Category Archives: View

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, November 05, 2015

Guy Fawkes Night

Remember, remember!
    The fifth of November,
    Gunpowder treason and plot;
    I know of no reason
    Why Gunpowder treason
    Should ever be forgot!

Larry and Steve were over for the day conferring on our interstellar colony novel. We also talked with Jack Cohen in England, via Skype, but the connection was bad and we kept losing it and having to call again. Of course “connection was bad” is a residue of times when you quite literally had bad connections by phone and had to call again; with the Internet that’s not a real diagnosis.

We suspect the problem was at Jack’s end, because things seemed fine here and it was before Noon; I’ve never had Internet problems before Noon, I only have the traditional problem at 1600 – doesn’t matter if it’s PDT or PST – when Time Warner, at least at my house, simply funks out, going to less than dialup speeds sometimes. You can’t do searches because you can’t find the Google server, but even if you know the exact address you’re looking for, as when you do F5 to get the site updated, it often gives the same error, can’t find server. Then for a few seconds it’s only slow, not halted, but it quickly returns to busted. The easy workaround is not to do anything requiring an Internet connection between 1600 and 1615 Pacific Time.

Anyway, I have a lot to contribute to the book, but when I try I spend so much time trying to type it in, and correcting the sentence I just typed and in correcting that forgetting the next sentence I was composing – well, it gets frustrating. In my venerable “How to Get My Job” essay written a long time ago I make the point that a writer must get so familiar with his tools that he can forget the “how” in writing and concentrate on the story or whatever it is he wants to say. He must not be thinking about “i before e except after c”, or elementary grammar rules; he needs to know his craft. Alas, since the stroke I don’t know my craft; I have to worry about how to say something as well as what to say. It’s a humbling experience; I remember from when I first had to write for a living.

Autocorrect helps. One of my more common errors is to insert a bracket (‘[‘) into words when I hit the p key. I hit the [ key at the same time; but sometimes before I hit p and sometimes after. I’m slowly teaching autocorrect to fix this. I just added “com[posing” and “comp[osing” to AutoCorrect’s dictionary so I had considerable trouble getting them into this text: you can defeat autocorrect but it takes doing, which is fine with me.

Anyway I get frustrated, and then I tend to lecture, and yesterday after a while I sort of became aware that here I was lecturing to two master writers about such things as pacing, in particular, weaving expository lumps into the text at any good opportunity so you don’t have so many lumps close together, and always introduce a character and a little backstory when you can so that if there’s coming up a big scene with many characters the readers haven’t met yet, they will have at least been introduced earlier so there aren’t so many strangers in the big plot-necessary scene, and So I woke up and apologized for lecturing.

Larry was kind enough to say we often get a lot of work done when I’m in lecture mode, so I don’t feel so bad, but still—

And of course I typed p;lot-necessary up there, and managed to get that into AutoCorrect’s dictionary.

Anyway the book’s coming along pretty well. In a slower than light universe, which we’re assuming, there are going to be inevitable problems, such as a period after they first get there of adults and infants with no ages in between. You can’t freeze children – how could they give informed consent? – and unless you have somehow built a generation ship such as Heinlein did in Universe you won’t be having children on the way (and if you did they would know nothing of living on a planet). So on Avalon we have the Earthborn and the Starborn, and a generation gap like nothing you have ever, ever seen.

And I have to get back to it shortly because I’m at least able to block out scenes, and if I get going just right I sometimes can do quite a lot of finished text.

I ought to add some of this to How to Get My Job but I probably won’t.

It’s getting late and I am going to LASFS tonight. I am reading The Great Escape by Angus Deaton, about wealth and inequality; it goes well with A Farewell to Alms in showing how remarkable the times we live in have been, compared to ten thousand years in which nobody had much of anything and most people born died before they were five years old. And most women died in childbirth if they had many children. But of course in the great escape from poverty there will be inequality.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal had “Where the New Jobs Will Come From” by Thomas Tunstall, and it’s worth reading although I have some misgivings.

Caterpillar recently announced plans to shed at least 4,000-5,000 jobs by the end of 2016, adding that the number could reach 10,000 by 2018. The company is also restructuring its operations—as it has several times in recent decades. What’s going on at Caterpillaris partly driven by a slowdown in the global economy. But it is also emblematic of fundamental changes in the economy. Many jobs cut from manufacturing in recent years are not coming back, and the ones that do will look very different.

Americans tend to think of this as very bad news, but that’s a little like thinking most of us should still be working on farms. In 1840, 70% of the workforce was employed in agriculture. By the start of the 20th century, it was 40%. In 1930 it was 20% and in 1970, 4%. Now it’s less than 2%.

He has considerable discussion of what has happened over the past twenty years, and concludes

Yes, some jobs in services will include Zumba instructors and retail sales. But many others in the future will be in cloud computing, cybersecurity, gene sequencing, big-data projects and fields that are only beginning to emerge—and today are literally unimaginable.

I don’t see that happening; even with 20 hour weeks and other artificial ways to get more people working. I may be an elitist, but I don’t think that 60% of the population can DO those jobs – and I am very sure that the current education system cannot teach most of the population to do them. I am pretty sure the current education system can’t teach half of those enrolled to do much of anything that someone would pay money to have done.

And then I read in Deaton’s book that inequality isn’t caused by the upper classes holding back the lower ones; indeed they are generous with education.

