#code history

[gigslist]

OOPART Art History of The Holy Grail Mysteries

Finally my new Book on OOPART Art of the Holy Grail. A book of art posters and a selfie game of OOPART art telling a different story of the Holy Grail Bloodline. Enough content ideas for all of 2023 if you quote me as your source:) All the OOPART art in this collection is over 100 years old. Housed in recognized museums to visit in person or registered with auction houses to visit online. 

The Virgin Mary with a snake up her dress, 17th century. The Holy family entombing Jesus at Glastonbury Tor in England, 17th century. Jesus as a young boy in a boat with Buddha, 16th century. For starters.

The collection in OOPART Art of the Holy Grail is in poster format, with their OOPART histories on the back, and includes a selfie photo game to win points and show your followers. How the lost histories are preserved old school, in pictures, stories and games. Reviving a kind of wow way to experience classical art.

Coded History is a 10 year research project. Until now, mostly followed by academics, who include royals, diplomats, historians, grand masters and members of orders/societies. Mostly USA, UK, France, Australia and Italy. And at least one USA court judge. And a few celeb doc makers. Such as Brad Olsen from Ancient Aliens, who’s followed Deborah’s work for over 10 years.

The author and curator, Deborah Hodgson, was born a duchess on Prince Philip’s side. Deborah worked for an antiquities dealer while studying classical fine art in London, UK. Graduating with a drawing exhibited at the Royal Academy. A career in entertainment, the arts, design and media in 5 countries and many formats. Now documentary producer, curator and researcher for the content creator business zine GigsList.info

Get the book and game

https://www.blurb.com/b/11401135-oopart-art-of-the-holy-grail

Deadlines to get yours in time for Christmas 2022

Standard Delivery Dec 9

Express Delivery Dec 19

Thank You for Supporting Weird Content Research!

[code-abuse]

First Programming Language

Officially, the first programming language for a computer was Plankalkül, developed by Konrad Zuse for the Z3 between 1943 and 1945. However, it was not implemented until 1998.

Short Code, which was proposed by John Mauchly in 1949, is considered to be the first high-level programming language. It was designed to represent mathematical expressions in a format readable by human beings. However, because it had to be translated into machine code before it could be executed, it had relatively slow processing speeds.

Other early programming languages were developed in the 1950s and 1960s, including Autocode, COBOL, FLOW-MATIC, and LISP. Of these, only COBOL and LISP are still in use today.

Source: Wikipedia

[flatironschool]

Code History Lesson: Edsger Dijkstra

Computer Scientist Edsger Dijkstra shaped his field from both an engineering and a theoretical perspective. Today, he is best known as the inventor of structured programming, a master of tongue-in-cheek commentary, and a former owner of a Volkswagen van dubbed “the Touring Machine.” Despite what he might have said about object oriented programming, Dijkstra is always a part of Flatiron School lectures.

Dijkstra is well known nowadays as the inventor of structured programming—in which programs flow from top to bottom following a hierarchical model. As the terminology implies, this invention has made code more structured, and, more specifically, clearer, faster, better organized, and higher quality. 

That structured programming is one of Dijkstra’s central contributions makes sense given his advocacy for simplicity above all and his critical perspective on programming languages. This perspective is summed up nicely in a short, tongue-in-cheek essay called “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” that Dijkstra published in 1975. 

The essay is centered on aphoristic “truths” about programming. Most of these “truths” are blunt and biting. For example, “The use of COBOL cripples the mind.” Apart from his harsher truths, one statement resonates in particular:

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.

Dijkstra saw the programming languages available in the 70’s as flawed. His work toward improving them was in service not only of faster programs, but also of a more rigorous, innovative approach to programming. As we interpret it: using inadequate tools is damaging not only to programs but also to a programmer’s ability to think of elegant solutions to complex problems—an overarching theme in Dijkstra’s work. As he once said:

“If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, ‘Dijkstra would not have liked this,’ well that would be enough immortality for me.”

Read more Code History Lessons. Edsger Dijkstra art by Flatiron alum Mitch Boyer.

[flatironschool]

Code History Lesson: Anita Borg

Anita Borg dedicated her career to making the tech industry a better place. Although she was a respected computer scientist, she is given the most credit for her tireless advocacy for and mentorship of women in computing. In honor of her 66th birthday tomorrow, here are three reasons to celebrate her memory.

1. She taught herself how to program

2. She created communities of women in computing

In 2015, Borg is best remembered for her work supporting, celebrating, and advocating for women who wanted to impact technology. This work gained momentum when she founded the online community Systers in 1987—years before online communities (let alone global communities of women in computer science) were a thing.

