{"id":416,"date":"2006-02-08T07:51:24","date_gmt":"2006-02-08T13:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/?p=416"},"modified":"2006-02-08T08:09:10","modified_gmt":"2006-02-08T14:09:10","slug":"heres-one-for-glenn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/2006\/02\/heres-one-for-glenn\/","title":{"rendered":"Here&#8217;s one for Glenn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2006\/02\/07\/difference_engine_me.html\">Boing-Boing: Difference Engine mechanical computer made from legos<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Cory Doctorow<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/craphound.com\/images\/legodifferencemachine.jpg\" width=\"312\" height=\"235\" align=\"left\"\/><\/p>\n<p>An enterprising hacker has created a working &#8220;difference engine&#8221; &#8212; a mechanical calculator first attempted in 19th Century by Charles Babbage &#8212; out of legos. The difference engine was immortalized in the William Gibson\/Bruce Sterling <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/055329461X\/downandoutint-20\">collaboration<\/a> of the same name, and it&#8217;s a perpetual source of hacker fascination (Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron&#8217;s daughter, financed the project and invented the idea of software for it because she was interested in handicapping horse races). Though Babbage was never able to get his design working, London&#8217;s science museum did build a Babbage Engine that worked, thanks to the greater precision of twentieth-century machining techniques.<\/p>\n<p>Andy Carol is a Lego builder who created a working Difference Engine in legos, though his machine &#8220;only&#8221; solves second- and third-order polynomials to three or four digits. The site contains fascinating detail about the workings of Difference  Engines and Carol&#8217;s implementation thereof.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/acarol.woz.org\/\">Link<\/a><\/p>\n<p>(<em>Thanks, <\/em><em><a href=\"http:\/\/rick.wordpress.com\">Rick<\/a><\/em><em>!<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Boing-Boing: Difference Engine mechanical computer made from legos Cory Doctorow: An enterprising hacker has created a working &#8220;difference engine&#8221; &#8212; a mechanical calculator first attempted<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pekNN-6I","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}