At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

_the stuff in the room is more or less the same_

jack it into my veins.

One big thing, however, is different. In 1983, that kitchen contained just a handful of transistors, all of which lived in the – there’s a clue in the name – transistor radio.

makes u think

Do people keep keys and vaccuum cleaners in the kitchen? Keys - by the door or in a coat pocket. Vacuum - usually hidden somewhere, maybe in the kitchen, but certainly not visible.

I notice we are both "picturing" and "fast-forwarding".

"Also in the room are a fridge" - I love that, just by itself

i assumed it was a very small flat, maybe not one-room (bcz he says "kitchen") but at most three

he makes no shift to clarify this tho, as ever forcing the reader to serve between different iterations of interpretation

On the table is a typewriter; to one side is a radio, to another is a phone; also in the room are a fridge, an oven, a hob, a toaster, a set of car keys and a vacuum cleaner.

but which ways are the exits

Admire the fearlessness of the title. Why not

I want to hear this para read aloud in that sunny Tiktok voice

haha yes

oven hob hob oven oven hob hob oven oven hob hob oven oven hob hob oven I don't understand:

* he looked around and thought 'well there's the oven… but wait the hob isn't technically an oven' but forgot the word cooker
* he needs to draw attention to the hob because ovens haven't changed and he wants you to think oh yeah maybe it's an induction they wouldn't have had that back then
* it's important that it's a separate hob, somewhere other than above the oven, like it was once a 2-ring electric burner running off a socket idk
* he's just listing words, sheer idiot say-what-you-see
?

it's a one-room bathroom-kitchenette with a bed and an oven AND AN AGA

I mean for all this I did enjoy the article, maybe anyone could have written it - but then we wouldn't have the lulz.

Something about the cadence of the excerpt has been nagging at me, and I just realised how much it sounds like "early text adventure"

On the table is a typewriter; to one side is a radio, to another is a phone; also in the room are a fridge, an oven, a hob, a toaster, a set of car keys and a vacuum cleaner.

>> Turn on vaccuum cleaner

You can't do that

>> Go south

lmao

perfect

but which ways are the exits

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, March 22, 2023 6:12 AM bookmarkflaglink

'early text adventure' incredible and otm observation. lanchester's worlds need to be navigated, so much of the navigational challenge is due to the opacity of meaning in the depicted world ie it's implied the objects described have meaning, but the meaning is unclear at this stage of the adventure, and you're presented with a reductive rebus (ie nothing exists outside the depiction and its related conundrums). i need to go back and re-read with this lens.

I've heard good things about the book Chip Wars, and have got it on my long long list of unread books. But the only heckin way i'm reading this is for the lulz.

Lanchester has written a book called CHIP WARS?

I too like Chuck Tatum's observation, as I still remember the computer game THE HOBBIT.

He's written a review of Chip War by Chris Miller.

sorry for the (entertaining) confusion.

is chip wars like tek wars

It's curious that people have so lambasted that notorious first paragraph, as I have now opened the issue and found that the subsequent paragraphs are worse.

Lanchester introduces 'the vacuum tube', which he implies can perform mathematical tasks. How? I don't comprehend.

He repeatedly refers to transistors. He tells us that his computer contains a microchip that contains 20,000,000,000 transistors. How many is that? 20 billion? That seems to suggest that these transistors must be very small - smaller than the eye can see. Is that the case? What kind of object are they?

What is a transistor? I have no idea. Lanchester refers to them again and again, but doesn't tell me what they are, nor how an item can contain 20,000,000,000 of them.

Also involved are semiconductors. They are some kind of 'material'. They 'both do and don't' conduct electricity. When? Why?

I think Lanchester is mainly aiming to tell a human-level story of business, which is relatively comprehensible to a human. But he wants to bolster his credibility, as a scientific sort of thinker, by citing these technical items and substances. But that doesn't help, because he doesn't tell us what they are, or his descriptions and definitions mystify more than they illuminate.

i guess i have a better basic understanding of these things but i wouldn't really expect more than those high level details in a book review - if you want to know more, read the book! isn't it common knowledge that transistors are incredibly, ridiculously, inconceivably small?

though the one extract from the book that explains the vacuum tube makes it sound just like a light bulb - a filament inside a glass bulb that can be switched on and off. it misses the crucial detail that it can be switched on and off with another electrical signal - though why that is important requires further explanation.

