Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

We’re reorganizing here. I’m going to spend at least two hours, with luck more, in the Monk’s Cell writing fiction. I’ve got my downstairs life organized well. Now for the fiction phase. This isn’t moving back into the upstairs offices with the Great Hall; that is still in the future. The problem with that part of the house is that while I have no trouble getting up there, getting down is tricky because of the twists in the stairway.

The Monk’s Cell is the large upstairs bedroom in the old part of the house. It does not connect with the Great Hall suite at all. It was Alex’s old room, inherited by the oldest son left in the house as the boys left, then became a sort of guest room. It has no telephone, and no books. It has a good console, and I set one of the first flat screen monitors up there – we still used large bottles, in those days – and a good keyboard, and brought to current laptop up there to work undisturbed by [phones and visitors. Got a lot of books done that way.

Came the stroke I couldn’t get up and down those stairs, so it got well cleaned out, and the ancient ThinkPad laptop slowly deteriorated. I never did have a high speed Internet cable going up there, and wi-fi was indifferent to slow, but that was fine – no distractions, but enough connectivity to save backups to other machines and to get to the Internet for the occasional research without any temptations. I don’t keep mail on that machine either. Or SFWA or any other Iternet distractions.

So now I need to replace the old ThinkPad, which worked quite well, and my first thought is to just get another one.

This morning I thought about it and sent this to my advisors:

The ThinkPad upstairs in Alex’s old room – the “Monk’s Cell” — is ancient and slow, and time for replacement.  I will as before have a large screen and a Logitech K360 wireless keyboard for my writing, and it will mostly be upstairs all its life.  I prefer a laptop up there because I can actually carry it downstairs if I have to, while getting a tower or desktop down would be a real pain.

But since I’ll be doing much of my fiction on it, the important thing is ease of use, and good wireless.  Since I have a rather powerful wireless network set up by Alex and Eric, a good built in and non-distracting laptop wireless should be fine; the ThinkPad was except that sometimes the ThinkPad and the Windows wireless software tended to get into conflict, and that wasted creative time.  Mostly what I want is fire and forget – when I go up there I don’t want to think about anything but what I’m working on.  The wireless is for research.

I’m having a problem getting the new Word whatever number that comes with Office 365 to accept my older custom dictionaries; it insists that it can only install dictionaries in some weird format whose name I cannot remember, but it doesn’t like mameluke.dic and the procedures Microsoft help gives me are as usual incomprehensible. That’s a secondary problem, but if anyone knows how to transform Word 2012 dictionaries or import and old dictionary into the new default, it would help.  I used to use a custom dictionary for each major work because there is no point in having the main dictionary know that Agzaral is a word, and things were slow and memory was expensive and you get the idea. Habits are hard to break and I had a habit of custom dictionaries, which Microsoft thinks is weird now.  At worst I’ll just manually put all the correct words in the main dictionary now since search is nearly instantaneous and dictionary memory is trivial. Memory used to cost money.

Anyway, should I just get a new ThinkPad or is there a better top end brand?  It will not be for games, should be reliable and trouble free, be able to connect to external devices such as the LASFS projector and con projectors in case I make presentations, and have good wireless. Much of the time it will simply sit upstairs with the lid closed waiting for me to come up for a couple of hours a day

For fiction.  I want it pretty soon, and given the importance reliability and lack of distracting quirks is FAR more important than cost. 

I realize the irony of this: that’s the sort of question everyone asked ME in the Byte era, and I was probably the best person to ask it of. Alas, those days are gone, but I still get good advice from my hard working advisors, but I don’t get to all the shows and have hands on ex[perience with all the new equipment any more.

One suggestion was

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232777&ignorebbr=1&cm_re=PPSSXYRSOEBIJU-_-34-232-777-_-Product

which looks pretty good, only I think I would like the 15 “ one. I see that Amazon (and surely many other vendors) offers a docking station for it. And I hjave at least one spare monitor I can put up there: the one at present is from the early 90’s, quite good at the time but a bit small and far too low resolution now. Of course the best doesn’t cost much now. Things have got marvelously inexpensive lately.

