Economic Terrorism and Tea Parties Past and Present

Choosing a label for something, whether a car, a novel or a political movement, is a tricky thing.   It requires inspiration to do well and sometimes it requires imagination and the ability to see the title from other points of view in order to judge how good or appropriate that title may be.   A Chevy Nova might become a humorously-labeled "No Go" in Hispanic countries.   A Tea Party might be a famous and colorful incident in a successful war of independence, or it might be an act of economic terrorism which hurts innocent people and leads to a war with vast disruption of many people's lives.

Lets look at the famous Boston Tea Party using modern terminology and a less overtly American-after-the-fact point of view.  There may be some irony in our right-wing fanatics choosing to call themselves the Tea Party, after all.

Here are a few basic statements about the Boston Tea Party which I think are quite defensible once you remove the blinders that says they were "patriots fighting against oppressors".   

1. The Boston Tea Party was a violent act of economic terrorism to attain extremist political goals.

Whoever did it, and we do not actually know who they were, deliberately broke onto three ships in the harbor and destroyed other people's property.   Where were they guards?   All ships are guarded in port.  Were they bribed ?  How many were injured?  How many might have been injured?

2. We do not know who these people were.

The Tea Party was executed by a group of anonymous fanatics who took the law into their own hands.   We know an awful lot about that period of America.  We know who spoke at a major meeting at Fanuil Hall when the terrorist act was committed, but we do not know who were in those outfits executing the criminal acts outside.  You may hear or read about the "Sons of Liberty" but that means very little in this case. Everyone called themselves the "Sons of Liberty" those days. In modern parlance, we would call it an "umbrella terrorist organization".  Who were they? What are their names? Who financed it? We do not know. 

There is speculation about who might have been involved.  I can tell you some very amusing theories which actually does implicate a radical (and famous) Freemasonry lodge. (2) Maybe John Adams knew, and maybe he didn't.  But so far as I know, all evidence is circumstantial.

3. The Boston Tea Party was a Failed "False Flag" Operation

These days you hear a lot of people throwing around intelligence community jargon as if they knew the first thing about it.  One of those terms is "false flag" which is where a country or organization mounts an operation but tries to make it look like someone else did it.  That is what the people, whoever they were, who did the Boston Tea Party tried to do.  They tried to make it look like an indian nation, the Mohawks, did the deed.  Of course no one believed them for a second.

So what we have here is a botched false flag operation executed by amateurs.

4. The terrorists clearly committed criminal acts.

One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Massachusetts had laws. They broke them. Yes, that might have been a reaction to some taxes which were "unfair", so what?   I think lots of taxes are unfair but I do not go around blowing up the California Franchise Tax Board (even if it is a tempting thought).  They committed these crimes to provoke a reaction from the central government and they got what they wanted. Property was destroyed.  People were hurt, if not that night, then in the days and nights to come. 

5. The Result was Anarchy and War.

The situation spun out of control and we had a full-scale war and revolution on our hands. Estimates are that 15 to 20 percent of the population of the colonies were loyalists (1) and left (or were forced to leave) for what became Canada.  Of course this is the war that the terrorists wanted to provoke with their acts.

So what I want to propose to you here is that the modern Tea Party may have unintentionally chosen a very appropriate name for their organization, naming it as they did after cowardly, extremist political radicals and incompetents who violated the law and caused a war.

Good choice, guys.


Wikipedia page on Loyalists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_(American_Revolution)

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1. I have heard different numbers for the percentage of the population of the 13 colonies who were loyalists, and for how many left or were forced to leave.   The 15 to 20 percent is on the low side, I think.

2. In NYC, the most important Freemason temple was refurbished and on the opening night gave a talk to the public inviting them to have a look and to hear about Freemasons in their own words.  This would have been mid-late 1990s.   The talk was very interesting and among things discussed the American Revolution because there is so much myth out there that the Revolution was sponsored and let by Freemasons.  Our speaker was quite dismissive for the most part.  Yes there were Freemasons in the Revolution, but there were many Freemasons on the British and Loyalist sides as well.  Yes, there are incidents where a Freemason was able to help a brother in distress, but there are also events where a Brother signalled distress and did not receive help.   But he said there was one intriguing story where it may have been that the Freemasons did have a genuine role in instigating the revolution, and the story is this.

