Monthly Archives: August 2015

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Conference with Steve Barnes and Jack Cohen (ain’t Skype wonderful) on the new book; Larry Niven had a dentist appointment. We’ll have one more Wednesday conference before the SF WorldCon. The planning of the book proceeds nicely; so does the text, but now it’s time for some text only I can write. We need a big scene with most of the characters in the book and a good bit of technical detail. And a large expository lump; I generally do those and have since MOTE. And I’ve got to work on LisaBetta with DeChancie. And there’s always Mamelukes. I’ll be in fiction mode a while if I don’t starve. Of course starvation is no bad incentive for a writer to work.

We had some interesting experiences getting Live Writer, which is an intermediate step in getting this journal into publication, installed on Swan, the Windows 10 machine we’ve set up so I can work at night in the back room with disturbing my wife. It’s a relatively fast machine with a big 27” monitor, and a Logitech K360 keyboard just like the one on Alien Artifact (the main machine I write this on).

The names come from their appearance: both are Thermaltake cases, and the cases are elegant but somewhat ornate. Not unappealing; just a bit startling. They are both over a year old, and while more costly than plainer cases, they justify the extra money by being quiet and cool with plenty of power, as well as being convenient to work with. Swan may have been brought up as Windows 8 – frankly I forget – but has been Windows 10 since the developer test program existed, and is now just plain Windows 10. I have to say I am becoming rapidly more fond of 10, and I would upgrade my Windows 7 system to it except for a few reservations.

One is Total Annihilation, which worked on Swan with Windows 10, but won’t now: that is, the program runs, but not all of it is on screen. Some driver has been improved, and that made it unusable. While that game is not a vital necessity, what else won’t run? I use some pretty old programs because they work. One is DiskMapper, which I am pleased to say works just fine even though it was developed for Windows NT! I just used it to find and annihilate some redundant programs and data files on Precious, the Surface Pro 3, and it works quite well.

Anyway, the story of Live Writer is interesting, and you’ll find it in Chaos Manor Reviews along with much other good stuff http://chaosmanorreviews.com/ . Be sure to go look at CMR if you haven’t lately.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-car-aid-acid-test-1439249158

Electric Car-Aid Acid Test

Forcing poor rate-payers to subsidize green autos for the rich.

To the list of subsidies for elite lifestyles in the name of fighting climate change, you can now add charging stations for luxury plug-in cars and other electric vehicles. A growing number of states are forcing all consumers to pay for these green amenities that only a fraction of them will ever use.

The fleet of battery-powered cars is rising, and their owners are more than twice as wealthy as most Americans. An Experian Automotive study found that more than 20% of them are middle-aged professionals who make more than $175,000 a year. But deploying the new equipment to keep these affluent drivers on the go isn’t cheap, and states and power companies are starting to socialize the cost of these green frills over all rate-payers.

Historically in the regulated electric markets, public utility commissions have allowed utilities to recover only the costs of “fair, just and reasonable” capital investments that benefit everyone. This is the sensible principle of “user pays.” Now regulators are demolishing this barrier and inserting the tab for charging stations into higher electric rates, regardless of a consumer’s income or the kind of car he happens to drive. <snip>

More concessions to the ruling class. Madame Defarge is watching. And knitting…

My new story collection is out in paperback. At one time SF was dominated by short fiction. No more. But I think we’ve lost sight of something amid the flurry of novels. Stories, especially fantastic stories, have a keener edge if they are short and to the point. They can cut deeper, probe more pointedly. They can also vouchsafe epiphanies and other bursts of illumination. They can suggest offbeat worlds that spring into existence like virtual particles. Besides, they are not huge investments of writing time. If one doesn’t sell, you’ve not wasted a year or more. Just a few of the many reasons I continue to perfect the art of short fiction.

