Category : Technology

HAPPY HOLIDAY MONTH

This is the holiday card we sent out for 2018. As usual, my IT husband carried out what was just an idea in my head. Thanks Cable Guy!

I chose the message first, then searched for an image to complement it.

The photo is one I took in 2014 during Sunset “Manhattanhenge” — when sunset or sunrise line up with the grid of Manhattan streets. I was standing on the overpass outside the Grand Hyatt on 42nd St., along with a host of other people, walking, standing, in cars or cabs.

Looking west from 42nd and Park.

Happy Holiday Month everyone!

Lighting the way

This week, on October 21, we celebrate the light bulb.

Legend has it that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, and that the first one started brightening the night on October 21, 1879.

It’s a little more complicated, what with Humphrey Davy creating an arc lamp years earlier, and other scientists creating sparks here and there along the way. One thing that is certain is that Edison created the first marketable bulb.

This is as official as anything: the DOE’s The History of the Light Bulb page, with a great timeline, starting with the first arc lamp in 1803. Another exciting history is from the Edison Tech Center.

Perhaps the most famous light bulb burns in Livermore, California: It is maintained by the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department. The fire department claims that the bulb is at least 116 years old (installed 1901) and has only been turned off a handful of times.

Need an update? Here’s a more modern floor lamp, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art open access collection:

“Toio” Floor Lamp Designer: Achille Castiglioni (Italian, 1918–2002)
 Designer: Pier Giacomo Castiglioni (Italian, 1913–1968)
 Manufacturer: Flos S.p.A.
 Date: designed 1962 Medium: Automobile headlight bulb, steel, enamel, transformer, rubber, duct tape, plastic Dimensions: 65 x 8 1/4 x 7 3/4 in. (165.1 x 21 x 19.7 cm) Classification: Lighting Credit Line: Gift of Dr. Michael Sze, 2002

Do you feel enlightened? <groan>

A Pebble in My Shoe

I’m just back from New York City and the Edgar™ Awards. If you missed the nominations and the grand banquet where winners were announced, go here.

Jeffrey Deaver, MWA President (the tall one) and me at the podium.

The event had me thinking of Edgar Allan Poe and his legacy for mystery writers especially. But it’s this quote of his that I relate to above all:

The past is a pebble in my shoe.

And we probably all feel the same way about a pebble in our shoe: Out!

The high school history teacher tasked with giving me a healthy respect for the past failed—maybe because his primary duty, for which he was hired, was to coach the football team to victory. (He failed at that, too.)

But I can’t blame Mr. F. forever. I’ve had ample time to visit the past in a meaningful way, to learn the details of wars, to imagine lunch with the greats of bygone ages.

We see this “poll question” all the time: if you could visit the past, whom would you have lunch with?

I suppose I could go back and ask Poe if he could sleep at night after writing the “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I couldn’t, after reading, the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. The same with his “The Cask of Amontillado.” I was young enough to worry myself sick that I’d hurt someone enough for him to seek that level of revenge.

If I ever did have a chance to time travel, I’d go forward, not back.

I don’t want to revisit the time when some women had their lower ribs surgically removed to achieve a more pleasing (to whom?) waistline. And I already know all I want to about the days before plumbing and the zipper and all the iStuff.

I’d like to visit the future, find out what becomes of the Kindle.

It’s fun to have my slide rule hanging in my office, as a reminder of earlier times, but I wouldn’t want to give up my computer.

I’d love to go away for a while and rest, and then come back in 60 or so years and talk to those who are now toddlers.

Some questions for them:

1. Has there been a First Gentleman in the White House yet?

2. Was there a revival of regular cinematic dramas—no comic heroes, no animation, no “special” effects?

3. Did we ever give peace a chance?

4. Did Amy Adams’s face ever wrinkle?

5. What’s the official language of the United States?

. . .  and more.

Of course I could read sci fi and get someone’s idea of the future, or I could write it myself and make my own predictions.

But I want to know what actually happens, whether there’ll be paper books in the year 2100, and what became of the kids who grew up hearing “Good job!” just for waking up in the morning?

What would you want to know?

Three Miles Downriver

That's me, on the left, in a cool but uncomfortable hat.

This week marks the 39th anniversary of Three Mile Island, forever the name of an accident, rather than the name of a nuclear reactor three miles downriver from Middletown, Pennsylvania. It’s the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history.

The accident began in Unit 2, at about four in the morning on March 28, 1979. HERE is a complete backgrounder from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission site. Here’s my version of the aftermath.

