Monthly Archives: September 2015

View from Chaos Manor, Wednesday, September 17, 2015

Today at lunch my long suffering wife decided she had enough of the mess I live in. It was bad enough when it was upstairs, preventing us from having much in the way of parties since guests would want to see “where I work” and the Great Hall looks like a packrat’s nest; no, since the stroke I have been inhabiting the old downstairs office I bought this house for 50 years age. It was formerly a physicians office and treatment room (in the 1930’s), converted to a writer’s office, the reconverted into what amounts to an expanded hall, leading into Roberta’s office, with a staircase up to the Great Hall and the office suite I have been using (and accumulating junk in) since 1990. The chaos is coming downstairs! It is at her door!

Which means I have spent most of today getting the downstairs office into a semblance of order, all the junk off the stairs, and general making the place look like it is inhabited by a successful writer, not a pigsty. I also went upstairs and threw away a pile of junk, set out more for Eric and Alex to decide what to do with, and filled a couple of bags with books for LASFS in case anyone wants them. If not, LASFS has a big disposal bin, and I’ll be glad to pay for the next trash collection. When Michelle picks me up to go to the LSAFS meeting tonight it will be out of the house forever.

So my working environment is much improved, but I didn’t get much done, and there’s no access to email up here in the Monk’s Cell.

Thanks to the people who wrote me on how to implement autocorrect in Word, but that’s not my problem. I think I have Autocorrect under control, at least for the versions of Word that I use. It’s AutoComplete that I can’t use. Microsoft gives me no help at all. Looking through the web I found

Using AutoComplete Tips

by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 8, 2015)

http://word.tips.net/T001750_Using_AutoComplete_Tips.html

who tells me

Word includes a nifty little feature called AutoComplete. This feature uses what Microsoft calls AutoComplete tips. These are used when you are typing AutoText phrases or even the names of months. As you type, Word will bring up a little yellow box above the incomplete word. If you then press F3 or the Tab key, Word automatically finishes the phrase. You may have noticed this if you ever typed in the name of a month, such as January.

To enable or disable the AutoComplete tips feature, follow these steps:

1. Select AutoCorrect Options from the Tools menu. Word displays the AutoCorrect dialog box.
2. Click your mouse on the AutoText tab. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The AutoText tab of the AutoCorrect dialog box.

1. Depending on your version of Word, select either the Show AutoComplete Tip for AutoText and Dates option or the Show AutoComplete Suggestions option to enable this feature, or deselect the option if you no longer want it.
2. Click on OK.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1750) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

There’s only one problem. I’m using Word 2010, and there are no tools to be found anywhere in there or any version I have. Microsoft has improved things to unusability. The nifty feature is still in it – it works on Alien Artifact – but I can’t figure out how to turn it on on the ThinkPad up here. I’ll keep looking, but Microsoft Help doesn’t want to tell me; I’m not clever enough to ask with the right terms. You have to think like a Microsoft product manager, and I fear I can’t do that.

The debates last night showed that there are a lot of voters, Republican, Independent, and Democrat, who are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more. Despite CNN’s predictable actions, they didn’t destroy Trump, and notice that Dr. Carson, who has even less experience than Trump, is doing well in the polls. So is Carly Fiorina.

The Wall Street Journal doesn’t really understand this:

The Joy of Madness

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and the mad-as-hell American electorate.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-joy-of-madness-1442441068

By

Daniel Henninger

Sept. 16, 2015 6:04 p.m. ET

But they’re closer than most. It’s simple. Republicans have had both houses of Congress, and we sill have all those horrid laws the Democrats rushed through in their last days in office, and no one has done anything. We have more Regulators than ever, and we can’t cut their budgets. We have raises for the Bunny Inspectors as they do jobs no one thinks are worth doing if we have to borrow the money to to it – most people think it not worth doing at the federal level. And a few of us look at the Constitution and try to see how keeping rabbits in our back yards is even under federal power by any possible construction. The states may have the power to forbid you to mistreat rabbits, but the Framers weren’t interested in granting that power to the Feds. Why would they be? And don’t tell me it’s because rabbit keeping is a modern practice unknown to John Adams.

Anyway, it’s time for dinner, and LASFS after that. And I have work to do on the Heorot novel with Niven and Barnes. Note that I wrote this with the new keyboard in the Monk’s Cell. Progress. Alas it’s still two finger starring at the keyboard, but I’m getting faster and faster.

