unverifiable fabrications

Out of the Fishbowl and into the Fire

2006-07-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

A week or two, they said. Don’t bother to pack much, they said. Talk to the team on the ground, see if there’s really anything behind the report. Spend a week, fly to D.C. for a day or two to check in with the group staff, and you’ll be back home by the first week of April at the latest.

“Very interesting,” I told the speakerphone. “But isn’t this one of those projects that will suck?”

Oh no, no no no no no, not at all. Oh no, they said. And look, you won’t go alone, we’ll assign a junior analyst to accompany you. He’ll do the gruntwork. And it’ll be good for him to get the field time.

“Don’t give me anyone stupid or lazy,” I warned.

Just before 10:15 on Tuesday morning, junior gruntlet arrived. He was a fashionable young man, the well-tanned sort who didn’t feel the need to tuck in his shirt on a weekday, and his head appeared slightly too large for the rest of his body. He also had a big titanium watch, which seemed to be more a matter of style than function since he was forty-five minutes late.

“Hi,” he grinned at me with vigor, plunking himself down casually. “Sorry about being late, my alarm didn’t go off on time and since I missed my usual window I figured I’d wait until rush hour traffic died…down a little bit, and…um…what are you doing?”

“Don’t bother saying anything especially important just yet,” I cheerfully advised, and then firmly inserted the second earplug into my other ear.

“Uh,” he mouthed at me, his easy confidence wavering as I gazed serenely at him. “I guess I don’t under--“

And then he instinctively winced and clapped his hands over his ears as the 130-decibel BREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE of our evacuation alarm speared both his eardrums, then gave him a good smack on the interior back wall of his mildly oversized skull.

I stood up briskly as he looked wildly around in confusion. “FOLLOW ME,” I told him, and strode out of my office. Outside, a mass of people was assembling in the hallway, clutching their ears and surging toward the stairwell exits. Our director of security (a retired federal agent perpetually offended at how some employees insisted on working through his emergency drills) had found the loudest alarm available on the commercial market. On its most annoying setting, it operated just at the threshold of pain. An announcement had been circulated that a drill was going to be held sometime after ten o'clock today. Of course everyone knew it would be at 10:15. It was always at 10:15.

“I TRIED TO SCHEDULE OUR MEETING FOR BEFORE THE DRILL,” I explained to my visitor as we descended en masse past the eighth floor. “BUT UNFORTUNATELY YOU GOT HERE LATE. TRY NOT TO BE LATE. AND WEAR MORE APPROPRIATE SHOES. IF YOU FALL DOWN THE STAIRS NO ONE IS GOING TO CARRY YOU.”

I glanced back to see him trailing along with wide eyes, mouth slightly ajar, fingers in his ears. He reminded me of a goldfish that I had had in the third grade, which would adopt that sort of vacuous expression just before taking a gulp. In fact, the resemblance was rather striking, aside from the fingers in the ears. Though Inspector Cousteau’s head was proportionately smaller, probably.

At the bottom the stairwell fire door had been propped open, and in the lobby Special Agent Hearing Loss (ret.) eyed the parade with folded arms. Upon reaching open air, the compressed pack of humanity dispersed by clique into the vast parking lot, chattering and squinting in the sunlight. I headed toward some trees near the sidewalk, where four or five IT people hovered, largely uninterested in the antics of people without sysadmin privileges. Goldfish followed mutely.

I tossed my foam earplugs into the trash. Oddly, there then commenced some tinny and crass singing on the subject of a "promiscuous girl." I confess to not being entirely surprised when I observed that the source of this latest curiosity appeared to be, drum-roll, Goldfish. Nelly Furtado, live via ringtone. He reflexively moved to answer his phone, opening his mouth in the beginnings of an apology, then seemed to decide that maybe he would let it go to voicemail. I watched him fumble with silencing his jagged wafer of a phone.

Finally, he looked at me, Nelly-less and somewhat forlorn. I could make out a faint tanline left by a pair of sunglasses.

“Okay. So have you been briefed on what's going on?” I asked.

Goldfish paused for a moment. I was momentarily surprised: this showed some promise. I like people who think before they talk.

“Well,” he said, drawing out the syllable meticulously. “I got a call. Yesterday. From Mark Thann. And he said to call George Lewis, in SPD. About a new project. So I left a message for George right away. But his assistant said he was going to be out until five o’clock. But she forwarded me your e-mail and said that this was about that. And then I had an important appointment so I couldn’t talk to George before five-thirty. But George had to leave five minutes after that. So we didn’t get a chance to talk for very long. Although he did tell me…”

I read somewhere once that fish need to constantly swim in circles to avoid suffocating, as it keeps water flowing over their gills. Or maybe that was just sharks. I might actually have seen it on Wikipedia, which probably means that someone just made it up. But I was starting to think that there might be something there.

I let Goldfish flap about through his ponderous narrative for another thirty seconds or so, looking more oxygenated all the while. The BREEEEing had faded and people were moving back toward the building.

“Alright,” I interrupted, as he started to tell me about how he got into his car to go home, “so you haven’t been briefed. My assistant will send you the file. Coordinate with her to have the ticket we’ve been holding for tomorrow’s flight issued in your name. Pack for two weeks. Meet me here at eight-thirty in the morning. Don’t be late.”

In the meantime, Goldfish’s eyes were wide and he was involuntarily opening and closing his mouth, in that unconscious rhythm adopted by people urgently in need of a restroom. Either he was suffocating or he had a question. I raised my eyebrows.

“I apologize if this is something of an obvious question, but I just wanted to confirm with you,” he said, arranging the stems and petals of his question with agonizing precision. “Should I bring my laptop with me?”

This was going to be a very long two weeks.

Away...

2006-03-20T14:46:00.000-08:00

...for a week or two in Lincoln, Nebraska. Back around the 30th, I hope.

Eighteen Feet and Four Legs

2006-03-16T02:42:00.000-08:00

"This isn't exactly what I expected," I finally replied, looking up. I had to squint against the late-morning sun, peering down on us from an uncharacteristically cloudy perch.

"I would imagine not," the talking giraffe agreed.

A duck blithely waddled past. I sighed. "And I suppose that I should surrender my weapon to you for the duration."

The giraffe thoughtfully shifted its weight from one long leg to another. "It would be best. To avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, you know."

I dropped the laptop case at the animal's feet.

"Thank you," said the giraffe, gracefully dipping its head to hook the shoulder strap around its neck. "I will see that this is returned to you intact when the cessation period is concluded."

"That would be very kind of you."

"So, it is settled then. No blogging until the middle of March," declared the giraffe. "And in return, the Ungulate Confederation will waive its right of invasion against your city."

"Irrevocably," I added, with a firmness forged from twenty-three hours of tilt-headed negotiations.

"Of course," the giraffe agreed, without a trace of irritation. "Between you, me, and the tree here, I'm relieved. I find these periodic invasions of human cities to be childish and wasteful, genus tradition notwithstanding."

"Really."

"Indeed." The giraffe swayed a bit, in a long-necked nod. "We will return your weapon at the appointed time. Farewell, Worryman of All-Spectrums. You have been acknowledged by the Camelopard Prime and saved your city from certain ruin. Go forth now in peace."

And so, that's, uh, why I haven't updated my blog recently.

Twelve Hours Lost, Twelve Hours Gained

2006-02-19T20:13:00.000-08:00

I blinked back into conscious awareness about an hour ago, having somehow dropped off for a nap in the middle of the afternoon. The ceiling of the room was faintly striped by the soft outside light stenciling in through the vertical blinds, and the wall clock that I still haven't bothered to reset to standard time said seven-thirty.

Slumped in the dark, mind chasing the remnants of a dream whose termination was not altogether unwelcome, I thought to myself: how in the world did I manage to nap for fifteen hours? And then I got to my feet and headed to the bathroom, thinking about the morning routine and how I would at least manage to get into the office early today, even though it was a holiday, which would somehow make up for this embarrassing little episode. It was another ten full minutes before I got it together enough to sheepishly realize that it was still Sunday, that the time was six-thirty in the evening, not six-thirty in the morning, and that I really needed to be paying more attention to my surroundings.

A bit of embarrassment aside, I'm in a fairly good mood, as it feels like a gift of twelve hours has been given unto me.

