Category Archives: View

View 783 Wednesday, July 24, 2013

It hasn’t been all funk. I’ve managed to do some fiction and got a few other things done around here. But I did come down with something, or I think I did. Not much in the way of symptoms except a general malaise and lack of energy, and I think that has cured itelf.

I did make a list of important topics to comment on in the next few days. One, the importance of NSF and what is happening to NSF in this administration, seems important enough to warrant a bit of digging. And as usual I have a good collection of really interesting mail, some of which I’ll comment on and the rest I guess I’ll just have to run as I try to catch up. Apologies, but I did manage some fiction during the slump and that may turn out to be the most important thing of all. And in an hour I’ll leave this and go up to the monk’s cell to do more.

Vaccinations and Autism

When I was growing up everyone got measles. Measles and mumps were just a part of childhood, and most of us wanted to get them and get it over with, preferably during the school year so that we spent a few days in bed or cooped up inside instead of going to classes, rather than use up valuable vacation time. Since the way one gets measles is to catch it from someone else, that usually happened, so that when you class in a school got it, you did, and it was all over in a week or two. Similarly with mumps, which was a bigger deal, or at least getting mumps seemed to worry our parents more than measles did.

There was also “German Measles”, which you could get even if you’d already had measles, which seemed unfair. There seemed to be general disagreement over which was the most serious, measles or German measles (which we later learned to call rubella), but neither was serious. We were also told to stay away from pregnant women if we had any kind of measles, because it was suppose to be particularly dangerous to them. I didn’t really learn why until I read the Agatha Christie mystery in which that turns out to be a key plot point.

The thing that scared everyone was polio. We weren’t scared of smallpox because everyone got smallpox vaccinations – not inoculations – in first grade. Boys got theirs on the upper left arm. Girls had a choice and could get them on some part of the thigh that boys never saw, and as I recall most of the girls at St. Anne’s in Memphis chose (or their parents chose) the thigh, while most of the girls in Capleville consolidated had the telltale mark on the upper left arm. I was curious as to why, but it may be that out in the country they weren’t given the thigh choice. The vaccinations were given by a travelling county team, and they were pretty painful: drops were put on the skin and then you got stabbed about twenty times with a little needle, and it all swelled up and itched like crazy for a day or so. I got mine at age 5 at St. Anne’s. If anyone in my part of Memphis (known as the Normal district because it was the location of the Memphis Normal College, which transmogrified into Memphis State College, then Memphis State University, and now, I think, the University of Tennessee at Memphis) escaped the smallpox vaccinations I wasn’t aware of it.

Also in the 1930’s one routinely got a tetanus shot, a diphtheria shot, and a whooping cough shot. I am told it was possible to get them all at once, but that wasn’t what I got. Being under 5 years old I wasn’t asked an opinion, but I gather than my parents and Dr. Dimarco agreed that it was better to get them over a period of a month rather than all in one shot the way they gave them at County Hospital where you had to go if you wanted them free. You had to have had the diphtheria and whooping cough shots before you entered first grade. You’d get the smallpox vaccination at school, and everyone in first grade got them at once. We stood in line, got then, went back to class, and went to school the next day although apparently those who didn’t feel well could stay home without an additional excuse.

Incidentally, when I joined the Army n 1950 one of the first things that happened to us was a smallpox vaccination. Since we were all men we all got them on an arm. I’m not sure where it went in relation to where the previous inoculation had been. Nearby, I think. The rather large scar from the previous inoculation was still very visible at the time, and when I asked the doctor supervising the inoculations why we needed a second one when I had clearly had the desired reaction to the first he nodded agreement and said that the army had found it was cheaper to give them to everyone just to be sure.

We also got a whole bunch of other shots during the first week in boot camp. The army took immunization seriously, as had the State of Tennessee when I was growing up there. If you could be immunized against something you were pretty well required to have that done, either at state/county cost or your own, essentially your choice. Except for the smallpox I had all mine in Dr. Dimarco’s office, but my friend down the street went on the street car to the county hospital to get the free shots.

