March 2015 – Page 5 – Chaos Manor

The mountains labor; the future of the dollar; Beware the fury of the Legions

By Jerry Pournelle | Mar 10, 2015 - 4:04 pm | Updated: March 10, 2015 - 4:33 pm | View

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Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, March 10, 2015

I was going for another story conference today, but John had problems, which is just as well because I still have a cold. Not bad, but it hangs on. Given that half the United States is suffering from Climate Change as Global Warming buries them under ten feet of snow, while Southern California is warm and sunny, I mustn’t complain.

The Apple Mountains labored, and have produced the Apple Watch. It may be a very profitable item, but for me it is not very interesting; at least not yet. I am reminded of one of Aesop’s fables: http://www.taleswithmorals.com/aesop-fable-the-mountains-in-labour.htm .

A watch that was in communication with my telephone, allowing me to dictate notes without removing the phone from its holster would be of more use to me; indeed a watch that was in integral part of the phone system might be very useful. The present ones seem to me more decorative, although their ability to keep my calendar without drawing out me phone is a good start.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-apple-medical-research-app-20150309-story.html

Apple’s medical research app raises hopes, questions (LA Times)

By MELISSA HEALY

A new toolkit announced by Apple on Monday would allow medical researchers to tap into an expanding universe of iPhone users to recruit and enroll study participants, collect data and monitor health outcomes that are the object of research.

Apple on Monday made publicly available five new apps built by Apple and various university researchers using the toolkit. The company said it would release the open-access software for the toolkit next month, so other researchers could tailor apps to their needs.

Researchers studying asthma, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and breast cancer will be the first to use the new apps to conduct studies.

Most of the research being launched with the new applications appears to allow participants and researchers to track the daily lives and functioning of subjects and detect patterns that might lead to better disease-management practices.

One of the apps will be used as a part of an observational study that collects data from Parkinson’s patients in an effort to more fully understand the disease and how it affects daily life. Parkinson’s patients who download the app will be able to use the iPhone’s GPS and accelerometer to provide data on dexterity, balance, gait, voice strength and memory several times a day.

Apple Introduces ResearchKit, Giving Medical Researchers the Tools to Revolutionize Medical Studies

New Apps to Aid Research on Asthma, Breast Cancer, Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes & Parkinson’s Disease

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Apple® today announced ResearchKit™, an open source software framework designed for medical and health research, helping doctors and scientists gather data more frequently and more accurately from participants using iPhone® apps. World-class research institutions have already developed apps with ResearchKit for studies on asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.* Users decide if they want to participate in a study and how their data is shared.

Apple introduces ResearchKit, giving medical researchers the tools to revolutionize medical studies. (Photo: Business Wire)

“iOS apps already help millions of customers track and improve their health. With hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world, we saw an opportunity for Apple to have an even greater impact by empowering people to participate in and contribute to medical research,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations. “ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse, global population and more ways to collect data than ever before.”

ResearchKit turns iPhone into a powerful tool for medical research. When granted permission by the user, apps can access data from the Health app such as weight, blood pressure, glucose levels and asthma inhaler use, which are measured by third-party devices and apps. HealthKit™ is a software framework Apple introduced with iOS 8 to provide developers the ability for health and fitness apps to communicate with each other. ResearchKit can also request from a user, access to the accelerometer, microphone, gyroscope and GPS sensors in iPhone to gain insight into a patient’s gait, motor impairment, fitness, speech and memory.

ResearchKit also makes it easier to recruit participants for large-scale studies, accessing a broad cross-section of the population—not just those within driving distance of an institution. Study participants can complete tasks or submit surveys right from the app, so researchers spend less time on paperwork and more time analyzing data. ResearchKit also enables researchers to present an interactive informed consent process. Users choose which studies to participate in and the data they want to provide in each study.

“We’re excited to use these new ResearchKit tools from Apple to expand participant recruitment and quickly gather even more data through the simple use of an iPhone app. The data it will provide takes us one step closer to developing more personalized care,” said Patricia Ganz, MD, professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Director of Cancer Prevention & Control Research at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Access to more diverse patient-reported health data will help us learn more about long-term aftereffects of cancer treatments and provide us with a better understanding of the breast cancer patient experience.”

“When it comes to researching how we can better diagnose and prevent disease, numbers are everything. By using Apple’s new ResearchKit framework, we’re able to extend participation beyond our local community and capture significantly more data to help us understand how asthma works,” said Eric Schadt, PhD, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. “Using iPhone’s advanced sensors, we’re able to better model an asthma patient’s condition to enable us to deliver a more personalized, more precise treatment.”

Developed by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions, the Asthma Health app is designed to facilitate asthma patient education and self-monitoring, promote positive behavioral changes and reinforce adherence to treatment plans according to current asthma guidelines. The study tracks symptom patterns in an individual and potential triggers for these exacerbations so that researchers can learn new ways to personalize asthma treatment.

It took longer to bring this out than I would have thought, but it certainly is significant. Look for a new wave of such programs coupled with micro sensors of the sort I saw at the Hilton Island Nanotech Conference last year http://www.hh2014.org/general.html — there will undoubtedly be more this year http://www.mnmconferences.com/nanotechnologies_attend-conference.html?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=Nanotech%20registration&gclid=CPjgw5TsnsQCFYqDfgodN2EAbw – and expect real progress. This might be incorporated into a watch. That would be progress indeed.

The one Chinese innovation that could change the way we think about money (WP)

By Dominic Basulto March 10 at 8:59 AM

The new China International Payments System (CIPS), which is set to debut before the end of 2015, has been described as a “worldwide payments superhighway for the yuan.” What the creation of such a system means in the short-term is that the Chinese currency (officially known as the renminbi) has the potential to become a truly international, convertible currency and a more attractive currency for conducting international trade and finance. What it means in the long-term is that America’s long reign of economic dominance is at risk.

Ever since the end of World War II, the dollar has been the bedrock of the international financial system. The rise of a competitor currency to challenge the dollar seems almost impossible. While the euro and the yen have emerged as possible options for supplanting the dollar, they have never had the global clout of the U.S. dollar. China’s plans for the internationalization of the renminbi, though, are a different matter entirely. Given the size and heft of China’s economy, it only makes sense that China is creating a global payments system to make it easier for people to trade, invest and conduct transactions using the renminbi.

One way to measure how important the Chinese currency has become worldwide is to look at the percentage of international trade finance deals that are conducted using the renminbi. On a global basis, the renminbi accounts for nearly 9 percent of all trade finance deals worldwide, the second largest behind only the dollar. Moreover, as of January 2015, the renminbi is now the fifth most used payments currency in the world, trailing only the dollar, the euro, the pound sterling, and the yen. According to Wim Raymaekers, Head of Banking Markets at SWIFT, this is “an important milestone” that confirms the transition of the renminbi from an “emerging” to a “business as usual” payment currency.

