A Long Love Affair

“Flight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

Yesterday’s post was really about a couple of funny helpline incidents. But by way of introducing it I started to talk about my love affair and history with computers. Well I didn’t stop thinking about that when I finished yesterday's blog post and so another post was born.

I hope you find this at least a little bit interesting. Obviously I do because I lived through it. To younger readers I’m sure it won’t mean much, but maybe they can have a laugh at the archaic crap that at the time we all thought was just the greatest thing ever – and actually at the time so it was.

As I said yesterday, my first experiences with computers were on the big mainframes. We had them in university and quite honestly the stuff we were doing on them in those days you could probably do on a good scientific calculator now. But there we were punching cards and working out mathematical formulae and getting results that I’m sure no one understood or cared about but us. (I probably wouldn’t even understand them now either!)

Here are a couple of pictures of the big machines. Younger readers will note the handy compact hard disks used to store information!

Compare the size with one of today's disks

My first tussle with the big boys was on something resembling this

And we inputted our data via either these punch cards

Or via these teletype machines that I called the “chuggers” in yesterday’s post (notice the paper tape at the left hand side that made everything work!)

Then the personal computer era began.

My first introduction to that was a Commodore PET. It was around 1977 or 1978, I think. A fellow student and friend of mine at the time, a Malaysian Chinese guy who’s family were super rich (I don’t think he ever told them the proper exchange rate so his monthly allowance was huge!) bought one of the first of these machines and he loaned it to me for a few days when he away on vacation. I was enthralled. Dear knows why. If you look at the video at the end of this post you’ll see just how basic the technology was.

But ignorance is bliss. There was nothing better around.

Needless to say I could not afford a Commodore PET, nor for that matter an Apple II which was making its debut at more or less the same time and was vastly overpriced as Apple stuff still is. In it's defense the Apple II was a cut above the norm even in those days as regards looks and it had a floppy drive (which I think you had to buy as an optional extra) instead of the awful cassette tapes.

But something that I could afford was the budget priced, but very, very basic Sinclair ZX81. To call it a computer nowadays is a bit of a joke, it had little or no memory, you needed a cassette tape deck, and a television to help it along, and it hadn't even a real keyboard. But it did come in kit form and was fun to build and do basic Basic programming on.

Of course my thirst for bigger and better machines was only getting started. Next I was on to something called a Dragon 32, which as the name implied had a massive 32k of memory  -  yes, you young 'uns, I said 32k, as in kilo  -  of memory. There was talk at the time that the company were working on a 64k version, but hardly anyone at the time believed that a machine with such a vast memory was possible or even desirable!

The Dragon 32 was another one fired up by a cassette tape and a tv screen connection, but it was okay for learing more programming skills and there were plenty of games available that amused everyone at the time.

Then for me came an epiphany, computer-wise. I was about to put my trusty, and maybe a little rusty, typewriter aside. I bought an Amstrad 8256 word processor. It allegedly could handle other tasks as well, but it was primarily a word-processing machine and it did that job pretty well and reliably using its inbuilt Logoscript software. You could store letters and documents on its floppy disks and it had its own printer as part of the bundle. All in all a good piece of kit for the time.

A while after that the whole game changed. And the game changer was the graphical user interface, GUI, and the mouse.

DOS was dead. We would no longer have to plough our way through screens like this

The Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981 was the first to use it.

But Xerox didn't see the potential and didn't capitalize on it.  Steve Jobs and Apple did and the Mackintosh released in about 1984 was the first to perfect its use commercially. It was a major change and brought computing into the reach of ordinary people instead of just the computer nerds and geeks.

Microsoft Windows soon dominated the PC end of the market with their 3.1 version doing a reasonably good job. Later versions like Windows 95, 98 and the appalling ME versions were rushed out and unstable. And, having learned nothing they followed that with a similarly unprepared Vista. All that did nothing for the reputation of the company. 

They have made a lot of ground up with Windows 7 and 8 which seem to be a lot better both with regard to stability and functionality. And nowadays if you really hate windows you can run PC machines in linux based operating systems, just look for the penguin.

From the mid 1980s the PC market exploded. Many companies large and small, from the IBMs to brand new budget manufacturers (or rather, assemblers) were born. They all did basically the same job, used the same internal hardware and software and had internal hard drives that would store up to 100MB (yes, mega bites) and up to 4MB of RAM.

