Two articles about the U of C.

In recent weeks, I happened to stumble across two totally unrelated, but interesting, articles about the University of Chicago.

Here's a nice page with some historical information about the nuclear missile base that was once in place just across the street from my dormitory at the UofC. I lived in Shoreland Hall from 1980-1981, during my first undergraduate year.

The missiles were gone by the time I arrived at the UofC. As the story was told to me back then, during the later years of the Vietnam War there were intense protests against the military-industrial complex, as well as more directly against the presence of the base, and it was removed around 1970 (?).

We knew that space as "the Point"; it was a public park and we used to walk out there regularly for fresh air and frisbee and to enjoy the views and the fresh air off the lake. Even in the hottest summers, you could almost always find relief from the heat down at the Point. In the winters, however, the storms blew lots of water up onto the big blocks of conrete that reinforced the shoreline, and the icy paths were treacherous.

I don't recall anyone referring to it as Promontory Point. That seems wrong to me, it seems like something that the Departmant of Redundancy Department (also known as the Squad Squad) would have shot down straightawy.

Moving on...

I found myself fascinated by a recent article by Professor Clifford Ando of the U of C: The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump.

When I talk to friends and colleagues about my times at the U of C, they are uniformly amazed at my experiences. I don't believe I ever had any classes with more than 40 other students in them; many of my classes had barely a dozen other students enrolled. Nearly all my classes were taught directly by professors; I never had classes where some grad student was the teaching assistant who led the class, nor do I recall cases where my work was graded by anyone other than the professor themself.

During my time at the U of C, one of the few policy debates that I remember affecting me was the question of adding Computer Science classes to the curriculum. That happened soon after I left, and was even underway during my final years; I remember in particular taking a Complexity Theory class in the Mathematics Department that was truly better classified as a Computer Science course. The resistance to adding Computer Science classes was based in a feeling that the university needed to avoid topics that were industrial or vocational in nature, and instead prefer only those subjects that were rooted in the pure pursuit of knowledge. Although it was already decades old, the Great Books program at the U of C was still strongly held during my time there.

But according to Ando, substantial change was already underway during my time at the U of C; he cites several examples:

The Bayh-Dole act [of 1980] provided for the private licensing of discoveries made during federally funded research. It was motivated by a concern that discoveries made in the preceding decades had not been fully exploited because the lack of opportunity for private gain deprived the system of incentive for development. In short, it granted intellectual property in discoveries made during federally funded research to the universities that hosted the projects and the people who did the research—not, as before, to the people of the United States, who funded that research.

...

The Bayh-Dole act has also fundamentally corroded policymaking at universities. Within perhaps a decade of the act, universities had begun all to pursue each latest fashion in applied science, hoping to score a windfall via licensing that would pay for all: from biomedicine, to imaging, to molecular engineering, to quantum computing, to AI.

Ando also weighs in on the question of whether universities should see themselves as having a duty to provide their students with a direct path to financial success, connecting it back to the same debates that I remember from my years in Hyde Park about whether vocational programs should be a goal of the university.

And of course, just as universities themselves have nearly always failed to make money as they flit from fashion to fashion, so students who were deceived into thinking of higher education as a kind of pre-job are now discovering that the path from coursework to salary is fraught: economics PhDs are going unemployed; finance and computer science BAs have higher unemployment rates than do Art History graduates; coding is a path to Chipotle.

The present landscape, in which AI is coming first for the supposedly high-paying jobs that involve rote forms of data analysis or ground-floor coding, recalls an earlier moment in the history of the University of Chicago. In 1982, a committee at the university published a report on the history and future of doctoral education. It is a remarkable piece of analysis and offers a stunning affirmation of the ideals of the university. It allows that interest in doctoral degrees in STEM fields had plummeted so far that one could fairly pose the question of whether these should be sustained as fields of advanced education at all. The answer, according to the report, was emphatically yes, because that was the duty of the university—to sustain inquiry and training into all things that touch on human existence, both for them in themselves and because we as leaders of universities cannot possibly know the fashions and needs of the future.

