The ABQ Correspondent

Last Two Issues

October 2009

EXPENDABLES
The news is full of reports about progress in development of robot swarms...made up of individuals that have useful capability, but which depend largely upon communication with and support from the other members of the swarm. YouTube features a number of really interesting videos of such critters swarming about laboratories. A recent report in the handsome blog Inhabitat, focuses on some intriguing solar powered robots that are little tiny guys, “under 4mm square” that can actually walk (well, totter, probably) on three legs. If one falls over, it’ll be in trouble, but that’s a problem for later. There’s a nice picture of one standing on somebody’s thumbnail, on which there’s plenty of room for it to move about. The thought is that hordes of these could be sent out to gather data...about what, from where, isn’t entirely clear, but the idea seems worth pursuit. It’s also not entirely clear who’s developing these things; the only reference a hurried search could find was to “researchers from Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.” Well, good luck to them; what they’re achieving is remarkable. One aspect of swarms is coming increasingly clear; the devices in them must be extremely inexpensive, because so many of the individuals, if not the swarm as a whole, will be lost in any practical assignment. Nature uses swarms for all sorts of things...but an awful lot of those ants and bees get killed in the course of their work. The bigger fish eat lots and lots of smaller fish whose swarmish behavior allows survival of the species, and the hawks do snatch individuals from the flocks of smaller birds maneuvering in their spectacularly coordinated style. The swarms of robots may not soon face predators who profit from devouring them, but the opportunity for accident in the wide world is great, and there may indeed be hostile critters intent upon preventing the swarms from collecting data, or picking up manganese nodules, or pollinating the flower fields. It’s probably unwise to become emotionally attached to individuals in the swarms, because we’re going to lose a lot of them.

NOW HEAR THIS
Wally Burr is a Hollywood voice director who has produced tracks for a zillion cartoons, TV commercials, and lately, video games. He’s worked for years in the big time (that’s BIG TIME), directing people like Ed Asner, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Whoopie Goldberg, William Shatner, Mary Tyler Moore, Eric Idle, Jody Foster, Julie Harris, Burgess Meredith, Mel Blanc, Ted Knight, and Orson Welles...to drop just a few names. He’s currently seething with frustration with respect to video games. When he got into directing, he says, “I'd always figured that the dialogue and the animation shared a sort of a common understanding of the same storyboard pages and that, through their mutual magic, they eventually merged to become a single piece of, hopefully, entertaining theater. Wrong! Engaging dialogue with vitality, energy and crisp, motivated performances animated, if you will, the animation! When the dialogue was lame -- as a result of lame voice work or lame story – the animation was lame. Conclusion: For the most part, dialogue drives a show. Dialogue is the engine! It determines the show's tempo, energy and tone. The animation is hung upon the dialogue track!” That insight has never occurred to most of us. “Now digest this rather amazing fact: The total cost of the dialogue track for an average series half-hour (scale actors, recording studio and voice director) is under 5% of the budget for the entire episode!” Mr. Burr feels that most, though not all, of the hundreds of video game producers, and would-be producers, are squandering their opportunities. “Video game production has just barely progressed beyond, "Hey, we play video games and we've all got hot computers, let's design a new video game!" Producers tend to hook up with talented artists who went to schools where the instructors thought about creating pictures, not about story and performance. Wally lists half a dozen descriptors of most video games, of which our favorite is: “Spectacular high-res graphics voiced by a receptionist and a security guard.” If you’re going into the video game biz, have a bit of budget, and want to stand out from the pack, we can steer you to a guy boiling with skill, enthusiasm, and great stories.

