Britain

Cool RetroTech, but…

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The first stored-program electronic computer capable of doing useful work was the EDSAC, built at Cambridge University and commissioned in 1949. It supported research in several scientific disciplines as well as the development of software techniques until being scrapped as obsolete in 1958. There is now a project to rebuild this pioneering computer: the reconstructed version will be made as close as possible to the original, with one exception…and the reasons for the exception, I think, are perhaps more related to social history than to the history of technology.

EDSAC used vacuum tubes (valves, in Britspeak) for its arithmetical and logical functions; for memory, it used something called a mercury delay line, an idea borrowed from WWII radar technology. (EDSAC=Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator.) information to be stored was introduced at one end of a tube of mercury, down which it traveled in the form of pulses of sound. About 1 millisecond later, at the other end of the tank, the pulses were picked up, amplified, and emitted again at the starting point, with the whole train of information bits in the line thereby being kept in continuous circulation as long as the power was on.

Can you guess how the reconstructed EDSAC is going to differ from the original version?

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Declassified, after 66 Years

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Mavis Batey, a WWII codebreaker, was presented by the British intelligence agency GCHQ with a document (“the history of Abwehr codebreaking”) that she co-authored in 1945 and that has only now been declassified. One of the other authors was her late husband Keith, but the information was considered so secret, and was so compartmentalized, that she had not previously read or even been aware of his contributions to the document.

I’ve previously written about Mavis Batey (née Mavis Lever) in my post the bombe runs again. Her realization that a certain enciphered message did not contain a single occurrence of the letter “L” led to the breaking of the message, the setting of a trap for the Italian fleet at Cape Matapan, and the sinking of four enemy ships.

Assorted Links, or, I wish I could think up a better title for this post….

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The US could be almost self-sufficent for energy by 2030, while the EU will be the most vulnerable region for energy security, BP said on Wednesday.
 
Growth in shale oil and gas production would mean the US needed few imports, while North America as a whole could be self-sufficient, BP forecast at its Global Energy Outlook 2030.
 
BP forecast that Eurasia could also become self-sufficient, based on the prediction that Europe would being a net importer of energy, and the former Soviet Union countries net exporters by a similar amount.
 
In practice, this would leave the EU the most vulnerable region for energy security.

– The Telegraph

Friends, I have no particular knowledge of this subject. If you have anything to add in comments, I’d love to hear it.

Ah, age. One of the most daring aspects of this novel is that Lively is concerned with the hearts and problems of older characters. Her major players are well past their youth, and a boyish up-and-coming historian (the snake in Lord Henry’s mansion) doesn’t become important until much of the novel has passed. “How much remains when youth is gone?” Lively seems to be asking. And the answer is, “An abundance.” Here middle and old age are times of blossoming identity and possibility, miraculous bursts of sunshine.

– The New York Times reviews Penelope Lively’s novel, How it All Began.

Even as a twenty-something, I was fascinated with literary representations of middle age. An odd one, that’s me.

To The Lifeboats

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Pretty damned ironic, that the Costa Concordia disaster happened almost exactly a hundred years after the Titanic. It’s not all that often these days that a European/American flagged passenger ship becomes a catastrophic loss to their insurance company although it happens with dispiriting frequency to inter-island ferries in the Philippines and hardly any notice of it taken in Western newspapers. The contrasts and ironies just abound; fortunate that the Costa was so close to land that some passengers were able to swim to safety, and that rescue personnel were at the scene almost before the air-bubbles from the sunken half of the ship even popped to the surface.

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A Revived Delight

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I know that in Louisiana, they are trying to create a culinary demand for nutria, since the wretched beasts have outworn their welcome in the wetlands there. They were once imported from South America for their fur but I have no idea why American grey squirrels were inflicted upon Great Britain. You’d think they had enough problems of their own without adding imported, fluffy-tailed tree rats to them … maybe it was payback for that fool who wished America to have every critter mentioned in Shakespeare.

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