First Quarter Roundup 2023

This was the beginning of the tenth year of daily blogging.  Excitement builds, as we count down to the tenth anniversary….

The blog continues as usual. Robots. Dinosaurs. Cryptocurrencies. Quite a bit of coverage of Earth’s Cryosphere.  “Hot topics.”  (Get it?)

Inevitably, there has been a burst of interest in ChatGPT and its competitors.

Which reminds me:  a friend asked ChatGPT about me.  I hit the jackpot!  According to ChatGPT, I won the Gordon Bell Prize!

(emphasis added)

What do you know about Bob McGrath at NCSA?

Bob McGrath is a researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently the Technical Program Director for the National Research Platform (NRP), which is a project aimed at creating a national cyberinfrastructure platform to support collaborative research across a wide range of domains. McGrath has been involved in the development of many important computing systems, cyberinfrastructure projects, and scientific applications, and he is particularly interested in the intersection of computing, data analysis, and scientific research. He has also been a key contributor to national and international initiatives that focus on cyberinfrastructure and advanced computing, including the US National Science Foundation’s Information and Intelligent Systems Division’s Advisory Committee and the Global Grid Forum. McGrath has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gordon Bell Prize for Supercomputing in 2001.

(Please note:  Before you get all riled up, almost nothing in the above information is correct.  Please don’t get mad at me because ChatGPT tells lies about me.)

(And no, I have nothing to do with the National Research Program. They’ve never heard of me, and I’ve never heard of them.)

Comment:  All this chatter about “will ChatGPT take my job” seems kind of premature.  I mean, unless your job requires confidently producing wrong answers, what do you have to worry about?

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Band Names

As always, I have noted some Dave Barry Tribute “Great Names for a Band”.  These phrases were all found in real, I-am-not-making-this-up, science and technical articles.

“Fayetteville Lacewing”
“Nonflaking percussive activities”
“The Swarmalators”
“Non-uniform chiral”
“Non-chiral”
“Bosonic Code”
“Decoherence”
“Bit-flip code”

Books

This quarter I discussed 15 books.

Non-Fiction

American Inheritance by Edward J. Larson
Inventing the World by Meredith F. Small
Meade at Gettysburg by Kent Masterson Brown

Fiction

Murder Your Employer by Rupert Holmes
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes
The Last Voice You Hear by Mick Herron
Standing By The Wall by Mick Herron
Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron
Blitz by Daniel O’Malley
Dr. No by Percival Everett
Before Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Babel by R. F Kuang
The Maltese Iguana by Tim Dorsey
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Book Review: “Meade at Gettysburg” by Kent Masterson Brown

Meade at Gettysburg by Kent Masterson Brown

Like the nerd that I am, I saw Brown talk on C-Span and was motivated to get his book.

The C-Span talk was interesting because it covered the two weeks of the Gettysburg campaign with not one shot fired or any combat at all.  He spoke about horses and mules, oats and forage (for said horses and mules), wagons, railroads, traffic jams, and shoes.  If you want to understand what happened at Gettysburg, you need to understand logistics.

And you have to understand how important the horses and mules were. KMB is really into horses!

Fittingly, in the book, Plate 1 is an image of General Meade, and Plate 2 is an image of General Meade’s favorite horse, who was seriously wounded in the battle.

The book itself covers a lot more, but you get the idea–this is not history, not cinema. 

Besides horses, the other theme is Meade’s long standing historical controversies.  He has suffered a bad reputation for incompetently “letting Lee escape”.  Brown gives a pretty complete picture of what Meade did and didn’t do, and why.  From our perspective, Meade isn’t guilty of incompetence, and probably saved the country.

There is plenty of drama here.  Gettysburg was, and remains, the largest land battle ever fought on North America.  Many things did not go to plan, so there was a lot of improvisation. Both armies gave their all, and it could have gone either way.  At the end, the winners were only barely better off than the losers.

For Meade personally, it was insane.  At that point, the Army of the Potomac had been badly beaten by Lee again and again over more than a year.  Noone wanted to command it.  Meade was ordered to take command, and immediate ordered to shield Washington and Baltimore from the victorious invading Confederates.

He took command, to learn that half his army lacked shoes, and that the Confederates had just cut his supply likes.  A great first hour on the job.

Still, he moved forward and prepared to block the invasion.  The second day, his plans fell apart, due to a general ignoring his instructions and getting into a disastrous battle at Gettysburg rather than retreating to the planned defense lines as instructed. 

With little choice left, Meade pounced.

We are told of the incredible efforts of the scattered army to rush to the unintended battle site, as well as 50-mile-long traffic jams as the supply wagons and mule trains were quickly moved to the rear of the upcoming battle.

The fighting itself was confused, but easy to understand.  Southern forces attacked.  Northern forces threw them back. 

Tens of thousands died and were maimed.  Including tens of thousands of horses.

The South withdrew in heavy rain, leaving exhausted Northern army, abandoning their own captured and wounded.  

Meade’s first task after the battle was to bring up supplies, starting with tons of oats and forage for the animals.  If the horses died, the army could not move at all.  Soldiers and casualties lay unprotected in the rain until the horses were fed.  This kind of decision is what a real commander is called upon to do.

After the battle, Meade requisitioned 10,000 replacement horses, which had to be brought from as far as Boston and Chicago.

The greatest controversy was the disappointment and anger that Lee was able to escape.  Brown makes very clear that there was nothing Meade could do.  When he did catch up with the Southern Army a few days later, he contemplated an attack. 

He had no good intelligence, and the enemy was entrenched in very strong positions.  His exhausted army would have been beaten badly, likely undoing the victory at Gettysburg.  The attack was called off, and it’s a good thing.

All kinds of criticism followed from the President on down, including back-biting in the Army, a media frenzy, and Congressional hearings.  Knowing what we know now, this was basically disappointed wishful thinking coming from people who had no first hand knowledge of the army or the situation.

In the face of 150 years of this controversy, Brown makes a strong case that Meade was a superb commander who did everything possible and won the most important battle of the war. 

And he also reminds us of the critical and heroic contribution of not only the average soldier, but also the quartermasters, and the animals.

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1. Kent Masterson Brown, Meade at Gettysburg: A Study In Command, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Sunday Book Reviews