There weren’t any flu shots, and the only thing you could do about polio was pray, although some did avoid going to summer camp because it was possible to for a polio wave to sweep through the camps. Mostly we just prayed. In my case I got a light case of something that might have been flu and might have been polio while I was in summer camp and spent a week essentially in isolation until it subsided. No one was ever sure whether I had polio or not, but Dimarco thought I probably had a mild case without aftereffects. He didn’t quite say I could stop worrying about polio, but it was clear to me he thought so.

It’s hard to emphasize how frightened we all were when “polio season” – Spring – came around. Sniffles in polio season got you a day or two in bed, period. Whenever there was a case – and there were always some – it was reported in the newspapers including the district it happened in. We were scared of polio. Everyone knew that President Roosevelt had it and that he was somewhat crippled although we didn’t know how badly. No one my age ever saw a picture of him in his wheel chair while he was alive. But we knew he had one. Polio was serious stuff.

And it’s time for me to go upstairs and work on fiction. I’ll continue this tomorrow.

This came this evening:

Vaccinations and autism

You mentioned "autism" in the title, but never addressed it in the body. Do you think there is a bona fide link between the two, or is it just a statistical anomaly?

Jay Ward

No, I said I’d get back to the subject. What’s above is just the introduction.  In 1954 the graduate psychology class in abnormal psychology had one lecture on autism, and very few symptoms were associated with it.  It was rare. I need to introduce that topic before we can look at vaccination and autism. Sorry for the confusion.

(I wrote what comes after this earlier today),

I’m still trying to figure out what Apple did to warrant the Wrath of Washington in the anti-trust case. The Wall Street Journal editorial “Guilty of Competition” last week http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324879504578597883383524650.html pretty well says it: Apple up competition in the eBook business, the prices of eBooks went down while sales went up, Amazon’s market share remained high but fell significantly so that Amazon came up with numerous author-friendly schemes, and there are still more eBooks sold by Amazon to Apple iPad users than are bought by them from Apple. If this was a conspiracy in restraint of trade it was the most incompetent one I ever heard described.

As proof of Apple’s malfeasance she [Judge Denise Cote] notes that the company "did not want to begin a business in which it would sustain losses" and "hoped to launch a new content store that was both profitable and popular." Next up, indictments for every other successful American company.

Before Apple’s creation of the tablet computer, Amazon dominated 90% of the e-book market and the book industry worked on wholesale distribution, with publishers charging a fixed price and retailers setting the consumer sale price. Amazon was selling e-books at $9.99 as loss leaders for the Kindle device. That price point and business model were not for all time revealed to man by God in a burning bush, unless He turns out to be Jeff Bezos.

Apple preferred agency pricing, in which it would take a fixed 30% commission of sales, with prices set by publishers. Retailer royalties are routine and have long been upheld by the courts, but Judge Cote accepts the Justice Department’s bizarre legal theory: By following its independent business interests and using new products and content to disrupt an incumbent near-monopoly, Apple thereby gave the publishers a platform to challenge Amazon’s dominance and the leverage to force Amazon to flip to the agency model too.

This helps explain why the average price of "trade" e-books fell to $7.34 from $7.97 over the next two years. Judge Cote called this fact "not persuasive" because Apple "did not present any analysis that attempted to control for the many changes that the e-book market was experiencing during these early years of its growth." In other words, the only way to show harm to consumers is by slicing the e-books pricing data in ways that automatically lead to the conclusions that Justice and Judge Cote had already reached.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324879504578597883383524650.html

I find that analysis persuasive. The Federal Government had no business getting involved in this. Silicon Valley, the Internet, Amazon, and the whole industry grew up without Federal Regulation and did just fine. The Feds with their ham handed anti-trust action managed to make it so painful for Bill Gates that he has left Microsoft to go search for a new vision while he and Melinda try to change the world by spending money, which may or may not be a good thing (it certainly wasn’t for computer users, but it was good for his competitors). Now it goes after Apple.

I am reminded of the story of Tarquin the Proud. For those wondering what that’s about, see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view476.html.

I would be pleased to see a rational defense of the government’s action against Apple in this matter. I have so far seen none.

