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View 776 Monday, June 03, 2013

Beginning to catch up. There is a great deal going on in the world, but much of it is self explanatory.

The Ground Game

It comes as no surprise to anyone who studies such matters that the IRS hounded Tea Party and Patriot get out the vote organizations, and President Obama won re-election largely through the operations of Democratic get out the vote activities. When I was in the campaign management business, I always stressed the importance of what we called the ground game – getting voters willing to vote for your candidate actually to do so.

Of course many managers stressed media campaigns. Most of them were partners in advertising agencies which got 15% of the money put into campaign ads. None of the managers profited from the much harder work of building get out the vote organizations. Republican campaign advisors generally prefer media campaigns, and insist that it’s important to win hearts and minds. I always pointed out that if I have 40% approval and get 60% of my people to the polls, and the other guy has 50% approval but only gets half of his people to the polls, it’s a very close race; and if I manage to get 65% of my people actually to vote, I win. Getting people to change their minds is not easy. Getting them so disgusted with the political process that they adopt the attitude of “I never vote. It only encourages them” can also be effective but it often makes it difficult to govern if you won that way. The Obama election strategy was to attack Romney and discourage Republican voters. Since it was obvious that the 2010 Congressional election was dominated by the Tea Party and Patriot groups, and had been obvious since 2004 that Patriot and Tea Party Get Out the Vote organizations were the shock troops and mainstay of the Republican ground game, it took no Presidential order to get the unionized IRS public employees to understand the stake they had in this game – even if the IRS Acting Commissioner had more recorded official visits to the White House than the Secretaries of State and Defense combined during the year leading up to the 2012 election.

It may be that the IRS scandal will bring back the Tea Party quite literally with a vengeance. If so, the upcoming Congressional election will be a key event in the history of these United States.

One can argue that the entire matter of ‘tax exemption’ for politically oriented organizations needs considerable rethinking if we are to preserve the fundamentals of freedom. Political donations are made from already taxed income. Political deductions should not be deductible – why should they? But those who collect political donations and spend them on political elections shouldn’t be paying taxes on what they collect, either. The devil is in the details.

Then there is the matter of civic good. We have always acted as if we believe that higher voting percentages are a Good Thing, illustrative of the strength of the Republic, but that isn’t entirely obvious. Communist one-party regimes routinely get 90% of the vote to the polls, and approval rates of over 90%, but those weren’t signs of strength and popular approval, they were signs that the Communist Party understood the value of getting those numbers. For some Party managers it was not quite a matter of life or death, but it was a definite matter of career trajectory.

On the non-political level it is time to have a non-political dialogue on campaign financing and party organization in this Republic; alas, it is probably impossible to do that. With academia overwhelmingly liberal Democratic, any convention of political “philosophers” is likely to look like a Democratic Convention with the only dissent and debate being between the ruling politicians and various factions to their left. A “bi-partisan” group would mostly consist of the usual suspects. A national convention with Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner isn’t going to do much for the United States. Still, perhaps it is possible to have some rational discussion of the organization of political financing. As was observed a very long time ago, in a relatively free society it is very difficult to silence the rich no matter what restrictions you put on campaign financing. Those who own a printing press generally enjoy some freedom of the press, and those who and throw bit parties can often get a big audience… But then all this has been known since the days of Cicero (substitute having literate clients and slaves for a printing press).

Enough. This isn’t what I wanted to write about. The bottom line is that the President’s star is not shining as brightly as it used to, and although he was re-elected it was at a fairly high cost. Attacking Romney while building a get out the vote operation as the IRS closed down the opposition ground game was a successful way to win the election, but it left little mandate for governing.

A good summary of the last couple of weeks in Washington is in today’s Wall Street Journal, The Decline of the Obama Presidency, by Fred Barnes. Barnes is a mainstay of the NeoCon Weekly Standard.

The Computer Revolution Continues

I’ve been brooding about the political situation, but “Professors Are About to Get an Online Education” by Andy Kesslar in today’s Wall Street Journal reminds me of hopeful developments that have been building (and we’ve been discussing for a long time). Georgia Tech has announced an on-line master’s degree in computer science for a quarter of the cost of an on-campus degree. Since the course lectures are likely to be better produced and selected from the best available, it is possible that the on-line graduates will have learned more than the on-campus students.

