| Wednesday,
May 27, 2009 :
Why The Industrial Revolution Started in Britain
Documentation of Pournelle's 2nd (?)Law
Sent to you by BobK via Google Reader:
Why The Industrial Revolution Started in Britain <http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/
prometheus/why-the-industrial-revolution-started-in-britain-5255>
via Prometheus <http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus>
by Roger Pielke, Jr. on 5/26/09
Robert Allen, an Oxford professor, has a new book out
with Cambridge University Press titled “The British Industrial Revolution in
Global Perspective <http://cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/
catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521868273> .” Allen has a precis up over at
VoxEU <http://www.voxeu.org/
index.php?q=node%2F3570>
which provokes a few thoughts about efforts to spark a new green global
economy.
Allen argues that a combination of factors led to the
industrial revolution, among them international trade associated with the
British Empire, an educated and wealthy populace which created a demand for
the fruits of technology as well as the skills necessary to produce them,
and, crucially, cheap energy. Allen provides the following graph, showing a
comparison of energy costs across Europe in the early 1700s.
<http://www.voxeu.org/files/image/allen%20fig%202.JPG>
Allen writes:
The famous inventions of the Industrial Revolution
were responses to the high wages and cheap energy of the British economy.
These inventions also substituted capital and energy for labour. The steam
engine increased the use of capital and coal to raise output per worker. The
cotton mill used machines to raise labour productivity in spinning and
weaving. New technologies of iron making substituted cheap coal for
expensive charcoal and mechanised production to increase output per worker.
These technologies eventually revolutionised the
world, but at the outset they were barely profitable in Britain, and their
commercial success depended on increasing the use of inputs that were
relatively cheap in Britain. In other countries, where wages were lower and
energy more expensive, it did not pay to use technology that reduced
employment and increased the consumption of fuel.
The French government was very active in trying to
promote advanced British technology in the eighteenth century, but its
efforts failed since the British techniques were not cost effective at
French prices. James Hargreaves perfected the spinning jenny, the first
machine that successfully spun cotton, in the late 1760s. In 1771, John
Holker, an English Jacobite who held the post of Inspector General of
Foreign Manufactures, spirited a jenny into France. Demonstration models
were made, but the jenny was only installed in large, state supported
workshops. By the late 1780s, over 20,000 jennies were used in England and
only 900 in France. Likewise, the French government sponsored the
construction of an English style iron works (including four coke blast
furnaces) in Burgundy in the 1780s. The raw materials were adequate, the
enterprise was well capitalised, and they hired outstanding and experienced
English engineers to oversee the project. Yet it was a commercial flop
because coal was too expensive in France.
Since the technologies of the Industrial Revolution
were only profitable to adopt in Britain, that was also the only country
where it paid to invent them. The ideas embodied in the breakthrough
technologies were simple; the difficult problem was the engineering
challenge of making them work. Responding to that challenged required
research and development, which emerged as an important business practice in
the eighteenth century. It was accompanied by the appearance of venture
capitalists to finance the R&D and a reliance on patents to recoup the
benefits of successful development. The Industrial Revolution was invented
in Britain in the eighteenth century because that was where it paid to
invent it.
The Economist reviews <http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13688053>
Allen’s new book this week, writing that “when governments from America to
Japan are reinventing industrial policy with each off-the-cuff bail-out,
this study offers some useful reminders.” Cheap energy and ample wealth as
the mothers of invention appear to be among them. The importance of R&D in
creating both should not be overlooked either.
Bob
Alas, I believe that Obama was at Harvard during
the period when history was not required.