One area where the launch of the new Chinese payments system could really have an impact is in the global energy markets. As a result of the so-called “petrodollar system” established between the U.S. and Middle East oil producers, oil exports are priced and transacted in dollars. Now imagine the price of oil being quoted in Chinese yuan and not U.S. dollars. What if Saudi oil exporters decide they want yuan and not dollars for their oil? That means anyone buying or selling oil in commodity markets has to have a yuan bank account in addition to a dollar bank account. Given the voracious energy demands of China’s growing economy, it’s easy to see why a global payments system facilitating these trades makes sense.

An interesting future. Farewell the Almighty Dollar and with it the Euro and the Ruble..

: The Demise of Military Integrity

An apt article, if overdue. I recall being told: “there is the right way, the wrong way, and the army way”.

http://ow.ly/K921n

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Leaders lie “in the routine performance of their duties,” and “ethical and moral transgressions [occur] across all levels” of the organization. Leaders have also become “ethically numb,” using “justifications and rationalizations” to overcome any ethical doubts. This “tacit acceptance of dishonesty… [facilitates] hypocrisy” among leaders.

These quotations sound like they are ripped from the headlines about some major corporate scandal. But they’re not describing Enron before its collapse in 2001, or firms like Lehman Brothers and Countrywide before the 2008 financial crisis. Instead, they describe one of the country’s most respected institutions: the U.S. Army.

Leonard Wong and Stephen Gerras, who are both professors at the U.S. Army War College, just published a devastating study called Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession. They state up front that indications of ethical and moral problems can be found throughout the entire U.S. military, not just in the Army. These include (but certainly are not limited to) U.S. Air Force personnel cheating on tests about nuclear launch systems, and U.S. Navy admirals and others sharing classified information in exchange for gifts and bribes. Last year, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel appointed a two-star admiral as the first Senior Advisor for Military Professionalism to address mounting concerns about ethical issues throughout the force.

Nevertheless, this study of the Army deserves special attention, because its findings are so broad and deeply disturbing. Wong and Gerras find that it is “literally impossible” for Army officers to meet all the requirements imposed on them, but that it is also unacceptable for them to fail to meet the requirements. They routinely square this impossible circle by lying – about what they’ve done, who they’ve trained, and to what standard. Yet they maintain a self-image of integrity by rationalizing their lies in various ways. They no longer see this pervasive dishonesty as dishonorable, or even wrong. As Wong and Gerras argue:

“‘White’ lies and ‘innocent’ mistruths have become so commonplace in the U.S. Army that there is often no ethical angst, no deep soul-searching, and no righteous outrage when examples of routine dishonesty are encountered. Mutually agreed deception exists in the Army because many decisions to lie, cheat, or steal are simply no longer viewed as ethical choices.”

We have seen signs of this in the Academies; if there is rot there you may be sure there is more in the field. Of course there have always been Sergeant Bilko and his minions, and there have always been higher officers with political influence; is there more now? Recall the letter from Africa from the centurion.

“We had been told, on leaving our native soil, that we were to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many of our citizens settled overseas, so many years of our presence, so many benefits brought by us to populations in need of our assistance and civilization. We were able to verify that this was true, and because it was true, we did not hesitate to shed our quota of blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes. We regretted nothing, but whereas we over here are inspired by their frame of mind, I am told that in Rome factions and conspiracies are rife, that treachery flourishes, and that many people in their uncertainty and confusion lend a ready ear to the dire temptations of relinquishment and vilify our action. I cannot believe that all this true, and yet recent wars have shown how pernicious such a state of mind could be and to where it could lead. Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we protect the glory of the Empire. If it should be otherwise, if we should leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware the fury of the legions.”

From a letter supposedly written by one Marcus Flavinius, a centurion in the second cohort of the 2nd Augusta Legion serving overseas, to his cousin, Tertullus, in Rome, quoted in the Prologue of Jean Larteguy’s novel, “The Centurions.” http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2009/09/the-angst-of-the-legions.html

(And yes, I am aware that this may be fiction; I first became aware of it as an epigraph in The Centurions; but fiction or not it expresses a real concern. But recall its results. Timocracies rarely last a generation. They are replaced by something far worse.)

I am pleased to report a strong upsurge in sales of The California Sixth Grade Reader. http://www.amazon.com/California-Sixth-Grade-Reader-Pournelle-ebook/dp/B00LZ7PB7E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425595105&sr=8-1&keywords=california+sixth and I hope that will continue. Technology has given us some means of counteracting the abysmal plunge of the public education system. The Kahn Academy https://www.khanacademy.org/ is another. The Kahn site has recently been “improved” in a disturbing manner, but the underlying lessons seem as effective as ever.

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

SD Cards; Educating Educators, Aliens and Talking to Them, Federalism, Sapir-Whorf; and Other Matters.

By Jerry Pournelle | Mar 8, 2015 - 4:20 pm | Updated: March 8, 2015 - 10:56 pm | Mail

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Chaos Manor Mail, Sunday, March 08, 2015

Continuing the March 4 discussion on SanDisk SD cards:

Regarding the 200 GB SanDisk microSD card, Chris Barker is simply wrong. This is not a primary storage device for a PC or other system that uses that volume for virtual memory paging. On an SSD, which is intended to replace a conventional hard drive and thus must fulfill the virtual memory role, provision is made for the loss of cell function without loss of advertised capacity as Mr. Barker explains. But this simply isn’t an issue for a volume that isn’t used for paging. The level of read and, most importantly, write activity is far, far less. The allocation of a large area to hide the loss of capacity over time simply isn’t necessary as the typical usage of an SD card or USB flash drive doesn’t produce the rate of loss that would be noticed in the device’s expected life cycle. Most current operating systems are designed to handle this as a background task. (The Windows ReadyBoost feature that first appeared in Windows Vista would have been a very high usage scenario for a USB flash drive but falling prices on RAM made it unlikely that many people managed to appreciably wear out a flash drive using ReadyBoost.)

Another clue here is the extreme amount of capacity supposedly being set aside by SanDisk. A 256 GB SSD is typically sold as a 240 GB volume (before formatting) with 16 Gb set aside for replacing cells lost to wear. For a microSD card to have 3.5 times as much set aside for that purpose is absurd. It should also be noted that 256 GB SD cards are already on the market, which are electrically identical to microSD cards. If the capacity was due to factory allocation settings rather than physical chip volume, it would be reflected in the SD cards already.

