Category Archives: View

View 813 Monday, March 03, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

The Wall Street Journal this morning in a lead editorial says flatly that the Russian de facto annexation of the Crimea cannot be allowed to stand. That is because they are crazy, and think that there is something the United States can do to prevent it. There is not, of course. We have no ships in the Black Sea, and we certainly would not send SAC even if there were a SAC to send. We have no bargaining points – not that it is much of our business. The Crimea has been conquered and recolonized throughout historical times, and cannot be said to be the ethnic homeland for anyone. It has been held by Greeks, Tatars, Khazars, Venetians, Genoese, Turks, Kievan Russ’, Golden Horde, Mongols, Tamarlane, Russians and most anyone else you can think of, and has been ethnically cleansed several times including during the Twentieth Century. We did northing about Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of the Crimea after WW II. Truman threatened unconditional nuclear war if Stalin did not remove his troops from Iran, but saving the Crimea was beyond his abilities.

After the collapse of the USSR, the Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for a guarantee of its territorial integrity from the US, NATO, and Russia. The guarantee is not enforceable and is unlikely to be useful except as a blaming point to use against President Putin. One wonders what might have happened had they kept a few, a force d’ frappe? The lesson will not be ignored by North Korea, which continues to enslave its people and conduct daily atrocities dwarfing anything Russians, Ukrainians, or Tatars would even contemplate; meanwhile South Korea views with alarm the US swing toward Japan as the key to US Far East policy. Much of Korea has the same regard for its Japanese former colonial masters as the Irish Republican Army has for England.

We can threaten economic sanctions against Russia, but the West is furiously backpedalling on the economic sanctions against Iran even as the lesson of the value of having a few nuclear weapons becomes more obvious. Economic war against Russia is a negative payoff game; not as expensive as war, but not profitable either. Due to the various populations shift in the last seventy years, a large majority of the Crimea would rather be part of Russia than the Ukraine, so the notion of self determination of nations – supposedly one of Wilson’s objectives for America in the Great War – is against out intervention to force the Russian inhabitants of the Crimea to remain subservient to the Ukrainian Republic.

There is the question of the Eastern Ukraine where there is a large Russian minority; probably a majority in only a few places, but there are a lot of them, far more Ukraine Russians than ever there were Sudeten Deutschen, the ostensible reason for Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Russian occupation of the Crimea will not bring war and possibly no battles; this is not so certain for Eastern Ukraine.

It promises to be an interesting year for John Kerry, but then it will also be a distraction for Russia  A clever and bold enough strategy might obtain some concessions in Syria for an American hands off policy regarding Crimea, and more for the same policy regarding Eastern Ukraine; it is not clear what other objectives the US can achieve. We have no army over there, SAC does not exist and we are not going to send missiles. We have no warships in the Black Sea; and Russia can live without our foreign trade. We make as much profit from that trade as they do.

The White House spokesman has said that President Obama called President Putin, and “the president was very strong”.  One assumes he meant President Obama, but what President Obama was very strong about was not made clear.  We await clarification. Meanwhile I have not heard that the Minuteman wings have been put on full alert. And China is watching.

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

View 813 Sunday, March 02, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Sunday evening. The Oscars are over. No great surprises. Ellen DeGeneres did a very good job of hosting, a bit more farce than I care for, but apparently a good audience pleasing mixture.

forced sale of Crimea?

I have a modest proposal:

How about if Russia _buys_ Crimea from the Ukraine? The method is simple; Russia need merely pay off the Ukraine’s foreign debt (which of course no-one expected to recoup), and in exchange Ukraine lets Crimea go without objections. Of course it’s a forced sale, and pricey, but it’s cheaper than war, or even long-term diplomatic tensions.

But hard on the Tatars, of course…

paradoctor

I confess I had not thought of this, although I should have. Russia was willing to pay a lot of the Ukraine’s debt to gain influence and bring them into a treaty status with the new empire; purchase would be cheaper than war, and the US, which bought Alaska natives and all from Russia can hardly complain that sovereign nations cannot sell territory to each other. And it gets us out of a potentially sticky situation. If Canada and Cuba are in the American sphere we can hardly claim that the Ukraine, home of the first Russ state, is not part of the Russian sphere; we can avoid that territorial dispute in Europe, and avoiding war there is very much in our national interest.

