I think I was in high school or early college when I first heard of Babbage’s, a computer store that has since been acquired by Barnes & Noble and is now more likely known as GameStop. Perhaps it’s strange that the name has stuck with me for all these years – like an arrow shot from a great distance – to find its mark today as I read an article about the Difference Engine #2.
Charles Babbage, a 19th Century mathematician, once found a number of errors in a hand-written astronomical chart that got him thinking of how calculations might be better performed by a machine (of course his quote indicated that the power for the machine would be provided by steam, but that’s beside the point). He wrote up the plans for the Difference Engine (#1) which was a Victorian-era calculator but after completing the design, he then moved on to a different machine, the Analytic Engine – amazingly similar to early computers. He later went back to the Difference Engine and revised the original plans (thus the “#2″ above) with 3x fewer parts.
Although he never had the funding to complete his invention, there are now 2 Difference Engines in existence, both built over the past 17 years. With their completion, Babbage can turn his posthumous frown upside down as they work both beautifully and effectively. Most of us use computers every day and it has always seemed like a vehicle for looking forward – at “What’s next.” Although it’s hard to see while looking at the DE2, the computer that I’m typing on right now can trace its roots back to Babbage. My question is, if he had plans for a computer about 100 years before the equivalent computer was finally created, and knowing how quickly technology has moved since computers have come on to the scene, where might we be now had he built the DE2 in the 1840’s?
Dear reader (notice that this is singular. not because it’s general but because I think there’s only one reader),
I very much appreciate your loyalty in reading my thoughts on technology. I have enjoyed writing them and I hope you’ve not found it to be too unpleasant. This will, most-likely be my final post as a student in the class that was the motivation behind this blog’s creation: Tech Fluency. It’s been a really great academic and personal experience to be in the class as I was suffering from a real sense of deficiency in terms of my… well, technical fluency. I’ve learned a tremendous amount and now feel I know more than enough to get myself in trouble.
This isn’t, however, “Goodbye.” I plan to continue blogging, moving forward, as I’ve found it fun and I like the idea of creating a portfolio of thoughts to reference. It’s as much a part of the class as any of the information that we were presented with that the delivery vehicle for some of our inquiry and insight, our blogs, are themselves based in technology and their creation is part of the learning process.
Until the next post…
I’m a people person. I like to chat and I find communication, in its truest sense, is best accomplished with a voice (at least) and a face (ideally). Electronic communication is something I, like most of us, do WAY too much of. I’m think I’m good at it but it takes so much effort to project tone and personality – the texture and topography of communication – that I prefer the old-fashioned face time.
Where technology is really great is in playing a supplemental role to the individual. Not representing or in lieu of the personal touch, but complementing it. The classic example of this is in presentations.
Long ago, there were charts on an easel; still used today but more for writing on in self-help pep talks. What followed was the transparency (or foil) that went on the overhead projector. A step up in quality with a nice step down in cost, but the flipping transitions were less than elegant. Both of these were concurrent with slides, which are better at transitions and sharper but were labor and cost prohibitive sometimes and lacked the former options’ ability to write directly on them. Take slides to the next level and you have Power Point (ppt). Match ppt with a smartboard and you have the best of all worlds.
The disconnect is when you consider the constraints of ppt in that the format of a presentation still has to fall into the same general format (and, sadly, lack of dynamism) as slides. Enter Prezi.com.
Prezi is Power Point on acid. I did a recent presentation in Prezi (above) and, in the words of the judge in a certain Monty Python skit, “Stunning effect.” To set up an account is free and it took me about an hour of working with it to get to a relative level of proficiency. Check it out for your next presentation.
(I’m not getting paid by Prezi to evangelize for them [though if they want to slip me some cash, that's cool])
The first 6 years of my life I spent growing up in Wakefield, RI. It was one of those idyllic upbringings that included finding polliwogs on the shore of a hidden pond, weekend trips to the beach, Sunday meals with my Grandparents, and endless games of kickball with my brothers and other kids from the neighborhood. These kickball games weren’t always populated with the appropriate number of players, however, but, as is often the case with kids, we made due with what we had.
