Yearly Archives: 2015

Chaos Manor View, Friday, November 13, 2015

Friday the Thirteenth Falls on Friday This Month

Everyone with an interest in education – and that is about everyone who reads – should read Eva Moskowitz

Why Students Need to Sit Up and Pay Attention

Our charters are guided by what I learned from a great public-school teacher: Distracted, misbehaving children aren’t learning.

By

Eva Moskowitz

http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-students-need-to-sit-up-and-pay-attention-1447373122

I doubt it says anything that would surprise you, but it is important, because a lot of public school teachers would be horrified by it.

I propose that school boards should have the right and obligation to fire for incompetence teachers who cannot keep good order and discipline in their classrooms. Teaching civility and self-control is one of the major purposes of public education, and if it isn’t being taught, what is the justification for tax support of the schools?

It may be necessary in some school districts to have classrooms where civility and self-control are the only important things taught, and those who refuse to be orderly in regular classrooms should be sent to them; distracting all the other students, talking back to the teacher, disrupting the class, and generally being a public nuisance in an institution supported by money collected by compulsion – taxes – is not a constitutional right in any state or nation I know of, nor should it be. Tolerating disruption – letting some express themselves at will – is depriving everyone in the class. And yes: if what is being taught is boring, as much of what I heard the second year in my two-grades-to-the-classroom grade schools was, there is still no right to disruption and incivility; and learning self-control is valuable even for bored kids. Teachers who keep good order and discipline are not necessarily competent; but those who don’t at least try are certainly incompetent, and firing them will improve the school.

There’s a lot wrong with the content of what is taught in our public schools; but failure to teach civility and self-control is intolerable.

See also https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/03/a-venture-capitalist-searches-for-the-purpose-of-school-heres-what-he-found/

‘He walked out of a building, got in the car… we took the shot’: Pentagon chiefs reveal how Jihadi John was ‘evaporated’ in the street in midnight drone strike

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ushome/index.html

For once, some good news.

I would not think that an all-out negative attack on Dr. Carson would be Donald Trump’s best approach to demonstrating he has the gravitas to be President.

On the same theme:

Republicans Are Ready to Rumble

Substantive arguments are healthy, but personal attacks aren’t. And unity gives Democrats an edge.

By

Peggy Noonan

Nov. 12, 2015 7:34 p.m. ET

http://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-are-ready-to-rumble-1447374852

Subject: Perhaps a New Record for Government Waste

If we thought HealthCare.gov was wasteful…how about $1 Billion to put one form online? What happened to that US Digital Services that was supposed to roam Washington and make these things work?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-decade-into-a-project-to-digitize-us-immigration-forms-just-1-is-online/2015/11/08/f63360fc-830e-11e5-a7ca-6ab6ec20f839_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_immigration910p%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

—

Dwayne Phillips

Just shaking my head.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-decade-into-a-project-to-digitize-us-immigration-forms-just-1-is-online/2015/11/08/f63360fc-830e-11e5-a7ca-6ab6ec20f839_story.html

Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.

A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

John Harlow

Of the candidates for President, Mrs. Fiorina seems the only one seriously interested in government incompetence, and certainly one of the best qualified to deal with it. See also

https://www.aei.org/publication/the-regulators-yoke/

Another Big War
Could the U.S. mobilize for a major war today? In Parameters, Steven Metz suggests our greatest limitation might be logistical, stemming from the lack of excess industrial capacity (which differs starkly from pre-WWII). Another could be the fact that so many young people today do not meet the standards for military service. Large formations formed in the lead up to a major war would most probably have inferior equipment and men, and may not be able to carry out the mission. Thanks in advance for your response,

Nathan Jaco

There’s not much response to make; despite government hoopla, we remain in close to a depression, and have since 2008. We do not have surplus industrial capacity, and our schools aren’t turning out work-ready graduates. In 1941 we converted to a war economy and overwhelmed both Germany and Japan; it may not be so easy this time. Robots may help.

