The ABQ Correspondent

Last Two Issues

June 2008

A DIFFERENT PLACE TO START
Thirty years ago or so, when the subject of fermenting fuel from “renewable” sources arose, Don Isenberg commented that it would be a lousy idea to use edible stuff for the purpose, when we could use waste products (e.g. cornstalks) instead, cracking the cellulose in them to produce sugars that could be converted into almost anything. The drawback was that cracking cellulose was difficult. Shown a report that some fellows had developed bugs that would break down cellulose, Dr. Isenberg observed testily that it had been done frequently, but nothing practical had come from it, largely because the experimenters tended to start with pure cellulose (typically filter paper, ready to hand in most labs), whereas in cornstalks, etc...the cellulose tends to be mixed with all sorts of stuff that must be processed at great expense to make the cellulose accessible. Since that long-ago exchange, there has been some progress, and people in places like Brazil say they are getting lots of ethanol from cellulose...though one supposes that the figures look especially good, because of the sugar already available in the cane they are using. Recently, the R. M. Brown, Jr. Laboratory Group at the University of Texas has reported a strikingly sensible approach to the matter. As the first step, they use cyanobacteria to produce large quantities of nice, clean cellulose, reportedly as a whitish gel, that can much more conveniently be processed into ethanol. While they are at it, the bugs also produce welcome sugar. The folks doing this work are optimistic that the efficiency of the process can be increased dramatically over just a few years to become commercially important. I studied the report, hoping to figure out what these bacteria eat...they have to eat something, and we wouldn’t want to have to compete with them for our bread. Having been maneuvered by computerist Joel Fentin into reporting that the nanotube-excreting bugs discussed last month subsist on Coors Lite, I asked the group at UT directly what their bugs eat, and got a note back from Dr. David Nobles, gently explaining that these cyanobacteria “have photosynthetic machinery that is essentially identical to that of plants and algae. Using the energy of sunlight, they are able to split water and fix CO2 to create sugars that are then metabolized to create everything the cells need: proteins, lipids, etc. So, in answer to your question, our bugs eat CO2 and convert it to sugars.” As crisp an explanation as one could wish. Good news, but also good grief! I shoulda known, still able as I am to recite the eighth-grade science class definition of photosynthesis. (Of course, when I was in the eighth grade, nobody mentioned that chlorophyll in the plants is a semiconductor that apparently aids in using the energy from the sunlight. Semiconductor? What’s that?) One is eager for the uncommonly practical work of the UT group to pay off.

KICK START
The Correspo has previously mentioned the Big Dog robot developed by Boston Dynamics, Inc., which is still wonderful to watch at the BD site. . The thing is four-legged, and looks like a couple of guys facing each other while wearing the rear ends of two horse costumes. It’s about that size, too. The videos show it stamping through the woods, up a hill, over a pile of construction rubble, through snowbanks, and across a patch of ice, where it loses its footing, but recovers with surprisingly human moves. Well, a system developed by the University of Pennsylvania ModLab is similarly fascinating. ModLab has been creating modules that can be assembled like construction kit blocks into bigger machines that walk, roll, and crawl. The startling thing here is that the modules can assemble themselves into more complex structures that can do things the individual modules can’t do...like stand up to get a better view, or form into doughnuts that can roll at remarkable speed under their own power. These things are rather like slime molds whose individual cells can, after being pushed through a strainer that separates them, find one another, and form up into larger structures that are able to do things the individual cells can’t do. You can watch the robots in one such process in a YouTube video. One thing the Boston Dynamics and UPenn presentations have in common is well-developed Show-Biz sense. While Big Dog is chugging along, a man steps up, and kicks it solidly to try to knock it over. The robot recovers from the blow without falling, and the viewer enjoys some suspense while wondering if that machine will kick the guy back. (It doesn’t.) In one ModLab demo, the cluster of robot modules is minding its own business, when somebody steps up, and literally kicks the pieces apart, not lofting any into the next room, but forcefully knocking the machine to pieces. Patiently, the pieces find one another, and form a new structure, which then moves away. Heartwarming. The major question in this (some of us longtime fanciers of artificial animals accept the notion that the basics of control and machine autonomy are already within our grasp) is that of energy. Where can these critters get the energy to keep them going long enough to be useful? They could be made to eat what they find, of course, living off the country, but we’re not quite up to that, and the idea makes people uneasy. Spectacular progress, this.

