Notes Quotes - page 24
![Some of the symbols written down will form the sequence of figures which is the decimal of the real number... being computed. The others are just rough notes to "assist the memory ". ...[O]nly ...these rough notes ...will be liable to erasure. (Alan Turing)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/73/alan-turing-assist-decimal-1016373.webp)
All but one of the programs cited in her notes had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier. The exception was prepared by Babbage for her, although she did detect a 'bug' in it. Not only is there no evidence that Ada ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine, but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so.
Ada Lovelace
"Most musical, most melancholy" bird!
A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
(And so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself,
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he,
First named these notes a melancholy strain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Before the nineteenth century, writers on education portayed the "improvement of mind" as an activity mainly suited to gentlemen. ...both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush had venerated David Rittenhouse as an example of how arduous philosophical investigation might elevate the child of humble parents. But Jefferson and Rush tagged Rittenhouse as a genius, and hence untypical, and each employed Rittenhouse as ammunition in a debate among educated gentlemen. Jefferson invoked Rittenhouse in his Notes on the State of Virginia, a book he wrote to disabuse French philosophes of the notion that all specied degenerated in the New World; Rush used his eulogy of Rittenhouse before the select audience of the American Philosophical Society to ridicule colleges for requiring students to learn the ancient languages.
David Rittenhouse
