Monthly Archives: June 2014

View 828, Sunday, June 08, 2014

John Quincy Adams on American Policy:

Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Fourth of July, 1821

Sunday afternoon at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It rained for a few minutes about an hour ago, but now it is cloudy bright outside. Humid, of course. I may take a walk in a bit, but the weather may defeat me.

After getting in late having had no sleep Friday night other than dozing on the airplane I caught up by sleeping until after Noon, getting downstairs well after breakfast time. I have seen no signs of the Nanotech conference, but the Hotel is aware of it, and was concerned that the 6 PM reception on the patio might be rained out. I presume that concern is over since the rain seems to have gone away. The overhead clouds look about right for this time of year on the Georgia-South Carolina coast; as I recall, the weather here is about like Seattle, but more clouds and rain and hotter. Anyway we’ll see. I’ve seen no signs of an invasion of nanotech engineers. On the other hand the conference organization has been very efficient.

US Air is a puzzlement. The flight to Charlotte from LAX was uneventful, although the airplane looked a bit old with old style seats, no radio or movie capability, and clearly no power for PC or anything like amenities. The only food served was sandwiches and they ran out of those before getting to me. On arrival at Charlotte I went to the departure gate for the Hilton Head Island connection. The gate it was to go from didn’t exist, but there was a cardboard poster saying that another gate was that gate. Sort of. A pleasant and overworked young lady gate agent at the 38 A gate which had the 36 cardboard sign nearby told me to wait nearby and she’d tell me what to do. Not encouraging. I didn’t see anyone else trying to get on that flight. About the time it was to leave I was told the flight was cancelled, and taken on a handicapped cart to a Special Services counter where there was a long line, but the cat driver took my boarding pass and it was sent inside where I couldn’t see it or what wsa happening. No one told me what was going on, but then someone appeared form inside the office and asked if I could stay in a hotel — at which point I summoned what was left of my composure and said I was due at a big conference as a speaker and had no idea what I would do now. She looked flustered. A few minutes later she came out with a new boarding pass for a flight at 6:25 PM, this time from Gate 38A. The cart driver, who spoke as if she had a higher education than cart driver, had waited for me. The white lady who had delivered the boarding pass said she knew precisely who I was, “Mr. Wade Curtis” with a bit of a wink, and told me to be nice to the cart driver. I protested that I thought I had been, and we all laughed. Back at Gate 38A the pleasant gate agent was surrounded by people. I couldn’t hear what was going on, but eventually, at about 6:25 when I was supposed to board, I got to her, and she said it was delayed for half an hour, but all was well, “Please sit there and I’ll let you know.” But this time the sign was flashing a flight to Hilton Head Island, and a departure time of 7:25, so I figured it was going to work. I told the young lady she ought to be promoted, and thanked everyone,

The flight was a propeller craft, elderly, that could not accommodate my Number Nine roll on but has “valet” checking in the hold of the airplane. That has happened before although the reason I like the Number Nine is it is the largest of the old first generation roll-on bags, but not as thick as the new monstrous ones that expand and expand. Anyway I staggered out onto the tarmac, walked about 100 yards, and there was an unattended cart. I’d already been given a baggage tag and stub. There were bags with similar tags on the cart. I put my roll-on on the cart and had problems climbing the stairs into the airplane since my computer and other stuff were in the carry-on computer bag – and it is a big one. A nice lady in uniform – I’d have called her a stewardess but I understand that’s not a correct word in these modern times – helped me on with it and carried it down the aisle to a rear seat, by then the only seat left on the airplane. Everyone was very nice. A bit more than an hour later we were at Hilton Island.

Small airport, one terminal, a bit confusing. My bag was in the cart outside the airplane. My cell phone, which was down to 5% charge (my fault, I think) rang. The limousine service driver called, said he’d heard my flight was cancelled and was I on this one? I said yes, gleefully, and he said seven minutes. If you are headed for Hilton Island Resort I recommend Diamond Transportation 1-843-247-2156. Seven minutes later he was there. It was about 30 minutes to the resort, Sonesta Resort, where everyone seems pleasant. I was there too late for dinner, and made do at the bar with a snack called Shrimp In Grits, which turned out to be precisely what it sounds like and astonishingly good. I grew up in the land of the grits, but I never had that before, probably because shrimp were a delicacy in Memphis, and it’s too simple a dish for New Orleans. Or something.

Slept in until after Noon. Got to the Hotel restaurant too late for breakfast. Menu is limited and unfamiliar. Decided on a Grouper sandwich with sweet potato fries. It came on a big hamburger bun – looked like perfect fish and chips, but that would not be exotic enough I guess. It came served on a hamburger bun with very fresh lettuce and tomatoes. Turned out to be excellent. Fish was rolled in grits before being fried, of course. They had offered a Tuna Reuben Sandwich, but they were out of Tuna and never heard of corned beef to substitute for it. But the Grouper sandwich instead of a burger worked out well. Coffee was excellent. The local Island paper is surprisingly good, better than the LA Times, really.

So now I’m waiting for the evening conference. I came yesterday to be in it – I told the conference managers, who are very efficient, that I was damned if I would try to get to a reception after leaving LA before midnight the night before and arriving only an hour before the reception, and they said yes, yes, of course, and arranged for my 0730 departure from LAX that got me here at 2030 last night. I should be up to sparkle for the reception. Can hope so, anyway.

And just in time comes:

Turing

Jerry,

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/computer-becomes-first-to-pass-turing-test-in-artificial-intelligence-milestone-but-academics-warn-of-dangerous-future-9508370.html

Computer becomes first to pass Turing Test in artificial intelligence milestone, but academics warn of dangerous future

Jim

The site seems to have a way to send your own questions to the program, but it doesn’t work, at least not for me from here.

