Chaos Manor Musings

Thursday View Roundup 8

2010-09-02T16:40:03-06:00

It was maybe 8-10 years ago when the nearest Borders started cutting back...

2010-09-02T16:40:02-06:00

It was maybe 8-10 years ago when the nearest Borders started cutting
back on books and selling greeting cards, which management presumably
thought would bring more dollars per square foot. Maybe in the short
term it did, but it also cut back on the broad selection of books that
brought in customers. We went elsewhere - to a fine local independent
called the New England Mobile Book Fair, and to B&N. A few years later,
the Borders store was gone.

Jeff

http://www.theonion.com/ video/historic-blockbuster-store- offers-glimpse-of-how-m,14233/...

2010-09-02T16:40:01-06:00

http://www.theonion.com/
video/historic-blockbuster-store-
offers-glimpse-of-how-m,14233/

Note the ending tag line.

Bill Millin, piper at the D-Day landings, dead at 88

2010-09-02T16:30:02-06:00

Bill Millin, piper at the D-Day landings, dead at 88

Dr Pournelle

Thought you might want to know. Economist obituary: http://www.economist.com/node/16885894

Live long and prosper
h lynn keith

Give us a tune, Piper!

Thursday Mail Roundup 4

2010-09-02T16:00:12-06:00

: Thorium Power

2010-09-02T16:00:11-06:00

: Thorium Power

Dr Pournelle:

An Australian source recommends nuclear power as as a means to avert Americanogenic Global Warming of 1.4 - 5.8 C by 2100. Not only that, use of thorium, abundant in Australia, will also avoid the Nastiness of Uranium and the Destruction of Plutonium.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348/

Jim Watson

Russian cops cuff 10 ransomware Trojan suspects

2010-09-02T16:00:10-06:00

Russian cops cuff 10 ransomware Trojan suspects

Cybercrime gang allegedly raked in $16m

By John Leyden <http://forms.theregister.co.uk/
mail_author/?story_url=/2010/09/01/ransomware
_trojan_suspects_cuffed/>

Posted in Crime <http://www.theregister.co.uk/security/crime/> , 1st September 2010 09:58 GMT <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/01/>

Russian police have arrested 10 suspected members of a ransomware gang who allegedly made millions via a locked computer malware scam.

PCs infected by the WinLock Trojan at the centre of the scam were rendered unusable because the malware disabled key Windows components. More embarrassingly pornographic images were displayed on compromised machines, IDG adds <http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/
article/204577/alleged_ransomware_gang_
investigated_by_moscow_police.html>

The crooks claimed the damage could only be undone by sending premium rate SMS messages at a cost of between 300 rubles ($9.72) and 1,000 rubles. Tens of thousands of victims, mostly in Russia, were hit by the scam, Host Exploit reports <http://news.hostexploit.com/cybercrime-news/
4436-hacker-gang-caught-in-moscow.html> . Web users in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova were also reportedly affected by the scam, which reportedly earned crooks as much as $16m in just one month.

Tracy

Parts of America surrendered to invading barbarians.

2010-09-02T16:00:08-06:00

Parts of Arizona Controlled by Drug Cartel--still

Jerry,

I am so disgusted that I have nothing positive to contribute, so I will simply offer the article:

<snip>....the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has placed 15 signs along a 60-mile stretch of Interstate 8 that links San Diego with Phoenix and Tucson warning travelers of drug cartels and human trafficking operations.

“DANGER – PUBLIC WARNING, TRAVEL NOT RECOMMENDED,” read the signs placed along Interstate 8. “Visitors May Encounter Armed Criminals and Smuggling Vehicles Traveling at High Rates of Speed. Stay Away From Trash, Clothing, Backpacks, and Abandoned Vehicles.”

“BLM Encourages Visitors To Use Public Land North of Interstate 8,” the signs say.

“I think the American people are outraged that we can fight wars half-way around the world, send our nation’s treasury and our most precious resources – our American heroes that serve in the military -- and yet here in our own country somehow they believe it’s okay for us not to have a secure border,” Said Sheriff Babeu.

“And that it’s okay to put up signs in my county and parts of America to surrender parts of our country to foreign born criminals,” Babeu added, “warning our own American citizens to stay out.”

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/72068

-- BDAB,

Josh

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I note that the Federal Government is suing Arizona over enforcement of borders. The local signs in Arizona, put up by the Federal Government, advise travellers to rush through -- and call local government if they see criminal activities. We have sown the wind.

A new bureaucracy.

2010-09-02T16:00:07-06:00

trying to buy gold coins reveals new bureaucracy

Hi Jerry

If you have a "department" devoted to governmental drilling down on individual liberties, please post this there. No doubt you and your readers have much more insight and guidance on this issue. But I discovered (to me) a really troubling intrusion.

To start: Thinking ('way behind the curve, I admit) it might be worthwhile to invest gold coins in the event civil order broke down I searched online for a local coin shop website and asked the following question: "Given a desire for privacy, what is the threshold on purchases not requiring reporting to the federal government?"

The answer came back:

"I can't help you structure your purchases to avoid government reporting. That is a federal offense. Also I have your name. So now that I know your intentions I am not able to sell you anything."

That struck me as a bizarre response to a perfectly innocent question, but then I did a little more investigation on the Internet. While $10K is the legal threshhold for reporting financial transactions, coin dealers apparently fall under a relatively new (2005) Homeland Security Act regulation on the outlook for terrorist activity. This threshold is now $3K to $5K according to "Coin Update News" http://news.coinupdate.com/irs-and-government-
reporting-requirements-for-coin-and-bullion-dealers-0353/. )

Quote:

"In complying with anti-money laundering regulations, dealers may be required to obtain the name of all customers engaging in cash transactions above a threshold dollar amount, no matter whether buying or selling. What I have heard is that the AML compliance programs of most dealers have a threshold of $3,000 above which they must obtain this customer information. My own company, because of its higher volume and larger average transaction size, has a $5,000 threshold."

Now, to me, here is the scary part: It appears that a $600 threshold will apply to coin shops thanks to a little-known regulation inserted into the health care bill -- which will take effect in 2012 -- that requires transactions of that amount and above to be reported to the federal government. (Perhaps someone can explain why that is included in the health care bill?) This does not only apply to coin shops but to vendors in many other fields as well.

Back to the point of trying to privately build a nest egg of emergency money: Essentially, every time you buy or sell a single one-ounce coin or bullion, it will soon have to be reported to the federal government. To me, privacy is the main issue, but imagine the paperwork (electronic or otherwise) that will surely overwhelm employees both on the sending and the receiving end. What were they thinking?

Paul

Holy Moley! So if you want to buy gold, think it all out as you do.

Parts of the United States surrendered to invading barbarians . We've known...

2010-09-02T16:30:01-06:00

Parts of the United States surrendered to invading barbarians. We've known this for a while: is it likely to actually make the news?

WATCH THE 26TH ANNUAL WRITERS AND ILLUSTRATORS OF THE FUTURE AWARDS CEREMONY...

2010-09-02T16:00:03-06:00

WATCH THE 26TH ANNUAL WRITERS AND ILLUSTRATORS OF THE FUTURE AWARDS CEREMONY

In case you missed the Awards Show Saturday night, you can see the entire event here online. Find out who the Grand Prize Winners were and don't miss an inspiring speech.

<http://click.icptrack.com/icp/
relay.php?r=32367906&msgid=458906&
act=PL6D&c=468607&destination=http%
3A%2F%2Fwww.writersofthefuture.com%2F>

The opening aerial act was spectacular to watch; I am not sure how it comes across on film. The moral of the performance seems to be that the author gets the girl with glasses...

Few seem to be much impressed with the Apple announcements yesterday. Mr....

2010-09-02T16:00:02-06:00

Few seem to be much impressed with the Apple announcements yesterday. Mr. Jobs did his best, but there wasn't much excitement. I remain impressed with iPad, which in my judgment, is changing the publishing industry far faster than we thought would happen. Three million iPads sold...

Wednesday View Roundup 3

2010-09-01T19:30:01-06:00

Today's Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece calling for a return of the...

2010-09-01T16:30:01-06:00

Today's Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece calling for a return of the Federal Estate Tax. I can't think that is a major pressing problem in these United States. It's a matter for the states, and competition among the states keeps the confiscatory death taxes down to something bearable in most places.

Distributionism was once a more popular political ideology than it is at present, and was a "third way" between capitalism and socialism. The theory is that socialism leads to horrors but so does capitalism; distributists would redistribute concentrated wealth so that everyone has some access to essentials for life. The usual mechanism is death taxes as being the least intrusive into the economy, and the goal is not equality, which is impossible, but avoidance of concentrations of wealth. One possible scheme would be a 50% death tax on estates greater than, say, $10 million. This would not go to the general treasury, but be immediately redistributed, in one scheme through income tax refunds, with everyone receiving the same amount including those who don't pay income taxes (negative income tax). The money is not to be planned on or spent by the government.

The arguments for distributism are old, and some find a trace to the Diggers of the English Revolution and of course Jeffersonian Democracy. The notion is to decrease dependence for survival on capital owned by others. In a simpler economy the notion of farmers who grow their own food, carpenters who own their own tools, and so forth makes more sense than in today's economy where few of those who work in chip manufacturing facilities have any notion of how the overall facility works and could not have designed it. (Marx had a similarly simplistic view of industrial society, having experienced shoe factories and weaving mills, and was unaware of anything like mass production.) Because the notion of self-sufficiency has become increasingly less viable (and modern definitions of subsistence have expanded to include telephones, a TV set, transportation, and a number of other items that didn't exist in the glory days of Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc) distributism has lost most of its former popularity among intellectuals. It was never very popular with the masses, and even Belloc and Chesterton were more Conservative than Distributist.

Rubin and Robertson ("Bring Back the Estate Tax Now") present economic arguments about spending and consumption rather than moral arguments, and in that sense are not part of the Distributist tradition; although they do appeal to the notion of opportunity and meritocracy. The problem is that they propose to rob those who have earned their status and goods in order to reward those less successful. They argue that inherited economic and political power power is dangerous to a Republic, as of course they are; but their arguments don't have the moral power of the old distributists, and there are powerul economic reasons for preserving some accumulations of wealth while encouraging competition. Wealth does tend to use wealth to buy government services to protect that wealth, and death taxes are one automatic answer to that. They don't make that argument.

Death taxes are often the end of precisely what the distributists hoped to achieve, when family businesses and farms are sold in order to pay the death tax. This is a major argument in favor of a large exemption to death taxes.

[I don't give a link to the article because if you use Google to find it, that will generally get past the paywall (Google and the Journal have an agreement), but a direct link generally does not.]

Sun/Magnetic Field

2010-09-01T13:40:10-06:00

Sun/Magnetic Field

Nature. 2000 Nov 23;408(6811):445-7.

Evolution of the Sun's large-scale magnetic field since the Maunder minimum.

Solanki SK <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%22Solanki%20SK%22%5BAuthor%5D> , Sch�ssler M <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%22Sch%C3%BCssler%20M%22%5BAuthor%5D> , Fligge M <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%22Fligge%20M%22%5BAuthor%5D> .

Max-Planck-Institut f�r Aeronomie, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany. solanki@linmpi.mpg.de

Abstract

The most striking feature of the Sun's magnetic field is its cyclic behaviour. The number of sunspots, which are dark regions of strong magnetic field on the Sun's surface, varies with a period of about 11 years. Superposed on this cycle are secular changes that occur on timescales of centuries and events like the Maunder minimum in the second half of the seventeenth century, when there were very few sunspots. A part of the Sun's magnetic field reaches out from the surface into interplanetary space, and it was recently discovered that the average strength of this interplanetary field has doubled in the past 100 years. There has hitherto been no clear explanation for this doubling. Here we present a model describing the long-term evolution of the Sun's large-scale magnetic field, which reproduces the doubling of the interplanetary field. The model indicates that there is a direct connection between the length of the sunspot cycle and the secular variations.

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11100720>

Interesting. I am beginning to be persuaded that the heat variance from solar neutrinos is fairly small and probably does not need to be modeled; but the dynamo effect of the magnetosphere is another matter. That can be very significant, and I'm still collecting data here. I have not found where the interior temperature of the Earth fits into the very expensive Climate Models that we all are told we must respect.

Taking the Earth's Temperature

2010-09-01T13:40:11-06:00

: Working on a possible hook

Jerry,

Concerning the question of the believable accuracy of temperature measurements, I've been playing with the issue on and off in my spare time for a couple of years. (Unfortunately, that doesn't leave much time...)

What I keep coming back to is that temperature is a field variable. The individual measurement stations may be accurately calibrated (or may not, see the Lake Michigan reading), and the measurement process may be statistically independent, but the variable being measured IS correlated through the field equations which relate temperature to energy and material flows.

One problem is that the points for which temperatures are not measured (and see the discussions in the winter and spring about NOAA dropping some 4500 measurement stations in favor of modeled extrapolations) are estimated using models, rather than solutions of the field equations, which introduces a model-dependent bias in addition to the correlations of the measurement point.

It is conceivable that once systematic biases are added, the actual error in the average temperature of the field being measured may well be greater than the errors in the individual measurements; and just on the basis of the correlations themselves, the error in the field average should be on the order of the measurement error, not the measurement error divided by sqrt(N), where N is the number of stations.

(Another reason is this not necessarily Gaussian: the assumptions of Gaussian statistics state that an average is constructed by repeating measurements of a single quantity. We are not measuring a single quantity; we are measuring multiple points within a field of different quantities).

What I keep coming back to is that prediction of global warming of 1 degree per century with any accuracy requires the energy balances be closed to 20 ppb on a per-time-step basis. Feeding the model with inputs that are no better than 1% or so.

I think is is possible to construct a statistical model for what the actual error in the temperature should be; but it must start with the recognition that the temperature is a field variable with correlated values in both space and time. I just don't believe that anyone has done that computation.

Jim

Bottom line, the apparent errors are suppressed by treating the temperature measurements as independent variables.

Abstractly, the temperature can be written as

DT = S,

where D is a second-order (and probably nonlinear) partial differential equation in position (latitude, longitude, and altitude) and time,

T is the temperature, which is a continuous function of position and time,

and S, which is a source function, is also a continuous function of position and time (barring discontinuities such as asteroid impacts or large nuclear bursts), and includes all of the radiative, conductive, and convective effects which translate both solar and geothermal influences to the atmosphere.

I am not sure that we could write either D or S accurately, but that's besides the immediate point.

The global average temperature at any time would accurately be described as the integral of T over that set of latitudes, longitudes, and altitudes which contribute to the averaging process, divided by the enclosed volume of that domain.

This is estimated by a SPARSE set of local temperature measurements taken on variable scales which are generally much greater than the variances due to local effects on the source terms (e.g. we know that the presence of even relatively small bodies of water effect humidity, which affects precipitation, which affects temperature). Averaging those effects out doesn't decrease uncertainty (as the climate modelers appear to believe), it increases it.

Bottom line, we simply lack the data to determine that average with any accuracy.

Dr. Roy Spencer yesterday : Dump the IPCC Process. It cannot be Fixed. http://www.drroyspencer.com/

Jim

bangs head slowly:

Further down http://www.drroyspencer.com/ , in a post dated August 20th:

<snip>

Do not trust any of the other channels for temperature trend monitoring. This is because, while the Aqua satellite equatorial crossing time is kept very near 1:30 am and pm with periodic orbit maneuvers, the rest of the channels come from the NOAA-15 satellite whose equatorial crossing time has now drifted from its original 7:30 am/pm value in late 1998 to about 4:30 am/pm now.

This orbital drift makes the NOAA-15 channels (4 and 6) unusually warm, and is why those of you who have been monitoring channel 4 and 6 at the Discover site are seeing such warm temperatures. <snip>

In other words, NOAA-15 is out of calibration, is KNOWN to be out of calibration, is presenting overly warm data SYSTEMATICALLY, and is not being corrected by NOAA.

Fraud on this scale deserves punishment on the same scale.

Jim

Wow

For your physicists working on the temperature average, and from the link below:

How is the average global temperature anomaly time-series calculated?

The global time series is produced from the Smith and Reynolds blended land and ocean data set (Smith et al., 2008). This data set consists of monthly average temperature anomalies on a 5� x 5� grid across land and ocean surfaces. These grid boxes are then averaged to provide an average global temperature anomaly. An area-weighted scheme is used to reflect the reality that the boxes are smaller near the poles and larger near the equator. Global-average anomalies are calculated on a monthly and annual time scale. Average temperature anomalies are also available for land and ocean surfaces separately, and the Northern and Southern Hemispheres separately. The global and hemispheric anomalies are provided with respect to the period 1901-2000, the 20th century average.

I think the basic answer is they “swag” the average, and attribute a precision to the number they produce

...jim dodd

------ Forwarded Message

From: Scott Stephens TO: Jim

Subject: Re: ss*[Fwd: Climate data question]

Hi Jim,

See our global anomalies page for a nice Q&A on the subject at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.html

Scott

That does not sound like the basis for sound science, but I have no other explanation for the confidence in a tenth of a degree -- or even a single degree -- accuracy of estimates of the annual temperature of the Earth. I am still inquiring, but answers seem thin on the ground. It is someone else's specialty...

The cost of war

2010-09-01T13:40:09-06:00

Amazing

Contains an amazing chart!

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/30/cbo-years-iraq-war-cost-stimulus-act/

Kinda shows the catcall that Rumsfeld was running the war on the cheap was pretty much on target? <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/30/cbo-years-iraq-war-cost-stimulus-act/>

David Couvillon Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired.
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Collector of Hot Sauce; Avoider of Yard Work

The war cost far more than it was estimated to cost (as I said it would; hardly an amazing prediction) but wars end. Entitlements never end.

Insightful and strategic.

<http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100830_
rethinking_american_options_iran?utm_source
=GWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=
100831&utm_content=readmore&elq=2c8f22cbc5
194b2fbca6ae2b4a15003d>

David Couvillon Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired.

The arrogance of the educators

2010-09-01T13:40:08-06:00

Morton parents protest return of teacher, pull kids from his classes | Education News - The News Tribune

Don't know if you saw this. Morton _may_ not be unionized, but the education union basically owns the state Dept. of Ed. here in Washington.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/08/31/1321596/morton-parents-protest-return.html

Christopher Johnson

MSgt, USAF Retired

The Iron Law at work. The purpose of the American public school system is to pay teachers (good and bad). That is its first order of priority; that task will be accomplished before any others.

The President's speech on Iraq is done. Reaction has ranged from mild approval...

2010-09-01T13:40:02-06:00

The President's speech on Iraq is done. Reaction has ranged from mild approval downward. Apple's Fall announcements are under way, but I haven't heard much yet. There was a time when I'd have been at the event, of course. BYTE was invited everywhere. I didn't get an invitation to this one. I doubt I'd have made it anyway. Neither did Leo Laporte, so I don't feel too neglected.

Looks like false alarm. Two Yemini who didn't know each other got assigned seats together when they missed a connection and had to have new last minute flights without reservation. At least one had a cell phone taped to a bottle of Pepto Bismal in checked luggage, a heinous thing to do (apparently both were intended as gifts for the same person). And everyone is trading in currencies. It's the silly season.

There is mail.

Economic Recovery and Space

2010-09-01T13:40:01-06:00

Economic Recovery and Space

Today's Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece by Andy Kesslar entitled "TARP and the Continuing Problem of Toxic Assets". He opens by saying "We should have eaten those toxic assets instead of sweeping them under the carpet. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was a foolish bait and switch. To prevent the 2008 financial crisis from worsening, TARP was originally designed to buy toxic mortgage derivatives..."

That's a bit of a misstatement. Yes, it's what they said about TARP; but the timing is important. The original notion was to buy up those toxic assets before the financial collapse, back when we might be able to afford that. It was something to try, and had it been done quickly and without a lot political mess, it might have worked and prevented this new Great Recession (none dare call it the Second Depression. Yet.) It wasn't done quickly, and there was a lot of political involvement. By the time TARP money was available it was too late.

TARP foundered on politics -- at the time there were those who saw a coming recession as a good thing politically, while others insisted on wetting their beaks in all that TARP money as a price for supporting it, and others -- well, you can add your own stories. Then, once it was passed, the collapse was already under weigh. No one could figure out which bundles of crazy derivatives were the toxic assets, and who owned which bad properties. At the time I suggested that it might be better just to subsidize house payments with TARP money to prevent defaults and foreclosures while we sorted out just who had to take a bath here. After all, many of those bad loans were forced by the government (even in the frenzy few banks really wanted to sell a $500,000 house to a person with a "stated income" (non-verified) of $40,000 a year. Perhaps the government ought to eat part of the costs of recovery. On the other hand, the banks did loan the money. And on the gripping hand, the reason the houses were all overpriced was because the government, through Fannie Mar and Freddy Mac, had injected all that money int0 the housing market. The result, which was both foreseeable and foreseen (if I could see it coming, surely everyone else who actually thought about it could; when too much money chases goods, the prices of the goods rise) -- the result was a bubble. And the TARP problem was what price do you pay for a toxic asset? Pay what those properties were worth and the collapse continues because the banks are depleted of capital. Pay what the loans were and it's a subsidy to the worst banks. It was suggested that we split the difference, and that might have worked and might not have, but in any event it wasn't tried.

So the TARP money was squandered. Thrown away, but that's all right, it's debts our grandchildren will have to pay. And there are lots of other debts we are throwing at them. Meanwhile the toxic assets are still out there, the market is still over priced, houses are offered for sale at considerably more than they are worth, and lots of people are under water, given a dilemma of paying more than their house is going to be worth for many years, or walking away from the house. Fortunately our house is paid for, but then I bought it before the bubble, and I never treated it as some kind of cash cow to be milked by borrowing money against it.

And now we are still in trouble and it's getting worse. Unemployment is officially under 10%, but we get that number by ignoring a lot of people who have simply given up looking for work. There are four million homes for sale, as opposed to perhaps 2.5 million in normal times. More are coming as more foreclosures happen, and the foreclosures are inevitable because so many homes are under water. So it goes.

Kessler suggests TARP again: buy the toxic assets at whatever they are worth and readjust the banks. Some will fail. Let them. This is not a terribly attractive alternative. He suggests that we help by getting the price back up: import buyers. Grant a million or more visas to "qualified immigrants, say, those with a master's or PhD., and watch home prices start to rise."

Kessler reasons that we are about $4 trillion dollars consumer debt overshoot. "Even at normal economic growth rates, that calls for at least seven years of consumer deleveraging. We're no three years into it."

And of course we are not at normal economic growth.

How go back and look at the German Economic Miracle. Freedom and energy can restore an economy, even one pounded into rubble. But it won't be very pretty, and it certainly won't be socialist. If we won't give up socialism, we should be prepared to give up expanding economic growth, and the notion that our kids will have it better than we do. That's a fairly new notion in human history anyway.

Of course the resources are out there. Ninety percent of the resources including energy available to the human race are not on Earth at all. We can expand the resource base. I used to think it was inevitable. Now I am not so sure.

The Space Access Society has a new bulletin on the NASA budget. If you haven't already seen my essays on Getting to Space and Why Have NASA?, I suggest you look at them first, then go read the Space Access Society's bulletin over in mail. Those concerned with military power ought also to have a look at my paper on armed service megamissions. And that's probably enough work for all of you for the day.

Of course I should have said then go read the Space Access Society paper. Apologies.

The Space Access Society: an explanation

2010-09-01T13:40:06-06:00

Space Access Society Apologia and Rewrite

The NASA Authorization Battle: Why It Matters

A week ago we asked you all to actively support the Senate version FY 2011 NASA Authorization bill. We described it as not great, but acceptable compared to the extremely bad House bill. The response we've seen so far has been pretty lukewarm.

Partly our fault, we expect - we'd done considerable puzzling over the legislative fine print before concluding our best immediate tactic is to support the Senate version, but last week's Update presented a rather condensed version of that thinking. We didn't want the thing to turn into a novel. Nor to tip our hand on tactics unduly, since the opposition is way too well financed and organized already, while our side is still scrambling to shake off rust and rebuild an effective coalition. (It's been years since there was anything much at NASA we thought worth volunteering to fight for.)

Then too, we'd forgotten how far we gradually came around during that bill-reading session. Our position going in was, fight the Senate bill too, kill the continued in-house NASA launcher boondoggle, do or die, right now! We concluded that wasn't a useful approach over the course of a couple of weeks; we can't blame anyone who got whiplash being asked to make that course change in a couple of paragraphs.

But we do understand how you feel. A few weeks ago we too were happily anticipating the revolution implicit in the Administration FY 2011 NASA budget request: Shut down unaffordably bloated in-house NASA launcher developments, encourage many-times-cheaper commercial launch options, and spend the (substantial) difference refilling the (bare) NASA exploration technology cupboard, so in a few years NASA might be ready to begin putting together some real exploration missions. We knew we had a fight on our hands over the House bill, but that was so outrageously bad it was easy to get motivated.

Then the Senate surprised us with a bill that roughly split the difference - about a 60/40 compromise between the House's rejection of reform and the original Administration proposal. Our first reaction: NASA had been serving up a crap sandwich for a lot of years, and we were just getting used to their new plan to switch to caviar. The Senate suddenly compromising on a 60/40 blend of the two didn't thrill us. We were pumped to attack it too.

Then we started remembering our previous years of fighting such fights. Once the House and Senate have staked out their positions on something like this, the final result is almost always in the range bounded by those two positions. Moving significantly outside that range takes extraordinary outside pressure, especially once the White House and NASA already have admitted they can live with the Senate version. We don't think that our coalition (yet) has the kind of political firepower it'd take to get a better Authorization than the Senate version in the next couple of weeks. (Frankly, the only way we'll ever have the clout to push this toward a good final outcome is if a whole bunch of you decide we're making sense.)

After calming down, we spent some time reading the fine print in the different versions of the NASA budget, trying to figure out how they really compare, and how that fits into the tactical situation. (Tabular results, with commentary, follow below.)

To sum up, the House Authorization effectively kills the good Exploration options, largely defunding them, and also strewing their path with poison-pill requirements. This House bill steers 92% of all Exploration funding to a sort of Constellation-Lite - even more full of fatal contradictions, more underfunded, and less likely to ever fly than Constellation - blatantly sacrificing NASA's future for a political jobs program.

The Senate version tries to split the difference. It keeps all the good options from the Administration proposal alive and more or less funded, so we don't have to fight the next round from a zero base. It doesn't contain as many internal contradictions and poison pills. It doesn't spend as much as the House on a new in-house NASA heavy booster and capsule, and it gives NASA wiggle room on how to execute that booster that the House doesn't. So NASA might eventually end up with a usable (albeit probably horribly expensive) new heavy lifter, and if not (as still seems most likely) at least less money is wasted. We think it's a considerably better bill than the House version (mediocre rather than disastrous) even in the unlikely event it ends up precisely defining what NASA is doing a year from now. (As for two and three years from now, we advise not taking the out-years too seriously - those numbers tend to be highly mutable.)

We don't want to go into too much tactical detail, but while the final NASA Authorization bill is a lot more important than usual this year, the actual checks still get cut by Appropriations. There has been a lot of speculation as to whether an Appropriations bill for NASA will be passed before the Congress leaves town again, or if NASA will be funded for some months at last year's levels under a "continuing resolution". Our view: It doesn't immediately matter. The thing to focus on right now is avoiding an unacceptable NASA Authorization. If we can do that in the next two weeks, an acceptable final result is a lot easier to achieve.

The bad news is, without your active and energetic help, we may yet end up a few weeks from now with much or all of the House version in a final NASA Authorization. And that would be a far, far worse place to continue the fight from than the alternatives.

Budget Numbers

For context, NASA's overall budget in recent years has been around $18-$19 billion. Of that, about $9-$10 billion goes to human spaceflight, about $4-$5 billion to science, about $3 billion to overhead and miscellany, about a half billion to aeronautics, and a couple hundred million to everything else.

One mistake a lot of people reading federal budgets make is paying undue attention to "the outyears", the notional numbers given for years after the one year actually being funded. Both House and Senate versions of this Authorization give numbers for FY 2011, 2012 and 2013. The 2011 numbers are what the Appropriators will consider cutting checks for starting October 1st. The 2012 and 2013 numbers are more expressions of hope about what the next Congress might fund.

Our Five Budget Columns

(Table columns will line up a LOT better in this email text version if you read them in a monospace font like Courier New.)

- "Actual '10" gives the amounts actually appropriated for the current FY 2010.

- "Old '11" gives the "outyear" notional numbers for 2011 from the 2010 budget proposal (written in 2009) to give you an idea of what planned 2011 Constellation business as usual looked like back then.

- "Admin '11" gives the Administration FY 2011 NASA budget proposal numbers.

- "Senate '11" gives the Senate FY 2011 NASA Authorization numbers.

- "House '11" gives the current House FY 2011 NASA Authorization numbers.

- All figures given are in millions.

We'll mark with a "*" budget items where we think a reasonable fraction of the money will be spent usefully for our purposes. (NASA is a large government agency; "a reasonable fraction of the money spent usefully" is about as good as it gets. This is, by the way, the core of why we think routine functions should be done commercially.) For each budget column, we'll do a final total of the in-our-view good stuff, as one way to compare the different budgets.

The Budgets Compared

Our first table gives the overall NASA totals for our five budgets. There's apparently consensus on 1.5% growth next year, which is likely about as good as it gets for the forseeable future. (The wild card here is potential government-wide deficit reduction moves. Stay tuned.)

Actual'10 Old'11 Admin'11 Senate'11 House'11

NASA total $18,724M $18,631M $19,000M $19,000M $19,000M

Next, some of the big-ticket NASA budget lines we're not directly concerned with. Note that Science and Aeronautics both grow substantially (and non-controversially) from this year's totals.

Space Operations varies a lot, meanwhile - almost entirely from varying timing of Shuttle program shutdown. The Actual '10 total includes $3,139M for a full year of Shuttle ops, while the Old '11 guesstimate from back in '09 assumed no more flights by '11, just $383M in shutdown expenses. The Shuttle flight schedule has since slipped into '11, and there's talk of adding one more mission later in '11 - the Senate version funds this additional mission, while the House version says just nice things about it.

We then give subtotals (in parens) within Space Ops for Shuttle, Station Ops, and Station Crew/Cargo Services. Note the $857 million Admin '11 item for Station Crew & Cargo services. This is also embedded in the House and Senate '11 Station totals, though they don't break it out. This is roughly how much we'll be sending out of the country for foreign crew and cargo services every year for the remaining life of Station until we get US commercial Crew and Cargo services online.

Actual'10 Old'11 Admin'11 Senate'11 House'11

Science $4493M $4747M $5006M $5006M $5016M

Aeronautics $507M $514M $580M $580M $580M

Space Ops $6181M $3664M $4888M $5509M $4591M

(Shuttle) ($3139M) ($383M) ($989M) ($1,610M) ($989M)

(Station Ops) ($1689M) ($2548M ($1923M) ($2780M ($2802M

(Crew/CargSvc) ($628M) combined) ($857M) combined) combined)

Now we get to our first "good stuff" budget line, the interesting new Space Technology program, outside of the Exploration budget. This seems to be a direct descendant of the current IPP Program, which includes SBIR, STTR, Centennial Challenges, etc. IPP will be replaced in 2011 by the new Space Technology line, paired with Aeronautics rather than under the catchall Cross-Agency Support line where IPP lived. Note that this is one line where the House version is actually better than the Senate - the House goes along with the Administration in nearly tripling this line, while the Senate merely doubles it (assuming we haven't missed other existing items being pulled into it.)

Actual'10 Old'11 Admin'11 Senate'11 House'11

IPP $175M* $185M*

Space Technology $572M* $350M* $572M*

That brings us to the big kahuna, the Exploration total. Notice the Old '11 total's $2.3 billion jump - this was the lion's share of the expected Shuttle shutdown dividend, and marked the start of a serious decade-long rampup for Constellation. Probably more money than was actually going to be there, in hindsight.

Senate '11's lower-than-House '11 Exploration total, meanwhile, is much better distributed, as we'll see in the next two tables.

Actual'10 Old'11 Admin'11 Senate'11 House'11

Exploration $3780M $6077M $4263M $3868M $4535M

Now, the major line items within the Exploration total:

First, the various launcher/capsule project budget lines. Old '11 again shows the start of the planned big Constellation ramp-up compared to Actual '10.

More interesting and less well-known, the Admin '11 request actually has nearly $2.5 billion for Constellation program shutdown and future Heavy Lift Vehicle engine development - one reason we're not all that upset about Senate '11's $2.8 billion funding for HLV & Orion next year - there's less than $300 million difference.

House '11 meanwhile has $4.2 billion for their HLV and Station Transport program, 92% (!) of their Exploration total - not much left for anything else there. Note that the House bill fine print implies two boosters - one unspecified unfunded booster is needed by 2015 to carry the House Station Transport on its mandated first mission, plus there's the official House HLV due to fly by 2020. Note too that this House '11 total is $1.4 billion less than the Old '11 Ares/Orion line that the Augustine Commission found was already unrealistically low for the two in-house NASA vehicle developments planned.

Actual'10 Old'11 Admin'11 Senate'11 House'11

Ares I and Orion $3326M $5531M

Constellation Shutdown $1900M

Heavy Lift Propulsion Technology $559M

HLV & Capsule $2751M

HLV & Station Transport $4156M

And now, we get to a bunch of useful stuff - admittedly, useful from our perspective.

Human Research (deep-space mission related) is essentially level under Senate '11, up sharply under Admin '11 and House '11. We can live with level for a year.

Commercial Crew/Cargo development support funding varies all over the place. The Senate '11 total is a bit down from the Admin '11 request, but still far far better than the House '11 chop job. (The questionable $100 million in the House line was a last-second loan guarantee program add-on that may or may not have been turned into some sort of development grant program by the time this bill hits the full House again.)

Exploration Technology is more than doubled from this year under Admin '11, and a mild decline under Senate'11. A mild decline is still a lot better than House '11's zero.

Robotic Exploration (probe missions as precursors for future human exploration) gets increased five-fold under Admin '11, four-fold under Senate 'll. Not bad, and again miles better than House '11's zero funding.

Actual'10 Old'11 Admin'11 Senate'11 House'11

Human Research $152M* $152M* $215M* $155M* $215M*

Commercial

Crew/Cargo $39M* $12M* $812M* $612M* $64M*(+$100M?)

Exploration

Technology $283M* $381M* $652M* $250M* $0*

Robotic

Exploration $19M* $0.2M* $125M* $100M* $0*

Finally, a total for each budget's funding of "good stuff" - things we consider likely to significantly advance routine low-cost access. Admin '11 more than triples this year's total, Senate '11 more than doubles it. Even House '11 provides a modest increase, though note that's almost entirely in the (apparently non-controversial) $572 million Space Technology line - the House version really hammers Commercial Crew/Cargo, and zeroes the Exploration Technology and Robotic Precursors needed to give the House HLV and Capsule actual missions (in the unlikely event they ever even fly.)

Actual'10 Old'11 Admin'11 Senate'11 House'11

Total Good Stuff* $668M $730M $2376M $1467M $851M(+$100M?)

Our bottom line: The Senate version makes up 40% of the difference in good stuff between the Administration's request and the House's counter-attack. The Senate version also keeps all the major useful line items alive, with enough funding to make useful progress. It also makes a far better starting point for the eventual NASA Appropriation than the House version. Worth supporting vigorously over the House version? We think so. Agree with us? Then read Space Access Update #117 again, and go rattle some Congressional cages!

Space Access Society's sole purpose is to promote radical reductions in the cost of reaching space. You may redistribute this Update in any medium you choose, as long as you do it unedited in its entirety. You may reproduce sections of this Update beyond obvious "fair use" quotes if you credit the source and include a pointer to our website.

Space Access Society

http://www.space-access.org

space.access@space-access.org

"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System" - Robert A. Heinlein

Tuesday View Roundup 2

2010-08-31T15:20:04-06:00

Monday Mail Roundup 8

2010-08-30T16:30:03-06:00

Neutrinos & Half-life

2010-08-30T16:30:02-06:00

Neutrinos & Half-life

Jerry- It's been 'known' for some time that neutrinos have an effect on radioactive materials. The following article is from 2003:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/
dn3734-neutrino-beam-could-neutralise-
nuclear-bombs.html

Clearly, if the effect of additional neutrinos is to accelerate decay, then an absence of neutrinos would be... no decay? The determination of this could be extremely interesting. We have no way to effectively shield solar (or interstellar) neutrinos, but we could certainly run some tests to see if there is a relationship between neutrino flux and decay rates and if that relationship is linear or not.

Story idea: Perhaps the sun has a 'neutrino cycle'. Perhaps solar neutrino output is normally much higher. Perhaps there are no 'little green men' running about the galaxy because nuclear energy is unavailable to them because their suns produce enough neutrinos that their home worlds have no usable actinides left. Be a pity if our sun decided to emit a neutrino burst sufficient to detonate all the nukes we have lying around the planet.

-Jim

The silly season Mars Hoax

2010-08-30T16:10:20-06:00

The Mars Hoax. Every year??

Dr. P,

Why is it that we (Internet users) get this Mars e-mail every August? This has been going on since 2003, when Mars really was closest to Earth and as bright as it could be (but nowhere near as bright as a full moon. Are we that dumb that this meme continues on an annual basis? Are our memories that short? I used to blame this hoax on inexperienced users (like my parents) who forwarded on e-mail from friends. Also, every August? That isn’t possible, with our 365.24 day orbit and Mars’ 686.91 day orbit.

Is this a case of someone meaning well and not understanding, or are we really that gullible?

Best regards,

Bill Kelly

It's the silly season. As I noted I have no idea why I included that other than that it's so obviously absurd.

Education Ratings

2010-08-30T16:10:19-06:00

LAUSD Teacher Rankings

Dr. Pournelle,

The last time this subject came up, I was intensely critical of the teacher effectiveness models that had been proposed. I am happy to see that the recent work by Richard Buddin for the LA Times corrects the deficits noted in earlier studies. I finally feel that the evidence supports the conclusions.

If one were to forge ahead and try to improve the public schools given this information, the biggest stumbling block seems to be sheer number of poor teachers who would need to be let go. This would be a challenge both because the teachers and their unions would object, and because you would need to find replacements that we still don't know how to predict whether they themselves would be good teachers. However, given that in the LA Times study, Buddin did not find any effect on class size, perhaps an easier path is to not replace the poor teachers, but instead place extra students with the most able teachers, and increase their compensation.

This would be an ideal followup study, to see whether you could place extra students with a teacher who did well and have that teacher maintain their effectiveness. My observation of the public schools here in Arizona is that the primary driver of smaller class sizes is discipline problems, but as you have noted, we could deploy retired gunnery sergeants to good effect.

-- Benjamin I. Espen

There are obvious limits, but in general class size is not terribly significant. In my old country school we had about 25 pupils per grade and two grades to the room. Four teachers for the entire 1-8 regional school (the 7-8 grade teacher was the Principal Teacher; the 5-6 was the librarian). We learned, I would say as much as it taught in contemporary public schools. Christian Brothers College (which was a JC with a high school attached) was a superior college track high school and had about 25 students to the class. There are many studies all showing that teacher quality is far more important than class size.

The effectiveness models are troublesome, but it is very clear that if we randomly fired 20% of the teachers every year and made those randomly chosen teachers reapply it would improve the heck out of the system. Clearlyw e can do better than random in selecting the worst teachers.

Fixing Education

2010-08-30T16:10:18-06:00

Public Education: a Modest Propposal

Hi Jerry.

As a fellow CBHS Memphis alumnus (1980) and a reader of your fiction in my misspent youth, I was delighted to find your blog. It has been entertaining and thought-provoking.

The LA Times story you linked is very interesting, especially coming from that particular source. It noted that individual teachers are significant factors in student performance. As I'm sure you're aware, many other studies have failed to demonstrate much correlation between overall funding levels or class size.

Having read many of these studies over the years, I have been advocating a modest proposal to reform the system. It has several advantages: It is budget neutral (does not "add one dime to the deficit"). It addresses teacher complaints of low salaries, It is likely to improve educational outcomes based on the available evidence.

It is not politically feasible, although in most respects it is very simple.

First, fire the bottom half of the teachers.

Double class sizes, since they don't appear to affect outcomes.

Double the salaries of the remaining teachers, while making their continued employment contingent on performance.

The biggest problem that I see is what metrics would be used to evaluate the teachers. It is a non-trivial problem.

All students in the system would immediately have the advantage of teachers at or above the 50th percentile, which should result in improved outcomes.

The higher salaries would create more competition for teaching jobs, resulting in more competent teachers over time

Not really a workable solution for lots of reasons, but fun to think about.

James

Perhaps drastic, in that 10% would probably do the job, but I like the notion that it leaves all the teachers above average...

Solar neutrinos

2010-08-30T16:10:17-06:00

==============

Neutrinos

Jerry,

I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to write earlier. The past couple of days have been interesting, in a "terror-induced surge in marketing activity ahead of the pending round of layoffs" way. And I'll add that I'm a bit rustier that Dr. Andreassen, since most of my recent work on radiation has been on practical effects rather than mechanisms. (And my recent work on radiation, despite also have a Ph.D. in particle physics, has been subverted to project assignments normally more suited to civil engineers and data managers.)

(1) Dr. Andreassen provided a correct description of alpha decay. He is also right about the complexities of the strong force at nuclear scales.

(2) The mechanisms for beta decay are based purely in the weak force; a neutron disassociates into a proton, an electron, and an electron anti-neutrino; the nucleon goes from atomic number Z, atomic mass A, to atomic number Z+1, atomic mass A, and the electron and the anti-neutrino recoil against the changed mass-energy of the resulting nucleon.

(3) Gamma radiation exists because both alpha decay and beta decay often result in target nuclear which are in electromagnetically excited states; gamma rays are the products of transition back to rest.

I'll add one note I ran across in the early 1990's but haven't seen followed up. Neutrinos are well known to have very low levels of direct interaction resulting in conversion into electrons (or muons) and other products. However, there is still a probability of elastic scattering where the neutrino encounters an electron or nucleus and changes direction without changes in energy. About 17-18 years ago, I saw a series of papers about a group of neutrino physicists were considering whether neutron scattering could be detected by measurement of the thermal energy generated when the recoil electrons settled back into their initial state in a supercooled semiconductor.

There is a lot about neutrino scattering currently in the literature. A quick search turns up this reference:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/95p07226ut516p78/

Proceedings of the International Conference “Nucleus, 2009: Fundamental Problems and Applications of Nuclei Physics from Nanotechnology to Space” (LIX International Meeting on Nuclear Spectroscopy and the Structure of Atomic Nuclei)

Temperature effect for an inelastic neutrino scattering cross section

A. A. Dzhioev <http://www.springerlink.com/content/?Author=A.+A.+Dzhioev > and A. I. Vdovin <http://www.springerlink.com/content/?Author=A.+I.+Vdovin>

Abstract snippet: ...for neutrino energies lower than the energy of the Gamov-Teller resonance, the inelastic scattering cross section depends substantially on temperature.

Your View article on Thursday notes that the rate of radioactive decay appears to increase closer to the sun; that is, in higher neutrino fluxes. If neutrino flux is the mechanism, then it becomes plausible to consider that inelastic neutrino scattering in a nucleus yields either prompt or delayed decay of the nucleon, which is not that different than other low energy transfer nuclear reactions.

http://www.sns.ias.edu/~jnb/SNviewgraphs/
Opacities/colorbahcallserenellibs05OP.pdf is a plot of the solar neutrino flux as a function of (modeled) source of neutrinos. Just to put a scale on the number, the flux of 10E11 low-energy neutrinos per square centimeter per second (from pp interactions), results in about ten neutrinos per average nucleon (I used a mass number of 27 for the approximation but with heavy rounding) per day, or three thousand per year. For a species with a nominal half life of 200 years and a 1% change in the decay rate, the rate for neutrino inelastic scattering transferring enough energy to a recoil nucleus to result in induced radioactive decay would be about once per ten million interactions.

If I've not slipped any digits anywhere, and remembering that I'm working with "very" round numbers.

Back of the envelope, this seems to hold water. Maybe I need to write the paper.

Dr. Jim W

Obviously even small increases in radioactivity levels in the interior of Earth would have SOME effect on the internal temperature, and that must eventually affect the bisophere temperature. How much over how long is beyond my ability to calculate although I am still looking for some numbers, at least orders of magnitude.

The more I think on it, the more I wonder about internal temperature and transfer of energy to the seas. It doesn't take a lot of change to make a change, so to speak.

Wind Problems

2010-08-30T16:10:16-06:00

=============

Study shows that wind power increases air pollution

http://www.bentekenergy.com/files/userfiles/file/BENTEK%20-%20Executive%20Summary%20-%20How%20Less%20Became%20More_100416.pdf

The short version is that using coal generation to supplement wind is inefficient and adds to pollution because boiler based systems are not designed to start and stop a lot. They are designed to heat up and run for a long time. (In my Navy days, lots of ships needed several hours notice to get the boilers hot before they could leave port. Luckily, unless you were a fireman, my ship steamed 7x24 even in port, but I digress.)

Its interesting to me that they ignore the option of running the power generation 'steady state' at optimal efficiency and air pollution levels and somehow storing the excess power when the wind is blowing and generating sufficient power. Then they could use the stored energy to supplement the generation capacity when the wind isn't blowing.

It isn't currently easy to do (except for pump storage) but with some R&D it ought to be reasonably doable. I'd personally lean in the nanotube capacitor direction as a workable storage medium.

Regards,

John Harlow

President BravePoint

It's not ignored, it's that all the storage methods are too expensive.

Dangerous Wind Turbines -

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/
business/energy-environment/27radar.html?_r=2

The United States military has found a new menace hiding here in the vast emptiness of the Mojave Desert in California: wind turbines

The Iron Law

2010-08-30T16:10:15-06:00

===============

The 'Iron Law' marches on...

Jerry:

Apparently, the Iron Law of Bureaucracy is alive and well in Virginia. I just came across this on CNN's web site -

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/08/27
/virginia.paid.for.no.work/index.html?hpt=T2

...under the title "Worker at taxpayer-funded agency in Virginia plays hooky for 12 years".

The part that really got my attention was the statement that -

When McGuire was asked how a person who got paid for not working could have escaped detection for so long, she said she was unsure.

"We don't know at this point how something like this can happen. We're very concerned," she said. "[We're] working on procedure to prevent this from happening again."

As with any self-respecting bureaucracy here had to be at least one supervisor to whom this person was assigned. And, over 12 years, that position was likely to have been occupied by several different people. And apparently NONE OF THEM noticed that one of their minions simply didn't show up... day after day after day. How could any 'procedure' deal with this kind of culpable incompetence?

John L.

We need a procedure to answer that question.