There will be more later today, but that’s the project for the week as I move into high gear to get my writing projects done. My computer project is to set up a good writing station for stroke victims who have to do two finger typing and stare at the keyboard. I’ve found a few tricks for adjusting Word to my needs but if a Word expert is reading this. I’d sure like a lesson on importing old dictionaries. It would save me a bit of time. I also think the Word 2010 procedure for adding to the autocorrect table was much better than the one at present; it used to be that right-clicking a red-wavy-underlined word produced a menu of choices, one of which was to add that word and its correction to autocorrect. You need to be careful when the typo could have been any of several words, but if you got a unique suggestion and that was what you meant, it was simple to add it to autocorrect so that you would never see that typo again. For instance, in the last sentence I missed a space so that I typed “typoagain”. The spelling program offered to correct it to typo again, which I let it do; but with Word 2010 I could have, with one click, added that to autocorrect. I could give many other examples.

Alex will be over shortly and we’ll go to dinner. I’ll post this now, more later.

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

We’re reorganizing here. I’m going to spend at least two hours, with luck more, in the Monk’s Cell writing fiction. I’ve got my downstairs life organized well. Now for the fiction phase. This isn’t moving back into the upstairs offices with the Great Hall; that is still in the future. The problem with that part of the house is that while I have no trpouble getting up there, getting down is tricky because of the twists in the stairway.

The Monk’s Cell is the large upstairs bedroom in the old part of the house. It does not connect with the Great Hall suite at all. It was Alex’s old room, inherited by the oldest son left in the house as the boys left, then became a sort of guest room. It has no telephone, and no books. It has a good console, and I set one of the first flat screen monitors up there – we still used large bottles, in those days – and a good keyboard, and brought to current laptop up there to work undisturbed by [phones and visitors. Got a lot of books done that way.

Came the stroke I couldn’t get up and down those stairs, so it got well cleaned out, and the ancient ThinkPad laptop slowly deteriorated. I never did have a high speed Internet cable going up there, and wi-fi was indifferent to slow, but that was fine – no distractions, but enough connectivity to save backups to other machines and to get to the Internet for the occasional research without any temptations. I don’t keep mail on that machine either. Or SFWA or any other Iternet distractions.

So now I need to replace the old ThinkPad, which worked quite well, and my first thought is to just get another one.

This morning I thought about it and sent this to my advisors:

The ThinkPad upstairs in Alex’s old room – the “Monk’s Cell” — is ancient and slow, and time for replacement.  I will as before have a large screen and a Logitech K360 wireless keyboard for my writing, and it will mostly be upstairs all its life.  I prefer a laptop up there because I can actually carry it downstairs if I have to, while getting a tower or desktop down would be a real pain.

But since I’ll be doing much of my fiction on it, the important thing is ease of use, and good wireless.  Since I have a rather powerful wireless network set up by Alex and Eric, a good built in and non-distracting laptop wireless should be fine; the ThinkPad was except that sometimes the ThinkPad and the Windows wireless software tended to get into conflict, and that wasted creative time.  Mostly what I want is fire and forget – when I go up there I don’t want to think about anything but what I’m working on.  The wireless is for research.

I’m having a problem getting the new Word whatever number that comes with Office 365 to accept my older custom dictionaries; it insists that it can only install dictionaries in some weird format whose name I cannot remember, but it doesn’t like mameluke.dic and the procedures Microsoft help gives me are as usual incomprehensible. That’s a secondary problem, but if anyone knows how to transform Word 2012 dictionaries or import and old dictionary into the new default, it would help.  I used to use a custom dictionary for each major work because there is no point in having the main dictionary know that Agzaral is a word, and things were slow and memory was expensive and you get the idea. Habits are hard to break and I had a habit of custom dictionaries, which Microsoft thinks is weird now.  At worst I’ll just manually put all the correct words in the main dictionary now since search is nearly instantaneous and dictionary memory is trivial. Memory used to cost money.

Anyway, should I just get a new ThinkPad or is there a better top end brand?  It will not be for games, should be reliable and trouble free, be able to connect to external devices such as the LASFS projector and con projectors in case I make presentations, and have good wireless. Much of the time it will simply sit upstairs with the lid closed waiting for me to come up for a couple of hours a day

For fiction.  I want it pretty soon, and given the importance reliability and lack of distracting quirks is FAR more important than cost. 