Do you remember where you were on March 28, 1979? It was a Wednesday, and if you lived on the east coast, by the time you were getting ready for work, the news, if not a plume, would have spread. For those of us working in the nuclear power industry, the memory is sharp, as for the day President Kennedy was assassinated, and the day the towers fell.

Though it resulted in no fatalities or injuries, the accident at Three Mile Island changed the way we viewed nuclear power and was probably the chief reason we haven’t seen a new plant in decades.

For me, it meant donning a hardhat, clipboard in hand, and traveling the country to inspect reactor control rooms.

Problems with control room procedures were at the heart of the accident, so the government undertook a massive overhaul of reactor operator training and human factors engineering. Week after week, I landed in towns with top-notch accommodations—where “room service” meant having a vending machine down the hall, instead of across the parking lot.

In my experience, relations between the utilities that ran the plants and the government body that regulated them had always been adversarial, and grew more so after TMI.

Sorry, the stairs aren’t working.

Take the time our team arrived for an inspection of a second floor control room. We were told the stairs were being upgraded and the only way to get to the second floor was to go out of the building through the window, climb the scaffolding to the upper level, and enter through the window on that level. Even though I was more agile then, it was still a hassle, not to mention scary. At the end of our three-day inspection, and after many hair-raising trips along the outside of the building, a plant worker made the mistake of removing a temporary partition that was hiding a perfectly good set of stairs, right in front of us.

Words were exchanged.

Surprise!

Typically, we’d arrive in town after a long flight, plus a puddle-jumper, get a few hours sleep, and show up unannounced at the plant around 8 or 9 the next morning. Tip: the “unannounced” part doesn’t work if the population is 300 and the innkeeper is the plant manager’s uncle.

“Oh, shucks,” the manager would say, with a smile that fooled no one. “We’re doing a test right now. Can you come back later? Say, around midnight?”

For all the lack of cooperation on inspection days, I was still impressed by the amazing technology and the possibilities of nuclear energy.

There’s a rumor going around that the US is starting up its nuclear energy program again.

I say this with the bias that comes from wanting to keep my electric blanket and LAN going.

The resurgence of nuclear power might also give new life to my first book ever: Nuclear Waste Management Abstracts. It was released in 1982, but you can be the first to review it on amazon.

Call me

Sheet music: From The New York Public Library

A big week for the telephone:

•  On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his invention.

• On March 10, 1876, Bell makes the first telephone call, in his Boston lab, summoning his assistant, Thomas Watson, from the next room.

Interesting — 23 years later, almost to the day (March 6, 1899), the aspirin was invented.

The Jig is up

I borrowed the title and content for this blog from my engineer husband. One of his passions is doing puzzles — acrostics, cryptoquotes, anagrams, and the ones requiring some amount of real estate in our family room: jigsaw puzzles.

He has his own blog that features all the puzzles he and his family and friends have done over the last couple of years. But high-level security concerns make him wary of posting his blog publicly. Potential readers and contributors are required to submit an application to his editor at camille@minichino.com. I’d post his URL here, but he’d only delete it.

Being an engineer, he looks for problems to solve.

The latest, in his own words:

Have you ever wondered if a puzzle maker uses the same cutting process for all the puzzles of the same size and number of pieces?  I have. The next puzzles to be solved are going to be that kind of 500 piecers.  After one of them is solved, I’m going to keep it assembled and compare it to the second one, to see if the pieces are related to each other.

Fortunately for us, the project has been completed and we have the answer: yes! The bottom left-hand corner of two 500-piece (brand name here) puzzles are shown here, as evidence.

If you have any other crucual puzzle-related problems you need solved, submit to the email address above.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY INTERNET?

April 7, 1969 is listed as one of the birthdays of the Internet.

One of? You mean you can’t Google “Internet birthday” and get a definitive date for the invention of something we use every day? Apparently not.

For example:

• On April 7, 1969, the first Requests for Comments (RFC) were published by the Pentagon’s ARPA project. RFC documents describe the theoretical foundations of the Internet and interconnected computers.

• On September 2, 1969, the first local connection between two computers was established at UCLA.

• On the evening of October 29, 1969, the first data travelled between two nodes of the ARPANET, a key ancestor of the Internet.

• On January 1, 1983, the switch was made from Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, to accommodate the much larger and more complicated network that would eventually be needed.

As for the WWW, the multimedia portion of the Internet, some say it was invented on Christmas Day, 1990, when the first practical HTML browser was completed; others say August 7, 1991, when CERN unveiled the browser to the world.

Does anyone else think it’s ironic that a chief source for information on everything from movie times to important dates in history doesn’t know when itself was invented? (Pardon the grammatical license. I could check the Internet for proper usage, but can I trust it now?)

