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Saturday,
December 19, 1998
Well, they did it. What will happen now isn't clear. The whole scene in Washington
reminds me eerily of the last stage of the Roman Republic. I hope I am wrong. Neither side
came off well in that. I'm glad I don't have any part in this. I do note that as power
grows greater, having it is a greater reward: and worse, fewer men and women of honor want
that kind of great power, leaving it to those who do want it, and will do anything to get
it. That is the point of limiting government: it makes it less of a prize to grab. A
lesson Washington and Adams knew well.
I didn't hear the final debates because I got up late: I spent much of the night
infuriating myself reading The Baltimore
Case by Daniel J. Kevles, and didn't stop until it was grey daylight outside. This is
the story of Congressman Dingell's exploitation of a scientific dispute that ended up with
David Baltimore resigning as President of Rockefeller University, and shows precisely what
happens when you take government money for science: the politicians win, the scientists
lose, and the effect on science is interesting. Especially in direct funding systems like
NIH (as opposed to NSF which can be something of a buffer in these matters), the
politicians will exploit anything they can. Few cases are as raw as Dingell's decision to
"get" Nobel Laureate Baltimore because Baltimore dared stand up to Dingell and
his gang of thugs posing as Congressional staff; but there are and always will be many
more.
The lessons here are not clear. Without churches and great families, in this era of
death taxes, it is difficult to find mechanisms for looking far to the future or funding
sources for long term research and basic research and the argument that only government
can do this now is compelling; but The Baltimore Case shows this can be fraught with
danger. In this case the conclusion was found almost in the first weeks after Margot
O'Toole, a brilliant but dangerously obsessive and flawed post-doc who expoited her role
as "whistle blower" raised the questions about the publication in the journal
CELL that started the whole thing.
O'Toole was unable to duplicate some of the work done by Baltimore's co-author Thereza
Imanishi-Kari. In frustration she came up with an alternate interpretation of the results
Imanishi-Kari and Baltimore obtained. And in the first meeting with Baltimore, Baltimore
said that he didn't accept O'Toole's views but they were a possible interpretation -- and
"no one is going to settle this by arguing. This indicates a need for further
research." That is where it should have ended, but it didn't end there; research in
an area critical to understanding lupus was set back by years, careers were ruined, tens
of thousands of man hours of brilliant scientific people were wasted, and Dingell's thugs
ran roughshod through the scientific community establishing dangerous precedents. And at
the end the conclusion is that the questions can only be settled by more research because
no one is going to settle it by arguing.
Well, Roberta's machine is stable, but I had to
turn off the power management in the BIOS; it was going to sleep, but would never wake.
That is, the monitor would show the yellow light that indicates no signal, moving the
mouse would do nothing to wake it, and while the machine was "on" nothing would
recover it. The odd part is that earlier while I was having other problems, this didn't
happen. It may be that I changed some BIOS setting in getting things set up, but I don't
know. I do know that this machine has consumed more time than I like, but it HAS to be
stable since it will be Roberta's. I'll make another attempt to see if there's a BIOS
power management setting that will recover, but for the moment what's happening is that
Windows 98 is putting the monitor to sleep, and that we can recover from. The power
consumption of a PC is not large when the monitor tube power is off, so I don't worry much
about power management anyway.
With that fix the machine seems very stable. I ran THIS MEANS WAR and TOTAL
Annihilation (games), both of which put a LOT of objects in motion on the screen, and
neither locks up; both did when I had the USB mouse installed. I am now certain that
Windows 98 doesn't really understand USB mice, and USB is contraindicated; stay with PS/2
or serial. Both of those work.
Alex has taken away one of my machines, leaving me a work station bench free, so I will
get the other Windows 98 experimental machine going, then turn my attention to Linux. If
Moshe Bar is reading this, I have sent mail several times, but it is bounced; if this
wasn't temporary, please send me a good mail address, and my thanks for the SAMBA suites.
I'll get at all that Monday or so.
==
I find some amusement in the current stories of what happened to my
ARPANET account many years ago. The real story has far more to do with politics than
anything else. When my account was cancelled I was invited by friends in the Pentagon
(where I still did some briefings for USAF Plans and Doctrines) to make a formal protest,
but that would have been to return evil for good; Professor Moses (MACSYMA) and his
executive assistant Ellen Golden went to a lot of trouble to set things up for me, and I
sure would not have wanted to see her harmed directly or indirectly. Marvin Minsky offered
to intervene as well, but again it seemed a lot of trouble to keep an account at MIT when
I had one most people didn't know about through John McCarthy at SAIL. As far as I can
see, one Cstacy wanted to show that he could kill my account, and I didn't have any real
reason to pay attention.
I didn't see them at the time but now I notice there are stories of threats about suing
McGraw Hill if I were to "libel" the people involved in BYTE. Man, they didn't
want to DO that; McGraw Hill legal were aggressive tigers! All I ever had to do was prove
truth; they would take it from there. But I think that threat came about through a casual
remark I made at a science fiction convention, in which I said something to the effect
that they could tell Cstacy that he had managed to annoy me and I'd have a lot more to say
in public. I promptly forgot about it, since I had many other means of communication if I
wanted them.
