THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT

ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 156......January 2009
Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of
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A HUGELY IMPORTANT EVENT...WELL, AS SEEN IN RETROSPECT
The media have made much recently of a presentation made by Doug Englebart on December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was there and then that he and his associates presented several new technologies that greatly advanced interactive computing ...notably, the hyperlink, and, most memorably, the computer mouse, which has since taken over the world. Wonderful stuff, and the current reports speak of a standing ovation from the audience of 1000 computer types packing the hall, to whom it was apparently obvious that this technology was the wave of the future...as, indeed it was. Paul Honore and I gave a paper on computer animation at that same conference, in the same hall, from the same platform Englebart had used just a couple of hours earlier. (We didn’t get or deserve a standing ovation, but we got a lot of laughs...and what we presented also pointed to a wave of the future, as these last 40 years have shown.) I didn’t see the Englebart presentation, what with being busy with the Computer Science Theater, of which I was manager for that show. That required me to spend a long time showing a union projectionist how to thread and run a 16mm projector. He was skilled in the art of striking arcs and running 35mm projectors in movie theaters, but was completely baffled by Bell and Howell’s infernal mechanism for showing movies in schools and such. However, I heard a whole lot of talk about that presentation from attendees chatting about it later. (The site has been referred to as Brooks Hall, but really those sessions were held in the older Nourse Auditorium, longtime civic theater then connected to underground Brooks by a tunnel.) The chatter was not all in the standing ovation vein. There was a whole lot of muttering that these tricks were all very well, but were immorally wasteful of valuable computer cycles. They might entertain amateurs, but serious computerists were unlikely to play with the toys. In retrospect the technology seems inevitable and splendid, but it was not yet quite respectable in 1968. It’s a tribute to Englebart et al that the stuff moved into general use as rapidly as it did. It was only about sixteen years later that the Apple Macintosh showed the computer mouse to all of us. Breathtakingly fast acceptance of new stuff.

ESTABLISHING CHANGE
Determined, heavily armed, well organized people made a clear point in Mumbai, India recently that they can cause pain and misery if they are set upon it, especially if folks just plodding along through their daily lives are unprepared for assault. The affair also made another point as a side effect: the name of the city is Mumbai, not Bombay, not that either name has much significance to many of us ignorant Westerners. As the name change was called to our attention every couple of minutes for three or four days running on national/international television and all over the web, the idea gradually penetrated that the name change is important to Indians. “Bombay” was officially changed to “Mumbai” in 1996, largely based on the argument that "Bombay" was a corrupted English version of "Mumbai" and an unwanted legacy of colonial rule. Simple as this sounds...it’s their city, after all, and they can call it whatever they want (as the old song goes: “Why did Constantinople get the works? That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.”)..the matter is a bit more complicated. In fact the name change was not taken entirely seriously in India for some years, annoying the authorities to the point at which they reportedly returned mail addressed to Bombay instead of Mumbai. Apparently, though, the place was never earlier known as Mumbai, per se, the current city is appreciably larger than any single town within its current boundaries was in pre-colonial days, and none of those towns used quite that name. Certain names were common in the area (that of a goddess, for example) from which Mumbai might be derived, but the 1996 decision seems to reflect regional politics as much as anti-colonial sentiment. Some have pointed out that the Falkland Islands, over which the UK and Argentina fought in 1982, were in British hands before Argentina was a unified country able to hold possession. That was beside the point of the war, but the detail is intriguing. Real issues are not always what they seem to be. Mumbai is a nice name, and the locals there may be pleased that intense reporting has established it so firmly, however stressful the circumstances. To put things in perspective, think of trying to change “New York” back to “New Amsterdam;” if that had been in the works at the time, it might have succeeded with the aid of worldwide media coverage of the events of 9/11. Side effects are sometimes as interesting as main events.