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, September 16, 2015

 

 

I’m doing this from the back room before I go to bed. Swan seems to be working well, but it’s also Windows 10. So far so good.

Today was story conference day, and it was a bit stormy but productive. I think we are on track now; there was in the plot a pacing error – I think it was, anyway. Important things happened while our main characters could not be on stage; I think we fixed that. And we sure have some great aliens, and a powerful story line.

Had a good talk over lunch, and it was a good lunch. Came home to find the next Logitech K360 keyboard had come, and I took it upstairs to install. That went easily, but Word is driving me nuts. It’s trivial, and hardly affects what I write in the fiction station, but it annoys me. Does anyone know – know – how to set up and control Word 2010? Particularly autocomplete? I have 2013 on this machine, and I’ll play with that later, but upstairs is an older Word. And when I I was up there I’d do F1 for help, and it tells me to do things that aren’t possible – it gives me commands that aren’t where they are said to be. Often where they were on an older version, but not now. Specifically, when I try to set up autocomplete I’m told to go to Insert on the ribbon and select autocomplete; but autocomplete isn’t there. Another time it tells me to go to File / Tools, but there is no tools there, only options. I know you can set Word so that when you type in the first few letter of the day of the week it offers to complete it if you press return, and if you type in Wednesday comma it offers to complete that to Wednesday, September 16, 2015; Word 2013 just did that although I didn’t turn the feature on, and I don’t know how to control it; I’ll experiment later. But it’s sure frustrating.

The debates were fairly dull. No one did brilliantly, but no one came off badly. Trump continued to be the man who would change things because they are now broken, and even if he doesn’t know exactly how, he gives the impression that he’d go in the right direction – less government. Get rid of it if it’s not obviously doing good, fund defense and less funding for entitlements. Eight years of hope and change have given us a huge debt and we still have bunny inspectors, and we are never going to get rid of them despite Obama’s promise of laser like line inspection of appropriation. The answer to anything is more regulation and more government supervision; we’d do well to have some one who sees it the other way, automatically stop doing it if you can’t show the good. Stop borrowing money to pay bunny inspectors and offices full of regulators thinking up new reasons why you don’t want to hire anyone — but that’s sort of a dream, isn’t it? But I don’t see anyone up there who would go through those offices saying “You’re Fired!” except Trump. And who’d build am actual wall. He may be a clown – they all say he is – but he might actually do something. It’s for sure the Speaker and the Majority Leader and the Whips, and the Chairmen and all the country club Republicans won’t DO anything and generally won’t even talk about it. Obama promised the Left lots of Hope and Change, and he’s doing it at enormous cost – each of you, every one of you – owes the government 5% of everything you make for the next 20 years, and that’s for debt, not for running the government.

But of course nobody’s going to elect Trump. And the Republicans will find a new Bob Dole for us.

Scrivener

https://bitsdujour.stacksocial.com/sales/scrivener-2?utm_source=bitsdujour&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=2015-09-11_bitsdujour_scrivener-2&utm_content=scrivener-2

    Scrivener licenses for half-price, if you want to check it out. I’ve got it on one machine here but haven’t found the occasion to really make use of it. I may try to see if it makes some parts of The Evolution of Political Thought easier to lay out. Likewise if the updates to Strategy of Technology get done and can be integrated. If nothing else, the support for tables is a critical item missing from Atlantis Word Processor, which is what I’ve used up until now to produce EPUB files.

Eric

Right.  I keep hearing good stuff about scrivener.  Does it have autocorrect?

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

    It wouldn’t replace Word but rather be a place for writing down and organizing all of the bit of info that go into making a book or novel. My interest in it is whether it is strong enough of a formatting tool to be useful for e-book creation. I’m still in the process of figuring out how to test that. I was starting to read the manual but got distracted and have yet to go back. What I’d really like and would pay a decent price for is a replacement for Sigil. Sigil itself appears to be in limbo, with the blog site last seeing an entry in mid-June. So I keep an eye out for something that might be comparable or even better.

