Even the most casual anime watcher is bound to notice the frequent appearances of power lines. Some folk at Tumblr have been collected them at a dedicated Powerlines in Anime page. Contributions welcome!
They are prevalent in old cartoons as well -along with TV aerials. Before the 50s, lots of rural places were still getting electrified. Quite a few rural places still had outhouses till the 40s, so electric wires and TV aerials were signs of progress/modernity.
I would wager a majority of the people who have complaints about electric wires and poles would pipe up the moment their electricity went out. Yes, we can have both (have electricity without the wires, but people should have perspective.
Back in the 40's having the electric company put up poles and bring electricity to town was a moment of celebration not curmudgeonry.
IIRC (read the book ages ago when much younger) , the theory was that by using the 56 Aubrey holes to count, say, by moving a pole from one hole to another once a year, an eclipse could be predicted to occur every 18th or 19th year.
I always wondered why this was never simulated, and I guess the answer is that it would not work.
What about his contributions to human civilization? ;)
He got a world record score on the Tempest arcade game [1], then developed an AI which beat his own record[2]. His biggest failure was, that after rebuilding TEMPEST from arcade machine ROMS, he added levels to the game but never made them public [3].
Nifty little project! It doesn't seem to be much of a leap to have this on one's web page so it runs when the page is loaded. It does require knowledge of the viewers' position though.
I remember hacking GORILLA.BAS code, which was on our office computers, to randomize gravity for my opponent, the result being they could not accurately predict where their bananas would go. I was an unbeatable legend for a while.
For a while I worked at what was then the Sperry Rand Corporation (now Unisys) which had some pride in their heritage as the descendant of the Univac Corporation founded by ENIAC inventors Eckert and Mauchly. In a glass case there was a vacuum tube circuit said to be a memory unit of the original ENIAC. No one seemed to know much about it, casting doubt on the claimed provenance of the device.
The tube circuit resembled the ones shown in the photo linked below (although none of those in the photo are from ENIAC).
If it looked like the one on the left then it was probably an ENIAC decade ring counter. It could store 1 digit from 0 to 9 and could selectively count pulses to increment the value, with carry to the next one. The 10 tubes on the right (out of 36) were the actual flip flops of the counter.
https://powerlinesinanime.tumblr.com/