Freemasonry is mostly a social and charitable organization, a so-called fraternal organization.  They meet once a week, each lodge in its own place and normally do such exciting things as plan a charitable event for a hospital, or work on initiating members, or discussing their obscure lore.  Each lodge has its own personality, and attracts its own types of members.   In the pre-revolutionary days there was a famous radical lodge outside Boston.   I forget where exactly he said it was, but apparently it is quite famous and they met in a pub, I think, and that pub is still there.   The lodges all kept books recording the minutes of their meetings and they have the log books for this lodge.   On the night of the Boston Tea Party, only 3 members of the lodge showed up.  They immediately called the meeting to order and dismissed it.   Nothing else.   The speculation is that the rest of the lodge (and maybe also those three members who showed up to formally hold the mini meeting), who were all radical citizens apparently in favor of opposing the British and in favor of separation from Britain, the speculation is that they were the people in costume and on the boats that night.  Apparently it would have been about the right number of people.   The evidence is not close to definitive, but at least it is an explanation of who they might have been, and if so, how they were organized and how they did such things as organize their costumes etc.

I consider this just an amusing story, submitted for your consideration.

Upcoming Seminar on the History of Cryptology, Oct 17 - 19, 2013

Every once in a while (maybe every year, for all I know), the NSA (1) has been sponsoring a symposium on the history of Cryptology. This symposium is mostly for scholars but I am going to presume that people who are interested in this will make the effort to find out whether or not they can attend.

Special Note:

But for all you silly people who got your panties in a bunch because of Snowden, you are suggested to attend.  What a wonderful opportunity to learn something about the field and the people in reality instead of the very weird beliefs that so many of my peers seem to have.

The program is on the www.cryptome.org site at the following URL, but I have at great personal expense converted the PDF to jpeg for your convenience.

http://cryptome.org/2013/09/nsa-symposium-2013.pdf

This promises to be a very exciting conference. Here are some talks and speakers that I noticed off the top of my head:

1. David Kahn (2) chairing a panel on new work on Alan Turing and his work on cryptology.

2. Work in progress by Whitfield Diffie on the ECM Mark I

3. Crytology in ancient Greece and China

4. Preparation for WW 2 and WW 2 Cryptology Operations including the attack on Japanese naval cypher JN25.

5. East European COMINT in WW 2

I am not sure I can attend but I might be able to show up for a half a day. I wish I could attend the whole thing, it looks great.

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1. Nichren Shoshu of America www.nst.org

2. David Kahn is a well known author on cryptology, considered to have written some of the best books on cryptology and the people who do it in the open literature.

Coming up Shortly on Global Wahrman

The following topics are all being written in parallel (I dont recommend that strategy) and will hopefully show up on Global Wahrman in the next two weeks.

A. The keynote speech at SIGGRAPH and why I did not attend.

B. Living in Los Angeles in the 1980s and attending many courses at UCLA Extension and the American Film Institute.

C. Should I run a write in campaign for the Executive Committee of SIGGRAPH?

D. Essays on debugging lighting procedures for webgl

E Essays on J Walt Adamczyk and his live dome performance work as well as his exhortation to animators at SIGGRAPH

F. A post on artist Manfred Mohr who was honored this year at SIGGRAPH.

G. Death of a Synthetic Character

H. Working in the Slave Pits of the Rich

Archaeology of the Cold War: The U2 and the History of Overhead Photography

draft

The following post is for those of my readers who are interested in the history of intelligence in this country, particularly during the cold war.   

For those of you participating in my occassional "good citizenship class on the Intelligence Community" and how it works, here are some things I think worthy of note:

1. Projects like this are approved by the President.  2. Congressional approval does not seem to be required back in the "good old days", beyond budget approval.  That is different now, but the details of that will not be apparent in this case, it was before such things. 3. People die.  4. Top scientists of the country devote their time, sometimes without compensation to help make it happen.  5. Some projects are reasonably priced and get done on or ahead of schedule.  6. The different agencies really are different and compete for money and really do want to do things differently.  7.  Projects like this are inherently interdepartmental and ultimately require the agencies to work together.  8. (most importantly) The project helped to deescalate tensions during the cold war on at least three occasions (the bomber gap, the missile gap, the china/taiwan issue).

