| Thursday,
December 9, 2004 See
Above
for one important matter. Now for another:
Subject: Gee, Dr. Jerry, Maybe Some People Don't
Exactly Fit
Into the narrow categories of the educationists. For
example, I believe that you've written that you'd rather do conceptual
design of things than actually cut metal and build hardware. However, there
are folks like myself who might not be so engineeringly creative, but can
nevertheless cut and build to the drawing, and come up with something which
flies.
And then there are people like Peter Bowers, the man
who designed the "Fly Baby" homebuilt airplane. That is, people who are good
with their heads AND their hands! (not to forget Burt Rutan.)
Of course, nobody's good at *everything*, but I think
I have detected a slight derision in your latest posts, against people who
like to make ingenious things with their hands.
You may have a point if that's all they can do, but
please don't leave us thinking that that those 10 fingers, with two
opposable thumbs among them, are useless for scholars and only good for
boneheads with trade-school training!
A Real Man can do Anything! (with head OR hands!)
Sorry to rant at you like this, I remain
B. Fan, formerly A.Fan.
I must be a worse writer than I suppose myself to
be if that is the impression I have left. I have never for a moment supposed
that the United States ought to be governed by an intellectual elite, nor
have I ever supposed that people who work at manufacturing are to be
despised. I have often written that the major strength of my old Human
Factors Laboratories at Boeing wasn't really in the clever science types
like me, but the experienced experimental mechanics who could take the stuff
we thought up and actually build it; we'd never have done the space suit
tests if it had been left to engineers.
You may have detected some kind of derision, but if
so, you detect what wasn't intended.
In general you will find that the "educated" people
are able to learn skills when necessary; but most aren't suited for skilled
labor jobs. The craftsman who put the same dedication into the 40th part he
makes as he did to the first ten is someone to be admired and treasured, and
is not likely to be found among the eggheads.
The fact remains that skills take one form of
training, and what used to be called education takes another; and
intellectual ability is important, but so is character and integrity. Bill
Buckley famously said that he would rather be governed by the first 500
names in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the faculty of Harvard
University, and many would agree.
My brother in law makes wonderful airplane models,
first from kits, then if he likes the design, he blows up the plans and
strikes out on his own with raw materials. I envy him that ability, and I
know darned well that if I ever took a whim to try to duplicate his work I'd
end up with an ugly mess, which is why I don't try. Patience and infinite
attention to detail, taking pains, are skills that I am unlikely ever to
acquire.
Since our school system seems determined to teach
neither the intellectual skills of learning how to learn, nor the arts and
crafts, nor much of anything else except the ability to get passing marks on
an examination and thus earn a credential, the discussion is probably moot
anyway.
An army of all officers would not win many battles.
Aldous Huxley speculated in Brave New World on what would happen if there
were created a society of all Alphas.
Your final statement that "a real man can do
anything" seems to me an exaggeration. I know a lot of people who can do
things I can't do. I flatter myself there are one or two things I can do
that most cannot. But spare me your inferences of contempt for my fellow
citizens. I despise no one who is honest.
=============================
Subject: Mr. Thompson's
questions
I think that it’s not so much a matter of the
questions that he has chosen (though you can certainly take issue with the
individual questions), but the thrust of the entire suite of questions that
makes them rather useless for determining the level of education of a modern
student.
Examining the questions, we find one on the history of
photography, one on the history of Rome, one on the history of biology mixed
with a trivia question, a three-parter on the history of astronomy, a
mathematical question requiring a significant amount of rather basic
number-crunching, a question on the history of music, and a question on the
history of the British succession.
I can certainly appreciate questions about actual
history – goodness knows our schooling system should spend more time and
attention to Roman history than it currently does, and British political
history is also of at least some importance. But questions about the history
of science aren’t education, they’re trivia. I did quite well in my
chemistry courses, and I’d like to think that I’m competent to, if not
perform chemistry research, at least to read a paper produced by such
research with good general understanding. I’m familiar with the history of
chemistry, but for example, I would be hard-pressed indeed to remember who
it was that proposed the phlogiston theory. This doesn’t mean I’m ignorant
of the history of chemistry, any more than a failure to recognize Daguerre’s
contribution to photography indicates ignorance of the principles of
photography.
I’m certainly not prepared to say that learning the
history of science is not a useful endeavor. Even if it was useful for
nothing else, the demonstration that our areas of knowledge and
understanding have undergone radical revisions several times in the past is
essential in understanding the reasoning behind the scientific method, and
developing the ability to appreciate the difference between actual science
and junk science. But a question of history of science is not a question of
scientific knowledge per se. It’s quite enough to understand that the model
of the atom, for example, passed through the stage of the Bohr model; that
Bohr was the scientist who devised it is interesting, but not specifically
useful knowledge.
