| Thursday,
September 26, 2002 There are times
when I think I have lived too long, and ought just get out of the way.
Apparently if I don't state that I know the obvious, then everyone assumes
I am unable to grasp it.
Dr. Pournelle,
I always enjoy reading your comments. They are well
thought out, concisely articulated, and thought provoking, whether I agree
or not. Usually, I don't even feel qualified to comment. However, on the
case of the Air Force pilots in Afganistan, who killed the Canadian
soldiers, I do wish to comment.
I don't think I have enough first hand information
to be sure what happened, and it will evidently have to wait for the trial
and its reporting for us to feel sure. I read the links provided by David
Patterson, particularly the one from centcom. That is an amazing document.
I don't know when I have seen the military kick itself around so much. I
was also surprised to note that the US Army began conducting an
investigation even though Air Force pilots were presumed to be at fault.
Assuming its correctness, I don't see your
objections. Especially as regards command and control. That is crucial to
the military. When it fails, missions fail, and the military fails. From
what I have read in the media, the incident at My Lai seems to have been
largely due to a lack of proper leadership in that company first, then at
the division level.
In this case, the actions of the pilots as outlined
in the report led to the death of the soldiers on the ground. If they were
not following the orders given to them, and more specifically, apparently
disobeying them, then they are responsible for the deaths. The actions of
Pilot Y sound like what I have heard pilots were reported to do in Vietnam
over the DMZ, when they were not allowed to engage enemy forces unless
fired on. That is, fly in such a way as to invite attack, then respond to
it. The centcom report almost says as much. Well, when you are killing
enemy and not losing aircraft, maybe that can be winked at. What do you do
when it causes friendly deaths? Do you just forget it and hope it doesn't
happen again? That isn't to say that all things that cause deaths rise to
the level of criminally culpable actions.
If that is your argument, and you believe that some
action should be taken against those who did not maintain order and
discipline, but not rise to the level of court martial for homicide, ok.
Say so. If you don't believe the centcom report, I could hold judgment
until its accuracy could be determined. I can even wink at minor rules
infractions that aid in overall mission as long it doesn't kill friendly
forces. However, when a person goes outside the rules, they have to know
they may face consequences, and be ready to stand up to it without
complaint.
Bottom line. What do you do in this instance? People
are dead. Someone appears to be to blame. If someone got off before, that
doesn't excuse anyone in the future. Canada is a sovereign nation which
can legitimately request we look into this and take action deemed
necessary. But, what do we care about whether it was Canada or not. What
we need to worry about is whether or not our people did something illegal.
If we think so, we should take action whether Canada wants us to, or asks
us not to. It is our concern first. It is our military discipline we
should worry about, politics not withstanding.
NPrice
I would have thought it obvious that there is a
difference between willful disobedience to standing orders, and homicide.
In one of my "lectures" in The Prince I have the lecturer say
that soldiers will accept harsh discipline but they must believe it just:
even the man being unjustly punished must believe that the crime he is
being punished for warrants the punishment. That's one difference between
an army and a mob.
Dear Jerry,
I agree the Canadians are being a bit precious about
having their troops bombed by US aircraft. After all, the US killed a New
Zealand Army major in a bungled bombing demonstration in Kuwait in March
2001, and the NZ Government was really understanding about it.
I know the Americans are supposed to kill enemies
rather than allies, but people should realise they're only human. And in
return, maybe some Canadians or New Zealanders can kill a few Americans by
accident; I'm sure the US would be just as tolerant and understanding as
new Zealand was.
Still, I think you may be over-simplifying when you
say "This incident won't be important for anyone but the two
officers." Don't Canadians have families?
Yours, Gregor
================
Gregor Ronald Christchurch, New Zealand 03-385-0577
http://www.inet.net.nz/~gregor/
History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a
lot. (Mark Twain)
My initial response to this letter was a bit
snippy. I'll try to do better after my hair appointment.
Meanwhile, write five hundred times: War is Hell.
When you decide that you want to be in one, understand that many things
will happen that you did not want or intend.
And oddly enough, yes, I knew they had families.
What I don't have is time to say everything I think and feel about a
subject; to insist that I must restate the obvious every time I write is
to say I shouldn't write at all. Perhaps that's the right lesson to be
drawn. God knows I don't get paid much for doing this. But let me repeat:
yes, I knew they had families, and the matter will be important to the
families of the dead. That statement would be true had they died in a jeep
accident. Apparently I should apologize for not saying that?
I am going to end this with two more letters from
Canadians, and I am going to do Canada the favor of NOT printing a dozen
and more really vicious letters.
