| Thursday,
December 23, 2010 North Pole Volcanoes
Dr. Pournelle --
Study finds Arctic seabed afire with lava-spewing
volcanoes
July 25, 2008
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/
story.html?id=81bb2fd3-63f1-476f-b0be
-f48c0dc90304
“Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a
widespread, and ongoing, process,” according to an international team that
sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world beneath the Arctice volatile
discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process,” according to
an international team that sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world
beneath the Arctic ice."
"They returned with images and data showing that
red-hot magma has been rising from deep inside the earth and blown the tops
off dozens of submarine volcanoes, four kilometres below the ice. “Jets or
fountains of material were probably blasted one, maybe even two, kilometres
up into the water,” says geophysicist Robert Sohn of the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, who led the expedition."
Apparently there is a volcano under the Arctic ice. Do
they have an impact on Arctic ice? Some researchers say they don't. I don't
yet know enough about the situation to venture a guess.
Pieter
I have seen the secular press reports of the
volcanic activity under the Arctic. I have seen little discussion of the
heat effects, It does seem to me that heating water from the bottom is
more effective than heating it by shining lights on it or blowing warm air
across it: that is, heat introduced from volcanism is 100% absorbed, while
much solar radiation is reflected back into outer space even with
increased CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb most of it. Of course the devil
is in the details: how much is the relevant question.
We know that volcanoes on land tend to cool the
Earth by injecting reflective materials into the upper atmosphere; no
doubt the Iceland eruptions had a good bit to do with the current very
cold weather in northern Europe. The Year Without A Summer was after all
caused by Tamboura.
============
education and youth
Dear Jerry
As a former member of our local information
technologies trade association I've taken part in several task forces
addressing the expansion of our tech export business, in that respect our
association and industry have been fairly successful to the point that we
now find ourselves in need of more trained personnel, given that our country
is small and that math based disciplines like engineering have a small
following we found ourselves in a quandary, where to recruit new personnel?
(not just engineers, also programmers and analysts).
We decided to go to high schools and visit classes at
the point where the students make a choice on their career path, that is two
years before they finish high school, they are 16 years old and those who
wish to pursue a career in science or technology (please note that this
includes bio sciences and medicine) take a path with significantly more math
and science (including physics and chemistry) than do those who want to go
into the humanities.
So we started visiting high schools, we formed a pool
of volunteers who would visit those schools all over the country, the idea
being that practitioners of engineering and programming would tell tales of
what it's like to work in the field and point out how much of those
students´ everyday life is surrounded by the products of hi tech.
My personal experience, and most of my colleagues´ was
pretty much disappointing, the lack of interest, apathy, "wise guy" replies,
where on a level that none of us expected, let me point out that I'm 54
years old and have three children of whom the youngest is 23, so I've been
"out of school" for quite a while, but I have younger colleagues, some very
much younger, and none of us expected to find such a poor environment and
response.
The high school I went to is located in a middle class
area and the kids going there are not from economically distressed areas,
nevertheless the response was depressing, out of a group of about 70 persons
(three classes worth) only three or four exhibited any interest, thus I
believe that the malaise you perceive in the LA area (and perhaps much of
the USA) might be much more widespread than you believe.
I offer no solutions, indeed I believe that the only
solution that would actually work is to have those kids' parents place a
higher value on education, this might prove hard to do. From personal
experience I know that getting my own children to value knowledge was a long
struggle and demanded a sustained effort. It was ultimately successful but
that doesn't mean I was not concerned for quite a while....
One last comment, when I asked "what kind of career do
you want to pursue?" the overwhelming answer was, "the one the pays back the
soonest" the underlying subtext was "and the one that takes the least
effort".
Happy Holidays
Ariel Fabius
Montevideo Uruguay
Through eighth grade I went to schools that had
two grades to a room, 20 - 25 pupils per grade, and the teachers had
2-year Normal School degrees. No one in my family had a 4-year college
degree. My first two years were in Catholic grade schools, after that it
was Capleville public school, and my classmates were farmers' kids.
Discipline in all those schools was strict, and corporal punishment was
legal: I didn't get whacked often, and learned to discipline myself
despite the urge to interrupt, talk too much, get bored and cause trouble,
etc. High school was Christian Brothers and we were, or pretended to be,
terrified of the Brothers who were rumored to have bashed several kids
with roundhouse rights although I never actually saw any such thing. We
went through the motions of discipline: we stood when the teacher came
into the room, and stood until dismissed at the end of class. I never saw
any discipline problems. On reflection I suspect that classroom order was
as great a factor in my getting a decent college prep education as
anything. In any event I was exempted from introductory English and math
on arriving at college (after my stint in the Army).
