Reading List: How Civilizations Die
Tuesday, July 30, 2013 00:38
Floating Point Benchmark: Go Language Added
Sunday, July 28, 2013 14:34
Reading List: Shock Warning
Saturday, July 27, 2013 22:14
Reading List: First Strike
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 22:32
Reading List: The Obligation
Tuesday, July 2, 2013 22:16
Tuesday, July 30, 2013 00:38
- Goldman, David P.
How Civilizations Die.
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-596-98273-4.
-
I am writing this review in the final days of July 2013. A century
ago, in 1913, there was a broad consensus as to how the 20th
century would play out, at least in Europe. A balance of power
had been established among the great powers, locked into
alliances and linked with trade relationships which made it
seem to most observers that large-scale conflict was so
contrary to the self-interest of nations that it was unthinkable.
And yet, within a year, the irrevocable first steps toward what
would be the most sanguinary conflict in human history so far would be
underway, a global conflict which would result in more than
37 million casualties, with 16 million dead. The remainder of the 20th
century was nothing like the conventional wisdom of
1913, with an even more costly global war to come, the great
powers of 1913 reduced to second rank, and a bipolar world
emerging stabilised only by the mutual threat of annihilation
by weapons which could destroy entire cities within a half hour
of being launched.
What if our expectations for the 21st century are just as wrong
as those of confident observers in 1913?
The author writes the
“Spengler”
column for
Asia Times Online. It is
commonplace to say “demographics is destiny”, yet
Goldman is one a very few observers who really takes this to heart
and projects the consequences of demographic trends which are
visible to everybody but rarely projected to their logical conclusions.
Those conclusions portend a very different 21st century than most
anticipate. Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and increasingly, the
so-called developing world are dying: they have fertility rates not
just below replacement (around 2.1 children per woman), but in
many cases deep into “demographic death spiral”
territory from which no recovery is possible. At present fertility
rates, by 2100 the population of Japan will have fallen by 55%, Russia
53%, Germany 46%, and Italy 39%. For a social welfare state, whose
financial viability presumes a large population of young workers
who will pay for the pensions and medical care of a smaller cohort of
retirees, these numbers are simply catastrophic. The inverted age
pyramid places an impossible tax burden upon workers, which further
compounds the demographic collapse since they cannot afford to
raise families large enough to arrest it.
Some in the Islamic world have noted this trend and interpreted it as
meaning ultimate triumph for the
ummah. To this,
Goldman replies, “not so fast”—the book is
subtitled “And Why Islam is Dying Too”. In fact, the
Islamic world is in the process of undergoing a demographic
transition as great as that of the Western nations, but on a
time scale so short as to be unprecedented in human history. And
while Western countries will face imposing problems coping with
their aging populations, at least they have sufficient wealth to
make addressing the problem, however painful, possible. Islamic
countries without oil (which is where the overwhelming majority
of Muslims live) have no such financial or human resources. Egypt,
for example, imports about half its food calories and has a
functional illiteracy rate of around 40%. These countries not only
lack a social safety net, they cannot afford to feed their
current population, not to mention a growing fraction of retirees.
When societies are humiliated (as Islam has been in its confrontation with
modernity), they not only lose faith in the future, but lose their faith,
as has happened in post-Christian Europe, and then they cease to have children.
Further, as the author observes, while in traditional society children
were an asset who would care for their parents in old
age, “In the modern welfare state, child rearing is an act
of altruism.” (p. 194) This altruism becomes increasingly difficult
to justify when, increasingly, children are viewed as the property
of the state, to be indoctrinated, medicated, and used to its ends
and, should the parents object, abducted by an organ of the state.
Why bother? Fewer and fewer couples of childbearing age make
that choice. Nothing about this is new: Athens, Sparta, and Rome all
experienced the same collapse in fertility when they ceased to
believe in their future—and each one eventually fell.
This makes for an extraordinarily dangerous situation. The history
of warfare shows that in many conflicts the majority of casualties
on the losing side occur after it was clear to those in political
and military leadership that defeat was inevitable. As trends forecaster
Gerald Celente
says, “When people have nothing to lose, they lose it.”
Societies which become aware of their own impending demographic extinction or
shrinking position on the geopolitical stage will be tempted to go
for the main prize before they scroll off the screen. This means that
calculations based upon rational self-interest may not predict the
behaviour of dying countries, any more than all of the arguments in 1913
about a European war being irrational kept one from erupting
a year later.