Simulating a 13 year old Ukrainian boy should be a lot easier than trying to be Eliza. I once had from a reader Analyza, a very enhanced Eliza program that ran in a version of BASIC, I think C-BASIC; it allowed you to add your own data bases of questions and answers. The major problem with it was that if you added many data bases it was far too slow for the Z-80 chips in the systems we had then. I wish I had kept it though, because I suspect that on this system it would work quite well. Like all those programs the problem was responding to questions it had no knowledge of, like asking Eliza about your lost luggage. She could ask you how it made you feel to lose your luggage, and in advanced versions might be able to ask what it would mean to you to find your luggage, but since the program had no idea of what luggage was or why you would care about losing it, it soon got tangled up. Eliza needed a lot of willing suspension of disbelief. Analyza with customized data bases was a bit better at dismissing irrelevancy – it assumed you were a patient in need of psychiatric help and kept getting you back on the subject – but of course it eventually became hopelessly looped so that it was easy to tell this wasn’t a human. Oddly enough Eliza did for a while fool a few MIT secretaries.

I have no idea how this new program works, but I can think of approaches to it. It might be a fun project for a bunch of science fiction writers, to come up with scripts for an Analyza type program that pretended to be a lost child, or even pretend to be an alien crashlanded on Earth and wanting to phone home but very cagy about being found and taken to Area 51…

Sounds like a great conversation topic for the reception.    But see below, alas.

I have this from someone who had first hand information on dealing with the situation.

Subject: Re: Russia & Putin

Dear Jerry

This is a large subject and we could discourse on it for a long time. I don’t disagree with most of what you wrote in response.

Staying to the highest points:

"The realist balance of power strategy would be for the US to move closer to the Russians, who have a common interest in opposing Chinese expansion."

I agree. The question is whether Putin or anyone emerging from his system can ever constitute the partner who can bring this about at his end. I think the course of time and events have shown the answer is no. Putin and his gang are uninterested in the "Rule of Law". They are only interested in their own rule. The question therefore is what to do about it.

Meanwhile, nothing we can say or do will cause Russia to shed its interests in the parts of the old Soviet Empire that contain ethnic Russians; and to Putin the term “Russian” is an ethic term, almost congruent with Slav.

Moscow has assiduously promoted a false syllogism about the populations of adjacent sovereign states – which it labels as the "near abroad" – and whose borders the Russian Federation previously and repeatedly recognized and promised to respect. This states:

"Russian speaker = Russian = Wants To Be Ruled By Vladimir Putin and Moscow".

If the first part of this were true then Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia would clamoring by 75% majorities to be reoccupied by the Russian Army ("liberated from NATO occupation") and have the FSB (former internal KGB) reopen its offices. Nearly everyone in those countries read and spoke Russian in 1991. Large majorities still do. Obviously this is not true. We can make the same observation about Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

The situation in the Ukraine is far more complex than mere "Russian speaker". I expect 70% of those on the Maidan from November – February could be categorized as "Russian speakers" too. Acquaintances in Kiev who were out on the Maidan in December spoke fluent Russian. And in their minds the issue was very clear. Yanukovych presaged the appearance of "Russian tanks". In retrospect they were 100% correct in spirit.

Putin likes this syllogism because it justifies his periodic interventions to protect his own narrow interests. He has no intention – and certainly no capability – to formerly reannex all these areas. The Russian state budget cannot afford it. It cannot even afford so-called "Novy Russia" in the eastern Ukraine. This alone would represent over a 10% instant increase in population. Putin is interested in maximizing Moscow’s natural resource potential and also aborting any trends that threaten his personal position.

NATO Expansion In Eastern Europe.

The big issue with NATO is also China. Is it better to reorient this entity or attempt to build a new one from scratch to resist aggressive Chinese expansionism?

Not expanding NATO is certainly not the self-determination of the new eastern European members. How exactly was this supposed forbearance agreement codified? There is no treaty stating this. The NATO website explicitly denies this Russian government legend at length. Was there something more than a wink and handshake between Gorbachev, Baker and Bush? And for that matter what have Baker and Bush said about it since then? Was there even a wink and a handshake? Gorbachev alone is hardly an authoritative source.

I first became conscious of "Conservatism" in high school in 1970 – 1974. I remember that at that time FDR & Churchill’s Yalta sell out of all of eastern Europe to Stalin was still a cause celebre. This was done as a deal across the table and rape the self-determination of the populations concerned. Or was this was wrong and FDR was correct?

The biggest single reason that Putin has reacted so strongly is simple. The Yanukovych government in Kiev was built as a scale model of Putin’s own regime in Moscow. The course of events has shown how such a government can be toppled.

Best Wishes,

Anonymous

I think it is important to understand that Putin is not motivated simply by a despotic urge to seize and wield power. He truly believes that Western Culture is decadent and doomed, and alas he has a lot of evidence for that.  What we call rule of law he sees as a deception. After all the President of the United States does not act as if he cares a fig for rule of law when it comes to constraints on his activities; nor do the Brussels bureaucrats, nor does much of merry old England. France is not known for its bureaucratic restraint.  Putin has plenty of evidence that the US security services don’t much observe any rule of law. He has Edward Snowden to give him details.

