Archive for October 2023
“I have spread my dreams under your feet”*…
From Brian Potter, a fascinating look at the history of a technology, tunnel boring, the products of which we tend to take for granted…
Tunneling is an important technology for modern civilization, as a tunnel is often the only reasonable way to create a direct path between two points. When the Hoosac tunnel was completed in 1875, it turned a difficult, 20-mile railroad route along “precipitous grades” into a direct 5 mile route, connecting Boston with the Upper Hudson Valley. Large infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric dams often require tunnels to function. The Hoover Dam required more than 3 miles of tunnels 56 feet in diameter to divert the Colorado River around the construction site. And a tunnel can be used to create new land beneath dense urban areas, making it possible to build large-scale horizontal infrastructure like sewers or mass transit that wouldn’t be feasible to build above ground.
A common way of building a tunnel today is with a tunnel boring machine (TBM), particularly in urban areas where other construction methods such as drill-and-blast or cut-and-cover would be too disruptive. Of the 89 transit projects around the world that required tunneling in a dataset compiled by Britain Remade, 80 of them used TBMs. But tunnel boring machines are a comparatively modern construction technology. The first successful rock tunneling machines weren’t invented until the 1950s, and into the late 1960s most tunneling was done using other construction methods. But as TBMs have improved, they have increasingly been the method of choice for tunneling through a wider variety of ground conditions. And while many construction tasks have resisted automation and mechanization, tunneling machinery has steadily gotten more automated, to the point where a modern TBM is akin to a mobile factory that burrows through the earth and constructs a tunnel behind it.
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Soft ground TBMs evolved from unmechanized tunnel shields. The first tunnel shield [see illustration above] was designed by Marc Brunel, father of famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and an accomplished engineer in his own right, and built by Henry Maudslay for tunneling under the Thames in 1825. Brunel’s shield, which was inspired by the action of shipworms boring through the wood hulls of ships, consisted of a large cast-iron structure, 38 feet wide by 22 feet tall, which was broken into 12 separate “frames,” each consisting of three individual compartments stacked on top of another. Within each compartment was a series of horizontal boards, called “poling boards,” that were placed against the face of the tunnel. A worker in the compartment would remove a board, dig out the earth behind it to a depth of around 6 inches, and then proceed to the next board. Once all the soil behind the boards in a frame had been dug out, that section of the shield would be advanced forward using screw jacks, and the process would repeat. Behind the shield, masons would construct the brick lining around the sides of the tunnel, which prevented the tunnel from collapsing and provided a structure for the shield to push off against.
When the Thames Tunnel was completed, it was the first tunnel under a body of water in the world. But the project proved to be incredibly difficult, encountering “almost overwhelming problems” (West p115). Excavation was slow, advancing at around 8 feet per week on average, and the tunnel flooded repeatedly. Gas occasionally filled the tunnel, which caused “collapse and blindness of the workmen” (West p109), and at one point the entire shield needed to be replaced. The tunnel wasn’t completed until 1843, 18 years after it was started, and it was never a commercial success, though it is still in use today. Tunneling via shield wasn’t tried again for over 25 years…
[But it was tried again… and again, and again, being improved and enhanced each time. Potter describes (and illustrates) the steady mechanization of the process– up to and including The Boring Company]
… The arc of tunnel boring machinery looks much more like the progression we see in other industrial areas, and that we don’t often see in construction. Construction operations often remain craft-based and labor intensive, and have been performed in similar ways for decades (or centuries). With tunnel boring machines, we see gradual automation and “factoryization,” where the work increasingly takes place in a highly mechanized, factory-like environment. New technology comes along and displaces the old technology, even in an environment of high risk aversion. And the process gradually converges on the “continuous flow,” where the machine continuously transforms solid ground into a lined tunnel, and continuously removes excavated material with the use of conveyors, the same sort of development we see in things like Ford’s assembly line, chemical process industries, and the Toyota production system.
“The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines,” from @_brianpotter.
* W. B. Yeats, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
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As we go deep, we might recall that it was on this date in 2017 that work on the Ryfast Tunnel, connecting the Norwegian city of Stavenger with the the village of Tau on the other side of the fjord, entered its final stage. It became the longest undersea road tunnel in the world; its 8.9 mile length was greater than the Eysturoyartunnilin in the Faroe Islands (at 7.0 miles), the Tokyo Bay Tunnel in Japan (at 6.0 miles), and the Shanghai Yangtze River Tunnel (at 5.6 miles) in China. It is also currently the world’s deepest subsea tunnel, reaching a maximum depth of 958 ft below sea level.
