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"History
is just people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 341......May 2024 Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REGULAR OR
EXTRA CRISPY? The Correspo has commented more than once on
major (read “big money”) efforts to develop both simulated meat using
vegetable materials to manufacture what cannot without chemical analysis be
distinguished from the real thing, or growing real meat in the lab, starting
with live cells. This second class of “artificial” meat doesn’t
necessarily begin with cells from a filet mignon or a quail’s leg. They may
be from any cells derived from a still living, unharmed critter (could be a
human being, if you’re into cannibalism) that have by the magic of modern technology
been persuaded to behave like stem cells, and grow into any selected form arising
from the DNA of those cells. The desirable goal of the effort is to
provide protein in familiar, acceptable form to large populations, while
potentially producing other welcome side effects like reducing waste and
pollution in food production. It ain’t easy. For one thing, until real
mass production is achieved, the product is more expensive than the meats
already available, while its quality is not superior, and does not justify
the premium price. It addition, the existing beef, pork, poultry, and
fishing industries feel threatened, and are pushing states, with
increasing success, to outlaw these “unnatural” products. (A friend
who was a pig farmer was morally outraged by the term “turkey ham,” ham being
ham, not a stupid bird.) There’s a new twist in all this: A bunch of companies
here and there around the world are producing protein on a significant scale
by fermentation, using single-celled organisms. Consumers seem to be less
hesitant to eat the product of fermentation than they are about eating
lab-grown meat. A Finnish company, Solein
seems to be doing this on a larger scale than anybody else so far, A video about a company
called Solar Foods…apparently an earlier incarnation of what
they’re now calling Solein…explains the idea and process pretty well,
although one may quibble about some of the language that arises from
oversimplification. Nothing new about the concept; people have been
fooling with the idea for decades, but only in recent years have the need and
the supporting technology become important. Recall that the fermented
product beer, especially in its heartier form of porter, has been considered
a “food” for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Do we know how to scale
up the production of beer? Yes,
indeed; we’ve lots of practice. Beer uses sugars converted to alcohol.
Other fermented products like cheese use different materials to produce
edible, non-alcoholic stuff. Solein and its like should be more-or-less
straightforward, making it seem more practical than some other approaches to
feeding the world. It isn’t clear to some of us outsiders quite how they
convert Solein into chicken, scallops, and fish (no mention of beef yet). Their
version of chicken looks really convincing…and the ice cream (ice cream?)
looks worth a try. One hopes. HOW MANY? A paper published in October 2023 (this is just the abstract) suggests that our brains use two different mechanisms to count numbers of objects…one for four and fewer, and the other for five and more. Here’s a brief explanatory article by somebody else. Improbable as this seems, it rings a bell, recalling a long-ago report that chickens can’t count above four (pretty sure it was four). The observers determined this by noticing that a momma with a flock of chicks, say seven, was not upset if a couple of them wandered off. The hen simply didn’t notice, but if as many as four got lost, reducing the number remaining to three, Momma Chicken became upset, and looked for a fourth chick. The difference between four and five seemed important. Anything above that was just a lot of chicks. We always just figured that this was a side effect of domestication…kind of like what has happened with domesticated turkeys, who unlike their wild relatives not only can’t fly (being too heavy) but seem to have become self-destructively stupid, for example, standing around a dead fellow turkey who has just been killed by a rattlesnake, still in easy reach of the snake. One suspects that wild turkeys don’t do that. Really, I’ve no idea to contribute here, just a trifle of speculation. Maybe there’s something to the 4/5 counting thing. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Item: A chap named
James Bruton builds things that interest him, displaying the building process
and the finished devices on his YouTube channel. This “screwbike” was intriguing to us. Item: To follow up on last month’s piece about the costume show
business, which drew a surprising amount of reaction; it’s bigger and more
diverse than was apparent. For example, an artist fiend commented. ““I have been to the circus
a few times for work. I now go to see and muse upon the curiosity of grown
adults dressed as Wookies, Marvel superheroes, and awkwardly overweight
princess Leas wearing golden bikinis.” I don’t know what business reason
compels an artist to go to these shows, but my brother Terry has explained
why he goes…it pays handsomely. My brothers, Jeff, Terry, and Dan were three
of the guys in the animal suits in a Saturday morning Hanna-Barbera kid show
called The Banana Splits back in the ‘60s. It turns out that some of
these costume shows, relying on people’s strong sense of nostalgia, bring the
surviving casts of many old television shows together at events to chat with
and for a fee, sign pictures, and have selfies taken with nostalgia-crazed
fans who were smitten by those shows as kids. Ter and Dan (Jeff died in 2006)
have been at a number of these shows along with Bob Towers, who was in
the elephant suit. Indeed, Al Roker, the morning weather guy on NBC was a kid
fan of the Splits and interviewed them on the Today Show. With
all expenses paid, Terry gets a cut of the fees, netting, he says, as much as
$5k for a weekend’s attendance…and he himself gets a kick out of meeting some
of the other aging performers at the shows. Apparently, the PR people
promoting shows and movies actively work these events on behalf of their clients.