I found on looking up the Tarquin the Proud story that I said in 2007:

Three things are pretty clear about Iraq:

o   If we leave in a hurry, it will come apart, and there will be civil war. I doubt those who call for US intervention in Darfur will agitate for us to go back in. The Turks will probably intervene in the Kurdish zone of Iraq. In Baghdad those who collaborated with the US and/or the US backed coalition government will probably be killed, some quickly, others over time. Their families are not likely to survive either.

o   The Civil war will be our fault. We broke it.

o   Any rational analysis of the situation would have reached these conclusions before we invaded. It was not only predictable but predicted. 

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view476.html.

DC-X 20th Anniversary

Jerry,

The upcoming DC-X 20th Anniversary conference is shaping up. I somewhat poor-mouthed the Friday August 16th session out at the New Mexico Spaceport in an earlier letter, but they’ve since added considerably more good content. In particular, both of the reunited DC-X Team sessions are now out there on Friday, and it’s worth catching despite the need to deal with getting on a bus in Truth or Consequences NM at 8 am, then that evening driving to Alamogordo for the Saturday and Sunday sessions.

Saturday in Alamogordo, after our morning session on the politics behind DC-X, the focus is on all the things that came of DC-X’s success, then the Sunday workshop sessions will look at where things should go next.

This is very much a worthwhile event for anyone interested in where "newspace" came from and where it’s headed.

The latest conference details are at http://dc-xspacequest.org/.

best

Henry

A final toast for the Doolittle Raiders

 

Verified. The item below is from CNN, April 4, 2013, by Bob Greene.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/14/opinion/greene-doolittle-raiders

There are additional pictures and video at the web site.

Thirty seconds over Tokyo

View 782 Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The Hollywood Boulevard robbing spree in honor of Tyron Martin continues. http://hollywood.patch.com/groups/breaking-news/p/lapd-around-20-people-go-on-street-robbery-spree-near-hollywood–highland

Rush Limbaugh has deduced from Martin’s final phone call that Martin had concluded that Zimmerman was a homosexual and should be sent away from the neighborhood. The only evidence is from the telephone call, and the fact that Martin did not run away from Zimmerman but turned to confront him.

Why we stayed in Afghanistan

I am not a military strategist but I would venture that having a military position in Afghanistan gave us leverage over Pakistan without the need to do much beyond the occasional boarder incursion into Waziristan, chasing Taliban. It seems this was being accomplished with minimal effort up until Obama decided that Afghanistan was "the right war". After the Iraq invasion, we should also have been in an excellent position to put pressure on Iran. We "had them surrounded", but we seem to have done little to empress this fact upon the Iranians. All that is purely theoretical of course and now the moment is gone. My fear is that the next time our only strategic option will be to, as they say, "make the rubble dance".

Thank you for all the enjoyment I have gotten from your various writings. You are always interesting and reasoned and make me examine my own reasons especially when I disagree with you. And I have long said that you and Larry Niven are my three favorite living SciFi writers.

Regards

Dean Kennedy

Having a military presence in Afghanistan – having a couple of key bases – did not require occupation and attempt to impose the mayor of Kabul on the rest of the country. After the expulsion of the Taliban it would have been simple to negotiate permission for bases from whomever became the mayor of Kabul while leasing the territory from local war lords. And making clear that while we provided security for the locals around our bases, we were not there as rulers.

As to Iraq, as I said after the fall of Baghdad, originally promised the Iraqi Army “an honorable place” in the rebuilding of Iraq. That would have been enough to preserve order. Anything more ambitious was beyond our ability – and there was no nation of Iraq nor ever had there been. It had been three provinces of the Ottoman Empire glued together to make a kingdom for the senior Hashemite who had been displaced from the hereditary post of Protector of Mecca by the Brits who owed Arabia to Ibn Saud. We might have hired the Brits and French to try to run Iraq for us, but we certainly had no expertise in competent empire. Rather the opposite. We learned little from our Philippine adventure; we incorporated Hawaii into the Republic after that conquest.

Republics suffer when they try to be imperial. We are suffering from our attempt.

