Coming up for air

View 805 Thursday, January 09, 2014

I’m just back from a LASFS meeting. It was probably a mistake to go. I woke up believing I was getting over whatever has laid me low for the week, but I woke up at 1100, and by 1500 I wasn’t so sure. Niven and I were going to do a working dinner, but I didn’t quite feel up to that, and now I’m back and ready for med.

This stuff is pretty bad. I’ve had worse, and I am sure all the vitamins and stuff I take have helped keep me out of the great miseries some people have had, but I sure don‘t have much energy or concentration. I hope to be back on track next week. Apologies.

This is typical of mail I have been getting. My thanks to all.

Dear Doctor Pournelle,

Congratulations on your new hearing aids. When I got mine, the experience was similar to what you describe. When I walked out of the audiologist’s office I was astounded by the sheer plentitude of sounds-distant car alarms, bird calls, the rustling of my clothes. The latter sound took me about a week to get used to. But now I know why they put cymbals on drum sets. Before the aids, they merely "clicked." The piccolo also seems much less pointless now.

Enjoy!

Jeff

And in fact it pretty well describes what I am going through. I hear things that I must have heard at some point earlier in my life because I recognize them for what they are, but they still take me by surprise. My stairs creak a bit. I have never known that before.

Please tell people in your column that the longer they wait to have hearing aids can change how effective they are. Once you lose your hearing some of it cannot be brought back (maybe in future). I could not get my WW2 artillery friends to ever go get aids until it was too late. Enjoy your work. Thanks for your effort.

I will. I will also point out that the VA seems eager to help veterans whose hearing has been affected by even basic training rifle range practice, which never required hearing protection when I was in service.

Greetings, Dr. Pournelle,

I’m glad you’re enjoying your Costco hearing aids; my father had much the same experience as you are describing, and I expect that at some point I will get something similar as well.

Your "Man Mountain Molehill" correspondent states a real whopper when he says "For example, a Pentium has always been roughly 1" square since the original ca. 1990.". In fact, Intel’s consumer processors (excluding a few of the crazier Xeons-in-consumer-clothing Core i7s) have always been significantly smaller than that in die size; 1" square equates to ~645 mm^2, and the largest of Intel’s consumer processors (the original 60 & 66MHz Pentiums, on an

800nm/0.8 micron process) are less than half that size (294 mm^2), with most of the subsequent processors significantly smaller. A typical Core i5 processor, which includes graphics functionality as well as the CPU, is 177 mm^2.

I more complete list of models and their die sizes and power consumption can be seen here:

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=337&pgno=8

Charles

The bottom line remains: computers are getting more and more effective at doing the kinds of jobs that do not require high intelligence to do. And our schools are not teaching many of their graduates to do anything that anyone would pay you money to do. The cost of school is outrageous although you don’t see it because it is paid by the state not the local taxpayers. Just as the local taxpayers don’t control the schools. At the university level the math is inexorable: say that having a degree from Waybelow Normal will earn you on average $2,000 a year more than you would make without the degree. You graduate with a $50,000 debt. How long will it take to be even steven on that?

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

I occasionally think about our current political mess in America. Sometimes I think Apophis could solve all of our problems in 2029 or 2036. I am responsible for my part of the current mess since I started voting in 1976 without taking a critical thinking class. I blindly followed my dads directions to vote. It took many years, but I started voting for the other party after my eyes were opened. Later still I have come to the conclusion that both halves of the "incumbent party" are just like the guy in the Sneetches story by Dr. Seuss. We walk from party to party paying our two dollars to get a star tattooed on our bellies and later paying our five dollars to get it removed. I am ashamed to say it took this long to come to this level of knowledge or perhaps disappointment in government. There seems to be many more people who are willing to trade individual freedom for material stuff and can’t see that only two parties is not enough – especially when they are apparently working together. There are other parties and I do look at them from time to time.

I’m sure you watched "The Wild Bunch" by Sam Peckinpah. A man could walk into a bank with a note and a gun and rob the bank teller and probably live to tell about it. The movie was set in 1913 and before that time robbing banks probably worked well. Bank robbery is very irresponsible. Probably as irresponsible as telling King George to go chase himself. Depending who is writing history bank robbery and insurrection could be scorned or praised. Technology was on the side of the bank robber and the patriot. Firepower and a fast horse could win the day for the bank robber. Today a gun and a note gets your face on national TV and the bank is very happy to give you a bag of money containing a dye pack and a GPS.

Keeping in mind a patriot is defined by the winners who write history, I do have to ask the following question: what happens when a CDC doctor discovers an odd benign virus in blood samples from across the United States that upon further analysis is determined to be artificial and contains a message that demands individual freedom to be redeposited into our Constitution and a list of politicians to be retired – real retirement not the Bladerunner kind? I wonder if such a world is ahead of us? Our Founding Fathers took matters into their own hands, but weapons have gone from local to nearly global in reach.

I have realized that every pound of freedom comes with a ton of responsibility, and that every ounce of "Free Ice Cream" from government costs a ton of freedom. Do we need to reform ourselves before we can reform government? I am asking if science is going to get us out of our current mess and will the majority of the Eoli never understand?

Thank you,

-Bruce

Thanks. And good night. I’ll be back with my brain turned on Real Soon Now.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.