I was extraordinarily lucky to receive the education that I got at the U of C. I hope the institution can find a way to continue helping others the way it helped me.

Backpacking 2025: Cliff Lake, Dinkey Lakes Wilderness

California has many, many Wilderness Areas. Some are named after famous people (John Muir, Ansel Adams, Herbert Hoover), some after not-so-famous people (Dick Smith). Some are named after people who lived here before there was a California (Mokelumne, Chumash), some are named for reasons that nobody can remember (Siskiyou).

Often, California Wilderness Areas are named after major geographic features, which, in turn, often have dramatic and impressive names (Granite Chief, Trinity Alps, Desolation, Sawtooth Mountains, White Mountains, King Range).

Sometimes, however, Wilderness Areas have names that are, well, a bit less intimidating.

This summer, when it was time to pack our packs and get out on the trail, we found ourselves heading to the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness.

The very similar word "dinky" generally means insignificant or tiny, and apparently comes from a Scottish word describing the amount of whiskey you might consume in a single sip.

However!

This is not quite the same word, for Dinkey is not dinky. And this Dinkey is said to have been a brave little dog who traveled these parts back in the 1860's:

Due east of the Rancheria, near the center of the Holkoma Mono people’s half-million-acre ancestral homeland in the Sierra, lies a creek that outsiders named after a little dog in August 1863. One day that month, a group of non-Indian hunters was surprised by a large, angry grizzly bear. The hunters’ pet pug, Dinkey, barked and rushed up to challenge the bear. The grizzly swatted the little dog away, but Dinkey’s attack distracted it long enough to allow one of the hunters to grab his gun and shoot the bear. Dinkey died of his wounds from his brief fight, and the hunters named the nearby creek after the little dog to honor its bravery.

I think it's true that there were grizzly bears in California in the 1860's, though there are certainly none now. And I suppose the story is not inconceivable, though we all found it rather far-fetched. But it's entertaining, anyway, and really more more interesting of a name than simply naming your Wilderness Area after a president (ho hum).

Although the name was an amusing side-note, we were interested in the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness for other reasons. We departed from the Cliff Lake Trailhead at Courtwright Reservoir, which at about 8,500 feet is one of the higher trailheads in the western Sierras. It's a five mile walk from the trailhead to Cliff Lake, which sits at 9,400 feet at the base of a dramatic 500 foot high cliff that leads up toward the Three Sisters peaks. The trail to Cliff Lake is clear and well maintained, although the final climb up to the lake is fatiguing when you're carrying a full pack at nine thousand feet of elevation.

Cliff Lake itself is beautiful, and certainly one of the most enjoyable lakes we've visited in our decades of backpacking. Besides just the beautiful scenery of the lake, we had great weather and enjoyed swimming and relaxing on the shores of the lake. Rich and I had brought our "backpacking boats" (glorified inner tubes, cleverly fashioned to be light enough to carry but sturdy enough to allow for paddling around mountain lakes), so we spent most of a day just exploring Cliff Lake from the water.

On this trip, I decided that my ancient Lowa Zephyr GTX boots were finally too worn out to be used (after a mere 25 years!!!), and so I upgraded to a brand new pair of Lowa Renegade EVO GTX boots. They are absolutely wonderful boots, though I am doubtful that I will be able to continue hiking for 25 more years. It's nice to know that if these are the last boots I'll ever buy, at least I found a really great pair.

Although the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness includes 30,000 acres of protected wilderness, the maintained trails are concentrated in an section in the center of the wilderness area which contains some two dozen lovely lakes, from Cliff Lake at the south east to Coyote Lake at the north west. All these lakes are in a large plateau at an elevation range of nine thousand to ten thousand feet of altitude. Normally, the Sierra mountains quickly become bare and exposed once you are at this height, but here the conditions are just right, with plenty of water and fairly protected valleys providing a beautiful region that supported a robust and healthy forest and a large population of birds, fish, and small mammals.

We saw little sign of larger creatures such as deer, lion, or bear, but there were a multitude of squirrels and mice and hawks and woodpeckers to keep us entertained.

