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Oldest Programmer?

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Paul De Groot

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Nov 26, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/26/98
to
Hi,
I hope you Fortran folks will forgive me (I know some of you won't but
that's why we freelance journalists have life insurance), but I'm
writing a story for a newspaper about age and the computer industry.
The idea of the story was to see if there's any prejudice against older
folks in the IT industry. So far I haven't found any evidence of that.
So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
working programmer.
Naturally, I thought comp.lang.fortran would be a place to start, given
that Fortran was one of the earliest programming languages, although
from looking at the messages here there are lots of young folks, and for
all I know the oldest working programmer works exclusively in Java these
days.
At any rate, feel free to email me with any nominations or suggestions.
I'd like to do a follow-up interview by phone or email, so if you could
include contact information I'd appreciate it. Since my
article is for a Canadian publication, I'm particularly interested in
hearing about older Canadians who are still programming.
By working programmer, by the way, I'd like to restrict it to people who

currently make money as programmers. I'm sure there's a 72-year-old out
there doing Java (because I met him at Comdex last week), but because
the story has a would-you-hire-an-old-person focus, I'm most interested
in people who are still working as contract or employee programmers.

Thanks
Paul De Groot


Ralph jay Frisbie

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Nov 27, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/27/98
to
On Thu, 26 Nov 1998 17:23:52 -0700, Paul De Groot <pdeg...@edmc.net>
wrote:

>Hi,
>I hope you Fortran folks will forgive me (I know some of you won't but
>that's why we freelance journalists have life insurance), but I'm
>writing a story for a newspaper about age and the computer industry.
>The idea of the story was to see if there's any prejudice against older
>folks in the IT industry. So far I haven't found any evidence of that.
>So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
>working programmer.

snip

>Paul De Groot
>
>
>
I'd like to see your article. If you can, how about putting
it up on the web and post a pointer to it in this newsgroup?
Ralph Jay Frisbie
a saucer lover,
but not the inventor.

Phillip Helbig

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Nov 27, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/27/98
to
In article <365DF118...@edmc.net>, Paul De Groot <pdeg...@edmc.net> writes:

> Hi,
> I hope you Fortran folks will forgive me (I know some of you won't but
> that's why we freelance journalists have life insurance), but I'm
> writing a story for a newspaper about age and the computer industry.
> The idea of the story was to see if there's any prejudice against older
> folks in the IT industry. So far I haven't found any evidence of that.
> So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
> working programmer.

Well, Professor Loren Meissner is a regular contributor---he would
rather post to comp.lang.fortran than play golf in retirement; three
cheers for him!


--
Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.he...@jb.man.ac.uk
Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297)
Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618
Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G
UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/

My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester.


John Harper

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Nov 27, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/27/98
to
In article <365DF118...@edmc.net>,

Paul De Groot <pdeg...@edmc.net> wrote:

>So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
>working programmer.

At what age did Grace Hopper write her last program?

John Harper, School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences,
Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
e-mail john....@vuw.ac.nz phone (+64)(4)471 5341 fax (+64)(4)495 5045


Paul De Groot

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Nov 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/28/98
to
Well, when she was 79, Digital hired her as a consultant.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling Grace Hopper isn't writing code any more.
Although, who knows? Maybe St. Peter needs someone to work on Y2K in New
Jerusalem. You couldn't do much better than get the inventor of Cobol to do
it, now, could you?
Paul De Groot

Paul De Groot

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Nov 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/28/98
to
I'd love to see it too. First thing I need to do is get some good
nominations for oldest working programmer.
If you'd like to see previous stuff I've written, it's at
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/computers/degroot.html.
Paul De Groot

Ralph jay Frisbie wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Nov 1998 17:23:52 -0700, Paul De Groot <pdeg...@edmc.net>
> wrote:
>
> >Hi,
> >I hope you Fortran folks will forgive me (I know some of you won't but
> >that's why we freelance journalists have life insurance), but I'm
> >writing a story for a newspaper about age and the computer industry.
> >The idea of the story was to see if there's any prejudice against older
> >folks in the IT industry. So far I haven't found any evidence of that.

> >So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
> >working programmer.

H.W. Stockman

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Nov 28, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/28/98
to
Paul De Groot wrote:
>
> Well, when she was 79, Digital hired her as a consultant.
> Unfortunately, I have a feeling Grace Hopper isn't writing code any more.
> Although, who knows? Maybe St. Peter needs someone to work on Y2K in New
> Jerusalem. You couldn't do much better than get the inventor of Cobol to do
> it, now, could you?
> Paul De Groot

I would vote for Joe Fortrani, the inventor of the FORTRAN
programming language. From humble beginnings as a janitor in
Grace Hopper's lab, he is credited with discovering the first
"bug", a small listening device (attached to a Luna moth)
that had accidentally fallen into a relay in Hopper's
computer.

After the discovery of Joe's programming talents, Grace (or
possibly Dennis) Hopper joined him on a cross-country tour,
riding on the back of his Harley-Davidson "Turing Machine".
This epic travel was the inspiration for the movies "Easy
Rider" and "I am Joe's Bladder."

Despite the huge commercial success of FORTRAN, Joe's real
passion was the gamma programming language (the name was
incorrectly translated to "C" in later years). The Java
language is also named after Mr. Fortrani, as "cup of Java"
and "cup of Joe" were interchangeable phrases for "coffee" in
the early, raw days of computer programming.

Sadly, Joe was taken from us by an auto accident several
years ago. Always passionate about exotic cars, Joe was
descending from the highest point in Delaware in his Citroen
Deux CV, when he was sideswiped by a drunken Visual Basic
programmer. He survived the accident, but was so badly
shaken that he went home and drank an entire bottle of Pepto-
Bismol, and suffered an acute Bismuth allergy attack.
Whatever else you may learn from this tragic tale, always
remember: VBX and Bismuth don't mix.

John Harper

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Nov 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/29/98
to
In article <36608A52...@edmc.net>,

Paul De Groot <pdeg...@edmc.net> wrote:

>Unfortunately, I have a feeling Grace Hopper isn't writing code any more.
>Although, who knows? Maybe St. Peter needs someone to work on Y2K in New
>Jerusalem.

I doubt it. You forgot about Divine omniscience. If St Peter does
use computers and feels about them the same way I do, he'll be using
base 666 arithmetic. The analogous bug must already have been dealt with
there, because 1998 = 3*666. (Dionysius Exiguus's famous error implies
that St Peter would have actually had his problem a few years ago.)
The obvious alternative would be to outsource St Peter's data processing
to a place that specialises in inflicting eternal torment on the
workers. There must have a good firewall, of course, but I don't think
he would feel able to trust the output that came through it.