But our high tech advantages are not so great as they once were either.

How Free Speech Died on Campus

In a 2012 interview, Greg Lukianoff describes how universities became the most authoritarian institutions in America.

By

Sohrab Ahmari

Nov. 16, 2012 7:11 p.m. ET

New York

At Yale University, you can be prevented from putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on your T-shirt. At Tufts, you can be censured for quoting certain passages from the Quran. Welcome to the most authoritarian institution in America: the modern university—”a bizarre, parallel dimension,” as Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, calls it.

Mr. Lukianoff, a 38-year-old Stanford Law grad, has spent the past decade fighting free-speech battles on college campuses. The latest was last week at Fordham University, where President Joseph McShane scolded College Republicans for the sin of inviting Ann Coulter to speak. [snip]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323894704578115440209134854

To be decided: why should taxpayers support this sort of thing? Harvard and Yale can do as they wish; but the state universities and colleges were established to aid qualified students not able to go to private institutions. Should taxes pay for intolerance of this kind? Certainly those who accept public largess are subject to stricter rules than those who do not. Universities supported by taxes are public, not private, institutions. But surely being subject to a diversity of views is part of a good education?

The Death of College Sports

The University of Missouri football team has just killed college sports. They have showed that if the football team threatens to not play a game ($1 million fine to the university) the university President and Chancellor will resign. Taken to its logical conclusion — an idea fraught with peril — a football team can demand that admission policies and everything else be changed at a university or they will strike. Imagine A BIG BIG BIG time football program like at U of Alabama or Ohio State U threatening strike.

Another logical conclusion is that those who operate state universities, a.k.a. state legislatures, cannot allow a situation where 40 students, who happen to be on the football team, dictate policy. They have inadvertently given economic power to those students. Hence, they will remove the football program from the university.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/09/missouris-student-government-calls-for-university-presidents-removal/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_missresignation-1124am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

It will be interesting to see what happens at the University of Missouri.

Alumina smelting
Smelting Bauxite into Aluminum uses huge amounts or electricity. To meet military needs (and other) The Bonneville Dams on the Columbia were built to supply this power cheaply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_in_the_Columbia_River_watershed
In the eighties and nineties increased demand found Kaiser and others selling their power south at a profit higher than making aluminum. No good idea is safe from government and they changed the rules and started charging market clearing rates for the power.
Pricing US aluminum smelters out of market.
The results of increased recycling of cans and waste aluminum has also reduced US price points further.

Tom Weaver

As everyone used to know —I believe I learned it in 6^th grade – aluminum is made where electricity is cheap, not where bauxite is found; it’s cheaper to ship bauxite. Energy is ultimately the governing price of most everything. The pipeline from Canada would have been important, and perhaps will be after the election.

We are not building power plants.  Nuclear fission plants are “green” and emit no CO2, but it is impossible to build them because of regulation upon regulation.  Coal works but is messy and creates waste.  Natural gas would be reasonable but creates CO2.  None of this discourages China or India who are building all three, and will become economically much stronger.

Make of this what you will

http://www.independent.co.uk/student/shu/how-xbox-kinect-can-transform-breasts-literally-a6721051.html

FBI expands probe of Clinton emails, launches independent classification review

By Catherine Herridge, Pamela Browne

The FBI has expanded its probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails, with agents exploring whether multiple statements violate a federal false statements statute, according to intelligence sources familiar with the ongoing case.

Fox News is told agents are looking at U.S. Code 18, Section 1001, which pertains to “materially false” statements given either in writing, orally or through a third party. Violations also include pressuring a third party to conspire in a cover-up. Each felony violation is subject to five years in prison.

This phase represents an expansion of the FBI probe, which is also exploring potential violations of an Espionage Act provision relating to “gross negligence” in the handling of national defense information. [snip]

Does this affect the election?

In Case you missed this

Miranda Devine: Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate

http://www.news.com.au/national/western-australia/miranda-devine-perth-electrical-engineers-discovery-will-change-climate-change-debate/story-fnii5thn-1227555674611

I have seen no refutation.

