Priebe's analogy

The memory hierarchy is one of the abstractions in computer architecture that has withstood the test of time for at least the past 30 years. It was a lot simpler in the '80s, since computers did not have caches and while mainframes had access to tape storage, most microcomputers did not have hard disk drives.

There are many figures of merit to memory. The most important consideration is the distinction between size and speed: you can have one or the other. There are frontiers to what is possible with memory using today's technology. There is no memory that has the capacity of a modern hard disk with the access time of an CPU register, even for all the money in the world. However, since a computer needs to be able to execute programs using instruction and data memory very quickly, and it needs to store large files for future use, there need to be present multiple levels of memory in all digital systems except for the most very basic embedded systems. Other considerations exist: cost per gigabyte, reliability, physical size, and expandability.

Volatility

An unmentioned characteristic of the fastest memory is that it is invariably short-term. It is possible to execute code that rewrites the entire register file a million times in the blink of an eye. The SRAM on the processor, known as the cache, is short-term memory for the processor and it is constantly updated to whatever is most likely to be used by the processor, possibly changing every entry in the table every time a new process is completed. DRAM modules, historically and still known as "main memory," need to be constantly refreshed and they vanish when the power is out. Flash memory is persistent semiconductor memory, but compared to a disk it cannot be written as frequently; the mean longevity of flash-based memory as of this writing is about 10,000 writes; nevertheless, manufacturers as of 2013 are capable of warrantying SSDs (solid-state drives, or hard drives based on flash) to the same length as conventional disk drives. Nevertheless, the cost per gigabyte of semiconductors is much more than magnetic disk platters, so HDDs remain dominant for persistent storage at this time.

The bad old days

In the beginning, there was obviously no defined hierarchy. However, even the earliest machines had registers, even if it was only an accumulator for intermediate arithmetic results. The computer programs of the 1940s to 1960s were mostly arithmetical, designed to provide mathematical solutions to artillery trajectories, business solutions, and bookkeeping batch processing. Instructions and data still had to be entered into the machine's memory from punched cards or tape, and the "main memory" went through some ugly experimentation (UNIVAC used mercury delay line memory) until in 1954 it settled on magnetic core memory. This had a great run, but by the end of the 1970s it had been totally superseded by semiconductor-based DRAM.

All of these memories were slow (DRAM is still very slow compared to CPUs today and it will never catch up), but the main performance bottleneck has almost always been getting data into memory. It took far longer to enter the punched cards and read them into the machine than it did to execute the instructions. Although memories became larger and could store ever more complex programs, they were always outpaced by the demands of programs. Efficient memory usage was especially critical on the small-scale microcomputers that were the vanguard of the PC revolution in the early 1980s. These had a small amount of ROM that was always loaded when the computer was powered on to run the BIOS; the cheaper 8-bit home computers like the VIC-20 and Apple IIe did not have hard disk drives and this untouchable ROM was the only persistent memory on the machine, save for external floppy disks. The IBM PC started shipping with a hard drive in 1983, and eventually everybody else got the idea.

Does anyone miss reading programs into memory on microcomputers using floppy disks, or, even worse, compact cassettes? Neither do I. Computers sucked back then. I can be nostalgic about some aspects of old technology, but we should be infinitely grateful for what the past 20 years has brought us in terms of computing.

In the 1980s, the processor rarely had access to any on-chip memory aside from the register file, and coders in assembly (or compilers, for that matter) routinely used as many of the registers as they could, so it was impossible to use them for any kind of storage. DRAM was universally used to load programs, but, as previously stated, was just as slow relative to the CPU then as it is now. To get around this problem, Intel started putting L1 cache memory on-chip for the 486 processor, and with the Pentium Pro they finally had L1 and L2 caches. Cache memory stands alongside pipelining and multiple cores as one of the most important breakthroughs in microprocessors. Since then we've added L3 cache as well, since the roles of each cache level have changed a bit with multiple cores on the same die, but the memory hierarchy has remained in the same form since c. 1995.

Priebe's analogy*

All of the various types of memory have different roles to play. They are all needed in some way. All general purpose computers built nowadays will have a CPU with a register file, onboard cache, and will need RAM on the motherboard, and will probably also need an SSD or HDD. For truly massive data storage, tertiary storage sits below the disk.

To understand the role they each play, and the timeliness versus capacity tradeoff, I'll share with you Priebe's analogy. Suppose you are watching a football game at home. You are responsible for providing access to beer whenever one of your friends runs empty.

1. All beer enters your mouth from a bottle in your hand. Think of a beer in your hand as a register (and when everyone present in the party has a beer in their hand, you may be said to be fully utilizing the register file). It is so quickly available that it is practically no latency. However, just as you can only hold one beer in your hand, the register file can't hold much data, perhaps on the order of hundreds of bytes.
2. You could go to the fridge each time someone wants a beer (perhaps like you once did in the olden days) but you have yourself a fancy cooler onsite. Think of the cooler as the cache. This cooler also provides a short access time, although not as quite as short as bringing the bottle to your lips, you can still lean over, flip the lid, and grab a cold one in a few seconds. It takes maybe ten times longer to do this than to drink from a beer that is already in your hand, but this can't be helped. If you use an operand in the register for as long as you can and consistently find what you need in the cache, it's the best possible outcome.
3. The fridge is the lowest level of access that could be described as readily available. Think of the fridge as main memory. You're going to take a couple minutes to get what you need and load the cooler back up, making it much less convenient. However, it is still basically present. If someone had beer in their fridge, they would treat it like it was on the premises. Going into memory is a distinct penalty from using the cache, but it is only thousands of times slower. I guess if we wanted to make it realistic, the main memory access should take hours compared to the cache access! Still, as we're going to see, it could be a lot worse.
4. You have a large party and they consume all the beer in the fridge! If the fridge is empty, this is a very bad thing. You can't cancel all the festivities, but everyone is in for a long wait. You have to go to the store to get more beer. Think of the supermarket as the disk drive, or secondary storage. The difference between walking to the fridge to retrieve even one beer compared to driving through heavy traffic and standing in an enormous checkout line to purchase a new supply of beer, which you had to get at the rearmost aisle, is somewhat analogous to the difference between a memory access and a disk access. Except that a disk access is on the scale of milliseconds, which amounts to millions of cycles. It's massively slower than main memory, so it's truly a tragedy for performance whenever a disk access occurs (sometimes through a page fault), but its size is practically unlimited for most purposes.
5. For desktops, the disk is as far down as the hierarchy goes and it is where the example ended in class. However, I personally wanted to carry it further! If an organization had implausibly high demands for beer and denuded an entire store of its supply, they would just go to another one, and another until their demands were met. Likewise, a user who needed more storage space than a single disk would simply have to buy more disks until the demand was satisfied. However, there are businesses whose sole role is to deal in beer and provide it to people, and for them, their own supply might exceed that of any supermarket's supply, so it makes sense that they would incorporate a layer of supply that went above and beyond going to the store and buying some. Likewise, there are archives and databases of tertiary storage which store petabytes of data, far more than any individual would normally acquire, and stores them on magnetic tape libraries, swapping between sections of the library as needed. Accessing data on a tape archive amounts to billions of cycles.  It's so slow that, using the same time scale as the previous examples, you could think of tertiary storage as founding a brewery and building it from the ground up to be one of the world's largest breweries. It's incredibly, agonizingly slow, but archives do need to exist to back up data in huge quantities, just like someone had to spend the time to make a successful brewing company, or else we wouldn't have beer available to us in the first place.