There is much, much more in this book, with some of which I
agree and some of which I find dubious, but it is
all worthy of your consideration. The author sees the United States
and Israel as exceptional states, as both have largely kept
their faith and maintained a sustainable birthrate to carry
them into the future. He ultimately agrees with me (p. 264) that
“It is cheaper to seal off the failed states from the rest
of the world than to attempt to occupy them and control the
travel of their citizens.”
The twenty-first century may be nothing like what the conventional
wisdom crowd assume. Here is a provocative alternative view which will
get you thinking about how different things may be, as trends already
in progress, difficult or impossible to reverse, continue in
the coming years.
In the Kindle edition, end notes are properly linked
to the text and in notes which cite a document on the Web, the URL is linked
to the on-line document. The index, however, is simply a useless list of
terms without links to references in the text.
Sunday, July 28, 2013 14:34
I have posted an update to my trigonometry-intense
floating point benchmark which adds
Go
to the list of languages in which the benchmark is implemented. A new release of the
benchmark collection
including Go is now available for downloading.
The reference C implementation of the benchmark was ported to Go
by
John Nagle.
The timing results below were run on “go version go1.1.1 linux/amd64”.
The relative performance of the various language implementations (with C taken as 1) is as follows. All language implementations of the benchmark listed below produced identical results to the last (11th) decimal place.
| Language |
Relative Time |
Details |
| C |
1 |
GCC 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| Visual Basic .NET |
0.866 |
All optimisations, Windows XP |
| FORTRAN |
1.008 |
GNU Fortran (g77) 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| Pascal |
1.027
1.077 |
Free Pascal 2.2.0 -O3, Linux
GNU Pascal 2.1 (GCC 2.95.2) -O3, Linux |
| Java |
1.121 |
Sun JDK 1.5.0_04-b05, Linux |
| Visual Basic 6 |
1.132 |
All optimisations, Windows XP |
| Haskell |
1.223 |
GHC 7.4.1-O2 -funbox-strict-fields, Linux |
| Ada |
1.401 |
GNAT/GCC 3.4.4 -O3, Linux |
| Go |
1.481 |
Go version go1.1.1 linux/amd64, Linux |
| Lisp |
7.41
19.8 |
GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Compiled, Linux
GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Interpreted |
| Smalltalk |
7.59 |
GNU Smalltalk 2.3.5, Linux |
| Forth |
9.92 |
Gforth 0.7.0, Linux |
| COBOL |
12.5
46.3 |
Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2010, Windows 7
Fixed decimal instead of computational-2 |
| Python |
17.6 |
Python 2.3.3 -OO, Linux |
| Perl |
23.6 |
Perl v5.8.0, Linux |
| Ruby |
26.1 |
Ruby 1.8.3, Linux |
| JavaScript |
27.6
39.1
46.9 |
Opera 8.0, Linux
Internet Explorer 6.0.2900, Windows XP
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6, Linux |
| QBasic |
148.3 |
MS-DOS QBasic 1.1, Windows XP Console |
Saturday, July 27, 2013 22:14
- Walsh, Michael.
Shock Warning.
New York: Pinnacle Books, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-7860-2412-4.
-
This is the third novel in the author's “Devlin”
series of thrillers. When I read the first,
Hostile Intent (September 2010), I described it
as a “tangled, muddled mess” and concluded that the author
“may eventually master the thriller, but I doubt I'll read any
of the sequels to find out for myself”. Well, I did eventually
read the sequel, Early Warning (January 2012), which I
enjoyed very much, and concluded that the author was well on the
path to being a grandmaster of the techno-thriller genre.
Then we have this book, the conclusion to the Devlin trilogy. Here
the author decides to “go large” and widen the arena from
regional terrorist strikes to a global apocalyptic clash of civilisations
end-times scenario. The result is an utter flop. First of all, this
novel shouldn't be read by anybody who hasn't read the previous
two books—you won't have the slightest idea who the characters
are, the backstory which has brought them to their present points, or
what motivates them to behave as they do. Or maybe I can simplify
the last sentence to say “This novel shouldn't be read by
anybody”—it's that bad.
There is little more I can say which would not be spoilers
for either this book or the series, so let us draw the curtain.
