h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Now that was early days!

I remember bringing a class of first-year (secondary school) pupils to see a gigantic computer in UCD where a friend of mine was studying computer science. He set it up for us to play a game: we were given a target distance, perhaps with a side-wind speed, typed in the desired direction and elevation for our gun and fired a shot. Within minutes we received a printout telling us how far we were short, or beyond, or to either side of our target.

This was 1971. The computer would have fitted comfortably into a truck container.

I didn't start programming computers until 1977.

That is a fascinating game to play - when I was at secondary school, we learned how to 'play tennis' on our (handheld, not truck-sized) graphical calculators, drawing the net on the screen | and then shooting the ball at various angles and speeds to see if we sent the ball over the net or not!

I remember programming my programmable calculator to find out whether my (6-digit) phone number was a prime number. It had to do 490 divisions to do this, so I left it running overnight.

I have a solar calculator that could do that in split seconds.

Technology keeps improving at breakneck speeds, while our bodies and minds are locked into much slower speeds. If we find ourselves feeling inadequate or confused, is it any wonder?

I feel far from inadequate, at least on behalf of my fellow humans. Particularly Alan Turing

Well, granted, he didn't get the girl, but then he wasn't after one anyway.

I remember playing a game in the late '80s or so over a modem or maybe a BBS where you shot mortars at your opponent over a random 2D terrain. I distinctly remember being very impressed by some of the graphical effects of some of the more fantastic weapons like the "napalm" mortar that was handy when your previous mortar barely missed your opponent but dropped him into a crater. I think the effect it used was similar to the "Mondrian" screensaver effect of that era. 8bit color was amazing back then.

I've played a couple of games like that – 'Bang Bang' and 'Scorch/Scorched Earth'.
Plus 'Gorillas' where there are two Kong-like gorillas on the top of skyscrapers trying to throw nuclear bananas at each other. Of course the ultimate in this genre was 'Worms'.

<BB<

My daughter, who is studying costume design:

I want to do my final-year University thesis on the design of the computer game "Bioshock".

Lecturer:

A game! How many levels has it got?

Daughter:

Games don't have levels any more.

Lecturer:

Oh, that's as much as I know about computer games.

Freecell is the only computer game I've played. Does it count that i played it 20,000 times in two years*?

*After which I stopped due to tendonitis....

My father used to love Freecell. He came across one deal which is not possible to get out, and I later verified this for him with an internet search.

Another one for Gnomon's Guide:

A87875635 Stone Circles of Ireland

This one is also in Peer Review at the moment.

Great research and report Gnomon!

Several surprises: does the sun rise in due southeast at the winter solstice, and set in due northwest at the summer solstice in this latitude? That would be a coincidence. No, rereading I see you say 'roughly'. Still surprising to me...

Also, the arrival of hunter-gatherers before farmers. I had thought that we were already farming by the time we arrived in Ireland. Of course we may have forgotten the lore of farming on arriving in such a garden of Eden, though I doubt that is likely. Still, the people of Australia forgot how to make boats after arriving in them, according to Dawkins.

From a reference book, I see that at Stonehenge on the Summer Solstice, the sun rises 3° east of due Northeast. At the time it was built, it was 4° east of Northeast. The south of Ireland would be the same as Stonehenge. I don't know how much it would change as you travel north.

The hunter gatherers arrived in Ireland in about 8000 BC. There were never many of them. There's a debate as to whether they came in boats or waded from Great Britain - the sea level would have been different at that time although we're not sure whether it was ever low enough to allow a sort of "Land Bridge".

The farmers arrived in much greater numbers in 4000 BC, in boats along with their farm animals. These people were the ones who built the first stone structures.