This is made my day. Two great freedom fighters meet for the first time to discuss the fate of the world…

Full playlist: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=873165882541602C

I thought I’d do a little post for Ada Lovelace Day. But rather than just point to a single “tech heroine,” instead I have a World War II-era technology story I find interesting, which involves a whole bunch of women. A technological Rosie the Riveter story.

One of the lesser-known stories of World War II is the American role in cracking the notorious “Enigma” machine’s encryption codes. The Enigma encryption system was used by the Germans to coordinate submarine attacks against the the Allies to devastating effect.

Probably even fewer know the bulk of the work building and running the decryption machines and much of the cryptoanalysis was accomplished by women.

The credit for cracking the Enigma codes almost always goes entirely to the British “Ultra” program and Bletchley Park. The Brits cracked the Enigma using a gigantic electromechanical decryption machine known as a “bombe.” However, in 1942, the Germans found out and improved the design of the Enigma by adding a fourth rotor. The newer Enigma machine rendered the British decryption machines practically useless.

Enter the United States, which ramped up its own parallel Enigma-breaking initiative in 1943. The program was created and run by the Navy in cooperation with The National Cash Register Company (NCR) of Dayton, Ohio. The site of the operation was Building 26 on the NCR campus. (Incidentally, I know about this story because my father worked for NCR in building 26 in the late 1970s — on things completely unrelated to the Enigma, or code breaking.)

Inside Building 26, six hundred Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) worked in shifts, 24-hours per day, to build approximately 120 newer, faster code-breaking “bombes” of an American design that could crack the new Enigma codes. WAVES had equal status with their male Navy counterparts, serving mostly stateside to free up Navy men for duty overseas.

The manufacturing of the American bombes involved the state-of-the-art electronics techniques of the time, which included complicated wiring, mechanical relays, vacuum tubes and motors. Each bombe was seven feet high, two feet wide, ten feet long and weighed 5000 pounds. WAVES also operated the machines and deciphered the messages transmitted by the U-boat captains, which helped the Allies out maneuver and terminate the U-boats. While all told there were several thousand people involved in the project, the WAVES did the bulk of the work involving the bombe machines. It has been estimated that World War II was shortened by one or more years due to the American bombes, and the contribution of the WAVES participating in the American Enigma-cracking program.

The project was one of the best kept secrets of the war, and remained secret until it was declassified, something the WAVES involved were very proud of. In fact, many passed away without ever revealing the secret.

I think it’s a cool story that highlights some of the tech contributions of women to the war effort. If you’re interested in learning more, here are some links to follow:

• Keeping the Secret: The Waves and NCR Dayton, Ohio 1943-1946 by Curt Dalton.
• Dayton Codebreakers
• The Secret in Building 26 By Jim DeBrosse, Colin Burke

UPDATE: My dad and I were talking about this earlier; as I said he’s the original source for the idea for this post. He got excited about it and wrote his own essay on the WAVES and the American bombe machines, which is an order of magnitude better written and more exciting than this blog post. I highly recommend that anyone interested in the story read his post as well.

I think this is an animated time line of contributions to Laconica organized by author made with the Processing graphics language. Pretty cool and fun to watch whatever it is! It makes me want to learn Processing. More info on Michael Klier’s blog (@chimeric).

http://apps.facebook.com/identica

• Hexapod walking robots
• Autonomous robots
• Autonomous robots that can do things other than aimlessly move around
• Art incorporating robots

Thus, I want to share the coolest hexapod robot I’ve ever seen:

It can draw pictures! With a pen!

And carve faces in 3-D! with a router head!!

If you know of a cooler hexapod robot, I need to know immediately.

More about this robot and it’s creator, Matt Denton, at micromagic systems and his robotics forum.

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book was a major slog to get through, but I can’t deny that the main character, Oscar, the hunchback midget, is hard to get out of my head. Some of the prose was poetic enough to stick in my head as well (”The bookshelves laughed themselves into splinters…” as they were hit by bullets, and stuff like that.)

Starting in, I had the impression that this book was sort of a analysis of the psychosis of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but I didn’t really get anything like that out of it. I felt if anything it skated, if not glossed over, that subject. As for Grass being the “guilty conscience” of Germany, I have to call BS on that as well. That certainly didn’t come through in this book, and it turns out Grass hid the fact that he was in the Waffen SS for 60 years. Sorry, I can’t just go with, wow, it was all insane! And, see, the characters in this book are all insane–that’s the only way to understand the Nazi phenomenon: by putting yourself in the insane POV! Uh, no, not buying it.

That being said, the book has some memorable scenes, grotesque characters and settings (even some gross sex scenes), and it makes you squirm pretty good sometimes. It Reminds me a lot “Geek Love” by Katherine Dunn — except cross-pollinated with a little Kafka, and much longer. Too much longer. The Tin Drum could have been edited in half, at least.

Why this book won the Pulitzer I have no idea. Perhaps, I just don’t understand what makes great literature.

View all my reviews.

That’s why I was surprised I had no luck in recruiting any of my dad friends to come with Wyatt and me to see the 2008 RoboGames at Fort Mason Center last weekend. RoboGames is a massive robot competition with the star attraction being robot fights. These are the kind of robot battles you may have seen on TV, in which the robots attack each other with pneumatic hammers, saw blades, flame throwers, and other weapons inside a bullet-proof glass arena. There were many other competitions, including bipod races and Robot Sumo, lots of vendors showing their robot wares and robot enthusiasts exhibiting various robot projects.

One dad said to me, “[I don't want to take my kid because] then I’d have to explain to him why the robots are fighting.” I find this baffling. What’s to explain? It’s like Wyatt says, “All robots do is walk, walk, walk, walk and fight.” Different parenting styles I guess.

I managed to get some good photos and videos. We were too busy watching the fights to take many pictures of that aspect of the show, but there’s good links to videos of the fights and stuff on BotJunkie.

WeAreChange needs some financial help for legal bills. Things are heating up. These guys are doing the job our news media is supposed to be doing but isn’t. Please throw a few bucks their way.

If I ever get off my lazy ass and do a podcast, I want to commission this guy to do the intro and bumper music…