Tag: rick sutcliffe
April 1, 2025 Dear Spy Can you help me with a family issue? It’s really breaking us up. See, we have this uncle who’s lately become a problem for the family. O.K. strictly speaking Samuel’s not actually our uncle, but he styles himself so. Yeah, we’re distantly related, but that was, like, centuries ago. For almost that long, our two branches of the family have lived peacefully on side-by-side properties, and we’ve both built up extensive business interests that over…
Technology News and Views Since 1983March 2025 That title isn’ta reference to bus drivers on strike at the beginning of a bright sunny week. Rather, it is a reflection on how quickly worldly honours (glories) can vanish into oblivion, whether through conquest, or self-destruction via overweening hubris. Take, for instance politicians. (Please.) OTOH, they paint a glorious picture of how great will be their reign if the electorate will hand them and their party the keys to the empire. But…
First up is Murphy who is very well known in politics, the military, engineering, and, of course, computing. – “Murphy was an optimist.”–a former Mrs. Murphy. – It only appears to work now; it’s still in the process of going wrong. – The law of small scale software development: There’s always one more bug. – The law of large scale software development: We can make a statistical estimate within one or two orders of magnitude for how many bugs there…
Expect Apple tohave a big hardware year in 2025, with new phones, tablets, Apple TV and a new MacPro. The latter has become somewhat of a niche product of late, as busy professionals can now use a laptop as a heavy duty machine with suitable accessories such as multiple external monitors and bulk storage without sacrificing much by way of workflow capability. Still, for people doing video editing and/or running multiple high-demand applications at once, the big bulky desktop beast…
to prepare for Cinco de Mayo, which seems appropriate in view of this column being a little late in the mad panic to get the graduates across the stage and out into the “real” world, where their work week hours will be halved. It’s budget time, there’s a $10K typo, meetings galore, research season is ramping up and the Spy’s been busy preparing a paper for a literary conference. The title is Alternate and Future History Speculative Fiction as Mythopoesis….
For a changethe Spy will do a “normal” (sic) and less long winded column despite the date on the calendar–sporting only the usual random observations, and a few extended thoughts on common themes. He’s not in the mood for fool-ishness. Intelligence–of various kinds and degrees:In general terms the Spy sides with Roger Penrose (“The Emperor’s New Mind”) on the subject of AI ever becoming a straight out equivalent-part replacement for the human mind–the former resides on a finite state machine,…
Have you ever questionedhow the transition from gasoline powered cars and trucks to electrified ones willwork in practice? To wit: The Spy does have a possible solution to #4-5a on the list. Keep many of the gas stations open, but change what they sell to reusable and recyclable component materials. Assuming for the sake of argument that future batteries consist of (metal) plates immersed in a liquid electrolyte, why not rather than recharging batteries directly using electricity, use the regular…
Have you ever noticed that most people pronounce the name of this month as if the first “r” were not there, viz. “Feb-you-air-e” rather than “Feb-roo-air-e”? That’s on the level of the ads one hears on radio stations from third mortgage loan sharks saying “our criteria is less strict”, or the habit of our neighbours in the terra incognita to the south of our frozen north failing to distinguish between “metre” (an international standard unit of length) and “meter” (an…
Meme: a recursive or self-defining term (“meme” is its own meme) originated by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”. He defined it as a cultural unit transmitted from person to person by imitation. Today this might happen via serial re-posting and liking. Memes are now a principal means of communicating ideas, entertaining, or making political or social commentary, particularly of the semi-humourous type, though they can sometimes have a very dark side. For instance… Trump and his…
Does it seem odd to anyone else that a religious holiday once created to honour “saints” with no personal day of their own on the then religious calendar, would become deprecated in most of the Western world, while “All Hallows’ Eve” (=the evening before said “All Saints’ Day”) should become both a “dress-up and beg for candy” day and one to enjoy being frightened by symbols of death and evil? On the one hand, Apple iCooked up a “scary fast”…
July-August 2023 Apologies are certainly in order, as the Spy let not just a day or two of July go by with no column, but the entire month. Put the lapse down to senility setting in if you will, for he simply forgot until queried at month’s end by the editor of one of the magazines to which these random ramblings are syndicated. Even then, the Spy thought “no, impossible; I surely wrote and sent it, but for some reason…
Apple’s M2 Pro MacBookis a wicked fast production machine. The Spy’s reader will recall he got one to replace his 2019 MacBook Pro, which has never been very rugged, reliable or power smart, and has now been relegated to recording his lectures and uploading them to Streams. The new machine never gets warm even when in heavy use, and he still does not know what the fan sounds like, if indeed it has one. On boot it pauses to think…
The April Fool, A.K.A. The Northern Spy took a break from April foolishness this year, except to wake up the sleeping-over grandchildren with a clarion call to go outside and play in the snow. Believe it or not, ye who be denizens of Terra Incognito to our South, but this part of Canada does have snow-free months–unlike Calgary, place of the Spy’s birth, which has the occasional year where it snows at least once every month, and the saying is…
This month, has some pretty important dates, and all in a row, starting with the fourteenth, fondly known by mathematicians as pi day. The Spy is unaware of a type of pie that would not be a favourite, unless someone makes it with kidney or liver. Moreover, pi philology has come a long way since “Yes, I have a slice.” There’s “How I love a drink, raspberry of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics,” or “And, O, have…
Last month, the Spy said of the botched Ecoline window installation: “Yes, if one can believe the scheduling department, the installers shall return(!) on January 4 (that’s 2023 BTW) to fix their errors and damage, install a long list of items missing from the first delivery, and make everything honkey-dory. But given the history of this thing, if you believe all will be well at the end of that day, I know of a really busy bridge I can sell…
To talk of many things but rather than ‘shoes and ships, and sealing-wax, Of cabbages and Kings, And why the sea is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings,’ and also with apologies to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the Spy will instead speak of windows, wackiness, and the weather, Of controllers and cameras, Of furnaces and hernias, And what else is really hot, And whether digital assistants, new MacPros and EVs have wings. Windows, wackiness, and the weather The Spy has…
Apologies to our impatient reader for the extreme lateness of this column. The Spy is attempting two full time jobs at once (his own and that of his boss, who has a concussion) plus handle the fiscal year end and budget for his church, and that of the Science faculty, all at once. Moreover, he spent the last weekend (Thurs-Sat) at the Murdock College Research Conference in Vancouver WA (5+ hour drive). Things got a little hairy. Climate change is…
The Spy’s Reader who’s been lurking around here a while will be familiar with his many discourses on the mutual effects of society and technology upon each other (including the entire currently-being-revised textbook on that theme referenced below among his web sites). In order of technological sophistication, the three (kinds of) civilization to date are/were the Hunter-Gatherer, the Agrarian or Agricultural, and the Industrial. Hunter-Gatherer societies are usually nomadic, and transition to Agricultural mode with the invention of the plough–which…
Not “Supply and Demand?” The supply and demand equilibrium is elementary economics, and easy to explain to anyone who understands graphs. The demand curve has quantity intercept the number of units that could be given away, and price intercept the cost at which no sales will happen. The supply curve has both intercepts at the origin, and a positive slope–theoretically, as the selling price increases, so does willingness to produce, and indefinitely so. Of course there are other constraints such…
It’s often been said that half of Physics can be summed up in the sentence “You can’t push on a rope.” The other half is: T M A U H S W T Well, the Spy has said both often enough, at least. It’s a common belief, reinforced by a boatload of Speculative Fiction led by Isaac Asimov’s books featuring thinking robots, that RSN (Real Soon Now) we will succeed in creating true thinking machines that will either be equal…
