Yearly Archives: 2015

Chaos Manor View, Monday, December 28, 2015

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

I never had this happen before. I had prepared a bunch of stuff to post in Windows, and it’s gone. Gone forever and not in the recycle bin. A couple of hours work, and I have no idea what I did. And of course it’s cold, and I can’t type, and I am about as down as I can get, so this will be brief as I try to reconstruct at least some of it. Word has never caused a file to vanish before. I am sure it is due to my hitting alt-spacebar and some key sequence. I need epoxy to disable the left hand alt key. I hate this.

Mostly I am working on fiction and doing family things and surviving the cold, which isn’t cold to anyone but Angelinos; I’ve long since become adjusted to here. Happy New Year.  If you haven’t bought There Will Be War Volume Ten, you know what to do.

Another time.

Last week I wrote about Eugene, a new system Eric and I built. Well, he did about all the work. Anyway we are still doing many tests, and there will be a lot more. I must say 4K video is gorgeous even with the built in Video. We’ll add a video car next month or so.

The SSD in Eugene isn’t merely an SSD, which nobody in their right mind who makes a decent living would be without, it is a PCIe connected SSD with read speeds up to 2.5 GB. One of the reasons for running the Insider version of Windows 10 is this drive is so fast the system cannot fully exploit it but Microsoft surely has plans as these will become common by this time next year.

                Also, the hard drive is 3 TB, because 4K video adds up quick. Now that high-end phones can capture 4K video and semi-pro gear is very affordable for the budding movie maker, multi-TB drives continue to justify their role in a PC where SSD capacity is now affordable for most other needs.

Eric Pobirs

This article is worth your attention.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/27/love-robot-artificial-intelligence-elon-musk-stephen-hawking

Ever since IBM’s Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game contest in May 1997, humanity has been looking over its shoulder as computers have been running up the inside rail. What task that we thought was our exclusive preserve will they conquer next? What jobs will they take? And what jobs will be left for humans when they do? The pessimistic case was partly set out in the Channel 4 series Humans, about a near-future world where intelligent, human-like robots would do routine work, or stand on streets handing out flyers, while some people worked (law and policing seemed to get a pass, mostly) but others were displaced – and angry.

In May, Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment, described the concern for both white- and blue-collar workers as that Humans-style world approaches: “Try to imagine a new industry that doesn’t exist today that will create millions of new jobs. It’s hard to do.”[snip]

The prospect of robot Lamarckian evolution, self aware robots building their prodigy to design, has been with us a while. Of course some, like Penrose, have doubts about strong AI; and in any event I will not live to see it.

I think that the biggest problem we’ll have in the near future is the automated cars. There are so many possibilities of the car saving its occupants only to kill others, or saving kids to kill the occupants, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

The other stuff awaits true AI, which is, IMHO, a good piece off yet. If it ever arrives at all; it seems to me to be developing a “sustained fusion reaction syndrome,” always “only” a couple decades away.
Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”

three laws, no waiting
Dr. Pournelle,
A good summary of the state of real AI.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/demystifying-artificial-intelligence-no-the-singularity-is-not-just-around-the-corner/
As for the singularity or sky net, I think there are more important and likely things to worry about.
-d

Of course, even with the best of intentions, robots can leave us with not much to do as they take over all our work. See Jack Williamson, With Folded Hands…

Visual picture of near Earth space, then and now

Jerry

From 1957, 58 years of space junk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPXCk85wMSQ

Ed

Suppose I am a Fubartarian. That’s a peaceful get along religion that allows its adherents to do what seems necessary if somebody else sticks a nose, pee-pee, scream, or even gun in to the adherent’s face. Otherwise adherents are expected to be peaceful and honest co-dwellers on this great ball of crusty molten gup.

Suppose my holiest day is coming along, fimblemas. So I go around and as a Fubartarian I wish others around me a glorious Fimblemas.

Why are some people repelled and moved to lawsuits over the simple wish for a specially good day on a day I consider significant? I am not wishing them to take on my idiosyncratic religion. I’m just wishing them a good day. Most other religions take the wish at face value even if the day is not significant to them. It becomes, “I hope you have a wonderful day on the 47th of gargle.”

