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Christmas Trilogy 2017 Part 2: Charles takes a trip to Turin
Charles Babbage wrote a sort of autobiography, Passages From The Life of a Philosopher. One of its meandering chapters is devoted to his ideas about and work on his Analytical Engine. In one section he...
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The first calculating machine
Even in the world of polymath, Renaissance mathematici Wilhelm Schickard (1592–1635) sticks out for the sheer breadth of his activities. Professor of both Hebrew and mathematics at the University of...
View ArticleNO, SIMPLY NO!
I realise that in writing this blog post I am banging my head against a reinforced concrete wall, pissing against a hurricane, crying into the void and definitely not going to do my reputation any good...
View ArticleDon’t criticise what you don’t understand!
I was pleasantly surprised by the level of positive support my latest anti-Ada polemic received on Twitter, I had expected much more negative reaction to be honest. But I did receive two attacks that I...
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Christmas Trilogy 2018 Part 2: A danseuse and a woven portrait
I had decided some time ago to give up my attempts to rescue Charles Babbage’s reputation from the calumnies of the acolytes of Saint Ada, as a lost cause. However, the recent attempt by said acolytes...
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Christmas Trilogy 2019 Part 2: Babbage, Airy and financing the Difference...
Charles Babbage first announced his concept for his first computer, the Difference Engine, in a Royal Astronomical Society paper, Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical...
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Charles not Ada, Charles not Charles and Ada, just Charles…
The is an old saying in English, “if you’ve got an itch scratch it!” A medically more correct piece of advice is offered, usually by mothers in a loud stern voice, “Don’t scratch!” I have had an itch...
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When is an algorithm not an algorithm?
A word previously well known to mathematicians but probably not to the general public, algorithm had begun to seep into the general awareness during the early years of the computer age. As the...
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Christmas Trilogy 2023 Part 2: Charles the genial host
People writing about the history of science tend not to think of their subjects as party animals. Science is a serious topic, scientists are serious scholars, party time is not really considered as...
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HISCTSCI_HULK reporting for duty – A history of science and technology...
I don’t remember ever coming across half a paragraph of just nineteen lines that manages to cram in so many history of science and technology myths, errors, and falsehoods as the one that I recently...
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