Hermenautic Circle blog

The Peel Sessions:

This is a few days late, but should you wish to hear the Elvis Costello & the Attractions Peel session that aired on Feb. 25, 1980, get yourself over to the invaluable Peely Sessions site!

It is with a great sense of loss that I close the covers of the last of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles.

It has been more than a month since I read the first of the House of Niccolò books; I have been living in the world of these novels, I do not want to come back to real life!

(Jo Walton happened to post something earlier today about the joy of reading an unfinished series.)

In less emotionally equivocal literary news, I started writing the little book on style this past Monday, in the grip of a feverishly strong delusion that it could be done in three weeks. Now that I've taken the weekend off, and now that I think about the fact that the week of May 14-21 is designated for private life rather than for work, I have scaled up the likely production time to six weeks, but it still seems to me genuinely possible that I might have a whole draft of the thing by the end of March!

(Can it be?!? It might indeed not be - but it is at least possible that the outcome of a lifetime of obsessive reading and writing has led me to a place where an entire book - a little book! - can be written in six weeks. It's based on the lectures I gave this fall, so really it's a question of making something out of things that are already there...)

The little book on style still doesn't have a real name, but in a productive sleepless couple of hours a few nights ago I had some (to me) thrilling insights into the bread-and-butter-of-the-novel book. It has a new title and a clear organizational scheme, both of which I find so secretly delightful that I think I must cherish the details to myself in private for a little while longer before announcing them to the world via Light Reading - but I won't start working on this until I have sent the little book on style to my agent (and there is an essay on Austen and Flaubert and aphorisms, with which the book begins, that I will send out separately).

Bonus link: the song I couldn't get out of my head while reading the last installment of Lymond; we used to sing it in my high school choir.

These books have also reminded me of how much I loved the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries between the ages of 10 and 14 or so - it was a feature of the school I went to that younger children especially were asked to enter into historical periods with an intellect infused with imagination, and I vividly remember the account of the death of Savonarola from the point of view of a young Italian nobleman I wrote the year I was in fifth grade.

A favorite book at the time was Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, which I still think is pretty much a perfect novel for children, but I was also already at that stage beginning to read T.S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers and Nicholas Blake and through them to discover the beauties of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. In sixth grade I wrote a half-hour adaptation of Twelfth Night for our class to perform; I was steeped in the language and mythos of Shakespeare...

I said to Brent the other day, regretfully, that much as I still somewhat aspire to write airport thrillers in the vein of Dick Francis, my gifts as a writer are not really in the direction of that minimalist leave-everything-out-but-the-essentials intelligent storytelling that you see in the best of Francis or of Lee Child. I do not know, either, that I could possibly write a series of the scope of Dunnett's or of those of Susan Howatch, which I also love, partly because I am keeping a lot of my imagination in reserve for intellectual writing, but I would think that a very fully imagined historical series would be a better fit with my actual strengths and preferences than a series of stripped-down thrillers about men and women of action...

I have had several conversations recently (it has partly been prompted by walking the ramps at the Guggenheim) about a very happy insight that has struck me in the last year or so, and that seems to me in great part a function of being age 38.

Options close down - the infinite range of possibilities that seemed open to me at age twenty (at least if I was in an argumentative mood) is now significantly narrower - but unlike what I would have thought if you had been able to persuade me of it at that age (which you would not), this is a good thing.

We are constrained by our individual temperaments in ways that are very difficult to understand when we are eighteen or twenty or indeed thirty - it comes upon us gradually, though, at least if we are lucky, that we were right not to go in the direction of being (implausibly) fighter pilots or investment bankers or (more plausibly) epidemiologists or chemists - that our lives have to be governed by what will suit us best as well as by what we think we should be able to do...

Page 3. Click for larger size.

I’m very excited to extend the invite to anyone in the area to the opening night of the group show I’m a part of, Landscapes of Quarantine. From the press release:

NEW YORK CITY – February 17, 2010 – On Tuesday, March 9, 2010, Landscapes of Quarantine, a group exhibition exploring the spatial implications of quarantine, will open at New York’s landmark Storefront for Art and Architecture. The exhibition consists of new works by a multi-disciplinary group of eighteen artists, designers, and architects, each of whom was inspired by one or more of the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political, temporal, and even astronomical dimensions of quarantine. Curated by Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh of Future Plural, the exhibition will be on view at Storefront until April 17, 2010. Entrance to the exhibition is free; the launch event on March 9 is open to the public and will showcase a one-night-only, inflatable quarantine prosthesis attached to Storefront’s façade, designed by architects Jeffrey Inaba and Joseph Grima, as well as a range of beers generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery.

