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Monday February 18, 2008

Harry Erwin's Letter from England

The Labour Government is slowly losing its grip on reality.

Requiring a £10 licence to smoke:

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7247470.stm>

Bribing students to eat better:

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/16/nchildren116.xml

> <http://tinyurl.com/357t3c>

Shutting down access to the internet for persistent piracy: <http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3353387.ece

> <http://tinyurl.com/33udnj>

The BAE bribery scandal is coming out, showing just how much hidden leverage the Saudis have had with western governments. The Saudis said they would withdraw from the fight against terrorism if the probe were not dropped:

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7247714.stm>

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2007/02/investigating_bae_systems.html

> <http://tinyurl.com/2kvkd5>

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/15/bae_deathmongers_v_hippies_n_saudis_case_happy_beak/

> <http://tinyurl.com/ywkhyk>

Taxes: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/02/16/do1602.xml

> <http://tinyurl.com/28mpek>

Schneier on security: <http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/dhs_in_the_onio.html

> <http://tinyurl.com/2yoxfh>

My research is making progress. What you usually hear at a discovery is not "Eureka!", but "That's funny..." I have five questions travelling with my colleagues to a conference in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend, all reflecting recent "That's funny..." moments in my modelling.

--

Harry Erwin, PhD, Senior Lecturer of Computing, University of Sunderland. Computational neuroethologist:

http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw/phpwiki/index.php/AuditoryResearch

==

Some Sunday stories for your amusement

First, however, put down your coffee.

More on the proposed £10 licence to smoke: <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=514753&in_page_id=1770 > <http://tinyurl.com/2t7r6k>  <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3378895.ece>  <http://tinyurl.com/3xtxah

Bishop of Carlisle compares Brown Government to the demonic beast of Revelation 13:15-18: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/7244502.stm

"Targets and Terror": <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/
2008/feb/17/ businesscomment.policy>  <http://tinyurl.com/2rqdh6>  <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/10/businesscomment1>

 <http://tinyurl.com/3cycm9

-- Harry Erwin, PhD "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1755)

=========

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

For many years, I have despised "blogs" and "bloggers." It always seemed to me that there could not possibly be any value in what anyone can (and does) do, for which there is absolutely no quality control of any sort. I preferred to publish my thoughts and ideas in peer-reviewed academic journals.

But, alas, the time has finally come for me to come down from my elitist high horse and join the twenty-first century. With the gentle urging of my dearest friend Kaja Perina, Editor in Chief of Psychology Today, I have joined the behavioral economist Dan Ariely (MIT) and the Darwinian anthropologist Helen Fisher (Rutgers) to be one of the inaugural bloggers of Psychology Today blogs.

Under the moniker "The Scientific Fundamentalist," I will be posting a couple of times a week to share my and other scientists' findings in evolutionary psychology and intelligence research with the readers of Psychology Today. I invite you all to visit my "blog." (I still can't believe I'm saying this!)

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist 

I have always envied my friend, the Cornell economist Bob Frank, for his monthly column "The Economic Scene" in the New York Times. I suppose this is my answer to his column, what might be called "The Evolutionary Psychological Scene."

It's official now. I have joined the plebeian masses. I have become what I despise. I am just like anybody else now.

Sanoshi

Welcome to the club.

And a comment on Peer Review

1) Peer review works, it seems to me, if you believe that people credentialed as scholars are not subject to political correctness, fear of their peers, concerns about tenure, and the heavy pressure to stay within the accepted paradigm. Is this the case?

2) Who would write the more insightful and accurate paper on race in America—Jared Taylor (who I believe not to have any sort of high academic credentials), or the head of the sociology department at the U. of Maryland? Whose paper would be more likely to pass peer review?

3) If I stole a prepublication copy of a high-grade-paper from a major figure in one of the semi- or pseudo-sciences—psychology, sociology, anthropology—and submitted it under my name, as plain Fred Reed, would it pass peer review? If not, then the function of peer review as an assurance of quality would seem dubious. Indeed, I would have to conclude that the journal didn’t even recognize quality in its own field, and that peer review was chiefly a form of exclusionary unionism.

4) I may be wrong, but I have the impression that people who pass peer review, such as Jay Gould (was he peer-reviewed?) have been regarded by the list as incompetent if not dishonest.

5) I believe I have read that someone wrote a deliberately nonsensical paper in sociology or some such, and this parody was duly published in a respected journal. I don’t know whether it was peer-reviewed.

Maybe journals ought to reserve a slot per issue for things interesting but unconventional, and let the reader decide.

