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View 717 Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The Secret of Black Ship Island by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes is now available on Nook and Amazon Kindle. This is a novella – a bit more than 40,000 words – set on Avalon, the first human interstellar colony, and takes place in the time between the novels The Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf’s Children. There’s a short preface by the authors, and the story will tell you why it is not an explicit part of the cultural background in Beowulf’s Children. It’s the story of a colossal generation gap, and some consequences of that. There’s also a new alien, designed by us with help from Jack Cohen. We liked it.

NOTE THAT I first posted this as The Legend of Black Ship Island, which is illustrative of the memory lapses I have come to hate but expect. It’s SECRET, and it’s still a good story. I get things right eventually, but I am not as often right the first time as I used to be. Ah. well.

And my daughter gets a favorable mention/citation in this Nature article: http://www.nature.com/news/satellites-expose-8-000-years-of-civilization-1.10257

Niven and I hiked up to the top of Mulholland today. Our first since I was laid out by whatever has kept me down since January. I made it, so I must be getting over it all, but it was pretty tough and the pollens were bad. Got a lot of good notes and scene ideas for our book. Profitable morning, very much so.

I came back from lunch to find a stockbroker alert about Chinese Credit Default Swaps experiences price anomalies after Internet rumors of a coup in Peking. I don’t really have much in stocks, and none in credit default swaps, but I do get some of the broker alerts. This is the first one like this I have seen in a while. The latest I can get on the subject is that no one knows. I remember similar rumors surfacing every few years. The People’s Liberation Army has enormous stakes in the Chinese economy, and armies have somewhat different goals, ideals, and honor systems than parties do. On the other hand the Chinese party system is systematic and thorough, and I recall few precedents for this extensive – and surprisingly well thought out – party structuring. It’s far more pervasive than anything Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin ever put in place. Stalin’s system teetered after his death, and the succession apparently depended entirely on the personal skills of some of the highest participants. The Nomenklatura began dismantling Stalin’s party system, and over time were successful; then their system gradually crumbled as the economic situation of the USSR remained static and then crumbled. China’s economic boom is said to be faltering, but that’s a slowing of growth, not an actual collapse. There is no shortage of goods in the large cities. Shops thrive, luxury goods are available to walk in customers for cash, and there is nothing like the extensive secondary economic/distribution system that marked the last decades of the Soviet Union Nomenklatura system.

Best guess is that it’s all rumor, but you can never know for sure. One reader sent me this link http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/21/inside-the-ring-436080940/ with the comment that we live in interesting times.

View 718 Monday, March 19, 2012

It is spring and tax time. And I am far behind.

The legend of the Red Tailed Angels

I’ve seen a few articles lately stirred up by the “Red Tails” movie, and a couple of letters: the Tuskegee Airmen did not have the perfect escort record generally claimed for them, and they were inefficient compared to other escort groups. The claim often made is that no bombers escorted by the 332^nd were ever lost to enemy air action. Few claimed that no bombers they escorted were ever shot down, although some accolades say as much, unlikely as that might be – there’s not much an escort fighter can do about flak. Especially if you’re going to Ploesti, or Berlin.

It turns out neither claim was true. The 332^nd did lose some of their bombers to enemy air action, nor should anyone be astonished at that. The Luftwaffe was pretty thin and green by the time the Tuskegee Airmen got well into the bomber escort business, but it still had some good pilots left, and they were defending their homeland against bombardment from the sky. They fought hard.

In the early days, the 99^th – the first of the Tuskegee trained fighter groups – was mostly given ground support missions (which fighter pilots have always hated) and when given escort missions were often excluded from the mission briefings. The real glory days of the Tuskegee Airmen came with the formation of the 332^nd (which incorporated the 99^th), and they got the red-tailed P-51 Mustangs in July 1944. Not long after that they went to Ploesti. Ploesti had the best flak defenses USAAF encountered during the war.

They lost some bombers, of course. Most to ground fire, but some to enemy air action. The claim that they never lost a bomber to enemy air action apparently originated in a Chicago newspaper and was picked up and echoed by other journalists. It made a good story, and I never questioned it; but it isn’t true. Over the course of their engagement about 25 bombers were lost to enemy action. It’s hard to get exact numbers, but one back of the envelope calculation shows about 750 US bombers lost to enemy air in the Mediterranean campaign and about 13 fighter groups operating there: that works out to 58 bombers lost/fighter group. Of course that’s too high since we don’t know what kind of bombers, but from all the evidence I can find, the 332^nd had a very low loss ratio, and they didn’t get the easy missions.

It is also true, as some recent articles point out, that the the 332^nd had a far lower kill count than many other escort squadrons. As far as I’m concerned that is no criticism: That’s the major reason for their formidable reputation as escort fighters. If you’re after kills, you relentlessly chase down damaged enemy aircraft. That generally leaves you well behind the mission, probably with your wing man. The point of escort missions isn’t to kill fighters. That was the big mistake that the Luftwaffe made in the Battle of Britain. The purpose of escort missions is to get the bombers to their targets – and to bring them home again, after the enemy has staged his fighters to cover the return route. On the way in there are many potential targets and the interceptors can’t cover them all. They may have to fly a long way and have less attack time before they have to land and refuel. When the bombers are on the way out it’s easier to know where the bombers are going, and to stage pursuit planes along the way. The fighters are fueled and ready and the pilots are fresh. The bombers and their escorts have been halfway to Hell – particularly if the target is Ploesti – and now they have to come home again. And if your fighter escorts have been off killing damaged aircraft, the interceptor units get Aces, but fewer of the bombers get home again.

