Novels, a project completed

In high school our history and literature classes always seemed to arrive at the year 1900 when school let out for the summer. I preferred reading non-fiction over reading novels, but from my teen years I had a certain fascination for 20th-century American novels that I read about but never read. Five years ago I embarked on a project to read one novel each from a list of 20th-century American writers. Traveling on an airplane as much as I do provided the time, and Amazon's Kindle software for my laptop and iPhones made it easy to bring the novels at no additional weight or size.

I completed the project, having read

Saul Bellow
Pearl S Buck
William S Burroughs
Erskine Caldwell
Truman Capote
Willa Cather
Joseph Conrad
Don DeLillo
John Dos Passos
Theodore Dreiser
William Faulkner
F Scott Fitzgerald
Joseph Heller
Ernest Hemingway
Jack Kerouac
Sinclair Lewis
Norman Mailer
Carson McCullers
Vladimir Nabokov
Flannery O'Connor
Sylvia Plath
Ayn Rand
Philip Roth
JD Salinger
George Santayana
William Saroyan
Upton Sinclair
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
John Steinbeck
Hunter S Thompson
John Updike
Kurt Vonnegut
Thornton Wilder
Thomas Wolfe
Tom Wolfe

Ok, I bent the rules on selection a little. But only a little.

What surprised me was how Southern I still am. You can take the boy out of Alabama, I suppose, but you can't take Alabama out of the boy. There was something about the Southern writers — Caldwell, Capote, Carson, Faulkner, McCullers, and 2x Wolfe —  that I could identify with strongly. I knew the mannerisms and figures of speech of their characters, and I caught their references to Southern places and things and culture. Occasionally there were brutal references with respect to African-Americans, and I remembered those too. Southern Gothic is a powerful form, I think, to examine our deepest thoughts, emotions, fears, conflicts, inadequacies, and graces.

Who was my favorite author on that list? Truman Capote, by far. Reading a chapter of his work is likely feasting at a Michelin 3-star, listening to the London Symphony Orchestra play Bach, or looking at a Renoir for hours. Capote had a vocabulary, a pace and a style, power of observation and evocation, and a clarity and efficiency and deceptive simplicity. To write like that is such an awesome talent.

Among the non-Southern writers, my nod goes to Nabokov.

What's next on my reading? Five years of non-fiction that has accrued on my reading list, and then I aspire to re-read everything by Thomas Pynchon.

Just another reason to love Japan

From prior visits to Japan I could have written 100 reasons why I love it here. Now I have 101.

On Wednesday I had a flight from Tokyo Narita to Taipei. I had not gotten much sleep for several days, and my workdays Monday and Tuesday were demanding. In other words, I was dog-tired as I waited for my flight in the JAL Sakura lounge. While there I took some items out of my computer bag. After an hour I packed up and left the lounge to board my flight.

Later in the air, when I wanted to check the agenda for the next day in Taipei, I reached for my computer bag and noticed that a zipper was open — a zipper that, apparently, I had neglected to close when I was leaving the lounge. I am a creature of habit when I fly, and items always go into the same places in my computer bag. Behind this particular zipper go my car keys. One of them was missing… one with a built-in fob.

Crap, I'm thinking, either I expend $250 and several hours to replace this key for an automobile that's too old to justify it, or I suffer inconvenience for as long as I own the car. I have a spare key that a hardware store cut for me, but of course it has no fob.

These things happen, we all know, and there's no sense in blowing them out of proportion. I tried to be kind to myself and let my error go.

Today, Saturday, I passed through Tokyo on my way home from Taipei. I walked into the same JAL lounge at Narita and inquired of my lost key. Half an hour later, a JAL employee brought it to me. It had been carefully tagged with the date, time, and place of discovery.

To those of you who have spent time in Japan, this is no surprise at all. If I had lost my key at JFK, Heathrow, or any of the world's other busiest international airports, would I have been able to get it back? I don't think so. But at Narita and elsewhere in Japan, unexpectedly good things happen.

Memories of cold fusion

In 1989 I was invited to a dinner party a few weeks after the announcement of cold fusion. By that time there were reports that the results of Fleischmann and Pons were not being reproduced in other labs — at least not without ambiguity from measurement error. I was asked what I thought about it, and I answered that I had doubts about cold fusion although perhaps Fleischmann and Pons had stumbled across some other new and noteworthy phenomenon.

