Positively 4th Street — Dylan

It's clear you don't like the show or Sorkin, but I think you're missing the sanctimonious but nonetheless true point the episode was trying to make. There really is a thing called "journalism" that dying in the U.S. in 2014. In the television space, the start of that decline long preceded the growth of the Internet…

YES! Also Buckley (Lover, you should have come over).

It's true. I have always hated Sheila!

Whether or not Ada Lovelace's mathematical talents were on par with Mary Somerville's is a question beyond my scope of knowledge. But what is most definitely true is that Ada Lovelace documented the "cutting edge" notion that a machine could have a capacity beyond mere calculation: to store data and run different…

Ha, well I won't argue that she and her whole set were eccentric to say the least, but that doesn't mean she didn't understand mathematics, and I think it's rather unfair to judge someone's acuity in a subject solely based on their correspondence while learning about that subject. Recall that Babbage et al. also…

Actually, Stein's Ada takedown has largely been debunked, see http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Ada_an…. On the Grace Hopper matter, you are entirely in the right.

Well Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Ha! All Hail The David Mitchell Reading Party. I just downloaded Ghostwritten and number9dream — haven't read those yet — so Hilary Mantel killing off Thatcher will just have to wait until after the uprising.

Just started The Furies: A Novel by Natalie Haynes, and then it's on to Hilary Mantel's new short story collection.

Just finished it and it's fantastic — If you haven't read the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, that was also very good, though a much different kind of novel.

Joe Biden is everything that is right in America.

Ew! I just hate Scott Pelley — Everytime I look at him, I see William Hurt pretending to cry in Broadcast News.

Valid criticism, but I will note that this is the only cancer novel I have ever read that mentions fast fourier transforms. Plus, it's beautifully written.

I don't think she was drinking or popping anything illicit—she looks too sane. But that dude at the start of the clip looks like the SF Bay Area's own Marty Gonzalez pre-grey!

@Ipomoea: You should definitely read Committed. It's not exclusively focused on her post-EPL relationship, though that is the hook. She offers up a lot of interesting personal and family history, but the book is essentially and exploration of the institution of marriage and its role in relationships, what it has meant…

When are you going to do the Pigman!

The episode also used a recent story from the Smithsonian magazine about a dude who was cutting rare historical maps out of library books and selling them on Ebay.