NSA’s Creative Interpretations Of Law Subvert Congress And The Rule Of Law

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennifergranick/2013/12/16/a-common-law-coup-detat-how-nsas-creative-interpretations-of-law-subvert-the-rule-of-law/

NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html

The Rule of Law versus the NSA 

Regarding deals after the collapse of the USSR, you will understand that the Bush I White House expelled every Reagan sympathizer the day after George H. W. Bush took office.  That specifically included all those involved in Strategic defense, which meant that neither General Graham nor I had many sources after that – which is why we had to present the SSX proposal to Vice President Quayle as head of the National Space Council rather than to the National Security Advisor. Precisely what handshake and wink agreements were made about expansion of NATO is not known to me. After the attempted putsch put Yeltsin in power, Putin was out of the loop for several years before he became a rising star under Yeltsin; whatever Yeltsin knew about understandings over NATO expanding into the former USSR, Putin will know.  He has every reason to believe that both Germany and France would like some compensation for the Cold War, and that Germany does not really accept the acquisition of Silesia by Poland, nor the abolition of Prussia in favor of Russia. There are plenty of territorial disputes in Europe, and many sides to the arguments, and damned few of them rest on self determination of nations.  The Baltic Republics are a special case, since the importation of ethnic Russians was a deliberate act of conquest carried out against nations that the United States recognized as remaining sovereign despite the German and Russian conquests. We could make the case that the Baltic republics were simply the successors of the nations established after World War I, and that we had never recognized any Russian sovereignty over them; and indeed I understand that is the position of the State Department.  Georgia on the other hand has never been any part of NATO business.

It is probably time for the US to give Brussels the responsibility for much of European Security, there being no real need for US forces to be involved.  Germany, Britain, and France are economically capable of building their own military forces; they have huddled behind the shield of the United States of America long enough. They don’t furnish any addition to American security.  And yes, of course we can make an exception for the mother country, provided that she survives the collapse of empire and the remaking of the island. Maybe there will always be an England even…

US intervention in the Balkans made it clear to Russia that even with Yeltsin as President the US was anti-Slav and was not terribly interested in Russia as a potential ally.  This came I think as a shock to Putin just as he was rising in the Yeltsin government. 

You are of course correct in understanding that Putin can have no interest in annexation of much of the old USSR because he simply cannot afford it, even if they peacefully requested it in a UN supervised plebiscite. Russia is a regional power, not a rising Second World. Nuclear weapons are an equalizer, and Russia has more of them than anyone other than the US and China. In Cold war days a “tactical nuclear weapon” was one that went off in Germany: if one went off anywhere else, it was likely to invite retaliation at, in Eisenhower’s words, “a time and place of our own choosing.” Truman had been even more direct in the Tehran crisis.  Russia has never forgotten that.  NATO still threatens nuclear retaliation at a time and place of our – the President of the United States’ – pleasure. No one else realistically can do that so long as the United States is in the game.  The French force de frappe isn’t that kind of force, and neither is the British residual.

It is an interesting game, and one that Europe has played since the Lechfeld. It is also a game that the United States thrived by staying out of.

F-35

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

I agree that materials science is on an S-curve, but what is the rate of change over the next several years? When the F-35 contract was awarded, I was told (by someone who ought to know) that the Lockheed design was made of “unobtanium” at the time. Well they obtained it, eventually. So today’s airframe is yesterday’s unobtanium. How a time period is it before a short-term contract can make a vast improvement on the previous materials? I confess I have no idea.

As to the utility of the design specification, the iconoclasts all seem to be muttering under their breaths about an F-4 redux. I suspect that they are right, and that the F-35 will be a fine strike fighter but not much of an air superiority fighter. So in my opinion, we should perhaps worry less about the F-35 replacement and more about the lack of a contract for the next-generation Raptor. There just weren’t enough of those bad boys made before they shut down the line…

Oh, and don’t let anybody fool you. The F-35A, B, and C are completely different aircraft. They share some common components, but the airframes are significantly different (a requirement when one of them has giant dorsal and ventral hatches). Out of the three I’m skeptical that the F-35C (the catapult naval version) will enjoy a long service life.

Neil

TFX turned out to be a great recce/strike aircraft, about the best we ever had in its day, but it needed some protection from the best USSR interceptors.  TFX was originally intended to be an all missions all services airplane, and the result was a second place aircraft in the Air Superiority mission. There are few prizes for second place in that mission. Of course F-35 will be first place against everything in the air now, but technology never stands still.

You say “So in my opinion, we should perhaps worry less about the F-35 replacement and more about the lack of a contract for the next-generation Raptor. There just weren’t enough of those bad boys made before they shut down the line…” and I agree entirely. I must have been unclear. But starting up the Raptor line now would be a mistake.  Finish the F-35 and make it the new recce/strike; but build something else to be the air superiority first place winner…. The S Curves of technology march inexorably on. Or as we said in Strategy of Technology, the river flows inexorably, and you can either swim with it, float with it, or climb out on the bank and watch; but it will continue to flow, will you or nill you.

It’s time to go to the nanotechnology reception…

It was interesting and I had good conversations with my Sigma colleagues and the conference director.  More on that as the week winds on.  I expect to learn a lot.

Got back from dinner and the reception to find:

Turing Test? Not so much.

 

Each time some "AI" program is announced which "passes the Turing test", I’m always a little puzzled when I get to lay hands on the latest "breakthrough".

First, journalists don’t seem to understand what the "Turing test" actually is. They seem to think it means "passes as a human", which is explicitly *not* what Alan Turing described in his paper. Rather, a human questions a pair of entities, one of which is the program, the other a human. If the questioner can’t pick out the program, the program passes the test.

Now, as to this latest program, I’m puzzled at how this software can be considered anywhere near human level when, as best I can tell, you can not say:

I have a dog.
His name is Fido.
He is in the house.
Where is my dog?
Who is he?

Not only can you not have this conversation, but the program does not appear to have any functionality which even attempts such a simple interaction. Whereas I defy you to find any kindergartener who would not easily participate in this conversation. How can we discuss (in hushed voices) the implications of having "achieved AI" when the emperor’s new clothes appear (to this skeptic) to be yet more chatbot buffoonery?

Curious,

Andy Valencia

  As I said, I was unable to access the program; I had intended a similar experiment.  I’m sorry to hear this: but I do think that the time is coming when the formal Turing test will be passed by a good computer/program, probably of the Analyza strain with multiple data bases.  It will need a big and powerful computer of course, and it will have to simulate a slow person, perhaps an elder…  Thank you for the prompt answer.  I am really sorry to hear it, but it was not unexpected.