Using a SD card for primary storage on a desktop OS like Windows, MacOS, or Linux would be a miserable experience, so little provision is made for such usage. The performance level of UHS-I cards is at best on par with the last generation of parallel ATA before SATA became the prevailing hard drive interface for mainstream PCs. (UHS-II cards, offering read performance roughly between SATA-I and SATA-II, and devices that support them are still rare and not a factor for most conversations about SDXC. It’s possible they won’t catch on before an entirely new standard takes root.) In a related matter, the cell phone industry is prepping a major shift in how it interfaces primary storage because the bottleneck of the existing standard for embedded flash, eMMC 5.01, is expected to become a drag on performance gains by other components. A newer standard, UFS 2.0, offers substantially higher performance close to the latest generation of PCI-e SSD just appearing in PCs. Both eMMC and UFS are JEDEC standards, so there aren’t any rivalry issues as so often has complicated things in the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#SDXC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Flash_Storage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiMediaCard#eMMC

Eric Pobirs

I would say misinterpreted, rather than wrong. Of one thing we may be certain: the observation I made 30 years ago, that silicon is cheaper than iron and therefore memory drive would replace spinning metal for hard drives, as a long time coming but is finally arriving

DOJ Ferguson Report

Dear Dr. Pournelle,
The Justice Department has released its report on Ferguson
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/national/department-of-justice-report-on-the-ferguson-mo-police-department/1435/

which essentially follows this report from before the events:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vwptqn3mhq9xvy7/ArchCity%20Defenders%20Municipal%20Courts%20Whitepaper.pdf

It appears that the city decided to use the police department as a revenue generating device, which so antagonized the community that it only took a single spark to touch off a riot. That happened.

I’m a little bit puzzled as to what any of the rest of us can do about it; if there’s a city council then the most logical course would be for the city voters to Throw The Bums Out. However, I also suspect that many of those most directly affected can’t vote due to felony convictions.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Didn’t New York do the same with their cigarette tax?

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. The cigarette tax was one thing. By contrast, it appears that Ferguson took the ‘broken window’ concept of policing to an extreme by upping enforcement of minor violations up to 11 , and always levying a fine, never jail time, for the infractions.

Point 2: Almost all of the charges levied in Ferguson were municipal charges, even when there was an equally applicable state law.

What does that tell you?

Point 3: There were some other things as well. For instance, there was one woman who owed a $100 fine but couldn’t pay it, so she tried to pay a $27 partial remittance until she could get the money together. The courts wouldn’t take it. They wanted the full amount at once, and refused any attempt.

There was another case where a gentleman had paid $500 on a $100 fine — and still owed $551 thanks to interest!

Put all this together and I think we’re seeing something far different than what we saw in New York .. this looks to me much like the ‘organized brigandage’ St. Augustine described in “City of God” , the sort of thing that happens when justice and the state part ways.

I admit I’m a bit confused as to how we reached this place. The point of a democracy is that the leaders are elected, and are supposed to be removed by an outraged citizenry when things get this bad, preferably with tar and feathers. Likewise, there’s supposed to be oversight over police behavior, an internal affairs bureau, and recourse when things go bad. Instead it’s as if the system has frozen up — we no longer seem to have any way of checking or restraining police or governmental power.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

One of the consequences of the Constitution is that these United States will always have different opinions about what is right and what is wrong. There will always be some who would make a Federal Case out of State and local policies which were not given to the Federal Government; abortion is one such. No one thought there was a Federal right to abortion in the Constitution for two Centuries, and the various states had different policies; it was a matter for the States, and there was insufficient national consensus for a Constitutional Amendment. The liberal view was that this was a moral issue of great importance, and the court found a right of privacy in the “emanations and penumbras” particularly in the 14^th Amendment, although the States that adopted that Amendment would have been astonished to learn that were conferring a right of privacy which forbid state laws against contraception. The principle that the Constitution was a living document rather than a contract is now upon us, and the original Constitution which restricted the Federal Government to explicitly granted powers, reserving all the rest to the States (or to the people) is dead. Some mourn it still. In the deciding case Justice Stewart called the Connecticut statute “an uncommonly silly law” but argued that it was nevertheless constitutional. The Federal government might be far more “correct” by modern standards, but it did not have the Constitutional power to impose that view against the States any more than, prior to the 13^th Amendment, it had the Constitutional power to end slavery.

The Ferguson system seems unseemly, but the remedy is political, not the force of the Federal government. Both State and Federal investigations have shown there is no Federal Case here. Similarly, the New York Cigarette tax seems stupid, and perhaps the Interstate Commerce law ought to be applied; but it seems to be New York’s business, not mine. Or the US Attorney’s.

Of course there is much in “modern” Federal practice that resembles “organized brigandage”. We are well on the way to what the late Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny”. We have sown the wind. Were I living in Ferguson I would study the Atlas, and were I in the business of helping the citizens of Ferguson I would be installing precinct committee members; not imposing my views by force because of my moral certainty. In particular, intimidating store clerks while stealing cigars is a dangerous and probably ineffective form of protest.

We’re not alone?

More evidence that we may not be alone in the universe:

<.>

Astronomers believe mysterious signals – previously dismissed as stellar bursts – are coming from an Earth-like planet.

The Gliese 581d planet has conditions that could support life, and is likely to be a rocky world, twice the size of Earth.

Signals from the planet were initially discovered in 2010, but last year dismissed as noise from distant stars.

Now, a further study claims that the 2014 research was based on ‘inadequate analyses of the data’ and that Gliese 581d does exist.

</>

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2983202/Alien-noise-Earth-like-world-Mystery-signals-suggest-habitable-planet-exists-22-light-years-away.html

These guys have an SETI program? Let’s hope 22 light years is far enough away to keep them safe from us; else we might go in there and try to “liberate” them from their oppressive rulers and engage in nation building because it’s in the national interest and it will create jobs. =)

Seriously, though, it would be nice to make a friendly contact and it would be nice if “our people” were also friendly about it.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Others including Hawking have different vies about the desirability of communications; in any event you may confident that if we do try, it will be friendly on our part, and most of will mean it. We have no way of knowing the intentions of the aliens. And of course probabilities favor a more physical explanation anyway.

Subject: Are barely trained teachers just as good as education majors…

Dear Jerry,
I thought you might be interested.
Cheers,
Bob

Are barely trained teachers just as good as education majors? Looks like it.

csmonitor.com • The Wonkblog headline “Teach for America teachers aren’t any better than other teachers when it comes to kids’ test scores” buries the lede.A new study comparing test scores among elementary school …

I would say a good case can be made for two year certificates for grade school teachers; it seems to have worked in the past, and I suspect requiring 4 year degrees is counter-productive and does not produce the expected results. A case can be made for more intense education of high school teachers, but not in “education” courses.

: Educators vs. Education

Jerry,

I would suggest that if we wish to save our schools we need to “Return to those thrilling days of yesteryear” and examine the curriculum of the two year Normal School that trained teachers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I would guess that the vast majority of the 6th Grade teachers using the 1914 Sixth Grade Reader had that education.

As the “Educators” have taken over the training of Teachers we have been afflicted with a steadily declining quality of Education coupled with a steadily increasing inflation adjusted cost of Education.

The current age of Credentialism has forced our Teachers to take an increasing number of courses in HOW to teach at the expense of WHAT to teach.

