I heard the term “computer” used to refer to a person in this film. Interesting scene!
Yeah, “computer” used to be a job title for humans, and the job was mathematical, but the computer was not, herself, a mathematician per se. A mathematician was likely to have computers working for him.
And the choice of pronouns there was deliberate: In the era when humans worked as computers, most mathematicians (certainly, most mathematicians of enough status to be hiring anyone) were men, while a computer was a lower-status job, resulting in them being disproportionately women.
Which didn’t, of course, stop many of those women from making significant discoveries themselves, for which many of them weren’t properly recognized at the time.
While Katherine Johnson was working as a computer, she was making use of many mathematical techniques, some of which are more advanced than most folks will ever encounter. But it was still mostly rote work, doing things that nowadays an IBM could do. She was eventually promoted to the job of mathematician, however, in which job she did work that couldn’t be done by a machine.
The metal cover that stops the end of your shoe/boot laces from fraying is called an aglet.
Reading about Action Park New Jersey…
The park entertained over one million visitors per year during the 1980s, with as many as 12,000 coming on some of the busiest weekends.[3] Park officials said this made the injury and death rate statistically insignificant. Nevertheless, the director of the emergency room at a nearby hospital said they treated from five to ten victims of park accidents on some of the busiest days, and the park eventually bought the township of Vernon extra ambulances to keep up with the volume.[3]
I may need to get that free trial…
Both the Alaska Reindeer Service and Norwegian Reindeer Police are things. I regret neither rides reindeer.
Play-Doh has now started releasing containers of Play-doh with all the colors already mixed together.
When we were kids, if we wanted our Play-Doh colors all mixed together we had to do it ourselves. This coddling of the new generation will rob them of their initiative!
Next they’re be selling pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
What?
Edwin Goodwin, the wealthy founder of the Bergdoff Goodwin department store lived in a penthouse apartment on it’s roof. Because the building was zoned commercial, only a custodian was legally allowed to live on the premises. Edwin’s official job title was custodian.
I had no idea for the longest time that the whole “Type A vs Type B” personality type thing was originally a way of denying smoking causes cancer. The hypothesis was that Type A people are more driven and live higher stress lives, and also have higher rates of smoking (and cancer) than Type B people who are more relaxed, live lower stress lives, and have lower rates of smoking (and cancer). The claim was that it was the underlying personality type that accounted for the different rates of cancer, and the correlation between smoking and cancer was a confounding factor.
You do understand the point of the last word in my post, right?
I had never heard of the place until a couple of weeks ago, when the documentary Class Action Park, which tells the story of the park, was on Sky Documentaries here in the UK. It’s a helluva watch, intermittently hilarious and horrifying. I very nearly posted something asking if any NY/NJ dopers had actually been there/done that/had the T-shirt torn off their backs in some horrific accident. Your post has provided the opportunity.
j
Unfortunately, it’s not available any more.
A friend of mine took that peanut butter / jelly jar mix on a ski hut trip. On these trips everyone brings something to contribute, and they cook up nice meals.
After that, he got the nick name ‘Goober’.
Yeah, who vets these things? One article says:
Employees were offered $100 to test the waterslide. In initial runs, people came out with bloodied mouths. Then riders emerged with lacerations. It turns out teeth were embedded in the slide from the earlier group. Mulvihill brought in a Navy doctor to assess G-forces, who found that those riding the slide experienced 9 Gs, much like an F-14 pilot.
I’m uncertain of the current landscape when it comes to TV viewing. It used to be that you had a cable provider or maybe you used a dish satellite service. Occasionally HBO and other premium channels would have a free weekend, try to hook subscribers. When we had DirecTV I would sometimes suddenly find a recent Bill Maher HBO program on my DVR because it was still in the list to record. Now a lot of it seems to be going a la carte, which can add up in a hurry.
In the U.S. perhaps. But it is an ingredient that has been used in Indian cooking (called methi) long before they heard of maple syrup.
Yes, yes, traditionally in the US. Pardon my Amero-centrism. I know its uses as both a spice and an herb in South Asian and some other cuisines. The fenugreek seeds and kasuri methi I have in my spice cabinet I use exclusively for those reasons, not as a lactation aid nor maple substitute.
When my dad was a junior engineer, the computers were likely to be young women with a math degree, ie mathematicians. They did more complex stuff than simply adding and subtracting. They often married young engineers, and left the workforce.
“In the late 1950s and early 60s, the Florida Panhandle was responsible for two-thirds of all loss-of-limb accident claims in the United States due largely to one town: Vernon, Florida.”
Here’s a podcast that I have not listened to.
Here’s a Wikipedia article that explains what happened when Errol Morris attempted to make documentary about Nub City.
The movie Six Minutes To Midnight is enjoying it’s streaming release over here at the moment. I mention this because the movie has brought to light a little bit of local history that I (and I think the vast majority of folks) was completely unaware of. Bexhill Observer story - Warning: cookie fest - see below for alternative video source.
Six Minutes to Midnight tells the story of Augusta Victoria College, a large Victorian villa in Dorset Road, which once housed a Nazi finishing school where up to two dozen daughters of the Nazi regime were sent to improve their English.
Students included the daughter of Adolf Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
The Augusta Victoria School operated in Dorset Road and taught German girls throughout the 1930s and only closed at the outbreak of World War Two.
The school was run on Nazi ideals throughout Hitler’s governance as demonstrated by the school badge, a Swastika on one side and a Union Jack on the other.
Bexhill is on the south coast of England, about 30 miles east of Brighton (50 miles SSE of London, if you prefer).
Here is a short (6 minutes) somewhat worthy and amateurish YouTube video put together by (I think) local historians. You can see the school badge, swastika and all, at the start and a list of alumni at the end. I’d say it was worth sticking with the video, but then I’m local and thus biased.
j
Definitely more complex stuff than adding and subtracting. Numerical integration, for instance, would be a big chunk of it, and it takes a certain level of mathematical knowledge to even understand what that is, much less to properly make use of the various techniques for it. But it’s still mind-numbing work, that the people with the job title of “mathematician” didn’t want to waste their time on.