Selected Excerpts from

Technically Speaking

Appearing six times annually in IEEE Spectrum Magazine

Technically Speaking is intended as a commentary on the use and misuse of technical language and culture. Comments, concerns, commendations, and condemnations will be accepted, often cheerfully.
-Technically Speaking mission statement.

[Jurassic Sparks] [Ohm's Law, revisited] [Personal Magnetism]
[Soothing Bromides] [Dead Memories] [Alice in Cryptoland]

Jurassic Sparks (October 1993)

As most scientists and engineers will testify, ours was not an easy childhood. Our intellectual prowess and generally well-scrubbed appearance engendered a certain amount of jealousy in our juvenile playmates, and unfortunately this often carried over into discrimination in adulthood.

So you an imagine our horror when we discovered that the current hit movie Jurassic Park, viewed by millions, perpetuates the insidious discrimination against engineers that we have fought against our entire life. In the movie, the character of mathematician Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum is heard to utter the phrase, "God help us, we're in the hands of engineers!" Letters protesting this slight have been sent to screenplay writers Michael Crichton and David Koepp, and to Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.

In addition, Technically Speaking is proud to announce the formation of the Worldwide Engineering Reputation Defense Society (Werds). Werds will serve as an anti-defamation league for all technical professionals, working hard to convince the public that we can be athletic, fashion-conscious, socially mature individuals, capable of completing a sentence without using the word derivative. Individuals are encouraged to contribute examples of discrimination they have been subjected to in the past.

Ohm's Law, revisited (June 1993)

Much has been written lately about the declining abilities of U.S. students in the sciences. Technically Speaking has recently discovered direct evidence that the problem has existed even longer, and may be more pronounced, than previously thought. Take the following example uttered, quite seriously, by a nontechnical professional in his mid-30s at a recent party: "It's like Ohm's Law that they taught you in school: things always work out to the least resistance."

The situation appears grave.

Personal Magnetism (February 1993)

Physicists everywhere will mourn the defeat last year of Kandace Williams in the Miss America contest. Press statements about the 23-year-old Miss Mississippi prompted Technically Speaking to obtain a copy of her one-page biography, submitted to the judges to help them evaluate the character of the contestants.

What caught our eye was her claim in the "Other Facts" section that she "has a rare electrolytic body chemistry which makes her a human magnet." One newspaper wrote that "abnormal ions in her blood can drain batteries." Technically Speaking could locate no references to such a condition in medical journals, but did uncover, in other sources, some reports about people who spontaneously burst into flames.

Though we failed to learn more about Williams' biomagnetic properties, her biography did yield one more item of interest: her father is an engineer.

Soothing Bromides (April 1994)

A recent article in the business section of the Dallas Morning News described the growing popularity of a service that provides electronic copies of resumes to recruiters. In the opening paragraph, the following sentence appeared: "There's a new meaning to that old bromide, 'We're keeping your resume on file.'" Although Technically Speaking is always on the lookout for helpful advice on job hunting, it was the use of bromide that caught our attention.

A bromide is defined as a compound of bromine with an element or organic radical. The element has a bitter, irritating smell - and bromos is Greek for stench or stink. Several bromides have medicinal uses, especially potassium bromide, a sedative.

The soothing nature of this compound was slangily equated with a trite, soothing comment. Other bromides include "The check is in the mail," "This won't hurt a bit," "Your request for more funding is being carefully considered," and "That bug will be fixed in the next revision of the software."

Dead Memories (April 1996)

Given the international nature of the electronics industry, technical translations from one language to another are necessities, but the process may sometimes lead to odd results. While researching another topic, we had a chance to peruse a copy of Cassell Business Companions: France, an abbreviated English-French lexicon. In the chapter entitled Data Processing /Le Traitement de l'Informatique, the lexicon shows that the French translation for "random-access memory (RAM)" is "la memoire vive, RAM" and "read-only memory (ROM)" is translated as "la memoire morte, ROM." The literal translations of the French words for RAM and ROM are "the living memory" and "the dead memory," respectively.

We became curious to see whether these terms were still current. Yves Le Bras, and electrical engineer in Canejan, Cestas, France, reported to us by e-mail that, until recently, personal computer advertisements in French consumer magazines did indeed use the expressions memoire vives and memoire mortes. This practice was done for pedagogic reasons, explained Le Bra. "It is much more meaningful to the majority of consumers who don't understand English, although I don't see it any more in PC ads," he said. He is fairly certain, though, that people working in PC stores still use these expressions.

Engineers, on the other hand, would rarely use them, fearing to be accounted ignorant by their peers, continued Le Bras. "They use the good old reliable RAM and ROM."

Alice in Crytpoland (August 1998)

Having had occasion to dabble in concerns cryptographic, this column's editor has noticed a peculiar trend among technical papers on the subject. As is to be expected, many of these publications illustrate their points with examples of an encrypted transmission between two people. What caught our attention, though, is that almost every publication we have come across features the same two protagonists: Alice and Bob.

Of course, we understand the convenience of the association with the variables A and B. But the fact that the same names appear over and over again in the cryptographic literature made us suspect there was a story to be decipered.

As a jumping off point, we posted a query in the sci.crypt Usenet newsgroup, a forum for people interested in cryptography. Although one reader waggishly suggested that the names were derived from the 1969 wife-swapping movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," the truth appears otherwise.

A majority of the replies informed us that the first recorded incidence of Alice and Bob in such a context lay in a paper titled "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems" by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, published in the Communications of the ACM, February 1978, Volume 21, Number 2. In it the authors display a flair for the practical in their choice of variables including ciphertext C, decryption algorithm D, encryption algorithm E, and message M. (By the way, the authors are the RSA in RSA encryption, the popular commercial data-scrambling scheme they developed.)

The genesis of our two cryptographic companions lies in the sentence "For our scenarios we suppose that A and B (also known as Alice and Bob) are two users of a public-key cryptosystem." The names, simple and direct, seem to have caught on. In addition to developing an important implementation of a public-key cryptosystem, we also found it interesting that in 1978 the authors offered this prophetic statement: "The era of 'electronic mail' may soon be upon us."

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