NELS MUSES
Item:
Early in 2009, we chatted with some fellows in the Risk Mitigation Business. They provide teams to accompany executives, politicians, aid workers, and scientists on visits to dangerous places in the world, and bring ‘em back alive. The outsider typically thinks of this sort of activity as the Security Business, in which confidence is increased by putting the largest possible number of armed bodyguards (wearing sunglasses and sporting earpieces) around the travelers, to scare away criminals, guerrillas, mobs, and the like. Our contacts don’t work that way, preferring to avoid all confrontation by obtaining good intelligence, using their wits, educating their clients, developing good connections, blending into the local scene, being wary and flexible...then using highly developed skills in defensive tactics, contingency planning, emergency medicine, and, in the worst case, escaping and evading with their client if situations beyond their control occur. “Risk mitigation” is a fair descriptive term for their function. They commented that their business was increasing sharply as a consequence of the worsening world economic situation, which encourages a rise in violent crime. “In countries where poverty has been reported at startling levels of between 40% and 60% of the population, and increasing, there is a clear destabilizing effect on civil order. People who went about their work quite freely in such areas find their lives in danger. “We’ve sent rescue teams to bring out engineers, missionaries, and others whose situations have changed.” Now, late in 2009 their company is overloaded ....unable to fill all the requests for services. One supposes that’s a pretty good measure of civil instability in the world. There’s talk of economic recovery already, but, since the bills haven’t yet come in for our attempts to solve the problems, some expect several more years of intense demand for risk mitigation services...in places that surprise and depress those who think about it.

Item:
Way back in 1985, Bill Morrisey and his wife Nikki Delgado actually ran a business selling robots and related stuff to amateur enthusiasts in Las Cruces, New Mexico. (They had a lot of success with the Robot Control Language that Excalibur had created for RB Robot Corporation, making made it very easy for school kids to control robots in long sequences of action, with many variables.) A comment of Bill’s from that era is still intriguing: "There is almost no overlap between computer hobbyists and the people who buy robots from us." Computer geeks and robot geeks are not necessarily the same sort of people.

ITEM FROM THE PAST
This brief item from 1994 caught my attention, and
held it, because of the idea expressed that personal
computing vastly increased the power of individuals.

YOU MEAN...IT”S NOT JUST A MOVIE?
The personal computing revolution, in which we were minor players, distributes power among the populace, taking it away from the central organizers. The politicians persist, but the bureaucrats in business, if not in government, are already losing their place as useful facilitators, and are shuffling dejectedly through the unemployment lines. We can write glibly of rending social changeenabled by technology, and get off snide, condescending cracks about people who are unable to deal with change...but the stress on folks whose lives are disrupted is real, painful, and irreparable. Sorry. Well, back to the snide cracks.

Yes, the PC did give individuals unprecedented
power, and has wrought enormous change world
wide...but the central organizers are winning that
power back, having figured out over the last thirty
years how to go about it. Despite sincere efforts to
protect privacy by passing laws, the laws don’t
seem to work. You may be assured that your bank
will not reveal your innermost financial secrets, but
who doubts that a combination of bribery and
threat (from the Mafia, Our Government, Other
Governments, ambitious reporters, religions) will
bend the will of the clerks who actually have the
information at hand? National Security (anybody’s)
provides enough reason to pry anything loose...and
besides, everything any malefactor, or do-gooder,
needs to break you is already on line, accessible to
any moderately skilled and motivated geek. The
big institutions...now including not only governments,
but Microsoft, Google, MySpace, Facebook, and the
rest...urge us, very sensibly, mind you (it’s practical,
inexpensive, and easy) to put all information of
importance to us where anybody can study it without
half trying. Access is access is access. Those who wish
to guide and limit everybody, for our own good, to be
sure, will have at least as much control of individuals
as banks, railroads, and governments had in the good
old days, and can act faster. It took a technological/
social revolution to give us a couple of decades of
respite. What will it take to free us up briefly again?

