Chaos Manor View, Saturday, December 05, 2015

Yesterday I was reading the Wall Street Journal at the breakfast table; I was reading the paper copy, because, probably out of habit, I find it easier to read as a newspaper in the mornings. Precious, my Surface 3 Pro with Surface 4 keyboard, works well enough, but, again likely because of habit, it seems to be more in the way than the paper copy, and I’d have to go get her from my front room office before I sit down to my first coffee of the morning, and that would mean using the walker which I have just folded up after going out to the front walk to get the three paper newspapers we get and bringing them in so Roberta will have her paper, and I will have my LA Times and Wall Street Journal, and – well, this sentence is getting away from me, but you see where it might have gone. Reading on line at the breakfast table is not a simple affair, and I haven’t planned out how to make it a daily routine.

For that matter, newspapers – for me – are better on paper anyway. I can mark them up, I can stack thing in orderly piles – again habit – and I’m just used to doing things that way. I doubt I will ever give up newspapers on paper.

Anyway, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an editorial page piece by Father Arne Panula on the Vatican Two Declaration Dignitatis Humanae that I thought I would recommend to you. As Wikipedia puts it (at least this minute; you never know about Wikipedia) “Dignitatis humanae spells out the Church’s support for the protection of religious liberty. More controversially, it set the ground rules by which the Church would relate to secular states, both pluralistic ones like the U.S., and officially Catholic nations like Malta and Costa Rica,” and tends to be rather unknown now despite its importance. It informed our two novels Inferno and Escape from Hell. I was going to mention this yesterday, but I forgot.

This morning I remembered, but I couldn’t remember the exact title of Father Panula’s article. That’s important, because of paywalls; if you Google the exact title, you can generally access the item you’re looking for without regard to paywalls. So I logged on to the Wall Street Journal – and couldn’t figure out how to see yesterday’s paper. Today’s I have fine – I pay for both paper and electronic subscription – but I couldn’t find my way back to yesterday. I wasted enough time on a fruitless search for how to read yesterday’s paper and found the exact title rather easily, but I do wonder: how do you browse past editions of the Wall Street Journal? I know there’s got to be a simple way, but it apparently is lost in my failing internal data recovery system.

Anyway, you need to Google “A Lodestar of Religious Liberty”, which ought to show you the link to the short piece. I get http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-lodestar-of-religious-liberty-1449188143 which ought to work, but of course I won’t ever encounter paywalls in the first place.

Father Panula notes that this Declaration, accepted by an overwhelming majority, is important in this current age. In contrast with the Caliphate and other Islamic movements, the Church has renounced any right or obligation to force religion on anyone, even for that person’s own good (as argued by the Inquisition). There is a universal right to religious freedom. That does not mean that missionaries have no right to argue for conversion; it does mean they cannot use secular power to obtain it. There is no obligation to offer dissenters the choice of the Church or the sword. There is more, all worth reading.

Dignitatis Humanae

http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html
The WSJ paywall unfortunately is stronger than your link-fu. 🙁

Reziac

Eric and I went to the Apple store the other day. All my Apple equipment other than the iPhone 6 is pre 2008. My MacBook Air, which I loved, decided to die horribly—it swelled up like a balloon. It’s long out of warranty, and the battery isn’t replaceable – that’s what swelled up of course – so there isn’t much to be done about it. I like the Surface Pro 3 (with Surface 4 keyboard) enough that there’s really no need to replace the Air, but I do miss it; If I did much travelling or even writing outside my house I’d almost certainly get a new Air. I carried that Air to Kaiser when they were burning my brain out with X-rays – well, actually burning out The Lump, which, Deo gratia they did splendidly and I have been cancer free for years now – and it was very easy to work with. I wrote columns in the radiation therapy waiting room, and journal entries, and that made waiting to get my head burned with hard radiation a lot easier.

Needless to say, I have a sentimental attachment to the Air; and I did find it well worth carrying. As I said, if I were going to do a lot of writing away from Chaos Manor, I’d get one. As it is, the Surface Pro 3 with Pro 4 keyboard does all the away from home work I need, now that we’ve given up the beach house.

But I was enormously impressed with the new MacBook Pro line. My MacBook Pro dates back to before the brain cancer; I guess it’s one of the first of the new Intel Apple line. I’m pleased to say it works just fine. No glitches. I mostly use it to Skype, and it works perfectly. But wow, are those new MacBook Pro’s beautiful! Getting one is probably a luxury I can’t quite justify. I have a need for a working Mac, since I do a lot of silly things so you don’t have to, and I don’t think of anything I need to do that my Pro can’t do; it would be a simple upgrade, and a bit expensive, and work faster, and of course the screen is beautiful, I mean really beautiful, and if I don’t stop I’ll probably talk ,myself into getting one.

