[gameprogrammer] Re: Innovation and Creativity. Getting OT?

On Wed, 2004-05-05 at 04:33, Ray Gomez-Bravo wrote:
> >  How many counter examples will it take to show you that this is just
> wrong?
> If you are getting personal, you are choosing the wrong examples.
> >  Frank Whittle, a British military officer invented the jetengine.
> Yes, Frank Whittle was a British Military Officer, he was an apprentice
> before that and Knight after that. It doesn't change the "facts" he
> developed the concept and prototype without help from the British
> Military. He did it independent of Hans J. P. von Ohain, who also
> invented the jet engine.
> When Whittle went to the British military for funding they told him to
> get lost, when WWII came along, they took his invention, gave it to the
> Americans (GE) for implementation into airframes. Meanwhile, Ohain's
> jets were shooting down Allied pilots.  After the war, the Brits
> nationalized the jet engine told Whittle to ... and gave contracts to de
> Havilland to develop jets.

That doesn't match the version of history I read. It also ignores the
fact that during the war the British tossed a lot of development work
and manufacturing over the the US because the were rather busy fighting
a war.

> Am I to infer the military did Frank Whittle a favor? Am I to infer that
> the British military actually funded an invention?
> >> In fact, since we started this with WAR and the ATOMIC BOMB, let me
> emphasize the following. Most of the scientist that worked on the
> Manhattan project were piece-nicks.
> >  Really? You knew them? Where did you get that idea?
> You are correct! I did not meet all of them. I had the privilege to
> study physics under one of them, Dr. Robert. L Purbrick and he did his
> Manhattan work in Chicago. I spent some years with him as an undergrad.
> Of course he could have lied about working on the Manhattan project and
> he could have lied about being against using the atomic bomb. On the
> other hand if you review the Leo Szilard petition to the President of
> the United States you will find his name as petitioner number 48. A copy
> of the petition can be found at
> http://www.dannen.com/decision/45-07-17.html.
> The other Manhattan Project member I had the privilege to meet was
> another Physicist named Richard Feynman. He too told me he did not like
> war. So let me see, I met two out of hundred and read about many more.
> And then there are the 69 in the Szilard petition. Statistically I would
> say my statement stands.

There is a large difference between liking war and being willing to
support it. 

> >  The US-NAVY invented the nuclear  submarine. The US-DOD invented GPS.
> And so on and on and on.=20
> About the nuclear submarine. OK, if you want to call it an invention.
> Personally, the submarine was invented during the civil war, and was
> there a Navy then? The nuclear reactor we discussed.  Put the two
> together and you can call it an invention. Not in my mind. At most it is
> an innovation akin to putting a different motor in a car.
> GPS is another story. I don't think there is much about GPS that I don't
> know since I was one of the technical members involved in the
> development, deployment, verification & validation, and evaluation of
> the project. I gave up countless hours of sleep, 1 wife, 1 fellowship,
> making sure that I contributed as much or more as the other team
> members. I was after all one of the new members on my first job...had to
> prove myself. Not anymore, many years later I don't have to prove myself
> to anybody. But, hey let's finish this last post.

No you don't have to prove anything to any one. This is turning into a
classic example of the "my resume is longer therefore I am right" kind
of posting. If you want I will send you my resume by private email so
you can compare it to yours.

> Incidentally, it was a math problem with the inversion of covariant
> matrices in a computer that took me from my geekie little house in south
> of Los Angeles to Pasadena north of Los Angeles to seek the help of
> Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology.
> >> Still it took William Shockley (Nobel Laureate) to invent the
> transistor so IBM would get into the game of computing  machines.
> >  IBM didn't have anything to do with inventing the transistor and IBM
> Where in my sentence does it say IBM had anything to do with inventing
> the transistor?

Frankly, the sentence was difficult you understand since the invention
of the transistor had nothing to do with IBM's entrance to the computer
business. So, I countered the what I considered to be the most likely
interpretations.

> >  I remember being told that no women had ever been involved with the
> building of the atomic bomb or with nuclear missiles.
> No where did I distinguish between men and women, but at the risk of
> starting something else, let me say that women are probably the better
> side of the species in more ways than I will elaborate here. I will say
> that man of the women I studied with and worked with were more
> intelligent than the men and their post-hole-deep (PhD) diplomas.

Those were examples of revisionist history. 

> >  I remember seeing the premier of the Soviet Union pounding on a table
> with his shoe shouting "We will bury you!" at the top of his lungs
> Strange, you don't look that old on your web site. By the comment, I
> would assume you are near my age. Your hair looks good. Mine is mostly
> grey on black...more grey than black.

There are no pictures of me on my website. You have mistaken me for
another Bob Pendleton. There are around 30 of us in the state of Texas.
There are 3 of us who use the same pharmacy.

