America
The Fat Albert Saga
In the 1960’s Boeing designers were years behind the McDonnell Douglas DC9 and BAC 111 and knew they had a problem as these two twin engine aircraft would beat them to market gaining a considerable [more…]
Computing
Computing
Civil Contingencies: Preparing for Internet Shutdown and Censorship with Mesh Networks
We have entered the most fraught political and social climate I have yet experienced in my lifetime. Having discussed this with several GPers in person it is clear we need to start seriously considering contingency [more…]
Computing
Computing Partitions
Euler gave us the following recursion formula for via his Pentagonal Number Theorem : Note the generalised pentagonal numbers in the above. Define if and let . This is the formula that [more…]
20th Century
The Early Days of Computing, Part Two
I worked for Sweda Litton designing a POS (Point Of Sale) system for Boots The Chemists. The relevance for my future computing work is that I invented a table driven methodology for controlling POS terminals. [more…]
Arts
The Ovinet
Since the World Wide Web has become a conduit for the streaming of the received ‘wisdom’ of so many sheep, there’s a case for renaming it the Ovinet. The appropriateness (good LibFascist word that) of [more…]
20th Century
The Early Days of Computing, Part One
I started working with computers when computers started. Not quite but my first line of code was written in 1969 and loaded onto an Elliott 905 computer at Elliott Automation, Borehamwood. My last line of [more…]