View 715 Tuesday, February 28, 2012

I will be spending the day on Legend of Black Ship Island. I have been saving some mail for longer and better treatment, but this seems a reasonable time to bring them up. Alas, my contributions will be brief, but the matters are important.

I proposed this http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf as a rational argument for a skeptical position on AGW in another conference, and asked for comments. A physicist who often strongly supports the consensus position replied:

Let me propose some terminology, to make it a little easier to discuss the argument. The people opposing the anthropogenic theory of global warming can be divided into three distinct categories:

*skeptics

*policy critics

*deniers

"Skeptics" are asking legitimate questions about the science.

"Policy critics" criticize the policies proposed in response to global warming, for economic or political reasons.

"Deniers" deny anthropogenic global warming, period, end of discussion.

I’ve notice that, although deniers always claim that they are in fact "skeptics," deniers and skpetics are in fact complete opposites. The key feature of deniers is that they are not even slightly skeptical of any arguments against global warming: they are completely credulous of any argument, no matter how trivially it can be shown to be baseless, that opposes global warming.

Reading through this particular presentation of Lindzen, he starts out by saying that the greenhouse effect is real, and anthropogenic gasses contribute to it exactly as much as non-anthropogenic gasses; he just disputes what the radiative response function is. So I’ll put him in the category of "skeptics" rather than deniers.

In fact, he pretty much dismisses the deniers:

"Unfortunately, denial of the facts on the left [that the greenhouse effect is real], has made the public presentation of the science by those promoting alarm much easier. They merely have to defend the trivially true points on the left; declare that it is only a matter of well- known physics; and relegate the real basis for alarm to a peripheral footnote – even as they slyly acknowledge that this basis is subject to great uncertainty."

So, let’s ignore his loaded vocabulary here (words like "those promoting alarm" and "real basis for alarm" and "sly.") Here’s what he just said:

1. The greenhouse effect is real. It’s well-known physics.

2. By denying this, the deniers are not merely muddying the waters, they are discrediting actual skepticism by turning their case into one that is disdained by real scientists because they are defending propositions that are "trivially" not true).

3. The real scientists (the ones he calls "alarmists"), on the other hand, acknowledge uncertainty.

OK, once we’ve deleted his slanted vocabulary, I’ll agree with these statements.

At no point does he use the words "hoax," "fraud," or "scam," or support people who use those terms. Good for him. Maybe he could call up the rest of the deniers and tell them "hey, just because you disagree with the scientists, that doesn’t mean that they are frauds."

With that said, the presentation shown is one-sided; he presents a case for a value on the low side of the IPCC estimate, and makes no attempt to show any part of the arguments for higher values of the radiative forcing response function. Not unusual, if you see this as a presentation of one side of a debate, but one should never draw conclusions in a debate before hearing the other side.

I then said “And this is the response ?” which brought this reply:

I’m not sure if I understand the question. This is *my* response; I wouldn’t say it is "the" response.

Lindzen’s arguments, of course, has been pretty well addressed; it’s not hard to find good technical analyses if you look for them. I find it a little disconcerting that his conclusions have remained the same but the analysis he uses to support the conclusions keep changing; this (to me, at least) looks uncomfortably like the signature of an analysis crafted to support a pre-existing conclusion, rather than a conclusion that results from a careful analysis.

On the other hand, he does use actual science in his arguments, he agrees on the basic physics (that the greenhouse effect actually does exist, and human-generated greenhouse gasses are part of it) and only disagrees on the magnitude of the response function. And, most notably, he doesn’t accuse scientists who come to different conclusions of "hoax", or "swindle", or "fraud."

So even if he cherry-picks data rather egregiously, I’m good with him.

A good article about Lindzen in _Seed_ a couple of years back, if you’re interested:

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_contrarian

My problem is that I still have no answer to questions I asked forty years ago regarding the global warming controversy.

