Monthly Archives: July 2015

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, July 23, 2015

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/01_1.shtml

After this great glaciation, a succession of smaller glaciations has followed, each separated by about 100,000 years from its predecessor, according to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit (a fact first discovered by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, 1571-1630). These periods of time when large areas of the Earth are covered by ice sheets are called “ice ages.” The last of the ice ages in human experience (often referred to as the Ice Age) reached its maximum roughly 20,000 years ago, and then gave way to warming. Sea level rose in two major steps, one centered near 14,000 years and the other near 11,500 years. However, between these two periods of rapid melting there was a pause in melting and sea level rise, known as the “Younger Dryas” period. During the Younger Dryas the climate system went back into almost fully glacial conditions, after having offered balmy conditions for more than 1000 years. The reasons for these large swings in climate change are not yet well understood.

I have been worrying about education: what is the curriculum for children on an interstellar colony? There must be some common culture, and it won’t all be science and technology. Sure, as time goes on, there will be those who choose to specialize, “Classicists”, Shakespearian experts, and so forth; but, besides Dr. Seuss, what books have all the kids read? And whose history?

And with that I need to go to bed.

“Cold” fusion report

Acknowledging that you once noted that the signal to noise ratio at Slashdot can be quite high.

Independent Researchers Test Rossi’s Alleged Cold Fusion Device For 32 Days – Slashdot

Independent Researchers Test Rossi’s Alleged Cold Fusion… WheezyJoe (1168567) writes The E-Cat (or “Energy Catalyzer”) is an alleged cold fusion device that produces heat from a low-energy nuclear reaction where nickel and…
View on tech.slashdot.org Rod McFadden	Preview by Yahoo

Laser Launchers Subject
Paging Dr. Pournelle:

 http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/microwave-power-beaming-for-launching-satellites-into-orbit

Rod McFadden

platinum asteroids.

Dear Jerry –

You kindly printed my letter about the (possibly) dodgy evaluation of 2015-UW158, and responded

“We don’t need it to be worth $5 Trillion”.

True enough.

But if we do need it to be worth $500 billion (big infrastructure, NREs, energy/resource costs for delta-v, etc.) then a value of $250 billion is a real problem.

And while there are any number of mitigating factors such as the reusability of research and infrastructure, nobody in their right minds is going to be the first to make the effort if only his successors won’t go bankrupt. And if the first guy goes bankrupt, his potential successors may have a hard time getting backing.

Which is why getting the numbers right in the first place is important.

Regards,

Jim Martin

Space metals 
Dr. Pournelle:
Concerning 2011 UW158 in the July 20 View: Sure a butt-load of platinum might produce dreams of wealth, but if such amounts of the precious metal were to be that available, the price would drop through the floor. What would be the commodity price of platinum if it were as common as iron ore?
Not to say industrial uses for platinum and gold wouldn’t benefit, but I suspect the terrestrial sources of these metals would resist any attempts to drop prices through flooding the market with ET metals.
Pete Nofel

Still hope for being exiled to glory?

Dr. P,

This sure sounds like something I read about some time in the last millennium:

Company is Launching Spaceships Using a Microwave Antenna

Colorado company Escape Dynamics (EDI) has designed a spaceship engine that doesn’t rely on chemical propulsion (in the form of a controlled explosion), like in traditional rockets. Rather, the engine utilizes the power beamed at it from a microwave antenna—“external propulsion.” 

Here’s how it works: power is drawn from a giant set of batteries (or solar panels, wind turbines, etc.). Once charged, power is sent to a set of modular, phased array microwave antennae, spanning a square kilometer, that then fire a microwave beam at a heat exchanger on the spacecraft. The exchanger heats up the hydrogen in the fuel tank, which in turn powers the ship’s rocket into orbit.

