Intel and AMD are continually coming up with creative new ways to cram more transistors on silicon chips. Chip makers have to continue to find ways to improve computer performance in order to continue to make sales. Their strategy up to now has been making transistors ever smaller and as a result, faster.

There is a limit to this approach, though we haven't reached it yet. The problem is that as transistors get smaller certain quantum effects start to show up. I can't find the link again (I really need to be more diligent about saving links for things I write) but these quantum effects started showing up several chip generations in the past. Electrons whizzing along through the chip sometimes tunnel through non-conductive materials. So transistors that expect to be at zero suddenly find themselves at one and vice versa. It's the kind of thing that makes programs collapse into a twitching heap of spastic electronic epilepsy. But engineers, being the clever folks that they are, invented error correction which mitigated the effects of quantum tunneling. Only it gets ever more difficult as the distances continue to shrink. At some point the effects of quantum tunneling will become so severe that error correction will not be able to resolve the issues. Additionally, heat continues to be a problem. Semi-conductors don't conduct very well as temperatures rise, so chipmakers must also find ways to conduct a great deal of heat away from the chips. There is evidence of this on practically every chip or board that you buy. I have a heat sink and fan on my CPU, another one on my motherboard, one on my video accelerator, and four system fans to pump heat into my living room.  We're pretty much at the limit of cooling technology.  If chips generate much more heat than they do now, they will quite literally melt.

There may be another few generations of transistor miniaturization. Intel recently announced another step forward due to materials science and such. But they are also looking for other mechanisms to allow them to continue shrinking chips or at least making them faster. Multi-core processors are coming soon. Basically this means arranging two or more processors on a single chip. News articles tout it as parallel processing. I have my doubts on that score. My old machine is a dual processor machine. My new machine has an Intel Prescott chip with hyperthreading. Both are ostensibly capable of parallel processing. Neither performs that particular function however. For one thing, none of the software I have seems to have any use for dual processors (beyond recognizing them). For another, I'm not sure that the system architecture really permits processors to work in parallel.

For processors to work in parallel, they must have access to the same resources and data. They can work on crunching the same numbers thus doubling the speed at which data is processed. Two minds are better than one, you know. But so far as I know, we haven't figured out how to do that yet. When you have two processors working on the same bits of information, they tend to try accessing the same resources at the same time which is a big no-no in the computer world. Instead we have a quasi-parallel computing scheme whereby the two processors are assigned specific tasks or processes. They each do their own little processing gig and scrupulously avoid bumping into each other or stealing one another's resources. It's faster than with a single processor but not as fast as would be the case if they really were operating in parallel. It will be interesting to see how the multi-core processors work and what impact they will have on software. I rather suspect we'll see the same problem. There might be two or four or eight processor cores packed onto a single chip but the effect will be as though there were four distinct processors each dedicated to its own tasks.

In the more distant future there are alternatives. I think the one that will reach maturity first will be spintronics. Right now our computers use the electrical property of quantum particles (electrons) to perform binary mathematics. The electrical charge of electrons flows through the transistors. The transistor is charged or not, one or zero, on or off. The same binary logic works with spintronics. Spin is a property of particles related to magnetism. Electrons can be either spin up or spin down, again giving us one or zero, on or off. Magnetic devices can read the spin of the particle to determine whether it is up or down and relay that information to other parts of the computer. We already use a sort of rudimentary version of spintronics in laptop hard drives and other magnetic storage media. IBM is investing an enormous amount of money and energy into spintronic research. One technology is MRAM or Magnetic Random Access Memory. It operates at or near the same speed as conventional ram but maintains its state even when powered down. Another avenue of research is storage devices capable of storing information on a near-atomic level. Particles can be embedded in a material with a given spin. A read head can pass over the particle and determine whether it is up or down, can change the spin of the particle (one or zero) and can relay the information. Mind-boggling amounts of information will be able to be stored on ridiculously small devices. Our knowledge of electronics is extremely mature. I think spintronics will be next because it will rely on the same binary logic as our electronic computers, (in fact spintronics computers will likely be an amalgam of electronics and spintronics) and magnetism is basically a variant of electricity (the electromagnetic force).