Paul De Groot

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Nov 29, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/29/98
to
I understand as well that Joe Fortrani was instrumental in the design of early
microprocessors. As a janitor, he was accustomed to sweeping things under the
rug, but in the institutional environments in which he worked the floors were
often bare.
Joe relied, instead, on heating and cooling vents. One such vent was well known
around Navy headquarters as the "accummulate register" for all the stuff that Joe
pushed in there, and when the register became too full, it occasionally popped.
Thanks for your contribution.
Paul De Groot


"H.W. Stockman" wrote:

> Paul De Groot wrote:
> >
> > Well, when she was 79, Digital hired her as a consultant.

> > Unfortunately, I have a feeling Grace Hopper isn't writing code any more.
> > Although, who knows? Maybe St. Peter needs someone to work on Y2K in New

Stefan A. Deutscher

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Nov 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/30/98
to
On Sat, 28 Nov 1998 16:33:52 -0700, Paul De Groot <pdeg...@edmc.net> wrote:
>I'd love to see it too. First thing I need to do is get some good
>nominations for oldest working programmer.
>If you'd like to see previous stuff I've written, it's at
>http://www.edmontonjournal.com/computers/degroot.html.
>Paul De Groot
>
>Ralph jay Frisbie wrote:

If you count people who do computational physics you could try Charlotte
Froese-Fischer at Vanderbilt University. She has been working for a very
long time on Hartree-Fock codes (and still is) and has published a
rather famous text book about it in various incarnations:

@Book{ 494,
author = {Charlotte Froese Fischer},
title = {{T}he {H}artree--{F}ock method for atoms: {A} numerical
approach},
publisher = {{W}iley {I}nterscience},
address = {New York},
year = {1977}
}

@Book{ 1107,
author = {Charlotte Froese Fischer and Tomas Brage and Per
J\"onsson},
title = {{C}omputational atomic structure: {A}n {M}{C}{H}{F}
approach},
publisher = {{I}nstitute of {P}hysics {P}ublishing},
address = {Bristol},
year = {1997}
}


A Ph.D. student from my former group just went to Vandy U. after he was
done with his Ph.D. in physics to get a computer science degree under
supervision of Charlotte Froese-Fischer.

Cheers, Stefan

--
=========================================================================
Stefan A. Deutscher | (+33-(0)1) voice fax
Laboratoire des Collisions Atomiques et | LCAM : 6915-7699 6915-7671
Mol\'{e}culaires (LCAM), B\^{a}timent 351 | home : 5624-0992 call first
Universit\'{e} de Paris-Sud | email: s...@utk.edu
91405 Orsay Cedex, France (Europe) | (forwarded to France)
=========================================================================
Do you know what they call a quarter-pounder with cheese in Paris?

Charles Neil

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Nov 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/30/98
to
In article <365DF118...@edmc.net>, pdeg...@edmc.net says...

> Hi,
> I hope you Fortran folks will forgive me (I know some of you won't but
> that's why we freelance journalists have life insurance), but I'm
> writing a story for a newspaper about age and the computer industry.
> The idea of the story was to see if there's any prejudice against older
> folks in the IT industry. So far I haven't found any evidence of that.
> So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
> working programmer.
...
> Thanks
> Paul De Groot
...
I feel like I'm about a hundred.
--
-Charlie Neil (c...@lanl.gov) (505) 665-0978
Los Alamos National Laboratory FAX (505) 665-5553

H.W. Stockman

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Nov 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM11/30/98
to
Paul De Groot wrote:
>
> I understand as well that Joe Fortrani was instrumental in the design of early
> microprocessors. As a janitor, he was accustomed to sweeping things under the
> rug, but in the institutional environments in which he worked the floors were
> often bare.
> Joe relied, instead, on heating and cooling vents. One such vent was well known
> around Navy headquarters as the "accummulate register" for all the stuff that Joe
> pushed in there, and when the register became too full, it occasionally popped.

That's exactly right. In fact, most people don't realize the
strong ties between FORTRAN and Forth are all due to Joe's
interest in microprocessor stacks. Forth was to be named
Fortranieth, but the name was syncoped to fit in the 6 letters
of a FORTRAN variable (plus one for safety).

Joe got some of his ideas working in the Navy cafeteria (janitors
often served Navy food, since cooks were in short supply after
the war). He noticed the manner in which trays loaded and
unloaded from the springy tray-holder, and thought, "I wonder
what would happen if I just made a huge pile of trays on a
single table," and thus the most common FORTRAN programming
style was born.

Jeff Silverman

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Dec 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/2/98
to Paul De Groot
Paul De Groot wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I hope you Fortran folks will forgive me (I know some of you won't but
> that's why we freelance journalists have life insurance), but I'm
> writing a story for a newspaper about age and the computer industry.
> The idea of the story was to see if there's any prejudice against older
> folks in the IT industry. So far I haven't found any evidence of that.
Tell me, Paul, what evidence would you accept? My experience is that
there are relatively few older people in the industry, and most of them
are in managerial positions.

> So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
> working programmer.
That's an angle, but it won't prove your point. What would prove your
point would be to conduct a survey of the industry and look at the
distribution of ages compared with the distribution of ages of the
general population. But even if you found a statistically significant
variation between the age distribution of progreammers and the general
population, that won't change anything.

I have been writing computer programs since 1974 (unless you count the
Digicomp-1 my parents gave me for my 11th birthday in 1969) - but I am
now actively discouraging young people from going into the IT industry.
Given the amount of time we spend on it and the sacrifices we make, it's
not a good place to make a career.


> Naturally, I thought comp.lang.fortran would be a place to start, given
> that Fortran was one of the earliest programming languages, although
> from looking at the messages here there are lots of young folks, and for
> all I know the oldest working programmer works exclusively in Java these
> days.

Good idea.


--
Jeff Silverman, Software Engineer
Mathsoft, Data Analysis Products Division
1700 Westlake AVE N Suite 500, Seattle, WA, USA 98109

Paul De Groot

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Dec 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/3/98
to
Is that Internet years?
Paul De Groot

Charles Neil wrote:

> In article <365DF118...@edmc.net>, pdeg...@edmc.net says...

> > Hi,
> > I hope you Fortran folks will forgive me (I know some of you won't but
> > that's why we freelance journalists have life insurance), but I'm
> > writing a story for a newspaper about age and the computer industry.
> > The idea of the story was to see if there's any prejudice against older
> > folks in the IT industry. So far I haven't found any evidence of that.

> > So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
> > working programmer.

Paul De Groot

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Dec 7, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/7/98
to
You're right, Jeff, finding a 98-year-old programmer wouldn't prove very much.
I'm more interested in exploring this area and getting opinions -- like your
quite interesting opinions on this topic -- and working a story out of that.
Readers will be left with the opportunity to make some of their own
judgements, and the story's role is to illustrate the issues rather than prove
anything.
You've raised some important issues. Let me tackle one or two. You say

>Tell me, Paul, what evidence would you accept? My experience is that
>there are relatively few older people in the industry, and most of them
>are in managerial positions.

