Sydney Padua's Blog, page 10

Lovelace and Babbage Vs The Organist, Part 8

At long last! DANGER! INTRIGUE! CHARTS! It's Lovelace and Babbage Vs The Organist, Part 8!

Just a few short notes for this one..

- John Thomas was a Welsh harp prodigy who was put through school by Lady Lovelace, so he did owe her (although the real one was 9 years old at the time).   He eventually became Harpist to the Queen!  Just one of those random facts I have to stuff into the comic somewhere.  Maybe this whole business is like 'Singin' In The Rain', where they were contractually obliged to turn a random bunch of 20 year old songs into a musical.

The song is Ar lan y mor, here's a restful moment for you and a nice change from the usual cacophony around here:

Lovelace herself was divided on whether to pursue the strand of music, or the strand of mathematics in her short and restless life.  The harp was her favorite instrument.

- Triads to appear in Chinese music but as it is heterophonic they're not characteristic.  Wikipedia:  allowing me to bullshit through my teeth since 2001! When the Triads appear you can play the following:

Diminished triad

That's what you call an Enhanced Comic.

Really sorry about the long waits folks.. I figured when I was done the film (coming soon! as well as the US release for The Illusionist! ) I would be a buzzing bundle of energy but instead I crumpled into a heap a little bit.  I'm off to Denmark for a couple of weeks to teach at the Animation Workshop, which is a kind of animation retreat/monastery/spa so I expect to regain my Vital Magnetisms, as well as have some nice Danish beers and draw me some more comics!

ADDENDUM: The shady character is selling a mix of tin whistles and piccolos. Fun fact, I played the piccolo in Jr High Band, which is about as high as I got in my misspent youth.

Beam Us Up!

I'm nearly done the next episode, so hang in there — in the meantime something else I've been working on is a wallpaper for Tor.com– it's called "Beam Us Up", and you can pick it up now at their Steampunk Fortnight celebration! Teaser:

That's Darwin with the jar (I like his dorky looks of youth, without the beard), and you can't see it properly but Wheatstone (reformed) is wearing a miniskirt. I've promoted Eleanor Cressy (born on-board ship, rumour had it) from navigator to Captain, and OF COURSE there's only one possible Chief Engineer!

This was inspired by an amazing thing I saw a while back on the BBC– Airship Around The Globe!!!

It made me think of an adventure-and-intrigue packed voyage of a crew of cool geeks boldly going forth to seek out new colonies and subsume old civilizations in that Victorian way, on a giant airship kitted out with cutting edge technology… wouldn't that be fun?

NEWS, Thrills, etc!

Plague! Houseguests! Nice weather!  Bottomless todo lists!  Stupid 'life' and 'work' etc!  All of these, my friends, have stood between you and new comics. I GROVEL BEFORE YOU.

However, there's a couple of RED HOT news items that cry out— nay, continually nag– to be brought to the attention of the vast middling-sized and peculiar demographic following this here 2dGoggles.  VIZ:

— FIRSTLY, you may notice the banner has changed, and there's a dazzling new Episodes Page for easier navigation.  I say 'easi-ER' because I doubt getting one's head around this sprawling mess of a blog will ever be 'easy'.  I don't really know what's around here or what it all means myself!

— TWO- the Geek Calendar is now available for purchase!  I am Miss August. I can't help but feel I'm mightily outclassed by every other month (Simon Singh!  Aleks Krotoski! Brian Cox! ), but luckily no one does anything in August anyways so no one has to look at their calendars that much that month.   Amazingly they managed to find one picture where I look a little bit like a normal person, because I saw some of the discards and I look like this:

SO many thanks to the lovely folks from Geek Calendar, sorry I flinched away from the camera like a cat from a spray-bottle!  The photos in the Calendar look absolutely stunning and it's all in a good cause, so pick one up from their website!

THREE AND VERY THRILLING INDEED!

(and also I want everyone to stop emailing me about it because I have just got to the fabled Inbox Zero and want to admire it for a while)

There is a momentous project underway— hang on, let me find a big enough font—

TO BUILD AN ANALYTICAL ENGINE!!-

John Graham-Cumming, of the splendid Turing Apology Campaign, is masterminding this scheme and you can read all about it on the website or on Oreilly.com.

This is plainly in a desperate attempt to save 20 bucks and win the coveted "Build a working Analytical Engine, Win a 2DGoggles TShirt!" prize, but as STEP ONE this project aims to finally digitize Babbage's papers— something I'm sure we can agree ought to be done without delay.  Who knows what gags might lurk in there!   Actually this just goes to show you the power of Thinking Big because I had on my todo list 'start campaign to digitize Babbage papers', and not only did it get buried between 'sew missing buttons on winter coat' and 'make some goals or something', but also somehow I doubt it would have made the BBC!

