If it walks like a duck, eats like a duck, and shits like a duck...

 ...it might only be a mechanical "digesting" duck.

Such was one of the iconic inventions of the dawn of the mechanical age, "The Duck." The steampunk creature of clockwork limbs could not only move, but simulate eating food and - sparing no effort in attention to detail - pass droppings as well, although the actual product was pre-stored and didn't involve actual biological digestion.

Such was the invention of Jacques de Vaucanson, widely considered to be one of the fathers of robotics or at least automata. He created this duck in 1738, for demos to the elite, using it to finance further creations.

Before you scoff too loudly at such frivolity, keep in mind that Vaucanson's major accomplishments included automated, programmable looms, which could be programmed with punch cards - in 1745. Later this same media storage format would be used to input data into the world's first computers.

You can still generate a punched-card design at emulators like this. I would recommend the 'bcd' command from the bsdgames package on Unix systems, but that's such lost technology that it's barely worth mentioning.

Gene Youngblood on Media (1977)

Just listening to Ubuweb Sound and caught the Gene Youngblood interview from 1977 (listen to it here). Was this guy a prophet, or what? Towards the end when he talks about the effects of the digital revolution on modern media, he sounds like he nailed everything we know now in 2013.

Blow your mind by listening to a media theorist who called quite a few shots.

Gene Youngblood on Wikipedia.

Youngblood's book, Expanded Cinema, in PDF.

Building Ms. Pac-Man machines - fascinating factory footage

Just puts 1982 in perspective, doesn't it? I almost can't see a Ms. Pac-Man game without smelling pizza because I saw them in Pizza Hut restaurants so much.

Also, keep your ears sharp for a Bosconian machine playing in the background. Yes, they had to test the games post-assembly, so at least some of them could say "My job is to play video games." Although they look bored as mud doing it, because let's face it, it's still a job.

Incidentally, Ms. Pac-Man was never conceived in the halls of Midway Games. Instead, rogue hobbyist programmers created mod kits - exactly like the indie gaming mod community today - and sold conversion kits for existing arcade games. When they made such a kit for Atari's Missile Command cabinet, Atari sued, but dropped the suit in exchange for an agreement from the makers - General Computer Corp in this case - to not make any more mod kits to sell to the public, but to come work for them instead. Ms. Pac-Man started out as a mod kit for Pac-Man called "Crazy Otto", which they sold to Midway, whom turned around and sold it as Ms. Pac-Man.

And now you know.

M.C. Escher's models made possible

The iconic artwork of M.C. Escher features impossible structures that defy geometry. But they're all too possible if you "think stretchy" and view them from only one angle...

Intellipedia - A US government intelligence Wiki that mere mortals aren't allowed to view.

So I was browsing Wikipedia looking for creepy United States government intelligence agencies. Hey, they're a dime a dozen! Such as the "Information Awareness Office" (established at the height of the paranoid Bush years), which seems to be going out of its way to say "government spooks' world-wide conspiracy" with just their logo alone:

But then I linked along and discovered "Intellipedia", a collaborative database for sharing information between the various (multi-hydra-headed) intelligence communities. "Cool beans!" I exclaimed dorkily, because I've heard all about this open government thing and what better way for all of us US citizens to participate in our national security than to collaborate with US intelligence, right? And we cyber-denizens and open-source proponents know that "obscurity != security", right? Besides, if it's just intelligence about outside threats to the US, what could they possibly have to hide? If there's a terrorist plot afoot to bomb something, don't we all have a right - perhaps even a patriotic duty - to be informed?

Well, no, turns out that you need US security clearance just to view the damn thing! The link at Intellipedia stops you dead, demanding some kind of electronic passport called an "Intelink" to go any further. Ironic, considering that it's supplied by Google. Wait, who played that scare chord?

Well, there you go, you've heard of the "dark web" before? What could be darker?

Oh, and the FBI has its own "Bureaupedia" - and it's closed to public viewing as well. Fine then, catch your own criminals!

And more classified US websites. The thing that is impressive is just how large this is. The US basically has its own "shadow Internet". Now, pause and consider this point: Citizens frequently complain about how the US government seems out of touch with its people. Picture your own internal office intranet at work, if you have one. Naturally, if there's an artificial wall between public and private, you tend to stay on one side of it, right? So it just could be that government officials act as if they're ignorant of what the rest of us are thinking because they use their own Internet.

Blit, a Bell Labs computer with GUI capabilities from 1982

Fantastically nostalgic early precursor to our modern technical gadgets, even having voice simulation. Astounding how far we've come, and yet how well they envisioned the future!

More about Blit here.

The Internet needs a new patron saint!

Well, the current reigning patron saint of the Internet and computers in general is Saint Isidore of Seville, an Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades, and considered to be the last scholar in the ancient tradition. Based on this flimsy pretense and nothing else, this man, who died in the year 636 having missed even the invention of the Difference Engine by a millennium, was decreed to be the patron saint of the Internet, and all of computing technology, programmers, and students.

