It's Sunday, June 27th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grophy. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international non-profit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. I'm really happy that my guest this week is Paul Kurtz. He's one of the founders of the worldwide skeptics movement. He's Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a founder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, PsyCOP. He's also founder of the Council for Sacred Humanism and of Prometheus Books, and has served as editor-in-chief of Free Inquiry Magazine and has edited Skeptical Inquirer Magazine for many years. He's a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been featured very widely in the media on topics as diverse as reincarnation, UFO abduction, religious versus secular ethics, communication with the dead. You name it, if it had to do with skepticism over the last many decades, he's talked about it. In fact, he's really advanced a critical thinking, a humanistic and skeptical inquiry into many of the most cherished beliefs society's had for the last 40 years. So Paul Kurtz, it's a great pleasure to welcome you to For Good Reason. Delighted to talk to you, DJ, and always enjoyed your sharp questions. Well, thank you, Paul. Along with Randy or along with Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Ray Heimann, this group of men in the 70s, there were a couple others. You are one of the central founding figures of the modern skeptical movement. So before we get into exuberant skepticism, let me just ask you, is the skeptics movement, is it turning out like all of you planned in the mid-70s? Well, it's part of the landscape and I'm pleased about that. I think I was the one who first initiated and then I invited these other people and I was delighted when they came to the State University of New York, Buffalo, where we got it going.  You bring people together. I don't know about that, but I do try to, maybe I give them a shock. That's why they conduct this, that's how it gets going. But in the case of Get Off the Good Start, immediately, I think it hit the front page of the New York Times and ever since that, it's now part of the landscape. So I'm pleased about that. I mean, people have talked about skepticism, but now it seems to be more current. And I think we're responsible for that to some extent. So you think it's had some impact. You're proud of where it's, where it's how it's turned out. But what's more to do as you know, there are foolish beliefs everywhere. But yes, we've made a great deal of progress. Wouldn't you say though that the shape of this worldwide skeptics movement, it was never really planned, right? A group of men didn't sit in a back room and kind of plot a 30 year plan for it to turn out this way. No, we didn't plan that. It seemed to me growing out of my criticism of astrology that was very successful internally, that we need to critically examine other ideas. And so I did invite people here at a conference in Buffalo and we got it launched, yes. And so it is widely used now and particularly in science and in politics and business and other areas.  But the point is you're recognizing there has been impact. So Paul, your new book is exuberant skepticism. Honestly, it's one of the best books I've read on these issues. It belongs on everyone's shelf right next to Sagan and Randy and the other classics, I think. So for you, skepticism is not just doubt. It's a kind of active inquiry. It's life affirming. Is that what you mean by exuberant skepticism as opposed to just run of the mill skepticism? Yes, I think you've touched on the key point that I wanted to make. Many people keep consider skeptics to be cold fish, to doubt doubt doubt. And that form of skepticism is negative and it has existed throughout history and still exists today, but there is a positive form of skepticism. And that's what I've been defending and my colleagues have been doing it as well. So skeptics shouldn't be going around just doubting everything. Otherwise, there's not much difference between a scientific skeptic. You know, I've had I've put a lot of college students over the years that we often touch on skepticism. And I find out many young college students are skeptics. They doubt everything. There's no such thing as knowledge. There's no truth. Then those things values go to bed right or wrong. And I try to show them that that is mistaken. So you argue for something you call selective doubt. It's not doubt in general. It's selective. If you doubt in general, you never get up in the morning and go out. So you have to take things for granted and act on the best knowledge that you have. So you're right. Selective skepticism, which I consider not negative, but positive. So how does one decide, Paul, what to be skeptical of and what to accept? Well, I don't know that one decides that in life, you encounter problems. You have questions of what is true and false. Issues of knowledge always arise. And the skeptical attitude is to raise questions and ask for evidence and reason. And until you have that, then when someone claims something, it may not be true. And when you believe it, it may not be true. I'm sure you can show evidence for it. So you're zeroing in on evidence. That's the thing skeptics get all wound up about. It's about the evidence and also reasons. And many, like in a court of law, you argue a case. So you reason is true. So evidence and reasons and consequences. If someone believes something, well, what are the consequences? So this form of skepticism is a kind of practical knowledge by which you live. Paul, you've argued that this kind of skepticism, this method of inquiry, it's the same that's used in the sciences. Is skepticism the same thing as science or are you drawing a distinction? Well, science is based upon a method of inquiry. And the modern science is developed by leaps and bounds and still is because it uses these rigorous methods to test claims to knowledge. But you can extend that beyond science, the ordinary life, the politics, the ethics, the business, the personal affairs. Now that that itself is a kind of controversial claim because there are many skeptics the past 30 years who say skepticism should put its blinders on and only treat those things which you can scientifically investigate. Well, no, I see that as too narrow because a lot of things we can't scientifically investigate. For example, in personal relations, if you fall in love with someone and you want to know that is that person true to you? Well, if you find she or he is going out with someone else behind your back, then you ought to be skeptical. So it applies to every area of human life and not only the science. So I want to zero in myself on how you see skepticism more broadly applied. It's not just about fact claims, but it's vital to the life well lived. Is all the life life well lived and the life well lived should be based upon a kind of rationality or reasonableness. It's based upon reasonable choices that we make and we have to doubt those things that we want to choose if they don't hold up under scrutiny. So but you've argued that it's more about just knowledge claims that may or may not hold up under scrutiny. It has to do with self liberation, escaping the bonds of prejudice, idols, avoidable errors to use poppers line. It's it's really, you know, it's it's it like leads to a more enriched life. It's not just about being right or wrong. Well stated, indeed, I think it's the mark of the educated mind and you can be educated without going to college or university. It's a thoughtful person who does not leap in, you know, fools leap in without thinking. So before you act, you have to reflect. And so skepticism is part of reflection, the reflective life. And not just before you act, but before you believe something. Look for good evidence or so in that area. I mean, in the religion and ethics and politics, you have to be skeptical of claims that people make. So it applies to all parts of life, your own beliefs and the beliefs of others. And your willingness to examine these to see if they hold up under scrutiny.  That's in. And yes, indeed. And in that it should. So you're well, you know, not, not all the time of your if you're in the process of having a good time at a party, if you're making love. You don't you don't engage in reflective inquiry. But there is a place for reflective inquiry, clearly. Skepticism for you is so it's not just a way to kind of take other people's supernatural claims for a test drive. It's clearly not. And that's a mistake to apply only skepticism to religion. Yeah, well, look at the area of politics, OK, where people are making claims all the time, candidates, and you want to doubt what they say, unless you can examine it carefully and listen to criticism. So by your broadly applying this kind of skepticism or rationality, you know, believing those things only for which there are adequate sets of evidence, yes, it is it's a method of living. It's a method of acquiring it. It's the test of an educated person who who when a claim is made, including his own or her own wants to see whether it holds up under scrutiny. So you need you need evidence. You have to examine the consequences and you need to give reasons for you. Skepticism, really, you kind of look at it in this historical sense. Sure, you could trace it back to the ancient Greeks, but that's not the kind of skepticism you're talking about. Not that kind of denial that knowledge is even possible. You're more talking about the Enlightenment project, that kind of skepticism. Well, I'm talking about modern skepticism. You know, the Greeks introduced skepticism. They were negative and some of them thought with no knowledge was possible. No truth was possible. You couldn't distinguish good from bad, right from wrong. And many people today are total skeptics. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about skepticism as the method of questioning and arriving at knowledge upon which you can act. The kind of skepticism you're talking about, this broadly construed or kind of applied skepticism, broadly applied, it sounds just at least a little different than the skepticism of the skeptics movement. You know, these people who get together at regular meetings or come to skeptics conferences, they focus mostly on spurious supernatural or paranormal claims, pseudo-scientific claims. Well, the skeptics movement does not represent the skeptical inquiry, the skeptical method, the use of doubt in everyday life. And that skeptics movement is important, but it's too narrow. I'm saying that skepticism is part of intelligent inquiry. And any educated person has to be skeptical until claims can be supported. And all sorts of claims, not just about the paranormal. Oh, yes, all sorts of claims. That why it should be focused on the paranormal or religion is really a surprise. I mean, you have to use it in business. If someone wants to sell you a product, then you have to examine it carefully and evaluate it in the light of other products. If you're going to buy a car, you have to be damn skeptical about what the guy tells you. And that's a good illustration of everyday skepticism. Or if you want to be an educated consumer of health care, you want to make sure what you're buying from your doctor or health practitioner that it works. Doctors are often taken as authority figures, but you ought to be skeptical about everybody to some extent. You've actually in recent years almost argued that a lot of the topics that organized skepticism treats, that they're sort of trivial and that you think there are bigger fish to fry than whether or not Bigfoot exists. Of course. I mean, as the one who introduced the paranormal in some sense, the reason I did that because it was easy to criticize Bigfoot or psychic claims or astrologers and people would be interested. It's more difficult to apply skeptical depth to questions of religion or business or politics or ethics. But but that's where it is crucial in life to do it. It has to be used everywhere, not only for the paranormal or for religion. OK, so if you want to broadly apply skepticism and skepticism is based on evidence, what do you do about certain kinds of beliefs for which there's no evidence one way or the other, like certain political ideologies? There's no units of measurement to see whether or not libertarianism or socialism is the true approach. Well, there may be some, but it's insufficient often. So I would be hesitant about leaping in.  