This is my semi annual plug for all of you to watch the fantastic and somehow forgotten FX network TV show, The Americans, A spy drama set in Washington DC in the 1980s about KGB “illegals” posing as travel agents.
It’s way better than any basic cable TV show had any right to be. Plus, all seasons are streaming on Hulu, so you don’t have to worry about whether the story will be completed.
Einstein was the first to truly grasp James Clerk Maxwell's work. If Maxwell hadn't died in 1879 at only 48, then I like to imagine he would have produced Special Relativity – most of it is there in his famous equations.
Einstein also had the benefit of knowing the null result of the Michelson–Morley experiment (1887), and Hertz's experimental confirmation of electromagnetic waves moving at the speed of light (1889) predicted by Maxwell.
Einstein, of course, explicitly recognised Maxwell and kept a picture of him on his office wall.
While Einstein's theoretical work is fabulous, it was Maxwell who first broke away from the mechanical model; something that even his illustrious contemporaries struggled to understand.
If you appreciate Einstein, yet know little of Maxwell, then The Man Who Changed Everything[0] is a great introduction.
Shameless plug: I built an open source, completely free, no ads/tracking whatsoever sudoku with a lot of bells of whistles. It’s only web based, so no native apps. Find it here: https://sudoku.tn1ck.com/
Was just showing the subject to a youngster recently. Other folks mentioned the Code book, I liked that one. The MMM by Brooks of course. We also looked at the following videos on youtube/Kanopy and other places:
- The Story of Math(s) by Marcus du Sautoy to set the stage... school and taxes in ancient Sumeria, Fibonacci bringing Indian numbers to Europe, and other fascinating subjects.
- We watched short biographies of Babbage and Lovelace, full-length ones of Turing and Von Neumann. The "code breakers" of WWII.
- Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII, another good one.
- There's more history in PBS' Crash Course Computer science, than you might expect. It is great although so peppy we had to watch at .9x with newpipe. Shows relays, vacuum tubes, to ICs, to the Raspberry Pi. As well as the logic gates they model.
- "The Professor" at Computerphile is a great story teller about the early days.
- There are great videos about CTSS being developed at MIT I think, where they are designing an operating system via paper terminal and trying to decide on how to partition the memory/storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q07PhW5sCEk
- The movie/book "Hidden Figures" touches on this time as well. Facing obsolescence by IBM, one of the characters teaches herself Fortran.
- The Pirates of Silicon Valley is a fun dramatization of the late 70s to 80s PC industry. It specifically calls out the meeting between MS and IBM as the deal of the century. We also watched a "Berkeley in '68" doc on Kanopy to set the stage before this one. Interesting, but a tangent.
- The "8-bit Guy" is also great, he dissects and rebuilds old home computer hardware from the same era, and teaches their history as he does it. Even his tangential videos on why there are no more electronics stores (besides Apple) in malls is great.
- There are good docs on the "dead ends" of the industry as well, such as "General Magic" and "Silicon Cowboys."
- "Revolution OS" a doc about the beginnings of FLOSS and Linux.
To counter-act this simply position yourself on the other end of American ridiculous data prices: buy $AMT, $SBAC. Those are cell tower REITs. They're up >900% and >2000% since the 2009 crisis.
It’s way better than any basic cable TV show had any right to be. Plus, all seasons are streaming on Hulu, so you don’t have to worry about whether the story will be completed.
https://www.hulu.com/series/the-americans-6deba130-65fb-4816...