"And we can always sentence them ....
and commute their sentences, and everyone will be happy"
I wouldn't bet on it. That was the attitude the
execrable French adopted after they'd sent in their troops to murder
people in New Zealand. They negotiated a prisoner transfer, got the
murderers home to France, then released them. New Zealand hasn't
forgotten, they haven't forgiven the French, or the domestic political
party that let the murderers go. More to the point, I'm writing from
Australia, and I haven't forgiven them either. I think you can take it as
a given that when there was a culpable death, neither the nation suffering
nor their allies will forgive. If there isn't a true punishment for the
guilty, then the Empire of the United States will have lost the goodwill
of (at least some of) their allies.
Now, granted, the USA is incredibly powerful, and it
can probably manage to exist without allies. However, it wouldn't be a
pleasant life. If you try to insult Canada, you'll likely find you've
insulted the Commonwealth. Check the list of active allies you have, and
consider how your international stance would look without Britain, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of the Commonwealth.
That's not to say that I don't understand that
accidents will happen. They do. Some of them deadly. But I don't think
even the USA is in a position to be able to start killing off their allies
without at least a full and open enquiry - much more so than they would
have if they had just had some jet jockeys blasting some US marines into
thin goo.
Regards, Don Armstrong
What this says is that we need some scapegoats,
and we can't even mitigate their sentences. And of course given
"culpable deaths" perhaps Leavenworth is too light a punishment?
What will the clients demand of us to gain their continued good will?
As to the "International Stance" of the
United States without the entangling alliances and concerns with
territorial disputes in Europe, I would have thought my views clear
enough.
Dr. Pournelle...being a Canadian by birth and an
American Citizen by parentage I have a slightly different view on the
"friendly fire incident". As a small aerospace company owner I
travel often and by the nature of my business I talk to all sorts of
people and hear their comments.
Most folks in general (Canadian) wanted answers to
the questions posed after the incident. Those people are now genuinely
appalled at the outcome. The answers are reasonable , understandable, and
sadly commonplace. The actions taken against the flyers are not and
therefore both confusing and embarrassing to the average Canadian citizen.
Many of my managers are former Air Scouts and ALL of their families
understand the hazards of combat. A typed (not written) apology from on
high to the aggrieved families would have been sufficient and warmly
welcomed by them. Fighter jocks MUST be cocksure and aggressive or the job
does not get done. That simple. The old adage goes...mistakes happen and
people die. But you have to be willing to learn from those mistakes and
not punish those that made the mistakes on the front lines so brutally
that others take notice and question the wisdom of the initial enterprise.
Christopher
Well that is fairly close to my view; but of
course it's impossible now. The lawyers and politicians will have to
settle the matter now. We can wish that lawyers and politicians will work
to achieve justice.
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
subject: Europe vs. the U.S.
Dear Jerry:
There's a long but fascinating and important article
at http://denbeste.nu/external/Kagan01.html
that's very relevant to the Republic or Empire? debate. It's by Robert
Kagan, and the subject is how relative power affects a country's approach
to questions of war and peace, and Europe's belief it has achieved Kant's
"Perpetual Peace". Three quotes:
"The psychology of weakness is easy
enough to understand. A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear
prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative -
hunting the bear armed only with a knife - is actually riskier than lying
low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle,
however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a
tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn't
need to?"
And:
"The differing threat perceptions in the
United States and Europe are not just matters of psychology, however. They
are also grounded in a practical reality that is another product of the
disparity of power. For Iraq and other ‘rogue’ states objectively do
not pose the same level of threat to Europeans as they do to the United
States. There is, first of all, the American security guarantee that
Europeans enjoy and have enjoyed for six decades, ever since the United
States took upon itself the burden of maintaining order in far-flung
regions of the world - from the Korean Peninsula to the Persian Gulf -
from which European power had largely withdrawn. Europeans generally
believe, whether or not they admit it to themselves, that were Iraq ever
to emerge as a real and present danger, as opposed to merely a potential
danger, then the United States would do something about it - as it did in
1991. If during the Cold War Europe by necessity made a major contribution
to its own defense, today Europeans enjoy an unparalleled measure of ‘free
security’ because most of the likely threats are in regions outside
Europe, where only the United States can project effective force. In a
very practical sense - that is, when it comes to actual strategic planning
- neither Iraq nor Iran nor North Korea nor any other ‘rogue’ state in
the world is primarily a European problem. Nor, certainly, is China. Both
Europeans and Americans agree that these are primarily American
problems."
