Monthly Archives: September 2015

Chaos Manor View, Monday, September 28, 2015

1330: Just back from a walk with Paul Schindler, former BYTE editor and old friend who comes down from the Bay area once or twice a year. We usually take a hike up the trail to Mulholland, but with the walker that was right out, so we had to make do with two miles on the flats. I am now motivated to get up the paved fire road past the ranger station at Fryman so that I can get up the hill again. I am sure I can manage the fire roads. But first time I think I want Barnes along, just in case…

Saturday night I went to a gumbo party out in Woodland Hills. It was a meeting of the Mystery Writers of America local chapter. I have been off and on going to MWA meetings since the late 60’s when it met in the Los Angeles Press Club building, and I used to hang out with Ed McBain aka Evan Hunter. Alas the Press Club sold the building (I have no idea where the money went) and met in various places thereafter, with increasingly smaller meetings. Some were in the nearby Sportsman’s Lodge in Studio City and I went to those, but then they got increasingly harder to get to, and each time I went I knew fewer and fewer people. For some reason I decided to go to the gumbo party and said I would be there.

Then Greg Bear and Astrid Anderson Bear came down for the weekend to see Karen Anderson, and I was committed for Saturday night, so we had lunch at a nearby Italian place that serves gluten free pizza that my wife can eat. That went well, but there was no way Karen could get into my house with the front stairs – I use the garage, as I can’t get up the front stairs either. But my garage opens on another street, not the front of my house, and it has stairs too, only not so complex, so I couldn’t invite them in. It worked out fine, and the restaurant was quiet enough that we could have a great conversation, sort of finishing the conversation we started Thursday night at the LASFS meeting.

At the MWA party there was no one I knew, and I doubt anyone there ever heard of me, but it was interesting getting the mystery writer point of view on what is happening to the publishing industry. After a while I found myself sitting at a table with a younger guy, whom my son Alex introduced with a name I didn’t catch – my hearing aids aren’t so good at noisy parties – as having produced a recent documentary on Glenn Campbell. I mentioned that I had met Glenn Campbell a long time ago when I was one of the managers of Sam Yorty’s campaign for Mayor. Of course I didn’t know him, but that led to other conversation, and eventually I found out I was talking to Trevor Albert, who produced a lot of big movies including Groundhog Day. I was impressed.

Then Sunday there was at LASFS a memorial to Ann Morell, an old friend, as is her widower Bill Ellern. I’ve known Anne since before she met Bill, and they were married for thirty years.

That pretty well used up the weekend, and I am off to Kaiser and physical therapy in few minutes. More another time.

1605: Hah.  Kaiser Physical Therapy specialist Theresa Wong has just said I don’t need her any more; I have graduated. I suppose that is good, but I will miss her.  I have to go out to the Podiatrist tomorrow, so I’ll drop off a couple of books for her when we go.  The first day I came home from hospitals I was a mess.  Now they can’t do a lot more.  And I can do several miles walk after vegetating for a week.  Good progress, and no reason to believe I can’t keep improving. 

USAF tankers 

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Here’s a pretty good writeup on the KC46 Pegasus, the USAF’s next generation air-to-air refueling tanker.

http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/26/pegasus-its-no-unicorn-either/

While it isn’t much of an improvement over the older KC-135 and is quite a bit more expensive, that doesn’t change the fact that the older aircraft is quite long in the tooth, and still needs replacing.

Also, the procurement process is wasteful. I’m sure that comes as a shock to all readers .

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The elimination of Systems Command was a drastic mistake.  Now we pay for that “saving”.

Dave Hammond

Begin forwarded message:

Subject: Popular in NYT Technology: Microsoft Releases Office 2016, With Features Focused on Teamwork

Microsoft Releases Office 2016, With Features Focused on Teamwork
By NICK WINGFIELD
Office 2016 has numerous changes, with the most prominent ones designed to improve how the software is used by groups of people to collaborate.
September 21, 2015 at 05:00PM
via NYT Technology http://ift.tt/1V7CKtx

Eric installed  Windows 16 on Swan, my Windows 10 system in the back room, and on Precious, the Surface Pro, over the weekend, but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet; I’m hoping it will improve our collaborative efforts.  More when I know more.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-briny-liquid-water-on-mars-20150926-story.html

Watch NASA scientists explain why they think water still flows on Mars (LA Times)

By KAREN KAPLAN

Some of NASA’s top scientists are set to share new findings they say will solve a mystery about Mars.

Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science, and Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program, will hold a news conference Monday morning at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., to “detail a major science finding,” according to the space agency.

The news conference will also include three members of the research team behind a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience that offers evidence of “contemporary water activity on Mars.”

