UNIVAC's birthday

 There's an old joke that goes like this: A bunch of scientists created a huge machine capable of complex calculations and called it UNIVAC. Eager to test their invention, they asked it, "Is there a God?" The vacuum tubes hummed and the tape spools spun for several minutes. Finally, the machine spit out a little card, on which was written, "THERE IS NOW." On this day in 1951, the Remington Rand Corporation signed a contract to deliver the first UNIVAC computer to the U.S. Census Bureau. UNIVAC I (which stands for Universal Automatic Computer) took up 350 square feet of floor space — about the size of a one-car garage — and was the first American commercial computer. It was designed for the rapid and relatively simple arithmetic calculation of numbers needed by businesses, rather than the complex calculations required of the sciences. It was intended to compete against IBM's punch card-reading computers, but UNIVAC read magnetic tapes, not punch cards, so a special "card to tape converter" had to be designed.

Though the government contract was signed, and a ceremony held, on March 31, the computer wasn't actually delivered until the following December; this was because there was only one UNIVAC I, and Remington Rand wanted to use it for demonstration purposes. So they asked for and received time to build a second computer.

The government was the first big customer of the UNIVACs, with subsequent models going to the Air Force, the Army Map Service, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Navy. The first commercial sale was to General Electric, for their Appliance Division, followed soon after by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, in 1954. There were 46 UNIVAC I's built and delivered, in all.

The computer first came to the notice of the general public in 1952, when CBS used one to predict the outcome of the presidential election. UNIVAC correctly picked Eisenhower and predicted his electoral count within 1 percent, but the network didn't release the results until after the election was called, so as not to affect the outcome.

Barbara Baker

 

Many images may be pictured on her Macarons (not macaroons!)

It's Women's History Month, so we'll be spotlighting some of our favorite femalepreneurs all month long!

Today, we celebrate Barbara Baker, owner of @moonlitmacaronsbybarbara. After 35 years in the music industry, working with The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Cher, Prince, and other artists, Barbara started her own baking business and things quickly took off! "As the world began to shut down due to the pandemic, a dream began to shimmer in the Florida moonlight," she writes on her website.

Thanks FB group LocalShops1

Barbara Baker is married to my son, Marty. She often will be found at festivals, Comi-cons, fairs, etc...indoors or out, in the Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties of Florida. Look for a purple tent if it's outside!

Macarons are temperature sensitive, so she always has a cooler full of them. They can't be shipped easily (without dry ice) so I go visit and store up on them!

Two Barbaras...myself and B.Baker!

Get to Know Us

We are a small-batch macaron baking company located in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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All of our flavors are created and baked by Barbara Baker, known for her creative designs and flavors. We hand-deliver to markets, weddings, office parties, dessert tables, events, festivals and homes near you and do curbside pickup for your convenience as well.

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Corporate clients include Rolling Oats, Local Shops 1, Jannus Live, St Pete College, Werk Gallery & More.

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We proudly serve Pinellas, Hillsborough and Manatee counties.

My Ferrero Roche flavor is my signature, award-winning flavor: Chocolate Ganache with hazelnut cream. Topped with organic toasted hazelnuts and golden flecks, so it looks as good as it tastes.

Singer/songwriter Tracy Chapman

 

Tracy Chapman (born March 30, 1964) is an American singer-songwriter, widely known for her hit singles "Fast Car" (1988) and "Give Me One Reason" (1995).

She was signed to Elektra Records by Bob Krasnow in 1987. The following year she released her debut album, Tracy Chapman, which became a commercial success, boosted by her appearance at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert, and was certified 6× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The album received six Grammy Award nominations, including one for Album of the Year, three of which she won: Best New Artist, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for her single "Fast Car", and Best Contemporary Folk Album. In 1989, she released her second album, Crossroads, which earned her an additional Grammy Award nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Her third album, Matters of the Heart, followed in 1992.

