A stroll through computer history

The best way to visit the Computer History Museum is with someone who worked on early computers. That's what I did last week when my favorite uncle, Jordan Spofford, and my Aunt Bev were in town for a few days.

I enjoyed seeing the Apple computer prototype, but my uncle (at left) got most excited about seeing the Cray computer and a reproduction of the Babbage Engine, the first automatic computing machine. I'd never heard of the Babbage before, but he knew all about it.
















My uncle worked at Western Electric in Massachusetts in the early days of computing. Here's a photo of him testing the wiring in the D2 computer bay at Western Electric. (He said Hughes Aircraft made the test equipment they used back then.)

This pic shows my uncle and me, reflected in the glass covering over the wiring of the Cray computer.

Tags: computers, Cray, Apple, Babbage

Unexpected guest

Alzheimer's came to my door last night, and I let her in.

She was wearing pink flowered pajamas topped by a green V-neck sweater. She was standing at the end of my driveway, after ringing the doorbell at 1:30 a.m. From a distance, her blondish page boy hair reminded me of a friend.

"Pat?" I asked from the doorway.

"No," the woman replied, turning toward me, but remaining at the end of the drive. I walked out to meet her, tugging my bathrobe close against the cold.

She was frail, much shorter than my friend Pat, maybe five-foot-two. She said she'd been driving a friend home and had gotten confused. Her car had run out of gas and she'd been walking for a while around trying to find her way home.

I said we'd figure it out and led her inside. She said her feet were cold. I looked down and saw she was barefoot. I sat her down in the family room and went to get her a pair of socks -- a pair of thick, warm woolen ones. As she slowly tugged them on, I asked if her car was nearby. She didn't know. How about her address? She couldn't tell me. Anyone we could call to help? No answer. Her name? That she could tell me, so I looked her up in the phone book and found she lived just three blocks away.

My husband and I took her out to the car and drove a few blocks, then started looking for her address. She gave no sign of recognition, no "That's my house!" I got out with a flashlight so I could read the house numbers. According to the phone book, this was her house. There was one light on inside. I tried the door. Locked. I rang the bell. No response. A car parked on the street directly in front of the house was also locked.

I went back to the car. She was still sitting quietly in the back seat. What next?

"I think we should take her to the emergency room," my husband said. It was either that or call the police.

The emergency area was quiet. I asked her to take a seat in the waiting area while I talked to the admittance clerk, who had a hard time figuring out our relationship.

"No, I'm not related," I told him. "I think she lives in my neighborhood, but never met her until she rang my doorbell about half an hour ago."

Another young man -- a nurse, a doctor? -- came out and asked her some questions. Did she know what day of the week it was? Could she give him the name of a family member to call? Did she know what year it was? No, no and no.

"How old are you?" the young man asked.

"Umm ... 28?" she responded.

"I don't think so," he said. "I think we need to admit you."

She followed him without protest into the hospital, and my husband and I drove home.

A Grandin suprise

Reading a Philly Inquirer article about Temple Grandin this morning reminded me of my own favorite Temple Grandin story.

Grandin, who is autistic, is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and noted livestock industry consultant. She is also the author of several books on livestock handling, animal welfare and autism, and an autism advocate. I first met Grandin in the mid-'80s, when she was beginning to become known in the livestock industry.

It was the summer of 1987, as I recall, and I working at the Livestock Industry Congress, an annual conference put on by my employer, Livestock Marketing Association. I'd helped develop the conference program and recruited most of the speakers, including Temple Grandin, who was scheduled to speak on livestock handling, and Ellen Haas, then executive director of Public Voice for Food and Health Policy, representing consumer concerns.

It was an ambitious program for its target audience of leaders in the livestock and meat industry, most of whom had little awareness of (or interest in) the budding animal welfare and consumer movements.

The late Orville Sweet, then president of the National Pork Producers Association, opened the program by bringing out two big cartons full of postcards proclaiming bacon and eggs as the "breakfast of cruelty." The postcards, all sent to the NPPA, were part of a campaign against factory farming organized by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). PETA had also helped organize the animal rights protest that was going on outside the conference hall that morning.

