Creating Computing Superheroes

Most interesting view of computing history.   Examining Walter Isaacson's The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.  Regarding the treatment of Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper.  I briefly encountered Grace Hopper at the Pentagon in the 70s. Have written about it in this blog.  See tags below. We have a long history of creating heroes for our needs.

Lovelace Test versus Turing Test

More powerful in testing machine intelligence than the Turing test, it is claimed, from Slashdot.   I had not heard of this particular term.  A generalized non technical article. With an element of measuring actual creativity in the results.   Here also see an original paper on the subject.

Michael Faraday Bio

A Life of Discovery: Michael Faraday by James Hamilton is the first bio I have read of Faraday. Hamilton is an architect, and sometimes fits in pieces about London architecture into the work, I didn't mind that, since I enjoy London, but it can seem forced. Good descriptions of Faradays lectures and the amount of time and care he took to get them right. I doubt he would have used Powerpoint. The most amazing part is his description of Faraday's creation of the first simple electric motor, the rush of creativity, if it could only always be that way ... his own enthusiasm then got him into trouble as he rushed to get the word out. I also recall reading parts of his chemical history of a candle in chemistry class, a tour-de-force of observation. He was to follow with the invention of the transformer, the dynamos and electrolysis, plus a great deal of fundamental chemistry and physics. His correspondence with Ada, Lady Lovelace, is also intriguing. Good bio.
The Wikpedia entry on Michael Faraday is also worth a look.