Monthly Archives: July 2012

View 734 Sunday, July 22, 2012

Still in Chattanooga with the ThinkPad. The IBM keyboard is pretty good but I find I am addicted to full size keyboards. Work with this one is slow. I’m a sloppy typist anyway. I’d have done better to learn two finger typing. Ah well.

We had the traditional Libertycon Mad Scientists discussion last night. This was started some years ago when Jimmy Hogan was a guest here and as was his bent he had a late night discussion on things in science we are sure of that may not be so. A lot of that got into his book Kicking the Sacred Cow, and while he is likely wrong about most of his theories it’s healthy to look at basic scientific beliefs with a bit of a jaundiced eye, just to find out if you can back up your own beliefs. There’s also a long tradition in the Catholic Church of exposing core beliefs to the test of reason – Aquinas and Erasmus come to mind among dozens of others – but of course the hierarchy lapses into ‘believe or else’ mode at frequent intervals;. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy at work, I suppose, but that’s too long a topic for now.

I wanted to kick the Special Relativity sacred cow, and for that matter General Relativity as well, especially since Einstein himself began to wonder about Special after the big confirming instances of General and the Hubble discoveries. I’ve said all this before and I have nothing whatever to add to Petr Beckmann’s book Einstein Plus Two which doesn’t attempt to refute relativity, it merely points out that the crucial experiments that seem to make necessary the complexities of relativity equations can in fact be explained by more conventional Newtonian views.

On the orbit of Mercury, on page 171, Beckmann writes: "… Einstein was not the first to derive the Mercury formula. It had been derived 17 years earlier by Paul Gerber [1898] by classical physics using the same assumption that I am using now — the propagation of gravity with velocity c. For readers who find this hard to believe, Gerber’s final expression is reproduced here: …". After reprinting Gerber’s formula as it appeared in Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik, vol. 43, p. 103, Beckmann notes that this formula is now known as "the Einstein formula". http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/496.html)

Alas, I found the usual results: most physicists don’t study relativity at all, but they do hear people they respect say that it’s absolutely proven, and quite properly assume it doesn’t need further investigation. Perhaps so, but Beckmann, who thoroughly understood both General and Special Relativity, thought it a needless sacred cow and proceeded to offer alternatives. See Beckmann, Einstein Plus Two. He claims to cover all the known evidence, not in an attempt to refute either eneral or special relativity but to show they are not needed to explain what experiments have shown. Obviously relativity theory works, but it may be leading to some needless postulates about cosmology that make things more, not less, difficult to understand – a sort of Occam’s barber shop floor principle rather than Occam’s razor. But that’s kicking sacred cows, and it’s more a sport than a science even if it could be important.

And I am off to another panel.

The convention is formally over and we’re about to go to dinner somewhere. I’ll see what I can do about catching up when I get back.  And we returned, and had the last meetings, and I am going to try to get a mailbag out before I go to bed. We return in the morning.

It has been a good weekend. There were panels on the future of education and what science fiction says about democracy, and can we save civilization?  Bit hard to do in an hour, but we try to indicate ways of thinking about the problem, probably endind up with me sounding like a pretentious ass – old professors given an audience often do.  Ah well.

View 733 Saturday, July 21, 2012

Chattanooga

Niven and I are at LibertyCon in Chattanooga. We have a busy schedule, and the convention is in a unique hotel, where everything is spread out over a vast area: the hotel is the former railway station and railway yard, converted into a hotel, with some of the rooms (not mine) being in old railway cars. There is a dining room in a former railroad car diner, but it didn’t open early enough for us to eat there. The main dining room is the former lobby and waiting room of the station. I’ve seen this station before, twenty years ago, but at that time they hadn’t built the conventions center and some modern hotel structures and the old station was mostly a museum and a place to display a spectacular model railway layout. I would guess that the model railroad is still there since I saw a sign offering tickets to a model railway museum, but I haven’t had a chance to see it.

I don’t think I have ever seen a hotel constructed from a railway station and old railroad cars before. The downside is that it makes for a lot of walking, but that has its positive aspects as well.

We have a very busy schedule. Last night Niven and I were invited to discuss how to save civilization. Today we talk about education. Tonight we have dinner with our Baen Books publisher, and hang out with some other writers. All is well, but there isn’t a lot of slack time.

Another long book signing session, followed by speechifyng which I pretty well left to others. Bit of a problem with the wireless connections. The ThinkPad thinks it has one wireless control system and Windows thinks it has another, and they get confused. As usual it all sorts out eventually.  All well if somewhat exhausting.

View 733 Thursday, July 19, 2012

It’s late and this will be brief. We’re here in Chattanooga after a fairly grueling day of travel and indifferent meals – reminds me when I was travelling for the Air Force lo these many years ago except that in the days of the Stratoliner and the 707 there were not people paid to make you miserable, and the seats were much larger and everyone was far more pleasant. But that was another era.

