Daily Archives: Feb 9, 2013

Mail 761 Saturday, February 09, 2013

This place operates on the Public Radio model. It is free to everyone, but it exists on subscriptions. I do not bug you about subscriptions except when KUSC our local good music station holds a pledge drive. This week is pledge week for KUSC, so this is the week I remind you that if you don’t subscribe you ought to, and if you haven’t renewed recently you ought to. If we get enough subscriptions during pledge week we don’t have to have these exhortations. So this would be a great time to subscribe if you don’t already, and to renew if you haven’t for a while.

The ultimate e-book is printed on the Espresso Book Machine

Dear Jerry:

You can create a print on demand version of your daughter’s e-book on the Espresso Book Machine. It does mean re-formatting the text and creating a different cover, but those are minor costs. There are more than 50 EBM locations in the USA and Canada. The machine prints and binds each book in a few minutes while the customer waits. I sent you a release about our Virtual Booksigning for my new thriller MELTDOWN, but it may have gotten lost in the clutter of your in-box.

These books have to be priced for the print market rather than the e-book because there is a cost of production. Many of the bookstores that have EBMs offer shipping service. The one closest to you is the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffeehouse in La Canada.

We plan to use this as a way to have a print edition for new products of uncertain demand. We can maintain the same list price and still make money and we will not have stocks of books sitting idle in our distributor’s warehouse. We are also working on the audiobook editions of "The Shenandoah Spy" and "The Queen of Washington" through ACX.com with wonderful narrators. Those will only be available on Amazon, Audible and iTunes. We already have four shorter ones and they have a new program where a customer can buy the e-book on Kindle and, for a slight additional amount, the audiobook, which can be listened to as they read. The system is called WhisperNet.

So, there is always a new development in electronic publishing. For what it’s worth, our tax statements reveal that we made ten times as much from Amazon as from any other channel last year. Of course. we’ve just started with the EBM. There are still a lot of people who want the print edition.

Sincerely,

Francis Hamit

Brass Cannon Books

I have no experience whatever with self-publishing of printed books. The Strategy of Technology was published by a small university press, which in some ways made it indistinguishable from self-published in that there was little publicity and uneven distribution, but the book did sell many copies in the Brentano’s in the Pentagon basement, and was later adopted by the service academies for a while. Alas by then the press was out of business.

I have had considerable experience in eBooks, but of course Niven and I started as ‘names’ before we did any eBook publishing, so we began with a readership. For those who don’t start with that advantage, the trick to eBook success is to get the word out to the proper niche – to those who will enjoy the book. I am beginning to suspect that almost every reasonably well written book has a potential niche of ten to twenty thousand readers. The problem is making the book manifest to them.

Anyway, thanks for keeping me up to date on your experiences.

The world’s first Virtual Book Signing through the Espresso Book Machine

Dear Jerry:

My new novel, MELTDOWN, is now available through the Espresso Book Machine at about 70 locations across the nation. Locally the EBM can be seen at the Flintridge Booksote and Coffeehouse at 1010 Foothill Blvd in La Canada. There you can see the trade paperback edition printed and bound before your eyes in just a few minutes. And at the same price as the regular trade paperback, $21.00.

This is a pretty impressive technology, and not that much different from producing an e-book. The cover requires a different file and we format the interior for print production rather than e-book with page numbers and headers. The content is the same. We also have the e-book in different formats at a slightly lower price. The difference is the cost of printing a print-on-demand copy. Regardless of format, most of the price goes to the retailers and distributors.

Here is a link to the Espresso Book Machine site. http://net.ondemandbooks.com/odb/selfespress/9781595954022

The machine costs about $100,000. Some large independent book stores in major cities, such as Tattered Cover, Politics & Prose, and Powells have EBMs and can produced the virtually signed edition. Creating that was simply a matter of adding a signature and inscription on a blank page. This signing will run about two months, rather than two hours. We’re hopeful everyone will buy a copy, just as a collectible. We will be publishing other EBM editions, too.

Sincerely,

Francis Hamit

Brass Cannon Books

Good luck. Thanks for reminding me of this – it had got lost in the swim. I do like fast computers that can find things no matter how badly lost…

While we are at it

Coming Home From ‘Nam

http://www.indiegogo.com/ComingHomeFromNam

Hi:

This is a link for a new book project that Leigh and I came up with yesterday. We have high hopes for it, but need a little community support. Please pass this on theanyone you think can help.

Sincerely,

Francis Hamit

An interesting concept for an anthology. Good luck.

Roman breadbasket

Jerry

Thinking about the area the Romans called “Africa,” I am moved to ponder: Does Algeria today produce as much wheat as it did when it was the Breadbasket of the Empire? If not, why not? I have to go to work, so I cannot pursue this burning question.

A related query: could the Romans have sown enough salt over a wide enough area to cripple the Carthaginian agricultural capacity? Does Tunisia today produce as much grain as Carthage did?

