from
https://www.space.com/seti-chief-bill-diamond-ufos-alien-visitation

SETI chief says US has no evidence for alien technology. 'And we never have'
News
By Leonard David published 6 hours ago
"The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is
just totally absurd. There's no motivation to do so."

Comments (9)
a series of large white radar dishes stand alone in the desert
The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array is a radio astronomy observatory
located in the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. (Image credit: Getty
Images/Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo)
If all the reports of mysterious objects buzzing our skies are taken as
true encounters, the Earth appears to be under assault.

But spoiler alert: For the chief leader of the SETI Institute,
established to search for and understand life beyond Earth, there's a
need to step back and cuddle up to a cup of cosmic reality.

"We don't have any evidence of any credible source that would indicate
the presence of alien technology in our skies. And we never have," said
Bill Diamond, president and chief executive officer of the SETI
Institute, headquartered in Mountain View, California. "The idea that
the government is keeping something like this secret is just totally
absurd. There's no motivation to do so."

Related: 'It's getting closer and closer for sure.' How SETI is
expanding its search for alien intelligence (exclusive)

SETI is a key research contractor to NASA and the National Science
Foundation, and collaborates with industry partners throughout Silicon
Valley. Space.com caught up with Diamond for a close-encounter with his
own thoughts and counterpoints to claims of alien visitation and to ask
whether there's any signal in all the UFO noise.

a man in a blue vest stands in a large room before a large red piece of
equipment and a large dark circular disk towering over him.

Bill Diamond, president and chief executive officer of the SETI
Institute. (Image credit: Bill Diamond)
Thought experiment
Diamond said that, while we should not outright rule out the possibility
that we might someday discover evidence of alien technology in our
skies, "we should equally not jump to the conclusion that UFOs are alien
technology in the absence of any compelling evidence to that effect. And
there is no compelling evidence," he contends.

To help visualize why, Diamond urges people to try a thought experiment.

Get the Space.com Newsletter
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching
events and more!

Your Email Address
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands
Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors
By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and
Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.
The fastest spacecraft that humans have ever built and continues to head
outward from Earth is NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. It was hurled
outward back in January 2006, cruising by Pluto and is still adding
mileage to its odometer.

"If you sent that spacecraft to our closest neighbor star, Alpha
Centauri, it would take 80,000 years to get there," said Diamond. "Any
civilization that has mastered the ability to traverse the
incomprehensibly vast distances of interstellar space would have
technology so far advanced from our own as to be beyond our comprehension."

The binary stars of the nearby Alpha Centauri system, as seen by NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope. On the left is Alpha Centauri A, which is a
sun-like G-type star. On the right is Alpha Centauri B, which is a
slightly cooler K-type star.

The closest star system to the Earth is the Alpha Centauri group at a
distance of 4.3 light-years. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope snagged
this view of Alpha Centauri A (on the left) and Alpha Centauri B (on the
right), appearing as cosmic headlamps in the dark. (Image credit:
ESA/NASA)
It would be much like a smartphone to a Neanderthal, Diamond suggested.

"If such beings exist, they would likely send hardware here first and
not biology, and they certainly wouldn't crash-land in our deserts," he
said, like the alleged and highly acclaimed 1947 nose-dive of a UFO and
its accident-prone occupants near Roswell, New Mexico.

In short haul language, that's a long way to travel and run out of
braking fluid.

Where's the mothership?
"Long before they sent any craft into our sky they would have some
understanding of what they were dealing with," Diamond observed, "as
they would already know everything about our atmosphere, our airspace,
our technology and more."

It just wouldn't happen, Diamond emphasized.

"And if it did they wouldn't leave them behind. And by the way, if you
have a small craft zipping around in our airspace, where is the
mothership? And if they didn't want to be observed, they wouldn't be!"

an image of space with the words SETI INSTITUTE

For many, the SETI logo signals a universal question of 'are we alone?'.
(Image credit: SETI Institute/Trevor Beattie)
Connective tissue
All the same, in the public mind, is there some kind of connective
tissue between SETI and UFOs?

"There is definitely connective tissue," Diamond responded. "Why do
people have these beliefs? It is because they want to believe. Nobody
really wants to think that this Earth is the only place in the vastness
of space where life has emerged. Even that idea is also kind of absurd."

For example, Diamond points to the revelations cranked out by the NASA
Kepler mission, lofted in March 2009.

That hunter/data-gatherer spacecraft discovered more than 2,700 planets
beyond our solar system. Compiling deep space data for nine years, the
message from Kepler: there are billions of unseen planets, indeed, more
planets than stars.

Statistical probability
"Statistically speaking, every single star in the sky has one or more
planets around it," Diamond pointed out. Furthermore, 50 percent or more
of these are Earth-like (rocky surface and similar size) and in the
habitable zone of their host star, he said.

"That implies the existence of tens of billions of potentially habitable
worlds in our galaxy alone," Diamond said. "So indeed, the statistical
probability that we are alone in the Universe is zero. Surely there is
life beyond Earth!"

