| Thursday,
July 20, 2000
Dr. Pournelle,
An article from the WASHINGTON POST, which appeared
in my local paper today, states that scientists have broken the light
speed barrier with light. It seems they propogated a light beam into a
"box" containing a "special media" and the peak of the
beam exited the "box" before it finished entering. Sounds
fascinating, but I wonder if they haven't just created a medium with an
index of refraction lower than vacuum (??). Also, the question of
experimental and measurement errors come up in my mind. However, it is
still an interesting experiment. I thought you might like to check on this
if you didn't already know.
Bob Doane
I've read the popular press articles. I'm waiting
to see what other physicists, particularly Charles Sheffield and Robert
Forward think about it. I haven't any special means for looking into this.
It sure does make for interesting times, though.
Hi Jerry,
An excellent book on string theory is: The
Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. It is written for a non-expert
audience and has many easy-to-understand analogies. I'm a mechanical
engineer with only a semester course in non-Newtonian physics but I
haven't had trouble following along. I realize you're short on time, but
it does seem like it would be inspiration for future writings.
Stay well, Jim Laheta
I haven't read that. I have a minor fear that it
would make my head explode. Probably not, but alas, there are a lot of
books I ought to have read but don't seem to have time for. I still
haven't finished the latest Harry Potter, although that one I'll get to
before long. And there's this stack of on-line books by colleagues I've
got bookmarked. And.. I thought the idea was that things would slow down
some day, but they haven't. Thanks for the pointer.
Defense Spending - Balance?
Jerry,
I was checking the latest Intellectual Capital http://www.intellectualcapital.com/
articles today, and along with your
fine piece on the debate over our capability to successfully deploy a
national missile defense system http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue393/item10122.asp
,
I noticed a related piece in their links section, criticizing defense
spending.
I am not knocking your support of the missile
defense system, in fact, on most of your points I completely agree with
you. But for the public like myself to even feel like supporting these
issues, some semblance of balance and proper priorities must be restored
to defense spending in general. I have read several commentaries on your
site alone regarding basic infantry training, munitions, etc., that point
to a lack of basics, let alone sharp ability to keep a multi-billion
dollar missile defense program aimed straight (pun intended).
How do we convince the politicians, as well as
military brass, that if we are to allocate large amounts of peacetime
funds to military spending, -which agreeably needs to be done to keep our
guard up and sharp-, there must be a balance of spending, or no one will
care, or possibly benefit at all in the long run. Missile defense is only
part of the picture, and only draws ire from the public if this is not
explained. Maybe some words should be spent proposing the entire balanced
picture, better spending (not more) on training, munitions, AND missile
defense, also pointing out the job opportunities that could be created for
the working sector.
Again, I don't oppose the missile defense program,
but check out this article (directions below), for more insight into why
so much ire gets raised over the spendy issues like this. -Here's a quote
from the piece:
"In case you've forgotten, the bottom line as
to why we have a standing military force will always come down to our
soldiers' ability to put a slug between the enemy's eyes. But lately,
elite Army Green Berets tell me they're not getting enough range time. And
range time is what allows these trigger-pullers to sharpen their skills so
they can do their deadly job: kill people when they threaten our country
or national interests. Across the board, these dedicated men say they're
actually not being given the money to buy enough bullets! If this special
unit--which normally gets priority over all other fighting outfits--isn't
getting the right stuff, then what about the ordinary grunt airmen,
sailors, soldiers and Marines who do the sustained hard duty at the point
of the spear? If the dough isn't going to the troops who do the fighting
and dying, where does the $300 billion go that you and I give to the
Pentagon each year? ..." (David Hackworth, 7-20-2000 Fairbanks Daily
News-Miner)
The link on their page doesn't seem to work properly
for me, possibly due to the obfuscated way the web pages are generated
(don't we all just love the way the current crop of database-driven script
pages work for following links, etc...), but the article, entitled
"Forgotten Mission" can be reached from the home page at
http://63.147.65.1/ (The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner), and selecting
"Commentary" in the menu on the left...
I wish these issues were debated as hotly as the
"showy" ones like missile defense. -Comments?
