Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 101: Year 2000 Problem

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

beep boop computers Abi's Youtube which you may have heard of: https://www.youtube.com/c/thephilosophytube KJB Podcast: https://killjamesbondpod.podbean.com/ Chris Steaker's nomogram video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swCy6pQSEpk&t=1s&ab_channel=ChrisStaecker James Burke's "Connections" episode as mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0&list=PLf02uWXhaGRng_YzH-Ser_VEV4lGSLX_1&index=4&ab_channel=DRS_Education support trans kids in the south: https://southernequality.org/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

You've got like a whole bunch of like secretarial women assembling the podcast in a back room. Yeah, we should be right away Mr. Rosniak. Yes. Yeah, we've got the secretary, Sean Wick doing this. I wish I had someone to just, just, uh, yeah, just a whole, whole room of like, you know, tape drives going back and forth that assembles the podcast manually for me. I could simulate the, the noise. Yeah.

All right. Um, well, I started, I started my, you know what? I shall also check and make sure I have enough room on the hard drive. I'll be smart. Don't be smart. I'm going to buy a new hard drive, but before I give it to you, I'm going to stuff it in your mouth. Do you want to, do you want a sink point?

I think we should be fine. I think we should be fine. Shut up. Because I do the screen recording, which means I have a continuous sink point. Yeah. Unless you lose the video file. Who would do that? Oh.

Ross, you did that. That was in some kind of 2022 bug scenario. Absolutely. Yes. The, the bug is to be trying to free up space on my hard drive. Why don't you take the hard drives I've already given you? All right. Cause I don't know where they are.

Oh my God. Hard drives. You add one to the pile every time you come over. There's literally one in his room. I could, I know where it is. When you give me so many computer parts, I don't know what any of them are. Yeah. We're starting the podcast.

Oh, we've been recording for a bit of that. God damn it, Ross. You sneaky bastard. Hello. And welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him. Okay. Go. I am Alice Goldor Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Hey, Liam.

I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. And we have a guest. Yes. Hello. My name is Abigail Thorne. My pronouns are she and her. Is that the Abigail Thorne from Philosophy?

The Abigail Thorne. Wow. Yes. How do we get her? From Kill James Bond. From Kill James Bond. Oh, you know, I heard Kill James Bond is a good show, except that one of the hosts owes me $40,000.

Look, I told you I was going to pay you that after you show me proof of the body. Oh. No, I was. Yeah. That too. Can I also have $40,000 to review and we'll get the speedboat underway? Abby, I just want to thank you for being the first person to put philosophy in a tube. Because it used to be.

Thank you. Where it belongs. Yeah, exactly. Well, it used to be, you know, you're in the kitchen. You're in the kitchen. You're making a recipe. It calls for some philosophy. And it's like four ounces, right?

Yeah. You have to go get a can and the cans like eight ounces. Good. You just have this. Yeah. Yeah. And then you, and then you have like just this half empty can of philosophy and the bridge.

You're implying that Abby is some sort of Hillsbury grand biscuits. And then, and then you have to put plastic wrap on it, but now it's in a tube. You can just squeeze it out. Exactly. It's great. Homogenous. Well, I'm glad that you found it useful. Oh, yeah.

You people are fucking freaks. But we've brought you on to talk about why to K some of some of our listeners are too young to remember this, which depresses the absolute set of me. Definitely. I mean, how are you? She's, she's, she's a child is the thing. We use a child labor. Okay.

Not remembering the year 2000. Yeah. I don't remember that at all. I'd have to check a box on YouTube. I'm going to throw up, dude. But we have some helpful images here of the 2000s. I need to lie down. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and this sort of cultural moment that was the Y2K computer bug. Because of course, as a zoomer, I dress in Y2K fashion and somebody said that the other day and I was like, what does that mean? Do you mean it was something else before this? What is this? Because I'm only, you know, 21. When you know, there's a time when people didn't go on the computer.

You're 21. You're 20. God damn one. You could log off. And so this is all over time. You had a dial up connection. Yeah. 28 Bod modems, man.

I do want to say, you know, we do get the occasional requests for sort of, well, there isn't your problem for the disasters that weren't. And I don't know if this is an official entry in that, but like, Spiritually, spiritually will be apocalyptic messaging surrounding it. And what it ended up being is certainly, I think on that level. We have, we have the weekly world news here on the bottom right, which tells us that hundreds of planes will fall out of the sky. Cars will stop dead in their tracks.

Nuclear missiles will launch themselves. If only man. Yeah. I mean, like the headline says the final days. And it's like, and then also inside Armageddon. So you get both. You get two for the price of one there. Yeah.

You can get an eschaton free. Yes. But before we imminentize that, we have to do the goddamn news. Oh, that was good. You too. Yes. So, so that the American trucker convoy has fallen hilariously flat. Defeated by the Beltway.

Defeated by just being scared of going into Washington DC. There was, there was, there was an interview about this that I saw with one of the truckers where he was like, well, I was going to drive into Washington DC, but then three girls in a blue Hyundai gave me the finger really aggressively and I got scared. So I just left. I saw that too. I saw that too. So the point of this, right, was all of these truckers were going to assemble in various

points across the United States and drive west to east until they arrived at your next capital, Washington DC, where they were going to blockade the city. You make it totally unusable in order to protest vaccine mandates. Now the vaccine mandates have all ended now. So they were, they were going to do all of this in service of something that they had already gotten and then they couldn't even do it. They just kind of, It still hasn't ended on Amtrak or on planes or in healthcare settings or in certain schools.

What I think is funniest about this is that since they've decided instead of going into DC proper, they're just going to, they're going to circle the Beltway and not really block traffic, which is what they've been doing. They're just driving around. Yeah, they're going to do a ton of Washington DC. They're circumambulating it like the camper. The other thing is, you know, the only firms out there on the, the Beltway are, you know, a bunch of, a bunch of like government contractors and conservative lobbying firms.

The only people they're irritating are the people who are in favor of their cars. They're all getting blocked in by like CIA guys having to try to commute to work through all of these 18 milers, which is great. Sounds like we owe those three girls a debt of gratitude. Absolutely. But I want them both to lose, you know, the CIA people who can't get to work, the people who want to give everybody COVID and conjunctivitis and Washington DC. I'm going to, I'm going to protest the liberal establishment by blockading the exit that goes

to the national right to work building. I, yeah, I just, I hope they stay tangled up on, on, on the Beltway forever going around in circles and society progresses without them. About to say it's just a hilariously ineffective protest against something that isn't real anymore. This photo is very cool though. I mean, it kind of looked like the transformers went off the deep end. You kind of have like, it's a little bit Mad Max too, isn't it? You kind of want to see a guy with a guitar on the roof of the sleeper camp.

We'd love to see Optimus Prime with like an end or mandate. Optimus Prime is a QAnon guy now. Another, another news about highways. One more lane. One more lane. It's fine. We can handle it. This is incredible.

And the, I forget if it's Doug Ford or Rob Ford now. One of them. Yeah, one of those guys. One of the one who's not dead from crack. His just a wild piece of Canadian political history that there were these two, these two brothers. Two brothers. Two brothers. And they briefly ran Ontario.

Ontario. And they ran. Personal fiefdom. Ontario. In a world, in a, in a world where two brothers run Ontario with crack. They decided that the Ontario 2051 comprehensive transportation plan says they're going to widen the 401, which is currently the world's widest highway in order to. 20 lane highway.

It is an 18 lane highway. It's going to be 20 lanes. Well, people in Texas will tell you the Katie freeway is wider, but six of those lanes of the 24 lanes are on a frontage road. And I don't think that counts. This is monstrous. This is atrocious to look at and probably worse to be in. I hate everything about it.

Well, yeah, because I don't understand how you could safely widen this road. Right. Cause you got four local lanes. You got five express lanes. You got four local lanes. You got five, uh, uh, five express lanes, not in that order. I got that order wrong. Um, yeah.

Where, where are the others going to go? Once you get beyond like four lanes bunched up together, you get really diminishing returns because it gets so hard to drive in the inner lane because you have to go over all those other lanes. Well, this is, this is also one of our best friends on the show induced demand. Right. Yes. You build more highways, people drive on them and they, they get as congested as the

lanes they were supposed to relieve the congestion on. Yeah. I mean, that's my question, which is what are you going to do in however many years time when you just got to do this again? Yeah. Ontario has fallen to highway 401. Well, it's all highway now. It'll be, it'll all be one swath of highway 401.

Yeah. This is sort of, this is sort of like the outer felt way that goes around Toronto. Um, and this is kind of, um, it is the world's widest highway. It is extremely busy. I don't see a safe way to widen it other than like add a second deck with super express lanes. It seems very expensive. There's also a subway line that parallels this, which is unfunded. Um, yeah.

Just perfect. There, there, that, that, that, that line is not in the comprehensive plan. One of the reasons they want to do this is for climate resiliency, which I think is hilarious because this is climate arson right here. I mean, unless every single vehicle is electric by 2051, which it will not be. Um, no, but like what during the water wars, you're going to need to use this as a kind of like dry moat so that the city of Toronto can shoot raiders coming in from the outlands and that's where you need to widen it.

Yeah. But you also have a nice smooth surface where the invading Russians can come in easily rather than having to go through the mud where the Chinese tire should have invaded the GTA. Uh, would have been much more successful. Would have worked much more to their advantage. It's a good point. You imagine the, uh, the Ontario SSR, um, communism. Yeah.

The, the, uh, the Canadian forces slightly fewer Ukrainian Nazis than the Ukrainian armed forces, not that fewer though. Speaking of Russia and Ukraine. We are the dumbest motherfuckers alive. Oh my God. Man. Uh, the, the, the Cardiff city Philharmonic, I think it is canceled, uh, a production of Tchaikovsky because it was inappropriate at the current time.

Uh, the Glasgow film festival, uh, in my home city has, uh, banned a couple of Russian films not because of anything that's in them, but because they are Russian. Uh, we're also fucking banning Tolstoy. So cancel culture is real, but only in the most, uh, like idiotic way, which is to just go, actually we think it's, it's a bad idea to have any, any Russian content at this time. Wasn't Tchaikovsky criticized for being insufficiently nationalist? Sure.

Sure. I mean, he did make out for it by being insanely anti-Semitic, which always gets you some points in Russia. And gay. And gay. Yeah. He was gay. He was gay as hell.