Nope. As far as I can tell, no new discovery whatsoever emerged from the cold fusion episode.

In some respects the cold fusion affair was a triumph of theoretical physics over experimental physics. The theoreticians were saying all along that cold fusion was highly unlikely to be true because no widely-accepted theory of physics provided a basis for it. They were correct in retrospect. But having been trained as an engineer, I find it easier to identify with experimental physics despite the big screw-up by Fleischmann and Pons. Theoretical physicists should be careful about arbitrarily rejecting every new purported discovery merely because the observations don't fit widely-accepted theories. There's a chance that those theories might be incomplete or inaccurate, despite having been peer-reviewed and experimentally verified in the past. In other words, hubris and close-mindedness are risks for theoreticians just as much as faulty technique and the desire for glory (or riches) are risks for experimenters.

Today, though, theoreticians and experimenters are at peace because of the announcement on gravitational waves. It seems to me that each side of physics still needs the other. I sometimes have wondered whether the work on string theory has gotten too far ahead of confirming experiments, but LIGO is a reminder that experimenters, if given sufficient time and money, can eventually catch up to the theoreticians. It's a happy day when that happens. But how long will this convergence between the theoreticians and the experimenters last, before the next report of an inexplicable or theoretically inconsistent phenomenon? Hard to say.

Elephants on their way out

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is in town. When we began taking our boys, the RBBB headliners were liontamer Gunther Gebel-Williams and clown David Larible. It wasn't long, in retrospect, before Williams retired and Larible returned to his native Europe — indications that even though the circus might superficially look the same year after year, it's always changing.

That's a noteworthy theme in 2016 because RBBB has accelerated its schedule to retire their elephants. The final performances will be in three months. People speculate that other wild animals in the circus, like lions and tigers, will go next. So much for Williams' legacy. Indeed, Feld Entertainment (which owns and operates RBBB) has pulled one of their three traveling units off the road, and there are rumors that the other two units will merge. Demographics and customer preferences are changing too.

The elephant question prompts me to think about animal rights in a broader context. I'm not a vegetarian and I'm definitely not a PETA member. Usually I deride the stereotype of a well-intentioned but overly zealous PETA lunatic. On the other hand, it seems barbaric to me to confine animals in old-style zoo cages. (The NC Zoo allows some of its animals to roam outdoors, with the inevitable consequence that they cannot be seen most of the time.) I don't object to laboratory mice, but photos of laboratory beagles disturb me. Hunting whales and baby seals is repugnant, but exterminating mosquitoes seems not only natural but absolutely satisfying. Not an orderly, consistent point of view, is it?

Overall I suppose it's time for circus elephants to fade out, but curiously I feel a little sad about it.

Creeps

René Angélil passed away this month. He met Céline Dion when she was 12, became her manager, "began a relationship" with her (as Wikipedia puts it) when she was 19 and he was 45, and married her when she was 26 and he was 52.

Tommy Mottola encountered Mariah Carey when he was 41 and she was 20. They married, he at 44 and she at 23.

Bill Clinton was 49 when he began a series of sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, then 22.

All three broke the so-called French rule, half the man's age plus 7. All three entered those relationships from positions of power, not equality.

I was outraged by Clinton's escapade, and I would have been without the juicy tidbits about the closet and the desk in the Oval Office. When I accepted a faculty-level administrative position at Georgia Tech in my mid-20s, I was told point-blank not to pursue female undergrads. When I first took a management position in industry, the universal rule was the same: managers don't chase interns.

From all accounts, Angélil and Dion had a good relationship. Not so, of course, with the other two couples. I have no relevant statistics from sociology but my gut says the odds of the outcome that Angélil and Dion enjoyed are very small. And even when it happens, I can't condone the guy's actions. Do we pardon Mary Kay Letourneau for her two felony counts of statutory rape simply because she remains married to Vili Fualaau? I say no. The end does not justify the means.

Besides, real men know that women get better with age.

Terminology to understand North Korea

Disputed claims by North Korea that it successfully tested a hydrogen bomb are an opportunity to review the different types of nuclear weapons, what they are called, and how they work.