I said then that what we knew was well known: that in historical times the Earth has been both warmer and colder than it is now. It was warmer in Viking times until about 1300 after which the Earth began to cool. Since 1800 the Earth’s temperature has risen about a degree a century. About 1900 Arrhenius did some back of the envelope predictions of what would happen if CO2 levels doubled. Since 1900 the Earth’s temperature seems to have risen at about the rate that it had previously been rising: that is, there is warming, but there has been warming from 1800 when the Hudson and Thames froze solid enough to walk across, and the rate of warming doesn’t seem to have greatly increased so far as we can measure given the accuracy of the data. Some of the warming may well be due to CO2 but there doesn’t seem to be cause for alarm. We do need to continue to study this and develop better measurement tools.

A Bayesian analysis would conclude that it is better to invest in ways to reduce uncertainty than to spend resources on the predictions of the models; there is just too much uncertainty.

I also concluded long ago that cooling was still a possible threat: that the return of the glaciers requires energy to transport the water vapor to the cold areas where it can fall as snow, and this can have a runaway effect. That needs to be watched.

Regarding science and cherry picking: I would have thought that the experimentum crucis was the essence of science, and that’s certainly cherry picking. As I said long ago in my essay on the Voodoo Sciences, novelist need plausibility, lawyers need evidence, but scientists need data and hypotheses that explain all the data: one contrary result (cherry picking) is important. Look at the controversy over whether or not they have found faster than light neutrinos. No one supposes that if we are certain of FTL particles this will not force a revolutionary change in our standard models in physics. It won’t be dismissed as cherry picking.

As to Lindzen not having changed his conclusions over the years, I think I could easily say the same thing about many of the AGW believers. What I find alarming is that Lindzen asks questions about the models and their predictions, and concludes that there is not enough evidence to justify panic: that the best evidence is that the increasing CO2 is not a justification for alarm, and particularly not enough quality evidence to justify spending $Trillions on revising the entire industrial economy. What I get is a sociological discussion about the quality of the debate, and a discussion of Lindzen. I would not think that is a rational scientific discussion.

My conclusion is that Lindzen has the better of it: he has challenged the models and the data, and I do not believe he has been answered.

Relevant to the subject of cherry picking in science

Dark Matter, Vacuum Energy, and Aristotle’s Aether

Aristotle’s aether was not Lorenz luminiferous aether and so was no disproven by M&M. Here is an interesting comparison of the properties of Dark Matter, Vacuum Energy, and Aristotle’s Aether:

http://hylemorphist.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/zero-point-energygroundvacuum-state-vs-real-being-vs-logical-being-vs-nothing/

or in this article

http://www.thomist.org/jourl/2004/July/2004%20July%20A%20Dec.htm

MikeF

Philosophy as I understood it when I was young seems relevant to today’s fundamental questions, but it does not seem often to be discussed by today’s philosophers. I am grateful for my education in philosophy of science from Gustav Bergmann at the University of Iowa when I was an undergraduate, and to the Christian Brothers for my high school introduction to Aristotle. And to Mike Flynn for continuing to remind us that we do not want to lose sight of the relevance of some of the old questions.

A-10

Regarding the A-10, I’m reminded of the Stuka. At the outset of WW II, it was the best close-support aircraft on either side. It was regularly in the news. By the end of the war it had disappeared from the news, just as it had disappeared from the sky. It couldn’t survive in skies with high-performance fighters. It had neither speed, armor, nor armament to outfight the P-51 or the P-38.

I think the same would be true of the A-10 in a war against a "peer" power like Russia or China. It wouldn’t survive against their front-line fighters.

Having said that, the A-10 has been extremely successful in wars against non-peer powers. One of the most effective aircraft used in Vietnam was the A-1 Skyraider, originally developed during WW II as a carrier aircraft. It would not have survived in a sky full of MiG-19s, but it didn’t have to. There weren’t any over South Vietnam. the A-10 is now doing the job the A-1 formerly did.

We may have to fight a "peer" power some day, although I hope not. We are very likely to have to fight non-peer powers in the future, just as we have for the past fifty years. Getting rid of the A-10 because it can’t outfight Chinese J-10 would be foolish. They should be kept around for when they’re suitable, not eliminated from the inventory.

Joseph P. Martino

But no one ever supposed that the A-10 would operate without air superiority, as no one ever supposed that the A-10 would be useful in performing the air superiority mission. I was on the Boeing TFX design team, and we went through that analysis: the kind of airplane that wins dogfights is not the airplane you need for close support of the ground army, or for that matter for local battle area interdiction missions. As it happens the P-47 was useful for both, but its major value was for interdiction. Trainbusting recce/strike missions by the P-47 were a major factor in the conquest of Europe, although the P-47 was designed as an escort fighter. The P-51 with the Rolls Royce supercharged engine proved better at that mission.

