Stanislav Petrov saves the world?

Charles Stross sends us to an essay on the man who saved the world ...

FAQ - Stanislav Petrov

The date is 1 September 1983 and the Cold War between the Soviet Union and USA is in full gear, when from the New York skies Korean Air Lines Flight 007 flies from JFK, destination Seoul, South Korea.

In the middle of the flight, while accidentally passing through Soviet air space, Soviet fighter jets appear getting close the aircraft. ..

... The Soviet fighter jets shot down the plane, with the aircraft plunging 35,000 feet in less than 90 seconds, killing 269 civilians, including a US congressman.

The tension between the two mega-powers hit an all-time high, and on 15 September 1983 the US administration banned Soviet aircrafts from operating in US airspace. With the political climate in dangerous territory, both US and Soviet government were on high-alert believing an attack was imminent.

It was a cold night at the Serpukhov-15 bunker in Moscow on 26 September 1983 as Strategic Rocket Forces lieutenant colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov resumed his duty, monitoring the skies of the Soviet Union, after taking a shift of someone else who couldn't go to work.

Just past midnight, Petrov received a computer report he'd dreaded all his military career to see, the computer captured a nuclear military missile being launched from the US, destination Moscow....

Petrov figured something didn't make sense, as strategically, just one missile...

But then, seconds later, the situation turned extremely serious. A second missile was spotted by the satellite. The pressure by the officers in the bunker to commence responsive actions against America started growing. A third missile was spotted, followed by a fourth. A couple of seconds later, a fifth one was spotted... everyone in the bunker was agitated as the USSR was under missile attack.

He had two options. Go with his instinct and dismiss the missiles as computer errors, breaking military protocol in the process or take responsive action and commence full-blown nuclear actions against America, potentially killing millions.

He decided it was a computer error, knowing deep down that if he was wrong, missiles would be raining down in Moscow in minutes.

Seconds turned to minutes, and as time passed it was clear Petrov was right, it was a computer error after all. Stanislav Petrov had prevented a worldwide nuclear war, a doomsday scenario that would have annihilated entire cities. He was a hero. Those around him congratulated him for his superb judgment.

Upon further investigation it resulted that the error came from a very rare sunlight alignment, which the computer read as missile.

Of course, top brass in the Kremlin didn't find it so heroic, as he broke military protocol and if he would have been wrong, risked millions of Russian lives. He was sent into early retirement, with a measly $200 a month pension, suffering a nervous breakdown in the process...

...In 2008, a documentary film entitled 'The Man who saved the World' is set to be released, perhaps giving Petrov some financial help, thanking him for the incredible part he had in keeping the US and the USSR out of a full-blown war....

I'd heard a bit of this story before, but not with this much detail. Of course he didn't only save American lives. The Soviet system could not wipe out the US arsenal, Trident submarines would have destroyed much of the USSR.

There have been other, similar, close calls. I recall reading of 4-5 that have been made public, I assume there are another 5-10 that are still secret.

So why are we still here? How can we keep getting lucky? It's enough to make one wonder about bizarre variants of the anthropic principle, or wonder if the game is rigg.... [abort, retry, fail].

Systemic failure and financial firewalls

I caught an MPR Midday conversation on my drive home - MPR: Another bank bites the dust Broadcast: Midday, 09/26/2008, 12:00 p.m.

It featured Chris Farrell, who usually represents my team -- the rational left. The odd bit was the other guest, Louis Johnston. I suppose he was there to represent the right -- but he was rational too.

A discussion between two rationalists is probably a bit bland for the masses, though I much appreciate it.

Early in the program, there were some interesting themes. Chris spoke of systemic failure and of regulatory failure, and in another context both spoke of firewalls and hurricanes.

That suggests, as they probably intended, that even if there are deeper economic and cultural failures, there are also more straightforward firewall failures in our current crisis. These are usually called "regulatory failures" but regulation can come in many forms. I think the most interesting forms are those that are designed to stop the spread of contagions.

Fires, seizures, epidemics, hurricanes and financial crises are all, famously, "chaotic". They have non-linear perturbation sensitivities, and they can roar up and die down in ways that are only loosely predictable.

Excepting hurricanes, we have firewalls for these things. In our brains are systems to dampen seizures should they arise, and, we think, to limit where they spread. In our buildings we have, well, firewalls. In public health we find immunization rings, targeted interventions, quarantine and the like.

