Queen Elizabeth sends email to US Secretary of defense in 1976 to open the connnection between England and the US for the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE)

I think of myself as long lived. Growing up in a computer store, seeing many twists and turns within the technology space – I often bounce around as a tech veteran – then you see this, the Queen of England trying email for the first time in 1976 and realize that those among us are much longer lived.. having seen more.

Her email address was hme2 (no hostname to my knowledge). The system was made redundant for military reasons (assured retaliation in case of attack) and its design is ingenious in serving that task. Something I’d like to write about one day.

Enjoy the pic

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Just a brainstorm. If the power is provided from above the center of gravity, then it will be easier to land. Sent to @ElonMusk through twitter. : )

Alwin’s design proposal for a smoother vertical rocket landing.

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It was my first time at CES this year (2017) and was thrilled to see so many products and innovative ideas under one roof. I guess under any other year, things may be highly seasonal like fashion, but because we are changing as a society so quickly technologically, it really was a display of the next generation ahead to some extents, not just cyclical.

I have been reading  the press – which just covered things according to flash/cool factor – but stepping back one, there seemed to be some inarguable themes as competition between two standards eventually leans a certain way. I’ll focus on VR because it is so much of a personal interest area.

This is forward-looking and may not play out in one-year but believe the long term advantages prove that one way of doing things is much better than the others.

1. LED displays will no longer be the norm. Eye projection (ODG, Avegant, Magic Leap etc) as a method is much much more effective and at a smaller scale. LED was handy because of the mobile industry, but it requires a large headset, eye projection only need a reflective mirror or lens in front of your eye and a small projector, the form factor is much much smaller and lighter.
2. Cameras for Eye tracking (foveated rendering along the lines of Fove) will be the norm. It is too easy to point a camera at your eyes to see where they are looking and the benefit to the scene/rendering/interaction is huge.
3. Wireless headsets will happen (of course, fairly easy to guess that will take place). Glasses – as in ray ban style ones – will be the new form factor (before hitting any cybernetic phase I guess), along with wireless ear buds as the standard form factor 5-6 years from now.
4. Cameras for environment. Base Stations are going away eventually. A camera looking at your hands may take place of a controller. Some people have tried this already, I think it may get better or at least the intermediate versions will be much cooler compact left and right hand controllers.
5. Z Layer is more ubiquitous as a large cultural theme for how we interact with technology. Many things will have new expectations to incorporate the z layer in interaction.

Also cool but unrelated to VR was that so many smart objects were on view. Smart hairbrush, smart toothbrush, smart suitcase etc. It likely will be an option for those who can afford it. The predictions people made years ago will likely J-curve change into tangible change for the  societies who are exposed to these new products.

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The watchmaker analogy as it is known, made by William Paley states that a complex design, such as an eye, implies a designer….

For whatever reason, this thought popped into my head one day while in the shower*.

The role of ‘feature level’ in discussing how a machine is naturally selected and evolves is critical. The order of ‘features’ can be inferred by deduction and something which I didn’t really get until well.. today.

The Gist:

Eyes, or other specialized organs must of developed very very early on in the morph-history of species with eyes. The proto-species where eyes developed must of used ‘eyes’ in a more general purpose. Think protists, sun-sensitive algae etc, maybe even slugs.. I’m not sure of the biological details, but they are irrelevant to the argument. That these innovations come from something less specialized, something more crude and general in application on early prototypes. You can even take something fully specialized and re-appropriate it, say a dishwasher as a propeller for a motorboat, but the initial will be less specialized than later iterations. The novel part (to me) is that you can deduce the order of innovations.

Certain features cannot exist without the supporting base functionality.

The analogy and explanation is easier to see when looking at a car made with rain tread tires on it. We might look at the wheels of a car and see the treads perfectly made, designed to pump water away from the wheels and infer that this complexity can only arrive by a designer, but it doesn’t really belie the history of the tire (made pneumatic by michelin), the tires and bending wood technology before that, spokes before that, discs and ball and round logs before that. The idea which must of come for all bikes, cars or trains is the wheel which evolved very early on in the ‘protospecies’ / a more primitive preceding model.

The feature ‘richness’ of certain abilities allows us to infer which modification came first and set an order, by logic. That is very cool.

*Footnote: Showers are prodigious places for random ideas. Most people would agree with that. My theory about this is that no other place is as isolating or makes you stand stationary with little else to do for 10-15 minutes a day.

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Yay!

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Larry Page was on Charlie Rose this week.
He comments on a bunch of current initiatives.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12366

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We are just entering a time period, whereby people’s lives, songs, videos photos, documents (classified or declassified) are entering into the public record. History is much more real, when you can see and hear in film what things were like.

Recently I’ve been immersed daily in both reading and watching of early 20th century american history. Notably 1920’s-1950’s.

WWII:

Watching a 12 part series on WWII (in Color), amazing how ‘day-to-day/homevideo/newsreel’ the footage looks when it is colorized. Among other things: women stepping up into jobs traditionally thought were only done by men. The Spanish Civil War. Malthusian scenarios of debt/Havenstein’s hyperinflation.  The genuine debate whether democracy or fascism was the best course for societies. German engineering, American Industry, British perseverance. Postwar companies and industries which developed. In a lot of the footage, people were still using horses for military operations! Amazing to think how much technical innovation came out of that period. In that time, Europe was a garble of turbulent states, very similar it can be said to present day dynamics in the middle east. By the end of the war there was:

Technologies from WWII
-Computers (Independently invented by Attansoff, Turing/Bletchley Park team, Konrad Zuse)
-Radar
-Subs
-Jet Propulsion
-Rockets (eg. v1/v2 Werner Von Braun)
-Nuclear Power
-Planned Stealth Bomber (see the Horten Ho 229).