*- This analogy was mentioned in a lecture of my introductory computer architecture class as taught by Dr. Apan Qasem in Spring 2013. Dr. Roger Priebe is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Texas State University, my alma mater. Dr. Qasem is an Assistant Professor at the same institution.

Why I feel that time travel is necessarily impossible

When considering time travel, I feel it is necessary to weigh in with as logically complete an argument as I can muster. I do not know about the progress that may have been done with subatomic or massless particles. I do not claim that time travel of these objects may be found to be achievable by human technology. I do claim that these events are necessarily infinitesimal: if there is found to be a wall of progress, beyond which certain diminutive particles become too massive to transport, or beyond which the duration of the time displacement becomes too great to affect, then my points below will be just as valid.

My argument here is against travel through time of macroscopic objects, up to and including human beings. The time travel allowable must be of a non-negligible quantity. Let us say 1 second, but for pedantic readers, many important things have happened in less than 1 second, so you can go as low as you like, say 1 ms or 1 us. I do not believe that time travel (into the past) of massive objects, for non-negligible periods of time, is physically or logically possible.

1) What limitations do I propose of the term massive?

The limitations of “massive” are not hard and fast. If it is technically possible to transport 1 g of mass, then it will likely become possible to transport 100 kg, or 1000 kg or more. But this development is not necessary for my point to remain valid. If it is not possible to transport 100 kg, 1 g is enough mass for a suitably advanced microcomputer to influence past events. Even if 1 g is not possible, 1 mg of VX nerve gas could be sent back in time to the exact spot in which Hitler was standing in 1923, and kill him. As we drift downwards to other small quantities, there approaches a point in which the displaced object is too small to make any perceivable difference; that is what I would refer to as the cutoff point of “massive.” Something that is the mass of an electron naturally has nonzero mass but I would not refer to it as “massive.”

2) Is there just one timeline?

If there are multiple universes, and each event divides the present universe into parallel universes, this is in accordance with the “multiverse” theory. This means that a “timeline” doesn’t really exist; at best, going back in time would be to travel backwards from the present universe (the “leaf” of an infinite and constantly expanding binary tree of universes) along any of an infinitely long path of parent universes. If this theory is accurate, then time travel to the past is not logically impossible. Even if one were to go back in time and kill him or herself as an infant, the ramifications to the “present day” would be felt in a parallel “present day” universe in which the traveler did not exist. Since he must have lived in a divergent timeline in order to become an adult, no paradox exists.

The multiverse theory cannot be disproved at this point in time, but I do not feel that it is a valid model.  It is fairly magical and whimsical. If all events led to another set of universes based on the possible outcomes, then there would be an infinite number of universes. The observable universe that we know at the present moment is finite, and so it is possible that universes could communicate with each other. My argument here is not an appeal to ridicule, since the notion of communicating with other universes is strange but not inherently impossible, but that if communication could possibly exist, the infinite sophistication of technology that would come about through time travel would render it inevitable that in the present universe in which we currently exist, evidence of this communication would be manifest. Since such evidence is not manifest, I am inclined to disagree with the multiverse theory.

3) What constitutes physical or logical impossibility?

Something can only be definitively stated to be impossible if it causes logical error. This is to say,  if it defies logic for such a condition to exist. 2+2 = 5 is impossible. Using mathematical rigor that is beyond my ability to competently provide, it can be proven that 2+2 = 4. For something to be impossible, it must result in a paradox. Paradoxes are by their very definition impossible and unachievable. The Novikov self-consistency principle essentially states the same. It is basically a tautology, and of course like all things scientific it can be denied, but if you contend that paradoxes ARE possible, then you defy all existing human logic and you will have a very hard time creating a new one to suit your beliefs.

4) What is the grandfather paradox?

This is a very common theoretical paradox. An individual travels back in time and kills his own grandfather, thus making his own existence impossible. This constitutes a paradox in a one-timeline universe because he was never alive to kill his grandfather, but this event definitely happened in the past. There are lots of paradoxes, but I will use this one.

Having qualified these terms, I have a few premises (bulleted) that I want the reader to accept.

•  If time travel caused paradoxes to exist, then time travel must necessarily be impossible, since paradoxes are by definition impossible.

This should not be controversial. If you are a multiverse fan or you have some sort of alternate theory, then you are probably shaking your head since nothing near and dear to you is under assault yet. But let me go onward.

• A one-timeline universe in which time travel to past periods with macroscopic objects for non-negligible periods of time is possible, results in intentional attempts to create paradox.

This is a direct assault. I think it is crucial that this premise is accepted and I will go to all lengths to ensure that it is. I’ll start with an example in the form of one of my favorite middle-school novels, the very brilliant Timeline by Michael Crichton, published 1999. Robert Doniger, the ruthless founder of a technology company that invents time travel, gives us a monologue on why the grandfather paradox is invalid. He says that the traveler might have the most tenacious will to commit the act but the mere fact that history and his own memory records differently means that the act must not have happened. Something must have stopped the traveler and preserved the timeline. It could be as minor as getting second thoughts, or it could be as extreme as the grandfather shooting first and killing the traveler. Whatever the means, paradoxes do not occur.

