The Ghost of Invention: A Visit to Bell Labs
wired.com
wired.com
I was very happy to move on from that gig, because I saw the future there and it was stagnation.
In Houston you get much the same feeling talking with NASA folks and former personnel...the writing is on the wall, the dream is all but dead, but the poor bastards haven't gotten the memo yet. There was once great hope for the future, once some great idea that using technology we could go out on rocket ships and study the universe and spread and thrive and grow and learn and love and all these wonderful things, and then suddenly we decided to reallocate those funds to frivolous and costly wars. Decided to spend that money instead on bureaucracy and police departments and shitty healthcare and a dozen other things.
By contrast, every technician and engineer I meet here in the energy industry is gleeful and well-paid, if perhaps overworked and overstressed. They get to make things, they get to order big impressive parts built to tolerances NASA would approve of and stick those things in the most inhospitable places you can imagine--if we ever wanted to go to Venus and set up shop, you'd want to hire Baker Hughes or NOV to build the gear.
This, despite the fact that the work they do is inevitably going to hurt the planet and mankind in the long run. It's a hell of a thing.
The campus is bizarrely sad, like the article describes, a place where its best years seem behind it. They have one of those trail/fitness courses that snakes around the back, and it's in terrible disrepair. And a basketball court with broken nets and weeds growing through it. But they installed a brand new shuffleboard court! I guess the demographics of the place have changed...
> in 1995, “Nobody in Bell Labs used the Internet
:(( I did.
>umbrella with a GSM modem that glows blue when it knows you’ll be needing it
its called an app, on your phone
>Medicine bottles that record the number of times they’ve been opened
already patented several times over and on the market for years
http://www.epill.com/timecap.html
I was expecting place like that to be working on big stuff. Quantum teleportation, beam forming, not fart apps and magic umbrellas :(
http://www.newenglandruins.com/bell-labs
It was an impressive building at the time. Having worked there for years, it is rather unsettling to see it featured as an abandoned urban site.
The second most interesting building was the "Oceanic wave test facility". Its a fairly mundane building along the perimeter of the property, located between an emergency power plant and the strong waste holding tanks. On one of my first visits here the room was filled with equipment- open books on desks facing a mainframe computer filled the room. I couldn't get in because I was worried about tripping an alarm or alerting the patrolling security guard so I left. On my next visit all of the equipment was gone.
There are a few other buildings and interesting artifacts (including a replica horn radio made of solid metal), but since it was acquired security has tightened up a bit. I took a ton of pictures, maybe one day I'll post em.
I used to work in Murray Hill, but traveled a bunch to Holmdel and Crawford Hill facilities. I'm not totally surprised by the oceanic wave sim; There used to be a sizeable submarine fiber group before it got sold to Tyco.
What was the replica horn? There is of course a somewhat famous horn, responsible for finding the 4K background radiation, but it has a plaque: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_Labs_Horn_Antenna_Cra...
The replica horn I found in front of the "Global Compliance Test Facility" right across from the wave facility. It's not too large (probably the size of a person), but it's very very heavy.
If the author had spent as much time actually telling us what these people do and what's interesting about it, as he spent flopping on the floor weeping "I'm not worthy!" about their intelligence, it might've been an interesting read.
Sadly, it wasn't.
Here's a sample from chapter 22:
> One of the perks of having my own room was the freedom to fart whenever I felt the urge. The disadvantage was that Newell invariably knocked on my door seconds after I'd done so. It was almost as if, by breaking wind, I had summoned him — a faster and more efficient method than calling him on the phone. On this occasion he and the snapper had come to tell me that our visit to Flight Deck Control had been moved forward so we had to get up there right away.
In the later sections the author attacks singularity problems, humanities place as it continues to virtualize more and more of itself, and frames Bell Labs as the remnants of reality left over (and maybe we still inhabit) after we move our minds further and further from our physical presence.
When a company gets big enough, the people who operate the machine that is the company become more prominent than the people that do what the company is supposedly in existence for. Because when a company gets that big, the sole reason it exists is to make money, and what it does to make money is incidental. In that sense, Google is exactly the same as Kroger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger
Every large billion dollar company is doomed to be a large billion dollar company.
I have seen this design now on multiple pages, how is this called? IMHO it is a terrible user experience.
//edit: No, really, what's the idea? It really messes up the scrolling experience.
web 3.something baby :/