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View 770 Monday, April 15, 2013

It’s Tax Day

I do mine last day for no particular reason, and there’s no real stress here. I’ve done this for a long time now. It’s just time consuming filling out more and more work sheets with line items that used to be consolidated. We will endure.

Last night was Writers of the Future dinner and awards. Since I tend not to drive at night my son Alex drove me down. Coming back we drove Kevin Anderson and his wife Rebecca back to their hotel on our way home, we all having stayed late to talk to people. The WOTF event gets a bunch of us writers together at their expense and since I don’t go to many SF conventions any more this is a great opportunity to get to meet my friends. Talked to a lot of them, including Col. Doug Beason, Chief Scientist of Space Command. Also some NASA friends. Space isn’t dead yet, and neither is the notion of savable and reusable Earth to LEO launcher development.

It looks to me as if the proper role of NASA and the Air Force (Navy too if they’ll get in on it) is X programs; focus on good technology development. When it comes time for industry to build new craft we’ll have proved out the concepts and can go to production. That’s how we developed the best Air Force in the world. Develop the technology, let the aerospace companies build the spacecraft, and operating companies will fly them. But that’s for another discussion.

We had a nice dinner. Alex found a place at a table with Mike Reznik and Larry Niven and some other writers, and presently there appeared Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, who professed to be overwhelmed with all the talent she was with. She was one of the award presenters. Very charming.

A few pictures below. I’m in a bit of a hurry.

Nancy Cartwright, voice of Bart Simpson and a charming dinner companion.

WOTF is organized and they take a lot of pictures of crowds of people who don’t want to spend a lot of time being posed for photographs. There are about fifty of us on stage being posed. I thought it fair to take a shot of them at work. Like most of what they do it’s all professional and everyone is as nice as possible given the time pressures…

Backstage operations. Lousy picture but you get the idea. I am sure there are tons of photos and videos at the WOTF site.

It’s late in the day and I have to print and sign the taxes. I should be near normal tomorrow. I hope.

There is news from Boston but you’ll know more about it than I do in ten minutes. They either do or do not have a suspect in custody who either is or is not a Saudi native. The one thing we can be sure of is that no one saw this one coming. The Terror War is not over.

Jerry,

If you want to post this, feel free to shorten it…

You wrote that no one saw it coming, with regards to the Boston bombings. Is that really what you meant to write? I think we’ve "seen it coming" since 9/11 even if the short attention span crowd prefers to forget what happened and why. Islamist extremist terrorism aside, I’ve personally been waiting for the next attack since the Oklahoma City bombing.

Although as a declining republic we are creeping towards totalitarianism in the name of the common "good", we are still a largely open society and that makes us about as soft a target as it gets for any flavor of terrorism you could think of. OK City. Unabomber. WTC 1. 9/11. Anthrax letters. What strikes me is that while effective as terror attacks and of course devastating to the victims, except for 9/11 they were all amateur efforts. While the specific target this time was not known in advance we have known for a long time that there WILL be more attacks.

Creating a restricted society won’t help but we can try to be prepared to effectively deal with them when they do occur. Just like airplanes and gyms now have automatic defibrillators hanging on every wall, simple trauma kits could be cheaply pre-positioned anywhere large numbers of people gather. All they really need to contain are nasal-pharyngeal airway tubes, battlefield compression dressings/bandages, battlefield tourniquets, quik-clot gauze (magic stuff!), and a box of those latex-free gloves. With just those items, you could keep a whole lot of people alive for the 15-30 minutes it would take before medical personnel arrive, and every military or recent ex-military member would know how to use those supplies because we’ve ALL been taught how to use them. It’s relatively cheap, and they will last almost indefinitely if packaged properly. They need to be clearly visible though, since the first responder may be Joe Citizen and he doesn’t have a key to the supply closet.

If they want to easily protect against low-tech chemical weapon attacks, there would need to be kits with plastic sheets and lots of duct tape (plus signs saying "door sealed from inside – do not open"). This would be surprisingly effective if the threatened people have enough tape and feel motivated to seal up all the room openings until decon crews arrive. Military pilots in a chem weapon scenario travelling between shelter and their aircraft do so wearing what is really just a large clear plastic bag over their other protective gear, because it is an effective temporary barrier.

