Colossus Mark 2

James Pegrum built the Colossus Mark 2:

1944AD 1st June, Bletchley Park, England. The improved Colossus Mark 2 starts working in time for the Normandy Landings.
The Colossus was the world's first electronic digital computer that was at all programmable. It was designed by Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by a mathematician, Max Newman. In December 1943 the prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to work. There were ten Colossus computers in use at the end of the second world war.
The computers were used by British code breakers, giving the Allies valuable intelligence, obtained from reading many encrypted high-level telegraphic messages between the German High Command and their army commands.

Book Review: The Cult of LEGO

Another book review. I'm posting these across my blogs, with blog-specific content at the end.

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The Cult of LEGO, John Baichtal and Joe Meno, 2011, No Starch Press.



Okay, I'm embarrassed. I've had this one sitting here to review for just about a year now. I've been hesitant because I didn't want to be negative, but I suppose that's not a concern one should have in reviewing books. The thing is, from the point I first heard of this book, I wanted to love it. And, don't get me wrong, there is so much to love about this book. And before I go any further on a negative note, I want to start out celebrating what I love about this. We all know Joe as the founder and editor of BrickJournal, and a look at his Flickr stream reveals that he can be found at just about every gathering of more than five AFOLs, snapping picture after picture of all the great MOCs in the community. And the photos here are stunning - both those by Joe at fan events and photos chosen from builders across the community. This book tries to comprehensively cover all aspects of the hobby. The text by John Baichtal starts with a history of the company, then goes into all different areas, like different themes, spotlights on builders, NXT building, brick comics, LEGO in education, fan fests, micro macro sculpture and figs, Legoland parks, customization, Lugnet, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

There, I suppose is what bothered me. I love the photos. Yes, with anything like this you're going to quibble with 'why did they include this and not the five thousand other MOCs that they should have?' I suppose part of this comes down to taste, or luck, or maybe just which builders gave permission to use their photos. The text, though, tries to do too much, and it doing so it falls kind of flat. The style is more reporting, and lacks the personal feel we get in something like Jonathan Bender's LEGO: A Love Story. Actually, this book works best as the illustrations that were missing from Bender's book. In addition to the lack of a real emotional connection, there are odd inclusions and exclusions. I completely understand how a favorite MOC can be overlooked, but there are some glaring omissions in the text. For instance, the Castle theme gets less than a page (with a few additional MOCs that show up elsewhere). This is much less coverage than some individual builders or MOCs. Now, I'm a castle guy, so maybe I'm being sensitive to my favorite area of building, but Castle is one of the 'big three' themes along with Town and Space. Also, the coverage of the online community is sorely lacking. If you read this, you'd think that the community consists primarily of Lugnet and the Brothers-Brick. Miniland building is another shortfall. Sure, there aren't a ton of people who build in this scale, but it's at the heart of the theme parks, and in the book miniland figures get about a third as much space as Homemaker and Belville figs. Some inclusions are odd. There seems to be a huge emphasis on FFOLs. I'm not complaining about including women builders prominently, but it seems a bit agenda driven - trying to prove that LEGO isn't just for boys. There are also some individuals who get featured again and again - no knock on them, but it just seems that there are so many who get overlooked that to put a lot of attention on a few seems misplaced. The book does cover some areas that are left out of other LEGO books I've seen, like First LEGO League and Serious Play. I guess part of the problem is that there is no narrative thread that runs through the book. It's more like a scatter-shot of short pieces that tries to cover everything, but is inevitably hit and miss.

I'm really sorry to be negative on this book, which is why I've put off reviewing it. I do think that as a peek into the community it works well, and as a coffee table book to pick up and flip through the pictures, but to sit down and read to get some comprehensive insight I think it falls short of the high mark it set for itself. Anyway, if you're into LEGO books, you probably already have this. If you don't, I might turn first to one of the other books on the market.

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SciBricks specific content - Actually quite a bit. We see several great dinosaurs including Henry Lim's lifesize stegosaurus. There is a lot about robotics with Mindstorms NXT and the First LEGO League. There's a feature on high altitude experiments involving LEGO and weather balloons. Andrew Carol's working LEGO replicas of Babbage's Difference Engine and the Antikythera mechanism get a three page spread.

Ada Lovelace

As you probably know if you've used Google at all, today is the 197'th anniversary of Ada Lovelace's birth (LEGO Ada by Dunechaser). She is referred to as the world's first computer programmer, since in 1842 she designed an algorithm to use Babbage's analytical engine to compute the Bernoulli numbers.



Babbage's difference engine was a mechanical calculating machine that pre-saged later computers. Due to technical difficulties he never actually built it in his lifetime. Here is a difference engine built in LEGO by Andrew Carol - this was a precursor to the analytical engine.

Difference Engine

In 1822 Charles Babbage described the plan for a difference engine - a mechanical device that would use turning geared columns to calculate logarithms and trigonometric functions. Due to technical difficulties and cost overruns, it was never completed, and Babbage moved on to his analytical engine (unfortunately for mechanical computing, also never completed). Today, through the magic of LEGO, we can see his dream realized, the 3-digit difference engine by Aecarol.



And here you can see it in action.

Digi-Comp II

Yesterday I discussed the Digi-Comp I, an educational toy that was a mechanical computer. The same company followed up with what was probably a more fun version, the Digi-Comp II. In this version, marbles rolled down a ramp, and depending on how you set different gates, they would roll to the left or right, flipping switches as they went, leading to the output of a mathematical problem. A bit like the game Plinko on the Price is Right, but the balls aren't just bouncing randomly. Here's a good explanation on a giant version. Brdavis built a LEGO version.



Here you can see it in action with his explanation.

Digi-Comp I

A simple computer works by combining binary bits of data via logic operations. 0 OR 0 gives 0, 0 OR 1 gives 1, 1 OR 1 gives 1. 0 AND 0 gives 0, 0 AND 1 gives 0, 1 AND 1 gives 1, and so forth. Clever combination of AND, OR, NOT and IF functions allow you to perform mathematical and other operations on multi-digit binary numbers. Do this millions of times on a silicon chip and you've got the laptop I'm typing on right now. Before silicon chips, transistors and vacuum tubes, there were mechanical computers that work by physically moving switches or wheels to indicate the changes in value. An extremely simple example is the odometer on your car (if it's not electronic). Every so many rotations of the axle leads the tenth-mile wheel to move forward. Once that wheel turns all the way around, it causes the mile wheel to move forward one click. Once that goes around from 0 to 9, it causes the ten mile wheel to move forward one click. If you go 100,000 miles, or a million, or however many digits the odometer has (I'll have to go out to my car and look), the whole register clears and it flips back around to zero. This, of course, is an extremely simple mechanism only built to count in a forward direction. The early history of computing is all about the development of mechanical adding machines and other calculators.

This leads us to the Digi-Comp I. This was an educational toy sold in the 1960's where you move two levers back and forth, and depending on how you 'programmed' it, that is, how you arranged a series of wires, a little counter would give you the result of a simple mathematical operation.



Recently Nico71 built a LEGO Digi-Comp I.



You can watch it in action serving as a counter.