Never ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence, and indeed I agree; I doubt that there is any conspiracy to provide incompetent schools at increasingly higher costs – but that is what is happening, and most of it is due to well meant efforts to help that have pretty well destroyed the school system that let my wife and I, both without incomes, get through college working our way; indeed, the system that let us get out of high school, me in Tennessee and her in Washington state graduate with a better education than most have after graduating from community college, and with enough work skills to find ways to get people to pay us for working our way through college. I am sure there are many older readers who can understand what I mean. Younger ones are products of the current broken system and may not know just how good our school system once was – and how, at least for the competent, it was virtually free from first grade to a bachelor’s degree.

I never heard of a student loan, or at least never thought of saddling myself with debts.

And the high schools of our day were deteriorating, although not to the extent of the present ones.

If you want to know what public schools are capable of, look at The California Sixth Grade Reader which was copyrighted in 1916 and used in California public schools; compare it to the reading books now used in tenth grade. And weep.

http://www.amazon.com/California-Sixth-Grade-Reader-Pournelle-ebook/dp/B00LZ7PB7E

Another time I’ll say more on what might but won’t be done. Meanwhile, understand that we sow the wind. We want to eliminate inequality. We have inadequate schools. We routinely saddle college graduates with debts they can never repay for credentials that are not worth what they had to pay for them. By 2025, and I suspect a lot earlier than that, 50% of the jobs – not just industrial but clerical and many in health and service – can be done by a robot costing no more than a year’s pay of the worker it replaced, and having a life span of at least ten years with annual operating costs of less than 1/20^th of the worker. How much supervision it will need is debatable, but the robot will work three shifts as easily as one shift; the supervisor will of course not do that, but he will be able to attend to multiple machines.

Our present schools are not training people adequately for jobs “in cloud computing, cybersecurity, gene sequencing, big-data projects” and so forth. Some colleges are. Some. At very high costs.

Meanwhile we centralize and federalize the schools, give local school districts less and less control, and add more and more regulations requiring more and more administrators inevitably driving the cost of colleges, high schools, and grade schools higher and higher; it is not likely that these new bureaucrats are I creasing the quality of education, or indeed teaching anything other than compliance with more regulations.

There are ways to undo this mess, but we won’t take them. But that’s for another time.

VDH: How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America.

<http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1101-hanson-rural-urban-divide-20151101-story.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

The Bicentennial of George Boole, the Man Who Laid the Foundations of the Digital Age

Isaac Newton, Wikipedia tells us, “is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution.”  George Boole(1815-1864) was undoubtedly also one of the most influential scientists of all time, and a key figure in the digital revolution.  Both men were from Lincolnshire, England, and had Unitarian leanings, which impacted their career paths in the Anglican dominated world of their eras.
Furthermore, both made key mental breakthroughs while enjoying fresh air outdoors.

Newton’s Eureka, or Aha! Moment, was his celebrated musing on falling apples, in 1666 when he was 23, which in due course inspired his development of the theory of gravitation. Boole’s came early in 1833, when he was only 17, while walking across a field in Doncaster:

“He relates that the thought flashed upon him suddenly [], but he laid it aside for many years []. The thought however smouldered in his subconscious and became an integral part of his main ambition is life—to explain the logic of human thought [].”

Battle of Britain Quibble

Jerry,

In response to my aside “A quibble about WW II BoB, mind: The Luftwaffe understood just fine how to achieve air supremacy – go for the opposition’s air fields and support structure while also forcing them to come up and be atritted in the air. My read of ultimately why the Germans failed at the Channel is that the Brits (unlike everyone else to that point) had a good enough air defense that it was going to cost the Luftwaffe massive losses – on the rough order of half of their total air force – to grind the RAF into dust. German leadership (Goering) couldn’t stomach that price, backed off the proven winning approach partway, and commenced trying to find ways to win on the cheap – none of which worked.”

you wrote “Actually, Eagle started without realization by Goering that air bases were more important than airplanes; but the no one realized that fully for a long time. The Britain bombed Berlin, and Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to waste planes and time on London, and Britain was saved.”

You state the conventional view, and while it’s not wrong, it’s incomplete. Hitler indeed ordered the switch away from directly attacking the RAF to attacking British cities on 5 September, but the RAF still might have been defeated at that point. (USAAF, after all, four years later did successfully grind down the Luftwaffe by forcing them to come up and be atritted defending against bombing raids on German urban targets.)

According to American journalist Ralph Ingersoll, who returned from Britain later that year and wrote a book about the battle, the key date was September 15th, ten days later, after which the Germans backed off the massive daylight London raids and switched largely to night attacks, thus greatly reducing their losses, but also giving up on attriting the RAF day fighter force.

Ingersoll wrote about that day “[a] majority of responsible British officers who fought through this battle believe that if Hitler and Göring had had the courage and the resources to lose 200 planes a day for the next five days, nothing could have saved London.”

Not provable either way, no, but I tend to agree. The Germans, in addition to all the other errors they’d made to that point, finally just lost their nerve.

Henry

Well, I state the conventional view among Air Force generals of my time; you may have better sources. The key shortage was fuel; most Fighter Command bases were not for maintenance and repair, but all of them needed fuel ,and fuel supply lines; of course that is a conclusion reached after the failure of the Luftwaffe, but it was, after, very effective against ground installations; and the goal was to buy a safe Channel crossing.

