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The ABQ
Correspondent Last Two Issues January 2025 OH, I
REMEMBER YOU After only a few years I’m slowly learning to use
my smartphone for more than making and receiving phone calls.
Lately, the spook-in-the-iPhone, Siri, has been helping me set timers, steer
me to locations, and turn off the iPhone…which I think is supposed to shut
down if I press on the button long enough…but which doesn’t seem to do that
in practical time. Siri is polite and efficient, asking for
clarification if I don’t explain clearly what I want her to do, and one hears
that she’s about to become a full-fledged LLM. Critics have complained
that Siri is fawningly subservient, but I just find her decently courteous.
When she does something for me, I often automatically thank her (just the
habit of a lifetime), and she sometimes replies “You’re welcome” or “My
pleasure” or something similar. She’s not a real person, but neither were our good
old dogs, to whom we always gave a word of approval for good performance. It
just seems like the thing to do. I mentioned this to a colleague who makes a
point of being extremely courteous in frustrating situations…notably in
dealing with representatives of bureaucracies. (In fact, my colleague is far
more able and likely than I to take cool, devastating action when crossed,
“cool” being the operative term here…well, so is “devastating”…like
showing up at the bureaucracy office with a carefully annotated notebook
explaining the bureaucracy’s own rules, and politely discussing the notes in
detail for as long as it takes.) Always with kindness and tolerance. Why
bother with courtesy to Siri and her increasingly numerous cousins? My colleague’s response had not occurred to me. Siri
and her cousins have almost perfect memory, stuffed with metadata,
recording not only your specific exchange, but the date, time, geographic
location, your name, race, religion, political
identification, apparent frame of mind, the frequency of your
exchanges, any apparent connections with other events and people…and
so on and so on. Siri and her cousins are getting better and better at
remembering and relating things…and we must assume that they will chat
among themselves, sharing all they know, never mind any silly rules
intended to prevent such hobnobbing. To help you (or somebody else) to
achieve something in particular, those agents must know you well. They will. Do you
want Siri and her cousins to think of you warmly or frostily? NAME DROPPING While driving from Connecticut to Wisconsin in
1950, my uncle and aunt took me on a scenic route that included
Niagara Falls. We did the Maid of the Mist tour, went into tunnels
that let us see the falling water from behind, and admired the big
power plant. (Canada was still on 25-cycle power, instead of the 60-cycle
power standard in the States, and the clear impression lingers of the
perceptible flickering of the lights at the 25-cycle rate.) We spent a
couple of hours in the Niagara Falls Museum. Founded
in 1827, the museum had a checkered history, changing hands and locations,
and acquiring many collections of this and that unrelated stuff. We
saw, of course, the oak barrel in which the first person to survive going over the
falls intentionally made her successful journey, as well
as other over-the-falls vehicles. The museum was in a big loft building with
an open central area and maybe four floors of galleries around it. On exhibit
in a room along one of the galleries was a pile (literally, a pile) of
Egyptian mummies, of which one stood out distinctively, and I
stared at it for a while, pondering the guy’s ignominious fate. The museum closed in 1999, and the mummies were
passed to people with some respect for them who did research to figure
out who they might be. It turned out that the chap I had been staring at
was the Pharoah, Ramesses I, founder of the 19th
Dynasty who reigned in the 1290s BC. Gosh.
