Chaos Manor – Jerry Pournelle – Page 140 – the original blog of Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor

Population, Programming Languages, Global Warming, Planet Defense, and other matters of gravity.

By Jerry Pournelle | May 11, 2014 - 11:30 pm | Updated: May 12, 2014 - 1:13 am | Mail

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Mail 824 Sunday, May 11, 2014

You were ahead of your time, Jerry –

I recall that you once backed an idea for sending water back up into the mountains.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/water-flows-uphill-maybe-california-drought

Of course, they’re not using recycled water, and it can’t work in both directions at the same time except incidentally. It is still subject to state approval, so they may manage to kill the idea yet.

–Gary P

It has long been clear to me that LA needs to reprocess its sewage and runoff water – it does that very well now – and pump it up into the Angeles Crest to runs down refilling the water table as it goes.

: Useless population

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

I’m not convinced that you have the right of the argument when you say that half the population will inevitably be economically useless. Perhaps there will be sufficient government incentives and disincentives to encourage indolence in half the population, but that’s not the same thing. As a thought experiment, think about the U.S. agricultural sector that you use as an example of the phenomenon.

It’s true that farm labor is a very small fraction of what it was at the beginning of the 20th century. But that reduction is a result of increased productivity through the employment of many technologies, from tractors to vacuum-packed breakfast cereal. Perhaps it would be more reasonable to add back in the employment at firms ranging from John Deere, to General Mills, to Frigidaire, to Gunderson rail cars and manufacturers of shipping containers, to financiers who lubricate the process of putting the capital investment in place. All of a sudden, there’s a lot more people employed in bringing you your Wheaties and orange juice.

Now, it’s true that those firms don’t solely service the agricultural sector—their profits are driven in large part by the rest of the industrial (and other) sectors. That is to say, the productivity of today’s agricultural sector is largely a by-product of the industrial sector. It seems to me that it’s not so much of a reach to say that productivity increases in the manufacturing sector will continue to be driven by innovations (and employment) in the technology sector, biotech sector, transportation, energy, etc. Because it takes time and capital to automate any task, and it always seems that tasks pop up faster than we can get together the time and capital, it seems to me that there will be jobs aplenty for those with a good work ethic and enough intelligence to either mop a floor or to tidy a room in preparation for the floor-mopping robot.

Think of it another way—at one time, one-third of the population was employed in feeding the other two-thirds. Later on, 1/3 was employed providing rail transportation to the other 2/3. Later on, (if memory serves) 1/3 was employed building cars, car parts, or roads for the other 2/3. Perhaps someday 1/3 will be employed capturing energy for the other 2/3.

It’s true that my optimistic take pre-supposes an educational system that equips all but the developmentally disabled with a good work ethic and the ability to do basic arithmetic and to read and comprehend instructions. But that gets back to the government incentives I mentioned. (As an aside, at one time I contracted with a foundation that employed the developmentally disabled to do part-kits for a product, so I don’t think even that is a real disqualification.)

The one fly in the ointment that I see is something that I left out of my “1/3” progression. The employment picture has gotten muddier lately, but out of the non-agriculture, non goods-producing population, one-third is employed either by government or by health and social services (which is difficult to separate from government in the official statistics). Perhaps this is an aberration, and not a harbinger, but I think it’s the source of much of our current ennui.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm <http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm>

Neil

The key to your statement is “good work ethics.” Given present trends, I’d say we were moving more to “sensitivity to entitlements”. I am not sure where good work ethics will be learned. I suspect that given incentives, freedom, and decent work ethics we would have a brilliant renaissance, but I fear that is more a hope than a prediction.

Understand that my definition of useless is an economic term, not a moral judgment. Those who produce less than they consume over their lifetimes generally have contributed little to the civilization. Of course ‘contribute’ is subject to discussion. I sing for my supper, but I don’t produce very much in the usual sense.

ADA

Hi Jerry

You wrote that “The Department of Defense tried to get into the act with its invention of ADA but like all projects operated by committees, it grew and added features and never quite got there.”

ADA itself may not be much used but a lot of it lives on in Oracle’s PL/SQL language: http://www.dba-oracle.com/concepts/programming_pl_sql.htm

“Oracle PL/SQL was based on the ADA programming language which was developed by the Department of Defense to be used on mission critical systems. Although not a ‘sexy’ language like Java or C, ADA is still being develop and used for applications such as aircraft control systems. ADA is a highly structured, strongly typed programming language that uses natural language constructs to make it easy to understand. The PL/SQL language inherited these attributes making PL/SQL easier to read and maintain than more cryptic languages such as C.”

As a PL/SQL Software Engineer myself over the last few years I have written tens of thousands of lines of PL/SQL and I can confirm that it is widely used around the world, by most of the organizations that use Oracle databases, and is a living language that is actively updated by Oracle with new features released most years.

Having, in my time worked with Assembly language, COBOL, C, Forth, PL/SQL and other languages, in my opinion PL/SQL is one of the better development languages. Unfortunately because it’s only supplied as part of Oracle’s database offering, with very little support for using it for anything other than building and executing SQL queries it’s never going to be the language of choice for general software development.

Best wishes

Paul Dove

I was very hopeful about ADA and hoped that it would become wildly popular, but I fear the committee nature of its design, no matter how well meant, doomed it.

Compilers for number crunching

Hi Jerry.

Coincidentally, I stumbled across this article today just after the latest round of discussions on compilers got started on Chaos Manor. It focuses on FORTRAN and some up-and-coming computer languages:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computings-future-can-any-coding-language-top-a-1950s-behemoth/

From personal experience, FORTRAN is still the dominant language in both oceanography/atmospheric science and astrophysics…

Cheers,

Mike Casey

When I was keynote speaker to the Grand Challenges in Supercomputing Conference some decades ago, I took the opportunity to question people who used supercomputers on just what they did. I generally got the answer, “I write 120,000 lines of FORTRAN and try not to go mad.” Apparently that’s still a fair description of what some Supercomputer people do to this day.

