{"id":1604,"date":"2011-08-23T15:09:14","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T22:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/?p=1604"},"modified":"2011-08-23T23:38:58","modified_gmt":"2011-08-24T06:38:58","slug":"earthquakes-and-alien-invasions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/earthquakes-and-alien-invasions\/","title":{"rendered":"Earthquakes and alien invasions View 20110823"},"content":{"rendered":"

View 689 Tuesday, August 23, 2011 <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t do topical news, but today seems dominated by it, and I ought to be aware:<\/p>\n

The topical news is the continued \u201cTripoli has fallen, sort of,\u201d news from Libya. It seems only a matter of time, and perhaps the delay is a good thing, giving the West time to think how to respond and giving the sane rebels time to organize. We can wish them well. <\/p>\n

And I will say that Obama\u2019s reluctant response, assuming the position of hindmost, turned out well. Britain had a long tradition of muddling through that often worked; and Obama\u2019s strategy of providing air power and some logistics while being involved minimally produced results at low cost. Qadaffi appears to be doomed. There is open looting in Tripoli, a sure sign that the security forces of the government are not in control in large areas of the city. <\/p>\n

A tyrant is out, and unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are not in. It happened on President Obama\u2019s watch and he deserves the credit: without the US strike forces the rebels would long ago have been snuffed out.<\/p>\n

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Of course the concentration on Libya was interrupted by an earthquake between Richmond and Washington. At least one person is known to have motion sickness from this 5.9 quake between Charlottesville and Spottsylvania Courthouse. As a result three New York airports have been shut down, sections of the Pentagon evacuated, and there was an hour of great concern and reaction along the eastern seaboard. <\/p>\n

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A 5.9 magnitude earthquake jolted the East Coast, rattling people from Martha’s Vineyard to Washington, D.C. to North Carolina, prompting the evacuation of Congressional buildings, slowing rail and air traffic, and taking two nuclear reactors offline. <\/p>\n

The earthquake sent people pouring out of office buildings, hospitals, the Pentagon and the State Department. The pillars of the capitol in Washington, D.C. shook. Alarms sounded in the FBI and Department of Justice buildings, and some flooding was reported on an upper floor of the Pentagon as a result of the quake. <\/p>\n

http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Technology\/earthquake-measured-59-magnitude-rattles-washington-york\/story?id=14364643<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Presumably they will have fewer problems than Los Angeles did with the 6.6 Sylmar earthquake about 9 miles northeast of my house in 1971. One of my grandchildren is in pre-school in Washington. One presumes that life will return to normal along the east coast.<\/p>\n

I have heard that there are some consequences, and of course most of the reactions were to what people thought might be a terrorist attack; it\u2019s not astonishing that security agencies might think so. They have got themselves a live fire test, apparently without serious consequences. There is talk of allowing government workers a day off. Shut down the government because of a 5.8 40 miles away. It tells us that we can do without the government for a day or two.<\/p>\n

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Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists<\/b><\/p>\n

Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report <\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/science\/2011\/aug\/18\/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations?CMP=twt_gu<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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A NASA study reviews scenarios for alien contact, and it’s not pretty<\/a><\/h4>\n

Scientists say aliens could decide to destroy humanity to save other civilizations<\/p>\n

News Desk<\/a>August 20, 2011 04:48<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.globalpost.com\/dispatches\/globalpost-blogs\/weird-wide-web\/science-alien-attack-scenario-climate-change<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Air & Space<\/h4>\n

Aliens Could Attack Earth to End Global Warming, NASA Scientist Frets<\/h3>\n

Published August 19, 2011<\/p>\n

| NewsCore<\/p>\n

Read more: http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/scitech\/2011\/08\/19\/aliens-could-attack-earth-to-end-global-warming-nasa-scientist-claims\/#ixzz1Vt8uUebW<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I have had considerable mail about a brief Internet storm asserting that NASA has published a report about aliens attacking the Earth because we aren\u2019t green enough. It turns out that didn\u2019t happen: there was a paper, <\/p>\n

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Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis<\/p>\n

Seth D. Baum, Jacob D. Haqq-Misra, & Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman<\/p>\n

Acta Astronautica, 2011, 68(11-12): 2114-2129<\/p>\n

http:\/\/arxiv.org\/ftp\/arxiv\/papers\/1104\/1104.4462.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The third author lists affiliation with NASA Planetary Science Division. The paper was not sponsored by, or submitted to, NASA. It was just a speculative paper by some postdocs looking for a publication. Not easy reading \u2013 a bit dry and academic for my taste \u2013 but it attempts to cover the subject raised earlier about contact with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences, and deal with logical sequences. If this is your subject it may be worth your time.<\/p>\n

The more interesting story is the big Internet reaction to it.That story is told here:<\/p>\n

