Ruling engines and lapping the ultimate screw

The story of the ruling engine is one of those bizarro incredibly important things that has slipped into obscurity, only really known by people still directly involved in this sort of thing. I was briefly involved in this area working at LBNL’s Advanced Light Source, measuring diffraction gratings, their efficiencies, and attempting to estimate how well they’d work in presence of error. I promptly forgot almost all of it in favor of learning how to pants goth girls or whatever I repurposed that set of brain cells for, but it’s still in there rattling around somewhere.

Diffraction gratings are those little rainbow thingees on your credit card. Or if you’re old, you remember the rainbow patterns on CDs, those were sort of ad-hoc diffraction gratings. Ultimately it is a set of very precise lines across a mirror substrate. There are all kinds of profiles and shapes of diffraction gratings for different purposes, but they all work roughly the same way. Different wavelengths of light are reflected into different angles via constructive interference. The simple grating equation is where is the diffracted order, is the angle of the diffracted order, is the periodicity of the grating, and is the wavelength of the light diffracted.

 

This is a long winded way of saying if you reflect light on a grating, it will make a nice rainbow pattern. If you make a slit out of razorblades (this is basically what people use) perpendicular to the first order diffraction angle, you get a monochromator or spectrograph, depending on how you use it. This means you can resolve narrow lines in the spectra of whatever it is you’re looking at. Of course, nothing is perfect, least of all diffraction gratings. There’s a figure of merit in spectroscopy called resolving power; where is the approximate wavelength of interest and is the narrowness of line you want to resolve. It’s easy to show that R is proportional to the number of coherently illuminated perfect grating lines, and that any error in grating line shape or tracking will cause R to be smaller. So  if you want to discover quantum mechanics, you need to make some nice lines otherwise you’re wasting your time. Oh yeah, and obviously if you want to resolve smaller wavelengths of light, say, in the UV, you need to rule your gratings with smaller lines.

Over complex representation of a monochromator or spectrograph

Now a days we have a number of ways of making gratings, but the first way (still important and used) is using a ruling engine, which is a very fine machine tool which mechanically draws lines on a substrate using a diamond anvil. The first important such tool was Rowland’s mentioned several times now; literally the machine that launched American physics and made quantum mechanics possible. There were gratings made before, but Rowland’s was the first to make useful gratings repeatedly. For decades it was the only one capable of making decent gratings; like a machine made by super intelligent alien beings that nobody else can figure out. For decades after this, all the subsequent ruling engines that worked were Rowland designs. The first successful ruling engine which wasn’t a Rowland design is the topic of the rest of this blog; that invented by the underappreciated experimental physicist John Donovan Strong (I’ve definitely been in the same room as him early in my career, but I can’t say I remember anything about him –his book is amazing BTW). This is the type of ruling engine still used today, more or less, with some additional complications of using feedback mechanisms made possible by electronics over the years. I’m following Strong’s article from 1951 as well as a couple of  Scientific American articles.

The original Rowland machine was a sort of overgrown and ultra precise metal shaper (or for a more familiar example; a grocery store meat slicer). Strong took his design cues from the much more uncommon metal planer. The difference, Rowland’s machine advanced the relatively heavy grating blank using the precision screw, making the screw subject to mechanical deformation and stick slip, while moving the diamond using ways that could wear out.  Remember, this thing is making long, straight lines, very precisely on the order of 1000/2000 lines per millimeter; a perfect line every 500-1000 nanometers. Real nanotechnology; not the imaginary kind done with Schroedinger’s equation and pixie dust. For contrast, an atom is around a tenth of a nanometer. While they call the latest semiconductor technology 14nm, it’s really more like 100nm, and diffraction gratings built with screws were doing that, over much larger areas than a defect free wafer more than 140 years ago using doodads such as these very precise screws. There were seven major sources of error with this design in absence of mechanical or manufacturing defects, to give an idea of the type of thing involved here; they were referred to as the “seven demons.”

1. Stick slip/lubrication forces of the various moving parts caused large irregularities.
2. Wear in the various parts of the engine were also hugely important; the carriage might travel miles in ruling a grating and the Rowland carriage was a big beefy object.
3. The metal parts also contain locked-up stresses from creation from raw ore to machining; as the machine ages, the stresses relieve and the perfect surfaces deform.
4. Creep also takes place from external forces; sag, motion, weight support.
5. Any vibration may cause bad gratings to be made; one worker correlated his grating defects to the swaying of trees outside the building (this is huge with optics in general, especially in current year with all kinds of machinery around and driving by).
6. Dust of course is a big problem; get dust under the diamond cutter or in the screw/nut interface and you’re, well, screwed.
7. Finally, the heat radiated by a human body can cause sufficient creep in the engine to ruin a grating.