The theoretical reason was that I was supposed to be giving away ARPA secrets by
mentioning something or another in BYTE; this about an unclassified tax funded DOD Defense
Communications Agency test system, in which the very people who were complaining about me
were having "at sign" parties ("if you have an @ in your name you're
invited") and generally seeing that this was the worst kept 'secret' in the world. Eric
says these people were the Net equivalent of Welfare Queens who never paid for accounts,
and were terrified that somehow if it got to the public that a defense agency was allowing
all these students to use their assets, the game would be over.
But in any case my public discussion of public supported facilities was the ostensible
reason I was dropped. One supposes that my views on defense -- DOD was paying for the net
-- had a lot more. Here we had people who loathed the Defense Department working on a DCA
project; they had to do things to relieve their consciences, and show they weren't
"really" helping defend the United States, but just taking the nation's money.
Or something like that. I never quite understood that position. Some of them were using
their university connections to avoid conscription, and again seemed determined to show
they didn't REALLY support defense.
My views on the Viet Nam War were published at the time, and have not changed. It was
undelcared, and I did not like that; but there was the color of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution. I thought that illegal, but the courts held otherwise.
I thought the Viet Nam war horrible--Sherman was right, War is Hell-- but necessary: it
was a campaign of attrition in the Cold War (the Seventy Years War), and while wars of
attrition are slow, costly, frustrating, and often tragic, they can be decisive; this one
was, as enormous percentages of the USSR's truck and transport industry worked to send
their products to be destroyed in South East Asia and thus were not available for building
USSR infrastructure. This was decisive.
But it was a horrible war, and as Allard Lowenstein said one night in a debate, it
looked as if the goal was not to win and get out but lose and stay in. (One of the few
times I have been floored in a debate, and this on national TV. Allard said "Jerry,
you want to win and get out. I just want to get out. Your friends McGeoge Bundy and Robert
McNamara want to lose it and stay in.")
But there were many ways to oppose the war. My friend Phil Lemons, my first tech editor
at BYTE (later Editor in Chief at BYTE and now PC WORLD) was opposed to the war in Viet
Nam but his protest took a costly (to him) form. It's his story, not mine to tell, but it
does him honor. And Allard Lowenstein, the man who brought Lyndon Johnson down and one of
the few people to defeat me in a national debate, and I understood and respected each
other's positions. But that was at a level a bit above the petty gossip that was the early
ARPANET.
The only significant thing I ever did on ARPA NET was to get GPS funded. Of course that
is too strong a statement; actually it was a lot more complicated than that.
What happened was that Francis X. Kane, the silent co-author of Possony and Pournelle
THE STRATEGY OF TECHNOLOGY, had invented Global Positioning System while Director of Plans
at USAF Systems Command, and had managed to get USAF to request and get funding. Then in
the 70's Congress zeroed GPS out of the budget. Kane called me in hopes I had some
resources to get it revived. I broadcast a message about that on ARPANET, and Lowell Wood,
Livermore physicist and one of Teller's inner circle, saw it, sent me email to get
details, got in touch with Kane, and went to Washington where he lobbied among his
Congressional contacts to get it restored. It was restored and I think it would not have
been done without Wood, who would not have heard about it were it not for ARPANET. GPS
turns out to be important, but then we all knew it would be; the trick was convincing
Congress.
That done, I had books to write and work to do. Commercial net accounts were coming,
Loudon was inventing what became CompuServe after several evolutions and transformations
and acquisitions, and BYTE was inventing BIX; I still held a clearance through having been
President of Pepperdine Research and I still did some policy briefings for Air Force Plans
and Doctrines, and so had all the communications I needed. Stallman, one of my friends
from the MIT ARPANET, was done with most of his work there (I was an early beta tester of
emacs, and some of my naïve observations found their way into the final product), and I
found I spent most of my time on ARPANET playing ZORK, an activity for which I had no
time; it was a gift of time to find that account closed. I resented the way it was done,
but not enough to speak to anyone in the Pentagon about it. I see that the story still
reverberates after twenty years (it all happened in CP/M S-100 days, mostly at 300 baud;
1200 was a godsend). Peace.
===
Saturday night: Eric and I went out to Fry's where I decided to solve Roberta's Modem
Problem once and for all: I plunked down a hundred bucks for a Creative Labs external V.90
56K Modem Blaster. I could probably get one of those from Creative, but I want to get her
system set up and tested and DONE, and this ought to do it. And if I do have any problems
I can get hold of people at Creative. I gather their tech support can be slow but it is
sure; and in my case I can by-pass much of the slowness. One advantage of my position.
I'll need to know about this modem for the O'Reilly book anyway.
For the record I have not yet managed to get any AGP board to work with a super-7 AMD
K6/2 chip, and I have tried three mother boards. I'll keep trying, but it's a little
discouraging. As I said I got one to work until I installed sound card and then it blew
up... I will keep trying.
And it's about time to build a new Pentium II system. May as well see just how much
advantage you get from Pentium II vs super 7 vs Celeron A. Or that I get, anyway.
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