UNIX @ 50

Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie (standing) in front of a PDP-11. Ritchie annotated this press image for Bell Labs as "an amusing photo," and he joked that he had much "more luxuriant and darker hair" at the time of the photo than when it appeared in magazines like the March 1999 Scientific American (which, unfortunately, incorrectly swapped IDs for the two).

ArsTechinica hits a home run describing the circuitous way UNIX came to be by brilliant guys working in a loose environment that allowed them to be smart and creative in ways that truly boggle the mind. :)

Luckily for computer enthusiasts, constraint can at times lead to immense creativity. And so the most influential operating system ever written was not funded by venture capitalists, and the people who wrote it didn’t become billionaires because of it. Unix came about because Bell Labs hired smart people and gave them the freedom to amuse themselves, trusting that their projects would be useful more often than not. Before Unix, researchers at Bell Labs had already invented the transistor and the laser, as well as any number of innovations in computer graphics, speech synthesis, and speech recognition.

It gets better.

Still, there was one tiny problem for Thompson and his fellow tinkerers at the moment—nobody had a computer. While lab management had no problem with computers as such, McIlroy’s programmers couldn’t convince their bosses to give them one. Having been burned badly by the Multics fiasco, Davis wasn’t sold on the team’s pitch to give them a new computer so they could continue operating system research and development. From lab management’s perspective, it seemed like Thompson and the rest of the team just wanted to keep working on the Multics project.

Scrounging for hardware ...

Acoustics still had that computer, but they weren’t using it and had stuck it somewhere out of the way up on the sixth floor.

And so Thompson, an indefatigable explorer of the labs’ nooks and crannies, finally found that PDP-7 shortly after Davis and Baker cancelled Multics.

With the rest of the team’s help, Thompson bundled up the various pieces of the PDP-7—a machine about the size of a refrigerator, not counting the terminal—moved it into a closet assigned to the acoustics department, and got it up and running. One way or another, they convinced acoustics to provide space for the computer and also to pay for the not infrequent repairs to it out of that department’s budget.

Seventh Edition Unix was an important early release of the Unix operating system from 1979. It was the last Bell Labs release to go widespread before AT&T commercialized Unix. Fun fact: The user ("dmr") and home directory ("/usr/dmr") for Dennis Ritchie are still present.

Sidenote, yours truly actually had one of these ... :)

Eventually, Thompson made it to Murray Hill. To his surprise, he found Bell Labs to his liking and accepted the job offer. And a short while later, he received a box from his friend in Pensacola—a box with a baby alligator inside. Rather than quickly dispatching it, Thompson adopted the gator and kept it in a glass baking dish on the radiator in his office, feeding it bologna and hot dogs from time to time until it escaped. It reappeared some days later in a typing pool on one of the lower floors, standing on its hind legs. Thompson recalled it hissing at a secretary who was standing on her hind legs and screaming. Ultimately, Thompson was allowed to stay on at Bell Labs—but the gator had to go… not before biting a few Nobel Prize winners, at least according to Thompson.

Back in the day where America did things, amazing things like building UNIX, the OS that connects the world was the norm, not the exception, something that needs to be changed now without question.

Endnote, my gator was named Albert who also came in a box. Said predator started at 10 inches, grew to almost 3 feet before mercifully dying of natural causes. Hamburger, hot dogs plus any leftovers of the meat variety were on the menu for this incredibly intense animal. :)

2020 redux???

Could this fubar happen again? ... Absolutely given just how ignorant and passive people truly are regarding Agent Orange and the well oiled political machine striving to put him back in the White House for four more years after the upcoming election follies of 2020 have finally been put to rest.

Early evening, August, Cincinnati. The Queen City’s many bridges are sealed off, its sky is dirty with helicopters, and seemingly every cop for 100 miles is patrolling Pete Rose Way along the Ohio River. A crowd of 20,000 or more stands in punishing heat, waiting to enter U.S. Bank Arena. The evil rumor buzzing down the line of MAGA hats is that not everyone will get in to see Donald Trump.

“Can we just get in for a minute?” complains a boy of about 10 to his mother. There are a lot of kids here.

Donald Trump doesn’t visit Middle America. He descends upon it. His rallies are awesome spectacles. Gawkers come down from the hills. If NASA traveled the country holding showings of the first captured alien life-form, the turnout would be similar. The pope driving monster trucks might get this much attention.

Welcome to 'Useful Idiots,' a New Rolling Stone Podcast

2020 redux? Possible without question.

Addendum ... Almost everyone in line is wearing 45 merch. Trump is the most T-shirtable president in history, and it’s not even close. Trumpinator tees are big (“2020: I’LL BE BACK”), but you’ll also see Trump as Rambo (complete with headband, ammo belt, and phallic rocket-launcher), Trump as the Punisher (a Trump pompadour atop the famous skull), even Trump as Superman (pulling his suit open to reveal a giant T).

Any questions?

Beyond Meat - Is now prime time :)

Beyond Meat is thrilled to announce that today we became the 1st plant-based food company to go public on a major exchange. Going public will enable us to further invest in R&D and manufacturing, allowing us to bring plant-based meat to more communities and countries around the world.