A good number of players meant that you had enough to have the bases loaded and still have someone “at bat” (or maybe “at leg” as the case may be). If you only had three people per team, though, the work around was the “ghost man.” The phrase “Ghost man on third” seems so ingrained in my brain that I can hardly believe that it isn’t a universally understood phrase in English. As you might imagine, the ghost man just meant that the player who was standing on x base was once again “up” and so he would leave the base saying “Ghost man on [x]” which meant that a) he couldn’t be tagged out for stepping off the base and b) should the person on the base behind him advance, so would the ghost man proportionally advance.
Technology has allowed us to create ghost men in our everyday lives like never before. Through pended schedules, tele and digi-commuting, and the ubiquitous nature of our personal media artifacts, we can be present even when we aren’t. This very blog post is being written on the 18th but won’t come out until next week so that it will fulfill the class requirements for this blog even though I’ll be on a beach in South Carolina. Technology allows us to be in two places at once.
The strangest and most literal form of that may be what I heard in the second section of this podcast from WNYC’s Radio Lab. It seems there is a website called Death Switch upon which you create a number of final emails that it will automatically send out in the event of your death. You check in with it from time to time and, should you fail to do so, the site takes it that you’ve moved on and just pushes the send button. Imagine the shock of your loved ones receiving an email from you after you’ve passed; a kind of targeted, electronic, time-based message in a bottle… from the ghost man on third.
I recently heard about Lifeloggers who are folks who record their every movement, interaction, moment using digital cameras, GPS, etc. For those loyal followers out there (Lisa), you might remember that someone (Lisa) commented on these folks when I brought up the questionable need for 1TB (Terabyte) external memories. These people record everything so they need a lot of space to keep such an in-depth record. I just find this to be so… I don’t know. Maybe… counter-intuitive? There are 3 main reasons why this sounds so unappealing to me
- I’ve rarely looked back at the me of yesterday with much of a fond eye. Have you taken a little trip down memory lane, lately? Not a pretty picture my friend. I don’t want, or need, to be reminded of the tedium of daily life and the truly memorable moments are just that – memorable.
- Call me a romantic, but I think that there is something wonderful about the temporal nature of life. Good or bad, painful or pleasant, life comes and goes and ebbs and flows, yadda yadda yadda. I think it would detract from the wonder of it all if I had the ability to return to certain moments at will. Worse yet, it would be revisited on a screen. The power of the experience, it seems, would be lost in the translation to pixels. Finally, I think that it’s wonderful to be able to forget, on the one hand, and allow our subconscious to manipulate some memories to favor our perspective, on the other. Maybe that’s delusional but life is easier with it as well.
- The last major issue I have with this is the fact that you would need a 1:1 time ratio to really examine what you recorded. I know that there’s a fast-forward and a rewind but if you really wanted to go through it fully, there’d be little time for other things; like maybe your life. The vision of a man watching a recording of himself watching a recording of himself watching a recording of himself is a little heavy-handed but not terribly implausible.
Surveillance is a fact of life and we all must be prudent in our reaction and interaction with the surveillance we face daily. To do it to yourself, however, seems a little like going on a Fast while you’re starving to death.
Sitting on my table at home collecting dust… the cellphone. I’d originally thought that perhaps I’d keep it as a kind of portable phone book. Then, of course, its battery ran out and I didn’t have the gumption to plug it in so that it would be available for me to search a number. The irony: my technological solution (“It can’t call anyone, but it’s a portable phone book”) was killed by printing up a piece of paper with all of those phone numbers and thumb-tacking it to the wall. Taaa-daaa. Yes, I know, I should’ve thought what you’re thinking, “Why would you need a portable phone book if your only phone is physically attached to the wall of your kitchen?” Yes, good question. Thus the paper.