(Whenever that is.) But atheists seem to be VERY religious about taking offense.

Is it because they see money in it? Is it their religion’s creed to feel threatened when a member of another religion uses improper phrasing to simply wish them a good day? Or are they just plain old fashioned fuggheads?

Regardless, I’d like to wish all readers here a VERY Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year beginning with the first strains of Robert Burns’ traditional melody to the last tick of 2016.

{^_^} Joanne Dow (And please underline Christmas in your minds.)

A Grim Fate for Syrian Christians.

<http://warisboring.com/articles/a-grim-fate-for-syrian-christians/>

Be sure to read the comments.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

250,000 fine for Misgendering Transexuals…

Yes, I know this is local and topical, but it’s related to the national trend of “safe spaces”, “microagressions” and all this “social justice warrior” nonsense:

New York City will fine certain people 250,000 dollars for using the wrong pronoun with a transsexual…

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/27/nyc-will-fine-you-250000-for-misgendering-a-transsexual/

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Brave new world, fueled by progress.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-scientists-dismiss-the-possibility-of-cold-fusion

And there is still some funding to investigate the Pons Fleischmann effect.  Energy without fossil fuels and enormous central distribution nets would change the world.  Of course oil and gas companies know that. Hot fusion has been thirty years in the future for forty years. And, as the article says, Rossi continues to produce heat than anyone can find going in.

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

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, December 24, 2015

Christmas Eve

.

It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold!
“Peace on the earth, good will to men,
From heaven’s all gracious King!
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come
With peaceful wings unfurled
And still their heavenly music floats
O’er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing.
And ever o’er its Babel sounds
The blessed angels sing.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world hath suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love song which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophet bards foretold,
When, with the ever-circling years,
Shall come the Age of Gold;
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And all the world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.

We can hope so, anyway. God bless you all.

And a special Merry Christmas to all on deployment, and to all who sit in ready alert rooms, or deep underground in silos, or under the sea in submarines, on watch in warships or in fire stations, on patrol or watch in cities and towns and in the country.  Thanks to you the rest of us can sleep tonight. God bless you, every one.

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, December 22, 2015

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

I have rediscovered the authors page on Amazon; if you have not claimed authorship of your book and there are contributors who have, one of those will be listed with link to author page, and often a bio. A boon to that author. I figured out what was happening and got some of it fixed. I’ll probably do more. It’s the first time I have thought about that author’s page in a decade or more.

Unfortunately that ate up time I should have been spending on the Avalon book, and we have a conference and lunch on that tomorrow. That means I have somewhat neglected this place. Nothing I can do about that but apologize.

We have a new system. SSD C drive and a terabyte spinning metal drive, 4K screen, experimental grade Windows 10. I’ll have more to say another time; it’s still on a shakedown cruise. I can say that Windows is shaping up nicely. They have improved the improved Office; I wish I could go back to Office 7 and stay there, particularly Word; I presume they will tune the “improved” version to make the autocorrect work like Office 7 did, but maybe not. Some of the Improvements are OK, but it’s well past my requirements; I wish they would get a good text creation editor, optimize it for that, and leave it alone; use Publisher or some fancy program for exotic formats. Sometimes you just want to write a book. Publishers do the formatting.

“The disintegration of such giant comets would produce intermittent but prolonged periods of bombardment lasting up to 100,000 years.”

<http://news.yahoo.com/giant-comets-may-threaten-earth-astronomers-145625835.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

RE: “The disintegration of such giant comets would produce intermittent but prolonged periods of bombardment lasting up to 100,000 years.”

1) This is not news. Astronomers have known this for years, if not decades. The Kuiper Belt and especially the Oort Cloud are likely reservoirs of just such objects as this, and are probably made up of this type of thing. After all, New Horizons is studying Pluto and its system of moons, and these are all ice bodies insofar as we can tell from the data, with precious little bits of rock thrown in — aka dirty iceballs. Slip ’em into a high-eccentricity orbit, they would get dubbed centaur comets.

2) Practicality of search is the problem. Look at what we’ve had to do just to explore the Pluto system.

3) Comet strike is a possible KT-boundary event causation, but not the most probable. That still remains the Chixulub impactor, which evidence indicates was an asteroid, not a comet.