For my first 8 years I was mostly in a rural red
earth farming area, and all my friends lived out there. I don't recall any
emphasis on education in my family, but we did have an Encyclopedia
Britannica.
I do believe that discipline is a major key to
education.
==========
Pogo, etc.
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
I note that you do not have a youtube clip for
Pogo's carol (deck us all with Boston Charlie)
May I recommend this:
http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=46u50qJY0GM
And in something in the spirit of "Grandma got run
over by a reindeer", I suppose this is not too bad:
http://vimeo.com/2399404
Wishing you and yours a scary solstice, a happy
Christmas, and a good new year, I am
Very truly yours,
Bernard Brandt
Thanks.
=============
Naked emperor and a conspiracy of silence
Jerry
Naked emperor and a conspiracy of silence, another bit
from Spengler:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/
Middle_East/LL23Ak04.html
As usual, he cuts to the meat of the matter:
“America is exceptional - utterly and absolutely
exceptional - because the rest of the world depends on American guns,
American money and American mediation in a way that no other country or
combination of countries possibly might replace. Any other power that
suffered the setbacks that America sustained during 2010 under the Barack
Obama presidency would have been pushed off the top of the hill. The
reason America still has diplomatic currency to spend in Asia as well as
actual currency to borrow demonstrates its indispensable role: no one,
least of all Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao or Russian Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin, wants America to fail.
“That is why a conspiracy of silence surrounds the
observation that the emperor is naked. But the facts are depressingly
clear.
“After one trillion dollars and 5,000 casualties,
America will leave Iraq with nothing to show for its Quixotic commitment
to build a nation in the Mesopotamian sand.” <snip>
“Russia is holding America's feet to the fire over
ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) nuclear
weapons treaty which - stripped to essentials - forces the world's only
first-rate power to deal with a vanquished second-rate power as equals.
Russian surface-to-air missiles and other technology remains an instrument
of blackmail against the US.” <snip>
“America's capacity to punish Pakistan for its
ongoing support of the Taliban as an anti-Indian force in the region has
reached the vanishing point. "If America cut off spare parts for
Pakistan's F-16's," an advisor to former Afghanistan commander General
Stanley McChrystal observed, "they'd be flying Chinese planes the next
day".
“China wants Pakistan to continue to maintain
pressure on India, and has visions of a warm water port on the Indian
Ocean linked by rail to China.” <snip>
North Korea, Venezuela, our economic difficulties with
Germany and Asia. Then:
“Never before in the course of strategic events have
so few done so much damage to so many in such a short period of time. The
"few", to be precise, are Obama and the tiny coterie of advisors through
whom he runs the government. Obama was true to his baffling words before
the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2009: "No one nation
can or should try to dominate another nation," Obama told the United
Nations on September 23. "No world order that elevates one nation or group
of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations
will hold." <snip>
“Those who wanted an end to US hegemony will get
what they wished for. But they won't like it.” <snip>
He goes on to say why.
He had me shaking my head. When Obama hit the national
scene, I thought of him as Jimmie Carter Junior. Now I see how wrong I was:
you’d have to mix the worst elements of Carter and Woodrow Wilson to get
someone near as toxic.
Ah, well. Despair is a sin.
Ed
Carter was a bit smarter than Obama, but he had
far less self esteem and confidence.
=============
Subject: Ice Cube Neutrino Detector at South Pole
http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/info/scale.php
Tracy Walters, CISSP
Holy moley, its BIG.
==============
: flash mob question
Dr. Pournelle,
The original flash mob Hallelujah chorus you posted
about took place in Canada on November 13. The Washington Post story was
about a similar (but larger) event in northern California.
--Matt Knecht
==
Yes, that became obvious quickly. The moral of
the story is don't let anyone know in advance.
=============
A few random thoughts
Hello Dr. Pournelle,
I was pleasantly surprised to see you mention Tim
Powers' novel Declare last week. That's one of my favorite books, but I
seldom hear it mentioned. I just accidentally picked it up while browsing
through the library, and, as a result, looked up his other books as well.
Thanks.