Following spintronics, things get a little more vague. I think optronics will follow spintronics. These are computers that compute using beams of light rather than streams of electrons. There are already optical semiconductors and optical transistors. Optronics will use beams of visible or possibly infrared light to perform computations and carry data. This approach to computing is still nascent, but I think one of the most fascinating. And besides, the idea of a computer operating at light speed seems very sexy in a way. I can't find the article anymore, but one of the colleges (MIT or possibly Cal Tech) have built and operated an optical computer. It uses mirrors and optical transistors to calculate numbers. It fills most of a room but then, so did ENIAC. The important thing is that it actually crunched some numbers. There's no fundamental reason that the devices can not be shrunk and the beams of light miniaturized to fit in a little box on your desk. In fact, the beams of light could theoretically amount to a single phton being fired through a given transistor (though I don't know if that will prove to be practical). Optical computers won't be likely to require a fundamental shift in computer programming either because optical computers will also use binary (transparent or not, on or off, one or zero).

The above options don't change any fundamental aspects of computing (at least as far as our understanding of programming and binary goes). They advance computer science by increasing the speed at which operations are capable of being calculated either by shrinking distances between transistors (spintronics) or by using a faster medium (optronics). There are two other computer technologies on the horizon and both have recently been demonstrated to be possible.

Chemical or DNA computers fascinate me. I have doubts about how useful they will prove to be on a consumer level. A DNA computer doesn't use binary. I don't know really know what rules of logic apply to DNA computing. But, in any case, DNA computers are very good at Hamiltonian Problems. Hamiltonian Problems are key in the lock problems. It goes like this: I give you a padlock and box filled with five hundred (thousand, million) padlock keys. Only one key fits the lock. How can you find which one will work? A traditional computer, given that problem would have to try each key, one at a time until it found the one that works. A chemical computer is different though. To solve the problem using a chemical computer, you create a chemical sample representing the lock say the chemicals in the test tube are shaped like the lock. Then you dump all the keys in your chemical sample and shake up the vial. When you examine the chemicals left over you find that only one key fit into the lock and all the rest are floating around uselessly. There's more to it than that, but you get the idea. The problem with chemical computers like this is that they're very poor at linear computing (like adding a string of numbers together). Something else they're very good at, though, is storing data. DNA strands can potentially be used to store enormous arrays of data. I think it will likely be used as data mining and pattern recognition applications. One problem with DNA as a computing medium is that it isn't very stable. DNA strands don't live very long without repair mechanisms. Heat degrades them very quickly. A more stable chemical arrangement needs to be found or else a device or critter that can repair the information strands and maintain data integrity. I don't doubt something will be invented.

Finally, we will see quantum computers. I'm a little foggier on their nuts and bolts but I'm not alone. Quantum computers work by manipulating certain quantum properties of particles. Namely, the wave properties. Particles exist as both waves and particles. Our current state of knowledge permits us to manipulate the particulate properties of particles. It also allows us to observe the wave-like properties. We now have a vague inkling of how it might be possible to manipulate these wave-like properties. The wave-like properties can be termed probability waves. A particle exists in an infinite range of possible existences until it is observed at which point the state of the particle collapses into some sort of stability. So, if you shine a particle beam (a flashlight will do nicely) on a wall, each photon zips across the distance to impinge on the wall. Only instead of zipping through the intervening space, the photons from the flashlight potentially zip everywhere at the same instant. Each photon has its own probability function that says it is simultaneously crossing between the flashlight and the wall. At the same time, each photon takes a jaunt to Epsilon Eridani and the wall, and Timbuktu and the Wall and Gramma's back porch and the wall. There is a finite (though in most cases vanishingly small) probability that you could observe the photon from your flashlight in the space around Epsilon Eridani or Wolf 359. However, once you observe a photon all of those possibilities collapse into a single possibility. Quantum computing is an attempt to manipulate this probability wave. The idea is that a problem can be sort of written into a probability wave. The wave can then be tweaked so that it collapses in such a way as to result in the correct solution to the problem. Believe it or not, it's been done. Again, I can't find the article, but scientists have managed to coax very simple calculations from a sort of pre-quantum computer. I don't think our grasp of quantum mechanics is sufficient to achieve an actual quantum computer, but I don't believe there is any fundamental reason it can't work. There are problems, for example, larger problems require larger probability fields, but the probability fields tend to break down and do bizarre things when they get too large. They also go nutso when they interact with other particles like matter and such, so the fields must be contained.

