Tribute Thread for the Recently Passed Greats

RADM Grace Hopper (AKA "Queen of Code") used to hand out "nanoseconds of wire" at her lectures, wires cut to about a foot in length, the distance that a signal could travel in one nanosecond (she brought a handful of them to her interview on 60 Minutes back when she was still a CAPT -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LR6NPpFxw4 , 06 Mar 1983).Just for fun, a proof: Before integrated circuit technology, computers were incredibly expensive and slow. The speeds that we depend on now would have been impossible to achieve. And the complexity was limited by the size of the army of girls you could hire to assemble all the parts.In a late-70's interview about the new microprocessor, the "computer on a chip", the interviewer asked the engineer how they would repair a microprocessor. The interviewer couldn't understand the answer, "simply replace it and throw it away", since all computers the public knew about cost millions of dollars.The Cray S-1 supercomputer (circa 1980) was in the shape of a C with circuit boards interconnected by wires inside that C. None of those wires were longer than two feet (ie, 2 nanoseconds).

It was a pun. You need for us to explain a pun?

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Man beseeching God: Why did you create the world like you did?
God, impatiently: Well, if I have to explain the joke then it's no longer funny.

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Read Message 1204 and Message 1205 and think. BTW, I'm the one who mentioned the Cray-1S (our class from the UND Computer Science Dept toured their manufacturing facility in Chippewa Falls around 1980).xongsmith was citing a pun, which I developed further.Think about it:

• Despite both CDR Spock and Han Solo erroneously using it as a unit of time (the standard Physics for Poets college class should be augmented with Science for Screenwriters), the light-year is a unit of distance: the distance that light travels on one year = 9,460,730,472,580.8 km (exactly) ≈ 5.8786×10¹² statute miles.
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  Subsequent quotes in this message are from that Wikipedia page.
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  The nearest known star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri, is about 4.24 light-years away.

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• This has spawned other units, most of them informal, for the distance traveled by light in smaller units of time; eg, the light-day, the light-hour, the light-minute, the light-second, and the light-nanosecond.
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  For example, the distance from the sun to the earth is about eight (8) light-minutes, since it takes sunlight about 8 minutes to reach the earth. This was used in a sci-fi short story dramatized on the first revival of The Twilight Zone (or Night Gallery) in which a young boy (I keep thinking it was Bill Mumy) with the ability to predict the future was asked on live TV to predict the future of humanity and he predicted the most incredibly wonderful future for us. Immediately off-camera all the adults were ecstatic but the boy was inconsolably sad. When asked what was wrong, he explained that the sun had just exploded but we wouldn't know that for another eight minutes so he gave us joy before our sudden deaths. Final shot was the camera following an adult's gaze to the window and the sun.
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  Communication with deep space probes is delayed by distance:

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  Reflected sunlight from the Moon's surface takes 1.2–1.3 seconds to travel the distance to the Earth's surface (travelling roughly 350,000 to 400,000 kilometres).

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  New Horizons encounters Pluto at a distance of 4.7 billion kilometres, and the communication takes 4 hours 25 minutes to reach Earth.

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  Voyager 1 as of October 2018, nearly 20 light-hours (144 au, 21.6 billion km, 13.4 billion mi) from the Earth.

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• A light-second is basically the definition of the speed of light:

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  ... the light-second, useful in astronomy, telecommunications and relativistic physics, is exactly 299,792,458 metres ...

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  Therefore, a light-nanosecond is the distance light travels in one nanosecond, which is about 29.98 cm, about 3/16-ths of an inch short of a foot.
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• CAVEAT: the speed of light depends on the medium through which it is traveling. The highest speed is through a vacuum (ie, the absence of a medium) and is hence slower for various media (eg, glass, air, water). Electrical signals travel at the speed of light and hence are also slowed down by the medium through which they travel.
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  Fun fact: When light transits from one medium to another, its speed changes thus causing the light to refract. This is why lenses and prisms work.
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• While terms such as "light-<unit of time>" are used to measure the distance that light travels in that unit of time, we can also use terms such as "light-<unit of distance>" to measure how long it takes light to travel that distance.
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  Light travels approximately one foot in a nanosecond; the term "light-foot" is sometimes used as an informal measure of time.