The knock against programmers in management is that they haven't been trained
for management, and therefore often aren't good managers. So, is there a
silicon ceiling, so to speak, for coders? (Lest you think I'm picking on
programmers, most journalists haven't been trained for management either,
which is why there are some, uh, interesting choices made in newspaper
management on occasion).

You wrote:
>Given the amount of time we spend on it and the sacrifices we make, it's
>not a good place to make a career.

Do you feel that a lot of programmers aren't fully compensated for the time
they spend on the job? To read the popular press these days, programmers can
ask for, and get, a lot of extra perks, such as stock options, free food and
drink, good benefits, and other stuff, because it's so easy for them to move
to another company.
What do you see as the reality behind that image?


Jeff Silverman wrote:

> Paul De Groot wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> > I hope you Fortran folks will forgive me (I know some of you won't but
> > that's why we freelance journalists have life insurance), but I'm
> > writing a story for a newspaper about age and the computer industry.
> > The idea of the story was to see if there's any prejudice against older
> > folks in the IT industry. So far I haven't found any evidence of that.

> Tell me, Paul, what evidence would you accept? My experience is that
> there are relatively few older people in the industry, and most of them
> are in managerial positions.

> > So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
> > working programmer.

Richard Weaver

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Dec 8, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/8/98
to

>Paul De Groot wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>> I hope you Fortran folks will forgive me (I know some of you won't but
>> that's why we freelance journalists have life insurance), but I'm
>> writing a story for a newspaper about age and the computer industry.
>> The idea of the story was to see if there's any prejudice against older
>> folks in the IT industry. So far I haven't found any evidence of
that.

>> So, looking for another angle, I've decided to search for the oldest
>> working programmer.

Well, looking for angles, why don't you search for the oldest living
computer? You young'ns may not recall, but up until the early 1950s a
computer was a person, not a machine. I don't know what the people
writing instructions for those living computers were called.

To locate old programmers, find the 1st membership roster for the ACM
and compare to current roster -- that will give you a base of early
participants that are still alive. Or ask McCracken (if he is still
alive). Or Werner Buchholz (retired, I think, from IBM); he worked on
the IBM 701.

Dick W

James Phillips

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Dec 8, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/8/98
to
Richard Weaver (rwe...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:

: Well, looking for angles, why don't you search for the oldest living


: computer? You young'ns may not recall, but up until the early 1950s a
: computer was a person, not a machine. I don't know what the people
: writing instructions for those living computers were called.

[...]

At least some of them were called physicists. Richard Feynman talks
about these living computers, briefly, in one of his books. Perhaps
it was "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman"?

Alas, the use he talks about was in calculating nuclear reactions in
an atomic bomb. Perhaps inevitable, but not physics' finest
contribution to civilization.

--
James Phillips Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Opinions mine, not Harvard's or Smithsonian's.

Richard Maine

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Dec 8, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/8/98
to
jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu (James Phillips) writes:

> Richard Weaver (rwe...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
>
> : Well, looking for angles, why don't you search for the oldest living
> : computer? You young'ns may not recall, but up until the early 1950s a
> : computer was a person, not a machine. I don't know what the people
> : writing instructions for those living computers were called.
> [...]
>
> At least some of them were called physicists. Richard Feynman talks
> about these living computers, briefly, in one of his books. Perhaps
> it was "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman"?

At NASA Dryden (which wasn't called Dryden back then), the people
giving instructions to these "computers" were called engineers.
I came here about as the last of these "computers" was retiring.
I never worked with her in that capacity, but did meet her.
Alas, she died not too many years ago.

A few years later, my wife got a summer job for the Air Force as a
"mathematician." Her BS in math apparently qualified her for this
job, which had much in common with the living computers. It consisted
of staring into a film reader, lining crosshairs on the nose of an
aircraft image, and punching a button to record the position (on a
punched card, of course).

Perhaps not too related to Fortran, but us "older" folk do like
to reminisce.

--
Richard Maine
ma...@altair.dfrc.nasa.gov

Toon Moene

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Dec 8, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/8/98
to
jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu (James Phillips) wrote:

> Richard Weaver (rwe...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:

> : Well, looking for angles, why don't you search for the oldest living
> : computer? You young'ns may not recall, but up until the early 1950s a
> : computer was a person, not a machine. I don't know what the people
> : writing instructions for those living computers were called.
> [...]

> At least some of them were called physicists. Richard Feynman talks
> about these living computers, briefly, in one of his books. Perhaps
> it was "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman"?

> Alas, the use he talks about was in calculating nuclear reactions in


> an atomic bomb. Perhaps inevitable, but not physics' finest
> contribution to civilization.

L. F. Richardson, in his 1922 "Weather Prediction by Numerical Process"
envisioned a stadium full of "computers" solving the atmospheric equations of
motion. Unfortunately, his method for solving those coupled partial
differential equations was flawed, so his (own) handiwork didn't really get
numerical weather prediction started - that had to wait until the work of von
Neumann c.s.

Indeed, there are better things to do for physicists than "the destruction of
life as we know it" :-(

--
Toon Moene (mailto:to...@moene.indiv.nluug.nl)
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
Phone: +31 346 214290; Fax: +31 346 214286
g77 Support: mailto:for...@gnu.org; egcs: mailto:egcs...@cygnus.com

Charles Neil

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Dec 8, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/8/98
to
...
> Indeed, there are better things to do for physicists than "the destruction of
> life as we know it" :-(
>
>
But when the latest army marches through the Low Countries, you need to
be ready to oppose it.

James Phillips

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Dec 9, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/9/98
to
Charles Neil (c...@nospamlanl.gov) wrote:
: ...
: > Indeed, there are better things to do for physicists than "the destruction of
: > life as we know it" :-(
: >
: >
: But when the latest army marches through the Low Countries, you need to
: be ready to oppose it.

Not with the destruction of civilization.

Craig Burley

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Dec 9, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/9/98
to
jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu (James Phillips) writes:

> Charles Neil (c...@nospamlanl.gov) wrote:
> : ...
> : > Indeed, there are better things to do for physicists than "the destruction of
> : > life as we know it" :-(
> : >
> : But when the latest army marches through the Low Countries, you need to
> : be ready to oppose it.
>
> Not with the destruction of civilization.

Last I checked, "civilization", whatever that might reasonably mean to
you, was not destroyed in WW2, despite the detonation of two of those
civilization-destroying bombs.

I've lived through a good chunk of the Cold War, and known the
very real fears of nuclear annihilation at the hands of antagonistic
superpowers. I don't think the threat is gone, though it has been
transformed somewhat.

Still, it is my guess that, in terms of fast-acting destruction,
civilization is threatened less by nuclear annihilation than by:

- Biological weaponry

- Biological emergence (virus/bacteria not invented by man)

- Large-asteroid impact

Perhaps others as well.

