The ABQ Correspondent

Last Two Issues

November 2024

The surge in practical use of digital neural net technology in the past couple of years has stimulated some acceptance of old ideas that were shrugged off when they were new. One such is the “memristor.” Go back a bit. In the 1970s Dilithium Press published a book Iben Browning and I wrote called Robots On Your Doorstep. (Iben was mostly the thinker-upper; I was mostly the writer-downer, though we used a lot of his good lines, and I had an occasional technical thought.) The book arose from my realization that much of what we were working on at the Thomas Bede Foundation involved creating smart machines. I started to document it…and the product of my work was so dull that I kept falling asleep on the typewriter, waking up with indentations of the keys on my face…rather like napping on a chenille bedspread. So, I turned it into a story full of anecdotes. The book’s first review said it was “bizarre”, but over the years, some have been intrigued by it, explaining its peculiarity as “the way people wrote things in the ‘70s.” No, it’s the way I wrote one thing. A recent published comment said with surprise “There’s really something to this; they documented an artificial analog neural net before the digital revolution.” The Correspo has commented a couple of times on startling work that combines digital neural nets with living neural nets in a hybrid system. One concern, of course, is that the living cells die. Though they may be replaced by others, one wonders about maintaining continuity. Living systems are FAST, processing immense amounts of data with relatively low energy consumption. We want that capability, but…. Enter the memristor, which LLM system Claude helpfully defined thus: “A memristor is like a special kind of electrical switch that can "remember" how much electricity has flowed through it in the past.” No point in my trying to elaborate on that, because after another phrase or two, I have no idea what I’m talking about, and presumably the memristor is one of several related systems in development. Still, the point seems clear: we may develop hybrid digital/analog neural nets without having to worry about the analog component dying. Further, we may conceivably develop wholly analog artificial neural nets. Seems bizarre.

SAILING

Every few years, somebody promotes, and spend a lot of money in development of wind-powered ships using Flettner rotors to assist propulsion. It’s an appealing idea, and was actually put into practice as long ago as 1925…but the technology comes with some problems that have limited its use. The rotors are big vertical cylinders, perhaps fifteen meters tall, that stand upright on the deck of a ship. Those hollow cylinders are split in half lengthwise, and slid apart along that split. Wind can slide off the convex rounded surface, but is caught by the concave opening of the other side. Since the thing is symmetrical, it is a turbine that can be turned by the wind. BUT, it ain’t a sail, the propulsion is not provided by the wind’s pushing on it as it would a sail, and the turbine is not driving a generator. In fact, the cylinder must be rotated by a motor to make it work with the added energy of the wind. The motors providing that rotation can be small, compared to motors used to drive the propellers of a ship. The driving force comes from the Magnus Effect, produced perpendicular to the rotating cylinder, that pushes the ship. It isn’t very efficient, but promoters hope that rotors can provide as much as 50% of the energy needed for propulsion…saving immense amounts of diesel fuel. We shall see.

Anton Flettner (1885-1961)…an “Aviation Engineer

and Inventor,” was important to Germany during WWI

and WWII. Though his wife was Jewish, he had

connections with Heinrich Himmler, who had his family

escorted to neutral Sweden during WWII. After the war,

Flettner was brought to the US by Operation Paperclip,

about which many of us have extremely mixed feelings.

It gets a bit personal, because I knew people who worked

with such as von Braun and Dornberger, Indeed, I assume

that one funny, interesting acquaintance (probably not

an employer of slave labor), was one of the Paperclip gang.

It’s a complicated world.

