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"History is just
people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 354......June 2025 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
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YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE Mistrust it or embrace it, solar power
has been much in the news during the last several years, and it seems to
have become a significant source of energy in some areas. The big digital
chip majors aren’t talking much about going solar for the massive new
plants they’re building; they lean toward nuclear power… nerve-wracking
fission, not yet fusion. Still, solar is interesting in a number of
areas, including agriculture., and the U.S.
Department of energy maintains a website encouraging farmers along these lines. This and other sites
talk about ideas that don’t occur to most of us city folks, for
example, the solar panels can be placed over the farmer’s least productive
land (not just on the barn roof), and livestock can flourish
underneath them, enjoying cooling shade in the hot summer
and…um…fertilizing the poor soil there to make it more productive over time. One
farmer in Colorado
(he got a head start by being an engineer before taking over the farm) has
four acres of solar panels on his place,
producing energy enough for 300 homes while raising chickens, ducks, sheep
and a variety of vegetables under them. He observes that the panels must be
raised appreciably more above the ground than they are typically to
accommodate activity below them, Really, four acres doesn’t seem like a
whole lot of area; on the farm where we lived in Massachusetts many
decades ago, we could easily have dedicated four acres out of our sixty to
this. We didn’t farm it, apart from growing some veggies while chasing off
the deer that were intent on eating them. (Our former-farmer relatives
from the Midwest commented that the best harvest from the New England fields
seemed to be the rocks from which the endless stone walls are made.) To see the
other side of the solar-power-in-agricuture argument, take a look at this
rather testy website
posted by The Institute for Energy Research. An appealingly different
approach to solar power that looks great (and rather expensive) is offered by a
Belgian company, Smartflower. The panels sit on a base on the
ground like a radar or radio-telescope antenna. The circular blossom of
panels opens and closes (automatically, at night, when the panels can be
washed…dust being a major enemy of solar power). These things are adaptable
to various situations; fun to contemplate.
HISTORY IS PERSONAL Allan Branch, previously identified in the Correspo
as The Tasmanian Roboticist, whom I have known for nigh unto forty years has
published an intriguing autobiography, The Vandemonian: Wall
Street and Silicon Valley Collide. The handful of people who enjoy
the mixture of comments on technology and anecdotes in the Correspo
will probably like The Vandemonian. The story is entertaining,
informative, and unsettling. Allan and I have crossed/almost
crossed paths occasionally, but our backgrounds and general experience are so
different that it’s surprising to find that we come to the same basic
views on what’s good and important. The narrative is stuffed with stories
about famous companies and people…some I have known, and some I didn’t know I
knew, revealing a whole lot about how new technology actually comes into
use. It isn’t an orderly process, and this isn’t an orderly book.
It’s full of pain and emotion. It begins conventionally enough by
recounting his stressful youth in a village in Tasmania, during which he
learns that he’s smart, technically adept, and tough enough to protect
himself and his siblings. His story moves on through oddly varied
education and increasingly high level professional activity to his
becoming a consultant, company-fixer, and constant round-the-world
traveler…but that story isn’t chronologically straightforward. He
keeps recalling, sometimes repetitiously, the many people who have been
important to him, but the repetition is helpful, because who remembers all
the names and relationships he’s talked about earlier? The book’s 280 pages
are a picture to be viewed as a whole …kinda like a life. Good stuff. I can’t remember the occasion of
meeting Allan, but when he was traveling with a party of four in the States
long ago, they stayed with us one night. I pressed him to demonstrate Mr.
Walker, his uncommonly clever (maybe 18” high) walking robot, to our son
Brock, which he did…I can see it now,walking on the counter between the
kitchen and the dining room. That demo
may have had some influence; Brock went on to become a figure in special
effects in Hollywood. (You may remember the scene in Terminator II
when Arnold slit his arm open to show the robot mechanism operating inside
it; Brock had built that arm and was operating it in the scene.) I once asked Allan if Australians
have as much trouble understanding Americans as Americans have understanding
Australians. He said, “What?” Item: The Correspo
has spoken of nematodes (roundworms) a couple of times, not always favorably.
