Category Archives: View

View 682 Monday July 4, 2011

Happy Birthday, America!

• Subject Heading Problem
• The Declaration and the Fate of the Signers

Since I am on the road and doing this in the new WordPress system, I won’t attempt to put in my fireworks and waving flags and other gifs images. I hope to master that sort of thing shortly. I also hope that we can get past the craziness in formatting that caused bookmarked paragraphs to change fonts and colors.

A Subject Problem

This is mostly a test to see if my new system for bookmarks works, or if it turns ugly again. If it works that’s fine. If not, we’ll find something that does. I tend to use a good number of internal links in my work, and the new WordPress system doesn’t seem well set up for it. I am still striving for the old system of week’s mail in chronological order from Monday to Sunday, with bookmarks to the days, and also bookmarks to the important topics or to comments. I have used that system for a long time and I am used to it, but WordPress wasn’t really designed for that: we’ll see. This is still very much a work in progress. Rick Hellewell has done miracles in catching glitches and fixing things, and it’s evolving nicely. We’ll get there.

I really would like this to be about as close to the old Chaos Manor as I can. Incidentally, those to get to the old pages will find that links between there and here don’t work very well or often not at all. I do not know how to revise those links back on pages you find with Google but I’ll figure it out and fix them. If you get here you are fine. Some people try to Google me and end up lost in the old web site because a lot of the old site links don’t lead here. I will try to put a big CURRENT VIEW and CURRENT MAIL button prominently in the old places you are likely to end up with Google. That may take a few days. But we are getting there.

Alas, I see that the problem persists: if I insert a bookmark, then everything from there to the next book mark seems to change colors when you mouse over it. I expect to get this fixed. At least it is not bright red. I do wish WordPress were a bit more usable. It seems to hate bookmarks and multiple topics per post – while I don’t really like the notion of a separate post for each and every thought. Spoils the notion of a day book. We will get this fixed. Vincero…

Fourth of July

I generally try to write some kind of civic essay for the Fourth of July in part because the Framers asked us to: this is The National Holiday par excellance, the day that Christians and Jews, Catholics and Protestants and Quakers and freethinkers and the various brands of Unitarians and Universalists, Deists like Jefferson and Franklin, Masons like Washington, atheists like Tom Paine could all celebrate as an important day in history. A new age began with the adoption of the Declaration.

Declaration of Independence

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/print_friendly.html?page=declaration_transcript_content.html&title=NARA%20%7C%20The%20Declaration%20of%20Independence%3A%20A%20Transcription

This should be required reading for every citizen, every year.

Rose Krueger

And I certainly agree. You may also be interested in The Fate of the Signers.

In Studio City we have a children’s Fourth of July parade, starting down the block and across the street from The Science Guy’s house. Ed Begley Jr. generally comes as do some of the other Studio City Hollywood Industry people, but it’s strictly local, and I have never seen any kind of news camera crew. It’s just a patriotic parade, mostly for the kids. Sable loves going to it since there are all those kids with various kinds of food…

Now back to fighting some other problems. Happy Fourth of July, and Happy Birthday America!

View 681 Sunday July 3, 2011-1

• eBooks are a’comin
• Making contact with Eric
• High and low speed
• A need for thumbnails?
• Needed: A National Debate on the Legions

I still have not quite figured out how to get my gifs to work in the new WordPress Chaos Manor. I usually have fireworks, (well, OK, they are a bit old and perhaps hokey) and waving flags and the like for the Fourth. I probably won’t manage that tomorrow. However, those who miss them can go to last year’s Fourth http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q2/view629.html#Sunday where there will not only be fireworks but a short piece by Isaac Asimov on the meaning of the Star Spangled Banner with all four – four, not three – verses. And I will work on getting my little decorations to work. Rick Hellewell, who has been managing this transition for me with yeoman’s work and great patience, says he has thought of ways to do it. I will pore over that when I get caught up. Meanwhile, largely due to the near infinite patience of Eric Pobirs, we have got the Kindle edition of Fallen Angels out to Amazon. It’s not quite available yet, but it will be in a day or so. For those looking for a Kindle book to read I can recommend A Step Farther Out, and more and more of my books, both mine and in collaboration with Larry Niven, are coming to Kindle. Note that many of those books have been available in an eBook format for years, some even free, (both pirated and perfectly legal edition from Baen) but the early eBooks weren’t formatted well and don’t automatically transfer to Kindle. The new ones look a lot better. It has taken Eric a lot of work and experimentation to discover just what is going on, and how early eBook formats inserted strange codes and characters that affect the display. With great patience he has overcome most of that. When he’s finished with a book it looks great.