My beard is white, my hair is grey, with a little black left in it.

> >  When a nut cake like that has nuclear weapons, and is threatening
> publicly to kill you... Well, you have to take it seriously no matter
> how little you trust the military or the government.
> I agree. Maybe that is why I volunteered and wound up outside of Saigon
> during New Years 1968.  Although, I have only alluded to it, there are
> reasons why I abhor war. I don't mean the stupid etymological wanna be
> influences like the "war against terror" or the "war against drugs"!  I
> mean real wars where children are given weapons and faced one against
> the other...nation against nation.  War, where the politics only matter
> for the politicians, not with the ground troops and the casualties,
> civilian and/or military.

I turned 16 in 1968.

Up until I was 17 I intended to be a military officer. Then I spent a
week at China Lake as a Civil Air Patrol cadet and got to see napalm
from a couple of miles away. That is when I realized that being in the
military meant having to trust the civilian authorities to make moral
decisions for me. I could not accept that then and I can not accept that
now. 

I was in the 1971 draft lottery. I drew a high number. 

> >  And I suppose you are now going to ignore the work on programming
> languages done by the USAF and USNavy? Do you even know what they are?
> Do you know why a USNAVY Admiral is considered to be one of the giants
> of language design? I'll give you a hint, she was there when the term
> "bug" was invented.
> Yes, I am going to ignore that to some degree, USAF/USNAVY work on
> language...except for the "bug" story ...there are too many tales and
> RADM Hooper was in one, but not all the tales.
> Personally, and I mean I was there in person, the idiocy of hearing
> (expletive description deleted) Jean D. Ichbiah trying to convince me
> that Ada rendezvous would not affect a jet flying  faster than mach 1
> towards a mountain would not scare the sh__ out of a  pilot. 

Cool, did you know Art Evans? I Took a long series of course on language
design an implementation from him when he was a visiting professor at
the U of U. We had a lot of fun studying and dissecting Ada. Then we
went on to dissect about a dozen other languages but we spent most of
our time a versions of LISP and Prolog. 

> Pull the
> stick...sorry, I have a rendezvous pending, was a favorite argument of
> mine. He came by to convince the Ada Joint Program Office about the
> benefits of Ada. Unfortunate for him/me that I was one of the
> consultants translating techie to English for the program office. 


> Jovial
> was before my time. Jovial was a solution language to a real time
> problem. 

Jovial was a great system language.

> Ada was a language looking for applications (sounds like an ABC
> thread I've been reading here). 

Ada was to broad in scope, neither fish not fowl.

> Naval languages are beyond my training
> unless you consider COBOL which is a by-product from FOW-MATIC, but I
> never liked COBOL. 

Well... I spent the first part of my career implementing Cobol on the
8080/z80 and a number of other processors. So, while I never really
cared for it I know it better than I want to.

> I also never looked into compilers A-0 or B-0. Were
> they ever put into Mil-Std (Military Standards)?

I couldn't say.

> I apologize if I offended you by not mentioning the honorable Rear
> Admiral Grace Hooper creator of the A-0 compiler before Backus developed
> FORTRAN. After all, I am trying to convince you that the military does
> not invent. And you will notice if you read her history that she was
> nearly NOT in the NAVY, was OUSTED from the NAVY and then was CALLED
> BACK because she was the only (mathematician viewed as a lowly
> accountant) accountant that could bring the Navy payroll back in line.
> Personally, in hind sight I would have told the Navy what to do with its
> "Anchors away" instead of retiring as the oldest admiral ever.=20

I have read an heard several versions of all the stories. I heard what I
consider to be the most authoritative version of the bug story from her.
She spoke at my school when I was an undergraduate. She was a good
friend of one of the faculty.

> >> The faster the machine, the circuits, the microcode, the languages,
> and the faster we like it. Harder, faster, pumping more electrons
> through shorter and shorter delay paths with more application specific
> Instruction Set Architectures as guides to development. Pride and the
> need for fun push for more efficiencies which make faster machines.
> > I can tell you have never actually done that. I have.
> Really? What did you do? On my behalf, does being project
> manager/project lead on a microprocessor R&D development count?

Yeah, that counts. Its not like being an engineer. But, I'll give you
credit for that.

>  Do I get
> extra points if the microprocessor is immune to single event incidents?
> Does that count? If the Instruction Set Architecture was the USAF
> military 1750A, does that count? What is it that you have done? SDL is
> dandy and you claim credit.

No, I do not claim credit for SDL. I didn't write it. I use it. And, I
have written about it. But, I did not write it.

>  I have no reason to doubt you and I won't go
> on the attack here. But, for your information, I started as the
> technical lead on a "Design for Testability" microprocessor and wound up
> as "Project lead/manager" on a build for space computer. I also wrote a
> lot of software various version of the same software to run on a variety
> of operating systems. Does that count?  So what did you do besides SDL
> that is higher, lower, or equivalent to my little project? (Okay, not my
> project, the Air Force Project funded by under Secretary of the Air
> Force for microelectronics.)

