The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

For those not informed, Ada Lovelace, a.k.a. Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is the woman widely regarded as the world’s first ever computer programmer. In the 1840s. (She’s also Lord Byron’s daughter, which is pretty neat.)

To give the short version, Charles Babbage at the time had built a successful mechanical calculator called the Difference Engine. It was powered by a hand crank and calculated solutions to polynomial equations. More intriguingly, he also spent much of his life developing an “analytical engine”, a generalised machine for solving mathematical problems that would have been equivalent in use and capability to some of the early digital computers. The analytical engine would have been able to solve a wide variety of different mathematical problems, not just a small subset of them, by running programs encoded on punch cards. (Again, just like early digital computers.)

Ada Lovelace comes into the picture while translating a paper published by an Italian mathematician on Babbage’s analytical engine. Her notes ran longer than the translation and included a computational algorithm tailored to be run on the analytical engine, which is now recognised as the first computer program.

For more on Ada Lovelace and the contribution of women scientists to the Royal Society see this post over at Skulls in the Stars.

Today is evidently Carl Sagan’s birthday. To celebrate, let’s all make his apple pie recipe tonight.

So, those of you who follow me on Twitter might have noticed me referring to a trip to Washington DC and hinting at some crazy plan I wanted to enact when I got there. Well, today is the day I go out and do it, so rather than keep everybody in suspense until I get back to Boston and upload today’s photos, I’ll just reveal things now.

I’ve been a fan of the Fallout games since the very first one, and of course recently a brand-new game in the series, Fallout 3, was released by Bethesda, makers of the Elder Scrolls RPGs. Fallout 3 moved the action from a devastated, post-apocalyptic California to a devastated, post-apocalyptic DC known in-game as The Capital Wasteland. See where I’m going with this?

Fallout 3 uses a number of well-known DC landmarks as significant spots in the game. The Jefferson Memorial becomes Project Purity, the focus of the game’s main quest. The Washington Monument is home to Galaxy News Radio‘s (“This is Three Dog! Awoooo!”) broadcast relay. Other spots like Dupont Circle, the Willard Hotel (subject of several of my hints), and many of the DC Metro stations, have cameo appearances in the game.

So, what’s a nerd to do? Obviously, dress up as the game’s main character and wander the city asking random passerby to take pictures of him. Obviously.

I had the idea for all of this last Saturday, so I had to rush things. My pal James helped out with the jumpsuit, sewing on the yellow trim and the big 101 on the back. (The game’s advertising tends to use the Armored Jumpsuit, but we went for the plain Vault Jumpsuit instead.) He also loaned me a bit of Sculpey, which I used to mold a Pip-Boy 3000. I made a sleeve for the Pip-Boy from posterboard and some foam I had lying around, then I painted both.

For four days of work, I was pretty damned impressed with what I managed to pull off. A lot of the details are off from the game, but in broad strokes I think it looks awesome. (Again, muchos kudos to James for helping on the jumpsuit.) So here are the photos of it on Flickr! I’ll get photos from my actual DC trip up as soon as I can, which probably won’t be until Monday.

Hey, it’s been a while since I did a lyrics post, hasn’t it? 90% of the others have been Neko Case, so this one might as be, too. (Ganked from the best lyrics site I’ve found, Always On the Run.)

Neko Case impresses me in that she continues to evolve her sound with every album she does, and furthermore her lyrics just seem to get richer and richer every time. If people aren’t studying this stuff in lit classes two decades from now, I’m gonna be having words with academia. At any rate, my favourite song off her latest album, Middle Cyclone, is either “Red Tide” or “Prison Girls”, but the one I relate to most is “This Tornado Loves You”. I think we all know how this feels:

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So, one of my favourite sites on this ol’ internet of ours is Badass of the Week, which, as the name suggests, posts an article a week about various badasses, like Jack Churchill or This Huge Ass Beetle. But as much as I love reading about Jack Churchill vs. Titanoboa or awesome Vikings or whatever, I have a real soft spot for the more unconventional badasses, like Muhammad Ali, who gets badass points for not just being the greatest boxer ever but also risking both his career and jail time to stand up against the Vietnam War, or Harriet Tubman for rescuing thousands of slaves on the Underground Railroad.

