Intellectual Property in Strange and Unusual Places
Optical Fiber in Strange and Unusual Places
To contemplate the navel or fix the plumbing: it goes without saying that information technology has changed our world views, to the degree that we are now in a marathon to close the divides: of race, wealth, education, commerce, skills etc., all of which can be either solved or exacerbated by the proliferation of knowledge, or the warping of same.
As consumers we want three things: free, perfect and now.
As end users of technology, we also want three things:
we want it to do what we want it to do,
we want it to be easy to use,
we want it to be robust and repairable.
Henry Ford knew that, John Deere knew that, lots of people knew that; yet in the rabbit holes of complexity these principles have been let’s say overlooked or manipulated or even abused.
The first rule of survival is: pare down and simplify.
Let’s start with artificial intelligence: imagine for a moment that we are a common House Fly - at rest; we still process data faster than any manmade device to date and will for a long time to come. If you doubt that, try catching one; or better still catch the much larger but slower Blow Fly, slam it full force onto concrete and watch it fly off. When we start building swarms of drones with the sort of redundancies that enable flight after catastrophic damages, the battle spaces will be forever changed.
That would be impressive until we consider the Blow Fly does all that with considerably fewer moving parts. Yes, yes there are good counter arguments, but we want to know if anyone is working the issue by hurling Blow Flys to the ground trying to find out how they do that!
The Hardware People:
See it always comes down to hardware, and the more hardware one sees the less impressive it becomes with its multitude of traps, built in obsolescence, weak links and failure points. “Latent Failure” is the bogyman of high reliability, long term irretrievable devices. NASA knows that - lots of people know that. Rust alone destroys more hardware than all wars of all time combined. Extreme conditions, remote locations, vulnerabilities that will boggle the mind. It’s rough out there!
We owe a debt of gratitude to the people who do that work, you know, the stuff hiding in your walls and ceilings, in the closets where you work, the towers, cables, wires and boxes; the plumbing that carries the stuff you are using right now. It also orbits the earth, resides deep under sea, flies above us and well it’s just everywhere.
Remember Larry the Cable Guy? Not just a flash in the pan.
Larry was and still is squarely in the realm of classical physics, he’s an electron guy and he won’t be going away anytime soon. We’re the photon people; we live in both the classical and quantum realms. But mostly we’re hardware people who get what you need from point A to point B, anywhere, everywhere all the time.
Feed the people who do the work:
The best managers don’t lead, follow or rule - they serve. “Tribal Knowledge” is the bane of high reliability in any workforce, it is the train-on-the-job-by-your-coworkers passing on the most rudimentary knowledge required to appease the straw bosses; often in hostile environments with hostile people, with no time allocated for research or development. The folks with degrees don’t want to do that work, it’s below their pay grade; the more highly educated the longer their dwell time pursuing those goals to the sacrifice of interpersonal and tactile skills. Nothing personal, a matter of choice.
Too many umpires, not enough batters:
This post is directed to those groping for something to do, or just want some weird entertainment:
Photonics, n., the branch of technology concerned with the properties and transmission of photons, for example in fiber optics. Oxford Languages
My title: Senior Engineering Technician, optical fiber and photonics.
My credentials: Bell Certified
You are reading from a drop-out (GED) with barely a high school education, and for a lot of reasons someone who should be living under a bridge.
So just talkin’ smack here, this ain’t a resumé.
The reason WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) is mentioned here is because that’s where my realization of self-worth truly began, at least the temporal side of me; the one that has to eat. After all of the confidentiality contracts, gag-orders and guilt are expired, everything learned in life becomes by default intellectual property. Got skills? Just as importantly there is a worldwide organization that supports and defends that principle. There is no affiliation here with WIPO but they probably won’t mind promotion. The organization has undergone a lot of changes, but this ain’t about the politics.
People need incentive and nothing breeds incentive like ownership. Owning our knowledge is a life right; laws defend rights; nature seeks balance. Where free trade prevails, all skills are needed; those skills become trades and enable us to engage in commerce. Engaging commerce helps to feed us and the world at large.
Maybe this seems rudimentary.
Rules for survival: don’t overlook the obvious.
But we’re hardware people so let’s start turning some wrenches. LIGHT is your friend in this trade; and the best part is nobody owns it. If you know anything at all about it, you already have an advantage. Warning: if you’re tempted to geek out on me be aware that unless you have seen a photon, you know no more about it than any of us.
This is Strange and Unusual Places, and it doesn’t get any stranger than light, radiation, bosons or any calculation you care to apply to whatever the hell it is. But it’s exciting in today’s complex world and getting more so all the time. For one thing it possesses an infinite number of wavelengths. That’s just cool because if we need wavelengths to transmit information, light has lots of them, more than enough for everyone. And goes just as fast as any technology within reach of our physics can provide. And therein lies the problem. It’s back to hardware.
The scientist’s write the recipes, the engineers flesh them out, the innovators put the recipes on the menu and the hardware people bake the cakes; and none of us know how the stuff really works. We know it’s a cake. We know it’s not a Blow Fly.
Too far in the weeds?