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Per the last, since a "light-foot" refers to one nanosecond of time, then through algebraic substitution Gordon Lightfoot's name becomes "Gordon Nanosecond".QED / QEFThe Power of the Pun! Circa 1977 in the USAF Electronic Computer Systems Repairman Course (305x4), we kept encountering delay lines without fully understanding their importance. The basic explanation is that they were needed to synchronize the arrival at signals to a gate. A logic gate (eg, AND gate, OR gate, inverter AKA "NOT gate") uses input signals to generate an output signal, but all those input signals had to be present at the same time (and be held there to compensate for propagation delays within the gate circuitry). An example we were given was an AND gate requiring 5 inputs, four of which were generated nearby but the fifth came from a circuit at the other end of this six-foot cabinet, so while four signals were present almost instantaneously, that last signal too at least six nanoseconds to show up. Hence those other signals needed to be delayed by six nanoseconds in order for all five input signals to arrive at that gate at the same time (actually, input levels were not a problem outside of having to be held, but it was the pulses that needed to be delayed). As a result, the switching speed of large computers were constrained by the length of the longest conductor (plus other factors, of course).We also studied signal waveforms, especially the rise and fall times which were surprisingly slow (remember, this was 60's/70's discrete component tech). The designers of those circuits had to take all those delays into account by waiting a little extra longer in order to ensure that the signal had time to arrive. The technical term for those extra delays was "sloppage factor". And of course having to include those sloppage factors every time you turned around further contributed to slowing down the entire computer system.Another problem with long conductors was the rapid degradation of the square-wave signals -- digital signals are all square-wave signals since you're switching between two discrete voltage levels. If you use Fourier analysis to look at a square wave's power spectrum (the amplitudes of the waveform's harmonics; eg, for frequency f they're 2f, 3f, 4f, 5f, 6f, etc), you will find that a square wave has very strong harmonics. Since conductors and all electronic devices have inherent "stray" capacitance and inductance, just running a conductor creates an unintended filter circuit (as well as inductive coupling between wires creating "cross-talk" -- the longer the conductors the greater the effect). Those unintended filters would filter out whole sections of a square wave's higher harmonics, the ones that give the rise and fall edges their sharpness, thus reducing those signals to crap. That means that if a digital signal has to travel any appreciable distance then it will degrade into meaningless mush -- rule-of-thumb for RS-232 data cables was to keep them shorter than 25 feet. And of course, that would increase the need for greater sloppage factors.A large part of my father's enjoyment of being a general contractor was meeting clients from other professions and learning about their work experience. When he did a home remodel for a data processing supervisor, he was given a tour of the data center (circa 1972). For every piece of equipment, he was told which mental hospital the designer had ended up in. The story he was given was that because of the mental exertion needed to get all those signals synchronized exactly right, the designers ended up having a nervous breakdown. What I learned in tech school confirmed Dad's story.Shortening those distances, which is taken almost to its extreme by integrated circuits, has contributed enormously to switching speed and signal quality. Ever since tech school as I would watch computer tech become ever faster, disk density ever more compact, and systems ever more reliable, knowing the inherent problems I am still amazed that any of it can even work at all, let alone moving such immense amounts of data so reliably. 
Now back to the Cray-1S. Around 1981 at the University of North Dakota, I went on a Computer Science Dept field trip. In Minneapolis we first visited Sperry Univac and the offices of Cray Research, then we traveled to Cray's manufacturing facility in Chippewa Falls where they were had just completed a Cray-1S for delivery to Japan.As I already described, viewed from above the computer looks like a "C". Our guide asked us why that was and one student offered, "Because 'C' for 'Cray'?" The guide chuckled, saying that he hadn't thought of that. Rather, it was because they needed to keep all interconnecting wires as short as possible in order to increase the speed of the computer (along with other measures, such as their choice of very fast IC chips). He told us that there was not a single wire in that computer longer than two feet, which is to say with a delay longer than two nanoseconds. And when they still needed a delay line for a signal, they would simply lay a little extra trace on the circuit board, like a zig-zag.

My 24/7 duty office (I had swing shift) had a TV with cable, so I would sometimes watch CBN for fun -- I had also been a "fellow traveler" of the Jesus Freak movement c. 1970, so I had a background.When he was running for President a reporter asked him a "gotcha" question of whether a Jew (or any other non-Christian) could be saved and Robertson answered that a Jew could be saved if he obeyed every single part of the Law throughout his life. That mollified the reporters and most hearing that report, but I had eyes to see and ears to hear (ie, I had heard what they actually taught about that). The fundie teaching he used was that obeying every single part of the Law unfailingly was humanly impossible, which is why accepting the Christ was the only practical solution. IOW, he had effectively lied to that reporter. I spoke with a believer at the time and even he was fooled.Their reactions to modern technology were hilarious. Whenever the topic of computers came up, the screen dripped paranoia. I remember his co-host panicking as he pointed out, "Do you know that they even have computers that can talk!" The TI-99A home computer with a voice attachment made him have to change his shorts? Priceless!In the following decade, one of his producers wrote an insider exposé: Salvation for Sale. Looking for it at a Crown bookstore, I asked the clerk, "Do you have 'Salvation for Sale'?" He replied, "No, but there's a church a couple blocks down the street."I was starting to learn about "creation science" at the time I would watch CBN so that was how I first saw creationists in action. Taught me everything I needed to know about them; from my page, Why I Oppose Creation Science (or, How I got to Here from There):

