Episode 101: Year 2000 Problem

Well There's Your Problem | Episode 101: Year 2000 Problem .ass file - download the video off of YouTube and play with your media player of choice .ytt file - feed the subtitle file to your YouTube(!) in this convoluted manner Corrections (please!) to haitch dubya ei zed you you dubya at the google mail service ABI: You've got a whole bunch of secretarial women assembling the podcast in a back room. LIAM: Yes. NOVA: We should be so lucky. ABI: “Right away, Mr. Roczniak!” NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, we've got the secretaries from John Wick doing this. JUSTIN: I wish I had someone to just, uh, yeah, just a whole room of, like, tape drives going back and forth that assembles the podcast manually for me. ABI: [laughs] LIAM: [tape noises] NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: I can simulate the noise! [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah. Alright. Um. Well, I started my... you know what, I shall also check and make sure I have enough room on the hard drive! NOVA: That would be smart, that would be smart. LIAM: I'm gonna buy a new hard drive, but before I give it to you I'm gonna stuff it in your mouth. JUSTIN: I do have room for it. ABI: Do you wanna–mm. Do you wanna sync point? NOVA: I think we should be fine. LIAM: Shut up. JUSTIN: I think the Zencastr already works, because I... JUSTIN: I do the screen recording, which means I have a continuous sync point. NOVA: Yeah, unless you lose the video file. LIAM: Who would do that? JUSTIN: Oh. LIAM: Rocz, you did that. That was the joke. JUSTIN: I did do that. ABI: In some kind of... ABI: 2022 bug scenario. NOVA: Absolutely. JUSTIN: Yes. JUSTIN: The bug is me trying to free up space on my hard drive. LIAM: Why don't you take the hard drives I've already given you? JUSTIN: Because I don't know where they are. LIAM: Oh my god, oh my god. NOVA: A room full of hard drives. NOVA: You add one to the pile every time you come over. LIAM: There’s one in your bedroom. LIAM: There's literally one in his room. I know where it is. JUSTIN: Liam, you’ve given me so many computer parts, I don’t know where any of them are. NOVA: Start the podcast. Start the podcast. Start the podcast. JUSTIN: We're starting the podcast. LIAM: Oh, we've been recording for a minute and I'm like, goddammit, Rocz. You sneaky bastard. JUSTIN: Hello, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, with slides. I'm Justin Roczniak, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are “he” and “him”. Okay, go. NOVA: I am [November Kelly], I'm the person who's talking now, my pronouns are “she” and “her”. Yay Liam. LIAM: Yay Liam, hi, I'm Liam Anderson, my pronouns are “he” and “him”, and we have a gueeeest. JUSTIN: Guest. ABI: Hello! My name is Abigail Thorn, my pronouns are “she” and “her”. NOVA: Is that THE Abigail Thorn from Philosophy Tube? LIAM: THE Abi Thorn? JUSTIN: Wow. Yes. ABI: [laughs] NOVA: How did we get her? ABI: From Kill James Bond? NOVA: From Kill James Bond? LIAM: Oh, you know, I heard Kill James Bond is a good show, except that one of the hosts owes me 40,000 US dollars. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] ABI: Look, I told you, I was gonna pay you that after you show me proof of the body. LIAM: Oh. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: No, I was– yeah, that too. Can I also have 40,000 dollars from you, and we'll get this speedboat underway. JUSTIN: Abi, I just wanted to thank you for being the first person to put philosophy in a tube. Because it used to be– ABI: Thank you. NOVA: Where it belongs. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. Well, it used to be, you know, you're in the kitchen, you're in the kitchen, you're making a recipe, it calls for some philosophy, and it's like four ounces, right? You have to go get a can, and the can's like eight ounces? ABI: Could use a can of them, yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah, and then you have just this half-empty can of philosophy in the fridge. LIAM: Are you implying that Abi is some sort of Pillsbury Grahams biscuits? NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: And then you have to put plastic wrap on it, but now it's in a tube, you can just squeeze it out. ABI: Exactly, yeah. JUSTIN: It's great. ABI: Homogenate. Well, I'm glad that you found it useful. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. LIAM: You people are fucking freaks. NOVA: But we've brought you on to talk about Y2K. ABI: Mmhm. NOVA: Some of our listeners are too young to remember this, which depresses the absolute shit out of me. LIAM: Don't tell me that. Don't tell me those words. ABI: So am I, definitely. NOVA: I–mmmh. LIAM: Abi, how old are you? ABI: [non-disclosure noises] NOVA: She's a child, is the thing. We use a child labour. LIAM: Is she? Is she? NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Okay. NOVA: Not remembering the year 2000. [crosstalk] JUSTIN: Yeah, I'd have to, like... ABI: Yeah... I don't remember that at all. [laughs] JUSTIN: I'd have to check a box on YouTube. LIAM: I'm gonna throw up, dude. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: But we have some helpful images here, of the 2000s. LIAM: You guys do this podcast, I need to lie down. NOVA: Yeah. LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: And the sort of cultural moment that was the Y2K computer bug. ABI: Mmhm. Because of course, as a Zoomer, I dress in Y2K fashion, and somebody said that the other day, and I was like, what does that mean? You mean it was something else before this? NOVA: What is this? NOVA: Do you mean there was a time... ABI: Because I'm only, you know, 21. [laughs] NOVA: You know there was a time when people didn't go on the computer? LIAM: You're 21, you're 20 goddamn one? NOVA: You could log off, and so (?) all the time? LIAM: Is this a fucking joke? JUSTIN: You had a dial-up connection. ABI: Wow. LIAM: Yeah, 28 baud modems, man. I do wanna say, we do get the occasional request for sort of, Well There Isn’t Your Problem for the disasters that weren't. And I don't know if this is an official entry in that, but like... NOVA: Spiritually. LIAM: Spiritually—Well, the apocalyptic messaging surrounding it, and what it ended up being, is certainly, I think, on that level. NOVA: Yeah, we have the Weekly World News here on the bottom right, which tells us that hundreds of planes will fall out of the sky, cars will stop dead in their tracks, nuclear missiles will launch themselves... LIAM: If only, man. NOVA: [laughs] ABI: Yeah, I mean, like, the headline says, “the final days”, and it's like... and then also inside, "Armageddon". So you get both. You get two for the price of one, there. NOVA: Yeah. You even get an eschaton, free. JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] ABI: [laughs] NOVA: But before we immanentize that, we have to do... JUSTIN: The God Damn News. [♪news jingle♪] LIAM: Oh, that was good, you two. JUSTIN: Yes. So... the American trucker convoy has fallen hilariously flat. LIAM: Defeated by the Beltway. [laughs] JUSTIN: Defeated by just being scared of going into Washington DC proper. NOVA: There was an interview about this that I saw with one of the truckers, where he was like, well, I was gonna drive into Washington DC, but then three girls in a blue Hyundai gave me the finger really aggressively and I got scared, so I just left. JUSTIN: Incredible. LIAM: I saw that too. ABI: Aww. NOVA: I... LIAM: Nope. NOVA: [laughs] So the point of this, right, was all of these truckers were gonna assemble in various points across the United States, and drive west to east, until they arrived at your nation's capital, Washington DC, where they were gonna blockade the city, make it totally unusable in order to protest vaccine mandates. Now, the vaccine mandates have all ended now, so they were gonna do all of this in service of something that they had already gotten, and then they couldn't even do it. They just kind of– LIAM: Ironically, it still hasn't ended on Amtrak or on planes, or in healthcare settings or in certain schools. JUSTIN: What I think is funniest about this is that since they've decided instead of going into DC proper, they're just gonna... they’re gonna circle the Beltway and not really block traffic, which is what they've been doing, they're just driving around in sort of a line. NOVA: Yeah, they're gonna do tawaf of Washington DC, they're circumambulating it like the Kaaba. JUSTIN: The other thing is, y'know, the only firms out there on the Beltway are a bunch of... a bunch of, like, government contractors and conservative lobbying firms. So really, the only people they're irritating are the people who are in favor of their cause. [laughs] NOVA: They're all getting blocked in by, like, CIA guys having to try to commute to work through all of these 18-wheelers. Which is just great. ABI: It sounds like we owe those three girls a debt of gratitude. NOVA: Absolutely. But I want them both to lose, y'know? The CIA people who can't get to work, the people who want to give everybody Covid and conjunctivitis in Washington DC... JUSTIN: I'm gonna protest the liberal establishment by blockading the exit that goes to the National Right to Work building. NOVA: [laughs] Yeah, I just hope they stay tangled up on the Beltway forever, going around in circles and society progresses without them. JUSTIN: About to say. It's just a hilariously ineffective protest against something that isn't real anymore. [laughs] ABI: This photo is very cool, though. It kind of looks like the Transformers went off the deep end. NOVA: You kind of have, like, JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: it's a little bit Mad Max too, isn't it? You kind of want to see a guy with... a guitar on the roof of the sleeper camp. ABI: I would love to see Optimus Prime with, like, an “end all mandates” detail. [laughter] NOVA: Yeah, Optimus Prime's a QAnon guy now. ABI: [laughs] JUSTIN: In other news about highways. [♪news jingle♪] NOVA: One more lane. One more lane, it's fine. We can handle it. JUSTIN: This is incredible. I forget if it's Doug Ford or Rob Ford now. NOVA: One of them. JUSTIN: Yeah, one of those guys. The one who's not dead from crack. His, um... NOVA: Just a wild piece of Canadian political history, that there were these two... these two brothers who, like... JUSTIN: “Two brothers.” ABI: “Two brothers!” NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: And they briefly ran Ontario, as their own kind of personal fiefdom. ABI: “And they ran... Ontario.” JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: “In a world...” JUSTIN: “In a world where two brothers run Ontario. With crack.” ABI: With crack. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: “They decided that”– the Ontario 2051 Comprehensive Transportation Plan says they're gonna widen the 401, which is currently the world's widest highway, in order to, uh... And this is for all kinds of– NOVA: Is this a 20 lane highway? JUSTIN: It is an 18 lane highway. NOVA: It's gonna be 20 lanes. JUSTIN: People in Texas will tell you the Katy Freeway is wider, but six of those lanes of the 24 lanes are on a frontage road, and I don't think that counts. NOVA: This is monstrous. This is atrocious to look at, and probably worse to be in, I hate everything about it. JUSTIN: Well, yeah, cause I don't understand how you could safely widen this road. Right, cause you got four local lanes, you got five express lanes, you got four local lanes, you got five express lanes. Not in that order, I got that order wrong. NOVA: Yeah, where are the others gonna go? JUSTIN: Once you get beyond, like, four lanes bunched up together, you get really diminishing returns, because it gets so hard to drive in the inner lane, cause you have to go over all those other lanes. NOVA: Well, this is also one of our best friends on this show, induced demand, right? You build more highways, people drive on them, and... they get as congested as the lanes they were supposed to relieve the congestion on. So... ABI: Yeah, I mean, that's my question, which is what are you gonna do in however many years' time when you're just gonna do this again? NOVA: Yeah, Ontario has fallen to Highway 401. It's all highway now. JUSTIN: It'll all be one swath of Highway 401. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: This is sorta like the outer beltway that goes around Toronto, and this is kinda... it is the world's widest highway, it is extremely busy. I don't see a safe way to widen it other than add a second deck with super express lanes, which seems hilariously expensive. NOVA: Ah, that’d be cool. JUSTIN: There's also a subway line that parallels this, which is unfunded. ABI: Yeah, just take the train. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Just perfect. Just perfect. JUSTIN: ...that line is not in the comprehensive plan. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: One of the reasons they want to do this is for climate resiliency, which I think is hilarious because this is climate arson right here. I mean, unless every single vehicle is electric by 2051, which it will not be. [laughs] NOVA: No, but like, during the water wars, you're gonna need to use this as a kind of dry moat, so that the city of Toronto can shoot raiders coming in from the outlands, and that's why you need to widen it. JUSTIN: Yeah, but you also have a nice smooth surface where the invading Russians can come in easily, rather than having to go through the mud where the (?). NOVA: Should have invaded the GTA (?). Would have been much more successful. Would have worked much more to their advantage. JUSTIN: Good point. Imagine the Ontario SSR. Um. [laughter] "Communism, eh?" NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: Yeah, the Canadian forces. Slightly fewer Ukrainian Nazis than the Ukrainian armed forces. Not that fewer, though. ABI and JUSTIN: [laugh] JUSTIN: Speaking of. Russia and Ukraine. [♪news jingle♪] NOVA: We are the dumbest motherfuckers alive, man. JUSTIN: Oh my god. ABI: Yeah. NOVA: The Cardiff City Philharmonic, I think it is, cancelled a production of Tchaikovsky because it was "inappropriate at the current time." The Glasgow Film Festival, in my home city, has banned a couple of Russian films, not because of anything that's in them, but because they are Russian. We're also fucking banning Tolstoy, so cancel culture is real, but only in the most, like, idiotic way, which is to just go, actually, we think it's a bad idea to have any Russian content at this time. ABI: Wasn't Tchaikovsky criticised for being insufficiently nationalist? NOVA: Sure. Sure. I mean, he did make up for it by being insanely anti-Semitic. Which always gets you some points in Russia. ABI: And gay. NOVA: And gay, yeah. LIAM: Was he gay? I didn't know that. ABI: He was gay. NOVA: He was gay as hell, yeah. JUSTIN: Ah. LIAM: Oh, “biographers have generally agreed that Tchaikovsky was homosexual.” Look at that. ABI: There you go. ABI: It's a really bad time for anybody out there who is trying to sell a TV script which is an adaptation of a famous Russian novel. NOVA: Mmm. ABI: So... NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah, I mean, it's a damn shame that all of these, um, artists, and, um, playwrights and authors of Russian culture and literature prove to all write “Vladimir Putin is great” in the foreword and afterword of all of their works. [laughter] NOVA: Yeah, they predicted him. And the thing about Tolstoy... The thing about Tolstoy is, absolutely, insanely pro-war. Loved it. Couldn't get enough of it. ABI: He wrote that famous book, “War–” NOVA: Yeah. [laughs] ABI: ...and nothing else. JUSTIN and LIAM: War and Nothing Else. NOVA: Yeah, there was... some talk that he was working on a sequel, but I don't think it ever panned out. ABI: I mean, it does go to highlight, like, part of the tragedy, obviously the main tragedy, is the lives that have been lost in the invasion of a sovereign nation, but like... NOVA: ...We're only equipped to focus on the trivial shit and this is the trivial shit. ABI: Yeah, it's like, part of the tragedy is that Russia... has so much to offer culturally, like, the architecture, the music and stuff, it's beautiful, and it's a shame to see it reduced to a war machine by this kind of collaboration of plutocrats and petrochemical billionaires and fascists. It's a real shame, and it's a shame that stupid people play into this by doing shit like this. NOVA: People who should know better, yeah, that's exactly the thing that bothers me here, is that, like people, like, if you run an arts festival, if you're on a cinema festival in Glasgow, right, why do you need to go, “actually, I think Putin is basically right, “that Russia is this sort of, like, warrior country, and therefore “we're not gonna show fucking indie films from Russia.” JUSTIN: I was gonna say, my... PE teacher in high school was an ex-Soviet Olympic athlete, and while she wasn't kicking– NOVA: (?) LIAM: Northern Virginia's a hell of a place. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: While she wasn't kicking our asses, she was always pushing, like, Russian literature and culture on us, it was great. [laughs] NOVA: Hell yeah. Didn't you do Russian at college, too? JUSTIN: I did, I took Russian in college and in high school. LIAM: His dad majored in Russian. JUSTIN: My dad did major in Russian. Um, yeah. NOVA: So both of us have to distance ourselves. JUSTIN: I was about to say. Yeah, I'm canceled too now, unfortunately. LIAM: Ah, Liam reigns supreme once again. NOVA: [laughs] ABI: The thing is, like, it would have been so easy for, like, the conductor of the Cardiff City Orchestra to come out at the start and say, obviously, like, we all condemn the horrible things that are being done in Ukraine right now, Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer, but, like, now more than ever is the time to remember the things that we have in common with the people of Russia rather than the government, and like, many of whom are scared and oppressed as well, and like, to enjoy cultural products like this from a more peaceful time in a spirit of love and unity, like, something like that. It's not hard to write something like that. And everyone goes, great. NOVA: It would have been better to just do it and say nothing, even. That would have been perfectly reasonable. ABI: Someone goes, “wasn't Tchaikovsky Russian” and then the Cardiff City Orchestra just go, “shit, really?” NOVA: ...just like, “what?” JUSTIN: “Oh, fucked this up.” LIAM: “Oh, we thought... We thought he was French.” NOVA: “Sorry about this, I liked some of his overtures, didn't know that he was Russian.” LIAM: “Unfollowing now.” ABI: “Unfollowing now!” NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: On the plus side, maybe we'd get Ayn Rand canceled. LIAM: No. That's not how it works, and you know that. [laughter] JUSTIN: Yeah, I know, right. JUSTIN: Get Solzhenitsyn canceled? LIAM: Still no. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Again, not even for any of the good shit, just... ABI: Can Vladimir Nabokov cancel–oh wait, no, nevermind, that's already been done. [laughter] LIAM: As long as I don't have to hear anyone ever tell me about Lolita again, I will be a happy man. ABI: Yeah, as I say, it's a bad time to be trying to sell a screenplay. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] ABI: It's such a no! JUSTIN: Yeah, and the whole world has become that one Call of Duty mission. LIAM and ABI: No Russian. NOVA: Remember, no Russian. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Rocz, did you ever play Call of Duty? JUSTIN: No. LIAM: So stop stealing valor. ABI: [laughs] JUSTIN: I don't like shooting people. NOVA: Imagining you playing Call of Duty is very funny. JUSTIN: I never found first person shooters to be very fun, cause I don't want to shoot people. LIAM: Oh, I on the other hand love first person shooters! NOVA: Yeah, and you love calling people slurs, which is the other important aspect. LIAM: I do, it's my favorite thing to do. JUSTIN: ...It's the other important aspect, yes. LIAM: Before we warmed up, I called you and Abi all sorts of unspeakable things. NOVA: Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. ABI: Mmhm, mmhm. JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: Yeah, when I'm... You know what, I'm not even gonna make the joke, cause then I'm gonna get censored. I'm pre-bleeping myself. JUSTIN: Alright. That was... The God Damn News. [♪news jingle♪] NOVA: Alright, we gotta talk about compu–hello. JUSTIN: We gotta talk about computers. ABI and LIAM: Hello! JUSTIN: Yes, this is an image from the Well There's Your Problem back room, where all the editing goes on. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: These are our editors. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: It's not just Rocz drunk. JUSTIN: No, this is our IBM 1401 system. [laughs] NOVA: Fantastic. JUSTIN: Yeah, so we gotta talk about... I may have put too much effort into this segment. We have to talk about what is computer. NOVA: Yeah, you badly distracted yourself learning what a computer was, and then forgot to ask what Y2K was, and I had to do the “what Y2K is” segment in the last ten minutes before we recorded. But that's fine. LIAM: Is it? Salt to snail(?)? NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Alright. I thought it'd be fun, we start by looking at the history of this device that has ruined our lives. LIAM: Yeah. NOVA: What is a computer? JUSTIN: What is a computer? LIAM: What is a computer? NOVA: It's a machine that thinks in sand that we've poisoned and arrayed in weird sigils. LIAM and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: And then, like, you do that often enough, and in an advanced enough way, eventually you can play Call of Duty and get called slurs. JUSTIN: Yes. ABI: It can only do two things, one or zero, but if you tell it to do lots of them in a special order, it can do more than two things. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: Yes. Um, so, computation, y'know, goes back a long time, because people had to count things, right? And sometimes they had to determine relationships between things by using, horror of horrors... math. NOVA: Don't like that. Don't care for it. JUSTIN: Yeah. So one of your earliest– NOVA: What is this fucking dread sigil on the bottom right corner there? JUSTIN: Oh, I'll get to that in a second. NOVA: Okay. JUSTIN: Yeah. So one of the earliest computing devices was the abacus, right? So it requires a lot of skill to use effectively, but essentially the position of the beads can tell you where various, can... assist you in adding numbers very quickly, right? Some people are very good at it, they still teach it in parts of Eastern Europe, in Japan, in parts of Eastern Russia. NOVA: Oh, we’re cancelled. ABI: We can’t talk about that. JUSTIN: It is canceled. ABI: No more abacuses. JUSTIN: This is in fact a Russian abacus, so definitely canceled. NOVA: Double cancelled. JUSTIN: Yeah. So– ABI: We can figure out exactly how cancelled it is using an abacus. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: But not this one. JUSTIN: Yeah. So, each row corresponds to a number place, right, and you move the beads back and forth to compute quickly, right? I don't know very much about how to use these. NOVA: Yeah, you can do the same thing with knotted strands of rope, which is what they did in Mesoamerica. Counting is hard, and it's especially hard if you do it in your head, so it helps to have some kind of aide-mémoire, and... everything sort of spirals from there, I'm afraid. ABI: What sort of things were people counting back in the day? LIAM: Grain. NOVA: Taxes. JUSTIN: Taxes. NOVA: Taxes on grain. JUSTIN: Money, materials, anything that needed to be counted. I mean, that's a big question, that's the thing. [laughs] NOVA: Yeah. And, like, days, and that leads you into sort of calendars? ABI: Oh yeah, yeah, true. Because I suppose all of this now is kind of done by computers, so I don't really think about when you've gotta count shit. JUSTIN: If you had to do, for some reason, a more complex calculation, like addition, subtraction, division, sometimes mathematicians could create something called a nomogram to aid in these calculations. LIAM: What. JUSTIN: This is sort of a paper calculator dedicated to a single equation. NOVA: Fuck, that’s cool! JUSTIN: This one I stole from a guy named Chris Steaker, who has numerous videos on this subject, as well as early adding machines. Guy should be getting half a million views on each video, cause they're really good, they're well edited, they're witty, um, y'know. NOVA: And all the things that we don't bother to do. JUSTIN: Exactly, right. So I’m gonna put a link to his channel in the description, but I stole this one from him. This is essentially a device for computing polynomials, right, which you can do simply by picking, you pick one of the numbers, you lay a string over it towards another number, and then the third number you get from the intersection– I forget exactly how to do it with this one, but he has a video on it, I'll link in the description. NOVA: It's intricate as hell, I really like it. ABI: Dare I ask what a polynomial is? IN UNISON: Uhhh... ABI: Cause I haven't done math since GCSE, which was... five years ago, so. JUSTIN: Well, we're gonna need this for the next slide. NOVA: [laughs] Fuckin– LIAM: “It's a mathematical expression involving a sum of numbers “and one or more variables multiplied by coefficients.” NOVA: Oh, okay. ABI: None of that made any sense to me. JUSTIN: It's like a 2x squared plus x plus a constant, y'know. ABI: ...Okay. NOVA: I mean, I'm being a materialist about this, the reason why you need to count stuff is tax, mostly, because you accumulate capital in a primitive sense, you get a lot of grain, you need to work out how much grain you take off of each person, therefore you need to work out what a percentage of a certain number is. LIAM: Formulate the way to do it right... NOVA: Yeah, exactly. LIAM: I can't believe we're on a real podcast. ABI: Got it, okay. ABI: Cool. JUSTIN: So one of the first machines which was programmable, right, um... well, first off, they were organs, actually. Once you had, like, um... NOVA: Like the human brain? JUSTIN: No, no, I was talking about a pipe organ. NOVA: Oh. JUSTIN: Because sometimes you could run part of that automatically. ABI: Sorry, what, you do maths with a pipe organ? LIAM: Can we not talk about– JUSTIN: No, but you can program it. Because you can put on, y'know, like, the paper– NOVA: Oh, because it's all like valve work! Yeah, yeah, yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah, so you can run, like, a player piano, right, y'know, that's a program which is done through a reel of paper, right? ABI: Oh! LIAM: Also, don't forget the... ABI: So what is a “program”? LIAM: What is... the Antikythera mechanism? NOVA: A program is a set of instructions. Where you... essentially, you are moving things on the abacus, or you're tracing things on the big nomograph or whatever, but it's just a set of instructions. ABI: So I mean, in theory, you can run a program on anything, like an organ, or a water clock or an abacus, or this loom that we're looking at. JUSTIN: Or this loom. I mean, so this is... This is one of the first programmable machines, right, the Jacquard loom. Um, you know, in France in the 18th century, clothing with lots of fancy floral... ...fancy floral patterns was in style. This was really hard to weave manually on just an ordinary loom, this was also compounded by the fact that most of the individual heddles, which are the little hooks that raise and lower the threads for weaving those patterns, those are operated by child labor, which you know, fucked up a lot, because they're kids. NOVA: Yeah, unreliable. JUSTIN: Unreliable, yes. ABI: Yeah. JUSTIN: So, Joseph Marie Jacquard realized you could replace the children with punch cards. ABI: He put all those children out of work. Monster. NOVA: Absolutely. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. But on the other hand, he greatly increased the reliability of the loom. NOVA: And your ability to get, like, cute floral patterns, so it's impossible to say whether this was bad or not. JUSTIN: But essentially, the... the various patterns– ABI: The children came around and broke its legs. Like, fuck you! JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] NOVA: The first Luddites, yeah. JUSTIN: So, Jacquard realized you could replace the children with punch cards, and the punch cards could block the heddles from being raised and lowered, depending on what the pattern on the... on the fabric was gonna be, right? ABI: Oh, clever! NOVA: Yeah. Same with an organ, same with a music box, same with a player piano. Sometimes it's a metal cylinder, but you just use these perforations. JUSTIN: So yeah, in effect, these punch cards are a program for the loom. You couldn't store a lot of data on them, of course, you needed a whole hell of a lot of punch cards for a complex pattern. ABI: So these are like the first workers to be automated out of a job, were these... were these children. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. So you might see the root of our problem already here, actually. Um. But I– ABI: Yeah, now we've got a whole bunch of unemployed children on our hands! JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Yeah. ABI: Gonna be (?) around, causing trouble, inventing being teenagers! NOVA: Antisocial behaviour. Yeah. JUSTIN: There's a show, um, that was on, I forget where it came from, if it was from BBC, it was on PBS a long time ago, it was called Connections, by a guy named James Burke. He explains, y'know, sort of history of computation through the loom, but sort of traces it back also to, like, Roman mills with camshafts. Um, y'know, he does a really good job with that, I might link that in the description. NOVA: The thing is, there's this distinction, right, between just sort of additative–”additative”? Additive and multiplicative machines, right, to sort of timing-based ones. And that's what an organ is, that's what a... a water-powered forge hammer, a trip hammer does, is it just rolls around on a wheel and that trips it to drop down. Same with this. And this will come up later, once we start getting into the ones and zeros. