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"History is just
people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 353......May 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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HOME FREE? In June 1962 three prisoners attempted
to escape from Alcatraz Island
and in spite of intense search by the FBI, the U.S. Marshalls, and a lot of
individual investigators, it still isn’t entirely clear whether the
fellows made it to the mainland or were swept out to sea. Appropriately
embarrassed by the idea that anybody could get out of their escape-proof
prison the FBI doesn’t
like the idea that they might have made it, but they can’t be certain. In 2018 The
History Channel aired an intriguing documentary making a good case that the guys did
get away. It’s hard not to root for the escapees, who robbed a bank with
a toy gun, and were in Alcatraz, not because they were likely murderers, but
because they had previously demonstrated that they were very good at escaping
from jails. The prison was closed in 1963…presumably coincidental close
timing. We have a minor (well, trivial) personal Alcatraz story. In
the late ‘60s Native Americans who felt strongly that as
long as the government was no longer using the island that had
been stolen from them by European invaders a couple of hundred years earlier,
the cold, pretty much useless, unpleasant, windswept 22-acre piece of land
should be given back to them. So, they occupied Alcatraz for 19 months
until they were forced off it again. (It’s currently a National Park.) It
happens that in 1969 The Thomas Bede Foundation, in which I was a
functionary, was working with a chap in Richmond (in the East Bay) on development
of a new method for cleaning contact lenses, which our client manufactured.
In a fit of bonhomie, our client invited Dr. Browning and me to visit him in
Richmond. When we got there we learned that his
plan was to take us out on the Bay in his thirty-or-so-foot motorboat.
Iben said, “Let’s leave our briefcases in the car, so they can be found when
we drown,” and we boarded the craft for a cruise. Our host’s idea of
cruising involved opening a can of beer for each of us, pouring out a couple
of ounces, then topping the can again with vodka. Ah well, as we headed
out toward the Golden Gate, our route led us past Alcatraz, and we steered
close enough to the island to read even the smaller signs being waved by the demonstrating occupiers there. In spite of our cordial waving, they regarded us
as fresh invaders (well, we were three white guys in a yacht) and one
of them threw a long stick, sharp at one end, at us. Our host commented,
“They usually throw oranges.” The missile missed…and we didn’t linger, but
I guess I can truly report that an Indian threw a spear at us, and that’s
what I associate with Alcatraz. We headed on out under the bridge,
(interesting to admire the Golden Gate bridge from directly below) where the
significantly large real waves moved our pilot to observe that they were capable of capsizing us. We
managed to turn, and got home OK, sunburned and ruffled. Not quite a typical
workday. AMAIZING As a kid, when I heard the song: I'm
Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, I give
my horse good corn and beans; Of course it’s quite beyond my means, Tho a Captain in the army. I always pictured Captain Jinks holding an ear of corn out to his horse, who carefully ate the kernels off the cob. The beans were a different course of the meal, and I didn’t think much about them. In later years somebody explained that “corn” meant any sort of grain…could be oats or barley or any of several other things…that was more expensive than hay, for example. Oh! To most anybody but Americans, the stuff on the cobs is “maize,” just one form of “corn.” Corn is still more complicated than that, and granddaughter Ondine recently pointed out an article discussing “hominy.” The piece is written from a Navajo perspective (or Diné perspective if you prefer, though apparently Diné means “The People” and there are lots of groups who refer to themselves as The People…some even using the term Diné…”Navajo” may have been a pejorative term picked up from Pueblo people by the Spanish when they arrived, so one can appreciate enthusiasm for Diné.)The author explains that hominy is dried corn that has been soaked in an alkali solution …these days usually bicarbonate of soda, though most any wood ashes will do, and the Navajo traditionally use ashes from juniper, which was a common firewood here in the high desert. The mild alkali causes the kernels to swell to perhaps double their size, and loosens the husk around them, so the contents can be squeezed out easily. Those contents are hominy. The article cautions the reader to check the label on commercial corn meal to be sure that the product has been Nixtamalized, and is not just untreated corn (“Nixtamalization … is a Nahuatl word [Aztec] that comes from “Nixtli” = ashes, and “Tamalli” = unformed corn dough.”) because nixtamalization brings out nutrient qualities from the corn that are not derived from consumption of the untreated kernels. Gee, I didn’t know that. Corn became one of the top foods all over the world after Christopher Columbus took it back to Europe. People liked it and discovered it would grow easily. They also discovered that additional nutrients were needed; one couldn’t subsist entirely on maize. (See kwashiorkor.) Ironically, Columbus took the corn, but not the recipe. Item: The Correspo recently commented on the desirability