This was a bit of an adventure for me, and, I suspect, several other participants, since we had 10 solid weeks of inspection of the subject matter, group idea sharing, peer crit, and a final group review with a stellar cast of all-star critics. As an illustrator by trade, and often a web-enabled artist by choice, I don’t usually have the luxury of ruminating on a project an entire season before putting it together. Often times when, late at night, I’m reading the working practices of famous artists I admire (as I’m wont to do, whiskey in hand), I’m envious of a time when artists were able to chin-scratch for years on one project, painting, or attempt. Maybe I’m romanticizing it, but from a pure economics point of view, unless you’re a really famous artist, what someone might get from selling a piece of work hasn’t kept up with cost of living increases, to say the least, so more work is demanded in a shorter amount of time. But maybe it’s also personal. I’m a type-A guy who’s also impatient. Regardless of the reason, the length of time was a breath of fresh air. To be able to share that with a select group of amazing artists who gave some un-sugar-coated honest critique almost felt like I was being greedy.

My particular piece, titled Pages 179-187 is a result I came to after studying both the roots of quarantine in the modern age, as well as the plague epidemics of early times. As we were introduced to the historical material, I became fascinated with the power imbued in the  Powers That Be to make very real decisions of life and death, sometimes with very little real information at hand. The idea of The Word From On High, for the good of all, became, in my mind, inextricably linked with the power structure behind a quarantine, and the nearly-imperialist power that implies, on top of how that word was distributed to the masses. I quickly found a relation between what the elder times placed their faith in (God), and what our more modern forebearers trusted (technology), and came up with a kind of ‘lost fable’, told in a form that was a consciously reminiscent of both 19th century etchings and cartoons, and both Italian and Byzantine illuminated manuscripts. My hope is that the result is 8 pages that are nearly ahistorical, so universal are both the themes and the images.

My initial plan was to get these pages binded in a leather tome, but after some teeth gnashing and rending of clothes, I ended up abandoning the plan, due to both a logistical flaw: how do I get every page to be shown without asking the audience to touch the pages?), and a thematic one (isn’t that a little Epcot-y?). My final framing choice I think you’ll find both subtle and really cool and appropriate.

I’ll be posting all the pages, eventually, but if you’re in the area, please do come down and pull me aside to say hello at the opening on March 9th,  at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. It should be a blast, and not only can you see my pieces in person, you can see all the other fantastic stuff on display. See you there!

Download the original press release here.

These just came in today — and they’re too amazing to keep to ourselves! Above: Toy Airplane + Robert Lopez Story; below, Mermaid Figurine + Tom McCarthy Story. And check out the amazing story-in-a-found-bottle presentation, courtesy of Underwater New York. Fantastic!

As it happens, both of these Significant Objects were purchased by Susan Clements, who shared these images with us. Thank you, Susan!

More Significant Objects in their new homes can be found here. Are you an S.O. owner? Please send us your pix!

As the terrible news of Andrew Koenig’s suicide and Michael Blosil leaping to his death, both after long depressive bouts, emerged over the weekend, the New York Times Sunday Magazine had aided and abetted Jonah Lehrer’s continued slide into unhelpful Gladwellian generalizations by publishing his sloppy and insensitive article claiming that depression really isn’t that bad. Lehrer, an alleged bright young thing who found his own tipping point with How We Decide, appears to have cadged nuanced examples from such thoughtful books as Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire and Daniel L. Schachter’s The Seven Sins of Memory, proving quite eager to cherrypick tendentious bits for a facile sudoku puzzle, or perhaps print’s answer to a “fair and balanced” FOX News segment, rather than a thoughtful consideration.

