Category Archives: View

View 807 Sunday, January 19, 2014

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

The grandchildren are off to Disneyland and then back home to Washington. Roberta is still in bed, and I’m going to take her out to the doctor Monday. I’m not anywhere near up to normal energy.

Everyone I know – well nearly – has had flu shots yet many of them have come down with this long lingering flu-like affliction, which saps energy. Sudafed takes care of the stopped up nose, but not completely. It takes half the morning to clear the crud out from my sinuses and lungs, and it comes out a little at a time as fairly hardened grey crud. I’m sitting here trying to come up with enough energy to write on a number of interesting subjects I’ve found, but it’s hard slugging.

Has the Sun gone to sleep?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25771510 It is well worth your time to watch the video on Maunder Minimum that comes up when you visit this site. There are paintings of markets set up on the frozen Thames River during the Little Ice Age. It gets cold when the Sun dozes off, as many think it did back then.

Back when I was science editor of Galaxy – well, it really means I wrote the science column, A Step Farther Out – there were a number of articles in both the science and general press on whether the Sun had “gone out”: that is, if there had been a fundamental change in the way the Sun fuses hydrogen into energy. The then current theory of how the Sun works required there to be about 300% more neutrinos than were being detected. Perhaps, perhaps, the Sun had gone out? That there had been a fundamental change in the processing of hydrogen, something that might be restored as the Sun continued to contract; in other words that there might be a cyclical process at work.

Then theorists decided that neutrinos had mass after all, and they could wiggle in certain ways, and when they acted that way we would not expect to see so many of them since some would decay on the way from the Sun to the detector. Everyone was overjoyed. The Sun hadn’t gone out, after all. Of course it took thirty years to come up with a theory that explained why we weren’t seeing as many neutrinos as we had, and there are still dissidents pointing out that the Sun seems to vary in brightness in a cyclical way, and perhaps that has something to do with the neutrino detection rate. Note that a neutrino is pretty close to being nothing at all travelling at light speed. It doesn’t like to interact with anything, and mostly just goes on past without leaving any trace of having been there, so you don’t detect many of them anyway. Billions and billions of them pass through every square inch of everything – including you – every second, but since they don’t interact with you they don’t have any effect. Or at least we sincerely hope so.

One experiment detected precisely nineteen – that’s 19, 1.9 x 10^1 – neutrinos out of some 10^10 coming our way from a supernova in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Other detectors get larger numbers, but they remain quite small. Given that, the reliability of our estimate of just how many we should be able to see – or of the total flux based on what we do see – is subject to question.

The Maunder Minimum doesn’t refer to solar output, but to Sun Spots, but for all the time I was growing up it was assumed that solar output was lower during the centuries of the Little Ice Age (roughly 1350-1850 AD) and that the Maunder Minimum period (1645 – 1715) right in the middle of it was indicative of something related to that. It was a period of great cold, not just in the northern hemisphere. We know the Viking Warm period was warm in the northern hemisphere through all kinds of observations – longer growing seasons in Europe and China, grape vines in Vinland and Scotland, almanacs, monastery records, and the like. We don’t have much on Africa and the Southern Hemisphere although there are Inca records, sort of, that indicate it was warm there too in Viking times. But the Little Ice Age was global.

So. Has the Sun gone to sleep? If so, what does that mean, and how long will it go on?

For one speculation about life in a time of a renewed Maunder Minimum, I can recommend Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, Fallen Angels http://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Angels-Larry-Niven-ebook/dp/B005BJTZ1U/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1390176803&sr=1-5&keywords=Fallen+Angels. The book is largely satire and comedy, but we do some serious speculation in it. It’s also a lot of fun.

For more serious discussion, the last time we worried about reduced solar output a great number of books such as The Genesis Strategy were spawned, and Big Science told us to take it all seriously; but that was before the Great Global Warming Consensus that came about when global temperatures began to rise – by fractions of a degree Centigrade – in the 80’s and 90’s (up to 1997 or so) when they stabilized and may have begun to fall again. We don’t know how long that will go on, either.

