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Continue reading →: Marlyn Meltzer: The Mathematician Who Wired the First Computer, Then Disappeared Into Community ServiceMarlyn Meltzer taught herself to program ENIAC’s 3,000 switches without manuals, inventing software engineering before the discipline existed. Erased from history after marrying in 1947, she later knitted 500 chemotherapy hats. Her untold story challenges what we think we know about computing’s origins.
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Continue reading →: Sub JudiceI sit in judgment whilst my hands shake from want of whisky. The red earth of Katanga clings to everything. I fear I am become both judge and judged, and the verdict grows clearer with each passing night.
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Continue reading →: What Bodies Will BearCovering Rajesh’s morning clinic and planning for Michael’s weekend visit, Catherine confronts leftover turkey bones and lamb mince – and uncomfortable questions about factory farming, inherited recipes, consent, and whether she’s better at feeding others than listening to her own appetite.
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Continue reading →: Ruth Teitelbaum: The Mathematician Who Invented Software Engineering From Schematic Diagrams, Then Vanished Into HistoryOne of ENIAC’s six female programmers reveals how she invented software engineering from circuit diagrams, computed ballistics in seconds instead of days – then vanished from history when she married. A quiet pioneer’s erasure by secrecy, gender, and institutional silence.
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Continue reading →: Log: Orbits and Other CompanionsFirst of December. Night watch alone. Heater’s broken, CCD’s glitching, Rachel’s soup has meat in it. There’s a doll by the monitor. Binary star logged. Everything else holding position.
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Continue reading →: Hanging Up the White Coat, Keeping the ScarfOn a late Sunday in New Corinth, Catherine shrugs off her consulting-room armour and keeps her mother’s scarf on, testing what it means to meet David – and the winter – in clothes without the white-coat script to hide behind.
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Continue reading →: Frances Spence: The Quiet Programmer Who Taught ENIAC to Think and Then Vanished from HistoryFrances Spence helped programme ENIAC, the world’s first electronic computer, inventing software engineering from scratch – then left the field when she married. Discover how one brilliant mathematician became history’s invisible architect.
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Continue reading →: Rifle and WatchYou ask what I wear? My rifle and my watch. One tells me I’m still dangerous, the other that I’m still alive. Six kilometres of ravine, same patrol twice daily. That’s what 2014 looks like from down here.
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Continue reading →: The Light That Went Out EarlyCatherine arrives too late to a community exhibition, then confronts how email and browser tabs have become elaborate avoidance systems. When digital housekeeping replaces actual presence, she plans a modest Sunday experiment: three phone-off hours with only tide tables and recipe cards for company.
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Continue reading →: Kathleen Antonelli: The Subroutine’s Architect – How Ireland’s Invisible Programmer Built Modern SoftwareFrom Irish immigrant to ENIAC coder, Kathleen Antonelli invented the subroutine while being told to smile for cameras. Hear how she cracked machine logic, fought erasure, and shaped the digital age – only to be recognised decades later.
Feign the virtue thou dost seek, till it becometh thine own
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