This is a totally self-indulgent episode that has nothing to do with anything.
What’s the use of Pictures and Conversations without NOTES?
This episode is dedicated to Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice, which I read until it fell apart; more recently I’ve been hugely enjoying Lewis Carroll in Numberland, a highly recommend little book, from whence this episode has sprung.
Through the Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There) was published in 1871, the year of Babbage’s death, and much too late for Lovelace who would have loved it I think. Charles Babbage, I am THRILLED to report, did once meet Lewis Carroll, in 1867:
“Then I called on Mr. Babbage, to ask whether any of his calculating machines are to be had. I find they are not. He received me most kindly, and I spent a very pleasant three-quarters of an hour with him, while he showed me over his workshops etc.”
I have to wonder if Charles Dodgson (as we should call his name, in his Mathematical Incarnation) is kidding here; it seems impossible to me that he didn’t know the most famous thing about the Engines being that they didn’t exist. How sad that they didn’t have a longer acquaintance!
It’s even sadder that he never met Lovelace- he would have been about 20 when she died, and there’s more than a touch of the kindred spirit there; at least so it seems to me. Their ‘voices’ at least sound very similar– here’s Lovelace for instance, writing to her informal tutor August de Morgan:
Dear Mr De Morgan-
I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected & to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one shape now, & the next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome & tantalising are the mathematical sprites & fairies sometimes; like the types I have found for the in works of Fiction..
and Dodgson, on trying to find a proof–
“Like the goblin ‘Puck’, it has led me “up and down, up and down,” through many a wakeful night: but always, just as I thought I had it, some unforeseen fallacy was sure to trip me up, and the tricksy sprite would “leap out, laughing, ho ho ho!””
Lovelace and Dodgson both loved Euclid (Lovelace: “It is a very pretty little Theorem– so neat and tidy! the various parts dovetail so nicely!”) and the emerging field of symbolic logic, and both stumbled through the Nameless Wood of calculus– Lovelace wrote to De Morgan “these Functional Equations are complete Will-o-the-wisps to me’, and Dodgson, after four years (!) of studying Mathematics at Oxford and despite coming at the top of his class, writes “talked over the Calculus of Variations with Price today; I see no prospect of understanding the subject at all.” You may need to recalibrate your judgements of people’s math by the way– Carroll was already lecturing in mathematics at Oxford when he described the end of Differential Calculus as ‘new to me’ as late as the 1850s!
Look at me, rambling on.. MORE NOTES!
—Zero, a subject fascinating to ‘non-mathematical minds’ I have been informed, is both real and imaginary– Leibniz calls it “a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit – almost an amphibian between being and non-being.”
–Lovelace’s sums are correct if done in binary.
—A gloriously simple and clever binary counter
—A handsome Rube-Golbergian binary adding machine.
–For a truly awesome introduction to the history of binary, I refer you to this concise paper with loads of interesting docs (PDF), including this lovely passage from Liebniz:
One of the main points of the Christian Faith, and among those points that have penetrated least into the minds of the worldly-wise and that are difficult to make with the heathen is the creation of all things out of nothing through God’s omnipotence, it might be said that nothing is a better analogy to, or even demonstration of such creation than the origin of numbers as here represented, using only unity and zero or nothing.
I love the bit about publishing this discovery in the form of a large medal.. talk about cumbersome notation!
— `Too much mathematics!” — Here is an Alice-in-Wonderland conundrum for you: as we all know, Lovelace’s mother attempted to curtail the inherited Poetical Disorder of Ada’s mind through rigorous mathematical study. On the other hand, her tutor Augustus de Morgan worried about the well-known fact that studying mathematics damaged women’s brains, as he expressed in this extraordinary letter to Lovelace’s mother. If she did NOT go mad through not ENOUGH mathematics, she was bound to go mad by studying TOO MUCH. It’s heartbreaking to read the letter to De Morgan’s wife Sophia that I quoted in the last episode–
”There has been no end to the manias & whims I have been subject to, & which nothing but the most resolute determination on my part could have mastered. The disorder had been a Hydra-headed monster; — no sooner vanquished in one shape, than it has sprung up in another.[…] Many causes have contributed to the past derangement; & I shall in future avoid them. One ingredient, (but only one among many) had been too much Mathematics.”
