The column is done, filed, corrected, circulated, signed, sealed, and
delivered. Part of the story in the column is what happened to the mailing
list and what I am doing now. There's other interesting stuff in there.
The papers this morning show a weeping godmother, upset because the police
shot dead her 14 year old nephew. The boy was in the act of stealing a car,
fled in it from the police, then backed it into a police cruiser. There is
no evidence that the police officer knew the age of the culprit. The rest of
the circumstances are under investigation, but we have had a couple of LAPD
seriously injured by fugitives using a stolen car as a weapon to try to
batter their way out of an apprehension situation.
If the
godmother has any sense of failing in her responsibilities, which surely
must include teaching the kid that stealing cars is wrong, and trying to
escape the police by using a stolen car as a weapon is stupid as well as
wrong, the interviewer didn't record that. Instead the case is being played
in the papers for sympathy for this child gunned down by the police.
I hold no brief for trigger happy cops, some of whom have acted in the
stupidest possible way -- we had a case of a deranged street woman (with a
Ph.D.; she was well known to neighbors who were trying to intervene but were
unsuccessful) shot dead for "threatening" an officer 8 feet away from her
with a screwdriver; the cop's partner shot her for reasons no one has yet
been able to fathom; the incident began when they stopped her on suspicion
of having a stolen Ralph's shopping cart, but the cart had in fact been
bought for her by a neighborhood association since she kept leaving home to
live in the streets) -- but one can have considerable sympathy for an
officer being threatened by a moving automobile. Of course 10 rounds fired
may be wretched excess. I have mixed feelings about having the police trade
their service revolvers for automatic pistols: it seems to me that a
revolver is a good tradeoff between being unarmed and being fully armed; but
I freely admit that it has been 40 years since I was in the Mayor's office
in LA and had both the access and the time to find out what it was like on
LA streets. It has all changed, and by a lot.
When you have
areas of a city in which it is not considered unusual for 14 year old boys
to steal cars and try to evade the police, you will have situations like
this; people who cannot govern themselves will be governed, and those
assigned the task have a fairly high regard for their lives and an even
higher one for their partners. This is inevitable.
But if the
US cannot impose self government on large parts of our own cities and
populations, are we not over reaching a bit when we think we can impose
liberal democracy and self government on the shards and wreckage of the
Turkish Empire that have been gathered into chunks we are pleased to call
"nations"? I ask seriously.
Niven came over and we hiked to the top of
the hill. Sable then went to the groomers, and I have to go pick her up. I
had shopping errands, and Roberta is making disks for her
Reading program. I need to write up the notes
we made on the hill about Inferno, the purpose of Hell and the true purpose
of the Universe and the other small and trivial themes we are working on...
Mail is piling up. I'll get to some shortly. And I have some thoughts on
education and reading and how LA wasted $50 million on a reading program
that didn't work while paying no attention to ones that do work.
Credentialism run riot.
And the stock went up. Considering that the printer division of HP is
worth more than the entire HP-Compaq empire is valued by Wall Street,
and that she managed to reduce the stock value of two technically
excellent companies to about 1/3 of their value before she took over,
perhaps it is time to end this particular experiment in shattering the
glass ceiling.
Oh, don't get me wrong, it's not that women can't be heads of large
empires whether commercial or military or political; but it is the case
that most of the traits required for heading a big enterprise tend to be
"manly" rather than "feminine" (and if you don't know what those mean, go
read a bunch of western literature and history and come back because your
education is deficient). Manly virtues tend to be more common in men than in
women. So it goes.
There used to be a conventional wisdom among military people that
officers could be differentiated by two variables, brilliant and stupid, and
by active and lazy. The active and stupid (these are relative terms, and
it's assumed that all of them are smart enough to be officers, but some
aren't as bright as others) are to be eliminated. Active and stupid is
dangerous. Stupid and lazy are the heart of the army, the usual officers who
work their way up from platoon to batallion command, who often lead by
example. Brilliant and active make good staff officers, but they want to DO
things, and drive the men crazy and are never to be given supreme command,
but should be promoted: the perfect General Staff Officer to be sent out as
Chief of Staff to important units. Brilliant and lazy are the commanding
officers.
In business you can't quite make these distinctions, because brilliant
and lazy is often not good enough in a highly competitive environment. On
the other hand, if it ain't broke don't fix it is good advice in business as
elsewhere.
But brilliant and active is still dangerous, and near brilliant and
active is even more so.
The Compaq acquisition was at best ill advised. The companies had
entirely different corporate cultures. Compaq had marketing strategies based
on getting their products out to the press, getting people to think Compaq
first. They tried to compete in the consumer market and were not all that
good at it; there was this residual of engineering skill and integrity that
hesitated to pump out stuff at low prices by cost reduction. The Compaq
professional line was very good, and I always thought well worth it. Servers
not quite up there with the really top line, but plenty good enough for
nearly all small and middle businesses. I used them for years. I have a Dual
Pentium Plus Professional Desktop Workstation that has been in continuous
use for a decade; it was the best thing out there when it was installed, and
it has never been out of service, although now it's used mostly to collect
web site information: but still in use. Memory and disk drives have been
added, and Princess gets dusted out once in a while, but otherwise she just
works.
HP also had a reputation for engineering excellence and a market strategy
that roughly went "If you don't know how good our stuff is, you don't
deserve to have any of it."
