lebuffon

That, in my opinion, is the question of the era for the USA. We were taught that the rule of law prevailed and there are "checks and balances" but it seems like there is no prescibed way to enforce the rules inside the system.

The RIAA equalization curve for recording and playback, was typically implemented with only resistors and capacitors. No DSP required.

I know I know. It's so hard to believe you can manipulate signals without a processor. ;-)

In my case it was around 1975ish. There was no digital circuitry in signal paths then.

If you are asking how the thread pitch motor controller was working I have no in depth knowledge but it would likely be an analog envelope detector. (simple RC filter/integrator would suffice) That would be rectified to make a DC control voltage and the control voltage would be used to modulate the power to the motor in an inverse fashion. ( more audio signal -> less power )

No digits would be harmed in the process. :)

Old guy here. I brought a few masters into RCA in Toronto, just before dinosaurs went extinct.

At that time they used a Studer A80 (if memory serves) 1/2 track machine, modified, with an extra playback head that was placed before the head stack so it read the music on tape about 500mS before the playback head got it. The extra head sound was fed to the motor controller that controlled the speed of the cutting head feed motor that turned the screw that controlled the pitch depth of the grooves.

When the preview head sound was loud, the screw motor would slow down to make bigger grooves and then return to normal when the audio envelope was smaller.

That's how they optimized groove spacing before digital buffers. :-)

My observation after numerous decades is that people who invent technology don't control it because they seldom imagine how the rest of humanity will ultimately use it. I am thinking of printing press versus newspapers with advertising business model. Same for Radio and TV. The techs made it work. The business weenies made the profit. The original "www" followed a similar path. How that plays out with AI is in motion I think.

As counter argument proposal; we should look into studies of children deprived of language until later in life. I have a dim memory of reading that one of these people never mastered complex language constructs. I could be that language and other cultural artifacts provide an "operating system" of sorts for the brain that allow higher level thinking. ?? (conjecture here by a complete layman)

Aside from the Jesus centered stuff what are the things in Gaudium et Spes that you find to be trash? (I only read a summary before asking)

By "back Illinois bill", does that mean they wrote it?

So the "checks and balances" we were taught in school was just nonsense?

... and we seem to be unable to make something that works without "turning it off and turning it on again" :-)

Forth does not specify threaded code. Implementation is left to the implementor.

Internally Forth can be direct threaded code, indirect threaded code, byte code, sub-routine calls or optimized native code.

The 16K memory block is connect to the TMS9918 video chip and is accessed by port read/write. The TI-99 out of the box only has 256 bytes of RAM memory on the 16 bit buss.

UNIX99 uses an after market card with 1Mbyte of RAM on an 8bit external buss used for peripherals. This card replaces the old 32K RAM card made by TI in the 1980s.

Sure. But the emitted chemicals strengthen/weaken specific neurons in our neural nets. If there were analogous electronic nets in the bot, with analogous electrical/data stimulii, wouldn't the bot "feel" like it had emotions?

Not saying it's like that now, but it should be possible to "emulate" emotions. ?? Our nets seem to believe we have emotions. :-)

Probably worth mentioning that writing a big project in Forth is more like creating an OOP framework.(if you are disciplined)

The end result of that is one doesn't write the program in "Forth" per se but in the domain specific language you create for the job. This is how Forth gets more productive than pure assembly language if the team documents things well and follows the prescribed system.

Forth is a compiler but what it "compiles" is not standard. The implementor decides what they need. Forth can compile pointers to native code that are the VM's instructions, called direct threading. Forth can compile pointers to pointers to native code VM instructions, called indirect threading. Forth can compile byte code like OpenFirmware/OpenBoot.

And modern systems compile optimized native code (VFX Forth, SwiftForth) but still remain fully interactive at the console.

People who need to hit their revenue numbers make allocations decisions. That's not a conspiracy. It's what people have to do to keep their jobs in industry. And those decisions affect what gets the resources.

And yes I know that outcomes after detection have improved, but the HPV vaccine shows an alternative that to me deserves more resources.

I am simply frustrated by 60 years of research and lots of dead friends and family. If that's a crime get the tar and feathers while I strip down to my shorts.

That is super news. Thanks for this.

We have one solid example of cancer caused by members of the HPV family. The disease can be transmitted via body fluids and/or contact. So there's that.

My laymans take: Cancer is a disease of the DNA of a cell. Viruses survive by altering cellular DNA. It begs the question: How many other viruses cause cancer?

It also seems clear to me that the virus may not be the sole cause since not everybody gets cancer so it is a multi-variable problem.

Virus + X = cancer

This will be harder to nail down but with modern data tools we should be able to get there.

Makes me wonder: Is the cancer "industry" searching for causes or just after-the-fact treatment?

It seems like imagination was more common in those days. There was no "digital" anything to lean on.