Fred

=========

Analysis: Kosovo strains US-Russian ties 

Doctor Pournelle,

So, in a few years when a nuclear-armed Iran signs a Treaty of Co-operation and Friendship with an Islamic Kosovo, in order to counter-balance the Russians and Serbs, we shall have the cold comfort of feeliing altruistic that we helped something so counter to our national interests as Kosovar independence take hold and fester in Europe.

If there is justice, someday Venezuela will demand we return Texas to Mexico in return for Venezuelan oil. It would be roughly analogous. Kosovo is actually more important , "psychically" speaking, to Serbia than Texas is to us, but the pain would be close enough.

I imagine Madeline Albright is proud. She managed to help Kin Il Jong develop nuclear weapons and ICBM's through her diplomacy, . and now may add to her C.V. that she midwived the birth of the first majority-Islamic state located wholly in Europe since the Middle-Ages. Future historians may well date the beginning of the "Re-reconquista" to this year. In a chapter titled, perhaps, "What were they thinking?"

Ah, this doubtless shall make the hearts of the "Prgoressive's" warm"Progress" such as this always does! Isn't Jacobinism wonderful? One almost (Almost!) wishes Mme. Clinton wins the election, so she might be on watch when this particular "turkey" of the Clinton years comes home to roost.

Almost. As in "Not Quite", as in "hold your nose and vote for McCain".

Best wishes and prayers as you begin treatment this week.

Petronius

"Russia is a traditional ally of Serbia. But that is not the only reason it vehemently opposes Kosovo's independence. The Kremlin contends it will set a dangerous precedent for secessionist movements across the former Soviet Union, including Chechnya and Georgia.

The confrontation over Kosovo could harden Russia's resolve on the other disputes that have brought ties to a post-Cold War low. While analysts say Russia is unlikely to restrict energy supplies to the West in response to recognition of the province, ignoring Russia's concerns could make Moscow less cooperative on crucial issues such as Iran's nuclear program.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080217/
ap_on_re_eu/kosovo_america_s_gamble

We did ourselves proud, didn't we?

===========

Democratic Party 

Jerry,

Why I can no longer support any registered Democrat for any office at any level...

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/
RobertDNovak/2008/02/18/torts_and_terrorism 

Torts and Terrorism By Robert D. Novak Monday, February 18, 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A closed-door caucus of House Democrats last Wednesday took a risky political course. By four to one, they instructed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call President Bush's bluff on extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to continue eavesdropping on suspected foreign terrorists. Rather than passing the bill with a minority of the House's Democratic majority, Pelosi obeyed her caucus and left town for a 12-day recess without renewing the government's eroding intelligence capability. <snip> The true cause for blocking the bill was the Senate-passed retroactive immunity from lawsuits for private telecommunications firms asked to eavesdrop by the government. The nation's torts bar, vigorously pursuing such suits, has spent months lobbying hard against immunity. <snip> Big money is involved. Amanda Carpenter, a Townhall.com columnist, has prepared a spreadsheet showing that 66 trial lawyers representing plaintiffs in the telecommunications suits have contributed $1.5 million to Democratic senators and causes.<snip>

(1) Regardless of whether you believe in the merits (or demerits) of eavesdropping, the telecommunications companies should not be held culpable for cooperating with the government.

(2) Making such decision even in part on the basis of trail lawyers who hope to profit from the chaos is despicable.

Every day the Democratic party manages to enact a new low point in American politics. (And yes, I still believe that the "loyal opposition" and their Goebbels-like ability to sway the public by repeated assertion of lies and falsehoods and their support by the main-stream media, contributed as much or more to our early failures in Iraq as the fog of war and the Administration's admitted missteps, many of which can be explained by pursuing senseless military and economic policy to try to achieve compromise and/or limit MSM criticism).

Anon

I find many imperfections in that act, but I entirely agree with your enumerated conclusions. It is a despicable act of putting, not party, but a campaign fund donor group, ahead of the nation. It was also predictable after McCain Feingold.

=========

Spiderwick Chronicles 

Dr. Pournelle,

I went with my teenaged children to see the Spiderwick Chronicles today. I agree that it is a very well-done story with excellent young actors. I was unacquainted with the series that it was based on, but after the movie, I checked out a strong hunch that I had that the author (or the person responsible for the screenplay) was female (the author is Holly Black).

It is never stated explicitly, but in the world of Spiderwick, Men are Bad News. Mother and children move to the abandoned house because the father has moved in with another woman, and they can no longer afford to live in New York. Jared is counting on his father coming to take him away, but the dad at first makes excuses, and then just ignores Jared's phone calls. In short, Dad is a Cad.