One day, we made a side trip to Dogtooth Peak, marked at 10,302 feet on my map. The peak is off-trail but approaching it was straightforward for us and we all managed to reach a large saddle at just over 10,000 feet without any problems. Half of our group chose to wait at the saddle, enjoying spectacular views of many miles to the east and north, while our more intrepid explorers (Chris, Roger, and Dan) made a run at the summit.

Dogtooth Peak is rated Class 3 on the Yosemite Decimal System, meaning that it's just at the threshold from hiking to climbing. As one colorful climbing page puts it, Class 3 means things like:

• requires use of hands for climbing, rope may be used
• I need my hands but might survive a fall
• MUST use your hands for progress but don't need to search for holds nor do you need Real Rock Climbing(TM) techniques

It's actually possible to see Chris and Dan in this picture, though you really have to know where to look!

Our adventurers, upon their return, largely agreed with this assessment. They stopped a mere 25 feet or so below the summit, where the necessary technique was comfortable for Roger (who has some Real Rock Climbing experience) but not for Dan and Chris. They returned with no injuries and with lots of great stories and pictures, which is about the best possible outcome we could have desired.

Sandwiched between the John Muir Wilderness, Kaiser Wilderness, Monarch Wilderness, and Ansel Adams Wilderness, Dinkey Lakes surely often is overlooked. But we're awfully glad we found it, as it was beautiful and remote and wild, and I can't think of a single thing about our trip which could have gone better.

Perhaps someday we will return to this wilderness, for there was much left that we did not explore on our first visit.

A little bit of good news from Mother Nature

Via the SF Chronicle: First salmon in nearly 100 years found in Northern California river.

It came as a surprise when, earlier this month, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife confirmed reports of adult Chinook salmon in the river near Ash Camp. Officials saw one female exhibiting spawning behavior and “guarding her nest,” while multiple smaller males were observed nearby, competing to spawn themselves, the agency wrote of the July 15 sighting.

...

Officials suspect they spent a year or more in Shasta Reservoir before returning to the river. The CDFW attributed the comeback to reintroduction efforts spearheaded in 2022 in collaboration with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. For the last few years, experts have been incubating winter-run Chinook salmon eggs in the frigid, clean waters of the McCloud River.

Welcome back, fish!

Kyla Scanlon on Alex Tabarrok on Sputnik

I've been following Kyla Scanlon a lot recently. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but Kyla Scanlon is amazing. She's an Internet-based author and commentator with an enormous reach. She's written a well-received book. She has an extremely good newsletter (that's how I generally get her writing). And she's only 28 years old!!

Her latest issue of her newsletter talks about the age-old economics topic of zero-sum thinking: Zero-Sum Thinking and the Labor Market.

Her essay starts and ends with the big picture, but for me the most compelling part was the mid-section, where she digs deep into the much-reported observation that "Since 2018, the unemployment rate of recent college graduates has generally been higher than the rest of the labor force."

Dissecting the details, Scanlon notes:

We've turned job hunting into a lottery where you buy as many tickets as possible and pray one hits and it is destroying our belief in meritocracy itself. When getting a job feels like winning the lottery, what happens to the 'hard work pays off' narrative that held American society together? It creates the kind of thinking that feeds zero-sum thinking: “if I can only win by gaming a rigged system, then the system itself must be fundamentally unjust.”

Read the whole thing. Read everything Scanlon writes. You'll be better off for incorporating her perspectives and analyses into your life.

I'm concerned about the Flock

One day, not too long ago, a bunch of Flock Automated License Plate Reader systems suddenly showed up all around my neighborhood.

I asked around and none of my neighbors knew what they were or why they had been installed.

So I did a little reading.

Apparently this was decided about 3.5 years ago, in a quite tight and controversial vote during the pandemic.

Use of ALPRs was approved by City Council by a 3-2 vote on February 1, 2022. Originally, the proposal called for a 90-day retention period for data, but the final version presented by APD and approved unanimously by Council on April 5 called for a shorter, 60-day period. However, APD Chief Nishant Joshi said at the September 20 Council meeting that all data will be automatically deleted after 30 days and will not be recoverable.