NELS MUSES
Item:
A recent article on Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), may blessings on that organization fall, remarked on the diversity of its interests, pointing, for example, to their development of water-cleaning methods that remove not only particles, but microorganisms. This recalls olden days in which Microbics Corporation went to extraordinary lengths to produce and protect really clean water for use with its microorganisms. I’d had some contact in Silicon Valley with commercial producers of ultra-pure water at far less expense for the finicky semiconductor industry, and I called a couple of companies to ask about their product. They didn’t understand what I was asking about. It turned out that “pure” means different things to different people. Microbics worried chiefly about toxic stuff in the water that would make their toxicity-detecting bugs sick. The chip-makers didn’t care at all about that, but worried extravagantly about conductive stuff in the water that might affect their teeny-weeny circuitry. Maybe PARC’s clean water will satisfy everybody, but it pays to ask all the questions you can think of.

Item:
The Correspo has talked more than once about “3D printers” that can produce three dimensional objects under computer control. A team in New Zealand is reportedly developing a 3D printer that can replicate all its own parts, enabling rapid reproduction and distribution of the system. They’re calling this RepRap (Replicating Rapid- prototyper), and releasing all of the designs, information, software, etc...as open source material. Team member Vik Olliver commented in an interview with ComputerWorld: “We know that people are going to use the printer to try to make weapons [and] sex toys and drug paraphernalia. This is obviously not what we’re hoping they are going to build. We are hoping they are going to build more and better RepRaps.” Wild power implied here.
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ITEM FROM THE PAST
The effects treated upon in this item from April 1998
(gee, it’s been ten years) is relevant because of some
disquieting reports in the current news.

IN SYNCH
According to news reports that engendered a lot of entertaining speculation about evil manipulation of impressionable young minds, an animated cartoon produced and broadcast in Japan caused some hundreds of its viewers to fall senseless in fits, from which they recovered shortly without apparent lingering effect. Moralists and literary critics enjoyed the rare chance to point directly to the dreadful effects of today’s depraved application of the media. No follow-up in the press in the weeks since the remarkable event has explained it, and enthusiastic efforts to broadcast the same show on U.S. network television, just to see what would happen, have not yet been successful. Intriguingly, this calls to mind a story with which some of us were much taken many years ago. Dr. Browning had found a report about a chap in France who customarily rode his bicycle to and from work without incident. Yet, for a couple of weeks, every time he pedaled home, he’d pass out along a certain stretch of the road, and topple off his bike, recovering after a few minutes with no apparent aftereffects. Growing tired of the dirt and minor bruises, he consulted his physician, who couldn’t explain it, and brought in other authorities. Indeed, a party of observers waited at that stretch of road, and saw the poor fellow actually take a dive into the dirt, more than once, apparently. After much consideration of fraud, sorcery, etc... somebody came up with the probable answer to the mystery. A row of tall, straight trees lined that stretch of road. At that particular season, and at the time of day, the victim pedaled home from work, the strong shadows of the trees fell across the road, so that he moved through a series of evenly spaced dark shadows and shafts of strong light. When he reached just the right speed on his bike, he received the input of this powerful oscillation at a frequency that matched the natural alpha rhythm of his brain, reinforcing it so strongly that it overwhelmed his nervous system, seizing control of all but his autonomic functions. He literally had a seizure, and conked out. At other seasons, times of day, speeds of travel, the effect did not occur. The circumstances simply combined to bowl him over as he was riding home in those weeks. Physiologists were satisfied with this explanation, if conspiracy theorists were not, and the victim could control the situation by moving faster or slower.Smells mighty like a rose, does it not?

In fact, this effect was not as unusual as it seemed at the
time. Garth reported back then, while working on location
in Toronto, that the speed of the glass-sided elevators on
the big tower there was carefully timed so that regular
features of the architecture flashing by wouldn’t trigger
seizures in passengers, and that has proved to be common
practice. Recently, hackers altered a website designed to
support, and be useful to people who are subject to such
seizures, in a deliberate attempt to induce seizures. It
worked. They even ran an email campaign to drive traffic
to the site. No life-threatening effects were reported, but
migraine headaches were triggered in some, and mild
seizures in others. The ability of malevolent geeks to
create hazard and pain for a targeted selection of people
worldwide is an unwelcome new reality. Who’d have thought?