The above is nothing more than a fairly casual risk assessment on
my part. I'm not saying nuclear annihilation of our civilization
can't happen, just that I think it's a lot less likely a scenario
than some other civilization-destroying events, like the above.

So I worry a bit less about what physicists are inventing than
I do about what chemists, biologists, and geneticists are up to,
and about what astronomists are missing. :)

Of course, without chemists, biologists, and geneticists, we'd soon
have probably half the planet's population starving to death, and
without astronomists efforts to date, we'd have far more people
convinced that an planet-killer asteroid was about to hit ("the
end is near").

Instead of blaming scientists for doing science, perhaps we should
place the blame on politicians for misleading the public, and the
public for being so willingly misled? But people like Scott Ritter
have more intimate knowledge about that sort of thing than do I.
--

"Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful."
James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson bur...@gnu.org

James Phillips

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Dec 9, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/9/98
to
Craig Burley (bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com) wrote:
: jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu (James Phillips) writes:

: > Charles Neil (c...@nospamlanl.gov) wrote:
: > : ...
: > : > Indeed, there are better things to do for physicists than "the destruction of
: > : > life as we know it" :-(
: > : >
: > : But when the latest army marches through the Low Countries, you need to
: > : be ready to oppose it.
: >
: > Not with the destruction of civilization.

: Last I checked, "civilization", whatever that might reasonably mean to
: you, was not destroyed in WW2, despite the detonation of two of those
: civilization-destroying bombs.

The rest of what you said, about relative risk assessment, is
debatable but not obviously wrong. The above is misleading at best.
The number of weapons in the arsenals is four orders of magnitude
greater than the number used in WWII, and the average explosive power
per weapon is an order larger. This makes the analogy to the
Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs, which killed hundreds of thousands of
people, misleading.

Accidental war remains a substantial possibility, and no one can
guarantee that the exchange would remain limited. If a large
proportion of the weapons were used, scaling from WWII to the current
arsenals reveals a qualitative difference, both in terms of numbers
of immediate deaths (which could not be larger by 10^5) and the
effect on climate.

Michael Kagalenko

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Dec 9, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/9/98
to
James Phillips (jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu) wrote
]Charles Neil (c...@nospamlanl.gov) wrote:
]: ...
]: > Indeed, there are better things to do for physicists than "the destruction of
]: > life as we know it" :-(
]: >
]: >
]: But when the latest army marches through the Low Countries, you need to
]: be ready to oppose it.
]
] Not with the destruction of civilization.

Apparently, budget makers disagre with you. They give more $$$ for nuclear
weapons research then during the Cold War.

John Appleyard

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Dec 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/10/98
to
In article <y6u2z5i...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com>, Craig Burley
<bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com> writes
>
<snip>

>
>Still, it is my guess that, in terms of fast-acting destruction,
>civilization is threatened less by nuclear annihilation than by:
>
<snip>

> - Large-asteroid impact
>


!

Too many movies! Shouldn't alien abduction of Y2K programmers (Fortran)
be in there somewhere?
--
John Appleyard

Craig Burley

unread,
Dec 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/10/98
to
jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu (James Phillips) writes:

> Craig Burley (bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com) wrote:
> : Last I checked, "civilization", whatever that might reasonably mean to
> : you, was not destroyed in WW2, despite the detonation of two of those
> : civilization-destroying bombs.
>
> The rest of what you said, about relative risk assessment, is
> debatable but not obviously wrong. The above is misleading at best.
> The number of weapons in the arsenals is four orders of magnitude
> greater than the number used in WWII, and the average explosive power
> per weapon is an order larger. This makes the analogy to the
> Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs, which killed hundreds of thousands of
> people, misleading.

No, what I said wasn't in the *least* misleading, in the original
context.

In particular, *you* appeared to claim that the use of *one* nuclear
bomb to repeal an invader was a civilization-destroying action, in
your post. That was *very* misleading, because, as I pointed out
(entirely correctly and properly), the USA used *two* such weapons
for exactly that purpose in WW2, and civilization was not destroyed.
(I doubt it would have been even if both weapons had been "modern"
in their yields, though it probably would have been Japan-destroying,
at least.)

It's not the *bomb* that is civilization-destroying. It's the
irresponsible, mass-suicidal detonation of *thousands* of such bombs.

So there's no question in my mind, nor should there be in anyone's
mind, that nuclear weapons are not, by themselves, civilization-
destroying.

A single civilization-destroying weapon *is* possible
to build, so that's an important distinction. For example, just
one scientist who figures out how to knock a planet-killer asteroid
off its orbit so it plummets into earth, plus one insane person with
the resources to do it with whom the scientist shares his discovery,
is all that is needed to destroy civilization.

So I suggest you save your hysterical "civilization-destroying"
verbage for technologies that *are*, in fact, capable of destroying
civilization, even when used in small quantities, either intentionally
or unintentionally. I suspect biological weaponry falls into this
category, and there probably are going to be "physics"-type
technologies that will someday, but nuclear weaponry doesn't reach
that level as such.

> Accidental war remains a substantial possibility, and no one can
> guarantee that the exchange would remain limited. If a large
> proportion of the weapons were used, scaling from WWII to the current
> arsenals reveals a qualitative difference, both in terms of numbers
> of immediate deaths (which could not be larger by 10^5) and the
> effect on climate.

Exactly. I do think that the detonation of thousands of nuclear
weapons is less likely a scenario than the presumably much-smaller
release of biological weapons necessary to wipe out civilization,
as I already said. But not unlikely enough to not worry about it,
to not continue to take steps to properly decommission such weapons,
and so on.

So, I don't have any problem with people being aware of the challenges
we face, and the mistakes that have been made.

But I *do* have problems with people who overload emotion-laden
labels like "civilization-destroying" by applying them to weapons
that are not, by themselves, appropriate for such labels. Such
people weaken the *correct* usability of such phrases when it comes
to warning people about the *actual* threats we face. (For example,
people who say "ozone-layer-destroying" instead of "ozone-layer-
depleting" or "ozone-destroying" to describe chemicals released by
man's industrial activities. We don't yet have a clue, AFAIK, how
to destroy the ozone layer. Someday a technology, chemical, even
biological organism might come along that scientists recognize as
constituting such a direct threat. It'd be "nice" if they could
announce "this will destroy the ozone layer" without people yawning
and saying, "didn't that happen already?".)

I stand by my opinion that my statement about civilization not
being destroyed by detonating nuclear weapons during WW2 is *not*
misleading. That we've built more and bigger nuclear weapons
since then, such that, potentially, they would, used all at once,
destroy civilization, does not make the *technology*, or the limited
use of that technology, civilization-destroying. Calling it that
*is* misleading, since, by the same logic, we could probably fairly
call ammonia and chlorine "civilization-destroying chemicals", as we
probably have enough of them on hand to destroy civilization if we
release them all at once in the proper configuration.