Arthur Spiderwick was obsessively preoccupied with the hidden world and neglected his young daughter. She has been pining for him for eighty years, and has been institutionalized because of his discoveries. These men just can't be bothered to take care of their families.

Then there is Mulgarath, the murderous, hyper-aggressive ogre whose sole purpose seems to be wholesale slaughter. Although Mulgarath can assume many forms, the masculinity of the ogre is beyond doubt. He even manifests as Nick Nolte early in the movie so we can't miss the point.

If there is one unforgettable scene in the movie, it is Jared stabbing his father in the chest with a butcher knife.

In the end, All is Well. Jared decides that he wants to stay with his mother, who gratefully accepts the nine-year old as her protector (he is nine in the book, although he appears a couple of years older in the movie). Who needs Dad?

The world of Spiderwick is entertaining, but never, ever trust the men.

Steve Chu

You may well be correct about the hidden message although I didn't notice it, but you may be making more of the story than is there. I found it good entertainment. Alas, the situation of separated parents and bitter divorces is not uncommon to those who will see the picture; you could also draw the conclusion that had the mother not simply started yelling when she disagreed, her husband would not have left her, and the boys would have a father. He does seem to have stuck it out for a while given the ages of the 3 children.

I liked the movie.

=============d

 

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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Fred on Peer Review:

1) Peer review works, it seems to me, if you believe that people credentialed as scholars are not subject to political correctness, fear of their peers, concerns about tenure, and the heavy pressure to stay within the accepted paradigm. Is this the case?

2) Who would write the more insightful and accurate paper on race in America—Jared Taylor (who I believe not to have any sort of high academic credentials), or the head of the sociology department at the U. of Maryland? Whose paper would be more likely to pass peer review?

3) If I stole a prepublication copy of a high-grade-paper from a major figure in one of the semi- or pseudo-sciences—psychology, sociology, anthropology—and submitted it under my name, as plain Fred Reed, would it pass peer review? If not, then the function of peer review as an assurance of quality would seem dubious. Indeed, I would have to conclude that the journal didn’t even recognize quality in its own field, and that peer review was chiefly a form of exclusionary unionism.

4) I may be wrong, but I have the impression that people who pass peer review, such as Jay Gould (was he peer-reviewed?) have been regarded by the list as incompetent if not dishonest.

5) I believe I have read that someone wrote a deliberately nonsensical paper in sociology or some such, and this parody was duly published in a respected journal. I don’t know whether it was peer-reviewed.

Maybe journals ought to reserve a slot per issue for things interesting but unconventional, and let the reader decide.

Fred Reed

This came up in another conversation, and I got Fred's permission to post it.  See also my essay on The Voodoo Sciences.

==========

A lot about steroids:

Jerry,

Three or four years ago, I thought I was having a heart attack. Sudden *intense* chest pain. So intense that I cannot describe it. BAD pain.

Took a nitro immediately. No effect (other than migraine which is de rigeuer with those things). Waited five minutes, took another. Another five minutes, and popped a third nitro under my tongue. Still having intense chest pains, not reduced in the least. I am scared at this point. I was told that if I am still having chest pains after the 3-in-5 regime, to go to the hospital post haste.

My wife rushes us to the ER. I am a wreck from the pain. They slap me down on a table, hook up an E.K.G., and draw blood. They can see that I am in a lot of pain.

The tests come back in a few minutes -- no enzymes in my blood that would indicate a coronary, and the E.K.G. looks good. But I am still having intense chest pains.

They keep me there for a while scratching their chins, and finally draw a blank. They have no idea why I'm hurting like that. Maybe "something" with my throat, or "a virus" -- but basically, no clue as to what was causing the pain.

So, they shrug, tell me to roll over, and jab me with a shot of steroids. They then give me an rx for a week's worth of steroid pills (take yay many on day one, then reduce the number each day until they're gone). They tell me to check with my G.P. as soon as I can, and wish me well.

We go to drive to the closest pharmacy, which due to it being late on a holiday weekend, is a forty mile drive.

Before we get there, I'm feeling like a new man. About 20 minutes after that steroid shot, the pain is completely gone, and it's as if nothing had ever happened. Amazing stuff!

It gradually wore off, and the pain returned, but not as bad, so a few days later, I went to "see a doctor" (had to use one of those walk-in clinic deals since my G.P. was away for the holiday).

Same thing -- no clue as to why I was hurting.

When my G.P. is back, she sends me in for an MRI. Turns out that I blew out a disc -- it happened quite suddenly, and it caused pain in the same region as would have been caused by a heart attack. What a surreal coincidence!

