The end is nigh

 Moore's Law is the empirical observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two year and it has approximately held true since it was proposed in 1965.

It is driven by the economics of the insatiable demand for ever increasing electronics complexity and the steady reduction in feature size in the fabrication of silicon chips (integrated circuits).

In 2013 Robert Calwell vowed the end would come in 2022, maybe even 2020, with the herald of 7nm and even 5nm feature size.

And today the BBC has announced that Apple's new flagship iPhone 12 will incorporate the "A14" processor with 5nm feature size - the chip's transistors have been shrunk down - the tiny on-off switches are now only about 25 atoms wide - allowing billions more to be packed in.

These electronic chips use "solid state" technology, i.e. they have no moving parts which makes it sound like they can never wear out, will last forever short of physical damage. Alas, such is a dream. I am well used to using Flash and other types of non-volatile solid state memory (chips) in my work and I am all too aware that the specification documents mention a lifetime of sometimes as little as 100,000 re-write cycles. When software is running at GHz speeds this many can clock up quite fast!

Chips are made by first growing a very pure silicon crystal, slicing it into wafers, and then diffusing into it a photographic pattern of known amounts of certain impurities that give the silicon its required special electrical properties. Diffusion (the intermingling of substances by the natural random movement of their particles) is both the essential mechanism and Achilles' heel of solid state chips.

Back in college days I was told that the lifetime of a solid state circuit was limited by diffusion - what can be diffused in to make it work can, by the same token, diffuse out and self destroy it. OK, it is diffused in at high temperature where the particles are in much stronger random movement, so what may take seconds to diffuse in might take many years to diffuse out at room temperature. But the smaller the feature size, the more likely that diffusion defects can occur - the particles have less distance to move.

The aging problem is discussed in this paper - so I am not just imagining it!  Many people regard their cell-phone as a consumable item, with expectation that it be replaced after a year or so. Those people may have limitless bottoms to their purses but I, for one, am happy enough with my Pixel 2 and have no desire to shell out to upgrade it. So I'm hoping that all those billions of transistors inside will not diffuse into randomness too soon. All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

The Royal Albert Hall

I have mentioned Saint-Saëns Symphony No 3 before. I raved about it in teenage years whilst at school with nickname SSS. It has been somewhat mutilated in common culture by its use in that dreadful film Babe, but that's OK because I've never been common and don't intend to start now.

So I was listening to this recording in a Proms concert and came all over with possessive feelings about the Royal Albert Hall, the BBC, and indeed London then England in general. I am English, after all, and cannot help it. I was born like it. Is that wrong? Even though I do not think I have ever had the privilege of attending a Proms concert, that being not for lack of desire but because of other persuasions.

Here in Dublin we have the National Concert Hall which is OK but not quite the same. You can say what you like about Brexit or not Brexit, about the Empire and all its dreadful atrocities, but there is something solid about England. Winchester. Oxford. Even Cambridge. The Pennines. Devon and Cornwall. Hampshire. Alresford. This is My England. I wonder will I ever live there again?

Does it matter what you believe?

All manner of atrocities have been committed in the name of religion. Their perpetrators earnestly believed they were acting on God's behalf. Like Paul. And there's the crunch. We are taught that we need to hear the voice of God and obey it. But of this "hearing"... some say like "I felt God was telling me to..." and I wonder are they really hearing God's voice? What if one party earnestly believes God is saying X and another party Y and X and Y are major issues and mutually exclusive? Is this how splits and new denominations happen in the church?  There are rather generous estimates of up to 43,000 denominations within perhaps 40 main variations. Which gives the new convert plenty of choice. So does it matter what you believe?

If the deep outer veneers of difference are scraped off, what core value, common vision is there that defines a true Christian? Like the simplicity of Peter's "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house".

