Author: 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…
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…
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…
Apple has been on somewhat of a roll of late, particularly with the M-series chips, which offer blinding fast speed and literally cool machines. Rival Qualcomm claims its new Snapdragon X Elite PC processor is 21% faster than the M3 chip when it comes to multi-core performance, but first indications are that the thermal profile renders it far from being a serious competitor. The iPad and iPhone have also done well, but the latter market is at or close to…
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…
…like an arrow (a) “but fruit flies like a banana”, is an excellent sentence to illustrate the difficulty that speakers of other languages have in learning English. Even most who grew up in English could not parse the parts of speech in the following: “Did you know that…that that that that that that followed was redundant?” …like an arrow (b) is a common aphorism to be sure…one many people would use to refer to its speed–a subjective perception of course,…
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…
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…
The Spy was working in his woods a few months back, trying to rehabilitate a trail that had been washed out when his little creek became a raging torrent this time last year as the mother of all atmospheric rivers struck the area, causing Sumas Lake, which had been drained for farmland a century earlier, filled back up again, destroying roads, killing 630 000 chickens 12 000 hogs, and 420 cattle, and displacing thousand of people from that quarter of…
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 Webb Bang No, that is not a spelling error, but a reference to the James Webb telescope, successor to the Hubble platform, and capable of producing images of long ago and far away. Initial results are disconcerting, as they seem to blow up long accepted models for the “early” universe, by revealing spiral galaxies much like our own, but at distances of sufficient light years that should in theory have revealed early post Big-Bang chaos from before such galaxies…
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…