Yikes. Anyways, to happier subjects–
— It was Lovelace, not Babbage, who invented a steam-powered horse, but as she was 13 at the time she was unable to secure government funding.
— Charles Babbage’s horsemanship cannot be accurately assessed from the available documents, except for the unbearably awesome fact that Ada Lovelace lent Babbage a freaking’ pony when he used to visit her estate: “You can have a pony all to yourself, and never have to walk a step except on the terrace, the ‘Philosopher’s Walk’” (1849-ish) I want a pony.
— Lovelace to Babbage, 1848, re his TicTacToe machine: “You say nothing of Tic-tac-toe– in yr. last. I am alarmed lest it should never be accomplished. I want you to complete something; especially if the something is likely to produce silver & golden somethings..” :D
–The delightful image of Ada as Alice and Babbage as The White Knight, which only becomes more apt the more I think about it, is not mine–it’s throwaway line of Lovelace’s first biographer Doris Langley Moore. I’d criticise Moore’s bio but I’m afraid she’d slice me in half with a microscopic lift of one perfectly groomed eyebrow. I’d criticise all the rest of the bios but I’m too chicken to do that too; at least, I’m waiting until I can do it without being really fighty and unpleasant. Instead, I’ll stick to passive-aggressive digs! Soon I shall sink to writing mean reviews on Amazon under a pseudonym, instead of the approved method of elaborately sarcastic letters to the Times Literary Supplement that commence: SIR–
Anyways!! Seriously I could have done Alice episodes forever but I promise, next episode MONKEYS! COFFEE! EVIL SCHEMES! POSSIBLY EVEN A MUSICAL NUMBER!
PS- small query– how is the size of the comic working for you? Too big? To small? How about the size of the text? It’s hard to tell what the best size is, right now I’m doing them 550 px wide with 14 pt text but that seems a bit big.. opinions?
Comments
62 responses to “Lovelace and Babbage vs The Organist, pt 5”
Redshift, where do you want your Internets sent? :-)
Indeed. I like to think Martin would have quite enjoyed this comic, had he ever seen it.
sadly, r.i.p. martin gardner…
Brunel’s espresso machine would have been the LARGEST and MOST POWERFUL ever conceived! It would have filled a warehouse! It would have operated at pressures previously considered INCONCEIVABLE, and produced coffee so strong as to deprive lesser men than Brunel of their wits! :-)
To continue musing along the lines of on the first comment: I wonder what Brunel’s espresso machine would have looked like? Oh yeah…
The large size is much appreciated! Last time someone changed to a smaller size, it diminished the comic artistically as well as physically.
(http://www.faubcomic.com/, but the larger versions have gone.)
When I read about 2D Goggles on A Miracle Of Science (or Afterlife Blues?) I thought they were exaggerating about it being the coolest thing ever. Not so :-)
(http://www.project-apollo.net/mos/index.html)
Another amazing episode. Lovelace as Alice is inspired and very cute. The Jabberwock/Hydra looming over her is an awesome piece of art. Brunel is wonderful as always.
Thanks for the kind comments about my video.
ANdrew wrote:
I want one of those too!
This must be leading up to Brunel’s “I was surprised you should buy such bad roasted corn. I id not believe you had such a thing as coffee in the place” quote. It must.
