Bullying the Nuns By Garry Wills.

Bullying the Nuns

Garry Wills

Adrian Dominican Sisters
A group of Adrian Dominican Associates

The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops’ thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don’t. Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them. The priests drive their own new cars, while nuns ride the bus (always in pairs). The priests specialize in arrogance, the nuns in humility.

There was a vogue, just after the Second Vatican Council, for some Catholics to demonstrate their liberation from Catholic schooling by making fun of nuns, as strict disciplinarians or prissy moralists. I wrote at the time that this was untrue of the many nuns I have known, beginning with the Dominican Sisters of Adrian, Michigan, who taught me for five of my grade school years. They taught me the Latin of the old liturgy; Father Sullivan, our pastor, just got angry at words mispronounced or forgotten. The Dominicans never physically punished anyone that I saw or heard of.

They were more supportive of talent than were most of the lay teachers I met in a brief experience of public school. I had no artistic inclinations, but classmates who did were encouraged. The nuns’ genuine interest in their pupils can be seen in the fact that my seventh grade teacher kept in touch with me for all the years until her death in 1996. She was Sister John Joseph when I met her, but she recovered her real name after the Council, and as Anne O’Connor congratulated me on anything I wrote. (I would no more have kept up with Father Sullivan than with cholera.)

Anne O’Connor was just the kind of nun the Vatican is now intent on punishing. She had been a social worker before she became a nun, work that she loved and went back to several times as a Dominican. She was quick to shed the old habit (which was designed to disguise the fact that there was a woman somewhere in that voluminous disguising of hair, breasts, and hips), and quick to take back her own name. After she took on several high offices in her order, she became the mother provincial of the California branch of the Dominican order during the 1960s, coping with the changes of that volatile era on her college campuses.

Now the Vatican says that nuns are too interested in “the social Gospel” (which is the Gospel), when they should be more interested in Gospel teachings about abortion and contraception (which do not exist). Nuns were quick to respond to the AIDS crisis, and to the spiritual needs of gay people—which earned them an earlier rebuke from Rome. They were active in the civil rights movement. They ran soup kitchens.


Adrian Dominican Sisters
Mother Camilla Madden, OP, 1st Provincial and Foundress of the Dominicans in Adrian

I saw their regard for the neglected or despised when our grade school had an influx of Mexican immigrants during World War II. The jobs left open when men went into the army were filled by Mexicans coming into the country to fill them. These families were not welcomed by some in the community, but the nuns insisted that their children, our classmates, must be treated as brothers and sisters.

Last week, following an assessment by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle has taken control of the Conference, writing new laws for it, supplanting its leadership, and banning “political” activity (which is what Rome calls social work). Women are not capable, in the Vatican’s mind, of governing others or even themselves. Is it any wonder so many nuns have left the orders or avoided joining them? Who wants to be bullied?

It is typical of the pope’s sense of priorities that, at the very time when he is quashing an independent spirit in the church’s women, he is negotiating a welcome back to priests who left the church in protest at the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. These men, with their own dissident bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, formed the Society of Saint Pius X—the Pius whose Secretariat of State had a monsignor (Umberto Benigni) who promoted the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. Pope Benedict has already lifted the excommunication of four bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X, including that of Richard Williamson, who is a holocaust denier. Now a return of the whole body is being negotiated.

None of the anti-Semitic ties of the Pius X crew matter to Rome, since that crew holds to the hard line against women priests, gay marriage, and contraception. They have also retained the Latin Mass, which Rome has been inching back toward. All these things, you see, are the work solely of male hierarchs, distrustful of the People of God—who are the church, as defined by the Second Vatican Council. Those Lefebvre defiers of the Council are all the things the nuns are not, and all the things Rome wants to restore. The real Gospel must be quashed in the name of the pseudo-Gospel of papal monarchs. Poor Anne O’Connor—she thought caring for the poor was what Jesus wanted. She did not live to see that what Rome wants is all that matters.

A Gentle Life

David Esposito passed away on 24 April 2012 at San Francisco. A child of New Hampshire he came west in the 1960s seeking a life free of bigotry and a place in a city known for eccentrics. For thirty years David was a night clerk at one of several respected hotels and he was beloved by friends guests and fellow employees.
In the last year his most recent employment came to a close as he sought retirement and grew weary from changing times.
Despite best efforts David was not ready for idleness and depression stalked him and after months of indecision and dread he faded away .

Those of us who knew him. A small circle of friends did everything to motivate David but his heart wasn't in it. Now he is gone, a good dinner companion and steady friend.

All the best David...

What Hath Bell Labs Wrought? The Future

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI NEW YORK TIMES

THE IDEA FACTORY

Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

By Jon Gertner

In today’s world of Apple, Google and Facebook, the name may not ring any bells for most readers, but for decades — from the 1920s through the 1980s — Bell Labs, the research and development wing of AT&T, was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. As Jon Gertner argues in his riveting new book, “The Idea Factory,” it was where the future was invented.

Indeed, Bell Labs was behind many of the innovations that have come to define modern life, including the transistor (the building block of all digital products), the laser, the silicon solar cell and the computer operating system called Unix (which would serve as the basis for a host of other computer languages). Bell Labs developed the first communications satellites, the first cellular telephone systems and the first fiber-optic cable systems.