Furthermore, devising a system of education that
prepares its students to do well on examinations of exquisitely obscure
trivia is not a revolutionary technique; it essentially describes the
Japanese system of college examinations. Unfortunately, while these
examinations do an extremely good job in culling unprepared students from
admission, they also manage to burn out virtually every student who does
manage to meet the standard, leaving colleges with a large pool of
essentially unmotivated students. Students spend their most productive years
of educating studying facts which can be turned to virtually no practical or
useful end, and don’t actually ensure the student has even a basic
understanding of the world (I mean, sure, you might know about political
reforms instituted by an emperor a thousand years dead, but if you can’t
name the various powers involved in World War II, you’re probably not
well-versed in history, no?) By the time the students reach somewhere that
they can receive a useful education, most of them have come to the
conclusion that education is bunk, and only hang in there to obtain their
credential. I doubt this is an end that either you or Mr. Thompson would
find acceptable.
Better than historical trivia are questions of general
knowledge of a given area. Instead of asking which amendment instituted
Prohibition, ask, “What is a Constitution? What relation does it have to the
laws of a nation?” Why not, “How does a refrigerator function?” It’s perhaps
too much to ask that people not intending to study biology or chemistry
remember the particular mechanism of the Krebs cycle, or its name, but they
should at least understand that plants absorb energy from sunlight to
convert CO2 into sugars. A question asking about the event that triggered
the first world war might elicit a proper answer of Archduke Ferdinand’s
assassination, but if the student doesn’t have the knowledge of the system
of secret treaties between the powers in that era, they still don’t
understand why there was a war – and if they DO understand that system, then
the Archduke’s name does not give them further understanding.
Naturally, there’s a danger in overgeneralization; you
can quite easily devise a test that can be passed by students who are quite
uneducated. Furthermore, practical matters dictate that it’s virtually
impossible to give a comprehensive essay exam on a multitude of topics to
everyone – even though the students might be willing to spend a week taking
it, the process of evaluating the answers will be painstakingly slow.
Too much of modern education focuses on the learning
of trivia as it is. There was once an era where a learned man could
encompass a great deal of the collective body of knowledge of Western
civilization, but that era is over and will not return; the complexity of
the modern world demands that some things be taught and others neglected
(and, frankly, there never was an era where that “body of knowledge” was
possessed by more than a tiny, tiny minority of people, and thus serves as a
lousy model for mass education anyway.)
Andrew Kent
============
Subject: Education multipliers
Dr Pournelle,
Education multipliers
"...it would take me a while to lay out all the
categories of the Linnaean taxonomy from memory (although I could find them
in a matter of minutes)."
In that case, you are an educated man--not that I ever
doubted it--because what fundamentally matters is not the knowledge one
knows by heart but the knowledge one knows how and where to lay ones hands
upon. It's why educated people are, by and large, the ones who have their
own libraries.
Properly used, the internet and Google should be the
greatest "education multipliers" in human history.
Perhaps if we could figure out how to keep the natural
curiosity of young children alive long enough for us to teach them reading
and writing and how to use Google, the next generation could be the best
educated ever.
Jim Mangles
And yet it is also the difference between education
and acquisition of skills. I know how to find all the rules for
driving a large bus or an 18-wheeler truck; but that is not the same as
KNOWING them, having them ready to had, having the ability to use them. I
could I expect in 6 weeks learn enough to pose as a brain surgeon, but not
to be able to perform brain surgery...
Subject: Measuring educational success
Jerry P:
The sham that is the "No Child Left Behind" reveals
the motives of a Congress, and maybe the President, which believes that if
they repeat a lie often enough, it will become reality. The inadequate
funding of the program is evidence that they either did not understand what
support would be necessary, or that they did, but produced yet another
unfunded mandate upon the states. It sounds good on the 30 second sound
bite, but does nothing for the education of the young. There is a terrible
hypocrisy afoot that preys upon the children.
Charles Simkins
No I think not. The intention is to do good; and
the misunderstanding is one propagated by a very large number of people who
mean well. Of course the effect may be the same.
==============
Subject: Hydro Pulse Irrigator
Dr. Pournelle,
When the link for the Grossan sinus irrigator appeared
for perhaps the third time on your site, I decided to order it. After having
it for a week, and only using it a couple of times myself (due to the recent
Santa Ana winds) I have (knock on wood) kicked a twenty-eight (28) year
nasal spray habit. Thank you.