I will go to work now with visions of the great grain fleets in my mind, held hostage to the winds while the Great City went on short rations . . .

Ed

North Africa does not produce as much wheat and grain as it did in Roman times. But of course the ritual sewing of Carthage with salt was done in the Republic days, and what is today Tunisia was much more productive during the days of the Empire than it had been under the Carthaginians, who were traders first and farmers second. When I was growing up the conventional explanation for the fall in North African productivity was overgrazing, particularly by the goat introduced after the Muslim conquest. Overgrazing killed off the ground cover, and bare ground is hotter and causes rising hot air, thus lowering annual rainfall. That may be a Just So story; I don’t think I can prove the hypothesis and I don’t recall ever thinking it needed to be proved. And it may be the Vandals had much to do with it.

A Dark Age comes not when you forget how to do something, but when you forget that anyone was able to do that; it may well be that the Vandals brought a Dark Age to much of North Africa. Hippo wasn’t desolate when St. Augustine was Bishop there. It became so later.

I am no expert on the history of North Africa. I do know that in Dark Age France the peasant working the fields for three bushels to the acre yield had no idea that the same field in Roman days had produced eight to ten.

In America we seem to have no knowledge that at one time we had more the 90% literacy, and the conscripts who were illiterate had essentially no education: the number of illiterate conscripts who hade four or more years of school was essentially zero. But by 1950 that number began to rise. It seems to be rising still, but we don’t have conscription and teachers unions oppose any true literacy tests.

Asteroid Impact That Killed the Dinosaurs: New Evidence,

Jerry

It seems that the book on the dinosaur-killing asteroid was not quite shut:

http://news.yahoo.com/asteroid-impact-killed-dinosaurs-evidence-191146621.html

“However, further work suggested the Chicxulub impact occurred either 300,000 years before or 180,000 years after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. As such, researchers have explored other possibilities, including other impact sites, such as the controversial Shiva crater in India, or even massive volcanic eruptions, such as those creating the Deccan Flats in India.”

Oops. But hold on! New data is in:

“New findings using high-precision radiometric dating analysis of debris kicked up by the impact now suggest the K-T event and the Chicxulub collision happened no more than 33,000 years apart. In radiometric dating, scientists estimate the ages of samples based on the relative proportions of specific radioactive materials within them.”

Whew! Close one. "The impact was clearly the final straw that pushed Earth past the tipping point," Renne said. "We have shown that these events are synchronous to within a gnat’s eyebrow, and therefore, the impact clearly played a major role in extinctions, but it probably wasn’t just the impact."

“Although the cosmic impact and mass extinction coincided in time, Renne cautioned this does not mean the impact was the only cause of the die-offs. For instance, dramatic climate swings in the preceding million years, including long cold snaps in the general hothouse environment of the Cretaceous, probably brought many creatures to the brink of extinction. The volcanic eruptions behind the Deccan Traps might be one cause of these climate variations. "These precursory phenomena made the global ecosystem much more sensitive to even relatively small triggers, so that what otherwise might have been a fairly minor effect shifted the ecosystem into a new state," Renne said. The cosmic impact then proved the deathblow.”

I guess the take-home lesson is that even the most likely theories need to be tested. For decades, likely theories in psychoanalysis were accepted as settled fact. Only later when the theories were tested they turned out to be wrong or only partly true.

Ed

I am sure that the whole story is not known. Niven and I were greatly pleased when de Alverez recognized us at a AAAS meeting. But whatever killed the dinosaurs Lucifer’s Hammer sells well, and it should, being a whacking good story if I do say so.

Suppose Atlas shrugs and the Algoreans "win"?

http://lewrockwell.com/deming/deming11.1.html

"Our industrialized and technological civilization does not run on rainbows and moonbeams. Nor is it likely to at any time in the foreseeable future. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are not viable replacements for fossil fuels. It is not a question of politics, but limitations imposed by the laws of physics and chemistry. Instead of apologizing for the use of fossil fuels, we ought to be damn glad we have them."

Charles Brumbelow

We sow the wind, but I would say the greatest danger to our civilization is that we have a school system that Glenn T. Seaborg described thusly “If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States we would rightly consider it an act of war.” It has not improved since Seaborg wrote that in 1983. We no longer seem to notice that we now teach in college what just about every student learned in high school, and we joke about The Blob, but we continue to hold that teachers are entitled to tenure, and when we consider the right of the teacher to teach we don’t seem to ask what the students did to deserve a bad teacher. We sow the wind. We may yet reap a Dark Age.

Richard III alternate history

Dear Doctor Pournelle,

You wrote: "One could write a pretty good alternate history novel on the premise that Richard III found a horse."

This has already been done but in a TV series format. It occurs in the first episode of the original Black Adder series – although Richard III (played by Peter Cook) is killed by Rowan Atkinson’s character for trying to steal his horse! There’s even a nice bit with Henry VII moaning that all is lost (at the battle of Bosworth Field).

David C.

