Saturday, 4 December 2010

1604 New Year 2009 discontent

A relaxed and balanced day turned into disappointment with myself and an unjustified sense of failure. Late in the day I began to understand the extraordinary development which could occur in the exponential growth of computing processing over the next century with the ability to control all aspects of the physical world within its limitations and to explore the universe. I say could because the precondition is a world economy and a world government and for this to occur all those who oppose such a development will have to be eliminated before the new power could become available to them. This is the inherent contradiction of the situation and which makes those who continue to prophecy the ending of human life on the planet through fire, a more likely outcome than a government which has eliminated armed conflict, death from starvation and most present illnesses. However just as human kind has appeared able to control nuclear technology without self destructing planet to-date it may be that we can catch up to the implications of micro technology and exponential faster and more intelligent computers.

I did not go to bed until the early hours and managed to get up before nine to place out the wheelie for collection. I knew I would not sleep although I did return to bed but after a matter of minutes got up for the day. Breakfast was a soup and lunch the remainder of the chicken with a Chinese style prepare stir fry including rice. It was a bigger portion than needed and I left some, mainly the rice. In the evening I had two slices of the ham and two salmon fish cakes bought in the early afternoon shop, I had grapes, tea with milk as well as coffee and a small glass of wine with dry crackers. I have reached the point mentally when I am ready for a serious attempt to get fitter and lose wealth. I said no today as I said yesterday, today at the supermarket and also having replenished the fridge and larder with coffee, tea and milk, with individual packet soups although their use will be reduced for a time as I work though the remaining tins and full packets. I will alternate porridge with cereal as the temperature improves. I bought fruit, grapes and bananas, and vegetables, lettuce, cucumber tomato peppers and onions but forgot the courgette. I did buy six rolls of bread for the bacon to use up tomorrow, possibly keep some for the following day. I bought some frozen prepared slices of bream which with the fish cakes and the remaining frozen meat should cover a week before the freezer defrost and I switch to the diet used before (not dieting) which included the use of the steamer more than the grill.
Given the early start and how I felt I also knew I was not in the mood for serious and prolonged work involving thought. Over an early lunch I watched the last part of Hotel Reserve, the 1944 film previously seen within the past year and which starred James Mason as a presentable young Austrian seeking French Citizenship before World War 2 who is asked to help the authorities after accidentally becoming caught up with a German Spy and his wife (Herbert Lom) filming defences as Toulon and which also stared a just as young Valentine Dyall and where Patricia Hayes had an appearance. The film is supposed to be set in Southern France, in the days where small hotels became something of a house party and those of a certain position holidayed for summer.

I did not enjoy the first half of Blackburn’s visit to Blythe Spartans at Croft Park. The Setanta producers set the wrong tone instead of celebrating the achievement of getting to the third round and drawing a Premiership club with match earnings on top of previous wins likely to free the club from financial worries for two or three season, the focus was on the glory of 1978 when they should have won the first game away and then lost in a match played at St James Park with 42000 supporting, and what glory there was to come if they managed to win this evening.

At the end of the first half I switched over to watch the final part of Beyond Suspicion which failed to yield an outcome worthy of the talent involved in this Lynda La Plant Production of her novel. Once the basic premise has been established that because someone is famous does not mean they are not also a serial killer, the plot has nowhere to go and the same outcome could have been achieved in 90-100 minutes instead of 250. The was a lack of credibility which may explain why so many of those participating are not listed as cast members. I went back to the football during the commercial breaks and gained the impression that Blythe not only held the 1.0 deficit but came close to finding an equaliser in the closing minutes and could hold their heads with pride, although in truth they were outclassed from start to finish, which is as it should be.

I enjoyed the selection of the best of Flog it and later half watched a space epic Serenity and which directly relates to the issues raised by the first of Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Science on the way the central processing Unit of computers has changed and will change, dramatically affecting our lives.