When the CIA releases a report about a project or projects you can be quite sure that whatever project they are talking about is considered ancient history. In this case we have the release of a report written in 1991 about the origins, operations and results of the CIA ventures in overhead photography via the U2 and A-12 / SR-71 reconnaisance airplanes.

The report itself can be found here:

http://cryptome.org/2013/09/cia-u2-oxcart.pdf

For those of you who are not aware of how difficult the U2 is to fly (particularly to land) please take a look at the following 4 minute Youtube video. It is, among other things, very funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eamnTyfkUBY

The Table of Contents:

Here are some items that I found interesting and were (for the most part) new to me.

-- Later uses of the U2 included work for NASA and other agencies to map terrain in the continental US for a variety of land management purposes. This I think was before the LANDSAT satellites.

-- I knew the U2 was not pressurized and had a suit for the pilot that was basically a space suit to keep him pressurized.   What I had not realized is that this is one of the first times that this had been done, the U2 was happening in the mid 1950s and that was before the manned space program, so far as I know.

-- Initial testing of the U2 resulted in a greatly increased number of UFO sightings and lead to Project Bluebook, the famous US Air Force study of unidentified flying objects. At the time the U2 was flying higher than common belief thought we could fly, and was catching sunlight during sunset and appeared to be glowing dot of fire at very high altitude to lower transcontinental airplanes.

-- The U2 is really cheap. Less than $1M a pop in its initial configuration (not including extras like a camera, a crew, etc).

-- The U2 was normally flown out of overseas locations because of limited range. It was not refuelled in the air, apparently. This made its very small operational footprint a big advantage over later airplanes (e.g. it used standard aviation fuel, did not need that many people to maintain it, etc).

-- The U2 was really dangerous to fly. Particularly in the later days when we were collaborating with the Nationalist Chinese to photograph mainland China they were losing planes and pilots right and left.

-- The CIA did not want to run these airplanes or their operations, they wanted to focus on their core expertise which was more in the areas of human intelligence. But Eisenhower wanted a civilian agency to run this so that the overflights would be less provocative. In other words, when a plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, they wanted a civilian to climb out not a Colonel in the US Air Force.

-- The Air Force wanted nothing to do with an airplane that could not be used as a military jet. The U2, fundamentally a powered glider, did not have the ability to take the kind of G forces that a military jet has to be able to withstand, so the Air Force rejected it.

-- The SR-71 project started soon after the U2 project because everyone knew that the U2 would not be immune to air defenses very shortly.

-- For a variety of reasons the A-12 / SR-71 was not used ultimately for strategic reconnaisance. It did have a limited role in tactical reconnaisance but was retired after only a few years.

-- The competition / issues between the CIA and the Air Force versions of the A-12 / SR-71 plane was much more complicated and weird than I had realized.

Regarding photography, we learn, among other things:

-- Kodak invented a new thin film for the U2. I presume this has to do with both the incredible weight limitations and also the need to fit a certain amount of film into a limited space.

-- Lots of cameras and lenses were designed for the U2. Several of them would not fit in the limited space available and had to be redesigned.

-- Apparently some of these cameras are still flying in U2s to this day.

The Uses of Procrastination: The Origins of Pork Barrel and Lobbying

As we stare into the darkness of the inevitable failure of our lives, what could be better than to waste a little time looking up things on the Internet? The Internet is a Bold New Paradigm (tm) and provides endless opportunity to learn a little about nearly everything, as long as what you want to learn is not complete, well-presented or, in many cases, accurate. These are details that have nothing whatsoever to do with its value as a time waster however.

Today I want to enlighten you with two important words in our uniquely American political language. The origins of one of them I have known for a long time, the other I just learned on the Internet recently. So as to give you fair warning, I am going to name those two words now and ask you to think about what they might have originally meant, or what their origin might have been.

The words are "pork barrel" and "lobbyist".

