View 699 Thursday, November 03, 2011

Don’t know when you’ll see this. Time Warner Cable Internet service has been unreliable for the past couple of weeks, with intermittent periods of no service. It’s been out for over an hour now. Ah. Now it’s back. We’ll see for how long. Time Warner has been doing this to us recently. Hah. It was back for less than a minute. Now the cable modem is blinking again. I sure wish I had a reliable alternative to Time Warner Cable Internet service, but I don’t think I do.

It came back on at 1400 and seems to be working again. When it works it works well, but I have had a several minute failure every couple of days for the past week. It’s more annoying than anything else, of course. I expect you can just call this griping. I’d have been happy for this much service a decade ago.

What with the Time Warner Internet connection being out again it’s probably as well that I don’t do breaking news. (Now it’s back, but I still don’t do breaking news. And now it’s gone again.)

The reason I don’t do breaking news is that although the media give you the impression that they know what’s going on, they don’t, but they have a great interest in making you think they do.

There are now many new versions of the Herman Cain story, none with much in the way of facts. What’s clear is that he’s fair game for anyone who can come up with something to say, and even fairly conservative outfits are eager to get in on the game, with announcements that turn out to say little to nothing that can be confirmed, and some of which has already been withdrawn.

I understand the blood lust of the liberals against Cain. I am not sure why outfits that call themselves conservative are joining that hunt given the ambiguity of the charges. Yes, it proves that Cain can be flustered. So have a number of presidents. I am not at all certain that stability under media fire is at the top of the list of qualifications to be president in what is the biggest crisis since – well, certainly since the end of the Cold War. Being cool is a virtue, but the President is not often called before an Inquisition without advisors and staff. President Obama seems to have that skill; has it served the nation well? Presenting a good front to journalists is not actually the ultimate achievement for a president.

The journalism game has changed a lot since I got into the racket. Of course I was and am a columnist rather than a reporter, and while I have done factual reporting – I was science correspondent for National Catholic Press for a number of years and did a lot of straight reports – it wasn’t my strongest point. Mostly I deal in what I choose to call informed opinion and rational argument. But I have noticed that over the years journalists have become more frantic, a lot more like paparazzi.

I wonder if that is caused by the Internet and blogging? Now everyone has access to the public. Everyone is a publisher. Having a Press Card counts essentially for nothing. Anyone is a reporter. In my day journalists were more concerned with getting it right than getting it first – the old Hearst days of getting it out there as an Extra to sell more papers were over and taught as bad examples. Of course being right rather than first could be taken too far; I recall some of us ribbing Eric Burgess, the highly respected science correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, and incidentally the man who thought of “The Plaque” that went out with Pioneer – Niven and I were with him when he thought of it and saw him dash off to talk to Sagan about it. At a National Association of Science Writers meeting once Burgess, in a public discussion, said “Everything in the Monitor is true!” At which point several of his colleagues said “Yes, Eric, and it has been for a long, long time…”  But in general we were all agreed that it was better to get the facts right before breaking the story.

But the myth of the scoop continued even then and seems potent now. After all, you might have that golden story, the one that goes viral and gets you a million readers, and you can turn that into your own web site. You can be the Daily Koz or rival Huffington, all you have to do is hit it right. That still doesn’t explain how supposedly conservative and well established web sites rush into the Pound Cain and Pound Him Now contest.

As for me, I can wait for the facts on his personal story. I like most of what Cain proposes. I particularly like a national excise tax. Taxing consumption has the great merit of being inescapable. Everyone has to pay some of it. The worst thing about democracy is that it gives the power to tax to those who aren’t paying that tax. The very principle of a ‘progressive’ tax is that it’s a tax on someone else, but if it’s actually progressive then there’s some hope that even the poorest must pay something, and thus have an incentive to think about what that something is spent on.

It’s really easy to vote for a tax you won’t pay that is targeted for something that either benefits you directly, or makes you feel generous and charitable, a bit like Robin Hood. It’s not charity when you rob the rich to give to the poor, and it’s not really all that moral when you slaughter the King’s Men in ambush in order to rob the tax collector . You may also learn that you have made mortal enemies of the King’s Men, and that they may be better at their job than you are, but that’s another story. But I ramble. My point is that Cain proposes taxes that everyone will pay, which gives everyone a powerful incentive to keep those taxes low.