You don't have to worry about turning into Ahnold (thick neck, "steroid voice," etc.) The kind of steroids they use to counter inflammation are completely different from the kind of steroids used for "body building" and do not cause those problems. At least, that's what they told me, and I've read it in other places, so I believe it.

(For certain ca treatments, there *will* be a transient effect manifesting in overall edema of the face and other locations, but it's temporary, and goes away when the treatment stops. I've seen it with a friend's son -- it was not trivial -- but it was not permanent either.)

Ron

==

Reply to Duffin On Big Pharma

 

Jerry,

I was mainly referring to things like the review boards (the name escapes me at the moment -- rough few weeks under this !#$%#$% flu that's making the rounds). Case in point -- several years ago, we owned some shares in CLPA, which was developing a fairly impressive ca drug ("Aptosyn"). It had remarkable results when used to treat FAP ("familial" colon polyps).

The punchline: Aptosyn was sort of dropkicked to the back of the line, because the FDA approved Celebrex for that indication. (Aptosyn was getting some kind of special handling since there was no treatment for that disease -- until Celebrex was approved.)

The board that did the deed acted largely on the strength of the testimony of a certain woman who had been treated with great success. They listened to her explain how she took the medicine, had her condition turn around, and was happy to continue taking the drug. *Very* impressive! So, Celebrex was approved.

So what's the problem?

The problem was that she hadn't been taking Celebrex. She was on an Aptosyn trial. The board, however, engineered things so that she was 1) not aware that it was a *Celebrex* panel, and, 2) she wasn't allowed to mention that she was taking Aptosyn.

Cuteness times... well, I ran out of fingers (at one).

Net result: CLPA is no more, and all was well with Celebrex (until it was discovered that it had certain cardiovascular problems).

The bottom line is that however onerous the FDA trial system may be for big pharma, it is *much* moreso for *small* companies. As I said, it does not scale -- and this accrues to the benefit of big companies. Is this painless and inexpensive for big outfits? No -- but it is *less* expensive than it would be if *small* companies did not have to bear the same weight applied to big outfits.

As to my own gratitude (or what have you) for big pharma, I am currently consuming a couple of thousand dollars worth of their products each month. Make of that what you will.

Ron

========

In the Year 2021...

Lake Mead and/or Lake Powell could be dry.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2008/2008-02-12-095.asp

"The Lake Mead/Lake Powell system includes the stretch of the Colorado River in northern Arizona. Aqueducts carry the water to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other communities in the Southwest. Currently the system is only at half capacity because of a recent string of dry years, and the team estimates that the system has already entered an era of deficit."

"Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system. The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region," the report concludes."

Charles Brumbelow

With energy, water recycling is trivial, and there's plenty of water. If LA were to pump the output of Hyperion into the San Gabriels, we wouldn't need a lot of the Delta water. Alas, water politics is rough and involves billions and billions for capitalists, and as usual, the worst generally get in control and use politics and cash donations to stay there. The Chandler family when they owned the LA Times set a great example of how to make money out of water. They took the Times from being a Republican paper to a Democrat paper largely because of Pat Brown's California Aqueduct, which flowed through Metler and the Onion Fields.

If there were rational policies on energy and recycling water, we wouldn't have a water problem at all.

========

Subject: junk mail from CMP

Jerry,

CMP media seems to have adopted an annoying email marketing strategy. I attended Macworld, and as usual, was careful to opt out of as many email notifications as I could see on the various on line forms I had to fill out. After Macworld, I started receiving emails on every damn convention CMP handles, or at least it seemed that way.

Each individual email had an option to un-subscribe from further emails for that convention only, not all promotional emails from CMP. After spelunking through the CMP website for about 10 minutes, I found this link:

http://www.cmpadministration.com/ars/optout1.
do?mode=optout&forward=optoutpagespecial&T
=CT&F=5907&K=PVYPGE 

Which is supposed to take the entered email off all lists. Note that I had to go looking, it was not offered in any of the add-mails. Great strategy CMP.

Another company seems to have adopted a similar strategy. My wife and I have subscribed to the online Wall Street Journal since it was established. Recently, WSJ has started pushing email on us whether we like it or not. I have gone to the preferences pages and un-subscribed from everything, but the emails keeps coming. It's been this way for several weeks. Not what I would have expected out of WSJ.

Phil Tharp

And you expect things to be different?

Pournelle's lesson: unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.

