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"History
is just people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 347......November 2024 Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of ABQ
Communications Corporation, the fuzzy focus of The ABQ Correspondent
is "the impact of new technology on society." If you'd like to
receive email notification when each monthly issue is posted, please let
us know. correspo at swcp dot com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The surge in practical use of digital
neural net technology in the past couple of years has stimulated some
acceptance of old ideas that were shrugged off when they were new. One
such is the “memristor.” Go back a bit. In the 1970s Dilithium Press
published a book Iben Browning and I wrote called Robots On Your
Doorstep. (Iben was mostly the thinker-upper; I was mostly the
writer-downer, though we used a lot of his good lines, and I had an
occasional technical thought.) The book arose from my realization that much
of what we were working on at the Thomas Bede Foundation involved creating
smart machines. I started to document it…and the product of my work was
so dull that I kept falling asleep on the typewriter, waking up with
indentations of the keys on my face…rather like napping on a chenille bedspread. So, I turned it into a story full of
anecdotes. The book’s first review said it was “bizarre”, but over the
years, some have been intrigued by it, explaining its peculiarity as “the way
people wrote things in the ‘70s.” No, it’s the way I wrote one thing. A
recent published comment said with surprise “There’s really something to
this; they documented an artificial analog neural net before the
digital revolution.” The Correspo has commented a couple of times
on startling work that combines digital neural nets with living neural
nets in a hybrid system. One concern, of course, is that the living cells
die. Though they may be replaced by others, one wonders about maintaining
continuity. Living systems are FAST, processing immense amounts of data
with relatively low energy consumption. We want that capability, but…. Enter
the memristor, which LLM system Claude helpfully defined
thus: “A memristor is like a special kind of electrical switch that can
"remember" how much electricity has flowed through it in the past.”
No point in my trying to elaborate on that, because after another phrase or
two, I have no idea what I’m talking about, and presumably the memristor is
one of several related systems in development. Still, the point seems clear: we
may develop hybrid digital/analog neural nets without having to worry about
the analog component dying. Further, we may conceivably develop wholly
analog artificial neural nets. Seems bizarre. Every few years, somebody promotes,
and spend a lot of money in development of wind-powered ships using Flettner
rotors to assist propulsion. It’s an appealing idea, and was actually put into practice as
long ago as 1925…but the technology comes with some problems that have
limited its use. The rotors are big vertical cylinders, perhaps
fifteen meters tall, that stand upright on the deck of a ship. Those hollow
cylinders are split in half lengthwise, and slid apart along that split. Wind
can slide off the convex rounded surface, but is caught by the concave
opening of the other side. Since the thing is symmetrical, it is a
turbine that can be turned by the wind. BUT, it ain’t a sail, the
propulsion is not provided by the wind’s pushing on it as it would a sail, and
the turbine is not driving a generator. In fact, the cylinder must be
rotated by a motor to make it work with the added energy of the wind. The
motors providing that rotation can be small, compared to motors used to drive
the propellers of a ship. The driving force comes from the Magnus Effect,
produced perpendicular to the rotating cylinder, that pushes the ship. It
isn’t very efficient, but promoters hope that rotors can provide as much
as 50% of the energy needed for propulsion…saving immense amounts of diesel
fuel. We shall see. Anton Flettner (1885-1961)…an
“Aviation Engineer and Inventor,” was
important to Germany during WWI and WWII. Though
his wife was Jewish, he had connections with
Heinrich Himmler, who had his family escorted to neutral
Sweden during WWII. After the war, Flettner was
brought to the US by Operation Paperclip, about which many of
us have extremely mixed feelings. It gets a bit
personal, because I knew people who worked with such as von
Braun and Dornberger, Indeed, I assume that one funny,
interesting acquaintance (probably not an employer of
slave labor), was one of the Paperclip gang. It’s a complicated
world. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Item: With the recent occurrence of what used to be Columbus Day, we’ve been hearing a lot about “indigenous peoples.” The implication of most of that discussion is that the folks whom Columbus and his ilk treated in such vile fashion were always where they were discovered by self-important Europeans, but it’s increasingly difficult as we learn more from DNA studies to believe that any people were always where they are. Having just watched a report of the invasion of the Salish by the Haida in the 1840s, I rather suspect that things have been tense among most groups of people for a long, long time, and “indigenous” really means “we came here before you did.” Along the same lines, we hear a lot about “indigenous” species of plants, and the ravages of invasive species. (We’re often over our heads in tumbleweed… Russian thistle…after a windstorm.) Hawaii seems particularly touchy, but guys…when those heaps of lava broke the ocean’s surface to become islands, there wasn’t any hibiscus growing on them; everything that grows in Hawaii is “invasive.” When the island of Surtsey popped up off Iceland in 1963 birds started visiting almost at once, bringing seeds that grew into plants…very visible and looking indigenous by the ‘70s. Well, grump,
