(Well, strictly speaking, to the Michigan Senate and its majority leader, Mike Shirkey, whose appearance is hardly reassuring.)

*****

Dear Senator Shirkey,

I read with some alarm your subordinate’s statement to the effect that Michigan law doesn’t allow the legislature to overturn the popular vote in an election. That statement misses the point.

Michigan law also does not allow election cheating. There is public testimony, soon to be legal evidence, of mass-scale cheating in Michigan. As a lawmaker, you should regard election tampering as bad faith or incompetence in the Executive branch. You ought to be indignant they put you up this tree with no safe way down.

Your authority to correct this situation doesn’t come from Michigan law. It comes from the Constitution. If your Executive failed to run a believable election, then they, not you, have broken Michigan law. Unless cheating is “prescribed in [Michigan] by the Legislature”, your Executive also violated the Constitution. That gives you the power to act. Don’t pretend you don’t have it; eighty million Americans know.

If, through cowardice or conscience, you cannot overturn the result, you have an Historical duty to nullify it. Send no electors.

You must be under intense personal pressure from the Left. I offer my sincere sympathy for the anxiety and fear you must be experiencing. But the only way you’ll ever be safe from those people is to keep them out of power. Defy them, and they may destroy you in their rage. Appease them, and they’ll destroy you for the fun of it, as soon as they get around to it. And then there’s the question of whether you want to be friends or enemies with eighty million Trump voters.

Be brave. Be grateful you have a hill to die on. Most people don’t get that honor.

Do the right thing, and God Bless You.

In Peace and Liberty,

*****

Snail mail is a very effective way of getting your message to a politician. It means you care. All Michigan State Senators receive their mail at the same PO box, which is very obliging of them. You can reach any or all at:

P.O. Box 30036
Lansing, MI 48909-7536

The Republican Senators’ names (they like to be addressed by name):

Mike Shirkey, Majority Leader

Barrett, Tom
Bizon, John Dr.
Bumstead, Jon
Daley, Kevin
Horn, Ken
Johnson, Ruth
LaSata, Kim
Lauwers, Dan
Lucido, Pete
MacDonald, Michael
MacGregor, Peter
McBroom, Ed
Nesbitt, Aric
Outman, Rick
Runestad, Jim
Schmidt, Wayne A
Stamas, Jim
Theis, Lana
VanderWall, Curt
Victory, Roger
Zorn, Dale

For God’s sake, do not be impolite. We want to give these people a sane side of the tree to climb down on.

(In every sense of “fix”)

The recent mass censorship of the New York Post by Twitter and Facebook has led to calls for anti-monopoly action. Break them up and regulate them, people say.

That sounds like a terrific pain in the ass, and dubious of success. It would be a fine thing to bring some pain to Big Social, but whether it will change their behavior is doubtful. They can outspend, outlawyer, outflank, or outright capture the regulators. There may be no feasible, believeable solution.

But there is a way to fix Google. It will cause them much pain and humiliation, which they richly deserve. And it will reliably protect the public interest.

Open-source the search engine.

Some Google bigwig had to answer to Congress: does Google manipulate search results? No, the bigwig answered, we don’t manually alter search results. Congress thought that answered the question. They’re pretty dumb.

But then it came out that Google’s bias could be explained by its search algorithm. Some internet wise guy said we should all dump Google and use a different search engine, one without an algorithm. I don’t think it was a member of Congress who said that, but it could have been.

It happens that even smart people like doctors and lawyers often have only the vaguest idea of how computers work. “Where are your documents?” “Oh, I keep them in Word.” The average Congresscritter will not have creative, practical, technical solutions in mind. They are likely to recommend a regulator with the power to impose legal sanctions against Google’s public conduct after the fact. I am confident Google can defeat any regulator which works that way.

But Google can’t defeat a review of their database and source code.

Here’s roughly how a search-engine works. It takes a list of keywords and then queries a vast database linking keywords to the documents in which they appear. A sophisticated algorithm then decides which documents are most relevant, using criteria such as word frequency, keywords in the same clause, inbound links to the document from other documents with the same keywords, and so on. One key innovation Google developed was a search engine that is almost impossible to cheat. You can’t fake relevance.