The merger produced a system that didn't know how to market yet was told
to compromise excellence and get out there and sell. The result was
predictable and predicted.
There is no evidence from her speeches that Carly Fiorina understood any
of this.
I am told that Jack
Chalker has died. He was an old although not a close friend, and he will be
missed. This rates a larger announcement but I'll wait for his family.
http://www.qis.net/~ewhitley/eva
I am apparently not smart enough to find James Hogan's explication
on his web site: it
isn't organized in a way that lets me do that. Probably my fault. I did have
some small discussion of
this here at one time.
Do understand: I have always thought that Duesberg is probably wrong in
his views about the causes of AIDS; my concern has always been that HIV
doesn't fit with the Koch Criteria for determining causation of diseases,
and the vehemence with which the orthodox research establishment resisted
any kind of crucial experiment to settle the matter once and for all. Given
the huge amounts of money AIDS gets -- far more per death than does, say,
breast cancer which may or may not be a significant comment on the power of
different pressure groups -- it certainly would not cost a lot to do some
definitive tests on the HIV == AIDS hypothesis and get it over with. There
are some significant questions remaining even after this development, but it
certainly looks as if the old Duesberg thesis that HIV is more likely a
marker than a cause is probably in correct. On the other hand, quite
orthodox researchers have wondered about correlations between viral loads
and severity of immune system collapse, and the ability of HIV to hide; and
of course Duesberg was a discoverer of retroviruses, and seems to have been
treated rather oddly by the research community given his former standing
among virologists.
I don't pretend to be an expert on the politics of AIDS research money
allocations, but you don't have to be an expert to realize that there is a
lot of money here, and an orthodoxy has formed to guard against any of that
money going to anything but research efforts the orthodox establishment
approves of; and, of course, to lobby for increasingly larger funding. Under
those circumstances I would always advocate that the public step in to
insure that some small amount of public money be spent as insurance against
the possibility that the major scientific community is just plain wrong. Big
Science is often -- usually -- right, but not always, and if science is to
take public funding it is in politics whether it likes it or not --
allocation of tax money is by definition politics -- and ought to accept
some public oversight.
This is especially true when highly expensive cures are developed.
There's just a lot of profit in selling AIDS drugs.
Duesberg is probably off his head; but given his prior standing in the
virology community -- one does not become the Chief Virologist of the
University of California Medical School by being a complete nut -- it would
seem prudent to test his adamantly held hypothesis, particularly since it
wouldn't cost that much as a percentage of what is being spent. I have
always wondered why, but when I ask those in charge they say it would be
silly to waste any money at all testing what we already know. That seems a
curious attitude for science; after all, they still run the Michelson-Morley
experiment once in a while.
My conclusion the last time I did a serious look at AIDS research was
that a Bayesian analysis would show this would be a good time to spend a
little money confirming hypotheses. I have not followed developments very
closely since then, so I have no idea whether such an analysis would give
the same results. I am entirely sure that spending $100,000 on a Bayesian
analysis of AIDS research fund allocation would be very much worth while,
and I could recommend some statisticians or operations research specialists
who could do the work. I'll also bet that no such study will be done.
Jimmy Hogan is right to kick sacred cows. He ought not be surprised to
discover that some sacred cows have very loyal and very fierce bulls to
defend them -- or that sometimes the sacred cow is sacred for good reasons.
I see by the LA Times that there's more to be said about the money wasted
on a badly conducted program to use computers to teach English.
Roberta's experience back when they were looking into funding that
program was that she had to pay to play, and we didn't want to get into
that. Her program was already highly successful and in use in several LA
schools, but the people deciding what to buy weren't interested in looking
at the results of programs in use in some of their own schools. They had
some elaborate and rather expensive procedures for being considered, and
they were enough that only major publishers were likely to be able to pay to
play.
The fact remains that every place her reading
program has been tried it has worked far better than anyone expected,
and that includes specifically with English as a Second Language schools.
She's got the results. No one much cares, of course. The experts know how
reading ought to be taught. It's just that they can't do it. But people who
can do it aren't important.
This may be relevant to the discussion of sacred cows, see above.
A reader who doesn't
care to be identified drilled around in Hogan's web site to find
http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/aidsarticle.pdf. This is worth reading, as
it is a pretty well written summary of Duesberg's position. It was a more
defensible position prior to the recent discovery of
super-HIV, but it's not entirely unreasonable now. HIV is an odd kind of
infectious disease, and it would be well to know that. And to the best of my
knowledge there is still no crucial experiment determining the truth or
falsity of the HIV == AIDS hypothesis.
Duesberg once offered to have himself injected with HIV as a
demonstration that it doesn't cause AIDS. I don't know if he still holds
that position. If so, he will be lonely even among skeptics of the HIV ==
AIDS hypothesis. And I still wonder why, given that there has been no
demonstration that HIV == AIDS conforms to the Koch criterion of disease
confirmation, there hasn't been more testing of the hypothesis that everyone
seems to just know is true. I suppose it is true, but that's a very heavy
bet, and given the money spent on all this, wouldn't Bayesian analysis
indicate spending a little on assuring us that the key hypothesis in all
this is true?
This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up
daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column,
8,000 -
12,000 words, depending. (Older
columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.
If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.
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