I flew back from Dulles late on Friday afternoon, an experience that reinforced a very valuable lesson that I am pleased to share: you don't really want to fly out from Washington, D.C. late on a Friday afternoon. In addition to the usual frictional effects that result from a stampede of egressing humanity, the weather gods were against us this time, with the winds blowing themselves out from west to east. An Airbus A319 passenger jet is capable of an airspeed of roughly 540 miles per hour. As the crow flies, the distance between IAD and SFO is about 2,400 miles. Struggling through the wind like a salmon against the current, we were in the air for seven hours and fifteen minutes. As we crossed the California-Nevada frontier, about six and a half hours after rotating, the captain quipped that he had never crossed the country in an airplane at 300 miles per hour before. Yeah, me neither, and hopefully never again. I feel mildly ashamed about complaining, as my net contribution to all of this was basically to sit there and add 180 pounds to gross takeoff weight (plus baggage). But even sitting there and being a person-sized lump of ballast can hurt more than you would think.

A long weekend, with little exciting on the schedule. Ran some errands, tidied up little bits and pieces of my living space, poked halfheartedly at some bills and accounts and such. I still need to purchase a baby gift for a new relative, who is no doubt screaming at his weary parents right about now. Will spend the day in the office tomorrow, catching up with a number of bad things that have been simmering in my absence. I'm hoping that the past two days of the weekend will have some kind of narcotic effect on most of the people with whom I have to deal, leaving me in peace to actually get some work done. Ever the optimist am I.

Now, off to find some kind of washable item that won't be dangerous for a very small person to put in his mouth.

GMT Minus Five

2006-02-16T18:14:00.000-08:00

Not much in the way of excitement to relate. I am presently lounging in a hotel room on Dupont Circle, having spent an earlier part of the day interfacing with some certain pieces of a majestic bureaucracy. The District of Columbia is a funny kind of place, full of enormous buildings that somehow seem smaller than you would have imagined, had you bothered to imagine them. Sidewalks full of serious young people in powerdress, audio wires dropping out of one ear, talking to their invisible friends.

I saw metro police setting up to block traffic for a VIP, and idly remarked to my cab driver that there must be a lot of important people around here. He snorted and said something about important people being remembered by no one after they passed from this life. Well, I don't know about that. A lot of important people are remembered only when they pass from this life.

Weather's beautiful, surprisingly enough. I think it may actually be warmer here than it is in California. Hope it lasts until the weekend.

Valentine's Day

2006-02-14T12:16:00.000-08:00

CNN reports the results of a study suggesting that love has some addictive properties (and in fact may not be just a common variety of mental illness, as was previously believed). Prof. Lucy Brown explains:

"We certainly think of romantic love as something that's magical, and the magic is here and here," Brown said, pointing to the part of the brain that lit up during the experiment, the brain stem region known as the ventral tegmental area. There, pigmented cells known to contain dopamine send messages to a part of the brain called the caudate nucleus.

Where most might see a harmless addictive activity, I see a promising state revenue opportunity. If ever there was a catchy name for a tax, it would be "the caudate nucleus tax." Of course we already have a day devoted to the indirect taxation of love, but wouldn't be just be easier to convert this into a direct tax and move Valentine's Day to April 15? Consolidating these tax filing deadlines would simplify life for everyone, and I suspect would reduce the incidence of inadvertent forgetfulness that has been known to occur around this time of year.

On the east coast for a few days, posting may be intermittent. (For those imaginary friends of mine who sit on pins and needles awaiting the next dispatch.)

If Stuart Smalley Were a Roman

2006-02-13T07:02:00.000-08:00

"Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill... I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together..."

- Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.)

Meditations, Book II

Shortage

2006-02-11T13:48:00.000-08:00

Of interesting and/or amusing things to say at the moment. Exhaustion, moderate levels of disgust, perhaps some frustration -- none of which particularly inspires any useful thinking or is especially pleasant for other people to read about. To be clear, it's nothing of any real significance, just another unremarkable series of spiked rungs in the ladder of life's ordinary pain. So for now, more damned climbing.

Back some other time. Happy weekend.

Don't Give Up Hope

2006-02-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

Because it's never too late to have a bad week.

Holy Bagels That's a Big Lizard

2006-02-09T02:04:00.000-08:00

This is scary: scientists have apparently found a 160-million-year-old "great crested dragon with a fuzzy fur coat" that had extra fingers and some kind of comb on its head. This was a great great ancestor of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I think I speak for all sane people when I say this is precisely the sort of thing that scientists should leave buried in the ground. Now that the secret's out, it won't be long before a mad scientist funded by some megalomaniac bent on taking over the world figures out how to clone an army of these things. Then we're all going to be in really big trouble. I don't have time for an invasion of fuzzy carnivorous dinosaurs, and especially not ones with extra fingers.

And if that alone weren't enough, when I loaded that news page, there was some interstitial ad showing a lovely, supple-skinned young woman apparently undergoing some kind of "health spa massage treatment," which seems very likely to end in our sleeping beauty drifting off into a relaxed slumber. Leaving her immediately vulnerable to the predations of dastardly organ thieves seeking unguarded kidneys!

I'm going to have nightmares tonight.

Agh. My Neck.

2006-02-08T00:21:00.000-08:00

For reasons unknown, at the moment my head will not comfortably tilt beyond fifteen degrees of elevation. This means that if my head were an antiaircraft gun, we would be in serious danger from kamikaze attacks. Fortunately my head is not. This pain is not unlike the morning discomfort that results when I fall asleep after having been deposited head-first in the laundry bin. Except that I haven't been sleeping in the laundry, and everything was fine until about 10:30pm or so, when I was sitting in the office pushing some square buttons on the computer. And then the captain sounded general quarters, whereupon I made the painful discovery that the gun mount wouldn't elevate. Ow...ow. Ow. Nope, still doesn't.

Perhaps I need some WD-40.

Mechanical difficulties aside, today was tolerable. Usual routine. Some of this, some of that. A bit of wounded yelping by a particularly stupid person in a liaison role outside the company, whose soaring incompetence mixes with a wormy persistence to produce situations that never fail to entertain. It is an enduring mystery how some people manage to tie their shoes every day without getting their heads caught and accidentally throttling themselves to death with their own shoelaces.

Ow. Time for bed, I guess. I wonder if my neck will work in the morning.

I Have a Date with Danger

2006-02-07T00:46:00.000-08:00

Not a bad start to the week, all things considered. Generally I hate to put things like that in writing, because if you're going to tempt the fates, you should have the common sense to do it off the record. Taping "kick me" signs to the hindquarters of the Sisters of Destiny is just asking for an eye-watering debacle in the morning. Think that was funny, did ye, prideful mortal? Summon forth the locusts!

But of course I like to live Dangerously, because that's just the kind of man I am. (And I have the, um, like, official James Dean motorcycle...hat to prove it. Also a pirate eyepatch, if the hat alone doesn't do it for you.) Yes, Danger is the object of my flirtation. Which, in this particular instance, consists of toying scandalously with the fates. On my blog, man.

So yes, events are developing within the expected margins of variation. I did not have to smite anybody at work with a rock today. Some people (whom we were expecting to engage in a night action) declined battle and sailed away in the late afternoon, which was mildly annoying but ultimately an acceptable outcome. And, despite the growing menace, nobody I know had any important internal organs pilfered in some steamy and aromatic den of lotion-wielding organ thieves.

Yes, yes...excellent. Everything is going exactly according to plan. At moments like these I feel like riding around in an enormous spherical battle station and shooting force lightning from my fingertips. And cackling. But not too much, because an excess of cackling makes it difficult to concentrate on important things. (I have carefully read and make sure always to heed the precepts set forth in the Evil Overlord Guide.)

Into tomorrow. Forward, my minions!

No Such Thing as Unlucky Croaking

2006-02-05T09:31:00.000-08:00

Some practical wisdom from eighteen centuries ago:

When a raven happens to croak unluckily, don't allow the appearance hurry you away with it, but immediately make the distinction to yourself, and say, "None of these things are foretold to me; but either to my paltry body, or property, or reputation, or children, or wife. But to me all omens are lucky, if I will. For whichever of these things happens, it is in my control to derive advantage from it."

- Epictetus, The Enchiridion, 135 A.D.

