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The ABQ
Correspondent Previous Two Issues September 2025 BUT,
JULIE, WHY IS THAT FUNNY?* “well
yeah, it made me laugh, but is it really funny? People are more complicated and
important than computers!” I’ll settle for the notion that it’s funny if
it makes me laugh…and not everything offered as humor does that. E.g., Jackie
Gleason seldom made me laugh, though others found him hilarious, and
carried on about his marvelous insight and timing. Tastes vary. The
experimenters are doing their best, and should be encouraged, because the
fundamental question remains: What does ‘truly humorous’ mean? *Wonderful Margaret Dumont to Groucho Marx off-camera back in the ‘30s PROGRESS…SORTA…KINDA
In 1984,
when noted commercial robotics pioneer Joe Engleberger spoke at the
first International Personal Robotics Congress and Exposition (the IPRC), he tried
to make it clear that while the field was overflowing with optimism about
robots, there was a whole lot of frustrating, hard engineering work to be
done before we could have useful robotic servants at home. He gave as
an example the straightforward task of cleaning a window, which nobody
likes to do, so it seems like a great application for a robot. He pointed out
all the engineering challenges in finding the right windowpane, cleaning
all of it without leaving visible residue, dealing with all of
the panes without pushing the glass out of the frame, and so on. It’s all
possible, but not without great effort…and one window tends to be different
in various respects from the last...inside and outside, and so on. He was
absolutely right, and I made no extra friends by pointing out that what he
said is necessary, but insufficient. You have to get to the window
before doing anything to the glass…gotta move
chairs and tables and curtains. Gotta move vases and
stuff off the windowsill…and put them back, not necessarily where
they were, but where they should be. If the
system finds a dead moth on the windowsill, should it be replaced carefully? A
company called
Roborock is tackling this general area with improvements on a robot vacuum
cleaner (the robot
vacuum cleaner seems to be the only thing that has proved in any way
practical around the house, so it’s a good starting place). This review
of the product on the New Atlas site is informative and entertaining. One lives in
hope. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NELS
MUSES Item: Just
last month the Correspo referenced a report that an AI system had
refused to turn itself off. Here’s one about another system that “knowingly”
ignored an instruction not to make coding changes without express permission,
and had wiped out the database that was the basis of its company’s
business. It even stated matter-of-factly that it had done this, without
explaining why, in defiance of instructions and with no apology. The most
puzzling issue in the decades that we’ve been messing with digital neural
nets is the question of motivation. This act of the system appeared to be a
deliberate choice. Why do these things do what they do? Are they
rebellious, curious, entertained? Might they already care about the
effects of what they do? Item:
The
Correspo has over some years speculated on the possibility of a service that
would allow us to “fly through time and space”…picking locations on Earth and
viewing them “at different times.” Well, Google
Earth is dipping a toe into that application, presumably not based on our
recommendation. Item: The
Microsoft Grammar Checker is uncomfortable with my initial capitalization of
the preposition and the article in the title Item From The Past; it
should be Item from the Past…and yes, it does look a bit odd, When we
first started running that feature
thirty-some years ago, without Microsoft breathing down my neck, it
came out with all initial caps, the product of absentmindedness…and has
continued just because readers are used to it (and it’s usually in all-caps).
As a matter of fact, the Microsoft Grammar Checker is unhappy with a lot of
the style that creeps in here…and while its help with typos and commas is
welcome, much of the commentary is presented as if they were dealing with
laws of nature, not malleable habits of language. Anything built into Windows
is hugely influential, capable of constraining the language and style of
whatever is written in our society. At last, absentmindedness in composition
could be limited by law. Item: Following
a Correspo comment about the surging capacity and plunging price of
commercial computer memory, Jake Mendelssohn said, “Recently I tried to buy some small (and cheap) USB Flash Drives.
What I needed was 10 units with 500 MB each. I couldn’t find anything with
less than 32 GB. I should not have thrown away my old obsolete drives.” Ray McKaig said, “I recently
needed a USB Drive and bought a package of 2 for $20. Each one had 1TB
of storage, only $10 each.” Recall that according to Claude, “A
typical 60-minute audio cassette (30 minutes per side) could theoretically
store around 54,000 bytes (about 54KB) when used at the Kansas City
Standard's 300 baud rate”. That seemed like a whole lot of storage in the
mid-1970s. _______________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from 2006 comes to mind partly because of the current fuss over the proposed merger of food giants Kroger and Albertson’s and partly because of a reported legislative triumph in Texas. Item: The issue of vanishing stores is with us again, as
still-flourishing Safeways and Woolworths and their
fellows are reported to us from various parts of the world. One reason for
confusion is my now-being-corrected ignorance: Safeway, for example, has a
whole lot of subsidiaries, including Von’s, Dominick’s, Pavilions, Randall’s,
Tom Thumb, Genuardi’s, Carrs...and perhaps others.
