Most geeks already know about Charles Babbage‘s Difference Engine, but there was a nice piece on NPR this morning about it:
Charles Babbage, the man whom many consider to be the father of modern computing, never got to complete any of his life’s work. The Victorian gentleman was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn’t very good at politics and fundraising, so he never got the financial backing to finish any of his elaborate machine designs. For decades, even his fans weren’t certain whether his computing machines would have worked.
But Doron Swade, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has proven that Babbage wasn’t just an eccentric dreamer. Using nothing but materials that would have been available to Babbage in the 1840s, Swade and a group of engineers successfully built Babbage’s Difference Engine — and a version is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Having just watched “Longitude” about the construction and restoration of the first functional marine chronometers (and having seen reproduction of same at Greenwich), this seems, er, timely.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Daily Kos, General Musings, movies, Society, Survival, Violence
It’s always dangerous to quote yourself. But I think this is worthwhile:
“You think about those famous truths in our culture-about a son’s coming to adulthood and seeking to avenge his father’s death. It’s been a recurring theme in Western culture for centuries. Look at Shakespeare. The first ‘Star Wars’ movie was largely that.
“One of my favorite movies is ‘The Princess Bride.’ There you have one of the main characters, Inigo Montoya, say, ‘You killed my father. Prepare to die.’ And that refrain plays out through the entire movie. It is interesting because one of the things that same character says in the movie is: ‘There’s not a lot of money in vengeance.’ That’s a very insightful thing. I could not have allowed that to twist my life, to give me that sort of single-minded determination, to seek revenge in one way or another.”
At the mid-century point of his life, the pain is still there.
“Talented authors can explore these themes, but I was actually faced with dealing with it. My father was murdered and the man who did it was sentenced to death for that crime. But his sentence was commuted to a life sentence without parole by the court in the mid-1970s,” reflects Downey.
“If I dwelled on who he was and what he had done, there would have been a lot of rage that would have been given personification. I really wanted to avoid dwelling on the negative things. This man is presumably still in prison. I have tried my absolute best to ignore him. By distancing myself that way, I don’t feel like I have to seek vengeance personally. But the thought still crosses my mind every time I watch a movie that has that theme, every time I read a book or watch a movie, or an officer dies,” he adds.
That’s from page three of an article in this month’s POLICE magazine, titled “What Happens to the Children of Fallen Officers”.
Trust me, that was not an easy interview to give.
I’ve written about this subject before, and mentioned it in passing. It’s obviously, and appropriately, been a major factor in my life – one which has never been far from my awareness.
It’s almost trite to say “we are defined by the choices we make rather than the experiences we have,” as if life were just simply a game of cards where you sought to win some small pot of money. I know hard choices. Choices that have to be made again, and again, and again, in the face of ongoing societal pressures pushing you to make different choices. And because I have had to face this, I am much less inclined to pass judgment on those who have chosen poorly. I know full well – as lucky as I have been to have a loving wife, a loving family, and friends who care deeply – I know full well how close I have come to making poor choices myself.
Rage and vengeance are part of our heritage, part of what makes us human, part of what has enabled us to survive. That cannot be denied. But they are less important than love and community – which have allowed us to start to build a civilization.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to Daily Kos.)
Just when I was trying to be good about not buying more geeky SF stuff, BB had to post this:
Two of the many great selections from here: Last Exit to Nowhere
And they even ship to the US . . .
*sigh*
Jim Downey
The nasty bit of lower GI gak I mentioned earlier this week has been an ongoing joy since. Yes, I saw a doctor yesterday. No, it is nothing to worry about. Just a bug, probably viral, which has kept me more grumpy and less productive than usual.
But this news made me smile:
‘Alien’ prequel takes off
Ridley Scott attached to return as director
Twentieth Century Fox is resuscitating its “Alien” franchise. The studio has hired Jon Spaihts to write a prequel that has Ridley Scott attached to return as director.Spaihts got the job after pitching the studio and Scott Free, which will produce the film.
The film is set up to be a prequel to the groundbreaking 1979 film that Scott directed. It will precede that film, in which the crew of a commercial towing ship returning to Earth is awakened and sent to respond to a distress signal from a nearby planetoid. The crew discovers too late that the signal generated by an empty ship was meant to warn them.