September 2009

PATIENCE
In our book Robots On Your Doorstep in 1978, we observed that robots might be really helpful in such pursuits as agriculture. An artificial critter (or flocks of artificial critters)with nothing much else to occupy them, might without complaint work all night, picking unwelcome bugs individually off the valued crop plants, reducing the need for insecticides. It has taken some decades already, but robot designers at such centers as Carnegie Mellon are in 2009 feeling bullish about the practicality of setting autonomous robots loose in the fields to squirt insecticides and fertilizers precisely where they are needed, with great restraint, to pick only the ripe fruit, and to give a drink of water to each plant that needs it, without saturating others. In 31 years, the roboticists have reconfirmed what they already knew: farmers have a whole lot more specialized, and localized knowledge than the average city dweller suspects. A Louisiana farmer we knew years ago commented that if he changed places with a farming friend in South Dakota, neither of them could run the other’s operation successfully until several years had passed, and they got a feel for the differences. Indeed, Dr. Sophie Aberle told us about hosting U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace...who had developed hybrid corn...on a visit to the Indian Pueblos in the Southwest. The man from Iowa had a lot of corny advice for the people whose folks had been growing it in the desert for maybe three thousand years. They were fascinated, but, in the interest of survival, not moved to adopt his methods. (On the mesa at Acoma, he specified that he was to be lodged in a room on the East side, so the rising sun could stream in, and wake him, following which he would have blue corn tortillas for breakfast. They didn’t have any rooms opening on the East side, but they knocked a door and a window through the wall of a room to accommodate him. They also didn’t grow blue corn, but they bought some in town for the occasion. On the whole, the puebloans seem to have been a bit more adaptable than Mr. Wallace.) The robots are going to have to learn lots and lots about the farms on which they work, not just reading books sent from D.C.. But, their progress is encouraging. Ideally, the machines would eat the weeds they pull, and use the energy to power themselves, but nobody’s talking much about that yet.

CREATIVE FORENSICS
Twenty years ago, or so, the more excitable of our scientists stirred our politicians into a state of worry about bioengineering, genetic manipulation of organisms, and accidental development of pathogens against which we have no natural defenses, that might sweep across the world in deadly plagues. Some of our political leaders were frightened into loud calls for tight control of all such work, policing of the laboratories, and stern measures against fiddling with anything peculiar. The concerns were not entirely unreasonable, but Nature has a whole lot of experience in dealing with such problems, and the odds of such disasters are mighty small. Not only that, it was embarrassing to discover that any high school kid with a bent for biology could figure out how to tinker with organisms in his basement. Chances of control are lower even than the chances of escaped Frankenbugs. Along these same lines, a team in Israel has now reported in a paper that it’s not very difficult to alter samples of bodily fluids, so they contain DNA from somebody other than their donor. The team was also able to “construct a sample of DNA to match someone’s profile, without taking a sample from that person,” commenting that “you can just engineer a crime scene.” The same smart high school kid has another way to play practical jokes now. The next time the D.A. sets out to pin rape charges on the Duke LaCrosse team, he can be far more confident of having persuasive evidence. While distressing, this really shouldn’t be a great surprise.

NELS MUSES
Item:
The 2009 Fall Scientifics Catalog from Edmund Scientific arrived a couple of days ago, to our great pleasure. Since the mid-1940s, when they were known as Edmund Salvage, selling fascinating military surplus optical and mechanical gizmos, we have eagerly awaited each new catalog. The Scientifics consumer catalog (as distinct from their lab and industrial catalogs) concentrates on entertaining and instructive gadgets using interesting technology. It is startling this time to find an offering on page 4 of a book called Forbidden Science, containing 43 essays on controversial topics by people like Velikovsky and Tesla. Even more fun is the listing on page 36 of nine items under the heading of Ghost Hunting Equipment...EMF meters and the like...not inexpensive stuff, the IR camera going for $2,995.00, for example. Wow. Probably the greatest risk to their reputation is their offering of a triple-beam balance, the War on Drugs being what it is. The none-too-well-informed authorities here hassled a local scientific supply shop for months for offering odd glassware and triple-beam balances. The cops’ rationale was that the only people wanting to measure very small amounts of stuff precisely are drug dealers. Go, Edmund!

Item:
Our curiosity last month about the origin of an old song featuring the line I know a boarding house not far away, where they serve onion hash three times a day...has been fully satisfied. Bill Schaedla in Bangkok (why didn’t I think to ask somebody in Siam first?) remembered it from a Little House On The Prairie book, and he tracked down a website with all the information and a link that plays the tune. It’s derived from an old hymn, as many popular songs are...some versions downright dirty. Bill Williams, in Georgia, reasonably did a search not on “onion hash,” as I had, but on “I know a boarding house,” and came up with a reference to the song in an 1877 book whose author sternly disapproved of this irreverent treatment of the hymn. Indeed, “onion hash” is not the only substance mentioned in various versions of the thing. Remarkable what a searcher more sensible than I can find online!

