"Professor Stanley Wellman, we would like you to say a few words for the Henry County Register about the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Internut."
Sure. I was there. I think that the big drought of the last few years is what triggered the Internut; that plus the roadside computers, of course. I was a young professor of rural sociology at Auburn University when we started noticing the Internut. Of course now, almost everybody in the world uses it and we take it for granted, but in the beginning, we didn't know that such a thing could exist. It has changed how we think about plants, especially about the lowly peanut, and it has enhanced the lives of everyone, everywhere. Let me remember – I was working on the problem of the population decline in Abbeville, down at the Wiregrass Research and Extension Center, down in Henry County Alabama.
"Professor, do you remember how it began?"
Yup: my cell phone rang right after class, back in 2020. "Professor Wellman, you must join me and Director Graeme here at the Kimball farm. You know that 600 acres that he puts in every year in peanuts? Well, something fishy is going on. I don't want to explain it over the phone."
Sure. I was there. I think that the big drought of the last few years is what triggered the Internut; that plus the roadside computers, of course. I was a young professor of rural sociology at Auburn University when we started noticing the Internut. Of course now, almost everybody in the world uses it and we take it for granted, but in the beginning, we didn't know that such a thing could exist. It has changed how we think about plants, especially about the lowly peanut, and it has enhanced the lives of everyone, everywhere. Let me remember – I was working on the problem of the population decline in Abbeville, down at the Wiregrass Research and Extension Center, down in Henry County Alabama.
"Professor, do you remember how it began?"
Yup: my cell phone rang right after class, back in 2020. "Professor Wellman, you must join me and Director Graeme here at the Kimball farm. You know that 600 acres that he puts in every year in peanuts? Well, something fishy is going on. I don't want to explain it over the phone."
A Brief History of the Internut
By Doug Hilton
Now, Jack Ginsmore, my assistant, ran the Wiregrass Extension Center in those days. That day, he was being mighty cryptic. The Wiregrass region of southeast Alabama was the biggest peanut-producing area in the state, but the drought pushed peanut production more to the southwestern counties. During those days, Henry County wasn't doing well, and Jack's students were trying to measure the damage that the drought was causing to the economy. The Governor declared a state of emergency and our Extension Center was compiling a report for him so that he could go to the Legislature, armed with facts. "OK, Jack. I'll get out there tomorrow, after my morning lecture. See you then." It seems like everything complex starts out so simple.
"So you went out to the Kimball peanut farm?"
Sure did. The next day, Jack and his Ph.D. candidates were out in the pasture of Jim Kimball's farm. I remember how hard the ground felt – it wasn't normal for land to be this dry. The few peanut plants that were alive were on death's doorstep. Except for the ones near the edge of the field where the students were all busy talking and taking pictures. I remember how young they all looked, and how they treated me with dignity and respect. Heck, I'm just a professor at Auburn, what were they thinking?
"Tell us what you saw."
Well, right there, we saw about 10 acres of peanut plants that were doing very well, for the 3rd year of a severe drought, that is. Jack shook my hand, and introduced his students, and then he pointed his pocket laser pointer towards one of the peanut plants and quietly said "Look Dr. Wellman. Right there."
It was a hot Alabama day, and I was beginning to sweat. The eau du peanut was rising up out of red clay of Kimball's farm. Then – well, I saw the darndest thing I ever saw!
The biggest problem of the decade from 2010 to 2020 was waste disposal, specifically what to do with old TV's, radios, batteries, computers, and all that electronic trash that people just don't want to be bothered with when they're done with it. It's all too easy to just chuck a battery out the window of a moving car. It's OK for some people to stop at the end of a country road and unload a bunch of old CRT's and computers. There's no penalty, so people just do it. When the landfills charge 5 bucks to dump a load of junk, then people just dump it beside the road. Well, Henry County and especially Newville had been the dumping grounds for electronics detritus for many years. It seemed like everybody knew that the rural roads were just right for getting rid of puppy dogs and computers. So, over the years, lots of hardware wound up all along the back roads of Henry County.
A lot of that junk came from your readers, you know. There are 6,500 families living within 50 miles of here, and probably most of them have availed themselves of the dark of night in order to avoid paying the 5 buck tipping-fee at the Dothan recycling plant. Anyway, the sun was bright and it took me a minute to focus on the point where the laser beam was, and then I saw it: the peanut plants in that area were growing out of an old Dell computer case. And they were all green, leafy, and healthy. I kind of cringed, because I knew that the plant was absorbing the heavy-metals that are present in computers. Those old computers are really miniature toxic waste dumps, and here was a group of peanuts that were deriving sustenance from that goop – it wasn't right. Well anyway, some of the students started talking all at once: "Dr. Wellman, what should we do? If we uproot the plants, we'll kill 'em, but if we leave 'em, they'll die from heavy-metal poisoning." Well, I didn't know what to tell 'em.