The key thing about a techno-thriller is that the technology should be
plausible and that it should be thrilling. This novel fails by both
criteria. The key conceit, that a laser operated by a co-opted employee
of
CERN
on the Côte d'Azur could project lifelike holographic images
of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Prophet Mohammed by bouncing them off
the lunar ranging retroreflectors placed on the lunar surface is
laugh-out-loud absurd. A moment's calculation of the energy required
to return a visible signal to the Earth will result in howls of
laughter, and that's before you consider that holograms don't work
anything like the author presumes they do.
Our high-end NSA and special forces heroes communicate using a
“double
Playfair cipher”.
This is a digraph substitution cipher which can be broken in
milliseconds by modern computers.
Danny brings the MH-6H Little Bird “just a few feet off the high
desert floor”, whereupon Devlin “rappelled down, hit the ground,
and started running” if it were just a few feet, why didn't he just
step off the chopper, or why didn't Danny land it?
I could go on and on, but I won't because I didn't care enough about this
story to critique it in detail. There is a constant vertigo as the story
line cuts back and forth among characters we've met in the first two
novels, many of who play only peripheral roles in this story. There is
an entire subplot about a manipulative contender for the U.S.
presidency which fades out and goes nowhere. This is a techno-thriller in
which the tech is absurd and the plot induces chuckles rather than thrills.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 22:32
- Cashill, Jack and James Sanders.
First Strike.
Nashville: WND Books, 2003.
ISBN 978-0-7852-6354-8.
-
On July 17, 1996, just 12 minutes after takeoff,
TWA Flight 800
from New York to Paris exploded in mid-air off the coast of Long
Island and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. All 230 passengers
and crew on board were killed. The disaster occurred on a summer
evening in perfect weather, and was witnessed by hundreds of people
from land, sea, and air—the FBI interviewed more than seven
hundred eyewitnesses in the aftermath of the crash.
There was something “off” about the accident investigation
from the very start. Many witnesses, including some highly credible
people with military and/or aviation backgrounds, reported seeing a
streak of light flying up and reaching the airliner, followed by a
bright flash like that produced by a high-velocity explosive. Only
later did a fireball from burning fuel appear and begin to
fall to the ocean. In total disregard of the stautory requirements
for an air accident investigation, which designate the National
Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as the lead agency, the FBI was
given prime responsibility and excluded NTSB personnel from
interviews with eyewitnesses, restricted access to interview
transcripts and physical evidence, and denied NTSB laboratories
the opportunity to test debris recovered from the crash field.
NTSB investigations involve “partners”: representatives
from the airline, aircraft manufacturer, the pilots' and aerospace
workers' unions, and others. These individuals observed and remarked
pointedly upon how different this investigation was from the others
in which they had participated. Further, and more disturbingly,
some saw what appeared to be FBI tampering with the evidence,
falsifying records such as the location at which debris had
been recovered, altering flight recorder data, and making
key evidence as varied as the scavenge pump which was proposed
as the ignition source for the fuel tank explosion advanced as
the cause of the crash, seats in the area contaminated with a residue
some thought indicative of missile propellant or a warhead explosion,
and dozens of eyewitness sketches disappear.
Captain Terrell Stacey was the TWA representive in the investigation.
He was in charge of all 747 pilot operations for the airline and
had flown the Flight 800 aircraft into New York the night before
its final flight. After observing these irregularities in the
investigation, he got in touch with author Sanders, a former police
officer turned investigative reporter, and arranged for Sanders to
obtain samples of the residue on the seats for laboratory testing.
The tests found an elemental composition consistent with missile
propellant or explosive, which was reported on the front page of a
Southern California newspaper on March 10th, 1997. The result: the
FBI seized Sanders's phone records, tracked down Stacey, and arrested
and perp-walked Sanders and his wife (a TWA trainer and former
flight attendant). They were hauled into court and convicted of
a federal charge intended to prosecute souvenir hunters disturbing crash
sites. The government denied Sanders was a journalist (despite his
work having been published in mainstream venues for years) and
disallowed a First Amendment defence.
This is just a small part of what stinks to high heaven about
this investigation. So shoddy was control of the chain of
custody of the evidence and so blatant the disregard of
testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses, that
alternative
theories
of the crash have flourished since shortly after the event until the
present day. It is difficult to imagine what might have been the
motives behind a cover-up of a missile attack against a U.S.
airliner, but as the author notes, only a few months remained before
the 1996 U.S. presidential election, in which Clinton was running on
a platform of peace and prosperity. A major terrorist attack might
subvert this narrative, so perhaps the well-documented high-level
meetings which occurred in the immediate aftermath of the crash
might have decided to direct a finding of a mechanical failure of
a kind which had occurred
only once before
in the eighty-year history
of aviation, with that incident being sometimes attributed to
terrorism. What might have been seen as a wild conspiracy theory in
the 1990s seems substantially more plausible in light of the
Benghazi attack
in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election and its treatment by
the supine legacy media.