Tomorrow I will be talking to some of the people who will make it happen if it ever does… The technology river flows on, but you can influence where it goes, within limits.  But you have to want to do that.  McNamara wanted to halt the arms race by treaty. It turns out that this meant halting a lot of technology advances. I tried to show some of that in my CoDominium stories.  Then the USSR came to an end; and while Russia is not the USSR, it remains an important player in this game.  Meanwhile China knows how to find out what we know almost as soon as we know it…

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 827, Friday, June 06, 2014

John Quincy Adams on American Policy:

Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Fourth of July, 1821

I am off to South Caroline Hilton Head Island at 0 very dark 30 in the morning, and the computers have decided to drive me mad as I do that. Not much I can do at this stage. It should be food for comment when I get home. There are a number of companies out there that try to seize your computer to sell you registry cleaners and “Speedup” programs; they get in when you try to do the old fashioned Norton Scan, and apparently they are aided by Bing and Google in their efforts. If Google really wants not to be evil they should stop that, but in fact they seem devoted to helping these people.

More later.

Anyway, I have got control over my ThinkPad and it will have to do until I get back.

The news is not very inspiring. It looks like a long summer.

If you need something to read, Mike Flynn sent this to another conference. It’s interesting…

There is a post on The Renaissance Mathematicus on the fruitfulness of scientific disagreements for the advance of science:

http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/science-grows-on-the-fertilizer-of-disagreement/

MikeF

And NASA seems to have learned something which we told them twenty years ago…

NASA warned plan to send humans to Mars may fail <http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-warned-plan-send-humans-mars-may-fail-022806799.html>

image <http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-warned-plan-send-humans-mars-may-fail-022806799.html>

NASA warned plan to send humans to Mars may fail <http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-warned-plan-send-humans-mars-may-fail-022806799.html>

The US space agency NASA has been warned that its mission to send humans to Mars will fail unless its revamps its methods and draws up a clear, well-pla…

View on news.yahoo.com <http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-warned-plan-send-humans-mars-may-fail-022806799.html>

But of course the path to the New World lies out past the Azores, and the path to Mars goes through the Moon…

I see that the ThinkPad is compromised but good, and is inserting little ad clicks into the text.  I didn’t put them there and I do not have time to take them out. Ignore them.  We’’ll fix this mess when I get back.

I went into the control panel and removed a whole bunch of programs installed this morning by my attempt to get an off line security scan.  I expect that has got rid of those pesky little ads in the text.  We’ll now test to see.

AND they are gone.  These were well behaved little scoundrels but I didn’t ask for them; they had to be installed by what looked like harmless stuff. One was PC Speed Maximizer which I never heard of and never allowed to run but it sure was aggressive about asking. Another was an ad program.  Anyway they are gone. And I have to get some other stuff done.

One thing I did was run a Microsoft Security essentials scan on this machine, so it looks safe enough. Now to catch up. At leas I had lunch.

Well, I have spent the day getting the ThinkPad into safe condition.  The problem came about when I left it unusued for months: the number of updates it missed accumulated, and somehow when I started it up one of those friendly helpful services hat pay to jump in ahead of everything else in the search line got into line before Microsoft update.  One it got in, it viewed Microsoft Update as a threat and never went there. This allowed the system to get even more interesting helpful systems that had paid to jump the search line.  I was trying to do several things at once and didn’t pay enough attention, and by chance the wininit.dll problem on my other machine was getting attention.  And I just hadn’t realized how aggressive those “help you” programs have  become.  Got rid of them all, scanned the system, installed 42 updates from Microsoft, reset about five times, and the only thing I don’t have now is a driver for my new HP LaserJet 400 printer.  I’ll worry about that when I get home.  I won’t be printing from South Carolina anyway.  For some reason the printer driver didn’t come in the package of stuff I did install, and the control panel search for the driver on line failed.  I know I have the danged driver over on another machine if worst comes to worst, but probably I’ll figure out how to get it from HP.  The problem is that about ten “helpful” programs have paid Bing and Google to be first in line, making it important to CAREFULLY read the addresses of all the web sites offering you official services when they are in fact not official, and I am running out of time.  But I am set to catch my airplane.  Now all I have to do is be up and about at 0400, which means getting some rest – I won’t say going to bed – early enough.  And I can sleep on the airplane.

Back to the joys of being a Road Warrior.  Heck I used to make a living doing that and writing about it, and we got some great stories.  The problem with getting older is that it’s harder to tell your brain to change the subject when a good habit no longer works.  I should write about surviving as you get older.  I don’t know of any really good books on the subject, at least none that apply to me.  I haven’t got stupid, but my memory is awful.  No worse, actually, than Niven’s was when I met him forty years ago, but I used to have a very good memory, and it’s hard to get used to having to look up almost everything I want to say because I can remember what happened, but not when and to whom, and –  Oh. Well.  No need to ramble on that.

I haven’t heard much of the news today.  I will say the news to me is that Google and Bing seem to have sold out to The Evil Ones, and I would recommend that you never, ever, go to one of the paid web sites at the top of the list when you are looking for the solution to a computer problem.  not even the Norton OnLine Security Scan seems to work properly now.  Everyone wants to install something on your system, and that something wants to exclude everyone else, and they conflict with each other.  More on this when I have time to do some experimenting, but it looks as if we’re in a new jungle of very vicious people who are careful enough to avoid doing too much damage, and whose goal is to wear you down so you let them control your system.  What they do with it after that is never very clear.