I certainly hope the readers of this comic can muster a respectable display of support for this noble proposition, so get on over and pledge! Ten dollars, pounds, or euros is the going rate and I'm sure it's plenty worth it for the chance of seeing something like this!

And finally— if you've recovered from that excitement—  in addition to cramming in some work on Organist Pt 8, I've done a new wallpaper for Tor.com's upcoming steampunk fortnight! You'll be able to get it from their website and I'll alert you when it's up, in the meantime.. Teaser!

Lovelace and Babbage vs The Organist, Part 7

I have dragged myself up from the floor, and with quivering pen have managed to scratch out the following almost-illegible CRY FOR HELP. The Organist! Part 7! AKA, Act II part 1, because I totally have this whole thing planned out. Really!

A heaping' spoonful of NOTES:

– All the concertina primary documents I KNOW you are craving! Patents! Price lists! Evil plans! I'm still finding Wheatstone a bit slippery as a character.. I'm going for a Bunsen Honeydew/Werner Von Braun thing at the moment. Speak to me, Wheatstone! What's it all about?

– I have to record in these notes, the uncomfortable fact that Charles Babbage did die under torture, of a sort– his mortal enemies the street musicians played continually under the window of his death-bed room, while his poor son unavailingly begged them to stop. Evil of this variety does not thrive in the Pocket Universe I'm happy to say.

– After that, I'm sure we would all be cheered up by a Wurlitzer rising up out of the ground:

–Things I DO NOT MAKE UP: The TELHARMONIUM.

"The Organist" was going to be a wee short cute episode, until the Helpful Bryce (who himself openly admits to studing the organ!) sent me a missive alerting me to the existence of a turn-of-the-20th century, 200-ton electric organ that broadcast over the telephone wires. What is a girl to do with this information? I ASK YOU? Hence, this monstrous epic that you see unfolding before you.

– Scientific American on the Telharmonium.

A Telharmonium documentary, if you have 20 minutes or so. Part 2. Featuring Mark Twain: " The trouble about these beautiful, novel things is that they interfere so with one's arrangements. Every time I see or hear a new wonder like this I have to postpone my death right off. I couldn't possibly leave the world until I have heard this again and again." Sadly there is no recording of the no doubt celestial harmonies of the Telharmonium, I am informed it would resemble a Hammond Organ:

The Telharmonium proper is too electronic for this comic, though it does feature pleasantly steampunky cogs (and overalls! and child labour!):

What with this high technology of telephone wires and paper cones, and I was highly concerned that this is edging out of what may properly be considered the technological scope of this comic until I found:

- Music By Telegraph! Yankee Doodle, carried by lightning! The Tele-orchestri-phono-blater-ion thus can theoretically be brought back to the 1860s, give or take. If you're interested in that sort of thing, this notion led to the Harmonic Telegraph, which led to the Telephone.

– On the properly period front, here's a lovely Orchestrion for you. Put it on a loop and crank the volume!

Oh what the heck, here's another. You know you want more!

You'll get a new one every episode now. Collect them all!

– The Correspondents have absolutely nothing to do with this comic. This Shadowy Kingpin does bear a striking resemblance to The Organist, but I'm sure he is PERFECTLY INNOCENT:

Let us hope the Organist's plan does not succeed and fill London with such MUSIC! Because that would be TERRIBLE!!

As usual, no eta's for the next episode, but now I have been Flung Out Into The Streets* I have little more time for these Frivolities, in between the health-giving country-pub walks I intend to do as soon as it stops raining. Comments are always welcomed, I know I'm ponderously slow at responding but I really do love getting them!

*don't worry I am routinely Flung Out at the end of movie, and tend to find myself Flung Back In Again in fairly short order, which is why my hair is always such a mess.

Well It's About Time

So, Giant Monsters, wrestled!  And I don't mind telling you, I am KNACKERED. This is how it went down:

Your Intrepid Correspondent will need a small period of convalescence to recover her energies.  But fear not!!  There is no greater Balm To the Soul and Restorer of Animal Vigour than the Healing Power of DRAWING COMICS, so I'm aiming for Part 7 of the Organist to appear around the beginning of September.

A few small news items:

-The Amazing and Stupendous GEEK CALENDAR, starring a bunch of really cool people, and, for some reason, ME, is now available for pre-order.  No I'm not naked.  Why does everybody ask that?  It's to support libel reform in the UK, a subject of anxious interest to cartoonists and to all who value the basic human, and, indeed, simian! Right to Point and Laugh.   Early Birds will be put in the draw for Fabulous Prizes, including this drawing!

-I'm spending today cleaning up the sole page of the Salamander People quasi-episode for Steampunk Reloaded.  I'm disconcerted by the Borgesian metaphysics surrounding the unfinished, and even un-started 'Salamander People'– suspended somewhere between Being and Non-Being… does an Imaginary Story exist, or not exist?  Anyways this does give me an excuse to look at pictures of Giant Salamanders. Bet you thought I made those up, didn't you?