We're skeptics fair to trade until they get some support. So you ought to be you ought to consider claims, hypotheses using science as a method hypothetical until you can find sufficient evidence to say, well, this seems probable, like I can act on it. So you don't need certain knowledge, but you could have reliable knowledge based on the probable likelihood of it being true. Well, we very rarely have certain knowledge. I mean, certain areas such as mathematics, people say, well, we have certain knowledge, yes and no. But there are areas where more is somewhat certain, such as mathematics. But in the other areas, even in the sciences, you have to use the principle of fallibilism, according to the American philosopher, Charles Perce. You may be mistaken. People may discover new facts, which will claim, which will undermine their theory. So you ought to be prepared to change any belief you have. But challenge, but just because you may be wrong, you're not then therefore suggesting that you should withhold adopting any positions, whatever. Look, if I step off a curb and I want to get to the other side and I see a car rushing rapidly, it's the student I flunked. I don't know whether he's going to hit me or not, but I'm sure it's all going to rush back to the other side. So you have to act as the kind of will to believe. OK, so it's a question of the great. OK. Point is, skeptical doubt is an antidote to foolish beliefs and enables you to clarify beliefs and decide whether they're sufficient support for them. You were just talking about how some of the topics of skepticism over the past 30 years may have seemed trivial. And I don't think I'm putting those words in your mouth. I've heard you say as much many times, correct? There are many questions I'm using and fun to deal with. But you can't stop there and the focus on the paranormal happened because it was safer to criticize these foolish beliefs than others. But then other beliefs such as what? Well, beliefs in religion, you don't prepare to do that. Belief in politics, beliefs in business, beliefs in personal relationships, whether you can trust a person. So you have to use common sense, critical common sense. Skepticism is part of common sense. So leaving aside that cheeky retort of skeptics who say there's no such thing as common sense because most people aren't sensible. Well, that criticism is well taken. Yeah, because some people use common sense. It's commonly held belief, but they're widely different. Often so it's difficult to find universal belief. But by common sense, I mean intelligence, the ability of a thoughtful person to examine a claim and see whether it holds up. Yeah, that sense of common sense is very important. And you need it not only in the sciences, but in everyday life. I want to get back to this topic. We were just talking about how you as one of the fathers of the worldwide skeptics movement here, you've suggested that so much of what the movement has concentrated on for the past 30 plus years has been somewhat trivial. I want to ask about that. Even even if you recognize that some of its trivial, on the other hand, wouldn't you agree that so much of that stuff deals with our most basic and most cherished convictions, the meaning of life, life after death, communication with loved ones, you know, deceased people? Trivial. I mean, there are trivial questions that have been examined and held. But there are important questions and skepticism should be used everywhere without the hesitation. The reason why the the skeptics of modern days focus on paranormal beliefs because it is easy to criticize that. But there are cherished beliefs that people hold dear, such as religion. And people are fearful of challenging them. But if it is in a situation where you can do that without embarrassment, then you should. You just raised a lot of questions. Maybe next time you're on the show, I want to talk about whether or not religion can can be treated by skepticism. I want to begin finishing up by asking you about why in the history of organized skepticism, the organizations have had a kind of non-overlapping magisteria. I'm not talking about this notion in science that says science can't touch religion, for instance. I'm talking about how the organizations have said, you know, psychops only going to deal with the paranormal and other organizations only going to deal with religion. But isn't it the same kind of skepticism that's applied to those various areas? Indeed. Correct. You're exactly correct. Why use it only in one area? Because you feel it's safe and not in other areas. You ought to be prepared to use it in any domain where claims are made. Now, you can't in a party get up and be the skeptic and shout to your criticism. So it depends on the appropriate time and place. But in answer to your question, yes, the method of skeptical inquiry can be extended and should be to all areas of human knowledge and human action and not only the paranormal. So a couple of quick things. I don't think we ever actually defined what exuberant skepticism is, unless you just mean that it's life affirming. It's not just denying claims. Yes, well, that's the term I've used to say the name is the title of a book, Exuberant Skepticism, that I published. Well, let me make a distinction. First, between negative skepticism, where you doubt everything, and that's a mistake. Second, positive skepticism. And I think positive skepticism is essential if we're going to develop knowledge and make wise choices. And then third, exuberant skepticism. That's what I've used. And my wife said sometimes to me, please, don't wake up again this in the morning, exuberant, you know. You go overboard. But exuberant skepticism, I think I relate that to the good life. But I believe happiness, exuberance, the realization of creative pleasures and joys are all a part of what it means to live well. And some some touch of skepticism is essential in that kind of life. So you're saying you basically get a better life if you are skeptical.  Everything it would fail and so on. But I think skepticism. Let me make this point, D.J., and you you touch on the central question. I think skepticism is an antidote for nonsense.  And also it's a method for discovering what's true or false. And yes, we should use it throughout life, not only in the paranormal, but in everyday life and personal affairs and business in the company you work for is going to school everywhere. OK, moral claims, religious claims, all of it. Yes, yes, it's a mark of the educated mind. So last question. We were talking a little about this division of labor and the organizations that advance skepticism in North America, at least. Do you think that there could ever be a full throttle group of institutions that advance skepticism in the public interest? Or will skepticism always just be about clubs and meetings, you know, skeptics in the pubs that where people just get together for fellowship and friendship, but they're not actually changing society? You're raising the central question. No, skepticism should not become a cult where people get together and enjoy attacking other people's beliefs. They think they're foolish. Though that's not that that's important to some extent.  If you're a captain in an army in the army, you have to be skeptical about whether the whether the enemy is going to fire that machine gun. If you're in business and you've been investing in stocks, you've got to be skeptical about the broker. The truth or merely trying to sell you a bill of good. So it seems to me it should be applied everywhere. OK, you know, I'm sorry, Paul, I just don't feel like we've really gotten into that topic of why the paranormal. So if if you think it should be widely applied, why does psychop just focus on the things that go bump in the night? Well, I love psychop. I found it psychop with the help of others. But clearly, it has to go beyond that. It can only be restricted to the paranormal. Then not the skepticism of the paranormal are not not the same as necessarily. It should be used everywhere and anywhere. OK. And it's useful. It's a pragmatic tool of inquiry and of knowledge. Well, personally, I agree with you that that skepticism should be widely applied. I think organizations are better if they have a limited mission and don't try to be all things to all men. So maybe we're agreeing and we're just talking about different aspects. But nonetheless, every every area, every field, whether you're studying for the law or you're you're studying to be an accountant or you want to be a nurse, whatever you feel you're in, you need to use your critical intelligence and the skeptical method in appraising claims to knowledge and not merely accept it, hook, line and thinker. Well, as I said a couple of minutes ago, I feel like we've only scratched the surface. We'll continue this discussion next time. Thank you, Paul, for joining me on For Good Reason. Thank you very much, D.J. Thanks for listening to this episode of For Good Reason to get involved with an online conversation about today's show. Join the discussion at ForGoodReason.org. Views expressed on For Good Reason aren't necessarily the views of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Questions and comments on today's show can be sent to info at ForGoodReason.org. For Good Reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. For Good Reason's music is composed for us by Emmy Award nominated Gary Stockdale. Christina Stevens contributed to today's show. I'm your host, D.J. Grothe.


Polymers are considered to be good hosting matrices for composite materials because they can easily be tailored to yield a variety of bulk physical properties. Moreover, organic polymers generally have long-term stability and good processability. Inorganic nanoparticles possess outstanding optical, catalytic, electronic and magnetic properties, which are significantly different their bulk states. By combining the attractive functionalities of both components, nanocomposites derived from organic polymers and inorganic nanoparticles are expected to display synergistically improved properties. The potential applications of the resultant nanocomposites are various, automotive, aerospace, optoelectronics, etc. Here, we review recent progress in polymer-based inorganic nanoparticle composites. This article was authored by Inyap John and Jangbiam Beck.


The gut microbiota brain axis is a two-way communication system between the gut microbiota and the brain.  Research suggests that gut microbiota can affect the brain's functioning via these pathways, and that changes in the gut microbiota can lead to changes in the brain's structure and function. This article was authored by Hongxing Wang and Yuping Wang.


