Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 6

The majority of Americans want to ditch the #Electoral #College and 💥"would instead prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally."

Pew Research Center surveyed 9,720 adults across the United States in late August and early September, and found that
✅ 63% want to abolish the process outlined in the U.S. Constitution
and replace it with a #popular #vote approach,
compared with just 35% who favor keeping the current system.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/electoral-college-map-2024

Sheldon Whitehouse here.

President Biden and Vice President Harris endorsed sweeping reforms to the Supreme Court,
including 18-year term limits for justices and an enforceable code of ethics.

I've been leading the way on reforming the Supreme Court for many years.
This has been a long, and at times lonely, fight.
But we've got momentum now.

My SCERT Act, which would create real ethical guardrails at the Supreme Court, is through committee and ready for a floor vote.

AND I have the Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits Act to establish eighteen-year term limits for justices.

Will you chip in before our end-of-quarter fundraising deadline on September 30th to support my re-election campaign
so I can keep building on our momentum to clean up the mess at the
Court That Dark Money Built?

https://go.whitehouseforsenate.com/9261

Federal judge blocks employee abortion, IVF protections
at thousands of Catholic employers nationwide

The group that brought the challenge to a new federal policy argues it cannot be forced to accommodate
"immoral infertility 'treatments.'"

A federal judge in North Dakota issued an #injunction on Monday ❌blocking the🔸 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission🔸 from protecting
any employees of any members of a nationwide Catholic association
who are seeking time off or other accommodations under the #Pregnant #Workers #Fairness #Act
for an ♦️abortion or
♦️in vitro fertilization ( #IVF ) treatment.

U.S. District Judge #Daniel #Traynor, a Trump appointee to the federal court in North Dakota, issued the🔸 religion-infused preliminary injunction🔸 to partially
🆘 block enforcement of an EEOC rule implementing the 2022 law,
👉along with related implementation of Title VII of the #Civil #Rights #Act of 1964,

as to the Catholic Benefits Association and its members
— current or future
— #nationwide.

The order covers ⚠️more than 8,000 employers
— including thousands of churches
— across the country.

The #PWFA was passed in December 2022 and is supposed to protect covered workers from discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions”
by, in part, requiring employers to provide employees with reasonable accommodations.

The EEOC proposed its implementing rule for the PWFA in August 2023,
stating in part that abortion and fertility treatment, including IVF,
are covered by the law’s protections.

That rule, which does not relate to insurance coverage, went into effect in June.

Judge Traynor concluded that the CBA is likely to succeed in its challenge to the rule and related Title VII enforcement guidance under the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act".

Any appeal would go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit,
which only has one Democratic appointee among its 11 judges.

https://www.lawdork.com/p/federal-judge-injunction-cba-pwfa-abortion-ivf

Murder and other violent crime dropped across the U.S. last year, FBI data shows

Crime, including serious violent incidents like murder and rape, dropped nationally from 2022 to 2023, according to new data released by the FBI on Monday.
Violent crime was down about 3% from 2022 to 2023 and property crime took a similar drop of 2.4%, the FBI reported in its annual "Summary of Crime in the Nation."
The most serious crimes went down significantly: Murder and non-negligent manslaughter were down an estimated 11.6%
— the largest single year decline in two decades
— while rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%.
#proharris #gobiden
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/violent-crime-dropped-america-last-year-new-fbi-data-shows-rcna172217

Fertilizing the ocean with iron
is a form of #geoengineering,
a set of technologies that are compelling for their potential to meaningfully alter Earth’s systems,
-- and controversial for the same reason.

These days, some geoengineering techniques,
such as spraying chemicals into the sky to encourage clouds to produce more rain and ease drought,
are already in use.

Scientists have begun real-world demonstrations of
“cloud brightening,”
misting the skies with sea salt to dial up how much sunlight clouds reflect.

And even the more controversial approaches
—such as injecting the stratosphere with shiny sulfur compounds to block the sun’s rays
—are becoming part of mainstream climate discussions.

All of these methods are of undetermined efficacy, involve unknown risk, and may entail unintended consequences.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/09/geoengineering-microbe-bacteria-climate/679961/

When the eccentric entrepreneur Russ George dumped iron filings in the ocean, the world was outraged,

critics issued condemnations,

and experts talked soberly about the potential for disaster.

But we failed
— as we have on climate change in general
— to build any kind of international consensus about a solution.

In the meantime, we live in a world where
anyone can dump iron into the oceans,
and where local, commercial, and national actors might move ahead with larger-scale geoengineering interventions as climate change worsens.