Firewalls are probably a fundamental requirement for all systems sufficiently complex to be interesting (insert Godel reference of choice). I think even the GOP House would agree things are interesting now.

Firewalls don't show up, to my knowledge, in classical economics. I'm sure they show up in modern economic models of regulation and in studies of "complex adaptive systems" [1]. Maybe this latest crisis will bring models of financial system firewalls, like the mourned Glass-Steagall act, to the level of popular economics.

Brad, over to you ...

[1] Unfortunately in English we use the same word for computer network security tools as for the broader concept of things that prevent spread. So a search involving the word "firewall" doesn't work too well. Interestingly the "same" search would work much better in a language with different homographs.

Keillor on human error, finance, and truth

It's odd, as a Minnesotan, that I didn't realize Keillor has a Trib column. There's no feed, but I'll use one of several page monitoring services to create one. A special thanks to the commenter who pointed me to Garrison's latest column. I'll split my response into two parts

Cowboy economics -- chicagotribune.com

It's just human nature that some calamities register in the brain and others don't. The train engineer texting at the throttle ("HOW R U? C U L8R") and missing the red light and 25 people die in the crash—oh, God, that is way too real—everyone has had a moment of supreme stupidity that came close to killing somebody. Even atheists say a little prayer now and then: Dear God, I am an idiot, thank you for protecting my children.

So true. Two days ago a driver almost ran me down as I crossed a shopping mall exit. She drove straight ahead, maybe 200 yards, and I still didn't register in her central vision. She was looking right, and probably talking on the phone.

I'd have jumped on her very slowly moving hood, so I wouldn't have been badly hurt, but those things happen all the time. I've done lesser versions myself. For every person who backs over their child playing in the driveway, a hundred fall to their knees with a near miss.

The train driver shouldn't have been texting, but it's insane that the system relied on someone noticing a red light. That was reasonable in 1940.

Keillor continues ...

... On the other hand, the federal bailout of the financial market (YAWN) is a calamity that people accept as if it were just one more hurricane. An air of crisis, the secretary of the Treasury striding down a hall at the Capitol with minions in his wake, solemn-faced congressmen at the microphones. Something must be done, harrumph harrumph. The Current Occupant pops out of the cuckoo clock and reads a few lines off a piece of paper, pronouncing all the words correctly. And the newscaster looks into the camera and says, "Etaoin shrdlu qwertyuiop." Where is the outrage?...

... Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn't their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that's why you need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, "This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon."

The Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense, and then it was taken over by crooked preachers who demand we trust them because they're packing a Bible and God sent them on a mission to enact lower taxes, less government. Except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.

... What we are seeing is the stuff of a novel, the public corruption of an American war hero. It is painful. First, there was his exploitation of a symbolic woman, an eager zealot who is so far out of her depth that it isn't funny anymore. Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how McCain has made a fool of her.

McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in Macy's window, he would do that, or eat live chickens or claim to be a reformer. Obviously you can fool a lot of people for a while, and maybe he can stretch it out until mid-November. But the truth is marching on...

Government regulators are corruptible too; we've seen plenty of that in the past 8 years. The sex and drugs dept of the interior scandal shows how government can be broken. We need a mix of market oversight and regulation; the Clinton years show us how the balance can work.

We need something else though, and that's much harder.

Every cop knows that civil peace doesn't come from the police. The police are an essential component, but most of all you need a civil society, a culture of accommodation, tolerance, respect for law and for people, and a culture where duty and honesty earn respect. A culture where wealth without honor earns scorn and liars are scum.

We've drifted from that culture. Rove and the GOP led the descent in the 2nd Clinton term, but they couldn't have done it alone.

We don't know how cultures form or shift -- we still can't do the "social engineering" I contemplated 30 years ago. We suspect it comes, in part, from the top. If McCain/Palin are elected, and I still think they will be, we'll be cementing a culture of deceit. If Obama/Biden win, and I think that will take a bleedin' miracle, maybe we can start a turnaround.

Lastly, I don't remember when the "Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense". I think that was probably before Nixon - Gerald Ford was perhaps the last of that breed. A little bit before my time. We need that conservative party very badly.

Unfortunately only a devastating electoral defeat will lead the GOP to reform and return as a healthy alternative -- and I don't see that happening.

I wish the truth were marching on, but I sure don't see it. Maybe in China.

Train wreck McCain

As expected, McCain went in to stop the Paulson plan.

