Chaos Manor Mail, Sunday, March 08, 2015

Continuing the March 4 discussion on SanDisk SD cards:

Regarding the 200 GB SanDisk microSD card, Chris Barker is simply wrong. This is not a primary storage device for a PC or other system that uses that volume for virtual memory paging. On an SSD, which is intended to replace a conventional hard drive and thus must fulfill the virtual memory role, provision is made for the loss of cell function without loss of advertised capacity as Mr. Barker explains. But this simply isn’t an issue for a volume that isn’t used for paging. The level of read and, most importantly, write activity is far, far less. The allocation of a large area to hide the loss of capacity over time simply isn’t necessary as the typical usage of an SD card or USB flash drive doesn’t produce the rate of loss that would be noticed in the device’s expected life cycle. Most current operating systems are designed to handle this as a background task. (The Windows ReadyBoost feature that first appeared in Windows Vista would have been a very high usage scenario for a USB flash drive but falling prices on RAM made it unlikely that many people managed to appreciably wear out a flash drive using ReadyBoost.)

    Another clue here is the extreme amount of capacity supposedly being set aside by SanDisk. A 256 GB SSD is typically sold as a 240 GB volume (before formatting) with 16 Gb set aside for replacing cells lost to wear. For a microSD card to have 3.5 times as much set aside for that purpose is absurd. It should also be noted that 256 GB SD cards are already on the market, which are electrically identical to microSD cards. If the capacity was due to factory allocation settings rather than physical chip volume, it would be reflected in the SD cards already.

    Using a SD card for primary storage on a desktop OS like Windows, MacOS, or Linux would be a miserable experience, so little provision is made for such usage. The performance level of UHS-I cards is at best on par with the last generation of parallel ATA before SATA became the prevailing hard drive interface for mainstream PCs. (UHS-II cards, offering read performance roughly between SATA-I and SATA-II, and devices that support them are still rare and not a factor for most conversations about SDXC. It’s possible they won’t catch on before an entirely new standard takes root.) In a related matter, the cell phone industry is prepping a major shift in how it interfaces primary storage because the bottleneck of the existing standard for embedded flash, eMMC 5.01, is expected to become a drag on performance gains by other components. A newer standard, UFS 2.0, offers substantially higher performance close to the latest generation of PCI-e SSD just appearing in PCs. Both eMMC and UFS are JEDEC standards, so there aren’t any rivalry issues as so often has complicated things in the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#SDXC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Flash_Storage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiMediaCard#eMMC

Eric Pobirs

I would say misinterpreted, rather than wrong. Of one thing we may be certain: the observation I made 30 years ago, that silicon is cheaper than iron and therefore memory drive would replace spinning metal for hard drives, as a long time coming but is finally arriving

DOJ Ferguson Report

Dear Dr. Pournelle,
The Justice Department has released its report on Ferguson
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/national/department-of-justice-report-on-the-ferguson-mo-police-department/1435/

which essentially follows this report from before the events:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vwptqn3mhq9xvy7/ArchCity%20Defenders%20Municipal%20Courts%20Whitepaper.pdf

It appears that the city decided to use the police department as a revenue generating device, which so antagonized the community that it only took a single spark to touch off a riot. That happened. 

I’m a little bit puzzled as to what any of the rest of us can do about it; if there’s a city council then the most logical course would be for the city voters to Throw The Bums Out.  However, I also suspect that many of those most directly affected can’t vote due to felony convictions.  

Respectfully,

Brian P. 

Didn’t New York do the same with their cigarette tax?

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I don’t think it’s quite the same thing.  The cigarette tax was one thing. By contrast, it appears that Ferguson took the ‘broken window’ concept of policing to an extreme by upping enforcement of minor violations up to 11 , and always levying a fine, never jail time, for the infractions. 

Point 2:  Almost all of the charges levied in Ferguson were municipal charges, even when there was an equally applicable state law.

What does that tell you? 

Point 3:  There were some other things as well. For instance, there was one woman who owed a $100 fine but couldn’t pay it, so she tried to pay a $27 partial remittance until she could get the money together. The courts wouldn’t take it.  They wanted the full amount at once, and refused any attempt.

There was another case where a gentleman had paid $500 on a $100 fine — and still owed $551 thanks to interest!

Put all this together and I think we’re seeing something far different than what we saw in New York .. this looks to me much like the ‘organized brigandage’ St. Augustine described in “City of God” , the sort of thing that happens when justice and the state part ways.

I admit I’m a bit confused as to how we reached this place. The point of a democracy is that the leaders are elected, and are supposed to be removed by an outraged citizenry when things get this bad, preferably with tar and feathers.   Likewise, there’s supposed to be oversight over police behavior, an internal affairs bureau, and recourse when things go bad.  Instead it’s as if the system has frozen up — we no longer seem to have any way of checking or restraining police or governmental power. 

Respectfully,

Brian P.

One of the consequences of the Constitution is that these United States will always have different opinions about what is right and what is wrong. There will always be some who would make a Federal Case out of State and local policies which were not given to the Federal Government; abortion is one such. No one thought there was a Federal right to abortion in the Constitution for two Centuries, and the various states had different policies; it was a matter for the States, and there was insufficient national consensus for a Constitutional Amendment. The liberal view was that this was a moral issue of great importance, and the court found a right of privacy in the “emanations and penumbras” particularly in the 14^th Amendment, although the States that adopted that Amendment would have been astonished to learn that were conferring a right of privacy which forbid state laws against contraception. The principle that the Constitution was a living document rather than a contract is now upon us, and the original Constitution which restricted the Federal Government to explicitly granted powers, reserving all the rest to the States (or to the people) is dead. Some mourn it still. In the deciding case Justice Stewart called the Connecticut statute “an uncommonly silly law” but argued that it was nevertheless constitutional. The Federal government might be far more “correct” by modern standards, but it did not have the Constitutional power to impose that view against the States any more than, prior to the 13^th Amendment, it had the Constitutional power to end slavery.

The Ferguson system seems unseemly, but the remedy is political, not the force of the Federal government. Both State and Federal investigations have shown there is no Federal Case here. Similarly, the New York Cigarette tax seems stupid, and perhaps the Interstate Commerce law ought to be applied; but it seems to be New York’s business, not mine. Or the US Attorney’s.

Of course there is much in “modern” Federal practice that resembles “organized brigandage”. We are well on the way to what the late Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny”. We have sown the wind. Were I living in Ferguson I would study the Atlas, and were I in the business of helping the citizens of Ferguson I would be installing precinct committee members; not imposing my views by force because of my moral certainty. In particular, intimidating store clerks while stealing cigars is a dangerous and probably ineffective form of protest.

We’re not alone?

More evidence that we may not be alone in the universe:

<.>

Astronomers believe mysterious signals – previously dismissed as stellar bursts – are coming from an Earth-like planet.

The Gliese 581d planet has conditions that could support life, and is likely to be a rocky world, twice the size of Earth.

Signals from the planet were initially discovered in 2010, but last year dismissed as noise from distant stars.

Now, a further study claims that the 2014 research was based on ‘inadequate analyses of the data’ and that Gliese 581d does exist.