Um, indeed.

Fog and Decision

2006-02-03T03:06:00.000-08:00

It was past midnight when I left, and by then the world had receded into a misty murk. California weather can be a little moody around this time of year. Tonight it wasn't quite pea-soup, but dense enough to cut basic visibility to forty feet or so. I drove home under sheets of sodium-orange light, cast out into the haze by haloed streetlamps that illuminated nothing. Funny how different everything can look when your world is abruptly cut off by an eighty-foot bubble.

But then again we spend much of life in a thick fog, even when the sun's out under blue skies. At least during those singular points when we convince ourselves that we can actively influence things. Roads diverging in a yellow wood and all that. The parts that the eloquent Mr. Frost neglected to mention were that the fork is always socked in, that the "yellow wood" bit is all poetic license because nobody can see woods of any color, and that it's not really clear at this moment whether there are two, five, eleven, or no roads to be taken at all.

The familiar truth is that the nearsighted limitations of human intuition and intellect, combined with the relentless press of time, force us into most decisions with only a fraction of the information that we really need to properly decide. No surprises here; everyone is used to uncertainty at some level. For my part, I have been trained to deal with uncertainty of a certain kind, through the vicious application of analytical process. Collect, observe, evaluate, decide. Think carefully, draw your conclusions, then move to the next step. Rinse and repeat. Hone your process and be draconian about consistency, so that you trust your incremental results enough to build on them without looking back. Do not leave too many doors open behind you, or you may end up in a loop of indecision, shuffling back and forth in a flurry of second guesses. That way lies paralysis.

I admit that this is probably not the path to true knowledge. But it is my opinion that most self-professed seekers of true knowledge underestimate the influence of time on outcomes. Yes, you do not want to underanalyze, to be sloppy about your thinking, to jump to false conclusions and then throw away the key. Yet you cannot think forever, or even for a perceivable fraction of forever. We do not float cross-legged above the world, observing and meditating -- we live in and act on it. And this is a competitive existence: the first mover can often clear away the fog around himself and thicken the fog around others. A very profane American cavalryman had it exactly right: "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week." Just make sure that it's a good plan, and go.

So goes the theory: simple enough, hard to dispute as a general principle, fashionably assertive.

Yet there are patches of fog in my life that remain utterly impenetrable. The processes and intuitions that I ordinarily rely on to pierce some of the haze glow but do not illuminate, as useless as those dim streetlamps in the mist. And all the training and the counsel I've given to others countless times before suddenly fall into a meaningless jumble of words, hollow and inactionable, because in the end I still don't have a good plan and time isn't waiting.

It's easy to demand decisiveness in the abstract, and under some circumstances it's even easy to practice it. However, when applying "decisiveness" starts to look a lot like a blind leap into an inky murk, you start to revisit your operating assumptions a little bit. It's not even a question of risk, not in the normal sense: this is just an opaque block of enriched weapons-grade unknown.

The point of all of this? Who knows. But it was pretty foggy tonight.

End of the Weekend

2006-01-29T18:51:00.000-08:00

Might well mean rain on Monday, but tonight I will confess a certain level of agreeable indifference to small things like that.

A Sunday Morning Post About Nothing

2006-01-29T08:31:00.000-08:00

Having little better to say at the moment, I present some news about submarines!

First, in what looks to have been a little-reported incident, one of the German Navy's Type 206 diesel boats ran aground in the Baltic on Friday. U-15 (pennant number S-194) was returning to the naval base at Eckernfoerde when it grounded about 150m from shore. Apparently it took about six hours for divers to refloat the boat, and no casualties were reported. [Hat tip: Ultraquiet No More]

Second, the Russians have started building the third vessel of the Borey class of fourth-generation strategic nuclear missile submarines, this one to be named Vladimir Monomach. No bets on when this one will enter service, as the lead vessel has been under construction for ten years (and recently was delayed by another). [Hat tip: Bellona]

Third, ever wonder what happened to the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine ride at Disney World? Here's a two-part photo account of what happened to it. [Hat tip: The Sub Report]

Light day planned: some errands and such in the morning and early afternoon, then catching up on work in the late afternoon and evening. Managed to catch up on a lot of sleep yesterday, so I'm feeling a little dazed and out of sorts today. Funny how that happens.

Seventy-Three Seconds, Twenty Years Ago

2006-01-28T08:54:00.000-08:00

I remember standing in front of the TV with my classmates, watching an interesting spectacle that nonetheless had in some sense started to become routine in our young minds. You might have things going horribly wrong in history books, maybe on the front page of the newspaper, but apart from scenes you saw in movies, things just didn't go disastrously wrong when you were actually standing there watching. Because in real life, somebody would have made everything safe.

And then.

Thirteen seconds of silently dawning horror, as we stared, uncomprehendingly, along with the rest of the world.

"Flight, GC, we've had negative contact, loss of downlink."

"Okay, all operators, watch your data carefully."

"Flight, FIDO, till we get stuff back he's on his cue card for abort modes."

"Procedures, any help?"

"Negative, flight, no data."

"Flight, GC, negative downlink."

"Copy."

"We have no downlink."

"GC, all operators, contingency procedures in effect."

"We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded. The flight director confirms that. We are looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what can be done at this point."

But, of course, there was nothing that could be done. And I felt a sense of sickened and horrified impotence, which would not come again until another very bad morning fifteen years later.

They were our best and brightest. In our cynical age it has become fashionable to scoff at the notion of heroes, or of sacrifice for the sake of the greater good, or even of the existence of human achievement to begin with. But twenty years ago seven people, whose intelligence, education, and training allowed them to know the risks better than any of us, gave everything for the advancement of human progress.

"[T]hey were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge, and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us."

- President Ronald Reagan
Address to the Nation, January 28, 1986

IN MEMORY OF THE CREW OF MISSION 51L/STS-33
OV-099 CHALLENGER

Francis "Dick" Scobee, Lt. Col., USAF (ret.), mission commander
Michael John Smith, Captain, USN, pilot
Judith Arlene Resnik, Ph.D., mission specialist
Ellison Shoji Onizuka, Lt. Col., USAF, mission specialist
Ronald Erwin McNair, Ph.D., mission specialist
Gregory Bruce Jarvis, payload specialist
Christa Corrigan McAuliffe, payload specialist

On Making Life Harder Than It Needs to Be

2006-01-27T06:55:00.000-08:00

A methodology:

"Be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points; do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test."

- Dr. William James (1842-1910)
Early psychologist and general pain-in-the-rear

At first glance this doesn't look so difficult, because all else being equal, I would rather not do most things. The harder part is addressing the "no other reason" issue, since a great part of human interaction consists fundamentally of one person making another do things that the latter really doesn't want to do. Sort of clutters the motivational picture.

Which is why it's important to have exchanges like this, just to clarify things in your own mind and reap the maximum benefit of Dr. James' counsel:

Someone else: Please perform this extremely horrible task.

You: I will perform this extremely horrible task, but not because you asked me to. I am performing this extremely horrible task in order to prepare myself for when the hour of dire need draws nigh.

Someone else: . . .

You: For at that time, I shall find myself neither unnerved nor untrained to stand the test!

Someone else: Um. You know, maybe I'll see if Bob has any bandwidth to handle this one.

Dawn of the Inarticulate

2006-01-26T05:14:00.000-08:00

Aagh. Gak. Urr.

Big hand on the six, little hand half past five. 5:30. No, wait, that clock's still on daylight savings time. 4:30. Back feels familiarly twisted, must have fallen asleep on the couch again. In yesterday's work clothes, no less. Outstanding.

Work laptop warbles. Some lunatic is sending emails already.

Sit up. Blargh. Where did we leave off here. Got home just after ten, got on the phone to deal with the crisis that somehow managed to pop up during the twenty minute drive home, got back online to finally finish something I promised "by the end of the working day." Ha, my working day, that is.

Hm, don't remember finishing that. Oh right, couch. Around midnight, I think. Just to rest my eyes for a bit. Truthfully, I think we all knew how that was going to turn out.

Frugff. Well, back to it, before more people start waking up and getting into the gleeful mischief that will become today's assortment of problems. Happy Thursday.

Rock, Scissors, Wireless Dead Drop?