Eric

    I wish there was still some way to get the MS Office team’s attention. It’s apparent to me they’ve been hard put to come up with any really new features for the individual user in recent years but they seem to have completely missed the rise of e-books. Between Word and Publisher, this seems like such a natural path to pursue but I’ve seen no indication in the Office 2016 preview that they have any awareness of it at all. Everything new is geared toward big corporate collaboration efforts. I realize that’s where the big money is but I can’t believe the investment wouldn’t be paid back by giving millions of users malingering on old versions a reason to finally upgrade or get a 365 subscription.

Eric

I’ll let you know how it comes out. I hear about scrivener’s organization tool, but I never used it.

Doctors Obsolete?

A doctor does “differential diagnoses”, which is a lot like intelligence analysis (analysis of competing hypotheses and similar structured analytic techniques) or science (looking at the activities of many scientists as a whole). The difference is that with intelligence analysis and science, you want to refute hypotheses and not find data to support the same. Differential diagnosis — as I understand it — looks to see what symptoms fit what disease; it’s intellectual construction work that anyone could do in theory. But, it requires vast knowledge of medicine and human physiology to work effectively with those data sets; thus the doctor is hard to come by and takes years of training. It’s not so much the process of diagnosis as the knowledge necessary to use differential diagnosis in medicine. This computer might change all that:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34245655

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Eventually most medical decisions, and a good part of surgery, will be done by robots. Diagnosis with computer assistance is generally better now. After all, you don’t fly airplanes ever without checklists – if you have to get rid of the checklist or the pilot, you throw the pilot out…

Surfing the Internet… from my TRS-80 Model 100

<http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/surfing-the-internet-from-my-trs-80-model-100/?mbid=synd_moz_technews>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Future of the GOP

Now, several presidential election cycles later, the so-called pundits are starting to grasp a tend that has built for a long time but really gained steam under the presidencies — and I use the term loosely — of Bush II and Obama.

<.>

A majority of Republican registered voters want either Donald Trump or Ben Carson to be their party’s 2016 presidential nominee, according to two new national polls from the Washington Post-ABC News and the New York Times-CBS News.

Let that sink in for a minute. Neither Trump, who made his name as a real estate mogul and reality star, nor Carson, a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, has run for any office prior to their presidential candidacies. Both men have staked the entirety of their campaigns on the idea that they are the furthest thing possible from a traditional politician. And it is working for both of them. Big time.

While the rise of Trump tends to dominate the headlines, polls like these from The Post and the Times provide a reminder of the big picture here for the Republican Party. And that big picture is simple:

The GOP establishment is on the run, and there are few signs that its members have any sort of coherent strategy to deal with the massive uprising within its ranks.

</>

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/15/the-republican-establishment-is-in-deep-trouble/

What do you think the future of the GOP is? Does the GOP have a future? Are the country club republicans irrelevant in terms of social influence? I realize they still have financial influence, good old boy networks, and so forth. What happens if they do become, socially, irrelevant? Do we want to fix the party or do we want an entirely new party? What is the way forward and how do we get there?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I will do an analysis later, but I note that more and more are beginning to get the message.

the terrorists have won

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-9th-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school-so-you-tried-to-make-a-bomb.ece
I would guess that almost all of the kids in that school have cell phones, which have probably been used to set off a lot more bombs in the past 15 years than clocks have.

 

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, September 15, 2015

It rained last night and this morning, heavy rain which is unusual in September. That may or may not affect expectations for ending the drought; I would think so, but I am not a meteorologist, and our expensive climate models are required to predict global warming and are not much use. There is a strong “el Niño” development in the south Pacific http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/09/el-nino-set-strongest-150913093902800.html , and meteorologists expect that to bring heavy rains to California this Fall and Winter, but no one really knows. The BBC, quoting the climatologists, says the next two years could be the world’s hottest ( Next Two Years Hottest Says Met Office http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34226178 ) but it might be cooler in Europe, but don’t worry, it’s really all about CO2 and manmade global warming even if el Niño events have been happening for a long time and we can’t predict them, but they really know:

An external reviewer, Prof Rowan Sutton, from the University of Reading, confirmed: “Unless there’s a big volcanic eruption, it looks very likely that globally 2014, 2015 and 2016 will be among the very warmest years ever recorded.

“This isn’t a fluke. We are seeing the effects of energy steadily accumulating in the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, caused by greenhouse gases.”

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34226178

You can believe as much of that as you want. There has been warming since before 1800 and CO2 buildup, which is still relatively small. Arrhenius thought doubling the CO2 percentage would cause some warming, but we haven’t had that much yet, and no one has shown any connection between El Niño and C02.