A Kindle edition is available. If you are
interested in this independent investigation of Flight 800,
be sure to see the documentary
Silenced
which was produced by the authors and includes interviews with many of
the key eyewitnesses and original documents and data. Finally, if this
was just an extremely rare mechanical malfunction, why do so many
of the documents from the investigation remain classified and
inaccessible to Freedom of Information Act requests seventeen years
thereafter?
Tuesday, July 2, 2013 22:16
- Wolfe, Steven.
The Obligation.
Los Gatos, CA: Smashwords, 2013.
ISBN 978-1-3010-5798-6.
-
This is a wickedly clever book. A young congressional staffer spots
a plaque on the wall of his boss, a rotund 15-term California
Democrat, which reads, “The colonization of space will be the
fulfillment of humankind's Obligation to the Earth.” Intrigued,
he mentions the plaque to the congressman, and after a series of
conversations, finds himself sent on a quest to meet archetypes of
what the congressman refers to as the six Endowments of humanity—capacities
present only in our own species which set us apart from all of those from
whom we evolved, and equip us for a destiny which is our ultimate
purpose: the Wanderer, Settler, Inventor, Builder, Visionary, and
Protector. These Endowments have evolved, driven by the
Evolutionary Impulse, toward the achievement, by humans and their
eventual descendents, of three Obligations, which will require
further evolution into a seventh Endowment.
The staffer tries to reconcile his discovery of the human destiny
beyond the planet with his romance with a goo-goo eco-chick who
advocates cancelling the space program to
first solve our problems on the Earth.
As he becomes progressively enlightened, he, and then she realise
that there is no conflict between these goals, and that planetary
stewardship and serving as the means for Gaia “going to seed”
and propagating the life it has birthed outward into the cosmos
are a unified part of the Obligation.
When I describe this book as “wickedly clever”, what I mean
is that it creates a mythology for space migration which co-opts
and subsumes that of its most vehement opponents: the
anti-human
Merchants of Despair (April 2013).
It recasts humanity, not as a “cancer on the planet”, but
rather the means by which Gaia can do what every life form must:
reproduce. Indeed, Robert Zubrin, author of the aforementioned book,
along with a number of other people I respect, have contributed
effusive blurbs on the
book's Web site.
It provides a framework for presenting humanity's ultimate
destiny and the purpose of life to those who
have never thought of those in terms similar to those I expressed
in my
Epilogue
to Rudy Rucker's
The Hacker and the Ants.
(Warning—there are spoilers for the novel in my Epilogue.)
In the acknowledgements, the author thanks several people for help
in editing the manuscript. Given the state of what was published,
one can only imagine what these stalwarts started with. The text
is riddled with copy-editing errors: I noted 61, and I was just
reading for enjoyment, not doing a close proof. In chapter 6,
visiting Evan Phillips, the Builder, the protagonist witnesses a
static test of an Aerojet
LR-87
engine, which is said to have a “white hot exhaust”
and is described as “off the shelf hardware”. But the
LR-87, which powered Titan missiles and launchers, has used
hypergolic fuels ever since the
Titan II
replaced the
Titan I in
the early 1960s. These storable fuels burn with a clear flame.
Re-engineering an LR-87 to burn LOX and RP-1 would be a major
engineering project, hardly off the shelf. Further, during
the test, the engine is throttled to various thrust levels,
but the LR-87 was a fixed thrust engine; no model incorporated
throttling.
In chapter 9, after
visiting a Kitt Peak telescope earlier in the night, in the predawn
hours, he steps out under the sky and sees a “nearly full Moon
… dimming the blazing star fields I saw at Kitt Peak”. But
a full Moon always rises at sunset (think about the geometry), so if
the Moon were near full, it would have been up when he visited the telescope.
There are other factual goofs, but I will not belabour them, as
that isn't what this book is about. It is a rationale for
space settlement which, if the reader can set aside the clumsy
editing, may be seductively persuasive even to those inclined
to oppose it.
Only the Kindle edition is available from
Amazon, but a wide variety of other electronic formats, including
HTML, PDF, EPUB, and plain text are available from
Smashwords.