Wonderful story, mainly the parts 3 to 5, which brought a different (more thrilling) pitch and intensity to the plot. Maybe that’s because it decidedly and boldly entered the dangerous and largely unchartered territory of Lovelace’s mind conflicts. I do subscribe to the view that those conflicts had more to do with Byron’s bloodline genetics than to that fallacious saying that poetic and mathematical mindsets cannot live together in peace inside a single human brain (let alone the BS of how much math a woman can healthily learn). The more abstract branches of Math show a lot of aesthetics every bit as much as one can find in poetry. Take Maxwell equations, for example: Their sheer capacity of embed – in meager four short lines- such a big and intense message and, at the same time, display aesthetically beautiful symmetry make them “rhyme” much like a poem. Abstract thinking and symbolism are the link.
About the sizes (panels and text): Well, I don’t think it’s really an issue. I felt quite comfortable with the current size, as much as I liked the previous one. Given the wide range of screen sizes available (from netbooks to large monitors) and the ease of zooming in/out, it’s something you shouldn’t worry about (oops! An unintended rhyme here). Using a worn out cliché, “size doesn’t matter provided it is neither too big nor too small, and at the end, it performs its magic”.
Keep the pace, the pitch and intensity. I can’t wait for the next strips. I can feel things converging: Poetry, math, engineering, music (Byron, Lovelace, Brunel, Babbage), Maybe the difference engine making music with lyrics…
I noticed you changed “2D Goggles dangerous experience in comics” to a far more appropriate “2D Goggles fine comics”
A last word: Despite this lengthy comment I’m not bipolar. At least I’ve not been diagnosed so. Maybe in the future, if someone read my e-mails…
Yeah, vertical is the way to go on computers, especially with the mouse wheel. It’s also the way things are done on nearly everything else from message boards to news sites so people are used to it and, I think, expect it. Side to side is feasible with the arrow keys but less friendly on the eyes in my opinion.
And, Kat, yes to the middle-aged eyes friendliness of the size of font.
Technical note– Sydney, your layout, blocking and design of each “page” is always solid. The blocking is consistently brilliant. Case in point, Brunel’s profile and then quarter-turn as Ada passes out in the next panel.
The scrolling down has never bothered me in the least, especially since hundreds of other graphic novel artists who post online make use of the vertical layout. I’ve been editing a friend’s work for the last ten years (helping with plot and dialog) and he’s always posted vertically. He just divides the vertical posts into pages for press. Then we compile all the footnotes for each page at the end.
If you ever (please) decide to go to press (please), you could easily adapt this to the printed page (please)!
For someone who doesn’t write a web comic, you really are extremely good at it!
Size is fine on my 9″ netbook and 17″ desktop monitors.
Coffee *and* monkeys in the same episode! I’ll be tuning in for that for sure!
RE: the comic dimensions. To my poor middle-aged eyes, everything is easy to make out. Not every talented cartoonist I follow is so kind to the aged!
The comic and commentary are utterly perfect. It brightens any day when evidence of an update appears via RSS in my reader.
Thank you for sharing your cleverness and research with us.
You also misspelled “coffee” in the last panel.
I love the way you set out your panels, although I’m sure if you put these to print someday your layout designer will have fits.
Also, BRUNEL TEH FAIRY. WIN.
The last four panels are absolute genius. Brunel as a fairy and Ada’s face when she says “queen of the math fairies” are priceless.
Also, just found out today that Babbage once cooked himself in an oven to find out the effects it would have on a human body. Which begs two questions: first, why am I always the last one to know these things; and second, how has this not been in a comic yet… unless… that’s how he escapes the monkeys somehow (your secret is safe with me).
I really like how Humpty Dumpty looks so like Babbage when he says “That is a very handsome sum!” just before he shows up as the White Knight. It’s so logical and dreamlike that Babbage would haunt her that way. And that Babbage would be split up into schoolmaster Babbage (Humpty Dumpty) and childlike goofball inventor Babbage in the dream. Brilliant!
THE BEST ONE YET!! GENIUS!! Lewis Carroll AND Brunel all in one episode. Both the bit with Babbage (“I want you to complete something!”) and the hydra-jabberwocky (resolving into none other than the man IKB himself) made my day. That and all the footnotes!!