NELS MUSES
Item:
We mentioned the recurring appearance of phantom mail in Thunderbird stamped 12/31/1969 5PM, attracting the attention of somebody who often actually knows what he’s talking about, my brother Dan. He comments: “Dec 31, 1969 is an interesting date. I'm not sure what the 5:00 p.m. is -- are we 7 hours from GMT? If so, that actually explains the 5:00 p.m. Windows followed the lead of Unix for recording a time/date stamp. Unix has the idea of "The Epoch": time in seconds since the "birth" of Unix, which is defined as midnight January 1, 1970. So "1" is one second into Jan 1, 1970. Your 5:00 p.m. Dec 12, 1969 is midnight GMT. Therefore, the four-byte field holding the date is all zeros. Thirty two bits for the time stamp ends up being smaller than might be wished. The field will roll over some time in 2036 or 2038 or some such. If we can move to 64 bit systems (and convert all occurrences of the 32 bit fields to 64 bits), then we'll have quite a breather before the roll over happens. It's just like the Y2K meltdown. Possibly more difficult to deal with because it's built into the OS, not into individual programs. I have NOT heard of anyone working to avoid the problem. ~30 years still seems infinitely far away.

Item:
It’s a pleasure to encounter again a quote from Saki (H.H. Munro): "A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation."
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ITEM FROM THE PAST
Just in the last couple of months, BlackLight Power, mentioned
in this item from 2000, announced that it has licensed a small
New Mexico power company to use its technology to build
a generating plant with capacity up to 250MW. The cost of
the power is said to be a fraction of that produced by
conventional power plants. I had the technology a bit muddled
in this nine-year-old item, but the gist of things is there.

GET UP AND GO
Stirred by previous items about alternative energy sources, readers have sent interesting references worth passing along. Selden Stewart pointed to an American Scientist item about a “desktop fusion” device invented by Philo Farnsworth, otherwise renowned for inventing the methods for making television wholly electronic, instead of relying on whirling disks. In this case, the device is not intended to produce more energy than is put into it, which it doesn’t, but to produce a reliable supply of neutrons when they are needed. The system is commercially available, presumably not as a mass-market appliance, because few of us need lots of neutrons, and can borrow a cup from the neighbors when we do. See the article online at
www.amsci.org/amsci/issues/sciobs99/sciobs99%2D07fusion.html. Phil Keuhnen steers us to BlackLight Power, Inc. in Princeton, whose activities are the stuff that dreams are made on. (See them at www.blacklightpower.com.) They seem to have money, good credentials, and respectable associates who lend their names to the venture. Their technology may conceivably be for real. They say they have been able to extract more power from hydrogen than you get from simply burning it. Using appropriate catalysts, etc...they say they are dropping the electrons of hydrogen atoms to lower orbits, and releasing immense amounts of energy. The byproducts of this are reportedly both benign and useful, and the amount of energy available at modest cost is boggling. They speak of generating electricity cheaply, of course, but the grabber is their discussion of automobiles with a range of fifty-thousand miles on a single refueling. As Archy the Cockroach said, “Can such things be, Boss?”

BlackLight is apparently stronger than Steorn, to pick an
example at random, and has not yet been smothered. They
have money, aren’t public, aren’t promoting stock, and have
a startlingly respectable board of directors. They are being
ridiculed and excoriated with great vigor, of course, by people
who know that the technology they have been talking about for
years (and have reportedly demonstrated in a 50KW system)
can’t possibly work, so its proprietors must be engaged in
villainy that should be stamped out. It can’t work! Oh, it is
working? Well, it can’t be scaled up! One commentator who
observed that he can’t imagine that the technology is for real,
but is certainly willing to watch BlackLight experiment with it
unmolested as long as they are spending their own money, has
been sternly taken to task for failing to denounce them. One
recalls that when John Jay negotiated a practical settlement to
the War of 1812 (which the U.S. essentially lost) somebody who
thought we had won declared loudly: “Damn John Jay! Damn
those who don’t damn John Jay! Damn those who don’t put lights
in their windows, and sit up all night damning John Jay!” The
current complainer’s argument is that BlackLight’s activities
are wicked, because they “give a bad name to Science” among
the vast, unwashed populace who don’t understand Science,
“just the way cold fusion did.” Thank goodness somebody is
protecting Science from being defiled by people horsing around
with possibly silly ideas! Fortunately, right-minded people like
this worked hard to crush Wegener and his ridiculous floating
continent theories, and led the campaign that gave a Nobel Prize
to the fellow who developed the pre-frontal lobotomy. We can
all sleep better, knowing that the good fight is being fought.

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