- On the Primary Documents front, check out this adorable engraving of Charles Babbage!

That's him in 1841, around the time he fought the Salamander People, or at least went to Mount Vesuvius.  Found via Google Books, in the Portraits and Biographies of Thirty-Six LIVING SCIENTISTS, if you read Italian there's a nice, if unsurprising biography following on that. I would like everyone to take careful note of how closely the top part of his hair accords with the comic, though I'm disappointed to see that he combed the sides for the occasion of having his portrait taken (and they've given him a regrettable, and inaccurate, Victorian-ized cupid-bow mouth). Don't you just want to hug him?

Giant Monster Attack

sorry folks.. in Crunch!  No time for comics!! Giant monster attack!!!  Movie looking great!

See you in a few weeks!

Lovelace and Babbage vs the Organist, Pt 6

As the ancient saying goes, "Audiences are like monkeys.  Give them a grape a day, not a whole bucket of bananas at once!" Sadly I am so constructed that buckets of bananas are my natural production unit.  And they don't get much more bananas than this here.   It's been a while, GOD KNOWS, so a summary of how we have reached our present state:

NOTES NOTES NOTES! PIPING HOT NOTES!

–Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  Engineer. Genius.  Coffee connoisseur and Master of Sarcasm:

Brunel to the Swindon rail station coffee shop proprietor, who had heard Mr Brunel had a complaint:

Dear Sir,

I assure you that Mr Player was wrong in supposing that I thought you purchased inferior coffee. I thought I said to him that I was surprised you should buy such bad roasted corn. I did not believe you had coffee in the place: I am certain that I never tasted any. I have long ceased to make complaints at Swindon. I avoid taking anything there when I can help it.

Brunel also gave as a principal reason for his pursuance of the broad-gauge rail the smoothness of the ride enabling him to drink his coffee.  I'm guessing caffine had a part to play in his only sleeping four hours a night.  I'm trying to figure out how he had a hand free to draw, seeing as he was BOTH continually smoking cigars and continually drinking coffee.

– The Coffee House was a fixture of both high and low Victorian London, ever as much as it is today.  Finding decent coffee was notoriously difficult; if you find yourself wandering around Victorian London looking for a cup, you may consult this excellent guide.

– Every once in a while, a piece of evidence is found which utterly overturns the foundations of an understanding we once thought unshakably sound;  evidence which forces a humble confession of the inability of our puny constructions to hold up before the awesome weight and complexity of Truth.  Such  epoch-birthing evidence is found in this painting, from which I drew the coffee shop interior– before you click I warn you– it contains a SHOCKING IMAGE.

They are all wearing hats.  INSIDE.

My inside/outside no-hat/hat paradigm is utterly shattered.  Is it because there are no ladies?  As usual with everything cool in Victorian England, women were not admitted to Respectable Coffeshops… in any case I need to go and lie down for a while before I recover from this shock.

– I honestly have no idea at all what impact an actually Analytical Engine would have had on the course of Victorian Science.  They did pretty good without it!

– Here is a period Organ Grinder and monkey:

– Although we pride ourselves on our meticulous research here at 2dgoggles, there is no evidence that Charles Babbage was ever kidnapped by an army of capuchin monkeys.  He did have troubles with mobs, sadly, as can be found in the following anecdote (warning:  in this anecdote, the human race kind of sucks):

A German band was in the habit of annexing a position before his house, and treating him to its music. .. Babbage got tired of this sort of thing, and ordered them go and play somewhere else.  They refused, and he, worn out by their music, left his study to seek a policeman and have them moved on.  Like Carlyle, he dressed quaintly, and moreover, at the moment, he was bareheaded… Babbage's dispute with the band soon collected a small crowd, eager to witness the fun.

Hatless!  In the streets!  At least some things I KNOW are wrong.

The Usual Grovelling; Brunel Beefcake; Musical Tortures; Thaumatrope, and Caption!

I know everyone is used to the blistering pace we usually set around here at 2dGoggles Amalgamated Comic Industries, but apologies for the long pause.  Get used to it, loyal fan base, as day job is entering the phase technically known in the VFX business as AAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!

