stickmaker | JOHT 67: Baseline (Reply)

The Joy of High Tech

Rodford Edmiston

Being the occasionally interesting ramblings of a major-league technophile.

Please note that while I am an engineer (BSCE) and do my research, I am not a professional in this field. Do not take anything here as gospel; check the facts I give. If you find a mistake, please let me know about it.

Setting a Baseline

Any competent engineer (or navigator, for that matter) will tell you, in order to know where you're going you need to know where you've been. That is, you need a frame of reference.

If you're trying to measure the effect something has, you are just guessing if you don't know what the situation was beforehand. Some of the greatest blunders in history (not just in science, either) resulted from people assuming that what they observed after taking some action was an improvement, or any change at all. Because they hadn't bothered to confirm what the situation was before making the change. Even when right about the direction of change, they were often wrong about the magnitude.

As one example, during the Second World War Germany - besides repeatedly using what they'd learned in practice to improve the next version of their equipment - kept increasing their output of aircraft, tanks and other implements of war. Considering their early successes with what they were building at the start of the War, for most of that period they should have been constantly increasing their conquests! However, Great Britain increased their output even more, and that was a shade of what the US was doing, which pales in comparison to how much the Russians were building! Once their opponents got on a war production footing, the Germans were vastly outproduced, in spite of constantly improving their own production. The German command looked at how much they were producing and the their increases over their earlier efforts, and simply didn't understood just how much more than that the Allies were putting out. (There was also the fact that the German saw their equipment as superior in quality, and criticized British, US and Russian gear even as their superior numbers of tanks, etc. - troops, especially - pushed the Germans back. In some cases while the overall quality of manufacture of German equipment was better, not only were the Allies producing more, their designs had better features.)

It didn't help that the Germans often focused on an unnecessarily high quality of production in many areas, wasting valuable resources - including time - on things which didn't need to be that good. The Germans had a gas mask container for foot soldiers which was made of corrugated sheet steel, with a complicated fastener. The US used a canvas bag with simple snaps. The engines for German military aircraft were exquisitely machined in places where that wasn't needed for performance, yet they ran on 80 Octane gasoline while Britain and the US were using 100 Octane, and engines which were more rugged and had a higher compression reatio. (On the other hand, while each V2 rocket took about the same amount of materials and manufacturing work as a medium bomber, by that time in the war the Germans usually weren't getting the bombers back from flights over Britain, either, and the planes were taking vital aircrew with them.)

Part of the problem of finding a baseline is that a situation may be constantly changing. (During WWII rapid improvements in technology even rendered some baselines completely obsolete. Once you have radar, you don't need to keep building improved audio aircraft detectors. No matter how much larger those giant, parabolic, concrete reflectors are now vs. then, radar renders them all obsolete.)

Even the way a situation changes may change. This is especially true with regard to natural phenomena. One of the greatest revolutions in the human understanding of the universe was accepting the depth of time, closely followed by how that amount of time expands what may happen. Mountains rise and wear away. Continents split, with oceans filling the gaps; then they crash together, squeezing the water out, including downwards. Even on the scale of human lifetimes, a single flood can change the course of a river, shifting landmarks. Wars have been fought because one party thought the old marker was here and another thought it was there.

The Colorado River Compact of 1922 - a legal agreement on how to divvy up the water in that area - was based on rainfall and river level measurements which turned out to have been made during one of the two wettest 100 year periods for that area in the past 1200 years. Over most of the past several decades the law allocated more water than was in the river! Reservoir levels in most places fluctuate from year to year, with heavy rainfall years making up for drought years. However, in most of the Colorado River watershed, reservoirs have been going down almost steadily in recent decades. Add global warming and the changes it is bringing to local rainfall and snowfall and you have a disaster in progress. (As I revise this for posting to DreamWidth, California is dealing with another late Summer of record fires.)

Living things can also change the environment, often in ways which aren't obvious until something causes the living things to change.

For thousands of years, bison were the dominant large mammal over much of North America. (In a bit of local history, this explains why there's a road (and distillery) named Buffalo Trace near where I live in Frankfort, Kentucky.) Because of what the bison ate, what ate them, how they traveled, what seeds stuck to their coats or were left in their droppings, they determined what grew. Not just the plants, either. The predators, the scavengers, the entire ecology of much of North America was shaped by the vast herds of bison.

The bison themselves only achieved dominance after their predecessors - which included great herbivores such as massive ground sloths and woolly mammoths and predators such as Smilodon fatalis - died out. With the bison effectively gone (though they have made minor comebacks in some areas) the environment of the western US changed dramatically.

One of those minor comebacks of bison is in Yellowstone National Park. Reintroducing bison to Yellowstone caused systemwide changes in the environment, without humans needing to do anything else. New plants are growing, new animals thriving. The region is slowly returning to the way it was before Europeans found it. Whether that return is what some individual human wants is irrelevant. The first national park was created to preserve – and in many ways restore – what used to be there. Adding bison (and wolves) is helping fulfill that purpose.

Sometimes it is safe to ignore data of more than a certain age. In fact, you might have to ignore it, if changes in circumstances render it irrelevant.

A large part of determining what your baseline is comes from determining when it is. I used to do trendline analyses of highway traffic for a living. We knew to generally ignore traffic count and composition data from before the late Sixties. The development of the Interstate Highway System had so altered travel in the United States that the earlier information was not only useless, but including it could distort the modern results. Add in the more local consequences of malls opening, drive-in theaters closing and bypasses being constructed around towns, and finding a baseline for traffic becomes very complicated, indeed.

So, the next time someone declares victory or success, try to find out the context. They may actually be going backwards.