I do not see any solution to this problem as long as we have Federal Control of Education.

Bob Holmes

The question being how great the value of “how to teach” studies can be; no greater than the teacher’s knowledge. How well do Professors of Education do in grade school classrooms?

: Educationalism

The following book by the Underground Grammarian regarding educationalism should tickle your fancy:

The one-eyed man knows that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will be inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but, just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply of the witless and utterly blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed man, it is clear that other half-wits and one-eyed men are potential competitors and supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant kept watch against a one-sandaled stranger by keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes and operating minds. Uneasy lies the head.

Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the propensity to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously, threatens the land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed man and the half-wit.

http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/graves-of-academe/index.html
MikeF

And the moral of that story is …

General Relativity – The Comic Book

http://spark.sciencemag.org/generalrelativity/?int-cmp=print-comic

J

No comment.

My own research on Clinton emails

Jerry:

First, hugs to you and Roberta. I am impressed as hell that you were back to writing and blogging while still in rehab (and tweeted about it a few times). You’re in our prayers.

Second, ABC News called me when the AP story broke about Clinton running her private e-mail on a home server and asked, “Can you verify/replicate this?” I’ve been working on it all week, and the answer still is, “No.”

In fact, I think AP leapt to an unjustified conclusion based on data I was able to recover as well. If anything, there are indications that the Clinton e-mail server may have been hosted by two successive hosting firms — The Planet and Confluence Networks — and the latter is a foreign-based, foreign-owned hosting system (though apparently making use of US-based server farms) well known for spam and malware sites.

The real, real question is: where was the e-mail domain server physically located? There may be some profound negative security implications depending upon that question, which may be why no Clinton associates have confirmed or denied the existence of a home server.

I’ve written two posts on the subject. Here’s the newest one:

http://andstillipersist.com/2015/03/where-is-or-was-the-clinton-e-mail-server/

And here is my original one, which has its own updates up front; it helps to scroll down to “BACK TO OUR ORIGINAL POST”, read to the end, then go to the top and read the updates:

http://andstillipersist.com/2015/03/curiouser-and-curiouser/

Down the rabbit hole, indeed. ..bruce..

—

Bruce F. Webster

Long time readers will recognize Bruce as an old friend and longtime correspondent.

How America was Misled

https://www.google.com/#q=How+America+Was+Misled+on+al+Qaeda%27s+Demise

One of many money quotes

At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: “By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.”

This wasn’t what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA officials to stop producing analyses based on them.

Sent by a usually reliable source.

: Sapir-Whorf refuted

Dear Dr. Pournelle:
Recently on your blog you marvelled over the lack of the word “blue” in Ancient Greek. You ask, following the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, if the Greeks actually experienced the color blue, under that azure Mediterranean sky.
I reply that there are many vivid experiences lacking words. Consider your stomach; when there is food in it, you are “full”; when there is no food in it, you are “hungry”. These are fine and short words. Now consider your bladder and your colon. When these are full, you are what? When they are empty, you are what? These feelings are vivid, intimate, urgent and felt by all, but I know no words for them!
My urologist says that the condition of having a full colon is called “tenemus”. That’s a noun, but he doesn’t know a corresponding adjective. Also it refers to the condition, not the feeling.
I propose the following; bladderful, bladdervoid, colonful, colonvoid. Those are the ‘polite’ and abstract words; their ‘rude’ and immediate synonyms are pissful, pissvoid, shitful, shitvoid. This 2x2x2 word-cube possesses mathematical regularity, and also musicality; I offer it to you for free. Use it in good health.
These words did not exist before now; yet they denote universal experiences. Thus I refute the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
And as long as I am discussing missing useful words… we need words for velocity; short words to be said in a great hurry. Sailors have ‘knots’ for ‘nautical miles per hour’; but what do we call a mile per hour? “MPH” is an acronym, and it’s five syllables long; by the time you’ve screamed it at the driver, he’s already crashed the car. So what word will do? “Miph”? “Oomph”? Nah…
Or take “kilometers per second”; useful for all space-farers. I think “kaypees” will do admirably. This too I offer to you.
Sincerely,
paradoctor

I had to demonstrate understanding of the Whorfian hypothesis as part of my Ph.D. qualifying examinations. I can honestly say I have thought about it little since then.

“Lest Darkness Fall”

Jerry,

I don’t think I told you, but I read “Lest Darkness Fall” last year and enjoyed it a great deal.

Phil Tharp

I just bet you did. Sprague spins a great yarn. http://www.amazon.com/Lest-Darkness-Fall-Del-Classics/dp/0345310160

Brian P’s command on Sex and Terrorism 3/4

Last autumn, I took the time to listen through the famous recorded lectures of Greg Mosse on cultural history at the UW Madison web site. In those, he points out that many men are perfectly happy living in a state of slavery and bondage.
Doug Roberts
From my personal observation, it takes education and training for people to prefer freedom and liberty over slavery and bondage. It matters how tight the bonds are. I think it is an accident of history that here in the USA we built a nation upon the principles of liberty and freedom. We were taming a continent with little oversight. Only then do men resent the bonds of various forms of slavery. That may also help explain why, today, rural areas are bastions of liberty and freedom while urban areas are havens of restriction and limitation.

Some are content to let others face the challenges, and live off the efforts of others. When there are enough of those to control the government the Republic is doomed. Among other reasons, when the soldiers no longer respect the government…

Is it bad when

Jerry,

Regarding your recent view comment about the legions not respecting the government… Is it bad when the reaction inside the operations center is general laughter, upon seeing “breaking news” on CNN about another physical security breach at the white house?

Name withheld…

Sex and terrorism

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

In one of your older novels (Prince of Sparta, I believe), your characters debate why their enemies are fighting. One concludes “it’s the girls”.
Turns out that may apply to our current troubles as well.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mia-bloom/isis-marriage-trap_b_6773576.html
Arab men in traditional culture have NO contact with women at all, not even dating, until they’re married. That can often not be until one reaches the thirties.
This has the results you would expect.

http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/02/homosexuality-in-iraq-and-saudi-arabia/
ISIS, by contrast, offers a quick marriage both to male and female recruits. For the men the attractions of marriage are obvious. Women are offered ” wonderful husband and a free house with top-of-the-line appliances, such as a fridge, microwave and even a milkshake machine”. Moreover, ISIS will pay a stipend for every child the couple bears.
Framed that way, it’s obvious why they exert such a powerful draw. People who aren’t ever going to amount to much , people who have been let down by their traditional culture, are flocking to a place that offers them a fresh start. And sex , of course.

If this is the draw , then perhaps we can help demolish ISIS by offering similar things, or convince those countries that reform it’s necessary. It’s difficult for me to imagine those countries being truly stable if they’ve got all that sexual energy screaming for an outlet, even after we crush ISIS like the bug it is.