Indeed, the latest round of observations confirms what I’ve been trying to say for a long time: we don’t really know where the climate is going. We know we’re pumping a fairly large amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, and it will be around a long time unless we do something about it – plant huge forest areas, encourage plankton blooms in the ocean, stop burning fossil fuels and run civilization on something else – it may well be something to worry about. The one thing we are not going to do, though, is reduce the amount of CO2 mankind puts into the atmosphere until we have new and economical ways to generate energy. We thought we had those in nuclear power, but we seem to have gone into panic mode on that score. We sure don’t have them in wind – very few windmills ever generate enough useful power over their lifetimes to build their replacement. We have only partial source in solar power. It works great to run air conditioners in hot areas, but storage of ground based solar power for use during bad weather and at night is hideously expensive. Electric cars, for instance, will never “save” as much CO2 as was produced in their manufacture – they tend to be coal powered cars.

And of course as I pointed out in A Step Farther Out – the book made up of many of my Galaxy columns http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_8?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=a%20step%20farther%20out&sprefix=A+step+f%2Cdigital-text%2C207 – what used to be called the third world isn’t interested anyway. “Hey man, I get you, now that I got a piece of this industrial revolution action you tell me to shut down the game. Let me tell you what I think of that —“ India and China add far more CO2 every year than the US produces already. And that beat goes on.

But there are some signs of returning sanity to the scientific community. With so many tenure positions and grants dependent on being a Global Warming Believer it will take a while to return to actual science in which theory is made to conform to data rather than data massaged so that it will fit the computer models, but we can have faith that reason will prevail. Especially since the Sun keeps going to sleep…

MS leukemia drug http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303465004579322403405913292

I had hoped to comment on this in some detail, because it illustrates a real problem in attempts to regulate. People willing to be government regulators tend to a certain personality type, a sort of civil service mentality cubed, with doses of megalomania and paranoia thrown in. Now the paranoia is justified: when you make recommendations intended to protect public safety but costing large and powerful corporations billions of dollars, you are going to be attacked if you can be attacked. They really are out to get you, and one thing they will do is accuse you of megalomania. It doesn’t take a lot of that to generate the notion that one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and better not to be hanged at all. Find rigid standards enforced by the courts, and stick to them.

The problem there is when the regulators also reach out as far as they can, no matter what their motive for doing so. It is one thing for the FDA to demand that a product do no unexpected harm; it is quite another for it to say that it must do good. That is: few would disagree that fraud ought to be prevented, and if someone wants to sell snake oil that will cure chilblains, pneumonia, gout, cancer, bad disposition, whooping cough, and measles, something should be done about it because the man is clearly a hoaxer. But what should be done? Put him out of business?

It would seem to be better if the FDA enforced truth: if Ol’ Doc Methuselah’s Genuine Snake Oil says it contains snake oil, then it better contain actual oil of actual snakes, or it is fraudulent. What it claims to be able to do is another matter. I’d be satisfied with a notice that “The FDA requires us to state that no one in their right mind should take this stuff. We have seen no evidence that this cures anything, and there is plenty of reason to believe it’s going to poison you. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. The Federal Drug Administration and the Bureau of Public Health have rated the value of this as JUNK. Have a nice day.”

Of course that won’t stop some people from selling the snake oil, but then I wouldn’t prohibit states and cities and counties and villages from having stronger ordinances about the stuff. I’m not in favor of snake oil cure-alls, but I do worry about too much power for the FDA.

This drug is a case in point: Europe and Canada have decided that it may well be valuable for treating MS, more so than the “standard treatments”. But the FDA is stuck with the ritual of the Double Blind Experiment. The problem is that this stuff has well known (and unpleasant) side effects, making “double blind” impossible : the treating physicians will know, absolutely and without doubt, which of their patients are getting the new experimental treatment and which are getting placebos and which are getting the old and not very effective standard treatment. Any patient with minimum curiosity and access to the Internet will also know whether she is getting the experimental treatment or not. If they know it’s a sugar pill they won’t be rigorous in taking them and may stop altogether; their hearts sure won’t be in it. There goes the last value of the double blind experiment.

Of course you might devise a placebo that makes people as sick as the treatment but which can’t possibly do them any good, and I expect there are regulators who might think that a good idea, but we don’t need to go there.

