A TOUR GUIDE TO CHAOS MANOR CONTENTS Jerry Pournelle Tuesday, March 06, 2007
REPORTS Work in Progress	A page describing what's available on this web site. Revised not very often. Think of this as a very inadequate and outdated tour guide. It may be worth a little attention; see below. View The Black September War Mail How to get my job: the secret to becoming a professional writer. Alt.Mail Reports Debates Pictures Chaosreports Computing (columns not published in BYTE) linux Sciences Velikovsky Dean Drive Strategy of Technology Space and Space Policy Getting to Space (Policy) Megamissions and Space Power Single Stage to Orbit The SSX Concept (Technical) Other SSX papers (Council Report)   New Projects at Chaos Manor Amorphophallus titanum Search Function See Below for Details
	The most popular feature is VIEW.  This is a day book of what we are doing, and often contains first impressions that don't make it into the column. It is revised daily or nearly so when I am at home, and often several times a day. Each day starts anew. The VIEW series has a home page. That lists all the previous VIEW pages. There is also the current view page. Secondly there is MAIL. This is organized similarly to View in that there is a Mail home page, and a current mail page. There is a lot of cross connection between mail and view, as I publish feedback and comment on reader views. We think we have one of the best mail sections on the Web. You can even find The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere in mail. There's a lot of good stuff in there. In both cases the current pages have absolute addresses, and you should be able to bookmark them; the contents change daily and the page itself changes weekly. You can find previous mail and view pages at their respective home pages.   alt.mail is mail about things outside the usual scope of this page; it gets added to when I think a debate has gone too far. It has an Alt.Mail Home Page which will tell you what else is there. Among other things there is a debate on Cosmology and gravity, Two Party States and Empires, and a bunch of other stuff, much political. See the alt mail home page for details. Sometimes things will flare up in MAIL and eventually be put into Alt.Mail, and other times they just stay in mail. This is one area where we could be a lot better organized. It tends to be stocked episodically rather than periodically, and the episodes can be infrequent. Next there are REPORTS. There is a Reports Home Page that is more or less kept up to date on what reports are available in it. Under it are many different reports from many people. It would be pointless to repeat all that here. You will find reports on Y2K, the Yorktown incident, Microsoft, the Seventy Years War, and a flood of other stuff. Go look at the reports home page for details. There is a Debates Home Page. The difference between debates, mail, alt.mail, and reports isn't easily defined, and is best thought of as a product of whim. The Debates Home Page tells most of what's there. Among the items on this page are the Paris LeMonde article on how I won the Cold War but ruined the space program, debates on the Microsoft Monopoly, the Halloween Papers about Microsoft, and other such stuff. Reviews has a Reviews Home Page, which once again describes much that is there. That section has my essays on what we currently recommend (not updated as often as I would like, but still valuable), book reviews, the book of the month, and much else. Confusingly, there is another and later Recommended page, which see. The Pictures Home Page gives some clues as to what pictures are available here. In particular, the Death Valley sequence on rolling my Bronco II and walking out of Death Valley after the 1998 COMDEX, and some many other pictures I've put up from time to time. Includes Chaos Manor NASA Epcot Center Larry Niven's New Year Party Parsifal under construction Dragoncon: Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury, and, well, me... and a whole bunch of stuff...   There are many other pictures including Roberta at the Opera, the Administrator of NASA, and other such stuff.  ChaosReports was a folder I created when I was trying to do sub-webs> It didn't work well, and ended up merely as a holding place for the verbal part of the Death Valley Report (linked to the picture report), the new and revised Recommended page, and CMREPORTS which was an attempt to do what I have done with this page, give a sort of tour guide to this site. CMREPORTS is still worth a short look, since it tells details I won't repeat here. There are several photo groups in ChaosReports including: the Christening of our goddaughter on August 1, 1999, and a short expedition to take cover photos for The Burning City a few days earlier. There's also a photo report on The Corpse Plant, Amorphophallus titanum. The COMPUTING folder contains a Computing Home Page, which tells what is in it. In brief, for a period after the paper BYTE folded the column was not published in the United States, but it continued publication in Nikkei BYTE in Japan and in other overseas licensees. All of those columns are contained in this folder. You can get to them from its home page. The linux papers are a work in progress. There is no definitive linux home page yet, but if you go to the first of the linux papers, you'll get some idea. The second linux page gives some installation adventures. There is a long discussion of Open Source Free BSD vs. Linux, a series of questions about linux, some linux links and references, and more papers on linux as they came in. (3) (4) (5) . This is all due for a complete revision, but I am waiting (August 1999) for some new developments in hardware with preinstallations, and the Corel Office Suite to be ported to Linux. There needs to be a Linux section home page but at the moment there is not one. The Sciences Folder was another attempt at a sub web that didn't work. The pages ought to be folded back to reports. There are two, one on Velikovsky including considerable from James Hogan, the other on the Dean Drive, a "reactionless drive" that was once well known, and which both I and the late G Harry Stine had some personal experience with. The Strategy of Technology is a book by myself and the late Stefan Possony. It was used as a text at West Point and Colorado Springs at one time, and periodically at the Air War College where it sometimes appears on the reading list to this day. It is a "shareware book". It was important in its day, and may still be. There is nothing quite like it around, I fear. For a short disquisition on this book, see View30 for January 1999. That disquisition also contains a tribute to the late Stefan Possony, one of the heroes of the Cold War. I should move it to a page of its own. Space papers are described largely on the Space Papers Home Page. There are a number of them some linked to pictures. There was a brief correspondence about space on its own page; much more took place in various issues of VIEW, and can be found, sort of, by looking through VIEWDEX. One of these days I will go through and pull it all together, but that isn't likely soon. The Black September War page lists and described special pages devoted to the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center Work In Progress: major book projects at Chaos Manor. Not updated often enough. Search Function, which is specific to this site and indexed nightly: Search: type in string and press return. Match ALL words Match ANY word   There are other random papers. How to get my job is a paper about how to become a professional writers. It has proved to be quite popular.   Megamissions and Space Power is an essay I gave at the Air War College and reflects some of my thinking on grand strategy and defense policy. Starswarm talks about my book of that title. What's New tries to keep a running commentary on what new stuff has been added here. What Is This Place is another summary page sort of like this one but much older; it also tries to show what's going on here. And if after taking a tour you like this place and want to help pay for it, here's how. I do the best I can at indexing, but it is never easy.