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Veterans Day

Armistice Day originally; 11/11/ at 11 AM

Steve is at a conference, and Jack Cohen was busy, so Niven and I used the morning to confer on details for our Avalon series novel: number three in the story of Earth’s first interstellar colony in a slower than light travel universe. The colony is forty years old, and without any warning a new ship is coming; there was no warning. Meanwhile they are exploring the mainland having become secure on their original island; and they are finding astonishing facts about the planet’s life forms.

We got sorted out who will write certain needed scenes and went to a very good lunch. Alas it’s pollen season in Los Angeles, and it has rained very little this fall. Ah well.

I watched the debates last night, and I was pleased to see that Carly Fiorina is more than holding her own. She kept to the theme that government has got out of control, and it is time for the American people to take back their government from the professionals. In particular, we must have Zero based budgeting: every dollar spent has to be justified, not just spent because it was spent last year. That would be the end of bunny inspectors and many other absurdities, and a reduction in the total size of regulatory agencies; nothing should be spared from scrutiny. I recall that Barrack Hussein Obama made a “laser fine” inspection of each item in the budget one of his primary goals upon taking office, but that never happened or was alluded to again.

Charles Murray, who is one of the few sociologists I can respect as a scientist, has an article: The Regulators’ Yoke, https://www.aei.org/publication/the-regulators-yoke/ which does a better job of telling why this is important than I can.

The de facto legislative power delegated to regulatory agencies is only one aspect of their illegitimacy. Citizens who have not been hit with an accusation of a violation may not realize how Orwellian the regulatory state has become. If you run afoul of an agency such as the FCC and want to defend yourself, you don’t go to a regular court. You go to an administrative court run by the agency. You don’t get a jury. The case is decided by an administrative judge who is an employee of the agency. You do not need to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather by the loosest of all legal standards, a preponderance of the evidence. The regulatory agency is also free of many of the rules that constrain police and prosecutors in the normal legal system. For example, regulatory agencies are not required to show probable cause for getting a search warrant. A regulatory agency can inspect a property or place of business under broad conditions that it has set for itself.

There’s much more, but it amounts to this: Regulatory agencies, or the regulatory divisions within cabinet agencies, operate as self-contained entities that create de facto laws that Congress would never have passed on an up-or-down vote. They then act as both police and judge in enforcing the laws they have created. It amounts to an extra-legal state within the state.

I have focused on the regulatory state because it now looms so large in daily life as to have provoked a reaction that crosses political divides: American government isn’t supposed to work this way.

There is a lot more, all good, and I commend it to you. And Mrs. Fiorina is one of the few candidates who seem to take such things seriously and – I think – she means it. All Republicans, and until recently most Democrats – recall Mr. Obama’s promise of a laser like inspection of each item in the budget – talk about making sure that each tax dollar goes for something we want done; but the country club establishment Republicans never did anything about it when they had the power, and the Democrats never took it seriously at all. Hope and Change always means bigger government; increasing the middle class means adding more higher ranking civil servants to the payroll. Little thought is given to those who must pay for it.

And another government instruction is education: why is it paid for by taxpayers? Why can’t it earn its own way? Well, because poor people could not afford it. But does it do anything you would pay to have it do if you looked at it seriously?

Dr. Pournelle,

I stumbled across this interesting article from a venture capitalist’s point of view about what he sees wrong with our educational system.  I thought you might enjoy this article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/03/a-venture-capitalist-searches-for-the-purpose-of-school-heres-what-he-found/

Best regards,

Dave Boyette

Read this and think on it: if the students aren’t learning much, why do we pay to have then study it?

And the remedy to this starts with returning control of education to the states; better would be to local school district boards elected by local tax payers. Sure, that would result in some appalling school districts – although it is hard to get worse than we have now – but it also give us some good ones; and eliminating Federal institutions controlling education would be worth doing anyway.

