Kathleen Charters and Lawrence Charters
Explorations large and small
R2D2 has been missing for several years, though allegedly it will return — officially — in December 2015. Don’t despair, however: R2D2 is not idle. Well, sometimes it is idle, but it is still working hard to thwart the Empire. Continue reading R2D2 found
Thanks to the movie The Imitation Game, Alan Turing (June 23, 1912-June 7, 1954) is probably better known today than at any time in history. A mathematician trained at King’s College, Cambridge, England, he was fascinated with the concept of formal Continue reading Alan Turing’s Birthday
Do you want to have a lawn so green, it glows green in the dark? But do you find the simple challenge of turning on a faucet to water the lawn insufficiently challenging? Then get the Rachio Smart Sprinkler Controller! Which Continue reading For those who find sprinkling undercomplex
Located at the edge of Fort Meade, Maryland, in an old, nondescript motel, is the National Cryptologic Museum. Admission is free, and with that admission you can explore how the worlds of communications, mathematics, and security intersect in cryptology. Photos Continue reading Codes, cyphers, and the National Cryptologic Museum
FOSE is the largest computer conference and exhibition in the Washington, DC, metropolitan region. At one time, it had days of meetings, classes, speeches, and other educational events, plus miles and miles of aisles filled with the latest computer hardware Continue reading FOSE was gunning for business
This was the early version of Google. Using these humble wooden drawers, generations of scholars and researchers, desperate students and cunning spies, despairing parents and fanatical bibliophiles, and every other shape and size of reader delved into the depth and breadth Continue reading Early version of Google
Some of the 257 (and counting) rubber duckies surrounding one coworker’s cubicle. Each one is unique: There is nothing more to be said, other than to note that the person in question is a computer techie. Award winning! Another photo Continue reading Ducks!
I spent most of my grade school years drawing pictures instead of doing classwork. Classwork was easy, so I did that quickly and then “illuminated” my work with fanciful spacecraft, mythic maps, and lots of lizards and horses. My maps Continue reading Why I didn’t become a graphic artist
I was just alerted to a new site, ackuna.com, that is promoting their crowd-source translation capabilities by showing how bad machine translation can be. To illustrate this, you type in some text, and their “Bad Translator” feature runs it back Continue reading Automatic translation