| Monday
December 16, 2002
An intriguing
question which contains assumptions:
I would be interested in seeing something on why
every war we have fought with a citizen army we have won, but not so with
a professional army.
I expect this has something to do with political
reasons for war, but since your views have always been enlightening, I
know I would be interested in reading them.
B Yokem
The assumption here is that the US
has lost wars, and that the ones lost were fought with a professional
rather than a citizen army. Which ones were those?
Viet Nam was a campaign of attrition
within a larger war, and wasn't lost, the victory of 1972 was thrown away
by a Congress more interested in domestic politics than in preserving what
we had won in South Viet Nam. Citizen armies are not very good at long
wars without obvious ending points: you might almost say that the citizen
army held South Viet Nam, then, as we put in a more professional force,
the Congress lost interest.
There is no doubt that the US could
have held South Viet Nam forever with fewer than 500 US casualties,, all
professionals, per year, had we chosen to do that. But that would have
been conceding that Nixon had been right, and that the Democratic Congress
was not prepared to do. Kennedy sent long term professional volunteers
into Viet Nam; Johnson made it a citizen army war.
You could argue that we lost Korea,
although we achieved the objectives that Truman sent the troops in to
achieve. More or less, anyway: the result, after the initial year, was a
long war of attrition, a company a day meatgrinder well shown in the TV
series MASH, with eventually a return to status quo ante. South Korea was
free to become a tiger (which still lets us defend it rather than building
its own defense forces) and North Korea became a puppet state and then a
hermit kingdom, now a comic opera dictatorship with nuclear weapons and an
enormous army. An odd situation we have allowed to fester; but it wasn't
created by the US military.
Macarthur, like Patton, thought we
were going to have to fight the Russians (or their puppet China) and we
might as well do it while we had an army over there to do it with. Truman
had decided that containment would eventually bring down both Communism
and the USSR. It did that. China remains, neither communist nor free, and
is a matter for another generation. History proved Truman right; what
would have happened had Macarthur unified Korea is another story. But in
any event, Korea doesn't fit the pattern of the question.
The only other war the US arguably
lost was the War of 1812, but in fact it cemented US hegemony in this
hemisphere: the Brits settled for status quo ante, and the wisdom of that
was shown by the Battle of New Orleans, where a citizen army buttressed by
some professionals made mincemeat of Wellington's finest Napoleonic
veterans.
Citizen armies serve a number of
purposes other than military. They are a means of unifying the country,
giving a large number of citizens a common experience and shared goals and
objectives. Whether in this day and age citizen armies are the key to
military victory in overseas adventures is another story.
At the moment we have an odd
situation, with the sharp end pretty well in the hands of professionals,
but the means and logistics and support dependent on National Guard and
Reserves.
And see below.
I am looking for the source of Shallit's Razor
(never attribute to conspiracy what might be adequately explained by
stupidity or incompetence). I e-mailed Jeffrey Shallit and admitted to the
authorship of the version above, " but, Jerry Pournelle, (he) later
learned, said something similar, and I doubt the sentiment is original
with (him)."
When you can, would you please substantiate or deny
the paternity of this or a similar phrase?
Jack Linthicum Indialantic, FL
Napoleon Bonaparte
One note in the smallpox
story, where the author blithely asserts "In the civilian world,
vaccinations are voluntary". Nothing could be further from the truth:
in order to enter any school system, one must provide both a social
security number and a vaccination record for each child. You can't get
anything done today without this information--all of the systems they
touch ask for the same information. Here in Southern California, they are
especially concerned about tuberculosis, as lots of cases are brought
across the border from Mexico and into the general population. However,
not everyone looks blithely at those shot records: we encountered a
mindbending amount of resistance from the Western Australian Health
Ministry about letting my daughter into the country, as she'd been inoculated
for a couple of things they'd never heard of (Western Australia is
particularly isolated) and they thought she might DELIVER the disease unto
Western Australia. (The story did eventually have a happy ending, but it
someone at an alarmingly high level of the administrative food chain to
understand the folly of the position.) Sometimes I worry, because I don't
really KNOW what's being injected into my family, but it is the only way
business gets done. I don't recall the vote about it, though.
