Part 16
The most perfect expression of a person with a “one track mind” takes me back to my favorite desert, the Namib. Retired lawyer Louw Schoeman, who was born in Namibia, grew up with an abiding passion for the desert. After running a successful law practice for many years in the nation’s capital, Windhoek, he retired early to concentrate on his first love, the sands of the Namib.
The film company for which I regularly freelanced called me in to write a script on Louw after seeing an article in the paper. It seemed that in the course of his many expeditions taking international tourists to remote corners of the Namib in his light plane, he had discovered a remarkable freak of nature.
What occured very simply is that while walking in the desert on his own one day, Louw needed to relieve himself. With no one in sight, he proceeded to do so on the ground in front of him on what appeared to be an ordinary rock. But moments later – to his amazement – some long dried-out lichen on the rock unfolded and turned green at his feet!
In the article, Louw then extolled the many wonders and surprises to be found in the desert, which led us to make a film on the Namib using Louw as our central figure.
The film opened with him using a watering can to water some rocks, which obligingly produced the same unfurling lichen turning green. As a matter of fact, during the filming we were fortunate enough to experience the first rains in eight years, with the miraculous, literally overnight miracle of grass and other small plants coming to life and turning the desert momentarily green.
Louw truly loved this particular desert. Before we set off in Land Rovers to explore it, he insisted that we follow only existing tracks, explaining that these tracks could last for up to fifty years in the sand and too many of them would defile this precious place. Hence, we called the film “One Track Mind.”
Louw was totally obsessed with keeping “his” desert as pristine as possible. During filming, we were shooting in an area where literally dozens of sailing ships had run aground over the past few hundred years. Treacherous currents and deceptive sandbanks had claimed many ships, including some recent wrecks.
Louw showed us debris from the ships, which ranged from masts and spars to wooden domino pieces and even the occasional skeleton, hence the name Skeleton Coast. At one point he gasped, pointing to a mast that had been sawn off. Nearly in tears and furious, he explained that some uncaring fool had probably cut if off for firewood. It was an artefact that could have been up to 200 years old.
Louw was a wonderful character, but clearly on a single track in life. He even told me that he had once travelled to Ireland and found the greenery of the Emerald Isle to be offensive to his eyes!
It occurs to me now that computing, since its inception, has collectively also had a one track mind. The developers of existing computer technology have never looked beyond the original concept of how software should be built in order to change and improve it during its evolution. Sadly, the original construction method was badly flawed.
Fortunately, ExoTech’s founder, Peter Warren, has totally changed the construction method and found a much more powerful one which can build a computer that “thinks” like a human.
Just as the Namib remained a desert for lack of one of the most basic elements in the world, so too did computing languish from the lack of a correct method to make it expand.
But ExoTech has handled that. It’s the simple technology that will cause computing to flourish again.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.