Won't Somebody Tolerate
Me--An essay written by my mother, Elinor Goulding Smith, in 1956.
It is about being an agnostic in a time and a place when "freedom of
religion"
seemed to mean "freedom of religion for everyone but agnostics. You can
have any you like, but you gotta pick one."
The Optics of an Eyeglass Prescription
An
Eyeglass Prescription--An illustrated explanation of the
abbreviations,
terms, and numbers on an eyeglass prescription.
Young at Heart: Aging Gracefully with Attitude
NEW My old high school
classmate,
Anne Snowden Crosman, has published a pretty darn nice book containing
a collection of interviews with people in their seventies, eighties,
and
nineties who have managed to stay young at heart. Interviewees include
Linus Pauling, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross,
and
57 others. Read my review here
at Amazon.
Photos for your Desktop
Photos
suitable
for desktop art on your PC or Mac. Eight photos, mostly on nature
themes
(trees, clouds, etc.) at 1600x1200, 1024x768, 832x624 and 800x600
resolutions,
with gamma (darkness) tuned for Mac or PC.
MIT Nostalgia
The Doormat
Singers--In the years 1964-1966, listeners to MIT campus radio
station
WTBS were sometimes privileged to hear the songs of the Doormat
Singers:
Matt Fichtenbaum, MIT '66 and Dan Murphy, MIT '65. Four songs are
available
here in .mp3 format, about two megabytes each. (Dan Murphy's
post-Doormat-Singers
folksinging is chronicled here)
Bullets--Personal
college nostalgia. These are photographs of bullets in flight. I took
them
myself. Sort of. I took them in Dr. Edgerton's lab in 1962. Entire page
is about 40 KB including all jpg's.
Apple Gunkies and Nocturnal Aviation
Spoofs of commercials that aired on the MIT campus radio station (which at the time had the call letters WTBS). Apple Gunkies, Digicomputronimatics ("when you think of Dynadigitrons,
think
of Digicomputronimatics"), "Flexopneumohydroservosystematization and
Control", and more...
Neon
Visions OK, it's just a silly animated GIF which you may find
amusing
and nostalgic if you lived in a West Campus dorm at MIT in the
sixties.
Otherwise, don't bother...
PDP-1
Music Music as played by the PDP-1 Computer, MIT Building 26, in
the
mid-sixties.
Computer History/Nostalgia
Munching Squares--a program than runs on
a G3 or G4 Mac and simulates a classic "display hack" on a PDP-1
computer.
Project Whirlwind
(No, folks, this was
way before my time). Based on a 1953
documentary movie, Making Electrons Count. This Web edition includes:
transcript
of the soundtrack illustrated with 108 frames from the movie, forming a
storyboard version of the film (approx 600K total); three minutes of
edited
audio (200K); 1 minute of compressed video (3 MB) showing Whirlwind's
engineer
walking through and around the huge racks, ending by holding up a core
plane. The portions of the film dealing with 1953-style debugging from
the point of view of a user are fascinating and hysterically funny to
modern
ears. "My consultant notices and corrects several logical programming
errors.
I express my confidence that the program is now ready to run. On the
basis
of his experience with other programmers, my consultant feels that my
confidence
is unfounded."
Bush Differential
Analyzer in action??? This 732K QuickTime movie reproduces a very,
very short clip from the 1951 George Pal sci-fi epic, "When Worlds
Collide."
I think this must be a real shot of the Bush Differential
Analyzer
(1940's 100%-mechanical analog computer).
Philosophy
4 Etext of Owen Wister's charming, nostalgic account of two Harvard
undergraduates off on a spree in 1880's Cambridge.
Miscellaneous Humor
The Year-2000-Is-A-Leap-Year
FAQ--In the years leading up to 2000, to my astonishment, I saw
various
discussions in USENET and elsewhere debating whether or not the
year 2000 was a leap year. ComputerWorld once published a letter in
which
someone upbraided a major piece of software--VMS, I think--for treating
2000 as a leap year. After making several unsuccessful attempts to
convince
skeptics in comp.software.year-2000 that the year 2000 was really a
leap
year, I wrote this, in an effort to find something, anything, that
would
actually close off debate.
FAUXBIZ--This
page uses Javascript to generate fake business addresses. (It's a joke,
folks... like a poetry generators or random sentence generators. Every
few years a new interpretive language comes along... BASIC or Hypertalk
or VB and now Javascript... and we get to relive our past, writing
hundred-line
adventure games and the like). Well, things of this kind do have one
practical use: populating databases for demonstrations...
SCSI FAQ: Everything
you never wanted to know about SCSI