A TSA man decided my large tube of Crest was too big and confiscated it. I expect his kids need it. Otherwise no real incidents of note.

The Libertycon people were expectedly competent and pleasant and makes it all worth while.

I’m going to turn in but Niven and I are safe and all is well.

View 733 Wednesday, July 18, 2012

You didn’t get that on your own. You didn’t do that. This is the essence of the President Obama’s campaign.

Of course his handlers are now insisting that President Obama didn’t mean it that way. It was taken out of context. He was talking about the essential activities of government, and particularly education and public roads. He also mentioned the Internet which didn’t invent itself. What the President was trying to say is that government is necessary for prosperity. He didn’t say it very well, perhaps, but it’s an important thing to remember. You can’t just dismiss the importance of government.

But if that is what he meant, it is hardly a new concept. Most civilized people have known that for millennia. They have also known that government, while necessary for prosperity, can also be its enemy. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington both noted that government is force, and “like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” We need government, but we must be ready to restrain it.

Thomas Jefferson summed it up in his first inaugural in 1801:

“Still one thing more, fellow citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities. About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration”

For a very long time that was the guiding philosophy of the American government.

I do not think that is what President Obama had in mind when he told us

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

It is certainly possible to have too little government. That is not America’s problem. For more than half my life people have laughed at the suggestion that “Aren’t you glad you are not getting all the government you pay for?” Now Mr. Obama wants us to pay for more.

Tomorrow before dawn Niven and I get on a Delta airplane for a long and grueling trip to Chattanooga. It will take all day and we will get there well after dinner time. I don’t expect to log in along the way, and I may well be too tired to do more than glance at my mail after I arrive. I have no idea what kind of Internet connection I will have.

We will be at Libertycon in Chattanooga until Monday, and we will be all day Monday getting back home, so if you don’t hear much from me for the next few days, it is nothing to be concerned about.

I have this from a reader:

"US geoengineers to spray sun-reflecting chemicals from balloon"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/17/us-geoengineers-spray-sun-balloon

I guess we will find out in a year or so if it works.

The story is more than interesting. Of course we have for years heard conspiracy theories about contrails. Few of them get beyond the Art Bell show, but now we have this.

I would think there is considerable to discuss before we do environmental engineering experiments – including real science about temperature trends, and a real debate about what is the ‘best’ climate for Earth.

Before spraying stuff into trhe atmosphere would it now make more sense simply to paint roofs white? Assuming we really want cooling.

It is generally agreed that the one thing in US Education that is done fairly well is high tech higher education. When I used to lecture at Cal Tech there were generally no girls in the classes. At one dormitory hall where I was invited to have dinner there was one and only one woman student, and she wasn’t in a particularly technical program, although I make no doubt she could have been had she wanted to. That situation has changed now, and there are women in nearly every Cal Tech class, but there are far more men in high tech classes than women.

‘Since a college cannot force a woman to go into math or science, the only way for a college to satisfy a gender quota will be to cut the number of male math and science students, by turning male students away from their favorite subject.’

<http://www.openmarket.org/2012/07/10/quotas-limiting-male-science-enrollment-the-new-liberal-war-on-science/>

—-

Roland Dobbins

I suppose I should not be surprised.

And Fast and Furious won’t go away, although both candidates seem to wish it would:

‘Precisely because this is such a jaw-dropping accusation — criminality at the highest level of government to score a political point — Republicans refuse to make it.’

<http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2012-07-11.html>

—

Roland Dobbins

Congress is the Grand Inquest of the Nation, Constitutionally and by tradition; but everything seems to have become political now. I am seldom in favor of special prosecutors, but I would think a situation involving the Attorney General would be the case in which one might be appropriate.

If that weren’t enough, we have

Jerry,

Did YOU know that we’re in a state of national emergency?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/do_obamas_executive_orders_reveal_a_pattern.html

<snip>

In EO 13617, entitled "Blocking Property of the Government of the Russian Federation Relating to the Disposition of Highly Enriched Uranium Extracted From Nuclear Weapons," Obama says (among other things)that"the risk of nuclear proliferation created by the accumulation of a large volume of weapons-usable fissile material in the territory of the Russian Federation continues to constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.”

Obama, by signing this EO, actually declared a national emergency. I guess that President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous saying, "Speak softly and carry a big stick," can’t apply in this case because we don’t want to offend the Russians by having them honor treaties they signed (the "HEU" Agreement). But what’s more important is that Obama can now "justify" any action he wants to take by citing EO 13617 since it declares a national emergency.<snip>

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/do_obamas_executive_orders_reveal_a_pattern.html#ixzz20to19bIx

I suspect we have not heard the end of this, either. Certainly Axelrod understands the implications. It is probably time to revise the War Powers Act as well as the Patriot Act.

Just remember, if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.