The Bell Labs scientist Claude Elwood Shannon effectively founded the field of information theory, which would revolutionize thinking about communications; other Bell Labs researchers helped push the boundaries of physics, chemistry and mathematics, while defining new industrial processes like quality control.

In “The Idea Factory,” Mr. Gertner — an editor at Fast Company magazine and a writer for The New York Times Magazine — not only gives us spirited portraits of the scientists behind Bell Labs’ phenomenal success, but he also looks at the reasons that research organization became such a fount of innovation, laying the groundwork for the networked world we now live in.

It’s clear from this volume that the visionary leadership of the researcher turned executive Mervin Kelly played a large role in Bell Labs’ sense of mission and its ability to institutionalize the process of innovation so effectively. Kelly believed that an “institute of creative technology” needed a critical mass of talented scientists — whom he housed in a single building, where physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers were encouraged to exchange ideas — and he gave his researchers the time to pursue their own investigations “sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end.”

That freedom, of course, was predicated on the steady stream of revenue provided (in the years before the AT&T monopoly was broken up in the early 1980s) by the monthly bills paid by telephone subscribers, which allowed Bell Labs to function “much like a national laboratory.” Unlike, say, many Silicon Valley companies today, which need to keep an eye on quarterly reports, Bell Labs in its heyday could patiently search out what Mr. Gertner calls “new and fundamental ideas,” while using its immense engineering staff to “develop and perfect those ideas” — creating new products, then making them cheaper, more efficient and more durable.

Given the evolution of the digital world we inhabit today, Kelly’s prescience is stunning in retrospect. “He had predicted grand vistas for the postwar electronics industry even before the transistor,” Mr. Gertner writes. “He had also insisted that basic scientific research could translate into astounding computer and military applications, as well as miracles within the communications systems — ‘a telephone system of the future,’ as he had said in 1951, ‘much more like the biological systems of man’s brain and nervous system.’ ”

Mr. Gertner’s portraits of Kelly and the cadre of talented scientists who worked at Bell Labs are animated by a journalistic ability to make their discoveries and inventions utterly comprehensible — indeed, thrilling — to the lay reader. And they showcase, too, his novelistic sense of character and intuitive understanding of the odd ways in which clashing or compatible personalities can combine to foster intensely creative collaborations.

Mr. Gertner deftly puts these scientists’ work in the context of what was known at the time (and what would rapidly evolve from their initial discoveries in the decades since), even as he describes in remarkably lucid terms the steps by which one discovery led — sometimes by serendipity, sometimes by dogged work — to another, as well as the process by which ideas were turned by imaginative engineers into inventions and eventually into products that could be mass-produced.

Most notably, there’s the team that would win a Nobel Prize for its work on semiconductors and the transistor: the brilliant, aggressive physicist William Shockley (later to become infamous for his unscientific views on race), who “enjoyed finding a hanging thread so he could unravel a problem with a swift, magical pull”; the soft-spoken John Bardeen, who “was content to yank away steadfastly, tirelessly, pulling on various corners of a problem until the whole thing ripped open”; and Walter Brattain, “a skeptical and talkative experimentalist” who played extrovert to Bardeen’s introvert.

Restlessness and curiosity were traits shared by many of Bell Labs’ most creative staff members. Mr. Gertner describes John Robinson Pierce, father of the communications satellite, as an “instigator” who “had too many interests (airplanes, electronics, acoustics, telephony, psychology, philosophy, computers, music, language, writing, art) to focus on any single pursuit” but possessed a knack for pushing others to do their best work.

As for Shannon, the mathematician and engineer whose information theory laid the groundwork for telecommunications and the computer industry, he burned off excess energy by riding his unicycle up and down the long hallways of Bell Labs (sometimes juggling as he rode) and building whimsical machines like a primitive chess computer and an electronic mouse that could learn to navigate a maze, demonstrating the ability of a machine to remember.

Many Bell Labs scientists, including Brattain, Kelly and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles H. Townes, who helped develop the principles of the laser, grew up on farms or in small towns, which Dr. Townes argued were the perfect “training grounds for experimental physics.” Such childhoods, he contended, taught a person how to “pay attention to the natural world, to work with machinery and to know how to solve practical problems and fix things innovatively, with what is on hand.”

Mr. Gertner nimbly captures the collegial atmosphere of Bell Labs and the mood of intellectual ferment — a blending of entrepreneurial zeal, academic inquiry and passion to achieve things that initially seemed technologically impossible — that suffused its New Jersey campuses.

The very success of Bell Labs, he notes, contained the seeds of its destruction. Not only was it producing too many ideas for a single company to handle, but some of its innovations (like the transistor) also altered the technological landscape so much that its core business would be reduced to a mere part of the ever-expanding field of information and electronic technology — a field increasingly dominated by new rivals, with which a post-monopoly AT&T had difficulty competing.

In addition, as a Bell Labs researcher named Andrew Odlyzko observed, the new business environment meant that “unfettered research” was no longer a logical or necessary investment for a company, which, in Mr. Gertner’s words, “could profit merely by pursuing an incremental strategy rather than a game-changing discovery or invention.”

