The ABQ Correspondent

THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT

ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 371......November 2026

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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SO THAT’S WHY…

Going through his papers .Jim Dowe’s family has found a document explaining why he developed the SAVVY^®operating system/programming language with Adaptive Pattern Recognition Processing (APRP) back in the early 1980s. Jim was so dyslexic that programming, which he largely did professionally, was a huge challenge for him. He took Bonehead English several times in college before the university relented, and waived the requirement to pass that course for his graduation. APRP was running on IBM PCs and APPLE IIs with now-slow processors and about 250 K of RAM. (The unremarkable notebook on which this is being typed has 16 GB of RAM with a processor running at 2.60 GHZ.) The increased speed and capacity do make a difference. APRP was in the mid-80s what we now call AI or a Large Language Model, and the Savvy system in which it was first embedded was so easy to use that even I could do a bit of programming. We weren’t able to commercialize it at the time, because its very different approach to using computers was offensive to the good taste and morals of the time, and we didn’t have the financial staying power to explain it over and over and over. One day some government agency realized its potential, and the whole thing went into the black for many years. It’s nice to see it again.

The units of data now called “tokens” were in our parlance “ibens” because it seemed like a nice gesture to name them after Iben Browning, from whose development of nTuple pattern recognition in the mid-1950s APRP was largely derived…like watts, volts, etc… (On being shown APRP, the first thing Dr. Browning said was, “You’ve done what we were never able to do; you’ve turned nTuple inside out.”)

Jim did achieve his goal of making programming easier for dyslexics. I know this because I once got into conversation with famed science-fiction author Jerry Pournelle at some conference, and sent along a Savvy Sampler to him afterward. He wrote a brief review in his column Chaos Manor, commenting that it seemed like magic, and was a lifesaver for his assistant, who was dyslexic, but could now type things into his computer without a struggle.

Good.

NO FAIR!

Following several recent reports that computers using AI have produced solid solutions to problems that have long baffled mathematicians, one would expect an expression of relief, if not rejoicing, from mathematicians. Surprisingly, that’s not the uniform reaction from those savants. Some are pleased, others disquieted. The article referenced here is a reassuring, middle-of-the-road discussion of the matter, while others suggest that some people are downright offended by this capability of machines, just as artists and musicians are offended by the ability of smart machines to produce startlingly good images and sound.

Indeed, I’ve thought of finding an AI/LLM system that would be allowed in its learning mode to read only the last forty years of ABQ Correspondents, acquiring my peculiar style. It could then be assigned by anybody to write Correspo pieces on any topic …going out to search for references, but not bringing their style home. Creepily, it would sound like what’s here.

It can certainly be done, because a human being once did almost that. Mickey Willins, having looked at the Correspo for a couple of years, back in the ‘80s, mocked one up, and showed it to me. It sounded just like me. Mickey was primarily a commercial artist and copywriter, and he certainly wasn’t threatening to compete…compete for what, the occasional attention of my contacts? Still, it was unsettling. (Mickey had no leaning to technology; I pressed him for months to get a fax machine, so he could send samples of copy and ad layouts to his clients for proofreading and approval without hiring expensive messengers to carry physical materials back and forth. He was astounded when he tried it…and saved significant money.)

This all makes it easy to understand the queasiness of those in The Arts.

But mathematicians?

It’s difficult to think about math without recalling the late satirist and mathematician Tom Lehrer, who proposed that success in math is best achieved by plagiarism, his work including such memorable lines as:

One man deserves the credit
One man deserves the blame

Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name
Oy!

and

My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed

When he finds out I’ve published first.

Why do mathematicians pursue that interest? There’s probably not much money in the math biz, so giving each other awards is heartwarming, but what’s the point of indulging in math? Well, it’s useful…lets us build bridges that don’t often fall down, go to the Moon, and stuff like that. If that’s the case, why not be unreservedly happy when computers produce knowledge and methods that improve such capabilities rapidly and at comparatively modest cost? Got no answer…only the speculation that math must be a sport, rewarding in some mystical way, also puzzling.

Life is full of puzzles, This one is more entertaining than some.