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

NELS MUSES

Item:

With the recent occurrence of what used to be Columbus Day, we’ve been hearing a lot about “indigenous peoples.” The implication of most of that discussion is that the folks whom Columbus and his ilk treated in such vile fashion were always where they were discovered by self-important Europeans, but it’s increasingly difficult as we learn more from DNA studies to believe that any people were always where they are. Having just watched a report of the invasion of the Salish by the Haida in the 1840s, I rather suspect that things have been tense among most groups of people for a long, long time, and “indigenous” really means “we came here before you did.” Along the same lines, we hear a lot about “indigenous” species of plants, and the ravages of invasive species. (We’re often over our heads in tumbleweed… Russian thistle…after a windstorm.) Hawaii seems particularly touchy, but guys…when those heaps of lava broke the ocean’s surface to become islands, there wasn’t any hibiscus growing on them; everything that grows in Hawaii is “invasive.” When the island of Surtsey popped up off Iceland in 1963 birds started visiting almost at once, bringing seeds that grew into plants…very visible and looking indigenous by the ‘70s.

Well, grump, grump, grump.

Item:

The Correspo has more than once mentioned the Hear-a-Lite that was developed back in the 1950s to aid the blind. Look at what people are doing these days.

Item:

Somebody is producing a new musical instrument that is an “AI piano teacher” and a digital Theremin. Da mind is boggle. The theremin is interesting. It’s an electronic device that produces a tone that rises in pitch when you move one hand close to it, and rises in volume when you move your other hand close to it on the other side. A skilled arm-waver can produce eerie music with it. The memorable music by Miklós Rózsa for the 1945 movie Spellbound featured a theremin. The guy who invented the instrument in the mid-1920s, Lev Terman aka Leon Theremin was long-lived (97), traveled the world, was married multiple times, and won a Stalin Prize from the USSR for developing technology for the NKVD/KGB that was effective in spying on the British, French, and US embassies in Moscow. My college roommate built a pre-digital Theremin that didn’t work quite as he hoped; the best it could do was a full-volume screech that would loosen the paint from the walls if allowed to persist. It might be fun to play with one that works.

_______________________________________________

ITEM FROM THE PAST

This item from 1995 is recalled just because the

Holiday Season is creeping up on us.

The Dutch tulip growers sent a nice cheese to the chief gardener at a California estate at Christmas each year in appreciation of his purchases of thousands of bulbs. When the expected cheese failed to appear one year, the chief asked if any of his men had seen the round, red, wax covered cheese. Indeed, one of his new men had planted it, looking forward with excitement to the blossoming of this immense bulb. With some difficulty, they relocated the cheese, exhumed it, and consumed it. It was just fine. This was a triumph of packaging on several counts. Ah, Gouda. Ah, Edamse Kase.

The “California Estate” was in fact “Belmont”

so named by William Chapman Ralston. The

town of Belmont is named after the estate and

its main drag is Ralston Avenue. Ralston was an

interesting guy, an important figure in turning

San Francisco into a major city in the wild times

when the gold rush came along.

In recent decades, Belmont has become home to

major companies like Oracle…not in the Ralston

avenue part that runs up through a canyon to

the hills, but the area down on the salt flats lining

San Francisco Bay. One wonders how often sea

lions wander into those big buildings.

The estate has become the campus of Notre Dame

de Namur University, with which I had a trivial

connection back in the 1950s when it was still called

the College of Notre Dame. Friend David Hardie,

who was a ballet dancer (he’d discovered that there

were lots of attractive girls in ballet), was directing

and appearing in a performance at the College of

Notre Dame when one of their male dancers failed

to show up. David desperately needed a replacement

for him in one scene, and couldn’t find anyone but

me who was handy to the location and might be silly

enough to do it. I didn’t have to dance, just lead a

procession on stage as a king, and sit to watch others

dance. Feeling like a fool in my crown and tights and

fancy vest, hoping nobody would recognize me, I did

it. David had not warned me that the ladies would

occasionally dance back to where I was sitting, and

stamp on my toes (probably more to their

consternation than mine) but we all survived, and I

slunk away as rapidly as possible. The minor point

of reciting this dopey story from sixty-some years

ago is that the performance must have taken place

in the ballroom of Ralston Hall, which is described

breathlessly in the link above. I wasn’t paying much

attention to that at the time.