Consider your latest installment a cup of coffee for the rest of us.
PS. As far as the size of your text and layout, everything always displays just fine for me. I’ve pulled up your site on itty-bitty 15″ desktop monitors as well as the massive studio cinema displays and you always look great.
I concur that the coffee/ peasant panel needs to become a shirt!
Also absolutely adore Brunel, especially when he rescues our drunken/delirious heroine and takes her to get coffee. Such an awesome man! The looks on his face are absolutely priceless.
“Calculus of Variations” is certainly an advanced topic! You write as if it need be covered in Calculus II.
As others have said, your notes are great. Hopefully I can build an adding machine like that one…
*integral hisSSSS*
Lovely comic, as always! A book i read to tatters when i was a kid was “Alice in Mathland,” a sort of sequel that combines maths with the Alice universe very much in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Dunno if you can find it in English, but if i ever translate it (from Russian), i’ll send it along. :)
More sheer brilliance. Always delighted to see another episode and always in awe of the breadth and depth of your research. I’m just disappointed that Ada/Alice didn’t turn into something much more involved. Maybe when The Organist is finally vanquished?
Apart from typos already noted by Andrew, a couple of corrections: first, Ada, being thoroughly *not* from the U.S., would refer to “maths”, not “math”; secondly, you can’t say “from whence”: “whence” itself means “from where”.
Keep up the enchantment! Oh, and I second the plea for more merchandise!
A nice long comic to read through is wonderful. Scrolling up to find the relevant panel while reading the notes is a little trouble, but not a big thing.
Lovelace slicing apart the Jabberwocky really should be on a t-shirt!
“I am Queen of the Math Fairies!” -Love it!
Hm. The last time I recall you mentioning that something had nothing to do with anything and was just a luxurious indulgence it had everything to do with everything.
1) The ‘We Need Coffee / Unhand me, peasant’ pic must become a tee-shirt.
2) The size and font work well on my computer. Since this is on computer, the size doesn’t have to fit a standard like the average comic book size. I like reading it down this way, too, since it’s easy to scroll or arrow down.
3) ‘Coffee/Peasant’ must become a tee-shirt.
4) Ooh, Ada gets to be rescued by not one but two great guys.
5) Ada Lovelace – streetwalker… er, Walker of the Dark Streets of the Mind.
6) Seriously, though, in the ‘Coffee/Peasant’ panel (subliminal whisper: which must become a tee shirt /subliminal whisper) Ada’s legs are very dynamic looking in their staggering drag there.
7) The notes are great. I had to double-squee with both ‘Fairy’ Brunel (and his coffee comment) and DeMorgan both in one post.
Marvellous, marvellous. I love the way you’ve used Through the looking glass, which is one of my very favourite books. Smashing.
Size of the comic works fine for me, and the size of the text seems entirely in tuen with everything else, though if you did make it smaller I would still be quite easily able to read it with the settings I use. Hope that helps.
J
Love this installment! :D The font is a bit large for the web, but I also like to read offline on a portable device, and I think it would be just right for that purpose.
Oh, thank God – the new episode! My marriage is saved!! :-)
I feel like a junkie – craving my next fix! OTOH, a junkie doesn’t get the pleasure of re-taking the same drug, while I have the luxury of re-reading each comic, and enjoying the discovery of something new in each re-reading. I just love devouring the comic – GULP! GULP! Then going back for round two, paying closer attention to the art (and seeing how the art influenced my first reading, without my even noticing it!), and then round three, after reading everyone’s comments, to see what THEY saw & I didn’t (side note: isn’t it wonderful that people seeing the same thing all respond to it differently?) And then, coming back every few days, to re-savor it all – hoping that such re-readings will keep me satisfied, and non-grumpy, thus keeping me in my state of marital bliss.