To make this work efficiently, each page needs to be assigned a base relevancy rating for each keyword. If you post a document as a trap for the unwary, with a single keyword pasted in 7,000 times, Google’s algorithm will know it for the garbage it is, and give it negative relevancy. Documents which show indications of relevance get a positive relevancy rating.

There are a million ways to game this system. Suppose Google decided that the New York Times’s narratives were most important to the public interest. They could simply up-rate all documents from nytimes.com automatically, making them the first result for all searches.

There is some evidence that Google ranks keyword combinations, associating keywords not supplied by the user, but by Google. So if you Google “Donald Trump”, you get results skewed towards “Donald Trump scandal russia rapist racist supremacist prostitute cheats golf” and so on. “Hillary Clinton beloved feminist icon charity women’s rights”, anyone?

That’s how the scam works, and the only way to expose it is to look at the code and the data. Those things can’t be concealed from a trained eye. “It’s on the hard drive,” so to speak.

As much as I fantasize about Google’s pain and suffering, their source code probably shouldn’t be forced out into the open, at least not right away. That would be unprecedented in our legal and Constitutional order. There are other reasons to doubt it would be a good thing.

But being a monopoly power acting against the public interest should erode their right to confidentiality. An investigation could determine with full confidence whether Google was guilty. Ongoing scrutiny could prevent future abuse.

But only if the regulators can see the code and verify on an ongoing basis. That will take a massive, expensive effort. It will entail a raft of novel liabilities and security challenges; the needed expertise to do even the basic task won’t be cheap; and even a regulator with the practical ability to rein in abuse can and will be captured eventually.

Google created a service which the public came to rely on. Google has long abused, and continues to abuse its position of trust and power. Open-sourcing the critical elements of the search engine would expose Google’s algorithms to independent analysis by experts from all over the world. That is the proven best method to detect bugs, or malice, in software. Failing that, a massive system of truly punitive inquiry into Google’s internal affairs must be instituted and maintained in the Federal Government.

Blow the lid off. Rein them in.

A monkey’s justifiable rage leaves one man dead and 250 wounded, mostly women and children with their faces chewed off.

Well…okay. It’s a start. The most frustrating thing about this situation is that it didn’t happen in the United States House of Representatives.

The monkey was subdued by a violent mob and will spend the rest of its life behind bars or wires or whatever they make cages out of in India. They’ll probably keep the poor bugger in a wicker basket.

Alcoholic killer monkeys get a bum rap. Given the opportunity, alcoholic killer monkeys could achieve much-needed reform in these troubled times.

I remember Ben Domenech from the early days of the blogosphere, around 2002. At the time he was about drinking age and was a wunderkind junior contributor at National Review. He also ran a blog of his own.

I got in a blogwar with Ben, way back in the day. We were arguing about the ethics of stem cell research. Ben was a pompous jerk about it. At one point he even called me a racist, as though I give a flying fuck that Ben’s a spic. I was so annoyed with his dickery that I nicknamed him “Genital Ben”.

A year or two later, Ben got busted for plagiarism. It was a stale bust, for some inconsequential thing he did in his teens, but it was plagiarism and Ben had to go away for a while. I popped a little schadenboner over it, because Ben had pissed me off before.

A few years back, Ben’s byline began to appear in respectable company again. At first I was miffed and wanted to know if anyone other than me remembers anything. But Ben’s publication, The Federalist, was turning in valuable work.

Valuable work is anathema to the left, of course. So NBC created a task force to stamp it out. This week that task force narced out The Federalist and Zero Hedge to G**gle on some risible claim or other. It’s not yet clear what’s going to happen to The Federalist; Zero Hedge appears to have been successfully demonetized.

That’s right. A seller of news dialled up the advertising monopoly and politely requested that accounts be cancelled for a couple of competing sellers of news. And the monopoly appears to have complied most willingly, on the flimsiest of rationales.

I have no love for Ben Domenech, but at this point I’d take a bullet for him. Nobody deserves to be persecuted like this.

(As a show of support, I have added The Federalist and Zero Hedge to my blogroll. Stop by and give ’em a dime.)

Science makes stupid: Otters might juggle because they’re getting excited for dinner.