Recent papers have outlined new ways that individuals could try to DIY-engineer our planet out of the climate crisis — with uncertain consequences.

Are we more prepared
for that than we were in 2012❓

Not really.

Russ George, for his part, considers himself vindicated,
and told me he’s continuing to work.

In his last email to me, he signed off:
“The greatest threat to the environment is waiting for someone else to save it.”

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/24/18273198/climate-change-russ-george-unilateral-geoengineering

🙏🏻 @Nazani

#geoengineering

Hey!
It’s Get Your Sh*t Together Day

- We’ve got a wannabe dictator campaigning for president,
- a religious weirdo as Speaker of the House,
- countless extremists running down-ballot,
- and a corrupt Supreme Court with a fetish for stripping away basic rights.

Do your part and check your voter registration status.

Then, guilt/inspire three friends to do the same.

https://www.votesaveamerica.com/

One of the most telling parts of Trump’s insane rant du jour was this:

YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES,

This is something that not only Trump believes,
or that members of the anti-abortion lobby believed
— it was a way for centrist pundits to demonstrate their Savvy.

The idea that "Roe was the reason there was political conflict over abortion" was amazingly widespread.
And, of course, couldn’t possibly be more #wrong:

⚠️The number of women in Texas who #died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth
#skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care
— far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.
🆘 From 2019 to 2022, the rate of #maternal #mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%,
compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

❌Supporters of abortion rights and women’s rights are #never going to accept this status quo.
🔥And it’s hard to imagine a time when the well-connected anti-abortion minority stops trying to pass draconian bans in every state legislature they control -- and nationally,
whether legislatively or by judicial fiat.
The idea that overruling Roe would mean you no longer have to think about abortion made no sense if you thought about it for more than 5 seconds,
but ⭐️this is the case of Trump believing something he heard all the time on cable news.

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/more-pregnant-women-getting-killed-by-trump-abortion-bans

Harris dares Trump to debate again with acceptance of CNN offering

Vice President Kamala Harris agreed to a presidential #debate on #CNN set for #Oct. #23, even though Donald Trump has signaled that he won’t debate again.

The Harris campaign is hoping Trump accepts this invitation -- given the format and setup will be similar to his face-off with President Joe Biden in June.

The debate would take place at CNN’s studio in Atlanta, Georgia.
Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said, “Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate,” given the similar format.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/presidential/3162280/harris-dares-trump-debate-again-acceptance-cnn/

Trump and his campaign enter turbulent phase in final weeks

With just 45 days left until the election,
the past three weeks reveal whatever control and self-restraint helped launch Trump’s third presidential campaign has largely disappeared in the crucial final stretch.


On the Monday before Trump’s first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, his running mate shared on social media, without evidence, the claim that Haitian immigrants were abducting and 🔸eating their neighbors’ pets
— one Trump repeated the following night on the debate stage, in a moment that instantly went viral.

Trump’s #chaotic and widely criticized #debate #performance coincided with an already tumultuous period for the former president.

He had recently welcomed back into his orbit Corey #Lewandowski
— his former 2016 campaign manager who was exiled after allegations of #sexual #assault by a donor
— and had begun traveling around the country with Laura #Loomer, a far-right ally who has spread #conspiracy #theories.

Two failed apparent #assassination attempts,
as well as additional #threats against him,
have also left the freewheeling presidential candidate constrained by a mushrooming #security presence and has made staging campaign events more challenging.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/21/trump-turbulence-campaign-election/

Newsweek just made a MAJOR surprise prediction!

"𝙺𝚊𝚖𝚊𝚕𝚊 𝙷𝚊𝚛𝚛𝚒𝚜 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚙𝚞𝚕𝚕 𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚊 "𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚎 𝚟𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢" 𝚒𝚗 𝙵𝚕𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚍𝚊" - 𝙽𝚎𝚠𝚜𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚔

Kamala Harris could pull off a STUNNING upset in Donald Trump's home state of Florida!

But that's ONLY going to happen if we drive Black Voter Turnout through the ROOF!

So we're doubling up our Florida Voter Turnout Fund to help our teams on the ground get every single voter to the polls.

Will you rush $5 to get Black voters to the polls in Florida?

https://go.cbcpac.org/ZbBEjP

🔵 Look - Barack Obama won Florida TWICE.

🔵🔵 And Joe Biden came within 3.4% of flipping it BLUE in 2020!

🔵🔵🔵 We can finally flip it blue again in 2024 but only with a WAVE of Black Voter Turnout.

