| Saturday,
July 13, 2002
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Silly me! I always thought of judo as a way of
fighting that used mental and physical discipline, along with fighting
techniques developed in China, to allow an unarmed man to face up to armed
oppressors when there is no other answer. This article shows that
politically correct stupidity is not confined to the United States.
http://my.netscape.com/corewidgets/news/story.psp?
cat=50900&id=200207130405000220590
The length of the URL does not demonstrate superior
intelligence on the part of Netscape.
regards,
William L. Jones
Roland sends this link with the title "Imperium"
http://www.nationalreview.com/nr
_comment/nr_comment071202.asp
And this
Incompetent empire, indeed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn
/articles/A47823-2002Jul10.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn
/articles/A63413-2002Jul12.html
Sue Ferrara adds:
To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/
A63413-2002Jul12.html
State Detains Reporter Over Leaked Saudi Cable
By Howard Kurtz State Department officials detained
a young National Review reporter for questioning at the daily briefing
yesterday after he asked about a classified cable involving embarrassing
problems with U.S. visas in Saudi Arabia.
Joel Mowbray, 26, said several guards prevented him
from leaving the Foggy Bottom building for half an hour and that a
department official asked where he had obtained the cable from the U.S.
ambassador in Riyadh.
"The thing that blows me away is they were
trying to get my source," Mowbray said.
And this is how the Empire treats its friends...
And Randall Parker adds to the case file on
incompetent imperialism
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/
michellemalkin/mm20020710.shtml
Michelle Malkin
July 10, 2002
Deadly diversity, dumb program
In the drawer of dumb, post-Sept. 11
immigration ideas, the State Department's Diversity Visa Lottery program
sits near the top of the heap. What could be more out of touch with the
national security goals of the War on Terror than giving away visas
randomly to thousands of people from the Middle East to fulfill a
politically correct social agenda?
< snip >
America remains America so long as our culture
can absorb immigrants; we have done well making Americans of Irish,
Italians, Serbs, Croats, Ulstermen, Germans, Hessians, Ruthenians,
Hungarians, etc., etc. But you can't dilute the original mix too
much, and you have to believe the goal is assimilation, not pockets of
"diversity". "Diversity" without federalism produces
Empire. Iberia for centuries had different laws for different peoples. So
did Rome, with a Praetor Peregrinus to try cases involving foreign law
(and indeed this evolved into what we now know as Roman Law...)
Are we coming to that now? Diversity: applying
different laws to different peoples. Sometimes when I read the papers I
believe that is so.
Is it not time to end immigration for a
generation to assimilate our new populations? Immigration as we now know
it provides low cost competition to our citizens: is this the right way to
go? And yes, I know: there are many who want low cost gardeners and
servants, and low cost engineers and doctors; many Silicon Valley firms
could not operate without the brain drain. A good case can be made for
importing the best and brightest from the rest of the world. But at some
point the cultural dilutions reach a critical mass, and the entire nature
of the culture changes.
In any event, lotteries would not seem the best
selection criteria...
In rural Botswana impregnation of young girls by
schoolteachers has always been routine in my experience. No particular
impetus to hide it in these essentially matrilineal societies where the
women especially are keen eugenicists.
Last time I was there there was a new baby in the
village fathered by a visiting road engineer. People proudly called him
"our little Englishman".
Henry
This in response to the item about
"transactional sex" between students and pupils in Africa. It is
an interesting notion. The girls do better by having affairs with men they
can never marry: they get higher status, and the society being matrilineal
have no problem getting husbands.
From Eric
The Center for Strategic and International Studies
suggest that trying to plan for biological warfare attacks is a lot like
being Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
http://www.csis.org/burke/hd/reports/Buffy012902.pdf
An interesting view. I used to be a Fellow of the
Strategic Studies Institute. I forget why I gave it up a decade ago.
Dr. Pournelle,
Michael Swanwick has been writing a whole lot of
very short (few-paragraphs-long) stories based--sometimes very loosely--on
the chemical elements, in ascending Z-order. This week's is iodine, and
somehow it seems germane to one of your major discussion topics of late.