And I'm not about to tell someone cleaning their house with ammonia
and washing their clothes with chlorine that they're "destroying
civilization" by using those chemicals, because I choose to not
use alarmist language. I'd rather be taken seriously and, despite
a pretty good sense of humor, when I *want* to be taken seriously,
I usually am. The same cannot, and should not, be said of "chicken
littles".

That being said, I certainly agree with your earlier comment that
inventing nuclear technology was not one of physics' finest moments.
That's probably as far as this discussion should have ever gone.

James Phillips

unread,
Dec 11, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/11/98
to
Craig Burley (bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com) wrote:
: jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu (James Phillips) writes:

: > Craig Burley (bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com) wrote:
: > : Last I checked, "civilization", whatever that might reasonably mean to
: > : you, was not destroyed in WW2, despite the detonation of two of those
: > : civilization-destroying bombs.
: >
: > The rest of what you said, about relative risk assessment, is
: > debatable but not obviously wrong. The above is misleading at best.
: > The number of weapons in the arsenals is four orders of magnitude
: > greater than the number used in WWII, and the average explosive power
: > per weapon is an order larger. This makes the analogy to the
: > Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs, which killed hundreds of thousands of
: > people, misleading.

: No, what I said wasn't in the *least* misleading, in the original
: context.

: In particular, *you* appeared to claim that the use of *one* nuclear
: bomb to repeal an invader was a civilization-destroying action, in
: your post. That was *very* misleading, because, as I pointed out
: (entirely correctly and properly), the USA used *two* such weapons
: for exactly that purpose in WW2, and civilization was not destroyed.
: (I doubt it would have been even if both weapons had been "modern"

What you said *is* misleading, until current arsenals are reduced by
several orders. Using a single nuclear bomb is qualitatively
different now: it carries a very substantial risk of the exchange of
thousands, which does risk the destruction of civilization. And all
I said was "no one can guarantee" that escalation will not happen.
The emotion associated with the concept is unavoidable, I agree, but
the argument is straightforward and not based on emotion, except that
the possible outcome is one we all wish to avoid.

Stefan A. Deutscher

unread,
Dec 11, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/11/98
to
On 11 Dec 98 03:46:48 GMT, James Phillips <jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu> wrote:
>Craig Burley (bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com) wrote:
>: jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu (James Phillips) writes:

>>> Craig Burley (bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com) wrote:
>>>> Last I checked, "civilization", whatever that might reasonably mean
>>>> to you, was not destroyed in WW2, despite the detonation of two of
>>>> those civilization-destroying bombs.
>>>
>>> The rest of what you said, about relative risk assessment, is
>>> debatable but not obviously wrong. The above is misleading at best.
>>> The number of weapons in the arsenals is four orders of magnitude
>>> greater than the number used in WWII, and the average explosive
>>> power per weapon is an order larger. This makes the analogy to the
>>> Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs, which killed hundreds of thousands of
>>> people, misleading.

>> No, what I said wasn't in the *least* misleading, in the original
>> context.

>> In particular, *you* appeared to claim that the use of *one* nuclear
>> bomb to repeal an invader was a civilization-destroying action, in
>> your post. That was *very* misleading, because, as I pointed out
>> (entirely correctly and properly), the USA used *two* such weapons
>> for exactly that purpose in WW2, and civilization was not destroyed.
>> (I doubt it would have been even if both weapons had been "modern"

> What you said *is* misleading, until current arsenals are reduced by


> several orders. Using a single nuclear bomb is qualitatively
> different now: it carries a very substantial risk of the exchange of
> thousands, which does risk the destruction of civilization. And all I
> said was "no one can guarantee" that escalation will not happen. The
> emotion associated with the concept is unavoidable, I agree, but the
> argument is straightforward and not based on emotion, except that the
> possible outcome is one we all wish to avoid. -- James Phillips


How about: One such device, even if "used", will in itself probably not
be civilization-destroying. Yet the technology behind it can be, as such
an event would have the potential to set of a civilization-destroying
nuclear "exchange". Collective effects might well increase in a
non-linear fashion the destructive potential of even "just" a limited
exchange (which, in itself strikes me as a naive concept). (Nice words,
"use", "just", "exchange", are they not?). Someone who wrote about that
in detail is, for instance, Jonathan Schell ("Fate of the Earth", 1988)

Of course, there are uncertainties (for example: tests in water at great
depth, cobalt coating with the long half life of cobalt). I sincerely
hope nobody will ever strive for experimental evidence.

Not just because it would seriously break my fortran codes. To which I
am going back now, for the time being.

On that note, have a jolly good weekend,

Robert S. Lawrence

unread,
Dec 11, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/11/98
to
Richard Maine wrote:
>
> jp...@cfa0.harvard.edu (James Phillips) writes:
>
> > Richard Weaver (rwe...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
> >
> > : Well, looking for angles, why don't you search for the oldest living
> > : computer? You young'ns may not recall, but up until the early 1950s a
> > : computer was a person, not a machine. I don't know what the people
> > : writing instructions for those living computers were called.
> > [...]
> >
> > At least some of them were called physicists. Richard Feynman talks
> > about these living computers, briefly, in one of his books. Perhaps
> > it was "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman"?
>
> At NASA Dryden (which wasn't called Dryden back then), the people
> giving instructions to these "computers" were called engineers.
> I came here about as the last of these "computers" was retiring.
> I never worked with her in that capacity, but did meet her.
> Alas, she died not too many years ago.
>
> A few years later, my wife got a summer job for the Air Force as a
> "mathematician." Her BS in math apparently qualified her for this
> job, which had much in common with the living computers. It consisted
> of staring into a film reader, lining crosshairs on the nose of an
> aircraft image, and punching a button to record the position (on a
> punched card, of course).
>
> Perhaps not too related to Fortran, but us "older" folk do like
> to reminisce.
>
> --
> Richard Maine
> ma...@altair.dfrc.nasa.gov
As a young physicist at the National Bureau of Standards in 1950 I wrote
"programs" for a room full of "computers" (people) who followed the
instructions with desk calculators. We did this on "analysis paper"
which looked like a spread sheet and gave values in the left column and
formulas in the top row.

The problem with this type of computer was errors. People refused to
perform the same calculation twice to check for errors so we physicists
and engineers always had to devise two ways of calculating the same
result and submitting both jobs as an accuracy check.

It was a great relief when, in 1958, we rented (for $60,000 per month!)
an IBM 650 machine to do our computing.
--
Robert S. Lawrence
204 Gold Run Road, Boulder, Colorado 80302-9710
303 442-7534
303 444-7719 (fax)
Permanent e-mail address: lawr...@alumni.cs.colorado.edu

Jeff Templon

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Dec 11, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/11/98
to

As a physicist, I feel compelled to point out that the current
nuclear arsenal was not invented by physicists. The design of
the first few weapons was worked out by physicists, in cooperation
with the military, under the (perceived) threat that the other guys
were working on it too. You sure don't want the other guys to have
it first, especially if they are already shooting at you.

