CLASSIC FILM SERIES AT CAT

Meet Artist Michael Molanphy

PRIDE FILM FESTIVAL by Erik Gudris

Independent Film Festival (#25) Takes a Final Bow

Three Indie Icons Will Have Films Screened at This Year’s RBIFF

Meet Programmer Michael Tuckman

Best of British Theatre at the CAT

Ada Lovelace was born in 1815 as the only legitimate child of infamous poet Lord Byron and was educated in mathematics from a young age for the sole purpose of being as little like her father as possible. She was tutored by Mary Somerville, one of the first two women introduced into the Royal Astronomical Society, who would later put her into contact with Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first mechanical computer, or “difference engine.” The notes Lovelace wrote for it, as well as for Babbage’s unbuilt but conceptualized “analytical engine,” are credited to be the first computer program. Due to the technological limitations of the era, there was no computer and thus no program, so who’s to say if her notes would have rung true; what cannot be disputed, however, is the prodigious intelligence required to even think of such a thing. She had such a grasp on the future of technology that she even argued against the concept of artificial intelligence. Lovelace was published in a scientific journal in 1843 where she expounded upon the aforementioned points; she did this under the initials AAL. I’ve introduced you to Lovelace not simply because of my excess of fondness for the Byrons- a claim that would hold up in court, I will confess- but to show that women always have been and will continue to be enmeshed in the history of science and mathematics. Men like to make all those jokes about how women can’t count or drive because they wouldn’t give the time of day to a woman who could do either- or they don’t want women to try just in case women would end up doing better than them. The long-standing underpinning of sexism to the capitalist society of the Western world does nothing but grind the proletariat to dust, and one half of that is women. Lovelace, though, was bourgeois landed gentry, which is what allowed her to have the time to perform complex mathematics and publish and translate papers in journals. We can only imagine how many women could have been capable of the same thing if given the proper support and resources. Which brings us to our exciting showing of Top Secret Rosies: The Female “Computers” of WWII , a 2010 release directed by LeAnn Erickson about the military use of women’s mathematical skills and the beginnings of programming and computers. The title a clear reference to the famous propaganda effort Rosie the Riveter, these women went to work not in the factories but for the government, not building the bombs but helping them be aimed as accurately as possible. Performing the actual calculations was considered clerical work, in the manner of a secretary taking shorthand notes, while the men did “real” engineering, designing and building hardware. This simple menial women’s work being, of course, longform nonlinear differential equations by hand. I’m not even sure what linear calculus is; I didn’t even get to pre-calculus in school, for the record. If it can’t be punched into the calculator on my phone I shouldn’t be doing it. The government hired women out of universities from all around the country for this, though only six were later selected by Adele and Herman Goldstine, the leaders of the human computing operations, for the running of the ENIAC. The ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, was the first programmable, electronic, and digital computer. It weighed over 30 tons and covered fifteen hundred square feet. Tasked with doing the nonlinear differential equations that the women were working on, it was a huge wall of holes for wires and switches to flip, and resembled more Babbage’s machine than anything we would call a computer today. They manipulated it physically for each usage at first, having no code, while under the supervision of the Goldstines, who then wrote an Operations Manual on the subject. Adele would later aid in the creation of the code used in the future. A fun fact I did learn over the course of writing this is that the term “computer bug” comes from when an actual bug, a moth, got stuck in the machine and prevented it from working. You can also still see the ENIAC on display at Fort Sill, if you have an interest in that kind of thing. The machine was never ready in time to perform for the war effort but was critical in our later development of nuclear fusion calculations in the forties and fifties. It was also used to prop up the excellence of the American government for having such a machine, though Cold War propaganda did as much as possible to make it as separate and infallible from humankind as possible to accentuate the intelligence of it all. Coincidentally this also seemed to work pretty well with forgetting that women were involved in the first place. The Soviets, on the other hand, were also making feminist history with the launching of the only solo female spaceflight to go into orbit in 1963, maintaining their lead in the space race. Women: just can’t get them out of that science. Director LeeAnn Erickson interviews several women over the course of the documentary, namely twins Doris and Shirley Blumberg, Marilyn Meltzer, and Jean Bartik, about their contributions to the war effort and American history. For this they received no more gratitude than a handshake and a certificate of commendation, which is about the same as what my high school gives out for performing community service hours, and went on for the most part thanklessly contributing to the future of technology and computer programming. A very human effort behind the mechanical supremacy of the machine. Erickson has indicated in interviews that she thinks it would make a good story if it were fictionalized, in the manner of the A League of Their Own movie, and it’s not like Hidden Figures didn’t prove that they could make math interesting. The continual popularity of the documentary on the educational circuit seems to indicate a level of interest in that possibility; Americans also love making movies about the World Wars, since that was about the last time we had any level of justification in our armed involvement. We continue to need women in STEM programs in the United States, seeing as how most every tech industry is riddled with men who think Elon Musk is smart. A variety of viewpoints also brings a greater understanding of the impacts and future possibilities for technologies, if equality itself isn’t a big enough draw. And part of the future is knowing the past, as they all say, so come and investigate at the Rehoboth Beach Film Society’s Cinema Art Theater

Meet Artist Amy Salganik