Actually, that latter has been true for a long time. The Kahn Academy Lectures have received increasing support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other major sources, and his series of mathematics “chalk talks” will take students from Algebra and Analytical Geometry through Limits and Differential Calculus to a sufficiently advanced skill in using calculus to make the Feynman Lectures on Physics quite comprehensible. Clearly not everyone can get through them – Feynman’s Three Volume Lectures on Physics are a Cal Tech level introductory experience – but anyone who takes a few months to go through the Kahn Academy lectures on calculus, the Feynman on-line Physics lectures, and then three volume introduction to physics will breeze through the first couple of years almost anywhere but Cal Tech or MIT, and will likely do well there. Now understand that I mean by “go through” algebra and calculus working every darned exercise problem. The trouble with growing up bright, particularly when not in a community of brights, is the temptation to quit working on a subject when you understand it but before you become comfortable with it. This is particularly true when you quickly find that you understand the subject better than the teacher – and alas, in most high schools and community colleges, bright students trying to learn calculus will very quickly understand it better than the teacher (who may well be someone much like themselves, with an ‘understanding’ not based on the familiarity that comes from use.

I have trouble getting that across to bright kids. Watching really good lecturers like Kahn and Feynman tempts you to think you understand what they have said, but generally you won’t, not until you try to use your new tools to work through problems. Using calculus to solve a problem like “Is it possible with existing materials to build a centrifugal arm on the lunar surface that can throw materials into lunar orbit?” is a way of determining whether you really understand the subject. Proving theorems – the classical way calculus was taught for a long time – won’t do that.

Kessler’s WSJ article discusses some of the possible consequences of this credentialed on-line degree. If it is possible to gain credentialed mastery in computer science for $7,000, while in fact almost all the needed lectures and courses are on line for free, just where is the need of the $132,000 a year professor? Now one can make the case that at the Master’s level there is some need for some interaction with the faculty (although how much gets for the standard $25,000 on-campus degree fees isn’t as obvious as it might be), but move down a few notches.

Universities have proved from the days of the GI Bill after WW II to present that if there is more money available in the student pool – whether government subsidies or government backed loans with government enforced payment – the universities will absorb it, and like every other market the more money injected into the market the higher the prices will rise. This is egregiously obvious in the American University system, and every year brings us more confirming incidents. Now some universities may be selling excellent instruction, and thus justify their prices, but surely not all of them. I have seen some community colleges charging more than my undergraduate classes at the University of Iowa cost for instruction that wasn’t a tenth the quality of what we got from the Christian Brothers in Memphis in the 1940’s – and that’s just my personal experience. There’s plenty of data. And modern high schools are no great shakes at college prep, else no university would need to offer bonehead English.

The United States is being divided into the children of those rich enough to get them through college without debt, and those who aren’t. Of those who aren’t the children of the rich, the brightest will probably manage scholarships. Even they will have to find ways around the national minimum wage laws that forbid students to take the traditional student jobs like waiting on tables for a hour for a meal and tips – “board jobs” were a life saver for me at the University of Iowa because the GI Bill paid tuition with a little left over for rent, but nothing for food. Alas, the vast majority of students who go to college will graduate with a lifetime of debt owed to the unremitting Federal bureaucracy. I can’t think that a middle class of bondsmen was the intent of the Framers.

But there is hope so long as there is freedom. What modern academic institutions have to offer is no longer superior education – you can generally find better education on line for all but a few laboratory intense subjects – but credentials. One doesn’t go to most universities for an education but for a degree. It is that credential that you pay for.

