Reflections on Technology and Society

One dictionary definition of lazy includes, "disinclined to activity or exertion."  It is clear intuitively what this means. How does one differentiate laziness from procrastination?  This is a subtle problem.  The key point is that the procrastinator may not be lazy. The procrastinator may, at some future date, display a sudden burst of energy and get done the task that had been postponed.  By contrast, the lazy person never gets the task done. How does one tell the difference between the laziness and procrastination?  Well, the key secret is that you might have to wait a long time.  A very long time.  In fact, you might have to wait an arbitrarily long time before the procrastinator gets his round tuit and actually gets the task done. Interestingly, theoretical computer scientists call this the busy beaver problem and consider it of fundamental importance because the solution is noncomputable.  Thus, obviously, whether someone is lazy or a pro...

It is astonishing that Ivan Sutherland never secured this patent.  Ivan's curmudgeonliness is widely acknowledged to be the unit reference. Of course, lesser mortals have discovered that the Ivan, like the Bell for sound pressure, is much too large a value for practical purposes.  Statisticians and scholars have concluded that the milliIvan (1/1000 of the curmudgeonliness of the full Ivan), denoted mI, is a more practical unit for day-to-day use. Reliable metricians report that the peak observed value on the US east coast is Peter Weinberger, clocking in a quite remarkable 137 mI. Patent licensees are authorized to use certain characteristic phrases based on their certified curmudgeonliness values: 100 mI: "Get off my lawn!" 50 mI: "Kids these days!" 25 mI: "Go away, you bother me." 10 mI: "No, don't tell me your name.  I'm not interested." It has been asserted that a Sesame Street character, Oscar the Grouch, has a curmudgeonliness m...

Some years ago I realized that once the USPTO decided to allow business process patents they would have to allow patents for behaviors as well.  I quickly wrote up a bunch of important behavioral patents.  It took a while and some back and forth between my patent attorney and the USPTO examiners, but I was finally awarded a large number of behavioral patents. Here is one of my favorites: Procrastination The royalty rate is quite high, to discourage people from procrastinating.  It took me a while to get around to sending out the first batch of invoices, but I finally got them in the mail several years ago.  Sadly, no one seems to have gotten around to sending payment.

Introduction With the arrival of USB C and the final collapse of the last corporate resistance to the standardization of digital interconnection, it is instructive to reflect on the evolution of these connectors and their electrical and signaling standards going back at least to the 1960s. My first experience with remote computing connections came when I was in high school.  Our school established a relationship with a time sharing operator and situated a Teletype Model 33 ASR device in a small windowless room in the high school.  The device connected by telephone and acoustic coupler to the remote computer and we wrote and ran programs in BASIC. The interconnection between the modem and the teletype was a bundle of wires presented through a DB-25 connector. DB25 (male) connector This connector was referred to at the time as a "D Subminiature," a designation that may have made sense to the engineers who developed it but that is now viewed with hilarity. What was fascinating ...

I have been posting on Quora since April of 2014, earning top writer status in 2017 and 2018 and running up, as of this writing, 5.6 million views by Quora readers. While many of my posts are of limited interest, I'm inordinately proud of some of them.  With this post I will begin retrieving some of my particular favorites from Quora and reposting them here on my blog. There is some fun history behind this particular post.  Back when I was a grad student at CMU back in the 1980s I was friendly with Jeff Schrager, a fellow grad student at the time, and he posted a hilarious item in, as I recall, rec.humor.funny, an early netnews group.  The item was titled "How Many AI People Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb" and I admired it so much that I tracked it down and put it up on this blog some years ago (https://nygeek-blog.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-many-ai-people-does-it-take-to.html). Several years ago someone posted the question, "What are common stages that PhD studen...

BGP reroute Blackholes Facebook, Instagram The sound of silence.