Moth in Relay
In 1947 a moth was found in a relay switch on the Mark II electromechanical computer, a true computer "bug." What's most interesting here isn't that an insect was found in the machine, but that the computer operator taped the moth into the logbook. It's almost as if the moth was trapped in a thin sheet of amber, preserved as the pre-digital ancestor of the tricksters within our own modern devices.
The insect was found by Grace Hopper (Wayback Machine link), a computer scientist and rear admiral in the US Navy. Google recently paid homage to Hopper with a "doodle" (below) showing her working on an early mainframe computer. Not only does the computer display an answer on a paper printout, but a moth also flies out at the end of the sequence.
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
Lincoln's shadow
Today is the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
Lincoln casts quite a shadow in history. There was a grand speech before Lincoln's at Gettysburg in 1863 by Edward Everett, a well-known orator.
Speaking for 2 hours and over 13,000 words Everett's speech was complex, referencing Ancient Greece and using terms in Latin. Today Everett's speech is largely "invisible."
Lincoln spoke only for 2 minutes, and his 272 words are inscribed on the Lincoln Memorial.
Assembled in the USA
Apple - Making the Mac Pro (2013)
I love videos like this, especially the “How it’s Made” series on the Discovery science channel.
The robotic ballet is mesmerizing, and it’s great that the new Mac Pro is assembled in the United States. With the complexity of the global marketplace, it seems unlikely that new high-tech devices could also be completely manufactured in the US though.
Google is producing the Motorola Moto X smartphone in the US too.
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
How the Enigma Machine worked
Murlyn Hakon of Bletchley Park explains how the Enigma Machine worked.
The remarkable thing about Enigma, is that when you press a letter on the keyboard and the subsequent enciphered letter lights up to the rear of the machine, the chances of that letter lighting up are nearly 158 million million million to 1.
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
Mavis Batey: Bletchley Park codebreaker
Mavis Batey was one of the codebreakers working at Bletchley Park during World War II. She recently passed away at age 92. Batey was part of the codebreaking team that ensured a successful landing for Allied forces on D-Day.
She initially worked in London, checking commercial codes and perusing the personal columns of The Times for coded spy messages. After showing promise, she was plucked out and sent to Bletchley to work in the research unit run by Dilly Knox. Knox had led the way for the British on the breaking of the Enigma ciphers, but was now working in a cottage next to the mansion on new codes and ciphers that had not been broken by Hut 6, where the German Army and Air Force ciphers were cracked. “It was a strange little outfit in the cottage,” Mavis said. Knox was a true eccentric, often so wrapped up in the puzzle he was working on that he would absent-mindedly stuff a lunchtime sandwich into his pipe rather than his tobacco: “Organisation is not a word you would associate with Dilly Knox. When I arrived, he said: 'Oh, hello, we’re breaking machines, have you got a pencil?’ That was it. I was never really told what to do. I think, looking back on it, that was a great precedent in my life, because he taught me to think that you could do things yourself without always checking up to see what the book said."
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
George Romero: It's not about the zombies
Horror film legend George Romero on zombies:
I always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism...
I think the zombies could be anything. They could be a hurricane or a tornado. It’s not about the zombies. The important thing to me is the way the people react to this horrible situation, misbehave, make mistakes and screw themselves up.
And I need to get a pair of those glasses too!
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
Quantum Computing and Pizza Bagel Entanglement
Google, NASA, and D-Wave are teaming up to take quantum computing to the next level.
The case or container of the D-Wave is much more empty than I had suspected. It’s so different from portable computing which seeks to maximize internal dimensions for power usage and heat.
The biggest question is the question itself – “we don’t know what the best questions are to ask that computer, that’s exactly what we’re trying to understand now” (Eleanor Rieffel @ 4:52 in the video above).
(via kottke.org)
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025 — I can’t help but think of Everything Everywhere All At Once)
Quantum Computing 101
Quantum Computers Animated, Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD Comics)
The illustrations for this video on quantum computing are fantastic, especially the "0/1" transition at 1:40.