Stephen Borchert
======================
AND NOW A FEW WORDS---
Back in the 80s were most of your readers using the
same hardware & OS you were or were you a few steps ahead, showing the way?
I don't expect you to abandon Windows, but Apple
hardware & especially OS X has some real, and significant, advantages over
XP: security is just one of them, and even if it was the ONLY one wouldn't
that be a story worth telling?
True Mr. & Mrs. Total Geek, with a passel of Windows
software on the shelf and years of experience with the OS, can do quite well
with a Windows machine, for less $$$ than an Apple. But for the rest of us?
Think of the hours the average user spends maintaining his firewall, ad and
spam blockers, virus protection programs... or if he doesn't contending with
a real mess!
Not to mention the quality of the included software on
a Mac: if you like to dabble with music creation you'll pay a lot extra on a
Windows machine for something like Apple's Garage Band; iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD
et al are extremely powerful applications which are still incredibly easy to
use, iTunes and the iTunes store are the gold standard for MP3 purchase &
playback (so good, in fact, they've migrated to Windows versions),
Rendezvous is extremely powerful and makes life SO much easier, and on & on.
Come on, let's be honest: Windows development is
stagnating. When was the last time MS or Dell came up with something truly
innovative in OS or hardware? They've been stealing Apple's ideas for a
decade.
Look at your PowerBook as just one example: Airport
(802.11) not invented by Apple, but first standard on Macs, same with
FireWire (and before that USB), same with the wide-screen aspect ratio which
only now is becoming common on HP, Toshiba, Sony, Dell etc. machines; to
this day as far as I know no Windows laptop offers a backlit keyboard, DVD
burners first gained mass acceptance on the Mac, Apple hasn't produced a
machine with a floppy drive for YEARS, and on and on. Not to mention all the
great stuff in OS X...
I'm just afraid you haven't used OS X enough yet to
become comfortable with it and to discover its elegance, underlying power,
and ease of use. Windows isn't BAD (although it used to be) - I'm typing
this right now on a Dell - but OS X is BETTER in so many ways that I'd think
that would make compelling copy for your readers.
Apple IS the leader these days, and you used to be,
too - I remember because the first thing I did with every new issue of BYTE
was read the CHAOS MANOR column to find out what was new, groundbreaking,
and cutting edge. That's where you should be again today, not mired in some
obscure MS Exchange, Office, or virus imbroglio for the Nth time this
generation.
Sorry for the rant but that's the view from here, 7
feet above sea level (literally).
All the best--
Tim
You have a point. Perhaps an important one.
However, I do point out that I get a lot of work
done. Perhaps I would get more done using Apple and Mac. God knows Peter and
Roland and Dan work hard at persuading me. As do you.
Dear Jerry:
As you point out you get a lot of work done on your
Windows machines: you get a lot of calories eating at McDonalds, as well,
but that doesn't make it a quality meal!
I think of just two quick aspects of the Mac
experience: spring-loaded folders and the powered FireWire ports all Macs
have had for years.
Spring-loaded folders pop open whenever you hover the
mouse pointer over them. Say you want to move a file from the desktop to
somewhere three or four levels down - you simply grab the folder (point and
click) and drag it to the icon of the folder or drive the contains the final
destination: after a second of two that folder or drive pops open on the
desktop showing its contents and you can then hover over the next sub-folder
and have IT pop open, ad infinitum. It takes longer to explain than to
learn, and once you're used to it you wonder why every OS doesn't work the
same way - it's incredibly convenient. I can't tell you how many times, when
working on a Windows machine, I drag a folder over a disk icon and wait for
something to happen... and wait and wait.
Now most Windows PCs have a FireWire port these days,
but the vast majority are 4-pin or unpowered; it must save a few cents in
the design and building of the machine. FireWire still works better than
USB2 for streaming large amounts of data like video which is why it's there
in the first place. But all Macs come with multiple powered FireWire ports,
which means:
You can run any (FireWire equipped) Mac from another
one using Target Disk mode: start one normally, start the second machine
after connecting them with a FireWire cable while holding down the T key and
the second Mac's disk will show up as a "slave" on the first Mac. Incredibly
useful if your OS ever goes south and you need to harvest data from your
hard drive immediately before you worry about making repairs.
Having powered FireWire also means external disks like
SmartDrive's deck of playing cards sized SmartDisks do NOT have to use a
wall wart to work; less to carry, less to keep track of, less weight, you
can have a FULL backup of an 80GB hard disk literally in the palm of your
hand... and that backup can boot and operate ANY FireWire equipped Mac,
anywhere!