I realize the irony of this: that’s the sort of question everyone asked ME in the Byte era, and I was probably the best person to ask it of. Alas, those days are gone, but I still get good advice from myh hard working advisors, but I don’t get to all the shows and have hands on ex[perience with all the new equipment any more.

One suggestion was

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232777&ignorebbr=1&cm_re=PPSSXYRSOEBIJU-_-34-232-777-_-Product

which looks pretty good, only I think I would like the 15 “ one. I see that Amazon (and surely many other vendors) offers a docking station for it. And I hjave at least one spare monitor I can put up there: the one at present is from the early 90’s, quite good at the time but a bit small and far too low resolution now. Of course the best doesn’t cost much now. Things have got marvelously inexpensaive lately.

There will be more later today, but that’s the project for the week as I move into high gear to get my writing projects done. My computer project is to set up a good writing station for stroke victims who have to do two finger typing and stare at the keyboard. I’ve found a few tricks for adjusting Word to my needs but if a Word expert is reading this. I’d sure like a lesson on importing old dictionaries. It would save me a bit of time. I also think the Word 2010 procedure for adding to the autocorrect table was much better than the one at present; it used to be that right-clicking a red-wavy-underlined word produced a menu of chjoices, one of which was to add that word and its correction to autocorrect. You need to be careful when the typo could have been any of several words, but if you got a unique suggestion and that was what you meant, it was simple to add it to autocorrect so that you would never see that typo again. For instance, in the last sentence I missed a space so that I typed “typoagain”. The spelling program offered to correct it to typo again, which I let it do; but with Word 2010 I could have, with one click, added that to autocorrect. I could give many other examples.

Alex will be over shortly and we’ll go to dinner. I’ll post this now, more later.

Papal Statements Shocked Me

I’m not sure what to say; I’m not sure if you saw this but I never thought I’d see such statements associated with a Pope — even

privately:

<.>

Today, I don’t think that there is a fear of Islam as such but of ISIS and its war of conquest, which is partly drawn from Islam. It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest.

</>

http://www.la-croix.com/Religion/Pape/INTERVIEW-Pope-Francis-2016-05-17-1200760633

Maybe his Bible differs from mine, but I never read anything about beheading people who don’t convert to my religion, enslaving women, and so forth. I don’t recall any instructions from Jesus about this nor do I recall any pastors saying anything about any of this. Did I miss something?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Popes are infallible only on formal matters of faith and doctrine, not on secular matters.  Like many, His Holiness has a good heart and proper instincts, but his experience is limited.

“We’re just trying to slow things down. It’s all going to be ruins eventually. But people love ruins.”

<http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/the-gravekeepers-paradox>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

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

Chaos Manor View, Sunday, May 22, 2016

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

I’ve been working on fiction, and I had a mild breakthrough – spasm of interest, actually – in, of all things, Mamelukes. I had some inspiration on how to end this volume in a fairly satisfactory way without introducing author control with a deus ex machina settling things. Of course that leaves room for more stories, but at least the major characters are in the right places in their lives. Of course things could change, and they know that, but then they’ve always known that. I won’t give more away than that.

Now all I have to do is get the time to finish it squeezed in among the work I must do on the coming best seller with Niven and Barnes, and the adventure/romance with new insights into artificial intelligence I’m doing with John DeChancie. I pretty well know what I have to do on those, too. I should have Mamelukes finished before World Con.

My NSS International Space Development Conference acceptance speech for the Heinlein Award is at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfm8abmN3pg&feature=youtu.be

and it’s not all; that bad a speech. My son Alex with some friends got a lot of equipment in here and set up what amounted to a professional studio with lighting and good microphones, two cameras and a lot of other equipment. Alex “produced” it, Mike Donahue directed (and operated one of the cameras), Peter Flynn manned the main camera and also provided most of the equipment and editing, and Eric Pobirs did whatever else needed doing. All I did was show up when they said they were ready.

It’s not all that long, and I’m surprised at how good it is.