-k
Proof of smallpox vaccination was
required for admission to public schools when I was young. Diphtheria inoculation
became required at least in Tennessee. I think these were matters of state
law at the time.
Various states have different
requirements today, but in California at least it's fairly easy to get out
of them through religious objections. There is some resistance to inoculations
based in part on (mostly anecdotal) evidence of a possible connection
between inoculation (or at least the preservatives in the serum) and autism.
The last I heard, a definitive study has shown no correlation between
having received the standard DPT (Diphtheria, Pertussis [whooping cough]
and Tetanus) shot California requires and becoming autistic, but
controversy remains over whether the study answers the questions
concerning perservatives.
The increase in autism is itself
controversial in that some have put forth good reasons to wonder if it's
not more an increase in diagnosis than incidence. It is certainly the case
that the authorities wanted to drug two of my children when they were in
school, and we refused; a decision I am quite happy to defend to this day.
Public health officials who think
someone inoculated against a disease becomes a carrier are I guess not
rare, but they ought to be.
In another place, the following
comment:
> Unfortunately this article
provides no indication what evidence has led this > scientist to this
belief. > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news
/england/2561629.stm > BBC NEWS | UK | England | Bacteria
'may cause cancer'
Which drew this response from Greg
Cochran. I thought it worth posting here as a summary of what is known:
That article had little information, but sure,
bacteria can cause cancer, and are the primary cause of most of at least
one fairly important one, that being stomach cancer. An ongoing h. pylori
infection raises your risk of stomach cancer by something like 6 to 10
times. Long-term infection of the gall bladder by s. typhi - the 'Typhoid
Mary' phenomenon - also greatly increases the risk of gall bladder cancer.
Viruses often cause cancer by introducing new
genetic material that in one way or another deregulates cell division.
That's the case for papilloma virus and cervical cancer, Epstein-Barr
related cancers like Burkitt's lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, HTLV
and adult T-cell leukemia, etc. Might be the case for ordinary basal skin
cancer and colon cancer.
Parasitic worms can cause cancer. A form of
schistosomiasis had made bladder cancer common in Egypt, while a parasitic
fluke (clonorchiasis) causes a high rate of biliary tract cancer in
northeast Thailand.
In the case of bacteria like h pylori, or parasitic
worms like S. haematobium, there seems to be no chance of any transfer of
genetic material to human cells. Rather, it looks as if long-term
inflammation itself can lead to cancer. This may, possibly, explain why
aspirin halves colon cancer risk (and, probably, significantly reduces the
risk of several other cancers).
The third known way in which a pathogen can
significantly increase cancer risk is by suppressing the immune system,
which can greatly increase the risk of certain cancers, particularly ones
caused by viruses. When in working order, the immune system can,
apparently, suppress much virus-induced cancer, since it can recognize
foreign viral antigens expressd by those infected and transformd cells.
Thus HIV greatly increases the risk of cervical cancer, Epstein-barr
positive lymphomas, Kaposis's sarcoma (caused by human herpesvirus 8 but
rare in immunocompetent patients), skin cancer, etc.
Gregory Cochran
And this from
Space Access Society
(Our apologies for the delay in mailing out this
Update - our email arrangements took a couple days to get up and running
again.)
Space Access Update #99 12/13/02 Copyright 2002 by
Space Access Society
Reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.
We are still around, watching developments and
thinking about what comes next. We did spend much of the last six months
otherwise engaged - we prefer to avoid sleeping on park benches. (Our
apologies to everyone whose mail we haven't answered over that stretch.
We'll be working through the backlog RSN.)
But then, not coming close to making a living off
this space stuff can be a blessing as well as a curse, in that we are not
obliged to constantly make a public fuss whether we have something to say
or not. We do, now, have a number of things to say.
For starters, this: One of the more useful things we
do is putting on our annual conference, bringing players in the cheap
access game together in one place to focus intensively on access issues.
(For those of you who like what we do but worry whether we'll keep doing
it, we'll stop either when cheap access is an accomplished fact, or when
they pry our cold dead fingers off our last hotel contract.)