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. NOVA: Just bear in mind the idea that the Antikythera mechanism... LIAM: Yes! We don't have it in the slides. JUSTIN: I don't understand how it works. NOVA: Uh, it allowed you to play Ancient Greek Halo. Uh. LIAM: I just wanted us to mention it. ABI: Oh, God of War, surely. NOVA: Oh, well, yeah, absolutely. The important thing for you to note down in your little notes here is that, uh, the timing of operations is something that is potentially very important when you're trying to execute a program. ABI: Mmkay. JUSTIN: Industrial capitalism comes, right, and leads to increasingly complex societal structures, right? NOVA: Oh no. LIAM: Uh oh. JUSTIN: You know, you got railroads, factories, multinational corporations, and needs for computation increase as well, right? And this becomes sort of the era... NOVA: Yeah. NOVA: Well, we have a picture of a computer using a typewriter. JUSTIN: This is not a typewriter, this is an adding machine. NOVA: Ah, excuse me. You have a picture of a computer using an adding machine. JUSTIN: This is when “computer” was a job. Right, and not a machine. NOVA: Yeah, this woman is a computer. JUSTIN: This woman is a computer, yes. ABI: Yeah, she's been dronified. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] JUSTIN: Now this guy Charles Babbage had an idea for a mechanical computer in the 1830s. He called it the “difference engine”. NOVA: “Well, Charles.” JUSTIN: This is sort of, ABI: [laughs] JUSTIN: this is built on some earlier concepts for, like, um, I wanna say it's called a pinwheel adder, which is a really really simple adding machine where, y'know, it has a mechanism to carry the one when you add over nine, and you can have an arbitrary number of rows of that. And Babbage realizes, well, you could add a lot more to it and have a much more complex machine, right, that could do a lot more than just addition or multiplication. And this came, he's inspired by... the fact that at this time, when you're navigating on the high seas, you need huge books with big charts and numbers... about, like... where the stars are supposed to be for celestial navigation, right? All those books, they had to be published once a year, because all these stars are drifting... slightly because the Earth's going around the galaxy, y'know. NOVA: Yep. Farming almanacs about the length of days. ABI: Ooh, ooh. JUSTIN: Yeah. ABI: And they wouldn't have known why that was happening as well, they would have just been like, ah, fuck... God just makes it hard. NOVA: [laughs] ABI: You just gotta do this every year. JUSTIN: I think actually... there was some knowledge that the Earth was moving around the galaxy at that point, just cause you could take a look at all the stars and sort of figure out, based on how they move, how far away they might be. I'm not exactly certain what the extent of knowledge was at that point. But yeah, the big important book was the nautical almanac, right. This provided locations of the stars, the sun, the moon, at each hour, at all locations on Earth, for a full year. Right? And you could use– ABI: And I guess somebody somewhere must still know how to do this, in case the computer goes down. Like, you must have to train somebody on the ship to be able to navigate. JUSTIN: Yes LIAM: The US Navy has started reintroducing celestial navigation in case the... the ship systems get hacked, I guess. NOVA: They trained air force navigators in celestial navigation into, like, the 80s, at least. Yeah. JUSTIN: Oh yeah, and... the US Naval Observatory still publishes a book like this, but I think it's... you can get a physical copy, but it's mostly an electronic form. But you could use this book, and a sextant, and you could figure out where the hell you were, right? And the smart guys back at the observatory would devise some big complicated mathematical formulas for the locations of the stars this year, and then send it to the computers, right, and the computers were, y'know, guys. Or gals. I think back then, this is like early 1800s, they were guys. NOVA: Oh, it’s all guys, then, yeah. JUSTIN: And they had to work on this, right? Every calculation was done twice, by two different guys, and there were tens of thousands of these calculations, and they were all very complicated, they required, like, y'know, sines, cosines, logarithms, all that crap, right? Now, two of these guys got different answers, then they knew one of them did it wrong. LIAM: (?) shot. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: No, there wasn't enough shot back then. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Just dropping it off the... NOVA: Hacked to (?) with sabers. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. You get bayoneted. LIAM: I would not want to be dropped off the Baltimore Shot Tower. JUSTIN: So if two guys got different answers, they'd have to do it again. Sometimes the two guys got the same answer, but the answer was wrong, and that made it into the book. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Or, more frequently, they got the right answer, and then when the calculations went to typesetting, the typesetter got it wrong, and it made it into the book. Right? LIAM: It's tough. JUSTIN: Yeah. And this was very bad if you were a sailor and you needed that specific number. Right? Now Babbage worked on these books, and he was frustrated at all the inaccuracies in the finished product, and he's like, alright, if only these calculations could be done by steam. Right? LIAM: Uh-huh. NOVA: Again, perfectly normal guy. ABI: We'd put all those children out of a job. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] JUSTIN: So he realized, okay, if we sort of scale up these adding machines that already exist, we could make something he called the difference engine. Right? So, this is a series of really big... adding machines, sort of in an array, and they interact with each other in a funny way. Right? It's very difficult to explain how it works. NOVA: And crucially, you can interlock them in ways that allow them to essentially have a computer memory, and if you arrange those in the right way, you can set it to do different tasks. JUSTIN: Oh, this one does not have memory. NOVA: Excuse me, I'm talking about the Analytical Engine, aren't I? JUSTIN: The Analytical Engine, yes. NOVA: The sequel! The sequel to this. JUSTIN: The sequel to this, yeah. Well, this sort of... this machine worked on two principles, right, the first of which is that most mathematical functions, like really complicated ones, where x is some function of... or y is some function of x, or however it goes, right, it might have sines, cosines, logarithms, all kinds of stuff that's very difficult to calculate by hand, right, you can approximate it to a pretty good degree of accuracy with a polynomial, right. NOVA: Ah, the sort of Kentucky windage of mathematics. JUSTIN: Yeah, if you know a certain number of points on a line, you can... NOVA: make an educated guess. LIAM: Approximate where the rest of the line is, presumably. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. So, a Newton polynomial, if you have a series of known points in a complicated function, you can approximate it to a good degree of accuracy, but the higher order the polynomial is, like, y'know, it's, I don't know, x to the seventh, or something like that, the more accurate you are, right. And you can do some more advanced stuff if you can figure out, like, the derivative at that point, but, hey, it's too complicated to go in here. NOVA: Yeah, especially working in metal cylinders. JUSTIN: Yes. ABI: I did maths at GCSE, which was only three years ago, and I can't remember any of this. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] JUSTIN: The second thing is, polynomials can be solved very rapidly, entirely through addition. ABI: Through guesswork! JUSTIN: Um, no. No. No. NOVA: Yeah, that’s how you got that maths GCSE last year. JUSTIN: That's a very slow way they teach you in algebra 2 here in the United States, and it sucks. [laughs] LIAM: It does suck, can confirm. JUSTIN: It's really stupid. LIAM: Dude, I, listen, man, although if it makes you feel better, I literally have a degree at this, and I'm still just like, what the fuck. JUSTIN: Alright. So this is called the method of finite differences, right? So these very complicated polynomials– NOVA: Sounds like a TERF blog post. ABI: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughs] JUSTIN: If you do... all you have to do is you have to do a few points on the polynomial equation by hand, right, and you tabulate the differences, right, in a big table, until you get this chart right here, right. So this says, this x is here, the function is p of x is 2x squared minus 3x plus 2, and here if x is 0 it's 2, jr x is 1 it's 1, x is 2 it's 4, 3 is 11, so on and so forth, right. Well, if you can get this first chart here, and this is, this one is the difference... how do I explain this? NOVA: [laughs] You're struggling here, huh. JUSTIN: This is x plus 1, the function of x plus 1 minus the function of x. So essentially, it's this number minus this number. NOVA: I'm fully bimbofied here, dude. JUSTIN: And then you get a negative 1, right. And then, if you do the difference between x plus 1 minus the difference of x, okay. NOVA: That’s so funny. JUSTIN: I'm subtracting here, from the next table, the next row and column, I'm subtracting negative 1 from 3, I get 4. Now once you hit the third row here, because this is a second order polynomial, on the third row, everything comes out to the same number. ABI: Holy shit, that's amazing! JUSTIN: What that means is that by continuing this method downwards, right, rather than having to solve the equation, I'm solving a series of very simple arithmetic problems, and I can extend that out to any arbitrary polynomial, right, and therefore I can do lots of very very complicated math, which is approximating some kind of very very very very very complicated function, just by doing addition. ABI: That's so fucking cool, that's like you've cheated, that's like you did a backflip and unequipped several items and you've just managed to skip straight through math, so that's so good! [laughter] ABI: You're just like, speedrunning math, that's amazing! NOVA: Just do algebra with a calculator that only has a plus and a minus button. JUSTIN: Exactly. ABI: It only has four, everything's four. I should remember this when I do my GCSE next year. [laughter] NOVA: Everything is four, that's the answer to everything, yeah. JUSTIN: So the difference engine uses inputs based on this system to calculate large numbers of polynomials to a high degree of accuracy in a very short period of time, because even when... the computers, who are the guys, who were doing these charts, they would use this method, but they have to do it manually, right? But uh, this machine– NOVA: They're joining the French children in the ranks of people who have been unemployed by automation. JUSTIN: With this machine, instead of having to do all that manually, you just did a couple points, and then you crank the handle... ABI: Wait, it just said it’s “four”! JUSTIN: ...you crank the handle and the numbers come out. ABI: Yeah, all the tabulations and star charts, they print them every year, it's just the number four. JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughter] ABI: Sick! NOVA: “Well, it's four again.” JUSTIN: You ever see that RAND Corporation publication, which is one million random numbers? NOVA: Oh yeah, my favourite book. JUSTIN: Yeah, well, imagine that, but they all came out to four. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] NOVA: I mean, you can't falsify it! Yeah, absolutely. JUSTIN: It's a perfectly random process, they just happen to all come out as four. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: But this wasn't enough, because they had to build a sequel, they had to do a 2.0. JUSTIN: Well no, the biggest problem with this machine we'll get to in a second. Now, it was designed so that you also got rid of the typesetters in this process, it actually automatically imprinted onto a mold, which you could later fill with molten lead to get the typesetting, so now no one could fuck up the typesetting. ABI: But also no one could do the calculations anymore because they've all got brain damage from lead poisoning. LIAM: Well, everything says four! [laughs] JUSTIN: ...comes with the job. [laughs] And this could... do calculations to a very high degree of accuracy. 31 digits, right. 31 digits on a 7th order polynomial, right, which is much much higher than what the book could do. NOVA: And with a hand crank, no less. JUSTIN: Yes. Babbage explained this concept– ABI: Hand crank. NOVA: Hand crank. JUSTIN: Babbage explained this concept, he’d built a tiny model of a portion of the machine to demonstrate it to the British government. The British government was really interested in it, because these books were really expensive to produce. ABI: British government was like, “That's so funny!” NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: Twirling a single strand of hair, yeah. JUSTIN: The main issue with the machine, though, is... Babbage didn't actually build it. LIAM: Well, that will do it. JUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, he sort of lost interest in it. Because he realized he could build– NOVA: “Well, Charles.” ABI: [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] JUSTIN: He had a better idea, he could build the analytical engine. Which was much bigger. NOVA: Once again, perfection is always the enemy of the good to the hardware engineer. It's like, no, I can do this better, I can do this perfect, in fact. JUSTIN: It would be programmed the same way a Jacquard loom was, right, you'd have a series of punch cards. The core of the machine was something called the arithmetic mill. Which is essentially what we'd now call a central processing unit, a CPU. NOVA: Fuck. Call CPUs that again. “The arithmetic mill”? Fuck yes, that rules. JUSTIN: The arithmetic mill. Yeah. They could add, it could subtract, it could divide, it could do square roots, it had mechanical memory for advanced programming, could store a thousand numbers of forty digits for later use, y'know. So this machine would be what we'd call Turing-complete. It could calculate sort of almost any arbitrary set of instructions. It would be the size of a locomotive, with 25,000 moving parts, and it would be powered by a steam engine. ABI: That's so cool! NOVA: He also inadvertently invented the first computer programmer, his friend Ada Lovelace, which is a transgender woman-ass name, as is fitting for the first computer programmer. JUSTIN: Does sound about right. NOVA: She worked up some hypothetical programs for these. Which worked, as was later discovered. No word on whether she had, like, some Jacquard-loomed knee socks on in the process. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: One of the issues is... neither of these machines actually got built. Someone built a difference engine, or I think there's two replica difference engines that were constructed in full between 1989 and 2000; there's been some effort to build an analytical engine, but it's been stymied by the fact that no one understands Babbage's diagrams or notes, and no one's ever managed to fully– NOVA: “What the fuck is a ‘catgirl’? “Why is this in here?” ABI and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: He also has a series of volumes called his “scribbles”, which– LIAM: Was that really what it's ca–That's fantastic. JUSTIN: Yeah, which had a lot of details for the machines in there, but there's so many of them, no one's managed to digitize all of them, let alone comprehend all of them. ABI: It's probably like Heidegger, and it's just full of a lot of racist shit. [laughter] LIAM: Hundreds of thousands of etches of catgirls. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: [laughs] ABI: Would be very cool to just whip out an analytical engine in your maths GCSE. It's like, well, you said I could use a calculator, you didn't say it had to be of a certain kind. NOVA: Yeah, it has to be in a clear pencil case, though; good luck fitting that in there. LIAM: I used a slide rule in high school to be smart. ‘Cause they won't let us use graphing calculators, so I taught myself how to use a slide rule. Highly recommend it to piss off your math teacher who claims she's a doctor but won't show you the degree. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] LIAM: Show us the degree, Mrs. Mumbert. All I asked for was a degree and she wouldn't show it to us. ABI: “Show us the birth certificate.” JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: That's right. JUSTIN: In the meantime, these much more simple adding machines got more and more popular, right, and they got more sophisticated, they got mo–quicker to use, right, this is sort of the golden age of the computer as a job, really between, I dunno, 1840s to the 1910s, right? This is when stuff like... spreadsheets are physical objects, right, really complex computations that are trivial for a modern machine to handle were instead handled with armies of people, usually women, they're doing calculations on paper, a lot of times they'd add– ABI: “We find a computer indispensable.” NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: And this takes on the shape of the state, and vice versa, like, things become more centralized, things become more statistical, it becomes more... more sort of numerate in these ways. JUSTIN: Yeah. And, y'know, one development really assisted here was the development of the relay, right? So in 1840 Samuel Morse... patented the telegraph, right, and the primary element of this telegraph was something we now call a relay, right? You power an electromagnet, and two plates make contact, and... that completes a circuit, right. Use several of these and you can make simple logic gates, right. You know, AND OR NOT. NOVA: Yeah, and then you're really off to the races, because that's all you need, like– well, it's not all you need, because you can do it with simple addition, as we've seen– but once you have the ability to tell a computer, this is an AND function, this is an OR function, this is a NOT function, you can do some very clever things with that. ABI: Like what? NOVA: Uh, don't worry about it. [laughs] JUSTIN: You can make a podcast. NOVA: You can make a podcast with it! You can play Call of Duty with it! LIAM: Not that I would recommend either of those things. NOVA: Absolutely. ABI: Because then you can start writing code and shit, right? You can start being like, if this, then this, and this. LIAM: If this event happens, then this event happens. If this event and this event happens, and be able to trace logic back. ABI: If going to crash, brackets, [don't]. LIAM: Yes. ABI: Yeah. LIAM: That's the Tesla pedestrian safety initiative. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, once electricity becomes more ubiquitous, at least in office environments, adding machines could be powered, right, and simple relay logic could automate a lot of functions, right? So, y'know, whereas before you were adding on the machine, and you had to manually clear it, maybe now you get a little electric motor controlled by simple relay logic that would clear the machine, or maybe it would be able to do multiplication now, by doing the same calculation over and over again. You know... a lot of these little adding machines got really sophisticated. They still weren't computers, though, right? NOVA: It's a big calculator. ABI: Oh no, ‘cause– Because computers were pretty girls. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Yeah, exactly. JUSTIN: Computers were the pretty girls who used the adding machines. ABI: Uh-huh. JUSTIN: Now this guy, Herman Hollerith, saw opportunity. Right here. Hollerith was the son of German immigrants, graduate of the Columbia University School of Mines, right? LIAM: Wow. ABI: “Mines” as in digging in the ground, or “mines” as in kaboom? JUSTIN: Uh, “mines” as in digging in the ground. It's now the engineering school there. LIAM: I was gonna say, at Columbia–I guess that makes sense. Pennsylvania and New York have... just wasn't expecting Columbia to have a mining school. JUSTIN: In 1880, the US Census was recorded on paper, processed on paper. NOVA: Ah! You make my point for me about the computer and the state becoming as one. JUSTIN: Yes. It took eight years to tabulate, right? ABI: And everyone had to record the sex they were assigned at birth, that was the rules. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yes. Now, Hollerith had never heard of a Jacquard loom or an analytic engine, but he had ridden a train. And he had had his ticket punched. NOVA: Just a perfect brotherhood of slightly autistic men who have, like, experienced things in different ways across the world. LIAM: By(?) their inconveniences. NOVA: [laughs] Yeah. And it's like, “I could do this better.” JUSTIN: Yeah. A conductor, when you receive a fare, punch in the presence of the passenger. NOVA: Ah, cause they punched your ticket! JUSTIN: They punched your ticket! NOVA: Literally. JUSTIN: And railway tickets had more information printed on them than just the fare and the destination, right? Because there'd be multiple conductors along the same route, they wanna make sure you're the same guy, right? So you have punches for people's gender, rough age range, their race, yeah. ABI: Uh oh. NOVA: [shivers] JUSTIN: Yeah, yeah. LIAM: You don't wanna know what the categories of race were, I'll tell you that. JUSTIN: Oh my God. LIAM: Just “slur one”, “slur two”, “slur three”, “White”. JUSTIN: Yeah. Well, it's this, uh... NOVA: “Irish”. JUSTIN and LIAM: “Irish”. JUSTIN: [laughs] JUSTIN: “Italian”. [laughter] JUSTIN: Italian's just under a category of “swarthy”. [laughter] JUSTIN: Um, so this is so– LIAM: “Maybe some kind of Scottish?” JUSTIN: Yeah. This is so that the conductor knew, the next conductor knew the person was the person they were supposed to be. NOVA: Yeah, you hadn't had your ticket stolen by some kind of Italian. JUSTIN: This practice lasted for a very long time. Actually, SEPTA was still printing a little gender sticker on the transit passes. LIAM: Oh, Transpasses. JUSTIN: Yeah, the Transpass, ironically named. LIAM: Ironically enough. JUSTIN: [laughs] They were still doing that until 2013. NOVA: Jesus. LIAM: Yeah, we don't live in the most... good city. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: So, Hollerith realized data could be stored on punch cards, right? And... y'know, once he was in school, he realized the Jacquard loom... existed. Machines could read them. This could be applied– LIAM: Data is stored on the balls, Rocz. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: This could be applied to the census. JUSTIN: So you would record the census data on punch cards, and have a machine tabulate the data, right? These are initially custom-made cards with a special key punch that allowed census takers to accurately punch holes, right? Hollerith– ABI: Sorry, can I ask what you mean by “tabulate”? Because you said earlier on that it took eight years to tabulate the data. What do you mean, “tabulate”? JUSTIN: Just adding everything up, so you get your final numbers, and you get your various subdivisions and numbers. NOVA: Yeah, “percentage of Irish”. JUSTIN: “Percentage of Irish in this district”. ABI: Right. So instead, you can do that on punch cards, and then you can just, like, [punch card noises], and it'll do it. JUSTIN: Yeah, and you just shove it in the machine, and the machine does it all for you, right. ABI: Aah! JUSTIN: So, his tabulating machine company was an instant success, his machines were on the market by 1886, used by several public statistics-taking organizations, right. So these tabulating machines were simple. You put the punch cards in, which have punched holes based on the data, several spring-loaded wires were dropped on the card, right? NOVA: If you're a 19th century public authority, right, the desire for you to have data is there already, but the ease makes you desire it more. And because you are a 19th century civil servant, you start thinking, man, I could record anything with this. I could record race, uh, race... race. ABI: Or even... race. JUSTIN: Skull size. NOVA: [laughs] ABI: Yeah. ABI: Numbers of Irish. LIAM: And don't forget, this eventually becomes IBM, famous for not doing anything during World War II that was bad. NOVA: International Business Machines. JUSTIN: Now, where the wires were blocked by the card, no data was recorded, but where there was a punch in the card, the wires plunged into an electrified pool of mercury. [laughter] LIAM: What? NOVA: “Yeah, so I’ve been working on the census for several years now, “and it’s making me feel Very Normal.” LIAM: “Let me tell you about the space Martians that I think are in my brain.” NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: And this– LIAM: Yeah, uh, that's not good. JUSTIN: And this completed a circuit, right. And that recorded data... LIAM: And killed whoever was tabulating. NOVA: Yes. JUSTIN: One of this series of dials, on the front of the machine... NOVA: So these dials tell you how Irish the person you're looking at is? ABI: Yeah, you do your vigour test, then you assign your special points. JUSTIN: Well, I mean, this one might be total people, this one might be percentage Irish, this one might be percentage Italian. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: This one might be some... some factor accounting for skull size. NOVA: All of the rest of these are skull size. JUSTIN: This one down here is average depth of horseshit per street. NOVA: [laughs] ABI: In a throwback to Charles Babbage, one of them is just "four". [laughter] NOVA: It's like a sanity check, if the four dials aren’t pointing at four, then you have to check the machine. ABI: I'd be interested to know how these machines affected people's trust in the census and the census-taking authority. Because at least with a person you can be like, oh, I understand that this person is adding things up, even though I haven't checked the calculations, I understand how it works. But with this, it's like, well, God knows how this machine works. I assume you didn't just tell everyone. But like, “ooh, I don't trust it. “It says we're 60% Irish, but what if it's more, you know?” NOVA: Yeah, yeah. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: I think... you're predisposed to believe one way or the other about this, and I think a lot of... liberals or whigs of the day are more likely to be like, oh, we're applying the infallible scientific method. JUSTIN: Oh yeah, this was adopted very enthusiastically by the census for 1890, because they didn't think they were gonna get it done otherwise. [laughs] ABI: Yeah, somewhere Foucault is waiting to write a paper about this. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. So yeah, once you've fed all the punch cards in, you read the numbers off all the dials and you record those, and then those can be integrated into the census in some other fashion, depending on, y'know, whatever. You record a huge amount of data very quickly. But yeah, the US census bought a whole shitload of these machines, and they finished the 1890 census in... six years. NOVA: [laughs] ABI: Okay. NOVA: Worth it. JUSTIN: That's an improvement! NOVA: It is! I mean, three years off is not bad. JUSTIN: Yeah. So, Hollerith’s company made a whole bunch of money, these machines got more sophisticated, automatic feed, y'know, card sorting, arithmetic operation, they– ABI: More mercury. NOVA: Mm-hmm. JUSTIN: More mercury. They would print out specific statistics rather than have dials, right? Y'know, you'd have control panels... NOVA: Beep beep beep beep, beep beep beep. JUSTIN: so you could switch the machine between different jobs. And in 1911, his company and three of his competitors amalgamated into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which in 1924 became International Business Machines! NOVA: Yes! Big Blue. JUSTIN: Yeah. And from that we got the standard punch card, this IBM 80 row card. NOVA: Ah, okay, that's what this is. JUSTIN: Excuse me, 80 column card. That's the opposite of a row. Y'know, and this is the definition of computing for about 50 years. Y'know, it's 80 columns with digits 1 through 9 on each of them, there's a section up top for information about the card, the machine can read. The printed numbers don't necessarily mean exactly the printed numbers, y'know, you could actually store a lot more data on these cards by just, y'know, ignoring the numbers and putting stuff in in binary. Right. but, um, anyway. NOVA: And you can store a ton of data about, uh, race. JUSTIN: Oh, race. The Nazis were fond of that, yes. LIAM and NOVA: Yeah. NOVA: IBM guys went out to install these in certain locations in Germany and occupied Poland, in order to keep accurate records of, uh, don't worry about it. LIAM: They were just trying to check, uh, Fanta consumption. NOVA: Absolutely. ABI: They made a special version of the machine that automatically destroyed itself if you press a button? JUSTIN: You'd probably have to run the card through like six or seven times to determine the exact tiny fraction of Jewish blood you had in you, in order to go to the camps or not. NOVA: Jesus. JUSTIN: It was definitely a complicated process there. But IBM facilitated it. NOVA: Yeah, they facilitated a huge data management operation in the process of genocide, and to this day I don't believe they've apologized. LIAM: No, uh, Lions Led by Donkeys, our sister show, if you've never heard of this, I'm sure our smartass listeners have, and also like to bring it up every time someone brings up IBM, definitely check out their episode on it. Along with Fanta, which was developed by Coca-Cola Germany. NOVA: And we see a culmination of my thing, is like, the person is reduced to a set of numbers in order to eliminate them. LIAM: Facilitate the state, that's really good, [Nova]. NOVA: Thank you. Should get a history degree or something, maybe. LIAM: What is your undergrad degree in? NOVA: Law, and I didn't graduate, I dropped out to do this. ABI: Ah, maybe I'll get to university in eight years. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] LIAM: Shut the hell up! NOVA: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. LIAM: Some of us are in our thirties, Abi. NOVA: Oh, my God. ABI: I'm ten. [laughter] NOVA: It's fine, we're gonna automate your labour out of the podcast. JUSTIN and ABI: [laugh] JUSTIN: So, a big issue with punch cards is you need a lot of them to store a lot of data, right? So here's a bundle of punch cards. ABI: Recording, uhh, don't worry about it. JUSTIN: Yeah, probably one program. You can see they wrote a diagonal line here, so you can easily sort them if you drop them. ABI: Oh, that is clever! NOVA: Oh, the nightmare of dropping your program into, like, a thousand sheets. LIAM: “We call them Little Bobby Tables.” NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: This was a common– NOVA: Literally “drop tables”. Fuck. JUSTIN: Yeah, you're literally dropping the table, yeah. This was a common problem... when my granddad taught at Washington Lee in the early days, he had, as I've mentioned before, the most salt of the earth Appalachian job: professor of economics at W&L. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Every once in a while, some undergraduate would, y'know, drop a set of punch cards and lose all the data for their thesis. [laughs] ABI: Oh, no! NOVA: Ooh. JUSTIN: Because if they hadn't marked it properly, it would be a pain in the ass to re-sort it. ABI: Yeah, is like, using somebody's thesis as a coaster? JUSTIN: [laughs] Actually, that would probably be fine. Because it doesn't matter what's printed on there, as long as the hole's intact, right. ABI: Oh, I can see now, looking closer at the diagram, yeah. That's where the mercury goes in. JUSTIN: Yes. ABI: Right. [♪“Local Forecast - Elevator” by Kevin MacLeod♪] JUSTIN: Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is, you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes, so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com/wtyppod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. JUSTIN: So one of the things with punch cards is because they don't hand– there's not too much data on each one, you wanted to try and conserve wherever possible. So you abbreviate it, right? Which is very common for dates. LIAM: Uh-oh. JUSTIN: Yeah. ABI: Oh, I think I see where we're going with this. JUSTIN: Yeah. The general nomenclature for a date went from, like, March 11th of the year of our lord, 1952, to like 3/11/52, or, if you wanted to get really aggressive, 07152, meaning it was the 71st day of 1952. ABI: If you wanted it to be readable by absolutely nobody. JUSTIN: Well, it's readable by the machine, though. Which is what we need. ABI: And this is where humans have to start thinking like machines in order to get jobs. NOVA: Yes. JUSTIN: Yes. ABI: Right. JUSTIN: Also if someone yells at me that it should be the 70th day, I would point out that 1952 was a leap year. NOVA: Get their asses. JUSTIN: Yes. But this saves space on the cards for other data, and over a large program, or a large set of data, this could add up a lot, right? And I mean, punch cards were very very cheap, you'd get like a thousand of them for a dollar, but they were difficult to carry around, and again, if you dropped them, you're having a bad day. NOVA: Plus marginal improvements, and again, because I'm still thinking about totalizing institutions, you don't just use codes for dates, you use codes for anything that you want to, well, encode about a person. Which means that you have to categorize things, and you have to have a useful little handy key printed out of what, like, group 01, group 02, group 03 means. But it's very– LIAM: Oh, “Jehovah's Witnesses”, “Jews”, uh, “gays”... NOVA: Exactly what I was getting at. LIAM: Yeah. NOVA: ...it's very inflexible, and it's very dehumanizing. LIAM: Ah, well it's perfect for literal fucking Nazis, then. ABI: It's kinda cool to be carrying around a computer program and it's just like a stack of paper. JUSTIN: It's just a brick. [laughter] ABI: That’s quite fun, you can like– JUSTIN: It's just a big heavy brick. ABI: You can hide it in something. LIAM: Toss it through your local Starbucks window. NOVA: On the right here, you have an act of sabotage. JUSTIN: Yes! NOVA: The precursor to the Black Fax, which is itself the precursor to... the DDoS attack, this is a Lace Card. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: And a Lace Card is a fucking nightmare to a punch card computer. JUSTIN: If you, uh... the thing about the Lace Card, this is a card where every single potential hole is punched, right? Which means, um, the card has very little structural integrity now. So if you feed it into the punch card machine, it tends to just shred. NOVA: Yeah, it eats it. And then it jams up all of the mechanical works of your computer. ABI: Oh, that's so cool! That's like, “Ha! You thought you had me beat, Yugi, “but I planted my deck virus into your deck five turns ago!” NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] ABI: That's so good! NOVA: I mean, this kind of mechanical... weakness is also where we get a “computer bug” from, is if you have a bunch of, like, mechanical computation going on in a room, and a bug gets in there, it can, like, stick in the thing. ABI: Ah. ABI: So you can just, like, shuffle one of these into somebody's thesis and just fuck their whole shit up? NOVA: Potentially. JUSTIN: You fuck up everyone's thesis. Because the machine would break. ABI: That's so cool. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: “Hi, I'm Rocz's grandfather, this is Jackass.” [laughter] NOVA: Then, we had to go and ruin all of this beautiful futurism by inventing electronics. JUSTIN: It’s a terrible idea. LIAM: Transistor radios, you son of a whore. NOVA: We diverge from the Fallout timeline onto this. JUSTIN: Yeah, we wind up, um... So, alright. The thing about relays, is that, y'know, they have moving parts, right? And that means they're also big, right? So eventually we invent this thing called vacuum tubes that do the same thing, in a smaller form factor, right? And they're solid state–I don't know exactly how a vacuum tube works, but they do the same thing. Right? ABI: As punch cards? JUSTIN: They're an electrically activated switch. NOVA: As relays. JUSTIN: As relays, yeah. ABI: Oh, okay. JUSTIN: And this is when computers start getting boring. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] ABI: I'm just scrolling back up to remind myself what relays were again. JUSTIN: So, because all these relays, y'know, they were big, they were bulky, they make a nice clicking noise, right, which some people don't like the clicking noise. NOVA: I like the clicking noise. JUSTIN: No one tried to really create a general purpose computer. Now there was this guy named Konrad Zuse, who'd taken a whole lot– LIAM: Heck of a name. JUSTIN: He’d taken a whole lot of money from the Nazis and created a relay-based computer in 1935 that was almost, but not quite, Turing complete. NOVA: “Veelink very normal, UND ZEN, I built zis electronic computer!” JUSTIN: [laughs] ABI: So instead of using cards– JUSTIN: No, it's electro-mechanical. ABI: Oh, okay. NOVA: These can still use cards, but the way that they move... but the way that they move electricity across switches to connect circuits is they're using these vacuum tubes instead of a relay. ABI: Oh, okay. NOVA: And that's how you do your logic gates, that's how you do your ANDs and your ORs and your NOTs, is through these glass tubes. ABI: Oh, and then they don't have all the moving parts to make a noise, got it, okay. JUSTIN: Yes. So this guy Konrad Zuse made the Z3, that was a relay-based general computer, but there wasn't much call for one, so... very few other than that prototype were built, right. Now, World War II happens. NOVA: Yeah, and you need to use a computer for things that aren't genocide. You need to use a computer for things like fire control, LIAM: Artillery. you need to be able to go, I want to make an artillery shell land at such and such a point, do the maths for me. JUSTIN: There's a fundamental and difficult problem in ballistics, which is, y'know, the science of non-propelled objects moving through the air, which is this. How do you get the dumbest guys you know, LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: artillery guys, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: to do some very advanced mathematics? NOVA: I was in a Royal Artillery Cadet Detachment, and you're so right. Um. [laughter] LIAM: I'm sorry, infantry, I know it's normally you guys, but... I've met artillery (?) and it's not you guys. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] ABI: I always thought you just kinda looked through a little telescope and then you said, “they're over there!” And you kind of, you fire at them until you hit them. But I suppose, do you have to do maths? NOVA: That used to be the way, but now you have to do maths. JUSTIN: And they had, like, analog artillery computers for that purpose. ABI: Pretty girls. JUSTIN: Which is essentially, it's a little, NOVA: [laughs] Yeah, me. JUSTIN: ...fancy little device that was, y'know, you'd have some inputs that were in big block letters so you could read them, and... I don't understand much about how, like, artillery aiming works. NOVA: It's basically, I mean, these kinds of things, they're a lot like nomograms. They're also a lot like the things that you use... to mark fires from a fire-sighting tower. You just sort of, like, you move a big wheel around, like a slide rule, and you kind of arrange things that way. And it's very very fallible, particularly in something where you need to be precise, like ballistics. JUSTIN: Yes. Now, during World War II, we're of course making all these new weapons, and that means they needed all new artillery charts, so they can create these little nomograms and little analog calculators, right. And they needed a machine that could make all this shit really really quickly. Right. NOVA: That's what this is! JUSTIN: This is what this is. This is the first general– ABI: “I find a computer indispensable.” NOVA: Truly! ABI: Yeah! JUSTIN: This is the first general purpose electronic computer. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, ENIAC, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945. LIAM: Booooo! NOVA: I'm simply getting smugger as you tell me that the first general purpose computer was invented to help the state make war in a reliable and industrialized fashion. LIAM: At Penn, no less! JUSTIN: At Penn, yeah. LIAM: You sons of whores. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: The building where they built this is still... the engineering school main building. LIAM: Well, they never shut up about it, do they? JUSTIN: Exactly, that's true. ABI: ...Try to run COD on it? LIAM: I hate that fucking school, man. [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So they– No, it's Doom, Abi! They gotta run Doom on it, that's the benchmark. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: They, uh, they finished this on like December 10th, 1945, just in time for the war to be almost over. NOVA: Perfect. ABI: Maybe they did that deliberately. LIAM: December 10th, 1945 was after the war was over, Rocz. JUSTIN: Oh, that's a good point, yeah. ABI: Maybe they were like, oh, we don't want it to be used for war, we won't let them do that to you, ENIAC. JUSTIN: [laughs] ABI: You know, he's like, [robot voice] “I do not want to kill humans.” LIAM: Yeah, University of Pennsylvania, well known as a lover of peace. [laughter] JUSTIN: And, um, I think it was December 10th, it may have been a little bit earlier than that, first thing they used it for was... to work on the atomic bomb project instead of artillery tables. NOVA: –See? fucking modernity, red in tooth and claw. ABI: Skynet-ass shit. NOVA: Mmhm. JUSTIN: So it was, uh, 100 t–it was 100... no, 1,000 times faster than electromechanical adding machines, computing devices, IBM tabulating machines, so on and so forth, and it could be programmed to do anything. Right? Essentially, any programming– ABI: Anything? JUSTIN and NOVA: Anything. JUSTIN: If you're willing to wait long enough. [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, it's still trying to do E1M1 to this day. LIAM: It's called “edging”, and it's fine. JUSTIN: I think you could probably get it to display some ASCII porn. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Yes! JUSTIN: If you were willing to wait, like, half an hour. LIAM: Yeah, that's no trouble. I’m on SNRIs, dude. [laughs] NOVA: ...like the Colossus, like the bomb that they used at Bletchley Park, this is plugboard input. You see in the background, like a synthesizer, you just have a load of little connectors, and you connect those up with cables to get it to do what you want it to do, and this takes for fucking ever. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. You can't program it through punch cards, you program it through, y'know, switching cables around, there were some, what they called function tables, which were really big panels that had 1,200 ten-way switches on them, right. This process was very tedious, it took weeks to do, to set it up for one set of calculations, and the men didn't want to do it, so the women did it. NOVA: Also... JUSTIN: Women in programming. Very old tradition. NOVA: Absolutely. Also, as we see from the caption of this, the thing about vacuum tubes is they can just die very easily. They give no sort of signal that they've done this. JUSTIN: Absolutely. NOVA: Which means that you have to... if your computer does not work, if it doesn't want to cooperate with you in doing atomic bomb shit, you have to go through all nineteen thousand of these fucking little tubes and check them individually. ABI: God, that sounds like electrolysis. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Uh, I believe ENIAC was also responsible for predicting... the presidential election of 1948, and was able to give, I think, an accurate prediction of Truman winning it. I’m maybe wrong on that. ABI: What was even weirder is that he did it in 1911. [laughter] JUSTIN: So yeah, this is, uh... you could input data and punch cards in this machine, but programming was very complicated. The machine had a whopping 20 bytes of memory, it had 18,000 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 5 million hand-soldered joints. NOVA: Jesus! ABI: Wow! NOVA: That's a battleship! JUSTIN: It weighed more than 30 short tons, was roughly eight feet tall, three feet deep and a hundred feet long. LIAM: Mood. ABI: Holy shit. JUSTIN: Occupied 1800 square feet and it consumed 150 kilowatts of electricity. The power requirement led to the rumor that when the computer was switched on, the lights in Philadelphia dimmed. NOVA: Jesus. ABI: Philadelphia's always like that. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Shut the hell up. JUSTIN: Oh my God. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] ABI: Wait, is that the one you're from, or is that the other one? I forget. JUSTIN: It's where we are right now, yeah. ABI: Oh shit, I'm sorry. I meant that to be a compliment, but I got it mixed up with the other one. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: I'll tell you what, I was coming home from my friend's house a couple days ago, and I got a big roll-up door, right, which I can use to get into the back of my house so I don't have to go to the front. LIAM: Someone blocked it again? JUSTIN: No... I opened the roll-up door, and it got about halfway through, and then... a transformer blew down the street. NOVA: Yeah, cause they were trying to use ENIAC to print porn. JUSTIN: Yeah, and then the whole block blacked out for like 30 seconds. And then the power came back on, and I was like, shit, did I do that? [laughs] NOVA: Must've done. LIAM: [Nova], you make that joke, but we are down the street from Penn. NOVA: Oh yeah. That's true, yeah. So yeah, ENIAC’S your first general purpose computer, proves very successful, does the job, but... we invent something even better than vacuum tubes, that make computers more boring, which is the transistor. NOVA: Boo. NOVA: The transistor. It's a little tiny relay, you can put it on a chip, and from then on, everything is silicon. We use the poisoned sand, and everything gets smaller. Way smaller, in fact. JUSTIN: You know, you've got no moving parts, you don't have any wearing parts, really. Um. Fully solid. ABI: That is a very cool invention, though. To go from like, we've got a mechanical thing that reads cards, to like, NOVA: Oh yeah, it's incredibly useful. we made it small and it never wears out. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Well, we put a bunch of, like, arsenic in some sand, and the result is that now you can do math without, like, any kind of mechanical interaction whatsoever. ABI: Yeah, we put arsenic in sand and now we've destroyed democracy. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Also that. Also that. JUSTIN: So yeah, you use a semiconductor to create a fully solid state switch, no moving parts, very tiny, very... reliable, your computers start to take recognizably modern forms. This is an IBM 1401 system, you see the big tape hard drives. NOVA: Ah, I always thought those were so cool. ABI: So cool. JUSTIN: These are some, like, I think these are either punch card feeders or sorters over here. You know, this is for, like, big business applications, right? These came out in the 1950s, they could have up to a whopping 16,000 individual characters of memory, right. You could store 16,000 letters or numbers in there, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: for actual computing purposes. Obviously storage was in these big tape drives, right. ABI: So again, like, abbreviations, space, you try to keep everything down. NOVA: Yeah, this is... What you'd use this for is indexing of paper files, so it tells you where to find a paper file that you need, rather than storing any of the data on it. ABI: Ooh, okay. NOVA: But that's still a huge efficiency gain. JUSTIN: As we mentioned in our last episode on Penn Central, railroad car routing, railroad car tracking, some passenger ticketing, which actually there were some pretty wild electromechanical systems for passenger ticketing before electronic computers, but those were upgraded pretty quickly, and then... disregarded because we have no passenger trains in America. But... [laughter] NOVA: But yeah, you can do a lot with 16,000 characters, it transpires. JUSTIN: It's true, yeah. LIAM: Oh, my tweets would be unstoppably bad. [laughter] NOVA: But the drive is always to get more. You need more. And in order to do that, you need to start... having more efficient methods of data storage. Things like magnetic tape, it's an improvement on punch cards, it's got great data fidelity, it archives very well, but it doesn't store a lot of data, that's why you can't fit as much music on a cassette as you can on a CD, kind of thing. And we progress towards things like optical media, based on needing more space. JUSTIN: So, you know, these... I don't know what the capacity of these tape drives are, but yeah, stuff does improve. So for instance, here is a five megabyte hard drive being loaded... NOVA: [laughs] into an airplane. ABI: [laughs] LIAM: Wow. JUSTIN: [laughs] ABI: Wow. JUSTIN: This is, uh, this is in... what, 1956. This is an IBM 350 hard disk drive. It has 50 24-inch platters, right, so 24 disks. Or, 50 24-inch disks, for that five megabytes of data. NOVA: Incredible. ABI: Wow. You've really gotta wanna look at that porn. [laughter] NOVA: Now, all of your porn, on the other hand, is stored in the photo on the bottom right. That is... the culmination of my point about data and the state and storage. This is the Utah Data Center. It was built for the NSA, amongst others, and it's sort of a central data holding facility, one of several, but I believe the largest, that the US government runs. And it facilitates a lot of mass data collection, because if you intercept a lot of phone calls, and you read a lot of emails, and things of this nature, you need to fucking put that shit somewhere, and this is where they put all of it. It's enormous. ABI: So what you're telling me is we can just take out that building, and... NOVA: Good luck trying. I think if you take two steps towards this thing, then you get sawn in half. It's like, all of this is filled with racks and racks of servers, for data storage. It's an enormous environmental draw, uses huge, huge amounts of water, power, for cooling all of this shit. And it's just sort of the... the apotheosis of big data, is that you can store all of this shit like this. But there's... another thing that I want to talk about, which is that, like, obviously storing huge amounts of data takes a lot of space, still, and while we've gotten much better at it, it's still a problem. Data storage is one thing, data transport is another. We're really bad at transferring data, and so what you have on the top right here is an Amazon Web Services snowmobile. And this is a tractor trailer, a semi-truck, which contains, I think it's like, exabytes worth of data. If you need to– LIAM: What's this? NOVA: It's the snowmobile. It's Amazon Web Services' big truck. LIAM: Oh, yeah yeah yeah yeah. The thing is fucking wild. NOVA: Yeah, yeah. They will send this to you with an armed escort, and not a kind of joke-armed escort; the kind of Snow Crash kind of corporate-armed escort, and if you need to transport a lot of data securely, this is more efficient to physically put it on a truck, like it's on pallets, than it is to try and move it. Even something like... so much shit gets moved through the US Mail, through people carrying like even... SD cards or hard drives, which is called sneakernet, charmingly. It's still an unsolved problem of data transfer, and so these two things, the fact that data takes a lot of space and a lot of resources to store, and the fact that it's very difficult to transport, mean that you want to abbreviate still, as much as possible. That's why you want to collect metadata, that's why you want to... categorise, that's why you want to abbreviate. ABI: So inside that truck, just so I can picture it, there's like, a hard drive? Or a laptop? NOVA: Essentially, yeah. LIAM: Hundreds, thousands of them. NOVA: Big, big–think of massive server racks that run down the whole length of that, in like a climate-controlled environment. LIAM: That's a hundred petabytes per snowmobile. And a petabyte is a thousand terabytes, if I'm not mistaken. And for reference– ABI: And even to be able to access that data, you'd need, like, the fucking Enterprise. LIAM: For reference, I have a 53– well, with redundancy–53.6 terabyte server, okay? JUSTIN: Wow. Good for you, Liam. LIAM: Thank you. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: You have to log in to it! JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: And it has taken me, Abi, years and years and years to collect that much data. NOVA: But it's the same as the Ontario highways. Because what you do is you induce demand. The more data you collect, the more you want to use it, and the more you want to use it, the more data you collect... Until you end up with the Utah Data Center, until you end up just collecting everything... that's of very little value to you, potentially, because... LIAM: Hey, you leave my .flac backups alone. NOVA: [laughs] ABI: Just running up to that truck and putting a lace card in it, like, “HAHA!” NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: I just want to comment on this tractor trailer. They made it all white in an attempt to be discreet, like, oh, this is an ordinary snowmobile. NOVA: It's the least discreet thing–It's up there with the safeguard transport, so that they, the fucking, the NNSA moves nuclear weapons in. It says to me, there is a highly, like, laden down black Suburban with tinted windows in front of and behind this truck. It's... JUSTIN: Well, I mean, you can just look and see, oh. Third axle. Something's up with this. [laughter] LIAM: What's funny is, because you're doing economies of scale, which is super important to this, I'm looking at how much snowmobile, like, the snowmobile pricing details, and it's 0.005... dollars, for a gig per month. But I assume you have to be storing, like, petabytes of stuff. NOVA: If there's no minimum, we could badly irritate Amazon Web Services. Send me this truck so I can toss one external hard drive in the back of it. LIAM: Actually, I want you to host my super illegal, uh, website. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: All of my music pirated. JUSTIN: ...This highly secure data facility, where they'll shoot you on sight if you approach it, is... built out of tilt-up concrete, which is gonna get knocked over in a stiff wind. NOVA: Oh yeah. LIAM: We could also talk about Iron Mountain, in Pennsylvania. NOVA: Oh yeah. LIAM: Which is built into, literally, iron mountain. A mountain in Pennsylvania. ABI: I'm just wondering, how do you become an armed guard for Amazon? Like, where's the recruiting service that gets you that job? LIAM: It's easy. Abi, your coworkers say, hey, maybe we should unionize, and what you do is you take a shiv to them, NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: and say, daddy Bezos save me. NOVA: Now what you wanna do is you wanna get out of the US military, at a, like... a junior officer or senior enlisted rank. LIAM: E-4! [laughs] You wanna get out of the US military and go to a security clearance job fair, where all of these guys will try to recruit you for secret shit. ABI: Ooh. NOVA: Next slide, please. JUSTIN: Oh, well, I was just gonna comment on this. This 5 megabyte drive, it's not just big because data storage was inefficient, you could easily store this in a tape drive at the time, something that was more the size of a cabinet than a... you know, five ton pallet thing, right? But this was– LIAM: I really appreciate your weird obsession with tape drives. JUSTIN: Yeah, it's fun. NOVA: They’re cool. JUSTIN: But this is... This is one of the earliest hard disks, where you would access any kind of... any information, anywhere on the hard drive instantly, rather than having to wait for the tape to scroll to where it is, right. That's one of your advantages to this, uh, a hard disk over tape drive, because tape drive you have to... You gotta... LIAM: ...you have to rewind... NOVA: Also, now obsolete technology, don't @ me, get an SSD LIAM: No it’s not, no it’s not, no it’s not. NOVA: Next slide, next slide. Next slide. JUSTIN: Be kind, rewind. NOVA: An hour and a half in, and we get to the culprit of our problem here. LIAM: You're not doing Enterprise-scale shit, [Nova], unless I'm sorely mistaken. NOVA: This is an RTC, it's a real-time clock. It's a little chip that you put into a computer, because sometimes a computer needs to know what time it is. And there are two, basically two ways of figuring out what time it is for a computer, like on a hardware side. One is you have a little quartz clock in there, the other is that you just fucking read it off the mains electricity with some very clever electrical engineering. And remember what I said about how timing makes a, makes a significant difference in a lot of applications? Not just things where you need to know exact timing, like, say, train timetables, but also things where you need to know what you've computed when, right. There's a lot that depends on these. And so, every computer will have one of these in it, just as a fact of life. And what it's actually intended to do, the priority of displaying you what time it is, that's way low down there. Measuring things like... how long it's been since you last powered the computer, even while it's off, for instance, that's something that this needs to do; it needs to do a bunch of shit. And so, they're in everything. This will be a problem. Next slide, please. ABI: But we don't know when exactly, because they're all broken. NOVA: Exactly. Now, join me, Mr. Chapo, in the Mastercard Y2K Command Center. JUSTIN: I was gonna say... we went through all this computer history, and it's kinda like, why are we talking about all the old-timey shit when we're talking about a problem that... it starts at the end of history, you know, the late 90s. NOVA: Yeah, this type of office. Yeah, when everything was fine. JUSTIN: Yeah. JUSTIN: This is like the Salvador Allende... NOVA: Cybersyn. JUSTIN: Cybersyn, but for capitalism. Yeah. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: Yeah, and there's two reasons why. One is international finance. We accidentally computerized it. We turned a bunch of guys making bets on a chalkboard in a coffeehouse into the way that we organize everything. LIAM: Taught the wall(?) how to write Python, yes we did(?) NOVA: We accidentally made that the way that we allocate resources, for some reason, and we required them to be able to do this and make those bets several hundred times a second. So therefore, finance just computerized everything, and everything was computerized by finance in a way that required a lot of very precise timing. Even just to prevent fraud. ABI: I like their old-fashioned phones, though. NOVA: They are cool. JUSTIN: Oh yeah, they're nice. JUSTIN: More ergonomic. NOVA: Like, even just if like... someone steals your card, right, and takes some money out as an ATM, you will have a timestamp of that exactly, because the ATM will have a little RTC in it that tells it what time it is, and they'll be able to pull the camera footage of that. That's a concern too. So that's one reason, that's finance. The other reason is... just sort of entropy, I guess. JUSTIN: Legacy systems, yeah, lots of shit was still running with punch cards, and these old-timey, you know, embedded computers, cause lots of big industrial processes will have machines that run for 30, 40 years or more, right, you know, and they won't really be– NOVA: Stuff that's designed only for that function. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. Like, I dunno, you're in a steel mill, maybe, you know, and you have like, some kind of like, maybe... the ladle that dumps the molten steel into the crucible or whatever, you know, has like an IBM machine attached to it that was designed in 1956, which is the last time you modernized that steel mill, because it's incredibly expensive to do so, right, and now... The dates aren't gonna work. JUSTIN: Because it's the year 2000. NOVA: Yeah, every single one of these things NOVA: has a little RTC in there, ticking away, and it's ticking away, but because everything is abbreviated, you want to use as short a date format as possible, and the shortest way to write a date is with... –and a year is two digits. Use the last two digits. JUSTIN: Loads of stuff was punch card operated well after you might expect, like up until like, the 80s, the 90s, right, especially the 90s are relevant here, you know, especially, again, heavy industrial processes where you don't want to replace the machinery so often because it's all one-off, custom-made shit, which is incredibly expensive. ABI: So the computer knows, like, 1991... Well, because it knows 91, 92, 93. When you get to 2000, 00, it can't tell the difference between 2000 and 1900? JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Exactly. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: That's the problem. JUSTIN: There's your problem. ABI: So it's gonna be like, we've all gone back in time, now we're doing computations, in the year 1900! NOVA: Wearing like, a bowler hat? Yeah, exactly. JUSTIN: I can sexually harass other computers now! NOVA: And as people start to realize... ABI: I remember, there's that line from Futurama where Bender's like, are you familiar with the old robot saying, “does not compute”? NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: Well, as people start to realize that every computer knows what year it is, and actually, weirdly, depends on what year it is for a lot of things, people start to get worried. And then they start to get more worried, and then they start to Next slide, please. JUSTIN: I was gonna... Another anecdote. I... Coincidentally. So, these legacy computer systems kinda keep an old-timey computer business afloat even today, right? So I remember there was a... near where I lived, coincidentally, very close to where the Capitol Beltway truck convoy is now blockading the Right to Work building, there was a computer recycler and reseller that, as of 2011, was still selling computers from, like, the 1980s. Their biggest customer– LIAM: NASA had to go on eBay to get an 8-bit Pentium chip. JUSTIN: Yeah. Their biggest customer, I think, was a... dairy processor across the street. LIAM: Sure it was. JUSTIN: Because, yeah, because their systems all ran on shit from, like, the 80s. And if anything broke, they had to go across the street to the used computer store to get it because it would be too expensive and complicated to upgrade the computer system. NOVA: Organizations just have this sort of, like, entropic feature, it's the same way that, like, Mossad is able to just destroy a bunch of centrifuges in Iran, because they're all hooked to, like, Philips SCADA systems, and, like, once those are compromised, what are you gonna do, change them all out? Of course you aren’t. LIAM: [nerd voice] You mean Siemens systems, actually? That's what Stuxnet targeted? NOVA: Excuse me, sorry... I don't mean to insult the brave hackers of... [laughs] LIAM: The good people of Mossad. NOVA: of the NSA and Mossad, yeah. But so, everybody became– JUSTIN: Wow, Mossad going after a German company. Who would have thought? JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] LIAM: Yeah, that set of working with them, yeah. NOVA: But people became very worried, and, next slide please, and the febrile atmosphere of the 1990s, because a lot of people think that, oh, it was just the end of history. No. The end of history was an elite opinion for elites. Normal people, and abnormal people for that matter, during the Clinton years were going completely fucking insane. As NAFTA started to bite, you had the birth of the militia movement, which we'll get into, you had a lot of millenarian symbolism, because Americans ever since, well, ever, in particular, have loved a symbolic date. You guys love that shit. ABI: Yeah, people were like, Jesus is coming back on... you know, December 31st. NOVA: And a new millennium? Like the year 2000, is a frightening, frightening prospect, just sort of numerically. If you've lived your whole life in the 20th century, you're gonna be in a new one. It feels like a demarcation point. JUSTIN: I thought this was gonna be the Fourth Great Awakening when the Fourth Great Awakening was actually QAnon. Um. [laughter] LIAM: Oh, Jeez. LIAM: No, no, no, fuck, go back, fuck, go back! JUSTIN: Going to take another 20 years, guys. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] NOVA: Now, this had been... This had been known, right? Like, everybody, like, computer programmers kind of knew that this would be a problem. But it, like, it didn't become a mass hysteria until... they sort of warning about it in public, because of, again, financial systems. Because you have bonds that are gonna mature in 2000, and everybody's like, oh, this hundred year bond is now a two hundred year bond, or whatever. Um. JUSTIN: ...the financial industry was well ahead of everyone else in, like, fixing Y2K issues, just because... they found an issue where, y'know, these bonds had to be issued and the data had to correspond to it. Now, I don't know how that affected bonds which had been imported into the system earlier, but yeah. NOVA: But you also have this kind of creeping terror, of people who are aware that everything has a computer in it now, had no real say in this, feel very... very alienated from it, and don't understand it, are frightened of it, and therefore think, everything has a computer in it, everything that has a computer in it is going to fail. And so, on the first of January 2000, there will be no electricity anymore because the power plants will have computers in them, all of the prison gates will open because they have computers in them, there will be terrorist attacks because terrorists have computers in them, LIAM: [laughs] and there will be wild dog packs because wild dogs have computers in them. JUSTIN: Not domestic dogs, though, which is confusing to me. LIAM: No, that's what happens when they get spayed or neutered. ABI: I remember... I remember the 31st of December 1999, when I was minus two years old. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] ABI: ...I do remember the stroke of midnight, and I was at a big party at the time. I was very, very young then, but I do remember it. And I remember there was like a good, like, 10 or 15 seconds after the stroke of midnight when everyone was just like, oh, oh! nope, I mean, the speakers still work, so, everyone alright? Yeah, okay, let's go! JUSTIN: [laughs] ABI: So there was a real tension. NOVA: You see some more of this fear of technology... A lot of the evangelicals in particular were very, very frightened of barcodes when those became adopted universally as as the mark of... as the mark of the beast. LIAM: Are you still seeing that with the 5G shit? ABI: Because "the barcodes have like 666 hidden in them.” Classic times. NOVA: It's like, no, it's like sublimated anxiety, because now all of this stuff has this, has this, like, symbolism on it that you don't understand why it's there. And no one consulted you, it's just been imposed on you. LIAM: There's a really good book called The End of Money that touches on... I highly recommend it. It's a bit technocratic lib weird, but... there's a whole section about this evangelical guy who basically refuses to use credit cards because he believes they're the devil or whatever. And it's just really interesting to watch– JUSTIN: It's true. JUSTIN: It's not in the way he thinks, but it's true. NOVA: [laughs] That’s right. LIAM: Can confirm. ABI: The Omen films came out, and they were like the Antichrist is gonna come, and it's gonna be a charismatic person with the surname of Thorn who has, like, political and entertainment connections, and it's just ridiculous! NOVA: [laughs] Next slide, please. Because I have this photo that I found at the last minute which I love a lot. This is a family in Colorado with their Y2K supplies. And I think this says much, much more than it was meant to at the time. Right, I think this speaks to a kind of terror. The 90s, this place, were like, there was this pendulum, right? The right wing in America exists on a pendulum between, we love our cops, we love our law enforcement, and where it was in the 90s, which is the president of the NRA calling the ATF “jackbooted stormtroopers”. And this was the far end of right-wing distrust of the federal government in particular. And so, a lot of these people went into militias, the consequences of which are still being felt to this day, and a lot of people started prepping. And I feel like this was, like, obviously it existed because of nuclear war before this, and even before that, but this was prepping's big cultural moment, was that there would be a defined moment when the shit would hit the fan, you could no longer rely on the government or anybody else, and there would be others outside waiting to take your bucket full of food, and you would have to shoot them in order to keep it. ABI: In order to defend your, I'm zooming in here, rice-a-roni and bag of raisins. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: But these people have always fantasized themselves to be sort of the... you know, in the event of– it's like the same reason, the same way gold is positioned, even though, like, when the apocalypse comes, how much useful is your gold gonna be? NOVA: Mmhm. JUSTIN: This is a comically small amount of firewood. LIAM: Yeah, I was thinking that. NOVA: It's not a lot of firewood, it's not a lot of food either, um... JUSTIN: I guess there's a bigger pile back here, but yeah, this is all generally a comically small amount of everything. NOVA: I think this is a neat little window into the American, the white American psyche here. LIAM: Oh, please don't. [laughs] ABI: And let's not overlook that t-shirt, the boy on the left that says, "Jesus is life." NOVA: Let's not. JUSTIN: "Jesus is life"? NOVA: Mmhm. LIAM: No, he's actually dead, that's the whole point. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: What about this pickup truck, though? NOVA: Ah, I mean, back before the pickup truck's got big, so it's not a tank, but... JUSTIN: Yeah, it's small, but it still looks like it's got an 8 foot bed, though. NOVA: Mmh, yeah. Spiritually, it has a gun rack. JUSTIN: Got a job box in there? JUSTIN: Yeah. maybe that's what's in the job box. NOVA: Yeah, maybe. NOVA: Yeah, I'm thinking about this image, I'm gonna be thinking about it for a while. But of course, as we know, and I used my favorite book cover in recent times as the next slide, as we know, nothing happened. ABI: Well, I think there were a few things that went wrong, weren't there? JUSTIN: A couple things happened. Um, cause there were at least two Japanese nuclear power plants where a couple safety systems failed, not critical ones, though. They got confused. US Naval Observatory that day said, um, reported the date as "19-100". NOVA: [laughs] ABI: That's quite cute, actually. I quite like that. JUSTIN: That was a fairly common error, actually. ABI: We should change it to that, we should have just done that. No, we're not doing the 21st century, it's now 19... NOVA: 19122. ABI: Nineteen hundred one hundred twenty two. LIAM: (?) now! NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: I think there was an incident in the UK where a bunch of medical tests were sent out to pregnant mothers informing them of the risk of Down Syndrome in their children, and because of the date change they were all wrong, so a bunch of healthy babies got aborted, and a bunch of kids with Down Syndrome who would have been aborted otherwise were born. NOVA: Oh shit. ABI: Wow. NOVA: Y2K had a body count, after all. JUSTIN: This is true. ABI: Wow. NOVA: So it is a problem. There is your problem. JUSTIN: It depends on how you define “abortion”. NOVA: Well. LIAM: Jesus. [laughs] NOVA: But what didn't happen were wild dog packs roaming the streets. As far as I know. LIAM: They were all domesticated dog packs. NOVA: Exactly, exactly. Planes didn't drop from the sky. And as a consequence of this– ABI: Wasn't any terrorism in the early 2000s at all? NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: No, thankfully. NOVA: And so as a consequence, people learned a lesson from this, which is, um, everything is fake, actually, and you shouldn't ever be worried about anything, because it's gonna work out. JUSTIN: Nothing actually happens. NOVA: Yeah. And there's the kind of thing, right, where, like, a lot of programmers and a lot of hardware developers spent many, many years working on this. It cost something like 400 billion dollars, because what they were doing was going in and replacing all of these little RTC chips in things that... would otherwise have had obsolete ones. ABI: Oh really? They just did it by hand? NOVA: Yeah, absolutely. ABI: That’s so cool. NOVA: And sometimes it literally was just changing out a part. But because that's, like, uninspirational, and because it's nerdy, and because it takes a long time and it doesn't make for good media– ABI: Because it's all done by women! JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Well, also, yes. This was, like, totally unremembered. Even very, very quickly afterwards, I think the consensus about Y2K was that it was a joke. LIAM: That's certainly how I remember it culturally, yeah. NOVA: ...Like, oh, the nerds warned us about this thing, and then nothing happened. ABI: Yeah, we didn't listen to the nerds the same way we didn't listen to the hippies, who turned out to be completely right. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: And this is, I mark this up as a rare sort of dub for mankind, a rare entry in the win column alongside the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain, where, like, in some ways, those easy, and I'm doing big air quotes, those “easy” wins, really fucked us in the long term, because we thought, ah, well, it's fine, then, clearly. We don't have to worry about any of this other shit, because someone's gonna take care of it, and it's probably not even a problem in the first place. And I mean, clearly this was a case of hysteria, right, like a lot of this was blown wildly out of proportion, wild dog packs were not gonna roam the streets and eat you. But... JUSTIN: If the plane lost navigation, you could always take out the sextant and the big almanac, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: and figure out where you are. ABI: Oh, it's four! Ah, yeah. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: It's four. It was four all along. NOVA: But there was a real problem here, and it did take effort to fix, and it was fixed largely because of the sort of self-preservation instincts of capital. And we learned... nothing from this whatsoever. NOVA: We, uh, well, I mean, that's not true. I'll say this, right. We learned, next slide please, we learned not to use a legacy system just for the sake of it being a legacy system, because we don't know how to upgrade it. Incidentally, this is a, a floppy disk that controls ICBM launches. Those were only– ABI: [laughs] Sorry, what? JUSTIN: Is that an 8-inch floppy? NOVA: That is an 8-inch floppy disk, as used by the Strategic Air Command. JUSTIN: Oh my God. NOVA: They used these until 2019, as command and control for nuclear weapons systems. JUSTIN: Oh, now some guy from 4chan can just hack into it because it's connected to the internet, great. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: I don't know, I trust the 8-inch floppy. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] ABI: Estradiol will do that to you. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: And, next slide please, we learned a lot about putting computers in things for no reason. We stopped doing that, and now, things are only online, things are only networks. LIAM: I've never heard of the Internet of Things. NOVA: Yeah, because–for when they have a good practical reason... please ignore this photo of a Weber grill that on Thanksgiving needed a software update. JUSTIN: There was a... ABI: I find a computer... LIAM: The future so goddamn stupid. ABI: ....indispensable. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: And of course, best of all... Next slide please. JUSTIN: There was an article on Billy Penn today. LIAM: Oh, the Bitcoin house. JUSTIN: The Bitcoin mining house, yes, that someone's selling up on, like, 42nd Street. [laughs] They're like, oh, you have a Bitcoin miner planted in your house already. It's also connected to internet of things, which all your appliances are. I'm like, I don't know, this is somehow going to cause my oven to eat me, if I have something like that. NOVA: The packs of wild dogs are real now. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: And of course– JUSTIN: the washing machine is gonna walk its way across the house and lock me in my bedroom. And then catch fire. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: “Feed me. Feed–”You know, Rocz, It's gonna go to the wash and fold across the street, be with its brethren. NOVA: And of course we also learned not to worry too much about apocalyptic dates. And we have here a headline from The Guardian, saying, “Is the Year 2038 problem the new Y2K bug?” And proclaiming that it's going to cause “computerized doom”. ABI: And that it's somehow the fault of trans women. NOVA: Absolutely. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: Congratulations. NOVA: I mean, the year 2038 thing is even funnier, because it exists by virtue of Unix systems having this kind of French Revolution calendar, whereby they count up in seconds from midnight 1st of January 1970. JUSTIN: That's the epoch, yes. NOVA: And it's a 32-bit number, and... sometime in 2038 it will become larger than a 32-bit number. JUSTIN: The question is, can you... replace all of these 32-bit systems in time, because a lot of systems now count up with... 64-bits, in which case you do have to worry about the Year 292 billion problem. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: But, uh, I think we may have some time to fix that one, I will say that. NOVA: A little Best Buy sticker that says, "please remember to turn off your computer before midnight on 12/31/292,000,001,970." JUSTIN: [laughs] ABI: Put that in a little sci-fi video game as an easter egg, that'd be great. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: No, it wouldn't be that date. Because the Gregorian calendar gets a little shoogly at those... that time. NOVA: Oh no. ABI: Wait, what? JUSTIN: Yeah, it's not that precise. LIAM: “Shoogly?” [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, “shoogly”. ABI: Wait, are you telling me the– ABI: Is the calendar gonna run out? Are we gonna run out of dates? NOVA: No, what's gonna happen is the leap seconds are gonna count up. JUSTIN: ...the leap seconds, because you gotta leap... everything's an approximation because a year is not 365 days, it's 365 days, 6 hours and change. And, you know, so the current thing is, you know, you gotta– NOVA: If no one updates the calendar in the next 292 billion years it's gonna be really bad for your computer. JUSTIN: Exactly, right. NOVA: So, what have we learned about Y2K here? LIAM: Go back. Go back. JUSTIN: Actually– NOVA: Go back to vacuum tubes? JUSTIN: That's another thing that most computers didn't have programmed into them are some of the nuances of the Gregorian calendar. Such as, that years dividable by, I think, 400 are not leap years. LIAM: Right. So 2000 was not a leap year, but 2004 was. Our next non-leap year is 2400. NOVA: Well, the way a computer wants to think is that it's, y'know, the thirty-firth of February. LIAM: The "thirty-firth". Not the "thirty-first", but the "thirty-firth". NOVA: Yeah. It's the thirty-oneth of February, kind of thing. Yeah. ABI: 19-100. NOVA: Exactly. Think like a computer. Everything else is. JUSTIN: Just count up seconds. And store that as a floating point... value in your brain. NOVA: Yeah. And... this podcast, and anything that you type in the comments, will be minutely recorded in a data center in Utah. JUSTIN: In China, they teach you how to use a mental abacus. So I believe we should teach our children to use... a mental adding machine. ABI: That's what they've been teaching me. [laughter] LIAM: Fuck you, buddy. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] JUSTIN: Yeah, Abi has been aging in reverse through this podcast. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: The curious case of Abigail Button. ABI: The Benjamin Button disease. NOVA: Abigail Button JUSTIN: Yeah. ABI: Putting a button on that podcast. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Every week or so I have to go down to the beach that makes you old. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Just to keep from regressing into the womb. [laughs] JUSTIN: I got a new idea for a Picture a Dorian Gray-style novel now. ABI: It's just my YouTube videos, Rocz. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: It's called Estradiol. ABI: Mm. JUSTIN: I've heard it does that. NOVA: It does, yeah. ABI: Makes you look younger. Or makes you have a haunted painting. NOVA: That too. LIAM: Whichever. NOVA: Both, yeah. JUSTIN: I thought that was how it worked. NOVA: The haunted painting? Yeah. ABI: Yeah, you gotta wait several years so that they can paint the haunted painting. NOVA: You have to get, like, two painters to sign off on it. ABI: Yeah. JUSTIN and ABI: [laugh] NOVA: But on this podcast... JUSTIN: We have a segment called... ABI: We have a science-based... wait, no. NOVA: [laughs] We have a science-based segment called... NOVA and JUSTIN: Safety Third. LIAM: Safety Third. [♪Shake hands with danger♪] NOVA: Incidentally, if you want to send one of these in, it's wtyppod at gmail.com, you should do that. We'll read it on the air. JUSTIN: Try and keep the text to about a page, otherwise it goes too long. Today's Safety Third comes from the Balkans. NOVA: Oh no. ABI: Uh oh! NOVA: Hookay. JUSTIN: “Hello, [Nova], Liam, and Rocz.” NOVA: Didn't include guests. Cancelled. JUSTIN: Yeah, sorry, Abi's canceled. Um. [laughs] JUSTIN: “First let me–” JUSTIN: We're cancelled for being Russian like Tchaikovsky! JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: “First let me say how much I love that you found the clip “of ‘Shaking Hands with Danger’. “I had to watch that video while at engineer officer basic school, “and it is in my top five comedies ever made. ABI: [laughs] JUSTIN: “As an army engineer, in addition to learning how to build roads, bridges, and buildings, “all unlicensed because the army builds in a pre-PE exam world, “I got to play around with explosives and landmines. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Hell yeah. JUSTIN: “This was about as much fun as you would imagine. “A lot for explosives, but not so much for the landmines. “This led to a large number of safety issues, “especially when I was in Bosnia, “working in humanitarian demining. NOVA: Shake leg with danger. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Shake toecap with danger. ABI: Deny for years that you were doing anything involving danger. LIAM: ♪(?) Ta-da-da-da-da, and shake it all up♪ JUSTIN: “On my first day on the job, we were visiting a site that was being demined “by a group of Bosnian soldiers. “As we walked up to the campfire, “where all meetings began with coffee, “two soldiers were hiking out of the woods that were being demined. “I asked as they approached if they had found anything, “and in response, “one of the soldiers threw an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade “like a football to me. [laughter] NOVA: Classic Bosnian prank. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: "We call it 'hot potato'." LIAM and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: “These (?) RPGs were known not to explode when shot “because they had to have a certain number of revolutions to arm, “leaving them very much alive and liable to go off when handled. “So I watched as it spiraled towards me, “wondering how many rotations it had left in it before becoming live, “and did my best Jerry Rice impression to catch the RPG “without letting any part of me touch the fuse at the head “and risk setting it off. “As my heart was calming down, I went to hand the RPG back to the soldiers who, “who said, laughing, ‘Oh yeah, we disarmed it first.’ [laughter] ABI: Should’ve passed it back to them. JUSTIN: “Assholes, they're everywhere. [laughter] “Also while in Bosnia, “my boss begged to be taken out in a field with us. “He was a desk jockey and never got to go out and wanted to have “more of a story to tell “than that ‘I sat in a walled off compound for half a year’.” NOVA: You would not catch me doing this shit in the army, I would sit in my compound. JUSTIN: Let me sit at the desk, yeah. “Finally, the timing and the pleading worked out for him, “and he tagged along on a trip to a mountain site “where a family of Bosnian brothers “held off a Serbian advance “along a narrow road corridor next to the Drina River.” This sounds like a, sort of, Bosnian 300 Spartans situation. NOVA: Well, the 300 Spartans would have found it a lot easier with anti-personnel mines, I think. JUSTIN: It's a good point. LIAM: Like a cheat code to the Persians. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: This is the issue with the Spartan military legacy, is it's really exaggerated. You know, they weren't very good, and this was due in part to, you know, the militaristic culture actually not producing a great military, but also, they never thought to use mines. [laughter] JUSTIN: “So the Bosnian brothers held off the Serbian advance “along a narrow road corridor next to the Drina River. “It was full of mines and unexploded ordnance due to the brothers' efforts, “and I figured it'd be a good show for my boss. “It was that type of thinking that almost left me as a red mist. “My personal policy was not to wear armor in a minefield, “as if you hit something you were dead regardless. “So why be a–” LIAM: ...That is Liam logic right there. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] NOVA: “No, I don’t need to wear a seatbelt, I'll be thrown clear.” LIAM: I do wear a seatbelt. I was talking more about the Heritage Run, where I told Rocz that A. no medics were coming for us, and even if they did, we would be marinara long before they got to us. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: And he said, “okay”. So away we went. JUSTIN: “And, so why be hot and sweaty? “Y'know. But my boss insisted on wearing his armor, right? LIAM: Pathetic. JUSTIN: “When we got to the minefield and drank our obligatory coffee “with the Serbian soldiers working on this site, “I turned to my boss and told him that this was an active demining site, “so don't assume anything is cleared ever, “only walk where others are walking, “and stay the hell out of the way. “He was very mindful of my directions for all of two minutes. “For as we climbed the hillside, “one of the Serbian soldiers rushed over to tell us “they had found a daisy-chained cluster of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines, “if we wanted to go take a look. “My boss pulled out his camera and rushed forward, so excited to get a picture.” NOVA: [laughs] "Oh neat!" JUSTIN: “He did not register to him what ‘daisy-chained’ meant, “or to hear that there were six anti-personnel mines, “or that these were freshly uncovered and had not been deactivated yet.” NOVA: “My boss was a great admirer of the film A Serbian Film.” JUSTIN: [laughs] ABI: Are we looking at them in the picture? JUSTIN: I... I'm not sure what we're looking at. ABI: I can't see anything, it just looks like ground to me, but then I got untrained eyes. JUSTIN: “The setup was so that if one of them was triggered, “the whole lot would go off, “about fifty pounds of explosive, give or take. “He was walking forward to get a nice closeup of the anti-tank mine, “and was stepping directly on an anti-personnel mine “when I caught up with him and dragged him back by his armor. “I cursed him out and had him escorted back to the vehicles “to think about what he had done, “and to wait for us to finish the day. “On the plus side, the picture turned out to be great. “You can spot the hidden landmines here.” ABI: Oh yeah, I can kinda see one on the right just underneath the... the toe there, and there's one on the left there. JUSTIN: Under the... maybe this is one. NOVA: Oh Jesus, yeah! ABI: Can you see a third one over there near the red match head-looking thing? God, you must have good eyes though, I'd have stepped on that. JUSTIN: I'd definitely step–I'd step on any landmine anywhere. Like, I would have no... there's no way. I would be killed instantly in any battlefield. ABI: I mean, I can only see three, he said six, right? JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Six anti-personnel and an anti-tank. JUSTIN: I assume this is what the, um, what the... stakes are for. I will say, there is one trick to detecting mines, which is you sort of, you click on a square, right, and a number shows up, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: and then you know that there's probably mines... NOVA: I have... ABI: (?) to detect mines now? NOVA: ...I have a foolproof technique for detecting whether or not a mine is present in an area, and that's, you walk around, and if you're losing a leg suddenly, you have detected that a mine is in the area. ABI: And you've also neutralized it, so. NOVA: Absolutely. JUSTIN: That's a good point, yeah. NOVA: The finest mine clearance techniques of 1941 Stalingrad. JUSTIN: You can do that up to twice. [laughter] NOVA: You've got arms, don't you? LIAM: What's the matter, you've got like six freebies? JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: “Good luck in your struggles, from JC.” NOVA: Well, I hope they aren't as bad as yours. LIAM: Thank you, Jesus. NOVA: Thank you, Jesus. Thank you Army Officer Jesus. ABI: Thank you, Mr Corbyn. JUSTIN: Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr Corbyn, yes. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Our next episode is on the Boston Molasses Disaster. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? NOVA: You should listen to Kill James Bond. JUSTIN: Oh, that's a good idea. NOVA: You should watch Philosophy Tube. ABI: Yeah, yeah, please do if you don't. I mean, I do put a lot of work into it. And it does have a Patreon, so if you would like me to continue making the things that I make, then why not consider signing up to that? It's not like this podcast where you get bonus stuff. NOVA: No, it's good. JUSTIN: [laughs] ABI: You do get rewards, like you can get little cards or books or stuff, and you get your name in the credits. JUSTIN: You could get some philosophy in a tube. ABI: Yeah, yeah, you can. LIAM: Nice. Oh man, I'm gonna make (?) grands after we're done this. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] ABI: Also, if I'm in a TV show or a play or something, like, watch it. [laughs] JUSTIN: That's a good idea. NOVA: Follow Abi on Twitter, @... Is it PhilosophyTube? Philosophy_Tube? ABI: @PhilosophyTube, yeah. NOVA: Alright. It's a podcast. JUSTIN: That was a podcast, folks. ABI: Four. NOVA: Four. JUSTIN: Four. ABI: Fooour. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Alright. Bye, everybody. JUSTIN: It's a (?) podcast now. NOVA: Taking a nine iron into my minefield, yeah. JUSTIN: [laughs]