Doniger’s explanation is not very convincing because it comes from the perspective of a writer of science fiction. The writer of science fiction often depicts the origins of time travel, gives us a good story to read, and never has to contemplate what would happen if, instead of one time travel journey, there were an infinite number of time travel journeys.

Maybe the perpetrator of grandfather paradox simply fails en route almost all the time. Maybe even the best-laid plans of geniuses to create paradoxes are somehow foiled. Maybe there are 1 million time travel events over 1000 years, trying to cause paradoxes, and somehow each one of them was defeated before it changed the timeline in any impossible way.

But we are talking about an INFINITE number of time travel events, which makes 1 million the same as zero. If there is any possibility of causing a paradox, if somehow even the most foolproof method of just going back in time to change history is always foiled, we should examine the preponderance of probability, as I refer to it. What is more probable? 1) Time travel is possible and an infinite number of time travel events somehow do not lead to a single activity that causes a time paradox; 2) Time travel is not possible, making it unnecessary to prevent every conscious effort to create a paradox.

I’m going to keep hammering on about infinity. Of course a time paradox isn’t “supposed to happen”, but how much probability can stack against it? If a time traveler came to the past with a million bombs, each of which is 99% likely to work, and every single one is a dud, is that more unlikely than time travel being impossible? But that’s not even fanciful. Let’s propose some other things that very definitely would happen in an infinite number of time travel events.

1.       A scientist and his colleague sit together in a sealed room for 10 minutes motionless. They have a time machine which can take one of them back exactly 5 minutes and can only be engaged from a remote console; the time travel machine will self-destruct in 15 minutes. At the 10 minute mark, one of the scientists goes back in time 5 minutes with a katana and decapitates the other scientist (sitting motionless), making the journey impossible.

2.       A pregnant woman who knows that her child will be born with a defect from the father goes back in time 6 months and persuades her earlier self not to have sex with that particular man.

3.       A very dedicated Japanese Imperial sympathizer goes back in time to 1945 and just minutes before the Trinity blast in Alamogordo, he arrives and sabotages the device on the spot. The test is declared a failure and Fat Man is not dropped on Nagasaki, which means that WWII does not end in August 1945, in contravention to known history.

4.       A Nazi sympathizer goes back in time and demonstrates his technology to the Germans. They bring their armies of 1942 and 1943 back to 1941, more than tripling the size and power of the force for Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet Union capitulates in 1941. Thereafter, the Germans conquer the world, in contravention to known history. They ostensibly preserve the "new" timeline by remembering to send exactly the same armies back in 1942 and 1943.

5.       The original inventor of time travel is identified by a hater of time travel, who goes back in time and kills the inventor.

All of these and millions more paradox attempts are guaranteed because time travel will perpetuate itself. Once time travel is invented, it will be used to go back in time, and then exist at a previous time period. Eventually the time travel events will encompass every moment. The leads me to the next main premise of my argument.

• Time travel’s existence will lead to an infinite number of time travel events, and an infinite number of attempts to create paradox.

As a prelude, let me address why each and every single time travel event can’t be managed so as to not cause paradoxes. I need a new example: Time Squad, a Cartoon Network show from the early 2000s.

This cartoon is actually pretty entertaining because it shows revered historical figures to be totally different from the way posterity records them. It shows Abraham Lincoln as a hooligan who has to be “reformed” by the Time Squad. If we suspend our disbelief concerning the fact that Lincoln’s second life was kept secret from the press of the 1860s, then their activities make total sense. We know that Abe Lincoln was president 1861-1865, and that he fought and won the Civil War, and that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Time Squad did not alter the past to change history. They went back into time to ensure that history was preserved in its current form. This causes no paradoxes, and it’s completely logical in a one-timeline universe. Of course they went back in time! Because somebody had to have gone back in time to help these historical figures- it obviously happened in the past, even if nobody knew about it. This is totally plausible even in the one-timeline model.

The problem is that Time Squad is made up of responsible persons who have not intervened in ways that are contrary to recorded history. They have not done anything that flagrantly violates what we acknowledge as fact. But they are one team working in a very regimented way with a very limited number of time travel events. If time travel were a real human technology, the infinite amount of time would tend to make it widespread.

I propose the following set of assertions that support my contention that an infinite number of time travel events follows from the mere invention of time travel.

1.       Human beings may endure catastrophes that set them back hundreds or thousands of years in technology, but on an overall trend, they must inevitably get higher in technology.

2.       If a technology exists once, there must exist a means, however complicated and expensive, to replicate it. Nobody has yet made a device so miraculous that its purpose cannot be met by a reverse-engineered device. We are not talking about what is “practical” to replicate. The pyramids could not be practically made again unless hundreds of billions of dollars were spent, and the workforce simply wouldn’t stand for it, but it is theoretically possible.

3.       Technology tends to become more widespread over time, inexorably and despite the best efforts and intentions of government and organizations and communities. We are at a point in the 21^st century where nuclear weapons could potentially be developed by most of the world’s countries. Almost all of them may choose not to do so, but as far as time travel is concerned, it would only take one exception to cause a time paradox. If North Korea developed time travel technology, it would spell the end.

4.       Free will does exist, and there are people who do want to see the world destroyed. Even if it takes millennia to happen upon such an evil person who would use time travel to contradict history, the passage of time will generate so many time travel events that the presence of nefarious intentions is assured in the long run.

5.       There is no human extinction event that will wipe out people before time travel technology can spread. This may be the hardest for some people to swallow. But if you consider that humans would have a desire to prevent the extinction of their species, if most of the world were rendered uninhabitable for a long time, one would reasonably predict that the nation or entity that controlled time travel would save itself from the extinction event by going into the past before the event. If you believe that extinction will come before time travel is even discovered, then you’re dodging the question of whether it’s possible or not. We have to assume that time travel WOULD be discovered before extinction, or else there is no point in discussing it.

