Anyone who believes the modern world is a simple one should read Dava Sobel’s Longitude. Lucky for us, many of our modern luxuries make this historical puzzle of knowing your location an interesting story rather than a daily challenge. It’s as easy as an app on a smartphone, the right Google search string or clicking a city on a web-based map. Facebook, Twitter and other apps regularly ask for permission to share your location. Longitude reminds us this simple request is far from easy to make happen. The modern luxury is in having access to a daunting amount of information through simple tools and Sobel’s book takes us back to the point of origin for determining your coordinates.

The truth is that we encounter what is at least difficult to know or even unknowable more often than we realize. The book concludes with a short passage that captures how simple and familiar ideas help us believe we know something about the incomprehensible.

With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth—temporal—dimension to link points on the three-dimensional globe. He wrested the world’s whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.

We recognize this idea of “testing the water,” but Sobel asks us to apply it to space-time. Few of us have any experience with space-time outside of our favorite Star Trek episode. We’ve never actually seen this temporal dimension but we can imagine it alongside the three-dimensions we know and the recognizable globe those dimensions draw for us. Distant stars had obscured our whereabouts for centuries until something as familiar as a pocket watch made it possible to know one’s location. What we know (the watch, three-dimensional space, and troubled waters) helps us understand what is unknowable (space-time, the fourth dimension and the systems of the universe).

Harrison's H-1

We regularly rely on our imagination to understand the world around us. Our preoccupation with using the simple tools of modern life while dismissing the complexity of their original proposition is dangerous. It threatens our understanding of how essential imagination is to the pursuit of knowledge and our ability to invent the very tools that have captured our attention. The GPS embedded in your car or your smartphone began with John Harrison’s first model for calculating longitude, the H-1. It weighed 75 pounds and sat in a 4ft. x 4ft. x 4ft.  cabinet. Accurate enough for the Longitude Board charged with granting the £20,000 award, the H-1 did not satisfy its inventor who had spent five years building it. Harrison knew it could be more precise. And more manageable. Solving the problem of longitude was not enough if the solution was impractical for sailors who needed this information while navigating the open sea. Knowing one’s longitude had alluded sailors and astronomers for hundreds of years, but Harrison seemed to believe finally knowing it was of little value without an easy way to access the data and calculate distance.

His designs continued to evolve until he presented the H-4 nearly 25 years later. The H-4, Harrison’s “sea watch,” finally put the precise measure of time in a device as simple as a pocket watch. The precise measure of longitude was not only knowable in 1760, it was finally easy to use.

The elements of Sobel’s narrative as she tells the longitude story sometimes appear more convenient than real. Longitude undoubtedly only skims the surface of the actual story, but the opportunity to think through the complicated nature of something considered to be so simple today makes the quick read worthwhile. The story makes the sophistication that accompanies innovation just a little more tangible.

It reminded me of a 20th century story of innovation too. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Isaacson reflects on a quote from the very first Apple brochure, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” and remarks, “Jobs had aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them.

Sophisticated knowledge requires us to confront complexity too.

In an interesting read, Jack Shafer wonders about the state of our politics “now that we have dirt on everyone.” While some debate the power of the Internet to democratize even the most authoritarian regimes, we should consider its role in making our politics dirtier than ever. Shafer describes the shift by comparing a campaign’s opposition research to mining for gold:

The past no longer matters to the political present the way it once did, because we have such better access to it today. Just 15 years ago, investigations of politicians and opposition research were largely limited to professionals with access to Lexis-Nexis or those who knew how to conduct a document search at the county courthouse. Digging dirt back then was like mining gold in the 1800s: labor intensive, and requiring both expertise and expensive tools. Widespread digitization and cheap information technologies haven’t eliminated the professionals from political dirt digging, only lowered the barriers to entry.

Leaping over those low barriers this cycle is Andrew Kaczynski, a 22-year-old history major at St. John’s University, who quarried C-SPAN archives for political gotchas and posted more than 160 of them on his YouTube channel, alerting the press to the best, he tells me.