Air superiority is rarely attained by air to air combat, just as you don’t usually win against hornets by swatting one hornet at a time.

Whether throwing another 1000 planes into the meat grinder would have done it, I can’t say; but a massive raid on all the fuel installations they knew about would have had great effect; or so I concluded back in the days I studied that. It has been a very long time.

Stay well.

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Pledge week is over. Thanks to all the new subscribers and renewers. I was pleased to see some have returned to subscribing after many years.

My Surface Pro 3 with Pro 4 keyboard is working fine now, although I did have to put in a lot of time setting things up, and I’m not really done yet. In particular the Outlook Rules have some problems, but they appear to be just a matter of recasting; and this isn’t my position mail processing machine anyway.

All kinds of trivial problems take up my time, but they aren’t worth talking about; things that ordinary people do easily, but are hard work for me. Getting down on my knees to test a phone problem at the input socket, for example. Then discovering I can’t see, so getting back up, getting a flashlight, getting back down… Ah well. John DeChancie is here to discuss LisaBetta, our near future primitive asteroid mining colonies civilization – one that I would but in 2020 or so if I were writing it now, but we’ll have to set a bit later since we didn’t go the route I thought we would. Which means an even more bureaucratic Earth. It’s still a hard science novel.

Russian plane crash in Egypt: Midair heat flash detected

(CNN)A midair heat flash from Metrojet Flight 9268 was detected by a U.S. military satellite before the plane crashed Saturday in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, a U.S. official told CNN.

Intelligence analysis has ruled out that the Russian commercial airplane was struck by a missile, but the new information suggests that there was a catastrophic in-flight event — including possibly a bomb, though experts are considering other explanations, according to U.S. officials.

Gary Power went to his grave believing that his U2 was shot down by a missile, but it could not have been: he was too high.  Possony was always convinced that a Pakistani worker put a bomb aboard it. I thought so at the time, but if so the information was remarkably well concealed not to have come out since.  In this case a bomb is even more likely.

I don’t usually reprint press releases, but sometimes:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AUTHOR STEPHANIE OSBORN DEBUTS NEW HOLMES SERIES!

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE MUMMY’S CURSE DEBUTS!

Pro Se Productions, a leading publisher of Genre Fiction, proudly announces the debut of its latest novel featuring perhaps the most popular detective ever created, Sherlock Holmes.  Author Stephanie Osborn, creator of The Displaced Detective series, which also features Holmes, brings her exceptional skill and Sherlockian knowledge and love for the character to a new series for Pro Se.  Sherlock Holmes and The Mummy’s Curse, Book One of Sherlock Holmes: Gentleman Aegis is now available in print and digital formats.

Tommy Hancock, Editor in Chief of Pro Se Productions, states, “Sherlock Holmes isn’t simply the definitive detective. He is a character that has not only captured the imaginations of millions for over a century, but he also has untold potential in terms of stories to be told.  And Stephanie Osborn is ideal for tapping into the wondrous worlds that Holmes and Watson can still explore.  This first volume in Stephanie’s new series involves a Holmes and Watson we are all very familiar with at the beginning of their careers and near the start of their relationship.  What Stephanie crafts with Sherlock Holmes and the Mummy’s Curse is both a book that any Holmes fan would want to include in their library and a work that she leaves her own mark on.  She takes Holmes and expands his world, pushes the boundaries we know his universe within, and creates an adventure that literally readers will not be able to put down!”

Sherlock Holmes and the Mummy’s Curse is the debut volume in a new imprint from Pro Se Productions- Holmes Apocrypha.  Holmes Apocrypha will feature works that take Holmes onto adventures and in directions that go beyond Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original canon, including supernatural stories, science fiction interpretations, and more.

Holmes and Watson. Two names forever linked by mystery and danger from the beginning.

Within the first year of their friendship and while both are young men, Holmes and Watson are still finding their way in the world, with all the troubles that such young men usually have: Financial straits, troubles of the female persuasion, hazings, misunderstandings between friends, and more. Watson’s Afghan wounds are still tender, his health not yet fully recovered, and there can be no consideration of his beginning a new practice as yet. Holmes, in his turn, is still struggling to found the new profession of consulting detective. Not yet truly established in London, let alone with the reputations they will one day possess, they are between cases and at loose ends when Holmes’ old professor of archaeology contacts him.

Professor Willingham Whitesell makes an appeal to Holmes’ unusual skill set and a request. Holmes is to bring Watson to serve as the dig team’s physician and come to Egypt at once to translate hieroglyphics for his prestigious archaeological dig. There in the wilds of the Egyptian desert, plagued by heat, dust, drought and cobras, the team hopes to find the very first Pharaoh. Instead, they find something very different…

Noted Author Stephanie Osborn (Creator of the Displaced Detective series) presents the first book in her Sherlock Holmes, Gentleman Aegis series – Sherlock Holmes and the Mummy’s Curse, the debut volume of Pro Se Productions’ Holmes Apocrypha imprint.

Featuring a fantastic cover and logo design by Jeffrey Hayes and print formatting and logo design by Percival Constantine, Sherlock Holmes and the Mummy’s Curse is available now at Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Mummys-Curse-Gentleman/dp/1518883125/ref=sr_1_3_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1446569718&sr=8-3&keywords=sherlock+holmes+and+the+mummy%27s+curse and Pro Se’s own store at www.prose-press.com for 15.00. 

