Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #241

Sinister shadow? Menacing Mouse?

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t e m p n a m e says:

John von Neumann had seen this strip during his childhood and told Herman Goldstine about it 30 years later while both were at Princeton. The rest is history.
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

i love this...esp. the little bird looking on quizzically about the whole caturday thing....

this whole concept takes the LOLCAT silliness to an extreme that makes it actually funny....the little hobo cats in bow ties is priceless...
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

DK Rising says:

Says it all :)
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

a.h says:

this comic seems to get better and better. bravo!
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

meowy takes photos says:

I love caturday!
(and your comics!)
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

gatsby11rel says:

New desktop wallpaper!
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

evil nickname says:

This is made of win.
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

t e m p n a m e says:

Update to my earlier post: The story of the "invention” of the flowchart is told in The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, Goldstine, Herman (1972), Princeton University Press, 266-267. ISBN 0-691-08104-2.

Laugh-Out-Loud Cats isn’t acknowledged by name, but you can read between the lines.

Who knew early computer science owed so much to a cute 'lil Cat Lad?
*ahem*
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

Ape Lad says:

If I had an Amazon wishlist, I'd add it.
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

t e m p n a m e says:

You should save your money on the book. Apparently the relevant passage was rewritten after the first edition; but here's the original:

(excerpt from page 266)

I had been thinking about new graphical ways to represent algorithms, not only for use with the EDVAC project, but in a general way that could be interpreted for use on any automated computing machine. When I mentioned this to John [von Neumann] one day in the autumn of 1946, his eyes lit up. He told me a story of when, as a young boy of 9 or 10 in Budapest, he briefly escaped his studies with a trip to the Csepel shipyards. A shipment of cigars from Tampa, Florida was being unloaded. (He emphasized this was less than 3 years after the Tampa cigar strike of 1910, not to be confused with the 1899, 1901, or 1935 strikes, although I'm not sure why this was significant.) As he watched, he was calculating in his head the number of cigars that could fit in the cargo hold, when one of the crew - or perhaps a stowaway - dropped an American newspaper as he hastily left the docks. John (or Jansci, as he was known then) picked it up. "There were two things in that paper that stayed with me until the day I emigrated," he said. "First, there was an etching of a shapely woman wearing Annette Kellermans on a Florida beach..." He went on about her at some length, as I patiently sat and wondered what she had to do with algorithms, but that was John for you! He credited the newspaper with accelerating his comprehension of written English at a young age, and the young woman in the swimsuit for motivating his move from Germany to America some 20 years later (not to mention the rise of Hitler). Eventually, he got around to the second thing in the newspaper, which was a comic strip panel. If I interpreted his description correctly, the comic featured a box containing a nonsense question, and arrows extending below it labeled "no" and "yes," pointing to additional boxes containing the corresponding outcomes. He claimed it was this image that inspired him to first consider the idea of machine-executable algorithms in 1913, before he had learned of the work of Pascal and Babbage. I smiled at the notion of any boy thinking in such terms at the age of 9 1/2, but with John it was at least plausible. I jotted down "decision boxes," and a few weeks later, we had developed the first generalized "flowchart," a word John had memorized from that long-gone comic strip.
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

Wincey (was ishkabibb) says:

I like how this one is boing-boingy too -- many flowcharts posted over there recently, some of which were new to them but very old to people who traffic in office-photocopy-humor.
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

falfa says:

I love confluence!
Posted 28 months ago. ( permalink )

Brunocerous says:

genius
Posted 27 months ago. ( permalink )

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Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #241

Comments

t e m p n a m e says:

njudahchronicles.com says:

DK Rising says:

a.h says:

meowy takes photos says:

gatsby11rel says:

evil nickname says:

t e m p n a m e says:

Ape Lad says:

t e m p n a m e says:

Wincey (was ishkabibb) says:

falfa says:

Brunocerous says:

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Ape Lad's photostream

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Laugh-Out-Loud Cats: 201-300 (Set)

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