In that study, scientists from Georgia Tech, NASA Ames Research Center and elsewhere explain that an instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted telltale signs of hydrated salts in several locations on the surface of the Red Planet.

Using data collected by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars instrument, the team members concluded that salts are deposited on the slopes of several craters and canyons. These salts — including magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate – appear to have been carried there recently by flowing water.

Mars has frozen water at its poles and traces of water in the dust that covers its surface. Finding liquid water flowing on Mars would make the planet much more Earth-like, and potentially increase the likelihood of Martian life.

In their study, the researchers write that their findings “strongly support the hypothesis that seasonal warm slopes are forming liquid water on contemporary Mars.” But they aren’t sure where that water comes from. One of the possibilities that comes to mind – that water ice melts in the relatively warm summer – is unlikely, since these salts weren’t found near the icy poles. They list a few other theories but say none of them seems probable.

More details may be forthcoming in the news conference, which begins at 8:30 a.m. You can watch it live in the window above.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-humans-can-win-the-race-against-the-machines-1443392035

How Humans Can Win the Race Against the Machines

American education is ripe for a technology revolution to prepare students for the 21st century      (journal)

By

Christopher Mims

Sept. 27, 2015 6:13 p.m. ET

Whatever your measure—the reading and math proficiency of high-school graduates, the skills gap in the nation’s labor market, or the real value of college—there can be little argument that America’s schools, as a whole, are failing to prepare students for the 21st century.

There are countless explanations why, but here’s a significant contributing factor: Until recently, we simply didn’t know how to use technology to make teachers and students happier, better engaged and more successful.

Think about it: In every field of human endeavor, from manufacturing to knowledge work, we’re figuring out how to use technology to make humans more successful—to raise the quality of their work, if not their measured productivity.

But the same can hardly be said of teaching. In education, the overwhelming majority of students are still learning as they always have, in classrooms dominated by a one-to-many lecturing model in which teachers inevitably leave some students behind while boring others. That model has barely changed in a century.

<snip>

We need a new education technology, but we won’t get it.  There are too many who have built their lives on learning the old technology, and they now lead the unions to protect their comrades. We cannot fire incompetent teachers; we cannot fire incompetent education professors; we cannot require new teachers to learn the new technologies assuming we have some in development.  The public school system now exists to pay unionized teachers salaries and pensions; if that condition is not fulfilled, then the children don’t matter.  Again that may not be true of individual teachers, but it will be true of their union leaders at both the public school and teachers college levels levels.  Pournelle’s Iron Law will prevail; heck we can’t fire obviously incompetent teachers now;  how can we ever replace those who don’t know whatever new technologies we may develop?  We can’t even keep order in the classrooms.

It may be that parents will learn the new technologies; but will regulators ever allow schools using them to be credentialed?  Perhaps I am misinformed?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/matt-damon-tinkers-to-survive-on-mars-in-new-movie-1443025432

Matt Damon Tinkers to Survive on Mars in New Movie

In ‘The Martian,’ opening Oct. 2, Matt Damon plays a stranded astronaut who has to figure out how to survive on Mars for almost two years      (journal)

By

Don Steinberg

Updated Sept. 24, 2015 9:37 a.m. ET

“The Martian,” a science-fiction movie opening Oct. 2, isn’t about mind-bending quantum cosmology or the intergalactic origins of human life. There are no bureaucrats or evil CEOs with hidden agendas who could sabotage a space mission. There’s no back story about parental issues between a wistful astronaut and a child peering into the night sky.

Instead, “The Martian” is the story of an enterprising scientist who is stranded on a planet and must use his wits and limited resources to survive and be rescued. The movie, directed by Ridley Scott, is based on a book that Andy Weir, then a computer programmer, published chapter-by-chapter on the Web.

“No one would ever accuse ‘The Martian’ of being literature,” Mr. Weir says of his book. “I’ll be the first to admit it. There is very little character depth at all. There’s no character growth. It’s a story about events, not people.”

In the movie, astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is part of a crew sent to Mars. (Other members are Jessica Chastain, Michael Pena and Kate Mara). A storm hits and Watney is struck by debris that appears to kill him. The crew reluctantly aborts and blasts off. Then Watney wakes up amid the rusty red dust of Mars and wonders where everybody went. The NASA brass in Houston (boss Jeff Daniels and scientist Chiwetel Ejiofor) arrange a funeral—there’s no grieving family—before receiving word from Watney that he isn’t dead after all.

