By Frederic Friedel
We all know the story from the Jewish Bible, told in 1 Samuel 17 in the Old Testament. The Israelites were facing the Philistines — the bad guys — who kept sending out their fiercest warrior to challenge the enemy to do battle in single combat. Goliath, the Philistine, was a brute of a man: six foot nine inches tall (a later text puts him at nine feet nine inches or 2.97 meters). “He had a bronze helmet on his head;” Samuel 17 tells us, “and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels; on his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze javelin was slung on his back. His spear shaft was like a weaver’s rod, and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels. His shield bearer went ahead of him.”
Goliath’s challenge was: “Choose a man and have him come down to me. If he is able to fight and kill me, we will become your subjects; but if I overcome him and kill him, you will become our subjects and serve us.” He kept doing this for forty days, and it left the Israelites dismayed and terrified, and full of loathing for this “uncircumcised Philistine”.
Along comes David, a chit of a shepherd boy, charged with delivering some corn and bread to the troops. He hears the roaring challenge of the Philistine giant and volunteers to take him on. The Israelite soldiers can only laugh, but David explains: while tending the sheep he killed both a lion and a bear, and he would do the same for “this uncircumcised Philistine” (yes, it was an obsession at the time). The Israelites relented, and tried dressing David in some armour. But it was too heavy and he was unable to walk properly in it. So he faced Goliath in a loincloth, armed only with a sling and a pouch with a few small stones.
And David won! You can watch the battle, which has become a metaphor for uneven contests and improbably victories, here in this video:
Goliath was killed, the Philistines fled, pursued by the Israelites, who killed as many as they could and then plundered their camp. That is biblical tradition.
For millennia we have cheered this astounding victory of good over evil, but we must ask ourselves: how did he do it? How did the shepherd boy overcome the giant, well-trained and well-armed warrior. The answer is: David had a gun! Or the closest you could get to this at the time.
Now I could tell you how it all happened, and why Goliath was the underdog in this contest, not David. But I will let Malcolm Gladwell do it, seeing I gained most of the insight for the above from the Canadian journalist and New Yorker staff writer. So do not miss his TED talk below, which is thoroughly inspiring and illuminating. It is sixteen minutes well worth investing. If you are pressed for time watch at least the first ten minutes.
By Frederic Friedel
First published on May 31, 2016
In pre-state societies — when humans lived in bands, tribes or chiefdoms — war was rare and highly ritualised, consisting mainly of non-lethal contests or competition. It is only when primitive people encountered the “civilised” world that violence was introduced, and homicide became part of their everyday life. With the advent of modern mega states and advanced techniques of destruction warfare and terror achieved its current terrifying levels of killing and slaughter. The 20th century was the most violent in the history of mankind, and the 21st continues in the same vein.
What is unusual about the above statements? The answer: they are all erroneous — in each case the opposite is true. Even though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given the horrors of world wars and mass genocides, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.
A 1996 book, “War before Civilisation” by Lawrence H. Keeley, exposes the myth of the peaceful savage.
Keeley describes in great detail how archaeologists have artificially “pacified the past” and, in spite of compelling evidence, denied the possibility of prehistoric warfare. They seem to have adopted the views of Jean-Jacque Rousseau, who believed that “nothing could be more gentle” than man in his natural state.
The truth of the matter is that since the advent of humanity violence has been commonplace and lethal, with a large percentage of all adult males of all bands and tribes being involved at some stage in their lifetime in homicidal incidents. The encounter with civilisation, far from introducing aggressive warfare to the peaceful primitives, generally served to pacify their murderous tendencies. The Kung San (or Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert are generally depicted as being a very peaceful community. In reality, Keeley tells us, their homicide rate from 1920 to 1955 was four times that of the United States and twenty to eighty times that of major industrial nations during the 1950s and 1960s. The Kung were pacified by the Botswana police. Similarly the Copper Eskimo experienced very high levels of feuding and manslaughter before the Canadian Mounted Police suppressed this.
A very eloquent survey of the situation described above is presented by Harvard Professer Steven Pinker in the following lectures, which draw from Keeley and other archaeologists and ethnologist, deftly shattering the views (Pinker calls it “treacle”) which academia has propagated in spite of telling evidence to the contrary. What Pinker tells us puts things into a more accurate — and pretty startling — perspective.
From my Medium Biographical and General Interest Blog
By Frederic Friedel
First published on May 31, 2016
Some years ago I spent quite a bit of time in Mexico — five trips I believe, average two weeks each, as a journalist and software specialist attending world class chess tournaments. Mexico City was scary — more about that in a separate article. Morelia, on the other hand, was the nicest place you can imagine — a beautiful, calm city with the friendliest people. Making eye contact with a stranger on the street, I quickly learned, should be accompanied by a friendly smile. After a few weeks of that you return to Europe, where the appropriate reaction to chance eye contact is to look away quickly and apologetically — “sorry, didn’t mean to offend you, to invade your privacy.”