Chemical and quantum computers will necessitate the first real paradigm shift in computing since the days of the vacuum tube. They don't operate on conventional binary rules and an entirely new language will have to be invented. Estimates I've read suggest that quantum computers aren't much more than ten years away. I think that's an optimistic estimate. On the other hand, the same is said about DNA computers, which I think is much more likely.

 

I don't think we will have true parallel computers (like our brain) without making enormous strides in programming.  But that might be another topic.  Fuzzy logic will probably have something to do with it.  Anyhow, Moore's law has continued to prove accurate, right up to this very day.  We are now running into the physcal wall that may end his prediction, but I'm not so sure.  The wall might not be a barrier to stop us, so much as it's likely to encourage a detour.  With all these options on the horizon, I think we have every reason to beleive that Moore's law will continue to hold true in the near future.

My Sunday usually starts with a cup of coffee and a wander through the bookstore. I park in the 90 minute parking so I have to leave at some point. I favor the history, politics and science sections. I tak an occassional look at the science fiction section, though I seldom read fiction any more, and watch for good deals on classics (especially when I can find Easton Press bindings). I tend to ignore the social studies section. The titles always turn me off. You aren't supposed to judge a book by its cover but the titles make me suspect that everything on those shelves is written by a bunch of whiners who think the world ought to change for their sake.

I haven't been proven wrong. One of the books in men's studies caught my eye so I leafed through it for a while. It was a collection of essays about men and society. The gist of it was that both are bad for each other and need to be changed. The essays pretty much surrounded a theme about perceived masculinity, that in America men are expected to behave with a certain aggression and territoriality, to be competitive. The conclusion was that all of this is bad.

Men ought to be raised to be softer and more gentle. We need to be metrosexualized. We should wear pink and carry hand bags and be excited about hugging because it's better you see. And society needs to be conditioned to accept these newer more sensitive men.

The world is not equitably balanced. Men have unfair advantages. Men have all the good jobs and get all the good money and they're ever so mean. But it's not their fault. Society makes them into hairy hulking beasts. So obviously, the answer is to create a new man and remake society to reinforce our collective rebirth.

To translate: 'It's not fair! Don't you people realize the universe revolves around me?' It's more cleverly done than that though. What they say is that men behave in x manner. But it's not the fault of man because society reinforces x manner and punishes y manner. It's very nice that way because nobody is to blame. (Americans tend to be very good at shifting blame.)

There's always an anecdote as well. 'My little boy likes to play chess and read and build lego cities but he's ostracized because he doesn't play sports.' 'Our son liked playing with dolls in kindergarten and we worried he might be gay and that the other kids would tease him.' On and on.

I understand where they're coming from. It's a knife in the heart of every parent when they see their babies being teased and picked on. They only want their children to be happy. They don't want their children to go through some of the things they remembered facing as children. But, they think the world should change to make things better rather than teaching their children how to adapt.

God knows the marketers are all over it. Look in any magazine, in any mall, at any billboard and you'll see how things are being changed. Men shaved so smooth they squeak, manicured, hair doed, wearing pink shoes. Not so long ago the world would have been certain they were gay. At some point the stereotypical gay boy image became trendy.

The only problem is that their solution can't possibly work.

Society shapes certain aspects of character, I'll give you that, but biology does as well. You can dress men up in pink jump suits and make them hug till their ribs crack but in the end you're still likely to have a bunch of beer-drinking, pizza-eating, football-watching guys. Men and women function differently. Hormones, proteins, brain functions, it's not the same. I believe a significant amount of behavioral differences between men and women can be traced to biology. Certain of these things are hard-wired into our biology, whether you're a man or a woman.