</>

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2983202/Alien-noise-Earth-like-world-Mystery-signals-suggest-habitable-planet-exists-22-light-years-away.html

These guys have an SETI program? Let’s hope 22 light years is far enough away to keep them safe from us; else we might go in there and try to “liberate” them from their oppressive rulers and engage in nation building because it’s in the national interest and it will create jobs. =)

Seriously, though, it would be nice to make a friendly contact and it would be nice if “our people” were also friendly about it.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Others including Hawking have different vies about the desirability of communications; in any event you may confident that if we do try, it will be friendly on our part, and most of will mean it. We have no way of knowing the intentions of the aliens. And of course probabilities favor a more physical explanation anyway.

Subject: Are barely trained teachers just as good as education majors…

Dear Jerry, I thought you might be interested. Cheers, Bob Are barely trained teachers just as good as education majors? Looks like it. csmonitor.com  •  The Wonkblog headline “Teach for America teachers aren’t any better than other teachers when it comes to kids’ test scores” buries the lede.A new study comparing test scores among elementary school …

I would say a good case can be made for two year certificates for grade school teachers; it seems to have worked in the past, and I suspect requiring 4 year degrees is counter-productive and does not produce the expected results. A case can be made for more intense education of high school teachers, but not in “education” courses.

: Educators vs. Education

Jerry,

I would suggest that if we wish to save our schools we need to “Return to those thrilling days of yesteryear” and examine the curriculum of the two year Normal School that trained teachers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I would guess that the vast majority of the 6th Grade teachers using the 1914 Sixth Grade Reader had that education.

As the “Educators” have taken over the training of Teachers we have been afflicted with a steadily declining quality of Education coupled with a steadily increasing inflation adjusted cost of Education.

The current age of Credentialism has forced our Teachers to take an increasing number of courses in HOW to teach at the expense of WHAT to teach.

I do not see any solution to this problem as long as we have Federal Control of Education.

Bob Holmes

The question being how great the value of “how to teach” studies can be; no greater than the teacher’s knowledge. How well do Professors of Education do in grade school classrooms?

: Educationalism

The following book by the Underground Grammarian regarding educationalism should tickle your fancy:

The one-eyed man knows that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will be inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but, just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply of the witless and utterly blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed man, it is clear that other half-wits and one-eyed men are potential competitors and supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant kept watch against a one-sandaled stranger by keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes and operating minds. Uneasy lies the head.

Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the propensity to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously, threatens the land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed man and the half-wit.

http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/graves-of-academe/index.html
MikeF

And the moral of that story is …

General Relativity – The Comic Book

http://spark.sciencemag.org/generalrelativity/?int-cmp=print-comic

J

No comment.

My own research on Clinton emails

Jerry:

First, hugs to you and Roberta. I am impressed as hell that you were back to writing and blogging while still in rehab (and tweeted about it a few times). You’re in our prayers.

Second, ABC News called me when the AP story broke about Clinton running her private e-mail on a home server and asked, “Can you verify/replicate this?” I’ve been working on it all week, and the answer still is, “No.”

In fact, I think AP leapt to an unjustified conclusion based on data I was able to recover as well. If anything, there are indications that the Clinton e-mail server may have been hosted by two successive hosting firms — The Planet and Confluence Networks — and the latter is a foreign-based, foreign-owned hosting system (though apparently making use of US-based server farms) well known for spam and malware sites.

The real, real question is: where was the e-mail domain server physically located? There may be some profound negative security implications depending upon that question, which may be why no Clinton associates have confirmed or denied the existence of a home server.

I’ve written two posts on the subject. Here’s the newest one:

http://andstillipersist.com/2015/03/where-is-or-was-the-clinton-e-mail-server/

And here is my original one, which has its own updates up front; it helps to scroll down to “BACK TO OUR ORIGINAL POST”, read to the end, then go to the top and read the updates:

http://andstillipersist.com/2015/03/curiouser-and-curiouser/

Down the rabbit hole, indeed. ..bruce..

—

Bruce F. Webster

Long time readers will recognize Bruce as an old friend and longtime correspondent.

How America was Misled

https://www.google.com/#q=How+America+Was+Misled+on+al+Qaeda%27s+Demise

One of many money quotes

At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: “By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.”

This wasn’t what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA officials to stop producing analyses based on them.

Sent by a usually reliable source.

: Sapir-Whorf refuted

Dear Dr. Pournelle:
Recently on your blog you marvelled over the lack of the word “blue” in Ancient Greek. You ask, following the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, if the Greeks actually experienced the color blue, under that azure Mediterranean sky.
I reply that there are many vivid experiences lacking words. Consider your stomach; when there is food in it, you are “full”; when there is no food in it, you are “hungry”. These are fine and short words. Now consider your bladder and your colon. When these are full, you are what? When they are empty, you are what? These feelings are vivid, intimate, urgent and felt by all, but I know no words for them!
My urologist says that the condition of having a full colon is called “tenemus”. That’s a noun, but he doesn’t know a corresponding adjective. Also it refers to the condition, not the feeling.
I propose the following; bladderful, bladdervoid, colonful, colonvoid. Those are the ‘polite’ and abstract words; their ‘rude’ and immediate synonyms are pissful, pissvoid, shitful, shitvoid. This 2x2x2 word-cube possesses mathematical regularity, and also musicality; I offer it to you for free. Use it in good health.
These words did not exist before now; yet they denote universal experiences. Thus I refute the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
And as long as I am discussing missing useful words… we need words for velocity; short words to be said in a great hurry. Sailors have ‘knots’ for ‘nautical miles per hour’; but what do we call a mile per hour? “MPH” is an acronym, and it’s five syllables long; by the time you’ve screamed it at the driver, he’s already crashed the car. So what word will do? “Miph”? “Oomph”? Nah…
Or take “kilometers per second”; useful for all space-farers. I think “kaypees” will do admirably. This too I offer to you.
Sincerely,
paradoctor

I had to demonstrate understanding of the Whorfian hypothesis as part of my Ph.D. qualifying examinations. I can honestly say I have thought about it little since then.

“Lest Darkness Fall”

Jerry,

I don’t think I told you, but I read “Lest Darkness Fall” last year and enjoyed it a great deal.

Phil Tharp

I just bet you did. Sprague spins a great yarn. http://www.amazon.com/Lest-Darkness-Fall-Del-Classics/dp/0345310160

Brian P’s command on Sex and Terrorism 3/4

Last autumn, I took the time to listen through the famous recorded lectures of Greg Mosse on cultural history at the UW Madison web site. In those, he points out that many men are perfectly happy living in a state of slavery and bondage.
Doug Roberts
From my personal observation, it takes education and training for people to prefer freedom and liberty over slavery and bondage. It matters how tight the bonds are. I think it is an accident of history that here in the USA we built a nation upon the principles of liberty and freedom. We were taming a continent with little oversight. Only then do men resent the bonds of various forms of slavery. That may also help explain why, today, rural areas are bastions of liberty and freedom while urban areas are havens of restriction and limitation.

Some are content to let others face the challenges, and live off the efforts of others. When there are enough of those to control the government the Republic is doomed. Among other reasons, when the soldiers no longer respect the government…

Is it bad when 

Jerry,

Regarding your recent view comment about the legions not respecting the government… Is it bad when the reaction inside the operations center is general laughter, upon seeing “breaking news” on CNN about another physical security breach at the white house?