Lehrer attempts to establish a precedent with Charles Darwin’s mental health: a troubling task, given that the great evolutionist kicked the bucket around 130 years ago and, thus, didn’t exactly have the benefit of psychiatric professionals watching over his bunk, much less a DSM-IV manual. Lehrer suggests that the “fits” and “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” that Darwin referenced in his letters represented depression. While it’s difficult to diagnose a mental condition in such a postmortem manner, John Bowlby’s helpful book, Charles Darwin: A New Life, has collected various efforts to pinpoint what Darwin was suffering from. And Bowlby’s results tell a different story. Darwin, who was very careful to consult the top medical authorities of his time, described his “uncomfortable palpitation” in a letter to J.S. Henslow on September 1837, when he was hard at work making sense of his data after the Beagle had landed back. In 1974, Sir George Pickering made an analysis of Darwin’s symptoms from these shards and attributed this state to Da Costa’s Syndrome, more commonly known as hyperventillation. Da Costa’s is most certainly unpleasant, but it is not depression. Dorland’s Medical Dictionary describes Da Costa’s as “a manifestation of an anxiety disorder, with the physical symptoms being a reaction to something perceived to be dangerous or otherwise a threat to the person, causing autonomic responses or hyperventilation.” (Emphasis added.) This diagnosis was backed up, as Bowlby notes, by Sir Hedley Atkins and Professor A.W. Woodruff.

Later in his book, Bowbly suggests that Darwin may have suffered from fairly severe depression during the months of April and September 1865 — which corroborates the “hysterical crying” that Lehrer eagerly collects and that Darwin conveyed to his doctor. But where Bowbly is careful to note that the “hysterical crying” leading to depression is a speculation based merely on a phrase and an anecdote conveyed by Darwin’s son, Leonard, Lehrer conflates both Darwin’s “hysterical crying” and Bowlby’s other non-depression examples into depression. Furthermore, Lehrer fails to note that the reason that Darwin was “not able to do anything one day out of three” (as he noted in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker on March 28, 1849) was because, as Darwin noted, his father had died the previous November. (Lehrer does note Darwin’s grief following the death of his ten-year-old daughter and proudly observes that the DSM manual specifies that the diagnosis of grief-related depressive disorder “is grief caused by bereavement, as long as the grief doesn’t last longer than two months.” But David H. Barlow’s Anxiety and Its Disorders cites a 1989 study*, which points out that “it is not uncommon for some individuals to grieve for a year or longer” and observes that some people may need longer than two months to escape severe incapacitating grief. A major depressive disorder may not necessarily be the result after two months of grief. In other words, the human mind is not necessarily an Easy-Bake oven.)

The basis for Lehrer’s thesis — that Darwin conquered the totality of his apparent “depression” to “succeed in science” and that his “depression” was “a clarifying force, focusing the mind on its most essential problems” — is predicated on a willful misreading of the primary sources, one that apparently eluded the indolent army of Times fact checkers, who only had to consult Bowlby’s more equitable analysis. This was irresponsible assembly from Lehrer: bad and inappropriate badinage intended to back up a sensational headline and convey Darwin as a falsely triumphant poster boy for severe depression. But depression is a deadly disorder, a condition that requires a less specious summary.

Lehrer later cites David Foster Wallace’s short story, “The Depressed Person,” as a qualifying example for how the depressive mind remains in a “recursive loop of woe.” One may find comparisons between DFW’s real depression and the details contained in the story. But the story, written in third person and loaded with clinical details, might also be read as something which depicts the regular world’s failure to comprehend inner torment. Prescriptive analysis may very well apply to patterns of behavior, but fiction is an altogether different measure.

It is doubtful that DFW ever intended his story to be some smoking gun for lazy cognitive science, as Lehrer insists that it is, when Lehrer declares that those with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to be depressed. Daniel L. Schachter’s The Seven Sins of Memory, a book that Lehrer appears to have relied upon for the Susan Nolen-Hoeksema example, pointed out that people “who focus obsessively on their current negative moods and past negative events, are at a special risk for becoming trapped in such destructive self-perpetuating cycles.” But what of those who are ruminating after a positive mood or after positive events? The danger of using a phrase like “ruminative tendencies” is that it discounts Nolen-Hoeksema’s clear distinction between dysphoric subjects inclined to ruminate (and feel worse) and “nondysphoric subjects [who] would show no effects of either the rumination or distraction inductions on their moods.” Perhaps by warning his readership of “ruminative tendencies,” Lehrer is encouraging them not to ruminate and therefore become mildly depressed about Lehrer’s dim findings. Lehrer is right, however, about the Loma Prieta earthquake data (also found in the Schachter book). But his failure to distinguish between the dysphoric and nondysphoric perpetuates a convenient generalization rather than an article hoping to contend with conditional realities.