I suspect the Tatars get along better with the Russians than Ukrainians, but that is on thin evidence and I am willing to be convinced otherwise. As it happens I have friends in Moscow, a Kazakhstan poet and his Ukrainian wife formerly a code clerk in a USSR station in the Middle East. Long story I’ve told before. But of course if I had not been told I would have thought she was Russian, not Ukrainian, and actually if required to guess from talking to her I would have said Swede. The other day I met at Kaiser a lady with an odd name, blonde, nearly as tall as me, blue eyes,with an Armenian name. Impertinently I asked if she was Swedish; she said no, but many asked her that; she had never been to Sweden. She was from Armenia. This may serve to give some appreciation for the ethnic mixtures found in the remnants of the old USSR… (I presume everyone here knows that many ethnic Russians are of Swedish origin from the Viking times, and the Kievan State that became the foundation of Russia was largely Swedish) Although Russians have a traditional identification with the Slavs; and many Slavs migrated to Sweden before the Vikings returned the favor, so like most ethnographic identifications a good bit of discussion is possible.

no war to general war in no time

Dear Dr.Pournelle;

It has taken 25 more years, but we might soon experience a display of strategic systems. I drove through northern Montana this summer and saw a few minuteman silo complexes sitting in the bald ass prairie. It’s hard to believe that those lids could be sliding back to let the dogs of war cry havoc.

I guess this frustrated cold warrior might get to experience it in realtime, I wonder if the folk of these lands still have the blood of heroes? If you could suggest some links to resources dealing with the effects of strategic systems i.e. civil defense, I would be most grateful. Thank you and the greatest luck to you and yours, we’ll all need luck.

Christopher Kelly

I do not think it will come to that. There is a lot at stake here, but it hardly comes to Armageddon. I’ve visited those silos, and been in tests of the alert system, and memories of that Klaxon still give me the willies. “EWO. EWO. Emergency War Orders. I have a message in five parts. Part one. Tango. X-Ray…”

As to civil defense I have been urging that we scrap FEMA and go back to a Civil Defense organization as we once had ever since we dismantled Civil Defense. I once had my Scout Troop involved with the local Civil Defense group (headed by a retired Colonel) and we had Emergency Preparedness kits and training. All that went away when FEMA became a federal bureaucracy to the detriment of actual emergency preparedness, but that’s another story. I suspect a solar event is now a more likely threat to civilization than nuclear war, particularly over Ukraine. Of course the solar flare is not predictable, but history shows that really serious ones happen every couple of centuries and our last one was the Carrington Event of 1859 in which fires started in most telegraph stations – then the only places that long unshielded wires were exposed. A similar event could knock out much of the power grid, and few major cities have more than a couple of weeks’ supply of food. People can do strange things when they believe they are about to starve.

Op-Ed

How our 1,000-year-old math curriculum cheats America’s kids

By hiding math’s great masterpieces from students’ view, we deny them the beauty of the subject.

By Edward Frenkel

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-adv-frenkel-why-study-math-20140302,0,5177338.story#axzz2usy4LyHx

Imagine you had to take an art class in which you were taught how to paint a fence or a wall, but you were never shown the paintings of the great masters, and you weren’t even told that such paintings existed. Pretty soon you’d be asking, why study art?

That’s absurd, of course, but it’s surprisingly close to the way we teach children mathematics. In elementary and middle school and even into high school, we hide math’s great masterpieces from students’ view. The arithmetic, algebraic equations and geometric proofs we do teach are important, but they are to mathematics what whitewashing a fence is to Picasso — so reductive it’s almost a lie.

. . .

If you are at all involved in children’s education, whether as a teacher or a parent, take the time to read and think about this short op-ed piece in today’s Los Angeles Times. I do not think you will regret it.

Note that he says

Of course, we still need to teach students multiplication tables, fractions and Euclidean geometry. But what if we spent just 20% of class time opening students’ eyes to the power and exquisite harmony of modern math?