David Crowley

S&P being sued

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I have my doubts. Here’s what I had to say on http://yardsaleofthemind.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/us-state-prosecutors-throw-us-a-bone-no-meat-on-it/

—

Now, maybe this is the first small step in a bigger plan – maybe the prosecutors have explained to some mid-level lackey at S&P that he could be rooming with Bubba and Vinnie the Neck for the next 10 years, unless he cared to share with them the names of the people involved in making sure that S&P didn’t look too hard at those mortgage-backed securities, but instead gave them the AAA-rating Goldman and others needed them to have in order to sell them to unsuspecting retirement funds. Because there were dozens of people in those rating agencies that knew MBS were some seriously bad stuff well before they started to stink – math & logic insist this is so.

Then, the prosecutors could have a remarkably similar discussion with the people that lackey fingered. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you’re having a little talk with senior execs at Goldman – and at Treasury and the SEC, and maybe (let’s dream a little here) with a few Congressmen. Then – when Wall Street Presidents and CEO are doing time and having their assets seized, Treasury and SEC heads are rolling, and (dreaming again) Barney Frank has his retirement plans changed to live off our tax dollars in an entirely different and more confined way – THEN I’ll admit I was too cynical.

Until then, the more likely scenario is: The government prosecutors are under enormous political pressure to DO SOMETHING about all these Wall Street fat cats having worked the system in order to not just stay out of jail, but to make off with enough tax-payer funded plunder to make Black Beard blush. So, who can they go after, that calms the little people without really bothering the big boys? How about the rating agencies? Yea, because OF COURSE S&P wasn’t under ANY PRESSURE AT ALL to give Goldman and others the ratings on MBS that Goldman and others needed to pull off their scam – it’s not like Goldman pays them for the ratings, after all.

Oh, wait – they do.

So, prosecutors can bag S&P, hit them with a billion-dollar fine, nobody does any time, and everybody else – the real perps from Wall Street to DC – skate, to fund another reelection campaign another day.

—

This is big news, but I’m not sure exactly how.

Regards,

Joseph

Joseph Moore

It is interesting that in all the reforms that came in the wake of the crash there was no reform of the rating system that allowed junk to be sold as safe.

Proscription vs. war

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

I have to say that the legal opinions on assassination-by-drone of American citizens make me squeamish. However, though they walk right up to the line I don’t think they cross it so long as one accepts the fundamental legality of the assassination of enemy combatants (which is another discussion entirely).

The power to order these strikes seems to derive from a legislative grant of power to the executive to wage warfare (though perhaps not “war”) against Al Qaeda and associated groups. The power to wage warfare against an alien force has always included the power to use lethal force at will against American citizens in the enemy ranks. That MUST be part and parcel of the war powers, or the military could be rendered ineffective by a small number of naïve volunteers for the other side. I don’t believe this means that the president has the power to put his political opponents on a kill list (and certainly not if they are resident in the U.S.).

Now, if you want to argue that assassinations per se are too dangerous a tool to be left in the hands of individual politicians… Like I said, that’s a whole other discussion.

Neil

I believe in rule of law, and that means explicit procedure. If we act as if we already have in effect the Ultimate Decree, there is no limit to the power of the executive. On what meat does this our Caesar feed that he has grown so great…

Subj: This is a breakthrough!!

Will the Dangers of Radiation Exposure Ever Make Sense?

By William Tucker

<http://www.nucleartownhall.com/wp-content/uploads/image/Tucker%20headshot.png> You have to wonder how there can be a scientific issue of extreme public importance where the disputing parties differ by about 10,000 orders of magnitude.

That’s the way things stand over the question of whether low doses of radiation are harmful and whether there have serious health effects from Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Jim Conca, writing in Forbes <http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/01/11/like-weve-been-saying-radiation-is-not-a-big-deal/> , thought the matter had been settled a few weeks ago. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation – UNSCEAR – had just brought out its annual report. For the first time since World War II, UNSCEAR stated specifically that it does not make sense to try to project the effects of high doses of radiation down to the very low levels. Here’s what the report had to say <http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/67/46> :

In general, increases in the incidence of health effects in populations cannot be attributed reliably to chronic exposure to radiation at levels that are typical of the global average background levels of radiation. This is because of the uncertainties associated with the assessment of risks at low does, the current absence of radiation-specific biomarkers for health effects and the insufficient statistical power of epidemiological studies. Therefore the Scientific Committee does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels. [Emphasis added]

There it is. The nuclear community has been waiting for such an admission for almost half a century. In the 1980s, the nuclear industry was forced to spend billions of dollars in order to reduce the emissions at the property line of a nuclear reactor from 5 millirems per year to 1 millirem. All this was performed in communities where the normal background levels stand at anywhere from 200 to 500 millirems. It was about the equivalent of paying $1 billion to prevent someone from smoking a single cigarette in your living room.