<http://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/blogs/2015/07/latest-rocket-science-company-launching-spaceships-using-microwave-antenna>

    Regards,
    Bill Clardy

“The faster I run, the behinder I get!”– Pogo

: Space Access Update #145 7/20/15

 
Monday, 7/20/15 – We have a new Space Access Update out, #145, with SpaceX’s Preliminary Diagnosis of the recent Falcon 9 loss, plus a quick word on how the SLS Mafia may try to exploit this.  You can see this Update at:
http://www.space-access.org/updates/sau145.html

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, July 22, 2015

I’m in novel writing mode now, which means that for a few days I will have less time for this page and Chaos Manor Reviews; but Chaos Manor Reviews will generally have something computerish, and I’ll try to keep this place going; and it won’t be that long.
We had a good Wednesday story conference including Skyping Dr. Jack Cohen in England, and one thing it indicated is that we’ve come to a part in the opening of the book that needs me; technical stuff mostly, and fitting it into dialogue and action scenes so you don’t get lumps in the stew; the sort of stuff I used to turn out fairly quickly, but it seems to go slowly now because my typing is so bad. I am not able to touch type at all. The good news is that I am getting better at two finger; but, alas, that means I have to look at the keyboard and not the screen. Then when I look up I see the silly mistakes I have made, and have to go about fixing them. It’s slow; but it’s faster than typing on a Selectric and we wrote quite a lot, including The Mote in God’s Eye http://www.amazon.com/Mote-Gods-Eye-Larry-Niven/dp/0671741926 on typewriters, and Mote still holds up (and sells pretty well, too; if you haven’t read it, you will probably like it a lot).

Anyway, that’s the way things are. I also learn that all my little ornaments each open a new file, and those add up, so I’m trying to get a new scheme to put in the little gold bubbles a different way. We’ll see.

I need to comment at length on the Iran “deal”, but it is sort of pointless: it’s pretty well a done deal. Mr. Obama has made that clear. He’s in this all the way.

As to why, unless you assume deliberate malice on his part, he must be assuming that he’ll win the Persians around to his way of thinking: we are showing trust and good faith, and we expect that in return; after which we will both be better off. After all, we’re not on a war course with Iran, but they can’t know this because we sent an invading army into Iraq. Jihadists don’t blow up Brazilian airplanes and civilians. Treat Persia right and they’ll stop holding Death To America parades, and the world will be a better place.

We tried force, and CIA operations and such; give peace a chance. And of course he is President and it’s pretty well his call.

I do point out that in the early 1500’s, a sophisticated Prince, Suleiman, later called Suleiman the Magnificent, became Sultan of Turkey; It was thought by many of the European leadership that this was a man you could do business with, and many set their policies to accommodate that assumptiuon.

Islamic scholars were just completing new editions of the Koran and the Hadith (Sayings of the Prophet), and the plain language laid upon the Leader of Islam the duty to bring the entire world under submission; there could be truces with the infidels, but peace with them is forbidden by the black letter law of the text. But there are black letter commandments in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament that were no longer taken seriously (see Jonathon Swift on that 200 years later); surely Suleiman would be a reasonable man.., Of course he was not, and in 1529 marched to besiege Vienna after taken much of the Balkans and starting feuds there that continue to this day. His siege was not successful, although it could have been; it was a near thing, actually. And the campaign was undertaken at considerable cost, both economically and to his prestige. Fortunately his rule was tempered by the loss of his genius advisor and his oldest son to palace intrigues and the Ukrainian/Polish girl known as Roxelana, but that’s another story. So are the Ayatollahs ruling Iran, and the Sunni/Shia conflict continues.

I do not think Mr. Obama has the correct appreciation of the situation, but I was not elected President; and under the Constitution we have only one President.

As to what strategy we adopt if this one does not work, one thing is certain: Iran will have nuclear weapons before we can know.

Still more on automation and jobs
There is little doubt that, someday, robots will be taking a lot of jobs from people. Whether that will be in five years or fifty cannot be determined with certainty until after it has happened. It is however true that, right now (which is where we are on the time-line), truck drivers are not seeing their wages fall because self-driving trucks are taking their jobs from them. Right now, much of the talk of automation taking jobs is clearly a smoke screen designed to obscure the real reason that current wages are stagnant or falling.
However, there is another angle to automation that I think people have missed. It’s possible that, at least under some conditions, robots could simply be a stealthy means of offshoring jobs to low-wage countries that have, until recently, been hard to offshore!
For example, there is a company that makes robotic floor cleaners for large establishments. These floor cleaners are only competitive when wages for that class of labor are over ten dollars an hour. Obviously the businesses would be even happier employing human labor at a dollar an hour – that would be cheaper than using robots (for now).
But here’s the thing: these robots are, I believe, largely assembled by hand in places like Vietnam where wages are a dollar an hour or less!
So here’s the thing: what if the total amount of human labor saved by these cleaning robots is equal to the total amount of overseas human labor required to assemble the robots (and their spare parts etc) in the first place? In this case we haven’t saved any human labor at all – we’ve used the robots as a conduit to replace $10/hr labor with $1/hr labor!
Yes I know – the truth is in the specifics, and in this case would require the kind of careful quantitative analysis that modern jingoistic economists have largely abandoned (‘Anything labeled free trade is always good just because’ etc). Still, something to consider.