This is the time to get off the sidelines. Rush $5 to help our Voter Turnout teams get Black voters to the polls:

https://go.cbcpac.org/ZbBEjP

Thank you so much,

-Congressional Black Caucus PAC

He was driving my rental car through the West Virginia coal fields when he said this.

His father had taken care with his dress and appearance.

Robert Mark liked suits and bow ties and his white beard as tightly and neatly groomed as an Augusta green.

Chris wore a wrinkled uniform of flannel and jeans and a careless stubble that was closer to the Augusta rough.

After 40 years in the coal fields, he looks and sounds less like a Princeton kid than a West Virginia coal miner.

When he laughs, he reveals a hole where a molar should be.

Nothing about him is decorative;
everything serves some structural purpose.

He lives in a modest house in the Pittsburgh suburbs
and drives a 10-year-old Subaru Forester with a standard transmission.

In the presence of luxury, he was visibly uneasy
— the sort of person who, when offered filet mignon,
squirms a bit before saying he’d rather have a cheeseburger.

“We always told our kids there are two ways to be rich,” he said.

“One is to make a lot of money.

The other is to not want much.”

It was the kind of thing a father would say only if he’d figured out how not to want much.

From the moment we left the interstate,
we were on narrow back roads winding through towns half-populated by people with a talent for throwing leery glances at strangers.

One side of the road was usually bordered by a canal or a single railroad track
and the other by exposed layers of sedimentary rock containing a thin seam of coal.

The West Virginia coal fields were famous for their abundance of coal seams.

Seldom more than six feet thick, they were still everywhere and encouraged generations of small mine operators to dig into the closest mountain they could find.

Every couple of miles, we’d pass a mine that had been abandoned,
its infrastructure left in place.

Old cranes rose from beds of weeds.

Chutes that once carried coal still ran half a mile from the mouths of exhausted mines to rusting and empty shipping containers.

“Does anyone ever intend to remove any of this?” I asked,
as we passed what looked like a vast abandoned construction site.

“It’s hard to imagine,” he said. “There’s no money in it.”

When Chris arrived in coal country in 1976, there were roughly 250,000 coal miners in the United States.

There are now fewer than 70,000.

During this time, West Virginia has turned from the bluest state in the country to the reddest.

“My idea about how society changes has changed,” he said.

Public interest in preventing miners from being killed on the job has always tended to peak after a mining disaster
and then fade until the next catastrophe.

The U.S. Bureau of Mines was created by an act of Congress in 1910,
three years after 362 coal miners were killed in an explosion in a West Virginia mine.

The bureau was mainly a research facility, however, and lacked the authority to police the mining industry.

In 1941, a year after mine explosions killed hundreds of miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania,
Congress gave the bureau the authority to enter mines and look around
— but not much else.

In 1952, a year after 111 coal miners died inside an Illinois mine, Congress required the industry to acknowledge every roof fall fatality and investigate the cause of failure.

In 1969, a year after 78 miners died in another explosion inside a West Virginia mine, Congress passed a new law that gave the bureau the power to punish safety violations with fines and even criminal charges.

In 1972, after 125 people were killed by a burst dam in a West Virginia coal mine, Congress,
suspecting that the Bureau of Mines had been largely captured by the industry it was meant to regulate,
encouraged the Interior Department to separate mine inspection and regulation,
and created a new agency called the Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration.

Five years later, after 15 miners died inside a coal mine in Kentucky, Congress changed the new agency’s name to the Mine Safety and Health Administration
and gave it even more powers.

It mandated quarterly inspections of every underground coal mine, for instance, to ensure it was following the safety rules.

The powers obviously were only as helpful as the safety rules.

And the safety rules had some problems.

In the late 1960s, roughly 200 American coal miners were dying on the job every year.

Half of those were killed by collapsing roofs,
and roughly half of those were killed while following the existing safety rules.

No one ever told Chris to invent better rules.

But before he even began to figure out better designs for coal mine pillars, he knew that was what he wanted to do:

He wanted to keep miners safe.

As he worked toward his PhD, he figured out that the only place to do it was inside the federal government.

The coal mining companies had largely dodged their responsibility.

Industry executives who visited Penn State made it clear to Chris that they viewed safety as a subject for wimps and losers.

And no one coal mining company was likely to fund the research that would benefit all coal companies.

Working on his thesis, right through the mid-1980s, Chris had offers to teach,
but he knew no university could guarantee him access to the mines he wanted to study.

“Plus, academia puts on a facade of being impartial but is in fact much more closely connected to industry than anything else,” he said.

“In some ways it is an arm of industry.”

He needed to find a job inside the federal government,
with either the Mine Safety and Health Administration or the Bureau of Mines.