The evidence against the linear no-threshold (LNT) hypothesis is overwhelming. There has never been any data to support it. Evidence from Japanese bomb survivors shows a clear dose-response relationship down to 10 rems. Below that the incidence disappears against the background noise of normal cancer rates. There are plenty of studies showing the body has repair mechanisms that can handle low doses of radiation or is even strengthened by them. One recent study at Berkeley <http://www.rdmag.com/news/2011/12/low-radiation-doses-might-not-be-proportional-risk]%20%20Another%20showed%20that%20mice%20exposed%20to%20400%20times%20natural%20background%20showed%20no%20DNA%20damage,%20%20[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=10.1289/ehp.1104294> actually filmed damage cells migrating to the repair sites within 30 seconds of exposure. Another showed that <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=10.1289/ehp.1104294> mice exposed to 400 times natural background showed no DNA damage.

So you’d think the UNSCEAR report might finally make a small dent in hysteria about nuclear radiation. But no, Conca’s two columns have unleashed a firestorm of criticism from people claiming there is all kinds of evidence that Chernobyl and Fukushima have already wreaked harm on nearby populations. Dr. Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina claims to have discovered that birds living in the Chernobyl evacuation zone have smaller brains <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3033907/> due to low levels of antioxidants. Dr. Wladimir Wertelecki from the University of South Alabama spent ten years investigating <http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2010/03/22/peds.2009-2219.abstract> newborn birth in the Ukraine and found all kinds of spinal and nervous system defects, including an increased incidence of Siamese twins. Then there was a study just a month ago <http://truth11.com/2012/12/12/over-40-percent-of-fukushima-children-have-thyroid-disorders-officials-not-helping-ways-to-protect-yourself/> where a Japanese doctor claims that 41 percent of 57,000 children have tested positive for early signs of possible thyroid cancer, and four out of five evacuees are experiencing thyroid abnormalities.”

I have no trouble dismissing Greenpeace’s wild claim that 985,000 people have already died from Chernobyl. Nor do I have any difficulty in casting a skeptical eye on the notorious New York Academy of Sciences publication, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment <http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf> . I recall opening that volume and immediately discovering a study by the notorious Dr. Ernest Sternglass, who used to command so much attention in the 1990s showing that every blip in cancer rates around the country was a result of nuclear fallout. This time Sternglass was claiming that an uptick in breast cancer rates in Connecticut in the 1990s must have been due to Chernobyl.

Still, I must admit, some of these studies send my head spinning. Are all these people just making stuff up? Is it that they don’t know how to establish control groups? Can a doctor from Alabama really spend ten years monitoring all newborn babies in the Ukraine and not know how to interpret his own data?

In the end, I have to go back to my own experience. In 2006 I spend a week sitting in the F <http://www.radonmine.com/> ree Enterprise Radon Mine in Boulder, Montana <http://www.radonmine.com/> , absorbing 400 times the EPA’s “action level” of radon gas. Radon spas have long been the rage in Europe and had their heyday in the United States for awhile until the EPA began its scorched earth campaign against radon in the 1990s. (Apparently frustrated because it couldn’t regulate cigarettes, the EPA now attributes 20 percent of lung cancers to household radon.)

At Free Enterprise I met people who had been coming to the mine every summer for 25 years to treat arthritis and other ills. Some claimed to have arrived in wheelchairs. There was one memorable delegation of Amish with white beards and glistening teeth who had taken the train all the way from Pennsylvania because their religion doesn‘t allow them to travel by air. Nevertheless, they made the trip to Boulder every summer to brush up on their health. Patricia Davis, whose family has owned the mine since the 1950s, says they have never been sued in all that time. I noticed she was one of the first people to congratulate Conca on his article.

I have no way of confirming whether the rate of spinal bifida in the Ukraine is above what is to be expected or whether the number of children with early signs of possible thyroid cancer in Japan is outside the norm. Not having yet experienced any ill effects from my own deadly exposure to radon, however, I can’t help but thinking that the doctrine holding even the smallest doses of radiation to be dangerous is highly suspect.

I think the evidence is overwhelming that radiation is like poison: the dose makes is deadly. There are levels of radiation that do no harm.

Indeed I think the case may have been made for hormesis: that there is a level of radiation that may even be beneficial, but it has not been proven and is not widely accepted.

Jerry,

Is this the future of the flyswatter?

Subj: Bug-a-salt

http://tinyurl.com/9eqzned

EPA Doubles Down on Unicorns

Hi Jerry,

One of my favorite analysts writes about the cellulosic ethanol requirement for blending with gasoline that is enforced by the EPA.

EPA Doubles Down on Unicorns

Robert Rapier

In my previous column — Why I Don’t Ride a Unicorn to Work <http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2013/01/29/why-i-dont-ride-a-unicorn-to-work/> — I used an analogy to describe the US government’s approach to cellulosic ethanol mandates. In brief, they have mandated that something that does not exist — commercial cellulosic ethanol volumes — be blended into the fuel supply in the hopes that they can incentivize the industry into existence. They decided to require gasoline blenders to purchase the fuel, which as it turns out was a bit of a problem since it didn’t exist.

http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2013/02/01/epa-doubles-down-on-unicorns/

—

Robert K. Kawaratani

And apparently it is still the law: you must buy this non-existent product. The ways of bureaucracy are marvelous to behold.