FORTRAN can be a confusing language. It will compile nonsense including type changes and confusing data with program instructions, and allows a number of coding tricks that save lines of code and memory at the expense of understanding, but there are also programs like RATFOR (RATional FORtran) and its descendants and improvements: these are precompilers that enforce strong data typing and a degree of structuring forcing the programmer to think about the logic of the program before handing the whole mass to the compiler. I have written some FORTRAN programs including an expected value model of a nuclear exchange of ballistic missiles, and it is powerful. I’d still rather use C-BASIC for the kinds of work I tend to do with computers, but I have to confess that I’m likely to use Python if I just need something quick and dirty. But then I try to avoid programming when possible and lately I have been very successful at doing that.

I suspect that for really complex systems like climate and complex flows, FORTRAN is the weapon of choice to this day. I know that when I worked with nuclear weapon designers, most of their work was done in FORTRAN.

Subject: Cutting-edge research still universally involves Fortran; a trio of challengers wants in.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computings-future-can-any-

coding-language-top-a-1950s-behemoth/

An interesting article.

Fr. N.

Coding for dollars

Dr. Pournelle,

I enjoy your occasional discussions on software coding, and agree with many of your points — but at the cost of possibly being boringly repetitive, I must stick with the position that the language is possibly the least important factor of the components of generating good software. Seriously, it is the systematic approach (or lack thereof) by the coder(s) and their organization. In my recently departed systems engineering career, I’ve witnessed lousy software written in low-level languages (or machine code) by coders with the reputation for a high degree of skill, and excellent code written in loosely typed, interpreted languages by relatively inexperienced programmers. The differences distinguishing the two extremes have always been the developer’s understanding of requirements (including security requirements), the degree of code review, integration testing, and configuration management.

Languages do make a difference in the sheer amount of good, verified code that can be generated by a given group with a given skill set. Strongly typed languages have all the advantages you list, including the ease with which the code is inspected and debugged, as well as the ease with which the project is staffed. However, if testing is given short shrift a good language is as likely IMO to produce poor results as a project run using machine code.

There is some excellent and useful software written, by a single person, much of it in assembly language, in Spinrite by Steve Gibson. I became aware of him and the software indirectly via a reference from you to TWiT. His attention to detail and commitment to thorough testing by a team set his work apart from others. He posts a lot of freeware and security utilities, along with a lot of other good information on his site at grc.com.

I do enjoy the discussion, and look forward to your comments and those of your other readers. I also am continuing to enjoy reading of your recovery and increased activity.

-d

I don’t disagree with what you say. What Niklaus Wirth has spent a lifetime trying to accomplish is to get programmers to think a lot more about what they are trying to accomplish before they begin to write code, and to design languages that require you to do that.

Wirth’s view of ADA, incidentally, was that was based on bad principles from the beginning because it had code Exception operations (so that if you coded yourself deep into a hole you could get out by declaring and exception). “They don’t know how to program if they need those,” he told me once, I think over sandwiches at my kitchen table. I had brought him and his wife to the house when he was in town for a conference, and I recall showing him the DOS game Wing Commander: he was greatly impressed with it (as was I).

re Substandard Programming Practices and Their Effect on Our Daily Lives and the Catastrophe Waiting Just Around the Corner:

I think it is quite unfair of your correspondent to dismiss the complexity problem as nonsense. The complexity of systems has indeed become enormous.

That is no excuse for poor design and implementation, but even with good and thorough design and high-quality implementation, what we expect from a system these days is far, far more than what it used to be, and hence a huge amount of added complexity.

I know whereof I speak. I have been a software engineer for 42 years now, and have worked for Symantec and Google as well as for several not so well-known companies.

It is easy to say "poor choice of programming tools" but in reality there is little choice available – unless you want to re-educate your workforce, you use the tools they know.

There are, of course, plenty of examples of the problems Mr. Holmes cites, but there have always been inferior products in the marketplace, and a marketplace that changes as rapidly as computing has more than its fair share.

But it is not universally so, and the discipline of software engineering is advancing (albeit slowly). The most hopeful signs I see are a greatly increased use of unit tests and Test-Driven Development (write the tests *first*, then test the code as you write).

To me, the design and test aspects are more important than the implementation language, but we are not yet completely done with the language wars. The most interesting new language (for me anyway) is the "go" language. At least one of its designers was a student of Wirth’s. The language itself seems to address my biggest concern with existing languages. (Their complexity! The C++ book from its principle designer is huge, and very difficult for mere mortals to fully understand.) Hopefully go will become a major programming language that can challenge C++.

While problems such as Mr. Holmes cites are all too common (I have gone through several routers in search of a decent one for my home installation), there is hope, and there *are* companies who are doing what could reasonably be called software engineering – they design, they test (in multiple ways) and they apply the lessons learned from failures. But we do have to learn to deal with complexity in a far better way than we do now. I currently work for Panasas, a computer storage company. I can tell you that the level of complexity in a modern hard drive is truly frightening. Some days it seems like a miracle that they work at all. Then we take these hugely complex components and assemble them into systems containing hundreds or thousands of them, connected together by super-complex networking systems. So it goes. If someone does not do their work correctly, then lots of bad stuff can happen.

The best answer I know of to keep vendors of consumer equipment honest is on-line ratings and reviews. Use them to help you buy, and review the products you do buy (positive or negative – both are important).

