Yearly Archives: 2015

View from Chaos Manor, Sunday, February 22, 2015

I’m going to get Dragon Naturally Speaking going on the Surface Pro 2, but first I have to get better Wi-Fi down here. Everything was sort of optimized for upstairs, but I can’t even go up there alone, much less work there. First thing is to get the Pro docking station downstairs, so I have reliable Internet connections for the Surface Pro; then get the Wi-Fi router down here so there’s good Wi-Fi here even when the Surface is not in the docking station.

Obviously I’m moving most my operations into the old office where I wrote most my older books and columns, I can climb the stairs but I can’t carry anything. I could get a second walker and leave it up there so I could get around, but it would be dangerous to work alone up there; I have to change my work habits. So it goes.

We did bring the AT&T MicroCell http://www.att.com/att/microcell/ downstairs, connected it by Ethernet to my internal net and thus to the Internet, put it in a window so it sees the sky, and turned it on. All the lights began to blink but one by one they went solid – but you need faith, The whole process took half an hour or more. Eventually they all came on and my iPhone 4g had a full five bars, or rather the dots they have replaced the bars with in one or another OS update. It works splendidly.

The 4g is getting old and would be replaced by now if I had not had the stroke: I need someone to take me to the Apple Store in Fashion Square and I haven’t arranged that yet.

However there is now no great hurry: one reason for replacing it was out of power by evening, and I thought that meant the battery was going: I bought the 4g when they first came out, and never bothered to upgrade. Now, though with five bars, it is at 85% or more power at night, and clearly the battery is fine. I remarked on this to my stalwart advisors, and they gently pointed out that I ought to have expected it.

The flailing search for signal is a big battery eater. Alex and I run into it a lot on Location Connect jobs, which is why getting on AP set up in the NOC before any of the wire runs have been made is useful, assuming our outside world connection is there. T-Mobile among the big carriers pioneered support for calling over Wi-Fi, so I find it especially helpful. All of the carriers have indicated plans to support this in the next year or so.

    When your carrier does offer that the microcell shouldn’t be needed any longer if the Wi-Fi coverage throughout the (used? infested? inhabited?) parts of the house is up to snuff.

Eric (Eric Pobirs, one of my advisors )

Yes, that’s one great thing about being in a strong signal area. The phone doesn’t keep chatting with the base stations, looking for a stronger signal. If you aren’t using it for Internet data very much, you can also extend the battery life by turning off 3G or 4G. Just something to keep in mind for future use.

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And on reflection that is hardly surprising. Given the fold in the hills that we live in it is not surprising that the unbooted signal is weak, but it is better upstairs, and I never used the 4g over in this part of the downstairs office – a few yards away there was plenty of signal, provided by the MicroCell, although I suspect the MicroCell, having run without fault or attention for years, might have needed a reset; indeed that was the original plan but I hadn’t made it clear to Alex, so when the lights kept blinking after five minutes he thought it was defective and brought it downstairs. But all it needed was time.

Next problem: in digging around for info I discover that to get the iPhone 6 working with the MicroCell I must log on to the AT&T account that the MicroCell is on. Alas I set that up years ago and I have not the foggiest notion of user name and password. That will be in and old log, and they are all upstairs. I may go up and look if Eric or Alex comes over, but more likely I’ll call AT&T tech support – of course I have low expectations of that, since AT&T has forgotten other things about my accounts. We’ll see. I guess I get wireless bills and one of those must have a clue. I’ll work on that next week.

I will get to work on Dragon – I think of it as the Abominable Autoscribe after Walter Miller’s abbot in Canticle For Leibowitz – soon. Eric thinks it can easily be done.

Dragon Naturally speaking will probably work with Windows 10 Preview that is on the Surface now. Eventually, you’ll want to compare it with what Cortana provides for free. They’ve demonstrated dictating an email message using Cortana but I don’t know if that is in the current build.

    Assuming my brain isn’t lodged sideways in my skull tomorrow like it was today, I can come by tomorrow afternoon and get the dock set up. The dock will also drive a monitor in addition to the Surface’s display, so one of the remaining big monitors upstairs could be used, once the layout is worked out to avoid turning the area into something that looks like the Batcave, although that has a certain appeal.

Eric

If you are not familiar with Canticle it is an apocalypse novel and I can recommend it to you; it doesn’t hold up as well now that the Cold War is over, but we seem headed that way again as we ignore the Caliphate. Fortunately ISIS considers Iran heretics – apostates, actually – because they are Sunni and Iran is Shiite; but ISIS has other paths to nuclear weapons, and or government dithers. If you have not seen Peggy Noonan’s latest column http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-administration-adrift-on-denial-1424392150 I recommend it.