Strong’s gizmo obviated the stick slip problem by moving the diamond rather than the grating blank, removing the ways for moving the diamond, and improving both the lubrication of the screwing mechanisms, and the alignment techniques.  His thing used two precision screws to advance the diamond, and as they’re pointing in opposite directions, they can cancel out pressure and sag errors as well as angular “fanning” errors in the grating ruling (Rowland’s machine had microradian misalignments that borked the resolving power via this fanning effect; a microradian across a few inches is easily a wavelength of green light). Downside; you need two nice screws instead of just one.

Strong’s exposition was fascinating. He points out that precision in his day was entirely “primitive methods.” Aka geometry, averaging and lapping compounds. The dividing heads on the screws for making microscopic motions were self lapped in place on an oil bath. Instead of a kinematic mounting system for moving the grating, he overconstrained it with multiple ways which averaged out to a nice straight line.

Strong was a great scientist who understood machinery and tooling in great detail. He also had a couple of helpers he credited with his success. One of them was Wilbur Perry, an engineer trained at WPI. Before he went to school he made a bunch of telescopes, and was a proud member of the Springfield Vermont telescope makers society, which still maintains a clubhouse. Let me emphasize the implications of this: a tiny town of a few thousand people had a telescope makers society at the turn of the century, when telescopes were still high technology, and they endowed it well enough it is still physically there. That’s sort of like a small town of a few thousand people having its own privately owned MEMS fab in the 1990s when this became a more common technology. Social capital is highly underappreciated and they had lots of it in those days. Strong himself got many of his ideas for the ruling engine from hanging out in a club he founded with John Anderson (the previous John Hopkins Rowland engine driver); the “100-to-1 shot club.” Some nice oral history before it fades away: an interview with Henry Victor Neher:

NEHER: This was a small group that was formed at Caltech in about 1934 or ’35. The
way it originated was this. John Anderson, who was at the Mount Wilson Observatory, had an office at Caltech when he was working on the 200-inch telescope, back in the thirties. One of the members of the staff was a young fellow by the name of John Strong [professor of physics and astrophysics, 1937-1942], who had his experimental equipment in the same room in Bridge as I did. John Strong was over talking to John Anderson one day. John Strong was always interested in ideas of one sort or another. He was an inventor if there ever was one. John thought that there ought to be a group that considered far-out ideas of one sort or another.

INTERVIEWER: For example.

NEHER: Primarily ideas connected with something scientific or mechanical, or something of that sort. And John Anderson said, “Well, what you are suggesting is to discuss things that have one chance in a hundred of working.” And so, this is the way the 100-to-1 Shot Club was formed. They got a group together which consisted of John Strong, John Anderson, Russell Porter, Roger Hayward—who did that picture up there above the fireplace—and then some others not connected with the Institute, like Byron Graves. And there were a couple of patent attorneys in the group.
Well, I didn’t get into it right away. I guess it was about 1936 or ’37 before I became associated with it. We met once a month at various members’ homes. It was mostly discussions of ideas in connection with astronomy or with physics. There may have been some mechanical things. One of the members was George Mitchell, who designed and made the Mitchell camera that was used in Hollywood for years. Another was George Beadle [professor of biology 1946-1961], who joined after World War II.

INTERVIEWER: Did anything ever come out of it?

NEHER: No. It wasn’t meant to be that. It was just a place where you could just discuss anything you wanted.

 

Or as Strong himself put it:

 

We called it the “100 to 1 Shot Club.” We met at various member’s houses at Palomar; in the Mohave Desert; etc. — about 6 or 7 times a year. It was called by the name mentioned to indicate that our considerations (like: Does the water spin in a contrary way in the Southern hemisphere when it runs out of the bath tub? — etc.) were restricted to topics that were fantastic by a factor of 100:1 over scientific. The dozen members included: Trim Barkelov — patent council for Paramount Pictures Roger Hayward — artist and architect Victor Neher laboratory roommate George Mitchell — millionaire manufacturer of the Mitchell camera; a former Hollywood camera man Byron Graves — an amateur astronomer and retired executive from Ford Co. in Detroit John Anderson — my boss Jack McMorris — a chemist (and disappointed concert pianist) George Worrell — successor to Mitchell at the Camera plant Milton Humason — astronomer I mention this because it was a group worthy to go down in history.

 

The importance of such clubs can’t be overestimated. They’re everywhere in the annals of technological history; from Wernher von Braun and company’s rocket club, to the famous Lunar society, to the X club even the Bohemian Club was responsible for the US nuclear weapons program. Most great human ventures have started in some sort of men’s club. And yes, they were/are men’s clubs, u mad? As my pal BAP put it, only the most depraved ancient Greek tyrants would ban men’s associations:

A brotherhood of men in this form is the foundation of all higher life in general: there is a certain madness, an enthusiasm that exists also in a community of true scientists or artists…. it is totally forbidden in our time…. the dedication, severity, focus and enthusiasm necessary to sustain true scientific enterprise are forbidden because they make women and weaklings uncomfortable.

