Who “discovered” the computer?
Spike Milligan, in his book The Little Pot Boiler, wrote a short piece called “Telephones”. In his usual madcap manner he talks about The Telephone as having been “discovered” in the same way that penicillin for example was accidentally discovered by Alexander Fleming.
I must share with you a quote from this piece, which I hope you will find as funny - and profound - as I did. “The first telephone proved to be useless until the arrival of the second.”
Unfortunately, Spike is no longer with us. If he were, I think I would ask him to write something in a similar vein about the discovery of the computer. I doubt if he would stick to the facts! However, it’s possible he may have modified the above quote by saying that the first computer proved to be useless because nobody knew how to use it. Which is more or less true. I’m referring to a contraption called the Difference Engine. Go on. Do a quick image search on “difference engine” and you’ll get some idea of why no one could use it. Amazing beast, though, isn’t it!
The “discovery” of this beast is attributed to a gentleman by the name of Charles Babbage. I had to tell you all this in case you didn’t already know. Otherwise, you’d have no idea what this cartoon is all about!
Cartoon from The Domestic Scene in Microholics
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What is a Blog?
I’m not going to make a habit of this, I promise. But the subject matter of today’s blog will be mainly ….er…. blogging. Just a couple of observations, and I’ll leave it at that. But it occurred to me that the reason so many blogs have as their main theme as “blogging” is quite simple. You write about what you know (or learn) and what you do. And, unless you’re very careful, the main thing you do when you start a blog is, well, blog. It’s a kind of recursive phenomenon. The more you blog, the less you do anything else, and the less choice of subject matter you have to write about!
When I say blogging, I’m not just talking about the physical act of writing the content of each post. There are all those supplementary but highly necessary activities. You get embroiled in time-consuming occupations like Search Engine Optimisation, social networking, and of course subscribing to online blogging forums.
I (inevitably) have signed up to a couple of forums which I follow, and sometimes contribute to if something grabs my attention. Recently a thread was started with the title “What is a blog?”. Pretty fundamental stuff, and potentially quite interesting I guessed. Wrongly! One post had the audacity to simply put a link to Wikipedia’s main article on blogging. Time to inject something a little more stimulating I thought - controversial even. So I contributed with, “A blog is something you create when you’re egocentric enough to believe that the world is actually interested in what you have to say“.
So far no one has replied to dispute this view. So it could be true!
Finally, no post on this blog would be complete without a cartoon. Today the subject is…. Guess what?
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