Beliefs of Climate Believers

2010-08-30T16:10:14-06:00

What Climate Change Advocates Believe

Jerry:

I saw this at Jon Ray's "Greenie Watch" blog, and thought of you. http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-do-warmists-actually-believe-list.html

........Karl

<quote> An email below from John Droz, Jr., [aaprjohn@northnet.org] physicist & environmental advocate. Droz welcomes comments

I have dialogued with many pro-AGW parties, and have tried to ferret out their underlying (often unstated) assumptions. Below is my current list. AGW proponents have the following stated or embedded beliefs:

1) We currently have the ability to measure and report on an average annual global temperature to .01 degree Celsius

2) We have the ability to empirically calculate the average annual global temperature, with this same degree of accuracy, over the last few thousand years

3) Based on the data from #1 & #2, the earth has recently (100� years) been warming

4) Based on historical records (#2), the earth is warming to an unusually high degree

5) This increase (in the last 100 years) has been .74� degrees Celsius

6) Assuming business as usual, this warming will continue (or increase) for the foreseeable future

7) This warming will soon have profound negative environmental and economic consequences to all of the earth’s inhabitants

8) The mechanics of the earth’s recent warming are essentially entirely explained by the Greenhouse Gas theory

9) CO2 increases is the primary greenhouse gas driver that explains earth’s recent warming

10) That 350 PPM of CO2 is a critical concentration that we should not exceed

11) Other greenhouse gasses (e.g. water vapor) are discounted as consequential causes of recent warming

12) Most CO2 increases are man-made

13) The fact that we don’t understand a significant amount about CO2 sinks has been deemed to be irrelevant.

14) The solution of restricting man-made CO2 has passed an objective cost-benefits analysis

15) That proprietary computer models produce results equivalent to empirical testing <end quote>

Well some of us can believe six impossible things before breakfast...

Letter from England

2010-08-30T16:10:10-06:00

Letter from England

The education mess here continues to unwind. The private sector has clearly figured out how to game the system: <http://tinyurl.com/3ag5rl4> <http://tinyurl.com/35ub7cz>

Discussion of the Australian approach to university education: <http://tinyurl.com/2wle2fw> . A bit too profit-driven.

Guardian comment on Labour's restructuring: <http://tinyurl.com/2wyosdz>

Android marketplace discourages app developers: <http://tinyurl.com/32ctr58>

What *did* cause the dinosaur extinctions? <http://tinyurl.com/2gx59y5>

From during the week:

University crisis hitting high school students. Explanation: UK students studying for their A-levels (college entrance exams) attend sixth-form colleges (corresponding to the last years of high school in America) after they complete their GCSEs (between 14 and 16, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Certificate_of_Secondary_Education>) . Older students who cannot find university places often return to their sixth-form college for another year to improve their A-level test results. This eliminates places for 16-year olds who would be entering a sixth form college. Additionally, universities are now using GCSE results to break ties between equivalent A-level results.

Daily Mail article: <http://tinyurl.com/3y4njkw> Guardian article: <http://tinyurl.com/28uesxk> Telegraph article: <http://tinyurl.com/39rdkcz>

A Dutch university is offering English-language courses (at half the cost) to UK students who missed out on their university places. <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=413025> The down-side is that only 30% of students entering Maastricht University graduate, about a third of the graduation rate the UK Government now requires--which, by the way, is probably one of the reasons UK employers are unhappy with UK graduates.

-- Beware Outside Context Problems--

Harry Erwin, PhD

For platinum subscription:

2010-08-30T16:00:03-06:00

For platinum subscription:

Platinum subscribers enable me to work on what I think is important without worrying about economics. My thanks to all of you.

Patron Subscription:

Did you subscribe and never hear from me? Click here!.

Now a California legislator has said that...

2010-08-30T16:00:02-06:00

Now a California legislator has said that, yes, California Consumer Affairs agents have the power to seize private property for testing, and do not pay compensation. The furniture or other item seized is destroyed in the tests. No compensation is paid and in the case under discussion no receipt was given; the agent suggested that the shop owner try her insurance company. The $1400 couch was confiscated to be tested for fire resistance to cigarette butts. Whether the state ought to be paying agents to go about seizing private property for destructive testing is a question worth debate, but apparently has not been debated.

But we were born free.

Sunday Mail Roundup 1

2010-08-30T13:50:36-06:00

Saturday Mail Roundup 1

2010-08-30T13:50:35-06:00

Friday Mail Roundup 1

2010-08-30T13:50:34-06:00

On the Mars Email

2010-09-02T16:00:09-06:00

On the Mars Email

Jerry,

I feel compelled to adjunct to Mister Bill Kelly's email. I don't know that *we* are that 'stupid'--as Mister Kelly puts it--but there are some among us who seem to think we are. Are they correct? I was listening to a radio show and the host interview Nathaniel Rothschild--yes, the Red Shield banker family that skilfully manipulated the English economy following the results of the Battle of Waterloo [1]. Nathaniel Rothschild has taken it upon himself to become part of this whole urbanite, pseudo-environmentalist movement. He was advocating his 'climate change' policies. The host of the show raised the matter of data indicating that Mars and Jupiter are also heating up, and asked if the Sun could be causing global warming. Rothschild said--and I played this back several times as I could not believe it--that Jupiter and Mars were closer to the Sun than the Earth!

While I would like to give credit to Orwell for doublethink, there is another man who taught us about doublethink. I once wrote about this remarkable man when I did a paper on Orwell, and I used a certain scene from a certain play during that paper. If you will indulge me, I will end this letter with the wisdom of the venerable Spear Shaker:

PETRUCHIO

I say it is the moon.

KATHARINA

I know it is the moon.

PETRUCHIO

Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun.

KATHARINA

Then, God be bless'd, it is the blessed sun: But sun it is not, when you say it is not; And the moon changes even as your mind. What you will have it named, even that it is; And so it shall be so for Katharina.

--William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, Scene 5.

Warmest Regards,

Josh

[1] It's a very interesting piece of history. Rothschild had an observer at the battle, and his observer got the news of the result of the battle to him first. When Rothschild found out Napoleon had lost, he went to the market, sighed, and sold all of his holdings. Investors assumed Napoleon won! Investors dumped their assets--which brought their value down. Rothschild's men then, quietly, bought up the dumped assets at pennies on the dollar. The Rothschild family remains powerful today, and of course is the target of various 'conspiracy theories' because of that. -- BDAB,

Josh

Blair's Memoirs Bare a Lot

2010-09-01T13:40:07-06:00

Blair's Memoirs Bare a Lot

Americans may find these interesting, particularly in terms of how UK politics works. <http://tinyurl.com/32d6bsn> <http://tinyurl.com/32d6bsn> <http://tinyurl.com/32yxe9p> <http://tinyurl.com/25sh8rv> <http://tinyurl.com/35h97sh> <http://tinyurl.com/2vnxbjx> <http://tinyurl.com/352b3jb> <http://tinyurl.com/2uns9fb>

Harry Erwin, PhD

"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." (Catherine Aird)

: Bush warned Blair off Brown

2010-08-30T16:30:01-06:00

: Bush warned Blair off Brown

See the following stories: <http://tinyurl.com/3y6lh33> <http://tinyurl.com/3a4xgmv>

By the way, if the Austrian school does have a prescription, the Con-Dem Government here in the UK needs to learn about it. They've lost focus in their budget cut-backs.

-- If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? (Albert Einstein)

Harry Erwin PhD

The Menace of Wind Turbines

2010-08-30T16:10:21-06:00

Subj: The Menace of Wind Turbines

http://xkcd.com/556/

Rod Montgomery

Funny nuclear decay rates

2010-08-30T16:10:13-06:00

Funny nuclear decay rates

Jerry

Dr. Rolf Andreassen provided a very nice description of how one normally models alpha decay. However it still comes down to 'the alpha particle "pops" through the barrier' and Quantum Theory only tells us the rate (or % chance) not the why. Consider a tunnel diode in electronics, you know that a certain percentage of the elections will tunnel through the barrier, but the theory makes zero prediction as to "which ones".

As a Solid State Physicist, I find this all very fascinating, but Nuclear decay physics is a different field entirely. If it's not at the "that's funny" stage, it's certainly at the "what in the world could be causing that?" stage.

Mark E. Horning, Physicist

: My nomination for quote of the year

2010-08-30T16:10:12-06:00

: My nomination for quote of the year

There is a recent column by James Taranto in the WSJ concerning the liberal elites and their disdain for common Americans.

http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB100014240527487041478
04575455523068802824.html?
mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

The entire article is worth a read, including this memorable gem:

> The liberal elites cannot comprehend common sense, and, incredibly,
> they think that's a virtue. After all, common sense is so common.

Steve Chu

Record cold snap in Amazon kills six million fish...

2010-08-30T16:10:11-06:00

Record cold snap in Amazon kills six million fish...

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/
100827/full/news.2010.437.html

Jim

Global Warming, I presume.

Massive solar storm to hit earth in 2012! Lions and tigers and bears! Oh...

2010-08-30T16:10:09-06:00

Massive solar storm to hit earth in 2012! Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!

Dr Pournelle

Thank you for your contribution to the silly season. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q3/view637.html#Friday

"Massive solar storm to hit Earth in 2012 with 'force of 100m bombs'"

From the article: '"The general consensus among general astronomers (and certainly solar astronomers) is that this coming Solar maximum (2012 but possibly later into 2013) will be the most violent in 100 years," News.com.au quoted astronomy lecturer and columnist Dave Reneke as saying.'

Who is Dave Reneke? Dave Reneke is 'one of Australia’s most well known and respected amateur astronomers and lecturers'. In the article, he quotes Dr Richard Fisher, NASA, and, yes, Dr Fisher has published alarms about the ill effects of solar storms, but Dr Fisher is forecasting the big one will occur in 2013.

So why does Dave Reneke say 2012? Just coincidence that 2012 is the year the Mayan calendar cycles to 0.0.0.0.0? Could be. Could be that a 99-to-1 horse will win the Kentucky Derby next spring, but my money won't be on that horse.

(I note that the story was published without a byline. Who would want his name connected to this piece?)

And what is this uncorroborated talk show nonsense about the California Department of Consumer Affairs? I recall the trumped-up report about Texas law requiring software mechanics to get PI licenses. The talk show stuff sounds like it comes from the same zany mindedness. 'Hey, look! According to the law, the Department of Consumer Affairs can do this!' Call me when it happens and a store files a Fourth Amendment suit against the State of California in Federal District Court.

"If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

My wife keeps asking me what is in the news, and I keep telling her there is nothing worth talking about; it is August and everyone is on vacation, so the sogenannte journalists are making up stories.

Who was it who said, "When there's no news, we give it to you with the same urgency as when there is"?

Live long and prosper
h lynn keith

When I post something with the tag "Something else to worry about" I am not always dead serious. I am aware of the 2012 date.

As to the California Department of Consumer Affairs, yes it was a talk show; and the proprietor of the store was on the air, gave the name of the Consumer Affairs agent to the show hosts (it was not broadcast) and generally sounded believable. It may be all made up, but so far I have no evidence that it is not true. We have come to the point where bizarre stories turn out to be true. The arrogance of our masters sometimes knows few bounds. There were calls from others to whom much the same thing had happened. I agree: it sound unlikely. But the store owners were intimidated and did not resist. I now find that a state legislator has been on the talk show to say yes, that's the law.

I would be pleased to find that it was all made up. I suspect that it may have been fraud by a pretended agent because I really don't like to think we have come to the point where Monsieur le Marquis can run his carriage over a child and toss out a gold coin while riding on -- or walk into a store demand that a product be surrendered for product safety testing without giving compensation -- but I am no longer sure.

You or I would have challenged their right to seize property. Or I like to think so, but I at least have been intimidated by TSA agents, one of whom threatened to have me jailed for writing down her badge number. I surrendered the paper rather than miss my flight. Madame la Marquise had her way. Of course I memorized the number and sent my account of this to the Inspector General of TSA, but it has been years and I have had no answer, so I suspect that was a waste of time. The purpose of TSA is to drum across the fact that we are no longer citizens, but subjects, and that purpose is being served well.

Sunday View Roundup 1

2010-08-30T13:50:18-06:00

Friday View Roundup 1

2010-08-30T13:50:17-06:00

As I warned you earlier, we have family visitors...

2010-09-02T16:00:01-06:00

As I warned you earlier, we have family visitors, which gets me started late. And it's still the silly season.

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article By Neil King, Jr. "Outlook Dimming for Democrats." The thrust of it is that even very conservative Democrat seats are now unstable and may go Republican. This is news of joy for Republicans.

I'm not so sure. I don't want Americans to be disaffected from their government, and I sure don't want the Republicans to slaughter all the conservative Democrats. Not over the long run. What I want, over the long run, is two political parties we can trust to run the government without bringing in either the Creeps -- the "big government conservatives" who wanted to sell us out, increase entitlements, and pay for it with higher taxes and borrowed money -- or the Nuts -- the Pelosi Democrats who want to sell us out, increase entitlements, and pay for it with higher taxes and borrowed money.

One purpose of government is defined by Adam Smith as financing those projects which have little potential profit to individuals, generally take time to complete, but which have great benefits to the society as a whole. The Framers put that in the powers of Congress to finance post offices and post roads. It is also what is meant by the rather vague phrase "promote the general welfare". This was the inspiration of the Roosevelt New Deal program to built TVA and Hoover Dam. Note that whatever else you want to say about the New Deal, we did get Hoover Dam and TVA out of it, built in a timely manner and producing energy, which we darned well needed when World War II broke out. The original TVA dam at Muscle Shoals was built to generate power for nitrogen fixing; nitrogen fixing is needed to make nitric acid and various nitrates which are the basis of high explosives. The 'surplus' power from the Department of War requirements was sold as power. This was one of the precedents that sparked the New Deal TVA.

Other New Deal projects actually produced some useful infrastructure.

We can legitimately argue over the desirability of government building programs and whether all that ought to be left to the market; but it seems to me that if government is going to borrow money and spend it, the end result ought to be something useful, not just spent money. The argument for death taxes -- that the money is better spent than accumulated -- is not very compelling, nor is the Keynesian argument that the remedy for recession is spending money. (His most famous image is that the government ought to bury jars of money, thus promoting labor -- people going out to dig it up -- and spending which would have a multiplied ripple effect throughout the economy.) Just spending borrowed money doesn't seem to work well.

It certainly doesn't for private citizens. It may well make sense for a man who has landed a job as a carpenter to borrow money to buy his basic tool kit, or even to buy a car for transportation to and from work. It makes little to no sense to borrow money to take a trip across country for vacation and relaxation, or to buy frivolities. Everyone knows this, or certainly used to. Apparently the government doesn't really know it. And now we borrow money to fund entitlements, to build demonstration projects, local museums that no one is going to visit, increase salaries of government workers and to hire new government workers whose funding will then fall on the local community, and other such horrors. Spending borrowed money without a very specific purpose is nonsense.

The Clintons understood that, and early on talked about "investments" rather than spending. It was just spending, but at least the talk was of investments -- and after the Gingrich Contract with America gave the Congress to the Republicans for the first time in forty years, the talk, for a while, went back to the notion of investments -- as well as back to eliminating the deficits. But after Newt resigned, the Creeps took over in the Republican caucus, while the Democrats learned to horse trade and when it was their turn brought in the Nuts. And here we are.

All of which is rambling, I suppose. But I get greater joy when I learn that Democrat wheel horses are in danger, not when I find that conservative Democrats are in trouble. Is the Republican running as a "moderate"? I also worry about what a Republican Majority will look like. Will they bring back the Creeps? For the moment that doesn't look like much of a danger. The nation is so disaffected with government that a return to the big spending days doesn't look likely. Besides, the Republican won't get the White House this November, and for a year or so they'll have to act like they know what they are doing, while most of what they propose will be dead on arrival at the White House. That looks to be interesting times.

It does look as if the November election could, just possibly, deliver us from the rule of the Nuts without handing us back to the Creeps. It may be that sanity will return. We can pray. But the first two items in today's mail show that perhaps it's a long journey.

Ending the month of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus...

2010-08-31T15:10:02-06:00

Ending the month of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, First Emperor of Rome, who ruled form 27 BC to 14 AD.

Caesar Augustus tried to impose Roman Law across the civilized world, and spread it beyond into the lands of the barbarians. Some resisted. "Publius Quinctilius Varus, give me back my Legions!" Some have called the battle of Teutoberg Forest one of the decisive battles of history because its result was that Rome never established the Empire beyond the Rhine. Augustus was a competent emperor.

"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed." This decree has been enforced ever since.

You break it, you own it. Tonight the President will give a "Mission Accomplished" speech in which he will be very careful not to say "Mission Accomplished."

If you have the stomach for it, you can see what we are leaving behind: http://www.apostatesofislam.com/media/stoning.htm

We don't have a video of Saddam's sons feeding people feet first into a wood chipper.

If you haven't seen Saturday's View entries ...

2010-08-30T13:50:13-06:00

If you haven't seen Saturday's View entries, they're probably worth your time.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a somewhat unreadable opinion article entitled "The Folly of Subsidizing Unemployment" by Harvard economist Robert Barro. It says about what you'd think it says, but presents some data. The general principle that if you want more of something, subsidize it, is given another substantiation. He doesn't mention the other general principle, that if you want less of something, tax it. We now subsidize unemployment and tax employment. Guess what.

Taking the temperature of the Earth

2010-08-31T15:20:02-06:00

Taking the Earth's Temperature

I continue to look for data on the coupling of Earth's internal temperature to the biosphere temperature. I have also had conversations with space scientists on just how you might go about getting a single number accurate to a tenth of a degree that represents the annual temperature of the Earth. Unsurprisingly they were nonplussed. At first it might seem simple, as for example to take the temperature of a particular layer of the atmosphere: the satellite instrument may be capable of that accuracy, but then there is the problem of justifying that particular measure as representative of the entire Earth. Once you have established an altitude, there are other questions. How many such measurements do you need? Over land or water? What latitudes? Clearly the temperatures will vary by seasons, and of course it will be colder in one hemisphere while warmer in the other. Is the instrumentation so accurate that the standard error of measurement will be way down below 0.1 degree? Will that be true for each latitude measured? And why is an air temperature representative of the water temperature, when water temperature is clearly a major part of the "temperature of the Earth"? As it happens, you can consume a good part of an evening just discussing questions like this without getting an answer. I didn't expect an answer, but I may have set two physicists to thinking about the question.

One space scientist said "But we don't really have a good understanding of the air/water temperature exchange." This didn't surprise me, but think about that one for a while. If we have to factor in water temperatures as well as air temperatures, how do we get those accurate to a tenth of a degree? At what depth? Latitudes? We understand that water circulates. Do we take a temperature in the Gulf Stream? Do we pair that one with one taken a few miles away outside the Gulf Stream? Justify your answer...

How would you go about generating a number accurate to a tenth of a degree that represents the annual temperature of the Earth?

===

And I continue to wonder about volcanism and the interior temperature of the Earth. If solar activity -- possibly neutrinos, possibly something else -- affects radiation that's one thing. Then there's iron in the Earth, and a magnetic field, and the Sun has an electromagnetic field, and last time I heard those are the parts of a generator capable of producing heat. If the interior of the Earth changes by a half a degree in a hundred years, then at some point that temperature change has to affect the ocean temperatures and thus "the temperature of the Earth" (which always appears to be the temperature as seen from outside Earth since the black body temperature of the Earth is what started all this quest for the mechanisms of global warming).

At which point my head aches and I realize that it's going to take a lot of work to understand all this, but my tentative conclusion is that "climate models" that rely on tenth of a degree accuracies are nonsense -- and we are spending millions (some have said billions) on constructing those models and running them on supercomputers. Fortunately the supercomputers are getting a lot cheaper. Alas, the salaries of senior research professors at tax supported institutions are not going down at all. A University of California professor makes more than $200,000 plus benefits and retirement. A climate model team surely has a score of people on it. Grants are in the millions at each institution. How many such teams at how many institutions has to be a guess, but surely it's a fair number.

All of which is chick feed compared to the money that Al Gore and his comrades are making on "carbon offsets" in which you get to pay to have a sapling planted in a rain forest so that you can feel good about driving an SUV. And all of that is chicken feed compared to the costs to the economy of the green regulations.

Leading me to the conclusion that we are spending billions on the assumption that it makes sense to believe there is a number accurate to a tenth of a degree that represents the temperature of the Earth.

And I have yet to see what those models do with the coupling of the interior temperature of the Earth to the biosphere -- and nothing at all about what that temperature is and whether or not it changes, and if so by how much. I'd be astonished if over the centuries the interior temperature of the Earth was unchanging down to a single degree -- and yet any permanent change there surely must eventually be reflected in a change in sea bottom temperatures. Of these the models speak not at all.

Sunday View Roundup 2

2010-08-30T13:50:09-06:00

Solar activity and radioactive decay

2010-08-30T13:50:03-06:00

Solar Activity and Radioactive Decay

I've been talking to my physicist friends including the chief scientist of a major space lab about variations in radioactive decay rates, and so far none of them had heard about this. They were all intrigued. We also have some mail on the subject.

Long time readers will recall that back in the last Millennium we all worried about whether the Sun had gone out: that is, the big underground tanks of various fluids that ought to be detecting solar neutrinos were finding about 1/3 the number that the Standard Solar Theory predicted. Eventually the Standard Solar Theory had to be modified. For a readable account with pointers to even more, see the Berkeley Labs post. The point being that we still don't really understand neutrinos very well. Coupling decay rates of radioactive elements to solar activity raises a whole bunch of new possibilities for explaining climate changes; or at least new inputs that models may have to account for. I have still not found a really good account of the interaction of the interior magma and the biosphere. For general principles, there's a good overview by a Tulane professor here.

It's clear that solar activity producing lots more neutrinos would have only a small effect on the Earth's interior temperature -- which is just as well! -- but it's also clear that it would have some effect. I've not yet got a good handle on how much of an effect it would, have, or how much the interior temperature affects global biosphere temperatures. Again it seems obvious that there must be some effect. The only way to warm the Earth is to warm the seas -- they are, after al, 80% of the surface -- and it's pretty clear that if you want to warm a pot of water, you do not first go get the hair dryer and blow hot air across the surface. You'd do better to blow it on the pot and let that heat the water. The coupling of warm air to sea surface turns out to be imperfectly modeled in all the climate models; at least that is what I have been told by a climate modeler who doesn't want to be named for fear of ostracism by his colleagues. The climate modeling experts are afraid they will lose some of their funding as the ranks of Deniers swell. But that's another story.

I have also been asking physicist and scientist friends how they would go about getting a reliable to a tenth of a degree single figure of merit representing the temperature of the Earth for a given year. Just what do you measure, and how do you combine the measures to get a repeatable figure? I haven't been getting much in the way of satisfactory answers.

So I remain intrigued by the possible coupling of solar activity to radioactive decay rates. Everyone "knows" that there isn't enough absolute solar radiation change from times of quiet Sun to times of active Sun to explain climate shifts like the Little Ice Age. That the Maunder Minimum (1645 - 1750) -- a period of minimum sunspots -- happened during the coldest part of the Little Ice Age . (1400-1800 more or less)

There doesn't seem to be an agreed explanation of why a period of minimum sunspots could have a large effect on the temperature of the Earth. Perhaps solar neutrinos acting on radiation decay can have something to do with this. We'll keep looking.

I had a book signing and took the day off.

2010-08-30T13:50:11-06:00

I had a book signing and took the day off.

I had errands and then the Writers of the Future Awards and dinner.

2010-08-30T13:50:10-06:00

I had errands and then the Writers of the Future Awards and dinner.

Wednesday Mail Roundup 6

2010-08-30T01:31:55-06:00

Kudos and Concerns

2010-08-30T01:31:54-06:00

Kudos and Concerns

Jerry,

I do not tap into the primary infostream often i.e. I do not watch television, I do not listen to radio, and I do not read periodicals regularly. I tap the internet. It brings me what I want, when I want it. So, lately, when I turned on the radio or the television just to see what is happening in the primary infostream consensus, I see Meg Whitman doing an excellent propaganda campaign. Her information warfare skills are incredible. The adds do not seem to impose, though they are the most cut-throat and negative advertisements I've heard in years. They are succinct and they are convincing. I would not be surprised if her strategies--amplified by technology--got her in power.

