The Lockheed thing is weird. They gotta have a handle on something interesting (which does not mean “fusion tomorrow”), or they wouldn’t have press released it. Unless it’s some weird internal political fight over funding or something.
If Lockheed had more than the Powerpoint slides they've shown, they should be able to do a reveal under non-disclosure and get the money, or at least the first piece of it, without any trouble.
I figure they're at the point where they're thinking, "We need a few billion coming in for something else, because one of these days Congress is going to wake up to the F-35 scam." Myself, if I were a Congress critter, the day after Lockheed announced that it would be almost four years after the plane passed initial operational capability before the software to actually fire the cannon in flight would be available, I'd have introduced a bill to close the whole project down.
Geography, geography, geography. Across the old South from the Atlantic to Texas, then up the Great Plains and some other parts of the Midwest, it was a bad day for the Democrats and a good day for the Republicans. OTOH, in addition to the things mentioned, Salt Lake City elected an openly gay mayor, earlier in the week Montana's Medicaid expansion scheme was blessed by the feds [1], and more importantly than the school board in Colorado, the voters across that state passed a referendum allowing the state to retain and spend the excess tax revenue from legal marijuana sales [2]. More importantly than the badly flawed Ohio marijuana initiative, the voters there overwhelmingly passed the redistricting proposal.
[1] The remaining three states in the Mountain West that haven't expanded are Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. The Republican governors of all three favor expansion. The Utah governor and Republican leaders in the legislature have agreed on a framework for expansion.
[2] An explanation of Colorado's excess revenue system is beyond the scope of this comment. Or a full-blown post. Most importantly, this proposition passed in every county, not just in the big counties along the Front Range that passed the original marijuana legalization.
All true. Laser photon thrusters producing a milli-Newton of force and accelerating actual macro masses can be demonstrated on a repeatable basis. No reaction mass involved, they don't require any new physics, and they're already three orders of magnitude more efficient than these microwave gadgets (in terms of Newtons-per-megawatt). I think it will be amusing if these new devices turn out to work because of some incidental maser effect doing the same thing.
Over the last 25 years, there have been a whole series of instances where the popular press has grabbed onto something that violates our current understanding of physics. Cold fusion. Powerful space drives that don't require reaction mass. Even Lockheed's announcement that the Skunk Works could produce a working hot fission generator in five years if someone would just give them enough money. My own belief about this trend is that it reflects the growing realization that the two biggies that speculative fiction has been promising for decades -- dirt-cheap energy and easy access to outer space -- appear to be receding out of reach.
So why did they trek across the Atlantic for African slaves...
It's been an awfully long time since I read on the subject, but my recollection is that Americans didn't, for the most part. Coastal Africans handled the initial capture and subjugation. Mostly European-flagged ships carried slaves to the Americas (South much more so than North), although I believe this changed after laws against the Atlantic slave trade began to be more seriously enforced. From the perspective of someone looking to buy slaves, they just "appeared" in the port cities like a keg of nails or bolt of cloth.
The phrase "uses no fuel" in the article is misleading. What they mean is "uses no reaction mass". The generated force requires rather prodigious amounts of electricity -- the current claimed force can be conveniently measured in micro-Newtons per kilowatt. Electricity generation in the kind of form that would make this interesting for getting mass to LEO very definitely requires fuel. Probably also tens or hundreds of Newtons per kilowatt to be really interesting. Call it eight orders of magnitude. We've spent decades trying to make that kind of jump with controlled nuclear fusion, and that was starting from a point where there was no question but what fusion was occurring in the experiments.
Although these days, when I want to be depressed about space possibilities, I read pieces about Kessler cascades.
Spot on. The NFL game you see on TV in your living room bears only a passing resemblance to what you see live in the stadium. The thing that struck me the most is just how much dead time there is at the stadium.
When I took analysis in grad school at UT-Austin, it was the math department's fail-out class* for new grad students. By the end of the first week, I had a Walkman-sized cassette recorder running while I simply transcribed what went up on the board. Later in the day I would replay the tape while I read my notes.