The mine safety agency had been hit by the Reagan administration with a hiring freeze.

But the Bureau of Mines, still largely owned by the industry, had some money and knew about his research.

“I just kind of had an open door there,” said Chris.

“I’m not actually sure who even hired me.

I know I had one interview because I forgot a tie and had to stop off at Wal-Mart on the way to buy one.”

It was now 1987.

He was 31 years old, married and the father of a 1-year-old son.

He joined the bureau at its research facility outside of Pittsburgh.

Upon arrival, he sensed a certain wariness from his new colleagues.

No one else had a PhD.

No one else had studied with the great Bieniawski.

“They put me in a basement office that was way out of the way with a guy who was mentally unstable,” said Chris.

“Whenever I’d get a phone call, he’d start making these funny sounds.”

They also assigned him to the jobs no one else wanted
— week-long trips to gather data from coal mines in Kentucky.

None of it mattered;

he was the least likely human being on the planet to put on airs,
and what was pain to others was pleasure to him.

He didn’t even much care that his phone calls triggered at the desk beside him the honks of a braying donkey.

“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” said Chris.

“The idea of being able to spend weeks studying these longwall mines was fantastic.

And as soon as I got to the Bureau of Mines, I had no one to tell me what to do.

I even made up my own title:
Principal Roof Control Specialist.”

He began with the problem he’d been attacking in his still-unfinished PhD thesis:

roof collapse inside longwall coal mines.

Evaluating the safety of a coal mine roof was less like evaluating the safety of a suspension bridge than it was predicting the performance of baseball players.

No matter what you did, you were going to be wrong some of the time:

The best you could do was improve the odds of success.

And the way to do this was to collect lots of data from roof failures
and search for patterns.

Much later, he’d explain his approach in a paper:

“The very words ‘statistical analysis’ seem foreign to many in rock engineering.

Engineers are trained to see the world in terms of load and deformation,
where failure is simply a matter of stress exceeding strength.

Statistics are generally given short shrift in engineering curriculums,
and so the entire language of statistics is unfamiliar.

Yet statistics are the tools that science has developed to deal with uncertainty and probability,
which are both at the heart of mining ground control.”

His new job came with a badge that granted him access to any mine he wished to study.

The Bureau of Mines also kept records of deadly roof failures along with important details:

the mine’s depth, the size and shape of its pillars, the nature of the rock in the roof, and so on.

Oddly, no one was really searching for meaning in the numbers.

“They had all this data but weren’t doing much with it,” said Chris.

The phenomenon had also occurred in baseball and, I’d bet, in other fields, too.

The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it.

People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure.

But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.

He finished his thesis while settling into his new job at the Bureau of Mines.

But even before it was finished, coal mine engineers embraced his stability factor.

At conferences, they’d come up to him after he’d explained his work and say,
what you are doing is the future.

They hadn’t felt compelled to do the work themselves, but they were delighted that he spared them these roof falls that cost them $200 a minute to clean up.

There was a limit to its practical usefulness, though, as the stability of a coal mine roof depended on its specific geology.

And the geology varied from coal field to coal field.

“In some places, like Pittsburgh, you needed a higher stability factor,
and in other places, like Alabama, you could use a smaller one,” said Chris.

The same stress that caused a mine roof outside Pittsburgh to crumble and collapse would have no effect on a mine roof in Alabama.

It wasn’t enough to know the load on the pillars.

You needed also to know more about the rock mass over them.

In some coal fields, the sedimentary layers were as thick and cohesive as a chocolate fudge cake,

in others as thin and flaky as a mille-feuille.

Some mines had more moisture in them than others,
and some rocks, in the presence of moisture, would return to mud.

Layers of laminated shale tended to be weakly bonded and vulnerable to horizontal stress.

All else equal, a layer of sandstone was a good sign.

Yes, it had once been a beach, but grains of sand tended to bond more strongly than other particles.

Between a rock and a rock mass was the difference between a person and a society.

Hard as it was to understand a rock,
it was far harder to understand masses made of lots of different rocks.

And so Chris spent much of the late 1980s and early 1990s figuring out which qualities in rock masses caused their strength to vary.

“What I realized very quickly was that none of the existing classification systems for rocks were going to work for coal mine roofs.

You are evaluating not a rock but a structure.

There’s enormous variety.

That’s the key, to look past that variety and come up with a measure.”

Again, he found work done by others and repurposed it for his uses.

Back in the 1940s, geologists working for the Agriculture Department in national forests created a crude method for work crews to determine if some rock would work as a road:

whacking it with a ball-peen hammer.