In Morelia we were treated like kings: stayed in fine hotels, got everything we wanted, quickly and always with an enchantingly friendly smile. And we had meal vouchers — breakfast, lunch and dinner were all paid for by the organisers, and they were valid for one of the best restaurants in Morelia, La Conspiration, just minutes away from the hotel.
Chicharrones was introduced to me by Guil, a nice Jewish boy who bought copious amounts of it and shared it with our group. Chicharrón is pork rind that has been seasoned and deep fried. You can add salsa verde (green chili sauce), or squeeze lime on them. Don’t get started on it, you cannot stop until you are thoroughly stuffed.
My Mexican friends — Manuel, Jorge, Lorraina, Guil and Ricardo, pretending to eat habanero chilies— took me to the market was so I could buy an adequate supply of fresh chillies to take home to Hamburg. Habaneros, the deadliest of them all, weigh in at 100,000 to 300,000 Scoville units, enough to kill a horse at twenty paces.
I discovered recently why chillies are hot, from an evolutionary point of view. Normally plants produce fruit so that they are plucked and eaten, so the seeds may be transported by animals to distant locations. So what is the point of producing a fruit that nobody in their right minds would touch (but see below)? Well, it turns out that chili plants have specialised in being transported by certain birds (like parrots) which have no taste buds sensitive to capsaicin, the chemical compound that makes chillies hot.
Here are the treasures I brought back with me to Hamburg. On the left are the round chili manzana, on the top my favourite jalapeños, on the bottom the hotter green serranos, on the right the sweet pablanos and, in the middle, the deadly orange-red habaneros.
Most of the chillies keep for over a month in my refrigerator, an important factor when you live in a country where Mexican chillies are not readily available, even in gourmet stores.
The Great Mexican Chili Challenge
After the chess event we were all transported to the International Airport at Mexico City for our trip back to Europe. While passing through the baggage check my bag with the chillies sounded off an alarm. Apparently capsaicin — at least a lot of it — can set off the explosive substance detectors. In the end the guards who opened and carefully checked the bag concluded that this was just a European nutcase hooked on Mexican food. They simply laughed at me.
But the others in my group, who saw this happen, wanted to be briefed on what I was transporting. World class chess grandmaster Levon Aronian asked me to show him some of the chillies. I pulled out a bag of dried pequin chilis and handed him a few, with appropriate warnings (they are 30,000–40,000 on the Scoville scale). Levon ate them like popcorn. Peter Svidler, top Russian grandmaster from St. Petersburg, joined the fun and, after tasting a few, made snide remarks about how mild they were. Insulted and bent on revenge, I pulled out one of the — habaneros!
I tried a tiny bit from the tip and was initially disappointed. But then it suddenly came— that terrifying burning sensation that causes your brain to produce endorphins, natural opioids, which ultimately leads to hot foods addiction. Of course the tip is nowhere close to the bottom half with the seeds, which is the deadly part. Levon demanded and reluctantly got half of this. He chomped away at it and looked somewhat dazed: “Okay, that is seriously hot,” he said. But he survived very nicely. And I bowed to him, saying: “In Germany I am the king of hot foods — people come from near and far to watch me eat chillies. But you — you are the ultimate master, compared to you I am a simple amateur.” — “A chilli wuss,” Lev confirmed.
Peter Svidler had watched this all and was consumed with jealousy. “Give me the other half,” he said. “No way,” I replied, “I don’t want to end the life of one of the world’s strongest chess players.” But Peter grabbed it out of my hand and munched away at it, seeds and all, with a contented smile on his face. So I bowed to him and repeated the accolade I had bestowed on Lev. That an aristocratic St. Petersburg boy can take undiluted habaneros was utterly beyond my comprehension.
After the above transpired I went to get some coffee, and when I returned Peter had vanished. “He’s having trouble with your chillies,” the others said. I raced down the hallway searching for him, in panic. I could see the headlines: “Stupid German journalist kills world class chess grandmaster at Mexican airport.”
I finally found Peter in the men’s toilet, splashing soapy water from a basin into his face. “I touched my eyes,” he told me, and looked up. They were completely red, almost crimson where the whites normally are. I led him back to the others, where he covered his eyes and said “It is not his fault!” before he took down his hands and showed them what had happened. Peter also had a rough night on the plane, with stomach aches and grumbling. I think he learned an important lesson for life.
One more little tale: I once bought a bottle of Dave’s Insanity hot sauce. It came in little wooden box with a “Caution” banderol around it and a warning booklet that made sure you knew what you were buying. I tried it out at a dinner: I opened the bottle and touched the rim with the sharp edge of a dinner knife. Then I drew a line on a plate with the sauce. It was barely visible. A young lady who was translating for us at the event took her knife and drew the tip across the line, at 90 degrees. Then she touched the knife briefly to her tongue. She didn’t speak to me for a week.