Macs last a lot longer than Windows machine. They cost more, but amortized over the actual useful life of the system it’s not really much at all. Unless the battery swells up…

Oh, and I have to add that the new iMac with Retina 5K screen is so nice you have to see it to believe it. Not that my old iMac doesn’t work, but it’s upstairs and I haven’t room for it down here and going upstairs to my old office is an expedition so there’s no way I could justify spending that much, but wow! Squared.

I also find I may need equipment to do quality podcasts, so I have another reason to upgrade my MacBook Pro…

Peter Glaskowsky called my attention to this:

Microsoft Will Not Fix Power Management Issues with New Surface Devices Until Next Year

https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/microsoft-surface/62772/microsoft-will-not-fix-power-management-issues-with-new-surface-devices-until-next-year

I’ve got bad news for Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 users: The software giant now says it will this year not solve the endemic power management issues that have dogged these two premium devices since their October launch. And it is recommending a workaround until it can figure out the “very hard computer science problem” that causes the issues.

I briefly contemplated getting a Book or a Surface Pro 4, but I have had good experiences with the Surface Pro 3, and ended up buying only the Surface Pro 4 keyboard/cover. I don’t regret doing that; for a two finger typist the Pro 4 keyboard is much, much better, Works on the Pro 3, and the fingerprint recognition works with the Pro 3 and is much better than the ThinkPad fingerprint system. I wanted to see how the Book worked out; I’ll wait until they have the bugs under control to do that.

Eric calls our attention to this:

The latest in powerline networking

http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-powerline-networking-kit/

We finally ran an Ethernet cable to the back room, and did other thing to get both wireless and Ethernet all over the house; it’s possible that this would have done the job

“NEW: Shooting suspect Tashfeen Malik passed DHS counterterrorism screening as part of her vetting for K-1 visa,”

Yup. our super efficient DHS screened the San Bernardino killer, Tashfeen Malik, when she came in on a K-1, fiancé, visa.

The killer is that the town in Pakistan she claimed as her home town does not exist.

San Bernardino Female Terrorist Passed DHS Screening http://patterico.com/2015/12/04/san-bernardino-female-terrorist-passed-dhs-screening/

{+_+}

More SB Data Points

The woman in the shooting has links to a certain radical cleric and a radical mosque in Pakistan:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3346618/ISIS-loyalist-woman-San-Bernardino-massacre-linked-Pakistan-s-notorious-radical-cleric-mosque-known-center-fundamentalists.html

She easily passed through the visa process:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/us/for-woman-in-shooting-easy-passage-through-us-visa-process.html

And this president’s solution is disarm citizens and bring in more folks when we can’t vet the ones we brought.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

If they do not even detect that her hometown didn’t exist, what does this say for the accuracy of the “background scrutiny”? Of course ID checks are expensive; one reason not to flood the country with migrants. The “fiancé visa” she entered on may once have been a good idea; not so sure it is now.

You might enjoy this.  I did.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427640/orson-scott-card-naysayers

2015 Darwin Awards

Yes, folks, these are all true – you can’t make up this stuff.

Nominee No. 1:[ San Jose Mercury News]:

An unidentified man, using a shotgun like a club to break a former girl friend’s windshield, accidentally shot himself to death when the gun discharged, blowing a hole in his gut.

Nominee No. 2:[ Kalamazoo Gazette]:

James Burns, 34, (a mechanic) of Alamo MI, was killed in March as he was trying to repair what police describe as a “farm-type truck.” Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway while Burns hung underneath so that he could ascertain the source of a troubling noise. Burns’ clothes caught on something, however, and the other man found Burns “wrapped in the drive shaft.”

Nominee No. 3:[ Hickory Daily Record]:Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton NC. Awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith & Wesson 38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear.

Nominee No. 4:[UPI, Toronto ]:

Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the buildings windows to visiting law students. Hoy previously has conducted demonstrations of window strength according to police reports. Peter Lawson, managing partner of the firm Holden Day Wilson, told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Hoy was “one of the best and brightest” members of the 200-man association. A person has to wonder what the dimmer members of this law firm are like.