Sobering Points on the Navy

As we are a sea power, this video is worth every Americans’ time.  I do not think people have a full grasp of how weak our Navy is and what this means.  I’m sure you’ve noted this over the years and now, finally, an important Congress critter is concerned:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1dD5DrYq034#at=550

You could read more here:

http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=hudson_upcoming_events&id=1017

http://tinyurl.com/ppjkg7x

—–

Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo

It is well to be reminded of this. The United States is a maritime power, and our peacekeeping ability is dependent on our Navy. We raise armies when we face war, but small wars have always been the province of the Navy and Marines. Had we had Swift craft in the Mediterranean the Benghazi incident would not have happened. There is piracy along the Horn of Africa and little we can do. Neglect of the Navy is a major defect in the Obama strategy of withdrawal from overseas entanglements.

I approve of the elimination of entangling alliances and involvements in overseas territorial disputes; but as a sea power we also have obligations. I doubt that President Obama has ever read Mahan, and I suspect few of his national security advisors have either. Many of the specific recommendations of Mahan’s advice were greatly influenced by the technology of the time, and some are clearly out of date; but the importance of sea power in maintaining liberty cannot be overstated.

Re: Afghanistan (and Iraq)

As you know, I supported both Afghanistan and Iraq. I still believe that going into Iraq was the right thing to do, but was badly handled — and in retrospect wish that President Bush 43 had gotten a formal declaration of war so that the Democrats would also have owned the consequences. (Even better would have been if Bush 41 had finished the job right the first time.)

In response to yesterday’s email from "paradoctor," the problem is not with the military. The problem in both cases was mushy, open-ended objectives which kept changing over time with the political winds (see comment about Democrat ownership above). A battlefield is no place for political correctness, but as a country we seem to have become incompetent to establish rules of engagement which consider meeting the military objective as a higher priority than the impossible task of leaving behind a friendly populace. (Dare I say that the only ruthlessness from political progressives comes directed towards their conservative/libertarian/Christian political opponents; not towards their country’s opponents on the battlefield.)

Of course invaders have been repelled by Afghanistan itself throughout history, but we should have gone in with simpler objectives, achieved those objectives, and left behind a cooperative government without insisting on Democratic process in a country which has known nothing but tribal authoritarianism for millennia. Ditto Iraq; take out the troublemaker and let the people form their own government(s) afterward. I am a firm believer in the Constitution, but there is probably no more anti-Constitutional form of governance on the planet than rigorous adherence to Sharia law, and no way a liberal (old definition) Constitution can be enforced in a Sharia-adherent dominated society.

Anon

There is never a substitute for victory, but it is always well to know what victory is and is not. Being able to dictate your will to a conquered people does not mean that you will be smart about what you do with that ability. Democracies tend to be either greedy and exploitive imperials, and worse, because of internal politics tend to be incompetent at empire while raising the stakes higher and higher. See the history of Rome after the conquest of Sardinia and Sicily: territories that, unlike conquests of the Republic up to then, were never intended to be incorporated into the Roman State, and were governed without the consent of the governed. The effect on the Roman Army which learned how to govern rather than defend was enormous. Rome eventually had to choose between Republic and Empire and the Army chose Empire.

The way to export freedom is to live as free men.

This is in reply to last night’s View.

Sabre engines seeking funding…Jerry

It seems Reaction Engines Ltd. are looking for the next round of funding (approx £200M) having managed to extract the promise of £60M from the UK government.

See:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23332592

It seems the only functional part of Sabre is the pre-cooler for refrigerating the intake gases.

The history of British Government involvement in space technology is spotty (see the history of the Blue Streak missile

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Streak_%28missile%29 ).

Best regards

Ian Crowe

View 782 Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Riots in Los Angeles last night, but they weren’t much. The Attorney General advocates dual jeopardy for Zimmerman. He has to be guilty of something! Several radio talk show hosts are saying the same thing. There is one interpretation of a telephone conversation in which Martin intimated that he was being stalked by a creepy dude: that Martin thought he was being pursued by a male rapist, and that he confronted the stalker with violence out of fear. That approaches high tragedy: each of those in the fatal confrontation thought he was doing the right thing in protecting the neighborhood. I have no evidence of this other than Martin’s final call.

If Martin had called 911 as Zimmerman did the result would probably have been different.

Development of commercial space will be needed to increase productivity sufficiently to make a big enough pie to distribute and spread the wealth – you can’t socialize unless you produce. I am often informed of claims to progress in space technology.

