View 718 Monday, March 26, 2012

We are working on the new Sandy Bridge machine. I have a huge pile of components from Thermaltake, including a power supply that Eric says would power a village, and the most spectacular case I have ever seen. It will all be in the column.

There’s also a gamer’s keyboard. It has mechanical keys, and they feel great, but it also has the compact layout that, I guess, killer gamers prefer: that layout is too small for me. I love the key feel, but I want the keys further apart; but then my goal is not to be a gaming challenger. This keyboard is for killers, with its high polling race, and I suppose gamers like keyboards with a more compact layout. I’m impressed with this Ttesports MEKA by Thermaltake, but it won’t be the keyboard that replaced my wonderful old Ortek.

I’ve been making do on most of my systems with Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboards, and I do like them, but the keys don’t feel right compared to my wonderful old Ortek. I sure wish I had bought half a dozen of these old keyboards when they were available, but as time goes on machines are more and more demanding USB keyboards, which of course the Ortek wasn’t.

I have a ton of mail on this subject and I am sure I will get more, but I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do about the keyboard situation.

What I need is a full sized keyboard, not curved – I thought I liked curved but I seem to be able to type faster with straight lines – and clicky. I like having programmable keys. And I want a full sized layout.

Construction of the new machine continues. We’re using the Thermaltake case. It’s costly – but I already wish I had had that available when we built Emily, the Intel Extreme system that this new one will replace. I am fond of Antec cases, and they have been standard at Chaos Manor for years, but the model we chose for Emily turns out to have been an experimental design that just didn’t work. It attempted to do what the Thermaltake has done – make it very easy to maintain and upgrade hardware on a high end system. Full writeup coming, but I would have paid for this Thermaltake case when we were building Emily had I But Known. It is really designed to make life easier for those who have to update and maintain high end systems. So far we have not got the system done so I can’t recommend it yet, but I love the design. The Thermaltake is so fancy in presentation that you at first don’t appreciate the design features which make it easy to get at the components and change them without having to use tools and pull the system out of its installation. And the internal cable routings and such are very nice. More when we finish it but my first impressions are highly favorable, and while the cost is high, anyone who has to maintain high end systems will realize that it’s worth money to save time and frustration – or so I have learned trying to keep Emily up to snuff.

Again more later when we have got the new system running, but as Eric just noted, it’s a bit like building a sports car and finding out that they’ve really worked on making the maintenance easy.

We have had a brushup caused by a bad DVD blank disk (a generic – don’t use them!) rendering Emily unusable then requiring a restart from power down, and of course the horrible case – again you can’t buy one of that design, it was a temporary and it seemed pretty good when we installed it, but it uses a goofy hinge front system that breaks easily – anyway the horrid case cost an hour of mucking about getting Emily running again so we could burn a Windows 8 disk. Finally all is well.

The Florida Zimmerman/Martin case continues to take up time and energy, but it is clear enough to me that there are unresolved – perhaps unresolvable – ambiguities, and we aren’t going to settle it on general principles. We have a conflict of rights situation, and the details matter. Martin had every right to walk through the neighborhood. Zimmerman acted a bit like a snoop but apparently didn’t threaten Martin; if there was any interaction it’s not reported. And then everything went to hell.

If ever there was a matter for local authorities to sort out, this is it; and there is no reason for all this national attention. But this is an election year and we have a President desperate for an incident to raise his popularity above the deadly 43% mark. Perhaps this can be made into something. And here we go.

In the meantime there have been dozens of homicides in the US. And there will be more.

Bill Gates seems impressed with the rising CO2 enough that he prefers nuclear power to natural gas. So do I. I agree that we don’t want to run an open ended experiment on how much CO2 we can put into the atmosphere. On the other hand, India’s cows can produce enough CO2 to keep the atmospheric amount rising. If we seriously have to eliminate CO2 additions to below what the ecological system can absorb we are talking about really drastic measures.

More likely we come up with some means of increasing the ecological reduction of CO2 amounts. The method that used to be discussed was adding iron to the sea to cause plankton blooms. A couple of experiments give less promising results than enthusiasts had expected. After that the experiments seem to have stopped. I have lost track of why. I’ll see if I can find out. Clearly, if we are going to limit the CO2 in the atmosphere, we have to find ways to take it out, or change the way we live. Drastically. And probably limit population. That is a formula for war without end.

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.