* Under Texas statute at the time, anyone who graduated from an accredited four-year Texas state school was deemed qualified for graduate study in their major field, and the UT schools were required to accept them. A substantial number of undergrad math majors who didn't get accepted at out-of-state graduate schools wound up in Austin. There was no way the faculty could properly shepherd that many through, so one of the first-year required classes was a fail-out class made as difficult as possible. The lectures didn't line up with the assigned text, obscure material was included, etc.
There's a growing body of evidence in recent studies that taking hand-written notes has a strong effect on retention of material. The same effect doesn't occur when notes are taken using a keyboard.
If you fail to attract top faculty to the university, the graduate experience you are offering declines uncomplicatedly with that decline. The value and experience of graduate degrees, or in any case certainly doctorates, essentially depend entirely on the quality of the top research faculty at an institution.
Indeed. In many fields, it's not which school you got your Ph.D. from, it's who supervised your work. Which carries all sorts of risks for the graduate students. Anyone who has spent time in a graduate school that offers Ph.D.s has encountered people who went through the disaster of having their highly-regarded supervising professor die/retire/move to another school.
At least from my perspective, the interesting technology challenge was "How close can we come to that kind of informal real-time interaction?" Based on a variety of unpublished experiments that were conducted in the mid-1990s, the order of importance for the media is audio, then some soft of sophisticated still image manipulation (my description was always "smart shared paper"), then video. Our results for fully distributed sessions indicated that people used the video as a body-language signaling channel. The kind of life-size face-only video windows common in many conferencing tools weren't as helpful as a waist-up shot that included all the hand gestures and fidgeting.
For some, it looks like an extension of the hidden purpose of high school -- keep a bunch of young workers out of the job market, which is already overly full. Much like the GI Bill after WWII, one purpose of which was to keep several million soldiers and sailors from flooding back into the civilian job market too quickly.
Broncos - Packers from Denver tonight. I'm hoping that the camera crews spent the last couple afternoons up in the high country getting plenty of snow shots. The Front Range is getting kind of crowded, and we don't need more people who might be thinking about relocating see the last two afternoons of 70-ish and brilliant sunshine...
I've been an online classroom advocate for something over 20 years now, going back to the time when I was doing research on protocols to implement versions of real-time multi-party multi-media communication over TCP/IP networks tailored for specific applications. My goal, as it turned out, wasn't a distributed form of the giant lecture hall, but a distributed form of a small upper-level class, even seminars. For me, the RSM factor wasn't on the professor side, but the student side. My belief was and still is that there is a lot of unserved demand for such classes from non-traditional students -- they can't come to campus, they're not working on a degree per se, but they're sharp and interested and make the class better for the other students. An online version provides one enormous advantage over the in-person version -- it's trivial to record the entire session and go back to visit some part of it later.
One of the biggest hurdles, I thought -- probably because I was a techie at the time -- was the lack of a really good piece of smart shareable paper. It had to be a high-resolution digitizer on top of a good display. Writing, drawing, sketching, using specialized notations like math and music -- to do those things well seems to require the feedback loop of hand, brain, and eye working on a single image. Still can't buy one at a reasonable price.
In preparation for Oklahoma’s admission to the union on an “Equal footing with the original States” [3] by 1907, through a series of acts, including the Oklahoma Organic Act and the Oklahoma Enabling Act, Congress unilaterally dissolved all sovereign tribal governments within the state of Oklahoma, transferred all tribal lands by Land patent (or first-title deed) to either individual tribal members, sold to non-tribal members on a first-come basis (typically by Land run), or was held in trust by the Federal government for the benefit of the members of the tribes.
If your land is held in trust by the feds, there's little you can do except wait for BIA or BLM to act. You probably have a better chance of getting them to act today than you've had for 50 years.
When I wear my western secession hat -- which I do, from time to time -- I say that if the Army needs to take another big chunk of land to ruin with live-fire tank exercises, then it's long past time for the states east of the Mississippi to pony up. Ditto for any "spent" nuclear fuel repositories, as the vast majority of the commercial reactors are east of the Mississippi and those have never delivered watt one to a western state.