Oddly, it didn’t matter how hard you whacked it.

There were just a handful of ways the rock might react,
and its specific reaction revealed its strength.

Chris started whacking mine roofs with ball-peen hammers.

“It’s not precise,” he said, “but it does get you in the ballpark.”

The why of it all often remained out of view.

He couldn’t explain why certain traits in a rock mass made it less prone to collapse.

He could just show that they did.

But as Chris set out to classify rock masses, he noticed an odd force that was often observed inside underground coal mines:

the massive horizontal stress on the rock.

“There’s a textbook explanation for stress in the ground,” he said.

“You have the vertical stress of the rock above.

And any time you apply stress from above, the rock below tries to expand laterally.

But at depth it can’t expand laterally in either direction because it is confined by other rock.

So you get horizontal stress.”

In the textbooks, the rule of thumb was that the horizontal stress was about one-third of the vertical stress.

In fact, as mine engineers had known from the stress gauges they drilled into rock,
the forces on the rock running parallel to the Earth’s surface were often two to three times greater than the vertical pressure from the rock pressing down directly from above.

Often miners could even see this horizontal stress
— say, in a buckled mine floor.

But its source was a mystery.

“No one could explain it,” said Chris.

“Nobody had any theory of it.”

It finally occurred to him that what coal miners were seeing near the surface of the Earth
was simply an expression of forces deeper in the Earth’s crust:
plate tectonics.

He made a study and sure enough, the direction of the horizontal stress in coal mines lined up exactly with the definitive plate tectonics stress map that had been created in the 1970s.

The plates pushing against each other directly below West Virginia create a stress running from east to west.

West Virginia mines that ran north to south had always experienced more roof collapses than those that ran east to west,
but no one knew why.

Now they did:

It was as if they were trying to saw against a wood’s grain instead of with it.

“Once you figured that out, it was like magic,” said Chris.

“You would see people’s eyes light up.”

At the start, much of what Chris did in his new job felt like bricolage.

He took data gathered by others and work done by others and repurposed it to his narrow problem.

His immediate goal was to create for the pillars inside the tunnels of longwall mines the equivalent of what engineers call a safety rating.

A safety rating is the load-bearing capacity of whatever is holding the load,
divided by the load.

(If it’s less than one, don’t look up.)

Bieniawski had created a formula for calculating the load-bearing capacity of coal pillars,
but to use it you needed to know the load that needed bearing.

Calculating this was tricky.

It changed as coal was removed from the mine in ways that were not obvious,
and that varied from mine to mine.

The rock that collapsed harmlessly behind the mining machine did not have the same ability to support the mountain above it as the previously intact seam of coal.

Crumbled cake offered less support to whatever was above it than intact cake.

The weight of the mountain needed to travel someplace.

One place it went was onto the remaining coal pillars.

The more coal you removed, the greater the so-called abutment load
— not the load that was vertically over the pillar, but the load that moved, horizontally, onto it.

Chris spent several years measuring the way the load on the pillars changed as coal was mined.

His aim was to reduce his findings to a set of equations that could be used by mine designers.

Given the length of the mining wall, the depth of the mine and the height of the roof, etc.,
the load should be roughly X.

X was the numerator of his safety factor, which,
to avoid the impression that the entire mine was rendered safe by it,
he renamed the “stability factor.”

He then back-tested the number against case histories to see whether coal mine roofs had indeed collapsed when the stability factor was less than his model thought it needed to be.

He was turning pillar stability into a science.

“All I’m doing is taking trial and error and looking at the data more scientifically,” he said.

By academic statistician standards, his work was more than a bit loose.

“I’ll never have a database that is large enough
— or collected in the random way that you’d need to do precise statistical analysis,” he said.

“I’ll never be able to say ‘there’s a 95 percent chance the roof will hold up.’

You’ll never know the exact probabilities.

I’m using statistics to make better engineering judgments.”

By 1994, Chris had figured out how to rate any coal mine roof, on a scale of 1 to 100.

He’d created new understanding of the effects on roof strength of various properties of rock masses:
the thickness of the sedimentary layers, their sensitivity to moisture, their response to being whacked by a ball-peen hammer, and so on.

He’d reduced these to a checklist that any coal mine engineer anywhere in the world could use to evaluate his roof and know just how much support it required.

And then he’d traveled to coal fields across the United States to personally deliver to mining engineers the new knowledge,
in the form of software he’d written.

“Technology transfer has always been central to what I do,” he said.

“If you don’t transfer it, you’re just wasting taxpayers’ money.”

It was all voluntary.

Congress never passed any law that ordered coal mine companies to use the Chris Mark software.