By Frederic Friedel
Sergey is a very intelligent, very talented person. He is a world class chess grandmaster who travels the globe and sends me wonderful cultural pictorials of the places he visits. He is a lucid and interesting conversationalist, whose company I enjoy. But: Sergey believes in magic, he believes in paranormal phenomena. And he believes in aliens and UFOs.
Some year ago I receive the following email from Sergey:
Dear Frederic! I managed to shoot this object in Ohrid (Macedonia).
I sent the photo to the leading Russian UFO expert Mikhail Gershtein, and I got an answer from him:
Уважаемый Сергей! Прошу прощения за задержку с ответом. Точнее, я хотел бы дать ответ и спрашивал у всех, что бы это могло быть, но мы сошлись на том, что это:
1) объект материальный, находящийся довольно далеко,
2) определить его размеры и истинную форму по одному снимку невозможно.
Так что до сих пор этот объект остается НЛО в широком смысле — что-то летело, неопознано. Скорее всего птица (так кажется при увеличении фрагмента снимка), но не поручусь, что это так.
* Михаил Герштейн *
To translate his answer from Russian:
“Dear Sergey! Excuse me for the delay with the answer. To be more accurate, I wanted to give the answer and asked everyone, what the object could have been. We had agreed that:
1) this is a material object which is rather far away;
2) to determine its size and true shape only after one photo is impossible.That’s why so far this object remains a UFO in the wider meaning — something that was flying but cannot be identified. Probably a bird (it seems after zooming in a fragment of the photo), but cannot guarantee that it is so.
Mikhail Gershtein
Well, he couldn’t give a definite conclusion about the nature of the object. But, I would like to attract the attention to the fact that the object has the aura around it!
With best wishes.
Sergey
Here is my reply to Sergey:
Dear Sergey!
For some time now we have been discussing the possibility of getting together for a debate on the subject of your interests in extraordinary phenomena — a debate that is bound to be quite belligerent. We have not managed so far, and for this reason I will reply to you this way.
Your picture, Sergey, could also well be a bird, smudged by the digital resolution of your camera. In the vast majority of all UFO pictures we are looking at smudged birds — the creatures are constantly flying through the sky.
Let us turn to the “aura” you noticed in both pictures. The Exif information in your picture tells us you took it on with a Canon PowerShot S40 with an exposureTime of 1/1002 seconds, an aperture of 4.51, a focal length of 7.09 mm and using a 3 bits/pixel compression. That can easily lead to smudging at this length, and more importantly to chromatic aberration and blooming.
Let me explain: chromatic aberration is an optical defect of a lens which causes different colours or wave lengths of light to be focused at different distances from the lens. It is seen as colour fringes or halos along the edges of highly contrasted objects.
Note that the halo or “aura” is visible not just around the flying object in your picture, but also along the stone ledge and indeed on the diffuse edges of the hills in the background. They are the result of CCD physics and sensitivity, produced by image contrast on the pixels of the chip, not by the objects being photographed.
I spent ten whole minutes searching for UFOs in my digital photo archives. Here are two quick examples, both from the first directory I examined with outdoor pictures:
It may interest you to know, Sergey, that modern picture processing programs have chromatic aberration filters which attempt to remove the effects of both traditional transverse chromatic aberration as well as the very common “purple fringing” which plagues most digital cameras.
We now come to the reason for my “narrow-minded” rejection of the theory that some of the pictures are actually not birds, planes, blimps and other natural objects, but are indeed space ships or other flying objects that originate from other star systems. As with everything that does not contain a blatant logical fallacy the possibility that they might be extraterrestrial objects cannot be refuted. But I reject the theory on the basis of probability.
Occam’s razor tells us that the simplest explanation is the best, and all extraterrestrial explanations are horribly complex and improbable. In particular I have problems with the following assumptions:
- I cannot understand why interstellar travelers would cross such gigantic distances, which is very, very hard, and then try, more or less unsuccessfully, to carefully hide themselves from the native species. What is the point?
- It is difficult to believe that alien spaceships, which have apparently been sighted in many millions of instances, and have indeed conducted countless abductions and the infamous probes, have never left the equivalent of a Hershey Bar wrapper for us to find and analyse.
- I find it disturbing that the creatures described in cases of abduction tend to have great similarity with the comic book and movie aliens of the corresponding countries and for relevant eras. It is interesting to compare the tall, slender aliens that visit Europe and Scandinavia with the reptilian beings that tend to land in Japan and the Far East; and how over the last fifty years or so the aliens people claim to have encountered mutated in sync with science fiction movies produced in Hollywood.
- But the key problem for me, Sergey, is the following: if we assume there have been alien landings, the people who would best know about this are scientists, the military and politicians. Each would have a tremendous motivation to bring the information to public attention. Scientists have great trouble keeping anything a secret — they are dying to announce discoveries and publish papers. The military knows that the moment they can plausibly confirm the visit of some reclusive alien beings with space ships and, in all likelihood, powerful weapons, their military budget would immediately be doubled and tripled. They would be able to build all those “gorgeous toys” they have been longing to do all these years. And finally politicians know that this type of “crisis” inevitably leads to the widest possible support for those currently in power — people need their leaders to steer them out of danger.
