Recommended by Ricochet Members Created with Sketch. Quote of the Day: The Analytical Engine

 

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”–Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace

One-hundred eighty-seven years ago, on June 5, 1833, Augusta Ada Byron (she was the poet’s only legitimate child and a brilliant 15-year-old student) met Charles Babbage, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Ada and Charles subsequently went their separate ways, she married and had children, but she never lost her love for, or stopped studying, mathematics. Although she thought about her one-time mentor every now and then, and about the huge mechanical “Difference Engine” he’d built to perform and tabulate mathematical functions, she did not come into his life again in a substantive way until 1842. She was asked by a mutual friend, Charles Wheatstone, to translate an article written in Italian and describing a talk that Babbage had given in Turin the previous year.

At the time, Babbage was on a whirlwind tour of Europe, trying to drum up the money to build his next-generation “Analytical Engine,” as he’d been repeatedly disappointed at the lukewarm and miserly reception to his fundraising efforts in his native England. Babbage envisioned a steam-powered unit, into which instructions were fed by a series of punched cards (an idea he stole from the French weavers and their Jacquard looms, another interesting story in its own right). A memory store in the Analytical Engine would be capable of holding a thousand or so numbers, and the output resulting from its machinations would be sent straight to a printer.

Recommended by Ricochet Members Created with Sketch. James Lileks: National Treasure

 

I know that just about everybody here knows who James is, probably largely from the podcasts where he stands athwart Rob Long, enticing him into breaking into his segue, but I’ve only sporadically checked out his Bleat blog, which he has been doing since Moses took two tablets of Advil down from Mt. Doom and rebuilt his lightsaber to defeat the Sith on a volcano planet somewhere, out there, in the galaxy.

Today, he’s documenting what’s happened in his town, pictures of the buildings, many of them with boards on the windows, but he’s also got these fantastic tidbits on the architecture and the background on the buildings.

Recommended by Ricochet Members Created with Sketch. The Weekly Standings: Warm Bucket of Spit Edition

 

Hank Howdy: Hello and welcome to the Weekly Standings. I’m chief analyst Hank Howdy.

Bob Spwortz: And I’m your host, Bob Spwortz. Along with Kurt Kurtsson at the tracking board, we’ll be following the most exciting Vice President competition in US history to the very end. Last week’s leader Amy Klobuchar has taken some hits after suggesting that all Minneapolis police officers should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.

“Conservatives should be leading the civil rights movement,” says Kay C. James, President of The Heritage Foundation. Conservatives have the solutions to solve much of the racial inequalities and injustices present in America today.

James joins the podcast to explain that the answers to many of the issues plaguing the African American community, such as poverty, lack of access to good healthcare, and poor education systems, are issues conservatives have the viable solutions for.

Recommended by Ricochet Members Created with Sketch. Mattis Is Dangerously Wrong

 

Mattis: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

This is an idiotic and baseless claim from an educated man who ought to know better. The president will call in the military not to shut down peaceful protests but to stop the rampant looting of businesses – retail outlets, pharmacies that provide critical medications for people; as well as stop the burning down of buildings and stop the attacks on innocent people (many of whom are attempting to protect their businesses from destruction). Given the theft, arson, destruction, and violence that has occurred, these aren’t minor incidents by just a few people. If POTUS calls in the military to shut down the looting, the arson, and the attacks on innocent civilians, there is absolutely nothing “illegal” about that order. No one has a Constitutional right to steal, burn down businesses or government buildings, or to attack innocent people!

Given the idiocy or the blatant and possible deliberate misrepresentation that Mattis espouses, he deserves every bit of ridicule that can be heaped upon him. He does a disservice to the nation and a disservice to the truth. He also may be influencing other currently-serving, high-ranking officers to disobey the Commander-in-Chief’s lawful order when given, as the Dan Bongino video below suggests. If that is the case, Mattis has become someone who has disgraced himself and permanently marred his otherwise honorable career.