Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!<\/p>\n
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Larry and Steve were over for the day conferring on our interstellar colony novel. We also talked with Jack Cohen in England, via Skype, but the connection was bad and we kept losing it and having to call again. Of course \u201cconnection was bad\u201d is a residue of times when you quite literally had bad connections by phone and had to call again; with the Internet that\u2019s not a real diagnosis.<\/p>\n
We suspect the problem was at Jack\u2019s end, because things seemed fine here and it was before Noon; I\u2019ve never had Internet problems before Noon, I only have the traditional problem at 1600 \u2013 doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s PDT or PST \u2013 when Time Warner, at least at my house, simply funks out, going to less than dialup speeds sometimes. You can\u2019t do searches because you can\u2019t find the Google server, but even if you know the exact address you\u2019re looking for, as when you do F5 to get the site updated, it often gives the same error, can\u2019t find server. Then for a few seconds it\u2019s only slow, not halted, but it quickly returns to busted. The easy workaround is not to do anything requiring an Internet connection between 1600 and 1615 Pacific Time.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I have a lot to contribute to the book, but when I try I spend so much time trying to type it in, and correcting the sentence I just typed and in correcting that forgetting the next sentence I was composing \u2013 well, it gets frustrating. In my venerable \u201cHow to Get My Job<\/a>\u201d essay written a long time ago I make the point that a writer must get so familiar with his tools that he can forget the \u201chow\u201d in writing and concentrate on the story or whatever it is he wants to say. He must not be thinking about \u201ci before e except after c\u201d, or elementary grammar rules; he needs to know his craft. Alas, since the stroke I don\u2019t know my craft; I have to worry about how to say something as well as what to say. It\u2019s a humbling experience; I remember from when I first had to write for a living.<\/p>\n Autocorrect helps. One of my more common errors is to insert a bracket (\u2018[\u2018) into words when I hit the p key. I hit the [ key at the same time; but sometimes before I hit p and sometimes after. I\u2019m slowly teaching autocorrect to fix this. I just added \u201ccom[posing\u201d and \u201ccomp[osing\u201d to AutoCorrect\u2019s dictionary so I had considerable trouble getting them into this text: you can defeat autocorrect but it takes doing, which is fine with me.<\/p>\n Anyway I get frustrated, and then I tend to lecture, and yesterday after a while I sort of became aware that here I was lecturing to two master writers about such things as pacing, in particular, weaving expository lumps into the text at any good opportunity so you don\u2019t have so many lumps close together, and always introduce a character and a little backstory when you can so that if there\u2019s coming up a big scene with many characters the readers haven\u2019t met yet, they will have at least been introduced earlier so there aren\u2019t so many strangers in the big plot-necessary scene, and So I woke up and apologized for lecturing.<\/p>\n Larry was kind enough to say we often get a lot of work done when I\u2019m in lecture mode, so I don\u2019t feel so bad, but still—<\/p>\n And of course I typed p;lot-necessary up there, and managed to get that into AutoCorrect’s dictionary.<\/p>\n Anyway the book\u2019s coming along pretty well. In a slower than light universe, which we\u2019re assuming, there are going to be inevitable problems, such as a period after they first get there of adults and infants with no ages in between. You can\u2019t freeze children \u2013 how could they give informed consent? \u2013 and unless you have somehow built a generation ship such as Heinlein did in Universe you won\u2019t be having children on the way (and if you did they would know nothing of living on a planet). So on Avalon we have the Earthborn and the Starborn, and a generation gap like nothing you have ever, ever seen.<\/p>\n And I have to get back to it shortly because I\u2019m at least able to block out scenes, and if I get going just right I sometimes can do quite a lot of finished text.<\/p>\n I ought to add some of this to How to Get My Job<\/a> but I probably won\u2019t.<\/p>\n It\u2019s getting late and I am going to LASFS tonight. I am reading The Great Escape<\/a> by Angus Deaton, about wealth and inequality; it goes well with A Farewell to Alms<\/a> in showing how remarkable the times we live in have been, compared to ten thousand years in which nobody had much of anything and most people born died before they were five years old. And most women died in childbirth if they had many children. But of course in the great escape from poverty there will be inequality.<\/p>\n This morning\u2019s Wall Street Journal had \u201cWhere the New Jobs Will Come From\u201d<\/a> by Thomas Tunstall, and it\u2019s worth reading although I have some misgivings.