My top 50 free agent rankings went up Friday for Insiders, following by the “deleted scenes” post with capsules on four guys whom I wrote about before their employers picked up their club options. I’ve also got buyers’ guides to catchers and to corner infielders up, with middle infielders due on Tuesday.
Everything seems to be coming up Ada Lovelace lately; largely overlooked in her own time because she was a woman in the early Victorian era and was better known as the one legitimate offspring of the rake Lord Byron, she’s now widely recognized as the creator of the first machine algorithm, the primary ancestor of the modern computer program. The Department of Defense named a programming language (Ada) after her in the early 1980s, and she’s appeared in numerous works of fiction (such as William Gibson’s The Difference Engine) and non-fiction (including a brand-new short work aimed at schoolchildren called Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine
Ada Lovelace’s place in history comes from her friendship with Charles Babbage, who designed (but never built) the first computers, one called the Difference Engine, of which he built one-seventh, and another called the Analytical Engine, which he never built at all due to the prohibitive cost and lack of manufacturing facilities capable of building all of the cogswheels the device required. Babbage was a bit of a mad scientist, prone to emotional outbursts and self-destructive arguments that cost him any shot to gain the funds necessary to build even part of either Engine beyond what he built. He also lacked Ada’s communications skills, and when the Italian mathematican (and later Prime Minister of Italy) Luigi Federico Menabrea wrote a paper describing Babbage’s Analytical Engine, Lovelace translated it into English and supplemented it with her own Notes, the latter of which ran more than twice as long as Menabrea’s original article, and included the algorithm that earned her posthumous fame. She saw the potential of Babbage’s machine that even Babbage did not – that programmers could use it to solve all kinds of mathematical problems beyond mere arithmetic, as long as the programmer could conceive the necessary series of steps for the calculations.
Essinger gives us too much of the text of some of her less relevant letters, and inserts his own speculation on things like whether she might have met certain personages of the era, like Charles Darwin, or whether Babbage was in love with Ada, for which there’s no tangible evidence. The first hardcover edition also has numerous typos and minor errors in the text – for example, using “inconceivable” when he meant “conceivable,” which is kind of a weak word anyway – that further added to my impression that I was reading Essinger’s thoughts and opinions rather than a narrative rendering of her life. It seems that we don’t know enough about Ada Lovelace for a full biography, but that doesn’t quite justify surrounding what we do know with speculation or tangential details.
Next up: Speaking of Gibson, I’m reading Mona Lisa Overdrive
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, is largely overlooked today even within Faulkner’s oeuvre, despite its grand scale and rich subtexts, which seem ripe for literary analysis, but it may suffer from Faulkner’s obtuse prose and adumbration of character descriptions and plot details. (And his vocabulary; “adumbration” appears at least twice in the text, and Faulkner engages in his own wordsmithing at times, such as “cachinnant,” a Latin word that means something like “laughing immoderately.”)
won Heinlein the second of those four Hugos, four years after he won for Double Star and two years before his magnum opus, Stranger in a Strange Land, did the same. I was turned off from reading the book after seeing the trailer for the apparently very unfaithful 1997 film adaptation, but the book is nowhere near as dumb as the movie. (Casper Van Dien, who starred in that film version, was most recently spotted in a straight-to-DVD film called Avengers Grimm that holds a 13% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) Heinlein’s book, written as a first-person memoir of the protagonists youth and first few years serving as a space marine, touches on many of the themes I mentioned above, while also apparently drawing controversy for its overtly militaristic setting … although I don’t agree with criticism of the work as somehow pro-war or even pro-fascism.
, still had serious themes and the distinction seems arbitrary when one has the vantage point of reading his entire oeuvre. His first novel, 
, foreshadows the potential dichotomy in his work, as a suspense novel with a tragic-romantic component, themes of Christian morality and guilt, and a central character grappling with fundamental questions of right and wrong.
and 
, and Wired has a piece 
, the first book in a trilogy that posits a parallel universe where Neanderthals won the evolutionary battle over Cro-Magnons and have since become the dominant species on their version of Earth.