The lectures are designed for young people and examples of the way the processors have been developed through microziation (!?)
I cannot quickly find a word which is stronger than miniaturize, given that the official definition of a micro is one millionth of the norm. I began by reminding that with the scale of 1 as the norm we use the deci- (mal) to describes dividing time or speed by tenths, centi-(metre( by 100th) , Milli- by 1000th and the Micro- by millionths and in the programme there were examples of the nano-second Billionth, which is the number of actions the latest on sale computers can achieve in creating games, but given the exponential nature of our ability to make things smaller since 1991 scientists have talked, and therefore one presumes undertaken calculations not just in pico- trillonths, femto-quadillionths, and atto’s- Quintilionths, as they have since 1964, but further into zepto- sextillionths and yocto-quadrillionths since 1991 which is 24 decimal places. Apparently there is now no limit to the extent it will be possible to size reduce the technology having overcome the intense heating problem which threatened development at one point.

Because the lectures are designed to not just explain the known world to school age young people but to fire imaginations, Professor Chris Bishop the Chief Scientist for Microsoft at Cambridge and Chair of Computer Science at Edinburgh and a Fellow of Darwin College Cambridge explained the potential implications of developments and aspects of the research currently being undertaken. I remember well the first game video machines which could be seen in public houses, motorway service areas and fairground and amusement arcades in the later 1970’s which consisted of black and white screens and lines of moving characters which represented aliens and where the task was to shoot down as many as possible, The idea of colour was created by including coloured strips within the machine. My first game console had to be sued with the TV and comprised a ball going across the screen which players had to hit with their hand held controlled connected by wiring to the cons to recreate the game of tennis. It was quickly discovered that the player who controlled one of the handsets could always dominate once they had learnt the technique. A few years later the Commodore 64 arrived, I have it still, where games were loaded on to the console through tapes and there was the first experience of colour moving graphics in a game called Alice, although the main use was in creating data base records of my books and gramophone records, also on tape, and processing with a dairy. I then moved on to a Green Screen Amstrad 246 and then 512 and held out against the colour all singing and dancing multi Media Integra as the main purpose was word processing, database creation and internet communication. Now rarely a day passes without playing chess on an authentic looking three dimensional board with ten levels of difficulty, while children can play sophisticated complex games through special consoles such as the X box and Wii Nintendo with wireless hand held sensors playing everything from skiing to golf and driving. There is not just movement but the graphics are realistic to the extent that the shadows change according to time of day and level of sunshine.

The programme explained the development of Transistor after World War 2 which marked the arrival of the small portable radio and the mass production of Television sets. One of my cousins created a Family TV in time for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth and I watched him connect each transistor by hand. Transistors are switches which enable programmed decisions to be taken in a logical way and the Professor used the basic example of the ingredients of a milk shake, milk with banana or milk with Strawberry or with both. A plus B equal C A plus B1 equals C1. The more options the longer it takes for the computer to sort out which answer you are seeking and the Professor mentioned that because of the increased speed the number of options which the computer considered had changed from half a million a second to 300 billion and the ability to make smaller was improving at the rate of doubling every two years.

He demonstrated how this microziation process was crated by getting a member of the audience to write her initials with a thick felt tipped pen and then transfer this on a grain of rice, explaining that without this process the area of space required to store the information for operating systems, processing, programming and information storage on the average domestic computer would be the size of greater London. The drive to make things smaller came out of the space and defence programmes, but it is not clear if it was theoretically known in advance or was a by-product that the ability to reduce the size of transistors so that they cannot be seen with the naked eye, resulted in increasing their speed of operation exponentially with each reduction.

For the example with speed, he asked the audience to shout out the answer of simple sums and the flashed a multiplication to the power of a nano which as met with silence, and then awe as he announced that the home computer could give an answer in less than a nano. He then demonstrated by showing an experiment which measures the speed (velocity) of a projectile from a riffle passing through two sensors over a measured distance. This demonstrated that the home computer could process complex mathematical equations quicker the passage of the projectile. The message the Professor wanted his audience to take away is that this processing speed has been changing exponentially and is down to doubling every two years. This means more and more information can be stored and analysed quicker and quicker. It has already been possible to create a programme which contains all the information on every commodity, or share, to currency traded throughout the world and its movement throughout the trading day as well as all the information relevant which appears to determine those movements. The catch is the human behaviour factor and this was the subject of the final programme and if I am right that each human being is the repository of every linear generation which has led to each new being then being able to replicate human being by machines is a greater task than is perhaps still appreciated

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