I shall endeavor to not stay “too tuned”! ;-)
As for fonts, layout, etc: I think the fonts (both family & size) are a perfect fit for this comic. As a regular reader of graphic novels, I do find the vertical nature of this one slightly odd – I had trouble at first getting the flow of the ‘3-panel’ pieces [pages?] (“The question is…” and “I see you are admiring my steam steed”). But, upon subsequent re-readings, I see the flow and find it appropriate. And I wonder how this layout would translate to a print version? (Said version being my One True Hope!)
Oh – and, yes, we need more wallpaper images! Surely you’re not too busy…
[ducks and runs]
“I am Queen of the Math Fairies” — love it! Another outpouring of admiration from Toronto — keep it up, kid!
I love this strip! ’nuff said.
The size is good. Easy to read.
As usual, this is marvelous. Also per usual, I love the notes. Unfortunately, I live in the US (which should not be construed to mean I dislike my country) and I cannot see the link to the BBC video. This country blocking is so odd.
Ada’s madness is wonderfully evoked here. Thank you for sharing your your fun and research! Every time I read this I learn!
Other than the spelling errors in some of the text, most notably “shockings scenes” instead of “shocking scenes” and “rythmic” instead of “rhythmic” (and admittedly these are quibbles generated from a mind long since warped out of symmetry by a career as a technical writer and editor), I found the installment brilliant as always, and even illuminating. The footnotes are such an essential part of the experience. I would very much like to have a t-shirt with the image of Brunel, with fairy wings, and that terrific scowl. My apologies for the random nature of this missive, but I find it difficult to take in the entirety of the installment in a linear manner. Perhaps the infinite fairies of mathematics have infested my poor brain – a visually transmitted meme / virus of sorts.
Man, if I had a nickel for every time I was hopped up on poetry and wandered through the Looking Glass as a metaphor for an alternate, less fantastic universe…
Meanwhile, I’m trying to find “the thing” I like about this particular strip, and I’m finding it’s not a thing. It’s the flow and movement of the strip itself. There’s a momentum to the whole thing (look at the figure of “Adalice” when the horse comes to a stop, for example) that works really nicely, and it annoys me that I don’t have a sufficient art background to be more specific than that.
Lastly, I have to wonder how…isolated, I guess, Ada felt growing up. Today, we see reports of animal-like robots and personal flying machines (and why they won’t come to market) all the time. But close to two hundred years ago, for a thirteen year old girl to be dreaming of such things? Given how hard it’s historically been for a girl to find someone to confide in about ANYTHING, that couldn’t have been an easy burden.
(Eagerly awaiting monkeys. Or more metaphor. Whichever. Even coffee!)
Re: comic sizes and dimensions
I typically read L&B through Google Reader which display the image a full size – at a screen resolution of 1680×1050 the size is perfect: easy to read and discern details and no issues reading the text.
… okay, let’s see here. I’ve got both a hyphen *and* a colon in that sentence. If only I’d managed to work in a semi-colon or some parenthesis!
So Ada cutting off hydra’s heads has absolutely no relationship to the Hydra Game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_game) ? Then it is a wonderful coincidence.
Wonderful!
If you ever publish this as a book (which You Had Better Do), you must include the notes.
Another great episode. Don’t change a thing :)
It may be a testament to how much I’ve been dealing with binary lately, but I didn’t notice anything wrong with the sums for a while, and wasn’t quite sure why Ada was complaining it wasn’t right!
I think the text size and style is working fine. It feels very dynamic.
I love that Brunel comes to save the day! I should get myself a Brunel t-shirt, and aspire to be like him. I barely feel worthy of being called an engineer :)
Wait, I think there was one thing Burton got wrong.
His Jabberwock wasn’t wearing a waistcoat.
I never did notice that the original slayer does have curly Alice-hair though…
Having just watched the Tim Burton Alice, this rocks my world.
I always loved the White Knight and it makes me very sad that most people ignore him. Especially constructions like the symbol/object parsing in ‘The name of the song is called Haddock’s Eyes’ could only have come from the already demented mind of a mathematician.