‘They have been charged with possession and distribution of child pornography.’

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/police-continue-to-investigate-alleged-porn-production-involving-fairfax-students/2013/02/04/3c2c861e-6f18-11e2-8b8d-e0b59a1b8e2a_story.html>

Roland Dobbins

And the times continue to change…

Printing a 3-D Moon Base

The European Space Agency is exploring the idea of using a 3-D printer to build a structure on the moon using moon dust, rather than hauling materials from Earth. 1:02 PM

Trouble is the money’s in the ink not the printer <GRIN>

—

Kind regards,

Michael

Michael Montgomery, MD

And more on this as we learn more. Of course I participated in a NASA study in which the Administrator took part back in the Carter administration. Marvin Minsky were roommates during the study. The study was whether we could build robots who could go into space and replicate themselves (or possibly build factories which could then build robots; you harvest robots or factories at need). At the time we could not close the loop.

Much of what was said about the effect of changes on the middle class seems on target. The problem is that roughly fifty percent of the population has an IQ < 100, and few of these people can make significant contributions to the creative opportunities of the 21st century. So, apart from make-work solutions, call centres for public utilities, checkout chickery and hamburger flipping, there are few opportunities for what is becoming the unemployed underclass. The relevant occupations of the past, like domestic service, labouring, agricultural work and so on, have become unavailable to the superior white people, who become dependant on charity while the dignity of work is exported. I have no solution, but what cannot go on forever will not.

Ian Macmillan

I have said before that a Republic with half its voters no longer capable of useful contributions cannot possibly last. And our education system appears to be designed to produce that result.

No Science Courts

While it’s not really on the subject of genetic engineering I thought I should point out a partial exception to the lack of science courts.

Since the eighties any litigation against vaccine makers that involved CDC recommended vaccines have had to go first through a special court where a tribunal of judges decide whether any damage claims have validity. While the judges themselves don’t necessarily have to be experts in the vaccine field they are given access to those who are so that they can make informed decisions.

If the court does decide that a claim is valid they can give reparations to the harmed party though a special fund set up for the purpose. There are some more details but that’s the essentials.

My understanding is that this was set up because of a slew of law suits back in the seventies that threatened to cause the pharmaceutical industry to abandon vaccines because no company could afford the liability. In a rare moment of foresight congress, realizing the potential disaster, set up this special court.

Arondell Hoch

Arky Kantrowitz spent a great deal of time arguing for the establishment of science courts to settle questions of science. His arguments seemed sound to me. The notion of a jury selected from people who have no opinion on the matter in a case involving scientific principles seems bizarre.

Mail 761 Friday, February 08, 2013

It’s pledge drive time at KUSC, which means that it’s also pledge drive time at Chaos Manor. Normally I don’t bug you about subscriptions, but at pledge drive time I do. This place operates on the public radio model. It’s free to everyone but it’s supported by subscriptions. If you haven’t subscribed this would be a good time to do it, and if you haven’t renewed your subscription in a year, this would be a time to do that. You have been reminded. Subscribe or renew now.

The radio is telling me that this will be a snow storm for the history books in New England. I am still scheduled to catch an airplane to Boston to be part of BOSKONE next Wednesday morning. We’ll see if the weather forces a change of plans. I expect things will have recovered by Wednesday morning, but you never know.

 

Triangulation interview.    [Note that for the first six minutes or so of the show, there is a typo in the on-screen caption which lists your Web site URL.]

<http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/90>

 

Roland Dobbins

My interview with Leo Laporte from last Wednesday

Forth and WikiReader

Hi Jerry

Funny you should mention Forth the other day, I recently purchased WikiReader as it was priced right (originally $99 but now available on Amazon at $16.95)http://www.amazon.com/Pandigital-Handheld-Electronic-Encyclopedia-WikiReader/dp/B0039NLVB2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1360385137&sr=8-2&keywords=wikireader

It has a built in Forth interpreter, although the main WikiReader application is in C I believe. It’s all opensource software, and it runs for a year on 2 x AAA batteries. Simple touch screen user interface, a bit retro (no backlight or ports and only 3 buttons and the power switch) but handy to have the full text (no images) of wikipedia if you are unplugged for any reason. I wonder if it would be handy at the beach house. And you can write and run your own Forth programs, there is an emulator and once debugged you can install by putting them on the micro SD card which comes with it. A bargain I think

More details here (on Wikipedia of course… a bit recursive! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader)

and here’s the Forth emulator http://createuniverses.blogspot.com/2011/03/wikireader-forth-simulator.html.

Some more here http://thewikireader.com/ and here http://www.openmoko.com/wikireader.html

The casing seems quite robust and, somewhat charmingly it is not quite square.