“Literature offers not just a window into the cultures of diverse regions, but also into their society, their politics; it’s the only place where we can keep track of ideas”*…
… and no region is more valent today than China. In the inaugural offering of a new podcast series from China Book Review, Mary Kay Magistad moderates a conversation that demonstrates the power of literature as an avenue to understanding a culture…
China’s epic transformation over the past four decades has seen cities expand, fortunes rise and expectations change. It has left Chinese people to either ride the waves of change, or scramble — perhaps struggle — to keep up. In the midst of it all, Chinese fiction has reflected and riffed on life on the ground, with humor, satire, pathos and good old-fashioned story-telling. At times in the Reform and Opening Up era, Chinese fiction has even driven a national conversation.
In this first episode of the China Books podcast, I talk to writer Jianying Zha and literature scholar Perry Link about how Chinese fiction reflected and influenced the societal change in the era of Reform and Opening Up, from Deng Xiaoping’s ascent as top leader in the late 1970s until Xi Jinping changed direction from 2013 onward…
More background, transcript, and a link to the streaming audio: “Chinese Fiction in the Reform Era,” from @MaryKayMagistad, @AsiaSociety, and @chinabksreview.
* Reza Aslan
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As we listen and learn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that Hua Guofeng followed Mao Zedong as paramount leader of China. The designated successor of Mao, Hua held off the Gang of Four and assumed the top offices of the government, party, and the military after the deaths of Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai. But he was gradually forced out of supreme power by a coalition of party leaders starting in 1978. Led by Deng Xiaoping, this more reform-minded group initiated the Reform Era that’s the subject of the podcast featured above– and China’s transformation into the one-party capitalist state that we know today.
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play”*…
We all know that our behavior has to change if we’re going to continue healthily and happily to inhabit the earth. And we all have a few ideas of changes we can make to make a difference. But they are mostly incremental and remedial. What might a society designed to have a healthy relationship to its environment look like? Spencer R. Scott has some guidelines…
Many see the Industrial Revolution as its own kind of Renaissance. Over the past 300 years it enabled an accumulation of wealth that the world has never before seen. Yet, industrialization and the fossil-fuels that aided its growth did not come without a price. As a recent report warns, six of nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded. This unprecedented material abundance is only enjoyed by some, yet has polluted and put at risk the whole world’s air, rivers, oceans, forests, and food, and has caused two of humanity’s largest crises: climate change and the biodiversity crisis. The era of the industrial civilization is foreclosing on itself, and many are now pointing to the need for an ecological civilization to take its place. This would be a true Renaissance, where human and ecological flourishing alike are at the center of everything we do.
Before industrialization, humanity existed in an agricultural civilization during which productivity was low and people were organized around meeting basic needs. The industrial civilization ushered in a new high-productivity era that inevitably affected peoples’ values, lifestyles, beliefs, and the institutions that governed them. An ecological civilization will similarly necessitate a major paradigm shift. As Jeremy Lent asserts in “What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?”, we need “a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior.”
From Latin, ecology means “knowledge of home” and ecological means the “applied knowledge of home.” While the old industrial system is characterized by an indifference to how life on this planet works, an ecological civilization operates with ecological principles at its core – with behaviors, values, goals, and institutions organized around the applied knowledge of life on Earth.
In her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus outlines some of Life’s Principles here on Earth:
Life runs on sunlight. Life rewards cooperation. Life builds from the bottom up. Life banks on diversity. Life recycles everything. Life builds resilience through diversity, decentralization, and redundancy. Life optimizes rather than maximizes. Life selects for the good of the whole system. In short, life creates the conditions conducive to life.
Inspired by Benyus’ Life’s Principles and the work of sustainable development scholar, Jiahua Pan, I created 6 ingredients for an ecological civilization…
Six ingredients for a more resilient future: “An Ecological Civilization is the Renaissance We’ve Been Waiting For,” from @SpencerRScott.
* James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
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As we think systemically, we might spare a thought for Guillaume Amontons; he died on this date in 1705. A physicist who made formative contributions to the understanding of friction, he was also an accomplished designer of scientific instruments– perhaps most notably, the air thermometer, which relies on increase in volume of a gas (rather than a liquid) to measure temperature. His approach led to the emergence of the concept of “absolute zero” (long before the advent of cryogenics). These days, there’s more attention at the other end of the scale…
“He who can pay every day for a dinner fit for a hundred persons, is often satisfied after having eaten the thigh of a chicken”*…
In a review of Jacques Pépin’s recent book, Jacques Pépin Art of the Chicken, a collection of stories, recipes and the authors own paintings (like the one above), Daniel M. Lavery considers both its subject and its author…
If you are a bird, odds are that you are a chicken. Since the sixteenth century the global bird population has steadily decreased, in both the number of species and the number of individuals, and each year more of them are chickens. Today there are some 33 billion chickens in the world, although this number can fluctuate substantially according to slaughtering trends.