Onto other matters. This seems most interesting to me:

LOS ANGELES – Next month's opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will be auspicious for a reason other than its both storied and infamous history as the former Ambassador Hotel, where the Democratic presidential contender was assassinated in 1968.

With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation's most expensive public school ever.

The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of "Taj Mahal" schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.

"There's no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the '70s where kids felt, 'Oh, back to jail,'" said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. "Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning."

Not everyone is similarly enthusiastic.

"New buildings are nice, but when they're run by the same people who've given us a 50 percent dropout rate, they're a big waste of taxpayer money," said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution who sits on the California Board of Education. "Parents aren't fooled."

At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex's namesake, a manicured public park, a state-of-the-art swimming pool and preservation of pieces of the original hotel.

Partly by circumstance and partly by design, the Los Angeles Unified School District <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/
ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal_schools#> has emerged as the mogul of Taj Mahals.

The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other LA schools among the nation's costliest -- the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School that debuted in 2009.

The pricey schools have come during a sensitive period for the nation's second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/
ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal_schools

And, last--but not least--Philly requiring bloggers to pay $300 for a business license: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion
/blogs/beltway-confidential/
philly-requiring-bloggers-to-pay-300-for-a-
business-license-101264664.html

-- BDAB,

Josh

Tax the Internet. Tax speech. Why not?

Hi Jerry,

2010-08-30T01:31:50-06:00

Hi Jerry,

In case no one's mentioned it Gizmondo is running an old picture of you in your pajamas for a column "Creativity May Favor the Smelly and Unkempt"

http://lifehacker.com/5620336/
creativity-may-favor-the-smelly-and-unkempt

They do have a link to the old <2006> column it came from:

http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/
open_archives/jep_column-310.php

Take care,

Robert Hickey

Ah well. I doubt it will bring in new readers, but perhaps...

Occupation army

2010-08-30T01:31:49-06:00

Occupation army

Regarding an American Foreign Legion, there are a million Indian army veterans available for recruitment, and they can be Hindu, not muslim, and we will not have to worry about bringing to America trained muslim soldiers after their terms expire. Company regiments worked for the British Empire for along time.

Darryl Miyahira, Honolulu, Hawaii.

It would not be hard to arrange to hire Gurkhas. Indeed, we already do. Hiring several regiments would be simple enough. A competent empire would do so. The question is, how involved in world policing ought we to be? The Balkan excursion did nothing in our national interest while exacerbating our relations with Russia. I have already commented on out interests in Afghanistan and Iraq. Empire is expensive and we have not learned how to make it pay.

Re: Medal of Honor

2010-08-30T01:31:48-06:00

Re: Medal of Honor

On the one hand, you could suggest that a highly-realistic depiction of armed combat could well be a useful tool to *stop* people lightly turning to force of arms. (After all, haven't people always said that the best way to stop wars is to make everyone fight in one? EA makes this possible for the low, low price of $59.99!)

On the other hand, "time bombs" have been part of games like Medal of Honor since...well, since EA's own "Battlefield 1942", albeit they were depicted as bundles of dynamite straight out of a Roadrunner cartoon. (A popular tactic was to load up a jeep with six or seven bombs and then drive it into an enemy tank. Gamers, displaying that keen sense of tact they're well-known for, dubbed this the "Jihad Jeep" attack.)

On the gripping hand...even Battlefield 1942 didn't go so far as to have an "Auschwitz" level.

-- Mike T. Powers

LAUSD Teacher Rankings

2010-08-30T01:31:47-06:00

LAUSD Teacher Rankings

Dr. Pournelle,

-- Benjamin I. Espen

I would wager that we could find effective teachers to replace the 10% that would have to be let go. Of course that would require evaluating the new teachers on some performance based criteria rather than "credentials" which are nothing more than proof of payment of bribes to colleges of education, and the ability to sit through boring and often useless classes without running screaming into the afternoon; or to endure countless expensive "workshops" which are another way of paying tribute to the educationists who run the school system.

But in fact they don't have to be replaced. If we were simple to fire the 10% worst teachers (and 10% of the administrators who would be rendered redundant) and apportion their work to those left, the result would be a great improvement, instantly, while saving money. It is only if we try further improvements that we might have to consider replacing those who have been no more useful than non-functioning broken parts hanging on a machine and getting into the gears.

Since the purpose of the school system is to take money from taxpayers and give it to incompetent teachers -- that is certainly what they put as their first order of business whatever they say their purpose is -- there will always be great reasons why we cannot fire the 10% who turn education experience into a nightmare for many students and cause about half the dropouts from high school. No one who cared beans about the kids would defend some of the horrors that go on in the system perpetrated by teachers who can't be fired.

In this economy there are engineers, market analysts, all kinds of educated people who could do a better job of teaching than our worst 10% and would would be pleased to have a job. As friends have observed, educating the young is a rewarding experience. Teaching used to be a profession. Profession is defined as being composed largely of those who do the work not for the money but for the love of it. "The Professions" used to be Medicine and Law, neither of which were seen as paths to wealth. Those who wanted to get wealthy went into trade. Teaching was also a profession. Of course those old class distinctions are long forgotten now. Ah well.

LA Times does something useful?

You may have seen this a ka-jillion times already, but here it is again.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/
marginalrevolution/2010/08/la-times-
ranks-teachers.html

It's a link to a blog that discusses the LA Times apparently trying to link teachers to performance! With statistics that already exist but the LA County Unified doesn't report! This appears to be legitimate public service?! And the Teacher Union are organizing a boycott?!

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0819-teachers-union-20100819,0,5684383.story

Wow.

Thanks again for the site; just started reading it again more (and re-upped the sub., too) after hearing you on TWiT. I hope you do more of those! Picked up "Oath of Fealty" in a used bookshop just the other day also...interesting how it in some ways presaged the "gated communities" and other items of latter-day "civilization". The discussions on taxes and "social contract" must have seemed weird in the 80s? Funny too how wireless comms. and the "mainframe" model of computing were "missed" in that era of S.F. Next up: "The Gripping Hand"...you and Niven do rip along at a good pace you know?

Jay R. Larsen BA, MBA

Thanks for the kind words.

And the Union's response?

2010-08-30T01:31:46-06:00

And the Union's response?

Dr. Pournelle --

You have no doubt seen the article in the LA Times:

Who's teaching L.A.'s kids? http://www.latimes.com/news/
local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815,0,2695044.story

My wife, a teacher at an LAUSD high school, commented midway through her reading of the article that she wished that she could get this kind of feedback on her effectiveness as a teacher.

Does the teacher's union see the method described as a way to identify teachers who need help to adjust their classroom techniques? Of course not. This afternoon the president of UTLA, A. J. Duffy, sent out a recorded message to all members which attacked the article and the LA Times and called for teachers to cancel their subscriptions and boycott the newspaper.

And some people wonder why it's hard to change the system.

No name, please.

The purpose of the public school system is to make sure that bad teachers are paid from tax money for the rest of their lives. That is certainly what the system puts as its first and irrevocable goal. It is well established that about 10% of the teachers produce over half of the horrible results. Firing the worst 10% would double effectiveness while saving money. Not that the institutions care. And the voters are intimidated by credentialism.

Shrinking The USMC

2010-08-30T01:31:45-06:00

Shrinking The USMC

Worth your read.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htamph/articles/20100815.aspx

David Couvillon Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired.;
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Collector of Hot Sauce; Avoider of Yard Work

Historically the Marines have been the Navy's muscle ashore, and the Navy belongs to the President as opposed to the Department of War which belonged to the Congress.

Imperial Presidency

2010-08-30T01:31:44-06:00

Imperial Presidency

You wrote "The Imperial Presidency has advanced a great deal since the days of Harry Truman."

Funny you should pick that example. I distinctly recall listening to historian David McCullough narrating the audiobook of his biography Truman and, when telling about Truman's last day in office, remarking that on the drive away from the White House it was the first time in 8 years he'd had to stop for a red light.

--Mike

In case it was not clear, I certainly meant no derogation of Harry Truman, who would never have closed the streets around the White House...

'Zombie ants' controlled by parasitic fungus for 48m years

2010-08-30T01:31:43-06:00

'Zombie ants' controlled by parasitic fungus for 48m years

Dr Pournelle,

There has to be a story in this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/aug/18/zombie-carpenter-ant-fungus

Although I suppose Brian Aldiss sort of covered it in Hothouse with the Morel.

Best regards,

Alun

Dr Alun J. Carr

School of Electrical, Electronic, and Mechanical Engineering University College Dublin Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

I think I first heard of these from Jack Cohen some years ago. Thought of writing a story around it or including in Legacy of Heorot but never did. Thanks

: For Your Amusement

2010-08-30T01:31:42-06:00

: For Your Amusement

Possible evidence for cyanobacteria in carbonaceous meteorites believed to originate from comets. <http://www.panspermia.org/hoover4.htm>

-- "Truth is the intersection of independent lies." (Richard Levins, 1966)

Harry Erwin, PhD

Books

2010-08-30T01:31:41-06:00

Books

Dr. Pournelle --

I appreciate your recommendations of books. I would never have found The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes had you not written about it. It is, indeed, an excellent, if rather frightening, read I would also not have delved into The Federalist without your frequent reminders. In college I had read sections and been given a summary of the rest by an honest professor and felt myself familiar with its arguments and principles. Ah, the power of ignorance through education because God, or the Devil, is surely in the details. It has become my current "study book". One line, among many, has stood out to me of late:

"But as the plan of the convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the state governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, exclusively delegated to the United States." [The Federalist, No. 32]

Pieter

By Their Own Sword...

2010-08-30T01:31:40-06:00

By Their Own Sword...

http://seekingalpha.com/article/
221344-homeowners-rebellion-could-
62-million-homes-be-foreclosure-proof

"If MERS [Mortgage Electronic Registration System] is not the title holder of properties held in its name, the chain of title has been broken, and no one may have standing to sue. In MERS v. Nebraska Department of Banking and Finance <http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ne-supreme-court/1016162.html> , MERS insisted that it had no actionable interest in title, and the court agreed."

"...what MERS did allow was the securitization and shuffling around of mortgages behind a veil of anonymity. The result was not only to cheat local governments out of their recording fees but to defeat the purpose of the recording laws, which was to guarantee purchasers clean title. Worse, MERS facilitated an explosion of predatory lending in which lenders could not be held to account because they could not be identified, either by the preyed-upon borrowers or by the investors seduced into buying bundles of worthless mortgages."

Charles Brumbelow

Fannie Mae knoweth not what she owns...

More on the Taliban

2010-08-30T01:31:39-06:00

Big expensive school

2010-08-30T01:31:38-06:00

Big expensive school

Jerry

I think the thing that disturbed me the most about the Taj Mahal school with the weird excrescence on top was its proposed enrollment: 4200 elementary students. That makes this building nothing but a high tech prison for children. And think of the human hierarchy you will be paying for: the bigger the building, the more layers of supervision and management you need. Just the number of CCTV monitors (cameras and people to watch the screens) needed to keep perverts from having their way with the children will be staggering.

California. Such a happy land.

Ed (escaped 1968)

The Party is Over

2010-08-30T01:31:37-06:00

The Party is Over

Jerry,

Wow, Gate's said it all:

"The culture of endless money that has taken hold must be replaced by a culture of savings and restraint," Gates said. "Toward this end, I am directing that any new proposal or initiatives, large or small, be it policy, program or ceremony, come with a cost estimate. That price tag will help us determine whether what we are gaining or hope to gain is really worth the cost."

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/10/
gates-proposes-cutting-joint-forces-command-
from-defense-budget/

A culture of endless money was able to take hold only because there was an abundance of money--or at least enough money for such a culture to manifest. This line "must" be replaced implies a lack of choice, which I infer to mean the available resources for the the military are--or will be--scarce enough to force sensible spending. Sensible spending is something I have never seen in my entire life. We are starting to sound like some country I would hear about on the news as a child. The America I know does not worry about such foolish things as budgets and disagreeable economic data.

It seems to me that when our persuasive powers declined, we resorted to military force to effect the agenda of the day. Now it seems to me that our military powers are declining. The dollar declined--and continues to decline. China passed Japan as the number two economy, China passed the United States as the number one consumer of energy and is expected to pass the United States and become the number one economy within a year or two.

When the Boomers get old, it is going to be most difficult to look at one of them and not ask them how it feels to have presided over the collapse of the greatest empire this planet has ever seen. We can't look to them for answers and we certainly cannot look to those creatures coming out of the High Schools now for leadership. As I see it, we need to work on training the future generations to get their act together as soon as possible--and we have to pray that we survive the curse of the generations to follow. This is the gloomiest news I've seen in years, Jerry. Our military power is in decline. That hits home for me.

-- BDAB,

Josh

Imperial overreach. The Republic built the wealth. It requires a return to the republic to replace that wealth and pay for the recent adventures.

Solar Activity affects Radioactive Decay rates?

2010-08-30T01:31:36-06:00

Solar Activity affects Radioactive Decay rates?

Current models for radioactive decay have been challenged by, of all sources, the sun:

On Dec 13, 2006, the sun itself provided a crucial clue, when a solar flare sent a stream of particles and radiation toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, a short-lived isotope used in medical diagnostics, noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare.

See:

http://news.stanford.edu/news
/2010/august/sun-082310.html

On the practical side, this could be an important predictor of flare activity.

On the theoretical side, it could result in new theories and particles.

On the SF side:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

- Isaac Asimov

We do not have a real understanding of how sunspot minima affect global climate. Perhaps they don't. but it sure seems so. As I have said many times, we need to find out what's going on before wrecking the economy to fix something we don't really understand.

Exciting news: "The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements" buffy willow

"When researchers found an unusual linkage between solar flares and the inner life of radioactive elements on Earth, it touched off a scientific detective investigation that could end up protecting the lives of space-walking astronauts and maybe rewriting some of the assumptions of physics."

http://news.stanford.edu/news/
2010/august/sun-082310.html

Wow!

Best,

Jon

Monday Mail Roundup 10

2010-08-30T01:31:35-06:00

Rich Getting Richer

2010-08-30T01:31:33-06:00

Rich Getting Richer

I notice that the article by Dr. Saez, Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at Berkeley, is based on the IRS income data. Three points should be made.

First, his frequent and unfavorable references to ex-President Bush may hint at a tendency to read the data in a certain way.

But the second is more important. The IRS income series is compiled by household, and it really does make a difference if that household consists of a married couple with both employed. A large part of the increased "share" of earned income by the top percentiles has been at least in part an artifact of intact double-income families rather than of Scrooge McDuck wallowing in his cash vault. On the contrary, an enormous proportion of the lowest-earning households are comprised of single-parent families, primarily headed by women abandoned by men anxious to avoid fatherhood responsibilities. A simple thought experiment suffices: imagine three people earning equal incomes, save that two of them are married to each other and the third lives alone. The married family will account for twice as much income as the single family, yet with no necessary injustice in the "distribution" of wealth. This does not mean that there is no income inequity -- there will always be such differences due to all sorts of factors, ranging from dumb luck to diligent work to desire to pursue happiness rather than money, etc. Some people may prefer to be artists selling their pottery out of a van and living free. It would be grossly unfair to force them to be stockbrokers, to the peril of their souls. I saw no evidence in Dr. Saez's paper that he addressed that issue; but is it symptomatic of his class to treat a class as if it were monolithic in its makeup.

A third point, curiously overlooked, is that the truly wealthy are seldom those who work for wages. Studies of income distribution apply only to those who have incomes. Those who simply _have_ privilege and wealth -- vast properties and the like -- do not show up on that particular radar screen. Their own income may be trivial. Their servants might be paid directly from the trust, for example; so it is the maid's income, not the master's that winds up on the IRS tables.

MikeF

An Officers View on The Iraq Reconstruction

2010-08-30T01:31:32-06:00

An Officers View on The Iraq Reconstruction

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2006/jul/03/00019/

Pretty much how I thought it was going pre-surge.

If I doubted that the Iraqis were any more committed than my own superiors to outfitting and training their army, the answer came after a long presentation to the Iraqi army battalion’s executive officer, offering suggestions on his logistics operational plan. I concluded by asking what he thought. “My plan is that you should care for all of our logistical needs,” he said. “Why?” I asked. The Iraqi executive officer replied, “You broke our country. Now, you fix it.” The essence of a failed policy did not get any clearer than that.

. . .

I returned home in September 2005, grateful and safe, but stripped of the illusions I had taken with me.

. . .

I believed in my mission, and I wanted the Iraqis I was training to run their own country. But this wasn’t an American priority, and I left Mosul feeling that my efforts were either erased or ignored.

That’s not to say that the men who died in Iraq died for nothing. They were doing their jobs. But the Bush administration disgraces their memories by stating that our only option is to prolong a losing policy. If I learned anything from the lessons I was charged with teaching, it’s that a good military leader examines costs and benefits and adjusts his course accordingly. Yet this administration refuses to learn from its mistakes, level with the soldiers fighting its war, and bring the sad American chapter called Iraq to a close.

David March

The above was written in 2006, well before the election.

It is one view. It is not much different from what I said would happen when I opposed going into Iraq in the first place, and very much opposed staying there. A Republic had no need of an extended stay in Iraq. A competent Empire would have built an army of auxiliaries and set up a puppet ruler. A competent Empire would have paid attention to priorities, got the oil pumping again, built a native army to keep order, and kept the Legions in fortresses to rule the native cohorts and vexillations whose task was to tame the people. It would not have been pretty, but it would have been preferable to Saddam and his psychopathic sons. It was also a policy that requires money -- the kind of money that could only be generated by Iraqi oil. We could never pump enough oil to make Iraq profitable, but we could pump enough to keep energy prices low, and thus make the US economy boom.

I predicted that our policy would be incompetent Empire, and I have seen little to change my views. The incompetence began when Bremer was sent in: neither competent nor capable of learning, he may be the most incompetent proconsul since Roman time .

In 117 the proud emperor wisely elected to withdraw from Mesopotamia, and died in retreat in Cilicia. His adopted son and successor, Hadrian, returned Mesopotamia to Parthia the following year. “Thus it was,” wrote Dio, “that the Romans, in conquering Armenia, most of Mesopotamia, and the Parthians, had undergone severe hardships and dangers for naught.” But as historian B. W. Henderson put it, “it was very wise to abandon what could not be kept.” Mesopotamia resumed its former status as a prosperous part of Persia. The citizens of Rome didn’t suffer from the loss of a couple of briefly-held eastern provinces, or the revival of Parthian power up until that empire’s fall over a century later. Nor did it suffer when Hadrian, on the island of Britain at the other end of the empire, elected to build his famous barrier between Rome and “barbarian” Celtic tribes. Hadrian’s Wall, marking the boundary of Roman Britain, denoted the realistic recognition of the limits of imperial power.

We are neither withdrawing from Iraq nor leaving behind a stable ally. The story is not ended.

God save the Legions.

Letter From England

2010-08-30T01:31:31-06:00

Letter From England

P!=NP proof is probably incorrect. See <http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=349&bpid=25616>

I spent a day in Northern Ireland as an external examiner for a PhD. They didn't have far to fall in the current downturn--60% of their economy was already Government jobs. There seem to be plenty of well-qualified people, but there isn't much capital investment--we're seeing the same thing in the North East. It appears the payoff for low-risk short-term investment in London is sufficiently high that very little money is going into longer-term investment elsewhere in the country.

Malware apparently contributed to fatal air crash <http://tinyurl.com/2ves3g8>. Suppose they were to chase down the guy responsible for the malware and jail him 8)...!

UK police force now requires underwear to be inconspicuous and of an appropriate colour... <http://tinyurl.com/3xcbxvd>. Could you imagine what Monty Python would do with that?

Crash scam becoming popular in the UK <http://tinyurl.com/32wpr2b>

UK navel-gazing about research and education:

A-level results continue to rise: <http://tinyurl.com/2v4slrl>. This may not be due to easier tests--remember the Flynn Effect.

Six students per place: <http://tinyurl.com/2vy8ome>

Youth opportunity in the UK in decline <http://tinyurl.com/32vdm6p>.

Blaming low social mobility on poor parenting rather than social class. <http://tinyurl.com/34n35hf>.

THE editorial comparing the holes in the ground occupied by California and the UK <http://tinyurl.com/33qmoea>

Secret list of 'banned' A-level subjects not accepted by top UK universities <http://tinyurl.com/37fq7zq>

THE opinion piece on research <http://tinyurl.com/2vwgoys>

Harry Erwin, PhD

"Old age and treachery will beat youth and enthusiasm."

NASA Exploration Funding: The Battle Continues

2010-08-30T01:31:30-06:00

NASA Exploration Funding: The Battle Continues

"No man's life and property are safe while the legislature is in session." - widely attributed to Mark Twain

This is a followup to our last two Updates, both of them urgent political alerts in the continuing battle over fundamental reform of NASA's human space exploration program. The good news is, with your help, the last round was a standoff. But the fight is far from over. It's once again time to get active, if we don't want to see these reforms sunk without a trace. And this time, we actually have a couple of weeks warning.

State of Play

The House NASA Authorization bill, HR.5781 was up for full House consideration, but was pulled back at the last second when it became clear there was considerable lack of consensus on major provisions. (To every one of you who called your Representative, thanks!) The Senate NASA Authorization, S.3729, meanwhile has been approved by the full Senate. Both House and Senate are now on recess till the week of September 13th.

The Senate version is not great, but is livable, with $3.9 billion overall Exploration funding split as follows: $1.6 billion for NASA development of a new in-line Shuttle-derived heavy-lift launcher, $1.1 billion for continuation of the Orion capsule, and $1.1 billion for the rest of Exploration. That last $1.1 billion includes reduced but still substantial funding for the Commercial Crew, Commercial Cargo, and other new space technology/exploration precursors we support. (S.3729 also fully funds Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research, under another account.) Close to a billion dollars of NASA exploration funding directed toward useful things is hugely better than we would have hoped for coming into this year.

The House version is extremely bad. HR.5781 is essentially a blueprint for the destruction of NASA human space exploration in the name of saving it. - Out of a total $4.5 billion Exploration funding, it devotes $4.2 billion to development of a new in-house NASA heavy booster (to be based on existing Ares work) plus a government-owned Station transportation system based on the Orion capsule. - It makes drastic cuts in funding for developing US Commercial Crew and Cargo to Station capabilities, to a small fraction of NASA's request. - It imposes "poison pill" requirements on potential US commercial crew services that neither NASA nor existing Russian crew service providers have to meet. - It zeroes Exploration Technology and Robotic Precursor Missions funding.

The gutting of Commercial Crew and Cargo budgets, and the Commercial Crew poison pills, will leave us spending hundreds of millions annually for non-US Station transport services for the forseeable future, and will leave us with no backup should those non-US services have technical or political problems.

The new House-mandated NASA heavy booster and Station-transport Orion get less funding than, but a similar schedule to, what the Augustine Commission already found unworkable for the old Ares/Orion. The issue of what Station-Orion would fly on (2015 operational goal) while waiting for the new heavy lifter (2020 goal) is not even addressed, never mind funded. The odds are extremely poor that these projects would ever amount to anything beyond never-fly jobs programs. Even if the new vehicles do eventually fly, NASA would still have no deep space missions to fly on them, due to this bill's effective starvation of all other Exploration precursor work.