Respectfully,
Brian P.

One of the attractions of Communism to undergraduates in the 50’s was that the girls believed in free love. That was effective in the days before the hookup culture. It would not be now in US universities.

M. Stanton Evans, gone to his reward.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/m-stanton-evans-pioneer-of-conservative-movement-dies-at-80.html>

Roland Dobbins

Mr. Evans, as Mr. Dobbins well knows, in the mid sixties had in his book a statement making me a Communist spy, despite the personal assurance of Russell Kirk that this wasn’t true. It’s a long story and not important now if it ever was. RIP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-it/could-ibms-brain-inspired-chip-change-the-way-computers-are-built/2015/02/28/8cf45e5a-be99-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html

Could IBM’s brain-inspired chip change the way computers are built? (WP)

IBM has worked its way up from a worm-size brain, with 256 processors that simulate neurons, to a chip with 1 million of them — the equivalent of a bee brain. By the end of next year, the team hopes to build a mouse-sized brain with 256 million processor-neurons, he said.

At 100 billion neurons, the human brain remains a distant dream.

That looks like a 256-fold (2^8) increase every two years, or 16-fold every year.

If we have 256 million neurons by the end of next year, that means 4 billion a year later, 65 billion the year after that, 1000 billion the year after.

So “a distant dream” is reached about four years from now.

Distance just ain’t what it used to be.

………….Karl

We can discuss the singularity another time; it does appear we are moving ahead with the concepts making AI possible.

The Unreasonable Power of Mathematics

Dear Jerry:

Some brave souls at the BBC have decided to risk their careers by putting basic equations on screen in an attempt to deconvolute the Climate Wars.

It aired a day ago across the pond, and has already gone global oh YouTube.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zqkPmM_hj4

Be warned: this program just might change your mind.

Monckton & Soon’s Model ? I don’t think so.

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

I wonder if there is any significance to this article being in the UK press and not US…

Subj: Bubonic plague-carrying fleas found on New York City rats

Plague shots anyone?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bubonic-plaguecarrying-fleas-found-on-new-york-city-rats-10083563.html
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a
child.” — Cicero, 46 B.C.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/print/89669
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
I appreciate that this article represents a point of view, and that this point of view is no more (and, of course, no less) arguable than the “realist” viewpoint which you appear to espouse with respect to Ukraine et al. I also appreciate that you are unlikely to come around to a different way of thinking on this subject.

I pass this along for two reasons: the author does a comprehensive job of laying out his position, contra the realpolitik view; and he does so in a way that i think exposes the weaknesses of the “realist” view in a measured and non-confrontational fashion.

As I’ve stated in other correspondence, I find your views on the subject quite distressing, the more so that you were one of the thinkers who most influenced me during the Cold War, when your positions seemed on all fours with the forward-leaning internationalist–indeed interventionist–bipartisan foreign policy that was this country’s from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, in which President Reagan played the final hand to a successful close.

It is quite difficult for me to reconcile one of Reagan’s strongest supporters with the (you’ll forgive the expression, but I am at a loss to find a better) neo-isolationist you seem to have become since the Cold War ended: and while it’s possible that it’s due to my ignorance or lack of sophistication, I like to think that those are not the primary factors in my failure.

And while we’re on the subject of epithets, your continued use of the term “neo-conservative” and its various pejorative attributes does nothing to make your argument more convincing, although it does irritate and alienate people like myself, who share some of those views. I leave it to you to decide whether that should affect your usage: of course “Chaos Manor” is your house, therefore your rules. But my late mother once observed that manners consisted in the avoidance of behaviors that made others uncomfortable.

I realize I am probably wasting my time (and yours), but you’ll have to forgive me for continuing to (politely, I hope) try.
Very respectfully,
David G.D. Hecht

I am not immune to emotional attachments, or to dislike of cooperation with tyrants and unpleasant leaders; the question is, what is the threat to the United States, and what agreements make us safer?

Russia needs and wants Russians, or inhabitants that can be Russified – assimilated into the Russian culture. Ukrainians and Cossacks can be. Some Slavs can be. Finns and Swedes cannot be, and their experience is that Poles cannot ne either. They were given a large part of Poland after WW II, as well as Konigsberg. They don’t want Poles and dilution of the Russian culture. They are a threat to Ukraine, but the Russophile Ukrainian population will assimilate nicely; the rest won’t. Russia knows this.

Russia is no threat to US territory, and a life or death treaty with Ukraine will not increase the security of the US. Russia and US have similar interests to the East of Ukraine; having a hostile relationship helps neither nation.

I am not an isolationist and never have been, any more than Jefferson was when dealing with the Barbary Coast. I am a realist.

If you will give me a term more acceptable to describe the modern interventionists who got us into a needless war in Iraq, and a prolonged stay in Afghanistan after we had cast out the Taliban I will endeavor to use it, as you do not like neo-conservative. They were allies in the cold war, but do not understand that it is over.

According to the egregious Frum I have been read out of the Conservative movement, so while I think of myself as conservative I am no longer a “Leading Conservative Intellectual.” But then I am of a company with the late Messrs. Stephen Tonsor and Russell Kirk who also opposed the Iraqi invasions.

I believe we are at war to the knife with the Caliphate, and that war is far more a threat to the US than the Russian territorial disputes; and I firmly believe we must accept that war. No war was ever won by waiting for the enemy to take the initiative. This puts us into a war in Iraq. We must fight it. It would not have come upon us without our invasion of Iraq, which I very much opposed – of course once we were in it it behooved us to fight to win. And having won we needed a proconsul who understood our objectives. At the price of much blood and treasure – most Iraqi but much of it ours – we imposed Bremer.

And now we refuse to acknowledge ISIS is at war with us, yet they say so hourly.

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

Abysmal Education, continued; Notes on AI; Warmest Year; Clinton eMails

By Jerry Pournelle | Mar 5, 2015 - 5:45 pm | Updated: March 10, 2015 - 4:34 pm | View

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Chaos Manor View, Thursday, March 05, 2015

While Steve Barnes was over for a story conference, we do talk about other things. One of them was his 11 year old son’s fascination with the California Sixth Grade Reader http://www.amazon.com/California-Sixth-Grade-Reader-Pournelle-ebook/dp/B00LZ7PB7E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425595105&sr=8-1&keywords=california+sixth+grade+reader available on Kindle.

His son very much liked the story of Jason and the Argonauts, but he is even more fascinated with the Macaulay poem Horatius at the Bridge. That’s no real surprise: just as girls are intrigued with the story of the romance in The Courtship of Miles Standish. Horatius has action, great lines, verses you can learn. Prior to this he was sort of reading at level in his school, meaning he had controlled vocabulary readers, and although he knew how to sound words out, he seldom had to do it because he seldom encountered new word and did care to read them if he did because the text wasn’t interesting. Horatius, on the other hand, is full of unfamiliar words, and he very much wants to know them because the poem is exciting. Not that this is anything that professors of education didn’t know in 1914, but they don’t know it now.