Yeah. Oh, biographers have generally agreed that Tchaikovsky was homosexual. Look at that. There you go. It's a really bad time for anybody out there who is trying to sell a TV script, which is an adaptation of a famous Russian novel. So. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's a damn shame that all of these artists and, um, uh, playwrights and, um, writers of, uh, Russian culture and literature, uh, prove to all right. Of Vladimir Putin is great in the forward and afterward of all of their works. Yeah. They predicted him. Yeah. The thing about Tolstoy, the thing about Tolstoy is absolutely insanely pro-war, loved it,

couldn't get enough of it. Yeah. He wrote that famous book. War. Yeah. And nothing else. War and nothing else. Yeah.

There was some, some talk that he was working on a sequel, but I'm thinking of a panned out. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to highlight, like part of the tragedy, obviously the main tragedy is like the lives that have been lost and the invasion of a sovereign nation. But like we can only equip to focus on the trivial shit. And this is the trivial shit. Yeah. It's like part of, part of the tragedy is like Russia is like, has so much to offer culturally,

like the architecture, the music and stuff. It's beautiful. And it's a shame to see it reduced to a war machine by this kind of collaboration of plutocrats and, and petrochemical billionaires and fascists. Like it's a real, it's a real shame. And it's, it's a shame that stupid people play into this by doing shit like this. People should know better. Yeah.

That's, that's exactly the thing that bothers me here is that like people, like if you run an arts festival, if you're on a cinema festival in Glasgow, right? Why do you need to go? Actually, I think Putin is basically right that Russia is this sort of like a warrior country. And therefore we're not going to, we're not going to show fucking indie films from Russia. My, my, my, my PE teacher in high school was an ex-Soviet Olympic athlete. And while she wasn't kicking.

Yeah. Yeah. Virginia's a hell of a place. While she wasn't kicking our asses, she was always pushing like Russian literature and culture on us. It was great. Oh yeah. Didn't you, didn't you do Russian at college?

I did. I did. I took Russian in college and in high school. Is dad majoring in Russian? My dad did major in Russian. So both of us have to distance ourselves. I was about to say. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm canceled too now in Farsi. We are brain supreme once again. It would have been so easy for like the conductor of the Cardiff city orchestra to come out the start and say, obviously, like we all condemn the horrible things to be done in Ukraine right now. Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer, but like now more than ever is the time to remember the things that we have in common with the people of Russia rather than the government.

And like many of whom are like scared and oppressed as well. And like to enjoy cultural products like this for a more peaceful time in a spirit of love and unity. Like something like that. It's not hard to write something like that. It would have been better. It would have been better to just do it and say nothing even. That would have been perfectly reasonable.

It wasn't Tchaikovsky Russian and then the Cardiff city orchestra. Really? It's like, what's happening? Sorry about this. I like some of his overtures. Didn't know that he was Russian. I'm following now. On the plus side, maybe we get iron ran canceled.

No. That's not how it works. And you know that. Get salts and eats and canceled. Again, not even for any of the good shit. Just a lot of me in Nabokov. Cause wait, no, never mind. That's ready to go.

As long as I don't have to hear anyone ever tell me about Lolita again. I will be a happy man. Yeah. As I say, it's a bad time to be trying to sell a screenplay. Yeah. And the whole, the whole world has become that one Call of Duty mission. No Russian. No Russian.

Yeah. Ross, did you ever play Call of Duty? No. I don't stop stealing valor. I don't like shooting people. Imagining you playing Call of Duty is very funny. I never found first person shooters to be very fun because I don't want to shoot people. Oh, I love first person shooters.

And you like calling people slurs, which is the other important aspect. Before we warmed up, I called you and Abby all sorts of unspeakable. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, when I, when I, you know what, I'm not even going to make the joke because I'm going to get censored. I don't, I'm pre-bleeping myself. All right. That was the goddamn news.

All right. We got to talk about computer. Hello. Talk about computers. Hello. Hello. Yes. This is the, this is a image from the, well, there's your problem back room where all the

everything goes off. These are our addresses. It's not just Ross drunk. No, this is our, this is our IBM 1401 system. Fantastic. Yeah. So we had to talk about, I may have put too much effort into this segment. We have to talk about what is computer.

Yeah. You badly distracted yourself learning what a computer was. Yeah. What Y2K was. And I had to do the, what Y2K is segment in the last 10 minutes before we recorded. But that's fine. Is it? Salted snow.

All right. I thought it'd be fun. We start by looking at the history of this device that has ruined our lives. Yeah. It's hard. What is a computer? What is a computer? What is a computer?

It's, it's, it's a machine that thinks in sand that we've poisoned an array and weird sigils. And then like you do that often enough and in an advanced enough way, eventually you can play Call of Duty and get called slurs. Yes. It can only do two things, one or zero. But if you tell it to do lots of them in a special order, it can do more than two things. Yes. So computation, you know, goes back a long time because people had to count things, right?

And sometimes they had to determine relationships between things by using horror of horrors, math. Don't like that. Don't care for it. Yeah. What is this fucking dread sigil on the bottom right corner there? Oh, I'll get to that in a second. Okay.

Yeah. So one of the earliest computing devices was the abacus, right? So it requires a lot of skill to use effectively, but essentially the position of the beads can tell you where various can, can, can assist you in adding numbers very quickly, right? Some people are very good at it. They still teach it in like parts of Eastern Europe, in Japan and parts of Eastern Russia. You know, it is canceled. This is in fact a Russian abacus.

So definitely canceled, double canceled. Yeah. We can figure out exactly how canceled it is using an abacus. This one. Yeah. So each row corresponds to like a number place, right? You move the beads back and forth to compute quickly, right? I don't know very much about how to use these.

Yeah. You can do the same thing with like knotted strands of rope, which is what they did in like most America. Counting is hard and it's especially hard if you do it in your head. So it helps to have some kind of like aid memoir and everything's sort of spirals from there, I'm afraid. What sort of things were people counting back in the day? Grain.

Taxes. Taxes. Taxes on grain. Money. Materials. You know, anything that needed to be counted. I mean, that's a big question. That's the thing.

Yeah. And like days that leads you into sort of calendars. Yeah, yeah, true. Because I suppose all of this now is kind of done by computers. So I don't really think about when you got to count shit. If you had to do, for some reason, a more complex calculation like addition, subtraction, division, sometimes mathematicians could create something called a nomogram to aid in these calculations.

What? This is sort of a paper calculator, develop a dedicated single equation, right? This one I stole from a guy named Chris Steaker, who has numerous videos on the subject, as well as early adding machines. Guys should be getting half a million views on each video because they're really good. They're well edited. They're witty. All the things that we don't bother to do.

Exactly, right? So I'm going to put a link to his channel in the description, but I stole this one from him. This is essentially a device for computing polynomials, right, which you can do simply by picking, you pick one of the numbers, you lay a string over it towards another number, and then the third number you get from the intersection. I forget exactly how to do it with this one, but he has a video on it. I'll link in the description as hell.

I really like it. Do I ask what a polynomial is? I haven't done math since GCSE, which was five years ago. Well, we're going to need this for the next slide. It's a mathematical expression involving a sum of numbers in one or more variables multiplied by coefficients. Oh, okay. It's like a 2x squared plus x plus a constant.

I mean, I'm being a materialist about this. The reason why you need to count stuff is about is tax mostly because you accumulate capital in a primitive sense. You get a lot of grain. You need to work out how much grain you take off of each person. Therefore, you need to work out what a percentage of a certain number is. Yeah, exactly. I can't believe one real podcast.

Cool. So one of the first machines, which was programmable, right? Well, first off, there were organs, actually, once you had like... Like the human brain. No, no. I was talking about a pipe organ because sometimes you could run part of that automatically. Sorry, what? Do you do maths with a pipe organ?

No, but you can program it because you can put on, you know, like the paper... Oh, is this all like valve work? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so you can run like a player piano, right? You know, that's a program which is done through a reel of paper, right? Oh. Also, don't forget the... So what is a program?

What is the etiquette theorem? A program is a set of instructions. Yeah. Essentially, you're moving things on the abacus or you're like tracing things on the big nomograph or whatever, but it's just a set of instructions. So, I mean, in theory, you can like run a program on anything like an organ or like a water clock or an abacus or this loom that we're looking at. Or this loom.

I mean, so this is one of the first programmable machines, right? The Jacquard loom, you know, in France in the 18th century, clothing with lots of fancy floral patterns was in style. This is really hard to weave manually, you know, on just an ordinary loom. This was also compounded by the fact that most of the individual heddles, which are the little hooks that raise and lower the threads for weaving those patterns, those are operated by child labor, which, you know, fucked up a lot because they're kids. Yeah.

Unreliable. Unreliable, yes. Yeah. So, Joseph Marie Jacquard realized you could replace the children with punch cards. He put all those children out of work, monster. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. But on the other hand, he greatly increased the reliability of the loom, right?

He made your ability to get like cute floral patterns. So it's impossible to say whether this was bad or not. But essentially the, the various children came around and broke his legs. The first Luddites, yeah. So Jacquard realized you could replace the children with punch cards and the punch cards could block the heddles from being raised and lowered, depending on what the pattern on the fabric was going to be, right? Oh, clever.

Same with an organ, same with a music box, same with a player piano. Yeah. Sometimes it's a metal cylinder, but you just use these perforations. So yeah, in effect, these punch cards are a program for, you know, the loom. You couldn't store a lot of data on them, of course. You needed a whole hell of a lot of punch cards for a complex pattern. These are like the first workers to be automated out of a job with these children. Oh yeah.

So you might see the root of our problem already here, actually. Yeah, we've got a whole bunch of unemployed children on our hands. Yeah. Going to be crying around causing trouble, inventing being teenagers. Anti-social behavior. There's a show that was on, I forget where it came from. It was on PBS a long time, though. It was called Connections by a guy named James Burke.

He explains, you know, sort of history of computation through the loom, but sort of traces it back also to like Roman Mills with camshafts. You know, he does a really good job with that. I might link that in the description. The thing is there's this distinction right between just sort of additive, additive, additive and multiplicative machines, right? To sort of timing based ones. And that's what an organ is. That's what a like a water, like a water powered forge hammer, a trip hammer does. Is it just like rolls around on a wheel and that trips it to like drop down?

Same with this. And this is, this will come up later once we start getting into the ones and zeros. Oh yeah. Just bear in mind the idea that the Antikythera mechanism. Yes. Yeah. We don't have it in the slides. I don't understand how it works.

It allows you to play ancient Greek Halo. I just wanted us to mention it. Oh, yeah, absolutely. The important thing for you to note down in your little notes here is that the timing of operations is something that is potentially very important. When you're trying to execute a program. Okay. Industrial capitalism comes, right? And leads to increasingly complex societal structures, right?

You know, you got railroads, factories, multinational corporations and needs for computation increase as well, right? And this becomes sort of the era. Well, we have a picture of a computer using a typewriter. This is not a typewriter. This is an adding machine. Ah, excuse me. You have a picture of a computer using an adding machine. This is when computer was a job, right?

Yeah, this woman is a computer. This woman is a computer, yes. Yeah, she's been drone-ified. Now this guy, Charles Babbage, had an idea for a mechanical computer in the 1830s. He called it the difference engine. Wow, Charles. This is built on some earlier concepts for like, I want to say it's called a pinwheel adder, which is a really, really simple adding machine where, you know, it has a mechanism to carry the one when you add over nine and you can have an arbitrary number of rows of that.

And Babbage realizes, well, you could add a lot more to it and have a much more complex machine, right? That could do a lot more than just addition or multiplication, right? And this came, he's inspired by the fact that at this time, when you're navigating, you know, on the high seeds, you need huge books with big charts and numbers about, like, where the stars are supposed to be for celestial navigation, right? All those books, they had to be published once a year because all these stars are drifting slightly because the Earth's going around the galaxy, you know? Yeah, I'm farming all my acts about the length of days. And I wouldn't have known why that was happening as well. I would have just been like, ah, fuck, God just makes it hard.

I think actually there was some knowledge that the Earth was moving around the galaxy at that point just because you could take a look at all the stars and sort of figure out based on how they move, how far away they might be. I'm not exactly certain what the extent of knowledge was at that point. But yeah, the big important book was the Nautical Almanac, right? And this provided, you know, locations of the stars, the sun, the moon, at each hour at all locations on Earth for a full year, right? And I guess somebody somewhere must still know how to do this in case the computer goes down. Like, you must have to train somebody on the ship to be able to navigate. The US Navy has started reintroducing celestial navigation in case the ship systems get hacked.

They trained Air Force navigators in celestial navigation into like the 80s at least, yeah. Oh, yeah. And the US Naval Observatory still publishes a book like this, but I think it's, you can get a physical copy, but it's mostly in electronic form. But you could use this book and a sextant and you could figure out where the hell you were, right? And the smart guys back at the observatory would devise some big complicated mathematical formulas for the locations of the stars this year, and then send it to the computers, right? And the computers were, you know, guys or gals. I think back then, this is like early 1800s, they were guys.

Oh, two guys then, yeah. And they had to work on this, right? Every calculation was done twice by two different guys, and there were tens of thousands of these calculations. They were all very complicated. They required like, you know, signs, cosines, logarithms, all that crap, right? Now, two of these guys got different answers. They were both shot. One of them did it wrong, yeah.

No, there wasn't enough shot back then. Just dropping it off the hull with sabers. Yeah, exactly. They get bayoneted. I would not want to be dropped off the Baltimore shot tower. So if two guys got different answers, they'd have to do it again. Sometimes the two guys got the same answer, but the answer was wrong. And that made it into the book.

Or more frequently, they got the right answer. And then when the, when the calculations went to typesetting, the typesetter got it wrong and it made it into the book. Right? It's tough. Yeah. And this was very bad if you were a sailor and you needed that specific number, right? Now, Babbage, Babbage worked on these books and he was frustrated at all the inaccuracies in the finished product. And he's like, all right, if only these calculations could be done by steam, right?

Again, perfectly, perfectly normal guy. We put all those children out of a job. So he realized, okay, if we sort of scale up these adding machines that already exist, we could make something he called the difference engine, right? You know, so this is a series of really big, you know, adding machines sort of in an array and they interact with each other in a funny way, right? You know, it could, it's very difficult to explain how it works. And crucially, you can interlock them in ways that allow them to essentially have a computer memory. And if you arrange those in the right way, you can set it to do different tasks.

Oh, this one does not have memory. Excuse me. I'm talking about the, the analytical engine. The analytic engine. Yes. The sequel. The sequel to this. Yeah.

Well, this, this sort of, this machine worked on two principles, right? The first of which is that most mathematical functions, like really complicated ones, you know, where, you know, X is some function of, or Y is some function of X. Or however it goes, right? It might have, you know, signs, cosines, logarithms, all kinds of stuff that's very difficult to calculate by hand, right? You can approximate it to a pretty good degree of accuracy with a polynomial, right? Ah, the sort of Kentucky windage of mathematics. Yeah. If you, if you know a certain number of points on the line, you can make an educated guess.

Yeah. And you can talk about where the rest of the line is, presumably. Yeah, exactly. It's a Newton polynomial. If you have a series of known points in a complicated function, you can approximate it to a good degree of accuracy. But the higher order of the polynomial is like, you know, it's, I don't know, X to the seventh or something like that. The more accurate you are, right? And you can do some more advanced stuff if you can figure out, like, the derivative at that point.

But it's too complicated to go in here. Yes, working in metal cylinders. Yes. I did math at GCSE, which was only three years ago, and I can't remember any of this. The second thing is polynomials can be solved very rapidly, entirely through addition. With guesswork. Yeah, that's how you got that math GCSE last year. No, that's that's that's a very slow way they teach you an algebra two here in the United States.

And it sucks. It does suck. Can't confirm. It's really stupid. Dude, I listen to that. Although if it makes you feel better, I literally have an agree on this and I'm still just like, what the fuck? All right. So this is called the method of finite differences, right?

So these very complicated polynomials. Sounds like a tough blog post. Yeah. If you do, all you have to do is you have to do a few points on the polynomial equation by hand, right? And you tabulate the differences, right? In a big table until you get this chart right here, right? So this is this, this X is here. The function is P of X is 2x squared minus 3x plus two.

And here if X is zero, it's two. X is one, it's one, X is two, it's four, three is 11, so on and so forth, right? Well, if you can get this first chart here, and this is this one is the difference. How do I explain this? You're struggling here, huh? This is X plus one, the function of X plus one minus the function of X. So essentially it's this number minus this number, right? And then you get a negative one, right?

And then if you do the difference between X plus one minus the difference of X, okay? So funny. I'm subtracting here from the next table, the next column, the next row and column. I'm subtracting negative one from three, I get four. Now, once you hit the third row here, because this is a second order polynomial, on the third row, everything comes out to the same number. Holy shit, that's amazing. What that means is that by continuing this method downwards, right,

rather than having to solve the equation, I'm solving a series of very simple arithmetic problems, and I can extend that out to any arbitrary polynomial, right? And therefore I can do lots of very, very complicated math, which is approximating some kind of very, very, very, very, very complicated function just by doing addition. That's so fucking cool. That's like you've cheated. That's like you did a backflip and unequipped several items, and you've just managed to skip straight through math, so that's so good.

You just did speed running math. That's amazing. You just do algebra, like calculator that only has a plus and a minus button. It only has four. That's everything's four. I should remember this when I do my GCSE next year. Everything is four. That's the answer to everything.

Yeah. So the difference engine uses inputs based on the system to calculate large numbers of polynomials to a high degree of accuracy in a very short period of time, because even when the computers who are the guys were doing these charts, they would use this method, but they have to do it manually, right? They're joining the French children in the ranks of people who have been unemployed buying automation. With this machine, instead of having to do all that manually, you just did a couple

points and then you crank the handle. Yeah. You crank the handle and the numbers come out. Yeah. All the tabulations and star charts, they print to them every year. It's just the number four. Yeah. It's sick.

Well, it's four again. You ever see that RAND Corporation publication, which is one million random numbers? Oh, yeah. My favorite book. Yeah. Well, imagine that, but they all came out to four. I mean, you can't falsify it. Yeah.

Absolutely. It's a perfectly random process. It's open to all come out as four. But this wasn't enough because they had to build a sequel. They had to do a 2.0. Well, no, the biggest problem with this machine we'll get to in a second. Now, it was designed so that you also got rid of the typesetters in this process. It actually automatically imprinted onto a mold, which you could later fill with molten

lead to get the typesetting. Now, no one could fuck up the typesetting. But also, no one could do the calculations anymore because they've all got brain damage to the typesetting. Well, everything says four. It comes with the job. And this could do calculations to a very high degree of accuracy, 31 digits, right? 31 digits on a seventh order polynomial, right?

Which is much, much higher than what the book could do, right? With a hand crank, no less. Yes. Babbage explained this concept. Hand crank. Babbage explained this concept. He built a tiny model of a portion of the machine to demonstrate it to the British government. The British government was really interested in it because these books were really expensive

to produce, right? The British government was like, that's so funny. Twirling a single strand of hair, yeah. The main issue with the machine, though, is Babbage didn't actually build it. Well, that will do it. Yeah, yeah. Babbage sort of lost interest in it because he realized he could build- Wow, Charles.

He had a better idea. He could build the analytical engine, which was much bigger. Once again, perfection is always the enemy of the good to the hardware engineer. It's like, no, I can do this better. I can do this perfect, in fact. It would be programmed the same way a jackard loom was, right? You'd have a series of punch cards. The core of the machine was something called the arithmetic mill, which is essentially

what we'd now call a central processing unit, a CPU. Cool CPUs that again. The arithmetic mill? The arithmetic mill. Yeah. They could add, it could subtract, it could divide, it could do square roots. It had mechanical memory for advanced programming. It could start a thousand numbers of 40 digits for later use.

So this machine would be what we'd call turing complete. It could calculate almost any arbitrary set of instructions. It would be the size of a locomotive with 25,000 moving parts, and we powered by a steam engine. That's so cool. He also inadvertently invented the first computer programmer, his friend Ada Lovelace, which is a transgender woman ass name as is fitting for the first computer programmer. That's sound about right. She worked up some hypothetical programs for these, which worked as was later discovered.

No word on whether she had like some jackard loomed knee socks on in the process. One of the issues is that neither of these machines actually got built. Someone built a difference engine, but I think there's two replica difference engine that were constructed in full between 1989 and 2000. There's been some effort to build an analytical engine, but it's been stymied by the fact that no one understands Babbage's diagrams or notes and no one's ever managed to fully... What the fuck is a cat go?

