A webcomic devoted to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage!**

**With footnotes!

Also, Kate Beaton's historical webcomic, Hark, a vagrant, looks at Ada Lovelace here...

Class notes 2/21:

-          Coursekeeping:

-          Watch film in preparation for a panel discussion (Conceiving Ada)

Merzbow takes its name from the word “merz”. In reference to Dadaism and surrealism, merz means art made of rubbish. I was wondering how Merzbow would be taken as a live performance, so I searched and found the following:

I’m not an authority on what is and isn’t art, but it’s hard for me to see something performed so casually as important as a meticulously composed piece of music.

Dennet has a very particular way of describing memes as if they were living organisms. He seems to describe them as tiny microbes or viruses or bacterium that invade our body for a purpose, which is to reproduce and survive. I am very interested in the ideas he is putting forth about biological evolution and its further applications. However I feel like he took this meme thing a little too far. By the time I was done with the reading I realized he had spent all that time comparing a simple idea, like the idea of free speech, to a microbe of some sort that actively tries to reproduce and further its "species". I found this to be a little too far out there.

Thursday’s discussion group made me consider the extinction of certain genes from our genetic makeup. While the idea of certain qualities dying out is romantic and self-important (i.e. pointing to certain traits as ‘special ones’ worth passing down), a classmate of mine voiced the point that recessive genes do not disappear entirely from populations. Instead, they may lie dormant until they are joined with other recessive genes. In this way, people carrying such recessive genes may not be expressing their traits phenotypically, but they are carrying them amongst all the other recessive genes that are denied expression.

“Life on Earth has been generated over billions of years in a single branching tree- the Tree of Life- by one algorithmic process or another” (51). 

 In Tuesday's discussion, we talked about the difference between computers and humans.  I think it might be safe to say that most people believe the difference to be our concept of free will and the confinement that computers experience because they run accordingly to their program coding.  The computer outputs whatever the coding of its program tells it to.  However, what if we stretch this idea of a program in a broader sense?  What guides us in our actions, what we say and our behavior is due to our morals, principles, beliefs, etc.  We develop this code of ethics due to influences from out respective cultures, parents and other institutions (educational system, religion, etc).

I am speechless at the accuracy and speed of Watson. If I were just listening to this broad-casted on the radio, I would not recognize Watson as a supercomputer. I wonder whether an algorithm could be written so that the computer's random behavior (outcome) has the capacity to socially interact with humans and to learn from its experiences.

This clip speaks for itself:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE