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Curiosity often breeds innovation, which was precisely the case with Grace Murray Hopper. As a child, she would often dismantle household electronics to see how they worked—a habit that forced her mother to limit Grace to taking apart just one alarm clock. Her interest in machines and how they functioned served her well as she applied her knowledge of mathematics and physics to develop the first computers, and then to advance computer programming.

A programmer is born

Hopper transitioned from dismantling household electronics to dismantling complex equations and theories. She chose to study mathematics and physics at Vassar College, and eventually obtained her masters and PhD in mathematics from Yale University. During her PhD, she did double-duty as a student and professor, teaching math at Vassar College during much of her PhD. She would remain on as a professor of mathematics there for over ten years.

Her transition from mathematician to programmer in 1944 was made possible through military service in the Navy Reserves. Hopper first attempted to enrol in the Navy during World War II. However, at the age of 34, standing at 5’6” and only 105 pounds, in 1940 she was considered too old and too small for active military duty—and her role as a professor of mathematics was also deemed too important to the war effort for her to leave. But Hopper was determined to serve her country, and four years later—after successfully obtaining a leave of absence as a professor and special exemption from the weight requirement, she enlisted in the Navy Reserve.

Hopper’s first assignment placed her at Harvard, where she began work on the first Mark I computer for the Bureau of Ships Computation Project. The excitement (and no doubt challenge) of programming the world’s first computers led Hopper to turn down a full professorship from Vassar to remain working at Harvard and their Computation Lab. This decision established her incredible career trajectory.

“Debugging”

In 1947, as Hopper was working on the Mark II computer at Harvard, her team discovered a moth stuck in a relay, a type of electric switch. This impeded the operation of the relay, and therefore the function of the computer itself. The remains of the moth can still be seen in the team’s log at the Smithsonian. Hopper is often claimed to have coined the phrase “debugging” to refer to identifying issues in computer code. While it’s a charming story, the phrase “debugging” was not used in any of the team’s usage logs, and in fact, “bug” had already been in use in the engineering field for quite some time. However, it is technically true that with the moth, Hopper found the first “computer bug.”

Teaching computers English

Hopper was dedicated to computer programming, and was determined to make computers easier to use. As anyone who has dabbled in computer programming can tell you, it can be hard to learn the correct commands. With the early computers Hopper was working with, it was even trickier—commands were structured as complex symbols and numbers, and even simple programming required extraordinary technical knowledge. One of Hopper’s most notable accomplishments was to aid the transition of programming to something more people-friendly, through the creation of the first compiler. She also developed the first coding language, which she based primarily on English words.

Initially, her idea to incorporate English into programming was criticized. Many people pointed out the obvious—computers can’t understand English. However, Hopper was adamant, stating, “It’s much easier for people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols. So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code.”

To do so, Hopper invented the first compiler, a program that translates computer code from one programming language to another. Often, this involves taking a high-level language—for example, using English words and phrases as a set of instructions—and then translates those to a low-level computing program, one rich in symbols and numbers, that a computer can understand. Having a compiler allows computers to “understand” English, and helps programmers more easily communicate with the machines they build. Hopper hoped that programming languages that relied on English would help the average user be able to access them.

It’s a simple idea, but a revolutionary one, and eventually would lead to the creation of many programming languages—user-friendly inputs that can be translated by the computer to machine-friendly outputs. Hopper herself was responsible for one main language, known as COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), earning her the nickname “Grandma COBOL.” The program was developed in 1959, mainly for business and administrative systems to organize large information sets, and still remains the most ubiquitous programming language used in business (though now it’s mainly used to maintain older systems). COBOL’s widespread use can likely be attributed to the fact that Hopper developed and validated the COBOL software and its compiler counterpart for the entire Navy during her tenure as director of the Navy Programming Languages Group.

Hopper’s influence and stature in the Navy was highly praised—she left Navy service with the rank of Rear Admiral, at a time when few women achieved such a high status. Her career in the Navy Reserves spanned more than 42 years, although she never was allowed into the full Navy. She eventually became the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the US Navy when she was 79 years, eight months, and five days.

