Lovelace’s friend Charles Babbage designed a concept for a machine he called the “Analytical Engine” – essentially a mechanical computer that would have relied on punch cards to run programs. He recruited Lovelace to translate some notes from one of his lectures, but while Lovelace was translating she added to the notes herself.
The notes grew to three times their original length, as Lovelace described what many call the first computer program. Because of funding issues, the machine was not built during her and Babbage’s lifetimes.
But Lovelace’s published article on the Analytical Engine later became a source of inspiration for Alan Turing’s work to build the first modern computers in the 1940s.
Women are sometimes considered outsiders in the science and technology fields, but Lovelace and many of the female computer programmers who followed her are proof that this paucity is a function of society, not capability. We forget or never learn about the female “computers” who programmed early mechanical machines in World War II, or that the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan once ran articles suggesting that women were perfectly suited for programming.
If the lack of acknowledgement of women’s contributions to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields grinds your gears, then Ada Lovelace should be one of the first names you go to right that wrong.
Further reading:
Wikipedia profile
10 Things You May Not Know About Ada Lovelace
What if there were more women in tech?
Why we ALL need to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day
AT-ATs went native...and domestic
Baumraum. Bachstelze. Eberschwang. Austria. photos: Alasdair Jardine
Watch subsequent decades have a mass exodus from the tropics towards the poles
Population density, 3000 BC to 2000 AD
Elevated walkway and visitor centre added to 12th century abbey ruins by Binario Architectes »
Stay safe, you guys
Live wind map of hurricane Matthew – expected to make landfall in FL late tomorrow
After the devastating earthquake in Amatrice, Italy, on August 24th, the Vigili del Fuoco (Italian fire brigade) requested assistance from the TRADR (Long-Term Human-Robot Teaming for Robot-Assisted Disaster Response) project (EU FP7 framework, grant No. 60963). TRADR deployed two Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and three Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to assist the post-earthquake response in Amatrice.
The task was to use robots to provide 3D textured models of two churches, San Francesco and Sant’ Agostino, national heritage monuments from the XIVth century. Both were in a state of partial collapse and in need of shoring to prevent potential further destruction. The models should serve to plan the shoring operations and to assess the state of various objects of cultural value inside the churches, such as valuable frescos.
The UGVs successfully entered the San Francesco church, teleoperated entirely out of line of sight and partially in collaboration. For part of the mission, one UGV provided a view of the other one to enable maneuvering in very constrained space with low connection bandwidth. One of the UGVs operated in the church continuously for four hours. A UAV was also present for a short time in parallel and provided additional views of the UGVs.
A shooting star over Mount Rainier By Tanner Wendell Stewart
js
Eugenics was massive in the US, however much we pretend it wasn't
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 decided, by a vote of 8 to 1, to uphold a state’s right to forcibly sterilize a person who was deemed unfit to procreate. The case Buck v. Bell legitimized the eugenics movement – yes, the thing Hitler and the Nazis believed in – and directly led to the sterilizing of 70,000 American citizens against their will.
Gaming, Science, History, Feminism, and all other manners of geekery. Also a lot of dance
243 posts