WikiReader<http://www.openmoko.com/images/wikireader_outline.png>

all the best

Dave

Something to look into. Thanks. FORTH has always been a very efficient language, but it can be a pain to debug complex programs. Of course FORTH users build a library of tested routines they can incorporate into their programs, and most FORTH users tend to work with specific devices. I understand it is still very much in use in astronomy. Thanks.

The buck stops with Ambassador Stevens!?!

Panetta’s response to questioning by Senator Graham is obscene. When asked who was in charge during the Benghazi attack, he says that it was not himself, Secretary Clinton nor President Obama. He says that Ambassador Stevens was the man in charge.

http://www.examiner.com/article/benghazi-secretary-of-panetta-says-president-obama-never-called-back?cid=rss

Carl Taylor

I would think that if the President told me “do what you have to do” and got out of the way, it would be a clear authorization to take charge. Were I Secretary of Defense I would call the theater commander and pass the order and authorization on to him; I wouldn’t expect the President to become involved in the details. It’s not his expertise. The local commander knows what assets he has, and what they can do. Give him the mission and get out of the way.

That did not happen. I do not know why. But I find it hard to blame the President in this instance. And I have known Panetta, not well but well enough to have some respect for his judgment and motives although we are hardly political allies. Someone should ask him why he did not pass along the order to do what you have to do.

Firing Teachers

Maybe firing the lowest-performing ten percent of teachers will improve a *bad* school. I doubt it will improve a *good* school.

——————-

In my experience it makes no difference; as the decision on who the ‘bad’ 10% are is made based upon who does the paperwork best, not who teaches best. For instance, if a teacher is late or inaccurate with the paperwork because they are spending time helping the slow students, or inspiring the class as a whole to good performance, that teacher become the ‘bad’ one. I think the paperwork is an attempt to measure the unmeasurable. This is because part of the learning process is based upon subjective performance measures. If a gifted student creates this grand symphony, how does one determine, in an objective fashion, this is ‘grand’ from a monkey (taught the basics of

harmonization) pounding on a piano?

If one is serious about it, it is not difficult to identify the really bad teachers. The students know. Yes, sometimes they will name a teacher who is ‘bad’ because the teacher insists on hard work and discipline, but not only do those cases stand out, but they are actually less common than you might think. In really bad schools where nearly everyone has given up there may be no good teachers – yet the technique works there too, or case histories show such. Reminds me of a well known personnel consultant technique: just showing that someone in management is interested and cares can change motivations and increase output in many employment situations. Of course measuring how good a teacher is by average performances on tests is fraught with danger, and unions rightly oppose it.

Yes: there is some art to choosing which are the 10% worst teachers, and certainly mistakes will be made. If the goal is perfection, failure is certain. Yet do not the students deserve some improvement in a school system deemed indistinguishable from an act of war against the nation?

Someone is going to be hurt by school reforms. Yet there must be reforms.

Affirmative action downside…

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/132016.html

Charles Brumbelow

An inevitable downside, predictable and predicted.

Patenting ideas

Jerry P>I find my computer glasses (they are bi-focal) more comfortable around the house than my regular tri-focals, although I certainly don’t wear them outside and it would be a disaster to wear them for driving. I sure wish I had patented the concept. Probably wasn’t patentable. But I think that old BYTE column was the first place to talk about compouter glasses. Certainly I don’t remember any source for the concept, and I think I invented it.

I can’t believe you are saying this seriously. And wishing for the ability to patent such a trivial "invention". The invention of "software patents" in the 1970s OTOH was not only non-trivial, but devastating for software innovation, granting government monopolies to visionless entities like Bill Gates’s Microsoft, which survive and thrive, not by continually improving their software and occasionally coming up with something really new, like dozens of microcomputer software companies did in the 1980s, but by filing patents on hosts of trivial ideas implemented by routine coding within the grasp of any competent programmer, then defending them with a stable of lawyers, backed by infinitely deep pockets. As a result, there was more software innovation in any given year of the 1980s, than there has been in the last ten years (note I am not talking about innovation in the use of software, which has been widely democratized over the internet, past any possibility of government regulation). Software patents are pretty much a U.S. invention, since they’re not recognized in Europe or anywhere else that I know. But this shouldn’t be surprising in a nation in which all the money flows to lawyers, politicians, and those who are in a position to manipulate the law in their favor, with maybe just a bit of trickle down to the actual inventors and creators, just to make the whole scam look legit.

As for the "invention" of computer glasses, how is the concept any different from the "invention" of reading glasses for older people at whatever convenient focal length? Do you wish that you had patented reading glasses at the 28" focal length? Well, if so, I’ve got you beat, since when I had my first cataract operation some seven years ago, I had my implant set to 27", which was my measured distance from the screen. When I had my second cataract operation a couple of years ago, I had the other eye set to my preferred book reading distance. To complete the adjustment, I have two pairs of monofocal glasses at, respectively, computer distance and book reading distance; in fact they are essentially monocles in a pair-of-glasses frame, since each pair of glasses has only one lens, the other prescription being covered by my cataract implant lens. Since in a pinch, I can drive with my eyes set to 27" (there’s not that much difference between 27" and infinity), I can get along without glasses altogether, if I have to, though I would not want to spend many hours doing anything intensely visual without them.

