Category Archives: Technology

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Can you hear me now? No? If that’s a 5G phone, come closer.

All television ads annoy me, some infuriate me, but the one they started airing a couple weeks ago induced hyperventilation. It was T-Mobile, announcing their inauguration of the country’s first and only 5G cellphone network. In took this personally because I have said repeatedly here that this was never gonna happen. Was I (gasp) wrong? Or are they lying? You want three guesses?

As it has been hyped for lo, these many months, 5G (or fifth generation, aka the Next Big Thing) cell phones use extremely high frequency radio waves, called “millimeter waves” that permit data to be transferred at extremely high rates of speed. There is no evidence at all that the downtrodden masses are crying out for more smartphone bandwidth with which to watch kitten on Facebook, but the marketers are convinced they can make us want it, and spend heavily to get it.

The marketers are desperate. Global sales of smartphones have been declining for a year and a half (there was a slight upward tick in Q4 2019) despite blandishments including three (count ‘em three!!) cameras per phone, foldable screens (that break almost immediately) and bigger batteries. No? Okay, how about 5G? Continue reading →

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The Boeing 737 MAX, it turns out, is not the only thing the company has been dpong wrong. Not by a long shot.

If they gave out Academy Awards for Most Spectacular Industrial Crash of the Year, this year’s hands-down winner would be Boeing, Boeing. It’s not just that their code writers did a nifty update of the software in the 737 Max airliner that caused it to dive unpredictably, killing 346 people in two crashes, and grounding the entire fleet for a year or more. It’s not just that a new version of the 737 has started to show cracks in the attachments of wings to fuselage, causing 50 of them to be grounded for repairs. No, there’s more. Much more. 

Boeing, Boeing, it turns out, has for six years been conducting one of the biggest experiments ever in automated manufacturing, spending untold millions of dollars on robots designed to assemble the fuselages of the 777. The machinery was designed to position the large curved panels that make up the cylindrical fuselage while other machines automatically drilled holes, inserted rivets and fastened them. It would do the work of hundreds of human mechanics, and do it better and faster.  Continue reading →

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Gene editing is easy. All you gotta do is make the right presumptions.

Next to money, America worships technology most intensely. Most of us believe that no matter what problem arises — climate change, water shortage, soil exhaustion, oil depletion, whatever — technology will solve it (and somebody will make a ton of money). The belief is shored up by a constant stream of ads and stories in the industrial media about the wonders in store for us just as soon as Technology gets around to its next miracle.

This faith is not without basis in our history. I can remember many times Technology intervened in my life in a thrilling way: when we first got electricity in our remote farmhouse (you can flood a room with brilliant light just by flicking a switch!); when we got running water upstairs (no more treks to the outhouse when it was 20 below zero!); when I saw television for the first time (it was I Love Lucy); when I got my first computer (it stores 50 pages of text on a single floppy disc!); and yes, when I got my first smartphone. Continue reading →

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Mosquitoes are annoying. What is more, they carry, and infect humans with, infectious diseases — dengue, malaria, Zika and the like. Humans would be infinitely better off if all the mosquitoes were wiped out. We’ve agreed on that, and have been trying to accomplish that, for a hundred years or more. Now, at last, high technology has arrived to save us from this evil.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the Garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it. 

A commercial company in Brazil (no doubt awash in grant money and dizzy with prospects for future profits) genetically altered a strain of mosquitoes with a gene they said would kill the mosquito’s offspring immediately after hatching. Released into the wild to breed with the pesky, disease-laden mosquitoes — you know,. the evil ones — the genetically mutilated insects would cause the mosquito population to plummet, and cases of Zika and dengue to virtually disappear. What could possibly go wrong? Continue reading →

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Law enforcement and security forces around the world, as well as operators of airports and commercial buildings, are racing headlong for bragging rights for having deployed facial recognition technology to try to  spot bad guys and confirm IDs in all kinds of situations. From the FBI to ICE to several big-city PDs, agents have been caught trolling through drivers-licence files with software designed to identify illegal immigrants, wanted criminals, and other miscreants. 

It’s another huge and successful con, perpetrated by marketers of cameras and software on an endlessly gullible audience who want desperately to believe that artificial intelligence is not artificial, that machine learning is real learning, that robots can do everything humans can do only better. The inconvenient truth is that facial recognition does not work. Continue reading →

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How about a room-size cell phone? No? Okay, wait, how about….

Cell phone makers and telecom companies are increasingly desperate to keep us in the habit of trashing our phones every year or two in order to be among the first to own the Next Big Thing. That made some sense when cell phones were progressing from flip phones that couldn’t do anything but make a phone call to the web browsers/movie screens/GPS navigators/music players/cameras that they are today.

But there hasn’t been a Next Big Thing for quite a while now, and it’s getting really easy to see them sweat. Recently we’ve been offered three — count ‘em, three — cameras on a single phone. No thanks. For $2,000 you could earlier this year have bought a double wide phone with a screen that folds out to IMAX size: “It’s huge! It folds! It breaks! After just a few folds!” No thanks.

But they have it now. They are sure they have it now, it’s called 5G. The explanation is a little technical, so hold tight: using a combination of ultra-high, ultra-low and ultra-middle radio frequencies, 5G networks will dramatically increase download and upload speeds and reduce latency. Yeah, I don’t know what that means either. Apparently, if you have been cursing your phone for taking more than four seconds to download a two hour, high-definition movie for display on your IMAX-size fold out screen, then 5G is what you want. Continue reading →

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The Boeing 737 Max, the most technologically advanced airliner there is, a.k.a. a thoroughly crapified and deadly airplane, currently grounded.

The Boeing 737 Max is an almost perfect embodiment of all the trends driving the industrial age to destruction: the worship of money to the exclusion of all other values; government of the people, for the industrialists; and a pathetic faith in ever more complex technological solutions for simple problems.

When brand-new 737 Maxes began to fall out of the sky — an Indonesian airliner crashed in October, an Ethiopian ship in April, with a total death toll of 346 souls — the entire fleet of 393 aircraft, each worth over $100 million, was and remains grounded. The search for a cause of the crashes immediately focussed on a software upgrade. You know, like the Windows 10 updates that come unbidden in the middle of the night and obliterate all your computer files, or the sudden improvements that turn your useful cell phone into a maddening, contrary, spastic piece of junk (or is that just my experience?).   Continue reading →

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As long as there have been Popular Mechanics Magazines there have been predictions of personal carplanes. Ain’t gonna happen.

Forests have been sacrificed for their paper and Arabian kingdoms deflated for their oil to provide scribes and pundits with the materials and energy necessary to propagate predictions. This is wrong on many levels, but to name two: news was better when it consisted of reporting what happened, rather than spinning predictions of what might happen; and secondly, nobody ever predicts what’s not going to happen. Fake news not only fails to tell us what is happening, it never tells us what is not going to happen. Let us begin to correct that situation here and now.

Five Things That Ain’t Never Gonna Happen:
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“Yeah, she’s got a little age on her, but we have to keep using her until they can debug the software on the new-generation tanks.” (Photo by Andy/Flickr

You know those movies in which the villain at some point shouts, “I’m going to rule the world?” He never adds, even under his breath, “if I can get this damn tank started,” or “providing this fershlugginer gun will shoot for a change.” But for anyone setting out to take over the real world today, such qualifications — and many many more — are embarrassingly necessary.

The relentless enrichment of the “defense” industries at the expense of everybody else continues apace in all those countries run by people who want to take over the world — on other words, countries that are run by the defense industries. Expense is no object, it seems, when you’re after the biggest bomb, fastest fighter, or most menacing ship. The results are increasingly hilarious: Continue reading →