View 720 Sunday, April 08, 2012

Easter Sunday

Roberta is mobile again, and our friend who had been hospitalized after an aneurism was at church this morning, a bit weakened but cheerful. There was much to be thankful for.

It’s 2100 and at o-dawn-thirty I have to get up and go out to get an MRI. Routine followup, but it happens early enough that I have to get to bed early. Happy and joyous Easter to all.

I’ve been working on an essay that goes along with what Niven and I are doing in the novel we’re working on, and has to do with fixing the education system, or at least getting some of it to work. We’re novelists so we can control things – all novelists have to do is be plausible. It’s more complicated in the real world.

I do start with the assumption that if education is an investment, then it should operate in ways that at least make it possible for there to be a return on that investment. That means that at least some of the population must come out of the system more productive than they would have been if they had never been in it. Since most parents in the US game the system to try to get their children into anything other than the public school system, and with some notable exceptions it’s almost axiomatic that bright kids fare better in charter schools, home schools, special magnet schools – almost anywhere but in the local school where they live and grow up – we are clearly not doing well by the bright kids.

We don’t seem to be doing well by many of the others, either. Drop-out rates are awful, and we know from experiences in special places such as Harlem and Chicago that it’s possible to have much better results with the same kids as the public school system takes in (and lets drop out) it is certainly possible to do better. So why are things so wrong, or are they? Is that just a perception? Does the public get a decent return on the education investment, which is, after all, a major part of the state budget, and for that matter, the federal Department of Education gets three or four times as much as NASA; and while NASA is not terribly efficient, it does tend to have a positive effect on science and research. Has anyone ever shown that all the Federal money spent on education improves education for anyone?

Of course that’s overly broad. But education in the US is highly organized and very expensive, and correlating money spent with results isn’t encouraging – that is if you are allowed to have a hard look at results. The purpose of the public education system seems to be to insure the job security of all teachers good or bad and of the outfits who provide credentials; proof of the relationship of credentials to effective teaching seems singularly lacking.

But this is all musing. You’re welcome to comment. Just don’t take it that I have presented the above as anything but rambling. My general conclusions haven’t changed in years: the best thing we could do for education now is to return control of hiring, spending, policy, teacher qualification, and just about everything else to local school districts which pay for the schools and elect school boards. Some of them will be terrible, some will be wasteful, but does anyone believe that the overall result would be worse than what we have?

But enough. I have to get up at blooking dawn to get out there for an MRI, and I have to first figure out just where it is that I am going.

View 719 Friday, April 06, 2012

Good Friday

Yesterday we took Roberta out to her regular doctor, who confirmed that everyone else – two trips to the emergency room and three to urgent care – had done the right thing, and the only thing we can do now is be patient. It’s what I expected to hear, and under the circumstances it was the best possible news, but it will be weeks before her hand is anything like normal again. Which makes for a difficult routine at our age; my apologies to subscribers for being a bit slow on updates and comments.

I took Roberta to dinner to ‘celebrate’, so yesterday was pretty well used up. I have to visit an old friend in the hospital today. He has been a character in a couple of my stories. And it’s Good Friday.

Alien Artifact, the new system built with an Intel Sandy Bridge in the beautiful Thermaltake case runs just fine except that we’re having trouble setting up the cache system which uses silicon memory and is supposed to work just fine: it doesn’t, and that’s probably because I’ve been so distracted I haven’t been able to go through the manuals and on-line stuff to see how the RAID system that works this magic is properly set up, and whether there are memory tests I ought to perform. A side effect of this is that if I let the energy manager put the machine to sleep, it wakes up, looks for the cache, can’t find it, and reboots. So long as I set sleep to ‘never’ the system works just fine.

It is running on the Sandy Bridge on-board sound and video, and it does that just fine. I’ve been testing it with really complex video stuff like Total War Rome Barbarian Invasion, which can involve a lot of individual figures in combat, and the display is just fine on the 21” analog bottle monitor at the test stand. I’ve been meaning to replace that monitor with a larger flat screen and one of these days I’ll get around to it; but in any event, I can say that for all business applications and for anything but the really latest fast shooters, Sandy Bridge is just fine for video. The sound is all right, too. At some point I may put in a sound card that lets me do some selective amplifications of different frequencies: as it happens my hearing losses are rather specific and narrow, and if I turn up to a high enough volume to be able to understand, some speech frequencies are over loud to the point of making some announcers nearly intolerable. Not their fault. I have a very strange hearing loss pattern and any kind of hearing aid to adapt to that would cost a lot more than I want to pay. Once we’ve fixed the cache adjustment problem with Alien Artifact I’ll do a column catching up with 2011 Orchids and Onions, and details on Alien Artifact. I got the Thermaltake case and power supply after the end of 2011, so I can’t give it an award in that column, but I sure like the way Thermaltake has designed the case for ease of maintenance, replacement of disk drive, and all the rest. It is costly, but that’s a cost I’ll be willing to pay in future: I’m tired of having to fight case design when I maintain computers. Of course for most computers that you’re never going to update or make changes to that doesn’t matter, but most of our machines end up as lab rats at some point. Anyway I’ll cover all that in the column as soon as we have a happy ending.