The unionized faculties of the universities will try to keep the price of a credential high, but I think we out-number them, and a rational case can be made that all anyone needs now is a credential. Make the credentialing fair. You can’t make it too fair – make the credentialing exam tough enough and too many will fail, as witness high schools that try actually to enforce standards. Public high schools rarely manage that and crumble. Some private high schools continue to market excellent education. In between are a number of institutions that can, by giving every student an iPad and supervising their use, raise their credentialing standards and build reputations…

Meanwhile it can only get better. Moore’s Law will see to that. The cost of the iPad or Droid needed to access the already available lectures is dropping fast. Tablets that let you interact with an AI that dispenses exercise problems are cheap and getting cheaper. Building servers that host the AI who dispenses and corrects the exercises are getting cheaper. As I predicted forty years ago, easily learned high level computer languages have been developed with more to come which make creating those AI tutors a much easier job. Modern desktops eclipse what were thought of as supercomputers back in BYTE’s early days.

We’re just seeing the beginning of the effects of the computer revolution on modern education.

There is now talk of the economic advantage of amnesty: it will bring in new workers. Social Security is broke in the sense that it is obligated to pay out a great deal of money, and has none whatever in its “Trust Fund”. That is, the Trust Fund contains IOU’s, mostly Treasury Bonds.

The problem is that in 1950 there were 16 workers paying into Social Security for each worker drawing out of it. Money flowed into the Trust Fund – and was sent to the general treasury in exchange for IOU’s. That money was spent to expand the government’s size and raise its worker’s pay. Meanwhile more Social Security entitlements were created, such as various disability payments to people who never worked and never put money into the system. Very soon now the number of workers paying into the Social Security System will be two for each drawing out of it. Every American worker must support himself and family and pay half the support for another worker. Less cash comes in. The Social Security obligations began to mount up. The system inevitably fails.

One solution is to import workers, and to legalize undocumented workers and put them in the system. The math looks fairly good: most illegals are working age and didn’t bring their parents, and many have children who are already legal and will add to the work force. More workers paying into Social Security means less deficit. It’s all good.

We’ll defer comment on that. What I want to point out is that Moore’s Law is inexorable. Even in bad economic times – perhaps it’s a big cause of bad economic times? – productivity of each worker goes up. In some manufacturing industries each worker (and some robots) actually does produce more than 8 workers used to – and we are still on the rapidly rising part of the big S curve that really graphs Moore’s Law.

It’s pretty hard to see how we can much improve productivity in traditional agriculture , but there are amazing developments in unconventional food production. The same is true in many other fields. Perhaps the Social Security problem isn’t as severe as we think.

Of course there are many jobs where productivity can’t improve much. Those are often the ones filled by undocumented workers. It isn’t likely that making the gardener crew legal and collecting Self Employment tax from them will solve the problems…

I’ll try to catch up with Mail. We have a lot of it, much of it very good.

View 776 Thursday, May 30, 2013

I’ve had a hectic week, some good – Monday was good – and some not so, which I suppose is to be expected, so I’m catching up again. The news has been a bit discouraging. I was going to write a couple of short essays today, but the day was eaten by locusts. Shopping takes longer than it used to. Everything takes longer. Suddenly it was dinner time, and then time for the LASFS meeting, and I was planning on doing something tonight but we stayed and talked about the loss of Jack Vance.

Jack Vance, RIP. I never knew him well, but he was a close friend of Poul Anderson. Jack had a story telling knack that many envied. He also had a live imagination. This resulted in some wonderful tales – the Demon Princes series was wonderful – and some sequences that appealed to some and turned off others. Jack was never a big best seller but he was a journeyman artist story teller who make a good living at this racket, and told some great stories.

But it’s late and I’m due for bed. I’ll try to catch up tomorrow.

View 775 Friday, May 24, 2013

If you wonder why Congress is losing approval with the people, this may be of use: 

http://www.youtube.com/embed/svGDZOW-brA?rel=0  It is worth your time.

A cheer for President Obama

In a major speech at the National Defense University, President Obama announced that it it time for an end to the war on terror. In pursuit of that he has a new policy on drone strikes, with strict procedures to be followed before anyone can be put on a proscription list and killed by a Hellfire missile (along with anyone else unfortunate enough to be near the proscribed person) anywhere in the world. And he says that he intends to close the internment camp – prison? – at Guantanamo.