Last spring's Space Access '02 conference went well,
with attendance up and considerable useful work done. Our take on the
theme of the event: "Building a Place to Stand" - what a number
of startup low-cost launch companies have spent the recent investment
downturn doing. Here are a couple of reports from the conference:
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/
marericks_020510.html
http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/
archive/RLV/SAS-2002-Review.html
Meanwhile, preparations for next spring's Space
Access '03 conference are underway. We have a hotel contract for our
traditional last- weekend-in-April date at an old favorite site - SA'03 is
set for Thursday evening April 24th through Saturday night April 26th,
2003, at the Old Town Hotel and Conference Center, in downtown Scottsdale
Arizona. This is the same hotel we were at two years ago, the former
Holiday Inn Old Town, with new owners and name but otherwise largely
unchanged, in the heart of Scottsdale's restaurant and shopping district,
a fifteen minute cab ride from the Phoenix airport. For SA'03 room
reservations, call 800 695-6995 or 480 994-9203 and ask for our
"space access" rate of $74 a night. (Our rate is available for
three days before and after the conference dates.)
As for our current view of things, here, briefly, it
is:
- Radically cheaper space access (ten to a hundred
times less than current costs) would be a massive public good, enhancing
existing space markets and opening up potentially huge new ones, creating
new opportunities for research, exploration, commerce, and defense.
- Such access is possible in the near term with
current technology, at sufficiently high flight rates. Rocketry has become
more medium- tech than high, as witness among other things growing
third-world missile proliferation. At the same time, modern lightweight
materials and electronics greatly ease combining high performance with
intact reusability, allowing breakout from the traditional
expendable-missile ammunition design mindset, with potential huge benefits
to low-cost reliability.
What's been lacking to date has been the proper
combination of reasonable goals (it's DC-3 time, not 747), sensible focused
management, good engineering (KISS), and funding. Much depends on a leap
of faith that large new markets will emerge to support the necessary
higher flight rates - "if you build it, they will come". At
least one such new market, tourism, is growing steadily less speculative.
As for who might produce such access anytime soon...
- Certainly Not NASA
In the best of all possible worlds, we'd have long
ago dismantled the NASA "human spaceflight" empire for being a
massively inflexible bureaucracy neither capable of making nor willing to
make any significant changes in what they do: Flying a half-dozen people
on a half-dozen missions a year at over a billion dollars a mission. We'd
have put money into low-cost access X-projects and investment incentives,
and once the results started flying we'd have rebuilt NASA as a genuine
leading-edge research and exploration agency flying hundreds of times a
year on other people's rockets at less cost than it now flies a half-dozen
times a year on its own.
Alas, in this imperfect world NASA JSC/KSC/MSFC
represents a volume of Federal funding impossible to radically redirect
with the available political capital. The current White House still has
only thin Congressional majorities, and obviously has higher priorities
than radical reform of NASA - for now at least. Administrator O'Keefe's
immediate brief at NASA seems to be to stop the bleeding - to impose
actual accounting of where the money goes, and to steer the agency back
toward meeting existing obligations without busting future budgets.
In this context, we see the new "Orbital Space
Plane" (OSP) project as being the best ("least bad", if you
will) use of the existing SLI funding wedge practical under current
political constraints. It is a huge improvement on SLI's previous
direction, a budget-busting all-up Shuttle replacement designed primarily
to drop painlessly into the current Shuttle operations bureaucracy, yet
also touted as meeting US commercial launch needs - seriously muddying the
waters for genuine commercial space transportation investment.
OSP has the virtue of assuring NASA's minimum manned
launch needs (whatever one may think of the current agency, we do now have
international obligations to meet) without the slightest chance of anyone
plausibly pretending it addresses commercial markets too.
We still would like to see NASA formally declare
itself out of the business of developing commercial space transportation.
Further, we would like NASA to make explicit that launch cost reductions
impractical in the context of their large and inflexible organization,
complex requirements, and miniscule flight rate may be eminently practical
elsewhere.