TG

The problem of ‘unemployment’…
Dr. Pournell,
You have hit “ glancingly “ at the problem.
The last time industrialization created a surplus of goods-per-working-hour the response of the industrialized world was to simply decrease hours to match. (It is amusing – but the reduction of factory hours from 60 per week to 40 per week is nearly a match to the reduction of farm laborers. Effectively we got more factory workers but each did less factory work – and the total volume of factory work hours remained fairly stable.) Why can we not do the same again? Well, one block might be the law/union homogeny that has demonstrated itself entirely resistant to any shift in the ‘eight-hour-day/five-day-week’ formula. Another might be the burden of confiscatory taxes – which have in effect already removed a third of the working hours so far as the worker compensation is concerned. In effect, 1/3 of the ‘surplus hours’ have already been taken away – just not the work involved. These are both injurious, and annoying, and frustrating… but the stupidity of the master class has been overcome before and can be again. What can NOT be overcome, unfortunately, is the unsuitability for productive action of a fair percentage of the population. The productive cannot lay down a portion of the working day because the unproductive are incapable of picking up the ‘slack’. [One may, from another angle, view the division as having occurred, if one takes idle dependency as a form of work. Which – I grant – as it is paid for – can be so viewed. Consider the percentage of ‘career welfare’ personnel. The numbers are, again, amusingly close.]
As for solutions? I have none save that of history. The industrial revolution destroyed a fair percentage of the English population. Whatever upheaval cuts off the bread for the charity-dependant class will do the same. This is sad, but hardly a unique event, or one difficult to anticipate in any context save time.
With respect
Keryl Kris Reinke

When there is little shortage of goods, all is well; it is easy to divide a large pie. Or it is said to be.

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

Chaos Manor View, Monday, July 20, 2015

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

I have installed – well Eric has installed while I watched – a new XBOX ONE in the TV room. At the moment it’s more used to get the TV into my local network than anything else, and I have little experience with it; but we seem to be able to access the web, and my various servers. It’s on HDM2 while the regular TV is HDM1 because I didn’t want the way we use the set to change much, particularly for Roberta; eventually we’ll have integrated it into the system, and we can use voice control. So far I’ve sort of seen the potential but we don’t do that.

Eric’s report will be in Chaos Manor Reviews.

We did test SKYPE. We usually Skype the kids on Sunday, and it’s a problem because Roberta’s machine faces a bright window, so it’s a bit hard for me to get into her office and in the picture with her; but we used Skype on the XBOX now that we have reliable Internet in the back TV room – and it worked splendidly. The camera adjusts to get both of us into the picture, and if we add a third the view expands to include him too. I expect there are apps that will do that for the MacBook Pro or Widows 7 with Logitech Camera that we normally use, but I haven’t seen them.

It probably means that we’ll use it for Skyping with Dr. Jack Cohen next time since it’s easy enough to get three chairs in there, and it’s been hard getting all three of us in the picture using the Mac; although I suspect there is a Mac app that would make it easier. We’ll see. In any event. Look for more about the XBOX One now.

We need a new version of capitalism for the jobless future

By Vivek Wadhwa July 20 at 7:00 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/07/20/we-need-a-new-version-of-capitalism-for-the-jobless-future/

“There are more net jobs in the world today than ever before, after hundreds of years of technological innovation and hundreds of years of people predicting the death of work. The logic on this topic is crystal clear. Because of that, the contrary view is necessarily religious in nature, and, as we all know, there’s no point in arguing about religion.”

These are the words of tech mogul Marc Andreessen, in an e-mail exchange with me on the effect of advancing technologies on employment. Andreessen steadfastly believes that the same exponential curve that is enabling creation of an era of abundance will create new jobs faster and more broadly than before, and calls my assertions that we are heading into a jobless future a luddite fallacy.

