ADAMANT

Spaghetti Archaeology

Architectural Conservation , Software Division

" Software is the heart and soul of today's array of gadgets—and, the way it is written is crucial to their operation. The problem is, however, there is no one manual dictating how it should be written. In essence, programmers now simply string together commands to make devices do what consumers expect them to do. There are no rules for software developers to follow, such as those that guide most engineering disciplines, and there is no historical frame of reference code writers can study to determine which approaches work and which do not." notes Scientific American.

It  relates that IBM fellow Grady Booch,a self-styled 'Software Archaeologist' ,

"approached the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum [in Mountain View, Calif.] and told them they should also have a museum of software. It would be a sad thing…[for]…future generations if we didn't have access to the original source code for, say, Word. I can't find the original source code for [IBM's mainframe operating system]; not even IBM has it. It's hard to get access to some of this software because it's proprietary and businesses don't want their competitors to see it. We're conducting an archaeological dig for software so that future generations can study it and improve upon it.

How will the software define and use the different data it encounters? These are questions that must be answered before the software is written in the first place. In civil engineering, if you ask someone to build a Victorian house, there is an inherent understanding of what that looks like. If you ask different programmers to design software for a high-throughput system [such as one that processes financial transactions], there's no general agreement of how that software should be built."

Terror Gets A Short Stare

Since 9-11 TSA and DHS have been besieged with detector proposals for ferreting out  passengers attempting to conceal explosives and hazardous substances beneath their clothing.  They have run the gamut of technical ambition, most bad, many ugly, and variously plagued by  poor signal-to-noise ratios  and alarming false positive rates. Some that work do so more by brute force than technical elegance- what can't you detect with a MR scanner, a sawed off synchotron .and a megabuck array of single crystal gadolinium scintillators ?

Few  of the black boxes on offer have seen practical deployment, so I was pleasantly surprised by a gizmo in prototype production by the British ex-MOD firm, Qinetiq.

This sub-terahertz  gadget relies on the short end of the ambient  millimeter wave spectrum to illuminate the difference between what people are made of and what they may be carrying. Advances in high electron mobility indium phosphide  semiconductor detectors and a MIMIC amplifier allow a simple dielectric lens (the white-domed top of the hooded cocktail shaker in the photo)  to give passengers the  once over at a few hundred gigahertz, to see if they are plain vanilla humans, or packing liquid or solid contraband that does not match the dielectric properties of flesh, blood, and bone.

The dielectric lens and a boresighted video camera ( the cocktail shaker's dark spout ) afford a  magnified directional view fed to an internal millimeter wavelength horn antenna and a one dimensional scan train not much more complicated than a bar code reader. Discrimination is afforded by proprietary  AI firmware that presumably has total recall of what people look like over several  wavelengths, allowing comparison of the real-time background illumination with what emanates from a target up to several hundred feet away.

If a passenger's millimeter wave  profile lights up as anomalous, security people come into play to see what he or she may be hiding. This is a very simple system , but MIMIC devices lend themselves to phased arrays, and the technology could grow into a sophisticated imaging system if this early embodiment delivers  high passenger throughput and few false positives. A larger roadside version can detect concealed passengers in soft-sided Brit lorries, but here in the land of metal truck bodies , it will probably be debuting  in airports rather than Ro-Ro terminals.

But Can It Play Volleyball?

A Virtual Lifeguard To Watch Your Bay
Though it more resembles a horseshoe crab on steroids than Pamela Anderson, Sentry may become a welcome sight to surfers.The waterjet propelled unmanned reconn craft from MOD spin-off Qinetiq can get to where you wipe out at 50 knots, with length --3.5m, and beam--1.25m, enough to  haul   back to the beach without anybody else getting wet. A joystick console allows full control of the vehicle over a 16 nautical mile range.

The basic payload includes microwave datalink communications and camera. Options include stabilized real-time day / night high resolution cameras, a full lighting rig , a loud-hailer system and a smoke marker launcher. Add a homing system and a wristband transponder , and  It could revolutionize the  Arabian Sea beach scene, affording damsels in gnarly distress an alternative to drowning if a lady lifeguard or male relative cannot be found to  rescue them -the gadget debuted in Dubai.

A Singular Question

Vernor Vinge has stepped into Kurt Vonnegut's empty shoes to ask  readers of the Kurzweil AI blog a question the recently deceased immortal might approve : 'What if The Singularity Doesn't Happen ?'

Before speculation on the thermodynamics of information becomes completely  divorced from discussion of its embodiment , a little dimensional analysis is in order. Though Quantum computing works because it happens at no energetic expense , one of the weird corollaries of spooky action at a distance is that you get nothing for nothing- something material has to exist and be doing work at both the transmitting and receiving ends to write and read  the input and output. So despite the metaphysical elegance of it all , somebody has to pay Q-bit based AI's power bills.

It is cautionary that while only ounces of electrons at one time do the heavy computational work of the internetk the humongous infrastructure supporting their caged rattling within semiconductor junctions takes upwards of fifty million horsepower to run. At present , in America , this means creating some few molecules of CO2 per binary 1 or 0 computed -- a server consumes more than its weight in coal each day.