I will repeat my offer: give me two divisions and the A-10’s with enough air supremacy forces to protect them, and I will eliminate the Caliphate within a year. By hat I mean of course I know generals who could do it if commanded to. The other factions in Iraq and Syria have not declared war on the US; ISIS has; and claims to be the legitimate ruler of the Moslem world, and the world in general. They need elimination, and we know who to give the conquered territory to. It would be costly, but not as costly as allowing Libya, Iraq, and Syrian to further down while ISIS grows and attracts recruits with successes.

License renewed? Air Force says it needs A-10 a bit longer, thanks | buffy willow

Jerry

No comment needed, I think:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/us-air-forces-top-combat-general-says-a-10-retirement-may-be-postponed/

Ed

While we are looking at notions worth reading:

Soviet collapse due to fortunate Reagan-era error?

I came across a Professor Watkins who wrote that a budgeting mistake by the 1980’s OMB led to a greater increase in Pentagon spending than was originally directed by the Reagan’s administration.
As I don’t remember any reporting on this, I thought you might like to refresh us on this topic, especially if there’s anything to Watkin’s claims.
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/sovietcollapse.htm

B. Pastoral

While economic stress on the Soviet Union was a key element in the Reagan strategy, it was deliberate; I had not heard that any part of it was accidental.  Otherwise this is a reasonable account.

Long, interesting, and somewhat tragic.

“I do not expect this scroll will be read during my lifetime.”

<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/the-invisible-library>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

You will see this here again after I have looked into it a bit; is the Cold coming? And when?

Cold Sun Rising.

<http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/Cold-sun-rising-30272650.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

:bubbles]

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

Chaos Manor View, Friday, November 06, 2015

Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point scholarship. Politico

“I never once saw Ben Carson at West Point when I was Chairman of Brain Surgery & Grain Pyramids there from 1954-1985.” Rob Delaney

It is inconceivable that in 1960 a black high school graduate with the academic credentials enabling him to get into Yale, and also graduating from high school ROTC at the top of his class would not have been courted by many including Army generals to apply for West Point, or that he would not have received an appointment had he applied. The benefits would be free tuition and room and board: sort of a full expenses scholarship and it’s not unlikely that one or another of those trying to recruit him would have used the phrase “like a scholarship.” Dr. Carson chose to go to pre-med and medical school and the rest of the training to become a neuro surgeon rather than to join the Army; but it is not a surprise that he is proud of having been asked to go to West Point. It is also not a surprise that certain people calling themselves journalists use this pride to malign him because he may have said he was offered a scholarship.

And see http://www.dailywire.com/news/960/no-ben-carson-didnt-lie-about-west-point-its-ben-shapiro

It’s late and I’ve been busy.

When a 127-Year-Old U.S. Industry Collapses Under China’s Weight.

<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/when-a-127-year-old-u-s-industry-collapses-under-china-s-weight>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Physics Mystery

NASA conducts MORE secret tests of its ‘impossible engine’: Study reveals fuel-free thrusters do work, but no one knows why

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3305990/Nasa-conducts-secret-tests-impossible-engine-Study-reveals-fuel-free-thrusters-work-no-one-knows-why.html