Originally there was the atomic bomb, or A-bomb, whose source of energy was the fission of uranium-235 or plutonium-239. These weapons were very large, very heavy, and not very powerful in comparison to their successors because little of the fission fuel was actually consumed. The weapon self-destructed too quickly.

Just a few years later, scientists developed a more efficient "boosted" fission device that used a small amount of fusion to increase consumption of the fission fuel. The fuel for fusion was a mixture of deuterium and tritium gases, which are isotopes of hydrogen. Specifically it's the fusion of one deuterium atom and one tritium atom that makes things go. (The fact that tritium has a short shelf-life because of radioactive decay is a complication in actually deploying a weapon with tritium.) But it's important to understand that nearly all the energy released by a boosted fission device still comes from fission; the fusion simply generates more neutrons that, in turn, cause a greater percentage of the uranium or plutonium to undergo fission. The additional energy released by the fusion reactions is relatively small. Nearly all fission weapons today — whether standalone weapons or triggers for H-bombs (see below) — are boosted. However, a rogue nation or terrorist group starting from scratch would probably develop a non-boosted fission weapon first and then pursue a boosted fission weapon.

And then we come to the hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb, or thermonuclear device as it's called in professional circles. This weapon relies on fusion for most of its energy. A different fusion fuel is used, lithium deuteride, which is a solid and relatively stable compound. A thermonuclear device uses a small fission device (usually a boosted fission device) as a trigger to create the heat, pressure, and neutrons that are prerequisites for fusion to begin. The neutrons cause the lithium to produce tritrium, and then the tritium fuses with the deuterium. These thermonuclear weapons can grow quite large by increasing the amount of lithium deuteride. Improvements in missile navigation, however, have led to reductions in the individual size of these weapons. For example, the U.S. formerly fielded thermonuclear bombs of 10-25 megatons. All warheads of U.S. weapons today are less than 1 megaton. Contemporary missiles will almost always hit within a few hundred yards of their targets. You don't need a multi-megaton explosion with that kind of accuracy.

Lastly, scientists discovered that if they added passive uranium-238 to the thermonuclear device, they could significantly increase the energy produced by the weapon because the fusion would cause the normally placid uranium-238 to undergo fission with a high degree of completeness. In such a weapon about half the energy comes from fusion and half from fission. These are the types of weapons that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were (and still are) prepared to launch at one another. They have the highest yield per pound of weapon.

So what did the North Koreans actually detonate? Most experts believe it was a boosted fission weapon — or that's the story we are being given. They offer the explanation that a true thermonuclear device would have produced larger effects, such as ground tremor. Perhaps they're right. But even if they are, it's still a worrisome development because the North Koreans have taken another step.

Stuff in one's pockets

Do you look closely at coins and paper currency that you handle daily? I do, when I have the time. During 2015 I found the following:

• A five-dollar Federal Reserve Note, series 1950C. Actually these notes were printed in 1961 and 1962; how the Federal Reserve assigns a "series" designation can be cryptic. But this is still ancient for a note in circulation. It probably sat in someone's desk drawer for a very long time.
• Nickels from 1941, 1952, and 1954.
• A penny from 1952.
• And the most unusual: a steel penny from 1943 in good condition (what a numismatist would grade AU50).

The steel penny is worth 50 cents, a 50:1 ratio over face value — that's high in the coin market. The 1941 nickel is worth 30 cents. The other nickels, somewhat less. And unfortunately the $5 note is worth only $5. If it were crisp and clean, or if it were a star note or had an unusual serial number, it might have been worth a lot.

By the way, some nickels in 1942 and all nickels in 1942-45 are worth several dollars at a minimum. Nickel metal was in short supply during the war years because it was (and still is) required for the highest-strength steels such as armor plate. The U.S. government had lots of silver on its hands, so it made five-cent coins with 35% silver during the war years. Like all circulating coinage with silver content, most of them have been cherry-picked by collectors over the last 50 years. But some are still out there.

I think I'll recirculate all of them. The $5 note is certain to be marked for shredding the next time it's deposited in a bank, but the coins could keep circulating for years to come. Perhaps someone else will notice them.