The researchers observe that otters play dexterously with rocks that they bring to the surface. The researchers are mystified:

The team has been able to draw a clear connection between otter juggling and hunger, suggesting that the animals tend to perform their little trick when their stomachs start grumbling.
…
The team suggests one possible explanation is that the otters play with rocks when they’re excited, or perhaps when they anticipate eating. For captive otters, anticipating feeding time may be enough to get them excited and in need of a distraction, hence the juggling. Still, they have no real way of proving that and thus the mystery deepens.

When I was a wee tot I knew, and everyone I knew knew, that otters use rocks as eating utensils. Otter dives to the bottom and fetches a clam and a rock. Otter then floats on his back with the rock on his chest, and bashes the clam open on the rock. My mother owns a brass-cast sculpture of an otter doing just that, which she picked up at a roadside attraction where wild otters were to be seen. Besides the evident exuberance of wild otter life, the rock-clam behavior was the thing most commented upon.

Middle-aged otters tend to juggle more than youngsters or older otters, so the researchers thought the juggling act might have something to do with building the skills they use for eating. Since otters like to feast on shellfish, it would have made sense that the animals that play with rocks more often were better at extracting their food. However, when the researchers tasked otters of varying ages with solving food-related puzzles, the otters that juggle more often weren’t any better at it than the rest.

Food-related puzzles like how to eat shellfish using a rock, which wild otters do all day, and you could have looked it up on wikipedia?

These fucking researchers don’t know which end of the fork.

In parts One, Two, and Three I toyed with an idea to make bureaucratic institutions more effective in emergencies, by incentivizing and indemnifying such rule-breaking as would be likely to serve the public. I then identified a couple of things that went wrong with CDC/FDA’s response to China’s Filthy Wet Market Lung Attack of 2019. I showed how those things might have gone right if the incentives I suggest were in place.

Obviously I write from a privileged point of view: hindsight. It’s cheap and easy to armchair-quarterback tough decisions taken by others in the past.

This idea of mine isn’t some brilliant flash of higher-order insight. Populations, institutions, and industries have been put on a war footing from the dawn of time. Generally, it means a more regimented command structure with centralized control, but at the same time a relaxation or adjustment of rules and customs that happen to interfere with war aims.

CDC, FDA etc. failed in both those roles. They were not perceived as authoritative, and failed to achieve any semblance of control. They confused and misled the public. At the same time, they kept in place rules which defeated the purposes of many who were able and more than willing to help.

The problems at CDC, FDA etc. can’t be fixed by some obscure blogger’s idea. Instead, these problems illustrate key facts about the way in which institutions degenerate.

Pournelle’s Law goes something like this: “In an institution, there are two types of people: those who support the mission of the institution and those who support the institution itself. The latter kind always gain control, set hiring practices and general policy.”

American institutions have been the envy of the world. Our mode of government, our schools, our industries, have attracted admiration and emulation. But many of our vital institutions are worse than worthless now. They have no mission to serve the public; they serve themselves, when they are not serving corrupt paymasters, often foreign.

Sometimes human institutions improve over time, but all senesce in the end. NASA in the Mercury and Apollo days is perhaps the finest example of mission-focussed institution in history. That latter kind of person, the kind who works for the institution and not the mission, didn’t stand a chance at NASA in those days. They were effortlessly sloughed off, routed around, made irrelevant, even fired from their jobs. Despite this experience, NASA succumbed to Pournelle’s Law in the fulness of time.

Could we establish a new institution with a similar unfailing mission focus, to respond to future pandemics? It might help to define its mission solely as emergency response, only to ever act in the public service under emergency conditions and incentives. War footing, “breaking the glass”, or whatever you want to call it, would be this institution’s only possible reality in action, and its latent reality in preparation. Its daily mindset could be “An outbreak is not a possibility. It is a reality whose time may already have come.”

That mindset is very tough to maintain in the face of Pournelle’s Law. But in America today, that mindset may be unattainable even in the short term, forever.

In the old days, we sometimes said, “It is better to ask forgiveness than permission.” This thinking applied when you had a really good idea and/or a really bad situation on your hands and there was no time to explain to your superiors so you just did whatever you needed to and asked for forgiveness later. Generally, if the results were anything other than a disaster, you’d be forgiven.

That culture is gone, probably for good. The schools have fostered a culture where forgiveness, for anything, is considered a crime. And liability, for anything from drunken sex to expressing a contrarian opinion, is absolute and without appeal. In this climate, it is not possible to breed the kind of humans who can staff an effective institution with the core responsibilities of the CDC. A guy whose eye is always on the liabilities is a guy who can’t look straight at the emergency.

