Ada has garnered the attention not just because of her mathematical achievements but because she is a great story. When she was a month old her mother, Anne, wife of George Gordon, Lord Byron, had had enough of her husband’s profligacy (he disposed of her vast inheritance within a year), promiscuity (he had an affair with his half-sister Augusta among many, many others) and general horridness (he would send his wife up to bed while he dallied with Augusta downstairs), and stole away from the marital home with her baby. Neither mother nor daughter ever saw the mad and bad poet-peer again, but when he died at the age of 36 he was such a celebrity that Ada was, royalty aside, London’s most famous child.
.. “She was”, wrote Bruce Collier, one of Babbage’s biographers, “a manic-depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine…I guess someone has to be the most overrated figure in the history of computing.” But the world will continue to give Ada the benefit of the doubt – because it needs her.
Names in the Ivy League
In the end, Hermann Glaser, Nuremberg’s culture minister at that time, came up with a novel way of responding to the site’s dissonant heritage—a strategy he called Trivialisierung, or trivialization. “What should be done,” Macdonald writes, “was to let the buildings fall into a state of semi-disrepair but not total ruin. They should be allowed to look ugly and uncared-for. And they should be used for banal uses, such as for storage, and leisure activities like tennis and motor-racing.” This “profanation” of the Nuremberg rallying grounds aimed to keep them available to history while denying them the dignity and sacredness that the Nazis had longed to create.
.. In suggesting that “the name of the University itself” was up for grabs, Holloway was referring to the fact that Eli Yale, the university’s founder, was an official of the East India Company and a slave trader.
.. The notion that Calhoun College could remain Calhoun College, and that its name could become, in some sense, an ironic form of critique, suggests just how different universities are from other places.
.. In fact, because Calhoun’s name is protected by South Carolina’s Heritge Act, changing the name of the street is more or less impossible.)
.. The vast Gothic campuses of Princeton and Yale communicate a different idea. Their towers and arches embody a sense of timelessness and power that is profoundly linked to the history of white Europe.
History – The Key to Henry Kissinger’s Success
Ferguson’s observation reminded me of an occasion three years ago when, after an absence of four decades, Kissinger returned to Harvard. Asked by a student what someone hoping for a career like his should study, Kissinger answered: “history and philosophy”—two subjects notable for their absence in most American schools of public policy.
.. “More than ever,” Kissinger urged, “one should study history in order to see why nations and men succeeded and why they failed.”
.. As Kissinger put it, “History is not … a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims.” History “can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations.” But—and here is the key—for it to do so, “each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.”
.. Kissinger sought to remind them of the complacency of Germans during Adolf Hitler’s early years. As he wrote, “It took some of the best elements in Germany six years after Hitler came to power to realize that a criminal was running their country which they had been so proud of considering a moral state.” The challenge was “to convince the conservative element that true conservatism at the moment requires … opposition to McCarthy.”
.. “If the democracies had moved against Hitler in 1936, for instance, ‘we wouldn’t know today whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist or whether he was in fact a maniac. The democracies learned that he was in fact a maniac. They had certainty but they had to pay for that with a few million lives.’”
.. Ferguson calls this concept the “problem of conjecture”: acting before one is certain to avoid potential but uncertain consequences. This is the challenge policymakers face constantly—whether dealing with Vladimir Putin or the threat of nuclear terrorism from ISIS or al-Qaeda. What price are we willing to pay for greater certainty of an adversary’s intentions and capabilities?
Russia: Battle of Kulikovo
The Battle of Kulikovo (Russian: Мамаево побоище, Донское побоище, Куликовская битва, битва на Куликовом поле) was fought between the armies of the Golden Horde under the command of Mamai, and various Russian principalities under the united command of Prince Dmitri of Moscow. The battle took place on 8 September 1380, at the Kulikovo Field near the Don River (now Tula Oblast) and was won by Dmitri, who became known as Donskoy (of the Don) after the battle.
Although the victory did not end the Mongol domination over Russia, it is widely regarded by Russian historians as the turning point when Mongol influence began to wane and Muscovite power to rise. This process eventually led to Muscovite independence and formation of the modern Russian state. According to the Russian historian Lev Gumilev, “Russians went to the Kulikovo field as citizens of various principalities and returned as a united Russian nation”.[6]