Space access breakthrough by Poms

Hi Jerry,

just in case you do not have this yet – here is a link for you:

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html

Regards

This leads to a nice web site presentation of an engine concept first postulated in an Arthur Clarke story about 1950 or so: A supersonic ramjet that once flown to high altitude as a ramjet becomes a rocket (by closing the ram intakes and feeding oxidant into the system) to achieve orbital velocity.

There were a number of projects aiming at development of this sort of engine. The NASP National AeroSpace Plane project generated numerous  tests. Most rocket scientists abandoned the concept because the plumbing was expensive and the mass savings were low. In order to achieve an appreciable fraction of orbital velocity it is necessary to fly at very high Mach numbers in the atmosphere. This puts re-entry temperature stress on the leading edges of the wings and the intake surfaces of the air intake scoops, and as of 1990 at least there were simply no materials to build those of. NASP was reluctantly abandoned because many concluded that it would need unobtanium for the intake scoops.

The ramjet-then-rocket concept appealed to Clarke and to many who followed him, but the numbers don’t give all that much advantage to the concept. LOX is cheap and cryogenics have mass costs, with the mass added to the structure which must be put into orbit; while LOX is of course part of the reaction mass that does not go to orbit.

We designed the SSX at 600,000 pounds Gross Lift Off Weight (GLOW) and about 50,000 pounds structure weight as an x-project that as Max Hunter put it “Might not make orbit but it will scare it to death”; SSX http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/SSX.html was intended to supply the knowledge required to build a single stage to orbit system, refuelable and reusable. The Air Force didn’t have the money to build the 600,000 GLOW SSX so the scale model DC/X was built to test the Vertical Takeoff and Landing concepts; it did that. DC/X could be controlled at low speeds, and was steerable and landable.

I would be astonished if the SABRE ramjet/rocket engine described on this web site had actually been built and flight tested. I note that the web site claims Mach 5 cruising speeds. The X-51 achieved that but not as a sustained cruising speed. http://jalopnik.com/5549364/scramjet-destroys-nasa-record-hits-mach-5-for-three-minutes

The original ramjet to orbit concept required reaching speeds above Mach 20 before converting to onboard oxidant.

I’d appreciate enlightenment from anyone who knows more, but I have no confidence that we known how to fly to space and return with this concept. I still believe we can build reusable Single Stage to Orbit systems at above 600,000 pound GLOW vertical takeoff and landing. X-33 was intended to be vertical takeoff horizontal landing but after billions of dollars were spent no fling hardware was tested. The SSX cold have been tested with three flying X vehicles for less than X-33 cost.

Sabre engines seeking funding…

Jerry

It seems Reaction Engines Ltd. are looking for the next round of funding (approx £200M) having managed to extract the promise of £60M from the UK government.

See:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23332592

It seems the only functional part of Sabre is the pre-cooler for refrigerating the intake gases.

The history of British Government involvement in space technology is spotty (see the history of the Blue Streak missile

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Streak_%28missile%29 ).

Best regards

Ian Crowe

Subj: Video: Hexacopter view of SpaceX Grasshopper 325m flight and precision landing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGimzB5QM1M&feature=c4-overview&list=UUtI0Hodo5o5dUb67FeUjDeA

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Now imagine a thousand of them each with a kilo of C-4 as a payload.

Re: Russian security at US events

Jerry,

this has already been debunked. Infowars is spinning this tale based on a single snippet of a press release and ignoring the context. See http://ace.mu.nu/archives/341506.php which links to another site with a fuller explanation.

Here’s the relvant portion:

"The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry and the USA Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are going to exchange experts during joint rescue operations in major disasters. This is provided by a protocol of the fourth meeting of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission Working Group on Emergency Situations and seventeenth meeting of Joint U.S.-Russia Cooperation Committee on Emergency Situations, which took place in Washington on 25 June.

The document provides for expert cooperation in disaster response operations and to study the latest practices.

In addition, the parties approved of U.S.-Russian cooperation in this field in 2013-2014, which envisages exchange of experience including in monitoring and forecasting emergency situations, training of rescuers, development of mine-rescuing and provision of security at mass events."

Note that what Infowars elided is that this was a conference or meeting to discuss sharing information about provision of security, not an agreement to actually provide security.

Rick C

Good. Actually I had expected to see the US and Russia in a much closer alliance by now.  Clinton dumped that with his anti=Slav activities in the Balkans. Everyone seems to forget that Russians have always been Pan-Slavic.  They never listen to "Serbo-Russian March during Serbo-Ottoman war” AKA Marche Slav by Tchaikovsky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vq1cJex4o

They are still Russians, and they saw us aiding the Bosnian oppressors. The music contains some of Russia’s soul.

Dear Jerry Pournelle:

You write:

<<

We had good strategic reason to go into Afghanistan and throw out those who had harbored our enemies; and to make it plain that if they went back to harboring our enemies we would be back. Then we should have left. Instead we stayed. I do not know why.

>>

Whereas I do. The explanation is simple; the military of the USA is not in the business of winning wars. It is in the business of forever waging wars. To win a war, in the usual sense, is to enforce a peace on the victor’s terms; but to the American military-industrial complex, war is peace, and peace on its terms means a bigger and better war.

This is of course a special case of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

– paradoctor@aol.com

That is not the business of the military.  It is the result of their political masters.  Military professionals don’t seek war. 

View 782 Monday, July 15, 2013

I put up a mail bag including comments on the verdict last night.

Roberta sees the questioning of the Zimmerman Verdict as just more in the war against women.

The Attorney General is moved to investigate despite the fact that the FBI already investigated. The President to his credit has said that this is a nation of law and the jury has spoken, but he seems to be the only member of his administration to talk that way.

Either we live in a nation of law or we have a tyranny in development.

Moving ahead in commercial space.

The only way the United States can survive the wild increases in disability and unemployment benefits and the rest of the entitlement rush is through a massive increase in productivity. If you are going to give everyone a slice of pie there has to be enough pie to go around. There also have to be some incentives for those actually producing the pie to continue raising the fruit and berries and wheat and baking powder and butter (or at least lard) and see to the mixing and baking and – but you get the idea. There has to be a pie, and it has to be large enough for everyone to get a share, or spreading the wealth around is just a slogan to attract votes.

Democracies endure until the majority learns that it can vote itself largess from the public treasury. Up to that point awarding yourself money for doing nothing was known as graft. Old Ed Crump, the highly popular and successful city boss of Memphis when I was growing up, used to talk about ‘honest graft’ dishonest graft. Honest graft was the sort of thing like knowing where a road would be built or improved and tipping off your friends to buy out in that direction. Dishonest graft was stealing money from the treasury or intimidating taxpayers. Crump talked openly about it: he didn’t put up with theft and embezzlement and incompetence, but he rewarded efficiency and honesty. Oddly enough, most people believed him, and did so all the time I was in Memphis. I haven’t been back since. I suppose there has been some kind of debunking and posthumous degrading of the old man since I left in 1950.

But I ramble. My point is that the entitlement programs, all of them, Medicare, Social Security Retirement, Social Security Disability which has become a new form of extended unemployment – few who get on SS Disability ever return to the work force – are going broke. There is not enough pie to give out as much as has been promised to the Baby Boom generation (actually which it promised itself).

Fortunately commercial space is developing new ways to make more and better pie, and there are still entrepreneurs. For a while.

We all know Space-X and X-Corps. There are others.

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/space-all-small-cheap-satellites-may-one-day-do-your-6C10488674

Space for all: Small, cheap satellites may one day do your bidding

Matt Rivera and Alan Boyle NBC News

July 14, 2013 at 5:11 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO — Someday, swarms of satellites the size of a tissue box will be snapping pictures, taking environmental readings and broadcasting messages from orbit — but the entities controlling those satellites won’t be governments.

Instead, they’ll be hard-core hobbyists and elementary-school students, entrepreneurs and hacktivists. In short, anyone who can afford a few hundred dollars to send something to the final frontier.

The technology for this outer-space revolution already exists: It’s a type of satellite known as a CubeSat, which measures just 4 inches (10 centimeters) on a side. The CubeSat phenomenon started out as an educational experiment, but now it’s turning into a crowdsourcing, crowdfunding movement of Kickstarter proportions. And not even the sky is the limit.

