* I don’t have a source for this one as it came by email. If someone recognizes it and wants to source it, please let me know.
Rants
Happy Groundhog Day
I spent last Groundhog Day with the flu. Watched Groundhog Day twice as it was marathon’d on AMC. Bill Murray‘s repeating purgatory could have been much worse if he’d woken up sick that morning!
QWERTY
QWERTY is the name for the commonly used keyboard on computers. It takes its name from the first six letters in the upper left of the keyboard. Its layout was transferred to computer keyboards from electric typewriter keyboards. It was transferred to electric typewriter keyboards from manual typewriters… which didn’t have “keyboards”. They just had keys.
Computer keyboards are totally electronic. Hitting a key activates electrons. Electric typewriters came in various forms, but most later ones had little balls covered with reversed letters that struck carbon paper ribbons against paper to imprint images when the keys were struck.
Manual typewriter keys controlled little arms with reversed letters on them. As you hit the keys, the little arm would swing into action, smacking the same carbon paper image against paper. The difference here being that the action was totally controlled by the force of your fingers hitting the keys. Typing this way was hard work and resulted in tired fingers. But if you were good, you could get fast. And if you were too fast, the keys would jamb as in the image to the left. In college I used an electric typewriter with strike arms. As a left-hander, I often caused jambs because commonly used letters are mostly on the left… slowing most right-handed people down.
Self-Assembling Robots
I’ve been a fan of Science Fiction since Grandma Berger gave me a Tom Swift Jr. book in grade school. I think it was an impulse purchase on her part as I can’t imagine her as a sci-fi fan. That first Tom Swift book was an old book when I read it. Part of the fascination with it was reading what the book presented as fantasy juxtaposed against those same things coming to life in the real world in which I was living. In any case, I was hooked.
It seems to me that most scientists would be fans of science fiction as well. Look at Sheldon, Leonard, Raj & Howard on the Big Bang Theory… Ha! But on the more sober side, do you think scientists ever think about the cautionary science fiction tales as they strive to bring those fantasies to life?
This article by Judy Schriener titled “Will Self-Assembling Robots Slide into the Construction Industry?” makes me wonder. Isaac Asimov first presented The Three Laws of Robots in a 1942 short story titled, “Run Around”. Some of you may be familiar with them from the recent Will Smith movie version of another of Asimov’s books, “I, Robot”. For those of you unfamiliar, here they are in their original form:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
* Laws and timelines taken from a wikipedia article title Three Laws of Robotics.
Down with DST
Well, here we are suffering through DST (Daylight Savings Time) again. While “Falling Back” isn’t a traumatic as “Springing Forward”, I still prefer leaving things alone. I used to think Indiana was progressive for not participating. That was confirmed when I lived under DST for a few years in Georgia that pretty much confirmed my feelings, so I was pretty vocally against the change when it happened.
I ran across an article by an economist, Allison Schrager, titled: “The US needs to retire daylight savings and just have two time zones—one hour apart” I learned a few things including how little of the world observes DST. The cool map above is from her site. The Wikipedia link to Daylight Savings Time above shows a map that indicates large portions of the globe that did observe DST no longer do so.