Nominee No. 5:[The News of the Weird]:

Michael Anderson Godwin made News of the Weird posthumously. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolina’s electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. While sitting on a metal toilet in his cell attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.

: Nominee No. 6:[The Indianapolis Star]

A cigarette lighter may have triggered a fatal explosion in Dunkirk IN. A Jay County man, using a cigarette lighter to check the barrel of a muzzleloader, was killed Monday night when the weapon discharged in his face, sheriff’s investigators said. Gregory David Pryor, 19, died in his parents’ rural Dunkirk home at about 11:30 PM. Investigators said Pryor was cleaning a 54-caliber muzzle-loader that had not been firing properly. He was using the lighter to look into the barrel when the gunpowder ignited.

Nominee No. 7:[Reuters, Mississauga, Ontario ]:

A man cleaning a bird feeder on the balcony of his condominium apartment in this Toronto suburb slipped and fell 23 stories to his death. “Stefan Macko, 55, was standing on a wheelchair when the accident occurred,” said Inspector Darcy Honer of the Peel Regional Police. “It appears that the chair moved, and he went over the balcony,” Honer said.

Finally, THE WINNER!!!:[ Arkansas Democrat Gazette]:

Two local men were injured when their pickup truck left the road and struck a tree near Cotton Patch on State Highway 38 early Monday. Woodruff County deputy Dovey Snyder reported the accident shortly after midnight Monday. Thurston Poole, 33, of Des Arc, and Billy Ray Wallis, 38, of Little Rock , were returning to Des Arc after a frog-catching trip. On an overcast Sunday night, Poole ‘s pickup truck headlights malfunctioned.

The two men concluded that the headlight fuse on the older-model truck had burned out. As a replacement fuse was not available, Wallis noticed that the .22 caliber bullets from his pistol fit perfectly into the fuse box next to the steering-wheel column. Upon inserting the bullet the headlights again began to operate properly, and the two men proceeded on eastbound toward the White River Bridge .

After traveling approximately 20 miles, and just before crossing the river, the bullet apparently overheated, discharged and struck Poole in the testicles. The vehicle swerved sharply right, exited the pavement, and struck a tree. Poole suffered only minor cuts and abrasions from the accident but will require extensive surgery to repair the damage to his testicles, which will never operate as intended.

Wallis sustained a broken clavicle and was treated and released. “Thank God we weren’t on that bridge when Thurston shot his balls off, or we might be dead,” stated Wallis

“I’ve been a trooper for 10 years in this part of the world, but this is a first for me. I can’t believe that those two would admit how this accident happened,” said Snyder. Upon being notified of the wreck, Lavinia (Poole’s wife) asked how many frogs the boys had caught and did anyone get them from the truck? Though Poole and Wallis did not die as a result of their misadventure as normally required by Darwin Award Official Rules, it can be argued that Poole did in fact effectively remove himself from the gene pool.

Rufus

Forget Old Age, It’s Time to Live Long and (Really) Prosper

Advances in health care have added years to our life. According to Laura Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, it’s time we added life to our years

(journal)

By

Laura Carstensen

Dec. 3, 2015 10:26 a.m. ET

Given the option of a 30-year life extension, who would apply it only to old age? Yet, this is precisely what we’re doing. Life expectancy nearly doubled in the 20th century, with all those extra years tacked on at the end.

Instead of thinking imaginatively about this unprecedented opportunity, we tend to wring our hands at the thought of populations top-heavy with the elderly. Policy makers despair over Social Security, but the idea that we should buckle down and save for 40-year retirements is utterly misguided. The real problem is that our lives are still led according to the norms and social scripts that guided our grandparents. We humans are creatures of culture, and life expectancy increased too fast for culture to keep pace.

Flash forward 30 years: Every fundamental aspect of our lives will change, and none more so than work. We will work many more years but fewer days in a week—reaping cognitive, social and physical benefits in addition to financial gains. Rather than raising children at the peak of our careers, we’ll cycle in and out of full-time and part-time work, allowing parents—finally—to achieve a work-life balance. We’ll pursue multiple careers, and education, instead of stopping in our 20s, will continue throughout life, with intermittent returns to universities, nanodegrees and employer-based training. Gap years, sabbaticals and extended leaves between jobs will become commonplace. Workforces will be more age-diverse than ever before, and the glimmers from research on mixed-age work teams indicate they outperform all others. Matching the speed and flexibility of youth with the experience and stability of age will make work more enjoyable and profitable in the age of longevity. Career arcs will expand early and contract very gradually as we trade income for flexibility and apply well-honed skills to work that matters greatly to us.

