Monthly Archives: January 2011

I caught an interview with urban historian Steve Duncan on one of the morning shows and was just fascinated with what he was doing. Duncan takes us underground in New York City to abandoned subway stations, Lincoln Tunnel, a sewer (euwww) and even climbs the Williamsburg Bridge! The best part for me was the beautiful subway station, it spoke volumes of the creative architects who designed them.

Being a native New Yorker myself, I thoroughly enjoyed this and only wish Duncan had legal access to these beautiful structures so we could learn more. It was a daring feat, and one I don’t advise others to do.

"The first actual case of a bug being found..."

Don’t you just hate a bug on your iPhone, computers, etc?  They make your life a living hell! But where did the term “computer bug” come from, and which computer got it first?  Back in 1945, after WWII ended, the gargantuan Mark II computer which ran ordinance calculations for the U.S. Navy shut down. Technicians eventually found that a moth trapped between two of the machine’s relay points was the culprit. Navy personnel preserved the moth in the daily log (photo above) & noted “the first actual case of a bug being found” in a computer, hence “computer bug.” However, the culprit being a bug was sort of a coincidence, because the term “bug” had been used to describe a mechanical malfunction since Thomas Edison’s day. Today the term “bug,” & “debugging,” is techie jargon and one we all have come to understand to mean a major pain in the ass if you have one.

The Navy’s “debugging,” was quite simple, close all windows in the lab. That’s it, no more bugs. Today, it’s a lot more complicated to debug. In 1949 a mathematician Jon Von Newmann said that constructing self replicating computer programs was possible. The dude was right, today bugs, worms, viruses, and other pain in the asses, have become every computer users worst nightmare. Computer experts say that 55,000 new malware programs are introduced over the Internet every day.

Lesson of the day, closing your windows won’t rid you of computer bugs, so make sure you have good anti-virus software on your computer or you will pay dearly.