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Monday, January 25, 2010

Mildly overwhelmed. I recommend Saturday's View if you didn't see it. I'll have more this evening. Thanks to all those who have recently subscribed and renewed.

We are winding down in Iraq We will leave the place a lot better off than it was under Saddam; how long it will remain that way is another story. The tendency of the Shiites is to take their revenge not only on the secular Baathists whom they want to outlaw like Nazis in Germany (and who can often be prosecuted in a sort of slow motion edition of the Terror in the French Revolution), but also on the Sunni minority. But of course the majority of all Muslims is Sunni. The Kurds are probably organized well enough to take care of themselves; they will become increasingly a thorn in the sides of Turkey and Iran as they push for a new Kurdistan. Given Turkey's continuing Islamization, we may see a Kurdish-Israeli alliance (a low probability event but you never know -- it's the Middle East).

Whether Iraq will break into an uneasy Shiite-Sunni confederation and a pretty well autonomous Kurdistan or into the three historic provinces it was in the Ottoman Empire is an open question; given the political skills and performance of this administration, it's hard to see what the future will be. Meanwhile the war has cost more than a trillion and has done little to nothing for US energy independence -- indeed exacerbated it. We now have the Nuts vs. the Creeps again when it comes to Middle East policy. No one over there knows what the US will do because we don't know either. And the lobbyists continue their efforts.

Wild card: those who study history will recall that when the Muslim movement was coming apart and the Christian Crusaders were battling over the spoils in a contest between Nuts and Creeps, a Kurd named Saladin united the Moslems and drove the Christians out of Jerusalem, sparking the Third Crusade (Richard of England, Philip of France, and Frederic Barbarossa of Germany).

It's the Middle East.

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

We have a lot of good mail over in mail, and the January Mailbag is up over in Chaos Manor Reviews.

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

Bill Gates has begun a web site. It's bound to be interesting; it may also show the direction of his thinking. I found the "Infrequently asked questions" and particularly why the Gates Foundation isn't involved with global warming -- since he claims to want to help mankind -- of interest. He also has a very large Twitter following.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860
_3-10437854-56.html?tag=nl.e703

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

For a chart that probably predicts global temperatures for the next century, see

http://m-francis.livejournal.com/47705.html . Mike Flynn understands predictive models better than the average bear -- he'd better, being a quality control engineer -- and like me long ago read Dewey on Cycles. I'm abashed that I didn't put this chart together myself. I'd bet it's a lot better predictor than most the IPCC models.

 

 

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Tuesday,  January 26, 2010

Parties and Principles

The fallout from the Massachusetts election continues. Suddenly everything is made new, and the Republican possibilities are endless. Some GOP political leaders are frantically trying to moderate this wave of expectation. Others cheer it on. And everyone is trying to spin events.

There's a movement to add a national litmus test: a list of ten supposedly conservative items, of which candidates would have to accept at least eight in order to get any Republican National Committee support or funds.  The motivation is clear, and given my disdain for some of the goofy leftists posing as Republicans some might think I'd support the notion; but this is a particularly poor idea, for a number of reasons.

First, it makes all ten of those "conservative" principles equal. I had this discussion with a Member of Congress friend some years ago: I warned him against the "big government conservatives" and crazy spending sprees. "That's not conservative at all."

"But," he asked me, "what about social conservatism." This was a very good question, particularly so coming from a Member of Congress known for conservatism. (Smart Congresscritters actually listen to people and are interested in what they hear. That's one of the big contrasts between real conservatives and the country club Republicans who already know what they need to know, and mostly pretend to listen if they even bother to do that.)

The answer to that question is long and complex, but it boils down to this: There are proper Federal Values, and proper State Values, and they are different, and the one does not balance off the other. Opposition to Big Government and the notion of Big Government Conservatism is a national value, and those who do not hold to it are not conservatives at all, and I for one don't want them in any party I am going to support. Moreover, I don't think opposition to abortion (to choose a "social conservative value") in any way "balances" or excuses or justifies an affinity for big government.