The pride of the Tuskegee Airmen was that they didn’t abandon their bombers. They didn’t get as many kills, and overall they lost more of their own fighters than they shot down, which is why some claim they were the least efficient escort group in the European theater; but they stayed with the mission, and they brought their bombers home. That’s the mission.

View 717 Saturday, March 17, 2012

St. Patrick’s Day

There seem to be a number of malcontents determined to call this by some other name. I can’t think why. For those wondering why the fuss about St. Patrick, I can recommend How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. If you find the title an exaggeration, you may have a different view after reading the book; the claim is not at all unreasonable. It’s also a good story of how the Dark Ages came about.

The rush is on to the Apple stores. Steve Wozniak was first in line at the Century City mall Apple Store to get the new iPad. Steve has a habit of being first in line for new Apple products, although usually up in Silicon Valley rather than down here. I suppose he has long forgiven the other Steve for killing his Apple III and forcing Woz out of the company; I can remember when he was pretty bitter about that, and told the story often. Over time he came to appreciate Jobs, as has just about everyone else.

Everyone I know who has the new iPad likes it. Given that I make a living from books, which are marked up by 100% by the seller from the price paid to the distributor, I can hardly complain that Apple routinely marks up the iPad to about twice what it costs to make. Their service is good, and whether for good or not Apple always went for immediate profit rather than market share. It’s about time for me to upgrade my iPhone and iPad, but I may have to wait: I want to get mine from the local Apple store and they keep running out.

The faster than light neutrinos are getting less and less likely all the time: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57398740-264/not-so-fast-neutrinos-cern-says-lights-speedier-still/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&tag=nl.e703 They haven’t completely gone away, but that’s the way to bet it. Of course that’s always been the best way to bet it.

Dr. Roy Spencer has a new essay on Global Warming Belief as Cargo Cult science. That’s a fun idea, and no harder on the true believers than they have been on the skeptics, but it is a bit unfair. Some of the Global Warming Believers continue to look for other sources of heat retention and climate variation, and certainly some kind of greenhouse effect (which, as farmers will tell you, ain’t the way their greenhouses work, but that’s another story) and they just can’t find one that they think adequately covers the bases.

The problem is that even if it’s all due to CO2, that hardly justifies the draconian measures proposed to lower atmospheric CO2 content, particularly since those measures will never be adopted by the developing nations, or by India and China which are morphing from “developing” or “third world” status to tigers. I said forty years ago in this context that short of conquest there wasn’t any way for the West to impose “green” on the rest of the world. As my South African friend said one day, “Now that we have a seat at the table you tell us the game is over. So we’ll play our own game.” China and India have the same attitude.

Slowly we are developing the proper tools to deal with all this. We need to know more about what might be the optimum CO2 level and for that matter the optimum temperature. We certainly don’t want to go back to mile thick glaciers –which, by the way, can’t develop without there being some source of energy to move the water into the high northern latitudes so it can fall as snow. And we know that when that ice starts to form the glaciers can come with dazzling rapidity. England and Belgium apparently went from deciduous trees to being under year round ice in well under a century. Once you’re under a foot of Ice year round you may as well be under a hundred feet – you aren’t going to be growing wheat, or practicing dairy farming any more. As the Vikings in Greenland found. The Inuit ceased to be dairy farmers and learned to live off the land in the new climate. The Vikings went home to Iceland and Scandinavia.

We need to study climate, but we also need to develop energy. I had thought that by now the United States, like France, would be generating a substantial part of our energy from nuclear sources, which would make electric vehicles – beginning with trains, then interstate trucks, and eventually town cars – desirable and economical. Instead we seem to have thrown money in all directions, hoping that something would work.

But it’s late, Roberta and I are going out, and that’s a topic for another time .

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

View 717 Thursday, March 15, 2012

Ides of March: birthday of the late Dr. Stefan T. Possony, one of the great men of the Cold War.

My outlook mail has been broken since this morning when Microsoft seems to have sent some kind of update. I now have to exit Outlook, use Task manager to really kill it, then open outlook again to get it to send anything. It limps along as if it works, but it doesn’t. Also my accounts are now called jerryp@jerrypournelledotcom which is not the way I entered them nor have they been that way until – well I don’t know when it changed.

I can still get my mail, but I have to do things to get it. You can send and I’ll get it, but when I send mail it stacks up in my outbox until I exit and kill outlook then reopen it again. I am hoping to be able to find the message that seems to be stuck in my account but I am having trouble finding it. Ah well.

I kept playing with this, sending test messages and shutting down and restarting outlook, and Lo! a few minutes ago it stopped being stuck with the last message. I have no idea whether this ‘cure’ worked or what was done, but test messages now come through fast. We’ll see. Meanwhile it is bed time. Apologies.