Book Review: The Berlin Project

“The Berlin Project” by Gregory BenfordIn September 1938, Karl Cohen returned from a postdoctoral position in France to the chemistry department at Columbia University in New York, where he had obtained his Ph.D. two years earlier. Accompanying him was his new wife, Marthe, daughter of a senior officer in the French army. Cohen went to work for Harold Urey, professor of chemistry at Columbia and winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of deuterium. At the start of 1939, the fields of chemistry and nuclear physics were stunned by the discovery of nuclear fission: researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in … Continue reading

Retrocomputing Again: Marinchip Systems

This week-end’s project has been putting together an archive of documents and images about the company I founded and operated from 1977 through 1985, Marinchip Systems.  Marinchip delivered, starting in 1978, the first true 16-bit personal computer on the S-100 bus, with the goal of providing its users the same experience as conecting to a commercial timesharing service which cost many times more.  When other personal computer companies were providing 8 Kb BASIC, we had a Unix-like operating system, Pascal, and eventually a multi-user system.

Marinchip (which was named after the Marinship shipyard not far from where I lived, which made Liberty ships during World War II), designed its own hardware and software, with hardware based upon the Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor and the software written by, … Continue reading

Web Development: JavaScript Comes of Age

Back in the day, JavaScript was a tacky interpreted language you used as “glue” when putting together Web pages.  When I benchmarked it against C for a scientific computation application in 2005, it came in between 27.7 and 46.9 times slower than code compiled with C.

Well, that was then….  I’ve just completed a series of benchmark tests of JavaScript on platforms which include node.js, Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Firefox, and Apple’s Safari (on both the MacOS X desktop and iOS iPad), and on some of the desktops it runs faster than C and on none of them more than 50% slower.

For Web developers, this is Big Thing.  It used to be you’d code your little hacks within Web pages in JavaScript, but then basically re-do them on … Continue reading

Retro-Computing: How I Spent My Week-End

Since 1980, I’ve been the keeper of a floating point benchmark which measures the performance of various computer systems and languages on a problem which, when it was originally defined in the 1930s, took days of manual computation.  This benchmark, which might otherwise be considered eccentric, was found, in the 1980s, to be inordinately accurate in predicting the performance of AutoCAD on a particular computing platform, and hence a guide to which ones we should prioritise in our efforts to support.

This week-end, I ported the benchmark to a language I’d last used more than thirty years ago, PL/I, then for the first version of AutoCAD,  The whole story is here.  It’s just too painful to port tables and other structured data to reproduce them here, … Continue reading

Weekend Reading: Little Wars

In 1913, H. G. Wells essentially single-handedly invented the modern pastime of miniature wargaming, providing a (tin soldier) battle-tested set of rules which makes for exciting, well-balanced, and unpredictable games that can be played by two or more people in an afternoon and part of an evening. Interestingly, he avoids much of the baggage that burdens contemporary games such as icosahedral dice and indirect fire calculations, and strictly minimises the rôle of chance, using nothing fancier than a coin toss, and that only in rare circumstances.

I have just posted a new public domain Web edition of Little Wars which includes all of the photographs and marginal drawings from the 1913 first edition of the book. Some readers may find the marginal illustrations, which are mostly purely decorative, distracting, while … Continue reading

Weekend Thought: Where Do You Draw the Line?

The following appears in a footnote to chapter 7 of Herman Kahn‘s 1962 book Thinking about the Unthinkable.  He is discussing whether it is inevitable that a conflict will escalate to the highest level of violence available to the combatants.

The fact that such unilateral restraints exist should not surprise anyone. Indeed almost all nations and individuals are likely to have limits which they will not cross even if under great pressure to do so to protect themselves or to further their policies. I have used the following chart to illustrate this point:

Where Do You Draw the Line?

  • Insecticides
  • Eating meat
  • Any violence
  • Police
  • Conventional warfare
  • Kiloton weapons
  • Megaton weapons
  • Gigaton weapons
  • Doomsday machines
  • Galaxy-destroying machines
  • It is the purpose of the above chart to make … Continue reading

    Weekend Reading: The Time Machine

    I have just posted a new Web edition of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.  This story (at around 33,000 words, it would be considered a long novella today), was originally published in 1895.  Wells continued to revise it over the years, with the final version published in 1935.  My edition is based upon that text.  I originally posted a Web edition in 2002.  This revision updates the documents to current Web standards (XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS3) and improves typography, formatting, and navigation.

    The story can be read in one or two sittings, and is much better and more interesting than the two Hollywood movies loosely based upon it.  Given Wells’s attraction to socialism and communism, it is an interesting view of the ultimately pernicious consequences of eliminating … Continue reading

    Weekend Reading: The Go-Getter

    New on Fourmilab today (so new, in fact, it isn’t yet linked to the home or index pages) is a Web edition of Peter B. Kyne’s 1921 novelette (11,000 words, 62 print pages with reasonably large type) The Go-Getter.  Subtitled “A Story That Tells You How to be One” (capitalisation thus in the original), an inspiring and motivating tale of a person who approached any task he undertook with a spirit of “whatever it takes.”

    This work is in the public domain and available in text form from Project Gutenberg.  As with all of the books I make available on my site, a number of typographical and formatting errors have been corrected, and the typography has been updated to contemporary Web standards to be easier on the eye. … Continue reading

    Weekend Reading: P. T. Barnum’s Art of Money Getting

    P. T. Barnum in 1851

    In 1880, Phineas T. Barnum summed up a lifetime’s experience as a showman, entrepreneur, and politician in his short book, Art of Money Getting.  I originally produced a Web edition of this book in 2002, and have just updated it to contemporary Web standards (XHTML Strict/CSS) with Unicode typography.  In the process, I had an opportunity to re-read it, and once again found it wise, pithy, and inspiring.  Barnum has an aphorism for every situation, and an amusing anecdote for each insight.

    I particularly love the story in chapter 2 about meeting the showman in London who put him to shame and the story of the Irish harbour pilot in chapter 12,

    Like the Irish pilot, on one occasion when the captain, thinking he was … Continue reading

    C-ship

    C-ship: Exploring special relativity

    C-ship: Exploring special relativityHere’s what I’ve been doing the last week.  I’m not going to call this a Saturday night science post lest I find myself on a treadmill like at the other place, and besides it’s Sunday morning and before long the silly clock changing thing will kick in.  I’d hoped to wrap this up hours ago, but little did I expect that a bizarre confluence of IPv6, Gmail anti-spam filters, and obscure sendmail.cf configuration parameters would devour my entire day.

    In 1995, I posted C-ship, in which I used a notional ship able to accelerate at a constant rate of up to 100 metres per second per second and ray-traced images and animations to provide … Continue reading