In modern parlance, the term pork barrel politics refers to a congressman arranging for his district to receive some federal project that pumps money into the local economy. This would usually take the form of construction projects, such as highways, bridges, etc. It might take the form of an Army or Navy base, or it might be in the form of a military procurement that spends some of its money in that district. By this definition, the building of the 1st six frigates for the US Navy during the Geo. Washington administration was a pork barrel project, because it began the navy tradition of spreading the work out across as many states as possible to increase congressional support for the project. In the case of the six frigates, each one was built in a different seaport, each in a different state. That is six states out of thirteen, not a bad spread. An informed discussion of this term would have the first use of the term in the congressional record, but I do not have that kind of information here. This is the Internet, after all.

The pork barrel harkens back to a time in history when salt was a major means of preservation of food. In agricultural America, various farms and homesteads would have a central place that might serve as the location of a church, a post office, and a general store. At the general store one might find a variety of goods, bulk foods, hardware, etc. One of features of your general country store would have been the "pork barrel", which was a barrel of salted pork. One would go to the county seat on the weekend, perhaps, and pick up the mail, see some friends, and pick up supplies at the store to bring home to the farm. One would select some salted pork from the barrel and pay by weight, presumably. Thus the analogy of bringing something home to one's constituents from the pork barrel that was Washington. Surely we are all allowed to bring something home from the pork barrel for our families ? That is only fair.

Apparently with the origin of the term "lobbyist" we have an example of a self-reinforcing Internet myth.  Fun but not true.   The lobby in question refers to a famous old hotel in DC which is two blocks away from the White House, the Willard Hotel. It was at one time the only hotel you could stay at in DC and still easily get to the major attractions or see all the possible people you needed to see to do business in Washington. When Grant was president, being one of our more social presidents, he liked to go out for a drink and a smoke, and he usually went to the lobby and bar of the Willard hotel.

The restored lobby of the Willard Hotel presumably without the spitoons that would have been there in Grant's day

This meant that you could hang out in the lobby of the hotel and have a good chance of just running into the president many evenings of the week, and have a few informal words with him on some topic. This became known in town as "lobbying", the people who did it were called "lobbyists", the verb was "to lobby".

Its a fun story, but I am told, just not true.  The origin of the term "to lobby" comes from England and parliament and refers to the lobbies where the members of parliament would assemble before going into the chambers to debate and vote.    The process of researching this word reminds me that the Internet is NOT a substitute for solid reference material, probably in print, next to your computer terminal.

The implication is that the term "lobbyist" is not uniquely American in the least, it is a shared term of art with our brothers in crime, Great Britain.

We hope you have been enlightened and entertained by this vital information and that we have contributed to the wastage of what little time you have left in a suitably amusing manner.

The Willard Intercontinental Washington

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_InterContinental_Washington

WebGL and the Learning Curve Saga Part III

My WebGL saga continues. If we are talking tortoise vs hare here, then I am certainly the tortoise member of this fable.

Slowly but surely we beat the thing into submission. Its not really bad, just badly documented, IMHO, like so much of the GL family. With WebGl we are definitely in a world circa 1982 or so. But MUCH faster than we ever would have achieved in 1982 no matter how rich you were. So we have vast power on all our desktops, but for some reason "we" have "chosen" to program it in a rather low level way. Well, hell, I like low level now and then. I like debugging this stuff that could have been documented but why bother, they can figure it out on their own.

So here is the kind of things I have been working on instead of figuring out how to end war or torture the rich or writing great fiction.

1. The Element Array Debacle

So, for example, if I had been paying attention, I would have noticed that the "element array" feature of WebGL (1) was defined to be a "short" or a 16 bit number. Warning alarms should have gone off in my head but its been a long time since I have programmed 16 bit machines.   Because its a short, the largest number of elements that one can therefore address is 64K vertices. In other words, it is useless for objects that are of modern complexity. Remember there are no higher order surfaces rendered directly by WebGL so we get the appearance of complexity by having a lot of triangles, I mean a lot of triangles, and maybe play with the shading. Maybe this limitation was noted in the documentation but I don't think so.

The result was that I had to rewrite the core of the object viewer to not use element arrays but just use the vertices, and the vertex attributes, etc. It took about 2 - 3 days and resulted in a much cleaner if slightly more verbose piece of code that could actually be maintained if it had to be.

2. The How Many of WHAT Exactly? Problem

The documentation says that you need to specify the number of things you are transferring. Well now, that could mean the number of triangles, or it could mean the number of vertices it takes to specify the triangles, or it could mean the number of bytes that it takes to hold the data, or ...

