| Tuesday,
January 5, 2010 'Ministers now face having
to exempt under-18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new
legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under
child pornography laws.'
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/04/new-scanners-child-porn-laws>
- Roland Dobbins
===========
Navy Accepts Future USS Independence
http://www.military.com/news/article/
navy-news/navy-accepts-future-uss-
independence.html?ESRC=dod.nl
Tracy Walters
Pirates beware
============
Ah ha! I have the solution at last... <grin>
As I was catching up on your daybook and mail today,
the solution to the whole AGW mess, as well as the energy crisis and
economic crisis came to me like a blinding bolt of bullsh.. errr - make that
brilliance.
Surely we have some clever person who can figure out
how to design an instrument package on a sat that will be able to measure
not o the ground temperature of the planet below it, but thousands of
increments of air temperature between itself and the ground as well.
We propose putting up a fleet of these things. Think
of the consequences!
Real data on planetary temperatures!
Full employment for the aerospace industry!
So much data coming in so quickly we have to hire an
army of American programmers to deal with the huge data streams. Perhaps
some of that ill-user TARP money can fund this!
Which automatically means American computer producers
like IBM and Apple make a ton of money, 'cause you need a lot of computer
power to do any kind of analysis on that data!
Which automatically improves the economy, both here
and in China, since the parts for all those computers would come from China.
(buying from China = economic prosperity! )
Which allows us to fund a way to power those sats,
once their normal power cells run dry, in a totally green way by building
power sats to do it. Incidentally, the power sats can beam any excess power
to the ground. The greens will be happy, no pollution, and we can use the
sat power beams to put heat wherever we want it giving us weather control!
(Well, those AGW people do say that just a tiny amount of extra heat in
exactly the right place can ruin the planet... weather control from a hugh
microwave oven in the sky makes just as much sense,,, no? :)
How cool is that?
<grin> Now that I think of it, some looney just might
buy into braindead logic like that, perhaps I should go peddle it in D.C....
-Paul
Sounds like a plan...
==============
Your papers, please! And how much do you make a
year???
Dr. Pournelle:
War correspondent and photojournalist Michael Yon was
handcuffed and detained at the Seattle airport by the border bullies for
refusing to tell them how much he makes.
Posted on his Facebook Fan Page follows:
http://www.facebook.com/#/MichaelY
onFanPage?ref=search&sid=1289278330.563267364..1
Got arrested at the Seattle airport for refusing to
say how much money I make. (The uniformed ones say I was not "arrested", but
they definitely handcuffed me.) Their videos and audios should show that I
was polite, but simply refused questions that had nothing to do with
national security. Port authority police eventually came -- they were
professionals -- and rescued me from the border bullies.
When they handcuffed me, I said that no country has
ever treated me so badly. Not China. Not Vietnam. Not Afghanistan.
Definitely not Singapore or India or Nepal or Germany, not Brunei, not
Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Kuwait or Qatar or United Arab Emirates. No
county has treated me with the disrespect that can be expected from our
border bullies.
You are astonished?
=====================
: Wattgate 381 Audio Grade Duplex Socket
Jerry,
Have you read the reviews of this product?
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=110-439&vReviewShow=1&vReviewRand=2818820
That made my day. I haven't howled like this in a long
time!
On a more serious not, the quality of AC power can be
an important factor in the quality of high end sound reproduction. Of
course, these sockets won't do anything regarding the lousy quality of the
power supplied by the power company of the lousy quality of the wire in the
walls of your house. The money would be better spent if saved up for a good
power conditioner.
Hearing and listening to music is a psycho-acoustic
experience. These sockets will definitely help the psycho part of the
experience!
Bob Holmes
Power conditioners are certainly to be
preferred...
