Last Two Issues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Two Issues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Two Issues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Two Issues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Two Issues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Two Issues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Two Issues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Two Issues

 

 

 

 

 

"History is just people doing things"

THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT

                 ISSN 1087-2302   Online Edition Number 339......March 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
 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

YES, YES, I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME

It a recent conversation about printing a few color trifold brochures to take to a conference (really, there are only two folds in a single sheet of 8½” x 11” that give you three pages on each side of the sheet, a handy format), I repeatedly urged other members of the meeting not to use glossy paper, but a good high-quality non-glossy stock instead. Someone finally said, “You must have been frightened as a child by somebody threatening you with a glossy trifold brochure. Why are you so insanely vehement about this?”

Oh. I figured out how to account for the excessive vehemence. Right up to the 1970s, color printing was an expensive BIG DEAL, nothing to be used on short-run work unless you had money to burn and really needed to impress somebody. It was necessary to convert the original photography to the desired size. Then it was necessary to create “color separations” from that material, from which printing plates could be made that would put just one color of ink each onto the paper in multiple steps. Each of these steps cost something in the resolution of the image, so was very fussy. Then, of course, the images had to be placed on the paper in exact registration…thousands of times. The whole process was picky, picky, picky. Skills and people were developed to make the process routine and reliable, but those skills and equipment were expensive. You’d be in for hundreds of dollars (in an era when a hundred bucks was a hundred bucks!) before you had a few brochures to take to a show.

Well, then along came microcomputing. No industry was more affected, more rapidly, than printing. In just a few years, anybody could lay out a full-color trifold brochure on an office computer and print a few…or take the layout to a print-while-you-wait shop and get as many as desired for about twenty cents apiece (maybe a nickel each in 1950 money). We knew a guy who had inherited his dad’s prosperous graphics arts business, making color separations and the rest, using a great big camera we could walk into. The place was worth maybe a quarter million dollars when he inherited it in the mid-70s. By 1980, the business had disappeared.

It was a side effect to this that was what made such a strong impression on me that I made a nuisance of myself in that meeting; when it became possible to print glossy trifold brochures fast and cheap, everybody did it. Very little of that was high quality, with good design. The world was flooded with cheesy promotional material printed on glossy paper that did not represent its proprietors well. To stand out you had to do something different and do it well…like using good pix, good design, well-crafted copy…and careful printing on well-finished, non-glossy paper. I hope I’ve got that out of my system now.  What other sudden technical changes are likely to unhinge us?

 

CANDLING

I learned about “candling” as a kid in rural New England…didn’t learn much, except that people who raise chicken, ducks, etc…for eggs or meat, ordinarily held each egg up next to a candle in a dark room to see if it was fertile, containing a chick embryo or not. (The shells pass a surprising amount of light). I always assumed that the main point of candling was for those selling eggs to avoid having their customers dump live or dead embryos into their frying pans; yes, but those raising chicks also want to be sure that the embryos are doing well in their shells. Candling the eggs repeatedly, right up to the time of hatching provides all sorts of useful information. These decades later, commercial candling machines with cameras and computers can look inside the eggs at rates of 50,000 an hour, accurately reporting what they find. There are even some stories going around, sworn by believers not to be just urban legends, that candling is now taking on a more active role. An experimenter passed light through a fertile duck egg and into fertile chicken egg. The chick from that egg reportedly hatched with some duck characteristics because genetic information had been passed from one developing embryo to the other. Someone repeating the experiment, passed light through salamander eggs, into frog eggs (neither of which has a shell; the embryos grow inside transparent globs of gel). Sure enough, the hatching frog tadpoles had salamander characteristics. The key variable here seems to be the nature of the light used…the selected frequency or frequencies, variations in timing, etc. That was not reported, presumably because the experimenters don’t want everybody turning their chickens into ducks and salamanders into frogs for free.  DON’T YELL AT ME; I’M JUST TELLING CANDLING STORIES

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NELS MUSES 

Item:

Here’s another brief report on the development of ground-effect flying machines. Not quite new, it’s a year old, documenting the first flight of the Regent Seaglider. As near as I can tell, they still can’t turn these things very fast, raising worry about floating logs and fishermen who doze off and drift in the way. Still, interesting to see. 

