A good day; Iron Law and NASA

View 698 Wednesday, October 26, 2011

For NASA SWAT Teams making America safer, see below. It’s an interesting story.

Feeling Safer Already

It has been a strenuously good day. Began with short walk with Roberta and Sable, getting home in time to set up for Skype calls to Jack Cohen in England, and Steve Barnes in Atlanta. Skype doesn’t allow conference calls, or if it does, I don’t know how to do them, and it was all complicated by the fact that Barnes had given us the wrong Skype number, and to make it even more complicated Jack has two machines, one better for Skyping than the other, but of course the Skype number I have for Jack is on the least preferred machine. Niven is the wrong person to consult for this sort of thing, but eventually we got it working, only of course only two conversations at the same time. So Larry and I talked to Barnes for a couple of minutes about our upcoming novella in the Beowulf’s Children series, then we had a long talk with Jack Cohen about the aliens and evolutionary design and plot points. Then we called Steve Barnes and went over it with him.

It was a very productive hour. We’ve got a powerful work in progress, and in fact it’s nearly finished, and we ironed out some important points. This will be a good story with, as Jack put it, some of the customary deep undertones expected from a Niven/Pournelle book. Not to leave Steve out. He supplies the emotional appeal that isn’t so much expected from Niven/Pournelle. I think this will be one to be proud of, and we have a neat new alien.

After which Niven, Sable, and I went up the hill, 2 miles each way, something more than 400 foot altitude gain. Strenuous for all three, a bit exhausting for Niven and me. Sable loves it. The fire road up the hill is lined as far as the eye can see with gopher holes, and every now and then a gopher puts his head up. Sable has yet to catch one, but she sure likes to try. There are more holes than gophers – the rattlesnakes seem to have got a few of them – but now that the crows have thinned out the newly hatched rattlesnakes I make no doubt the gopher population will return. Interesting ecology in the scrub hills. We put together a lot of stuff for Lucifer’s Anvil – the title will probably involve Samael, the protector angel – as well as getting a great hike.

After which Sable went flat in the kitchen and we went to lunch in the local Thai restaurant, and back for a nap. A very productive if exhausting day. As Niven observed, we still think about as fast as we used to. We just can’t keep it up for as long. A day to count blessings.

Of course as I was writing this I saw a Time-Warner truck parked on our street, and then discovered that my Internet access was gone. Naturally I thought the worst. I reset the cable modem and router. I even went outside to see if I could talk to the Time/Warner guy, but he was gone. So then I thought about what I might have just done. Well, I had pushed the computers around a bit to make room for Niven to have a chair in view of the Mac Book Pro I use for Skype, and — well, and lo, I had managed to turn off the main Ethernet switch that connects my office systems to the main router connecting to the cable modem and —

Which is to say, it was my own damn fault, and it didn’t take long to fix. My DLink switches and routers work fine and have been for a long time – it’s probably about time to get a couple of spare switches just in case. I use Belkin and DLink for my Ethernet equipment and I have never had any reason to regret that. Ah well. Another lesson. And more blessings to count.

Feeling safer already.

NASA Makes Bunny Inspectors Look Tame

Jerry,

You may have seen this already:

"The target [of a sting by NASA to recover a tiny speck of moon dust], Joann Davis, a grandmother who says she was trying to raise money for her sick son, asserts the lunar material was rightfully hers, having been given to her space-engineer husband by Neil Armstrong in the 1970s….

When officers in flak vests took a hold of her, the 4-foot-11 woman said she was so scared she lost control of her bladder and was taken outside to a parking lot, where she was questioned and detained for about two hours."

Here is a link to the entire story at Reason.com: http://reason.com/blog/2011/10/26/nasa-freaks-out-little-old-lad

Apparently Mrs. Davis triggered the sting operation by appealing to NASA for help in selling the Lunar material. Instead of telling her she couldn’t do that, or even sending a bureaucrat to her home to get it back, the agency set up a sting operation, then had armed men apprehend and question her at a public restaurant where she thought she was meeting a potential buyer.

I tell you, between the rampant bunny abusers and the student loan felons and the grannies trying to sell off our national heritage, what is this country coming to? I certainly feel safer knowing that every single Federal agency now has an armed SWAT team ready to jump in and stop these serious offenses whenever and wherever they occur.

But, as you say, despair is a sin.

Best wishes,

John DeVries

The Iron Law applies everywhere. Some military outfits manage to avoid the worst consequences, but the Iron Law applies everywhere. Sometimes it is silly, sometimes it is dangerous.

I am not really very good at obituaries. John McCarthy was an old friend of forty years and more. John McCarthy, RIP. He first showed me the ARPANET, back when very few had ever heard of it. He was part of the Council I chaired that recommended Strategic Defense to Reagan, An old friend and a man of some importance in the history of computer science. Goodbye, old friend.