It got me thinking, however, about what I should do with the cellphone. Seems foolish to keep it lying around. Actually, what happens to all of the things that are made obsolete everyday by the newest technology? If Moore’s law roughly indicates that technology’s capacity and/or speed will double every 2 years, then there will always be a folding over of hardware that will create an enormous amount of waste. Where will it all go? Perhaps the Digital Divide will be bridged by filling the chasm with junk. Maybe that’s already happening.
One needn’t be a rabid environmentalist to be a little overwhelmed by the pictures I found today on the WebEcoist site. The volume is astounding. It is so difficult these days to find a sense of scale but we are currently at about 6.8 billion people on this planet. A study in March of 2009 indicated that 60% of the world’s population have cellphones. That puts us around 4 billion cellphones. Stop. Deep breath… let that wash over you for a second – 4,000,000,000. Now, with Moore’s law, many will be obsolete in less than 2 years. I fear that the obsolescence of our things may lead to the obsolescence of us.
I recently found something that pays homage to one of the most fundamental dreams of humanity and one of that dream’s most fervent proponents. Carl Sagan – author, truth evangelist, scientific educator – was born on November 9th, 1934. To some folks, even though Carl passed out of this universe in 1996, that day is still celebrated as Carl Sagan Day.
I think it’s nearly impossible to separate technology and science as each fuels the other and, as one of the great communicators in the world of science, Carl did a lot to advance not only the understanding of science, but the thrill of it as well. So often we find ourselves burdened by the everyday realities of our routinized lives and it was Carl Sagan who gave us, all of us, a collective kick in the backside to think “outside the sphere” (just made that up. Cheesy? Maybe) and into the “Cosmos.”
If you’re interested in taking a sip of the Sagan Koolaid, do as I did the other day and watch the 2 songs on the site symphony of science. The first line of one of the songs (a classic Carl line that points to why he was so beloved) is “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
That. Is. Awesome. I mean, really, it takes some incredible chutzpah to say something like that. In the songs, which I have to admit that I really like (Yes, I’m a dork), there are some incredible insights. Even being surrounded by technology and all its forms and visions, I was shocked to be told, “The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning. The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world.” We are so shocked when we are told that binary code runs technology, but there is something within each of us that’s even more fundamental.
What is technology? Is it the creation of tools? Is it innovation? Can a thought be technology? To see where we are going, we must know where we came from. The future of technology is built on the foundation of how humans conceive of our universe fundamentally. Trying to communicate those foundations is taking a trip down the rabbit hole; but it’s what Carl Sagan did so well.
Lest we forget that technology doesn’t stop (nor did it, of course, start) with the Internet, I’d like to take a look at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). I read a recent article in TIME magazine about some of the challenges that CERN has faced in getting the LHC up and running. The fact that there have been issues is not terribly shocking: the LHC uses more electricity than nearby Geneva, it is one of the (physically) largest science projects ever created and when people talk about things “going wrong” with the LHC, the scale is worth note (from an article on MSNBC):
“The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.”
All of this is interesting to be sure, but it isn’t necessarily worthy of my writing about it. What is worthy is the most recent issue that has come up. Power for the LHC was suddenly cut, recently, which led to yet another unexpected stoppage. The cause was exactly what you’d expect. That’s right, a bird flew over one of the power substations and dropped a piece of baguette into the inner workings causing an electrical short… uh huh, of course. Yes, yes, indeed, I did see that coming. Who wouldn’t?
Oh no, wait. It gets better. The reason for this incident, the one that two CERN researchers have come up with, is that nature or “God” (air-quotes were used in the article) is so against the Higgs boson, the tiny particle which is the hoped-for product of the LHC, that the bird, as well as other causes of LHC problems, were created/sent-back-in-time to foil its release – Terminator style.