Solar Storms Strip Air From Mars, NASA Says

By KENNETH CHANG, NOV. 5, 2015
The air on Mars — what there is of it — is leaking away, about half a pound a second sputtering into space, scientists announced on Thursday.
Stories from Our Advertisers
The planet’s early atmosphere is thought to have been as thick as or thicker than Earth’s today, and even over the 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system, that slow leak would not explain how it atrophied to its current wisps.
But new readings from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission — Maven, for short — show that when Mars is hit by a solar storm, the ferocious bombardment of particles from the sun strips away the upper atmosphere much more quickly.
That could help explain the disappearance of the atmosphere. The sun during its youth was more unsettled, with many more solar storm eruptions, and it shone brighter in the ultraviolet wavelengths that also help knock atoms out of Mars’ atmosphere.
Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage
From left: Europa, the moon of Jupiter; Titan, the moon of Saturn; a composite image of the Valles Marineris across Mars; a mosaic of Venus’s surface.
NASA’s Next Horizon in SpaceAUG. 28, 2015
An illustration of the Maven spacecraft approaching Mars on a mission to study its upper atmosphere.
NASA Craft Is Orbiting Mars, to Study Its AirSEPT. 21, 2014
A painting of early Mars, showing shallow seas across the northern lowlands and weather systems drifting in a denser atmosphere than today’s.
Looking to Mars to Help Understand Changing ClimatesDEC. 8, 2014
“What this tells us is loss through space has been an important process,” said Bruce M. Jakosky, a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado and the principal investigator for the Maven mission.
[We do this so you don’t have to, dear Jerry!!!]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/science/space/mars-atmosphere-stripped-away-by-solar-storms-nasa-says.html?&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Army Research Lab 2050 Report

The US Army Research Laboratory report Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050 is worth taking a few minutes.

http://www.arl.army.mil/arlreports/2015/ARL-SR-0327.pdf

Section headings include:

Ubiquitous Robots

Swarms and Teams

Dynamic Hacking and Spoofing

Super Humans

Directed Energy Weapons

Force Fields

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Climate Change Weather Attribution
I ran across this article the day after the note I sent wishing that there was a blog for looking at the numbers of Climate Change and discerning the impact of that change. The group, World Weather Attribution (WWA) started in 2014 “aims to deliver timely information on how patterns of extreme weather may be affected by climate change”:
http://www.climatecentral.org/wwa
Whether humans are or are not at fault is moot. Clearly patterns are changing in our human time frame of several generations and we need to deal with it. And taking a really long view, at some point it time it was natural for a 1 mile thick ice sheet over the state of Michigan, which is still rebounding from it’s disappearance.
This group seems to be trying to make sense of all the information and models in a way that we can maybe use it in a shorter time frame of our children and children’s children. Bravo for the attempt. I look forward to following them.
Bob P

TPP Nightmare

The TPP is worse than we expected, which was to be expected. To make matters even worse, the cries against it are about “repealing fast track authority”. Apparently, whatever Congress did that allowed the Iran Debacle — excuse me the Iran Nuclear Agreement — to pass as fitting policy also allows the same process for TPP. So, the Senate will not have to ratify this treaty, they’ll have to get an impossible number of votes to deny the treaty’s automatic ratification.

Apparently, now, it’s called “Trade Promotion Authority”.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/05/jeff-sessions-kill-the-anti-democratic-trans-pacific-partnership-in-the-crib-repeal-fast-track-authority-now/

And what Senator Sessions has to say about this is beyond unsettling.

We’re looking at a synarchy, much like EU synarchy. We will be ruled by unelected bureaucrats in a regulatory framework that looks more communist than capitalist and we’ll have lose certain rights under TPP since we’ll all be under some commission that will dictate our rules to us without consent of our congress and without regard for out Constitution — according to Senator Sessions.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo

And dependent for energy on imports. It’s part of the design.

No RF from KIC 8462852.

<http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.01606v1.pdf>

This doesn’t preclude artificiality, though. They could’ve died out before the epoch in which the light reaching us from KIC 8462852 – and, therefore, any possible RF emissions – can be observed.

In other words, the time window for the persistence of megastructures is potentially much larger than that of a civilization which produced such megastructures.

There’s probably a natural explanation for what we’re seeing – including something much closer headed our way from KIC 8462852 and running silent, which nobody has mentioned, AFAIK.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Time Warner and 1600 to 1615

Could it be they are downloading the evening’s (or the next 24 hours’) new commercials and/or commercial broadcast schedule for their cable head end?

Just wondering. The consultancy leads me to think they are.