- Probably Not DOD
The Defense Department is starting to get interested
- discussing the military implications of near-term radically cheaper
on-demand launch is no longer career suicide for officers, and DARPA is
funding some useful work as part of their RASCAL project - but DOD's
latest reorganization consolidated space under USAF, whose space people
are currently wrapped up in bringing EELV online, and which over the
medium term isn't interested in anything which might interfere with F-22
funding. DOD in general has other more pressing budget priorities for the foreseeable
future. We don't expect DOD to produce radically cheaper access anytime
soon.
- Almost Certainly Not BoeMacLockMart
The existing major aerospace companies may or may
not still be organizationally capable of developing radically cheaper
space transportation - recent signs are not good - but this is a moot
question, since absent a deep-pockets government customer, none of them
will try. They've had that sort of risk-taking thoroughly squeezed out of
them over the last generation. It ain't gonna happen.
- The Startups
This leaves the entrepreneurial startups as our main
hope for a cheap space transportation revolution. None of them yet look
like much - a few of them have test-flown hardware, but on average they
tend to be a handful of engineers with shoestring funding, an ambitious
business plan, and a partially refined design - but historically, every
time there's been a revolution in transportation technology, new companies
have taken over from the old established leaders. The massively complex
organizational structures that evolved to squeeze marginally acceptable
reliability out of modified artillery rockets are more hindrance than help
in dealing with the new high-flight-rate reusable paradigm. The startups
should be supported and encouraged - individually they're long shots, but
collectively they're by far our best bet for a spacefaring future.
Space Access Society's sole purpose is to promote
radical reductions in the cost of reaching space. You may redistribute
this Update in any medium you choose, as long as you do it unedited in its
entirety.
Space Access Society http://www.space-access.org
space.access@space-access.org
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere
in the Solar System" - Robert A. Heinlein
From Dave Colton:
Subject: DoD's Twelve Days of Christmas The
President has authorized the Department of Defense to assist Santa with
the Twelve Days of Christmas.
Status of acquisitions follows:
Day 1- Partridge in a pear tree: The Army and Air
Force are in the process of deciding whose area of responsibility Day 1
falls under. Since the partridge is a bird, the Air Force believes it
should have the lead. The Army, however, feels trees are part of the land
component command's area of responsibility. After three months of
discussion and repeated OpsDepsTank sessions, a $1M study has been
commissioned to decide who should lead this joint program.
Day 2 - Two turtle doves: Since doves are birds, the
Air Force claims responsibility. However, turtles are amphibious, so the
Navy-Marine Corps team feels it should take the lead. Initial studies have
shown that turtles and doves may have interoperability problems. Terms of
reference are being coordinated for a four-year, $10M DARPA study.
Day 3 - Three French Hens: At State Department
instigation, the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs has blocked offshore
purchase of hens, from the French or anyone else. A $6M program is being
developed to find an acceptable domestic alternative.
Day 4 - Four Calling Birds: Source selection has
been completed, with the contract awarded to AT&T. However, the award
is being challenged by a small disadvantaged business.
Day 5 - Five Golden Rings: No available rings meet
MILSPEC for gold plating. A three-year, $5M accelerated development
program has been initiated.
Day 6 - Six Geese a-Laying: The six geese have been
acquired. However, the shells of their eggs seem to be very fragile. It
might have been a mistake to build the production facility on a nuclear
waste dump at former Air Force base that was closed under BRAC.
Day 7 - Seven Swans a-Swimming: Fourteen swans have
been killed trying to get through the Navy SEAL training program. The
program has been put on hold while the training procedures are reviewed to
determine why the washout rate is so high.
Day 8 - Eight Maids a-Milking: The entire class of
maids a milking training program at Aberdeen is involved in a sexual
harassment suit against the Army. The program has been put on hold pending
resolution of the lawsuit.
Day 9 - Nine Ladies Dancing: Recruitment of the
ladies dancing has been halted by a lawsuit from the "Don't Ask,
Don't Tell Association." Members claim they have a right to dance and
wear women's clothing as long as they're off duty.
Day 10 - Ten Lords a-Leaping: The ten lords have
been abducted by terrorists. Congress has approved $2M in funding to
conduct a rescue operation. Army Special Forces and a USMC MEU(SOC) are
conducting a "NEO-off" competition for the right to rescue.