If it takes a more incendiary comment to attract rebuttals, let me know :^)
If I were to guess -- and I have learned that guessing on BLM matters is largely a waste of time -- I would guess that the case will come down to something like "Under the Texas theory, over the years the area of Texas has increased by 90,000 acres and the area of certain Indian lands guaranteed by the federal government has decreased by 90,000 acres. Despite any other agreements Texas may have reached with Oklahoma, neither Texas nor Oklahoma have authority to claim 90,000 acres of federal territory."
If BLM, Indian Affairs, and the tribes decide to use the land to create wilderness areas along the river that require certain minimum flows to preserve, the Red River Compact dividing up the water between four states also gets major changes.
Things get rather confused when the state consists of multiple parts at different levels. The collective we in the form of the State of Texas defined and defended a property right. Now the collective we in the form of the BLM asserts that the Texas-we lacked the authority to make that decision. I won't predict how it will shake out eventually, but will say that there is a body of case law going as high as the SCOTUS that says the federal-we can assert property rights for itself that overrule the property rights that have been defined by the state-we decades after the state-we acted.
A considerable part of the ongoing animosity of western states (at least among the political class) toward the federal government is because of such late-to-the-party assertions of property rights. Backed up by, as I recall one state legislator saying, "they have nukes and we don't."
The courts are usually reluctant to change anything where there's a long-standing mark. The Four Corners physical marker where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah come together is generally agreed now to be about 1,800 feet off from where statute specified, which would translate into a fair number of square miles being in the wrong states. The SCOTUS ruled that the marker is correct for border purposes. Georgia and Tennessee are fighting again over their boundary. Georgia cites the original statute, contemporary measurements, and writing by the surveyor back in the day that says "I measured it wrong." The correction would give Georgia some border in the right place along the Tennessee River that would allow them to divert a billion gallons of water per day from there to Atlanta. So far the courts haven't bought it.
Three sides. The Red River Boundary Compact adopted by Congress in 2000 sets the boundary between the two states as the vegetation line on the south bank of the river. With a couple of exceptions, the boundary moves when the river moves. One of the exceptions is at Lake Texoma, where the boundary is fixed by survey. The other exception is lands that fall under the sovereignty of federally recognized Indian tribes on either side of the river remain under Indian (hence BLM) control whether the river moves or not. I believe that BLM's interpretation of the law is that those Indian boundaries that were fixed by survey never moved with the river. So when the river moved north over a few decades, land that had previously been "in" Oklahoma but controlled by the tribes was now "in" Texas but still controlled by the tribes, and that Texas deeds to that land were improperly issued.
G2: I have been told that one of the common refrains heard at the Western Governors Association meetings is "Do you know what those d*ckheads at the BLM have done now?" Having spent time in the state government of a western state, I have to be careful these days because Black Lives Matter is never what springs to my mind when I see BLM in print. 90,000 acres is a relatively modest amount -- the US Army's efforts to expand the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Area in Colorado was after 6.9 million acres.
Even in the larger environment, there's the issue of ongoing support. At my last full-time gig, neither the budget director (my boss) nor the IT director were willing to add support for a real database application to their list of responsibilities without an authorized headcount increase. I didn't blame them. The IT director had been burned in the past with the cost of taking over half-assed but now mission-critical apps built by staff organizations. And while it was true that my boss had, at that point in time, two people on his staff who could have handled development and maintenance, turnover was relatively high and he didn't want to have to constrain his choices about budget staff so that he would always have a part-time developer available.
I'm trying to get my head around the idea of unit tests for a piece of code embedded into a spreadsheet that gets replicated by copy-and-paste sans any notion of repository or version control...
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “What’s in this Black Box?”
The Lockheed thing is weird. They gotta have a handle on something interesting (which does not mean “fusion tomorrow”), or they wouldn’t have press released it. Unless it’s some weird internal political fight over funding or something.
