May, 1999

KENDAL, England -- Paul Brown flicks on the garage light, walks to the wall telephone and dials a number in Manchester. The phone crackles, then connects. "Francesca," he says, "I have a visitor here I'd like you to say hello to."

It isn't quite in the league of "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you," the fabled first phone call made by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant in 1876. But it is hardly commonplace: The Manchester call travels over the very electric wire that simultaneously feeds 240 volts of current to the garage light.

"No one expected this to fly," says Mr. Brown, an affable 51-year-old radio engineer at Britain's Norweb Communications, and the inventor of the technology. "But I've proved it beyond any reasonable doubt."

Mr. Brown's breakthrough has electrified the staid power industry. Because electricity cables snake into virtually every home and office, the technique could let power companies worldwide offer cheap phone and data services.

Norweb's system can transmit at least one megabit of data per second, 20 times faster than high-speed modems linked to regular phone lines. And users won't have to dial up the Internet because the connection is always turned "on," just like the electricity supply.

"It's unbelievably quick, and the quality is excellent," says Jenny Dunn, head teacher at Seymour Park Primary School, near Manchester. The school has linked 12 computers using the Norweb system.

Researchers have created a new device called an atom laser by pushing super cold atoms into a laser beam that could be fired in any direction. The scientists said in the journal Science that the new laser could "revolutionize computer chip making." The report said that the device could be used to build instruments for measuring and navigation 10 times more precise than current optical laser systems.

A South African company which produces the Freeplay windup radio expects to manufacture hand cranked laptop computers by next year. The report said the Freeplay Power Group is working in conjunction with General Electric to make a small "clockwork generator" to power laptops with a handcrank and a solar panel. It said the Apple Computer is considering using the technology in future Macintosh products. (Daniel 12:4)

Bill Gates smiles when he talks about there being no shortage of frontiers, and smiles when he talks about all the neat new things yet to emerge under his name. Lee Kuan Yew [former leader of Singapore] frowns when he talks about family values being eroded, and frowns when he talks about a totally new world emerging. Yehudi Menuhin [famous violinist] smiles when he talks of every child having the opportunity to be an artist, and frowns when he talks about speed and noise threatening our sense of balance.

The very different perspectives and priorities of three of the giants of the 20th century came together in a remarkable meeting of the world's movers and shakers at Davos in the Swiss Alps.

In a six-day live chatroom, 40 heads of state, 250 political leaders, 300 scientists, artists, academics and intellectuals, and 1,000 corporate chiefs (each with $1 billion in revenue) talked over what in the world is going on, and where the world might be going.

The annual World Economic Forum is committed to improving the state of the world. It seeks to bring leaders from various fields together to discuss key issues, away from the usual obstacles of bureaucracies, protocols, and media scrutiny.

It was up to 20 degrees below outside. Inside, the issue that everyone warmed to was globality, today's buzzword for issues relating to yesterday's buzzword of globalization.

Whichever word in whichever language, the world's elite has either fully embraced globalization, or fully accepted it as unstoppable: ready or not, the world is being plugged into one hot-wired, digitized, interactive marketplace, with normal definitions and understanding of time, distance, corporations, assets, value, consumers and government being challenged or transformed with astonishing speed.

There was comparatively little focus on the causes and lessons of the economic failures of the past two years; that's history, and there is little time for history lessons. Design new financial architecture and let's get on with tomorrow.

The world is getting smaller and faster as the march of science, technology and money reshape the landscape almost oblivious to government. The title of Bill Gates's forthcoming book says it all: Business at the Speed of Thought.

For older heads like Lee Kuan Yew and Yehudi Menuhin, the rapidity of change, life at the speed of thought, is challenging man's ability to cope.

Lee has masterminded the success of Singapore, a country whose technology, education and national unity is the envy of many a world leader. But even he is worried.

"The world is changing so fast I'm not sure Singapore can adjust fast enough to keep up and find a niche in the powerful knowledge-based economies," he said at Davos. "The speed with which societies are being interlinked to each other, the ease with which they can influence the other, will make for a totally new world. It may erode long-held values that have held our society together. I see signs of it already."

Yehudi Menuhin expressed disquiet about a world becoming faster and noisier in the push to get a nanosecond of attention. He decried the amplification, commercialization and multiplication of music and images to fill every vacant space and silence.

I have seen the future and it is personal. Or "personalized." Those were the buzzwords this year at Renaissance Weekend, the gathering of hundreds of accomplished men and women from walks of life as separate as church and state.

