One year ago today: October 11, 2017, the cardinals still live here.
Five years ago today: October 11, 2013, Connaught Square isn't.
Nine years ago today: October 11, 2009, about those volcanoes . . .
Random years ago today: October 11, 2006, obviously written at work.
No word yet on this weekend for hotdog operations, but let’s see if it gets left to the last minute again. If it was me, I’d be ready now, as of noon today at the latest. Instead, my knee healed well and I was out in the yard prepping the ground for the shed electric. I also measured the size of panels needed to put in a privacy fence for the far back yard. So it cannot be viewed from the roadway. And I found my old science fair project, read about it in the addendum today. Here’s the board layout. It has a few loose wires but otherwise works fine. The keypegs to the left are small clothespins, the beige plate with the red dots in the center is the ROM and the display on the right side is a homemade seven segment display.
I could have used regular switching diodes, but decided on the LED types because it let the operator see directly which part of the circuit was being used. The ROM itself is in rows across the perfboard. You may notice that not every row has every location used. That is the nature of ROM, it is essentially hard-wired. To change the function, you have to change the physical connections. However, the ROM still works after years of outdoor storage. This is the design I hope to adapt to RAM. The concept is simple, I’ll refresh our memories. Instead of a fixed diode at chosen wire intersections, I will place a transistor at every intersection. Think of it as dynamic ROM, instead of just one static function, by turning the transistors off and on with programming, it can fulfill any operation of which it is physically capable.
Yes, all this has been done and all that, but I don’t know anybody who has actually built their own RAM. The trade-off is that transistors don’t work unless they have constant power. Now you know why you lose your program when your computer goes dead even for a split second. All the transistors wink out and the pattern is lost. And besides, anybody who reads about invention knows how many times a complete amateur like me comes along and finds something the illustrious professionals said cannot be done. Who’s to say I’m not the guy who stumbles on a way to make those transistors remember where they were without electricity. They laughed at Albert Frankenstien, did they not? And they never thought Louis Armstrong would be the first black man to play trumpet on the Moon.
[Author’s note: But be reasonable, as the day of the solitary inventor seems to be long gone. One curious side-effect of the robot club is that working as a team always moves faster and better, but it’s uncanny how often everybody gets the same dumb idea at the same time.]
Old school.
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I checked my news feed around noon, spending a comfortable afternoon with all three A/C units purring away. You’d like it. Where the old unit would chill the north wall, you could feel the convection on the south. The insulation has cured the radiant feeling during really hot spells and the entire living area can be set to shirt-sleeve comfort. Tomorrow I’m planning on more electric, get some lights up and working and finish a few small tasks that got put off due to hot weather. Back to the news.
The highlights of today are worth recording. Scientists in Australia have picked up some mysterious rapid radio transmissions from outer space. Tickets for a lunar landing and return by 2028 have dropped in price so that mere millionaires can now afford them. MicroSoft is now building laptops, making me wonder if they’d royally screw that up, too. Imagine, a computer that knows more about what you want than you do. And my motorcycle days may not be over. Today I found a snapshot of a three cylinder single-seat car that gets 85mpg. It’s for commuting, but from that description, it might be close enough to a motorcycle for me.
Another search brought up some code examples of artificial intelligence. I was appalled by how simple the examples were. You call that intelligence? I’ve seen better COBOL. Another major mistake is using C+ as the language. Have they not learned from Internet programming what a kershmozzle that always results in? I did try to find drum coding or examples, but nothing suitable came up. I’m thinking I should search back in this blog and find out what ever happened to the venture guy who built the beat box.
I’ve heard nothing more of that invention. Did it succeed? If so, why have I never seen one in action? My plan is to build a drum machine that is stage and musician friendly. Instead of fussing with that pattern number and beats per minute, you scroll, punch one button, and it plays the actual drum track you want.