But the presence, both in space and time, as well as proximity, of
advanced alien civilizations is another matter completely, Diamond
continued. "There are innumerable variables, all of which in the
sciences of astrobiology, planetary science, astronomy and astrophysics,
we are trying to figure out."

Accidental observations
The SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California is
now searching 20,000 red dwarf stars for signs of intelligent life.

The SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array is the first radio telescope
to be designed from the ground up to search for extraterrestrial
intelligence. (Image credit: Seth Shostak, SETI Institute)
Diamond questions why any alien civilization would send biology when
they could isntead send hardware.

"The farthest things we have sent into space are hardware. And that's
logical," said Diamond. "But if you did send beings and the most
interesting thing you can do is draw circles in crops … come on!"

One other scoop of skepticism Diamond added is that every single UFO —
now tied to the term Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) — are all
"accidental observations."

RELATED STORIES:
—  The search for extraterrestrial intelligence gets a new home at Oxford

 — SETI scientists begin huge new hunt for intelligent aliens

— SETI's 1st 'conversation' with a humpback whale offers insight on how
to talk to E.T.

"Therefore, they are highly unreliable. They don't have instrumentation,
technology, or methodology to discern what they are looking at," said
Diamond.

Lastly, the SETI Institute leader said if the government actually
believed in ET buzzing our planet, where's the study money?

"The lack of government funding to study UAP/UFO is evidence of either
the government being quite certain that there's nothing to these
accidental observations — or — the government preferring that we not use
available technology to closely watch our skies because of our own human
technologies that are being developed — in secret," said Diamond.

"I think that's the most compelling bit of evidence against the idea
that we've got visitors in our skies," Diamond concluded.

For more information on the SETI Institute and its programs, go to
https://www.seti.org/

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions,
night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment,
let us know at: community@space.com.

Leonard David
Leonard David
Space Insider Columnist
Leonard David is an award-winning space journalist who has been
reporting on space activities for more than 50 years. Currently writing
as Space.com's Space Insider Columnist among his other projects, Leonard
has authored numerous books on space exploration, Mars missions and
more, with his latest being "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published in
2019 by National Geographic. He also wrote "Mars: Our Future on the Red
Planet" released in 2016 by National Geographic. Leonard has served as
a correspondent for SpaceNews, Scientific American and Aerospace America
for the AIAA. He was received many awards, including the first Ordway
Award for Sustained Excellence in Spaceflight History in 2015 at the AAS
Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium. You can find out Leonard's latest
project at his website and on Twitter.

In alt.astronomy a425couple <a425couple@hotmail.com> wrote:
> from
> https://www.space.com/seti-chief-bill-diamond-ufos-alien-visitation
>
> SETI chief says US has no evidence for alien technology. 'And we never have'
> News
> By Leonard David published 6 hours ago
> "The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is
> just totally absurd. There's no motivation to do so."
....

LOL. To think anyone has all their $trillions invested in the status quo
is just silly. It just goes against all conservative thinking!

--
Everything in Our Universe May Possess a Form of Consciousness, Scientists Say
Popular Mechanics, 21 Mar 2024

"a425couple" wrote in message news:eEUTN.1933$Dfwf.617@fx12.iad...

"If you sent that spacecraft to our closest neighbor star, Alpha
Centauri, it would take 80,000 years to get there," said Diamond. "Any
civilization that has mastered the ability to traverse the
incomprehensibly vast distances of interstellar space would have
technology so far advanced from our own as to be beyond our comprehension."

------------------------------

Suppose the "Dark Energy" that we observe as unexplained galactic structure
etc but don't understand is repelled by a star's gravity well, so we won't
detect it until we sent the proper instruments far enough out. (How far,
which ones?) Then we discover, lets say, antiparticles of gravity and how to
shield them, as we can the electric and magnetic forces, and the existence
of parallel dimension(s) with different rules of physics, such as limits on
matter but not energy or time, opposite to ours. We know about only what we
can detect and measure, and for deep space we see but can't touch, like
studying animals and minerals from photographs. Without advancing our
science very much we might discover warp speed interstellar travel, as we
unexpectedly discovered and utilized electromagnetic and nuclear radiation,
not so long ago. Neither of them increased the advance rate of our
mechanical technology.

In this scenario other spacefaring civilizations don't have to be far beyond
us, perhaps they haven't yet discovered semiconductors and use miniaturized
integrated vacuum tube technology, which has been explored here but isn't
competitive.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/43768
"Compared to existing semiconductor devices, they should be faster and much
more tolerant of high temperatures and radiation."

In our history low budget explorers, prospectors and adventurers usually
made first contact, and it didn't always go well.

"R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
news:uvp77o$1al4$2@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...

Everything in Our Universe May Possess a Form of Consciousness, Scientists
Say
Popular Mechanics, 21 Mar 2024

----------------------------------

I -knew- the universe was jealous and out to get us.

