Clay Shirky describes how government IT cannot effectively translate planning into reality, avoids testing, and insists on shunning a phased roll-out approach but then finds itself experiencing exactly that.
It’s certainly true that Federal IT is chronically challenged by its own processes. But the problem with Healthcare.gov was not timeline or budget. The problem was that the site did not work, and the administration decided to launch it anyway.
This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem. This is a management problem, and a cultural problem. The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.
Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.
This is a perfect fit for a culture that communicates in the deontic language of legislation. It is also a dreadful way to make new technology. If there is no room for learning by doing, early mistakes will resist correction. If the people with real technical knowledge can’t deliver bad news up the chain, potential failures get embedded rather than uprooted as the work goes on. …
[Emphasis added:] The vision of “technology†as something you can buy according to a plan, then have delivered as if it were coming off a truck, flatters and relieves managers who have no idea and no interest in how this stuff works, but it’s also a breeding ground for disaster. The mismatch between technical competence and executive authority is at least as bad in government now as it was in media companies in the 1990s, but with much more at stake.
We used to have this (in plaster casting) sitting atop my grandmother’s oak server in our living room. (Finally movers broke it.)
Joe Fassler interviewed Russell Banks for the Atlantic about the inspirational role of his Puritan gravestone casting.
[J.S.] When I asked Russell Banks—whose new story collection, A Permanent Member of the Family, is out today—to contribute to this series, he chose to write about his own prized curio. For five decades, he’s shared his office with a gravestone angel. Its inscription, both a mandate and reminder, has been an inspiration throughout Banks’s writing life. …
[R.B.] I read the phrase the first time a half-century ago in the dark and dusty window of a used furniture store in Keene, New Hampshire. Remember Death. Both words capitalized. They were incised beneath the winged head of a wide-eyed, open-mouthed, plaster angel cast from a late 17th- or early 18th-century slate gravestone. I’d remember if I paid much more than 10 dollars for it—I was newly married then, working as an apprentice plumber and living on a tight budget.
It was a memento mori. I don’t think I even knew what a memento mori was exactly, although growing up in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts, I’d certainly seen plenty of them in old cemeteries and churchyards. Mostly, they struck me as unpleasant reminders of Puritanism, the wages of sin and the flames of hell, more creepy than religious. This was 1963. I was pointedly irreligious and whatever the opposite of puritanical is. But something about this particular reminder got through to me, as if I had never linked the two words together before, had never probed the meaning of either one alone or truly considered the imperative mood, and I had to own it, had to bring it home to our little apartment and hang it above my writing table, so that every time I looked up from my struggle to write my first poems and stories, I would see it, and I would remember death. Which is not all that easy to do when you are still in your early 20s, in excellent health, have not been to war, and have not yet lost to death anyone close to you. Even Jack Kennedy was still alive and well in Washington, D.C.
The phrase and the image of the messenger who carries it—in this case, an angel, which is to say, a servant of the lord, but more often a skull—long precede Puritanism and probably even precede Christianity itself. Tertullian in his Apologeticus (Chapter 33, 4) tells of an ancient Roman general who assigned a servant to stand behind him whenever the crowd celebrated his exploits and remind him, “Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!†(“Look behind you! Remember that you are a man! Remember that you will die!â€)
Wise counsel, but not nearly as simple as it may seem. Especially when boiled down to those two words. For to remember death is to look both ways before crossing, to gaze simultaneously into the past and towards the future. You’re being told to look back and remember what has occurred to every human being who has ever lived, and look ahead and remember what will inescapably happen to you as well. You’re also being told to monitor your behavior, your past and future behavior, because all behavior has lasting consequences. Your future is lashed to your past. And you’re being told that every second counts, don’t waste a one. It’s not just a hip, winking reminder, saying, like the title of Jim Morrison’s autobiography, “Nobody gets out of here alive.†No, on a profound level, beyond the purely personal, beyond pop-romanticism, beyond politics, beyond history, beyond even genocide and terrorism, it’s saying, Never forget. I took it as a command, not a mere reminder. …
For half a century I have carried that memento mori with me—from New Hampshire to North Carolina in the mid- and late-’60s, back to New Hampshire, to Jamaica in the mid-1970s, to New York City and Princeton, New Jersey, to upstate New York where I have lived in recent years, and now to Miami where I spend winters. Wherever I have set up my desk and sat myself down to write, my angel has looked down and murmured, Remember Death.
