he won the Manufactures’ Championship the same year he broke his back and then, again, the next year. Below is a gratuitous video of Lewis Hamilton driving Frank Williams around the Silverston Racetrack.
What makes Formula One a unique form of motor racing is that each team must build their own car (although they can use somebody else’s engine). There are huge egos involved, both national and personal, with the main manufacturers, besides Mercedes (Germany) and RedBull/Honda (Austria/Japan), being Renault (France), Ferrari (Italy – duh!), and McLaren (England). The drivers may be easier to relate to but they come and go, the cars are stars. If that sounds strange think of football or baseball teams.
The cars are powered by a hybrid power unit consisting of a 1.6 liter, turbocharged, V-6 engine along with an electric motor that, together, put out about 1050 horsepower. The cars, themselves, are aerodynamic and technological wonders; they have upsidedown wings at both ends to keep them glued to the track, and glued is the right word, the tires are preheated to 212°F with tire heaters before they even go on the car and that makes the tires incredibly sticky. That stickyness means that the tires wear out quickly, usually lasting less than 50 miles on a fully fueled car.
Because the cars have different designers with different design philosophies, they have different personalities and different tire wear characteristics. Some cars are easier to drive on slow, very curvy, tracks and some like faster tracks better, so, as they race at different tracks around the world, from tight city streets in the principality of Monaco to a flowing purpose-built racetrack at Spa-Francorchamps in the hills of Belgium, or a night race in Singapore, different cars have different advantages or disadvantages. Formula One is data-driven, the cars have sensors everywhere and are constantly sending information to the engineers in the cars’ pits – racing lingo for garage, BTW – and, more importantly, to the team Strategists.
Strategy is a big part of Formula One and a big part of the joy of watching a race, especially a tight race. Strategizing how the different scenarios will play out based on data like tire wear is the job of the head Strategist and, somewhat surprisingly, they are, at both RedBull/Honda and Mercedes, women. At RedBull, the Head of Strategy is Hannah Schmitz – who, at her Linked-in account writes I am passionate about understanding and interpreting data and excel in a high pressure, fast-paced environment – and, at Mercedes, it is Rosie Wait. Also, it is a little surprising that both of these women went to Cambridge.
Still, after all the design decisions, all the strategy decisions, the championship has come down to two very different drivers who have been battling it out all year. Not only have they been close to equal all year, all year they have also been way better than anyone else. More than once, the two of them have finished a race more than thirty seconds ahead of third place, an unheard of time for a sport that measures time in 1/1,000th of a second.
Max Verstappen is in the lead of the Driver’s Championship by eight points and, up until very recently, the smart money has been on him. Max is only 24 but he has been racing in Formula One since he was 17 and is the youngest driver to win an F1 race (which he did when he was only 18). Verstappen is brash, arrogant – in a Mohammed Ali way – very serious, and a marvelous, aggressive, driver. He is the kind of high-risk driver that pulls off the big risks. Max is sort of like an F1 monk cloistered in the F1 bubble. His dad, Jos Verstappen, was a Formula One driver, and his girlfriend, Kelly Piquet, is the daughter of Nelson Piquet, a three-time Formula One Champion.
Lewis Hamilton is Formula One’s youngest Champion and has now won the Championship a record seven times. During about the third quarter of this season, however, it seemed as though Hamilton was no longer hungry enough to win another Championship. He was fast but not as fast or aggressive as Max and when Max won the Grand Prix of the United States, and then Mexico, the Championship seemed to be slipping away. Then Lewis came back with the most dominant race of the year, easily winning in Brazil, where he came from the back of the grid, and then winning in Qatar. Lewis is anything but an F1 monk, he is very active on both Instagram and Twitter showing pictures of himself surfing in Southern California or skiing at Aspen. The day after Hamilton and Verstappen were in a major accident at the Italian Grand Prix, Hamilton went to the Met Gala in New York where he promoted four, young, Black clothing designers.
Like Sir Frank Williams, Lewis Hamilton has been knighted and he strongly feels that his accomplishments give him a public platform that he wants to take advantage of. In Qatar, a conservative, Muslim, country in which homosexuality is illegal, Hamilton wore a helmet featuring the Progress Pride Flag with We stand together on the back and love is love on the side. He plans to wear it this weekend in Saudi Arabia. I started the season thinking that it would be better for everybody if Max won but, as they went back and forth during the season, I kept rooting for Lewis. Then Max started to pull away and I was OK with it. Now, with Lewis coming back strong, I’m definitely rooting for him. He is just such a decent human being that it is hard not to.
roughly, garage owner, a term used haughtaly by Enzo Ferrari after he lost another Championship to Williams.
History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books – books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
I used to think Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, and maybe it still is, but Fall is not my favorite season and this year seems especially fallish. Fall; the days get shorter and the nights get colder. Life gets slightly harder. Now, Thanksgiving, itself, is increasingly taking on the role of reminding us that we took this land away from its original owners. There were people here before the Europeans arrived we did take the land and made the original owners live on shit land and, as a nation, we are slowly starting to own up to what we did. What we are going to really do about what we did is a different story.
