Maggie's Farm

I wouldn't call Ms. Fluke a slut. She's more of a con artist, and expects the public to be shamed into financing her somewhat turgid sex life. My message to her would be something along the lines of "Come on Little Girl. Don't infantilize yourself to get money out of the hard pressed taxpayer so you won't have to pay for what in the long run is your own pleasure."

Back in the 1940s, when I was in college, I decided that I needed protection for my future, so I didn't ask the Government to give it to me [It was my life after all] I got on the bus and went down to the Margaret Sanger clinic which was dispensing birth control devices and got one. I had studied the material on condoms, and diaphragms and decided that the diaphragm gave me the most personal control of my life, so I got one. I wouldn't even have considered letting any man I chose to 'do the deed' with have control over my decision, nor would I have considered expecting the Government to pay for what was after all my own pleasure. My body -- my responsibility.

I still feel that way. And I don't feel the least bit impelled to pay for Ms. Fluke's pleasure. If I can pay for my own contraception on a college student's allowance and part-time earnings, so can she.

Ms. Fluke seems well on the way toward working for the ACLU. Her train of thought seems to match theirs.

Marianne

A little bit off-topic here, but there is a fascinating book review in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. The book, "Turing's Cathedral," by George Dyson, is about the Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and outlines the really amazing inventive progress made on the nation's first fast digital computer -- called the MANIAC by its inventors. I went to work for the Computer Project in the fall of 1951 and left regretfully in 1953 when my first husband died and I went back to live in the Midwest. Modern computing was in its infancy back then. The MANIAC was assembled from various available components already on the market. It was assembled from separate "chassis" wired in sequence to make a device which was about ten feet long, 2 feet thick and eight feet high. At the time I was hired, its memory was held on cathode ray tubes, and not very many of them, each one having a "raster" of 1024 bytes of information, IIRC. Sounds primitive, and it was, but it was an enormous stride forward in computer science. In that 2-year window of time, advances popped forward at lightning speed. The cathode ray tubes were abandoned, to be followed by the magnetic drum memory and shortly thereafter by the magnetic core memory. They were already developing new advances when my first husband died and I left Princeton to return to Wisconsin where my family lived.

My job at the Computer Project was a humble one [I was a Purchasing Assistant] but it was the most fascinating job I ever had, before or since. All the computer technology that has developed since has come from the innovations made during that crucial ten year period, and the giants who made them. John Von Neumann ran the Project, but Julian Bigelow was instrumental in many of those innovations and so was Herman H. Goldstein. Up the hill at the Institute there were great minds as well. Robert Oppenheimer ran the place and Albert Einstein had his office there. Often when I drove to work I would see him walking to work, his bare ankles blue with cold, huddled in his pea-coat and his white hair blowing in the wind like a gone-by dandelion. We would exchange comments about the weather as I drove by. having offered to drive him up the Hill. He always refused and thanked me, and explained "It's my exercise, you see."

Of all the jobs I've had in a long and active life, this was by far the most fascinating. There is a kind of atmosphere in a place like that -- a yeasty excitement that pervades the offices and halls where engineers and inventors have impromptu conversations, and lights burn late at night.

I have a few disputes with the book, at least with the review of it. There doesn't seem to be any mention of Charles Babbage, an inventor in the nineteenth century who is often credited with the innovations which led to the invention of the modern computer. Babbage had devised a machine which included many of the MANIAC's abilities but didn't run on electricity so was of necessity very slow. It involved the use of textile cards used in printing jacquard fabrics to input information.

At any rate, let me recommend the book for your examination. I just wish you all could have been there and shared the excitement.

Marianne