And the answer is: its the number of vertices you use to define the object. So the count you send is (3 * number of triangles) or (2 * number of lines). Maybe it was obvious to you, but it sure was not obvious to me from the documentation.

3. The Ongoing Normal Mystery

Look at the following picture. See anything odd? Well, its made out of flat triangles, and you should see flat surfaces. Ok, so its interpolating the normals, whats so odd about this? Its just that all the normals for a face (all triangles really) are all pointing the same direction. Unless WebGl is rebuilding the topology of the object by doing a giant vertex sort, there is no way it could be interpolating the normals.

So what is going on? No one knows, but I suspect that it is a bug in my shader that somehow does not compute the diffuse component correctly. The specular would normally and correctly be "smooth shaded", e.g. not show flat surfaces for the most part. So this maybe is just flat shaded, with transparency, and a specular. If that is not the problem then we are definitely in the twilight zone here.

"This war will be over one day".

You get extra credit for knowing what movie that is from and who said it.

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1. Where one specifies a line or triangle by keeping a list of vertex numbers rather than repeating the vertex itself over and over again.

Evidence of Vast Improvement in Los Angeles Mass Transit

I have recently been shown evidence that we are on the verge of a vast change in the way we do mass transit in this country. Well maybe that is a little bold and overreaching.   The evidence relates to Los Angeles specifically, not very well known for being progressive in this area.

In order to understand this evidence we first have to discuss certain techniques used to predict the future and also certain aspects of the history of the topic as it relates to the evidence. But don't worry we will get there.

It is a theme of this blog that predicting the future is sometimes easy and sometimes very hard if not completely impossible, but that it is always entertaining. One complicating factor in predicting the future of course is predicting when it will happen. Predicting what will happen is not enough. When is just as important as what.

One technique used is a concept known as the "indicator". The indicator, stolen from the fields of National Security and Economics, is nothing more than a carefully chosen event or trend that is used as a signal that something of greater scope is happening. The price of corn, the temperature of sea water, and whether a nation's troops are mobilized are all examples of indicators.

Recently I have come across solid evidence that we may be on the verge of a genuine revolution in how we do mass transit in urban areas. I suspect that this might be autonomous vehicles, which I discuss briefly below, but it might be something else. The evidence is not too specific although it is clear that something is coming.

Autonomous Taxicab, the JohnnyCab, from the original Total Recall.  If its good enough for Arnold, it should be good enough for us.

I am a firm believer that autonomous vehicles are in our future and that this is a good thing. I think that they have the potential of changing many things about how we deal with transit in an urban and non-urban environment and that many of these changes will be somewhat unexpected. Maybe we will not own cars, maybe we will just call one up from a pool when we need one. People may never have to worry about parking again and a host of other possible changes.

But being certain when this change will happen is less clear. There have been a lot of promising technologies in the past that have never been deployed in real life: people movers, monorails, levitating trains, not to mention personal airplanes and jet packs. And there are many obstacles in the way of deploying autonomous vehicles beyond the merely technical ones. I will mention just two which are daunting: the greed of the insurance industry and the stupidity of local city governments. Just navigating those two barriers will require more skill and probably more money than solving the technological issues.

Consider the following evidence of imminent change.

Slowly, and without a lot of fanfare, Los Angeles is in the process of building two mass transit systems that will reach the west side of Los Angeles. One is light rail, the Exposition Line, and it is well along and already reaches Robertson near Culver City. The other is a subway down Wilshire and it is in the early stages of construction. The estimated completion of all this work is a date well beyond 20 years from now. But there will be incremental deliverables and parts of the system will be in production sooner than other parts.

The Expo Line actually runs to Culver City.  Its like a Miracle from God that they built this thing.  

To understand why this matters you have to realize that mass transit in Los Angeles is different from other places. In other places, mass transit may be controversial, it may be a compromise, it may be expensive, it may be bankrupt, but it proceeds. But in Los Angeles, you literally have world class crime, political malfeasance, and fraud not to mention racism and major lawsuits. Volumes have been written about the stupidity, short-sightedness and corruption (e.g. bribery).  But most of all, this is an area where the politicians and the civic community failed together to find a solution to a problem that was clearly going to get worse.  In other words, they "kicked the can down the road" and hoped that others would solve it.