The last specific rules on the subject passed by Congress had been written in 1969 and said only that coal mine pillars needed to be sized appropriately for their conditions.

It never specified what that meant.

“It’s not like we told them, ‘Hey, you have to use 70 foot-wide pillars here,’” said Chris.

“We just said, ‘Here’s a solution.’

I knew it was better than anything they had before.

There was no competition out there.”

A mining engineer named Phil Worley, who’d spent his entire career working for coal mining companies, put it another way:

“It was like somebody turned on the lights.”

There’s obviously something unusual about a person willing to spend a decade figuring out how to prevent roofs collapsing in longwall coal mines.

“Why I find it so fascinating is a mystery to everyone I’ve ever met,” said Chris.

“But I do.”

Most people capable of solving such a time-intensive technical problem would grow bored of it before they were done.

“You have to be smart but not too smart to put in the years,” as he put it.

The federal government has long been a natural home for such characters:

people with their noses buried in some particular problem from which they feel no need to look up.

But once Chris had solved his particular technical problem, he had nothing to do but to look up.

“I said, ‘Okay, I solved the pillar problem for longwall mines.

What do I want to do next?

I want to look at whatever has the direst safety implications.’”

He never questioned the path he had put himself on,
but he soon had new thoughts about how to move along it.

“As far as I was concerned, there was only one reason I was there:
worker safety,” he said.

“At the Bureau of Mines you didn’t have to feel that way.

The kinds of things we did research on were usually not the same things that killed people.

It was more about keeping the mine stable and working.

But I started asking: What’s killing people?”

And so he brought his statistical mind to another mother lode of data:
casualty reports,
which had been meticulously collected since they were mandated by law in 1952.

He began to read individual accident reports.

Patterns leaped out from them.

Chris had always imagined that accidents in a coal mine followed the same logic as casualties on a battlefield.

In war, the rule of thumb had always been that for every soldier who died, three or four would be wounded.

He now saw that for every miner who was killed by a falling roof, 100 were injured.

More oddly, the injuries were occurring in mines where the pillars held up.

“When I looked at the data, the support system seemed to be working, but you had all these injuries,” said Chris.

He assembled another database.

It showed that injuries were being caused by smaller pieces of rock falling between the pillars.

As these fragments could be the size of Volkswagen buses,
they occasionally killed,
but mostly they just maimed. “

I realized that death and injuries were two separate problems,” he said.

“On a battlefield the same bullet can kill or wound you.

Here there are two different mechanisms.”

He’d been so focused on the bullets that killed that he hadn’t noticed the bullets that usually just wounded.

This was the problem that roof bolts had been invented to fix.

Right through World War II, miners had used timbers to support the roof directly over their heads.

In the 1940s, a handful of coal companies showed that it was far more effective to bolt the roof,
effectively to itself.

It struck many miners, at first, as completely weird.

They’d drill a hole into the mine roof and then drive a metal bolt between three and six feet long into it.

The bolt pinned the sedimentary layers together the way a toothpick pins a turkey club sandwich.

The success of the bolt
— and the toothpick
— turns on the presence of at least one solid, strong layer.

Roof bolts, in effect, used strong rock to hold weaker rock in place.

“The single most important technological development in the field of ground control in the entire history of mining,” Chris called them.

Roof bolts were adopted more rapidly than any other technology in coal mining.

Someone had the idea, and almost instantly they were being drilled into mine roofs.

They obviously worked and yet … they hadn’t.

At least not for a very long time.

In the accident statistics, Chris stumbled upon a riddle:

The powerful new technology hadn’t reduced deaths and injuries.

“The accepted story was someone invented roof bolts and it was safer right away,” he said.

“I looked into it and saw it just wasn’t true.

By the end of the 1950s, death rates had actually gone up!”

It was a full two decades before roof fall fatality rates began to decline, and dramatically.

That year, 1969, also happened to be the year that the Bureau of Mines was finally given the enforcement power it needed to properly regulate the industry.

The standard story
— the story accepted by the coal mine industry
— was that new technology had led inexorably to greater safety.

What had happened was far more interesting
— and told you how this little American subculture worked,
rather than the way economists who had never seen the inside of a coal mine might imagine that it worked.

Roof bolts were indeed more efficient and effective than timber supports in preventing chunks of roof from wounding miners.

But they were expensive to install.

The coal mine companies had, in effect, figured out how few roof bolts they needed to use to maintain the same level of risk their miners had endured before their invention.

“Simply stated,” Chris wrote, “roof bolts can only prevent roof falls if enough of them are installed.”