The physicists were relieved when the war was over, naively having
assumed that that was the end of it. Nope. Thanks for designing
it, now we're going to build a lot of them, said the military.

This is somewhat of an exaggeration, since not all physicists
were opposed to building lots of them, but it captures the essence.
So I think it's more fair to characterize this as "not the military
establishment's finest moment". They are responsible for the
current astonishing numbers that James points out, and he probably
correctly assesses the (low) probability that a "limited" exchange
could ever take place.

On another point, I would agree with several others that the
probability of dangerous asteroid strike is minimal. Probably happens
with an average period of tens of thousands of years, given our
evidence. Stuff like the Tunguska impact is probably more frequent,
but not civilization-threatening (unless it landed between e.g.
Boston and New York City, though some might argue this would save
civilization.)

JT

Toon Moene

unread,
Dec 11, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/11/98
to
"Robert S. Lawrence" <rsla...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> The problem with this type of computer was errors. People refused to
> perform the same calculation twice to check for errors so we physicists
> and engineers always had to devise two ways of calculating the same
> result and submitting both jobs as an accuracy check.

That's a good one ! Reminds me how my father used to work (when he still had
to - over ten years ago): He never trusted spreadsheet programs and always
built in cross-checks, just as he did with his paper spreadsheets :-)

H.W. Stockman

unread,
Dec 12, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/12/98
to
Jeff Templon wrote:
>
> As a physicist, I feel compelled to point out that the current
> nuclear arsenal was not invented by physicists. The design of
> the first few weapons was worked out by physicists, in cooperation
> with the military, under the (perceived) threat that the other guys
> were working on it too. You sure don't want the other guys to have
> it first, especially if they are already shooting at you.
>
> The physicists were relieved when the war was over, naively having
> assumed that that was the end of it. Nope. Thanks for designing
> it, now we're going to build a lot of them, said the military.

As someone who worked at one of those places where
big boomy-things were designed, I can attest there
sure were lots of people with PhD's in physics who
assisted in the design of the big boomy-things.

Craig Burley

unread,
Dec 13, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/13/98
to
John Appleyard <Ne...@polyhedron.com> writes:

> In article <y6u2z5i...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com>, Craig Burley
> <bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com> writes
> >

> >Still, it is my guess that, in terms of fast-acting destruction,
> >civilization is threatened less by nuclear annihilation than by:
>

> > - Large-asteroid impact


>
> Too many movies! Shouldn't alien abduction of Y2K programmers (Fortran)
> be in there somewhere?

My guess has nothing to do with *any* movies. As I've said, I lived
through some of the Cold War, including the hysterical unilateral-
disarmament-type discussions, which included having coworkers tell
me that a vote for Reagan for President was a vote for greatly
increasing the odds of WW3.

Having learned a bit about the history of US/Soviet relations during
that period, it turns out we *did* come pretty close to WW3, and
Reagan wasn't entirely blameless in that. (But not because of his
"warlike nature" or however it was put back then. After all, he
deployed American troops less often in his eight years than Clinton
has in his six, I believe.)

But, I think thanks to Reagan and many others, we're now much further
away from those kinds of risks than we'd been for 30 or so years.
I believe we'd be running a much higher risk of global annihilation
due to nuclear exchange if we'd undertaken a unilateral-disarmament
plan, mainly because the plan would not have been successfully
implemented, and the US government would have been overthrown,
due to having attempted to force it on a public unwilling to render
itself defenseless against the Soviet Union. (I wish gun-control
advocates would remember this: the problem isn't just what happens
when nobody has guns anymore, it's how you get to that mythical
reality -- it's what happens when you send two BATF agents to the
home of a nominally upright, law-and-order American and have them
order that American to turn over his weapons, repeated about 20
million times across this entire nation over a period of years.
*That's* what poses the real risks to our government, putting
aside the question of what risks any government poses to a disarmed
populace.)

I just don't see the risk of global annihilation due to nuclear
weaponry being all that high *now*, or in the near future. For
one thing, we're much more interdependent, on a global scale, than
we were during the highly risky Cold War. Wheat transfers aside,
the Soviet Union didn't really need, or want, the USA, and vice
versa. Now the USA is annoyed because some of its trading partners
trade with Cuba, meanwhile the USA happily trades with Russia,
various countries whine about various other countries trading
with Iran, or Iraq, or what-not...but all the trading basically
continues happily along.

When I guess about what would happen if a Hussein started a limited
nuclear assault (against, say, Israel), or a USA used tactical
nukes in a military conflict, I just don't see *any* feasibility
for a nuclear superpower (China, Russia, or the USA) deciding to
do an all-out launch. Against whom do they launch the entire
arsenal, or a sufficiently substantial portion thereof -- Iraq,
for example? Talk about overkill. *Iraq's* target certainly won't
be large enough to require a lot of nukes anyway, as just one example.

What does such a large launch serve to accomplish, anyway?

Even if that one large-scale response by a superpower takes place,
what *other* superpower is going to be stupid enough to say "hey,
let's join in on the mutual assured destruction" by taking on that
first superpower? It just doesn't make sense. Nukes, except for
the Soviet Union's during the Cold War (and I *hope* this has been
changed), don't launch themselves. They're not like hundreds of
mousetraps containing ping-pong balls littering a living-room floor,
where one touch sets them all off. As "big" as nukes have gotten,
the really big ones are, AFAIK, possessed only by the superpowers,
at least in any numbers, and any one of those is still pretty small
on a planetary scale (though maybe the multiple-warhead missiles
aren't so -- I've lost track).

The area I'm most worried about, offhand, is Russia, due to the
political instability there at the moment. In the future, that
kind of worry can, and probably will, apply to North Korea, China,
the USA, and so on, but probably not all at once and, these days,
instability seems composed much more of popular discontent (rather
than two or more groups vying for control of an ignorant populace)
than it used to be, and getting the populace on your side is unlikely
to be seen as best accomplished by launching a few nukes, even at
an enemy, anytime soon.

In essence, I think that, while we are still collectively grappling
with new global responsibilities and ongoing challenges, we've
gone through the riskiest part of coping with the nuclear threat,
and entered another, less-risky, phase. A growing percentage of
the planet's population is aware of the issues, the history, and
the risks, and it's the populations, ultimately, that decide whether
we'll wipe our own civilization out, through stupidity or accident,
via nuclear weaponry. (That's why I prefer government via, rather
than over, the population being governed.)