6.       Going onward from Premise 5, if a nation or group of people would choose to avoid an extinction event by going backwards into the past or forwards into the future, then the timeline becomes basically circular. At any point on the timeline there are an infinite number of people who have chosen to avoid death by going into the past, because these people who went into the past inflated the population of previous populations, who later grew into the future population that also went back into the past to live there as well. Perhaps this doesn’t cause any visible paradoxes on its own;  maybe overcrowding is prevented by colonizing other planets. Perhaps censuses are no longer taken. Maybe the extinction-avoiders implement a government that kills off most of their population and rigidly limits the number who can be saved, so as to avoid interfering with the past timeline. However, the presence of this circularity does still make the number of time travel events virtually infinite, and see Premise 4 for a treatment of the ramifications of that condition.

The hardest part of my argument is yet to be made. We are at the point now, I hope, where you agree that time travel will create a “circular” timeline, if only one timeline exists.

D.      An infinite number of time travel events means that in the long run, a paradox is guaranteed to occur.

I know, you’re thinking “How can he say that?” If paradoxes are impossible, of course there must be some way to make sure that they do not happen. I propose that the actual method of not creating paradoxes is by time travel not existing in the first place, since if it did exist, there would be a million trillion billion quadrillion people at every second in the entire universe trying to go back in time and screw up the timeline. Whether they used reliable tools and obedience of solid mechanical rules, or half-hearted and poorly planned attempts, every action has to be counteracted by increasingly improbable counteractions. The timeline could only be preserved if there was an equally infinite number of “time preservers”, like the Time Squad, preemptively preventing paradoxes. However, their job too would become impossible, since the presence of infinite numbers of future travelers in the past would make the witness of such events unavoidable. Right now, if time travel existed, somebody from the year 2145 would unquestionably be trying to blow up a bomb in your neighborhood, and even if it took a million tries for such a person to successfully get to the year 2012 with a bomb, and even if it was defused at the last second, you would still bear witness with your own eyes to time travelers. A billion time travelers might somehow keep a secret, but an infinite number of time travelers would with certainty have success in making time travel known to previous generations.

I have met with some resistance on the topic of assuming time travel would be developed before extinction, if time travel were possible. Let us assume that extinction occurs; the argument becomes easy:

Premise: Time travel is not discovered before extinction of intelligent life.

Premise: Extinction causes the end of future technological developments.

Premise: Without future technological developments, nothing new can be discovered.

Premise: If time travel is never discovered, it remains impossible.

Conclusion: Time travel remains impossible.

If you have no further objections (please add them in the comments), then I’d like to condense my argument to conclude.

Premise: Time travel is discovered before extinction of intelligent life.

Premise: If time travel caused paradoxes to exist, then it must necessarily be impossible, since paradoxes are impossible.

Premise: A one-timeline universe in which time travel to past periods with macroscopic objects for non-negligible periods of time is possible, results in intentional attempts to create paradox.

Premise: Time travel’s existence will lead to an infinite number of time travel events.

Premise: An infinite number of time travel events means that in the long run, a paradox is guaranteed to occur.

Conclusion 1: Time travel in one timeline will generate paradox.

Conclusion 2: Time travel within one timeline is impossible.

Hope I’ve made you think. For a more entertaining story, let’s change gears to a most patently incorrect treatment of time travel, along with my most hated phrase: “ripple effect.” Of course I am talking about Back to the Future.

The most agonizing part for me about Back to the Future and the other two sequels is the notion that although there is one timeline, the past can be changed to affect it, even as a future observer traveling into the past.

Where does the Doc make it clear that there is one timeline? When he suggests that a paradox could arise. If there were more than one timeline, then paradoxes couldn’t occur. If Marty actually failed to get his mother to fall in love with his dad in 1955, then there would exist an alternate 1985 in which Marty McFly never existed, but that is obviously not the 1985 from which he came and of which he had memory. There would be no paradox here, just diverging timelines. If Marty stayed in 1955 for 30 years, he would witness an alternate 1985 that was distinct from his own memory, because the point of divergence occurred when he traveled back to 1955 and started a new timeline.

If there is only one timeline, then nothing like the “ripple effect” can occur. Marty being born around 1967 is an established fact. He knows when he was born. There does not exist any doubt about the fact that he was born, because he is a living, breathing teenager. If Marty could go back in time to make himself not exist, then he couldn’t have existed to go back in time to do it, because there is one timeline. A paradox is by definition impossible, so it’s imaginary to even consider what a paradox might be like. Let’s say that Marty failed spectacularly in getting his mom and dad to hook up in 1955. Let’s say that he actually just abandoned Lorraine without success and returned to 1985. He didn’t de-materialize. The timeline would have to remain intact. It would come out later that Marty’s parents were lying about kissing for the first time at the Enchantment under the Sea dance, and they got together later. Marty’s world could not be changed when he returned to 1985. George would still have to be bullied by Biff, because that is what happened in the one timeline. If Marty’s old 1985 showed his dad as a weak wimp, then unless he was in The Matrix or being fed some kind of virtual reality simulation, that was the only real 1985, and when he gets back his dad must still be the same weak wimp.

This happily precludes paradoxes. But it means that the ripple effect is garbage. If they were going back in time to prevent Biff from becoming rich, then their deeds done in 1955 predated Biff becoming rich in 1958-1985, and so it could never have happened in the first place. In our single timeline, they would have arrived in 1955 and burned the sports almanac three years before Biff ever won his first horse race, and so Biff would never have won all that money, and he never would have taken over Hill Valley, and Biff’s matchbook would either have to say that he was a casino owner or a car detailer, but it couldn’t possibly be blurred from one to the other based on meddling with the past. The past predates the present; the past has already happened relative to the present. The ripple effect is itself a paradox, because it allows the time traveler to change events in the past that would have affected the motivation to do the travel in the future, even when removing the problem.

The problem is not that paradoxes are possible, but that BTTF’s creators have taken liberties with the possible effects of time travel. Everything that is done by a time traveler in the past must have already influenced the future. It would create no paradoxes whatsoever if a man was his own grandfather. Perhaps he knew that his grandmother was a single parent but did not know who her lover was, and when he went back in time he had sex with her as a young woman, causing the creation of his family in the first place. His memory is intact, everything happened in a way consistent with the one timeline. Consequently, the very fact that Biff is rich in 1985 must be part of the timeline, and if they tried to go back to 1955 to stop it, they could not stop it from happening. Something would have to have intervened to stop it. The proof is in 1985. How could Biff be rich if he never got the almanac 30 ears ago? Moviegoers don’t really ponder the fact that the decision to stop Biff becoming rich came 30 years after it had to have happened or not, and consequently that bit of history was already written.