=========
Solar energy and US needs
<i>"There is a limit to what you can get from ground
based solar -- the sun doesn't shine at night, and there is this thing
called weather. Nuclear and spaced based solar have a real potential."</i><p>
Nope. Not true any more. Solar thermal (30% efficient)
can provide 100% of the entire electrical energy needs of the United States
from an area 100 miles x 100 miles. That land area is a postage stamp
compared to the size of the United States. And it does NOT need either
fossil fuel nor nuclear backup to provide full baseline load. It pulls this
trick by storing the necessary energy to "damp" the day-night cycle AS HEAT
in a large tank of molten salt. Electricity generated by standard
steam-turbine plants. Only 16 hours of storage are enough to take care of
your "the sun doesn't shine at night" argument. The places where this would
be installed are called "deserts", and have LOTs of sunny days. The White
Sands Missile Range has about enough land area to do it all, all by itself.
But of course, we won't "build just one" because distributed redundancy is a
good idea (also takes care of that thing called "weather"). For places with
less sunlight, a "hybrid" natural gas/solar thermal plant makes a good
combination. And in fact, a commercial power plant just as I describe will
be built soon in Southern CA by the Spanish company (Ausra) that developed
the technology.
I understand your desire to use the energy crisis to
sell the need for "cheap access to space" with the "solar power satellite"
argument, but your arguments against ground based solar simply do NOT stand
up. I normally agree with you, but not on this one. I'm all in favor of
nuclear power, but I've studied solar enough to know what the current facts
are, and ground-based solar CAN power our society.
Duane
I do not believe the current demonstrations of this
technology have given anything like the yields projected, but I world be
pleased to be proved wrong.
My preference for cheap access to space is
simple: well over 90% of the resouces available to the human race are not
on earth. Space is the key to widespread wealth for all.
============
Solar electric payback, etc...
Dr. P:
One thing is certain about PV systems available today.
It is very important where you live.
I live in Colorado, with Xcel energy as my electric
and gas company.
Two years ago I put up a 5600 Watt PV array. After all
was said and done, after all the federal/state/local/Xcel rebates, my system
cost me $12K.
Before the system went in I was paying about $700/year
for electricity.
This last year I was paid $100 by Xcel, as I produce
more power than I need. So my $12K investment is paying me back at about
$800/year. More next year as electric rates go up a bit.
So my payback is about 15 years. The panels have a 25
year warranty. I have no idea how long the inverter will last.
Your reader "R" commented on how the system shuts down
if the grid goes down to prevent damaging the grid. Close, but not quite. It
shuts down because lineman don't expect backfeed when they are working on
the damaged power lines. One can spend more money on batteries and automated
backfeed cutoff and be lit when the grid is down.
Rob
=============
The gigabuck breath mint
Dr. Pournelle,
Your correspondent, Doug Hayden, wrote
" I'd heard of this, so decided to look it up. I can't
think of a simpler, cleaner way to reduce smokestack emissions than bubbling
them through algae tanks to trap CO2 and particulates. I just can't figure
out (politics aside) why it isn't in use already. Heck, with a little work,
maybe the algae could be tailored to produce pharmaceuticals or some such. "
Pieces and parts of this are being done:
http://topics.nytimes.com/
top/news/business/companies/
martek-biosciences-corporation/index.html
but why not biodiesel, instead of pharmaceuricals?
Examples:
http://www.biodieselmagazine.com
/article.jsp?article_id=3189
http://www.allbusiness.com/energy-
utilities/oil-gas-industry-oil-processing/
5487188-1.html
The problem is not politics, but simple costs. The
article cited by Mr Hayden shows a huge reduction in CO2 and NO, but as a
measure of how much exhaust from the power plant is fed into algae
production? Certainly the claimed 40% CO2 reduction would be useful if it
could be applied to the entire volume of exhaust from the 20-Megawatt power
plant, but I suspect that the technique was applied to only a small portion
of the total output. How much processing must take place before the plant
exhaust can be used for the algae? I suspect cooling of the exhaust would be
needed at minimum, with pumping and filtering of potential toxins (sulphur,
soot) also probably necessary. The cost of these processes are significant
for large volumes of exhaust. While the article states that the algae is
harvested daily, then processed into fuel, no mention is made of the volume
produced or the efficiency of the processes of conversion.