You've written quite a lot lately about those who
don't need, and won't really benefit from a college education. I teach at a
community college, (the same one I attended in the 1960s), and what seems a
bigger problem is that the work world has changed so dramatically. When I
went to OCC in 1966, several of my classmates went through the 2-year
electronics program, and got jobs working at the hundreds of local
electronics and aerospace companies in Newport, Huntington and Long Beach.
My first job was creating and etching custom integrated circuits for Babcock
Electronics. Now, all of those companies are gone, along with the
entry-level and assembly jobs that my school's vocational programs prepared
students for.
In a lot of ways, I feel like James Lee Burke's
character, Dave Robicheaux as he longs for the world that he grew up in, a
world that seems to have disappeared. When my newly married folks moved to
Costa Mesa in 1952, they could support themselves, including buying a house
and going to school at night, on the money my mom made as a car hop at De
Murels and that my dad made as a night watchman. The working people that I
knew in the community, the school janitor, the milkman, the postman who
lived across the street, all made enough to support their families, usually
with only one breadwinner. My parents were unusual since both of them worked
(as school teachers) once they graduated. The "wealthy" in town were those
who owned the local businesses.
I often hear that the manufacturing jobs that
disappeared starting in the 1970s are gone for good, and are never coming
back. When I hear that (and, when I believe it) I find it hard not to
despair. I really can't see how it can be in our best interest to have a
country where we don't make anything, and, where the most successful segment
of the population consists of those who can manipulate incomprehensible
financial instruments in inexplicable ways. I, personally, would be willing
to spend more for goods and services if I was hiring people in my state and
community. That just turns out to be very hard to do (which I found out when
I tried to find a bicycle that was made here in the US).
On another topic, I'd like you to know that one of my
treasured papers I've kept in my files from the 1980s was a hand-written
reply I got from you to a letter I'd sent to Byte about the Apple III. I was
always impressed that you'd take the time to personally respond.
-- Steve
Of course we could create an economy in which
there were more jobs, but we can't do it with regulations, minimum wage
laws, Free Trade and International Economy, and a capital sytucture that
demands growth rather than profit.
===========
The Flawed Legal Architecture of the Certificate
Authority Trust Model
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/
sroosa/flawed-legal-architecture-certificate-
authority-trust-model
Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com
==========
Thor Power Tools Ruling
Dear Jerry:
As I recall, this never rose to the level of the
Supreme or any other court. It was an IRS administrative ruling on how
inventories were to be valued and the issue was that businesses could no
longer write off the old ones over a period of years to recapture the costs.
The issue was not taxes per se but depreciation, which is cost recovery.
Under the Thor Power Tool rule you carry the inventory in the warehouse at
the full cost or you dump it. The result of this ruling for publishers is
that slow-moving stock gets sold off to remainder dealers as "scrap". The
author receives no more royalties and those copies go into the marketplace
in direct competition with the books we do make money on. Carrying inventory
in storage costs money, regardless. So short sighted MBA types , in an
effort to reduce costs, write down these assets and give them away for
pennies. The result is no more backlist. The entire traditional publishing
system which seeks to jam every channel with books very quickly and expects
half of them to be returned is ecologically anf fiscally unsound. Everyone
loses.
This is why, despite the higher per-unit cost, many
publishers are going over to print-on-demand. Minimal inventory and all
customers can be serviced quickly. Of course ultimately this will mean the
end of all those cheap bargain books.
We are going over to print-on-demand when the current
stock of offset copies is gone. We have already raised the prices to cover
the higher per-unit cost. That ripples through because while the discounts
to sellers and distributors remains the same, the amounts needed to cover
that cost rise proportionally. The suggested retail price is now $22.50
instead of $18.95, but we don't make any more money at that price. The
Kindle edition with the special formatting will be $9.99 and we expect some
foreign language rights sales soon as well. We are open to licensing the
book for a mass-market paperback, which will probably be the same price or
less than the Kindle edition. Those will be offset, but probably "cover
rips" rather than returnable. The royalty won't be much but the sales will
be massive. You'll see it in grocery stores.
The original edition will stay in print for at least
six more years because it's the first in a series and we have the 150th
anniversary years of the Civil War starting very soon. Actually, with
print-on-demand , it need never go out of print. No inventory, which is also
true of all the e-book editions. All of our future print editions will be
print-on-demand, which means they will not be cheap, but since what we sell
is not a fungible commodity, we expect people to pay full value.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit Brass Cannon Books
Thor Power Tools vs. Commissioner of Internal
Revenue was decided by the US Supreme Court. It says that you can't write
off inventory just because you can't sell it; thus if you keep unsold
books in the hopes that a market will appear in future, they are property
and can't be written off just because they aren't selling now and cost
money to ship and store. The Congress could have changed the law that let
the IRS set its own rules (in contrast to standard accounting rules that
let Thor write off unsellable inventory), but it did not. Congress could
have acted at any time since, but it has not.