Ledge: I agree that it's always feasible to say "if you want to know X, look it up". I could have looked up "semiconductor" instead of writing that post - though I still probably wouldn't have understood it well.

"If you want to know more, read the book", I don't exactly agree with - the book is £20, 431pp, and it wouldn't particularly occur to me to go out and get it, or find time to read it. Whether it explains those items better than Lanchester, I don't know - I suspect it does.

My own sense is that if you're writing a lengthy article as Lanchester is, you shouldn't be leaving things for readers to look up elsewhere, but explaining them in the course of your own article.

"isn't it common knowledge that transistors are incredibly, ridiculously, inconceivably small?" It may be known to many people. It's not known to me. The only think I have ever known about them is that radios used them, so I imagined that they were the size of ... a battery, I suppose. Whatever they are. Lanchester doesn't say.

my complaint abt his economic writing is not that he doesn't understand it, it's that he's not at all good at conveying -- to ppl who want to know! -- which bits matter and how it works, and often as he approaches of such a demand he instead loops off in some comfortably digressive and not very illuminating anecdote: i take PF's point here to be "spend less time on (clumsily) evoking an 80s bedsit with lists of details and more time getting at the (relevant!) specifics of e.g. vacuum tubes and transistors, and the haptic specifics if this helps" (he talks a lot abt gordon moore, whose "law" -- abt the constantly doubling capacity to do stuff -- is deeply tied into the now-stupefying smallness of the present-day transistor, bcz the smaller they are the more of them you can cram in and thus the more it can do in more complicated ways)

(haptics notoriously doesn't apply in economics, yards of linen notwithstanding, which may actually be one of the big barriers to its easy assimilation) (i only just thought of this, maybe i shd go back and recast all my contributions to the econ-speak thread in light of this)

(haptics in artspeak means relevant to the specifics of touch rather than vision; it became a v common word in crafts criticism abt 20 years ago which is why i'm allowed to use it in that now-fading sense; as it's transferred to electronics and balllooned it tends to refer to the possibilities being realised with e.g. touch screens and such)

as with economics so with modern technology: any short essay is having to judge what the semi-informed reader needs to proceed, and this will require a balance of history and technical explication

there are people who are good at this, back when i was strongly embarked on my history of music and technology it was the issue i thought most about and worked hardest on: well that project silted up for various reasons (i plan to revive it tho!) and now instead we get lanch being really not at all good at it (but somehow at the same time good at persuading the right readers and reviewers that he's GREAT at it)

(in conclusion it's my fault)

"Any short essay" - agree.

This isn't a short essay!

Paragraph 2: he tells us that in 2023, all these items use microchips:

ovens, fridges, vacuums (= vacuum cleaner?), car keys, radios, speakers.

Note that 'speakers' are an item he's just added to the list and were not part of his original scenario, while fridge and toaster have mysteriously disappeared!

I definitely believe that current, high-end versions of these things are very electronic and sophisticated.

I am unsure that every instance of them, including those that I have in my home, are.

Does my oven contain a microchip? Quite doubtful. It seems to be quite a mechanical device. I turn a dial and it starts making a noise and generating heat. It doesn't seem very electronic.

Same for the toaster, actually.

In short, I'm not sure that Lanchester's view of 'now' as against 'then' is very precise.

Does your oven have a digital clock?

this very simple looking toaster has chips: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/electric-toaster-pictures.htm

you're probably right about the speakers!

I don't think my oven has a digital clock. It has a dial that turns round to make it heat up.

<3 but I did just remember Those round things that are in the middle of car tires and often seem to fall off, what's their purpose?

I mistyped in saying 'fridge and toaster have disappeared' from Lanchester's list, from para 1 to para 2 -- I meant HOB and toaster.

Odd as I think my hob *does* seem quite electronic.

The problems continue.

At p.2, para 2, of the article Lanchester tells us about a shift from one kind of 'chip' to another. Possibly this second kind is the 'microchip' - I'm not sure. He doesn't say so here, though that term is surely central to his review.

What is a 'chip'? He describes it visually here, which is a start. But what is it, what does it do? He doesn't say.