In this case, the attacker(s) probably made a serious tactical error. While the attack will have its desired terror effect in terms of forcing us to "do something!!!111one", the death toll will be a mere fraction of what it would have been had the bombs not gone off within sight of the well staffed aid stations already in place for the runners. From many initial reports, some rather horrific injuries were survived only because there were so many medical personnel on scene within seconds of the blasts. I even saw some pictures of some military members getting a chance to practice their battlefield first aid. Had this attack occurred at a "normal" mass gathering or other event, everyday citizens would have been providing the immediate care and as we found in our recent wars, the first few minutes of care is utterly critical when it comes to surviving the types of injuries you get from improvised explosive devices.

S

What I meant was that no one in authority saw it coming.  They don’t see much because they have a mind set.  As to how many hard line old pros saw this coming, that’s another story.  Of course a fairly large and fairly official part of Islam now sees it incumbent on themselves to renew the Holy War, and put all the People of the Book into either conversion or submission with tribute. It is, after all, directly commanded.

The West didn’t realize the Cold War was on until it was nearly over and now it has been forgotten that it was once very real with the possibility of some very dangerous outcomes.  Of course our modern intellectual establishment doesn’t believe in that sort of thing because they don’t believe in much of anything, so even when faced with fanatics who are willing to die while trying to kill for the cause they continue with clinical language and speak of disorders.

It is said that God looks out for fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Perhaps that is not true but the people of Boston have much to be thankful for.

And yes, I got my taxes posted on time. Now I can come up for air.  Now it’s late and time for bed. Mailbag tomorrow, and maybe a few more words on a strategy of technology.

One Note.  I’ve been reading a lot about dark matter and dark energy, and how the universe is about 75% dark this that and the other, and we know this because things are farther away than they should be, and some of them are moving faster than they should. And none of it makes a lot of sense.

Special relativity says that the speed of light is constant, relative to any observer, and there is no aether in which light or gravity waves. Michelson, whose Michelson-Morley experiment was fundamental to the abolition of ether, never accepted either general or special relativity. Of course relativity is pretty well agreed to by everyone, although in fact most of those who agree to it neve4r thought much about it and can’t actually defend the theory from attacks such as the existence of spectroscopic binaries.  (They are very difficult to explain under relativity. It takes highly complex tensor mathematics to account for them, whereas the ether theory of Michelson as expanded by Petr Beckmann manages that with a algebra.)  All of this has me wondering: if we use Beckmann’s ether (which is the local gravitational field) then we do not need to assume that our local velocity of light is the same as the velocity of light in deep deep space where the gravitational field is much thinner.  Waves travel slower in thinner media.  Out between the galaxies it’s thin indeed. I don’t think we have any way of measuring the actual speed of light out there.  And of course waves speed up in dense media; the gravity field of a major galaxy, itself salted with dark matter assuming there is dark matter, would be a great deal stronger than out between the galaxies. 

Physicists have assumed dark matter makes the galaxies “heavier” than they would be without it, which explains why they whirl faster than they should, but no one has found dark matter. Other physics theorists see the galaxies plunging away from us faster than they ought to, and assume dark energy which pushes them.

But if light speed changes with the density of the ether, and ether is in any way related to gravity (as for instance if its associated with dark matter) then we really don’t know how far away the distant galaxies are.

I haven’t the math skills to put this into equations, and I suspect I can no longer tool up to learn enough; but it all seems suspicious to me. Ether was postulated as the medium that light could wave in. It wasn’t suppose to do anything else. It pervaded everything but you couldn’t actually contain it or manipulate it: characteristics it shares with dark matter. 

This is a very half baked idea, a cocktail party theory on the order of my view of the influence of dogs on the evolution of human intelligence, but the more I keep turning it over and over the more I wonder.  Dark matter would be thin between the galaxies.  And I think I’d rather believe in dark matter than dark energy.

And lest you think I have gone mad, I haven’t. I just wanted to get my wild idea written down, so someone can blow it away with experimental evidence or even a good thought experiment…  Those who read this last night will have noted that I got some of it backwards, which wouldn’t have been a problem if I hadn’t been in a hurry to get to bed. Potentially embarrassing.

View 769 Saturday, April 13, 2013

Coming up for air. I have the taxes pretty well done now, although there is still some key punching to be done.

