The Thirst of San Francisco

I have been reading Imperial San Francisco by Gray Brechin, which is a history of the long shadowy reach of the development of San Francisco. It is an excellent book, and a good reminder that corruption of the elite did not begin with Donald Trump. Here are my notes on Chapter 2, which is about water development.

• The Sunol Water Temple was built in 1910 modeled after the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli northeast of Rome; its funder William Bourn had second generation wealth and a sense of civic responsibility.
• San Francisco has very little water in its territory; a financier named George Ensign got legislation to create private companies to claim water rights-of-way through eminent domain. Thus we get the Spring Valley Water Works.
• San Francisco County originally extended to the border of Santa Clara County, but in 1856 the legislature created San Mateo County. The city elite wanted San Mateo back. They diverted Pilarcitos Creek.
• Hermann Schussler becomes the chief water engineer at Spring Valley Water Works.
• William Ralston wanted an urban park but did not really like Frederick Law Olmsted’s suggested design.
• The civil engineer William Hammond Hall gets obsessed with building Golden Gate Park.
• Hermann Schussler builds an aqueduct from the Sierras to Virginia City, thus aiding one of Ralston’s rivals.
• Schussler recommended acquiring water rights to the Alameda Creek watershed.
• In a bold gambit Ralston acquires the rights to Alameda Creek, wanting to sell the water company to the city.
• In August 1875 there is a bank run on Ralston’s bank encouraged by William Sharon; Ralston is bankrupted and disgraced and dies swimming in San Francisco Bay.
• William Sharon (also senator from Nevada) manages to emerge from Ralston’s ruin with most of Ralston’s assets and few of his liabilities. He becomes one of California’s wealthiest men.
• Sharon dies in 1885. There is a spectacular estate battle involving a woman named Sarah Althea Hill, who claimed to be married to Sharon. Hill loses this case and eventually ends up in an asylum; much of Sharon’s estate winds up with Francis Griffith Newlands, Spring Valley’s attorney.
• Newlands takes up residency in Nevada and become congressman there. He starts to develop Burlingame as a luxury enclave for the elite of the West. Lots sell quickly there after the depression of 1890 ebbs. Hillsborough gets carved from Burlingame to become an even more exclusive town.
• The Hillsborough set is second-generation wealth, heavily intermarried and extremely secretive.
• But Hillsborough needs water for its estates and horses, not even Alameda Creek suffices.
• Newlands understands that the water has to come from distant sources, which requires taxpayer funding. James Duval Phelan, a fellow elite Progressive, becomes a proponent of this.
• Phelan is elected mayor of San Francisco in 1896, and wants to consolidate the Bay Area into “Greater San Francisco” a la the boroughs of New York. But this requires a great aqueduct.
• Phelan becomes fixated on Hetch Hetchy Valley on the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park.
• Newlands leads passage in Congress of the National Reclamation Act, launching the agency now known as the Bureau of Reclamation. This agency’s first project is in Nevada, not surprisingly.
• Down south, Fred Eaton, William Mulholland, and J.B. Lippencott quietly acquire water rights for Los Angeles at the expense of the farmers of the Owens Valley.
• Phelan’s claims for a reservoir within Yosemite National Park are thwarted by the U.S. Secretary of Interior.
• The 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurs. It is clear the city will quickly be rebuilt, and Phelan’s plan has a lot more support.
• The debate over Hetch Hetchy is bitter, pitting John Muir and the Sierra Club on one side and much of the Bay Area on the other side.
• City voters approve a $45 million bond issue in January 1910, but federal legislation for the dam construction doesn’t pass until December 1913. Hetch Hetchy does exactly what it is designed to do – raise land values.
• Michael M. O’Shaughnessy becomes San Francisco city engineer and leads the Hetch Hetchy project.
• Huge cost and time overruns on the Hetch Hetchy project, partly because the initial bond measure was lowballed to ensure voter passage.
• The water finally arrived in 1934. O’Shaughnessy had been stripped of power by his enemies. O’Shaughnessy dies in October, 18 days before dedication day for the water project. A new water temple is built in San Mateo County, the Pulgas Water Temple; it is a mile north of William Bourn’s estate, Filoli.

Swatching for a Cardigan

Trying to decide what knitting to take on a trip is always a challenge: it should be portable, it shouldn’t be too challenging technically, but it should be interesting enough to be entertaining.

I’ve had Jennifer Beale’s Fort Amherst cardigan in my queue for a while now and this might actually fit the bill, despite the fact that it’s a sweater and lugging a sweater around while I’m knitting it doesn’t seem so smart. But it has an incredibly unusual construction: The long vertical cables are knit first, on their own, an 8-stitch pattern that goes on for 25 inches or so; then side cables are attached to them and knit down; then the fair isle strips are attached to the cables and worked in the round and steeked. All of this seems fairly straightforward and might just work. But because you’re attaching vertically knit pieces to horizontal ones, the row gauge as well as the stitch gauge is going to need to work in order to avoid some very complex math, certainly beyond my capabilities.