Well, that last paragraph is a rather pathetic summation of the original film. Here’s the original trailer:
Which doesn’t explain much, granted, but sure captures the feeling a whole lot better.
Anyway, having Scott involved should be good for the project. We’ll see.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
Went to see the new Harry Potter movie last night (which I enjoyed), and of course had to sit through about six days worth of “Previews of Coming Attractions” (which I didn’t). In amongst the usual eminently forgettable fare they were threatening us with was one particular movie that sent a chill up my spine.
No, it wasn’t a horror flick, though it certainly looks to be pretty horrible. It was Sherlock Holmes.
Good lord, they’ve tried to turn him into an “action hero”.
Now, granted, Holmes was able to take care of himself in a fight. Sir Arthur specified this in the books & stories. He was capable with sword, walking stick, and his fists. And most of those play their part in his lore.
But this preview wanted to portray him as some steampunk version of Batman. All that was lacking was a mask and cape.
Methinks the writers (there are four of them – never an encouraging sign for a movie) heard that Robert Downey Jr was to be in the role and thought that they had to somehow connect the story to Iron Man. And no, according to the ImDB, the screenplay is not based on any of the actual works of Conan Doyle. This is what can happen when fictional characters pass into the realm of the “public domain”.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
Jim Downey
Some weeks ago, I came across a reference to a TV show from my childhood I had almost completely forgotten about: The Invaders. I checked, and NetFlix had it, so I added it to my queue. This weekend the first disk arrived.
It starts with classic 1960s graphics and ‘dramatic’ music, something like a cross between The Avengers and The Fugitive.
Then you get this introduction (taken from Wikipedia):
The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.
And you’re off and running.
OK, a couple of things. The special effects are about on a par with the original special effects used in classic Star Trek (not the remastered version), which is to say “not great, but acceptable”. Except that introductory sequence, which makes the Moon look like a giant ball of mashed potatoes that has been lightly toasted. Seriously – it’s bad. And you can’t excuse that, since by the time the series was made, we’d already sent a number of probes around and onto the Moon, and it was well known what even the “dark side” of the Moon looked like.
Anyway, I’m just four episodes into the thing (I do intend to watch it all the way through), and I usually cut most TV shows a little slack at first, to find their footing and allow people to settle into their roles. But already the sense of paranoia is more sophisticated than I expected. It isn’t, as most of the comments I have seen about the show, just a rehash of Cold War paranoia a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers or other classic 1950s SF. Rather, it has elements of the counter-cultural distrust of government itself in it – the sort of thing which would come to play such a crucial role in The X Files almost thirty years later, and was considered ground-breaking then.
Looking for something old? You might want to give The Invaders a try.
Jim Downey
A little chuckle for a Friday:
“Logic.” You keep using that word — I do not think it means what you think it means.*
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. *Apologies. Cross posted from UTI because I have an annoying cold and little imagination today. So there.)
Pub evacuated after Monty Python prop mistaken for grenade
Bomb disposal teams were called in and buildings evacuated after workmen mistook a Monty Python film prop for a hand grenade.Water company engineers spotted the object when they lifted up a fire hydrant cover during work on a street in Shoreditch, east London.
The road was cordoned off and a nearby pub was evacuated amid fears that the “grenade” could explode.
But after nearly an hour of analysis bomb experts realised that the cause of the scare was in fact a copy of the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch” used by Eric Idle to slaughter a killer rabbit in the 1975 film Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
Makes me wonder whether there isn’t a new version of the DVD coming out – this’d be a brilliant marketing gimmick.
Jim Downey
(Via BB. Cross posted to UTI.)
I wrote this the other day:
See, some time back I decided that I needed to watch the 2001 movie remake Planet of the Apes. I’d been on a bit of a Tim Burton kick, and figured that I should see this, even though it had been widely panned and looked dreadful.
It was dreadful. I watched it last night. Muddled plot. Pointless special effects. Sub-par acting. Unrealistic and inconsistent sciency-stuff. Absurd set-up for a sequel which was never made. Technology just 30 years ahead (of when the movie was made) that supposedly would survive for over a thousand years after crashing from orbit. Ballistic ridiculousness. Biological impossibilities.
I could go on – even for bad SF, this was inexcusable. But, since the movie is not exactly current, and they wisely decided not to make a sequel, it’s not worth the effort. I just thought that I should report on my reaction to the thing.
Maybe some more later –
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 