Indeed, the company that was part of the initial study
at MIT, from the original 2006 article citation, has gone bankrupt this
month:
http://biofuelsdigest.com/blog2/
2009/05/14/algae-pioneer-greenfuel-close
s-doors-according-to-reports-closed-system
-approach-led-to-several-pilots-no-commercial-
scale-developments-before-group-ran-out-of-money/ .
What is the mean daily yield rate per square foot of
algae-producing glass tubes? This article says this proprietary process
yield is an established 1500 gallons per acre/year
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes
.com/2008/11/11/colorado-company-
to-take-algae-based-fuel-to-the-next-level/, with hopes of
doubling that, but it is unclear whether they are referring to the
production of bio-diesel or of feed stock. Even producing biodiesel at the
hoped-for rates per acre, this is only enough to fuel about 15 tractor
trailers, or ten home heating tanks. I've seen few references to the size of
the clear glass algae tanks that are needed to produce a significant amount
of algae, but from the picture accompanying the article, it is significant.
Like a lot of other solar-derived technologies, there isn't enough free
terrestrial acreage in places close to low-loss transmission lines to make
it practical. Gains in production efficiency are frequently lost as heat in
transmission losses from distant solar farm real estate.
If the algae is used for bio-fuel, the process would
only serve to displace the CO2 production from the power plant smokestack to
the place where combustion takes place. The oxygen "produced" at the algae
plant would just be consumed by the truck engine or the home heating plant,
and be output there as NO, CO, and CO2.
My point is that this is a potentially useful
technique with a lot of engineering bugs needing work for it to be
practical. In the end, the total reduction of CO2 or NO might not justify
the cost, or be feasible without subsidy.
While pharmaceuticals are more valuable than fuel (at
least by retail price-to-weight ratio), they are probably more economically
extracted from less expensive sources of algae that are FDA-approved.
So, the only politics involved are those of subsidy.
Government sponsorship is being provided already for many of these research
and development studies. Without subsidy, most if not all of these promising
new technologies are only partial answers (my Grandfather used to say
"half-vast," and be assured that he counted on the homonym) to the problems
of power production and waste reduction, and are so far as practical as
perpetual motion. The gap between the part-answers and the actual need is
too great, and subsidy will be an economic hardship. It might seem fair to
remove subsidies from current coal and gas electricity production systems,
but TANSTAFL: It will cost more both ways.
-d
There is an enormous thermonuclear reactor 93
million miles from here...
============
“We skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism,
deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in
the first place.”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/books/review/Miller-t.html>
-- Roland Dobbins
One wonders at how many such experts the taxpayers
ought to subsidize. Perhaps we could do with fewer in these times?
===========
another take on "global
warming"
Dear Dr Pournelle,
I have followed your columns since the early days of
Byte and have always enjoyed them. I stumbled recently upon your web site
and caught up with your last few years of interesting and valuable
experiences and opinions.
I would like, however, to present a new case for one
of your pet peeves: "global warming".
I'll quickly agree that "global warming" is a
demagogical buzzword. It might be happening and CO2 emmissions might be a
contributing factor.
In fact, some of the climate change markers observed
in the last 30 years are even contradictory. We call it global warming but
we are not quite sure yet whether the planet is going to end up warmer or
colder. The one certitude that is growing within the scientific community is
that our climate is much more complex and fragile than we once estimated.
Whatever the reason or the ultimate effects, we know that it wouldn't take
much to change it significantly, at an unbelievably high cost to the human
race.
But that is not even the point of my argument. I would
like to talk about resources. I chose Tin as an example close to your heart
since it is present in all electronic devices. The consensus is that, at
present consumption levels, there are about 35 years of reserves left. If
the Chinese and the Indians raised their consumption to European levels, not
even American ones, we are talking about 10 to 15 years. Even with a lot of
padding, it is clear that within one generation, the only source for this
important metal will be recycled cell phones. Unfortunately, many other
resources we have taken for granted for so long are in the same situation.
The only things we won't run out of are iron and, ironically, energy. The
former is everywhere, the latter is also everywhere, it's just expensive.