Back to badass screws, Wilbur Perry of the Springfield Telescope Club eventually got a job running the Rowland engines at John Hopkins and was widely recognized as a genius and meticulous engineer with perfect hands. Strong hired him for this expertise. His fellow technical  coworker was Dave Broadhead, another optics hacker who made complicated telescopes in his spare time, and at one point made a living crafting roof prisms for the war effort, something he picked up in his spare time from reading magazines. He literally made them in his basement. His education, as far as I am able to determine, was reading popular science and popular mechanics magazines, going to the library and fiddling with things. Broadhead is the kind of guy I keep harping about; the careful working class machinist craftsman who basically no longer exists in American society. . Strong at one point asked him for a pair of 36″ parabolic mirrors, which he literally made in his basement 30 days ahead of a 90 day schedule. So, for the ruling engine project, he was a shoe in. He was working class to the bone; treating his employers to venison dinners from deer he shot himself when they’d come visit his basement workshop in upstate New York. I have to wonder what his descendants are up to these days. Hopefully not shooting heroin which seems to be the primary avocation in that part of the world.

Broadhead was a wonder, like many of this class of instrument builder machinist. More importantly though, we have a fairly good first hand view into how he did it; all the steps. Nobody really documented how Rowland and his guys built his doodads. He wrote some post-facto notes down, but nothing in detail. Broadhead’s adventures in fine screw craftsmanship was much better documented. Broadhead’s first step in building the thing was rebuilding his basement South Bend lathe. Scraping the ways and refitting all the parts until it could hold a 1 micron cut. That’s 1/1000 of a mm. As Broadhead put it. “It’s an old lathe, but instrument makers use such lathes for centuries, just scraping ’em over -which they’d have to do even with new ones, for this work.” Scraping of course was the manual technique used to make a flat surface back in 1800 when Maudslay invented the screw cutting lathe. Mind you a South Bend lathe is not considered a toolroom lathe; it was mostly used for light work and was popular with hobbyists for its relatively low cost. According to one account “I journeyed to Wellsville and found Broadhead peering downward through a 50-power toolmaker’s microscope attached to the lathe. The tool was smoothly peeling off a shaving only one micron thick. Without the microscope it seemed to be cutting nothing”

 

To remove stress in the screw blanks, he had two garbage cans with inner cells, one for heat the other for dry ice,  so he could stress relieve the screws before the finish cuts. He dipped them in what he called “tincture of skunk cabbage” (overheated Mazola corn oil at 400F, 100F) and “hobo cocktails” (dry ice and alcohol at 10, -60 and -100F). He did this stress relief cycle 50 times per screw.

When he moved on to lapping, he rigged up a tape recorder which kept a record of the torque  of the screw being lapped in its giant split nut. This way he could keep track of progress on the lapping process and the recorder would tell him when there was a burr or requirement for more lapping compound. Mind you this is a 1940s era tape recorder, so in addition to being a great machinist, he must have known a thing or two about electronics back in the vacuum tube era. He also rigged up a motor mechanism and ran the thing on his wall in his basement.

Apparently the whole new ruling engine worked the first time, which is a minor miracle. A hugely successful scientific breakthrough done with a sort of miniature Klein type-1 organization. More of a Klein type-1 A-team;  a common type of group for successful experimental physics ventures. The origins in a couple of men’s clubs and a couple of obscure working class geniuses makes it all the more sweet.

It’s also an object lesson in why current year can’t have nice things. No men’s clubs thanks to various vile and pathetic tyrannies. No working class craftsmen making things in matter. No physicists who understand how a fucking screw works (who worked on the Kansas wheat harvests).  And tens of thousands of nincompoops fiddling around on a computer instead of learning how matter works with the eyes and fingers. The very idea of using such mechanical creativity by talking to other artificers and hammer and tongs precision work is anathema to current year bugmen. I’m pretty sure they’d find a way to call the whole project sexist and racist because they don’t understand how a fucking screw lap works either.

That is the biggest advance in the grating art that I am responsible for. I also made an advance in the lapping of lead screws that is recognized in industry. I developed several techniques which are useful in precision machine tool practice. And that was a consequence of the work on ruling engines. But my work on ruling engines, in a sense, was supernumerary, because now the control of the relative position of the ruling engines components is accomplished by interferometry. Here Harrison was the pioneer.

From ancient Gears and Screws to Quantum Mechanics

The geared mechanical clock, like the pipe organ and the Gothic cathedral is a defining symbol of Western Civilization. Division of the day into mechanically measured hours  unrelated to the movements of the sun is a mechanical symbol of the defeat of the tyranny of nature by human ingenuity and machine culture. The hours of the day used to be something measured locally by the position of the sun. The liturgy of the hours of the Catholic Church caused north-western Europeans to go all spergy and design intricate machines to tell the monks when to say their prayers, rather than using arbitrary times. After all in the sperdo north, it’s often cloudy or dark very early or barely at all: you need something better than the sun to tell the time.

There’s an oldest surviving clock; that of the Salisbury Cathedral (allegedly 1386). It’s an interesting enough looking mechanism, foliot and verge escapement (the first known mechanical escapement for counting the seconds); you can see it running here. These early clocks had the advantage over water clocks in that you didn’t need to haul water up the tower, and they didn’t freeze in the cold northern winter.

