It might be the lack of coffee and food, (I read this before breakfast), but the mental image of a flower describing how it got watered kept popping into my head - the flower can't decide whats more impressive, the watering can containing the water, or the water itself. And in the middle of telling the story, every now and then, the flower says "But look how pretty I am !!"
Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
21–30 of 37 posts
Re: Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
#22Is it okay to mention https://ideas.lego.com/projects/102740 ?
Oh, I was expecting a full LEGO Technic replica of the Engine :(
Will a Lego reproduction [1] of Difference Engine No. 2 computing 2nd order differences to 3 digits (the reproduction in the UK [2] evaluates 7th order polynomials to 31 digits, true to Babbage's design) suffice?
Re: Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
#23There is an excellent webcomic called The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, that describes what would have happened if they had successfully completed the Analytical Engine and gone on to fight crime. http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/ More impressive than the comic itself is the amount of research put into it and the footnotes that go along with it. The author often takes inspiration directly from primary…
I am a very happy owner of a print copy of the comic, and I recommend it at every opportunity possible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thrilling_Adventures_of_Lo...
It is an amazing work of art and scholarship. It's so much fun. It is indeed thrilling to imagine Ada as an accomplished horsewoman and lady of adventure, wrangling engines both within and without. In one of the stories, she's something of a parkour artist running through the gears of the difference engine. And it's all full of footnotes to primary sources that explain more about her actual life.
I find it more fun to read than Wolfram's blog post. Certainly more fun than, "in apparent resonance with some of my own work 150 years later, he talks about the relationship between mechanical processes, natural laws and free will."
Re: Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mathematica is significant Mathematica is a proprietary software influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied). Maxima is a computer algebra system based on a 1982 version of Macsyma. It is written in Common Lisp and runs on all POSIX platforms such as OS X, Unix, BSD, and Linux as well as under Microsoft Windows and Android. It i…
> Mathematica is a proprietary software Nothing wrong with that. > influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied). Not much wrong with that either. Even if it was just a clone of those systems when it came out, being the successful clone is enough to make it have merit. But of course since then it's 1000 times the code size of the…
> Nothing wrong with that.
Much wrong with that. Mathematics should not proceed based on a secret sauce. In mathematics, the details of the computation are almost always far more interesting than the result. The details are the very raison d'être of the subject.
Re: Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Mathematica is a proprietary software Nothing wrong with that. > influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied). Not much wrong with that either. Even if it was just a clone of those systems when it came out, being the successful clone is enough to make it have merit. But of course since then it's 1000 times the code size of the…
The issue is misattributions and misappropriations. And those should be (and are) wrong, esp. in science. Taking the spirit of the times, ie. migrating software from minis to micros/pc^1-s in both cases and expropriating and monopolizing is not about simply copying, nor evolution in the best sense. ^1 https://xkcd.com/386/
(1) "There Was a Time before Mathematica…"
Wolfram's blog post says he discovered "a program called Macsyma — that did algebra, and could be used interactively. I was amazed so few people used it. But it wasn’t long before I was spending most of my days on it."
Later: "I got more and more ambitious, trying to do more and more with Macsyma. Pretty soon I think I was its largest user. But sometime in 1979 I hit the edge; I’d outgrown it."
Later: "And after a little while I decided that the only way I’d really have a chance to get what I wanted was if I built it myself. And so it was that I embarked on what would become SMP (the “Symbolic Manipulation Program”)."
Mathematica came after SMP.
Sounds like a fairly familiar software story, no?
(1) http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time-befo...
Re: Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every Wolframy thread turns into the same discussion about Wolfram himself. Let's not let that happen here. Idiosyncrancies aside, he obviously has the background to understand this material. The main obstacle is putting in the time to understand it, which he did. The article is replete with historical information, he explains why he concludes what he does, and the result is an order of magnitude more substantive (an…
I disagree strongly with this. Wolfram himself litters the entire essay with asides in which he compares and contrasts his own place within science history with both Babbage and Lovelace. If Wolfram wanted to write a neutral historical account, he could have, but instead he opened the door for the continued derision of NKS-style pomposity by specifically tailoring this historical account as if it too must serve to un…
> I disagree strongly with this. Wolfram himself litters the entire essay with asides in which he compares and contrasts his own place within science history with both Babbage and Lovelace.
I count 18 times in the essay where he refers to himself with 8 of those times relating to his experience in computation, the others are showing Lady Lovelace's computation in Mathematic or small asides personal notes (e.g. "the same school where I went 150 years later", "When I was in elementary school, logarithm tables were still the fast way to do multiplication.").
Even with the times he relates it to his own work, he is basically using it as a guide for his conclusions on what he believes about his subjects.
I'm not a Mathematica user, nor do I follow the controversy with Wolfram. Its not my thing beyond having looked at the language underlying Mathematica because I look at almost every language (it is a hobby). That being said, I think your reading this with an eye to be irritated.
Re: Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Mathematica is a proprietary software Nothing wrong with that. > influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied). Not much wrong with that either. Even if it was just a clone of those systems when it came out, being the successful clone is enough to make it have merit. But of course since then it's 1000 times the code size of the…
> Nothing wrong with that. Much wrong with that. Mathematics should not proceed based on a secret sauce. In mathematics, the details of the computation are almost always far more interesting than the result. The details are the very raison d'être of the subject.
>Mathematics should not proceed based on a secret sauce.
Thanks god Mathematica is not mathematics the science, then, but just a tool in assisting with doing math and physics and all kinds of calculations.
>*In mathematics, the details of the computation are almost always far more interesting than the result.
Yeah, just not in any case Mathematica, Maple, R, Matlab etc were involved.
Re: Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
#28Is it okay to mention https://ideas.lego.com/projects/102740 ?
The certificate for that site has expired (assuming it's yours).
Re: Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
#29Re: Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
#30This is really well written and researched. I can't imagine reading so many century old letters and papers.
The most interesting part of this was getting a glimpse of a totally different society. Little details, like all these notable people that knew each other. And how many of them published in widely different fields. Or their totally different style of speech. Or how Babbage had 8 children, and all but 3 died.