"History is just people doing things"

THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT

ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 171......February 2010
Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of
ABQ Communications Corporation, the focus of
The ABQ Correspondent is "the impact of new
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YUM, TNT!
As ever, our attention is caught by reports of applications for organisms that produce light as a byproduct of their metabolism. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh announced recently that they’ve engineered a strain of bacteria that produce green light when they are exposed to the sort of explosives that are used in land mines. This is essentially the same idea as using bugs that react detectably to fumes seeping up through the earth from deposits of oil below. (A technique that has been tried in oil exploration with only modest success, apparently.) In this case, the notion is to spray the bugs, cheaply produced and presumably non-pathogenic, over terrain where people have thoughtfully planted land mines, and then forgotten where they were after their tactical importance had diminished. After some hours of exposure to the outgassing of the explosives in those mines, the bugs glow brightly enough right over the hotspots, so that observers can detect where the mines are, and render them harmless. One commentator remarks that this makes mine detection “a snap.” Yeah...well...we’d like to think so, because the plague of leftover mines is unspeakably tragic, but experience suggests that these undertakings are a bit more complicated in practice than in theory. What if it rains, and the glowing bugs are washed into bright pools? Do they glow brightly enough to be seen without instruments? Do you have to wander through the minefield, looking for bright spots at night? And so on. Clever idea. One wishes the project well.

IS THAT RED OR GREEN...APART FROM MY BEING COLOR BLIND?
Municipalities all over the U.S., maybe all over the world, have been delighted to replace old traffic lights using incandescent bulbs with arrays of LEDs in red and green (don’t recall seeing any yellow, but maybe) that require larger capital investment, but last far longer, and reportedly use about 75% less electricity. Happy cities have reported hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings on their power bills, even millions. Wow. One intriguing problem has begun to get a lot of attention, however. Because the LEDs don’t dissipate much energy in the form of heat, they don’t get warm enough to melt off snow, and in the winter storms, many traffic signals produce no information for drivers hoping for clues at intersections. Not surprisingly, this has already generated a lot of legal wrangling. Drivers of vehicles that have been struck by other vehicles driving through what were (probably, maybe) unseen red lights are suing the light-runners as usual. Those drivers are saying “Red light? What red light?” “Well, you should have known!” say the suers. “How?” All parties then turn to suing the municipalities for allowing their signals to be obscured. So far, the legal stuff is not more expensive than savings, but it’s an interesting systems problem. Do you add heaters to the lights, with sensors that switch them on only in the presence of snow? How much power does that take, and how expensive and reliable are the heaters? Any other good ideas?

NELS MUSES
Item:
Maintaining a long tradition, some New Mexicans around us have indicated frustration tinged with indignation over the common failure of national news people to pronounce perfectly simple Hispanic names like Chavez, Garcia, Vigil, and Gutierrez properly...let alone more interesting names like Jojola, Jaramillo, and Ulibarri. (As kids in New England, reading the classic, inspiring, and instructive story A Message To Garcia, we learned to pronounce the name as “Garshya,” of course.) One sympathizes with the frustration. Still, it isn’t all one-way. One of the many small New Mexican towns named for guys who first managed the railroad stations around which the towns rose, is named Thoreau, which is locally pronounced “Theroo.” That may be an unfair example; hardly anybody is certain of the pronunciation of the last name of the author of Walden Pond. Fortunately, we have a mnemonic aid for those who care. A Thoreau expert explained years ago that it helps to recall the phrase “Thoreau plowed a thorough furrow”...accents on the first syllables. Indeed, it’s hard to shake that out of your mind once you’ve repeated it a few times. Work on “veeheel” for Vigil.

Item:
The Correspo mentioned last month the current attitude that the feared Y2K problem was mostly talk, an overblown tempest in a teapot. Geoff Dolbear responded “There would have been havoc throughout the oil and chemical process industries without the efforts to rewrite code to eliminate the date problem. One of my friends worked 70 hour weeks during 1999 to track down and repair these problems. As I understand it, many of the process control systems were built around data collection functions. After midnight on January 1, the control systems would have lost their ability to function. It would have been a real mess.” Sounds right. The big push to produce lots of vaccine for H1N1 is now being treated by some as a false alarm propagated by avaricious pharmaceutical industry, because H1N1 has not yet proved a much greater hazard to health than “normal” flu. Far be it from us to say anything kind about the drug baronies, but one wonders if the unexpectedly limited effects of H1N1 have anything to do with widespread programs of inoculation, especially of those most vulnerable, travelers, and so on. This is idle speculation based on little information, but...