One can come up with ways to except this procedure from the usual rules and probably Congress will do so when enough Americans flee to England or Germany to get an MS treatment that has a chance of working, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: we may all agree that FDA ought to have power to protect from harm, but assuring effectiveness is a different and larger power, and prevents informed patients from trying measures of a last resort. We dealt with such a bureaucrat in ESCAPE FROM HELL, and few think we mistreated him.

And it is late afternoon, and this small amount exhausts me, and yes, I know I’ve done better. I expect to be getting better. I sure wish there’d been a shot for the brand of flu I got instead of what they protected me from last October…

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

View 806 Wednesday, January 15, 2014

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

Roberta thought she had to go to the emergency room at 6 AM this morning. Having been through what she suffers from – she caught it from me –  I could understand that, and I didn’t argue. We went out at a good time, shift change, almost no one in the waiting room, so we got lots of attention and didn’t take up resources needed more urgently. Of course even at Kaiser that’s expensive, but it did assure us that she is fundamentally all right, no pneumonia, nothing wrong other than she feels more miserable than she has in a year. It was that way on the third or fourth day with me, and this stuff is tracking through her just like it did with me.

So that used up the day until noon. Now Richard and Herrin and two grandchildren are due here in an hour, and that’s going to be tricky, which means that yes, once again, I am begging off, but I thought I owed you an explanation.

I hope to take this up again when I have more time.

Stephen Tonsor, RIP.

<http://obits.mlive.com/obituaries/annarbor/obituary.aspx?n=stephen-tonsor&pid=169062682>

–

Roland Dobbins

Stephen Tonsor was of the generation of Russell Kirk, one of the philosophers of conservative thinking, whose writings influenced a generation. Of course that was all the more reason for the egregious Frum to “turn his back on him” in his infamous neo-conservative denunciation of the true conservatives. His list included many, including me; we deserved his ire, he said, because we were not zealots for the Iraq Wars. I am not sure who appointed the egregious Frum as the Lord Censor of the Rolls of who may call themselves conservative.

A number of us opposed the invasion of Iraq as retaliation for 9/11. Most of us said at the time that once we have committed the troops to the fray we have no choice but to give them all the support they need: we have not sent them overseas to bleed out in the desert sands. They deserve support, and they deserve a clear mission that they can accomplish so that we may shed this entangling alliance and this involvement in the territorial disputes of the Middle East. Frum would have none of that. If you are not a war hawk you are not fit to be in the honorable company of men like the Egregious Frum.

Dr. Tonsor and I exchanged a brief correspondence after that. He has not written much lately, but he was a good influence on scholars and students at a critical time, and deserves respect from us all. Requiescat In Pace. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

NASA Image of God’s Hand

Jerry:

First God’s eye, now God’s hand. Once NASA images a few more body parts, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what God looks like.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/01/09/hand-god-spotted-by-nasa-space-telescope/

Doug Ely

It is certainly remarkable.

Greetings and wishes for a fine New Year.

For your pleasure, former Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, off the grid.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/roscoe-bartlett-congressman-off-the-grid-101720_Page2.html

Best Regards,

Paul Taggart

I have much to say about the end of net neutrality. You will recall that I was opposed to federal interference in the Internet market place. Some regulation may be needed, but not the ham handed actions of the current bureaucracy. More another time.

Jerry,

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/gadget-border-searches-2/

Court Upholds Willy-Nilly Gadget Searches Along U.S. Border

Note: The article makes the point "The judge said it ‘would be foolish, if not irresponsible’ to store sensitive information on electronic devices while traveling internationally." I agree. But that’s because of theft risk and capture of the electronics by the country you’re visiting. It should not justify random searches of electronics by the US on return. This business of collective exceptions to the Fourth and Fifth Amendment is Unconstitutional, no matter what the Courts say. All of that said, I would encourage everyone traveling internationally to either buy a "sacrificial" laptop for the trip and only put the minimal information necessary on it (a practice at least one company of my experience recommends), or backup any personal or business sensitive information onto a disk that you leave at home and delete it from the computer using NSA protocols. (Speaking of which … at this point it’s probably safe to assume NSA has the data anyway…)

Jim

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. I seem to have heard that said before…

And I have to run.