On another topic, a quick recommendation of two webcomics:

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-06-12

http://www.widdershinscomic.com/chapters-2/

Enjoy.

A. Chris Barker

Subj: Languages for Reliable Programs: Don’t Forget Go!

I think you’ll find that Go channels Wirth’s spirit pretty well, if not perfectly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTl0tl9BGdc

http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

Rob Pike’s "Public Static Void" talk is somewhat dated, but I know of no better concise presentation of exactly what Go’s inventors tried to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE

Pike’s more extended introduction, "Another Go at Language Design", is also somewhat dated, but, again, I know of no better comprehensive overview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VcArS4Wpqk

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Operating systems

Jerry:

I’m still annoyed that IBM shot down OS/2, just as it was getting into orbit. Strong, stable, capable and secure, it was a victim of internal politics.

Then there were evolutionary dead ends such as Pick, which came and went.

Currently, there is really no true alternative OS to Windoze. The "IXes" — in all iterations, from UNIX to AIX to Linux to Apple — have been around since the days of DOS, and while significantly better, don’t have the muscle behind them to take on the Redmond Rangers’ marketing department (and licensing schemes which made Windows a monopoly). The only "rival" to what MS is putting out is Windows XP!

If OS/2 were still actively under development by Big Blue, MS would have been forced to fix the longtime weaknesses in the Windows platform.

Ah, well, one can wish. As the song goes, "Every OS sucks!"

Keith

I was there. IBM had no idea of what they were doing. At one COMDEX, if you came within fifty feet of the Microsoft booths and had the faintest resemblance to being a developer, A Microsoft operative would thrust a Windows Software Development Kit into your hands. Meanwhile IBM was proud to announce that you could buy the OS2 SDK for only $500. I agree that if IBM had the vision that Gates had, they’d have produced a better OS; but they did not. They never believed in a computer in every house, and in every office, and in every classroom. They believed in 10,000 big computers all running IBM software. And their dreamers thought there might be as many as a million computers by the year 2000.

Growth

Jerry,

Growth is the high fructose corn syrup of the financial world. The kind of growth demanded by investors is only sustainable for a new company during its expansion phase, the "exponential" portion of the growth S-curve. Such growth is unsustainable as all markets reach a saturation point. Mature companies that try to sustain growth in profits after they have saturated their market do so by pushing profit margin. A high profit margin should mean that a company is efficient — lean, spending money mostly on making product or service, not on overhead. However, there is a limit to how much overhead can be reduced relative to production. At that point, companies driven to growth will start cutting out production personnel, the high-cost (read most experienced) ones first, then moving down through the ranks till production is fully compromised and the company fails.

I have been involved with this cycle before and it is not pretty.

I do not trust companies who claim extraordinary gains in market share as they are inevitably small, unstable companies in the early portion of their life-cycle. I also do not trust mature companies who make claims of extraordinary gains in profit margin. They are inevitably destroying their means of production.

I prefer to look for companies paying a steady and healthy dividend. This is the protein and complex carbohydrate diet with a sprinkling of healthy fats that provides for a sustainable life for the company. Wall Street shuns such companies.

Kevin L. Keegan

Between the tax and the market structure of our financial system we have made it very difficult to have what used to be called stable Blue Chip companies: companies that make a good profit and pay dividends, and don’t try to buy their competitors to expand, nor do they seek to sell out for a capital gain. For a stable Republic you need something of that sort. Schumpeter’s creative destruction needs to be combined with prevention of “too big to fail” and with tax laws that encourage “good enough” for as long as it is good enough.

Yes. I understand that this is difficult. But we now overregulate everything, making it very hard for new companies to enter the market because they can’t afford compliance officers and lawyers, while encouraging companies to eat each other and become too big to fail. This is a formula for disaster. Stable companies that make a good profit should not be forced to grow or die. Yes, when their market vanishes they have no choice, but often that is not what forces them into unwise expansion in search of growth. I suspect it’s too late at night for me to be writing this.

‘Despite the threat of war with Russia, the Ukrainian government is being forced by its lenders to try to militarily recapture their eastern tax base.’

<http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/05/ukrainian_crisis_is_about_taxes.html>

——-

Roland Dobbins

That’s a bit scary. Putin is skating as close to the edge as he dares go. If he loses control, things might get out of hand. Putin needs Russians.

The one thing we all need to remember is that Ukrainians, whether they speak Russian or not, are Slavs and related to the Russians. We also need to understand that Putin is no power mad dictator: he believes himself a patriot.

Today ends the Spring pledge drive. This is the last pitch about money you’ll hear for a while (well, there may be a similar announcement in the mailbag I’m hoping to get prepared before midnight). As we have said often, this site runs on the Public Radio model. It’s free to all, but it will not stay open unless it gets enough subscribers. I do want to thank all those who chose to subscribe this week, and particularly the new subscribers.

If you have never subscribed to this place, this would be a good time to do it. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html If you have subscribed, but it has been a while since your renewed – if you can’t remember when you renewed your subscription – this would be a great time to do that. I won’t be reminding you of it for a while, so do it now while you’re thinking about it… http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

The rising of the oceans…

Got to wondering, could the reported rising of the oceans actually be due to pumping down the fossil water in various aquifers such as the Ogallala Aquifer for agriculture and other human uses? After all, that water goes some place after its first use and many aquifers are not being replenished as fast as they are being drained. And since water vapor is considered by some to be a significant green house gas, this draining could be contributing to climate change as well.

http://www.hpwd.com/aquifers/ogallala-aquifer

Charles Brumbelow

Well, we know that the kilometers of ice over land areas of the Northern Hemisphere has been melting into the sea for nearly 20,000 years as we entered this interim in the Ice Ages, and we know that Scandinavia and other land areas once covered by ice have been rising. And battle hill in Hastings was once a dry road gating the way out of marshes. And, as I have said, I have seen how far from the sea the Hot Gates of Thermopylae are today. Finding a stable area to be the reference point for whether the seas are rising or falling isn’t all that easy.