==
Economy power cables/outlets vs high quality
Hello Jerry,
The wall outlet cited may be OK, but this one is
probably better for the 'critical listener':
http://www.musicdirect.com/product/74162
Naturally, having a decent wall outlet is worthless
without a high quality power cord. Here are a couple of well thought of
candidates, although you may have to wait; they are both on back order:
http://www.musicdirect.com/product/84626 (on back
order) or http://www.musicdirect.com/product/74066 (on back order)
And of course once you have POWER to your system you
are, unless your ears are rated several stages below 'tin', going to need to
need high quality interconnects for the various parts of your system. And
then speaker cables. These would probably be 'OK': http://
www.soundstage.com/equipment/shunyata_aurora_cables.htm
No system is complete without a turntable for your old
vinyl. This one may not be the 'best' but it is such a steal at $13,999 (vs
the normal $24K) that it would almost be a sin to NOT buy it: http://
www.musicdirect.com/product/73004
Unfortunately, it comes sans cartridge. This one is
decently rated: http://www.musicdirect.com/product/72713.
A quality pre-amp is a must: http://www.musicdirect.com/product/
73063 should do.
As is a power amp: http://www.musicdirect.com/product/73053
Speakers are SO personal; just figure on an entry
level of $20-30k and let your conscience (and ear) be your guide.
All-in-all it MAY be possible to put together an
'acceptable' (to a connoisseur) system for under $100k, but I wouldn't get
my hopes up.
But, rest assured, the power outlets and power cables
are CRITICAL to your audio success. Low ball those and you may as well go
back to 8- track. Or so you would deduce by dipping into the surreal world
of the audiophile.
I'll also bet that the audiophile world went for Obama
at a higher rate than Harlem.
Bob Ludwick
===========
Subject: CO2 levels and temperatures in the distant
past
Jerry,
I wanted to offer a cautionary note for those of your
readers who are ginning up correlations of CO2 with temperature, using
estimates from the distant past. The wild card here is the intensity of
solar radiation. Astrophysicists apparently believe that, when the earth
formed, the solar radiation from the young sun was only 70% of what it is
today. So as you go further back in time, the intensity of incoming solar
radiation may also have been lower. This leads to what Carl Sagan termed the
"Faint Young Sun Paradox". Based on lower solar radiation, the earth should
have been a snow ball for much of it's history. Yet geological evidence
suggests liquid water was present for much of earth's history. One theory to
resolve the paradox is that, in the past, higher levels of greenhouse gases
offset the effects of lower solar radiation. The implication for the current
debate is that a given concentration of greenhouse gases today might produce
higher temperatures than in the past, because the sun in now hotter.
CP, Connecticut
===========
Before 'Global Warming' saved us
Hello Jerry,
I'm with you. If I have a choice between warm and
cold, I'm gonna go with warm. At least if this 'before Global Warming' story
is an example of the 'cold' option.:
http://m.caller.com/news/2009/
dec/23/king-of-northers-arrived-in-1899/
Bob Ludwick
==
I took
another look at Octave's ordinary least squares function, and noticed
something I'd missed/misunderstood. The function fits the matrix equation
y = Ax. To use this to fit a line, y = mx+b, in the usual form, you have
to find a way to get it to fit y = a1 x1 + a2 x2, and let it solve for m =
[a1 a2]. Using a constant 1.0 for x2 works nicely. (Computer graphics
people will recognize homogeneous coordinates.)
I dug out my
old HP-11C, did a quick fit to the data in the table, and got one set of
numbers. I cooked a new AWK script, to create a corresponding set of [ppm 1
temp] triples, and ran the ols() on that set. The numbers agreed with the
HP-11C fit, to four significant digits, which is better than the input data,
so I knew I was on the right track. I then reworked my original AWK script,
to do the same thing, and ran that.
The final fit
was:
temperature =
7.3736e-004 * ppmCO2 + 15.715 C
which
translates to 1356 ppm CO2 gives one degree C temperature rise.
Raw data
(columns are name of era, date of beginning of era in millions of years ago,
ppm CO2, and Celsius temperature):
Cambrian 542
4500 21
Ordovician 488 4200 16
Silurian 444 4500 17
Devonian 416 2200 20
Carboniferous 360 800 14
Permian 300 900 16
Triassic 250 1750 17
Jurassic 200 1950 16.5
Cretaceous 145 1700 18
Paleogene 65 500 18
Neogene 23 280 14
Revised AWK
script (you will need gawk or something similar to create the long-form data
file that is sourced into GNU Octave, below):
BEGIN { printf("a
= [\n"); }
NR == 1 {
gstart=$2; start = $2; co2 = $3; temp = $4; }
NR > 1 {
for(i=0;i<(start-$2);i++) {
printf("%f 1.0 %f %d;\n", co2, temp, (gstart--));
}
start = $2; co2 = $3; temp = $4;
}
END {
for(i=0;i<start;i++) {
printf("%f 1.0 %f %d;\n", co2, temp, (gstart--));
}
printf("];\n");
}
Revised GNU
Octave commands:
source("c:/co2.foo");
x = a(:,1:2);
y = a(:,3);
[m,b,r] = ols(y,x);
m
Jerry, I'd be
happy to supply the 500-line expanded data file to anyone who wants it.
