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The ABQ
Correspondent Last Two Issues March 2024 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. February 2024 A note: With
this issue of the Correspo, it has
been published for a full 39 years. If we get out an issue in March of
this year (and we expect to), that will begin the 40th year.
Nobody is more surprised than I. PROGRESS
It was in
June of 1997 that the Correspo first noted
the development of miniature surveillance aircraft “with six-inch (really, six-inch, fifteen centimeter)
wingspans and a range of some kilometers.”
Approaching thirty years later, that seems unremarkable; the skies are full
of interesting big and tiny things. Word is getting around about a new
development (apparently already in use) that gives one pause. A classic
problem with drones is that their range is limited by the amount of fuel
they can carry. This new development addresses that. A very small vehicle
is now able to perch on electrical power lines and draw power from them,
allowing the aircraft to navigate from spot to spot along its route, stopping
off to recharge whenever necessary. Given this, the aircraft can carry a
lot of navigation and communication equipment as well as a useful payload.
Somebody’s idea of a useful payload is a small, unobtrusive package that can
be secured to one of those power lines, and left behind, not attracting
attention. This package may contain an explosive…not in itself really
damaging, something along the lines of a Roman Candle that can when triggered
toss an expanding cloud of fine conductive wires into the air. That cloud
can settle over its electrical surroundings… shorting them out. Some
of us recall lunching in a New Mexico restaurant many years ago when the
lights went out for an extended time. The effect was produced by hot
weather in the state of Washington a thousand miles away that caused some
power transmission lines to expand until they shorted out on something
normally below them. Thoughtful (and quite inexpensive) application of clouds
of fine conductive wire could bring down power in a whole country,
creating inconvenience. SPREADING THE NEWS A while back (can’t find the piece at the moment)
the Correspo spoke of work that revealed
active communication among plants…largely warnings of danger, but other
matters of importance as well. The information seems to be transported by
networks of fungi that can pass along chemical messages over great
distances. It’s by no means clear to some of us how those messages can be
intelligible to their recipients, and one wonders how complicated the
messages can be, but Nature is clever and resourceful. Those researchers
were concerned with underground systems, but work proceeds and people are discovering things about communication
using aerosols. Apparently a plant may notice
something of which it disapproves…maybe a caterpillar eating its leaves,
and it responds by releasing into the air some chemicals that carry
the message, “Hey, watch out, guys, I’m being attacked.” Other plants in
the area may respond to that warning by emitting chemicals that are repugnant
to caterpillars, giving them some protection. Detecting this message
sending/receiving was not casual for the researchers, who modified some
plants genetically, enabling them to emit light as well as noxious chemicals,
letting their reaction be seen. You can see it. Not to be too anthropic about this; the variety
of communication seems to be, must be, quite limited and entirely a
mechanistic process, but it’s easier to talk about it as if the
communication were by choice. Then again… Late friend Steven Sester (aw) whose
comments we often published, had this to say about
the piece on fungal communication: “I just realized
I tossed lots of Science Report features
including one called Tree Talk. The Acoustical Society of America worked for a more broad spectrum of
folks beyond piano builders and tuners, concert
halls, and audiology concerns. Tree talk
was about how acoustical sensors could tell how
stressed a tree was including as I remember, drought,
disease and boring beetles (they wouldn't be that
way if people had read to them). One wonders if, as your story suggests,
they were passing that information along to other
trees too. The species of trees I worked with most
had common root systems as one form of
reproduction. Redwoods needed this provision since
their seeds required high heat to shed a protective
shell and germinate otherwise. Lodgepole Pines
were almost like stands of bamboo and heat would
travel through the common roots systems and combust miles away. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NELS MUSES Item: There’s a whole lot of work on “soft” robots,
mostly because of their ability to squoosh down and
slither through narrow places (under doors, for example), expanding again on
the other side. Here’s a case in
which the researchers are more interested in the “end effectors” for handing
things…using octopus tentacles and related structures for models. (We seem to have developed a soft spot for
octopuses lately.) Item: It’s hard to know what to make of this, but it’s an interesting phenomenon, different from sublimation. Item: This report on a long-term experiment to
determine how long seeds can remain vital
(they’re looking at about 150 years of controlled experiments so far, and the
things keep germinating) recalls that thirty years ago or so a friend gave us
a handful of very distinctive-looking beans that were the second generation
grown from a cache of seeds discovered in an ancient site in New Mexico,
estimated to be a couple of thousand years old. We planted them…and, sure
enough got a crop. We didn’t have the self-discipline to carry on the line,
though we talked about selling small lots of ancient beans…harder in those
pre-WWW days. We also didn’t eat any, mostly because we didn’t have enough,
but others had, and they reported that they were very good. Further, somebody
had done some scientific analysis of them, and determined that they were
exceptionally nutritious. ITEM FROM THE PAST This piece from
2000 is brought to mind by both the fact that this
is an Olympics year (in Paris) and by the emergence
of a television network dealing with the status and
activities “indigenous” peoples worldwide. THE GOOD OLD
DAYS Much commentary during Olympics coverage from Sydney
dwelt on the awkward relationship between
the aboriginal Australian people and the folks who have overwhelmed them.