Haas and Grandin were up next, with Haas speaking first. She was interrupted almost immediately by an animal rights protester who marched up to the stage, shouting, and took over the microphone. After a couple minutes, someone thought to turn off the microphone, and an security guard asked the protester to leave. She did, and Haas resumed her talk.

Then it was Grandin's turn to speak. Instead of stepping up to the microphone, she strode over to the cartons of postcards, still sitting at the side of the stage, grabbed one and upended it while turning toward the audience. Postcards spewed in an arc across the stage, some showering over the edge to land at the feet of the people in the front row. No one moved. All eyes were on Grandin, astonished, wondering what she'd do next.

What she did was proceed to tell the group, in no uncertain terms, that they needed to clean up their act when it came to livestock handling and production -- or they could expect to see a lot more animal rights protests. I like to think that speech helped launch her career.

Afterewards, some conference attendees told me they thought we'd choreographed the whole thing just to get their attention. I didn't need to choreograph it ... not with Grandin as a speaker.

Now, Grandin's story is headed for a larger stage. HBO is making a movie about her, starring one of my favorite actresses, Claire Danes. I can't wait.

Tags: Temple Grandin, animal welfare, livestock industry, HBO, LMA

Older and wiser? (we hope)

Losing words, forgetting names and numbers...ah, the annoyances of middle age. But it may not signal the onset of memory loss. Instead, it may indicate a change in memory function, and a transition to a wider focus.

As noted in this NYT article on the older brain:

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

Could be good news for someone who's about to turn 55.

A stroke of insight

My mother's brain is being eaten away by Alzheimer's. That's one reason why I found this video of brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor so fascinating. But not the only reason.

Taylor had a massive stroke and lived to tell about it. The experience gave her new insight into how our brains function, and into that place in the brain's right hemisphere that she calls "nirvana."

The video, posted on ted.com, is titled My Stroke of Insight.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a nonprofit foundation that works to spread great ideas.

"There is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea."

What I can't forget...at least not yet

I recognize that vacant look. I've seen it before -- on my mother's face. It's the look of Alzheimer's.

Instead of grading student papers tonight, I'm watching "The Forgetting: A Portrait of Alzheimer's" on PBS...again. I've seen it once before, but that was three or four years ago...before my mother went into an Alzheimer's care facility.

During the program, a man talks about losing his wife to Alzheimer's. What he misses most, he says, are the conversations they used to have. Sometimes now she doesn't even recognize him. It makes me think of my father, who cared as best he could for my mother and kept her at home...until the point when she started leaving home because she didn't like "that strange man" who kept talking about marriage.

In another scene in "The Forgetting," two daughters visit their mother, who is in a nursing home. She is largely unresponsive, doesn't seem to recognize them. They speak to her in cheerful voices, patting her hand, her hair. Been there, done that.

Later in the show, the daughters talk about how long it's been since their mother was diagnosed -- 13 years -- and how they know it could go on like this for another five, 10 or even 20 years. It seems endless, they say. They wonder what they will do if she gets pneumonia -- treat it, or let it run its course? I've had that conversation too.

It is nearly 10 years since I first realized something was wrong with my mother. As the out-of-towner in the family, I was the first to notice the changes. Mom had stopped doing needlepoint, which she'd loved. She'd stopped cooking; said she'd done enough of it. She'd stopped cutting her hair; said she liked it longer.

Later, I found that her last completed needlepoint was dated 1997. My brother looked back through his photos and saw that 1998 was the year she let her hair go.

We've now had a decade of living with Alzheimer's and watching our mother slowly disappear. There's no knowing when it will end...or if it will end with her.

Car dreams

I like cars. In part, it's probably the influence of my sister and brother-in-law, who have amassed a small collection of cars (the ones they drive regularly, plus an MG Midget, a restored Toyata Land Cruiser, and a soon-to-be-restored round-shouldered 1956 truck).

Their two young sons started down the car-collection road early. By the time he was 2, the 8-year-old could identify practically every make and model on the road...from a distance...and by the headlights alone at night. Yup, he's a car prodigy. He has hundreds of Matchbox cars, and his younger brother, now 4, isn't far behind.