Name withheld…

Sex and terrorism

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

In one of your older novels (Prince of Sparta, I believe), your characters debate why their enemies are fighting. One concludes “it’s the girls”. 
Turns out that may apply to our current troubles as well.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mia-bloom/isis-marriage-trap_b_6773576.html
Arab men in traditional culture have NO contact with women at all, not even dating, until they’re married. That can often not be until one reaches the thirties. 
This has the results you would expect.

http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/02/homosexuality-in-iraq-and-saudi-arabia/
ISIS, by contrast, offers a quick marriage both to male and female recruits. For the men  the attractions of marriage are obvious. Women are offered  ” wonderful husband and a free house with top-of-the-line appliances, such as a fridge, microwave and even a milkshake machine”.  Moreover, ISIS will pay a stipend for every  child the couple bears.
Framed that way, it’s obvious why they exert such a powerful draw.  People who aren’t ever going to amount to much , people who have been let down by their traditional culture, are flocking to a place that offers them a fresh start. And sex , of course. 

If this is the draw , then perhaps we can help demolish ISIS by offering similar things, or convince those countries that reform it’s necessary. It’s difficult for me to imagine those countries being truly stable if they’ve got all that sexual energy screaming for an outlet, even after we crush ISIS like the bug it is.

Respectfully,
Brian P.

One of the attractions of Communism to undergraduates in the 50’s was that the girls believed in free love. That was effective in the days before the hookup culture. It would not be now in US universities.

M. Stanton Evans, gone to his reward.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/m-stanton-evans-pioneer-of-conservative-movement-dies-at-80.html>

Roland Dobbins

Mr. Evans, as Mr. Dobbins well knows, in the mid sixties had in his book a statement making me a Communist spy, despite the personal assurance of Russell Kirk that this wasn’t true. It’s a long story and not important now if it ever was.  RIP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-it/could-ibms-brain-inspired-chip-change-the-way-computers-are-built/2015/02/28/8cf45e5a-be99-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html 

Could IBM’s brain-inspired chip change the way computers are built? (WP)

IBM has worked its way up from a worm-size brain, with 256 processors that simulate neurons, to a chip with 1 million of them — the equivalent of a bee brain. By the end of next year, the team hopes to build a mouse-sized brain with 256 million processor-neurons, he said.

At 100 billion neurons, the human brain remains a distant dream.

That looks like a 256-fold (2^8) increase every two years, or 16-fold every year.

If we have 256 million neurons by the end of next year, that means 4 billion a year later, 65 billion the year after that, 1000 billion the year after.

So “a distant dream” is reached about four years from now.

Distance just ain’t what it used to be.

………….Karl

We can discuss the singularity another time; it does appear we are moving ahead with the concepts making AI possible.

The Unreasonable Power of Mathematics 

Dear Jerry:

Some brave souls at the BBC have decided to risk their careers by putting basic equations on screen in an attempt to deconvolute the Climate Wars.

It aired a day ago across the pond, and has already gone global oh  YouTube.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zqkPmM_hj4

Be warned: this program  just might change your mind.

Monckton & Soon’s Model  ? I don’t think so.

                         Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University        

I wonder if there is any significance to this article being in the UK press and not US…

Subj: Bubonic plague-carrying fleas found on New York City rats

Plague shots anyone?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bubonic-plaguecarrying-fleas-found-on-new-york-city-rats-10083563.html
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a
child.” — Cicero, 46 B.C.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/print/89669
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
I appreciate that this article represents a point of view, and that this point of view is no more (and, of course, no less) arguable than the “realist” viewpoint which you appear to espouse with respect to Ukraine et al. I also appreciate that you are unlikely to come around to a different way of thinking on this subject.

I pass this along for two reasons: the author does a comprehensive job of laying out his position, contra the realpolitik view; and he does so in a way that i think exposes the weaknesses of the “realist” view in a measured and non-confrontational fashion.

As I’ve stated in other correspondence, I find your views on the subject quite distressing, the more so that you were one of the thinkers who most influenced me during the Cold War, when your positions seemed on all fours with the forward-leaning internationalist–indeed interventionist–bipartisan foreign policy that was this country’s from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, in which President Reagan played the final hand to a successful close.

It is quite difficult for me to reconcile one of Reagan’s strongest supporters with the (you’ll forgive the expression, but I am at a loss to find a better) neo-isolationist you seem to have become since the Cold War ended: and while it’s possible that it’s due to my ignorance or lack of sophistication, I like to think that those are not the primary factors in my failure.

And while we’re on the subject of epithets, your continued use of the term “neo-conservative” and its various pejorative attributes does nothing to make your argument more convincing, although it does irritate and alienate people like myself, who share some of those views. I leave it to you to decide whether that should affect your usage: of course “Chaos Manor” is your house, therefore your rules. But my late mother once observed that manners consisted in the avoidance of behaviors that made others uncomfortable.

I realize I am probably wasting my time (and yours), but you’ll have to forgive me for continuing to (politely, I hope) try.
Very respectfully,
David G.D. Hecht

I am not immune to emotional attachments, or to dislike of cooperation with tyrants and unpleasant leaders; the question is, what is the threat to the United States, and what agreements make us safer?

Russia needs and wants Russians, or inhabitants that can be Russified – assimilated into the Russian culture.  Ukrainians and Cossacks can be.  Some Slavs can be. Finns and Swedes cannot be, and their experience is that Poles cannot ne either.  They were given a large part of Poland after WW II, as well as Konigsberg. They don’t want Poles and dilution of the Russian culture.  They are a threat to Ukraine, but the Russophile Ukrainian population will assimilate nicely; the rest won’t.  Russia knows this.

Russia is no threat to US territory, and a life or death treaty with Ukraine will not increase the security of the US.  Russia and US have similar interests to the East of Ukraine; having a hostile relationship helps neither nation.

I am not an isolationist and never have been, any more than Jefferson was when dealing with the Barbary Coast.  I am a realist.

If you will give me a term more acceptable to describe  the modern interventionists who got us into a needless war in Iraq, and a prolonged stay in Afghanistan after we had cast out the Taliban I will endeavor to use it, as you do not like neo-conservative.  They were allies in the cold war, but do not understand that it is over.

According to the egregious Frum I have been read out of the Conservative movement, so while I think of myself as conservative I am no longer a “Leading Conservative Intellectual.” But then I am of a company with the late Messrs. Stephen Tonsor and Russell Kirk who also opposed the Iraqi invasions.

I believe we are at war to the knife with the Caliphate, and that war is far more a threat to the US than the Russian territorial disputes; and I firmly believe we must accept that war.  No war was ever won by waiting for the enemy to take the initiative. This puts us into a war in Iraq.  We must fight it.  It would not have come upon us without our invasion of Iraq, which I very much opposed – of course once we were in it it behooved us to fight to win.  And having won we needed a proconsul who understood our objectives.  At the price of much blood and treasure – most Iraqi but much of it ours – we imposed Bremer.

And now we refuse to acknowledge ISIS is at war with us, yet they say so hourly.

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

Mail 824 Sunday, May 11, 2014

You were ahead of your time, Jerry –

I recall that you once backed an idea for sending water back up into the mountains.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/water-flows-uphill-maybe-california-drought

Of course, they’re not using recycled water, and it can’t work in both directions at the same time except incidentally. It is still subject to state approval, so they may manage to kill the idea yet.