We couldn’t arrange dinner.  The kids have been travelling all day, and Richard and Herrin are done in anyway.  I find my grandchildren exhausting. Their dog at home is a desert pit bull, so devoted to them that they can ride him although he doesn’t put up with it for long.  His solution to being abused is to go away.  He is fanatically devoted to them.  Sable, with her bad leg, is also devoted to human children, but she can’t run off so easily, so fur pulling is going to get snarls from a wolf.  That doesn’t happen often, but it’s worth preventing: which takes a good deal of watchfulness. Anyway, with Roberta still bedridden, and all the kids tired, it works out better that they all go to a hotel for the night.  We’ll see them in the morning.  Disappointing, but given just how bad off Roberta was this morning, about the best we could hope for.  As I said to her a few minutes ago if you can’t be cheered up by grandchildren nothing is going to work.  But of course she was.  We had a great time. They’ll be back tomorrow for the day.

For reasons I won’t go into I was thumbing through some old View posts, and came across the one I did after the Osama bin Laden assault. There were a lot of unanswered questions a couple of days after that was over.  They are still unanswered so far as I know.  If anyone knows any of the answers, I’d appreciate mail on that. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2011/Q2/view674.html#Monday

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

View 806 Tuesday, January 14, 2014

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

I keep saying I am going to catch up, then I fall further behind. I haven’t really recovered from this flu like thing, but I was getting there – then Roberta came down with it. She has been bed ridden since Sunday, and tomorrow Richard and his family will be here in LA. I can only hope she’s recovered enough to enjoy the grandchildren, and that I have enough energy to cope with everything.

I’ve been keeping notes as things get more and more bizarre. A governor’s political staff use public office to cause traffic jams in Fort Lee? I cannot imagine what they thought the upside of that action would be. In order for it to have any political effect it would have to be known that it was done as a political move, but how could it be known? As soon as it came out that it was caused, done on purpose, for political reasons, the entire operation was a disaster, as nearly anyone should have known.

Meanwhile, in Orange County, a rather highly educated jury – three of them had Master’s degrees –- after relatively short deliberation found the Fullerton policemen “not guilty” of anything after they beat a homeless schizophrenic to death. Six policemen, pounding on him with batons and the butt of a Taser, listening to him plead for his life; all this caught on film, and the film was played for the jury –it defies belief that anyone would have voted these police not guilty of use of excessive force. I can understand a reluctance to convict the one policeman, Ramos, of second degree murder, since I doubt that at any time he ever actually formed the intent to kill the man; but he most certainly had the intention of teaching him a lesson, as he put on his latex gloves and told his captive “These are what will F— you up.” And then used them to do so. Had the chap been black, there would be riots all over LA and Orange counties; but this was a white middle class schizophrenic who reminds me somewhat of the goofy chap in Silver Linings Playbook. Irritating, annoying, but hardly deserving a death sentence. I find the jury verdict appalling, and the precedent even more so. Rodney King actually led the police on a high speed chase, and was big enough and tough enough to be a bit scary; but there was none of that here.

The worst of it is that this makes for a perfect opportunity for the Federal Government to expand its power by charging those police with civil rights violations. However that comes out the result will not be good.

And former Secretary Gates has come out with a tell all book about his term as Secretary of Defense under both Bush II and Obama. I haven’t read it although I will. But it’s a bit early for that book, isn’t it? Had he left office when Obama came in, it would be one thing; but he agreed to serve Obama. He quite possibly fell into the myth – First Black President, reforms president, politics ends at the water’s edge, foreign and military policy in the national interest — and became disillusioned. Many did. But he stayed on, for reasons not entirely clear; does he not owe Obama at least enough loyalty to delay publishing the book until after the next election? But perhaps I am reading everything wrong.

The education disaster continues. University presidents routinely make a million dollars or more a year. The rich grow more powerful and the powerful grow rich. And the middle class is put into bondage. You are not longer wealthy if you cannot see to it that your children graduate from University without owing a lifelong crushing debt. Fewer and fewer can say that as time goes on. However much money we throw at the education system it will absorb it and demand more, while raising its prices. And apparently we will never catch on.