Anyway, the rains were welcome, and while strong were not heavy enough to cause mudslide problems; and they may help put out the forest fires. The severity of the fires is often attributed to global warming, but in the 70’s I wrote articles about how our forest management practices pretty well guaranteed uncontrollable fires, and I’d never heard of global warming then. At all the AAAS meetings I went to in those days, the big science gurus mostly talked about global cooling and the danger of a new ice age.

1750  I just finished a session in the Monk’s Cell.  I didn’t accomplish much, but I did some sit-ups, discovered that I cannot as of now do pushups; did three of the five Tibetan rites  (http://www.lifeevents.org/5-tibetans-energy-rejuvenation-exercises.htm ) to 7 repetitions.  One of the five I cannot do at all, and one requires I be able to do pushups; it will take a while to get there, but it appears I will be able to work up to it.  And I did ten sit-ups.  Not a lot of writing because I need Logitech 360 keyboard or some other that separates the keys well preventing me from hitting two at once every time. I’ve ordered one for taking upstairs. It may come tomorrow.

I have email from Castaglia: stories are pouring in.  I have not seen them so I cannot speak of their quality.  I can fill this book with reprints, so I am not worried, but it would be good to discover some new writers…

There Will Be War

Hello,
Can you tell me what the deadline is for submission.
I am working on a screenplay that involves a Time traveler from the 30th Century, who ends up, by mistake, in the year 9986.
I’d like to write a story that occurs “outside the script” in that time.
Is there a minimum size for the story? I’d like to do about 10 pages – 2,500 words. Will that be OK?
Thanks,
Frank

Please do not send me email about the new volume of There Will Be War. Please do not send me inquiries about submitting to There Will Be War. Send story submissions to submissions@therewillbewar.net. We buy only nonexclusive anthology rights. We will publish a notice when submissions are no longer wanted. To get an idea of what the anthologies are like, see the already published volumes. Please do not ask me for advice on how to write for this anthology.

When I did the original There Will Be War anthologies, I had the services of Mr. Carr to work with prospective authors, and he was responsible for starting many new careers. Alas, John is on his own in Pennsylvania now, and I have neither time nor energy, nor do I have John’s talents.

Submit stories to submissions@therewillbewar.net. Previously published is acceptable and far more usual than original. Alas I have not the time to discuss story ideas by mail.

Last April, Mike Glyer did a good piece on There Will Be War.  http://file770.com/?p=21956 There was discussion and some of the commentators wondered why I went with Castaglia Press to publish these  reprints of old anthologies.  It’s simple: after my agent declined to find a publisher who would handle the paperwork of paying the contributors their royalties (and certainly didn’t want that responsibility herself) Castaglia offered to do it. That was the best offer I had. The contributors get paid, and I don’t have to do it. They are doing well enough that Castaglia offered to publish a new volume and do all the paperwork. including an advance payment on acceptance. submissions@therewillbewar.net

SURFACE Pro 2

I HAVE A SURFACE Pro 2 that occasionally loses its ability to see Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I’ve fixed the problem by purchasing USB accessories that allow me to see wired connections. The problem with my Surface Pro 2 (a tablet loaned to me by a colleague) is its Marvell Avastar Wireless Composite Device often fails. I follow Microsoft’s advice and use various steps to disable, uninstall, power down, reinstall and enable the driver. Sometimes that works. When it doesn’t, I now use a Manhattan USB Hub with gigabit Ethernet adapter to connect to our campus network where speeds normally exceed 100 megabits per second. I still need to get a cabled mouse because when the Marvell driver fails, Bluetooth is inoperative. The Microsoft USB Ethernet adapter is smaller and less expensive than the USB hub version. The USB hub recognises everything I throw at it. It is the fastest way I have discovered for swapping files between the Surface, my phones and OneDrive. That ease of file maintenance has improved my workflow and enhanced collaboration. So from the headache of “this device is not configured correctly” came a better and faster way of managing my collaborative workflow. The Surface Pro 2 headache was worth it. [Photo of two Ethernet adapters snapped with my Lumia 1520 and sent from Outlook Mail for Windows 10.]    

http://www.insideview.ie/irisheyes/

Lawrence

Fortunately I have never experienced that problem; of course Surface Pro is next to useless without wireless. I have the docking station, but generally I use wireless even in that.