Through success and struggles, the consumer has been there for us, offering feedback, love and inspiration. Today, together, we are breaking new ground. #GoBeyond

It's about time. :)

Intensity +

Up close and personal, this video shows just how intense fire ants truly are.

As Dr. Smith explains, a fire ant's stinger is made up of two main components. First is a stylet, which is essentially a hollow hypodermic needle attached to a reservoir of venom. Arranged around the perimeter of the stylet are three more needles called lancets, which move back and forth to dig beneath the surface and pump out the venom. It only takes about 75 milliseconds for one lancet to move, so a fire ant can inject a surprising amount of venom in less than a second.

Intensity + without question. The video seen below shows just how tough they truly are.

Ah ... Just Nuke It

Ah ... Just Nuke It, a notion the Donald floated to various agencies regarding the use of nukes to off hurricanes before they hit land has actually been around for over 60 years.

Sunday night, Axios’s Jonathan Swan broke news that Donald Trump—among his many often random musings—appears to have considered one of the worst-but-most-persistent ideas in public policy: Nuking hurricanes.

The idea has evidently surfaced multiple times in the administration, as Swan outlined, including during a hurricane preparedness briefings at the White House. “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” the president evidently interrupted, according to Swan’s source. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?”

Well, why not ...

In those heady early years of the atomic age, many scientists imagined a world where humans could routinely use nuclear weapons to cleave the earth and remake its climate. Decades before climate change became a major concern, one book, Almighty Atom: The Real Story of Atomic Energy, suggested using atomic weapons to melt the polar ice caps, gifting “the entire world a moister, warmer climate.”

It gets better as Trump suggested this "wonderful" idea more than once.

President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president's private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.

But ... as stated before ...

Trump didn't invent this idea. The notion that detonating a nuclear bomb over the eye of a hurricane could be used to counteract convection currents dates to the Eisenhower era, when it was floated by a government scientist.

One cannot make this up, ever. :)

This will not end well ...

This will not end well ...

Hubble yet again ...

The pair of strange, luminescent creatures at play in this image are actually galaxies — realms of millions upon millions of stars.

This galactic duo is known as UGC 2369. The galaxies are interacting, meaning that their mutual gravitational attraction is pulling them closer and closer together and distorting their shapes in the process. A tenuous bridge of gas, dust and stars can be seen connecting the two galaxies, created when they pulled material out into space across the diminishing divide between them. 

From the very small ... Think Butterflies ... to Hubble yet again, shows that reality is something else altogether. :)

Think Butterflies :)

Nuff said. :)

The new land rush ...

Even Trump recognizes the reality of global warming by suggesting to buy Greenland, a region containing vast resources being slowly revealed by the melting of ice as we speak.

President Donald Trump’s much-mocked desire to buy Greenland, which was rebuffed by the Danish government to his great displeasure, might be the closest he has come to acknowledging the gravity of global warming—though hardly the sort of acknowledgment one might hope for. According to the Wall Street Journal article that first broke the news about Greenland, Trump’s interest was piqued when advisers spoke of the island’s “abundant resources and geopolitical importance.” The reason those resources—including reserves of coal and uranium—are available for exploitation is because of Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet. Its geopolitical importance has been greatly increased by the melting of Arctic Ocean ice, which has made new shipping routes accessible and opened up a new theater of strategic competition for the United States, Canada, Russia, the Nordic countries and, increasingly, China.

Trump probably doesn’t realize it, but he’s not the first president in recent years to look at the coming impact of climate change and decide to buy land. And with dislocated populations and scarcer resources looming on the horizon, he might not be the last.

He won't be as nothing is being done as we move toward climate disruption of the most pernicious kind.

Fake News/rev XX

Fake news is everywhere. From Fox News to CNN, spin is part of the vocabulary of the news channels to 1, sell ads to the specific viewer demographic in question and 2, to shape public opinion as the real owners, so eloquently articulated by the late great George Carlin, don't want critical thinkers capable of understanding just what the hell is going on in a world spinning increasingly out of control. With that being said, more fake news is being generated by AI because 1, it's CHEAPER and 2, AI is getting better at it.

AI vs AI

AI can be used to spread fake news, write fake reviews and to create a pretend mob of social media users aimed at bombarding comments sections with specific agendas.

However, according to MIT researchers, it can now also be used to spot fake artificially-generated text — apparently, it takes one to know one.

But there's hope.

Though the technology for misinformation is advancing at a worryingly fast pace, the same broad toolset can thankfully be used to catch this type of misinformation. Fake news, deepfakes and twitter bots might have their days numbered by the very technology that helped create them.

Harvard University and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers recently developed a new tool that spots text that has been generated by AI.

The tool called the Giant Language Model Test Room (GLTR), takes advantage of the fact that AI text generators use fairly predictable statistical patterns in text.

While these patterns might not be easy to spot for your average reader, it seems that an algorithm can do a pretty good job at it. The AI tool, essentially, can tell if the text is too predictable to have been written by a human.

Factoid:  6 corporations own 90% of all US media.