And that is important. The first and most important thing in math that children should learn is simple arithmetic, and the best way to learn that is sheer memorization, first of the addition, then of the multiplication tables. It is boring to learn “one times one is one, one times two is two, one times three is three…” out to one times twenty is twenty and then start with “two times one is two, two times two is four, two times three is six…” and so forth right on up to twenty times twenty, and it might take a couple of months to learn them all, but it will serve them well for the rest of their lives. And of course in first grade you start with “one plus one is two, one plus two is three…” again up to “one plus twenty is twenty one”, then back down to two plus one is three, etc. I recommend learning the addition and times tables to twenty, not just ten, because there are inferable lessons in the patterns made after you reach ten, and most kids will learn them without having to be taught once they have memorized the tables. For young kids, bribery is as good an incentive as any; whatever you pay for learning to recite a given table flawlessly is going to be worth it in long term effects. “Nine and twelve is twenty one” is far easier to handle when doing large sums than having to think of it, and knowing what fifteen times fourteen is without having to do the multiplication saves a lot of time. When I was at St. Anne’s in Memphis for first grade we all learned the addition tables (to fifteen) in first grade, and the multiplication tables in second, and I don’t recall any of my classmates including one recognized as retarded who did not learn them. In the case of the retarded boy, who was about nine in second grade, we became friends and he would recite them to me at recess because he wanted to learn, and that made me feel like a teacher. Anyway, we all learned them, and when I got to Capleville consolidated (like St. Anne’s two grades to a room, more than 20 pupils to a grade) they had not been required to learn the tables, and everyone including the teacher was astonished at how much faster I was than most of the others – until it came out that the other fast arithmetic students had been taught the tables by their parents.

But having learned the addition and multiplication tables, one is ready for some of the beauty of math. Since the ability to manipulate abstract symbols quickly is just about the definition of the “g” factor that IQ tests look for, there is definitely going to be a spread of abilities in just what level of math one can reach; but exposure to some of the potential at an early age can be important to students of high intellectual potential and will stimulate curiosity.

Anyway, with the caution that I am not advocating the nonsense once known as “the New Math” nor is Frenkel, I recommend you read this.

I wrote this for another conference, but it occurs to me that while I have mentioned Freefall here before, it has been a while:

If you are not a fan of Freefall http://freefall.purr…100/fv00001.htm you ought to be.  Alas, it really will involve some time because it is a serial story, and the current panels are shocking — that is, they have a total surprise that I do not think many readers saw coming. I did not. And you should not see them before reading the rest of the story leading up to now.

The graphic novel — it has become as long as one — has as its premise that mankind has settled planets other than earth, and on one of them there is a population of a small number of humans and tens of millions of robots, all pretty well subject to Asimov’s three laws, only a lot of that is in my judgment better thought out than Isaac did.  The robots are highly intelligent and competent, but they are programmed to obey most human direct orders, and are very protective of humans.  This situation can be exploited by certain unscrupulous bureaucrats.

And into this mix comes Florence,  a Bowman’s Wolf, an artificially intelligent product of genetic manipulation, a genetic mixture of red wolf, dog and human genes with programming for artificial intelligence, born of a dog (St. Bernard) who was not her biological mother, and developing opposable thumbs, human speech, and the ability to walk on her hind legs although she runs much faster on all four legs. She wears clothes and has normal human modesty, and grew up in a household of humans, first as a pet then as — well, as an intelligent dog, then as a sibling. In theory she is the property of the human family. She has most of the powers of a real wolf and an IQ I would estimate at 140 or so.  She is a graduate engineer.

Also living on this planet is a single member of an alien species brought there as a stowaway from another planet — he is not artificially intelligent, he is intelligent, but he has nothing of the ethics and mores of a human and no human companionship. He is of a race of scavengers, and had thousands of siblings but he is probably the only survivor, and that because he stowed away on the human ship. He owns two robots and as owner he can give them direct orders.  One is a general purpose robot who likes him, and the other is his space ship which he managed to acquire as scrap and sort of get it running — but the ship considers him a danger to humans and hates him and would like to kill him but has been forbidden to do that.  It belongs to Sam.  Sam wears an environment suit which makes him appear sort of humanoid, but under that suit he is not humanoid at all.