Fighting Climate Change with YOUR Money

Hello Jerry,

You get right to the crux of the matter:

"We will be asked to pay lots more money to avert this new climate disaster, and the costs will be enormous because the effects of the remedies on the economy will be enormous (and the effects on the climate unmeasurable—BL), and cause famines in Africa. Now that they might get in on this industrial progress we are closing the gate in their faces, but that’s the way the climate changes.

At least there are jobs in climate change analysis. So long as you come up with the accepted results. If you don’t, well, you must work for an oil company.”

Where does the ‘Climate Fighting Money’ actually go?

No one will ever fully know, of course, but the following accounts for multiple billion of the missing dollars:

http://greencorruption.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/podesta-power-and-center-for-american.html#.U2tvVl64nlK

And, as you knew with the confidence of the schedule of the next sunrise, most of it can be found in the pockets of progressives in high places and their friends.

Bob Ludwick

Begley’s Best

I bought the product at a store called Good Earth, did not use it but it had Ed’s name on it and he is one of the few that actually do what they preach, so I had to buy it, would buy it again if they still sold it.

ron

more evidence for your cocktail theory

https://shine.yahoo.com/pets/dog-protects-missing-3-old-boy-160100896.html

Phil Tharp

The theory referred to is my “cocktail party” theory – i.e. a theory I would defend in a cocktail party but not publish in a scientific journal – on the importance of dogs to human evolution of intelligence. Since the same part of the brain that we use for cognition is used by dogs for olfactory sense, I propose that long ago humanity made a deal with dogs. “We’ll get smarter. You keep your sense of smell and protect out village. We’ll look after your children and you look after ours, and we’ll be friends forever, and after we get smart we’ll be better able to take care of both of us.” Human cultural evolution is by villages, and villages with dogs have a much higher chance of producing surviving descendants, and you can work the rest of it from there.

Re: Sexual Assault on Campus

Jerry,

A few days ago I read the article linked below that bears on the subject of your latest posting. I was unaware of many of the facts regarding investigation of rapes on college campuses and frankly, it’s quite a travesty.

http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/03/how-government-created-the-campus-rape-c?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reason%2FArticles+%28Reason+Online+-+All+Articles+%28except+Hit+%26+Run+blog%29%29

Regards,

george

The entire “battle between the sexes” has got out of hand. Girls are expected to join the hookup culture will they or nil they. People call themselves feminists shout rape at every possible opportunity, often causing authorities to become indifferent to very real cases of rape. There is little rational discussion now because attempts to talk about the situation generally degenerate into name calling and charges of gross insensitivity (and that’s the mildest charge).

The Euthanasia Coaster.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster>

————

Roland Dobbins

Pope Benedict spoke of a Culture of Death.

William Harvey "Bill" Dana, RIP.

<http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-bill-dana-20140508-story.html>

—–

Roland Dobbins

..and one of the first astronauts…

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-bill-dana-20140508-story.html

Stephanie Osborn

Interstellar Woman of Mystery

See all my books at http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com <http://www.stephanie-osborn.com/>

Today ends the Spring pledge drive. This is the last pitch about money you’ll hear for a while (well, there may be a similar announcement in the mailbag I’m hoping to get prepared before midnight). As we have said often, this site runs on the Public Radio model. It’s free to all, but it will not stay open unless it gets enough subscribers. I do want to thank all those who chose to subscribe this week, and particularly the new subscribers.

If you have never subscribed to this place, this would be a good time to do it. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html If you have subscribed, but it has been a while since your renewed – if you can’t remember when you renewed your subscription – this would be a great time to do that. I won’t be reminding you of it for a while, so do it now while you’re thinking about it… http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

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

Planet Defense

By Jerry Pournelle | May 11, 2014 - 11:21 pm | Updated: May 11, 2014 - 11:21 pm | View

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View 824, Sunday, May 11, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

It appears overwhelmingly clear that the alien attack on the Taliban http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2623330/Is-Inter-Stellar-Assistance-Force-Mysterious-UFO-filmed-blitzing-Taliban-base-Afghanistan.html was Photoshopped, and I have to confess I never thought otherwise because the remarks from those taking the movie didn’t mention the object, just the bombardment. Of course I have just been to a lecture by Claudio Maccone, who is well known for his interest in SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) and also for planet defense – Space Defense if you will. http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc021502.html That’s something Niven and I have been interested in for decades. (See Yesterday’s View)

Planetary defense usually means defense against impacting objects, but there are other views.

Alien contact

My whole problem with contacting aliens has always been; what if they think humans are as tasty as we consider lobster? Have we ever asked the lobsters about their civilization? Pretty much "No"! Why would you expect a space traveling race to be so noble? They will arrive here hungry after traveling so far. Best to not be the main course…

bill brunton

Those who read FOOTFALL by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle will know that we do not assume the “they’re friendly and here to help us” view, nor do they want to eat us. Our aliens have a very complex social order. Of course stories about Earth resisting invaders have become more common since we wrote Footfall (and they weren’t rare before we wrote it) but we did work on the question of “If they can cross interstellar space, why don’t they just snuff us and have done with it? What chance have we got?” Footfall was our first novel to make Number One on the publisher’s best seller list, and we’re rather proud of it, and despite having been written before the end of the Cold War it holds up pretty well.

As it happens I got this today also:

What is your take on this?