And so, amazingly, for the first 20 years of its use, the main effect of the most important lifesaving technology in the history of coal mining was to increase the efficiency of the mines
while preserving existing probabilities of death and injury.

Taking advantage, essentially, of people conditioned to a certain level of risk by failing to ameliorate that risk.

“No one puts people’s lives at risk per se,” Chris said.

“It’s not obvious most of the time that people’s lives are at stake.

You’re always playing probabilities.

But they knew what they were doing.

They could see people dying.

Even in a union mine they did it.

That is what is so extraordinary.

These were not dumb guys.

This was a conscious decision.”

If coal mine companies had played the odds with miners’ lives,
it was because they felt they couldn’t afford not to.

Any mine that installed a safe number of roof bolts would find itself at a competitive disadvantage to any mine that didn’t.

It had been a race to the bottom,
and until Chris created his database and made his study,
no one had really noticed what had happened.

If working-class families in West Virginia were angry but didn’t know quite where to direct their feelings,
here was a road map.

Their society had just assumed it could foist risk upon them without anyone ever really noticing or caring.

But someone had noticed.

The point of the roof bolt story was that,
left to itself,
the free market would fail to protect ordinary workers
— even when it clearly had the wherewithal to do so.

A mining company called Murray Energy soon proved the point.

Just before 3 in the morning of Aug. 6, 2007, the pillars collapsed inside of its Crandall Canyon mine in Emery County, Utah.

Crandall Canyon was especially deep:

Six miners were trapped 2,000 feet underground.

Three rescue workers were killed trying to save them.

The bodies of the six miners were never recovered.

The subsequent investigation and Senate hearings and criminal trials would last for years,
but it took Chris less than a day to work out what had happened:

The company had ignored his formula for pillar design.

As the pillars were made of coal, the fewer of them you left standing, the more coal you could remove.

Murray Energy wanted more coal, and to get it, the company had hired an engineering consultant who persuaded a regional mine inspector to sign off on a pillar scheme that Chris’s formula would have flagged as wildly risky.

“This is one where it should have saved lives but didn’t,” said Chris.

“They ran my algorithm.

They knew they had a problem.

They said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.’ ”

“The short answer to the question of what happened at Crandall Canyon is that the people in the Western coal fields had this deep-seated idea that the rules from the East didn’t apply to them,” said Chris.

Historians already knew that the cathedrals had been erected over decades, one bay at a time, from east to west.

Mark’s models showed how adjustments in design made by the builders
— the slight differences from one bay to the next
— were probably responses to problems they had observed along the way.

A crack in an early pillar led to a different approach for a subsequent pillar.

This is how people unable to multiply or divide had erected these miraculous structures:
by trial and error.

This enterprise was the SpaceX of its day.

By the time Chris was aware of what his father did for a living,
his father had become a tiny bit famous.

He’d been featured in Life magazine and Scientific American and was soon to be the subject of a PBS documentary.

Chris was the eldest of three sons and the one whose mind most resembled his father’s:

Their thoughts rhymed in all sorts of interesting ways.

He was usually the smartest kid in the class.

Technically gifted, he, too, crossed the usual academic boundaries.

He, too, loved art and history.

“In kindergarten, I’d ride a tricycle and pull my socks over my pants because it looked like Napoleon in garters.”

He was naturally self-contained and inclined to see the world for himself rather than how others wished him to see it.

His parents encouraged the quality.

When he was 5, he asked his mother, how come the rest of the world goes to church and we don’t?

“She said, ‘Well, they’re wrong and we’re right.’

And what I took away from that was that I should be able to make my own decisions about right and wrong,
and whatever anyone else thinks doesn’t matter.”

He had a feeling in him that his father lacked, however,
or perhaps he could afford to develop a side of himself that his father couldn’t:

the side that questioned the structure not just of churches but of society.

“I have a very fine nose for elitism,” said Chris.

“And it bothers me.

And I was in Princeton.

There’s a kind of idea at a place like that:
‘We’re the smartest and you should just shut up and let us run the world.’

And this just really bugs me.”

The younger Mark was coming of age in what seemed to him a revolution.

His weeping mother had awakened him in the middle of the night, when he was 12 years old,
to inform him that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been killed.

The Vietnam War was roiling the Princeton campus
— and it wasn’t Ivy League kids being sent to fight and die.

One day, flipping through one of his mother’s magazines,
Chris came across photographs from Vietnam.

They showed children killed and wounded by American napalm and shrapnel.

Next to them was a piece about an American company that had figured out how to make plastic shrapnel,
so that it couldn’t be detected by an X-ray.