It seems the only things we’re really sure happened on April 7 are

• King Kong opened in movie theaters (1933) and

• It’s Russell Crowe’s birthday (1964).

As long as there’s some excuse to eat cake, I’m satisfied.

In Memoriam

January 28, 1986 – one of those days in history. We all remember where we were, what we were doing. Most adults who could, were watching television.

We saw it live: the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven crew members. Flight commander Francis R. “Dick” Scobee; pilot Michael J. Smith; Ronald E. McNair; Ellison S. Onizuka; Judith A. Resnik; Gregory B. Jarvis; and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.

The Evolution of Stored Music

Only a little arm-twisting and I got The Cable Guy to write about the evolution of stored music. I was inspired by the sight of boxes and boxes of CD’s now stored in a corner of our bedroom, compared to a “party favor” we handed out this summer — a small flash drive with hours and hours of music.

Here’s The Cable Guy, in his own words:

I got my first stored music in my life when, as a child, I listened to 78 RPM shellac records. A 12-inch record side could hold around 5 minutes. When I was a teenager, records came as 33 1/3 LPs and could hold around 22 minutes/side. When 1982 came around, the Compact Disc could hold around 75 minutes.

As can be noted, as time passed, the volume of space needed to store music declined significantly. The birth of the CD brought music into the era when it could be stored in digital form.  The personal computer could now be used to supply audio signals to a sound reproduction system which had no moving parts to wear out.  Each replaying of the stored music was as good as the last.

Along with the technological progress in computers, storage of digital data became more reliable, needed less space and had larger storage capacity.

WHAT I DID WITH MY MUSIC STORAGE LATELY

In the last year or so, I converted all my analog music sources to digital files. These included records, tapes and CD’s.
As a summary of this activity, all of the CD’s in my collection were converted to .mp3 files by using the Apple iTunes software program.

The 6 boxes shown contain about 750 CDs:

A view of the inside of one of the boxes:

The conversion of about 200 Clssical CDs to .mp3 files resulted in 53GB of digital data.  This amount of music can fit into the USB flash drive shown on the left side of the image below.
My entire 700 CD collection has 122GB of digital data and can fit into the USB flash drive shown in the middle.
The 2 1/4 inch SSD shown can hold almost 1000GB of digital data.

To provide a perspective of the volume of space that has changed over my lifetime, consider the time on the side of a LP record (22 minutes/side) compared to the 10 hours that the 64GB flash drive can hold.

Back to School

Heavy-duty text!

At the end of this month, my class for Golden Gate U, SF, begins. That is, the payroll office and the Help Desk are in San Francisco; I’m at home in a suburb thirty miles away and my students are all over the world.

The syllabus states: This course examines the impact of scientific thought and technological innovation on major cultures of the modern world. It includes analysis of the acquisition, application, and adaptation of technology in pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial societies.

Okay, it’s a bit academic, but that’s to be expected in a university catalog. Really, what the course allows me to do is discuss key events in the history of science that have changed cultural patterns and beliefs. Topics include breakthroughs from the printing press (the Church at the time condemned it as an instrument for spreading the devil’s work) to stem cell research and cloning (now being condemned by some).

It’s challenging and exciting to explore these issues with my students. Advances in science and technology have given every age more conveniences and life-saving medical procedures as well as new problems and new moral issues.

Remember the divorcing couple who were arguing over who would get her frozen eggs? Not a problem in my grandmother’s time. And all the cases of how long to sustain life with technology? Not a problem in the Old West, for example.

With an international student body working in cyberspace, I often don’t know the gender of some of my students. At first this was disconcerting. How could I know how to respond to a posting if I didn’t know whether it came from a man or a woman? I’ve had first names such as Jigme, Myint-San, Widya, Lieu, and many more that are unpronounceable. I longed to have a photo, an audio file, or some indication of the student’s gender. Maybe he or she would refer to a wife or husband. Of course, in 2015, that still wouldn’t be a clue.

Even some “American” names are gender-neutral. Was the Sean I had last term a girl, like the actress Sean Young, or a guy, like the actor Sean Penn? How about Jordan? Lee? Alex? Casey?

Short of asking outright, which I don’t want to do, I have no way of knowing the gender of these students. Every year that I’ve taught this class on line, there is at least one student whose gender I never learn, not even as I assign the final grade.

Eventually, I realized that it shouldn’t matter whether I’m reading the views of a man or a woman. Does it help to know the gender perspective of a person if the issue is end-of-life technology or gene therapy? Or does it hinder our ability to listen objectively?

Boy or Girl. Should it matter?