Mind you, this is the same guy who joined in the general Catholic persecution of Jews, by passing "Canon 60 calling for the forced removal of Jewish children from the parents and their education by Christians and Canon 65 forbidding Jews and Christians of Jewish origin from holding public office".

Internet users, programmers, and techie stemmers of all kinds - are you ready to join me in crying "bunk"?

BUNK!!

We have far better candidate for the patron saints of programming, computing, and Internetting:

Saint IGNUcious, the tongue-in-cheek alter-ego of Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and spiritual father of all software. Listen, if I stood them both up before Saint Peter at the pearly gates, I'd bet Isidore would be nervously shuffling his feet and eying the side exit before Peter was done reading the half of the list of Stallman's good deeds.

Tim Berners-Lee He got to be in the Olympic opening ceremonies through virtue of creating the World Wide Web, the improvement which opened the Internet up to the masses. That's gotta be worth a brownie point or two.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the inventors of both Unix and the C programming language. All modern operating systems - no matter how loudly Microsoft lies otherwise - descend from Unix, and all modern programming languages descend from C. I mean, literally the patron saints of computing and programming!

And finally, Douglas Englebart:

What, you don't know who Douglas Englebart is??? I explain in that link. He invented the modern GUI computing interface - the mouse, the icon, the menu, the graphical interface, hypertext... all the pretty pictures on the screen that let you use a computer without having to type in hexadecimal runes at a command prompt. Before Microsoft, before Apple, before even Xerox. And he did it all as research at Stanford university, way back in 1967. Now just look at that picture and that serene, beatific smile on that saintly face: doesn't he look like a saint?

Vatican, your choices suck! Each of the people I've named here did what they did in the genuine desire to benefit all of mankind by putting more computing power into the hands of the masses, potentially doing the human race more good than any ten canonized saints, and they all did it with no thought to their own profit or power.

If your religion can't recognize that these are the true saints, then there's something wrong with your religion.

The shocking difficulty of producing truly random numbers (and the world's most boring book)

Need some random numbers? The RAND Corporation has you covered. They published a book called "A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates". This 1955 work makes for some boring reading indeed; it's exactly what it says on the cover, no more, no less. Just columns of digits, which were simulated with a roulette wheel device hooked up to one of their mainframe computers. The numbers are arranged in strings of five digits, ten strings to a line, in neatly numbered rows numbered at the far left column from 00000 to 19999.

And if you want a copy, it's yours for - as of this writing - a used price of $33 or a new price starting at $76.67. And while you're at Amazon, don't miss the hilarious customer reviews, ranging from tongue-in-cheek drollery to one man who claims that the book was instrumental in him meeting his future wife.

Why would anyone want such a tome? Because TRUE random numbers are actually surprisingly hard to come by. Especially back in 1955. Even modern machines, however, are hard-pressed to come up with true entropy. True, you could sit there rolling a handful of dice all day and writing down the results, but this is slow. The best we can do is psudorandom numbers, generated from things like the system clock, user input, or the measurement of system voltage.

Why are random numbers so important? They are used in both cryptography and in gambling games - in both cases, it's a disaster if your number sequences become predictable. While pseudorandom numbers are fine for things like determining random events in a video game (such as which Tetris piece will fall next), they just don't cut the mustard for more mission-critical applications.

One such case is demonstrated in the lesson of the TV game show Press Your Luck, in which pseudorandom number sequences were used to generate a pattern of squares on a game board and the contestant would have to press a button to stop the board on a square, hoping to win money. As one determined contestant discovered, the patterns on the board were very easy to predict, and so when he got on the show, Michael Larson had an unprecedented winning streak.

Casinos, with electronic slot machines, Keno, poker machines, and so on, have the same risk. So do lotteries. And then so does any security application of cryptography - it doesn't matter how great my secret code is, if one can simply run the letters or digits through a frequency analysis and figure out that "36547" = "Washington". So the encoded information has to be combined with a bank of random numbers, used once, and thrown away.

There are a number of hardware random-number generators today, things like little frobs that plug into a USB drive and have things like a radiation-decay mechanism or an atmospheric noise microphone to get true natural entropy as input.

For students with test data needs, websites like RANDOM.ORG have downloadable random numbers produced from a microphone dangling in the breeze.

Eight Artifact Designs That No Longer Serve A Purpose

You never notice them until someone points them out. Because they've always been that way. But once you know about them, you can't help but notice them, and appreciate how ridiculous we are in the way we have to keep things familiar.

These are all design elements on various things which used to have a function, but are now done "just for decoration" or because "we've always done it that way".

1. Slot Machine Payout Tray / Hopper

Slot machines originally both accepted and paid out cash. Modern slot machines pay out a printed receipt which you then cash at the cashier's cage. They no longer need the tray where the coins used to land, yet slot machines still have them. Some of them even play a recording of coins hitting the tray when you cash out and the machine prints its receipt!

2. Cigarette Filter Design

Cigarettes used to have filters made from cork. When they switched to synthetic filters (usually made from cellulose), they kept the printed paper on the outside in a cork design.