If you are an American, odds are that you eat meat. In this country roughly 4 percent of the population identifies as vegetarian. Americans who do eat meat most frequently choose chicken, the consumption of which overtook beef sometime in the late 1990s. Pork has maintained a steady position in third place for decades. Pigs become pork when they are processed and eaten; cattle become veal or beef. But chicken is chicken everywhere, and chicken is everywhere.
If you are a home cook preparing a whole carcass for dinner, you are almost certainly roasting a chicken. Only the very adventurous or committed will roast an entire pig or goat, and usually only as part of a special celebration. The home cook can still with relative ease purchase a whole chicken (albeit usually with the feet and head already removed) almost anywhere meat is sold. She can address the carcass herself: whether to split the breast or separate the drumstick from the thigh; to section the wing into flat, drumette, and tip or leave it intact; to toss the neck and innards or keep them for stock.
It is through the chicken that most American cooks acquaint themselves with the techniques of butchery, if they butcher at all, and often it is through the work of Jacques Pépin that the introduction is made…
…
It is difficult to become an excellent chef. Once you are an excellent chef, it gets easier to become a beloved chef, since people already love food. Pépin has the Chrysler Building of culinary reputations, prestigious but not daunting, popular but not inane, an amalgamation of influences and opportunities only possible in the midcentury United States. He has unimpeachable old-world credentials, having left home for his first kitchen apprenticeship at thirteen, only earning the right to turn on the stove after a year of scrubbing pans, hauling coal, and plucking chickens. He has served as official chef to two French prime ministers. In 1961 he turned down an invitation to cook for the Kennedy White House in order to become the head of research and development at the central commissary for the Howard Johnson hotel and restaurant chain.
Writing came as a relatively late-in-life reinvention for Pépin, who was unable to continue working restaurant hours after a 1974 car accident. At the time he had written only one book, The Other Half of the Egg, with two co-authors, the McCall’s editor Helen McCully and William North Jayme. Since then, he has written over thirty. He has been cooking on American television since 1982, usually on PBS and its San Francisco affiliate, KQED, and often appeared with his friend and collaborator Julia Child during her lifetime. There is a loose biographical framing to Art of the Chicken, but Pépin gave a fuller account of his career in The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen (2003). In the newest book, his life story is only drawn out insofar as it informs his relationship to chicken…
If it sounds pat to suggest that people enjoyed watching how easily French and American cooking traditions could come together when Jacques and Julia did it, we must remember that in the 1980s and 1990s, cooking shows were still in the business of generating ease. There remains excellent cooking on-screen today, but it is almost never permitted to be exhibited calmly. Pépin is one of the few remaining on-camera chefs who seems to have relaxed for longer than five minutes at a time. His quietly competent air, his teeth-sucking ease, and his gentle, affirming style all played beautifully with Child’s patrician heartiness (her maternal grandfather was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts). She was outdoorsy, unselfconscious, cheerful, unaffected, practical, uninterested in euphemism but given to nicknaming; she naturally complemented Pépin’s tidy, dynamic, unpretentious Gallic enthusiasm.
How unpretentious? Here Pépin recalls with equal parts alarm and delight the transition from Henri Soulé’s restaurant Le Pavillonon Park Avenue and 57th Street to the short-order grills at Howard Johnson’s:
Quitting one of the very finest kitchens in the country, I found myself standing over a grill flipping burgers and hot dogs at a Howard Johnson’s in the nether reaches of Queens…. Nothing in my career…had taught me the finer points of preparing food on a flat-topped griddle. I scrambled eggs, cooked them sunny-side up, and flipped them over hard. Piles of hash browns sizzled beside the eggs, along with hot dogs, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and pancakes.
