Surfaces

"In 1821 an inventor and mathematician, Charles Babbage, was poring over a set of mathematical tables. Finding error after error Babbage exclaimed, "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam." His frustration was not simply at the grindingly tedious labor of checking manually evaluated tables, but at their daunting unreliability. Science, engineering, construction, banking, and insurance depended on tables for calculation. Ships navigating by the stars relied on them to find their positions at sea.". "Babbage launched himself on a grand venture to design and build mechanical calculating engines that would eliminate such errors. His bid to build infallible machines is a saga of ingenuity and will, which led beyond mechanized arithmetic into the entirely new realm of computing. Through Ada, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron, we gain tantalizing insights into how at least one Victorian glimpsed the promise of what was to come. Babbage springs out of history like a jack-in-the-box: a gentleman philosopher, a tireless inventor, a vigorous socialite, and a mesmerizing raconteur. "Mr. Babbage is coming to dinner" was a coup for any hostess.". "Drawing on previously unused archival material, The Difference Engine is a tale of both Babbage's nineteenth-century quest to build a calculating engine and its twentieth-century sequel. For in 1991, Babbage's vision was finally realized, at least in part, by the completion at the Science Museum in London of the first full-sized Babbage engine, finished in time for the 200th anniversary of Babbage's birth. The two quests are mutually illuminating and are recounted here by the then Curator of Computing, Doron Swade - one of the main protagonists of the successful resumption of Babbage's extraordinary work."--BOOK JACKET. What a difference a century makes. Doron Swade, technology historian and assistant director of London's Science Museum, investigates the troubles that plagued 19th-century knowledge engineers in The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer . The author is in a unique position to appreciate the technical difficulties of the time, as he led a team that built a working model of a Difference Engine, using contemporary materials, in time for Babbage's 1991 bicentenary. The meat of the book is comprised of the story of the first computing machine design as gathered from the technical notes and drawings curated by Swade. Though Babbage certainly had problems translating his ideas into brass, the reader also comes to understand his fruitless, drawn-out arguments with his funders. Swade had it comparatively easy, though his depictions of the frustrating search for money and then working out how best to build the enormous machine in the late 1980s are delightful. It is difficult--maybe impossible--to draw a clear, unbroken line of influence from Babbage to any modern computer researchers, but his importance both as the first pioneer and as a symbol of the joys and sorrows of computing is unquestioned. Swade clearly respects his subject deeply, all the more so for having tried to bring the great old man's ideas to life. The Difference Engine is lovingly comprehensive and will thrill readers looking for a more technical examination of Babbage's career. --Rob Lightner Despite its importance in the sciences and the plastic arts, the concept of a surface has been virtually ignored bt philosophers - mentioned in the philosophical literature since the time of Aristotle, but never accorded the full investigation that Avum Stroll provides in this book. Stoll shows that the concept plays an essential role in many philosophical problems (Our knowledge of the external world, abstract ideas, foundationalism); it is also important in it's own right and for its bearing on future research projects in philosophy and in the psychology of perception. Stroll's first line of questioning - how we define and perceive a surface - issues in a powerful chalenge to one of the main assuptions of traditional epistemology. Then he looks into "the geometry of ordinary speech" - the terms we use to organize and structure the world we inhabit ("margin," "border," "limit," "boundary," "edge") - and shows how this informal topological system reesembles and differs from the mathematical science of geometry. In doing so, he opens up a novel philosophical issue to further discussion and research. In 1821, Charles Babbage was reviewing a set of mathematical tables with a colleague in preparation for a scientific presentation when, after finding a wealth of errors, he exclaimed in frustration, "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!" With this outburst, Babbage began to envision an end to human errors in the numerical tables upon which finance, trade, science, and navigation relied. The Difference Engine is the fascinating story of his heroic quest, against all odds, to build the first computing machine more than one hundred years before the modern computer we use today was invented. Set against the politics and science of the explosive early Victorian era, The Difference Engine is a thrilling tale of Babbage's exuberant determination. Like Longitude, The Difference Engine is a fascinating portrait of the human story behind a pivotal moment in history and one of the most influential inventions of our time Forensic anthropologist Maples revisits his strangest, most interesting, and most horrific investigations, from gruesome and baffling dismemberment cases to the revelation of the identity of long-buried skeletons. "These tales of crime unmasked by science are compelling in their own right." Avrum Stroll. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 220-222.