Why is this? It also has a series of volumes called as Scribbles, which... Was that really what it's called? That's fantastic. Yeah, which had a lot of details for the machines in there, but there's so many of them, no one's managed to digitize all of them, let alone comprehend all of them. It's probably like high-digger and it's just full of a lot of racist shit. Hundreds of thousands of etches of cat girls.

It would be very cool to just whip out an analytical engine in your maths GCSE. It's like, well, you said I could use a calculator, you didn't say? Yeah, it has to be in a clear pencil case. I use a slide rule in high school to be smart. Well, let us use graphing calculators. So I taught myself how to use a slide rule. Highly recommend it to piss off your math teacher who claims she's a doctor but won't show you the degree.

Show us the degree, Mrs. Mubbert. All I asked for was a degree and she wouldn't show it to us. Show us the birth certificate. That's right. In the meantime, these much more simple adding machines got more and more popular, and they got more sophisticated, they got more quicker to use. This is sort of the golden age of the computer as a job, really between 1840s to the 1910s.

This is when stuff like spreadsheets or physical objects, really complex computations that are trivial for a modern machine to handle where instead handle with armies of people, usually women, they're doing calculations on paper, but a lot of times they add a machine. Find a computer indispensable. And this takes on the shape of the state and vice versa. Things become more centralized, things become more statistical.

It becomes more sort of numerate in these ways. One development really assisted here was the development of the relay. In 1840, Samuel Morris patented the telegraph. The primary element of this telegraph was something we now call a relay. You power an electromagnet and two plates make contact, and that completes a circuit. You use several of these and you can make simple logic gates, and or not.

And then you're really off to the races, because that's all you need. Well, it's not all you need, because you can do it with simple addition, as we've seen. But once you have the ability to tell a computer, this is an and function, this is an all function, this is a not function, you can do some very clever things with that. Like what? Don't worry about it.

Make a podcast. You can make a podcast with it. You can play Call of Duty with it. Not that I would recommend either of those things. Absolutely. Because then you can start writing code and shit, right? You can stop in like, if this, then this. If this event happens, then this event happens.

If this event and this event happens, and being able to trace the logic. If going to crash, brackets don't. That's the Tesla pedestrian safety initiative. So once electricity becomes more ubiquitous, at least in office environments, adding machines could be powered, right? And simple relay logic could automate a lot of functions, right?

So, you know, whereas before you were adding on the machine, and you had to manually clear it, maybe now you get a little electric motor controlled by simple relay logic that would clear the machine, maybe it would be able to do multiplication now by doing the same calculation over and over again. A lot of these little adding machines got really, really sophisticated. They still weren't computers though, right?

It's a big calculator. Because computers were pretty girls. Yeah, exactly. Computers were the pretty girls who used the adding machines. Now this guy, Herman Hollerith, saw opportunity right here. Hollerith was the son of German immigrants, graduate of the Columbia University School of Mines, right? Wow.

Yeah. Mines isn't digging in the ground, or mines isn't kaboom. Mines isn't digging in the ground. It's now the engineering school there. I was going to say at Columbia. I guess that makes sense. Pennsylvania, New York have. Just wasn't expecting Columbia to have a mining school.

In 1880, the US Census was recorded on paper, processed on paper. You make my point for me about the computer and the state becoming as one. Yes. It took eight years to tabulate, right? And everyone had to record the sex they were assigned at Berkeley was the rules.

Yes. Now Hollerith had never heard of a Jacquard Loom or an analytic engine, but he had ridden a train and he had had his ticket punched. Just a perfect brotherhood of slightly autistic men who have experienced things in different ways across the world. Why are inconveniences?

Yeah. And it's like, I could do this better. Yeah. A conductor, when you receive a fare, punch in the presence of the passenger. Oh, because they punched your ticket. Yeah. They punched your ticket.

Literally. And railway tickets had more information printed on them than just the fare and the destination, right? Because there'd be multiple conductors along the same route. They want to make sure you're the same guy. Right? So, you know, that you have punches for people's gender, rough age range, their race.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's bad. Yeah. You don't want to know what the categories of race were. I'll tell you that. Oh, my God.

Just slur one, slur two, slur three. What? Yeah. Well, it's this. Irish. Italian. Italian is just under a category of Swarthi. So, this is some kind of Scottish.

Yeah. This is so, this is so that the conductor knew, the next conductor knew the person was the person they were supposed to be. No, you haven't had your ticket stolen by some kind of Italian. This practice lasted for a very long time. Actually, SEPTA was still printing a little gender sticker on the transit passes.

Yeah. The TransPass. Ironically named. They were still doing that until 2013. Jesus. Yeah. We don't live in the most good city. So, Hollerith realized data could be stored on punch cards,

right? And, you know, once he was in school, he realized the Jacquard loom existed. Machines could read them. This could be applied to the census. So, you would record the census data on punch cards and have a machine tabulate the data, right? These are initially custom made cards with special key punch

that'll add census takers to accurately punch holes, right? So, can I ask what you mean by tabulate? You said earlier on that it took eight years to tabulate the data. What do you mean tabulate? Just adding everything up so you get your final numbers and you get, you know, your various subdivisions and numbers. Percentage of Irish.

Percentage of Irish in this district. Right. So, instead, you can do that on punch cards and then you can just, like, do, do, do, and it'll do it. Yeah. You just shove it in the machine and the machine does it all for you, right? So, his tabulating machine company was an instant success.

His machines were on the market by 1886, used by several public statistics-taking organizations, right? So, these tabulating machines were simple. You know, you put the punch cards in, which have punched holes based on the data. Several spring-loaded wires were dropped on the card, right? Yeah. And if you're a 19th century public authority, right, the desire

for you to have data is there already, but the ease makes you desire it more. And because you are a 19th century civil servant, you start thinking, man, I could record anything with this. I could record race. Oh, yeah. Race. Race.

Even race. Soul size. Yeah. Numbers of Irish. And don't forget, this eventually becomes IBM, famous for not doing anything during World War II. That was bad. International business machines.

Now, where the wires were blocked by the card, no one was recorded, but where there was a punch in the card, the wires plunged into an electrified pool of mercury. What? Yeah. So, I've been working on this sentence for several years now, and it's making me feel very normal. Let me tell you about the space Martians that I think are

vibrate. Yeah. That's not good. And this completed a circuit, right? And that recorded a circuit. And this completed a circuit, right? And that recorded data. And killed World War II tabulated.

Yeah. One of this series of dials on the front of the machine. So, these dials tell you how Irish the person you're looking at is. Yeah. You do your bigger test, do you assign to your special points? Well, I mean, this one might be total people. This one might be percentage Irish. This one might be percentage Italian.

This one might be some factor accounting for skull size. Which is. All of the rest of these are skull size. This one down here is average depth of horseshit per street. In a pro back to charge babbage, one of them is just four. Yeah. It's like a sanity check of the four dollars. Then you have to check the machine.

I'd be interested to know how these machines affected people's trust in the census and the census taking authority. Because at least with a person, you can be like, oh, I understand that this person is adding things up. Even though I haven't checked the calculations, I understand how it works. But with this, God knows how this machine works. I assume you didn't just tell everyone. But I'm like, oh, I don't trust it.

It says we're 60% Irish, but what if it's more? Yeah. Yeah. I think you're predisposed to believe one way or the other about this. And I think a lot of liberals or whigs of the day are more likely to be like, oh, we're applying the infallible scientific method. Oh, yeah. This was adopted very enthusiastically by the census for 1890

because they didn't think they were going to get it done otherwise. Yeah. Somewhat Foucault is waiting to write a paper about this. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. Then once you've fed all the punch cards in, you read the numbers off all the dials and you record those and then those can be integrated into the census in some other fashion, depending on, you know, whatever.

You get, you record a huge amount of data very quickly. But yeah, the US Census bought a whole shitload of these machines and they finished the 1890 census in six years. Okay, come on. That's an improvement. It is. I mean, three years off is not bad. Yeah.

So, Polaris Company made a whole bunch of money. His machines got more sophisticated, automatic feed, you know, card sorting, arithmetic operation. More mercury. More mercury. They would print out specific statistics rather than have dials, right? You know, you'd have control panels so you could switch the machine between different jobs. And in 1911, his company and three of his competitors amalgamated into the computing,

tabulating recording company, which in 1924 became International Business Machines. Yeah, it's big blue. Yeah. And that's from that we got the standard punch card, this IBM 80 row card. Ah, okay. That's what this is. Excuse me. 80 column card.

That's the opposite of a row. You know, and this is the definition of computing for about 50 years. You know, it's 80 columns with digits one through nine on each of them. There's a section up top for information about the card. The machine can read the printed numbers don't necessarily mean exactly the printed numbers. You know, you could actually store a lot more data on these cards by just, you know, ignoring the numbers and putting stuff in and binary, right? But anyway,

And you can store a ton of data about race. Oh, race. The Nazis were fond of that. Yeah. Yeah. The IBM guys went out to install these in certain locations in Germany and occupied Poland in order to keep accurate records of don't worry about it. They were just trying to check phantom consumption.

They made a special version of the machine that automatically destroyed itself. If you press a button, you have to, you have to run the card through like six or seven times to determine the exact tiny fraction of Jewish blood you had in you in order to go to the camps or not. Jesus. There's definitely a complicated process there. But IBM facilitated it. They facilitated a huge data management operation in the process of genocide.

And they to this day, I don't believe they've apologized. No. Lions led by Donkeys, our sister show. If you've never heard of this, I'm sure our smart ass listeners have and also like to bring it up every time someone brings up IBM. Definitely check out their episode on it along with Fanta, which was developed by Coca Cola Germany.

And we see a culmination of my thing is like the person is reduced to a set of numbers in order to eliminate the state. That's good. Thank you. She got a history degree or something maybe. What is your undergrad degree in law? And I didn't graduate. I dropped out to do this.

Maybe I'll go to university in eight years. Some of us are in our 30s. Oh, my God. So 10. It's fine. We're going to automate your labor out of the podcast. So a big issue with punch cards is you need a lot of them to store a lot of data, right?