(via Hacker News)
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
Rewiring Class Emails and Student Interaction with Piazza
In a previous post I wrote about the experience of teaching an online class as a TA. One of the primary tools we used for the course was Piazza, and it was instrumental in shifting the burden of email to a more open and constructive arena.
Infectious Information: History and the Dissertation Quarantine
On July 22nd, 2013, the American Historical Association published to their blog a statement regarding the embargo of dissertations (Wayback Machine link). The suggestion was for digital embargo periods to be lengthened from around 1-3 years to 6 years, so that new PhD graduates could revise their dissertation manuscript for the purpose of creating a book for publication. As a significant revision of the dissertation, this book would then become a major component within the process of applying for tenure.
The back-end of online classes
In "Who is Driving the Online Locomotive," (Wayback Machine link) Rob Jenkins asks some pertinent questions about the force and direction of online education. There is definitely the feeling that something is coming, and those who aren't prepared will be lost by the wayside...or flattened by the train. However, this feeling of online education as the next-big-thing has been palpable for a couple of decades now. The latest gust of wind in the sails has been the infamous MOOC, but it's really more about the intersection of budget cuts and the ubiquity of social networking. It's also very unfortunate that there is usually little discussion of the differences between types of online classes – a MOOC with thousands of participants is a very different thing from a small online-class of 40 students.
Digital pedagogy and the online classroom
A few days ago I finished grading for an online summer class, The History of Latin America (HIST75V). I was the TA (teaching assistant) for Professor Juliette Levy, and this was the first time that either of us had conducted an online course. We’ve both taught the traditional in-class version of this course many times, and the opportunity to transform our in-class materials and teaching styles into an online presence was quite exciting. Professor Levy and I are both from the University of California, Riverside, and the course itself was hosted through UC Online. This class was an accelerated summer course, only 3 weeks long, and the LMS (Learning Management System) was Canvas. We also used Piazza for a student question & answer forum (I’ll write more about Piazza in another post).
Hipsters and nice-looking web pages
Unintentional Hipster Faculty (Wayback Machine link)
Making a nice-looking Web page is just too hard. The physicists across the street are teleporting matter! But yesterday I had to read a tutorial on how to vertically center an image.
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
BAM Colloquium this Friday
Please join us for the Year-End Colloquium for Graduate Students in "BAM." Designated Emphasis in Book, Archive, and Manuscript Studies – http://bam.ucr.edu (Wayback Machine link)
Friday, June 7, 2013. 10:00am to Noon
English Department Conference Room (HMNSS 2212)
Presentations by Steve Anderson, Cori Knight, and Heather Van Mouwerik
Display of printshop projects by Rebecca Addicks, Ann Garascia, Cori Knight, Jessica Roberson, and Anne Sullivan
This will also be a celebration of the new Mellon Workshop Grant awarded to the Material Cultures of the Book Working Group – http://bookhistory.ucr.edu (Wayback Machine link)
(Revised and republished April 23rd, 2025)
CDH event: Animated Music Screening and Talk - May 30th
Cindy Keefer, Archivist, Curator & Director . Center for Visual Music
Preserving Visual Music : The Archives of the Center for Visual Music
THURSDAY . May 30, 2013 . 4:30 PM . INTN 1113 . Refreshments served .
Cindy Keefer, Director of the Center for Visual Music Los Angeles, will discuss and screen work by pioneers of kinetic art, abstract animation and pre-digital cinema from CVM's archives. CVM is a Los Angeles archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and abstract media. CVM preserves and promotes films by Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson, Charles Dockum, Mary Ellen Bute, Jules Engel, Harry Smith and others, as well as contemporary artists. Keefer will screen work from CVM's archives by Fischinger and Belson, plus Dockum's Mobilcolor Projections, Bute's Abstronics (an early oscilloscope film), a short Bute documentary, and more. She will also discuss Belson's now legendary 1950s Vortex Concerts, CVM's work with the Fischinger legacy, current preservation work, and Raumlichtkunst, the new HD 3-screen reconstruction of Fischinger's 1920s multiple-projector performances, recently exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Tate Modern, and scheduled for exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in summer 2013.