Like I said, I'll happily send you a copy of my resume. 

I think the project I am most proud of is a compiler for arbitrary
languages for arbitrary architectures and a linker that worked with it.
It was developed for a company that built graphics hardware out of bit
slice components and had to support machines with instructions words
ranging from 8 bits to 1024 bits. The compiler allowed the programmer to
define the instruction format and the language. The best part was the
ability to include in the definition a set of conditions so that the
compiler would detect illegal instructions at compile time.

It was used on all new development and all old code was moved to it.
When it was used on old code it found hundreds of errors and as a result
bugs that had been deemed unfixable were fixed.

I spent the next several years at a couple of different companies as the
software engineer who oversaw the interface design between the hardware
and the software.

> > Sure, it was fun. But, believe me. I did it for the stock options and
> because I needed ajob. I do *this* for fun.
> I don't get what was fun, you didn't say. 

I run my mailing list and my web sites for fun. Helping people learn
makes me happy.

> You did what you did for stock
> options, and I did what I did for patriotism.

Ok. So, you hate the military and you hate war. But, you designed a
military rad hard microprocessor out of patriotism? A processor whose
main use it in spy satellites and nuclear warheads? 

I understand. For just the same reasons why someone who hates war can
work on the atomic bomb sometimes you have to help develop weapons to
prevent wars from happening. It really tears you up inside. I know
several people who have done the same thing. The emotional cost is worse
and lasts longer than getting wounded in battle.

>  The think tank I worked in
> for 15 years didn't give stock options, and some of the Program Office
> colonels were more interested in retirement options, than making sure
> their successor had a good program. I started working in the think tank
> because I needed a job. I stayed there because I got to enjoy myself too
> much and forgot to go out and look for stock options.
> Okay, if you are doing this for fun, what is fun? Pushing War? 

What have I ever said that made you think I was pushing war!?

Nothing I have said has been in favor of war.

> Then I
> think I have joined the wrong learning group. I learn by making
> mistakes. I learn by listening to answers. Member of your list make
> mistakes, are not afraid to ask for help. Other members of your list,
> including you, provide answers, or at least point in the direction where
> answers might be found. I like your members. I even like a lot of your
> technical insight.

Thank you, that is what the list is for.

> I don't like war.

Neither do I. 

> >  It would be fun to argue with you if you at least bothered to get
> some fact straight.
> Yeah! You are right. My parents, my teachers, and lately my doctors said
> I should not engage in debate with persons who are not up to par. Okay,
> you didn't catch the pun about Shwartzchild and black hole theory (or
> string theory). Stringing along (another allusion to black holes and
> multiple dimensions) you didn't get the pun about Tolkein and fantasy
> (although the movies have been out for three years...then again maybe
> you just ignored them).  

Ignored :-)

> Okay so I am trying to recover from
> encephalopathy, but I haven't lost it all, yet. I still have enough
> processing power to know when you say:
> >  Frank Whittle, a British military officer invented the jetengine.
> Does not translate into the military complex invented, funded, made
> possible, or even gave credence to your point that the military complex
> is out to help humankind with advancements in technology.
> Now let me see if I can get this right:
> >  Enough is enough, and this is too much.
> >     Check your facts before you post
> >             Bob Pendleton
> Good advise. You should listen to yourself. This will be my last posting
> on your list.

Sorry to see you go.

> It has been a long time since I got my hands (mind) dirty
> trying to write good hard code. I joined this list for help. I learn by
> seeing what others struggle with. I learn by seeing how other help those
> who struggle. Meanwhile, I struggle to remember. Encephalopathy has made
> me slow, not stupid. Because I am slow, the time I have to learn is
> precious. This debate would have been fun, if it had not become
> personal. But time is not something I have a lot of to waste on
> romanticism, especially the romanticism of war.

Ray, you are reading a lot into this that is not there.

> Goodbye, Good luck, and may I see you healthy wealthy and wise on a
> friendly basis on the sands of the outer banks-- someday. I use to go
> out there to run during business trips (I write this assuming you are
> the Bob Pendleton from Rowan County). 

Sorry, I am one of the Bob Pendleton's who live in Williamson county
Texas. I don't even know what state Rowan County is in.

> I hope to go out there again, to
> run, to think, but most of all to revel in the knowledge that I have
> written a good game.

                Good Luck

                        Bob Pendleton


+--------------------------------------+
+ Bob Pendleton: writer and programmer +
+ email: Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx             +
+ blog:  www.Stonewolf.net             +
+ web:   www.GameProgrammer.com        +
+--------------------------------------+

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