Trumbo Hankpapper

@AndrewHenry@mastodon.energy unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/LG95Q

I've long been fascinated by #ProjectWhirlwind, originally conceived in the penultimate year of WWII as a general-purpose, mixed analogue and digital aircraft simulator. That morphed into SAGE, the "Semi-Autonomous Ground Environment", a continent-spanning network of hundreds of room-sized computers, radars and communication links, which ran for a decade starting in the 1950s. Both systems were groundbreaking and relied on the invention of technologies which didn't exist at their outset; similar in character if not in scale to the space program of the same era.

This sounds like the OG example of one of those sprawling, years-long 'digitisation' projects that frequently go catastrophically wrong; think of the UK Post Office Fujitsu Horizon project, the Obama-era HealthCare.gov.

Yet SAGE was a success, despite the massive change in scope and intent. Was it just a question of throwing obscene amounts of state (federal) funding at it until it succeeded? I'm still finding out.

But there are interesting indications that those involved had a grip on the project from the earliest days. Jay Forrester was tasked with scoping out the technical solution to Luis de Flores' vision of a flight trainer. During the first two weeks of December 1944, Forrester gained a sense of the complexity of the project, resulting in the sponsors backing away from their initial plan for a $200,000 "breadboard model contract" and instead opting for a 4 to 6 month "preliminary study" to be funded at $75,000.

#histodons, is there such a thing as a book on the history of the #papacy and the #caliphate, comparing and contrasting them?

...or even a paper, or thesis?

Failing that, what's a good recommendation for a general reader of the history of the caliphate that isn't hagiography or colonialist?

@grrlscientist@mastodon.social a plus one to bring it home: a citizen of a rich, democratic European country, my dad hid in the crawlspace under his future wife's parents' house to avoid being kidnapped to work as a slave labourer.

The kid in the crawlspace next door brought a candle, and snuffed it out when the Nazis came. They smelled the candle and found him. He was hauled away. My dad stayed hidden and wasn't found, that time or other times.