Throwing a chunk of hunky red meat to you baying hounds at my heels, here's some Brunel beefcake I mysteriously found time to draw:

This was actually very necessary preparatory groundwork, as there's a lot of Brunel, and coffee, in next episode.  I've also devoted some time to an exhaustive search for the all-important Brunel theme song.. SORTED:

I always like to have a soundtrack for every project I work on.. heck, I have individual soundtracks for every character, or sometimes every shot. Funny that way. The nifty 8tracks.com thru the magic of computing and the even more mysterious magic of copyright law naviagation allows me at last to present a Selection of Musical Stylings from my internal 2dgoggles sountrack:

Tracks are:

A Drop Filled With Memories x Susumu Hirasawa

Album: Paprika (Original Soundtrack)

The Calculation x Regina Spektor

Album: Far

Texas Eagle x Steve Earle & The Del McCoury Band

Album: The Mountain

Enterprising Young Men x Michel Giacchino

Album: Star Trek

M79 x Vampire Weekend

Album: Vampire Weekend

Humpty Dumpty x Aimee Mann

Album: Lost In Space

Discombobulate x Hans Zimmer

Album: Sherlock Holmes

Extraordinary Machine x Fiona Apple

Album: Extraordinary Machine (John Brion)

Human x The Killers

Album: Day and Age

"Texas Eagle" is the alternative Brunel song because it's cool and train-y; 'Enterprising Young Men' I kept listening to over and over when I drew the Difference Engine interiors that open Economic Model pt 2. "Humpty Dumpty" is a painfully appropriate Ada song for her descent into Poetry addiction.

What else… a few weeks ago I was doing some clearout of the Old Homestead and came across this:

Made at some indeterminate point in my Youth. A most serendipitous find, as not only is it Alice-related, that, my friends, is a Thaumatrope, the invention of which is sometimes credited to none other than Charles Babbage! Of course it's also sometimes credited to Roget, of Thesaurus fame, and Herschel, of astronomy fame, and a few other random guys in waistcoats. Nobody assigns it to Wheatstone, whose optical toy invention was the stereoscope– I've been trying to come up with a cut-out-and-keep stereoscope but it's not QUITE so simple as I would like. Nothing could be simpler than a Thaumatrope however so here is one for you Kids to Make at Home. Get a responsible adult to help you with the scissors, and if you can find a responsible adult, congratulations! and be sure to file the sighting with the RSPB. Click the image for the PDF.

Instructions here.

In other news, I'll be making an appearance — my VERY FIRST comic con appearance! of any kind! — at Caption in Oxford on the 31st of July and 1st of August. Not quite sure yet what this will involve, I guess I'll be on display on some sort of slowly revolving platform, with a small placard describing my History and Features. Please do not climb on the exhibit.

Anyways, that should keep y'all busy, Organist 6 should be up in a couple of days.. coffee! monkeys! Inspiration Speeches! Top hat conundrums!

We Interrupt This Comic Because I'm Really Distractable

Here at 2dGoggles we are always On The Alert for the very latest Babbage facts, especially facts as awesomely cool as these.. via Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond: Charles Babbage, the Secret Police Reports!!

"The known Fortunato Prandi of Camerana, arrived here from Lyon during the 10th day of the present month in the company of a certain Mr. Babbage, an English mechanician, and he lodged in the Penzione Svizzera.

The following day, he rented two furnished rooms in the Arcade of the River Po, on the second floor of No. 22, a house of the Hospital for the Poor, and he moved in with the above-mentioned Englishman, to whom he is the interpreter. The Englishman has the intention of presenting shortly to the Scientific Congress an engine of his invention, which facilitates mathematical calculations."

This would be Babbage's lecture trip to Italy, from which Frederico Menabrea wrote his Sketch of the Analytical Engine, which Lovelace was to translate the next year.

So I know what we're all thinking…

EPISODE!

Title: The Vigenere cipher (I drink a lot more wine than I break codes, so my brain insists on pronouncing it, the Vioginer cypher) was the supposedly unbreakable code secretly broken by Babbage in the late 1840s by means of, as Simon Singh puts it in his great The Code Book, 'sheer cunning'.

Materials:  The Experimental Carriage (aka the Mystery Mobile, to be equipped with oil-slick and missile launchers etc), spy-vs-spy, James Bond, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Charade, codes and cyphers, my vast knowledge of 19th century Italian secret police drawn from 'Tosca'. Poss. Menabrea could appear.. was he Entertaining? Might make plausible Tintin-esque military Dictator type?

Method: haphazard

Hypothesis: (this is my husband's theory, which is is very keen on Sharing for the World's Edification) That the 17,000 pounds the British government put towards the Difference Engine, was ACTUALLY for the Black Ops project of Babbage's code breaking.  I counter that Babbage's open, dare I say, transparent personality was not exactly suited for espionage.  Why, he'd be giving away his secrets in his widely-read autobiography, where he enthuses about his deciphering project that involved the copying out of 26 separate dictionaries broken up by letter count and frequency! Babbage had that most enviable of gifts, viz. huge piles of personal cash, but would he be spending his own money on stuff like this?  Hmmmmmmm…..

Anyways.. what was I supposed to be doing? Oh yeah, The Organist! Next episode.. uh.. soonish. Really!

Lovelace and Babbage vs The Organist, pt 5

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's My Own Invention!

– 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?