Here's the link: http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/periodictable.html
Best regards, JBWoodford
Thanks
And an interesting essay on
games:
To: Jerry Pournelle
Re: your "Everything at E3," July 8, 2002
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=
7448/byt1026009620001/pournelle0708.html
Sir:
One of the major things you can do with additional
computer power is to attack problems in a more abstract, more generalized,
more object-oriented way. To give an example, scalable fonts have by now
very nearly superseded fixed fonts. The result is that typeface designers
are no longer concerned with the issue of what typefaces are to be used in
what point sizes.
If we apply the same principle to games, one could
envision a game without any characters, plots, settings, or rules.
However, such a game would have an authoring system, and provision for
importing and exporting the characters, plots, settings, and rules, either
jointly or severally. Of course games are starting to move in this
direction, but they will go further, until the games themselves are in
effect content-free.
At this point, what you have is a gaming
environment, a specialized operating system for the conducting of games. A
gaming environment would do for games very much what spreadsheets did for
calculations. One might add, of course, that a game is the general case of
an animated movie.
The major game vendors are still operating under
what one might call the Hollywood Central Dogma. This "dogma"
says in effect that you start with a literary work, such as a novel,
script, scenario, etc., and then send in large numbers of technicians to
turn it into an audio-visual production, such as a movie or video game.
This dogma has various corollaries, such as the presumption that moneymen
are to be literary critics, and the expectation that there will be
formidable barriers to entry into the audio-visual business.
With a well developed gaming environment,
audio-visual production would tend to get subsumed in literary authorship.
The people who manufacture printing presses do not concern themselves with
whether or not you are a good writer, or even whether your books sell.
They sell printing presses to anyone who pays for them, and what the buyer
does with the press is the buyer's affair. For that matter, most
publishers do not own presses, but employ jobbing printers on the same
basis.
The internet has merely accelerated this tendency.
For example, Amazon so efficiently manages its logistic pipeline so as not
to be in the position of investing in particular books or authors, unlike
a traditional bookseller.
By this standard, the movie, record, and game
industries are an anachronism. Sooner or later, gaming environments
will probably become open-source, on much the same basis as operating
systems, etc. The provision of gaming environments will cease to be a
commercial affair. At a guess, what will happen is that certain categories
of books will command a premium price if they have bundled game
components, or rather, that publishers will be more disposed to take a
chance on a book which has game components. Adding a game will be part of
finishing up a book, on the same basis as edit-and-rewrite or
illustration. It will be firmly within the province of the author.
Andrew D. Todd
http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/
[Emphasis added by editor.] A very
interesting essay, and well worth thinking about. Thank you.
Harry Erwin on species (Discussion
begins above):
The recent results are interesting. Note that we
have no evidence for Australopithecus, Ardipithecus, Pan or Gorilla
outside of Africa, so the parsimonious hypothesis is that the radiation
producing those genera occurred in Africa. The ecological contexts in
which these genera are found, plus the variation even within groups of
specimens, suggest that prior to Homo, the hominids may have formed a
'species flock' like those seen in the East African cichlid populations,
with most populations being quite local and separated by extensive biomes
where hominids were not found. The first evidence for hominids in the
savannah seems to be for some local populations of Homo habilis. The
Turkana Boy provides fairly strong evidence that early H. erectus was well
adapted to the savannah biome, but some populations of its predecessors,
Australopithecus and H. habilis, probably occupied savannah-edge biomes,
especially as bipedalism is useful when foraging in open conditions. (It
increases speed of resource localization and identification of predators
when combined with vocalization. This is something we are studying in the
Intelligent Systems group at Sunderland.) Other than culturally and
intellectually, H. erectus was fully human. It was an obligate biped, but
the Turkana Boy has anatomical features suggestive of recent evolution
from a population that made heavy use of tree-climbing. Also, it probably
did not use complex speech. Tool-making and use (which involves complex
planning) was not limited to Homo--aside from tool use known in Pan,
Australopithecus garhi, robustus, and boisei seem to have been
tool-makers.