–Gary P

It has long been clear to me that LA needs to reprocess its sewage and runoff water – it does that very well now – and pump it up into the Angeles Crest to runs down refilling the water table as it goes.

: Useless population

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

I’m not convinced that you have the right of the argument when you say that half the population will inevitably be economically useless. Perhaps there will be sufficient government incentives and disincentives to encourage indolence in half the population, but that’s not the same thing. As a thought experiment, think about the U.S. agricultural sector that you use as an example of the phenomenon.

It’s true that farm labor is a very small fraction of what it was at the beginning of the 20th century. But that reduction is a result of increased productivity through the employment of many technologies, from tractors to vacuum-packed breakfast cereal. Perhaps it would be more reasonable to add back in the employment at firms ranging from John Deere, to General Mills, to Frigidaire, to Gunderson rail cars and manufacturers of shipping containers, to financiers who lubricate the process of putting the capital investment in place. All of a sudden, there’s a lot more people employed in bringing you your Wheaties and orange juice.

Now, it’s true that those firms don’t solely service the agricultural sector—their profits are driven in large part by the rest of the industrial (and other) sectors. That is to say, the productivity of today’s agricultural sector is largely a by-product of the industrial sector. It seems to me that it’s not so much of a reach to say that productivity increases in the manufacturing sector will continue to be driven by innovations (and employment) in the technology sector, biotech sector, transportation, energy, etc. Because it takes time and capital to automate any task, and it always seems that tasks pop up faster than we can get together the time and capital, it seems to me that there will be jobs aplenty for those with a good work ethic and enough intelligence to either mop a floor or to tidy a room in preparation for the floor-mopping robot.

Think of it another way—at one time, one-third of the population was employed in feeding the other two-thirds. Later on, 1/3 was employed providing rail transportation to the other 2/3. Later on, (if memory serves) 1/3 was employed building cars, car parts, or roads for the other 2/3. Perhaps someday 1/3 will be employed capturing energy for the other 2/3.

It’s true that my optimistic take pre-supposes an educational system that equips all but the developmentally disabled with a good work ethic and the ability to do basic arithmetic and to read and comprehend instructions. But that gets back to the government incentives I mentioned. (As an aside, at one time I contracted with a foundation that employed the developmentally disabled to do part-kits for a product, so I don’t think even that is a real disqualification.)

The one fly in the ointment that I see is something that I left out of my “1/3” progression. The employment picture has gotten muddier lately, but out of the non-agriculture, non goods-producing population, one-third is employed either by government or by health and social services (which is difficult to separate from government in the official statistics). Perhaps this is an aberration, and not a harbinger, but I think it’s the source of much of our current ennui.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm <http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm>

Neil

The key to your statement is “good work ethics.” Given present trends, I’d say we were moving more to “sensitivity to entitlements”. I am not sure where good work ethics will be learned. I suspect that given incentives, freedom, and decent work ethics we would have a brilliant renaissance, but I fear that is more a hope than a prediction.

Understand that my definition of useless is an economic term, not a moral judgment. Those who produce less than they consume over their lifetimes generally have contributed little to the civilization.  Of course ‘contribute’ is subject to discussion. I sing for my supper, but I don’t produce very much in the usual sense.

ADA

Hi Jerry

You wrote that “The Department of Defense tried to get into the act with its invention of ADA but like all projects operated by committees, it grew and added features and never quite got there.”

ADA itself may not be much used but a lot of it lives on in Oracle’s PL/SQL language: http://www.dba-oracle.com/concepts/programming_pl_sql.htm

“Oracle PL/SQL was based on the ADA programming language which was developed by the Department of Defense to be used on mission critical systems. Although not a ‘sexy’ language like Java or C, ADA is still being develop and used for applications such as aircraft control systems. ADA is a highly structured, strongly typed programming language that uses natural language constructs to make it easy to understand. The PL/SQL language inherited these attributes making PL/SQL easier to read and maintain than more cryptic languages such as C.”

As a PL/SQL Software Engineer myself over the last few years I have written tens of thousands of lines of PL/SQL and I can confirm that it is widely used around the world, by most of the organizations that use Oracle databases, and is a living language that is actively updated by Oracle with new features released most years.

Having, in my time worked with Assembly language, COBOL, C, Forth, PL/SQL and other languages, in my opinion PL/SQL is one of the better development languages. Unfortunately because it’s only supplied as part of Oracle’s database offering, with very little support for using it for anything other than building and executing SQL queries it’s never going to be the language of choice for general software development.

Best wishes

Paul Dove

I was very hopeful about ADA and hoped that it would become wildly popular, but I fear the committee nature of its design, no matter how well meant, doomed it.

Compilers for number crunching

Hi Jerry.

Coincidentally, I stumbled across this article today just after the latest round of discussions on compilers got started on Chaos Manor. It focuses on FORTRAN and some up-and-coming computer languages:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computings-future-can-any-coding-language-top-a-1950s-behemoth/

From personal experience, FORTRAN is still the dominant language in both oceanography/atmospheric science and astrophysics…

Cheers,

Mike Casey

When I was keynote speaker to the Grand Challenges in Supercomputing Conference some decades ago, I took the opportunity to question people who used supercomputers on just what they did. I generally got the answer, “I write 120,000 lines of FORTRAN and try not to go mad.” Apparently that’s still a fair description of what some Supercomputer people do to this day.

FORTRAN can be a confusing language. It will compile nonsense including type changes and confusing data with program instructions, and allows a number of coding tricks that save lines of code and memory at the expense of understanding, but there are also programs like RATFOR (RATional FORtran) and its descendants and improvements: these are precompilers that enforce strong data typing and a degree of structuring forcing the programmer to think about the logic of the program before handing the whole mass to the compiler. I have written some FORTRAN programs including an expected value model of a nuclear exchange of ballistic missiles, and it is powerful. I’d still rather use C-BASIC for the kinds of work I tend to do with computers, but I have to confess that I’m likely to use Python if I just need something quick and dirty. But then I try to avoid programming when possible and lately I have been very successful at doing that.

I suspect that for really complex systems like climate and complex flows, FORTRAN is the weapon of choice to this day. I know that when I worked with nuclear weapon designers, most of their work was done in FORTRAN.

Subject: Cutting-edge research still universally involves Fortran; a trio of challengers wants in.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computings-future-can-any-

coding-language-top-a-1950s-behemoth/

An interesting article.

Fr. N.

Coding for dollars

Dr. Pournelle,

I enjoy your occasional discussions on software coding, and agree with many of your points — but at the cost of possibly being boringly repetitive, I must stick with the position that the language is possibly the least important factor of the components of generating good software. Seriously, it is the systematic approach (or lack thereof) by the coder(s) and their organization. In my recently departed systems engineering career, I’ve witnessed lousy software written in low-level languages (or machine code) by coders with the reputation for a high degree of skill, and excellent code written in loosely typed, interpreted languages by relatively inexperienced programmers. The differences distinguishing the two extremes have always been the developer’s understanding of requirements (including security requirements), the degree of code review, integration testing, and configuration management.

Languages do make a difference in the sheer amount of good, verified code that can be generated by a given group with a given skill set. Strongly typed languages have all the advantages you list, including the ease with which the code is inspected and debugged, as well as the ease with which the project is staffed. However, if testing is given short shrift a good language is as likely IMO to produce poor results as a project run using machine code.

