We are no longer so amazingly primitive that we “still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea”.
Many people today have smartphones to do everything. I do not. I have a rebooted Nokia 3310, which I barely use except to tell the time. This annoys people. I occasionally get texts on it for things like two-factor identification, but it spends most of its time left at home when I’m out, with a flat battery or turned off. It used to spend a lot of time with no credit but it’s now part of my BT account so that no longer happens.
Over a long period of time, I had little problem adjusting to new technology, although as previous posts probably make clear, this got a lot more difficult once GUIs had been almost universally adopted because they make me feel like they’re hoarding the device’s resources and stopping me from using them properly. This is, as I said yesterday, similar to the difference between pedalling and riding a motorbike. In the former case I can maintain some kind of connection between my physical effort and the results achieved, but in the latter the vehicle felt like it was running away from me and had a mind of its own. This connects to the RastafarIan concept of I-Tal, which I mentioned in passing yesterday.
I am of course the world’s whitest person, and also a Gentile. There is no sense in which I am even slightly non-white or Jewish. Consequently there may be an issue with my attraction to I-Tal, in particular because I’m not interested in adopting most of the rest of RastafarIanism. It was, however, once noted with approval by a Rasta who came into my workplace that I never cut or combed my hair, and he correctly guessed that this was in accordance with the will of Jah, as he put it. I was also teetotal at the time. Basically, I did these things because it seemed to concord with God’s will.
I-Tal is notably practiced in accordance with diet, although it extends elsewhere. It is of course the English word “vital” without the V, and is compulsory in some of the mansions, though not the biggest one if I have that correct. The idea is to encourage livity, i.e. what might in different circumstances be called qi or prana, or vitality, and I-Tal food should be pure, “natural” – that is, unadulterated by the likes of E numbers – tends to be organic and can also insist on being vegan although fish is sometimes included. It also avoids salt. Canned, dried or otherwise preserved food is also sometimes avoided. It’s been summed up thus:
Some Rastas do eat fish fairly regularly, however. Similar to kosher and halal practices,
pork is considered unclean, and is the worst of the ‘deaders’ (meats), but if it is all that is
available, it should be eaten instead of going hungry. Rastas apply a ‘sliding scale’ to
behaviors based on separation from what is ‘best.’ One Rasta put it thus: “Pork is the worst,
then beef, then chicken, then fish. Pure veggie is best. Same with travel…worst is plane,
then train, then car, then bicycle. Best is pure foot.” These are guidelines for living, not
‘sins’ in the common Christian sense.
- WHAT IS A FARM? AGRICULTURE, DISCOURSE, AND PRODUCING
LANDSCAPES IN ST ELIZABETH, JAMAICA
By
Gary R. Schnakenberg
From the viewpoint of this article the interesting connection is with modes of travel. In the early days of our relationship, Sarada and I used to walk everywhere barefoot. This brings home the close connection one has with Earth and also the degree of dirt, broken glass and general oomskah present on its surface. The further one is from Earth technologically, the more abstract one has become from it. Even shoes make a difference, but beyond that lie bikes, cars and ultimately planes. This distancing also occurs with other devices, notably telephones. That said, I admit that much of this is rationalisation. The true explanation of my failure to adopt mobile ‘phones as a central part of my life is more likely to be simply that I was a shade too old when they became practically ubiquitous. I don’t in fact consider myself morally superior for not using them much, although like all technology dependent on large numbers of strangers there is an ethical trust issue involved.
This wasn’t supposed to be what this post was about though. We are living in a world today when people have started to re-adopt wristwatches, but there was a fairly long phase during which they became almost unheard of, and the reason for this, of course, was the near-universal presence of mobile devices with built-in clocks. If you constantly have a device in your hand which can tell you the time, why have another one on your wrist?
Hovercars and holidays on Cynthia (the “Moon”) is a common phrase, which for some reason just shows me pictures of trousers when I Google it, often accompanied by “where’s my jetpack?”. These describe a fantasy version of the future as expressed in the likes of ‘The Jetsons’ and more sarcastically in Donald Fagen’s ‘I.G.Y’, which is notable for never arriving. Personally I don’t understand the appeal of jetpacks, but I have been a fan of the horrifyingly unsustainable hovercar in my time. Mea maxima culpa. One faux future feature is the wristwatch videophone, which doubles as a television, and these are odd because they are 100% achievable but don’t really exist and have never really caught on. It’s entirely unclear to me why they don’t. We’ve had mobile videophones for a while now, but in the form of handsets. Why is it that ‘phones became watches but not the reverse?
