Schools, customs, aether, unobtainium, and asteroid mines. And more.

Mail 721 Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Subject: My Grandson is serving detention today….

Jerry,

My Grandson is serving detention after school today for disrupting his class by making a poster and showing it to a girl he liked during a lecture. I’m trying going to have to try to remain stern with him when he returns home, but it’s going to be hard. He drew a picture of a ‘thumbs up’ on a sheet of paper, then printed in big block letters on the paper “Like Me… I’m a Facebook status!” (I included a PDF of it for you).

I had to tell you about it, because it’s pretty clear that Facebook is not only mainstream in the culture, but when he compared himself to a Facebook status, AND did it on paper….. it’s just pervasive.

 

 

(MY apologies: what was easy under FrontPage has become nightmarishly complex with LiveWriter and ridiculous when using Word and LiveWriter. They keep improving things to the point of insanity. Anyway, there is the expansion of the pdf).

 

When Niven and I were doing Mote we were trying to describe a world in which people had pocket computers and used them routinely, but we did not think of stories like this. Signs of the times indeed.

Journal pricing

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup14344

Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained

Harvard complaining about journal pricing.

Chris C

When CD ROM came out I pointed out that journal costs could quickly become trivial; but in fact they got more expensive. It is of course the Iron Law at work. And the government will subsidize those who “need” those journals, so the prices will continue to rise.

Supernovae and Life

Dr. Pournelle —

Fascinating possibility!

Did exploding stars help life on Earth to thrive?

http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/219-news-2012/2117-did-exploding-stars-help-life-on-earth-to-thrive

"Research by a Danish physicist suggests that the explosion of massive stars – supernovae – near the Solar System has strongly influenced the development of life. Prof. Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) sets out his novel work in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society."

"The director of DTU Space, Prof. Eigil Friis-Christensen, comments: ‘When this enquiry into effects of cosmic rays from supernova remnants began 16 years ago, we never imagined that it would lead us so deep into time, or into so many aspects of the Earth’s history. The connection to evolution is a culmination of this work.’ "

(Perhaps the stars have more to do with our lives than we thought.)

Pieter

Well, it may well be that cosmic rays have a lot to do with the temperature of the Earth; although the Warmer Believers do not seem to accept that. Or perhaps Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave was prophetic?

: Debtors Prisons?

This is horrible; a woman went to jail for $208 medical bill that she did not owe and was told she did not have to pay:

<.>

Under the law, debtors aren’t arrested for nonpayment, but rather for failing to respond to court hearings, pay legal fines, or otherwise showing "contempt of court" in connection with a creditor lawsuit. That loophole has lawmakers in the Illinois House of Representatives concerned enough to pass a bill in March that would make it illegal to send residents of the state to jail if they can’t pay a debt. The measure awaits action in the senate.

"Creditors have been manipulating the court system to extract money from the unemployed, veterans, even seniors who rely solely on their benefits to get by each month," Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said last month in a statement voicing support for the legislation. "Too many people have been thrown in jail simply because they’re too poor to pay their debts. We cannot allow these illegal abuses to continue."

</>

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/jailed-for–280–the-return-of-debtors–prisons.html

Laws are so many and so complex who even has time to read them all?  Lawyers all specialize in areas of law because so many laws exist that they can’t even be expected to know them all.  This is a joke!

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

The stones are hard in debtor’s yard…

Your point about the multiplication of the laws is correct. It is now estimated that most middle class adults commit three Federal felonies a day, but few are aware of them. When the law is that complex it is not law at all; it merely puts everyone’s liberty at the discretion of the authorities. In his impeachment of Warren Hastings over Hastings’ activities in governing India, Edmund Burke said “Mr. Hastings pleads that he had discretionary power, and he used it. I put it to your Lordships that he had not discretionary power, and indeed your Lordships have not descretionary power to give.” Burke’s point was that discretionary power was the antithesis of the rule of law, and rule of law was the constitution of England. He was sympathetic with the American cause for similar reasons.