Things are settling in: Trump is the candidate, some of the neocons are beginning to realize that, and others were so bust celebrating their takeover of the conservative movement they didn’t notice that they’d become irrelevant as Trump stole the voters they were so sure they could count on. It will be interesting to see which way the egregious Frum goes now. He was the one selected to read all the traditional conservatives out of the movement after Bill Buckley retired from National Review but was still alive but apparently wasn’t paying enough attention, or didn’t want the fight it would bring on if he denounced the neocon takeover. He did, just before he died, say that if he had known then what he later learned about the invasion of Iraq, he would not have supported it; but no one pays a great deal of attention to that.

The problem is that a great number of Americans had just got used to the notion that they were conservative, and they thought they were being conservative in supporting someone who wanted to make America great again, control the borders, stop policing the world (and if we have to keep doing it, get some other beneficiaries of the expenditure of American blood and treasure to start contributing their fair share, a real portion of their GDP not just token amounts), appoint original intent Justices to the Supreme Court — well, you know. Put American interests first. Really. With a realistic foreign policy. And if we have to fight a war, then fight it, with enough force to win and win fast and then get out, the way we always have. Didn’t we do that in four years, going from essentially no army at all, and while we were at it becoming the “arsenal of democracy” whatever that means, and doing that in two years? While coming out of a Depression, for heaven’s sake. But, we’re told, that’s not conservative, that’s something else.

So a lot of people are confused. Having been read out of the conservative movement for being insufficiently enthusiastic about globalism, I didn’t figure I owed any obedience to the label, and apparently there are a lot of Americans who feel the same way. I’d say I was for liberty, but that sounds like a liberal, and I know I’m not part of the liberal movement. Whatever I am, I know that Federal aid to education has been a disaster and we had far better schools when it was left to the states, some of whom competed to have schools run to serve the interests of the students, not the interests of the teachers’ unions. But it’s very much in the interest of the ruling class to have awful schools and to keep the price of good ones high; their kids generally don’t go to public schools anyway.

Remember the Northwest Ordinance? Probably you don’t. Or the Land Grant colleges and universities? Can you recall when public state colleges were essentially free to those qualified to be in them? I suspect nostalgia for those days is reactionary, not conservative.

But I also remember when Detroit was the symbol of productivity, and the enemies of America had the goal ending that.

DoD Makes Decisions on Antitrust Regulation?

That article on ULA, the Pentagon being under investigation for related activities, and the ascension of SpaceX had much that was unsettling at best. Among the most unsettling mentions:

<.>

“DoD informed the Commission that the creation of ULA will advance national security by improving the United States’ ability to access space reliably. Because DoD considers access to space essential to the U.S. military, maximizing the reliability of launch vehicles is of paramount importance to DoD,” the FTC said in an October 2006 statement announcing it would allow the venture to proceed. “After thorough review, DoD concluded that the national security benefits of ULA would exceed the anticompetitive harm caused by the transaction.”

</>

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/elon-musk-rocket-defense-223161

So, DoD has the authority to direct the FTC on these matters under certain conditions related to national security. I’m confident legislation backs them up, but what legislation exactly and how broad is that authority?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

: Windows 10 Forced Upgrade

Jerry, you aren’t the only one who was upgraded to Windows 10 without your consent.

When I left the apartment this afternoon, to run errands, my PC was running Windows 7.  I came back home, took a nap, went back out.

I just got back in, went to the PC, and discovered that it was now running Windows 10.

No, I did not at ANY time consent to the upgrade, nor did I at any time “schedule” an upgrade.  Microsoft pulled a Nike: They Just Did It.

I suspect that there is a LOT of money to be extracted from Redmond, via a class action lawsuit.  I also suspect that someone could have serious fun going after them on criminal hacking charges, for “unauthorized access and modification of code and/or data”.  Or something.

–John

Happened to Larry Niven over the weekend. I need to go out to his house and show him how to get back to work; he’s in shock, and I don’t blame him.

Buchanan: ‘If we look more and more like the British Empire in its twilight years, it is because we were converted to the same free-trade faith that was dismissed as utopian folly by the men who made America.’

<http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/free-trade-vs-the-republican-party/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Free trade works among equals; when it’s a means of exporting your productivity for cheaper goods, while paying those put out of work compensation from the public treasury, it changes things.