"a425couple" wrote in message news:eEUTN.1933$Dfwf.617@fx12.iad...
>
>from
>https://www.space.com/seti-chief-bill-diamond-ufos-alien-visitation
>
>SETI chief says US has no evidence for alien technology. 'And we never
>have'
>News
>By Leonard David published 6 hours ago
>"The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is just
>totally absurd. There's no motivation to do so."
>
> Comments (9)
>a series of large white radar dishes stand alone in the desert
>The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array is a radio astronomy observatory
>located in the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. (Image credit: Getty
>Images/Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo)
>If all the reports of mysterious objects buzzing our skies are taken as
>true encounters, the Earth appears to be under assault.
>
>But spoiler alert: For the chief leader of the SETI Institute, established
>to search for and understand life beyond Earth, there's a need to step back
>and cuddle up to a cup of cosmic reality.
>
>"We don't have any evidence of any credible source that would indicate the
>presence of alien technology in our skies. And we never have," said Bill
>Diamond, president and chief executive officer of the SETI Institute,
>headquartered in Mountain View, California. "The idea that the government
>is keeping something like this secret is just totally absurd. There's no
>motivation to do so."
>
>Related: 'It's getting closer and closer for sure.' How SETI is expanding
>its search for alien intelligence (exclusive)
>
>SETI is a key research contractor to NASA and the National Science
>Foundation, and collaborates with industry partners throughout Silicon
>Valley. Space.com caught up with Diamond for a close-encounter with his own
>thoughts and counterpoints to claims of alien visitation and to ask whether
>there's any signal in all the UFO noise.
>
>a man in a blue vest stands in a large room before a large red piece of
>equipment and a large dark circular disk towering over him.
>
>Bill Diamond, president and chief executive officer of the SETI Institute.
>(Image credit: Bill Diamond)
>Thought experiment
>Diamond said that, while we should not outright rule out the possibility
>that we might someday discover evidence of alien technology in our skies,
>"we should equally not jump to the conclusion that UFOs are alien
>technology in the absence of any compelling evidence to that effect. And
>there is no compelling evidence," he contends.
>
>To help visualize why, Diamond urges people to try a thought experiment.
>
>Get the Space.com Newsletter
>Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching
>events and more!
>
>Your Email Address
>Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands
>Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors
>By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and
>Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.
>The fastest spacecraft that humans have ever built and continues to head
>outward from Earth is NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. It was hurled outward
>back in January 2006, cruising by Pluto and is still adding mileage to its
>odometer.
>
>"If you sent that spacecraft to our closest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri,
>it would take 80,000 years to get there," said Diamond. "Any civilization
>that has mastered the ability to traverse the incomprehensibly vast
>distances of interstellar space would have technology so far advanced from
>our own as to be beyond our comprehension."
>
>The binary stars of the nearby Alpha Centauri system, as seen by NASA's
>Hubble Space Telescope. On the left is Alpha Centauri A, which is a
>sun-like G-type star. On the right is Alpha Centauri B, which is a slightly
>cooler K-type star.
>
>The closest star system to the Earth is the Alpha Centauri group at a
>distance of 4.3 light-years. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope snagged
>this view of Alpha Centauri A (on the left) and Alpha Centauri B (on the
>right), appearing as cosmic headlamps in the dark. (Image credit:
>ESA/NASA)
>It would be much like a smartphone to a Neanderthal, Diamond suggested.
>
>"If such beings exist, they would likely send hardware here first and not
>biology, and they certainly wouldn't crash-land in our deserts," he said,
>like the alleged and highly acclaimed 1947 nose-dive of a UFO and its
>accident-prone occupants near Roswell, New Mexico.
>
>In short haul language, that's a long way to travel and run out of braking
>fluid.
>
>Where's the mothership?
>"Long before they sent any craft into our sky they would have some
>understanding of what they were dealing with," Diamond observed, "as they
>would already know everything about our atmosphere, our airspace, our
>technology and more."
>
>It just wouldn't happen, Diamond emphasized.
>
>"And if it did they wouldn't leave them behind. And by the way, if you have
>a small craft zipping around in our airspace, where is the mothership? And
>if they didn't want to be observed, they wouldn't be!"
>
>an image of space with the words SETI INSTITUTE
>
>For many, the SETI logo signals a universal question of 'are we alone?'.
>(Image credit: SETI Institute/Trevor Beattie)
>Connective tissue
>All the same, in the public mind, is there some kind of connective tissue
>between SETI and UFOs?
>
>"There is definitely connective tissue," Diamond responded. "Why do people
>have these beliefs? It is because they want to believe. Nobody really wants
>to think that this Earth is the only place in the vastness of space where
>life has emerged. Even that idea is also kind of absurd."
>
>For example, Diamond points to the revelations cranked out by the NASA
>Kepler mission, lofted in March 2009.
>
>That hunter/data-gatherer spacecraft discovered more than 2,700 planets
>beyond our solar system. Compiling deep space data for nine years, the
>message from Kepler: there are billions of unseen planets, indeed, more
>planets than stars.
>
>Statistical probability
>"Statistically speaking, every single star in the sky has one or more
>planets around it," Diamond pointed out. Furthermore, 50 percent or more of
>these are Earth-like (rocky surface and similar size) and in the habitable
>zone of their host star, he said.
>
>"That implies the existence of tens of billions of potentially habitable
>worlds in our galaxy alone," Diamond said. "So indeed, the statistical
>probability that we are alone in the Universe is zero. Surely there is life
>beyond Earth!"
>
>But the presence, both in space and time, as well as proximity, of advanced
>alien civilizations is another matter completely, Diamond continued. "There
>are innumerable variables, all of which in the sciences of astrobiology,
>planetary science, astronomy and astrophysics, we are trying to figure
>out."
>
>Accidental observations
>The SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California is now
>searching 20,000 red dwarf stars for signs of intelligent life.
>
>The SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array is the first radio telescope to
>be designed from the ground up to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
>(Image credit: Seth Shostak, SETI Institute)
>Diamond questions why any alien civilization would send biology when they
>could isntead send hardware.
>
>"The farthest things we have sent into space are hardware. And that's
>logical," said Diamond. "But if you did send beings and the most
>interesting thing you can do is draw circles in crops … come on!"
>
>One other scoop of skepticism Diamond added is that every single UFO — now
>tied to the term Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) — are all
>"accidental observations."
>
>RELATED STORIES:
>— The search for extraterrestrial intelligence gets a new home at Oxford
>
>— SETI scientists begin huge new hunt for intelligent aliens
>
>— SETI's 1st 'conversation' with a humpback whale offers insight on how to
>talk to E.T.
>
>"Therefore, they are highly unreliable. They don't have instrumentation,
>technology, or methodology to discern what they are looking at," said
>Diamond.
>
>Lastly, the SETI Institute leader said if the government actually believed
>in ET buzzing our planet, where's the study money?
>
>"The lack of government funding to study UAP/UFO is evidence of either the
>government being quite certain that there's nothing to these accidental
>observations — or — the government preferring that we not use available
>technology to closely watch our skies because of our own human technologies
>that are being developed — in secret," said Diamond.
>
>"I think that's the most compelling bit of evidence against the idea that
>we've got visitors in our skies," Diamond concluded.
>
>For more information on the SETI Institute and its programs, go to
>https://www.seti.org/
>
>Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night
>sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us
>know at: community@space.com.
>
>Leonard David
>Leonard David
>Space Insider Columnist
>Leonard David is an award-winning space journalist who has been reporting
>on space activities for more than 50 years. Currently writing as
>Space.com's Space Insider Columnist among his other projects, Leonard has
>authored numerous books on space exploration, Mars missions and more, with
>his latest being "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published in 2019 by
>National Geographic. He also wrote "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet"
>released in 2016 by National Geographic. Leonard has served as a
>correspondent for SpaceNews, Scientific American and Aerospace America for
>the AIAA. He was received many awards, including the first Ordway Award for
>Sustained Excellence in Spaceflight History in 2015 at the AAS Wernher von
>Braun Memorial Symposium. You can find out Leonard's latest project at his
>website and on Twitter.
>