I was pleased to hear it because that is one of the reasons for getting the reader published. And I wasn’t surprised that he shows no similar interest in The Courtship of Miles Standish. Most boys don’t.

The physical therapist was here with her ingenious tortures. Of course I feel better afterwards, but it makes for an interesting hour.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/27/359302540/ive-got-the-ingredients-what-should-i-cook-ask-ibms-watson

I’ve Got The Ingredients. What Should I Cook? Ask IBM’s Watson (NPR)

OCTOBER 27, 2014 5:40 PM ET

LAURA SYDELL

IBM’s Watson computer has amused and surprised humans by winning at Jeopardy! Now, one of the world’s smartest machines is taking on chefs.

Well, not exactly. Watson is being used by chefs to come up with new and exciting recipes in a feat that could turn out to be useful for people with dietary restrictions and for managing food shortages.

If you give Watson a few ingredients and cuisine specifications, it can help you with recipe ideas. I had a few things in the kitchen, but I didn’t know what to make with them — ground turkey, frozen peas, dried mushrooms, canned tomatoes. I live in San Francisco, so it’s easy to get Asian and Mexican spices.

I sent an email to Watson and a couple of days later, the recipes arrived in my inbox. Watson sent three recipes for ground turkey and another for Mexican green pea pancakes. I picked one of the taco recipes and decided to make the pancakes.

The ingredients Watson chose were surprising. For example, the tacos called for grated citrus peel.

Though Watson can’t taste the recipes it churns out, it has an understanding of the chemistry behind taste. It understands what we humans enjoy and why, says Steven Abrams, an engineer with The Watson Group.

There is considerably more, but you get the idea.

The late L. Sprague de Camp was one of the funniest men ever to write science fiction, but he had no sense of humor; or at least as odd a sense of humor as anyone you will ever meet. He said he studied humor and jokes, and wrote what intellectually he thought would be funny. He did so successfully, as anyone who ever read The Incompleat Enchanter and his other fantasies knows full well. The point being that much of what is peculiarly human is intellectually understandable and describable; in theory a robot could do what Sprague did. Of course many of Sprague’s friends thought this was actually one of his jokes..

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/mind-control-breakthrough-quadriplegic-woman-flies-f-3-1689274525

Arati Prabhakar—director of the Pentagon’s advanced research arm DARPA—has revealed a breakthrough achievement in machine mind control. Jan Scheuermann, a 55-year-old quadriplegic woman with electrodes in her brain, has been able to fly an F-35 fighter jet using “nothing but her thoughts.”

= = =

Scheuermann—who is quadriplegic because of an hereditary genetic disease—was recruited by DARPA for its robotics programs. Scientists and doctors implanted electrodes in the left motor cortex of her brain in 2012 to allow her to control a robotic arm, which she did successfully. But she’s not using the robotic arms to control the joystick in the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II simulator used for the tests. She is controlling the plane with “nothing but her thoughts,” according to Prabhakar, pure neural signaling:

Instead of thinking about controlling a joystick, which is what our ace pilots do when they’re driving this thing, Jan’s thinking about controlling the airplane directly. For someone who’s never flown—she’s not a pilot in real life—she’s flying that simulator directly from her neural signaling.

The implications of this for robotics are obvious.

Coldest year on record

Hello Jerry,

I second your opinion that warm is preferable to cold. Makes for a larger supply and better selection of food, too.

Re: “It’s cold outside, even after the warmest year in history.”

The headlines worldwide and the lead story on EVERY news broadcast, as well as being the focus of the SOU message, was some iteration of ‘2014 was the warmest year since records began in 1880.’. Of course it was all because of anthropogenic CO2 (ACO2) AND spelled doom if ACO2 were not drastically reduced or eliminated by the taxing and regulating of every human activity that produced a government-identified and quantified ‘carbon signature.

What wasn’t prominently featured in the stories is that the record was set by 0.02 degrees.

NONE of the stories expressed the slightest curiosity as to whether we have had a world wide data collection system in place since 1880 that allows the ‘annual temperatures of the earth’ to be placed in rank order by year OR whether the overall precision of the network over the 135 years was adequate to justify a ‘record’ anomaly of 0.02 degrees as statistically significant.

Of particular interest to me is that NO prominent climate scientist or group focusing on ‘climate change’ expressed ANY doubt as to the validity of the record OR its significance as a harbinger of ACO2 driven doom.

Bob Ludwick

To emphasize: the previous heat records were set in the 1930’s, and the “record” only starts in 1880 or so. We know that in 1880 most of the data were not accurate to a tenth of a degree, certainly not to a hundredth. Moreover, in the 30’s I cannot believe that data from the USSR, China, Chinese Turkestan, Russian Turkestan, much of Viet Nam, much of Indonesia, much of Africa were reliable at all and at times were not even available. The same would be true of parts – large parts – of South America. They had other worries to occupy their attention. China was largely under warlords, or Japanese occupation. I could continue but surely the point is made? We simply do not know the average temperature of the Earth to a tenth of a degree, now or in the 1930’s; the models assume warming, but actual data shows no warming for a decade.

Clinton’s E-Mail System Built For Privacy Though Not Security – Bloomberg Business

(Bloomberg) — A week before becoming Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton set up a private e-mail system that gave her a high level of control over communications, including the ability to erase messages completely, according to security experts who have examined Internet records.

“You erase it and everything’s gone,” Matt Devost, a security expert who has had his own private e-mail for years. Commercial services like those from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. retain copies even after users erase them from their in-box.

Although Clinton worked hard to secure the private system, her consultants appear to have set it up with a misconfigured encryption system, something that left it vulnerable to hacking, said Alex McGeorge, head of threat intelligence at Immunity Inc., a Miami Beach-based digital security firm.

The e-mail flap has political significance because Clinton is preparing to announce a bid for the Democratic nomination for president as soon as April. It also reminds voters of allegations of secrecy that surrounded Bill Clinton’s White House. In those years, First Lady Hillary Clinton fought efforts by some White House advisers to turn over information to Whitewater investigators and, later, sought to keep secret records of her task force on health-care reform.

Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who leads a special committee looking into the events surrounding the 2012 terrorist attack at a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, said he will subpoena Clinton’s e-mails.

“We’re going to use every bit of legal recourse at our disposal,” Gowdy said Wednesday during an interview on CNN.

Private Service

The committee also said Wednesday that it has discovered two e-mail addresses used by Clinton while secretary of state.

Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though he said in a statement Tuesday that her practices followed “both the letter and spirit of the rules.”

Setting up a private e-mail service was once onerous and rare. Now, it’s relatively easy, said Devost, president of FusionX LLC, based in Arlington, Virginia.

I have mixed emotions here. I would rather have a private mailbox were I Secretary of State. But there are matters of security and public responsibility. But an official mailbox gets lots of Spam..