2006-01-23T23:20:00.000-08:00

Well, this all seems rather awkward. If somehow you missed Sunday night's Rossiya broadcast, it seems that four bright young functionaries accredited to the British Embassy in the Russian Federation have landed the starring role in a new reality show produced by the noted documentary filmmakers of the Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. The four (reportedly all operations officers of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service) were filmed by Russian surveillance teams in the act of servicing a wireless dead drop -- hidden in a fake rock.

This is widely seen in the West as a gambit by Mr. Putin to discredit various domestic opposition and human rights groups, which now stand accused of accepting funds from Western intelligence. From my untutored perspective, this seems not altogether implausible -- the Russians seem to have always had a more, um, well-developed view of "political operations," and Mr. Putin seems to be an imaginative sort.

But setting aside the political context for the moment, and accepting the FSB's version of events at face value -- a wireless rock? I can sense all of you who have ever torn out handfuls of your own hair while trying to set up a wireless router shaking your heads right now: there was no way this could have ended well.

Imagine: special support directorate comes up with a clever little setup that allows wireless receipt and retrieval of data from an ordinary PDA -- now agents and their case officers can service the dead drop from yards away, with no telltale movements to tip off a surveillance team. (And assume that they solved the emissions problem somehow.) Then they hide the whole thing in a movie-prop rock and ship it off to their stations abroad.

Lieutenant Theory, meet Colonel Practice. Naturally the rock doesn't handshake properly with the PDAs in the field, and so agents and case officers begin slowing down, doubling back and circling the rock, trying in vain to get the bloody Palm to sync properly. One case officer kicks the rock. Eventually someone picks up the rock and scurries away with it. All of this makes for highly entertaining television.

But the final word on Sunday's broadcast goes to former diplomat Alan Philips, writing in the Telegraph:

Such productions serve to make [SIS] look like a bunch of bunglers. Of the truth, I know nothing. But two things need to be said. The Russians hold the British Secret Service in high regard, believing that we are people of boundless hypocrisy, and therefore perfectly suited to espionage. The Americans, by contrast, lack finesse.

Well, perhaps. But we never see Jennifer Garner getting caught servicing a fake rock on TV!

Update: A reader points out that Mr. Philips is in fact not a former diplomat, but a journalist and foreign editor at the Daily Telegraph, who was regurgitated from Moscow in one of those tit-for-tat expulsions after that whole Gordievsky business. In that place and time, and without diplomatic immunity, I suppose he was lucky not to spend a few tense days in a basement cell somewhere first. Thanks to anonymous.

Shuffle and Bang

2006-01-21T19:34:00.000-08:00

The sniper team leader was in a jovial mood. His spotter, a younger guy in a ballcap and sunglasses, was certainly courteous enough, but his boss stood bareheaded under the sun and smiled cheerfully at the lot of us as if this was the most entertaining thing he had done all week. "Thermal imaging sight," he declared grandly, holding up a black, expensive-looking cylindrical object, and passed it into the hands of his onlookers.

When it came to me, I peered curiously through it and saw nothing. After a few more tries the view didn't much improve. I passed it to Emily, who looked, frowned, raised an eyebrow at me: did you see anything?

"Thermal imaging sight," I murmured back stupidly, then ignored her exasperated eyeroll to watch the sniper enthusiastically untangling something else from the kit on the table.

It's useful sometimes to break the routine, get out of the office, see what unique and interesting things that others of your species are getting into. And so, given an opportunity to observe something I hadn't seen before, I got in my car and drove roughly two hours southeast to a sprawling, somewhat spartan multipurpose facility in an unincorporated area of one of the inland counties here in northern California.

"Multipurpose facility" was about the most descriptive phrase that could be fairly used for it: a collection of fenced buildings and vehicle lots connected by narrow service roads with speedbumps every five hundred feet. Fairly easy to get lost in, given the absence of any useful navigational signage, and it didn't help that the few signs that were visible all seemed to threaten dire consequences for assorted transgressions. I began to idly wonder how much a body shop would charge to repair a bullet hole, and whether State Farm would cover this sort of thing. Now, I do not harbor any particular vanity with respect to my car, but my general view is that having small-caliber holes in one's vehicle often conveys the wrong impression to a casual observer.

Fortunately, I arrived at the designated assembly point without any projectile interruptions. Saw Emily and some other familiar faces, shook some unfamiliar hands, chatted idly in the morning chill while swallowing short gulps of black coffee. Then a sharp, very loud combustive blast from up the hill startled most of us. "Think they're taking some people through early over there," commented someone in a tie and a trenchcoat, one of the few of us who hadn't flinched. "Busy time of year."

"Over there" was something called a "shoot house," a rather salesmanlike term for what was really just a series of plywood-covered bulletproof slabs, arranged to form a series of chambers approximating the layout of a single-story house. Doors were built into the walls, furniture and paper targets arranged randomly (or not so randomly) throughout, and closed-circuit cameras perched in corners. The entire structure was open-air, and a metal observer's catwalk stretched over the top. When the shoot house was "occupied," ladies and gentlemen were politely requested to remain outside the rather generous perimeter for their own safety, as there would be a great deal of live ammunition being flung about, and wouldn’t you like to maybe wait at the bottom of the hill and have a donut?

Now, I personally have little use for a shoot house, as it takes up a lot of space, regularly produces sounds that would scare a dead cat, and is otherwise the kind of thing that earns you dirty looks from the neighbors. But there are some people who find shoot houses absolutely invaluable, and are willing to regularly truck out to the middle of nowhere for a frolic inside. Of course, usually these folks are already the sorts of energetic characters who routinely tolerate all kinds of physical inconvenience in the course of doing what they do. Folks not so unlike the cheerful sniper and his sidekick, in fact, the kind of people who will earnestly explain that crawling two miles in the middle of the night and then lying in some tall grass for another seventy-two hours really isn't that bad, though it does kind of suck when it rains. But generally the bad guys don't like rain either and so they're more likely to stay put at the bottom of the hill where we can see them, and less likely to come up to the top of the hill and try and kill us. Anyway, it hardly ever rains around here anyway so it's all good.

It occurs to me that I should remember this the next time I start feeling that my job is hard.

You would be surprised at how many varieties of non-military "special operations" units actually exist in the United States, ranging from all of the well-known and not-so-well-known federal services, to state, county, local, and city SWAT teams and emergency response units, to the growing numbers of multiagency task forces formed for this and that. The acronym proliferation alone boggles the mind. I suppose that there are some people who would point to this as evidence of the growing paramilitarization of law enforcement and the rise of a monolithic police state, and so on, etc., etc. But anyone who has spent enough time seriously looking at the homeland security landscape will instantly recognize a different picture, and one which has far more to do with fragmented jurisdictions, overlapping bureaucracies, and the, uh, flawed genius of our multi-layered system of government. From this perspective, the very notion of a monolithic anything is a source of great hilarity. My opinion, anyway, but I guess that's neither here nor there.

The band of rude and oppressive government door-kickers that we came to observe appeared shortly after our sniper team orientation: about a half-dozen members of a well-regarded tactical unit from a large agency. Quiet, professional, courteous, and somehow conveying the impression of being both tightly-wound yet strangely comfortable in these surroundings. I noticed that one of them was a woman: marathon-lean, blonde, and every bit as confidently unflappable as her teammates. Once she donned her helmet, goggles, body armor, tactical vest, and everything else, the only way I could distinguish her from the others was by her height. Slung low over the front of each operator's tactical vest was some particularly blocky variant of the ubiquitous MP5 submachine gun; in a holster on each person's hip was a large-frame semiautomatic pistol. This team was trained and equipped to do a variety of pretty dangerous things, but its core skill set was known as CQB -- close-quarters battle, or the point-blank room-to-room engagements that are characteristic of hostage rescue, high-risk warrant service, and other rather stressful things that most of us see in the movies but don't otherwise spend a lot of time thinking about.

Now in the movies, an encounter between a squad of fully-equipped CQB operators and a motley collection of uninitiated civilians such as ourselves would be characterized by a lot of glowering from behind mirrored shades, conspicuous gum-chewing, and the occasional knife-sharpening, just to unnerve the poor skittish civilians for fun. Or perhaps they would stand ramrod-straight and refuse to look at anything other than the far wall, sir! Here in real life, though, these serious but not altogether unfriendly people removed their helmets and sunglasses, nodded politely to us, and smiled at the floor at the senior instructor's introductions. Not entirely comfortable with outsiders, of course, but proud of their training and ready to show us what they could do.

