Here is my senior thesis in history, "An Instinct for the Regrettable": The Inventions and Legacy of Thomas Midgley, Jr. - which just received an A and some very kind remarks from Prof. Segal, the faculty member who conducted the senior seminar section I was in this past semester. It's a tale of good intentions and unanticipated consequences, in which one man played an improbable key role in two of the most infamous environmental mistakes made by 20th-century industrial chemistry.

This paper marks the last of the requirements for my Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Maine. Because I'm still working on the courses for my minor in graphic design (which I may or may not be able to complete in the spring semester, but since I've missed December graduation, I may as well attempt it), I won't actually graduate until May, but I have now accumulated all the credits necessary to do so, and have no further undergraduate work to do in the area of my major.

This spring, in addition to the above, I'll be taking a graduate-level course with the same professor, and have been assured by the head of the University's Graduate School that, should I be accepted as an MA candidate next fall, I'll be given retroactive graduate credit for it. I'll also need to take the Graduate Record Exam sometime in the spring, gather up letters of recommendation, and all that jazz to facilitate the graduate admissions application, and so on.

Right now, though, I've got 16 days to kick back, unwind, re-shelve the books I used for the above project, and see about getting some proper creativity done before all that starts.

I don't expect "An Instinct for the Regrettable" to be everybody's cup of tea, but some of you may enjoy it. I've been told my academic work is pretty readable.

(If anyone is really interested in that kind of stuff, I have other, shorter papers from previous semesters kicking around. I don't think I've already posted any of my term papers from the other 400-level history courses I've taken, though I could have forgotten. The ones on Johannes Kepler and the Canadian government's 1970s social engineering experiment, Project Surname, might interest a few folks.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I don't expect "An Instinct for the Regrettable" to be everybody's cup of tea,
>but some of you may enjoy it. I've been told my academic work is pretty readable.

Oh, it's certainly readable, and not really any harder to understand than a typical science magazine article. Of course it might be a little bit easier for me because have two terms of Atmospheric Chemistry courses.

In the case of chlorofluorocarbons, I probably would have brought up a couple more points. The first is that safe refrigeration has saved thousands if not millions of lives, both in preventing starvation and in transport of vaccines and drugs safely into the tropics. That alone outweighs most of the damage caused by increased UV exposure -- and we were lucky enough to have cooperation from the chemical companies for the replacement.

What bothers me about Midgley as an environmental scientist, is that it doesn't ever seem to have thought about the end fate of the products he made. And is that simply a product of being a man of his time? Modernist culture sure talked a lot about changing the whole world for the better -- was it without ever really considering that the world wasn't so big that it couldn't be changed by accident? Or did he have that imagination, but it was just covered by showmanship and profiteering?

Also fluorides are known to be fairly stable, like the calcium fluoride in your tooth enamel.

Anyway, your paper was a good read for me, thanks for sharing. 💯

-- ∇×V

I like reading science and history-of-science articles anyway; in fact, I think I still have my old collections of Asimov's F&SF columns tucked away in a box in the attic.

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Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

Also, the sun is pretty warm.

This is an excellent piece of work, and I think it would be readable regardless of a person's experience. Some people might choose not to read it because they weren't interested in the subject, but I don't think anybody would have trouble understanding what they were reading.

If you don't mind, I'd like to post a link to this.

Peter Eng
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Insert humorous comment here.

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com 1st Courier of the Heavenly Prophets for Tianxia "Never give up, never surrender!"

This was a helluva lot of fun to read!

I'm not sure why, exactly, but it reminds me of this piece by Max Gergel. Less exhaustive (and to me, bordering on incomprehensible) detail, more simplified -- but similar in feel, somehow.

It's funny, given what forum we're on and all, but I think I enjoy your non-fanfiction-related writing as much, if not more. Which is not to say I dislike the fanfic, but I'm having a hard time expressing myself here.

The best shorthand I can think of is, I like Gryph's Story Time a helluva lot, and would like to see more. (I think I even said something similar back in the days when Off The Top Of My Head was just out.)

--sofaspud
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