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I first saw creationists in action one night in 1982 on CBN. A Tennessean host would run various debates (I believe it was David Ankerberg {CORRECTION: John Ankerberg}). This particular night, a creationist was debating a scientist -- it was only later that I could put faces to names, but from what I remember of how they looked I think they were Drs. Henry Morris and Frank Awbrey. I remember that the scientist showed several slides of hominid fossils between the same chimpanzee and human bones for comparison, such as knee joints (to show evidence of developing bi-pedalism). Then he showed slides of a human pelvis and chimpanzee pelvis side-by-side. First from the side, then from the top, he pointed out two sets of characteristics that clearly distinguish the one from the other (i.e. whether viewed from the side or from the top, the pelvis could be positively identified as human or chimpanzee). Next he showed both the same views of a hominid pelvis. From one view it was definitely ape, from the other it was definitely human, thus demonstrating it to be a intermediate form. The creationist then proclaimed the hominid pelvis to be 100% ape and not the least bit human by completely ignoring the human characteristic (even when reminded of it repeatedly by his opponent) and concentrating solely on the view that displayed the ape characteristic. Of course, the host declared this to be a creationist victory and threw in the standard creationist gross misrepresentation of punctuated equilibrium for good [?] measure.

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This event made a lasting impression on me. The creationist's steadfast ignoring of the blatantly obvious evidence that was repeatedly pointed out to him is a selective blindness that I have found to pervade much of the creationist literature. Now I've begun to suspect that this is but one of many manifestations of the Dark Side of the Farce.

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At least we can thank him for his contributions to the growth and spread of atheism through his horrible example (eg, Pat Robertson controversies).

My music appreciation prof in the early 70's played us his "New Horizons in Music Appreciation -- Beethovan's Fifth Symphony" in which the first movement was covered like a baseball game: "And there's not a cloud in the ceiling." If my grandsons acquire their father's love for baseball, I'll play it for them some day.His whole PDQ Bach schtick was a parody and inside jokes about classical music. PDQ was the last and oddest of Johann Sebastian Bach's twenty-odd children. His works were lost and rediscovered (by Schickele) when his sheet music was being used as filter paper for a coffee percolator (story is that JS Bach was rediscovered when Mendelsohn found his music being used to wrap fish). That turned out to be his "Sanka Sonata" (JS Bach had written a cantata for a friend's new coffee shop, Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (AKA Kaffeekantata) ). One of PDQ's pieces was "Concerto for Piano versus Orchestra" (S 88) -- we saw Schickele perform it in concert and between movements he went back to his corner as if he were in a boxing match. And so on.A friend at university checked out the score for PDQ's Fugue in C minor, (Fuga Vulgaris) for Calliope Four Hands, from the Toot Suite S. 3.14. Where the hands would cross each other, the treble and bass staffs of the grand staff would twist around each other.He presented himself as a musicology professor from the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. However, Hoople, ND, is in the northeastern part of the state; I know because I was stationed at Grand Forks AFB, a third of the way down the eastern edge of the state, and Hoople was north of us. I seem to recall that Schickele had lived in Fargo, a third of the way up the state from South Dakota, don'cha know?Schickele had a radio show on Public Radio which I listened to late Sunday afternoons once a month as I drove from my weekend of reserve duty in San Diego back up to Orange County. The line I remember from those shows was:

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Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach become musicologists.

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  ABE:Just listened to "New Horizons in Music Appreciation -- Beethovan's Fifth Symphony" again. That album, The Wurst of PDQ Bach, which I bought in the mid-70's includes the Concerto for Horn and Hardart. I never understood that one, which included an apparatus with doors from which to extract food, until a few months ago when I saw a documentary about Horn & Hardart's automats which were popular in New York City from 1910 to the 1960's -- the founders' names were Horn and Hardart. Duh!

I had seen auotmats in movies as everyone has (there are a number of YouTube videos featuring movie clips), but I learned more about it in a 2021 documentary, The Automat, when it aired on Turner Classics. It's available to rent on Spectrum and various streaming channels and is currently being carried on Max (former HBO Max).Horn and Hardart had gotten the idea from a Berlin automat. Not featured in the documentary, I wonder if the Germans had gotten their idea from some emperors (the Tsars especially after Catherine, as I seem to recall) who wanted privacy from servants at dinner parties, so the servants were on the floor below and would hoist each serving up through holes in the table. Kind of a more elaborate version of the dumb-waiter idea.The whole automat ran on nickels, so when you entered you would first go to the cashier for nickels. She had a box full of nickels and was so practiced that she could grab a handful of coins and know exactly how many she had -- exact change every time without having to look or count.The documentary cited fast food chains one of the reasons for the automat's demise.