Clean Up Space Junk or Risk Real-Life ‘Gravity’ Disaster, Lawmakers Say <http://news.yahoo.com/clean-space-junk-risk-real-life-gravity-disaster-105445423.html>

image <http://news.yahoo.com/clean-space-junk-risk-real-life-gravity-disaster-105445423.html>

Clean Up Space Junk or Risk Real-Life ‘Gravity’ Disaster… <http://news.yahoo.com/clean-space-junk-risk-real-life-gravity-disaster-105445423.html>

While the plot of the hit Hollywood film \"Gravity\" is fictional, the United States must bolster efforts to address the alarming amount of space junk s…

View on news.yahoo.com <http://news.yahoo.com/clean-space-junk-risk-real-life-gravity-disaster-105445423.html>

————–

You have worked extensively with the space program, so tell me it this is so?

1) Except in rare cases when we want a polar orbit or something unusual, we launch satellites in the direction the Earth spins because that is the economical in terms of energy usage? So most of the satellites move in the same direction.

2) If two Satellites are moving in the same direction but at different speeds, they are in different orbits? So one will be at a different altitude than the other.

3) Even if two satellites are moving at different speeds and/or directions (due to elliptical orbits or not having exactly the same vector) would the difference be enough to cause serious damage?

Everything sent to orbit is launched eastward because that’s the way the world turns, and you want to add rather than subtract the rotational velocity to the velocity change (Delta-V) achieved by the rocket engines. It also makes the clock lose time (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/airtim.html ) but that’s a story for another time.) But of course the latitude from which it is launched will play a big part in determining the orbit the satellite will have after it reaches orbital velocity. In general, the rocket will pass over its launch site. A satellite launched on the equator will more or less stay jut over the equator at all times; one launched from Kazakhstan will go that far north during every orbit.

This establishes a lot of orbits, and space is very large. Space junk can be a real danger, but again, space is very large. The Wikipedia article on Space Debris is fairly good (or was when last I looked). The danger of space debris as present is often exaggerated, particularly by those who want to be paid to clean it up, but it is not something to be ignored forever.

Incidentally, while the US and Russia and the other powers wanting to become space faring nations have a shortage of the capability to get stuff into orbit, there is an even more critical lack of the ability to get garbage and waste out of space. One proposal is for a “streamlined” garbage net to be tethered to Space Station, since any mass put in orbit has a potential use if we ever build a more sophisticated space station. In any event, waste accumulation can be a problem. There are a number of science fiction stories written about space junk causing critical accidents, and of course there is the movie Gravity.

I don’t know if this has anything to do with what Dr. Maccone was working on or if there is a metric that could apply, but I define civilization thus:

That person is civilized who, having the means and opportunity to compel another against his will with impunity and profit thereby, refuses to do it because he believes it is wrong.

Richard White

Austin, Texas

Dr. Maccone’s metric for level of civilization is bits/person, a measure of information processing divided by the number of people in the civilization. The main critique I have of the measure is the denominator: you can change the metric by eliminating the low information members of the population. One can imagine situations in which survivors of a nuclear war would retain much of the technology, and quickly recover to become a considerably higher level of civilization (according to the metric) if the size of the denominator falls greatly relative to the numerator.

I will have more to say on this another time. Maccone’s mathematics was beautiful; and do understand this is a first cut at a metric that would allow us to compare ours with an alien civilization. If I ever have time I may try guessing the metric for the Fithp, the aliens in our novel Footfall, compared with Earth…

Once again this is the close of the Spring Pledge Drive, and I will no longer be bugging you about subscriptions to this place. This site operates on the Public Radio Model. It is free to all, and we try to keep it interesting. It can only stay open with your support. If you have not subscribed, this would be a great time to do that. If you have subscribed but have not renewed in a while, or can’t remember when you last did, this is the right time to renew.

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

The measure of Civilization

By Jerry Pournelle | May 9, 2014 - 11:55 pm | Updated: May 9, 2014 - 11:55 pm | View

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View 823, Friday, May 09, 2014

I spent the day with friends going to the JPL Lecture by Claudio Maccone on finding a metric to measure the level of a civilization; this in anticipation of messages from an alien civilization. It is likely that civilization is more advanced than ours if it initiates contact with us. The question is, how much more advanced? Is level of civilization subject to measure? If so what models are there for this?

The answer to the first question is, we don’t know, but it sure would be important if we could do it. As to what models we might employ, until now none at all. This first cut measure by Maccone is is subject to considerable debate, but it is a starting point on a subject I would have previously thought impossible. I sat fascinated during the lecture and I suspect I was overly enthusiastic in some of my questions at the question period, but this was about the most interesting lecture I have been to in years.

Dr. Maccone isn’t certain he has answers but he has developed some beautiful mathematics to produce a model that might let us obtain such a metric, on both ourselves and on some alien civilization. Clearly this is a first cut at a highly difficult task. I’d never have thought of trying it. My thanks to Greg Vane, Senior Executive Advisor for Strategic Planning Solar Systems Directorate at JPL for inviting us to attend. Afterwards some of us went to dinner to discuss it, and my head is filled with questions.

It’s late now and I’m tired, so I’ll have to leave you with that teaser. I intend to do more with his presentation tomorrow, but tomorrow morning Roberta and I will be going to the live video simulcast of Rossini’s La Cenerentola tomorrow at a local movie theater, so I’ll be a bit late getting started.

I’ll ad a picture, but the rest will have to wait.

