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Happy birthday, ENIAC

There are two epochs in computer history: Before ENIAC and After ENIAC. The first practical, all-electronic computer was unveiled on Feb. 14, 1946, at the U. of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electronics. ––Alexander Randall 5th

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was a programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. It was the first to have all of these features in a generally useable machine.

The photo shows four mathematicians/programmers for ENIAC, from L to R, Patsy Simmers (ENIAC), Gail Taylor (EDVAC), Milly Beck (ORDVAC), and Norma Stec (BRLESC-I). The original “computers,” also women, were soon to be replaced by an electronic computer.

The women in the photo above are holding circuit boards from the first four Army electronic computers, illustrating the rapid evolution and miniaturization of computing technology. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

ENIAC’s 80th birthday is significant to me because it comes during a year when most of my classmates are also turning 80. We’ve shaped and been shaped by the digital world that ENIAC helped to spawn.

It’s appalling to see how that digital world is being used to oppress ordinary people. Regimes from Teheran to Washington, DC are using the technologies of ENIAC’s spawn to spy upon, categorize, track down, deport, and otherwise persecute people who are simply asserting their rights, or often just quietly trying to live their lives.

References

“ENIAC,” Wikipedia, February 6, 2026.

Scott McCartney, ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World’s First Computer, Berkley, 2001).

Alexander Randall 5th, “Q&A: A Lost Interview with ENIAC Co-Inventor J. Presper Eckert,” Computer World, February 14, 2006.

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The snow pile is happy

The 12 foot high snow pile at the top of our driveway plans to stay there for the foreseeable future. S/he seems quite happy with this arrangement.

A series of snow falls and steady low temps has kept life more interesting than we might like this winter. Early on, a large snow plow truck got stuck close to where the gleeful snow pile sits now. It had to be towed out. A neighbor with a snow blower couldn’t help because the snow blower broke down. Shovels were useless with this volume of snow.

Various people had trucks and plows––a guy who delivers firewood, someone at an excavation company, a landscaper––but they were all already overcommitted. Our usual strategy, to rely on our Forester with all-wheel drive, doesn’t work when the snow gets above 6 inches. That’s especially true for going up a steep driveway.

There were other effects. Three of the five therapists at my PT clinic fell on the ice and hurt themselves. Those are the professionals dedicated to improving our strength and balance! Susan’s eye surgery took longer than scheduled because an accident on the canal bridge made the doctors wait over an hour to get to the Cape.

But, as I said, the snow pile seems quite pleased.

And I’ve enjoyed the sledding, using either a kids’ sled or a beach boogie board.

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The Wanderer

The Wanderer

My son Stephen has recently completed a fascinating, and at times daunting project. It’s a translation, with an Introduction to a work by Alexander Veltman, The Wanderer: A Novel, written in 1831-32. Northwestern University Press is the publisher.

As Stephen says, Veltman aims at a kind of truth, “about how we tell stories, understand history, and perceive the world through our imagination.”

The book is “striking in its use of intertextuality and fictional devices that are more familiar to readers of postmodernist fiction today. He mixes prose, poetry, and drama.” It uses multiple languages, making it a challenge for any translator. That may partly explain why it has not been translated into English for nearly two centuries.

Stephen ends it’s his introduction with a recommendation for the modern reader:

Emulating Veltman, I will end this introduction by addressing the reader directly. I encourage you to jump into Veltman’s narrative. Navigate the text as you wish, moving forward or backward, as seems to have been the authors intent. This work is a call to active and inquisitive readers, inviting you to join Veltman on his imaginative odyssey and engage, even if fictionally, in a dialogue with the author. Through my translation and commentary I have inevitably added my own layer of interpretation. Now it is your turn to explore this rich and complex work,

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Learning with limited resources

Café Swotha near Patan Durbar Square, Nepal

I’ll never forget a meeting over tea in 2016 at Cafe Swotha near where we stayed in Patan. 

Collaborative Schools Network in Nepal (CSN) was just getting underway with a novel approach to improving the poorest schools. We’ve since tried to support CSN, mostly as cheerleaders on the side, but also through visits to CSN schools, video meetings, collaboration on writing, editing curricula, as well as donations. This year marked the tenth year of operation for CSN and our collaboration.

Collaborative Schools Network

CSN works through a unique partnership agreement with local government. It manages all the day-to-day operations. Local government pays for up to 50% of the costs. Two of the team are appointed as School Leaders, who work in each (primary level) school as full-time members of the staff. School Leaders teach, coach, and lead a school improvement plan alongside the existing teachers and school principal.

