View 734 Monday, July 23, 2012

1430 EDT Atlanta Airport Delta Crown Room

We’re here and comfortable. This is a public wireless network access. I think I have a way to get a more secure access, but since I don’t intend to do much here I’ll chance using this one for now.

All’s well, we have a long way to go but we’re in competent hands.

The TSA people in Chattanooga are the best I have ever experienced. Nothing is going to make that a pleasant experience, but at least these people are helpful.

Cicero was put on the proscription list to be killed on sight by Marc Antony over the objections of Octavius Caesar and Lepidus. Antony insisted and although Octavius had inherited the Army, Antony commanded it, and Lepidus paid for much of it. Antony insisted, Lepidus supported him, and Octavious acceded. Cicero was tracked down by a squad of soldiers while in transit. Before he got out of his carriage, Cicero, once savior of Rome from the Cataline rebellion, Consul who held the power of the Ultimate Decree and who returned that power to the Senate and People when the crisis was over, told the soldier who would be his executioner: “Young man there is nothing proper about what you are about to do, but I do hope you will do a proper job of it.”

I can say that the Chattanooga TSA did a proper job of what they did, and I did not tell them that story.

Uncle Timmy drove us to the airport and shepherded us through. LibertyCon takes great care of teir guests, and there is everything proper about what they do. I’ll get home fairly late tonight.

I can’t write an essay on the Colorado Killer working on this laptop in the Crown Room.  I refer you to Hansen http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-demons-of-the-modern-rampage-killer/?singlepage=true which is quite good, and his conclusion proper. The chap in Colorado deserves a fair trial and then hanging. I can’t think the trial needs to be more than an hour long, although I am convinced that he will long outlive me and for that matter most of those he wounded. He will get better medical care than just about any of my readers and most of those I know including me.

Niven comments that he could be taken to a proper operating facility and shot in the head in a way that does not damage the spine, then taken apart for his parts. My comment was that if sold on eBay that would make a fortune. His liver might bring a lot all by itself. Niven nodded sadly. “That is the problem.” But of course competition from China may bring down the prices that can be obtained for freshly killed criminal parts, and of course they don’t have to worry about the costs the trials.

Of course thinking like this – it used to be called Prudence – is long out of fashion. Now virtue begins and ends with intentions, and not understanding consequences is no vice, merely unfortunate. I didn’t realise that not teaching children to sound out words would leave many of them illiterate! I meant for them to read better! iT’S NOT MY FAULT!!

But now I am rambling. I’ll see if I can get back to an Internet connection.

2430 Tuesday AM  I am home without incident, and about to go to bed. All the files have been transferred, my computer systems are working properly, and I learned some Road Warrior lessons. I’ll make a quick pass through the mail, but mostly I am off to sleep.

View 734 Sunday, July 22, 2012

Still in Chattanooga with the ThinkPad. The IBM keyboard is pretty good but I find I am addicted to full size keyboards. Work with this one is slow. I’m a sloppy typist anyway. I’d have done better to learn two finger typing. Ah well.

We had the traditional Libertycon Mad Scientists discussion last night. This was started some years ago when Jimmy Hogan was a guest here and as was his bent he had a late night discussion on things in science we are sure of that may not be so. A lot of that got into his book Kicking the Sacred Cow, and while he is likely wrong about most of his theories it’s healthy to look at basic scientific beliefs with a bit of a jaundiced eye, just to find out if you can back up your own beliefs. There’s also a long tradition in the Catholic Church of exposing core beliefs to the test of reason – Aquinas and Erasmus come to mind among dozens of others – but of course the hierarchy lapses into ‘believe or else’ mode at frequent intervals;. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy at work, I suppose, but that’s too long a topic for now.

I wanted to kick the Special Relativity sacred cow, and for that matter General Relativity as well, especially since Einstein himself began to wonder about Special after the big confirming instances of General and the Hubble discoveries. I’ve said all this before and I have nothing whatever to add to Petr Beckmann’s book Einstein Plus Two which doesn’t attempt to refute relativity, it merely points out that the crucial experiments that seem to make necessary the complexities of relativity equations can in fact be explained by more conventional Newtonian views.

On the orbit of Mercury, on page 171, Beckmann writes: "… Einstein was not the first to derive the Mercury formula. It had been derived 17 years earlier by Paul Gerber [1898] by classical physics using the same assumption that I am using now — the propagation of gravity with velocity c. For readers who find this hard to believe, Gerber’s final expression is reproduced here: …". After reprinting Gerber’s formula as it appeared in Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik, vol. 43, p. 103, Beckmann notes that this formula is now known as "the Einstein formula". http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/496.html)

Alas, I found the usual results: most physicists don’t study relativity at all, but they do hear people they respect say that it’s absolutely proven, and quite properly assume it doesn’t need further investigation. Perhaps so, but Beckmann, who thoroughly understood both General and Special Relativity, thought it a needless sacred cow and proceeded to offer alternatives. See Beckmann, Einstein Plus Two. He claims to cover all the known evidence, not in an attempt to refute either eneral or special relativity but to show they are not needed to explain what experiments have shown. Obviously relativity theory works, but it may be leading to some needless postulates about cosmology that make things more, not less, difficult to understand – a sort of Occam’s barber shop floor principle rather than Occam’s razor. But that’s kicking sacred cows, and it’s more a sport than a science even if it could be important.

And I am off to another panel.

The convention is formally over and we’re about to go to dinner somewhere. I’ll see what I can do about catching up when I get back.  And we returned, and had the last meetings, and I am going to try to get a mailbag out before I go to bed. We return in the morning.

It has been a good weekend. There were panels on the future of education and what science fiction says about democracy, and can we save civilization?  Bit hard to do in an hour, but we try to indicate ways of thinking about the problem, probably endind up with me sounding like a pretentious ass – old professors given an audience often do.  Ah well.

View 733 Saturday, July 21, 2012

Chattanooga

Niven and I are at LibertyCon in Chattanooga. We have a busy schedule, and the convention is in a unique hotel, where everything is spread out over a vast area: the hotel is the former railway station and railway yard, converted into a hotel, with some of the rooms (not mine) being in old railway cars. There is a dining room in a former railroad car diner, but it didn’t open early enough for us to eat there. The main dining room is the former lobby and waiting room of the station. I’ve seen this station before, twenty years ago, but at that time they hadn’t built the conventions center and some modern hotel structures and the old station was mostly a museum and a place to display a spectacular model railway layout. I would guess that the model railroad is still there since I saw a sign offering tickets to a model railway museum, but I haven’t had a chance to see it.

I don’t think I have ever seen a hotel constructed from a railway station and old railroad cars before. The downside is that it makes for a lot of walking, but that has its positive aspects as well.

We have a very busy schedule. Last night Niven and I were invited to discuss how to save civilization. Today we talk about education. Tonight we have dinner with our Baen Books publisher, and hang out with some other writers. All is well, but there isn’t a lot of slack time.

Another long book signing session, followed by speechifyng which I pretty well left to others. Bit of a problem with the wireless connections. The ThinkPad thinks it has one wireless control system and Windows thinks it has another, and they get confused. As usual it all sorts out eventually.  All well if somewhat exhausting.