That’s worth a cheer. I have never been a great fan of a war without identifiable enemies which justifies proscription lists, nor of overseas internment camps to which people may be sent for the duration of a war which has no visible means of being concluded. A detainment camp for prisoners of war, subject to the rules of the Geneva Convention, should be sufficient: and yes, I understand that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo are uncooperative to say the least, and require extraordinary means of confinement including separation from other prisoners. I understand the impossibility of running such an establishment when hundreds of judicial officers can assert authority over them and issue writs of habeas corpus.

The War Powers of the President are great, and should be; but wars ought to have a defined enemy, and some means of coming to an end.

This will not all be settled by fiat. There will be debate, as there should be. This is not the first time that the United States has been challenged by organized clandestine enemies. It is time to find ways of dealing with this.

Perpetual war is not in my judgment the best way to do that. It is time and high time to have a national debate on just what measures the United States should take in defense against an implacable enemy dedicated to acts of terror.

Regarding Cold Fusion:

E-Cat report

I too have been following Andrea Rossi since he first surfaced. I find the vitriol used against LENR and him pathological, from the days of Robert Park and Huizenga, through the Patent Office making it virtually impossible to obtain patents in anything related to cold fusion, to the current ad hominems.

Andrea Rossi sold his EON business for about a million Euros (a matter of public record) and could have retired. It is ludicrous to suggest that he has spent that money and several years working 14 – 16 hour days to build an elaborate fraud.

The recent two 100 hour tests funded by the Swedish R&D Organization ELFORSK (equivalent to our EPRI) run by seven professors from various universities, proves beyond reasonable doubt that LENR is real and Rossi’s E-Cat works.

Doubt remains about how controllable the E-Cat is and the actual COP of a commercial unit. They are already committed to a six month trial starting this Summer.

The critics start with the idea that LENR is impossible and jump at any detail that might confirm their belief. The earlier demonstrations left plenty of room for the skeptics to suggest ways for fraud, but if the E-Cat really does work, this means that Rossi’s claims were actually true.

As of a couple of days ago DOE doesn’t believe LENR is real and refused to take Defkalion up on their offer to test the Hyperion (a kissing cousin to Rossi’s E-Cat) in Greece last year.

That DOE supports the $25 billion ITER hot fusion Tokamak is not entirely coincidental.

LENR is indeed real. I don’t think anyone has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation of how it works. Possibly Rossi knows as he knows what the fuel is and can analyze the ash.

There are hundreds of peer reviewed papers on the subject at http://lenr-canr.org Interesting times ahead

Adrian Ashfield

What I would like to see is a picture of a plant delivering a megawatt of power with some indication of how that was measured and what the power was being used for. Such things need no peer reviews although if reporters are not allowed to look behind the curtains some might be suspicious. I have seen a dozen “cold fusion” plants purporting to show as much as a hundred watts of output, but I was never allowed to examine where all the wires going into the system led to (and I suspect that one eventually ended in a wall socket), but those were all very low power output systems. It would be impossible to fake a megawatt (although finding a load to measure that much power output might be difficult). I’d be glad of an account of “How I charged my Volt on an LENR.”

There is no need for vitriol. A power plant that delivers a megawatt of power is not small, and showing that it can deliver that output, while not simple, isn’t all that difficult either; and since a megawatt is a lot of power, it would be very difficult to conceal some hidden input. If a small device can output a megawatt of electrical power, it should be headline news in any country in the world. I note that Forbes does not claim to have seen such a demonstration. I would be glad to be shown that I am in error on this. Surely it can’t be hard to show a megawatt of power?

As to the peer reviewed papers, the one by DIA appears to be a justification of continued Navy and other US agency investments in continued experimentation of the Fleischmann and Pons research, and an estimate that other governments are making similar small investments. It does not mention any large scale results, but does state that “energy anomalies” have taken place. I don’t doubt the energy anomalies. I have not seen any claim to have witnessed a megawatt.

I MW E-Cat plant real

Further to my recent comment on this form, I then read that you doubted the existence of the 1 MW plant.