<\/p>\n Caterpillar recently announced plans to shed at least 4,000-5,000 jobs by the end of 2016, adding that the number could reach 10,000 by 2018. The company is also restructuring its operations\u2014as it has several times in recent decades. What\u2019s going on at Caterpillar<\/a>is partly driven by a slowdown in the global economy. But it is also emblematic of fundamental changes in the economy. Many jobs cut from manufacturing in recent years are not coming back, and the ones that do will look very different.<\/p>\n Americans tend to think of this as very bad news, but that\u2019s a little like thinking most of us should still be working on farms. In 1840, 70% of the workforce was employed in agriculture. By the start of the 20th century, it was 40%. In 1930 it was 20% and in 1970, 4%. Now it\u2019s less than 2%. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He has considerable discussion of what has happened over the past twenty years, and concludes<\/p>\n Yes, some jobs in services will include Zumba instructors and retail sales. But many others in the future will be in cloud computing, cybersecurity, gene sequencing, big-data projects and fields that are only beginning to emerge\u2014and today are literally unimaginable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I don\u2019t see that happening; even with 20 hour weeks and other artificial ways to get more people working. I may be an elitist, but I don\u2019t think that 60% of the population can DO those jobs \u2013 and I am very sure that the current education system cannot teach most of the population to do them. I am pretty sure the current education system can\u2019t teach half of those enrolled to do much of anything that someone would pay money to have done.<\/p>\n And then I read in Deaton\u2019s book that inequality isn\u2019t caused by the upper classes holding back the lower ones; indeed they are generous with education.<\/p>\n Never ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence, and indeed I agree; I doubt that there is any conspiracy to provide incompetent schools at increasingly higher costs \u2013 but that is what is happening, and most of it is due to well meant efforts to help that have pretty well destroyed the school system that let my wife and I, both without incomes, get through college working our way; indeed, the system that let us get out of high school, me in Tennessee and her in Washington state graduate with a better education than most have after graduating from community college, and with enough work skills to find ways to get people to pay us for working our way through college. I am sure there are many older readers who can understand what I mean. Younger ones are products of the current broken system and may not know just how good our school system once was \u2013 and how, at least for the competent, it was virtually free from first grade to a bachelor\u2019s degree.<\/p>\n I never heard of a student loan, or at least never thought of saddling myself with debts.<\/p>\n And the high schools of our day were deteriorating, although not to the extent of the present ones.<\/p>\n If you want to know what public schools are capable of, look at The California Sixth Grade Reader<\/a> which was copyrighted in 1916 and used in California public schools; compare it to the reading books now used in tenth grade. And weep. <\/p>\n http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/California-Sixth-Grade-Reader-Pournelle-ebook\/dp\/B00LZ7PB7E<\/a> <\/p>\n Another time I\u2019ll say more on what might but won\u2019t be done. Meanwhile, understand that we sow the wind. We want to eliminate inequality. We have inadequate schools. We routinely saddle college graduates with debts they can never repay for credentials that are not worth what they had to pay for them. By 2025, and I suspect a lot earlier than that, 50% of the jobs \u2013 not just industrial but clerical and many in health and service \u2013 can be done by a robot costing no more than a year\u2019s pay of the worker it replaced, and having a life span of at least ten years with annual operating costs of less than 1\/20th<\/sup> of the worker. How much supervision it will need is debatable, but the robot will work three shifts as easily as one shift; the supervisor will of course not do that, but he will be able to attend to multiple machines.<\/p>\n Our present schools are not training people adequately for jobs \u201cin cloud computing, cybersecurity, gene sequencing, big-data projects\u201d and so forth. Some colleges are. Some. At very high costs.<\/p>\n Meanwhile we centralize and federalize the schools, give local school districts less and less control, and add more and more regulations requiring more and more administrators inevitably driving the cost of colleges, high schools, and grade schools higher and higher; it is not likely that these new bureaucrats are I creasing the quality of education, or indeed teaching anything other than compliance with more regulations. <\/p>\n There are ways to undo this mess, but we won\u2019t take them. But that\u2019s for another time.<\/p>\n VDH: How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America.