This is the last event Critical Digital Humanities will host for the 2012-2013 season. Please join us for this exciting presentation. [cdh.ucr.edu](http://cdh.ucr.edu)
(Revised and republished April 23rd, 2025)
The Quantum Cloud
Google Buys a Quantum Computer
Google did not say how it might deploy a quantum computer into its existing global network of computer-intensive data centers, which are among the world’s largest. D-Wave, however, intends eventually for its quantum machine to hook into cloud computing systems, doing the exceptionally hard problems that can then be finished off by regular servers.
It’s not very interesting on the exterior, just another black box – actually I wonder if there’s even a computer inside the black monolith in the image below. More pictures of the interior of the quantum “mainframe” would be great.
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
The "3000-pound spreadsheet machine"
If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today (Wayback Machine link)
Companies traditionally used the 402 for accounting, since the machine could take a long list of numbers, add them up, and print a detailed written report. In a sense, you could consider it a 3000-pound spreadsheet machine. That’s exactly how Sparkler Filters uses its IBM 402, which could very well be the last fully operational 402 on the planet. As it has for over half a century, the firm still runs all of its accounting work (payroll, sales, and inventory) through the IBM 402. The machine prints out reports on wide, tractor-fed paper.
This is pretty amazing. I’ve seen older systems in use recently, like Windows 95, but this is just extraordinary.
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
Keeping TaB with diet soda
TaB soda was named by an IBM mainframe (Wayback Machine link) – now it makes sense. The name was supposed to relate to keeping “tabs” on your weight (Wayback Machine link), rather than being an acronym for “totally artificial beverage.”
To obtain a list of potential names, William Mannen, chief programmer for data processing, programmed the company’s IBM 1401 (Wayback Machine link) mainframe computer to print all possible four-letter word combinations containing a vowel or vowel-sounding letter. The results took a day to print and contained more than 300,000 possible combinations. This list was narrowed down to 600 possibilities, which were then given to the legal department to check against existing trademarks. After legal narrowed the list again, TaB was chosen from among the final two dozen contenders. Why? Because it was distinctive and easy to remember, and it projected the desired image.
(via @melissaterras on Twitter)
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)
Yosemite - Summer 2012
About a month or so ago my wife and I went on a camping trip with some friends in Yosemite National Park. It was much warmer than we thought it would be, and there were even a few mild rain showers, but overall it was a wonderful trip. This wasn't my first time camping, but it was my first trip to Yosemite and the valley was just beautiful. We didn't branch out into the wilderness too much, as we were just there for a couple of days. After a long day of travel on foot, the pizza and beer at the Curry Village Pizza Deck (Wayback Machine link) was a lifesaver... more than once!
Sadly, it's come to light that several people who stayed in Curry Village's "signature tent cabins" were infected with hantavirus (Wayback Machine link) during the same time we were in Yosemite, and a few people have died. The cabins in question were poorly designed; they were built in 2009 after a rockfall from Glacier Point destroyed buildings and caused minor injuries (Wayback Machine link). The continued high risk of rockfalls (Wayback Machine link) has prompted the closure of other areas of the park as well. We camped in our own tent and never saw any mice, but we did hear a colossal boom and cracking sound in the late afternoon that we could only assume to be a rockfall somewhere in the valley.
Now on to the photos – I'm going to save all the silly, sweaty, hiking photographs for my personal file and just stick to some nice landscape shots.
The first picture is of the Wawona Tunnel View, this is the classic Yosemite picture that all first-timers just have to take. On the left side of this photo is El Capitan, in the center is Half Dome, and on the right side is Bridalveil Fall. There are many other rock formations in the largely granite, glacier-carved valley, but El Capitan and Half Dome are perhaps the most famous.