The Dmanisi specimens recently reported in Science
had _very_ small cranial capacities for H. erectus, suggesting that there
was migration out of Africa prior to the differentiation of H. erectus to
the degree seen in the Turkana Boy.
Africa seems to have been a center of cultural
evolution during the last 200 KYr. There is evidence for increasing
complexity of social interactions and tool making during that period. The
first evidence for anatomically modern H. sapiens is in Africa (Klasies
River Mouth) and the Near East about half way through that period, but the
culture for the latter was middle paleolithic. There are some complex
artifacts from the Congo of about that date. Although H. erectus made
sea-going vessels, the first evidence for long distance sea-going
movements was in New Guinea and Australia about 60 KYr BP, also associated
with the first evidence for productive creative art.
I suspect the emergence of creative art was
triggered by a female choice process and is a precondition for complex
culture. It seems to have spread through modern H. sapiens after the
emergence from Africa, but it is not clear how much of the spread was
cultural diffusion (which is a Lamarckian process that can drive genetic
evolution).
The report of Sahelanthropus in Nature, today, is
actually not as conclusive as the news reports indicate. The material is
cranial and mandibular, and they do not have any post-cranial remains.
Given the variation in other hominids, we cannot be sure we're looking at
a specimen that post-dates the Pan/Gorilla/ Ardipithecus/Australopithecus
radiation. I have seen some recent analyses that suggest knuckle-walking
is derived relative to bipedalism, so the usual questions still need
answering.
-- --- Harry Erwin, PhD, Senior Lecturer of
Computing, University of Sunderland. Computational neuroscientist modeling
bat bioacoustics and behavior. <http://www.cet.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0her/index.html>
Of course we are very nearly at the point
of Lamarkian genetics now, are we not? And on "Out of Africa or Into
Africa":
This reminded me of a question I wanted to ask:
In 1962, Carleton Coon published a big book on
"The Origin of Races" which argued, largely from bone evidence,
that there was regional continuity in Asia and Africa going back to Homo
Erectus. This suggested to him that the "Out of Africa" theory
(not that it was called that back before the movie came out) was wrong
because people appeared to have evolved multiregionally, maintaining some
regional morphological continuity over hundreds of thousands of years
(although he certainly argued that there was interbreeding across regional
boundaries as well - it's a canard that he did not).
Anyway, most (but probably not all) of the genetic
evidence seems to have gone against Coon's notion that Homo Erectus
contributed a lot to modern humans. The current dominant belief is that
anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa between, say, 50k and 200k
ago, then emerged and wiped out the Homo Erecti and Neanderthals globally.
So, that leads to two questions:
1. Does this mean Coon was wrong about the fossil
record? Did he just imagine regional continuity? Or did he just have too
small a sample size and more recent finds of Homo Erecti showed there
wasn't regional continuity. Or was there continuity?
2. If there was, yet the genetic evidence suggests
no admixture with predecessor species, could that be explained by the
theory that modern humans, facing the same regional environmental
pressures in Asia versus Africa just evolved in the same ways
morphologically as their predecessors?
Steve
And back to computers:
Subject: Intel observations...
Dr. Pournelle-
I finally decided to bite the bullet and build the
2-ton gorilla of desktop systems. I bought all my components at newegg.com.
I bought an Intel D845EBG2L motherboard, 2.53Ghz processor, 2 pieces of
Kingston 512MB DDR PC-2100 RAM, 2 Western Digital 120GB hard drives, 16x
Pioneer DVD, ATI All-in-wonder 8500DV video, SoundBlaster Audigy Platinum
EX and a TDK 40x-12x-48x CD-R. Now I know I could have bought all of that
just as easily at Fry's. But every motherboard box I picked up had one of
those white product return stickers on it. If it were a toaster, I
wouldn't have a problem buying something that was repackaged and reshelved.
But when it comes to computer components, I'd rather buy something new.
