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"History
is just people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 340......April 2024 Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SMALL POTATOES We who are not zealous fans of animé, manga,
Marvel movies, and other media featuring people dressed in interesting garments We tend to shrug
off reports we hear of the Comic-Con convention in San Diego.
(Well…that’s close to Hollywood, and you can get a crowd together for
anything odd there.) It turns out that we curmudgeons are not in the
mainstream; those costume enthusiasts are. Granddaughter Ondine, her
professional costume designer mom Chantal, and associate Hide are frantically
working to finish elaborate costumes (they are moths of one kind or another)
in time to attend a costume event in Denver at the end of March 2024. I asked
how many people attend these things and was told this is just a small
show…a few hundred to two thousand people, probably on the higher end of that
estimate as the event recovers from pandemic restrictions. A couple of thousand? How big is a big
event? Denver hosts a show in the fall that draws 85,000 people…and
the really big one in D.C. brings in 100,000,
though Ondine wasn’t sure whether they’re counting individual ticket sales or
turns of the turnstile by people with multi-day tickets returning to the
event. In some communities, several blocks of city streets are blocked off
for parades and competition, city convention centers and multiple
hotel facilities are filled to overflowing, and in D.C., at least, a four-story
office building hosts hundreds of commercial exhibitors. The shows offer
technical programs, and some bring in celebrities to pose for selfies with
fans, and sign pix for a fee. Not surprisingly, this field has its own culture.
which chiefly affects the hotels. The sponsoring organizations reportedly
try to negotiate three-year deals with the hotels, booking large blocks
of rooms at good rates for attendees. If the rooms aren’t filled, the
organization must pay for those empty rooms. A hotel that hasn’t dealt
with the costume people before tends to be conservative in estimating the
number (and nature) of the attendees. When the organizations insist, and
the hotel finally agrees, saying that it’s given fair warning…the rooms
are typically completely reserved weeks before the event, and the hotel is
besieged with desperate calls from costumers explaining that they must
have one of those rooms, because there’s no way they can fit in a cab…or
run for blocks…in their voluminous outfits. Further, they don’t show
up with backpacks and carryons, they have extra
bags and boxes for all their stuff. Most attendees have very little
money, so six or eight of them may share the cost of a room, with two
or three of them sleeping on the floor. They also can’t afford the
comparatively expensive hotel restaurants, and when they run out of peanut
butter sandwiches they brought from home, they look for fast food within
walking distance of the hotel. Most of them haven’t quite finished their
outfits, so one or two sewing machines are busy in most every room, day and night. Elevators full of costumed people often present
challenges to regular guests, and sometimes steps are taken to segregate
costumers from real people. Depending on the focus of the conference,
costumers present special cleaning problems to the hotel staff; notably, costumers
are big on the use of glitter, which gets into carpets and furniture. Importantly, hotels are unaccustomed to having
eight people in a two-person room. After calls to the front desk for
additional toilet paper, somebody usually shows up an hour later, bringing
what is obviously not from the hotel’s usual supplier; the person has spent
that hour emptying the stocks of grocery stores, Costco
and Sam’s club. …and let’s not get into checkout time when people in
partial costume and makeup besiege the clerks, asking for late checkout
times, and where they can put their mountain of baggage. It’s a wild, BIG business. Who’da
thunk it? Incidentally Ondine has won awards,
even internationally, for her
work…including in one instance a parrot that sat on a
pirate’s shoulder. It could turn its head
and move its mouth while saying “pieces of
eight.” It could also move its wings enough
to look alive. Interesting in the
elevator. BUILDING
WITH WOOD The
Correspo has commented a number of times
about using wood in new ways…from directly growing finished objects like chairs…or
even houses… to generating useful amounts of electricity by
walking on floors of special wood…to using sheets of transparent (or, at
least, translucent) wood in place of glass…but not until now has an article about using waste wood to create an “ink” for 3D
printing popped up in our view.. After you build your house or
shed, using lumber and plywood, you typically have a pile of not-very-useful
wooden leftovers. The notion is that it will be possible to convert those
into filament that can be used to print, for example, furniture for use
inside the house or shed, conserving much of what would traditionally be
lost. Turns out, this isn’t easy. While some of us still think of 3D
printing as a novelty, it has been around for a good many years. and
it’s even possible to buy wood-based printing filament from commercial suppliers. Its use is just a bit
complicated. In looking at the 3D printing literature online, you’ll
frequently find images of a small boat, maybe a tugboat, that people
print in various sizes, from teeny-weeny to the size of a coffee cup, with
various materials, and which is referred to mysteriously as a “benchy.” This
de facto standard is used for benchmarking the performance of printers and
materials. It has a handful of straightforward features like
overhangs, openings, and different surfaces whose quality can easily be
compared. (Apparently, the algorithms/instructions for producing the benchy at various scales are widely available.) Item: [Online April 2024] The Correspo has more than once commented on the
increasing difficulty of obtaining helium…the second-most comment element in
the universe, as far as we can tell. There’s lots of it, but not in
convenient form, and the U.S. has indifferently away its resources while the
demand for helium in really important applications
has been increasing. Reassuringly, a
large, higher quality than expected source has been discovered in Minnesota.