ENLARGE

Andy Weir, author of ‘The Martian,’ at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Photo: Jeff Vespa/Getty Images

The driving force of the film is Watney’s Popular Mechanics-style approach to surviving on Mars for almost two years. He measures, calculates, builds, experiments and blows thing up. He adapts communications devices and mulches Mars dirt with his own waste to create soil for growing food. He’s like the Discovery Channel’s “MythBusters” guys in space, joking darkly, with little time for brooding about his plight. Six years ago, Mr. Weir was a programmer working on mobile apps who had gained a modest following for the comics and sci-fi stories he published as a hobby on his website. A space nerd, he plotted missions in his head and wrote software to calculate orbital trajectories. He figured a Mars mission gone awry would make a thrilling tale, which he started posting online in 2009. The science, he says, became the drama.

<snip>

Robinson Crusoe in space.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fd1c2266-62e6-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3n5GT1Iwr

Astronomical costs of intellectual property rights patently wrong    ft

Kate Burgess

Innovations are still being stifled by dense thickets of overlapping patents

The International Space Station cost €100bn over a decade, smartphone patents wars have cost $20bn over two years

It seems cruel that it costs comparatively little to launch groundbreaking ideas into space yet so many are held back by the billions spent protecting intellectual property rights on earth.

The price of funding the International Space Station, the collaborative project that has taken the technology of many corporate tots to the stars, is about €100bn over a decade, according to Europe’s Space Agency. That means every European paying about €1 a year.

Put that against the $20bn that the patent wars cost the smartphone industry alone over two years when the likes of Apple, Motorola and others filed thousands of patents and battled to protect them.

As far back as 2011, the Hargreaves Report, sponsored by the UK government, warned that innovations were being stifled by the dense thickets of overlapping intellectual property rights. Since then, growing numbers of patents have been filed across the digital spectrum with holders laying claim to algorithms and formulas and through them sweeping ownership of broad technologies and products.

Multinationals may have the resources to file and then defend their claims in court when necessary, but few small businesses do.

For most start-ups, the costs of litigation are astronomical and the outcome too uncertain. Academics from the London School of Economics put the total cost in the UK for claimants and defendants in patent litigation at between £1m and £6m in 2012. The costs are rising. It emerged last week that the UK government is planning to double the fee for issuing civil lawsuits — the second increase in 12 months. The Law Society says it is a further deterrent to small businesses defending their rights to intellectual property.

It does not deter big companies.

<snip>

Dear Jerry:

Washington’s  Growing resemblance to the City of Dis  has washed over into another Dantean analogy:  the Best Practices of both sides in the Climate Wars increasingly  draw on the Seven Deadly Sins

http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2015/09/metamodeling-seven-deadly-sins-at.html

Finding seven deadly sins Emoji in short supply, I had to make my own.

Best regards

—

Russell  Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University    

An example

Model Envy-   The need to command larger research budgets than competing models or theories, if need be by having competitors defunded or charged with crimes.

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

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, September 24, 2015

It’s hot and once again I feel like a stagnating vegetable. So it goes.

The man made global warming movement got more support from the Pope’s speech, but His Holiness does not seem to be listening to the scientist members of his Jesuit order.

Certainly the CO2 level is rising, although other than its influencing global temperatures to rise I know of few effects; nor do I have any reason to believe we know much more than Arrhenius did when he calculated that doubling the C02 proportion of the atmosphere – which we have not done — would result in 2 degrees per century global temperature rise – which hasn’t happened yet. Wikipedia says:

Nowadays, the accepted explanation is that orbital forcing sets the timing for ice ages with CO₂ acting as an essential amplifying feedback.

Arrhenius estimated based on the CO2 levels at the time, that reducing levels by 0.62 – 0.55 would decrease temperatures by 4–5 °C (Celsius) and an increase of 2.5 to 3 times of CO2 would cause a temperature rise of 8–9 °C in the Arctic.^[16][13] In his book Worlds in the Making he described the “hot-house” theory of the atmosphere.

Increasing the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere certainly causes some rise in temperature; the question is, how much? At some point it will have reabsorbed all the radiation from Earth to space that can be absorbed by CO2; some believe that it is likely to have done that now (since water vapor and methane are pretty effective in that absorption in many places, so there isn’t any left for CO2 to grab; more CO2 doesn’t have any to get).

But that’s generally true anywhere. CO2 is most effective at absorbing radiation from Earth to space (more effective in getting heat that would go to space and not be absorbed by something else like methane) in cold, dry areas. This does not seem to be reflected in any of the climate models.

The present models do not seem to take account of any volcanism whether atmospheric or undersea; do not account for the physical restriction of CO2 effectiveness to cold dry areas; cannot predict the present from the physical conditions of the past; cannot account for the present halt—however temporary – of the rise in temperature; cannot account for the Little Ice Age; cannot account for the Viking Warm; cannot account for the Roman Warm; and cannot explain why historically the CO2 levels rise after temperature rises rather than before. (Outside the models that’s easy to explain.)