All this happens in the first couple of dozen panels.  Sam acquires the Bowman’s wolf as his ship’s engineer. He does so by devious means, but she considers herself bound as a crew officer to be respectful to and obey the captain.  Only sometimes that would be disastrous and she’s pretty clever about playing logic games.

There are now two thousand four-panel pages of story, all relevant to the story line although some are not obviously so.  We are now reaching a climax, I think, and certainly the story has taken a surprising turn.  Meanwhile we have met many fascinating characters, including robot police who have to deal with humans, a veterinarian who sort of falls in love with Florence the AI wolf, a child who wonders if Florence and the vet will marry prompting Florence to be amused that the kid thinks all mammals have the same number of chromosomes, scheming officials who try to prompt a robotic war so they can get rich on scrap, and a great number of antics in which Sam acts quite morally for him == he is a scavenger, after all == but which drive the human authorities nuts. Especially since Sam is a very skilled thief, pickpocket, and jail breaker.

If you never heard of this you should try it: it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s the best of this kind of thing I know of. It is a combination of comedy of manners and some broad farce, and it mixes those elements well. It starts black and white but acquires better art and color at a couple of hundred pages (again four panels to a page).  It is now up to a couple of thousand and it will take you a bit of time to get from the beginning to where we are now, but I liked every episode I read.  I urge you NOT to skip ahead, and particularly don’t look at the current pages at all; catch up to them from the beginning. It will be worth it in my judgment.  The story is well developed and very logically constructed.  I’d like to see it win a Hugo.  It’s really good.

Recommended.

I have several pointers to this story:

An interesting climate change article

Hey Jerry,

I found an interesting article that I wanted to pass along to you.

Apparently, one of the original principals of Greenpeace is now saying that human caused climate change is bunk and testified before a senate committee saying as much. It’s nice to see something other than the usual rhetoric getting published.

http://www.outsideonline.com/news-from-the-field/Greenpeace-Founder-Humans-Didnt-Cause-Climate-Change.html?247838831&utm_campaign=googlenews&utm_source=googlenews&utm_medium=xmlfeed

Chris Willoughby

The point being that the earth has had CO2 levels several hundred times higher than now in periods when Earth was extremely warm, and when Earth was in the midst of an Ice Age; which makes the importance of CO2 levels at least questionable.  And of course there is nothing that California, or the United States, can do to reduce CO2 levels even with extremely costly green technologies; what we can do is reduce our financial ability to adapt to climate changes. If you can have the Earth extremely hot and freezing cold while CO2 levels are more than a hundred times the levels we have now, our current theories are simply not correct. More on this later.

Saw the Met performance of Prince Igor Saturday morning. Sugar 135 before breakfast. Hearing only in left ear, but I could hear that, and the subtitles were readable, so enjoyed it – even if the plot is a bit confusing. It was unfinished by Borodin and there are several versions finished by others, but none make great sense.

The sets and special effects are marvelous. Costumes were sort of early 20^th Century, and not really appropriate to the story; I’d have preferred period costumes. Russian soldiers fighting Tatars while waving automatic pistols take a bit of getting used to, but again you can get used to it.

Upcoming is Werther, which I have seen, and I fear that my impression was that it would be improved if he shot himself in the first act and let us go home; but that’s probably my ignorance. Anyway we like the Met performances simulcast into a local movie theater, and the looks backstage as they do the setup are fascinating. Of course there are more IATSE employees and supervisors than singers including chorus.

Didn’t take sugar in the morning. After lunch and before metformin it was 192; took the metformin and six steroids about half an hour after lunch. Took the second metformin just after dinner. Now just before bed time is it 236, taking a an extra metformin now. The pattern has been it goes up at night and down to close to a hundred in the mornings before breakfast. I think I hear a slight scratching when I stroke the left hearing aid; of course that produces a loud sound when I do it to the right one.

