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Ada Lovelace and Her Legacy
nightcats writes: Nature has an extensive piece on the legacy of the "enchantress of abstraction," the extraordinary Victorian-era computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Her monograph on the Babbage machine was described by Babbage himself as a creation of "that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force that few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it." Ada's remarkable merging of intellect and intuition — her capacity to analyze and capture the conceptual and functional foundations of the Babbage machine — is summarized with a historical context which reveals the precocious modernity of her scientific mind. "By 1841 Lovelace was developing a concept of 'Poetical Science', in which scientific logic would be driven by imagination, 'the Discovering faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of science.' She saw mathematics metaphysically, as 'the language of the unseen relations between things;' but added that to apply it, 'we must be able to fully appreciate, to feel, to seize, the unseen, the unconscious.' She also saw that Babbage's mathematics needed more imaginative presentation."
I must confess I think of lord Byron chiefly as Ada Lovelace's father. I know the name, but can't name a single thing he has done.
He wrote some poems, had lots of sex with people of various genders, and fought in the Greek War of Independence.
Wasn't he also present on the famous rainy holiday when Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage: together, They Fight Crime (for certain definitions of "crime").
On the first issue of voting that needs to be seen a wider context. Most of the British population where unable to vote during Ada Lovelace's lifetime (she died in 1852). Specifically until the Representation of the People Act 1867, only around 15% of the adult males in the United Kingdom could vote. Even with the Representation of the People Act 1884 around 40% of adult males in the United Kingdom could still not vote.
On the issue of property you are flat out wrong. Women where also allowed to own property for the entirety of Ada's lifetime. The one restriction was that when they married their property became that of their husbands to do as they saw fit under the doctrine of Coverture. That did not start changing until the Married Women's Property Act 1870 and was not completed until the Married Women's Property Act 1893.
It was not uncommon for wealthy women to not marry for this very reason.
The situation in Scotland was different, because Coveture was a Norman thing introduced by Henry II. There where separate married womens property acts that covered Scotland.
Also, you are not an idiot who is unable to recognize and ignore a retarded troll comment that's already been modded -1.
This is why I find women (ahem) like Brianna Wu insufferable. When faced with yes, truly horrible sounding things that no human should say to another, instead of ignoring it or laughing at it, she flees from her home in "mortal terror." Given that saying horrific things to strangers is par for the course on the internet, no reasonable person could possibly take that seriously. If .01% of rape and death threats made over XBox Live were followed through the streets would be ankle deep in blood. Has it ever happened? No. Does that mean it's okay to say such things? No, I think very poorly of anyone who says such things. But I think worse of those who respond.
To be genuinely horrified and offended by stupid things said by morons on the Internet is a strong indicator that you are very stupid. To pretend to be horrified and offended by stupid things said by morons on the Internet to garner sympathy and attention from others is to be a manipulative lying weasel deserving derision.
Only a fool or a weasel would react to "if you were around back then maybe she would suck your dick! turns out there really IS a reason to have women in IT!"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.