4) The more probable means of throwing one or more of ’em inward is passage by a neighboring star, and tidal disruption of Oort cloud objects thereby. This has been a general consideration for the various extinction events over the epochs.

5) Secondary problem: we’re still speculating on the best way(s) to move a bloody asteroid. How do you move something the size of a small moon? Because yes, we are talking about objects the size of Pluto’s moons Nix and Hydra.

Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com

We’re already experiencing “intermittent but prolonged periods of bombardment,” which we call “meteor showers.”

Clearly it _could_ be worse, but the data to show that this threat is _likely_ to get worse seem to be lacking.

. png

 

 

A SpaceX Twofer

Jerry,

SpaceX’s first post-accident Falcon 9 launch is in orbit and deploying payloads.

Far more important in the long run, the F9 booster first stage is back on the landing pad at Canaveral, upright and intact, after engine-braking back down from something over 5,000 km/h at over 100 km altitude. A good day, for the company, for the industry, and for all of us who think that learning how to get off this planet affordably is important for the future of the species.

There’s plenty more hard work ahead, but this, on top of Blue Origin’s similar but less extreme booster-landing feat a few weeks ago (roughly the same height but without the large horizontal velocity) is a huge step forward. With two rival outfits both succeeding, it’s not just luck, or a stunt – we really are finally learning how to reuse space-launch rockets.

http://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/679114269485436928/photo/1

Henry

SpaceX launches rocket 6 months after accident, then lands | Fox News

Jerry,

It isn’t SSTO, but it achieves many of the same goals.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/12/21/spacex-launches-rocket-6-months-after-accident-then-lands.html?intcmp=latestnews

The next step is to either reduce structural mass of the booster to make it SSTO or develop an upper stage that is itself recoverable and reusable. I for see Ballutes playing a role in the later idea.

James Crawford=

It isn’t my SSX but it’s definitely a step forward from DC/X and on the path we need to follow. The Commercial Space Act which we worked so hard for has also been working. Cheer.

A neat video of 360 days of sky over San Francisco

Jerry,

Enjoy! The video is just under 5 minutes.

“Each panel shows one day. With 360 movie panels, the sky over (almost) an entire year is shown in time lapse format as recorded by a video camera on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, California”

<http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap151222.html>

Regards, Charles Adams

http://www.amazon.com/There-Will-Be-War-X-ebook/dp/B019KYLOKQ/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8&amp%3Btag=chaosmanor-20

Has been selling very well, and the reviews have been good.

The Pipe Organ Desk.

<http://www.kagenschaefer.com/pipeorgandesk.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Random presidential candidates

Dear Dr. Pournelle, 
I read one of the comments to your blog in which an author proposed that presidential candidates be chosen by lottery.   I believe there is a problem with this approach, and the name of the counterexample is Barack Hussein Obama. As in, this is what happens when a major political party nominates a person without meaningful executive experience to the white house , and he proceeds to “govern” for eight years. 
The fundamental problem is that , in a world where the presidential candidates are selected by lottery, those candidates still have to run for office and win the election. That’s going to cost millions of dollars in advertisements, tv spots. The person also needs to travel from state to state “selling” him or herself, participating in TV debates, answering questions on topics like ethanol in Iowa that the average citizen doesn’t think about. 
Which means that they’re going to need a bevy of handlers, pr people, airplane pilots, advertising copy writers, you name it. 
I don’t believe a randomly selected person is going to be able to put together that machine by themselves.  But that won’t be a problem, because the existing Democratic and Republican machines will beat a path to their door offering all those services in exchange for signing onto the platform.  If the candidates are the products of the American school system, I find it unlikely they will have independently thought about these issues. Instead, the majority will simply blindly cling to whatever creed happened to be popular in their social circle at the time they were selected.
What that means is that instead of a runoff consisting of governors and senators, we’d have a political nomination of people who are the bought-and-paid-for creatures of the existing machines, people without meaningful political ideas of their own, people who make Obama look competent and well-prepared , since HE at least had national political experience as a senator before his run. 
…
I would suggest the current system is a better solution.  And will remain so, so long as the cost of running for President is as expensive as it is.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

‘The study found existing models for climate change had been too simplistic and did not account for these factors.’