Hearing Loss 

I experienced a sudden hearing loss around Thanksgiving. I thought the ear was plugged from swimming but it was described by the doctor as a sudden loss. I lost maybe 75%. I couldn’t hear a dial tone in that ear. I have been through the steroid treatment and the injections into the ear. It’s been a few weeks since the last treatment and I would say I am back to about 90%. The doctors said the treatment works for about 30%. 30% get some form of improvement and the rest don’t get any improvement. I hope you are in the first group and get it back. I am grateful that I have most of it back. It’s not fun being in a conversation and not hearing any of it.

Best wishes

Rick Dahl

Thanks for that. It gives hope.  No significant improvement so far. I get the next shot in the ear Tuesday morning.  I am not looking forward to it, but I do hope it will have results.

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

View 812 Friday, February 28, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Crisis in Ukraine?

It looks as if Robert Kagan’s wife may have just managed to provoke a war in the Ukraine.

<http://www.euronews.com/2014/02/28/ukraine-armed-group-attempt-to-seize-crimea-airport/>

<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957>

—–

Roland Dobbins

The Russians say it is not their doing. Meanwhile, the Ukraine has been allowing the Tatars to come back to the Crimea after Stalin expelled them all these years ago, and many have come to their homeland. Including I presume the descendants of Abdul Abulbul Amir?

The Ukraine is within the Russian sphere by any measure I know of, certainly as much so as, say, Canada is in the American sphere of interest. Is this one of those territorial disputes in Europe that Washington warned us to avoid? Or has the world become so much smaller? I would not blame Mrs. Kagan, a career FSO and now Assistant Secretary of State for that region (ne Victoria Nuland).  I would like to ask her more about Benghazi. Dr. Robert Kagan is the son of Dan Kagan, the Yale historian and author of the best work on Thucydides I know of.

It’s morning and I have not had breakfast. More later.

And now this  http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/02/victoria-nuland-us-ambassador-to-ukraine.html  So perhaps it will be Mrs. Kagan’s War…

Blood sugar last night after LASFS (where I succumbed to a slice of pizza, but only one) was 240. Took a second metformin. Blood sugar before breakfast 121. No change in hearing, right hearing fine, deaf as a post in left ear and hear nothing with or without the hearing aid. Steroids continue, will take six with lunch.

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

View 812 Thursday, February 27, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

I am preparing more exposition on Ron Unz’s “Conservative case for higher minimum wages” with some very perceptive correspondence including an exchange with a very successful software engineer inventor entrepreneur in the heart of Silicon Valley, and a good account of effects in a Canadian province. I’ll have that later. I need to take a walk now before it gets too late.  I also have some good material including a Possony story on Taiwan and China.

Meanwhile, I wrote the following for a closed conference, and thought it might be of more general interest. It tells a story I have told before, of how a very strange experience – given the astronomical probabilities involved one might be justified in calling it miraculous. The conference is writers and the theme was “Do you write full time?” For some reason probably having to do with the steroid treatment I am in the middle of for my Sudden Hearing Loss, I found myself waxing, if not eloquently, then at length:

====

I have had no income other than writing since 1971 after the earthquake.  The Sylmar earthquake. I had 5000 books in the house. None of the book cases were fastened to the walls.  In the Los Angeles library there were so many books on the floor that the library was asking for volunteers to come reshelve them, not in any order, just get them off the floor so that docents could come reshelve them in order.