Had a good evening with old friends at the Writers of the Future dinner last night. Author Services held it in the building across the street from them, a sort of fancy all you can eat sushi and other Oriental stuff place called the Vegas Sea Food Buffet. I expect it was a lot cheaper for WOTF than some of the previous and fancier catered dinners they had and the variety of food was enormous and quite good. Sat with Yoji and Ursula Kondo and Todd McCaffrey. The only problem with the place was that it is quite large and while we had a section all to ourselves the general noise level was fairly high, which probably didn’t bother anyone but me.

Tonight we have opera tickets and tomorrow is the Writers of the Future Awards thing. Monday I will finish, print, and mail the taxes, after which we can get back to a more reasonable publication schedule, and clear out some of the accumulated mail. Apologies to all. The supporting forms needed for the taxes get a bit more complicated each year. TurboTax can handle it but it gets just a little more onerous, at least for me, every year. Ah well.

Thanks to all those who continue to subscribe and renew.

I should mention Paolo Soleri, RIP. He was responsible for the inspiration for Todos Santos, the arcology Larry Niven and I postulated in Oath of Fealty, the novel we set out to write after Mote. There was a California legislative committee looking into the California future back then, and it had me down to talk with them and some other futurists. One of their guests was Soleri, and after I had lunch with him and spent several hours in discussion with him I went out and bought his books, and Niven and I thought we’d try to see what it would be like to live in an arcology. It was a radical idea at the time. We visited the Richfield Towers in Los Angeles, and a number of the early closed Malls – they were a great deal less common in those days. And of course we were just starting on work with small computers, and we tried to work a lot of that into the story.

Obviously an S-100 computer was a big step forward over what there had been, and indicated directions Moore’s Law would be taking us, but we had to do a lot of extrapolation. We gave the computer some capabilities for communication within the arcology not available to those outside – now of course an iPhone lets everyone communicate with everyone else. And Facebook. None of those existed then. But oddly enough the story still holds up a lot better than I would have thought. Soleri invited Niven and me to go out to visit him in Arcosanti, and we always intended to do it, but somehow we never did and now we never can. I regret that. I only spent a few hours in his company a long time ago, but I remember him well, and we did correspond for a while but over time that dwindled to nothing.

Paulo Soleri, dreamer and futurist, RIP

View 769 Wednesday, April 10, 2013

It’s tax week, and I’m up to the ears. Meanwhile I allowed myself to get into a silly discussion not worth the time of any of its participants, and now it’s Wednesday and I am way behind on doing my taxes.

It’s going to be very thin here for a while. Apologies.

Here are some pictures. Marvin Minsky at home when I was last in the Boston area. Then Sable, and Sable with a new Beagle friend. And finally Larry Niven at the Irvine conference we went to last week. All from an iPhone which takes better pictures than some of the much larger cameras I used to lug around – and I always have it with me. I’ll have more on all that another time. Taxes call. Thanks to all those who continue to subscribe and renew.  I’ll be back.  Really.

View 769 Friday, April 05, 2013

I am still in the throes of taxes. I took an hour off for a walk to the bank. It’s the longest walk Sable has had for weeks, and she was fine, vigorous on the way there, and while a bit slower coming back, not dragging at all, and interested in sniffing everything. She’s doing fine. She limps a bit, and we keep a bracing bandage on her cancerous leg, but she doesn’t seem any worse than she was in December when she was diagnosed. She’s still a happy dog.

For those who have not the foggiest notion of what I am talking about, Sable is a Red Siberian Husky about ten years old, vigorous and healthy except that she has cancer in one leg. It’s inoperable although there’s a chance that amputating her right front leg will get her another year. We have decided she’d be miserable as a cripple, so we are essentially doing nothing; so long as she is happy and not in pain all is well. When she’s no longer happy about living we have a decision to make. Frankly I thought that would have happened by now, but in fact she seems no worse now than she did in December. She limps a little and is just a little less active – she no longer plays werewolf on our walks – but she’s curious, happy, and likes people particularly children, and everyone knows her.

Tuesday the neighbor house next door was tented for termites and some of the tentage came into our back yard, where Sable sleeps and relieves herself. Since she’s a very active, curious and smart dog it would not be wise to let her loose with a strange object in the yard that might contain lethal gas, so we had to keep her in the house Tuesday and Wednesday nights, taking her for short walks like any other city dweller with a big dog. She didn’t like that at all. She knows us enough to be able to work the system, which she did at every opportunity, the goal in mind being to get another treat. She keeps score by the number of treats she can talk us out of. Huskies are great dogs, but they are very intelligent, and they have a strong sense of entitlement. They are very loyal but they tend to be cooperative rather than obedient.