The first volume in Osborn’s Sherlock Holmes: Gentleman Aegis series is also available as an Ebook, designed and formatted by Forrest Bryant and available for only $2.99 for the Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Mummys-Stephanie-Osborn-ebook/dp/B017IX33NW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1446569797&sr=8-2&keywords=sherlock+holmes+and+the+mummy%27s+curse and for most digital formats via Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/590130.

Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/1101/Antarctica-is-actually-gaining-ice-says-NASA.-Is-global-warming-over

Antarctica is actually gaining ice, says NASA. Is global warming over?

Not quite, scientists say. But new study results show the fallibility of current climate change measuring tools and challenges current theories about the causes of sea level rise.

Lawrence

Interesting.  The models don’t understand it of course.

http://www.news.com.au/national/western-australia/miranda-devine-perth-electrical-engineers-discovery-will-change-climate-change-debate/story-fnii5thn-1227555674611

Too Many Things Going On & Too Little Time

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nasa-latest-tests-show-physics-230112770.html
It may work or it may not. Possibility of thermal induced errors still need to be eliminated.
Still, “the fact that the machine still produced what March calls “anomalous thrust signals” is by far the test’s single biggest discovery. The reason why this thrust exists still confounds even the brightest rocket scientists in the world, but the recurring phenomenon of direction-based momentum does make the EM Drive appear less a combination of errors and more like a legitimate answer to interstellar travel.”
I think that they mean interplanetary. But, with the current state of NASA, they may mean interstellar.
Microsoft admits Win 10 spying can not be stopped!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/11/02/microsoft-confirms-unstoppable-windows-10-tracking/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix
I haven’t read this about MacOS yet. But, …

And, we can get from NYC to London in 30 minutes
https://www.yahoo.com/travel/we-live-in-pretty-cool-times-weve-already-got-160143322.html
That is, if we can get some unobtanium that won’t melt at 4000 degrees F and find passengers willing to take that flight!

And, yet another reason for HRC to lie about Benghazi!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2390642/400-surface-air-missiles-STOLEN-Libya-Benghazi-attack-says-whistle-blowers-attorney.html

I wonder if President Putin has heard about this? It would let him chime in about the next US Presidential election.
Star Trek is coming back!
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/star-trek-tv-series-works-828638
Hopefully this one won’t cause Gene Roddenberry to be spinning in his grave!

See; too many things to think about without my head hurting and all I want for Xmas is a copy of Jannisaries hot off the presses!

Peter

A New ‘Star Trek’ TV Series Will Debut in 2017

By DAVE ITZKOFFNOV. 2, 2015      (nyt)

“Star Trek,” that venerable outer-space adventure, is boldly going where it’s been before, but hasn’t been seen in more than a decade: back to television. The science-fiction program that chronicled the voyages of the Starship Enterprise and its intrepid crew will return to TV in 2017, CBS said on Monday, in a new series that will be introduced on the network but will be shown primarily on its digital subscription video service.

This latest “Star Trek” series will focus on “new characters seeking imaginative new worlds and new civilizations, while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception,” CBS said in a news release.

It will be executive-produced by Alex Kurtzman, a writer and producer of the rebooted 2009 “Star Trek” movie and its 2013 sequel, “Star Trek Into Darkness.” Mr. Kurtzman has also been involved with other popular works of geek culture like the TV shows “Alias,” “Fringe,” “Sleepy Hollow” and “Xena: Warrior Princess.”

http://www.homeai.info/blog/news-stories/were-building-superhuman-robots-will-they-be-heroes-or-villains/

We’re building superhuman robots. Will they be heroes, or villains?

(iStock)

Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week we’re talking about robot intelligence. Need a primer? Catch up here.

Patrick Lin is an associate philosophy professor at California Polytechnic State University and an affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. He works with government and industry on technology ethics, and his book “Robot Ethics” was published in 2014.

Forget about losing your job to a robot. And don’t worry about a super-smart, but somehow evil, computer. We have more urgent ethical issues to deal with right now.

Artificial intelligence is replacing human roles, and it’s assumed that those systems should mimic human behavior — or at least an idealized version of it. This may make sense for limited tasks such as product assembly, but for more autonomous systems — robots and AI systems that can “make decisions” for themselves — that goal gets complicated.

There are two problems with the assumption that AI should act like we do. First, it’s not always clear how we humans ought to behave, and programming robots becomes a soul-searching exercise on ethics, asking questions that we don’t yet have the answers to. Second, if artificial intelligence does end up being more capable than we are, that could mean that it has different moral duties, ones which require it to act differently than we would.

Let’s look at robot cars to illustrate the first problem. How should they be programmed? This is important, because they’re driving alongside our families right now. Should they always obey the law? Always protect their passengers? Minimize harm in an accident if they can? Or just slam the brakes when there’s trouble?

These and other design principles are reasonable, but sometimes they conflict. For instance, an automated car may have to break the law or risk its passengers’ safety to spare the greatest number of lives on the outside. The right decision, whatever that is, is fundamentally an ethical call based on human values, and one that isn’t answerable by science and engineering alone.