Here is a picture of the 1 MW plant being loaded for shipment to the US last month.

http://s20.postimg.org/fc0n0hat5/004.jpg

Here is a picture of the Hot Cat under test http://ecat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Hot-Cat-closeup.jpg

Adrian Ashfield

My apologies but neither of those pictures shows me anything that convinces me that the system would deliver a megawatt or even light a hundred watt lightbulb. Now if the system ready for delivery were to be turned on and light up McCormick Field or Dodger Stadium I would be enormously impressed; and I suspect that such a demonstration could be arranged and would probably sell out. Perhaps the plant in the picture could be used? It can’t be that expensive to set it up just outside the stadium.

The existence of a system of the size in the picture capable of delivering a megawatt of power would start a fourth industrial revolution, as well as end the importance of the Middle East. No place on Earth need be without electrical power, apparently without need for large turbines and big power grids. Obviously a new source of energy would have an enormous impact on the war on terror.

The Kern County sheriff’s department, whose officers beat a partly drunk man until he died, has ruled that the man died of heart failure and high blood pressure. This seems a bit like saying that a man thrown off a building died of the fall. It seems extremely unlikely that the man would have died of failure had he not been bitten by police dogs and beaten by a number of young men with clubs. He was being beaten because he was trying to defend himself from the dog. A casual observer would say that the deputies beat him to death. He was certainly screaming for help as he lay with bound feet while being assaulted. He died soon after.

In England a British soldier was killed by attack with a cleaver. There is no contention that the assault was not intended to result in death. The President of the United States has so far refused this to call an act of terrorism. One presumes that the actual cause of death was exsanguination.

Neither of these is officially to be called an act of terror.

A brilliant idea

Re the London terrorists: We can put them thru the new food replicator and turn them into bacon. Then feed them to the pigs.

My fantasy on hearing of the attack was to picture a wigged judge putting on the black cap and sentencing them to be taken to Woolwich Barracks and there delivered into the custody of the Sergeant Major of Her Majesty’s Fusiliers, who need make no future account of his disposal.  Do they have the equivalent of Mons Meg in an English fortress?  I am pretty sure the Scots would loan her to the Fusiliers…

View 775 Thursday, May 23, 2013

Talk continues on carbon taxes, and there are political claims that Oklahoma deserved destruction since it produces oil and contributes to global warming and global warming causes extreme weather. Some of the rhetoric is frantic: we cannot continue spewing out CO2 into the atmosphere. We summed up what we know for sure a couple of days ago: CO2 levels in 1800 were about 280 ppm. In 1900 they were about 300 parts per million. Current levels are about 400. The error rates are in the order of 10% for the earliest estimates, and about 3% now.

This is a pretty dramatic rise in CO2. Up to now there is little evidence that the higher levels have caused harm, and considerable evidence that they have aided plant growth. If the growth rate slowed to a stop time would erase much of the growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration from the last century. While there may be benefits to the higher CO2 levels, I think few would regret a halt in their growth.

The problem with that is energy: there can’t be any economic growth without increases in the availability of energy, and the cost of energy is a very large part of the cost of economic growth. For the most part, any increase in low cost energy availability means an increase in production of atmospheric CO2.

All of this should be obvious although many of the AGW True Believers seem to be ignoring it.

There is, of course, an economical energy source that produces no CO2 whatever. The Believers will instantly say “Green Energy!” and their usual example is ground based solar energy. It’s true enough that it’s “green” in the sense that it doesn’t produce CO2 while it is producing electricity, although one could quibble over the CO2 produced in the production of solar panels. The problem is that except in special cases ground based solar is not an economical way of producing energy for economic growth. Indeed, most of the reason for its demand is tied to government subsidies. Ground based solar suffers from physical limitations: the Sun doesn’t shine at night, not much energy gets to the ground during bad weather, and the solar constant limits the maximum amount of power you can get per square meter even at noon on a clear day. There are inherent limits on electrical energy storage. Again no surprises.

A much “Greener” energy source is nuclear power. We keep hoping for lost cost high efficiency nuclear fusion power, but for the last forty years the estimate of the time needed to produce economically useful fusion power given major capital investment and a priority override to regulatory red tape has been thirty years. That is, we needed thirty years to get fusion-originated power into our houses back in 1970 (and I wrote stories based on that assumption). Came 1980 and we still needed thirty years to get there. And now in 2013 the last time I checked with the experts, the estimate is that we can do it with current science in about thirty years.

