March 2, 2022

s11e06: They only went and taught the sand to do maths

0.0 Context setting

It's Wednesday, March 2nd 2022 in Portland, Oregon. Today on my docket I have a fun meeting, a sort of oral Story So Far of one of the projects I'm working on. We decided to do these because there's a bunch of stuff that happened (gosh, I'm being so vague) and we thought it would be important/useful to go over and understand what happened and why. Yes, this is partially a constructed narrative. But I'm pretty sure it's a good idea and I'm pretty sure I could explain at length.

And then I also have some fun meetings! One of them is a follow-up to a meeting where I showed a governance board how to make a cup of tea. It was brilliant, everyone loved it, and if you're a small set of people you might understand why "what's involved in making a cup of tea" is an interesting/useful thing to do with People Who Importantly Manage Important Things.

Aaaaand, it turns out I'm having a chat with someone about Spreadsheets, based on the earlier thread and what I wrote on Monday.

It rained so much yesterday the preschool class essentially decided to make muddy puddle angels. I am reminded, again, by my wife telling me the phrase that "there's no such thing as bad weather days, there's only the days you don't have the clothing". We have so, so, so much rain and snow and cold gear now.

On with the show!

1.0 Some things that caught my attention

I remembered, the other day, that here in the U.S. when Amazon delivers something to you directly (as opposed to using, what, a "third party logistics solution provider"), they do that thing now where they take a picture of the package and include it in the "We just delivered your thing" notification, both in their app/website and, I think, in your email.

A long, long time ago, in a country far, far away from here there was an old institution. A university. And in that university there were people dedicated to the study of mathematics, and the burgeoning field of applied mathematics, that is, the mathematics and implications of teaching certain kinds of sand, treated in certain precise manners, to be able to do addition and other assorted tricks.

Well, many of the people at this institution also liked a brown drink, known fairly well throughout many parts of the world, sometimes with cream, sometimes with sugar and always, wherever you are, prepared to varying degrees of quality. In this place, there was a room, and in that room was an apparatus dedicated to both making this drink and storing it in a way that would keep it, if not at the optimal temperature, then certainly and most importantly, marginally warmer than room temperature.

The problem was that this drink apparatus was in one room, and the room in which the people doing the studying and research on the quite talented sand were in a different room. The distance between the two rooms was not totally inconsiderable: it was surely possible to walk between the two. But as with most people who are dedicated to their cause and studies, on occasion it's possible to become so engrossed and so, well, at one, with the mathematically-capable sand, that one might lose sense of time. But, needs must, and these scholars would also require food and drink and attend to their other bodily needs from time to time.

And so it was that there existed a great tension: the scholars wished to maximize their time and attention upon the mathematical sand which, many of them were sure, having been blessed with prophetic visions of mathematical sand of such power that one day the sand might talk unto other sand, that people would carry such sand around with them and the world be encircled, embraced, held in both a visible and invisible, beautiful, interlaced and interlocked mesh of such sand. It would be a glorious vision, for what could not be accomplished with sufficiently complex and speedily calculated mathematics?

And yet they had to eat and drink and shit and piss, and as with any of these efforts, they wished to optimize their effort to bring about the greater glory.

One of their frustrations was the journey from their study area to the drink apparatus. Why, thought some of the scholars, why, there must be a way for us to divine whether the drink apparatus, whether the vessel of this brown drink we love, of the drink that gives us, in some way, the energy and drive to keep going when that same drive is ebbing from us, there must be some way to tell whether that vessel is empty or full or bears enough of this drink to make our arduous journey to the vessel worthwhile. It would be the worst, they agreed amongst themselves, if one were to make the journey to the drink vessel and it were empty.

So the scholars schemed and thought and did what scholars do and they begat unto the world an invention, an invention of the mathematical sand aimed at solving what they quite cleverly thought was both a practical problem and also, in a way, quite funny, for sand that does mathematics was not cheap and easy to obtain at the time, certainly not the kind of sand they were interested in for their timesaver (that would not come until much later in their vision, and in retrospect, the moment came both much later and much earlier).