October 2024

WHO’S DOING THAT?

For many years the Correspo has offered links to videos showing especially interesting robots in action. Many of the most interesting clearly weren’t products performing practical tasks, and we wondered vaguely why anybody would put the energy and money into developing robot birds, ants, kangaroos and other fascinating critters…one after another, year after year. The videos of these thing in action…not just one, but a flock of birds, for example, are professionally made, and often shot in what seems to be a great big lobby of a building at least four stories high (easy to mount cameras at different levels) and the robots themselves are artistically crafted, often beautiful. Only recently did it occur to us to look into the company, called Festo. They’re family-owned, headquartered in Esslingen, Germany…the Stuttgart metro area…and they’re a large company, with more than 20,000 employees and revenue around four billion dollars a year. They sell automation products to 300.000 customers in several different industries worldwide, they are big in education as Festo Didactic, offering training programs in automation…and they invest 7% of their gross income in research and development. We’ve never seen their name in connection with anything, but their wonderful biologically inspired robots are marvelous advertising, as well as being great experimental exercises. Notice on the company’s website that their robots aren’t all that’s imaginatively designed. Their architecture is interesting.

ARF!

Dogs interact with machines in different ways One of ours would hide in corners when we were using the vacuum cleaner, rushing out to bite the bag on the machine whenever it sensed an opportunity, then rushing back to hide before the thing could bite her back. Neither of them was injured in this activity, and it added entertaining challenge to cleaning the carpet. In 2020, a team at Yale published a report on their study to explore how dogs interact with robots; do they perceive them as companion critters? will they respond to commands from them (necessarily via speakers) in the voices of their human folks? Not surprisingly, the results were mixed, but fascinating. The pups weren’t very responsive to commands simply played through speakers. They weren’t much interested in video displays. They were a bit more responsive to static robots, and more responsive to social robots that moved and pointed…especially when their human folks were seen to interact socially with the robots. This wasn’t a huge study, and the results (which I may have misunderstood) provide just an interesting start. Because 2020 was a few years ago, we looked online for followup, and there hasn’t been much. That was early in the covid outbreak, and people were staying home a lot with their dogs. They worried that the pups would feel lonely and abandoned when work and other group activity resumed and their folks left them for extended periods, so there was talk…not a whole lot …of giving them robot companions to make them feel better. (A work associate in the 1970s knew that her dog became much excited, and would race wildly through the house whenever the phone was ringing, so she’d call home a couple of times a day when she was away to give her pup some exercise.) There’s commercial activity along these lines four years later, all companies offering devices that produce signals that cue a dog who has learned what they mean to interact with the machine. When the dog responds, the machine tosses out one or more treats as a reward. The prominent guy in the field is John Honchariw, who set up a company called Companion as long ago as 2020 offering machines that interact with dogs, ostensibly (maybe really) training them. A second company, PupPod, offers a “toy” that does the same thing. A third, Ogmen, offers a more complex and presumably more expensive system. Perhaps there are others. These things all use cameras, sound, wi-fi, and software to allow dog owners to be part of the activity from near or far (my associate could have seen her dog running) and with the advent of powerful AI, all sorts of automatic activities are possible. Still, we’ve never actually seen any of these thing, so they’re not yet reaching the mass market. Mr. Honchariw’s company, Companion, is still online with a dog in its logo but they’re selling business consulting, with no mention of dog-training-robots, whatever that indicates. It may seem a trifle cynical to recall that decades ago when an observer commented to a trainer of animals for the movies, “It must be really tough to train the turtles,” the guy replied grimly, “If it eats, we can train it.”

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

NELS MUSES

Item:

A couple of years ago the Correspo commented on closely related jackfruit, breadfruit, and durian as a significant source of human nutrition over the centuries. Noting my comment that I’d never eaten breadfruit, Steven Sester sent me three packages of breadfruit snack chips that were slightly more edible and tasty than cardboard, but did not suggest the rich gastronomic potential of breadfruit. This article from Wired brings the subject pretty well up to date. It’s intriguing to read here about the growth of other food-producing plants protected from the sun by the broad-leafed breadfruit trees. Apparently, breadfruit trees flourish in the warm and warmer weather we’ve been noticing in recent times.