Charles Brumbelow=

I doubt it, but I do not know,

return of the nitpicker II
Dr. Pournelle,
Minor errata: I believe that you meant 1960. I find a black high school graduate is indeed inconceivable in 1060!
..and I had considerable trouble typing that line correctly despite not having a brain injury: don’t be so hard on yourself! I have considerable trouble hitting the qwerty number row at all, intentionally, yet alone correctly; in spite of years of practice. Patience.
There is also some strange text between a couple of the e-mails in the Nov 7 post. I paste:
sc:bubbles]
…I fear may be a missed segment of someone else’s PII.
Anxiously awaiting news from Avalon, and from Tran,
-d

Fixed, and thanks.  The Sc bubbles are a script to save loading times and dis space; it produces  an image.

I’m anxiously awaiting Mamelukes  and the colony novel too; and experimenting with ways to type faster.  I suspect it’ll take a new machine and some negotiations about using autocorrect.  And Live Writer doesn’t even have AutoCorrect. You’d be amazed at how many words I had to correct in these sentences.

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

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, November 05, 2015

Guy Fawkes Night

Remember, remember!
    The fifth of November,
    Gunpowder treason and plot;
    I know of no reason
    Why Gunpowder treason
    Should ever be forgot!

Larry and Steve were over for the day conferring on our interstellar colony novel. We also talked with Jack Cohen in England, via Skype, but the connection was bad and we kept losing it and having to call again. Of course “connection was bad” is a residue of times when you quite literally had bad connections by phone and had to call again; with the Internet that’s not a real diagnosis.

We suspect the problem was at Jack’s end, because things seemed fine here and it was before Noon; I’ve never had Internet problems before Noon, I only have the traditional problem at 1600 – doesn’t matter if it’s PDT or PST – when Time Warner, at least at my house, simply funks out, going to less than dialup speeds sometimes. You can’t do searches because you can’t find the Google server, but even if you know the exact address you’re looking for, as when you do F5 to get the site updated, it often gives the same error, can’t find server. Then for a few seconds it’s only slow, not halted, but it quickly returns to busted. The easy workaround is not to do anything requiring an Internet connection between 1600 and 1615 Pacific Time.

Anyway, I have a lot to contribute to the book, but when I try I spend so much time trying to type it in, and correcting the sentence I just typed and in correcting that forgetting the next sentence I was composing – well, it gets frustrating. In my venerable “How to Get My Job” essay written a long time ago I make the point that a writer must get so familiar with his tools that he can forget the “how” in writing and concentrate on the story or whatever it is he wants to say. He must not be thinking about “i before e except after c”, or elementary grammar rules; he needs to know his craft. Alas, since the stroke I don’t know my craft; I have to worry about how to say something as well as what to say. It’s a humbling experience; I remember from when I first had to write for a living.

Autocorrect helps. One of my more common errors is to insert a bracket (‘[‘) into words when I hit the p key. I hit the [ key at the same time; but sometimes before I hit p and sometimes after. I’m slowly teaching autocorrect to fix this. I just added “com[posing” and “comp[osing” to AutoCorrect’s dictionary so I had considerable trouble getting them into this text: you can defeat autocorrect but it takes doing, which is fine with me.

Anyway I get frustrated, and then I tend to lecture, and yesterday after a while I sort of became aware that here I was lecturing to two master writers about such things as pacing, in particular, weaving expository lumps into the text at any good opportunity so you don’t have so many lumps close together, and always introduce a character and a little backstory when you can so that if there’s coming up a big scene with many characters the readers haven’t met yet, they will have at least been introduced earlier so there aren’t so many strangers in the big plot-necessary scene, and So I woke up and apologized for lecturing.

Larry was kind enough to say we often get a lot of work done when I’m in lecture mode, so I don’t feel so bad, but still—

And of course I typed p;lot-necessary up there, and managed to get that into AutoCorrect’s dictionary.

Anyway the book’s coming along pretty well. In a slower than light universe, which we’re assuming, there are going to be inevitable problems, such as a period after they first get there of adults and infants with no ages in between. You can’t freeze children – how could they give informed consent? – and unless you have somehow built a generation ship such as Heinlein did in Universe you won’t be having children on the way (and if you did they would know nothing of living on a planet). So on Avalon we have the Earthborn and the Starborn, and a generation gap like nothing you have ever, ever seen.