Anyway, we’re safe, scanned, and back on track.  And those annoying little adds that one of the ‘helpers’ wanted to put into LiveWriter blog posts are gone, gone, gone.  They weren’t up for more than two minutes before I did something about them. But that has used the day.  I’ll review he Nanotech technical papers – I got about 50 megabytes of them – on the air plane.  So maybe I won’t sleep so much after all…

I’ll probably post something up just before I put the ThinkPad into his carry bag.  My carry on board roll on is an aicient one I got from Number Nine when they were the cat’s meow in graphics boards.  I’ve repaired a few minor damages to it, and it still works just fine, with all the pockets and capacity I need, and strong like nothing else. I must have got it in the early 80’s. For a while Number Nine was a major player in the graphics technology field.

Anyway I have plenty to do.  Maybe something tonight before I go, but probably I’ll deal with some mail on the airplane and get something up before bed at Hilton Head Island.

I am packed and the alarm is set.  I’ll nap up here in the study until 4 AM.  Hope all goes well.

Jerry,

One caveat on you comments in the View yesterday:

If this report is correct (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/georgetown-students-shed-light-on-chinas-tunnel-system-for-nuclear-weapons/2011/11/16/gIQA6AmKAO_story.html) Russia might be Number 3, not Number 2.

I suppose I should have made it clearer.  I always expected Russia to  become Number Three at some point if they have not already.  The Chinese have learned from North Korea that if you want to keep the West from interfering in your internal affairs with their “end of history” liberal democracy, you cannot do it without nukes; and while a force de frappe may be sufficient, it may not be.  A good nuclear arsenal including some tactical nukes will be needed.  Particularly if you need to intimidate Taiwan…

Incompetence or malice?

Dr Pournelle

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." –Napoleon Bonaparte

The result of egregious incompetence is indistinguishable from that of malice.

I submit in evidence Paul Bremer’s administration of Iraq.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

That has long been debated.  As one who does not suffer fools gladly, nor indeed at all given a choice, I understand perfectly.  And you have given a very good example.

Jerry,

This is worth sharing. It is a listing of college majors, popularity, income range, and unemployment rate for graduates with each major.

http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/NILF1111/#term=

Sean

I have not time to comment on this tonight so it will probably appear again; it is a matter of importance to many at this time of year. The cost/return of expensive education with concomitant debt is a matter of considerable concern.

And one more that deserves a longer comment and which you will probably see again:

F-35 issues

  Hi Dr. Pournelle,

Over the course of my career, I’ve been involved with a couple of components on the F-35. In both cases, I was involved in re-designing a component which had been shown to have problems. From my worm’s-eye-view, we did in fact actually upgrade the parts which were amenable to Moore’s Law, essentially doing a ground-up redesign of the component with radically different silicon, fitting into the same volume and performing the same function but better.

I’m not going to defend the F-35 project from a strategic point of view—for several reasons I tend to agree with you that smaller contracts issued more frequently is the way to go, rather than one big “transformative” contract. However, I do not know much about the details of the airframe, and I’m willing to entertain the possibility that this is the correct way to do some of the trickier bits (such as stealth, and VTOL). But from the point of view of electronic components you could look at the F-35 as a series of aircraft, not just one, with successive acquisition blocks incorporating evolved versions of the electronics. And so far, at least, I don’t think materials technology is amenable to Moore’s Law.

Neil

After the Challenger disaster we convened, at the request of the White House, another weekend meeting of the Council.  The Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy (I made up the name during an interview since we had to call it something) was an ad hoc group of space experts and enthusiasts which had access to the National Security Advisor and after the President read the first report, to the President.  It contained astronauts, aerospace executives (George Merrick, North American’s general manager for Shuttle was a member from the beginning, intelligence experts (General Graham and Dr. Stefan Possony among some who never cared to be named), rocket experts (Max Hunter for example), science fiction authors (Heinlein, Anderson, Bear, Dean Ing), publishers (Jim Baen for example), physicists, serving and retired officers, and many others.

We recommended essentially unanimously that Challenger’s replacement be the best ship we could design with modern technology rather than a copy of Challenger, and as George Merrick and Dr. Gould of North American pointed out, many of the  sub-contractors were out of business, and there were no production lines – copying Challenger was more expensive than building a new one incorporating much we learned from the Challenger failure.

NASA couldn’t do it.  The bureaucracy was too strong. Atlantis had many of the known flaws of Challenger.  I am pleased to hear that USAF is not as rigidly controlled by the bureaucracy as NASA was, but I fear that is not universal.  When Benny Schriever was running Systems Command he controlled the bureaucracy, but that has not been the case since Systems Command was abolished (with gleeful cackles by the  bureaucracy).

I haven’t tome adequately to respond to your comment on materials science, but I think you are not correct.  Do understand that technology advances by S Curves, not pure exponentials, and many technologies have their own curves, some of them quite unique; but we do know how to build spacecraft which are stronger and lighter, and thus have higher payloads for the same delta v, and that has been on its own S curve for some time. Not as steep as chip technologies, but not flat either.

As to the trickier bits, some of them are important; and some we would be better off without. Multi-mission aircraft are not the best answer to economy, if one of the missions is air to air supremacy.

Oooo, interesting

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/big-bang-inflation-evidence-inconclusive/

Stephanie Osborn

Interstellar Woman of Mystery

http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com <http://www.stephanie-osborn.com/>

OOO, interesting indeed.  I’ll have more on this when I get back,  Stephanie will be at Hilton Island this coming week and we can discuss it there.

Saturday night.  Safely arrived in the resort hotel. Long flight, one connector from Charlotte to HHH Iskabd was cancelled, but the gate agents were able to get me on the next plane so I lot only a couple of hours.  And now for bed

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 827 Thursday, June 05, 2014

Saturday at Oh Dark thirty I get a limousine to LAX to head off to Hilton Head Island for a conference onf nanotechnology and technology in general. His is a professional conference and they have invited several science fiction writers, including Niven and me, to come talk to them and attend the conference and listen to papers. It would be a lot of fun.