One of the interesting mysteries of technological history; nobody knows where gears came from. A gear is sort of like a wheel, or a pulley system, both of which existed long before the gear. There are claims that the Chinese had them before anyone else; the south-facing wagon is a postulated example, though the first document of it was by Yen-Su in the 11th century, long after such mechanisms were in common use in the West.  As with most of early Chinese history, this isn’t well documented and it may have been nonsense. Unless they influenced the Greeks directly, which doesn’t seem to have ever happened otherwise, the Chinese developments weren’t important in a world historical context.

As with most things, the first documented gears are Greek. Aristotle wrote about them in his physics book around 340BC -around the time of Alexander the Great. Ctesibius was first we know of to write about the things (~250BC) being used in interesting ways; his stuff all lost, but written about by later thinkers; he also invented the pipe organ. It has been suggested that water wheels using lantern pinions were the first gears: we learn of them via Vitruvius (probably originally Ctesibius). We know that Heron of Alexandra had well developed gear trains; he described some effectively like the backgears in a lathe. Archimedes invented the worm gear and pinion used in modern clockworks; possibly also the spiral bevel gears used in differentials.

The most shockingly advanced early geared mechanism is the Antikytheria mechanism. It’s one of those things people didn’t for some reason expect, but if you read old astronomy books, I’m virtually certain such mechanisms are much older. The epicyclic theories of Eudoxus (375BC) and Callippus (330 BC) were pretty explicitly gearworks; later expanded by Hipparchus and Claudius Ptolemy, who was contemporary with the Antikytheria mechanism. It’s entirely possible there were no gearworks before Posidonius (maybe) brought us the Antikytheria mechanism. I suppose it’s possible there were no gearworks after. But it seems vastly more likely we didn’t just randomly pick up a unique space alien technology toy off the sea bed, and there are probably more such treasures still buried in other places, perhaps even sitting somewhere in a Museum storage closet.

My pet theory, for which there is exactly zero evidence, is that gears were very ancient and lost with the late Bronze age collapse. Certainly they had brasses and small drills and the ability to fabricate elaborate objects out of much harder materials. Since the Greeks didn’t mention where they got the basic gear idea, I’m assuming it existed before they started making more clever versions of it. I suppose such things could have existed in some other culture (Sumerian, Egyptian, whatever), but it’s my pet theory; feel free to come up with your own.

The Screw might have been an invention of Archimedes as well, though some historians attribute it to a more forgotten artificer called Archytas (my pal Eudoxus‘ teacher from the time of Plato). Screws were used in the Mediterranean region for olive and grape presses. There is a widespread misapprehension that the science of the ancient Greeks was some kind of theoretical construct: not so. The mechanical and scientific ideas of the great ancient philosophers and the Alexandrian Museum were used by ordinary people on a daily basis. From screw presses to waterwheel contraptions, the Hellenistic and Roman world benefited from the applications of Greek thought.

Gears allow one to change the plane of rotary motion, or the angular velocity of the rotary motion. Screws turn rotary motion into linear motion, generally considerably stepped down in velocity. You need both to make something like a modern clock or a mechanical lathe. Screws are commonplace now and used everywhere, but they really are a wonder. An inclined plane wrapped around a cylinder. Early screws were made with tools like hammer and chisel, with taps and dies made in the same way, various kinds of ingenious mechanisms to assist the process.

Making the first set of standardized and precise screws took until around 1800, culminating in Henry Maudslay‘s screw cutting lathe which was one of the most important inventions in human history. The screw cutting lathe required a screw and gears, combined together on a rigid lathe bed. The lathe bed is effectively a plane, allowing for precise motion. You can make these with a chisel and scraper/file out of arbitrary chunks of steel or cast iron; hobbyists still carve and scrape their own lathe beds. The leadscrew allowed the cutter to automatically move along a piece of rotating stock to cut another thread in a piece of rotating stock. Changegears allowed one to cut arbitrary threads from stock, by altering the ratio of screw linear motion to workstock rotation. With all these ingredients you can move a cutter along a piece of rotating screw blank an arbitrary amount, making arbitrary pitch screws. What’s more, you can amplify the accuracy of your leadscrew to a certain extent. There are heroic tales of Maudslay creating his master leadscrew that are in their own way as glorious and Promethean as Benvenuto Cellini casting his Perseus statue.

Maudslay is one of those guys who created a whole center of excellence around himself; he was a blacksmith/locksmith who built a classic Klein type-1 organization. He invented all manner of clever devices we now take for granted, from micrometers to various kinds of steam engine and telescope; he was even involved with the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel building machines for his various ventures. Maudsley’s students (it wasn’t a school, it was a high technology business) went on to make numerous further innovations and form their own high technology companies. Joseph Whitworth invented all kinds of machine screw standards (BSW still in use today) machine tools and measuring devices, guns and so on and became enormously wealthy. Joseph Clement built the first version of the difference engine.  William Muir manufactured machine tools, Richard Roberts made locomotives and  power looms, and James Nasmyth invented the steam hammer and shaping machine.There aren’t any substantive books written about this amazing group of men, and the one I know about is expensive and out of print, but if done properly it would make an excellent case study of a Klein type-1 organization. All of these guys were giants of invention and industry and they all got stinking rich inventing new technologies and increasing man’s power over nature. There’s a sort of pamphlet about Maudsley available on archive, which is slightly better than nothing.  I assume there were contemporaries who wrote about them, but they’re mostly forgotten today.