Her fourth album, New Beginning, was released in 1995 and became another worldwide success. It was certified 5× platinum by the RIAA and yielded the hit single "Give Me One Reason", which earned her the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song. Five years would pass before the release of her fifth album, Telling Stories (2000). Let It Rain and Where You Live followed in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Her most recent studio album, Our Bright Future, was released in 2008. The remastered compilation album Greatest Hits, which she curated,^[2] was released in 2015.

In 2023, Chapman became the first black person to score a country number one with a solo composition, and to win the Country Music Association Award for Song of the Year, when Luke Combs covered her song "Fast Car".

Singing Fast Car

Singing Give Me One Reason

Ceramic sculptor - Ruth Duckworth

 The daughter of Ellen, a Lutheran, and Edgar, a Jewish lawyer, she left Germany to study at the Liverpool College of Art in 1936, as she could not study art in her home country under the restrictions imposed by Nazi Germany.^[1][2][4] She later studied at the Hammersmith School of Art and at the City and Guilds of London Art School, where she learned stone carving. Using these skills, she launched her sculptural career and began specializing in tombstone carvings.^[1] When she applied for art school, she was asked if she wanted to focus on drawing, painting, or sculpting. She insisted that she wanted to study all of them; after all, she replied, Michelangelo had done so.

Ruth Duckworth (April 10, 1919 – October 18, 2009) was a modernist sculptor who specialized in ceramics, she worked in stoneware, porcelain, and bronze. Her sculptures are mostly untitled. She is best known for Clouds over Lake Michigan, a wall sculpture.

Untitled porcelain sculpture by Ruth Duckworth, 1998, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Inspired by an art exhibit of works from India, Duckworth studied ceramic art at the Central School of Arts and Crafts starting in 1956. While her early ceramic work was in traditional forms, she soon started to produce more abstract works. Her work started to fall into a middle ground that wasn't the typical ceramics thrown on a wheel and fired in a kiln or the standard forms of sculpture that used metal, stone or wood. As described by ceramist Tony Franks, Duckworth's style of "Organic clay had arrived like a harvest festival, and would remain firmly in place well into the '70s". While ceramists such as Bernard Leach rejected her work, other artists in the UK started adopting her style of hand worked clay objects.

She characterized porcelain ceramic as "a very temperamental material. I'm constantly fighting it. It wants to lie down, you want it to stand up. I have to make it do what it doesn't want to do. But there's no other material that so effectively communicates both fragility and strength."

In 1964 Duckworth accepted a teaching post at the University of Chicago's Midway Studios. She remained there through the next decade, eventually deciding to settle permanently in the United States, her third homeland. Her mural series Earth, Water and Sky (1967–68) was commissioned by the university for its Geophysical Sciences Building and included topographical designs based on satellite photographs with porcelain clouds overhead. Her 240-square-foot mural Clouds Over Lake Michigan (1976) is a figurative depiction of the Lake Michigan watershed. It was formerly on display at the Chicago Board Options Exchange Building., and is now on display at Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

SOURCE: Wikipedia

Potter woman - Maria Martinez

 

Maria Poveka Montoya Martinez (c. 1887 – July 20, 1980) was a Puebloan artist who created internationally known pottery.

 Martinez (born Maria Poveka Montoya), her husband Julian, and other family members, including her son Popovi Da, examined traditional Pueblo pottery styles and techniques to create pieces which reflect the Pueblo people's legacy of fine artwork and crafts. The works of Maria Martinez, and especially her black ware pottery, are in the collections of many museums, including the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and more.

Maria Martinez was from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, a community located 20 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. At an early age, she learned pottery skills from her Aunt Nicolasa and recalls this "learning by seeing" starting at age eleven, as she watched her aunt, grandmother, and father's cousin work on their pottery during the 1890s. 

During this time, Spanish tinware and Anglo enamelware had become readily available in the Southwestern United States, making the creation of traditional cooking and serving pots less necessary. Traditional pottery-making techniques were becoming less common, but Martinez and her family experimented with different techniques and helped preserve the cultural art.

[Two archaeologists] ...encouraged local potters to recreate the ancient pots that were found near the pueblo from 1907 to 1909, and [ ] saw [Maria] as the perfect Pueblo potter to bring this idea to life. This work was distinct from, but invariably confused with (in the popular narrative) the matte black on polished blackware that Maria and her husband experimented with and perfected on their own and for which there was no prior precedent, contrary to popular myth.