That leads us to the second, related problem. With its unblinking sensors and networked awareness, robot cars can detect risks and react much faster than we can — that’s what artificial intelligence is meant to do. In addition, their behavior is programmed, which means crash decisions are already scripted. Therein lies a dilemma. If a human driver makes a bad decision in a sudden crash it’s a forgivable accident, but when AI makes any decision, it’s not a reflex but premeditated.[snip]

SABRE dual mode engine

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/11967229/Want-to-fly-at-2500mph-BAE-Systems-does-and-is-willing-to-pay-20m-for-it.html

Seems like a very good idea. Wonder why it’s taken so long? In any case, the dual mode concept makes sens. Burn the same fuel and switch oxidizers as the flight regime changes.

—

Phil Tharp

You might want unobtainium for the leading edges…

Hybrid wolf/coyote/dog

Hi Jerry.

All in one, the evolution of wolves, coyotes, and dogs continues:

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21677188-it-rare-new-animal-species-emerge-front-scientists-eyes

Cheers,

Mike Casey

Of course one now wonders what is a species.  Mules are generally not fertile.  Wolf-coyote, dog-coyote breeds true fertile…

: Ranger School Cover-up

Dr Pournelle,

So I’ve been following this pretty closely and it’s getting better and better. We seem to have Ranger Instructors talking anonymously to the media and Congress and a cover-up stretching from the White House all the way down the the Commander of the Ranger Training Brigade.

http://usdefensewatch.com/2015/10/the-ranger-school-records-cover-up-continues/

“Congressman Russell contacted the Secretary of the Army on September 15, 2015, and requested the Ranger School records for Captain Kristen Griest and First Lieutenant Shaye Haver.

The Secretary of the Army stalled Russell for nine days and then asked for an extension to obtain documents readily available.

The Army waited another two weeks to tell Russell the documents had been shredded.

The Army refuses to tell anyone what the school’s policy is for the storage and destruction of Ranger School records.

The Army refuses to tell the media why they shredded Griest’s and Haver’s records.

The Army refuses to tell the media what they are doing with the third female graduate, Major Lisa Jaster’s records.

The Army wants us to doubt that journalist Susan Keating’s Ranger School sources are real because they are anonymous.

The Army wants us to believe that if Susan Keating’s sources were real they would come forward, when in fact, they are frightened of retribution. Considering the Obama administration’s treatment of whistle blowers, these fears are more than justified.”

I’m a graduate of the school and a former Infantry Officer and against women in the combat arms and in the military in general. I guess that makes me a dinosaur or a sexist/misogynist/reactionary or whatever you want to call me, but in spite of this I have trouble believing all this.

I happen to know Major General Miller, the commander of the Infantry/Maneuver Center (he was my adviser at the Infantry Officer Advanced Course many many years ago) and he just isn’t the type to do something like this. I’m pretty sure this will be his retirement job and a man like him will have many options after retirement. He doesn’t need to curry favor with anyone. For details on just what kind of man he is, see here http://www.benning.army.mil/common/leaders/Bio/pdf/MG%20Miller%20Bio.pdf

Further, the RIs wouldn’t stand for it. Many (probably most) don’t want women there any more than I do, but they wouldn’t stand for ANYONE telling them to make things easier on women. The way they’d deal with it would be to stay strictly by the book. If someone told them to do otherwise they would come out publicly, careers be damned, and tell the world. This is the E-6s that run the place that I’m talking about, not the Captains and Majors. They’d tell everyone to get bent and let the world know.

That’s just my take on it. There might be more to it. I know a couple of people at the Infantry School now and they tell me it’s a load a crap. That’s hardly authoritative but these are people I know and trust.

Matt Kirchner

Houston, TX

I have others who say it is all very real. 

BP Sees Technology Nearly Doubling World Energy Resources by 2050     (nyt)

By REUTERSNOV. 2, 2015, 9:06 A.M. E.S.T. 

LONDON — The world is no longer at risk of running out of oil or gas for decades ahead with existing technology capable of unlocking so much that global reserves would almost double by 2050 despite booming consumption, oil major BP said on Monday.

When taking into account all accessible forms of energy including nuclear, wind and solar, there are enough resources to meet 20 times what the world will need over that period, David Eyton, BP Group Head of Technology said.

“Energy resources are plentiful. Concerns over running out of oil and gas have disappeared,” Eyton said at the launch of BP’s inaugural Technology Outlook.

Oil and gas companies have invested heavily in squeezing the maximum from existing reservoirs by using chemicals, super computers and robotics. The halving of oil prices since last June has further dampened their appetite to explore for new resources, with more than $200 billion worth of mega projects scrapped in recent months.

By applying these technologies, the global proved fossil fuel resources could increase from 2.9 trillion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) to 4.8 trillion boe by 2050, nearly double the projected 2.5 trillion boe required to meet global demand until 2050, BP said.

With new exploration and technology, the resources could leap to a staggering 7.5 trillion boe, Eyton said.

“We are probably nearing the point where potential from additional recovery from discovered reservoir exceeds the potential for exploration.”

[snip]

A power source and vastly improved robots makes a different world.

That Voyager job req

Y’know, if they’d bothered to post an email or US Snail address, they’d RIGHT NOW be drowning under resumes from WELL-QUALIFIED applicants for that Voyager job.

I’m one of them.  A college buddy of mine is another.  I got my start in this crazy racket in 1970, in FORTRAN IV.  By the time I was getting paid for it, 64K was still a lot of memory.

There are a lot of people doing interesting things with Arduino boards these days who know a lot about small memory systems, who could learn the rest quite easily.