AT&T’s original mission — to create and maintain a system of modern communications — has largely been fulfilled. And according to Mr. Gertner, the current Bell Labs president, Jeong Kim, believes that the future of communications may be defined by an industry yet to be created: a business that does not simply deliver or search out information, but also somehow manages and organizes the vast flood of data that threatens to overwhelm our lives.

The larger idea, Mr. Gertner concludes, is that “electronic communication is a miraculous development but it is also, in excess, a dehumanizing force. It proves Kelly’s belief that even as new technology solves one problem, it creates others.”

Recent rains give wildlife chance this spring

Tom Stienstra San Francisco Chronicle

From my hiding spot behind a small hill, I watched a pregnant doe, about 70 yards below in a ravine, feast on fresh-sprouted grass. Water streamed off my hat from a steady rain.

Nearby, in a bare patch along a manzanita thicket, another fat doe buried her nose in the wet soil and burrowed for truffles, mushroom-like fungi that are like deer candy.

Standing water pooled up in every depression for miles across the foothills. In a valley, thousands of frogs chirped away. With a windless rain as backdrop, it had a sweet collective sound, like a frog symphony. Grosbeaks and towhees hopped around on the hardwood forest floor, scratched and pecked for food.

For deer and all wildlife, the spring rains are a savior sweeping through the Bay Area and Northern California.

In the next month, roughly 400,000 fawns will be born in California. They will enter a world where their mothers will be healthy and nourished, and the landscape is filled with food and water. Survival rates of fawns have a chance to be very high compared with many past years.

What many people call "the balance of nature" is what scientists call "carrying capacity of habitat." I ran a private wildlife preserve for 15 years and saw the rises and falls of wildlife populations, year after year, based more on weather than anything.

Carrying capacity is the amount of food, water and protective cover that is available for wildlife in a specific habitat. In years with wet, mild springs, the carrying capacity is high, and wildlife health, breeding success and overall nutrition is also high. In severe winters, either drought or an extended hard freeze, the opposite occurs.

With a drought in December and January, the fear was the lack of rain would continue into spring and that plants, grass and trees could induce artificial hibernation and not emerge with fresh growth in February, March and April.

Like in the winter of '92-93, we were looking at catastrophic habitat conditions and low carrying capacity. With that comes stressed pregnant deer, poor nutrition of all wildlife, and disastrous survival rates of fawns and other newborn animals.

The amount of rain this past week has turned the year around for wildlife. The best examples are in the Bay Area's foothills and parks, and in the foothills spanning the Sierra Nevada. Fresh grass, wildflowers and budding hardwoods are exploding across the range. There is unlimited food and water.

During years with heavy rains, scientists have a saying that goes, "Good time to be a plant." For the next month, it is also: "Good time to be a deer."

Fate of the parks director

In the one year and four months since Gov. Jerry Brown was elected, State Parks Director Ruth Coleman faced a long, cold winter over her future. She has emerged this spring with a string of victories and good reason to be reappointed for the duration of Brown's term.

Coleman, who has worked for both Republican and Democratic governors, had a budget imposed on her that would close 70 parks starting July 1 and allow no vacant ranger positions to be filled.

With no new budget money, she and her staff helped negotiate agreements last week that will keep open Castle Rock State Park on the south Peninsula, Plumas-Eureka in the Sierra Nevada and Jug Handle at Fort Bragg. That makes 12 parks taken off the closure list. Coleman also started a search last week for new concession agreements to keep five others open, and outreach continues across the state.

She won many over this past winter when she said limited access would still be permitted at closed parks, and the department will help volunteers look after the parks, similar to U.S. Forest Service trailheads and many regional, county and city parks where rangers are not present.

 

Venerable Original Joe's is back — and it's even better

By:Patricia Unterman | 02/24/12 4:00 AM
Special to The SF Examiner

Courtesy photo

Original Joe’s three-quarter-pound hamburger steak is a beef-lover’s dream.

Eaters in this town wondered if Original Joe’s would ever reopen after a fire destroyed it four years ago. This beloved institution, started in 1937, drew devoted customers from all walks of life to one of the funkiest blocks of the Tenderloin.

I am ecstatic to report the new Original Joe’s — in the former Fior d’Italia space in North Beach — has not only recaptured the inclusive, unpretentious spirit of the old place, but has upped the quality of both its decor and kitchen.

I love the new place, though I wish it were easier to get in. The restaurant has served 800 customers a day since it opened. Two generations of the Duggan family have not had a moment to set up a reservation system, create a website or catch their breath.

So many old customers have poured in — to share memories, to congratulate or just try the new place — that 37-year-old John Duggan, the former University of San Francisco basketball star, cannot walk through the bar or the coveted inner dining room (with the signature Original Joe’s open cooking line) without being pulled over for a heart-to-heart.

He told me that by the 18th day of business, he, his mom and his sister had seen at least 500 old customers, and 300 have been in twice.

During two anonymous visits, the kitchen showed amazing discipline in the face of this onslaught. Each dish from the slightly abbreviated, if similar, menu came out better than I remembered it.

