Ennio and His Fistful of Dollars

In the 1960s, the movie-loving world became obsessed with the American West. Hollywood couldn’t stop exploring themes around gunslingers and lawmen. Much in the way that superhero movies consistently top the box office and the Star Wars tv shows are the most talked about today, Westerns dominated entertainment during the 1960s and the creators of these Westerns were propelled to stardom. Three men in particular would have their lives forever altered by their portrayal of the American West.

The first is Sergio Leone. Leone was an Italian director who popularized what is now known as the Spaghetti Western. The term was publicized by a Spanish journalist to define the rise of Westerns, directed and produced by Italians, whose actors generally had no common language; the movie instead being dubbed over in a uniform language during production. This new genre encompassed some of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of all time: Django, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and A Fistful of Dollars. The last of these movies would surge the second man whose career was to change forever into stardom: Ennio Morricone.

Towards the end of his life, Ennio Morricone would outright refuse to talk about his career ties to Sergio Leone. Not out of a resentment of the man who he made five legendary Westerns with, but instead that his career seemed to never escape “The Sergio Question,” the persistent attention put on the old days and not whatever Ennio was working on at that moment. Ennio was obsessed with his present work and was frustrated by interviewers who were obsessed with the past.

Morricone was relatively unknown when he was approached by Sergio Leone to create a film score for the director’s new movie A Fist Full of Dollars. In addition to Ennio as a composer, a young actor named Clint Eastwood would join the cast as the lead. When the movie was released in 1967, each of the three men’s lives changed forever. Leone’s budget for his movie was $200,000. Each of his following movies would have budgets that were large multiples of this amount, but in his obscurity it was the most that could be afforded. $200,000 needed to be allocated across actors, production crew, set creation, promotion, and, of course, score composition. It was in this last line item that Leone decided that serious budget cuts would be adopted.

The specific proportion of funding that Morricone was allotted to create an entirely original soundtrack is not known, but it was such a small amount that he could not afford to hire a full orchestra for his recording. He was hired to define the sound of a new world in the Dollars Trilogy, but wasn’t given the tools to do it. Instead of simply writing the music that would underscore Leone’s creation, he would have to improvise sounds which would be inserted in lieu of the instruments that Ennio was accustomed to working with.

To compensate for the missing musicians, Ennio utilized instruments and sounds that weren’t all intrinsically musical: gunshots, yelling, the crack of whips, and, famously, a Fender electric guitar. These sounds punctuated the soundtrack of A Fistful of Dollars where one at that time would expect to here cymbals, kettledrums, and a strings section. The title track from A Fistful of Dollars opens with a low acoustic guitar and then proceeds to mix in some of the most inexpensive sounds one can make: someone is whistling the melody, triangles ring, a bell tolls, and someone chants. From our vantage the song is the quintessential Western song, but at the time these kinds of amalgamated, wild seeming noises had no association with gunfights and deserts. It was a musical innovation being heard for the first time, defining a legendary trilogy and laying the groundwork for nearly all Spaghetti Westerns that would follow.

A Fistful of Dollars was a massive success at the box office earning $18,875,000 world-wide. Sergio Leone was immediately slated to direct a sequel and Ennio Morricone’s involvement in the score creation was without question. Leone and his crew of increasing fame had now proven they deserved far more funding to create their anticipated sequel. The sequel, For A Few Dollars More, received a much larger budget than the title would suggest. The budget tripled to $600,000 for the new film.

One would expect that with this new budget, Morricone would finally splurge on a full blown orchestra and create the kinds of sounds that he was trained to compose. That didn’t happen. For A Few Dollars More and each of the succeeding Westerns that Leone and Morricone made together followed the musical blueprint created on a restrictive budget during their first film together. Thanks to, not in spite of, the lack of funding for an orchestra early in his career Morricone proved his worth as a musical innovator and created a genre that was truly original and beautiful.