My hearing aids continue to work splendidly. I heard the homily at Mass last Sunday for the first time in years. I also found out what the warning of of failing batteries sounds like. Only the left battery was getting low, but I was told about it at increasingly frequent intervals until I changed the battery. Actually I changed both of them. I have about 90 batteries, and I am told they’ll replace the batteries free any time I am out at COSTCO. I have turn the volume down on all the listening devises in the house, and in fact I find I can do that several times. I turn the radio down until it’s comfortable, and a few hours later it seems a bit loud. I’ve been quieting the house down quite a lot. And I heard all the activities at the LASFS meeting last week. When we take a walk I hear birds, and all kinds of sounds. There is one peculiarity. When I first sit down to this keyboard, the clicks seem loud. After a few minutes they fade. When they have faded to near stillness they begin to get louder again. Meanwhile the radio in the background doesn’t seem to change in volume at all.

I also hear sibilants a bit more loudly than anything else, which can be a bit distracting. Not so much that I’d risk the overall improvement, but I wonder if there is a fine tuning possible. It’s great to hear what people are saying, dogs barking, mocking birds staking out territory, clerks in the grocery store not having to raise their voices… I had forgotten what it was like to hear what is going on around me. If you are wondering if it’s worth it, then it probably is. I am told there are effective hearing aids cheaper than the $2000 set from COSTCO, and I suppose there are – I hardly looked at everything – but I can say that the COSTCO aid work very well indeed. They become increasingly comfortable over time, and I often forget I am wearing them. It’s interesting getting used to hearing again.

How to Eliminate Poverty

Jerry,

A friend of mine told be about a way to eliminate poverty. Here is how it would work:

Every legal resident of the United States, both Citizens and non-Citizens with Green Cards, would receive an annual stipend from the Federal Government, say $32,000. Zone half of this amount would be withheld as Income Taxes.

The Income tax rates would be structured as follows:

Every one would pay a fixed $16,000 per year. That would be covered by the $16,000 withheld from the annual stipend.

The next $16,000 of income would incur no additional Federal Income Taxes.

Income above $32,000 would be taxed at rates determined to be sufficient to fund the Federal Government. There would be NO deductions of any kind.

Under this plan a Family of Four would have an annual income of $64,000 if none of the family members chose to work.

If members of the Family chose to work to generate additional income they could have up to $128,000 without additional Federal Income Tax.

Of course, the annual stipend might have to be lower or a different amount for Children under the age of 18. Using 2013 US Population Estimates the cost of a net $16,000 per person would be a little North of Five Trillion Dollars. This compares with Fiscal 2013 expenditures of 3.5 Trillion dollars and revenue of 2.8 Trillion Dollars.

A quick look shows that total personal income in the US for 2012 was about 13 Trillion Dollars.

Personal Income taxes have been a little less that 50 percent of Federal Tax Revenues. This would indicate that under the scheme above, a total of about 6.5 Trillion Dollars would have to be generated from Personal Income Taxes yielding a rate of something close to 100 percent for taxable earnings.

My Friend’s suggested stipend amounts are obviously too high, but it was his concepts that were important, not the actual amounts.

Something to keep in mind is that there would no longer be a need for payroll taxes to support Social Security Retirement Benefits. Welfare and Unemployment Benefits would also be eliminated.

It is left to the reader to envision the other synergies that a proposal such as this might yield.

Bob Holmes

It may well come to this: a minimum income available to everyone. I have not the energy nor the mental clarity to calculate costs here, but given time I can work on it – this is hardly a brand new idea, and variations of this are indistinguishable from some of the suggestions of Belloc and Chesterton; indeed there is a Jeffersonian character to the idea that everyone is independent of the government for the fundamental necessities of life. No huge bureaucracy need, no boards to determine who is deserving and who is undeserving poor. Some of the Framers in discussing Locke’s notion that everyone is entitled to life, liberty and property wondered if the right to property didn’t mean that everyone ought to have some.