In Greek tragedies, when it seemed all was lost and often many of the characters were dead, a crane (no, really, a rudimentary mechanical crane) was used to lower an actor playing a god onto the stage to make everything magically OK. This mechanism, both literal and literary, is called deus ex machina or, God from the machine.
To sum up this post’s figure-eight unification theory: God, savior, dove of peace, bird, baguette, (fishes and) loaves, Jesus, power, LHC, technology, science, physics, time-travel, theory, professor, smart, omniscient, God.
Not a new concept (actually from 2005) but I heard today about Nature-deficit Disorder. This sounds, frankly, like a crock o’ poo but the idea is not terribly shocking as people, especially children, are connected to one screen or another much of the time. The idea behind this “disorder” is that kids are disconnected from the natural world due to increased time in front of a screen – leading to attention limitations, obesity, depression, etc. What was a twist that I didn’t see coming is that the blame for this disorder is being placed on the backs of parents; not just for not pushing their kids outside but for teaching kids that the outside is a place to fear due to bugs, animals, strangers, dirt, injuries, blah blah blah.
I’ll just sum up the big points of why this is a mess with one-liners rather than bore you with a rant:
- It’s not a disorder. It’s an imposed deficiency easily fixed with a hammer, a trashcan and a front door (smash video game, throw in can, toss kid outside)
- We just seem to always move to such extremes. What ever happened to balance – a little TV, then the eventual, “That’s it. Get outside and play.”
- We seem shocked that ADD/ADHD is so prevalent, yet we live in a society of short, intense media that moves on with hardly a chance to process.
- Speaking of the media, it fuels the fire by making so much of the relative rarity of abductions; scaring the Bejesus out of parents and making the screen an attractive alternative.
Not to toot my own horn, but my wife and I have made specific decisions, which have some inherent sacrifices attached, to make sure that there is time and opportunity for the little one to get outside and for her to have very limited time in front of a screen. We are fortunate, indeed. But for many, they have simply NOT made those decisions, yet, they wonder why the little one can’t sit still for 5 minutes. I’d love to come home and sit in front of the tube. I work hard and deserve a little time to just relax but we don’t have a TV and choose to play board games and dance with our kid rather than plant her in front of a screen. It’s not always easy (nor is it an option for some parents out there who are in school, single, with kids, working, trying to make it all work – I’m not ignorant of those challenges) but for many parents, they need only make a decision.
Maybe we should see if there’s a Parental Decision-deficit Disorder.
Is more, better?
We are a culture of “more.” Like a 400lb. Oliver Twist holding a 50 gallon bowl, we look up and say, “More, please” (sadly, we often leave off the please). Often, the reason for this drive for more is to simply have/possess/own/control more. At some point, one must ask, “Why?” I’ll spare you the speech on Western consumer culture as I’m sure you already know, but at what point is it pointless?
I recently heard from some friends that they’ve purchased 1 TB (terabyte) external hard drives. I have to know, what on Earth do they need that much memory for? It’s crazy. According to an article I read 1TB is equal to “50,000 trees made into paper and printed.” Another said it’s “enough space to store a quarter-million songs.” What is the point of all of this. If it’s for music (a common answer), and we estimate the average song is 4 minutes, we do a little multiplication and, voila, something like 16,667 hours; nearly 2 years. Let’s be honest, you aren’t going to listen to them all. It’s “more” for the sake of “more.”
We are a culture that needs to reexamine the concept of Quantity vs. Quality.
I have a couple thousand songs on my computer and I have listened to all of them – multiple times. If a song isn’t good, I don’t download it. Having more is useless if, like the issues with Google and search, you can’t find anything and there’s no distinction of quality. Quality is a word easily bandied about but rarely acted upon. Would you rather have 50,000 depictions of Elvis in velvet or 1 real Monet?
Yes, it’s preachy but I think that in the race for “more” we can easily lose sight of “better.”