We’re glad. Item: At last…a floor-cleaning
robot that can move up and down stairs…at least as gracefully as I. Item: Not surprisingly,
laboratory-grown meat is now coming under concerted attack by forces who warn
that the artificially-grown products may not be safe. One recalls that
many years ago, the Dairy State of Wisconsin made it illegal to sell yellow
margarine, lest it be mistaken for butter. In the many decades since, yellow
margarine has not been shown to cause either significant heath or economic
hazards, but the reflexive resistance to it was interesting. Presumably the beef/poultry/pork/fish
industries will reflexively urge politicians to stamp out not only real, but artificially-grown meat, but also the vegetable-based simulated
meats currently on the market. Conceivably,
they have a point; one always wonders if the foods that people shape
deliberately are missing something that Nature provides without mentioning it…some
trace element or some process that matters. We shall see. Meanwhile the show
goes on. _______________________________________________ ITEM
FROM THE PAST This item from 1985 was brought to mind by the discovery that some young technical acquaintances have never seen
a “computer card” …or even a 5¼”
floppy disc PORTERABLES Standard IBM and Compaq portable computers work well, but
are clumsy backbreakers to lug. Portables with liquid crystal screens
are light and convenient, but the displays have been impractically
dim. As we stagger through airports with computers, it helps to recall
earlier portables. A chap
installed a monster 1960's system in a semi trailer,
so his clients could have computer service right there at their factories and
offices on a monthly schedule. The Thomas Bede Foundation turned
that approach inside out. Programmers in those days punched their work
into IBM cards, and handed them to computer gnomes, who would run programs in
a batch, returning the cards with the results. The programmers would
groan, punch new cards with changes, and send the twenty pounds of cards back
for another run. With fleet courier services, it was possible to run a
couple of batches a day. For one crash project, TBF put a 200 lb. IBM keypunch machine in the back of a 1964
Studebaker Lark station wagon for Ed Whitaker to drive over to Sandia
Livermore. He didn't have the clearances needed to enter the atomic
bomb works, and use their keypunches, but he parked next to the guard house
at the gate, plugged into their power, and fired up his own. The Lark
wagon had a roof panel that slid forward from the rear, making the car into a
sort of pickup. Ed sat up there
in the sunshine like a circus calliope player, banging out new cards, while
the head of computer operations at Sandia ran back and forth from the gate to
the big computer, giving Ed a dozen batch runs that day. What we're dragging through airports
now is better. The computers
we were dragging through airports in the mid-1980s
weighed about forty pounds. They did just barely fit under the
seats, and it’s hard to believe that the airlines let us hoist
them into the overhead compartments if we had the strength,
which was not always a certainty after a hard day on the
road. The Studebaker
Lark Ed took to Livermore was mine. It was so
poorly crafted that after a couple of years it was necessary
to carry pliers in the glove compartment to open and close
doors whose handles had simply fallen off, and couldn’t be
put back. Every time we’d hit a bump, the windows
would drop down inside the doors, and have to be fished
back up with a specially bent coat hanger carried for the
purpose. I loved that car, and it’s a source of pride that
we made computer history with it. A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that the younger guys working in Darzlab, whose
entire lives have been lived in the thumb-drive era not only hadn’t even seen “IBM cards” but didn’t know how they worked…so I gave them a handful punched cards that have been lying around here for fifty years or more. They were astonished. Dar explained to them how these antiques worked. I explained that new cards without holes in them were particularly useful to me. I
used to give a lot of talks, and the standard IBM card was
just the right size to fit in my shirt pocket, holding the
notes I needed for a talk. The story goes that the size and shape of the original data cards, patented by a chap named Hollerith in the late
1880s, were the same as the dollar bill of the time, because
it was convenient and familiar. The size of the dollar bill was reduced in the 1930s, but the old “blanket bill” was represented by the IBM card up to at least 2012. ________________________________________________________________________
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