My favorite Original Joe’s dish, a three-quarter-pound hamburger steak ($17.95) of coarsely house-ground beef, arrived medium rare with a luscious charred crust of chopped onions. This is a magnificent dish for beef lovers, full of flavor, juice and texture.

My second favorite, calf’s liver ($22.95), turned out to be a dream come true: the liver medium rare as ordered; two thick, crisp slices of bacon that melted in my mouth; and plenty of sauteed onions that maintained their character.

Now, I would also include as a favorite veal scallopini sec ($24), slices of tender veal swathed in sliced mushrooms and a perfectly executed pan sauce made with white wine.

Salads have vastly improved. A Caesar salad ($8.95) shows the pedigree of anchovies in its creamy dressing. The success of a lively Italian chopped salad ($15.95), good for sharing, lies in crisp, fresh romaine judiciously proportioned with fresh chioggia beets, salami, cheese sticks and black olives.

Just by substituting fresh vegetables for canned, the tired old war horses turn into steeds. And spaghetti is no longer precooked!

Dessert ($8), best skipped at the old place, is something to look forward to now. Try the salty caramel-topped butterscotch pudding or warm bombolini: doughnuts that come with affogato, an espresso poured over vanilla gelato. An oozing warm chocolate cake with a crust reminds me how much I used to like this restaurant dish.

Old photos and memorabilia cover one long wood-paneled wall that leads from the barroom to the central dining room — and there, low enough for everyone to notice, is a fire-singed menu, a poignant reminder of many meals I had eaten at the former location with three generations of family at the table.

Original Joe’s has achieved the impossible by returning to us intact and better than ever, reclaiming its niche as the quintessential San Francisco restaurant.

Patricia Unterman is the author of many editions of the “San Francisco Food Lovers’ Guide.” Contact her at pattiu@concentric.net.

If you go

Original Joe’s
Location: 601 Union St. (at Stockton Street), San Francisco
Contact: (415) 775-4877, www.originaljoessf.com
Hours: 10:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily
Price range: $8 to $31
Recommended dishes: Hamburger steak; calf’s liver, bacon and onions; grilled lamb chops; spaghetti and meatballs; crab Louie; butterscotch pudding
Credit cards: All major
Reservations: Not yet

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/food-and-wine/2012/02/venerable-original-joes-back-and-its-even-better#ixzz1nJI1VqB7

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The machines that made the Jet AgeBy Tim Heffernan- Share this article

This is a companion piece to Iron Giant: One of America’s great machines comes back to life, a feature by Tim published in The Atlantic

Germany, June 1945. The Nazi regime has been toppled; the war in Europe is over. But the Allied victory is largely the result of sheer overwhelming force, not technological superiority — and the victors know it. Most glaringly, while the Allies still rely on propeller-driven aircraft, the Luftwaffe has put three jets successfully into service.

A Messerschmitt Me 262, the first military jet to enter service. Brought to you by Krupp’s magnesium forging division. Photo: USAF

A Boeing B-29, the first bomber with pressurized crew compartments. Brought to you by Rosie the Riveter. Source: USAF

The reasons for German air superiority were several, of course, but a key one was their mastery of light-metal forging. While the Allies were still bolting together their planes out of steel plate, a slow, labor-intensive process ripe for error and unsuited to design optimization, the Germans were stamping and squeezing out complex structural elements from magnesium and aluminum alloys.

Not surprisingly, after Germany surrendered, both the U.S. and the USSR sought to take control of its forging facilities.

The Soviets got the good stuff.

In so doing they got a head start on the Cold War race for supersonic air superiority. Unwittingly, they also set in motion a larger, and largely forgotten, industrial revolution that shaped the second half of the 20th century and will shape the 21st. This is the story of the birth of the Jet Age — but it’s anchored firmly to the ground.

Photo: Library of Congress

The magnificent machine pictured above is a closed-die forging press, one of the biggest in the world. (For reference, check out the men standing at its foot, down there on the left.) It and nine other huge forges were built in 1950s by the U.S. government, in a long-forgotten endeavor called the Heavy Press Program. I wrote about the press and the program in the March Atlantic, and Maggie kindly invited me to write a bit more here, because — well, first of all, because just look at that thing. It stands nine stories tall (four of them are hidden under the floor), weighs 16 million pounds, exerts 50,000 tons of compressive force, and, like Vulcan’s own waffle iron, squeezes ingots of solid metal between its jaws until they flow like batter.

Here’s another picture for scale:

Each casting was loaded individually onto a specially built train car and carried from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. Photo: USAF Air Force Material Command

Those are just four of the 14 steel castings that make up the Fifty, as the press is known, and they aren’t even the biggest ones. Those would be the twin 250-ton upper stationary crossheads, shown in Figures 5 and 6 of this document— also a good source for more technical details about the press.

And here’s a before-and-after of the Fifty’s handiwork:

Press-forging minimizes waste metal compared to machining, and by realigning the metal’s internal crystalline structure along natural lines of stress, results in much stronger parts than casting would produce. Photos: Library of Congress

That’s a piece of titanium about 15 feet wide and a foot thick, in its raw state and after being forged in a single stroke between the Fifty’s hardened steel dies under 100 million pounds of pressure.