The Army neither wants nor can perform the air superiority mission in a peer power war. That’s the job of the Air Force, and USAF is pretty good at it: the spectaculars of dogfighting, and the more decisive but more prosaic mission of taking out the hornet’s nests. You don’t really get rid of hornets by swatting one hornet at a time, but you sure do need a capability for escorting the guy with the Flit through a swarm of hornets. Air superiority takes a combined arms approach just as winning ground forces are those with combined arms capabilities. Give the A-10 to the Army, and give the local interdiction mission to the Army, and leave air superiority to the Air Force.

History has shown that combined arms armies have generally been victorious. That would seem to apply to the air superiority campaign as well. The Warthog is important in ground campaigns, and might well perform the equivalent of the heavy cavalry charge at just the right time in battle – provided that there is air superiority so that the A-10 can perform its mission. 

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/320137

How to delete your Google Browsing History before new policy

With just a week to go before Google changes to its new privacy policy that allows it to gather, store and use personal information, users have a last chance to delete their Google Browsing History, along with any damning information therein.

Tech News Daily reports that once Google’s new unified privacy policy takes effect all data already collected about you, including search queries, sites visited, age, gender and location will be gathered and assigned to your online identity represented by your Gmail and YouTube accounts. After the policy takes effect you are not allowed to opt out without abandoning Google altogether. But now before the policy takes effect, you have the option of deleting your Google Web History by modifying your settings so that Google is unable to associate data collected about you with your Gmail or YouTube accounts.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/320137#ixzz1nissqAwZ

View 715 Sunday, February 26, 2012

It has been a long day, and it does seem I am recovering from this upper respiratory infection that seems to be going around. We managed church this morning, and Roberta sang in the choir, and after we went with friends to breakfast, and while it was all tiring I managed it; We even had a walk later. With Sable it’s pretty hard not to take a walk. She considers that an entitlement. Then we discovered that we were out of dog food and I had to go out again. Sable wondered where I was going, and she had an idea where it might be, so I took her along. It’s her favorite place. When we get to the Petco parking area she goes mad to get out of the car. Literally her favorite place. Inside she picked out an enormous bone and talked me into buying it for her. When I was a kid you’d get those for a quarter for a soup bone, but in modern times it’s not likely that any store around here ever sees such bones. This was huge, and will last her for a while, and it’s good for her teeth.

And then it was time for the Oscars. No real surprises on the awards, and none I disagreed with. Clooney and Streep certainly deserved theirs, and of the nominees I have seen I’d have voted for The Artist. But it all exhausted me, and I didn’t get these notes written up.

I strongly recommend http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf as about the best rational discussion of CO2 and climate I have seen. It’s reasonably technical but not overly so; and it asks questions. I particularly invite those who believe in AGW to read it and send me your comments.

I actually know that Clooney didn’t win the best actor award, and I thought he dshould have. IN fact I thought that so thoroughly that I seem to have made myself think he had. That’s an odd trick for memory to play on me.

View 714 Saturday, February 25, 2012

The FTL neutrinos may not be gone after all. The evidence is still murky.

This from one of our PhD physicist readers:

Subj: FTL Neutrino "Clarification"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17139635

On the one hand, the team said there is a problem in the "oscillator" that provides a ticking clock to the experiment in the intervals between the synchronisations of GPS equipment.

This is used to provide start and stop times for the measurement as well as precise distance information.

That problem would increase the measured time of the neutrinos’ flight, in turn reducing the surprising faster-than-light effect.

But the team also said they found a problem in the optical fibre connection between the GPS signal and the experiment’s main clock – quite simply, a cable not quite fully plugged in.

In contrast, the team said that effect would increase the neutrinos’ apparent speed.

_____

In other words, the much ballyhooed "loose plug" from the earlier reports, when corrected, makes the discrepancy even worse, rather than better. It’s a separate problem, the oscillator, that reduces he discrepancy.