Besides the above, there will always remain a minority who doesn't fit normal perceptions. The gay boy image could become the norm and suddenly actual gays don't really stand out any more. I suppose the theory goes that by homogenizing society, there will be an end to societal rejection. But the staggering variety of humanity makes the premise ludicrous. For example, what am I to do? I'm a gay guy. I own an iron but can't remember the last time I used it. I'll be damned if I'm going to shave anything besides my face. I prefer a handshake to a hug any day. I don't care if my clothes match, and if they do, it's not because of anything I did on purpose. I prefer comfortable clothes to fashionable clothes. On the other hand when I watch sports it's because of the hunks. I know the physical principles and theory that makes a car work but damned if I know how to fix one. I would rather play Final Fantasy than Madden NFL.

I'm too masculine to be metrosexual, too gay to be straight.

Fortunately for me, my parents had the solution before anybody knew there was an issue. They raised me to be comfortable in my own skin. They raised me to be my own person and not worry about appearances or illusions. The people I grew up with recognized it. I was teased as much as anybody. But the fact that I gave as good as I got, that I knew who I was and didn't care that I was being made fun of earned me the respect of my peers. Certainly I was never popular as such but I was respected. The tattlers, the whiners, the cry-babies were the ones made miserable (and I won't deny my participation in tormenting them).

Regardless, the point is that the problem would be better solved by teaching kids confidence. Teach them to be themselves to act right and be proud of themselves when they do.

This effort to homogenize society has other problems. It degrades polite behavior. I often hold a door for people (especially women) when I go to a store. Sunday I held the door to the coffee shop and the lady was visibly shocked (pleasantly so, but none the less. . .). There was a time when it was a thoughtless action people barely noticed. Then somebody woke up one day and decided it was some sort of gender based slight so it became vaguely inappropriate. Now who goes around bitching about rudeness?

I'll be the first to admit that I hold to old-fashioned values. I feel distinctly uncomfortable when a woman holds a door open for me. There are very few women I allow to pay for my meal or my drink. I would probably burst into flames if a woman bought me flowers or chocolates. Why do I think these things? I have nothing vested in behaving towards women in such a way. At best I'm going to make a new friend should we strike up a conversation. I'm not going to get laid or meet my soul mate.

No.  I hold to my old-fashioned values purposely. It makes for a better more civilized world.  Homogenizing our society makes for an oatmeal society.  If we are to celebrate diversity we must recognize it, and appreciate it for what it is.  Diversity means different, not the same, distinct from other things.

 

Men and women are diverse.  Men should be permitted to be masculine as women should be permitted to be feminine.  I was still a kid in the 80s.  But I have recollections of tv images, commercials, magazines that portrayed women in a particularly masculine light.  During the nineties it shifted and women once again drifted towards femininity.  During the same period there was the shifting of men away from masculinity.  I also remember during the 80s how frequently men were admonished about allowing themselves to be emotional, how there were support groups for everything, how hugging was particularly big at the time.  Then in the 90s we end up with Abercrombie and Fitch and The Gap and Banana Republic with their quasi- homosexual soft porn advertisements.  It was the birth of the metrosexual.  The Salon.com article I linked above seems to me to be clearly in favor of the metrosexual engineering project.  It's as though people are trying to erase these genetically drawn lines.

 

But what is served?  It won't solve the problem of men being men.  It won't end certain gender inequities.  It won't preclude peer rejection.  It feels like an oblique attempt at societal engineering.  It is an addition to slavery guilt.  White people ought to be sorry for slavery and reparations need to be made.  Men ought to be sorry for being masculine and ought to be remade into something less masculine.

 

There will always be exceptions.  There will be men who are not terribly masculine.  There will be women who bring home the family bacon.  There will be gays who actually like monster truck rallies.  No matter how hard these people scrub with their eraser, no matter how long they spend trying to blur the lines and balance the equation it will never work. 