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
> "R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
> news:uvp77o$1al4$2@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...
>
> Everything in Our Universe May Possess a Form of Consciousness, Scientists
> Say
> Popular Mechanics, 21 Mar 2024
> ----------------------------------
> I -knew- the universe was jealous and out to get us.

Quantum physicists seemingly *finally* come around to agreeing with animists
supposedly going back to the Palaeolithic.
Not *that's* progress. :)

--
In the past 1000 years scientists have managed to quickly survey about
1 part in 10**25 of the universe. While the survey is of course not
a reprasentative sample of all that is supposed to exist out there
they are quite quite certain they know something.

"R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
news:uvpso2$up5$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
> "R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
> news:uvp77o$1al4$2@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...
>
> Everything in Our Universe May Possess a Form of Consciousness, Scientists
> Say
> Popular Mechanics, 21 Mar 2024
> ----------------------------------
> I -knew- the universe was jealous and out to get us.

Quantum physicists seemingly *finally* come around to agreeing with animists
supposedly going back to the Palaeolithic.
Not *that's* progress. :)

--
In the past 1000 years scientists have managed to quickly survey about
1 part in 10**25 of the universe. While the survey is of course not
a reprasentative sample of all that is supposed to exist out there
they are quite quite certain they know something.
-----------------
Where are you? In the 60's I learned either ^ or E between the mantissa and
exponent.
Are you the Australian Dr. Horsell?

We "know" something until experimental results disagree, and we are reaching
beyond physical access for verification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistentialism
I used to blame Entropy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finagle%27s_law
Early in my scientific education I learned about the Finagle Factor, which
rationalizes the difference between what you want and what you get.