Six weird automotive crushes

Think back to when you were in 6th grade or so. When the opposite sex was starting to become interesting to you. For some it was earlier or later than others. Myself, at about that time, I actually hurt a girl's feelings by refusing to be interested, simply because I wasn't ready yet to "like" girls. Sorry Ali! In retrospect, you were very pretty, very nice, and I was an idiot.

As far as boys are concerned, there was usually a "prettiest" girl who gathers all of the affection and is the first girl in the class to figure out how to use it to gain power over boys. The others will probably learn later. But this girl is used to getting all the attention. She's Ferarri. Ironically, her prettiness makes her such an obvious choice, that it becomes boring to think of her.

In comparison, there are are utterly plain girls who do nothing interesting at all. This would be the Toyota Camry or the fourth-gen Ford Taurus. If you like these models, you are akin to the man who genuinely wants a completely vanilla marriage with no surprises or headaches, but no passion whatsoever. Maybe I'm just jealous because I'm not so easily pleased, but I kinda hate you guys.

Just as with women, there are choices of automobile which are esoteric and cannot easily be explained. You'd lack the ability to convince someone to love her as much as you do, but you don't even want to try: the exclusivity of your love makes it a bit more special.

6. Isuzu Impulse Turbo

Mm, pizza.

What's an Impulse? It was also known abroad as the Isuzu Piazza, which sounds like it should have been a great name in the US since so many of us love pizza.

Joe Isuzu in the 1980s and 1990s was such a blatant, humorous liar, that he charmed viewers into liking Isuzu even when their product was occasionally regarded as the most uninspired that Japan had to offer (although still probably better than most American cars in the mid-1980s).

Modern Isuzus (those made in the late 90s to today) betray the utterly negligent management they received from GM. Seems like the design team for almost every model (Ascender, Axiom, i-Series) just took a vanilla GM design and added some clunky metalwork to the front. Maybe somebody at Isuzu had a fetish for braces? Metal dental work is the only consistent piece of design language from this brand until it foundered in 2008. 

Isuzu's best hour was in 1968, with the pretty and luxurious 117 Coupe, which looks as though someone took a second-gen Corvair coupe and gave it a DOHC motor and Euro-luxury interior. They've never been bold like Mazda or Honda, but they can do competent engineering.

The Impulse is refreshingly interesting to behold and a fairly good performer with a 2.0L turbo-4 cranking out 180 hp. Still, it's not so much a car as a prop in this ridiculous commercial. If I owned one, I swear that I would tell people with a totally straight face that it does 950 mph. In the meantime, even at 9.5 mph, it should be pretty entertaining to drive with a big 80's turbo (read: incredible turbo lag) and rear-wheel drive. At the time, the latter was already becoming uncommon among all cars, even performance machines. The RWD layout of this car was still de rigeur in 1980 when it was launched, but by 1990 when it was time to redesign, they switched to wrong-wheel-drive and ditched the funky cheese-wedge styling for a new body so featureless that I can't even be bothered to remember what it looks like.  

The mainstream Japanese giants Toyota, Honda, and Nissan never seem to have financial difficulties or take big risks. This makes it hard for me to love them.  It's easy to forget that there are small, troubled Japanese automakers too. Unique Subaru and plucky Mazda are the only standard-bearers, with Isuzu and Suzuki dead and Mitsubishi not far behind it. Sure, a CRX Si would be better in every tangible way (except that it's front-wheel drive) but the little Isuzu is the underdog. The Impulse is not quite good enough to win on points, but it does win your heart for trying. The wedge shape and that fabulous commercial make it a car that I unexpectedly love.

Ever met her?
Nope, I've never even seen one in person. I doubt that it would enthrall me as much as it did when I was a young'un. The cost of entry would likely be cheap, but it's not a common car to see. If I am in a situation where I can blow some money on a cheap, fun little machine and this pops up, I might do it.

_________________________________________________________________

5.     Chevrolet Berettz GTZ 

If you're gasping for breath with laughter, just take it GT-EZ (see my terrible pun?) and think about how advanced the Quad-4 engine was when it debuted in 1988. At a time in which the base V8 in a Camaro put down 190 hp, the Quad-4 put down 180 hp and nearly as much torque. It also happened to a be a four-cylinder engine with just 2.3L displacement and no turbocharger. Madness to see such a product from an American company.

But when you add in the Beretta name, it's like multiplying by zero. Nothing comes of it. I think no pair of names in history is as forgettable as Chevy Beretta and Corsica. They're like the annoying kid in gym class who doesn't bring deodorant and doesn't take showers at home. You don't really like him, even if he seems nice enough. He's forced to hang around with you because you're both in the same public school (kinda like GM forcing the Beretta and Corsica into showrooms for 9 years because the design was bought and paid for). But most crucially: you really don't care if he doesn't exist.

This is a GT, not a GTZ. But LOOK at that greenhouse!

Yep, that was the reviled Beretta. But I don't smell the body odor. It looks pretty nice to me. The front end, especially on the GTZ, is very clean. It's quite slick if you see one in good shape. 

The windows look cartoonishly big compared to the doors and the rest of the car. I reckon if you could lower the back fixed windows, you'd have a profile nearly as open and airy as a Renault Avantime. Suck in that oxygen and feel the Heartbeat of America! I also like how the magnificent rear end is even more 1980s than a DeLorean. It's just inimitable! And also how EVERY SINGLE GTZ came with body-colored wheels. That's just silly, and I approve.

For those who care, this car when new did 0-60 mph in 7.6 seconds and recorded the highest  slalom speeds for a front-wheel drive car of the time.

Ever met her?

I've seen oodles of them in my time, but I've never sat in one or driven one. Maybe all the squeaks and rattles would drive it off this list if I actually did. But this girl is like a freckled redhead who's not that pretty, or cultured, or even very reliable, but she fights for your attention even if you don't notice. And if you do, you might notice hidden talents.

_________________________________________________________________

4.     Bentley Turbo R

We're getting into serious desire here. Just say the name "Bentley Turbo" in your head in Darth Vader's voice and see if it doesn't give you goose pimples. Leave out the "R" at the end. It sounds extraneous. Just "Bentley Turbo" will suffice.