We all picked up our shooting glasses and headed toward the metal steps to the observer's platform. (Emily somehow ended up with the only pair of yellow-tinted ballistic glasses in the bin.) Anticipating what was about to happen, I inserted a pair of foam earplugs under the "Mickey Mouse" ear protectors. From our overhead vantage point, we could see the team "stacking up" outside the primary entrance to the shoot house.

A knock and a shout. The wooden door moved slightly on its hinges, and something small bounced in.

Here goes. I looked away.

A terrific concussion ripped through the structure in a way that you could feel in your throat. Even thirty feet away and elevated, shielded by a double layer of hearing protection, in the open air, eyes averted, and braced for the blast, the effects of the flashbang grenade were impressively visceral. In a confined space with a roof, I would have been blinded, dazed, and very probably curled into a fetal position.

Dark figures were already hustling into the structure, barking commands, before my senses consciously registered movement. There are those who describe a well-executed room entry drill as a choreographed ballet. One wonders where these people go to the ballet. Room entry by a CQB team is loud, violent, involves a fair amount of shooting and lots more shouting, and is otherwise extremely unballerina-like. The objective is to generate momentum into the building, and this involves a massive pounding rush that urban Marines call "flooding the room." Yet it is not just an undisciplined stampede: fields of fire and avenues of movement are carefully coordinated, lest a team member stumble, collide, miss a threat, or (worst of all) accidentally make a hole in another team member. Choreographed, okay. But ballet?

At the same time, the operators must be ready to shoot quickly and precisely. While intense training and well-maintained equipment help, the fact remains that this is a non-trivial task on the best of days, while standing still on a sunny outdoor range in front of a motionless target. The challenges start to multiply when charging through the dark clearing an unknown room along with a half-dozen of your best friends while wearing thirty-five pounds of body armor and assorted gear. Graceful and dramatic movements seen in action movies are simply out of the question. Instead, the body's movements are almost entirely centered around the firearm: weapon raised in a shooting position, stocks fused to shoulders, and muzzles leading the rest of their bodies. The result is brisk, efficient, stable, and I'm sure very deadly -- but on a purely aesthetic level it all looks pretty awkward.

Bursts of scattered popcorn below. I realized that someone was shooting. Several people, actually. Paper flapped and jerked. The team was smoothly putting rounds into the paper terrorists arranged in the rooms, avoiding the somewhat bewildered-looking paper hostages. Some other members of the team had already entered and cleared the room behind us. And then, suddenly, it was over.

By my watch, it had taken just fifty-six seconds. I'm not sure what the benchmark for this sort of thing is, but the whole process seemed pretty fast to me.

So anyway, that was an interesting way to spend a weekday morning. Today I'm sitting in front of a computer again, staring at an enormous pile of work that needs to be done by Monday, while feeling a bit drowsy. In terms of quantifiable fun, this really is something short of a barrel of monkeys.

But then, I suppose it beats spending all night lying in the tall grass with a thermal imaging thingy that doesn't work.

The Obligatory Blog Post About Music

2006-01-19T09:06:00.000-08:00

One of the many little-known but intensely interesting facts about me is the extent to which I am an appreciator of great music. First, it masks the clandestine and drowns out the annoying. Second, people seem quite happy to do things in the presence of music that if performed in silence would be compelling evidence of some severe mental irregularities (see, e.g., most forms of dancing). Third, rhythm is a dancer, hmm hmm hmm, hmm hmm hmm (and some other stuff I can't quite understand).

However, mostly I draw inspiration and strength from song lyrics. I find myself moved, sometimes even touched, and the honesty's too much, and I have to close my eyes, and hide. As an excellent example of this, I started the day crouched under my desk like a frightened chipmunk, weeping at the raw emotionalism found in this contemporary ballad of the human heart:

Dit dah dee dah dee dah doh doh
Dee bah dee dit doh
Deedledeedledeedledeedledeedledeedledeedledeedledeedledaydoh

Dit dah dee dah dee dah doh doh
Dee bah dee dit doh
Deedledeedledeedledeedledeedledeedledeedledeedledeedledaydoh

But enough of that. The serious point to all of this, which I can comfortably relate to you now that I am no longer crouched on the floor, is that I myself aspire to be a lyricist. For I have experienced so many very emotional and inspiring moments in my life that it would be a crime against humanity not to capture them in song.

Which brings us to a particularly memorable nocturnal episode that occurred on some mode of rail transportation many summers ago, when I encountered a sleep-deprived professional wagering man, who (after some preliminaries involving staring out the window, whiskey, and smoking) solemnly advised me that I should always maintain a full awareness of the proper times to do each of the following:

(a) maintain physical custody of an item in one's hands;

(b) reduce the aggregate surface area of an item by bending it in the middle such that one end is doubled over another, as in the case of configuring trousers for storage;

(c) remove oneself from the immediate vicinity at a deliberate but not unduly hurried pace; and

(d) depart with all possible haste.

Moreover, he confided, one should refrain from inventorying liquid assets while still seated at the table, because experience shows that this sort of accounting is best performed without the artificial time constraints imposed by the simultaneous distribution of playing cards.

Then he fell asleep, and, somewhat inconsiderately, died. Subsequently this led to a very interesting interview with the police. But despite the abrupt and moderately horrible conclusion and all of its resulting inconvenience, I have still always kept that gambling man's counsel near my heart.

Someday I shall write a song about it, and it shall be a tremendous hit that eventually crosses over from the country-western charts. And one day some one will sing herself to sleep with it, except for the last part about the dying, because that's really sort of morbid and maybe I'll just leave that whole piece out to begin with.

I can do that, you know, because I write the songs.

What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks

2006-01-18T00:52:00.000-08:00

The day begins with misty wavelets washing over blue skies. Someone is singing, I think, though that’s probably not exactly the right way to describe the wordless melody that is at once human and unearthly, and clear as a crystal bell. Come to think of it, maybe it is a bell, or at least some kind of instrument, because—

—an alarm clock explodes twenty inches from my head and that pretty much suspends this particular line of speculative inquiry for the morning. Peer at the infernal glowing digits: three hours and twenty minutes of rest, which I suppose is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And no time left for the traditional lament to the bedroom ceiling, either, given that there’s a meeting in forty minutes with some impatient people I haven't met before. Well, thirty-nine, depending on which wrong clock we’re looking at right now. “Tempus fugit,” I mutter to the bathroom door. Or maybe it was just “fuggit.” Hard-g, soft-g, I get confused.

Cold water!

Better. In the wash of shock and annoyance I am beginning to remember who I am. Mostly I’m a person who is about to be late. Also someone seems to be singing some kind of nautical folk song in my head. Well. Sailing songs aside, this sort of thing happens often enough that I have a drill for this.

The sun was setting in the west
The birds were singing on every tree
All nature seemed inclined for a rest
But still there was no rest for me.

Clock, cup, toothpaste, toothbrush, clock. Eight minutes.

Farewell to Nova Scotia, the seabound coast
Let your mountains, dark and dreary, be
For when I am far away on the briny ocean, tossed
Will you ever heave a sigh or a wish for me?

Splash, shave, shirt, living room, button, email, curse, clock. Five minutes.

I grieve to leave my native land
I grieve to leave my comrades all
And my parents, whom I held so dear
And my bonny, bonny lass that I loved so well.

Pants, news, zip, belt, cuffs, socks, light, clock. Three minutes.

Farewell to Nova Scotia, the seabound coast
Let your mountains, dark and dreary, be
For when I am far away on the briny ocean, tossed
Will you ever heave a sigh or a wish for me?

Watch, wallet, keys, badge, phone, Blackberry, shoes, coat, clock. One minute.

The drums, they do beat, the wars, they alarm
My captain calls, I must obey
So farewell, farewell to Nova Scotia’s charm
For it’s early in the morning, I’ll be far, far away.