There he was in upstate New York with people staring at him. He’s now back
where he belongs in a museum in Egypt with people staring at him. When I
comment on these contacts with folks others might know about, I’m often
asked, “How come you know all these people?” Most of the contacts
are just brief encounters, not “acquaintances,” and it’s chiefly
accidental. I feel as much connected to Ramesses, just sharing space
with him for a few minutes in that odd place seventy-some years ago, as I do
to many others. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Item: Speaking of the impact of technology on society…a friend who visited an eye doctor a couple of days ago was told that the incidence of “dry eye” has been increasing significantly in recent times, requiring the use of appropriate eye drops …especially for those wearing contact lenses. The change is attributed to our tendency to blink less frequently when watching display screens. Really? I’ve been looking intently at increasingly large computer screens since the mid-seventies (well, and at television screens since my family first acquired an RCA, all-vacuum-tube, black and white television set with a giant ten-inch display in 1949), and my eyes no longer produce tears. I had not associated the condition with video screens. Hm. Apparently also, there’s a major increase of nearsightedness in school kids. That too is attributed to dramatically increased screen time, though the mechanism is not obvious. Maybe we should be cautious about staring at things. Item: The Correspo has more than once commented admiringly on both the physical and social attributes of octopuses…and something else amazing has turned up. The little Coconut Octopus has figured out how to fire projectiles at critters that are threatening, or at least annoying it. Item: An associate departing a Sam’s Club recently with a basket of purchases was steered through an “arch,” instead of having to pause while an attendant checked the stuff in the basket against her receipt. To her surprise, she was waved on without stopping, because cameras (and perhaps other sensors?) in the arch had looked at her purchases in a couple of seconds, and had it checked by an AI system that said the paper and the stuff matched. Sam’s has already installed the new systems at many stores, and plans to install them at every location. One assumes that Costco and others aren’t far behind, because this significantly speeds the process of leaving the store without having to plod through long lines. So far the systems do not automatically shoot thieves. _______________________________________________ ITEM FROM THE PAST This item
from 1997 is recalled for no particular reason
except that I came across it, and nostalgia drew me to
it. FROM THE
HORSE'S MOUTH When the
10th anniversary of the UN was celebrated thirty years ago, many
dignitaries blew into San Francisco for the show. Among famous speakers
like Romulo of the
Philippines (who died just the other day) and Kleffens
of the Netherlands, was the distinguished Paul Henri Spaak of
Belgium. His speech was a major event, and the Belgian Consulate
took steps to translate and distribute it in English to the swarming press.
The first step was to give the French manuscript to consulate employee Mado Winkless (my wife). She and Andrée Casey
clawed the thing into interesting, if baffling, English. The
second step was for Mado to bring it home so I
could polish the English. Time being of the essence, I made wild
guesses at what Spaak and his interpreters had intended by phrases like “We
have other cats to whip,”' and quickly knocked out an impressionistic
third version of the man's oration. Skilled reviewers would, of
course, check it against the views of the Belgian Foreign Minister. First
thing in the morning, the secretaries typed my draft neatly, and handed
it out as the official speech. What review? I have no reason to
suppose that any of Spaak's ideas were fairly represented in that document. At
least it didn't start a war promptly. The consulate gave us tickets to attend
a session. It was an inspiring spectacle, and Spaak sounded impressive
delivering the speech. In the crowded lobby of the War Memorial Opera House I
trod on the foot of Indian Ambassador
V.K. Krishna-Menon, who then shook his gold-headed cane at me, and a
grand time was had by all. The Time Magazine report of the
meeting struck me as so outrageously inaccurate, that I cancelled my
subscription. Years later, it occurred to me that Times's confusion
was partly my fault. Still later, it became clear that rampant
confusion is the normal order of things. My contribution was
trivial. Well, I’m
pretty sure the “other cats to whip” phrase did not
actually appear in the Mado/Andrée draft, but there were
others equally puzzling. Indeed “other cats to whip”
did arise in family conversation. Mado and her sister
were born in New Jersey, but in the 1930s when Mado was a small kid their French mom fled their dad
with the girls, heading first to her family in La Flèche, Sarthe, then to Brussels (where they were stuck
through the Nazi occupation). Mado spoke English,
French, Flemish, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish,
and some Romanche. I was an embarrassingly tongue-tied
monolingual Yankee when we traveled in Europe.
