Category Archives: View

View 805 Wednesday, January 08, 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

It’s Wednesday, and the flu has still got me. I feel worse now than I did Monday. Possibly some of that is due to going out Tuesday.

It Changed My Life

Tuesday I got my new Kirkland Signature Receiver in Ear Hearing Instrument Model K5562-DRW hearing aids at COSTCO. They had already programmed mine but I got there a few minutes early and the very competent and extremely pleasant young lady technician was programming a new pair for people whose appointments were after mine, so I got to see a bit of how that was done. They seem to have many options, all done on a laptop computer with Bluetooth connection to the instruments – both at once although they can work on one at a time. Between the prescription I had from Kaiser and the tests she had done last week when I decided to buy them, they had a pretty good picture of the complicated pattern of my hearing loss. It took about half an hour of instructions to be sure I understood how to do everything from changing batteries – about every three days – to tuning the volume, to recharging the remote. There are three programs put into the instruments. Inspection of the documents that came with them show a capacity for four. The three I have are for ordinary use, use in crowds with background noise, and one intended for when I am listening to music or at the opera. Since I didn’t know it was possible to have a fourth I never asked what that ought to be for, but apparently I can get them reprogrammed, including adding a fourth option, anytime I want to. I can also go out and have them cleaned and new batteries put in any time I shop at COSTCO. I’ll probably do that although I don’t think of any program I need that I don’t have.

When I put them in my life changed. I had them on the #1 or “ordinary” program, and suddenly I could hear things. The click of computer keys, which I haven’t heard in years. Door works when you turn the knob. Rustle of paper when you put things away. My own footsteps. All kinds of sounds that most of you pay no attention to, but which I haven’t heard in so many years that I had forgotten they existed. Moreover, I hear them more loudly and clearly than I have for forty years and more.

I went out into the COSTCO store crowd. Used the remote first to change the program to #2, the suppress background noise program, and then to lower the volume a click or two. Wonderful. I could still hear myself walking, people coming up behind me, random conversations. A pretty blonde athletic lady with a pony tail followed by – perhaps better to say accompanied by – three girls who were very clearly her own, ages about 10, 9, and 7, although they might have been 10, 10, and 7; hard to tell, and I didn’t want to alarm anyone by paying a lot of attention to them. But I could hear them talk. And having granddaughters I found them interesting. Reluctantly I went on through the store, just wandering about to see the wonders of COSTCO – there are some – and kept finding them coming up behind me or toward me when I turned into an aisle; apparently their mother was casing the joint as I was.

And I could hear everyone around me. This was just before noon; as noon approached COSTCO blossomed with free samples of food appearing everywhere. You could eat enough to live on there assuming you could wangle a membership. I suppose they have ways of discouraging that. I ended up buying very little, several bags of coffee beans in 2 ½ lb. bags and costing less per pound than the same blends – Columbian and Sumatran – that I usually get at Trader Joe’s, and about the same price per pound we pay for Sumatran at Smart and Final.

I’m wearing down. This flu is painful. Fortunately it is a beautiful Spring day outside, about 75 F. And the radio is telling me that Swine Flu is back and several have died of it in LA County. I should have got my flu shots. Only of course I did get my flu shots. I always do. And I can’t guarantee that I have flu, although most of the symptoms fit. The exception is my nasal passages. I am sort of stuffed up, my head feels full of cotton wool, but I don’t have that much trouble breathing. I do cough up stuff. Sudafed is enough to get me through the night, mostly. I’m almost out and I’d go out to get more but I don’t feel up to going out.

Anyway last night for the first time since we have had it, the TV volume was about 16=20 as opposed to the 20-35 I usually have to set it to. And I could hear the words without having to watch the sub=titles. I may turn off the sub-titles if this keeps on. And this morning I could hear the radio as well as read the paper, a kind of multitasking I used to do but haven’t since The Lump was extirpated.

I’ll have more on this as I gain more experience, but I can recommend the Kirkland hearing instrument sold by COSTCO, since they have a guarantee – if you don’t like them, you take them back and they refund your money. I paid essentially $2000 for the pair, and it’s a good use of the money.

Moore’s law may be over for awhile.

Here’s a pretty good overview, and abstract, with graphs:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-unhappy-with-tsmc-claims-22nm-essentially-worthless

This is no secret in the semiconductor industry. Industrial ICs have always used inexpensive process nodes. However, GPUs are high volume consumer products that have always been able to use more, cheaper transistors.