In 1994, while attending a conference with a notable lack of female representation, Borg had dinner with Telle Whitney and started the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Now the world’s largest gathering of its kind, this conference started with 500 attendees and was dedicated to bringing women’s achievements and research in computer science to the forefront.

She also founded the Institute for Women and Technology. According to Borg, the Institute was started to ensure women (regardless of whether or not they worked in tech) had opportunities to shape the technologies of the future.

"There are many ways that women can impact technology without being IN technology. We need both kinds of women… At IWT, we think that women must be involved in every aspect of defining the future of technology, from policy to research to design and implementation. We must be there in order to assure that the technology of the future serves us well."

3. She helped show Barbie that math is for everyone, not just boys

In general, Systers provided a place for technical women to discuss highly technical topics. But on occasion, non-technical discussion was sanctioned. One of these occasions happened in 1992 when a talking Barbie complained about math class.

Mattel’s Teen Talk Barbie was programmed to say 270 phrases including “Math class is tough.” If this doesn’t sound familiar to you, allow us to direct your attention to the recent Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer controversy.

Because girls were playing with Barbies at an age when confidence in their math abilities needed to be bolstered, not undercut, protest stirred among the Systers list. Ultimately, they played a role in getting Mattel to remove the phrase.

The beauty of Borg’s advocacy lied in the belief that rallying women’s voices would add a distinct, yet critical perspective to technology. This diversity of thought would not only make the industry richer in the short run, but would help future technologies make a positive impact. In a time when technology touches people’s social, political, economic, and personal lives, it should serve everyone, regardless of their gender, age, or level of tech savviness. Advocating for women was her part in helping all people secure the power to shape their own futures.

Happy Birthday, Anita Borg! Thank you for making our community even better.

Read more Code History Lessons. Anita Borg art by Flatiron School Instructor Mitch Boyer.

[flatironschool]

Code History Lesson: Alan Turing

The quote above is from Alan Turing's essay, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (the one where he introduces the Turing Test). It might seem like an overarching statement about technology, but it's actually about building a theoretical basis for artificial intelligence back when AI was just fantasy.

As the "father" of theoretical computer science, Olympic-quality long-distance runner, extraordinary genius, and tragic hero, Turing (1912-1954) packed a lot into his 42 years. Because so much of we do wouldn't have been possible without him, he makes a regular appearance in programming lectures at Flatiron School. Here are three things you should know:

1. He helped make computer science a thing

He formalized concepts we use every day like, "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine—a beautifully simple, totally hypothetical device that explores the possibilities of computation.

The Turing machine, or "universal computing machine," held its program on an infinite piece of tape and was capable of solving any algorithm. This set the groundwork for him (and others) to make the conceptual leap from impossible tape to using the computer's own memory to hold the program.

2. He dropped math "bombes" in World War II

After moving to Bletchley Park (a house where Britain kept its codebreakers during WWII that was as ugly as it sounds), he gathered fast intelligence for the British Army. Thanks to him, much of the content in coded messages sent by the German army were swiftly passed along to allied forces...and he didn't do it by just sitting there crunching numbers like an airplane passenger playing Sudoku.

The German military's cipher machine, appropriately named Enigma, was the source of the code. Turing initially developed and produced the prototype of the anti-Enigma "bombe"—an electro-mechanical device used to mechanize codebreaking that looked a lot like a backgammon board. The bombe cracked about two messages per minute (around 84,000 messages in total), including those used by the U-boats that threatened Britain's food supply. It's estimated that Bletchley Park's operation shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years. Read more about how Turing saved lives with math in WWII here and here.

3. He beat everyone to artificial intelligence

In the same decade Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics set rules for the thinking robots of science fiction, Turing founded the field of artificial intelligence and came up with a theoretical basis for it.

In 1950, he proposed a test to figure out whether or not machines could think, now widely known as the Turing test. It's kind of like reverse Captcha. And it implied that if we could write programs that were close enough to human cognition that they passed the Turing test, they wouldn't be programs anymore. They would be actual minds. At the time, this all seemed like Asimov fancy (probably even to Turing). And it's still not a very good way to actually determine whether or not a computer can think (although Eugene Goostman fooled a few folks). But it has inspired and challenged AI research from the start.

We get now that Turing's arrest and subsequent suicide were part of an enormously shameful chapter of recent history. His sexuality became public by a fluke—and because homosexuality was still considered a crime in Britain, he was arrested under the same law as Oscar Wilde 60 years before (along with about 75,000 other men throughout Britain's history). Although the world has recently showered him with accolades, it doesn't really erase the inhuman treatment he received in life. So here's a hard question: would the people who persecuted Turing pass his test?