Near the end of his piece, Lehrer confesses that the criticisms against the analytic-rumination hypothesis are often responded to “by acknowledging that depression is a vast continuum, a catch-all term for a spectrum of symptoms.” Well, if only he had told us this at the head of the article before leading us down a rabbit hole. He later writes, “It’s too soon to judge the analytic-rumination hypothesis.” Well, it wasn’t too soon to speculate on Darwin’s letters (not all the result of depression) or David Foster Wallace’s inner psychological state, as reflected through a story.

Lehrer also brings up Joe Forgas’s experiments at a Sydney stationery store, whereby Forgas hoped to get his subjects to remember trinkets. He played different music to match the weather. Wet weather made the subjects sad, and the sadness made the subjects more attentive. But in a Financial Times article written by Stephen Pincock, Forgas was careful to note “that any benefits that he has found apply only to the passing mood or emotion of sadness, rather than the devastating illness that is severe, clinical depression.” Once again, Lehrer neglects to mention this scientific proviso, leading readers to conclude that Forgas’s results are more related to depression.

It’s also important to note that the Paul Andrews study Lehrer relies on, which drew an interesting correlation between negative mood and improved analysis, defines “depressive affect” as “an emotion characterized by negative effect and low arousal.” This is a fundamentally different metric from outright depression, which Andrews’s study is clear to specify. But Lehrer confuses the two terms and retreats back to his clumsy Darwin metaphor of “embrac[ing] the tonic of despair.”

I don’t doubt that Lehrer wished to point out how depressive affect, or modest negative feelings, need not translate into a crippling existence. But his distressing conflation of “depressive affect” and “depression,” and his insistence that even a modest negative feeling might be categorized as depression, may very well suggest to readers that hard-case depressives in serious need of care and treatment might do without these essential long-term remedies. As someone who has offered assistance to friends living with this very real condition, I find Lehrer’s willingness to lump every sad behavioral pattern into “depression” truly shocking. I’m also greatly concerned that the New York Times — the ostensible paper of record — has failed to fact-check the selected studies, thus misleading readers into believing that depression is always a “clarifying force.” Depression, as Andrews attempted to convey to Lehrer, is “a very delicate subject.” Andrew did not wish to say anything reckless for the record. It’s just too bad that Lehrer did.

* Jacobs, Hansen, Berkman, Kasi & Ostfield (1989). Depressions of bereavement. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 30(3), 218-224

Today's New York Times "Ideas and Trends" feature is pegged to the flap over German novelist Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill, which was published last month, and which plagiarizes remixes passages from various other books. Hegemann is unapologetic: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” she insists.

This leads the Times' Randy Kennedy to lead us in a thought exercise. Kennedy writes:

Think of almost any kind of cultural endeavor and then use the word “we” to describe its creation. The communal pronoun trips easily off the tongue when talking about the world of contemporary arts and entertainment, where things are often the product of teams, workshops, studios or institutions, where collaboration and idea-swapping are the norm. But now try applying it to creative writing, especially to fiction and poetry, and it can sound absurd: “We worked for years on the character development and the voice, and when we finally nailed the subtle epiphany, we cracked open a bottle of Champagne to celebrate.”

Not that there isn’t the occasional team-written novel. But the popular conception of the creative writer is still by and large one of the individual trying to wrestle language, maybe even the meaning of life, from his soul, the kind of lone battle Jonathan Franzen described himself waging in writing The Corrections, which he sometimes did in the dark, wearing earplugs and earmuffs, trying to hold his mind “free of clichés.”

Kennedy's story isn't actually about crowdsourced or open-source art; it's not about team-writing. It's about pastiche, cut-up, remixing. But his thought exercise — well, I'm tempted to steal upcycle it for my opening remarks at SXSW!