Madness on Pennsylvania Avenue - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

...House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) angrily accused House Republicans — with the tacit support of Republican presidential candidate John McCain — of crafting an alternative to undercut Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson...

McCain is so bad, he makes Bush look ... Ok, I can't go there.

Update: more here. Looks like Bush and McCain's political ploy blew up on Bush.

DeLong: Bank finance 101 - in Salon

A great article. I more or less know this stuff, but DeLong's easy going exposition still taught me new things - like that banks lend long and borrow sort. Essential reading (emphases mine) ...

Why Ben and Hank are right, mostly | Salon

... In large part because the market thinks banks and other financial institutions are way risky, they are. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy element here. No bank or other financial institution can survive for more than a month or two when market risk is at current levels. Banks borrow a lot of money. They lend out a lot of money at a slightly higher interest rate. They make their profits on volume -- on the amount of money borrowed and loaned. Most of their loans are long-term: Their terms don't change when market conditions change. Most of their borrowings are short-term: Their terms do change when market conditions change. The high level of market risk and its rapid run-up from normal levels only a year ago last August means death to all banks, and near-banks, and shadow-banks, and banklike institutions -- unless the economic fever is broken and is broken soon....

So say we all

I've grown quite fond of Gail Collins, heir to Molly Ivins ...

Bring on the Rubber Chicken - Gail Collins - NYTimes.com

... Or, as Sarah Palin told Katie Couric on CBS News last night: “Not necessarily this, as it’s been proposed, has to pass or we’re gonna find ourselves in another Great Depression. But there has to be action taken, bipartisan effort — Congress not pointing fingers at this point at ... one another, but finding the solution to this, taking action and being serious about the reforms on Wall Street that are needed.”

So say we all.

(Palin was unable to answer questions about McCain’s record and relief for homeowners with troubled mortgages. But she did reveal forthrightly that she considers her running mate a “maverick.”)...

Update 9/25/08: M saw the interview and the transcript. She now understands why John McWreck had to cancel on Letterman, cancel the debates, and fly off to Washington to destroy the American economy. Anything to make people forget the interview.

The comments, by the way, are priceless. My fave: "Just who in the name of atheism is this person?"

The November Conspiracy – or just an accident waiting to happen?

Charles Stross is a brilliant science fiction writer with a robust imagination …

Charlie's Diary: Straws in the Wind

Straws in the wind: the US army's 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division will for 12 months be assigned to US Army North in the continental United States — "The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys. Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home." (Army Times)

Excuse me, but haven't they heard of the Posse Comitatus Act? Evidently not.

In other not-news, oh-no, that-couldn't-be-true, here's Teresa Nielsen Hayden discussing John McCain's life expectancy and Naomi Wolf explaining what it all means (in case you didn't read Teresa's piece past the bit where she starts explaining why Sarah Palin would be a Very Bad Thing Indeed for America).

Putting the jigsaw pieces together, you get a remarkably ugly picture:

* Old guy with 1-3 years to live
* Charismatic Evita Peron figure fronting for Karl Rove and the old gang, ready to step into his boots
* Battle-hardened infantry units (recruited from politically conservative areas, natch) being moved into position in the homeland
* Opposition members being harassed, bugged, arrested, beaten — before the junta steps in
* A gathering fiscal crisis which will leave a lot of very angry people looking for scapegoats to blame

I really hope I'm putting these pieces together in the wrong order and it all falls apart on November 5th. But I'm not betting that way.

Could Stross have guessed the outline of The Trilateral Commission’s Project Skynet? I shall have to dispatch a team to converse with him.

Even there isn’t really a Cheney scheme to take over on 11/5/08 (who knows what he has to hide?) American democracy is now an accident waiting to happen. By dissolving the constitutional rules that keep government healthy, Bush has made freedom a pushover. It wouldn’t take too much to wrap the whole thing up.

BTW Charlie, I believe Posse Comitatus was suspended a few years ago.

(Sorry, I can’t help it if the past 8 years have made the once insanely preposterous seem almost plausible.)

In praise of David Hume

Towards the end of The Social Contract, after discussing the continuity between Rousseau and the The Terror, David Hume appears and we leap 250 years into an essentially modern perspective.

It’s not the first time in years of listening to In Our Time that Hume comes in to deliver the final word. So why is it that we hear of Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Sartre, Popper, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and other, lesser, philosophers and not of Hume? Is it that Hume takes all the fun out of philosophy by drilling directly to the 21st century? (More like, from what I can tell of Melvynn Bragg, that he’s looking for a team who can do justice to the Great One.)

