The way I see it, few parts of American life are as quintessentially American as buying gas. We love our cars, we love our oil, and an industry about as old as automobiles themselves has developed a highly consistent, fully automated, and fairly user friendly system for filling the former with the latter.

I grew up in Oregon. While these rules have since been relaxed, many know Oregon for its long identity as one of two states where you cannot pump your own gas (the other being New Jersey). Instead, an attendant, employee of the gas station, operates the equipment. Like Portland's lingering indoor gas station, Oregon's favor for "full-service" is a holdover. It makes sense, of course, that all gas stations used to be full-service.

The front part of a gas station, where the pumps are and where you pull up your car, is called the Forecourt. The practicalities of selling gasoline, namely that it is a liquid sold by volume, make the forecourt more complex than you might realize. It's a set of devices that many of us interact with on a regular basis, but we rarely think about the sheer number of moving parts and long-running need for digital communications. Hey, that latter part sounds interesting, doesn't it?

Electric vehicles are catching on in the US. My personal taste in vehicles tends towards "old" and "cheap," but EVs have been on the market for long enough that they now come in that variety. Since my daily driver is an EV, I don't pay my dues at the Circle K nearly as often as I used to. One of the odd little details of EVs is the complexity hidden in the charging system or "EVSE," which requires digital communications with the vehicle for protection reasons. As consumers across the country install EVSE in their garages, we're all getting more familiar with these devices and their price tags. We might forget that, well, handling a fluid takes a lot of equipment as well... we just don't think about it, having shifted the whole problem to a large industry of loosely supervised hazardous chemical handling facilities.

The front of the American grocery store contains a strange, liminal space: the transitional area between parking lot and checkstand, along the front exterior and interior of the building, that fills with oddball commodities. Ice is a fixture at nearly every store, filtered water at most, firewood at some. This retail purgatory, both too early and too late in the shopping journey for impulse purchases, is mostly good only for items people know they will need as they check out. One of the standard residents of this space has always struck me as peculiar: dry ice.

Carbon dioxide ice is said to have been invented, or we might better say discovered, in the 1830s. For whatever reason, it took just about a hundred years for the substance to be commercialized. Thomas B. Slate was a son of Oregon, somehow ended up in Boston, and then realized that the solid form of CO2 was both fairly easy to produce and useful as a form of refrigeration. With an eye towards marketing, he coined the name Dry Ice—and founded the DryIce Corporation of America. The year was 1925, and word quickly spread. In a widely syndicated 1930 article, "Use of Carbon Dioxide as Ice Said to be Developing Rapidly," the Alamogordo Daily News and others reported that "the development of... 'concentrated essence of frigidity' for use as a refrigerant in transportation of perishable products, is already taxing the manufacturing facilities of the Nation... So rapidly has the use of this new form of refrigeration come into acceptance that there is not sufficient carbon dioxide gas available."

The rush to dry ice seems strange today, but we must consider the refrigeration technology of the time. Refrigerated transportation first emerged in the US during the middle of the 19th century. Train boxcars, packed thoroughly with ice, carried meat and fruit from midwestern agriculture to major cities. This type of refrigerated transportation greatly expanded the availability of perishables, and the ability to ship fruits and vegetables between growing regions made it possible, for the first time, to get some fresh fruit out of season. Still, it was an expensive proposition: railroads built extensive infrastructure to support the movement of trains loaded down with hundreds of tons of ice. The itself had to be quarried from frozen lakes, some of them purpose-built, a whole secondary seasonal transportation economy.

Previously on Computers Are Bad, we discussed the early history of air traffic control in the United States. The technical demands of air traffic control are well known in computer history circles because of the prominence of SAGE, but what's less well known is that SAGE itself was not an air traffic control system at all. SAGE was an air defense system, designed for the military with a specific task of ground-controlled interception (GCI). There is natural overlap between air defense and air traffic control: for example, both applications require correlating aircraft identities with radar targets. This commonality lead the Federal Aviation Agency (precursor to today's FAA) to launch a joint project with the Air Force to adapt SAGE for civilian ATC.