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
> "R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
> news:uvpso2$up5$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...
>
> In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
>> "R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
>> news:uvp77o$1al4$2@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...
>>
>> Everything in Our Universe May Possess a Form of Consciousness, Scientists
>> Say
>> Popular Mechanics, 21 Mar 2024
>> ----------------------------------
>> I -knew- the universe was jealous and out to get us.
>
> Quantum physicists seemingly *finally* come around to agreeing with animists
> supposedly going back to the Palaeolithic.
> Not *that's* progress. :)
>
> --
> In the past 1000 years scientists have managed to quickly survey about
> 1 part in 10**25 of the universe. While the survey is of course not
> a reprasentative sample of all that is supposed to exist out there
> they are quite quite certain they know something.
> -----------------
> Where are you? In the 60's I learned either ^ or E between the mantissa and
> exponent.

It seems you skipped the class on FORTRAN. UNFORGIVABLE!!! ;)

> Are you the Australian Dr. Horsell?
....

I am "a" Dr Horsell (psychiatry MBBS MPM but dont think I only have 2 degrees :).
As I was telling someone else 10 sec ago Google once listed
350,000 references to me, about 50k more than some guy President Obama.
Since then the Google gaslight co policy is unless you write your own entry
on Wikipedia none of those kind of links can be searched anymore.
Everything else useful is what's on wayback archives or maybe
whatever is now on google groups archives (AFAIK about 1/2 of what was
ever posted to USENET has been lost).

A bit of a shock, I know.

"R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
news:uvu8uk$16ad$2@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
> "R Kym Horsell" wrote in message

> Where are you? In the 60's I learned either ^ or E between the mantissa
> and
> exponent.

It seems you skipped the class on FORTRAN. UNFORGIVABLE!!! ;)

------------------
I began as a chemist, which the Vietnam draft cut short at a B.S. but the
Army gave me a good education in advanced electronics, which I liked and
stayed with, designing and building custom and prototype hardware. My first
programming language was an industrialized version of DEC Pascal, then I
used the similarly structured QBasic for unhindered I/O register level r/w
access in a PC. Programming was a side job I did because I knew the unique
architecture and register models of products in development.

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
> "R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
> news:uvu8uk$16ad$2@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...
> In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
>> "R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
>> Where are you? In the 60's I learned either ^ or E between the mantissa
>> and
>> exponent.
> It seems you skipped the class on FORTRAN. UNFORGIVABLE!!! ;)
> ------------------
> I began as a chemist, which the Vietnam draft cut short at a B.S. but the
> Army gave me a good education in advanced electronics, which I liked and
> stayed with, designing and building custom and prototype hardware. My first
> programming language was an industrialized version of DEC Pascal, then I
> used the similarly structured QBasic for unhindered I/O register level r/w

Copy that. Similar deal here. After undergrad I worked at a college
CC in the 70s with a KI10/TOPS10.

Pasrel or Pascal? :)

I was mostly into Simula by then.

> access in a PC. Programming was a side job I did because I knew the unique
> architecture and register models of products in development.

--
The way to win [on climate change policy] is very slowly and very
locally, then all at once.
-- Tom Steyer, billionaire activist, 22 Jan 2014

"R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
news:uvutit$1dq9$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
>...

>Pasrel or Pascal? :)

The class used Wirth's Pascal textbook, the DEC LSI-11 compiler had been
tweaked for register level bit-banging, with typing rules relaxed from ivory
tower academic to real world problem solving level. I don't know if that was
custom or a commercial product. The final MS version of QBasic was very
similar, for instance machine language code could be stored as a text $tring
and executed with a pointer CALL to it without any compiler complaint.

The machine tested IC chips and the test patterns on the scribe line between
them on the wafer. It was optimized to measure the intermediate results of
the fabrication processes of ion implantation and diffusion although it
could do much more, I used it to test rapid PROM programming concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_test_equipment

My education in computerized measurement there prepared me to work in the
development of digital radio in the 90's, once sufficiently fast A/D
converters became available. I was never officially a programmer though I
wrote the OS, text editor and assembler for a home computer I designed and
wire-wrapped.

An LSI-11 is a single board PDP-11. With memory and the custom cards we
added the card cage was about the size of a shoebox. The first "portable"
Army Burroughs computer I dealt with in the early 70's had filled a semi
trailer, the sides expanded out like an RV for human access. The entire
communications center of 6 interconnected trailers and microwave radio vans
could be set up in any reasonably flat spot, ours spent December 1972 in a
frozen mountain top forest near Fulda. It was the predecessor of global
wireless Internet, the hard way. We were encouraged to communicate with
other nodes to generate Teletype traffic for testing, so I began chatting on
line over 50 years ago.