Not to mention that this kind of thing is what FORTH was designed to do (and there have been spaceborne FORTH systems before).

–John R. Strohm

Did You Hear About How Scientists Discovered A Two Billion-Year-Old Nuclear Reactor In Gabon?

<http://www.iafrikan.com/2015/11/02/did-you-hear-about-how-scientists-discovered-a-two-billion-year-old-nuclear-reactor-in-west-africa/>

When first reading about this years ago, I remember thinking that the premise that it was deliberately engineered would make a great story hook . . .

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

I believe I mentioned it in A Step Farther Out in the 80’s.

‘America has 100 nuclear power plants. We need hundreds more.’

<http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

I think I said that in A step Farther Out too.  with the present Administration it cannot happen.

Drones programmed for light painting in the sky

What do you get when you put LEDs on a system of drones and then program them to fly in formation? Spaxels from the Ars Electronic Futurelab.

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

Chaos Manor View, Sunday, November 01, 2015

All Saints Day

Last night after I got home from Larry Niven’s Halloween party I saw, just before going to bed, messages from Eric Pobirs, my long suffering associate. He had spent part of the afternoon trying to revive Precious, my Microsoft Surface Pro 3, which I seem to have killed by trying to install the Surface Pro 4 keyboard; Precious was in an endless cycle of trying to boot up, realizing something was wrong, going into diagnostic mode, trying to fix it, thinking it had done so, then restarting, instantly perceiving that something was wrong, going into diagnostic mode, trying to fix it, thinking it had done so, then restarting – well, you get the idea. You couldn’t start in Safe Mode because it realized instantly that it was not doing well, went into diagnostic mode, etc., etc.

Eric tried booting from a USB drive, but to do that you had to get to the Bios or what passes for a Bios in a new Windows 10 machine. Not long before I left for Niven’s party Eric took off with Precious bound for the Microsoft store,

So when I got home my first message from Eric was that the Microsoft geniuses or geeks or whatever they call themselves couldn’t fix it either, but they did check the hardware and it was working and Eric had some ideas and was headed home. And just before midnight I got the short message: Precious lives.

I don’t know a lot more, but apparently much needs to be reinstalled; but the good news is that the Pro 4 keyboard is working fine with the Pro 3; and there’s yet another new build of the OS.

You can read all the details soon in an upcoming piece by Eric in Chaos Manor Reviews, which is my continuation of the BYTE column along with contributions from Chaos Manor Associates like Eric, and Peter Glaskowsky, and my son Alex; they’ll be up soon.

Pledge week ends; if you haven’t subscribed, time to do so.  If you don’t remember when you last renewed, this is the proper time to do it.  That way I won’t have to bug you for another quarter, and we can keep the ads off this place. Click here: Paying For This Place

Larry’s party was great, as usual, with lots of people I only see a couple of times a year at Niven’s place. I didn’t take many pictures; I’ll get a lot more at Hew Years. Here’s Alex, my friend John De Chancie with whom I’m writing an near future novel set largely in the asteroids, and LASFS secretary Kirsten.

I had to leave early; Roberta couldn’t go because she had to get up early for choir practice.

Fred Thompson, RIP http://news.yahoo.com/former-sen-fred-thompson-had-tv-film-roles-231012877.html?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma

He was my candidate for President, but he didn’t have enough fire in his belly; the very characteristics that would make you a good President make it very difficult to get the office.

Here’s Bill Gates on energy and the future. I disagree with him about the urgency of reducing CO2, but clearly we can’t go on forever as we’re doing; someone’s got to invest in new energy sources, it takes a long time to replace one energy economy with another, and we haven’t got the basic technology yet. Time to look for a miracle, or least a radical innovation. I came to that conclusion in the 70’s in my Galaxy columns.

Gates is always worth paying attention to.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/

Phil had this to say:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/

I’m not surprised he feels this way. Though his commitment to R&D on energy is not a bad idea at all.

Roland was a bit more trenchant

Bill Gates loses the plot.

<http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/bill-gates-says-that-capitalism-cannot-save-us-from-climate-change–b1xNpbL8O_x>

We need the research, and we’ve long known that there has to be a substitute – an effective and economical substitute – for fossil fuels.  Hurrah for Bill investing a couple of billion in some new ideas.  I would think it obvious, though, that before we have laws and taxes forcing people into an alternative, we had some idea of what that alternative is. At the moment the only viable alternative is nuclear fission; make the carbon taxes stiff enough and that will be the only way to go.  I used to hope for fusion, but it has remained “thirty years from now” for forty years; that hardly progress.

As to the safety of fission, it will never be totally safe; but it isn’t the scary monster it is usually painted.  The worst disaster was Japan, who saved a bit of money by building sea walls to resist a 100 year tsunami, and not designing their plants to be failsafe when the tsunami came. Note that Chernobyl was a military installation and a known dangerous design – a positive void reactor – but life is returning to Chernobyl.  TMI was a test to destruction that proved we know how to build plants to minimize the effects of full internal destruction.

Social justice has come to the United Nations and are we to expect another episode in Congress like we saw with the Iran “treaty”?

<.>

At the upcoming United Nations Climate Summit in Paris, participating nations have prepared a treaty that would create an “International Tribunal of Climate Justice” giving Third World countries the power to haul the U.S. into a global court with enforcement powers.