So whether we want it or not, consumption will have to
decrease as we are running the planet dry.
Thankfully, all is not gloom and we might not have to
give away our standard of living.
The first variable is population. The Earth can
support two billion people living like princes or 20 living like paupers.
Our choice.
The second variable is the type of consumption that
will constitute the bulk of the economy. If we revert to buying items that
have a higher manual labour to materials ratio, we keep the economy the same
and everybody with a job. Of course, we won't buy as many "items" but they
should be of a much higher quality and have a much longer lifespan. Really,
something as resource hungry as a car should have a useful life of 30 or 40
years. They used to. And they used to be reparable, another, low resources,
high labour side of the economy which has all but disappeared.
Finally, of course, a large part of the economy can be
virtual, with an insignificant resource consumption and high added value. We
have movies, music, books, video games and we've even had a parallel virtual
financial Market for the last few years. All of these have value without
having to dig big holes in an increasingly smaller planet.
So, no, let's not call it global warming among
ourselves, but the cure is the same and needs to be applied. Who cares if
the rest of the world does the right thing for the wrong reason.
And, of course, we could talk about pollution and the
crashing ecology. There should be little controversy there.
With the best wishes for your continued good health, I
remain,
Yours, respectfully.
Gregory Guida
This is the standard Malthusian argument, and
indeed I was once a strong proponent of it. It turns out not to be the
case. When one resource runs low we find another. Meanwhile there is a near
infinite supply of resources available in space. It's raining soup out there
and all we have is forks rather than soup bowls. See A Step Farther Out. Or
my upcoming Survival With Style.
================
A very successful entrepreneur speaks
Under-Performing a Crooked Roulette Wheel...
All,
I believe that "money management" should be outlawed.
Oh, not all kinds of money, just savings in tax-advantaged accounts,
including private and public pension plans. My reasoning is very simple. The
job of a money manager is to beat the market. But the retirement savings
pool is so large that collectively, it *is* the market. Thus, in the
aggregate, money managers who work with retirement savings are pure economic
friction.
It also must be the goal of regulators to do whatever
it takes so that the Steve Balmers (CEO of Microsoft) of our world do *not*
answer "Goldman Sachs" when asked who their company's most significant
competitor is. (Mr. Ballmer did indeed have this answer when FORTUNE
Magazine interviewed him two or so years ago, and he was not kidding. During
the asset bubble, Goldman Sachs and its ilk were paying the best and the
brightest out of M.I.T. And Harvard hundreds of thousands of dollars a year
to start more than Microsoft could afford. The result was that America got
what is not yet another Great Depression, but what is certainly a very
*good* Depression, and Windows Vista on top of that!
Above all, the best and brightest must be directed
into "real" fields and away from "financial engineering" of all kinds.
All that would have been necessary to avoid the
Housing Bubble and the Tech Stock Bubble before it, for that matter, would
have been for Alan Greenspan to have banned the use of borrowed money to bid
up the price of existing assets back under Clinton, before Netscape's IPO.
He would not have needed new statutory authority to do so. Then, when a
"Look Ma! No Revenue Model" dot-com had a "three comma" IPO on top of no
profits and almost no revenue, the margin value of shares would have been
*zero* the first month, rather than 50% like shares of IBM and Proctor and
Gamble. Greenspan could have then let it increase, say, half a percent a
month so after 100 months it was up to 50%.
Similarly, even the erosion of lending standards from
20% down to 0% down would not have been fatal had the total loan value of
existing housing not been allowed to go up more than 1% a year, regardless
of what one could get an appraiser to say. Want to pay $450,000 for that San
Diego house that sold for $150,000 in 2000? Knock yourself out, but do it
with cash!
(As an aside, the value of my Del Mar, California
beach house has apparently tripled since 2000, when I bought it. I have no
interest in finding out (because my wife would divorce me if I sold it!),
but *all* the transactions in the Del Mar Colony are for cash (no mortgages
at all!), so that might even be a real number. The peak price of regular
housing in San Diego was not a real number.)
