Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
In ascending order of difficulty:

On summers in DC:  Having lived in the neighborhood of DC for at least
150 years now, I have the statistical base from which I can confirm
the wisdom of your friend's decision.  The summers are godawful.  I had
a friend who worked in public health in the equatorial third world,
and one summer I asked her how the weather there was, and she said,
"About like here."  But as Brian says, those Jasons, being Jasons,
wouldn't meet somewhere like DC.  It would be beautiful, cool,
delightful LaJolla for them.

On Jason's black spots: I'm sure they have some.  I did hear a good
bit about certain personal loosenesses in marital loyalty, but that's
by no means specific to, or revealing of, Jason.  I heard a rumor of
other Jasons working on black studies that the informant Jason wouldn't
work on, but for obvious reasons, couldn't substantiate the rumors or
even get anyone else to repeat it. And that was a question I asked
everyone several times in several ways:  anything Jason does that keeps
you up nights?  And the answer was, not at all; that even if Jason
took on repugnant studies, the individual Jasons would not sign up for
them.  One Jason said, "We don't get asked those things."

On authorial hard-eyedness:  Anyway, you're right, I liked Jason and
many of the Jasons.  You don't get people to talk openly to you by not
liking them. And I can't see spending four years of my life on people I
don't like.  As I wrote, individual Jasons could be pompous or way too
talky or conceited or impressed with the importance of talking to
generals. And in certain studies, they seem to me to be naive and
excessively academic.  But that's about the worst I could find.  And
those adjectives would describe half my acquaintances anyway.  The
reviewers making these criticisms did seem to want Jason to be
condemned for collaborating with the military-industrial complex; or to
think I should have used the Freedom of Information Act to get, say,
the membership list or unclassified studies that were still
unavailable.  But I know for a fact that if I'd FOIA'ed anything, Jason
would have closed down on me and I'd never have gotten any interviews
with anyone. By the way, they didn't care whether I liked them or not;
all they were interested in was whether I had an active animus. 
Neutrality was fine.  One of them said, "Just don't make us look like
either giants or jerks."

On DARPA's illustrativeness:  I like your argument that if Jason
hadn't felt insecure about their clout, they wouldn't have had to
scramble to replace DARPA. I did get the sense that before they found
the replacement, they were pretty anxious and jumpy.  And I also got
the sense from the DARPA people who would only talk OFF THE RECORD (and
the caps are appropriate) that they were a little unimpressed with
Jason and a little sick of dealing with them -- and in their way, were
about as arrogant as the Jasons themselves in feeling that scientific
advice wasn't all that crucial.

Re Rumsfeld:  I know who to ask and just haven't done it.
  

    
well, i;ll tell my friend that la jolla is now the spot,
and not DC! however tis also true one more demand on her
time, she doesnt want...
  

    
I hadn't thought of the Freedom of Information Act as a two-edged
sword but now I see that it can be. I suspect the tack you took, Ann,
was the right one, at least with the Jasons. Talking to the them, even
if they have to dance around classified material, is going to provide
better overall insight into the group than some begrudgingly
turned-over documents. (Although, I can't help but wonder what you
might have learned.)

Did the DARPA people seem ideologically tinted to you at all? Or maybe
what I'm driving at is whether or not there was a perception that the
Jasons couldn't be trusted as much anymore.
  

    
Do you think there's anything you learned about the Jasons might help
other organizations?
  

    
On FOIAing:  I wonder what a FOIA request might have turned up too. 
But let's say it's the sexiest possible, something like make some
secret weapon or poison that's lethal and untraceable so you can
assassinate some foreign potentate WHICH TO MY KNOWLEDGE THEY DID NOT
DO.   But I've read that plot a hundred times and it's not to my taste:
 bad people doing bad sneaky things is not news.  What was news to me
were the Jasons themselves with their complicated lives and intellects
and motives.  And that news I couldn't get by FOIAing anything.

On DARPA's ideological tint:  You can't tell a single solitary thing
about any DARPA employee's ideological tint unless you spend years
researching and interviewing them.  Actually I don't know whether
that's true or not, only that every DARPA employee I've ever talked to
ruthlessly follows company rules.  I think people at DARPA were
exasperated with Jason and probably always had been.  There's a natural
tension between defense and academic scientists that I spend a lot of
time talking about in the book.  You can see both sides of the tension
easily.  Anyway, if DARPA got the word from on high that Jason should
go along or get out, and Jason wouldn't go along, then DARPA wouldn't
have felt too sad about getting Jason out.   But I don't think DARPA
distrusted Jason.

On Jason as an example for other organizations:  I guess if the
organizations were like Jason -- groups of academics trying to advise
the government -- then yes, Jason's example might help navigate the
cultural and political differences.  For instance:  if you're trying to
invent a nice little missile that can go on Navy submarines, don't
make it an Air Force missile.
  

    
Shoot, another budding conspiracy theory dashed by mundane
bureaucratic culture stuff. You know, you might sell more books if you
connected the Jasons to the Illuminati, alien technology, government
mind control or something. Any weird responses along those lines since
the book was published?
  