Dr. Claudio Maccone, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Lou Friedman at JPL just before the lecture on May 9, 2014. The lecture/seminar was on the subject of metrics for comparing development state of civilizations. Lou Friedman is the former Executive Director of the Planetary Society. Dr. Maccone is author of Mathematical SETI, a textbook for university courses on the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-SETI-Statistics-Processing-Astronomy/dp/3642274366

The Chaos Manor pledge drive is coming to an end. I thank the many who have subscribed or renewed this week. This site operates on the public radio model: it is free to all, but it exists only so long as it is supported by subscriptions. If you haven’t subscribed this would be a good time to do it. If you have subscribed but haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a great time to do that. We don’t have advertising and I don’t bug you for money except during the pledge drives, which I run whenever KUSC the LA good music station runs its pledge drive. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

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

Growth, Morality, and economy. A new discussion of programming. UFO or Photoshop?

By Jerry Pournelle | May 8, 2014 - 12:39 pm | Updated: May 9, 2014 - 4:31 pm | View

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View 823, Thursday, May 08, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

“…the only thing that can save us is if Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us alone.”

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon

“Slow to Cut Prices, Whole Foods Is Punished

“Shares drop to 19%as Investors Worry About Slowing Growth, Competition; ‘We’re Never Going to Be in Race to the Bottom’ ”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304655304579548343382157608?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304655304579548343382157608.html

I have watched the progress of Whole Foods for years, ever since we discovered that Roberta is allergic to gluten and we had to find a reliable source of tasty gluten-free foods. As I remarked after our first Whole Foods experience, “Whole Foods is a way of life.” Our local Whole Foods is on the Studio City/Sherman Oaks border, which is to say, in prosperous suburban Los Angeles, surrounded by middle to upper class homes and families. Whenever we go there ts has had plenty of customers, and the staff are always alert and courteous. When my friend and neighbor Ed Begley launched a housecleaning product called Begley’s Best he did so through Whole Foods, and one day when I ran into him in the store he pointed it out to me. Of course I bought some (he offered to buy it for me), and in fact it proved to be very good, effective, good smelling, and organic and non-toxic, all you would want in a surface cleaning compound. We generally bought it so long as it was available, but alas it is no longer on the Whole Foods shelves. I presume it was just too expensive.

Whole Foods expanded and the stock soared, but of course that put it under pressure from the “investors” who bought the stock because it would go up. It had to keep going up. The fact that the stores were successful and very profitable serving a niche – a large and rich niche, but nevertheless a niche – market wasn’t enough. It had to “grow”.

Nationwide, sales of natural and organic foods now amount to roughly $50 billion a year. Investors had adored Whole Foods, giving it a market value at times exceeding that of Kroger Co. KR -0.54% , the nation’s largest mainstream grocery chain, which has seven times as many grocery stores.

But its accomplishment drew broad new competition, from mainstream retailers like Kroger and Safeway Inc. SWY +0.04% and upstarts like Sprouts Farmers Market Inc. SFM -3.05% and Fresh Market Inc. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. last month said it struck a deal with Wild Oats to launch 100 mostly organic products that will be priced 25% cheaper than national brands.

Phoenix-based Sprouts, which has about 170 stores, on Wednesday said earnings rose 86% for the latest quarter and raised its forecast for the year, pushing its shares up 6% in after-hours trading. The shares had dropped 12% as of 4 p.m.

Its shares had fallen 45% from their peak in October through Wednesday’s market close amid concerns about over expansion and competition among specialty grocers.Sprouts Chief Executive Doug Sanders credited Sprouts’ focus on affordable prices, which attracted customers who wouldn’t otherwise be able to buy natural and organic foods.

Whole Foods has largely tapped out its core demographic in upscale urban neighborhoods. The company’s solution has been to expand beyond its comfort zone in new areas such as poorer neighborhoods, smaller cities and suburbs. It has recently opened stores in Detroit and West Des Moines, Iowa, and plans to open one in Chicago’s South side next year. To fend off new competition and attract customers in those new markets it has had to lower the high prices—and profit margins—that earned it the moniker "whole paycheck."

Which is a course doomed to failure. I am sure that’s one reason Begley’s Best is no longer offered for sale, even in Ed’s favorite home store. If you’re going to grow you have to get new customers. Whole Foods already had a lot of customers in the Studio City/Sherman Oaks area. Its other potential customers are unemployed and hanging on for their lives, and in this economy there won’t be a lot more people willing, able, and even eager to shop in Whole Foods despite the prices. So cut the prices – and open yourself to competition from someone who will emphasize health, effectiveness, ecological friendliness, organic at any cost and cater to those who believe in that and can afford it.

This is the slowest economic recovery in the history of the nation – assuming that you believe we are recovering. The signs of recovery are faint, and if you count the number of permanently unemployed and thus not part of the work force and thus not officially unemployed at all, the economy is a disaster. I think this demand for growth, for income through capital gains rather than from profitable return on investment – taxed as income – is a key. It is no longer enough to have a company making good profits on its investments. Now it must have capital growth as well. This doesn’t serve the customers very well. I could give a hundred example of old staid merchant enterprises that sold things I like at a profit who have experienced the Growth Phenomenon, peaked, crashed, and now no longer exist, or exist in a truncated condition – and no longer sell what I wanted. Woolich Silvertan shirts is one such casualty. Ah well.

I found this interesting. It may be relevant to the Whole Foods thing:

Sexual assault on campus and the curse of the hookup culture

Jonathan Zimmerman

Survey students about the problem. Train victim advocates. Urge bystanders to intervene.

You can find these suggestions — and other equally sound ones — in the report issued last week by a White House task force on sexual assault at U.S. colleges. But here’s a recommendation that you won’t find in it: Challenge the hookup culture that dominates undergraduate life.