The system will consist of 35 cameras monitoring 14 locations, including all ingress and egress points—all bridges and tunnels entering or leaving the island of Alameda and on Ron Cowan Parkway on Bay Farm Island—as well as business district locations such as Harbor Bay Landing, Encinal Shopping Center, South Shore Center, Marina Village Office and Retail Center, Alameda Landing, and Atlantic Plaza.

The city's original RFP said that there would be 14 such locations, and listed them in detail. One thing I can say for certain is that there are many more locations than this. There are at least a dozen cameras within walking distance of my house, including one on my own street. None of those locations are in the 14 location list provided in the official city documents. None of those locations are "ingress and egress points" for the city; the ones I've seen are just on ordinary residential streets in ordinary residential locations. I would guess there are actually hundreds of them around the city.

I found something that appears to be the city's current policy about this system. It says:

All data and images gathered by an ALPR are for the official use of the Alameda Police Department and because such data may contain confidential CLETS information, it is not open to public review. ALPR information gathered and retained by this Department may be used and shared with prosecutors or others only as permitted by law. All ALPR data downloaded to the server will be stored for a period of six months, and thereafter shall be purged unless it has become, or it is reasonable to believe it will become, evidence in a criminal or civil action or is subject to a lawful action to produce records. In those circumstances, the applicable data should be downloaded from the server onto portable media and booked into evidence.

Six months is a long way from 30 days.

Apparently my little town is just part of a wave of such systems, and people are only realizing belatedly what is going on. Here's a report from North Carolina: PRIVATE EYES How a tech company is expanding surveillance in public streets. That article describes an incident in Kansas:

In October 2022, a Kansas woman asked her boyfriend, a Wichita police officer, how a friend could get a domestic protection order. The woman was concerned her estranged husband was tracking her somehow after he made “several comments about her whereabouts,” according to an affidavit from the resulting investigation.

The officer knew Wichita used Flock, and asked a supervisor if other agencies had access to the department’s data.

Wichita detectives soon learned that 32-year-old Victor Heiar, a police officer from the small town of Kechi north of the city, used that access to search for his wife’s license plate at least nine times in less than an hour — shortly before texting the woman that she was “spotted” in several locations away from home.

Back at home, the camera company host a "transparency portal" for their activities here. At least it doesn't claim there are only 14 cameras, though I have no reason to believe that any of the information on that web site is legitimate.

And there's definitely reason to believe that the information that the city and the company are providing is not accurate. Here's what happened in Richmond, Virginia this week:

In June, administrators of the Richmond Police Department’s license plate reader program learned an analyst with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had been granted access to the RPD system and had made queries for immigration enforcement in violation of RPD’s operational standards. The ATF analyst’s access was immediately terminated and, moving forward, no federal agencies will have access to RPD’s license plate reader program.

“ATF is a valued partner in our efforts to combat violent crime in Richmond. But their analyst should not have been granted access to our system — and absolutely should not have used it for immigration enforcement purposes,” said RPD Chief Rick Edwards. “I’ve been clear with the public, with city leadership, and within this department: the Richmond Police Department does not enforce federal immigration law, and we do not investigate a person’s immigration status. If ATF had formally requested access for that purpose, I would have denied it.”

In Virginia, at least, a new state law is trying to prevent such use.

I see that the ACLU has been warning about this for years, apparently to mostly deaf ears.

Many police departments neither understand nor endorse Flock’s nationwide, mass surveillance-driven approach to ALPR use, but are adopting the company’s cameras simply because other police departments in their region are doing so. As such, they may be amenable to compromise. That might even include using another vendor that does not tie its cameras into a mass-surveillance system. In other cases, you may be able to get your police department or local legislators to add addendums to Flock’s standard contract that limit its ALPR system’s mass surveillance capabilities and highly permissive data sharing.

My father was a proud member of the ACLU and a loyal sponsor of their work. But one thing he used to frequently tell me was that the ACLU have good ideas about important issues, but no money and very little audience.