Leo Laporte is recommending the low cost Winbook a very good buy, and it might be even better for a dictation machine than the Surface; smaller. And it is said to have good battery life, and well under a hundred bucks. I’m thinking about that.

Which brings us to Pledge Week. This site operates on the Public Radio plan: it is free to all, but it cannot survive without subscribers. It is Pledge Week at KUSC, the LA Good Music station, which means Pledge Week at Chaos Manor. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html will tell you all about how to subscribe. Obviously I do not ask for monthly donations as KUSC does.

If you have not subscribed and you like rational discussion on many topics, this would be a splendid time to subscribe; it doesn’t take long, Do say if it is a new subscription. If you do subscribe but haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a good time to do so.

Note that Pledge Week is essentially the only time I nag you about subscriptions; I hate it as much as you do.

Re: The Man Who Destroyed America’s Ego

Jerry,

This is a long read but well worth it. It’s about the work of psychologist Roy Baumeister, primarily his work on self-esteem and narcissism.

The Man Who Destroyed America’s Ego

“Everybody who said it cited somebody else, so I’d look up the previous source, and they’d also cited somebody else. That’s when I realized there was no evidence for it.”

https://medium.com/matter/the-man-who-destroyed-americas-ego-94d214257b5

Regards,

George

It is indeed long, and many will not find it worth the time investment; the whole notion of psychotherapy has changed since I was in graduate school. But those interested in the subject will learn something for it.

Air Power

The 8th Air Force did not relieve Bastogne; Patton’s 3rd Army did.

I suppose it is pointless to mention that the weather at that time made air operations impossible

Brice

Once the the weather cleared air power was effective. Patton famously prayed for good weather. Col. Bagley, on his staff, was in the church at the time. Bagley was in the same analysis group at Boeing that I was, and we worked together in the TFX design team. But it is true that Patton had worked his miracle before the weather cleared.

Further on warfare, etc.

Of course we all want to win as cheaply in terms of casualties and costs to the taxpayers.
We seem to forget the repeated lessons that applying overwhelming force ASAP is the “cheapest” and quickest solution. Sad.
But what is really tragic is “losing the peace” and abandoning allies.

Michael J Schuerger Sr

MacArthur’s message used to be memorized bt every West Point cadet and was part of the mess hall conversations; “there is no substitute for victory”

http://www.west-point.org/academy/malo-wa/inspirations/buglenotes.html

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

View from Chaos Manor, Friday, February 20, 2015

Morning and lunch with Niven and Barnes, and much progress on the new book about the Cthulhu war and other problems plaguing the settlers of Avalon, the first interstellar colony. And there’s no faster than light.

I fear I am exhausted, and somewhat irrational. Computer problems, but they fixed themselves. Outlook 2010 is enough different from 2007 that it can be frustrating. So it goes. I am probably going to experiment with some kind of dictation device; it has to be faster than this. I’ll experiment, I guess.

A couple of points, but this will be short.

The threat posed by ISIS

“Obviously we do not declare war on a billion people because of their religion.”
Obvious to you, but what about the average person casually soaking up the reporting by Fox News? You hear constant complaining that Obama isn’t calling it ISLAMIC terrorism. Guests frequently point out that the seeds of violence are at the core of that religion. O’Reilly (and many others) tells us we are engaged in a HOLY war, only the president won’t acknowledge it. How many of those people walk away fearful of anything and anyone associated with Islam, ready to go to war with the religion?
I say this the day after my wife got off the phone with her mother, who was literally sobbing in fear of ISIS and the Islamic threat. “They are only 100 miles away from her beloved Pope! Never in her lifetime have we faced such a dire threat”.
This reaction is from an 80 year old woman who was born poor at the tail end of the depression, only to see her older brothers go off and fight in WWII, then lived through the cold war with the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation, the turmoil of the 60’s and the Vietnam war, and then the financial crises of recent years. And at the end of her life she is most terrified of the Muslim hordes that she is convinced are about to engulf us, all the fault of our much hated Muslim president.
It seems very wrong that a normally sensible women could be driven into such a state of hysteria by what she sees reported by her favorite news outlets.

