Cray vs Raspberry Pi

In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1

(via Slashdot)

Four years ago

It’s four years to the day since a doctor in China privately warned colleagues about pneumonia cases related to coronavirus (which turned out to be COVID). His message was leaked, and went viral on social media, leading to his arrest by authorities for spreading fake news. A few months later he contracted COVID and died, aged 33 (via Kevin Beaumont on Mastodon)

Jimmy the Raven

Random fun film fact: The crow in It’s a Wonderful Life seen in the Building & Loan that Uncle Billy kept as a pet is the same crow that flew on Scarecrow’s arm in The Wizard of Oz whom he was unable to scare. His name was Jimmy and he was a raven who first appeared in You Can’t Take It With You directed by Frank Capra who went on to cast the bird in every subsequent movie he made.

Via John Pinter on Mastodon

That time I used Google to cure myself of something

In most cases, people will tell you (as they have definitely told me) not to Google symptoms or use “Doctor Google” to try to diagnose or treat something, the implication being that whatever you are likely to find will be misleading and/or completely wrong, and possibly even wrong in a dangerous way. All of which is often true! But not always, as I found out a number of years ago, when I was hit with a medical issue very suddenly, and the internet was my only hope in terms of figuring out what I should do about it.

So what was the issue? In a word, vertigo. Repeated and paralyzing vertigo, which started when I woke up one morning and turned my head to look at the clock. Immediately, my head started spinning as though I had just gotten off the Tilt-A-Whirl ride at the fair. After about 30 seconds it went away, but when I sat up, the same thing happened — swirling, head spinning, a feeling of being nauseated. I should mention here that I suffer from motion sickness quite badly, and always have — according to my family, I used to throw up on pretty much every car ride.

Even as an adult, I found I couldn’t go on any amusement park ride that went around in circles — even ones designed for small children. Going up and down was fine, but around and around was death. When our youngest daughter was little she begged me to go on the spinning tea-cup ride, where you sit in a giant tea cup and then the cup goes around and the thing it’s attached to also goes around. After what seemed like hours of agony (it was probably about three minutes) I had to go lie down on a bench, and didn’t feel right for hours.

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Canada and guitars

As an acoustic guitar player, I’ve played Norman guitars and Godin guitars and Boucher guitars and Seagull and La Patrie guitars, and I knew they were all connected somehow, but I was never sure how. This is a chronological description of the relationships between some of Canada’s best luthiers (guitar-makers) rrom a regular poster on the Acoustic Guitar group on Facebook:

“Robert Godin met Normand Boucher on a hunting trip to La Patrie around 1969-70, maybe 71. Robert was then a salesman at La Tosca music store in Montreal. Normand Boucher was then a carpenter, door and windows and cabinet maker in La Patrie. Building / designing guitars took more and more of his spare time.
He wanted to design an adjustable angle neck so that musicians could adjust their guitars as needed in a few minutes. Normand Boucher and Robert Godin both started working together in 1972, Normand running his shop, Robert being the exclusive distributor through his company Sibécor.

Even before that, Robert started to sell Norman guitars through La Tosca. Norman guitars were a smash hit in the province of Quebec, every player wanted one, tons of artists using them. Robert Godin started to build his own guitars in 1979 with Claude Boucher, son of Normand: Kamouraska and Lys, which later became La Patrie and Seagull. Claude designed and ran the shop, Robert on the road selling. Now we had in La Patrie the Unisonic shop up the hill (Robert Godin/Claude Boucher) and the Norman shop down the hill (Normand Boucher), All distributed by Sibécor (Robert Godin).

The early 80’s were tough times for the acoustic guitar industry. In 1982 the Unisonic / Sibécor companies were shut down, Claude Boucher left and Robert with fresh investors restarted under a new company structure: Guitabec (the shop) / Lasido (distribution), that is when the Kamouraska / Lys lines changed names to La Patrie / Seagull. Meanwhile down the hill in September 1980 the Norman shop burned down to the ground completely. Normand Boucher rebuilt the shop and tooling, and tried to restructure a decent distribution network. Claude Boucher came back to the Norman shop in 1983.

Times were hard as there was also a general economic recession. Eventually Normand Boucher lost control of his shop around 1986 and the new management who had no experience in the making of musical instruments. Struggled trying to survive, eventually, Robert Godin ended up buying Norman in 1989. Claude left Norman in 1986 and bought the village’s restaurant. Richard Boucher (Normand’s other son) stayed at the Norman shop till the end. Richard and Claude would years later start up the « Boucher » line of guitars, run today by Robin Boucher, Normand’s nephew.”

