Posts by Dr. Ellen 334 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2007
I went to college at MIT, and while it would have been easy to find a radiation hazard, it wouldn't be in the dorms. (Some students excepted.) But there was a very stringent policy: no hot plates in the dorm. I can understand why - the wiring in the walls was old and hot plates draw lotsa current - but some didn't care. One ingenious chap opened up his speaker box, moved his mini-kitchen into it, and closed it up, and never had a bit of trouble.
There actually is an equivalent to pre-atomic iron. It's called the Internet Archive. It's not perfect, and only includes publicly-accessible things, but files are stored by date. Some trustworthy group (?) should grab it, trim off everything after AI started roaming about, and put it on a read-only machine. Nothing's perfect, and it would include all the pre-AI malarkey, but at least one font of malarkey would be excluded.
In grad school, I worked with humongous magnets with equally humongous power supplies. We were strongly warned NOT to wear rings, lest we touch the wrong terminals. It would have ended poorly, with loud shrieks and a burnt-off finger next to a blob of gold on the floor.
The precautions around the high voltage were different
Depending on what I'm doing, I use RTF. If I'm getting fancy, PDF works. I like images like JPG that can easily scale in size. There are other ways of doing things, but I'm a relatively simple soul. I can't tell you how many document formats I've gone through. Most of them were proprietary. but those three formats are almost computer Esperanto.
When I want to do Interesting Things to my computer's hard drive, I take the original drive out, install a different HD, and do it to that. If something goes wrong, I can try it again, or try something else. The original drive sits quietly on a shelf. If what you're doing doesn't work out, put it back in. There are DOZENS of 240-GB SSDs on Amazon for under twenty dollars. That's a lot of room for experimenting. (I'm not interested in mammoth C: drives, I use separate, larger drives for data.)
I live with a writer who is somewhat a technophobe. She started with TRS-DOS 5, went through MS-DOS, several versions of Windows, and every time there was an upgrade the house was very tense for months and months. She uses Windows 7, and it is no longer being updated. An upgrade would seriously be a homewrecker. She has a Win7 laptop. If it dies, I'm keeping another as backup. (The suggestions in the article will probably be implemented in the backup.)
Here is the bedrock fact: Windows 7 is what it is. It's not being updated or improved. Using it is no longer a moving target, and it does what she wants. Why change? (I do keep a backup of her data files Just In Case.)
I'm more free-thinking. I have a cheapo Win10 laptop for travel, and two Win11 machines. But I'm not totally ecumenical -- don't try to make me use Apple. Those people don't think like me.
I've been to a lot of conventions, some professional, but mostly hobby-related. Most of them had hundreds or thousands of people. A significant percentage have come long distances to get to them. Emotions and expectations are high, and some of the attendees rub others wrong, some are overly sensitive, while others are downright jerks. Who's to say which way the jerking goes? When you get truly serious, the judge does.
My go-to solution is to go. Away. Sometimes I do it pre-emptively; there are conventions I don't go to, and people I won't be on panels with. Banishment is harsh, but at least you won't get in trouble at THAT con again.
Pipes are everywhere, hidden in walls and ceilings. They lurk, unobserved. And sometimes they strike. I was a curator at the time, in a museum devoted to electricity. One morning I came to work and found the ground-floor exhibit halls several inches deep in water. Museums are often put in historic buildings, and they are at times repaired, refurbished, or extended -- without full attention to the consequences. Some time before the museum moved in, the plumbing had been modernized -- well, some of the plumbing. Which meant that iron pipes were joined with copper pipes invisibly in the ceiling. The joint finally gave away to electrolytic corrosion and let loose the flood.
The scrambling to save artifacts was intense, even before the pipes had a chance for repair. But we saved the pipe junction and got an excellent artifact demonstrating electrolytic corrosion. Well-documented, too.
You are never completely safe. Murphy is too ingenious.
I did some rather complicated programming on the C64 using Basic. Didn't have trouble like that. Since I was used to Fortran at work, I would have used larger names for my variables. No guarantees, that was at least forty years ago and I don't have a copy of the program.
Games can be fun, but I was a writer, and lived with a writer. We started with a TRS-80 Model III (differentiating caps and lower-case letters was an expensive add-on board for Apples in those days, ptui). Went up to a Model 4, and discovered -fun- things about moving text files from III to 4. Maybe it was switching from Roman numerals to Arabic. Meanwhile I'd gotten a C64 with more memory for less cost, and entered the Scripsit program by typing it out from a magazine article. It worked nicely, but it wasn't compatible with other computers. So we got a C128. C64 files transferred to CP/M seamlessly, and we got a program that translated TRS-80 files to CP/M.