<http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/628524/Climate-change-shock-Burning-fossil-fuels-COOLs-planet-says-NASA>

I’ve spent about six months of my life in China, all told, mainly in Beijing and Shanghai. Of that six months, only on two days did I see blue skies and sunshine – and those were by far the hottest days I experienced in China.

Those two sunny days, one after the other, were bracketed by darker days full of the usual Mordor-like soot. It was noticeably cooler on the darker days.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

The models were designed when computers were not so good; now I have on my desk a faster machine with more memory than they had when they started climate models and chose the sizes of weather cells to use (and of course all had to be equal),

Perhaps it is new model time.

Meanwhile models are what we have; if they had better date they might find some new answers; but it is certainly time to refine the models – only they “test” the models against each other. And while temperature measuring equipment is so much better, they can’t use it to measure the past…

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

Chaos Manor View, Sunday, December 20, 2015

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019KYLOKQ?tag=chaosmanor-20

There Will Be War Volume 10 is out and can be ordered now. Early on would be good, I suppose, assuming making the top of Amazon sales lists is a good thing. In any event, it’s out, if you like military or war science fiction you’ll love it, and I can move on to the next books. My typing is worse than usual tonight. I’d apologize, but with luck you won’t see that; the spell checker will find the typos, autocorrect will take care of about half, and I’ll get the others, It takes me as long to correct a sentence as it did to write it. Ah, well.

One of the essays in the book, by Commander Phillip Pournelle, won the Surface Navy Association Literary Award for the for the year:

SNA Literary Award Winner Notification

Dear Commander Pournelle,

It is my pleasure to inform you that have been selected as this year’s

recipient of the Surface Navy Association Literary Award for your article

“The Deadly Future of Littoral Sea Control “published in the July 2015 issue

of Proceedings.

I have attached a letter from the President of SNA announcing your selection

and providing details on how to receive this honor. The award is normally

presented during the Awards Luncheon on 14 January at our National Symposium

in Washington DC, 12-14 January 2016 (details at Caution-www.navysna.org).

Bill Erickson

CAPT, USN (Ret)

Executive Director, Surface Navy Association

mathematical greetings of the season

Mathematics IS a language, you know…  😀
Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”

IQ as predictor.
IQ is a valuable predictor as I also learned in Graduate school. I think the newer concept of EQ or Emotional Quotient is also a valuable predictor. The combination of the two is even more effective.
IQ is not well defined as a review of the literature will show, unfortunately EQ is even less well defined. Still the concept of measuring EQ as a general form of emotional maturity adds a very useful dimension to predictive validity.
At least for me, it helps explain the number of people that I meet that are very smart but not very successful in life.

Tom Carey

A good part of the book Hive Mind is devoted to speculations on why IQ is a less successful predictor of individual achievement that a national average IQ is of GNP. It remains the best single predictor with individuals, but multivariate predictors are far better; as I have written before. A good part of my graduate work in psychology was in multivariate analysis and required that I go to the math department to learn calculus, matrix algebra, theory of probability, and experimental statistics – which eventually sparked my going into operations research/systems analysis. I started as an aerospace psychologist, but didn’t stay there long.

Mayans, giants in North America?

<http://www.examiner.com/article/south-american-and-mayan-dna-discovered-southern-appalachians>

<http://www.examiner.com/article/ruins-georgia-mountains-show-evidence-of-maya-connection>

<http://www.examiner.com/article/did-giants-once-live-north-america>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

My, my. First I have heard of this, Thanks.

On Random Promotion

You write:
<<
Cicero said that the problem with democracy was it prevented able men from rising to the top.
>>
Then Cicero was being too clever by half.
Lawrence J. Peter put it more scientifically. He said that democracy puts no barriers for men to rise to their level of incompetence and stay there; whereas aristocracies, with their artificial barriers and bridges to advancement, force some able men to stop advancing before they reach their level of incompetence, and allows other able men to bypass their level entirely.
I propose a system of random promotions, followed by a period of training and vetting, and re-demotion if necessary. In a sense jury duty is such a system; and so is aristocracy, given that position is an ‘accident of birth’. The Tibetan Buddhists choose their Dalai Lama by elaborate mystical rites that no doubt make internal sense, but which I think look a lot like random sampling.
If random sampling works for the Dalai Lama, and jury duty, then maybe it would work for the Presidency. Here’s my proposal; once every four years, a dozen or so citizens get a letter saying “Greetings! You are now a Presidential candidate!” They then suffer the usual journalistic vetting that candidates suffer now. Also there are behind-the-scenes meetings. Some candidates will try to beg off, but only serious excuses are accepted, as with jury duty now. After winnowing comes the election, for you need the appearance of public input for our system to work.