May 2008

DOING LUNCH
Last month’s commentary on using microorganisms to produce aspirin and nanotubes commercially in fermentation processes prompted a note from Kate McManus pointing to the recent announcement that hundreds of strains of bacteria in the wild happily eat natural and artificially produced antibiotics as a regular part of their diet. This comes as an unsettling surprise to many people (Congress will presumably legislate against such behavior by the bugs), but not to anybody who has tried to make living things behave in a certain way. Iben Browning used to point out that any material containing energy is likely to become food for microorganisms, which, on discovering such stuff, shout “Whoopee, a new niche for us!” and begin to chow down vigorously. One of his examples of an attractive material to eat was polyvinyl chloride...of which pipes and electrical insulation are made. As long ago as the 1960s, a strain of pseudomonas (if memory serves) was found to be munching on pvc. Those bugs haven’t yet chewed through the pipes, or started fires by baring wires, as far as we know, but be patient; the bugs are certainly patient. Similarly, some people are now greatly distressed to hear that enormous masses of plastic bags, bottles, and other detritus are rotating in the oceans, forming artificial Sargasso Seas of a new sort. The news is certainly unwelcome, because it represents change, and any change, human-produced or natural, is considered immoral. The dreadful masses of stuff do not threaten the eradication of life, of course; they are simply new niches in which living things from micro to macro will thrive in new ways. The critters with new attitudes that arise in this new environment may or may not be attractive and useful to us, but we shall see. Patience, patience. By the way, we commented that we didn’t know what the nanotube-excreting bugs eat. Joel Fentin suggests Coors Lite. Well, maybe. The Lord moves in strange ways, his wonders to perform.

PUBLIC ART
Good old Edmund Scientific is offering handsome Lichtenberg Figures in its current catalog, calling to mind Bob Leeman’s specialty in the fifties and sixties when he was a tech working on high energy accelerators at the Lawrence Radiation Lab (LRL) in Berkeley, the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL) at San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point, then at the Stanford Linear AcceleratorCenter (SLAC). He was much bemused that some of his paid time, thus the taxpayer’s money, went into production of objects of art. The activity was informal, but the demand was constant, and Bob was the resident expert in his time at the various labs. The scenario was this: somebody would place blocks of clear plastic right in the beam of the accelerator. The blocks I saw ranged in size from about 2x2x2 inches to 3x8x12 inches. They’d build up enormous static charges as the electrons or protons poured into them. Then someone, usually Bob, would carry them carefully to a workbench, and put them down on a non-conducting surface. A wire was attached firmly to ground next to the bench. The other end of the wire was wrapped around a large nail with a good, sharp tip. Picking up the nail very cautiously with a rag to insulate him from it, Bob placed the tip of the nail just above a surface of the plastic block, not quite in contact, and gave the nail a sharp tap with a small hammer. As the nail made contact with the block, all those extra particles in it eagerly rushed toward ground, seeking to balance the block’s charge with that of the earth. The effect was spectacular, creating “frozen lightning” in many forms, often with a beautiful filigree of fibers etched inside the block, all leading to the point where the nail made its small contact. More than once, a beautiful filigree of fibers was created inside Bob’s hand as the insulating rag slipped, and the lightning jumped through him. He’d stagger back from the bench, groaning, while others rushed to see what lovely object he’d created. The blocks made stunningly handsome paperweights or decorations for the shelves of Important People in the labs. Of course, every visiting dignitary, especially congressional representatives who voted appropriations for the labs, admired these objets d’art, and many were presented with examples. Wonderful. At least these things were tangible products, unlike the graphs and columns of figures that were the more important, and less fetching real products of the labs. I never knew they were called Lichtenberg Figures. I don't know if Bob knew that.

NELS MUSES
Item:
Much was made recently of a report that SWORDS “robots,” small, tracked vehicles carrying light machine guns, had been yanked from service in Iraq after one or more had turned their weapons toward their own troops. Worriers shared their visions of out-of-control creatures avenging themselves on their masters in a robot rebellion. Well, the report was incorrect, the things are apparently still in use, and there were no incidents of misdirected fire...though some broken connections raised reliability concerns that have been addressed. What’s most interesting is a military spokesman’s clear, firm statement that these are not autonomous critters, making up their own minds about what to shoot at, but remotely controlled devices operated by people on site. This just highlights again our silly habit of calling remotely controlled systems “robots.” There are no real robots. There will be, but we’re not there yet, fellers. The fun is yet to come.