War brought out some of the best (and obviously the worst) traits of human character. Ingenuity, Achievement & Sacrifice, Barbarism, Genocide. Seeing several documentaries now on the war (from different perspectives), technological, political etc. It is unreal that the world got into such a place.

Bell Labs:

Reading a history of Bell Labs. “Idea Factory: The Great Age of American Innovation, Jon Gertner”.
Bell Lab’s inventions can be summed up by one larger invention: the modern day communications satellite (conceived by John Pierce).

Almost all (if not all) the inventions needed to get a communications satellite working were invented at Bell Labs:

-Solidstate Transistors
-Unix
-Solar Panels (an offshoot of semi-conductor research
-Digital Communication Theory and Protocols (Claude Shannon)
-Various Antennae (Horn and Standing Wave)
-Lasers/Fiber-Optics/Optical Communication
-Modems/Modulator-Demodulators
-Mobile Networks
-Aeronautics Apparatus (through Sandia a branch of Bell)
-Digital Photography (CCD Sensors)
-Polaroids
and a whole lot more..

Some notable names mentioned in the book were Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, Claude Shannon, William Shockley and my favorite John Pierce. Pierce was an ‘idea man’ and provides a model/path to the application of my own temperament (IMO). He was all over the place, a bit of a romantic, musical, focused on pragmatics, a writer and altruistic. He was a conceiver and connector, considered valuable in this role, who initiated and collaborated with others to get things done. He gave the name ‘transistor’ to the new invention and wrote a treatise on music and glider building  among other things.

As an UX/IA specialist – essentially an ‘idea person’ – it provides a model for how one like this can contribute to a larger organization.

*It’s also interesting to see how so many of the great inventors and engineers at Bell Labs came from small towns. Both Edison and Bell himself were other examples.

Big Bands – Artie Shaw, Helen Forrest

The Jewish heartbeat of Jazz. Jewish musicians played great. Their lives were as crazy, restless as the rest of the people in this era it seems. There was a lot of anti-antisemitism during that time. It probably made them stronger. Artie Shaw had Billie Holiday as his first singer, which was truly notable (a color-blind meritocracy) ahead of his time. Helen Forrest, born Fogel had a great voice… The whole thing is a jumble and connects with all the other parts of the technology/u.s. life/society during the war that i’ve been reading about. Fascinating.

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I’ve finally caught up on some reading. Some of the more interesting by-products of today’s deep thoughts and reading are listed below:

• drone subs: at any given second, we can see drone planes whizzing around, but there must be enumerable drone subs combing the bottom of the sea too. both commercial and military. Looking for sunken treasure, oil, or laying in wait. The resources of the ocean are undermined to date,, so this is ‘exploration’ is possibly the next resource frontier. If used properly, it would be a good thing.
• Like newton’s first law, The effect of almost any incident has usually an element of good and bad and stimulates peaks and valleys in the ‘event wave’ (to use water as the analogy). take for eg: bubonic plague –> invention of calculus; world war ii –> invention of computer, a liberation of european intellectual power immigrating to the u.s. and onto that generations many accomplishments..
• Akbar the great, (the mughal who is most famous for building the taj mahal) is a very interesting character. He is a bit like Louis IV, or even cosimo de medici. militaristic, strong, but enlightened and pluralistic in his beliefs. Revamped the concept of equality among muslims and hindis, revised taxation, translated persian texts into hindi and vice versa. a catalyst in the best sense…. the india of the mughal era, was religiously diverse and multi-cultural. the creation of pakistan during 1947 is such a bad idea.. taking a group of people artificially and creating a country from them..  At the time, it’s the only solution but, the fall-out and dislocation always creates mega-conflict as it beckons the  intense power grab which follows, in my op. The best way should be the transition method, from most cases of people-moving and nation-building.My long-term fascination with spain is finding itself mutating into the fascination with india. Going to read Gandhi’s autobiography next – “the story of my experiments with truth” available free online here.
• John Travolta is an accomplished pilot, licensed to fly numerous aircraft, including a Boening 747 jet.
• Reading “In Search of Memory” by Eric Kandell. Learning how the brain works, at a molecular level is a bit like watching a car drive around a race course… almost all blackbox. the machinery for memory, it turns out is both complex and elegant. learning about it is very very similar to how an internal combustion engine works.. there are all these events that happen, that push along the memory. serotonin, glutamate, kinase A, Cyclic AMP, KREB, NDMA and bunch of other stuff. The mechanism can target specific synapses. given then each neuron can have hundreds of axons, that gives an idea of the mind-numbing number of circuits that can be created. the book is highly recommended.
• We are at a level of understanding biological engineering, similar to the level we were at with electronics in around 1900-1910. We can build simple things, most of which are of little use except as playthings, but demonstrate knowledge of how things work. The true value will be unlocked later on.
• On Level 256 of all Classic Pac-man, there is a glitch in the sub-routine of generating the bonus items, which causes an integer overflow which all the code to be one read, a digit off.. this makes the level appear as if it was on lysergic acid.

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If you have not read any of his work, James Burke is a historian, who mostly writes about the history of science and innovation. He is known for his Connections 1 / 2 / 3 series on BBC. His work is always web-like and built off tangents.

In this book Pinball Effect, he writes about the interconnectedness of the world and how one chance incident triggers another. The style is non-fictional, but he is always telling a story along the way. Think of Umberto Eco coming to your highschool and teaching science class.

This is the fourth book I have read by him, and it is the best in my opinion. James Burke respects no real bounds to speak of, except one: the topic of the first sentence always comes back to finish the chapter. recommended.

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