Beach Haven

Bibliography
Ramsdell, Mike. 2006. A Train to Potevka: An American Spy in Russia. Layton: Zhivago Press.

Review by Michael Beach
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This book is an autobiographical sketch of some experiences of a CIA operative working in Russia in the waning years of the Soviet Union. Mike Ramsdell speaks of his early training days in the agency and how his unit was betrayed by another trainee with whom Ramsdell had a friendship. He tells of his bringing up in northern Utah, his marriage and divorce brought on in part by how much he was away on assignments.

The main story of the book is how his unit in Russia was attempting to turn an official into an asset for the CIA. It goes wrong and his unit is told to bug out. That is, the others in his unit are sent to the relative safety of Moscow. Ramsdell is left alone to finish sanitizing the various locations the group of American spies were using. He is eventually ordered to take a train to a safe house in the far away village of Potevka. Before he can make his get away, Ramsdell is attacked by local thugs. He escapes the assassination attempt, but barely. He is beaten and seriously injured. In this rough condition he gets on the train in a lot of pain. It’s the slow train that stops often with the lowest class ticket. He ruminates about his life and what seems to him like abandonment by the agency. As he slept, another passenger steels what little food he had, leaving him to travel for days hungry and bloodied.

Eventually he arrives only to find the safe house empty and with no food. Eventually villagers help him, but not at first. He speaks of how the local people have little for themselves because of the bad policies of the Soviet government. Several times he is stalked by wolves that at one point keep him from walking from the house to the outhouse to relieve himself. After a long stay in the bitter cold and deprivation that included Christmas, he eventually makes his way to rescue and a return to the United States.

Throughout the ordeal, Ramsdell was sustained by his memory of his relationship with his son and a coworker who later becomes his girlfriend and future wife. He wrote to them and imagined future times together. He also considered his own perspective about God and his faith. The humbling experiences at first caused him to question, but then he was drawn closer to God and found his faith growing.

The story is an interesting mix of spy thriller, introspection, and social commentary with a religious connection. Since I lived part of my life in northern Utah, I was familiar with the places he describes. I also made two work-related trips to far eastern Siberia, but after the fall of the Soviet Union. I can see his perspective offering praise and sympathy to the Russian people while questioning their government as well as our own.
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Bibliography
​Collins, H. M. 1992. Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Review by Michael Beach

The original publication of this book was in 1985. I read the updated 1992 edition. The focus on this book is an examination of how we perceive order and our need to replicate. In science, replication is important in particular because when one makes a factual claim, it must be based on evidence and any empirical evidence must be replicable. Collins shares three chapters of specific examples to make his point. He discusses the TEA-Laser, detecting gravitational radiation, and paranormal experiments.

Order and perception are subjectively designed. Whenever there we examine a large number of things we try to categorize. In science, categorization is necessary to make sense of differences. The problem with categorizing is that things don’t really exist in discrete groups of things, but rather as a continuum of individual things. Scientists attempt to define categories by defining attributes. Whenever one creates experiments that either attempt to define a category, or attempts to make conclusions about subjectively defined categories, it becomes difficult to take the next step. That is, it is difficult to draw general conclusions about specific empirical outcomes. This is the problem with inductive reasoning. As soon as one attempts to apply a finding in a specific situation to larger groups, the generalized conclusion will inevitably have to include exceptions.
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The major concern Collins points out about replication is that each group defined and included in an experiment will influence outcomes differently. Generally, empirical work includes undocumented steps. “My concern is not how we could be certain in principle about induced regularities but about how we actually come to be certain about regularities in practice” (Collins 1992, 6). For example, some processes are taught from one lab worker to another through tacit practice. Explicit documented procedures carry a project so far, but there are different ways of doing lab tasks. Practices vary from lab to lab and from practitioner to practitioner. This means that replication includes variation, and variation leads to different exceptions when attempting to analyze and generalize findings.

​Bibliography
Aiken, Katherine G. 2019. "The Environmental Coneqences Were Calamitous: Smelter Smoke Controversies in Progressive Era America, 1899-1918." Technology and Culture, The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology (Johns Hopkins University Press) 60 (1): 132-164.

Review by Michael Beach
 
In this article, Katherine Aiken looks at legal battles between smelter operation companies and community organizations that sued for damage created by toxic smoke. Most of these organizations represented farmers, but the author includes the “four-way interaction among farmers, industrialists, government, and technology” (Aiken 2019, 134). Aiken speaks to claims and settlements, but since this journal is about technology, as one could guess, the primary focus is on technological ways smelter owners approached reducing particulate output. Her intention with the article is to “survey major smelter smoke battles with an emphasis on the intersection of industrial growth, engineering solutions to challenges, and the role of farmers and the government” (Aiken 2019, 135).

The specific systems developed included baghouses, large buildings filled with filtering bags that captured much of the particulate matter. A weakness to this approach is it was expensive and did not stop gasses. Two related solutions were to extend the location of smoke exhaust. In one version, large underground tunnels would be used to move the smoke away from locations with people and farms to less concerning (more remote) locations. The other was to build ever taller smokestacks so the particulates were spread more widely, having less affect in any one location.

Perhaps the most exotic approach was something called ‘electrostatic precipitation’ in which emissions were passed through an electric field that caused some of the gases to break into other compounds that had other uses. This was costly in terms of electricity generation, but some of the cost was offset by revenues created from sale of the chemical byproducts.

Social and financial forces were at odds with each other. They were also connected to each other. For example, Aiken shows how farmers’ claims were argued by the smelter companies to be exaggerated. Experts on both sides made their cases. Both groups had financial motivation. The technology was developed to lower the financial impact claims of farmers while minimizing cost to smelter operators. 
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