Back to screws; using a screw, you can precisely position things on a nanoscale. I’ve done it, using these little buggers called picomotors. You can buy big giant screws made in temperature controlled oil baths which are capable of similar tricks while retaining their accuracy as well. It boggled my mind when I first read about how this is accomplished; basically the same way most mechanical accuracy is achieved; by lapping with abrasives. You can read all about it in the old Wayne Moore book “Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy.”

Which brings me back to Henry Rowland, father of American physics. It was Rowland who invented the techniques for creating the ultra precise nanoscale screw by manually lapping the screw in a giant split nut. He did this to create diffraction gratings using a “ruling engline.” Diffraction gratings are responsible for the origin of modern physics, as scientists needed them to resolve atomic spectra. And of course as I said in the previous blog, Rowland was by his own self largely responsible for American physics activities in general.

The story of the ultra-precise screw and ruling engine is so insanely awesome I’ll dedicate a later blerg or two to the topic.

 

 

 

Managerial failings: complification

“To the engineering mind, a state will probably appear decadent in just the degree that there are numbers of inhibitory or uselessly tabulative persons employed to interfere with, and inquire into the actions of others” -Ezra Pound, Machine Art

 

The managerial class in America is failing everywhere; it’s obvious, demoralizing and a  dangerous moment in history. It is the same way mandarinates have failed through all of history. Mandinarates don’t necessarily become corrupt in the sense of taking bribes, though this is definitely a factor. More serious is the problem of mental corruption. Mandinarates fail due to complification. Failed mandinarates such as our managerial class can’t simply solve problems any more. They make simple problems into complicated ones and add new and arbitrary problems which literally can’t be solved. The tendency is near universal now, and you can see it and its effects everywhere.

The “managerial elite” of current year aren’t anything like the hard men of old who raised us up from the muck. The actual engineers and managers who pushed the needle lived in contact with the cold reality of matter and existence. They had to do difficult things like milk the cow, bring water up the hill to their homes, deal with bullies, chop wood to prevent their families from freezing, shit in a bucket and carry it to the cesspool. They were mental adults in a way that the present day managerial “elites” mostly can’t be.

Current year managerial “elites” are psychological children who primarily look to others for approval. These are coddled people whose fragile self conception is based on their “cleverness.” They depend on authority figures making their lives comfortable. Like most immature people, they’re also conformists; they wouldn’t dream of diverging from the consensus of experts. Just like kids in school who can’t bear to stand out, a stage in life which they never escape. While there were great innovators who were playful and child-like in their creativity, being praised or feeling clever for being “oh so smart” wasn’t part of their psychological makeup. This tendency is infantile and ineffective at delivering anything useful. It results in outcomes about as helpful as a toddler’s Lego creation, or mummy thinking you are a good boy for getting high marks on a test.

HG Wells saw this psychological tendency back in his day. In his Time Machine novel, he had the childish and degenerate cummies-obsessed “elite” of his day evolve into helpless conformist psychological children; the Eloi. He didn’t anticipate that the Morlocks, aka the people who keep technological society functioning would politely excuse themselves and let the Eloi attempt to run everything. Today’s engineers and managers are almost all worthless Eloi who will eventually destroy everything they’re put in charge of. Eloi engineering and management barbarism is a tremendous danger. If it isn’t stopped, we’re rapidly approaching a time where technological society decays irretrievably, if we haven’t already gone over that waterfall. Eloi are (rightly) terrified of Morlocks, but they’re only dimly aware of the fact that they depend on Morlocks for every facet of their existence.

 

Consider running a college. In the old days it was a couple of janitors, a couple of accountants and some professors who teach. Now, we have creatures called administrators. These festering pustules have metastasized and made running a college absurdly expensive and difficult.  There are more infantile crackpot administrators than professors in most modern Universities. Mind you, this is a class of “managerial” Eloi bureaucrat that didn’t exist 80 years ago. None of these dingbats can justify their existence. Thanks to Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, these childish meshugganahs have run the educational system into a ditch. Adding them to the College headcount doesn’t add to the institution’s effectiveness; it does the opposite: it makes it more expensive, vastly more ideological and less oriented towards imparting anything resembling knowledge. Headcounts are absolutely exploding in Universities in every category but the people who actually teach things.

Yale for example: more administrators than undergraduates. This is ridiculous; Yale students would be better off if they hired each undergraduate a PhD educated personal tutor and a maid/servant, and it would be cheaper. There is a Yale administrator event horizon at which the mass of administrators at Yale within the confines of the Yale campus will form a black hole from which light cannot escape. If current trends continue, this will happen by the year 3622.