Our record-length lives afford us the chance to redesign the way we live, and write a life script for lifetimes that last a century. It won’t be a story about old age—it will be a story about long life.

Laura Carstensen

Laura Carstensen is the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity.

Maybe we’ll be around longer than we planned on.  Meaning that we run out of money…  There ought to be SF stories in that.

‘Steve Jobs’ Flops at Box Office, and Silicon Valley Cheers     (nyt)

DEC. 2, 2015

The movie “Steve Jobs” had all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster.

It had a starry cast (Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, Michael Fassbender). The screenplay was by the acclaimed writer Aaron Sorkin (who also wrote “The Social Network”). And it received rave reviews (“‘Steve Jobs’ is a rich and potent document of the times,” wrote my colleague A.O. Scott.)

But the movie tanked at the box office, earning about $18 million in the seven weeks after its Oct. 9 release. Perhaps Hollywood had overestimated the public’s fascination with the man. Perhaps the film came a couple of years too late or a couple of decades too early. Or perhaps we have Steve Jobs fatigue, after all the books, movies and documentaries on the visionary Apple co-founder.

But perhaps most surprising is the way in which Silicon Valley relished in, and contributed to, the film’s demise. [snip]

An Apple press release that may portend something big.  The buzz has been pretty big.

Apple Releases Swift as Open Source

Developer Contributions Will Help Make Swift Even Better and Available on More Platforms

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Apple® today announced that its Swift™ programming language is now open source. As an open source language, the broad community of talented developers — from app developers to educational institutions to enterprises — can contribute to new Swift features and optimizations and help bring Swift to new computing platforms. Introduced in 2014, Swift is the fastest growing programming language in history and combines the performance and efficiency of compiled languages with the simplicity and interactivity of popular scripting languages.* Apple today also launched the Swift.org website with detailed information about Swift open source, including technical documentation, community resources and links to download the Swift source code.

“By making Swift open source the entire developer community can contribute to the programming language and help bring it to even more platforms,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Swift’s power and ease of use will inspire a new generation to get into coding, and with today’s announcement they’ll be able to take their ideas anywhere, from mobile devices to the cloud.”

Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language that gives developers the freedom and capabilities they need to create the next generation of cutting-edge software. Swift is easy to learn and use, even if you’ve never coded before, and it’s the first systems programming language that is as expressive and enjoyable as a scripting language. Designed for safety, Swift also eliminates entire categories of common programming errors.

The Swift open source code is available via GitHub and includes support for all Apple software platforms — iOS, OS X®, watchOS and tvOS™ — as well as for Linux. Components available include the Swift compiler, debugger, standard library, foundation libraries, package manager and REPL. Swift is licensed under the popular Apache 2.0 open source license with a runtime library exception, enabling users to easily incorporate Swift into their own software and port the language to new platforms. For more information about Swift, and access to community resources visit the new Swift.org.

*Based on RedMonk Programming Language Rankings, June 2015.

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple’s 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

NOTE TO EDITORS: For additional information visit Apple’s PR website (www.apple.com/pr), or call Apple’s Media Helpline at (408) 974-2042.

We’ll take this up another time after I think on it.

Parents May Pass Down More Than Just Genes, Study Suggests

Jerry

Lamarckianism is getting a scientific test:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/science/parents-may-pass-down-more-than-just-genes-study-suggests.html

Who woulda thunk it? But data beats theory every time.

Ed

Lamarckian evolution is something I thought had been settled : it doesn’t happen in nature.  Of course genetic engineering is Lamarckian as is much computer evolution..

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

Chaos Manor View, Friday, December 04, 2015

My LiveWriter lost its title. That is, the title block simply vanished, and I could not put a title on my posts. The only way was to post it untitled, then go to another machine where it was working, download recent post “Untitled” into Live Writer, add a title, and repost. I mucked about with it and got nowhere and when Alex was over here he did the same, with the same results.

In frustration I asked Google Why does my title in LiveWriter vanish? I was instantly led to Chaos Manor Reviews, http://chaosmanorreviews.com/windows-live-writer-almost-good-enough/ , where Managing Editor had posted Eric’s complete account of the problem and a workaround that I can use. If you use Live Writer it’s must reading. I still haven’t completely restored LiveWriter on Alien Artifact to the state it was in before the title vanished; I can see the title, or I can see what the post (without title) will look like by toggling the f11 key, and that’s good enough, but it’s really frustrating. It’s possible to post to this site from Word, which is what I use to compose it in the first place,, but I never took the trouble to find out how, LiveWriter works, and works pretty well; but I sure wish Microsoft would do more to explain how to use it, particularly themes and formatting and what appears on the page.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t been by Chaos Manor Reviews recently, it’s well worth your time.