This has nothing to do with my views on state abortion laws: the point is that in my judgment the proper conservative value on the subject is the same as it should be on many other "social" issues: Leave It To The States. Indeed, Congress has not the authority to legislate on such issues (save in the District of Columbia). It isn't the business of Congress to tell Maryland that the state cannot outlaw abortion, or to tell California that the state cannot make it simple and easy. It's not a Federal matter. Neither are many other "social conservative" issues. They are not the proper business of Congress, nor should they be.

That, by the way, includes religions. The Constitution could not be more clear on that subject: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion has that peculiar wording for the simple reason that at the time we adopted the Constitution seven of the states had churches by law established and would not have joined the Union if doing so meant disestablishing those churches. If the Framers had known that eventually the Supreme Court would use the establishment clause to forbid mangers and menorahs in the public squares, they would have written in "nor shall the Federal Courts have jurisdiction in any matter concerning the establishment of religion." I wish they had been wise enough to do that. It would save the Republic a lot of strife. If Utah wants to establish a church with tax supported clergy, that's Utah's business, not mine; and if a local city wants to hold a Christmas ceremony in the public squares, that's the local city's business, although I concede that the state has the right to interfere if it so chooses; but it's never a matter for Federal action.

Parties have platforms. They used to be important, and candidates that wanted support from the State party organization had to adhere (mostly) to the platform and support the ticket; candidates who wanted support from the National party organization had somewhat the same obligations to the national platform; but trying to make candidates in Massachusetts adhere to eight of ten principles drafted in a national party meeting in Memphis, Tennessee (or in a resort hotel in Hawaii) is not smart party politics.

Were it left to me I'd make it clear that the Republican Principle is Limited Government and This Time We Really Mean It. (Just as if I could dictate a single civil rights amendment I'd make it read "nor to deny to any citizen the equal protection of the laws, and this time we really mean it, including the words citizen, protection, and laws." But that's another story.

Subsidiarity and transparency. Those are the principles we ought to endorse, and we can hope that the Republican Party will endorse them; but the notion that those principles can be traded for pieties that ought not be the concern of the Federal Government is abhorrent.

So long as winning an election means triumph and losing it means ruin, politics will be far too important in the United States. The recent Supreme Court decision that allows corporations and unions to pay for political advertisements merely balances something that has been happening for years, in which public employee unions agitate for the election of those who would raise taxes rather than cut spending, and the businesses and corporations about to be taxed to make up dire deficits are not supposed to reply -- and thus have to resort to all kinds of trickery and legal manipulations to try to defend themselves in an election. The remedy here is not to suppress the arguments: it's to make their outcome less important. But that's for another column.

I'm all for the Republicans retreating from the "Big Government Conservative" madness. I'm all for finding stalwart candidates who will endorse principles we can live with. I'm pretty sure that publishing a list of ten principles, choose eight, is not a step in the right direction.

If I seem a bit hurried, I am: the new Lenovo laptop arrived a few minutes ago. The story has a happy ending, or I think so: I'm anxious to get it installed. It has Windows 7 Professional on it. I own a license to upgrade it to Ultimate, and I am hoping that will be easy and won't give me any conflicts with the Lenovo/IBM software already installed. I'm anxious to get at that, too. Anyone have experience with this?

=======

Note the correction above. I managed to say that the ten principles was a step in the right direction when of course I meant that I do not think that it is. I think it is plain wrong. Apologies. The installation of Office on my new system continues.

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

Preliminary Report: Happy Ending. Rolando, the new Lenovo W500, has Office 2007 installed and the network aut0matically sees all the shares in the house. I am happily transferring files. Full story in the upcoming column; the ordering and delivery problems were unpleasant, but I got a great discount in ordering it, and I will have to say that although Lenovo PR in Georgia called, they didn't do anything to expedite the system: the system was shipped on January 20 (after the order acknowledgment had predicted Jan 19). The problem came when someone updated that to show it would ship 2-20, i.e. February 20, on the 19th. I was already upset by the 19 Jan date since the point of ordering this was to delay having to get Office running on the Mac Book Pro, and this was the last straw. They fixed that but by then I had somewhat exploded here. I probably should not have. Lenovo became aware and called me but by then the shipping date typo had been fixed and the machine shipped. It came this morning. Anyway to the best I can tell it's a happen ending. Story in the column.