Pursuing the path implicit in HR.5781 would reduce our nation's international commercial space competitiveness, would damage our national space technology base, and would destroy NASA's chances of moving out beyond low orbit in any meaningful way for decades to come.

What's Next

Our understanding is that they'll try to pass HR.5781 again right after Congress returns from this recess. There will be three opportunities to fix it: In negotiated modifications before it's reintroduced to the House, by amendment on the House floor, or by negotiations in the House-Senate conference committee that will reconcile the two versions. The process may move very quickly once Congress is back. We need to prepare the ground now.

Recommended Action:

Contact your Representative and both your Senators, and ask them to support the Senate version of the NASA Authorization bill, because the House version is unacceptably bad. Get as many of your friends as you can to do it too. Numbers count. We need to make as many of our Representatives and Senators as possible aware of our concerns in the next few weeks, before deals start being made on the final NASA Authorization bill. Start doing it now, don't wait till the last second. (We may ask you to do it again at the last second - a little repetition does no harm.)

Contact Info for Representative and Senators: If you know their names, you can call the US Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for their DC office. If you don't know who your Representative is, go to http://www.house.gov/zip/ZIP2Rep.html and enter your home zipcode. (You may need the 9-digit version.) For Senators listed by state, go to http://www.senate.gov/general/
contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Once through to their office, let the person who answers know you're calling about the NASA Authorization bill. They may switch you to another staffer (or that staffer's voicemail) or they may take the call themselves. (If you're calling after-hours or they're getting a lot of calls, you may go directly to a voicemail.)

Regardless, tell them you want (Representative/Senator TheirName) to support the Senate version of the NASA Authorization, because the House version has major problems.

Briefly give one or two reasons you support the Senate version... - it provides adequate funding for NASA Commercial Crew and Cargo - it supports US rather than foreign crew and cargo service providers - it provides some funding for new NASA exploration technology - it enhances our national technological competitiveness - it partially addresses the NASA problems pointed out by the Augustine Commission and begins to restore NASA's ability to usefully explore - it supports the President's NASA policy ...then a reason why you oppose the House version - see the bullet points in the HR.5781 paragraph above. Then answer questions (if any) as best you can, and politely sign off.

OK, that's the basic version. Some of you may want to get more involved in this effort than making a few quick phone calls. Letters and faxes are great! (Emails much less so; you know how much spam you get - now imagine the amount a Congressman gets. Better to phone than to email.) Keep letters to one page, state your basic point (Dear Representative/Senator TheirName, I am writing to request that you support the Senate NASA Authorization, since the House version is very, very bad...) in the first sentence of the first paragraph, then go into a paragraph or two of supporting detail, then politely wrap up. Faxes may be slightly better than paper mails in that they arrive faster and more reliably - if you are going to paper-mail a letter, do it early so it has time to get through the security checks.

And for you real self-starters out there, your Representative and Senators are on recess, and will probably spend some time back at home with the voters in the next few weeks. - You can show up at a "town hall" and get in line for the microphone with your request ready ("I'm worried about the future of NASA. I'm here to ask that you support the Senate version of this year's NASA Authorization bill, because the House version has serious problems") plus an example or two to give if you get the time. - You can call their local office and try to set up an appointment to meet your legislator (or an appropriate staffer) and spend a few minutes making the case in person. If you do, we strongly recommend you study up on the details, do the whole well-groomed businesslike and courteous thing, practice making your case in less than the allotted time, and unless they keep you longer with questions, depart on-time gracefully. - You can come up with some other way entirely to let them know what you, their constituent, want. We haven't come close to covering all the conventional effective methods here. Just remember though, if you're thinking of getting creative - keep it legal, keep it safe, make VERY sure it gets the point across unmistakably clearly - we've seen way too many political messages delivered so cleverly that nobody else can tell what the message is - and make SURE it doesn't make us all look like flakes (way too easy when we're talking space) or annoy people counterproductively. (Simple parameters, yeah, we know...) Then let us know how you did it!

There's one other very effective way you can help out, if you can be in Washington DC for a few days around the start of the week of September 13th: Some of our DC colleagues are very likely to be organizing citizen lobbyist visits on Capitol Hill early that week. We plan to support their efforts. More on that as soon as we know more.

What it comes down to is, if we care about US space commercial and technical competitiveness, if we want to see NASA with some hope of going new and interesting places anytime soon, we need to keep at this, and we need to get more organized about it. To that end, if you do make a call, send a letter, or otherwise deliver the message, afterwards please email us at space.access@space-access.org, with "contact" in the email title, and describe briefly who you contacted, how you contacted them, and what (if any) response you got? (If you don't want to go onto our mailing list for Updates, be sure to mention that.) Thanks!

Now go get 'em.

= = = = = = = =

_= == = = = =

Space Access Society http://www.space-access.org space.access@space-access.org
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System" - Robert A. Heinlein

RE: I think I've seen discussions like this at Chaos Manner

2010-08-30T01:31:28-06:00

RE: I think I've seen discussions like this at Chaos Manner

Dr. Pournelle, Having seen many discussion of the state of education here. I thought this might interest you. The link in the story takes you to Newsweek.

<http://news.slashdot.org/story/
10/08/21/0027242/Union-Boycotts-
LA-Times-Over-Teacher-Evaluation-Disclosure>

Quae nocent, saepe docent,

Douglas Knapp

: Some Sobering Considerations

2010-08-30T01:31:26-06:00

: Some Sobering Considerations

Jerry,

A most interesting series of thoughts:

Top Six Reasons Why the Economy Is Going Down

1. A “jobless recovery” in the U.S. is not a recovery. You can bail out the largest and most mismanaged companies and change the rules to allow banks to forgo reporting their mistakes, making national economic statistics look better. But that doesn’t change the reality that millions of people are out of work – since the crash, over six million more in the U.S. alone – and unable to find jobs.

2. Nor does it make it any less alarming that the rate of bank failures is well ahead of last year’s record (140), with 86 shuttered as of mid-June. Nor does it have the slightest effect on a myriad other harsh realities that politicians, as a group, are unable to face.

3. The EU’s massive rescue package has not, and will not, avert trouble in the eurozone. To the contrary, the situation continues to deteriorate, pressuring the euro ever lower and taking it to levels not seen since early 2006. In today’s global economy, what’s bad for Europe is bad for Asia and the U.S. Ominously, the Baltic Dry Index, a barometer of international trade that staged a feeble recovery following the 2008 crash, is falling sharply again <http://investmenttools.com/futures/bdi_baltic_dry_index.htm> . With all due disrespect for the man, Alan Greenspan considered this his “must watch” leading indicator, and it has proved a good predictor of where the global economy is headed. That would be south.

4. Just as Greece exposed the extent of Europe’s problems with the PIIGS (and they thought the “Mexican Swine Flu” was a problem!), California seems poised to upset the whole U.S. applecart if it doesn’t get bailed out. It would be hard to maintain the illusion of recovery if the most populous state in the U.S. – with a GDP greater than Russia – implodes into a black hole. Illinois, New Jersey, and at least 43 others are just behind <http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=711> , hat in hand.

5. From Obama’s attempted ban on drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, to the new financial regulations Congress has passed, to America’s flirtation with socialized medicine, it is clear that the U.S. has entered a new era of Big Government. Big Government, Big Debt, Big Deficits, Big Military… and surely soon: Big Taxes. One does not have to be an anarcho-libertarian to see this as a Big Problem delivering huge, negative unintended consequences.

<http://www.caseyresearch.com/crpmkt/crpSolo.php?id=189&ppref=ATP189BN0810A>

6. The real estate markets are still an unfolding disaster. May sales of new homes fell by 30% to a record low (seasonally adjusted 300,000 units vs. 800,000 “normal” sales) and dropped another 2.6% in June. Housing starts are down similarly, and previously more rosy stats have been revised downwards. A recent report from Florida <http://newsblaze.com/story/2010062806331500001.bw/topstory.html> tells us that 81% of all loans in the state are “underwater,” and that nearly 40% of all Florida borrowers owe more than 150% of the value of their homes – just another hay bale in the wind. And the commercial real estate debacle we have been warning of has yet to hit the fan.

Have you ever seen Pitch Black? Said the Muslim Holy Man: "The model predicted a lasting darkness." As Stan Lee put it, " 'nuff said".

-- BDAB,

Josh

Who you write like

2010-08-30T01:31:25-06:00

Who you write like

My daughter sent me this link: http://iwl.me/

It says I wrote like David Foster Wallace. I submitted a paragraph from your blog and it says you write like Kurt Vonnegut. I don't know whether that is a compliment or an insult. But it is, at least for me, amusing/fun.

Best regards, Paul Schindler

Amusing. But note what the site really is. It intends to be flattering... I chose some of my mail and submitted that to the system. It seems that most of those writing me write like Dan Brown, one like Mark Twain... I certainly have some distinguished readers!

Solarcycle24.com

2010-08-30T01:31:24-06:00

Solarcycle24.com

Jerry,

www.solarcycle24.com

After a 55 day stretch of sunspots, the last month of which has seen quite a bit of C-level flare activity, the sun went spotless again on August 21st.

This 55-day stretch did not break the Cycle 24 records for flare intensity (M8.3, set in February) or daily sunspot number (77, set in May).

Even if the new spotless streak ends tomorrow, it is very unusual to have spotless days this far into a solar cycle. (See the chart of spotless days on the website.)

Note that, per earlier discussions, a dearth of total flares does not mean that unusually intense individual flares are impossible.

Jim

Playing as the Taliban

2010-08-30T01:31:23-06:00

Playing as the Taliban

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I noticed your notes on the fact that the latest Medal of Honor game allows gamers to play as the Taliban, and that this has generated controversy.

I frankly don't get it. If you're going to play Cowboys and Indians, someone has to be the Indians. Computer-controlled opponents just aren't the same. Even *I* can slaughter them by the hundred.

For that matter, just about any WWII sim , going back before computers to the days of Avalon Hill, allows people to play as the Nazis or even the SS. There have been Vietnam simulations that allowed one to play as the Vietcong.

And there was flippin' Grand Theft Auto, which allowed players to hold up convenience stores and murder prostitutes. A game that, though I have been computer gaming since 1982, have never played for that reason.

So what's so special about Medal of Honor? Why is it different from every other computer game in existence? What's controversial about games having two sides? Who knows, some of those gamers may join the armed forces and it might be very useful to have soldiers who can think like their enemy. Sun Tzu said something about "know your enemy and know yourself", if I remember correctly.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I understand the view. I suppose that rationally I should share it. After all, it's only a game. Yet even so, I find the prospect of a popular electronic game of this sort a bit disturbing. I would rather see measures that decrease the emotional distance between the Legions and the people.

A thought

You wrote:

"The next version of Medal of Honor from Electronic Arts allows you to play the Taliban, planting IE devices and detonating them with a cell phone. This has generated considerable controversy. One Iraqi war veteran has suggested that they let the game get really realistic by allowing players to bomb EA's corporate headquarters in Playa Vista."

That idea could be extrapolated into a whole domestic insurgency game -- and leads me to ask, you mean there isn't one already?

--Mike

Sun and Radioactive decay coupling

2010-08-30T01:31:22-06:00

Eastern Languages and high tech writing

2010-08-30T01:31:21-06:00

Erosion of the middle class

2010-08-30T01:31:53-06:00

The Erosion of America's Middle Class...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,712496,00.html

"Many Americans are beginning to realize that for them, the American Dream has been more of a nightmare of late. They face a bitter reality of fewer and fewer jobs, decades of stagnating wages and dramatic increases in inequality. Only in recent months, as the economy has grown but jobs have not returned, as profits have returned but poverty figures have risen by the week, the country seems to have recognized that it is struggling with a deep-seated, structural crisis that has been building for years. As the Washington Post writes, the financial crisis was merely the final turning -- for the worse."

Charles Brumbelow

Empires, competent or not, are seldom ruled by middle class. The English Nation of Shopkeepers had a fair amount of self rule while permitting the King and upper classes to conduct war and foreign policy; and acquired an empire in a fit of absent mindedness. India paid for much of the upper and officer class, leaving England to be governed largely by justices of the peace -- who were often retired officers. You see the system in operation in novels from Jane Austin on. You also see the underside of it in Dickens.

But until 1860 there was no real effect of the industrial revolution and most of mankind including the English lower classes had the same standard of living as the average human had for 100,000 years. In America it was a bit different, but America was exceptional. And American exceptionalism is not politically correct. The notion is being eradicated and is no longer taught in our public schools.

Despair is a sin.

LA Times and bad teachers

2010-08-30T01:31:52-06:00

LA Times study and bad teachers

Hi Jerry,

The focus on improving the quality of teachers overall is a good one but as usual the media is ignoring the role of parents and the community in educating children. It's going to take more than money to get good teachers to stay in inner city schools.

I've had several friends who went into teaching and left after a few years, burnt out. One woman was teaching in Chula Vista (in San Diego). She was young, bright, motivated and not after a big salary. She lived up in University City (near UCSD, a very nice neighborhood) so had no issues about where she was living and was excited to teach inner city kids.

She left after three years. Every year I could see her being more and more worn down by the kids and the situation. She was teaching second grade and she had to take knives away from some of the students.

If people in poor/inner city areas want their kids to have a good education they've got to tell their kids to go get that education and support them in doing so. It doesn't take a college degree to help your kids get a good education. Feed them breakfast, tell them to respect the teachers, make them do their homework, don't beat up the kids who are doing well. Don't go down and threaten the teacher when your child gets bad grades.

Schools would probably benefit from giving more power to the teachers to discipline and also hiring more male teachers. Young women wind up scared to death in our inner city schools. Separate out the kids who are causing the most trouble and send them off to reform school.

And before anyone writes me off as being an out-of-touch elitist, I grew up very poor, in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, with a single mom. My mother didn't even attend high school. However, she did work hard to make sure that I went to school, did my homework, respected others, etc. We used to use a friend's address in a different neighborhood so that I could go to a better school. Many of the kids from the Tenderloin that I grew up with did not make it into their thirties due to drugs and gang violence.

This problem, incidentally, is happening all over. I recently met an American woman here in Tokyo who was teaching English in the Japanese public school system. She was assigned to a middle school in a working class neighborhood and she said the kids were terrible, disregarding her and not wanting to learn.

Regards,
Dave Smith
Tokyo

If parents supported discipline in class it would not be a Blackboard Jungle in the inner city. If the school authorities believed in justice they would impose discipline. An inner city kid trying to learn cannot do so if the classroom is disorderly. No one can. Those who try to learn must pay tribute to those who want to disrupt the school, and the school system apparently sympathizes with the disruptive who extract tribute from the others.

On bureaucracy: a corollary to the Iron Law

2010-08-30T01:31:51-06:00

Seeing your article about suspending teacher tenure prompted me to respond with a thought:

I am a long time state level employee in the midwest. It pains me sometimes to see the vitriol hurled at all public employees, because my particular agency has a lot of really dedicated, knowledgeable people. But I understand the ill will every time I deal with a self-important bureaucrat that thinks he knows more than me.

Long ago, I executed a permitting program for the state to meet a federal deadline. I was young and unfettered with the knowledge of the limits of what I was allowed to do within a bureaucracy. It was my first supervisory position and I was allowed to hire about half my staff brand-new. Everyone assumed I would fail, but I was determined to get the job done on time and within budget. So I did. I stole people from other programs and got new hires from colleges where I had contacts. Only about half of my hires were successful people who did what needed to be done. The others were what you would call a "typical government worker" within a year. Of my successful people, half became frustrated or received tremendous offers from industry and left within 2 years. As for their replacements- only half were the quality that I wanted because I had to hire someone, anyone or we'd lose the position. My bosses would rather have a useless drone than wait for an achiever. I wanted to get the right person no matter how long it took. I was constantly interviewing people and not being as effective a manager as I wanted to be. I woke up and realized it had been this way at the other agencies I had worked for.

From this, I created a corollary to your iron law- The half life of a new governmental program is 2 years. Every two years, half of your effective people leave. Half of the replacements are "typical government workers" who never leave. Within 10 years, the government program is useless since 3% of staff will be effective workers.

Proudly, I finished a 3 year job in about 2 years and left when I saw what was happening. I still work for my state in another agency. What sets this agency apart is that every 10 years or so, our tax is voted on by the state populace at large. Knowing that you will have to make it through three votes to complete a career sharpens the mind to provide excellent customer service and not waste taxpayer monies lest you wind up with bad press before the election. I advocate that all taxes have an 8 to 10 year sunset. I believe this would greatly motivate public employees to provide better customer service.

A corollary to the Iron Law.

It certainly has the immediate look of truth...

We cannot do without state workers, but we cannot do without responsibility either, and the civil service system as it has eveolved (or degenerated) from the original premise has not proven to be correct.

How can one have careers in civil service, get experienced people to do the jobs, be fair to them -- and avoid what we see as the result?

LA Times Teacher Study

2010-08-30T01:31:34-06:00

You may have seen this a ka-jillion times already, but here it is again.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/
marginalrevolution/2010/08/la-times-ranks-teachers.html

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/
la-me-0819-teachers-union-20100819,0,5684383.story

Wow.

Jay R. Larsen BA, MBA

Thanks

ADHD in Sweden

2010-08-30T01:31:27-06:00

ADD/ADHD and Ritalin in Sweden

Re the comments about ADD/ADHD:

A few years ago I did a MS in Business Education. One of my courses was Special Education. One of the class requirements was a paper and I chose to write mine on "The Use and Abuse of Drugs in the Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder". I can send you the whole paper if you wish.

At the time, I was in maillist with a woman who is a special education teacher in Sweden. Naturally I asked her how they did it in Sweden. Here is what I wrote in the paper based on how she explained it to me:

+++ As mentioned before, Ritalin use is predominantly an American phenomena with over 90% of the total world production consumed in the US. Next to no information about Ritalin use in other countries seems to be available. However, it might be helpful to look at Swedish practice as regards Ritalin.

In 1968, Sweden effectively banned the general use of Ritalin due to potential problems. It is still used but only under rigidly controlled conditions. The process for treatment with Ritalin is:

1) The child is diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having ADHD

2) The treating psychiatrist will work with the patient and may try a number of different therapies to manage the ADHD.

3) If the patient does not respond to any of the other therapies, they may be referred by the psychiatrist to one of a very limited number of specialists. These are specially licensed psychiatrists and are the only ones permitted to prescribe Ritalin in Sweden.

4) Due to the limited number of specialists, the patient is placed on a waiting list.

5) When the patient's name comes up, a comprehensive examination takes place. This examination may take a week and will include examination of task completion at home, at school and specialized testing at the psychiatrist's office.

6) If the specialized psychiatrist feels that the patient will benefit from Ritalin, an application will be made to the Swedish National Board of Health.

7) The board will review the case and if they feel that Ritalin is justified, the patient will be permitted to receive it.

8) While taking Ritalin, the patient is carefully monitored to verify that the Ritalin is helping.

Given this process, it is easy to see why Ritalin use and abuse is so low in Sweden. I am indebted for the above information to my friend XXXXX, who is a special education teacher in XXXXXX Sweden. ++++

I redacted my friend's name and city. This was written in 2001 so may or may not still be correct.

I got an A on the paper, BTW.

Feel free to print this or not, with or without my name, as you see fit.

Best,

John R Henry CPP

Apparently most of the Ritalin consumed in the world is prescribed in the United States.

Space Access Society Bulletin

2010-08-30T01:31:29-06:00

Contents This Issue:

NASA Exploration Funding: The Battle Continues - A Followup to SAU #115 "The New NASA Exploration Policy/An URGENT Call To Action SAU #116 "NASA Exploration Funding: An URGENT Call To Action"

.Off to a book signing at Borders on Lake in Pasadena. Niven is picking me up...

2010-08-30T13:50:08-06:00

.Off to a book signing at Borders on Lake in Pasadena. Niven is picking me up in a few minutes. The Writers of the Future Awards and dinner was last night at the Hollywood Roosevelt. Good show. Had much fun.

===

Good turnout. Had a chance to look over the new books and what's selling. I used to do that sort of market research a lot, and I probably ought to do it more. Vampire books, teen romances; not the sort of thing I write. But there's sure a lot of that being sold.

While we are on the subject of today's Wall Street Journal...

2010-08-30T01:31:13-06:00

While we are on the subject of today's Wall Street Journal, there's an excellent profile of Peter Boettke, whom some believe to be the successor of Hayek as leader of the Austrian school of economics, that's well worth your attention.

http://online.wsj.com/
article/SB1000142405274
8703418004575455911922
562120.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook

It wasn't a lack of government oversight that led to the crisis, as some economists argue, but too much of it, Mr. Boettke says. Specifically, low interest rates and policies that subsidized homeownership "gave people the crazy juice," he says.

But as much as the Austrian diagnosis may resonate now, it doesn't provide a playbook for what to do next, which could limit its current resurgence.

Mr. Hayek rightly warned of the dangers of central planning, Mr. Boettke says, but "he didn't give a prescription for how to move from 'serfdom' back."

Actually, the Austrian school does have a prescription, and it's one that our proconsul Lucius Clay allowed Ludwig Erhard to apply to occupied Germany. The result was known as the German Economic Miracle. Much of Germany's capital plant was destroyed, the transportation system was in ruins, there was near starvation. That all changed and far more rapidly than anyone supposed it would, largely due to "Austrian economics."

Happy 60th Birthday Steve Wozniak

2010-08-30T13:50:07-06:00

Happy 60th Birthday Steve Wozniak

Ms. Noonan today

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014
2405274870395970457545404295699
7192.html#articleTabs%3Darticle (

We Just Don't Understand.

<snip>The fact that the public doesn't fully understand or have a clear fix on the president leads to many criticisms of his leadership. One is that a leader must show and express the emotions of the people, and he's not very good at it.<snip> He relies most on his own thinking. He focused on health care, seeing the higher logic. The people focused on something else. But he's always had faith in his ability to think it through. <snip> <Concluding sentence> The White House must be hoping that a year from now, people will start looking at the president and saying "Hey, I do know that guy. He's the moderate."

I'm not sure this even comes to the level of "praising with faint condemnation," much less the usual rendition of that phrase, and suggests that Ms. Noonan is still thoroughly swayed by the gentleman.

Which to most readers -- as a sampling of the comments will confirm -- suggests that the misunderstanding is all on Ms. Noonan's side.

I would have a somewhat different interpretation: this isn't Miss Noonan's lack of understanding, but a warning about the Republican Party. I do not think it impossible that a year from now Obama will appear to be the moderate if the Republicans win big in November. I don't think it likely because I don't believe that Obama can do as Clinton did when he lost his Congressional majority. Clinton began triangulation, became the moderate, and took advantage of Mr. Gingrich's mistake when Newt over-reacted to a personal slight and took that as an attack on the office of Speaker. Clinton skillfully played the Moderate and made the Republicans responsible for the Train Wreck, and won re-election. I don't think Obama can do that. He is surrounded by ideological advisors and unlike Clinton, Obama has an ideology. It is not clear that he can play this game with Clintonian charms and skill.

The key paragraph in Miss Noonan's essay is:

The great question is what happens after November. The hope of the White House, which knows it is about to take a drubbing, is probably this: that the Republicans in Congress will devolve into a freak show, overplay their hand, lose their focus, be a little too colorful. If that meme emerges--and the media will be looking for it--the Republicans may wind up giving the president the positive definition he lacks. They could save him.

It's all true. Even as Gingrich, who is both skilled and principled, could be maneuvered into the disastrous Train Wreck and made to appear to be out in the fever swamps, so can whomever ends as the Republican leader. The Republicans ran the only man Clinton could beat because the Country Club Republicans who controlled the Party decided that it was Bob Dole's turn; Clinton was accordingly re-elected, and the Train Wreck greatly helped accomplish that.