It isn’t just the dirt. We’re also awash in data or dirt masquerading as data. The information costs of a wold-be knowledgeable citizen are skyrocketing!

David Weinberger takes on this question from a scientific perspective in a book with a great title, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room. He points to a scientist’s lament from 1963. That scientist, Bernard K. Forscher, titled his famous letter “Chaos in the Brickyard” and complained that science was churning out too many bricks (facts) without the ability “to complete a useful edifice because, as soon as the foundations were discernible, they were buried under an avalanche of random bricks.” Weinberger explains the problem today is much larger than Forscher could have imagined. Our brickyards are networked!

He offers three reasons today’s brickyards are galactic in scope and they’re worth considering in the context of political dirt. I’ll list them here but recommend visiting Weinberger’s post on The Atlantic for a more detailed discussion. 

1. The economics of deletion. Little data is ever discarded now that massive amounts of storage are easy and inexpensive.
2. The economics of sharing. It’s easier than ever to share everything. From the 160 hours of video on YouTube mentioned earlier to terabytes of data.
3. Computers are smarter. The processing power of the average desktop has increased exponentially.

For science, this means the data grows more and more distant from hypothesis-testing and model-building. Data is made accessible in the hope that someone will eventually make it usable. For political life, this creates a chasm between news that matters and news that’s entertaining. You want news you can use? Well, that’s your problem.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed while trying to sift through fact and fiction to find the information that makes a difference in vote choice, policy expectations or even the decision to get involved. If journalists once dug for gold to help their audiences navigate these turbulence, they’ve sacrificed that role as they’ve competed to throw bricks, to throw lots of them and to throw them before anyone else does.

A flurry of web activity demonstrates just how little help one can expect from the press. In a recent post to the New York Times Public Editor’s Journal, Arthur Brisbane asked, “should the Times be a truth vigilante?”

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

The earliest comments on the site hit along the same theme… how could this even be a question? If the Times isn’t a truth vigilante, what else could it be? Perhaps our media outlets have considered themselves to be purveyors of petty insults and meaningless drivel this whole time. Jay Rosen, a NYU journalism professor, has relentlessly called out the media for their “view from nowhere” and offers an excellent analysis of this latest installment.

There are many reasons to expect this deluge of dirt and date to only get worse. I hope this all hits home the next time you see a headline lampooning what little information American voters know. Too many of us enjoy the chuckle and assure ourselves we’re different. There’s an important follow up questions we should require… how the hell are we supposed to know anything? And what news are we missing because this headline was funny?

*** Our next post will look at how to ditch dumb headlines and demand better. If you have a strategy that works for you, please share it by commenting on this post.

Politics is inescapable. It’s embedded in every effort to understand who we are as a community, what we value and how we resolve conflict. L.A. muralists believe their work to represent their community is now challenged from two different directions with everyone claiming their right to free speech is in jeopardy.

I found this video through Open Culture so I’m going to recommend you visit their site for a bit of background on the conflict. I find it interesting that the muralists claim their work represents the community while graffiti artists only promote themselves. Graffiti has a long history associated with public protest, and I’m not interested in arguing that point here. The interesting part is that, in this assessment, the community outweighs the individual. This criticism is presented as everything you need to know to understand which work has value and which work doesn’t. These value judgments are tricky when you compare a real Rembrandt work to one from “the school of Rembrandt.” It might just be impossible when comparing museum pieces, public murals and graffiti.

What is informing the value we assign to L.A’s murals and their challengers: the city’s commercial ordinances and the local graffiti artists?

You can watch the video here:

Behind The Wall: The Battle for LA’s Murals from Oliver Riley-Smith on Vimeo.

Bonus Points: Open Culture is an excellent resource for free educational media on the web. They have a directory of free university course on the web, free ebooks, free videos, free language courses… you get the idea, right? If you’re not the type to keep up with a website through an RSS feed, you can “like” them on Facebook and pull their posts into your newsfeed. Super easy.