Though they were built nearly 60 years ago, the ten machines of the Heavy Press Program — four forging presses, the waffle irons, and six extrusion presses, basically giant caulking guns except the “caulk” is solid metal — are still among the most powerful ever made. Even more impressively, at least eight of the ten are still in use.

Extruded aluminum parts (not parts from Heavy Press Program machines). Photo courtesy Dalcio Metal

So, what do they do? Well, in strict terms, they make heavy components for aircraft, spacecraft, and power-generation facilities. That chunk of titanium, for example, became one of the bulkheads that anchor the engines, fuselage, and wings of an F-15. More familiarly, every time you fly on a Boeing or Airbus, you’re relying on parts made by the Heavy Press Program machines to keep you aloft—things like the wing spars, which connect the wings to the plane’s chassis.

But in broader terms, what the machines do is make the Jet Age possible. On a plane, a pound of weight saved is a pound of thrust gained—or a pound of lift, or a pound of cargo. A lighter plane also puts less stress on its chassis when it goes through maneuvers. Supersonic military jets are optimized for speed and strength. Subsonic passenger and cargo jets are optimized for fuel efficiency and load capacity. Without the ultra-strong, ultra-light components that only forging can produce, they’d all be pushing much smaller envelopes.

Dawn of the Military-Industrial Complex

Back to 1945 for moment. The Soviet acquisition of Germany’s biggest forges made it all but inevitable that the U.S. would build its own heavy presses—but it’s important to note that it did not make the Heavy Press Program inevitable. Private industry could have built its own machines. The government could have built them, too, and indeed early plans called for the military to construct a “pilot plant” and dole out chunks of time to the air industry to experiment on government-run machines. The idea that it was in the public’s interest to pay for the machines but cede their control to industry was a controversial one, and many leaders in Congress strongly resisted it as a dangerous blurring of private and civic concerns.

On the other hand, with millions of WWII servicemen and women being demobilized, mass unemployment was a threat, and shoring up the aerospace industry was an attractive way to stave it off and harness wartime technology to the peacetime economy. Cold War policy also encouraged massive defense spending, but (as ever) a secondary war was being waged by the military branches for funding, and heavy forging wasn’t of much use to the Army or Navy. It was a complex situation, and one that could have been resolved in several ways. But by 1949 it had been decided that the government would build a number of heavy forging machines and the factories to support them, and that these facilities would be leased to the great metals companies of the day on very generous terms. The Heavy Press Program had begun.

Nifty Fifty

The Fifty was installed at Alcoa’s Cleveland Works facility and began operations on May 5, 1955. A complementary 35,000-ton press was installed shortly after. I have their initial production list, and it reads like catalog of American military air power of the age: wing roots for the Republic F-105, wing spars for the Convair B-58, landing gear trunions for the Boeing B-52, bulkheads for the Lockheed C-130—in all, hundreds of items. From the start, the forges were busy machines.

The Heavy Press Program also supplied Wyman-Gordon of Grafton, Massachusetts, with a 50,000- and 35,000-ton pair of forging presses. Here’s their 50K, nicknamed Major (yep, the 35K is Minor), and again, note the man standing at its foot for scale:

The two 50,000-ton presses were of very different design — those interested can compare them here and here — but their dies were made to be interchangeable, so that production would not be disrupted if one of the machines broke down or was attacked during war. Photo: Library of Congress

To these four were added the six huge extrusion presses: a 12,000-tonner for Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo; twin 8,000-tonners for Kaiser in Halethorpe, Maryland; a 14,000-tonner for Alcoa in Davenport, Iowa; and an 8,000- and a 12,000-tonner for Harvey Aluminum in Torrance, California, just south of L.A. With stroke lengths of up to 92 feet, the extruders were used to produce long, hollow structures like aluminum missile bodies and wing struts in a single, seamless piece, saving time, weight, and material. Here’s the Harvey 12K, which went into service in August 1957:

Though it was nearly 300 feet long and weighed 8 million pounds, the maximum variance along the Harvey 12K’s chassis was just 0.004 inches. Source: USAF Materiel Command

This iron giant—which reminds me somehow of a steam train—is the one Heavy Press Program machine that definitely no longer exists: it was cut up for scrap in the 1990s. And I haven’t been able to confirm the fate of the 8,000-tonner at Harvey—though it may have been shipped to Korea or China.

As for the other eight machines, they’re still working. Curtiss-Wright’s extruder ultimately was bought by Precision Castparts and moved to Houston, and Kaiser’s pair was taken over by Alcoa, but their jobs haven’t changed. They make the things that make us fly, and they’ll be doing so for decades yet.

A Stamp on History

I see three main legacies of the Heavy Press Program.

