Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace) was born this day in 1815.
The following quote is taken from Wikipedia’s entry for Ada Lovelace.
She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the “first programmer” since she was writing programs — that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.
On 30 November 1934, running a light test train, 4472 became the first steam locomotive to be officially recorded at 100 mph (160.9 km/h) and earned a place in the Land speed record for railed vehicles; the publicity-conscious LNER made much of the fact.
4472 Flying Scotsman
My fascination with steam locomotives is I think based on the fact that these graceful machines are purely mechanical. They do not need electronic components in order to function. They belong to an age that passed away before even I was born.
Now the largest spacecraft ever built, the orbital assembly of the space station began with the launch from Kazakhstan of its first bus-sized component, Zarya, on Nov. 20, 1998. The launch began an international construction project of unprecedented complexity and sophistication.
In the photograph above of the International Space Station, Zarya is the third “bit” from the bottom. It’s solar panels are folded up. below it is Zvezda with it’s solar panels ‘horizontal’ and below that is ESAs Automated Transfer Vehicle Jules Verne with it’s X-shaped solar cells. Jules Verne has been deorbited so it is no longer docked to the ISS. Below is a detailed image of Zarya.
The orbit of ISS is inclined about 51-52 degrees which means it never passes directly overhead where I live (above 60 degrees North). Here we see it passing in the South low on the horizon about every 14 days or so. Even so it is great fun to see this man made object brighter than the brightest stars. I visiteed the South of France earlier this year and had the opertunity of watching the ISS pass over the zenith. Jules Verne was about to dock so we saw that pass over about 10-15 degrees in front of ISS. The ISS has been continually staffed since 2nd November 2000. Think about that. Humans have been continually in space for the last eight years.
Galloping Gertie (properly known as the Tocama Narrows Bridge) opened on 1st June 1940. It collapsed into Puget Sound on 6th November 1940. The collapse was caused by aeroelastic flutter. To see what that means in practice take a gander at this video:
Since the failure took some time no people were injured. Here is the account of Leonard Coatsworth the owner of the car that went down with the bridge.
Just as I drove past the towers, the bridge began to sway violently from side to side. Before I realized it, the tilt became so violent that I lost control of the car…I jammed on the brakes and got out, only to be thrown onto my face against the curb…Around me I could hear concrete cracking…The car itself began to slide from side to side of the roadway.
On hands and knees most of the time, I crawled 500 yards [450 m] or more to the towers…My breath was coming in gasps; my knees were raw and bleeding, my hands bruised and swollen from gripping the concrete curb…Toward the last, I risked rising to my feet and running a few yards at a time…Safely back at the toll plaza, I saw the bridge in its final collapse and saw my car plunge into the Narrows.
Coatsworth’s cocker spaniel Tubby was lost with the car.
When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did.
apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the rectifying of the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so much desired longitude of places for the perfecting of the art of navigation.
Hence the term Greenwich Meridian or Prime Meridian, the starting point for measuring longitude.
I took a half day off work to watch the eclipse. The day had started off completely overcast but cleared up just after first contact. Towards the maximum the sky clouded over again and was completely overcast the rest of the time. I did manage get some images. Those shown here are pretty much the best. Difficult to focus and my cameras optics are not good enough for this kind of stuff really. I used a zoom lens set at 300mm, a tele-extender pushing it to 600mm and mylar film so I wouldn’t fry the digital camera chip or my eyes.
Eclipse 2008/08/01 10:54
Eclipse 2008/08/01 11:36
Eclipse 2008/08/01 10:37
All in all a fun morning.
Warning: Staring at the Sun with your unprotected eyes for an extended period of time will damage your eyes. Looking at the Sun through pretty much any kind of optical device without a suitable solar filter will damage your eyes. Think eye safety.
A massive explosion occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in the middle of Siberia. The explosion was probably caused by the air burst of a meteor or comet fragment at a height of about 5 to 10 kilometers. The yield of the explosion is estimated to be the equivalent of between 10-15 megatons of TNT. About 2150 square kilometers of trees were flattened by the explosion. That is the same area as a circle about 52 kilometers in diameter. Humans were lucky that time since the area it impacted was very isolated. If the air burst had occurred over a major city hundreds of thousands could have died. This fortunately is rather unlikely, since cities cover such a small area of the Earth’s surface.
I just noticed that the latitude of the site of the Tunguska event is nearly the same as the place I live. If the impact had occurred roughly 6 hours later it could have hit 20 or so kilometers from where I am right now.
Note on the application of machinery to the computation of very big mathematical tables.
The mechanical machine he proposed is called a difference engine and could be used to compute mathematical tables (for instance logarithmic tables – if you are old enough to remember such things). In the days preceding computers accurate tables were important in many scientific/technological disciplines. They were calculated by hand and often had errors.
The Science Museum in London has a replica of the Difference Engine.
This machine is one of the forerunners of the modern computer.
As such Charles Babbage is regarded as one of the creators of ideas that are fundamental to the principles of computing.
Posted by mph 
Posted by mph 
Posted by mph 