    
I expected more weirdness than I got -- Jason conspiracy theories have
a small but definite presence on the internet.  But not much happened.
 A late, late night talk show that features conspiracies asked me to
be a guest.  I had to go into training to stay up that late, and didn't
much want to anyway.  But the book's publicist saw the audience
numbers and I was made to see the light.  Anyway.  The host was lovely
-- he'd actually read the book and asked smart questions.  And the
call-in's asked things that were reasonable to ask.  I did get one
on-air proposal of marriage (I had to back out), one inquiry about
Jasons in Omaha (none that I know of), one Illuminatus (the host cut
right to a commercial), and my favorite:  a creaky old-lady voice
saying, "God bless those Jasons."

I should say:  I'm leaving tomorrow for a week-long trip to interview
some astronomers for my next book, plus go to my mother's 90th birthday
celebration with 88,000 relatives.  I think I'll be able to get on the
internet every day.  But if I miss a day, it'll only be because the
old-folks home doesn't reliably get the internet, and not because I
don't love you.  I do love you.
  

    
Enjoy!  And would that be "Coast to Coast AM?" (the former Art Bell
show).  I will admit to listening now and then, and yeah, the host is
really intelligent, enthusiastic, and a prince.  And the guests and the
callers... well, sanity is optional.  Entertaining radio, though.
  

    
It was Coast to Coast, it was.  The host's name was Ian, I think.  I
had a great time.  It was smart and informed without being all
ponderous and big-think.
  

    
You mention in your book, Ann, that Jasons have brought in a number of
biologists which speak a consderably different scientific language
than physicists, but the physicists appeared to enjoy learning about
biological techniques. (The account of the physicists doing DNA
sequencing is pretty amusing.)

Anyway, it's implied but not real explicit that the biologists were
brought in, at least in part, for biological weapons research (I hope
mainly of a defensive nature). Are there any developments along these
lines that you can talk about? The idea of some sort of terrorist
biological attack wreaking havoc is a kind of bogey man these days. Any
sense that the Jasons are losing sleep over it?
  

    
I'm apologizing right now for all future late responses.  I'm
traveling and I never know where my next bed, meal, or internet
connection will be.  Really I do know where my next bed and meal are.

On biological Jasons:  Jason veered off into biology beginning in the
mid-1990s.  They did very few studies, but the ones they did were in
biomedicine -- "Ultrasound," "Biomedical Imaging" were two of the
titles -- and detection of biowarfare bugs.  In the late '90's, they
started working on ways of dealing with the sequencing of the human
genome, a militarily-useless subject.  Around 2000, the number of bio
studies picked up. They continued work on all the above, but added
civilian biodefense, that is, how to detect biowarfare not on the
battlefield but in our cities, and how to defend against it (the
current public health system, they said, is a great starting-place). 
They've also done more work on how to combine the various biomedical
images to get one complete image of the body; and other work on
engineering bugs so they produce energy.

So the bottom line is:  their bio studies have been all over the map,
scary and not scary.  The scary ones are, as you hoped, defensive --
though any knowledge that helps you defend against bioterror can also
be used to help you carry it out.  And yes, some Jasons told me they
lose a little sleep over that, not at all that any of their fellow
Jasons might go over to the dark side, and not so much about the
potential for bioterror attacks, as about the value of their knowledge
to bad guys.  And they didn't want to talk about it further one bit.
  

    
Biological Jasons sort of remind me of the teams in Andromeda Strain.
  

    
Ha!
  

    
Ick!
  

    
Ann, if I might be a bit P&P(pedantic and petty), on page 209 I found
the following over lunch the other day and my mind has(ahem) been
chewing over it for a few days:

"Interact, though a perfectly good common-usage word, is also physics
jargon for two particles with certain characters and trajectories that
converge until they feel each other's fields of force, then either
collide or veer off; in either case their characters and trajectories
have changed."

(BTW, I believe 'characters' s/b 'characteristics')

A more succinct way of stating what I believe you mean is to say that
an interaction will change the velocity(which is a vector, ie has a
directional component as well as speed) and/or position of the
particles(or molecules or, for that matter persons or animals) which
ties neatly into the Heisenberg Principle WRT not being able to know a
particle's position *and* velocity with absolute certainty as learning
the one absolutly will change the other.

Interestingly, I think one of the reasons physicists view biology(and
therefore a good part of chemistry) as 'squishy'(I believe is how you
put it) is because very often particles and molecules in biological
systems interact from a distance or by not very well understood steps. 
Biological systems resist modeling because what causes me to thrive
may kill you for reasons we can't quite grasp.  We all know that
methamphetamine gives one energy and freedom from hunger but I could
also say that this is because of the similarity in the molecules of
methamphetamine and epinephrine(aka adrenalin) and the 4 step hormonal
cascade which results in the utilization of one's glycogen.

In these interactions there is neither a collision nor a veering, but
something close to embrasure as these complex molecules fold around the
target which allows others to fold around them.  Keep in mind though
that there is neither collision nor necessarily binding in the strict
sense.