The response of the Global Warming Warriors has been largely political. The science response tends to the ridiculous such as Mann’s attempt simply to erase the Viking and Roman Warm periods in favor of his “hockey stick”, which requires considerable data adjustment and ignoring historical records in favor of interpretations of tree rings and other proxies of temperature. The emerging Viking farms in Greenland and the records of increases in growing seasons in England and on the Continent are not considered valid proxies of temperatures. The models do not explain the Ice Ages, which are assumed to be brought about by orbital factors operating over so long a time period as can safely be ignored: this despite considerable evidence that Ice Ages went from temperate conditions to meters if ice year round in England and the Northern part of the European continent in under a century. The Ice came fast.

In the OR (operations research) business, we had a saying: you can prove anything if you have sufficient adjustment to your data.

Defense of the Global Warming hypothesis became extreme, with criminal prosecution being threatened for unbelievers, most of whom had already lost their grants. It can be lucrative defending Global Warming. Whittaker Chambers thought he was leaving the winning side for the losing when he left the Communist Party. Given the trends in Academia at the time, his observation, though wrong, was not ridiculous.

more reputable sources…

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/23/when-messaging-collides-with-science-the-hottest-year-ever-inside-a-global-warming-pause/

http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/09/20/update-leader-of-effort-to-prosecute-skeptics-under-rico-paid-himself-his-wife-1-5-million-from-govt-climate-grants-for-part-time-work/
Stephanie Osborn

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

Hal Lewis

You do, of course, realize that Dr. Lewis’s resignation from APS occurred 5 years ago, and that he died in early 2011. His comments have been rebutted numerous times.
DJ

No, I didn’t realize it, but I do note that although it is said that he has been rebutted, the rebuttals don’t seem so obvious. No one has stated that the Global Warming Scam is recent or new (and for the record I have never said it was a scam except on the part of specific individuals). The facts as he stated them have not changed much: the grants go to those who embrace the man made global warming theories; theirs also the publications. This may be because they are correct, but somehow the major problems have not, in my opinion, been addressed other than to say “but that was rebutted.” Discovering the actual rebuttal (as opposed to its proclamation) has proven impossible of discovery.

volcanoes effects on albedo, typo

Dr. Pournelle,
Agree that volcanoes seem to be left out of the equations, even though this is vehemently denied by people with variable familiarity with the mathematics involved. I’d also put in a plug for subsurface volcanic affects on ocean temperatures, they’re not part of either the models nor is there accurate sensing, nor adjustments made to ocean temperature readings.
Just to register an opposing viewpoint: I only bring typos to your attention when I feel that they change your intended meaning. I’ve been wrong several times, but you’ve clarified the points in question. Casual publication and personal correspondence are full of these minor errors, they don’t impede my enjoyment of your column/blog, and as with most things, copy editing should be done in moderation. Please don’t let self-checking get in the way of recording your thoughts — I’d rather have new blog posts from you than nothing.
With hopes for you continued recovery and returning good cheer,
-d

I do the best I can.

This might be interesting

    1960s Boeing Stealth Concept

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/never-seen-photos-of-boeings-1960s-stealth-jet-concept-1732308296

Eric

Stealth aircraft. I heard rumors of something going on in Wichita, but no details.

The U.S. Air Force Has Loathed Close Air Support Since the Beginning.

Gimme a break. It is not just the US Air Force that hates CAS. All air forces hate CAS. Why? ‘Cause it’ll get you killed.

Arthur Lee Gould flew for the RFC in 1917 and, from his letters to his wife and his diary, compiled ‘No Parachute’ as a contemporary account of his experiences. When he joined 46 Squadron, the squadron had just made the switch to Sopwith Pups. The Pups were a match for German fighters only above 18,000 feet, so 46 Squadron flew top cover (air to air). The mission was cold and dangerous but the dangers could be mitigated.

In September 1917 the squadron switched to Sopwith Camels. The Camels flew low cover (10,000 – 12,000 feet) and ground attack sorties. Gould was shot down 3 times, all on ground attack missions. He was shot down twice in the space of 3 days. He had nightmares of ground attack and, like Roy Brown, lived on toast, tea, milk, and brandy. He went from being the new guy in the squadron to being the squadron’s senior pilot in 6 months. In January of 1918 the wing sent him to the Home Establishment.

USAF distaste for CAS in Korea was not new. The pilots of the RFC hated CAS in 1917. I recall a memoir ‘A Fighter Pilot’s Story’ about a USAAF pilot flying P47s over France and Germany from D-Day to VE-Day. Over 11 months his squadron suffered 300% casualties. Three hundred percent.