My day always starts with a brief foray to a nearby coffee shop where I buy a bucket of black coffee and plug it in to the IV.  I'm a coffee snob when I have the option, favoring single origin coffees from the Middle East and Northern Africa, but any liquid resembling coffee will do in a pinch.  I'm not really the sort to hang out at coffee shops, but you hear people talking, or read the little flyers while waiting in line. 

 

All I can really say is god damn.  Were I to sit down and think of a list of political issues regarding coffee, I would probably come up with tarriffs and. . .  Well that's pretty much it.  Perhaps I'm not well-suited to considering such heady issues

 

Fortunately for the world there is a whole mess of people out there who have nothing better to do than come up with <strike>idiot</s trike> revolutionary ideas.  I suspect these are the same people who decided dancing about with long ribbons and synchronized diving would make super Olympic sports.

 

They puzzled out the real issues facing the world of coffee and came up with some bell ringers.

 

1.  Fair Trade Coffee:  Coffee merchants cut out the middle man and buy coffee direct from the farmer for a minimum price of $1.26 per pound.  It's good for the farmers I guess.  And I'm all for it if coffee bought directly from the farmer at $1.26 per pound costs me less than coffee bought from an import agent.  On the other hand, I don't care to drink socialist coffee.  I want my coffee to carry the nutty undertones of free market capitalism.

 

2.  Sustainable Coffee Farms:  A "sustainable" farm is one where "sustainable coffee is coffee grown in a manner that is kind to the environment and its people."  This includes but is not limited to "reuse coffee husks as heating fuel rather than cutting down eucalyptus trees.  They will plant new trees for those used during heating, or implement pollution free coffee dryers . . ." and "They promote education programs, provide medical care for workers, and provide decent wages and working conditions for their employees."  Color me wowed.  I would have thought a sustainable coffee farm is one that engages in farming techniques that permit it to continue growing coffee.

 

3.  Organic Coffee:  Most folks by now should be aware of the anomalous 'organic' title.  Food grown without things like pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers.  I um. . . don't care.  Coffee needs to be black and caffeinated.  Grow it in such a way that it meets those conditions and I'm satisfied.

 

4.  Bird Friendly Shade Grown Coffee:  Apparently birds like coffee too.  But they're bigger snobs than I am.  They only want coffee as long as there is shade nearby.  So, to make the birds happy it's better to grow coffee in the middle of the forest where the birds can get their daily dose of caffeine.  Hey, I'm willing to share a bean or two with the birds.  But in the end the <strike>spice</s trike> coffee must flow.  Don't get too comfy, birds.

I have kind of particular taste in anime. Series like Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon do nothing for me. I did enjoy Card Captor Sakura on a diversionary level. The premise fascinated me and it there were a lot of beautiful visuals, but it lacked the depth I like. BoogiePop Phantom, on the other hand, is remarkable. It's extremely complex (a thinking movie). The visuals are curiously bland, but amazingly effective in the context of this particular series. Another series that is particularly notable is Escaflowne.

Escaflowne is spectacular. I caught one episode of Escaflowne (Episode #8, The Day the Angel Flew) on a Fox Box afternoon while I was between jobs (I still watched television at that time). I was instantly hooked. Fox cancelled Escaflowne shortly after that, and I never saw another episode on TV. It ended up not mattering though because I spent two years hunting down the dvds for the entire series.

To set the scene, Hitomi is the main character. A bright light comes from the sky and carries her to a strange new world ("Was it a dream... or an illusion? It's about the sudden transfer of my admirable senpai abroad... ...about him and a giant dragon that appeared in front of me... ...and this mysterious world where both Moon and Earth appear in the sky."). Hitomi finds herself in Gaea where people operate giant units of powered armor, dragons fly through the sky, and angels exist.

The opening where Hitomi is teleported to the Gaea universe is another terribly effective tool they used to set the stage and bring the viewer to Gaea. They create and maintain the illusion that we are transported to Gaea along with Hitomi where we witness all the drama and adventure and magic that lives in Gaea.

