The summer semester

isn't a time off for teachers, especially not for academics. There are syllabi and lectures to prepare for the Fall, meetings and conferences to attend to keep up to date in the field, research projects to work on, and neglected home maintenance up with which to catch. The Spy does take a little more than the nominal month off work to balance off some of the ten to sixteen hour working days during the active semesters.

One of his projects may interest a slice of his more techy readers, though. His CMPT 242 course is an introduction to "on-the-iron" computing. A little UNIX, a little assembler, machine language, and some play with the relevant circuits in the lab. Among several other labs, students will build a flip-flop (one bit of memory) from gates using 14-pin chips with multiple gates, such as the 7400 with four two-input NAND gates. They then have to imagine billions of those complex circuits etched on a cip no bigger then their little fingernail. Students are paired and given a kit with a 5V power supply, breadboard, assorted chips (and access to more) a logic probe, resistors, capacitors, switches, and wires.

Thing is, he's never had more than twenty-two students in that class, so only had eleven fully stocked kits, with three more that had been partly cannibalized over the years. The limit this time was set at thirty, but somehow thirty-two are already registered, and there is a growing waiting list. So, for the first time in several years, he was in the market for supplies--bins, wire kits, chips, more breadboards, probes, power supplies, etc. His old supplier was a local specialist store--now out of business, It couldn't complete with the giant online distributers.

Apart from a very few items (parts bins bought at London Drigs), he obtained all he needed from Digikey Canada (branch office of the global U.S. reseller/distributor). The inventory is truly encyclopedic, the reputation stellar, the service terrific, delivery was quick, and the prices as good or better than anyone's. His only beef: The Adafruit Industries (made in China!) triple-strip breadboard assembly has one instakk the terminal posts right through and sticking out below the metal plate foundation, necessitating rubber feet be added, lest any surface where it is used be badly scratched. The adhesive on those was too pathetic for words. Any person assembling one of these is advised to discard the bit of rubber adhesive and use a drop of super glue instead, else the feet will surely fall off and be lost.

Spring has come,

the grass has riz; see how grassy-weedy my whole yard is." The John Deere tractor took some fixing as the engine would run a minute or two, lunge a few times like a runner out of breath, then cough to a halt--sure symptoms of dirt in the gas and a plugged filter. Run gas through under air pressure, filtering through a screen and cloth; repeat until gas comes out clean. install new filter, reattach all fuel lines, and the Deer runs like a charm. Had to replace the belt that drives the bagger, though, and that wasn't easy. Nothing is, it seems. Mowed the weedy lawn, flower beds still to do.

Last year, the garden was mediocre at best. What could be harvested early was good--rhubarb, peas, small salad veggies, and the first carrots. The squash, tomatoes, and beans were OK, but limited in size in quantity--the first two with their growth cut short by blight, and the latter rather limp and unenthusiastic. The potatoes were a disaster, the earlier ones yielding little, and the later ones with their foliage cut down to mush in a single day by the late blight migrating from the tomatoes. So, the garden gets a sabbatical this year (thirty-two years is a long time without a rest), with the drill being rototill, kill blight, repeat loop till done. 'Course, the tiller was another low-tech piece of equipment that needed work--some TLC of the two-year-old engine the Spy installed to replace the one that croaked after nearly five decades, and some tire maintenance. Runs like a charm again.

Meanwhile, back inside the ranch house, some more low-tech functionality needs replacement. See, when the Spy built his first house (pretty much all with his own hands, hence "the Carpenter") back in 1971-1972, he used copper water supply pipes (and a well, but that doesn't come into the story, nor are their oysters). But in the 1992 project for the new manse, he was persuaded by the foreman he hired to use Poly-B plastic pipe. Though the Spy was sufficiently skeptical to insist on copper fittings, the product has become a stench in the nostrils of insurance companies because it tends to fail. See, with few exceptions, floods cause far more serious problems than when, say, an electrical circuit fails. And never mind that nearly all such Poly-B failures were in the hard plastic fittings that most plumbers used, and only very rarely did the pipe itself split.