I do not say the mission should not be done. CAS must be done. But it is prejudiced, ignorant, stupid, and damned silly to expect pilots to like it.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Escorting heavy bombers will get you killed. Air superiority missions will get you killed. Being an infantryman will get you killed. Artillerymen get killed. Wars get you killed.

The problem with close air support is that there is no career path for those successful at it; the great careers are for other pilots in other missions. There are exceptions. And of course in WWII after air supremacy in Europe was established, cruising along thirty miles from the line of engagement in a P-47 looking for anything that might supply the Wehrmacht on their front lines with food or ammunition was an extremely effective use of air power, and pretty damned safe compared to being in the advance party of an armored column. Close support in that situation shortened the war by a lot; the Army concluded that if they’d had that earlier, the war wouldn’t have lasted as long. What makes you think I want anyone to love the CAS mission? As you say, it must be done, which I think is all I have ever said. I certainly do not expect gunners involved in an artillery duel to love their work.

: General Blasts A-10 vs. F-35 Debate as ‘Ludicrous’ | DoD Buzz

Some of the reader comments on this article are right on. Some are just priceless.

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2015/09/15/general-blasts-a-10-vs-f-35-debate-as-ludicrous/

John Harlow

In a session with reporters, Carlisle called the A-10 “a fantastic airplane doing fantastic work down range” in Iraq.

“One of the questions I get is if you’re going to retire the A-10s why are you still using them in the fight? Well, that’s an easy answer. I don’t have enough capacity. I’ve got to use every single thing I’ve got. I don’t have enough capacity” to handle the missions in Iraq and Syria without the A-10s, the general said.

However, Carlisle said, “It’s about how we do CAS, not what platform is replacing what platform.” In addition, the A-10 was not suited for operating against more sophisticated air defenses being developed by Russia, China and other potential adversaries, he said.

“The A-10, it’s more difficult for that airplane to operate in a contested environment,” Carlisle said. “We would lose, which none of us want to accept, we would lose a good portion of those airplanes potentially in a contested environment.”

Which of course is correct; ground support before establishing air supremacy – and nowadays that means suppression of ground based intercept – is costly, dangerous, and expensive. No one I know believes the air supremacy mission is unimportant; but the airplane most useful for that mission is not likely to be the best airplane for the close support mission. Educating the Congress, and the McNamara’s, to accept that truth is never easy. I really ought to find time to update Strategy of Technology, but alas, Dr. Possony has been gone for decades, and Col. Kane died last year.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-software-robots-changing-outsourcing-up-to-60-percent-of-the-tasks-can-be-automated/

The ‘software robots’ changing outsourcing: ‘Up to 60 percent of the tasks can be automated’ (ZD)

Romanian startup UiPath is targeting the BPO industry by helping robots take over the jobs that human workers hate.

By Andrada Fiscutean for Central European Processing | September 24, 2015 — 10:45 GMT (03:45 PDT) |

UiPath’s strategy is straightforward. Its CEO Daniel Dines refuses to make PowerPoint presentations for potential clients. “Instead, we show them the software and teach them what it can do.”

Dines and his team are in the ‘software robots’ business, part of a market expected to stretch to $5bn by 2020, up from less than $200m in 2013, according to Transparency Market Research. A challenger to Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, the Romanian startup estimates it will quadruple its annual turnover this year, to $2m.

The team started working together some ten years ago. Initially, their products addressed the consumer market. Then, they wrote libraries for UI automation and screen scraping for other developers to use, a step that helped them test their ideas and gather feedback.

A few years ago, they started working on their own robotic process automation platform. “We came late to the table, so we’re using the latest technologies,” Badita said.

A UiPAth software robot mimics a user. It sees the computer screen the way a human does. It clicks buttons, copy-pastes data from a picture to a spreadsheet, looks for specific numbers in a PDF file, or pops-up information about a client you’re talking to on the phone.

How long before 70% of jobs they will pay someone to do can be done by a robot?

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Fall Equinox

For explanation of equinox: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34334712

There is new material in Chaos Manor Reviews http://chaosmanorreviews.com/ and there will be more. Tell your friends.

Great conference with Barnes, Niven, and Jack Cohen (by Skype) this morning, followed by a great lunch at Hugo’s. There Will Be War: the anthology is filling faster than I thought it would, including some new stories written just for us (reminder: we buy only non-exclusive anthology rights, sometimes known as reprint rights; we do not pay extra for first rights). Anyway, if you have a story for the new There Will Be War, now’s the time to get it to submissions@therewillbewar.net .