Autoharp. I took another look. The concept is easy enough, why can’t they make one that acts like a guitar? And program a robot to strum it. That would make my day. I see Texas is outlawing robo-doll whorehouses. Guess they prefer the real thing, which, if you’ve been to Texas lately, has zero unemployment in that category. Last item before siesta, my pal Elliott and I have been having an e-mail disagreement. He says the Forbes survey lists the top ten countries that people rate for living and the USA is number 38. I disagree for many reasons, not the least of which is Forbes tendency to armchair these surveys. It’s like rating the phone company as top employer. From the outside it sure looks that way. Forbes uses other questionable tactics like on-line surveys for the people who live there.
He says the lists are valid. My question is, if those are the most desirable places to live, why do most of them not have immigration problems? Why is not half the world trying to get into those countries by any means they can? Places on the list like Norway and Sweden are full of opportunities for ethnics to overstay their visas. (Could be because unlike America, they are easy to round up.) Factoring in all these things, I say the Forbes list is far from accurate. Go to these countries and ask only the taxpayers who do not have any immediate family on welfare what they think. Then I’ll believe you.
ADDENDUM
Examining the leftover wire from the sub-panel was interesting. It is a mixture of stranded and solid, ideal for the project I’ve had in mind for years. To build my own working version of RAM. I still have my ROM project and that was fascinating. I’ll dig it out, you may recall it is the contraption that displays the digits 0 thru 9 depending on what spring is pressed. That was supposed to be my science fair kit marketed by Hactronics, who went belly up just as I finished ironing out the bugs. The working parts were built from nothing but diodes and wire.
I’ve since learned the way RAM is built much the same, but at the time I independently figured out that by replacing the “dumb” diodes with “smart” NPN transistors, it would be possible to build a workable mini-computer that could, say, add two numbers up to 15 and display a carry flag after that. When I was 18, I took a course in machine language, and around 32 another course in assembler. I was intrigued by the almost mechanical way that the digital commands performed arithmetic functions. Most people think the computer actually adds 2 plus 2 and so on.
Back then, there were no working models, so I learned these concepts from diagrams. I always wanted to have an actual apparatus, greatly slowed down mind you, that demonstrated the workings. There’s an old adage among real computer programmers, such as myself, that all the computer can do is add very rapidly. It’s largely true in that every operation is reduced to addition. But what I’m referring to here is a visual depiction of what happens in the actual computer memory. There are roughly seven total different operations and I’ll provide one as an example. How does the computer multiply by two?
Here I’ve drawn a fictional ten-bit chunk of computer memory. There are 7 registers, represented by the seven rows of memory, of which 5 have something in them. In a real setting, there would be only one row but it’s easier to understand in steps as shown. The first register is blank, the second has the binary digit 1. We are going to multiply that by 2 four times to get the result of 16, also in binary. I think it obvious what the computer does. It shifts whatever is in memory one byte to the left and plugs in a 0 on the right end.
My idea is to replace this diagram with blinking lights that reveal the process, depending on which button the user presses. This is a very simple accomplishment for an Arduino, but I would like to do it using only discrete (dumb) components. That would be the challenge. It is these operations that fascinated me. There are many but the basic seven are takeoffs and variations on what’s illustrated here. The one I never could understand was how the computer is able to compare numbers. How does it know 50 is bigger than 40? I would like to see the actual sequence in the format as described here. Am I being clear? If you look again at the diagram, you see there is no real magic or logic, the computer has no smarts, it is just blinking the lights the way it is wired to do.
I have a theory on how comparison works, but it would get cumbersome with very large numbers. What I would do to compare two numbers is keep dividing by 2 and see which one becomes all zeroes first. But the flaw is, it is still comparing the result to zero. If you can see the conceptual problem I’m driving at, you already know more about real programming than most millennials. No joke, I’m serious. Most of them would not have a clue what just happened here, and for a very simple reason. It is not necessary to know any of this to program in a high-level language. Alas, such a person would find it nearly impossible to “check for reasonableness”.
What I’m saying is that anybody who programs without knowing the basics is a magnificent idiot. Please, MicroSoft, no show of hands.
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