"Personalized" was the word favored by Oren Etzioni of the University of Washington, an authority on artificial intelligence. He talked about each of us having an "intelligent agent," that is, an almost invisible friend living, probably, in cellular phones--something like a cross between a bottled genie and the little men who turn on the light when you open a refrigerator.

"You will be able to talk into the phone [or other device] and tell your car you're on your way," he said. "It will know where to go without more help from you…. Or you can say, 'I want to call Chicago' and the phone will get you the best deal on the call." "Or, you can ask a pretzel bag, 'Are you fresh?"' said Bill Cheswick of Bell Labs. He was not kidding. Computer chips will be the size of big gnats. "There are computers in hotel doorknobs right now. Next you'll be talking to light bulbs and shirts." Mr. Cheswick did not tell us what you would talk to the shirt about, but they'll think of something.

The implications of all that are many and enormous, but Mr. Etzioni focused on shopping. Mr. Etzioni said your intelligent agent, which would know everything about you, including shoe size, foot shape and personal quirks would be a shopper with infinite time and patience, even as it worked almost instantaneously everywhere in the world (or on the Web) to find you or me the perfect shoe at the best price. Sorry, Nike. Forget the swoosh, close the stores.

On future medicine, Ian Hunter, a microbiotics professor at MIT, talked about a most personal, inside-out health care system, your own "virtual body." At birth, a "body" would be created from each person's genetic data and as life went on, basic medical examinations would be comparisons between the real you and the projected you of the virtual body. Any differences between the model and the real you would be the first indicator of medical problems.

This is not pie in the sky; this is where we are. Science is moving and changing so fast now that John Cramer, a University of Washington physicist, who certainly spoke for me, said the only thing we can be certain of is that "everything we know is wrong."

Al DiMora, who made a name for himself as the head of a now-defunct Carpinteria company that made custom cars for the rich, has founded a business in Utah that is promising to revolutionize computers and electronics in ways that will be felt at all levels of society.

Star Bridge Systems says its HAL-4rW1 hypercomputer is three times faster than the most powerful supercomputers now in use, and will be available for $26 million--about one-quarter of the cost of bigger, slower competitors. But the hypercomputer--which its creator says may be capable of attaining self-consciousness--is just the beginning. HAL was built to demonstrate the enormous potential of a new way of using computer chips that, if the company's claims are true, will be embraced by companies making everything from toaster ovens to automobiles to satellites.

The company's claims do sound plausible when explained by HAL's inventor and company co-founder, Kent Gilson, a 33-year-old high school dropout. Gilson, who has spent the last 15 years working in a discipline known as reconfigurable computing, says he's found a way to get the most out of the concept. Computers have traditionally used two types of computer chips: slower ones that are designed to handle a large number of tasks, and speedy, application-specific chips that are tailored to do a specific job. Intel's Pentium chip, the heart of many personal computers, is an example of a versatile chip that can handle many different jobs. The price is a loss of speed. Chips like those on a graphics accelerator card--a device that allows personal computers to handle video and games--are hard-wired to do that job, and do it fast. These hard-wired chips, called application specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, are expensive to design. A cheaper alternative is a reconfigurable chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA), which can be reconfigured to act like an ASIC. The chips were an exciting enough development to merit a cover story in the June, 1997 issue of Scientific American.

Star Bridge Systems has developed hardware and software that allows FPGA chips already on the market to be reconfigured as many as 1,000 times per second. HAL uses 280 FPGAs on 36 integrated circuit boards, and the company claims it can perform 12.84 trillion operations per second. That makes it nearly 10 times faster than the Blue Mountain, the supercomputer used by Los Alamos National Laboratory to simulate nuclear explosions. IBM's $94 million Blue Pacific, which does 3.9 trillion calculations at best, uses 5,856 Power PC chips and takes of 8,000 square feet. HAL isn't much bigger than a personal computer.

The key to getting that much power out of so little hardware is software written by Gilson called Viva. "Up to a thousand times per second, Viva inventories available resources, both in hardware and software, and automatically selects the most efficient available resource to perform each function required to complete the computer's task, trading one resource off with another, as needed, in order to maintain maximum efficient use of all resources," according to information the company distributes on its web site.

In a device like a satellite, a personal computer, a camera or an automobile, it allows one FPGA chip to act like many ASICs, increasing computational power and cutting costs, weight and power consumption. Al Dimora's brother, Frank, a long-time Lompoc resident, prophecy expert and author, sees HAL's capabilities and its potential use as a tool for increasing mankind's knowledge as another sign that the return of Christ to Earth will happen sooner than some were expecting. HAL is "fulfilling part of Daniel's prophecy that knowledge will increase before the Lord returns. They weren't expecting this kind of computer to hit the scene for 10, 20, 50 years."