NYTimes Science Times: On Babbage but not the difference engine; Raising striped Okapi; Raising faded ink…
Did you, should you be another compulsive reader of popularized science journalism, find your heart also sinking just a little on seeing that John Markoff’s lead story of the nation’s top science section is about Charles Babbage and a machine he logically derived but never contrived? I am paid to read onward and hence did so, which readers generally should also have done to see for sure if the yawn had merit. Surprise! This story is not on his plans for the marvelous difference engine, which later researcher-hobbyists did create don’t we all know. Rather, it concerns an even more wondrous but never realized device, his analytical machine. A big project is now underway to build one, a far more challenging task for reasons the story spells out. This I don’t recall reading about. Markoff takes readers right up to speed on the challenges of this incompletely imagined, mechanical logic-follower from what he calls the Age of Steam. The pic is better in higher def – click it or go to it here, and the NYT’s full version with caption is here. A perfectly satisfying story. The most interesting aspect is well-along. Markoff includes a long appreciation for Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. While Babbage may be the father of the digital calculating machine, Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron) sneaked her big brains to the fore in a time when ladies were not supposed to present themselves as among the intellectual elite. She was first to see the broad potential of such machines. She was, in short, the grandmistress of computer programming and hence, in a way, of the likes of the iPhone. She too is well enough known even today but probably not as well as she deserves.
Other Headlines to Note:
- Douglas Quenqua – For a Baby Okapi, Don’t Push Too Hard ; Fine job of natural history. Most striking to me is the photo of mom and tot. That’s in New York City? Says here it’s the Congo Gorilla Forest at the Bronx Zoo. There’s a huge mangrove or something there in the full-width image. Is that concrete or a real tree? Just curious.
- Henry Fountain: Restored: Fading Account From the Heart of Africa ; Mostly a history tale about David Livingston – carried along by the great technical lengths to which a team of old book restorers went to make visible the entries in a diary he kept up after his writing paper and proper ink ran out.
- Leslie Kaufman – After Years of Conflict, a New Dynamic in Wolf Country from Saturday, and today a blogpost How Is a Grizzly Bear Like a Wolf? ; Not from ScienceTimes, but the regular and on line sections. This duo serves as a model. First, the standard news story on Saturday was an expert, insightful account of political, business, and wildlife worries in the Northern Rockies. And today’s blog provides context and the reporter’s sense of where things are going now.
- Hilary Rosner: Spotted Horses in Cave Art Weren’t Just a Figment, DNA Shows ; Separate post today tracks this and other accounts of the news that Cro Magnon artists were not just winging it by torchlight. But why – as other outlets had examples- did the NYT illus not include an ancient painting showing spotted horses?
- John Tierney: A Tool to Quit Smoking Has Some Unlikely Critics ; Methinks Tierney overdoes the political-temperament angle here. Sure, liberals and conservatives display patterns of typical behavior that can be statistically demonstrated. But there is danger in trying to so neatly sort behaviors and ring bells when the scatter has somebody acting like their big, fuzzy category might seem to discourage. He should’a stuck to facts about health, epidemiology,efficacy, risks, benefits, and such as that.
As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;
- Charlie Petit