I will make this announcement again, but if you need a book properly formatted for Kindle and other eBook formats, I suggest you make contact with eric at Pobirs.com. He can start with a printed copy to be scanned, or an existing eBook that looks bad, or a word processing document. He’s at present doing most of Niven’s older books as well as working on mine. And since he’s a science fiction reader – addict might be a closer description – he understands the stories so he can catch things machines can’t.

The new Kindle and other eBook editions also have Afterword appreciations. I did a new Introduction to the latest edition of Step Farther Out. Fallen Angels has a brand new Afterword from Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn, on how we came to write this, how Mike Flynn got aboard, and an appreciation of fandom. Watch for it.

= = = = = = = =

It’s official. Amazon has sent a formal notice to all Amazon Associates in California terminating the contract arrangements whereby Associates get a small percentage of the sale price if someone buys a book by using a link provided by the associate. It’s not a lot of money, but it does add up: I was getting about $2,000 a year from the program, which at my age and energy level is pretty respectable. This means I am going to have to grind a bit harder, which means reminding you a bit more often that it would be a great idea to subscribe. Since the last thing I need is for visits to this site to be a painful experience, I’ll try to keep the appeals down to a non-irritating level. Incidentally, I will continue to put the associates link into recommendations or references here: this isn’t entirely cut and dried. I am also wondering if I can arrange for Amazon to send payments to my New York literary agent rather than directly to my bank account. That would cost me the agency fee, but that’s better than costing all of it. I don’t know how to do that, though, nor do I know anyone at Amazon I should suggest it to. I had lunch with Bezos and Bill Gates more than once back in the BYTE heyday, but that was a while ago, and I never did get to know anyone in the Amazon staff. Ah, well. I don’t suppose it would work anyway? That might be seen as some kind of evasion? Yet I don’t know how. Amazon’s position is that they are terminating all business connections with California, so that California has no hook to use to enforce sales taxes against Amazon, there being some federal laws on taxing Internet commerce. California gets around that by saying that Amazon does business in California through the Associates program. At this point I ought to go digging deeper, but just at the moment I am at the bottom of a dialup well, and surfing the Internet is painful.

This was of course part of the California budget balanced by showing line items receipts from the Easter Bunny. At least they may as well have been: the receipt estimates which made the budget balance seem based on thin air. The amount the Governor thinks he will get from Amazon is in fact less than what he will lose from the termination of the Associates program. He knows this by now, but I don’t think that matters.

= = =

For those wondering, I will be doing a full article on Internet Access when there is no Wi-Fi or cable modem or other high speed access available. The AT&T direct telephone box – a small thing USB thing a bit larger than a large thumb drive – works and works quite well; but it also costs $50/gigabyte, and I have in three days used more than 400 megabytes. AT&T thoughtfully counts that for you. Some of that was spam, some is trading eBook copies back and forth as they are upgraded and reformatted, but much of it is just leakage. There are web sites that periodically update themselves. Adobe and Firefox keep sending out updates. Some spam is enormous. It’s astonishing how this stuff eats up bandwidth. More on that another time, but what I have been doing is connecting the AT&T thumber when I need to do browsing and otherwise being connected by dialup. Dialup works, if you are patient, but alas the new WordPress format here takes a good deal longer to download than the old FrontPage site did – and I haven’t been inserting any pictures at all. From my mail I would estimate that I have fewer than a hundred readers who still use dialup with any frequency – I could be off on that, it’s a guess – but I am not writing them off. The old FrontPage editor used to count the page size and at the bottom it would tell me how many seconds it estimated that the page would take to download at 56K. (That tells you a bit about how old FrontPage is…). WordPress doesn’t do that. It assumes you’re Connected. But as I say I have not forgotten the dialup users.