President Obama retains a number of the advantages that got him elected. He is one of the best orators of his generation. He has lost the ability to disguise himself as the honest broker who will bring fundamental change, but he is doing is best to throw all the blame for his failures to bring about the hoped for changes on the Republicans and his predecessor. Bob Dole and his Country Club Republican cohorts were able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It could happen again.

Apparently agents of the California Department of Consumer Affairs have...

2010-08-30T13:50:06-06:00

Apparently agents of the California Department of Consumer Affairs have the power to walk into a retail store, confiscate a piece of furniture, take it to their lab, test it to destruction, and not give the store owner a receipt, nor ever pay any compensation. This appears to be a taking of private property without any process of law whatever.

The story is being told on an afternoon talk show; I find no original report in Google, although I suspect it will now turn up.

Whether there ought to be tax paid agents wandering about taking private property seems not to be discussed, although firing those people as redundant might be a reasonable way of saving tax money. Still, they will probably get pensions if fired. Where is Madame Defarge now that we need her?

Is there any wonder that California is losing businesses as fast as they can pack up and run?

Something else to worry about:

2010-08-30T13:50:05-06:00

Something else to worry about:

Melbourne, Aug 26 (ANI): Astronomers are predicting that a massive solar storm, much bigger in potential than the one that caused spectacular light shows on Earth earlier this month, is to strike our planet in 2012 with a force of 100 million hydrogen bombs.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/
139/20100826/981/tsc-massive-
solar-storm-to-hit-earth-in_1.html

I'm off to go lecture to the winners of the Writers of the Future Class. I am...

2010-08-30T13:50:04-06:00

I'm off to go lecture to the winners of the Writers of the Future Class. I am also learning things about self publishing through Amazon and Apple. The publishing world is a-changing...

A civil service worker proposes a corollary to the Iron Law.

2010-08-30T01:31:06-06:00

A civil service worker proposes a corollary to the Iron Law.

If this one doesn't bring tears, we are DEAD!

2010-08-30T01:31:05-06:00

If this one doesn't bring tears, we are DEAD!

Click Here <http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=KTb6qdPu8JE>

You may also find this interesting. The letter is at the link:

A Letter to President Obama

A link to Snopes (your favorite folks) -

Did a from nonagenarian World War II veteran write a letter criticizing President Obama?

snopes.com: Letter to President Obama - Harold Estes <http://shar.es/0boCA>

The newer GSM-based Kindles do in fact have a telephone number ...

2010-08-30T01:31:04-06:00

The newer GSM-based Kindles *do in fact* have a telephone number - that's how they work on the 3G network.

Go to a GSM-based Kindle's Settings screen, and then type '611' - you'll get all kinds of information (four pages of it), including the telephone number of the GSM Kindle.

You can try and register it on the MicroCell and see if it works . . . AT&T may disallow the phone number ranges they've allocated for the GSM Kindles, but it's worth a shot, if you've access to one of the newer GSM-based Kindles.

---- -

Roland Dobbins

That I will have to try. Thanks!

Two moons on 27th August 2010

2010-08-30T13:50:02-06:00

Two moons on 27th August 2010

cid:1.183102900@web51001.mail.re2.yahoo.com

27th Aug the Whole World is waiting for......... ....

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting August.

It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.

This will cultivate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within

34.65M miles off earth. Be sure to watch the sky on

Aug. 27 12:30 am.

It will look like the earth has 2 moons.

(I suppose I ought to have explained: nothing can possibly be brighter than the full moon except the Sun. Mars doesn't get brighter than about magnitude -2.9, while Venus gets to about -4. The full Moon is about -13 at it's brightest. I don't know why included this other than whim. Please don't go out looking for two full moons...)

I think I must have been distracted by a phone call while I was looking for stuff to put up here and this didn't register.

I found this interesting...

2010-08-30T01:31:02-06:00

I found this interesting: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-
20014393-54.html?tag=nl.e703 It's a tour of the electric grid and I found it informative.

Phillip and family ended their visit just after noon today...

2010-08-30T01:30:59-06:00

Phillip and family ended their visit just after noon today, and I'll try to get back on schedule, but there's more the rest of the week. Tomorrow evening will be the annual dinner of the Judges and Winners of the Writers of the Future contest down in Hollywood. I always look forward to that as WOTF brings in many of my colleagues whom I only see at conventions and this event, and I don't go to so many conventions as I used to. Meanwhile, there is a heat wave in Los Angeles, and the main effect on me is terminal blahs.

I have more to do to catch up, but I have managed to select some interesting mail to comment on. I'll try to get up some more mail this evening. It's the silly season, so there's not as much to comment on as often. Silly or not, it's a crucial time in the history of the Republic. When the number of people who believe they are ruled by the consent of the governed goes down below 30% -- and that number appears to be about the same among the Legions -- one could say that it becomes an interesting situation.

To this end governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

That is about the only statement of the right to rule that this nation ever accepted. Of course it is no longer taught in the schools. Still the concept should not be hard to understand even to those who first encounter it as part of a poll.

Does anyone have experience with getting DOSBOX working on the Mac? I am confused...

2010-08-30T01:30:58-06:00

Does anyone have experience with getting DOSBOX working on the Mac? I am confused as to what mounts to which and how to tell it that.

I got some mail up over in mail (our mail here Chaos Manor Mail is also up).

2010-08-30T01:30:57-06:00

I got some mail up over in mail (our mail here Chaos Manor Mail is also up).

The August mailbag is up at Chaos Manor Reviews. My son and his family are here...

2010-08-30T01:30:56-06:00

The August mailbag is up at Chaos Manor Reviews. My son and his family are here for a visit before he is deployed to the Middle East, and I am enjoying my older grandchild. So is Sable.

For platinum subscription:

2010-08-30T01:30:55-06:00

For platinum subscription:

Platinum subscribers enable me to work on what I think is important without worrying about economics. My thanks to all of you.

Patron Subscription:

Did you subscribe and never hear from me? Click here!.

We celebrate the opening of a $578 million Robert F. Kennedy School. Note...

2010-08-30T01:30:54-06:00

We celebrate the opening of a $578 million Robert F. Kennedy School. Note that price. This is a state that's broke.

Meanwhile the Los Angeles Times has a series about schools: they found, as the Gates Foundation has found, that the school doesn't matter. It's the teachers by an enormous factor. Good teachers get results, and they get them in the awful districts as well as the classy ones -- and bad teachers get bad results, and they get them in the classy districts. And bad teachers collect in the classy districts. Wouldn't you? If you want to retire on salary, you don't want to do that in some horrible place.

The best way to improve the schools would be to fire the worst 10% of the teachers. Everyone knows who they are. That would improve the schools by a factor of two, and probably more. If we terminated "tenure" every five years, the schools would improve enormously.

It won't happen.

The purpose of the public school system is to pay bad teachers. That is its first priority, it's first order of business. Now that isn't what they say their priority is, but if you look at what they do, they will do anything to avoid firing bad teachers.

The Kennedy School will attract "qualified" teachers, with "impressive credentials" and will slowly fill with those who get there through influence, union power, political connections: it's a desirable place to be. You may be certain that the new teaching staff will be "qualified" but that the qualifications will not include any objective measure of success in the classroom. Time in grade and accumulations of workshops and course, no doubt; and it won't hurt to be connected. It's a desirable place to be.

It's on the site of the Ambassador Hotel (remember the Coconut Grove?), which was closed largely because of the riots many years ago. Donald Trump wanted to buy the site to built the tallest building in Los Angeles, but the District went to court, spent millions of taxpayer money, and ended up with the property; and now has spent half a billion dollars to build a school in a district with falling enrollment and about 50% high school dropout rate.

Your purpose is to pay taxes so that you can support bad teachers. The purpose of the school system is to pay those bad teachers and prevent them from being fired. Salve, Sclave!

The latest Space Access Society bulletin is in mail .

2010-08-30T01:30:53-06:00

The latest Space Access Society bulletin is in mail.

.We have family visiting this week...

2010-08-30T01:30:52-06:00

.We have family visiting this week, so this is going to be thin. The August Mailbag is done and should be posted shortly over at Chaos Manor Reviews, and if you missed it, the August Column is up.

The next version of Medal of Honor from Electronic Arts allows you to play the Taliban, planting IE devices and detonating them with a cell phone. This has generated considerable controversy. One Iraqi war veteran has suggested that they let the game get really realistic by allowing players to bomb EA's corporate headquarters in Playa Vista. I find all this disturbing. Alienating the Legions isn't the smartest notion. Of course it's just capitalism in action; one wonders what the market research for this looked like.

The Legions are already volunteer, and the separation from the citizenry grows as a small class of professional soldiers does all the fighting and takes all the losses. Machiavelli warned that Republics that hire soldiers are in danger. A nation that defends itself -- which is to say uses conscription as a uniting mechanism -- is stronger. It's worth debating. Returning troops say the civilians just don't get it. In the Roman Republic service in the Legions was not voluntary, but it was a privilege.

Interestingly, Charlie Wrangel is in favor of conscription, largely for the nation building aspects.

I note there is another proposal, for an American Foreign Legion, recruited males only overseas, trained overseas, ten years service earns you citizenship. They never set foot in the United States until discharged. One presumes that as citizens they could enlist in the regular forces assuming any would want to. This would of course be even more separated from the nation it is hired to defend, but by keeping them as light infantry and not allowing them armor they would not be dangerous...

We live in interesting times.

A new Climate Model

2010-08-30T01:31:07-06:00

New Global Model for Climate Change Research Announced

"Scientists can now study climate change in far more detail with powerful new computer software released by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. The Community Earth System Model (CESM) will be one of the primary climate models used for the next assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

http://www.scientificcomputing.com/
news-DA-New-Global-Model-for-Climate-
Change-Research-082010.aspx

They say it takes a lot more things into account, and that the model itself will be freely available to all researchers worldwide. And they are trying to make the models match the actual data.

"Using the CESM, researchers now can simulate the interaction of marine ecosystems with greenhouse gases; the climatic influence of ozone, dust, and other atmospheric chemicals; the cycling of carbon through the atmosphere, oceans, and land surfaces; and the influence of greenhouse gases on the upper atmosphere. In addition, an entirely new representation of atmospheric processes in CESM will allow researchers to pursue a much wider variety of applications, including studies of air quality and biogeochemical feedback mechanisms."

I will be much interested in whatever comes of this. My expectations remain low.

And I have posted a lot of mail over in mail today.

Getting to Space; Why have NASA?

2010-08-30T01:31:01-06:00

I have several messages critical of the Space Access Society because it doesn't want to abolish NASA. That seems naive. There is a case for public investment in space; the question is how that should be done. I have always been in favor of X=Projects and Prizes, both of which NASA can do. Space research facilities are expensive; NASA has them; we have a model of governent cooperation with airplane companies during the development of the aviation industry.

NASA has been a good part of the problem and the Standing Army has been one of the major factors; but NASA has done some wonders. It has good people as well as bureaucrats. I'd rather money went to NASA than the Department of Education. In 1980 Larry Niven and Art Dula wrote a paper called "How to Save Civilization and Make a Little Money" for the first Citizen's Advisory Council report. It got critiqued by everyone at the meeting and was rewritten and was part of the Council Report. It gave a good basis for a commercial space policy (Mr. Heinlein was one of those in attendance) and parts of that paper were incorporated into the Commercial Space Act. There are many ways that NASA can be of great benefit to the nation. We need real climate observation data. We need weather observations.

I've been one of NASA's most stringent critics -- I am told that when the rumor went around that I was going to be appointed Administrator there was sheer terror at NASA headquarters -- but I am no advocate of leaving research and development vital to the future of the human race entirely to commercial forces. It is the duty of government to look into the far future long past the time when you can predict return on investments.

I've explained all this in two papers; they are quite old, but the principles have not changed. See Why Have NASA?, and How To Get To Space.

Musing on science

2010-08-30T01:31:00-06:00

Musing on science

It continues hot in Los Angeles. There's a dinner tonight, and some other stuff so it's taking a while to catch up.

Meanwhile, one of the more interesting things to think about is the possible relationship of radiation decay rates to the Sun. From Rutherford's decrees on we have "known" that radiation decay rates are constant. For any given isotope there is a probability that it will decay and emit radiation. There are several kinds of radioactive decay. It's a bit more complicated now than it was when I was in high school physics, but the essentials are the same. The major kinds of radiation are alpha particles -- which are helium nuclei, two protons and two neutrons; beta decay, in which a neutron breaks up into a proton and an electron (and an anti-neutrino); and gamma decay in which things break up and emit x-rays. There are other kinds of radiation discovered more recently. In all cases, though, Rutherford's dictum was that the amount of radiation is dependent only on the number of atoms of the radiating stuff. Over time more atoms pop and do their emissions, so there are fewer of them left to pop, so the total radiation decreases.

We generally express this in "half life": the time it takes for half the radiation in a sample to be emitted, which is to say the time it takes for half the atoms to pop. There are a lot of theories on why a given atom pops when it does, but none I know of that "explains" it, and certainly none that will let you predict when a given atom will pop; that's a random process.

This is mostly confirmed by observation, but there are exceptions. Long term observations of the emissions of some substances like silicon-32 (half life 172 years) show something very strange: the radiation emitted certainly adds up to that expected by a half life of 172 years, but there is seasonal cycle, a wobble, with radioactive output peaking when the Earth is at perihelion and at minimum when the Earth is as aphelion. The closer we are to the Sun, the more radioactive output. The variation is fairly small, but it's there. There are observations of other periodic radiation, some in periods of 7 seconds. Since no one has been looking for any such thing, there's no predicting what else may be found on closer observation.

Understand that it's not easy to observe this. The variations are fairly small compared to the total radiation (which continues to conform to what's predicted by Rutherford's uniform decay rate if you look at longer time periods). You can't study this in stuff with half lives in the millions of years because the total decay is tiny and the variations would be invisible. It's hard to study it in stuff with short half lives because it doesn't last long enough to go through the cycles. You need stuff with half lives in the order of a century, it needs to be pure, and you need to look at it and record the output continuously. Until recently that hasn't much been done.

If proximity to the Sun affects radioactive decay, then presumably so does solar activity. A lot of the Earth's interior is radioactive stuff and its decay is what heats the Earth's interior. Apparently this is another possible coupling of the Sun to Earth temperature. How powerful this influence can be isn't known to me, and so far I haven't found anyone studying it. Perhaps it is not a large enough variation to put into the climate models. On the other hand, we know that climate seemed to be different during the Maunder Minimum (1645 - 1750) when there was very little solar activity (few to no sunspots). We don't have much of a sunspot count before that when the Little Ice Age was forming; but the Maunder Minimum happened during the middle of the Little Ice Age. In 1709 the Rhine froze and wasn't navigable until Summer. Many in Europe starved. After about 1715 sunspot counts rose, and so did temperatures. Whether that has any causal relationship is a matter of debate.

The acceptance of ignorance over what causes radioactive decay has annoyed a number of theoretical physicists. "It just happens that way" isn't very good theory, but our understanding of nuclear forces doesn't really give a better hypothesis. Attempts to quantify and understand nuclear forces including the "strong nuclear" force have resulted in a number of theories, and as I understand it are being revised again in terms of field theories. Let me hasten to say that my understanding is minimal. I wasn't all that interested in nuclear forces in my undergraduate physics courses. and the theory wasn't all that good in those days anyway. What I did learn was that we can't predict when a given atom will pop because we don't really know why it pops. I don't think that has changed much.

It does seem to me that if something as fundamental as nuclear decay can be influenced by solar radiation, this is a significant discovery. Whether it has implications for climate science I don't know, but since climate science has no real predictive power and doesn't seem able to explain things like the Ice Ages in any detail, it may be interesting. Ben Franklin postulated volcanoes shading the Earth could have great cooling effects and cause it to be cold. I'm not sure we have got a lot further than that, and I doubt that's the explanation for the 200,000 year Ice Age cycles. Note that we are in a temporary warm period in the middle of a big Ice Age. Our temporary warming period is about to run out; the best prediction from past cycles is that the ice will come back. That fear was all the rage when I first began writing science fact columns back in the last millennium.

The significance here is that the Rutherford dictum was about as accepted as anything in science ever can be. Now it appears to be in doubt. Science remains exciting, because there's so much we don't know -- but we could find out. If we keep looking.

I took the day off.

2010-08-30T01:30:48-06:00

I took the day off.

2010-08-30T01:30:47-06:00

I took the day off.

Friday Mail Roundup 5

2010-08-30T01:30:46-06:00

immaturity diagnosed as ADHD

2010-08-30T01:30:45-06:00

immaturity diagnosed as ADHD

Jerry: Children immature? Give them Ritalin!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,599702,00.html

Kindergarten is none too soon to be working on your lifetime requirement for pharmaceuticals.

Chris C

Subject: More evidence of misdiagnosed ADHD

Jerry, I found this article through Slashdot suggesting that as many as a million children have been "diagnosed" with ADHD simply because they're the youngest, least mature students in their kindergarten class: http://www.sciencedaily.com/
releases/2010/08/1008171033
42.htm?sms_ss=reddit What's really worrying about it is how many of them are on Ritalin because of this.

Joe

Chinese Hardware

2010-08-30T01:30:44-06:00

Chinese Hardware

Jerry,

In several of my courses related to intelligence and counterintelligence, the matter of China is ever present. At times, we discussed the Chinese capabilities in computer hardware. There was a piece that we read concerning a secret FBI study. There was little concerning the substance of the study, but it basically said the problem was worse than public knowledge indicated. Here is some of the public knowledge I was able to research today when a new article popped up.

http://www.dailyartisan.com/news
/and-now-the-manchurian-microchip/

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008
/05/pentagon-fears-manchurian-chips.ars

http://groups.google.com/group/total_truth_
sciences/browse_thread/thread/6086202f743baa66?pli=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/
business/05offline.html

http://www.itworld.com/security/95398/
can-you-trust-chinese-computer-equipment

Some of these are from blogs, but I read the original source articles--though I cannot locate them at this time. There are some interesting reads in there. One must also integrate bits of actionable intelligence with the other bits of actionable intelligence from past years and other spheres to get a complete picture. However, China is insidiously introducing its systems into ours at subtle and critical levels.

The most disturbing indicator that I have seen so far, I saw today on the Drudge Report. http://www.washingtontimes.com/
news/2010/aug/18/inside-the-ring-732011050/ A Chinese company wants to sell equipment to Sprint. Remember how closely Sprint cooperated with the NSA? Note how closely it cooperates with the military and other entities of state? Is it only a series of fantastic coincidences that China is at the center of a significant and long-lasting controversy concerning its hardware and that Sprint happens to be so tightly integrated into the military-industrial-media-pharma-ITelcomlex? I doubt it. Let's not forget the 36 Chinese stratagems: http://www.pipeline.com/~tkd-pix/36_strat.htm

-- BDAB,

Josh

And give some thought to the transportation vulnerability...

: Unintended consequnces?

2010-08-30T01:30:43-06:00

: Unintended consequnces?

Dr. Pournelle,

Judge Jackson appears to "find" in his ruling that there is nothing special about the relationship between biological parents and children. Wouldn't this have a profound effect on child custody and children in foster care? Might we reach a point that parents are declared unfit at birth, and the children are handed over to others "better suited" to raising the children - possibly the state itself?

Steve Chu

Whatever the truth or falsity of the findings, they are not appropriate for judicial findings. Legislatures may or may not have proper power over such matters, but if they don't then no one does.

"bayesian backcasting" , a statatician looks at it

2010-08-30T01:30:42-06:00

"bayesian backcasting" , a statatician looks at it

An actual statistician/author has looked at this, and written a very readable, easy to understand (because he is an author) explanation of why models of temperature, such as the Mann hockey stick, are not real temperature, but "fictional data". It could be summed up by saying "the map is not the territory".

The current AGW crowd are presenting us with models, and saying that this is what is temperature over time, but what they are showing us is not actual temperature, but only their map of temperature, which, being a map, does not show the very great uncertainty of the proxies they use to tell past temperature. Or as the link you posted said, "Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy-based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models." He shows why this is so, because turning the raw data into a model, or "smoothing" it, makes you far too certain of your result, because you are actually showing fictional data. Perhaps the best summery is here http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=195 , to quote a part:

"If the points--it really is just one point--I am making seem tedious to you, then I will have succeeded. The only fair way to talk about past, known data in statistics is just by looking at it. It is true that looking at massive data sets is difficult and still somewhat of an art. But looking is looking and it’s utterly evenhanded. If you want to say how your data was related with other data, then again, all you have to do is look.

The only reason to create a statistical model is to predict data you have not seen. In the case of the proxy/temperature data, we have the proxies but we do not have temperature, so we can certainly use a probability model to quantify our uncertainty in the unseen temperatures. But we can only create these models when we have simultaneous measures of the proxies and temperature. After these models are created, we then go back to where we do not have temperature and we can predict it (remembering to predict not its mean but the actual values; you also have to take into account how the temperature/proxy relationship might have been different in the past, and how the other conditions extant would have modified this relationship, and on and on).

What you can not, or should not, do is to first model/smooth the proxy data to produce fictional data and then try to model the fictional data and temperature. This trick will always--simply always--make you too certain of yourself and will lead you astray. Notice how the read fictional data looks a hell of a lot more structured than the real data and you’ll get the idea." (bold mine)

Here also he goes into the actual Bayesian backcasting article http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2773 and summes it up so:

"Can a hockey stick fit this? Sure. Can a straight line? Also sure. A line which also starts high in 1000 (AD) and continuously drops until now also fits. It’s getting colder! Like the authors said, we can tell +/- 5 degrees or better, but not so well with less than +/- 1 degree."

He also shows the raw data with the "smoothed" or "modeled" line over it, and shows how the model seems to show certainty where the raw data says something different You posted a scientist saying: It's something that non-scientists don't quite understand: Science is all about models. When we scientists say "model," what we mean is, this is our best understanding of the world. The fact that models get refined, and improved, is something that the creationists, and their ilk, attack as if it were a flaw, but it is, in fact, a feature of the scientific method, not a flaw." He shows that their current method of modeling, taking raw data, "smoothing" it, and then putting that now fictional data into their models, has a very great chance of error which is covered up by the smoothing resulting in them being far too certain of their conclusions.

What he does not go into is the problem of corrupted data, such as direct temperature measurements corrupted by Urban Heat Island Effects ( often resulting in +10F), land use changes, and "adjustments", which lately have adjusted all older temperatures down, and all recent temperatures up. This is aided by their method of smoothing the data before using it for their models, which covers up the degree of error in that data, allowing them to model it at maximum coldness back then and maximum heat now without showing that the cold then is only the maximum possible cold within the data, and the heat the maximum possible heat. There is also raw data corruption in the Mann hockey stick graph itself, where Mann said in an email how he would " hide the decline" ( Google about 4,790,000 results) , when at the end of the graph his tree ring proxy data show first increasing temperatures, then declining temperatures, despite that in the declining part they had actual temperature measurements from that area which showed temperatures going up, which meant that the proxy tree rings measurement was not accurately measuring temperatures. Mann's solution was to erase the decline shown, and substitute the actual temperature over it, and not bother to tell anyone how this impacted the veracity of the tree ring proxies he had been using, or even that he had done it. As stated above "But we can only create these models when we have simultaneous measures of the proxies and temperature." Mann had both, they showed that the proxy was not accurately showing temperature, and he simply covered this up.

In short, the map and the territory are two different things. The AGW crowd believes in maps. Maps are so convenient, you can include, or leave out, whatever the mapmaker wants. And maps are so much neater than raw territory, and are much easier to show to politicians or the press. Plus, the mapmakers can keep both out of the actual territory, the raw data, by simply not showing it to anyone, and by "smoothing" it and turning it into models, or maps, before anyone, even each other, actually sees it.