I’m almost through with story introductions to Volume Ten of There Will Be War; the first nine volumes were published from 1983 to 1992, and the series sort of ended when the Cold War did. Obviously a book of science fiction stories and essays will look farther into the future that the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union, and many of the stories and essays in that first series hold up very well; but much the non-fiction, in particular, was much concerned with the future of war in the in Cold War times. Themes like deterrence and defense. Of course I have one essay in the original series that I am tempted to publish again, making only the change of replacing “Soviet Union” with “Iran”; a lot of readers would never know unless they had read the first essays.

The new volume has Benford, Niven, Flynn, and a Poul Anderson story of the far future that I read in 1953 and have never forgotten, as well as new authors, an essay by Martin Van Creveld, and an essay on the future structure of the US Fleet by my son Commander Phillip Pournelle. It should be out in eBook form before the end of the year, and printed copies available by Spring.

Getting those intros and a nonfiction essay done has become critical, and has pretty well taken up most of my time in the last week or so. Apologies.

There’s little to add to the San Bernardino massacre information. It’s clear that Syed Farook and his Saudi wife had planned some kind of jihad activity: nobody has a hobby of collecting weapon, ammunition, and IED’s without some plan for their eventual use. Whether it was to be an attack on Syed’s co-workers is more doubtful, since the attack seemed less well planned than the couple’s tactical behavior would imply. They seem to have rehearsed tactics, but the actual assault seemed almost unplanned. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem reasonable that they – and it’s clear that it was “their” not just “his” attack – would make all these preparations then respond to a religious argument at the Christmas Party. Even if Syed were mortally offended and determined to be avenged in blood, would his wife, who was certainly a willing participant, want to be involved?

The latest headlines I have are

San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook may have been radicalized by Pakistan-born wife Tashfeen Malik, who pledged loyalty to ISIS before killing spree

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/syed-farook-wife-tashfeen-radicalized-report-article-1.2455213

I have no idea of the reliability of the report. It is obvious they planned something; why this attack at this time is not obvious.

Islam, we are told, is a religion of peace; but the Islamic tradition defines Islam itself as the House of Peace, and all those outside it are at war, and must either submit and pay tax or concert. It is legal to make truce with infidels, but one cannot make peace with them. How many modern Muslims believe that is not known, but it is pretty clear that The Caliphate – ISIS – does believe it. We do not know if the couple sought advice or orders in this situation. Perhaps that would explain their obvious planning of a larger jihad activity than they undertook.

Thorium reactor

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I hope it turns out to be true that progress is being made towards cleaner, safer, nuclear energy.

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/129913-world-s-first-thorium-reactor-ready-to-be-built-for-cheaper-safer-nuclear-energy

It goes without saying that, though “climate change” is a fraud, the need for more, clean, abundant energy is beyond any debate, and this might be part of the answer.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Thorium is a rather more common element than Uranium, and has figured in science fiction stories since the Golden Age; there is so far as I know no practical working Thorium power reactor, and not a lot of research devoted to it. But I may well be behind the times.

Google’s chief of self-driving cars downplays ‘the trolley problem’ (WP)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/12/01/googles-leader-on-self-driving-cars-downplays-the-trolley-problem/

As automakers and tech companies talk up self-driving vehicles and the chance to bring their benefits to the world, plenty of questions are being raised about the technology. One that’s attracted much attention is what’s called “the trolley problem.”

The issue is this — do you flip a switch and divert a trolley from killing two people, so that it instead kills only one person? In the case of cars, should your vehicle drive off a bridge to avoid hitting a Boy Scout troop, sacrificing your life to save a dozen? Should a self-driving car veer away from the pedestrians in a crosswalk with a baby stroller and instead hit a lone pedestrian on a sidewalk?

Consumers might be hesitant to take a ride in a self-driving vehicle if there’s a chance the software powering the car is programmed to put them at risk to save someone else. This has raised a lot of questions regarding the ethics of machines.

There hasn’t, apparently, been much thought about this, but as we increasingly give control to machines, there ought to be. What would one of Asimov’s ‘Laws of Robotics” AI systems do?

