An Eyeglass Prescription--An
illustrated explanation of the abbrevations, terms, and numbers on an eyeglass
prescription.
Bullets--Personal college nostalgia.
These are photographs of bullets in flight. I took them myself. Sort of.
I took them in Dr. Edgerton's lab in 1962. Entire page is about 40 KB including
all jpg's.
Won't Somebody Tolerate Me--In honor of
Mothers' Day, I present an essay written by my mother, Elinor Goulding
Smith, in 1956. It is about being an agnostic in a time and a place when
"freedom of religion" seemed to mean "freedom of religion
for everyone but agnostics. You can have any you like, but you gotta pick
one."
FAUXBIZ--This page uses Javascript to generate
fake business addresses. (It's a joke, folks... like a poetry generators
or random sentence generators. Every few years a new interpretive language
comes along... BASIC or Hypertalk or VB and now Javascript... and we get
to relive our past, writing hundred-line adventure games and the like).
Well, things of this kind do have one practical use: populating
databases for demonstrations...
Project Whirlwind (No, folks, this
was way before my time). Based on a 1953 documentary movie,
Making Electrons Count. This Web edition includes: transcript of the soundtrack
illustrated with 108 frames from the movie, forming a storyboard version
of the film (approx 600K total); three minutes of edited audio (200K);
1 minute of compressed video (3 MB) showing Whirlwind's engineer walking
through and around the huge racks, ending by holding up a core plane. The
portions of the film dealing with 1953-style debugging from the point of
view of a user are fascinating and hysterically funny to modern ears. "My
consultant notices and corrects several logical programming errors. I express
my confidence that the program is now ready to run. On the basis of his
experience with other programmers, my consultant feels that my confidence
is unfounded."
PDP-1 Music Music as played
by the PDP-1 Computer, MIT Building 26, in the mid-sixties.
Bush Differential Analyzer in action???
This 732K QuickTime movie reproduces a very, very short clip from the 1951
George Pal sci-fi epic, "When Worlds Collide." I think
this must be a real shot of the Bush Differential Analyzer (1940's 100%-mechanical
analog computer).
Nocturnal Aviation More spoofs
of commercials from the golden age of Apple Gunkies (see below). Digicomputronimatics
("when you think of Dynadigitrons, think of Digicomputronimatics"),
"Flexopneumohydroservosystematization and Control" ("Yesterday's
future is here today..."), Apple Gunkies Physics Lecture, more...
Neon Visions OK,
it's just a silly animated GIF which you may find amusing and nostalgic
if you lived in a West Campus dorm at MIT in the sixties. Otherwise,
don't bother...
Apple Gunkies In celebration
of Scarsdale High School's upcoming thirty-fifth reunion, RealAudio clips
of five "Apple Gunkies" (fake, humorous) radio commercials as
aired on WTBS (MIT student radio) circa 1964. Three of them were written
and performed by Sue Lasdon, SHS '62, and her dormmates at Goucher College.
The others were written by me. Due to disk space limitations, these files
may be removed after the reunion in October, so don't delay, download today...
Philosophy 4 Etext of Owen Wister's
charming, nostalgic account of two Harvard undergraduates off on a spree
in 1880's Cambridge.
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