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Author Topic:   Humour VIII
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 1261 of 1442 (883822)
01-13-2021 11:36 AM
Reply to: Message 1260 by xongsmith
01-13-2021 12:43 AM


Re: worse than 2020?
Match (used to be match.com?) has a commercial out that I had seen but didn't listen to until the other night.
Satan checks his smartphone and the Match app informs him of a match. They meet on a walkway under a bridge (Central Park?). He asks "Two Zero Two Zero?" and she replies, "Just call me Twenty-twenty." Then we see them doing things together, like going into public restroom and stealing all the toilet paper. Taking a selfie in front of a dumpster fire. Etc.
It's on YouTube (where I just now noticed that her avatar is a locust).

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1260 by xongsmith, posted 01-13-2021 12:43 AM xongsmith has not replied

  
AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8513
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 5.3


Message 1262 of 1442 (883839)
01-14-2021 4:46 PM



Factio Republicana delenda est.
I am antifa.

  
Diomedes
Member
Posts: 995
From: Central Florida, USA
Joined: 09-13-2013


(3)
Message 1263 of 1442 (883981)
01-20-2021 3:12 PM


Moving day at the Whitehouse
Hey moving guys; don't forget that orange thing hiding behind the desk.....

  
Diomedes
Member
Posts: 995
From: Central Florida, USA
Joined: 09-13-2013


(5)
Message 1264 of 1442 (884092)
01-22-2021 12:13 PM


Goodbye Donald Trump

  
AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8513
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 5.3


(5)
Message 1265 of 1442 (884122)
01-23-2021 10:50 AM


I know this doesn't relate to anything on the forum but it tickled me silly.

Eschew obfuscation. Habituate elucidation.

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.3


(2)
Message 1266 of 1442 (884152)
01-23-2021 5:16 PM


The von Trapp Children Bid Goodbye
--Percy

  
AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8513
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 5.3


(2)
Message 1267 of 1442 (884199)
01-26-2021 5:21 PM



Eschew obfuscation. Habituate elucidation.

  
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


(3)
Message 1268 of 1442 (884235)
01-31-2021 11:36 AM



My Sister's Website: Rose Hill StudiosMy Website: My Website

  
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


(3)
Message 1269 of 1442 (884269)
02-03-2021 8:24 AM



My Sister's Website: Rose Hill StudiosMy Website: My Website

  
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


(1)
Message 1270 of 1442 (884282)
02-04-2021 4:48 PM



My Sister's Website: Rose Hill StudiosMy Website: My Website

  
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


(1)
Message 1271 of 1442 (884283)
02-05-2021 7:59 AM



My Sister's Website: Rose Hill StudiosMy Website: My Website

  
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


(2)
Message 1272 of 1442 (884284)
02-05-2021 3:09 PM


computers

My Website: My Website

Replies to this message:
 Message 1273 by Phat, posted 02-06-2021 11:21 AM jar has not replied
 Message 1274 by dwise1, posted 02-06-2021 4:31 PM jar has not replied

  
Phat
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Posts: 18262
From: Denver,Colorado USA
Joined: 12-30-2003
Member Rating: 1.1


(2)
Message 1273 of 1442 (884286)
02-06-2021 11:21 AM
Reply to: Message 1272 by jar
02-05-2021 3:09 PM


Re: computers
sometimes I think that now that we all have smartphones we need to go back to school to catch up with them.
27 Funny But Thought-Provoking Images Of How Smartphones Have Taken Over Our Lives
Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." ~Mark Twain "
***
far from science having buried God, not only do the results of science point towards his existence, but the scientific enterprise itself is validated by his existence.- Dr.John Lennox
The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe.
- Criss Jami, Killo
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You
(1894).

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
 Message 1275 by dwise1, posted 02-06-2021 5:44 PM Phat has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 1274 of 1442 (884287)
02-06-2021 4:31 PM
Reply to: Message 1272 by jar
02-05-2021 3:09 PM