So, on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, I thought he should highlight one of the greatest non-violent badasses in history, Tank Man. Now, Ben who runs BotW has a policy which might technically exclude Tank Man from the official list. I agree with what he wrote on that page, but while an article about the badassery of Tank Man might not be appropriate for his site, it might do here. So, here is my e-mail to Ben reproduced below:

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Via Phil Plait, we learn something we already knew: flares can be mistaken for UFOs. To sum up, a group of skeptics in New Jersey attached flares to balloons using fishing line and released them. Sure enough, local residents and media reported seeing UFOs, hitting all the standard UFO tropes.

I bring it up because this is really indicative of the difference between skeptics and believers. Believers never stop to consider alternate possibilities. They see lights in the sky or crop formations, and then because they can’t imagine any alternative, it must be aliens. Their kids get autism, and then because they can’t imagine or don’t like the alternative, it must be vaccines. They see a weird shape in the water, and then because they can’t imagine any alternative, it must be an unknown species of giant sea creature. If they even consider, say, flares or a prank or a genetic disease or floating logs, the alternative is immediately dismissed as impossible.

That’s what UFO believers said about the military’s explanation for the Phoenix Lights. There’s no way flares could possibly look like what people saw over Phoenix! Right.

Skeptics, on the other hand, consider every alternative unless they have good reason to rule it out. When we say that autism is not caused by vaccines, we have a dozen lines of evidence that rule out a connection. When we say that homeopathy is impossible, we can point to a hundreds of years of modern chemistry that falsifies its theoretical basis, as well as empirical studies that show no efficacy for it. And now, when we say that aerial flares can be mistaken for UFOs, we can point to this simple experiment run by some skeptics who needed nothing more than some road flares, balloons, and fishing line to recreate something that we were told was “impossible” for any terrestrial source to duplicate.

Even more importantly, the skeptics actually had the will to try an experiment, rather than just assuming that they know what is and isn’t possible.

Thank you, Mister President. It was a great speech.

I, for one, am looking forward to the next four, hopefully eight, years.

So, the Boston Skeptics this month, in lieu of a speaker, took a field trip to Boston’s Museum of Science to check out the Mythical Creatures exhibit. The outing as a whole was a huge success, with everybody seeming to have a lot of fun.

As for the MoS itself, I went there early this year, and I have to say that in the short time since that visit they made a lot of improvements. There are a few new exhibits, not least including Cliff the Triceratops, a nearly-complete Triceratops fossil recently donated to the museum (who has been rightly featured in a lot of their advertising), lots more live shows and lectures than I remember, and other fun stuff. In particular, there was a presentation about optical illusions given by a guy who Rebecca dubbed “Skeptical Grandpa” that everybody got a real kick out of. And of course the Theater of Electricity is always awesome.

The thing that impressed me most, however, was the theme of skepticism that ran through all the exhibits and presentations. The Mythical Creatures exhibit, of course, examined the origins of myths like sea serpents mermaids, and giant apes, as well as discussing how mythical creatures can cross-pollinate between cultures and become fixed when a certain definitive account gains prominence. But it went beyond that exhibit to the Theater of Electricity presenter (I want his job so badly) telling us how important it is to test ideas we have, not to mention the entirety Mind Games! presentation that Skeptical Grandpa gave. It warms the cockles of a skeptical heart, it does, to see a museum actually doing its job like that.

Anyway, I put up a bunch of photos on Flickr. Go check ‘em out.

Is fucking awesome. FYI.

He has a song that I hadn’t heard before tonight, at his Boston concert. It’s about Laika. I cried.

I haven’t been obsessively following election returns like a lot of folk, but I have been checking in with Is Obama President? and Electoral Vote occasionally, in between doing laundry and watching DEVO videos on YouTube.

The former has flipped from “Almost” to “Yes” and the latter says that Virginia is being called for Obama and that the race is mathematically over now.

I’m too tired and sick (lousy winter sore throat…) to be appropriately excited, but I imagine I’m gonna have a bloody big smile tomorrow morning. “President Obama” has a bloody nice ring to it.