Paradoctor

Athens considered having a random factor in choosing high office – but not high military office – required to maintain democracy. Worked until it didn’t.

Windows Live Mail re-patched

Dear Jerry,
It appears that Microsoft partially/mostly fixed the Windows Live Mail crash that they introduced with the KB3093594 patch. The following InfoWorld article has the details.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3016851/microsoft-windows/microsoft-reissues-botched-windows-live-mail-2012-patch-kb-3093594.html?nsdr=true
Regards,
P Brooks

Your upcoming IQ essay – food for thought

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Please see the historical attachment on military aptitude testing. I hope it may assist you with your IQ essay.

Personal Anecdote: Back in 1984, I was a Lieutenant Naval Aviator (P-3 Orion pilot) just coming off my first tour of duty in Hawaii. (We defended against the Pacific Theater sub threat from the Russkies at the end of the Cold war.) I was posted for a three year tour in Navy Officer Recruiting for Officers in Hyattsville Md.
I tested hundreds of applicants using the methods in the attached document. I remember best the AQT/FAR portion which tested for general intelligence and flight aptitude. These and other tests (about four hours) were rolled up into a final “score” from 20-80.

I was charged with attaining quotas, especially minority quotas, for general officer recruiting and Navy flight school. One of my applicants was a young black male with a 4.0 average in physics (verified from transcripts) from Morgan State University, a predominantly black college in Maryland. This young man, who presented well and really wanted to be a pilot, scored the minimum – 20 – on the combined final scoring. No other applicant during the time I was a recruiter scored so low. I can’t seen to remember anyone scoring less than about 40. I was crushed to have to pass on the news to this kid.

From this single data point, I drew a conclusion: Black colleges were not serving their students in getting a degree that mattered to anyone outside the black community. I hope they are doing better 30 years later.

I look forward to reading your essay.

Merry Christmas, Joe

project Loon

the statement was made by a commenter that cell towers are cheap
that depends where you put them. you also need to get power and data signals to the tower.
you also need a LOT of towers to cover the same area that one balloon can cover.
It’s also a LOT harder for people on the ground to damage a balloon. In many parts of the world (including parts of the US), a vacant house will have the pipes ripped from it’s walls to be sold for scrap by poor locals.
cell towers work where there is a high enough density of people and the locals are going to leave it alone.
I’m not saying that balloons don’t have problems themselves, but they are a very different set of problems.
David Lang

: The billion-dollar robot question — how can we make sure they’re safe?

Will the robot car protect me from a cop having a bad day? I grew up watching Dragnet and Adam 12 and really respect the cops I watched on those shows. I’m wondering if the robots from “the day the earth stood still” could prevent individual, group and state violence. Of course they could modified by people seeking power. Maybe the robot car should save the children if I’m driving recklessly.

How to hack any Linux machine just using backspace (ZD)

A rather embarrassing bug has been discovered which allows anyone to break into a Linux machine with ease.

By Charlie Osborne for Zero Day | December 21, 2015 — 08:44 GMT (00:44 PST) | 

If you press the backspace key 28 times on a locked-down Linux machine you want to access, a Grub2 bootloader flaw will allow you to break through password protection and wreck havoc in the system.

Researchers Hector Marco and Ismael Ripoll from the Cybersecurity Group at Universitat Politècnica de València recently discovered the vulnerability within GRUB, the bootloader used by most Linux distros.

As reported by PC World, the bootloader is used to initialize a Linux system at start and uses a password management system to protect boot entries — which not only prevents tampering but also can be used to disable peripheries such as CD-ROMs and USB ports.

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