So, should I have the right to patent single lens glasses (ignoring the fact that once, before the time of software patents, monocles were very popular)? Or perhaps I could patent the whole two cataract adjustment as a glassless system for older people? I could turn this into a software patent by writing a program that engaged in a dialogue with an aging person eligible for cataract surgery, in which I would guide him in determining and measuring the two most useful focal lengths, then print out instructions to the ophthalmologist. I could refine and optimize the system a bit by determining also which was his dominant eye, and what his corrected vision was in each eye, so as to optimize for choice of eye as well as for focal length. If anybody at Microsoft had ever thought of that, I could perhaps have been sued for daring to do my own thinking about these everyday life problems. Well maybe not now, but the way things are going, with everybody looking to government to award them something for nothing, at everyone else’s expense….

John B. Robb

Great heavens. One would think I had actually attempted to get a patent. Or a trade mark which could be sold. I don’t really think I owe an apology for idle speculation.

Of course there is a real point here: it is the case that patents are sometimes, perhaps often, issued for matters that ought not be patented, which is to say that the patent office is not infallible. And there are patent trolls who impede progress. But then a long time ago Dr. Sivana was able to copyright the letter ‘e’ and Captain Marvel was obliged to defend his rights, and it sure did make for ethical conflicts, and

Clever

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21571384-how-use-mobile-phone-networks-weather-forecasting-counting-raindrops

Meteorology

Counting raindrops

How to use mobile-phone networks for weather forecasting

Feb 9th 2013

FORECASTING the weather requires huge quantities of data. Many of these data are collected by high-tech means such as satellites and radar, and then crunched by some of the world’s fastest supercomputers into predictions that are far more accurate than they were 20 years ago. But low-tech tools are important too—especially old-fashioned rain gauges, which are nothing more than tubes with funnels fixed to places such as rooftops.

Each technique has its upsides and downsides. Radar and satellites can cover swathes of land, yet they lack detail. Gauges are much more accurate, but the price of that accuracy is spotty coverage. Now, though, Aart Overeem of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and his colleagues reckon they have come up with another way to keep an eye on the rain. It offers, they believe, both broad coverage and fine detail. Best of all, it relies on something that is already almost omnipresent—the mobile-phone network.

Their scheme starts from the observation that rain can make it harder for certain sorts of electromagnetic radiation to travel through the atmosphere. Measure this impedance (and scrub out any other sources of variation) and you can measure how rainy it is. The researchers do not measure the strength of mobile-phone signals themselves. Instead, they piggyback on something that mobile networks already do, and measure the strength of the microwave links that base stations use to talk to each other.

The idea itself is not new, and there have been trials in recent years. But, as they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Overeem and his colleagues have successfully applied the technique to an entire country. Using data from around 2,400 links between base-stations belonging to T-Mobile, one of the Netherlands’ three mobile-phone operators, they were able to generate a rain map of the whole kingdom every 15 minutes.

Like all the best science, the idea is both technically elegant and practically useful. Dr Overeem points out that simply coming up with another way to measure rainfall is handy by itself, since it allows better cross-checking of existing methods. There are other advantages, too. Coverage is one. Even in rich countries with well-financed weather forecasters, there are likely to be far more mobile-phone base stations than rain gauges. That is truer still in poor countries, where rain gauges are scarce and radar often nonexistent, but mobile phones common. The GSM Association, a mobile-phone trade group, estimates that 90% of the world’s population lives within range of a base station.

Another boon is that network operators tend to keep a close eye on their microwave links. Although the researchers were able to obtain data only every 15 minutes, some firms sample their networks once a minute. That means rainfall could, in principle, be measured almost in real time, something that neither gauges nor radar nor satellites can manage.

The technology is not perfect: snow and hail are harder than rain for microwaves to spot, for example. And there are other caveats. Mobile networks are densest in urban areas, which are also the places most likely to have meteorological equipment already. Even in the rich, urbanised Netherlands, coverage outside cities was noticeably patchier. But that might eventually prove to be a boon, for if the technology becomes widespread then weather forecasters might contribute to the cost of installing base stations in coverage blackspots—something for which the 10% of humanity not yet within range of a mobile-phone mast might be thankful.

Clever indeed. Thanks.

Seen on Slashdot

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/06/emdrive-and-cold-fusion

The URL is highly misleading, no doubt deliberately so. The title is “EmDrive: China’s radical new space drive”.

From the article: “The latest research comes from a team headed by Yang Juan <http://web.nwpu.edu.cn/sastronautics/FacultyandStudents/Professors/65680.htm> , Professor of Propulsion Theory and Engineering of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi’an. Titled "Net thrust measurement of propellantless microwave thruster," it was published last year in the academic journal Acta Physica Sinica, now translated <http://www.emdrive.com/yang-juan-paper-2012.pdf> into English.”