You know that one of my favorite sports is bagging on forecasts of all types, so when I come across one that’s pretty decent, I think it’s worth highlighting. Here, we see that the Department of Energy’s 1996 forecast (drawn from here) does pretty well. They overprojected the price declines up until 2000, but as you can see in the bottom graph (from Ryan Wiser’s 2007 Berkeley Lab report), the wind industry quickly caught up as the price of wind electricity dropped from 6 cents a kilowatt hour to 4 from just 1999 to 2002.

(The scales of the charts above are different: One is cents per kilowatt hour, the other in $ per megawatt hour. Basic conversion: $10/MWh = $0.01/KWh. My apologies. I’d love to play Remake the Chart today, but I’ve got a few thousand words to write.)

Note, too, that the DOE projection shows the cost reduction curve flattening out around the 3-4 cent range, which is exactly what’s happened. What they did miss is that the price spread for different projects is wide. They anticipated that wind power projects would only vary half a cent up or down from the average. In reality, the variance is 1.5 cents either way, so the range extends from some projects making power at 2 cents a kilowatt hour to other projects that make electricity at 5 cents a kilowatt hour.

It’s worth noting that all of the costs cited here for wind are easily competitive in the wholesale electricity market. For example, in 2005, a good year for wind and bad one for natural gas prices, wind was off-the-charts cheap:

I went to the Park Rapids Enterprise homepage to renew my subscription, suffering severe Incident Report deprivation, and found that not only has the Akeley (pop. 412) bank been robbed, but there is an important poll for readers to answer.
Guess which one is winning? I will draw back the curtain in the comments.

[Image: Trapped in ice].

Back in January 2008, a ship called Tara unlocked from the polar ice near Greenland; it had been frozen in the Arctic floes for a year and four months, repeating the journey of the Fram, a Norwegian ship that once drifted across the polar seas, frozen solid in the ice fields, back in 1896.

In both cases, the ships temporarily became buildings, works of architecture wed flush with the landscape surrounding them.

[Images: Photos via Jules Verne Adventures].

As reported two winters ago in the Times:

Visitors to the North Pole in the past 15 months might have happened upon a peculiar sight: a ship, high and dry on the ice pack, her masts upright against the flaming aurora borealis, her bow pointing over the ice sheet, as if sailing on a sea of snow. They might have thought it a polar mirage.

It was, however, the Tara, a mobile building of the Arctic.

In a description so strange I have trouble visualizing it, we read about a "pressure ridge" that moved toward the boat at "super-slow" speeds, threatening everyone on board with destruction:

There was another scare that winter with a “pressure ridge” caused by colliding plates of ice advancing towards the boat. “It was like a frozen wave, moving in super-slow motion—about a centimeter a second,” said [a crew member]. “At one stage we attacked it with picks and chainsaws, but there was no way we could stop it.” It leant over the boat, then suddenly it stopped by itself and “we were released from the pinch,” said [the crew member].

When landscapes attack.

[Image: Map of the Arctic ice routes that brought ships across the sea, courtesy of New Scientist].

But what interests me here is the idea that you could build one thing—a ship—that only becomes what it's really meant to be—a building—when the circumstances it's surrounded by undergo a phase change (here, water turning into ice).

The ship's hull was specifically designed for this, we read in New Scientist; it was "broad, smooth and round so that, rather than being crushed like an egg, the boat would pop up like an olive stone squeezed between finger and thumb, and sit on top of the pack ice. It also featured a lifting centerboard instead of a fixed keel, and removable propellers and rudders. These precautions worked: Tara suffered just a small dent at the stern, and another stretching a metre or so along the hull."

What might the atmospheric equivalent of this be? Perhaps a planetary probe dropped into the skies of Titan or Enceladus, awaiting some strange aerial phase change to occur on all sides?

And, speaking of other planets, could you ever encounter such extraordinary air pressure—on a gas giant, say—such that solid objects simply become trapped in place, unable to fall any further? The atmosphere beneath them is denser than the metal they are made from.

Like machine-fossils buried transparently in air—or like Arctic ships locked in ice—NASA probes would gradually decay, compressed by nothing but air, under deformational pressures lasting tens of millions of years. Aerial tectonics. Slow weather. Sky glacier.

(Enceladus link via @pruned).