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
> "R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
> news:uvutit$1dq9$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...
>
> In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
>>...
>
>>Pasrel or Pascal? :)
>
> The class used Wirth's Pascal textbook, the DEC LSI-11 compiler had been
> tweaked for register level bit-banging, with typing rules relaxed from ivory
> tower academic to real world problem solving level. I don't know if that was
> custom or a commercial product. The final MS version of QBasic was very
> similar, for instance machine language code could be stored as a text $tring
> and executed with a pointer CALL to it without any compiler complaint.
....

Sounds a lot different from the PDP-10 version that was basically
Wirth's Pascal-S and Pascal-P4 portable compilers with a back-end
that turned the stack code the compiler generated into machine code
and then jumped on it. :)

In undergrad#1 I met my first big computers -- also Burroughs Corp.
We got to write some Algol and Fortran for various assignments but
the machinery was owned by a state corp so there were rules.
And the big rule was you could only write big programs if they were
in COBOL. So I got to write some astrophysics DE solvers in COBOL.
Luckily the profs only wanted the answers and didnt care to see the
programs.

From there I went straight to a job at another college with it was
PDP-10's and an old -15. I got to see some -11's but not use them
until the CC got a VAX that also could run RXS11 code which I experimented
with. I was vagualy thinking to buy my own 11 but some fast-talking salesman
convinved me 68000s were the future so I spent enough money to buy a house
on a home computer with a dual 68000 mobo. This with 10y before PCs.
The big attraction for this home PC was a streaming tape drive.
It turned out to be the only machine in the state at the time that
could read mag tapes produced by Shell out in Bass St. So I made some
money out of the deal. :)

From that college job I got enough money together to start setting up
my own businesses that generally kept their heads above water to
pay off the mortgage and give me some spare time to go back to
college every now and then. After I brief stay in the US mostly
waiting for funding to build "the big one" I eventually came back
to Melb and setup yet another company to put together a TF machine
to do some commercial AI work.
Part of the machine is visible here:
<http://kym.massbus.org/garage-pc/>.

Most of the work over the years has been hanging around govt job
sites (mostly Russian -- I'm an equal oportunity quant :) and working
on 100s of short jobs that pay reasonably well.

I joke with clients that they made a movie about my life
starring Ben Afflick ("The Accountant"). But they had "creative license"
and changed a few details. They played down the beatings I got
as a kid doing training in hand to hand combat.
They turned my sister into a brother and downplayed how many
people she beat up when we were kids. And I dont have a minigun
mounted in the garage -- it's in my entrance hall.

"R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
news:v01ea3$27l2$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...

I was vagualy thinking to buy my own 11 but some fast-talking salesman
convinved me 68000s were the future so I spent enough money to buy a house
on a home computer with a dual 68000 mobo. This with 10y before PCs.
The big attraction for this home PC was a streaming tape drive.
It turned out to be the only machine in the state at the time that
could read mag tapes produced by Shell out in Bass St. So I made some
money out of the deal. :)

{{{Good for you. I used the radioteletype modem protocol for my tape drive
and it was useless to anyone else. A sympathetic engineer had given me a
solenoid-operated cassette deck meant to work like your streaming tape
drive, but without the hanging loops for cushioning the starting shocks
broke audio tapes. Initially I stored programs on Teletype paper tape, as
booting from it required only 30 instructions entered manually with the data
bit switches. As soon as possible I added memory kept alive by NiCads.}}}

{{{I knew an engineer with a VAX 11/780 in his basement and an extra 10KW
power drop to run it. It was on display in a plexi case, like a museum
artifact. The VAX net at work became a hackers' paradise, the cleverest hack
would make random characters on your VT100 screen slowly slide down to the
bottom, with a note that the terminal was tired and needed a rest. He also
wrote The Grinch that Eats Programs, a random-walking worm crawling around
the screen and leaving a trail of blank spaces. Since I had very sensitive
measurement hardware connected I could remove its noise shielding and my
terminal would detect, light up and politely greet anyone approaching.
Another's terminal had a screensaver that randomly flashed REPENT, THE END
IS NEAR in large text, apparently triggered by and directed at people
passing by.}}}

{{{The 68000 certainly looked promising. I was on Macs that used it in the
90's and found Apple's support for electrical engineering very lacking,
compared to the PC or SPARC. I was asked to design and build a 16 bit data
acquisition card for it since no suitable one was available. It worked well
enough that I was given other computer-related design jobs despite not
having an electronics degree.}}}

From that college job I got enough money together to start setting up
my own businesses that generally kept their heads above water to
pay off the mortgage and give me some spare time to go back to
college every now and then. After I brief stay in the US mostly
waiting for funding to build "the big one" I eventually came back
to Melb and setup yet another company to put together a TF machine
to do some commercial AI work.
Part of the machine is visible here:
<http://kym.massbus.org/garage-pc/>.

