I decided to ride Amtrak back home after visiting my folks, because I dislike the indignity of traveling by air in the United States. I’ve had more than my fair share of “random bag checks,” and I disagree with the security theater at TSA checkpoints that does more to insult than protect.
While a train obviously takes longer than an airplane flight, it provides the individual with a dignified travel experience. You walk from the station to the tracks, board your train, and off you go.
I opted for a roomette aboard Amtrak’s Silver Meteor so that I could sleep more easily on the overnight train ride. The scheduled trip time was about 14 hours, but the actual trip time was closer to 17. For one-way travel, the cost was only a little more than a plane ticket.
Overall, I enjoyed the experience. Perhaps because the experience was new, I had trouble staying asleep. When I ride again, I might take a sleep aid like Melatonin to help with my sleep. Also, as others have remarked online, there were delays. My train’s delays meant that I missed the dinner service, and since the train was designated only with dinner and breakfast service, there was no lunch service despite arriving 3 hours late in NYC the next day. Thankfully, I had learned from other train travelers and came prepared with extra water and snacks to tide me over. However, I might pack an MRE for a meal next time to have something more substantial to eat if needed.
Below are some photos of my trip aboard the Silver Meteor and my roomette. I tried to capture the roomette’s features and amenities as well as demonstrate how much/little leg room there is if you are traveling with another person. Also, this train has a toilet in the roomette–something you would need to negotiate its use if traveling with someone else. Finally, I have some photos of the dining car and the early morning breakfast that I enjoyed (as the dining options are limited, the earlier you go to a meal, the more likely the option you want will still be available).
The Museum of Aviation is HUGE! There are four buildings (some with multiple floors) full of planes, drones, helicopters, support vehicles, equipment, and exhibits. There is a VR experience and other interactive exhibits. The four buildings are surrounded by additional aircraft that you can walk around (I walked 1.6 miles while I was there). Admission is free (but donations are accepted).
The museum is staffed by experienced volunteers/retired servicemen who are friendly and glad to talk and answer questions. They are also doing restoration work in the exhibit areas.
I was chuffed by the whole experience!
If you are an aircraft enthusiast, you owe it to yourself to visit here.
Below, I’m posting some of the hundreds of photos that I took there.
McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle on Pedestal Outside
McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle Wheels Down and Service Compartments Open In Main Building
McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle Cockpit
Pratt & Whitney F-15 Engine
General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon (Thunderbirds)
Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk
Lockheed C-130 Hercules and Its Weapons and Equipment
Rockwell B-1 Lancer
Boeing B-52 Stratofortress
Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II
McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II
Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird
Lockheed U-2
Republic F-105 Thunderchief
Convair F-102 Delta Dagger and Convair F-106 Delta Dart
McDonnell F-101 Voodoo
McDonnell RF-101
North American F-100 Super Sabre
Republic F-84 Thunderjet
North American F-86 Sabre
Sikorsky MH-53M Pave Low IV
Sikorsky HH-3E Jolly Green Giant
Curtiss P-40 Warhawk
North American P-51 Mustang
Boeing B-29 Superfortress
Curtiss JN Jenny with Snoopy (Maybe his Sopwith Camel was being serviced!)
Long before AT&T was having massive data breaches, they were burying cables and putting up these signs in the back country to warn would-be diggers from slicing through buried copper or fiber optic cables.
As I wrote about yesterday, my Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 maintains lower temperatures when it has improved air flow under its body where the twin cooling fan intakes are. Without raising the laptop, the laptop’s support feet only give it about 3 mm of space underneath it, which chokes the intake fans. Since getting the laptop late last year, I’ve used a variety of at-hand objects–books and small boxes most often–to prop up the back of the laptop when I was stressing the laptop with a heavy workload.
I wanted a permanent solution, but the portable options available in retail are either bulky adjustable metal or plastic platforms or folding 4-point stands. The former takes up a lot of room and those with fans don’t always translate to lower temps, and the latter might not provide the support needed on the ThinkPad P1’s lengthy support foot at the rear of the laptop. So, I turned to LEGO to create a customized stand that gives the ThinkPad the support it needs while also being compact and easily carried in my backpack.
What I made to solve this problem mostly used LEGO Technic elements with some brick elements (plates to provide support underneath its joints and the bright yellow smooth plates on top to orient the stand and provide a stop against the ThinkPad’s support foot).
The ThinkPad’s support foot fits perfectly in the center of the stand without the studs toward the front or the flat plate in the back touching the laptop’s body.
Essentially, the stand is built like a sandwich: the bread is the Technic bricks with holes on either side, and the filling is the Technic liftarms (straight and L-shaped). I used 3-stud wide pins to hold the sandwich together. The red pins are only used to provide stability to the support legs when they are deployed for use.
On the back of the stand, the red pegs can be partially pulled out and the feet folded.
The LEGO stand completely covers the support foot at the rear of the laptop (seen at the top of the photo above). When folded, it easily slips into the backpack that I use to carry this ThinkPad.
LEGO is a versatile, rapid prototyping medium for building art, expressing ideas, and in this case, creating something practical to solve a specific problem.
If you have some LEGO bricks laying around idle, you might stop and think about what problem they might be able to solve for you!