QM Experiment
Dear Dr. Pournelle, I hope all is well with you and yours. I just saw this article. Maybe Schrodinger’s cat is not both dead and alive. Interesting news in quantum mechanics: http://www.wired.com/2016/05/new-support-alternative-quantum-view/

Jim

Washington Post Truncates Trump

The latest installment in clown shows that pass for marketing exercises, labeled for those who don’t know any better as “elections”

is the truncation of Trump — if you will — by the Washington Post.

I’ve written not a small number of letters outlining how the media generally, and NBC, CNN, MSNBC in particular, are hiding Hillary.

Washington Post suppressed Trump; the latest WaPo poll shows Trump leading Hillary. The Hill had no problem tweeting the poll where Hillary lead Trump and then tweeting a second poll just minutes later that showed Trump leading. So, what did WaPo do? Let’s ask the Washington Examiner:

<.>

It’s not the headline, and it takes 219 words to get there, but a new Washington Post poll on the presidential race reveals that Republican Donald Trump leads Democrat Hillary Clinton among registered voters 46 percent to 44 percent.

</>

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/begrudging-wapo-poll-trump-46-clinton-44/article/2591982

This after the NYT piece you mentioned, later denied by Trump’s ex girlfriend and we have CNN and the NBC networks with their pro Hillary propaganda and other examples. It’s disgusting. They think he’s a scumbag, but they’re acting like scumbags themselves.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

“It has nothing to do with us anymore. It has to do with whether President Obama is going to betray us. Is this how democracy works?”

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/proposed-national-park-is-a-multimillion-dollar-gift-wrapped-up-in-distrust/2016/05/22/0f036aa0-1d0b-11e6-b6e0-c53b7ef63b45_story.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

There never was a democracy that didn’t commit suicide.

Immigration/China

Dear Jerry,

Immigration:

Is it twenty million? I thought the “economic downturn” of 2008 dropped the number of illegals to around twelve million? Perhaps it Has increased, but is it back to twenty million?

Perhaps the world has fundamentally changed, though that seems to conflict with a basic principle of conservatism, but the Republic did quite well until the mid-1920s with open doors limited only by screening for disease.

Of course, the Empire we have gone well down the road to becoming cannot afford to be so liberal in its’’ border policy. That leads to my favorite solution to problems of Empire: ask yourself “What would Augustus have done?”

Likely answer: Mexico would no longer be a fully independent state, but would quickly be reduced to a semi autonomous “ally”” a la Imperial Rome’s relationship with Bithynia or Armenia. Call it the “Cut the Gordian Knot” solution.

Given significant domestic resistance to this change in their national status, the Mexican nation would quickly find itself fully annexed.

That’s what Augustus would have done. Of course, the problem with that solution, as with so many of the lugubrious suggestions of some here, is that it could only be attempted in some mythical world without Democrats. Unlike unicorns, they do exist.

China:

I weary of the pounding on the drum by nostalgic cold warriors eager to find a new Dragon ever since the Soviet snake died of indigestion. The United States and the Russian Empire, under whatever name it goes by currently, have never had any conflicting vital interests of an enduring nature that weren’t driven by an expansionist ideology on the Russian side. The United States and China have fewer conflicts, more shared interests, and understand one another better than any two nations other than the United States and Great Britain. By the way, we fought two “wars to the knife” with the British, while only one full on war with the Chinese, as well as one skirmish and a nasty surrogate conflict. The problem with the Chinese is the recurring problem, since sixteen forty-eight, of a dominant/hegemonic power in relative decline trying to deal with a rising power. Out of half a dozen such situations in the modern era, only to have not resulted in a general war: significantly, the two peaceful exceptions both involve the USA. We managed the challenge of the USSR until the “dialectic” rendered its verdict, and due to the good sense of Prince Albert and Lord Palmerston in 1862, the British managed the rise of the United States. Even without the complicating factor of nuclear weapons, the rise of China is an eminently manageable problem. Yes, as they rise their capabilities will increase, their sense of self-importance will increase, they will want greater influence in their neighborhood and backyard, and there’s nothing remarkable in any of that. A steady hand, and knowing the difference between what we would like and what we must have our key in this endeavor. To be blunt, getting one’s panties in a wad every time the Chinese frown at us or an ally is not going to help the situation.