The difference between Libertarian and Conservative is that Conservatives understand this, and know that unregulated capitalism will eventually end with human meat sold in market places, and slavery. Alas, many Conservatives think that everything has to be regulated and controlled. Liberals, meanwhile, think everyone needs to be liberated from religion, the sight of religious symbols, and all marriage vows.

'Twas ever thus.

 

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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

RE: Fred on Peer Review

"...someone wrote a deliberately nonsensical paper in sociology or some such..."

He's presumably referring to Sokal's joke paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Physics”? That was the most famous one I'd heard about, and had folks from my old undergrad anthropology department fuming... much to my amusement.

After being inundated for years with "the Marxist interpretation of [fill in the blank]" or "Deconstructing [fill in the blank]" or "Gender Biases in [fill in the blank]" all throughout my undergraduate degree, I felt a certain sense of vindication that my skepticism towards most of what I was being fed was reasonable - the supposedly expert peer reviewers couldn't spot bovine excrement in their own area of expertise! My own interests were in history and antiquities and exploring the various permutations of human social structures and organization, but somewhere along the way the department decided it needed a "praxis oriented" approach to archaeology... whatever that meant.

I'm getting inundated with such worthy stuff yet again (with only slightly different [fill in the blank]'s) as I'm winding my way towards the magical Piled Higher and Deeper in archaeology (a curriculum that is strangely devoid of ANY historical studies). All so that the powers that be can realize that yes in fact I do know what I'm doing - just like I have been doing for about a dozen years now as a preservation archaeologist on scores of sites *without* the magic three letters, simply by virtue of doing good fieldwork and research.

Six years of "higher" education into the advanced degrees (part-time, granted) and I really can't point to one single class, article, book, paper, or presentation that I've encountered as I've been getting "educated" about human social behavior that struck me as original, critical, and intelligent thought. Most of it has been repackaged [fill in the blank]s as above with the latest and greatest jargon, mis-application of real science in other fields (such as information tech or neuropsych or even some of the new sociological work coming out of Europe), a whole new slew of nonsensical neologisms, and grand "conclusions" that are inevitably contradicted by the first simple observations of reality. For that matter, in all of the material that I've been *required* to study I honestly can't think of anything that has been in any way instructive with the exception of one section of a class that focused on historic preservation laws (an unusual experiment in real world applications for my department). Thank goodness I'm an inquisitive fellow that tends to read things other than what he's told...

All of this little exegesis (or rant, depending on your perspective), does actually have a point:

Ultimately the validity of any "peer review" is directly dependent on who those "peers" happen to be, as I'm sure we all know. My own ostensible "peers" have come up through just as much nonsensical "education" in social behavioral "science" as I have or are the ones that decided such was a good curriculum (such as teaching archaeology purely as anthropology without any history, geology, materials science, or museum studies). Any pretense that peer review is meant to be an independent and unbiased assessment of the strength of argument, validity and applicability of data and methods, and contribution to a wider body of knowledge is completely farcical. Academic journals and the peer review process (at least in my fields of study) are feedback loops of existing political and social agendas, established interpretations and reputations, and good old-fashioned good-ole-persons networks.

Fred would never be able to be published in an academic journal simply because it would never *get* to the point of peer review - not enough letters behind his name, no departmental affiliation (of an academic institution with appropriate connections), and no academic patronage to sponsor his application to the all-powerful "editors". Since tenure and funding is based almost exclusively on publication rather than one's actual research or ability to teach, you can see just where that leads...

Thankfully it hasn't stopped a growing number of us in my own academic field from pursuing independent lines of inquiry, forgoing the typical academic tenure path and doing the work in the private or public sectors, and actually spending our time looking at the sites & artifacts and just studying the histories of people. Sad to think that would at this point be considered a "new" approach.

As you've often said, education is now largely about acquiring "credentials" rather than learning (or even thinking in some cases). This is what I've had to do to get the credentials in my field. Just interesting to note that the "peers" doing the reviewing have excellent "credentials", too...

...how many of those "Dadaist Hermeneutics and Foucaultian Discourse Analysis of [fill in the blank]" did they read - or even write and get published - to get those credentials do you think?

Regards and best wishes for your rapid recovery and many long, productive years to come,

--A reluctant "Voodoo Scientist"

(name withheld for obvious reasons)

Yes that of course was the paper.

The Voodoo Sciences thrive. Thanks for the kind words.

 

 

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Thursday,

Colonel Haynes on the Intercept (from a week ago):

Re: Satellite intercept Importance: High

Okay. Accept that the hydrazine tank will survive reentry. Glass fiber over wrapped tankage is indeed likely to survive entry into the atmosphere ... and that means it will strike wherever it hits at a speed probably well under what will rupture it.... off hand, I'll guess no more than 200 ft/sec.

