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"History is just
people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 359......November 2025 Published
since 1985 for clients and contacts of ABQ Communications Corporation, the
fuzzy focus of The ABQ Correspondent is "the impact of
new technology on society." If you'd like to receive
email notification when each monthly issue is posted, please let us
know. correspo
at swcp dot com
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AN INSIGHTFUL TITLE Bear with this step by step, if you
will: We can represent sound signals as images
e.g. of amplitude modulation. We can scan images, converting them into
sound signals. We can convert those signals into sound,
and listen to them. A chap who is skilled with electronic
equipment and signal processing sketched an image of a bird. It’s just
an outline, but looking at it, you think, “Oh, that’s a representation of
a bird.” He scanned that image and converted it
to a sound signal. Because he is fascinated by the sounds
birds make, he took his equipment with him when he visited a friend who
had saved and raised a baby starling that had fallen from its nest.
(Starlings are noted for their high precision mimicry.) He shot pictures
and recorded the sounds the bird made, interested by the fact that it
had not grown up in the wild, hearing and imitating sounds produced there.
He wondered what would interest this bird. Among other experiments, he
played some sounds to see what would attract its
attention, including the recording he had made of that image of a bird he'd
drawn. Examining the data later, showing graphically the sounds the
bird had made, he was startled to see that image …unmistakably the one
he’d drawn, converted to an electronic signal, then into sound that he’d
played to the young starling, then back into an image. The discovery was
surprising partly because he’d heard the sound himself; it had no meaning
to him, just seemed like noise...but the reconstructed image did have meaning
to him. The sound presumably had no special meaning to the bird, either.
It had mimicked precisely what it heard. The experimenter reported this in a
video (that covers all sorts of other things as well…discussions of
equipment, for example), laying it all out, showing the signals, the images,
the bird, etc…and here’s the insightful part: his title
for the report gives it a satisfying technical twist: “I saved a PNG image to
a bird.” Well worth a look. SERIOUSLY… Bill Turner
commented on last month’s Item From The Past discussing Big G gravity, “This also has
been a mystery of mine . I tend to think
gravity is an invisible isotropic substance that I call "aperranto" that permeates all of space the way water
fills an ocean and that the presence of any mass within it distorts
the aperranto, creating gradients along which the
objects slide downgradient. Gravity is not created by the
objects. It is there without regard for the
objects. The objects or ejecta from supernovas cause larger
distortions of aperranto that we misnamed
gravity. Gravity as coined by Newton is so ingrained into the mind of
people that it distorts their thinking. It is actually
only the sliding of matter down the aperranto
gradients. That causes smaller ejecta to agglomerate and grow in size. They cause ejects containing elements
of all elemental species created from the supernova to accumulate within the aperranto. I heard Harold Urey pontificate on this
topic in a lecture at UNM about 1965 at which I ran his slide projector.
Could a mechanism be built that actively sucks in aperranto
and ejects it to create a propulsion system? Just saying.” This recalls a
long-ago puzzlement over the way light could be transmitted through space. We
refer to “wavelength,” so one would assume that there are waves in
something. That something was for a time identified as the aether, a stuff that permeated space, and was
agitated by the passage of waves we called light. By the mid-thirties or so the
concept of aether had been pretty
well discarded, leaving us with particulate light or waves in
nothing. When I grilled Iben Browning on the subject, he uncomfortably said
that best he could figure, space contains something, nothing, and
not-nothing. I take solace in equating Iben’s “not-nothing” with Bill’s “aperranto.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Item: The Correspo has shown so
many of the odd flying vehicles of our time that it’s not easy to find any
that are notably new, but here’s one: the
Helix, by a company called Pivotal, already commercially available. The electric Helix takes off
vertically, flies, and lands at a strikingly peculiar angle. (good video here). You won’t be flying it from Chicago to Rome; it has
one-person-and-maybe-a-briefcase capacity, limits on altitude, speed, range,
and all that, but maybe it’s practical for commuting (not by me). The picture
of the whole plane and pilot descending on a parachute is heartwarming. This one’s fun to contemplate. Item: It’s hard to imagine that these “intelligent
wheels” that can propel a vehicle (the wheel is the engine) can rotate