This year alone, more than two dozen CubeSats are due to go into orbit, piggybacking on commercial and government space launches.

. . .

It may not be long before CubeSats start going beyond Earth orbit: Scientists and engineers are working on schemes to send the nanosatellites to the moon, or to the outer solar system. (A Kickstarter campaign for interplanetary CubeSats is in progress right now.)

Eventually, putting a satellite into outer space could be as easy as sending camera-equipped balloons into the stratosphere — in other words, so easy a 7-year-old could do it.

"Realistically, in the next couple of years, it’s going to be possible to put a sprite into orbit for less than $1,000, so that will bring it within the reach of hobbyists and high-school students for science fairs," Manchester said. "It’s the sort of thing I wish I had when I was a kid."

Of course it takes entrepreneurial talent to figure out ways to make money with these programs: if they don’t make money they’re just another entitlement adding to the looming tidal wave of debt. But they are making money.

Moore’s law is inexorable. We can do more and more with less and less. The precision gyros and accelerometers in a Minuteman missile cost millions of dollars. Now you can get a full set of gyros and accelerometers with a GPS receiver to boot on a chip for under $50, and that cost is falling. You can build a satellite capable of doing crop forecasts for a few thousand dollars and get it launched as a cube sat. Telemetry is no longer expensive – the batteries cost more than the electronics. In the early days of spy satellites we had to drop physical film packages and catch them off Hawaii before they fell into the sea to get good pictures of the Soviet ICBM installations. Now a cubesat can give you an instant picture at much better resolution.

My Firefox open tabs list is getting far too long. I tend to keep tabs open when I intend to write something about their subject – generally I am sent a reference to the site by one of my readers, and having looked at it I decide to keep it open to remind me to comment. And then come a couple of bad weeks and the number of open tabs grows and grows, and I realize I will probably never have time to comment on all of them.l

Here are some of the open tabs I am closing. Every one of them is worth reading for one reason or another. Most deserve a comment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/opinion/sunday/why-the-fuss-over-the-dsm-5.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fopinion%2Findex.jsonp&_r=3&

http://www.gopusa.com/theloft/2013/06/05/excuse-me-did-you-just-say-gun/?subscriber=1

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/virtue.html

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/

http://www.mongabay.com/history/syria/syria-structure_of_society.html

http://www.fantasticalandrewfox.com/2013/06/20/burn-the-witch-swarm-cyber-shaming-in-science-fiction/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703749504576172714184601654.html

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/a-junior-officers-perspective-on-brain-drain

My apologies for throwing so much at you, but the titles are pretty well self explanatory so you can choose among them ones that you might find interesting. As I said above, I think each is worth your time, but clearly I don’t have time to deal with all of them. I thought it better to show them than just to forget them.

A comment to a mailbag item from last night:

"Stand Your Ground" comment

Jerry, the guy who gave you the piece on the Florida “Stand Your Ground” law may be somewhat mistaken.

He said “Under the law, I can go punch Mike Tyson in the face in locked room. If he hits back and I fear "great bodily injury" I can shoot him because I have no place to run.”

Tucker Max gives an absolutely beautiful exposition of the legal concept of “proximate cause” (legal term), in “Hilarity Ensues” at pp. 188-190 (http://books.google.com/books?id=0PJ2PdpE2XkC&pg=PA188#v=onepage&q&f=false <http://books.google.com/books?id=0PJ2PdpE2XkC&pg=PA188#v=onepage&q&f=false> ). He starts by quoting the Wikipedia entry, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause> , on “proximate cause”: “In the law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law> , a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to a legally recognizable injury to be held to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate (or legal) cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but for" test: But for the action, the result would not have happened. For example, but for running the red light <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light> , the collision <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision> would not have occurred. For an act to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.”

That would seem to be directly applicable to your correspondent’s hypothetical, and suggests that your correspondent would not fare well at trial. While Iron Mike’s return punch might be the cause-in-fact for his fear of great bodily injury, his initial assault on Iron Mike would almost certainly be considered the proximate cause, making him, not Iron Mike, responsible for the final outcome.

–John