Lord Byron's Novel by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page B

making that film, and then used their old footage in it. A big romance story. I never saw it, was it good. Some people seem to know all about it, I meet them. A cult film, somebody told me. Better than the others when he got famous.
     
    I haven’t thought about him in a while. Hm.
     
    I’m going to the Science Museum tomorrow if I can get away from Georgiana. I don’t think she can be cool, I feel so disloyal saying it, but she just sort of beclouds things. It’s raining but I’ve got my Swain Adeney.
     
    Smith
    From: “Thea”
To: “Smith”
Subject: him
    what you havent ever checked his website i mean the production company website i would if i were you even if I was scared actually today i did you never told me hes so good looking but he looks like he knows it that whole david bowie thing going on but with the farseeing eyes man he might be a phony tho i know hes awful i hate him but he does good things did you know hes making a film now about east timor recreating an awful massacre when east timor wanted freedom well i bet you know
     
    anyway hes not coming back
     
    t
    From: “Smith”
To: “Thea”
Subject: RE:him
    That’s him. The pervert. I do look. I just don’t tell you.
     
    The Difference Engine is the most amazing thing. It weighs tons, really tons. You can’t stand in front of it without thinking about how intense they were in the past, to have thought up and designed and then built a thing so heavy and so perfect, I mean so finely made that you can make the whole mechanism move with one hand. The guy showed me. You set these wheels etched with beautiful little numbers, and then you turn the handle, and the columns of numbers turn, and these arms turn other columns as they carry numbers over and add them (all this whole thing does is add!) and it makes this slick sound that grips your head or your heart or some part of you—if you like the sound of slick machines turning their parts.
     
    But of course Babbage didn’t build it—these guys at the science museum built it—Babbage never finished it, he dropped it and went on to design an even better machine, the Analytical Engine, that could be programmed, with punch cards, like an old computer. You know all this, I’m just thinking out loud, okay? So what would a long program of punch cards look like, I asked him. If somebody had written one out, back then. And he didn’t really know, or he thought it could look like a lot of things, that the whole process had never reached that stage.
     
    He was pretty snippy about Ada as a mathematician—he says she really contributed nothing much to the thinking about the Analytical Engine—but he did say that it was she and not Babbage who saw the possibilities, that the Engine could be a manipulator of symbols, and not just of numbers—a “generalized algebra machine,” this guy said. That’s the importance of her insight that the Analytical Engine could weave algebraic patterns just like a Jacquard loom could weave birds and flowers. (Jacquard’s loom wove patterns determined by a sequence of punch cards—that’s where Babbage got the cards idea.) It all depended on the instructions. And that’s really the concept of a computer.
     
    See what I’m wondering? Georgiana’s rushing ahead, she’s not wondering, she’s sure we have a computer program written by Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace. But what if she’s right.
     
    I’m faxing you a couple of pages of the math. Tell me what you think.
     
    S
    From: “Thea”
To: “Smith”
Subject: Log
     
    okay I got the fax no its not a log table guess again anyway why are we sure its hers
     
    t
    From: “Smith”
To: “Thea”
Subject: RE:Log
    What do you mean guess again? You guess again, you’re the numbers guy. If it isn’t