The Framers were very much aware of this. But those who will not learn history are doomed to repeat it…

And now a short break:

QM_is_actually_a_hardware_problem.png

Jerry

Abstruse Goose is similar to xkcd. Here we learn that QM is actually a hardware problem:

http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/QM_is_actually_a_hardware_problem.png

Ed

Subject: Pentagon explains why hypersonic, Mach 20 drone failed

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/04/23/pentagon-explains-why-hypersonic-mach-20-drone-failed/

Tracy

Subject: Skin-peeling doomed Hypersonic glider

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/23/skin-peeling-speeds-doomed-hypersonic-glider-u-s-says/?hpt=hp_t3

Tracy

And earlier Roland wrote

Unobtanium still unobtainable – it only cost us taxpayers $320,000.000.00 to verify that seemingly self-evident notion.

<http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-darpa-hypersonic-missile-20120420,0,4564567.story>

Spending that money on bunny inspectors makes more sense, IMHO.

—

Roland Dobbins

Which sums it up nicely. We have known since the NASP experiments that you do not want to be at hypersonic velocities in the atmosphere any longer than you have to be, which is why the Ramjet/Rocket hybrid route to orbit, which seems to attractive in theory, doesn’t work; which, to go a step farther, is why the kitchen cabinet group I chaired proposed SSX, See

Farewell to Space-Faring View 682 20110705-2

And

THE SSX CONCEPT

We have a lot of mail on this:

Excellent Space News

WOW, this is good!  James Cameron is really starting to impress me as a guy who has his priorities straight; both he and I are explorers and, if I had his money, I would be doing many of the same things he is doing e.g. going to the bottom of the sea and, now, venturing into space!  I’d also get a ride on one of those new Virgin Atlantic volcano rigs that can go into an active volcano — I sent you an email with links to that new company and their vehicles weeks or months ago.  

<.>

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and billionaire co-founder Larry Page have teamed up with "Avatar" director James Cameron and other investors to back an ambitious space exploration and natural resources venture, details of which will be unveiled next week.

The fledgling company, called Planetary Resources, will be unveiled at a Tuesday news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, according to a press release issued this week.

</>

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/google-execs-director-cameron-space-venture-005212432–sector.html

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Asteroid Mining?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303513404577356190967904210.html

Ian Perry

Subj: Google+Cameron=Asteroid Mines!!!!!

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/google-execs-director-cameron-space-venture-005212432–sector.html

Jim

I will comment at greater length when I know more. A Step Farther Out has a a lot about asteroid resources, and my EXILE TO GLORY novel is set in a future about 2025 when we have asteroid mines and some spacefaring civilization travel.

Aether

Jerry

The Michelson-Morley Experiment always struck me as very much like the Objection of the Headwinds, advanced by Aristotle, Ptolemy, and others against the rotation of the Earth.

The ancients were well aware that if you stood in a speeding chariot, you would experience a headwind. If the Earth moved toward the east diurnally, the speed would be much greater than that of a chariot and the headwind that much stronger. Nicholas Oresme, in the 14th century, expressed the objection this way:

If the earth is so moved, it makes a complete turn in a single natural day. Therefore, we and the trees and houses are moved toward the east very swiftly, and so it should seem that the air and wind blow continuously and strongly from the east, [much] as it does against a quarrel shot, [only] much more strongly. But the contrary appears by experience.

To which he gave the answer:

To the second experience, according to this opinion, the response is: Not only is the earth so moved [diurnally], but with it water and the air, as was said, in such a way that the water and lower air are moved differently than they are by winds and other causes. It is like this situation: If air were enclosed in a moving ship, it would seem to the person situated in this air that it was not moved.

With no concept yet of inertia, force, et al., he could not explain why the air and oceans (and people) should share Earth’s motion. Indeed, it was not until Gugliemini dropped balls from the tower of Bologna in the 1790s and measured the Coriolis effect that the rotation of the Earth was empirically established. It seemed to me that the Michelson-Morley experiment was the old Aristotelian Objection of the Headwinds.

Why they expected an aether wind at all, I have no idea. According to Aristotle, the aether is by definition an invisible, incorruptible body, with little in common with ordinary matter. It cannot be acted upon by ordinary matter; and acts on ordinary matter (and our senses) only indirectly. The nature of aether is knowable by argument, not by experience. (Which is sounding a bit like dark matter or the quantum vacuum, now that I think on’t.) MM may have destroyed the modern "Lorenzian ether," but it never laid a glove on the Aristotelian aether.

