Bishop Hill Charles Babbage - pioneer dendro
Oct 10, 2010 Climate: other John Graham-Cumming, familiar to readers here as an occasional auditor of the Met Office's computer code, has a new project afoot - he wants to recreate Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine:
It's time to build the Analytical Engine
I hope to finish Babbage's dream and build an Analytical Engine for public display. I've launched a project called Plan 28 to raise the money and bring together people to work on the Engine. Babbage left behind extensive documentation of the Analytical Engine, the most complete of which can be seen in his Plan 28 (and 28a), which are preserved in a mahogany case that Babbage had constructed especially for the purpose.
Details of the plans are here. As always, there's a need for money, detail here.
And lastly, and also from JG-C, there's this interesting snippet:
So, who's the father of dendroclimatology? Charles Babbage has a strong claim.
I bet you didn't know that. Details here.
Reader Comments (23)
Terrific. Must show my wife if Strictly's over. She started on punch cards. Likes rings.
Anybody going to Climate Fools Day (in memberance of the passing of the Climate Change Bill)
Look like Graham Stringer MP, will be speaking (an MP that has outed himself as a sceptic?)
http://climaterealists.com/?id=6438
As Babbage points out; "The means of identifying the influence of differentt (sic) seasons in various...and before any general conclusions can be reached respecting a tract of country once occupied by a forest, it will be necessary to have a considerable number of sections of trees scattered over various parts of it."
The poor man must be turning in his grave.
Barry
I would quite like to go if only to meet you :P
@barry
Very tempting if I can rearrange a diary clash. Thanks for drawing it to my attention.
I'd like to meet GS as we share a common background in Chemistry, and (despite not being political bedfellows), I have developed an admiration for his work. Others may be more of an acquired taste.
@ Barry Woods,
Looked on their website for action hints and found the suggestion for a "low-carbon Sunday lunch". Idiots. Or as Dellers calls them; Trustafarians.
Good to see you girls occupied with the flower reararranging of history nobody cares about while Wegman & McInytre and his li'll social network pals burn.
(Babbage? How terribly interesting! Do tell! Oh is that the time...)
Hilarious.
It's almost like you don't know whass 'appenin' man while you chunter that old hasty headline down the list and outtasight.
Go doggies! Ye haw!!
But, it has to be said very funny, if not quite up to a Downfall.parody.
Oh hush my mouth!
Do keep it up, chaps.
It's good for the morale of the shell-shocked masses who haven't acclimatised yet.
Didn't the Science Museum build one a couple of years ago?
It must be bishop phil's turn this week. It was ZDB last week. I wonder who the troll will be next week?
I found this powerpoint that has some interesting tidbits about Dendrochronology
http://web.utk.edu/~grissino/ltrs/lectures/dendro%20history.ppt
The history of the topic goes back a long way and includes Leonardo da Vinci
According to the ppt, Andrew E Douglass (1867-1962) is considered the "father of dendrochonology" though Charles Babbage is also mentioned in the slides.
Tried to post this at Mr. Graham-Cumming's website, but did not want to open a Google account.
Dear Mr. Graham-Cumming,
Much as I enjoyed your speculation about Babbage being the progenitor of dendrochronology, unfortunately this theory holds no water. 19th century German scientific foresters have to be given the credit for this instead - they developed age classes of trees based on tree-rings correlated with height and volume, to develop forestry tables for calculating the annual harvest. Also, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was aware that annual rings could be used to age trees, although he did not elaborate on this (see Linnaeus: nature and Nation by Lisbet Koerner.
I thought someone had already done this a few years back.
There is a register article that explains what the Science Museum built, and what they plan to build.
The first one they built was the "easy" one... the second machine can be programmed...
Register Article
To Simple Seeker After Truth:
It's settled science that if it's a bristlecone pine you only need one tree.
Cheers!
I'd like to see it let loose on a GCM. It'd probably do a better job than some of those super-computer things. And at a fraction of the cost.
Sounds like a British project, proposed in 1837 and finished 180 years later.
Ladies and gentleman we present the pinnacle of British computer science and engineering -
the Steam Driven Puff Adder.
Andy Scrase
Benoit Ritaud in Le Mythe Climatique credits Douglass with inventing the word 'Dendrochronology'. He also points out that he was trained as an Astronomer and worked for Percival Lowell until he was fired for being sceptical about Martian canals.
There's a moral in there somewhere.
Hi Latimer, Dung , missed you both ? at the Guardian Climate gate meeting.
I would like to meet Graham Stringer - I may have sent him a few emails ;)
I have a Chemistry background as well (so does the good Bishop!), also further degrees in Cybernetics. (we can talk about computer models I was attempting to develop to use in a defence system!, )
Franny Armstong & George Monbiot - both Zoololgy
@ Barry Woods, Oct 11, 2010 at 10:06 AM:
Now Barry, don't diss Zoology because of two (very) bad apples!
I bet Franny and Moonbat slept through all Year One lectures, due to permanent hangovers. And I'd guess they skived off all field trips as well. And they must ahve missed all the lectures on evolution as well.
This zoologist has been a sceptic ever since it was clear that the IPCC and its thousands of climate 'scientists' showed that they had no idea about the influence of clouds on the climate, and weren't interested in finding out.
Ain't the Zoology that is at fault - its those who never seem to have studied it properly. Like the two you named ...
Don't dis the zoologists. Behavioural ecology and paleontology both play useful and important parts in understanding past climate changes. Like how did those fossils get here? Where did the water go? etc etc. Cryptozoology, well, that's a lil different :p
As for Climate Fools Day, it's tempting, but may need to dust off my snow shoes.
Will it run Microsoft Windows?
TerryS
It must be bishop phil's turn this week. It was ZDB last week. I wonder who the troll will be next week?
Hopefully one with a better understanding of science and some real wit. However, it's so hard to find good trolls nowadays. Perhaps we can put out an advert.
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine
I guess I am not impressed, having spent a couple years working on Marchant "calculators" to do statistics on beasts like THIS . It was because of one them literally blowing up (springs flying and such) that I got my start in computers which had the added value of heating the room you were in. Very handy in winter. A draw back in summer. It was the CDC 1604
It used a CDC 160 as a "spooling" device, that read the card reader and wrote the printer, using one of the four tape drives as input to the "main frame" which only had mag tape. Now there was a real computer. They don't make them like that anymore -- thankfully.
I wrote about Charles Babbage here in my climate history article. His family were local to my home town.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/travels-in-europe-part-1/
He was years ahead of his time in his various machines and it would be intersting to see his device built.
tonyb