If you are looking for some good short snippets to read, try http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2010/02/economic-political-wisdom-jerry.html which is, of all things, a compilation of ‘the wisdom of Jerry Pournelle’. Needless to say I didn’t do it, but I rather like what has been done. It’s a number of snippets of things I have said, mostly in the old View and Mail columns before we moved to Bluehost, and some of them are pretty good. This was good editing. There’s also other good stuff on that site.

And with that I’m off. Thanks.

For those concerned about Roberta, there is no reason to be. She managed to bash her hand in a way that made us think it was broken, but it was not; still it ended up half the size of a football, and hurts like anything, and there were these dark line on her fingers and up her arm, and they had to cut her rings off, and it was a mess.  The various visits after the first were precautionary so that someone better qualified than me could have a look, and the last visit to our regular doctor was something I insisted on just be be sure. The remedy from here on is cheap – it is called patience. That isn’t an easy virtue to develop. I won’t say all is well because it’s painful and taking forever but it is daily looking marginally better and comparing it now to the photo of what it was at first is reassuring. Still ugly, and we were worried about infection, but there hasn’t been any. Danger of infection is why the surgeons didn’t want to do anything. So we wait. With patience…

I see that The Legend of Black Ship Island remains fairly high up on the Amazon sales list for science fiction, and there are a couple of good reviews. It will be interesting to see what will happen to this novella. We could certainly have sold it to one of the SF magazines, but it wouldn’t have come out for several months that way, and magazines really hate that length – too long for a since issue, not long enough to be in a three part serial, just awkward length – and it’s not the kind of story that ought to be broken into chunks anyway. I suspect it has already sold as many copies to earn more than we’d have got for serial rights – sf magazines haven’t changed their rates in years – and I doubt that any magazine would have wanted to print the Foreword and Acknowledgements. It was tricky to work out a story that could fit between two published stories, be significant enough to bother with, and still never be mentioned in Beowulf’s Children. All the comments I have got from readers have been good; a couple of people have spotted a minor error that ought to have been caught in the final edit (not a typo, an actual minor inconsistency in the story) that caused us to do another pass through the book. We didn’t do any significant change – about five words I think – and we didn’t find many more typos (probably about a dozen) so there’s no point in waiting for the republication. It really is a trivial error, and few seem to have noticed. I sure didn’t, and I did the final pass on the story. And the new alien is interesting…

“Self” publishing – in our case the novella was ‘published’ by our agent by posting it on Amazon and now I think at Nook – will become increasingly important as eBook readers continue to sell. It’s a publishing revolution.

It Is Later Than You Know…

When I was in school we all had to read Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, and in 9th grade we also were shown in class the 1935 film of Tale of Two Cities in which, after some arrogant acts by aristocrats, Defarge goes to a church plaque inscribed “It is later than you know” and scrawls BLOOD on the stone. After the revolution we are shown the beheadings of the aristocrats: whose who arrogantly took their lifetime privileges and laughed at those who had to pay for their revels.

New subject. It took a couple of years for it to leak out, but we now know the attitude of at least some of the civil servants whom we pay with increased taxes. We have from the Huffington Post the story of tine Las Vegas GSA Team Building conference paid for by federal taxes. We also have videos of federal employees in their cubicles doing videos of – well, see for yourself.

And those who “lost their jobs" over this turn out mostly to have been transferred, possibly demoted, but pension rights are pretty well unaffected. So it goes. And we need to raise taxes because the government doesn’t take in enough money. You can’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor.  Or something.

View 719 Wednesday, April 04, 2012

I’ve been fooling around trying to find out what we did wrong with Alien Artifact, the gorgeous new Sandy Bridge system built on the Thermaltake case. The problems have nothing to do with Thermaltake, and probably stem from advanced hardware features not fully understood. My fault, really.

I also tried the new Microsoft Sidewinder gaming keyboard, which is nice. Alas, the keys are just a little smaller than those on the Microsoft Comfortcurve keyboards, and spaced more closely than those on the Ortek. Nothing important here. One thing, Windows 7 once fully updated knows more about the Microsoft gaming keyboard including its macro programmable keys than does the software disk that comes with the machine. I find that  if you want to install this keyboard, you’re better off shutting down the system. I simply plugged mine in as a second USB keyboard, and the result was fun but time consuming as the system tried to figure out which keyboard to accept command for while it tried to install drivers. Once it knows about everything, that’s no longer a problem. Ah well.

The Sidewinder is a good keyboard, and is now a candidate for the standard Chaos Manor keyboard, but so far I’m still mostly using Comfotrcuve and of course my old Ortek. The Ortek cleaned up pretty good with a can of tuner cleaner. And besides I have stuffed foam rubber under the caps lock key so it takes a really had push to activate it. Far as I am concerned the Caps Lock key could be over on the side but that’s another matter.