I wish he were right, but he isn’t. And it isn’t a religious debate; it’s a matter of public policy and preparedness. With the technology advances that are presently on the horizon, not only low-skilled jobs are at risk; so are the jobs of knowledge workers. Too much is happening too fast. It will shake up entire industries and eliminate professions. Some new jobs will surely be created, but they will be few. And we won’t be able to retrain the people who lose their jobs, because, as I said to Andreessen, you can train an Andreessen to drive a cab, but you can’t retrain a laid-off cab driver to become an Andreessen. The jobs that will be created will require very specialized skills and higher levels of education — which most people don’t have.

I am optimistic about the future and know that technology will provide society with many benefits. I also realize that millions will face permanent unemployment. I worry that if we keep brushing this issue under the rug, social upheaval will result. We must make the transition easier by providing for those worst affected. In the short term, we will create many new jobs in the United States to build robots and factories and program new computer systems. But the employment boom won’t last long.

Within 10 years, we will see Uber laying off most of its drivers as it switches to self-driving cars; manufacturers will start replacing workers with robots; fast-food restaurants will install fully automated food-preparation systems; artificial intelligence–based systems will start doing the jobs of most office workers in accounting, finance and administration. The same will go for professionals such as paralegals, pharmacists, and customer-support representatives. All of this will occur simultaneously, and the pace will accelerate in the late 2020s.

The article is quite long and quite thoughtful. I recommend it to your attention.

The problem is real: our education is increasingly unable to teach people to do anything that someone else would pay to have done; yet it drives us increasingly into debt, both public debt and saddling the students with lifetime debts. That can’t last, and we all know it.

But the Federal Government is relentless: No child is to be Left Behind, and since in the real world there are only a very few Marc Andreessens there will be unequal results – but inequality is not acceptable in public education. So the smart ones flee to private schools, but if these are not – suitable – to the bureaucracy? Of course the rich will not give up their schools. Perhaps we can make them do it. But the rich can hire armies too. If this sounds a bit familiar, you probably didn’t get history in a public school, where government, we are taught, always produces good results because it has good intentions.

After all, intentions are more important than results…  If the Regulators have pure hearts and mean well, surely they will find an answer; can’t leave such things to freedom, no can we?

Apple Hires Auto Industry Veterans

Tech giant has been building a team for an electric-car project

http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-hires-auto-industry-manufacturing-veteran-1437430826

By

Christina Rogers,

Mike Ramsey and

Daisuke Wakabayashi

Updated July 20, 2015 7:51 p.m. ET

Apple Inc.is recruiting experts from the auto industry, a signal that its efforts to develop an electric car could be gaining ground.

Apple leaps in, but slowly?

Windows 10 Signifies Microsoft’s Shift in Strategy

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/20/technology/windows-10-signifies-microsofts-shift-in-strategy.html?_r=0

By NICK WINGFIELDJULY 19, 2015      (nyt)

SEATTLE — Next week, when Microsoft releases Windows 10, the latest version of the company’s operating system, the software will offer a mix of the familiar and new to the people who run earlier versions of it on more than 1.5 billion computers and other devices.

There will be a virtual assistant in the software that keeps track of users’ schedules, and Microsoft will regularly trickle out updates with new features to its users over the Internet. And the Start menu, a fixture of Windows for decades, will make a formal reappearance.

But one of the biggest changes is the price. Microsoft will not charge customers to upgrade Windows on computers, a shift that shows how power dynamics in the tech industry have changed.

The decision to make free a product that once cost $50 to $100 is a sign of how charging consumers for software is going the way of the flip phone. Companies like Google have crept into Microsoft’s business with free software and services subsidized by its huge advertising business, while Apple in recent years has made upgrades to its applications and operating systems free, earning its money instead from hardware sales.

If you have Window 8, you probably should grab Windows 10; but if you’re happy with Windows 7, I wouldn’t be in any great rush. ”Be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor yet the last to cast the old aside.”

https://medium.com/@Blakei/artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-work-abacce6328d6?curator=MediaREDEF

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work — Medium

By Blake Irving, CEO, GoDaddy — Artificial Intelligence has been the topic de jour lately with every corner of intellectual thought sounding in on the perils, and the potential rewards, of synthesizing a machine intelligence that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can. Elon Musk, Bill Gates and even Stephen Hawking have all suggested that an AI with this sort of general intelligence (also known as Strong AI or Full AI) could bring about an apocalypse that sees an end to human civilization, or even an end to the human race.