grump, grump. Item: The Correspo has more than once mentioned the Hear-a-Lite that was developed back in the 1950s to aid the blind. Look at what people are doing these days. Item: Somebody is producing a new musical instrument that is an “AI piano teacher” and a digital Theremin. Da mind is boggle. The theremin is interesting. It’s an electronic device that produces a tone that rises in pitch when you move one hand close to it, and rises in volume when you move your other hand close to it on the other side. A skilled arm-waver can produce eerie music with it. The memorable music by Miklós Rózsa for the 1945 movie Spellbound featured a theremin. The guy who invented the instrument in the mid-1920s, Lev Terman aka Leon Theremin was long-lived (97), traveled the world, was married multiple times, and won a Stalin Prize from the USSR for developing technology for the NKVD/KGB that was effective in spying on the British, French, and US embassies in Moscow. My college roommate built a pre-digital Theremin that didn’t work quite as he hoped; the best it could do was a full-volume screech that would loosen the paint from the walls if allowed to persist. It might be fun to play with one that works. _______________________________________________ ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from 1995 is recalled just because the Holiday Season is creeping up on us. The Dutch tulip growers sent a nice cheese to the chief
gardener at a California estate at Christmas each year in appreciation of his
purchases of thousands of bulbs. When the expected cheese failed to
appear one year, the chief asked if any of his men had seen the round, red,
wax covered cheese. Indeed, one of his new men had planted it, looking
forward with excitement to the blossoming of this immense bulb. With
some difficulty, they relocated the cheese, exhumed it, and consumed
it. It was just fine. This was a triumph of packaging on several
counts. Ah, Gouda. Ah, Edamse Kase. The “California Estate” was in fact “Belmont” so named by William Chapman Ralston. The town of Belmont is named after the estate and its main drag is Ralston Avenue. Ralston was an
interesting guy, an important figure in turning San Francisco into a major city in the wild times when the gold rush came along. In recent decades, Belmont has become home to major companies like Oracle…not in the Ralston avenue part that runs up through a canyon to the hills, but the area down on the salt flats lining San Francisco Bay. One wonders how often sea lions wander into those big buildings. The
estate has become the campus of Notre Dame de
Namur University, with which I
had a trivial connection back in the 1950s when it was still called the College of Notre Dame. Friend David Hardie, who was a ballet dancer (he’d discovered that there were lots of attractive girls in ballet), was
directing and appearing in a performance at the College of Notre Dame when one of their male dancers failed to show up. David desperately needed a replacement for him in one scene, and couldn’t find anyone but me who was handy to the location and might be silly enough to do it. I didn’t have to dance, just lead a procession on stage as a king, and sit to watch others dance. Feeling like a fool in my crown and tights and fancy vest, hoping nobody would recognize me, I did it. David had not warned me that the ladies would occasionally dance back to where I was sitting, and stamp on my toes (probably more to their consternation than mine) but we all survived, and I slunk away as rapidly as possible. The minor point of reciting this dopey story from sixty-some years ago is that the performance must have taken place in the ballroom of Ralston Hall, which is described breathlessly in the link above. I wasn’t paying much attention to that at the time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917 See on Amazon __________________________________________________
____________________ Copyright
© 2024 ABQ Communications Corporation. All rights reserved. |
This book was written, richly
illustrated, and published by excellent grandkid, Malia Hill. At 7 (gosh, ten
years ago) she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes… suddenly, of course “Get
her to the hospital NOW!” and things have been nip and tuck since then with
many scary crises. She’s taken control of her life…played and sang at Whiskey
A Go Go on the Sunset Strip at 15, put out an album at 16, has published this
book at 17, and is off to college hundreds of miles from home. She has been
videoed reading the book at a kids’ hospital, and every incoming T1D there
from now on will see that video. Book income (something like 46 cents net)
goes to her college costs. Some of us are rather proud of her.