Re: computers
Truth! In his 1985 series, The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke pointed out that in dictionaries published before the 1940's, computers were defined as people who performed calculations. Though, of course, that should come as no surprise to anyone who had watched Hidden Figures -- at the end of that movie something happened that almost never happens anymore: the audience broke out in applause.
When we covered iterative array operations to solve either linear or differential equations (it's been four decades, so cut me some slack), our instructor described how it used to be done by human computers. An array of small desks would be set up and "manned" by girls (calculations of the cost of running such operations were measured in "girl-hours" instead of man-hours, since you paid the girls less). The initial coefficients were given to the back row, who would perform their iterative step on those values and then pass their intermediate result to the next row, etc.
My initial response to this photo was to joke about how they wanted to implement shift-register operations but those mechanical were so noisy that you couldn't hear the music from the Vitrola (no electronic amplification) to play the requisite musical chairs.
While WWII marks the genesis of modern electronic computer industry, IBM data processing predates that by decades. Somewhere I saw a 1920's photograph of a major bank's bullpen filled with large oak desks (4' × 8' approx), each completely to a depth of about two feet by stacks of IBM punch cards. In the 1920's!
International Business Machines was formed by the 1924 renaming of the Computing Tabulating Recording Company through the 1911 merger of a few companies, including Hermann Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company. Hollerith had formed his company specializing in punched card data processing equipment in the 1880's in order to process the 1890 Census -- the 1880 Census had taken seven years to tabulate, so with the large influx of immigrants in the 1880's the 1890 Census would have taken more than a decade to tabulate, but Hollerith's punch-card technology completed the task within a few years. BTW, the encoding of characters into holes on a punch card has been named "Hollerith code" -- I found a strong correlation between Hollerith code and IBM's Extended Binary Coded Decimal Information Code (EBCDIC), which I had thoroughly memorized in school (we worked with an IBM S/370 mainframe) and could read on sight from a hex dump, but I never could do with ASCII despite working with it for decades.
Earlier there was the work of Charles Babbage, starting in the 1820's to automate the calculation of tables (James Burke attributed his motivation to a desire to remove human error from navigational tables which resulted in shipwrecks). While he did not profit from his designs, Swede Per Georg Scheutz picked up his work and sold a differential engine machine to the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, which nearly got that director fired.
Babbage's analytic engine was mainly theoretical and was very close to a general programmable computer. Interestingly, its memory storage was based on the same technology as Hollerith's later punch cards: the programming "punch" boards of the programmable Jacquard loom. BTW, on a BBC TV technology segment on Google's research into wearable tech which is woven into the garment, the name for that project was given as "Jacquard". So Google has a sense of history.
The title of the world's first computer programmer is given to Ada Augusta, Lady Lovelace, born in 1815. She was a correspondent of Babbage and she and her husband were supporters of his research -- basically from what I had heard, they wanted to use his tech to help them play the ponies. In their correspondence they discussed his design ideas and she wrote some programs for it to run, hence her unofficial title. In the late 70's and early 80's, the Department of Defense wanted to have one universal programming super-language that could to everything (we could spend hours discussing the reasons for that). They ended up naming it Ada after Ada Augusta. The specification for the Ada language is given the military standard designation of MIL-STD-1815, after her birth year. Other bit of trivia. In the competition for whose basic design would go into Ada, the four competitors were designated by color. The Green Language, based on Pascal, won. As a result, the government printing of MIL-STD-1815 was bound in green.
Also, when I left the military and started working in aerospace software engineering, the hot topic was transitioning to Ada. Frankly, in my first job I was not only the only one with a degree in computer science (eg, we had a marine biologist whose programming experience was from his work on his thesis), but also the only programmer with any experience with Pascal. Everybody was switching to working in Pascal since they saw that as a stepping stone to Ada -- one of the big problems with going Ada was that you were forbidden from working with a compiler that didn't implement all its features, including multi-processing. Furthermore, you were mandated to only use a validated Ada compiler, such that every Ada compiler had to be re-validated every six months. No such compiler existed yet in the early 80's. So they had all their programmers working in Pascal as a stepping stone. Indeed, most of the Ada training materials were divided into two sections:
1) how incredibly like Pascal Ada is, and 2) how completely unlike Pascal Ada is.
BTW, less than a decade later the hot idea in military procurement had become COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf). As I understand, Ada is still used, but primarily in specialized highly-critical projects, whereas most military applications can be satisfied with COTS.
One last which harkens back to your photo. If you have Amazon Prime Video, do a search on a PBS special, Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII. Wade through the personal memories. Women schooled in mathematics whose only possible employment was to teach were recruited into wartime technology roles. Some worked at wiring disks in very arbitrary ways not knowing that those were rotors to go into our bombes to automate the breaking of Enigma. Others worked as low-level technicians programming computing systems such as ENIAC. As it turned out, they were the ones who figured out how to get those systems to actually work.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
 Message 1280 by Percy, posted 02-08-2021 11:33 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 1275 of 1442 (884288)
02-06-2021 5:44 PM
Reply to: Message 1273 by Phat
02-06-2021 11:21 AM