And I have to get back to it shortly because I’m at least able to block out scenes, and if I get going just right I sometimes can do quite a lot of finished text.

I ought to add some of this to How to Get My Job but I probably won’t.

It’s getting late and I am going to LASFS tonight. I am reading The Great Escape by Angus Deaton, about wealth and inequality; it goes well with A Farewell to Alms in showing how remarkable the times we live in have been, compared to ten thousand years in which nobody had much of anything and most people born died before they were five years old. And most women died in childbirth if they had many children. But of course in the great escape from poverty there will be inequality.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal had “Where the New Jobs Will Come From” by Thomas Tunstall, and it’s worth reading although I have some misgivings.

Caterpillar recently announced plans to shed at least 4,000-5,000 jobs by the end of 2016, adding that the number could reach 10,000 by 2018. The company is also restructuring its operations—as it has several times in recent decades. What’s going on at Caterpillaris partly driven by a slowdown in the global economy. But it is also emblematic of fundamental changes in the economy. Many jobs cut from manufacturing in recent years are not coming back, and the ones that do will look very different.

Americans tend to think of this as very bad news, but that’s a little like thinking most of us should still be working on farms. In 1840, 70% of the workforce was employed in agriculture. By the start of the 20th century, it was 40%. In 1930 it was 20% and in 1970, 4%. Now it’s less than 2%.

He has considerable discussion of what has happened over the past twenty years, and concludes

Yes, some jobs in services will include Zumba instructors and retail sales. But many others in the future will be in cloud computing, cybersecurity, gene sequencing, big-data projects and fields that are only beginning to emerge—and today are literally unimaginable.

I don’t see that happening; even with 20 hour weeks and other artificial ways to get more people working. I may be an elitist, but I don’t think that 60% of the population can DO those jobs – and I am very sure that the current education system cannot teach most of the population to do them. I am pretty sure the current education system can’t teach half of those enrolled to do much of anything that someone would pay money to have done.

And then I read in Deaton’s book that inequality isn’t caused by the upper classes holding back the lower ones; indeed they are generous with education.

Never ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence, and indeed I agree; I doubt that there is any conspiracy to provide incompetent schools at increasingly higher costs – but that is what is happening, and most of it is due to well meant efforts to help that have pretty well destroyed the school system that let my wife and I, both without incomes, get through college working our way; indeed, the system that let us get out of high school, me in Tennessee and her in Washington state graduate with a better education than most have after graduating from community college, and with enough work skills to find ways to get people to pay us for working our way through college. I am sure there are many older readers who can understand what I mean. Younger ones are products of the current broken system and may not know just how good our school system once was – and how, at least for the competent, it was virtually free from first grade to a bachelor’s degree.

I never heard of a student loan, or at least never thought of saddling myself with debts.

And the high schools of our day were deteriorating, although not to the extent of the present ones.

If you want to know what public schools are capable of, look at The California Sixth Grade Reader which was copyrighted in 1916 and used in California public schools; compare it to the reading books now used in tenth grade. And weep.

http://www.amazon.com/California-Sixth-Grade-Reader-Pournelle-ebook/dp/B00LZ7PB7E

Another time I’ll say more on what might but won’t be done. Meanwhile, understand that we sow the wind. We want to eliminate inequality. We have inadequate schools. We routinely saddle college graduates with debts they can never repay for credentials that are not worth what they had to pay for them. By 2025, and I suspect a lot earlier than that, 50% of the jobs – not just industrial but clerical and many in health and service – can be done by a robot costing no more than a year’s pay of the worker it replaced, and having a life span of at least ten years with annual operating costs of less than 1/20^th of the worker. How much supervision it will need is debatable, but the robot will work three shifts as easily as one shift; the supervisor will of course not do that, but he will be able to attend to multiple machines.