Administrator headcount at Yale doubles every 20 years and there are 5000 of these slugs now. I will approximate their mass (including laptop and papers) at 100kg each; 5×10^5kg. Yale occupies about a square kilometre. A black hole of that size is 0.3 or so solar masses, about 5×10^29kg. Log2 of 10^24 is 80. 80*20=1600 years from now. Long before that, each new administrator added will simply have their electrons and protons fuse together into a neutron blob. This will improve both the productivity of the administrator and the value of the local New Haven real estate by bathing it in lethal radiation. A mere 1200 years from now  the mass of Yale administrators will exceed the mass of the rest of the planet. The present population of the earth will be matched by Yale administrators in 400 years, and the population of South Korea matched by Eloi administrators by the time Yale is twice its present age of 320 years. Lux et veritas.

Yale class of 3622 as the gravitational pull of administrators causes light to orbit New Haven

The “smart city” is a favorite concept of the TED talk/Davos class of Eloi managerial imbeciles.  It is, of course, hilarious that these self proclaimed “elites” have themselves destroyed numerous Western cities already. This is the core philosophy of our parasitic Eloi “experts” -they create tremendous problems with their complexification, then present us with ever more byzantine, intrusive, complicated and oppressive “solutions” requiring their intervention. Western civilization had the most glorious cities in the world for thousands of years. No dystopian hellscape IoT surveillance baloney was required; clean water, strong families, sound money, religion and good civic culture was sufficient. Dystopian hellscape surveillance frippery won’t help the problems we have in current-year cities, which can be summarized as a refusal to enforce any laws or require standards of behavior of any kind; an entirely Eloi concept.

Eloi software goons and engineers compexify things for themselves. Generally for no observable reason. Four hour long meetings instead of one 5 minute standup. Using some retarded object oriented thing to access a database instead of pasting SQL strings together. Using computers where a two wire feedback loop would do. Adding an operating system and wifi to a refrigerator. Most of these chuckleheads have no idea why they’re making things more complicated. Often because they’re so far from the actual enterprise they think they’re being paid to make really sweet solutions that show off how smart they are rather than products which function properly.

Consider the second parity multisig wallet failure. The parity multisig was a multi-authenticated cryptocurrency wallet on Ethereum. You need 2/3, 3/5, 4/5 signatures to make it send funds somewhere. Great use of “smart contracts” (don’t get me started on this simpering descriptor; hence referred to as SCS) assuming it isn’t built into your chain from the get go, which it should have been. This adds commercial bank functionality to otherwise badly designed blockchains which didn’t think of adding this as a core feature. However, this thing was complicated and apparently poorly understood. Some Eloi genius added a “feature.” This “feature” was deploying a “library” which all parity multisigs  depended on. The justification for this was to make it a few dollars cheaper to deploy your personal multisig. “Let’s be modern and use shared objects in blockchain just like the big boys in OS design.”

Well, in return for this twee complification, a complification for which there was no sane justification, the library became a central point of failure. This central point of failure had a self-destruct function that made a sort of deranged sense when the multisig was originally to be deployed as a monolithic smart contract. There’s no reason to have this method, but at least you could only kill your monolithic multisig if the owners agreed on it. When this method was pulled out into a library it had no owners; if it did have owners, it would be a security issue (the concept of “owners” was another complification which was completely unnecessary). Some curious person called the self destruct method they left hanging around in the library and destroyed the $2 billion+ in value locked up in all the parity multisigs. All to save a couple of bucks. Well played, sirs.

At the time this “use a library in a SCS”  idea was very actively pursued. People even gabbling on about writing SCS operating systems. SCS operating systems that could be upgraded if people voted to do so. In fact at one point there was the very bad idea of making the upgrades to your dependencies mandatory.  The reason people use shared libraries in normal computers is you’re worried about it gobbling up too much memory, and it makes it easier to upgrade buggy things without upgrading all the binary dependencies.  Worrying about this on a blockchain is the worst kind of premature optimization. You’re already doing something incredibly wasteful by writing code on a blockchain: own it. Adding dependency graph management to something which is designed to be immutable is barking lunacy.

 

Why I invested in Immunefi instead of MakerDao

The shared object concept itself is a towering failure. This is little appreciated but undeniably true. The idea of the shared object is simple enough: if you have a computer running lots of code, some of the code used will be the same. Why not just load it to memory once and share that memory at runtime? I’m old enough to remember when this happened to Unix style operating systems back in the 90s. Before that, you’d compile binaries which  contained everything you need statically linked. That actually worked rather well, and allowed you to do things like ship a binary that worked on different versions of the operating system. Mind you, back then, most computers were 32 bit and something like a quarter gig of RAM was considered an enormous extravagence. You could boot a real operating system using a 1.44mb floppy disk. People back then were interested in squeezing a little bit more RAM by using old Multics tricks from the days when “RAM” was a bunch of little magnetic cores knit by old ladies.  When people invented shared objects back in the 1960s, the computer was a giant, rare thing ministered to by a priesthood: there was no such thing as multiple versions of a shared object. You used what the mainframe vendor sold you. Now, when every half-human shambling ape-man in creation has multiple computers of varying vintage, to say nothing of the infrastructure depending on old computers, shared object versioning is an enormous problem. Nobody really thought of this in the 90s when Current Year shared objects were dreamt up and deemed futuristic.