more than a dozen times without suffering a mechanical breakdown, they have
so many moving parts…but maybe, maybe. The concept is certainly interesting. Item: (Nov) Pivotal, the company producing the Helix aircraft, is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Seeing that triggered a recollection unrecalled for many years. Sometime about 1952, when we lived in San Mateo, a bit farther up the Peninsula, I was involved in a play that called for a snake in a terrarium. One Saturday I just happened to be driving through a residential neighborhood in Palo Alto when I spotted a kid holding a snake. I asked if I might borrow his snake, promising to return it in a week. He agreed. We used the snake in the show, and the following Saturday I returned to Palo Alto, found the kid on the same street, and gave back the snake. One doesn’t get to do such things very often. It must have been fairly interesting for the snake, too. He surely didn’t think of himself as that kid’s property. He’d probably just been slithering along on a sunny morning, minding his own business when somebody picked him up. Somebody else coming by in a car had then taken him on a ride, displayed him to a big room full of people, and returned him eventually to the kid. That snake’s life seems to be no more sensible than mine, full of arbitrary events. Good cess to him...and to the kid, who is by now an old man. _____________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE
PAST This item from 1998 is recalled by a photo (maybe not a deepfake) of Bill Gates sitting at a banquet table with the President and an assortment of Captains of High Tech Industry. CHAIRMAN BILL IN THE MYTHIC BIGTIME The current difference of opinion between the U.S.
Department of Justice and Microsoft Corporation over the propriety of
Microsoft’s grip on the computer industry suggests that reason has little to
do with the matter. While the
company’s hubris insulates it from understanding the complaints of the people
it frightens and overwhelms, the DOJ’s
insistence on certain measures (dis-integrating internet functions from
the operating system, for example)
flies in the face of reality. It’s like legislating a value of 3.0 for
Pi, to make all that bothersome arithmetic unnecessary. If you’re waiting for the public to express itself helpfully, don’t
hold your breath. Consider that a well educated, technically competent geologist with
decades of practical experience, inquired recently what all the fuss was
about the Year
2000 Problem. After listening
to the explanation (including the observation that it’s more complicated than
anybody is likely to think, owing to thousands of arbitrary decisions made over
the years), he asked: “Does Bill Gates
know about this?” He was assured that Bill has
heard about Y2K. “Well,” he said, “why
doesn’t he just fix the problem?” This was a serious question from an
otherwise relatively sane man. Somehow, the
Bill we knew slightly as a disheveled, driven young computer geek has not
only become startlingly rich, but has acquired an aura of absolute
invincibility with respect to computers. The mind boggles. I recall as a
child being told that Horowitz was the
world’s greatest pianist... and I
assumed that was an objective fact; the title was real, established by
some authority. A chap who was raised
in Russia in the Stalin era
observed that he believed without
question that the Generalissimo was the best hand at everything, and if
he wasn’t performing miracles of brain surgery every day, it was only because
he was too busy with pressing matters of state. The chap was astonished to
learn otherwise in his later years. Gates
is achieving the same superhuman status in the eyes of the general populace...not
because he is striving for that, one supposes, but because he is a symbol of
his time. Then again, maybe he really
could haul off and solve the Y2K problem if he weren’t too busy with brain
surgery and pressing visionary matters. Perhaps we should ask. Indeed, we got through the Y2K turnover without major problems, aided probably by a massive review of installed software that
not only reduced the chances of turning into a pumpkin as the calendar passed the magic date, but doubtless cleaned up a lot of other problems, and increased the efficiency of our systems significantly. Apparently, Bill didn’t achieve that
single- handed. Meanwhile the hassle between the DOJ and Microsoft has quieted somewhat while that between Microsoft and the EU regulators has
escalated. Mr. Gates’ image has morphed from that of an untidy geek to that of a major philanthropist with a geeky history. Not all bad, probably. Holy smoke! The Bill Gates who
wasn’t old enough to order a beer when we first met at lunch some years since is seventy this
year. Ouch. He’s clearly still in the bigtime, with perhaps a bit
less mythic aura. Others of the several at the table with him have taken on that sheen. He’s probably relieved by the change. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917 See on Amazon __________________________________________________
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