{{{Impressive! That's only part of it? How do you distribute and coordinate
their tasks?
The only job I've done that could keep even a single computer busy for long
was autorouting circuit boards with an algorithm that had no pretense of
intelligence. My garage contribution was machining lab prototypes of a
satellite laser comm link proposal.}}}

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
....
> {{{Impressive! That's only part of it? How do you distribute and coordinate
> their tasks?
> The only job I've done that could keep even a single computer busy for long
> was autorouting circuit boards with an algorithm that had no pretense of
> intelligence. My garage contribution was machining lab prototypes of a
> satellite laser comm link proposal.}}}

The concept for the biz was to use off the shelve hardware as it evolved
at the time. We started with 200 MHz K7's and ended with dual 2 GHz
Athlons over just ~4 y. Dont be afraid of heterogenaity.
Try to buy components and assemble them in an optimal schedule so you
minimize costs and maximize bang per buck over the long term. Adapt
as you go.

At the time the AUS Nat University was tendering for a supercomputer
and ended up with a $200 mn machine that could not pass their acceptance
tests. We later found out the maker billed it as the fastest
check processing system on the market. ANU went for the brand.
I was trying to argue they build it themselves.
Another college (RMIT) spent a simular amount of state taxpayer money
on something was superceded as soon as it was installed. Also went for the brand.

We spent a total of $2m over 4y and quickly had a seeming hodge-podge
machine that could sustain 1 TF. The wayback machine someplace has some
exaflops.com pages but AFAIK none of the pretty pix survived last I looked.

Coordination of the system was pretty simple. Unix provides all the hooks
and its up to you to use them. There are batch queues you can put
on shared (nfs) disks. Then each box can be a "worker" and take
jobs off the queue, run them, spool their output to a global directory.
We also used afs (Andrews) to "copy stuff to local disk and use it there" to
speed up some things.
One package we used to efficiently hook modules together to make one-off
parallel packages for specific projects was "PVM" -- prob now long dead.

The physical hw was a tree of cheap 4-way switches and just the unix network
(mostly I use OpenBSD because they audit it line by line before every
new release) logic to switch packets around. Most boxes had 2 low
cost network cards (nominally "row" and "column" in a mesh). With judicious
use of IP addressing you can embed other meshes and rings so the logical
(programming model) sturcture of the network is simpler than the physical one.

Most of the projects we landed invovled just running the same
code again and again (SPMD) -- e.g. we did some animation/rendering for some
Korean ad company and some productiob company in Calif and some "parameter
search" design probs for some part of NASA that designs planes -- so all you
really needed was a local RAM disk (unix handled that) for each box and
some afs/nfs mounts for common utilities and the boot stuff and to collect
and merge the outputs. Some simple scripts to "scatter" the data between
boxes then "gather" (and usually merge in some way) all output data together.

--
[Never be afraid to state the obvious even to experts:]
If you had studied math you would know that calculus and statistics
are separate courses: two completely different disciplines.
-- "Trawley Trash"[@jeeves.gnet.net], 20 Jan 2011 20:53 -0800

"R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
news:v01u5m$15q1$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
....
> {{{Impressive! That's only part of it? How do you distribute and
> coordinate
> their tasks?
> The only job I've done that could keep even a single computer busy for
> long
> was autorouting circuit boards with an algorithm that had no pretense of
> intelligence. My garage contribution was machining lab prototypes of a
> satellite laser comm link proposal.}}}

The concept for the biz was to use off the shelve hardware as it evolved
at the time. We started with 200 MHz K7's and ended with dual 2 GHz
Athlons over just ~4 y. Dont be afraid of heterogenaity.
Try to buy components and assemble them in an optimal schedule so you
minimize costs and maximize bang per buck over the long term. Adapt
as you go.

At the time the AUS Nat University was tendering for a supercomputer
and ended up with a $200 mn machine that could not pass their acceptance
tests. We later found out the maker billed it as the fastest
check processing system on the market. ANU went for the brand.
I was trying to argue they build it themselves.
Another college (RMIT) spent a simular amount of state taxpayer money
on something was superceded as soon as it was installed. Also went for the
brand.

We spent a total of $2m over 4y and quickly had a seeming hodge-podge
machine that could sustain 1 TF. The wayback machine someplace has some
exaflops.com pages but AFAIK none of the pretty pix survived last I looked.

Coordination of the system was pretty simple. Unix provides all the hooks
and its up to you to use them. There are batch queues you can put
on shared (nfs) disks. Then each box can be a "worker" and take
jobs off the queue, run them, spool their output to a global directory.
We also used afs (Andrews) to "copy stuff to local disk and use it there" to
speed up some things.
One package we used to efficiently hook modules together to make one-off
parallel packages for specific projects was "PVM" -- prob now long dead.

The physical hw was a tree of cheap 4-way switches and just the unix network
(mostly I use OpenBSD because they audit it line by line before every
new release) logic to switch packets around. Most boxes had 2 low
cost network cards (nominally "row" and "column" in a mesh). With judicious
use of IP addressing you can embed other meshes and rings so the logical
(programming model) sturcture of the network is simpler than the physical
one.

