What I Learned Today

There was a time before the Internet—and it wasn’t that long ago. Consider excerpts of this 1984 article from the Whole Earth Catalog, titled “Telecommunicating”:

Someday everybody will communicate by computer, according to an emerging army of dreamers.
[…]
Less expensive than national networks are local bulletin boards […] To give an example of the bulletin boards’ power; David Hughes of Colorado Springs entered onto his computer bulletin board the text of a pernicious city council bill outlawing professional work at home. Instead of tracking the bill down at City Hall, residents could dial in at their convenience and read the bill at home. Within a week, Hughes had gathered enough angry readers to storm the next city council meeting and influence council members to defeat the measure.
[…]
Programs are finally emerging that treat telecommunicating as a human activity instead of a technical obstacle course.

So much so that we don’t even use the term “telecommunicating” at all. We’re just communicating.

NPR’s Science Friday broadcast an episode in 1993 called “The Future of the Internet” that is well worth the listen. The episode itself made history by being broadcast on the Internet, instead of just by radio. Today, the topics and the way they are covered sound so… quaint. Compuserve! WAIS?

The opinions being expressed are enthusiastic, sometimes prescient, and other times (from today’s perspective) naive. “I found a complete archive of jokes on the Internet in under an hour!” “The magic number is 64,000 bits per second.”

Ira: “Let’s make it clear to everyone listening that you’re not on a telephone, are you?”
Caller Tom: “No, I’m sitting in front of a workstation, with a microphone…”

I did like the discussion of “information anxiety” (they had that back then too? ;) ) over the “glut” of information available (from the 420 different databases WAIS was indexing. Oh, my word.).

“One of the things we’re doing is learning how to ignore information, and that’s one of the most important things the Internet will let you do. […] You want your machine to be working for you … finding the right stuff. There’s just way too much out there already. So going and filtering through, searching, finding just the issues that you care about — your machine is starting to know a lot about you. It knows what you like, what you don’t like, what you’ve read, what you didn’t read.”

I wish we could say we’ve solved that problem now! Even with RSS feeds, collaborative filtering, and various learning systems, I still feel inundated by all there is to read, and without a good solution for sorting and prioritizing it. Email alone…!

Yeah, I blinked at the headline, too. One of my projects at the Monrovia Library is scanning old newspapers (on microfilm) into digital files for easy later access (and hopefully indexing). This item came from the July 2, 1915 issue of the Monrovia Messenger:

Interesting slice of history!

What would you do with a brand-new computer of unprecedented capabilities? Ada Lovelace demonstrated the theoretical capabilities of Babbage’s Analytical Machine with a program to compute Bernoulli numbers (1843). J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly’s first program for ENIAC was a ballistics calculation (1946). Alan Turing used the Manchester Mark 1 to compute Mersenne primes (1949). When John von Neumann had the chance to explore the abilities of ENIAC’s successor, EDVAC, he focused on something quite different: data sorting.

Donald Knuth wrote a fascinating 1970 paper, “Von Neumann’s First Computer Program,” which analyzes the original 23-page handwritten document where von Neumann recorded his planned program. Von Neumann conceived of a merge sort algorithm and wrote out an implementation of the merge part of it, which Knuth examined and reported on. Knuth noted the insights von Neumann achieved and then respectfully, humbly, pointed out places where von Neumann’s code could be optimized as well as an unfortunate bug in the program. As Knuth noted, not bad for programming without having the actual machine yet to test it! (I do not know how Knuth found the error, whether by hand-examination or by running the program through a simulator.)

There were some very pressing reasons why ballistics and numerical simulations were the top priorities for the electronic computers just coming into existence in the late 1940’s. Von Neumann’s foray into “a nonnumeric application for computers” foreshadowed the generation and growth of information processing and a landslide of other associated activities and applications in use throughout the world today.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of riding the Coast Starlight train north from Albany, OR, to Olympia, WA. As always, I was entranced by the stunning views, the vast comfortable ease of travel, and what interesting things there were to learn and see. From Portland north to Seattle, the train has volunteers from the National Park Service who sit in the observation car and offer interesting bits of history or explanations about what you’re seeing outside those huge picture windows. This is brilliant! I learned a variety of interesting tidbits:

• Portland got its name as the result of a coin flip. The two founders, Asa Lovejoy and Francis Pettygrove, each wanted to name it after their favorite back-East city, respectively Boston and Portland (Maine). They flipped a coin and Pettygrove won. (Speaking of names, ever wonder how Oregon got its name? The wikipedia article on this is disappointingly inconclusive, but the various hypotheses are interesting.
• A Columbia River drawbridge was open when we arrived, so we had to wait for it to finish letting some ship through. The Columbia has been dredged multiple times to permit the passage of deep-sea ships up it.
• The Coast Starlight’s running speed is 75-79 mph. (It doesn’t feel that fast because it’s so smooth and quiet on the inside!) That speed limit is dictated not by the trains but by the track system, which was designed to accommodate the (much slower) freight trains. Apparently if the CS ran any faster, it would outpace the signaling system (e.g., the triggers prior to an intersection that sound the bells and lower the gates).
• Wheat grown in Washington is soft/winter wheat, mainly used for noodles and doughnuts. 90% of it is shipped to the East. Wheat from Montana is harder (heartier?).
• As a southbound train went by, full of grain cars, our guide commented that each train car holds 100 tons of grain; there are 110 cars in 1 train; and the contents of 6.5 trains fill 1 ocean carrier.
• We passed several artificial mounds and hills as we passed through Washington, which are formed from clearing ash from the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption. Ash had to be scraped off of hundreds of miles of roads and tracks.

Now I’m in Olympia, where more things to learn await. :)

My new home is in the tiny town of Philomath, just outside of Corvallis, OR. It tickles me to no end that Philomath means “lover of learning”; what better place for me to reside? [Contrast with “philosoph” (lover of wisdom) and “polymath” (one who has learning in many subjects).] I was curious, however, as to how this tiny town (fewer than 4000 residents) could have gotten such a name. Today while exploring the town on foot, I came across the Benton County Museum, which illuminated some of the town’s history.

Philomath was named after Philomath College, which was founded in 1867. The College consisted of the building that the museum now occupies. During my visit today, workmen were busy replacing the roof (you can see evidence of construction in my picture). The museum itself also featured an impressive display of quilts, an entire room of historic children’s toys, and a tiny side room showing fluorescent rocks. Philomath as a name for a college seems… just perfect. Sadly, the college closed in 1929 due to “declining enrollment”.

Philomath’s nickname is the “City of Volunteers”. Again, what a great place to be! I’ve already picked up an application form to volunteer at the library. While walking around, I passed the fire station — which is also seeking volunteers (“will train!”). I visited the library, the bank, the post office, and had lunch at a local cafe. The most amusing store I saw was the combination “rock shop” and “auto parts store” (insert B.C. Comic joke here).

This is definitely a great place to be. And only 10 minutes from Corvallis, with all of its own attractions!