But what if the territory changes so much that it no longer resembles the maps?

DM, in cooler than it's supposed to be California

email address not displayed by request

The map is not the territory. All science fiction readers once learned that. Maps are useful, but the map is not the territory.

Jerry p;

Now I don't have the time or patience to read all the AGW literature. I have on occasion looked for energy conversion in the conversations and not found it yet. As I am a mechanical engineer, I think in terms of entropy and enthalpy ( heat energy in general terms). When water is heated, there is a conversion of thermal energy to mechanical energy potential. This is how steam engines, Rankine cycle, internal combustion engines, Otto and Diesel cycles, etc. operate. So when we apply thermal energy, the solar heat and/or greenhouse component, we have the potential for some form of mechanical energy to take place. In fact it does as heating water causes water vapor to be released and in general with the differential in density, it will rise in elevation. This is mechanical transport and can be ignored in most cases as it is individually rather insignificant. But a hurricane is not insignificant and the rain storms that have been occurring in parts of the country are significant. Now you raise the water vapor, it condenses, and precipitates. But this is not an isentropic process and the horizontal movement of the water to another location is also not without losses. So the overall question is how much of increased solar energy, and/or retention, is converted to a slight increase in the overall velocity of the atmosphere about the globe? We don't know the answer but it is significant. What about the hydrosphere, the oceans? If the thermohaline cycle is increased by a small fraction, the increased evaporation of water vapor in the tropics, does this increase the net velocity of the Gulf Stream and/or the overall circulation velocity of the oceans? From what I have read, the turn-over cycle of the earth's oceans is around 1000 years, so how much energy is needed to subtract a few hours from that number? How do we know where the thermal/mechanical energy balance is set and how do we know this? When a tornado tears up a building, that is definitely mechanical energy in play, but it was generated by thermal energy and we know that it is significant. Until I hear someone account for all these mechanical energy effects I will have to remain an agnostic on the subject of AGW. On a final note, I attended a lecture on gases trapped in ice cores. So the CO2 was measured, but the greenhouse gas that was not measurable was water vapor, it was in the ice. I pointed this out to the Phd Physicist who ignored the whole topic. CO2 is king, but the king has no clothes.

CBS

Volcanic warming of the oceans

Jerry, Volcanic warming of the oceans may be greater than we would first guess. Given that the mid-Atlantic ridge is volcanically active where the plates separate, there will be a LOT of magma welling to the surface there. As an example, Iceland is a point on the mid-Atlantic ridge that rises above the surface of the ocean, and it certainly exhibits more than average volcanic activity. Given that the ridge in its entirety is over 10,000 miles in length, that could amount to a lot of heat. Having said that, I don't have any numbers, nor did a brief search show anything useful in terms of heat transfer.

Likewise, in the Pacific there is a new island forming in the Hawaiian archipelago, with apparently hundreds or thousands of cubic meters per day of fresh lava, and there are various other places where underwater volcanoes are known to be active.

And finally, independent of volcanic heat transfer, we should remember that the crust is much thinner under the oceans, especially in the Pacific basin, meaning that heat transfer from the mantle to the bottom of the ocean in those areas may be 2-3 times greater than on land where the crust is much thicker, both because it sticks up higher, and because the weight of the continental plates causes the continental plates to push deeper into the mantle. Again, I have no numbers that qualify as more than rough guesses, and in any case the values remain on the general order of 10^3 less than heat input from the sun, but as long as we are asking the question, it is worth considering the parameters that we do have some feel for.

Gordon Foreman

I would think it worth devoting a bit of the public money spent on these billion dollar models to go get some data on this, just in case. It never hurts to have good data when you have to make expensive decisions. But the Voodoo seems to have come into the physical sciences, creeping in from the social sciences I suspect.

Thursday Mail Roundup 3

2010-08-30T01:30:41-06:00

Concentration of wealth

2010-08-30T01:30:40-06:00

Concentration of wealth

Jerry,

Regarding this:

"I have often said that one reason America did not suffer the fate predicted by Marx, that all the wealth would be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, was our employment of anti-trust measures."

Anti-trust, to the extent it is enforced, may hinder the development of ever larger and more dominant corporate entities. But anti-trust law apparently hasn't precluded an increased concentration of wealth among the upper classes:

> Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez.

> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/14/income-inequality-is-at-a_n_259516.html

I have to wonder what will happen to the stability of our society if such a trend continues?

CP, Connecticut

Bill Gates urges all those who have accumulated enormous wealth to ged rid of it. Big disparities in wealth are not good for republics. Alas, the urge to despoil the wealthy is another ruin of republics. Robbing the rich to pay the bureaucrats involves the rich in counter measures, and they are generally a lot smarter than their opponents (although a fool and his money are soon parted...)

I have written on this before. Concentrations of power are generally frightening; yet sometimes they are necessary, and when so, remember Burke, Kings will be tyrants from necessity when subjects are rebellious from principle.

The Republic was supposed to get us around that. It did so by fragmenting power. The new tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect strategies undermine the whole point of the economy. It may be that no fix is possible. I may be that something is possible and we can change directions. I am certain that power must be fragmented, set in opposition to power, if republics are to endure.

: DSM and "disorders"

2010-08-30T01:30:39-06:00

: DSM and "disorders"

Jerry,

Peripherally related to the discussion of the DSM and "disorders": I have long speculated that many of what we nowadays label "disorders" of one sort or another (ADD, OCD, Asperger's, etc., perhaps even depression) are in reality simply points on the extreme end of the bell curve. We like to draw a line and define, "beyond this point lies xxxx syndrome", but exactly where to draw that line is problematic at best.

When I was in elementary school, I was diagnosed as what was then termed "hyperactive". I was prescribed Ritalin (which based on my experience I suspect may work by interfering with the patient's normal sleep, leaving him groggy and thus compliant during school hours, but I digress). I stopped taking it once I was old enough to question what it was for; big fight with my well meaning parents. Nowadays, of course, it's termed ADD or ADHD. I'm also afflicted with mild Tourette's syndrome (often associated with ADHD).

I mention the above because both, from the reading I've done, are often associated with above average intelligence and creativity. My own experience bears this out, having scored quite high on IQ tests as a kid (even though I got mostly mediocre grades in school) and now being known as an unusually creative engineer in my field (not to boast but to make a point). I tend to get easily sidetracked at work but I make up for it by working on several projects at once and jump around as I get new ideas. I was also the "weird kid", bookish, small and non-athletic (except for swimming where I excelled, more weirdness) who was picked on, until I started fighting back in 8th grade (fortunately political correctness didn't rule back then; I didn't get in trouble when I stabbed a bully with a pen in self defense... the last time I was ever picked on, bit again I digress).

So what is a "disorder" or "syndrome"? If I have ADHD (which I almost certainly would have been labeled with if the term had existed when I was in school) I don't think I would want to get rid of it; I think I'd lose more than I gained. As for the Tourette's (which some say affects as many as one in 100 in mild form... is that a "disorder"?) , as much as I'd like to send an entire night (or even an hour) lying absolutely still with my wife in my arms, something I can't do, it's something so interwoven with who I am I don't think I'd risk losing whatever goes with it.

regards, DH

Call Today

2010-08-30T01:30:38-06:00

Call Today

Jerry,

Last night, I was watching the NBC nightly news and ranting at it. My fiance asked me why I bother watching it if it is such bravo sierra. I told her that I like to sample the corporate media from time to time. That way, when I am talking to someone the next day, I have a higher likelihood of recognizing when someone is channeling Chris Mathews and his PR talking points. Today, I was sampling an alternative media talkshow called Infowars.

During the course of the show, a lady called from Japan. She is a Marine wife and she was talking about an article in the local newspaper at their base. She said the article pointed out that military personnel who went to the wikileaks website and viewed the video there--whether on their home or work PCs--would face punitive measures ranging from non-judicial punishment under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice to Courts Martial. I do not possess a copy of the Manual for Courts Martial at this time, however I was intimately familar with this book at one time. I would not be surprised if the elements for proof concerning the handling of CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, TOP SECRET, etc material included any unauthorized access. The woman who called in pointed out that this would mean that military could face charges even if they simply saw it on television. Again, I would not be surprised if that statement met the elements of proof in the Manual for Courts Martial. For a Court Martial to occur, the prosecuting party must satisfy all 'elements of proof' as listed in the Manual for Courts Martial and Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I am not surprised by the military's philosophy on this matter, nor the military handling of the matter. We noted the usual knee-jerk reaction from the Pentagon on this: http://www.washingtontimes.com
/news/2010/aug/6/pentagon-bars-
staff-from-visiting-wikileaks-site/ The Uniform Code of Military Justice probably supports the type of enforcement program that seems underway at this time. However, the most interesting element of this woman's call was that she said the military personnel and their families are dissatisfied with the military's handling of this. The host of the show took the opportunity to point out that the 'overall message here' is the military is watching you 'even when you are off the base'. We really need to get our act together.

Changing tac, I mentioned watching the NBC nightly news last night. They went over some graduation statistics. I believe 47% of Black males nationwide graduated from High School--it was not lower than 45% and not higher than 49%, but the exact number may escape me. One of the talking torsos--they showed more than the head--said that in places like Detroit, 12% of White males graduate in certain High Schools. There were other disturbing numbers. Most of this centered on the East Coast--as far South as Florida and as far North as New York. Memphis and Chicago were implicated in the crisis as well. This is the strong finish to the generation that is hitting the streets now? To quote Jimi Hendrix, "'There must be some kind of way out of here', said the Joker to the Thief. There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief...'"

As if that wasn't bad enough, now Google's CEO thinks that people don't want to ask Google questions, but they want Google to run their lives for them and tell them how to live their lives. This is an interesting article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/
google/7951269/Young-will-have-to-change-
names-to-escape-cyber-past-warns-
Googles-Eric-Schmidt.html

Warmest Regards,

Josh

Where is Madame Defarge now that we need her...

Asymmetrical Warfare

2010-08-30T01:30:37-06:00

Asymmetrical Warfare

Jerry,

I knew it. I've followed Iran for a number of years. Certain Congress Critters voiced concerns of Hezbollah operatives on U.S. soil during the 80's and 90's. I always thought that illegal workers were not the only people running across the border. Probably everyone has set up some sort of surprise for us if we ever go to war with them. Today, I read an interesting article that I found on www.drudgereport.com : http://wtop.com/?nid=25&sid=2029721

The crux of the article is up front:

WASHINGTON - Iran Air 744 is a bimonthly flight that originates in Tehran and flies directly to Caracas with periodic stops in Beirut and Damascus. The maiden flight was Feb. 2, 2007.

The mere existence of the flight was a significant concern for U.S. intelligence officials, but now a broader concern is who and what are aboard the flights.

"If you [a member of the public] tried to book yourself a seat on this flight and it doesn't matter whether it's a week before, a month before, six months before -- you'll never find a place to sit there," says Offer Baruch, a former Israeli Shin Bet agent.

Baruch, now vice president of operations for International Shield, a security firm in Texas, says the plane is reserved for Iranian agents, including "Hezbollah, the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and other intelligence personnel."

I suspect much of this has to do with businesses largely unrelated to the United States. However, this also allows a conduit for constant anti-U.S. activity in nearby region. Most importantly, this implicates Venezuela in any U.S. conflict with Iran. I would not be surprised to see U.S. strikes against Venezuela and Syria if matters touched off with Iran. I do not think these strikes must necessarily happen, however. The plot seems to thicken.

-- BDAB,

Josh

AGW discussion

2010-08-30T01:30:36-06:00

AGW discussion

Dr. Pournelle, you've been looking into how much heat the Earth is putting into the environment, but I haven't heard anyone talk about the heat that is being emitted by our industrial civilization. How much waste heat from power plants burning coal, oil, uranium are being generated? The solar plant at Four corners may be heat neutral, but there still will be electrical generation losses that show up as extra watts of heat. Motor vehicles emit gasses, but they are extremely hot gasses. Every electrical appliance has efficiency losses. Feel the back of your computer, now multiply that by how many millions? Running 24/7? Furnaces dump heat into the atmosphere in the winter (by design) and AC units dump efficiency losses in the summer. Plus there are 6+ billion of us 98.6 degree chemical factories heat sunk to the environment. While it may be small compared to the solar influx, or a single volcanic event, the heat doesn't disappear, the Laws of Thermodynamics still rule. Plus the amount of heat generated around the world is unlikely to start decreasing anytime soon.

Wayne Fiebick
China Lake CA

Well it depends on the sources of course, but I thought that had been thoroughly discussed. As in Fallen Angels, throw another log on the fire... Of course hydroelectric power, solar power, tidal power, wind power, has effects only through the energy needed to make the generators; watts is watts, and whether they release their potential energy directly as heat by going over a waterfall, or indirectly as electricity that shows up in a house heater, eventually that potential energy gets into the environment. Coal and Oil are another matter, of course. Depending on your theory of the origin of oil -- Tommy Gold may have been right and it's all physical -- coal and oil are supposedly 'fossil' fuels that take solar energy stored up from eons ago and release it into the current biosphere; or else they are just another manifestation of geothermal energy.

Watts is watts, as you said. The Second Law is unforgiving...

Forgotten Man, Shlaes

2010-08-30T01:30:34-06:00

Forgotten Man, Shlaes

Excellent recommendation on this book. I note it is #59 on the iBooks store.

A few thoughts.

Rooseveldt & crew did act like a bunch of bullies. The country club republicans of the past decade bullied people in a similar manner. Perhaps that is why they seem to come off as creeps nowadays.

Occasionally, the points that made the most sense in the book were overshadowed by the author's politics. Not always, but upon occasion.

Lastly, I am not so sure that business was at all as much of a victim as Miss Shlaes sometimes portrays it. Or perhaps I am just more interested in some aspects than others.

In any case, well worth the $10 I spent to add it to my collection. I guess I will reread it in a year or so and see how my perception of it changes.

Sent from my iPhone -Paul

Kindle Edition

Matrice Robinson

2010-08-30T01:30:33-06:00

Matrice Robinson

Dear Dr. Pournelle, I have been pondering your story of Matrice Robinson, towed to the middle of nowhere for not paying her bill, and I thought of a similar experience last December.

I was involved in a traffic accident in December of last year. No question it was my fault; I mis-judged the conditions, and my brakes failed on wet pavement, resulting in a skid into the back of an SUV.

Accidents that require a tow vehicle require a police report. After multiple hours of fun and games getting our cars taken care of, I was issued a ticket for 'failure to control speed'. The officer told me, however, that the ticket wouldn't stand because he hadn't seen the accident -- unless the other driver wanted to appear as a witness. If I went to court, the odds were good I'd be acquitted -- no witnesses, so reasonable doubt exists.

Well, in two months I duly presented myself at the Rockville Traffic Court, and after about two hours of waiting while the judge blasted through the docket at warp speed, I was duly acquitted.

Afterwards, I went to speak to the police officers in the courthouse office and asked a question: The officer knew the ticket wouldn't stand. So why issue it in the first place?

Their answer: "We don't like responding to accidents. If I have to write up an accident report, SOMEONE is getting a ticket."

If you inconvenience them, they will inconvenience you.

What is more, the law seems explicitly written to enable them to do this task. If you look at the traffic laws, you'll see a bunch of things on the books like 'improper driving', 'failure to control speed' -- things you could conceivably convict any driver on the road on. It's like they're tools specifically given to the officer to stick on people he otherwise can't find fault with. But if they want to badly enough, they can stick ANYONE with these.

If they were witness to the violation and can testify in court, it'll probably stand up.

Even if, as in my case, the ticket has no chance at all, they can still cost you some hours of hassle at the courthouse in order to get an acquittal.

And I think this is exactly what happened in the case of Ms. Robinson: The police didn't like responding to a call for someone not paying her bill, considering it a waste of their time, so they decided to cause her the maximum inconvenience possible within the framework of the law.

I'm not sure just how good an idea that is, or whether it's true to the founding principles of the Republic. But I'm pretty sure this sort of thing is going to happen wherever professional police forces exist; they have rights and knowledge ordinary people don't have, and can make the lives of ordinary citizens a living hell if they are so inclined. Within reason. I imagine inconveniencing a hollywood starlet might result in complaints that might actually get listened to.

On the other side of the coin -- I must also note that almost no one who went before the judge left empty-handed. If they had come to plead guilty, he would prompt them for an explanation. Regardless of what they stammered out -- if it was an apparent good faith effort -- he would then find some way to mitigate the sentence. He would reduce the fine. Or he'd leave the fine in place but negate the driving points penalty. But no one who took the time to actually show up for their docket -- that I recall -- went away without some sort of mitigation. The only people who received the defined sentence were the FTAs -- failures to appear.

It seemed to be the same principle with the police in reverse. The judge possesses a number of tools specifically to assist people who pay him the courtesy of showing up for their appointment. Show the judge respect, he (or she) shows you respect.

I'm not sure that is fixable, unless we want to go back to the frontier days when 'the law' was a single professional and a posse of deputized citizens. I suspect that wouldn't work at all in a place like Watts.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Online courseware: MIT vs Carnegie-Mellon

2010-08-30T01:30:32-06:00

Subj: Online courseware: MIT vs Carnegie-Mellon

Starting at time index 2:52:20 in the audio from the AEI conference on "Reinventing the American University" on 3 June 2010

http://www.aei.org/event/100218

I found this:

>>The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie-Mellon didn't start off to change anything about Carnegie-Mellon. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie-Mellon was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation under their Open Educational Resources Project. So they went to MIT and asked them to ... do Open CourseWare ... . When they came to Carnegie-Mellon it was a very different goal: we weren't putting [together] all of the traditional materials that support traditional instruction at Carnegie-Mellon and make them openly and freely available, it was "Could you bring together faculty experts in different disciplines and figure out how to create a completely Web-based learning environment for an independent learner who doesn't have the privilege of access to higher education [so he could] have a reasonable chance of achieving the same learning outcome as a student sitting in a comparable course at Carnegie-Mellon?" Very different design goal.

... [A]ll of the departments that participated at Carnegie-Mellon, at the beginning of the project said, "That's great that we're doing this for those people out there, but these courses will not be used at Carnegie-Mellon," because what's important at Carnegie-Mellon is the faculty and all the stuff you get in an elite institution. Now, every single OLI course is used at Carnegie-Mellon, and in fact the Formal Logic course is the only way Logic is taught at Carnegie-Mellon.

But is it all online? No, what happens is students use the OLI course and then they still meet in fifteen-student classes with a full tenured faculty member. It's just [that] the quality of the conversation is different.

And that's why I'm talking about using the Information Technology, not to take away that conversation, but to make that conversation actually more likely to happen, because the students are better prepared for it.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Higher Education in the UK--Oh My!

2010-08-30T01:30:29-06:00

Higher Education in the UK--Oh My!

Watching the wheels come off the UK Government's higher education wagon!

Something like 200,000 graduates applying to university will not find a place--the Government (both Labour and the new one) has defined such severe penalties on universities over-recruiting that most are deliberately under-recruiting.

A Dutch university is offering places to UK students <http://tinyurl.com/2bzdpsp>

3500 straight-A students denied places in UK universities <http://tinyurl.com/24ryegq> <http://tinyurl.com/25b8wo8>

Labour's new diploma qualifications have been rejected by many universities <http://tinyurl.com/28kw2py>

And the graduate tax proposal is likely to encourage many students to do their university education outside the UK or emigrate after graduation. <http://tinyurl.com/29hf7eq> <http://tinyurl.com/33k8rsy> <http://tinyurl.com/2d6pzdd> <http://tinyurl.com/2cblaq8>

Harry Erwin, PhD

"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." (Catherine Aird)

Monday Mail Roundup 2

2010-08-30T01:30:28-06:00

AGW: The Alternate View

2010-08-30T01:30:26-06:00

Subject: AGW: The Alternate View

Dr Pournelle

Jeffery Kooistra shares his views on AGW and its proponents in The Alternate View in Analog Magazine: http://www.analogsf.com/201009/altview.shtml Worth a read. Kooistra says nothing you have not said, but he says it with detail.

You frequently remark "Either you believe in rational debate or you don't." I doubt rational debate will sway proponents of AGW for two reasons: religion and rice bowls.

Your debate with the AGW Believer http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/
010/Q3/view635.html#Wednesday felt to me like an exchange between a bishop of the church (the AGW Believer) and a heretic (you). He insisted that you play by his rules; that way, you cannot win no matter how flawed his position. You argued from reason; he argued from faith. Belief in AGW is no longer a matter for science; it is a matter for religion. We are all environmental sinners, and we must do penance by reducing our carbon footprints. Yea, though you believe not, you, too, must do penance. (Screw 'em. Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em fast enough.)

I don't care how flawed the AGW position is shown to be, I don't believe that anyone who has hitched his horse to the AGW wagon is going to say, "Geez, you were right, and I was wrong" and see his research grants rescinded and his papers refused. In stronger language, even a fool knows better than to crap in his own rice bowl.

But thanks for educating me. When I first stumbled on Chaos Manor, I, too, believed. But, yea, verily, mine eyes have been opened, and I have seen the light.

Live long and prosper h lynn keith

Either you believe in rational debate or you don't. Clearly it isn't applicable to all readerships. On the other hand, the Federalist Papers were letters to the editors of newspapers...

Blago's Conviction

2010-08-30T01:30:35-06:00

Blagojevich Trial

Dear Jerry,

I share your dudgeon re: the single crime Blago was convicted of, but the fact that 11 jurors voted to convict him on ALL 24 counts should carry some weight as to the job that the prosecution did. I don’t think any of us downstate residents are surprised that someone wouldn’t convict him on the rest – the Chicago area reelected him all by themselves despite his obvious ethical issues. Move the trial to Springfield and you wouldn’t have that lone holdout – guaranteed.

John Prideaux

Another illustration of the unwisdom of immediate responses: I had not yet heard the jury count when I wrote that response. I am perhaps unduly sensitive to the "lying to Federal officers" tyranny. I do not believe that every one of those "officers" has been confirmed by the Senate, and the Constitution makes that a requirement to be a federal officer. I wonder why n one has used that defense; but probably the law has been written to distinguish agents from officers and create a category unknown to the Constitution. In my judgment perjury is important and must be prosecuted, but perjury is testimony given under oath under penalty of perjury, not "I didn't do it!" said to a Federal "Officer".

The consequences of this folly are that anyone of intelligence is well advised to tell any Federal "Officer" or agent to go peddle his papers when asked any question whatever including "Did you see him shoot at the President?" or "Do you know anything about this bank robbery?" You are well advised not to answer either yes or no; simply refuse to answer. After all they can later show that you read a newspaper article about the bank robbery so of course you know something about it, even if you were in a different city and unaware that a bank had been robbed until you say it on the evening news or read it in the Times. And yes, that sounds ridiculous but Martha Stewart spent time in stir for saying she hadn't done something that wasn't a crime if she had done it. If they can stretch that far to make you an awful example, what can't they do?

I suppose for me it's disillusion. I grew up with the notion that public authorities worked for me, were my friends, and deserved my cooperation. But that was a long time ago, and I suppose I ought to have the scales fall from my eyes...

Thanks for the reminders.