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BEHIND THE Aliens-Will-Smite-Us News Story<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t every day that a research paper<\/a> published in an obscure academic journal attracts its own, full blown article<\/a> in a major newspaper. It isn\u2019t every day that a science correspondent writes an article that merits a headline as bizarre as the following: Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilizations, say scientists<\/em>.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/nofrakkingconsensus.com\/2011\/08\/19\/behind-the-aliens-will-smite-us-news-story\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you\u2019re not familiar with the web site, it\u2019s worth your attention.<\/p>\n

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There is a Wall Street Journal op-ed \u201cThe Joy of Reading \u2018Pinocchio\u2019 \u2013 on Paper\u201d but it hides behind a pay wall, at least for me. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal paper edition, but they want more money for on-line access even for those who subscribe to daily paper delivery, and that infuriated me enough that I didn\u2019t bother to find out how much more they want. I understand that newspapers need revenue and they can\u2019t survive if they give everything away, but in my experience they don\u2019t pay much for op-ed \u2013 the real expense is in salaried reporters and data gathering \u2013 and I\u2019d have though that allowing access to that sort of thing might be a good advertisement for full subscription. In any event, WSJ seems to have come up with a way to aggregate Google findings in such a way that you can find a refernce to the article, but you get the paywall teaser if you click on it. At one time Google insisted that if you want to be in Google you have to give some kind of access. I haven\u2019t been following that closely enough, and perhaps I ought to look into it. I\u2019m all for newspapers surviving, and I understand the need for some kind of paywall, but it\u2019s still annoying when I subscribe to something I can\u2019t access on line.<\/p>\n

Just now I tried to get hold of their customer service to upgrade the darned subscription, and so far I have wasted considerable time. Their log in is designed to look sophisticated but in fact is primitive. The whole system sucks dead bunnies. I get a rep who said she had changed my password, but of course I hung up before trying it. Now I am back on the phone waiting.<\/p>\n

They are trying to commit suicide.<\/p>\n

I had better post this because I may be here all day. Actually it\u2019s worse. I\u2019ll be here all week. <\/p>\n

Update. I seem to have a username and password that the Journal online finally recognizes. I am unsure of why all this took so long. Twice I got people whose first language is not English and that may be part of the problem; last time I got a young lady in upstate New York who understood what she was doing, and all went smoothly.  <\/p>\n

The article is<\/p>\n

\n

 http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424053111903639404576516404015970050.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion<\/a><\/p>\n

The other morning, our daughters woke up clamoring to hear Pinocchio before breakfast. I’m not one of those who vows to always cling to the printed page. Before we left for California, I topped off my iPad with a dozen new titles. I accost strangers on airplanes to show them how dandy it is to load thousands of pages (including this newspaper) onto something the size of a shirt cardboard. <\/p>\n

But part of the connection our daughters make with Pinocchio seems to be that he’s a little puppet-boy in a book they hold, hide and run to find in the morning, not digits in a download.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s rather charming, and refers to a later edition of an illustrated Pinocchio that I may have encountered about the time I was in first grade. I agree that books have a panache that online doesn\u2019t always have.<\/p>\n

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Finally there is \u201cOff the San Francisco Rails\u201d, about a new entitlement called New Starts that appears to be a way for the people of Joplin, Missouri to pay taxes to pay for a $2 billion subway from Chinatown San Francisco to a quarter mile from the BART station on Market Street. The project doesn\u2019t appear well designed to me, but it\u2019s San Francisco, and thus not my business \u2013 except that apparently all of us get to pay for it if the Department of Transportation approves.  Just why we should pay for a San Francisco subway (well, they\u2019d pay for SOME of it, but we get to pay for a lot) is not clear to me, but this seems to be an entitlement we can do without, at least so long as we have to borrow money to pay for it. One may make a case for federal subsidies of Interstate Highways and such like, but a subway from Chinatown to the Ferry Terminal (well, most of the way) does not seem to be anything vital to the interests of the United States as an entity, or even to California. If San Francisco needs it let San Francisco pay for it, just as I would not expect San Francisco to pay for a Los Angeles Subway that actually goes to our airport. <\/p>\n

http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424053111903918104576500452522248360.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop<\/a><\/p>\n

This is an inevitable consequence of the 7% exponential growth of government spending that is at present built into our system. We are $Trillions in debt and the debt is growing: why should the children of kids in Joplin, Missouri be required to pay for a Chinatown, San Francisco, subway? At what point do we return to transparency and subsidiarity?<\/p>\n

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If you have not subscribed, or renewed your subscription in a while, this would be a great time to do it. Just Go Here.<\/a><\/p>\n

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View 689 Tuesday, August 23, 2011 I don\u2019t do topical news, but today seems dominated by it, and I ought to be aware: The topical news is the continued \u201cTripoli has fallen, sort of,\u201d news from Libya. It seems only a matter of time, and perhaps the delay is a \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-view"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}