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NELS MUSES

Item:

It isn’t often that somebody asks, “Can a mountain be taller than Everest?” but it’s happened at least a couple of times. Most recently the question was addressed in Live Science…I asked that myself maybe sixty-five years ago, and the consensus seems to be that Everest is about as high a pile of anything that can exist on Earth, because the materials of which piles are made are only so strong. They give way under anything heavier. The mass of Earth as a whole determines how high a mountain can be. Olympus Mons on Mars is about two and a half times the height of Everest, Mars being a smaller planet with less mass. Olympus Mons is a volcano, maybe just dormant, not extinct. There’s some uncertainty about whether that’s the biggest pile of anything on Mars, because there may be a taller non-volcanic mountain or two, but it’s the biggest volcano we know of in this solar system. That may be comforting.

Item:

A friend called the other day to answer another not-too-common question I hadn’t asked. The news was that string quartets up to the time of Joseph Haydn featured a solo by one instrument in the ensemble. You could respectably write different string quartets with solos for different instruments…but Haydn innovated significantly by writing solos for multiple, or all of the instruments in the same piece. Struggling to hold up my end of a discussion of a subject about which I know almost nothing, I commented that people must have been really startled by Claude Debussy’s version of a string quartet, vastly different from Haydn’s…only to be told that scholars have discovered that Debussy directly used some themes of Liszt in his works. Who’d have thought?

Item:

Back about 1977, we ran an item in Personal Computing Magazine talking about the novelty of a young lawyer’s opening a practice that specialized in the legal complexities of using personal computers. That was genuinely newsworthy in that far off time, because the new capabilities offered by the technology were unexplored, full of legal mystery and opportunity. (I upset the poor guy by referring to his “shiny new office,” Sorry, but he it gave him international publicity and one hopes he prospered by it).

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ITEM FROM THE PAST

This item is brought to mind by new reports

that buildings on the bluffs overlooking the

sea in Pacifica, California have been dropping

into the ocean, to the distress of their inhabitants.

I’m about as sensitive to psychic phenomena as the average brick, so personal experiences along these lines have been few, but not none…working in 1957 as Credit Manager (for which read Terrified Bill Collector) for a semi-honest little publisher of TV logs, I drove up the San Francisco Peninsula, stopping here and there to call on people who owed us money.

I was on the coast side, in what now must be part of Pacifica, about to leave the built-up community, and head up the two-lane highway carved out of the cliffs over the sea. There was a call I could make right there in the community, but I knew it would be a fool’s errand, because the shop owner was never in, the place was effectively closed, and this would delay me from more productive visits in the City. I knew several reasons why it would be stupid to turn back to visit that local shop, but something urgently impelled me to make the call anyway. At the last moment, against my better judgment, I hung a U-turn, and headed back to that shop. Yes, it was deserted, and I had wasted the time. Bah. I knew better, and felt foolish for having done it.

When I reached the point where I’d made the U-turn a few minutes earlier, I found a police barricade. In those few minutes, a landslide had dropped a chunk of the highway into the surf a hundred feet below, carrying three cars with it. Happily, I was not among them, because I was engaged on that bootless errand. Coincidence, I suppose.

The point is that the tendency of real estate

at the edge of Pacifica to fall into the waters

far below can’t possibly come as a surprise

to people there. Perhaps the lure of having

a great view of sunsets overpowers common

sense…or maybe the events occur so seldom

that nobody considers them to be serious

probabilities. It’s been sixty-nine years since

my incident; I recall it ever so clearly, but then…

In the 1960’s, while working with Iben

Browning on studies of changing climate,

people were worrying aloud about the

loss of California’s beaches…Pacifica not

being the only place where they were being

washed away while the cliffs above fell into

the sea. I gained the impression (though I

can’t document it with references here)

that in the mid-1800s the California coast

had very few beaches, and it was important

in many places to build shelters and piers

that enabled people to get ashore conveniently.

Over the decades, those sheltered places filled

up, and beaches formed where there had been

none. Here in the mid-2020s El Niño is

treating that coast to huge surf and a series

of Kelvin Waves that are carrying the sand

away again…often revealing old structures

beneath. Things do change.

This book was written, richly illustrated, and published by excellent grandkid Malia. At 7 (gosh, Thirteen years ago) she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes… suddenly, of course; “Get her to the hospital NOW!” and things have been nip and tuck since then with many scary crises. She’s taken control of her life…played and sang at Whisky A Go-Go on the Sunset Strip at 15, put out an album at 16, published this book at 17, and is off to college hundreds of miles from home. She has been videoed reading the book at a kids’ hospital, and every incoming T1D patient there from now on will see that video. Some of us are rather proud of her.

ISBN‎ 979-8320821917

See on Amazon

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