There is the old story of the butterfly flapping its wing and spawning
a hurricane.  I think we can all agree there has been interaction
there, but of which type?
  

    
When I defined "interaction" as physicists use it, I was thinking
about the pretty little Feynman diagrams in which any two particles can
approach each other, feel the force between then, and leave that
interaction as different particles.  It's the kindergarten version of a
 Feynman diagram and I don't know how it connects -- though it surely
does - to the Heisenberg principle.

But really, I put it in the book not for the physics but for the
metaphor.  Science is full of these metaphors and I love them.  One of
my favorite is critical opalescence.  Raise the pressure and drop the
temperature on any gas, like carbon dioxide, and it changes state and
becomes a liquid.  At one delicate point, as the carbon dioxide is no
longer exactly a gas, patches in it -- big and little, here and there
-- are sort-of liquid.  At this so-called critical point, each of these
patches reflects a different color and for a minute the carbon dioxide
shimmers and turns iridescent, exactly the way opals do.  So I like to
think that pressure results not in breakdowns but in changes of state
and critical opalescence.

Not really addressing your point, is it.  I don't know enough about
biology to know how biologists use "interaction," or whether their use
would make a good metaphor or not.  What do you think?  Would it? 
  

    
krome should speak for himself, of course, not me for him, but it isn't all
that clear biology is more prone to action-at-a-distance charges than
particle physics is. To me, at any rate.

Funny coincidence, then, that what's coming up next in the Inkwell has to do
with biology and biotech! It would be great to have you join in with us on
that conversation, too.

That's us. What's next for you, Ann?
  

    
Nice of you to ask.  I've just finished up some interviews at the
University of Chicago and Fermilab for my next book -- on astronomers
and a survey they bit off that was too big to chew -- and in the next
month will give two talks on Jason, one to the Space Telescope Science
Institute and the other to U Penn.  That plus regular life.  I love
regular life.

Biology and biotech -- my unlettered take on that is that those fields
are more or less where physics was just after WWII.  That is,
politicians and the public had just figured out this stuff is useful.

This has been fun.  And thank you, everyone.
  

    
"but it isn't all
that clear biology is more prone to action-at-a-distance charges than
particle physics is."

There was/is a sticker by the 5th floor freight elevator in the the
chem building at UT Austin which says, "Chemistry is Everywhere". 
Indeed it is.  That is to say that there is no action-at-a-distance in
any chemical system(and WRT to particles we are still talking chemistry
just as chemistry is fundamentally about physics).  What resists the
modeling are the steps involved in so many biological systems which
make it *seem* that things are happening at a distance from the cause. 
Of course, they are not.  All the actions in the forementioned
hormonal cascade are immediate and close.  But that doesn't mean that
the cause and effect are obviously linked.

That is to say that in biological systems the interactions can be many
more and more varied than in many strictly physical systems(and here I
should point out that I have only a layman's grasp of particle
theories).

And I would like to be in on the biotech discussion if I may.
  

    
But of course. Come on by, it's right over in the next topic.
  

    

Everybody's welcome to participate in all our Inkwell conversations,
<krome>.

Ann, thanks so much for joining us for the past couple weeks. This has been
a remarkable conversation, and we're glad you could be here. Thanks also to
Mark Harms for leading the discussion.

Though we've now turned our virtual spotlight to a new guest, that doesn't
mean this conversation has to stop. This thread will remain open for futher
questions and comments indefinitely, so please feel welcome to continue
if you can.

If you've got other things on your schedule that demand your time and
attention, know that we're glad you were able to share some of your
time with us, and good luck with your new book, Ann! 
  

    
Well, thank you for your kind wishes.  I've enjoyed this -- writers do
enjoy talking on and on about their books, and you've certainly got a
lively and intelligent community here.  I'll check back in now and then
to see whether the conversation has continued.
  

    
Much fun, Ann, as well as an opportunity to learn. Thank you, best of luck
with your next projects (and good ol' life!), and do stop by here again.

Thanks for the elaboration, krome, esp. the point about *seeming* distance.
That was roughly the inspiration for my "it isn't all that clear," since
from the start physical forces (gravity, perhaps most notable among them,
but others) have been susceptible to the action-at-a-distance charge. Much
of the research agenda of physics has been set by the demand to respond to
those charges -- as may the case in biology over the last century (a propos
of Ann's remark it's like physics after WWII).
  

    
I'm sorry folks for my unexpected absence. Thanks so much for joining
us, Ann. I really enjoyed the discussion and the book.
  

    
This wasn't Jason, but it sounds like similar work:

"The contractor building the satellites, Boeing, was still giving
Washington reassuring progress reports. But the program was threatening
to outstrip its $5 billion budget, and pivotal parts of the design
seemed increasingly unworkable. Peter B. Teets, the new head of the
nation’s spy satellite agency, appointed a panel of experts to examine
the secret project, telling them, according to one member, 'Find out
what’s going on, find the terrible truth I suspect is out there.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/washington/11satellite.html

Unfortunately, the panel of experts gave the go-ahead, and the rest is
a classic tale of project mismanagement.