Anyway, it was time for a technology upgrade, lest the insurance company get unwise and invoke cancel culture. Ever fanatically cautious, the Spy obtained six bids, collecting many creative ideas along the way from estimators eager for the contract. Though they were not 100% apples to apples, thus exaggerating the differences, bids roughly ranged from $6 000 to $17 500. Even removing some apparently unnecessary outside work from the latter, the low to high difference is well over 100%, the price roughly proportional to the size of the company--much like per capita national deficits (and therefore accumulated per capita debt) correlate to the size of a country's economy.) The bigger they are, the more they spend per person, and very likely the harder they will fall.

A second inside job, but that the Spy will do himself is a basement renovation--finish up a roughed-in bathroom, and turn the storage space under the front bedrooms into a functioning habitable room rather than a rough storage space. Since he had to move things around for the plumbers to work there anyway, he did some preliminary tasks. He'd forgotten how tricky it can be to hang a pocket (sliding) door. Takes 2-3 people. He also notes that the original plumber put the potential shower drain in a non-standard location. Since it is cemented rather thoroughly and permanently in that spot, it will be custom tiling all the way, as a unique fibreglass basin is prohibitely expensive. Ah well, been there done that.

Moving along to kings and such,

the old-time Greeks believed (roughly speaking) that governments revolved, rather than evolved. A democracy would gradually fail under the weight of outside wars and internal competing special interest groups, one of which would seize power and establish a dictatorship. An eventual successor would declare himself king, later onces would become expansion minded until an empire emerged, which would eventually collapse (likely in a violent revolution), and devolve into competing democracies (some of which actually turned out to be constitutiional nominal monarchies), when the cycle would begin again, repeating endlessly over the centuries.

There is some experiential truth to that ancient wisdom, though the Spy sees the progression more as a pendulum swinging between forms of democracy and autocracy. Indeed, we have seen just such eventualities eventuate over the years to this very day. In the last century, Europe's and some other democracies were taken over by brutal dictators eventually labelled either fascist or communist (not much different for the average Josephine), which all either were taken down by the allied coilition of the remaining democratic nations, or collapsed under the weight of their brutality and incompetence.

There was great optimism in the 1960s through 1980s that "Liberal Democracy" had won for good, and that victory would be reinforced by high technology. Universal availability of information, the ability to commuunicate either remotely or in person with anyone electronically or through travel anywhere in the world, would lead to soch a homogenization that the world would become, in the words of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan in his books "The Gutenberg Galexy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and "Understanding Media" (1964) not mearely culturally one, but a true "Global Village". "Not" declaimed the Spy, rather then and every since the opposite, for he believed the ability to meet "the different" face to face would only exacerbate alienation, incite more hatred, division, and warfare than ever. Framed in modern terms, most people live in silos with people of like background and/or beliefs, and solely communicate with copies of themselves, eschewing all others. The Spy got it righter.

The upshot: there are only extremes, the middle is empty. If change happens, it's not a cycle, but a pendulum swing. Think about it: a pendulum spends most of its time moving slowly at one end of the swing or the other. The only time it's in the middle is when rapid change is underway. The upshot? In countries where political choice still exists, those choices are all or nothing at one end of a spectrum or the other. Among autocracies, there is no difference discernable for the ordinary citizen Jane between the oppressors of the "left" or of the "right". Nor are critics of the regime allowed to speak. Rather they are shunned, jailed, or disposed of.

Standard formula for setting up an absolute dictatorship or monarchy (still proving itself daily): (1) convince the populace that the current form of government is incompetent, corrupt, demented, and acts against their best interests. You have to tell different sub-populations opposing lies to make this work, but that has never proven difficult in the past, nor is it in the present; (2) identify some internal or external group(s) (or both) as "the enemies" that must be extirpated from among their midst, lest they pollute the pure blood of true patriotic citizens; (3) co-opt and/or undermine the justice system, and any regulatory authorites that might provide checks and balances against you as dictator; (4) promise the rich and powerful they will get even more wealth and influence with you in charge so they finance your elevation; (5) deceive the predominent religious authorities into allying with your movement.

The latter two are easily achieved by pretending your ambitions align with theirs. Should either come to believe they are independently authoritative in their realm, you can deal with them by confiscating their assets in the name of the state (that is, in your name, for now the two are indistinguishable.) "L'Etat, c'est moi" is likely wrongly attributed to Louis XIV, but it perfectly sums up autarchs of all stripes.