At first they looked like this

And then this

And then this

I had versions like pictures two and three. In fact I still have one of what I've called the modern generic desktop design in my office today.  Of course the processing speeds and memory capacities of both the hard drives and the RAM have increased dramatically. Now it is not unusual to be able to buy a desktop computer with at least a terrabyte of hard drive storage and 8 GB (yes, giga bytes) of RAM, as well as extremely fast multi processors and large high definition flat screens.

All in all a great improvement. A lot of it not really necessary for the average user who just uses their computer for a bi of word processing and to surf the internet, but when it comes to computers most of us kinda have to have the best spec we can afford, rather than what we actually need.

And there was another revolution in computers. This one really took off during the late 1990s and it was the increasing popularity of the laptop. In earlier years the laptop had been the preserve of the business community and were priced accordingly,  usually well out of the reach of the average consumer. As well as that the spec was well below that of contemporary desktop machines and no one like to pay more for less.

Then a few things sort of coincided. We had the near saturation of the desktop market with a subsequent slowing down of new sales. The cost of component parts like processors and memory consequently dropped as demand tailed off. And some of the smarter manufacturers saw this as an opportunity to create a brand new market that would allow them to sell affordable laptops with a near desktop spec to the same market that had previously only been interested, and could only afford the bigger desktop computers.

I seldom if ever use my desktop at all now. All my work is done on my laptop. When I travel it comes with me. I'm writing this blog post on one like this right now

As for the future? Who knows? Now that Steve Jobs is no longer with us will someone else invent things that no one wants, and that no one needs, and sell it to them at inflated prices, while generating their love and gratitude for it? Maybe, but I doubt it. I think that Jobs was unique in that respect. He was in the right place at the right time and the right man to take advantage.

What I can envisage is the continued development of faster and better processing; better internet communication speeds with more mobility; infinite storage capacity in the "cloud"; greater integration of all the bits and bobs we have at our disposal; and easier operation of it all through more voice activated control.

The future I think will be every bit as interesting as the past. If some ballax with an EMP device doesn't fry all our chips, that is!

I kept my old typewriter just in case.

Finally, some hysterical historical videos.

Enjoy!

Commodore PET circa 1977

Apple II circa 1977

Sinclair ZX81

Amstrad ad circa 1985

May the Fourth Be With You

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

I must confess to always having been more of a Trekkie than and Star wars enthusiast, although I have enjoyed both. 

This blog post is actually based on Star Trek, not Star Wars, so apologies to the purists who were captured by the headline. I know it’s a bit of a cliché and a lot of other people may be doing it too, but it is May 4^th and I just couldn’t resist. I try to get it worked in somewhere every year!

And strangely enough this blog post is not about someone stupid either. A little eccentric perhaps, but I love people who are just that little bit off center. You could also call him a nerd or a geek. But whatever you call him, the guy is clever. He has just made himself something that has left me very envious, and that doesn’t happen too often.

You see, this guy has created a real-life, functional version of a Star Trek phaser.

Oh yes he has!

He has taken what looks like a ‘toy’ phaser casing and inside that fitted a laser unit, possibly one of those high powered laser pointers or maybe the laser from inside a Blu ray machine or something similar. However exactly he did it is less important at the moment than to view the result.

I won’t waffle on. Suffice to say is that I WANT ONE!

And there’s a good chance you might too once you see the video.

As ever, enjoy!

A Letter from the Smithsonian

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

Idiots don’t know a lot of things. Their ignorance usually spans a wide variety of subjects. 


I know one guy and no matter what subject you pick, except for football, he’s sure to know nothing about it. But he doesn’t care, doesn’t want to learn, and doesn’t want to pretend that he does know what he doesn’t.


That has a healthy degree of honesty about. I like him for it and so do many other people. He’s a very popular guy.  


What I can’t stand are the idiots who know next to nothing about what they are talking about but persist in giving their opinions on everything. These people are so dumb they have no idea just how dumb they are. They are not likeable and they are not popular. People melt away from them at parties, dread to be placed next to them at the dinner table, and never interact with them socially when they can avoid it. But unfortunately they are so self-absorbed in their own ignorance that they never catch on.


When they know nothing about something relatively simple its bad enough. When they imagine in their own demented craniums that they are ‘experts’ on something complex it’s even worse.


Below is a copy of a genuine letter sent out by the Smithsonian Institute to a Mr Scott Williams of Newport, Vermont. I don’t know Mr Scott and have never met him, but I can kinda tell from the letter from the Smithsonian that he may well be a good fit for the category of pest just described above.