ITEM FROM THE PAST
This item from 1998 sprang instantly to mind
on receipt of a report that somebody is producing
digital recording media that may last a thousand
years or more.

DID YOU BRING THE MARSHMALLOWS?
A recent splendid television series retracing Alexander the Great’s route of conquest noted his foundation of Alexandria in Egypt. It also of course, recalled the destruction of the great Library of Alexandria three hundred or so years later, which deprived us of a huge part of the written history, science, and lore of the Ancient World. The disaster was apparently not brought about entirely by a single event, but was the product of carelessness and malice expressed over perhaps four hundred years. Some attribute the major loss to Julius Caesar, who, besieged there, reportedly started a fire as a distraction, so his gang could escape. Bernard Shaw has Caesar say, when reproved for this, that the world’s not much worse off for the loss of “a few scrolls scrawled with errors.” However it was done, the destruction of those documents is often pointed out as a foul crime against humanity. Well...
In the early fifties much outrage was expressed over the actions of American troops who burned ancient documents from the library in Seoul, Korea. When I encountered a fellow student at San Mateo J.C. who remarked that he’d been one of the soldiers, I indignantly asked what gave him the right to do that. “I was cold,” he said. With the passing years, his answer seems ever more right. He and his fellows were thousands of miles from home, being shot at by strangers, and freezing in ruined buildings. Fuel was fuel. Indignation is easy. Survival is not.
The records we’re generating in such volume now, potentially of some interest to folks a couple of thousand years hence, are even more fragile than good old parchment and papyrus. Do CD’s burn well? One worries that our artifacts won’t be as helpful in keeping some poor devil warm.

The prospect for providing helpful digital records to people
in need of something to burn is suddenly diminishing, because
a company called Cranberry, improbably up North of Bellingham
WA, is now producing discs (for DVD and, presumably, other
recording formats) made of “high tech stone” that should last
as long as...well, good hard stone. They call the product
DiamonDisc, saying it can be played back on any drive...though
it requires a special drive for recording. This is really designed
for archival use. You send them a DVD with the stuff you want
to save forever, and for $39.95 (with some discount on quantities
greater than one) they’ll transfer up to 4.7 gig of that data onto
one of their long-lived discs. One supposes the thing is breakable,
if not especially fragile, but as long as the disc survives, the data
can be retrieved from it...if only somebody knows it’s there, and
can figure out how to read it. At least there’s hope that future
folks will be able to reinvent the quaint methods we now use.
Reportedly, our intelligence agencies have vast warehouses
(think Indiana Jones) of wires, tapes, and discs containing
recorded material that has some remote possibility of being
helpful to The Survival of the Western World (or Eastern World,
come to think on it). The data are leaking away, fading, crumbling,
with depressing rapidity. The Library of Congress points out that
you have no good reason to expect your data discs to hold their
stuff reliably for more than five years. Maybe Cranberry is on
to something. It’s great that the discs will last so long, too bad
they don’t make good fuel under conditions that call for heat,
not knowledge.

After some years of working and reworking, this has become a real book, via Lulu Publishing. The blurb on the back (under a picture of the author looking unnaturally cheerful) says:

“This book is Nels Winkless’s wry look at his half-century-and-more as a “professional outsider” writing, editing, interpreting, presenting new ideas, and serving as a sounding board for interesting people who have influenced some of the major technical developments of the era. While fascinated by the dazzling advance of technology, he’s most intrigued by the savage resistance people have to every sort of change, making technical progress virtually miraculous, and he suggests an explanation for this puzzling conflict.
His recollections of the work and people are often funny, sometimes painful, and usually surprising.

ISBN: 978-0-557-05785-6

Review(s)

Available at Lulu.com (in print or an inexpensive download)