The trivial counterargument is that such a black box could run instead on say , 20 square meters of solar cells and a battery. But wait a minute. Rev that meme up to the level of supporting a  supercomputer per capita , and the planet turns into a glinting black ball paved with  Green power supplies. This will not make Angelenos happy, as their Cool Cities initiative aims at down shifting the Earth's albedo , not turning it into a solar oven.

So Singularists and readers of Fortune are invited to assay this question, and apply the unreasonable power of dimensional analysis themselves.  Adamant invites then to tender envelope-back curves  showing  just how they think the power requirements of Getting Singular will evolve over the coming decades.  Since it's a long road to the Quantum Computing  equivalent of the one atom transistor ,  I expect to receive some warm words as well. All entries must be received by January 1 , 2027.

Weighing the Web

Britannica Blog complains last October's Adamant  essay, Weighing the Web has been copy catted by How Much Does The Internet Weigh ? , but I'm scarcely piqued Discover 's 100 Top Science Stories of 2002 issue celebrates my work on jade archaeology. Discover's Steve Cass insists they  

 "scanned technical databases, tore through reference books, Googled like crazy, and checked with experts. It soon became apparent that if we wanted an answer, we were going to have to work it out for ourselves, as no one else appears to have tackled this question before.  So we put our thinking caps on and set the coffee machine on extra strong."

It must have been decaf. Googling How much does the internet weigh? still yields four Page 1 links to :

WEIGHING THE WEB

The Internet weighs two ounces .

             ( Originally posted 25 October, 2006)

Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard's comparison of his home energy costs to Google's multi-gigabuck annual power bill is intriguing. $1,200 a month is rather a lot of Pacific Gas & Electric.

But like Al Gore's 22.6 Megawatt hour a month Eco-mansion , it only serves to make the $3 a year per capita it takes to power the global internet seem a roaring bargain, even by third world standards. Still, my dollar a day ISP bill gives me no joy , because the electrons I feed my pet laptop are costing me about half a billion dollars a pound. Let me explain.

I'm taking about the power that drives the bytes , not lights the lights. Geodesic dome guru Bucky Fuller baffled architects by asking how much their buildings weighed?  Not being paid by the pound , few cared , but  mass and energy matter more than ever in the aftermath of 9-11. Built like a Hummer on steroids , the Empire State Building shrugged off a  bomber crash in 1945 while the World Trade Center's economy model frame collapsed. So how much does the internet weigh ? And how many horsepower does it take to run it ?

The Information

The digital age does not count on its fingers

Computers clump zeros and ones into packets of eight called ' Bytes', but  to speak of Kilobytes is an insult to the Binary System. When Ubergeeks talk kilobytes , they are not referring to thousands of the things , but two to the tenth power of them--  32 times 32 is 1024 , not 1000

In 2002 , Roy Williams pointed out that any Richter Scale defining the quantitative impact of Information will err by millions if gigabytes are rounded off to eight billion bits- Yet as this list illustrates, a million isn't what it used to be: 

• A bit is the information in one coin toss - yes or no, 1 or zero, win or lose.
• A byte is 8 bits ; 5 bits approximate the information in the letter A.
• A kilobyte is about one handwritten page.
  • 50  kilobytes: The Constitution of the United States
  • 75 kilobytes:  Executive Summary of new UN global warming report
  • 250 kilobytes: an editorial cartoon
• A megabyte is  2²⁰ bytes
  • 1 megabyte: a rather short novel .
  • 2 megabytes: a sharp color photograph.
  • 5 megabytes: Shakespeare's Works
  • 25 megabytes The actual UN global warming report
  • 100 megabytes: A yard of books.
  • 500 megabytes: a CD
• A gigabyte is  2³⁰ bytes
  •   1 gigabyte : the human genome , or a ton of books.
  • 10 gigabytes: a  BlueRay DVD of The Matrix Trilogy
  • 20 gigabytes: The Complete Mozart in very high fidelity
    
  • 250 gigabytes: the ground floor of Harvard's Widener Library
    
• a terabyte is  2⁴⁰ bytes.
  • ~ 1 terabyte: the sum of all Federal , State and City regulations
  • 2.5 terabytes: Everything in Widener Library.
  • 5 terabytes: every article in every academic journal printed last year.
  • 10 terabytes: The Library of Congress.
  • 40 terabytes: every word in all the hardcover books printed last year
    
  • 50 terabytes: all of last year's mass market periodicals.
  • 60 terabytes: all the audio CDs sold last year.
  • 150 terabytes: all  the newspapers printed in 2006.
• A petabyte is ~ 10¹⁵ bytes--2⁵⁰ to be exact.
  • 1 petabyte:   last year's global production of office documents.
  • 3 petabytes: all the libraries in America.
  • 10 petabytes: all the film Hollywood ran through its cameras in 2006
  • 400 petabytes: every snapshot taken in 2006
• An exabyte is  2⁶⁰ bytes . 
  • 2 exabytes: the capacity of all hard disks produced last year
    
  • 5 exabytes: every word so far spoken.
    
  • 6 exabytes: the DNA of everyone living
  • 10 exabytes: everything on videotape
• A zettabyte is the estimated total cell phone pixel capture by the year 2018
• A yottabyte is how many atoms can dance on the head of a terapin.