Which is where swatching comes in: I’m swatching double moss-stitch, the single cable ropes, and the stranded colorwork separately. I measure the swatches before blocking then soak the swatch, allowing it to dry flat after being gently rolled in a towel, and measure again, noticing the difference.

My lilac moss stitch swatch is going to have to be redone on a larger size needle; the cable is perfect as is, and I’m not sure yet about the stranded colorwork…

For Fun Or For Beauty?

Thanks to a link on MetaFilter, recently I watched a masterful long-form video by jazz bassist and YouTuber Adam Neely entitled “Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future”. Suno is the technology company that has become the biggest powerhouse in AI music. A usual workflow with Suno is to give it some text prompts describing the characteristics of the music you want and perhaps some lyrics and then Suno will take that and generate a fully instrumented song for you.

Needless to say, Neely is not a fan.

Commercial generative AI is bad in ways which are different from other disruptive music technologies of the past, like MIDI sequencing and samplers, because there is a sociopolitical agenda behind its adoption. This agenda will be bad for musicians, it will be bad for music lovers, and it will leave us feeling more alienated and alone…Like any culture war, it’s a distraction from the real war, the class war. You see, there is a class of techno-capitalists who are currently using generative AI as a means of wealth extraction. They do this by circumventing intellectual property laws…

Fifty-nine minutes into the video, Neely links AI music to technofuturist movements past and present. He discusses the Italian futurists, in particular Filippo Marinetti who in 1909 pens The Futurist Manifesto. Nine years later he goes on to write the original Fascist Manifesto. Today’s technocapitalists such as Marc Andreessen view Marinetti as a patron saint. Theirs is the same worldview that produces abominations such as Reflect Orbital’s plan.

Suno describes their core values as being “Music, Impatience, Aesthetics, and Fun”. Neely would replace these values with Service, Patience, Craft, and Beauty.

Neely believes generative AI will cause music to split into two different art forms, just as theatre and cinema are different but related art forms. These will be live and recorded music, and he has a lot of hope for the future of live music.

Graphic Reportage

In Making Nonfiction Comics, Eleri Harris and Shay Mirk talk about the power of reporting on events using comics. There are advantages: a loose sketch of someone is a screen to hide behind in case they fear investigation. But it also humanizes the whole process, and I’m glad I took a pen and brush along to yesterday’s gathering in Woodland.

There are so many things to make us upset and even despair about this administration’s recklessness in all areas of public life here and in disrupting the world, but doing something, anything, to stand up to it feels helpful.

No Forever Wars

We went to an antiwar protest this afternoon up in Woodland that I believe was organized by our congressman, Mike Thompson. He is the individual speaking at the podium in the photo. Congressman Thompson served in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and was wounded there. Speaking with him today were four other veterans, one from the Vietnam War and three from the Iraq-Afghanistan wars. All of them saw wars that lasted over twenty years and do not want us entering another period like that. I am glad we got the chance to hear Congressman Thompson speak and that he is out in front on this issue, dreadful as it is.

Faine Greenwood on Bluesky yesterday expressed one reason why extricating ourselves will be hard:

“MAGA’s fundamental shared quality is a total lack of theory of mind for other people” is a theory that keeps getting validated by reality – look at almost every decision they’ve made in the war with Iran, and how they seem constantly surprised by the unanticipated actions of other parties. Strategy is fundamentally all about developing a sophisticated theory of the mind of one’s opponent. With MAGA’s Iran Adventure, guess we’re going to see what a modern war almost totally devoid of anything we’d call “strategy” looks like.

The Past Continuous

Several friends whose grasp of English grammar is better than mine have been unable to answer a question I have: What is the name of the construction in English, where the word “would” is used as a continuous past tense instead of as a conditional? Here’s an example I made up: “As a child, I would often go and play in a sandbox.”

Trying to figure this out, I remembered one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature, the first sentence in Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” I just came across an interesting discussion between Richard Howard and George Plimpton about different published and unpublished translations of this sentence, but none of them uses the “would” construction.

Which is what I would use, here: “For a long time, I would go to bed early.” It gives the sense of a repeated action happening over time, in the imperfect, though Proust doesn’t use the imperfect here, which, as Howard points out, is jarring: almost nowhere else in the seven volumes is the passé composé used in the narrative. The standard English translation for decades, Scott Moncrieff, reads “I used to go to bed early,” which is a different imperfect continuous…

Such questions keep me up at night, which is better than being kept up by stupid and illegal foreign wars.