Sling the computer and the briefcase, lock up, and we’re off to the races. Twenty-three minutes to the office at this time of day, God willing and the fenders don’t bend. The drive is usually a time for me to get mentally reoriented, and to assert some psychological control over the office bedlam that will shortly reign. Oh, and to try to remember what it is I’m supposed to be meeting about in twenty minutes. With all of this going on, I’m typically a fairly patient commuter, even when running late. Given Bay Area traffic along this route, there really isn’t much time that you can shave off the actual drive. And the inclination to rush disrupts the mentality of deliberate control that I’m attempting to erect before I pull into the parking lot.

At the twenty-one minute mark, I’m waiting at the stoplight and the Blackberry light blinks. Meeting cancelled, with less than two minutes of prior warning. Which, of course, makes much of this exercise a wasted effort. But there isn’t much point in cursing. The world is full of people who fancy themselves to be busy, but don’t really know what it means to work on the threadbare outer margins of time and endurance, where failures of consistency and communication exact a heavy toll (if not from oneself, then from others). Thin margins—say, on the order of three hours and twenty minutes (just to choose an arbitrary example).

Ah well. I have a vague recollection of some good advice from Marcus Aurelius about what to tell yourself in the mirror every morning. And in the end, it’s hard to stay too irritated about a cancelled meeting.

Park, sling, lock, badge, up the stairs, and smile good morning at Tess. Then: find the coffee machine.

Amphibian Thermodynamics

2005-12-29T01:54:00.000-08:00

Things at the office always are a bit uneven in the week after Christmas. Much of the world is still drowsing through the end of the year, but those who aren't are characteristically frantic. Then there are those who are half-drowsing but still would like you to be frantic on their behalf, if it wouldn't be too much trouble because this is an emergency so take care of it while I go back to sleep, thanks.

All of this begins to wear, especially at the end of a rocky year in which you yourself never were afforded much sleep to begin with. So, leaving my blinking wireless shackles behind, I slip out of the office for a walk.

It is the wet season in this part of California, though on a minute-to-minute basis the sky can't make up its mind about whether to storm or shine. Well, no surprises there. There is really nothing that is well-behaved in the week between Christmas and New Year's.

But, it's quiet, because it really isn't a nice day for a walk, and that's something to be thankful for. Except for a grimacing jogger who huffs past me in the opposite direction, the trail is mine. And in my splendid isolation, as I meditate upon a gray life under gray skies, I arrive at a startling conclusion: I am a boiled frog.

In one sense, we are equipped to deal with the spectacular failures. The eye is naturally attuned to motion, and we know to respond when things are Rapidly Trending Badly. But like the frog in the pot being drawn to a boil in barely noticeable increments, we defend poorly against creeping failure. There are few areas of our lives where Pearl Harbor represents the threat scenario for surprise attack. No, the threatening surprises we really need to watch for are those that infiltrate our lives in dribs and drabs, while we convince ourselves that the room has always been flooded, more or less, and no of course the water level isn't really rising.

I hate to wish away time, because in the final analysis none of us really has a surplus of it to spend on this earth. Yet suffice it to say that on a personal level I will be decidedly untroubled to see 2005 consigned to the burn bag of history. It's irrational to think this way, of course -- the sun will rise on January 1 in pretty much the same way that it will rise tomorrow. But change is difficult and does not smile easily upon the slothful, and it's a comfort to think that the New Year will help to catalyze a new year.

Well, we all cling to our grand gestures. So long as they don't involve dueling pistols or diamond rings I am content to judge them harmless.

So, action plan. Back to barely-remembered fundamentals, reaching back to who even knows when. When I had less but expected more. Before I found this nice stainless steel pot full of warm water in which to lounge.

It rains on the way back. I can't remember the last time that the cold felt this good.

Critically Succinct

2005-12-17T19:19:00.000-08:00

To: XXX, XXXXX (XXXX/XXX/XXX)
From: XXX, Director, Major Assessments Group (XXXX/XXX/NoVa)
Subject: Draft analysis document xxx-xxx

1. We are in receipt of your written evaluation of our draft analysis document xxx-xxx, which was circulated to the Division field on 12/12/05 for comment.

2. We acknowledge that draft xxx-xxx addresses a subject area that is new to Major Assessments, and that some of our discussion may lean more toward the speculative than is generally the case with our other analytical products of similar scope.

3. We also acknowledge that subject matter expertise in this area presently resides in the Field, and specifically in your operating unit.

4. All of that said, we observe that your evaluation appears to consist, in its entirety, of the word "hahaha" inscribed on the cover sheet.

5. While we generally appreciate conciseness, we wish to point out that your feedback does not, strictly speaking, conform with the editorial guidelines described in sections 2.1 - 5.8 (inclusive) of the Company Major Assessment Review Manual (the latest revision of which is available on the intranet at xxx.xxx/xxx).

6. It would be extremely helpful to Major Assessments if you could find some time to elaborate upon your remarks. We understand that the Field is extremely busy at this time of year, and if you do not have time to generate detailed comments we would suggest using the checkboxes provided in the margins of each page of the draft.

7. If it helps, please note that we have supplied checkboxes for "disagree" and "needs more evidence." Consistent with our prior correspondence regarding your feedback last October, we would again request that you refrain from creating new checkboxes postulating that the principal drafter was under the influence of illegal narcotics. Obviously, we would hope not to see a series of "hahaha" boxes either (but if you must, we would appreciate it if you were to make it very clear which paragraph represents the source of the hilarity).

8. Thank you for your timely assistance as always. If you have any questions, please contact either me (x12345) or my principal deputy (x56789).

Thursdays are Good Days for Lying

2005-12-08T22:51:00.000-08:00

Or for being lied to, at any rate.

Today’s serving of conscious deception did not suffer from a lack of variety, as I began with a small lie delivered by a very good liar, and then moved on to some big lies delivered by a very bad liar. In between I had a leisurely lunch, which I find to be remarkably therapeutic on these kinds of days. There are times when it is important to simply sit and chew your food.

I should probably clarify that when I use the words “lies” and “liars” here, I do so in a strictly value-neutral sense. Being lied to, in the abstract, does not particularly irritate me. Everything in context, of course—there are certainly some falsehoods that, when relayed under certain circumstances by certain people, can be extremely annoying. And certainly there are many opportunities for lying that people all too often seize for immoral purposes. But in most of those cases it is not the mechanical act of lying that is the problem, but rather the intentions that lie beneath. The mechanical act itself is actually sort of interesting; there is such variation in people’s ability to perform it convincingly that you almost always can see something new.

Hair-splitting, I know. And probably a little weird. But what can I say? Some people like to watch other people sing or dance. I sort of like to watch people lie. Entertainment is where you find it.

Anyway. The small lie of the day was delivered by my charming coworker Emily, who looked like she was already getting her second cup of coffee by the time I hurried into the office. “That’s a very nice tie,” she lied cheerfully, breezing past me in the corridor. I could tell that this was a falsehood because of two things. First, I was armed with external noncorroborating data: the tie I was wearing was actually the opposite of very nice, and as a point of objective fact verged on the very horrible. Second, I happen to know a pertinent “internal” about Emily. Although she possesses an extraordinary natural talent for convincing deception, in one small regard Emily adheres to a consistent and telling pattern: before expressing a genuine opinion about the aesthetic value of anything, she will always take a moment to look at it, picking out the key points upon which she’ll base her considered judgment. Emily simply does not have default opinions about these kinds of things. If she gives you a vaguely positive opinion about your necktie while gliding by with a coffee mug, she is making it up.

Yes, I know: elementary, my dear Watson, and all that. Quite the sleuth, I am.

The big lie event of the day was initiated by someone considerably less charming than Emily, regarding a matter considerably more important than my choice of business attire. He was a small, serious man who had just flown in this morning from an East Asian country, and he wheeled his luggage in front of him like a shopping cart. He declined our offer of hot caffeinated beverage and settled for a paper cup of ice water. When he sat down at the conference table, he extracted a single sheet of printed material from his briefcase and set it squarely in front of him before he began to speak.

The man from Asia represented a small industrial concern with big plans. He told us about their investors, their level of funding, their business plan. He explained to us their technical position, which markets they were targeting, who their primary end-customers were, what kinds of government approvals they already had. And he told us, in earnest detail, all about the kinds of products that the manufacturing lines would be churning out. Much of this had been disclosed before in written correspondence, but this was the first face-to-face elaboration on the details.