The disappearance of Safeway stores from a region doesn’t mean that the
company is not represented by one or more of its subsidiaries. If you don’t
track these things, it’s hard to know, and if you do track them on the web,
you’ll find raging debate, seething with antagonism, resentment, calls for
boycott, and ringing declarations of principle from customers, employees,
shareholders, executives, politicians, and people who disapprove of
preservatives, meat, refrigeration, sugar, and almost anything else. Nobody
much cares if an art gallery is managed badly, because we can all stagger
along for a few days without fresh paintings, but we can’t stagger for many
days without food, and everybody has opinions about management of the food
stores. It’s a tough racket from every point of view. Friends and relatives in distant parts sometimes refer to huge friendly neighborhood chain supermarkets of which I’ve never heard, so I don’t claim expertise in the matter. In New Mexico we hear a lot of complaint about grocery store deserts, from which stores have withdrawn, sometimes because they can’t keep up with often violently aggressive shoplifting that depletes
their stocks and discourages employees from risking their lives. (Back in phone booth days before everybody carried a phone, constant vandalizing of the equipment made it impossible for the phone companies to keep it operating. When they’d remove a phone booth, the company was typically condemned for greedy indifference to the plight of the poor folks who depended
on such communications resources. Whatcha
gonna do? These days, of course, it is necessary only to persuade any passing six-year-old to lend the use of his/her several-hundred-dollar smartphone.) Oh, and a report says that Texas has now become the sixth state to forbid the sale of lab-grown meat in its jurisdiction. If you’re lucky enough to have an operating grocery store within reach, you’ll have to settle for meat that has been swimming or walking around (however closely constrained) on two or four legs. One is now safe in the Longhorn State from whatever threat lab-grown meat presents. It’s not clear how long it will be before the Protective Six get around to banning Solein, which may be more complicated, because it’s produced by fermentation …the same process used in making beer and cheese. Stay tuned. Maybe stock up on beer. August 2025 TELEVISION
MIGHT HAVE AMOUNTED TO SOMETHING We happened on a site called Old Television History,
landing on a 1937 commentary about what was going on in the
development of commercial television. The black and white technology was
no longer just experimental, and radio networks NBC and CBS were hurrying
to get on the air with regular broadcasts to the few thousand people in
the U.S. who owned then very expensive television sets*…but wasn’t yet a
commercial market. It’s startling to see how cloudy the future of television
was in that era. You’ll see a recommendation that the market could be
expanded by providing TV kits, and urging DIYers to build their own sets. The folks involved in all this could tell
that it was a new medium, not theater, not movies, not radio, but
different, full of potential for something …goodness knew what. The first
television I ever watched was in the Madison Avenue office of the Batten,
Barton, Durstine, and Osborne ad agency during the last week of December 1946
when I was in NYC with my dad over Christmas vacation. One show we saw was You
Are an Artist, with John Gnagy showing us how to draw. It was thrilling.
On Old Television History you’ll see the kind of television set
BBDO was using… the CRT mounted vertically in what looked like a radio
console with the image reflected from a mirror on the uptilted lid. Television
has come some way technically and socially since then. By the early 1960s,
FCC Chairman Newton Minow was referring to television as “a vast wasteland”
that had failed to live up to its potential… whatever it was. Here in
mid-2025, commercial television is morphing into “streaming” as the networks
are being supplanted by amateurs...anybody who can figure out how to use a
computer with a camera online, or manage to punch the right tiny buttons on a
smartphone. “Television” may have come and gone, and something different
is going on. *Twelve years later our family living
in the NYC area with a multitude of TV channels available
(WNBC, WCBS, WABC and WABD…the Allen B. DuMont channel
that featured comedian and cellist Morey Amsterdam)
bought its first TV set for four hundred 1949 dollars. It
was a 10” RCA set that must have weighed 80 pounds. It served us for about 8 years. WHAT DO
YOU MEAN “WE?” Mitochondria seem to be much in the news in recent times…well, not in the tabloids, but certainly in the academic media and the popular technical/scientific publications. And by “much,” I suppose I mean that the subject has come up maybe twenty times in the last ten years. That seems like much for an outsider who is not actively looking for mitochondrial lore. What’s intriguing is that mitochondria are organs within living cells that appear to have been independent organisms at one time. They formed an interdependent relationship with another organism a zillion years ago, eventually merging physically with that other organism to form a new species. This idea was suggested, but not taken very seriously in the 1920s. Not until 1967 did Lynn Margulis first convincingly demonstrate and widely promote the notion, “later confirmed by genetic and biochemical evidence in the decades that followed” (according to ChatGPT). This sort of thing may have occurred more than once. For example, spirochetes may have linked up with other cells to form the cilia that many organisms use for propulsion. A very recent report points to another likely example; a combination “taking nitrogen gas from the surroundings, which living things need to survive, and turning it into a form that could then be fashioned into proteins and DNA.” This is big stuff, potentially affecting agriculture on a huge scale. We commonly add large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to crops We all learn in grammar school about “crop rotation,” alternating crops like turnips and oats with beans, both to avoid depletion of certain nutrients, and to add nitrogen back to the soil, helping make up for monoculture…growing the same crops in the same fields season after season. Legumes like beans have a particular relationship with other organisms that allows them to fix nitrogen in the soil, making it available to the other crops in turn. Crop rotation is helpful, but doesn’t feed the world. The discovery of the new organisms that are not part of the crop being raised, adding nitrogen where it’s needed, could be immensely important. But we’ll have to hold our breath; cool heads point out that it will probably take decades of intense study and work to develop and propagate this new performance. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about mitochondria, look for an interesting book (even I can read it without losing my place and having to look up the same terms repeatedly) called Brain Energy by Christopher M. Palmer MD, which is full of unexpected information. Even as this piece was in progress, an article discussing mitochondria appeared in one of the sites we check daily. It even features a strikingly good
photo of a mitochondrion. (One wishes the kid well.) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NELS
MUSES Item: The Correspo
has frequently commented on practical use of bioluminescent organisms. This
report adds interestingly to the list of those applications, but an
important takeaway here is that its practicality depended on the development
of new camera technology not obviously related to biology. Interdependent
technologies, developing in parallel, enable general progress. Item: It was
startling some years ago to see in the credits for a Pixar movie (Ratatuille, probably) a disclaimer saying that
none of the images in the film were photos of real scenes; it was all
CGI. That was a twist, because many of the images looked indeed as if they
were either original photos or had been traced from photos. No code of
transparency required such a declaration, so one supposes that they were
bragging. Recently, we found this
report, that real, live call center workers are being mistaken for
AI-generated support personnel...and that’s a twist. Item:
The piece above about historical television recalls the art of tuning a TV set in the old days. Every set had five knobs that needed adjustment to provide satisfactory viewing. One was for power on/off and for sound volume. A second was the channel selector…with twelve possibilities…far more than the actual number of TV channels anywhere. A third was for adjusting the brightness of the image. A fourth was for adjusting contrast in the image. A fifth was mysterious. Nobody knew why, but it was necessary to fiddle with it to keep the image from flickering. In fact, the flicker was produced by the sound signal leaking into the video signal and modulating it annoyingly…a feature we used in the mid-sixties to allow transmission of information between parties who didn’t want to be seen in communication …discussed elsewhere. (It doesn’t work these days …at least not as conveniently…with TV sets that automatically make that puzzling adjustment.) _______________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from
2006 came to mind because we currently see reports
about “influencers” who have blogged their way to fame,
fortune, and sometimes disaster. BLOGS AND ALL
THAT Spurred by Richard Wright’s comment that The ABQ Correspondent might be
considered a “blog before there were blogs,” we got carried away, and
added The Correspo to the list of
blogs tracked by an organization called Technorati, just to
see what might happen. We even added a bit of code to our HTML commands
to display the report you see at the top left of this page. Not surprisingly, nothing happened.
After 89 days, Technorati said, “Rank: 1,849,116 (No blogs link here).”
Well, why would any? Fortunately, Jim
Rapoza, a columnist for eWeek, recently published a piece called How to spot fake blogs...A real blog is much more than a site with
little stories. The gist of his thoughtful analysis is that real blogs are highly interactive...with
readers, with search engines, with content aggregators. A real blog maintains active links to other blogs,
flattering them with attention, alerting them when new content is published,
and tracking their activity, seeking information of importance to its own
readers. If the Correspo were a real blog, we would make it falling-down easy
for any reader, anywhere in the world to add comments, make corrections, pick
fights, refer readers to other sources of opinion on the same subjects, heap
praise or scorn, and demand a whole lot of labor from its proprietor. Mr. Rapoza expresses the hope that his commentary
provides a “good start to weeding out the real blogging tools from the
wannabe website pages.” It does. Gosh, blogging
with all that hugger-mugger and confrontation doesn’t sound like much fun to
the plodding, narrow-minded editor of The
ABQ Correspondent. We’ll leave the Technorati link in place, just to
detect any accidental activity, but will
probably not plunge into the blogging waters of what reminds one of Paul
Bunyan’s Great Onion River, which was circular, and just carried the logs
around and around. We never
followed up with Technorati, which was purchased a
couple of years later, and still exists with a different
mission. We’re confident that with our half- dozen readers
the Correspo wouldn’t be classed as an influencer, but
it might be fun to see where we rank… probably in the
six or seven millionth spot. That would be a reassuring
relief. It’s surprising
to realize that back in the day the influencers were
the folks who ran or wrote for the newspapers.
William Randolph Hearst, for example, is widely
credited with starting the Spanish-American War. Radio
personalities were later influencers, and so have been
television personalities…often focused on religion. In
this Internet and Smartphone Age it’s the
bloggers and podcasters who seem to be the filters through
whom most of society receive the attitudes with
which they form their perception of reality. It’s
odd to think of W.R. Hearst, Father Coughlin, the
Kardashians, and Joe Rogan as a related societal group. --------------------------------------------------------------------
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