I was pleasantly surprised to find this discussion of what it means to be a Christian on the BBC site - surprised because my son-in-law eschews the BBC considering it to be very biased. The site says "It's about a friendship - a friendship with Jesus Christ." But what does it mean to have a friendship with someone that cannot be sensed in the usual way? I am reminded of Chocky who, in the story, is thought to be a childhood invention but turns out to be real. And here is my conundrum: those seemingly more stable Christians with whom I fellowship will claim that they do have a friendship with Jesus, that they hear Him speaking to them, feel His presence, and so on. I've thought I did but now I am not so sure. Don't get me wrong - I love the concept, so aptly portrayed in the Narnia books, like But no one except Lucy knew that as it circled the mast it had whispered to her, "Courage, dear heart," and the voice, she felt sure, was Aslan's, and with the voice a delicious smell breathed in her face and I long for such an experience in my own life, a longing that is as close to "faith" as I can muster. Or maybe, horrors, my spirit has somehow grown cold like the dwarfs within the stable in The Last Battle.

On the other hand I've seen some pretty amazing things that I can put down to the hand of God. That I got married at all, let alone to an amazing woman and with resulting four amazing children. Even my closest friends at the time agreed it was an unlikely thing to happen. And more recently, after waiting in hope for so many years, J and S's adoption of a Thai child happening so fast and at such a time that one could not help comparing it with Joseph's sudden rise to second only to Pharoah. Or when I open my eyes and see creation in all its detail.

But I, being human, need constant reassurance of things unseen. Working on some scaffolding the other day I cantilevered a plank to help me reach, making the other end fast by a G-clamp to the scaffolding tower. It looked good. My knowledge of levers confirmed my observation. And yet still I very cautiously committed my weight to the projecting end of the plank. I needed more assurance than physics theory offered. And I need more assurance than Christian doctrine offers.

A recent visitor alluded to numerical patterns or "gematria" found in the scriptures, for example as purported by Vernon Jenkins with his 37 x 73 argument. This is all very fascinating but at the same time I am cautious. Many of the patterns only work in base 10 as this site observes, but then one might argue that the decimal system is God given because He gave our hands and feet 10 digits. And does Vernon also believe that the Earth is flat or is at least the centre of the universe?

Another guy came up with the Bible Wheel but has more recently debunked his own theory and now no longer calls himself a Christian. I followed this story because it is unusual for a theorist to publically recant. Without reading every word it seems that he fell into that trap of emphasising data that supported his theory whilst disregarding the rest. Commonly known as a biased sample. I think Christians are wonderfully good at this - wonderfully because it takes some guts, some perseverance and commitment, to persistently believe one thing when so much evidence points another way.

And thus Paul argues in the book of Romans: for what can be known about God is plain to them [unbelievers], because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. Doubtless Richard Dawkins would not agree. If I had to choose between him and Paul I'd choose the latter any day, but still I find Paul's argument curiously hollow. Conversely the anthropic principle says the world is as it is (all those physical constants having just the right value to sustain life as we know it and all that) because here we are to prove it, and this also seems to me a hollow argument lacking substance.

In all these musings I find myself coming back to the man Jesus and his claims of deity as recorded in the Gospels. But that was a long time ago and, like Trumpkin the dwarf, I find myself thinking "Do you believe all those old stories?" and "But who believes in Aslan nowadays?".  In this story Trumpkin's unbelief mercifully ends with "Son of Earth, shall we be friends?". Maybe that was just  the author's fancy.

I crave such mercy.

The evils of light

I know I've posted about light pollution before, but the other day at lunch the two women sharing my table were lamenting how hard it was to see along the road at night now that the neighbours had not had their outside lights on recently. I could hardly help myself interjecting how, for me, such lights actually made it harder to see. One of them said it was amazing when I pointed out I could see better without the lights.  Does this mean my visual purple is much better than average? I can hardly believe this. This morning I was taking my breakfast at around 0730 as it was starting to get light outside. Quite light enough for me to consume my cereal and tea. Shortly after I am joined by another community member and, wham, on goes 6 glaring ceiling spot-lights. Why? I asked - because it's dark and I cannot see, he says. Can this really be true? Do They really prefer the harsh, brilliant artificial light to dawn?

And so I was please when this morning's BBC-news offering included this article listing various evils associated with increasing light pollution across the globe and writing "Human vision relies on contrast, not the amount of light, so by reducing contrast outdoors - avoiding glaring lamps - it is actually possible to have improved vision with less light."