Category Archives: View

View 784 Wednesday, July 31, 2013

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

President Barrack Obama, January 231, 2009

We have errands but I thought this correction to last night’s mail might be important. It refers to an item in last night’s mail

: North pole camera

The pictures of the camera alone in the water are nice, but fatally flawed.

First: It was nothing more than a shallow lake only about a foot deep that was the result of surface melt of the much thicker ice floe. And it was the low point so it was the drainage sink for the surrounding area. Much like some subdivisions are constantly flooding because of being built at a depression. Since the air temperature was below freezing the lake refroze once the clouds blocked the sun.

Second. It is nowhere near the North Pole. It was originally close to the pole, but it is situated on an ice floe that has been moving. It is now some 300 miles south of the pole and on a rapid course to the Fram Strait (Greenland / Norway) where it will melt like all the other chunks of ice in the arctic. The arctic ice does not “melt”, it is eroded from beneath by warmer waters below, or is pushed around by the winds opening cracks of clear water or just pushed into the North Atlantic where it is bound to melt.

Earl Smith

I wondered if that were just a water pond on an ice floe but I didn’t check into it. I should have.

Solar Flare Narrowly Misses Earth…

http://washingtonexaminer.com/massive-solar-flare-narrowly-misses-earth-emp-disaster-barely-avoided/article/2533727

"There had been a near miss about two weeks ago, a Carrington-class coronal mass ejection crossed the orbit of the Earth and basically just missed us," said Peter Vincent Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Threat Commission from 2001-2008. He was referring to the 1859 EMP named after astronomer Richard Carrington that melted telegraph lines in Europe and North America."

Not to worry, though. I am certain all the. "climate change" models have thus factored into their data bases.

Charles Brumbelow

I have not done a systematic study, but I believe that northern lights were seen in Alexandria about every 300 years since classical times.  That probably indicates a Carrington class solar event. In 1859 the only long insulated wires in the world were telegraph lines.  So far as I can tell, during the 1859 event there were electrical events in every telegraph station, and many of them caught fire. We have a lot more long electrical lines now, and of course the effect on the electrical power grid cannot accurately be predicted. Some would make it the end of civilization.  Something of this sort is the premise of Lloyd Tackitt’s A Distant Eden and its sequels, which presents a grim picture of post disaster life.

View 784 Tuesday, July 30, 2013

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

President Barrack Obama, January 231, 2009

We took Sable for a walk around the block this morning. She was tired and ready to come home, but she was cheerful and happy to be home and I think she feels better for the exercise even though she limps a lot. She was slow this morning, but she managed to run into the breakfast room when she heard the spoon click on the cereal dish – it sounds different when you’re down to the last spoonful and she has decided that she’s entitled to lick the dish when we’re finished. She’s smart, and she’s cute, and she knows how to exploit being cute. But then she always has been.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/photos2002/sable1.html

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/photos2002/sable2.html

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/photos2002/sable3.html

Those were done when we first got her, and I used thumbnails because I was trying to keep page loading times down. You can doubleclick on the pictures to get the full image.

Continuing the theme on autism and vaccinations.

In the introduction I mused about growing up in a time when there were limited inoculations and vaccinations. There were a few religious objections to vaccination, most of them similar to those raised at the time that it was learned that those exposed to cowpox almost never got smallpox. If God wants us to get smallpox we have no business preventing His Will. That has never been the doctrine of the Catholic Church or its orthodox associates, and is not the doctrine of many evangelical churches, but there have always been a few Puritan derivatives who have held that God’s Will Be Done means that man must not interfere with afflictions. It was argued after Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, and very much so against Jenner’s vaccinations, but common sense prevailed in most churches as rod-protected churches survived and those with tall unprotected steeples burned, and vaccinated children did not die of the pox.

Cowpox is a fairly mild skin disease; smallpox was often fatal. People were so afraid of smallpox that some, like John and Abigail Adams, resorted to inoculation: they deliberately infected themselves with tissue from pox patients in hopes of achieving a mild case of smallpox – in hopes of avoiding the full pox. Inoculation was practiced in China in the First Millennium AD, and possibly in India two thousand years before that. Because it could result in a full and contagious case of smallpox, inoculation remained controversial, although there were reliable indications that inoculation was fatal less than 5% of the time, while smallpox was 30% fatal and some variants were essentially 100% fatal. When Jenner and other British physicians noticed that vaccination – inoculation with vaccina virus – conferred immunity from smallpox after recovery from a mild form of cowpox, vaccination became popular, and after a few years of controversy became mandatory.