My Surface Pro with the Microsoft wireless mouse.

I am a clinger…

Since I retired from the business world (chief financial officer for a small entity) I have absolutely no reason to upgrade Windows or any other Microsoft product. Still using XP and Office 2003, which can do far more than I currently require.

No need to send money to Microsoft for even more features and functions I don’t need and probably would never learn or use. Certainly don’t want to become involved in an arrangement requiring periodic payments to them seemingly forever.

Charles Brumbelow

I utterly agree. Outlook and Word 2007 are good enough for me; I don’t want improvements. I’d pay an annual fee to Microsoft if they’d continue to support Office 2008.

Microsoft updates

Dear Jerry,
I’ve found that MS launched a few horrible updates when getting things set up for the Great Windows 10 Experience. On one memorable occasion, after installing ~6 optional updates it managed to screw up MS’s update engine, disabled Malwarebytes Antimalware application, and made Pale Moon hard to use. I fixed that mess with a restore from my backup drive, though I’ve since learned that updates can be uninstalled.
Since Microsoft has been rather uninformative about some of its updates, I’ve learned to search for articles on ones that aren’t clearly defined. The “optionals” come under extra scrutiny. I’ve found the update articles in Infoworld by Woody Leonhard to be useful.
I’m looking forward to the continuation of There Will Be War. My paperbacks did not survive a move some years ago, but Volume II was one of my favorites. I see it’s now an eBook…
Regards,
Pete B

The first four volumes are out now; the others will be forthcoming in 2016.

http://www.amazon.com/There-Will-War-Volume-III-ebook/dp/B01110QOVQ

We are all Moties now

In the classic science fiction novel “The Mote in God’s Eye”, which you co-authored with Larry Niven, you created a fictional race of aliens called “Moties” that were biologically incapable of restraining their breeding. Nothing in this universe can grow exponentially for very long, and as the old saying goes, if it is physically impossible for something to continue it will stop. So when a rapidly growing population hits the limits of resources and the speed of technological innovation, it stops growing – and bad things happen when population growth is stopped the hard way.
Thus the fictional Moties were condemned to cyclic patterns of expansion and collapse.

However, we human beings should not be so smug. We also have our population-created cycles. It’s just that in our case, the cycles are not due to biological limits, but to the rich deliberately creating population explosions in order to drive wages down and profits up – at the expense of long-term stability.

An excellent current example is Syria, whose government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. They propagandized that women had to have six kids each, and even made the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See “Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba’thist Syria (Demographic Developments and Socioeconomics)”, by Onn Winkler).
So the Syrian population rose at an extremely rapid rate, going from 5 million in 1970 to over 20 million in 2010. At that point the aquifers had been drained dry (they had been falling precipitously for a long time even during abundant rainfall: no Virginia this is not about ‘climate change’), food ran out, and things fell apart.

We may blame the Syrian government’s brutal crackdown on the food riots, or the (typically) incompetent Western response (arming Islamic jihadists: yeah that’s going to work out), but the bottom line is that when a society hits the limits, bad things happen, one way or the other.
And yet the simple fact of Syria’s artificially-created population explosion has been totally suppressed from the news media. Talking about economics without including demographics is like talking about space travel without taking gravity into account: it’s insane.
But the rich want cheap labor. So any mention of the real forces behind the misery in Syria must not be mentioned, because that might cause people to not allow themselves to be bred like cattle, or to resist the importation of massive numbers of third world refugees to accomplish the same end, which would result in the right people not being able to buy their second yacht this year, and that would never do.

Syria is just one small example: most of the current population explosion has been due, one way or the other, to deliberate government policies. As this forced population growth adds ever more billions to the world, and as crop yields per acre have not increased in over two decades, and fresh water cannot be mass produced by any known technology (and robots don’t change this!), things will start to fall apart. The collapse will be slow, and erratic, but, increasingly, inevitable. There will be more and more refugees, centralized governments will have a harder and harder time keeping control, and states will tend to dissolve into warlordism and ethnic conflicts.

Welcome to the beginning of the end of the current great cycle, my fellow Moties.