About then, the IBM PC and MS/DOS began happening. We eventually transferred our files to Word Perfect on IBM. We still have those TRS-80 and C64 files, Mary went with DOC and I went with RTF, and we can still use them. And it's all due to that C128.
Back in the age of dinosaurs, the first computer I was allowed to get really intimate with was a CDC 3100. Its memories were kept on ferrite doughnuts - TINY doughnuts - physically woven into a tapestry of wire. ALL the memory in the computer was persistent. It had 8k 24-bit words, later increased to a stunning 12k. And you just turned it on. Everything else was external, on punchcards, punched tape, or magnetic tape. If you wanted the 3100 to do the same today as yesterday, you just turned it on, and there it went. Every bit was as fast and as permanent/changeable as any other.
There were, of course, drawbacks. Each bit in the tapestry had to have wires threaded through it, neatly, carefully, and expensively. And cramped.
I almost always get along well with secretaries -- as a writer and publisher (fannish subtype) I almost always know what she's doing, and can probably do it myself. But I somewhat lose it when the secretary can't do her job. Had one with problems formatting text. It turned out she was of the typewriter generation, and simply could NOT come near the right edge of the page without hitting the Enter key. Now I myself am of the pen-and-ink generation, picked up typing in high school, and met my first computer - IBM 704 - in 1959 or 60 - and didn't have that much trouble with using the Enter key, or not, at the appropriate time. I sat down at her desk and demonstrated the computer would do it for her. After half an hour of trying to convince her she fled sobbing to the Director and said I was being cruel to her.
I guess I could have been. My voice had certainly gotten louder and more insistent. But that woman was aggressively insistent upon her ignorance, there and at many other times.
Being polite is great. But unless you're an angel, it isn't always possible.
I've used quite a few inkjet printers - HP, Epson, Canon - and had poor luck with replacement cartridges or inks. Since I don't use them that much, mainly for things with color, official cartridges aren't THAT onerous an expense. If I want to print out lots of something, that's what the laser printer is for.
I liked wordpad. For a short and simple (couple lines) job it worked without adding all kinds of extraneous formatting characters. But its main virtue was that it would try to open ANY file, and often come close to succeeding. If nothing else, you could probably figure out what the file was, and what programs worked with it.
I write. I have a couple books out there, complete with copyright. I also write fan-fiction, which plays loose with others' copyrights in a more transformative manner, without copyright. I live with a writer who has maybe thirty books out, complete with copyright. We desperately need computers, because terrible things happen to your handwriting after several decades of keyboarding.
A virtuous use for AI would be as a proofreader or a copy-editor. It could warn if I'm using the same simile or word too often. It could probably tell if I'm using the right word out of the set {to, too, two}. It'd hardly be Nirvana, but it could warn us when we're making clangers.
I stated using a TRS-80 III and Scripsit in the mid-eighties. Unreliable cassette tapes indeed, but there was a lot of writing done. We bought a TRS-80 IV because it had a floppy drive and could read model III cassettes. Could read them if they were recorded at the proper speed, that is.So we had to run everything into the 3, re-record it, and save it on floppies. We also had a Commodore 64. The two-headed Commodore 128 could read the 64 tapes and turn them into CP/M disks. I don't remember all the details, but we eventually got everything onto an MS/DOS machine in DOC format. DOC went through quite a few changes itself, but we kept up. Today, I have a couple terabytes of data, painfully transferred from one machine to another, one format to another, and one storage device to another. And whenever possible, I save files in RTF, JPG and other reasonable formats that seem like they will last, and back up on two terabytes of spinning rust. The cloud? Too many strange things happen to data there,
But I still maintain an external floppy drive and an external DVD drive just in case something shows up.
I can't argue too strenuously against your point. Some distinguish between mysteries and science fiction - I'm one of them. Many fields are bedeviled by the lumper/splitter argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters
I'm obvious a splitter, while you're a lumper. At their extreme, lumpers would take anything that tells a story in pictures, accompanied by words, as a graphic novel. I, on the other hand, distinguish between manga and manhwa, And even though I see Marvel and DC as fitting in the same bucket (much as they'd hate it) I would split off Archie and Disney.
Now about that Bayeux Tapestry ...
I have an Ace Magician, which came with Windows 11 installed. I added 2 TB of spinning rust for data - the machine has a dedicated space. Wouldn't be surprised if there were one factory turning out these computers under many brand names. I use it a bit more intensely than the standard civilian, but not terribly so, and it behave itself well and does the work. And it hangs from the back of my monitor, so I don't have to look at the wires going every which way.