Over time inoculations against tetanus (lockjaw), diphtheria, and pertussis (whooping cough) became popular, and over time it became popular to give DPT shots which inoculated against all three at the same time. While I was growing up The story of Balto and the 1925 race against time to deliver diphtheria inoculation doses to Nome was known to every school child – at least to all I met in Memphis and Capleville – and I didn’t know anyone who was opposed to inoculation.

Then inoculations against measles, mumps, and rubella (German measles) were developed. I’d already had measles and mumps by the time those inoculations became widespread, and I never had them.

Now it’s time to look at the history of autism. When I was in graduate courses in psychology in the 1950’s, autism wasn’t a big subject. Henderson and Gillespie, A Textbook of Psychiatry, 15^th Ed. 1951, has no index item for Asperger or autism. In those days the medicos and the Freudians were the main schools of psychology theory. The medicos were hoping to find medical cures or at least alleviative medicines for psychiatric problem, but they hadn’t really been developed yet. They tended to insulin shock and electric shock, and even psychosurgery which the psychologists denoted as butchery. In one graduate psychology class we were shown that many of the effects of electro convulsive shock were indistinguishable from a blow to the head with a padded club.

The talk therapists on the other hand had their grand theories based on – well, on case histories, supposedly. In particular Sigmund Freud was the giant of the field. There were disciples and heretic prophets, and it was often difficult to determine which was which. There were also a myriad of odd and special theories and schools. Rogerian permissiveness, Freudian paternalism, Karen Horney’s variant on Freud and Jung, and Jung who got off into the realm of science fiction with his collective unconscious – which became one of the founding pillars of the science fiction author Lafayette Ron Hubbard who burst on the scene with Dianetics. Dianetics purported to be the modern science of mental health, and there was no hint of religion about it in the early 1950’s. It incorporated the theories of General Semantics as espoused by Korzybski, Wendell Johnson, and Hayakawa and much of the psychostructure of Jung’s variant of Freud, postulating “minds” and various neural structures for which there was no physiological evidence (just as there had never been any evidence for Freud’s Ego, Id, and Superego). Freud, of course, had medical degrees and put forth his case histories as evidence. Hubbell had no degrees, and put forth his case histories as evidence. It is now known that Freud made up many of his case histories. Given Hubbard’s biographical data, it is very difficult to determine when he compiled his case histories and his early patients have been extraordinarily difficult to find. Pretty well the same could be said for most of the other leaders in psychological theory. Orgone Therapy, Psychodrama, Gestalt theory, Horney’s ‘feminist’ psychology, general semantics and its variants – there was no end to theory but very little evidence, and no science at all.

Of the schools of psychology, the Freudians claimed the greatest respectability, and it could be said that there were Freudians and all the others.

And none of those were much concerned with autism. Moreover, ADHD didn’t exist at all.

I will continue this ramble into autism and vaccination – there is a connection – tomorrow and at some point I’ll pull all these pieces into a single report. Bear with me. Now I have other things I must do today.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323300004578555453881252798.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704022804575041212437364420.html

On Unintended Consequences

We are all happy that there is no longer smog in Los Angeles (at least not much; we can see the mountains every day, etc.) and I am sure that is true over on the East Coast.  Of course the cost of reducing pollution may be more hurricanes.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/23/pollution-reduced-frequency-of-north-atlantic-hurricanes-study/

http://www.france24.com/en/20130623-man-made-particles-lowered-hurricane-frequency-study

We can discuss this another time.  None of this is in the current climate models, of course, and in our politicized  science grant environment it’s unlikely to be studied.

