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Tuxedo Park
Loomis, a Harvard lawyer from a well-to-do WASP family, went from practicing law to doing artillery research in WWI to one of the most spectacular accumulations of Wall Street wealth in the go-go 1920's. He personally drove the creation of the electric utility industry and helped form or run most of the major Wall Street banks of the day (nearly all of which are still with us in original or merged form). Smart enough to see the 1929 crash coming, he sold his stocks early and entered the depression worth $50-100 million, all in cash.
How did he use this money ? By retiring to his real love, science and inventing, eventually being elected to the National Academy of Science. A brilliant man, at parties he would often play several games of chess simultaneously, with his back to the boards and while maintaining lively conversation with his other guests. When tackling scientific problems, he generated dozens of ideas to try and had dozens of teams running down these ideas, setting the stage for the Manhattan Project, which pursued all available avenues simultaneously.
During the Depression, Loomis built a huge laboratory in Tuxedo Park, a very wealthy enclave 40 miles northwest of New York City. The first gated community, it was largely populated by the Rockefellers, Morgans, and other rich scions of industry and finance. Considered the premier research establishment of its day, a typical day at the lab featured visits by Fermi, Lawrence, Einstein, Bohr, and scores of others, all helping Loomis work on important problems of the day.
Not content to be an observer, Loomis himself ran many of the experiments and published dozens of papers on a very wide variety of subjects. He would typically solve some major stumbling block in an area such as ultrasonics, microwaves, or biology and then leave others to work out the details.
Called to action in WWII by patriotism and is famous cousin, Henry Stimson, the War Secretary, he personally made RADAR a reality (borrowing heavily from British, who he convinced to give us all they knew), building the MIT Rad Lab from scratch into a war-time R&D lab of 5,000 people.
I had always thought RADAR played a minor role in WWII, but it turns out to have been extremely important, with nearly 25,000 units produced. It was conceived to help stop the German night raids on Britain, but beyond that helped end the U-Boat menace since Loomis' system could detect subs on the surface and even periscopes. Bombing RADARs guided bombers over the Continent and LORAN, which Loomis personally invented, guided all aircraft navigation in Europe, the Atlantic, and Pacific for the second half of the war.
Loomis helped kick off the hunt for the atom bomb more than a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, largely via his close friend the brilliant Nobel Laureate Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley (for whom the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore labs are named). While Loomis did not actually work in the atom efforts (he was too busy with RADAR), he mobilized the money, scientists, and political will to make it happen. He foresaw in the 1930's how nuclear fission and Germany's war-mongering would spell bad news for the world.
The book itself paints all of this in very concrete ways, moving back and forth between Loomis' private and public life, including quotes from nearly all involved. The author is related to many players in the story, including some of Loomis' closest friends, and thus had access to personal papers and numerous family members through the ages.
Writing in a witty and sometimes humorous style ("[T]he RADAR scientists knew they needed a single transmit/receive antenna. The trouble was, no one knew how to build one.") the book is an engaging read all the way through. A fair amount of scandal is mentioned, as the book opens with the suicide of one of Loomis' closest friends (the author's great uncle) and moves from there to gradually expose all that was going on through three of the most exciting decades of this century.
The book left me very impressed with Alfred Loomis and motivated to work even harder pursue more advances in technology and science, not to mention finance. I hope none of are called to support a war effort in the manner he did, but there are many discoveries that remain for us all; if we are one-forth as productive as Alfred Loomis, we'll do very well indeed.
You can purchase Tuxedo Park from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I have a LONG penis!
:(
That's the one in my mouth though... the one on my body is small
Fuck it, it's Friday! Tuxedo? Wasn't that Jackie Chan?
What the fuck does this have to do with linux, anime, RMS, RIAA, blah blahblah?
Anyone know the projected dates for when Sarge will freeze and Debian 3.1 is prepared? Really looking forward to it -- what with GCC 3.2 and all.
Completely OT, but then again, most comments are.
This isn't karma-whoring, it's karma-consolidating.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Invite Jesus into your heart today!
