John & I are both working on other posts at the moment, but in the meantime, this is hilarious:

Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace use the Difference Engine to solve the Global Financial crisis!

It’s a webcomic by Sydney Padua, and it’s fantastic. Padua touches on a lot of issues that I regularly talk about in lectures – the roles of Babbage & Lovelace in developing computing, the need to make inventions useful, the possible role of the Guassian Copula Function in causing the GFC, and a few other things. More important, it’s utterly hilarious!

And if you’re not familiar with the stories of Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace, here’s Padua’s version of the story.