This is perhaps the most obvious choice on this list. But I pick it because it's still sporting like a Bentley should be, unlike all previous Bentleys of the 1950s through the 1980s, without carrying the enormous price tag of the subsequent Arnage that replaced it. The Bentley Turbo is a lot of car for the money, but it's really been totally overshadowed by the subsequent models from Bentley. 

The thing about this car is that it's like a little princess, except her standards are messed up. She doesn't actually cost very much. As princesses go (or as compared to other specialist European cars), she's actually rather reliable. But when your relationship does go sour, where do you find a therapist fit for a princess (read: mechanic who knows Bentleys)?

But this is a car with old-world British luxury, dignified beauty, real leather or genuine wood on every single touchable surface, and a turbocharged 6.75L V8 providing 300 hp and 660 Nm of torque. This modern classic that I've just described has good examples available in the US for under $20k, and maybe even cheaper if you live in the United Kingdom from which this princess came.

A package like that sounds like Anne Hathaway, but when you look at the price you'll swear that she's as attainable as the chick sitting next to you in your 11th grade English class. Of course, you will still deal with a bit of fussiness and daintiness. But buying this car is like deciding you want a totally perfect car that sometimes goes wrong, rather than a decent car that works all the time.

Ever met her?

No, but it's not for want of looking. I still see several on ebay all the time, so they are still floating around. After I graduate college and make more substantial income, I could seriously consider giving in to this infatuation. If I see a cream puff in Texas for $18k with a nice dark green paint coat, I might be driven mad.

_________________________________________________________________

3.     Alfa Romeo 164

I totally understand why nobody bought this car new. It was just too expensive for what it was. It's like a pretty girl with unbelievably high standards who chews out almost every guy who ever asked her out. And when she did find a guy, she picked his wallet clean, chastised him for every mistake he made, until he got fed up and left her. This carried on until the supply of willing suitors dried up.

If you pick up any Alfa that has always been in good shape, it's cost every single one of their boyfriends (excuse me, OWNERS) a pretty penny. Because if you break the chain of conscientious Alfa ownership, and sell it to someone who neglects maintenance, the Alfa Romeo will not stand for it. Every single system will independently fail in protest. The electrics will defy the laws of physics so as to fail at the worst time. I don't know Alfas personally, but I've read so many horror stories on the internet and heard enough on Top Gear to believe the doom mongers. 

But an Alfa is just so intrinsically perfect in so many ways. It's something that simply cannot be created outside of Italy. Alfa Romeo actually covers the inlet pipes of its 3.0L V6 in chrome, which is one aspect of the car that always seems pristine no matter how ragged the car is. It has a heart of gold. No matter how hard it is to free the car of its unwillingness to run, you feel like you're fighting the good fight and it's always worth it.

That beating heart exists in all Alfa Romeos, even if they don't have mainstream aesthetic appeal. On this note, enter the Alfa Romeo 164. 

It doesn't have mainstream appeal. It doesn't have the youthful appearance of a Spider, but it doesn't have the solid appearance of a Bentley or Mercedes. It's somewhere in the middle, and as it comes at a low point of world car design (c. 1990) it looks so dated that you'd really struggle to ever get an average American to believe it's a beautiful car.

Sharing a platform with Saab, Lancia, and Fiat allowed Alfa to produce what was probably their most reliable car to date. The 164 still had the same glorious 3.0L V6 and enthusiastic 2.0L TwinSpark as their previous models, but it was in a more modern package. It was comfortably sized for four adults, but was light enough to provide decent performance with the V6.

And WHAT an interior. I still think that the modernist way they arranged the center console is one of the most imaginative uses of a car interior ever. It's just undeniably gorgeous. Pardon the dreadful picture.

Ever met her?

I have seen one of these parked outside a junkyard, though its condition was nice enough to assure me that it wasn't being dropped off there. I actually had to pull over and take a look. It was white, the interior looked great, but it was a bit dusty on the outside. Still, it looks even better in the flesh than I can show you in the pictures. Regardless of that, you can see 164s going for insane low prices. Maybe not 1000 GBP like on the Cheap Alfa Romeo Challenge in Top Gear Series 11, episode 3, but definitely for $3-5k you have options. Certainly one of the cheapest Italian exotics around. If you want really low mileage and fastidious maintenance records, I don't see any options unless you go over $10k.

_________________________________________________________________

2.     Dodge Magnum

I'm going to take it down a few notches from the previous swoopy, silky Italian luxury sedan. How about a big ol' American wagon?

First I want to congratulate them for the name. For everyone around my age, the word "Magnum" meant one thing: the most powerful handgun available in Goldeneye 007 for N64, which was the best game in the world when it came out in 1997. I even preferred that Cougar Magnum to the bigger shotgun and RCP-90 because the Magnum's rate of fire and accuracy was surprisingly high. Kudos to Dodge for using a classic name (Dodge Magnum had been around before) and then resurrecting it when it had new meaning.

Wagons don't get any cred, but they're the ultimate vehicle. You have a car with rear wheel drive and ample size for family and hauling.  In the rear of the wagon, you have a place to sit and post up, like a tailgate on a pickup, except stuff doesn't get stolen out of the back! A station wagon with rear-wheel drive is also great because it puts more of the weight of the vehicle over the driven rear wheels, which improves grip. Compare that to an unloaded pickup, with very little of the vehicle's weight over the driven rear wheels, which can spin extremely easily.

Wagons also beat minivans because all minivans are front-wheel drive, and they're very top-heavy. Some (but not all) wagons are real-wheel drive, which is better. And all wagons are necessarily lower, longer, and wider (the Detroit styling mantra for 40 years) than minivans, which are top-heavy, bulbous, and tall. Pulling off a stylish wagon is not hard for Detroit to do if they try (just do a Google image search for any pre-1972 wagon shape, they all look nice).

The only downside to wagons is that no mainstream manufacturers are bold enough to release an all-new full-size RWD platform with a wagon option.

Except when Chrysler decided to launch its LX platform in 2004. This was a modern automobile platform that would go on to win awards when launched with the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger sedans. But the first of them all, the very vanguard of the entire range, was the Dodge Magnum wagon.

There's not a huge amount to say. What you see is what you get. The dash is a bit plasticky and it's not as luxurious as the Chrysler 300C, which I love (my uncle has one). But it's basically the same car, and so it has lots of space and everything is fairly ergonomic. The only thing I really hate is the green-blue glow of the dials, with which every modern Chrysler Corp. driver should be familiar.

