The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere 'calculating machines.' It holds a position wholly its own, and the considerations it suggests are more interesting in their nature.
I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine.
As any parent knows, part of your mind is always engaged - wondering and worrying that everything is okay and calculating all the stuff that has to get done in the course of a day. When the children are asleep in their beds, I can go where I really need to go in my head.
'Easter' is a movable event, calculated by the relative positions of sun and moon, an impossible way of fixing year by year the anniversary of a historical event, but a very natural and indeed inevitable way of calculating a solar festival. These changing dates do not point to the history of a man, but to the hero of a solar myth.
As mathematics had been my best subject at school, my parents proposed - and I accepted - studies at the University of Lund in mathematics, statistics, and economics. The choice of the latter subject is said to be due to the fact that at the age of five years, I was very fond of calculating the cost of the various cakes my mother used to bake.
If you had a robot out here calculating all the variables, I think you could potentially get really close to perfection, but from a human perspective, there's no way to understand all the wind. The wind is the biggest variable, and the grass length is the second biggest variable that we just don't have control over and never will.
If the assumptions used in calculating energy are changed, then this seriously affects the final result, even though the same body of data might be used.
I don't try to be completely calculating in everything I say and do, but there's no way I'm going to talk. There's no reason to. And that's why I'm such a boring interview, because I don't go for the shock value, or smartass answers.
I'm always calculating what I want to do, who I want to be, what I want to accomplish. I don't need to worry about that - that's always there on a slow simmer. The muscle I have to work on is being more present.
Computers do the calculating to allow people to transform the world.