And yes: I think that even those who live entirely off the public teat, whose entire income is given to them by the government either as a pension or as salary or as Food Stamps or Health Care Benefits or as an “earned income tax” (aka negative income tax, a ‘refund’ of withholding taxes only there were no taxes withheld) – even if your total income is from government payments to you of other people’s tax money, you ought to pay some taxes. There ought to be some consequence to you for voting for tax increases. Or so I believe. And Cain seems to appreciate that.

It may well turn out that Cain has prohibitive personal faults. Or he may not. We can wait to find that out. Meanwhile, conservatives ought to learn something from the enemy: rally round the flag. Support your own people, and don’t be in a big hurry to bash them. Yes, we have principles, and if one of our own has committed the unforgiveable sin we will reject him: but we are certainly not going to look for reasons to pile on just because the rumors are flying. We can expect those rumors about every candidate we ever field. It’s the other side’s stock in trade.

I’ll let someone else break the news. Here we deal in principles.

The Long Beach Police have, as expected, have been cleared of all wrong doing in gunning down without warning a man seated on private property waving about a water hose nozzle that looked something like “a six shooter.” http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/long-beach-officers-cleared-in-water-nozzle-fatal-shooting-case.html

The police never identified themselves, there was no complaint against the victim other than that it looked like a gun –

I thought Americans had the right to keep and bear arms. That would, I would hope, include the right to keep and bear them on private property making no threats against anyone. It would include the right to keep and bear a toy weapon on your front porch.

I had never heard that it was against the law to sit on a porch and wave a toy gun about. I would have thought that the Long Beach police would be obliged to protect a man who, realizing he was drunk, retreated to a friend’s front porch and sat patiently waiting his return. I would have thought it criminal to sneak up on someone and gun him down without warning, whether you are a policeman or a scared neighbor or a would be robber. But I grew up in a time and place when we thought we were free.

Salve Sclave.

Martinmas approaches.

IT fell about the Martinmas time,

And a gay time it was then,

When our goodwife got puddings to make,

And she’s boild them in the pan.

 

The wind sae cauld blew south and north,

And blew into the floor;

Quoth our goodman to our goodwife,

‘Gae out and bar the door.’

 

My hand is in my hussyfskap,

Goodman, as ye may see;

An it shoud nae be barrd this hundred year,

It’s no be barrd for me.’

 

They made a paction tween them twa,

They made it firm and sure,

That the first word whaeer shoud speak,

Shoud rise and bar the door.

Then by there came two gentlemen,

At twelve o clock at night,

And they could neither see house nor hall,

Nor coal nor candle-light.

‘Now whether is this a rich man’s house,

Or whether is it a poor?’

But neer a word wad ane o them speak,

For barring of the door.

 

And first they ate the white puddings,

And then they ate the black;

Tho muckle thought the goodwife to hersel,

Yet neer a word she spake.

Then said the one unto the other,

‘Here, man, tak ye my knife;

Do ye tak aff the auld man’s beard,

And I’ll kiss the goodwife.’

‘But there’s nae water in the house,

And what shall we do than?’

‘What ails ye at the pudding-broo,

That boils into the pan?’

 

O up then started our goodman,

An angry man was he:

‘Will ye kiss my wife before my een,

And scad me wi pudding-bree?’

Then up and started our goodwife,

Gied three skips on the floor:

‘Goodman, you’ve spoken the foremost word,

Get up and bar the door.’

The Hephaestus ABE Books flap continues: I find that at least one of the POD “collections” of my novels, which lists superbookdeals as the publisher, is in fact not a collection of my works but of some statements about those works. That is not stated comprehensibly by the book description, which tries its best to look as if it is offering the books themselves in a new POD edition. At best, then, this is a deception, and offering it for sale does not make add to ABE Books’ reputation.

I am pretty clear that I am not losing any sales to this, and that I over-reacted to the discovery. Anyone buying one of those ‘collections’ and finding that he has paid for a few pages of commentary is not likely to be more reluctant to buy the books themselves, and in fact may even want the real thing even more. I also doubt that there are many sales of these things. My first thought when I saw this was that it was a matter for an author association committee: this whole matter needs a policy considered by experts, not merely the opinion of one author even if that’s me. I need to remember. I don’t do breaking news. And whatever damage this Hephaestus / superbooksdeal is doing to authors is not so huge as to warrant running about in panic. SFWA used to have a copyrights committee to consider such matters. Perhaps it will start that up again.