Dr. Cohen had some marvelous biology for our colonists on Tau Ceti to discover; the saga of interstellar colonization proceeds. Now it’s sort of my turn, so I’ll have to get to work on the plot, and while I’m at it contribute some scenes.

This message gives serious cause for concern:

Top Scientist resigns / Global Warming Subject

see http://www.sott.net/article/277349-Top-scientist-resigns-from-post-admits-Global-Warming-is-a-scam
“Top US scientist Hal Lewis resigned this week from his post at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He admitted global warming climate change was nothing but a scam in his resignation letter. “

Gary

As reported by the Gateway Pundit: Top US scientist Hal Lewis resigned this week from his post at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He admitted global warming climate change was nothing but a scam in his resignation letter.

I think “nothing but a scam” goes beyond the evidence, and Dr. Lewis does not go so far as that; but he does come close. His letter of resignation is given in the article, and says that physics has been corrupted by money, much as Eisenhower predicted. His resignation was as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, not from the University of California. It is worth reading.

Meanwhile, we have

Ice age predictions

This letter to the editor of NYTimes from a NASA scientist clears up the question of how global warming can be modeled without taking account of the ice ages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/opinion/wobbling-on-climate-change.html?_r=0

Hoyt Purcell

Which purports to explain why the various climate models pay no attention to the long term trends responsible for Ice age predictions.

I would myself question whether this “clears up” anything; if we understand the Ice Ages that well, I would think, then that understanding would be better known; it may be my ignorance, but it is my understanding that the role of volcanoes and their effect on albedo has not been eliminated. If we actually understand any part of global climate, I would think we would eagerly incorporate that into our models, even if the effect was trivial; and I am not sure I believe that the effects are trivial. I thought the origin and explanations of the Ice Ages was still under debate, and not settled for all time by the hand calculations of a Serbian mathematician in the early 20^th Century. I know that it was not generally accepted that we knew all about the Ice Ages during the 1970’s when I attended meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the scientific consensus of climate scientists was that we were headed for lean years and lots of cold. It may well be that the “wobbles” in Earth’s orbit have effects that take hundreds of years to make a noticeable difference, but I also know that Belgian lake sediments indicate that the local climate went from deciduous trees to being under several meters of ice in under 100 years; and apparently more than once. The sudden oncoming of the Ice Ages was not so casually dismissed as Dr. Piers Sellers of Goddard would have us believe.

http://io9.com/5119304/ice-ages-start-and-end-so-suddenly-its-like-a-button-was-pressed-say-scientists

and

http://www.livescience.com/7981-big-freeze-earth-plunge-sudden-ice-age.html

will tell you more; apparently the consensus at Goddard is not shared by everyone in that field. And as I said, the sediments in lakes on both sides of the Channel show rather sudden transitions from deciduous trees dropping leaves to ice. I would myself believe that if all is clearly understood it might be considered appropriate for our computer models; and that a model that cannot distinguish between a climate appropriate for deciduous trees and being covered by meters of ice might need modification. The map is not the territory.

“What we see here has nothing to do with seeking refuge and safety.

It is nothing but opportunism.”

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/migrants-are-disguising-themselves-as-syrians-to-gain-entry-to-europe/2015/09/22/827c6026-5bd8-11e5-8475-781cc9851652_story.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Of course.

Subediting

Been a reader of Jerry for more than 40 years – welcome back. But the standard of editing seems to have slipped.

Typo’s in virtually every article.

As an ex magazine editor (80 Micro for one) it hurts me to read … if you want free help then ask.

Jim Perry

Thank you; since my stroke I have been a sloppy typist, and can only do two finger typing. I am doing the best I can. I apologize, but I am not sure I can promise better.

The U.S. Air Force Has Loathed Close Air Support Since the Beginning.

<http://warisboring.com/articles/the-u-s-air-force-has-loathed-close-air-support-since-the-beginning/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Yes, I fear so.

http://fortune.com/2015/09/22/cybersecurity-women-careeres/

The gender gap is especially high in the business of securing the world’s data.

Women represent more than half of U.S. college graduates, yet they account for only 11% of today’s cybersecurity workforce. That’s even lower than the 26% of IT professionals who are female, according to a report from the ISC Foundation.

Given the rise of cyber attacks, the need for experts in this field is likely to increase. It’s estimated that almost 2 million cybrsecurity professionals will be needed by 2017, and 1.5 million security jobs will be open and unfilled by 2020. More than 200,000 cybersecurity jobs in the U.S. are currently unfilled and postings have gone up 74% over the past five years.