However, the 20 and 14nm processes at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (The premier fab, really) have transistors that cost about the same as its 28nm node. Just to be clear, historically one would expect 14nm to be 1/3 to 1/4 the cost.

Maybe TSMC fouled up? No, the new nodes work, they’re just not cheaper. Also, a separate foundry (a huge organization spun off from AMD) Global Foundries (GF) has also hit a similar wall near these numbers using slightly different technologies.

And, maybe the customers designed bad chips? No; Nvidia and AMD are both reporting similar cost problems across all their related product lines.

Intel may be having problems as well; They are opening up their formerly proprietary fabs to take outside work. This is at minimum a sign that they can’t pay for their fabs with PC CPUs alone.

In my understanding, Moore’s law has always been a marketing rule-of-thumb that customers will buy something twice as good, and it usually takes 18 months to get it. In the real world, exponentials usually become s-curves after a bit. It may be that optical thin-film lithography on silicon has reached its limits.

So, something really new will now be needed to sell up the customers, and there may be a pause in the tempo. Molecular manufacturing would be just the thing, but I don’t think it’s ready, at least, there’s no public evidence of it.

 

Ray

There are signs that Moore’s Law is best described with an ogive or logistic curve, not a simple exponential.  As Possony and I pouted out in The Strategy of Technology, the ogive or “S curve” describes a great deal of technological development, as for instance, the speed of aircraft through the 19th Century. Sometimes one ogive flattens out only to enter another period of rise, the first part of which looks like an exponential.  We don’t have enough data to be sure where Moore’s Law (which is, after all, more empirical than theoretical) will go.  My own belief is that we’ll see one more iteration at least. That would be astounding progress.  Even if we only get a 50% improvement…

My point really is that less and less unskilled labor is required to sustain civilization.  Encouraging everyone to expect the kind of middle class life of the semi skilled worker after World War II may be a mistake.  Sure, some will rise into a new middle class, but most of them will do so because of productivity – and the number needed to increase productivity is falling, not rising.  Given jobs eliminated and workers who have ceased to look for work, unemployment in the US is 11 – 12%, not the politically correct 7+ we pretend to believe.  Any economic plan must understand this.  It must also understand that the school system is useless in teaching skills to the lower 40% of the population. (Lower 40% is IQ <= 90.) These are not stupid or useless people; but they are not being trained to be part of a modern high tech civilization, and they are not needed in modern farming. Some will find a home in organic farming, possibly a very good home. ) 

I’d write more on this but my head is full of cotton wool.

Moore’s Law, TSMC

Everything else being equal, more transistors per wafer should lead to a lower cost per transistor. But yield difficulties reduce the cost advantage.

I can’t remember a new process innovation that didn’t have yield problems as it ramped up.

The industry has known this since the 1960s when a typical wafer was 3" and a typical LSI at the limits of technology had a few hundred transistors. Meanwhile, chip designers always pack more transistors onto a given chip area so the total area of silicon stays about the same. For example, a Pentium has always been roughly 1" square since the original ca. 1990.

Man Mountain Molehill

Maybe just drugging our problematic children isn’t the answer. Who knew?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/health/adhd-experts-re-evaluate-studys-zeal-for-drugs.html?src=recg

John Harlow

Of course we have been saying that here for years.  Ah well.  Unrestricted capitalism leads to many places. Of course over regulation of capitalism kills the goose laying those golden eggs. Everyone pretends to know this, but few act as if they do.

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

View 805 Sunday, January 05, 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

Ramble on Education: Silicon is cheaper than iron. And cheaper than muscle, too.

Climate Scientists Icebound

It’s Sunday afternoon and I just got up. Yesterday I had intended to get some work done, and didn’t; just not enough energy. Last night I went to bed with a mild sore throat and headache and by morning I had the works. Stuffy head, headache, sore throat, ache all over, so I only got out of bed a few minutes ago.

Ramble on education.

Everyone is doing year end analyses, and I should as well, but I’m just not up to it. I have identified two big issues, the Global Warming mess, and the coming dissolution of American Education from pre-school through university, but those are not easy to write on when your head is full of cotton wool We do have some indications of change in the right direction. More and more students, graduating with a lifelong debt, have discovered that they got neither education nor training in useful skills for their money, while the accrediting agencies continue to support the obvious grade inflation.