Craig

Without the Caliphate there is no pressing need; we are interested in preserving our republic, not in Crusades. I hope you are confounding me with Fox News? While I have some regard for individuals there – Britt Hume was a friend some years ago although I have not heard from him in a decade – much of Fox is neo-conservative, which is not my position. I am simply devoted to rational discussion, and I don’t carry a label.

But we allow the Caliphate to exist at our peril. Most Muslims do not accept the premise of eternal war, but ISIS does and says so. When an armed man says that I cannot live and beheads a man standing next to him, he has my full attention.

Air power and ISIS

Jerry, I see that the USAF is actually making use of their air supremacy to make tactical air strikes against ISIS, and that’s good, so far as it goes. Alas, it doesn’t go far enough because such actions only have a short-term effect, and what’s needed is something that will have more lasting effects. My personal opinion is that they should make an all-out effort to interdict the enemy’s supply lines so that their army doesn’t have enough munitions to continue their attacks or enough food to keep them from starving. I don’t care how dedicated, eager or inspired an army is, it’s very hard to press your attacks home when you’re low on ammo and even harder to defend against counter-attacks when you’re running out of bullets and living on half-rations because your supply convoys are being bombed and strafed into oblivion. (It’s not going to do anything good for your morale, either!)

I’d like to point out to you and your readers that this isn’t exactly a new idea. Back in ’72, my ship was one of a fleet of 38 warships on the Gun Line beating back the Easter Offensive. Very few of our fire support missions were directed at enemy formations. Most of them were either against truck convoys or supply dumps. During WWII, the submarine campaigns in the Pacific were mostly aimed against enemy shipping in attempts to cut supply lines, as were both Battles of the Atlantic. I could go on, of course, but I think my point is clear:

cutting the enemy’s supply lines is an effective way to win a war, and costs less than defeating him in the field. (If nothing else, less of your own troops get killed.)

There’s an old saying that junior officers talk about tactics, field-grade officers talk about strategy and senior officers talk about logistics. I’m sure that there are people in the Pentagon who understand this, but I don’t know if any of them have the President’s ear, or if he’s willing to take their advice in this case. I’m sure his opponents believe that he doesn’t really want to win, but I’m not willing to go that far because there’s no evidence to back the assertion. I would, however, be interested in seeing what you and your other correspondents think about this.

Joe Zeff

All air power is not equally effective. One mission is to isolate the battle area: see that no ammunition, supplies, or reinforcement comes through. This is generally more useful than hitting hard points; armor and artillery are usually better for that, but do not take that as dictum: this not a primer on major tactics and operations. But once we have achieved air superiority tha planes that did that are not the moist effective for interdiction, close support, or recce/strike, and the better they are at that the more likely they will be to be second best in a dogfight. This was the TFX problem.

The Air Force no longer serves the ground support mission in an optimum manner.

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

View from Chaos Manor, Thursday, February 19, 2015

I continue to recover but typing is slow and frustrating. I find myself hitting two keys at once quite often, and correcting a sentence takes longer than writing it. I must look at the keyboard rather than the screen. Of course that is grousing; I saw in rehab hourly reminders to count my blessings and I must remember that. I can only hope that I continue to improve. After all I started two months ago with one finger and a thumb I could control. I must not forget that.

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Some articles on the ISIS phenomenon and their theology which may prove of interest.

First, the Atlantic piece:

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

Second, a rebuttal I find convincing.

http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/02/18/3624121/atlantic-gets-dangerously-wrong-isis-islam/

It is true that ISIS justifies itself by a fundamentalist interpretation of the Qu’ran, but it isn’t fair to assume that Islam inevitably leads to violence.  ISIS is not exactly fully literalist, as they will destroy places of worship (forbidden in the Qu’ran) and they have a large obsession with porn
(http://www.meforum.org/5042/why-jihadis-obsessed-with-porn) — which, again, is counter to strict teaching.
So there’s no such thing as a real literalist in this world — neither for Muslims nor for Christians.  Instead, there are people who interpret scripture verses to justify acting on their worst instincts under color of law, and people who interpret scripture to try to build a society.  ISIS , while claiming to be literalist, is in fact as unliteral as the ‘inerrant’ churches of my youth who added prohibitions against drinking and dancing.  So while we have to acknowledge that they are an Islamic offshoot following a violent interpretation of Islam, we shouldn’t assume that it’s the inevitable outcome of Islamic teaching. That would put us at odds with the Jordanians and Kurds who are part of the solution to this problem and also happen to be Muslim.
Now, it is true that, as Mark Steyn puts it eloquently, violent Muslims following this and similar interpretations have caused a lot of grief in the world.
http://www.steynonline.com/6816/who-ya-gonna-believe-us-or-your-own-severed-head
But there are more than one billion Muslims in the world, and most of them aren’t doing this.  The Ottomans built a multicultural empire, once upon a time.  So while we need to recognize the threat of violent Islamic extremism, we have to be chary of assuming this is the inevitable result of Islam or of lumping in all Muslims in with ISIS. Especially when some of those Muslims are fighter pilots being shot down and burned alive on our behalf. 
The path to victory requires the Muslim world to ostracize this terrorism and violence, to cast them out of the Ummah, and then destroy them. We should do all we can to foster that end.   Perhaps providing the Jordanians, Syrians, and Kurds the assistance they need to quash the ‘caliphate’ like a bug. 

