January 29 in History

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Men are not bad. Men are degraded largely by circumstances …. It is the duty of every man … to help them up and let them feel that there is some hope for them in life.”—Louis Brandeis

President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court of the United States on this date in 1916.

At the time, most presidential nominations were accepted and voted on by the United States Senate in an up-or-down vote, often on the same day that the president submitted the name; the nomination of Brandeis was so controversial that the Senate held public hearings about it.
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I, for One, Welcome Our New Robot Overlords

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Most if not all of us have seen dialogue box like the one above in our online lives. Sometimes, a real person is called for, even in our heavily automated world. Especially when real money is about to be moved from one virtual hand to another.

About fifteen years ago, some Carnegie Mellon computer scientists developed a method to be employed to differentiate between a human being and a bit of software. They dubbed it, “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart,” or CAPTCHA. There are several dozen applications commercially available that perform the test.

Some require a user to type in a randomly generated word or number sequence that the app has displayed just for them. Some require a bit less, a simple mouse click inside a box that sits next to a (sometimes) charmingly worded version of the question, “Are you a robot?”
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January 28 in History

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.'”—U.S. President Ronald Reagan

Despite warnings from flight engineers that cold weather and ice should have led to a delay in the launch, a decision was made by NASA executives to launch the Space Shuttle Challenger thirty one years ago today.

Seventy-three seconds after lift-off, Challenger broke apart after its right-side solid rocket booster (SRB) sprung a fuel leak (caused in part by the cold weather and ice) which melted a steel brace that held it in place, which allowed the SRB to swing wildly and slam into the large central fuel tank which was still mostly full of fuel.
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