John Strohm
===========
1991 Iraq war
It appeared at the time (1991) that Saddam Hussein
intended to invade Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after Kuwait,
after which conquest he would have been able to dictate world energy prices.
What would have happened to the U.S. economy faced with $100 oil in 1992 or
$200 oil in 2002? Recession at least, and much lower GDP growth would be my
guess. August 2001, Iraq placed 100,000 troops on the Kuwait border for war
games and insisted that Kuwait was a province of Iraq, and gave indications
that it still intended to invade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Given this
Sudetenland type provocation, maybe invading Iraq in 2003 was unavoidable.
Darryl Miyahira, Honolulu, Hawaii.
Saddam was easily deterred, but we didn't do
that. As to expelling him from Kuwait, having done that we might as well
have seized the oil. There was no sane strategy to the First Gulf War. But
that's another discussion.
Iraq has ALWAYS claimed that Kuwait was a
province of Iraq. Perhaps it is. Why is it our affair? I have seen no
credible evidence for plans to invade Saudi Arabia. And I have no idea why
if we had to throw him out we did not make the Kuwaiti royals pay for the
exercise...
===========
re: Schneier is wrong about drone encryption. -
Hi Jerry,
Regarding Roland's email about Bruce Schneier being
wrong about drone encryption, he must have been reading a different article
than I did. Bruce's point is that given the choice between using the current
encryption infrastructure, and having an unencrypted link, the latter is the
better choice. However, he went on to make an additional point: The NSA and
DoD need to have a commercial-grade, ad-hoc encryption infrastructure that
can support encrypting non-classified data such as the drone links. The
current solutions and policies are time-consuming, restrictive, and hard to
implement across the wide variety of users who need access to the data -
it's a failure of the current system/solution to meet a new use case, not a
lack of a need, that's preventing the use of encryption on the links.
Cheers,
Doug
==========
SUBJ: The Misandry Bubble
http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html
A long read but extremely worthwhile.
Executive Summary: The Western World has quietly
become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the
state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various
perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against
men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is
celebrated. This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid
civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately
be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as
soon as 2020.
John
=============
hacks in Congress
Jerry,
In response to Mr. Greentree's well reasoned objection
to Congressional term limits:
(1) The absence of limits does not presume that the
next generation of Congressmen will take any further efforts to understand
the workings of the executive branch (which remains the problem at the
national level, as stated).
(2) The solutions are obvious:
(a) With very few exceptions, federal agencies should
be authorized for a finite period of time and closed permanently. If the
need remains, it is necessary for the Executive to convince Congress to
authorize a successor agency to continue the mission. (And on a one-on-one
basis, not a blanket authorization.)
(b) There should also be employment limits for federal
employees, particularly those in the Executive Service and Senior Executive
Service grades. (At which time they must be reappointed, or transfer to a
different agency, or some other appropriate termination. Retirement at
half-pay with benefits might be cheaper in the long run than what they're
doing to the country these days...) In any event, housekeeping after changes
in administration should go one or two levels further down than just the
appointees.
Jim
Or perhaps we could make GS-10 and above
hereditary with the oldest child inheriting the job. Modern
primogeniture...
===========
'Now researchers estimate that nearly ten times as many such structures
— of unknown purpose — may exist undetected under the Amazon's forest
cover.'
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/
2010/01/100104-amazon-lost-civilization-circles.html>
<http://antiquity.ac.uk/Ant/083/1084/ant0831084.pdf>
- Roland Dobbins
The Island of Dr. Moreau
For a PDF copy of A Step Farther Out:
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