The problem is that in this area, as in others as well but this is an excellent test case, solving the problems require capital investment, tremendous political will, short-term grief, and a lot of time to execute.   It is an excellent example where naive, one might say, stupid, reliance on "free market solutions" is obviously a failure.   The benefits of mass transit take many forms, but several of them require the system to be planned and executed and in place for a period of time so that things can be built around it and make it all the more useful.   In other words, the transit system may have to be there for 20 years before all the benefits accrue to the investment (through the placement of hotels, universities, theatres, etc).

To ask politicians and citizens in LA to face a problem 20 years in the future and a benefit also 20 years or so in the future is so far beyond their limited intelligence and wisdom as to be beyond funny into farce.   Los Angeles was built for a reason, and that reason resounds in every decision that the civic body makes.  Los Angeles is built on a desire to steal money and fuck people right now, not on stealing money and fucking people in some future day.   This is obvious in the cheap architecture, the lack of zoning to control cheap real estate development, the dumping of wastes into the water system, the failure to control pollution generated by container ships at the Port of LA that causes a substantial percentage of the air pollution in the LA basin (is it 30% ? 40% ? No one knows).

The point is this:  it isn't possible or plausible that LA would just get around to fixing this problem, or at least some of this problem, by building a transit system, eventually.  I don't buy it.  If something like this is happening, it is an indicator, as previously described, of a larger process that is taking place behind the scenes, even if the people executing this idea are not aware of it.  I think that the will of the people and the force of shame and the collapse of the transit system in Los Angeles over the last 15 years or so has finally caused the City of LA and related areas to finally move in an area that should have been addressed 50 years ago and therefore there is no possibility of this being a wise move.  By the time it is done, something will have happened to expose why this was at best a very late decision for LA to make.

Therefore I am very optimistic that we will see a sea-change in urban transit technology in the near future, as these things are measured.  Its about time.

In a later post I will discuss why I am holding back my real feelings here about Los Angeles and their failure to deal with fundamental issues.

I grew up here.  I know where some of the bodies are buried.

Links:

Ancient History of the Expo Line
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/history/la-as-subject/rail-to-the-westside-the-expo-lines-historical-precursors.html

More on the Design of WEBGL and the Origins of .OBJ

We have made a little progress in the last few days on both WebGL and the .OBJ origins issues.

This is an image from the current .OBJ object display software written for WebGL and written in Javascript/DOM/HTML.  Now, I doubt anyone actually needs a .OBJ viewer, its just a way to get familiar with displaying geometry with WebGL.

Instead of just showing you a picture, as I do, below, I should be able to just give you a URL so you can run it yourself, but I can't because I don't actually have a place to post the files for you to address (without seeing advertisements or in other ways compromising or inconveniencing my friends). The only web server I have access to is my own and it has only temporary IP addresses which Facebook will not even let me post. Besides, why bother to post a temporary IP address? I think it is funny how money controls everything, without money, our society says, don't even try to do anything.

So for fun I am posting this dilemma here and on Facebook, maybe someone will know where I can post some number of html and js files in a way that can be accessed by people on the net without inconveniencing them (e.g. no spyware, no ads, no Doubleclick tracking) at a price that even the poor can afford.

Regarding WebGL, once you realize that the designers had gutted it of any even slighlty higher level 3D and that this is a very low level interface to some of the power of the GPU without in any way providing even trivial conveniences for the programmer, everything is fine and you proceed.

I think they did this for good reasons. In the past, by making computers easier to use we opened the doors to allowing people to come in and take away our livelihood. The kind of conveniences I am talking about are trivial and do not hold back an experienced 3D technologist in the least (after they waste their time trying to figure out what the people who redesigned OpenGL were thinking ...).  (1)   So all that happens is that they inconvenience those who are writing their first 3D software and also tend to make such programs written to be a little more obscure because they will all be different (having to reinvent the wheel is trivial here, but since everyone will do it differently naturally it will be a little harder for someone to come in and read and modify because they will have to learn a new convention rather than rely on an industry-wide convention.)

I have no problem with this and in fact applaud it. As a victim of globalization and of the spread of these technologies, anything that makes knowledge that I have more arcane and valuable can only be good.