All the risks mentioned below only get systemically
toxic when they are taken with borrowed money.
(My liquid portfolio actually went *up* a little when
Bear, Sterns and Lehman Brothers went under, because I don't employ money
managers!)
Jim
Of course, there were many, many other sins against
financial sanity committed, many in the name of increasing the percentage of
permanently disadvantaged minorities who are home owners. But asset bubbles
have occurred before without such legislative and regulatory insanity. They
have not occurred without a lot of borrowed money being deployed.
Bubbles are created when too much money chases too
few goods. Making things 'affordable' by government fiat is a sure fire way
to create a bubble. Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were intended to inject more
money into the housing market.
============
Future air-fueled battery could store 10 times more
power
A new type of air-fueled battery being studied could
provide up to 10 times the energy storage of designs currently available,
and someday be used to power electric cars, mobile phones, and laptops, say
researchers.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128
_3-10244133-54.html?part=
rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Bill Shields
Terrific if they can pull it off. Efficient energy
storage is one of the key technologies.
==========
smallest corvette engine - 1/6 scale working model
buffy willow
Dr. Pournelle,
You might enjoy the craftsmanship in this model…
http://www.moyermade.com/chevyV8.html
It’s a working scale model of a 1964 corvette V8
engine. Very neat.
Sean
Thanks!
==============
Gay marriage
Jerry,
IMHO, the whole issue of "gay marriage" is significant
because the Federal government has overstepped its Constitutional limits and
established laws which define certain intrinsic benefits to the state called
marriage, which was once established as a private contract with certain
defined duties on behalf of the two participants (and in some cases, on
their parents), particularly in regard care of progeny. Since progeny is not
an objective of same-gender union, the term cannot apply.
I respectfully submit that the proper response would
be to undo those Federal laws and regulations which define such benefits;
many of those which are not related to progeny being financial in nature
(e.g. establishments of social security and various forms of private
insurance beneficiary behavior and laws of inheritance). It can also be
argued that, the contract of marriage being administered by the States, all
such laws are in violation of the Tenth Amendment.
Otherwise, if (for example) I should want to enter a
civil union with my parents and /or my children (of any gender or
combination of genders) to avoid those excess estate taxes which apply when
inheritance is not to the spouse, or to take advantage of filing my taxes as
married instead of single, why shouldn't I be able to do so?
Jim
I do not think that anyone involved in enacting the
Constitution of 1789 or any of the relevant amendments (including the income
tax amendment) would have thought it odd or unconstitutional that national
tax law ought to favor and reward stable marriage.
The problem here is that in these united States
we have no fountain of right and justice, and to the extent that we do, it
resides in the states, not the national government. We have signed on to
the notion that we have rights, and that to secure these rights
governments exist, and those governments derive their just rights from the
consent of the governed. The Federal Government was intended to protect
the states and allow them to govern by their own rules (provided that it
be "a republican form of government").
That worked fairly well, except when it didn't.
When it didn't we had the Civil War, which
managed to kill a larger proportion of our population than all our other
wars put together.
The Civil War Amendments were intended to
establish federal supremacy in what is known as civil rights matters: but
the supremacy was invested in Congress, and for a long time the tension
between the branches of government came about because the judiciary sought
to limit the powers of Congress (and later of the President). The judicial
theory in those times was that the Constitution granted certain powers to
the States and others to the Federal Government. The Civil War Amendments
readjusted that balance of power.
The judiciary represented the law and
constitutionalism; Congress did the adjustments between the constitution
and the powers of government and saw to modernization of the government.
That worked fairly well for decades.