(That’s the thing that so many people miss about Alice: that it’s not about fantasy at all, it’s about logic. Which is much more insane, by far.)
Also the Tenniel Jabberwock (leave the Y as the legend-noun-designator suffix where it belongs Tim!) scared the pants off me as a kid so it was fun seeing it again pretty much just like that in the film.
But of course a bit of calculus would suffice to deal to that infinite regress just fine. Are those Infinitesimal Fairies?
#include fanboi_gush.h
“I see nothing needs changing.”
But then some of us have tag-teamed “Jabberwocky” at unsuspecting bystanders.[1]
I love the off-balance feel of the first panel, the integral hiss of the monster, and the boundless courage of the Countess.
In the perfect universe, a certain Artist-Researcher will be commissioned for “The Annotated Ada” to accompany the cinématographe as it tours the finest lecture halls. I suspect that universe is at least two streets over.
Pray continue your endeavours, regardless.
—
[1] If you must know, it was choir practice and the worship pastor was the other member of the team.
Gratuitous plug: http://www.webscription.net/p-613-vorpal-blade.aspx
I’m fine with the size, and–speaking as a fellow Carrollian–if this is what your self-indulgences are like then I can certainly wait for the monkeys! I’m especially taken with Ada’s recitation of binary equations for Humpty Dumpty, so much like Alice’s poetry recitations in which she can’t quite get the words right (“How doth the little crocodile…” for “How doth the little busy bee…”, etc.), and yet the “off” versions of the poems are better-known than the originals.
Incidentally, you may be interested to learn that Martin Gardner is alive, tolerably well, and still writing at the age of 95. Time to write him a fan letter while he’s still around!
“… In fact I don’t think it ever SHALL be built. And yet it was a very clever engine to invent!” Is that not a most evocative epitaph for Babbage?
I… um… have just a little bad news. These two links:
–A gloriously simple and clever binary counter
–A handsome Rube-Golbergian binary adding machine.
go to the same YouTube video.
madrat-Fixed! Thanks!
Reading this episode made me feel like I was being seduced. Just wow.
The whole comic does seem a bit big.
For example, the “I hope I encourage him” text seems to be the size that most comics use for text, probably because you wanted that text be smaller, but other speech bubbles or narrative boxes seem to use a larger font size. It feels *almost* like shouting, though not quite. (Ofc, “STAY TUNED” was shouting. “not too tuned” -> hee.)
And the panels themselves feel large compared to what I see in comic books, which tend to squash a lot of panels together at everything but the grandest moments. Here, everything was a Grand Moment.
It does feel different than most comics, but more…*luxurious*, rather than anything bad. You need a colorist! :-)
Also, I had to read the comic a couple of times before I fully noticed the Alice Transformation. From what I see, she actually changes twice, once for Humpty Dumpty and once for the White Knight. I like that her “normal” clothing feels very Indiana Jones-ish for the Jabberwocky battle.
> writing mean reviews on Amazon under a pseudonym
Haha! Very nice dig. However, if you make sly references to Current Events, you may need to start adding notes for your notes!
Madame;
You have made my day a great deal happier by publishing this new instalment.
I find the size and fonts to be just fine for ready reading and look patiently for the next instalment.
After all; anticipation is the finest of sauces be it for food or fine entertainment.
Regards;
Arthur
I like Everything! The second panel is genius, and I like Ada’s disheveled hair, and as usual the notes are making me smarter and smarter. (and thanks for putting this up today. I just found out that a friend of mine died nearly a month ago and my mom didn’t bother to tell me, so I needed some ‘girl time’). You’re a jewel.
More comic perfection! When I saw the vorpal blade, I couldn’t wait for it to go “snicker snack”. Wonderful. And the image of Brunel and Ada (“unhand me, peasant”) needs to be added to my desktop wallpaper collection. BTW, the size is fine for me – I just want it to continue DOWN the page without ending!
“We need coffee.” Spoken like a true engineer.