Need a giant lot of used Parallax boards?
Jeff Haas
Posts: 421
57 assorted pieces, several Propeller boards but Basic Stamp and other stuff as well...with free shipping!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/57-PIECE-LOT-PARALLAX-DEVELOPER-EVALUATION-BOARDS-PROPELLER-ACTIVITY-QUICKSTART-/381569692855?hash=item58d75374b7:g:5LgAAOSwZQxW5vUz
http://www.ebay.com/itm/57-PIECE-LOT-PARALLAX-DEVELOPER-EVALUATION-BOARDS-PROPELLER-ACTIVITY-QUICKSTART-/381569692855?hash=item58d75374b7:g:5LgAAOSwZQxW5vUz
Comments
Ha! The first thing I thought of after seeing all those boards -- imagining them paralleled together under some mountain in Colorado -- and then your post, was the now infamous line: "In time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love."
Parallax stills sells a speech synthesizer, doesn't it?
Exactly. I always think of when when I see Roger's avatar.
And considering the power of computers in the late 1960's when D.F. Jones wrote it, a pile of Basic Stamps and Propellers like that in the OP probably would be able to cheat Colossus at poker and talk it into sharing the launch codes.
Anyway Forbin is a movie that stands on a lot more than its (very good) ideas; Eric Braeden (my avatar!) really puts across Forbin's bewilderment and anger as his life's work spins out of control into something he doesn't recognize. All of the human characters have rich interrelationships, particularly female uber-nerd Cleo and Forbin. (Cleo, played wonderfully by Susan Clark, is based more than a little on real life Admiral Grace Hopper.) It's hilarious to see the "video terminals" which are clearly projectors and "video conferencing terminals" made from Vidicon style CRT tubes sticking up out of wired desks. This was all super high tech in 1970, and it's one of the last movies made when computers were still too expensive and mysterious for a movie studio to arrange for a real one to use as a prop. Yet, even today, the performances and the smart script full of clever zingers make it worth seeing.
It seems that with the mind set of Newtonian mechanics that held sway for 200 hundred years of so such "perfect prediction" was quite conceivable. In principle at least. The universe was made out of nice simple particles that followed nice simple physical laws. If you could know the masses, charges, positions and velocities of every particle you could calculate the progress of the universe forever into the future, and forever backwards in history. It runs like clockwork right?
That idea got upset with the realization that little particles don't do what you might expect in the Newtonian model. Hence Quantum Mechanics in the 1900's where all of a sudden things happen at random with some statistical distribution. Classical determinism is lost.
It got worse in the 1920's when Heisenberg pointed out we could never measure anything much to an arbitrary precision. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Chaos theory was not really a thing until Edward Lorenz wrote his paper in the early 1970's. A new kid on the block, we had already given up hope of accurately predicting the future many years before.
I'm not sure what use Chaos Theory has come to, as opposed to QM that still continues to make accurate models of elementary particle physics. But it does serve to remind computer users how fallible there machines can be. Especially when they rely on floating point Math
Turing, in an abstract mathematical way, assumed a compute engine with infinite memory and an infinite time to run. For such a machine calculating the square root of 2 or Pi is taken as natural.
An often forgotten element of the film is the notion of 24/7 surveillance, which exists in certain forms today. So aside from all the relay clacking, gompy cameras, and tube-style terminals that make this a fun venture in kitsch, there are still some worrying insights that are amazing prescient.
There are lots of really low budget touches to this film, but I consider them as adding flavor. Starting with the theatrical release poster, I'm guessing they couldn't afford a poster artist like Robert McGinnis (http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Robert-E-McGinnis/dp/1781162174), so instead, they just took frame stills, airbrushed over them to sorta-kinda look like the art was painted, and combined them in a clumsy montage. Still, the poster merely adds to the mod factor, and makes the film all that more enjoyable today.
It would not matter if the Universe were completely deterministic and there was no Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle preventing its perfect measurement; it could well be that even such a system while "predictable" would be the simplest system capable of actually predicting its own future behavior. So unless you have access to a computer the same size as the Universe but running several times faster, the "predictability" of the Universe would be of no practical benefit even if it existed.
The other important thing which chaos theory undid was, of course, the idea that in order for the Universe to look the way it does, with so much interesting detail and activity, it must be the product of conscious design. Many models now exist for creating complex systems from ridiculously simplistic generative algorithms, I expect that in the fullness of time this will turn out to be one of the most important mathematical results of the 20th century.
http://putlocker.is/watch-colossus-the-forbin-project-online-free-putlocker.html
I accidentally hit the PLAY NOW button. After getting buried in advertising I found the embedded play button requires me to register.
On the other hand I accidentally found it here:
I agree, Chaos theory and QM are very different things. The former comes about because of sensitivity to initial conditions, that later is, well just
how nature does things.
My only little point, perhaps badly stated, is that I think determinism was already on the chopping block even in the days of classical mechanics and before Chaos Theory.
For example, whilst we have nice neat analytic solutions for two bodies moving under the influence of their gravitational attraction no such solutions were found for three or more bodies, "the many body problem". Never mind thousands, millions .. bazillions of bodies like in a complex system like the weather.
I just have a feeling that not many physicists would have believed that predicting the future like that was practical.
On the other hand, mathematicians are quite happy to deal with infinities and infinitesimals so perhaps for many it still looked like a simple case of just needing the required precision in measurement and calculation. Weather men for example.
I'm not sure the realization that complexity can arise from very simple systems does anything to undo ideas about "conscious design". The proponents of intelligent design can just move the goal posts, as they often do. For example they could say "Yes, simple systems and rules can give rise to all the complexity we see around us, including ourselves, but the great designer set up those rules knowing full well what the outcome would be".