Who the heck ways this guy, anyway (emphases mine):

David Hume (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, Hume's major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) — remain widely and deeply influential. Although many of Hume's contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism, his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend Adam Smith. Hume also awakened Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and “caused the scales to fall” from Jeremy Bentham's eyes. Charles Darwin counted Hume as a central influence, as did “Darwin's bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading Hume reflect not only the richness of their sources but also the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, as well as one of the most thoroughgoing exponents of philosophical naturalism….

…Born in Edinburgh, Hume spent his childhood at Ninewells, the family's modest estate on the Whitadder River in the border lowlands near Berwick. His father died just after David's second birthday, “leaving me, with an elder brother and a sister under the care of our Mother, a woman of singular Merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself to the rearing and educating of her Children.” (All quotations in this section are from Hume's autobiographical essay, “My Own life”, reprinted in HL.)

From what I can gather he was probably also the first modern psychologist and the first cultural anthropologist.

Of course he’s not a perfect modernist. His opinions on IQ and race are pretty much in line with his times (and today’s Bell Curve gang). So he’s only 200 years ahead of his time.

Incidentally, the 2008-2009 IOT season has begun. Podcasts are only available for a week, so I suggest subscribing to the IOT feed in addition to iTunes subscription (though now that I have an iPhone with Remote 1.1 I do leave iTunes running all the time).

Sounds familiar

I'm not nearly as extreme, or as talented, as the people Cringely mentions here, but there is a wee bit of a passing similarity ...

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Door Number Three | PBS

.... I have a friend of 20 years who is in a key technical role at a very large company. He's too vital to the company to risk losing but too geeky to fit in. He's on the craft (non-management) salary scale, but way higher than he ought to be for having no direct responsibility. All he does, in fact, is from time to time save his company from ruin. And even more rarely, he saves all the rest of us from ruin, too, in ways I am not at liberty to explain. How do you manage such a guy? Where he works they have him report to the CEO. The Big Guy has 5-6 direct reports and one of them -- my friend -- doesn't manage anyone or anything....

In most publicly traded corporations (PTC) rewards increase in proportion to the budget and team a person manages. PTCs can have a hard time dealing with oddballs who may be quite appreciated, but who don't fit the structure.

I think most of these people do best starting companies or joining small companies, but the latter are rare and the former is rather a lot of work - to the exclusion of other duties. Sometimes PTCs find a way to fit 'em in.

Fox attacks Sarah Palin the Black Democrat

Painfully wicked, painfully true.

Sarah Palin as a Black Democrat. Keith Knight: "Willow? Track? Trig? Black folks are cursing their children's futures with these crazy, ethnic names!!"

Where Wall Street meets Main street

A few hundred billion in bank losses typically means a few hundred billion in someone else's pocket. Winners and losers, money sloshing about, but, really, it need not impact the real world all that much. Not like a massive earthquake in, say San Francisco. There you'd be talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of real losses.

Where things meet the real world is when the financial system is so disrupted it can't fulfill it's essential functions including setting prices, assigning risks, and moving money around:

Why the threat of systemic meltdown is real - How the World Works - Salon.com:

... So why should we all be worried? Well, for one thing, if banks start failing, and credit markets freeze up, then any business that depends on rolling over short-term debt to fund daily activities is in danger. Remember Enron? Enron imploded in a matter of days because its lenders suddenly refused to roll over its short-term debt. But it's not just Wall Street investment banks and out-of-control Houston energy companies that depend on debt markets -- a vast number of large corporations engage in the same practices. And if a significant percentage of large corporations can no longer borrow money the implications for the 'real economy' will be substantial. Higher unemployment, slower or negative economic growth, etc...

Less activity means lower economic growth -- which is the equivalent of real, tangible, things getting destroyed.

Nice summary from HTWW. Unfortunately, with Bush/Cheney in power, we can't trust the executive branch to get things right. We've got to rely on the Democrat majority in the Senate to work out the best compromise ...

Will McCain withdraw?

Why would McCain duck a debate he was expected to do well at? He's been a better debater than Obama, and all he has to do is put on a reasonable show to win.

Maybe he wants to exert his will on the bailout bill. There's a good chance he'll be president -- he should have real influence within his party. Maybe he has donors he has to take care of.