So of course today my main computer seems to have decided that it has no wininit.dll file, and thus cannot open most programs. I can still access the machines files, I just can’t run this program which means I am using the ThinkPad to do that. I do that when at the beach, and I always forget how to do it because LiveWriter remembers what was written on this machine but doesn’t go out and look at the net to see what’s there so I have problems finding the files I have written. This is going to be experimental. Meanwhile if you know how to make a perfectly good machine believe it has a wininit.dll file in windows/systems32 (which it does – I can see the file—and it’s simple –

Actually I am sure one of my advisors know and will be telling me by the time I get up tomorrow. Meanwhile I better learn how to do this because it’s road warrior time again. Haven’t done that in a while.

I am of mixed emotions on the POW swap. I do understand the notion what we leave none of the Legions behind. Even a deserter – technically he can’t be a deserter because he was not gone of his own free will for thirty days. He may have intended to desert but he was caught by the Taliban before his expiration date so to speak. My original inclination was to think well, you bought your own farm, boy, but that doesn’t digest well. I’m glad I didn’t have to make the decision. I still say we surely could have negotiated a better deal than five flag officers for a PFC. On the other hand, I tend to agree that it’s all within the President’s legitimate war powers. Whether it was a good decision or not, it was his decision.

I’m going to post this much just to see if all it working. I’ll try to write more but it’s late. I spent the day working on these sick computes. In the old days I’d have got a good column out of all of it.

Well, it posted, and the local copy knows the title, so all is not lost.  And I have outlook working on this machine – it had managed to corrupt the outlook.pst file and that took time to figure out how to fix, but it was easy enough.  What you need to do with Windows 7 at least is right click the start button, open windows explorer,and search for scanpst.exe.  Run that file on outlook.pst and after much trundling and 8 passes through the system it will tell you the file is corrupt and ask permission to fix it.  Then go have lunch.  It will get it done.  And I suspect my wininit.dll problem is no more difficult than that, once I figure it out.

This is the anniversary of Tiananmen  Square and the fall of the goddess of democracy. Chia tries to forget that ‘incident’ and has suppressed its memory, but the Internet is hard to control.  Arthur Koestler said that the sufficient condition for the end of totalitarianism intellectual power was the free exchange of ideas.  Other ideologies may prevail, but the totalitarian varieties of the mid twentieth century were doomed by the Internet.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 827, Wednesday, June 04, 2014

John Quincy Adams on American Policy:

Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Fourth of July, 1821

Jerry,

http://m.nationalreview.com/article/379481/why-team-obama-was-blindsided-bergdahl-backlash-ralph-peters via @Instapundit "Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.

J

General Eisenhower had Private Eddie Slovik shot by firing squad in World War II for refusing to return to duty. Slovik boasted that he would go to an internment camp where he was safe, and he’d be released when America won the war. The sentence was confirmed on December 23, 1944, and carried out in January, 1945. Slovik was a conscripted soldier. He deserted after his request for a rear area assignment was denied by his company commander.

PFC Bowie Bergdahl, like all current American military, was a volunteer. AlJazeera America reports:

The circumstances surrounding the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl continue to ignite controversy, with mounting calls that he be prosecuted for desertion for having allegedly walked away from his base in 2009.

The U.S. takes desertion seriously. Under military law, desertion in wartime can carry the death penalty.

But despite mounting speculation and heated rhetoric, legal experts tell Al Jazeera that the military would be hard-pressed to make a legal case for desertion. And the military, while saying it will review the situation, said on Tuesday that Bergdahl "is innocent until proven guilty."

The Taliban captured Bergdahl in June 2009 after he walked off his base in Afghanistan, a decision that reportedly stemmed from his deep disillusionment with the war.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/3/bergdahl-is-thereacasefordesertion.html

One does wonder about the wisdom of trading five flag rank Taliban officers for PFC Bergdahl. I would think this inflates the price by a lot: the Israelis have famously made such asymmetrical trades, but the United States has not done so. 

‘In reality, the EU has never considered Ukraine fit for membership.’

 

To say that Western coverage of the Ukraine crisis has been light on facts and heavy on anti-Russian propaganda does not begin to do justice to the extraordinary levels of misinformation. In fact, the reality of the history of the relationship between Ukraine and the EU is almost the exact opposite to the claims being made in the mainstream media. Far from Ukraine being at the centre of a battle between West and East, actually the EU has consistently rejected Ukraine’s requests for membership. In place of membership, the EU has attempted to manage its relationship with Ukraine through various agreements and frameworks, all of which have been premised upon the refusal of the EU to accept Ukraine as a member. Most recently, the relationship has been managed through the European Neighbourhood Programme (ENP)/Eastern Partnership (EP) Programme. It was Ukraine’s rejection of an EP association agreement (which had been negotiated over several years and again was explicitly not a stepping stone to EU membership) that sparked the current crisis.

<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-eu-is-no-friend-of-ukraine/

—–

Roland Dobbins

There is considerably more, worth reading for anyone interested in what’s likely to happen next.

It’s not entirely clear what Brussels wants – the EU leadership isn’t really responsible to anyone, and operates pretty much independently of the populations of its members, although presumably it is responsive to European oligarchs and member state power centers. There is an interesting analysis from the viewpoint of the standard NGO think tanks here: http://carnegieeurope.eu/2013/04/16/why-does-ukraine-matter-to-eu/fzq3 . This is from the Carnegie foundation people http://carnegieeurope.eu/about/?lang=en , who tend to come from the academic centers but try to incorporate some realistic views.

In my judgment , Ukraine is far more important to Russia than it is to the EU, and infinitely more so than it is to the US. Allowing Ukraine to join NATO would be a declaration of hostilities to Russia, and Putin knows we know that. It is one reason why he is now interested in closer relations with Asian powers although Russia is far less influential in Asia than in Europe: it is still joined to the Pacific by a single vulnerable railway and a few rather badly maintained highways. Sheer geography – and a lack of transportation infrastructure – makes Russia more important to the Middle East and Europe, and not much of a Pacific power. President Putin is certainly aware of all this.