I get a lot of mail pointing me to web sites that I might find interesting. I try to look at a lot of them although I can’t get to them all, and if it looks interesting enough that I would probably want to comment and link to it I tend to leave the Tab open in Firefox. Over time those accumulate and I have to do something about them. This last week or so I had less time to follow them up. I kept the ones below, but in going over them I don’t think I’ll be able to comment on them, so I am putting them here. If you find one of these particularly interesting you can remind me to look at it again. And I have closed the tabs.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/22/prescient-fallen-angels-a1991-satire-of-climate-alarmism/#more-88559

http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2013-06-12.html

http://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/former-fbi-counterterrorism-agent-all-digital-communications-and-phonecalls-are-recorded/

http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/a-mind-bogglingly-stupid-statement/

http://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/06/12/who-are-you-really-2/

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book_the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/sun-s-bizarre-activity-may-trigger-another-ice-age-1.1460937

Monday, July 29, 2013  View

Last November we learned that Sable, our red Siberian Husky who will be eleven this September, has cancer in her right foreleg.  The only treatment was amputation, and that would give us about six more months. Sable is an active dog and she would hate it to have only three legs and be totally dependent on human for everything, and we decided that while the cancer weakened the bone and we couldn’t take her on long walks any longer, we could still go out, and so long as she seemed to be a happy dog we didn’t have any decisions to make. Last week there was further deterioration, and trips to the vet. She pulled a ligament or something on her right hind leg making it even more difficult for her to walk.  We had an appointment this morning to take her in for a new set of xrays to see where we are.

Meanwhile, about 2 AM Friday night/Saturday morning, my lack of balance did its thing and I fell flat on my face onto the wood floor.  Didn’t see any stars, did not lose consciousness, but I got a good lump on my forehead just above my left eye. It looked awful, but it wasn’t particularly painful.  Sunday it looked  a little better, but it was still such that people at church asked what had happened, and one fellow parishioner came up to me and said “No more falling, right?”  When I looked puzzled he said “You fell, right?. Give that up.”  I told him Roberta hit me with a bed slat.

Monday morning we got up to take Sable to the the vet for the xrays, and my left eye was a classic shiner. It looked really awful.  The lid was swollen so that it was hard to keep closed or open. So after we left Sable at the Vet we went out to Kaiser where I was looked at in the emergency room. They did a pretty thorough physical exam, lots of blood pressure and EKG, and decided that I didn’t need xrays, and the delayed black eye symptoms were normal. It cost about fifty bucks, but I was fine. This took until about 12:30, and when we got out to the car the lights had been left on and it wouldn’t start.  We were on the second story of the parking structure by the main building – one of several parking structures at the Panorama City Kaiser – but the AAA guy had no problem finding us from that description. Aside from the delay and embarrassment there wasn’t a real problem and the car runs just fine now. We came home and had lunch, sort of.

Then we went out to pick up Sable. The vet carefully explained it all to us. The cancer is of course worse, and her leg is more fragile than before, The rear hip problem is minimal and she needs to take it easy for a while, but we won’t have more than a few weeks with her, and probably a lot less than that. It is getting closer to decision time. We brought her home. She’s happy to be home. And my eye looks better. But it hasn’t been a productive day. Apologies.

When I first got Sable I did a lot of pictures of her.  You can find them at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/photos2002/sable1.html and if you double click on the small picture you will get the full sized picture.  There are three web pages of these, with links.

I’ll start catching up tomorrow. It has been a long and hard day.  Apologies.

View 784 Sunday, July 28, 2013

Sable has some problems, and I’m working on fiction, so I have fallen behind here. Beginning to catch up.

: We live in the Crazy Times

Is dry asparagus an indicator of racism?

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/dry-asparagus-prompts-questions-about-racial-discrimination-in-university-city/article_3e072b32-7aa6-5cf7-bc1b-6f2aac7605f5.html

I had to read this twice before I was sure it was not a joke. Apparently so many people have lost their minds that the rest of us simply aren’t startled. We have thrown out freedom and common sense. A supermarket does not invest money in a store in order to insult its customers; it will not have a policy of doing that – or if it does, the sales will fall. In any event we don’t need city commissions to decide matters like this. Of course the city commissioners have their own agendas. They may not be agendas that serve the public interest.

Now I’ll have to inspect all the asparagus in my local stores to see which one discriminate against the population of Studio City.