Day 11 - Eleven Pipers Piping: The pipe contractor
delivered the pipes on time. However, he thought DoD wanted smoking pipes.
DoD lost the claim due to defective specifications. A $22M dollar retrofit
program is in process to bring the pipes into spec.
Day 12 - Twelve Drummers Drumming: Due to cutbacks
only six billets are available for drumming drummers. DoD is in the
process of coordinating an RFP to obtain the six additional drummers by
outsourcing; however, funds will not be available until FY 05.
As a result of the above-mentioned programmatic
delays, and due to a High OPTEMPO that requires diversion of modernization
funds to support current readiness, Christmas is hereby postponed until
further notice.
Situation entirely normal...
Now a report on Dragon and
Dictation (see the BYTE
column that is up today):
Jerry
I have been using voice typing on & off since
the early IBM version with a digital signal processor card stuck in a dx2
pc costing over £1000! Early promise demonstrated by a terribly well
spoken (BBC newsreader English) IBM sales person proved impossible for me
to match so I went back to using a typist for reports etc.
I tried NaturallySpeaking V3 & 4 in a Dell
Pentium II 450 with 256 ram and enjoyed good accuracy and speed but was
defeated by one irritating error, it turned out that my speech has a
slight sibilance of which I was unaware but was picked up by the headset
microphone in close proximity to my mouth. To cut a long story short, a
very promising performance from NaturallySpeaking was totally spoilt by
the adding an extra “s" on the end of random words. The time taken
to correct this and my inability to tune this out by training the
software, back to keyboard!
This year I decided to look up some reviews on the
version 6 of the software and was attracted by a new feature, N. B. S.
(nothing but speech) that promised to remove extraneous sound inputs. I
decided to "try it before I buy it" by downloading a copy via
Kazaa which turned out to be an American English addition but good enough
to demonstrate that, on my fast Althon machine, the software flew and the
sibilance was ignored. I then bought an official upgrade from version 4 to
6 for C£85 from Scansoft UK. I have purchased the select version as this
includes all the features I require except for some minor office XP
navigation features in outlook and Internet Explorer. The macro facilities
enable me to automate a number of boring time-consuming jobs and the
advanced scripting and Visual Basic features in the professional version
are beyond my abilities and needs at present..
I have now installed this software in my office on a
puny IBM 600X 500 MHz laptop with 256 meg ram and whilst it doesn't
"fly" it produces a very acceptable result. From my experience
to date the best investment for voice typing is a quality headset and
microphone both for comfort and accuracy. I have heard good things about
and Emkay RF-5615, an ultra light-weight dictation quality radio headset,
details on their web site. http://www.communitech.com/
emkay/wireless_headsets.asp although this is an expensive
headset at 2 -- 3 times the price of the decent conventional set up the
ability to get out of my chair to cope with frequent meetings and
interruptions without strangling myself or tipping over cups of tea with
the dangling cable is worth almost any price. In theory, I can continue
dictating at up to 30 feet from my desk.. There is no doubt that dictation
accuracy improves when you do not look at the monitor, I think this is due
to people waiting for the text appear on the screen and this has a
self-serving effect of slowing the speech rate down, for some reason the
software performs much better when you talk at a fair pace. As an added
bonus, a button on the base station enables you to answer the telephone
fire the headset rather than having to pick up the headset.
Although I am able bodied thank God, I can clearly
see that for a disabled person the ability to navigate just about any
Windows program without a mouse or keyboard would be an absolute
godsend-believe it This program can do it with absolutely minimal
training.
If you are interested, I will let you know how the
new radio headset compares with the non-wireless option for convenience as
well as accuracy.
Excuse any typos as its real late here and rather
than proofreading I'm off to bed.
This message was initiated, typed and sent without
using the keyboard, I hope it is not too obvious!
Andy Gibbs
Thank you for that encouraging report! I
have managed to get all the components of Dragon Naturally Mobile and
Naturally Speaking, and I intend to install on one of my really fast
machines with a very good headset and microphone. I am also interested in
the mobile dictation device. I type fast enough at my regular keyboard
that I don't need to dictate, but I'd sure love to be able to dictate on
the road.
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