The Feelies’ Crazy Rhythms album came out Feb. 29, 1980. So this is as close as we’re going to get for a 30th anniversary… and here’s “Raised Eyebrows” from it.

Bad Manners’ debut single “Ne Ne Na Na Na Na Nu Nu” came out February 28, 1980. Here’s a live TV performance from thenabouts.

Psychedelic Furs recorded a session for the John Peel show that aired February 28, 1980. Here’s “Soap Commercial” from it.

I don’t know why I keep doing these. But here’s another podcast in defense of anonymity.

Like CD jewel cases, paperbacks, and other things, for better or worse the internet makes redundant, gone will be handmade “Missing” posters. Google’s Person Finder made me pause and think how far we’ve come. And of course I’m thinking about 9/11. Townes Van Zandt singing about his daughter. Here’s Dan Fox on Spacemen 3, and “The many uses of the Zeitgeist,” and pretentiousness, “The optimist sees pretension as innocent, tragicomic even: excess of effort, a lack of awareness that ambition might exceed capability, being unable to laugh about your own limitations. In this sense, it’s related to certain aspects of camp – to what Susan Sontag described as ‘the sensibility of failed seriousness’. (What often lurks behind pomposity is sad insecurity.) The cynic recognizes pretension only as the cousin of affectation, one of the dark arts of charlatanry; disguises to pass yourself off as something you’re not, talking yourself up, showing off about commodities or experiences you’ve acquired. But one quality of pretentiousness is a willingness to at least have a stab at something, for better or for worse, and you can only accuse someone of pretentiousness if you can identify both what is being aspired to, and just why it is that the person in question fails to make the grade.” New one from Jon Rafman. Best game of Twister EVER. The Atlantic on Matt Kirschenbaum’s work in video-game preservation. Brett Easton Ellis wants James Franco and Angelina Jolie to play Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan. China Mieville writes about JG Ballard, whose childhood home was just gutted. Luzinterruptus, replacing traffic with literature. The Power of Text (and Google Search Stories). Bunch of Pavement links, Gold Soundz is my favorite. Against speculative design competitions. Neoteny is the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. UK’s web heritage at risk. When in your life were you most afraid to talk to strangers? “When I talked with (adult) friends about the experience, some wondered if kids today are acculturated to be more afraid of strangers than kids were in generations past. I’m not so sure this is true. Until I was about ten, I was scared to ask for directions or talk to strangers in public. I don’t think I was afraid of the strangers–I was afraid of exposing and embarrassing myself.” I don’t think I ever stopped being afraid, I just learned to hide it.

Congress Extends Library Provision of Patriot Act to 2011. Grar.

Chris (TMi Wash DC correspondent) - "review of Armando Iannucci's film "In the Loop""
Armando Iannucci - "twitter"
Armando Iannucci - "Oscars"
Armando Iannucci - "the thick of it"
Armando Iannucci - "In the Loop"
Armando Iannucci - "Rebecca Front"
Armando Iannucci - "Plant Fondling"
Armando Iannucci - "childhood comedy"
Armando Iannucci - "milton scholarship"
Armando Iannucci - "Early Radio Days"
Armando Iannucci - "the fourth fact"
Armando Iannucci - "pushing it too far (time trumpet)"
Armando Iannucci - "truth and fiction I (Richard Bacon)"
Armando Iannucci - "truth and fiction II (high stakes)"
Armando Iannucci - "truth and fiction III (PR Gurus)"
Armando Iannucci - "truth and fiction IV (things never change)"

http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/34821

Back in 1993, it wasn’t the Bloom Box that was going to make clean energy “competitive with fossil fuels” but a new wind turbine from Kenetech.

The 33M-VS, which the company promoted as the “5 Cent Turbine,” was going to be the technological savior that would make wind energy as cheap as fossil fuel generation. In an American policy environment that was as streaky as the wind, these machines Were going to make the government irrelevant. Cranking out electricity at five cents per kilowatt hour, these machines wouldn’t need no stinking subsidies, no messy talk about externalities, or social goods. They’d be able to compete anywhere there was a good wind resource, company executives told Wall Street investors ahead of their late 1992 IPO. They raised $92 million and saw their stock shoot up as analyst after analyst foresaw huge growth for Kenetech.

