[HN Gopher] Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond (1983) ...
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Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond (1983) [video]
Author : scrlk
Score : 161 points
Date : 2022-06-17 11:52 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| wiredfool wrote:
| I had a genuine Grace Hopper nanosecond from when she visited my
| high school. Sadly lost now.
| paganel wrote:
| Sometimes I forget how militarized the computer industry used to
| be, probably still is, in one way or another. For every Stallman
| and Aaron Swartz there's a Grace Hopper dressed in military
| attire while talking about computers.
|
| Sad, too, that I haven't seen any news in here today about
| Assange's extradition to the US, at least not on the front page.
| _benj wrote:
| I loved this!
|
| It ties so well the another comment about the speed of computers
| on the front page:
|
| > On a 3GHz CPU, one clock cycle is enough time for light to
| travel only 10cm. If you hold up a sign with, say, a
| multiplication, a CPU will produce the result before light
| reaches a person a few metres away.
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31769936>
| croes wrote:
| Previous discussion
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24341229
| pvg wrote:
| And those from 6, 9 and 10 years ago
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12130933
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5045842
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3655886
| lelandfe wrote:
| https://youtu.be/3N_ywhx6_K0?t=33
|
| Hopper on Letterman
| sbarre wrote:
| What a great interview
| tomwheeler wrote:
| It's too bad that talk shows aren't like this anymore. The
| Letterman producers from the 1980s deserve kudos for finding
| interesting guests (not only Grace Hopper, but also Isaac
| Asimov, Doc Edgerton, Don Herbert, and plenty of others).
|
| Aside from Neil deGrasse Tyson or Dr. Fauci, it's pretty rare
| to see a scientist on a late night show now. For all the empty
| talk about the importance of STEM, it's pretty unlikely that
| you'll see a pioneer of computer science.
| shakezula wrote:
| So interesting to hear the street-level policy effects of the
| Carter administration talked about like this. It adds something
| intangible to this video.
| dominotw wrote:
| So sharp and quick witted at that age.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I love this so much. Computing is right up against the limits of
| the universe and seeing that your 4 ghz processor has a cycle
| time of about 7 light-cm shows you exactly how close we are to
| that limit. Looking at the computing time spent on accessing a
| remote server 8000 km away also keeps things in perspective.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| The foot has been criticized for being an arbitrary measurement
| with no real relation to a repeatable physical distance.
|
| However, it turns out that a foot is within 2% of the distance
| light travels in a nanosecond!
|
| Because of this, the foot becomes really convenient when talking
| about latencies. For example, if something is 6 inches away from
| the cpu on a motherboard, the lowest possible latency to reach
| that is 0.5 nanoseconds.
|
| Time to push for the adoption of feet everywhere /s
| InitialLastName wrote:
| A similar heuristic is very useful for acoustics: the speed of
| sound is close enough to 1 foot/ms to be a great rule of thumb
| for estimation.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| Or... rule of foot, for the compulsive unit-cancelers out
| there
| _joel wrote:
| Welcome to the UK in 2022!
|
| You'll even get a crown logo emblazened on the nanosecond ;)
| [deleted]
| protomyth wrote:
| I thought if the US ever switched from Imperial we should just
| switch to light-nanoseconds since its so close and then make
| fun of the metric folks for being Earth-centric.
|
| Units of weight / volume would be a pain though since a cubic
| light-second of water is about 7.118 US gallons and weighs
| (@1g) about 59.227 lbs at the melting point of ice.
|
| Of course, we should still go with base 8 like the Yuki tribe
| (spaces between fingers instead of fingers because that's how
| many bottles you can carry).
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Light nanosecond depends on 'second', which is _litteraly_
| earth centric :-)
| protomyth wrote:
| Less Earth centric than the distance from the North Pole to
| the Equator. We'll still use seconds on Mars.
| stn8188 wrote:
| Love your comment, this quick rule is critical, but... Don't
| forget that the relative permittivity if PCB material is
| roughly 4, so the rule for circuit boards is 6" per nanosecond
| :)
| Arcorann wrote:
| Of course, if one were to switch measurements for that reason
| it'd be better to use the Japanese shaku [1], which at 30.303
| cm is closer to a light-nanosecond than a foot.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_units_of_measurement
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > For example, if something is 6 inches away from the cpu on a
| motherboard, the lowest possible latency to reach that is 0.5
| nanoseconds.
|
| Isn't that going to be insignificant compared to everything
| inside the computer on both ends?
| mlonkibjuyhv wrote:
| Not if you're making computers.
| doliveira wrote:
| Reminds me of the whole "Fahrenheit is awesome because 0degF is
| too cold and 100degF is too hot"
|
| (BTW, for me 0degC is too cold and 40degC is too hot)
| 8note wrote:
| Celcius is nice because -30 is the limits of cold that I
| want, and +30 is the limits of hot
| johnsanders wrote:
| "...we should hang one over [programmers' desks], or around their
| necks so they know what they're throwing away when they throw
| away a microsecond." Relevant forty years later.
| ajdude wrote:
| That line really stuck with me
| lordleft wrote:
| Can we take a moment to acknowledge her incredible presentational
| ability? She was charming, wry, slightly subversive, and still
| conveyed a really cool scientific concept in one brief talk.
| bsder wrote:
| Charming, wry, and slightly subversive is all her personality.
| However, more than a few people who have been on the receiving
| end would argue with you about "charming" and "slightly".
|
| Presentation ability, however, was learned and practiced a
| _lot_.
|
| She used to make all her subordinates give oral reports weekly
| on written articles she would pass out and then discuss as a
| group.
|
| If you committed any of various presentation sins, you had to
| dump a quarter into the penalty jar.
|
| Her subordinates got _very_ good at presentations.
| corrral wrote:
| I've noticed that the prep-school-to-Ivy pipeline is great at
| producing people with that quality.
|
| I just checked and, sure enough, that's exactly what she did.
|
| [EDIT] The quality of being a confident, engaging
| conversationalist and presenter, I mean.
|
| For her it was The Hartridge School and then Yale. Hartridge,
| in its modern form as the Wardlaw-Hartridge School, runs a bit
| over $40k/yr by the time you're nearing the end, down to about
| $16k for pre-k, though many won't be paying full sticker price.
| zahma wrote:
| The fastest reactions in our body (hydride shifts, very small
| rearrangement of atoms to maximize charge stability) take a mere
| picosecond. This nanosecond is 1000 times longer than a
| picosecond. Try to imagine that the molecules in your body are
| spinning at crazy frequencies and rearranging themselves
| incessantly at that speed.
| LanceH wrote:
| I saluted her once. No idea who she was, she was an old lady
| standing at a bus stop on base, wearing an odd (dated) uniform
| with an unusual rack of ribbons.
| askin4it wrote:
| Is there a long version of this story?
| Abekkus wrote:
| I'd heard that in the army, once you reach General, you get to
| pick out your own uniform (she made it to some level of admiral
| during her service)
| nosefrog wrote:
| My grandfather got his PhD because he lost an argument to Grace
| Hopper because she had a PhD and he didn't. He was working for
| the Navy at the time, and he wanted to use a higher level
| language for some operating system they were building. Grace
| Hopper thought that higher level languages were only suitable for
| business applications, not other computing purposes where
| performance was more important.
|
| This is a link to a paper he wrote about one of the first cross
| compilers that they had built:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/367436.367477
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| mcdonje wrote:
| That was charming. Great demonstration of scientific
| communication. Great visualization.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This is the first time that I've ever heard her speak. I have to
| say, she's amazingly charming and charismatic.
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