_____

Meanwhile, I have finally looked at a few of the numbers. Given that classic tachyons of higher energies travel at speeds closer to the speed of light, and given that the mean energy of these muon neutrinos was something over 20 GeV, the measured speed is actually MUCH TOO FAST for these measured neutrinos to be classic tachyons if we assume the normally assumed rest energy in the vicinity of a few eV. Amusingly, the speed works out about right if the mass of the muon neutrino is sqrt(-1)*mass of the muon. But there is no apparent way to reconcile that with the obvious argument that it would suggest an electron neutrino mass of i*me.

And the fact remains as I noted in my presentation in November: EVERY quoted measurement of the neutrino mass is consistent with faster than light neutrinos. Even if this measurement falls, as noted above, it does not prove that neutrinos are not classic tachyons.

I will agree that it’s a mess and not getting cleaner until they get some good data with their hardware errors corrected.

Then we have:

The per person Medicare insurance premium will increase from the present monthly fee of $96.40, rising to: $104.20 in 2012; $120.20 in 2013; And $247.00 in 2014. These are provisions incorporated in the Obamacare legislation, purposely delayed so as not to ‘confuse’ the 2012 re-election campaigns. Send this to all seniors that you know, so they will know who’s throwing them under the bus.

I have no idea whether this is correct or not. It is from a partisan source. I haven’t read the Obama Health Care Act, (nor do I know anyone including some Members of Congress who has; it very long and complex) so I can’t say. Most of those who passed Obamacare didn’t know much about it – then Speaker Pelosi famously told the Congress they had to pass the act to see what was in it – but it is well known that it had lengthy time delays for many of its provisions. I am realizably informed that it has major changes in Medicare both A and B. I don’t want to get into a discussion of facts and interpretations, but do we have any experts who actually know in the readership?

I understand there is a new Internet Bill in Congress that has got past the Judiciasy Committee. It will require ISP’s to keep records of you internet visits, and make them available to law enforcement and also to discovery fishing lawyers in civil cases. Such as child custody or divorce – hah, he went to a porn site! – and any other civil suits. So all someone has to do is bring a lawsuit and collect everything your ISP knows about you, which is a lot.

I’ll have a lot more about this next week. I just heard about this on Leo Laporte’s radio show. More details later. Feel free to tell me what you know about this.

From the Show Notes, Saturday Feb 25 2012 of Leo Laporte’s radio show:

The EFF says Congressman Lamar Smith, you know, the SOPA guy, has introduced a new bill HR1981 which hides behind protecting children from internet pornography. But others are calling it the Internet Surveillance Act. Leo says it’s a grave invasion of privacy. It requires ISPs to keep track of all your search, electronics communications, email and IP addresses, credit card data for at least 12 months, and indemnifies ISPs from being sued for it. Leo also says it’ll give the MPAA and RIAA the ability to track you down easier.

On the air he said that the act would allow civil lawsuit lawyers access to all those records as part of discovery search. If so it’s not merely an invasion of privacy, it’s the end of any pretense of electronic privacy. Everything you have bought, every web site you went to intentionally or not, every place you have travelled…

Ands yet another warning: I got this Thursday but overlooked it.

GPS vulnerability

Jerry

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/23/gps-emerging-threat/

It’s worth reading. Excerpt:

For example, in 2010, UK researchers aimed a low-level GPS jammer at test ships in the English channel. The results were stunning: Ships that veered off course without the crew’s knowledge. False information passed to other ships about their positions, increasing the likelihood of a collision. The communications systems stopped working, meaning the crew couldn’t contact the Coast Guard. And the emergency service system — used to guide rescuers — completely failed.

Then, there’s the incident with the U.S. drone lost over Iran. Humphreys believes that by using simple jamming technology, Iranian authorities confused the ultra-sophisticated RQ-170 spy drone to the point that it went into landing mode. The drone’s Achilles heel? It had a civilian GPS system — not a military-grade encrypted model. It didn’t take much to blind it and force it down.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/23/gps-emerging-threat/#ixzz1nRJKFW69

Needless to say, If I can confuse ships at sea I can confuse airliners overhead. I’m not sure it’s as simple as this makes it seem,  but we know how to build directional antenna and oscillators of nearly any frequency you’d like, and…

View 714 Wednesday, February 22, 2012

ALAS:

‘FTL neutrinos’ result caused by inattention to Pournelle’s Law?