I think I’d be more concerned about a Chinese lunar base than if they paved over the Spratly Islands and purge the PLA until it spit whiskey and belched lightning bolts.

Wars are expensive. When Omar Bradley became administrator of the Veterans Administration ca. 1947, he had the books audited and discovered we were still paying for the Mexican-American war. Only a few years ago there was an article in an internal VA magazine about an elderly woman who was receiving a pension for the Civil War service of her late husband.

Wars are expensive, and “By jingo”, those who would ring the alarm bells should remember that.

Petronius

‘No model can predict changes in temperature and lay out climate change scenarios with any degree of accuracy. However the earth has warmed up much less than what most global warming models had predicted.’

<http://asiancorrespondent.com/135346/global-warming-and-climate-change-separating-truth-from-fiction/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

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

Acclaimed Science Fiction Author Dr. Jerry Pournelle Wins the National Space Society Robert A. Heinlein Award

(Washington DC – April 12, 2016) The National Space Society takes great pleasure in announcing that its 2016 Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award has been won by acclaimed science fiction author Dr. Jerry Pournelle. This prestigious award selected by an international vote of NSS members will be presented to Dr. Jerry Pournelle at the 2016 International Space Development Conference (ISDC). A video of his acceptance speech is after the jump. Continue reading →

Chaos Manor View, Monday, May 16, 2016

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

It’s amusing: the new York Times came out with attacks on Trump based on interviews with his former girl friend and one of his female executives, whereupon his former girl friend shows up at Fox News and denies it all. It would be amusing if there were not so much at stake; but it is instructive and probably illustrates just what America’s newspaper of record will do in the campaign. Journalistic integrity seems to have played a rather small part in this story.

Mitt Romney, the losing Republican candidate against Mr. Obama in 2012, is frantically seeking someone to run against Mr. Trump. He’ll even try it himself. Since he knows quite well that neither party cares for him – after all, he lost against a President with rather high negatives, getting far fewer votes than Mr. Bush got in his reelection campaign, it’s a puzzlement: the more votes he gets, the more likely that Hillary will win, saddling America with at least four more years of Obama’s leading from behind, intervening with too little and too late, and smarmy foreign deals, and forty years of a liberal Supreme Court. He knows this, Nelson Rockefeller cut the ticket against Goldwater in 1964; Romney will apparently try to go him one better. We will see how the Republican Establishment behaves in this crucial election.

Some of the smartest people I know think it won’t matter. Romney is demonstrating his irrelevance. I voted for Romney because the alternative was Obama. Some anti-establishment Republicans stayed home in 2012, thus giving four more years of Obama and Depression. Romney wants to double down, which may tell you something about the New Class.

[In case you missed it yesterday]

In the May-June issue of The American Conservative. I heartily recommend it as an honest assessment by an astute observer and thinker. His invocation of Djilas and The New Class in explaining the mess we have got ourselves into, and his analysis of just what it means to be an American conservative, is worth the time of every thoughtful American, conservative or liberal.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/trump-vs-the-new-class/

Announcing Hardbound Edition: There Will Be War, Volumes I & II. The first two volumes of the 1980’s anthologies bound together in a hardbound edition. Obviously these are available as eBooks for considerably less, but if you want them as a book, this is your opportunity. From the official description:

“Created by the bestselling SF novelist Jerry Pournelle, THERE WILL BE WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It features some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I and Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II. Many science fiction greats were featured in the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova. 33 years later, Castalia House has teamed up with Dr. Pournelle to make this classic science fiction series available to the public again. THERE WILL BE WAR is a treasure trove of science fiction and history that will educate and amaze new readers while reminding old ones how much the world has changed over the last three decades. Most of the stories, like war itself, remain entirely relevant today. This omnibus edition contains THERE WILL BE WAR Volumes I and II. Volume I is edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, and features 23 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Reflex” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the original “Ender’s Game” novella by Orson Scott Card, “The Defenders” by Philip K. Dick, and a highly influential pair of essays devoted to the then-revolutionary concept of “High Frontier” by Robert A. Heinlein and Lt. General Daniel Graham. Volume II is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 19 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Superiority” by Arthur C. Clarke, “In the Name of the Father” by Edward P. Hughes, “‘Caster” by Eric Vinicoff, “Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg, “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen” by William Wu, and “Proud Legions,” an essay on the Korean War by T.R. Fehrenbach.”

http://www.amazon.com/There-Will-Be-War-Volumes/dp/9527065593?tag=chaosmanor-20

‘They resent historical accounts such as those Klehr and I produced that present archival documentation of the CPUSA’s totalitarian character and its devotion to promoting Soviet victory over the United States in the Cold War.’