Ma Vie en Bling

A poem by Anne Boyer, found via Matt Bogle’s excellent newsletter Pome, which sends used to send you a new poem every day (alas, Matt recently announced the Pome newsletter is on hiatus):

“Did I explain that those days were the days when the people wrote on machines that connected to machines that connected to machines that connected to people who wrote on machines?

Those were the days when we believed in information.

And I was a person in those days, but I did not believe in information. I liked to imagine the interfaces that would make the public private and make the private okay.

Privacy was not an effect, exactly, of confession, which in those days was buying stock in the public company. Those were the days of crude luxury and genteel sorrow. Those were the days I loved to delete.”

Anne Boyer (2015)

Here are the things you clicked on the most in 2023

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. Before we begin, I realize that the “year-end round-up” newsletter has become so ubiquitous that you may have no room in your life for another one. But the round-up has become a time-tested tradition in the media business for some pretty compelling reasons – for one, the period between Christmas and New Year’s is kind of a dead zone, and round-ups are relatively easy to pull together when you are a) understaffed, b) tired c) hungover d) lacking in motivation or e) all of the above.

I am not immune to these kinds of pressures myself, I confess. But on top of that, I also find it kind of fascinating to look at which of the links I include here get the most clicks. That’s why when I started this newsletter, I also installed an open-source link-shortening service called Yourls, which lets me create custom links for the articles I share. It comes with built-in analytics that track the clicks on those links, in much the same way Twitter and other services do. I don’t really do anything with this information – I don’t sell it to advertisers, or pick different links to include based on whether they might get more clicks (at least not consciously). I just find it interesting! And maybe you will too.

This sample is obviously weighted with respect to time, in that the links I included in early versions of the newsletter have had time to accumulate more clicks. But I’m not sure how many people go back and look at previous versions of the newsletter, so it’s hard to say how much of an impact that has. Anyway, without further ado, here are the 10 most popular links since January, 2023:

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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He created the personal computer, then walked away

From Gareth Edwards at Every: “In September 1974, Ed Roberts was sitting at the bank in a foreclosure meeting. His once-profitable calculator company, Micro Instrument and Telemetry Systems, was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Roberts was soliciting a $65,000 loan. Not to spend on calculators, he explained to the bank, but for something much more important, something nobody had done before. He planned to build an affordable personal computer. This is the story of the man who created the personal computer, launched the careers of Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, and decided—at the height of his success—to walk away, buy a horse farm, and go back to school to become a doctor.”

There’s a sunken galleon worth $20 billion, but no one can agree on who owns it

Sunken Galleon | Revelation Online - Official Website

From Remy Tumin for the NYT: “When the San José made its final voyage from Seville, Spain, to the Americas in 1706, the Spanish galleon was considered to be one of the most complex machines ever built. Then it was destroyed in an ambush by the British in 1708 in what is known as Wager’s Action, sinking off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia, with a haul of gold, jewels and other goods that could be worth upward of $20 billion today. Some experts say that number is inflated. But the myth built around the San José has prompted the Colombian government to keep its exact location a secret as a matter of national security.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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The Ingram Christmas Letter for 2023

Yes, it’s your favourite time of the year — the Ingram Christmas Letter is finally here! In what has become a somewhat depressing annual event, I am typing this in mid-December and it’s plus 10 Celsius, not a trace of snow on the ground. The part of me that hates shovelling snow is happy, but the part of me that is concerned about global warming is not happy at all. In any case, on to the letter! I will do my best not to make this all about our 18-month-old granddaughter Quinn, but it is going to be difficult, since I am convinced she is the cutest and smartest child who probably ever existed (it’s possible there were some cuter and smarter children in ancient Greece, but I doubt it). As usual, the photos here are also available as a Google Photos album or at the Ingram Family Photo Archive  — which runs on an old computer in our daughter’s bedroom, so please don’t get mad if it’s down. You can also find a more old-fashioned web version of this letter, complete with old-timey Santa images, at https://mathewingram.com/christmas. However you consume it, it’s the same great Ingram family content that you know and love!