The likelihood of mechanical rupture at that speed is even lower than thermal effects during entry into the atmosphere. But, let's say it ruptured on impact and spread its hydrazine contents around on the "two football field" sized acreage. Surely we are capable of tracking the debris field (the tank will be accompanied by a cloud of other stuff) to impact and sending a HAZMAT clean up crew in there for one Helluvalot less expense and trouble than launching interceptor missiles at it.

The probability of hitting a populated area is pretty minute anyway. Let's face it; this is a unique opportunity to test the interceptor and sound like we are the good guys, while putting a stick in the eye of China for having polluted the LEO region.

And, by the way, I note the studious ignoring of the far better precedent than Columbia as a measure of re-entry debris behavior ... Skylab. But we do not want to remind the public of that fisaco. They just might begin to ask questions about what will happen when the ISS returns to the surface of its mother planet!

Bill Haynes

I should have posted this earlier, but things got in the way.

========

Maybe there are hydrogen wells? 

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-02/pu-naa021908.php <http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-02/pu-naa021908.php>

New aluminum-rich alloy produces hydrogen on-demand for large-scale uses WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University engineers have developed a new aluminum-rich alloy that produces hydrogen by splitting water and is economically competitive with conventional fuels for transportation and power generation.

"We now have an economically viable process for producing hydrogen on-demand for vehicles, electrical generating stations and other applications," said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.

The new alloy contains 95 percent aluminum and 5 percent of an alloy that is made of the metals gallium, indium and tin. Because the new alloy contains significantly less of the more expensive gallium than previous forms of the alloy, hydrogen can be produced less expensively, he said.

When immersed in water, the alloy splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, which immediately reacts with the aluminum to produce aluminum oxide, also called alumina, which can be recycled back into aluminum. Recycling aluminum from nearly pure alumina is less expensive than mining the aluminum-containing ore bauxite, making the technology more competitive with other forms of energy production, Woodall said.

"After recycling both the aluminum oxide back to aluminum and the inert gallium-indium-tin alloy only 60 times, the cost of producing energy both as hydrogen and heat using the technology would be reduced to 10 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with other energy technologies," Woodall said. <snip>

 

My best wishes and good luck in your treatments.

Cheers,

Fred

Interesting. Hydrogen is tricky. I have had varying opinions on it since I wrote "The Hydrogen Economy" in American Legion magazine back in the 1970's, and did several columns in Galaxy on the matter.

Our experience with Hydrogen in the DC/X led me to have second thought about the stuff as an energy distribution system. It REALLY wants to leak out, and it's REALLY light (non-dense) so needs large tanks, and it REALLY wants to be COLD.)

But it is good news. There are definitely used for hydrogen as a fuel.

It beats burning food.

==========

Continuing the on-going debate:

Subject: my strongest best wishes / a note on peer review 

Jerry,

For some stupid reason, I didn't realize until reading today's Chaos Manor post how serious your illness was -- probably because you've been so level-headed in writing about it. I very much hope that you have all the time you want to write all the books you want, both for selfish reasons (I like your stuff!) and for what I hope are unselfish reasons (we need as many 13th Century Liberals around as we can get).

On a much more trivial topic, Fred Reed wrote: "Peer review works, it seems to me, if you believe that people credentialed as scholars are not subject to political correctness, fear of their peers, concerns about tenure, and the heavy pressure to stay within the accepted paradigm. Is this the case?"

Having been in academia for some years, I'd say that peer review neither works perfectly nor fails badly all that often. Peer review is, fundamentally, an honor code: people are on their honor to work decently within the system to provide serious but fair-minded critiques, and on balance they probably do this much more often than they don't. I do know of cases where peer review probably has been abused, badly, for reasons of self-promotion; but I think that they're mercifully limited.

And I don't really know what we'd replace peer review with, if we somehow all decided to abolish it. The essential tension in science is we have to be as selfless as possible in our work, and yet our survival as professionals depends on being able to compete for resources that are inevitably scarce. That makes peer-judgements about whose work is really good inevitable.

Fred is right to think that scientists don't always stand up to that tension well, but wrong if he thinks that there's some race of angels who we could stock the labs with instead, or some way to avoid that tension (short of the Singularity giving us all infinite resources for our lab work). In the sciences, peer review is one of the last bastions we have left for human common sense and judgement. Its abuse is bad, but trying to do without it would probably go about as well as most such baby-with-bathwater "reforms" go.

