…a case study in the difficulties of finding historical truth.

The italicized story, which was the subject of a post I wrote in 2004, has apparently been accepted in radio and electronics engineering circles for many years: in fact, in 2006 there were commemorative events of the broadcast.  More recently, though, the story has been challenged:  James O’Neal has done considerable research on the matter and concludes that the Christmas Eve broadcast never actually happened,  based on lack of contemporaneous evidence (logs of other radio stations, for example)  among other factors.  He argues that Fessenden was no shrinking violet, indeed, he was a publicity hound and would have been expected to do everything possible to publicize such an obviously PR-able achievement…if it had actually happened.  (There is no question that Fessenden did do pioneering work in radio, including speech/music transmission: the controversy deals specifically with the legendary Christman Eve broadcast.)

Comes now John Belrose, who has also done considerable research on this matter and who argues that the broadcast did in fact happen.  Belrose notes that from a business point of view, Fessenden was pursuing radio for point-to-point applications, rather than broadcasting, and hence would have had no reason to devote great effort to publicizing the Christmas Eve event.  I found a much longer analytical piece by Belrose here; he has done further research and continues to believe that the broadcast did in fact happen. The associate editor of IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, where the article appears, finds his arguments persuasive.

1906 was only 108 years ago, not long in historical time. Yet even for an event so relatively recent, which would have involved several people directly and been heard by several more, and which was relevant to extremely intense litigation around the rights to various radio-related patents, anything near absolute certainty appears impossible to attain.

In any event, here’s O Holy Night.

cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open

…from Leonardo da Vinci.

The Sydney Morning Herald called for “empathy” for the terrorist who committed the recent hostage-taking in a cafe.  Hillary Clinton, too, has recently called for empathy for our enemies.

I’m reminded of something G K Chesterton wrote:

The posts in this fourth “theme” roundup are about the British actress and writer Fanny Kemble, whose observations on America…and on life in general…are very interesting.

"PROMOTION JOBS"

I recently read The U-Boat Peril, by Captain Reginald Whinney, RN, a British destroyer commander during WWII. In the late 1920s, Capt Whinney attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. He was not very impressed with the place, and his retrospective analysis is interesting:

What was really wrong with Dartmouth then? Well, my answer is cynical. The jobs of captain in command of the college and of his second-in-command, the commander, were 'promotion jobs'; and, in those days, the incumbent in a promotion job had only to do the same as his predecessor had done and he could hardly fail to be promoted. Further, these same captains and commanders had, while at Dartmouth...usually themselves been Cadet Captains. What was good enough for them...The requirement was to keep the sausage machine going.

I have no idea how accurate Capt Whinney's assessment of Dartmouth is...surely, they must have been doing something right, given the Royal Navy's performance in the war. But his analysis of the "promotion job" is an interesting one, with its applicability by no means limited to military organizations.

It's almost tautological...if you put people in jobs where all they have to do to get promoted is to remain in the job for a few years, then they are unlikely to do anything but remain in the job for a few years. You're certainly unlikely to see much in the way of innovation or of risk-taking behavior.

So, if you are an executive, you might ask yourself whether your organization includes anything that looks like a "promotion job"--and, if so, restructure it; that is, unless you actually like drones and time-servers as subordinate managers.

And what about the realm of education? It strikes me that, as things are now, the role of being a college student has been largely structured as a "promotion job." The student is incented to go through his 4 years or more, avoid taking any classes that might be difficult enough to unduly threaten his GPA, and avoid antagonizing any faculty members in a way that might harm the GPA or the letters of recommendation. Because the objective is, too often, not to accomplish things during the time spent on the job (in this case, to learn things), but rather to spend the requisite amount of time so that the much-desired certification can be obtained. That's a "promotion job" in Whinney's sense.

This is less true, of course, in the hard sciences and in engineering, where it's obvious that after graduation you're actually going to need to know what Young's Modulus is (or whatever)...but across wide swaths of American higher education, the concept of the "promotion job" seems highly applicable.

cross-posted at  Chicago Boyz, where comments are open

Amazing treehouses from around the world

Some signs of recovery in the rustbelt

A date which will live in infamy

In 2011,  Jonathan worried that the cultural memory of the event is being lost, and noted that once again Google failed to note the anniversary on their search home page, whereas Microsoft Bing had a picture of the USS Arizona memorial.  (12/7/2014: same thing this year, at least as of this posting)

Trent Telenko wrote about the chain of events leading to the ineffectiveness of the radar warning that should have detected the approaching attack.

Via a Neptunus Lex post (site not currently available),  here is a video featuring interviews with both American and Japanese survivors of Pearl Harbor.

cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open

The posts in this third "theme" roundup explore different aspects of the question:  How did one of the world's most advanced and cultured nations descend so rapidly into a state of utter barbarism, which was eventually curable only by the application of apocalyptic violence?

Book Review: The Road Back.  This neglected novel by Erich Maria Remarque, best known for All Quiet on the Western Front, is a beautifully-written portrayal of the psychological impact of the First World War.

Western Civilization and the First World War.  Cites some thoughts from Sarah Hoyt on the impact of the war, and excerpts a powerful passage from the Remarque book mentioned above.

An Architect of Hyperinflation.  Central banker Rudolf von Havenstein, "der Geldmarshall,"  although a well-meaning public servant, had much to do with the extreme inflation that proved so socially destructive.

Book Review:  Little Man, What Now?  Hans Fallada's famous novel follows the experiences of a likeable young couple in late-Weimar Germany.  (see also movie review)

Book Review: Wolf Among Wolves.  Also by Fallada, this is an epic novel with many characters and many subplots, set a little earlier in time than Little Man, during the period of the great inflation.

Anti-Semitism, Medieval and Modern.  Suppose you had historical information from the 1300s showing in which German cities pogroms had occurred…and in which German cities pogroms had not occurred.  Would you think this data would be of any use in predicting the levels of anti-Semitic activity in various localities in the 1920s thru 1940s….almost six hundred years later?

Book Review:  Herman the German.  Gerhard Neumann, who would eventually run GE's jet engine business, writes about growing up in an assimilated German-Jewish family (more stereotypically Prussian than stereotypically Jewish) during the 1920s and 1930s.

Book Review:  Defying Hitler.   Sebastian Haffner's important memoir of growing up in Germany between the wars.

Who would be a Nazi?  Writing in 1941, the American author Dorothy Thompson speculates about which of her acquaintances would and wouldn't "go Nazi" in a "showdown."  The original post consisted of  links to the Harpers and to a  Chicago Boyz post by Michael Kennedy with ensuing discussion.

cross-posted at  Chicago Boyz, where comments are open

Home movie footage from a 1931 cruise aboard the ocean liner Mauretania.

Video