Most of the projects we landed invovled just running the same
code again and again (SPMD) -- e.g. we did some animation/rendering for some
Korean ad company and some productiob company in Calif and some "parameter
search" design probs for some part of NASA that designs planes -- so all
you
really needed was a local RAM disk (unix handled that) for each box and
some afs/nfs mounts for common utilities and the boot stuff and to collect
and merge the outputs. Some simple scripts to "scatter" the data between
boxes then "gather" (and usually merge in some way) all output data
together.

--
[Never be afraid to state the obvious even to experts:]
If you had studied math you would know that calculus and statistics
are separate courses: two completely different disciplines.
-- "Trawley Trash"[@jeeves.gnet.net], 20 Jan 2011 20:53 -0800

----------------------
So you give each machine a small part of the data to crunch, then pool the
results asynchronously?? I've dealt mainly with intensive problems and don't
have experience with extensive ones. I did design a DRAM memory controller
IC that prioritized multiple simultaneous read/write requests, but only 4
channels of them. Programming a circular buffer briefly confused me. The
text editor I wrote handled random insertion by having all free space
between the cursor character and the following one, easy in memory but messy
and inefficient on magnetic storage. I tried to design a hard drive
controller and learned the random access formatting. Before I finished
Western Digital introduced cheap surface mount controller cards that
instantly obsoleted custom efforts.

In the 90's the US military decided that commercial hardware had become good
enough and they could reduce the expense of custom design (my job), so I
learned to cable boxes together instead of filling them, and soon moved on
to an IC manufacturer.

In the early 00's I was working on IC power controllers that allow hot
swapping disk drive boards in or out of running machines, mainly by limiting
capacitor charging current and sequencing the connections by finger length.
I was given an early 1.8GHz dual Athlon PC motherboard to test with and
found it had been too hastily and poorly engineered, and couldn't meet
specs. I remember only that it was designed in Taiwan.

When time for Statistics came up there were two choices with identical
descriptions, one in the College of Engineering, the other in Liberal Arts.
The Engineering one conflicted with a vital Quantum Mechanics course so I
chose Liberal Arts and discovered too late that it was about sampling
technique at the expense of the more challenging math; the liberal arts
students could barely manage Standard Deviation. Much later at a seminar on
NASA digital communications the lecturer asked us to calculate a numerical
value for the entropy of a system and I was completely lost. I have trouble
understanding the Reed-Solomon encoding of audio CDs.

"Jim Wilkins" wrote in message news:v02u7u$9i6n$1@dont-email.me...

>I was given an early 1.8GHz dual Athlon PC motherboard to test with and
>found it had been too hastily and poorly engineered, and couldn't meet
>specs. I remember only that it was designed in Taiwan.

Tyan.

In alt.astronomy Jim Wilkins <muratlanne@gmail.com> wrote:
> "Jim Wilkins" wrote in message news:v02u7u$9i6n$1@dont-email.me...
>>I was given an early 1.8GHz dual Athlon PC motherboard to test with and
>>found it had been too hastily and poorly engineered, and couldn't meet
>>specs. I remember only that it was designed in Taiwan.
> Tyan.

LOL. I still have a Tyan board with its 2 standard Athlon chips on a giant
mobo. The only boxes that needed a 1 KW Ps to boot up.
The big advantage with Tyan they got their boards out real early
within months of AMD upgrading their processors.
The problem with heat was mostly down to AMD. They were a bit fast and loose
with their designs. But they had large register sets esp for
the 256-bit wide quad FP regs, the first out with parallel FP operations
(3DNow) and were generally 1/2 the price of intel products.
We accidentally found with some experiments building a "supercompiler"
for some FP libraries you could make AMD run even hotter by using the
387 stack-based floating point at the same time as parallel SSE FP ops.
Their chips had both kinds of floating point hardware on the chip while in
Intel chips the 2 functions shared circuitry and you could not use both
at the same time (you had to flip a bit to enable one or the other).
I had a friend at Intel in I think Fulsom Cal at the time and he
was not impressed by AMD's cpus at all. Intel (signle) processors ran at 35C
even under load while AMD tended to warm up to 50C and then
get hotter under load even with extra fans in the box. If you didnt
turn on a shutdown at 70C option in the BIOS it was easy to turn an
AMD chip into a real chip.

--
fter wading throgh the nsoise created by morons on thisw thread
-- matt sykes, 20 Oct 2013

"R Kym Horsell" wrote in message
news:v03n7g$2t3u$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com...

Intel (signle) processors ran at 35C
even under load while AMD tended to warm up to 50C and then
get hotter under load even with extra fans in the box. If you didnt
turn on a shutdown at 70C option in the BIOS it was easy to turn an
AMD chip into a real chip.

------------------------

An IC designer told me those CPUs' power density was higher than an electric
stove element. Some of my laptops have Nvidia GPUs that can unsolder
themselves.

I've tested operating devices at high and low temperature. At 175C the life
of a power transistor was at best a few minutes. Dripping liquid Nitrogen on
a bare chip shattered the SiN passivation like a tempered windshield but the
device kept working.