The piece de resistance is that there were TWO trim levels with V8s. The R/T had a 340-hp 5.7L Hemi, and the SRT8 had a truly scary 425-hp 6.1L Hemi. Either one, I have no doubt, would be great fun. 425-hp V8 in a rear-wheel drive full-size American (made in Canada) station wagon. No more needs to be said. The only reason I'm calling this a weird crush is that they didn't sell many of them, and they killed it off in 2008 for no good reason. The last experiment with wagons went awry- the American people no longer have a taste for them. It's like a cute performance at a talent show by a pretty girl and for some reason everybody boos and I'm the only one who claps. And then the girl comes crying into my arms, holding onto me. Letting me be a knight in shining armor. Oh yes, wagon baby, you'll always have a place in my heart, even if nobody else loves you. It's an automotive fantasy!

Ever met her?

I suppose I should say yes, I have driven a Magnum when I worked at Brake Check. I was test-driving it after a brake job. But since it was a base 2.7L V6 with 150,000 miles, and needed suspension work which the owner refused, it wasn't exactly a great drive. Still, that doesn't put me off. I would love to own an SRT8 or R/T. Of all the recent Mopar products, I would have a Viper money-no-object. (Obviously!) But on balance, all things considered, I like the Magnum quite a lot. If I had to have exactly one car to do everything, this might well be it.

_________________________________________________________________

1.     Chevrolet Camaro (third-generation)

When I was 4 years old or so, the year was 1992 and they still made these new. I still saw them on a daily basis from the window of my mom's station wagon. And then I kept seeing them from the school bus when I started going to school. My very earliest memory of all automobiles, is me being awestruck by the styling of this car and the sound of its engine. Maybe I owe a thank-you to some loutish cretin who revved the engine at a red light in Toledo in the spring of '93 to scare some slowpoke next to him. Or maybe that memory never happened and I imagined it. Who cares?

For whatever reason, I was absolutely convinced in my young boy's heart that this car must be the fastest and coolest in the world. I didn't know any better. But that primitive desire has never left me. I've always wanted one.

Since about age 12, even after I knew better, I have always wanted to buy up the most perfect 1988 Camaro in the United States and paint it in the brightest metallic candy-apple red imaginable, and then transport it across the world to every continent, and act as a sort of impromptu "cultural ambassador" of the United States and its car culture. This car and the 1980s Chevrolet commercials spout optimism, freedom, confidence, integrity, and exuberance. These are what the world should think of America. We should not be thought of as nannying wimps who want to put 232 airbags in every dashboard, draft the most ridiculous business regulations conceived by humankind, and use one of the most bullying foreign policies ever seen on Earth since the Opium Wars.

I want to do EVERYTHING with it. I want to take it to England and have some old Englishman with a beard and an MG tell me that my car is "vulgar" and "excessive". Because I'll just smile and thank him for his opinion. I want to drive around the Arc de Triomphe with one of these. I want to overtake a Mercedes SL on the Autobahn, en route to a few white-knuckled laps at the Nurburgring. I want to drive it through Seoul at 7 mph, and let the V8's rumbly idle turn the heads of people who've never heard such an engine in their lives. I want to park it on the street in Tokyo and see what the curious tuner kids think of it. I want to drive it through Australia and mingle with the fascinating old muscle cars they have there. And, of course, I'm dying for any number of road trips across the USA, racking up miles while visiting any number of small western towns with their greasy diners and friendly local yokels.

I think this is a perfect cultural emblem of Americana. It's beautifully sculpted. It's cheap. It stands for fun and freedom. The 3rd gen will always be youthful no matter how many middle-aged people buy brand new Camaros. From the back, the front, the profile, and any angle in between, this vehicle is impossibly good-looking to someone who likes American design. And for me, even a 1967 Camaro or a Duesenberg SJ simply can't look as good.


As I grew older, and whenever I confided this desire to others, I was always laughed at. There is no shortage of hate for 80s GM products, especially the F-body. Here are some things that have been mentioned, and I'm not sure about all of them:

1. The dashboard was never properly fitted even when new, so some of the plastic was under tension; it loosens over time, and gets more squeaks and rattles than any other car.
2. The door hinges are not bolted on like normal. They are actually welded. This saves maybe 24 cents in the production process, but it means that after a few years the weight of those heavy doors opening on the welded hinges will cause sagging and misalignment.
3. The Fox-body Mustang was always dynamically better, with more power potential. And if you got the LX 5.0, it was cheaper than the Z-28 with 5.7L.
4. It came standard with a 2.5L Iron Duke 4-cyl engine with about 90 hp. If you got this in 1982 with the 3-speed automatic, it did 0-60 in 20 seconds, which is about as fast as a school bus towing a Boeing 747.
5. The ride was rock hard and it was so low with such a long hood that you'd never see out.
6. If you buy one, you must necessarily be trailer trash and/or wear a mullet. It's like a tattoo saying "I'm white trash."

But I don't care what they say. I love this car. I always will. Sometimes I find myself wanting it even more than a brand new Corvette. Just make it exactly like I remember it from when I thought it was the world's fastest car. I just want one because a part of me still believes it's the coolest car ever made. And I've never heard of anyone who feels the same way, so this must be an obsession particular to me. I am the only one who prefers this 80s machine over the original 60s pony car. This love feels extremely special and quite unique, and I'll never get sick of loving this little bastard, so it goes at the top of the list, even if I can't adequately explain why.

One of my friends tells me that I'm hopelessly stupid about this and that the Fox Mustang was always dynamically better, both when new and when modified. Tells me that at the dragstrip it couldn't hold its own. Tells me that you hardly see these cars in any serious performance situation, compared to other generations of Camaro, or contemporaneous Mustangs. But I don't care. This is all stuff that a guy has been told by his best friend when he's in love with a girl. Doesn't matter what that guy or anyone else says, you're in love!

Ever met her?

One of my uncles had a black 1990s Pontiac Firebird, but it was 4th gen, so it wasn't quite the same thing. I have ridden in a white 3rd gen Camaro which was owned by a friend in high school , but it wasn't a Z-28. I don't remember it being very roomy or refined, but to complain about that is like claiming that if you were God you'd make the sun slightly less bright and the moon slightly bigger. If the overall whole is so damn good, what makes me think it would be better if I tried to improve it? (That doesn't mean I won't upgrade the engine; I think a supercharged LT1 is in order.)