After much trial and error, Maria successfully produced a black ware pot. The first pots for a museum were fired around 1913. These pots were undecorated, unsigned, and of a generally rough quality. The earliest record of this pottery was in a July 1920 exhibition held at the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Creating black ware pottery is a long process that consists of many steps requiring patience and skill. Six distinct processes occur before the pot is finished. According to Susan Peterson in The Living Tradition of Maria Martinez, these steps include, "finding and collecting the clay, forming a pot, scraping and sanding the pot to remove surface irregularities, applying the iron-bearing slip and burnishing it to a high sheen with a smooth stone, decorating the pot with another slip, and firing the pot.

Maria and Julian decorating pottery 1912.

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When I was studying ceramics in art school at college I tried making the black on black technique - the stone smoothing of the surface took a very long time, and then it was fired in a pit fire. Unfortunately my pot broke in the firing.

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Today's quote:

Sometimes finding the answer is as easy as taking a break and stepping back from the situation.

Dorothy Thompson, journalist

Remembering Dorothy Thompson, the ardent Zionist who went to Palestine and suddenly changed her mind about Zionism. Dorothy Thompson is often mentioned these days by my liberal friends and sites for her 1941 Harper's Magazine article, "Who Goes Nazi?" in which she describes a parlour game where one tries, at a party, observing people's words and behaviour, who would be likely to collaborate after a Nazi putsch, and who resist.

In 1930, Dorothy Thompson joined her husband, Sinclair Lewis, in Sweden, where he was accepting his Nobel Prize in literature. While Lewis was famous for becoming the first American to receive the honor, Thompson was a lesser-known writer. At the time, Thompson was vigorously trying to reignite her career as a foreign correspondent in Berlin, which she'd paused since becoming a mother. And within a few years, she would be personally banished from Nazi Germany by Adolf Hitler and become a stalwart presence for millions of radio listeners during World War II.

Thompson first encountered the Nazi movement in the early 1920s when she was a Berlin-based correspondent for Philadelphia's Public Ledger. Hitler made headlines in 1923 for his failed coup attempt in Munich, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Thompson immediately sought to interview Hitler about the growing Nazi party.

"No one was taking them all that seriously in terms of their taking power," Peter Kurth, author of American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson, told Radio Diaries. "But she kept her eye on them."

In 1931, Hitler's press secretary organized an interview between the two at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin. In an article that Thompson wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine, which became a book a year later titled I Saw Hitler!, she said that meeting him was unimpressive.

"He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure," Thompson wrote. "He is the very prototype of the Little Man."

In addition to mocking Hitler's demeanor, Thompson sounded the alarm on the Nazi party's discriminatory policies. She highlighted his penchant for "the old racial prejudice" and wrote that "'down with the Jews!' was one of the first planks in his program."

"You know, there's that expression: 'Man's greatest fear is to be laughed at by a woman,'" says Karine Walther, associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar and author of "Dorothy Thompson and American Zionism." "This is a man who is so concerned with power and his image. She is able to say things about him that are humiliating. And I think this is why she gets kicked out of the country."

Thompson didn't predict that Hitler would become chancellor in 1933. According to Kurth, in an attempt to get rid of his rivals, Hitler promptly expelled Thompson from Nazi Germany in the summer of 1934.

"Dorothy was at her hotel in Berlin, and the Gestapo knocked on the hotel door and handed her papers saying she had 24 hours to leave the country," Kurth says.

Thompson returned to the United States in September 1934 to fanfare from reporters, according to a New York Times article. Her expulsion, combined with the outbreak of World War II, brought Thompson recognition in her own right, not just as the wife of Sinclair Lewis. She began a column with the New York Herald Tribune called "On the Record" in 1936. By August 1939, just before the start of WWII, she was broadcasting on NBC. She broadcast every night during the beginning of the war, before transitioning to Sunday nights.[continued below]

Thompson, who was ejected from a German American Bund rally for heckling, received an ovation as she spoke at the "tolerance meeting" in New York City on March 3, 1939. The meeting was held in response to the pro-Nazi Bund rally. Murray/Becker AP

But she had a long career, including her ardent Zionism and postwar activism for the establishment of the state of Israel.

