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by unlimitedbacon
3844 days ago
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There is an excellent webcomic called The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, that describes what would have happened if they had successfully completed the Analytical Engine and gone on to fight crime.
http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/ More impressive than the comic itself is the amount of research put into it and the footnotes that go along with it. The author often takes inspiration directly from primary sources. For instance, a whole series on Babbage's strange hatred of street musicians. |
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thrilling_Adventures_of_Lo...
It is an amazing work of art and scholarship. It's so much fun. It is indeed thrilling to imagine Ada as an accomplished horsewoman and lady of adventure, wrangling engines both within and without. In one of the stories, she's something of a parkour artist running through the gears of the difference engine. And it's all full of footnotes to primary sources that explain more about her actual life.
I find it more fun to read than Wolfram's blog post. Certainly more fun than, "in apparent resonance with some of my own work 150 years later, he talks about the relationship between mechanical processes, natural laws and free will."