Ada Lovelace Day: Barbara Snell (by alaric)

For Ada Lovelace Day I'm going to write about my aunt Barbara.

She's never been one to be arbitrarily limited by society - in the 1950s, she went and toured the world on her own; which was quite something for a woman in her early 20s to do!

She's retired now, but her career was in linguistics. In particular, she was a technical translator, translating equipment manuals from other languages to English; I've never obtained a full list of the languages she knows, but (from memory) all the main European languages, Russian, and Japanese have been mentioned.

Anyway, she happened to be working for Xerox when the job of translating some documentation relating to the Xerox Star came across her desk.

At the time, translators worked with typewriters; they'd type up a first draft of the translation, with lots of corrections pencilled in as they went along, as it's quite common to find you want to revise something you've already translated when you come to write a later paragraph. They would then have to type up a better copy incorporating the corrections; but this might then come back with amendments proposed by the marketing department or other stakeholders. So the translators spent a lot of time doing menial work.

So imagine Barbara's excitement when she read the manuals for an electronic word processor... So, never one to let convention stand in her way, she petitioned the management to let the translation department have some. This request was eventually fulfilled, and as she predicted, translation became a lot more efficient...

But Barbara continued to be vocal about the opportunities for computers to help with translation, driving developments within the company and starting a series of conferences on the use of computers in translation, which is perhaps why Xerox is considered "is the private company that has contributed the most to the expansion of machine translation"ref.

This was all about when I was being born, of course. But when, around 2000, Barbara retired and closed down her own translation business, I had the chance to take my pick of computer equipment as she was clearing out the office; I took away a 486 that became the home router - but I always wished I'd managed to claim her Xerox Star...

Circuits in Epoxy (by alaric)

Continuing from my previous experiments in epoxy casting, this time I decided to cast a circuit in epoxy, as that's my eventual goal.

So I made a test circuit with four LEDs and their series resistors on a large piece of stripboard, with unnecessarily long leads on everything and a few different orientations of components, in order to check whether shrinkage is an issue at the kinds of scales I plan to work at:

Then I mixed up some resin:

And poured it into a business card box and placed the circuit in. I chose the business card box since it looked like the same sort of plastic the proper moulds at resin-supplies were made of, and that's supposed to not stick to the epoxy:

Luckily, it seemed that the epoxy does indeed not stick to this stuff, as it came out easily, leaving a perfectly clear surface, with no damage to the electronics:

It's really weird to have one of my sloppily-made circuits that's completely waterproof and ruggedised:

We had to prop it up with one end out of the water so you can actually see that all the LEDs are lit, though:

I think I'll still need to experiment with silicone moulds, though - as I'm unlikely to find boxes of the right plastic in the precise sizes I want.

Epoxy casting (by alaric)

Inspired by this I set out to learn how to cast circuits in transparent epoxy.

You see, making decent cases for things is sometimes the hardest bit about an electronics project, and an issue that had been a major roadblock in my interest in wearable computers. What point was there in building something if it wouldn't last long under the wear and tear of being attached to me, and getting rainwater inside it?

So I obtained the smallest set of two-part clear epoxy from resin-supplies.co.uk.

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Join me blogging for Ada Lovelace Day (by sarah)

Tuesday the 24th of March is Ada Lovelace Day - this is a day of blogging about women in Technology, ones who have inspired you or that you admire.

Ada Lovelace is known as the first computer programmer in history though she didn't actually have a computer to run them on. She made them all from the description of Babbage's machine which he never finished.

She also saw far more potential in the machine than even he did and was well ahead of her time. Now I am posting this becuase a) we are obviously going to be doing write ups on this for this blog, my astronomy blog and web-empires blog - I'm not sure I can find relevent technology craft/art and cooking cross overs in time for the Salaric blogs but I will try. b) I'm hoping that alot of you lovely people will take up this challenge - from a personal point of veiw it would be nice to see the science side of technology and not just computing to be recognised - so geologists, chemists and astrophysists pull your fingers out, oh and anyone else who wants to off course! c) this will raise the profile of women in technology so that hopefully young women choosing careers paths and those debating weather to rejoin after a the whole 'career break'/having baby/looking after sick people can see that they are not alone and that both currently and in the past there female role models without whom medical advancements and the like may never have been made. (Or at least taken twice as long as there is an idea that you just need a saturation point for idea nucleation sort of thing).