She was secretary to the Belgian Consul General,
Willy van Cauwenberge in San Francisco when we
married. I miss
her. If you
look at the link to Krishna-Menon, you’ll see that he was a
striking figure, often featured in the media for both his
looks and his outspoken manner. My direct impression
of him there in the lobby was startling, because he didn’t
seem more than five feet tall. Of course, he had his cane
raised, and that loomed large by comparison in my
subjective perception…but I still see him clearly in mind’s
eye. December 2024 Celebrating my birthday at the Albuquerque’s Ironside
Restaurant, where the walls are covered with hundreds of pictures of military
veterans who have come to their attention, I spotted a picture of Grace
Hopper. Recalling my encounter with her, I told this story at dinner, and was
encouraged to write it out. So: It must have been 1976 when David Bunnell,
Publisher of Personal Computing Magazine, of which I was the Editor, decided
to stage the “first personal computer convention that was not sponsored by a
single company.” He had staged a sponsored show for MITS (at which Bill Gates gave his first
anti-software-piracy speech), and was in a rush to beat out others in
presenting the first general industry show. That’s another story…as is David. The show was scheduled in a hotel at the corner of Century
and Sepulveda close to LAX. Somehow, word got to friend George Glaser that my
associate Glenn Norris and I would be in LA at that time. George was then a figure in the computer industry…president of the American Federation of
Information Processing Societies. He had a couple of tickets he couldn’t use for
the annual dinner meeting of the California based Digital
Computer Association at a hotel near LAX while we were to be there, and
he offered them to us. The DCA, aka the Drunken Computer Association, was
a legitimate professional society that had flourished for some years with
regular meetings, proceedings, and all that. However, rubes from out in
boondocks like Santa Monica couldn’t be taken seriously in real centers
of professional and academic excellence like Princeton and Boston, so the
DCA withered. They finally threw in the towel, and suspended serious
activity, surviving for another quarter century or so by holding an annual
dinner for old times’ sake, at which people drank a lot of wine. Glenn and I showed up at the dinner in good time,
and watched notable people stream in…like Fred Gruenberger and the chap who was then editor of Datamation Magazine (whose name I can’t
recall, but who had bought an article from me and had it handsomely
illustrated…so I should remember his name), One of the notable
people was Navy Captain Grace Hopper, who
appeared in uniform. She was a true pioneer of the Computer Age, a
resourceful innovator, and a popular speaker. (She often handed to the
audiences at her talks a cord 984 feet long that they wound around the room.
It represented the distance a signal could travel in a microsecond. She also
passed out 11.8-inch pieces of wire, explaining that they represented the
distance a signal could travel in a nanosecond…not very far. …her point being
that as processors got faster, computers really had to get smaller, so that
data could arrive on time. She later passed out envelopes of pepper,
explaining the particles as picoseconds. The flag of the unit she commanded
was a pirate skull and crossbones, the only one in the U.S. Navy.) She retired
from the service as a Rear Admiral.
Oddly, as people came in, many of them were
carrying large shopping bags that they carefully placed under the tables.
Dinner began, accompanied by lots of wine. At
one point Captain Hopper was called to the platform and presented with a
T-Shirt that said “Grandma Cobol” on it. There were cries of “Put it on!”
but she declined with dignity, saying that she would never put anything on
over her uniform…bringing cheers and applause. Things moved on to business;
people brought us up to date on recent events, passings, etc…then
came the featured event of the evening. Somebody stood up to deliver a
technical paper that had been scheduled for presentation many years before,
but that event had been canceled as the DCA contracted. When the speaker
stepped to the microphone, those shopping bags were pulled out from under
the tables…full of wine corks, thousands of them. People threw the
corks at the speaker… at others on the platform…at each other…and
at the waiters (maybe that’s why the event was at a different location
every year). Corks rained on our table, and I was able to clip
Glenn behind the ear with a couple of them. Seated next to me, Captain
Hopper did not throw wine corks. She just chain-smoked, occasionally sweeping
a pile of corks in front of me, so I could throw them. When the riotous activity subsided, the party was
over. DCA persisted for a few more years but is now
apparently just a warm memory. I’m
pleased to be able to share it. BTW, “Amazing Grace” is not my
coinage. Someone else came up with that
appropriate descriptor long ago. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NELS
MUSES Item:
Fred Gruenberger is mentioned in the piece above about Grace Hopper. Looking for information about Fred, I came upon this report of a meeting of computer experts and educators that was carefully timed to occur just before the 1967 Fall Joint Computer Conference (a year before the 1968 conference featuring the “Mother of all Demonstrations” in which Doug Engelbart introduced the computer mouse). One is charmed by Fred’s preface to the document: “This
Paper is an expurgated and condensed transcript of