ITEM FROM THE PAST
The endless disrespectful exchanges amongst
manufacturers of personal computers bring this
1995 item to mind.

THE REUNION
As planned, a passel of oldtimers gathered in Albuquerque in June to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the first personal computer, produced here by a company oddly called MITS. (The L.A. Times report, of which Geoff Dolbear sent along a clipping, nicely caught the spirit of the thing.) Most of the key people were among the host, as they were at the 10th anniversary. Ed Roberts (the Fearless Leader of MITS, who came up with the Altair computer), Eddie Currie (Ed’s friend and lieutenant, still a figure in the industry), Paul Allen (partner in Microsoft), and David Bunnell (who has published a series of blockbuster computer magazines -- Personal Computing, PC Magazine, PC WORLD, MAC WORLD, and now New Media) were there, but Bill Gates didn’t make it. David thought Bill had written Currie a note saying he’d be glad to see folks...but Ed Roberts is still mad at him, and he didn’t want to spend an uncomfortable evening with him. “Ed is still mad, isn’t he?” I said. “Oh yes!” said David. (Ed had argued in court that the Microsoft software was developed as work-for-hire while the fellows were employed by MITS. Bill and Paul argued that Microsoft was licensing the work product to MITS. Bill and Paul won...and this is being typed on a computer using Microsoft DOS and Windows, not MITS DOS and Windows.)
David made a point worth remembering: commentators often discount the MITS role in creating the personal computer, pointing to the years of visionary work done at PARC, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. “The fact is, “ said David, “we didn’t know anything about that. We just hauled off and made a computer that an ordinary person could buy and use. It seems to me that one absolutely essential feature of a personal computer is that a person is able to get one. MITS produced the first computer an ordinary person could buy.”
Dar Scott was startled to find a display of 18-20 year old MITS artifacts that included a board he’d designed..and was even more excited to see an operating computer that contained another of those boards...still chugging away, with about 20kb of RAM and a mass memory cassette holding 72kb. Wow. One looks forward to 2005.

Well, looking back now at 2005 it’s a bit disappointing
that the gang did not rally around for the 30th anniversary
of the Altair. Last we heard, Ed Roberts (having become
a physician instead of a captain of industry), was sailing a
yacht around the Caribbean. Bill was slowly backing out of
day-to-day Microsoft operations, Paul was happily involved
with private space flight among many other things, and
David Bunnell has been lost in the mists. He published Upside
for a couple of years, stirring heated controversy as usual, but
has dropped out our sight. Although there are computer
museums here and there that emphasize personal computing,
few among us recall the astonishment of seeing the industry
grow from nothing, virtually overnight, to a pervasive
influence in society...a quarrelsome, often mean spirited
influence. One looks around eagerly now for the next
hugely important technical/social phenomenon that will give
hope and power to individuals in the same way personal
computers have. Nobody...not Gates, Allen, Roberts, Jobs,
or any of the pioneers who enabled the personal computing
revolution...fully understood in those days what power was
really being unleashed. That power has still barely started
to show its effects, one supposes. What else is stirring around
us, ready to blossom? Prophecy is a tough racket.

After some years of working and reworking, this has become a real book, via Lulu Publishing. The blurb on the back (under a picture of the author looking unnaturally cheerful) says:

“This book is Nels Winkless’s wry look at his half-century-and-more as a “professional outsider” writing, editing, interpreting, presenting new ideas, and serving as a sounding board for interesting people who have influenced some of the major technical developments of the era. While fascinated by the dazzling advance of technology, he’s most intrigued by the savage resistance people have to every sort of change, making technical progress virtually miraculous, and he suggests an explanation for this puzzling conflict.
His recollections of the work and people are often funny, sometimes painful, and usually surprising.

ISBN: 978-0-557-05785-6

Review(s)

Available at Lulu.com (in print or an inexpensive download) and at Amazon.com