The old FrontPage did an automatic thumbnail of a picture and put that in the text; it also inserted an automatic link to the actual picture which was stored elsewhere. Those who clicked on the thumbnail got the picture; those on slow systems didn’t have to. I wish there were some simple way to do that with WordPress and I’ll keep looking for a method; that way we can have a separate Category for Images and Pictures, and I can put stuff in there, with a thumbnail and link in View or Mail. We’re still developing this place, and suggestions are still welcome. I am not publishing a lot of the commentary on the site because we keep developing; but I read it all.

= = = = = =

National Debate on the Legions

It is time for a national debate on the military: how big do we need it? What are our military objectives and goals? Do we go abroad seeking monsters to slay, or are we the friends of liberty everywhere but guardians only of our own? If guardians of our own, what are the treats we must guard against? Who are our potential enemies and how stable are they? Where abroad do our national interests lie?

These are not trivial questions. They are not politically easy, either, since the needs of the services are different. It is much easier to build a large Army from cadre than greatly to expand a professional Navy. (The Caine Mutiny had some revelations about that.) The Air Force has to decide just what its role is now that SAC no longer exists, and we are not faced with 26,000 launchable nuclear warheads. The Army can’t be reduced simply to cadre. What is the proper size and role of the Marine Corps? These are not just political questions although they will be answered by politicians.

One problem is that we don’t have many who can debate these questions. As Kagan said long ago in his comments on the Peloponnesian War, if you seek peace you must keep that peace. Or as Appius Claudius put it, if you would have peace, be thou then prepared for war. Of course most of those who will be debating these matters will not have heard of Appius Claudius, or Plutarch, or Thucydides, and if they vaguely remember that people with those names existed they will not have read about them, much less have read them. There was a time when we could assume some minimum familiarity with the History of Western Civilization among all “educated” people, which is to say, all college graduates and most high school graduates. Now education costs a great deal more than it did back then, but few know as much as was routinely known by the class dullard in a decent university. We expected our Senators to be familiar with keeping the peace, and what a Pyrrhic victory was. Indeed we expected anyone who put himself up as a candidate for Congress to have some familiarity with the basic documents and ideas in the development of Western Civilization. Now – well, not so much, despite the enormous costs of our education systems.

And yet: we can’t afford what we are doing. We can’t afford to take a meat axe to the Legions, either. If we are to remain a Republic we must discuss these issues, which means that the debates must start, and those who do know some history will have to spoon feed it to the many who don’t – and worse, to those who have been persuaded that they know things they do not know. We have far too many who seem to have majored in self-esteem while in fact learning little that is estimable.

= = = = =

View 681 Saturday July 2, 2011 – 2

It was a bizarre story from the beginning. Dominic Strauss-Kahn, CEO of the International Monetary Fund and presumptive Socialist candidate for President of France, was arrested with fanfare, perp walk, and press conference by New York authorities. The District Attorney is the son of Cyrus Vance, Kennedy’s Secretary of the Army and Carter’s Secretary of State, and it was his press conference. The charge was that DSK had forcibly raped a hotel maid, supposedly after he came out of the shower to discover her presence in the $2,000 a night suite; overcome with lust, he forced her to have sex with him. Then he tried to flee the country. Incidentally, the DA is running for Mayor.

