Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, September 16, 2015
I’m doing this from the back room before I go to bed. Swan seems to be working well, but it’s also Windows 10. So far so good.
Today was story conference day, and it was a bit stormy but productive. I think we are on track now; there was in the plot a pacing error – I think it was, anyway. Important things happened while our main characters could not be on stage; I think we fixed that. And we sure have some great aliens, and a powerful story line.
Had a good talk over lunch, and it was a good lunch. Came home to find the next Logitech K360 keyboard had come, and I took it upstairs to install. That went easily, but Word is driving me nuts. It’s trivial, and hardly affects what I write in the fiction station, but it annoys me. Does anyone know – know – how to set up and control Word 2010? Particularly autocomplete? I have 2013 on this machine, and I’ll play with that later, but upstairs is an older Word. And when I I was up there I’d do F1 for help, and it tells me to do things that aren’t possible – it gives me commands that aren’t where they are said to be. Often where they were on an older version, but not now. Specifically, when I try to set up autocomplete I’m told to go to Insert on the ribbon and select autocomplete; but autocomplete isn’t there. Another time it tells me to go to File / Tools, but there is no tools there, only options. I know you can set Word so that when you type in the first few letter of the day of the week it offers to complete it if you press return, and if you type in Wednesday comma it offers to complete that to Wednesday, September 16, 2015; Word 2013 just did that although I didn’t turn the feature on, and I don’t know how to control it; I’ll experiment later. But it’s sure frustrating.
The debates were fairly dull. No one did brilliantly, but no one came off badly. Trump continued to be the man who would change things because they are now broken, and even if he doesn’t know exactly how, he gives the impression that he’d go in the right direction – less government. Get rid of it if it’s not obviously doing good, fund defense and less funding for entitlements. Eight years of hope and change have given us a huge debt and we still have bunny inspectors, and we are never going to get rid of them despite Obama’s promise of laser like line inspection of appropriation. The answer to anything is more regulation and more government supervision; we’d do well to have some one who sees it the other way, automatically stop doing it if you can’t show the good. Stop borrowing money to pay bunny inspectors and offices full of regulators thinking up new reasons why you don’t want to hire anyone — but that’s sort of a dream, isn’t it? But I don’t see anyone up there who would go through those offices saying “You’re Fired!” except Trump. And who’d build am actual wall. He may be a clown – they all say he is – but he might actually do something. It’s for sure the Speaker and the Majority Leader and the Whips, and the Chairmen and all the country club Republicans won’t DO anything and generally won’t even talk about it. Obama promised the Left lots of Hope and Change, and he’s doing it at enormous cost – each of you, every one of you – owes the government 5% of everything you make for the next 20 years, and that’s for debt, not for running the government.
But of course nobody’s going to elect Trump. And the Republicans will find a new Bob Dole for us.
Scrivener
Scrivener licenses for half-price, if you want to check it out. I’ve got it on one machine here but haven’t found the occasion to really make use of it. I may try to see if it makes some parts of The Evolution of Political Thought easier to lay out. Likewise if the updates to Strategy of Technology get done and can be integrated. If nothing else, the support for tables is a critical item missing from Atlantis Word Processor, which is what I’ve used up until now to produce EPUB files.
Eric
Right. I keep hearing good stuff about scrivener. Does it have autocorrect?
Jerry Pournelle
Chaos Manor
It wouldn’t replace Word but rather be a place for writing down and organizing all of the bit of info that go into making a book or novel. My interest in it is whether it is strong enough of a formatting tool to be useful for e-book creation. I’m still in the process of figuring out how to test that. I was starting to read the manual but got distracted and have yet to go back. What I’d really like and would pay a decent price for is a replacement for Sigil. Sigil itself appears to be in limbo, with the blog site last seeing an entry in mid-June. So I keep an eye out for something that might be comparable or even better.
Eric
I wish there was still some way to get the MS Office team’s attention. It’s apparent to me they’ve been hard put to come up with any really new features for the individual user in recent years but they seem to have completely missed the rise of e-books. Between Word and Publisher, this seems like such a natural path to pursue but I’ve seen no indication in the Office 2016 preview that they have any awareness of it at all. Everything new is geared toward big corporate collaboration efforts. I realize that’s where the big money is but I can’t believe the investment wouldn’t be paid back by giving millions of users malingering on old versions a reason to finally upgrade or get a 365 subscription.
Eric
I’ll let you know how it comes out. I hear about scrivener’s organization tool, but I never used it.
Doctors Obsolete?
A doctor does “differential diagnoses”, which is a lot like intelligence analysis (analysis of competing hypotheses and similar structured analytic techniques) or science (looking at the activities of many scientists as a whole). The difference is that with intelligence analysis and science, you want to refute hypotheses and not find data to support the same. Differential diagnosis — as I understand it — looks to see what symptoms fit what disease; it’s intellectual construction work that anyone could do in theory. But, it requires vast knowledge of medicine and human physiology to work effectively with those data sets; thus the doctor is hard to come by and takes years of training. It’s not so much the process of diagnosis as the knowledge necessary to use differential diagnosis in medicine. This computer might change all that:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34245655
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo
Eventually most medical decisions, and a good part of surgery, will be done by robots. Diagnosis with computer assistance is generally better now. After all, you don’t fly airplanes ever without checklists – if you have to get rid of the checklist or the pilot, you throw the pilot out…
Surfing the Internet… from my TRS-80 Model 100
—————————————
Roland Dobbins
Future of the GOP
Now, several presidential election cycles later, the so-called pundits are starting to grasp a tend that has built for a long time but really gained steam under the presidencies — and I use the term loosely — of Bush II and Obama.
<.>
A majority of Republican registered voters want either Donald Trump or Ben Carson to be their party’s 2016 presidential nominee, according to two new national polls from the Washington Post-ABC News and the New York Times-CBS News.
Let that sink in for a minute. Neither Trump, who made his name as a real estate mogul and reality star, nor Carson, a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, has run for any office prior to their presidential candidacies. Both men have staked the entirety of their campaigns on the idea that they are the furthest thing possible from a traditional politician. And it is working for both of them. Big time.
While the rise of Trump tends to dominate the headlines, polls like these from The Post and the Times provide a reminder of the big picture here for the Republican Party. And that big picture is simple:
The GOP establishment is on the run, and there are few signs that its members have any sort of coherent strategy to deal with the massive uprising within its ranks.
</>
What do you think the future of the GOP is? Does the GOP have a future? Are the country club republicans irrelevant in terms of social influence? I realize they still have financial influence, good old boy networks, and so forth. What happens if they do become, socially, irrelevant? Do we want to fix the party or do we want an entirely new party? What is the way forward and how do we get there?
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo
I will do an analysis later, but I note that more and more are beginning to get the message.
the terrorists have won
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-9th-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school-so-you-tried-to-make-a-bomb.ece
I would guess that almost all of the kids in that school have cell phones, which have probably been used to set off a lot more bombs in the past 15 years than clocks have.
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