 

Item:

Just a recollection raised in conversation with good old granddaughter Ondine. When she was in high school, maybe twenty years ago, she and her mom were much involved in Celtic dancing (crossed swords on the ground, and all that). Their group had a lot of local support, including a surprising number of bagpipers here in the high desert, and they staged many events. Ondine tells of an important occasion when they made made very clear, specific arrangements with a major hotel at which a big event was to be held… explaining carefully that bagpipes have just one volume. If you want a bagpiper to be louder, you get additional bagpipers; if you want a bagpiper to be quieter, you move farther away from him. The hotel was to give them space in a ballroom as far from any concurrent event as possible to avoid auditory conflict. The hotel agreed, then booked them into a room adjacent to a wedding reception with a mariachi band featuring loud trumpets. The ballroom walls slightly muffled the competing sounds, but the hotel had set up a bar in the hallway just outside the two rooms to serve both parties, and every time a door opened (lots of traffic to the bar), deafening sound spilled out. The bagpipers were in full regalia, with kilts, sporrans, etc… many with dirks tucked into sheaths at their ankles. Many of the wedding reception guests, dressed up for the important social event, were members of various gangs in their finest oversize T-shirts with identifying symbols on them, and baggy trousers concealing knives and pistols. As they mingled at the bar, neither group much admiring the other’s choice of music and dress, the opportunity for fatal conflict was present in spades. By some miracle, despite a lot of mad-dogging and glaring, the flash point was never reached, and all came away unscathed. The image lingers.

 

Item:

…and here’s progress in robots weeding fields. Wow! these things are becoming fast, very good at identifying weeds so they can be eliminated selectively, and very good at hitting them with lasers, not just anywhere, but in especially vulnerable spots. It’s remarkable to see a small fleet of these weeding critters moving through a real field of crops. They can only get better.

 

 

ITEM FROM THE PAST

This seems relevant currently mostly because

it’s been forty years now since the 1984 IPRC.

AROUND THE BEND...OR TURNING THE CORNER...TAKE YOUR PICK

When Iben Browning, who had long worked on machine intelligence problems, attended the International Personal Robot Conference and Exposition in 1984, he said gloomily “We should have been showing all this thirty years ago.” He had a point. All of the ideas embodied in those machines had been kicking around for at least thirty years. He went on to make a case that all genuinely new ideas need about fifty years to become generally useful. People think about new ideas for that long before they can start thinking with those ideas. Well, more than two decades have passed since that IPRC, and some of us have been complaining the whole time that roboticists haven’t been taking advantage of what we already know to make smart, flexible critters. I proposed in a 1984 book, indeed, that we should set up a “robot habitat” where robot makers would send their offspring to interact with other robots in an interesting environment, where Jane Goodall and her emulators might observe them patiently to see how robot society works. (Bob Content tried to get support for this at a science museum he managed, but...) In the last few months, all of a sudden, the key robot ideas seem to have reached critical mass or achieved ripeness or something, because they’re popping up all over. For example: A chap appeared in television news recently, tending a flock of twenty or so little autonomous vehicles that were milling around actively, attracted by one another, but avoiding collision. Their fascinating patterns of behavior could be altered by tinkering with their sensors and reflexes. Their shepherd had great ideas for expanding the work. Not only are semi-autonomous robot aircraft in many sizes and forms being used for reconnaissance and attack on actual battlefields (and one supposes our expensive big nuclear aircraft carriers must be accompanied and protected by unmanned undersea critters looking for trouble), but New Scientist reports that “...A Clodbuster robot...teamed up with three friends and a robot plane to find targets hidden in between buildings...No computer or a human need take a leadership role in the hunt, meaning the bot team can still track down targets effectively if it should lose any one robot. Each robot is loaded with a map... and is on a personal mission... information is also passed to other robots in the team so no data is held centrally.” Music to the ears! New Scientist quotes one of the development team members as saying “There is no need for complicated coordination of the different elements of the team – each just uses any information it gets to help with its own goals.” Even a behind-the-scenes documentary for the Stargate scifi TV series did a remarkable job of documenting the fact that a number of the far-out robotic notions on the show are now being matched in reality. Folks with real funding and applications are now actively thinking with some of the old notions, applying them, improving on them, and innovating vigorously. What a relief.

Well, not entirely a relief… one primary reason

(along with LLM’s) for the current rapid advance

in robotry has been the War in the Ukraine, on

for two years now, which has given both sides

license to experiment more or less freely with all

the terrible things remotely controlled or almost

fully autonomous smart machines might do to

people or property. One supposes that many of

the more interesting ideas, not all necessarily

lethal, are still not being revealed. Smart

machine technology is doing some things we’re

glad of, too…in medicine, in outwitting criminals,

and most notably, enabling almost realtime

communication among people using dozens of

different languages. Yeah. Take your pick.

------------------------------------------------------------- 

Nobody is a Nobody

-------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright © 2024 by ABQ Communications Corporation    All Rights Reserved

 

Two seem like