In view of this I find it very hard to believe that all three groups would join forces, as never before in history, to suppress this vital information, and that they would do so for one reason that is inevitably cited: to avoid world panic. Have they really been covering up the evidence, which is apparently available in great profusion, so meticulously and to their own considerable disadvantage, mainly because they fear that people will be running out on the street screaming? Sorry, I don’t buy it.
Sergey, you are still invited to come to Hamburg for our long-planned discussion on the subject. I know that you intend to leave me converted and a true believer — you have told me to expect that to happen. But do bring more than lens flares and chromatic aberration when you eventually come to visit.
With best wishes.
Frederic
Addendum: Sergey did eventually visit me and the anticipated adversarial debate ensued. Check it out in “Iridium magic — how to fool believers.”
By Frederic Friedel
First published: May 30, 2016
Planes disappear. In 1937 aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart went missing over the central Pacific Ocean while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. No remnants of her plane were ever found. In the late 1940s aircraft started vanishing in the “Bermuda Triangle”, leading to industrial level conspiracy theories. Planes going down over water are particularly difficult to find and the search for them monstrously time-consuming and expensive.
On 8 March 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished on a scheduled commercial flight to Beijing, after performing a number of mysterious route manoeuvres. The search for the missing plane has been the most expensive in aviation history — more than a hundred millions dollars — and over two years later all we have found are a few pieces of matching debris, washed ashore on the African coast.
And on May 19, 2016, EgyptAir flight MS804 went down over the Mediterranean. After the first ten days some scraps of debris and some body parts were found, but there is still no certainty on what caused the crash. And it is vitally important to know — was it terrorism, was it caused by an explosive smuggled onto the plane in one of its numerous stops on the day of the flight?
Experts suggest that it will take months or even years to retrieve enough wreckage to determine exactly what happened. When Air France Flight 447 disappeared off the Brazilian coast in June 2009 it took search teams nearly two years to retrieve the black boxes from the ocean floor and another year to finally establish the cause of the crash — faulty airspeed indicators — and to hear the pilot’s final words: “Damn it, we’re going to crash”.
The key to finding a plane, and finding out what caused it to crash, is hidden in a flight data recorder, which preserves as many technical parameter as possible from the recent history of the flight, and in a cockpit voice recorder that captures audio sounds from the cockpit, including the conversation of the pilots. If these two hardened, water-proof devices are found intact, they can provide valuable information to investigators on what transpired in the minutes and hours before the crash.
Black boxes, which are actually bright orange in colour, are stored deep inside the planes and go down to the bottom of the sea with the wreckage. They are equipped with underwater locator beacons which are automatically activated and will signal for around 30 (currently being upgraded to 90) days under water. But it is of course notoriously difficult to retrieve black boxes when they are under miles of ocean, especially if the sea bed consists of rugged terrain.
So why are we still relying on a device and a strategy developed in the 1950s to monitor modern aircraft traffic? Isn’t it time to upgrade? This has been discussed — most intensely after a plane goes missing, and the general demand is that the data should be streamed live, via satellite, to recording systems on the ground. To which the conclusion inevitably is: too expensive, would cost billions to install and maintain.
There is a certain justification in this objection: there are over 100,000 commercial flights per day, which would result in hundreds of millions of hours of transmission and recording per year. Accidents almost never happen — if you took a flight every single day of your life you could expect to die in a crash in around 30,000 years. Streaming the flight and voice data of all commercial flights would be an unimaginable waste. And completely unnecessary. What you need to do is to have the critical (and extremely rare) information at your disposal immediately after an accident occurs.
Is this possible, and is it possible at a reasonable cost? Like $75 per plane? Well, as a thought experiment we could start with a hardware budget in this range. The innards of a standard low-cost Android phone will provide most of what we need: a wireless connection to the built-in black boxes of a plane, a micro SD card, and some attachment material. And a bit of programming — a few hours of it. The device, which I have called the “F-box” (for Flight Box) in discussions, receives whatever the black boxes are recording and stores the data in a loop — overwriting the oldest material as the memory chip fills.
The F-box is attached to the outside of the plane, ready to detach itself if submersed in water. It would be surrounded by flotation material (adding some more cents to its cost) that insures that if the plane hits the sea, and it was not directly destroyed in the crash, it will soon be floating around at the surface. If we want to stay within the $75 budget we will encase the box in Styrofoam and attach it to a nook in the plane using water-soluble glue — okay, that’s pushing it a bit.