You’ve seen these reflections on Politicolor through our imagined conversation between Cicero and astronaut Michael Collins. As Sagan notes in this video, the space program did not provide “bread on the table” results that changed our everyday. It’s value might be best understood in what it revealed about us and the human experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shifting perspectives reveals as much about previous commitments as it does new ones. We do in fact have plenty of “housekeeping” to do a little closer to the surface of Earth. Do we necessarily have to neglect one or the other? Science dollars are scarce and pushing boundaries doesn’t always require rocket boosters. Another favorite web find last week was Radiolab’s show on “Talking to Machines.” The show  focuses on the idea of artificial intelligence and includes interviews of “The Most Human Human” and the world’s most sentient robot. The universe of an individual’s experience and how that influences the way we relate to one another has proven difficult to program.

My favorite bit from the interview with the world’s most sentient robot:

Q: What does electricity taste like?

A: Like a planet around a star.

Nonsense and brilliant. What’s more interesting than the exchange itself is the quantity of data behind the responses, the algorithms that assess what will make a reliable answer, and the debate over what’s a valid question. Many humans approach chatbots with impossible questions like the one above. When is the last time you asked a colleague what electricity tasted like? Or what the letter M looks like upside down? Or if she has a soul? Perhaps being human is a perfectly banal proposition until we encounter these frontiers of physical space and human intelligence.

For more on this topic of what it means to be human, look to Brain Pickings which posted perspectives from an evolutionary biologist, a philosopher and a neuroscientist. The author wanted to better understand the whole of being human and the wholeness of humanity. Whether it’s a question we confront everyday or only on special occasions, our answer to what it means to be human influences much of what we do. Our struggle to bring order to political societies or even our local communities relies on this understanding of wholeness, of being human.

What then do our frontiers, the ones we pursue and the ones we abandon, reveal about who we are, how we think, and what we want for the future?

Eric turns to an infamous spaghetti diagram of the American strategy in Afghanistan to demonstrate his point. Is it possible to truly know anything without also knowing how it is interconnected to everything else? And isn’t that what we’d call constitutional thinking?

As you watch this 3 minute video, consider how Madison’s work on ancient and modern confederacies or the vices of the U.S. political system both represent similar exercise in understanding the nature of questions and answers through zooming in and zooming out.

TED: Eric Berlow, How Complexity Leads to Simplicity

A corollary arises for participants at this year’s James Madison and Constitutional Citizenship: Where are we constituted?

Surely, that’s the case for the Landmarks workshops: that a home, a monument, a farm, a harbor, creates such an impression on our consciousness that it changes our collective or individual conscience.  These places can be more than just history; they may serve as a compass or a sundial.  Or, as with Will at Montpelier, the cumulative experience can help us to generate ideas and activities which will propagate constitutional thinking.

As you continue to work with what you’ve gained, as you take it home to look at from all sides, please share your findings.  Even Jemmy couldn’t fully realize his imagination until he let it out of the philosopher’s closet.

Feel free to become your own Publius and use this liberty for free exchange.  (The site may ask for an email address, but it is never published or shared.)

Construct even just a line.  Some of the most exciting posts have been nothing but a constitutional question; yet, through dialogue and response we’ve managed to propagate ideas and even strengthen a community of constitutional citizens.

Many in one.  I hear it’s good for your manliness.

There was a quibble about which version to read, the original version or the current version that reflects revisions, amendments or deletions…. actually, they couldn’t even agree on what to call those. Rep. Goodlatte (R-Virginia) had decided it would be the 2010 version. That contest was easily resolved without any inconvenient turn to principles. It was a matter of privilege. It was Goodlatte’s idea to start the session this way so it was his privilege to select the text.

With that settled, reading the Constitution isn’t tricky. Where our politicians prove their mettle is when they decide what to make of it once it’s read. Will congressional freshman and their colleagues see their own eye staring at them from the text or will they see something more than they already knew was there?

The 10th Amendment was so anticipated during the performance that Rep. Goodlatte made sure he recited it himself and more than a dozen representatives were present to applaud as he did so. Did that group listen as intently to all the powers that were delegated to the United States by the Constitution? Did they notice there was no requirement that those powers be “expressly” or “specifically” granted? This is where the Constitution gets tricky. You have to read carefully for what isn’t there as much as what is and can’t make too much of one favorite clip without considering its relationship to the rest of the document.