So here's here's a here's a bundle of punch cards. Recording. Don't worry about it. Yeah, probably one program. You see, they wrote a diagonal line here so you can easily sort them if you drop them. Oh, that is clever. The nightmare of dropping your program into like a thousand sheets. We call them little barbie tables.

This was literally drop tables. Fuck. Yeah, you're literally dropping the table. Yeah, this was a common problem. My when when my granddad taught at Washington Lee in the early days. Yeah. Yeah, as I've mentioned before, the most salt of the earth, Appalachian job, professor of economics at W and L.

You know, every once in a while, some undergraduate would, you know, drop a set of punch cards and lose all the data for their thesis. No, because they hadn't if they hadn't marked it properly, it would be a pain in the ass to resort it. Yeah. So using somebody's thesis as a coaster. Actually, that would probably be fine because it doesn't matter what's printed on there. As long as the holes intact, right?

Oh, I can see now looking closer to the diagram. That's where the mercury goes in. Yes. Right. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but, you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes, so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. So one of the things with punch cards is because they don't hand. There's not too much data on each one. You wanted to try and conserve wherever possible. So you abbreviate it, right?

Which is very common for dates. You know, uh-oh. Yeah. Oh, I think I see where we're going with that. Yeah. The general nomenclature for like a date went from like the March 11th of the year of our Lord, 1952 to like 3 slash 11 slash 52. Or if you wanted to get really aggressive, 07152. Meaning it was the 71st day of 1952.

Have you wanted it to be readable by absolutely nobody? It's readable by the machine though. Awesome. And this is where humans have to start thinking like machines in order to get jobs. Yes. Right. So if someone yells at me that it should be the 70th day, I would point out that 1952 was a leap year. Get their asses.

Yes. But this saves space on the cards for other data. And over a large program or a large set of data, this could add up a lot, right? And I mean, punch cards were very, very cheap. You get like a thousand of them for a dollar, but they were difficult to carry around. And again, if you drop them, you're having a bad day. Plus marginal improvement. And again, because I'm still thinking about totalizing institutions, you don't just use codes for dates.

You use codes for anything that you want to encode about a person, which means that you have to categorize things. You have to like have a useful little handy key printed out of what like, you know, group 01, group 02, group 03 means. But it's very... Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, gays. Exactly what I was getting. Yeah. It's very inflexible and it's very dehumanizing. Oh, well, it's perfect for literal fucking Nazis then.

Yeah. It's kind of cool to be carrying around a computer program and it's just like a stack of paper though. Oh, yeah. It's just a prick. That's quite funny. It's just a big, heavy brick. Can I hide it in something? Toss it through your local Starbucks window.

On the right here, you have an active sabotage. Yes. The precursor to the Black Facts, which is itself the precursor to the DDoS attack. This is a lace card. Yes. And a lace card is a fucking nightmare to a punch card computer. The thing about the lace card, this is a card where every single potential hole is punched, right? Which means the card has very little structural integrity now.

So if you feed it into the punch card machine, it tends to just shred. Yeah, eats it. And then it chams up all of the mechanical works of your computer. Oh, that's so cool. That's like, huh, you thought you had me beat, Yugi, but I planted my deck virus into your deck five turns ago. That's so good. I mean, this kind of like mechanical weakness is also where we get a computer bug from is, if you have a bunch of mechanical computation going on in a room and a bug gets in there,

it can stick in the thing. So you can just shuffle one of these into somebody's thesis and just fuck that whole shit up? Potentially. You fuck up everyone's thesis. Because the machine would break. Hi, I'm Braz's grandfather. This is Jackass. But then we had to go and ruin all of this beautiful futurism by inventing electronics.

That's a terrible idea. Transistor radios, you son of a whore. We diverge from the fallout timeline onto this. Yeah, we wind up, we wind up. So all right, think about realize is that, you know, they have moving parts, right? And that means they're a little, they're also big, right? So eventually we invent this thing called vacuum tubes that do the same thing in a smaller form factor, right? And they, they're solid state.

I don't know exactly how a vacuum tube works, but they do the same thing, right? Let's punch cards. They're electrically as real as switch. Yeah, as realize. And this is when computers start getting boring. I'm just scrolling back up to remind myself what radios work. So because all these relays, you know, they were big, they were bulky, they make a nice clicking noise, right? With some people don't like the clicking noise.

I like the clicking noise. I tried to really create a general purpose computer. Now there was this guy named Conrad Zeus, who'd taken a whole lot of him. He'd taken a whole lot of money from the Nazis and created a relay based computer in 1935 that was almost but not quite totally normal. And then I built this electronic computer. So instead of using electrical mechanical. These can still use cars, but in the way that they move, the way that they move electricity across switches to connect circuits as they're using these vacuum tubes instead of a relay. And that's how you do your logic gates.

That's how you do your ands and your ors and your not through these these glass tubes. Yeah. And then they don't, they don't have all the moving parts to make a noise. Got it. Okay. Yes. So so this guy Conrad Zeus made the Z three. That was a relay based general computer, but there wasn't much call for one.

So none very few other than that prototype were built right now. World War two happens. Yeah. And you need to use a computer for things that aren't genocide. You need to use a computer to things like fire control. You need to be able to go. I want to make an artillery shell land at such and such a point. There's a fundamental and difficult problem in ballistics, which is, you know, the science of non propelled objects moving through the air, which is this.

How do you get the dumbest guys, you know, artillery guys to do some to do some very advanced mathematics in the Royal Artillery Cadet Detachment. You're so right. I'm sorry infantry. I know it's normally you guys, but I've met artillery better than this guy. I always thought you just kind of looked through a little telescope and then you said they're over there and you kind of you fire at them until you hit them. But I suppose do you have to be the way. You had like analog artillery computers for that purpose, right, which is essentially it's a little it's like a me. Fancy little device that was, you know, you'd have some inputs that were in big block letters so you could read them.

And I don't understand much about how like artillery works. I mean, these kinds of things, they're a lot like nomograms. They're also not like the things that you use to mark fires from a fire sighting tower. You just sort of like you move a big wheel around like a slide rule and you kind of arrange things that way. And it's very, very fallible, particularly in something where you need to be precise like ballistics. Yes. Now, during World War Two, we're, of course, making all these new weapons. And that means they need all new artillery charts so they can create these little nomograms and little analog calculators, right?

And they need a machine that can make all this shit really, really quickly, right? That's what this is. This is what this is. This is the first general. Find a computer indispensable. Surely. Yeah. This is the first general purpose electronic computer.

The electronic numerical integrator and computer ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945. I simply, I'm simply getting smugger as you tell me that the first general purpose computer was invented to help the state make war in a reliable and industrialized fashion. At Penn, no less. At Penn, yeah. You sons of whores. The building where they built this is still the engineering school main building. They never shut up about it, do they? Exactly.

That's true. I hate that fucking school, man. Let's do it, Abby. They got a run-droom on it. That's the benchmark. They finish this on, like, December 10th, 1945, just in time for the war to be almost over. Perfect. December 10th, 1945 was after the war was over.

That's a good point, yeah. Maybe they were like, oh, we don't want it to be used for war. We won't let them do that to you, ENIAC. ENIAC's like, I do not want to kill humans. Yeah. The University of Pennsylvania, well known as a lover of peace. I think it was December 10th. It may have been a little bit earlier than that.

The first thing they used it for was to work on the atomic bomb project instead of artillery. Fucking modernity, red and tooth and claw. Yeah. Skynet, ass shit. So it was 100, no, 1,000 times faster than electromechanical adding machines, computing devices, IBM tabulating machines, so on and so forth. And it could be programmed to do anything, right? Essentially, anything.

Anything. Anything. Anything. If you're willing to wait long enough. Yeah, it's still trying to do E1M1 to this day. I think you could probably get it to display some ASCII porn. Yes. If you were willing to wait like half an hour.

Yeah, that's no trouble. I'm on SNRI, dude. Like the Colossus, like the bomb that they used at Bletchley Park. This is plugboard input. You see in the background, like a synthesizer, you just have a load of little connectors that connect those up with cables to get it to do what you want it to do. And this takes for fucking ever. Yeah, exactly.

If you can't program it through punch cards, you program it through, you know, switching cables around. There were some, what they called function tables, which are really big panels that had 1200 10-way switches on them, right? This process was very tedious. It took weeks to do, to set it up for one set of calculations. And the men didn't want to do it, so the women didn't. Also in programming, very, very old tradition.

Absolutely. Also, as we see from the caption of this, the thing about vacuum tubes is they can just die very easily. They get no sort of signal that they've done this. Absolutely. Which means that you have to, if your computer does not work, if it doesn't want to cooperate with you in doing atomic bomb shit, you have to go through all 19,000 of these fucking little tubes and check them individually.

Sounds like a like trusses. Yeah. I believe Eniac was also responsible for predicting the presidential election of 1948 and was able to give, I think, an accurate prediction of Truman wanting it. What was even weirder is that he did it in 1911. So yeah, this is, you know, you could input data and punch cards in this machine, but programming was very complicated. The machine had a whopping 20 bytes of memory.

It had 18,000 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 5 million hand-soldered joints. Jesus. That's a battleship. It weighed more than 30 short tons. It was roughly eight feet tall, three feet deep and 100 feet long. Holy shit. Occupied 1,800 square feet and it consumed 150 kilowatts of electricity.

The power requirement led to the rumor that when the computer was switched on, the lights in Philadelphia dimmed. Jesus. Philadelphia is always like that. Shut the hell up. Wait, is that the one that you're from or is that the other one? I forget. That's where we are right now.

Yeah. Oh, shit. I'm sorry. I meant that to be a compliment, but I got it mixed up with the other one. I'll tell you what. I was coming home from my friend's house a couple of days ago and I got a big roll-up door, which I can use to get into the back of my house. So I don't have to go to the front?

No. I opened the roll-up door and it got about halfway through. But a transformer blew down the street. Yeah, because they were trying to use any kind of print pole. Yeah. And then the whole block blacked out for like three seconds. And then the power came back on and I was like, shit, did I do that? Must have done.

I'll make that joke, but we are down the street from Penn. Oh, yeah. That's true. Yeah. So yeah, Enix, your first general-purpose computer proves very successful, does the job, but we invent something even better than vacuum tubes that make computers more boring, which is the transistor. The transistor.