At the same time, technology advances make skilled workers more productive than they used to be, meaning that we need fewer of them. The great industrial advances following World War II that made a majority of blue collar workers middle class citizens are no more: there’s no need for a huge population of factory workers. For a long while automation created jobs; it’s not so clear that this is automatic now. The result is that there’s less for the average citizen to do in the traditional economy. And as the robots get better at their jobs, some companies are finding it much cheaper to buy robots and do the work here rather than send stuff overseas for cheap labor; another trend that will continue. And our education system continues to raise prices, demand a larger share of income, and shows no sign of comprehension as to what is going on.

Moore’s Law may be slowing down, but there are a couple of iterations to go; and I remind you that doubling of the current state, not just another iteration of the doubling of the previous state. Think on it. The next doubling of computer power for the price will add as much new productivity as did all the doublings by Moore’s Law from the first Altair to last year’s desktops. Now, I know this is a first approximation and some of the effects can be discounted – but only some. And we have at least two more iterations of Moore’s Law to go. Actually, one suspects, we have many more than two coming.

Back in the very early days of computing, when I was working with old Zeke, my friend who happened to be a Z-80 computer running CP/M and CBASIC with 8” floppy disk drives, I came up with one of Pournelle’s Laws: Silicon is cheaper than iron. Therefore the days of the spinning metal disks were numbered.  In those times hard drives were huge and a 30 megabyte drive consisted of platters larger than soup plate, and the only hard drive available to people like me were a Honeywell Bull 5 megabyte which came with a case and power supply the size of a two drawer file cabinet; lights dimmed in the house when you turned it on. It seemed an easy prediction to make. But even as I said it, CPU flops became cheaper. Data separation on both hard drives and floppies started an exponential dive. Precision control of milling machines got better exponentially. We went inexorably from 5” Winchester drives with 5 megabytes to 25 megabytes, 100 megabytes, a gigabyte. Now a terabyte external drive is under $100.

At the same time silicon drives got cheaper and cheaper. They still cost more per gigabyte than spinning metal, but that gap is closing, and few new computers are built without at least one silicon “hard drive.” It too dates from about 1983 when I said silicon is cheaper than iron, but remember that Moore’s Law is both inexorable and exponential.

And my head is full of cotton wool so you’re free to speculate on the effects of this, but one is clear: the new technology makes traditional college and university education as obsolete as were the 8” floppy disks that sparked my observation. You can store and distribute the best classroom lectures in all the world, and do that cheaply. Since most of the expensive universities now use graduate students – often graduate students who don’t speak English very well – as teaching assistants to sort of conduct class discussions and actually deal with the students, the solution to that kind of college class is easy to see. We don’t need the highly paid tenured faculty at all for undergraduate education. Colleges can go back to being affordable for people like my wife and I – affordable and useful as well. It takes some thought but the clues are here. Of course we will go through another generation of illiterates running the Republic before anything can be done, but the mechanism for saving our own children to be survivors during the coming generation of chaos already exists.

And as it happens, I got this mail today.

SUBJECT: Qualification inflation

Hi Jerry.

Some more evidence pointing towards qualification inflation, as discussed many times before in Chaos Manor:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/01/03/critics-complain-of-qualification-inflation-as-more-canadians-hold-university-degrees-and-low-paying-jobs/

Cheers,

Mike Casey

Global Warming Questioned?

An Antarctic expedition intended to demonstrate global warming in the Antarctic became icebound in mid summer, and has caused other ice breakers to require rescue. At last count 22 crew members will remain trapped in the ice and wait for conditions to improve. The climate models had predicted open water in summer, but that didn’t work. Predicting just when the ice conditions will get better is a bit difficult since Winterset here is High Summer down there.

Of course the great faith in the consensus on global warming – oops, climate change – has not changed. It is too warming! And all that ice in the Eastern US, and all that ice trapping the scientists, is weather, not climate, and we know we don’t know how to predict the weather. And we can explain what looks like anomalies in our predictions. Let us make a few adjustments in our billion dollar models, and all well be well.

I continue to hold about the same opinions as Freeman Dyson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CM9YR6PZKo

For a somewhat whimsical presentation see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Y9EZDdpUw

And for a pretty good lecture on the data, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM

I tend to prefer papers to presentations, but this is what I could come up with for the moment.