If you only read your assigned portion or your favorite part before dashing out of the chamber, have you really read the Constitution? More importantly, have you considered what it requires of you in your role as an elected representative?

Reading the Constitution isn’t a bad idea but don’t stop there. What does it mean? The real debate lies in how we interpret the document and that debate is as old as we the people are. In Original Meanings, Jack Rakove characterizes the 1787 debate between Federalists and Antifederalists as a difference in political, perhaps even scientific, perspective:

If the framers were Newtonian of one kind in seeking to set different political forces in equillibrial opposition to one another, the Anti-Federalists were Newtonians of another stamp in thinking that the science of politics was grounded in universal laws. Their science comprised a fixed body of doctrine and cautionary lessons that were best applied to avert the risks of innovation… By contrast, for Federalists the science of politics was becoming experimental and dynamic in a modern sense (p. 152)

This same contest presents itself today when elected representatives think reading the Constitution on the House floor reveals everything we need to know. Considering these two different ideas about what to do next, it is easy to imagine the 112th’s performance will do little to change “business as usual” in Washington without continuing the discussion. In Rakove’s characterization, National Academy alumni will recognize the difference between nature represented as a a solid green line (Antifederalist) or a dotted one (Federalists). Students of Thomas Kuhn will recognize two competing paradigms or a contest to successfully articulate the one that will guide future efforts to govern. Whatever you see in Rakove’s analysis of the opposing viewpoints, the substance of the Constitution is revealed through its interpretation.

Whether green boxes, competing paradigms or different flavors of Newtonians, the real contest lies in determining what the Constitution means for the real work of governing. It doesn’t stop once the last words of the Constitution have been read. That’s only the beginning.

Facebook Visualization

An intern at Facebook wanted to see the geography of our online friendships. With a sample of 10 million friendships, Paul Butler paired their current cities and summed the number of friendships between each pair. You can read much more about his process here, but consider that there isn’t a single coast line, river or physical boundary added to the map. The data identified the continents and the space between them through our connections that transcend oceans and political borders

I offer this list of articles help you think about it more! If you’re using this never ending story to discuss the tension between liberty and security in your classroom, be sure to tell us about it in the comments.

• From Slate, Unfair Share. Christopher Beam marks the success of efforts by the government to share more data after 9/11 but ultimately concludes Wikileaks represents its continued failure to effectively manage it.

• Clay Shirky believes in the wisdom of crowds and channeling the power of the Internet but suspects there is something very undemocratic at work. That’s a criticism of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, as well as our response. His post, Wikileaks and the Long Haul, frames the question with the first amendment. It’s loaded with citations to other sources with a particularly important  quote from Tom Slee, another voice on the web,”Your answer to ‘what data should the government make public?’ depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government.”

• Glenn Greenwald at Salon is keeping tabs on the effort to run Wikileaks out of Dodge with The Lawless Wild West Attacks Wikileaks. Just a snippet of the outrage Greenwald sees in the string of stories… “The U.S. and its “friends” in the Western and business worlds are more than able and happy to severely punish anyone they want without the slightest basis in ‘law.”‘ That’s what the lawless, Wild Western World is:  political leaders punishing whomever they want without any limits, certainly without regard to bothersome concepts of ‘law.’” This post was cited by Dan Gillmor who has urged journalists to support Wikileaks in order to protect free speech.

• And, lastly, there have been a number of interviews with Julian Assange that will help evaluate his motives.

UPDATE 12/7/2010: An op-ed from Julian Assange was published today. Also, he was arrested in London for the charges against him in Sweden, or having sex without a condom.

It’s a very non-linear, chaotic complex process that we as historians get to study. And that’s why when we talk about the future, we should correct ourselves and say, ‘futures’ (plural) and here are the futures we have to choose from.

***It’s a short video, less than 4 minutes and it’s going to be short quips like this for me this semester. Remember to throw interesting content you find our way too. Sometimes the short thought provoking posts are the best.