And…the report on the recent event in Denver attended by Ondine, her Mom Chantal, and associate Hide, is that it was a triumph for them. They arrived a bit late, with no expectation of participating in competitions but as they strolled the halls in their moth-themed costumes, people stopped them every few feet, asking to take pictures and asking if they were signed up for competitions. Well, they signed up…and won five major awards, including (for each of the three) a year’s free membership in the online chapter of the Professional Costumers’s Association (something close to that). The official professional photos of the event haven’t yet been released by Costume-Con 42, but their website will undoubtedly include them when it happens. Item: Every time we think we have a pretty good handle on things somebody incautiously thinks a bit, does some research, and changes the ignorance on which we’ve been relying. Years ago, when I drafted a script about the glowing bugs we were using to detect toxicity in water, I carefully looked up the class of critter I was talking about and used the correct term. Well, people jumped all over me for using the wrong term. In the few years since the encyclopedia I was using had been published…really, just a few years, not decades…biologists had reclassified the doggoned thing. Here we go again. New Atlas did its usual good job, reporting the discovery of a new branch on the tree of life. Perhaps all will be different by 2025. _______________________________________________ ITEM
FROM THE PAST Published this in 2006. It’s
been thirty years since the original item was
posted.. I didn’t realize that the
next “paradign shift” was the internet…then growing
right under my feet. This item from 1994 is brought to mind by the current upheavals in the microprocessor business as American Micro Devices is actually increasing its modest (20%?) market share a bit at Intel’s expense, forcing early release of new Dual Core technology, and forcing prices down. ALL THE EASY THINGS HAVE BEEN TAKEN Progress seems to come in
fits and starts. We've plodded along
steadily for almost twenty years through a succession of faster and more
capable, but not strikingly interesting microprocessors, using variations
on the same old operating systems. It's remotely possible now that something
interesting can happen. The PowerPC
processor offers hope that both Intel and Microsoft will have some wholesome
competition. The thing is flexible
enough to let innovators slip something in. Revolution is unlikely to
come from the Establishment, which now includes former revolutionaries
Microsoft, Apple, and Intel. Even poor
old Digital Equipment is having another go at the personal computer
market with a new line, commenting in ads that they didn't ignore the
personal computing revolution when it occurred, but took notes, presumably
learning how to do things right. If memory serves, those folks did more than
take notes; they got into PC's with
their Rainbow line years ago, expecting to sell them to real computer lovers,
not just wimps who wanted to do word processing and such trivia, and took
a terrible beating. Where's the next paradigm shift? Gad, but things are
dull. I’m not sure why that commentary was so cranky ten years ago. The PowerPC didn’t reorganize the world, but things have been changing since 1996. Digital Equipment sold itself off in pieces, finally selling the core company to Compaq, which in turn was consumed by Hewlett Packard. HP had lots of trouble digesting Compaq, but seems to have managed it. Microsoft and Apple persist, facing all sorts of wholesome stress, and the computers get faster and smaller, with increasing capacity. Onward. …and now, thirty years on from when things seemed dull, the “AI” revolution is in full swing. The
potential impact of machine intelligence had been obvious for many decades…and in the mid-1980s, I was working on machine learning with essentially the same software tools we have now, but using in-retrospect painfully slow IBM PCs with 640K of RAM without scanners. Woof. The startling thing about the current explosion of AI in society is the suddenness with which it occurred…is occurring. It hasn’t been two years since ChatGPT came among us. Holy smoke! This chiefly demonstrates my shortsightedness as a prophet. Everything comes as a surprise. The future doesn’t reveal itself in nice, logical steps, and since
I’m about as psychic as the average brick, no help comes from that direction. Readers occasionally ask what’s coming up next, and the only answer available is “We’ll have to wait and see.” It will probably be be interesting, whatever it is, and in retrospect, we’ll say, “That was perfectly obvious. Why didn’t I see it?” ________________________________________________________________________
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