This today from the Gatestone Institute; an intriguing notion.  Gaza has at least as many natural resources as the islands that comprise Hong Kong, and though not as strategically located as Singapore as a trade station, Gaza is well located; but instead of development, most of the effort seems to have been devoted to futile efforts against Israel. Hong Kong became rich on far less to start with; as of course did Singapore. I suppose it is impolite to wonder why.

Who Is Stealing Palestinian Land? by Khaled Abu Toameh  •  December 4, 2015 at 5:00 am The lands that once housed Jewish settlements were supposed to transform the Gaza Strip into the Middle East’s Singapore. Instead, all the grandiose and ambitious plans went down the drain when Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip in 2007. Since then, the entire Gaza Strip has been transformed into a base for various Islamist groups, which have used Gaza to launch terror attacks against Israel and threaten Egypt’s national security. By stealing their people’s land and distributing it among their followers, Hamas and Fatah are further undermining the Palestinian dream of establishing a proper state based on the principles of democracy, accountability, transparency and the rule of law. At least they agree on one thing: Confiscating land. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (right) shakes hands with Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, during negotiations in 2007 for a short-lived unity government. (Image source: Palestinian Press Office) The beleaguered Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, has found an original way to solve its financial crisis. The movement is now planning to pay its unpaid civil servants with former Israeli settlement land in the Gaza Strip. Abandoned by Israel in 2005 as part of the “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, the land was supposed to provide a solution to the severe housing crisis in the Palestinian-controlled area. Back then, there was much talk about building new housing projects for thousands of Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli “disengagement” prompted some oil-rich Arab countries to propose plans to help solve the severe housing crisis in the Gaza Strip. The lands that once housed Jewish settlements were supposed to transform the Gaza Strip into the Middle East’s Singapore. Continue Reading Article

Bring back, bring back, O bring back that old continuity,
,  Bring back, bring back, bring back Clerk Maxwell to me..
Poul Anderson

“We’ve developed a new way of studying space and time that we didn’t have before. We weren’t even sure we could attain the sensitivity we did.”

<http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/holometer-rules-out-first-theory-of-space-time-correlations>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

If you missed this yesterday, you should see it. I expect to spend some time thinking on this when I get a chance; among other things it has a profound effect on the asteroid mining story John DeChancie and I are writing.

The Mysterious Aging of Astronauts.

<http://lemire.me/blog/2015/12/01/the-mysterious-aging-of-astronauts/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Recommended reading:

http://www.cnet.com/news/why-batteries-arent-getting-better/?ftag=CAD1acfa04&bhid=21042754377865639731827326151938

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

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, December 03, 2015

I am hard at work getting Volume Ten of There Will Be War bone; I am writing story and essay introductions, and I am almost finished; the book ought to be ePublished this year. It is all complicated by the fact that I can’t type. I can bag away two fingered, but I often hit two keys at once, and I am inaccurate anyway, so it takes as long to correct a sentence as it does to write it. Correcting breaks the chain of thought.

Count your blessings. I am still able to do something useful as an octogenarian. Deo Gratia.

The San Bernardino incident has not been clarified much. Apparently Syed Farook was preparing for some act of jihad, was offended at a Christmas party, went home, collected Tashfeen Malik his wife, deposited their infant with grandmother, and carrying thousands of rounds and some IED’s screamed and leaped, probably earlier than he had intended. They fired tens of rounds at the police and were killed.

Who were Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik?

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/03/us/syed-farook-tashfeen-malik-mass-shooting-profile/

can tell you more, although with what accuracy I can’t say. Perhaps the remedy is to import more Muslim refugees and migrants; perhaps not. An Inspector in the San Bernardino public health bureaucracy is decidedly middle class, and his coworkers have been induced to say that he was assimilating nicely. So it goes.

I have to go. More later.

You may find this article Peter Glaskowsky dug up amusing . Of course the media in 1975 were assuring us of something different.

The Popular Mechanics blog site ran this article on the R-23M cannon that was built into the Soviet Almaz military space stations:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18187/here-is-the-soviet-unions-secret-space-cannon/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz

The article shows a computer model of the cannon that was derived from a Russian TV program. After quite a bit of poking around on YouTube, I found a video of that program. This URL goes to the R-23M segment:

https://youtu.be/bj4uaMqCISo?t=1759

There’s other interesting stuff in the same video, like a rifle and pistol that use piston-based cartridges to reduce their sound signature; that segment starts here:

https://youtu.be/bj4uaMqCISo?t=1313

There are many other episodes of that showcase all kinds of interesting Russian military and space technology.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Военная+приемка

.                png

And in contemplating the future of man in space, contemplate this:

The Mysterious Aging of Astronauts.