Thermaltake makes a gamers keyboard that’s got lots of features, but it’s even smaller than the Microsoft. More on all these when I get the column done.

I’m climbing my way out of the hole I dug myself.

The Zimmerman case is too complex to be written about in a few sentences, and I haven’t had time to do it properly. Now there’s this:

A good write up on the zimmerman "case" by a former police offer and current high school teacher

https://statelymcdanielmanor.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/the-trayvon-martin-case-rational-procedure/

Phil

This summarizes the situation about as well as anything I know. There are principles here, and some conflicting rights; but the conflicts come from disagreements over just what happened? Who struck the first blow? Those are not matters we can resolve from this distance and most of the press doesn’t seem to have put much effort in trying to find out the facts. Anyway, this is a good summary.

I continue to observe that if you want self government, you need to have citizens participate in governing. One way to preserve public order is with the participation of the citizens in organizations like neighborhood watch.

I am informed that I have been misinformed: the requirement that emergency rooms treat all comers regardless of condition was not imposed by courts but by a law passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by Reagan as part of a consolidated budget reconciliation. The courts later added illegal aliens to the requirement. It was well intentioned, but the result was the closure of more than half the emergency rooms in Los Angeles county and the destruction of the trauma care network that had been built over the years. The same has happened in other places.

There is no general agreement over why hospitals all over the cpuntry close, but the ones in Los Angeles that closed their emergency rooms have made it clear that they can’t afford to leave them open.

There are discussions everywhere. One that looks in some detail at matters in New York is http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/iotw/20050926/200/1600

The real question, as usual, is entitlements vs. responsibilities. Modern health care is expensive, sometimes excessively so. A friend who survived an aneurism has been billed for more than $14,000 for a few day’s drugs. Few live through the experience so few need them so they remain expensive: that’s the best explanation they were able to get. It may be true. Modern health care is expensive. It’s a lot easier to talk about in the abstract than when it gets personal.

I have also been taken to task for using the phrase “borrow money from China” when talking about needless government, as in, should we borrow money from China in order to pay Federal inspectors to attend stage magician shows to see whether or not the magician uses rabbits in his act, and if so, does he have a Federal license from the Department of Agriculture to keep that rabbit? And no, I am not making that up: the regulation exists, and there are inspectors whose job is to enforce it.

My correspondent accuses me of unfair tactics when I use the phrase “borrow money from China” because most of the money we borrow doesn’t come from China. Most of the money the Federal government borrows is through bonds bought by American individuals and investment firms. We don’t owe that money to foreign governments. In Samuelson’s famous phrase about the National Debt, ‘we owe it to ourselves’. That was said in President Roosevelt’s time. Since then the debt has gotten much larger. It grew from 1776 fairly continuously until, for a couple of years, the Gingrich/Clinton combination managed to halt the debt increase and even pay down on it a little, but “Big Government Conservatives” started it growing again, a tradition continued after the Republican lost the Congress and then the White House.

Most of that is owed to Americans, but a substantial amount is owed to foreigners. It’s still debt. We may feel that it’s better to default on money owed Americans than on money owed to China – we owe it to ourselves! In fact there are some pretty severe consequences to owing so much to ourselves, but leave that: is my point about borrowing money to pay for needless government particularly affected by from whom we owe the money? The real question is, should we be paying Federal officers to see that stage magicians had Federal bunny licenses? There are also inspectors who see to it that a teenager keeping rabbits at home in North Dakota, or Missouri, or Oregon, have Federal licenses – but only if the bunnies are sold as pets. If they are raised to be eaten and skinned to make baby blankets, or to be fed to pet pythons, no Federal license is required. Only if you are selling the rabbits as pets or to others who will keep the rabbits alive and breed them, only then do you need a federal license.

One wonders just where in the US Constitution is the grant of power to allow bunny inspectors to wander about looking for stage magicians to harass, or teenage kids who raise rabbits in their back yards. One might think that if this is a matter for government at all, it would be state or county or city or village officials who should be involved, not Federal civil servants. But even if we concede that this is a Federal matter, is it of such vital importance that we ought to borrow money in order to do it?

And I do note that despite all kinds of promises from political candidates to go through the Federal budget page by page with a laser-like focus to eliminate programs we don’t need or can’t afford, the bunny inspectors are still with us, are still being paid and collecting health care and pension entitlements, and we are still borrowing money to pay them with. And the question remains, even if we had so much money we have budget surpluses, would this be the right way to spend the money before we have paid off the National Debt?

Incidentally, I see there is a web site called www.bunnyinspectors.com that collects stories of needless budget expenditures. It says it was started as a result of my ruminations on this matter,

Think of how much oil we would save if we all had one of these. Get yours today. http://www.tigerdirect.com/sectors/campaigns/kube/kubex15.asp?SRCCODE=WEM3063BY&cm_mmc=email-_-Main-_-WEM3063-_-tigeremail3063&utm_source=EML&utm_medium=main&utm_campaign=WEM3063

I’ll try to do a mail bag tonight.