That began to change after she actually went to Palestine and witnessed what was going on: "Thompson's advocacy for Jewish refugees was inseparable from her advocacy for Zionism, the idea that Jewish people should have a nation in their ancestral homeland. By the end of the war, she hailed the World Zionist movement and was being honored by prominent Zionist agencies, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

"'Dorothy was an avid, convinced, devoted Zionist, but she hadn't been [to Palestine],' Kurth says.

"Walther says that Thompson visited Palestine in the summer of 1945, days before Germany's surrender from World War II.

"Dorothy went to Palestine and saw refugees of the Palestinian population being forced off their own land," says Kurth. "She saw a people uprooted."

"Walther adds that it reminded Thompson of 'the kind of hatred and violence that she'd seen in Germany.'

"'She said that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was a "recipe for perpetual war,"' says Kurth.

"Thompson returned to the United States and began to ask questions about the Zionist movement.

"'The situation there is not the way it has been presented by many of the Zionists,' Thompson wrote in a 1946 letter to Ted Thackrey, editor at the New York Post.

"In 1947, the Post promptly dropped her column. In the aftermath, Thompson wrote of being targeted by 'radical Zionists.'

"'She faces really immediate pushback from American Zionist organizations, as well as newspaper editors, and they accused her of antisemitism,' says Walther.

"In 'Dorothy Thompson and American Zionism,' Walther writes that Thompson's advocacy for Palestinian refugees even extended to lending her voice to relief films. She participated in one called Sands of Sorrow, calling on the United States to intervene in the Palestinian refugee crisis. She also founded the American Friends of the Middle East, to encourage dignified relations between the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries. However, she found her job prospects decreasing.

"The New York Herald Tribune had dropped her column in 1940, and she had not been able to get a radio contract after 1945.

"'She really did struggle to find her place after that,' Kurth says. Toward the end of her life, Thompson turned inward and started working on a memoir. But in 1961, she died of a heart attack before she could finish it. She was 67 years old.

"'There is a great quote, which she makes at the end of her life,' says Walther. 'She says, "I had to speak out about this" — meaning attacks on Palestinian civilians — "for the same reason I had to speak out about Hitler. But my Zionist friends do not seem to understand the universality of simple moral principles."'"

SOURCE: Robert Scott Horton on Facebook

Thompson's advocacy for Jewish refugees was inseparable from her advocacy for Zionism, the idea that Jewish people should have a nation in their ancestral homeland. By the end of the war, she hailed the World Zionist movement and was being honored by prominent Zionist agencies, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

"Dorothy was an avid, convinced, devoted Zionist, but she hadn't been [to Palestine]," Kurth says.

Walther says that Thompson visited Palestine in the summer of 1945, days before Germany's surrender from World War II. 

"Dorothy went to Palestine and saw refugees of the Palestinian population being forced off their own land," says Kurth. "She saw a people uprooted."

Walther adds that it reminded Thompson of "the kind of hatred and violence that she'd seen in Germany."

"She said that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was a 'recipe for perpetual war,'" says Kurth.

Thompson returned to the United States and began to ask questions about the Zionist movement.

"The situation there is not the way it has been presented by many of the Zionists," Thompson wrote in a 1946 letter to Ted Thackrey, editor at the New York Post. 

In 1947, the Post promptly dropped her column. In the aftermath, Thompson wrote of being targeted by "radical Zionists."

"She faces really immediate pushback from American Zionist organizations, as well as newspaper editors, and they accused her of antisemitism," says Walther.

SOURCE: NPR All Things considered Mar 14, 2025

This story was produced by Mycah Hazel and the team at Radio Diaries. It was edited by Deborah George, Joe Richman and Ben Shapiro. You can find more stories on the Radio Diaries podcast.