If Lockheed had more than the Powerpoint slides they've shown, they should be able to do a reveal under non-disclosure and get the money, or at least the first piece of it, without any trouble.
I figure they're at the point where they're thinking, "We need a few billion coming in for something else, because one of these days Congress is going to wake up to the F-35 scam." Myself, if I were a Congress critter, the day after Lockheed announced that it would be almost four years after the plane passed initial operational capability before the software to actually fire the cannon in flight would be available, I'd have introduced a bill to close the whole project down.
"
The Lockheed remark should say "hot fusion". My fingers seem to be particularly stupid this morning.
On “Questions on Framing and Perspective”
Geography, geography, geography. Across the old South from the Atlantic to Texas, then up the Great Plains and some other parts of the Midwest, it was a bad day for the Democrats and a good day for the Republicans. OTOH, in addition to the things mentioned, Salt Lake City elected an openly gay mayor, earlier in the week Montana's Medicaid expansion scheme was blessed by the feds [1], and more importantly than the school board in Colorado, the voters across that state passed a referendum allowing the state to retain and spend the excess tax revenue from legal marijuana sales [2]. More importantly than the badly flawed Ohio marijuana initiative, the voters there overwhelmingly passed the redistricting proposal.
[1] The remaining three states in the Mountain West that haven't expanded are Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. The Republican governors of all three favor expansion. The Utah governor and Republican leaders in the legislature have agreed on a framework for expansion.
[2] An explanation of Colorado's excess revenue system is beyond the scope of this comment. Or a full-blown post. Most importantly, this proposition passed in every county, not just in the big counties along the Front Range that passed the original marijuana legalization.
On “What’s in this Black Box?”
All true. Laser photon thrusters producing a milli-Newton of force and accelerating actual macro masses can be demonstrated on a repeatable basis. No reaction mass involved, they don't require any new physics, and they're already three orders of magnitude more efficient than these microwave gadgets (in terms of Newtons-per-megawatt). I think it will be amusing if these new devices turn out to work because of some incidental maser effect doing the same thing.
Over the last 25 years, there have been a whole series of instances where the popular press has grabbed onto something that violates our current understanding of physics. Cold fusion. Powerful space drives that don't require reaction mass. Even Lockheed's announcement that the Skunk Works could produce a working hot fission generator in five years if someone would just give them enough money. My own belief about this trend is that it reflects the growing realization that the two biggies that speculative fiction has been promising for decades -- dirt-cheap energy and easy access to outer space -- appear to be receding out of reach.
On “Bigotry feels itself aggrieved: school busing”
So why did they trek across the Atlantic for African slaves...
It's been an awfully long time since I read on the subject, but my recollection is that Americans didn't, for the most part. Coastal Africans handled the initial capture and subjugation. Mostly European-flagged ships carried slaves to the Americas (South much more so than North), although I believe this changed after laws against the Atlantic slave trade began to be more seriously enforced. From the perspective of someone looking to buy slaves, they just "appeared" in the port cities like a keg of nails or bolt of cloth.
On “What’s in this Black Box?”
The phrase "uses no fuel" in the article is misleading. What they mean is "uses no reaction mass". The generated force requires rather prodigious amounts of electricity -- the current claimed force can be conveniently measured in micro-Newtons per kilowatt. Electricity generation in the kind of form that would make this interesting for getting mass to LEO very definitely requires fuel. Probably also tens or hundreds of Newtons per kilowatt to be really interesting. Call it eight orders of magnitude. We've spent decades trying to make that kind of jump with controlled nuclear fusion, and that was starting from a point where there was no question but what fusion was occurring in the experiments.
Although these days, when I want to be depressed about space possibilities, I read pieces about Kessler cascades.
On “Star Wars, The Hero’s Journey, and Multiculturalism”
Spot on. The NFL game you see on TV in your living room bears only a passing resemblance to what you see live in the stadium. The thing that struck me the most is just how much dead time there is at the stadium.
