We have a family friend, Glen, who was an important NASA scientist on the Apollo project. As a mathematician, he invented the idea of using a Fourier Transform to filter data on a digital computer. This was used to filter out signals coming back from in-flight rocket sensors and reduced the data processing time and increased the volume of usable data substantially. Reducing data processing time meant more flights could be scheduled and more adjustments could be done per flight and more things learned from each flight. Processing turnaround was the main bottleneck in the moon program at the time and solving it was the key element in not only winning the race to the moon, but doing it far more safely than would otherwise have been possible.

Glen built his own computer from TTL logic chips back in the early 70s. You programmed it initially by flipping nice thick metal toggle switches. He toggled in an assembler to bootstrap it, and eventually worked his way up to a keyboard and CRT for it. While visiting him one summer, I played an adventure game on it.

Today I read about a teacher in Portland who built a computer not out of TTL logic chips, but out of physical relay switches. He teaches computer architecture and if you want to understand that topic, watch his 1 hr video.

Then visit the web ring of homemade CPUs, linked from the bottom of that page. What fun!

Among the links is this web page:

http://www.magic-1.org/

Yes, that web page is being served to you by a webserver running in Minix, a small Unix, on a computer designed and built by hand using discrete logic units wirewrapped together.

Details of that computer and a photo:

http://www.homebrewcpu.com/

I have a dear friend whose mother is a animal horder. She has to take care of her mother's health problems as well as bring food for the dogs, both an exhausting process. Finally, after 15 years of this set up, the mother called the city and turned herself in! It seems she couldn't even get out of her bedroom at times because of the roving packs of wild animals that occupied the house.

So the city came out, and she tried to explain to them that she wanted to keep some of the dogs, but she would like for them to take the others away. The officials told her no, that would never do, and explained she had two options.

First, she could allow them to “do what was necessary”, in which case she would not be charged with more than 400 criminal counts of animal cruelty, public nuisance and health hazard. In addition, she can thoroughly clean her house and they will then consider not condemning it.

The alternate choice she had was that she could choose to resist their terms, in which case they would take her ass down. In other words, the “tough love” approach.

She agreed to the take the first choice.

My friend then went to take her mother out to town on the day of the city's big clean up operation. But before she did, she had to show the officials the “secret rooms” in the old pre-civil war farmhouse where the mother was “holding back” extra dogs that she wanted to keep.

So anyway, tomorrow is the third day of the dog kill. There are 400-some wild dogs living on the property. The animal control officers, including extras they brought in from up to 150 miles away, are shooting them left and right and stacking the carcasses like piles of corn husks.

What a relief this is for all parties involved.

I just read that in the early 1980s, Israel invested more per capita in education than any other nation. Guess who came in second? Puerto Rico! I wonder what that list would look like today. As a wild guess I'd think Singapore would be number one today with all their computers and ID cards.