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Obviously we do not declare war on a billion people because of their religion. Having said that, the question is, what do we do? The one thing we must not do is allow the Caliphate to exist; so long as it has any territory at all we are at war with it. As to the rest, I suspect – as do the Iranian mullahs – that the weapons of cultural mass destruction will have their usual effect as they have on Western Civilization. What that does to the future of humanity I do not know. We have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil – that is we have declared man as the measure of all things, and can dispense with the Will of God and all such. Of course this is not new. Protagoras said that man is the measure of all things, and Socrates answered that the dog-faced baboon is the measure of all things.

For more of the dialogue, see http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Protagoras/protagoras_plato_theaetetus.htm and the discussion; it is a debate that has been at the heart of philosophy and religion for more than two thousand years. And see http://praxeology.net/theaetetus.htm

We hope, and modern liberals are sure, that man has no need of rules posited from anyone other than ourselves. We recognize no authority other than 50%+1 of whatever collection of human beings happens to be interested, although we often defer to the loud and raucous.  Where that leads we do not know, John Stuart Mill believed that free speech and rational discussion were the only key to the pursuit of The Good Society, but that liberal philosophy has not led where he envisioned.

But we can agree that a liberal Republic cannot tolerate the existence of a viable and growing Caliphate, and the Caliphate is the first to agree. Nothing outside it can legitimately exist except in dhimmitude.

We have the means to extirpate ISIS just now. How long that will be true is not certain. But one thing is; there is no peace with the Caliphate; the Koran makes that very clear. There can only temporary truces, and not with all the enemies of Allah at once. So says the prophet, and that view cannot be changed. It is war to the knife, and ISIS grows daily.

Yes, we may ally with Muslims, as we have in the past; but understand that to the Caliphate those are not Muslims at all.

I that you are mistaken in your reading of the Koran. The commands are explicit, not interpreted into it.

Dr Pournelle

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/how-we-must-deal-with-the-caliphate-and-more/

‘[T] need new technology “to enable extended operation at Mach 0.8/0.9 and 500 ft,” exactly the A-10’s workspace today.’

I doubt very much that Mach 0.8/0.9 is in the Warthog’s workspace, because the Hog has a never-exceed-speed that is less than 0.7 Mach. In my experience, the only bird that regularly flew in that ‘workspace’ was recce (RF4c), but the Air Force does not fly those anymore.

But I take Ed’s point. The Air Force has no need for the F35. Nor does the Navy. The Marines may have. They bought the AV8 on their own nickel. Let ’em buy this bird, if they want it.

If the Air Force wants to retire its Hogs, give ’em to the Marines. I am sure the Grunts will find a home for ’em.

Or give ’em to the Army and let the fixed-wing/rotary-wing division go hang.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

The entire purpose of a military is to win wars. It should go to the War Department. Support of the ground force is the reason for existence of the Air Force. Now, true enough, it cannot support the ground force until it first wins air superiority, and much of the ground army command will not understand how to achieve that; but keeping a monopoly on close support and then not having the force to do it with is not the way. The Air Force and the Department of Defense were experiments which in my judgment have failed; bring back the War Department and USAAF. War is too important to be left to pilots.

Since the Europeans obviously don’t care about their own self-defense, we should finally exit NATO and withdraw all our forces from Europe.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/19/germanys-army-is-so-under-equipped-that-it-used-broomsticks-instead-of-machine-guns/>

Roland Dobbins

Certainly NATO is an entangling alliance, and has accomplished its mission. Europe can defend itself against Russia, and encircling Russia does not protect US interests. And the Balkans disaster indicates it should have been abolished long ago. We keep it at our peril, for it assumes we all have common interests – which we do not, particularly as NATO expands. It was a great alliance, but the Cold War is done.