MikeF

I have been doing considerable reading on special relativity and I am now convinced that it is wrong. By wrong I mean that every experiment it explains can be explained by something a great deal simpler, and by Occam’s Razor we have no need of special relativity. And spectroscopic binaries seem to impose a mountainous difficulty for special relativity, requiring a very great deal of complex explanation, while a much simpler theory – Beckmann’s notion of “aether” as a local gravitational field – gives the same result with algebra.

Of course I am hardly the person to proclaim the non-necessity of special relativity; but I do wonder if we need it.

Turing’s rapid Nazi Enigma code-breaking secret revealed

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/23/turing_papers_released/

Turing’s rapid Nazi Enigma code-breaking secret revealed

Maths homework kept in GCHQ vault for 70 years

By Anna Leach <http://forms.theregister.co.uk/mail_author/?story_url=/2012/04/23/turing_papers_released/>

Posted in Government <http://www.theregister.co.uk/public_sector/government/> , 23rd April 2012 07:26 GMT <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/23/>

Blighty’s communications eavesdropping nerve centre GCHQ has issued two papers written by superboffin Alan Turing on the maths behind code-breaking.

The documents, held in secret for 70 years, laid the foundations for the quick and efficient decryption of Nazi Enigma-scrambled messages – a breakthrough that lopped about two years off the duration of the Second World War.

The papers were donated on Friday to The National Archive <http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/default.htm> [1] in Kew, Surrey, where they will be available to view on request. An archives spokesperson said demand to see Turing’s work is high, but there is no plan to put it online.

The GCHQ mathematician who handed over the documents, named only as Richard, told the BBC <http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17771962> [2] that the agency had now "squeezed the juice" out of the two papers and was "happy for them to be released into the public domain". The move coincides with the 100th anniversary of Turing’s birth on 23 June this year.

The two typewritten papers feature Turing’s hand-scribbled notes, and are titled On Statistics of Repetitions and The Applications of Probability to Cryptography.

Excerpt from Turing paper, credit: National Archive scan <http://regmedia.co.uk/2012/04/20/turing_paper_2.jpg>

Turing the tables on Nazi encryption – click for the full page [3]

The statistics paper describes how examining repeated characters in two encrypted messages can prove that both passages use the same encipherment key. The cryptography essay is longer and applies rigorous probability analysis to code-breaking methods and techniques.

The mathematical workings are given a little historical piquancy when Turing uses life expectancy to examine conditional probability, taking Hitler – then aged 52 – as an example. It dates the paper to between April 1941 and April 1942.

According to GCHQ’s Richard, the papers used "mathematical analysis to try and determine the more likely settings [for the crypto key] so that they can be tried as quickly as possible".

The agency added that the message decryption rate achieved by wartime code-breakers at Bletchley Park was "almost certainly enabled by the techniques in this paper". More details on Turing’s newly revealed work can be found here <http://www.gchq.gov.uk/Press/Pages/turing-papers-released.aspx>

A gripping story.

Equality

"that all men are created equal": the Great Lie in the US Declaration of Independence. The Great Lie, because it is patently and obviously untrue.

Some people simply are superior to others. Was the opinion of Albert Einstein (who, I believe, became a US citizen) of equal value to Joe Epsilon Minus?

Ian Campbell

But of course it is untrue and those who signed the document knew that at least as well as you do. It was to be the agreed axiom: not a truth but an agreed axiom.

That was my point.

The problem comes when you assume that an axiom is actually to be regarded as true.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

Quite. I suspect that at least some of the Founders would like to have added "in the eyes of God" in the appropriate place, which would have made the matter clear. However, although my knowledge of American constitutional history is limited (and why shouldn’t it be – I’m British?) I do believe that at least some of them were atheist or at least Deist rather than formally religious, and that may be the reason why that phrase was not included.

A larger point is that any form of democratic rule only works well when the voters understand the issues and are prepared to take the time to think about them. For far too many people in the USA, and also in the UK to be fair, one or both of those conditions do not apply.

