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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 119 September 18 - 24, 2000

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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 monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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Monday  September 18, 2000

Paypals clearly has a critical need detector. Actually it's an impatience detector. I needed to send some money to clear up a couple of ebay purchases, and it took like half an hour to log on to Paypals.  Perhaps they are growing fast. One may hope so. Eventually I got on and all was well.  ONLY it has happened again. And again. And again. They had better get some more servers on line or they are going to be abandoned in droves.

 

I promised you an amusing story.

The Writers of the Future contest was set up by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Dianetics and the Church of Scientology. It is operated by his literary estate, Author Services Incorporated, which has close ties to Scientology. One may have varying views about Scientology, but the contest is quite straightforward and does a lot of good. The judges are science fiction writers including myself, Larry Niven, Greg Benford, Charles Sheffield, Fred Pohl, Tim Powers, Jack Williamson, and a cast of plaster, and the contest is conducted under the supervision of coordinating judge Algis Budrys whose integrity is unquestionable. If any of the winners of the contest have been Scientologists I don't know it for a fact (no reason why someone might not be) but I do know for a fact that a lot of winners are definitely not.

One of those was Dr. Ilsa Bick. Here she is with her husband Dr. David Bick:

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We're riding over to the awards ceremony in a limousine -- ASI does this contest right with a lot of attention to details. That's Edna Budrys and Charlie Brown of the SF news magazine Locus facing us, and Roberta dressed to the nines next to Dr. Bick.

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And there's Dr. Bick again, in a not very flattering expression but it's the best one I have. The amusement is that she's a psychiatrist, board certified. But when her biography was announced at the awards, all references to that were cut out; it made her sound like a housewife and mother (which she is in addition to her other accomplishments). Now to Scientologists the only group more evil than psychiatrists is the IRS, and apparently someone in the ASI office just couldn't stand it that a contest winner -- the winners are determined by the judges and ASI has no control over that -- was a real live --  horrors! -- shrink.

Incidentally, there was a time when I shared their contempt for psychiatry, but that was back when I was in graduate school, and psychiatrists consisted largely of two groups: Freudians who talked people to death while charging enormous fees for "analysis" which certainly did no more good than Dianetics auditing; and the ones who took their MD degrees seriously and used insulin shock, electro-shock, hot boxes, and other instruments of torture more appropriate to the middle ages than to the Twentieth Century. The evidence for Freudian theories of personality with its elaborate constructions was certainly no greater than that for Hubbard's Analytic and Reactive Minds, and Hubbard's people didn't administer massive doses of electricity, insulin, etc., nor extirpate part of the forebrain by inserting needles up the eyeball. At the University of Iowa the psychology department did some studies on the effectiveness of psychiatry in diagnosis and treatment and concluded that they didn't know what they were doing, arrogantly asserted that they did, and quite often did more harm than good.

So Hubbard's contempt for these people, who put him out of business -- he didn't claim Church status and Freedom of Religion when Dianetics first came out -- wasn't all that unjustified.

But things change. Most of what I learned in Abnormal Psychology was nonsense, just as most of Freudian analysis is nonsense. Meanwhile the geneticists -- Dr. David Bick is a genetics physician -- and the physiologists and the pharmacologists have found real mechanisms and real cures for a number of "psychological" disorders. Depression is routinely treated with drugs, not long expensive sessions lying on a couch speaking to someone trained in the art of the analytical deadpan. SAMe takes care of depression for a lot of people, and it's now routinely sold in drug chain stores as well as health food stores -- a few years ago the FDA confiscated any shipments of it to the US from Italy and other places where it was widely used. And so forth. We know a LOT more about the mechanisms of the mind than we did when Hubbard's Dianetics book came out.

So I find this rather amusing. It's also the first instance I can think of in which the Scientology belief system seems to have inserted itself into any detail of the Writers of the Future contests, and as I said, I find it amusing. So did Dr. Bick after some time brooding.

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And here is Roberta with Tim Powers the day after the awards (Sunday) just before a very pleasant barbeque dinner (at which we got the story: I had wondered why there was no reference to Ilsa's medical degrees in the bio they read out for her the night before and asked her.)

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And Serina Powers with Charlie Brown at the same event. We had a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next one. Given the horrors some editors have committed on my TEXT and put into print, clipping a biography is one of the lesser sins and may be forgiven...

And finally

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My work stations at Chaos Manor. That's Galacticus the Pentium 933 facing you, Princess under the monitor to the left, and you can just see the top of Regina the Compaq Dual 750 Professional Work Station on the floor at the far left foreground. You can't see the ICS-124 CPU Switch that lets both Princess and Regina work through the same keyboard and mouse. That's an oriole feeder you see through the windows. They like orange. I have a couple of red humming bird feeders out there on my balcony too, but you can't see them. And yes, I KNOW the place is a mess.  If you're wondering what the ladder is for, the book shelves go up fourteen feet.