An engineer at RCA in New Jersey told me that at the first(early) NTSC color demo the interference was corrected by hand tweaking the color sub-carrier oscillator from which vertical and horizontal intervals were derived and the final result was what we got.

The interference was caused when the spectrum of the color sub-carrier over-lapped the spectrum of the horizontal interval in the broadcast signal. Tweaking the frequencies allowed the two spectra to interleave in the frequency domain.

Our station had an art department that used a hot press to create text boards that were set on an easel that had a camera pointed at it. By using a black background with white text you could merge the text camera with a camera in the studio and "super-imposed the text into the video feed.

"And if you tell the kids that today, they won't believe it!"

I was on a course at Sony in San Mateo in the 1980s and they had a 36" prototype television in the corner. We all asked for it to be turned on. We were told by the instructor that he was not allowed to turn it on because the 40,000V anode voltage generated too many X-rays at the front of the picture tube.

:-))))

I quickly skimmed the instruction set and did not see anything resembling a sub-routine call or branch and link instruction.

Did I miss it?

Wow 300mm chips. They must be huge!

(I am sure they meant nm, but nobody is checking the AI output)

The hard part I think is grokking the fact that the FORTH can compile and interpret inside the same definition. Also one must understand the operation of the Forth primitives HERE and comma (,)

I will take a run at explaining IF ENDIF (endif is the Fig Forth term, used here to avoid confusion)

?BRANCH is an instruction in the virtual machine. It jumps if top of stack=0 . The offset (or address)that it jumps to is the memory word right after the ?BRANCH token. Like this: <?BRANCH><number>

Forth definition of IF

: IF COMPILE ?BRANCH HERE 0 , ; IMMEDIATE

At compile time IF "compiles" the token for ?BRANCH but then interprets "HERE 0 ,"

(IF is an IMMEDIATE word that executes even if the compiler is turned on)

HERE is like $ in Assembler, ie: the address where code is being laid down. It is simply left on the data stack. HERE is the address where the <number> will be stored... later.

0 is a zero, that is pushed onto the data stack.

"Comma" (,) pops the zero and puts it in memory address HERE but! it advances the system memory pointer 1 integer width.

The zero is now a place holder in memory to be filled in by ENDIF.

: ENDIF( addr -- ) HERE OVER - SWAP ! ; IMMEDIATE

ENDIF needs that address left behind by IF shown in comment as addr.

ENDIF gets the new value of HERE which of course is different because we will have compiled some code after the IF keyword.

All we need to do is do NEWHERE-OLDHERE to get the offset for ?BRANCH.

That is covered by the forth code ( oldhere-on-stack) HERE OVER -

This will make the data stack be: ( OLDHERE offset )

If we do a SWAP we just need the store operator '!' to put the offset into memory.

For the morbidly curious here is the definition of ELSE. :-)

: ELSE COMPILE BRANCH HERE 0 , SWAP [COMPILE] ENDIF ; IMMEDIATE

So loops are just more of the same... (all loops jump back to BEGIN. BRANCH is an unconditional jump instruction)

: BEGIN HERE ; IMMEDIATE

: AGAIN COMPILE BRANCH HERE - , ; IMMEDIATE

: UNTIL COMPILE ?BRANCH HERE - , ; IMMEDIATE

: WHILE [COMPILE] IF SWAP ; IMMEDIATE

: REPEAT [COMPILE] AGAIN [COMPILE] ENDIF ; IMMEDIATE

IMHO that is a failed example of "Chuck Moore's stuff". He went down a rabbit hole to an extreme level because that's what he does. His earlier CPU experiments like the 4016 and Shboom were excellent examples of ultra-RISC architectures.

The thing Chuck explored, related to abstraction, which I don't see much in conventional machines was reducing calling overhead. (1 cycle call and intrinsic return on many instructions ie: free return)

Some of the decisions we make today have a lot to do with what happens at the hardware level when we add abstraction. It just costs more than we are prepared to pay so it is avoided ... but for the wrong reason.

Programmers unsurprisingly want programmability.

Users want a toaster.

Input stuff, turn a knob, push something, -> output

NEW LINK

https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial-I...

I read this book a long time ago. It provided some insights on the role of Japan's difficulty with foreign languages in the 1980s and the desire to create AI translation. The "Fifth Generation project" was a massive government and big-business joint venture that amounted to almost nothing.

The author explores why with some surprises along the way. I would say it is like the "Mythical Man Month" from the Japanese side of computing.

The book also opened my eyes to the difficulty of mastering Japanese.

https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial- Intelligence/dp/019504939X

Depends how far back you want to go. I worked with guys a generation older than me. One clarinet/sax player worked in the "house band" at the Elmwood Hotel in Windsor Ont. Canada, in the 1950s. He had a wife and kids and a mortgage. He worked 6 nights a week and name acts like Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman came through the town on their tours across N. America.

That's when professional musicians were musically "literate", so many acts showed up with just their soloists and boxes with their "charts". One rehearsal and the show was ready to go.