My friend David Friedman’s father, Milton, proposed negative income taxes as the proper way to handle welfare: no big bureaucracy just for that. Just part of the tax collection machinery. We have a crippled version of that in the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Fine tuning can contain refinements like a poll tax: you are paid enough in the basic entitlement to afford a poll tax, say on the order of $250 a year. If you do not choose to pay it, you do not vote, nor can anyone pay it for you: it is paid through the same system that pays you the entitlement.

I see I am rambling. Odd, because I have thought about this since I was an undergraduate. The trick here is to make the basic minimum large enough to allow one to live, but not in luxury or even in excess comfort. Chicken every Sunday, perhaps, but not every day. And since it is paid to everyone, not just those who “need” it, a great deal of bureaucratic nonsense is eliminated.

As productivity increases – and it has done so for a hundred years – the “surplus” becomes greater. By distributing this there is likely a drop in the rate of rise of productivity – there is less concentration of capital – but that is not necessarily a bad thing. We are now at a point where there are individuals who could raise a private armored brigade. That happened in the declining days of the Roman Republic; Crassus was a needed member of the Triumvirate. His ability to settle Caesar’s debts was decisive. I am not terrified at the economic power of Bill and Melinda Gates, but I can think of people I would not care to see able to hire capable private armies. (Or to pay to maintain an existing army under a popular general, for that matter…)

Enough. It is something very well worth discussion.

The Kemalists finally make a move…

http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140102/DEFREG01/301020006/Turkish-Army-Demands-Retrial-Coup-Plot-Cases

This could be a portent for the secularists in Turkey to begin their resurgence in answer to government corruption.

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

The government established by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, in which the Army is the guardian of the Constitution but does not and must not actually rule, has its roots in Plato and Aristotle, and a “rule of honor” society has been described in some utopias. Ataturk and his brotherhood were concerned that the people would overthrow the rule of liberty he had established, and the Army was given the task of protecting it. They did so for generations. The present government has jailed hundreds of the officer corps, and is said to have crippled the Brotherhood, and most observers think – with rather joy or dismay – that is so; but the roots of the Brotherhood go deep, and it is likely that it extends to the junior officers and senior non-commissioned officers of the Turkish Army. We can only watch and see; American interference in Turkey’s constitutional affairs would quite rightly be resented by both the Ataturk Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood. I no longer have reliable Turkish contacts, and my views are not better informed than most.

The Syrian conflicts present the Ataturk Brotherhood with a terrible dilemma: as patriotic Turks they can hardly support the establishment of independent Kurdistan; yet the American have built a functional Kurdistan within Iraq. There are as many Kurds in Iran and Turkey as there are in Iraq; and of course there are many in Syria. The Syrian regime promoted religious tolerance among Muslims – Sunni, Shiite, Alawite, Jews, Marionites, Orthodox Christian, Protestant – in ways that few other Muslim regimes ever have. This tolerance has pretty well vanished now.

Prime Minister Ergodan has been frantically purging senior military and police and judicial figure in hopes of ending the Army’s role as guardian of the constitution.

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

View 805 Thursday, January 09, 2014

I’m just back from a LASFS meeting. It was probably a mistake to go. I woke up believing I was getting over whatever has laid me low for the week, but I woke up at 1100, and by 1500 I wasn’t so sure. Niven and I were going to do a working dinner, but I didn’t quite feel up to that, and now I’m back and ready for med.

This stuff is pretty bad. I’ve had worse, and I am sure all the vitamins and stuff I take have helped keep me out of the great miseries some people have had, but I sure don‘t have much energy or concentration. I hope to be back on track next week. Apologies.

This is typical of mail I have been getting. My thanks to all.

Dear Doctor Pournelle,

Congratulations on your new hearing aids. When I got mine, the experience was similar to what you describe. When I walked out of the audiologist’s office I was astounded by the sheer plentitude of sounds-distant car alarms, bird calls, the rustling of my clothes. The latter sound took me about a week to get used to. But now I know why they put cymbals on drum sets. Before the aids, they merely "clicked." The piccolo also seems much less pointless now.

Enjoy!