Delusions From Middle-Earth

Today I submitted a public comment to the Federal Communications Commission on the proposal from SpaceX to launch up to a million satellites for orbital data centers, which I blogged about last Friday. I am now working on the public comment for the Reflect Orbital proposal to put giant mirrors into space to light up the night particularly for use by solar farms. I retrieved the Reflect Orbital proposal documents from the FCC portal and was disenchanted to find that the name of their initial test satellite with an 18-meter mirror is EARENDIL-1.

This is a name that comes from Tolkien: Eärendil was a half-elf in The Silmarillion who bore on his brow a jewel — a Silmaril — that shone like a bright star. This leads to the question: why are so many tech bros obsessed with Tolkien?

A lot of people have commented on this trait lately. A writer named Samuel Arbesman compiled a list of all the tech companies he could find that have names from Tolkien (there are 22). In an essay entitled Mythic Capital, Lee Konstantinou discusses how Tolkien teaches a lot about capital and politics and the technoutopian vision of breaking free of all limits. In the New York Times Michiko Kakutani writes about how the traditionalism running through Tolkien appeals to the tech bros and that they are drawn to the themes of kingly and magical power rather than the gentle settled life of the hobbits.

It is interesting that when Tolkien first got popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was pulling in people mostly from the hippie counterculture. Times have changed.

But Pratchett doesn’t seem to appeal to the tech bros — I don’t see too many companies celebrating the cabbages of the Sto Plains for some reason.

German Modal Particles

I tortured my Advanced German Conversation class last night with an hour of modal particles, which are a peculiarity common to only a few languages (Russian, Japanese and Hungarian also use them) and which help convey attitude or intention. They are only used in spoken language, their omission doesn’t change the sense of a sentence, and they are very difficult to translate, being context-dependent. English tends to convey these intentions either with intonations or question tags. The particles also have a separate meaning outside their modal sense, as in “ja”:

The German particle ja is used to indicate that a sentence contains information that is obvious or already known to both the speaker and the hearer. The sentence Der neue Teppich ist rot means “The new carpet is red”. Der neue Teppich ist ja rot may thus mean “As we are both aware, the new carpet is red”, which would typically be followed by some conclusion from this fact. However, if the speaker says the same thing upon first seeing the new carpet, the meaning is “I’m seeing that the carpet is obviously red”, which would typically express surprise. In speech the latter meaning can be inferred from a strong emphasis on rot and higher-pitched voice. (Wikipedia article)

I have a friend who did her master’s thesis in Germany on the avoidance by foreigners of modal particles entirely. There’s a good reason to avoid them: without a full understanding of their idiomatic use, you can get them quite wrong!

Eclipse At 3:10 AM

I was aware enough there was a lunar eclipse happening early this morning that I checked the time, got out of bed, threw on some clothes and stumbled into the backyard to look at the moon. It was well to the west and pretty red, though the bottom of it had a bright edge. This made me wonder if it was actually at totality or maybe I had gotten the time wrong and missed it already. I didn’t review the timing of it the night before. Pica woke up and had a brief look outside at the moon too.

I did have the time right, and stayed outside another 15 minutes, enjoying the now-darkened sky and the red moon. Back to bed then only to get up at 6:30 for the early morning Tuesday grocery shopping. I dozed later in the morning with Winston the cat by my side. It was a good morning.

Listening to Language

I’ve been coordinating the Advanced German Conversation group for International House Davis since the death of our beloved instructor Paul a couple of years ago. This takes place every week on Zoom, though we also meet in person once per month, at least those of us who are local.

Last week I showed this Easy German video. It’s a podcast with an American guest (from Mississippi) whose German accent is so good that she is often mistaken for a German. She has studied German for a long time and now lives in Germany, which obviously helps, but she had to focus hard on improving what she assumed was an adequate accent and her efforts have definitely been worth it.

She did have some good tips about how to improve your accent in a foreign language. (It’s not necessarily fair, but native speakers will think your language skills are much higher than they actually are if you speak with a good accent rather than a bad one, even when your grammar is faultless.) Apart from learning what your tongue ought to be doing in your mouth and practicing sounds in front of a mirror, she recommended listening to a LOT of content in the target language. (I think this is a good practice for lots of other reasons, especially for the purpose of normalizing constructions that are awkward in our own language; German verb placement and cases with specific prepositions are two obvious examples.)

I’ve been trying to watch videos on subjects that interest me like spinning and birds following this advice. Today the algorithm served up an interview with a woman in her 90s on her experiences living (and moving around in) Germany during WWII. War inflicts trauma on everyone who lives through it with the possible exception of those who cause it…