Then came "sociological jurisprudence" and the
new view of what the courts should do. Instead of applying the law, the
courts became involved in "modernization" of the constitution, in bringing
us the "living constitution", in reconciling the law and constitution as
adopted to the changes in sociological beliefs: in a word, the courts
claimed to be determining not what the law is, but what, given the changes
in society, it ought to be. Now so long as the courts purported to act for
what the people wanted, they were usurping the powers of the legislature;
but they went further. They decided to implement not what the people
wanted, but what the people ought to want and would want if there were as
enlightened as the very enlightened judges. This resulted in a series of
rulings that found that every state legislature in history had been
unconstitutional; in rulings that said that if an examination for
lieutenant in a fire department was passed by 35 firemen but not one of
those who passed was black, there could be no promotions at all; that tax
supported universities could and ought to seek diversity and could employ
race and what amounted to racial quotas in admission policies; that there
was some kind of right to abortion built in emanations from penumbras in
the constitution; that states could not require that one pay property
taxes in order to be qualified to vote in referendums on property tax; and
dozens of other contradictory or absurd rulings.
The Congress ought to have reacted to all this,
but there was this problem: many of the "enlightened" people in the
country fully approved of all these fresh new rights, and they were well
organized, and those who opposed the changes could be labeled as racists
and bigots. I can recall when I was thought a hopeless radical because I
believed the law ought to be color blind.
We sowed the wind, and we reap the whirlwind; and
it will continue. We no longer have a recognized fountain of rights, nor
do we have a recognized source of laws. We do not turn to the courts to
determine and fix the laws, we turn to the courts to change the laws to
what the enlightened want and which everyone else -- the benighted --
ought to want if only they were as smart as the enlightened.
Trying to find consistency in all that is futile.
The gay marriage issue is just one more example.
A California court decided to revise the state constitution to suit what
it thought the law and constitution ought to be. Changing the law is not
the business of courts, and until a few decades ago when the voodoo
sciences became dominant in the universities, there were serious
discussions of such matters. That was when there was reverence for the
courts. I recall Stuart Chase in The Tyranny of Words being a bit derisive
about our national reverence for the courts. We saw the supreme court as a
group of vestal virgins tending the torch of liberty. That was, he
thought, unenlightened.
Now the courts are no longer revered, because
they are no more than another legislature. That is one of the greatest
dangers this or any republic faces, because the ultimate power resides not
in the courts, nor in Congress, but in the Executive. It always does. The
trick is to limit power. That's never easy.
"Deriving their just powers from the consent of
the governed" is the closest thing we have to a fountain of rights. That
same document derives those rights from endowment by a Creator. The modern
view is that there is no Creator or if there be such, this is irrelevant.
Our constitutions and institutions evolve, and it is the business of the
courts to reconcile those changes. Alas, we do not discern any design in
evolution which seems to have an extraordinary fondness for beetles, so we
turn to great thinkers to tell us what that purpose ought to be. Then we
wonder when many disagree. For a very long time we were able to limit the
raw power of government (a dangerous ally and a fearful master).
But I ramble. And see below
==============
718 billion
"haven't we spent more than $718 billion in thrashing
about bailing out various companies? If we had just undertaken to make the
payments for all those who couldn't make the payments -- taking over the
payments, I believe it is called -- and later negotiated with those who were
supposed to be making the payments as to who owned just what equity in those
-- would that not have prevented the disaster, lowered the number of
defaults (or at least limited them to under a trillion dollars)?"
You're missing the point. This isn't about fixing the
root problems or helping people in trouble. This is about saving politically
connected banksters who don't want to lose money. Nothing more nothing less.
Of course since they DID lose money the only way to make good the losses is
to take money from other people who had nothing to do with it.
Also, 700-800 billion is not the actual cost; that's
just what people have admitted to so far. Actual losses in real estate will
be in the 3 trillion range for the USA. When you start calculating the
losses worldwide the number gets much much bigger.
The one thing that would have a chance at minimizing
the damage and setting everything on a path to renewed prosperity would be
to admit ASAP all the bad paper and recognize all insolvencies and get all
the bankruptcy paperwork done. That's not what the politicians will do,
because their bankster friends don't want to face how badly they screwed up.
So they'll keep pushing with the voodoo economics plans and make everything
much much worse the longer they hold on.