Yes. It's a little tiny relay. You can put it on a chip and from then on, everything is silicon. Yeah. We use the poison sand and everything gets smaller, way smaller in fact. Yeah. You know, you got no moving parts. You don't have any wearing parts really.

That is a very cool invention though. We got a mechanical thing that reads cards to like, we made it small and it never wears up. Yeah. We put a bunch of like arsenic and some sand and the result is that now you can do math without like any kind of mechanical interaction whatsoever. Yeah. We put arsenic and sand and now we've destroyed democracy.

Yes. Also that. Also that. Yeah. Use a semi conductor to create a fully solid state switch. No moving parts, very tiny, very reliable. Your computer start to take recognizably modern forms. This is an IBM 1401 system.

You see the big tape hard drives. I always thought those were so cool. These are some like, I think these are either punch card feeders or sorters over here. You know, this is, this is for like big business applications, right? These came out in the 1950s. They could have up to a whopping 16,000 individual characters of memory. Right. You could start 16,000 letters or number.

It's in there for actual computing purposes. Obviously storage was in these big tape drives. Right. So again, like abbreviations space, you try to keep everything down. What you would use this for is indexing of paper files. So it tells you where to find a paper file that you need rather than storing any of the data on it. But that's still a huge efficiency gain.

Or as we mentioned in our last episode on Penn Central, railroad car routing, railroad car tracking, some passenger ticketing, which actually there were some pretty wild electromechanical systems for passenger ticketing before electronic computers. But these, those are upgraded pretty quickly and then, you know, disregarded because we have no passenger trains in America. But yeah, you can, you can do a lot with 16,000 characters. It transpires. It's true.

Yeah. Oh, my tweets would be unstoppable. But the drive is always to get more. You need more. To do that, you need to start like having more efficient methods of data storage. Things like things like magnetic tape is it's an improvement on punch cards. It's it's got great data fidelity. It's very well, but it doesn't store a lot of data.

That's why like you can't fit as much music on a cassette as you can on a CD kind of thing. Yeah. And we progressed towards things like optical media based on needing more space. So, you know, these, these, I don't know what the capacity of these tape drives are, but yeah, stuff doesn't prove. So for instance, here is a five megabyte hard drive being loaded into an airplane. Wow.

Wow. This is this is in what, 1956? IBM 350 hard disk drive. It has 50, 24 inch platters, right? So 24 disks or 50, 24 inch disks for that five megabytes of data. Incredible. Wow. Now, I mean, you've really got to want to look at that porn.

Now, all of your porn, on the other hand, is stored in the photo on the bottom right. That is the sort of the culmination of my point about data and the state and storage. Yeah. This is the Utah data center. It was built for the, the NSA amongst others. And it's sort of a central data holding facility, one of several, but I believe the largest that the US government runs and it facilitates a lot of mass data collection because if you intercept a lot of phone calls and you read a lot of emails and things of this nature,

you need to fucking put that shit somewhere. And this is the, this is where they put all of it. So what you're telling me is we can just take out that building and Good luck trying. I think if you like take two steps towards this thing, you get sawn in half. It's like all of this is filled with racks and racks of servers for data storage. It's an enormous environmental draw uses huge, huge amounts of water power for like cooling all of this shit.

And it's just sort of the, the apotheosis right of big data is that you can store all of this shit like this. But there's, there's another thing that I want to talk about, which is that like obviously storing huge amounts of data takes a lot of space still. And while we've gotten much better at it, it's still a problem. Data storage is one thing. Data transport is another. We're really bad at transferring data.

And so what you have on the top right here is an Amazon Web Services snowmobile. And this is, this is a tractor trailer, a semi truck, which contains, I think it's like exabytes worth of data. It's the snowmobile. Amazon Web Services big truck. They will send this to you with an armed escort and not a kind of like joke armed escort, the kind of like snow crash kind of corporate armed escort. And if you need to transport a lot of data securely, this is more efficient to physically

put it on a truck like it's on pallets than it is to try and move it. Even something like, so much shit gets moved through the US mail, through people carrying like even like SD cards or hard drives, which is called sneak a net charmingly. There's this, like, it's still an unsolved problem of data transfer. And so these two things, the fact that data takes a lot of space and a lot of resources to store. And the fact that it's very difficult to transport mean that you want to abbreviate still as much as possible. That's why you want to collect metadata.

That's why you want to like categorize. That's why you want to abbreviate. So inside that truck, just so I can picture it, there's like a hard drive or a laptop. Hundreds, thousands of them. Big, big thing. Think of like massive server racks that run down the whole length of that in like a climate controlled environment. It's a hundred petabytes per snowmobile. And a petabyte is a thousand terabytes.

Wow. If I'm not mistaken. I mean, even to be able to access that data, you would need like the fucking enterprise, like. For reference, I have a 53, well with redundancy, 53.6 terabyte server. Okay. Wow. Yeah. Good for you, Liam.

Thank you. I have the login to it. And it has taken me, Abby, years and years and years to collect that much data. But it's the same. It's the same as the Ontario highways. Because what you do is you induce demand. The more data you collect, the more you want to use it. And the more you want to use it, the more data you collect until until you end up with the Utah data center.

Until you end up just collecting everything. That's a very little value to you, potentially, because. Hey, you leave my flag backups alone. Just running up to that truck and putting a lace card in it. Like, haha. I just want to comment on this tractor trailer. They've made it all white in an attempt to be discreet. Like, oh, this is an ordinary snowmobile.

It's the least discreet thing. It's up there with the safeguard transport so that the fucking the NNSA moves nuclear weapons in. It says to me there is a highly like laden down black suburban with tinted windows in front of and behind this truck. Well, I mean, you can just look and see. Oh, third axle sums up with this. What's funny is because you're doing economies of scale, which is super important to this. I'm looking at how much snowmobile like the snowmobile pricing details. And it's zero point zero zero five dollars for a gig per month.

But I assume you have to be storing like. There's no minimum we could badly irritate Amazon Web Services. Send me this truck so I can toss a one external hard drive in the back of it. Actually, I want you to host my super illegal. I guess all of my music piratins. This this highly secure data facility where they'll shoot you on site. If you approach it is built out of tilt up concrete, which is going to get knocked over in a stiff wind. Oh, yeah.

Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania, which is built into literally Iron Mountain. I'm just wondering how do you become an armed guard for Amazon? Like, where's the recruiting service that gets you that? It's easy. Abby, your co-workers say, Hey, maybe we should unionize. And what you do is you take a shift to them and say, Daddy, please save me. Now, what you want to do is you want to get out of the US military at a like a junior officer or senior enlisted rank. You want to get out of the US military and go to a clearance, a security clearance job fair where all of these guys will try to recruit you for secret shit.

Next slide, please. Oh, well, I was just going to comment on this. There's this five megabyte drive. It's not just big because data storage was inefficient. You could easily store this in a tape drive. I'm, you know, something that was more the size of a cabinet than, you know, a five ton pallet thing, right? I really appreciate your weird obsession with tape drives. Yeah, it's fun.

But this is, this is a hard, this is one of the earliest hard disks where you could access any kind of invitation, any kind of in any information anywhere on the hard drive instantly, rather than having to wait for the tape to scroll to where it is. Right. That's one of your, that's one of your advantages to this hard disk over tape drive because tape drive, you have to. Yeah. Absolutely. Technology. Don't get an SSD. Next slide.

Next slide. Next slide. Be kind. We rewind an hour and a half in and we get to the culprit of our problem here. You're not doing enterprise scale shit, Alice, unless I'm certainly mistaken. This is an RTC. It's a real time clock. It's a little chip that you put into a computer because sometimes a computer needs to know what time it is.

And there are two, basically two ways of figuring out what time it is for a computer, like on a hardware side. One is you have a little quartz clock in there. The other is that you just fucking read it off the mains electricity with some very clever electrical engineering. And remember what I said about how timing makes a, makes a significant difference in a lot of applications? Not just things like where you need to know exact timing, like say train timetables, but also things where you need to know what you've computed when, right? There's a lot that depends on these. And so every computer will have one of these in it, just as a fact of life. And what it's actually intended to do, the priority of displaying you what time it is, that's way low down there.

Measuring things like how long it's been since you last powered the computer, even while it's off, for instance. That's something that this needs to do. It needs to do a bunch of shit. And so they're in everything. This will be a problem. Next slide, please. But we don't know when exactly because they're all broken. Exactly.

Now, join me, Mr. Sharfo, in the Mastercard Y2K Command Center. I was going to say, you know, we went through all this computer history and it's kind of like, why are we talking about all the old timey shit when we're talking about a problem that, you know, it starts at the end of history. And this type of office, right? Yeah, when everything was fine. Like, this is like the Salvador Allende cyber cyber sin, but for capitalism. Yeah. Yeah. And there's two reasons why one is international finance.

Yes. We accidentally computerized it. We turned a bunch of guys making bets on a chalkboard and a coffee house. Yeah. Into the way that we organize. We accidentally made that the way that we allocate resources for some reason. And we required them to be able to do this and make those bets several hundred times a second. So therefore, finance just computerized everything and everything was computerized by finance in a way that required a lot of very precise timing.

Even just to prevent fraud. I like the old fashioned phones, though. They are cool. Oh, yeah, they're nice. Even just like someone steals your card, right? And take some money out as an ATM. You will have a timestamp of that exactly because the ATM will have a little RTC in it that tells it what time it is. And they'll be able to pull the camera footage of that.

That's that's a concern too. So that's one reason that's finance. The other reason is just sort of entropy, I guess. Legacy systems. Yeah. I think that's one of the things that was still running with punch cards and these old timey, you know, embedded computers because lots of like big industrial processes or have machines that run for 30, 40 years or more. Right. You know, stuff that's designed only for that function.

Yeah, exactly. Like, I don't know. You're in a steel mill, maybe, you know, and you have like some kind of like maybe maybe the ladle that dumps the molten steel into the crucible or whatever. You know, has like a IBM machine attached to it that was designed in 1956, which is the last time you modernized that steel mill because it's incredibly expensive to do so. Right. And now the dates aren't going to work. Yeah. Every single one of these things has a little RTC in there ticking away and it's ticking away.

But because everything is abbreviated, you want to use a shorter date format as possible. And the shortest way to write a date is with any year is two digits. You use the last two digits. Loads of stuff was punch card operated well after you might expect like up until like the 80s, the 90s. Right. Especially the 90s are relevant here. You know, especially again, heavy industrial processes where you don't want to replace the machinery so often because it's all like one off custom made shit, which is incredibly expensive. So the computer knows like 1991, what?