Wristwatch televisions came into existence in about 1979, although they were partly fake. They had a cigarette packet-sized unit which did all the actual work connected by wires to the display along the user’s sleeve, and as such they were kind of gendered as they’d require the wearer to have pockets. Then again, they were probably gendered anyway because that’d be the kind of gadget men are socialised to being into. I’m not going into huge depth on this point though because that’s the job of one of my other blogs. Another convergence which did take place, and quite successfully at that, was between calculators and watches:
This raises a slightly different alternative trajectory. Smartphones have notably rubbish built-in calculators which are almost as basic as the Mathbox , but they kind of looked like calculators until they got rid of the keys. Why is it that calculators didn’t become ‘phones? Why did ‘phones become crappy calculators? I actually want to emphasise the fact that they didn’t just become calculators. They actually became garbage calculators about forty-five years out of date. I imagine this is connected to the oft-repeated claim that most people never use the maths they learnt in school, which I find utterly baffling, because, for example, people get into debt, have deposit accounts and change fuses, and yet I’m expected to believe that they do all of that without using maths? Maybe a lot of people do just wander around in a daze all the time, mathematically speaking. It would explain Bright House and the National Lottery I suppose, although that’s quite a contemptuous thing to say. I suppose people don’t change fuses as much as they did. Anyway, the fact is that mobile devices include practically useless calculators which have led to me installing a better calculator app on anything in my possession which runs Android as practically the first thing I do with it.
If the wrist watch/calculator combi had persisted, we would probably have much better calculators on our devices today. Over the 1970s, calculator technology progressed rapidly in a similar manner to how computers would in the next decade, and the ultimate calculator that I’m aware of is probably the TI-86, released in 1996, which was programmable in BASIC and assembler, had a 128×64 monochrome display, 128K of RAM, 256K ROM and a Z80 CPU. If something like that had been incorporated into a watch, a lot of care would have to have been taken regarding the user interface as even on a pocket calculator that looks really fiddly, but the display could easily have been scaled down to wrist watch size.
The irony of the cruddy mobile calculator is that it’s running on a device which can do all sorts of sophisticated maths with the audiovisual data it’s confronted with. In order for audio, video and photography to be feasible on a smartphone, it needs to be able to carry out discrete cosine transformations (DCTs). These are ways of converting raw visual and audio data to sums of trig functions at different frequencies. Now I’m not going to lie: I may have that wrong and the details of how image, video and audio compression work may be very different from how I’ve described, but the point is that there are certain mathematical functions which have to be optimised on smartphones for them to work at all, so it can be expected that a smartphone would be able to perform cosines, sines, arcsines and other trig functions in the blink of an eye, so why not give us a bloody button on the calculator app which will do that‽
It’s easy to imagine a path where calculators get steadily quicker at trig functions and combining them to perform DCTs until they’re able to record sound and convert it to easily and quickly transmissible form to other calculators which then do the reverse, and then to extend that to pictures and video. But strangely this isn’t how it happened. Dick Tracy had a radio communicator watch in 1946, although obviously that was just a comic strip and didn’t reflect what was then possible using existing technology, but it was clearly what people were expecting.
On the whole, the things which haven’t happened haven’t happened for good reasons. For instance, although we have videophone technology, we sometimes tend to avoid it because of privacy or self-consciousness. Videophones are not found in ‘phone boxes because they are superfluous given that we have mobile ‘phones. Moving outside the area of telecommunications, we have no hovercars because they would be extremely noisy gas guzzlers which can’t turn corners well. We don’t have food pills because there’s no way of packing enough chemical energy into a package that small and the most energy-dense matter is inedible and probably highly toxic. Other things are less obvious or more mysterious. We don’t know why we haven’t had contact with aliens. We haven’t visited other planets or established orbiting space colonies, apparently due to short-termism and unpopularity with the public, although I’m not clear about that. We don’t have a cure for the common cold, but one may be forthcoming as a result of Covid-19 vaccine research. Nor do we really have a cure for cancer which doesn’t have serious side effects. Babies are not grown in artificial wombs, partly because of the huge impact it would have on power politics but also because there’s a sacrosanct period during which it’s impossible to support a fetus or embryo outside a human body. I don’t know why that period is out of bounds from a technological point of view.