-P.S. Never see much mention, but I have always
enjoyed yours &; Mr. Nivens' "Inferno" -still an entertaining
laugh a minute!! Thanks. -Jn- Jeff G Newell, GM/Tech, CompuVision
Solutions www.cpuvision.com mailto:jgnewell@cpuvision.com
The US spends a smaller percentage of its budget
on defense now than at any time since before WW II, as I understand it.
Money for training was authorized and appropriated. It was spent on
adventures in Haiti and Kossovo which were live fire exercises not
authorized or appropriated. With this executive we will not get either
good training or good policy, much less real defenses that defend. What
did you expect?
"If you politicians don't stop wasting our
money we'll refuse to defend ourselves and someone else will dictate
policy to us, and then you'll be sorry." Not precisely a
rational choice.
Jerry:
Not only do troops not get enough range time and
ammunition to practice with, the Army Reserve is doing away with it's
competitive shooting teams. The soldiers on the teams helped maintain a
core of troops capable of providing marksmanship training to large numbers
of recruits and reserves. Now, apparently, the Army Reserve has no
requirement for infantry with the ability to supress the enemy by small
arms fire.
Regards,
Ross McMicken
This too shall pass. But we have lost a lot over
the past 8 years, and much of the splendid military system we had at the
end of the Desert War is gone and must be rebuilt. Bismark said that God
looks after fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Let's hope
so.
Dear Jerry;
While we're on the subject of how countries can
supposedly "get around" Ballistic Missile Defense delivering
warheads by small plane or Federal Express, has anybody noticed that
exactly the same tactics can be used to "get around" MAD?
The essence of MAD is the question, "what
country would be suicidal enough to launch a nuke at us, knowing they
would be obliterated by American nuclear retaliation?" Ah, but that
question contains a hidden assumption: that we /know which country/
launched the missile and can prove it.
Mobile missiles exist. The Soviets had quite a few,
and they were always thought to be destabilizing -- giving them a way to
avoid retaliation against strategic forces. But imagine this scenario:
strapped for cash, Putin or some renegade Russian general sells a few of
these mobile nukes to Iraq.
Hussein waits for a good opportunity, say when
something happens in the Middle East, and America actually stands up for
Israel (obviously this fantasy takes place after January 20th, 2001),
something that would create a long list of suspects -- then he rolls the
missiles in the dead of night across the border of Iran or Kuwait, or even
all the way to Afghanistan, deep inside, and from there, he launches
against us. Now where did that missile come from? Even if we realize it
wasn't launched by Iran or Kuwait, how do we know who launched it?
Shouldn't be that hard to disguise a missile truck.
Put a big shell over it advertising Teheran Falafal, and bribe as many
customs officials as necessary.
Suppose we have good intelligence, and we know that
Hussein had the missiles and must, therefore, have launched. Would any
American president really risk the worldwide cacophany that would result
from launching a nuclear attack on a nation that could not readily be
shown to have launched such an attack against us? For that matter, would
the /American people/ stand for such retaliation on the basis of secret
CIA intelligence... especially if Hussein were smart enough to drop the
missile, without a warhead but with a "cease and desist" order,
into the middle of Montana, so that no Americans were killed.
I suspect the capability for moving a missile and
launching it from somewhere else is actually far more readily available
than the putative capability to deliver a nuke by Piper Cub (as you say)
or FedEx. One more argument for some sort of ballistic missile defense.
Some /serious/ sort. --
Dafydd ab Hugh
Man Minus Ear Waives Hearing
Anonymous war doesn't make a lot of sense: how
can you hope to gain? The Peacemaker movie in which the motive was pure
revenge -- "Leave us alone! Go away!" -- comes close, I suppose.
But the organization required to get, conceal, transport, and smuggle in a
nuclear weapon is much different from the organization required to acquire
a warhead and a missile. Defending against one isn't a defense against the
other...
Regarding retaliation, my guess is that you make
parking lots out of EVERY country that stood to gain... The Anglo-Saxons
are a very war like people, as you Welsh ought to know.