--Erich Schwarz

=========

Jerry:

Just paid subscription and ordered strategy of technology.

I just had a thought on the nature of our disagreement on the Republic verses Empire issue and isolationism. Aside from disputing that America had become an Empire in the classic sense of the word (you'll note that all of the Iraq oil development contracts are going to China, Russia and Japan), I've seen no evidence that a Republic has ever been restored by retreating into isolationism. One need only look at all of the once great Powers of Western Europe who divested themselves of their overseas empires to illustrate this point.

The satellites shoot down by the US Navy is certainly cause for me to be supportive of President Bush in spite of his faults. I for one don't buy the hydrazine toxicity explaination. There is no chance that the fuel tank would not have ruptured high in the atmosphere while at a high enough Mach number to ensure that the fuel would be incinerated. To be blunt, I was suspecting and hoping that aside from just being a demonstration, this intercept was a ruse to distract world attention from other events such as a MOAB or heavey weight bunker buster landing on an Iranian Uranium enrichment plant. Alas, this doesn't appear to be the case. It looks like it is going to be war with the Persian Empire again. However; rather than stand with our allies as the Spartans did at Thermopylae and Salamis, we'll turn isolationist and try to make our stand at the isthmus of Corinth.

Pauline Crawford

I never said we were building a competent empire. As for example Kosovo and our support of a Moslem nation deep in the heart of Europe: that served no conceivable interest other than Albright's fantasies. And we did not need to invade Iraq in the First Gulf War.

Protection of American Interests with the most powerful military machine that has ever existed on the face of the earth is not isolationism. Minding our own business, not getting involved in the territorial disputes of Europe, attempting to preserve an American civilization rather than importing "diversity" and destroying our defining institutions; that's not isolationism.

I can live with competent Empire in which we levy tribute on the rest of the world in return for our management. The cost will be high -- empires are not republics, and must of needs have much 'diversity', and the consequences of collapse may be daily seen in England -- but a competent Empire based on our Legions and good management -- we are very capable of good management once we make it clear what the limits of  opposition to the Imperium at home and abroad will be -- can endure for a long, long, time. The years between Claudius and the collapse after Aurelius were long, and in many ways prosperous.

Note the cost; competent Empire cannot allow some of the political oppositions that Republics think part of the natural order of things.

Minor correction: Sparta stood at Thermopylae, and won the land battle at Plataea; it was the Athenian 'wooden walls' that prevailed at Salamis, making Plataea possible but not inevitable.

 

 

 

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FridayFebruary 22, 2008

Kosovo: The EU’s Bastard Child.

<http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2987>

-- Roland Dobbins

And there is no US national interest in being involved in planting a Muslim colony in Serbia's heart. Yet here we are, entangled in the territorial disputes of Europe.

=========

Subject: "roughly twice the size of the entire United States stock market" Importance: High

Oh, boy.

This, combined with all the *rest* of the Casino from Hell (formerly known as "investing") looks like it's poised on the brink of the Big Ugly. If these things cascade out of control, it could spell the end of the Weimar Repub...

Oops, sorry. Damn history book flipped pages on me as I was typing. It's *so* hard to keep one era straight from the other, damn you Santayana!

Arcane Market Is Next to Face Big Credit Test

  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/business/
17swap.html?_r=4&en=&ex=1360904400&oref=
slogin&pagewanted=all 

Ipsnay:

== [...]

The market for these securities is enormous. Since 2000, it has ballooned ... [to] roughly twice the size of the entire United States stock market.

[And: "it is unregulated."]

[...]

But during the credit market upheaval in August, 14 percent of trades in these contracts were unconfirmed, meaning one of the parties in the resale transaction was unidentified in trade documents and remained unknown 30 days later. ... Because these trades are unregulated, there is no requirement that all parties to a contract be told when it is sold.

As investors who have purchased such swaps try to cash them in, they may have trouble tracking down who is supposed to pay their claims.

[...]

Because these contracts are sold and resold among financial institutions, an original buyer may not know that a new, potentially weaker entity has taken over the obligation to pay a claim.

[...]

It would be as if homeowners, facing losses after a hurricane, could not identify the insurance companies to pay on their claims. Or, if they could, they discovered that their insurer had transferred the policy to another company that could not cover the claim.

[...]

But financial history is rife with examples of market breakdowns that followed the creation of complex securities.

[...]

There is no exchange where these insurance contracts trade, and their prices are not reported to the public. Because of this, institutions typically value them based on computer models rather than prices set by the market.

Neither are the participants overseen by regulators verifying that the parties to the transactions can meet their obligations.