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

We all wait with abated breath (not baited)** breath the Steve Jobs announcement of Apple's newest creation tomorrow. I was offered an invitation but decided not to go up: I don't travel a lot lately, and I am still hard at work on Mamelukes. The rumors persist that it's an iSlate Apple Tablet, and that Apple is working hard to set up book distributions through iStore. I expect I'll have to get one when it comes out.

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

There is a good essay by Michael Flynn on the nature of science over in mail.

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

Query: I have several DOS programs that run nicely in a 32-bit Command Prompt box in Windows 7. The new Lenovo has, apparently, 64-bit Windows 7, and attempts to run the program in a command prompt box gets me the information that it's a 32-bit program and won't run. It suggests I get a new program. I am unlikely to get a new version of THIS program, which generates alien names, or of the old Baen iChing, both of which work well in 32 bit Windows including Window 7. They are very simple programs with no actual graphics, and they are useful to me. There's no real requirement that they run on Orlando, so long as I keep one 32-bit machine around, but surely there's a simple way to run 32-bit programs on a 64-bit OS?

 

Thanks to all who responded to this one. I'll get this done shortly.

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

Next Query: Does anyone recall a simple way to transfer a FIREFOX setup complete with open tabs and favorites and bookmarks from one machine to another? I have a setup on Orlando that I would like to move unchanged to Rolando. I'd hate to have to do it one tab at a time but I suppose I could do that. I suppose I could also bookmark all open tabs and look for ways to export the bookmarks. That's probably what I'll end up doing.

THANKS TO ALL who have sent suggestions and methods on this. I'll get this done this afternoon. Thanks again, and no more needed...

==========

The good news is that I have Office and FrontPage running nicely on the new system, so it will do all that it was intended to do. I do need to get Firefox running with extensions and the 50 or so tabs I have open to places of interest for Mamelukes. But the networking works fine.

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

 

 

 

**Mehitabel eats Limburger cheese, and wafts her baited breath down mouseholes, luring nice mice to an untimely death. I've told you this before of course. This caused me finally to look for the original, which it turns out I misremembered. It's

Cruel Clever Cat
Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.
–Geoffrey Taylor, Argosy 1940

In fact there's a web page devoted to the "bated breath" phrase, from Shakespeare to Taylor. I found it interesting. However, I'm pretty sure that Taylor poem is an expansion on something else, because I remember the odd punctuation that puts 'nice mice' on a single line. Of course my memory isn't what it once was, and perhaps never was what I thought it to be but that's another story.

 

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Wednesday,  January 27, 2010

Editorial from today's Wall Street Journal

"Taxpayers may look at the unlimited federal credit line now enjoyed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and see disaster. But New York Senator Chuck Schumer sees opportunity.

"Yesterday he demanded that the two failed mortgage giants guarantee low rent for tenants in a Manhattan property they now own after the owner defaulted. As they say in Democratic Washington, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste."<snip>

http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB1000142405274870390620
4575027491265360632.html

Obama may or may not have learned something from the recent elections. The Ravening Wolves of the Democratic Congress have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Tax and spend, elect and elect; using the public purse to buy votes.

In the same issue of the Journal we have the op ed article:

The Supreme Court's decision last week in Citizens United v. FEC fundamentally changed the nature of political campaigns. In a 5-4 ruling, the court held that corporations have a constitutional right to spend millions of dollars in independent campaigns that attack or support particular candidates.

Critics of the decision worry, with good reason, that corporate interests might now exhibit outsize influence on campaigns.<snip>

http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB200014240527487039062045750
27021768240904.html

I suspect that most readers know about and have some worries about the Supreme Court decision, and few had known or cared much about the new earmarks for Fannie and Freddie. Americans are concerned about big corporations, and with good reason; yet perhaps there's more to be scared of with the increasing scope of government which grows by the inexorable work of the Iron Law -- only the Iron Law action is accelerated by the self interest of the Ravening Wolves, who use your money to buy votes for themselves, and build community action organizations to turn out the vote and raise money -- in other words to substitute for political parties. It's not likely that middle class citizens can organize the welfare recipients and those who benefit from other public spending including rent subsidies.

Most middle class citizens don't even think about such things. Perhaps the corporations, which are the victims of much of this tax and spend activity, will make us all more aware of them.