On “Why I think Online Education is the Future”
When I took analysis in grad school at UT-Austin, it was the math department's fail-out class* for new grad students. By the end of the first week, I had a Walkman-sized cassette recorder running while I simply transcribed what went up on the board. Later in the day I would replay the tape while I read my notes.
* Under Texas statute at the time, anyone who graduated from an accredited four-year Texas state school was deemed qualified for graduate study in their major field, and the UT schools were required to accept them. A substantial number of undergrad math majors who didn't get accepted at out-of-state graduate schools wound up in Austin. There was no way the faculty could properly shepherd that many through, so one of the first-year required classes was a fail-out class made as difficult as possible. The lectures didn't line up with the assigned text, obscure material was included, etc.
"
There's a growing body of evidence in recent studies that taking hand-written notes has a strong effect on retention of material. The same effect doesn't occur when notes are taken using a keyboard.
On “Tenure in Name Only”
If you fail to attract top faculty to the university, the graduate experience you are offering declines uncomplicatedly with that decline. The value and experience of graduate degrees, or in any case certainly doctorates, essentially depend entirely on the quality of the top research faculty at an institution.
Indeed. In many fields, it's not which school you got your Ph.D. from, it's who supervised your work. Which carries all sorts of risks for the graduate students. Anyone who has spent time in a graduate school that offers Ph.D.s has encountered people who went through the disaster of having their highly-regarded supervising professor die/retire/move to another school.
On “Why I think Online Education is the Future”
At least from my perspective, the interesting technology challenge was "How close can we come to that kind of informal real-time interaction?" Based on a variety of unpublished experiments that were conducted in the mid-1990s, the order of importance for the media is audio, then some soft of sophisticated still image manipulation (my description was always "smart shared paper"), then video. Our results for fully distributed sessions indicated that people used the video as a body-language signaling channel. The kind of life-size face-only video windows common in many conferencing tools weren't as helpful as a waist-up shot that included all the hand gestures and fidgeting.
"
For some, it looks like an extension of the hidden purpose of high school -- keep a bunch of young workers out of the job market, which is already overly full. Much like the GI Bill after WWII, one purpose of which was to keep several million soldiers and sailors from flooding back into the civilian job market too quickly.
On “Fantasy Football: Week 7 (and Football Season open thread)”
Broncos - Packers from Denver tonight. I'm hoping that the camera crews spent the last couple afternoons up in the high country getting plenty of snow shots. The Front Range is getting kind of crowded, and we don't need more people who might be thinking about relocating see the last two afternoons of 70-ish and brilliant sunshine...
On “Why I think Online Education is the Future”
Nice piece.
I've been an online classroom advocate for something over 20 years now, going back to the time when I was doing research on protocols to implement versions of real-time multi-party multi-media communication over TCP/IP networks tailored for specific applications. My goal, as it turned out, wasn't a distributed form of the giant lecture hall, but a distributed form of a small upper-level class, even seminars. For me, the RSM factor wasn't on the professor side, but the student side. My belief was and still is that there is a lot of unserved demand for such classes from non-traditional students -- they can't come to campus, they're not working on a degree per se, but they're sharp and interested and make the class better for the other students. An online version provides one enormous advantage over the in-person version -- it's trivial to record the entire session and go back to visit some part of it later.
One of the biggest hurdles, I thought -- probably because I was a techie at the time -- was the lack of a really good piece of smart shareable paper. It had to be a high-resolution digitizer on top of a good display. Writing, drawing, sketching, using specialized notations like math and music -- to do those things well seems to require the feedback loop of hand, brain, and eye working on a single image. Still can't buy one at a reasonable price.
On “Linky Friday #138: Pan-Nordica”
Add to that the fact that BIA seems to have "misplaced" on the order of billions of dollars of assets held in trust...
"
To quote from Wikipedia:
If your land is held in trust by the feds, there's little you can do except wait for BIA or BLM to act. You probably have a better chance of getting them to act today than you've had for 50 years.