It’s now such an enormous problem there are multiple billion dollar startups for  technologies for dealing with this complexity by adding further complexity. Docker, Kubernetes, various Amazon atrocities for dealing with Docker and Kubernetes and their competitors,  flatpak, conda, AppImages, macports, brew, RPM, NixOS, dpkg/apt, VirtualBox, pacman, Yum, SnapCraft, various app stores and associated applications of varying degrees of completeness, or for just one toolchain (NPM, Rust Crates, go get, OPAM, CRAN, CloJars, Maven, etc etc). The package manager tools that come with the OS generally push the shared object dependency hell back on …. the OS developer. If they support your application and write helpful test scripts, it will get built and you’ll have your application. Good luck getting them to upgrade it if you need a new feature.  As the number of packages grows, this breaks down, and even the OS maintainers are giving up and turning to flatpak, AppImages and Snap files. These are extremely complicated and incredibly wasteful (of memory) ways of literally packaging up a bunch of needed shared libraries with your application and presenting it to you as a crappy simulacrum of a statically compiled binary. Which is a lot more retarded than building a static binary. Mention compiling a static binary to an Eloi developer and you’ll be met with a doltish NPC stare, at which time you’ll be regaled with excuses for why Snap packages or flatpaks or whatever represent the future because reasons .

At the other end of the shared object spaghetti monkeypatch spectrum, you have shitty but simple virtual operating systems like docker. These push the complexity of shared object versioning onto the user. You now have to administer multiple shitty little operating systems, which sort of obviates the concept of having an operating system on your computer in the first place.  Things like conda or brew are vendored mini OS solutions concentrating on making some tool chain run usefully without breaking the OS. They only exist because people want to use shared objects instead of just shipping a statically linked binary. Shipping a statically linked binary; so “early 90s.” What’s the matter with you? Are you a Moorlock?

All of these “solutions” are incredibly complicated and require someone do a lot of work to deal with shared object library issues. Which are only there because in 1995 memory was kind of expensive. Complification. Even if I were nominated Lord of All Computers after the inevitable Butlerian Jihad, I’d have to kill most surviving “software engineers” to fix this, as they’re almost all imbecile complexifying, “playing in the gardens they don’t maintain,” Eloi.

I’m sure some dolt will pipe up and attempt to justify the parlous state of the shared object spaghetti which makes up contemporary operating system design. Or worse, defend one of the monkeypatch things people have cobbled together to make things work. Such people  can’t conceive of a world different from the one they occupy. A world where their “tech skills” are useless because humanity actually made progress. A world where we made progress by remembering something from the past. Complification is a choice, and we can choose to make things better. Eloi never do; they’re too busy playing with themselves.

Eloi complification brings ruin even in little ways. Consider the open source “code of conduct.” The idea of open source is pretty simple; share the code with the world so it doesn’t go away when a company goes out of business. Everyone can fix bugs and share code and make things better. These days you can’t just do that, you need a “code of conduct.” A complicated system involving ad-hoc courts, witch hunts and catering to the whims of emotionally turbulent “danger-hair” dunderheads rather than just ignoring jerks. Somehow people were able to develop significant software before the mid-2010s when this sort of bureaucratic nonsense became a thing. The glorious benefits of not hurting the feelings of debilitatingly fragile contributors haven’t manifested in any observable way.  It’s abundantly obvious that Linux Kernel development has gotten shittier and more bug ridden since it sprouted useless witch hunters and began catering to perpetually offended people. I don’t have a time series of number of critical kernel security patches over time, but I used to have the same kernel version on my machine with uptime measured in months. Now I’m lucky to go a week without a hard reboot being required because nobody told Danger Hair Daphne that she’d be better off pursuing a job as an HR administrator than a kernel developer.  Bring back Mean Linus. Morlock code is better code.

The job of management and engineers is ultimately solving the problem, and the problem almost always gets solved faster and better by making things simpler. When you’re given the opportunity to be clever ask yourself what the Morlock would do. Eating the Eloi should be included in your spectrum of possible actions.

Edison was better than Tesla in every way

It’s super popular among modern tech weebs to lionize Nikola Tesla and not think about Edison at all beyond identifying him with pointy headed bosses. This is insanity. While it’s possible that Tesla was very much ignored until my teenage years, just like the 80s era Yugoslavian propaganda services said, it is certainly not the case that Tesla is getting insufficient credit in current year. He is now extremely overrated. Tesla was indeed a great electrical engineer and inventor. However he is presently overrated; Edison is now underrated. So is Westinghouse, but we’ll keep it to Edison here, especially since Edison is propped up as some kind of villain versus somehow more heroic, rather than simply more lame Tesla.

