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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 232 November 18 - 24, 2002

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.

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If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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Monday  November 18, 2002

I am in Las Vegas for COMDEX. It's a tiny COMDEX. I'm sending reports to BYTE.COM, and you'll see them there.

I have tried Mozilla and I wish I hadn't. I am weary of the stupid rivalries that cause programs to play funny games. Now all my Front Page icons and every html page in my directory has a mozilla monster icon instead of the Front Page or IE icon when I go to save things. Mozilla is fine for many things but it doesn't integrate with other stuff, and I haven't had a chance to learn to use its rules. But once installed it keeps reminding you of its existence in odd ways. I suppose some people like that.

There are not so many exhibitors at COMDEX but there are lots of high tech companies here, mostly showing in suites and peep shows and press only events. 

More later. I have appointments all day. The Cox high speed connection at the Hilton continues to drop me every few minutes and makes me log back on. I think it thinks it is going to charge me ten bucks a log on instead of ten a day. I won't pay it of course, and if need be I'll let American Express fight that battle for me. Bah.

There was some interesting mail last week.

Dear Mr. Pournelle:

The Hector Berlioz website is celebrating the 95th birthday of Jacques Barzun by establishing a "guest book" in which friends and readers of Mr. Barzun may express their congratulations and best wishes. Mr. Barzun is president of The Berlioz Society.

The guest book is at: http://www.hberlioz.com/book.html 

A link will take you to a page where you may add your own greetings.

Please forward this e-mail to others you know who may wish to send their greetings to Mr. Barzun in this way.

You need not put it on your site. I doubt if most people who go to your site would know who Mr. Barzun is.

Sincerely, Leo Wong -- 

I hope he is wrong about that; I suspect many of my readers know and admire Jacques Barzun.

 

 

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Tuesday, November 19, 2002

Exhausting day. Apologies

 

 

 

 

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Wednesday, November 20, 2002

On the way home. Reports tonight or tomorrow.


Home safe. Long drive. Was this the last COMDEX? I need to file a report.

Lots of mail.

 

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Thursday, November 21, 2002

I am writing up my COMDEX report which will be on the BYTE site. Mark Eppley held a party entitled "The End of COMDEX as we know it," and that was a common sentiment: this was the last one of this kind.

The rumor remains that Sheldon Adelson will buy it back, restructure it starting with a smaller event in the Sands, and build it back to its former glory.

Another possibility is that CES will eat COMDEX's lunch and COMDEX will vanish. Another is that CEBIT will buy COMDEX. We will see....

I have lots of pictures which I'll send to BYTE and later will do a page of them here. And I'll have up more puppy pictures. Right now I am coming up for air...

=====

I have in the past day or so wasted some of my time with a Velikovsky enthusiast who pretended to be a reasonable person; I should know better. And when I said I no longer recalled all the details of Velikovsky's hypotheses because they were wrong, he leaped, of course.

"Are you unaware of how ridiculous that sounds? You don't know what someone's argument is because it's wrong?" The note of triumph runs through his letter.

But there's an illustrative point here: some of you may be young enough to remember everything you ever knew. I assure you that won't last. There will come a time when you will recall conclusions you reached without being able to reconstruct the arguments that led to them, or even recall the data on which they were based.  If this happens in your principal field of work it could be embarrassing, but if it's in something peripheral like Bronze Age Chronology and the work of Lord and Lady Hankey on Cretan pottery -- I spent a delightful afternoon at Villa Ariadne with Lady Vronwy Hankey back in the 70's, and she was kind enough to go over much of the material; later that month I spent a week with Marinatos at Akrotira where he had dug up a city.  

(Aside: Lady Hankey and Dr. Marinatos were rivals; when I told her I was about to visit Spyridon Marinatos at his newly discovered palace, she said "He hasn't got a palace!"  Which was at that time technically correct, but the enthusiasm with which she said it was instructive: after all, she and her husband had inheritated The Palace of Minos, and that certainly was a palace....)

But I sure don't recall all the details of why I concluded that Velikovsky's imaginative reconstruction of the Bronze Age was incorrect, and I sure don't recall or wish to recall all the details of his wrong theories. Why should I? I have trouble enough remembering things that are right. But at one time I knew enough to familiarize myself with the details. If I cared enough I could tool up to learn it all again, but why should I? I won't change my conclusions, and if someone doesn't want to take my word for it, he's welcome to go dig up the details himself. But there are many who think it intellectually respectable to demand that someone else do all their research for them.

And of course the burden of proof is always on those who challenge accepted theories to begin with: my correspondent, like most of those who rush to the defense of the unorthodox, demands that we refute the unorthodox theory, generally on its own terms and from inside it...  This chap wanted me to do all that RIGHT NOW, even in the middle of COMDEX, as if I had some obligation to him: after all, had I not offered him the opinion that Velikovsky was wrong? How dare I do that and not prove it? And do that NOW!

 That led to this exchange:

Me (in some exasperation) > Why you have decided to be rude to me after I took the trouble to answer as > best I could given that I have more to do than I can accomplish, I do not > know, but I see no point in continuing a trivial correspondence that > consists largely of your demanding things of me while contributing nothing > whatever.

To which Mr. M replied

"Sorry. I've long held the belief that if a person takes the time to refute the work of another that he will likewise take the time to show why he is right and another is wrong, as opposed to indulging in exercises in tautology. If that makes me appear rude, I apologize."

Ah well.

The moral of this story is that sometimes I forget I am no longer a professor. I need to remember that every correspondent, even those who can write decent sentences, is not my student entitled to my time. Some people ought to be dismissed out of hand.


Sable is growing and getting more civilized. She likes to sleep under my desk when I work at night. Every now and again she'll open an eye and see I am still here and go back to sleep. Just now she's clearly dreaming of chasing something.

 

And I still haven't written my COMDEX report, and I am supposed to do an introduction to John Dvorak's latest book; that ought to be fun.

 

 

 

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Friday, November 22, 2002

About to go out to Kaiser for a treadmill test. I gather they heard something they didn't like last time they listened.

And Roland sent me good news:

Ascent phase.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,71151,00.html 

I knew they were working on this. There will be more.

And Frank Gasparik sends this

I thought you might be interested in this article:

The Road Not Taken (Yet) by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

http://techcentralstation.com/1051/defensewrapper.jsp
?PID=1051-350&CID=1051-091102C
 

Interesting article Please take a good look at it.

Frank G.

I was given the task of looking into the original ORION proposal back in about 1960; Dyson and Taylor were interested in it. I had a story about ORION for The Last Dangerous Visions, which, alas, doesn't seem to be coming out soon...

 

 

 

 

 

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Cleaning up after COMDEX

 

 

 

 

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Sunday, November 24, 2002

Opera: Tales of Hoffman tonight.

 

=====

Well that was an exhausting day, followed by the full 4 hour 4 act version of Tales of Hoffman, as good a production as I am likely to see. Ramey is getting just a little old for such a demanding role as Lindorf, and my friend Louis Lebhertz was just a little bit in overacting mode as Antonia's father, but those are quibbles. Elizabeth Barrett is new to the LA stage as Muse/Niklaus; she's a front curtain singer whose voice gets just a little lost when she has to go upstage, but she's a very good actress and very believable; and this production gave her a lot more to do than most productions of Hoffman.

Enjoyable all around, but it followed a long day, and we're exhausted.

Tomorrow I start putting together the newest Athlon system, but I need a heat sink; I have a new PC Cool case and power supply for it.

 

 

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