The new turbine was a “marriage of aerodynamics and microelectronics” that allowed it to pull more energy out of the wind. The key was supposedly the introduction of a “variable-speed rotor,” which allowed the turbine to create nicely conditioned electrical power at a greater range of speeds than previous machines, supposedly from 8 miles per hour all the way up to 65 miles per hour. Over $70 million had been spent on its development, and it was implicitly endorsed by the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-backed group.

“Sitting atop a 90-foot tower, its 54-foot-long blades facing into the breeze, the 33M-VS looks like any other wind machine. But it isn’t,” Business Week wrote. The turbine, Kenetech president Dale Osborn averred, “has been tested in the lab and in the field. It has worked beyond our wildest imagination.”

Noting the 130 patents that Kenetech received for the 33M-VS, the Christian Science Monitor bought the company line that “after 10 years of development and a year of field tests, the 33M-VS wind turbine will produce electricity for 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, making it competitive with natural gas.”

An EPRI report testified the turbine “is less vulnerable to wear and tear from wind action, lighter weight, and less expensive than a comparably sized constant-speed machine.”

Sounds great! But the problem was that this was not really true.

The machines may have been a tiny bit more efficient than their competitors, but what they gained there, they more than lost in operations and maintenance difficulty. Blades cracked. The hydraulics broke down. The list of problems was long. In August 1994, financial analyst Hank Hermann visited the site and reported “the loud groaning, clanging, whining noises emitting from several of the machines strongly suggested to my untrained unscientific ear that meaningful problems may exist with some of these machines.” The next month, Wind Power Monthly reported on what the buzz had long been in the industry. It turned out the turbines stunk.

But even before Hermann’s report was published on August 22, talk throughout the wind industry was of most of the 33M-VS blades in Palm Springs being cracked or damaged, of times when most 33M-VS turbines in Palm Springs were apparently shut down when the wind reaches about 35 mph, of most of the blades on Buffalo Ridge having cracked roots, of problems with generators and hydraulics systems, and of availability lower than usual in a wind plant — about 60%-80% compared with the normal 95-99%. For example, on August 18, out of 80, 33M-VS turbines on Kenetech’s larger wind farm in Palm Springs, 28 turbines were stopped at 08.00 in winds of 18 mph, and 18 were not operating at 11.30 in winds of 15 mph, according to a long time wind expert who says he has frequently noted that kind of low availability at the plant.

Years later, after Kenetech had gone bankrupt, the Wind Power Monthly was still bagging on the renamed turbine, then known as the KVS-33. “Operating the Kenetech KVS 33 wind turbine was likened to “life in a high maintenance environment” by Bill Barnes of LG&E Power Inc, speaking at the American Wind Energy Association’s annual conference in Austin, Texas, in June. LG&E is the largest owner and operator of the KVS 33M model, said Barnes.”

The 5 Cent Savior had become the industry scapegoat. Turned out, the turbine didn’t work nearly as well as anticipated.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. The story was: drop in the variable-speed rotor and — bang! — the energy problem would be solved. For historians of technology, this idea is flabbergasting and frustrating. The Danish turbines that now dominate the world market didn’t make huge leaps in performance. They just got better and better, incrementally, like things do.

“American designers constantly sought breakthroughs. They wanted to bypass the drudgery of incremental development and bat a home run,” Gipe wrote in his book Wind Comes of Age. “Americans leapt from one size to the next with little transition.”

The idea that technological breakthroughs visit engineers like gods from a nerdier dimension and change everything pervades American society. It’s a TV movie-quality narrative, but things don’t work like that. And the weird thing is that people who run technology companies often think that it does, or at least that the American public should be fed that line in order to build interest in their company.

As I was drinking too much coffee this morning, I hit on a new analogy for this mode of thinking: it’s the Al Davis approach to technology development. Davis, which you know if you watch football, is the owner of the Oakland Raiders. He’s famous for meddling with his team’s talent evaluators and coaches. He looks for quick fixes, thinking that if he can just get that one player, it will transform his team.

The classic Davis move was his signing of back-to-back Super Bowl MVP players to his roster with lavish contracts, though the two players (Desmond Howard and Larry Brown) were just mediocre. Neither player stayed with the team for more than a year.