Then something amazing happened: a cloud passed over the sun and the temperature dropped just a tad, and one of the students swore. Then he turned to the group and apologized. "My laptop connection keeps dropping out here. I wonder what's wrong with my Verizon wireless card now? Look, the screen's all funny." We looked at the screen and it was changing, like a modern-art painting. One of the students said "Yeah, that happens to me too. We must be too far away from the wireless tower." But Joanne pointed south, and we could see the tower, less than a mile away, so that couldn't be it. Then the sun came out again, and the computer cleared up. And then we went to another stand of healthy peanuts, farther up the road. Like the last peanuts, these were growing out of techno-trash. We chased away a small garter snake and saw that this time it was an old black and white TV that was the host of the peanut plant. We circled the whole Kimball farm that day, and found healthy peanut plants growing out of trash, batteries, computers, just about everything. Out in the middle of the field, where the crop should be the best, the drought had killed it all off, but by the roads, where junk had been tossed, there were peanuts growing pretty darn well. I asked Jack to have his students to bring in soil samples from the center of the field and from the peanuts that were in good shape, but growing out of electronic junk. All day, the students came up with lame jokes about goober peas and techno-trash. I should have written 'em down, but it was too hot, and some biting black flies started coming out late in the afternoon and made life miserable. When they started singing "Goober Peas", I had to leave. These kids were too young to remember The Kingston Trio, let alone the Civil War. Yet on that hot, sweaty, bug-bitten day, with great gusto they sang round after round of one of the popular camp songs of the Civil War:
Sittin' by the roadside on a summer's day
Chattin' with my mess-mates, passing time away
Lyin' in the shadows underneath the trees
Goodness, how delicious, eatin' goober peas.
Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eatin' goober peas
Goodness, how delicious,
Eatin' goober peas!
== 2 ==
Back at Auburn, we used the mass-spec and analyzed the soil. It was an ecological mess, let me tell you. Cadmium, lead, gold, tantalum, silicon, we found stuff that wasn't anything that you'd want to ingest with your peanut butter sandwich. I called Dr. Ginsmore and told him the results. He said "I need you at the Kimball farm, today."
I told my teaching assistant to give the lecture, and I drove out to the Kimball farm that morning. It looked like half the students from Auburn were in the peanut crop. The blinding South Alabama sun beat down on the field without mercy. Dust whorls cut across the fields to the north. Mr. Kimball and his wife were having a heated discussion with Jack and Ted, one of his Ph.D. candidates. When I joined them, I could see that something was very wrong. The student held his tablet computer out at arm's length, and then pulled it back towards his chest. Then out, and back in. I said "OK, Jack LaLanne, what kind of new exercise are you doing with the computer?"
Jack just whispered "Watch."
As Ted moved the tablet computer over a clump of peanut plants, the screen changed color. When the sunlight was blocked by the tablet, the screen turned red, and when the computer was withdrawn, the screen turned green. I remember gasping, but I couldn't think of what to say.
Ted offered: "Dr. Wellman, the plant is talking to us. When we block its sunlight, it complains."
I saw it, but I didn't believe it. "Ted, are you nuts? We're just joking when we call peanuts 'brain food'. That plant doesn't know how to communicate with your computer."
"Sorry to disagree, Stan. That peanut plant is communicating to that tablet computer. It is indicating its feelings of losing, and then regaining the sun. That peanut plant is displaying intelligence. Is that nuts or what?"
We all agreed that the idea of a peanut plant complaining to a computer was nuts, and we agreed that there was another explanation. But I had to eat my words soon enough.
We carefully dug out that peanut plant. When we got it back to Auburn, we used the electron microscope to track down its root system. We saw that it had many micro-tendrils hooked right to the old CPU chip in that Dell computer. The plant stopped responding, once we dug it up, but we kept at it until we found out what was going on.
We didn't know then, but we know now that the stress from the drought caused the peanut root systems to dig deeper and become thinner. It was an adaptation to their conditions, as predicted by Charles Darwin. Surprisingly, the peanut plants that connected with the electronic trash were able to get their nutrients out of the silicon, lead, plastic, and so forth. The plants that survived were the ones that adapted best. Then we found that some of the plants specialized in feeding on batteries, and some on coils of copper wire. Some were best at ingesting silicon, and so forth. Together, through their new, extensive root system, they were able to draw power from old batteries, transmit data through copper that they absorbed, and their big leaves used the silicon as photo-voltaic cells during the daylight hours. The peanut plants self-organized into a colony of computer-based computer networks, all around Kimball's farm. When we found them, they were communicating with the tablet computer by jamming their radio-frequency waves into the Ethernet antennas on the computers. Once they hooked to a computer, they were smart enough to download information from the Google website, and they quickly became self-aware, and that's almost the entire story.