As always, enjoy.





Smithsonian Institution
207 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20078




Dear Mr Williams,


Thank you for your latest submission, labelled '211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull.'


We have given this a careful and detailed examination and we regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents 'conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Hennepin County two million years ago.'


Rather, it appears that you have found the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the 'Malibu Barbie'.


It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, however, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes which might have tipped you off to it's modern origin:


The material is moulded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilised bone.


The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimetres, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids.


The dentition pattern evident on the "skull" is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the 'ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams' you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time.


This finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted so far, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it.


Without going into too much detail, let us say that the specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on, and clams don't have teeth.


It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon dated. 
This is partly due to carbon dating's notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record.


To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results.


Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation's Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name 'Australopithecus spiff-arino' because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and doesn't really sound like it might be Latin.


However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate so effortlessly.


You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your back yard.


We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation's capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it.


We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the 'trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix' that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe
Curator, Antiquities

Confirmed Stupidity

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

Only two things are infinite:

the universe and human stupidity;

and I'm not sure about the universe.

Albert Einstein

At the weekend I was reading a post from ‘A Frank Angle’ which I had linked on to via Alex Autin’s Things I Love blog. Alex had been nominated for the “Very Inspiring Blogger” award  -  many congratulations Alex, well deserved  -  and this was one of the site she in turn recommended.

A Frank Angle’s post was on the subject of evolution, which was interesting and very well written. I don’t want to get into one of those “Intelligent Design versus Evolution” arguments, because this blog really isn’t the proper place for such a debate and in my experience I rarely if ever win over the poor deluded fools who don’t believe as I do! Why I’m writing about this at all is just to set the scene for you.

The thing that got to me when I was reading this post by A Frank Angle was in the comments section, not the post itself. Now the comment concerned as a whole was good enough and very applicable to the post so I am not in any way taking the writer to task for that. But it did contain one of the dumbest clichés in creation (little pun there folks!).

The writer talked about people denying “confirmed science”.

This may turn into a bit of a rant, but, excuse me just wtf exactly is “confirmed science”, apart from being a complete contradiction in terms?

It is a phrase often see used in the evolution argument, and elsewhere too, that implies that currently accepted scientific views cannot be challenged, with the further implication that one is an idiot if one dares to do so.

Quite the reverse is the truth in fact. Scientists tell us things are the way they are  -  until some other scientists tell us that this is not the way things are at all, in fact they’re this other different way instead  –  and so it goes on and on. And that’s actually a cack-handed way to define science. It is continual observation and discovery and hopefully therefore increased understanding of things. Nothing is ever “confirmed” forever.

Science is very valuable, I have nothing against it whatsoever. In fact I find lots of scientific things both extremely interesting and fascinating. But science is no different from any other sector as regards the people who inhabit its realm.

My realm is the business world mainly. And you actually can take this as “confirmed” born out through countless observations, that for everyone who is a good businessman or woman there are many, many more of the dumbest so-and-so’s you could ever have the misfortune to meet. And boring – don’t start me on that!

Other spheres are likewise. There are brilliant doctors and there are good doctors and there are doctors you wouldn’t want to be seen dead with – except you probably would be! Same goes for veterinarians, or bricklayers, or fund managers, or secretaries, etc., etc., etc.

Scientists (and I know a couple of really bright sparks in that field) are no different. They are people and people are fallible. They make mistakes. And they misinterpret things based sometimes on stupidity, sometimes on jumping to the completely wrong conclusion, sometimes by interpreting data in an erroneous way and sometimes they have their own more personal and pecuniary motives. Yes, that last bit means that some of them make “discoveries” for their own attempt at fame or for the money, or both. It happens. They’re just people, smarter people maybe, but people.

Take the global warming debate. I’m not going to go into that in depth here either, but whether you subscribe to the theory that it is a man made phenomenon, or that it the result of millions of cows farting too much, or that it is just a long term natural cycle that predates records, some of the scientists involved have very unscientifically (and dishonestly) “cooked the books” as regards the evidence they have provided on the subject, and more particularly the evidence that they have deliberately withheld.