This was cooking at a superhuman scale. The job of a chef in most restaurants, no matter how exclusive, is usually to make dinner for customers who order it, but at Howard Johnson’s Pépin was tasked with the general improvement of the menus for “more than a thousand outlets.” He describes being introduced for the first time to pressure cookers and the food-safety protocols necessary to cooking for an entire chain. More than almost any other public culinary figure, in his career Pépin has followed the trajectory of twentieth-century scientific development, as if he had been planned ahead of time as a shorthand for modernism. He went from learning to slaughter chickens efficiently and humanely as a child in his mother’s backyard, holding the head down carefully over a bowl after severing the jugular vein to ensure the bird bled out quickly, to mastering oeufs à la neige at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée as part of a forty-eight-chef brigade (a loose method is provided in Art of the Chicken), to poaching a thousand chickens simultaneously in an enormous commissary kitchen.
From Howard Johnson’s he went on to found La Potagerie in Manhattan in 1970; from there, television, Julia Child, and the world. Each reference to a new career highlight comes without either arrogance or false modesty and is almost always framed as a gentle request: “I was asked” to consult for the Russian Tea Room’s remodeling of its menu in the mid-1980s or to start teaching at Boston University—a casual, unanxious relationship to excellence…
Fascinating and delightful: “Coq au Pépin,” from @daniel_m_lavery in @nybooks.
* Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste
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As we reach for the deep fryer, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that Simon & Garfunkel released their paean to a suite of herbs often used as seasoning in the cooking of chicken, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
“The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes”*…
For some, the prospect of further advances in AI and related tech (robotics, connectivity, et al.) conjures a future of existential risk, a Terminator-like dystopian future in which humans fight with “machines” for primacy. For others (among whom your correspondent numbers himself), AI (better understood as “augmented” than “artificial” intelligence) has real promise– but also dangers of a different (and very human) sort. Those technologies, dependent as they are on capital and specific/rare expertise, could fuel further concentration of wealth and power, could usher in an era of even greater inequality. Noah Smith is here to argue that my fears may be misplaced, that augmentation may narrow the skills gap and help reduce economic polarization…
On the app formerly known as Twitter, I’m known for occasionally going on rants about how it’s good to be normal and average and middle-class. To some degree this is because I believe that the only successful society is an egalitarian one where people don’t have to be exceptional in order to live good and comfortable and fulfilling lives. But some of it is also a reaction against the messages I was inundated with growing up. It seemed like every movie and book and TV show was telling me that nerds like me were special — that because we could do physics or program computers or even just play video games, we were destined to be exceptional. In the late 80s and 90s, it felt like we were on the cusp of a great shift, where the back-slapping jocks who had dominated American society in earlier times were on the verge of losing power and status to the bespectacled freaks and geeks. The Revenge of the Nerds was coming.
It wasn’t just fantasy, either. Over the next thirty years, the nerds really did win the economic competition. The U.S. shifted from manufacturing to knowledge industries like IT, finance, bio, and so on, effectively going from the world’s workshop to the world’s research park. This meant that simply being able to cut deals and manage large workforces were no longer the only important skills you needed to succeed at the highest levels of business. Bespectacled programmers and math nerds became our richest men. From the early 80s to the 2000s, the college earnings premium rose relentlessly, and a degree went from optional to almost mandatory for financial success.
The age of human capital was in full swing, and the general consensus was that “Average Is Over”. And with increased earnings came increased social status and personal confidence; by the time I moved out to San Francisco in 2016, tech people were clearly the masters of the Universe.
The widening gap in the performance of the nerds versus everyone else wasn’t the only cause of the rise in inequality in the U.S. — financialization, globalization, tax changes, the decline of unions, and other factors all probably played a role. But the increasing premium on human capital was impossible to ignore.
That trend lasted so long that most Americans can no longer remember anything else. We’ve become used to the idea that technology brings inequality, by delivering outsized benefits to the 20% of society who are smart and educated enough to take full advantage of it. It’s gotten to the point where we tacitly assume that this is just what technology does, period, so that when a new technology like generative AI comes along, people leap to predict that economic inequality will widen as a result of a new digital divide.
And it’s possible that will happen. I can’t rule it out. But I also have a more optimistic take here — I think it’s possible that the wave of new technologies now arriving in our economy will decrease much of the skills gap that opened up in the decades since 1980…
An optimistic take on technology and inequality: “Is it time for the Revenge of the Normies?” from @Noahpinion. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Aristotle
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As we contemplate consequences, we might spare a thought for Joseph Glidden; he died on this date in 1906. An Illinois farmer, he developed and patented the design of the first commercially-feasible barbed wire in 1874 (an earlier, less successful patent preceded his)– a product that would transform the West. Before his innovation, settlers on the treeless plains had no easy way to fence livestock away from cropland, and ranchers had no way to prevent their herds from roaming far and wide. Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up to an end. With his partner, Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden formed the Barb Fence Company of De Kalb, Illinois, and quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
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