The reason I stopped and watched it on Fox Box was because of the art. The drawings are simple and clean, but no less expressive or detailed and the colors are rich and vibrant. It's pure eye candy. They used abstractions and freeze frames during the intense action sequences and it was very effective.

Most of the characters are more or less static throughout the series. Only two (Hitomi and Van) are really dynamic and changed by the end. There is a reason for this though. Hitomi is a high school girl interested in boys and school and track and all the things high school girls are interested in. Van is a child prince, and certain events force him into an adults role though he isn't ready for it. By the end, Hitomi is self assured and confident, Van comes to understand what it is to be a king and an adult. The rest of the characters (save Merle) are already adults. They don't change much, already having found their character. I also think that the characters are less individuals than they are representations of aspects of character. They aren't terribly deep characters until you see them in that light. Then their relationships become very intricate. It's as though the characters are pieces of a greater whole rather than unique individuals.

The voice acting was decent (not as good at BoogiePop Phantom). The translation was also pretty good (again not as good as BoogiePop Phantom), and something I noticed about the English was that it served to highlight differences between Japanese and American culture (also an important note for the previous paragraph). They translated a lot of things as directly as possible from Japanese to English so a character might say 'honor' where 'duty' would make more sense to an American. Catching those differences in language reveals a lot about how our cultures are different.

In reading reviews, I've noticed a number of people think the plot is simplistic. I can see how it might appear simplistic, but there are many layers, and many threads to the plot. It's not obscure and tangled like BoogiePop Phantom (it's not what I call a "thinking movie") but it's still complex and rich. Separating the plot lines kind of wrecks the whole thing. The story weaves character backstories, character development, general history and current events (on Gaea) into a comprehensive whole. It would be like describing a Monet as a picture of some weeds and water and a couple of trees. I liken it to The Lord of the Rings or Dune in detail and completion. The story and the visuals combine in such a way that the viewer doesn't have to set aside belief so much as having it set aside for them.

The soundtrack is as good as the rest of it. The music is very powerful and operatic. Babylon Five had the same quality to its soundtrack. The music was powerful and appropriate, creating and reinforcing moods.

The finishing touches really glued it all together. The episodes begin with Hitomi dragging the viewer into Gaea. "Was it all just a dream? An illusion? No. It was real." Each episode is marked by a tarot card (The Hermit, The Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man, The Burning Tower). If you know the meaning of tarot cards, it lends a hint about the theme of the present episode.

I've also watched the Escaflowne movie. They're barely related. The movie lacks the depth and polish of the series, but it is entertaining in its own right. The movie is far more mindless and I think a lot is lost in shoddy translation. You will be disappointed if you expect much of the movie, but I'm not sure that the series can be overestimated.

Now I need to start on a new anime series. I always feel like I'm blindly guessing at their content though. Especially since I watched Escaflowne. Had I not seen a portion of Escaflowne myself I would never have picked it up at a store based on reviews or the back of the box. Most people who review Escaflowne try to summarize the story and invariably they fail miserably (that's why I didn't try). I lucked out with Boogiepop Phantom. I basically picked it off the shelf because the box stood out compared to the others. But, I think now that I have established something of a flavor for myself, I can choose a little more selectively. While browsing for information on Escaflowne and Boogiepop Phantom, I've found two more titles that are often mentioned in relation to them. Serial Experiment Lain and Now and Then, Here and There are frequently compared to Escaflowne and Boogiepop Phantom in terms of complexity, detail, and completion. Also, something called Grave of the Fireflies might be worth a look. If you've seen any of these let me know. And if you know of any titles that might compare nicely to Escaflowne or Boogiepop Phantom let me know.

 

Anyhow, I suspect that Serial Experiment Lain will be the next series I watch.  I'm going to Fry's this evening where I expect I'll find it.  I haven't seen Now and Then Here and There in any of the stores around here, so it'll have to wait until I decide I want to special order it.  Stay tuned for notes on Serial Experiment Lain.