drallison

If we are to have a future as a species, we need go cooperate and work together. The COVID-19 Pandemic is just the first of many existential crises we will face in the next couple of decades. Global cooperation will be needed to ensure human survival in the face of global warming (and other assorted crises). So far, in the COVID-19 Pandemic, the US has earned a failing grade. Where will we be when the going gets much much worse.

That's the obvious take-away from the new reports. In practice, it is unlikely to happen: the fires will continue to burn, more CO2 will be dumped into the atmosphere, the earth will warm further, and, eventually humans (and lots of other things) will become extinct.

World leadership ignores large scale existential issues. Scientists and engineers can call out the problems and the risks, but getting anything done will require everyone to do their part. At the moment, the lunatics are running the asylum and there are no adults around.

Maybe the real hard problem is getting people to pay attention to what is happening in their world and to forecast what the impact of their actions will be in the next few decades.

It is also a good time to reflect upon the very idea of intellectual property. In this age, 15th century ideas about how to protect printers may not be ideal in the 21st century. Patents and copyright are constitutionally mandated: [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” It is not clear that our current laws are doing the job.

That portable odor generating devices tied to location using GPS are being used to promote commerce is not surprising. The Dunking Donut idea of reinforcing the odorant with a fragment of commercial jingle is right out of a Bollywood movie or a Gibson novel. Welcome to the 21st centrury.

BTW, I find it hard to believe that "_faster_delivery" and maintainability are in opposition. Most of us would agree that maintainable systems have fewer bugs at every stage. And experience has taught us that bugs, particularly subtle bugs, take a long time to find and correct.

Can we PLEASE do something about this. I am sick and tired of being asked to explain a US Govenment action by colleagues and friends in Europe or the Far East. The POTUUS should not be a laughing stock. And science and medicine in the US used to be pretty good.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer 3rd Edition by Michael Swaine (Author), Paul Freiberger (Author)

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet Paperback – January 21, 1998 by Katie Hafner (Author)

Progress.

The notice published on the site: To help support our community working remotely during COVID-19, we are making all work published by ACM in our Digital Library freely accessible through June 30, 2020.

Exported PDF here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqnhpz6puc2tagm/Coronavirus%20Situ...

You'll need to open it up in a PDF reader and zoom into it to read most of the content. It is mostly a form of structured note-taking on the source video (https://youtu.be/aX5n0DYXnUQ), augmented by Wolf Mcnally's own knowledge and reasoning.

Get the original source for Wolf Mcnally's Flying Logic document here:

https://flyinglogic.discoursehosting.net/t/ncov-19-and-covid...

The Johns Hopkins Beast (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Beast) held an almost mythological sway over my imagination when I learned of it in the early 1960's. Lee Hoevel, then a graduate student of Mike Flynn, spoke affectionately of the beast and the noises it made in its nocturnal foraging for electric power sockets on the 2nd floor of the lab where he began his graduate work.

Digging into the pre-history of another experience turned up the following story. Thanks to Bruce Koball who was there.

Briefly, in 1987, Key Dewdney attended the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. In conversations with John Wharton and Bruce Koball, he challenged them to come up with a realization of Valentino Braitenberg's thought experiment as described in his monograph "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles. The prize was entry to the exclusive First Conference on Artificial Life to be held that fall Los Alamos National Labs. http://alife.org/conference/alife-1 John and Bruce took up his challenge; Bruce built the h/w (using a gutted radio-controlled model car) and John wrote the firmware. As a "front-end" we used a simple neural net simulation program written for Macintosh called "MacBrain" that Bruce had been experimenting with. It had a nifty GUI which allowed him to define neural net topologies on-screen and then download the net into the vehicle via an async serial port where it was executed in John's code. Their vehicle debuted at A-Life 1 in 1987, and then was shown again at the annual AMW (the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop) and in Stanford's iconic Colloquium, EE380. Then, at Fred Coury's urging, Bruce wrote a brief paper, "A Test Vehicle for Braitenberg Control Structures", on our efforts for COMPCON Spring 1988. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3496636_A_test_vehi... [Bruce R. Koball, Motion West, Berkeley; bkoball@well.com, bkoball@motionwest.com]

I, Dennis Allison, was an observer and not a participant in both these anecdotes. It was inspiring to see Bratenburg vehicles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle), designed as a thought experiment, actually demonstrate very complex behaviors even though the control program used a very simple rule set. John released several vehicles during the RATS session at the annual Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop where they scurried about under tables and chairs. Some hid, others vamped. They were an immediate hit, a showstopper with an audience of jaded techies. It took a while to find them all as some went into deep hiding mode. Later, John repeated the release as part of an EE380 Colloquium talk at Stanford, but Terman Auditorium lacked the hiding spaces Asilomar provided.