There is an exchange of views about psychiatry in the past between me and Dr. Ed Hume over in mail.

For some strange reason the person who sent this doesn't want to have it known that he did. Have a look at

http://www.mslinux.org/ 

and be afraid, be very afraid.

 

 

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Tuesday, September 19, 2000

I will probably get over it, but I have about had it with Paypals. In daytime it is too busy, particularly if you have composed a complex message which it will lose and make you start over. Wait until night and they are installing new software. It's a great idea, but are they ready for prime time? I think they don't have enough servers to meet the demand. When it works it works well, but they should simply SAY "Go away. We are too busy. Come back another time." Instead they make you go through the whole rigamarole only to tell you to get lost because of  "unexpected" heavy traffic that is so unexpected they have a canned message about it. In other words they make that unexpected part up. They EXPECT overloading.

Maybe it's the health club phenomenon? Accept plenty of members, when it gets too crowded some will go away?  But this is what gives ecommerce a bad taste.

Eventually it begins to work again. When it does work, it works well, so I suppose I ought to count my blessings...

And in fact it is working again. One problem is that when it does work it works so well one expects it to do it right. Which in fact it does MOST of the time. But there's an impatience detector: if you are in a hurry it will always give you the "unexpected heavy traffic" message. Which is itself an insult to the intelligence for obvious reasons.  But on the whole, Paypals continues to have my approval.

 

It isn't my day. Now Pair isn't working. I can't upload and half the time my mail isn't getting here. Other mail accounts are working fine. Bah.

OK, it's fixed. Critical need detector I guess. The real moral of the story is sit back and do something else. But I am one of those "one less damn tings to worry about" people who tries to finish one job before going on to another. And that doesn't work in this wonderful world of e this and that.


The opening statement on this is in MAIL: an 11 year old boy was killed by police in a drug raid. I have put the following statement over there, but I will repeat it here:

Later: Clearly the incident happened. The boy was lying on the floor, face down, when the shotgun "just went off." There were no drugs found in the house. His father was arrested. Money was found in the house; how much is not known to me. AP, LA Times, and the Sacramento Bee had stories on this. The officer swears his finger was not on the trigger as he pointed his shotgun at an 11 year old boy lying face down on the floor.

I teach my Boy Scouts: Guns are always loaded. You do not point a gun at anything you will not shoot. You will not shoot anything you will not kill.

In Littleton Colorado the police were willing to let a teacher bleed to death and let the young murderers kill again and again rather than risk having an officer hurt going in after them. In this instance apparently procedure says that 11 year old kids need guns pointed at them, presumably for the safety of the officers. Aristocracies always consider the safety of the aristocrat of prime importance. Then comes their convenience. In this case clearly pointing a shotgun at a boy lying on the floor was important to police procedure.

If there are any senior police officials among my readership I invite them to tell me why this is good procedure.

 

 

 

 

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Wednesday, September 20, 2000

Mixed bag in mail today. And I hope to get my desk cleared off. A little anyway. Much cooler in Los Angeles.

I have had people ask about my ICS-124 CPU Switch. I have two and they both work extremely well. What is frustrating is that I cannot find the maker. There is no name on the BOX, on the unit itself, and now I have found the User's manual. It says ICS.  So I presume there is an offshore (probably Taiwan but I don't know that for certain) company called ICS that makes pretty good CPU switches, and does not want us to know the company name, address, or country of origin. But they sell them at Fry's. I suppose I could ask out there, if they are still speaking to me...

For an interesting picture look at:

http://fanac.org/Fan_Photo_Album/l02a003.html 

Much work on BURNING TOWER in the afternoon in a Monk's Cell session. Good stuff, too.

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Thursday, September 21, 2000

Taped the Techweb broadcast. Windows ME was my product of the week: if you use Windows 9x and you are happy with it, that's fine, but for new installations, ME will save you a lot of time in downloads to condition 98 SE to modern conditions, and I haven't had any problems with ME despite beating the holy heck out of it.

Ed Yourdon's latest newsletter tells of hackers aiding the European fuel price protestors by doing their own thing on the web. Sigh.

One of the hackers who seems to have been highly successful in his efforts to aid the demonstrators calls himself Herbless. If you want to know why (and possibly frighten yourself) see

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/byron7.html 

 

 

 

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Friday, September 22, 2000

A nice dinner in BelAire last night with opera people and an interview with Rodney Gilfrey, the Los Angeles baritone. I have some pictures which I'll try to do something with when I g a round tuit. Those tuits can be hard to find.

Recently in mail I posted:

Dr. Pournelle,

I************* Jerry, Came across this today: "The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words."