And Ukraine remains of interest to Russia because it has Russians and Cossacks, which Russia needs, and Ukrainians are seen by Russia as Russians who speak a different language. There are Germans who still consider Silesia a sort of Germania Irredentia. There are far more Russians who see Ukraine in much the same way.

“This committee found a number of compelling reasons to include the moon [sp] as a stepping stone on the way to Mars.”

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nrc-human-spaceflight-report-says-nasa-strategy-cant-get-humans-to-mars/2014/06/04/e6e6060c-ebd6-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html>

——-

Roland Dobbins

As of course I always have. Interplanetary colonization is not easy. When NASA studied self-replicating systems in Space in 1980 it was concluded that technology was not up to closing the loop: we could not build real self-replicating systems with the current technology. When the report was presented to the Administrator, I pointed out that we did have the technology to build one kind of self-replicating system: a Moon Colony. It would have a replication time of about 18 years. The Administrator asked “Why would anyone want to live on the Moon”, which sparked the L-5 Society study on lunar colonists that demonstrated there was no shortage of well educated adventurous couples who would undertake to go live on the Moon. But that was back in the days of great space enthusiasm.

The good thing about the Moon as a place to study problems of space colonization is that is is only a few days away for physical transportation, and only a few seconds away for communications. We don’t need great theorists on the Moon: we need craftsmen. The best heart surgeon in the world is available by high definition television; a skillful surgeon can do her work under the direction of the best.

Before we start trying to build self replicating colonies elsewhere we should learn to build them on the Moon – and they might well be both physically and economically successful.

As to getting to Mars, it has been decades since I ran the Human Factors Lab at Boeing and did serious professional study of such matters, but I have kept in touch, and I don’t believe we know how to get humans to Mars alive, much less maintain them there. I do know that if we have a Lunar Colony first, we’ll have a lot more confidence in Mars operations.

Russia Irredenta

When I was in Germany in the early 1970s, I saw graffiti showing a map with the shape of West Germany, East Germany, and East Prussia-Silesia to scale but as separate puzzle pieces. Underneath was the slogan: "Dreimals niemals!" I don’t know if it has been redrawn as "Zweimals niemals." In Austria, I saw a graffito reading "Südtirol bleibt deutsch!" That was a re-bordering made after WWI. Sometimes memories are long. Wasn’t there a Russian politician who was nostalgic for the return of Alaska?

And of course the nostalgia of the Irish for the Six Counties is legendary.

The Crimea always was Russian and when Stalin moved the boundaries of the Ukrainian SSR to include Russian regions, it was the era of the New Soviet Man. Ethnic distinctions were not supposed to matter. (Though curiously, both the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR received separate UN seats.) The Kazakh SSR was also re-bordered to include enough Russians to outnumber Kazakhs. (Though since then, demographics has reversed the majority, the northern tier of Kazakhstan is still ethnically Russia.)

John Lukacs, my old history professor, was fond of saying, "All the ‘isms’ are ‘wasms’." The only ism that mattered in Europe was nationalism. Memories are as long as language. Consider Quebec.

MikeF

Precisely. But these are now “territorial disputes in Europe,” precisely what President Washington warned us to avoid along with entangling alliances. Russian ambitions are no greater, and neither more nor less moral, than those of nations through most of history.  The Cold War with the USSR was different because communism claimed the world, and whether they believed it or not, Marxism was taught and taught well to every Soviet college and University graduate, and for that matter to all in high school.  So long as it was the official doctrine it remained the official doctrine, and you ceased to pretend to believe it at your peril, no matter how high – actually, especially how high – one might go in the Party.  After Stalin’s death Suslov became more important, and eventually became powerful enough to depose Khrushchev.  His antipathy to one-man rule kept him from becoming a new dictator, but he was powerful enough to prevent anyone else form achieving it until his death in 1982.  We used to call him The Last Communist.  After he died, the Nomenklatura, which had become a powerful faction, became even more important.

But for all that the goal of world communist domination remained the official doctrine and goal of the USSR so long as it existed.

My thoughts on air superiority

Dr Pournelle

I note that the F-35 is now 7 years behind schedule. Given the inexorability of Moore’s Law this means that the airplane is obsolete by current technology standards. We need to buy a hundred or so of the F-135’s, and finish working out the bugs, and get them into operational readiness; there are no prizes for second place in an air superiority airplane. On the other hand, we will not need to deploy them against very many countries; few will have anything that can challenge our current force.

The optimum strategy is to assure continuity by buying enough F-135 to dominate the air superiority mission in the next few years, while accelerating the design and development of the F-35’s successor. And about the time we are ready to deploy that, it’s successor should be well into the R&D cycle. –https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/negotiating-with-terrorist-more-on-the-new-russian-empire-notes-on-a-strategy-of-technology/

I know nothing of the F-135. Is that a typo?

It was not said in my classes or my briefings, but it was easily inferred: All air superiority is local and temporary. At this moment, North Korea enjoys air superiority over its land because it is uncontested. If the US or South Korea ever challenge them, that will change quickly.

Air superiority comes in two flavors: air denial and air control.

David Drake’s Hammers Slammers practice ground-based air denial. You cannot fly over them ’cause they have line-of-sight, speed-of-light weapons. In effect, Mr Drake ratcheted up the effectiveness of the ZSU-23 by six orders of magnitude. In reality, air denial is never complete, especially since the advent of PGMs.

Air control means that you can use your air power for offensive operations against the enemy. You can increase your control by knocking out his air force on the ground. But the point of air control is that you can deliver ordnance against his ground forces.

The F-35 is just a tool. I do not believe it is intended to replace the Raptor (F-22) as an air superiority fighter. My impression was that the F-35 is seen as the Viper (F-16) replacement.