of being courteous with AI agents such as ChatGPT, and Copilot on the
practical grounds that those entities will undoubtedly share their
impressions of you at some point, and it’s probably a good idea to be regarded
by them as a nice person. Sam Altman, the chap most clearly associated with
ChatGPT commented (also on purely practical
grounds) on the dollars-and-cents cost of making LLMs deal with social
pleasantries such as saying Please and Thank You. It’s
soberingly high. Artificial Intelligence has conventionally been described as
the attempt to make machines think and behave as
people do. One wonders if we can quantify the dollars-and-cents cost of
politeness among human beings. Item: Just because it’s been a while, here’s a look at an assortment of interesting robots. Item: The Correspo has spoken more than once about systems that combine digital electronics (for input/output/control) with networks of biological living neurons. Thet the living cells are apparently better at figuring things out than electronic neurons are. Here’s a report from somebody who certainly knows more than I do, observing that “Cells compute a billion times faster than we thought.” That would surely make worthwhile the extraordinary difficulty of keeping the cells alive and functioning as a system in the hybrid structure. One dimly recalls explanations from biologist Iben Browning long ago that individual neurons in the brain have not just a dozen or two connections via synapses with a largely random selection of neurons around them…but perhaps an average of fifteen hundred outward links and the same number in, with the counts of each ranging up to perhaps three thousand. I don’t think we’ve yet achieved such massively complex nets with electronics. Quite apart from quantum effects, maybe that has something to do with the speed of computation. _______________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE
PAST This item from 1986 is recalled by discovery of a many- years-old Yellow Pages directory. How many computer stores are listed in your in your Yellow Pages directory? In
1976, there were none. That year Susan Murrow, of Computer Power and
Light in Los Angeles, asked the directory people
for a listing under Computer Stores. "No such thing," they
said. She named five in the area, and urged them to check. They did, and
created her new category. In 1986 pokey Albuquerque
lists a couple of dozen stores, not even counting Radio Shack's 15
outlets. The first thought
that came up was that we don’t call “personal computers’
personal computers any longer; they’re laptops or desktops or
notebooks…and they’re just commodities like many other products,
sold in all sorts of stores, e.g. Target. The several “computer stores” in ABQ emphasize service, rather than
hardware, but most will sell
you a computer if you want one. The second
thought that came up was the startling realization that, while computers are
ubiquitous, printed Yellow Pages directories are a thing of
the past…at least in the areas of the world that I see. That can’t be!
In my lifetime, the Yellow Pages (first published in 1886) were like leaves on trees…part of universal
reality. Mind you, I haven’t
needed one in years, all that information and more is available
online. These things creep up on us. …and of course
The item brings to mind the earliest personal computer
stores. --In December
1976, on a trip Publisher David Bunnell had originally
conceived as a tour of all the computer stores in the country (the
numbers grew from about a dozen when the idea first occurred
to him to scores, maybe hundreds, in the months that passed by
the time I made that snowstorm-plagued trip… and it wasn’t
practical to visit them all) I visited Peachtree Computing in
Atlanta, already franchising. --Visited Dick
Heiser’s Arrowhead
Computer Company’s store (The Computer
Store) in Santa Monica. Dick was cordial … I was then a
magazine editor and could do him some good… but he was
extremely busy. To entertain me, until he got free from some
crisis he sat me at what must have been an Altair computer, so I
could enjoy the wonders of word processing. Well, it was a
command-driven word-processor…no such thing as
commercial GUI in the mid-‘70s… which baffled me completely but
yes, entertainingly, --And I knew Dick Brown, who operated
some stores also called The Computer Store on the
East Coast. --Visited Paul Terrell in his first
Byte Shop soon thereafter (it was in a former
plumbing supply shop in Mountain View CA that I had patronized
in earlier days in search of washers and stuff.) Went to a bunch
of others (including the itty bitty machine company [sic] in
Evanston) but have pointed to those listed above because according to
Wikipedia, “Terrell …as Byte, Inc.[1]
…was one of the four big computer retailers, along with
Dick Heiser, ("The Computer Store"), Peachtree in Atlanta, and
Dick Brown.” This was before the days of ComputerLand and BusinessLand,
which have come and gone. Enough. Note that this piece has freely Referenced “Yellow Pages”, a term which has long been copyrighted. We apologize for using the term without identifying the copyright holder...or holders, as may be in various jurisdictions around the world. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917 See on Amazon __________________________________________________
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