I contacted the organiser and asked what they ment by technology and they said it is perpusfully broad and would include science etc... 🙂

There is a pledge page where you can add yourself to the list of people who will blog. You can follow it on twitter and it has a face book presance. There is also a mailing list and to find tweets about it on twitter its designation is #ALD09.

I am probably far to excited about this and I think you will all be suprised by the one we have on here 🙂

So you lot lets get writing 🙂

analysing the moon rock (by sarah)

Friday saw me once again wending my weary way to London.

This time I was going in to carbon coat my lunar meteorite thin section and put it in the machine to make X-ray maps of specific elements. I felt very nervous as I hadnt done anywhere near the amount of reading I had ment to do for it what with boundary disbutes and work stuff etc...

And I had been highly confusing myself by trying to learn lunar mineralogy from scratch - complete with minerals I have never heared off! I had started making a list of elements mentioned in association with lunar minerallogy and then side tracked myself - turns out if I had completed this it would have been a very good start - oh well.

I was a bit sad when I arrived that the sample was already in being carbon coated - I assume the machine works by some sort of spluttering of carbon. You coat the sample to help get a clearer image by stopping alot of the interference(I think). This means I only got a pic of it carbon coated thin section and my hands were shaking so its not a very good picture anyway but this is a piece of the moon that fell to Earth in a meteorite that Landed in Africa.

The Carbon coating machine:

My piece of carbon coated moon rock!

This means I also have to be weary of terrestrial contamination when analysing it.

I took photos of the machine and bits around it!

What I have done for the mini project is just selected one breccia clast/grain out of this thin section from a few cubic cm's of lunar meteorite to ananlyse. This really is looking at the fine detail - I always have to remember that it is part of a system, part of a big over all picture, the small makes up the big and the big affects the small.

We chose which elements to map for, then defined the mapping area which was just slightly bigger than the clast. An important fact is that no matter how good the polish on the surfacce of the section it is not completely flat so to get golod results you have to sort of take the four corners and average them into a focus plan. At least this is what I understood to be happening.

Anyway I selected with some help the elements that I wanted maps for and the grand total time was 56 hours running time for the machine - wowowow. Of course this is why I was in there on a Friday afternoon so that I could have the machine run over the weekend - I clicked the button to start it and away it went.

I then proceeded to make a fool out of my self by saying - its obviously regolith isnt it - erm... we dont know came the reply. I am also very intreged by the clast I have chosen to analyse - it looks like two main minerals interlocked in some sort of intergrowth way - each with its own specific selection of other mineral inclusions.

I am a bit worried that I just dont remember enough mineralogy to do this project justice :/

Still I think I may have some idea of whats going on but suffered that thing of not wanting to say anything incase I was wrong and they thought I was stupid and wasting their time and effort. I now need to go and work out the correct scientific termonolgy instead of inventing my own - again.

Still I got to take pics of the sample being mounted in the machine including the adding of the highly conductive copper sticky tap that also keeps it in place!

There was one interesting point - the machine appears to do a continues scan but it doesnt it stops every .... and 'dwells' for.... this leads me onto something else I have been pondering recently - how different are analogue and didigital - you came make one appear as another depending on resolution etc... but this needs a me to do a bit more thinking and maybe write a few books on the nature of existance I feel!

Once I have worked out the mineral phases in the sample - which I will do from these elemental maps I will be putting it in the microprob for furthure analysis.

I think that for my oral presingtation and poster I will therefore need to focus on what we know of the moon from meteorites rather than just what we know about the moon.

I am getting very excited about all this - its the thought of being able to tie in the mineralogy of crystals grains within a clast with a brecciated meteorite to lunar and even solar and possible even universe formation processes!

Happyness is once again rock shaped. Though I am hoping the element doesn't blow over the week end - it was a new one this week so hopefully it will last!