Actually the Supreme Court decision probably doesn't do what you think it does. Most corporations already intervene in politics, but they do it through lobby activities, not through taking out political advertisements. As was noted  by political thinkers for a long time but perhaps most notably by Harold Lasswell (Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How) it's pretty hard to keep people with money from spending some of it to promote their own interests, and laws that suppress political spending generally just make these operations less transparent. In my judgment it's more important to have transparency: I'd rather the unions and the corporations be more visible in what they do.

More on this another time, but it did seem to me the two events are better connected than is generally realized.

===========

The Apple iPad Tablet is now real. About ten inch screen. No stylus, which in my judgment is a mistake: it's a giant iPhone in some ways. Ten hour battery life, on-screen keyboard. About $500 but I suspect you'll end up paying $800 by the time you are finished with it and accessories. AT&T G3 connection. 

From what I have seen it's less useful than I had hoped: I really wanted something that would do what a TabletPC with OneNote can do for research, in addition to what the iPad does. I do presume that the iPad will be able to function as a telephone, as well as a book and magazine reader.

There's considerably more from CNN. http://news.cnet.com/
8301-31021_3-10440943-260.html?tag=nl.e498

Apparently it is not going to be a telephone. It won't run OS X. It does run iPhone apps. It does not have a camera. If you carry this you will also have to carry a telephone.

It may changed publishing and it may not. It's not going to change communications. Not yet, anyway. I guess you can't Tweet with it...

===========

Thanks to all who responded to my queries about transferring Firefox settings and running 16-bit programs in Windows 7.

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

Apparently I am ruined and the new system is useless. (READ TO END before replying, it's weird but the problems are solved. Or look here.)

I have installed Outlook; but I cannot access the application data file under my user name although I am supposed to be the administrator for the system. Windows 7 does things a great deal differently from XP, and I can't do it.

My usual practice in installing outlook is to let it set itself up and save an outlook.pst file. Then I go nuke that and when I open outlook again it complains that it can't find a pst file. I tell it to go to C:\outlook and look there, and lo, it does that, and all is well. I did that in Vista even. Now, though, I go to my user files, application data, and I am told that I cannot access that file. HELP tells me to go to properties for that folder and set permissions. I did that. Nothing helps. Maybe I have to reset the machine after I do this?

Microsoft, I am beginning to hate you. You built a buggy system. You panicked and rewrote everything. You also brought in a series of nice people to make everything more friendly by hiding everything and removing control from the user. Thanks a bunch, Microsoft. You have cost me a day. Eventually we'll figure this nonsense out I suppose, but for the moment I am stuck. I can't get Outlook on the new machine to look in Outlook.pst for its files so I cannot set it up. Damn all.  If anyone out there knows someone in Microsoft who can help with this, I'd appreciate it. I suppose the story will eventually have a happy ending, but at the moment I am pretty upset.

I have gone to the file properties for the application data folder. It says that I am supposed to have full access to that folder. I still can't open it. In desperation I tried to give EVERYONE access to that folder. It won't let me do that, as I have insufficient permission.

In setting this up I was never asked to set up an Administrator account, so I never did. The properties seems to believe there is one, but it has no more privileges than I do -- and it doesn't seem to exist anyway.  This is serious. Is there something broken here or is this just Windows 7 being stupid? Whatever it is, it is making this machine useless.

I have restarted the machine. That doesn't help either. Nothing seems to be able to give me access to that file folder.

Well, I got to it. I opened a command line, and used that to get to the folder, and deleted the folder. Outlook then asked for a place to find outlook.pst and I told it C:\outlook and now I can configure Outlook. So I was able to work around the problem, but no thanks to Microsoft. This is ridiculous.

No wonder people try to turn off all security. Better my machine is a zombie? Why not, since Microsoft seems to want to lobotomize it.

But I still cannot access the application data file from Explorer.

Something about the latest Windows 7 is fouled up. Perhaps in the latest corrections, But to have folders on your machine that you can only open with a command line is very silly.