Refugee and mathematical question 

Dear Dr. Pournelle, 
I’m sure you’ve seen in the news the ongoing refugee crisis in Syria and western Europe. 
While no one wants to leave refugees to drown , there are significant problems when a country takes in too many immigrants.  You get unassimilated ghettoes in which crime is rampant. People from an alien culture , economically disadvantaged, are ripe for recruitment by fanatics. See Sweden.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/swedens-ugly-immigration-problem/article26338254/
There’s also the issue in Germany. Germany, in a burst of generosity, agreed to take in 800K refugees per year. All to the good, but they are projecting to receive one MILLION refugees this year, so they are re-establishing border controls, to the consternation of liberals everywhere.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11861966/Germany-to-reinstate-border-controls-as-country-struggles-with-influx-of-refugees-live.html
http://www.timesdaily.com/news/world/the-latest-germany-expects-million-migrants-this-year/article_4e3f0745-ff8f-5950-940c-f47c5d35c805.html
Charity demands we not turn away ALL immigrants.  Reason and common sense tell us we can’t take them all , either.
Which raises the question: How many is “too many”? Is this a function of a country’s population?  Can a nation readily absorb up to one percent of its population per year in terms of immigration?  Two percent? Ten?  Half a percent? 
Or is there some other factor? Might a country with minimal social benefits be able to absorb more immigrants than a welfare state? 
I think the entire question of immigration would benefit greatly by asking just what is the capacity of a state to absorb immigrants. So what I’m asking you and your readers is: How do we model that, and how can we test that model?
Respectfully,

Brian P.

There might first be a debate on the ethics of saying a nation has the obligation to import people who hate it and have no intent of assimilation. The Melting Pot worked; I’ve seen no indication that diversity does.

“Around 470 million years ago, two large asteroids collided in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and many fragments were thrown off in new orbits. Many of these crashed on Earth, such as these two in Jämtland.”

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150911095337.htm>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

wupsie…

http://www.rt.com/news/315227-japan-aso-volcano-evacuation/
Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”

I have removed by popular request a picture of the celebration of the attack on America on 911 2001.

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.

“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

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

Chaos Manor View, Monday, September 14, 2015

Sunday afternoon I bit the bullet and took the ThinkPad up to the Monk’s Cell. It turned out to be simple, and when I discovered that the power supply was no longer up there – usually one is left there – I went down the stairs and into the front office, got the power supply, put it in my pocket, and went back up. No adventures involved. I can navigate that, although it had me scared before I did it. I left the walker at the bottom of the stairs and made my way to the writing chair I have used for years but had not seen since last December. It felt pretty good.

Before I took the ThinkPad up I did all the upgrades possible to the Windows 7 on the ThinkPad. I brought up new AA batteries for the wireless keyboard and mouse, and replaced them both. Then I fired it up. It seemed to come up OK, but behaved oddly. The wireless worked flawlessly, as it does since I had Alex and Eric install the new wireless system, but clicking on Firefox in the tray did nothing; double clicking on the Firefox on the desktop worked, but it came up with a Microsoft site as the home page: apparently the latest upgrade did that for me.

It soon was apparent that something was weird about Explorer. Task Manager showed me the explorer app was using some 50% of the computer’s resources to do nothing – and I could not shut the computer down. I used Task Manager to end Explorer, and now I couldn’t do anything at all, so I used the power button on the laptop. When I restarted, Explorer was still acting weird.

Alex used Task Manager to close Explorer, then a command line to restart Explorer, and Lo! everything started working properly except that Firefox was still coming up on a Microsoft site as home page; I don’t know what that was about. We reset the home page to what it should be and all was well. Then we left for a two mile walk, and took Roberta out for dinner.

Before I left upstairs I closed the lid on the ThinkPad. I wonder what it will do when I bring it back up, but I have a Kaiser appointment so we’ll just have to wait to see.

1730:   Everything seems strange.  I have to a lot of horizontal scrolling.  The only change has been Microsoft updates, which seem to made the system I wrote many books with impotent and obsolete.  Thanks, Microsoft.

1800: a bit more normal now, but Firefox has forgotten almost all the passwords it used to know and will have to be rebuilt, or perhaps not; my rules only let me use the Internet for direct research on something germane to the story I am working on.  Tested my backup capabilities and all’s well, so I am on my way to a fiction session in the Monk’s Cell every day.  Cheer.

2315 Working in the back room  on last minute mail and such.  A more coherent daybook including a report from the Monk’s Cell tomorrow.