Once the F-box is out there floating on the surface it would send a wireless ping every minute — or every ten minutes or every hour, to optimize battery life — with exact geo-coordinates of its location (did I mention that an Android cell-phone has built-in electronics to do exactly this?). Finding the exact location of the crash would be quite easy, and we would have instant access to the final hours of the destroyed plane.
But that is not the only safeguard we want to install. We will program the F-box to know the exact planned route, directions, cruising altitude and destination of the flight. This is something I can almost do today with a free app which gives me flight data when I point the camera of my smart phone at a plane flying overhead. So no great problem there. Using the built-in GPS the F-box tracks the course of the plane and makes sure it is not deviating from the flight plan.
If it is, immediate action is taken. Say the plane starts to descend, or veers off-course, or depressurizes — or say a panic button is hit by the flight personnel — then the F-box immediately starts to broadcast whatever it is currently receiving from the black boxes. It does this using whatever technology is available on the flight. This could be broadband WiFi, which many planes have now installed; radio; or best of all Iridium communication, which is globally available. Make a special deal with Iridium, which costs $49 per month for private users. This might add a bit to the $75 hardware costs, but would be well worth it.
Anyway, the F-box begins broadcasting whatever it is receiving from the black boxes, but it also broadcasts what it has recorded before the emergency action was triggered. And it does this backwards: the data is sent in reverse, and continues being sent until the box detaches from the plane and has only its battery left to draw power from. After that it is retrieval time.
The above means that when a plane goes down, like MH370 or MS804, we will have instant access to the final minutes (or hours, in the case of the Malaysian plan) of the flight, and to the exact location of where it all happened. We would not spend weeks (or months, or years) trying to find out where the wreckage is located, speculating if it was technological malfunction or terrorism, and sending tens of millions of dollars doing this.
I will admit the above plan is not fool-proof: the F-box could detach itself prematurely, and be lost (another $75 to replace it); or it could be completely destroyed at impact; or communications with the black boxes or satellites could be disrupted. All of this can be addressed and solutions found. The point is that we are talking about hardware costs that are equivalent to a short-haul economy class flight ticket, for the simplest possible solution. Give me a budget that is in the range of a first-class ticket and I will provide something completely foolproof — like building a little backward facing recess for the F-box that is not exposed to rain, or sensors that will detach the box if it is immersed in water. With other words: for a reasonable budget you get a solution that will fail only under the very direst of circumstances.
Addendum
A number of brainy friends have sent me comments on the above thought experiment. John from Britain wrote:
I think the power supply to your F-box might be a problem. You commented on the WiFi (through the metal skin of the plane??) but didn’t discuss how the battery is kept charged. I don’t think that many plane designers would be happy to have a hole drilled in the side of the fuselage for a power cable to go through.” John thinks the simple fact is that my device would have to:
1) Stay attached to the plane in a 600 mph-airstream, through thunderstorms, turbulence, etc.;
2) Reliably detatch on entry into water;
3) Have a connection to supply power while it is attached;
4) Detatch this connection on entry into water;
5) Have a sufficiently low density to float to the surface.
It’s really hard to imagine how all this could be done and nothing which could accomplish it has been proposed.
Ken in California wrote (he abhors capital letters):
almost all commercial planes broadcast their position, altitude, temperature and wind every couple minutes. these are used for multiple purposes: 1) modern version of predicting winds aloft. old version (still used, but ignored in the u.s.) is weather balloons. 2) commercial flight trackers that have web aps that allow one to see where a flight is.
putting a much higher rate transmission of many more parameters would swamp any data channel. i think that allowing the box to self-diagnose a problem is not workable. only continuous transmission and/or recording will work. a possibility would be to transmit locally, and have near flights record. that means that the black box in a plane will record not only its own data, but data of nearby planes.”
Tommy from Hamburg said he had done a little googling and came to the following conclusions:
It appears that there are only about 20,000 planes in service. A large majority of those fly mostly over places like the US, Europe and East Asia, where they are never or only rarely out of communication range, so there isn’t a problem for those planes. Looking at flightradar24.com there are about 10,000 planes in flight right now, and I would guess that over 90% are over land, and most of those within visible range of a city. So that leaves probably well under 2000 planes out of direct communication range at any time. I was surprised how low all these numbers are.
According to this thread on stackexchange, planes already send out their location twice a second, but there’s not necessarily anything available to listen, to pick up the signals. Satellites that are launching soon might have receivers for the plane signals. But it appears that most planes don’t have satellite communication yet.
Considering the enormous cost of the MH 370 search (over $130 million), it might actually be worth retrofitting some satellite communication system to all existing long haul planes, especially since that would enable services that airlines want to be able to provide on planes anyway. The company Gogo seems to offer just that. Here’s their ground communication installation, and they also offer satellite communication upgrades. I suspect we will see these being installed on most planes soon anyway.
And I’m not convinced that the amount of bandwidth needed is all that much. In fact I’d go as far as to say that even if every single plane in the air transmitted many parameters every second and included a continuous compressed audio stream from the cockpit, the overall bandwidth would be less than 50 mbit.
Perhaps we should leave it all to Gogo, who need to add a recording device such as the one described above to the WiFi systems with which they are currently retro-fitting commercial airlines. This is more than the $75 I proposed (somewhat tongue-in-cheek), but it will also provide general connectivity on long haul flights. So it will be paying for itself.
Addendum: On January 17, 2017, after nearly three-year, the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was officially abandoned—forever. It had covered 120,000-square kilometers of ocean and cost $160 million, but has not been able to locate the aircraft.
From my Medium Biographical and General Interest Blog
By Frederic Friedel
As a young TV science journalist, I traveled to the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, near Munich, Germany, at the beginning of the 1980s. They had the fastest computer in the world, a Cray-1, and I was there to do a story on it. Recently I was trying to figure out how much progress we have made in the three decades that have passed. Are today’s consumer computers faster, and if yes by what factor? Ten? You are not going to believe what I am going to tell you.
I remember entering Max Planck with my film crew, sitting down and telling some scientists why we had come. Then I asked “where is the computer, the Cray?” — “You are sitting on it,” they replied. Oops, right they were. This is what the Cray-1 looked like:
Of course when you took off the panels of the tower and the structure surrounding it things looked different:
This super-computer had been developed by CDC engineer Seymour Cray, who had found backers on Wall Street for the project. It took four years to build, and in 1975 when the first 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced, interest was so high that a bidding war broke out between the Lawrence Livermore and the Los Alamos National Laboratories. The latter eventually won and took delivery of a trial machine with the serial number 001. The first regular customer was the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). They payed $8 million for a Cray-1 (serial number 3) and a million for storage disks. Over the years Cray Research sold over eighty Cray-1s, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. You will find a lot more information on this at Wiki.
Anyway, I was absolutely thrilled to see the Max Planck super-machine, and my six-minute TV piece on it was positively effusive. A couple of year later I got to see another Cray, this one in the basement of the Bell Laboratories, where my friend Ken Thompson had access to it. It was faster and more advanced than the one in Germany, and we dutifully drooled over it.
Recently — we are talking mid May 2016 — I wrote a chess article on a wonderful endgame involving a “wrong bishop” (which cannot easily support an edge pawn to promote). This endgame can only be solved with specialized chess knowledge, which computers at the time did not have. In spite of this a program called Cray Blitz, running on an advanced Cray, had played the endgame perfectly against a human opponent. At the time this was celebrated as the first instance of practical chess knowledge having been implemented into a computer (the “intelligent method”), but when I looked at the program logs and discussed the position with the Cray team I discovered that Cray Blitz had simply searched deep enough to see the solution — by pure brute force. It seemed to be impossible, but that was how fast the machine was.
Some time later I started using a “wrong bishop” study on famous chess players, including the great post-war World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik, and recording the time it took them to solve it. This again I reported in part two of the above article. I also showed it to Cray Blitz, which in the meantime had become the Computer Chess World Champion. Botvinnik, who was a proponent of the “intelligent method”, was shocked to see the computer solve the position by pure brute force calculation.
While I was writing these historical articles I started to wonder how fast the Cray-1 had actually been — compared to today’s machines. It was expedient that a British friend, John Nunn, had just bought his son Michael a good mid-range graphics card for his 18th birthday. John is a mathematician, computer expert (and a chess grandmaster). He did some calculations for me and wrote back: “The Cray-1 could do 130 Megaflops” [million floating point operations per second]. “The NVidia Graphics card in Michael’s computer can do 2258 Gigaflops. So it is about 17,000 times as powerful by this measure.” John conceded that, of course, the architectures are very different.
17,000 times more powerful?? A card you can hold in the palm of your hand, and which costs around $300? I consulted Ken Thompson on this — he has been work on the forefront of computing for over fifty years.
Ken, who never capitalizes anything, wrote:
the cray had 2–5ns cycle time. (depending on model) in that time, it could get up to 7 arithmetic units executing an instruction. the vector length was 64 and it took a few instructions to start and a few to shut down. some models had up to 8 processors. so, peak rate is about 0.5G (2ns) * 7 * 8 or about 25G. now to get to reality — not everything can be vectored. and when you can vector, usually only a few of the units are used. in fact, most instruction are simply run at the clock rate. some instructions take multiple units (divide, square root). but the cray had huge bandwidth to memory. the i/o was staggering.
You figure this out.
By Frederic Friedel
First published: May 26, 2016
Some years ago I was working in my home in Hamburg, Germany. My wife has a desk adjacent to mine, in the first floor of our house, and we each have a window in front of us. Suddenly Ingrid said: “What is it doing??” I followed her gaze and saw a crow sitting on a very high street light with an acorn in it beak. In a moment of quite uncommon presence of mind I grabbed my camera and started shooting. That evening I posted the following video on YouTube:
Description below the clip: Uploaded on Oct 26, 2009. The crow flies to the top of a very high street light and then throws the acorn down on the road for it to crack open. It obviously does this purposefully and intentionally. Please watch and appreciate how it checks for cars while crossing the road.