Buy ammunition, I guess.

In the first post in this series, I suggested a way to make bureaucracies more adaptable in times of emergency: change their incentives so that rule-breaking is allowed and even encouraged. The key concept was indemnification for rule-breakers if they had a reasonable expectation that breaking the rules would serve the public better than following the rules.

In the second post, I used the word “wargame” to describe how the CDC and other bureaucracies could have prepared for the Chinese Viral Terror Weapon of 2019. A pandemic was always inevitable, and the befuddlement and inefficacy of our institutions (notably CDC and FDA) in the face of this outbreak has been disheartening to witness.

One thing the CDC could have wargamed in advance is public policy recommendations. Every communicable disease has its own modes of transmission; there are only so many modes (aerosol, surface/fecal, bodily fluids). Based on how a disease is transmitted, on how infectious and deadly it is, suitable precautions could have been recommended. A system of “threat levels” and “local factors” could have been used to organize neat hierarchies of response and file away reams of guidance tailored to each scenario.

Suppose you were brainstorming sensible advice for dealing with an infectious agent just like Xi Jinping’s Inscrutable Lung Rot of 2019. It would be helpful to have fine-grained, specific advice tailored to a variety of contexts. Taking into account local factors such as population density, local demographics, and proximity to known clusters of cases, CDC could have rolled out detailed recommendations early on for:

• Individuals (hygeine, social distancing, masks/gloves, etc.)
• Businesses (retail, restaurants, venues for gatherings, offices, factories, transportation, etc.)
• State and Local Governments
• Other Government Agencies

One example of a cause for concern that might be addressed is the prevalence of public PIN pads and touchscreens at points-of-sale. Nobody seems to know what to do about those things.

CDC could have wargamed this outbreak and had reasonably sound public policy advice ready in advance. Probably one reason why they didn’t, is because they didn’t want to be liable if their recommendations proved to be ineffectual or harmful.

It’s a reasonable worry. In the early stages of an outbreak, uncertainty rules the day. There is bound to be some guesswork, and a totally unexpected factor could possibly come into play. Suppose CDC guessed wrong and offered recommendations based on that wrong guess. The recommendations might be ineffective at reducing infections, or they might be too stringent and cause unnecessary economic harm. Another reason bureaucrats might be chary is that any course of action in a pandemic will cause needless harm to someone; in hindsight, liability is just about guaranteed. Better, perhaps, not to take the risk. Make vague general pronouncements: “Wash your hands.” That should be safe.

But suppose CDC had offered detailed public policy guidance early on. Even if the recommendations proved to be unsound, they would still have salutary effects compared to the current situation. As it is, shopkeepers, mayors, governors and private citizens are making their own guesses, indulging in magical thinking, hygeine theater, social posturing, political self-dealing and politicization of every facet of what should be a unifying cause. Guidance from a neutral, authoritative source would do wonders to mitigate the problem.

Of course that is not what we have. Would we have it, if CDC wasn’t afraid to be on the hook for honest mistakes? Would we have it, if CDC was indemnified in the way I’ve suggested in this series?

In an emergency, the path to well-serving the public usually has a liability hurdle to block it.

(Feel free to skim if the first part of this post seems boring or condescending. The precise relation between anecdote and data is somewhat a side issue to this post; the meat is something a little meatier.)

Sniffy people who find themselves in arguments sometimes sniff, “data is not the plural of anecdote.” By this, they mean to discredit an anecdote supporting a claim they oppose, by suggesting that the anecdote is some kind of non-representative outlier.

They may be right about that, but they are mistaken when they say that data is not the plural of anecdote. All data consists, in fact, of a plurality of anecdotes. It must be admitted that not just any collection of anecdotes constitutes data. Data is the plural of anecdote in the special case where all the anecdotes in question share a data model.

Consider this anecdote:

From June of 2003 to March of 2007, Gertrude Toynbee resided at 1234 West Peacock Street in Cincinnati, Ohio.

That anecdote contains:

• Year and Month of start of residence
• Year and Month of end of residence
• Name of resident
• Street Address of residence
• City of residence
• State of residence

You can say the data model for this anecdote consists of those specific bits of information. A database is a system for studying the relations between anecdotes, when each anecdote contains the exact same kind of specific information.

