ok, maybe calling Charles Babbage, “Charles Cabbage”, is a bit disrespectful. but it’s not my fault that his last name sounds like cabbage. it just flows better.

in this weeks class, after some pretty light discussions about how most people enjoyed this weeks unlecture, we were thrown headfirst into research for our niki pages. who is niki do you ask?? niki is the networked media wiki. but niki sounds better than nmwiki so lets stick with niki. as i’m sure you’ve guessed by now, i was lucky enough to pull charles babbage out of the hat, along with 4 other class members. and while others in the class were sitting happily with stuff like written “youtube” on their little slips of paper, my table just had the dumbfounded faces. “who the hell is charles babbage??”

well now, i’ll tell you who charles babbage is. mr. babbage pretty much invented the calculator. now, i’m not talking about the pocket calculator, coz you would need pretty big pockets to fit this 2 story, 50 tonne beauty into your pocket. but back in the late 1800’s, babbage didn’t like the inaccuracy of calculations and so devised a machine to eliminate human error in arithmetic.

try fitting this in your pocket

so, after each of us spent 15 minutes googling (crazy that googling is a legitimate verb nowadays!) our mysterious subject, we were tasked with coming up with some ways of creating our niki page so that it would reflect his voice. you know, like an interview. except that he’s been dead for like 100 (almost wrote 1000!) years. and here we struggled. not because it was such a hard thing to think about, because i’m sure if we set our minds to it we would come up with something constructive (and if you by chance want to see what we came up with, and it’s not much i’ll just warn you know, you can check it out here) but our problem was that our attention span is just too short. everytime one of us came up with an idea, or the start of an idea, or even brought up another fact about the interesting life of mr babbage, we would all sidestep onto some completely random topic that would go on for another 10 or so minutes. so, by the end of class, our best idea was to ressurect charles as a zombie and try to talk to him before he tried to eat our brains. as you can see, a very productive class. but at least we’re getting somewhere….kinda.