There were two problems.

First, we had noncorroborating externals. Days earlier, the confidential backgrounder had come down from Division, which had access to databases whose scope of coverage rivaled that of a national-grade intelligence agency. The man was not lying about everything. Yet there were enough inconsistencies in critical areas to cause concern, about who ultimately would be their customers, about manufacturing capacity, about what the products could be used for. The biggest issue was the question of investors. What the man described was accurate, to a point. But a talented and suspicious analyst assigned to one of our competitive intelligence cells had pulled on a thread hanging out from one of those investors, and wound up following a labyrinthine nest of corporate entities that stretched through eight countries on three continents, before hitting a blank wall in the database. So that was not good. Our objective was to unfold the relationship further, hopefully teasing out enough cross-bearings to triangulate on whatever was on the other side of that blank wall.

Second, the man had bad internals: he was simply not a good liar. Before the guy arrived, Emily and I were split on how much he really knew; perhaps the contact person was going to be insulated from what was really going on behind the scenes. I thought he would be in the dark, while Emily guessed he would know enough to have to lie about it. After only five minutes, it became plainly apparent to both of us that Emily was right.

It’s hard to establish any universal indications that someone is lying to you. There are some well-known parlor tricks about eyes breaking contact to the left or to the right, but those kinds of things aren’t reliable enough to consistently use in a realistic setting. The truth is that fork-tongued people come in all shapes and sizes, and present different symptoms when they seek to deceive. Professional interrogators will tell you that you need to baseline your subject, establish a series of “control group” reactions that tell you what this person looks like when he’s telling the truth, then slowly probe into the areas of interest while matching his reaction against the baseline. This is all fine and dandy for laboratory work, but most people object to being guinea pigs. In the real world, you simply don't have that sort of total control over the social environment. (Unless, I suppose, you’re doing your socializing in a windowless room of a police precinct, or maybe at Guantanamo Bay.)

All of that said, you don’t need an electron microscope to read a billboard. Some people are just terrible at the mechanics of deception. Overly forceful about verifiable points. Temporizes too much about others. Abruptly drops pace when responding to questions. Displays loss of confidence when issues are revisited from an oblique angle. At one point, our guest even repeated one of our questions back to us, like a guilty five-year-old being grilled by his mother on the subject of the open cookie jar.

We backed off after thirty minutes, and expressed our satisfaction with his overview. To end things on the proper note, Emily got up and gave a typically dazzling twenty-minute presentation about our company and our more significant holdings in this industry sector. By the end of her talk, he looked happy enough.

After we politely threw him and his luggage out of the building, Emily and I returned to my office to conduct the post-mortem. When we were finished it was already starting to get dark.

“Well, I’m going to take a break and go to the gym,” Emily declared. “Give me some time out of the office to think about this.”

“Good idea. I’ll go later,” I lied.

Patterns

2005-12-03T08:26:00.000-08:00

Many years ago a vivacious dark-eyed girl declared to me that people are fundamentally unpredictable. That we avoid mechanistic routine as a matter of our nature, that a vibrant irrationality is an essential feature of our humanity. On a warm summer’s night in the foothills outside Charlottesville, I idly murmured agreement, as I had a teenager’s intuitive fascination for the irrational and hers seemed to be an observation both insightful and profound. In retrospect I suppose I was also focused on other things.

But the truth is that she was wrong. The human animal is nothing if not a creature of habit, of routine, of patterns. Certainly, we all seek exciting variations at a surface level: in the foods we eat, in our choice of entertainments, in dozens of small things that decorate our lives. Indeed, they say that the essence of what most people recognize as a “sense of humor” rests on the artful manipulation of the unexpected. But when the laughter stops and our gaze settles back on the critical aspects of our existence, we all are drawn to familiar and comfortable rhythms.

Now there is something unromantic, perhaps even vaguely offensive, about this notion. It seems to rob us of some measure of human dignity to suggest that our nature is to lapse, machine-like, into repetitious and unexciting cycles. But this misses the point. Human beings have a genius for patterns. The most sophisticated computers in the world do not have a fraction of the pattern-recognition ability of a toddler. Machines may be able to perform more repetitions of the same task more precisely over a measurable period of time, but this is true only after you collide with the raw limitations of human physiology. And even the most finely-machined industrial equipment lacks the relentless ability of a human being to reorder the local universe to fit a familiar personal pattern.

People prefer pain to surrendering their patterns, so long as the pain appears in an ordered and familiar fashion.

Admittedly, the patterns themselves are not always obvious. Perhaps at some subcerebral level we – ever mistaking the arbitrary for the divine – do not wish to be consciously aware of them. I am unpredictable, therefore I am. But the patterns are there, even if we do not perceive them. For the first law of human behavioral physics is that people tend to move in stable elliptical orbits.

All of that said, I hate physics and I find patterns kind of boring. To me, the more interesting question has to do with the anomalies of human conduct. For if human beings are so powerfully drawn to their patterns, what causes them to break those patterns? Show me a way to answer that question in the specific, and I’ll show you a pair of x-ray glasses into human affairs.

When I was a senior in college, my honors thesis advisor was an elderly gentleman in his seventies, who had occupied an endowed chair in the politics department for over three decades. During a more adventurous period in his life, he had spent years representing U.S. interests in postwar Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, mostly in ways that would not have amused the local authorities had they recognized his activities for what they were. Eventually a chance anomaly put an end to his overseas clandestine career, and he decided to retire to the quiet life of study, writing, and dealing with insufferable undergraduates like me.

In the days that I knew him, the international political order was collapsing, and students enthralled by the End of History were inclined to dismiss him as something of a well-spoken dinosaur. I would have joined my peers in their confident optimism for the coming world order, except that my heart had just been broken by a vivacious dark-eyed girl, and so for a time I viewed the world through a lens of melodramatic skepticism. Ever the bookish introvert, the solace that others might have sought in drunken carousing I searched for in the archival stacks of Alderman Library, struggling to find something original to say to a scholarly old gentleman about the history he had helped to make. I began stopping in to visit with the professor at office hours, where we discussed the Long Telegram and Budapest in 1956 and the fungibility of military force. It was during these pilgrimages that I also learned a few lessons that, although they were more or less useless to my thesis, stayed with me long after my thesis topic faded from memory. In fact, although I didn’t particularly see it at the time, what turned out to be the most interesting of these had nothing to do with high politics at all.

“There are three circumstances under which a person will break an established pattern,” the professor told me one day, as the late afternoon light died in his windowsill. “First, he may just be looking for a temporary variation, a ‘change of scenery.’ These changes are usually fairly short-term and the person will return to the established pattern before very long. Most of this is just ‘noise,’ some surface variation for entertainment’s sake. The root cause is often fairly arbitrary and usually of little significance.”

“Second, he may be looking to alter the pattern itself on a permanent basis. This change tends to be systemic and thorough, sometimes to the point of excess. Pattern-change is costly, and its underlying cause is usually not difficult to discern. Often you can trace the root cause of a pattern change by examining trends at a higher level of analysis – there you will find, more often than not, that the pattern change is itself part of a predictable pattern.”

“Third are those anomalies that are neither isolated nor total. Here the person is paying the costs of pattern-deviation over and over again; it is more than a momentary change of scenery, and there is some independent and recurring reason for breaking the pattern. Yet the person does not alter the pattern itself. Why? Is it because the costs of total pattern change are too high? Or is it because total pattern change would reveal something about the root cause that this person would prefer that others not learn?”

The daylight had almost completely faded. “Those last anomalies are always worthy of some attention,” the professor’s shadow told me, animated in the semidarkness. “If you run into two or three of them at once, be assured that there is something interesting to be learned there.”

I didn’t understand then. To me, this overtheorized swirl of patterns and anomalies and hidden motivations was too abstract to be useful—how could you tell one level of pattern from the other? Didn't this theory depend on simply blurring definitions? Was there any empirical data for any of this? The professor just smiled mildly at my earnest objections, and simply said something about cultivated intuition, and how life consists entirely of empirical data. I remember starting to make a face at this unscholarly dodge, then breaking into a forced cough to hide my disrespect. He watched me with what I could almost swear was a hint of amusement.

