Third Shift Workers Day

Today is Third Shift Workers Day. I often worked the graveyard shift, and worked it reliably and solidly. I was completely useless on 8-5.

This oil clock was developed in the 1600s as a timer and light for scribes and illuminators working through the night. It provided light for scribal work, and simultaneously measured the shift. When the light went out, time to go home or go to bed. (In other words, it was an illuminator illuminator.)

Self-calibrating in two ways: The light calibrated and enabled your work, and the flame calibrated the oil flow.

This is a patient machine in the same elegant way as the Willson automatic buoy. The fuel does all the work, with no other mechanism needed. As the flame uses up the oil, the level drops through the hours from sunset through sunrise.

= = = = = END REHASH.

A few days ago I had a possibly original thought closely related to this lamp.

= = = = =

AI designing itself is NOT NEW. Programs have been writing other programs since 1960. Creating a function to do a job, running the function, then deleting it from memory. Object-oriented programming like C++ is based on this idea. The stable part of the program is just the templates or genes. Most of the action happens in cells (virtual functions) spawned by the genes for a brief moment then discarded.

The content you see on the web was partly made by programs creating programs. Each web platform has a solid base, a constant page that doesn’t change and generally doesn’t get displayed. The constant page calls Javascript routines to write new pages “just for you”, generally including custom-made Javascript routines to ask “personalized” questions or fill out “personalized” order forms.

Pre-digital physical machines could have built new machines to perform functions. The trouble was on the discarding end, not the building end. A newly molded input knob doesn’t just disappear, it has to be disassembled and melted down.

Instead, some machines create virtual functions in air or fluid or electric current, a self-sustaining vortex or resonance that pulls in an input, tosses dust out of the chimney, or trips a valve.