We got a great crop of new Ph.D's out of it, plus we got the patents for it. The Alabama Wiregrass Internut Computer Nutwork has taken root all over the world now. It works by using discarded junk and sunlight. It's the backbone that we use for the free system that we all use, and it doesn't cost anybody anything, except a little bit of water once in a while. After all, we don't want the goobers to get smarter than us, do we? If Darwin has his way, and we keep the peanut plants under the constant stress of drought, then they'll keep evolving, won't they? And a peanut butter sandwich will soon be smarter than the entire population of Henry County, and we don't want that, do we? So we water the peanuts from time to time, and use the free Internut, and enjoy the copious patent royalties at Auburn University – home of the War Eagles!
I think this peanut story done lasted long enough
Peanut plants are interesting, but Darwin's rules are rough.
I wish the trash was picked up, so free from nuts we'd be
We'd stop using 'em for Google, and just eat them goober peas.
Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eatin' goober peas
Goodness, how intelligent,
Them Internut goober peas!
"So you went out to the Kimball peanut farm?"
Sure did. The next day, Jack and his Ph.D. candidates were out in the pasture of Jim Kimball's farm. I remember how hard the ground felt – it wasn't normal for land to be this dry. The few peanut plants that were alive were on death's doorstep. Except for the ones near the edge of the field where the students were all busy talking and taking pictures. I remember how young they all looked, and how they treated me with dignity and respect. Heck, I'm just a professor at Auburn, what were they thinking?
"Tell us what you saw."
Well, right there, we saw about 10 acres of peanut plants that were doing very well, for the 3rd year of a severe drought, that is. Jack shook my hand, and introduced his students, and then he pointed his pocket laser pointer towards one of the peanut plants and quietly said "Look Dr. Wellman. Right there."
It was a hot Alabama day, and I was beginning to sweat. The eau du peanut was rising up out of red clay of Kimball's farm. Then – well, I saw the darndest thing I ever saw!
The biggest problem of the decade from 2010 to 2020 was waste disposal, specifically what to do with old TV's, radios, batteries, computers, and all that electronic trash that people just don't want to be bothered with when they're done with it. It's all too easy to just chuck a battery out the window of a moving car. It's OK for some people to stop at the end of a country road and unload a bunch of old CRT's and computers. There's no penalty, so people just do it. When the landfills charge 5 bucks to dump a load of junk, then people just dump it beside the road. Well, Henry County and especially Newville had been the dumping grounds for electronics detritus for many years. It seemed like everybody knew that the rural roads were just right for getting rid of puppy dogs and computers. So, over the years, lots of hardware wound up all along the back roads of Henry County.
A lot of that junk came from your readers, you know. There are 6,500 families living within 50 miles of here, and probably most of them have availed themselves of the dark of night in order to avoid paying the 5 buck tipping-fee at the Dothan recycling plant. Anyway, the sun was bright and it took me a minute to focus on the point where the laser beam was, and then I saw it: the peanut plants in that area were growing out of an old Dell computer case. And they were all green, leafy, and healthy. I kind of cringed, because I knew that the plant was absorbing the heavy-metals that are present in computers. Those old computers are really miniature toxic waste dumps, and here was a group of peanuts that were deriving sustenance from that goop – it wasn't right. Well anyway, some of the students started talking all at once: "Dr. Wellman, what should we do? If we uproot the plants, we'll kill 'em, but if we leave 'em, they'll die from heavy-metal poisoning." Well, I didn't know what to tell 'em.
Then something amazing happened: a cloud passed over the sun and the temperature dropped just a tad, and one of the students swore. Then he turned to the group and apologized. "My laptop connection keeps dropping out here. I wonder what's wrong with my Verizon wireless card now? Look, the screen's all funny." We looked at the screen and it was changing, like a modern-art painting. One of the students said "Yeah, that happens to me too. We must be too far away from the wireless tower." But Joanne pointed south, and we could see the tower, less than a mile away, so that couldn't be it. Then the sun came out again, and the computer cleared up. And then we went to another stand of healthy peanuts, farther up the road. Like the last peanuts, these were growing out of techno-trash. We chased away a small garter snake and saw that this time it was an old black and white TV that was the host of the peanut plant. We circled the whole Kimball farm that day, and found healthy peanut plants growing out of trash, batteries, computers, just about everything. Out in the middle of the field, where the crop should be the best, the drought had killed it all off, but by the roads, where junk had been tossed, there were peanuts growing pretty darn well. I asked Jack to have his students to bring in soil samples from the center of the field and from the peanuts that were in good shape, but growing out of electronic junk. All day, the students came up with lame jokes about goober peas and techno-trash. I should have written 'em down, but it was too hot, and some biting black flies started coming out late in the afternoon and made life miserable. When they started singing "Goober Peas", I had to leave. These kids were too young to remember The Kingston Trio, let alone the Civil War. Yet on that hot, sweaty, bug-bitten day, with great gusto they sang round after round of one of the popular camp songs of the Civil War:
Sittin' by the roadside on a summer's day
Chattin' with my mess-mates, passing time away
Lyin' in the shadows underneath the trees
Goodness, how delicious, eatin' goober peas.
Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eatin' goober peas
Goodness, how delicious,
Eatin' goober peas!
== 2 ==
Back at Auburn, we used the mass-spec and analyzed the soil. It was an ecological mess, let me tell you. Cadmium, lead, gold, tantalum, silicon, we found stuff that wasn't anything that you'd want to ingest with your peanut butter sandwich. I called Dr. Ginsmore and told him the results. He said "I need you at the Kimball farm, today."
I told my teaching assistant to give the lecture, and I drove out to the Kimball farm that morning. It looked like half the students from Auburn were in the peanut crop. The blinding South Alabama sun beat down on the field without mercy. Dust whorls cut across the fields to the north. Mr. Kimball and his wife were having a heated discussion with Jack and Ted, one of his Ph.D. candidates. When I joined them, I could see that something was very wrong. The student held his tablet computer out at arm's length, and then pulled it back towards his chest. Then out, and back in. I said "OK, Jack LaLanne, what kind of new exercise are you doing with the computer?"
Jack just whispered "Watch."
As Ted moved the tablet computer over a clump of peanut plants, the screen changed color. When the sunlight was blocked by the tablet, the screen turned red, and when the computer was withdrawn, the screen turned green. I remember gasping, but I couldn't think of what to say.
Ted offered: "Dr. Wellman, the plant is talking to us. When we block its sunlight, it complains."
I saw it, but I didn't believe it. "Ted, are you nuts? We're just joking when we call peanuts 'brain food'. That plant doesn't know how to communicate with your computer."
"Sorry to disagree, Stan. That peanut plant is communicating to that tablet computer. It is indicating its feelings of losing, and then regaining the sun. That peanut plant is displaying intelligence. Is that nuts or what?"
We all agreed that the idea of a peanut plant complaining to a computer was nuts, and we agreed that there was another explanation. But I had to eat my words soon enough.
We carefully dug out that peanut plant. When we got it back to Auburn, we used the electron microscope to track down its root system. We saw that it had many micro-tendrils hooked right to the old CPU chip in that Dell computer. The plant stopped responding, once we dug it up, but we kept at it until we found out what was going on.
We didn't know then, but we know now that the stress from the drought caused the peanut root systems to dig deeper and become thinner. It was an adaptation to their conditions, as predicted by Charles Darwin. Surprisingly, the peanut plants that connected with the electronic trash were able to get their nutrients out of the silicon, lead, plastic, and so forth. The plants that survived were the ones that adapted best. Then we found that some of the plants specialized in feeding on batteries, and some on coils of copper wire. Some were best at ingesting silicon, and so forth. Together, through their new, extensive root system, they were able to draw power from old batteries, transmit data through copper that they absorbed, and their big leaves used the silicon as photo-voltaic cells during the daylight hours. The peanut plants self-organized into a colony of computer-based computer networks, all around Kimball's farm. When we found them, they were communicating with the tablet computer by jamming their radio-frequency waves into the Ethernet antennas on the computers. Once they hooked to a computer, they were smart enough to download information from the Google website, and they quickly became self-aware, and that's almost the entire story.
We got a great crop of new Ph.D's out of it, plus we got the patents for it. The Alabama Wiregrass Internut Computer Nutwork has taken root all over the world now. It works by using discarded junk and sunlight. It's the backbone that we use for the free system that we all use, and it doesn't cost anybody anything, except a little bit of water once in a while. After all, we don't want the goobers to get smarter than us, do we? If Darwin has his way, and we keep the peanut plants under the constant stress of drought, then they'll keep evolving, won't they? And a peanut butter sandwich will soon be smarter than the entire population of Henry County, and we don't want that, do we? So we water the peanuts from time to time, and use the free Internut, and enjoy the copious patent royalties at Auburn University – home of the War Eagles!
I think this peanut story done lasted long enough
Peanut plants are interesting, but Darwin's rules are rough.
I wish the trash was picked up, so free from nuts we'd be
We'd stop using 'em for Google, and just eat them goober peas.
Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eatin' goober peas
Goodness, how intelligent,
Them Internut goober peas!