Pease do not send submissions directly to me unless you are a previously accepted contributor to one of the earlier volumes, one of my collaborators, or you know me well enough – and I know you.  There is an address, submissions@therewillbewar.net  for unsolicited contributions.  We read them all, but I don’t need them in chaos manor mail.  I understand that it isn’t fair for you to have worked so hard to write something and yet I don’t drop everything and read it the hour it arrives, but I don’t.  Since my stroke I don’t change subjects easily and I read these things in batches, sometimes days, or even if I am very busy, a week or so after they arrive, and sometimes longer than that.  If you need an instant answer before you send it to someone else, we allow simultaneous submissions or you may consider it rejected if you simply cannot stand the suspense.  But do not send them direct to me unless invited to do so, because anything so sent will probably be lost in the noise.  I suppose I will have to say this several times,. and if I am working in a better light with a better keyboard I will probably summon up a bit more courtesy.

Scrivener

    I wish there was still some way to get the MS Office team’s attention. It’s apparent to me they’ve been hard put to come up with any really new features for the individual user in recent years but they seem to have completely missed the rise of e-books. Between Word and Publisher, this seems like such a natural path to pursue but I’ve seen no indication in the Office 2016 preview that they have any awareness of it at all. Everything new is geared toward big corporate collaboration efforts. I realize that’s where the big money is but I can’t believe the investment wouldn’t be paid back by giving millions of users malingering on old versions a reason to finally upgrade or get a 365 subscription.

Eric

I know a couple of Microsoft Executives subscribe, so perhaps one will read this?

I <3 Pluto

Dear Jerry Pournelle:

If a picture of Pluto with a heart-shaped feature on it had appeared on the cover of a Golden Age science-fiction magazine, then the story it illustrated would have been either very, very good, or very, very bad.
I would like to read that story, either way. Would you like to write it?
Sincerely,
Nathaniel Hellerstein

Like to, yes, but it is extremely unlikely.  I seem to overfill my days lately.  Thanks for the invitation; I’d like to think mine would be very good.

Russia move!

I’m listening to the news on the radio right now, and the intelligence community is reported that the Russians of move half a dozen tanks and several personnel carriers to their new base in Syria. It looks like the Russians will be in a position, in terms of personnel and materiel, to assert the Pournelle Doctrine vis-à-vis ISIS. Too bad the United States couldn’t get its act together on this one.

However, I care more about results than details. If the Russians can do what our policymakers lack the testicular fortitude to do then so mote it be.

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

ISIS is much closer to Russia than us, and understands chiliastic movements…

Blog

Jerry, Please take the picture of the woman with the flag off your blog.
Roger Miller

Yet there are those to whom it appeals.

Iran, Hezbollah, and the Future

The Iranian nuclear deal is more complicated than one might gather from the general, public conversation on the matter. Matt at 1913intel.com picked up on an interesting article that raised the following points:

<.>

“There is no intention of conquering the entire area for good. But it’s enough for Hezbollah cells to deploy in the area, hide for a while and hit vehicles and meeting points of the fighting forces preparing to enter Lebanon, in order to deeply sabotage any IDF plan of action.”

<->

This is of course a realistic option, but there are those in the intelligence community who say there is a different reason:

Immediately after the battles began in 2006, Israel has learned, a delegation of senior Iranians – led by representatives of the Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah’s adoptive body – arrived in Beirut.

The delegation reprimanded Nasrallah mercilessly. The military preparations we are devoting and giving you for a conflict with Israel were meant for a completely different time, they lashed out at him.

They were meant for a response in case Israel bombs Iran’s nuclear facilities. You have revealed the cards and the abilities we have given you without any reason, simply in order to kidnap soldiers and fulfill your promise to bring Samir Kuntar back home. And who is Kuntar anyway, someone added. Just a f**king Druze.

Since that admonition, which almost cost Nasrallah his seat, he has been holding fire and restraining himself, according to that perception, not for fear of Israel – but for fear of Iran.

If that is the situation, then now that the nuclear agreement has been signed, “it will be clear to the Iranians that Israel is not about to attack them, and they will therefore let go a bit and allow Nasrallah to respond as he pleases,” says Cohen (*). From the moment the nuclear agreement is signed and the sanctions on Iran are lifted, Tehran is able to transfer more funds to Hezbollah, and much more easily.

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http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4683471,00.html

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

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