The result is that paperback books that are not
sold are stripped and destroyed (although some end up in a black to grey
market that costs authors dearly). Whether it is in the public interest
for the government to require actual destruction of property before it can
be deducted as an expense has never been debated.
SF writer Kevin O'Donnell Jr. explains this
very well in an article in the SFWA Bulletin.
http://www.sfwa.org/
bulletin/articles/thor.htm . Neither I nor any of my friends of any
political persuasion have ever been able to get Congress to consider that
all this has done to publishing and author revenues. Those
Congresscritters who do get interested find that they are opposed by the
revenue collection lobby and there is no powerful lobby in favor of
Congressional overturn, largely because it is so little understood.
===========
". . . these meteorites would have contributed to
the amino acid inventory of the early Earth and other planets in our solar
system, including Mars."
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/101220-asteroid-meteorite-life-space-science/>
--- Roland Dobbins
==============
Cold winters here but ...
While it's cold in Europe and much of North America,
it's way warmer than normal in the Artic.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/
JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1710
" At the same time, warm air is flowing into the
Arctic to replace the cold air spilling south--temperatures averaged more
than 10°C (18°F) above average over much of Greenland so far this month."
BTW, while there may be issues with the accuracy of
numeric measurements of temperature, these measurements aren't the only
indicator of climate change. You might want to take a look at Tim Flannery's
The Weathermakers sometime.
Regards Keith
I would be astonished if it were not warmer in
the Arctic given that the dairy farms of Leif the Lucky have been
emergring from under the Greenland ice. Greenland used to be green, and
there were lots of vines in Vineland, and we can expect that to happen
again as the Little Ice Age ends.
The Earth has been heating since before 1800
(with a setback in eighteen hundred and froze to death after Tamboura).
Human activity has almost undoubtedly contributed to that heating. The
question is how much, and to what accuracy we can measure these events. We
have a warming trend that has been going on for some time. We need to know
more about it.
I do not think the delegates to the IPCC
conferences in Denmark and Cancun have shown great understanding of this.
http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/12/11/
un-delegates-sign-petition-to-ban-water/
==
Evidence about climate change...
http://jewishworldreview.com/1210/dead_sea_drilling.php3
"More tubes [of drill cores] lie on the floor of the
lab, soon to be put through the machine. In one, a 4-inch stretch of mud
reflects a century-long wet period around 400 years ago, in what is known as
the Little Ice Age. Deeper samples should corroborate other documented
events such as the volcanic eruption of Santorini about 3,500 years ago."
Charles Brumbelow
=============
Electronics assembly work in the US
I've worked in the California electronics industry for
the last 40 years. We've always done some assembly here. I think the problem
is marshaling and then disposing of the resources needed to build several
million iPhones as they go through their life cycle.
The US in general and California in particular make it
very difficult to reuse both people and facilities at the level needed to
build consumer gear.
There's no good answers. I can build 200 widgets and
the premium of building in the US is easily folded into the product cost as
it will be a low- volume, high-markup item. If I want to build 2 million
widgets, the $1 per unit I save by going to China becomes a big deal.
I would also point out that electronics assembly is
boring, repetitive work at low pay. Even in the US, the work is dominated by
Asian immigrants.
-- http://www.jkmicro.com Embedded Dos, Linux and
Windows Controllers Since 1995
Repetitive boring work is precisely what is done
well by the skilled as opposed to the educated. Shop work requires
learning discipline and care, not higher mathematics or finance theory or
voodoo economics.
And none of this is discussed when we talk about
free trade.
If you add cost to a product through regulations,
perhaps you ought to equalize that with a tariff?
==
Read more:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424
052748704828104576021142902413796.
html#ixzz18DBNzCAv
Tech Supply Chain Exposes Limits of Trade Metrics
The Wall Street Journal article demonstrates the
way that technology and economics do not make a simple metric.
The Taiwanese company is accounting for 3.6
percent of the "wholesale" cost of the iPhone. That is not what it is
going for at retail, which is even more interesting. The same may be
found in a lot of other imports where the added value is spread over
different companies, countries, and continents.
============
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