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

{Read all of this before send me email about it; this is a DAY BOOK and most of the problems have been resolved.  It goes in the column eventually.}

Windows 7 is goofy enough, but Firefox is weird too. On the t42 I bookmarked all open tabs, and managed to export that to a file. I put the file in a Work directory. I had no problem importing that to a work directory on the new machine. And there I stand. I find no mechanism for importing those bookmarks.

Does anyone actually USE these programs they design? It's like things have gone back to what they were in the early days of computing when computer people did things their way without regard for users, and were really surprised that no one knew how to use all the wonderful stuff they had invented.

Since the t42 is in another room, I need to network to it; but all the folders with firefox data are forbidden. There seems to be no way to turn off this madness. I can go up there and export stuff to a work file which I can then access by network. Maybe then I could experiment with settings and profiles and what not. But probably not. The security system is set up to make sure I don't actually get any work done.

I certainly understand why people just turn off the security systems. I'd rather have a machine turn into a zombie than be unable to use it at all. This is just goofy. There's an "import" menu item in Firefox. It won't import from anything except Internet Explorer or something else that's on the machine. It won't look in any other files, just looks for other browsers. Yowsa! That's real smart program design! And these are the people who back in earlier days were going to put Microsoft out of business with their network operating system. Yowsa! Brilliant program designs.

I have mail from readers recommending various programs, but my problem is I doubt they'd have much access either. Maybe I can go up to the room with the t42 (since its screen isn't working and it needs an external monitor, which is why I needed a replacement, it's not really very portable) and figure out ways to export whatever files I need to a work file, but really, I did export the bookmarks I want, and I see no way to get them into a new Firefox. I suppose what I will have to do is copy their addresses into a text file, copy that to a work file, copy the work file, and use cut and paste to open each one of those bookmarked windows by hand. There are about 50 of them. That's really great program design. Yowsa!

All this gets to the column eventually. You're seeing the log books. Maybe I should hide them. I don't come off looking very smart or very patient. Actually I'm mad as hell, but it looks like I have got to take whether I want to or not...

[Problem is solved. See tomorrow's view. One problem is that Firefox wants to export bookmark backup in json format, but it doesn't tell you that it will import that, or make it easy to see where it looks to find backup files. It explicitly offers to import html but offers no help in how to create an html bookmark backup. Anyway, I have all the files in a bookmark folder in the new machine, and I can open them to get to the specialized stuff I have found on Medieval Naval Logistics. And it's time to get to work.]

========

The Windows 7 problem is solved and worth writing up, but it's weird. In Windows 7 under users/jerryp there are two files. One is application data. That one is not accessible by any means known to me, and as far as I can see, to anyone else. In theory I own it, and in properties/security/advanced it shows I have full access, but in fact I don't. No one does. It just sits there. I am not sure it has any content. There is also users/jerry/appdata and lo! I do have access to control of that one, and it turns out, that is where outlook put the outlook.pst file. Once I deleted that I was able to get Outlook to look at the file I had copied over and all worked well. I suspect that my memory played tricks on me: that I used the command line to get into appdata because the command line doesn't seem to be able to find 'application  data' even though Explorer does.  In any event this is a major  and irritating goof, and if anyone in Microsoft is reading this -- I know some subscribe -- please have a look at the 'user/name/application data/' file. It's weird. Weird.

I now have instructions for getting the bookmark files into Firefox, and I've printed them out, and we'll see.  Anyway, that's enough on this story. It will look a lot smoother in the column.

 

 

 

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Thursday,  January 28, 2010

Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas*

The State of the Union was -- strange. It was predictable only on the hypothesis that Obama is guided by very strongly held left wing principles and no longer listens to political advice. In 1994 President Clinton found himself in a similar situation and changed focus, pivoting toward triangulation and compromise. It wasn't enough to save his majorities in Congress, but it did save his presidency. (The Republicans helped by running the only man he could beat.)

Until last night many speculated that Obama would do more or less the same thing. Clinton recognized the unpopularity of his massive government expansion proposal (Hillarycare), understood that the Democratic win was the result of Bush I's repudiation of his "Read my lips, no new taxes!" promise, and moved to govern from the center. Obama didn't follow that path.  Instead he has chosen to double down: you'll get health care reform, cap and trade, climate change regulations, immigration reform, and government expansion whether you like it or not. We know what's best for you.