Jeff

And in fact it pretty well describes what I am going through. I hear things that I must have heard at some point earlier in my life because I recognize them for what they are, but they still take me by surprise. My stairs creak a bit. I have never known that before.

Please tell people in your column that the longer they wait to have hearing aids can change how effective they are. Once you lose your hearing some of it cannot be brought back (maybe in future). I could not get my WW2 artillery friends to ever go get aids until it was too late. Enjoy your work. Thanks for your effort.

I will. I will also point out that the VA seems eager to help veterans whose hearing has been affected by even basic training rifle range practice, which never required hearing protection when I was in service.

Greetings, Dr. Pournelle,

I’m glad you’re enjoying your Costco hearing aids; my father had much the same experience as you are describing, and I expect that at some point I will get something similar as well.

Your "Man Mountain Molehill" correspondent states a real whopper when he says "For example, a Pentium has always been roughly 1" square since the original ca. 1990.". In fact, Intel’s consumer processors (excluding a few of the crazier Xeons-in-consumer-clothing Core i7s) have always been significantly smaller than that in die size; 1" square equates to ~645 mm^2, and the largest of Intel’s consumer processors (the original 60 & 66MHz Pentiums, on an

800nm/0.8 micron process) are less than half that size (294 mm^2), with most of the subsequent processors significantly smaller. A typical Core i5 processor, which includes graphics functionality as well as the CPU, is 177 mm^2.

I more complete list of models and their die sizes and power consumption can be seen here:

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=337&pgno=8

Charles

The bottom line remains: computers are getting more and more effective at doing the kinds of jobs that do not require high intelligence to do. And our schools are not teaching many of their graduates to do anything that anyone would pay you money to do. The cost of school is outrageous although you don’t see it because it is paid by the state not the local taxpayers. Just as the local taxpayers don’t control the schools. At the university level the math is inexorable: say that having a degree from Waybelow Normal will earn you on average $2,000 a year more than you would make without the degree. You graduate with a $50,000 debt. How long will it take to be even steven on that?

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

I occasionally think about our current political mess in America. Sometimes I think Apophis could solve all of our problems in 2029 or 2036. I am responsible for my part of the current mess since I started voting in 1976 without taking a critical thinking class. I blindly followed my dads directions to vote. It took many years, but I started voting for the other party after my eyes were opened. Later still I have come to the conclusion that both halves of the "incumbent party" are just like the guy in the Sneetches story by Dr. Seuss. We walk from party to party paying our two dollars to get a star tattooed on our bellies and later paying our five dollars to get it removed. I am ashamed to say it took this long to come to this level of knowledge or perhaps disappointment in government. There seems to be many more people who are willing to trade individual freedom for material stuff and can’t see that only two parties is not enough – especially when they are apparently working together. There are other parties and I do look at them from time to time.

I’m sure you watched "The Wild Bunch" by Sam Peckinpah. A man could walk into a bank with a note and a gun and rob the bank teller and probably live to tell about it. The movie was set in 1913 and before that time robbing banks probably worked well. Bank robbery is very irresponsible. Probably as irresponsible as telling King George to go chase himself. Depending who is writing history bank robbery and insurrection could be scorned or praised. Technology was on the side of the bank robber and the patriot. Firepower and a fast horse could win the day for the bank robber. Today a gun and a note gets your face on national TV and the bank is very happy to give you a bag of money containing a dye pack and a GPS.

Keeping in mind a patriot is defined by the winners who write history, I do have to ask the following question: what happens when a CDC doctor discovers an odd benign virus in blood samples from across the United States that upon further analysis is determined to be artificial and contains a message that demands individual freedom to be redeposited into our Constitution and a list of politicians to be retired – real retirement not the Bladerunner kind? I wonder if such a world is ahead of us? Our Founding Fathers took matters into their own hands, but weapons have gone from local to nearly global in reach.

I have realized that every pound of freedom comes with a ton of responsibility, and that every ounce of "Free Ice Cream" from government costs a ton of freedom. Do we need to reform ourselves before we can reform government? I am asking if science is going to get us out of our current mess and will the majority of the Eoli never understand?

Thank you,

-Bruce

Thanks. And good night. I’ll be back with my brain turned on Real Soon Now.

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