I'm more of a wanna-be car lover. I learned to drive on my mother's 1966 VW bug, a great little car. After she'd had it a few years, she put some daisy decals on it (hey, it was the '60s!) and eventually let me paint it with flowers and vines.

When I was in high school, I wanted (but never got) one of those rounded 1960s Volvo sedans as my first car. In college, I lusted after an MGB-GT (the one with the hatch...I do have a practical streak). Instead, my first car was a 1972 Subaru FF-1 wagon, the first front-wheel-drive vehicle from Japan. It was a nasty gold color (my grandmother once described it as "shit brindle"), certainly not the most attractive vehicle I've ever owned, but eminently practical. I used it to haul bags of grain for my horse, and to move all my college-era belongings from one apartment to another. It was not the most reliable vehicle I've ever owned...but that's another story.

After that, I owned a string of cheap, (mostly) small cars...a Datsun (210?) hatchback that rode like a duck in choppy water, a couple of Mazda GLC hatchbacks (the first one got totaled, so I bought another), and a 1987 Nissan Stanza that was so underpowered it could hardly get out of it's own way, followed by a used Madza 626 with the same problem (you'd think I'd learn!). Now I drive a 2001 VW Golf 1.8 turbo, an antidote to all those years of anemic autos.

I'm considering getting a Mini Cooper S...which, come to think of it, looks a bit like an MGB-GT. (The more things change, as the saying goes, the more they stay the same.)

I guess you could consider this my mid-life crisis car...not that I'm having a mid-life crisis, mind you. But now that I'm in my mid-50s, I figure it's probably my last chance to own a really fun, peppy little car...you know, while I can still get in and out of it without requiring assistance.

So lately I've been looking at car stats and reading reviews in Consumer Reports and elsewhere...which is what prompted this post. The immediate impetus: reading a fun review of the Scion XB, a homely little vehicle I have no desire to drive, in this morning's SF Chronicle.

Now you probably don't think of car reviews when you think of great writing, but this review by Dan Neil of the LA Times is masterfully written and highly entertaining. Here are the two opening paragraphs (once you get started, I'm sure you'll want to read the rest):

I suppose others have a more highly refined sense of aesthetics, but I just can't get behind the debate over the old vs. new Scion xB, the funky five-seat space wagon sold by Toyota's Gen Y-oriented brand. Aren't they both ugly?

Really. If you're serving, say, warthog for dinner - juicy, succulent, fall-off-the-tusk warthog - do you fret the relative pulchritude of warthog A compared to warthog xB? So it hardly matters if the redesigned car is more or less visually appealing than the original (model years 2004 to 2006). They both make babies cry. (Click here to continue reading....)

I'm not the only one who thinks Neil is a good writer. In 2004, he received a Pulitzer Prize for his "his one-of-a-kind reviews of automobiles, blending technical expertise with offbeat humor and astute cultural observations." If you love cars, or even if you don't, check it out.

Put your money where your mouth is

On a day when SJSU students are staging a protest over ever-increasing tuition and fees, let me quote a few paragraphs from "Stepping on the Dream," a recent NYT Select column by Bob Herbert (published March 22, 2007).

Tamara Draut, in her book, “Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead,” tells us:

“Back in the 1970s, before college became essential to securing a middle-class lifestyle, our government did a great job of helping students pay for school. Students from modest economic backgrounds received almost free tuition through Pell grants, and middle-class households could still afford to pay for their kids’ college.”

Since then, tuition at public and private universities has soared while government support for higher education, other than student loan programs, has diminished.

This is a wonderful example of extreme stupidity. America will pony up a trillion or two for a president who goes to war on a whim, but can’t find the money to adequately educate its young. History has shown that these kinds of destructive trade-offs are early clues to a society in decline.

At the state level, per-pupil spending for higher education is at a 25-year low, even as government officials and corporate leaders keep pounding out the message that a college degree is the key to a successful future.

...In a nation as rich as ours, it should be easy to pay for college. For some reason, we find it easier to pay for wars.

Amen!