Or maybe his Rovian advisors calculate political theater will get more votes than the debate. They could be right, they know their base much better than I do.

Or maybe McCain is not ready to be seen in a debate setting.

I've noted a few times that McCain is at risk, by virtue of age, smoking history and head injuries (Vietnam), of a dementing disorder. His erratic behavior over the past month makes that even more probable.

Cognitive disability in the aged often arises from a combination of the Alzheimer's process and vascular disease, including frequent small strokes. If he's experienced an abrupt drop in his cognition, I'd wonder about a small stroke or "micro-infarct". Typically symptoms will improve over days to a week, but usually not back to the previous status.

I'm not the only one to wonder, of course:

Daily Kos: Has John McCain had a stroke?

...listen to his speech, and look at his left eye. I'm no expert, and this is pure speculation only, but could the real reason McCain has suspended his campaign be because he has suffered a small stroke?

If McCain's health is failing the trip to Washington may also involve finding someone to stand in for him.

The Bush problem: how to rescue without ownership

So now we understand why the Paulson plan is so weird.

It is constrained by the Bushie's ideological aversion to owning private companies (emphasis mine, note Japan is not mentioned) ...

A billion slap in the face - Paul Krugman - New York Times Blog

... let’s talk about how governments normally respond to financial crisis: namely, they rescue the failing financial institutions, taking temporary ownership while keeping them running. If they don’t want to keep the institutions public, they eventually dispose of bad assets and pay off enough debt to make the institutions viable again, then sell them back to the private sector. But the first step is rescue with ownership.

That’s what we did in the S&L crisis; that’s what Sweden did in the early 90s; that’s what was just done with Fannie and Freddie; it’s even what was done just last week with AIG. It’s more or less what would happen with the Dodd plan, which would buy bad debt but get equity warrants that depend on the later losses on that debt.

But now Paulson and Bernanke are proposing, very nearly, to do the opposite: they want to buy bad paper from everyone, not just institutions in trouble, while taking no ownership....

Doing this without ownership is new ground. It's a choice mandated by executive branch ideology, not empirical reasoning.

You can't have it both ways. Either stay hands off and let the economy go where it will (to heck probably), or intervene and accept the scarlet stain of government ownership.

Dark flow - false alarm, right?

I've grown somewhat accustomed to the idea that our universe is far weirder than my brain can comprehend. Even so, this "dark flow" idea is pushing the envelope. For context, the In Our Time Multiverse program spent quite a bit of time talking about how no-one can imagine a way to test the nature of the universe beyond our event horizon.

I'm looking forward to commentary from my favorite physics bloggers. I assume it's a false alarm of some sort ...

SPACE.com -- Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space

... Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."

The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude...

...Scientists discovered the flow by studying some of the largest structures in the cosmos: giant clusters of galaxies ... observing the interaction of the X-rays with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is leftover radiation from the Big Bang, scientists can study the movement of clusters.

The X-rays scatter photons in the CMB, shifting its temperature in an effect known as the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. This effect had not been observed as a result of galaxy clusters before, but a team of researchers led by Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., found it when they studied a huge catalogue of 700 clusters, reaching out up to 6 billion light-years, or half the universe away. They compared this catalogue to the map of the CMB taken by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite.

They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).

"We found a very significant velocity, and furthermore, this velocity does not decrease with distance, as far as we can measure," Kashlinsky told SPACE.com. "The matter in the observable universe just cannot produce the flow we measure."

The scientists deduced that whatever is driving the movements of the clusters must lie beyond the known universe.

A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see.

In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.

"The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away, that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe," Kashlinsky said in a telephone interview. "Most likely to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation...

I suspect thse guys are jumping the gun by a fair bit, but looking forward to more commentary.

700 billion fluffy nothings

Sadly, an Obama administration would be bad news for Morford. The modern GOP inspires him...

700 billion fluffy nothings / Staggering bailouts? Body counts? Global warming stats? They're just numbers, silly

... A $700 billion bailout of a Bush-gutted economy by an already nearly bankrupt U.S. Treasury? Two trillion for a failed war in Iraq? Ten trillion in national debt and a $480 billion budget deficit (not counting the $700B for the bailout and it could be much more) and a record trade deficit, with all those numbers nearly double (if not far more) of what they were in 2001? Why, you'd almost think someone -- or maybe an entire administration, perhaps the most irresponsible in modern U.S. history -- was largely to blame. But they're not! Because they're just numbers...