View 699 Wednesday, November 02, 2011

First order of business is personal/professional:

You might see whether they’re scamming you, too

http://www.cherryh.com/WaveWithoutAShore/?p=3235

Harry Erwin

A quick excursion to Carolyn Cherryh’s web site reveals that there’s a real problem. Carolyn says

Everybody first search my books on B&N, and if you find Hephaestus Books with omnibuses of my work, go to customer service at B&N’s corporate site and write them explaining these are ripoffs and not real books. Be nice, but be firm that these are ripoff collections of Wiki articles purporting to be a book by me and that these have been tossed off Amazon and are now victimizing customers of B&N and cluttering up the search list under my name. This is the e-mail form: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/help/customer_service/morehelp.asp
Arrgh.

I went Googling for Hephaestus Books and my name, and found lots, at both Amazon and B&N. All of the Hephaestus Books I looked at had publication dates of September 2011, meaning that this is a rather recent event. I certainly have never authorized any publications of anything of mine by this publisher, and I am sure that Niven has not, but they sure will sell you a lot of works by us. They’ll also sell you works by Harlan Ellison, and many many others. I called Harlan and Susan to let them know. I note they also have many collections of Heinlein stories. I am pretty sure that Robert’s estate never authorized any such thing.

These appear to be actual printed books, which may mean a considerable investment? It’s certainly a larger operation than the usual pirate site.

My experience has been that readers prefer to buy legitimate copies of books rather than get them from a pirate site, and that includes libertarian friends who don’t believe in intellectual property as such; for them it’s a matter of ethics and courtesy. The argument is that if they download a pirate copy of a book it doesn’t cost the author anything; it’s not like stealing a chair or a car or something. That isn’t my view, but it’s also not the point of what I am saying: even the strictest libertarians apparently prefer to buy copies of books including eBooks, presumably as courtesy to the author. That view makes all eBooks operate the way this site does – it’s free but I encourage subscriptions because if there are no subscriptions I can’t do it. That works here, but I doubt it’s a good business model for publishers. Of course the way the publishing world is changing there may not be any good business models for publishing but that’s another story entirely.

In any event there are to the best of my knowledge no authorized Hephaestus Books by Pournelle or Niven. The good news is that the Hephaestus editions don’t appear in early pages when you Google my name, but I don’t know how long that will last.

Doing a Google of Pournelle Hephaestus turns up a ton of such books offered for sale by Abe Books http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?paratrk=&isbn=9781242814747&ltrec=t&bi= including one published by Superbookdeals, which appears to be in some way connected to ABE BOOKS. There are giant collections of my stuff, none ever authorized by me in any way. I don’t know what the quality of the book might be. I suspect these will turn out to be Print on Demand books if they exist at all, but they are also said to be available through Amazon. There is some indication that ABE is owned by Amazon. This would mean that Amazon owns a pirate book company and I hesitate to say that; but I do note that http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=5892701584&searchurl=isbn%3D9781242814747%26ltrec%3Dt offers

Novels By Jerry Pournelle, including: The Legacy Of Heorot, The Mote In God’s Eye, The Gripping Hand, Footfall, Inferno (novel), Fallen Angels (scienc
(ISBN: 1242814744 / 1-242-81474-4 )

• Bookseller: SuperBookDeals (South Bend, IN, U.S.A.)
• Bookseller Rating:

And I am sure that we have never authorized any such collection. This is a POD book. I suppose I should order one, but frankly I am aghast.

I have informed my agent of all this. I do not know the connection between ABE books and Amazon. I don’t know who is selling my works as POD. I get a fair amount of income from Amazon, including from eBook sales, so I am certainly not intending to denounce Amazon. If there’s someone in my readership who knows what is going on, I’d appreciate the knowledge.

Digging in further I find that many of the works Carolyn complained of are just collections of articles about her works put up as “books” ; but there are also POD editions of the actual works offered for sale. I found a POD edition of Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison, some Heinlein novels, a bunch of other such stuff. I’m only learning about this now.

I don’t seem to have Carolyn’s email address and it’s not obvious on her site, and I don’t have an account there, so I can’t tell her but there are still POD copies of her works for sale out there. Not sure whether on Amazon or not. I have wearied myself in digging up this stuff.  Time to do some real work.

abebooks. Used Book seller?

According to wikipedia, abebooks is a used book seller. A quick look I did for your books and Niven’s. All your books that I saw were "used" (condition "good", etc.). Two of the listings for Nivens were "new", but most were used? There were a lot of books listed for both of your names, and I didn’t check all of them.