I make no doubt there are plenty of explanations as to why the models didn’t show why three icebreakers couldn’t get through in mid summer. They just haven’t come out yet.

And I’d better get back to bed.

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

View 804 Tuesday, December 31, 2013

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

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

Barrack Obama, famously.

I’m still here. This will be brief: in an hour or so I have an appointment with audiologists who I hope will fit me with a newfangled design hearing aid that will take care of my hearing problems. We will see.

Thanks to all those who have renewed their subscriptions during this holiday season. I will not be going to CES but Alex is providing communications for several exhibitors, and I have other friends who are going. And this week I will be doing the year end essay.

But I mustn’t be late for my appointment.

1530: As it happens my web host was down and I could not post that before I went. I had a pleasant experience at COSTCO, and I may go there for other items sometimes. I know my friend Wayne Rash used to use Price Club for everything before Price Club and COSTCO merged, and I am given to understand that the founder of FEDCO, which Roberta and I liked a lot, is now the President of COSTCO; so we’ll see. If their Auditory department is an example of their competence I might just buy everything there.

The experience was pleasant and Kerry, the technician in Auditory is competent, pleasant, and explains things well. The tests and programming each ear device took about an hour; after which I wandered about through COSTCO with the new hearing aids. There was plenty of background noise but I could hear and understand individual conversations, including Spanish which I haven’t generally understood for years. Amazing. I haven’t heard this well since well before the big radiation treatments for the Lump, that big brain cancer that they managed to polish off in 2008. In other word, for as long as I can remember, really, I haven’t heard this well.

Alas I had to give back the demonstration models, which had been programmed just for me: programming takes a few minutes and is done by Bluetooth. They tell me my very own hearing aids will come in about a week. I confess I was tempted to run away with the demo units, but of course I didn’t. expect to hear more on this story in a coup-le of weeks.

Roberta won’t be going to Larry Niven’s New Year Party, but I’m going to trek out there because Niven’s parties are my one chance to see some people I don’t meet anywhere else, and Larry and I manage to get some work done at his parties anyway. And Wendy All will be there so we can talk about the revival of the children’s book Avogadro the Mole, which is a book introducing basic science concepts for people who like talking animals.

I’ve been reading some books on failure to develop Africa, and some of the concepts will go into my Tran novels. I am determined to finish Mamelukes by Spring, and I don’t see why I can’t. That will not end the series. Going through the Enlightenment, Reformation, Counter Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution all in one generation is not going to be easy, and I’m too much interested in it just to say they all lived happily every after. Or to kill off the characters and say they failed. Rick has to pass the torch and know he has done so before it’s all over. And you have yet to meet his children, who, like children of aristocratic houses of those times, spend more time with Nannies, Governesses, and other aristocrats than their own parents. Georgette Heyer has a wonderful novel My Lord John about the children and grandchildren of Belle Sire, John of Gaunt, brother of Edward the Black Prince, whose son Henry IV deposed Richard II and set the stage for the Wars of the Roses… Henry IV’s children Harry (eventually Henry V) and his brother John are shown in Shakespeare’s plays but Heyer does it better. Anyway, we are headed that way on Tran…

And if you’re looking for something to read before going to a party

Maps that changed the world…

Fascinating!

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/12-maps-that-changed-the-world/282666/#comments

(Len – Mackinder made the grade!)

s/f

Couv

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

HAPPY NEW YEAR

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

View 803 Friday, December 27, 2013

Feast of St. John Apostle

“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

Took yesterday and most of today off. I have notes on an essay on education, but someone grabbed the title and used it as a Wall Street Journal op ed page editorial today. We Pretend To Teach, and They Pretend to Learn. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303531204579204201833906182

It is very much on target, and says much of what I wanted to say. Anyone interested in the education mess should read it.

Back about 1970 I was involved with the Council that was to draw up the Master Plan for the University of California system. The program was very structured: the University System would have a limited number of campuses, and would do all the graduate school education. There would be a limited number of undergraduates at each of those campuses, and they would be the elite applicants. Tuition would be low for state residents, and very high for out of state and foreign students. This would be the University system, and it would be for the best and the brightest. Salaries would be high for an elite faculty.