A good place to start is to admit that there is more than one history of the United States. There are different stories from different viewpoints and they are all valid. Replacing the White Western European fable as the Agreed Upon Fable with another fable that everybody has to agree to is just going to take us down the rathole of victimhood. Replacing one set of bad guys with a new set of bad guys is not going to bring justice or resolution. It will just bring a new set of angers and resentments.
So this year, in a growing, changing world, Michele and I wish everybody a Happy and Thoughtful Thanksgiving.
“This country needs a therapist. White men [are] losing their power to brown women and it’s freaking them out.” Michele Stern
Last week, for the first time in eleven years, the House of Representatives voted to censure a member. This is a big deal, it turns out, and it has only happened eight times in the last hundred years. It got me wondering what the other centureés did. When I look at pictures of an old white man dressed in a suit with a starched collar, I default to smart, thoughtful, guy; I am reminded of both my grandfathers. But reading through several of the old cases has changed my mind. Not surprisingly, the House of Representatives has a long history of nasty rubes and Republican Paul Representative Gosar seems to be one of them.
That’s not completely surprising since Cozar represents a big chunk of Arizona’s boondocks, his district has been drawn to leave out both Phonix and Flagstaff to make it even more boondocky. In an act of petty meanness Gozar posted an anime video depicting himself killing Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. I have not seen the video – and, believe me, I tried – but nobody, including Gosar himself, denies that it depicts him killing AOC so I am going to go with that. The whole thing is so bizarre, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I can’t imagine a situation in which doing something like that would be acceptable, well, maybe two close friends with a history of teasing each other, but when else? In this case, they are not friends, and AOC has a history of being threatened by various right-wing haters. Serious enough threats that the Secret Service, FBI, and Capitol Police were brought in, more than once.
Gosar, in his defense, said that it was a joke, he meant no harm, and that AOC doesn’t have a sense of humor. I guess he thought it was a joke, but it was either a thoughtless, nasty, joke and Gosar should be kicked out of Congress because he is too stupid to make even basic decisions or it was meant to harm AOC. Either way, if this happened in the private sector, I’m sure Gosar would be fired.
What I find most disturbing about Gozar’s so-called joke is not the anime – it’s not surprising that there is a jerk in Congress – but that all but two Republican Representatives voted against censure. All but two Republican members of Congress think it is pretty much OK to make and post a video of yourself killing another member of Congress. The two Republican women who spoke sort of ignored the whole death threat joke thingy and complained about the process and the speed at which punishment had been served. Speaker McCarthy rambled on for close to three hours saying nothing particularly germane. And Representative Ocasio-Cortez gave another great speech cutting to the core of the problem. Give it a listen.
That’s it, the Tweet and the picture – together – are the joke. If you get it, you are smarter or better educated or just funnier than me, because I sure didn’t get it. I’m not sure that I even knew it was intended as a joke. But it was and it is.
Probably the place to start was with the Jews being hounded out of Europe by the Nazis. Obviously, not all the Jewish people were able to leave Europe, or even wanted to, with over six million Jewish people murdered solely for the crime of being Jewish. But a large number of Jewish people did get out and, ironically, many of them contributed to the Allies eventually beating the Nazis. One of them was a Hungarian Jewish mathematician named Abraham Wald. Wald managed to get to the US and ended us taking a job at Columbia as head of the Statistics Department. Like many immigrants, the job was below what his pay grade would have been back home, but it was a job. When the United States entered the war, Wald ended up in a wartime organization known as The Statistical Research Group and it was there that he made a major contribution to the Allied war effort.
The Statistical Research Group worked on problems like how to streamline the supply chain for material going to the Battlefield or the trajectory of bullets fired by a moving airplane and, according to the mathematician and author, Jordan Ellenberg, was a group where Milton Friedman, the future Nobelist in economics, was often the fourth-smartest person in the room. In mid-1943, or so, the military brought the airplane picture above to Abraham Wald with a question in armoring airplanes.
Armour is weight and weight is the enemy of a successful fighter plane: too much armor and the plane is too slow, and too little armor results in a plane being too vulnerable to enemy fire. The military told Wald that “The red dots are bullet holes; this is where our planes are being shot.” And they asked him, “What is the minimum amount of armor needed to protect these areas?” Wald gave them an answer they did not expect. He said, “Put the armor where there are no bullet holes.”
The planes that got hit where there are no bullet holes, didn’t come back. Statistically, this is known as survival bias. I only know one person, that I’m aware of, that refuses to take the vaccine and he hasn’t died or even gotten sick and offers this as proof that people shouldn’t be taking the vaccine. I’m sure he will feel this way as long as he remains Covid-free. Survival Bias.