Since most of these letters are written before Christmas, they don’t often include photos *from* Christmas, but I will make an exception in this case because of the aforementioned angel known as Quinnderella, who was vision in plaid for her first Christmas. She appeared to have a great time, despite not really knowing what was happening, and at one point she appeared to be channeling her Scottish ancestors and telling a tall tale, clad in her tiny sweater and plaid skirt. And someone upstairs must have heard us wish for a white Christmas, because we got a massive dump of snow just a few days before, and Meaghan — who was driving Becky’s mother from Ottawa — had to be rescued from the blizzard by Wade and me. But once everyone was safe, the snow made it very pretty on hikes around the property, making everything look like Narnia.

Continue reading “The Ingram Christmas Letter for 2023”

Inside the mind of a bee — do they think? Are they conscious?

Scott Alexander, a psychologist who blogs at Astral Codex Ten, writes about a book that dives into the question of whether bees can think or not:

“Lars Chittka, who wrote The Mind of a Bee, got thinking. He and his lab decided to build fake robotic crab spiders, and had them really robotically attack bumble bees when they visited flowers. Not only did the bees have a bad time, their behavioural patterns totally changed. They began to approach the flowers differently. They began inspecting flowers via quick scanning flights before landing on them, and would occasionally reject flowers even if there was no crab spider present. They seemed more nervous. If you want to see if humans are optimistic or pessimistic, you point at a glass of water that is halfway filled and ask them to describe it. Similarly, you can do the glass half-full versus half-empty test on bees, where you give them an ambiguous stimulus – it might be sucrose, which bees love, or it might be quinine, which they hate – and see if they want it. 

If they want it, they’re likely a happy-go-lucky bee with nothing on their mind. If you simulate the bee being attacked by a predator right before this test, they are much less likely to fly to the solution and much more likely to fly into the container labelled ‘Therabee’. Does that mean bees feel emotions? If they feel emotions, would that mean bees have conscious states? Or are these all just instinctive responses? Bees exist in that great hinterland of consciousness – the valley where we throw all manner of creatures and living beings whose experiences we remain fundamentally uncertain about. Some readers will likely enter the book believing that bees do not have conscious experiences, and Lars Chittka does a good job disabusing these people of their certainty in this belief, if not the belief altogether.”

There’s a lot more to it than this small sample, and it’s all fascinating — why bees build hexagonal honeycombs (even in space with zero gravity), why they do the waggle dance to deliver information about the angle of the sun even though it doesn’t improve their ability to gather nectar, and much more.

How Leonardo da Vinci was inspired to create his most famous drawing, Vitruvian Man

From Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor, comes the story of Vitruvius, one of the most important architects in history:

“What makes Vitruvius so important? During his retirement he wrote something called De Architectura, a comprehensive treatise — part history, part guide — on Greek and Roman architecture. This book is the only surviving architectural treatise from the ancient world. That is to say: without this book we would know far less about Classical Architecture, and would have had to reverse engineer our knowledge of the Five Orders and of Proportion by analysing ancient ruins. Vitruvius’ detailed description of human proportions, which he claimed to be the basis of Classical Architecture, inspired one of history’s most famous drawings: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.”

He wrote: “For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the dis­tance from the bottom of the chin to the under side of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the under side of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. The length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth.”

This busy World War I munitions company in Connecticut was too good to be true

From the excellent Why Is This Interesting newsletter comes the story of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, a munitions manufacturer based in Connecticut in 1915 that made artillery shells. With World War I raging in Europe, the company planned to do a brisk business and placed large orders with leading U.S. munitions suppliers. On July 24 of 1915, a German lawyer named Heinrich Albert had his briefcase stolen on the Sixth Avenue El in Manhattan. But this was no ordinary snatch and grab — the thief in this case was a US Secret Service agent named Frank Burke, and the contents of the briefcase, which quickly found their way into the hands of U.S. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, revealed that Bridgeport Projectile wasn’t a defense contractor at all, but rather a secret plot created by the German government. As a written account describes it:

“The plan for the Bridgeport Projectile Company, conceived by Heinrich Albert and Franz von Papen and approved by the German general staff, called for the sheer waste of tens of millions of dollars. Bridgeport Projectile was in business merely to keep America’s leading munitions producers too busy to fill genuine orders for the weapons the French and British so desperately needed. The false-front company had ordered five million pounds of gunpowder and two million shell cases with the intention of simply storing them.”

The Bridgeport Projectile episode has been cited by U.S. policymakers as a cautionary tale, an early example of how foreign direct investment in the United States—that is, non-U.S. entities or individuals buying or investing in U.S. companies—can harm U.S. national security. It helped lead to the creation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews the national security implications of certain foreign investment transactions through the an interagency body comprised of nine executive branch departments and offices and backed by the U.S. Intelligence Community.