Difference Engine (Calculator) Built Using Legos

[Texas Mac Man]

Difference Engine

[gunug]

I've been seen a number of interesting prototypes built with LEGOS; I'm not sure I've ever seen most of the strange lego connectors used in any of the lego's my kids ever had (I'm too old to have had LEGOS myself, maybe I should try building something out of Lincoln Logs)!  They must have a number of funny little parts that aren't as commonly available.

Later: http://www.fozztexx.com/LEGO/RubberBandGun/

Rapidfire:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8084831859001361822

Not as mathematical as the Difference Engine and a lot more likely to get you into trouble!  

Some things here:

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/legos/legos.html

[Texas Mac Man]

When I was a kid we would make rubber band guns.

The rubber bands we would make from cutting an old tire intertube. Tie a knot in the middle to make a "figure 8" shape.

Make the gun from a piece of wood - a handle & barrel.

Take a spring-type clothes pin & nail it to the back of the handle.

Stretch the band over the front of the barrel & pinch between the clothes pin.

Shoot by pressing the clothes pin.

We would make some guns with multiple clothes pins which would shoot multiple bands.

Great Fun.

[gunug]

Texas Mac Man - You got me beat because I usually just fired them with my forefinger and thumb; I've got no class!

[Kruser]

When i was a kid we took a spring clothes pin and make a match gun. It not only fired a kithen match but lite it too. Fired one on the house roof that had pine needles on it , caught  them on fire in which caught the wooden roof shingles on fire .Got it put out with little damage.

[D76]

Peter Calamai's story on Babbage's difference engine (Texas Mac Man's link repeated here), could have included at least a paragraph on Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, a gifted mathematician and Lord Byron's daughter, who worked with Babbage as he developed the engine.

QUOTE

When inspired Ada could be very focused and a mathematical taskmaster. Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now regarded as the first "computer program." A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in her honor in 1979.
<snip>
She has been used as a character in Gibson and Sterling's the Difference Engine, shown writing letters to Babbage in the series " The Machine that Changed the World" and I have gathered her letters and writings in "Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer Though her life was short (like her father, she died at 36), Ada anticipated by more than a century most of what we think is brand-new computing.

This Wikipedia entry relates that she died at age 36 and from the same cause as her father — medicinal bloodletting.

Googling "lady lovelace" hauls up 44,200 hits.