<http://blog.victimsofcommunism.org/qa-with-john-earl-haynes-part-i-soviet-subsidies-in-america-guilty-spies-and-karelian-fever/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

The Cold War against the USSR is over, but it remains in many American institutions.

I don’t agree with all of this, but it is worth your time reading it:

The Smallest Minority

                An interesting last post from a blogger calling it quits for now.

http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-last-uberpost.html

Why Machines Should Learn From Failures

Science is biased toward success. But to build reliable artificial intelligence, looking to scientific failures is important too.    (journal)

By

Daniela Hernandez 

May 6, 2016 8:33 a.m. ET

It’s often said that some of life’s most valuable insights stem from failures. The same might hold true for machines. 

Scientists at Purdue University and Haverford College devised an algorithm that can learn to predict new crystal recipes based on its analyses of not just chemical reactions that yielded other crystals, but also chemical reactions gone wrong. They reported their findings in a study published in the journal Nature this week.

Although the study focuses on chemical applications, Alex Norquist, the study’s lead researcher, said in an interview the approach has the potential to liberate large amounts of potentially powerful information that’s been traditionally ignored.

“In science we fail, and we fail a lot. We fail more than we ever really succeed, but the scientific literature is really biased toward success. We pretty much only tell each other about the successes,” the Haverford College chemist said. “But failures contain really valuable information. We wanted to create a mechanism by which we could learn from [that].”

In an age when machines are increasingly being used to help scientists and companies make decisions, looking to forgotten data sources could serve up unexpected wins—and open up new avenues of research. 

Here are edited excerpts from the conversation with Dr. Norquist.

WSJ: What effect does biasing data toward successes have on the machine-learning algorithms we’re hoping to use to make new scientific discoveries?

Dr. Norquist: If all or most of the data is success, then the model won’t really know where failures are going to come in. That paints a very different picture from what we see in reality. As we remove this bias, it opens up a lot more information. The approach we’re using can be generalized to a lot of different types of science. The more that we don’t bias the data that we look at, the better our understanding will be.

WSJ: In which other areas might this be useful?

Dr. Norquist: Our approach is designed to help us get to the end stage more quickly by making the materials discovery component faster. A lot of the initial machine-learning work was done by pharmaceutical companies working on drug discovery. We’re always looking for new materials that have better properties, better batteries, better photovoltaic [cells].

WSJ: Why is it important that our machines learn both from successes and failures?

Dr. Norquist: Knowing what to do is just as important as knowing what not to do. It’s only when we look to both that we’re really able to see the boundaries between successes and failures. Really understanding those boundaries and why those boundaries are as they are [is] where the real power in these failures comes from. For example, if nearly all reactions whose temperatures were above 130 degrees Celsius fail, we know to keep the temperature lower than that level. It tells us where we strayed into a bad neighborhood. 

WSJ: How difficult is this to do?

Dr. Norquist: The main thing is accessibility. Most of failures in science often times just exist in lab notebooks on a shelf somewhere. It’s hard to get at them.  

WSJ: What steps are you taking to liberate the failures data?

Dr. Norquist: We have made our [data] publicly accessible. We invite anybody who wants to contribute their own to the project.

WSJ: Data is proprietary. Companies guard their information. Why would they make data publicly available?

Dr. Norquist: The way that science works is that we all rely on the experiments of others. The old saying is that you can save a week in the lab by spending an hour in the library. 

WSJ: Is there anything particularly difficult about teaching machines using failures data, apart from getting access to that information?

Dr. Norquist: Not really. The algorithms don’t care.

Natural Selection: Dawkins’ Weasel and Martin’s Monkey

Dear Jerry –

Greetings, and I hope you are doing well.

I’ve been doing a bit of exploration which I thought you’d find interesting.

