By Jason
This will be a relatively quick update, at least compared to some of my recent photo overload posts. Last weekend was the July Fourth holiday weekend so we went down to San Jose for the fetsival there. We got to see some great Japanese taiko drumming:
And Ann was very, very excited to get some funnel cake. Almost too excited…
We had dinner with some folks from work and checked out the working difference engine at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It’s very cool – Charles Babbage designed the machine in the 1800s but was never able to complete construction. A museum in London decided to see if they could build on using materials available during his time, and this is the result.
It requires an operator to turn a crank, and prints results on paper at the other end.
The machine uses the difference method to calculate the values of polynomial equations. For example, if you needed to solve x^3 – 2x^2 +5x – 7 for various values of x, you would solve it for x=1, x=2, etc and set the gears at the correct values. The machine will then calculate for x=4, x=5, as far up as you need to go.
One other thing happened this week – Apple release the new version of the iPhone along with the new firmware for current iPhones. That means you can install new applications and do all kind of cool things with the phone you couldn’t do before. Ann has been even more geeked out about than me. Here she is, dozed off with the iPhone still in her hands. It was too cute to pass up.