<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/neutrinos-faulty-cable/>

Roland Dobbins

The applicable Pournelle’s Law was one of troubleshooting: 90% of the time it’s a cable. I first formulated that back in S-100 days, and it’s still true. Now it may be that we’re better off without faster than light neutrons, but I for one regret that they’re going away. Of course this was always the way to bet it, but it was a more intereresting universe when everything we thought we understood was fundamentally wrong…

Of course we still have the situation where some large portion of the universe is composed of dark matter which we can’t see or detect, and dark energy which we can’t find but have to believe in on faith. Of course one explanation of the data that forces us to believe in these undetectables is a revised aether theory such as Petr Beckmann’s aether as an entangled gravitational field – see Einstein Plus Two by Beckmann, and that would be interesting. Do note that I’m playing games. I do wonder about the proliferation of hypothetical constructs and intervening variables in physics. I thought those were a monopoly of the social sciences…

The Republican Debates

I watched the CNN-moderated Republican candidate debates that took place this evening in Mesa, Arizona.

The clear winner was Newt Gingrich. The clear loser was Senator Santorum, who was often petulant rather than presidential. It wasn’t a fatal loss, but Santorum must learn to stop taking the bait. The moderator, and others, all tried to get him to jump Romney rather than be presidential, to defend some past record rather than state what he would do now, to be apologetic rather than positive – and Santorum rose to the bait every time. Then he got into a long term slanging match with Romney. Neither of them looked very good in that, and neither came off all that well, but Romney looked more presidential than Santorum. Senator Santorum really has to learn the first rule of campaigning: don’t let the opposition set the agenda. Don’t respond and react. Santorum’s touchiness won’t hurt him as President. He’s sound in principle, and unlike British Prime Ministers, don’t have to engage in debates unless they want to, and being able to debate isn’t terribly important one way or another in actually governing the country. Debate talent is important for campaigning for the office of President, but not for executing that office.

That, of course, is one of the major flaws of democracy. We require those who would be president to spend most of their lives learning how to get the office, and almost none on learning how to be President once they get there.

Incidentally, Newt knows this. Campaigning actually bores him. He prefers to be among smart people discussing possibilities, in a situation in which he doesn’t have to be guarded but can say what he thinks as the ideas spring up. Most fresh and original ideas aren’t all that useful. They can lead to something useful, but we don’t use the phrase ‘half baked” for no reason. Many half-baked ideas do bake out, sometimes into very good things indeed. But of course campaign debates are not the place to spring new concepts; those need discussing in private and among friends who aren’t playing ‘gotcha’. When Newt was an unknown Congressman making speeches about the nature of the Constitution to the empty House chamber after hours, he was quite different from when he was Minority Whip, and when he found that it might be possible to win a Republican Majority for the first time in forty years and he went into campaign mode he had to change once again. Part of that was time, but part was the requirements of campaigns.

His experience at this came across during the debate. He stayed on target, didn’t rise to the bait and use his time on petty denunciations of others or in reacting to some accusation, and he pretty well stayed on point: we’re in big trouble, and it’s going to take some fundamental and profound changes to get out of it. We’re going to need energy independence to break our enthrallment to the Middle East. Breaking our energy dependence is a first requirement for independence and liberty. Fortunately we have the resources; all we need is to get the government out of that way.

Ron Paul came off well. When asked what single word best described him, he said “consistency” and he’s right. He doesn’t have plans and programs for education because the Constitution doesn’t give the government any rights or powers over education. It’s not a matter for either Congress or the President. He applies this principle to most of the matters brought up. He’s also keenly aware that we are spending money we don’t have, much of it on matters the Federal Government has no Constitutional power to spend it on. His return to the first principles of Constitutionalism seems absolute, and as the campaign goes on you begin to realize that he really means it. Whether that’s possible – whether the American people even want such a thing – isn’t clear to me, and I suspect it is not clear to him; but that’s his position, and he’s going to stick to it. Ron Paul reminds me of John Quincy Adams. We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but we are the guardians only of our own. We do not go abroad seeking dragons to slay. We have enough to do preserving our own liberty.