Far Cries: Collected Stories: John DeChancie: 9781514179208: Amazon.com: Books

John

John is of course my collaborator on LisaBetta which is a novel proceeding quite nicely. I don’t disagree with his analysis of the market, and of course Niven writes short stories; but it’s not my cup of tea. I have a few, but I always found that when I had a story idea it came out better in 50,000 words or more; and when I first got into this racket, 50 to 60 thousand words was a novel; there weren’t so many 100,000 word novels. But I never did work on short stories. I wish I had some.

The Starborn 

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

This isn’t directly related to your question, but I think it worth mentioning even so.

In church on Sunday I spoke  to a woman who had fertility problems, so she had her eggs harvested. Since she was determined that all fertilized embryos would be brought to term if possible, they created 8 fertilized embryos , and put them in the freezer until such time as it was possible to try to carry them.

8 embryos, 3 survived pregnancy, and now she has three lovely girls. Ironically, though the oldest and youngest girl are about seven years apart physically, the were *conceived at the same time*  — it’s just that the years that the oldest was developing , the other spent in a freezer. 
It made me wonder — we often talk about cold-sleep as one way to travel between stars. While the techniques to induce long-term hibernation in adult human beings are under development, the techniques to hibernate fertilized embryos exist * today *.
I was wondering if that might be another way to start an interstellar colony — to ship the colonists as frozen embryos.  This would require some kind of ‘caretaker’ to thaw them out and raise them up into functioning adults, either a robot crew or a generation ship “caretaker” family, a family of priests, as your other commenter mentioned, who could maintain their lives and their teachings, passing them through the generations, until planetfall, at which point it would be their jobs to literally act as mothers and fathers to the newly thawed colonists.
This would naturally make the caretakers a literal aristocracy which might cause friction among their children — especially if, several hundred years down the line, there is no more obvious difference between thawed and caretaker, but the caretakers still retain their privileges. Sequel fodder?
In any event, I would suggest that teaching in interstellar colonies will look remarkably like the teaching methods we have used to date. Reason: As you have argued in other books,  it isn’t practical to maintain a high-technology civilization on a new colony.  So until a new industrial base can be created, humans will have to use sustainable resources. Horses instead of tractors.  Animal labor in place of machines. Mechanical calculators and abacus devices instead of electronic calculators. They may eventually develop the tools to build the tools to create such things , but until they do any kind of sophisticated memory transfer technology will have to wait — or be the privilege of the caretaker family.
Some thoughts and ideas. I hope they are useful!
Respectfully,

Brian P.

This is an important theme in our new series on the first interstellar colony. There never will be all that many adults in the first years of a colony; what the children are taught is all they will know. We address these problems