Although about 40% of female college seniors report that they are virgins or have had sex only once, many others are engaging in sexual activity. At colleges nationally, by senior year, 4 in 10 students are either virgins or have had intercourse with only one person, according to the Online College Social Life Survey.

The culture is marked by a lack of commitment and especially of communication between partners, who rarely tell each other what they actually want. So it has also brought with it an appalling amount of unwanted sex.

Consider a study of 2,500 college students published last year by Donna Freitas. She confirms what we already knew: Many students engage in casual sex. More than that, though, the book shows that students feel a great deal of pressure to keep the sex casual; that is, to remove themselves emotionally from it.

"It’s just something that I feel like as a college student you’re supposed to do," one woman told Freitas. "It’s so ingrained in college life that if you’re not doing it, then you’re not getting the full college experience."

https://www.google.com/#nfpr=1&q=The+curse+of+the+hookup+culture+Johathan+zimmerman

Of course this says nothing that many haven’t been saying before, including Tom Wolfe in I Am Charlotte Simmons, but Zimmerman has data to back up his statements. Of course Arthur Clarke way back in 1952 in Childhood’s End postulated that the invention of reliable contraception and positive paternity determination would change the world’s sexual habits from inhibited to uninhibited, and this would turn out to allow us to grow up and join the aliens, hidden among us, in some kind of new maturity. The changes in sexual mores duly took place after the technology was developed.

Decoupling sexual practices from emotional commitment has probably been the goal of a vast majority of young men both in and out of college for hundreds of years. Traditional moralists pointed out there would be costs to this. Charles Murray in Coming Apart shows that the ruling class in America continues to profess religion, work ethics, industriousness, and family, although “they no longer preach what they practice”, while those who do not participate in those values generally tend to be part of the lower classes with noticeably poorer economic success. Of course there remain well known libertines within the wealthy classes – Mr. Sterling of the Clippers fame being a recent example – but then there have always been such exceptions among the very rich and in the entertainment world.

Zimmerman doesn’t say that we have sown the wind and may expect to reap the whirlwind, but many would. And yes: I am very aware that hypocrisy is the fee vice pays to virtue. So is Charles Murray.

Substandard Programming Practices and Their Effect on Our Daily Lives and the Catastrophe Waiting Just Around the Corner

Jerry,

I think that it is time to reopen the discussion of Best Programming Practices and the ultimate costs to us as individuals and to our Society and the Future of the Human Race.

I don’t know what is being taught to today’s Computer Science Majors and who is making Corporate Decisions about Best Programming Practices and the appropriate tools to use. What I do know is that the quality, reliability and security of our Operating Systems, Firmware and Application Programs has been steadily declining for more than thirty years.

There are a host of standard excuses regarding complexity and other nonsense. The reality of the situation is poor choice of programming tools, coding starting long before a complete specification is available, (The are we coding yet syndrome.) and little or no stress testing ala the healthcare.gov website.

Firmware for communications devices such as wireless routers seems to be tested superficially with no long term tests to uncover problems such as memory leaks and improperly handled exceptions.

As our Society becomes more and more dependent on these shoddy interconnected Systems it will not be too much longer before what, years ago, was local power blackout and has now graduated to a Regional Blackout becomes a National Blackout.

Our transportation systems are becoming more and more dependent on complex systems to provide control. How long will it be before we have a National Transportation Paralysis.

Something needs to be done. Perhaps the first thing is for Decision Makers to have some insight into the possible consequences of their decisions.

Several years ago some folks at BP made a decision to hurry up the abandonment of the Macondo test well and save perhaps 20 million dollars. The actual cost of that decision was 11 Lives and more than 20 billion dollars and the final bill is not in.

Last year some one at Target made a decision not to do anything when the Computer Security Group warned of potential security threats. The cost to address the problem would have been, more than likely, an order of magnitude less than the 70 Million dollar cost so far as well as the severe damage to Target’s reputation.

A new premium Wireless Router was released over nine months ago by a vendor I choose not to name. It was released with a great many of its premium features not working and firmware that needed to be restarted and/or reset at frequent intervals to restore basic functionality. The situation is essentially no better today than it was at release because the vendor’s software engineering department is scurrying improve functionality without examining bug ridden foundation. This product is seriously damaging the reputation of the Vendor and in the end will cost the Vendor many times the cost of delaying the product launch.

Bob Holmes

Long time readers will remember that I have always been an advocate of readable, understandable source code programs as opposed to the impervious assembler codes like C and its descendants. In particular, the use of tricks with pointers is convenient for those who understand the process, but can be enormously confusing to anyone trying to maintain or modify the code later. Opaque source languages generate faster programs, but in this tenth generation of Moore’s Law that’s no longer a primary concern.

COBOL was a first cut at a comprehensible language, but it had obvious defects. Niklaus Wirth of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich invented Pascal as a program instruction language. It was later used to generate working code, and there are still many programs written in one or another flavor of Pascal. It was once a rival to C, but for reasons I won’t go into lost out to BASIC and then Dbase Ii as the “popular” programming language. Wirth later devised “production” languages meeting his criteria of internal consistency, strong requirements for type declarations, and restrictions on tricks programmers could play to save memory or code lines at the sacrifice of future readability. I recall Marvin Minsky describing me as one who wanted to put on a straight jacket before coding; Marvin of course preferred LISP but also employed APL.

The Department of Defense tried to get into the act with its invention of ADA but like all projects operated by committees, it grew and added features and never quite got there.

But the time computers had become powerful enough to make code comprehensibility more important than code efficiency, the battle was pretty well over: Microsoft had gone the C route and despite the security problems (buffer overflows and other hacks) was stuck with supporting a huge customer base using an operating system just comprehensible to those who wrote it. And when an opposition to Microsoft developed wide support it turned out to Linux, an open source duplicate of UNIX, which requires C. UNIX notoriously required an on site guru until Apple cleverly came up with its operating system: usable by grandma but deep inside is the all powerful UNIX.