<http://lemire.me/blog/2015/12/01/the-mysterious-aging-of-astronauts/>

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Roland Dobbins

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

  

I spent the weekend at LOSCON and locusts devoured Monday.

One of my panels at LOSCON was at 10 AM. I do not promise to be either civil, coherent, or coordinated before 10 AM, but I didn’t allow for having to GET there by 10 AM. I didn’t take a hotel room because Roberta didn’t want to go, and it takes some logistics to set me up for sleeping. As a consequence I had to get up early enough for Alex to drive me from Studio City to the airport Marriot, which you may have inferred is near LAX. That’s a 40 minute drive on the best of days. As it happens, Saturday morning after Thanksgiving turned out to be one of the best of days. The freeway worked just fine, there were no problems on the surface streets, and Alex could drop me off at the hotel lobby and go look for parking while I looked for Boston, which was the name of the room they had me speaking in. That turned out to be fortunate, because it was across one hall from the Green Room, which I could find easily and where I could get coffee. So it all went better that I expected.

We were to discuss global warming, which might have been a furious discussion, but it turned out that the ‘panel’ was just two of us: me, and Keith Henson.

I haven’t had much opportunity to talk to Keith recently. We were much more closely involved in the 1970’s, when Keith formed the L-5 Society, I was Secretary, and I introduced Keith to Robert Heinlein at the Kansas City WorldCon in 1976. Those were frantic days. Robert approved of L-5 and endorsed it, members flowed in, we got involved in the Moon Treaty which was never ratified by the Senate, in good part due to our efforts (it might have failed anyway, but we certainly made failure certain).

We started the discussion simply: I asked Keith, “Believer or Denier?” He responded, “Doesn’t matter.”

He went on to summarize: “You (Pournelle) think the science of the warmists is deficient. I don’t care. We have to solve the energy problem some day. We can’t live off fossil fuels forever. Someday we’ll run out. Maybe a long time, but we will run out.”

I could agree with that. If something can’t go on forever, it will stop. And this was beginning to sound eerily familiar.

“You wrote forty years ago that we didn’t have a climate problem, we had an energy problem,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but the climate problem in those days—“

“Sure. The climatologists were all agreed we were due for another ice age. You said so in Step Farther Out. And you said…’

And of course he was right. I had pointed out then that what we needed was energy. We could do some things about global cooling, but for survival we needed energy and lots of it. Nuclear power for a start. Dams wouldn’t work so well if there were glaciers where there used to be rivers. And Solar Power Satellites would work even if the Earth was cooling. Ground based solar could help, but had the fundamental problem that the Sun don’t shine much at night.

And the panel of two went on to discuss energy, because if you have energy you can run the air conditioners while we think of ways to extract the carbon. Wheat in the Yukon would be a start. Lots of heat and CO2 makes farmland out of a lot of the Canadian Shield and other relatively non-productive areas. Enough energy and we can recycle water easily; I already wrote in Step Farther Out that the cleanest running stream in California even then was the outfalls of the Hyperion sewage disposal plant. For full recycling you take out the rest of the salt and pump the fresh water up to the Angeles Crest where it runs down and fills all the old groundwater chambers, then keeps then filled. It’s not a climate problem it’s an energy problem. It always has been. Whether the Earth is warming or cooling, we have an energy problem. Too much CO2 is just an energy problem. Running out of fresh water is an energy problem. Waste disposal is an energy problem. And if history is any guide, the underdeveloped nations have, at base, an energy problem.

We have constructed a new machine. Eric will have lots of details in Chaos Manor Reviews when he gets to writing about it. It runs Windows 10. It has an ASUS board. I don’t overclock, but this high end board doesn’t seem to have a “Don’t overclock” option; or at least so far we haven’t found it. We have tamed it down to 12%, but that’s 12% too much.

We’re still experimenting, and I need a new monitor just to keep up with its native video capability; all the monitors I have are several years old, and the best ones just barely do 1080p. More on this another time.

Probably just a review for most of your readers.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/11/30/what_should_we_do_about_climate_change_128876.html

“. . . climate change is a rabbit hole that goes very, very deep.”

Richard White

A good summary essay. Parts of it read a bit like Step Farther Out, but modern. Not that Step is much out of date, alas. I could wish it were. It says that soon we will go to the asteroids. We have had the technology for a while. And we’re going Real Soon Now. But it said it 30 years ago.