One anecdote isn’t all that interesting, but suppose you had a database containing this information for all residences, all residents, and all terms of residence. There are endless interesting questions that could be easily queried of such a database. How many people moved from New York City to Philadelphia in 2011? How many congressional representatives should the state of Nevada have? What percentage of arrivals in Florida in 2013 came from each other state? What was the total population of Wink, Texas for all months and years?

You could also answer questions ranging from the intrusive to the bizarre. List all places and times of residence for Gertrude Toynbee! List all years and months in which a person with the initials “G.T.” lived in the 1200 block of West Peacock Street!

Now suppose you had a collection of anecdotes that included not only the above information, but also the birthdate, sex and marital status of each resident at the time of residency. Surely you could make some fascinating sociological studies by querying all that data. But this new information comes with a penalty: you are getting your anecdotes from a variety of reporters and they don’t all report the same way. Some don’t include the name of the resident. Some don’t include the dates of residence. Some don’t include the city of residence. And some conform to the original data model and don’t report age, sex or marital status.

Now you have just as much information as you had before, maybe more. But you actually have less data, at least for some questions. You can’t determine the exact relation between marital status and living in Gary, Indiana because you some of your Gary, Indiana information doesn’t contain marital status, and vice versa. Data professionals can compensate somewhat for data which is incomplete in this way; they can give you an answer and then give a pretty clear idea how likely the answer is to be correct. Another approach is to take the incompatible data sets and put them in different databases. Now you have good confidence in your answers, but the only answers you can get will be local to that specific data set. There is no one database that can answer all the questions you might have with certainty.

That’s the situation we face with Xi Jinping’s Deadly Inscrutable Chinese Virus. We have plenty of information, but almost no data. Available data sets are small and local and can’t be used to answer larger questions. Reporting is wildly inconsistent; imagine if reporting parties didn’t even agree on the definition of a street address or marital status. Publicly available anecdotes paint a very confusing, contradictory picture.

The result is that there are fundamental questions we can’t answer in a general, meaningful way. Public policy is, therefore, largely a matter of guesswork. And some makers of public policy are guessing in their own favor at the expense of the public.

The Centers for Disease Control could have anticipated and mitigated this situation. It was a given that, sooner or later, whether by zoonotic serendipity or enemy action, a new pathogen would arrive on our shores, infectious and deadly enough to cause trouble and pain on an historical scale. Some of the more likely candidates would be in the categories of respiratory syndromes and hemorrhagic fevers. There is no reason why CDC couldn’t wargame these scenarios in advance. They certainly had the budget.

Suppose someone at the CDC had said, “In the event of an outbreak, we will want data. Standardized, uniform reporting is the key to useable data. CDC is the only institution that can standardize reporting on a national scale. Let’s build a reporting database in advance, on the scenario that there will be, oh I don’t know, a respiratory syndrome.”

When the outbreak occurred, that database could have gone online with a data model tailored to respiratory syndromes. All medical systems would be obliged to report to this database, any case where the novel pathogen was supected. The data model could have been something like:

• Age and sex of patient
• Time/Date of symptoms
• Time/Date of hospital admission
• Time/Date of Discharge/Decease
• Health status at discharge
• Virus/antibody test results
• Medical Interventions ordered, what and when
• Best guess as to time/date/nature of exposure
• Recent travel history
• Preexisting conditions / pertinent medical history
• Genetic markers
• Socioeconomic status
• Home life factors (Population Density, Air quality, etc. (ranges))
• Occupational Factors (Public-facing, Instructor/Lecturer, Office, Outdoor work, Commute time and method)
• etc. etc.

Now obviously some of this stuff is a little fudgy and not all the data you’d get would be accurate. But it would be tremendously powerful to have this tool, and CDC could have foreseen the need for it.

Here’s why they didn’t: it would have meant breaking the glass.

Early on in this outbreak, there was some public contemplation of the idea of creating a central reporting database under federal auspices. The main objection to the idea was that such a database would compromise individual medical privacy. That’s true; it almost certainly would. And such compromises would almost certainly violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Nevertheless, it would almost certainly have been the right thing to do. Better to violate the privacy of a few, than to give free rein to havoc among the whole public.