3. Hood Scoops

Originally, hood scoops were necessary to direct the flow of air onto the engine to help cool it. Modern cars now have air ducts from other, less intrusive parts of the car, but some cars still keep the hood scoop design. If your car has a hood scoop, put your hand in it. It may be completely closed off!

4. Fake Wood Grain Covering

Things like shelf paper, tabletops, and counters may be made of plastic, metal, or even processed particle board, but they'll still have this tacky vinyl covering with fake wood grain on it. Once you're aware of it, you'll get tired of looking at it.

How about those station wagons in the 1970s which had fake wood paneling on the sides? These things persist even when they make no sense. Who would even want to drive a wooden car?

5. Hubcap Spokes

Ever notice how many car hubcaps still have spokes in the design, as if you were still unable to deal with the concept of a tire unless it resembled a Conestoga wagon wheel?

6. Digital Camera Shutter Sound

Like the casino hopper sound, consumer-grade digital cameras still play an audio sound of an old-fashioned camera's shutter sliding and clicking.

7. Your Keyboard Layout

The standard "QWERTY" layout of the keyboard was originally designed partly to keep neighboring typewriter keys from jamming when they hit together. Other keys' placement were originally required by the limitations of manual typewriter design - for instance, the 'CAPS LOCK' key is directly over the left shift key because it used to be a physical lever that held down the shift key itself; it would lock in place until you tapped it again. Modern computers and laptops have no such requirements, of course, but the keyboard stays that way.

A whole new generation of design appendixes evolved from the first generation of computers, too. The 'scroll lock' key, for instance, comes form the days when text-only computers scrolled monochrome text on a black monitor - you'd print something out, and then hit scroll-lock to freeze the screen until you could read that screen-full of text, and then release it to get to the next screen-full...

8. Computer And Phone Icons

Computer and phone icons are a virtual forest of visual metaphors for outdated technology. Look at that hourglass! How many of you have seen one in real life? Yet we use it to symbolize time, clocks, waiting, etc. And then there's those quill pens used for writing apps, envelopes used for email apps, cartoon speech bubbles used for texting apps... How about that floppy disk icon to represent the concept of saving a document? Floppy disks have been out of common use for at least a decade now.

A Turing Machine Made From Model Trains

From Turing Train Terminal. In the schematics section, they detail how the system can perform up to six binary calculations. I couldn't find a YouTube video of the beast in action, so here's a Lego Turing machine instead, set to the theme to the '80s TV series A Team by somebody with nauseating taste:

The fascinating story of "Parked Domain Girl"

You've seen her a dozen times, often enough that her face jars your memory and yet you're never able to quite place the reference. She's a white blond young adult, wearing a backpack while she clutches the straps securely and grins tightly with her tilted face at the camera. Here she is, in all her famous glory:

She's "parked domain girl", and her use as the standard default photo for a parked web domain, starting in 2005, has spurred a little online fandom.

URLesque gets to the bottom of the story: The photographer is Dunstin Steller, and he snapped this photo of his little sister, Hannah, and tossed it onto his iStockPhoto portfolio. For a few cents, Demand Media scooped up the photo and was then licensed to use it throughout their web properties. Thus, every time a website goes dark, Demand Media scoops up the domain registration and parks it, with ads and links around this photo.

The file is usually saved with the name "0012_female_student.jpg". Here's another photo of her in the same setting:

And here is the same building where the photo was taken, at Unity Village, Missouri.

Steller works as a stock photographer and his sister Hannah is presumably still in the modeling business. Time may yet come when she wants to capitalize on her Internet fame; there certainly is fan art and meme images of her all over the web!

All of the dictionary words that can be made from hexadecimal numbers:

Here are all of the words I found in the dictionary file, using a filter that only allowed words which could be spelled in hexadecimal:

Ababa

Abba

Abe

Ada

Beebe

DEC

Dacca

Dada

Dade

De

Decca

Dee

Ed

Fe

abbe

abed

accede

acceded

ace

ad

add

added

babe

bad

bade

be

bead

beaded

bed

bedded

bee

beef

beefed

cab

cafe

cede

ceded

dad

dead

deaf

decade

deed

deeded

deface

ebb

facade

facaded

face

faced

fade

faded

fed

fee

feed

Relatedly, programmers often use hex numbers to form words in error codes to make them easier to read, such as "oxDEADBEEF".

A Silly Simulation Of A Robot Woman, circa 1968

This was a futuristic "booth babe" at the Instruments, Electronics and Automatic Exhibition in London in 1968. At the exhibition by Honeywell Controls, LTD.

Anybody remember Honeywell? They're still around, but they've been long gone out of the computer business. Those of us who were running around "dinosaur pens" in the 1980s remember Honeywell logos in the vicinity of a Halon dump switch, and also stuff related to the aerospace industry.

For your Easter-Egg-Hunting Fun, 55 Ways To Have Fun With Google

"Easter eggs", as the parlance of the web has it, are hidden features and unexpected surprises tucked into any kind of media. So what better way to hunt for software Easter eggs than to grab a free copy of "55 Ways To Have Fun With Google", by the same blogger who does Google Blogoscoped. Discover odd funky little features and idle amusements using the giant of search engines.