[flatironschool]

Code History Lesson: Ada Lovelace

1. She was probably the world’s first programmer

In 1833, the cutting edge of computing looked something like this. This machine, called the Analytical Engine, was a mechanical computing device invented (but never actually built) by “the father of the computer” Charles Babbage. Had Babbage ever built the Engine, it would have been possible to “program” it to tabulate functions with punched, operational cards similar to the ones used in the 1940s to program some of the first modern computers.

Evidence of Lovelace’s role in computing history exists largely in correspondences with Babbage and in very thorough notes on a translation of a lecture on the Analytical Engine. In these annotations she was kind enough to include a description of an algorithm to calculate Bernoulli numbers. So, if the Analytical Engine was the first general-purpose computer, her notes were the first description of software, and she was the very first programmer.

2. She was the math-whiz daughter of a famous poet

Specifically, she was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron—original bad boy of poetry and owner of a very fine turban.

People often credit Lovelace’s numbers-heavy education to her mother’s objectively awful relationship with Byron. Actually, Lady Byron loved mathematics even before she was left with such a terrible impression of poets. She felt this supposedly opposite discipline would encourage mental stability and ward off wantonness. In retrospect, it seems like this wasn’t the most successful parenting strategy. Lovelace grew into a brilliant but incredibly complicated adult.

3. The U.S. Department of Defense named a programming language after her

The DoD developed a programming language called Ada (after Lovelace) in the 1970s. In 2014, Ada is not exactly a hot new trend in technology. It is, however, a reliable language still used by the military and in projects where safety is absolutely crucial, like air traffic control and transportation software. So remember to think of Ada Lovelace "the enchantress of numbers" while you are getting on the subway or enjoying a tiny bag of pretzels on a flight.

Though widely considered the world’s first programmer, Lovelace’s contribution hasn’t been the most celebrated or well understood—and it certainly doesn’t seem like much when it’s described as notes on a translation of Babbage’s lecture. Just think of it this way: in a moment where computers are omnipresent, it’s easy to take for granted how impossible it must have been not only to understand the Analytical Engine but to imagine its possibility.

[lxdrsk-blog]

What Hackers Can Learn from Dead Artists

A good hacker might learn a thing or two from dead artists. Like how to steal.

Consider this apocryphal Picasso quote:

Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

Almost universally, the great artists developed their skills by studying and "stealing" from the masters that preceded them.

Edgar Degas:

“What I do is the result of reflection and the study of great masters.”

The Dance Class, by Edgar Degas

Picasso:

"As if I didn't know Cezanne! He was my one and only master. Don't you think I looked at his pictures? I spent years studying them.....Cezanne! It was the same with all of us."

The Card Players, by Paul Cezanne

Studying and stealing was how the artists learned. It was how they fell in love with their craft.

I think hackers can learn from this approach as well. By studying the code of masters, and the lives of the masters themselves, we too can learn to create innovative and beautiful things.

This is not a new idea. Paul Graham discussed it back in 2003, in one of my favorite essays: Hackers and Painters. The fantastic Architecture of Open Source Applications series promotes this idea extensively.

I'm writing about this idea here because it recently had personal relevance for me. A few weeks ago I started working on Guido.js, a javascript port of the Guido music encoding/engraving system. A large part of this project involves studying the original Guido code and figuring out how it works.

It's been a lot of fun, and I think I have learned some new things. And just about how software is put together.

When you study code, you also learn about how code evolves, how it gets documented, and perhaps most importantly, how it is built by a team of people.

As I work on other projects, I do find myself thinking about these things. I find myself "stealing" techniques and stories from the original Guido code.

So, if you want to expand your hacking horizons, I highly recommend studying and porting someone else's code.

Try keeping a notebook as you do it. Or even better yet, blog about it so others can learn from your journey. This is what the great artists did, just look at their notebooks and letters.

I also encourage you to help others learn with you.

One thing I would love to see would be more resources for "code history". Especially things related to the lives of the hackers themselves, What they were thinking about, what masters they studied, what their inspirations were.

Something like Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, but for hackers.

Vasari's Lives

There are some projects in this vein already. Some of my favorites are Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine and Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes the Computer Revolution . But I would like to see more.

I challenge a computer science class to do something like http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/ for code history. Create a class wiki; have teams of students make pages that focus on particular hackers or their projects. Talk about how the projects were related, or what made them special. And make it look nice! (this bit often gets left out, but I think it's important).

I finish with this quote, from one of my favorite dead artists, Kazimir Malevich:

I recommend that you should work actively... and study the artistic structures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Watteau, Poussin, and other painters, even Chardin, where he is an artist. Study very closely their dabbing manner of execution and try to copy a small piece of canvas, just one square inch.

Find your square inch today, and let us know how it goes!

Black Square, by Kazimir Malevich