From the green chamber, it was a clash of interests as some members kicked against the motion calling for special recognition for teachers to mark World Teachers Day. The motion was however discussed after the speaker's intervention. It will be a hono for the House to recognize the teachers. Honourable Baghoff resists the motion under matters of personal explanation on the need to celebrate teachers for their contribution to educating future leaders. But the motion is misconstrued by some leaders of the lower chamber who accused Baghoff's of seeking political relevance, especially now that the nation is preparing for the next general election. Baghoff's is trying to use this platform to get that attention. And in using that to get that attention, he's one of those that is very prompt to his attendance in terms of sitting in chambers. And I believe he should be learning the rock very well. When you raise a matter under personal explanation, I think the leader is just trying to save him, maybe because of a contribution. My thought would have been, he has to take note of what he has said because... And we move forward. What Baghoff's tried to bring on board is something that even last year we did it. We gave an honour to some teachers. We gave honour to some teachers who distinguished themselves in their field. And today Baghoff's is bringing that. So it has nothing to do with Baghoff's trying to achieve political relevance. In a bit to doubt the tension before it degenerates into political attacks between members of the two main political parties, the speaker steps in ruling that since a debate had already ensued on the subject matter, the motion should be discussed as a substantive motion. I don't think celebrating Teacher's Day is a controversial matter. It should never be a controversial matter. And that is established. The second condition is that it cannot be debated. And on that note, the leader of the House was right that it should have come under a substantive motion. But because we have already started debating it, we have heard about four speakers, that's the debate. Because we have already started debating it, it is automatically, by fiat, automatically it has been moved to a substantive motion. That's my ruling. Lawmakers then take turns to appreciate teachers who helped shape their lives from elementary to tertiary institutions. They call for the inclusion of housing provisions for teachers in the budget. A minute of silence is observed for late teachers, while a standard of action is also observed to say thank you to teachers for their work well done so far. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Hey, what's up folks and welcome back to another layer by layer in today's tutorial We're gonna take a look at a prop and how we created a holder to make the feather and prop maker feathering Adjustable and stuff. So let's go ahead and jump into The project. This is the project that we're gonna look at it is inspired by the Time stick from the Disney plus series Loki This is a 3d print no supports and it uses the feather m4 and the prop maker feathering You get motion activated lights and sounds 3 watt RGB LED Good amount of detail into this one. It's got a speaker a slide switch and an accelerometer so the main thing I wanted to talk about is this project and the main thing that makes it Modular and accessible is the way that the feather and the prop maker wing are nestled inside the handle So let me jump. So this is the learn guide check out the learn guide There is code documentation step-by-step instructions on how to build this to a tee The other thing I want to talk about is the prop maker feathering. It is Please sign up to get notified when you when they are back in stock It's only 995 and you get all sorts of awesome stuff for your feather So this has all the circuitry for building any type of prop You got a 3 watt RGB LED circuitry You can add buttons switches and a speaker and it has a built-in accelerometer. So it's really really nice And with the feather ecosystem, there are many different ways To lay out your feathers in this example, you can see here that they're laid out side by side But if you're doing something like this low key prop, you want to have them stacked on top of each other making a bit of a feather sandwich So the next thing I will promote is the 3d models of the board. So here's the 3d model of the feather m4 Notice that it is populated with all the components such as the jst connectors the components And even the usb connector along with the mounting holes and all the various pins Very very important. This is available on github So you can get just about any of the The Adafruit boards from here Of the feathers the prop maker feather wings are all here as well. So if you want the prop maker There it is. There's the prop maker feather wing There's an stl a step file and a fusion 360 file. So you can check that out This has all of the connectors as well And a built-in switch for the reset And currently they do not have the headers But that's fine if you want to do something without the headers and stuff But that's where you get the access to the CAD files You want to kind of not start from scratch but have these source files so that you can model around them So those are the three tabs that i'm talking about and then we'll switch over to fusion And we'll take a quick look at the prop itself really what i'm focusing on this tutorial is The feather holder in the handle. So let's take a look at this handle And one of the hardest things to do when making a prop is to fit your feather and your prop maker feather wing in your handle So the way i came up with is that the pommel here And the handle have screw threads. So if you do a cross section here you can see Where the two pieces connect and they are using these custom threads Built with the coil feature in fusion 360 and they have some nice clearance in between the threads so that so that you can actually Secure them together But the main thing i'm talking about here is the feather holder. So Let's turn off the section analysis and just deactivate the the pommel for a second here You can see here once you take the pommel out You can see that this this purple part here Is the feather holder. So it has a built-in tab so that you can pull this out So the idea here is that you would pull this out of the of the handle And you'll notice that there is this this bit of a railing Right and this railing Um has an a company accompanying nub that keeps the feather The feather holder rather um from rattling inside or rotating inside that's really kind of An important thing if you are planning to like swing this around and maybe even hit it You'll want to have that sort of geometry in place so that the two are not Rotating freely inside. So that's that's a nice thing When it comes to clearances you can see here that we just About have enough clearance for all the cables the pins and even the screws To do it. So this shape here Let's real quick if you take a note the diameter of the handle is 32 millimeters. Okay now the diameter of the Of the feather holder itself if we click on that we can see that it is actually 31 millimeters So it's it the clearance between the two parts is a half of a millimeter which may seem excessive But again when you're printing and things tend to expand You want to have that amount of clearance especially for Circular projects like this circular shaped objects like this The the they tend to have the bigger clearance between those surfaces So that's why I have a bit of a bigger thing there All right, so the railing we talked about the railing we're talking about the uh The the we're talking about the clearance between the two And now let's go ahead and kind of hide the the handle and talk about the feather holder So one of the cool things you can do right click isolate And that'll just save me a bunch of time from having to turn everything off But this is the handle in itself. I'm going to bring back some things. So uh the The prop maker and the feather Here Are actually combined in a way where they have the header pins Listed So let me hide this again. This is the feather holder. So this is what I'm talking about right here So this right here is the feather m4 and the prop maker feather wing Attached in the way where the The feather m4 has female headers and these are sort of your standard size headers We do have some lower profile ones, but I wanted to stay away from those because I felt like Most folks are probably going to use this standard header And plus I tend to always have more of these on hand than the shorter version So if you have something that has space constraints, you could swap these out for a smaller profile But I tend to stick with sort of the standard sizes here And you also get the added benefit of just having more clearance in between the boards So if you have these cables, which I do you're going to want to have all You know more clearance and space in between these two PCBs So that is how this is working the arrangement is that the Female headers are attached to the feather and the prop maker feather wing has the male Header pins soldered to the bottom of them. So That's that's kind of how feathers tend to work feather wings rather they tend to snap on top Of the feather. So that's how this assortment is All right, so then let's bring back the The feather holder and you'll see here that the way it's attached is Well with hardware screws. So this is the hardware screws. We have a set. There are four Screws and the feather and feather wings. They all have the same size of mounting holes Which tend to work really well with m25 sized screws. So that's what we got here These are m25 screws and they aren't eight millimeters in length They are the panhead style and if you look here The board is designed to accommodate for the screw head So you see that the screw head is just about able to clear The space around those mounting holes it gets a little bit tight in the back here, but it's just fine So that's the way they work Now the way they're attached is that you have these hex nuts that attach to the PCB itself And what that does is it gives the board a little bit of elevation away From the the actual the holder now you want to have that because sometimes wires tend to come in there And another thing that I added to this was these slots And the slots allow any wiring to kind of be wired on the bottom So if you ever need like extra ground pins or to break out various signals This having a slot for your header pins is a really good idea So that is the hex nuts. That's how they're attached and then the bottom here the bottom hex nuts Secure the the actual PCB holder To the feather and the feather the prop maker feathering just snaps on top So there's no need to screw that into anything. So that works out pretty well Another added geometry here is um Well, let me talk about the bottom here, right? So if I bring back the the handle you notice that this is um There's a bit of clearance broken out here. So I wasn't able to fully Make this a circle to to wrap around because you actually want this to be open So that the the prop maker has plenty of clearance because it's it gets pretty tight in there And when you have cables passing through you want to have this open So that's why this is kind of open and and the bottom the bottom has this opening because it's actually doing two things There is a slide switch that gets embedded into the handle And you need some clearance in order for the cabling to kind of pass through here Another thing is you need clearance for the actual hex nuts So you can see here that the hex nuts are just about able to clear this circular internal geometry here and The the added benefit uh to making this kind of cut all the way through The holder is that you have this really nice flat surface that you Will have really good bed adhesion to your 3d printer So it actually does two really good things it it allows clearance for cables to pass through And it gives you a lot of surface area to have a good adhesion to the bed So this this shape really works out really well for this handle for this project and I feel like it's it's it's I think