Our abysmal schools

I would like to remind you that:
In India, with like 1.35 BILLION people, about half of them are illiterate.
I don’t mean can’t read at the eighth grade illiterate. I mean ILLITERATE.
If half of India’s population is illiterate, then how is our educational system failing? Well?
And yet, because there are so many desperate poor people in India, you can still get brilliant people to work for you for two dollars an hour.
This is not because the American educational system is somehow failing. This is because India is an overpopulated cesspit of misery almost beyond our understanding.
If an American of average ability, with an IQ of 100, gets a market wage of $12 an hour, and an Indian national, with an IQ of 140, gets a market wage of $2 an hour, this is not because Americans are stupid. It’s because Indians breed like crazy so that even the smartest of them have to settle for sub-poverty wages.
Supply and demand, people. Supply and demand.
Stop blaming Americans. Americans in WWII beat the cr*p out of the Japanese even though their real wages were five times greater. Poverty is not virtue, even though getting a smart person to work for you for pennies an hour might make it seem so..

TG

Thank you, but I am well aware that some countries have a lower literacy rate than ours, and I do not share your inferences from that. Indeed, I do not share the modern view of literacy, at least of English; one can read or one cannot read, and learning to read took place in the first and second grades when I was in school – indeed both those grades were in the same room. Alas there were a few children in 3^rd and 4^th grades who could not read – were illiterate – and that greatly concerned the teachers. But for the most part, if you had four years of schooling, you were literate. The Army found that of illiterate recruits, more than 90% had never attended school to the fourth grade. Of course this was conscripts, who were all men, but there is no reason to suppose girls less able to learn English.

The California 6^th grade Reader, http://www.amazon.com/California-Sixth-Grade-Reader-Pournelle-ebook/dp/B00LZ7PB7E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425595105&sr=8-1&keywords=california+sixth+grade+reader was the required reader in California public schools in 1914. Look at it on line and tell me that California schools are still that good. Your WW II examples draw conclusions about those who had that reader or a similar one in 6^th grade.

I do not “blame” Americans, I observe what has happened to our schools. Even our teachers try to send their children to private schools, and who can blame them? There are good schools in America, but alas fewer and fewer are public tax supported schools, even though public school costs have far more than doubled as our literacy declined.

Supply and demand only works in a market economy. Since Federal aid to education the public schools are part of a command economy. That can produce good schools, and has in many places; but ours has not. I would welcome some injection of supply and demand into our school system, but it is unlikely.

For those who cannot afford private schools, teach your children to read before the education system gets hold of them. English pupils were expected to learn to read at age four or five until recently; your protoplasm is as good as theirs. Start with phonic works like Hop On Pop. Keep exposing them to challenges, and when they are old enough – which is well before the teachers say they are – give them access to tablets and The Kahn Academy on line. I would recommend Mrs. Pournelle’s Reading Program, but she has given up publishing it.

Or you can accept our current situation. I did not make up the data in Tuesday’s View. The source was http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/02/u-s-millennials-post-abysmal-scores-in-tech-skills-test-lag-behind-foreign-peers/?hpid=z4 and the Washington Post is not a right wing paper.

Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson

Spider has published this online, so the link is as legitimate as it gets.

Having just watched a web report about a law suit over the song “Blurred Lines,” the item is also timely.

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

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

Climate Change Politics; Office 365; SD cards

By Jerry Pournelle | Mar 4, 2015 - 6:16 pm | Updated: March 4, 2015 - 9:09 pm | View

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Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, March 04, 2015

Larry Niven and Steve Barnes were over this morning for a story conference, and then we went to lunch. Very productive morning. That used most of the day.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-s-lindzen-the-political-assault-on-climate-skeptics-1425513033

The Political Assault on Climate Skeptics

Members of Congress send inquisitorial letters to universities, energy companies, even think tanks.

By

Richard S. Lindzen

March 4, 2015 6:50 p.m. ET

23 COMMENTS

Research in recent years has encouraged those of us who question the popular alarm over allegedly man-made global warming. Actually, the move from “global warming” to “climate change” indicated the silliness of this issue. The climate has been changing since the Earth was formed. This normal course is now taken to be evidence of doom.

Individuals and organizations highly vested in disaster scenarios have relentlessly attacked scientists and others who do not share their beliefs. The attacks have taken a threatening turn.

As to the science itself, it’s worth noting that all predictions of warming since the onset of the last warming episode of 1978-98—which is the only period that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attempts to attribute to carbon-dioxide emissions—have greatly exceeded what has been observed. These observations support a much reduced and essentially harmless climate response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In addition, there is experimental support for the increased importance of variations in solar radiation on climate and a renewed awareness of the importance of natural unforced climate variability that is largely absent in current climate models. There also is observational evidence from several independent studies that the so-called “water vapor feedback,” essential to amplifying the relatively weak impact of carbon dioxide alone on Earth temperatures, is canceled by cloud processes.

There are also claims that extreme weather—hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, you name it—may be due to global warming. The data show no increase in the number or intensity of such events. The IPCC itself acknowledges the lack of any evident relation between extreme weather and climate, though allowing that with sufficient effort some relation might be uncovered.

There is considerably more, but you get the idea. The politics are ugly; the science is at best ambiguous.

So much for global warming…

http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/11/18/nasa-admits-winters-going-get-coldermuch-colder/

“Climatologist John Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, thinks that last year’s winter, described by USA Today as “one of the snowiest, coldest, most miserable on record” is going to be a regular occurrence over the coming decades.

“Casey asserts that there is mounting evidence that the Earth is getting cooler due to a decline in solar activity. He warns in his latest book, Dark Winter that a major alteration of global climate has already started and that at a minimum it is likely to last 30 years.”

Charles Brumbelow

NASA Admits That Winters are Going to Get Colder…Much Colder

http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/11/18/nasa-admits-winters-going-get-coldermuch-colder/

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.

Like the Dalton Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Maunder Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures.

During one 30-year period within the Maunder Minimum, astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as opposed to a more typical 40,000-50,000 spots. (Source)

Climatologist John Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, thinks that last year’s winter, described by USA Today as “one of the snowiest, coldest, most miserable on record” is going to be a regular occurrence over the coming decades.

Casey asserts that there is mounting evidence that the Earth is getting cooler due to a decline in solar activity. He warns in his latest book, Dark Winter that a major alteration of global climate has already started and that at a minimum it is likely to last 30 years.

Casey predicts food shortages and civil unrest caused by those shortages due largely to governments not preparing for the issues that colder weather will bring. he also predicts that wickedly bitter winter temperatures will see demand for electricity and heating outstrip the supply.

The United States is preparing only for Climate Change brought on by CO2. That change was thought to be warmer, not colder; but eliminating CO2 increases will reduce Climate Change and and thus we will be all right. Of course the theories predict warmer. And that hasn’t happened for some time, but theories apparently trump evidence.