Flying to Japan and don't want to lug a laptop? As
long as you'll have access to a Mac on landing you can bring everything with
you - all your settings, data, tunes, videos - in a package no bigger and
weighing no more than a deck of cards. While Apple doesn't support it you
can even make an iPod a bootable device; listen to music on the trip, have
the contents of your home hard disk with you when you get there!
I could go on and on about little advantages like
these that exist throughout Apple Mac hardware and software; they all add up
to a significant competitive and innovative advantage.
The newest Macs are even more than capable of playing
the most graphically intense 3D games, and release of the big name titles is
approaching parity: Unreal Tournament 2004, for example, was released for
the Mac and PC at the same time. Doom 3 for the Mac should be out in January
(for G5 based Macs only). The bad old days when Apples were expensive
also-rans are thankfully far behind us; today Macs are an extremely viable,
and more secure, superior alternative to Windows, and much easier to use and
more elegant solution than Linux (of course most Linux software will run
under Unix on the Mac with just a bit of tweaking).
The advantages are numerous and obvious and I'm VERY
glad to hear I'm not the only one yammering in your ear about them!
All the best--
Tim Loeb
Is Apple now the leader in technology for computer
users? It won't be the price leader, obviously; but is there enough going
on, and development happening, that the forward edge of the computer
community ought to switch to Mac? I'd be interested in reader views.
Much more below.
=============
regarding your Earth-is-flat positions
Honestly, was this Aaron Pressman-guy's purpose to try
and PERSUADE you and others?....if so, it should be said the consensus
position is that the tactic of starting out with an adolescent insult of the
target-to-be-persuaded does not often work in winning over the target to
one's own view.
"From: Aaron Pressman [mailto:gravitate@mac.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 8:18 PM To: Jerry Pournelle Subject:
climate change consensus
Based on your prior inability to assimilate facts
that don't correspond to your views, I have little hope this will change
your mind, but just in case you can be swayed from Earth-is-flat position on
climate change:"
The only consensus I see is that a group of
power-hungry, self-interested, political, tax-supported, non-profit,
faith-based bureaucracies (their faith being Scientism, of course) agree
that their own political power - as well as the political power of fellow
bureaucracies - should be increased at the expense of people who conduct
their commerce not through coercion, but on a voluntary basis.
In the interest of "presenting both sides", why not
also have a sentence that reads: "Some bureaucracies whose revenues might be
adversely affected by not having controls on carbon dioxide emissions have
alleged major certainties in the science." AS WELL AS the one presented in
the original: "Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected
by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major
uncertainties in the science."
Stuart Preston Tucson
Tom Bethel has a marvelous essay in the November
American Spectator in which he asks about public funding of science and the
effect that can have. I'll have more on that in view another time.
================
global warming and
consensus science and journalism
Dr. Pournelle:
Concerning consensus of opinion-style science: Last
fall, Geneva Overholzer, formerly of the Washington post, I believe, was
interviewed on public radio.
One of the topics Overholzer dealt with was the issue
of what is fair and balanced coverage. She used the issue of global climate
change as an example of the difficulties reporters encounter. Should a
reporter be bound, she asked, to seek out a scientist who disagrees with
anthropogenic climate change, when a consensus of more than 98 percent of
scientists agree that global warming, caused by human action, is occurring?
Ms. Overholzer was correct in part: No worthwhile
reporter need become entangled in reporting the beliefs of the Flat Earth
Society. However, it does seem to me that reporters have a professional duty
to be well-enough educated to know why the earth isn't flat, and a lack of
science education among reporters seems self-evident today.
The history of science is replete with (or consists
of!) examples of one person or group being correct, despite the opposition
of the majority. Consensus science fails, in my view, to consider such
examples as Semmelweiss, Galileo, or, in a recent example, the development
of the Heimlich maneuver. Dr. Heimlich had to battle for many years against
a consensus of medical people to prove that his 'maneuver' was a better
course of action than pounding on the back to help a choking victim. He was
ultimately proven right, but how many people choked to death first?
What troubles me most about this is that the media in
general seem to follow a manufactured consensus, rather than possible fresh
angles, when pursuing a story such as climate change. Is this simply herd
mentality, or do the media now wish to adopt a position and sell that
position to the rest of us regardless of the facts? It seems to me that
reporting the story means understanding the story.
The modern, credentialed media don't realize their own
lack of knowledge. Consider the reporters who, while standing on vast
expanses of concrete at an airport, refer to the "tarmac." It's not that
they're ignorant of the origins of the word that bothers me, it's that they
don't seem intellectually curious enough to look up 'tarmac' in a
dictionary.