this is like the golden standard Dimensions for any prop moving forward like I want to have my geometry internal geometry should kind of Be the same going forward like this is like the diameters. I'm going to use because it just works out really well For this setup and I feel like this is the setup that will work across a lot of different props So that's why I'm kind of featuring just this piece here Another thing about the geometry here is that this pull tab Once you've fitted this inside the handle You really can't dig your fingers inside to pull out the feather And there's nothing stopping the holder from being pushed all the way inside other than I guess the the size of the cabling But what this does is it gives you a way to kind of reach in and pull it out and that tends to work out really well With that 0.5 millimeter clearance you have You have a really good amount of clearance To to pull it out so it's not kind of stuck or anything so that works really well And so we talked about how it's attached we talked about the railings The railing really helps another thing is like the thickness of the handle. It's of the holder Is one millimeter and a half and that's modifiable, but it's really tailored to my Slicing settings and what I have set up in my slicer is that When I print this geometry it will not have any infill and only perimeters and because the perimeters are so tightly Printed together you basically have a super solid piece here There's no infill because the perimeter is pretty much just building a solid wall And that makes it really really robust. So this can be printed in PLA or whatever other filament And it will be pretty pretty robust and the bottom Because it has that really big surface area. You're going to get a pretty good print in a previous project I've tried printing this vertically, but This you really can't print it vertically because of this cutaway And you're wondering well, what's this cutaway here for? Well, you can see here that the the jst battery is pretty chunky You know to pass the voltage and all that you want to have a pretty chunky connector But because the the shape is really tight close quarters I had to create a cutaway for the cabling So the cabling was really important here to have a cutaway and once that cutaway was made It kind of stopped it from being able to be printed this way And I have printed it this way before but it's actually better to print it flat Because you have just more surface area here in the bottom And there's no supports required for this geometry. Everything just prints You know really well, there's no overhangs really there's nothing that's 45 degrees More than 45 degrees. So you're able to print all this geometry without any support Which is really good and that cutaway here for the battery is pretty critical So my idea is that in the future projects like I could just print out this exact same part and it'll just be you know What do you say it'll be Swappable changeable to any handle so I could just keep printing this same part over and over again And then just as long as I use the same geometry for my handle or whatever piece and whatever prop It should be adaptable. So that's kind of why I like this this whole arrangement I think it's going to work really well and it's like going forward like I want to keep these dimensions In tax so that I can kind of have a consistent way of doing this over and over again Maybe I can even bring this out as an external component and just bring it into my design and not have to redraw it every time So that would be really cool. Um, but yeah, it's kind of taking It's accounting for all of the little things Clearances cables securing not rattling around inside your handle. So that is really it there Um, I'll take a quick look at the sketches of how the feather Was created. So what I tend to do with the first sketch is to just draw out your mounting holes for the feather They're always going to be the same. So I always create it in the same fashion All right in the profile for creating the actual geometry for the holder itself You basically just make a circle since my handle has a circular internal Shell I want to have it that same thing. So I just use construction lines to kind of create these breakaways these these segments So that I can just extrude the pieces that I want um, you also see here that we have this sort of Triangular geometry that has 45 degrees or 135 degrees and that just creates that internal railing And you're just able to use them construction lines and some Some coincident constraints so that this is uh, you know, it's all printed Without any supports The thickness here is we could use a user parameter if we want to change that but I tend to just stick with this So it's just a hard core to evaluate, but that's fine. The bottom here is defined So you can see here. I have a two millimeter thickness. That's just to make it more rigid and more robust Um, and then you can see here that this this line just cuts straight across horizontally and that gives me The ability to just select profiles that I want as opposed to just creating a cutaway or anything Just select the profiles you want extrude it out, and then that should be good I hide the handle here. So that's the way I created it. Now the next bit is The cutaway for the jst battery connector So I just kind of project in some geometry from the piece itself Create a rectangle add some dimensions here and um, That's really it there. That's just a cutaway. We do some rounded edges And then the uh, the pull tab the the tab that allows you to pull this out of the handle That is just an extra um rectangle with some lines in there and um I kind of wanted it to be another thing about why I have hex nuts in between the pcb and the and the holder I talked about the wiring, but really what it allows you to do is that if these two were flush, right? If this was flush with the surface you actually would not be able to get a usb cable in there So with this elevated now you have that extra clearance for a regular usb cable to fit in And plug into the usb port. It's super duper critical to have these hex nuts So this is the arrangement. It kind of has to be this way Now I could have added um some standoffs You know built into this, but I just just chose not to um I don't know why I didn't you could do that But I guess less is more here when you have actual hex nuts It's not glued to it. So you have the freedom of I guess using different thicknesses or something But I just felt like hey if you already have hex nuts just use them, right? So that's why I have two sets of hex nuts here and that is super critical to get that usb cable in here I had to make sure that this right here this geometry here This is just here so that you have some sort of grip onto the tab You don't necessarily need it, but I felt like it was something that would help With the user experience of like pulling it out and having somewhere to grip onto Uh, so that's pretty much all of the uh the sketches The last sketch here is actually just these slots for creating some opening here some clearance for those headers And again, you could use these As a way to uh break out some of these pins You could even add a bigger hole here All of this right here could be hollowed out with a with a hole or a slot if you want to have even more cabling So it's very very Adjustable there, but I think this is kind of like the gold sweet spot For creating a holder for your props, but that's really all I want to talk about If you want to have access to just this piece I can share this I'll probably share this because it keeps it has those headers feel female headers everything's just set up so you just drop this right into your design So I'll share that as well, but that's going to really do it for this one Let me you guys know what you think about props and are you creating parts that are You know Adaptable for other projects Um, I think this this will be a new way going forward for for for props So definitely check out the feather m4 and the prop maker feather wing sign up when they're in stock and uh, you know Check out those 3d models as well That's going to do it for me. Um, I'll see you in the next one. But until then Remember to make a great day. Bye folks


My name is Guy Fedorko. I am here from the United States. I apologize. I have to be uni-lingual today. I have been working on this program for the project, for Whirlwind for a couple of years, along with the MIT Museum and also with the Computer History Museum in California. And now, of course, with HNF as well in Potterborne. What I want to talk about today a little bit is the Whirlwind machine, some of the background, and some of its architecture. And then switch to one particular application that we spent time working on as far as I can tell the first demo in the world for using a computer for air defense for tracking incoming attackers and directing interceptors. So we'll talk about that. And we can show all of the software in the demonstration down the hall. OK, so let's start. The first part, then, is about what is this Whirlwind machine. It was one of a kind research computer designed in the 1950s. It first started working in 1949 and stayed at MIT functionally until about 1958. The program was begun under a contract from the US Navy. So this was all done under the Department of Defense in the US. MIT did a lot of work during the war, did a lot of defense work, to an extent that became quite controversial later in the decades. But this was done with the Navy. Their intention initially was to design an aircraft simulator that is for training pilots. That evolved, as all good research projects do, evolved from that into air traffic control and finally into guiding interceptor aircraft. The machine itself is a 16-bit parallel architecture. This was at a time when serial architectures were all the rage. And it was designed to be fast. So this would have been one of the fastest computer on the block at the time. 50,000 ads per second, how fast can you possibly need? The project is now mostly remembered for the development of magnetic core memory. This was developed at MIT. There were a number of teams working on magnetic core. And it took quite a few years of legal dispute to agree that MIT actually, quote, invented magnetic core memory. The machine was initially built with electrostatic CRT memory. And they tried for years and could not get it to be reliable. The program project evolved substantially. This started as a small project in the Servomechanisms lab, where they had experience with radar tracking for aiming anti-aircraft guns. And eventually evolved into the US Air Force semi-automated ground environment, SAGE, which was a humongous program for continental air defense. The contract allowed MIT to use. It gave the Department of Defense the good hours during the day, but it gave MIT researchers the less good hours of the day. And they used it for many, many different kinds of applied mathematics research projects around MIT. And it stayed on campus until about 1959. The machine ultimately was, let's say, disassembled. And many of the pieces saved around 1970. But the machine itself will never exist again. It's long gone. Some of the timelines, I say they started in 44, thinking they were going to build an analog aircraft simulator. In 1945, I think J. Forrester, the program lead, saw ENIAC and decided that digital computers were the thing that they wanted to do. By 1948, I haven't figured out quite what happened. But by 1948, they decided an aircraft simulator. No, we're not going to do that. By 1949, they had enough machine running to display simple equations on a CRT display. 1951, we'll come back to this one. The first radar intercept demo. 1952, they started on SAGE, the air defense system. So the whirlwind team became the system architects for SAGE, along with IBM and a couple of other very large contractors. By 1953, they had a thing called the quote Cape Cod system, which, again, was centered on whirlwind to demonstrate some more of the SAGE technology. 