thanks & grab bag

Dear Jerry: 
I haven’t checked in in quite a while, been dealing with some health issues of my own (nothing near as serious as yours but debilitating nonetheless), so there are a number of things:
First, a huge roaring THANK YOU for posting the link to the video of the Feynman lectures!!!
I’ve been a huge Feynman fan since hearing SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN! on public radio’s Radio Reader 20 some years ago.  Remember Dick Estelle and how good he was?
Anyway I’ve tried to plow through the hard copy of the Lectures, but never got far.  The videos are an absolute treat, and in my opinion a national treasure (maybe after Windows ME and Vista Bill Gates CAN still get into Heaven).
But that voice!  I’d never heard Feynman speak before.  If he wasn’t consciously channeling Ralph Kramden on the Honeymooners he and Jackie Gleason must have grown up within a few blocks of each other.
It gives a whole new meaning to “To the moon, Alice!”  Or it’s like Fred Flintstone waking up one day with a genius-level IQ.
Anyway, many thanks.
Computer stuff:
NEW DESKTOP:  I can’t believe how much computer you can buy these days for $1200.  I recently got a new ASUS desktop from Best Buy (model CG5290) which comes with Intel Core i7 CPU @ 2.66Ghz, NINE gigabytes of fast DDR3 memory, a Hitachi terabyte HD spinning at 7200 RPM, and an nVidia GTX 260 with 892MB of dedicated video memory, plus a ton of ports, DVD, etc.  The only thing missing from my perspective was wifi, which I solved with a Belkin USB “N” adapter which works slicker than a smelt.
What’s this got to do with you?  Well, only that you were right: given enough horsepower – as in EIGHT cores and NINE gigs of memory – Vista64 doesn’t suck dead bunnies performance-wise any more.  On this machine it starts and stops and is about as responsive as my bottom line Mac Mini running OS X.  Happy happy joy joy!
But the ASUS is a sweet machine for the bucks, I don’t know how much you’d spend building the equivalent desktop but as my time is valuable (at least to me) I’m happy with the bargain I made.
DEVICE OF THE DECADE: well, maybe not, but I wanted to get your attention.  Maybe you know about the Thermaltake Blacx bare drive docking stations already; if so skip this.  If not I think one of these devices might be the answer to your storage and backup prayers.  Take a quick peek here:  Thermaltakeusa » Storage » BlacX
I’m sure like me you have a multiplying stable of bare drives hanging around not doing much: the BlacX easily and cheaply puts them back to work.  Even if not why buy external drives and keep paying for the case, controller, and cables with each and every one?  I just picked up a Hitachi terabyte bare drive, OEM edition (but 7200 RPM + 16MB cache) for $74.95 on Amazon.
I would think this could be the perfect solution for your backup needs as I’m sure you’re constantly rotating drives to and from offsite storage.  Works with both laptop and desktop bare drives, and the eSATA model means your data transfers are going to be many times faster than either USB 2 or even FireWire 800.  As somebody I know would say, “HIGHLY Recommended.”  Shop around, I got mine from Amazon for $43.38, a hefty slice off list price.
NIFTY NEW PRODUCT:  Intel has released the second generation of their top-line X25M SSD drives, and I have a 160GB on order.  The price is down from nearly $700 to $500, and according to Anandtech the speed and reliability are up.  Be careful to get the “G2” model.
MY NEW FAVORITE KEYBOARD:  Logitech’s Illuminated.  Great touch, four levels of key illumination, sleek looks, well thought out set of added “function” keys, what’s not to like?
WORLD OF WARCRAFT GOODY:  So how’s your Pally doing?  I’ve got three 80s now and two 70s on their way up, all classes.  Obviously I play way too much, but I don’t hardly turn on the TV any more, so…
Anyway the new goody is Logitech’s G13 game board.  Comes with a very nicely thought out WoW profile, auto-detects the game, and I find it very much more comfortable for long sessions than any regular flat keyboard.  A little pricey but if it saves me from carpel tunnel?  Check it out here: Logitech > Keyboards > Keyboards > G13 Advanced Gameboard
QUESTION OF THE MONTH:  Windows 7?  Why?  Sure it’s a bit faster and prettier, but where’s the beef?  Hopefully if you know you’ll share in a column soon.
Okay, I’ve taken enough of your time, I hope this finds you well and you find some of this useful and/or humorous, as ever all the best,
Tim

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/2009/Q3/mail579.html#Feynman

I have one of the Thermaltake drive connectors on Swan, and I just got five 4 terabyte drives…

Dr Pournelle

RE: TFX @ https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/still-in-fiction-mode-slave-prices/

This is the story of the TFX and me.

I was 6 years old. We had moved to the ranch in the summer. That winter, I walked out the back door and headed for the barn to pull out bales and hay the cattle.

At this time, General Dynamics was experimenting with the TFX at their Fort Worth plant. All their flights were secret, and they never flew the same route twice.

I heard a noise and looked to the southwest. I saw two jets in fingertip formation approaching at a high rate of speed. I estimate that they flew 50 feet off the deck. They traversed from my right to my left and passed within 300 feet of me. They popped over the ridge to the northwest and disappeared from my sight.