Regarding the .OBJ matter, we have learned both more and less. The ideas and the general approach to what the .OBJ format became was in the air at SIGGRAPH and the U of Utah in 1979 according to Frank Crow. According to Julian Gomez, there was no software from E&S that would have been an example of a .OBJ like format that would have come from them.   My leading hypothesis had been that the people at Abel's had received some sample software to (for example) load a geometric object and display it on the Picture System.   What would be a normal software development approach would be to start with that program and then write their own software on top of it.   Its an extension of the old joke that Unix only had one device driver (in other words, that everyone modified the original device driver when they had a new device to interface).  Julian may have written one of the first such "display an object" program at Andrews AFB long ago, but it did not use anything similar to a .OBJ-like format.

Julian also suggests that Mickey Mantle, who was in charge of customer support of E&S, may know more.

Thus it is still quite possible that the .OBJ format as we know it was based on ideas that were generally available but not based on specific code from a sample program, as I had expected. In other words, it may still turn out that the Abel version, written initially for motion control preview for Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the one that escaped into the wild (as I believe) and that it originated at Abel's, even if based on ideas more generally available.

 The time when this would have been written by the way is about 1977.

There is more to say, but also more to find out. I have been unable to find any early E&S documentation, for example, which would answer a lot of questions.

If anyone knows how to reach Mickey Mantle, please let me know.

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1. Well, that is not totally true.  OpenGL used to support drawing polygons, convex polygons, directly.  Now only triangles are supported so you have to subdivide into triangles yourself.  The problem is, this is a problem whose general case is actually fairly difficult.  Why not make everyone re-solve this themselves? Its good for them, it makes them think about fundamental principles.   I have no idea what these people were thinking.

Amazing Simulation of 1970s Graphics in WebGL

Its the mid 1970s all over again.

I actually have written my first WebGL application to display a .obj file.

First you have to convert the .obj to a ".json" file, and then type in its name to some code.  But this process which might seem awkward and stupid, is actually all the more authentic.  This makes the application feel even more 1970s with a retro user interface.

The image is of my test object, a viewpoint .obj of a playing card.   By being completely flat, believe it or not, I can test certain things in my code that was useful.  Yes I know, its not the most compelling 3D object you have ever seen, and you would not even guess that the object is lit, but it is.

So far I have only found one incompatibility between Firefox and Chrome, that being the ability to see the "." as in "period" in a javascript program.   Firefox can, Chrome can not.

The great advantage in having all this in HTML is that it provides all sorts of tools for layout, fonts, scrolling and so forth.  Thus the "program log" window on the far left scrolls which was trivial to implement.

Wow!  Thats exciting, isnt it !

Technical Notes

Ok, so the status display is wrong.  In fact this is the line segments of the very flat 3D object that you are seeing.   The display does not become correct until the user rotates the object and from that point forward it is correct.   Fixed in the next release.

More Balanced Commentary on WebGL

No matter how frustrating the process, after a while one learns what can be done with a system and how to get around whatever it is you need to get around.   In this case the surprise was that I simply did not realize to what extent programming WebGL meant actually also working with both Html and the DOM, even though in retrospect it is obvious, and even more than that, this is what you would want.

You want it to be involved with HTML and the DOM or how could it all be integrated into the browser otherwise.

So its all good.  

There are some mysteries in the direction that OpenGL ES 2.0 has taken.   These mysteries can no doubt be explained by the designers, but they haven't done so, not that I have been able to find.  The specific questions involve the extreme position they seem to have taken to remove many things that people who program graphics use.   Its not so hard to implement your own versions of these things, e.g. a perspective matrix, a uniform variable to put it in, etc.   But it does make one wonder why they took it out to begin with?   Maybe they are just trying to be minimal?   That could be good.  But it is a little puzzling when you know the earlier versions of OpenGL and just leap into this and can not find things you expect.

Same question about perspective matrices also applies to lights.

And they seem to have some major browser architecture issue which I will call "the problem of the lost context".   Its annoying but can be managed.

On the positive side, by being so integrated with Html and DOM it is trivial to do multiple window layout and such things as scrolling text windows that might otherwise be difficult.

So far it seems to work and browser incompatibilities between Firefox and Chrome have been minimal.