On the other hand we have plenty of experience with fusion based nuclear power. A recent Wall Street Journal article by environmentalists summarizes what’s known.

Going Green? Then Go Nuclear

We’re environmentalists, but pretending that solar power is ready for prime time is delusional.

By TED NORDHAUS And MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Over the last several decades, the cost of electricity from solar panels has declined dramatically, while the cost of building new nuclear plants has risen steadily. This has reaffirmed the long-standing view of many environmentalists that it will be cheaper and easier to reduce global warming emissions through solar electricity than with new nuclear plants. But while continuing price declines might someday make solar cheaper than nuclear, it’s not true today. Yet the mythmaking persists.

. . .

The cost of building and operating the Finnish nuclear plant over the next 20 years will be $15 billion. Over that time period, the plant will generate 225 terawatt-hours (twh) of electricity at a cost of 7 cents per kilowatt hour.

Since 2000, Germany has heavily subsidized electricity production from solar panels—offering long-term contracts to producers to purchase electricity at prices substantially above wholesale rates. The resulting solar installations are expected to generate 400 twh electricity over the 20 years that the panels will receive the subsidy, at a total cost to German ratepayers of $130 billion, or 32 cents per kwh.

In short, solar electricity in Germany will cost almost five times more for every kilowatt hour of electricity it provides than Finland’s new nuclear plant.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323716304578482663491426312.html

This is pretty much in line with what every other honest analyst comes up with. Nuclear is cheap compared to most other forms of energy generation. Its only real competition is from oil and coal.

If we want to continue economic growth while reducing the amounts of CO2 blown into the atmosphere, nuclear power is the way to go – at least until we get serious about space solar power satellites. I know, I know – I said all this in A Step Farther Out more than thirty years ago. It was true then and it remains true today. But so far as I can see, those who promise hope and change do so by subsidizing ground based solar, and hate boths pace and nuclear fission. And here we are.

Regarding the cold fusion report, I’m still waiting for input from some of our more expert readers, and I admit I have not been following this particular story very closely. We do have this:

Regarding Rossi and his E-Cat…

This report, taken in isolation, sounds impressive. But Rossi’s history and behavior are considerably less than impressive. He has a long criminal history in Italy, and has been caught in numerous lies about his current activities. Both the University of Bologna (on two separate occasions) and National Instruments have had to issue statements denying Rossi’s claims of a working relationship with them. His primary "expert" (Domenico Fioravanti) is a supposed retired NATO Colonel who seems not to have existed until Rossi presented him to the public (in 18 months, no one has been able to find any signs that such a person actually exists).

Rossi claims to have sold somewhere between 2 and 14 1-Megawatt devices, but they were all sold to "secret" customers. He has been selling "franchises" and claiming to have a factory in Florida to mass-produce the devices. But, when the Florida Bureau of Radiation Control investigated his public claims, he denied doing any manufacturing or selling in the United States.

I’ve been watching Rossi’s activities for over 2 years now, and it certainly seems to me that he is running an investment scam. I would love for his invention to be true, but if it is, then it will be the most extreme example of an "eccentric" inventor the world has ever seen. However, his behavior fits right in with several established con men (starting with John Worrell Keely, in the 1880s).

J

Which leaves unexplained the enthusiasm that Forbes has for the story; and I do not mean more than I say in that statement. I truly don’t know. I have seen no real explication of the fusion theory involved, and I have certainly seen no demonstration of a system that produces more energy than it consumes, or even a device whose output is a megawatt. A one-megawatt electrical device would not be small, and the cables to carry a megawatt of electric power would be difficult to hide. One would think that if several of them exist, it would not be that hard to get one of them to do a public demonstration.

As Descartes said (and Sagan made famous), extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In the case of a cold fusion plant the claim is more than extraordinary: it’s a civilization changer. The upside of it being true is enormous; but it does need at least one existence identification.