Interesting things

Bolards: an elegant defense for more noble times

kenritley

OK, it is always a bad idea to paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, but during my recent trip to Marseille I thought for a bit how some things never change. In the middle ages, villages and cities used stone walls to protect the people inside against invaders — and, by the way, to more effectively and efficiently kill those who would try to invade. And today, bolards are used to protect the people inside against terrorists. Maybe we can define “progress” in this sense, because today we build infrastructure to keep the terrorists out, not to kill them.

As an IT guy, I am wondering if we could call this a design pattern?

Here is a barricade I spotted guarding the pedestrian area of the Vieux-Port in Marseille:

And here is a nice snap of the Barricade Man opening it, so a water spray truck can drive inside and spray water everywhere. The French really don’t feel comfortable unless the streets are sprayed with water on a regular basis.

“Alpenglow” — or, Pre-Sunrise Twilight Scattering

kenritley

This is the view I see from my balcony in the morning. That triangular peak just right of the middle is the Eiger — and it plays a prominent role in The Eiger Sanction in my opinion the BEST moving starring Clint Eastwood as an assassin who’s been contracted to kill another assassin in a group of people climbing the Eiger — but he doesn’t know which of the climbing party is his target. Lest you think Clint always places the nice guy, Clint could not figure out who specifically was his target — so he killed everyone by cutting a rope and letting them drop to their deaths. At the very end of the movie, Clint realizes that in fact his trainer — not one of the climbers — was his real target all along — but he lets him live.

I’ve lived in Switzerland now for 16 years, and the morning sky above the Alps never fails to impress me:

These colors are what is known as pre-sunrise twilight scattering. 

Because the view is towards the horizon, the physical effect called Raleigh Scattering means the blue light is scattered more strongly so that the red light shines through. But, that same blue light that has been scattered away interacts with the red light – causing purples! The formula is quite complicated, but in general the scattering cross section depends on the reciprocal of the wavelength (actually, wavelength**4),  so that blue light (λ≈450 nm) scatters about 10× more than red light (λ≈700 nm)!

 

My battle with a monster

kenritley

A Guest Blog, by Arlene Ritley

I was in the bedroom reading and got up to go into the front room to turn the light off when I noticed this huge creature on the wall above the lamp, black with legs and a silver black back with tentacles and furry legs. It was still – not moving, just frozen in time.

Quietly on Catholic feet, I moved into the kitchen, open the cabinet under the sink and looked for something to spray him with. All I found at first was some room spray, and I took that. Then I found some Clorox without bleach spray, and I brought that along. I was now armed and ready for battle!

I quietly gathered my arsenal of weapons and walked close to the wall he was on. I knew he was looking at me, because the tentacles on his head began moving, almost as though he were trying to get my scent from the air. I slowly and carefully picked up what I thought was the Clorox without bleach. However, it turned out to be, the room spray. I had no choice put to aim the spray at him and pull the trigger.

The spray hit him full on, but he turned his head to look at me, and I almost saw him laugh, saying to himself quotation marks what does this woman think she’s going to kill me, room deodorizer?

And slowly, laughing at me, as I stood there, he climbed up the wall, not bothering to look back.

I quietly turned around and found the Clorox spray. I turned the nozzle on and put a sample of the spray into the sink. Seeing that the Clorox comes out of the spray quite heavily, I pointed at the cockroach and sprayed and sprayed and sprayed.

The Clorox spray started trickling down the wall, leaving wet marks on the wall as it came down. The cockroach never moved, although it was covered in the spray. It just looked at me and I looked at him. I told him, cockroach you will not win the war. I sprayed him again and again.

He finally fell off the wall, and I thought to myself this is the end of roach. But as I looked at him on the rug, he started moving slow, but then gaining speed running around my chair, trying to find a hiding place. The rocker is large, and there are many hidden places that he could hide within the springs of the chair. This is not what I wanted. So again, I moved forward, seeking him out.

He finally came into view, and once again I sprayed him, and he moved into the hidden shadows, and I lost him, but he came out again, and the spray was in my hand, and I used it spraying and spray until there was puddles of spray in the rug.

It finally seemed that the end was near for the roach. He did not move, nor did he look at me. I almost thought he was giving up, and I was very happy to put my spray down. But instead he made a right turn and went back under the chair with the speed of lightning.

I moved the chair and there he was quietly sitting, looking at me. I walked away and went to the closet and found a broom, and I got that out along with the rag. So, although he was not moving, just looking at me, I quietly threw the rag over him, and then hit him and hit him and hit him with the end of the broom. He did not come out from under the rag and so I stepped on it with all my weight. Gently and quietly I picked up the end of the rag and looked underneath it, and there he was never to live again. I wrapped him in a paper towel and put him in a large plastic bag which I then sealed tightly. Tomorrow I will take him to the trash barrel. But I know in the back of my mind if there is one cockroach in the house there are many, so every day I will be looking at the walls and the carpets for anything that moves.

I going to call the handyman out to put a sweeper under my front door so that nothing from the hallway hallway will crawl into my room.

I am also going to look on amazon.com to find some roach killer. And have that sent to me on overnight delivery. It is war and I will win!

