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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."
When Lord Byron was attending Trinity college at Cambridge, he kept a bear. He was hauled in to be told to get rid of the bear, because domestic animals were prohibited by college rules from college rooms. His response: the bear is not a domestic animal. He got to keep the bear!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
All they needed was steampunk Space Invaders.
Table-ized A.I.
With stuff like this, we wonder why women complain or feel harassed?
Ada Lovelace had an unmatched intellect combined with imagination and creativity, and especially given the era she lived in, is worthy of great admiration. Show a little respect instead of being a d--k yourself.
In that era, upper class women often dappled in (higher) mathematics, with womans magazines often having mathematical puzzles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
One day, hopefully, you'll get to see why this position is a little simplistic. Yes, criticise anyone for any reason; sounds fair. But sexism is quite prevalent and one side is starting with a disadvantage.
Here's another example from a slightly later period - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether. If you're completely - completely - happy that we're all now on a level playing field criticise away.
Otherwise, let's take gender out of it and try to get over the general geek thing of I'm-some-hot-shot-IT-geek-and-no-one-else-knows-anything nonsense. Try finding the positive rather than criticise. The "yeah, but..." thing is tiresome.
Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage: together, They Fight Crime (for certain definitions of "crime").
With stuff like this, we wonder why women complain or feel harassed?
If someone said something like this about me, I wouldn't feel harassed or complain. But I'm not a woman. I usually complain about things like having seven bosses all telling me to do opposite things.
My friend and I invented mechanical computation, and all I got was this lousy language named after me.
I agree they aren't being respectful, but then again why should they?
Well, for one thing, when you express yourself like a crude fool, you shouldn't be surprised when people perceive as one. As for Ada Lovelace - why should you respect her? You mean, you don't already know? Or is it that you can see past the fact that she expressed herself in the style and terms that were regarded as appropriate for her time? Read a few books of contemporary authors, and you'll see. Well, perhaps not, but at least you'll then have had the opportunity.
Many of her views on the nature of science and perhaps especially maths, were spot on - it isn't enough to know the equations or how to write code; to really understand, you need imagination and intuition - here's a quote that's attributed to Einstein (you do respect him?):
âoeImagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.â
And "intuition" is just another word for "abstraction": the process of "summing up" the essence of a class of concepts into a single, new concept - which lies at the very heart of mathmatics. Take natural numbers: a number is the essential quality that is common to all sets that are equivalent under isomorphism (in the category of sets: bijections). When we understand an abstraction without having to go into technical details like this, we call it intuition. So, don't scoff at imagination and intuition.
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.
With stuff like this, we wonder why women complain or feel harassed?
I feel genuinely put upon when I hear guys say things like this.
So, I'm going to say this in every thread where I encounter this statement.
I am a woman. I do not feel harassed. Stop fucking speaking for women and let us stand up for ourselves if it is necessary.
Please do not presume to speak for me, and further, please look up the definition of "harassed", because even if the above statement was insulting to all women (it isn't), it certainly does not count for the dictionary or legal definitions of "harassment".
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Who would have predicted that a Slashdot story that mentions a woman from the 19th century would inevitably whining comments about feminism and dicksucking jokes?
You guys are just the best.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem is that you describe a number crunching machine as the first instance ever of number crunching and that is clearly not that case.
No I didn't. Learn to read.
There are much older examples of using math and mapping that to something else
Quite possibly, but that's not the point I was making. You need to learn to read.
Also, at that time there were already other examples of machines that could do something besides number crunching.
Yeah there were machines to do all sorts of things. Like steam trains for pulling heavy things, and looms and whatnot. That still has no bearing on my point:
No one had realised that a number crunching machine could do other things with its numbers. This wasn't fully formalised until the Church Turing thesis about 70 years later.
This was a real example as opposed to just a mathematical construct or element of fiction.
Ah so an advance in maths isn't a real advance now?