This was just another interaction with crows, which have been quite numerous in my life. Most of them were abroad, in tropical countries, but there is another to relate that also occurred here in Hamburg. I have no visuals — we were not carrying a camera — but I have reliable witnesses to attest to the veracity of the following incident.
A year or two after the above had happened Ingrid and I went to see a blockbuster movie. We had to go early to get tickets, and we then spent half an hour waiting for entrance. We did this strolling by a beautiful lake, the Alster, that is located in the middle of Hamburg. And there we saw a few hundred dark birds — raven crows — perched on the trees and the ground.
It was quite spectacular, and a number of people stood around admiring the scene. Some tried to approach closer, but the crows were shy and immediately distanced themselves. Later I checked: they were migratory birds from Russia.
Well, I noticed that some of the crows on the ground were collecting acorns and burying them in the grass — poking holes in the ground and pushing them in. So I squatted down, some distance from the crows, and started doing the same, poking a hole with my finger and pushing an acorn in. It was clear that they were watching me.
Then I discovered that I could peel acorns quite easily after cracking them between my teeth. So I did this and tossed one towards the nearest birds. They immediately took flight and perched on a nearby tree. And kept watching. I peeled a few more acorns and tossed them in the general direction. After some minutes one of the crows descended and picked up a peeled acorn, which it proceeded to bury in the grass. Then another.
Now I changed my strategy: I would peel an acorn and, clearly visible to the bird, bury it in the grass. Then I would move a short distance away. And soon it happened: the bird “stole” my acorn and buried it in a different place. We did this a couple of times, and I kept decreasing the distance I move away from the buried nut. Finally I buried one and stayed put. With considerably hesitancy the crow approached, retrieved the nut and re-buried it a few yards away. It became more confident and kept taking them very quickly now.
And then I swear the following happened (and I have the reliable witnesses to confirm it). The crow was digging out a nut right next to me, and I slowly reached out to pet it. It crouched down, flattening itself on the ground, and allowed me to stroke it! A wild crow, one that had flown away if anyone approached within twenty yards.
I have not completely figured out what happened that afternoon. My theory is that the crow watched me perform something it understood and slowly decided that I was a giant, malformed member of its species. When I was stroking it, it pecked away at my hand, which was soon quite bloody. It must have know something was wrong about the situation and was in the turmoil of companionship, terror and flight. What other explanation is there? The bird may have been hand-raised, at some distant location, but it was clearly part of the migratory group which it soon rejoined, so that this explanation becomes quite unlikely. I ask any ornithologist (or ethologist) reading this piece to give me a plausible explanation.
By Frederic Friedel
First published: May 25, 2016
I watched Godzilla 2014 — well, most of it. Netflix seduced me. But spoiler alert: it really sucked. It has Bryan Cranston in it, at least for the first third of the movie. Then (another spoiler alert) he dies. Probably he said “this is silly. I am the Breaking Bad star and this is too much.”
However I stuck with the film, waiting for the incredible special effects that would inevitably come. Same as I did with Jurassic World, which was basically a B-movie but had superb dinosaur animation. Take a look at what they did with CGI. Or Avatar, which was in fact produced in stunning 3D.
After a modestly promising start the Godzilla 2014 monster appeared, as did a new player, the flying Muto, which is its mortal enemy. Both are hundreds of feet tall and can crush cars by stepping on them. But: they are played by men in suits! Can you believe that?
This is our 2014 hero, towering above skyscrapers, but clearly a man in a funny suit. I have brightened these screen grabs to reveal what the makers sought to hide by showing most of the movie in ominous darkness.
Godzilla’s enemy Muto is much worse. This hundred-foot pterodactyl-like creature is a man in a tight rubber suit, with some appendages — for example he is holding sticks covered with latex. With which he can destroy buildings. You can watch the action in the following YouTube extract:
I have left the time stamp visible in the screen grabs above so you can go to the relevant parts and see for yourself. The impression is worse when you actually see the monsters move.
Of course this Men-in-Suits production technique has a long history. When the first Godzilla (Gojira) was made in 1954 the producer wanted to use stop motion animation that he admired from the original King Kong. But he decided that the film would take years to make, and he only had months to do it. So he went for the costume solution.
The genesis of the first Godzilla costume technique is well described in the above documentary (starting at 26m 55s), giving us an impression of how laborious things were sixty years ago.
Godzilla 1998, made five years after Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, still stuck with a giant monster played by a man in a (tight) rubber suit. You can watch some HD footage, if you have the nerve for it.
So what is it with this genre, haven’t they heard of CGI? I mean we are entering the world of Virtual Reality, where people will soon be saying: Hawaii? Yes, it was pretty, but nothing like the VR version, which was far more stunning, with whales and dolphins, and even a full volcano eruption.