Accidentally Changing the World: A Very Short History of Quantum Mechanics

Last week a team of scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China accomplished what many had speculated was impossible: Quantum Supremacy. Quantum Supremacy sounds intimidating, and it is, yet it’s easily understood at a very high level. Simply put, Quantum Supremacy is a computer's ability to solve at least one problem from a set that is currently either unsolvable or takes a massive amount of time to solve given current computing methods. Until very recently, such an outcome was deemed completely infeasible. This particular turn in computing is of massive importance. Scott Aaronson, Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas, explains in his brilliant blog about Quantum Computing (QC):

It’s like, have a little respect for the immensity of what we’re talking about here, and for the terrifying engineering that’s needed to make it reality. Before quantum supremacy, by definition, the QC skeptics can all laugh to each other that, for all the billions of dollars spent over 20+ years, still no quantum computer has even once been used to solve any problem faster than your laptop could solve it, or at least not in any way that depended on its being a quantum computer. In a post-quantum-supremacy world, that’s no longer the case. A superposition involving 2^50 or 2^60 complex numbers has been computationally harnessed, using time and space resources that are minuscule compared to 2^50 or 2^60. I keep bringing up the Wright Flyer only because the chasm between what we’re talking about, and the dismissiveness I’m seeing in some corners of the Internet, is kind of breathtaking to me. It’s like, if you believed that useful air travel was fundamentally impossible, then seeing a dinky wooden propeller plane keep itself aloft wouldn’t refute your belief… but it sure as hell shouldn’t reassure you either.

Essentially, the advent of Quantum Supremacy isn't the flight you'll take home to see your family at Christmas, it's the first flight that many people believed couldn't happen. Like the Wright Flyer, the Quantum Supremacy achieved in China as a specific innovation does not have a massive effect on your life, but it most likely will drastically change the world with the variations that follow as a result of it. How did the scientists of Google, IBM, the University of Science and Technology of China, and others know about Quantum Supremacy? That stems from the work of a German physicist in the early 1900s.

Max Planck created the field of Quantum Theory (these days its referred to as Quantum Mechanics). He created it by accident. Planck was trying to solve a much smaller problem. He was trying to theorize a more efficient lightbulb for an electric company in Berlin. While tackling this relatively humble undertaking, he ran into the "The Ultraviolet Catastrophe." The Ultraviolet Catastrophe theorizes an ideal physical body called a "black body" which absorbs all radiated energy and releases that energy with 100% efficiency. Put simply, a black body is a "perfect emitter" of energy that would emit all radiation it absorbed. If achieved, the electric companies of Berlin would save massive amount of energy and money. The problem was that as scientists observed the world, they couldn't find any black bodies. The theory did not match reality.

Planck kept trying to solve the black body problem with little success. Every time he formed a solution, the solution did not reflect reality. Planck decided to take some scientific liberties to solve the problem and took the kind of step that surges technology forward. He created a solution that defied what was believed to be true about the atomic world at the time. Planck published an equation that could accurately determine the power output of an object after gauging its temperature and wavelength that had no basis in classical physics. Planck did not consider his equation a shocking overturning of scientific understanding. James Lees, in the forward for a republished Quantum Theory by Max Planck and Niels Bohr, states that:

Despite having become the 'father of quantum physics' through his Postulate, Planck remained unsatisfied with it. To him the quantization of energy was merely a means to an end - a mathematical trick that neatly solved the problem, but provided little insight into the physics behind it. (Emphasis mine)

The man who forever changed how science would understand the atomic world had no idea he had done it. He was simply solving a short term problem plaguing his immediate goal of making a marginally better lightbulb. Planck's "mathematical trick" would pave the road for a scientific hobbyist by the name of Albert Einstein to make his mark on the world, the eventual achievement of Quantum Supremacy by a team of scientists from China, and time will tell what else.

Planck's solution demonstrates how many of the greatest innovations take place. Not through grand dreams of surging science forward for the sake of it - instead, innovation comes about in a series of incremental steps, many times audacious steps that defy how we observe reality, but small steps none-the-less. Innovation cannot proceed without useful solutions to short-term problems.

Horses, Machine Guns, Tanks, and Drones

In 1904 Japan launched a surprise attack on a Russian fleet anchored in Port Arthur. Port Arthur is located in the Lüshunkou District of China. This district and the greater Manchuria region would be the location of a slugfest between the infantry, cavalry, and artillery of Japan and Russia until September, 1905. The cause and the outcome, a Japanese victory, is not regarded with much historical notoriety. What is notable is the how the conflict acted as the writing on the wall for how the the coming global conflict in 1914 would be fought. Like most writings on walls, it was mostly ignored by those who needed to heed it.