Jef Raskin, who wrote the user manual for the Apple II and founded the team that would go on to launch the Macintosh computer among other accomplishments, was an important figure in the first phase of the personal computer industry. Toward the end of his interview in Lammers’ book, she asks him about AI:
INTERVIEWER: What do you feel artificial-intelligence programs can contribute to society?
RASKIN: Artificial intelligence teaches us a lot about ourselves and about knowledge. Any reasonable artificial-intelligence program will not fit on a very inexpensive machine, at least not these days.
Real artificial intelligence is something like religion. People used to say that just above the sky were heaven and angels. Then you get a rocket ship out there, and now you know that’s not true. So they change their tune. As soon as you accomplish something, it is no longer artificial intelligence.
At one point, it was thought that chess-playing programs encompassed artificial intelligence. When I was a graduate student, you could get a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence by learning to program chess. Now you can buy a chess player for $29.95 and nobody calls it artificial intelligence. It’s just a little algorithm that plays chess.
First, there’s a problem of definition. Then it gets more complicated. People say that programs should understand natural language, but our utterances are too inexact for a computer, or anybody, to figure out what is meant to be done; that’s why we have programming languages. If anyone’s ever worked from a spec prepared in English, they know that you can’t write a program from it because it’s not exact. So if human beings can’t do it, there is almost no way we can expect to make a machine do that kind of thing. When you’re dealing with so-called artificial-intelligence programs, the computers have got to learn a vocabulary. Let’s say you have five commands and you want the machine to understand any possible English equivalent to them. But it won’t understand any English equivalent: One person might say, “Get employee number,” while an Englishman might say, “Would you be so kind as to locate the numerical designation for our employee.’ That’s exactly the complaint AI people are trying to solve.
A lot of the promise of artificial intelligence is misunderstood. What artificial intelligence has already taught us about the nature of languages is wonderful. So, do I think artificial intelligence is worthwhile? Absolutely. Do I think it’s going to turn out great products? A few. Do I think it’s going to fulfill the promise that you read about in the popular press? Not at all. Will I be putting a lot of money into artificial intelligence? Nope (qtd. in Lammers 243-244).
Lammers, Susan. “Jef Raskin.” Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry. Microsoft Press, 1989, pp. 227-245.
What he said has some resonance today. There seems to be the same kind of effect in computers that we see in other fields. For lack of a better phrase, it’s the “so, what have you done lately?” question. Once one hurdle is accomplished, its importance or significance gets erased by the passage of time and people’s attention. Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess? Great, what’s next? AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go? Okay, what’s next? ChatGPT can do your homework? Super, what’s next? With each milestone, the preceding success seems diminished and becomes the $29.95 chess player that Raskin refers to above.
However, as AI’s capabilities increase, it seems to be edging further toward ubiquity. It’s already ever present in many aspects of our lives, such as business, finance, advertising, and photography, that we are not necessarily cognizant of or paying attention to. Now, it’s creeping into computer and smartphone operating systems (similar to Don Crabb’s observations that I wrote about yesterday) and some of the software that we use for daily productivity (email, word processing, and integrated development environments for programming). Perhaps its the eventual ubiquity of AI that will make it feel mundane instead of a radical technological development as imagined in the heady cyberpunk era represented most clearly by William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).
But, there’s something else that Raskin talks about in his interview that has some relevance to AI. After he left Apple when Steve Jobs took over the Macintosh project, he founded Information Appliance, Inc. to build and market an add-on card for the Apple IIe called the SwyftCard. This card contained a ROM for an all-in-one piece of software that contained word processing, communication, calculation, printing, and programming capabilities. He explains:
Watch this. There is no disk in the drive, and I want to type a message, “Remember to bring home some milk.” How do you like that? I turn it on and start typing. No need for commands, no insert, no getting to the editor, I can just start typing.
Now I want to print the message and put it in my pocket, so I can use it later. I press a single key, and it prints. Isn’t that convenient . . . .
We can do calculations easily. Before, whenever I was using the word processor and wanted to do a calculation, I’d get out my pocket calculator and have to use a separate calculating program, or get up SideKick; on the Mac, you call up the calculator and paste it into your document. We also have telecommunications capability.
INTERVIEWER: All in the same program?
RASKIN: Sure. There is no difference between all the applications. What’s a word processor? You use it to generate text, move it around, change it if you make a mistake, and find things. What’s a telecommunications package? You use it to generate text, or receive text generated by someone else. Instead of it coming in from a keyboard or out from a printer, it comes in or out over a telephone line. And what’s a calculator? You use it to generate numbers, which are just text, and the answer should come back into your text. So, one day it dawned on me, if these applications do the same thing, why not have one little program that does them all?
INTERVIEWER: Well, what is this product you’ve developed to cover all of these features?
{Raskin holds up a simple card.]
RASKIN: It’s called a SwyftCard (qtd. in Lammers 233).
Lammers, Susan. “Jef Raskin.” Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry. Microsoft Press, 1989, pp. 227-245.
It seems to me that we’re heading toward a great collapsing of software into generative AI. As large language models learn more with increasing amounts of training data, they reveal new capabilities that emerge from the resulting trained models. Will we type and eventually talk to our computers to tell it what we want to accomplish without having to worry about having x, y, or z programs installed because the AI can do those things in an all-in-one fashion as the Nth degree of Raskin’s SwyftCard? Time, of course, will tell.
Dynamic Subspace 