A better analogy for how good technological development goes is Bill Belichick’s management of the Patriots. They are famous for getting older, undrafted, and otherwise unheralded players to work together within the overall scheme. They don’t look for one player who can transform their fortunes, but build the team as a team. Of course, they try to make each individual better, but they also find ways to put the players in positions where they can play their best.

Of course this is just an analogy, but I think there is a nugget of truth to it. We recognize that hit-seeking behavior in complex enterprises is kind of stupid, but with technology, we think that’s just the way it works.

Our data analysis to date has focused largely on Volume 1. But for fun, here’s an integrated top 25: The highest prices from the 150 (!) Significant Objects auctions that have closed to date.

Questions? Comments? Let us know.

Rank	Volume	Object	Author	Market price	S.O. Price
1	v2	Globe Paperweight	Debbie Millman	$1.49	$197.50
2	v1	Russian figure	Doug Dorst	$3.00	$193.50
3	v2	Kangamouse	Chris Adrian	$0.00	$162.50
4	v1	Indian Figurine	R.K. Scher	$0.99	$157.50
5	v2	Music Box	Nicholas Rombes	$0.50	$147.50
6	v2	Rabbit Candle	Neil LaBute	$3.00	$112.50
7	v1	Wood animal	Meg Cabot	$0.75	$108.50
8	v1	Pink Horse	Kate Bernheimer	$1.00	$104.50
9	v2	Mystery Object	Ben Greenman	$0.99	$103.50
10	v1	HAWK ashtray	William Gibson	$2.99	$101.00
11	v1	“4” Tile	Toni Schlesinger	$1.00	$88.00
12	v1	Brass Boot	Bruce Sterling	$3.00	$86.00
13	v2	Just Married Cup	Barbara Bogaev	$0.75	$81.00
14	v1	Porcelain shoe	Sheila Heti	$4.00	$77.51
15	v1	Fake Banana	Josh Kramer	$0.25	$76.00
16	v1	Missouri Shot glass	Jonathan Lethem	$1.00	$76.00
17	v1	Measuring spoons	Mark Doty	$2.99	$76.00
18	v1	Mallet	Colson Whitehead	$0.33	$71.00
19	v1	Duck Tray	Stewart O’Nan	$3.00	$71.00
20	v2	Partial Mermaid	Tom McCarthy	$0.00	$68.00
21	v2	Aquarium Souvenir	Mark Jude Poirier	$1.00	$66.07
22	v2	Pan Flute	Deb Olin Unferth	$0.00	$63.50
23	v1	Felt Mouse	Megan O’Rourke	$0.50	$62.00
24	v1	Cow Vase	Ed Park	$2.00	$62.00
25	v2	Letters and Numbers Plate	Joe Lyons	$2.49	$61.00

Note: Don’t forget that, among other possible factors, charity effects may have helped v2 prices; in any case, our number-crunching remains focused mostly on v1, when that potential spending rationale was not yet present.

Not this Justin Wolfe. What is it like to share a name with someone (possibly) wrongly accused of murder? The other Justin Wolfe is a very talented writer and creator of two delightful websites, who can do better than the suburban wasteland that is Northern Virginia.

I inch ever closer to the world of comedy here (I'm directing/co-conceiving the improvisers):



BURTONALIA
Sunday, March 14, 2010
7:00–10:00 P.M.
MoMA


PopRally invites you to an intimate viewing of the Tim Burton exhibition, followed by a special variety show inspired by the unique vision of Burton and his collaborators. Comedian Max Silvestri will play ringmaster to a cavalcade of performers, including improvisers Rebecca Drysdale and Jeff Hiller, comedians David Rees and Sam Anderson, Jon Glaser, comedian/musician Reggie Watts, music from Brigham Brough and Wyndham Garnett of Elvis Perkins in Dearland and others, and surprises galore.

Taking inspiration from popular culture, Tim Burton has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as an expression of personal vision, garnering for himself an international audience of fans and influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics. This exhibition explores the full range of his creative work, tracing the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work in film.

Exhibition viewing and cocktail reception starts at 7:00 p.m. and ends at 8:30 p.m.

Theater program begins promptly at 8:30 p.m.

Special thanks to Pernod Absinthe and Sud de France Wines.