If you grow soybeans, you want to keep nematodes away from them them…but they
do kill some insects, and are used in certain cases instead of pesticides to
protect plants from damaging invaders. That’s all very biological, but on the
physics side, it’s been observed that the critter is able to “jump” many
times its body length, and by slightly labored extrapolation, their leaping
technique is being promoted for “soft robots” that can move about on the
moon. See this entertaining explanation and
demonstration. Item: We don’t often dwell on the topic of viscosity around here (there was a sticky period some decades ago when a science fair project…one of many, many, not all recalled happily…involved measuring the viscosity of honey) but a report on an experiment on the viscosity of pitch, material you normally break up with a hammer, caught our attention. This demo has been going on for nearly a hundred years, and is now inspiring imitation. Not exactly thrilling action, but intriguing. Item: An associate who recently visited the million-plus square foot offices of Amazon’s Southeastern U.S. hub for retail operations has more than once mentioned her primary takeaway from the visit…the intense focus of Amazon employees on their delivery operations. They send out the familiar trucks, of course, and when you see a driver transferring packages to the back of somebody’s car, you’re not necessarily witnessing brazen theft; in busy times the company pays private individuals to make the final runs up to people’s front doors. In some areas, the deliveries are actually made by people on bikes…or even horses or mules. My goodness! Item: Some folks at
the UPNA University of Pamplona are demonstrating a method that allows us to
interact with three dimensional displays…to change the orientation of a
viewed object, for example, by reaching into the image and making the
adjustment…at least that’s what it looks like. Here’s a demo. _______________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE
PAST This item,
probably from 1986 comes to mind because of recent
discussion of hybrid digital/biological computers, de-extincting
long-gone critters, etc… SQUIRMING MOLECULES Biology is
basically very sloppy. How do enzymes and other protein marvels do such neat
work? The very idea that strings of amino acids, whatever they are,
actually pass energy around, and form useful new substances in a series of
clear-cut processes, is just too much for some of us to grasp. Well, a splendid Scientific American article
recently pointed out that sloppiness makes the neatness possible. For
years we've admired X-ray diffraction pictures of protein molecules, those
lovely geometric patterns that clearly identify the stuff through which the
x-rays flowed. These regular geometric forms suggest that the molecules
themselves are rigid geometric structures. Turns out they
aren't. The molecules twitch,
fold, flop, and twist constantly and rapidly, slithering around in the meat
of which they are part. Anything that fits anything else has a
zillion chances to make a connection...enough so that whatever can happen
will probably happen. Aloof, rigid structures couldn't do
that. "Ha," says Merl Miller, "I knew it all along.
What's a molecule?" Experimenters/developers are
exploring a wide range of products using living organisms,
or, anyway, cells, to produce or comprise products. An
example is the introduction of “T-Rex leather”
handbags, which has stirred up vituperative quarrels
over the question of whether the stuff is “really”
T-Rex leather or not. After all, we haven’t found any
T-Rex DNA…only some collagen. Does that count? And even if it
does, did the T-Rex leather people get it
right or are they just a bunch of degenerate
commercial hustlers who don’t deserve their daily ration of
gruel? Same goes for work on the supposedly
de-extincted dire wolf. debates among
usually-not-very-well-paid academicians lean to savagery. You may recall
the abuse Thor Heyerdahl received over the voyage
of Kon Tiki. Some of us are amazed that the
biologists can do anything at all practical along these lines,
“real T-Rex” or not. Apparently, some researchers have
now figured out how to persuade spiders to produce red
silk instead of the usual …er…whatever color spider
silk is. What a waste of time and money! Those resources
could be spent productively on something
worthwhile like football. One assumes that there’s a lot more
interesting stuff to come, along with intense scolding of
those who do anything …anything. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917 See on Amazon __________________________________________________
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