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"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 of The ABQ
Correspondent is "the impact of new ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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? 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 -------------------------------------------------------------
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