There’s no doubt that Strong AI is the subject of intense research by DARPA, MIT, Berkeley, IBM, Google and many others. But it’s hard not to notice that despite all the anxiety, Strong AI today lives only in the imagination of science fiction writers and in the hopes and dreams of research scientist. At the prestigious “Future of AI” conference in San Juan this January, the estimates for when an AI might emerge vacillated wildly from 5 years to a hundred years in our future — its variables are that unknown.

While a singularity triggering AI is tantalizing to speculate about, like day dreaming with a lottery ticket in your pocket, it’s still all hypothetical. So when I was asked to join a panel discussion about “when AI will change our lives” at this year’s Fortune Brainstorm Tech, my first thought was, “who knows, it may not happen in our lifetimes.” That thought was followed quickly by a second thought: “when it happens it will probably just kill us all, so let’s talk about something more practical.”

There’s considerably more.

Todos Santos in reality? 
Dr. Pournelle,
This came from the UK Daily Mail.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3167922/The-end-urban-sprawl-Ambitious-plan-fit-entire-CITY-inside-single-bee-hive-skyscraper-house-25-000.html
I wonder if the architect has heard of Paolo Soleri?
Best regards,
Bill Kelly

Arcologies make sense for some people.

A foolish consistency.

Dear Jerry –

I expect that you looked benignly on the recent publicity concerning the close approach of 2011 UW158, with its much-mentioned valuation of $5.4 trillion (in platinum alone – or maybe it’s all precious metals, that part seems to get left out). http://www.rt.com/news/310170-platinum-asteroid-2011-uw-158/

Unfortunately for the cause of space exploration, the numbers don’t add up. With measurements of 500 meters by 1000 meters, a brick-shaped object will have a volume of 250 million cubic meters. Since the pictures show that it is not remotely brickish, lets work with 100 million cubic meters. Assuming it is solid metal, with a specific gravity of about 8, that’s about 800 million tons. Assuming a platinum abundance of 100 ppm, that’s 80 thousand tons, or 80 million kg. With platinum at $32 per gram, total value is $250 billion.

While this is certainly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, it’s not $5 trillion.

Regards,

Jim Martin

We don’t need it to be worth $5 Trillion

advise and consent

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
In a recent posting you commented “this process of Presidential agreements without advice and consent of the Senate, with the President able to veto Congressional disapproval is a recent Constitutional discovery, unknown through most of the history of the Republic.” I agree; but it’s been a long time making, and I don’t know how we walk back from it.
In the run-up to the first Gulf war, I saw no congressional appetite for actually taking responsibility and declaring war. Much easier to hand it to the executive. From a cynical perspective, Congress seems to be more eager to cast votes which please “the base” but have no real effect (as in “repealing Obamacare”) than to enact something for which they might have to take ownership of the consequences. Recovering a more robust Constitutional government would, I think, require a Congress with the courage to make choices and accept responsibility for their consequences.
On another level, I am becoming convinced that the level of polarization in our current politics is pushing us toward bad government. Consider a Republican Congressional leadership which declared it to be their first priority, from the beginning of President Obama’s term, to make him a one-term president. Not to do the business of the Republic, but to ensure the ineffectiveness of the President. What might be plausible results of this?
One, of course, might be that the President in question would throw up his or her hands and say “My goodness! They don’t like me! I’ll just go play golf for four years.” Another option would be to try to work with the Congress anyway. As I remember it, President Obama tried this; and found that even originally Republican proposals (such as the substance of the Affordable Care Act) became intolerable once his hands touched them.
Another option — and I agree both that we seem to be moving toward this, and that it’s harmful — is that a President who actually wanted to accomplish something might look for ways to do it without relying on Congress. Cue the ominous music; but echo-chamber discourse and red-meat rhetoric move us in this direction.
If we are to recover a better balance among the branches of government, we’re going to need to learn to work together; and that “compromise” is not a dirty word.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

The usual path when democracy decays to decadence is some form of dictatorship, which can go in several directions after that.  Governor Schwarzenegger of California started with good intentions, and was called hideous names by nurse and other people he wanted to like him, so he just gave in. But of course he was only a governor.

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