If they’ve lost Unscientific Anti-American, they’re on the ropes.

<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-will-not-be-dangerous-for-a-long-time/>

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Roland Dobbins

Duh…

http://warontherocks.com/2015/12/sports-science-physiology-and-the-debate-over-women-in-ground-combat-units/?utm_source=WOTR+Newsletter&utm_campaign=d33fd8135d-WOTR_Newsletter_8_17_158_15_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8375be81e9-d33fd8135d-82921753

David Couvillon
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; 
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; 
Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; 
Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; 
Chef de Hot Dog Excellence;  Avoider of Yard Work

Blue Origin
png called the lack of test vehicles and launches of DC-X-concept craft a 20-year interruption of the forward progress of the concept. I’m not so sure that really applies as the advances and improvements of material technologies, miniaturization, and computers were absolutely necessary in order for these new craft to be built.
Bezos and Musk are approaching the solution from the opposite ends: Blue Origin launching SSTO (almost) from the ground up and back; while Musk has been working at making consistent successful deliveries to orbit (paying for itself, sort of), and then experimenting on controlled re-entry and landing. I suspect the two of them will succeed in both lines of experimentation, with products that with greatly resemble each other and provide commercial competition.
Thanks for pushing the government to at least have started the concept.
And Cheers to Bezos, et. al. on their latest milestone.
MDH

At the Core.

<http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-discovers-that-milky-way-core-drives-wind-at-2-million-miles-per-hour>

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Roland Dobbins

Be sure to look at the picture here. Now here’s a possible climate change threat…

At the Core

Those gas bubbles from the explosion are about 30,000 LY high? Um…Aren’t we about 30,000 LY from the core ourselves? Any of that stuff coming our way?

Tom Brosz

I see you take my point.

Close Air Support and the Super Tucano
“The WWII-Era Plane Giving the F-35 a Run for Its Money”
“So if the A-10 was never going to be around in enough numbers, what could be done? Only one group had enough distance from the Air Force and enough independent money to consider a viable alternative: buying a cheap, lightweight attack plane on their own. That was the Navy SEALs. A group of them met with the Secretary of the Navy in 2006 to tell him about the problems they faced with getting good enough air support.
Like other American combat troops in Afghanistan, the SEALs sometimes found that high-tech gear couldn’t reliably get the job done, or that cheaper, lower-tech solutions worked better. This is how the US military almost adopted the A-29 Super Tucano, a $4 million turboprop airplane reminiscent of WWII-era designs that troops wanted, commanders said was “urgently needed,” but Congress refused to buy.”

G

I got into the periphery on that one. I had some of the air war data and models that they needed to make the pitch. It never had a chance, of course. USAF has myriad reasons for rejecting it.

Lind: ‘The guardian of Ataturk’s secularism was the Turkish military.

The U.S. and the E.U. demanded it surrender that role because it was not “democratic”.’

<https://www.traditionalright.com/the-turkish-isis-alliance/>

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Roland Dobbins

This was one of America’s great blunders. The secularism of the Ataturk Brotherhood preserved diversity. Without it, majority rules eliminates dissent in Moslem lands. Protestantism and the Protestant German Princes preserved the Reformation, but at a very great price in blood.

Reversal of the nuclear threat

Dr. Pournelle,
While the weapons couldn’t be made to go high-order, they could make a good mass of “dirty” contamination areas, and would make great hostages.
Having said all that, Mr. Dobbins is absolutely correct, except in scope. The U.S. should withdraw all NATO nuclear weapons immediately. The senior Mr. Bush unilaterally withdrew most nukes from Europe in anticipation of a SALT-like agreement that never came to fruition (his successor dropped the ball). We need to follow through. Exceptions might be those weapons stockpiled in Great Britain, but the rest need to come out of there: EU interests are not aligned with the U.S. nor with the original NATO charter.
Mr. Dobbins also helps to make my other pet point — calling any of those weapons “Tactical” is still ridiculous cold war fiction: They’re the same makes and models that might be dropped by a B-52 in a SAC/TRIAD-style, second-strike, revenge scenario. Stated more simply: since the end of the cold war, having any nuclear assets potentially under the control of an untrusted state or political element is a foolish and irresponsible strategic mistake.
The U.S. nuclear security in NATO depends almost entirely on physical security provided by the host nations’ military. We should have a great deal of skepticism in the military competence and intentions of most of those nations.
-d

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