Item:
Steven Sester reports from the wilds of Illinois that he was recently “flipped sideways off the road by a semi. I am fine, but National will not be renting the car again any day soon. It turns out that the driver of the car ahead of the semi was leaning over the steering wheel and maneuvering it with the bottom of his arms while using his thumbs to play on his PlayStation. He said he must have been distracted, and accidentally tapped a pedal that turned the cruise control off. He didn't notice he was slowing rapidly on front of a big truck. There is a guy in my hood who plays his games while riding a unicycle. The bus I was riding the other day missed by about an inch a student in crosswalk who was texting. Once she got the iPod buds out of her ears so she could hear the horn, the student was surprised to see the light had turned red even as she stepped into traffic. Last year a grad student riding his bike was taken out by a young women downloading ringtones while driving.” Mr. Sester derives hope from these events. “If we encourage more such distractions we could do a lot to thin the population and finally answer the question as to why we still have opposable thumbs. In fairness, there are useful applications for texting. In Finland you need to text message to open the locks on public restrooms now.” It’s nice to have somebody looking after the philosophical aspects of this for us.
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ITEM FROM THE PAST
The government of Australia has recently apologized
formally to the aboriginal people who were displaced,
dominated, and scorned by incoming Europeans...and
later, Asians, Africans, Americans, and others attracted
or sent down under. The apology recalls this item from
December 2000.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS
Much commentary during Olympics coverage from Sydney dwelt on the awkward relationship between the aboriginal Australian people and the folks who have overwhelmed them. Amid the handwringing, one of the most-recently-living-away- from-civilization aboriginal gents commented wistfully that he missed the old tribal life...but he was rather glad to be free of the power of the shamans who could have him put to death for failure to conform with their views of what was proper. Bingo! There’s a key consideration: if you want to preserve the ancient cultures, can you succeed by preserving only the non-lethal parts? If people speak the old languages, eat the same foods, and sing the same songs...are you preserving the culture? The situation is not without embarrassing parallels here in New Mexico. Indeed, Southwest Airlines just decorated one of its 737s with an attractive big Zia symbol only after striking a monetary arrangement with the Zia Pueblo authorities, who insist that it’s exclusively theirs by tradition. Well no, the symbol isn’t copyrighted, and yes, it’s on the state flag and has been used in commercial logos, on letterheads, in jewelry, on clothes, cakes, license plates, and coffee cups, so often and so long that it’s virtually a generic symbol of the region. (One hears gossip that the Zia Pueblo helped the Spanish conquerors re-take the territory after the Pueblo Revolt in the late 1600's, and their symbol floating over all the state buildings is figuratively rubbing salt into the wounds of their numerous fellows here.) The airline’s gesture does not come without complications. Dr. Sophie Aberle (a distinguished figure with Conant, Bronk, and others on the National Science Board that created the National Science Foundation) once remarked to me that “preservation of the Indian cultures” became moot as soon as the tribal caciques lost their power to have people executed, which wasn’t really that long ago. That fundamental change destroyed the traditional structure of those societies. What’s left? We have no answers; merely point out the dilemma. Maybe cell phones and satellite TV will solve everything by blotting out all that has traditionally seemed important.

In our enthusiasm for making the world a better place
by initiating action to restore what we perceive as the
proper way of things, it’s difficult not to take sides
arbitrarily. Shall we protect the mangrove trees from
marine snails that are sucking the life out of them,
or support the snails that are bravely resisting the
depredations of the invading mangroves? Shall we
side with the polar bears whose territory is increasingly
being dominated by grizzlies, or encourage the long-
harassed grizzlies in their expansion to welcome new
habitats? ...and so on. Should life-or-death authority be
restored to the caciques and shamans? Does this tie go
with this suit? Simplicity does not seem to be a feature
of life.

Ancient Silver Birds is a warm recollection of the feeder airline business in the 1950's, when the DC3 was Queen of the Skies...written, narrated, and...well, lived...by Nels Winkless, with music and dogs by Jeff Winkless. Entertaining tales of a time fifty years gone by. Tailspin Tommy Harnish said “I expected a bunch of rowdy, thigh-slapping pilot stories, but this is Garrison Keillor material... great.” Now, instead of just sending off for the CD, you can download the whole album in MP3 format...and the distributor, CD Baby, may blessings on them fall, will send along a JPEG of the album cover and files of all the album notes. And the price (since we don’t have to copy, print, wrap, ship, and all that) is only $9.95 Go to www.cdbaby.com/winkless to look, listen, and order.