The shortage of women in cybersecurity struck home when I recently attended a conference at New York University’s Polytechnic School of Engineering, held to promote cybersecurity careers among female high school and college students. The young women I met had a passion for computer science, but were discouraged to go into cybersecurity by their friends at school. Their peers didn’t see the mysterious, male-dominated culture of cybersecurity as a place where girls belonged. I told these young women to follow their instincts and not give in to people throwing cold water on their goals. <snip>

SUBJ: The solar system to scale 

Just as an FYI: Along the bicycle path in Eugene, Oregon that runs along the Willamette river, there is a scale model of the solar system, similar to the youtube video on your site yesterday. It runs approx 5.5 miles of bicycle path and is at least 20 years old. Each planet is cast as part of a bronze plinth. The sun is in the park downtown.

Quite took me aback first time I saw it. Should your readers be in the neighborhood, I recommend the bike ride. The beer is excellent in Eugene too. 🙂

Cordially,

John

“Before I publish this, are you convinced that the Texas authorities acted moronically?  He was charged, not with making a bomb, but with making a fake bomb.  He repeatedly was uncooperative with the authorities before he was arrested; in particular he would never say why he brought a bomb-looking object – it looks like NCIS or any other TV show bomb – to school on 9/11. He just insisted it was a clock.”

——————–

Recall my story years ago about the Bomb Squad here taking me off in handcuffs in front of everyone in the office without telling me what was going on.

I lost a day and a half of wages as well as having to pay the deductible to repair my vehicle.  At a time when I was not sure where my next job was coming from.

The lesson – always say ‘I don’t consent to that’ and ‘I want a lawyer’.  In my mind he co-operated too much as he said more than the above two sentences. 

B-

I do recall that, and it was outrageous; but I would have taken Mr. Mohammed’s device to be a fake bomb, and I think the police acted as if they did.

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, September 22, 2015

There is new material in Chaos Manor Reviews http://chaosmanorreviews.com/ and there will be more. Tell your friends.

I recommend http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-night-alexa-lost-her-mind/ to your attention. Alexa is an Amazon home control gadget that has become quite popular; I have one, but I have nothing for it to operate, so it just sits there in its handsome box. I ordered it on whim when they were not yet available, and Amazon duly shipped it months later after I had forgotten it. I don’t even know where to order things for Alexa to activate or control. I had forgotten it until I saw this article, and now I suppose I will need to find out just what it can do for me.

I can also recommend https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/09/21/what-apples-ad-blocking-fight-is-really-about/. It’s clear to me that the current ad situation cannot endure. I am willing to put up with some ads – after all, they sponsor the shows I am watching – but there is a limit to what I will endure. After that I won’t watch that show unless I can record it and fast forward through the ad. I seldom watch shows as they are broadcast; why should I. I used to have sympathy for advertisers – I grew up in the radio business – but we thought double-spotting a bit rude, and three or four ads in a row went beyond the bounds. Naïve, weren’t we?

It’s too hot to walk, and for some reason I didn’t feel like writing. Funk, I suppose. I’ll get over it. It’s hot in here, too.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/09/21/internet-companies-are-rushing-to-defend-the-fccs-net-neutrality-rules-in-court/

• Web companies are fighting in court for the FCC’s net neutrality rules (WP)

By Brian Fung September 21 at 9:35 AM

A top Washington trade group for Internet companies such as Dropbox, Facebook and Netflix is now defending federal regulators in a major court battle over net neutrality, adding a legal brief to the flurry from both sides of the debate.

Arguing that the FCC acted legally when it rolled out strong new rules for broadband companies this year, the Internet Association said Monday that the regulations help protect consumers from Internet providers who control access to the Web. The “friend-of-the-court” filing called for the FCC’s net neutrality order to be fully upheld — endorsing for the first time the legal approach the FCC used to implement its regulations.

“Consumers and innovators will benefit from the Internet openness promoted by the FCC’s net neutrality Order,” it reads.

Opponents of the rules, such as AT&T and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, filed a lawsuit against the agency in April. They’re arguing that the FCC overstepped its authority in designing its net neutrality policy, and are calling for the rules to be overturned by the court.

The FCC’s net neutrality policy subjects Internet providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to some of the same rules that govern legacy telephone service in the United States. The move was hotly contested by industry amid fears of an administrative power grab that critics said would lead to the government’s direct involvement in setting retail prices for Internet.

The FCC’s rules also regulate providers of cellular data in similar ways — a move that the wireless industry argues is illegal. But Internet Association president Michael Beckerman said the FCC used its authority properly.

“Internet access has changed over the past few years,” said Beckerman. “My expectations are now the same whether I’m accessing the Internet from my mobile device or from my home computer.”

