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"History is just
people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 352......April 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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DISQUIETING A couple of recent reports involving
biology fascinate and provoke unease.
One is the story of the successful project to create “woolly
mice”
along the way to recreating the rather larger woolly mammoth. This was
accomplished by selecting genes from Indian elephants (apparently the
closest surviving relative of the woolly mammoth) that seemed likely to
contribute both to wooliness and insulating fat, then gene-splicing them into
a likely strain of mice. (Recall that while the term gene-splicing sounds
like a matter of snipping a tidy strand of DNA, and surgically inserting a
new section…it’s not a neat process. Like most everything
biological, it’s messy and problematic, with only probabilistic results.) The
other is a report that a company called Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia is offering for
sale devices that combine living neural nets (“…pluripotent stem cells
from consenting donors…” the stuff brains are made of) with electronic
digital hardware that allows input and output of commands and data that are
processed by the neural nets. It's “a computer.” A couple of years ago, the Correspo reported on this company’s work in
developing a living/electronic system of this sort that could play Pong and in
no time flat, we’ve come to commercial application of the technology, which
they are calling Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI). What would
you do with one of these computers if you had it? They speak of disease
modeling and drug testing “…perhaps being leveraged for real-time autonomous
tasks in robotics….” I don’t understand more than just the gist the basic
technology (which is treated at length in a series of technical papers on the
company’s website), or of the applications, but it’s easy to believe that this
is big stuff looming in our near future. And here’s a kicker: if
you aren’t running a lab equipped and staffed to handle the messy biology, but are, for example, computer people running software to
explore complicated ideas, you don’t have to install your own SBI system
from Cortical. They offer internet access to one or an array of the
units they operate in their own labs. You can experiment with and apply SBI
at whatever scale you choose. Some of us recall when using a Teletype
machine to log into a remote computer by telephone was a sort of scary new
idea. Back in the ‘60s our California lab installed a Teletype with suitable
phone service in the apartment of a couple who were working for us while
going to the University of Texas. That caused a lengthy struggle with the
City of Austin, whose zoning people felt that it was improper to operate
“business machinery “in a home. One supposes the zoning people in
Melbourne are resigned to Cortical’s operations. Oh, the woolly mice, while they may have other unsettling characteristics, are universally recognized as being wonderfully cute. While the lab that developed them declares it has no intention of breeding and selling them as companions, one wonders if public demand will bring about their appearance in pet shops. Maybe they can be modified further to hunt and kill (or at least distract from reproducing) the invasive Burmese pythons that are devastating more desirable life in our southern swamps. Yeah, disquieting. APROPOS OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR… except the bone-wearying effort to commercialize new technology…we recall an incident in the late 1970s when we were trying to sell a computer software technology called SAVVY. Built initially using FORTH, it was extensible, combined a plain English (or plain anything else if you wanted it) programming language with neural net pattern recognition capability that compensated for typos big and small, and it interacted gracefully with other software. Even I could program a little bit in SAVVY, and Dar Scott created a SAVVY bookkeeping application that we used for decades. Only a few people were comfortable just using it, because it seemed improbable and a bit creepy. (Many insisted on knowing how we parsed English. We didn’t, and when we said so, they assumed we didn’t know what “parse” meant.) Anyhow, no big company picked it up, though we had close calls. Some small customers did use it, and loved it. One of those companies liked it so much they stole it, repackaged it with a logo that looked a lot like SAVVY, and sold it to customers beyond our reach in those pre-internet days. We didn’t know about this until I was called from my office to our conference room one day to meet a couple of visitors who were on a mission. They were with a Brazilian computer company, and they explained that they had appropriated our product, were selling it, and felt sort of bad about it. They didn’t reverse-engineer the product, just copied it. They proudly showed me their very handsome repackaging. I called a couple more people in to talk about this. The visitors wanted to know what arrangement they could make that would allow them to continue their activities with a clean conscience. Our sales manager, stunned like the rest of us, said we might license it to them, but would certainly need a substantial payment up front. “How much?” they asked. Caught off-guard and not thinking very clearly, Bill said, “At least five thousand dollars.” One of the visitors opened a brief case that must have contained a hundred thousand in U.S. currency. He carefully counted out $5K, handed it to Bill, and closed the briefcase. The two visitors picked up their stuff, shook hands with us, and departed, never to be heard from again. I wish $50K had popped into Bill’s head. Our company ran out of money and was put into the hands of people who didn’t understand the implications of the technology. Disheartened, the Old Guard technical team left, as did I. A couple of years later, the company was inhaled into one of the now-still flourishing big-tech companies. Apart from that particular bone-wearying effort, we’ve had (and have) other before-their-time things to enjoy working on. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Item: As the Correspo has commented more than once, people seem absolutely determined to make huge lighter-than-air craft practical. See this one developed with vast amounts of Google profits at Moffett field in the San Francisco Bay area (incidentally, our fourth kid was almost born in that hangar…owing to an important dinner meeting…long story). And here’s another…love the name FLYING WHALES…in Finland. One of the problems with these things, pointed out by a pilot long ago, is that the big dirigibles are so large that “weather conditions” can be very different at the front from what they are at the back (for all I know, also top and bottom), making control, even survival, very touchy. How can that be tested except by flying them? Item:
Exoskeletons that increase people’s strength and leverage seem to be coming along very handsomely. Now, apparently, “AI enhanced exoskeletons” can be rented by tourists embarking on multi-hour climbs up stairs to high levels of mountains in China. The article doesn’t really explain the AI aspect of the system, but the idea of reducing energy expenditure by 30+% while hiking up stairs is increasingly attractive. Item: Word came recently that Joann’s is planning to close all 800 of its fabric
stores nationwide. While that may not distress everybody, and I admit that I
really avoided going to Joann’s and its
like with Mado over the decades, preferring to find
a nearby coffee shop or better, a bookstore, than to wander uninterestedly among
the bolts and the notions. On the other hand, ours is a family of costume
designers. Chantal, Ondine, and their associates are thrilled to the bone by
any opportunity get to L.A. and other centers to stroll the districts of
fabric stores. This catastrophe of Joann’s will leave Albuquerque, and
presumably many other cities, even of some size, with no stores dedicated to
the genuinely important business of providing wonderful materials to the
community… only a few places like Walmart whose enthusiasm for selling
fabrics does not rise to the level of fervor. We’ve not yet seen informed
commentary on the apparent decline in retail fabric sales…have people just
quit sewing? _______________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE
PAST This item from 2006 is brought to mind by a spate of recent reports of labs monkeying with new applications for bioluminescence. BIOMETRICS IN SPADES The Microtox system,
with which we were long involved, uses
luminescent bacteria as test organisms. The bugs naturally release about
ten percent of their energy in the form of light that is plenty bright for
easy measurement (I once had four petri dishes with these bugs growing on
agar with me in a hotel room, which they must really have liked, because they
were lighting the whole room startlingly (I could almost read by it) when I woke up at two in the morning). If they are exposed to anything toxic,
the bugs get sick, and their light output dims proportionally. Using a
clever approach to getting linear data from sloppy biology, the system works
great. An intriguing new system along
somewhat similar lines is far more complex, but potentially effective for
special applications. In this case, genes
from fireflies are transferred to the eggs of zebrafish, so that the cells of the fish hatching from them
will produce luciferase, as fireflies do, when properly stimulated. Additional genes may be injected into the
fish so that the stimulation of luciferase is caused only by specific
chemicals, such as mercury. If a
mercury-sensitive fish has been exposed to mercury in polluted waters, and is
then exposed to luciferin in a test tank, it will glow like a firefly... indicating its
exposure to that specific pollutant. The developers of the test think they can tailor the fish to respond to a
spectrum of different toxics of interest. They point out, somewhat
defensively one feels, that the fish are not necessarily expended in the
testing, but can live to glow again another day. Oh, good. Like most everything I’ve been involved with, Microtox was 25 years
ahead of its time, and the company was sold off
before we could get it off the ground. About a year ago the most recent owner of the now-in-use- worldwide
technology said proudly that “more than 500 papers
have been published about it.” *sigh* I wrote the
first one. People have been trying to use bioluminescence
commercially in a lot of ways. One recent article explains a project to create wood that glows. They’re infusing wood (it takes many weeks) with
bioluminescent fungi that apparently alter the structure of
the wood without reducing its strength as well as
finding a new home to rest in and glow green for as many as
ten days. Another group is editing the genes of
critters like rabbits so you can have pets that shine at you.
Gee, we just took the bugs as they came. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917 See on Amazon __________________________________________________
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