</>

http://www.wnd.com/2015/11/u-n-tribunal-to-judge-u-s-for-climate-debt/

This president gaveled himself in as chairman of the UN Security Council. This president is the first US president to do this. I will not get into the related article of the Constitution and the other popular arguments surrounding this action, but we can all agree that it is unprecedented and that this president leans more toward international institutions in some ways than previous presidents.

All this leads me to suspect this president might be more inclined toward this climate arrangement than I am. And I wonder if Paul Ryan would enable this agenda if this president pushed the point.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Be afraid. Be very afraid. But UN resolutions have no legal effect, and treaties that do need 2/3 of the senate to become law of the land.

‘In one survey cited, 82 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications.’

<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/opinion/academias-rejection-of-diversity.html>

I’m just surprised it’s only 82 percent. One suspects at least some of the respondents toned down their responses to appear to be more reasonable.

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Roland Dobbins

: Philosophical discourse 

This is taking philosophical discourse too seriously.

“I’ll give you a categorical imperative. Fuck you! How’s that for an imperative, you a priorist pig!”

Man Shot in Fight Over Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy in Russia

Man Shot in Fight Over Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy i… In the Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don two men were having a beer this weekend and talking about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (of course), when something went…
View on www.openculture.com	Preview by Yahoo

No comment.  None.  Really.

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

Chaos Manor View, Friday, October 30, 2015

I first opened this with an attempt to write a piece on China’s new two-child policy and the effects of their Mao imposed and brutally enforced one-child policy on their and our future; doubtless I will get to it, and probably write it next, but it’s getting late and I may not. Of course I was writing it at 4:05. Which is in the middle of Time Warner’s 4:00 PM daily net shutdown for this part of Studio City, so I couldn’t get to my links on data for the piece, and when I did – the Net doesn’t so much shut down as crawl to a near halt – I had another problem: my mouse right-click didn’t do much of anything. It’s a standard Microsoft redeye optical mouse, quite possibly one of the first they ever made; the standard mouse for Chaos Manor. I have several of them all acquired years ago, some, as I said, when they first switched optical for mechanical mice with mouse balls, others over time. I don’t think the newest is less than ten years old. I generally build my own machines – well, lately Eric does most of the work but it’s done here and I can claim to have supervised – and there it goes again.

My redeye mouse went wonky. The pointer moved, it tracked all right, left click worked fine, but right click did absolutely nothing. It didn’t take me long to notice because my typing since the stroke is two finger only and I often hit more than one key even with this Logitech K360 keyboard which has keys somewhat separated. Also, I often hit the wrong key. The result is I spend about as much time correcting a sentence as I did to write it, and if it weren’t for autocorrect I’d be spending more. Fortunately, hitting double keys in long words generally results in a unique error and once I teach that to autocorrect I never see it any more, which is one reason I can still produce text; but even so, there are plenty of red-wavy-underlined lines visible each time I look up at the keyboard, and compulsive as I am I must fix them before I can go on. And that requires right click.

Now that I know my mouse was dying I recall that the copy function was unreliable for a week or so past; I always cured it by restarting the machine, because right click seemed to work, and maybe it was a software problem; shutting down and restarting always cured it. Anyway, I tried that, it got long past 4:00 and the Time Warner gift of slowdown, and my right click still wasn’t functioning; and while dying mouse has never been a problem at Chaos Manor – at least since we lost mouse ball mice – it eventually entered my thick head that it could be a mouse problem.

I got out another Microsoft redeye mouse, attached it, and lo! the problem was solved. Right click worked just fine. Being me, I took the old mouse and sprayed it with Blue Works contact cleaner and dried it off with my towel, and lo! It worked. Alas, not for long. I wrote the first paragraph with it, and there it went again; the rest of this was written with another ancient mouse which seems to be working fine.

I even tried spraying the defunct mouse with Blue Works again, but this time it did nothing, and even I am forced to admit that it isn’t worth my time to try to revive a ten year old mouse.

As it happens, we’ll be going to Glendale tomorrow on an adventure to the Apple Store and also to the Microsoft Store, and I’ll buy myself two new redeye mice. If one can die, another can just as unexpectedly; they’re all the same age. And my time when I have the energy to write is at least valuable enough that it isn’t worth spending on dying mice,

It’s getting close to dinner time. I’ll post this and get back to China later. It’s an interesting problem: is the Earth over-populated, and can we reduce the population gracefully?

It’s still pledge week.  We got several new subscriptions this week, and the renewal of subscriptions is going at least as well as usual, or I think it is; I haven’t time to do a close analysis.  We operate on the Public Radio model, which is why I key it to the KUSC pledge drives.  I sure could use some new subscriptions.  If you’ve been here a while and like it, maybe it’s time to subscribe. Click here http://www.jerrypournelle.com/payingnew.html and get it over with…

Today China announced the end of their Mao-imposed and since then brutally enforced one-child policy. They even admit that the old policy was – well, not exactly a mistake, but not best – and they did not choose freedom as an alternative: Chinese couples will still need a license to have their two children, the bureaucracy that enforces that policy will still be in business and the Iron Law will have its effect, and one effect will be to abort unlicensed pregnancies.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a good column on all this, http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-new-two-child-policy-and-the-fatal-conceit-1446157377?alg=y and I recommend you read it. China is still trying to maintain control and still experimenting with social engineering.