View 717 Thursday, March 22, 2012

Eric was over all day as we Threw Stuff Away, coming down to the layer that accumulated when I was getting my brain burned out with hard X-rays, and all kinds of review stuff accumulated and piled up unopened. Some of it did get reviewed, and some just vanished into the muck, and it was pretty well a Shroedinger’s Cat situation as to which was which. We also discovered some truly historic stuff. There’s the ViewSonic 1024 x 768 flat screen monitor which in its day was the best thing since sliced bread, all boxed up in its original box with nylon thread reinforcing tape in strategic places, and all the original packing plastic mould beds. Niven and I carried that on road trips with the best portable computer we had, a good keyboard, and a good mouse; we’d set it up in a motel, such as the one in Death Valley, and write scenes from our next novel on it. As Eric observed when I asked what ought to replace it, now we just use large screen laptops; but in those days there weren’t any.

We found Ethernet Hubs (not switches); Software from the ages; all kinds of good stuff.

The Secret of Black Ship Island is posted. I yesterday called it the Legend of Black Ship Island. It’s one of those tricky memory things that keeps happening to me now. Nothing really serious, and I catch on fast. It is comforting that my memory today is about the same as Niven’s was when I met him forty years ago.

I’m feeling a lot better and my energy levels go up every day. Getting up the hill yesterday (4.5 miles round trip and 700 foot climb) was an accomplishment but it felt good. And my friend who has brought his severely autistic boy from a professional diagnosis of hopelessly retarded to A’s and B’s and clearly a high understanding of things he is interested in such as Medieval History – and also a polite potential citizen – is writing the case history up, which is terribly important.

I owe you a good essay on the state of psychiatric/psychological theory as it has developed over the years, and why things are in such a sorry state now.

When I was in graduate school in psychology, ADD and ADHD barely existed. The word ‘autistic’ ==

0330 AM

At this point I was called to assist Roberta who had a household accident that looked serious enough that I immediately drove her to the Kaiser Emergency Room. All’s well, we are back home with medications and a big bandage and some follow-ups to do, but I’ll have to do my essay on what has happened to psychiatry since I was in graduate school another time. It’s important. The teaser is that we have far too much theory and far too little data, and my friend’s case history of his son, and the stories of what happened to others he has met – people with severely autistic children tend to meet a lot of others with the same problem – is important.

It started in Vienna not so many years ago

When not enough people were getting sick,

And a starving young physician sought to better his condition

By figuring out what made his patients tick.

That’s the opening of a humorous folk song, but it contains a great deal of truth. Freud, on the basis of some real and some made up cases switched psychiatry from being a branch of medicine to something else, and postulated some physiological structures for which there was absolutely no evidence, nor is there any now. There’s actually more evidence for Hubbard’s theory of the ‘reactive’ mind as opposed to intellectual consciousness, which was the central theory of Dianetics before the AMA forced him to turn it from a science – he thought of himself as a scientist – to a religion. Yet Freud was and for the most part remains intellectually respectable. And psychiatry for a while divorced itself from the standard practice of medicine which collects case histories and looks for groupings of people who respond to certain treatments, and who use raw data – case histories – and have definite criteria for declaring when they know the ‘cause’ of a condition. Psychiatric textbooks of the 1950’s were way different from what you find now – and were also quite different in structure and argument from medical textbooks in other medical specialties.

But it’s late, and I have to get to bed.

I want again to say nice things about Kaiser. Everyone we encountered out there was cheerful, cooperative, and thoroughly professional. That includes the triage nurse who has one of the toughest jobs anywhere, the orderlies, and the checkout nurse, as well as the doctors and nurses in the ER itself.

While we were out at the ER I read an article I probably wouldn’t have read. Andrei Navrozov, Baudelaire in Russia in the current issue of Chronicles (a paleo-conservative magazine). I have searched for something to link to, but I can’t find it; the article is in the April 2012 issue. Navrozov is the poetry editor, and his point is that there was probably more communication among and within the literary community in the 19^th Century than today. “It turns out that news of high culture travelled much faster before the invention of the telephone and the computer.” He gives a number of instances. The article is not one I would normally have read, but it was what I had when waiting, and I got more to think about from it than from anything else I have recently read. More on that another time, but the entire April issue of Chronicles is filled with good stuff including a short disquisition on Green Pastures, the Broadway play made from Roark Bradford’s Ol’ Man Adam and His Chillun, a book I encountered in high school and remember to this day. I don’t care for much that I find in Chronicles, but sometimes it’s right on the button. As for instance “When Judicial Supremacists Artrack” by William J. Watkins, Jr., an excellent discussion of constitutional law and judicial supremacy, and perhaps a better exposition of what Newt Gingrich was trying to get at than Newt himself made, also in the April issue.

Note that I had misspelled Navrozov in my first uploading of this. That will teach me to write anything serious at 3:30 AM/

And now I really have to get to bed. It’s 0400. Good night.