: Heinlein Sestina published

My poem on Heinlein was just published…on line, in a pop culture magazine.

Mondo Cult: Poetry by John DeChancie

We add for the record:

Dr. Pournelle,
Some of your sources of F-35 information are guilty of the same type of deliberate obfuscation as the anthropogenic global warming crowd. Just FYI, the low-level flight restrictions are based on F-35 training range noise levels, not combat capability. Thermal efficiency through AETD is sought so that training can proceed in current civilian F-16/F-15 training ranges. It also doesn’t apply to VTOL modes (if those models of F35 are ever actually developed) which may also be used for anti-armor missions.
Noise (audible kind) management is an important quality in low-level, subsonic stealth, however, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the high-level stealth requirements were skipped in first gen, non-VTOL models. But I also have to tell you from frequent and recent experience that A-10 is far from silent.
While leading the project, the USAF isn’t the only buyer of the F35, and many of the other customers are mostly interested in developing close air support capabilities.
Don’t get me wrong: I agree with the conclusion that F35 is a pig in a poke and its acquisition is one more indicator that DOD needs a reboot. The cause just isn’t helped by spurious arguments.
-d

Note that I do not know a lot about the current aircraft, but I do know principles, If an aircraft is too expensive we will not have enough: numbers count.

An aircraft good at ground support of a field army will likely be inferior at air tin air combat; and  good good air to air combat planes are often inferior against SAM defenses. These principles have not changed since TFX days,

Just saying…

Google employee posts horrifying video that will convince you to never buy a Nest smoke alarm

It’s a safe bet that Nest CEO Tony Fadell is not too happy with Google staff engineer Brad Fitzpatrick right now. Fitzpatrick last week posted a video that showed Nest’s Nest Protect smoke alarms badly misbehaving in his home. In fact, despite the fact that his house was not on fire, the alarms kept going off and he was unable to find a way to get them to shut up. Fitzpatrick says he posted the video for one reason: To warn people away from buying Nest Protect.

RELATED: Nest now has 15 more ways to rule your home

“Do NOT buy a Nest smoke alarm,” he writes bluntly. “They false alarm and are unhushable pieces of crap… This went off in my house all day, annoying my neighbors. When I got the Android notification that my house was burning down I immediately assumed it was false, since my Nests had already cried wolf before.  I also checked video cameras and saw my house wasn’t actually burning down, so I stayed at work. My poor neighbors, though.”

Generalizing from one case…

One gram of DNA can potentially hold up to 455 exabytes of data, according to the New Scientist. For reference: There are one billion gigabytes in an exabyte, and 1,000 exabytes in a zettabyte. The cloud computing company EMC estimated that there were 1.8 zettabytes of data in the world in 2011, which means we would need only about 4 grams (about a teaspoon) of DNA to hold everything from Plato through the complete works of Shakespeare to Beyonce’s latest album (not to mention every brunch photo ever posted on Instagram).

There are four types of molecules that make up DNA, which form pairs. To encode information on DNA, scientists program the pairs into 1s and os—the same binary language that encodes digital data. This is not a new concept—scientists at Harvard University encoded a book onto DNA in 2012—but up to now, it had been difficult to retrieve the information stored on the DNA.

Past tests have seen gaps in retrieved information, as DNA reacts with its environment and degrades at room temperature. Robert Grass, the leader of the project at the Federal Institute, has found a new way to preserve the information: treat it like a fossil. His team encased their DNA sample in a shell made from silica—similar in structure to fossilized bones and one of the main components of glass—and stored the sample at about 140°F for a few weeks to test its durability.

When researchers recovered the sample, they were still able to read the encoded data, and Grass told the Institute’s blog that had the DNA been stored at subzero temperatures, it could potentially be read in over a million years. CDs and DVDs only have shelf lives of about 25 years, according to the US National Archives, so this would be quite an improvement on our current data storage techniques.

For now, the process remains expensive. The DNA sample created for the Institute’s test—the Swiss federal charter and the Archimedes Palimpsest—was about 83 kilobytes of data and cost £1,000 ($1,500) to produce, Grass told the New Scientist. That means encoding anything worth saving—Wikipedia, for example, or the first four seasons of The Wire—would be prohibitively expensive right now.

As with any new technology, the cost of DNA storage is likely to drop as it advances. So there may come a time when a future being venturing out into the nuclear winter finds a DNA data store and will be able to peruse the greatest achievements of humanity up until the turn of the 20th century.

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