Because it knows 91, 92, 93. When you get to 2000, 00, it can't tell the difference between 2000 and 1900. Yes. Exactly. Yes. So it's going to be like, we've all gone back in time. Now it's we're doing computations. Yeah.

1900s. Yeah. One hat. Yeah. Exactly. I can sexually harass other computers now. And as people start to realize. Remember, there's that line from FutureArmor where Ben does like, are you familiar with the old robot saying does not compute?

Well, as people start to realize that every computer knows what year it is and actually weirdly depends on what year it is for a lot of things, people start to get worried and then they start to get more worried. And then they start to next slide, please. I was going to another anecdote. Coincidentally. Coincidentally. So these, these legacy computer systems kind of keep like an old timey computer business afloat even today, right? So like, I remember there was near where I lived, coincidentally, very close to where the Capitol Beltway truck convoy is now blockading the right to work building. There was, there was like a computer recycler and reseller that, you know, as of 2011 was still selling computers from like the 1980s.

Their biggest customer had to go on eBay to get an 8-bit Pentium chip. Yeah. Their biggest customer, I think, was a, a, a dairy processor across the street. Sure it was. Because, yeah, because, because their, their systems all ran on shit from like the 80s. And if anything broke, they had to go across the street to the used computer store to get it because it would be too expensive and complicated to upgrade the computer system. Organizations just have this sort of like entropic feature. It's the same way that like Mossad is able to just destroy a bunch of centrifuges in Iran because they're all hooked to like Phillips SCADA systems.

And like, once those are compromised, what are you going to do? Change them all out? Of course you are. Seaman systems, actually. That's what Stuxnet targeted. Excuse me. Sorry. I don't, I don't mean to insult the, the, the brave hack.

The good people of Mossad. The NSA and Mossad. Yeah. But so, so everybody became. Wow, Mossad gone after a German company. Who would have thought? Yeah, that, that's sort of working with them. Yeah.

But people became very worried. And next slide, please. And the febrile atmosphere of the 1990s, because a lot of people think that, oh, it was just the end of history. No, the end of history was an elite opinion for elites. Normal people and abnormal people for that matter during the Clinton years were going completely fucking insane. As NAFTA started to bite, you had the birth of the militia movement, which we'll get into. You had a lot of millenarian symbolism because Americans ever since, well, ever in particular have loved a symbolic date. You guys love that shit.

People like Jesus is coming back on, on, you know, December 31st. And the new millennium, like the year 2000 is a frightening, frightening prospect to just sort of numerically. If you've lived your whole life in the 20th century, you're going to be in a new one. It feels like a demarcation point. I thought this was going to be the fourth great awakening when the fourth great awakening was actually queuing on. Come on, Jason. No, no, don't look back. It's going to take another 20 years, guys.

Now, this has been known, right? Like, computer programmers kind of knew that this would be a problem. But it, like, it didn't become a mass hysteria until, like, they sort of warn me about it in public because of, again, financial systems, because you have bonds that are going to mature in 2000 and everybody's like, oh, this 100-year bond is now a 200-year bond or whatever. So the financial industry was well ahead of everyone else in, like, fixing Y2K issues just because they found an issue where, you know, these bonds had to be issued and the data had to correspond to it. Now, I don't know how that affected bonds which had been imported into the system earlier, but yeah. But you also have this kind of creeping terror of people who are aware that everything has a computer in it now, had no real say in this, feel very, very alienated from it, and don't understand it or frightened of it and therefore think everything has a computer in it, everything that has a computer in it is going to fail.

And so on the 1st of January 2000, there will be no electricity anymore because the power plants will have computers in them. All of the prison gates will open because they have computers in them. There will be terrorist attacks because terrorists have computers in them and there will be wild dog packs because wild dogs have computers in them. Not domestic dogs, though, which is confusing to me. No, that's what happens when they get spayed or doodled. I remember the 31st of December 1999 when I was minus two years old. But I do remember the stroke of midnight. I was at a big party at the time.

I was very, very young then, but I do remember it. And I remember there was like a good like 10 or 15 seconds after the stroke of midnight when everyone was just like, oh. No, I mean, the speaker still works, so are you ever all right? Yeah, okay, let's go. So there was like a real tension. You see some more of this fear of technology. A lot of the evangelicals in particular were very, very frightened of barcodes when those became adopted universally as the mark of the beast. I used to see that with the 5G shit.

Because the barcodes have like 666 hidden in them. Classic times. It's like no, it's like sublimated anxiety because now all of this stuff has this symbolism on it that you don't understand why it's there. And no one consulted you. It's just, it's just been imposed on you. There's a really good book called The End of Money that touches on. I highly recommend it. It's a bit technocratically weird, but, you know, there's a whole section about this evangelical guy who basically refuses to use credit cards because he believes, you know, they're the devil or whatever.

It's just really interesting to watch. Thanks, but it's true. That's right. The Omen films came out and they were like, the Antichrist is going to come and it's going to be a charismatic person with the surname of Thorne who has like political and entertainment connections. That's just ridiculous. Next slide, please, because I have this photo that I found at the last minute, which I love a lot. This is a family in Colorado with their Y2K supplies. And I think this says much, much more than it was meant to at the time.

Right. I think this, this speaks to a kind of terror. I mean, the nineties were this place where like there was this pendulum, right? The right wing in America exists on a pendulum between we love our cops. We love our law enforcement and where it was in the nineties, which is the president of the NRA calling the ATF. Jack booted storm troopers. And this was, this was the far end of like right wing distrust of the federal government in particular. And so a lot of these people went into militias, the consequences of which are still being felt to this day.

And a lot of people started prepping. And I feel like this was like, obviously it existed because of nuclear war before this and even before that. But this was prepping's big cultural moment was that there would be a defined moment when the shit would hit the fan. You could no longer rely on the government or anybody else. And there would be others outside waiting to take your bucket full of food and you would have to shoot them in order to keep us. In order to defend your, I'm zooming in here, rice or roni and bag of raisins. These people have always fantasized themselves to be sort of the, you know, in the event of it's like the same reason. The same way gold is positioned, even though like when the apocalypse comes, how much useful is your gold going to be?

This is a comically small amount of firewood. Yeah, I was thinking that it's not a lot of firewood. It's not a lot of food either. I guess there's a bigger pile back here. But yeah, this is all generally a comically small amount of everything. I think this is a neat little window into the American, the white American psyche here. And let's not overlook that T-shirt, the boy on the left that says Jesus's life. Jesus's life.

No, he's actually dead. That's the whole point. What about this pickup truck though? Oh, I mean back before the pickup trucks got big. So it's not a tank, but it's small, but it still looks like it's got an eight foot bed though. Yeah. Spiritually it has a gun rack. Yeah. Maybe that's what's in the jab box.

Maybe. Yeah, I think I'm thinking about this image. I'm going to be thinking about it for a while. But of course, as we know, I used my favorite book cover in recent times as the next slide. As we know, nothing happened. Nothing. Well, nothing to worry about when things happened. Because there were at least two Japanese nuclear power plants where a couple of safety systems failed.

Not critical ones though. They got confused. U.S. Naval Observatory that day reported the date as 1900. That's quite cute. That was a fairly common error actually. We should change it though. We should have just done that. Now, not in the 21st century, it's now 1922.

I think there was an incident in the UK where a bunch of medical tests were sent out to pregnant mothers informing them of the risk of Down syndrome in their children. And because of the date change, they were all wrong. So a bunch of healthy babies got aborted and a bunch of kids with Down syndrome who would have been aborted otherwise were born. Yeah. And Y2K had a body count after all. This is true. So it is a problem.

There is your problem. It depends on how you define abortion. Jesus. But what didn't happen were wild dog packs roaming the streets, as far as I know. They were all domesticated dog packs. Exactly. Plains didn't drop from the sky. And there's a consequence of this.

Wasn't there any terrorists in the early 2000s at all? No, thankfully. And so as a consequence, people learned a lesson from this, which is everything is fake, actually. And you shouldn't ever be worried about anything because it's going to work out. Nothing actually happens. Yeah. And there's this kind of thing where a lot of programmers and a lot of hardware developers spent many, many years working on this. It cost something like $400 billion because what they were doing was going in and replacing all of these little RTC chips in things that would otherwise have had obsolete ones.

Oh, really? They just did it by hand? Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes it literally was just changing out apart. But because that's like uninspirational and because it's nerdy and because it takes a long time and it doesn't like make for good media. Because it's all done by women. Well, also, yes. This was like totally unremembered.

Even very, very quickly afterwards, I think the consensus about Y2K was that it was a joke. I'd certainly hire over at Culturally, yeah. Is it like, oh, the nerds warned us about this thing and then nothing happened? Yeah, we didn't listen to the nerds the same way we didn't listen to the hippies who turned out to be completely right. And this is, I marked this up as a rare sort of dub for mankind, a rare entry in the wind column alongside the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain. Like in some ways, those easy and I'm doing big air quotes, those easy wins really fucked us in the long term because we thought, ah, well, it's fine then. Clearly, we don't have to worry about any of this other shit because someone's going to take care of it and it's probably not even a problem in the first place. And I mean, clearly this was a case of hysteria, right?

Like a lot of this was blown wildly out of proportion. Wild dog packs were not going to roam the streets and eat you. Yeah. If the plane lost navigation, you could always take out the sextant and the big hominac and figure out where you are. Oh, it's four. Oh, yeah. It's four. It was four all along.

But there was a real problem here and it did take effort to fix and it was fixed, like largely because of the sort of self-preservation instincts of capital. And we learned nothing from this whatsoever. Learn nothing. Well, I mean, that's not true. I'll say this, right? We learned, next slide please, we learned not to use a legacy system just for the sake of it being a legacy system because we don't know how to upgrade it. Incidentally, this is a floppy disk that controls ICBM launches. Those were only...

Sorry, what? Is that an eight inch floppy? That is an eight inch floppy disk as used by the Strategic Air Command. They used these until 2019 as command and control for nuclear weapons systems. Oh, now some guy from Fort Chan can just hack into it because it's connected to the Internet. Great. I don't know. I trust the eight inch floppy.