Then in January 2003, on the occasion of my upcoming 60th birthday, my wife and I, my daughter Caerthan and her husband, Alex, and two old friends climbed Mount Kilimanjaro together. One of the two friends was Mark Saxe, a stone carver and sculptor from Rinconada, New Mexico. Unbeknownst to me, halfway up the mountain my wife hired Mark to dig up, literally, if necessary, a rough piece of gray granite large enough to mark a grave and carve into it the words, Remember Death. In early March, a few weeks before my birthday a large wooden crate arrived at our home in the Adirondacks. It weighed close to 200 pounds and took an hour to open. The stone is the size of a sleeping Labrador dog, more or less the shape of the province of Labrador. The words have been beautifully carved into the stone in a classic Times Roman typeface. My name and birth and death dates are not there yet, for which I remain thankful. But there it is, my gravestone, prepared ahead of time (well ahead of time, one hopes) sitting in the corner of my studio, waiting.
Hand-coloured albumen print photograph entitled Samurai, taken by Felice Beato and Charles Wirgman, c. 1865. Published in Photographic Views of Japan in 1867.
The subject of the portrait has his sword already started from its sheath in a ready-to-draw position, and his eyes and the expression on his face reinforce the pose. The subject’s natural pose of incipient violence reminds one of the readiness of a goshawk standing tiptoe on the branch or the lion crouched in the grass ready to charge. He has the same predator’s eye.
Jeffrey Hart, in the New Criterion, remembers the now-approximately-extinct ideal of the English, and the later American, Gentleman, as embodied in the lives and characters of Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, Princeton’s Hobey Baker, and the Post-WWII “wise men” of American Liberalism: Dean Acheson, Charles “Chip†Bohlen, John J. McCloy, George Kennan, and Averell Harriman.
On the morning of September 20, 1643, Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, died at age thirty-three in cavalry action before the town of Newbury. A scholar and poet, an intimate of Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes, John Selden, Clarendon, and Davenant, he em bodied in many ways the ideal of his period. His was not an absolutely first-rate mind, like those of Hobbes or Selden. They were, to put it one way, too surpassingly intelligent to be representative of anything. But Falkland did embody an ideal. He was an English gentleman as his era understood the idea. He was a man of great moderation, and in the House of Commons he often supported the reformers. He distrusted the power and arrogance of men like Bishop Laud. He had a broad definition of the Church of England, and held to reason and religious toleration. But he grew increasingly frightened by men like Cromwell, Hampden, and Pym. When revolution and civil war loomed imminent, Falkland stood with the King as advisor and cavalry officer.
His superlative personal qualities grew in his own eyes increasingly irrelevant to the history that unfolded before him. The air of England reeked of cannon smoke, and her soil was drenched in blood. The King was duplicitous and a victim of bad advice. The long afternoons of discourse at Great Tew, the Falkland family estate in Oxfordshire, might as well have been on another planet. Falkland’s philosophical and platonic friend Lady Sophia Murray was imprisoned in London as a spy and traitor, involved by Falkland himself in a feckless plot. She died of consumption on the same day—legend says the same hour—that Falkland in effect committed suicide on the field of battle.
For months Falkland had been sunk in melancholy, and had become uncharacteris tically careless about his dress. On the morn ing before the battle, however, he called for fresh linen, took communion, declared that he would be “out of it ere night,†and took his place on the right wing of the King’s line of cavalry.
The King’s infantry were finding it im possible to force their way past a hedgerow manned by Essex’s Parliamentary musketeers. The only way through was a narrow opening in the hedge, a bottleneck of slaughtered royalists. Suddenly Falkland and his horse sprang forward and plunged toward the gap. Before he reached it, he was mortally wounded in the stomach. A few minutes later, the rest of the King’s cavalry plunged through the gap, widening it, and routing Essex’s musketmen. Falkland was buried in a small church at Great Tew.