You protest, and rightly so, that

pendula do not swing forever, because nothing is frictionless, so eventually it must stop in the middle. All good physics, and perfectly true. Clocks need energy added to their swinging pendulum, oscillating spring, or rechargeable battery to continue keeping time. But all politicians and rulers do just that--push the pendulum. For instance, economies tend naturally to switch between times of inflation and deflation, and they know inflation is exacerbated by deficit spending or low interest rates, and deflation by the opposite. The former is politically acceptable, for the populace sees salaries rising and thinks they are better off, even though prices rise faster. The catch is that there is also friction both in the measurement of the pendulum's direction, and in generating the political will for action--so much so that by the time anything gets done, the pendulum often has already changed direction, so the delayed policy action pushes it faster that way, mandating an greater opposite correction. Sometimes governments may be better off pretending to do something, while in fact doing nothing (experienced politicians are good at that). Meanwhile, the government may have fallen, either at the polls or in the streets, leaving its replacement with an even bigger mess. Rule 1: "There ain't no such thing as a (friction) free lunch."

Is everything government does a con, then? Hey, Spy, are you that much of a pessimist? No, there can be (relatively) good governments, but the loudest voice is not usually the best voice, and loud tends to win. Smooth, loud, saying "trust me" more than once in a conversation, and pandering are generally cons. Consider. In this (dis)information era are there more Internet sites, "news" items, email messages, mass mailings at the door, and phone calls that are friendly, positive, character-building, and uplifiting, or more that are trying to get your vote, money, naked pictures, virtue, passwords, control of your computer, or allegiance to a political or social cause? More that are constructive or more that are destructive? Rule 2: "If it sounds too amazingly good, too much in your own perceived best interests to be true, it's almost certainly a con."

Take tariffs for in stance. (Please take them.) Ostensibly, they are imposed on goods from another country to reduce imports of items that can supposedly only be made elsewhere because of cheap labour. The con is twofold: (1) the exporting company pays the tariff; and (2) it's better to make the product domestically. Both are false, the first always, the second usually.

First, a tariff is a tax on the buyers, not the sellers. The end user pays the tax to her own government; the real economic theory being that if the price rises, demand falls, and the trade balance improves, with any imbalance offset by relative currency adjustments. But the economic actuality is that the sending country retaliates with counter tariffs, negating the exercise, possibly enriching both governments through higher taxes, but taking money from their own peoples, and damaging their own economy, thus lowering tax revenues instead. Second, if it were more better gooder cheaper to make the product in the destination country, it would already be being done. Manufacturers may be greedy, but they aren't (usually) breathtakingly stupid, or they would already be out of business. More than that, trade wars like these have a well-defined, well-proven past. They make economies less efficient rather than more, and when persisted in, they destroy the international economy. The last big trade war led to the great depression, and eventually WW II.

Yup. There is a cost to everything. The greater the potential benefit, the more it costs. (Theological hat on) Something of infinite value has an infinite cost. The only way we of finite resources can obtain such a thing is by a free grace gift from the one who paid that cost in full. And here, mathematics raises its philosophical head and avers that if that infinite gift is taken from the infinite reservoir and given to another, the amount remaining to give others continues to be infinite.

Now, what of the boiling sea?

Perhaps not yet, but as it warms, over time, the big ocean currents that bring warmer climes to northern coastal Europe will fail. Seasonal swings of temperature pendulum will become much more pronounced--hotter summers, and colder winters, but with a higher average everywhere. If it swings far enough, and much of the 30s latitudes, especially the coasts, become uninhabitable due to heat and rising sea levels, perhaps some hot, drowned cities and their nearby walruses will have to be relocated to the now balmy, temperate climes of Yukon and Alaska.

In the light of all this,

the fact that Apple plans to rename its OSs with the year as numerical suffix instead of the sequential version seems rather trivial, more of a cabbage than a king, don't ya think?

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is Professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-fourth year as a high school and university teacher in 2024. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several commercial and/or educational organizations and participated in developing industry standards both nationally and internationally. He is a long-time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named the best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (both dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 when cancer happened, so he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth has been released; site to be redesigned real soon now) : https://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html

URLs for a product mentioned last two months:

Wipf&Stock site for his 4Civ textbook Volume One: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385226818/the-fourth-civilization-volume-one/

Wipf&Stock site for his 4Civ textbook Volume Two: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385232932/the-fourth-civilization-volume-two/

URLs for a product mentioned this month:

Digikey (Electronics Supplier; Canadian office) : https://www.digikey.ca/en/products