24 March! Celebrate! It's Ada Lovelace Day!

Who? I hear the world exclaim! Ada? No-one's called Ada! Well my aunt was and so was the lovely The Right Honourable the Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, although she was christened Augusta Ada (after Byron's half sister Augusta Leigh - thank you Wiki, I hope you're right!)

So why should we celebrate? Well, despite the period she was born into, she was born in 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo (when Napoleon was defeated by a pair of boots and a Prussian general who missed his train from Berlin), she was, and is now widely credited with being, the first computer programmer!

"Oh come!" I hear you say. "The 1830/40s? Computers hadn't been invented! Steve Jobs was just the faintest twinkle in his great-great-great grandfather's eye and Bill Gates was only 9. How could she possibly code for something that was 100 years in the future?" (Yes, a mere hundred years, the 'Bletchly Bombe', based on a Polish design I think, was probably the first real computer and was used to de-encrypt 'Enigma' messages sent by the German High Command during the second world war.) So how can she be deemed the first 'nerd'.

She was very interested in, and good at, mathematics and was good friends with Charles Babbage, he of 'analytical/differential engines' fame! That's how!

She led a relatively privileged, if illness plagued, life. (Can illness plague you? After all plague is an illness. Can you illnessise an illness? English can be so tricky sometimes! Makes you wonder how Keats ever managed it. Or Byron, for that matter. Although there are advantages to being great; you get to write the rules that the rest of us have to follow.) However one of her great joys, and talents, was mathematics at which she excelled. She was called 'the Enchantress of Numbers' by Babbage, well at least according to Wiki, which we'll have to trust as I don't have the time or the inclination to go milling around in the writings of some pompous, if quite bright, middle class Victorian bloke, even if he doesn't appear to be quite the male chauvinist pig that most Victorians with the appropriate appendage were.

The reason she is credited with being the 'Mother of all Geeks' is that she wrote a self-penned appendix to a memoir, which she herself translated from the Italian, which explained in great detail how Babbage's proposed 'Analytical Engine' , the subject of the memoir, could calculate Bernouli numbers.

Bernouli numbers?

You'll need to go look at Wiki - it looks suspiciously like calculus to me and I don't do calculus!

So, if Babbage is credited with being the 'inventor' of the computer (analogue 'tis true but....) and , by and large, he is, then Ada must be the first programmer, no?

I must confess now that this is one of those 'invented' days. It has, as far as I can see, no relation to Ada's life in any significant way but was devised by Suw Charman-Anderson as a way of promoting women in IT. This is a problem in the UK; few women enter 'computing' at degree level, a few hundred at most, although can you blame them? It is unfortunately a self perpetuating cycle. Women perceive IT as a male dominated profession, populated by World of Warcraft playing geeks with the social skills of a tree (it is) and so do not enter it, which of course merely perpetuates the male dominance. She has, according to the report I read, a thousand bloggers pledged to blog about a woman in technology on 24 March. Well, I'm not being left out, here's 1001! There's only so many conversations you can have about whether being a druid is good for the soul!

Me? I'm all for more women in IT. It's way too closed. While the image of the pizza guzzling, game playing, socially clueless geek may be stereotypical, it is nonetheless not entirely inaccurate (quote: "Who needs women when you have the internet!"). A feminine perspective would I think be quite nice. (It would also avoid needing to look at the fat slob across the desk, dribbling over the latest bit torrent of Angelina Jolie's breasts while stuffing a Big Mac/Quarter Pounder/large Pizza down his ever open maw:)

There is, isn't there always(?), a sad postscipt to this. Ada Lovelace died at the age of 36, a victim of uterine cancer and over-enthusiastic 'blood letting' in an attempt to treat it - how could they have been so stupid? Galen has much to answer for! What might her incisive and mathematical mind have gone on to achieve? In the words of Billy Joel: "Only the good die young!" (Which is actually the only reason I'm still around!)

A slightly more optimistic postscript is the email I received this morning. Verbatim as follows:

"Hi MG

I'm about 150-200km from the Shelving Zone* and have managed to hack a machine at the 'McMurdo Sound' Station. I last saw Fricka about 4 weeks ago, so hopefully the rendezvous will go as planned. I really would hate to have to make the journey without her, especially as Havelock will not be with us this year. It will be strange not to have him to whinge at, I think. I hope Cozy makes it too. We can compare bellies - I am soooooooo fat! Perhaps it's my age. I had a quick look at the posts this year, not content, just volume. Thanks mate!

PS Can you look out some Gary Glitter and make it available. You know what I mean :)

The Penguin

PS Put IT back the way it was!

* Shelving Zone - where the penguins come ashore.

And yes, I know what the Glitter reference is. Hopefully I can find it.