There is a channel on YouTube called Flite Test. https://www.youtube.com/@FliteTest . Their specialty is making foamboard RC planes - some of which are amazingly improbable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=720HKxvyTEg . But from simplest on up, they make the plans https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=flite+test+plans available, and demonstrate putting them together.
the flight control gear is another matter: they set up for RC, often with on-board cameras. Drone hardware and software is probably the expensive part.
"Afina added that "there will always be a human accountable. That is for sure."
This is - dumb. All my life, I've watched governments, people and agencies alike, do stupid or evil things, things that would have had me or you in court or in jail. I haven't seen that many heads rolling, or even job losses. When there were job losses, they were mainly low-level folk caught near the calamity, not the people whose orders caused the calamity. Accountability in governance is even less effective than reliability and truth in ChatGPT.
The world is filled with arguments, but supplying data and references in a comments column is hardly the place for them. "Woke" summarizes a whole lot in one word, but most of us know what it is, Our opinions of the phenomenon may be different. Similarly, "dog whistle", while vague, summarizes a lot of arguments. I use "cooties" to indicate ritual contamination. If nothing else, it grabs people's attention, giving me a chance to explain.
Most every group has their own dictionary these days, and complains when others don't use it. I, too, have my dictionary. If you don't like it, tough. I've been accused of ableism, for instance. Damn right! To me, it translates to "I need such-and-so done. Can you do the job?" It's pragmatism - why hire somebody who can't do the job? It's also something for the job applicant to consider. If you're on a functioning region of the autism scale, go for detail-oriented work or quality control. Don't ask for the front-desk job. If you love working with people, that front-desk job would be fine, or maybe sales.
I did mention that the containers for hydrogen gas had to be extremely sturdy, and were heavy. You might get by with an airship, where the hydrogen is (mostly?) not compressed, IF you are very very careful. Helium works in an airship, but we're having a helium shortage and really shouldn't be throwing it away in balloons (or ballonets). Reliable storage for a lot of hydrogen gas would probably weigh as much as the rest of the plane put together.
Hydrogen doesn't belong free in the air unless it is very dilute.
Hydrogen is dangerous. It leaks through everything, and it is flammable. The mass of something able to contain enough hydrogen to feed an engine for a long trip is not something an aircraft wants to carry around. The Hindenburg disaster is a hint that when things go bad with hydrogen, they go bad very enthusiastically. To quote NASA, "Liquid hydrogen must be stored at minus 423°F and handled with extreme care. To keep it from evaporating or boiling off, rockets fueled with liquid hydrogen must be carefully insulated from all sources of heat, such as rocket engine exhaust and air friction during flight through the atmosphere." Gaseous hydrogen needs a very strong container, or something that can adsorb or absorb the hydrogen - then release it. Both are heavy.
NASA uses liquid hydrogen (with great precautions) mostly in UPPER stages. Dealing with liquid hydrogen in a main stage only makes all the problems bigger. The Shuttle engines used liquid hydrogen, but they threw the fuel tank away before they reached orbit. Wouldn't want the leftover fuel close to the shuttle and its crew and cargo for the entire trip. Wouldn't want airplane passengers sitting on it either.
The only place I can see hydrogen being really useful in transportation is for a train, where weight is far less significant.
Ah, the horror of the walled garden. I wouldn't mind buying a new computer, but they come with Windows 10 or 11 -- and have been "fixed" so you can't put Windows 7 on them. I'm still using Windows 7. If nothing else, Microsoft has stopped improving it.
I started programming on an IBM 704 back in 1959 or 1960. I'm eighty now, and tired of learning new languages and interfaces. So it's old computers, and that's okay -- people are throwing them out. So I can grab them and train them in my ways. It's cheaper.
I was working at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator in 1963. Right next to the beamline I was on there was this gigantic block of iron (or steel - I didn't check its pedigree). It was a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber about ten feet tall, or three meters. It was still in its youth, and had not yet been filled with hydrogen. I graduated (1963) and went back to Minnesota. The first time they filled the chamber, very carefully, the diabolic machine exploded. That was on July 5, 1965. Obviously, the hydrogen had not behaved itself.
http://tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_085/TECH_V085_S0235_P011.pdf
You have to be insanely sure of yourself to come anywhere near liquid hydrogen.
Sometimes it's a real call center - in India. If the accent is more legible after going through the gizmo. I do not have the best of hearing. I don't ask for English, though; I ask if they have anybody who speaks Midwest American English. This is, of course, when I make the call. Otherwise, I pick up then hang up for any call from an unknown name or place.