Re: computers
Doesn't really apply directly to your images (funny and poignant those), but still kind of applies.
I worked light construction with my father, a master carpenter and general contractor, for 8 years in high school and college -- when I enlisted, one of the hardest concepts I had to try to deal with was that I had weekends off.
As I learned construction skills, in the back of my mind I was always asking how they used to do it before power tools. We would use a power tool, a roto-hammer, to drill holes into concrete. Then on one project we used the old tech, a star-bit (basically a cold chisel with an X instead of a straight edge; I still have one). Everybody has used a power router, but I have a hand router (a tool with a cutting edge you can set to a given depth). Here's another one from another field, cooking. Look at Townsends on YouTube for how they used to cook in the 1700's (eg, their comparisons of kitchens then and now, No webpage found at provided URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axFFUdQdyJg&t=378s). In professional kitchens we have a special broiler called a "salamander" in which toppings are broiled or melted or turned into crme brle (back to medieval times, salamanders were considered elemental creatures of fire). An 18th-century salamander was an iron disk attached to a long handle, so you would heat the iron disk in your oven (or its embers before you emptied it) and then position it directly over the dish to be broiled from above.
There was one particularly stupid and utterly false creationist claim that I became aware of when a local creationist repeated it (he absolutely refused to support it, but wanted me to call his source instead) and then I also found it on Answers in Genesis. These creationists tried to claim that "secular" anthropologists think that ancient man in historical or late-pre-historical times were "ape men". Uh, hello!? Whichever scientist ever said such an utterly stupid thing? So then creationists are nothing that a bunch of f*cking liars? So what else is new?
Another tack. OK, so how intelligent are non-human apes? Firework Girl (AKA "Hanabiko", AKA "Koko", the famous National Geographic cover girl) was a gorilla who was given intelligence tests. She scored 85 to 90 -- the low score is attributed to species bias in the test, since the question of where you would seek shelter in a rain storm was species biased to go to the house instead of going under a tree.
Scoring 85 to 90 on an intelligence test measures favorably with some lower humans (sorry, but they do exist). Now to apply a mathematical practice that has been obsoleted by scientific calculators (more on that later), interpolation, we have several millions of years of evolution from us and our common ancestor with gorillas (actually, we are much more closely related to chimpanzees, but we have to work with what we have to work). So just for argument's sake, lets falsely assume 3 million years separation between us and gorillas (far too small, from my understanding) -- you chooses your orifices, you takes your chances. Let's also overestimate the date of prehistory at 30,000 years (just to make the math come out much more cleanly). 30,000 / 3,000,000 = 1/1000.
OK, so according to this creationist argument, 30,000 years ago we would expect humans to be one-one-thousandth less intelligent than modern man. So instead of an IQ of 100, we would expect those "ape-men" to have an IQof about 99.9. So how much different from modern human intelligence is that supposed to be?
Here are a few counter/parallel examples to your images.
I'm not even sure how I had ended up acquiring this book. It was published in 1914 and was an arithmetic text for schools grades 1 to ? -- it starts with counting and ends with a few pages on doing bookkeeping in shops.
A common exercise throughout the book are mental exercises in which the class would be drilled in performing arithmetic exercises in their heads. That was not a part of my own arithmetic experience in the 50's and 60's. But we did still do the work on paper.
In the late 60's when I was in high school, electronic calculators came out. Basic 4-bangers (ie, basic 4 arithmetic operations plus that extraneous do-nothing percentage key that I never ever had any use for) cost $300.
In my high school algebra class, we had one student, a white guy BTW, who pronounced everything as "white man magic" -- I still remember his name, but will not reveal it. As the pocket calculators came out in the late 60's, my father kept saying that what made them work was "chips", but he didn't understand what that meant. As I learned more about electronics, I learned that answer.
Around 1968, a four-banger pocket calculator would cost you $300. When I transferred to a four-year college around 1971, a scientific calculator would easily cost you between $200 and $300. Around 1978, I bought one at our base exchange for about $35.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1273 by Phat, posted 02-06-2021 11:21 AM Phat has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1276 by jar, posted 02-06-2021 6:09 PM dwise1 has replied

  
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