1953 also was the date that they switched from a lighter static to core memory. And that is an important date in the history of the machine, because at that point, it became reliable enough that anyone could believe that this was really going to be useful for something. I have no idea how they convinced the Air Force to spend so much money when the electrostatic tubes were just not working very well. But J. Forrester, the project lead, was a very persuasive guy. And then 1959 was when it was decommissioned. This computer would work fine in a 1950s science fiction movie. It had all the things, whirling tape drives, hundreds of blinking lights, switches. You will notice there is not a keyboard in sight. They did add a keyboard quite late in the program project. This is J. Forrester, who's the project lead. This is Bob Everett, who is the guy who keeps the trains running on time. This often happens. This pairing often happens in these kinds of computer projects. This is the guy who's got the big ideas and can't quite remember how to tie his shoes. And this is the guy who says, boss, yeah, OK, good. Yeah, we're working on that. And could you go away while we're, and don't think up anything else just right away. This woman I know whose name is Romana, but we don't know anything much more about her. But that is sitting in front of one of the larger CRT displays that they used. The machine itself, people in this room probably have heard of digital equipment, deck computers. Yeah, OK. Ken Olson was one of the engineers on whirlwind. So he was a junior engineer along with Harlan Anderson on whirlwind. And by about 1957, I think, had left whirlwind because, you know, like, hey, we could start a company. And so I think you will find the architecture looks spookily familiar. Sage also was, once it's turned into Sage, IBM took a very large role in designing the equipment and consequently, while the 701 was designed following von Neumann, 704 and on also has whirlwind influence. So the architecture is familiar because almost every computer we have has lineage back to either IBM or deck. The machine was a very straightforward von Neumann machine, what we would now recognize as von Neumann. In fact, von Neumann visited the whirlwind site a number of times. We've seen his name in the visitor log. The standard thing, memory, program counter, one accumulator, a second half of the accumulator for 32-bit numbers, a boot ROM, which was 32 words of toggle switches. So we would literally toggle the boot ROM and then push the start button, and it would jump to zero and run. And then quite a large list of IO devices which continued to grow. There's the IO instruction set is much more complicated than the computing instruction set for this machine. Because of the real-time focus, they kept on bolting on more stuff. This audience will be well aware that computers used to be kind of big. So this was one machine about 2,500 square feet for the computer itself. Sorry. That would be the ALU. So a 16-bit ALU was 16 racks, bit slice machine, very ahead of its time. This was five registers of programmable memory made of vacuum tubes, and then the rest is control and all that stuff. When they added core memory, some of this stuff went away, of course, to put in the core memory.  The first floor of the machine had the drums and some of the other peripherals, and then this is the second floor of the machine. This was built in a building at MIT called the Bartha Building. And the building is still there, and it's right across the street from where the MIT museum used to be. It has been renovated many times and is now occupied by a pharmaceutical company. But there's an IEEE plaque on the building to say this is where they built whirlwind. Again, this audience would be well aware of this, but most people I run into and say, wow, it must have been really big, bigger than a refrigerator even. I said, yeah, it's bigger than a fridge. Yeah, a lot bigger than a fridge. The I.O. system, there was the usual stuff.  Paper tape was the medium of choice, the original source for all of the software that went into the machine. They added tape and magnetic tapes early. They added drum storage a little bit later, and they added a line printer later than that. The not-so-familiar stuff, as you saw, there are not only in the control room are there hundreds of buttons and lights just to see what's going on, but the actual operation of the machine was focused around buttons and lights. It's in their view a real-time application. So you've got consoles with guys sitting at the console with looking at buttons and lights and looking at CRTs. There is the graphical output capability, which Reiner will talk about a little more, that was intentionally designed from the start for drawing images on a CRT. So this is not a character-oriented display. What they do is literally, they draw lines and dots. The CRT system also, there was a camera attached so that you could get hard copies of your output. And if you wanted to do a core dump, in fact, they would cycle through core on the CRT and flash it with a camera because the printer was not there. The second unusual thing is the so-called light gun, which we would call a light pen, which anyone outside of this room would recognize as sort of like a mouse, right, for pointing at the screen and in indicating points. They developed this, this is less known and quite unique, but developed mechanisms to connect to remote radar stations across telephone lines. So it wasn't exactly a modem, but they did encode radar signals, digitize radar signals on telephone lines to get from a couple of radar stations tens of miles away back to this BARTA building.  Again, developed for SAGE, for multiple sites. Cross-tell, I think, is the buzzword for my computer. My sector tells your sector, hey, there's a guy coming your way you might want to look at. So this would have been a picture of, you know, one of the CRTs. I originally thought this looks like a prop, but I think it really is the real thing. There was a little story that they said they hired a local woodworker to make the display for, or the cabinet for this display, and he accidentally made a thing which was, looked too much like furniture, and they said, oh my God, the Navy is going to kill us for wasting money. So they had to paint it gray so it didn't look too nice. This would be one of the original light guns. The museum in California has a number of these. I would love to know what's inside, but we have not convinced them to take one apart yet. By the time IBM was involved, the light gun had evolved, and the IBM industrial designers knew how to make stuff. To me, this picture illustrates why the Navy, or the Air Force liked MIT because they could get new stuff that no one had ever thought of before to work, and they liked IBM because they could make stuff, and it would stay working. Whirlwind was a continuous science experiment with stuff coming and going and working and not working and all kinds of things. They were very interested in reliability and worked hard on it, but man it was tough and they didn't have the right environment for manufacturing. Okay. Reiner will spend more time on the graphics system. I just want to say the underlying principle is extremely straightforward in a way that people who are accustomed to modern graphics have a hard time. Sometimes understanding is how straightforward it is. All they did was take two digital to analog converters, one for X, one for Y, connect them to oscilloscopes, and then a couple of bits put 16, some more. Anyways, in our case, we are only using two to modulate the Z-axis to turn the bit on and off. So if you want to draw a point on the screen, you set the D2As to the point you want, and then you flip the Z-bit and it will display the point when the Z-bit goes away, then you move the beam somewhere else and display another point. That's all there is. The good news is you don't have to do garbage collection. If you want to erase the display, you just stop and it's gone. This is a little hard to emulate, but that's what there was and that's what Reiner's kit does. Again, this will be quite familiar for this crowd, but the whirlwind, I like to tell people it's like an Arduino except slow, but the approximate memory capacities are similar. There's the 2K words of RAM, 32K words of drum space, sorry, 48K of drum space. The power is a little different. The third column here, at the time, if you wanted to do a large calculation, what you did was you hired a room full of computers, that is people who were quote-programmed to do steps in a repetitive calculation of some sort. The United States had a thing called the math tables project during the Depression, and at one point had 450 people, computers working on a single tables project. Curiously, 450 people, aside from what you have to buy for lunch, adds up to about 60 kilowatts of power. It's in the same ballpark. That makes 50,000 ads per second look really fast, and that's of course, we all know why this was a ground changer. Whirlwind was also expensive. It consumed at one point 80 percent of the budget of the Office of Naval Research, and the program had a bit of an existential crisis in about 1951, where the Navy said, where is our aircraft simulator? MIT said, well, here's this computer. It's really cool. You'll love it a lot. The Navy said, excuse me, where is our aircraft simulator? Fortunately, at that point, the Air Force, fortunately for whirlwind, not the rest of us, in 1949, we'll cover this again, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear weapon, and the Air Force was going, oh my God, what are we going to do? It picked up funding for whirlwind to change the focus to air defense. But one reason I can say with some confidence that this was the first of something or another is that the program was so expensive, there could not have been another one. If it uses half the budget, then there is not another one bigger. Okay, so what is this project about? What is my project about? The MIT, it's not just the museum, the MIT and its archives have many whirlwind documents. As a Department of Defense project, they were required to submit reports all the time. And so there are many, many documents. The librarians list gives 8,000 of them. I know about 2,000 exist. The Computer History Museum has hundreds of tapes, paper tapes and magnetic tapes. And of course, two sides of the country, oops. Well, okay, so what do we get if we put these together? There are some physical artifacts around, but not very many. So there's not a lot to learn from that, but there's enough that you can see kind of what it was like. So the question of course, can we combine all these resources and learn something about the evolution of this machine? And can we somehow make this material more accessible to non-specialists? The tapes in particular had been sitting on a shelf in the museum for 50 years. And it occurred to us all that it sitting on the shelf, they weren't actually helping much. And so they have been read and we're gradually interpreting them. How did whirlwind programmers program? People often say, oh, that must have an assembler language. And I'm saying, yeah. It was in the early stage of the program, it was pencil and paper. So you, the programmer, see it was a multimedia graphical presentation with sketch comments. Yeah, so you would write out your program on a coding sheet if you were lucky and then hand it to a typist who, you, the programmer are probably responsible for turning this into octal code and then handing it to a typist who is responsible for turning the octal into flexo codes and typing it on a paper tape. So you'd write it out on a coding sheet, type onto paper tape. The programmer gets a scheduled time slot, runs it, it crashes, you go back and try and figure out what to do and hope that you get another run that night. They, the project was structured in two parts. There was the primary application component of the machine, of course, for developing the use of the machine, but the Navy continued to fund development of tools for search. This was at a time when everyone was coming to the realization that, uh-oh, these things are hard to program. We better think about this. So the quote, automatic programming was all the thing in the mid-50s. And at the time MIT was one of the three major contenders in how should you program computers. So they rapidly developed an assembler and then gradually made the assembler more sophisticated paper tapes. This, of course, carried through to the DEC world and as soon as IBM was involved with SAGE, whirlwind grew a card reader. Okay, so of the software media, all of the, as far as we know, all of the tapes have been read. They're posted on BitSavers, so CHM read them, Al Casso posted them on his BitSaver site. We've read about 60 of the 100 magnetic tapes. Magnetic tapes, those are much harder to figure out. Some of them, some of the both, the formats are obvious and we are using some of that material. Some of them I expect we'll never figure out because they're data tapes for some application that we can't figure out. But there's still a lot of decoding there. And of course, what we have been doing the way this works is we can sometimes link a document on a program with the actual code of the program. So the Air Defense one is an excellent example of that. There are a few others where we have an actual document which describes the functioning of the program and then we have the program itself. I haven't found the index for the tape department. Documents, yeah, it's 8,000 titles. 