the Tenth Annual Computer Symposium held at The RAND Corporation, 13 November 1967…” Expurgated? The discussion must
have grown a bit heated. This conversation among people who had a big hand in creating the digital revolution is remarkable, seven years before MITS introduced the Altair personal computer. The guys had some inkling, but not much more than that, of what was coming, of a time when most individuals in modern society are dependent on using computers in one form or another. In addressing “who should be taught what about computing,” Fred himself said: “I submit that there is a large group of people (those who are artistically inclined, for example) to whom this is an unbearable chore. They will reap no benefit whatsoever….” Well, as one to whom being taught Fortran was an unbearable chore, I sympathize with his attitude, but the paradigm has changed over the years; “apps” are a way of life, and most everyone is “computer literate.” Item:
An associate sent along a link ostensibly demonstrating a development in machine intelligence. In spite of careful attention to the interesting half-hour presentation, most of what the enthusiastic man said went in one of my ears and out the other without being much impeded by understanding…math logic not being my thing. When I asked for help, it turned out that my associate had sent the wrong link, and would have to search for the right one. I was assured, however, that the math presentation explains a lot about cryptography….and that rang a bell. It shows that everything is related mathematically to everything else…pointing out why it is nigh unto impossible to come up with random sequences helpful to creating secret codes. Take a look. It’s both interesting and beautiful. The presentation of the Mathologer recalls a high point in my technical career. In the mid-1980’s, that same associate and I used to take long walks (often some miles) to chat about this and that out of earshot of eavesdroppers. On one occasion, I explained at length my scheme for generating random sequences of characters we wanted for the pattern recognition method we were working on with neural nets. He listened closely, and finally said “You’ve just re-invented the code wheel on which the Enigma Machine is based.” Oh. (Note that the Enigma code was broken.) _______________________________________________ ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from 1997 is
recalled by the sound of local granddaughter’s
Nissan Leaf electric car backing out of the
driveway. ELECTRIC CONFUSION Russ Eberhart called enthusiastically from Indianapolis to say that we should
watch ESPN 2 the following night, when his
university’s electric car would appear at the renowned Indianapolis Raceway
in a featured race against cars of other universities. Not toys, he said,
these are serious racing machines that
reach speeds as high as 140mph -- for as long as twelve minutes before
the batteries are tuckered out. At that, their
crew can swap out 1100 pounds of batteries in a 30-second pit stop.
Remarkable. Dr. Eberhart is apparently the technical director of the student
project that builds and maintains the racers. The event appeared as scheduled
with appropriate fanfare and commentary from well-known broadcasters. The drivers were not students, but
professionals with a lot of experience, who could handle the powerful
machines aggressively, but safely on the Indy track. On the first lap, the driver of the Indiana vehicle ran the car into
the wall, and smashed it non-trivially, though nobody was hurt. The young
man leading the pit crew glumly explained that another race was coming up in
a couple of weeks, for which they might be ready only if they worked day and
night. His crew had already not slept for two weeks in preparation for this
event. The cause of the crash was uncertain, but the broadcasters had
commented during the race that the
cars were silent, except for the noise of their tires on the pavement. The absence of the engines’ roar and
whine struck them as eerie. One suspects that the effect was also unsettling to the professional drivers,
who didn’t have those sounds to tell them what was happening, and may
have become disoriented. Maybe a student should have driven. Keep watching. While people
have been experimenting with electric vehicles
since the 1830s (Really that long ago… see this excellent article on EVs from Car and Driver) …practical
EVs have been a long time a-comin’. We’re not
quite there yet, given the limitations on range that
must be solved by improved electrical energy
technology. Still, it’s a
kick to ride in the Leaf and Mustang electrics
that are remarkably powerful, bristling with sensors
that let us detect hazards I’m unaware of in my
pretty good little Chevy Trax. Further, the electrics
can take action on the information those sensors
collect, for example, reading speed limit signs
and suggesting that the driver notice other
changes. We hear
reports that college student Malia in San Francisco
really prefers to take the driverless (Waymo, I
think) cabs instead of walking home from work of
evenings. Is it worrisome? Everybody hears about
it when an automatic vehicle gets into an accident, but
human drivers routinely have accidents
that attract little attention. It’s hard to know, because
we have so little statistical data thus far,
whether the automatic vehicles are better or worse
drivers than people are. One is fairly confident
that the automatics are steadily improving. Not so sure about human
drivers. --------------------------------------------------------------------
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