Tesla was a lone inventor mad scientist type. He had helpers, but by and large he was a one-man band. Indeed the parts of his genius which made it into production, more or less three phase motors, he was employed by Westinghouse as a single contributor. Three phase current was a work of creative genius, but it was also an obvious innovation of the time. This will make ignorant Tesla fanboys mad, but it’s absolutely the truth. Same idea was invented independently around the same time by at least four other men, none of whom had nationalistic-communist intelligence agencies doing PR for them later. Let us name them and remember their equally great deeds: John Hopkinson an Englishman of Great Britain, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky a Russian-Pole of the Russian empire,  Galileo Ferrais a Sardinian of Italy,  and Jonas Wenstrom a dwarf of Sweden. If Tesla had never lived, there were already four other guys who basically put the same mark on the world and achieved the same thing. In fact, all four mostly forgotten men are even more praiseworthy than Tesla, both as inventors and human beings.

Tesla is given all kinds of credit for shit he didn’t really do; radio, x-rays, wireless transmission of electricity. Sure he was tinkering in his lab and came across some weird things, but as an inventor he didn’t get them right, at all. He was definitely very bright; a polyglot, allegedly photographic memory and was in possession of a great deal of personal charisma and charm. He was also great with getting media attention and moved in the high society of his day. He was decent at most things he tried (games, etc), and led a volcel abstemious  life.

But we must be honest about Tesla; he was a semi-broken weirdo who needed a Westinghouse to bring discipline to his researches and make money. While it is sort of admirable that he spent all his time in researches which pleased him, what he did was also extremely self indulgent, and was ultimately almost entirely masturbatory nonsense, none of which actually mattered. He really wasn’t ahead of his time; he was a crank. He didn’t believe in almost any of physics which we now know is true: electrons and relativity were nonsense to him and he spent a lot of time attempting to refute it. He also despised fat people and mannish females, believed in eugenics, zapping people’s brains with electricity to make them smarter,  and had many eccentric and anti-social habits we now associate with sperg-lord character defects; and yes, they are character defects. Not being able to shag JP Morgan’s daughter because she wears pearls, or hallucinating about pigeons is indicative of a pretty severe basket of character flaws.

Edison, on the other hand, was nothing like this. Edison was a much greater inventor,  a greater businessman, leader, philanthropist and human being. Things Edison invented and shipped for profitable production: telephone microphones, phonographs, motion pictures, multiplexed telegraphy, light bulbs, iron ore separators, innovations in electrical power distribution, he delivered real X-ray imaging innovations, helped invent new forms of rubber from sunflowers, invented IR detectors, the stock ticker, the nickel-iron battery, invented new processes for plastics and other chemicals, and was basically the archetypical polymath genius. He made money on all of these things, brought every one of them from idea to market, unlike Tesla who could only bring stuff to market if someone else did that work for him.

Edison also had two wives and six kids, helped with the US war effort in WW-1, was active in an important social club, was briefly a Theosophist, was a monetary reformer, also abstemious in his diet, was a man of peace who would only work on defensive weapons (Tesla by contrast was always hawking quack death rays), and there are  a dozen companies he founded which still exist and create value to this  day.  Edison didn’t exist in his own little mad scientist world; he led men and machines to build great things, which are literally used and create value 90 years after he dropped dead. By contrast, Tesla made a bucket of loot on the one important thing he did (mind you, something done independently by 4 other men) and spent it all on his own entirely worthless personal passion projects. Mind you, Edison achieved all of these marvelous things, deeply engaged with society and the real world while stone deaf. He also never went to college.

Westinghouse did win the current wars with his Tesla invented technology, and Tesla deserves credit for having the correct solution (again, something done independently by 4 other men) but Tesla wasn’t fit to spit-shine Edison’s boots. Neither as an inventor, a creator/businessman, nor even as a human being: Edison is a greater man all the way down the line. I guess it’s OK to identify with Tesla as an underdog or something if you’re having a hard time of it, but frankly, most underdogs deserve to be underdogs. The fact that Tesla worked for Edison ought to have given you the hint: this is the natural order of things.

Everyone who works in software knows some Teslas; his self-regarding, grandiose sperg-lord nature is a familiar character. Such people may have done something that made them some loot, but then they spend it doing research into some quackery, or on polyamorous midget juggling prostitutes or whatever. None of you know an Edison, or if you do know a lesser Edison, he is probably a very great man. Edison lived in the real world rather than the self-indulgent world of cranks. Edison was a leader, a deeply moral man, and a man of affairs rather than a lone weirdo laboring on things nobody cares about. If you must emulate one of the two, don’t be a Tesla, be an Edison. It really is the virgin Tesla versus the chad Edison.

Early article, I think commissioned by Yugoslav spooks, which set me on my early Tesla fanhood, and probably everyone else’s:

https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/tesla-scientific-saint-wizard-or-carnival-sideman