An engineer and scientist by the unusual name of Vannevar Bush (nothing to do with the Presidents of that name, although I think he may have been an scientific advisor to FDR) gave the game away when he admitted that "The common idea that scientists reject a theory as soon as it leads to a contradiction is just not so. When they get something that works at all they plunge ahead with it and ignore its weak spots... scientists are just as bad as the rest of the public in following fads and being influenced by mass enthusiasm."


Like I said, they’re just people.  

You know how one day scientists tell you your breakfast cereal, with all its vitamins and fiber and stuff, is just the best thing you could ever put inside your body, and then the next day some other scientist decides that it’s really bad for you?

Stop eating chocolate it will kill you!   No, eat chocolate it’s good for your heart!

Cholesterol is bad!   No it’s not, just some of it is bad, actually some of it is really good too!

If you drink alcohol you will surely die!   No, no, have a drink if you want to, as long as you aren’t driving, it’s good for you in moderation, particularly red wine.

There’s a major flu epidemic on the way! It’ll be worse than the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918!! It’s going to kill millions!!! Here stupid governments, spend billions of dollars on this here serum thingummy-doo-dah that we just happen to have prepared earlier and inoculate your people. Er…. what flu epidemic was that then? 

The trouble lies in the ill thought out reverence people give to scientists which is founded on ignorance - in every definition of the word. Ordinary folks are afraid to take scientists on because we usually know little or nothing about the very narrow field of study that these people have devoted their lives to.

We don’t look at them as ‘people who know a lot about a little’ which is really what they are. We look at them as ‘people who know everything about everything’ which is absolutely what they are not. And sadly, we just accept what they say as fact when clearly it is not. And that is a very dangerous thing.

What is even more dangerous is that many of the scientists themselves think that they know everything about everything. When they are lucky enough to “discover” something they are seldom content to leave it at that. Next comes the extrapolation based on the “discovery” which is mostly pure conjecture on their part, but it is swallowed as fact by many gullible believers.

Actually I have a theory (not scientific you’ll be relieved to know) that no scientist should ever announce that they have discovered anything that is the be-all-and-end-all of a subject. They’re just setting themselves up for an inevitable fall, and their followers for a big disappointment.   

Clever Scientist: “Hey, I’ve discovered the quark. It’s the smallest thing in the universe.”

Simple Simon: “Really? That’s fantastic!”

Clever Scientist: “Yes, I’m ever so clever, aren’t I?”

Simple Simon: “What’s it made of then?”

Clever Scientist: “What’s it what???....... Oh, crap!”

Scientists used to think the earth was flat. At the time that was “confirmed science”.

For a while, well before microscopes and theories of cells and germs and stuff, scientists believed in spontaneous generation. Aristotle said, in no uncertain terms, that some animals grow spontaneously and not from other animals of their kind. But while you’re laughing at that, many scientists right up to the 19th century believed it was “confirmed science”. Some even wrote recipe books for making animals, like you would make a scorpion by using basil, placed between two bricks and left in sunlight. I know what should have been placed between the two bricks instead, it wouldn’t have made a scorpion but I’m fairly sure it would have stung quite a bit!

Another bit of “confirmed science” was a thing called Phlogiston, which was on the go around 1667 when Johann Joachim Becher (a German physicist) suggested that it was the fifth element to go with the four classical elements (Earth, Water, Air, Fire) which was contained within objects that could burn. The “confirmed science” of the day went something like, objects that burned in air were rich in phlogiston and the fact that a fire burned out when oxygen was removed was seen as proof that oxygen could only absorb a limited amount of the substance. This theory even led to the belief that humans’ need to breathe had a sole function which was to remove phlogiston from the body.

And, of course, there was good old alchemy that had its origins in ancient Egypt and, combined with metallurgy, ended up in belief in being able to turn ordinary metals into gold, and even to conjure up genies, and perform all manner of bizarre not-so-science-like activities.

To us now all these bits of “confirmed science” are absurd. But the likelihood is that sometime in the future a lot of the current batch of “confirmed science” will look equally absurd. The truth is, although we now know a lot more than we did, say 100 years ago, we still know next to nothing about our existence, and our own little planet, let alone what’s going on elsewhere. There’s a certain arrogance born out of ignorance that makes anyone think that they have a handle on it all, and an even more certain stupidity about those who believe them.

Take an interest in science by all means, as I do. But please do not be so dumb as to “believe” in scientists. Keep you feet planted firmly on the ground. Gravity will help you with that. It’s a really good job Sir Isaac Newton “discovered” it all those years ago otherwise we’d be floating about all over the place!