There are also significant differences. In general, SAGE did not provide any safety functions. It did not monitor altitude reservations for uniqueness, it did not detect loss of separation, and it did not integrate instrument procedure or terminal information. SAGE would need to gain these features to meet FAA requirements, particularly given the mid-century focus on mid-air collisions (a growing problem, with increasing air traffic, that SAGE did nothing to address).

The result was a 1959 initiative called SATIN, for SAGE Air Traffic Integration. Around the same time, the Air Force had been working on a broader enhancement program for SAGE known as the Super Combat Center (SCC). The SCC program was several different ideas grouped together: a newer transistorized computer to host SAGE, improved communications capabilities, and the relocation of Air Defense Direction Centers from conspicuous and vulnerable "SAGE Blockhouses" to hardened underground command centers, specified as an impressive 200 PSI blast overpressure resistance (for comparison, the hardened telecommunication facilities of the Cold War were mostly specified for 6 or 10 PSI).

Some years ago, I had a frustrating and largely fruitless encounter with the politics of policing. As a member of an oversight commission, I was particularly interested in the regulation of urban surveillance. The Albuquerque Police Department, for reasons good and bad, has often been an early adopter of surveillance technology. APD deployed automated license plate readers, mounted on patrol cars and portable trailers, in 2013. Initially, the department kept a six-month history of license plate data. For six months, police could retrospectively search the database to reconstruct a vehicle, or person's, movements—at least, those movements that happened near select patrol cars and "your speed is" trailers. Lobbying by the American Civil Liberties Union and public pressure on APD and city council lead to a policy change to retain data for only 14 days, a privacy-preserving measure that the ACLU lauded as one of the best ALPR policies in the nation.

Today, ALPR is far more common in Albuquerque. Lowering costs and a continuing appetite for solving social problems with surveillance technology means that some parts of the city have ALPR installed at every signalized intersection—every person's movements cataloged at a resolution of four blocks. The data is retained for a full year. Some of it is offered, as a service, to law enforcement agencies across the country.

One of the most frustrating parts of the mass surveillance debate is the ability of law enforcement agencies and municipal governments to advance wide-scale monitoring programs, weather the controversy, and then ratchet up retention and sharing after public attention fades. For years, expansive ALPR programs spread through most American cities with little objection. In my part of the country, it seemed that the controversy over ALPR had been completely forgotten until one particularly significant ALPR vendor—Flock Safety—started repeatedly stepping in long-festering controversies with such wild abandon that they are clearly either idiots or entirely unconcerned about public perception.

One of the difficult things about describing a grift, or at least what became a grift, is judging the sincerity with which the whole thing started. Scams often crystallize around a kernel of truth: genuinely good intentions that start rolling down the hill to profitability and end up crashing through every solid object along the way. I'm not totally sure about Evelyn Wood; she seems to have had all the best in mind but still turned so quickly to hotel conference room seminars that I have trouble lending her the benefit of the doubt.

Still, she was a teacher, and I am inclined to be sympathetic to teachers. Funny, then, that Wood's journey to fame started with another teacher. His curious reading behavior, whether interpreted as intense attention or half-assed inattention, set into motion one of the mid-century's greatest and, perhaps, most embarrassing executive self-help sensations.

In 1929, Evelyn Wood earned a bachelor's in English at the University of Utah. The following two decades are a bit obscure; she took various high-school jobs around Utah leading ultimately to Salt Lake City's Jordan High School. There, as a counselor to girl students, Wood found that many students struggled because of their reading. Assigned books were arduous, handouts discarded. These students struggled to read so severely that it hampered their performance in every area. She launched a remedial reading program of her own design, during which she made her first discovery: as her students learned to read faster, their comprehension improved. Then their grades—in every subject—followed suit. Reading, she learned, was a foundational skill. A person could learn more, do more, achieve more, if only they could read faster.

Wood became fascinated with reading, probably the reason for her return to the University of Utah for a master's degree in speech. Around 1946, she turned her thesis in to Dr. Lowell Lees. Lees was the chair of the Speech and Theater Department, and had a hand in much of the development of Utah theater from the Great Depression until his death in the 1950s. A period photo of Lees depicts him with a breastplate-microphone intercom headset and a look of concentration, hands on the levers of a mechanical variac dimmer rack. He is backstage of either "Show Boat" or "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the university's summer theater festival. A theater department chair on lights seems odd, yes, but theater was Lees passion.