Google just honored Grace Hopper with a doodle and once you see her in action, you'll know why. Grace Hopper was an accomplished naval officer/computer scientist with a wry sense of humor and a down to earth style of communicating. One of the first programmers on the Mark I Computer (IBM's Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator or ASCC), Grace Hopper once described the Mark I as having " 72 words of storage and could perform three additions a second." In comparison, the cell phone in your pocket has more computing power than NASA's first moon launch, so if you are using your phone to send lol cats.... think about it. It's not the power, it's what you do with it. The early behemoths Hopper worked on were as large as 51 feet long and 8ft high. She also worked on Harvard’s Mark II and III computers as well as the UNIVAC I computer. Affectionately known as "Grandma Cobol," because she lead the team that invented COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language). She was one of the first computer scientists to campaign for "coding" as a computer language rather than strings of … [Read more...] about Scientist Grace Hopper explains Nanoseconds
Archives for December 2013
Future Shock: Writing Sci Fi, Drones & Paranoia
Dystopia. The word hisses off the tongue with sibilant ease, a slow slide into the dark cellar of the collective psyche. The black regimes of our fears, the fascism, the rage, the oppression which mirrors our inner shades, often realized in nightmarish reality. Conversely, Utopia sounds so hopeful, so inclusive, like a suspended note of a celestial choir. A future where technology is used compassionately to further creative pursuits, knowledge and collective awareness. What's it going to be? One of the great tasks of Science Fiction is to explore humanity in the context of earth shattering change. In the case of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 with its mechanical hound or George Orwell's 1984, the startling portrait of the darker probabilities of the future, shaped the minds of a generation. The word "Big Brother" is now part of our lexicon of ideas. On the Utopian side, Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek inspired cell phones, interactive computers and has scientists noodling over the possibility of matter transfer and warp drive. Because I'm writing a dystopian novel, I … [Read more...] about Future Shock: Writing Sci Fi, Drones & Paranoia
Amazon Prime Air: Will Drones Deliver?
Remember The Jetsons? The cartoon about the future where the Jetson family had a plethora of wacky, futuristic gadgets to make life easier? Well it looks like CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos took that show seriously. Just when you're getting used to an irobot vacuum scooting around the floor, Amazon just revealed the next level of droid services. First Amazon created automated warehouses and now flying drones will deliver packages in under 30 minutes. The drone delivery service is called Amazon Prime Air: … [Read more...] about Amazon Prime Air: Will Drones Deliver?