After graduation, he confirmed that he had sent for my benefit a letter of introduction to a friend in the D.C. area, then he shook my hand and offered his best wishes. We had a few brief email exchanges after that, but I did not have a chance to see him again before he passed away, in the winter of the following year.

Today, I feel a measure of regret that he isn't still holding office hours. I would have liked to tell him that, after more than a dozen years, I think I'm finally starting to get it. But I guess that this reason only provides the basis for very mild regret. For I believe he would not be surprised at all, having already evaluated my youthful skepticism and academic pretensions for what I suppose it all really was: just another pattern.

Once More, With Feeling

2005-11-26T14:40:00.000-08:00

So last Monday we had our monthly session with Tim the CNS guy. That's Corporate Negotiation Support, the group within the company specializing in interpersonal elicitation, applied kinesics, foreign language translation, cross-cultural communication, and a bunch of other things about which they will be happy to lecture you at length if you don’t close the door quickly enough. Mostly we use them as coaches for executive negotiation prep, particularly in international deals when the principals are not familiar with the local social environment. They also run an ongoing series of advanced negotiation dynamics workshops, which most operating-level Division personnel are required to attend. As a group, I've found the CNS people to be a very polite, well-dressed collection of talented individuals, but they tend to talk way too much and after about forty-five minutes you feel like you're trapped in an episode of Dr. Phil.

“Very good, Emily,” Tim was saying. Emily is always very good at this. Then he looked at me. The problem child. “Um, Spec, that was good also, but a couple of points. First, you’re still aggressively responding. You need to step back into passive-receptive while she leads.”

“But I didn’t even say anything,” I protested. “I just sat here and did the reinforcing head bob thing at the end of each declarative sentence, just like you said.”

“Yeah, but somehow you've managed to make small movements of your head look sarcastic. And I could see you leaning into a rejection posture even while Emily was talking. Look: relax, think puppies and ice cream, smile and reinforce. And quit shifting in your seat every time the subject lies.”

“But the scenario says he knows that I know he’s lying. What’s the problem with calling bullshit when he does?”

“Don’t curse. I told you already, we haven't gotten to signaling kinesics yet. And you're sloppy on your openings, so you're only reinforcing bad habits that we'll have to break later. So stop.” Tim was a tyrant about doing things in the proper order. “The second issue is that when you're actively suggesting, you need to emote more.”

I involuntarily made a face.

“Very good,” Tim said, “but constructively engaged, not disgustedly impatient, or whatever it is that you're doing there. And not at me, at the subject. Look at the way Emily does it.” Emily shot me an amused glance. She always looks a little bit different when one of these sessions is scheduled. Maybe it's some kind of eye makeup thing.

They rewound the tape. I watched the subject talk, picking out the trigger words and looking for the counter-entry hook. When it came time to respond I relaxed my upper body, took a deep breath, and tried to channel all of the sincerity I had left that morning into one climactic verbal appeal.

After I finished, we waited a few seconds in silence for the recording light to go out. Emily made a delicate coughing sound beside me.

Tim was characteristically diplomatic. “Well. I think we’re all getting tired. Five-minute break, then we run the scenario again from the start. Spec leads, Emily in support. And Spec: please no more William Shatner impressions today.”

Me and My Dead Cat

2005-11-26T00:17:00.000-08:00

Well, with all of that awkwardness now behind us, I guess I should say a little bit about myself. Thirty-four years old, average build, brown/brown, no corrective lenses, nonsmoker, light social drinker, heterosexual, single never married, no prior military service, no distinguishing scars or other unique physical characteristics. In other words, I am a pretty unremarkable male specimen of the human species, at least as it exists in the western United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. I live in a small municipality on the San Francisco Bay peninsula, literally ten minutes away from SFO, along with my dead cat Walter.

Actually I should probably clarify that last part. Walter is indeed an ex-cat, having passed away years ago at the end of a long and particularly lazy life. My girlfriend at the time, however, strongly felt that it would be a moving tribute to have Walter cremated and his ashes converted, via a very dignified (but extremely high-pressure) industrial process, into some kind of colored gemstone. This whole line of thinking seemed sort of dubious to me, as Walter never really enjoyed being squashed in life and we had little evidence that his change in status had made him any more receptive to the experience. But in the end, as with most such things, she won the argument. A year later, she moved out to start a new life in Colorado Springs, and I was left with a small emerald-cut amber rock sitting on the mantelpiece that I sort of feel obligated to call Walter.

Anyway, enough of the dead cat story.

Like a great many people in the Bay Area, I am not a native Californian. I grew up near Rochester, New York, then went to college in Virginia, where I escaped with a degree in political psychology. With a bachelor’s in something like that you pretty much have no choice but to go to law school, which I eventually did after working for two years in the NoVa/D.C. metroplex. After law school, I clerked for a federal district judge in Florida who had a passion for skeet-shooting. Then it was back to D.C. to slave for a few years at a downtown law firm, before moving over from private practice to a company in-house job. At some point I stopped practicing law and moved over to the “business side” of the house, which turned out to be fairly convenient when I moved here, as it spared me the ordeal of the California bar exam.

My current job title is “director of strategic development” for a large but fairly anonymous privately-held company that invests in a lot of things, focusing on a broad range of global infrastructure markets. No, I don’t really know what that means either, although the work is unique and fairly interesting. I tend to move around a lot, but my permanent reporting chain runs through something called the Strategic Initiatives Division, located at company headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia. “Division” is kind of a strange business unit, outside the normal operating chain, populated by some very odd personalities. The standard quip is that people are hand-picked for their weirdness, which, yours truly excepted, probably isn’t too far from the truth.

But you don’t run into many people from Division in northern California. There are only two of us based here, and the other one, Emily, at least has the attractive quality of not being annoying in her eccentricity. Not sure if she would say the same thing about me, however. Emily is not really a fan of Walter (or, as she calls him, “that creepy cat-rock thing”), which of course means that Walter frequently turns up in unlikely places in Emily’s office.

Yes, I know it’s juvenile. But I think that Walter would have enjoyed it.

An Awkward Opening

2005-11-25T20:38:00.000-08:00

Hello. This first blog post is going to be a little bit awkward, for at least two reasons.

The first reason has to do with the somewhat disembodied nature of personal blog introductions in general. Usually, when you meet someone for the first time, you have some kind of obvious social context for the meeting. Hi, how are you, nice to finally put a face to the name, I’m looking forward to a very productive meeting, I’m so happy to hear your wonderful news, really sorry to hear that somebody shot you in the leg, goodness did you ever expect that our bomb shelter would be so well-lit? With a blog visit, there’s really no way for me to know how or why you arrived here to begin with. I would expect that some significant proportion of you wandered in uninvited, drifting through as part of the endless stream of clickery that characterizes the world wide web. Yet the introduction that is appropriate for the real-world analog to this sort of encounter (“Hi there buddy, keep your damned hands where I can see them”) somehow seems inconsistent with the general norms of blogospheric etiquette. So we’ll have to make do with a generic, context-free introduction, the sort of polite recorded greeting that you get from the robot lady when you call the front desk after hours. Good morning, afternoon, or evening, sir or madam. That is a very excellent browser that you have got there.

The second reason is that while all of us have interacted with people who lie to us for reasons great and small, it is exceedingly rare for those people to introduce themselves by informing you that everything about to spill from their lips is a falsehood. It is so unusual, in fact, that we can expect that such a preamble would instantly strain the social environment surrounding the participants. Yet common courtesy requires that I do exactly that now. And so I must expressly caution you that you should accept nothing that you read in this blog as true, or even as bearing any degree of resemblance to the truth. Please understand that this statement is not some sort of flimsy legal disclaimer, coyly erected for form’s sake with a wink and a nod. I am telling you now that this blog will contain conscious statements of utter fiction, which make it completely unreliable as a source of information on any subject whatsoever. There is a popular and well-known gem of legalese that most people associate with motion pictures and novels, relating to coincidental resemblances, persons living or dead, and soforth. I will not reproduce that disclaimer here, but you should consider it to be violently applicable to the contents of this blog.

Update: There may be some excessively clever students of formal logic reading this, who raise the classic objection: If everything on this blog is false, is the foregoing statement that everything is false also false? In anticipation, we have ejected all students of formal logic from the room, for their presence is vexatious and annoying.