And with the Congressional activities there won’t be any evidence. No one will conduct the experiments. It would all be a joke were it not so dangerous. Cold is a terrible thing. Prepare for high energy prices.

It’s cold outside, even after the warmest year in history.

Office 365

I am confused about your problems with Office 365 when it’s not connected to the internet. I use Office 365 on a Dell Venue 11 i5 tablet, which uses Windows 8.1 as the operating system. It’s Dell’s version of a Microsoft Surface Pro. (I’m not brave enough to use my school/personal computer to test Windows 10 yet. Perhaps this summer, except I’ve already scheduled learning R as opposed to SPSS which they teach in class.) I got the tablet right before starting in a Ph.D. program at the University of Central Florida, so I’ve had it for about seven months.
The Office 365 subscription I have is the University one, which as far as I can tell is a free for UCF students version of Office 365 Personal. Office 365 Personal ($6.99/month) allows you to download and install full versions of Microsoft Office locally. Except at installation, those local versions have never asked me to authenticate them on the internet. OneDrive (where I save my stuff) keeps a local cache as well as saving everything on the cloud.
The system works whether I’m on the internet or in a black hole of connectivity. Files are available whether I’m on the internet or in a black hole of connectivity. If I’m unconnected, my files are synchronized once I get connected.
Are you using the free version of Office 365, which only works online and uses your web browser to access limited functionality online apps? Perhaps that’s the problem. If not, then I’m not sure what’s happening.
BTW, I’ve been using OneNote for years and love it, although I haven’t been using handwriting on the tablet. For some reason, I just write too big on the screen, and my handwriting is no more legible large than it is small.
I’ve also just installed Dragon. I’m going to try to use it to write the first draft of my next paper. I’ll see if I need to get a microphone, or if the tablet’s microphone is adequate.
Hope your sprains heal soon.

Fredrik Coulter

Office 365 Followup

I wrote earlier about my lack of difficulties with Office 365 regarding online authentication. Last I checked, you cannot install Office 365 without online access; they don’t sell it on disk. As such, the best thing to do is immediately authenticate the software as soon as it’s downloaded and installed. You know you’ve got internet at that time; otherwise it wouldn’t have been installed in the first place.

Fredrik Coulter

I bought Office 365 and paid with Pay pal.

As you say, I must have had Internet access to install Office 365, since I cannot had had a disk; and of course I did. Moreover I used Outlook and Word when I was in hospital in December – I still need a way to import the two days worth of Outlook over to my main machine. But when I tried without Internet access, I was informed that I could not authenticate my Outlook, and when I tried to open Word 365 I got the same message. Later after I got Internet access again, they opened although there was a lot of clicking to be done. If you do not open Office 365 with Internet access this seems to happen. But see below. As to how you authenticate it on installation I must have done since I could use it. That doesn’t seem to have saved me.

I have always been a OneNote fan. I am delayed in installing Dragon. Thanks for the kind words.

And perhaps Eric has found the source of the problem:

According to Microsoft, Office 365 only needs to authenticate once every 30 days. I suspect you had gone a long time without using any of the Office apps on the Surface while also on a working connection. It’s also possible that the Windows 10 install reset the counter. What isn’t clear is whether Office tries to authenticate more frequently than the 30 days, moving forward the period when prolonged loss of connectivity would become a problem.

Eric Pobirs

I certainty made no attempt to access Office 365 on the Surface Pro in February. I vaguely recall using it in January on Swan – Office 365 lets you have several legal copies.

SanDisk Squeezes 200GB Into a Tiny microSD Card

Stop for a second and take a look at the fingernail on your baby finger. That’s roughly the size of a microSD card that can now hold a whopping 200GB of data thanks to SanDisk. Remember when USB flash drives with a full gigabyte of storage were mind-blowing? We were so foolish back then.

Available sometime in the second quarter of 2015, the new microSDXC card uses the same technology that SanDisk developed for the 128GB microSDXC card it introduced last year, but with an improved design allowing the company to increase storage capacity by 56 percent. The new card also boasts transfer speeds of up to 90MB/sec, but once available its $400 price tag might be a little hard to swallow—even if the card itself isn’t.

Too bad there’s no slot for it in the new Galaxy S6. [SanDisk]

That 200 GB microSD card

I strongly suspect that come November, if one went to SanDisk with the intent of buying that 200 GB microSD card, they would react with surprise. Such an oddball capacity suggests it exists solely as a demo of their manufacturing prowess, pushing against the physical volume constraints of shipping flash memory, rather than a product with a viable market. Consider, 128 GB microSD cards can now be frequently found for around $80. Which means you could have five of those, with a cumulative capacity of 640 GB for the cost of just one 200 GB unit.

You’d have to have a very specific and valuable usage scenario to justify the purchase. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if this item is never made available to retail. Samsung recently announced their latest advance in the reduction of flash cell size, followed by the announcement of the parts they sell for main storage in cell phones and tablets doubling in capacity, bring entry level from 16 GB to 32 GB and the upper limit on a single chip setup to 128 GB. Once this class of flash memory is available to SanDisk they should have little difficulty producing 256 GB microSD cards for a far lower MSRP meant to actually sell product, rather than as a stunt.

Eric Pobirs

I hadn’t thought about it. Very likely.

But then we have:

Jerry,
When it comes to SSDs, 200Gb is *not* an odd size.
Flash memory has a fairly low lifetime in terms of the number of erase cycles that can be made with the memory still functional, often on the order of 1000 erase cycles.
However, not all the memory cells last for the same number of erase cycles – there is a statistical distribution. Manufacturers “overprovision” their SSD memories by understating the actual capacity and using the extras as spares to replace the cells that fail early. Thus it is common to find flash memory products in “odd” sizes (i.e. not a power of 2).
With so-called “multi-level” cells (MLC and TLC and probably other acronyms) the situation becomes more blurred. Most cheap flash memory is multi-level, i.e. each memory cell is not a single bit but can store two bits (or maybe more) by dividing the charge into three levels + 0, or more. This allows the same product to store double the data, at the cost of some reliability. The reliability can be (somewhat) recovered by including ECC codes.
Flash memory has become extremely complex, and it is no longer to be expected (although it may happen) that capacities will be a power of 2.
Chris barker

Sex and terrorism

Perhaps, but I suggest there’s an extra element missing from that equation, and that’s pride. Self-respect. A person on welfare may be able to have sex and kids, but that’s not nearly the same thing as having a marriage that’s recognized and honored by your community. A warrior and a husband has status and respect that a welfare dependent can never have.
Man does not live by bread alone. That’s the mistake liberals make, I think. They think that seeing to people’s physical needs is all there is to contentment, self-fulfillment, and it’s not , it’s the bare bottom tier of Maslow’s pyramid. That’s why, ultimately, welfare doesn’t satisfy.
Respectfully,
Brian P.