Les
Earnest pretending to be a hippie
Little Lester was born in San Diego, California, and grew up
there as a bad boy Upstart
who enjoyed bicycling and body surfing but eventually matured into a happy
badass.
Bird Thanksgiving is
a half-minute video shot through our
kitchen window in Los Altos Hills, California, by son-in-law Paul Riggs. It
shows an annual celebration by local birds of the ripening of Toyon berries,
which eventually turn a bit alcoholic. This causes the birds to go a bit wild
and sometimes fly into windows and get knocked out.
That phenomenon was the basis of Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1963 film “The Birds,” which was mostly filmed in Bodega Bay, about
50 miles north of here. Toyon trees, also called Hollywood, grow in coastal
regions from southwest Oregon to Baja California, including the canyons just
north of what came to be called Hollywood, California.
Here are some
videos of Les giving talks of widely varying durations.
·
Lester
Earnest's Acceptance of Sigma Chi Fraternity’s “Significant Sig” award,
(2 minutes), 2017.03.20.
·
Setting SAIL, (1 hour 41 minutes),
Lester summarizes his innovations and the creation of the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, 2016.05.26. A corrected version of the slides used in
the talk can be seen here.
·
Interviews of Les Earnest
and Larry Tesler at the 40th Anniversary
of the Invention of Internet Protocols, (5 minutes), 2014.05.10.
·
How John McCarthy
Accidentally Started Uniting the World, (6 minutes), at the Celebration of John McCarthy’s Accomplishments,
2013.03.25.
·
Sustainable Archiving of
SAIL, (10 minutes),
2009.11.22.
My innovations that
worked to some extent or a lot: here
is a partial list by starting year:
·
1942
Private cryptographic system,
·
1955
Advanced flight simulation system for Naval Air Development Lab.
·
1959
Interactive drawing and writing on a computer display,
·
1960
Cursive handwriting recognizer,
·
1961
Spelling checker,
·
1961
Search engine (ROUT),
·
1962
High quality TV for the U.S. President and the later Moon Landing,
·
1965
Created the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), including the
first Do-it-yourself office,
·
1966
Do-it-yourself office with few secretaries,
·
1966
Personal online calendar (LESCAL),
·
1966
Hand-eye-ear robot, which manipulated children’s blocks in response to verbal
instructions,
·
1966
Self-driving vehicle (Stanford Cart),
·
1967
Digital photography,
·
1969
Co-developer of specifications for ARPANET.
·
1971
Document compiler with spreadsheets, automatic indexing and numbering of
chapters, sections, pages, etc. (PUB), Done with Larry Tesler,
then augmented with font selection by a CMU student.
·
1971
Desktop graphical display terminals with television service,
·
1972
Social networking and blogging service (FINGER) was initially just for SAIL but
became a network service in 1975,
·
1973
Online restaurant reviews (California YumYum),
·
1974
Network news service (NS), using Associated Press and New York Times Newswires,
·
1974
Computer controlled vending machine (Prancing Pony), which had a gambling
option and automatically billed via email,
·
1979
Desktop publishing using laser printers, which I subsequently developed by
founding Imagen Corp.
·
1979
Rewrote all American bicycle racing rules to make them less ambiguous and
standardize penalties, then got them adopted effective 1980.01.01.
·
1984
Initiated a rule prohibiting blood doping in American bicycle racing, which
then spread around the world in many sports and eventually nailed Lance
Armstrong and his fellow crooks,
·
1984
Developed a scheme for cryptographically distributing software, which
unfortunately was patented to make some vulture capitalists happy,
·
1985
Initiated a rule requiring strong helmets to be worn in American bicycle
racing, which then spread around the world, then was adopted by recreational
riders and has saved thousands of lives.
Retired in 1988
because of chronic fatigue and depression, the cause of which had been
misdiagnosed by my doctor. That left me in a depressed mental fog for 14 years until
I got it fixed in 1998. I am continuing to innovate now though it will take
time for some of this work to bear fruit.
My Innovations That Have Not Yet Borne
Fruit
·
1950
Planned a new electronic musical instrument called a Choremin
that would be played by waving your hands near two antennas, like the Theremin,
but able to play either chords or single notes.
·
1963
Began advocating that the racial classification systems used by public media
and various governmental agencies be dropped because they are all based on
scientific nonsense.
·
1965
Began advocating that the U.S. Interior Department augment roadside signs
indicating points of interest and providing historical information with low
powered radio systems providing this information, so that motorists could get
it without necessarily pulling off the highway,
·
1983
Began pointing out that the SAGE air defense system had been an enormous fraud
on American taxpayers and that other similar ongoing
Military-Industrial-Congressional frauds are continuing today,
·
1994
Pointed out that the corrupt U.S. Olympic Committee and its “nonprofit”
component organizations in various sports are being manipulated to maximize the
profits of commercial interests engaged in sports because of mishandling of
Federal Laws by the U.S. Congress,
·
2003
Began arguing that software patents are a bad idea even though venture
capitalists, lawyers and patent trolls love them,
·
2015
Advocate removing most Stop signs and replacing some of them with Yield signs.
Also modify traffic signals to promote yielding instead of unnecessary stopping
which will save time and fuel,
·
2016
Advocate using a much simpler calendar than the Gregorian and a unified time
system,
·
2016
Propose forming a new democratic and peaceful nation called Pacifica, composed
of California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
·
2017
Advocate forgetting Christmas, which has several things wrong with it,
including being illegal.