First, of course, is the aeronautics industry as it now exists. We are accustomed to talking about the ways abstractions like “technology” or “Washington” have affected life the world over. But the machines of the Heavy Press Program are a concrete—well, an iron-and-steel—example of how industry and politics can collide with enormous yet unpredictable effect. The civilian air industry was an afterthought when the program was conceived, yet it is arguably the program’s signal achievement. Again, every Boeing and Airbus jet you’ve ever flown, every one that has carried mail or freight across the oceans, on was built around vital structural components made by these huge machines. Their impact on global society and commerce has been incalculably great. But every American military jet that has fired a gun or dropped a bomb in war was also built around Heavy Press parts—and thus the greatness of the program’s impact is morally blurred.

You can’t have this...

...without this.

Second is the military-industrial complex. I don’t believe it’s possible to place its origin in any single spot. But I am also not aware of any defense program since the HPP that was meaningfully opposed by Congress on the grounds that it threatened the functioning of American democracy. That a given project was “wasteful” or “bloated,” sure—but that’s just bookkeeping. The Heavy Press Program was in many ways the test case for the proper division between private and public interest, and it was decided in favor of what amounts to a mutual aid society between American industry, the American military, and Congress. The consequences are plain, and not often pretty.

Lastly is a legacy of absence. Today, America lacks the ability to make anything like the Heavy Press Program machines. The Fifty, to pick the one I’m most familiar with, was made by the Mesta Machine Company of West Homestead, PA, just outside of Pittsburgh. Mesta built the machines that built Steeltown — the furnaces, the blowers, the rolling mills and the forges. Mech-heads will want to check out this digitized Mesta brochure of 1919, a kind of Whole Earth Catalog for the iron industry. The less avid can just enjoy the picture below, from the same era. Then imagine what Mesta Machine could do by 1950, with three decades worth of further innovation under its belt.

Mesta could mold, cast, forge, machine and field-test huge components under one roof — literally — a full-service shop of the sort that no longer exists in the U.S. Photo: Carnegie Museum of Art.

The company went under in the mid-1980s. It is not unambiguously bad that it and the rest of American ultra-heavy manufacturing are gone. But it’s not unambiguously good, either. Conventional wisdom would say that the industry went to less-developed nations, freeing American resources for higher-tech pursuits. In fact, the only companies today capable of producing Heavy Press-size equipment are in the backwaters known as Germany and Japan, with companies in Russia, Korea, and China rapidly catching up and the UK actively rebuilding its top firm, Sheffield Forgemasters, through cheap government loans. Just last year four Japanese companies joined forces to build a new 50,000-ton press for the aerospace and power industries, and while I was working on this piece China Erzhong, a nationalized conglomerate, announced that it will build an 80,000-ton press — the biggest ever — to support its nascent aerospace industry.

Now is not the time for America to build new forges: eight really is enough. But the original heavy presses, which have lived far longer and spurred far more innovation than was ever imagined, set an example that I think might yet be followed. Big machines are the product of big visions, and they make big visions real. How about a Heavy Fusion Program?

Whitney Houston, Pop Superstar, Dies at 48

By JON PARELES and ADAM NAGOURNEY NY Times

Whitney Houston the multimillion-selling singer who emerged in the 1980s as one of her generation’s greatest R & B voices, only to deteriorate through years of cocaine use and an abusive marriage, died on Saturday in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 48.

Her death came as the music industry descended on Los Angeles for the annual celebration of the Grammy Awards, and Ms. Houston was — for all her difficulties over the years — one of its queens. She was staying at the Beverly Hilton hotel on Saturday to attend a pre-Grammy party being hosted by Clive Davis, the founder of Arista Records, who had been her pop mentor.

Ms. Houston was found in her room at 3:55 p.m., and paramedics spent close to 20 minutes trying to revive her, the authorities said. There was no immediate word on the cause of her death, but the authorities said there were no signs of foul play.

From the start of her career more than two decades ago, Ms. Houston had the talent, looks and pedigree of a pop superstar. She was the daughter of Cissy Houston, a gospel and pop singer who had backed up Aretha Franklin, and the cousin of Dionne Warwick. (Ms. Franklin is Ms. Houston’s godmother.)

Ms. Houston’s range spanned three octaves, and her voice was plush, vibrant and often spectacular. She could pour on the exuberant flourishes of gospel or peal a simple pop chorus; she could sing sweetly or unleash a sultry rasp.

Dressed in everything from formal gowns to T-shirts, she cultivated the image of a fun-loving but ardent good girl, the voice behind songs as perky as “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and as torchy as what became her signature song, a version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”

But by the mid-1990s, even as she was moving into acting with films like “The Bodyguard” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” she became what she described, in a 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, as a “heavy” user of marijuana and cocaine. By the 2000s she was struggling; her voice grew smaller, scratchier and less secure, and her performances grew erratic.

All of Ms. Houston’s studio albums were million-sellers, and two have sold more than 10 million copies in the United States alone: her 1985 debut album and the 1992 soundtrack to “The Bodyguard,” which includes “I Will Always Love You.”

But her marriage to the singer Bobby Brown — which was, at one point, documented in a Bravo reality television series, “Being Bobby Brown” — grew miserable, and in the 2000s, her singles slipped from the top 10. Ms. Houston became a tabloid subject: the National Enquirer ran a photo of her bathroom showing drug paraphernalia. And each new album — “Just Whitney” in 2002 and “I Look to You” in 2009 — became a comeback.