<\/p>\n <http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/opinion\/op-ed\/la-oe-1101-hanson-rural-urban-divide-20151101-story.html<\/a>><\/p>\n —————————————<\/p>\n Roland Dobbins<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Isaac Newton, Wikipedia tells us<\/a>, \u201cis widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution.\u201d George Boole<\/a>(1815-1864) was undoubtedly also one of the most influential scientists of all time, and a key figure in the digital revolution. Both men were from Lincolnshire, England, and had Unitarian leanings, which impacted their career paths in the Anglican dominated world of their eras. Newton\u2019s Eureka, or Aha! Moment, was his celebrated musing on falling apples<\/a>, in 1666 when he was 23, which in due course inspired his development of the theory of gravitation. Boole\u2019s came early in 1833, when he was only 17, while walking across a field in Doncaster:<\/p>\n \u201cHe relates that the thought flashed upon him suddenly [], but he laid it aside for many years []. The thought however smouldered in his subconscious and became an integral part of his main ambition is life\u2014to explain the logic of human thought [].\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Battle of Britain Quibble <\/p>\n Jerry,<\/p>\n In response to my aside “A quibble about WW II BoB, mind: The Luftwaffe understood just fine how to achieve air supremacy \u2013 go for the opposition\u2019s air fields and support structure while also forcing them to come up and be atritted in the air. My read of ultimately why the Germans failed at the Channel is that the Brits (unlike everyone else to that point) had a good enough air defense that it was going to cost the Luftwaffe massive losses \u2013 on the rough order of half of their total air force \u2013 to grind the RAF into dust. German leadership (Goering) couldn\u2019t stomach that price, backed off the proven winning approach partway, and commenced trying to find ways to win on the cheap \u2013 none of which worked.”<\/p>\n you wrote “Actually, Eagle started without realization by Goering that air bases were more important than airplanes; but the no one realized that fully for a long time. The Britain bombed Berlin, and Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to waste planes and time on London, and Britain was saved.”<\/p>\n You state the conventional view, and while it’s not wrong, it’s incomplete. Hitler indeed ordered the switch away from directly attacking the RAF to attacking British cities on 5 September, but the RAF still might have been defeated at that point. (USAAF, after all, four years later did successfully grind down the Luftwaffe by forcing them to come up and be atritted defending against bombing raids on German urban targets.)<\/p>\n According to American journalist Ralph Ingersoll, who returned from Britain later that year and wrote a book about the battle, the key date was September 15th, ten days later, after which the Germans backed off the massive daylight London raids and switched largely to night attacks, thus greatly reducing their losses, but also giving up on attriting the RAF day fighter force.<\/p>\n Ingersoll wrote about that day “[a] majority of responsible British officers who fought through this battle believe that if Hitler and G\u00f6ring had had the courage and the resources to lose 200 planes a day for the next five days, nothing could have saved London.”<\/p>\n Not provable either way, no, but I tend to agree. The Germans, in addition to all the other errors they’d made to that point, finally just lost their nerve.<\/p>\n Henry<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Well, I state the conventional view among Air Force generals of my time; you may have better sources. The key shortage was fuel; most Fighter Command bases were not for maintenance and repair, but all of them needed fuel ,and fuel supply lines; of course that is a conclusion reached after the failure of the Luftwaffe, but it was, after, very effective against ground installations; and the goal was to buy a safe Channel crossing.<\/p>\n Air superiority is rarely attained by air to air combat, just as you don\u2019t usually win against hornets by swatting one hornet at a time.<\/p>\n Whether throwing another 1000 planes into the meat grinder would have done it, I can\u2019t say; but a massive raid on all the fuel installations they knew about would have had great effect; or so I concluded back in the days I studied that. It has been a very long time.<\/p>\n Stay well.<\/p>\n Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. <\/p>\n Chaos Manor View, Thursday, November 05, 2015 Guy Fawkes Night Remember, remember! The fifth of November, Gunpowder treason and plot; I know of no reason Why Gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot! Larry and Steve were over for the day conferring on our interstellar colony \u2026 Continue reading <\/p> \n\n
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The Bicentennial of George Boole, the Man Who Laid the Foundations of the Digital Age<\/h3>\n
Furthermore, both made key mental breakthroughs while enjoying fresh air outdoors.<\/p>\n<\/p> \n\n
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