It seems so obvious, but it is not reasonable to expect the CDC to do the right thing if it involves breaking the law, unless they are indemnified for breaking the law in a time of crisis. That indemnification wasn’t in the cards. Apparently nobody in the position to do anything about it, ever envisioned a scenario where indemnification would be a vital tool and incentive to public service.

Now that the span of history has shortened to the last seven hours, I can say that I lived in prehistoric times. In public buildings, schools, concert halls, churches and the like, you would see a metal box, painted red, mounted on the wall. The front of the box would feature a conspicuous glass panel. There would be printing on the glass, or maybe a placard reading “IN CASE OF FIRE BREAK GLASS”. Typically a small steel mallet was hung by the box, secured with a chain, as a means to break the glass.

The contents of the box were items deemed useful for fighting a fire. A fire hose, a fire extinguisher, an intercom for communication, even a fire axe might be obtained by breaking the glass. I saw these boxes from time to time when I was a kid.

When they built buildings later, they didn’t include these boxes. Sprinkler systems, visual and audible alarms were much more effective at controlling fires and reducing casualties than a hose or an axe in the hands of an untrained individual. The idea came into vogue that a fire alarm should be a simple lever that activated sprinklers, alarms and emergency response. But fire alarm design continued to include breaking glass. The levers were pinned in place by glass tubes or glass plates, which would break if the lever was pulled.

Breaking glass is usually considered a bad thing, almost a taboo. Suppose you offered a person a piece of glass and asked him to break it. He would be reluctant to do so. The idea was to make it so that anyone contemplating activating the fire alarm would have to overcome that reluctance. Trivial or frivolous motivations might not be sufficient. Having to break the glass should reduce the number of false alarms. As it turns out, people are so reluctant to break glass that they sometimes fail to do so, even when there is a real fire. Today’s fire alarms don’t feature breaking glass.

As everyone knows, the Centers for Disease Control, working alongside the Food and Drug Administration, spectacularly botched America’s response to the China Bug of ’19. Now we see a similar situation with the United States Department of Agriculture stepping in to make sure large lots of meat and dairy are destroyed, even as food banks experience record demand.

The common thread in all this is pettifogging regulations, rearing up in all their arcane, arbitrary and unbending glory. Common sense sometimes dictates that rules must be bent or broken in an emergency. But bureaucrats are not known for common sense.

It is a truism that bureaucrats are hidebound, unimaginitive creatures ill-suited to unexpected situations. And it’s easy to look at these bureaucratic snafus and want to punish somebody. You let thousands of people die because one checkbox wasn’t checked on the first application, and you sent them to the back of the line? What person will be held accountable for this?

We all know the answer to that. And sadly, that’s the way it has to be. Our complex civilization needs bureaucracies. Bureaucracies need rules and regulations. And the rules and regulations have to be uniformly followed, with bureaucrats punished for deviating. If you give bureaucrats discretion in following the rules, some of them will establish petty tyrannies and/or take bribes. Legal enforcement at the discretion of the enforcer creates a very tempting scope for self-interested wrongdoing.

So you need bureaucracies, you need bureaucrats, and you need the rules to be the rules. Except when you don’t. In an emergency, you want some bureaucrats to exercise some discretion. You want the institutions to become more adaptable, even at the cost of formal/correct procedure. The trick is to figure out how to incentivize good conduct in an “emergency” situation.

In normal times, a bureaucrat’s only incentive is to avoid liability to himself or the institution, which if everyone is honest means following the rules. Suppose a bureaucrat’s action or omission credibly leads to major harm or loss to the public. The bureaucrat can’t be held accountable so long as all the rules were followed to the letter. Truly rule-bound behavior and mindset is almost always a bureaucrat’s safest hold.

But suppose we adjusted the incentives in time of emergency? Suppose we stipulate:

• In time of emergency, bureaucratic agents are empowered to exercise discretion in some matters, relaxing procedures, making decisions above pay grade, or otherwise taking what in normal circumstances would be unacceptable risks.
• If an exercise of discretion leads to harm or loss, the agent will be indemnified provided he acted with reasonable information and intent, and with the expectation of a better outcome.
• If an exercise of discretion credibly saves a harm or loss, or brings a benefit, the agent should be suitably rewarded.