I'm no mathematician, but a friend in undergrad who
was pretty decent at it pointed out to me that one implication of Godel's
Theorem would be that no human brain could possibly understand the human
brain. I took this as a good reason to devote myself to neuropharmacology
-- the research opportunities are truly endless!
Tim Herbst
Interesting point I had not thought of. Thank you.
A negative plus a negative equals a negative.
http://www.zdnet.com/sp/stories/news/0,4538,2605191,00.html
Roland Dobbins
It's still an interesting possibility.
Thanks.
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
When I served in the US Army, 1956 to 1959, Basic
training was excellent and unpleasant. During the remainder of my three
years, I had one visit to the firing range, "qualifying" with an
M1 carbine. The session was treated as a joke by all present, missile
school instructors, and never repeated.
Later, my brother went to Viet Nam as an enlisted
man in Military Intelligence. He did not agree with the military that a
wounded enemy was better for the US Army than a dead one, because it cost
the enemy more to care for him. He found that the .22 varmint rifle
cartridge used in the M16 was ineffective against a determined assailant,
and went to some trouble to arm himself with a .30 M14 rifle. He is an
expert shot with many weapons, and wanted the enemy to know he was dead
when hit, not decide it a few minutes or hours later.
Bigger weapons? The enemy's cannons have been able
to outrange ours since WWII, and this was still true in the desert
conflict. We could not get cannons close enough to hurt Saddam Hussein,
because his cannons outranged ours by a considerable margin.
Atom Bomb? A colonel that went ashore to arrange the
Japanese surrender wrote a good article that I read in 1997. The atom bomb
dropped on Hiroshima did not kill as many people as the firebombing of
Tokyo. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did give Hirohito an honorable way
to call a halt to the carnage. A very few of his own generals still wanted
to fight, but they were rounded up in a day by Japanese forces. The
colonel, who had been one of the planners of the Japanese homeland
invasion, did his own survey while there. He stated that the US had
planned to lose 50,000 troops the first day of the invasion. After looking
at the armed and psychologically prepared civilians, he revised that
estimate to 500,000 casualties in the first day. Even the Japanese knew
they would lose eventually, but the General Staff was determined to make
it a very costly victory. Given this information, our atom bombs were a
good investment for both sides.
Lastly, I worked with the missile and electronic
warfare people for many years. The important things I learned are still
classified, but they would not increase your optimism.
Respectfully,
William L. Jones, PE wljones@dallas.net
Well, we did win in the desert... And in WW II
for that matter. People have underestimated us before. Thanks
Man, if you want to see something lame, look at
http://support.microsoft.com/support/help/aboutmaxwell.asp
Ask Maxwell, as I did,
"Why does mem.exe under Win98 show Total Memory
as 64MB and Free Memory as 128MB? I have 128. Thanks."
Microsoft is, on the face of it, presenting Maxwell
as a human. Cynicism opportunes. It beckons flailingly. I am somehow
reminded of an old joke about a defendant who asks the judge, since it is
illegal to call a police officer a jackass, whether it is illegal to call
a jackass a police officer...
Praeger
I looked at it. Lame is a fairly kind word. Thanks.
Reading your column about rescue disks reminded me
of this little bit of software that you might find interesting. It is
called CD ROM God and can be found (for now) at:
http://www.gankish.net/rumblesoft/downloads.htm
Basically, it contains compressed DOS drivers for
virtually every major CD ROM on a bootable DOS floppy. If you can pop the
hood on your computer to find out who made your CD, you can boot enough of
DOS to access your Windows installation disk. Saved me from a deal of
grief one time when my rescue disk turned out to have developed a bad
sector since I had made it.
Sadly, the distributor appears to be intent on
shutting the site down so it may not be available much longer. It is
freeware, so probably you'll always be able to track down a copy somewhere
on the Internet, but no further development will occur I guess. However,
if your system is totally hosed, and you can manage to get to the Internet
somewhere (like the library), you can at least reinstall and start over.
At least you don't have to remember how to configure the drivers and
MSCDEX with all those command line switches.
Paul J. Camp College of Computing Georgia Institute
of Technology Atlanta, Georgia 30332
The beauty of the universe consists not only of
unity in variety but also of variety in unity.
--Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Thanks!
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