Updated: The barrier for entry is higher than it used to be for a vehicle in the same condition, but it's still extremely low. I routinely see these things in non-running condition for well under $1000, or in running condition for under $2k.  Find an ugly original one parked on a lawn and you can probably buy it with the loose change in your sofa if you made an immediate cash offer. Truly excellent examples (like the one I crave) are more than they used to be, but they're still in the neighborhood of $10k, which would only get you a halfway-completed project 1967 Camaro.

My favorite movie joke of all times

Maybe a bit of overstatement, but I watched this movie exactly 17 billion times (along with the other two) and I have never ceased rolling with laughter. Of course I'm talking about Back to the Future III, which was always a bit light on critical acclaim, but to me was every bit as humorous as the whole series.

Let's analyze the scene about which I'm talking. Marty and the 1955 Doc are excavating the Delorean time machine from the cave, which was sealed by the 1985 Doc in 1885, and has been in storage for 70 years, 2 months, and 13 days. Astounding!

The 1985 Doc explains in his letter from 1885 that the lightning bolt burnt out the time circuit control microchip. 1955 Doc, with no capacity to appreciate the function or importance of microelectronics, is confounded by the tininess of the parts, holding a small chip in his hands with a pair of tweezers and saying "Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big problem." For someone who has an idea about how big a paradigm change the VLSI revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was, it's humorous indeed to hear a genius spout such rubbish about the physical size of circuitry.

I say, how can anything as small as this control a circuit?
Where do you fit the relays?
I don't even see any vacuum tube sockets, Great Scott!

But for those who are not aware, let me quickly explain that there was no tendency whatsoever for circuits to be miniaturized in the 1950s. Components were still discrete and quite bulky. We must acknowledge that when the only consumers were big businesses, who needed ultra-reliable mainframes, miniaturization was not a very high priority. Only with the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs from 1961 to 1972 was there a confluence of big money and big demand for small, portable computers. The pattern of increased transistor density and smaller physical component size was established by the end of the 1960s, and intimated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1971 in his famous "Moore's Law". Flashback to 1955, when tubes were still used in most computers, and transistors only starting to be widely used (most Americans didn't notice the change, but by the late-50s and later most small transistor radios were Japanese-made). Solid-state electronics had not yet been invented, although Doc explains further in his letter that since transistors were invented in 1947, there does exist a crude means of performing the computing required by the burnt-out 1985 time circuit microcontroller. He also includes a schematic that will aid the 1955 Doc in replicating the design, perhaps not trusting his earlier self to be able to grasp it.

We have no doubt that the Doc is brilliant, whether in 1985 or 1955. But his American sensibilities are also very much a product of their times. Doc turns the broken part over and over again, trying to find some way of making sense of it. He's found the problem! Doc finally leans over to Marty and laughs:

Well, THERE'S your problem!

"No wonder this circuit failed; it says made in Japan." He says the word Japan with the same sort of accent as manure.

One of my late grandma's former neighbors, born in the 1950s, will tell you that there was once a time when you could simply look at a label and make certain that something was a steaming pile of garbage. The determining factor was if that label said "Made in Japan." It seems utterly impossible for current audiences to believe, but when Toyota first sold cars on the US market in the late 1950s, they were shockingly terrible. I am assured by my dad that these very early Japanese cars were much, much worse than the Hyundai Excels and Yugos which hit the market in the 1980s. The Toyota Crown was sold in the US from 1957 to 1960, at the pinnacle of Detroit's chrome-and-fin era. A paltry total of 287 were sold stateside, and it is believed that a mere 5 of them still exist today. Although the Japanese had nearly gotten their act together by 1955 on the home islands, in terms of exports they were still laughingstock. This was also a mere 10 years after World War II. Still clinging in the mind of the American public was the resounding defeat of the Japanese nation by the greatest technological force of arms in all of history, culminating in two atomic bombings. Subsequent examination of crude Japanese WWII small arms absolutely confirmed our prejudices that the Japanese were sandal-wearing buffoons who could not build anything with precision or high technology.

Marty: nintendo pwns tektronix lol 

But there's a very, very, VERY important generation gap between Marty McFly from 1985 and Doc in the 1950s. Marty looks over with almost no expression, seemingly expecting it to be a joke. Then after the briefest pause, he says "What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff's made in Japan." The 1980s sensibilities of Marty come colliding 30 years in the past, and the 1955 Doc is left with absolutely no way to reconcile this gap. He looks aside, set adrift by this assertion.

The only word to describe Doc's face is mortified. He gasps one word of response: "Unbelievable."

Unbelievable.

My friends, the makers of BTF III have just summarized 30 years of simultaneous technological change and unforseen cultural upheaval! If you belong to a certain generation called "Greatest" or perhaps even "Baby Boomer" you might be offended by Marty's generalization even to this day. But if you belong to my generation, it's simply hilarious to witness this kind of mindfuck going on in the brain of poor old 1955 Doc. It's so gloriously funny because it makes nationalistic prejudice seem positively infantile, and common sense fall flat on its face. It's even more funny if, like me, you grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, and your image of the national technology level of popular consumer goods was determined by how superior the 1980s Japanese Nintendo systems were to the 1970s American Atari systems. It's so funny to see this joke played out because because it's simultaneously true, unfair, offensive, and unexpected.

How much does the wiser 1985 Doc's sensibility differ? Well evidently he did use some forward-thinking Japanese-made circuitry in his time machine when he built it decades later. But there's another side joke in Back to the Future II where the Doc is flying the Delorean above Biff's car in 1955, trying to get the almanac from him:

Marty (viewing from binoculars): "There he is, Doc! Let's land on him; we'll cripple his car."
Doc: *slightly scoffing* "Marty, he's in a '46 Ford; we're in a Delorean. He'd rip through us like we were tinfoil."

1946 Ford vs. 1980s Delorean:
Overwrought American steel against computer-designed poorly-made-in-UK flimsiness.
No contest here.

Progress indeed! Who's to be believed? The old farts who say "They don't make 'em like they used to!" or the young pricks who have to have the newest tech? You decide.

I'm stuck in the middle on this one, and I think I always will be.