I expect you remember about 30 years ago when Richard Dawkins came up with his Weasel program as a demonstration of the power of random variation and natural selection. While his results were striking, I’ve never come across any sort of systematic exploration of the Weasel’s performance.

Looking into this, I’ve developed my own program, which I call (with all due seriousness and self-importance) Martin’s Monkey. This approach replaces Dawkins’ fecund weasel with A Monkey At A Typewriter. Instead of breeding generations of offspring, the monkey simply tries to copy a line of text. Alas, being a monkey and easily distracted, it makes random errors, with a probability P of a mistake for each keystroke. For this exercise I’ve arbitrarily picked a P of .01, a 1 in 100 chance of making an error. The typewriter has only 27 working keys, 26 caps and a space. After each line of text, the result is compared with a target text, and if the monkey’s output is closer to the target text, it becomes his new standard. “Closer” is simply distance on a 27-element ring. So if C is desired, B and D have an error rating of 1, A and E have value of 2, space and F are 3, Z and G are 4, etc. The error values are simply summed over the characters of the text to produce an overall error value. The Monkey starts with a random text, and the target text is also randomly selected for each run. Each attempt from start to termination by the Monkey is a generation.

First, of course, the baseline. Let’s say the character set size is M, and the number of characters is N. If the text lines were randomly generated and you terminated the process upon a perfect match, you’d expect a match in ((M/P)^N)/2 generations. In this case, with M = 27, and an error probability of .01, a random process will require (2700^N)/2. This sort of exponential gets crazy very quickly, of course. For N = 20, it’s about 2 x 10^68, for N = 40 it’s 9 x 10^136, for N = 60 it’s 4 x 10^205, and for N = 80 it’s 1.6 x 10^274.

So, how does the Monkey do? Well, I’d like you to think about this for a bit, if I may. What would you expect? Just as importantly, how do you think it should respond to increasing N? I only ask this because, unless you’ve invested a bit of energy in thinking about it, the real results won’t mean much. For what it’s worth, I’d expected some sort of exponential with an exponent smaller than the random version, but not that much smaller. Aggregates of random processes often exhibit square root behavior – would that seem a reasonable starting point? Exponent equals N/2? Just suggesting. Think about it.

****

Ready? If you just got impatient and didn’t spend any time, that’s OK, but I thought I’d give you the chance.

I ran a series of simulations using the Monkey, and the results are included in the attached graph (Weasel.png). Each point represents the mean of 100,000 runs using random start and target sequences. I’ve got a decent machine and the compiler I use produces fast code, but it still took 3 days to produce the data. I also kept track of the minimum and maximum number of generations for each N, and they are pretty consistently within a 25% to 400% band around the mean, particularly for N greater than 15 or so. I’ve attached this as Weasel Full.png, if  you’re interested. 

And the results are pretty startling. For 80 characters it only takes about 28,000 generations. Compared to 10^274 that’s what you might call decent efficiency (I’m willing to define any efficiency greater than a google as “decent”). Even more interesting is the trend with increasing N. It’s actually not linear (it’s slightly concave upwards, and I can explain part of that if you wish – it’s a variant of the Birthday Paradox) but the contrast with an appreciable exponential is noticeable.

As Dawkins pointed out 30 years ago, this is not a model for biological evolution. Genetic mutations come in all sorts of scales, up to and including chromosome duplications and deletions, and the duplication and elimination of long stretches of DNA within a chromosome is well-known. Changes in regulatory genes will presumably have enormous consequences. The model has no equivalent of neutral mutations. Fitness functions are not anything like as simple as presented here. The point is simply to look at the effects of random variation combined with selection for any beneficial change, no matter how small.

With that said, I find the results fairly remarkable, and food for thought if you ever are tempted to dismiss “mere randomness” as a possible driver of evolution.

Regards,

Jim Martin

On the other hand, natural selection can’t see where it is going; there is no design that it has in mind. As Fred Reed once said, it is not obvious that a random lump of inorganic dancing atoms will evolve to write Shakespeare’s plays, perform Swan Lake, go to the Moon, and build the Trump Towers.

“We did end up with a monopoly.”

<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/elon-musk-rocket-defense-223161>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

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