Kit Case kitcase@starpower.net

and I said

No Comment Nesessary ************

Clearly I was wrong. Comment was necessary. I now have: 

Dr. Pournelle,

I spotted this;  [the above]

on your mail list today. It turns out to be urban myth; no such government regulation exists, and it has appeared in a number of different contexts referring to British gov't regulations on shell eggs, French gov't on duck eggs, and EEC directives on the importation of caramel and caramel products (the last also, by coincidence, purportedly coming in at 26,911 words). I got the details from www.snopes.com, a usually reliable source of information on urban legends.

Cheers!

JBWoodford

which proves that some people just have too much free time. At least they have something harmless to do. My mother used to say 'idle hands are the devil's workshop' and would find me something to do if I seemed to have too much free time.

Well of course it is an urban legend, and of course most of us have heard it before, and of course on the face of it it is unlikely to be true. What is interesting is that you have to think about it. When I was president of Pepperdine Research Institute Lo! these many years ago, one of the things we had to deal with was the Armed Services Procurement Regulations, known as the ASPRS or Aspers. There were 23 linear feet of them, and it took a graduate student in public administration about 6 hours a week just to keep with the constant stream of revisions; one of the Aspers insisted that the Aspers themselves be kept up to date, and about a foot of revisions would come in weekly and would have to be put into the bound volumes, chapter, or section, or page at a time; sometimes there would be paragraphs to be pasted over the existing paragraph, saving the government money on printing the entire page but at the cost of thousands of intelligent people put to silly makework.

Now I probably exaggerate, but not much: the Aspers took up 2 shelves and I recall those shelves ran along the whole wall of the documents library, and I know that my administrative officer, a student who had graduated from Howard and won the Honor Sword at ROTC and was spending a year at Pepperdine before being commissioned into the Army, had keeping them up as an onerous duty; whether a full 6 hours a week I suppose I don't know, but the time wasted on that was not trivial.

And there certainly is a three page regulation defining what may legitimately be called a 'jelly' in advertising: the case is a famous one studied in public administration classes, and I once quoted from it in a paper on the burden of regulations for my graduate seminar in administration. Moreover, I have seen some of the Market Orders (a somewhat fascist procedure left over from the Roosevelt Administration) on the difference between tangerine and tangelos and that ran to seven or so pages.

So, yes, the 26,911 words is probably legend; but absurd as it is, we all know it could be true, and given enough time with bureaucrats justifying their payment, one day it may be.

And see mail...

From Clark Myers:

Article is at:

http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0%2C1284%2C38945%2C00.html 

Pirates Invade Book Publishing

by M.J. Rose

It's well worth reading. And I haven't yet come up with an magical solution to this.


Dr. Pournelle,

A nice feature of the internet is that you can have "groupies" but never

actually have to meet them. For my Chaos Manor To Go, I used the AvantGo

automatic channel bookmark to make an AvantGo channel out of the Chaos Manor

Current Mail page. Here's a link for savvy readers:

https://avantgo.com/mydevice/autochannel.html 

Even with this week's rather protracted discussions, the channel size is

less than 100K.

Enjoy your weekend now that more seasonable weather is upon us.

Stephen Borchert (proud subscriber to Chaos Manor)

Thanks!

And Roland reports:

Another Theory proven correct:

http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/09/21/black.hole.ap/ 

AND Microsoft fixes licensing policy:

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/licensing/docs/re-imaging_brief.htm 

Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@netmore.net> 


For those interested in what really happened to the Kursk, click here. Warning: this is thought to be in bad taste by some, and it may well be. If jokes about the dead offend you don't read it.

 

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Saturday, September 23, 2000

With luck I'll get to hike and write. Like every day. Next weekend I won't be around at all: SF convention in St Louis where I am Toasmaster and Niven is GOH.

I do not often make a rule putting someone's inputs into the Junk folder, but it happens. I had to do that today. Proof by repeated assertions of contempt wastes both my time and the writers. It may all be true, but I am not likely to agree.

 

 

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Sunday, September 24, 2000

Oulook and my bad memory are driving me mad. I know there is a way to compact the Outlook.PST file. I also know that the HELP files under Compress and Compact do not tell me how to find it. HOW THE HECK do I find that? This is insane. Did they give the indexing job for HELP to a chimpanzee? Whoever did that should be ashamed. Ashamed.

It's in Syroid's Outlook 2000 In a Nutshell. Not well indexed, but it's there. RIGHT CLICK on a folder (the parent folder). Get Properties. Go to advanced. There you will find it. Intuitive, no?  Microsoft, you should hire someone to go over this program and fix junk like that. Or at least put it into the unhelpful help files. This is insanity. And makes Syroid's book even more essential.

I have been neglecting LINKS. I should have pages of useful links organized by subject.

I encourage you to send PERMANENTLY (value for months anyway) links with a subject. I'll try to organize them and get them onto a real links page.

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