Ron

I have not time to reflect on this before breakfast, but there's a lot here. If you "invest" and are successful, the government takes part of your winnings directly, and about as much more through inflation (artificially lower interest rates, bail outs, running the printing presses to fund the debt, etc. etc.). And then acts as if rational people ought to be saving money. But if they don't save, it's all right. We'll confiscate the investment profits of those who do to take care of those who never bothered to save.

And they never catch wise.

=========

Subject: Subscription renewal

Just putting my 2 cents in to keep the party going. Currently waiting for my new cybook reader from NAEB-LLC, the Baen books e-book buyers group. I'll let you know my experiences with that.

Another thing for which to watch, now that Apple is finally releasing tools for the IPHONE and ITOUCH, is the possibility of good reader software for that platform.

Hope you are feeling better. I always look forward to the latest from Chaos Manor.

Please let Roberta know I'm very pleased with her TLC Phonics package... as is my 7 year old son John.

Michael D. Horgan

Thanks. Roberta's program works. Pity it's not in wider use.

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

FYI on the "burning food" contention.

The crop being used for ethanol production is feed corn, not something that humans eat. Humans eat flour from flint corn, sweet corn, and pop corn. These are not involved in the ethanol industry.

As the country desires leaner beef, feed corn becomes a less desireable feed. Feeding cattle corn in feedlots was to produce heavily marbled beef. Grazing grass provides lean beef. The amount of feed corn being used helps reduce the size of the hills of corn rotting on the ground at the grain elevators. The government's cheap food policy (yet another incumbant protection act) forces famers to plant fence row to fence row even when that leads to corn rotting on the ground.

The increase in the price of corn, possibly keeping pace with the devaluation of the dollar, is not due to ethanol production, it is due to NAFTA, which forced Mexico to remove artificial price constraints on its corn crop, which had helped keep US corn parices artificially low.

Steve Schaper

I respectfully suggest you look up the concept of 'fungibles' and rethink your position. Else, why is the price of tortillas going up and up in these United States as well as in Mexico? By law we burn food and ban the Edison light bulb while not building nuclear power plants, and now we want to restrict coal. Stark Raving Mad.

The actual energy efficiency of ethanol, after you account for the energy expense required to make and distribute the fertilizer, is quite low.

=========

Subject: "Field" Corn -

Jerry,

"The crop being used for ethanol production is feed corn, not something that humans eat. Humans eat flour from flint corn, sweet corn, and pop corn."

He's wrong.

By "feed" corn, I presume he means "field corn", AKA "dent corn" -- which is *precisely* the type of corn used for tortillas.

Flint corn is nice for making corn muffins, but NOT for making tortillas. As to popcorn, it's just a variety of flint corn.

Sweet corn is just immature corn (highly specialized, yes -- bred for maximum sugar over maximum time, rather than a short sugar phase followed by rapid conversion to stach -- but, picked at the right time, immature field corn makes a *very* passable boiled sweet corn; picked at peak sugar and *raced* to the boil pot, and you'd never know you were eating "field corn." I speak from experience.)

And you're right about corn being fungible. If you plant your acreage in field corn, you won't be growing any popcorn in those fields.

The Indians cultivated "the three sisters" -- corn, beans, and squash -- in the same fields. They weren't growing sweetcorn, though, nor were they raising roma beans or zucchini. Hard (field) corn, dry beans, and winter squash. All grown to completion, for maximum nutrient value. And, no worries about stepping on a growing vine, since the plants are dead at harvest time.

BTW, dry field corn can be "parched" -- sizzled like popcorn, but instead of popping, it swells up, and gives you a roughly kernel-shaped -- but about twice kernel-size -- snack. You can also buy them in little pouches at the grocery store. (You can also buy "corn puffs" which are a similar concept -- and while we're talking bkfst cereal, cornflakes are made of field corn too. Kelloggs got started by a guy who was convinced that his snake-oil... ahem, Revolutionary Nutrient Food -- would cleanse the colon, and thus, cure all sorts of diseases. He started the company in Battle Creek, right in the heart of corn country -- FIELD corn country. The product, no longer sold as a medicinal, is still made the same way -- from field corn.)

The only kind of "feed" corn that is NOT used for human consumption is silage -- and that's a type of provender that is NOT of the "fatten 'em up with corn" variety. (It's basically fermented grass. It's the corn PLANT that is used, *not* the grain, which does not develop.)

Ron

The word, I repeat, is fungible.

=========

2x?

<http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2163>

- Roland Dobbins

The Milky Way. Who knew?

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

w

f

g

 

 

 

 

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