The speech itself was far more partisan than the State of the Union speech traditionally is. It amounted to a declaration of intent.

He has made next Fall's election an ideological plebiscite pure and simple. If the Democrats hold on to real power after next November, the United States will experience a fundamental change, with trust in central planning and government control of most aspects of the economy and our lives. The people done Obama dirty; we have repudiated the Savior; and we will be made to pay. We will get the changes he wants to give us whether we like it or not. He ran center-left. He has governed hard left. He now promises to change: to go even further left.

Prepare for the fight of our lives. Obama and the ravening wolves have enormous public funds to spend, and will make deals and promises as needed. Those who live off tax and spend will be told to fall in line and support the new United States, and stop asking questions and getting in the way. The alliance between the tax eaters and the ravening wolves will be strengthened.

The nature of the United States and the American Experiment is pretty well being put to the test in next Fall's election. We are promised Change. You can believe in that.

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

I have already seen PhD level scientists saying that that AGW Deniers ought to be prosecuted as public enemies

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

The Firefox import bookmark problem has been solved. It turned out to be simple once I knew how to do it. That, of course, has been true of computers since s-100 days. (Well, all right, some BIOS stuff in CP/M wasn't simple even if you'd done it twenty times.) For reasons not clear to me Firefox uses json and html files for backups, and it's never clear as to where it puts things or hides them. Eventually I have managed to get the new system to import a backup file of type .json. It wasn't simple. It will all be in the column.

The transition is pretty complete now. I should go on the new system today. I will now need a way to get the t42 fixed: it displays only to an external screen, not to the internal. The last time it was shut down the internal worked, and I have no reason to think anything real happened to that screen; by guess is the problem is a cable or switch connection, possibly the switch that says the laptop lid is closed. I downloaded the pdf on t42 maintenance and it's very complete, but getting to that cable requires a pretty thorough disassembly of the machine and I don't think I am up to that. I'd rather pay to get it fixed at which point it becomes Roberta's travel laptop. Anyway, excuse my grousing. The problems are solved.

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

Justice Alito said it all (assuming you can read lips):

http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=4pB5uR3zgsA&feature=player_embedded

Is it impolite to say something silently when the President bashes you in a State of the Union speech?

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

There are reactions to iPad in mail. And I'll have more mail later.

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

Greek and Roman classics available online

Dr.Pournelle, I found the greek and roman classics available online at http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/index.html

 I am sure readers of your web log will find this a treasure-trove. I know I have.

 Lee Rose

"Conservatives think liberals should be ignored, liberals think conservatives should be incarcerated. Tell me again, who's intolerant?" Martin Rose

These are decent public domain translations of the Greek and Roman classics, as for instance the Samuel Butler translations of Homer. The Fagles Iliad is much better, as is his Odyssey; and for that matter the T. E. Shaw (Lawrence of Arabia) translation of the Odyssey, which uses pure prose and makes no attempt to be poetry, is  a bit more readable; but Butler does preserve many of the conventions and metaphors from the Greek original, and is in some ways more edifying.

Note that there are some classics available free for the Kindle. These translations are all html and I presume would be easy to transfer to the Kindle or any other eReader. For those who have never read Aeschylus or Sophocles, you might be surprised at how readable these ancient works are -- and how familiar you are with some of the concepts in them. They've been part of Western culture for two thousand years, although their influence is waning now.

Which reminds me that today is the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. Although he was mentioned often enough in my Christian Brothers high school, no one there suggested I actually read him, and I really didn't get much sense of his importance until a character in the Wilmar Shiras' Children of the Atom science fiction stories that were appearing in Astounding Science Fiction in the late 40's told his young protégé that the protégé needed a personal philosophy, and that his was Thomism. That got me curious enough to actually read some Aquinas and to learn much more about him. Aquinas insisted that reason prevailed in the universe, and that when Reason and Faith collided, there was something wrong with our understanding of the proposition. The universe is lawful, and when miracles take place -- or what seem to be miracles -- they are either new data about the universe, or actual miracles: exceptions to the laws of nature. The laws still apply.

Mike Flynn reminds me:

Two quotes regarding the Ptolemaic astronomy that tickle.