Falkland exemplified one phase of the idea of the English gentleman, an idea which has remote classical and Christian roots but which can be discerned early in Chaucer’s “verray parfit gentil knicht†and later in such Renaissance works as Castiglione’s The Courtier and its English counterpart, Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Governour, and, of course, in the legend of Sir Philip Sidney. The idea undergoes a chilling formulation in Lord Chesterfield’s conduct-manual letters to his illegitimate son, and becomes broadened and more widely accessible in the Spectator essays of Addison and Steele. Gradually the idea takes on a distinctively English character, different from anything on the Continent. In the late eighteenth cen tury, the idea importantly incorporates the idea of sports: riding to hounds, cricket, boxing, rugby. Dr. Thomas Arnold reformed the school at Rugby in order to produce Christian gentlemen; his son Matthew Ar nold celebrated the idea in a little-known essay entitled “An Eton Boy,†about Arthur Clynton Baskerville Mynors, who died during the campaign against the Zulus. “We see him,†writes Arnold, “full of natural affection, and not ashamed of manifesting it; bred in habits of religion, and not ashamed of retaining them; without a speck of affectation, without a shadow of pretension, unsullied, brave, true, kind, respectful, grateful, uncensorious, uncomplaining; in the time to act, cheerfully active; in the time to suffer, cheerfully enduring.†The British scholar Philip Mason, in The English Gen tleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal (Mor row, 1982), provides a very rich account of the development of the ideal.
I believe it can be argued that the idea of the gentleman, modified in its American con text, but certainly derived from the British model and not at all from anything on the Continent, and involving matters of style and conduct comparable to the British model, has been since the eighteenth century the only persisting social ideal in American culture. Nothing has filled the gap left by its relatively recent disappearance.
Hat tip to Madame Scherzo who has labeled it “St. Hubert”. The Roman St. Eustace shares essentially the same conversion story with the later St. Hubert of the Ardennes. Both saw a vision of crucifix between the antlers of a hunted stag. Both are patron saints of hunters.
[A musical] instrument combining a piano and cello has finally been played to an audience more than 500 years after it was dreamt up Leonardo da Vinci.
Da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance genius who painted the Mona Lisa, invented the ‘‘viola organista’’ – which looks like a baby grand piano – but never built it, experts say.
The viola organista has now come to life, thanks to a Polish concert pianist with a flair for instrument-making and the patience and passion to interpret da Vinci’s plans.
Full of steel strings and spinning wheels, Slawomir Zubrzycki’s creation is a musical and mechanical work of art.
‘‘This instrument has the characteristics of three we know: the harpsichord, the organ and the viola da gamba,’’ Zubrzycki said as he debuted the instrument at the Academy of Music in the southern Polish city of Krakow….
The flat bed of its interior is lined with golden spruce. Sixty-one gleaming steel strings run across it, similar to the inside of a baby grand.
Each is connected to the keyboard, complete with smaller black keys for sharp and flat notes. But unlike a piano, it has no hammered dulcimers. Instead, there are four spinning wheels wrapped in horse-tail hair, like violin bows.
To turn them, Zubrzycki pumps a pedal below the keyboard connected to a crankshaft. As he tinkles the keys, they press the strings down onto the wheels, emitting rich, sonorous tones reminiscent of a cello, an organ and even an accordion.
The effect is a sound that da Vinci dreamt of, but never heard; there are no historical records suggesting he or anyone else of his time built the instrument he designed.
A sketch and notes in da Vinci’s characteristic inverted script is found in his Codex Atlanticus, a 12-volume collection of his manuscripts and designs for everything from weaponry to flight.
‘‘I have no idea what Leonardo da Vinci might think of the instrument I’ve made, but I’d hope he’d be pleased,’’ said Zubrzycki, who spend three years and 5000 hours bringing da Vinci’s creation to life.
Not only do gut bacteria regulate our metabolism, NPR tells us, some scientists now think that the same bacteria may influence moods, emotions, and may even behind some mental disorders like bipolarity and autism.