I believe that what matters most for air superiority is not the fighter; it is the AWACS.

I think an AWACS upgrade will do more to ensure American dominance of the air over the battle area than any fighter in development. We can deliver tons of PGMs from the belly of a B-52, so why send a manned vehicle into a battle area where the pilot can get his butt shot off?

As for air superiority, it may be time to resurrect the Navy’s theory of a stand-off fighter vis-a-vis the Tomcat (F-14) and the Phoenix. Strike Eagles (F-15E) loaded with Phoenix missiles maybe?

80% of air-to-air kills occur on the first pass. The loser never sees the winner. In the air, the element of surprise is decisive. AWACS gives the USAF surprise.

Once you see fighters as ordnance delivery systems for AWACS your picture of what we need in the-next-generation fighter changes.

Methinks the reason behind continuing to build the F-35 in numbers vs. putting together a demo squadron to see how they work in practice is the old fighter jock feeling of "Oooh! Cool! Wanna fly it." The Eagle-Viper-Warthog-AWACS mix worked well. The Raptor is a worthy successor to the Eagle, but there are too few Raptors. I do not see that the F-35 is superior to the Viper in the delivery of ordnance on target. Frankly, I do not see coherence in the Air Force’s acquisition plans. It looks to me like they are buying things because they are cool, not because they suit a defined role better than an existing aircraft.

FWIW I think any upgrade to AWACS must include control and targeting of RPVs. (Yeah, I know AWACS is obsolete terminology. But you know what I mean. Besides, the F-35 is an obsolete answer to the question of how do we put hurt on the target.)

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Of course F-135 is a typo. 

The simplest definition of air supremacy is “I can fly. You can’t.”  Air supremacy is not achieved by dogfights, and the air superiority mission isn’t really the key to winning the air war; this was the mistake Goering made. He had more air war experience than just about anyone else, first from his experiences as Freiherr von Richthofen’s successor in World War II, then in the Spanish Civil War; but it wasn’t in strategic air war. If you want to clear your yard of hornets you don’t swat one hornet at a time.  You clear out the nest. The WW II USAAF strategy of taking out fabrication of aircraft or of critical components of aircraft was sound, but it did not take account of the repair and reconstruction capabilities of German workers.  The costly Schweinfurt raids intended to stop German production of ball bearings, did not achieve their objectives, although it was difficult to know this at the time. Had Goering directed his air attacks on the British Fighter Command installations, particularly fuel storage, the outcome of the Battle of Britain might have been different.

Similarly the Army strategy of knocking out German airfields ahead of the advancing ground forces was quite sound, but resisted by the advocates of the Independent Air Force which had been persuaded that “victory through air power” was possible.  On the other hand, sometimes for political reasons it is important to swat the hornets one hornet at a time: that is to fight air penetration and interception battles. In those cases air superiority aircraft are vital, and “dual purpose” air superiority/recce strike weapons like TFX (FB-111) turn out to be nearly useless: there are no prizes for a really good second place airplane in air combat.  The TFX turned out to be an excellent weapon for recce strike and for isolating the battle area; nearly useless for close ground support; and very good but not quite good enough for air superiority missions.  When we pointed all this out to McNamara and recommended that we use everything we had to take out the three military airfields in North Viet Nam, he decided that we could target one of them.  When that was knocked out all the MiGs were moved to the other two, and their effectiveness was not much diminished – after all, they were in the combat area quickly, and didn’t have to fly any distance to get there.  I see I am rambling. I was involved in the strategic arguments in that situation, and I was on the design team for Boeing’s TFX proposal.

Structuring the force – Air Force, Navy, Marine, and Tactical Air – is complicated. We discuss much of this in Strategy of Technology. As technology advances rapidly it is important to build some operational system so that you can develop doctrines and tactics for the new weapons.  It is also important not to waste too much money on intermediate models.  None of tis is going to be settled in a few paragraphs.

But one thing is clear to me: the electronics, both hardware and software, of the F-35 is several years obsolete. It is still better than anything anyone else has; but five years we have three Moore’s Law cycles: capability doubles, and cost falls by half.  The rapid growth of technology makes it possible for newcomers to jump into the game. China is doing this now. We could and should be designing and building a fighter system at least twice as good as the F-35, and advances in technology have made that possible.  We must build enough F-35 to learn the new tactics and doctrines, but since funds are limited it is a mistake to spend billions on an obsolete airplane.  Structuring the Air Force is always a problem, because from the Army’s point of view a somewhat improved Warthog would be more than good enough.  Of course that airplane is entirely dependent on being protected by aircraft that are fairly useless in air superiority battles. Pilots good at close support of the field army are not likely to have a chance against middling good air superiority aircraft.  None of this is insoluble, but it must be resolved at the Presidential, not the Services, level – and at present the White House seems utterly unaware of this. 

As to what you call AWACS, with drones, the concept was developed by the Boeing advanced planning team back in the early 60’s. Boeing proposed building a fleet of KC-135 aircraft, some with lots of air to ground missiles (“Thoth Missiles”). Others would have a plethora of air to air missiles.  And of course they would be controlled by electronic warfare aircraft – all Boeing KC-135 but configured differently for each.  We had teams working with missile design companies on the armaments.  The fleet would be guarded by air supremacy aircraft to mop up anything that got through the missile interception drones.  War game analyses shoed this to be a pretty good system, but it was not loved by either the Army or the Air Force.  I left Boeing and air warfare to work on missiles and strategic defense in 1964, and I note that no contracts for the air supremacy fleet were ever issued.  Schriever’s Project Forecast, directed by Francis X. Kane, came up with some important concepts in the early 60’s, and some of them were implemented; but the conflict between the services always as to be resolved at the Presidential level, and few Presidents have been equipped to do that.  All services will buy things because they are cool if given the opportunity. Who doesn’t?

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.