I am writing on behalf of myself and a few of my friends to state that Mr. Alfred Loomis deserves to be punished. Although not without overlap and simplification, I plan to identify three primary positions on Loomis's expositions. I acknowledge that I have not accounted for all possible viewpoints within the parameters of these three positions. Nevertheless, I have one itsy-bitsy problem with Loomis's words. Videlicet, they destroy that which is the envy of -- and model for -- the entire civilized world. And that's saying nothing about how his smear tactics are not pedantic treatises expressing theories or extravaganzas dealing in fables or fancies. They are substantial, sober outpourings from the very soul of larrikinism. If I have a bias, it is only against whiney egotists who abuse science by using it as a mechanism of ideology. If we let Loomis muzzle his critics, all we'll have to look forward to in the future is a public realm devoid of culture and a narrow and routinized professional life untouched by the highest creations of civilization.
Someone once said to me, "Loomis's perorations are exemplary of the forces minorities must fight in their struggle to achieve equal footing with the rest of the community." This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. I, hardheaded cynic that I am, wonder what would happen if Loomis really did deprive people of dignity and autonomy. There's a spooky thought. Generally speaking, the most perceptive members of our society respond positively to my message that we need to stand up for our rights. And let me tell you, I'm willing to accept that evil individuals are acting in concert with other evil individuals for an evil purpose. I'm even willing to accept that it is a dangerous folly to ignore the threat to democracy posed by officious popinjays. But either he has no real conception of the sweep of history, or he is merely intent on winning some debating pin by trying to pierce a hole in my logic with "facts" that are taken out of context. Loomis can write anything he wants about how things would be different were we to give into his demands and let him blame our societal problems on handy scapegoats, but he is careless with data, makes all sorts of causal interpretations of things without any real justification, has a way of combining disparate ideas that don't seem to hang together, seems to show a sort of pride in his own biases, gets into all sorts of villainous speculation, and then makes no effort to test out his speculations -- and that's just the short list!
To put this in context, his sycophants believe that "the most valuable skill one can have is to be able to lie convincingly." First off, that's a lousy sentence. If they had written that it is cowardice on Loomis's part to crush the will of all individuals who have expressed political and intellectual opposition to his grievances, then that quote would have had more validity. As it stands, his cop-outs are based on two fundamental errors. They assume that profits come before people. And they promote the mistaken idea that his mistakes are always someone else's fault. The problem with Loomis is not that he's abusive. It's that he wants to annihilate a person's personality, individuality, will, and character. It's not necessary to go into too long of a description about how he plans to insist that our society be infested with negativism, expansionism, incendiarism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms" when you least expect it. Suffice it to say that there are two related questions in this matter. The first is to what extent he has tried to lower our standard of living. The other is whether or not this is not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where the state would be eager to demonize my family and friends. Not yet, at least. But Loomis wants to reopen wounds that seem scarcely healed. Why he wants that, I don't know, but that's what he wants.
Because of Loomis's eagerness to participate in riots, I have a hard time trying to reason with people who remain calm when they see Loomis make it virtually impossible to fire incompetent workers. I don't need to tell you that I, hardheaded cynic that I am, cannot conceive of any circumstance under which his tirades could be considered appropriate. That should be self-evident. What is less evident is that if we take his generalizations to their logical conclusion, we see that by the next full moon, he will teach militant concepts to children. Loomis wants nothing less than to confuse, befuddle, and neutralize public opposition, hence his repeated, almost hypnotic, insistence on the importance of his ignorant press releases. He spouts a lot of numbers whenever he wants to make a point. He then subjectively interprets those numbers to support his excuses while ignoring the fact that if he bites me, I will bite back. In general, Loomis says that anyone who dares to challenge the present and enrich the future can expect to suffer hair loss and tooth decay as a result. Yet he also wants to subvert time-tested societal norms. Am I the only one who sees the irony there? I ask, because I recently received some mail in which the writer stated, "I shall make every effort, especially in this limited space, to break the mold and stray from the path of conventional wisdom." I included that quote not because it is exceptional in any way, but rather, because it is typical of much of the mail I receive. I included it to show you that I'm not the only one who thinks that in the genesis of Loomis's publicity stunts, birdbrained begat shiftless, which begat silly, which begat self-serving. In fact, I have said that to Loomis on many occasions, and I will keep on saying it until he stops trying to conjure up dirt against his fellow human beings. In a nutshell, Mr. Alfred Loomis is battening on us.
KDE has so many vulnerabilities, and no binary patches, that I've decided to give up on the security of my KDE system. Discuss.