I went to college in the '70s, and I remember those days. I was one of those "students from modest economic backgrounds" and I never would have made it through college without tuition grants, work-study programs, and being able to commute from home.

I didn't get funded my senior year and had to drop out and work full-time for a while. Eventually, with the help of work-study and a small loan, I was able to go back, finish up my classes, and graduate.

When I graduated in 1977, I owed a grand total of $700 in student loans (don't laugh...that was a lot of money to me back then. Honestly, I wouldn't have been able to make it though the last month of my final semester if my Mom hadn't given me an extra $50...I was that close to the edge.) At the time, the job market for newly minted reporters was piss-poor. I got a few freelance assignments (a good way to starve), then got a job and worked (very briefly, because I sucked at it) as an advertising copywriter for a local radio station.

Then I got desperate and started taking anything...the graveyard shift at an emergency call center...a factory job building prefab houses (my hammering arm gave out after about four hours of straight pounding nails through cheap masonite siding). Hell, that's how I ended up taking a job as a small-town reporter in the middle of nowhere in Kansas...if you're willing to go someplace sight unseen, on a Greyhound bus with just two bags of luggage to your name, you know you're desperate for a job.

Yes, I remember those days...maybe that's why I support today's student protest.

It's also why I was happy to chair the JMC Scholarship Committee again this year. The awards reception is tomorrow evening. Although there's never as much money as you'd like, it always feels good to give checks to some deserving students.

SJSU Student Protest: 11:30-1:30 today at Plaza de Cesar Chavez on campus; wear red to show your support.
JMC Academic Achievement Awards Reception: 5-7 p.m., Thursday, April 26, University Room, Student Union, SJSU.

My Best Worst Moment

I asked the students in one of my classes to create a short video or multimedia slide show and upload it to YouTube or Google Video. I suggested they consider creating something for YouTube's "best moment of my entire life" category. Then I figured I might as well do it too.

It's hard to pick a best moment out of 50+ years of life. (Boy, that sounds old!) It seems that every decade has a highlight or two, like...getting my first horse...earning a ribbon in a combined training event...getting my first newspaper story published...rappelling down a 100-foot cliff, and living to write about it...getting a feature writing award from the same people who'd told me a year earlier that I should find another career...singing with friends and a great summer choir in Kansas City...finding the man I wanted to marry...having my garden on tour in Tennessee...writing a fascinating (well, to me, anyway) thesis, and getting it published...hearing my just-learning-to-talk nephew say, "Auntie likes tea." (Yes, I do.)

I could go on...but what I decided to focus on was something more recent, the day my father died...I think of it as my best worst moment.

Flashback to a war protest

I'd just scanned an article about the Iraq War protests, and moved on to an article about a student free-speech case, when I ran smack-dab into a flashback.

What set it off? It was this paragraph in the NYT article, Free-Speech Case Divides Bush and Religious Right:

Mr. Fredericks’s ensuing lawsuit...pits official authority against student dissent. It is the first Supreme Court case to do so directly since the court upheld the right of students to wear black arm bands to school to protest the war in Vietnam, declaring in Tinker v. Des Moines School District that “it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

I remember that. I remember wearing a black arm band at school, and I remember Mr. Day, the conservative civics teacher, angrily challenging me and another student in the hallway. "Do you know what you're doing?" he asked, sure that we were just following the crowd, thoughtlessly aping the college crowd whose protests were then making headlines.

I may not have know exactly what I was doing, but I knew this: the Vietnam War was still raging, the draft was still in place, and a couple of my good friends had just drawn low numbers in the draft lottery...which meant that if they weren't accepted into a college, they'd have to decide whether to enlist, wait to be drafted...or make a run for Canada.

Tough choices, especially for young men who hadn't even finished high school yet. Beyond the mounting death toll and our growing awareness of the utter futility of the war, that one thing was enough to warrant black arm bands...a visible sign of mourning for all the lives already lost, and for the next crop of young men about to be thrown into the war's relentless maw.

Today marks four years and counting for the Iraq War. Is the situation really any different now (except for the draft, of course)?

Maybe it's time to start wearing those black armbands again.