All the while the wingman was doing slow rolls.

At that moment, I knew I wanted to be an Air Force pilot. Took me 20 years from that point, but I made it.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

I was on the preliminary design team for TFX and had a minor part in the strategic analysis showing that a single design couldn’t do all the missions required of air power. Eleven military boards awarded TFX to Boeing, but the contract went elsewhere; the common appellation for the F-111 was the LBJ. The F-111 was a good recce/strike and battlefield interdiction plane, and one of them could generally accomplish more (for those missions) than 8 sorties by other aircraft; but of course it wasn’t a match for MIGS in air to air combat.

http://randomthoughtsandguns.blogspot.com/2015/07/excerpts-from-emails-with-friend.html

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, August 11, 2015

I had dinner with colleagues last night and a lunch conference today; still mostly in fiction mode. Now it’s dinner time.

The Chester Creek Wireless Visionboard is useless for me; the keys are larger but not separated so that I often hit two at once, and the alt key is right next to the space bar and far over to the right, so hitting alt along with space is nearly inevitable. Alt-Space does odd things to Word, and endangers all your text if you then hit the wrong sequence; since I have to look at the keyboard rather than the screen it is extremely dangerous, but with the Chester Creek it is damn near inevitable. I have retired the Chester Creek. Incidentally, it requires a screwdriver to install or replace the batteries, and the receiver seems somewhat delicate and squirrelly.

It is dinner time – I got up late and then had lunch with John De Chancie to discuss LisaBetta, our novel of an AI using near future when we are just reaching to the asteroids. LisaBetta is a young girl just reaching puberty who has mostly been raised by an advanced AI. She owns her father’s asteroid mining ship, but it is very advanced and the object of desire to a number of powerful people… It reads damned good so far, and now that I can type I can add some scenes myself as well as touch up the excellent work John has done. We look to finish it by the end of the year.

And Eric found the reason Live Writer started to install on Swan, the Windows 10 machine in the back room, so I can add to this tonight. With the Logitech K360 I make far fewer typos per sentence – too many, especially when I am tired or enthusiastic about what I am writing. Then I see all that red on the screen when I glance up, and have to fix it, and by then I have to rethink what I was saying. It slows things a lot.

With luck a lot more later; the batteries in my hearing aid just died, and it’s dinner time.

Currency War

China fired another shot in the ongoing currency war:

<.>

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/444c5bc8-3fca-11e5-9abe-5b335da3a90e.html#ixzz3iYWfgzZK

China on Tuesday carried out the biggest devaluation of the renminbi in two decades to boost its slowing economy, marking an escalation of international “currency wars”, surprising markets and risking a political clash with Washington.

The 1.9 per cent downward move by the central bank was its biggest one-day change since 1993 — and since China abandoned its tight currency peg for a managed float in 2005. It pushed the renminbi’s “daily fix” to Rmb6.2298 against the dollar, compared with a Rmb6.1162 rate the day before. Before Tuesday, the biggest shift this year had been a 0.16 per cent adjustment.

The move, coming as economic growth has flagged and the currency has been under upward pressure from its informal peg to the rising dollar, is in sharp contrast to policy during earlier times of stress when Beijing resisted pressure to devalue. It should help combat an unexpectedly large fall in China’s exports fuelled by the renminbi’s relative strength.

It also came as China is pushing to have the renminbi accepted as a global reserve currency alongside the dollar, yen, euro and sterling by the International Monetary Fund, which this month cited the need for great exchange rate flexibility as a key requirement.

</>

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/444c5bc8-3fca-11e5-9abe-5b335da3a90e.html#axzz3iYVh35TL

The average person has no idea what this means. So China is devaluing its currency; why should I care? Oddly enough, Trump is calling it:

<.>

“They’re just destroying us,” the billionaire businessman, a long-time critic of China’s currency policy, said in a CNN interview.