Santorum said little I disagreed with, and many things I liked, but I found myself shouting at him when he took the bait and went off on another silly tirade either attacking someone else, or defending his record in the Senate. I know why he does it, but I would far rather he showed himself being presidential rather than reacting as if — but no, I’m not going to frame that image. Let’s just say that he’s capable of looking presidential, and has done so, notably the night he won in Iowa but at other times as well. His positions are consistent and generally defer to the constitution. He’d do better if he displayed them rather than apologizing for voting for No Child Left Behind.

Day of the Drone

The two links below point to something astounding.

There was a time when I was the world’s most informed authority on inertial guidance. This wasn’t because of my expertise, it was because I was editor of Project 75, the USAF comprehensive survey of ballistic missile technology, and I had both the clearance and the access authority – need to know – for all of that. The result was a report that I wrote or edited every page of, but which was classified at a need to know level above mine – which makes sense because it literally had everything we knew about our missiles and everything we thought we knew about everyone else’s. Naturally I could get at every part of the document, but not all of it at once, because the number of copies was limited for very good reasons. Anyway, in those days inertial guidance depended on mechanical gyroscopes, and electronics to get the gyroscopic data. We were developing and hoped soon to deploy gyros which used lasers to pick off the spin rates and other pertinent data, which would increase accuracy because reading the data wouldn’t affect the gyroscope as much as the current electronic means would.

But for all that, an inertial guidance platform with three axis gyroscopes and three axis accelerometers was a fairly large and terribly expensive thing. Moreover, the computer that this had to feed was large too. Our other analyses indicated that the major improvement we needed in the ICBM force was not number of warheads or large yields, but accuracies at intercontinental range; and that required on-board guidance computers. (Obviously you couldn’t use any kind of midcourse correction system: no ICBM could be allowed to accept instructions from the outside because that would instantly become the major one point vulnerability of the missile. But that’s another story for another time.)

On board guidance computers had to be made smaller and more powerful and one result was a recommendation for major investments in large scale integrated circuits.

Once all that was done – we had smaller and lighter gyros and accelerometers, and much more powerful and smaller computers with kilobytes of memory, we still ended up with guidance packages that were large, heavy, and expensive,

Now go look here: http://invensense.com/mems/gyro/mpu9150.html

What’s described is a gyro and accelerometer system. In chips. Micromachines. You can buy it to put into your game controller. You can add GPS if that’s not already in it; it’s just another chip. And for about $1700 you can get a quadricopter, a four motor helicopter, complete with control system, GPS, battery life of more than ten minutes, payload of more than a pound. It will fly to where you send it, to an accuracy of a couple of meters, using GPS to find it. It can be given altitude constraints. Such as stay more than 20 and fewer than 30 meters above the local ground level (there’s a camera so you can see obstacles to go over or around).

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to think of the sort of things a geeky kid who has decided he really hates his school and those bullies who make his life miserable might come up with in a week of thought. I can think of things I might have done with something like that on a particularly lousy day. They’d probably involve sprayers and agar agar, or perhaps inorganic chemicals. Fortunately my geeky kid being bullied experiences were all when I was too young to do anything; by the time I was able to make nitroglycerine I didn’t have any such motives. I didn’t get bullied in high school because my friend was a very large guy who really really wanted to pass Latin…

But I do leave you with the thought for the day. Also I point out that guidance systems for drones don’t cost much. They’ll control fixed wing “model” aircraft of sizes up to tens of kilograms just as easily as they’ll control a small one pound payload quadricopter. The day when any geek can have his own personal drone is not only coming, it’s pretty well here.

Sleep tight.

https://store.diydrones.com/APM_2_0_Kit_p/br-ardupilotmega-03.htm

http://invensense.com/mems/gyro/mpu9150.html

Newt makes his case

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M415AGqnVrg&feature=player_embedded# !

If he would just keep this up.

Phil

Well, it does make his positions quite clear. I can say from personal experience that Newt talks like this and has done so since the 1980’s. He’s being interviewed so it’s not an interactive conversation, but he is paying attention to the questions. I’ve had conversations like this with him many times.

If you’re wondering about Newt, he directly answers the questions about his temperament. And as my reader says, he states his case quite well.