At Central Park in 2009, singing for “Good Morning America,” her voice was frayed, and on the world tour that followed the release of the album “I Look to You” that year, she was often shaky.

Whitney Houston was born on Aug. 9, 1963, in Newark. She sang in church, and as a teenager in the 1970s and early 1980s, she worked as a backup studio singer and featured vocalist with acts including Chaka Khan, the Neville Brothers and Bill Laswell’s Material.

Mr. Davis signed her after hearing her perform in a New York City nightclub, and spent two years supervising production of the album “Whitney Houston,” which was released in 1985. It placed her remarkable voice in polished, catchy songs that straddled pop and R & B, and it included three No. 1 singles: “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know” and “The Greatest Love of All.”

Because Ms. Houston had been credited on previous recordings, including a 1984 duet with Teddy Pendergrass, she was ruled ineligible for the best new artist category of the Grammy Awards; the eligibility criteria have since been changed. But with “Saving All My Love for You,” she won her first Grammy award, for best female pop vocal performance, an award she would win twice more.

Her popularity soared for the next decade. Her second album, “Whitney,” in 1987, became the first album by a woman to enter the Billboard charts at No. 1, and it included four No. 1 singles. She shifted her pop slightly toward R & B on her third album, “I’m Your Baby Tonight,” in 1990, which had three more No. 1 singles.

For much of the 1990s, she turned to acting, bolstered by her music. She played a pop diva in “The Bodyguard,” and its soundtrack album — including the hits “I Will Always Love You,” “I’m Every Woman,” “I Have Nothing” and “Run to You” — went on to sell 17 million copies in the United States. It won the Grammy for album of the year, and “I Will Always Love You” won record of the year (for a single). After making the films “Waiting To Exhale” in 1995 and “The Preacher’s Wife” in 1996 — which gave her the occasion to make a gospel album — Ms. Houston resumed her pop career with “My Love Is Your Love” in 1998.

Ms. Houston married Mr. Brown in 1992, and in 1993 they had a daughter, Bobbi Kristina, who survives her. Ms. Houston’s 2009 interview with Ms. Winfrey portrayed it as a passionate and then turbulent marriage, marred by drug use and by his professional jealousy, psychological abuse and physical confrontations. They divorced in 2007.

Her albums in the 2000s advanced a new persona for Ms. Houston. “Just Whitney,” in 2002, was defensive and scrappy, lashing out at the media and insisting on her loyalty to her man. Her most recent studio album, “I Look to You,” appeared in 2009, and it, too, reached No. 1. The album included a hard-headed breakup song, “Salute,” and a hymnlike anthem, “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.” Ms. Houston sang, “I crashed down and I tumbled, but I did not crumble/I got through all the pain,” in a voice that showed scars.

Neil R. Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which bestows the Grammys, called her “one of the world’s greatest pop singers of all time, who leaves behind a robust musical soundtrack.”

“A light has been dimmed in our music community today,” he said.

Lt. Mark Rosen, a spokesman for the Beverly Hills Police Department, said that emergency workers responded to a 911 call from security at the Beverly Hilton hotel on Wilshire Boulevard at 3:43 p.m., saying that Ms. Houston was unconscious in her fourth-floor suite. He said that some Fire Department personnel were already on the scene to help prepare for a pre-Grammy party.

Lieutenant Rosen said that detectives had arrived to conduct what he said was a full-scale investigation into the death. He said that Ms. Houston’s body was still in the hotel room as of 8 p.m. and would not be removed until the investigation was completed.

“There were no obvious signs of foul play,” he said. “It’s still fresh an investigation to know whether — the reality is she was too far too young to die and any time you have the death of someone this age it is the subject of an investigation.”

Ms. Houston arrived at the hotel with what Lieutenant Rosen described as an entourage of friends and family, some of whom were in the hotel suite at the time. He said that police had notified Ms. Houston’s mother and daughter of the death; it was unclear whether or not they were there.

At Mr. Davis’s party, where Ms. Houston was a regular guest and performer, tourists shot cellphone pictures of a police crime laboratory van parked outside. But inside, the glamour of the event seemed undiminished, even if Ms Houston’s name was on everyone’s lips

The streets in front of the Beverly Hilton, already crowded because of the Grammy Awards party taking place there, swarmed with reporters and fans, drawn by the news of this latest high-profile pop star dying in Los Angeles.

Even after the news of Ms. Houston’s death had been released, celebrities and other partygoers continued to arrive for the Davis event, which went on as planned, while fans stood behind a rope trying to take pictures. Dressed in evening gowns and tuxedos, people stepped out of limousines at curbside and streamed into the hotel.

A number of fans came to mourn Ms. Houston and to show their support. “I was in utter, total disbelief,” Lavetris Singleton said. “Who was not a fan of Whitney Houston at some point?”

“I want to show support because she inspired a lot of people and nobody’s perfect,” she said. “But if we’re not out here then she’ll be forgotten. We are her legacy.”

Performers at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, where the Grammys are to be held, heard about Ms. Houston’s death just as Rihanna and Coldplay were about to rehearse their number for the awards.