In my case one book was on the floor.  It was No Wonder We Are Losing, by former Senate Counsel Robert Morris.  A Cold War document, not precisely a tract, but a defense of congressional activity in the Cold War.  I thought, well, there’s a lesson there somewhere, and put it back on the shelf.  That was a Tuesday. The next day the phone rang at 0800.  Roberta was already gone –she was teaching and had the only real income, I having left the post of Director of Research for the City of Los Angeles, having previously left a professorship at Pepperdine, having prior to that left a fairly successful career in aerospace as the Apollo Project wound down and I had to give up an ideal job as a senior scientist to join management which I knew I’d be terrible at. Possony and I had written Strategy of Technology and it was fairly successful, and I had two action adventure novels published under a pen name, and did a bit of highly paid consulting for the Trustees of the California State College system and all of that was done, I’d given up: I was not going to make a living writing.  Haldeman and Erlichman had scotched the idea that I’d be an assistant secretary of either Defense or the Air Force in the Nixon administration although Strategy of Technology was already a textbook in the academy and war college, and I had friends in the r&d departments of the Army and Air Force; so I pulsed the system and asked for a civil service appointment in aviation operations research, my final title in aerospace being acting Director of operations research.  And lo! the Army Aviation people wanted me, and went to the Civil Service Commission which had to approve a lateral entry at GS 13 since I had never had a civil service job before. It was to be in St. Louis, and the papers were on my desk to be signed when the earthquake shook things up.  That was a Tuesday.

Wednesday morning the telephone rang at 0800. Roberta was not there, being out earning the money to pay the rent.  The kids were off to school.  I answered the phone.

"John Pournelle?"

At 0800 that was good enough.  "Yes."

"This is Robert Morris. Do you know who I am?"

I managed to recover enough composure to say, "Yes, oddly enough I was holding your book yesterday morning about this time."

He said, "Interesting. You had an earthquake in your city."

I admitted there had been one.

"Well, I am the publisher of Twin Circle, a National Catholic Press paper edited in Los Angeles, and I want you to do a short piece on the earthquake.  One picture if you have a good one that is illustrative, but mostly I want something scientifically correct, descriptive, compelling, and reassuring. It needs to be 700 words, and I’ll pay $400 dollars. Need it to be in the office of the editor in Century City by Friday Noon.  Can you do it?"

My house payment at the time was $210 a month. I’d made $22,000 a year in city hall, which was damned good money in 1972. I thought for about twenty microseconds and said "Sure."

So I did, and took the article down to Vince Ryan, the editor, in the Twin Circle offices in Century City, and he liked it, and invited me to lunch, and at lunch he said "We need a science correspondent.  Cover some science conferences, and do a weekly column on something interesting in science. It has to be interesting to the people who buy it in the back of the church, and it has to stand up to the inspection of Notre Dame Jesuit Professors of Physics and Medicine and such.  I hear you can do that.  Want to try? I can’t pay $400 a column. I’ll pay $200 a column and expenses if you need to travel. The AAAS annual meeting is coming up in Mexico City pretty soon.  We’ll pay expenses. I can use four pieces from that. Maybe in addition to regular column, maybe not, we’ll see how good you are."

Bottom line was that I put off St. Louis and the GS 13 for a couple of weeks, found I fit in nicely with Twin Circle as Science Correspondent, and I could do the column in a day, two tops, if I didn’t have a conference to go to, leaving me the rest of the week to work on fiction.  And $800 a month was pretty darned good money for a guy whose house payment was $200.  And I sold to Analog, and did a science article for Analog that I figured wouldn’t work for the Twin Circle readership, and Analog bought just about everything I sent in their direction, and — and I told St Louis thanks a lot and deep apologies for putting you through getting that Civil Service Commission vote in my favor, but I think the kids are used to California.  (And the Science Columnist for National Catholic Press had no problem getting his kids into the best Catholic school in Los Angeles, which beat holy hell out their prospects in St. Louis.)

And I’ve never done anything but write for a living since.  After MOTE IN GOD’S EYE and LUCIFER’S HAMMER I was making more out of fiction than Twin Circle was paying, but then I got on as the GALAXY science columnist, which gave me an interesting set of credentials for science conferences, GALAXY SF and NATIONAL CATHOLIC PRESS.  It was even good enough to get Niven a press pass to AAAS meetings, and we used to go to them together. I made enough to afford a $12,000 home computer ($6,000 for the Diablo typewriter that produced mss. and looked like they had been typed and couldn’t be told from typed mss. if you didn’t look too close at the edges of the paper).  And that led to an article about Writing with Computers which led to the BYTE column.