By Frederic Friedel
First published: May 20, 2016
Sounds like a great obscure movie title (like Shawshank Redemption)? Well, before you google it, let me dig into the story. Everything will be clear in the end.
Vera is one of the smartest people I know. She has a doctorate in Quantum Physics and String Theory, speaks at least five different languages, fluently, is an expert on German poetry, draws and paints beautifully, plays the violin at concert level, writes sumptuous prose — and all that before she had reached the age of 30 (which now she has gracefully done).
Vera is also a great sport, with a keen sense of humour. I kept meeting her for a few years, and then it became imperative to introduce her to the family. The opportunity arose when she was in Hamburg on a publication mission — she had taken over the physics department of one of the biggest publishing houses in Europe, Springer. I told her I would pick her up at her hotel, and when I arrived there I saw her standing in front of the entrance. There was no parking spot and I waved for her to come over. She glanced at me and then looked away.
Well, I found a place to park some distance away and walked over to her. She greeted me effusively, hug and kisses, and we walked back to the car. “Why didn’t you come over when I waved to you before?” I asked. “I didn’t see you,” she replied. “You did. We clearly made eye contact, and then you looked away. What happened?”
Vera was silent for some minutes. Then she said: “Okay, Frederic, I have prosopagnosia.” — “Face blindness,” she hastened to add. It is a cognitive disorder where people cannot recognize faces, while other visual faculties are unaffected. It can be caused by an accident involving brain damage (“acquired prosopagnosia”), but is often, as in Vera’s case, congenital. This latter form affects, to a more or less severe degree, about 2.5% of the population.
It is clear that there are areas of the brain that specialize in face recognition. In a normal person they are activated in response to face stimuli and permit wondrous feats. In experiments I have led subjects into a roomful of people, known to them, and then dragged them out in less than one second. I then asked them who was in the room, and they could usually name everyone, and even describe their demeanour (“…and Sally, who was looking quite unhappy”). An incredibly accurate high-speed scan. When I asked them about pictures hanging on the wall or what was on the table they were at a loss. Clearly recognizing faces is a specialized activity in the brain.
This ability is absent in Vera’s inferior occipital areas. She cannot recognize anyone by just looking at them — not even herself in a mirror, when there are other people in her visual field (she habitually moves a hand in such cases to be sure she is looking at herself). That is why she didn’t recognize me waving to her in my car. Vera — did I mention? — is a very attractive young lady, and must treat a man driving by, waving and inviting her into his car, with a certain degree of caution.
So how did she recognize me when I approached her? “By your voice. That is the way I recognize most people.” It was hard to believe. I had met Vera about a dozen times, often in a social environment, with many diverse and interesting people. Never noticed a thing. She mingles and chats like any other person.
Well, the prosopagnosia thing intrigued me, and the next time I was due to meet her I had an experiment prepared. She was standing in a crowded room with dozens of people around her. I simply walked up, smiled at her and said nothing. Complete silence. Within a few second Vera said “Frederic, great that you are here, lovely to see you again,” with the customary hug and kisses. “You lied to me,” I said, “you recognized me without hearing my voice.” Her explanation: “I was expecting you to show up, and nobody else would do this to me: stand in front of me and simply smile. I’m not stupid Frederic, I knew it was you.”
So the next test. We had arranged to meet in a hotel in southern Germany, where I was with a colleague, mathematics professor Christian Hesse. I took Christian, who knows Vera, into the cafeteria and gave him careful instructions. Vera would look around the lobby, not see us, and then proceed to the cafeteria. We, I told Christian, would glance up at her entering and then look away without smiling or anything. Just continue talking. It worked like clockwork, exactly as planned. Except that Vera walked over to us and greeted us enthusiastically, with normal pleasantries. So how did she do that? Later she explained that she had scanned the room and found only two candidates that matched the people she was going to meet. She can tell age, approximately, and recognize clothes and things. She did it all without breaking her stride.
I have now a fairly comprehensive knowledge of Vera’s prosopagnosia. She has explained it to me: “People with my condition have to find workarounds. For example, I would always recognize you in a place where we are supposed to meet and where it’s only you and a mathematician sitting there and waiting — what a simple challenge! Also, I remember hair, skin colour and texture, glasses, height of a person, and of course especially the voice. That is the way I can recognize who is who — unless there is someone around looking too similar. However, I will be very bad in cases when I meet a person by surprise, in a place I didn’t expect to see them. In such cases it even takes me some time to recognize my husband or my sister. But what is nice is that when I am trying to identify my husband, I often think: oh, that fellow is really good-looking — only to then realize: Wow, it is my husband! I think that’s not too bad.”
Recently I sent Vera a link to this article which I thought describes her condition fairly accurately. “I laughed when I saw the picture,” she wrote. “That’s exactly the way I see people. Now you know, Frederic.”
quodlib 