A civilization-destroying asteroid seems like a pretty low probability
as well. Whatever hit 65M years ago might not even be enough to
completely destroy the human race, but I think it's fair to consider it
to be capable of wiping out *civilization*.

I don't know that there's any scientific proof that these collisions
happen, at this point in the solar system's history, on any kind of
schedule, but 65M years is a *long* time.

Unlike earthquakes, though, probabilities of this sort of thing don't
really "build up". Asteroid collisions are thus more like a hurricane
making landfall in a particular area, as far as I know, in terms
of probability -- whether it happens *this* year is basically not
related, in terms of probability, to whether it happened *last* year,
or in any of the previous ten years.

(Of course, once we've identified the orbit of a *particular* asteroid,
then we've pretty much fixed the probabilities of it colliding with
earth at any given time and place.)

So I don't think "we're due" is the proper phrase for an asteroid
collision, but I know astronomers (not "astronomists", thanks for
correcting me, Sergio ;-), or whatever they call themselves these
days, sometimes talk that way, just as weathercasters sometimes
talk about hurricanes or snowstorms that way, even though, AFAIK,
there's no mechanism within hurricanes or snowstorms that makes
them prefer areas that haven't been recently hit.

Regardless, for the next 10, 20, 50, maybe even 100 years, there'll be
*nothing* we can practically do to avoid a civilization-destroying
asteroid collision. During that time, there'll be *plenty* we can do
to avoid a civilization-destroying nuclear exchange. Which is why
I put the risks of something actually *destroying* civilization the
way I did: we can, and will continually try to, actively *prevent*
a civilization-destroying nuclear exchange, just as we've done for
decades already.

And *that* is why I don't see a single use of a nuke, or even nuclear
testing and the emergence of new nuclear powers (such as India and
Pakistan), as necessarily civilization-destroying events. I do see
them as events to be strongly cautioned against, and thoughtfully
planned for and around, however. Billing them as "civilization-
destroying", in all honesty, serves only to make the use of nukes
an all-or-nothing gambit, and that's a risk I don't think any of us
should take, given the likelihood of a limited nuclear use, even
exchange, sometimes during the next century. We might as well face
the possibilities, and the fact that, after such an event, civilization
won't have ended *if* we've got the courage to cope with it, in
whatever manner is most appropriate. Throwing up our hands and
saying "well, so much for civilization" is not likely to help
preserve civilization, and is, fortunately, neither necessary nor
appropriate.

(Remember: nuclear testing was one of *the* most evil things happening
in the world during the Reagan years, according to many who bent
my ear -- many who have remained quiet during the Clinton years,
which saw India and Pakistan emerge as nuclear powers doing their
own testing. We can live, and have lived, with nuclear testing, so,
as dangerous as it seems, it doesn't destroy civilization, at least
not immediately. I've learned to take claims about various technologies
destroying civilization far less seriously, usually by giving the
claims more actual, objective *thought*.)

And I'm not entirely convinced that nuclear-weapons technology *can't*
be a crucial element in defending against a large-asteroid impact,
even though I find it hard to imagine how it could be. I don't go
for the self-serving, aren't-we-glad-we-invented-nukes attitude
that assumes we'll blast any asteroid into smithereens, but I wouldn't
want to assume that we can cope with any large asteroid just as well
without an ongoing understanding and development of nuclear weaponry
in general. After all, all of the pro-environment, anti-war, anti-
poverty, pro-business attitudes mean pretty much squat if we can't
repel the first large asteroid that comes along and threatens to
wipe out most or all life on the planet.

As far as Y2K fears: some might be realized, but there's just no way
even the worst possible scenario will destroy civilization. I can
say this for two reasons: one, if I'm wrong, nobody will be around
to notice; two, well, who cares what the second reason is? :)

My biggest hope about Y2K is that it quickly educates a substantial
portion of the technology-buying public as to the importance of
open standards, protocols, and source code...perhaps even a shift
away from programming in C++ with some of that shift going towards
programming in Fortran 95 (or F or Elf or whatever), among other
languages more suitable than C++ for various application domains.

So maybe I should have added "widespread C++ programming" to my list
of things more likely to destroy civilization than nuclear weaponry. :)

john

unread,
Dec 13, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/13/98
to
>>On 13 Dec 1998 04:04:23 -0500, Craig Burley <bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com> wrote:

>two tons of nuclear stuff deleted

Craig:

Can you take this nuclear destruction stuff elsewhere and leave this
thread of "Oldest Programmer? alone?

John

Matt Kennel

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Dec 13, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/13/98
to
On 10 Dec 1998 10:07:47 -0500, Craig Burley wrote:
:
:A single civilization-destroying weapon *is* possible

:to build, so that's an important distinction. For example, just
:one scientist who figures out how to knock a planet-killer asteroid
:off its orbit so it plummets into earth, plus one insane person with
:the resources to do it with whom the scientist shares his discovery,
:is all that is needed to destroy civilization.

It's an interesting calculation to figure out how much explosive power
is needed to knock a 10 km asteroid, especially an iron one,
significantly off course (presumably for good, and not for ill). As I
remember from the sci.physics discussoin, even the largest of existing
weapons designs wouldn't even come close to doing the job if the
asteroid were within a few years of impact. (you would need a
sustained program of many bombs ablating the asteroid just right). A 1
km rock is much easier.

:Exactly. I do think that the detonation of thousands of nuclear


:weapons is less likely a scenario than the presumably much-smaller
:release of biological weapons necessary to wipe out civilization,
:as I already said.

The difference is delivery systems (you can't quarantine a ballistic
warhead, Star Wars fantasies notwithstanding) and that sufficiently
virulent weapons oriented biogerms are evolutionarily poor.

:That being said, I certainly agree with your earlier comment that


:inventing nuclear technology was not one of physics' finest moments.

I'd put the blame on the fusion weapons. Many of those who supported
the initial development of the bomb (and in '42 the situation was very
frightening) opposed the fusion bomb. Many hoped that it would have
been physically impossible and it looked that way for quite a while.

:That's probably as far as this discussion should have ever gone.

So to get back to the topic at hand:

Do we blame Fortran for igniting the Cold War? Or for winning it?


:--

:
:"Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful."
:James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson bur...@gnu.org


--
* Matthew B. Kennel/Institute for Nonlinear Science, UCSD
*
* "do || !do; try: Command not found"
* /sbin/yoda --help

Serguei Patchkovskii

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Dec 13, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/13/98
to
Craig Burley (bur...@tweedledumb.cygnus.com) wrote:
: on a planetary scale (though maybe the multiple-warhead missiles

: aren't so -- I've lost track).

No surprize you did - multiple-warhead ICBMs have been prohibited
by one of the arms-control treaties between US and USSR (may it
rest in peace), which seems to be adhered to by both US and Russia.

: I don't know that there's any scientific proof that these collisions


: happen, at this point in the solar system's history, on any kind of
: schedule, but 65M years is a *long* time.