But there was never a popular comprehensible highly structured language/operating system that put maintainability ahead of code efficiency. Wirth’s theory was that programmer are better off with languages that will not compile mistakes (such as statements that take one type as input and return an entirely different type as output, or accepting overflow from data input buffers as program commands). Such programs catch programmer errors. That means that it takes longer to compile the program, compared to programs like FORTRAN and C which notoriously will compile almost anything. Back when computers were slower, compiling an enormous program like Windows took a very long time even with C, which is why comprehensible languages were unpopular with program managers.

The advantage of highly structured and strongly typed program languages were that once you got the program to compile, it generally did what you expected it to do. Most of the bugs were caught by the compiler, and it was not necessary for the programmer to simulate the compiler in his head in order to understand what the program was doing.

Wirth continues to work on his projects, but the fervent discussions of languages that took place in the 1980’s don’t take place any longer. I suspect that may be a cause of the problems you see. Program source code is now readable only by those who have spent time learning the languages they are written in, and it become much harder to figure out what they actually do.

Certainly something must change. I’d hate to see Launch Control at Minot put under the control of a computer network…

It’s lunch time. I have more in the stack. I’ll be back.

UFO bombarding the Taliban?

<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2623330/Is-Inter-Stellar-Assistance-Force-Mysterious-UFO-filmed-blitzing-Taliban-base-Afghanistan.html>

———–

Roland Dobbins

Holy moley. I have watched that four times, and it sure looks authentic. I suppose the origin has been verified? Clearly it would not be all that hard to Photoshop, and the flashing lights prior to the bombardment look a bit odd, but since we have no idea what they were we can’t know what they should look like. And the rest of it doesn’t look faked at all. Of course most fakes don’t look faked or at least try not to. If this holds up it will be interesting.

I hasten to add that my eyes aren’t what they used to be.

Burning Food

Jerry,

There is at least one good thing that burning food has caused.

With the high price of Corn caused by Ethanol mandates, the price of high fructose corn syrup is at or a bit higher than the domestic price of beet sugar.

If prices stabilize at this point we might hope that high fructose corn syrup is removed from our food supplies and the Obesity Epidemic starts to recede.

I am convinced that High Fructose Corn Syrup is a major cause of Obesity. This is based on my personal experience. About 30 Months ago I stopped drinking Soda Pop. I didn’t drink a lot, only one or two cans a day. Over the 40 plus years since I quit smoking I had gained more than 50 pounds. Since I quit drinking soda pop I have lost most of that weight gain without any attempts at dieting. Admittedly, a sample size of one has no statistical significance, but…..

Perhaps the high fructose corn syrup inhibits or kills tape worms and my infestation is now flourishing. (Said with tongue in cheek.)

Bob Holmes

Interesting point. If we burn it as fuel we don’t eat it/ Seems an odd way to accomplish the result, but devious enough to be true.

I am going to a lecture at JPL Tomorrow (Friday) with John de Chancie and Larry Niven, and I’ll probably not update this until nightfall. Saturday Morning we’ll go to a movie theater for the live performance at the Met. Roberta likes those.

It is still Pledge Time at Chaos Manor. If you have not subscribed, this is a great time to do it. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html This site operates on the Public Radio model: it is free to all, but it stays open only if it gets support from those who come here. We do not make fund appeals often: I time them to coincide with the KUSC pledge drives; JUSK is the LA good music station. I don’t bug you about money otherwise. If you have subscribed but it’s been a while since you renewed, this would be a good time to do that.

I have to go to the lecture shortly, but lest you think I have really gone mad:

UFO vs. Taliban

I think the video is of an AC-130 or USMC KC-130J Harvest Hawk which is out of picture (high left would be my guess) attacking insurgent forces with 105 and 40 mm rounds (AC-130), or Hellfire/Griffin or small dia bombs (KC-HH). One of the munitions is detonated in the air by debris contact at about 18 seconds. The UFO is photoshopped.

Chris Spratt

ufo bombarding Taliban?

It’s a Photoshop (or video equivalent) job. They reversed this and added a fuzzy image:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELe52UcZJb4

Kit Case

Jerry,

I’m sure you’ve gotten a hundred emails about this already, but the ufo video is a "real" airstrike or artillery barrage with a fake ufo added in. This used to be called "special effects", some are calling the ufo "CGI", but it’s not even all that good of an effort.

But the foundation of the vid looks an awful lot like a real artillery barrage, including at least one airburst where an incoming round fused off of airborne debris instead of the ground. It doesn’t take much effort nowadays to add some fake grainy graphics to an old video, and this one is not nearly as good as some others I’ve seen recently.

Sean

I haven’t played with Photoshop in years, but of course that was the obvious explanation. Ah well. If the aliens do intend to manifest themselves this is a very unlikely way for them to do it. And no, I haven’t gone mad in my old age. It was very well done, I thought, but I warned you my eyes aren’t what they used to be.

Clearly if there are aliens with that kind of gunship, there is no rational reason why suddenly they would reveal themselves there and in that way, so the picture was always to be regarded as an illusion of some sort. Apparently it wasn’t done as well as I thought it was.

UFO,

Jerry

The UFO side shot (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2623330/Is-Inter-Stellar-Assistance-Force-Mysterious-UFO-filmed-blitzing-Taliban-base-Afghanistan.html) is vague, but clear enough: it’s the Millennium Falcon coming out of its strafing run.

Ed

Not fair. You’ve known me far too long…