Warts and All

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I recently read an interview with magician James [The Amazing] Randi. He said: “You know the expression, ‘warts and all?’ Oliver Cromwell, I believe, was supposed to have said that.” I decided to take a look.

“Warts and All” means to show something in its entirety, even its unattractive aspects. Phrase Finder says the saying is attributed to Cromwell as his instructions to Sir Peter Lely, who was painting a portrait of him. However “there doesn’t appear to be any convincing evidence that Cromwell ever used the phrase ‘warts and all’. The first record of a version of that phrase being attributed to him comes from Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England, with some account of the principal artists, 1764… We can only assume he was indulging in a piece of literary speculation.” Somerset Maugham used the same phase and attribution in his 1930 book Cakes and Ale

English for Students reproduces the same origin almost word-for-word as Phrase Finder. I didn’t find any source to dispute this, but it does illustrate one problem with looking for word origins. Many sources are not independent.

Evolution of Codenames

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Louise S. Kettle has an interesting article titled “Operation Bunnyhug: What’s in a Name?” She explains, “This year’s First World War centenary also marks another unusual anniversary—the birth of military operational codenames.” The Germans were the first to use codenames during “The Great War,” and those became increasingly important as communications by radio became more common and more vulnerable to interception by the enemy. The Germans used some unwise codenames in World War II that, with minimal thought, revealed the nature of the mission. For example a planned invasion of England was named “Operation Sealion.” It referred to “an attack across the sea to the island with lions in the coat of armor,” which was, of course, England. The invasion of the Soviet Union began as “Operation Fritz,” but was changed to “Barbarosa,” which referred to the Roman Empire expanding power to the east.

American codenames began using colors. Examples were Operation Indigo, Gray, and Black. Winston Churchill might have approved of those names, and he set out some basic rules for establishing codenames: Continue reading →

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb

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dark-sun book cvrThe first several chapters of this book by Richard Rhodes contain a detailed description of Soviet spying on the Manhattan Project. The value of what was provided to the Soviets is well documented. The U.S. only identified and convicted some of the spies. Some escaped detection and others managed to make it to the Soviet Union before they were captured.

The Prologue demonstrates the rich dialogue of the book. “The Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy, was a uranium gun. It used sixty-four kilograms of rare uranium 235, all of that dense, purple-black metal the United States had been able to accumulate up to the end of July 1945.” Luis Alvarz was an American experimental physicist who worked in the Manhattan Project and invented a device for measuring the yield of the Hiroshima burst. The devices were dropped by parachute ahead of the bomb radioed their readings to Alvarez in a backup plane. “Alvarez had seen the bright flash of the Hiroshima explosion, had watched (the) pressure gauges register on the oscilloscopes…(and) felt the two sharp slaps of direct and ground-reflected shock waves slamming the plane like flak explosions…”Alvarez searched for the city below the rising mushroom cloud. “Alvarez could not see the city because the city had been destroyed.” A second atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki three days later and the Japanese surrendered a few days later with the emperor referring to the “terrible bomb.” Continue reading →

Lightning Never Strikes Twice

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Most sayings apply in some instance, even if sayings often contradict each other. A stitch in time may very well save nine, but haste often makes waste. “Lightning never strikes twice in the same place” means an unusual event will not happen twice to the same person or in the same way. Despite this gut-level intuition, unusual events do repeat. One person sometimes wins the big lottery prize for a second time; or take a random selection of twenty-three persons and you’ll find there’s a 50 percent chance that at least two of them celebrate the same birthdate. Who hasn’t been surprised at learning this for the first time?

But lightning frequently strikes over and over in the same place – the Empire State Building is hit an average of 25 times per year, according to a state website, and other sources give higher numbers. Surely, even back in whatever day sayings were created, people noticed the same lone tree or hill top was struck repeatedly.

Accuweather simply lists the saying as a myth. Phrase Finder reports the first written reference “in the United States in ‘The Man in Lower Ten’ by American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958)” but suggests the “old superstition” had been around before then.

Expect the Unexpected

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Our review of a book on the safety – or lack of it – for nuclear weapons, got me thinking. One of the book’s points was that complex, interconnected systems are inherently difficult to predict and control. Many of our nuclear weapons were designed without thought to how they would eventually be decommissioned and destroyed. It reminds me of a saying I had posted over my desk on my first “real” job out of college: if you design only for steady state, you’ll have a system that cannot be started-up, shut-down, or maintained.

Our modern society has many complex systems where failures are serious – for example, nuclear weapons, nuclear power, the electric grid, and commercial airlines. Also where people make up a large part of the system – for example, hospitals, pharmacies, and emergency response. We seem determined to insist people in these systems should be infallible, and many highly-skilled people strive to achieve this level of perfection. When something goes wrong, “blame was placed on human error, but ‘the real problem lay deeply embedded within the technological systems… what appeared to be… a one-in-a-million accident was actually to be expected. It was normal.'” Continue reading →

Nuclear Weapons and Safety

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command and controlSchlosser states his goal for Command and Control: “This book assumes that most of its readers know little about nuclear weapons, their inner workings, or the strategic thinking that justifies their use… It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.” The book works very well this way. If you wonder “why would anyone want to blow up the world?”, this book shows the premise of that question is wrong. You will learn the “whys” behind the nuclear arms race. This is a long book: 448 pages of text, with 229 pages of notes, bibliography, and index. So even if you’re familiar with the Cold War, you’re bound to learn something.

Schlosser’s book covers efforts to ensure American nuclear weapons don’t “go off by accident, [or] by mistake.” Schlosser uses an accident with a Titan II missile as the frame for the book. He covers the accident in great detail from the view point of many of those involved, so stringing the chapters together would have been an information overload. Instead, he intersperses chapters on the accident with history of the Cold War, political battles among military and scientific factions, biographies of some of the people involved, and other accidents – especially with airborne warheads.

Schlosser shows how “trivial events in non-trivial systems” can lead to significant problems. Some of these incidents sound ridiculous: a janitor cleaning the floor in a nuclear reactor caught his shirt on a circuit breaker, tripped the breaker and shut the reactor down for four days; a plane on an aircraft carrier inexplicably rolled off the deck, sending the pilot, plane, and its nuclear warheads to the bottom of the ocean, never to be recovered.

In many of the accidents, blame was placed on human error, but “the real problem lay deeply embedded within the technological systems… what appeared to be… a one-in-a-million accident was actually to be expected. It was normal.” Continue reading →