One of the issues of "Science" this spring has printed a fairly
serious discussion asserting that a life-time risk of being killed
by an asteroid impact is comparable to a life-time risk of death
due to motor vehicle incident (by virtue of an average asteroid
impact wiping out a *lot* more people than an average car pileup
- even though the last is much more likely to happen).

/Serge.P

Paul De Groot

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Dec 16, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/16/98
to
As the originator of this thread (and at high risk of sending it on yet another
tangent), I'm intrigued by the following:

I started a similar "oldest programmer" thread in the comp.lang.cobol group, and that
eventually evolved into a discussion of the best weapons to arm your family with come
December, 1999.

The Fortran group got engaged in a discussion of nuclear explosions, with political and
technical themes.

What does this say about programmers in general? Is there something about things that go
"bang"? Maybe it's just a male thing. (And, of course, anyone can talk in a newsgroup,
so there's a strong possibility that it doesn't say anything at all about programmers in
general).

What does this say (if anything) about the difference between Cobol and Fortran
programmers? From what I know of the two languages, I would guess that most Cobol
programmers haven't been involved in nuclear physics, while it would appear that at
least a few Fortran programmers have been so involved. Any other insights? It's
completely irrelevant to my story, but I'm curious, just the same.

And while I'm at it, does anyone know of a programmer I can interview who has been
pulled out of retirement to work on Y2K stuff?
Thanks
Paul De Groot

Charles Neil

unread,
Dec 16, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/16/98
to
In article <3677CE35...@edmc.net>, pdeg...@edmc.net says...

> As the originator of this thread (and at high risk of sending it on yet another
> tangent), I'm intrigued by the following:
>
> I started a similar "oldest programmer" thread in the comp.lang.cobol group, and that
> eventually evolved into a discussion of the best weapons to arm your family with come
> December, 1999.
>
> The Fortran group got engaged in a discussion of nuclear explosions, with political and
> technical themes.
>
> What does this say about programmers in general? Is there something about things that go
> "bang"? Maybe it's just a male thing. (And, of course, anyone can talk in a newsgroup,
> so there's a strong possibility that it doesn't say anything at all about programmers in
> general).
>
> What does this say (if anything) about the difference between Cobol and Fortran
> programmers?

COBOL programmers are wimps.

James F Cornwall

unread,
Dec 16, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/16/98
to
Paul De Groot (pdeg...@edmc.net) wrote:
: As the originator of this thread (and at high risk of sending it on yet another

: tangent), I'm intrigued by the following:

: I started a similar "oldest programmer" thread in the comp.lang.cobol group, and that
: eventually evolved into a discussion of the best weapons to arm your family with come
: December, 1999.

: The Fortran group got engaged in a discussion of nuclear explosions, with political and
: technical themes.

: What does this say about programmers in general? Is there something about things that go
: "bang"? Maybe it's just a male thing. (And, of course, anyone can talk in a newsgroup,
: so there's a strong possibility that it doesn't say anything at all about programmers in
: general).

: What does this say (if anything) about the difference between Cobol and Fortran

: programmers? From what I know of the two languages, I would guess that most Cobol


: programmers haven't been involved in nuclear physics, while it would appear that at
: least a few Fortran programmers have been so involved. Any other insights? It's
: completely irrelevant to my story, but I'm curious, just the same.

Well, I spent my Air Force programming career working on weather prediction
and nuclear war *plannning* - does that count? <G>

Jim Cornwall
(now a lowly hydrogeology grad student still using Fortran :-) )

: And while I'm at it, does anyone know of a programmer I can interview who has been

spa...@my-dejanews.com

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Dec 16, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/16/98
to

> COBOL programmers are wimps.

Yeah...they should nuke all COBOL programmers.

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own

H.W. Stockman

unread,
Dec 16, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/16/98
to
Paul De Groot wrote:
>
> As the originator of this thread (and at high risk of sending it on yet another
> tangent), I'm intrigued by the following:
>
> I started a similar "oldest programmer" thread in the comp.lang.cobol group, and that
> eventually evolved into a discussion of the best weapons to arm your family with come
> December, 1999.
>
> The Fortran group got engaged in a discussion of nuclear explosions, with political and
> technical themes.

But it took a while to get there, and all it takes is one volatile
comment
to get a bizarre tangent going.



> What does this say about programmers in general? Is there something about things that go
> "bang"? Maybe it's just a male thing. (And, of course, anyone can talk in a newsgroup,
> so there's a strong possibility that it doesn't say anything at all about programmers in
> general).

There was a time when DoD was one of a very few agencies that
could afford large computers, and there was a time when a lot
of the best programming jobs were in defense. If you look
for old programmers, you will undoubtedly come across many
old defense programmers.

But I'll bet a large fraction of random threads, planted
randomly in newsgroups ranging from sci.geo.hydrology
to alt.fan.christy.yamaguchi, will eventually evolve into
politically volatile discussions. Often, all it takes is
a joke gone awry.

Jeff Templon

unread,
Dec 17, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/17/98
to

on the question of "why did nuclear weapons get into the discussion?"

o the thread got started by a random comment from someone. no
accounting for random comments
o the thread continued since there are a lot of physical scientists
on this N/G who tend to know a lot about weapons/policy
and who tend to have strong opinons
o for many of the first years of computing, nuclear physicists
drove development in computing. the AEC used to routinely
have the best computers in the world. If I am not mistaken,
Monte Carlo simulation techniques were pioneered at Los
Alamos (a weapons lab in those days). Back then, Fortran
was king. So you might have a sizeable contingent still
lurking here.

JT

Toon Moene

unread,
Dec 17, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/17/98
to
Paul De Groot wrote:

> The Fortran group got engaged in a discussion of nuclear explosions, with political and
> technical themes.

I fully take the blame for that; I started this off with the "we
physicists have better things to do than the destruction of life as we
know it", which, I thought, was a hardly oblique reference to "Real
Programmers don't write Pascal". Unfortunately, some of our readers
found it necessary, based on this comment, to defend RayGuns' Star Wars
initiative (Craig - if you really want to lose my sympathy, try to
couple any real-world peace initiative to the GOP; I lived through most
of the Cold War too, and it has ben 20 years of fear that Western Europe
would be turned into a nuclear wasteland for the sake of Mutually
Assured Destruction).

> What does this say about programmers in general? Is there something about things that go
> "bang"? Maybe it's just a male thing. (And, of course, anyone can talk in a newsgroup,
> so there's a strong possibility that it doesn't say anything at all about programmers in
> general).

I am not a programmer, I am a physicist. BTW, Paul de Groot was a well
known Amsterdam communist during the Cold War.

Cheers,

--
Toon Moene (to...@moene.indiv.nluug.nl)


Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
Phone: +31 346 214290; Fax: +31 346 214286

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