The one-child mandate is the single greatest social-policy error in human history. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, his legatees were horrified to discover how little they had inherited. Despite almost three decades of “socialist construction,” China was still overwhelmingly rural and desperately poor. More than 97% of the country lived below the World Bank’s notional $1.25 a day threshold for absolute poverty, according to recent Chinese estimates. With a population still rapidly growing, China seemed on the brink of losing the race between mouths and food.

When I was an undergraduate I believed in social engineering, and I was very much convinced that the Earth was already overpopulated or nearly so. I was convinced by William Vogt’s Road to Survival and the ecologists, so much so that I sought out Rufus King at the University of Iowa and arranged to take his ecology course; where I learned a number of things including that not everyone calling himself an ecologist knows much about the subject; but that’s perhaps another subject. I was seriously concerned about over-population, and like most undergraduates with grandiose goals, I thought it was our business to fix these easily foreseen problems. I also thought it would be simple and rational, if only all the irrational people would get out of the way.

I have some sympathy with the Chinese, those not overwhelmed with political ideology but hoping to apply some rationality to obvious problems; and indeed, their worst enemies have to admit that the modern Chinese state has done a lot better than anyone expected.

It seems obvious that to reduce a population without simply killing a lot of people, you will have to pass through a period in which there is more work needed than you have workers to do it. People age, inexorably, and as they age their productivity rises, then declines; and when enough are in their period of declining popularity, they must be replaced with younger workers: now where are the younger workers to come from? Particularly if you care about what race they are, and you want cultural stability in any event. The Chinese have never been interested in the progress of anyone but Chinese; the communist ideology doesn’t recognize that, but Chinese history and tradition does. Perhaps the communist ideology blurred the obvious coming dilemma – there aren’t going to be enough Chinese workers.

There is one out: robots. Robots increase productivity enormously. Perhaps enough? Perhaps a much smaller young population can, with robots, produce enough to keep an increasingly less productive aging population not just in survival conditions, but the increasingly wealthy style that they are trying to become accustomed to?

It looks to be China’s only out; and for the nations of the West, and Russia, we can watch and learn, for our turn may be coming, even though not produced by social engineering.

: Ceres

Have you seen the latest update on the profess of the DAWN probe.
http://news.yahoo.com/dawn-probe-heads-superclose-orbit-dwarf-planet-ceres-193617377.html;_ylt=AwrXgyJEHjNWSSQA8NLQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTByb2lvbXVuBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg–
Your writing Science Fiction writing about Ceres were a great inspiration to read more about the rest of the solar system and beyond,. My background is in satellites in ground station operations and maintenance, as well as actual operation and maneuver control of Telstar. EchoStar and Sirius satellites.
Thanks
Bob (R. J.) Ballenger

Thanks

To save on weight, a detour to the moon is the best route to Mars

For a piloted mission to Mars, fueling up on the moon could streamline cargo by 68 percent.

http://news.mit.edu/2015/mars-mission-save-weight-fuel-on-moon-1015

Yet another reason to build a working moon base before trying to send men to Mars.

In case you haven’t seen this

The Rocket Man Who Wants To Beat the Billionaires

Deep in the California desert, an unknown entrepreneur is competing against famous billionaires for a chance to build the government’s next great spacecraft. He’s outmanned and out-financed. And Masten Space Systems just might pull it off.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a17574/masten-space-systems/

Monkeys to Mars

Travel to Mars is so easy a group of monkeys are being trained to do it:

<.>

Monkeys paved the way for us to reach the moon and now Russian scientists are hoping the animals will be key to getting a human colony to Mars.

Experts from the Russian Academy Of Science are training four rhesus macaques to travel into space and land on the red planet.

This training, which includes using a joystick and solving puzzles, should make them capable to man a mission within the next two years.

</>

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3291456/Monkeys-heading-MARS-Russian-scientists-training-macaques-solve-puzzles-travel-space-2017.html#ixzz3pngb2FGw

<.>

At the end of their training the creatures should be capable of completing a daily schedule of tasks on their own.

The scientists are hoping this will be achieved by 2017.

Dr Kozlovskaya said the main goal is to teach monkeys to perform a particular range of tasks which they will be able to remember.

‘What we are trying to do is to make them as intelligent as possible so we can use them to explore space beyond our orbit,’ she said.

The team is also hoping that the space monkeys will be able to train others and integrate them into the team.

</>

What if the monkeys learn they’re free and no longer need the Russians? Many decades from now, we may hear stories of a group of rogue monkeys who broke away from Earth and began settling other planets… =) ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

And alas, Dan Alderson is dead. His like may no longer be with us.

Voyager needs a programmer

Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Perhaps someone in your reading audience would like to take up the challenge. It seems the current engineer for Voyager 1/2 is retiring. 
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a17991/voyager-1-voyager-2-retiring-engineer/
So they need someone who is greatly skilled with Fortran and Assembly languages to step in and keep the probe running.    This is old-school programming at its finest; there are only 64kb of memory to work with, and this will be real-time programming , I suspect, with hard constraints. 
I’m a little disappointed. Voyager is the reason I got into computers in the first place, but now after years of writing database and object-oriented programs I don’t have anywhere near the experience required to do this kind of work. I’d be willing to learn ..  but I suspect “willing’ isn’t enough.   “Willing” doesn’t instantly make you an expert in real time software.
Respectfully,

Brian P.

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