There is some excellent and useful software written, by a single person, much of it in assembly language, in Spinrite by Steve Gibson. I became aware of him and the software indirectly via a reference from you to TWiT. His attention to detail and commitment to thorough testing by a team set his work apart from others. He posts a lot of freeware and security utilities, along with a lot of other good information on his site at grc.com.

I do enjoy the discussion, and look forward to your comments and those of your other readers. I also am continuing to enjoy reading of your recovery and increased activity.

-d

I don’t disagree with what you say. What Niklaus Wirth has spent a lifetime trying to accomplish is to get programmers to think a lot more about what they are trying to accomplish before they begin to write code, and to design languages that require you to do that.

Wirth’s view of ADA, incidentally, was that was based on bad principles from the beginning because it had code Exception operations (so that if you coded yourself deep into a hole you could get out by declaring and exception). “They don’t know how to program if they need those,” he told me once, I think over sandwiches at my kitchen table. I had brought him and his wife to the house when he was in town for a conference, and I recall showing him the DOS game Wing Commander: he was greatly impressed with it (as was I).

re Substandard Programming Practices and Their Effect on Our Daily Lives and the Catastrophe Waiting Just Around the Corner:

I think it is quite unfair of your correspondent to dismiss the complexity problem as nonsense. The complexity of systems has indeed become enormous.

That is no excuse for poor design and implementation, but even with good and thorough design and high-quality implementation, what we expect from a system these days is far, far more than what it used to be, and hence a huge amount of added complexity.

I know whereof I speak. I have been a software engineer for 42 years now, and have worked for Symantec and Google as well as for several not so well-known companies.

It is easy to say "poor choice of programming tools" but in reality there is little choice available – unless you want to re-educate your workforce, you use the tools they know.

There are, of course, plenty of examples of the problems Mr. Holmes cites, but there have always been inferior products in the marketplace, and a marketplace that changes as rapidly as computing has more than its fair share.

But it is not universally so, and the discipline of software engineering is advancing (albeit slowly). The most hopeful signs I see are a greatly increased use of unit tests and Test-Driven Development (write the tests *first*, then test the code as you write).

To me, the design and test aspects are more important than the implementation language, but we are not yet completely done with the language wars. The most interesting new language (for me anyway) is the "go" language. At least one of its designers was a student of Wirth’s. The language itself seems to address my biggest concern with existing languages. (Their complexity! The C++ book from its principle designer is huge, and very difficult for mere mortals to fully understand.) Hopefully go will become a major programming language that can challenge C++.

While problems such as Mr. Holmes cites are all too common (I have gone through several routers in search of a decent one for my home installation), there is hope, and there *are* companies who are doing what could reasonably be called software engineering – they design, they test (in multiple ways) and they apply the lessons learned from failures. But we do have to learn to deal with complexity in a far better way than we do now. I currently work for Panasas, a computer storage company. I can tell you that the level of complexity in a modern hard drive is truly frightening. Some days it seems like a miracle that they work at all. Then we take these hugely complex components and assemble them into systems containing hundreds or thousands of them, connected together by super-complex networking systems. So it goes. If someone does not do their work correctly, then lots of bad stuff can happen.

The best answer I know of to keep vendors of consumer equipment honest is on-line ratings and reviews. Use them to help you buy, and review the products you do buy (positive or negative – both are important).

On another topic, a quick recommendation of two webcomics:

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-06-12

http://www.widdershinscomic.com/chapters-2/

Enjoy.

A. Chris Barker

Subj: Languages for Reliable Programs: Don’t Forget Go!

I think you’ll find that Go channels Wirth’s spirit pretty well, if not perfectly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTl0tl9BGdc

http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

Rob Pike’s "Public Static Void" talk is somewhat dated, but I know of no better concise presentation of exactly what Go’s inventors tried to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE

Pike’s more extended introduction, "Another Go at Language Design", is also somewhat dated, but, again, I know of no better comprehensive overview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VcArS4Wpqk

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Operating systems

Jerry:

I’m still annoyed that IBM shot down OS/2, just as it was getting into orbit. Strong, stable, capable and secure, it was a victim of internal politics.

Then there were evolutionary dead ends such as Pick, which came and went.

Currently, there is really no true alternative OS to Windoze. The "IXes" — in all iterations, from UNIX to AIX to Linux to Apple — have been around since the days of DOS, and while significantly better, don’t have the muscle behind them to take on the Redmond Rangers’ marketing department (and licensing schemes which made Windows a monopoly). The only "rival" to what MS is putting out is Windows XP!

If OS/2 were still actively under development by Big Blue, MS would have been forced to fix the longtime weaknesses in the Windows platform.

Ah, well, one can wish. As the song goes, "Every OS sucks!"

Keith

I was there. IBM had no idea of what they were doing. At one COMDEX, if you came within fifty feet of the Microsoft booths and had the faintest resemblance to being a developer, A Microsoft operative would thrust a Windows Software Development Kit into your hands. Meanwhile IBM was proud to announce that you could buy the OS2 SDK for only $500. I agree that if IBM had the vision that Gates had, they’d have produced a better OS; but they did not. They never believed in a computer in every house, and in every office, and in every classroom. They believed in 10,000 big computers all running IBM software. And their dreamers thought there might be as many as a million computers by the year 2000.

Growth

Jerry,

Growth is the high fructose corn syrup of the financial world. The kind of growth demanded by investors is only sustainable for a new company during its expansion phase, the "exponential" portion of the growth S-curve. Such growth is unsustainable as all markets reach a saturation point. Mature companies that try to sustain growth in profits after they have saturated their market do so by pushing profit margin. A high profit margin should mean that a company is efficient — lean, spending money mostly on making product or service, not on overhead. However, there is a limit to how much overhead can be reduced relative to production. At that point, companies driven to growth will start cutting out production personnel, the high-cost (read most experienced) ones first, then moving down through the ranks till production is fully compromised and the company fails.

I have been involved with this cycle before and it is not pretty.

I do not trust companies who claim extraordinary gains in market share as they are inevitably small, unstable companies in the early portion of their life-cycle. I also do not trust mature companies who make claims of extraordinary gains in profit margin. They are inevitably destroying their means of production.

I prefer to look for companies paying a steady and healthy dividend. This is the protein and complex carbohydrate diet with a sprinkling of healthy fats that provides for a sustainable life for the company. Wall Street shuns such companies.

Kevin L. Keegan

Between the tax and the market structure of our financial system we have made it very difficult to have what used to be called stable Blue Chip companies: companies that make a good profit and pay dividends, and don’t try to buy their competitors to expand, nor do they seek to sell out for a capital gain.  For a stable Republic you need something of that sort. Schumpeter’s creative destruction needs to be combined with prevention of “too big to fail” and with tax laws that encourage “good enough” for as long as it is good enough. 

Yes. I understand that this is difficult. But we now overregulate everything, making it very hard for new companies to enter the market because they can’t afford compliance officers and lawyers, while encouraging companies to eat each other and become too big to fail.  This is a formula for disaster.  Stable companies that make a good profit  should not be forced to grow or die.  Yes, when their market vanishes they have no choice, but often that is not what forces them into unwise expansion in search of growth.  I suspect it’s too late at night for me to be writing this.

