If I had a keyboard; journalism; and voodoo

View 718 Sunday, March 25, 2012

I spent most of the day doing chores, then out to the annual Paperback fair where Niven and I signed books until our hands were tired. After which came what has become an annual dinner with Niven and me and Tim Powers and John DeChancie and whomever else we find as congenial company. Which got me home to more errands.

As I start to get back up to speed – I’ll be resuming the Chaos Manor Reviews columns shortly – I find that much of Chaos Manor is, if not obsolete, way behind the times. One thing that needs replacing are my main keyboards. Most of my keyboards, such as the Ortek MCK142 Programmable, are getting really old. The Ortek still works, and I love it –it’s got a clicky feel, and it just works except that I have used it for so long that the legends are gone from the keys – but it’s slowly wearing out. It’s time to replace it, but when I went looking I found it had been discontinued years ago.

Then I went looking for keyboard reviews, and I kept finding references to my own. Apparently nobody is writing the kind of informed opinion reviews I used to write, so it’s time for me to start doing them again. One place to start it keyboards. I Googled Keyboard Reviews and got a lot of references but they all turned out to be pretty tame, no real descriptions, and not much about the touch and feel, meaning that it’s time for me to go scouting again. I want a keyboard that will take a lot of pounding, and has a feel to it so that when you hit a key you know you have done it. It feels like it worked. I suppose that’s in part due to old habits – in the old days, computers might be so slow that I would be looking at the screen but what came up on it would be several letters or even a couple of words behind what I was typing. In these days of lots of memory and multiple processors that doesn’t happen much anymore, but I still like to have a definite feel to my keyboards.

I’ve been happy enough with Microsoft Keyboards for a while, but for my communications machine I like to have a programmable keyboard so I can set it up to send some standard comments and messages. Of course I could do that with macros (well, depending on what program I am using, and the latest Word is nowhere near as macro friendly as the old versions I grew up with), but I rather like the Ortek with its rows of PF(Programmable Function keys above the regular function keys. But Ortek doesn’t make them any longer, and when I went looking for keyboard reviews I didn’t find any that I was much happy with. Next move, I suppose, is to head out to Fry’s and see what they have in stock, since I missed CES this year.

And, we have a Beta copy of Windows 8 operating, and it looks interesting. It seems to be set up for people who use touchpads rather than mice, and will understand gestures, but you don’t gesture with a mouse. That’s all intriguing. So I went looking for descriptions and reviews of mushpad keyboards, and found not very much.

I’d have thought someone would have rushed in to fill the hole I left when I got later and later with my reviews and columns, but if so I haven’t found him. Or her. Or it. And I’m getting my energy back finally, so…

Anyway, we’ll be building some new stuff and updating software here at Chaos Manor and sort of generally catching up; I find that a lot has happened since I stopped paying so much attention to things. All that will be in the column which I’ll resume Real Soon Now if my days don’t continue to be eaten by locusts. And of course there’s my taxes, and I have to prepare for the big Air Force Space Command seminar/conference I’m supposed to be part of in a week. And it’s raining in Los Angeles.

I sure can type faster on this Ortek than on most other keyboards including the Microsoft comfort curve boards. I like the Microsoft, but I wish they had a clickier feel; I just don’t type as fast on them as I do on this wonderful old Ortek. So now I have to go find something to replace it. Preferably a line of keyboards with the right clicky feel so I can put them on all the machines I’ll be using. Since the keyboards I have are using the old keyboard port connectors rather than USB you can see they’re old, and anyway this will all be in the upcoming column.

Spending the day signing books doesn’t get you very well informed, but I did have to drive out there and back, and the radio was buzzing with stories about the Florida shooting. I wondered about it when it happened: when the story first broke it was clear we didn’t know enough to have any right to a conclusion. I still don’t think we do. It’s pretty clear that Zimmerman was chasing the seventeen year old young man, and the youngster tried to get away from him. The police told Zimmerman that “we don’t need you to pursue him” but I have not heard any stronger command from the 911 operator than that. Apparently – it seems fairly probable – the pursuit continued until at some point the young man ceased trying to get away – whatever that means – and a confrontation took place. At which point the stories go out in all directions. There was some kind of fight, someone cried for help, and Zimmerman fired at least one shot. And the police, after investigation, did not charge Zimmerman.

