Automata

The topic of the day is automata, mechanical or mathematical contrivances that seem to be alive:

• a brief history of automata, including the famous chess-playing Turk
• more about the Turk and its secret, a review of Tom Standage's new book on the subject. (Standage, you may recall, is the author of The Victorian Internet.
• Chomick & Meder, makers of artistic automata. The site includes animations showing how they move. (I must confess to coveting the hand-cranked monkey.)
• But mere mechanical automata are now hopelessly old-fashioned; automata are now computational. Here is a fine page on cellular automata, a mathematical/logical recreation which most programmers recall with fondness. This page includes interactive applets which let you seed the grids and run them yourself. This showier page provides many other places to play.
• Stephen Wolfram, author of the program Mathematica and the book A New Kind of Science, has written much on cellular automata, which he believes to be allied to the deep reality of the world.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:19 PM

The image above (slightly shrunken to save bandwidth and storage space) comes from curiousLee, a weblog formerly based in Baltimore but now in New York City. It's linked to a wallpaper-sized version of the same image. Mike Lee's photographic work is always worth a drop-by. He has also compiled an impressive list of Columbia-related links. Sunday's post:

Remembering at the mother of all places to remember

I'm back in Manhattan.

On a walk tonight to pick up some juice for the morning, I gave Columbia crew photos to the security guard inside the southeast gate at Ground Zero, a ConEd worker in front of St. Paul's Churchyard on Broadway, and the counter clerk at the N&N Gourmet on Liberty Street.

They all understood.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:02 PM

Bailing with straw hats

As AlterNet and others have already pointed out, Doris "Granny D" Haddock has turned 93. Doris Haddock has been an activist for decades. In 1998, she walked across the United States to demonstrate her concern for the issue of campaign reform, wearing out four pairs of shoes and traversing the hundred miles from Cumberland, Maryland to Washington, D.C. on cross-country skis. Her speech on the occasion of her 93rd birthday, "Will We Represent Love in the World?" is filled with articulate humor and luminous rage at our country's current condition.

"How we live shapes the entire world," she affirms.

Yes, we must stop this war. We must stop this attack on our Bill of Rights. But we are bailing out our flooding boat with our straw hats if we do not look to the cause of this insanity.

and, again,

Will we rise to this battle? If so, we cannot lose, for rising up to it is our victory. Will we rise up? Will we represent love in the world? If we represent love in the world, you see, we have already won.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:57 PM

Aftermath

Much is back to normal this partly-cloudy Sunday. The museum floor is uncrowded; lines in the cafeteria are short. Beside the model of the space shuttle, a big-screen TV shows a publicity tape from NASA, an optimistic tribute to the Columbia crew released before the mission.

The mood is subdued. People stop to take pictures. A docent, her face strained, stands by to answer questions. But it is apparent that NASM has become a place of pilgrimage. On the glass cases of the shuttle models, flowers lie. They are unofficial tributes, cellophane-wrapped bouquets one might buy from street vendors. They lie across each other loosely, half at random, as if they had fallen from a height.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 3:30 PM

Columbia

I.

Grief must be shared. If friends and family are not available, we hurry to total strangers. "Have you heard? Have you heard?" And if they have not, we bear the awkward and solemn duty of telling them, edging up to truth by stairsteps of approximation.

Something has happened.
There was an accident.
It doesn't look good.
Short of a miracle…

All the while knowing that this sort of miracle does not happen; the end is obvious as soon as the facts are spoken.


II.

My father, who maintained and taught aircraft electrical systems, always worked circuits "live", one-handed so any accident would not ground through the heart. In general, that's how I maintain our database server. But there are certain tasks which must be performed when the server is down, and these I save up until there are sufficient to justify a day's labor. Then I perform a "comp-time shuffle", one (or in this case, two) days worked on a weekend in exchange for days off later. I treasure this time alone in the glassed-in eyrie of the reading room, a hermit spider wiring new circuit-webs of data. There is a comfort in being cut off from the world. I rarely even check the news sites. But the FileMaker Experts list, which I do check (at least to scan the subject lines) had just sent a note with the subject [OT] Shuttle explosion. I opened it with the chill of déja vu: Please, God, not again. But it was so.


III.

On January 28, 1986, I was also working alone. It was a weekday, but I was downstairs in the collection room writing catalog numbers on land snail shells. It was a sublimely mindless job, filled with the joy of handling those beautiful aragonite whorls in their neat white boxes, smiling over ancient labels. (One read only "Austro-Hungary" in sepia ink on a scrap of brittle paper. We had the devil's own time fitting that into our modern geographic-codes system.) And, because it was sublimely mindless, it was one of the few jobs at which I allowed myself the luxury of a radio. The station, equal parts news, music and commentary, was broadcasting the Challenger launch. They had just finished playing "Ground Control to Major Tom", a song I still hear with complex emotions. You know, of course, what came next.

I was the only person in the department with access to a radio. I was the only one who knew. And I knew, immediately, that must tell them. Heavy with responsibility, I walked upstairs in slow motion. "Something has happened. There has been an accident with the shuttle." Stairsteps to the truth screaming in the back of the brain like a vampire raven: They're all dead.


IV.

Downstairs, in the exhibit halls, surprising little was happening. I wanted to scream, "This is NASM, dammit! We should have a TV up, tuned to the NASA channel, or at least to CNN. We should have a curator speaking of the implications." Which of course was terribly unfair, since it was a weekend and it had only just happened. But the broadcast media, ever on the prowl for sound bites, had sent a camera and a white-haired man in a neat dark suit to interview visitors. The grief of the man in the street. They used a model of the shuttle as a backdrop; across Space Hall, a second cameraman was shooting footage of the lunar lander. Implication: the space program is in dead trouble this time. Which we knew already.


V.

But first, of course, I called the Mouse. It was a weekend; he would be sleeping in. He would not have had the news on.

The distant phone rang and clicked live. Hello, hello! What a surprise that you have called. How's it going? What's up?

One walks sideways toward disaster. "At the risk of ruining your entire weekend…" I began.

"What's happened?"

"The Columbia has exploded. The shuttle. You might want to…"

"Oh my God!"

"…turn on the news channel. Yes, I love you too. Goodbye."

Both knowing and not saying it:

They're all dead. Again.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 2:01 PM