‘Despite the threat of war with Russia, the Ukrainian government is being forced by its lenders to try to militarily recapture their eastern tax base.’

<http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/05/ukrainian_crisis_is_about_taxes.html>

——-

Roland Dobbins

That’s a bit scary. Putin is skating as close to the edge as he dares go. If he loses control, things might get out of hand. Putin needs Russians.

The one thing we all need to remember is that Ukrainians, whether they speak Russian or not, are Slavs and related to the Russians. We also need to understand that Putin is no power mad dictator: he believes himself a patriot.

Today ends the Spring pledge drive. This is the last pitch about money you’ll hear for a while (well, there may be a similar announcement in the mailbag I’m hoping to get prepared before midnight). As we have said often, this site runs on the Public Radio model. It’s free to all, but it will not stay open unless it gets enough subscribers. I do want to thank all those who chose to subscribe this week, and particularly the new subscribers.

If you have never subscribed to this place, this would be a good time to do it. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html If you have subscribed, but it has been a while since your renewed – if you can’t remember when you renewed your subscription – this would be a great time to do that. I won’t be reminding you of it for a while, so do it now while you’re thinking about it… http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

The rising of the oceans…

Got to wondering, could the reported rising of the oceans actually be due to pumping down the fossil water in various aquifers such as the Ogallala Aquifer for agriculture and other human uses? After all, that water goes some place after its first use and many aquifers are not being replenished as fast as they are being drained. And since water vapor is considered by some to be a significant green house gas, this draining could be contributing to climate change as well.

http://www.hpwd.com/aquifers/ogallala-aquifer

Charles Brumbelow

Well, we know that the kilometers of ice over land areas of the Northern Hemisphere has been melting into the sea for nearly 20,000 years as we entered this interim in the Ice Ages, and we know that Scandinavia and other land areas once covered by ice have been rising. And battle hill in Hastings was once a dry road gating the way out of marshes. And, as I have said, I have seen how far from the sea the Hot Gates of Thermopylae are today. Finding a stable area to be the reference point for whether the seas are rising or falling isn’t all that easy.

Fighting Climate Change with YOUR Money

Hello Jerry,

You get right to the crux of the matter:

"We will be asked to pay lots more money to avert this new climate disaster, and the costs will be enormous because the effects of the remedies on the economy will be enormous (and the effects on the climate unmeasurable—BL), and cause famines in Africa. Now that they might get in on this industrial progress we are closing the gate in their faces, but that’s the way the climate changes.

At least there are jobs in climate change analysis. So long as you come up with the accepted results. If you don’t, well, you must work for an oil company.”

Where does the ‘Climate Fighting Money’ actually go?

No one will ever fully know, of course, but the following accounts for multiple billion of the missing dollars:

http://greencorruption.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/podesta-power-and-center-for-american.html#.U2tvVl64nlK

And, as you knew with the confidence of the schedule of the next sunrise, most of it can be found in the pockets of progressives in high places and their friends.

Bob Ludwick

Begley’s Best

I bought the product at a store called Good Earth, did not use it but it had Ed’s name on it and he is one of the few that actually do what they preach, so I had to buy it, would buy it again if they still sold it.

ron

more evidence for your cocktail theory

https://shine.yahoo.com/pets/dog-protects-missing-3-old-boy-160100896.html

Phil Tharp

The theory referred to is my “cocktail party” theory – i.e. a theory I would defend in a cocktail party but not publish in a scientific journal – on the importance of dogs to human evolution of intelligence. Since the same part of the brain that we use for cognition is used by dogs for olfactory sense, I propose that long ago humanity made a deal with dogs. “We’ll get smarter. You keep your sense of smell and protect out village. We’ll look after your children and you look after ours, and we’ll be friends forever, and after we get smart we’ll be better able to take care of both of us.” Human cultural evolution is by villages, and villages with dogs have a much higher chance of producing surviving descendants, and you can work the rest of it from there.

Re: Sexual Assault on Campus

Jerry,

A few days ago I read the article linked below that bears on the subject of your latest posting. I was unaware of many of the facts regarding investigation of rapes on college campuses and frankly, it’s quite a travesty.

http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/03/how-government-created-the-campus-rape-c?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reason%2FArticles+%28Reason+Online+-+All+Articles+%28except+Hit+%26+Run+blog%29%29

Regards,

george

The entire “battle between the sexes” has got out of hand. Girls are expected to join the hookup culture will they or nil they. People call themselves feminists shout rape at every possible opportunity, often causing authorities to become indifferent to very real cases of rape. There is little rational discussion now because attempts to talk about the situation generally degenerate into name calling and charges of gross insensitivity (and that’s the mildest charge).

The Euthanasia Coaster.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster>

————

Roland Dobbins

Pope Benedict spoke of a Culture of Death.

William Harvey "Bill" Dana, RIP.

<http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-bill-dana-20140508-story.html>

—–

Roland Dobbins

.

..and one of the first astronauts…

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-bill-dana-20140508-story.html

Stephanie Osborn

Interstellar Woman of Mystery

See all my books at http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com <http://www.stephanie-osborn.com/>

Today ends the Spring pledge drive. This is the last pitch about money you’ll hear for a while (well, there may be a similar announcement in the mailbag I’m hoping to get prepared before midnight). As we have said often, this site runs on the Public Radio model. It’s free to all, but it will not stay open unless it gets enough subscribers. I do want to thank all those who chose to subscribe this week, and particularly the new subscribers.

If you have never subscribed to this place, this would be a good time to do it. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html If you have subscribed, but it has been a while since your renewed – if you can’t remember when you renewed your subscription – this would be a great time to do that. I won’t be reminding you of it for a while, so do it now while you’re thinking about it… http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

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

Mail 765 Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Drone Strikes On US Soil Possible

Jerry,

The Obama administration just keeps getting more interesting, with the US Attorney General telling Congress that drone strikes could be ordered against Americans on American soil. http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/05/politics/obama-drones-cia/index.html?hpt=us_c1

Will it read your Miranda rights first? Or is this strictly a shoot first and ask questions later thing?

Kevin L. Keegan

Senator Rand Paul (R, Kentucky) has been conducting a one-man filibuster to draw attention to this. He says his goal is to get a statement from the President on the subject. Proscription lists were a major part of the downfall of the Roman Republic, and the cause of the death of Cicero, whose head was displayed in the Forum.

[Apologies: I earlier said ‘conscription’ which is an entirely different discussion. Mr. Heinlein always said that a nation that needed conscripts to defend it wasn’t worth defending. Machiavelli believed that Republics that did not employ conscription probably would not survive. Having the children of rich and poor alike involved in war affects whether or not a republic goes to war. The US ‘solution’ to this for most of its lifetime was to keep the Marines a voluntary organization and employ the Marines when it was an operation short of war. The Corps was kept rather small.  Marines and the Navy belonged to the President, but if you needed to involve the Army that was the Department of War and required Congressional action.  Conscription was needed in preparation for actual wars, as in the leadup to WW II. But it’s another discussion.

Senator Paul was discussing drones and proscription lists, and unlike most filibusters, what I heard in random trips to the live broadcast was relevant to the subject.]

