A Modest Proposal…

Folks,

I've been blogging recently about where tech collides with politics, society, commerce and culture. Yesterday, it occurred to me that I could could localize this stuff to be of particular interest to folks in Northampton, MA and the Pioneer Valley, as I tell simple stories of how tech hit the streets, worked its way into business, and entered our homes in the past, and continues to do so today. Some of the topics that immediately occurred to me are:

• Why are the only industries remaining in the Pioneer Valley, once the Silicon Valley of the first Industrial Age, light metal machining, arms manufacturing, specialty plastic fasteners, and agricultural chemicals?
• Why do we call a monkey wrench a monkey wrench? Clue: it has everything to do with the Valley, and nothing to do with monkeys.
• How did William Pynchon, Springfield, MA's founder, pull off one of the great swindles of early British colonialism in America by using ancient technology to drain a swamp in what became Springfield's north end. And, where did the natives that he swindled go?
• How and why was Florence, MA chosen as the home to a utopian community and worker owned textile mills?
• Why did Rolls Royce choose this region to build their vehicles outside the UK?
• And, why is the Valley a rare hotbed of enthusiasm for NASCAR in the Northeast?
• What are so many sensible but poor Hispanics doing in New England the Valley when they could be just as disadvantaged in someplace warm by coral beaches? Clue #2: It has to do with bombs and those agricultural chemicals.
• How did Victorian Era ladies help build the telephone industry in Greenfield, circa 1910?
• Did Mark Twain finance and own the world's first word processor while living in the region in the late 19th Century?
• How do Northampton's Web development companies stay afloat, even prosper with an international clientel, in the face of competition from 'Net and telecom giants, cloud-based freeware, and industry consolidation?
• Why was fiber-optic tech invented in the region at the dawn of the Internet and telecommunications revolution, but never commercialized by its inventor? How did Quaker Oats figure in this story?

So I'm pitching these ideas for an occasional column at Northampton Media, an excellent local news portal whose reporters and editors typically hustle harder and outperform their colleagues in regional print, television and radio. We'll see what happens.

S

There's Power and Then There's Power…

Folks,

Does nuke power have to be ugly and dangerous? There is such a tech, Thorium Nuclear Reactors, originally researched in the USA back in the '40s but never adopted as it was not suitable to generating Plutonium for Hydrogen Bombs from spent fuel used in the Peaceful Atom Program. Thorium nuclear tech is now being explored by the Chinese for the purpose of clearing their air of fossil fuel pollution, and powering their booming economy into the future. It also has the benefit of producing far lower amounts of toxic waste that must be sequestered for longer than Humanity has had civilization and perhaps even existed.

Meanwhile, other alternative energy sources including turning the faces of our skyscrapers into power plants, harvesting tides and the warmth of the deep Earth, the breath of the wind, the rain of photons from the Sun remain to be harvested.

Anyway we shake it, here in the West, to cut our addiction to oil, allow the folks in the Middle East and Northern Africa settle their affairs on their own as the big boys they really are (Israel has its own nuclear bombs, and Iran soon will, as well), we have to likely have to embrace everything in our tech quiver to quench our thirst for power.

S

More or Less in Line.

Folks,

Throughout Human history, across all aspects of our many cultures, innovation continues to either its terminal evolution or highest development along the line laid out in its initial state or conception, a path dependency. This trend can be seen in everything as diverse as religion and mythology to rocketry and space flight.


Right now, today, we can see this pattern manifest in another tech realm as Japan endeavors to stitch its electrical grid back together after it was brought to its knees by the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and a nuclear disaster brought about by Human muddling and over-optimism. Their problem today is the product of decision made one-hundred and five years ago when the big issue to solve was electrically powering newfangled, durable Edison light bulbs and textile shops automated by central electric motors that drove thick, wide bands of leather to power looms and sometimes shredded and  killed workers. Nuclear power was then more than half a century in the future, and nuclear radiation had yet to be discovered. The country was so busy in 1895, industrializing and modernizing, that they hadn't even gotten the knack of numbering new buildings by orderly street addresses, and thus had to invent the fax machine to send maps to each other over the recently installed telephone lines.


So, what's the point? I guess it's just that if you've got a bright idea, take a look to the Long Now. Your notion might have the legs to change and form the future in unanticipated ways.