The issue of indemnification is paramount, and indemnification will be a recurring theme in this series. Perverse as it seems, in normal times liability management takes precedence over public service. The agent must feel confident that in times of emergency, public service comes first and it’s safe to put liability management in second place. For one in the bureacratic mindset, this is truly breaking the glass.

Someone once wrote that a ton of gold, if cast into a sphere, would have a diameter of 17 inches. It’s counterintuitive to think of that much mass in the volume of a small beach ball. Naturally I wanted to check up on this claim.

The first time I tried to check it, I used a crude volume conversion for water: “a pint’s a pound the world around”. Turns out it’s not all that accurate. I came up with an answer in the neighborhood of seventeen inches, but I had no faith in my math.

Math about gold tends to confound. There’s the confusing matter of the Troy Ounce, there’s the fact that “gold” is a catch-all term for an array of alloys none of which is pure in the real world, and there’s the dazzle of the subject matter itself. Here’s a picture of the world’s largest bar of gold:

I found that picture here. If you follow the link, you can see a bunch of Americans having difficulties trying to figure out how much that ingot weighs. Could you move it with a hand truck, or would you need a pallet jack or even a forklift?

Finally a consensus emerged: that bar weighs about 550-600 Imperial pounds. And once again the notion of a ton of gold fitting into a 17-inch sphere doesn’t seem quite right. So I decided to get the calculation right once and for all.

The specific question is: what would be the diameter, in inches, of a sphere consisting of pure elemental gold and weighing exactly 2000 Imperial pounds?

The problem with the Imperial system of measures is that measures of volume and distance were established separately and without reference to one another. Thus you can’t relate, say, gallons to inches without the use of a cumbersome conversion factor. To simplify matters we’ll have to take a detour trough the Metric system.

Our input is the mass: 2000 pounds. The conversion factor to kilograms is .4535, so:

2000 * .4535 = 907

Since a liter of pure water has a mass of exactly one kilogram, we can say that the Metric volume of an Imperial ton of water is 907 liters. So what’s the metric volume of an imperial ton of gold? This table gives the specific gravity of “gold, pure” as 19.32, so:

907 / 19.32 = 46.9462

Okay, now how big a ball is ~47 liters? Since I want the answer in centimeters, I’ll convert liters to cubic centimeters the Metric way: just shift the decimal point. So I’ve got 46,946.2 cubic centimeters of gold. There’s a standard formula that relates radius to volume of a sphere, which goes: “V = (4 Pi r^3) / 3”. Turning this inside out to solve for r, you get “r = CUBEROOT((3 V) / (4 Pi))”. Weird, huh? I looked it up, but then I had to solve for r myself before I was sure.

Anyway, plugging in 46,946.2 to the formula:

3 * 46,946.2 = 140,838.509317

4 * Pi = 12.566370614

140,838.509317 / 12.566370614 = 11,207.572468

CUBEROOT(11,207.572468) = 22.3788201

The radius of the sphere is 22.37… cm. Dividing by the conversion factor 2.54, we get a radius of 8.810… inches. Which gives a diameter of 17.621 inches.

Knowing this, we can maybe wrap our heads around the idea of that bar of gold up there. We can convert the Metric volume of our sphere to cubic inches simply by cubing the conversion factor:

46,946.2 / 2.54^3 = 2865

So we say a ton of pure gold is within a hair of 2865 cubic inches. We can estimate the dimensions of the bar of gold by using the woman’s hand for scale. It would appear to be a petite hand, so I assume the distance from the heel of the hand to the fingertips is seven inches. Obviously the bar is tapered from top to bottom, but we can simplify this by looking at the length and breadth dimensions halfway up the taper and pretending the thing is rectangular at those dimensions. So I’m guessing the bar is 14 inches long, 7 inches wide, and 8 inches high. That gives a volume of 784 cubic inches and a purported weight in the range of 575 pounds:

784 / 2865 = 0.274

575 / 2000 = 0.2875

Close enough! We’re not totally out to lunch here.

It’s interesting to think what would happen if you could somehow get hold of a ton of pure gold and cast it into a sphere. You’d have to store it very carefully or it would deform rapidly under its own weight. To keep it spherical you could embed it in glass (though the glass would deform too over time), keep it in cryo storage or maybe in orbit. Or you could just leave it on the floor and stop-motion film it as it turned into a pancake with cracks around the edges.