The suppositions that these astronomers have invented need not necessarily be true; for perhaps the phenomena of the stars are explicable on some other plan not yet discovered by men -- De coelo, II, lect. 17 

"the theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established, because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained; not, however, as if this proof were sufficient, forasmuch as some other theory might explain them." -- Summa theologica, I, q.32, a.1, ad. 2

Thomas never ceases to remind us that the Universe is lawful, and that we are allowed to discover those laws; and what we now know as scientific method including the notion of falsification is pretty well inherent in Thomistic philosophy.

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

The sun also flares

http://townhall.com/columnists/
CliffMay/2010/01/28/the_sun_also_flares?page=full

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

 

 

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Friday,  January 29, 2010

The President paid what can best be described as an ill-will visit to the Republican retreat in Baltimore. It was of course a political visit, and probably a political mistake; he built no good will with the tea party voters, whom he wants to pre-empt by pretending to be a populist. If the President really wants to pivot from far left to left-center in his policies, he should not be insisting on full bore healthcare "reform", cap and trade, immigration "reform", and the other Daily Kos left wing fever swamp policies.

His State of the Union speech intentionally embarrassed the Supreme Court in a context where there was no possible self defense. To boot he was factually wrong: the recent decision did not allow foreign corporations any 'rights', although that was most of what he spoke about in the speech. There were other factual errors. As an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal points out, the Solicitor General would not have signed off on that speech with its factual errors. Indeed one wonders who did vet the speech. Obama has a law degree and once taught law, and made factual errors that anyone who had actually read the decision he criticized would not have made. Apparently the medium is the message?

 

 

 

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{Note that this is a daybook, and contains notes for upcoming work. THE PROBLEM DESCRIBED NEXT IS NOW FIXED. A story goes with that, see the upcoming column. Thanks to all the readers who sent suggestions.}

/Begin daybook notes.

Once again Microsoft is trying to drive me mad. I think I must have encountered this problem before, and forgot it.

I have Mamelukes in Word 2003, with its own dictionary, a .dic file. When I set up the new machine I installed Office 2007. When I try to enable Word to use the mameluke.dic, I am told that I have to convert that dictionary to a UNICODE format. I don't know what a UNICODE format is. Dictionary files in my experience are ASCII text files you can read with text file editors. Now, suddenly, they're something else.

When I try to open the mameluke.dic file in Word 2007, the program crashes. It won't open that file. [Later. That turns out to be an interesting story, too. Word 2007 has some residual feelings about .dic files and treats them differently from text files even when you are just trying to open them in Word 2007 as text files. Saving text files as dic files is also -- interesting. See upcoming column.]

Does this mean I have to uninstall Office 2007? Apparently if Niven and I work on the same program in Office 2003 format -- we've been doing that -- we have to have different dictionaries? This looks like real trouble. Do any readers have suggestions?

NOTE that this problem is solved, and thanks to all the readers who sent suggestions.

/end daybook notes

========

I have visitors this afternoon for tea (low tea? the appointment is for 1400). Francis Hamit and Leigh Strother-Vein will be over, and I expect to learn some more about the future of publishing and copyright and such like. Francis has done a lot of work studying Print on Demand as well as self-publishing in both paper and e-Book formats.

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1600

/begin daybook notes

This is the day when all the real problems of getting the new W500 set to take over for the t42p have been overcome. I find I greatly preferred the text from the t42p on the 19" ViewSonic screen (1280 x 1024). I can now just get used to what this displays, or buy a larger wide screen monitor. What I have now isn't bad, just different, and of course this isn't a wide screen monitor. Since text looks just fine on the 24" monitor I use downstairs at 1920 x 1080 resolution, and the Acer 24" monitors are often for sale at under $200, that's another possibility. I can then use this 19" ViewSonic to replace one of the big bottle monitors that take up space and help heat the Great Hall.

Or more likely I can live with it.

One other minor irritation. The FUNCTION Keys don't seem to be working on the Microsoft Wireless Comfort Curve keyboard, which means I can't do control-F1 to toggle the Word 2007 ribbons. Aha. As I wrote this I was examining the keyboard, and lo! over to the far right on the row that contains the Function keys and such like, there is a key with a big black F labeled in smaller letters FLock. Punch that and lo! the Function keys work again, F1 gets HELP and control-F1 toggles the Word 2007 ribbon. I have no idea why there is a key that disables the Function keys; I have used this keyboard for at least four years, and I have never punched that button. I must done so when I was changing machines here, although I don't know how. Anyway, the big F Lock key toggles disabling the Function Key row, if I even need to do that, and gives me something to wonder about.

