Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

This is a family of computers. It was a big success. It appears that this was a big unification project of previous architectures. And it also gave software portability guarantees with future systems, since writing software was starting to become as expensive as the hardware itself.

Media:

This was the first major commercial computer hit. Stlil vacuum tube-based.

Allows us to draw with JavaScript pixel by pixel! Great way to create computational physics demos!

Here is an animation demo with some useful controls:

new class extends OurbigbookCanvasDemo {
  init() {
    super.init('hello');
    this.pixel_size_input = this.addInputAfterEnable(
      'Pixel size',
      {
        'min': 1,
        'type': 'number',
        'value': 1,
      }
    );
  }
  draw() {
    var pixel_size = parseInt(this.pixel_size_input.value);
    for (var x = 0; x < this.width; x += pixel_size) {
      for (var y = 0; y < this.height; y += pixel_size) {
        var b = ((1.0 + Math.sin(this.time * Math.PI / 16)) / 2.0);
        this.ctx.fillStyle =
          'rgba(' +
          (x / this.width) * 255 + ',' +
          (y / this.height) * 255 + ',' +
          b * 255 +
          ',255)'
        ;
        this.ctx.fillRect(x, y, pixel_size, pixel_size);
      }
    }
  }
}

Bibliography: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Tutorial/Basic_animations">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Tutorial/Basic_animations

One is reminded of Nick Leeson.

Current Wikipedia seems to say that this refers specifically to cells taking up DNA from other dead cells as in the Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment, excluding other types of horizontal gene transfer like bacterial conjugation

The term is sometimes just used a synonym for horizontal gene transfer in general it seems however.

Can you just imagine what if luminiferous aether was one single fixed rigid body? This is apparently what Maxwell believed, Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 111 quoting his entry to Encyclopedia Britannica:Then it would provide a natural space coordinate for the entire universe!

Apparently Einstein was the first to completely say: let's just screw this aether thing completely then, it's getting too complicated, and we don't really need it. As Wikipedia puts it well, in very unencyclopedic tone^[ref]: Aether fell to Occam's razor.

Given experiments such as the Fizeau experiment and the Michelson-Morley experiment that couldn't really detect the Earth's movement across aether, people started to wonder if the Earth wasn't dragging the luminiferous aether.

Heinrich Hertz's main initial experiment used a spark-gap transmitter. It is not something that transmits recorded sounds like voice: it only transmits noisy beeps. And as such was used for wireless telegraphy.