If the question of P being in NP is solved while we're still on slashdot I'd like to see you dismiss it as not being "real" because it's a mere "mathematical construct" in the same way.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
I think you basically said that unless you're a schoolyard alpha, you'll never make Fields Medal level contributions. You gotta be bloody kidding me. I think of Claude Shannon, who apparently hid away in his office at AT&T Bell Labs, and I can only imagine he would be chewed to bits in the petty verbal battles you so admire. Or of Alan Turing, who no doubt was relentlessly hounded by the ancestors of your beloved verbal alphas for being gay. He ended up committing suicide, apparently. Most of the repartee you regard as a necessary precondition for your respect is aimed at censoring deviations from the status quo. Shouldn't we support the opposite? There is no necessary connection between spoken wit and technical achievement.
Me too! Deep Throat was a classic! The way she... uh... wait -- Ada? Ada Lovelace? Uh, I mean, wow, yeah, math... and stuff.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Lovelace is sometimes loosely described as the first computer programmer. She did produce an elegant set of tables showing how the engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers, but based on equations supplied by Babbage. Lovelace's originality lay in her conceptual definitions of the engine's mathematical functions, and her brilliant speculations on its design possibilities, going far beyond anything Babbage himself articulated. She wrote: “We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
Overall, the article is somewhat insulting, implying that "the only contribution a woman can make is to bring her imaginative, creative views to the table when she copies men. Put her in marketing." The article doesn't quite say that, but it is the natural conclusion from what the article says.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But if you can't even take a joke, then you don't belong in the workplace.
Ah yes, the classic "harmless banter" argument.
You probably don't believe that there's any such thing as bullying at school, just a bit of lighthearted physical pranking, right?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
First post: Intentionally confusing her with porn actress.
Second post: Her dad was cool - here's some cool stuff about him!
Third post: Meh. She didn't really do anything noteworthy.
etc.
Fuck you guys. Stop living up to the worst stereotypes of geeks and nerds.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
The UK is an interesting case. The simple fact was that at the start of the 20th century, most men also did not have the right to a parliamentary vote. While Mrs. Pankhurst and her supporters were fighting for their right to vote, the overwhelming majority of young men sent to the trenches in 1914 lacked any political franchise. Further, while other groups supported universal adult suffrage, such as the Labour movement, the suffragettes advocated a separate bill for wealthy women with property; women such as themselves.
The following extract from the Socialist Standard in 1908 makes clear its opposition to their proposals.
“Men vote at present under the £10 franchise. The suffrage is thus upon a property basis with plural voting for the wealthy. Therefore, according to the proposals of the women Suffragists, only those women having the necessary property qualifications are to be allowed to vote. This excludes not only all those single working women unable to qualify because of their poverty, but it also bars practically the whole of the married women of the working class who have no property qualifications apart from their husbands’. Further, it increases enormously the voting power of the well-to-do, since the head of the wealthy household can always impart the necessary qualifications to all the women of his house, while the working-man, through his poverty, is entirely unable to do so. ...
The limited suffrage movement is consequently only a means of providing votes for the propertied women of the middle class, and faggot votes for the wealthy; possibly tipping the balance of votes against the workers—men and women. Yet the Suffragettes pretend that this is a movement for the benefit of working women! The huge sums spent in this agitation prove that it is not a workers' movement. It is a movement by women of the wealthy and middle class to open up for themselves more fully careers of exploitation, and to share in the flesh-pots of political office, to get sinecures, position and emoluments among the governing caste.”
At the conclusion of the war, women over the age of 30 became eligible to vote in parliamentary elections. Rightly or wrongly, it was argued at the time that the age restriction was necessary to avoid a gender imbalance in voting given that so many young males had lost their lives. By 1928, however, universal suffrage for both men and women over the age of 21 became a reality.
So as you can see the picture was quite complex but had little to do with cultural misogyny or patriarchal power structures as some would paint it today.