/end daybook notes

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

/begin daybook notes

All works except one minor feature, and that may not be in Word 2007. It is my practice to begin work by entering a file called Record (there's one for each major project or book). That starts with the word count at the beginning of that day, then the day of the week. In Word 2003 when you type a day name, the program suggests the actual date, which you can insert by pressing return. I'm used to doing that. Word 2007 isn't making any suggestions at all. It's as if that feature were turned off, but I can't find any place to turn it back on. Ah well. It's not vital. But if anyone knows just what happened to this minor feature please let me know. My experience with Word is that they don't take features out, but sometimes they do hide them.

HA. I find that Firefox sets the default web viewing font to Times New Roman, and my site doesn't look so good in that font. I have changed the default to Georgia, and it looks better on line now. And it's time to get back to real work.

/end daybook notes

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

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

And you may find this interesting:

http://papercraftparadise.blogspot.com/
2009/05/perry-rhodan-stardust-papercraft.html

and on the subject of models, the Lief Ericson is returning:

http://www.round2models.com/
models/amt/ufo-mystery-ship

 

 

 

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Saturday,  January 30, 2010

I took the weekend off, largely because there is a dangerous computer virus out there I don't understand, but it got one of my machines. I took the infected disk out of the machine and started over with a new disk; I then scanned the infected disk by putting it in a USB device. Neither Microsoft Security Essentials nor ESET online scan find a thing on the disk, but it's sure unusuable. I don't think any of the data files have been hit. If I knew how to warn you of this I'd do it, but the infection came from a web site I don't know how I got to, and without any cooperation on my part.

I can't be the only one bitten by this.  More if I know more. It's similar to the one that got Roberta in that it offers to sell me its remedy. My remedy was to remove the disk. Once I am sure I have all the data from it, I'll reformat it.

 

 

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Sunday,  January 31, 2010

Our friend Joanie is Principal of a Catholic school in the north valley, and we visited out there today then had breakfast, returning to see the Lakers win a squeaker against the Celtics. Otherwise I took the day off and it's time for bed.

It looks as if the AGW hypothesis is crumbling for lack of evidence, but there's no sign that the President understands this. Some of the Congressional leaders in his party do. Others don't. It will be interesting to see if the President's pledge to double down and give us health care reform and a carbon tax whether the American people like it or not can be done before more realize that we just don't know what's happening in climate. I am now inclined to believe that there's constant one degree per century rise and overlaying that is a sine wave of less than plus and minus one degree with a period of about 30 years. If that's the case, we are due for a cooling period. You've seen the chart http://m-francis.livejournal.com/47705.html. I had something about it here last week.

Amazon declared war on Macmillan, then preemptively surrendered before the fighting started. Not sure what that was all about. Apparently someone in management blundered and upper management overruled, but perhaps there are deeper explanations. In any event the e-Book price war is real, and the timing suggests that Apple is stirring the soup. What this will do to author profits isn't clear. Eric Flint of Baen Books is certain that, at least for prolific authors, e-Books, even pirated, help sell paper books. Perhaps so; certainly his numbers indicate that to have been so. Whether this will continue when e-Books begin to cut deeply into mass paperback book sales is another matter. That won't happen until e-Book readers are ubiquitous, but this looks to be happening already. The trend is up -- 4% of publishing revenue was e-Books last year, and while that's only 4%, it's 4% up from essentially zero a couple of years ago. The curve may be steep.

My thanks to all those who have subscribed or recently renewed subscriptions.

I'll be back in the morning. It's column time. The good news is that I've got a lot to write about, including a really bad worm (see yesterday's View). That of course is the bad news.

And I am grinding on Mamelukes. Of course I had expected to finish it before Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the weekly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 8,000 - 12,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so. If  you got here through a link that didn't take you to the front page of this site, click here for a better explanation of what we're trying to do here. This site is run on the "public radio" model; see below.

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