S

Saturn V Apollo Moon Rocket

Hacking Toward Freedom…

Folks,

Tech folklore claims that the Internet routes information around obstacles, even a nuclear holocaust. As we've seen from ongoing and recent events in China, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, including the United States, this ain't necessarily so. Humans engineered the Internet, and the forces of repression can always install devices to spy on Internet users, and even hit a "kill switch" to cut off access to all or part of their populations as they please.

But, here's an article from the Economist magazine. It describes how rebels can build tools out of bubble gum and bailing wire to preserve their access to and from the 'Net, despite the efforts of tyrants to silence them and stop their ability to organize and make trouble for the powers that be. Any means of transport, whether for bullion or bytes, email or electrons, can be hijacked by clever people. That microwave oven (tech first repurposed from military radar to cook crappy meals) on your kitchen counter might someday be a tool for democracy as potent as the printing press was in the American colonies of the Eighteenth  Century. Organizations such as Tactical Tech and the Tor Project supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation can show you how.

S

Edison, Jobs, Kurzweil!

Folks,

Some folks refer to Apple's Steve Jobs as the Edison of our age, building useful playthings and workplace tools that disrupt incumbent industries and transform popular culture. For Edison, it was the phonograph and motion picture camera that put the kibosh on the player piano and got folks off the front porch and into movie theaters on Saturday afternoons. With Jobs it was first the Macintosh, then the iPhone and iPad.


With both of those guys, what they essentially did was take a pile of already existing inventions and materials off the lab bench, bee's wax, a lathe, digital circuit boards and aluminum, and configure them in ways that provided a superior way to be entertained or to do work. Their inventions are not novel in an essential sense. But, there is a guy named Ray Kurzweil who actually has invented machines that do things that machines could previously not do, that extend Human capacities beyond what is possible, or at least too tedious to undertake with our own senses and limbs.


If you've ever used an optical character recognition program to convert printed text to digital information, you can thank Kurzweil. When you listen to Stevie Wonder play, you are hearing electronic instruments controlled by Kurweil's voice pattern recognition engines and sonic wave forms created by the circuits that he designed.


But there's more. Kurzweil has a remarkable record of predicting the future of Humanity and tech. Starting with his book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines", and then in his more recent "The Age of Spiritual Machines", he forecasts a day coming soon, when our inventions will embody characteristics that more than mimic our own capacities in dexterous thought. They will appear to us to be conscious.


Given the solid batting average that he's thus far demonstrated both in prediction and commercializing the fruits of his ruminations, despite his seemingly nutty ideas on human life extension, this fellow demands being paid attention to. We have already seen, this year, a machine named Watson, that appears to understand subtle jokes and puns. Computers are emerging from University and industry labs that can "calculate" from human facial expressions and postures the state of their user's emotions. "Androids" are being created that closely mimic the human form, right down to appearing to breathe and perspire.


Yes, do stay tuned to what this old whack job is forecasting. When the iPod is as distant a memory to civilization as rotating cylinders that seem to sing, the proceeds of Kurzweil's work may still be evolving.


S

Ray Kurzweil

Agony…

Folks,

An immortal image. Folks alive and aware today will remember the time and place of the present and ongoing tragedy in Japan, an awesome and terrible confluence of Nature's fury and Human muddling. A thousand years in the future, if our species has one, Humans will simply see themselves and their kin in this photo and likely still know too well that desolate wailing frozen for eternity in pixels.



Yes, our species may yet undo itself, or perhaps the Earth and the Universe will simply shrug us off in natural catastrophe. Still, we must keep our eye on the ball, on those things that we can control and shed our stupidity, hatreds and greed, as best we can. There is no situation that Love and Hope will not benefit.


Right now, on the other side of my Home World, brave folks are hurling themselves against a nuclear inferno to protect their own and even Humans they have never met, some a world away. Only Love and Hope permits such courage. We are capable of doing our best against all odds.

If all you can do today is say a prayer for this mother and the departed Spirit and Ghost, the Reikin (霊魂), and Yūrei (幽霊), of her lost child, do so. That can't hurt anything. Spending a moment dwelling in compassion might do us all some good.

S

The Bear is Dead

Folks,


We've lost another great and weird hero, Augustus Owsley Stanley III. The bodies pile up. The bills come due. Life marches on in History's slow parade.


Thanks, Bear. The vistas that your handiwork revealed to me and my chosen family will remain forever as indescribable as they were profound in forming my outlook and curiosity, even long after a last adventure into the realm of the Ineffable and Loving Beautiful.


Sleep in the stars, my friend and benefactor,


S

S