No Such Agency

kenritley

Most people think the NSA is located in Ft. Meade, Maryland – and indeed, part of it is there. But according to rumors — and mind you, these are just rumors! — another NSA complex is located in San Antonio.

Of course, San Antonio is HOT – it actually broke global heat records in 2023 for the most continous days above 40C/100F. So as you can imagine, IF the rumors are true — and if the NSA were located in San Antonio — and I have no way of knowing if those rumors are true — and IF the NSA operated a huge datacenter — then it would be quite reasonable to expect a LOT of air conditioning.

Well, rumors aside, right next to a Walmart I spotted a HUGE field of massive air conditioning units – with no buildings in sight! To give a sense of scale, these air conditioning units easily cover a size of 10 footballs fields! So it does make one think: what exactly is being cooled, where, and for what reason?

When programs write programs for programs

kenritley

The evolution of programming languages from the electromechanical 0GL to the advanced 5GL has fundamentally altered human-computer interaction. High-level languages and Low-Code/No-Code platforms have democratized programming, leading to the recent integration of AI tools which challenge traditional programming roles. But now, the confluence of AI with coding practices may not be merely a further incremental change but could represent the inception of a new paradigm in software development, a symbiosis of human creativity and computational efficiency.

The human/computer interaction

How humans program computers has only changed a handful of times in the last 130 years. The first tabulating machine was electromechanical. It was first introduced by Herman Hollerith’s company in 1890, and in fact these business machines put the BM in IBM. They could do limited digital processing on data provided to them via punched cards. An operator would program them with jumper wires and plugs on a pin board, telling the electricity where to flow and thereby which calculations to carry out. Let’s call this programming approach the Zeroth Generation Language, or 0GL.

The first large computers that followed borrowed Joseph Jacquard’s loom approach from 1803, using a defined instruction set encoded by ones and zeros; these were the First Generation Languages (1GL). Often they were implemented by giant roles of black tape with holes, a technology dating back to Basile Bouchon in 1725. The computing power was limited, but the only limit to the size of your application was how much tape your roles could hold.

The Second Generation (2GL) assembly languages increased human usability by replacing 0’s and 1’s with symbolic names. But in fact this was a small paradigm change, because these languages were just as tied to their hardware as were the wires in the tabulating machines 50 years before them.

The next great jump was FORTRAN (in 1957) and COBOL (in 1959). These languages were more human-readable than assembly, but that was not the key point. The key point was abstraction, achieved via machine-dependent compilers, so that one FORTRAN or COBOL application would presumably give the same answers on any machine on which it was run.

The transition to Fourth Generation Languages (4GL) was all about a leap in usability. Invented around 1970, SQL is the most notable example, using a human-like syntax: you tell it what you want, and it figures out how to get it. Despite its age it’s never been replaced and remains the gold standard for interacting with relational databases today.

Many computer scientists argue that the newest Low-Code/No-Code programming environments, such as Microsoft PowerApps, are the latest addition to the 4GL cadre since they similarly require little knowledge of traditional programming structures. This paradigm is exploding in popularity and transforming the enterprise IT landscape: business users (not IT professionals) create ephemeral applications to solve specific and often short-term business problems. But how ironic that with their GUIs and controls and connectors, they are the modern digital equivalents of the 0GL tabulating machine pin boards from 130 years ago!

Some people have argued there are now Fifth Generation Languages (5GL), used for artificial intelligence and machine learning, where the focus is on the results expected, not on how to achieve them.

From coding by hand to AI collaboration

The evolution of 0GL to 5GL is all about the leaps in how humans interact with machines. But not unsurprisingly, the advent of ChatGPT (and its cousins like Bard and GitHub Co-Pilot) has brought about a new paradigm in how we develop applications. As the new generation of college computer science students now well know, you don’t have to write your own Java/PHP/Python… code anymore; instead, you can ask ChatGPT to write it for you. Or for example, you can feed ChatGPT buggy code or code lacking in quality, and ask it to remedy the situation, or to create the tests and documentation. To be sure, there are limits, and a good human understanding of the language is essential to avoid errors and ensure you get the results you want. But the technology is advancing rapidly, its limits are contracting, and the degree of user-needed corrections shrinks every day.

If we project this situation forward – even just a bit – its ludicrousness becomes self-evident: humans asking AIs to create human-readable code for humans that no longer need to read the code! This paradox underscores a new era where the traditional roles of human programmers are not just assisted but fundamentally altered by artificial intelligence; it marks a significant evolution in computational development.

With Artificial intelligence now a key player in the realm of code creation, we need to examine its repercussions on this craft. This present state may be the start of a larger change, where artificial intelligence becomes a collaborative partner in code creation and the relationship between developer and programming tool is increasingly indistinct – in other words, a symbiosis of human creativity and computational power.

Odd entrance

kenritley

I spotted this entrance to an apartment building in Bern.

It really makes one stop and wonder . . . . why?  Was this part of a building under historical protection? But if you look closely you’ll see it’s actually no entrance at all. What used to be an entrance lacks any stairs or steps up to it.