Climate data accuracy

2010-08-30T01:30:31-06:00

Sighs

Jerry,

Doing a little quick reading for some back of the envelope calculations, I came up with this little ditty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbody_temperature#Temperature_of_Earth

In the section Temperature of Earth:

<snip> Estimates of the Earth's average albedo vary in the range 0.3–0.4, resulting in different estimated effective temperatures. Estimates are often based on the solar constant</wiki/Solar_constant> (total insolation power density) rather than the temperature, size, and distance of the sun. For example, using 0.4 for albedo, and an insolation of 1400 W m−2), one obtains an effective temperature of about 245 K.[24]<l> Similarly using albedo 0.3 and solar constant of 1372 W m−2), one obtains an effective temperature of 255 K.[25]<l>[26]<l> <snip>

Note that the average albedo, which is critical to the determination of surface temperature, varies +/- 15% from its stated mean value. Surely that uncertainty has some relevance to global warming analysis?

Jim

I keep looking at the error measurements, and I cannot understand how anyone can have much confidence in the tenth of a degree accuracies that are needed to make "hottest year on record" even remotely credible. I don't know if it were hotter in 1938 than now; I don't think anyone can prove it one way or another. I would bet that it was hotter when the Greenland dairy farms were not under the ice, and colder when the Great Lakes were moving glaciers.

Go here to Annals of Applied Statistics: http://www.imstat.org/aoas/next_issue.html

Then scroll to the last entry and click to this article:

A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable? <http://www.e-publications.org/ims/submission/
index.php/AOAS/user/submissionFile/6695?confirm=63ebfddf> Blakeley B. McShane and Abraham J. Wyner

It opens in Adobe:

Abstract Predicting historic temperatures based on tree rings, ice cores, and other natural proxies is a difficult endeavor. The relationship between proxies and temperature is weak and the number of proxies is far larger than the number of target data points. Furthermore, the data contain complex spatial and temporal dependence structures which are not easily captured with simple models.

In this paper, we assess the reliability of such reconstructions and their statistical significance against various null models. We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.

And The degree of controversy associated with this endeavor can perhaps be better understood by recalling Wegman’s assertion that there are very few mainstream statisticians working on climate reconstructions (Wegman et al., 2006). This is particularly surprising not only because the task is highly statistical but also because it is extremely difficult. The data is spatially and temporally autocorrelated. It is massively incomplete. It is not easily or accurately modeled by simple autoregressive processes. The signal is very weak and the number of covariates greatly outnumbers the number of independent observations of instrumental temperature.

Oof.

Mike

I've found Climate Audit to be one of the better sites on AGW theory:

http://climateaudit.org/

-- "The past, while much studied, is little read." - M.M.

"In the first and in the final analysis, so-called multiculturalists are simply Western radicals, in the Western radical tradition, with the most imperial, dogmatic, and absolutist aspirations of all." - Alan Charles Kors

Votes of the Legions

2010-08-30T01:30:30-06:00

Justice delayed for military voters Importance: High

Update. The media is starting to pick up on the Obama Administration's attempts to deny the military the right to vote. Here are the states most at risk.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/
2010/aug/12/justice-delayed-for-military-voters/

Best,

John D. Trudel

Letter from England

2010-08-30T01:30:27-06:00

Letter from England

There is now evidence that P!=NP: See <http://www.scribd.com/doc/35539144/pnp12pt>, <http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf> , <http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf>, <http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/update-on-deolalikars-proof-that-p≠np/> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem>. Note that time travel implies P=NP. (See <http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html>.) Faster than light travel in the unrestricted sense <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light> implies time travel--the existence of closed time-like curves <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel> and <http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/02-the-real-rules-for-time-travelers>. (I seem to remember you can avoid the time travel paradoxes and still get P=NP, but I haven't been able to chase down the references.)

Possibly the point will be that a machine restricted to symbolic computational operations (Turing-equivalent) cannot produce FTL. I have speculated in the past that the problem AI has in replicating intelligence involves in some way its restriction to computers performing symbolic computation. If the universe is discrete at some level, all computation is symbolic and FTL is forbidden 8( ; but if it isn't, analog computation is essentially different from symbolic computation, and the possibility of FTL remains open. So if FTL actually works, it will involve something beyond Turing machine computability.

Suppose that life has figured out how to use analog computation to have dialogs with the future and the past and so choose an optimal trajectory through space-time. (In other words, free will is a basic capability of living organisms, and all eukaryotic cells have rudimentary minds.) Research into this phenomenon might produce time travel without contradictions, but only when a mind controls and guides the process.

Back to the UK:

Labour's default approach to anything it considered worth doing was to create a jobs programme. That did three things: it reduced the gross domestic product (GDP), it reduced wages at the margin, and it increased investment returns at the margin. So UK citizens were worse off, UK workers made less and UK investors made more. The Con-Lib Coalition Government started with a tax burden of about 39% of the GDP and is trying to reduce that to a number more like what we see in America--28% (federal+state+local taxes). It is starting with an across-the-board reduction in Government expenditure, with little consideration given to shifting the investment/spending balance. That leads to stories like the following:

--a 35% reduction in post secondary education and research spending: <http://tinyurl.com/38ff458>. The point is that the UK spends about 1.3% of its GDP in those areas, one of the lowest in Europe and about 40% of what America spends on a per-person basis. At the same time, student demand for places continues to outpace availability: <http://tinyurl.com/34owwp2>. Perhaps there is a message being ignored here.

--student debt is up--about $40,000 for a three-year degree: <http://tinyurl.com/37dq5bp>. That suggests a tuition increase, coupled with means-tested bursaries, would be viable. (Also as in previous years, the student loan system remains a shambles: <http://tinyurl.com/2eep2je>, which may be why the Government doesn't want to go that way.)

--instead the Government proposes a graduate tax: <http://tinyurl.com/2wbvgxu>. As I note in my comments here: <http://tinyurl.com/37z8yot>, "In the case of the graduate tax, we see people with equal income paying different taxes, with the higher taxes on advanced education. Aha!--the graduate tax is designed to discourage people from getting an advanced education. Why might that be? Remember, the answer in the UK is usually the preservation of existing class relationships.... Education is the primary mechanism of social mobility."

Ah, well....

-- "The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is." (Tom Vogl) Harry Erwin

I have to say I am having trouble understanding the FTL story, and while I've looked into it a bit I didn't get enlightenment, and I'm a bit out of time. Of course with FTL you get a time machine, as I understand it, so perhaps if I do understand it I'll be able to come back and arrange to have more time to understand how to build the device... I will have to leave further investigation to readers, at least for a while.

.I took the day off.

2010-08-30T01:30:21-06:00

.I took the day off.

.IS there a DOSBOX expert in the house? I have a problem with mouse continually...

2010-08-30T01:30:20-06:00

.IS there a DOSBOX expert in the house? I have a problem with mouse continually drifting. Anyone able to help? I'd prefer not to have a long discussion on this. What I need is a way to control mouse sensitivity

Friday View Roundup 5

2010-08-30T01:30:19-06:00

DH asks "So what is a 'disorder' or 'syndrome'?

2010-08-30T01:30:18-06:00

DH asks "So what is a 'disorder' or 'syndrome'?

That's easy - it's anything that an insurance company will pay a "licensed professional" to "treat".

Any wonder that they breed between releases of the DSM?

David Smith

We have become a nation of taboos. Dr. Laura is leaving her program because...

2010-08-30T01:30:17-06:00

We have become a nation of taboos. Dr. Laura is leaving her program because she pronounced the dread N-word on the air. Not as an epithet directed toward some human being, which would at least be rude and which has implications, but simply pronouncing it. Jennifer Anniston used the word "retard" on the air, and now she must be hounded into submission. You can't say "stupid" even in casual conversation. I suppose no one should ever read Charles Erskine Scott Woods Heavenly Discourse because one of the chapters concerns what happens when God becomes disgusted and decrees that the stupid shall not enter Heaven. So must that book be banned. Of course it was banned in its day for being blasphemous, and the very people who would ban it now stood up in its defense.

Saying those awful words is hurtful, and mean, and anyone who says 'retard' must be destroyed, and we know all this because we have the statistics on the number of people who are harmed by people saying things like that, and it's all science, and after all there are no stupid people, and no one is retarded. This is America where all the children are above average. And everyone is entitled to be protected from being offended. It's offensive for people even to know words like retard and stupid.

"Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court!" How long will the Marshall be allowed to continue that insidious practice?

The other was from Mike Zawitowski...

2010-08-30T01:30:16-06:00

The other was from Mike Zawitowski, which reminds me of something we have written about before.

<http://www.sciencenews.org/view/
feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wrong>

When scientists make mistakes using statistics

And is quite frightening. It says among other things

There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”

Ioannidis claimed to prove that more than half of published findings are false, but his analysis came under fire for statistical shortcomings of its own. “It may be true, but he didn’t prove it,” says biostatistician Steven Goodman of the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. On the other hand, says Goodman, the basic message stands. “There are more false claims made in the medical literature than anybody appreciates,” he says. “There’s no question about that.”

Nobody contends that all of science is wrong, or that it hasn’t compiled an impressive array of truths about the natural world. Still, any single scientific study alone is quite likely to be incorrect, thanks largely to the fact that the standard statistical system for drawing conclusions is, in essence, illogical. “A lot of scientists don’t understand statistics,” says Goodman. “And they don’t understand statistics because the statistics don’t make sense.”

The misuse -- indeed culpable misunderstanding -- of statistical analysis applies even more to the "social sciences" which are shot through with "significant" findings that can lead to far reaching consequences, but on analysis are not repeatable or reliable and are more likely to have arisen by chance than by any actual real world mechanisms. One of the big problems with analyzing the "HIV = AIDS" hypothesis came from the nature of the evidence.

When I was in graduate school in psychology we were required to take a statistics course given by the Psychology Department. It was the terror of many students, particularly the clinical psychology students. It used a textbook written by the professor who taught it, and was in fact a far better and more meaningful course than those taught in most university social science departments. It was also fairly trivial, largely consisting of learning cookbook techniques, including tricks that could be used on a Monroe Calculator so that you could get a number of required calculations done with one entry. (Ah, if we had only had small computers in those days!) There were lectures on "the null hypothesis" and such like, but there was almost no discussion as to how probability works (or indeed if it works at all). Those who wondered about all this were told they could go read L. Savage's Foundations of Statistics. Few got past the first chapter. (You can find substantial parts of the book at Google Books if you want a sample.)

In my case I wanted to study with Paul Horst, and he required his students to go to the Math department to take advanced math courses, which turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me since I was required to learn all the mathematical tools of Operations Research (including of course probability theory and linear algebra), but that's another story. But even in the math department the probability courses were more concerned with proving theorems than in understanding the relationship between data and reality. Fortunately I was eventually able to get through Savage, and that led to Bayes, and eventually to a realization that it's very difficult to prove general rules when you don't have a full understanding of the mechanisms involved. That is: scientific method consists of formulating falsifiable hypotheses. The problem is, unless you know (or are testing) the exact mechanisms involved, how do you know that an hypothesis has been falsified? The data are often inexact and are sometimes based on inferences from other inexact data. Clearly an example here is Global Warming: what data do we need to falsify the hypothesis? But that is probably simple compared to some social science theories.

Now of course much "scientific" theory is never subjected to the test of falsification to begin with; now suppose that a good half of the "findings" of science probably are false.

Clearly the better we understand a phenomenon, the more narrow a hypothesis we can make, and thus the more refined our definition of data. Also clearly the better the quality of our data, the more closely we can test the falsity of our hypotheses.

I'll stop rambling now. The important point here is that a lot of "science" isn't very good, because the hypotheses being tested don't make sense, and attempting to resolve the problems in experimental design when the data are fuzzy will make you head ache. If you want to know more on that, start with the Wiki entry on liklihood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likelihood_principle and read it (just assume the math is correct; you don't really need to be able to follow the equations) and see what happens when you're trying to measure simple voltage fluctuations all of which are below 100 volts with a 100 volt meter...

There are a couple of items brought to my attention by mail that seem very much...

2010-08-30T01:30:15-06:00

There are a couple of items brought to my attention by mail that seem very much worth looking into:

Cyberattacks via automobile worms might cripple traffic flow...

Jerry,

Stumbled across this quite by chance this morning. Plausible.

http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/
2010/08/city-crippler-car-worms.html

-John G. Hackett

It's worse than it appears on first look. All our modern "smart cars" are vulnerable to wireless attacks that could stick the accelerator at full on, or lock the brakes, or disable all the cars on the road at rush hour. I don't know how vulnerable our military vehicles are to this sort of thing. I wonder how long it will be before the first anti-auto electronic terrorist attacks?

.The August Column is posted at Chaos Manor Reviews.

2010-08-30T01:30:14-06:00

.The August Column is posted at Chaos Manor Reviews.

Niven and I went up the hill, then had lunch, and I have much to do on Lucifer's Anvil, so there will be no essay today.

The August Column is posted at Chaos Manor Reviews.

2010-08-30T01:30:13-06:00

The August Column is posted at Chaos Manor Reviews.

For years I have endured Thomas Frank's liberal/Marxist column in the Wall...

2010-08-30T01:30:12-06:00

For years I have endured Thomas Frank's liberal/Marxist column in the Wall Street Journal each Wednesday. I consoled myself with the thought that if this was the best the left could do when offered the opportunity to address those more conservative than they, we had little to worry about in the world of intellectual debate. I never did learn anything from reading his column. Today he was replaced by Ralph Nader, whether as a regular or merely for today I don't know. Nader is at least provocative, and sometimes informative. http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748704554
104575435321716423354.html

His pitch is against corporate America, concentrations of wealth, and centralization of power. Not bad things to oppose, but you don't control power by adding to power, which is what he has often proposed. I recall his people being triumphant over their victory over Alka-Seltzer, although I can't remember what terrible crime that Alka-Seltzer was supposed to have committed. I do know that we haven't seen the clever Alka-Seltzer ads -- I can't believe I ate the whole thing! -- since the Naderite triumph.

I have often said that one reason America did not suffer the fate predicted by Marx, that all the wealth would be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, was our employment of anti-trust measures. This was the thesis of David McCord Wright, an economist I mush admire -- I used his introductory book as a text when I was suddenly required to teach an introductory economics course -- and I have often thought on this. I generally approve of the notion of fragmentation of power. I don't think large companies ought to be allowed to buy each other -- let them grow by destroying the competition and driving it to bankruptcy, not by mergers and takeovers. And yes, I understand that there has to be some measure of sanity and reason in the way you do that; but for me the general principle ought to be that when a company gets too big to fail it is already far too big; it ought not be permitted to get to half that size.

Whether that is a more efficient economy or not is irrelevant. Concentration of power is dangerous and once done very hard to undo. Power can never be destroyed, but it can be fragmented and set to compete with other power. That's one reason I am strongly for State's Rights, even to the point of insisting that the States have rights to actions I think unwise, yea stupid and immoral to boot. I would not advocate that my city ban books including mine, but I would insist that it has the right to do it. (And of course that's moot now, and unenforceable given the Internet; but let me remind you that "Banned in Boston" was a mark of pride for some authors well into the 1960's. The Republic endured and survived. And I well recall that Jane Mansfield in The Outlaw was banned in Memphis, and some of us piled into a car and went across the Harahan Bridge to Arkansas where we saw the movie (and were shaken down for five bucks by an Arkansas State Policemen for having Tennessee license plates and no offsetting political connection sticker).

The cost of fragmentation of power is that there will be places that do things you believe monstrous and you will not be able to impose your views on them. (Think abortion, which is certainly a matter for the states.) Allowing others to do things you wouldn't advise is fine, but the test is whether you will 'tolerate' practices you think horrid. Think establishing the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints as a state supported religion in one or another state; I contend that the states have, and always have had, the right to establish religions, and indeed until the 1840's several did. They were all disestablished by state action; I believe the first such establishment was in Virginia under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson.

I would, were I appointed Dictator (a legal office in Rome, for six months duration, intended to allow fundamental reforms or dealing with extraordinary circumstances like an invasion of Gauls) I would do a great deal of power fragmentation, and when I was finished there would be no institutions too big to fail, and the federal government would have far less power over the ordinary business of life. Abortion, the rules of evidence regarding illegally seized evidence, composition of state senates, establishments of religion, education, and a great number of other federalized issues would be returned to the states as simply not the business of the federal government. I do not expect that to happen...

I have a medical (eye exam) appointment shortly...

2010-08-30T01:30:11-06:00

I have a medical (eye exam) appointment shortly, so you'll have to make do with mail until later. I got the column done and it should be posted this evening. And the economic news continues to be bad.

The President brought up the 9/11 Mosque at a White House dinner honoring the start of Ramadan. I don't know why I find that a bit disturbing. But then the whole religion matter is disturbing. The Constitution specifically allowed the States to have established religions -- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and for the first forty years of the Republic some states had religions "by law established" which meant mostly tax paid clergy and public prayer at public events. Virginia had disestablished the Church of England before the Constitution was adopted, but seven of the thirteen States had Established Churches, and Congress had no power whatever to disestablish them (nor or course could it establish a Federal religion). There is on the Harvard campus what Russell Seitz is pleased to call "the established Federalist Church" and I believe it still stands and functions.

One wonders if it might not be better to do as the Framers intended, and leave religion to the States. I doubt any would establish a church, but certainly they have a right to do that.

I remind you all that Escape from Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is...

2010-08-30T01:30:10-06:00

I remind you all that Escape from Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is available in both paperback and kindle editions. It's a good read. Perhaps not as philosophically sound as C. S. Lewis would have made it, but we hope at least as readable.

I do not understand why one does not have a constitutional right to present...

2010-08-30T01:30:09-06:00

I do not understand why one does not have a constitutional right to present any defensive argument one cares to present when one is on trial for his life.

Case in point: a man convicted twice before of crimes that might be thought violent, although there wasn't any violence and no one was harmed, was arrested for breaking into the church where he had been sleeping and eating. He had been regularly fed there. He was tried 8 years ago on a "third strike" meaning that he faced life imprisonment if convicted. His defense was that he thought he was permitted to get food from the church. He is pretty clearly simple. The pastor of the church testified in the man's favor once he found that he faced life for simple breaking and entering and stealing food. Les Miserables, anyone?

But he was not allowed to make that defense. The jury never heard it. He was duly convicted, and has been imprisoned for the past 8 years. Some Stanford Law students managed to get his case presented to a judge, who changed the sentence to 8 years (time served), a change that was not opposed by the LA District Attorney. http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/crime/third-strike-release/

Periodically sob cases based on trivial "third strikes" come to light, such as the third strike of stealing a pizza. In that latter case the theft was by intimidation, and it was pretty clear that this chap was almost a poster child for the siwash laws. California is fairly new to "third time losers", but when I was growing up that was pretty common, or at least the fear of being a third time loser was common enough in the comic books and radio crime shows. Some people ought to be locked away until they are 45 to 50 years old just in the name of a better civilization.

But it is monstrous that a man on trial for his life cannot present the defense that he thought he was entitled to do it. A jury may laugh at the defense; but surely it ought to be heard? Why should a judge have the power to deny you to argue in your own defense? It is all part and parcel of the notion that people are not fit to be citizens and must be subjects, obedient to their betters.

They have apparently acquitted Blagojevitch or was unable to reach a verdict...

2010-08-30T01:30:08-06:00

They have apparently acquitted Blagojevitch or was unable to reach a verdict on his crimes: but of course he was found guilty of lying to a federal agent (not perjury under oath, just of lying) and faces five years. This is monstrous. It is one thing to state something under penalty of perjury. This is quite another.

Note that they couldn't convict Blago of any real crime. It's fairly easy to get a conviction on this charge. Look at Martha Stewart who was convicted of lying when she said she had not done something that was in fact legal to do. They had no crime to charge her with so they jailed her for saying she hadn't committed an act that wasn't a crime. So much for justice.

It used to be a matter of civic pride to cooperate with the government. No More.

Anyone who cooperates with federal officials in any way including exchange of pleasantries is betting five years that they are not out to get him. The proper way to treat these agents is with silence. Saying anything to them including the time of day or comments on the weather is a needless danger. [but see mail]

They shut down the city yesterday evening and again this morning...

2010-08-30T01:30:07-06:00

They shut down the city yesterday evening and again this morning, because the President decided to attend a fundraising party in Hancock Park. This morning even bicycle traffic was stopped because the President's helicopter took off from Brentwood County Club golf course, and bicyclers were getting too close to the green.

He probably raised a lot of money, but I suspect he lost a lot of votes, because anyone who had to get anywhere yesterday or this morning was given to understand his place in this world relative to the White House. Even the Los Angeles Times was a bit upset: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/
lanow/2010/08/la-fuming-over-obama-traffic-
demands-investigation.html

In Harry Truman's time there were more than threats against the President: Puerto Rico nationalists shot up the White House (well, Blair House where the President was staying because the White House was being renovated) and killed a guard. The next day Truman took his customary walk on the streets of Washington. When told this was dangerous he is reported to have said to the Secret Service detail, "Come with the job."

The Imperial Presidency has advanced a great deal since the days of Harry Truman. Or even General Eisenhower.

One does wonder, why cannot the city prevent this sort of thing? Is there a Federal law that says that the traffic of a major city can be brought to a halt for a fund raiser? Or did the city invite this? Nurses could not get to Cedars/Sinai. The police were unable to respond to 911 calls in a large area of the city which was simply shut down -- and neither the police nor the traffic departments had any idea of which streets were shut down and which were not. Dozens of streets were simply blocked. Producer John Wells had the party at his house, and nurses and doctors could not get to work their shifts. Police officers were commandeered -- I don't know who is going to pay for this. There was outrage when the Lakers had a parade because of the costs of the police supervision.

And of course people could not get home. The stories are coming in. Thousands and thousands were delayed for hours last evening and again this morning. Streets were simply blocked off, and the blockages were not manned, nor were they removed for hours. And this morning people driveways were roped off. You were not even able to leave your driveway. People were unable to walk to work if their path took them anywhere near the Presidential Motorcade route.

One would think that if the President is so afraid of the people that he will not allow ordinary citizens to drive on the streets while he is traveling from his hotel to a commandeered golf course helipad, perhaps he ought to stay in the White House guarded by mercenaries?

The Fund Raising Party at the home of Producer John Wells was well attended by Democratic Party candidates and contributors. It is not known who delivered the panegyric. Perhaps a panegyric is not yet mandatory when the President makes an official appearance.

Is it time to rethink just what privileges our ruling aristocracy automatically have?

The President has interesting views on the Mosque at Ground Zero. I do not...

2010-08-30T01:30:06-06:00

The President has interesting views on the Mosque at Ground Zero. I do not think they are contributing much to his popularity.

For platinum subscription:

Platinum subscribers enable me to work on what I think is important without worrying about economics. My thanks to all of you.

Patron Subscription:

Did you subscribe and never hear from me? Click here!.

I had several things to say over the weekend.

2010-08-30T01:30:04-06:00

I had several things to say over the weekend.

: "bayesian backcasting" the Hockey Stick

2010-08-30T01:30:03-06:00

: "bayesian backcasting" the Hockey Stick

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/14/
breaking-new-paper-makes-a-hockey-sticky-wicket-of-mann-et-al-99/

Is this a smoking gun, or just smoke?

Jason Merrell

What interests me is the size of those error bars, which no one seems to have noticed or remarked on. We are concerned about a temperature rise that is smaller than the standard error of measurement of most of these data. Even the final measurements which are more accurate have error bars comparable in size to the temperature rises.

Mann famously would not share his model with critics. Nor his data.

The Votes of the Legions: See Also Saturday's View

2010-08-30T01:30:02-06:00

The Votes of the Legions: See Also Saturday's View

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/
at-doj-military-voting-rights-hang-in-the-balance/

Col. Bill Haynes, RIP

2010-08-30T01:30:05-06:00

Colonel Bill Haynes, RIP

An old friend, and one of the participants in the Council Meetings from 1980. I just learned that he was killed in an automobile accident Sunday. He had just got his ultra-lite certified as an experimental airplane.

Bill contributed to this site many times. I will miss him.