I'm slowly working through "Jacquard's Web" (a book on the history of computing, drawing links between the Jacquard loom - a loom that used punched cards to weave figured silk - and more modern machines, up to and including the computer).

I have to admit I like the sciency stuff and the "how these things work" part better than the gossip about the inventor's lives.

(Did you know Ada Lovelace - Lord Byron's daughter and a fairly bright woman [though, according to this book's author, not the super-genius she is made out to be by the Steampunkers] was fond of sex? Trufax: "And there was the physical side of marriage. Ada took to it with relish. Several letters she wrote to [her husband]...make clear how much she enjoyed love-making." Um, yeah. I think I could do without knowing THAT.)

Right now I'm about 2/3 of the way through, reading about the early days of IBM (and its precursor. I would LOVE to be able to see a Hollerith Tabulator - used to compile information in the 1890 census - yes, there was a mechanical computer of sorts used that early - in action, because it sounds both beautiful and fascinating.

And then there's Thomas John Watson, one of the early leaders of IBM. I knew nothing about the man. He is presented as a master salesman, and comes across at first as perhaps the original Pointy-Haired Boss:

"Hollerith [the originator of the tabulating machine] regarded engineers as backroom boys who worked best when they were left alone. Watson, on the other hand, was quick to take engineers out of the laboratory and into customers' offices to find out precisely what functions and features customers needed...Watson chased his engineers back into customers' premises again to deal with any problems the customer might be having..."

I dunno, but based on the (small number of) engineers I have known, many of them went into that field precisely to reduce interactions-with-customers.

Watson also ran C-T-R (a precursor to IBM) in a way that is eerily reminiscent of some of the "modern" corporate stuff that I am so eager to avoid by being in academe:

"There were company flags, endless group photographs of everybody being cheerful together, a daily company newspaper, banquets at horseshoe tables, and even company songs" (emphasis mine)

AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! Jean-Paul Sartre, I may have just found an alternate version of Hell for you to write about.

(Watson also required all employees to have the word "THINK" posted on placards in their offices. The Think System?)

But, just as I'm hating him for being pointy-haired, he redeems himself: In the Great Depression, rather than releasing all his engineers and salesmen and others to the bread lines as many other corporations did, he chose to keep them working and on the payroll. They kept building machines because of Watson's belief that things would turn around. (And when they did, he was one of the few equipped to provide customers - including the US government - with tabulating machines). Perhaps this is in part the origin of the much-lauded and now-long-gone "loyalty" of companies to their workers. (It wasn't so much an altruistic decision - at least not how the book's author presents it - as a canny gamble that paid off very well. But still).

But my favorite parts of the book remain the descriptions of the machines and how they worked. There were electromechanical calculators and computers before there were electronic ones! There were things like adding machines where you set cogs to the values you were inputting and then turned a crank to make it work the arithmetic! There was a thing called an arithmometer, and another called a comptometer! It's such a vanished time - one you never hear about in a "typical" history class, and yet it was not so long ago. And what if electronics had not been discovered? Would we be accessing the internet on room-sized machines that we had to (maybe) power with foot-treadles like old-time sewing machines? It boggles the mind.

There's a book out there called something like "The Victorian Internet" (I think it's about the telegraph). I want to read that some time. I find the history of modern technology pretty fascinating.

Okay: This makes it a little better.

(Caption: "Slime mold grows on anything." Yes, apparently it DOES).

I don't know why I find pictures like that so amusing, I just do. (And it's goin' in my Gen Bio lecture. I may have to hew to some lockstep common syllabus but at least I can have a little fun while I'm at it.)

Cool sciency thing:
High school students use DNA testing to "bust" restaurants selling cheap fish as expensive species.

I'm just going to keep that story in mind for the Biotechnology section of general bio this year.

Excellent online Physical Geography information. Includes an online textbook with chapters on weather and climate, maps, geologic time, and more.

Quote of the day:

"When an ecologist says 'there goes a badger,' he should include in his thoughts some definite idea of the animal's place in the community to which it belongs, just as if he had said, 'there goes the vicar.'"

--Charles Elton. (An early ecologist).


Except, I tend to think of badgers more as like the rugby players or lorry-drivers of the hedgerow world, not the vicars. (I think that role might fall to a hedgehog*, or a particularly contemplative squirrel).

I love the old British scientists; sometimes I think my mind must operate in similar channels to theirs. (I suppose whimsy has something to do with it.)


(*because: "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing" reference)

Way back when (before the turn of the century*) when I took biochem, I took it through the U of M Med School. Three days a week, I'd truck over there before 8 am (it was about a 15 minute walk from my apartment if I made all the "walk" lights) and sit through an hour's class on DNA synthesis, and allllllll the steps of glycolysis, and things like that. One of the lecturers (it was one of those evil team-taught classes where you'd just get used to someone's teaching style, and then their four weeks were up) had obviously learned the Cyrillic alphabet before the Latin, judging from how he wrote. Another one had a most odd vocal quirk I won't try to reproduce here.

But one of them showed us this:



Ever since then, I've been searching for some reference to this video. I'd mention it to people and they'd give me that "baroo?" look that said either, "Are you sure you didn't eat someone's 'special' brownies before class that day?" or "Were you perhaps running a high fever when you thought they showed that?"

But it is real. And very very 1970s. They have taken "Jabberwocky" and interpretive dance and applied it to protein synthesis.

I seriously doubt I'd have been happy as a college student in the early 1970s - I recognize that I am far too square (and "straight," in all the senses of the word) to have been comfortable. But I'm happy that we have some of the products of that time to look at and consider.



(*in other words, pre 2000. I'm not THAT old. It would have been perhaps 1989)

Scientists for better PCR*

(When science geeks get together and parody We Are The World.)



All together now:

"PCR, when you need to detect mutation
PCR, when you need to recombine.
PCR, when you need to find out who the daddy is.
PCR, when you need to solve a crime."

(*I don't do PCR as part of my "gig," but I know well enough what it is to find this really funny.)

A different kind of progress:

Spent most of the day looking up soil associations for Illinois prairie sites (this is for an ongoing project) using the online soil surveys. (There's also a supposedly-interactive tool that lets you plug in the section, township, and range numbers and then highlight the place you want to see, but it kept breaking....and it will only, apparently, work in IE, because they warn up front of a big bug when using Firefox. The interactive site was really nice for the two or three prairies it worked for, but then it went down so I spent the rest of the afternoon using the clickable online .pdf files).

My eyes kind of hurt from looking at a screen for so long but I'm probably 1/4 of the way through the task, which is a lot better than I thought I'd be when I began.

The only problem is not all counties (Cook is one) have online clickable surveys...I may need to see if I can find an "operative" with access to a university library in Illinois and fax them copies of my maps to see if they can find the info for me.

But still - a good day's work, for a change. (I'd been running into a brick wall about how to do this last week.)