Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Horton
Was accepted into a PhD engineering program at MIT, but chose to go into acting, instead. Ran into an engineering prof from MIT years later in the security line at an airport (iirc) and the prof told him that he probably made the right choice. |
To be fair, Bill Nye is a science explainer. He does not claim to be a scientist. He tries to explain the work of real scientist to the lay public. Nothing more. Yea, he goes by Bill Nye, the science guy only because that is catchier than Bill Nye, the science explainer.
But the meme above is accurate as far as science degrees.
Oct. 18, 1954 - The Texas Instruments "Regency TR-1" — the first transistor radio, was introduced. Finally, music you could take with you anywhere. One year after the TR-1 release, sales approached 100,000 units. Surviving specimens are sought out by collectors.
In those days, all AM radios (home, car, and portable) were required to mark, with little triangles, 640 and 1240 kHz, which were Civil Defense (Conelrad) stations, where you were supposed to tune in the event of a nuclear attack. Thank goodness those days are over.
Computer pioneer and mathematician Kathleen H.V. Booth¹ in the 1950s, loading a program into the All Purpose Electronic X-Ray Computer², known as the 32-bit APE(X)C which she co-designed and built with her husband Andrew D. Booth³. She helped to design and build three of the world’s first operational computers and wrote two of the earliest books on computer design⁴ and programming⁵; she was also credited with the invention in 1947 of one of the first assembly languages⁶ for their Automatic Relay Calculator called ARC Contracted Notation⁷. On November 11, 1955 Kathleen Booth typed some French words into a computer: ‘C’est un exemple d’une traduction fait par la machine à calculer installée au laboratoire de Calcul de Birkbeck College, Londres.’ Out came the English equivalent: ‘This is an example of a translation made by the machine for calculation installed at the laboratory of computation of Birkbeck College, London.’ It was probably the first public demonstration of what today we call a translation app⁸. With husband Andrew Booth, together they developed the Booth multiplier⁹, a highly complex algorithm that she once jokingly dismissed as an ‘arithmetical routine devised over egg and chips in the ABC tea shop in Southampton Row.’
