HN Reader

Regarding the quote about the British East India Company, it's worth noting that employees of the company had notoriously poor pay and were half-expected to set up their own personal ventures while in India to support themselves. The company was also poorly administered, and there was almost certainly a great deal of embezzlement going on (in response to the poor pay). So while the expected mathematics was probably comparatively simple, the numbers probably didn't add up (which is the kind of thing we'd expect a Commons committee to inquire into).

This is why so many early computing machines' names ended in "AC" for Automatic Calculaor or Automatic Computer. EDVAC, EDSAC, UNIVAC, though not ENIAC.

I wonder what we’ve lost, with the loss of human computers. It seems like it would be a nice job that rewards diligence and intelligence. Nowadays pretty much all intellectual work rewards creativity, almost exclusively… the machines are infinitely diligent, so it doesn’t provide much value add when the human is too.

I dunno. It just seems kind of sad, in a way, like we’ve dropped a whole entire way of being seen as intelligent.

A good movie drama about some of the human computers for NASA, and some of the prejudices that these particular ones faced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures

Finding out "computer" was a job title because precise calculation was so hard to find makes me feel less bad about needing a calculator for basic arithmetic.

We have a word for that: Lawyers!

Ah such a shame to miss out mentioning the not so well known Radhanath Sikdar the first person, employed as a computer, to accurately calculate the height of Mount Everest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhanath_Sikdar

Sometime when you're in a used bookstore, thrift store or yard sale, keep an eye out for very old dictionaries, and if found, look up the word "conputer". You will find the proof of the human occupant of this definition surprisingly recently (as in 1930s)

the other blog posts are pretty interesting too