And:
" ‘The
genius of the founding fathers,’ European Commission President Romano
Prodi commented in a speech at the _Institute d'Etudes Politiques_ in
Paris (May 29, 2001), ‘lay in translating extremely high political
ambitions . . . into a series of more specific, almost technical
decisions. This indirect approach made further action possible.
Rapprochement took place gradually. From confrontation we moved to
willingness to cooperate in the economic sphere and then on to
integration.’ This is what many Europeans believe they have to offer the
world: not power, but the transcendence of power. The ‘essence’ of the
European Union, writes Everts, is ‘all about subjecting inter-state
relations to the rule of law,’ and Europe's experience of successful
multilateral governance has in turn produced an ambition to convert the
world. Europe ‘has a role to play in world 'governance,'’ says Prodi,
a role based on replicating the European experience on a global scale. In
Europe ‘the rule of law has replaced the crude interplay of power . . .
power politics have lost their influence.’ And by ‘making a success of
integration we are demonstrating to the world that it is possible to
create a method for peace.’ ". . . The transmission of the European
miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe's new _mission
civilatrice_. Just as Americans have always believed that they had
discovered the secret to human happiness and wished to export it to the
rest of the world, so the Europeans have a new mission born of their own
discovery of perpetual peace.
‘Thus we arrive at what may be the most
important reason for the divergence in views between Europe and the United
States. America's power, and its willingness to exercise that power -
unilaterally if necessary - represents a threat to Europe's new sense of
mission. Perhaps the greatest threat.’ "
A lot more, all absorbing and insightful.
Best, Stephen
DELENDA EST SAUDI ARABIA!
A lesser known side of the late
Bob Wallace, from Seattle's PI... "Psychedelic philanthropist and
computer shareware pioneer Bob Wallace -- Microsoft Corp.'s ninth employee
-- died at his San Rafael, Calif., home Friday. He was 53."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/88590_obit26.shtml
PC Write was the only shareware I used and paid for.
I wish there'd been a windows version.
regards,
Jim Whitlock
Thanks. I was fond of PC Write too.
Doc,
Just to present the other side of the story on WinXP:
I've had mine installed and running since XP Home
was released. I have it loaded on a Pentium II 350 MHz w/ 256MB RAM I
built myself. It's on a cable modem 24/7. I run Microsoft Outlook 97, mIRC,
Messenger 24/7. I code VB and Access databases regularly. I run a web cam,
burn CDs, load digital pix via USB, and update my Palm Pilot regularly. It
generally runs two weeks before requiring a reboot. It has never crashed.
The auto-update feature has never caused a problem. I installed SP1
without incident.
I find this to be the best O/S I've ever used, from
early DOS to Win2K, and from Solaris through Linux. Just my $0.02, YMMV.
Don ***************************************
"There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand
binary, and those who don't." ***************************************
Come visit The Misanthropyst at http://home.nc.rr.com/dwmhome/
And on an entirely different
subject:
September 24, 2002
Here They Are, Science's 10 Most Beautiful
Experiments By GEORGE JOHNSON
Whether they are blasting apart subatomic particles
in accelerators, sequencing the genome or analyzing the wobble of a
distant star, the experiments that grab the world's attention often cost
millions of dollars to execute and produce torrents of data to be
processed over months by supercomputers. Some research groups have grown
to the size of small companies.
But ultimately science comes down to the individual
mind grappling with something mysterious. When Robert P. Crease, a member
of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony
Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked
physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time, the 10
winners were largely solo performances, involving at most a few
assistants. Most of the experiments ‹ which are listed in this month's
Physics World ‹ took place on tabletops and none required more
computational power than that of a slide rule or calculator.
What they have in common is that they epitomize the
elusive quality scientists call beauty. This is beauty in the classical
sense: the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical
simplicity of the analysis, seems as inevitable and pure as the lines of a
Greek monument. Confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside, and
something new about nature becomes clear.
The list in Physics World was ranked according to
popularity, first place going to an experiment that vividly demonstrated
the quantum nature of the physical world. But science is a cumulative
enterprise ‹ that is part of its beauty. Rearranged chronologically and
annotated below, the winners provide a bird's-eye view of more than 2,000
years of discovery.
Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's
circumference
At noon on the summer solstice in the Egyptian town
now called Aswan, the sun hovers straight overhead: objects cast no shadow
and sunlight falls directly down a deep well. When he read this fact,
Eratosthenes, the librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C.,
realized he had the information he needed to estimate the circumference of
the planet. On the same day and time, he measured shadows in Alexandria,
finding that the solar rays there had a bit of a slant, deviating from the
vertical by about seven degrees.