Biographies
Curriculum Vitae of Lester
Earnest is an
orderly summary of a random walk. Another short biography can be seen in Wikipedia.
L. Earnest, Steve Jobs set a
Precedent that I Will Not Follow.
You may have heard that I have same kind of Pancreatic
tumor that Jobs had and stupidly let it turn into cancer, which did him in.
That did not surprise me since I knew him casually and viewed him as an
arrogant jerk. I chose instead to “watch and wait,” doing annual MRI scans to
make sure that the tumor remains stable, which it has done through July 2017.
Dag Spicer, Oral History
Text of Lester Earnest, 2012.11.28, Computer History Museum.
Innovations
L. Earnest, Les’s Bucket List. Got to get it done by 2043.
L. Earnest, The first cursive handwriting recognizer
needed a spelling checker and so did the rest of the world, At MIT in the period 1959-63 I developed the first cursive
handwriting recognizer, which included the first use of light pens as drawing
and writing instruments and also included the first spelling checker. In 1966 I initiated the much simpler task of creating spelling checkers
for use in editing text files. We gave that software away beginning in 1971 and
it soon spread around the world via the new ARPAnet.
L. Earnest, ROUT, the first search engine (1961),
and NS, the first network news service (1975).
These services both used inverted indexes to provide rapid retrieval of
documents based on content.
L. Earnest, Machine recognition of cursive writing, IFIP Congress 1962 (Munich), Information
Processing 62, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1963. Describes the first
successful handwriting recognizer, which includes the first spelling checker. Nilo Lindgren wrote an article about this work in Machine
Recognition of Human Language, Part III – Cursive Script Recognition,
IEEE Spectrum, May 1965.
L. Earnest, Making WYSIWYG characters shape up, Proc Protext
IV Conf., Boston, 1987. Describes a mathematical method for choosing pixel
widths of characters so that lines of text most closely match their ideal
widths.
Anne Broache and Declan McCullagh, Blogging’s roots reach to the ‘70s, CNET
News, 2007.03.20. Discusses the origins of blogs, including the
proto-blog service included in the first social networking program, Finger,
which was created by Lester Earnest in the early 1970s.
L. Earnest, Modular Software Security, U.S. Patent # 4,888,798, Dec.
19, 1989 (assigned to Minolta-QMS). Patents a scheme for freely distributing
encrypted software for computers with hardware identity codes, then selling
numeric keys to unlock selected parts.
L. Earnest, A look back at an office of the future, Decision Support Systems: Issues and
Challenges, Pergamon Press, Oxford, England,
1981. Describes SAIL computer services for document preparation and other
interactive services, including displays on every desk with full bitmap
graphics dating from 1971.
L. Earnest, Radio markers needed, Feb. 1965. A letter to the U.S.
Secretary of the Interior advocated that roadside signs indicating points of
interest and providing historical information be replaced by low powered radio
systems providing this information, so that motorists could get it without
pulling off the highway. This received a prompt favorable reply from a
representative of the National Park Service but then nothing further happened,
as usual. This proposal still makes sense and modern digital technology could
substantially lower the cost but will government authorities ever figure that
out? Probably not.
L. Earnest, Kutta integration with error control, presented
at ACM National Conference, 1956, proposed a way to numerically solve
simultaneous differential equations, such as those used in flight simulation,
by automatically adjusting time steps based on error estimates obtained from a
modified Runge Kutta
method.
Opinions
L. Earnest, Testimony on Software
Patents, 2003. Argues that software patents are a bad idea
even though venture capitalists, lawyers and patent trolls love them.
L. Earnest, S*x, lies and politics: Part 4. Terrorists and the
politicians who love them,
2001.09.11. On the morning of 9/11 I started writing the fourth article in a
series aimed at restoring democracy in USA Cycling, the national governing body
of bicycle racing that had been taken over by commercial interests in a
thoroughly crooked way. I was planning to post it in the Usenet newsgroup rec.bicycles.racing but as I was
writing, news came in about planes being hijacked by terrorists, and rammed
into buildings so I switched topics and predicted the effects this would have
on civil liberties. Unfortunately my predictions came
true.
L. Earnest, E2A is worse than Y2K CACM July 2000. A wry look at
Y2K doomsters, avaricious contractors and military acronymiacs.
L. Earnest, CIA’s security theater, The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) likes to pretend
that everything is secret and that it is acceptable to lie whenever their
misconduct is exposed.
Soon see The Cisco Fiasco.
How to start a successful business by stealing technology and embezzling
start-up funds then getting the victim university to buy your stock and grant a
very generous license, then put their Dean of Engineering on your Board of
Directors and fund an Endowed Chair in the names of the chief crooks.
Travel
L. Earnest, A
Dedicated Umbraphile: Four
Eclipses with More to Come.
L. Earnest, Slavia
without Yugo.
Reviews visits to the Balkans in 1971 and 2016.
L. & M.
Earnest, Hunter
gatherer cultures that survive by default, March 2009. I
have made numerous
trips to Alaska and have numerous
grandchildren and great-grandchildren there. I also observe that native people
there have several things in common with those in the rest of the United
States, such as having been decimated by smallpox and other imported diseases
and being alternately abused and neglected by the Bureau of Indian Affairs
(BIA). Many groups with valuable mineral or timber resources also have been
exploited by commercial interests and “helpful” charlatans. However Arctic
people who live in lands that nobody else wants have
been relatively free of interference and have been able to preserve much of
their culture. They could do even better by commercially developing the
resources that they have but there are cultural barriers to doing that.