Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Ada, the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, was arguably the first computer programmer in the 1840's. I recently listened to a Stuff You Missed In History Class podcast about her: quite interesting. She envisioned capabilities in the Joquard Loom, an automated loom that was programmed with punch cards, as capable of calculations that Charles Babbage didn't recognize.

The Wired Geekdad entry is pitifully thin, and makes me wonder what makes this particular day Ada Lovelace Day. It isn't her birthday, and Wikipedia doesn't reference this day (though I may have overlooked it).
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/03/ada-lovelace-day/

From Wikipedia:
During a nine-month period in 1842-43, Lovelace translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's memoir on Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. The notes are longer than the memoir itself and include (Section G), in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, which would have run correctly had the Analytical Engine ever been built. Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer and her method is recognised as the world's first computer program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

I just love the fact that her notes were longer than the original manuscript.

Here's the podcast that I mentioned, it autostarts when you click on the link:
http://podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/symhc/2009-11-11-symhc-enchantress-numbers.mp3

Once again, lawmakers are looking at a national ID card

Lawmakers are proposing a national identification card — what they’re calling “high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security cards” — that would be required for all employees in the United States.

The proposal by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) comes as the states are grappling to produce another national identification card at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security. Virtually none of the states are in compliance with this Real ID program — adopted in 2005 — requiring state motor vehicle bureaus to obtain and internally scan and store personal information like Social Security cards and birth certificates for a national database.

I have absolute faith that they will be fraud-proof. After all, it's impossible to hack RFID passports.[/sarcasm]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/two-id-cards/