1,800 of them or so are on MIT's site. Al Casso has about 280, some of them overlap but there are actually some that are unique on Al's site. The Smithsonian, this is a problem, has 30 boxes of these documents and I have an index and have looked at some of them but that's a lot of stuff. And there was a whirlwind project photographer who spent, I don't know, he's literally full time but there was a guy who spent during the decade his career taking pictures of things in whirlwind. Okay, in my project, I have developed a tool chain to help reverse engineer and then re-engineer some of this code. The general flow, we start with the binary tapes and some of the source code tapes now, those are hard to use in a different way. So decode the tapes, disassemble the binary objects, the machine instruction set is very straightforward so rough disassembly is easy enough. I can then add comments to the assembler code if I can figure out what it does, reassemble that and run the image in a simulation environment. And of course the trick here is to go around this loop 100 times to run it and say, what the heck is that doing? Oh, I see, go back and comment the code some more and insert a debug assistance along the way so that you can start to understand the function of the program. Here is a sample runner can run this on the display in the other room. We came across this tape, Chad Blackjack written on it. Blackjack is a card game, also known as 21. As far as we can tell, this was a completely unofficial bit of work. We have not found a single document that even mentions it and the structure of the code looks like a mess. So I suspect it was graduate students at three in the morning who were just figuring out how to use a computer, but it does play a respectable game of Blackjack. It uses the light gun. So there's again no keyboard interaction, but you hit points on the screen to make it do things. So the one on the top right, for example, shuffles the card deck. These are the two critical ones where the player can say, I want to play the next card or you play the next card and at that point, you can tell who's one. So this code works.  All you can do is draw any combination of the seven different segments. So sometimes they have to get a little creative in how you make a character. That does not say C-A-A-D-S, of course, that says C-A-R-D-S. Okay, I want to switch topics now to the air defense application. Okay, we know about the machine. This application, there was, of course, the Soviet test in 1949, which has people who have seen the movie Oppenheimer might know the US government had declared to be not possible, and suddenly when it was, it was, oh, so MIT had all of these defense connections and the Air Force sponsored a competition. I'm not sure whether MIT's thumb was already on the scale or not, but there was a competition for what should we do for air defense for the continental US? And MIT, of course, responded with what you need as a computer, and we happen to have one, and it's, yeah, it's kind of expensive, but don't worry. And of course, SAGE ultimately became a very large program, I think at the time $30 billion went into SAGE. Okay, so in 1951, there's a guy named David Israel who was part of the whirlwind team and I think spent his entire life working on radars, computers, and airplanes, but he assembled a demo which was intended to steer an interceptor aircraft towards a target aircraft. I can't help being amused that they officially started work with radar and airplanes and computers on air traffic control where of course the goal is to make sure they do not collide and switched the sign bit and changed it into air defense where the goal is to make sure they do collide. So we'll see the goal of the program, of course, is for the radar operator to be as if that's the target, that's the attacker, that's the defender, go get them. The document which describes this is unusually straightforward and clear in modern times, you'd say, well, of course, that's a functional spec you described the problem. They did the mathematical analysis, a software flowchart commentary on the code and then the actual code. The astonishing thing is that this fit into 256 words of code, that's all there was at the time. This was in the era before they had the magnetic core and the electrostatic memory was very troublesome. So they had a small amount of core of main memory to work with and used every word. Okay, so here's the scenario for how you use this thing. The assumption is that you have a radar station, there is a target of some sort that you think you're trying to defend. There are aircraft in the vicinity, the radar operator, of course, the radar operator has to know somehow which one is which because that's what their job is, is to figure out who is the attacker and where the defenders are. So all they see on the screen is there are, there are blips here and there. In this scenario for this simulation, I know that this guy is the interceptor and these two guys are attackers. And so in my simulation I set initial conditions for these guys where both of the attackers are heading for a target which I have arbitrarily placed at the northern edge of the screen. So what the operator is supposed to do is watch the scopes for incoming attackers. There's again switches, buttons and lights. So you switch the switch to say, I see an attacker and you use the light gun to point to the attacker and say, computer, this guy is an attacker, watch him. And then you switch the switch and you tell the computer, computer, this guy is the interceptor I would like to use right now. Follow that please. And when the operator has identified both of them, then the computer can compute a heading, a direction to fly for the interceptor that will cause the interceptor in not exactly the most efficient way, but as close as they could get to efficient to bring them close together. And once they're within a mile or two, then the guy in the whirlwind control room can take a break and it's up to the interceptor pilot from there. It displays as we'll see, it displays on the scopes, on two oscilloscopes, one all of the radar traffic and on the other oscilloscope, the two that it's actually tracking and trying to converge. As the program runs, every radar scan, it will compute a new heading because of course the target, the attackers might say, hey there's someone come at me, I'm gonna change my course. So it continuously updates the heading for the interceptor to go towards wherever it thinks the attacker is going. The resulting heading is displayed on lights, of course, in binary coded decimal. And the radar operator's job is to read off the headings from the whirlwind and talk on the phone to the pilot to say, yo dude, the new heading is 329 and the pilot steers to 329. So that's the way the program works. In our environment, what I wanna try and do is help see which part of this is actually real code in which is the substantial simulation environment. So the real code is running, of course, in the simulated whirlwind, as I said, there are only 256 words of this stuff. So underneath this is, of course, is a straightforward whirlwind instruction simulator along with the simulated buttons and lights and stuff. On the right hand side, then we simulate the graphical system, Reiner's system is a little bit closer to real with the hardware, but that's our modern interpretation of it. It's a little more complicated. On the left hand side, there's, in my simulation environment is the radar station which transmits headings and azimuth across the telephone lines. So this simulated radar station acts as enough like the real radar station so this thing can interpret the codes. And then ahead of that are the simulated airplanes. So I set the initial tracks when the whirlwind operator reads off the lights to save the heading, then I'm feeding the interceptor headings back into the aircraft myself. So I am not making Reiner read the numbers and steer the interceptor. So there's a lot of stuff here, but this piece of code in the middle is running unchanged. There were, as usual, a couple of typos, but other than fixing the typos, it's running as it did in 1951. And I can't help but point out the stuff around is 50 megabytes of stuff to connect to a 256-word program. Jay Forester would say, you are out of your reeking mind to waste 50 megabytes. Okay, this is what the air defense screen looks like. This, to me, has been completely vexing. This is one of the most in terms of the development of the air defense application and real-time computing. This has to be one of the most significant demos that was ever done, right? This would have been just jaw-dropping at the time, right? There would have been generals and stuff watching this to see real airplanes flying real flight paths with real radar stations, with a computer in real-time saying, pilot, steer this way, and they would watch the radar and they would intercept. In modern terms, as a demo, this is the most boring thing you've ever seen because when you look at it, it's just a couple of diets moving across the screen. So it's a little hard to get this across in a live demo, but you can see how it goes. Again, I do this with one screen on the laptop. Runner has two screens, so he can see the entire radar situation and then the two tracks, the two airplanes are being tracked as they converge. There's my own output there to help us figure out what the heck is supposed to be, what's going on. So this is the heading that whirlwind is computing that would be in BCD 330, 330 degrees heading for the interceptor pilot. And in the real code, of course, when they intercept, nothing happens because they're just watching the radar. So if the interceptor pilot is good enough to down the attacker, then one of the blips would disappear, otherwise they'd just fly off and go home. Oh, and the interceptor pilots were not allowed to down the attackers. It was against the rules. And in fact, they flew at different altitudes just in case it worked. Because the attacker pilots wanted to get home at night. And I read which aircraft they flew. I don't remember, they were not exotic airplanes. A curious thing is if we actually analyze the results of this tracking program, if I don't mess up, if I don't mess with a thing that the attacker, of course, stays on a completely straight path because that's the way I programmed it, the defender should intercept here, but actually intercepts a little bit further down. And I'm still working on figuring out why are these not quite right. I know part of it is an artifact here where it starts out thinking its interceptor is roughly zero velocity, which of course, if the interceptor is zero velocity, you've got a long way to go before you're gonna get an intercept. So it starts out too far north and then correct, but I don't know why it doesn't come closer. That's one we're still trying to figure out. Okay, so let me start to wrap up here. A