Amid the handwringing, one of the
most-recently-living-away-from-civilization aboriginal gents commented
wistfully that he missed the old tribal life...but he was rather glad to be free of the power of the shamans who could
have him put to death for failure to conform with their views of what was
proper. Bingo! There’s a key consideration: if you want to preserve
the ancient cultures, can you succeed by preserving only the non-lethal
parts? If people speak the old languages, eat the same foods, and sing
the same songs...are you preserving the culture? The situation is not without
embarrassing parallels here in New Mexico. Indeed, Southwest Airlines just decorated one of its 737s with an attractive
big Zia symbol only after striking a monetary arrangement with the Zia Pueblo
authorities, who insist that it’s exclusively theirs by tradition. Well, no, the symbol isn’t copyrighted, and
yes, it’s on the state flag and has been used in commercial logos, on
letterheads, in jewelry, on clothes, cakes, license plates, coffee cups, so
often and so long that it’s virtually
a generic symbol of the region. (One hears gossip that the Zia Pueblo
helped the Spanish conquerors re-take the territory after the Pueblo Revolt
in the late 1600's, and their symbol floating over all the state buildings is
figuratively rubbing salt into the wounds of their numerous fellows here.) The airline’s gesture does not come
without complications. Dr. Sophie
Aberle (a distinguished figure with Conant, Bronk, and others on the
National Science Board that created the National Science Foundation) once remarked to me that “preservation of the
Indian cultures” became moot as soon as the tribal caciques lost their power
to have people executed, which wasn’t really that long ago. That fundamental change destroyed the
traditional structure of those societies. What’s left? We have no answers; merely point out the dilemma. Maybe cell phones and satellite TV will
solve everything by blotting out all that has traditionally seemed important.
In a
mere 24 years, cellphones and streaming have not
changed quite everything, but the work is still in
process. Now there’s a phenomenon in the form of “FNX”
First Nations Experience, a television network
that reverts to old-fashioned “free” television.
Threatened
by streaming and online media, the traditional
(well, since the 1940s) networks and PBS
have launched a campaign to persuade viewers to
obtain digital rabbit-ears antennas that allow them
to bring in very large numbers of channels (they
talk about as many as 100 in major markets …which
impresses some of us who recall having a max
of five or six in those same areas back in the day)
without any physical connection, and without charge.
One of those channels is FNX, which concentrates
on matters affecting “indigenous” groups
all over the world, from Zuni to Mauri to Uighers. Not surprisingly, the content features a lot
of restrained, but deeply-felt reference to the savage,
maltreatment of local peoples by encroaching European
occupiers who stole their land, their culture
and their children with breathtaking arrogance. But
really, there’s a wide range of material, much of
it entertaining and informative (see Moosemeat
and
Marmalade, for
example, a show in which a large
American Indian and a small, classically trained
British chef show each other what to eat and
how to prepare it in their different cultures. Lots
of great, non-resentful stuff to watch.) Every now
and again, something creeps in along the lines of
what the Australian chap expressed these years since…relief
at being free of the possibility of execution
at the whim of the shaman…and occasional recognition
that “aboriginal” really means not “we have
always been here,” but “we were here a long time
before you came.” There are a few cracks in attitudes
toward the “official” views of history enforced
by institutions that have a stake in the status
quo. Not many cracks, but a few, enough to keep
FNX sounding legitimate, not just propaganda. --------------------------------------------------------------------
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