Coping with Change in Documentary-World

This might be mildly amusing ...     

When in 2003 I started doing commentaries for History Channel and National Geographic Channel, I greatly enjoyed traveling to New York, Toronto, Boston, and LA, where I met up with a director and a crew handling sound, video, and logistics. Usually there was a "black car" for pickup at the airport. This from the Inviting Disaster series:

The fun continued through the History Channel's "Titanic at 100" show,  my high point of seeing quality production in action. With 3D magic the Lone Wolf crew converted a surplus hangar in Maine to a parking spot for the wrecked Titanic, if it were to be hauled up from the deeps. I'm the tiny person on the left. 

But now it's 2024 and documentary TV has lost a lot of sponsors. They've become earnestly budget-minded. 

NHK, the Japanese equivalent of PBS, interviewed me on Zoom last year for their series "The Error," so I didn't get to travel any further than a table in my office. I don't have a wall-sized bookshelf of weighty volumes for the Expert's Background, so I settled for a wall and a poster. 

This photo is from my attempt to illustrate how frantic the situation was among technicians at Three Mile Island Unit 2, about 4:00 AM the day of the core meltdown. Not sure how well it translated to the Japanese audience ...

Luckier Still: More recollections of the writing life

Continuing the previous post, thinking of memorable times on the job and while researching a story:

• During an expediter run on a construction job in 1980, I was assigned to make a stop at a dynamite wholesaler. I left with my VW Rabbit carrying a hundred pounds of DuPont Tovex, sporting a nifty triangular sign on my rear window: DANGER - HIGH EXPLOSIVES - KEEP BACK 300 FEET;
• Accompanied an Austin police officer on a weekend-night shift. When he went into a house to check on a domestic dispute, he pointed to his shotgun and said "If there's trouble, feel free to use this;"
• Spent a morning with Moulton Taylor, inventor of the first practical flying car;
• Had a lengthy talk with Harrison Ford about his time in helicopters; 
• Climbed a tower crane during a construction-machinery trade show in Houston;
• Jumped out of a helicopter during water-rescue practice with the LA County Fire Department;
• Attended a reunion of Vietnam-era pilots who flew for the CIA front company, Air America;
• From Henry Kaiser's key man Clay Bedford, I heard how the shipyard at Richmond, California, built a 9.000-ton Liberty ship in less than five days;
• Joined an afternoon of counterfeit-product raids with a private detective, sheriff deputies, and lawyers from the Disney Corp;
• While doing stonemasonry, learned that hitting a big slab of limestone with a sledgehammer makes a very loud "bong", lasting less time than striking a brass bell but about as loud (This requires the slab to be perched atop other rocks, so the vibrations aren't dampened);
• "Rode the block" from the top of a Kansas oil rig, but declined the crew's invitation to join in heaving chain around a spinning drill pipe (this, after seeing one roughneck's mangled hand);
• Learned how to drag oak logs up a hillside with a choker cable and a winch;
• Spent many happy hours running a Case backhoe; 
• Rode with archaeologists in a Bell 206 helicopter doing fieldwork above the Arctic Circle; and
• Made a teeth-clenching drive up a New Mexico mountain hauling a trailer-mounted air compressor and drilling equipment:
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Lucky, Lucky: The joys of feature writing

These are frustrating times for nonfiction writers, between AI competition and advertising's massive shift from print to search engines, streaming, and social media. Many magazines no longer have the budget for long-form articles requiring lots of research and travel. 

Nonetheless! After 44 years of nonfiction writing, and well over a hundred articles and columns, I feel lucky to have started work before the Internet. With all the research and travel needed, it kept me in student-mode throughout.  

It's a time when the uber-wealthy are paying a lot for "experiential" events, like playing a bit part in a movie, hunting for treasure, or climbing Mount Everest along with a hundred others seeking that killer photo atop the summit.  