When the President gives a speech, he doesn't step up
to a podium; he stands on a podium and behind a lectern. It's not a subtle
difference, but this difference is lost on almost every reporter,
commentator, and analyst today. If journalists don't even comprehend the
words they use to communicate, how can we trust the ideas they're putting
into words?
If this is the state of understanding common to the
media in these oh-so-enlightened times, then a Dark Age is indeed
approaching. Do we have time to get to space first, or should we rebuild the
monastery walls and lay up goods in store against famine and siege?
Mark Thompson jomath # hickorytech.net
The real question is, just who has joined a
consensus on what? There is a general consensus that the climate has been
warming since the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum. Until not too long
ago there was a general consensus that the actual trend was to Global
Cooling and that another Ice Age was due and overdue, and during the 60's
and 70's there were numerous conferences on this subject.
http://www.zianet.com/wblase/endtimes/gwarming.htm
is polemical but then most statements on this issue are (I could wish
otherwise), but it asks telling questions and produces some evidence that
the consensus may be as much politically driven as scientific.
My position has always been the same: this is an
issue of sufficient importance that we ought to be spending some real money
to get the real answers. A few billion now may save trillions in false
starts and bad remedies. We need a reliable means of launching more
satellite Earth observatories. We need better integration of ground based
sensors. We need more core samples from more places, and good analysis of
the data obtained. All of this is obtainable and it doesn't cost that much;
but instead of crash programs to get the answers, we get a "consensus" that
we ought to spend billions and billions, now, on remedies when we do not yet
have certainty as to what the problem is, what is causing it, and what is
the right way to do something.
There is a lot of money at stake here. Those who
want the Kyoto Treaty stand to make trillions of dollars if it is adopted.
Perhaps that is the right way to go; but surely it is worth spending
something to find out before we enrich all those in the "consensus"?
====================
Subject: Interesting WSJ item RE
5382
Jerry - this is of interest, RE yesterday's win. It's
a WSJ item from yesterday - I suspect (but can't prove) from the timing and
from earlier info I had that we had prepped the battlefield to the point
where there were only one or two holdouts against HR 5382 in the Senate by
yesterday afternoon, setting things up for a breakthrough when this came
out.
(The writer was predisposed toward our side as of last
summer but didn't know HR 5382 and its ancestors existed. I have a pretty
good idea who followed up with him and brought him up to speed on all this,
for what it's worth.)
Looks like we're winning the war of ideas here. Not
that the war is over, but at least it's going our way for the moment...
Henry
Wall Street Journal, Dec. 8, 2004, 'Business
World,' p A.13
"The 'Final Frontier' May Be a Senate Waste
Basket."
Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
The Senate came back in an ultra lame-duck
session this week to consider intelligence reform. But a battalion of
lobbying bloggers has done its best to point them to a more pressing matter
in the form of HR 5382, recently enacted by the House and now facing doom in
the Senate.
Thank the Internet for the fact that
legislation that normally would be ignored as the special interest of a
handful of companies has a noisy popular following among disinterested
voters and citizens. The bill would formalize the responsibility of the
FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to license and regulate a
burgeoning entrepreneurial sector devoted to private space travel.
Most importantly, it would specify that the
FAA's duty extends only to preventing undue risk to bystanders on the
ground. Passengers would be deemed willing risktakers in experimental
private spaceflight. Ipso facto, heirs can't expect to go running to a
lawyer and collect millions just because something goes wrong.
Says Rich Pournelle of rocketmaker XCOR: " This
industry needs regulatory certainty. If the bill doesn't pass this year,
we'll have to start the whole process again. We'll all be left speculating
what's going to happen."
Half a dozen entrepreneurs are currently hoping
to loft space vehicles on test flights in the near future, including Robert
Bigelow, a Vegas hotel magnate who has booked rocket space next year for a
one-third scale version of his proposed inflatable modular space hotel. But
an indifferent Senate is booting an opportunity to provide regulatory
certainty for all the budding space entrepreneurs who've got serious, well
funded plans to fly in the coming year.
Space fans have kept Congress's feet to the
fire over the past year, helping industry lobbyist James Muncy wedge the
bill past two ranking Democrats on the House Transportation Committee, James
Oberstar and Pete DeFazio, who posed as Horatio at the bridge to protect the
safety of passengers. "I do not think safety regulation is ever silly,"
grumbled Rep. Oberstar in his losing floor effort to defeat the House bill
last month. <snip>
Actually I also have a pretty good idea of who
followed things up.
==============
Subject: Theory and Falsification.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=315976
- Roland Dobbins
Interesting. I had dinner with Flew a couple of
times, once in Seoul a few years ago. If he has got as far as this, he is
likely to continue as Lewis did.
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