Would you believe it was 1863 when 27-year old novelist  Samuel Butler,  in an essay on Darwin Among the Machines, expressed serious concern that highly advanced machines might pose existential risks to humanity? The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question . In 1920, a play,  R.U.R . ( Rossum's Universal Robots ), by Czech author Karel Čapek, coined the term  robot .  They began to replace human workers, leading to a violent revolt against their  Homo sapien  masters.  Fritz Lang's 1927 film,  Metropolis , had humanoid robots fighting the capitalist oligarchy.  Click on that link to watch the entire 2 hour 29 minute production.  Fine quality, silent, of course, but with good audio sounds.  Portions of the original were lost, and only in 2008 found....

On July 21, Netflix debuted a new documentary,  Sunday Best:  The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan .  I still remember growing up of watching the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights.  So, as last night was Sunday night, I watched this new production. This all began as a radio program, Summer Silver Theater, that first aired on CBS in 1932, then in 1941, hosted by Ed Sullivan. This was first 15-minute gossipy talk-and-interview shows of Jack Benny Irving Berlin, Florenz Ziegfeld, etc. When it returned in 1941, it was called the Ed Sullivan Variety on CBS. From 1943-1944 as Ed Sullivan Entertains, a variety show on CBS. Then in 1946 as Ed Sullivan's Pipelines, a 15-minute program on the Blue Network. Finally, television. Toast of the Town on 20June1948. This first program featured comedians Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, singer Monica Lewis and Broadway composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II previewing the score to their then-new show,  South Pacific . This Bro...

This blog site is into my 18th year.  Thought I'd glance at how many partly written articles were in storage and  spent yesterday discarding many of them.  There were around 450.  After a hundred or so I gave up, and still have around 350 drafts.  However, one was the basis for my posting today. I was born and grew up in Honolulu, but did not spend any school time at the University of Hawaii until August of 1972, when I was hired by the College of Engineering as an assistant professor.  So it's been 53 years since I first came to the main Manoa Campus. I originally taught Fortran IV Programming and a couple of other computer courses.  This is the textbook I used.  I knew the co-authors, Paul Murrill and Cecil Smith.  Murrill went on to become president of LSU. After a couple of years, I joined the Civil Engineering Department.  Environmental Engineering and Technology & Society were two courses where I had more than a hundred student...