Two Rocks and a Nano Chip

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
When Historian James Shotwell taught classes at Columbia University in the late 1940’s he displayed two stone axes on his desk, one rough hewn, the other smooth and polished. The smooth one indicated the total technological advance in 10,000 years of man’s history.

When I was born in 1932 we had no TV and had to get accustomed to counting the number of rings on our party-line telephone. We did not have interior plumbing except in the barn. The cows had to press a lever in a bowl to get a gravity-fed drink of water from the tank in the hay mow. We didn’t have anything that even resembled a computer except for an abacus.

Some say Alan Turing, the English mathematician, cryptanalyst, and logician, was the first computer scientist. During World War II, Turing developed the Enigma Machine, an electromechanical “computer” that broke the code of the German Navy, helping us to win the war. For these efforts Turing was awarded the Order of the British Empire.

After the war he worked at England’s National Physical Laboratory designing the first stored-program computer. Although he was one of the real heroes of WW II, he was prosecuted for being a homosexual in 1952 and was treated with female hormones. That “remedy” resulted in chemical castration. He killed himself by taking cyanide in 1954.

The first working computer in the United States was the UNIVAC which weighed 13 tons and could do about 2,900 functions a second. It sold for well over a $1 million in 1950. Presently there are over one billion computers in public and private use in the world.
The Magic Between UNIVAC and Google
The other day this statistic struck me right between the eyes. In 2010 over 617,500,000 people in India have access to a mobile phone or cellphone. Only 366,000,000 of them have access to a toilet. 

The advances in electronics over the last half century absolutely boggle the mind. There is now one cellphone for every two people on earth. Thirty nations now have more cellphones than people. Most cellphones can connect to the Internet.

The radio in our living room 65 years ago took up about five cubic feet and was loaded with tubes and other mechanical parts. Today the National Security Agency intercepts nearly two billion e-mails, phone calls, and other types of communication every day in maintaining our “national security.” There are 40 billion pages on the Internet. Bill Gates gets one million e-mails a day. I hope he has good spam and crap detectors.

Sitting in air-conditioned offices at March Air Force Base in California, fighter pilots flying Predator drones in Afghanistan over 7,000 miles away fire Hellfire missiles at human and other targets in villages and the mountainsides-–and then go home and take their wives to dinner at Red Lobster.

Nanotechnology experts at the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel have inscribed the entire Jewish Bible on a space taken up by a grain of sugar, or about .01 square inch. It only took an hour to etch the 300,000 words on a silicon chip. These days we have to be reminded that a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Intel will sell you a single chip for .000055 cents.

Now you can call your well-trained dog on his collar cellphone and tell him to get his butt home. Or you can buy Nokia cellphones encrusted with $100,000 worth of rubies to impress your friends. If you really want to impress them with your class and style, you can buy a cellphone designed by Prada, Ferrari, or Versace.
Everyone Is Getting Into the Electronics Act
Deforestation experts have determined that during a storm in the Amazon River basin over 500 million trees were blown down. How did they do that?  They have a contract with Google Earth that concentrates on geographic information, including anything to do with global warming.

Google computer programs buttressed by satellites and computers can project deforestation rates, assemble climate change data, monitor the growth and decline in sea ice, and collect greenhouse gas emissions data. They can create maps, analyze vegetation and land use, and provide other environmental information.

Google even tracks wildlife. If you have traveled through Jasper Park in British Columbia, you were probably surprised by the animal overpasses built by Canadians to protect animals who have to cross a superhighway. The paths are well-worn. Google has partnered with an indigenous Amazon tribe, assisting them in protecting their homeland in the forest.

Even the Swiss police use Google Earth to find miscreants. While “just fooling around” with its satellites, they discovered a two-acre marijuana patch hidden inside a corn field. Using Google Earth, they even read the address of the two farmers involved.

Because Google Earth gives anyone with a credit card an astronaut’s picture of streets and buildings in almost any city, military leaders are worried about its use by terrorists and enemies. Some countries have banned its use.

The countries of the world are adding the equivalent of seven New Yorks to earth each year. In 1900 only 13 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. By 2050 demographers say 70 percent will. If Google Earth had been in existence two hundred years ago only two cities of one million–London and Beijing–could have been seen from earth. Today there are 450 cities of more than a million.
The Influence of the Internet on Seeking Information
While writing this column I used a “book” dictionary to check on the spelling of some words. I have a computer with Spell Check but I learned long ago not to completely trust it. But I used Google and other sources to check facts, particularly dates and info on Alan Turing and Google Earth itself.