What they invented was ingenious. There was a method for the mathematical sand to include in its memory a representation of the outside world, the world in which the scholars lived. A complex mechanism involving optics, lenses, charged-couple devices, much wiring, many, many individual parts of mathematical sand and, on top of the mathematical sand, the ultimate instructions that would cause the entire contraption to work.

It would be magic, and they would deliver for themselves the ability to see at a distance, truly something that only mythical magicians, those they'd read about in their youth, possessed.

They called this invention the Trojan Room coffee pot, so named after the room in which the vessel was held, and the latter part named for the drink and the vessel.

They connected a camera to a conglomeration of mathematical sand: an Acorn Archimedes computer (these scholars were fond of their Greek references). And true to their vision, the innards of the Archimedes would, thirty years later, find themselves to be the direct ancestors of the mathematical sand powering billions of devices around the world.

That Archimedes was connected to a network of other computers. And so in the year 1991, a group of computer scientists were able to check, from their laboratory, at any given time, whether the coffee pot in the Trojan Room was empty, full, or somewhere in-between. The image was coarse, of course: only 128 by 128 pixels. It was in black and white. But that is all you need when you need to know whether there is coffee or not. It was a portal to another physical location, available without the expensive apparatus of television cameras and broadcast wiring and a closed-circuit television network. It was a portal to another physical location available, in theory, to anybody with mathematical sand that could talk to another piece of mathematical sand that could talk to another, and eventually, to the Trojan Room coffee pot.

A couple of years later, the computer scientists thought it would be convenient (and, presumably both amusing and a bit show-offy, in that way scholars of a certain ilk sometimes are) if the Trojan Room coffee pot was accessible not only to their own colleagues, but to the entire world, over a particular sub, sub, sub, sub, sub dialect and custom of the mathematical sand's network, called the World Wide Web. Many other scholars and people inclined with the same tendencies and personality traits as these initial computer scientists were impressed, a little jealous, and from there, the idea of the first ever webcam sending a live image over HTTP and TCP/IP to relatively cheap computers was born and spread.

When someone working for Amazon, at the direction of Amazon, is the last part of a vast coordination of work resulting in the delivery of a package to an address you've specified, whether that's your home, an office, or some other place, and they take a photograph of it and that photograph is transmitted somewhere and made accessible to you, from nearly any location in the world, when that is done and it takes less than a second from the capturing of the image to it being available to you, that is, I believe, a direct descendant of the Trojan Room coffee pot.

Now, I would not go so far as to say that these two are directly correlated or that there is causation to the extent that but for the Trojan Room coffee pot Amazon, a product of an incredibly complex web of factors not least including economics, capitalism, the particular psychosocial and cultural make-up of specific groups of people in the United States and more specifically the West Coast of the United States, and the inhumane policy of enslavement, of the further inequitable distribution of wealth predicated on the belief that some people are inherently less human than others, I would not say that one of these caused the other. But I will say that the Trojan Room coffee pot was a tool and that the tool was put to both good, to ill, and to the simply humorous. That like all technology it is both invented by and used by people, and so is inextricably socially constructed to fulfill a need. And so I do think, but only in the loosest way, I suppose, when I think about the engines of capitalism and our economy and how we are all people deserving of respect and a right to life that there is always a balance between convenience and control, because while the Trojan Room coffee pot had no choice, being an insensate, unconscious (as far as we know) collection of atoms in a relatively ordered state, the people who work for Amazon who deliver our packages and then take photographs of them at the direction of their employer? The requirement to take a photograph of their delivery reduces their autonomy and can and most likely is used as a measure of control.

That, again, was slightly over 15 minutes. Only about 20!

But I enjoyed writing it. Hopefully you enjoyed reading it.

There's a more pithy version here, of course¹.

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How are you? I'm doing much better than yesterday, thanks! Today, it turns out, was another day, and another opportunity to, uh, Make Good Choices!

I love receiving notes from people -- it's one of the reasons why I like doing this newsletter, perhaps even more so than decades² ago when I was blogging.

Best,

Dan