Auschwitz – This is fascinating

How’s this for controversy…

The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15, 2008. It doesn’t take much imagination to extrapolate the message to the rest of Europe – and possibly to the rest of the world.

REMEMBER AS YOU READ — IT WAS IN A SPANISH PAPER

Date: Tue. 15 January 2008

ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz … We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.

The contribution of these people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime.

Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.

And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world’s population. They have received the following NobelPrizes:

Literature:

1988 – Najib Mahfooz

Peace:

1978 – Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat

1990 – Elias James Corey

1994 – Yaser Arafat:

1999 – Ahmed Zewai

Economics:

(zero)

Physics:

(zero)

Medicine:

1960 – Peter Brian Medawar

1998 – Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7 SEVEN

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world’s population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

1910 – Paul Heyse

1927 – Henri Bergson

1958 – Boris Pasternak

1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon

1966 – Nelly Sachs

1976 – Saul Bellow

1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer

1981 – Elias Canetti

1987 – Joseph Brodsky

1991 – Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:

1911 – Alfred Fried

1911 – Tobias Mi chae l Carel Asser

1968 – Rene Cassin

1973 – Henry Kissinger

1978 – Menachem Begin

1986 – Elie Wiesel

1994 – Shimon Peres

1994 – Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:

1905 – Adolph Von Baeyer

1906 – Henri Moissan

1907 – Albert Abraham Michelson

1908 – Gabriel Lippmann

1910 – Otto Wallach

1915 – Richard Willstaetter

1918 – Fritz Haber

1921 – Albert Einstein

1922 – Niels Bohr

1925 – James Franck

1925 – Gustav Hertz

1943 – Gustav Stern

1943 – George Charles de Hevesy

1944 – Isidor Issac Rabi

1952 – Felix Bloch

1954 – Max Born

1958 – Igor Tamm

1959 – Emilio Segre

1960 – Donald A. Glaser

1961 – Robert Hofstadter

1961 – Melvin Calvin

1962 – Lev Davidovich Landau

1962 – Max Ferdinand Perutz

1965 – Richard Phillips Feynman

1965 – Julian Schwinger

1969 – Murray Gell-Mann

1971 – Dennis Gabor

1972 – William Howard Stein

1973 – Brian David Josephson

1975 – Benjamin Mottleson

1976 – Burton Richter

1977 – Ilya Prigogine

1978 – Arno Allan Penzias

1978 – Peter L Kapitza

1979 – Stephen Weinberg

1979 – Sheldon Glashow

1979 – Herbert Charles Brown

1980 – Paul Berg

1980 – Walter Gilbert

1981 – Roald Hoffmann

1982 – Aaron Klug

1985 – Albert A. Hauptman

1985 – Jerome Karle

1986 – Dudley R. Herschbach

1988 – Robert Huber

1988 – Leon Lederman

1988 – Melvin Schwartz

1988 – Jack Steinberger

1989 – Sidney Altman

1990 – Jerome Friedman

1992 – Rudolph Marcus

1995 – Martin Perl

2000 – Alan J. Heeger

Economics:

1970 – Paul Anthony Samuelson

1971 – Simon Kuznets

1972 – Kenneth Joseph Arrow

1975 – Leonid Kantorovich

1976 – Milton Friedman

1978 – Herbert A. Simon

1980 – Lawrence Robert Klein

1985 – Franco Modigliani

1987 – Robert M. Solow

1990 – Harry Markowitz

1990 – Merton Miller

1992 – Gary Becker

1993 – Robert Fogel

Medicine:

1908 – Elie Metchnikoff

1908 – Paul Erlich

1914 – Robert Barany

1922 – Otto Meyerhof

1930 – Karl Landsteiner

1931 – Otto Warburg

1936 – Otto Loewi

1944 – Joseph Erlanger

1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser

1945 – Ernst Boris Chain

1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller

1950 – Tadeus Reichstein

1952 – Selman Abraham Waksman

1953 – Hans Krebs

1953 – Fritz Albert Lipmann

1958 – Joshua Lederberg

1959 – Arthur Kornberg

1964 – Konrad Bloch

1965 – Francois Jacob

1965 – Andre Lwoff

1967 – George Wald

1968 – Marshall W. Nirenberg

1969 – Salvador Luria

1970 – Julius Axelrod

1970 – Sir Bernard Katz

1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman

1975 – Howard Martin Temin

1976 – Baruch S. Blumberg

1977 – Roselyn Sussman Yalow

1978 – Daniel Nathans

1980 – Baruj Benacerraf

1984 – Cesar Milstein

1985 – Mi chae l Stuart Brown

1985 – Joseph L. Goldstein

1986 – Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]

1988 – Gertrude Elion

1989 – Harold Varmus

1991 – Erwin Neher

1991 – Bert Sakmann

1993 – Richard J. Roberts

1993 – Phillip Sharp

1994 – Alfred Gilman

1995 – Edward B. Lewis

1996 – Lu RoseIacovino

TOTAL: 129!

The Jews are NOT promoting brain washing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non Muslims. The Jews don’t hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants. There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church. There is NOTa single Jew who protests by killing people.

The Jews don’t traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

Perhaps they should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask ‘what can they do for humankind’ before they demand that humankind respects them.

Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel’s part, the following two sentences really says it all:

"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel ." Benjamin Netanyahu

General Eisenhower warned us it is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He did this because he said in words to this effect:

‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history someone will get up and say that this never happened’

Recently, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offends’ the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as of yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated while the German people looked the other way.

Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth,’ it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.

This e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people. Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.

How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center ‘NEVER HAPPENED’ because it offends some Muslim in the United States? Do not just delete this message; it will take only a minute to pass this along.

I was not fully in favor of building the Holocaust Museum on the Washington Mall, but now I wonder if there will not be pressure to close it.

Hello Jerry,

I thought you might enjoy this piece of security theatre reported in the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/new-tsa-rules-allowing-small-knives-on-planes-draw-fire-from-some-sept-11-family-members/2013/03/06/2bd2e188-86be-11e2-a80b-3edc779b676f_story.html

The best part of the article:

………Burlingame suspects the TSA decided to allow folding knives because they are hard to spot. She said the agency’s employees “have a difficult time seeing these knives on X-ray screening, which lowers their performance testing rates.”

Stay well,

J

P.S. please don’t publish my name/email with this article as I fly a lot and would prefer not to incur the wrath of the TSA.

The TSA says it cannot hire new gropers to harass travelers at the airports and will have fewer gropers working at any given time; therefore, we will have delays at airports while we wait to be groped.  This is all blamed on the "sequester crisis" that was Obama’s brainchild, but this President blames the GOP.  However, we note — once again — more activities at TSA that do not pass the common sense test. 

<.>

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration will let people carry small pocketknives onto passenger planes for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, along with golf clubs, hockey sticks and plastic Wiffle Ball-style bats.

</>

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-05/tsa-will-permit-knives-golf-clubs-on-u-s-planes.html

I don’t think I need to delve too deeply into that point; I’ll say that I think it may become a fund raiser for TSA.  What I mean is, allowing these items increases the likelihood of an "incident", which will result in much crying by certain sections of the general public.  The mother figure or father figure bureaucrats will come in and request more funding to deal with the new bogey men. 

<.>

The impending sequester did not prevent the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)  from acting in late February to seal a $50-million deal to purchase new uniforms for its agents–uniforms that will be partly manufactured in Mexico.