And the beat goes on. Meanwhile the net shuts down for about fifteen minutes at 1600 every day for me. I don’t know what Time Warner is doing. I am sure there is a regulation against it. I just kiva with it and continue to count my blessings; it took a decade to get reliable high speed Internet at Chaos Manor.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2015/09/22/iphone-6s-6s-plus-3d-touch-great-camera-add-up-tempting-upgrade/72591074/ gives a pretty good review of the Apple phones, if you can endure all the ads that go with it. I confess I could not; fortunately I got a copy of the actual text article, free of ads, pop-ups, strange offers, distractions advertising other articles which will bring with them even more unavoidable unendurable advertisements for products I avoid, etc. Anyway, he tells you a user’s reasons for liking the new Apple phone.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/09/21/what-well-encounter-on-the-path-to-the-jobless-future/

What we’ll encounter on the path to the jobless future

By Michael Fertik and Vivek Wadhwa

In just two short decades or so, we’ll enter a jobless future.

Thanks to highly disruptive advanced technologies, jobs — even industries — will soon vanish, becoming remnants of a distantly remembered past. Other positions will be more efficiently done by machines, eliminating the need for human employees. This has happened before – indeed, since the dawn of the Industrial Age – but never in history at the same speed and scale. It’s the advent of the “labor-light economy,” as defined by noted MIT researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, who have explored the benefits and downsides of rapid technological advancement.

At the same time as machines displace most of us, our fundamental needs — think of Maslow’s basic hierarchy — will be met through the application of technologies. Food, energy, shelter, and health care will be free or so low cost that they’re virtually free. Even education will be eventually be free.

There’s a lot more, and it makes more sense than do a lot of similar articles. Of course science fiction has been presenting stories of the jobless future for years, one of the most memorable being one by Poul Anderson in the 50’s or early 60’s. If the problem for socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money, the march of technology has made it increasingly more likely that most of the money will come from robots who, presumably, won’t want it. Marx envisioned such a future, when machines did most of the work, and no one would have to labor more than a few hours a day if that. He saw it as an utopia. Other writers have seen it as a nightmare.

There is no question that over half the things people do for money now can be done by robots, and it is becoming cheaper to roboticize more and more jobs including many that seemed safe. There is also financial incentive to use robots rather than risk regulation…

One thing never discussed is personal service and domestic service. It is politically incorrect to want a housemaid. And if the government is going to rob some robot to give away enough to live on and more, why would you want the job.

If idle hands make a devil’s workshop, think of how many such workshops are in our future.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/09/20/breakthrough-cloaking-technology-grabs-militarys-attention/72544510/

Breakthrough in cloaking technology grabs military’s attention (USA Today)

Kyle Jahner, Military Times 10:09 a.m. EDT September 21, 2015

An academic says he and his colleagues have demonstrated a major breakthrough in the quest for invisibility, and he has the military’s attention.

Boubacar Kante, a professor at the University of California-San Diego, and his colleagues tested the first effective “dielectric metasurface cloak.” That’s a fancy way of describing a super-thin, non-metal material that manipulates electromagnetic waves, including visible light and radio waves.

IF you can’t see it, it’s harder to kill it…

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327740&

3D Printed Parts Help Regenerate Nerves (EE Times)

Custom scaffolds regrow nerves in rats

R. Colin Johnson

9/21/2015 10:01 AM EDT

PORTLAND, Ore.–Today more than 200,000 people per year experience traumatic nerve damage from accidents or disease. Whoever thought a 3D printer could help. The University of Minnesota professor Michael McAlpine has proven that 3D printed scaffolds customized to each particular patient, can now regrow complex nerves, which has never been possible before. Current successful trials are in rats, but McAlpine says that human trials are just around the corner.

I’ve been using regeneration stimulators in my stories for decades, but I confess I neverc thought of sending wounded soldiers to the print shop.

APOD: 2015 September 18 – A Plutonian Landscape

Jerry

Look at this:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150918.html

Boring planet, not.

Ed

But planet, yes.

https://techpinions.com/why-ios-could-become-the-enterprise-os-of-the-millennial-generation/41847

Why iOS Could Become the Enterprise OS of the Millennial Generation

The Daily Techpinion

Tim Bajarin / September 21st, 2015

For the majority of my life, Windows and the Mac have been the operating systems that have dominated my personal computing experiences. iOS and Android only recently have become supplemental operating systems I use in my smartphones and tablets. But I believe there is a changing of the “OS Guard” happening as Gen Y and Gen Z users grow up and become millennials and move into the business sector. The tech tools they use and how they use them will be quite different than the generation before.

This younger generation does use PCs. However, they actually spend the most time on their iPhones and iPads and Macs are mostly relegated to serious productivity projects. More importantly, they know iOS inside and out as they spend much more of their day in this operating system then they do on any computer they have.

And much more. And now I have to get to work.

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