"
When I wear my western secession hat -- which I do, from time to time -- I say that if the Army needs to take another big chunk of land to ruin with live-fire tank exercises, then it's long past time for the states east of the Mississippi to pony up. Ditto for any "spent" nuclear fuel repositories, as the vast majority of the commercial reactors are east of the Mississippi and those have never delivered watt one to a western state.
If it takes a more incendiary comment to attract rebuttals, let me know :^)
"
If I were to guess -- and I have learned that guessing on BLM matters is largely a waste of time -- I would guess that the case will come down to something like "Under the Texas theory, over the years the area of Texas has increased by 90,000 acres and the area of certain Indian lands guaranteed by the federal government has decreased by 90,000 acres. Despite any other agreements Texas may have reached with Oklahoma, neither Texas nor Oklahoma have authority to claim 90,000 acres of federal territory."
If BLM, Indian Affairs, and the tribes decide to use the land to create wilderness areas along the river that require certain minimum flows to preserve, the Red River Compact dividing up the water between four states also gets major changes.
"
Things get rather confused when the state consists of multiple parts at different levels. The collective we in the form of the State of Texas defined and defended a property right. Now the collective we in the form of the BLM asserts that the Texas-we lacked the authority to make that decision. I won't predict how it will shake out eventually, but will say that there is a body of case law going as high as the SCOTUS that says the federal-we can assert property rights for itself that overrule the property rights that have been defined by the state-we decades after the state-we acted.
A considerable part of the ongoing animosity of western states (at least among the political class) toward the federal government is because of such late-to-the-party assertions of property rights. Backed up by, as I recall one state legislator saying, "they have nukes and we don't."
"
The courts are usually reluctant to change anything where there's a long-standing mark. The Four Corners physical marker where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah come together is generally agreed now to be about 1,800 feet off from where statute specified, which would translate into a fair number of square miles being in the wrong states. The SCOTUS ruled that the marker is correct for border purposes. Georgia and Tennessee are fighting again over their boundary. Georgia cites the original statute, contemporary measurements, and writing by the surveyor back in the day that says "I measured it wrong." The correction would give Georgia some border in the right place along the Tennessee River that would allow them to divert a billion gallons of water per day from there to Atlanta. So far the courts haven't bought it.
"
Three sides. The Red River Boundary Compact adopted by Congress in 2000 sets the boundary between the two states as the vegetation line on the south bank of the river. With a couple of exceptions, the boundary moves when the river moves. One of the exceptions is at Lake Texoma, where the boundary is fixed by survey. The other exception is lands that fall under the sovereignty of federally recognized Indian tribes on either side of the river remain under Indian (hence BLM) control whether the river moves or not. I believe that BLM's interpretation of the law is that those Indian boundaries that were fixed by survey never moved with the river. So when the river moved north over a few decades, land that had previously been "in" Oklahoma but controlled by the tribes was now "in" Texas but still controlled by the tribes, and that Texas deeds to that land were improperly issued.
"
G2: I have been told that one of the common refrains heard at the Western Governors Association meetings is "Do you know what those d*ckheads at the BLM have done now?" Having spent time in the state government of a western state, I have to be careful these days because Black Lives Matter is never what springs to my mind when I see BLM in print. 90,000 acres is a relatively modest amount -- the US Army's efforts to expand the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Area in Colorado was after 6.9 million acres.
"
This guy, who normally guards the programming languages section of my bookshelf, is offended by your remark about rhinos and cuteness.
On “Why Alphabet?”
Even in the larger environment, there's the issue of ongoing support. At my last full-time gig, neither the budget director (my boss) nor the IT director were willing to add support for a real database application to their list of responsibilities without an authorized headcount increase. I didn't blame them. The IT director had been burned in the past with the cost of taking over half-assed but now mission-critical apps built by staff organizations. And while it was true that my boss had, at that point in time, two people on his staff who could have handled development and maintenance, turnover was relatively high and he didn't want to have to constrain his choices about budget staff so that he would always have a part-time developer available.
"
I'm trying to get my head around the idea of unit tests for a piece of code embedded into a spreadsheet that gets replicated by copy-and-paste sans any notion of repository or version control...
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.