The plan has four priorities: improving the quality of teaching, management, community relations, and infrastructure. It achieves systemic, scalable, and sustainable change by working within the existing public education system, alongside government and at a low cost.

This year CSN managed nine schools – six in Kathmandu and three in Abu Khaireni, a rural town four hours drive from the capital.

Impact

I’ve attached the latest CSN Impact Report. It shows that CSN has provided high quality education to around 10,000 children. Students make progress at almost twice the rate of students in comparable public schools. The impact is especially noticeable among the weakest students. 

Projects like this give me hope in the darkest times.

CSN Impact Report 2024-25 FINALDownload
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Permanent destruction of a precious wilderness

Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park, alongside Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, forms the world’s largest international area dedicated to wilderness recreation.

Many people, even those who were able to go just once, describe a trip in Quetico/BWCAW as one of the most significant experiences in their lives. The area represents a significant portion of the remaining wild space on the continent, or for that matter, accessible wilderness area on the planet. 

Its destruction, through copper and nickel mining by Chilean mining giant Antofagasta is a crime against the future, against nature, against science, and indigenous people, not to mention any notion of stewardship of our natural resources

Worse than rounding up people for imprisonment in El Salvador or South Sudan without trial? Worse than ending health care for millions of people? Worse than destroying the pillars of democracy? No, but a planned, unnecessary disaster, a tremendous, irreplaceable loss nonetheless. It’s part of “our” national budget bill, the one that most Congress people voted for, but never read.

See more here: Minnesota’s Boundary Waters are pristine. Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ could pollute them forever

My two major trips to Quetico published in Outpost

1963, where tragedy strikes amidst incredible natural beauty: https://outpostmagazine.com/quetico-part1-bertram-bruce/

2015, a return, 52 years later, to portions of the same route, including the treacherous picture rock https://outpostmagazine.com/quetico-part-2-bertram-bruce/

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Inside / Outside

John Muir: “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” ––John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

L. L. Bean marketing motto: “The outside is inside everything we make.”

Paul Krueger, architect: “As you step in the house you enter the outside.”

Doctor Who

  • (1st) Doctor: “How is this possible?” / “You can’t fit a building into a sitting room, right? Then what of television?”
  • Jo Grant (to 3rd Doctor): “I don’t believe it! It’s bigger inside than out!”
  • Doctor Who (in The Three Doctors episode): “Well, Sergeant, aren’t you going to say it that it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Everybody else does.” / Sgt. Benton: “Well, it’s… pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
  • Clara Oswald (to the 11th Doctor, 49 years into the series): “It’s smaller on the outside.”

William Blake: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” –Auguries of Innocence

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Against Cartesianism

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes writes

we should conclude from all this, that those things which we conceive clearly and distinctly as being diverse substances, as we regard mind and body to be, are really substances essentially distinct one from the other; and this is the conclusion of the Sixth Meditation… we cannot conceive of body excepting in so far as it is divisible, while the mind cannot be conceived of excepting as indivisible. For we are not able to conceive of the half of a mind as we can do of the smallest of all bodies; so that we see that not only are their natures different but even in some respects contrary to one another.

He goes on to argue for the distinct separation of body and mind, part of what has become known as Cartesian dualism. While the whole argument may appear to some as abstract philosophical theorizing, it has had an enormous influence on Western thought, not only in philosophy, but also in social sciences, arts, religion, education, medicine, political theory, gender studies, colonialism studies, and other areas. For background, see Russell Shorto’s Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason.

I’d like to recommend three classic, short essays that discuss the problem of Cartesian dualism and its consequence for life today.

(1) One is “Some Consequence of Four Incapacities,” by C.S. Peirce, written in 1868 for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Peirce directly critiques four major assumptions of Cartesianism.

(2) A second is John Dewey’s essay, “Body and Mind.” He writes,

the question of the integration of mind-body in action is the most practical of all questions we can ask of our civilization. It is not just a speculative question; it is a demand: a demand that the labor of multitudes now too predominantly physical in character be inspirited by purpose and emotion and informed by knowledge and understanding. It is a demand that what now pass for highly intellectual and spiritual functions shall be integrated with the ultimate conditions and means of all achievement, namely the physical, and thereby accomplish something beyond themselves.

(3) A third classic is by Arthur Bentley, “The Human Skin: Philosophy’s Last Line of Defense.”

All three of these make the same general point––a rejection of dualist thinking, which derives from Descartes’s attempt to reconcile science and religion, but which pervades our thinking in practically every other area, and a call for integrated approaches to complex problems.