“They keep devaluing their currency until they get it right. They’re doing a big cut in the yuan, and that’s going to be devastating for us.”

<..>

“We have so much power over China,” he told CNN. “China has gotten rich off of us. China has rebuilt itself with the money it’s sucked out of the United States and the jobs that it’s sucked out of the United States.”

</>

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/11/presidential-candidate-trump-china-devaluation-will-devastate-us.html

I suppose now they’ll accuse him of being racist for these comments.

I’m not a Trump supporter, but I’m either not supporting or am directly opposing the others as well..

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Here’s Eric on Live Writer and Windows 10:

    Essentially, it came down to downloading the correct file to start the install. For reasons that defy my understanding, Microsoft has never done a good job on how they manage the Live suite of apps. My impression is they regarded it more as something for OEMs to bundle with new PCs, like the MS Works suite of yore, and didn’t put the proper effort into presenting it to individuals downloading the product.

    There were three major generations, 2009, 2011, and 2012. The earliest does not like post-XP versions of Windows. The middle version was intended for Vista, and the last version for 7 and 8.x. It was odd for a Microsoft program to display such compatibility issues but there it is. The 2011 version never gave me problems on Windows 7 but the only portion I used extensively is the Mail app, which has a long history as Outlook Express.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-live/download-windows-essentials#wetabs=we2012

    Microsoft pulled the earlier versions from download availability but they are still offered on numerous sites that are likely to show up in search. They’re hard to distinguish because they always have the same wlsetup.exe file name, rather than carrying some clue to their version up front. Some people are still obsessively attached to the 8.3 file naming convention.

    So, I made sure I was downloading the 2012 version and it simply worked. Notably, it showed a different icon than the one downloaded to Swan previously. The .NET 3.5 runtime must have been installed on Swan at some point because it didn’t ask for it as it did on my Windows 10 test machine a few days earlier.

And I can only say that I thought I was dealing with the official Microsoft site on Explorer not Firefox, and I got impossibly stuck; thank Eric for knowing what to do.

Eric Pobirs

Adjusted Sunspot Activity

It had to happen eventually. If the data don’t prove what you want it to prove, “recalibrate”.

“New sunspot analysis shows rising global temperatures not linked to solar activity”

“A recalibration of data describing the number of sunspots and groups of sunspots on the surface of the Sun shows that there is no significant long-term upward trend in solar activity since 1700”

(http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/aug/07/new-sunspot-analysis-shows-rising-global-temperatures-not-linked-to-solar-activity)

How very – predictable.

Braxton Cook

Predictable and predicted.

Lord of Janissaries

Part of my Baen monthly bundle.
Previously read the first two books and looking forward to reading the full series when Mamelukes is finished.
Glad to see your health improving.
I know from experience how difficult it is, I was 36 years old and battled stage 4 cancer for a year. Now at 69, the battle would be three times as hard.

Bud Pritchard

A random thought to be thunk upon

A bit of random speculation, not really deserving of publication…

On the one hand, we have the EM Drive, which appears to do something for which we have no theory whatsoever, and which threatens to be real.

On the other hand, we have the E-CAT, which appears to do something else for which we have very little theory, and which also threatens to be real.

Imagine the implications for humanity if BOTH of them turn out to be real.

The Solar System is ours, immediately.  With that come unlimited resources.  The E-CAT provides the power to get there, and do Interesting Things once you’re there.  The EM Drive provides the way to get there.

More interestingly, we gain access to flatter space, and much longer baselines, for doing physics experiments.  (“Pioneer anomaly”, anyone?)  What do you get if you build a REALLY BIG Michelson-Morley interferometer?

–John

It would be wonderful, but we still have not proved either is real; now, though, there are some grounds for hope.

This modification is a test

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

Chaos Manor View, Monday, August 10, 2015

We have a new keyboard, Chester Creek Wireless Vision keyboard, with bigger keys. I have dinner guests. More tomorrow.

“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.

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