On occasions as a student of English literature and language I have used a set of the Oxford English Dictionary “just to make sure.”  It is the most authoritative guide available and has been printed for 126 years. The current (1989) printed edition costs $1,165, weighs 750 pounds, and is bound in 20 volumes. The publisher, Oxford University Press, has sold only 30,000 copies in 20 years. Instead of purchasing the set, a person or publication can buy digital access for $295 a year. Evidently it is a bargain in that the publisher gets two million hits a month from paid subscribers.

Just this week Oxford University Press announced they may not sell a printed form of the new third edition because “the print dictionary market is just disappearing.” It is happening in other print forms. Amazon has sold more books in digital form for the Kindle than they have sold in hard or paperback. The Kindle has the capacity of storing 3,500 books. It weighs 8.5 ounces, is one-third of an inch thick, and can be carried in a pocket. Absolutely amazing to a boy who went to a rural school that had a 400-book library. Amazing the market has changed so quickly. That’s what happens when computers are used on the Internet. 

Google and Wikipedia are now beating Encyclopaedia Britannica to the punch. The Britannica was first printed in 1768 and is still available today. I bought a 50-year-old Britannica set about 20 years ago at a garage sale for about $25. I still use it today, particularly for historical references. Revised about every three years, my 1961 edition has 38 million words in the 24 volumes of the general text and over a million in the annual Book of the Year. Over 6,900 authorities were used to write this edition.

The Oxford Dictionary is now available through iPhone, so all of the signs point to a tough time for printed versions. Eighty expert lexicographers are busy preparing the third edition, already increasing the number of the 291,500 entries and the 2.4 million quotations that are in the second edition.

But the computer chip is changing everything in our lives. Just in the last three years three very expensive musical instruments have been traced quickly by chips when they were mislaid or lost. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma forgot his $2.5 million 266-year-old cello in a cab.  Lynn Harrell also left his $4 million 328-year-old Stradivarius cello in a cab. Just two weeks ago Hanh-Bin of Korea left his $600,000 violin in a cab. All safe because of a chip costing less than a penny.

But other countries are putting chips to more utilitarian uses.  South Korea uses wireless sensors in networks to analyze hundreds of variables in the strength of their bridges–including vibration, temperature, corrosion, and even sounds such as creaks, pops, and groans in cables.

Australia uses wireless networks in endangered rain forests to track climate change and other environmental conditions, including how plants and animals recover from damages in their environment. We are pathetically far behind in these areas.
Ronald Reagan: “Why Should We Subsidize Intellectual Curiosity?”
This was a pretty dumb statement by a person who was a pretty good B movie actor who played a president on TV. If we are to remain top dog in the world, we must develop and use computers, broadband, the Internet, cellphones, and other electronic communication devices not yet invented.

When Lurch became president in 2001, Bill Clinton and Al Gore had pushed the U.S. to third in the race to develop broadband for use in the world of communications. They even helped wire schools in their efforts to establish and promote priorities.

Ron Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush did nothing in their 12 years of “leadership,” although later they did insist that Gore had invented the Internet!

“Well,” as Reagan would say, after eight years of Lurch we ended up in 16th place in the world broadband race from third, succumbing to his 553 days of vacation during his eight years of cutting brush on his fake photo-op ranch. We have over 100 million Americans who are not even interested in using the Internet.  Maybe the ranch served as a “factory farm” for dumb ideas such as the Iraq War and tax cuts for the rich.

At a recent Minnesota Broadband Summit convened by Senator Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota business leaders, large and small, pleaded with politicians to assist in the development of high-speed broadband. The owner of the Gunflint Lodge north of Grand Marais testified he was at an economic disadvantage because he faces delays in processing credit cards (his “life blood”), fishing licenses, and requests from potential foreign guests in online reservations. His Canadian competition utilizes high-speed broadband while he is forced to use doddering, anemic, slow-speed dial-up.

Reagan was wrong about subsidizing intellectual curiosity. We must ensure that we lead the world in creating devices, networks, computer chips, cellphones, computers, and other innovations so we have the ability to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. Like electricity and sewers, communications is a utility and government has the responsibility to develop it to the fullest.

We have to make sure we are a helluva lot better than 16th in the world. We are currently behind Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Canada, Belgium, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Japan, and France in broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants. We lead the world in aircraft carriers and healthcare costs per capita.

Do we really want our national epitaph to be T.S. Eliot’s lines from his poem “The Rock: “And the wind will say these were decent people. Their only monument an asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls.”
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