Wikipedia says Amazon bought AbeBooks in 2008.

Aloha,

-Bill Elliott

I do not know how to make it clearer.  The work cited above http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=5892701584&searchurl=isbn%3D9781242814747%26ltrec%3Dt offers a printed new copy of a compilation of many of my books that have never been compiled into a single work. It can’t be a used book because no such book ever existed. I found many such works on ABE Books. I found a POD of Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird stories. Yes, there are many copies of used books offered for sale, but among them are new POD copies of the work. Perhaps some authors have authorized them to do POD copies of compilations of their works, but I certainly never have , Niven hasn’t, Harlan hasn’t, Carolyn Cherryh hasn’t, and in fact I don’t know of anyone who has.

Go to the link. See what is offered. Go to the link on that page about booksellers. It tells me that SuperbookDeals is the printer/publisher. I know that ABE Books is a used book store and has been for a long time. It offers rare books. It also appears to offer unauthorized POD copies of new books. I’m, not sure what else I can say.

See also http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=5816508978&searchurl=isbn%3D9781242814747%26ltrec%3Dt which offers a collection of my works in a compilation of Hephaestus Press.  I have never signed a contract with Hephaestus Press. I have not authorized anyone to off Hephaestus Press copies of a compilation of a number of my works. I have never authorized ANYONE to make a compilation of a lot of my books and sell them in a single volume.

View 699 Tuesday, November 01, 2011

The expected assault on Herman Cain continues. The Establishment media are afraid of him. They believe there is a substantial chance that Obama will lose the next election no matter who the Republican candidate may be, and that means that the Republican candidate must be someone who can ‘grow’ in office – i.e., can be co-opted by the liberal Establishment, and of the possible candidates Cain is one of the least likely to be seduced by the siren songs of the Establishment. They don’t have much that he wants, and he has been among them enough to know who and what they are; so they terrify him.

I am not privy to what the White House political operatives are learning from their polls, but it’s a pretty leaky outfit, and their inconsistencies are an increasing source of irritation to the technocrats in the staff. That’s always a problem with campaigns. Campaign management is one of the most stressful occupations one can have short of combat command, and competence and blind loyalty to a set of inconsistent principles adds greatly to that stress. From what I can gather, the internal White House polls are bad, and Cain’s growing popularity is seen as a real danger, because he cuts much of the ground out from under the chosen campaign strategy. Obama’s short 43 vehicle motorcade through Carolina and Virginia was a political test – although it was billed as “presidential” and thus paid for by the taxpayers rather than campaign funds – and they learned a lot. One thing they discovered is that even among the faithful an Obama speech doesn’t carry the magic it once did. Exhortations and perorations don’t generate the wild enthusiasm, and indeed, some voters are actually interested in some of the gory details of how we will get out of the hole we are in.

Cain says the way out of a hole is to stop digging. Scrap the complicated old tax code and start over. Limit the amount of spending. Determine what must be spent and raise the money to do that. Details can be worked out. Cain represents the old American “can do” spirit, and is a living embodiment of the once universal American dream. Work hard, apply yourself, and achieve; but don’t be full of yourself about it. Amazing grace saved a wretch like me. Go give it a try yourself.

Which is the exact opposite of the “trust us, and all will be well. Few remember Harry Golden’s book “You’re Entitle” but it expressed the notion perfectly: the essence of citizenship is entitlements, not freedom and opportunity. That works so long as there are enough people who don’t believe it and actually do the work, but as Margaret Thatcher told us, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. The US is about at the edge now: we’ll soon have more people living off the government and paying little to nothing in than those who work to pay for this. When that happens and is politically institutionalized, it’s pretty hard to displace by electoral means.

Back in the days of the myth of the General Strike and the various revolutionary movements, the revolt was of the workers who were weary of working for others. Those who grew the wheat and made the bread tired of feeding their aristocratic masters – or later the capitalists – and demanded that this stop. Today’s revolutionaries camp out in the public squares, and contribute to the society by organizing their communities and turning out the vote.

I recall a few years ago there was a movement to organize a “welfare recipients league.” I cheered it on: “Organize! Strike! Withhold your services!” Of course I wasn’t the only one to see the absurdity and the welfare recipient league went away. Now we have many organizations that are essentially the same outfit, but they have different names, and they organize to vote and pay lobbyists. Public employees unions pay dues which go to lobbyists to vote for the candidates who negotiate their salaries and pensions. Oddly enough, the salaries and pensions rise monotonically if not exponentially.

