111–120 of 131 posts
This was as much fun as it looked like. I got some nice paper, a nice pen, and made neat boxes for steps, rough columns, etc. I also converted the final RGB to hex for fun, and made a rough representation of it via colored pencil combinations. Total time was about an hour, I think, but the time wasn’t important to me. This was enjoyable.
Heuristically we can still get an estimate: Group names to individuals and groups. Guess average group size. Take difference between claim and submission for time it took to compute.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An unkind assessment. They used their brains to perform the calculations, I don't see how you could see it otherwise.
Sure they used their brains. But "brains behind the operation" is a term of art. Is the McDonald's cashier the "brains behind the operation" because they count change as part of their duties? Counting change accurately is very important to the continued successful operation of a retail establishment. But it's menial work. Even Wikipedia agrees with me: > Alan Turing described the "human computer" as someone who is "s…
The work could require superhuman endurance, though. “They had to keep working eight hours a day doing the same equation over and over again—it must have been mind-numbing,” notes Paul Ceruzzi, author of Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer.
from [this](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...) article
If I take the words of Alan Turing then your interpretation of menial work, then programming is menial work too. You have fixed rules that you can't deviate from. Is all programming really menial? I would argue that it can be very mentally taxing, the same way math or any intellectual work can be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An unkind assessment. They used their brains to perform the calculations, I don't see how you could see it otherwise.
Sure they used their brains. But "brains behind the operation" is a term of art. Is the McDonald's cashier the "brains behind the operation" because they count change as part of their duties? Counting change accurately is very important to the continued successful operation of a retail establishment. But it's menial work. Even Wikipedia agrees with me: > Alan Turing described the "human computer" as someone who is "s…
At its bases, NASA employed nearly 80 black women as computers, says Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures. One of them, Katherine Johnson, was so revered for her abilities that in 1962, John Glenn asked her to personally verify the flight path of his first launch into space on the Friendship 7 mission. The astronauts didn’t trust the newfangled digital computers, which were prone to crashing. Glenn wanted human eyes on the problem.
“They had a tremendous amount of respect for these women and their mathematical abilities,” says Shetterly. “The male engineers often were not good mathematicians. So the women made their work possible.” Still, some friction existed. Women who asked for promotions got stonewalled or turned down: “For women who wanted to move up, who wanted to be supervisors—particularly if that involves supervising men? Not so much.”
The women wouldn't have been employed without the engineering work, but the engineering work wouldn't have been possible without these women. They were equally the brains behind getting things to space. A sizable number of these women later became programmers, because building the computers was seen as the really difficult task. Coding was dull work. Writing code that gets people safely to the moon and back was obviously trivial.
This is a particularly fun exercise when you recall that the original "computers" were people doing arithmetic, not at all dissimilarly to what’s done here, just with less parallelism. Though they did at least have mechanical adders and multipliers!
Los alamos used a room full of women for doing simulations when their IBM machine was out of order: We needed a man to repair the machines, to keep them going and everything. And the army was always going to send this fellow they had, but he was always delayed. Now, we always were in a hurry. Everything we did, we tried to do as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we worked out all the numerical steps that…
Pretty soon even tasks like this will be done by computers.
This was as much fun as it looked like. I got some nice paper, a nice pen, and made neat boxes for steps, rough columns, etc. I also converted the final RGB to hex for fun, and made a rough representation of it via colored pencil combinations. Total time was about an hour, I think, but the time wasn’t important to me. This was enjoyable.
So you converted the RGB to CMYK to get a subtractive color space for colored pencils?