My dad took the long view

My dad had a crazy-broad range of interests, not surprising for a man who had both a PhD and a JD. Some of his interests were recreational: he loved cryptic crosswords; he was fascinated by genealogy; he loved playing board games; he was surprisingly good at golf.

He was also interested in many areas of basic science, particularly those that were involved with what he thought of as existential threats to the human race. He was interested in public health, in education policy, in foreign affairs and diplomacy, in international trade and economics, in military policy, and more.

He read voraciously. Just in the last few months of his life he was reading books on world history, on cosmology, even a biography of Emma Noether, who collaborated with Albert Einstein on the mathematics of the general theory of relativity.

A topic that my dad was particularly passionate about was climate change. He was fascinated by all the different ways that climate change was (or wasn't) affecting our modern society. How would zoning codes change? How would the insurance industry change? How would tax assessors adjust? How would transportation systems adapt? Almost everything he read, he immediately held it up to a climate change lens, thinking about the future.

I thought about this aspect of my dad when I came across this powerful essay by Michael Bloomberg: The Texas Floods Were Made Worse by Climate Denialism. Bloomberg writes:

Not every life can be spared from climate change, unfortunately, but many more could be saved if elected officials stopped pretending that they’re powerless to do anything about it. The fact is: Climate change is a manageable problem with practical solutions. Those solutions will not only save lives, but they will also improve our health, reduce our energy bills and create more jobs. The longer these officials pretend otherwise, the more the public will suffer, and the more people will die. And yet what are those in power in Washington doing? Worse than nothing: They are actively thwarting efforts to address climate change and help communities cope with its harms.

I can see my dad now, sitting in his reading chair, nodding his head, and forwarding the essay along to everyone he knew.

Trust, but verify

So my son bought a bunch of updated gear for our August backpacking trip. New boots, a day pack, some sun-protective clothing, etc.

He says to me: I think I want to take a good day hike, a real hike, somewhere that I can go and break in my gear and see how I feel after a 8-12 mile hike.

I said: great idea, that sounds worth doing.

This being the modern age, Dan goes off to ChatGPT and starts a conversation. He describes the goal of his hike, some parameters about where it needs to be so that he can accomplish it in a single day, etc.

ChatGPT thinks for a while, and gives him back a detailed description of a hike it's found, with lots of details about the trail profile, the distance and elevation, the points of interest along the way, what he needs to bring, etc.

ChatGPT includes a very detailed and precise set of driving directions to get to the trailhead. It starts by driving up to Truckee, then getting onto CA-89 north towards Sierraville, then taking a side road, then a side-side-road, then a Forest Service road, and then he'll find the trailhead. 4.1 miles down this road, 1.7 miles after this turn, etc.

Dan sends me the ChatGPT report and says: This looks great! Just what I was looking for, what do you think?

I look through the notes, really impressed by the detail and presentation. I bring up some maps on my computer and start following the driving directions to see where it's taking him.

About 30 minutes later, completely stumped, I get back to Dan, and tell him: I don't think this place exists! I don't think there's such a trailhead; I don't think there's such a lake; I don't think there's such a waterfall. I can't find them on the map, and the road names don't match up.

Some time passes.

Dan gets back to me: Yeah, I was afraid of that. I challenged ChatGPT on this, and it admitted that the trail didn't exist, and it had invented it. I'm going to go on a different hike that my friend takes regularly.

Thank goodness Dan is sensible (and sensibly cynical about these Machines of Loving Grace).

Trust, but verify.

My father was fascinated by the ideas and the activity around Artificial Intelligence. One of the last things that he and I did together was to sit for hours with my son and listen to Dan describe his adventures in the land of AI.

My father was never afraid of change, and was always eager to hear about what was coming next.

But he was realistic, a trait which arose from being born in the depths of the Great Depression, deepened by his innate wisdom and his decades of experience.

Bring me flying cars and wondrous new medical discoveries; let me bask in the ever-changing miracles they create.

But, still, I will feel compelled to verify.