Much of the political management expertise I once had is obsolete, based on an America that no longer exists, but some principles don’t change. If you want less of something, tax it. If you want more, subsidize it. If you want people to stop saving money, tax interest they receive from money they already paid taxes on. And if you pay people for not working, you will get fewer people busting their chops to find work, or taking jobs that are beneath them, and more pressure to have ‘guest workers’ to pick apples and mow lawns and dig vegetable gardens or clean buildings or scrub hospitals – jobs that Americans don’t want to do. Meanwhile we pay government workers to do the jobs that used to define people’s lives. When I was a Scout leader, some of my assistants were people who washed cars for a living. Another was a janitor. They got part of their life definition by being involved in public service, with the Scouts, or with their schools, or through their churches.

When enough people are paid by the government not to work, and whose contributions to the society are their progeny and their vote, what happens next? Ayn Rand speculated on that once, but we really don’t need her dramatic hidden valley.

Somebody’s got to work. Who should it be, you?

I ramble. My point is that Herman Cain scares the establishment something awful. He’s not interested in handing out entitlements so that he can win a second term. He’d like to win, but there are things he won’t do. Such men are dangerous.

Department of disturbing new items:

The radio is announcing on the regular news – I have heard this twice – that in one restaurant in China you can visit a cage full of Koala bears, choose one, pay Twenty-two ($22.00), and have the animal served either broiled or braised. I know no more about it than that, but I would have thought that live Koala Bears cost more than that?  More if I learn more.

(I added this to yesterday’s view, but it got posted late. Sorry for repetition.)

On the Procedure known as “Simple Western”: my thanks to all who sent me mail explaining it.

Simple Western

Hi Dr. Pournelle –

Long time reader, first-time caller. Regarding the egregious "Simple Western" ads in Science – your instinct is correct, there’s tremendous amounts of cash to be made by convincing molecular biologists that they need "integrated systems" to do biochemical assays they could just as easily whip up following instructions from the venerable Cold Spring Harbor manual (http://cshprotocols.cshlp.org/). In some instances (ie labs working with massive, parallel arrays of samples) this approach might be necessary, but I remain convinced of the virtues of DIY unless proven otherwise.

"Simple western" is nothing more than an automated "E-Z" western blot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_blot), a gel electrophoresis-based protein immunodetection assay (useful if you want to ID one particular protein, or even roughly quantitate the concentration of one particular protein in a sample extraction mix). The "western" in the name comes from a decades old joke – biochemist Edwin Southern invented a DNA hybridization detection technique that became known as the Southern Blot, then an RNA-detection technique jokingly got called a "Northern" blot and shortly thereafter the protein detection technique got called a "Western". The names have absolutely ZERO to do with cardinal directions and have been confusing students of biochemistry for decades. Just another example of how misused language can obfuscate and baffle all but the experts…

All the best and keep up the good work!

Sincerely,

Brett Alcott

Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics Columbia University New York NY

And my thanks. One of the great benefits of being me is that I have readers like you. I have said since BIX days that I can probably get the answer to any question no matter how obscure, and within a few days at that.

Cocktail party theories.

Cocktail party theories are theories you would defend at a cocktail party or a home salon, but which you don’t publish in peer reviewed journals. I have many of them.

I was reminded of one recently. I have for decades – I think I first published it in Galaxy in the 70’s – had the cocktail party theory that humans and dogs coevolved. It goes like this: the same brain areas that needed for a sense of smell are also those needed for smarts. A long time ago humans made a deal with dogs. You keep the sense of smell. We’ll get smart. We’ll watch out for each other’s kids. Thrive.

Evolution goes more by villages and clans than individuals. Villages that have dogs tend to have more kids growing up to have children than villages that don’t. Dogs are an advantage.

What reminded me of this is the discovery, way back in one of the cave picture caves with the buffalo pictures of some 25,000 years ago, there are some footprints that turn out to be from that time. (How they were preserved and how we know how old they are isn’t obvious to me, but it seems to be accepted.) One is the footprint of what appears to be a ten year old human. The other is that of either a wolf or a dog. Since it’s unlikely that the cave painters would be allowing their children to wander back in there and then let a wolf in, I imagine that’s a boy and his dog. From 25,000 years ago. Now I’m going to go pet Sable.