The absence of wrist watch videophones and allied technology is, I think, an evolutionary thing. It’s allied to the reason that this keyboard is currently set to QWERTY (odd sensation typing that!) rather than the more efficient Dvorak layout, and the reason railways are the same width as ancient Roman chariot axles. It’s because you can’t get there from here. Taking an example from the living world, snakes have transparent permanently closed eyelids because they are descended from burrowing reptiles and needed to keep their eyes protected from the soil. Then they “changed their minds” about being reptilian moles and came back out onto the surface. They still have the eye protection because it’s to their advantage. However, there are no mammals with this arrangement, even the various mole-like species, because our skin is different and we haven’t had that exact evolutionary route. Similarly with QWERTY keyboards, which for trained typists are slower than Dvorak, again for trained typists, there is no mass replacement on the cards because cu frg ypf yr yfl. rb a Ekrpat nafrgy frg i.y ydco abe brxref jab p.ae cy! Consequently few people are going to regard it as worthwhile changing from one to the other. QWERTY is also good enough. The Roman chariot axle example is similar. It’s claimed that Roman chariots cut ruts in British roads which meant that the carts which came after them had to have wheels the same distance apart, then tram lines were and finally railways. However, in this case this isn’t the whole story. There are physical reasons for building wagons that width I hear, and also people are resistant to change. However, psychological inertia is involved here too.
I presume that what happened with ‘phones, watches and calculators was similar. The first mobile ‘phone to include a camera was the Nokia 7650, introduced in 2001, but it would need to have a lens facing the caller to work conveniently as a videophone. As far as I know, calculators have never had colour screens so they don’t lend themselves to including cameras, and it seems quite peculiar for a calculator to go in the direction of becoming either a voice recorder or a music player somehow. Maybe calculators are too serious for that. Wrist watches did come to include high resolution colour displays in the end, and not even particularly recently. Casio marketed a digital watch with a built-in camera and 120×120 pixel monochrome display in 2002, the WQV-1:
Oddly, Casio also released a mobile ‘phone with a built-in camera at the same time. The WQV-1 has a lens facing upwards, so the screen is used as a viewfinder. Once again it would be complicated to take a selfie with, although presumably you could do it with a mirror. I’m actually wondering if Casio chose to kill this device, preferring the ‘phone, or whether it just wasn’t successful and they chose to go with the flow. But this particular watch was almost there.
Now, of course, there are smart watches too. However, they are usually Bluetooth devices wirelessly linked to smartphones. There are stand-alone smart watches which take SIMs, but the emphasis at least doesn’t seem to be on video calls, possibly due to the battery life. At this juncture, I have to admit I’ve ventured into very unfamiliar territory and have decided I don’t know what I’m talking about!
In conclusion then, it seems that the reason we didn’t get wrist watch communicators earlier is that there is a clear line of succession from a cordless telephone to a smartphone which makes video calls and tells the time, but not one from a calculator to a videophone or from a wrist watch to a videophone wrist watch. However, again this seems Whiggish. We do mainly have smartphones today and our smart watches usually rely on them rather than function independently, and this is partly apparently due to battery life, but there is a category of camera watch I haven’t mentioned which does seem to lend them to this development: spy cameras. Subminiature cameras have existed since the late nineteenth century, and they became widely available luxury items built into the likes of cigarette lighters in the 1950s. I haven’t tracked it down for sure but to me it seems pretty likely that there just were cameras built into analogue wrist watches at some point. However, if this happened it never seemed to have gone anywhere. To be honest, I think it’s a peculiar quirk of history that we don’t have watch communicators instead of mobile ‘phones, and in some parallel universe nearby, we doubtless have.
A Box Of Chocolates 