Amazing Grace

Even though her official teaching career ended in 1943, Hopper was in demand as a speaker and consultant throughout her life. She was energetic and engaging, and fondly remembered for one particular demonstration, involving wires to simulate nanoseconds and data processing. As she so frequently was asked, “Why does satellite communication take so long?” Grace used a spool of wire to show how far light could travel in one nanosecond, and to explained how long data takes to reach a satellite (spoiler—it’s a long time), which was why initially Internet speeds were so slow. Luckily for us, we’ve graduated from using dial-up and old copper phone lines to fancy fiber optic cables dedicated solely to Internet services, which can transmit our digital data faster. Today, Hopper would have to update her demonstration for the modern age.

Hopper’s life successfully intertwined both military service and academic prowess, with that dash of chance that discoveries often carry. It’s likely that without her fierce desire to join the military, Hopper would have remained as a professor of mathematics, and not had the opportunity to work on computers. Given her natural curiosity, this would have no doubt still led to important innovations, but her contributions to programming would have been missed. Hopper’s abundance of accomplishments earned her the nickname “Amazing Grace,” along with many awards (including a post-humous Presidential Medal Freedom from Barack Obama). She was a pioneering woman in the field of computer programming and the Navy Reserves—both areas notoriously dominated by men. But Hopper’s ideology and founding principles shaped computer science as we know it today. She was truly amazing.

This piece was originally published on Massive, a site that publishes science stories by scientists on the cutting edge of research. Subscribe to their newsletter or visit them on Facebook or Twitter for more.

When a chubby Marlon Brando roared into town on a motorbike in ‘The Wild One’ he popularized the black leather jacket as a fashionable symbol of rebellion. Leather jackets may have been worn by bikers for protection, but they were quickly adopted by rock musicians (from Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, The Beatles to Elvis) as an endorsement of their outsider status.

h/t: dangerousminds, flashbak

While fashions changed in the 1960s to soft denim and psychedelic colors, the black leather jacket never lost its iconic status as edgy, radical and subversive. The black leather jacket of the revolutionary students in Paris in 1968, became the fashionable uniform of the chaotic Baader-Meinhof, before returning to its spiritual home in the form of the matching outfits of proto-punk rockers The Ramones.

Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy made the black leather jacket de rigueur for punks, and soon became the latest fashion sold by a canny Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in their London boutique SEX.

Teenagers across the UK bought cheap black leather or faux leather jackets and decorated them with the names of their favorite bands, political slogans, or mini manifestoes written in White Out, paint, or nail polish. There was a naif art to such DIY accessorizing, a uniqueness that encapsulated the essence of punk (its ability to offend) and the character of the jacket’s owner.

George Schipporeit, co-architect of Chicago's suavely-curving Lake Point Tower, once the world's tallest all-residential building, has died.

We've seen umbrellas stuck into car doors; optimized for wind resistance; slapped onto bikes; and the design potential for this simple device is so great that we even ran a series on umbrella innovations earlier this year (here's Part 1, here's Part 2). The umbrella is one of the longest-lived objects I can think of (and a great example of early design). We know the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians had parasols for sun blockage, and that the Chinese had developed a collapsible umbrella design as early as 21 A.D. But who came up with the idea of the umbrella in the first place?

The amazing photos here, captured by Indonesia-based photographer Penkdix Palme, make you wonder: Was the umbrella's invention biomimetic in the sense that we saw an animal doing this and then emulated them? Or is it simply common sense that early man, caught in the rain, seeks to block it by holding a deflective object above their head?

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Corona Perspectives [coronaperspectives.com] developed by advertising agency JWT Spain and web development studio Espada y Santa Cruz provides an interactive and 3D perspective of all the tennis ball trajectories during 3 past ATP tennis matches.

The online interface provides different ways of exploring the large amount of tennis game data. An interactive timeline at the bottom of the screen allows the filtering of the trajectories according to the successive sets or different points during the match. The heatmap view denotes the zones on the playing field where the ball landed most often. The particle view highlights the trajectories where the ball had the most impact.

See also US Open Tennis Real-Time Data Visualization.