DSK is pretty well known as a womanizer, but he is also very rich, and New York is a city with no shortage of models, escorts, and call girls of various degrees of elegance. One suspects that for less than the cost of the suite DSK could have been met as he emerged from the shower by a far more attractive young lady than a Guinean single mother working as a hotel maid. The French reaction from a Socialist leader:

To tell the truth, everybody knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a libertine; what distinguishes him from plenty of others is his propensity not to hide it. In Puritan American, impregnated with rigorous Protestantism, they tolerate infinitely better the sins of money than the pleasures of the flesh. It would be easy to trap a personality so unresistant to feminine attractions as D.S.K. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/05/the-dsk-affair.html

It’s a reasonable reaction, and one that ought to have occurred to Cyrus Vance. If ever there was a situation made to order for a detective story, this was it: wealthy man, bizarre crime, victim with a very unusual story; no witnesses and little evidence other than the story of the victim; but apparently the temptation to have a say in French politics was too much for Mr. Vance, thus the perp walk and press conference before any real examination of the credibility of the accuser.

Now, it comes out, there may have been a few flaws in the case. The victim turns out to have made up stories before, to have asked at least one shady character how she could make money out of this, and to have received a rather large sum of money from some mysterious friends: exactly the elements one expects to find in a mystery story. I suspect we will see a Castle episode about this sometime in future. It ought to play well. Cyrus Vance Senior was often accused of credulity in dealing with the Russians. Apparently it runs in the family.

Of course this proclivity to believe the worst about anyone of stature is a rampant part of the modern age. For decades we have had best selling mystery novels in which the major plot element is that the most venerable and respected person in the story is inevitably the villain. We have seen episode after episode of Law and Order in which murders are never committed by street urchins or hoodlums: it’s always by a Park Avenue physician, or a stock broker, or the socially prominent wife of a wealthy professional, or – well, you get the idea. Prior to those, Ross MacDonald made a career of villainizing the prominent members of Santa Barbara county. And, of course, there had to be the fetish of giving greater weight to the (improbable) story told by an illegal immigrant hotel maid than to that told by a high ranking member of the international ruling class. The irony is that DSK is a prominent Socialist and liberal intellectual. I am sure that Mr. Vance would have been much happier had the supposed rapist been, say, Sarah Palin’s husband, or Rush Limbaugh rather than DSK; but when you’re running for Mayor against a fortune, you take what you can get for publicity.

We still don’t know precisely what happened in that hotel suite, but there was a time when everyone automatically would have suspected: maid sees opportunity, offers sexual favors to prominent and very wealthy man, continues to clean the room afterwards, and contemplates how she can make a bit of money out of the deal. That may not have been what happened, but most of my generation would have suspected it from the beginning. DSK, after all, could have afforded the most expensive call girl in Manhattan, and the hotel will not lack people who can tell him how to make the arrangement in case he didn’t know. “Go take your shower, monsieur, and when you emerge someone will be waiting…”

Ah well. Perhaps Cyrus Vance, Junior, doesn’t read detective stories.

And we have not heard the last of this one.

View 681 Saturday, July 2, 2011 – 1

I’ve been catching up all day. I’ve been working on fiction, including getting some older books ready for Kindle publication, but also on the new novella with Niven and Barnes. This takes place in the Legacy of Heorot world, and is set in the time between that first book and Beowulf’s Children. (The Kindle version of Beowulf’s Children is in preparation.) We are calling this a novella but it will be about 50,000 words, which was a novel when I got into this racket.

There’s a ton of stuff to write about, but it’s late.

Thought experiment: in most cities now the average expenditure per child in school is $10,000. Now High Schools may have different requirements, but in my time, grade school was 2 grades to the room, about 20-25 students to the grade, and a teacher with a 2 year Normal school degree. Imagine now that we take a four-year degreed teacher, give her 25 students, and $200,000. She is free to do with the money as she sees fit, but for every student who doesn’t get a passing grade (we’ll quibble about how we go about determining that another time) she gets docked $8,000, and for every student who gets outstanding grades she gets a $10,000 bonus. Again we can quibble about how all this is determined, but assume it’s meaningful and real, not just a way to stroke the unions. She’s free to teach anywhere she wants; we can be sure that capitalism will take care of offering classrooms for rent with desks and chalkboards and all the expected accoutrements. She can hire assistants as she likes. She can buy or rent computers, and Internet connections. In other words, she is free to try what she likes and keep the profits, so long as the kids learn, and she can go for the bonuses.

Do you think this would be an improvement over what we are doing now?

It’s late. Good night.