After mounting the motherboard in the case (Antec
Plus 1080), I had to look at the mobo documentation to check on the
Power/LED/USB connections. I'm still confused about that, but what puzzled
me even more was that the documentation said it only supported a P4 CPU
running at 2.4Ghz. I thought I had researched this enough and knew I read
in numerous places that the EBG2L board supported the 2.53Ghz CPU. Rather
than let doubt get the better of me, I jumped over to www.intel.com to see
if this was true or if there were some sort of updated info I could read.
This was about 3pm. Well, I couldn't connect to the Intel web site. Kept
getting the "could not find the page..." error. I kept trying to
connect until about 10:30pm. This morning I was finally able to connect
and found out that the mobo I had did support the CPU I bought.
I did try to find this info on other web sites, but
had no luck. This was a serious waste of my time. And so far I haven't
found any reason why Intel's site was down.
Anyway, just wanted to let you know that this type
of stuff also frustrates the hell out of your loyal readers. And I do
appreciate that you do all these silly things so I don't have to.
Keep up the good work!
Rob Madison
Interesting rounding error.
Note that Intel has a highly standard system for
connecting Power On/Off, HDD light, Reset, etc., and if you have documents
for any recent Intel board you have them for all; there is a missing pin
in the 2 column array of these, and note also that there is always an
alternative Power Light set with 3 pins since many cases come that way. It
confused me at first because I got an Intel board without the little
diagram showing which pins were for what, until I realized that they
haven't changed that in about 3 generations now; Intel really hopes that
case makers will standardize and make a single keyed plug for all those
functions.
I haven't advised anyone to get WD drives in some
time, which is to say that while I have some WD drives in operation, all
but one of my recent failures have been Western Digital. Which is not so
say yours will, but I would run Scan Disk fairly often just in case...
And now from Dr. Ed Hume:
http://www.strategypage.com/fyeo/howtomakewar/
default.asp?target=HTCBTSP.HTM
July 13, 2002;
U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan are very deliberately avoiding the
mistakes the Russians made. A lot of this has to do with combat support.
One major problem the Russians had during their 1980s war was keeping
their 100,000 troops healthy. Most of the Russian soldiers who served in
Afghanistan got sick, often very sick. The Russian troops always had
trouble getting clean water, or clean quarters to live in. American troops
have always paid more attention to keeping illness down and they have
succeeded in Afghanistan. This means more water purification equipment,
plus showers and latrines that use clean water and keep the troops clean
at the same time. Russian troops also had trouble with the Summer heat and
sandstorms in southern Afghanistan. American troops now have air
conditioned tents to sleep in, and other air conditioned tents where they
eat and have access to the Internet (for email) and short phone calls
home. And most Afghans aren't just "used to it." As the Special
Forces discovered when their medics began treating their Afghan allies, a
lot of Afghans are constantly coming down with one bug or another, and
many have just laid down and died up in the hills. American troops are
kept healthy and in good physical shape, so that when they do head off for
the hills in their helicopters, they hit the ground in much better
physical shape than their opponents. Nothing like a good night's sleep to
keep you sharp for combat.
Something any Roman Centurion could have told
you. Ancient and medieval armies lost more to disease than to the enemy,
time after time after time.
"My privy and well run into each other,
after the practice of Christiantee,
The plague has taken my mother and brother, why has my God afflicted
me?"
And another note from Sue Ferarra:
From http://OpinionJournal.com
Best of the Web Today - July 12, 2002 By JAMES
TARANTO
Cow Tripping http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55385-2002Jul11.html
"Faced with some of the world's strictest
anti-drug laws, some addicts in Malaysia are sniffing fresh cow dung to
get high," the Associated Press reports from Kuala Lumpur. Apparently
the sulfur in cow dung has an intoxicating effect.
Now that's disgusting!
And:
Dr. Pornelle,
I don't know who Victor Davis Hanson is, or what his
credentials are, but he makes a lot of good points in this article: http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_3_the_civic.html
. I too remember a time when the public schools seemed to understand that
their job was to produce good young citizens.
Ken Jancaitis
Hanson is author of two books I have chosen as
Book of the Month. The first was The Western Way of War. He is a classical
historian and always worth reading.
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