Meanwhile, feature writers on a beat like mine are paid to go into places not otherwise open to the public, and report back. Over the years I was allowed into locations including these: 

• To the top of a Texas radio tower under construction;
• Into a nitroglycerin factory in Missouri;
• Into the flight deck of the B-2 Stealth bomber, followed by time in the simulator that the pilots use;
• Ride on a training flight with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Night Stalkers;
• Drop into a deep tunnel under Brooklyn, to watch workers scale rock off the chamber's ceiling after a blast; 
• Ride on a helicopter doing maintenance on live, high-voltage transmission lines in Pennsylvania;
• Accompany firefighters into a burning trailer;
• Go into the Ohio State Prison to interview a safecracker;
• Go into Jet Propulsion Lab at 2 am to watch a transmission to the Voyager 2 spacecraft; 
• Spend days aboard an offshore drilling ship, 120 miles off Louisiana;
• Go into Cheyenne Mountain's "battle cab" command center;
• and to hear the terse command from my guide in the wreckage of the World Trade Center's Customs House: "If I say it's time to get out, just follow me!" (And good advice it was - a section we had visited collapsed a day later)

OpenAI's Chatbot on Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin"

 

I'm a fan of this classic silent movie, and wondered what the computer banks behind OpenAI might say about it. My prompt to the ChatbotGPT: "Analyze the significance of the motion picture Battleship Potemkin to Russians under the Putin regime"

Chatbot's answer: 

The motion picture "Battleship Potemkin" holds significant significance in Russia under the Putin regime in 2022 due to its portrayal of revolutionary ideals and the struggle against oppression. In a time when political opposition is heavily suppressed and the government exercises strict control over media and information, the film's message of rebellion and resistance resonates with those who seek change and freedom.

Furthermore, the film's depiction of the 1905 mutiny on the Potemkin serves as a reminder of the power of the people to rise up against injustice. This message is particularly relevant in a country where corruption and human rights violations are widespread, and where the government often ignores the voices and needs of its citizens.

Additionally, "Battleship Potemkin" serves as a reminder of Russia's rich cultural and artistic history, and its ability to produce powerful and impactful works that continue to inspire and inspire generations. In a time when the government often promotes a narrow, nationalist narrative, the film serves as a counterpoint and a reminder of the country's diversity and creativity.

Overall, "Battleship Potemkin" holds significant significance in Russia under the Putin regime in 2022 due to its portrayal of revolutionary ideals, its reminder of the power of the people, and its celebration of Russia's rich cultural and artistic heritage.

Writers' Walls

What do writers hang on their walls? Here are two items on my office wall, along a profile of our cat, who looks like he's checking for dust on the frame. 

These are two of six illustrations by Paul Breeden for my first article in Smithsonian Magazine, "Engineers Versus the Eons," March 1984. 

Paul's Facebook is linked here.  

My article speculated on what would happen to three great American structures if civilization collapsed and they were abandoned to the ages, as the Ancient Wonders of the World were. The painting on the right depicts the South World Trade Center tower having collapsed due to rusting in the basement. 

That was based on an interview I had with Les Robertson, the WTC's chief structural engineer. He said that, assuming failure of the PATH tunnels or heat exchanger lines allowed the basement to flood with brackish water from the Hudson, those massive steel columns would rust and eventually fail. 

I explained it this way: "Rust is nature's way of returning steel to iron ore by combining it with oxygen. Oxygen is richest at the tidal zone, where water rises and falls daily."

The illustration on the left imagines a collapse of the Gateway Arch following a tornado. The Arch's engineers told me that a break would most likely happen at the 300-foot elevation, where the concrete-stiffened lower section of the structure meets the stainless-steel-only, hollow upper section. After hundreds of years of no maintenance, corrosion of the stainless steel would grow into cracks, making a weak point. 

More experiments with DALL-E-2: Outpainting

This gives an idea of how the Outpainting tool can add a lot to the AI's initial square image. 

The original, in the center, was from my prompt asking for an underground spaceship-repair station. 

It's important to update the description in the prompt line when asking DALL-E for side images -- you want something that's related to the initial image, but different enough to be interesting. 

Old Meets New: Feeding ViaVoice speech-to-text into DALL-E-2

Circa 1999, when our boys were in school, we discovered that the iMac could turn speech into text. And the achievement was amazing, in a primitive sort of way. The iMac was a sluggish computer by today's standards, and IBM's ViaVoice program was freestanding, using only the algorithms stored on floppy disks, with no access to online algorithms.

We took turns reading aloud sections from The Three Musketeers, Tom Swift, and The Boxcar Children to see what would happen. 

ViaVoice made a heroic effort. A 1994 IBM factsheet claimed its software could render speech with complete accuracy. Well, no. It did turn out authentic words, and sometimes the sentences were grammatically correct, but the meaning rarely carried through.

Fed a line about somebody liking to eat ice cream, ViaVoice returned with "Islam is a beautiful blue dream."

We liked that phrase, and lately I fed it into DALL-E-2. Here's the result of the computers' unlikely partnership: