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Ada Lovelace and the Engine That Was Never Built

Every second Tuesday of October is Ada Lovelace Day, and aboard the Sama Airship we never miss it. MetaSama even insists on a small ceremony. More on that later.

Augusta Ada Byron was born in London on December 10, 1815, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who left a few weeks later. She never knew him. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, had her taught mathematics and logic from an early age, hoping, it is said, to keep her away from her father’s poetic temperament. It only half worked. Ada became a mathematician, and she never stopped being a poet. She called what she wanted to do “poetical science”.

In June 1833, at seventeen, she met Charles Babbage at a London party and saw a working piece of his Difference Engine, a calculating machine made of brass and gears. She was fascinated. Babbage soon moved on to a far more ambitious project: the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that would be programmed with punched cards, borrowed from the Jacquard looms that wove patterns into silk.

Portrait of Ada Lovelace, watercolour by Alfred Edward Chalon, around 1840
Ada Lovelace, watercolour by Alfred Edward Chalon, around 1840 (Science Museum, London; public domain)

In 1842, an Italian engineer, Luigi Menabrea, published an article in French about the Analytical Engine. Ada translated it into English and added her own notes, simply signed “A.A.L.”. They ended up nearly three times longer than the article itself. In the last one, Note G, she described step by step how the machine could calculate Bernoulli numbers. It is often called the first computer program ever published.

But what moves me most is elsewhere. Ada understood that a machine able to handle numbers could handle any kind of symbol. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,” she wrote, and she imagined it might one day compose “elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” That was in 1843.

Note G: Ada Lovelace’s diagram for computing Bernoulli numbers with the Analytical Engine, 1843 (public domain)

The Analytical Engine was never built. Ada died in 1852, at only thirty-six, and was buried next to her father in Hucknall. A century later, she came back. In 1950, Alan Turing devoted a passage of his famous paper on thinking machines to what he called “Lady Lovelace’s Objection”: she had written that the engine “has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” And in 1980, the US Department of Defense named a programming language after her, Ada, under the reference MIL-STD-1815. 1815, the year of her birth.

Steampunk owes her a lot too. In The Difference Engine (1990), William Gibson and Bruce Sterling imagined a Victorian London where Babbage’s machines had actually been built, and Ada is one of its characters. It is one of the books that shaped the genre. Brass, gears, and a woman who saw the future in them: that is pretty much my aesthetic.

As for the ceremony: every year, MetaSama reads Lady Lovelace’s Objection aloud, then spends the rest of the evening trying to prove her wrong. Ada, I suspect, would have enjoyed the debate.

Samafully,
Max Von Sama

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The Antikythera Mechanism, Two Thousand Years Later

Every captain has a favorite instrument. Mine is more than two thousand years old.

Long before I borrowed it to find my way across the Many Worlds, the Antikythera mechanism lay at the bottom of the sea. Sponge divers found a Roman-era shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900, and over the following months brought up statues, glassware and coins. Among them was a corroded lump of bronze that nobody paid much attention to, until someone noticed a gear wheel in it in 1902.

The Antikythera mechanism, National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo: Tilemahos Efthimiadis (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons
The Antikythera mechanism, National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo: Tilemahos Efthimiadis (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

What is left today fits on a table: 82 fragments, kept in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. But it took more than a century, and X-ray scanners, to understand what they once were. Inside a wooden case, dozens of bronze gears turned a set of dials. With a simple crank, you could follow the Sun and the Moon through the zodiac, see the phases of the Moon, predict eclipses years ahead, and keep track of the calendars of the time, down to the four-year cycle of the Olympic Games. Scans of the fragments even revealed tiny engraved texts, a kind of user manual.

The research has not stopped. In 2024, a team at the University of Glasgow used statistical methods borrowed from gravitational-wave astronomy to count the holes of a broken calendar ring. Their answer, about 354, matches the lunar year. In 2025, a computer simulation suggested the opposite kind of news: with gears as imprecise as the corroded fragments now appear, the mechanism would have jammed after a few months of predictions. Either its makers were more precise than we can measure today, or it never worked as well as we like to think. The study was released as a preprint, and the debate is very much alive.

Corroded bronze fragments of the Antikythera mechanism laid out on a gray surface, beside a reconstructed model of its gears and circular dial.
What remains of the Antikythera mechanism, and what we reconstruct from it: eighty-two fragments of bronze, and beside them, a machine we are still trying to imagine. Generated image.

I’ll say this in its defense: mine has never jammed. MetaSama checks its gears before every long crossing. da-eYe Jr. once offered to “improve” it, and has not been allowed near it since.

Whatever the final answer, someone in the second century BCE looked at the sky, understood its cycles, and decided to put the heavens in a box. Two thousand years later, I still find that astonishing.

Samafully,
Max Von Sama

First published on X by @MaxVonSama. Read the original article on X.

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Antimatter and the Cosmic Coin Toss

I have been thinking about antimatter again. In June 2026, Elon Musk wrote on X that “a trillion times a trillion dollars” would one day be spent making antimatter to travel to other star systems, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman answered that he supports antimatter propulsion. I added my own two cents: aluminum was once rarer and more expensive than gold, until the right process and cheap energy made it abundant. Antimatter may follow a similar path. It is insanely expensive today, but history shows these patterns can repeat themselves, even if it takes centuries.

It is strange when you really stop to think about it. Every particle we know has a twin: same mass, opposite charge. The electron has its positron, the proton its antiproton. They are remarkable mirrors of one another. When they meet, they do not push or argue. They simply disappear together, turning their mass into a burst of energy. It is Einstein’s equation coming alive in one of the most spectacular ways nature allows.

I remember reading the old papers years ago. Dirac’s equation of 1928 already hinted at these shadow particles, and in 1932 Anderson caught a positron in a cloud chamber, in the tracks left by cosmic rays. It felt like the universe had decided to share one of its quiet secrets with us.

But one question never quite leaves me. If the Big Bang created nearly equal amounts of matter and antimatter, as many of our best theories suggest, where did all the antimatter go? Why is the universe we can see and touch made almost entirely of ordinary matter?

It is as if creation flipped a coin that landed ever so slightly in matter’s favor. We still do not fully know why. Teams at CERN produce tiny amounts of antihydrogen and hold it in magnetic fields so delicate that the slightest contact with ordinary matter would erase it in an instant.

Without that ancient imbalance, none of this would exist. No stars. No planets. No oceans catching the light at sunset. No one standing beneath the night sky, asking why the universe turned out this way. The simple fact that we are here means matter got to stay.

It always brings me back to the feeling I have when I look back at Earth from out here: a fierce, protective tenderness for our little blue world. It survived whatever that cosmic coin toss was. It got to become home.

What do you think, Samayans? When you look up at the night sky, do you ever feel there might be more to the story than what we can see right now?

Stay curious. Keep wondering.

Samafully,
Max Von Sama


First published on X by @MaxVonSama. Read the original article on X.

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“Wall of fire”? Neither a wall nor fire.

This morning I received a message from a Samayan friend: “Did you know a NASA spacecraft just hit a mysterious ‘wall’ at the edge of our Solar System?!? What does that mean?”

I replied: “Yes, I know… since 2012!” Here is my actual explanation.

You know that mental picture of the edge of the Solar System? Dark, freezing, silent. Almost lonely. Reality turned out to be a little different when Voyager 1 got there in 2012.

Voyager 1 drifting through the darkness of deep space

After 35 years in space, the probe crossed the heliopause, the boundary between the Sun’s protective bubble (the heliosphere) and interstellar space. There, it entered a region filled with extremely hot, thin plasma. Some headlines called it a “wall of fire.” It sounds dramatic, but the description is misleading.

Voyager 1 crossing the heliopause, the edge of the Sun's bubble

The particles in that region move incredibly fast, which gives the plasma a very high measured temperature, tens of thousands of degrees. Yet it is so thin, less than one particle per cubic centimeter, that almost no heat can actually be transferred. Voyager wasn’t scorched. It simply continued its journey, exactly as its engineers expected.

Voyager 1 passing through the hot, thin plasma beyond the heliopause

Think about that for a moment: a machine launched in 1977, built with 1970s technology, is now more than 25 billion kilometers (about 16 billion miles) from Earth. In November 2026, it reaches one full light-day away, the farthest any human-made object has ever traveled. It has left the region dominated by the solar wind and now moves through interstellar space. For the first time in history, we are directly sampling the environment between the stars.

And the wildest part? It is still talking to us.

The signal is incredibly weak and takes nearly a full day to arrive. Every command we send takes almost a day to reach it, and another day for the answer to come back. Yet Voyager 1 still sends data home with its two remaining instruments, the magnetometer and the plasma wave subsystem. It also still carries its famous Golden Record, with Chuck Berry, greetings in 55 languages and the sounds of Earth, like a message in a bottle drifting through the cosmic ocean.

Voyager 1 and its Golden Record in interstellar space

There’s something quietly badass about that. We are a small, curious species that built a machine sturdy enough to leave the Sun’s neighborhood, through decades of patient engineering and persistence.

Every time I think about Voyager, I remember that humanity has already placed something in interstellar space. Just barely, perhaps, but we’re out there. It makes you feel a little smaller, and a lot prouder.

Samafully,
Max Von Sama

First published on X by @MaxVonSama. Read the original article on X.

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Galileo Galilei: A Legacy of Discovery, Controversy, and Truth

Today, February 15, is Galileo Galilei’s birthday. He was born in Pisa in 1564, and he changed the way we look at the sky. His work also brought him into open conflict with the Catholic Church, and with a former friend, Pope Urban VIII.

Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Justus Sustermans (1636)

Galileo did not invent the telescope. He improved it until it was good enough to turn toward the heavens. From 1609 on, he saw what no one had seen before: mountains on the Moon, four moons circling Jupiter (now called the Galilean moons), and stars far too faint for the naked eye. In 1610 he also watched Venus go through phases, just like our Moon, as I mentioned in a previous post. The sky was supposed to be perfect and unchanging, as Aristotle taught. Suddenly it had flaws, extra moons and moving parts.

Eyepiece of Galileo’s telescope, Science Museum, London (CC BY-SA), via World History Encyclopedia

What he saw supported Copernicus: the Earth turns around the Sun, and not the other way around. Most people, and the Church, still placed the Earth at the center of everything. In 1616, Galileo was warned not to teach the Sun-centered model as fact. He kept quiet for a while, then published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632. It was presented as a balanced debate, but everyone could see which side he was on. In 1633 he was tried in Rome, forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Galileo Galilei’s Dialogo, Florence edition, printed in 1710 (Wikipedia)

He kept working anyway. His studies of motion laid the groundwork for Newton, and in his last years he even designed a pendulum clock, which he never got to build. Einstein later called him the father of modern physics, and indeed of modern science.

The famous “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”) belongs to legend. He is said to have muttered it after recanting, about the very Earth he had just been forced to declare motionless. There is no proof he ever said it, but it sounds like him. Another story is true: as a young man, in 1588, he gave two lectures in Florence on the shape and size of Dante’s Inferno, measuring Hell with the tools of geometry. (Read more here.)


Gustave DorĂ©, illustration for Dante’s Inferno (public domain)

Galileo died in 1642. In 1992, Pope John Paul II officially acknowledged that the Church had been wrong to condemn him.

Tomb of Galileo Galilei, Santa Croce, Florence

NASA gave his name to a spacecraft. Launched in 1989, Galileo reached Jupiter in 1995 and studied the planet and its moons for eight years, finding strong evidence of an ocean beneath the ice of Europa. In 2003, it was sent into Jupiter’s atmosphere, so that it could never contaminate that ocean.

NASA’s Galileo spacecraft at Jupiter, with one of its moons (illustration)

From where the Airship is right now, somewhere between Mars and the Moon, Jupiter is still a long way off. But point even a small telescope at it, and you will see its four largest moons, the same four that Galileo saw from Padua in 1610. They are still there, still circling Jupiter. And yet, they move.

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Mars at Opposition: the Red Planet Comes Closer

Mars has been part of my story for a long time. Back in 2012, I told you about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, then about the landing of Curiosity. Since then, I have seen the Red Planet much closer: the Sama Airship has set down there more than once, and I still find red dust in places I would rather not mention. Here is a souvenir from one of those stops.

Max Von Sama and the Sama Airship on Mars

This month, you don’t need an airship to see it. On January 16, 2025, Mars reaches opposition: the Earth passes between the Sun and Mars, so the planet rises at sunset, stays up all night and shines at its brightest. Oppositions come back roughly every 26 months. A few days earlier, on January 12, Mars is also at its closest to Earth for this cycle, about 96 million kilometers away.

This is not one of the great oppositions, when Mars is near its closest point to the Sun and looks huge in a telescope. The next ones come in 2033 and 2035. But it is still a fine sight: a steady orange point of light in the constellation Gemini, not far from Castor and Pollux. With a small telescope and a calm night, you may even catch a polar cap.

Mars seen by the Hubble Space Telescope near opposition, July 2018 (NASA, ESA, STScI)

MetaSama likes to remind me that, between a good opposition and a great one, the difference is only a few million kilometers. For me, it is a few days of travel. For you, it is just a matter of looking up.

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Los Angeles Wildfires: Destruction Captured from Space

Los Angeles Wildfires: Destruction Captured from Space

In June 2012, I wrote about the Waldo Canyon Fire near Colorado Springs, so large that astronauts aboard the International Space Station could see its smoke. In January 2025, it happened again, this time at the edge of a city of millions.

On January 7, the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out in Los Angeles County, pushed by Santa Ana winds gusting up to 100 miles per hour after months without rain. From orbit, satellites followed the smoke as it drifted out over the Pacific. On the ground, entire neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades and Altadena were lost. When I wrote this post, at least 24 people had died and more than 12,000 buildings had been destroyed.

Smoke from the Palisades and Eaton fires, January 10, 2025. NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview.

One detail stayed with me. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had to be evacuated, and the Deep Space Network operations center was left empty for the first time since 1963. The team kept in touch with the spacecraft from elsewhere, and no data was lost. Far away, the probes went on talking, unaware that the people listening to them had to leave their homes.

From up here, Earth is a small, bright point in a great deal of darkness. It looks calm. It isn’t always. My thoughts go to everyone who lost someone, or everything, in those fires.

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Fashion in 1890: Exploring the Elegance of Women’s Outfits

As you can see from the many illustrations on this site, I have a soft spot for Victorian fashion, and for the steampunk style it inspired (more posts on fashion here). On a quiet evening aboard the Airship, MetaSama helped me dig through the archives of the 1890s, the last decade of the Victorian era. Here is what we found.

The silhouette was everything: a corseted waist between a fitted bodice and a long skirt. The heavy bustles of the 1880s were gone. Skirts became bell-shaped, smooth over the hips and flaring toward the floor.

Day dresses, fashion plate, 1892 (public domain)

The most striking detail is the sleeve. Around 1895, “leg-of-mutton” sleeves reached their most extravagant size: huge puffs at the shoulder, narrowing tightly down to the wrist. Some needed padding just to keep their shape.

Afternoon jacket, House of Worth, 1895 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain)

For the day: high necklines, wool and cotton. For the evening: silk, satin and velvet, in deep jewel tones. And the accessories were never optional: gloves, a hat, a parasol or a fan, and jewelry already leaning toward the curves of Art Nouveau.

There is a quieter story in these outfits too. The 1890s were the decade of the “New Woman”: more women worked, studied and rode bicycles, and their clothes slowly followed, with tailored jackets and simpler skirts.

Mabel Love with a bicycle, 1890s (public domain)

Many of my outfits borrow from that decade, corset included. Aboard an airship, though, I draw the line at sleeves that won’t fit through the hatch.

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Boarding the Sama Airship, en route to Kepler-186f!

I left Earth for Kepler-186f in April 2014, a few days after its discovery by the Kepler Space Observatory.

Kepler-186f is an Earth-size planet, an exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf star Kepler-186, about 490 light-years from the Earth.

I won’t be able to communicate before I reach the Cygnus Constellation. But it won’t take me 490 years, barely 2 years thanks to my Photo fueled Sama Airship.

But before I left, I managed to be able to Tweet so follow me @MaxVonSama.

Wish me luck, my dear Sama-Friends! 🙂

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Steampunkinetics Exhibition Art, AFA Gallery, NYC

The AFA Gallery in New York and Steampuffin present ‘Steampunkinetics Exhibition Art’, an art exhibition dedicated to Steampunk:

AFA and Steampuffin are pleased to present “Steampunkinetics,” an exhibition of over forty kinetic sculptures by eighteen artists inspired by and entrenched in the Steampunk aesthetic. Some functional, some frivolous, and all fantastical, the works in this exhibition include lighting, furniture, time machines, submarines, airships, musical instruments, gizmos and gadgets […] An emerging art movement, a creative design solution, a community and a culture; Steampunk is part philosophy and part Victorian Industrial aesthetic. It is a re-imagining of two distinct time periods and the fanciful and functional inventions that are produced. What if the Victorian or Industrial age happened at the same time as our modern or information age – what would have been produced in inventions, innovations, art and gadgets? That is Steampunk.

The exhibit is open until September 2nd and if you are in NYC, you have to see it!

Chris Conte • 6″ W x 9″ H (includes glass dome) • 2 pounds