References

Charles S. Peirce. “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1868): 140–57.

John Dewey. “Body and Mind.” In The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, LW 3:25-40. Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967.

Arthur F. Bentley. “The Human Skin: Philosophy’s Last Line of Defense.” Philosophy of Science 8 (1941): 1–19.

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Amidst the pavers

By mid-August, our paver entryway is a bounty of green, often obscuring the dark red pavers.

But I enjoy seeing the “weeds” return each year. It’s not that hard to tame them, but I enjoy seeing the varieties and the force of life bringing green into seemingly inhospitable conditions.

Many people would criticize our garden maintenance, or at best, express sympathy for this condition. One website says,

There’s nothing more frustrating than having weeds growing between the joints of pavers. Before you know it, the weeds can take over and be almost impossible to remove.

The site describes a method for removing those weeds. It then offers a service ($2 / square foot) to prevent their return:

After you’ve invested all this time an energy in removing the weeds from your pavers, the last thing you want the weeds to do is return. The problem: unless you do anything about it, they will. 

I’m willing to accept that will of the plants.

Moss may be the most compatible plant, one that sometimes just lays green above the sand between the pavers. Then there’s clover, which begins gently, then explodes into a mini-forest. For the last week we’ve been blessed with bright blue petunias.

A liberal use of vinegar followed by a pressure washing could combat all this growth, and I appreciate that many people would prefer the like-new look after a thorough cleaning.

Nevertheless, our like-old look seems to me more beautiful and far more interesting.

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Bouncing bet

Saponaria officinalis, known commonly as soapwort, bouncing bet, crow soap, wild sweet William, and lady by the garden gate, is blooming everywhere now in Wellfleet.

Although it’s a perennial, I don’t notice it most of the time amidst multiflora rose, blackberry Virginia creeper, bayberry, and other plants. Then it bursts on the scene in August, stealing the scene from all the rest.

Soapwort shines in various shades of pink and purple, brightening the path, and adding yet one more reason to walk in the woods and avoid driving on highway 6.

It can be a very useful plant, too. As the name implies, liquid from the roots and leaves can make a gentle soap. It’s especially handy for delicate woolens or dry skin, and was possibly used to clean the Shroud of Turin. 

It’s also used as an emulsifier in the preparation of tahini & halvah, and for brewing beer with a good head.

What I can see when I look up from the soapwort
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Finding lichen on the Fox Island Trail

[Cross-post from Wellfleet Conservation Trust]

Many of us grew up playing the Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? game. You had to guess an object, knowing only which of those three categories it fell into. Animal and vegetable (plant) were supposed to cover all living things.

Beard lichen (Usnea), a genus of fruiticose lichen

You can play that game on one of the WCT trails, for example, the photos shown here are from the Fox Island Marsh and Pilgrim Spring Woodlands Conservation Area, which is the site scheduled for the WCT Annual Walk on September 16, 2023.

But what if you came across some living thing that was neither animal nor vegetable? What if the thing you found looked like a plant, but wasn’t; looked like a single organism, but wasn’t; could appear as a mineral of some sort, but was full of life?

Powdered ruffle lichen (Parmotrema hypoleucinum); a foliose type

You could be looking at one of the most interesting phenomena on Cape Cod, but one that is often overlooked, even by those otherwise expert about birds, trees, wildflowers, turtles, mammals, mollusks, insects, and other fascinating flora and fauna.

That strange thing you observe might be a lichen, a composite organism made up of algae or cyanobacteria living among multiple fungi species. The fungi are in a kingdom separate from either plants or animals. That kingdom includes yeasts, molds, and mushrooms. Like animals, they cannot photosynthesize, but acquire food directly or indirectly from plants.

Greenshield lichen (Flavoparmelia caperata); foliose

Within a lichen, the fungi provide structure and attachment to a tree, rock, or split rail fence. The algae contain the green pigment, chlorophyll, which gives the green color to the lichen and captures energy from the sun to support. photosynthesis.

One common type you may find is foliose, or leaf-like lichen. Another is fruiticose, reminiscent of tiny fruit trees. There are also crustose, which attach to rocks so tightly that they can’t be removed without destroying them or the rock. They seem like the Mineral in the old guessing game. Some common crustose lichen are bright orange.

Reindeer lichen (Cladonia portentosa); fruiticose

Lichens are gray when the algae components are dead or dormant, but they may turn bright green after a rain. The fungus (which surrounds the algae) soaks up water, causing its to become more transparent, and revealing the green pigment of the algae.

See what you can find the next time you venture onto a WCT trail.