Someone truly cynical might think that the parlous state of the educational system in both of our countries is deliberately designed to keep it that way.

Regards

Ian Campbell

You turned me on to Kipling, and for that I thank you. Now I read a Kipling poem or two each day. Today’s read:

 

A Servant When He Reigneth

 

Three things make earth unquiet

And four she cannot brook

The godly Agur counted them

And put them in a book —

Those Four Tremendous Curses

With which mankind is cursed;

But a Servant when He Reigneth

Old Agur entered first.

An Handmaid that is Mistress

We need not call upon.

A Fool when he is full of Meat

Will fall asleep anon.

An Odious Woman Married

May bear a babe and mend;

But a Servant when He Reigneth

Is Confusion to the end.

His feet are swift to tumult,

His hands are slow to toil,

His ears are deaf to reason,

His lips are loud in broil.

He knows no use for power

Except to show his might.

He gives no heed to judgment

Unless it prove him right.

Because he served a master

Before his Kingship came,

And hid in all disaster

Behind his master’s name,

So, when his Folly opens

The unnecessary hells,

A Servant when He Reigneth

Throws the blame on some one else.

His vows are lightly spoken,

His faith is hard to bind,

His trust is easy boken,

He fears his fellow-kind.

The nearest mob will move him

To break the pledge he gave —

Oh, a Servant when he Reigneth

Is more than ever slave!

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

California Nightmarin’

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577340531861056966.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

"Its [personal] income tax is steeply progressive. Millionaires pay a top rate of 10.3%, the third-highest in the country. But middle-class workers—those who earn more than $48,000—pay a top rate of 9.3%, which is higher than what millionaires pay in 47 states."

Charles Brumbelow=

Alas

A message from the Believers to the Deniers

‘Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn.’

<http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevezwick/2012/04/19/a-tennessee-firemans-solution-to-climate-change/>

Forbes Magazine, ladies and gentlemen.

Roland Dobbins

—

 

Jerry,

When the scientists try to stifle contrary views, that might fall under "business as usual" even though it’s card to call it science. But when thy try to hide their own contrary data and analysis, or manipulate (or fabricate) data to achieve the desired results (e.g. the "hockey stick"), it is hard to avoid concluding that they are perpetrating a hoax.

I have no doubt that Gore is motivated by the billions a year that his companies would make from carbon credit trading rather than by any sense that he’s saving the planet.

Anon

Anonymity is advisable…

First contact based on space probe

In Mail 721 Tuesday, April 17, 2012 B asked about a novel where first contact followed alien discovery of a terrestrial space probe. It isn’t a novel, but the Larry Niven short story Like Banquo’s Ghost probably qualifies.

Doug

Douglas Stuart

Written in 1968. Niven and I were present when the Plaque idea for Pioneer was implemented.

A Sad Statemtent on Space

I hope this is just bitter cynicism and not indicative of our future.  If so, this is sad, and — yes — if this is the case, my son will be studying Russian and Chinese.  

<.>

When asked for advice Tuesday by a WUSA9 reporter, former Discovery astronaut Dr. Anna Fisher told a boy watching the shuttle, “Study Russian.”

</>

http://freebeacon.com/obama-ruins-kids-day/

This is so sad.  We wasted our money on socialist largess and now we might be stuck here with these creeps.  I wonder how hard it will be to stow away on a rocket off this rock?  But, we’ll see how things work when my generation takes the helm.  Maybe we can pull this one out of the fire and let these socialist creeps fall by the wayside where they belong.  

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

.Of course it might be bad advice. Studying Chinese might be more effective.

Video: ‘If I Wanted America to Fail’

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/04/22/video-if-i-wanted-america-to-fail/

This is a powerful video with an unrelenting tempo and one line at the end, "If I wanted America to fail I…I suppose I wouldn’t change a thing."

Just watch it. Think about it. Recommend it to your friends. And be sure to give it a thumbs up.

If we fail, the richest among us won’t fail. They’ll move to where failure is not the mode of the day. The rest of us will be stuck here in an ever worsening condition. All we have to do to ensure this is . . . . . nothing, not a single damn thing.

{^_^}