Item:

When Medellin Drug Cartel Leader Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993 (gosh, that’s 30+ years, now…feels like yesterday) and his lavish estates were let go to ruin, a small handful of hippos escaped from a zoo in one of them. They flourished in the tropical wilds of Colombia, and have become a serious hazard to people and other wildlife. Authorities set out capture or kill them, but their half-hearted efforts have not been effective, and the population is reportedly still growing. This is rather like the Burmese Python infestation of the southern swamps in the US. which has reportedly sharply reduced the populations of other critters like deer. The snakes are apparently fighting things out with alligators in some areas. It will be interesting to see what the next ten years bring.

Item:

This report of extraordinarily high tailwinds moving passenger airliners at well over the speed of sound relative to the ground does not mention the reverse effect of headwinds. One recalls being hastened along in one of the DC-3s we operated up and down the West Coast. The ‘3s typically cruised at ~150 mph, and it was unnerving to see landmarks appearing startlingly soon as we approached them at 220+mph. Conversely, one of our flights, fighting a 100 mph headwind wasn’t reaching its usual radio checkpoints one night, and the crew kept checking with the tower at their next stop. “Do you have us on radar yet?” “No, we don’t see you. Where are you?” “We’re here!” “Nope, don’t see you.” The plane was practically standing still with respect to the ground. When they turned to head back to their last stop before running low on fuel, they got there in record time. Airliners tend to be a little faster these days. _______________________________________________

ITEM FROM THE PAST

This item from 1996 was recalled when Ondine

hauled a big, heavy old Underwood office

typewriter upstairs recently from the recesses of

some downstairs closet.

I dug out an old portable typewriter the other day, so I can type envelopes and such without having to outwit the computer and the printer. Even found a fresh ribbon for it. Ondine, almost nine, and Skylar, five, were fascinated by this mechanical device. They ordinarily rise early and play games, check their e-mail, etc...on their dad’s computer. They had never seen a mechanical typewriter, and were astonished to discover the reversed letters on the print levers, to use the manual carriage return, and see the metal parts bunch up when multiple keys are struck at once.

Who would have thought...?

Computers and the internet are wonderful.

(One editor, may his canals be filled with

sand, rejected an article, sending it back in

my stamped-self-addressed-envelope [SASE]

with comments on it in ink, so I had to retype

it for submission elsewhere.) Hooray for

word processors.

…but I do sort of miss the ding of the bell at

the end of a line and the physical activity of

using the lever to swing the carriage back to

the right after each line. It was reassuring to

sit in my office and bang away on a great big

old Olivetti office typewriter. We were sort of

a team. No, no…that’s just a fit of nostalgia

talking…I wouldn’t go back to it, thank you.

A few companies are still manufacturing

mechanical typewriters, mostly for specific

applications…and it’s strange hear people

discussing IBM Selectrics with no carriage-

return levers and their golf-ball print heads as

old-fashioned systems. What? some of us still

think of Selectrics as dazzling new technology.

In the late ‘70s we found what looked like a

good deal, and bought portable typewriters for

each of our four kids…but it wasn’t a good

deal. I hammered out maybe three million

words on my good old 1957 Smith-Corona

portable (which must still be hidden somewhere

around the house), but I couldn’t do that on

those machines, and I don’t think the kids ever

used them. Quality counts in the typewriter biz.

Wikipedia has a great article on typewriters,

and by all means listen to Leroy Anderson’s

wonderful music The Typewriter.

The HP OfficeJet Pro behind me as I type

this seems unlikely to suggest such fun.

And see the Wikipedia piece about The

Typewriter. The Underwood pictured there

looks just like the one now across the room.

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