Anyway Thursday morning the tentage was removed and Sable was able to go back to a normal routine. She also spent more time outside than usual, enjoying her post down by the gate where she watches the kids going to school.

Thursday Niven picked me up in the morning and we drove down to UC Irvine for a day long academic session on science fiction in California with particular emphasis on the best-selling novel Oath of Fealty http://www.amazon.com/Oath-of-Fealty-ebook/dp/B004LRPQQ6/ref=tmm_kin_title_0 by Niven and Pournelle. It turns out that while the arcology Todos Santos which was the scene of our story doesn’t exist, something a lot like it exists at UC Irvine – a closed community of workers and intellectuals, with limited interaction with the outside world, and some sense of antagonism toward outsiders – the standard town and gown writ large because Irvine, like the original plan Walt Disney had for EPCOT, is pretty well closed to residence by people not part of the university in some way.

The conference was really interesting, and we’ll have a larger report another time. They brought in Steve Barnes from Atlanta, and scholars like Sheryl Vint from UC Riverside. More details here http://file770.com/?tag=jerry-pournelle. It all went well, the discussion was interesting, and the scholars have drawn more out of the book than I thought they would. They are pretty well right on what we had intended. And many of trends forecast for America in our novel are happening: see Murray’s Coming Apart. http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/0307453421 We also discussed The Burning City, another novel that takes place in California, but 14,000 years ago before all the magic went away.

I had a great time, but that used up the day and evening, and today was devoured by taxes as will be tomorrow. Sunday I will be out at the paperback book fair http://www.la-vintage-paperback-show.com/ I generally go to dinner with old friends after that. It may be a bit sparse around here for a week.

North Korea

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

You were concerned that no one seemed to be taking the DPRK’s threats very seriously. One group of people are , and that is the Chinese.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/05/china-refuses-north-korea-request-for-envoy/

Looks to me as if China wants a buffer state between it and South Korea. China neither wants war with the United States nor does it want its sphere of influence reduced. Thus the Chinese are moving armored columns to the border. If regime change is to be effected in North Korea because the ruler is mad, it will be they who replace him with another ostensibly Communist ruler. Thus the current status quo will be preserved.

I strongly doubt it will happen. I would be very surprised if their new leader didn’t change his tack to only the normal bluster of a Stalinist state. Of course, if the Chinese were to depose him and replace the current DPRK with their own brand of communism-in-name-only, it might be the next best thing to unification. A prosperous DPRK could be a source of cheap labor for China, wouldn’t export WMDs, and would be less likely to embroil China in war.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I have a lot of similar information on this. China, I am told, is quite concerned with the legalities of the state of war that North Korea has pronounced. So far there appears to be no trend toward evacuation of Seoul although some large corporations have sent their top executives to more southern cities. Some sources are saying that the state of war is a mistranslation; others insist that it is not. North Korea’s chief of state is not always perfectly understood. China would be reluctant to go in and effect a change, but China is in no condition to care for a million refugees. Chinese on the Chinese side of the North Korean border are said to despise Koreans, and Koreans seen in the streets are denounced to the authorities. China doesn’t want a US ally on their border, but they also don’t want the responsibility for North Korea. Rehabilitating the DPRK will be an economic task of the magnitude of rehabilitating East Germany; it’s within the capability of South Korea but it will not at all be easy.

As to projections of war, North Korean artillery is mostly recycled former Soviet artillery, old but still usable; the age and state of the ammunition isn’t really known. North Korean gunners have not had many live fire exercises because of economic restrictions. The old maxim in the field artillery was that it takes two fire missions to make a gunner. As Clausewitz observed, war is very simple but the simplest things are very difficult. Those not experienced have difficulty comprehending what Clausewitz called friction. The border guns pose a threat to Seoul and South Korea.

It’s a pity we don’t have battleships. A couple those over the horizon could have a very good effect in an artillery duel.

Australian Sky News is reporting troops movements. http://www.news.com.au/world-news/intercepted-north-korean-military-communications-reveal-plan-to-launch-missile/story-fndir2ev-1226612936097 We live in interesting times.