At the outset of the Russo-Japanese War nearly every major technological innovation that would be used in WWI was also at play in Manchuria, save the airplane (this was insignificant given the lack of beagles and barons in China at the time). The battles in Manchuria acted as a proving ground for new strategies stemming from technological changes. One of these new strategies was the use of indirect fire, the shooting of artillery from far off positions at unseen enemy using locations provided by forward observers. Traditionally, artillery sections would duke it out on the field of battle much like the infantry did: slinging rounds across the battle at the other side until one caved. With the advent of the technology enabling indirect fire, field artillery was safe from enemy guns and pivoted to being an anti-infantry weapon. The result of this change was the frequent use of trenches. Now that the artillery could extend it's eyes with forward observers and target enemies from unseen hills, the infantry responded by digging defensive positions to shelter from the thundering shells. The necessity of trenches in response to field artillery were quickly noted by the militaries of the world. Not all lessons were so quickly internalized.

One of the most stark military changes since the Russo-Japanese War has been the complete removal of horseback cavalry. The horse as a weapon has reached near complete obsolescence. This obsolescence wasn't fully realized until 1917, but the Cossacks thrown into battle by Russia against newly minted machine guns nested in Japanese trenches could have assured it back in 1904.

The first sign of the cavalry's last days came in South Africa where a young war correspondent named Winston Churchill reported on The Boer War. There, attention was drawn to the havoc a rapidly firing machine gun could cause on lines of men on large horses approaching it in straight lines. In response to the newly rumored end of their beloved branch, cavalry officers from England closely monitored the role that Russian and Japanese cavalry played in winning their nation's battles. The cavalry officers of Britain were looking for events to point to that proved their worth. Most of them believed that they were still a military necessity and all that was needed was a modern battle to prove it. John Ellis, in The Social History of the Machine Gun, summarized the feeling amongst cavalry officers at the time:

War was still a matter of will, in which the grit and resolution of the individual soldier counted for much more than any piece of machinery. Anything that was not compatible with this conception, anything that seemed to threaten the centrality of man upon the battlefield, was dismissed an being an unmilitary gimmick.

They were wrong. The cavalry was butchered by machine gun fire and played an almost nonexistent part in the outcome of The Russo-Japanese War. They did little besides waste resources and get shot. One would imagine the response of cavalrymen around the world would have been to immediately argue for the hanging up of spurs and switching to safer, more expedient tactics. For the most part they did the opposite. Cavalry officers would repeatedly defend the use of horses in the pages of prominent military journals. Slight strategy changes were adopted by the British cavalry such as the carrying of machine guns into battle in addition to the traditional arme blanche. The real tactical changes to the cavalry would be piecemeal responses to the destruction they suffered at the hands of machine guns. The lessons were available to be gleaned during 1904, but they were not internalized until they were learned in the face of machine gun fire.

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From September to November of 2020, Azerbaijan and Armenia escalated a decades long series of clashes into a full scale war over the long contested Nagorno-Karabakh region between the two countries. The roots of the conflict stretch back into the past. The short war may provide a glimpse into how future wars will be fought.

Videos have been released by Azerbaijan leading up to and following their victory. They demonstrate how they destroyed an alleged litany of Armenian armored vehicles who could not defend themselves from remote controlled enemies above. Since the fighting stopped, critics and defenders of the future of tanks in warfare have stepped up to assess what the conflict really means. Some assert that armor is over; others argue that very little has changed and that the destruction of the tanks says more about the competence of the users than the technology used by their attackers. There is not enough evidence to convince either side of the debate that they are wrong. The conflict was not long enough and the participants were not significant enough as world powers to definitively say "this is what the future of warfare looks like."

Like The Russo-Japanese War, it is difficult for observers to decide what facets of the conflict were happenstance resulting from terrain and specific combatants, and what are new norms that are here for good. Neither side in the debate has sufficient evidence to persuade the other. When will the correct side of the debate be proven to be right? When there's overwhelming evidence in the form of a victory or defeat so stunning that ignoring it is suicide.

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In 1917, the Germans occupied their last great defensive position of the first world war: The Hindenburg Line. It was a 90 mile series of trenches running through France. The 10th Hussars, a British cavalry regiment, were ordered to charge and take the line at the city of Arras. The regiment charged straight into barbed wire and machine gun fire. They lost two thirds of their men. The 10th Hussars would return to France 22 years later to face down Nazi Germany. This time with Crusader Tanks, not horses.

It took personally experiencing suicide missions for the cavalry regiments of the world to abandon their trusted horses and reorient to armored vehicles. It was impossible for the armies of the world to justify the abandonment of mounted cavalry without these experiences. It may only be after a conflict of mass proportions involving tanks, not before, that the wrong side of the tank debate will be convinced.

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The Russo-Japanese War by Charles T. Payne