Estradiol, we'll do that to you. And next slide please. We learned a lot about putting computers in things for no reason. We stopped doing that and now things are only online. I've never heard of the Internet of Things. When they have a good practical reason, please ignore this photo of a Weber grill that on Thanksgiving needed a software update. I find the future is so goddamn stupid. Indispensable.

And of course, best of all, next slide please. There was an article on Billy Penn today. Oh, the Bitcoin house. Bitcoin mining house, yes, that someone's selling up on like 42nd Street. They're like, oh, you have a Bitcoin miner implanted in your house already. It's also connected to Internet of Things, which all your appliances are. I'm like, I don't know. This is somehow going to cause my oven to eat me if I have something like that.

The packs of wild dogs are real now. And of course, the washing machine is going to walk its way across the house and block me in my bedroom and then catch fire. Feed me. It's going to go to the wash and fold across the street. And of course, we also learned not to worry too much about apocalyptic dates. And we have here a headline from The Guardian saying, is the year 2038 problem the new Y2K bug? And proclaiming that it's going to cause computerized doom. And that it's somehow the fault of trans women.

Absolutely. Congratulations. I mean, the year 2038 thing is even funnier because it exists by virtue of Unix systems having this kind of French Revolution calendar, whereby they count up in seconds from midnight 1st of January, 1970. That's the epoch, yes. And it's a 32-bit number. And sometime in 2038, it will become larger than a 32-bit number. The question is, can you replace all of these 32-bit systems in time?

Because a lot of systems now count up with 64 bits. In which case, you do have to worry about the year 292 billion problem. I think we may have some time to fix that one. I will say that. A little best buy sticker that says, please remember to turn off your computer before midnight on 1231, 292 billion, 1970. But that in a little sci-fi video game as an Easter egg? No, it wouldn't be that date. Because the Gregorian calendar gets a little shugly at that time.

Oh, no. Yeah. It's not that precise. Shugly? Yeah, shugly. Wait, is the calendar going to run out? Are we going to run out of dates? No, what's going to happen is the leap seconds are going to count.

The leap seconds, because everything is in approximation because the year is not 365 days. 365 days, six hours and change. So the current thing is... If no one updates the calendar in the next 292 billion years, it's going to be really bad for your computer. Exactly, right? So what have we learned about YCK here? Go back to vacuum tubes? That's another thing that most computers didn't have programmed into them or some of the nuances of the Gregorian calendar,

such as that years divided by, I think, 400 are not leap years. Right. So 2000 was not a leap year, but 2004 was. Our next non-leap year is 2400. The way a computer wants to think is that it's the 31st of February. Yeah, not the 31st, but the 31st. Yeah, it's the 31st of February kind of thing. 1900.

Exactly. Think like a computer, everything else is. Just count up seconds and store that as a floating point value in your brain. Yeah. And this podcast and anything that you type in the comments will be minutely recorded in a data center in Utah. In China, they teach you how to use a mental abacus. So I believe we should teach our children to use a mental adding machine. That's what they've been teaching me.

Fuck you, buddy. Yeah, Abby has been aging in reverse through this podcast. The curious case of abacus. Yeah, abacus. Yeah. Putting a button on that podcast. Every week or so, I have to go down to the beach that makes you old. Just to keep from pressing into that wound.

I got a new idea for a picture of Dorian Gray's style novel now. Just my YouTube videos. It's called Easter Dial. I've heard it does that. It does. It makes you look younger or makes you have a haunted painting. That too. Whichever.

Yeah. I thought that was how it worked. The haunted painting? Yeah. Yeah, you've got to wait several years so that you can paint the haunted painting. You have to get like two painters to sign off on it. But on this podcast, we have a science-based, wait, no. The science-based segment called Safety Third.

Incidentally, if you want to send one of these in, it's wtyppod at gmail.com. You should do that. Yeah, try it on the air. Try and keep the text to about a page. Otherwise, it goes too long. Today's Safety Third comes from the Balkans. Oh, no. Uh-oh.

Okay. Hello, Alice, Liam, and Roz. Didn't include guest. Canceled. Yeah, sorry. Abby's canceled. We're canceled for being Russian like Tchaikovsky. First, let me say how much I love that you found the clip of shaking hands with danger.

I had to watch that video while an engineer officer basic school and is in my top five comedies ever made. As an Army engineer, in addition to learning how to build roads, bridges, and buildings, all on license because the Army builds in a pre-PE exam world, I got to play around with explosives and landmines. Oh, yeah. This is about as much fun as you would imagine. A lot for explosives, but not so much for the landmines.

This led to a large number of safety issues, especially when I was in Bosnia working in humanitarian demining. Shake leg with danger. Yes. Shake toe cap with danger. Denied for years that you were doing anything involving danger. Shake it all up. On my first day on the job, we were visiting a site that was being demined by a group of

Bosnian soldiers. As we walked up to the campfire, where all meetings began with coffee, two soldiers were hiking out of the woods that were being demined. I asked as they approached if they had found anything, and in response, one of the soldiers threw an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade like a football to me. Classic Bosnian prank. We call it hot potato. These style RPGs were known not to explode when shot because they had to have a certain

number of revolutions to arm, leaving them very much alive and liable to go off when handled. So I watched as it spiraled towards me, wondering how many rotations it had left in it before becoming live, and did my best Jerry Rice impression to catch the RPG without letting any part of me touch the fuse at the head and risk setting it off. As my heart was calming down, I went to hand the RPG back to the soldiers who said, laughing, oh yeah, we disarmed at first. Should have passed it back to them. Assholes, they're everywhere.

Also, while in Bosnia, my boss begged to be taken out in a field with us. He was a desk Jackie and never got to go out and wanted to have more of a story to tell than that I sat in a walled off compound for half a year. You would not catch me doing this shit in the army. Let me sit at the desk, yeah. Finally, the timing and the pleading worked out for him, and he tagged along on a trip to a mountain site where a family of Bosnian brothers held off a Serbian advance along a narrow road called the Greeno River.

It sounds like a Bosnian 300 Spartan situation. Well, the 300 Spartans would have found it a lot easier with anti-personnel mines, I think. Yeah, mine. It's like a cheat code to the Prussians. This is the issue with the Spartan military legacy is it's really exaggerated. They weren't very good, and this was due in part to the militaristic culture actually not producing military, but also they never thought to use mines. So the Bosnian brothers held out the Serbian advance along a narrow road corridor next to

the Greeno River. It was full of mines and unexploded ordnance due to the brothers' efforts, and I figured it would be a good show for my boss. It was that type of thinking that almost left me as a red mist. My personal policy was not to wear armor in a minefield as if you hit something you were regardless. Oh, that is Liam Logic right there. I don't need to wear a seatbelt.

I'll be thrown clean. I do wear a seatbelt. I was talking more about the heritage run where I told Roz that, A, no medics were coming for us, and even if they did, we would be marinara long before they got to us. He said, okay, no way we went. So why be hot and sweaty? But my boss insisted on wearing his armor, right? It's not like...

When we got to the minefield and drank our obligatory coffee with the Serbian soldiers working on this site, I turned to my boss and told him that this was an active demining site. So don't assume anything is cleared ever. Only walk where others are walking and stay the hell out of the way. He was very mindful of my directions for all of two minutes. Whereas we climbed the hillside, one of the Serbian soldiers rushed over to tell us they had found a daisy chain cluster of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines if we wanted to go take

a look. My boss pulled out his camera and rushed forward, so excited to get a picture. It did not register to him what daisy chain meant, or to hear that there were six anti-personnel mines, or that these were freshly uncovered and had not been deactivated yet. My boss was a great admirer of the film, a Serbian film. Are we looking at them in the picture? I'm not sure what we're looking at. I can't see anything.

It just looks like grounds to me, but I get untrained eyes. The setup was, though, that if one of them was triggered, the whole lot would go off about 50 pounds of explosive give or take. He was walking forward to get a nice close-up of the anti-tank mine and was stepping directly on an anti-personnel mine when I caught up with him and dragged him back by his armor. I cursed him out and had him escorted back to the vehicles to think about what he had done and to wait for us to finish the day. On the plus side, the picture turned out to be great.

You can spot the hidden land mines here. Oh, yeah. I can kind of see one on the right, just underneath the toe there, and there's one on the left. Maybe this is one. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. It's the third one over there near the red matchhead-looking thing. You must have good eyes, though.

I'd have stepped on that. All right. Definitely step. I'd step on any land mine anywhere. There's no way. I'd be killed instantly in any battlefield. I mean, I can only see three. He said six, right?

Yeah. Six. Six anti-personnel and an anti-tank. I assume this is what the stakes are for. I will say there is one trick to detecting mines, which is you sort of, you click on a square, right? And the number shows up, and then you know that there's probably mines, you know. How do you fees to detect mines now?

I have a foolproof, I have a foolproof technique for detecting whether or not a mine is present in an area. You walk around, and if you're losing a leg suddenly, you have detected that a mine is in the area. And you've also neutralized it, so. Absolutely. It's a good point, yeah. The finest mine clearance techniques of 1941 Stalingrad.

You can do that up to twice. Get arms, don't you? Well, it's a matter of your, like, six freebies. Good luck in your struggles from JC. Well, I hope they aren't as bad as you are. Yeah. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Army Officer Jesus.

Thank you, Mr. Corbin. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Corbin. Yes. Our next episode is on the Boston Molasses Disaster. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? You should listen to Kill James Bond.

That's a good idea. Do you watch Philosophy Tube? Yeah, yeah. Please do if you don't. I mean, I do put a lot of work into it, and it does have a Patreon, so if you would like me to continue making the things that I make, then why not consider signing up to that? It's not like this podcast where you get bonus stuff. No, it's good.

I mean, you do get rewards, like, you know, you can get, like, little cards or books or stuff when you get your name and the credits or something. You could get some philosophy in a tube. Absolutely. Yeah. That's nice. Oh, man, I'm going to make pills very grand after we're done this. Also, like, if I'm in a TV show or a play or something, I could watch it.

God, that always helps. Follow, follow, follow Abby on Twitter. Yeah. Is it Philosophy Tube? Philosophy underscore tube? At Philosophy Tube, yeah. Yeah. All right.

It's a podcast. That was a podcast, folks. All right. Four. Four. Four. Four. All right.

Bye, everybody. It's a golf podcast, yeah. Taking a 9-9 to my minefield, yeah.