</>

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/tsa-sealed-50-million-sequester-eve-deal-buy-new-uniforms

So the TSA managed to arrange a bailout for the Mexican gropers’ garment industry to save the TSA from unfashionable uniforms.  But, I realize that point will not mean much to most people; so let’s add some context and put this into perspective, shall we?

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Under their new collective bargaining agreement, Transportation Security Administration officers get to spend more taxpayer money on their uniforms every year than a United States Marine Corps lieutenant can spend in a lifetime.

</>

http://washingtonexaminer.com/tsa-uniform-perks-more-expensive-than-marine-corps/article/2513111

One has to ask just what leverage the employees at TSA have to secure such nonsensical agreements?  I took a course in labor relations — specifically on bargaining and negotiation — and I’m wondering what these employees offer that warrants such an expense by the management?  After all, we’re talking about people who could not get a job at Starbucks or Walmart, that have no law enforcement training, and are, basically, unskilled workers who grope people and rummage through their undergarments while harassing a number of people they may meet in the course of the day.  What value could they possibly bring that we cannot just hire someone else with fewer benefits and lower salaries? 

While writing this email, another thought struck me.  We have unions for several federal entities; what would happen if we had unions in the military? 😉

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

: Probably not funny, but…

I suppose there is a logical reason that TSA settled on 2.36 inches as the dividing point for allowable and unallowable carry-on knives. However, NBC didn’t report why this precise-to-two-decimal-places measurement was chosen, and that makes it seem rather silly. You or your knife-savvy readers may be able to explain — is this just a conversion from metric length (where the metric number is nice and round)? Or an industry standard blade in some respect?

It’s not the most helpful newswriting, that’s for sure.

–Mike

http://www.nbcnews.com/travel/tsa-allow-passengers-carry-small-knives-planes-1C8700194

According to the TSA, passengers will be able to carry-on knives that are less than 2.36 inches long and less than one-half inch wide. Larger knives, and those with locking blades and molding handles, will continue to be prohibited, as will razor blades and box cutters.

We have a number of comments on correlation and causation. Here are some of them:

correlation

From the time (long ago!) when I studied at the Helsinki University of Technology (now part of the Aalto University) I remember an even better (because simpler) example of point 3 in ‘The Causes of Correlation’: At least in Finland, there’s a clear correlation between ice cream consumption and deaths through drowning, with both peaking in summer. So which causes which? Neither; what happens is that warm weather makes people eat more ice cream and also go swimming and boating much more, increasing their opportunities to drown.

Frej Wasastjerna

Correlation and causation

Dr. Pournelle,

Thanks for publishing the essay on statistics, and to the author. I’m convinced (again) that I should have spent more time on the subject in school.

Perhaps apropos:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/climate-change-volcanoes/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/03/06/as-carbon-dioxide-levels-continue-to-rise-global-temperatures-are-not-following-suit/

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/ice-age-chicken-and-egg-did-warming-precede-carbon-dioxide-rise/

I think that the lesson I might take is that global temperatures seem to correlate more with volcanic activity than to anthropogenic release of CO2. But it would be very important to pay attention to the details of the case studies before making such a conclusion.

-d

Subject: Postscript on correlation

This is too good.  By sheer coincidence today’s Dilbert (6 Mar 2013) addresses the problem of causation vs. correlation:

http://www.dilbert.com/

Mike Flynn

Here is a paper by Brian Joiner on lurking variables in correlation, anent the comment that to develop a causal hypothesis from a correlation, one needs information from outside the correlation.

http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/pages/faculty/MONeill/Math152/Handouts/Joiner.pdf

Mike Flynn

Correlation and Causation

In the strict logical sense, correlation does not imply causation. I admit that in general parlance the word "imply" has a looser meaning than that.

To use correlation as a starting point for causation, one needs two things; the correlation (finding of which can be done statistically) and a plausible mechanism by which the causation could be achieved. Ideally, the proposed mechanism should be testable. Testability is not the case for the correlation between CO2 and global warming, at least in a practical sense and at current CO2 levels. IMHO neither is the case for the correlation between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease. Testing this in humans is impractical due to ethical considerations and far too high time cost, and there is no plausible mechanism so the hypothesis (high fat ruins your heart) fails on both grounds.

I’ve used an imperfect and somewhat silly/OTT example of the "correlation implies causation" fallacy: There is a strong correlation between the number of men in American shopping malls (at least in the northern parts) wearing white-and-red suits, big belts, big boots, fat suits underneath the red, long white wigs and fake beards – and the amount of snowfall outside. Do the men in red suits cause the snow?

Regards

Ian Campbell

The Professors’ Big Stage – NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage.html?hp&_r=0

Tom Friedman’s NYT article on Massively Open Online Courses. Friedman tends to always be very excited by technology and the changes it affords us. Some quotes I like from the article:

Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know.

and

We have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor.

and my favorite…

We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach.

Having matriculated at a post-secondary school that is chartered as a research institution I can attest to the fact that a goodly portion of the professors I encountered could not teach.

John Harlow

The original California higher education master plan – I worked on it as a consultant – understood this and mandated that the California State Colleges be teaching institutions and not be able to grant advanced degrees. The University of California would have a limited number of campuses – Berkeley, UCLA, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz – and be primarily graduate schools although they would have limited undergraduate classes. Naturally the professor unions got the State Golleges first the right to give master’s, then PhD, then call themselves Universities… With the result that few of them can teach well, and they are generally lousy at research also. The big name UC campuses do have good grad schools but as they begin offering ethnicity and diversity higher degrees they sink into the muck of having undergraduate classes taught by uninterested grad students, and research degrees in subjects that have no market. And the beat goes on.

One can get a decent education without the awful classes with their crippling debts, but the universities still have the credentials monopolies.

"North Korea is a major threat because of the massed artillery along the border. The location of most of the guns is well known and plotted by both US and South Korean gunners and pilots."

A couple of sentences, while both true, are juxtaposed in such a way that would seem the threat of the artillery is mitigated by the knowledge of their location for counter-battery/attack. This would be foolhardy to accept at face value. The NK artillery placement is sophisticated with all of the locations hardened and dug in – mostly in tunnels with multiple firing positions (not to mention deceptive false positions/guns). The guns can be run out, fired, and retired back into to the tunnels and behind blast doors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way indicating that these positions are impervious to US & SK counter activities. However, there is no possible way to stop a NK first strike, nor any way to successfully insure a 100% neutralization of the NK artillery/rocket/mortar capability quickly (i.e. initial counter-battery/attack). At best, incremental reduction of the NK capabilities would require some hours, maybe as long as 96 (my own semi-educated guess). In the meantime, significant death and destruction will be dealt civilians and infrastructure to Seoul and surrounding areas. Make no mistake, the NKs will lose the complete military exchange but the first sentence of the above quote stands.

s/f

Couv

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

Of course, which is why deterrence is the strategy; when the time comes one expects China and South Korea to arrange the denouement. It’s not really a US affair.

Re: _Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War_.

On Mar 4, 2013, at 9:11 PM, Roland Dobbins wrote:

> <http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Curse-Battling-Communism-Cold/dp/0307269159>

Kindle link:

<http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Curse-Battling-Communism-ebook/dp/B00BG73FTE/>

Roland Dobbins