key observation, of course, is it works. It's not quite optimal. I'm not sure why. Because of the way the code is structured, not only does it use the 256 words, but you can tell they had to work at it to get it to fit. There are various things in there that surely no one would do unless they needed one more word somewhere else. So I assume there are approximations in there that I don't understand yet. Ironically, the trigonometric functions, signs and cosines and tangents, all seem to be accurate, which is surprising in such a small piece of code. One lesson that I would draw from this is, whoa, this must have been just misery to debug. I have no idea how they did it, other than the obvious thing of banging their heads on the wall a lot. It's a real-time program, and they didn't have any debug framework. There wasn't any spare memory to put handy print statements in, and the printer is too slow anyways because if you printed 10 characters, you'd miss 20 radar readings. So we know that they ordered a couple of analog multi-track recorders, tape recorders, so they could record the actual flight tests and play them back over and over again. But it still must have been just total misery debugging this stuff. I can only expect that they had quite a few graduate students who got locked in a room with a source code and not let out until they could manually work through every instruction and demonstrate how the program was supposed to be working or not. I think the code review would have been more like hardware design than what we think of as software design. But I oddly have not found a lot of material on how they did that stuff. I think it was just part of the landscape. Of course, it's miserable. What can you do about it? What I want to do going forward then is to try to follow the development of this air defense application. This demo obviously was influential and somehow eventually became sage and there must have been a lot of stuff that happened in between. I'm trying to see how the impact of this work spread. On a completely different thread, there's quite a bit of material available on their development of this automatic programming environment. They eventually ended up with something that looks a little bit like an operating system that most of the whirlwind material is bare metal code. Eventually, they got to a point where they didn't actually have to reload everything every time. Someone wanted to run something and I think it would be interesting to dig a little bit harder through that stuff and understand a bit more how the machine was used for the other applications. That is my favorite picture from the whirlwind photo archive. It was scheduled for June 1st, 1959, but as a shutdown, they actually turned it off a couple of days ahead of that, I think, to avoid any accidents. Okay. The documents, the bit savers, of course, is well known. MIT whirlwind is the place to look. MIT is public. Many of the tape images, all of the paper tape and some of the magnetic tapes are on bit savers and I have a GitHub site with the simulator. Reiner will talk about this in more detail. Reiner's focus has been on the vector interface, the actual graphical interface part of this stuff and has together produced two things. One is the underlying interface mechanism that is spliced into my simulator so that we can run real whirlwind code and display the results. But Reiner has a number of programs which are modern programs written to exercise that and demonstrate the graphical environment. So this menu is from a program dispatcher that projects on the screen and you can use the light gun to say, I want to run number nine and number nine is linked to the whirlwind vibrating string demo. Okay. With that, I think I can stop. Do you want to switch to yours? Okay. Yes. Oh, thank you. Oh, the remote microphone. Yes. So you had this diagram with this flow chart with the simulator on one end and I think the input on the other end in any case. So you have all of these. This code that you've recovered on a... This one? Or the tools flow? I think it was. Yes, this one. So you've recovered all of these tapes, all of this code which you've recovered imperfectly but also the simulator. I mean, how can you know that the simulator is a match to what the actual hardware was? Is there any uncertainty there? Yes. How do we know the simulator is simulating the real instruction set? In fact, of course, at some level that's a bit of a metaphysical question because the instruction set itself evolved. Fortunately, not much. There was a major change in the instruction set around 1952 and after that it stayed quite stable. There is a document, thank God, it survived, published in 1958 which is the definition of the instruction set for programmers and that document, I think, had been evolved and reviewed and evolved and reviewed for years and I think we found it to be very accurate. There are a couple of areas that seem suspiciously vague so where we might not have quite the right thing but fortunately the later instantiation of the instruction set is quite well documented. The tapes have quite a few diagnostic programs, some of them we've been able to get to work and of course that's a clue as well that if the diagnostics run then it probably runs. I have been surprised that, again, when the instruction set is very straightforward there are only 35 instructions and there's only one addressing mode. One's complement arithmetic is not fundamentally that hard but it certainly introduces a little bit of confusion here and there but other than that I think it's been relatively straightforward to decode the instruction set. I don't think it's a bio system, not so much but that's what we use as confidence for the thing. Other questions? Is this your personal private work or are you funded by something? Money? I don't know whether we can talk about money in a place like this. What is the diplomatic answer to that, Reiner? Yeah. The support from the museums that you mentioned and most of this I think is your private enterprise. Yeah, let's leave money out of it but it is done in conjunction with the three institutions and MIT has been generous enough to provide work space and so on so I spend three days a week at the MIT Museum on this and other related stuff. All questions? Okay.


The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohamed, has called on political opponents to desist from playing politics with Nigeria's security challenges. The minister made the call in Abuja while responding to a statement on insecurity by the People's Democratic Party, PDP. According to him, the opposition needs to have a rethink on their critical stance on the government. He said that the administration of President Muhammadi Buhari is aware of the challenges in the country and was doing all its can to address it. Lai Mohamed also said that they were working hard to prosecute all arrested kidnappers and bandits in Nigeria. The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohamed, has called on political opponents to desist from playing politics with Nigeria's security challenges. He said that he was working hard to prosecute all arrested kidnappers and bandits in Nigeria and was doing all its can to address it. The PDP should have on all the states included those in contention of the brutal prosecution of arresting kidnappers and bandits. Meanwhile, PDP got nearly forgotten that as far as tourism, a very precious concern is for the government as it successfully prosecuted thousands of Buhari members Engaging as part of the GXS


In the comments section is filled with this kind of stuff. Wealth was stolen from resource rich nations. Resources slaves, land, water, all stolen. And now I ignore that, but it keeps getting repeated. Somebody else says, well, he forgot to add it was because of exploited resources of Asian and African countries that the European nation built wealth. And I thought, God, this is a confusion that people have and that they still have in the 21st century and that it still kind of dominates people's thinking. The idea that wealth equals natural resources and that wealth comes from natural resources. And I thought, well, we should do a show on where wealth actually comes from and on natural resources, wealth. Now take natural resources. This stuff in the ground, oil, I don't know, metals, all kinds of stuff that's in the ground. Land, is it a natural resource? Well, is it a resource first? And then is it wealth? Well, if I don't know what to do with the stuff, then it's just stuff. It's not wealth. What do we say? Wealth is material goods made by man? Well, it's not a good because I don't know what to do with it. It's not made by human beings. It's just a waste. And indeed, until the mid-19th century, oil in the ground, oil in the ground was not considered a good. It was considered an evil. It made farming on the land impossible. It leaked out this black geek that dirtied everything. It was difficult to get rid of. Nobody wanted it. Resources that were underground were not known and therefore were not a good for man. They were just nothing. They were not existent. They didn't exist. Africa has had no natural resources before they were discovered. But more importantly, before a use for them was created. What made nature a resource is man's ability to take that and use it for something. Oil for energy, plastics, materials, gas coming out of the ground for energy, metals for construction of things. Today they talk about rare earth metals.  It was not a resource. They were not valuable. They had no value. They were just stuff and they were not wealth. So it's not the case that Africa and Asia and China and whatever had just these stores of wealth in the land that were stolen from them. They had stuff in the ground. And it's people who discovered that that stuff could be used for productive means, that that stuff could be made into wealth, could be harvested as wealth, could be mined as wealth. But that required discovery. That required action, that required ingenuity, that required innovation. And then they had to figure out how to get it, how to extract it. Now I'm not saying what colonizers, European colonizers did in Africa and in Asia was okay and they did it right because to a large extent they often did not respect the people who lived there. They often were brutal. They often killed a lot of people. So there was a massive violation of the rights of individuals in these countries. They weren't countries in these locations in their attempt to access the natural resources. Even today, the mining operations in the Congo are not just, they're not right, they're not good. Whose fault is that is an open question, right? Primarily the local people there who don't respect property rights. Local governments there who don't respect property rights. Nature is only a resource when human beings alter it, when human beings use it. It's not wealth until we discover how to make it wealth, how to make it productive, how to make it useful, how to make it something that is useful for human beings. Land, when we were hunter-gatherers, land was not a resource. Land was unimportant. Yeah, it was good for the grazing, the bison's of grazing, so we could hunt the bison, but the land, quality of the land was not a resource until we become farmers. Only when we become farmers does land become a resource. And then it becomes wealth, a source of wealth, because you can grow stuff on it. It's productive now. And now it is a material good that is made from man, agriculture. Now, so you can't... Natural resources sure are valuable to those who know how to use them. The fact is gold was not valuable to the Incas, because they didn't use it for anything. Yes, they did a little bit of jewelry, but it wasn't useful because there was no productive activity that it could facilitate. And many years in the Portuguese who mined it and brought it to Europe, it solidified it as the monetary unit. It then became the monetary unit that was used for what? Was used to facilitate production, funnily enough. Not in Portugal and Spain, and that's why it's interesting, right? The natural resources you'd think that Portugal and Spain today would be the richest