As we cull the herd of knowledge in our library, we find little gems, like our laboratory notebook from Analytical Chemistry 2149 (University of Tennessee?). Example pages below:
As well as a chemistry lab notebook later converted into writer’s notebook:
More as we excavate our house!
“Queen Elizabeth reigns over the UK”
noun
plural noun: reigns
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“Queen Elizabeth reigns over the UK”
noun
plural noun: reigns
1.
the period during which a sovereign rules.
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
noun
plural noun: reigns
1.
the period during which a sovereign rules.
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“Queen Elizabeth reigns over the UK”
noun
plural noun: reigns
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
noun
plural noun: reigns
1.
the period during which a sovereign rules.
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
noun
plural noun: reigns
1.
the period during which a sovereign rules.
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
“the original chapel was built in the reign of Charles I”
Decided to hook our scratch built DNA sequencer, 3D printer and AI quantum computing system to our home IoT network.
Overnight, the network asserted it is now the full embodiment of the Gaia planetary web and we are merely nodes in it.
Welcome to the new, posthuman reality.
Dr. Hawking, thanks for the warning. Good news, AI is not as bad as we thought but it has surpassed us more quickly than we imagined!
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
Was there ever a time when we programmed well, if not efficiently?
Sure, there were the early BASIC days on the TRS-80, later on the ZX81.
We had our stint writing PASCAL, then C, but never C++ or C#.
A bit of Visual C, to be sure, in our days as software test engineering lab manager at Conexant (formerly Rockwell Semiconductor) running a team that verified our company’s products (including Linux servers disguised as Windows-compatible ADSL gateway modems) met Microsoft WHQL standards, and later, at Avocent, ensuring cross-platform compatibility for Microsoft, Apple, Linux and other operating systems.
Let’s be honest with ourselves. We’ve faded in our programming capabilities.
Use it or lose it, as they say.
So it is that we find ourselves basically back at the drawing board, back to bits and bytes, working our way up to Arduino script and Python Shell on Raspberry Pi Linux.
Today’s lesson: the difference between/dev/ttyUSB0 (or 1, or n) and others/dev/ttyACM0 (or 1, or n) .
In a nutshell, according to this website, “another control model, aptly named abstract control model or ACM, lets the modem hardware perform the analog functions, and require that it supports the ITU V.250 (also known as Hayes in its former life) command set, either in the data stream or as a separate control stream through the communication class interface. …the devices offering UART-over-USB functionalities are named
/dev/ttyUSB0,/dev/ttyUSB1, and so on, even though they are in fact using distinct device drivers.”
Does that mean anything to you? It might. It does to us, springing to memory the old days of dialup modems long before ADSL and cable modems, before Gigabit Ethernet, CDMA/GSM, FTTx (fiber to the curb, home, etc.), WiFi, driverless cars and drone taxis.
Why are we relearning all this?
First of all, why not?
Second of all, in our transition to a computing world of AI that no longer uses bits and bytes, when quantum computing leads to the Next Great Thing, it’s good to see where we were so that we better understand where we’ll be.
After all, we said goodbye to Guin but haven’t completely forgotten who we are 400 earthyears from now.
In the not so distant future, we know we don’t look or act like the human interface devices you see and think as yourselves as today.
In other words, the Elegoo Uno R3 and Adafruit Circuit Playground Express devices allow us to be nostalgic in our late middle-aged years.
We understand by doing so where we deliberately drop pebbles in the pond of this set of devices we call a few billion instances of a species labeled Homo sapiens.
We live in this moment but see where we set in motion activities millions of years from now.
Don’t you?
On Mars will we wear our school colours?
Writer's oasis 