[Image: The WWI terrain model of Messines, Belgium, in Cannock Chase, England; photo, "taken probably 1918 by Thomas Frederick Scales," courtesy of the National Library of New Zealand].

Past Horizons reported the other week that "a large concrete terrain model on Cannock Chase, representing a section of the Great War battle of Messines Ridge, is to be excavated" by archaeologists later this year.

The preserved but damaged model "represents the section of the front captured by New Zealand troops," and, indeed, the model itself was used most extensively by troops from New Zealand who had been stationed in England during the war.

[Image: The concrete model at Cannock Chase, including a viewing hut; photo via The First World War Camps of Cannock Chase].

The construction of the model is itself pretty fascinating, as it was accomplished with the forced help of German POWs:

The Messines model had been constructed at Brocton in 1918 by men from the New Zealand Rifle Brigade, using German labour from the nearby prisoner of war camp. The use of trench maps and aerial photographs ensured the model, constructed in concrete, had a high degree of accuracy; trenches, strong points, railways, roads and buildings all being represented. The model was used to train soldiers in topography and to show how an impeccably planned battle could be won with minimal casualties. One feature, believed to be a "viewing platform" around three sides of the model still exists.

The "full excavation" to occur later this year—hopefully more photographs of the model will emerge online—will include the "recording and reburial" of the simulated landscape.

[Image: A viewing hut for studying the model landscape; photo via The First World War Camps of Cannock Chase].

An interpretive center—complete with an interactive 3D digital model of the nearby 3D concrete model of the actual 3D battlefield in Belgium—will also be constructed, to guide visitors through the site and to "explain how these models were used to prepare troops for battle."

Near the model, however, lie the rest of the training camps at Cannock Chase, the subject of at least one historical website about these wartime facilities, where we read about the preserved earthworks used to train soldiers for trench warfare:

Front line trenches were typically constructed in a pattern which in plan resembled battlements (also known as the Greek Key pattern) with the intention that attackers were fired upon from three sides. Conversely communication trenches connecting the front line with reserve trenches were built in a zig-zag pattern. This ensured that if the front line trenches fell the enemy would not have a clear line of sight down the length of the "communication" trench and could therefore not enfilade (fire straight at) approaching reinforcements.

They were topographic baffles, we might say.

[Image: The scale of the model becomes more clear in this photo, also via Past Horizons].

Briefly, I'm reminded of an aside by natural historian Tim Flannery in his long but extraordinarily interesting book The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, where he comments on the Maori origins of European trench warfare tactics.

The Maori—pre-European but remarkably recent inhabitants of the islands of New Zealand—had been brutalized, in Flannery's telling, by their own environmental mismanagement of their adopted island home, all but exterminating the indigenous wild bird population and reducing themselves, through egregiously unsustainable hunting practices, to an almost stereotypically Hobbesian state of nature.

They had thus long been at war amongst themselves, fighting over the archipelago's steadily dwindling sources of protein—which is when the British came along, unknowingly stumbling into the midst of what Flannery describes as a chaotic and very nearly continuous state of ecologically-necessitated human conflict.

The British, Flannery explains, thus learned firsthand that the Maori had already gone to ground, so to speak, digging themselves into defensive trenches and other complex earthworks as their battles became both more extreme and more sophisticated. "Indeed," Flannery writes, "during the Maori defense of the pa [or fortress] Puapekapeka, the British learned their first lessons in trench warfare and underground bunkers from the Maori. They were to turn these tactics to their advantage in the First World War."

Of course, as we've explored elsewhere on BLDGBLOG, Flannery's claim is an overstatement—"siege mines" and other forms of militarized earthworks had already long existed in the European war tradition, well before English seafarers reached New Zealand—but it's an interesting claim, nonetheless, and it resonates strangely with this vision of New Zealand troops studying trench geometries on a large-scale 3D concrete model in the middle of WWI England, preparing to dig themselves into "Greek key" and zig-zag patterns over on the European mainland.

Last spring, the inexplicably captivating live stream of brown bears catching salmon surfaced on explore.org and took the internet by storm. But even though it's not quite salmon season yet, that doesn't mean we should deprive ourselves the joys of watching a puppy sleeping in real time for 20 minutes.

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