Key word: propellantless. This is not a typo. This thing allegedly uses no reaction mass.

And some of what the article describes reminds me distantly of the Dean Drive, and Harry Stine’s description of the theoretical work he and others did at Huyck trying to figure out how to make it real and practical.

–John R. Strohm

I think I would want to see a working demonstration before investing any serious money in this…

Why?

Hello Jerry,

This was on ‘Drudge’ today: http://www.infowars.com/dhs-purchases-21-6-million-more-rounds-of-ammunition/

Again, the question that not a single ‘mainstream journalist’ is asking is ‘Why?’. A huge laundry list of federal agencies that apparently had few or no requirements for hand guns, assault rifles, and massive quantities of ammo in the past now have requirements for all of the above. Since they have been in business for years WITHOUT the requirement, how has their missions changed so that they now require war-fighting levels of armament and ammo (except that the ammo is illegal for war)? And, a related question that is evoking exactly zero mainstream media interest: "Why is much of the ammo being purchased from companies that came into existence days before the contract was awarded and have no physical presence–offices, personnel, nothing–except government contracts for guns and ammo?

Bob Ludwick=

Why indeed?

Proscription

Hello Jerry,

Since their inception, Marxists have ALWAYS used elimination as the ‘gold standard’ method for dealing with dissenters. Why should we suppose that OUR Marxists are in some way ‘kinder and gentler’?

This is a piece on what the administration is up to, including an embedded video hosted and narrated by the First Lady. Both the article and the video are ‘interesting’. As in the context of ‘May you live in interesting times!’. :

http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/01/18/obama-create-mass-organization-devoted-obama/

And then ‘The American Thinker’, noting that in the last six months alone the administration has purchased 1.4 BILLION rounds of small arms ammo, most of it hollow point ammo that is outlawed in international conflicts, asks the obvious question:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/09/why_does_homeland_security_need_14_billion_rounds_of_ammunition.html

Just as a matter of interest, the ammo expenditure rate of the military (from the article, unconfirmed) in Iraq and Afghanistan is around 70 MILLION rounds/year. In other words, just in the last six months DHS has bought enough ammo to supply the combat ammo requirements of our military for 20 years at the current rate of expenditure. Inquiring minds, at least those of the mainstream media, have less than zero interest in discovering what DHS intends to shoot it at.

Bob Ludwick

‘Stanford and Bradley say evidence for the Solutreans’ presence in America includes stone artifacts gathered by archaeologists at several sites on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, all producing dates more than 20,000 years old.’

<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/When-Did-Humans-Come-to-the-Americas-187951111.html?c=y&story=fullstory>

———————————————————————–

Roland Dobbins

Fascinating. Of course Niven and I have the New World populated by a magic aware sort of bronze age civilization 14000 years ago just after Atlantis sank. And then I found that terror birds really existed at that time. I rather like what we did with them in Burning Tower.

Book

Here is the new cutting edge reading technology. The bio-optically scannable book!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhcPX1wVp38

(in Spanish with subtitles)

Mike

39-inch hard drive platters in 1965…

Hi Jerry,

I hope you are well. I value your column and thoughts as always.

On the topic of computer technology during our lifetimes, I thought you might be amused and amazed by this two ton hard drive with 39" platters (8 MB each): http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/327/926

They only needed 20KVA at 440VAC for 1200 RPM operation. I assume that these were the largest hard drive platters ever produced… have you ever heard of anything larger?

Regards,

-John G. Hackett

Back in the 1980’s I was on the Board of the Lowell Observatory (in Flagstaff), and when I went to my first board meeting I found the Shoemaker had his asteroids and comets on a pair of DEC removable platter hard drives, I think not 39” in diameter, but perhaps 24”. The drives were in a case the size of a 4-drawer file cabinet. I replaced them with some 300 megabyte Winchesters that I got Priam and some other drive makers to donate. DEC had given them to us, but we were paying several thousand a month in maintenance for them; but until I got the Winchesters they were the only thing Shoemaker could use large enough for his data.

English history and U. S. Law

Dr. Pournelle,

Alongside or in tune with the effect that the English succession had on the first amendment, pertinent to today, was the effect James had on the development of our own second amendment. If he had not tried to disarm his powerful opposition, our founders might never had thought of the need for it.

-d

"What bravery its directors displayed over that time, so that the institution could stand tall and successfully complete its production and social tasks!"

<http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_RUSSIA_GULAG_PARTY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-02-05-11-43-15>

Roland Dobbins

It’s pledge drive time. This place operates on the public radio model. It’s free to everyone but it’s supported by subscriptions. If you haven’t subscribed this would be a good time to do it, and if you haven’t renewed your subscription in a year, this would be a time to do that. You have been reminded. Subscribe or renew now.