In addition, there would be the California State Colleges, which would not be permitted to award graduate degrees. They would do undergraduate education, and send their best and brightest to compete for places in the University system graduate schools. Their primary purpose was teaching, and it was on their ability to teach that faculty members would be chosen and retained: no publish or perish, because their purpose was to teach, not to do “research”. They were not to discover knowledge, but to convey it to most of the undergraduates in the state. A small number would go to the University undergraduate system, but about 90% of all undergraduates enrolled in state higher education would be in the California State Colleges. This would include colleges of education and teacher. Again the focus would not be on ‘research’ or anything else other than producing great teachers for the California schools.

Of course as soon as the Master Plan was adopted and funded, the California State Colleges began a political campaign to be turned into universities, with salaries comparable to the Universities, and graduate schools with research, and publish or perish, and all the rest of it; and instead of being teaching institutions they would become second rate copies of the Universities, with a faculty neglecting teaching in order to gather prestige in research and publication, or, perhaps, at least to look as if they were. In any event the California State Colleges became California State Universities, their commitment to actual undergraduate education was tempered to make room for the graduate schools, budgets were higher, costs were higher, and tuition, which had been designed to be very low, began to climb.

I make no doubt that something like that happened in many other states. When Roberta and I were undergraduates, tuition was low enough that you could, literally, work your way through college. In her case she did office work and she was good enough at it to earn a respectable salary as she managed to go to the University of Washington and study music, as well as get a teaching credential. I managed my first couple of years with the funds from the Korean GI Bill, then wangled undergraduate assistantships doing technical work – I built electronic stuff for Van Allen at Iowa and worked on polygraph equipment for Al Ax at the University of Washington, then later did computer programming for the NRL projects at UW under Dvorak – who had been a submarine commander in WW II, and who invented the Dvorak keyboard. We seldom saw him, but he was legendary even then. Apparently supervision of Navy Research Contracts fell under his sway because he was a USNR Captain.

My point is that we could work our way through college. The Korean GI Bill was good enough to pay state resident tuition and we could wait on tables or find other work to stay alive. Student loans were not a real option, and few graduated with debts. I managed to learn enough to get a job as an aviation psychologist and human factors engineer at Boeing, and Roberta got her music degree and teaching position in the Seattle public school system.

None of that is possible now – and from my perusal of the course catalogs of local universities, I could never have managed to learn enough to get a professional job at Boeing in four years.

The Universities pretend to teach and the students pretend to learn, the costs rise and the number qualified to do something a company might actually pay them to do goes down. And the rising salaries of the teachers and professors and deans and assistants to the Associate Deans, and all the rest continue. They also invented the ‘Post Doc” fellowship, which pays a pittance to someone who has actually earned a PhD but can’t find anything useful to do with it. Gardeners and maintenance crews get larger and are paid more. And every year the Faculty Senate pleads that the University is in danger without higher tuition. Meanwhile, grade inflation makes credentials meaningless.

Credentials are essential and expensive, and they are not worthless because you generally can’t get a job without them; but they don’t really certify that you can do anything, only that you have acquired the credential, something that you must have even to be considered for a job

And so it goes.

I note that in May of 2011 I proposed one remedy to awful schools.

You may take it as a general rule: get the worst 10% of the teachers out of a school, distributing their students to the remaining teachers, and you will improve the school, probably very dramatically. So designate one awful school as the place to send all the worst teachers. It won’t hurt that school much, because not much can. It complies with the silly laws and rules that make it impossible to fire bad, incompetent, malicious, and generally unsatisfactory teachers, and it will do some good for the other schools. Admittedly it’s a silly way to improve a school system, but it may well be the only possible way, since there appears to be no way to change the rules.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2011/Q2/view674.html#Tuesday

 

It’s not politically possible, but it would work without firing any teachers…

If your career interacts with the military, Colonel Couvillon recommends this:

Lessons of combat

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlead/articles/20131227.aspx#startofcomments

[enthusiastic comment deleted]

Alas, as the war(s) have wound down, the bureaucrats and ‘managers’ emerge from  the shadows and start issuing all manner of (CYA) safety regulations, EPA restrictions, and cost-saving measures. Additionally, those without combat experience will move to the forefront of promotion and command queues because of their sterling record of ‘education’ and accident (i.e. risk) free service.

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

I had intended to try to learn the Word Press editor that operates directly on the web site, since I hoped it would be easier to use than this, but alas, the learning curve is steep. This is good enough, but I’ll keep trying. I confess I preferred the FrontPage system to all this, but that is apparently no longer an option.  Ah well.

Good night, and happy New Year.

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