The show’s producer, Ken Ehrlich, debated about how to acknowledge Ms. Houston’s death. (The show is already scheduled to include a tribute by Alicia Keys and Bonnie Raitt to Etta James, the blues singer who died last month, as well as a video segment about music figures who died in 2011.)

After the initial shock, Mr. Ehrlich said he called Jennifer Hudson and asked her to come and sing one of Ms. Houston’s songs during the televised show on Sunday as a simple memorial. “We are going to do something very simple, not elaborate,” he said. “We just want to keep it respectful.”

“My feeling was it’s too early to do an extended tribute,” Mr. Ehrlich added, “but we really wanted to remember her because she was so closely tied to the Grammys.”

Besides her daughter, now 18, Ms. Houston is survived by her mother. A woman who answered the telephone at the Edgewater, N.J., home of Ms. Houston’s mother on Saturday night said she would not speak to reporters.

Jon Pareles reported from New York, and Adam Nagourney from Santa Barbara, Calif. Reporting was contributed by Ian Lovett, Jennifer Medina and Ben Sisario in Los Angeles and Channing Joseph and James C. McKinley Jr. in New York.

Newfound alien planet 'best candidate to support liquid water'

A planet recently discovered orbiting a nearby star is located in the star's 'habitable zone,' meaning that it could support life as we know it.

By Denise Chow, SPACE.com / February 2, 2012

An artist's conception of the alien planet GJ 667Cc, which is located in the habitable zone of its parent star.

A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.

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The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.
"It's the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it's not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze," Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz told SPACE.com "It's right smack in the habitable zone — there's no question or discussion about it. It's not on the edge, it's right in there."

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Vogt is one of the authors of the new study, which was led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a private, nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C.
"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.

An alien super-Earth

The researchers estimate that the planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, which makes it a so-called super-Earth. It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star, which is located a mere 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion).
"This is basically our next-door neighbor," Vogt said. "It's very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one."
Interestingly enough, the host star, GJ 667C, is a member of a triple-star system. GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf star that is about a third of the mass of the sun, and while it is faint, it can be seen by ground-based telescopes, Vogt said.
"The planet is around one star in a triple-star system," Vogt explained. "The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky."
The discovery of a planet around GJ 667C came as a surprise to the astronomers, because the entire star system has a different chemical makeup than our sun. The system has much lower abundances of heavy elements (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), such as iron, carbon and silicon.
"It's pretty deficient in metals," Vogt said. "These are the materials out of which planets form — the grains of stuff that coalesce to eventually make up planets — so we shouldn't have really expected this star to be a likely case for harboring planets."
The fortuitous discovery could mean that potentially habitable alien worlds could exist in a greater variety of environments than was previously thought possible, the researchers said.
"Statistics tell us we shouldn't have found something this quickly this soon unless there's a lot of them out there," Vogt said. "This tells us there must be an awful lot of these planets out there. It was almost too easy to find, and it happened too quickly."
The detailed findings of the study will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

An intriguing star system

Another super-Earth that orbits much closer to GJ 667C was previously detected in 2010, but the finding was never published, Vogt added. This planet, called GJ 667Cb, takes 7.2 days to circle the star but its location makes it far too hot to sustain liquid water on its surface.
"It's basically glowing cinders, or a well-lit charcoal," Vogt said. "We know about a lot of these, but they're thousands of degrees and not places where you could live."
But, the newly detected GJ 667Cc planet is a much more intriguing candidate, he said.
"When a planet gets bigger than about 10 times the size of the Earth, there's a runaway process that happens, where it begins to eat up all the gas and ice in the disk that it's forming out of and swells quickly into something like Uranus, Jupiter or Saturn," Vogt explained. "When you have a surface and the right temperature, if there's water around, there's a good chance that it could be in liquid form. This planet is right in that sweet spot in the habitable zone, so we've got the right temperature and the right mass range."
Preliminary observations also suggest that more planets could exist in this system, including a gas giant planet and another super-Earth that takes about 75 days to circle the star. More research will be needed to confirm these planetary candidates, as well as to glean additional details about the potentially habitable super-Earth, the scientists said.

Finding nearby alien planets

To make their discovery, the researchers used public data from the European Southern Observatory combined with observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the new Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph at the Magellan II Telescope in Chile.
Follow-up analyses were also made using a planet-hunting technique that measures the small dips, or wobbles, in a star's motion caused by the gravitational tug of a planet.
"With the advent of a new generation of instruments, researchers will be able to survey many M dwarf stars for similar planets and eventually look for spectroscopic signatures of life in one of these worlds," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement. Anglada-Escudé was with the Carnegie Institution for Science when he conducted the research, but has since moved on to the University of Gottingen in Germany.
With the GJ 667C system being relatively nearby, it also opens exciting possibilities for probing potentially habitable alien worlds in the future, Vogt said, which can't easily be done with the planets that are being found by NASA's prolific Kepler spacecraft.
"The planets coming out of Kepler are typically thousands of light-years away and we could never send a space probe out there," Vogt said. "We've been explicitly focusing on very nearby stars, because with today's technology, we could send a robotic probe out there, and within a few hundred years, it could be sending back picture postcards

Christian Science Monitor 2012