Our present schools are not training people adequately for jobs “in cloud computing, cybersecurity, gene sequencing, big-data projects” and so forth. Some colleges are. Some. At very high costs.

Meanwhile we centralize and federalize the schools, give local school districts less and less control, and add more and more regulations requiring more and more administrators inevitably driving the cost of colleges, high schools, and grade schools higher and higher; it is not likely that these new bureaucrats are I creasing the quality of education, or indeed teaching anything other than compliance with more regulations.

There are ways to undo this mess, but we won’t take them. But that’s for another time.

VDH: How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America.

<http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1101-hanson-rural-urban-divide-20151101-story.html>

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Roland Dobbins

The Bicentennial of George Boole, the Man Who Laid the Foundations of the Digital Age

Isaac Newton, Wikipedia tells us, “is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution.”  George Boole(1815-1864) was undoubtedly also one of the most influential scientists of all time, and a key figure in the digital revolution.  Both men were from Lincolnshire, England, and had Unitarian leanings, which impacted their career paths in the Anglican dominated world of their eras.
Furthermore, both made key mental breakthroughs while enjoying fresh air outdoors.

Newton’s Eureka, or Aha! Moment, was his celebrated musing on falling apples, in 1666 when he was 23, which in due course inspired his development of the theory of gravitation. Boole’s came early in 1833, when he was only 17, while walking across a field in Doncaster:

“He relates that the thought flashed upon him suddenly [], but he laid it aside for many years []. The thought however smouldered in his subconscious and became an integral part of his main ambition is life—to explain the logic of human thought [].”

Battle of Britain Quibble

Jerry,

In response to my aside “A quibble about WW II BoB, mind: The Luftwaffe understood just fine how to achieve air supremacy – go for the opposition’s air fields and support structure while also forcing them to come up and be atritted in the air. My read of ultimately why the Germans failed at the Channel is that the Brits (unlike everyone else to that point) had a good enough air defense that it was going to cost the Luftwaffe massive losses – on the rough order of half of their total air force – to grind the RAF into dust. German leadership (Goering) couldn’t stomach that price, backed off the proven winning approach partway, and commenced trying to find ways to win on the cheap – none of which worked.”

you wrote “Actually, Eagle started without realization by Goering that air bases were more important than airplanes; but the no one realized that fully for a long time. The Britain bombed Berlin, and Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to waste planes and time on London, and Britain was saved.”

You state the conventional view, and while it’s not wrong, it’s incomplete. Hitler indeed ordered the switch away from directly attacking the RAF to attacking British cities on 5 September, but the RAF still might have been defeated at that point. (USAAF, after all, four years later did successfully grind down the Luftwaffe by forcing them to come up and be atritted defending against bombing raids on German urban targets.)

According to American journalist Ralph Ingersoll, who returned from Britain later that year and wrote a book about the battle, the key date was September 15th, ten days later, after which the Germans backed off the massive daylight London raids and switched largely to night attacks, thus greatly reducing their losses, but also giving up on attriting the RAF day fighter force.

Ingersoll wrote about that day “[a] majority of responsible British officers who fought through this battle believe that if Hitler and Göring had had the courage and the resources to lose 200 planes a day for the next five days, nothing could have saved London.”

Not provable either way, no, but I tend to agree. The Germans, in addition to all the other errors they’d made to that point, finally just lost their nerve.

Henry

Well, I state the conventional view among Air Force generals of my time; you may have better sources. The key shortage was fuel; most Fighter Command bases were not for maintenance and repair, but all of them needed fuel ,and fuel supply lines; of course that is a conclusion reached after the failure of the Luftwaffe, but it was, after, very effective against ground installations; and the goal was to buy a safe Channel crossing.

Air superiority is rarely attained by air to air combat, just as you don’t usually win against hornets by swatting one hornet at a time.

Whether throwing another 1000 planes into the meat grinder would have done it, I can’t say; but a massive raid on all the fuel installations they knew about would have had great effect; or so I concluded back in the days I studied that. It has been a very long time.

Stay well.

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