Notices by Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social), page 4

The verb/noun interface is still a pretty cool idea, I think. Essentially virtualised global variables / procedures:

<< Verbs were things the computer could do (“78 UPDATE PRELAUNCH AZIMUTH”). Nouns were numerical quantities or measurements (“33 TIME OF IGNITION”). It was a long way from point-and-click simplicity. >>

VMs were everywhere in the 1960s-1970s... even in Tiny BASIC, as I recall.

<< To maximize the built-in architecture, Hamilton and her colleagues came up with what they named “The Interpreter”—we’d now call it a virtualization scheme. It allowed them to run five to seven virtual machines simultaneously in two kilobytes of memory. >>

Not often talked about: the missile origins of Apollo.

<< Conceptually, the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which designed the system, built it atop the work they’d done for the Polaris guided-missile system, made to launch nuclear weapons from American submarines. The Apollo computer's hardware, as Mindell has noted, was fairly well understood “in the world of military avionics.” >>

Hamilton
My name is Margaret Hamilton
And there's a million things I haven't done
But just you wait, just you wait

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/underappreciated-power-apollo-computer/594121/

Hamilton
My name is Margaret Hamilton
And there's a million things I haven't done
But just you wait, just you wait

@zensaiyuki I wanna know more about just what happened on Apollo 8 though and how they got back with the software wiped!

I guess this sort of thing is exactly why they trained in manual navigation techniques, but it must have been v. embarrassing

@zensaiyuki I read it more as an engineering vs astronauts culture clash - 'thanks but no, we don't need some machine to babysit us, we're far too smart to make mistakes'.

The same bravado that C++ programmers always swagger around with whenever anyone suggests something like 'automatic memory management'

The Lauren Bug

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/13/margaret-hamilton-computer-scientist-interview-software-apollo-missions-1969-moon-landing-nasa-women

omg Natalie Portman Jane Foster Thor!

its_happening.gif

https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/07/20/natalie-portman-is-thor-in-thor-love-and-thunder-november-2021/

@Rich_Graham I sort of have this, in a way - my sense of experienced religion comes primarily from my mother...

.. but she got hers either from personal Near Death Experiences, or else was just born with it.

So my feeling is that human initiation is one thing, but, The Powers Upstairs aren't waiting for that if it's not there. They are deliberately routing around the human system where it's broken down, and are wholesale initiating people themselves via, NDEs, past-life recall, etc.

@bstacey @frankiesaxx

Exactly! I guess what I hoped is that the Echthroi / Darkness would be an ongoing Big Bad and there'd be tessering all over the galaxy, but I think l'Engle just got very bored of the whole premise immediately.

The unicorn stuff really didn't do much for me and then the Weird Noah stuff did even less.

And then everyone's related to each other in a whole separate series of non-fantasy fiction which is great, but, those books also bored me because no fantasy.

@thegibson That's one... small... step for a man, one... aieeeee!

(is sucked down into moon dust by a tentacle, a nearby suspiciously round rock blinks open and stares)

Houston, uh, we're gonna need a bigger boat.

@frankiesaxx like I look back now and think 'hmm, in 1960, was everyone just sorta.... expecting all the younger Baby Boomers to automatically be superkids, cause they were learning New Math?'

@frankiesaxx I think AWIT is basically the Extremely Liberal Episcopalian take on Narnia, so yeah, the preachiness came baked-in.

I have no idea why there's a super-kid, Charles Wallace, at the core of the story who never really ever pays off why he's super (he does time travel on a unicorn to save the world from a conveniently unthreatening-to-liberal-capitalism South American dictator or other, but that hardly requires any super cleverness to pull off, just a unicorn)

@frankiesaxx It's only now I realise that the American Tomorrow People show was a CW thing. Now I understand. It's almost exactly like Arrow and Flash in how much it almost but doesn't work.. mostly revolving around the characters and the cities they live in having no credible ordinary lives.

@frankiesaxx On a related note, how is it that The Tomorrow People has been made.. four times now? And each time it still doesn't really work.

'Teens with psi powers fighting space battles while also dealing with ordinary life' ought to write itself! But somehow it never does.

@frankiesaxx

Maybe it was just the idea of doing 'Narnia but with witchy ambiguously-UFO-beings fighting a cosmic war across galaxies' that was exciting, and I wish she'd written the book series that AWIT suggested it was going to be, and wasn't

@frankiesaxx

The 'lost' three pages were found in 2015, not the book!

Book was published 1962, l'Engle began writing it in 1959.

She was well-read, because the Golden Age of General Relativity was only just getting going then.. I think the Chapel Hill gravity conference was 1957.

Not that AWIT really relies on anything from GR other than a vague idea of 'wrinkling space'.. her version is telepathic, much more akin to Alfred Bester's 'jaunting' from The Stars My Destination (1956)

BADGER BADGER BADGER
BADGER BADGER BADGER

https://twitter.com/ingham_mal/status/1152167214868586497