The longer this goes on, the more shattering the final
collapse will be. I wouldn't bet money on the USA surviving intact.
Rollory
I think you underestimate the resilience of these
United States when under extreme pressure. I certainly hope you do.
===========
Harry Erwin, Letter from England, Chaos Manor Mail,
Monday May 25, 2009
Sir:
Good community colleges offer craft apprenticeships
under another name. There are some differences from conventional
apprenticeships, of course. The community colleges are less likely to do
work which is routine but profitable, so they can't pay the students a wage.
The kind of traditional auto mechanic shop which could support an apprentice
did things like oil changes and car-washing for its regular customers, both
of which have since been taken over by franchise businesses. The auto repair
shop in the community college will tend to spend its time fixing old, worn,
and damaged vehicles, which a commercial establishment has written off as
economically unsalvageable. That is good for training, of course, but it
does not allow paying wages. Even when repaired, such vehicles will have
"histories," and be worth less than comparable vehicles which have not led
such troubled lives.
Here is the website for the best community college I
know of, Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. Lane Community College
has programs in a wide range of lucrative crafts, eg. all kinds of
mechanics, construction, restaurant cooking, a flying program leading to the
commercial pilot license, and various more mundane things.
http://www.lanecc.edu/
Lane Community College is in the same town as the
University of Oregon, and no doubt, this encourages them to develop a
positive counter-specialization in the crafts, rather than simply taking the
students the University of Oregon does not want. The University of Oregon
has a fine graduate school, of course, and many clever undergraduates, but
it isn't terribly selective at the undergraduate admission level. The lower
strata of Oregon undergraduates in the liberal arts and business schools are
more or less average, and trying to underbid the University for liberal
arts/business students would not get Lane Community College very choice
recruits.
Andrew D. Todd
===============
Subject: S.S. LIEF ERICSON
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
On this page
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosreports/macarthur.html you have
the link:
"All about the space ship model, the AMT Leif Ericson
Galactic Cruiser http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~frank/le.html"
That link has changed to:
http://frank.bol.ucla.edu/le.html
There's a re-direct on the old link, but it will be
removed June 15, 2009.
There's a mention there of something I hadn't known,
that the LEIF ERICSON was designed for AMT by the late Matt Jefferies,
designer of the original starship ENTERPRISE, and the ERICSON design evolved
out of the same original concept drawings as the ENTERPRISE (
http://www.starshipdatalink.net/art/1701.html,
http://www.starshipdatalink.net/art/images/de-2.gif ), just taken in a
different direction. At one point, the ERICSON was being considered for use
in the 1973 Saturday morning animated version of STAR TREK, to the point of
appearing in some early storyboards. Later, Mr. Jefferies used the design
again as a "hyperspace carrier" in a proposal for a t.v. series of WAR OF
THE WORLDS along with George Pal, although "upside-down" from the way it's
normally rendered, to make it slightly less recognizable from its source.
The new UCLA page links in turn to several other
pages, with scale line drawings; some amazing CG renderings; caps, t-shirts,
and mugs for sale with the LEIF ERICSON pictured; pages about your and Mr.
Niven's INSS MACARTHUR, and lots of other interesting stuff. New kits of the
ship (under the title "UFO Mystery Ship") are being manufactured and will be
available for sale beginning in July.
Next year in Luna City,
David K. M. Klaus
Thank you. The
summary page for Chaos
Reports lists other contents, some of which may be of interest.
==============
'If the free model would ruin Anderson's own
business, why does he think it's so great for most other businesses?'
http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/
monetize/2009/05/21/free-be-ignored?page=full
-- Roland Dobbins
===========
A video of the Milky Way rising taken at the Houston
TX Star Party. Spectacular!
This is the “small” version;
http://vimeo.com/4505537
Here’s the medium-sized one, at only 8.4MB.
http://www.wlcastleman.com/
astro/tsp09/tsp_mwcore_rise_720x480.mp4
He has a nearly HD version, at 135MB in size.
Ken Mitchell
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