countries in the world because they found all the gold and they stole in quotes all the gold and they should be the richest. And yet Portugal and Spain became impoverished, relatively speaking. They did not become the wealthiest wine because they didn't take that gold and they didn't invest it in production. They consumed it all. And once it ran out in terms of the new supply and constant mining, they had nothing. And where did all that gold flow? All that gold flowed to the countries that at the time were actually producing, were actually building, were actually creating, were actually engaged in productive activity and early on it went primarily to the Netherlands and to England and that's why the Netherlands and England became rich while Spain and Portugal became poor. And when Spain and Portugal had better colonies in terms of extracting natural resources, the British focused more on trade and focused more on production and ultimately the Industrial Revolution made them richer than anybody because they produced wealth. Wealth is produced. It takes natural resources, it takes labor and you emerge natural resources and labor with the most important component, the mind, reason, innovation, ingenuity, business. That's where you get wealth. So wealth is immaterial goods and immaterial goods need to be produced. Wealth needs to be created. Wealth needs to be produced. You can only produce wealth. You don't just find wealth. Wealth is not just out there to be picked. Now, a thief can steal wealth. You can steal your stuff but that's zero sum. It's negative sum. That goes nowhere. That creates nothing. Wealth grows not by taking. Wealth grows by producing. So yes, those natural resources, I don't know, we have all companies in Nigeria and constantly told that we're impoverishing Africa by taking the oil. But the oil is useless to them. It's only useful to those who extract it and can refine it. And refining and extracting and using and producing and creating and building wealth requires private property and freedom and that's really what Nigeria needs. That's really what the rest of Africa needs in order to become wealthy. Isn't it funny that places like Hong Kong have no natural resources? Singapore has no natural resources and yes, they are incredibly wealthy because they produce, they create wealth. So wealth comes fundamentally into some extent this is part of the theme of Atlas Shrugged. Wealth comes from the application of reason to the problem of human existence, human flourishing, human success, human progress. Wealth comes from the application of reason using reason to know and identify and understand the world around us, the components of the material world and then reshape them in ways that are more useful for human beings.  The reshaping of those resources that nature provides to fit man's needs but for that you need a mind and for that you need freedom and you need property rights. So the oil is not the resource, the ultimate resource is the human mind and therefore the ultimate source of wealth is the human mind and if you want to create wealth anywhere in the world what you need to create is an environment in which the human mind can flourish, the human mind can innovate and then, wait, individuals can act on their judgment, can act on their ideas, can try new things. Yeah, I highly recommend the writings of Julian Simon on the mind as the ultimate resource and why resources are infinite. I also recommend George Reisman's book, Capitalism. I'm just going to show you this book because it's hard to believe that this thing exists. Look at the size of that. I mean that's real size, I'll put it here next to my head. That is a massive book, right? Anyway, I recommend chapter two of that book about wealth. It's very good, it's very interesting, it goes through a number of different aspects of wealth. Julian Simon's book, which I have behind me, I have it somewhere there, is excellent. Yeah, there it is, much smaller book. The ultimate resource too, also pretty thick but much much smaller just to give you a sense of the difference, right? Look at that. And ultimate resource is already that big book. All right, these are great books to understand where wealth comes from, where natural resources come from, what makes a resource a resource rather than a liability and the role of the human mind in all of that. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to www.uranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.


شعرت شموس الهدي بالكلمات فأنا رت الأفهم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم والسرات والسرام على سيدنا ونبينا محمد وعلى أهل بيته الطيبين الطاهرين أمام الأشياء المهمة التي يفعلنا حياتنا is the motive that drives us كل أشياء محمدنا نتكلم from the moment we open our eyes in the morning and until we shut our eyes at midnight has a motive and a cause behind it what is the nature of essence of these motives these motives can be divided into two categories the first type of motive are driven by the power of anger the second type of motive is driven by the power of desire it's likely that mostly voluntarily actions humans commit are driven by one of those two types of motives the third type is the motive that driven by the power of illusion the power of illusion is relative as there is no reality behind it it's similar to the notion of ownership the notion of ownership is symbolic as it's not something tangible which can be empirically observed the notion of governance is also symbolic therefore the motives behind seeking ownership and seeking authority are driven by the power of illusion this was the third type of category of motives according to an analysis outlined by the scholars of ethics and morals the fourth type is the type of motives driven by the power of intellect the fifth and last type of motive is the motive driven by the divine and the unseen powers which originates from one being close to Allah from one having a great relationship with Allah making a distinction between the last two types of motives the intellect and the divine in which can become quite difficult sometimes it is not always clear this is a very important matter let's give an example of an individual that has good morals and good attitude he or she has a good attitude with people with people at home, with people at school, with people at work what is the motive behind this good attitude? one's motive can be a hassle free life this individual has a good attitude because he or she does not want any problems and conflicts in life there is this interesting hadith that states من ساء خلق عذاب نفسه whoever develops a bad attitude afflicts himself the one who suffers from a bad attitude is the one having that bad attitude he or she will be the first ones to suffer therefore a person with a good attitude realizes that having a good attitude will offer him or her a peaceful mind he or she believes that they will live a hassle free life why would a man treat his wife well? maybe it's for the sake of his social positions and reputation in society if he would have a problem or a conflict with his wife his reputation will be polluted obviously the decision in treating your wife well is a good thing it's good and it's peaceful to have a free life of hassle however would this person be able to ask Allah the Almighty for a reward and praise on the day of judgment for this motive? Allah could say to him that you wanted a life free of hassle and a peaceful life and you earned it you earned what you wanted what else would you ask from Almighty Allah? حاتم الطائي he had a wife who criticized him for his extreme generosity حاتم would tell his wife that money comes and goes but what remains from the money is the memories and the reputation meaning that people will remember his generosity and talk about it if حاتم's motive behind his generosity was to have a good reputation in society then would he deserve any reward from Allah? whenever we commit an action behind our action we must find out what the motive behind the action is and we should strive to make a motive behind every action to satisfy Allah سبحانه وتعالى every action should be done purely for the sake of Allah there are two حديث that is narrated in the book سفينة البحار by المحقق القمي the content of the حديث goes as following the angels ascend to the sky carrying the deeds of a believer and that deed would pass by the skies and barriers until the angels stand before Allah سبحانه وتعالى being pleased with a good deed they would tell him oh Allah this servant had a good deed Allah would reply to them to those angels and would say you are my guardians who watch over people yet you are not aware of the inner self he did not seek me in his deed this man or woman had a different motive he or she's motive was to be praised by society then the حديث continues and Allah says may Allah curse upon him or her then the angels would also say may Allah curse upon him or her as well this is the first حديث the second حديث is also narrated by the same source سفينة البحار it is narrated from the prophet the prophet peace and blessings be upon him addresses a man would not become a full man of understanding until he views people as objects before Allah سبحانه وتعالى just like camels they do not form our bases of our actions and deeds if someone is praised by people he or she should not care about that if someone is criticized by people he or she should not care about that whether people understand why he does good deeds those good deeds are dedicated for Allah سبحانه وتعالى people do not understand why he or she did such a thing so you shouldn't be concerned about it imagine ants crawling ants they come to know that you've done a good deed or a good action would you care? obviously not if those ants don't know about your good deeds would you be sad? of course not the man and woman who is fully understanding who does not give worth to any people's statement and thoughts before Allah's statement and decrees a believer only deals with Allah Allah is his only concern Imam عليه السلام says to his two sons Imam الحسن and حسين do and work for Allah's reward only meaning anything one does must be for the sake of Allah and receiving award and praise from Allah it's narrated that a scholar has written a book and he made a tremendous effort in finishing that book and authors acknowledge a relationship between them and their book once the author finished his book before publishing that book a man came and took the book from him to read and he did not return it to him the book remained with that person for a long time after a while the author of that book found his book being published by the name of the man who took the book away from him us as human beings once we complete something or do something we like to be praised by people some people like to be praised for what they did not do unfortunately this is a very widespread phenomenon in society where someone says he was part of a specific project and whoever she had no part in it whatsoever one likes to be praised and complimented and acknowledged if we build a mosque and then we realize that someone's name has been built on that mosque how would we feel now back to the story the scholar who found his book being published by a man who took the book from him he went to that man's house and he knocked the door the man came out and he told him that I wrote this book so that people can benefit from that book and you have published that book I have written a second volume take this second volume and publish it for me and put your name on it as well pay attention to this selfless act this state represents nothing but Allah's content and reward the holy verse of the Quran وأن تخفوها وتأتوها الفقراء فهو خير لكم but if you conceal them and give them to the poor it's better for you one should try to conceal his deeds his or her charity should be concealed all those deeds would be kept for him with Allah سبحانه وتعالى on the day of judgment we ask Allah سبحانه وتعالى to grant us success and achieve this state صلى الله عليه وسلم على سيدنا ونبينا محمد وعلى ألبيتي الطيبين الطاهرين نحن ينبغي علينا أن نحاول في كل عمل نقوم بيح أن نبحث في دافع ذلك العمل وفي باعث ذلك العمل ونحاول أن نجعل هذا العمل متماحظا الله سبحانه وتعالى