Asri-unix.551 net.space utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!Marvin Sat Jan 16 21:26:21 1982 Dean Machine History From: Marvin Minsky@MIT-AI (Sent by MINSKY@MIT-AI) Marvin Minsky@MIT-AI (Sent by MINSKY@MIT-AI) 01/17/82 00:25:30 Re: Dean Machine History To: space at MIT-MC, Pourne at MIT-MC, sf-lovers at MIT-MC Shortly after the Dean drive was described in Astounding, John Campbell published a picture of it. I examined the picture with a lens and managed to read the brand name of the bathroom scale used to measure the loss of weight of the machine. My college roommate, Roland Silver, and I conjectured correctly that this scale had a "diode" in it that coupled the platform and the reading device. So we went to Sears Roebuck in Porter Square, Cambridge and bought that very scale. When you stand on it it reads your weight fine, but if you pump your arms up and down -- just as did the dean machine itself -- then the weight fluctuates a lot -- with the mean weight (and even the maximum) far below the real weight. So then Clause Shannon and John Pierce and I wrote a sharp detailed letter to Campbell about this. John Campbell didn't print our letter, but he sent me (knowing I was the instigator) a long letter that I still have here, denouncing establishment scientists for their reactionary and unimaginative rigidity and general intolerance. Suitably chastened, I dropped yhe matter and continued with my reactionary, establishment-bound studies. Anyway, this incident jibes with Pournelle's account about Cambell seeing the machine which "jumped around a lot" on a bathroom scale. I checked out all the other scales, too, and finally found one that reads high when you bounce. But these were much less common. So, possibly, Dean was hoist by this pitiful petard. But I maintained that this was extremely unlikely since, obviously, he was all too familiar with flakey, vibrating, weighing mechanisms. -- marvin P.S.. I should add that much as we hated him, we loved him greatly too, and for all he did for all of us. And same for G. Harry Stine. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.