“This sent me off the deep end,” said Chris.

“Everyone knew what napalm did to kids in villages.

This was the same mentality used in a different way.”

By the time he reached high school, he was joining campus war protests
and entering a running one-way argument with his father.

“Chris was very political,” recalled his brother Peter Mark.

“Very antiestablishment.

He used words like ‘bourgeois.’”

His father, still working for the Defense Department, didn’t share his son’s taste for politics.

“My father didn’t like to argue,” said Peter Mark.

“He’d just listen to Chris and say, ‘you got funny ideas.’”

The roof of their family home had yet to collapse, but the structure exhibited obvious cracks.

One was that Chris identified less with the class his father had ascended to than the class he’d come from.

“He always wondered why the police didn’t use horses more often to scare demonstrators,” said Chris.

Christopher Mark was born in 1956, the eldest of three sons of a civil engineer named Robert Mark.

His mother was a classical pianist, but his mother, for reasons that later became clear, wasn’t present in Chris’s initial, and somewhat halting, telling of his own story.

His father, however, was impossible to hide.

His father had moved the family to Princeton the year Chris was born.

Robert Mark had grown up in the Bronx and studied engineering at City College of New York.

A few years out of college, he’d made a name for himself with his deft use of photoelastic models to test the effects of physical stress on virtually any object.

He was testing fighter jets and nuclear subs for the Defense Department when Princeton hired him to test parts of small but expensive nuclear reactors it was about to build.

His work saved Princeton so much money that the university ignored his lack of graduate education and invited him to be a professor in the engineering department.

He accepted.

There, his life was biffed onto a radically different course.

“A kid asked a question,” recalled Chris.

“He’d just come from some art history class, where they had these running arguments about Gothic cathedrals
— if certain elements in the buildings are there for aesthetic reasons or structural reasons.

The kid asks my dad:
Can you answer the questions using these models you have?”

The answer was yes.

It would be a bit like reopening a cold case using new DNA technology.

A 12th-century builder had no concept of gravity and only Roman numerals to work with:
He couldn’t multiply or divide.

And yet an engineering movement that started in roughly 1135 A.D. proceeded to generate structures more improbable and accomplished than anything built anywhere in the world over the next 700 years.

As if to further bewilder historians, their architects had left next to no written records.

Any tourist who has stumbled into Chartres soon asks the obvious question:
What’s holding this roof up?

By the time the question was put to Robert Mark, scholars had pretty much given up looking for an answer.

“An insuperable barrier separates their approach to building from ours,” wrote one of the leading historians of Gothic art, before dismissing any hope of figuring it out.

But then Mark deployed his stress-testing gizmos to investigate Gothic cathedrals.

“Robert’s big thing was showing that this technique that came from aerospace could be used for concrete,” says Rob Bork,
a former student and current professor of medieval architecture at the University of Iowa.

“The work was not only original but essentially unique.”

Mark began by taking a vertical slice of, say, Chartres and replicating it in a special kind of plastic.

He’d then hang fishing weights from various points on the plastic replica,
like ornaments on a Christmas tree,
to simulate the actual external forces acting upon various parts of the cathedral.

There was the direct load of the overhead stone, of course,
but also the winds.

(To estimate the winds in the 12th century, he found anemometer readings in rural France going back a century. Not perfect, but good enough.)

He placed his fully loaded plastic model in an oven, where it was subjected not just to heat but also light.

Warmed, the plastic model revealed its stresses, sort of like the way an MRI reveals damage to soft human tissue.

The models had their own haunting beauty.

They turned art history into science.

They generated testable hypotheses.

They predicted exactly which stones inside Chartres or any other cathedral might be overstressed by their loads.

But the power of Mark’s methods became clearest when he traveled to France to visit cathedrals.

The buildings behaved exactly the way his models suggested they should.

“There should be cracking in the mortar here,” he would say to some French stonemason at Chartres,
and the stonemason would invariably reply,

“We repointed that only last year!”

For centuries, the damage inside Chartres had been repaired by workers who never understood why certain stones always needed replacing.

Now this guy from Princeton could not only tell you why
— he could explain the buildings in ways that not even their builders could have done.

Mark founded a program at Princeton that combined architecture and engineering.

His plastic models yielded insights beyond the cathedrals’ weak spots.

They proved that certain Gothic features that art historians assumed essential were mostly decorative
and other Gothic features that seemed decorative were structural,
preventing the roof from collapsing.

An example:
The pinnacles on top of the outer piers had been thought to be mainly for show,
but they actually pre-stressed the mortar beneath them and thus prevented it from cracking and weakening the entire structure.