The rest was just geometry. Assuming the earth is
spherical, its circumference spans 360 degrees. So if the two cities are
seven degrees apart, that would constitute seven-360ths of the full circle
‹ about one-fiftieth. Estimating from travel time that the towns were
5,000 "stadia" apart, Eratosthenes concluded that the earth must
be 50 times that size ‹ 250,000 stadia in girth. Scholars differ over
the length of a Greek stadium, so it is impossible to know just how
accurate he was. But by some reckonings, he was off by only about 5
percent. (Ranking: 7)
Galileo's experiment on falling objects
In the late 1500's, everyone knew that heavy objects
fall faster than lighter ones. After all, Aristotle had said so. That an
ancient Greek scholar still held such sway was a sign of how far science
had declined during the dark ages.
Galileo Galilei, who held a chair in mathematics at
the University of Pisa, was impudent enough to question the common
knowledge. The story has become part of the folklore of science: he is
reputed to have dropped two different weights from the town's Leaning
Tower showing that they landed at the same time. His challenges to
Aristotle may have cost Galileo his job, but he had demonstrated the
importance of taking nature, not human authority, as the final arbiter in
matters of science. (Ranking: 2)
Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down
inclined planes
Galileo continued to refine his ideas about objects
in motion. He took a board 12 cubits long and half a cubit wide (about 20
feet by 10 inches) and cut a groove, as straight and smooth as possible,
down the center. He inclined the plane and rolled brass balls down it,
timing their descent with a water clock ‹ a large vessel that emptied
through a thin tube into a glass. After each run he would weigh the water
that had flowed out ‹ his measurement of elapsed time ‹ and compare it
with the distance the ball had traveled.
Aristotle would have predicted that the velocity of
a rolling ball was constant: double its time in transit and you would
double the distance it traversed. Galileo was able to show that the
distance is actually proportional to the square of the time: Double it and
the ball would go four times as far. The reason is that it is being
constantly accelerated by gravity. (Ranking: 8)
Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism
Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. He
graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1665, then holed up at home
for a couple of years waiting out the plague. He had no trouble keeping
himself occupied.
The common wisdom held that white light is the
purest form (Aristotle again) and that colored light must therefore have
been altered somehow. To test this hypothesis, Newton shined a beam of
sunlight through a glass prism and showed that it decomposed into a
spectrum cast on the wall. People already knew about rainbows, of course,
but they were considered to be little more than pretty aberrations.
Actually, Newton concluded, it was these colors ‹ red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo, violet and the gradations in between ‹ that were
fundamental. What seemed simple on the surface, a beam of white light,
was, if one looked deeper, beautifully complex. (Ranking: 4)
Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment
Another of Newton's contributions was his theory of
gravity, which holds that the strength of attraction between two objects
increases with the square of their masses and decreases with the square of
the distance between them. But how strong is gravity in the first place?
In the late 1700's an English scientist, Henry
Cavendish, decided to find out. He took a six-foot wooden rod and attached
small metal spheres to each end, like a dumbbell, then suspended it from a
wire. Two 350-pound lead spheres placed nearby exerted just enough
gravitational force to tug at the smaller balls, causing the dumbbell to
move and the wire to twist. By mounting finely etched pieces of ivory on
the end of each arm and in the sides of the case, he could measure the
subtle displacement. To guard against the influence of air currents, the
apparatus (called a torsion balance) was enclosed in a room and observed
with telescopes mounted on each side.
The result was a remarkably accurate estimate of a
parameter called the gravitational constant, and from that Cavendish was
able to calculate the density and mass of the earth. Erastothenes had
measured how far around the planet was. Cavendish had weighed it: 6.0 x
1024 kilograms, or about 13 trillion trillion pounds. (Ranking: 6)
Young's light-interference experiment
Newton wasn't always right. Through various
arguments, he had moved the scientific mainstream toward the conviction
that light consists exclusively of particles rather than waves. In 1803,
Thomas Young, an English physician and physicist, put the idea to a test.
He cut a hole in a window shutter, covered it with a thick piece of paper
punctured with a tiny pinhole and used a mirror to divert the thin beam
that came shining through. Then he took "a slip of a card, about
one-thirtieth of an inch in breadth" and held it edgewise in the path
of the beam, dividing it in two. The result was a shadow of alternating
light and dark bands ‹ a phenomenon that could be explained if the two
beams were interacting like waves.