Now there will be a special prosecutor, which is ominous – that is, a special prosecutor implies there is something to prosecute, and the Iron Law of Bureaucracy can easily creep into the situation. If there is no crime there is nothing to prosecute and the special prosecutor no longer has a mission. We have seen at the Federal level that once there’s a special prosecutor the odds go way up that things will continue until someone pleads guilty to something. I don’t know how such things work in Florida – I don’t think I have read more than one crime procedural novel taking place in Florida – and it may be that special prosecutors are not so special there, but in most places they are easier to set up than to call off.

We’ll see. It’s not really my business. It’s not really the business of the President of the United States, either. I doubt he knows much more for certain than I do, and I sure don’t feel I have any right to an opinion on the subject. It seems certain that Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin. It’s nearly certain that Zimmerman was far more zealous than we expect – or more us want – a neighborhood watch captain to be. ; and everything else gets cloudy. I don’t really expect the media scrutiny to make it much clearer. The old fashioned reporter seems to have vanished, and those who took over don’t seem to have the same motives that the Fourth Estate.

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. – Oscar Wilde

Those interested in the climate debate should find http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/23/warm_period_little_ice_age_global/print.html fascinating.

A proper temperature record for Antarctica is particularly interesting, as it illuminates one of the main debates in global-warming/climate-change: namely, were the so-called Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age merely regional, or were they global events? The medieval warmup experienced by northern Europeans from say 900AD to 1250AD seems to have been at least as hot as anything seen in the industrial era. If it was worldwide in extent that would strongly suggest that global warming may just be something that happens from time to time, not something caused by miniscule concentrations of CO₂ (the atmosphere is 0.04 per cent CO₂ right now; this figure might climb to 0.07 per cent in the medium term).

The oft-mentioned "scientific consensus", based in large part on the work of famous climate-alarmist scientists Michael Mann and Phil Jones and reflected in the statements [1] of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says that isn’t true. The IPCC consensus is that the medieval warming – and the "Little Ice Age" which followed it – only happened in Europe and maybe some other northern areas. They were local events only, and globally the world was cooler than it is now. The temperature increase seen in the latter half of the 20th century is a new thing caused by humanity’s carbon emissions.

Lu and his colleagues’ new work, however, indicates that in fact the medieval warm period and little ice age were both felt right down to Antarctica.

We know that it was warmer in Greenland, France, Scotland, Scandinavia, and China. Well, by “know” I mean that it is very easily inferred from records like growing seasons, crop yields, dates of first frost and of ice breakup in streams, and the like. This extends the inferential data to the Southern Hemisphere. It is unlikely that the Medieval Warm was caused by increases in CO2 levels, and even if it were, that the CO2 came from human activities…

The European Union According to Hayek by Alberto Mingardi is well worth your attention. It is the conceit of the voodoo sciences that we understand the world in some scientific way, and that applies to economics and economic systems. Hayek and the Austrians argue that we don’t. The regulators are certain they do. The results are usually quite horrid.

Friedrich August Hayek, who passed away 20 years ago this week, was one of the foremost social scientists of the last century. A Nobel laureate in economics, Hayek is often associated with his critique of socialist systems. There is, in society, a "knowledge problem": Economic life requires the coordination of individual planning. The relevant knowledge for economic planning is dispersed rather than concentrated in society. If this makes coordination challenging enough in a market system, it also makes coordination a virtual impossibility under central planning: The planner can never secure and process all the necessary information to provide detailed guidance to any given development in society.

Even though this argument was originally deployed against hard-core socialism, it works pretty well against the soft-core version widely adopted by European democracies. Centralized welfare systems are necessarily run by a bureaucratic leadership. The supposed technical superiority of such an organization is simply not enough to master the nuances of a complex society.

And it’s late. Good night.