Further on p.2 Lanchester explains that US bombing used to be very inaccurate, then they used electronic chips, and it became accurate.

Why?

He leaves this totally unexplained. What is the relation between electronic chips and bombs? This is central to what he's saying, yet he gives no explanation of it whatever. Instead he ventures into a typically irrelevant, self-serving digression about TOP GUN - quite characteristic.

Another bad sentence, qua sentence, I think, later arrives: 'If the first important beneficiary [...] was the military, the second was the rest of us'.

So the second important beneficiary was ... everyone except those already covered by the the first important beneficiary? Isn't that so all-inclusive as barely to count as a proposition?

Maybe he’s leaving out unimportant beneficiaries. “Them,” perhaps. Or snakes.

The further I get in this article, the less I see the relevance of its much-derided opening.

All chips are microchips. It’s fair to lambast Lanchester but it’s akso fair to assume readers have some awareness of the world post 1945.

I've heard good things about the book Chip Wars

Ideally to be read in conjunction with a history of the Cod War.

James Morrison: I agree that any article needs to assume that potential readers already know certain things. It can't explain everything.

This *particular* article is about microchips - and, by extension, I think, transistors, semiconductors and such like. As such, it would be a good idea for the article to explain those items.

On the other hand, I don't think this article has a responsibility to explain the Vietnam War. It mentions that war, but that's not what it's about.

I wasn't sure that you could write a brief enough explanation of semiconductors and transistors to fit into such an article so I had a go:

Silicon by itself is not a conductor,  but you can 'dope' it with other elements to improve its conductivity - hence semiconductor. The doping can be done in two different ways, n-type and p-type. By themselves each of these types is only a moderate conductor but if you put them together you get interesting properties. Electricity will only flow from the n-type to the p-type, permitting current in only one direction. As an electrical component this is called a diode. If you put three layers together in a sandwich, npn or pnp, you'd think that no current could flow, and you'd be right - unless you apply a small current to the central layer, then current can flow through the whole sandwich. This is a basic transistor, the micro electronic equivalent of the vacuum tube or valve, where one electrical current can be turned on or off by another.

Furthermore, because transistors are switches that use one flow of current to control another, you can wire them into each other. By doing so you can create logic gates, which can for example produce an output current if two input currents are on (AND), if either input current is on (OR), or an output current if there is no input and vice versa (NOT). If you take an output current to be a 1 and no current to be a 0 then you can wire up logic gates in such a way as to perform binary arithmetic. And binary arithmetic is ultimately all that computers do.

Thanks Ledge for producing these descriptions.

Do you work in computer construction?

This reminds me that 10 years ago I tried to understand electricity. I think I learned that it had something to do with magnets - that electricity was generated between magnets. Unsure why, and perhaps that's not even true.

It is hard to see how human beings would discover electricity.

the usual explanation is that electricity was first observed as static electricity, as generated by rubbing amber (greek: elektrum) against cloth

the relationship between electric current and magnetism: if you pass a conducting metal through a magnetic field (viz basically past some magnets) it generates an electric current: this is because magnetism is the consequence of an excess of electrons moving towards a zone that lacks electrons, and the moving magnet (oversimplification alaert) "drags" the electrons in the conducting metal so that they push against other electrons and cause a current, like a river of electrons. magnets are made of high-resistance metals where the excess of electrons are gathered at one end and and the lack of them at the other; a conducting metal is a substance in which electrons move fairly easily (metals such as copper; also water, as a non-metallic conductor).

^^ a great deal of technology from the mid-19th century onwards uses this mechanism (often the magnets are caused to spin around wires in which you need a current)

the "field" is the larger region affected by the magnet (there's a mathematical definition, but i won't risk embarking on that)
"resistance" is (in this instance) a material quality of the substance that slows electrons down

actual real scientists can step in and slap me around when i start talking nonsense here

you can also generate electricity from potatoes.

I work in i.t. but strictly software. I've read about this stuff before but forgot it all so had to crib it again from various how stuff works articles.

magnets are made of high-resistance metals where the excess of electrons are gathered at one end and and the lack of them at the other

Isn't it that the magnetic field of all the magnet's atoms or molecules are lined up in the same direction?

Tatoes being full of water, I guess

salty water yes

xp lol probably