I’ve just posted the photos from our 3-week vacation. There are 6 albums with nearly 450 photos. They can be found at http://sugargroup.net/photos/varrin/2009eastusvacation/
Most of the photos are self-explanatory. Some have captions. Some of the people pictures are uncaptioned (if you know who they are then you know who they are).
I have to add one special photo description here which wasn’t blogged but was part of an email exchange with my dad. In the Air and Space Museum at Dulles, there was a Control Data 3800 computer. I pointed this out to my dad and he wrote this back:
During the mid-1960s, when I worked for CDC, there were three families of computers built and sold by CDC.
The 1nna family was the small computer family. Often they were packaged to be the size of an office desk. Most of them had 12-bit word length. However, one model had an 8-bit word length and one model had a 13-bit word length.
The 3000 series was the mid-range family. They were packaged the way you saw at the Smithsonian. The 3100 was the bottom of the family and I think ( if I recall correctly ) they had a 24-bit word length. The 3800 was the top of the family with a 48-bit word length ( as the Smithsonian article said ).
The 6000 series was the top of the line. These were the world’s most powerful computers when they were first built. They were packaged a bit larger than the 3000 series. This family had 60-bit word length.
Thanks for sending that link and, thus, reviving those old,
delightful memories.
V-
Jefferson quotes
Varrin,
I just looked at a few of the photos. I like Jefferson’s quotes but some can be a problem depending on how one interprets them. Some examples:
-http://sugargroup.net/photos/varrin/2009eastusvacation/dc/2009-04-26-124355.jpg.html – This is a philosophy held by some who see the Constitution as a “living document” and see a strict adherence to it as “Civilized Society to Remain …”. Of course using Article V is too much trouble and you might not get your way. 🙁
-http://sugargroup.net/photos/varrin/2009eastusvacation/dc/2009-04-26-124413.jpg.html clearly and http://sugargroup.net/photos/varrin/2009eastusvacation/dc/2009-04-26-121850.jpg.html – Have been used as a justification of mandatory public school.
Tony,
You raise good points. Regarding the first, I don’t pretend to have climbed all the way into Jefferson’s mind, but I suspect he understood, to a degree, the difference between:
1: abstract and concrete,
2: ethics and morals
3: principles and laws
If constitutions and laws are written with good principles in mind, they should only need to be changed in as much as they were poorly written and/or outdated. A good example is the correlation, on one hand, between the abstract ethical statement of Christ (Love God and Love People – all the law hangs on those), and the 10 Commandments. The former is the abstract ethical principle upon which all Christianity is based. The latter is maybe the best written concrete moral law derived from those principles. Indeed, properly understood, the 10 Commandments have not really needed amending, save maybe gender and marital equality issues (an issue of understanding more than anything). But, then, they were shorter and beautifully written to begin with. I wouldn’t expect anyone in the 1700’s or today to do as well as the finger of God for Moses, hence the need for change.
When Jefferson speaks of new truths and more enlightenment he acknowledges reality. We don’t know everything. The very basics have been codified for more centuries than we have fingers and toes but our understanding of them continues to improve. Slavery is a good example. So we can expect laws to change, but good principles don’t. Of course, if you misunderstand that, as many do, you see it as an excuse to abandon good philosophy in favor of bad.
As for the mandatory public school, it should first be recognized that the quote on that wall are cobbled together from several sources (it’s not all from one document, letter, or speech). That was done in the 1930’s well after the idea of government schools got going in the United States.
In fact, Jefferson did support the idea of compulsory tax-funded schools, though they didn’t appear until well after his death. His purpose, however, for supporting them was exactly the opposite of their purpose starting in the mid-1800’s and continuing on today. He believed (I say rightly so) that education was aimed at defending liberty, not suppressing it. I supply these excerpts of his quotes in support of this view: “…to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.”, and “…rendering the people the safe as they are the ultimate guardians of their own liberty.”, and “…directed to their freedom and happiness.”, and “…to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government”…
That said, he did vocally support tax-funded compulsory education as the *method* to achieve those goals. Once again, in principle (abstract ethic), he was right – a well educated populace is required for a free society. In application (moral concrete law), he was wrong. After 150 years of compulsory tax-funded education (essentially his vision), we have a populace with virtually no such education and incapable of preserving liberty.
V-