Bright bands appeared where two crests overlapped,
reinforcing each other; dark bands marked where a crest lined up with a
trough, neutralizing each other.
The demonstration was often repeated over the years
using a card with two holes to divide the beam. These so-called
double-slit experiments became the standard for determining wavelike
motion ‹ a fact that was to become especially important a century later
when quantum theory began. (Ranking: 5)
Foucault's pendulum
Last year when scientists mounted a pendulum above
the South Pole and watched it swing, they were replicating a celebrated
demonstration performed in Paris in 1851. Using a steel wire 220 feet
long, the French scientist Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault suspended a
62-pound iron ball from the dome of the Panthéon and set it in motion,
rocking back and forth. To mark its progress he attached a stylus to the
ball and placed a ring of damp sand on the floor below.
The audience watched in awe as the pendulum
inexplicably appeared to rotate, leaving a slightly different trace with
each swing. Actually it was the floor of the Panthéon that was slowly
moving, and Foucault had shown, more convincingly than ever, that the
earth revolves on its axis. At the latitude of Paris, the pendulum's path
would complete a full clockwise rotation every 30 hours; on the Southern
Hemisphere it would rotate counterclockwise, and on the Equator it
wouldn't revolve at all. At the South Pole, as the modern-day scientists
confirmed, the period of rotation is 24 hours. (Ranking: 10)
Millikan's oil-drop experiment
Since ancient times, scientists had studied
electricity ‹ an intangible essence that came from the sky as lightning
or could be produced simply by running a brush through your hair. In 1897
(in an experiment that could easily have made this list) the British
physicist J. J. Thomson had established that electricity consisted of
negatively charged particles ‹ electrons. It was left to the American
scientist Robert Millikan, in 1909, to measure their charge.
Using a perfume atomizer, he sprayed tiny drops of
oil into a transparent chamber. At the top and bottom were metal plates
hooked to a battery, making one positive and the other negative. Since
each droplet picked up a slight charge of static electricity as it
traveled through the air, the speed of its descent could be controlled by
altering the voltage on the plates. (When this electrical force matched
the force of gravity, a droplet ‹ "like a brilliant star on a black
background" ‹ would hover in midair.)
Millikan observed one drop after another, varying
the voltage and noting the effect. After many repetitions he concluded
that charge could only assume certain fixed values. The smallest of these
portions was none other than the charge of a single electron. (Ranking: 3)
Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus
When Ernest Rutherford was experimenting with
radioactivity at the University of Manchester in 1911, atoms were
generally believed to consist of large mushy blobs of positive electrical
charge with electrons embedded inside ‹ the "plum pudding"
model. But when he and his assistants fired tiny positively charged
projectiles, called alpha particles, at a thin foil of gold, they were
surprised that a tiny percentage of them came bouncing back. It was as
though bullets had ricocheted off Jell-O.
Rutherford calculated that actually atoms were not
so mushy after all. Most of the mass must be concentrated in a tiny core,
now called the nucleus, with the electrons hovering around it. With
amendments from quantum theory, this image of the atom persists today.
(Ranking: 9)
Young's double-slit experiment applied to the
interference of single electrons
Neither Newton nor Young was quite right about the
nature of light. Though it is not simply made of particles, neither can it
be described purely as a wave. In the first five years of the 20th
century, Max Planck and then Albert Einstein showed, respectively, that
light is emitted and absorbed in packets ‹ called photons. But other
experiments continued to verify that light is also wavelike.
It took quantum theory, developed over the next few
decades, to reconcile how both ideas could be true: photons and other
subatomic particles ‹ electrons, protons, and so forth ‹ exhibit two
complementary qualities; they are, as one physicist put it, "wavicles."
To explain the idea, to others and themselves,
physicists often used a thought experiment, in which Young's double-slit
demonstration is repeated with a beam of electrons instead of light.
Obeying the laws of quantum mechanics, the stream of particles would split
in two, and the smaller streams would interfere with each other, leaving
the same kind of light- and dark-striped pattern as was cast by light.
Particles would act like waves.
According to an accompanying article in Physics
Today, by the magazine's editor, Peter Rodgers, it wasn't until 1961 that
someone (Claus Jönsson of Tübingen) carried out the experiment in the
real world.
By that time no one was really surprised by the
outcome, and the report, like most, was absorbed anonymously into science.
(Ranking: 1)
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
------ Richard F. Doherty, Director The
Envisioneering Group 3864 Bayberry Lane Seaford, NY 11783-1503 P (516)
783-6244 F (516) 679-8167
Envisioneering: Informed Intelligence. http://www.envisioneering.net
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