Ever notice that when spanky new technological hardware comes out it starts out big and gets smaller. Which one is bigger: the peanut or the watermelon? Is the peanut smaller or is it farther away? Is there a right answer?
The answer is we need highly skilled technicians, and we need them now…their time has come. Sharing knowledge is the way to turn unskilled people into skilled people.
Science will continue to look deeper and deeper, the more we find the more there is to find. The more we expand the smaller things get and the smaller things get the more we expand.
Seems like a riddle? Welcome to reality.
The reality is science will never defeat entropy and it will be a while before we exceed the speed of light. But it’s a resource and we’re tool users and tool users use resources.
So if you’re bored, now you have a rich pool of resources to ply with tools, and you have some tools.
Here in the USA, we’re getting our asses kicked because we shared our asses off to the world at large; a noble cause if sharing resources is the only goal. But when that world at large surpasses our ability to supply its demands we have outlasted our usefulness. Just sayin’. Won’t make ya wrong jes cause yer ok widdat.
To be blunt the ass pinchers, bean counters, profiteers, career whores, spellbinders et.al. have done more than their share of putting us here. The top-down approach is failing us miserably and what is called for here is some guidance from the bottom up.
An overabundance of logic can lead one to believe the shortest distance between two points is a curve; especially in a two-dimensional world. Why, my testosterone levels are falling even while typing this, or trying to. Love curves, but sometimes straight lines and angles can be useful too.
That’s why the hardware people are hated and feared, and for good reason.
Rules for survival: be prepared to back up your data.
Survivors like me only survive because we’re hungry. We want to get things right because our survival depends upon it. Hunger lends a keen sense of detail that comes in handy while trying to make the recipes work as intended despite the rat holes and missing parts. Here’s a secret: the experts need us more than we need them; they’re not smart enough to know that.
About cussin’: hardware people cuss a lot; we like cussin’ cause it helps to get the work done, adds color to the language and adds expression to intent. You’re far enough in here to lower your expectations of congeniality, right?
While everybody is busy running about with their panties on fire over the apocalyptic prospects of a weaponized artificial intelligence (an inevitability, what would you expect?); maybe we could put a little effort into getting ahead of the thing.
Is you is, or is you ain’t? Maybe you haven’t noticed we’re still here, and if we go by the probabilities most of us will be here tomorrow. That’s reason enough for optimism. Anything the evil geniuses can conjure up can be undone; like any domesticated animal, without us to feed it, it will cease to be. And even if we are consumed by the very beast of our own invention, well, it’s going to be awfully lonely.
So we have that.
You didn’t think you would find solutions to global issues here did you? That would just be laziness.
Spend any time wondering how things are changing so rapidly? How the markets seem to be moving at light speed, how everybody seems to know what everybody else is doing? How innovation moves so rapidly and militaries become increasingly more sophisticated? How artificial intelligence became a thing?
Photonics. The practical applications of light. While we’ve been busy watching Netflix and playing World’s End video games a silent revolution has been taking place. It’s the Quantum Revolution and it’s going to turn our understanding about ourselves and our reality on its heels. So put away all of your old ideas because the only thing here that’s certain is uncertainty.
Optical Fiber and Opto-electronics: all of the hardware here is possessed of Dark Energy. Query the manufacturers of test equipment and error rates in switches and they will wax eloquent on the vagaries of Dark Energy, oh the acronyms! The trouble is nobody has an explanation, which makes sense when we consider that if we knew what it was it would probably have mass meaning it would also have energy meaning it would emit radiation or light - it wouldn’t be Dark then, would it?
Just because we’re hardware people doesn't mean we were all born south end first. The alchemists with the high degrees don’t get out much let alone build the stuff they’re so proud of invoking. By the time the stuff goes through all the iterations, peer reviews and star awards, and finds its way to the bench, the miracle is that we can make it work at all. There’s nothing like boots on the ground to know what it’s like to get our feet wet.
Been in enough meeting rooms and failure analysis surrounded by the big hammers to understand that our knowledge is the armor that can prevail during heated exchanges and sometimes can even have the experts shredding their own white papers. That’s the power of intellectual property.
But what really pisses them off is the prospect that good technicians are earning more money than the degrees are, and not by a little. After all the time and debt required during their bid for no work jobs, when the hungry over achievers with no degrees and years of hands-on experience arrive on the scene earning three times their rate, why who wouldn’t be pissed off - unless you’re one of the hungry over achievers.
For every tool user there are at least a hundred carpet dwellers in support. While they languish in their cubicles, we’re doing what needs to get done so all of us can keep working and if their empire falls down, the technicians will be there until the lights go out. Ghenges Kahn would never have tolerated all of the dead weight roaming the hallways. A disenchanted and disempowered workforce is worse than worthless.
There is, by the way, a TED Talk on the very subject of House Fly intelligence. Take a look at their neural pathways and you might understand the argument. Swat some flies in your house and take notice of the survivors escalating evasion tactics. There is a sophisticated consciousness at work.
Finally, the experts are realizing that nature is indeed an ally, and will always seek a balance, even if the outcome is uncertain.