So for the last forty years of my life I haven’t earned any significant income except from writing.  Of course if I’d taken the GS-13 I’d have retired as GS-15 and have a heck of a good pension, but I haven’t done too badly — and eBooks have revived the economic value of the back list which is why I rail so much about not selling perpetual eBook rights whether exclusive or non-exclusive unless you’re getting paid royalties for every damned sale.

So that’s my one religious experience.  I mean, think about it.  I later asked Morris how he ever came to ask me to write for him.

It turned out he lived in New Jersey. Stefan Possony lived in Mountain View near Stanford (he was a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute) .  From New Jersey Stanford and Los Angeles don’t seem that far apart.  When he heard there was an earthquake in Los Angeles he called Possony to get an article from him.  Steve laughed and told him it was five hundred miles away.  "But I have a young man in Los Angeles, we wrote Strategy of Technology together–"  "Oh, yes, I have heard of that."  "Well, he is very familiar with such things, and he writes fast and well, and perhaps you can induce him to write this article for you. He will do it well."

So that’s a simple enough explanation of why Robert Morris called me the morning after the earthquake. Nothing mysterious about it. And he had no way of knowing that I was on the verge of giving up on writing for a living and about to sign the papers accepting the civil service GS-13 appointment but I really didn’t want to do that but it didn’t look like I had much choice in the matter, and this looked like a way out of that…  Big coincidence, but still within the realm of possibility.

But precisely how he managed to have his book be the only book out of thousands on my shelves fall to the floor the day before at this life crisis of mine is not so easily explained.  And that the post he would offer me was as science correspondent to the National Catholic Press was certainly interesting and then some. It certainly changed my life.

= = = = = = = = =

When I told this story to my old friend Marvin Minsky – who in contrast to his wife is a product of Ethical Culture and a pretty thorough atheist – he said coincidences happen because there are a lot of people in the world and a lot of days nothing like that happened to them, but then we began to look at the probabilities, and the improbabilities added up like crazy. When the numbers began to approach the age of the universe we stopped talking about it.

Oddly enough, in 1983 there was an earthquake in the Hollister-Coalinga are of California which affected the Bay Area including Mountain View where Possony lived.  He was by then in a wheel chair having had a stroke earlier, and by pure coincidence Roberta and I were in his house when it happened, having driven up for a computer conference of some kind, probably an Applefest but possibly not because the BYTE staff were in a motel not too far away. Anyway he was in his armchair and I was in his wheel chair so I could sit near him, and I suddenly found myself rolling across his floor.  Many of his books came down from the shelves in his study, but otherwise no damage there.  That one I call pure coincidence and it wasn’t at all improbable that I would be visiting him, nor that I would be in that area when there was a computer conference.  But of course almost all his books fell down. In my case where the shelves swayed two feet out of line from the walls, only one book fell down, and that was Morris.  Different probabilities altogether.

I will continue the minimum wage discussion in a MAIL I will post tonight.

Blood sugar last night before bed was 318, so in compliance with my internist’s instructions I took and extra metformin before going to bed. This morning before breakfast it was 125. It is now 1615, and I am about to take it having had lunch at 1300 along with a metformin and six steroid tablets. Ah, It is now 168. I had no breakfast – got up too late – and a salmon and lettuce sandwich for lunch. No exercise yet but I hope to get out for a half hour in a few minutes. Logging this now. No hearing improvement whatever, if anything a deterioration in the right ear which is terrifying.

Went to LASFS meeting after dinner. Dinner was soup. Was enticed by a slice of pizza at LASFS.  Home at 2050 (long program by Aldo Spidoni on an art history of the manned space program after Shuttle, excellent) and it is now 240.  Took a metformin at 1840 with dinner, will take another with my night time pills when I go to bed.  We’ll see what it is in the morning.

The batteries ran out on my hearing aids while at LASFS in the middle of the program.  The right one gave the warning tones just as I got there at 1920, and about 2130 expired.  I took the battery out of the useless left aid – ear still stone deaf – and put it in the right one, and it donged the low battery signal but lasted through the meeting and indeed until I got to my doorstep before it died.  I have replaced both batteries and the right ear hears fine. Left nothing not even when I scratch the sound input spot or send it gong signals.  The steroid treatment lasts three weeks.

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