What Does the Moon Smell Like?: 151 Astounding Science Quizzes Read Online Free PDF Page A

that a pencil will write about 45,000 words. I suppose that depends on how long the words are, and how often you break the point and need to sharpen the pencil. But even with a few broken points, there should be enough lead in a pencil to write this book, provided you could do it in just one draft. (Good luck!) So how would you get pumped for the task of writing tens of thousands of words? You could do what famous novelist Ernest Hemingway did. He sharpened dozens of pencils to get himself in the mood to write. It obviously worked for him. I tried it, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with all those pencils when I sat down at my computer.
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    COMPUTER FIRSTS
    A Mouse in the House
    The first computer mouse looked like a small block of Q
    wood with a cable sticking out of it. Douglas
    Engelbart patented his wooden mouse in 1970. Back then, a mouse was just a novelty that you might find in a computer lab. The first popular computer mouse came with the Apple Macintosh released in 1984.
    When the designers were coming up with the new
    concept for the Mac mouse, they built various prototypes. The very first conceptual prototype was made by Dean Hovey.
    What did he use to make it? A . . .
    a) butter dish and a roll-on deodorant ball
    b) cardboard candy box and toy truck wheels
    c) juice box and a small rubber ball
    d) sardine tin and a catnip ball
    37
    A Mouse in the House
    What did he use to make it? A . . .
    A
    a) butter dish and a roll-on deodorant ball
    b) cardboard candy box and toy truck wheels
    c) juice box and a small rubber ball
    COMPUTER
    d) sardine tin and a catnip ball
    FIRSTS
    CORRECT ANSWER:
    a) butter dish and a roll-on deodorant ball
    Many prototypes followed, but the concept of the deodorant ball made it into the final design. The way that Hovey and his team designed the new mouse is called rapid prototyping. Instead of waiting for parts to be manufactured, they used whatever they could find to get the ball rolling, as it were. The Mac mouse was a hit with consumers, and a mouse population boom began when other companies started
    releasing their own versions. These days, there’s a mouse in almost every house.
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    First Computer Bug
    The Mark II Aiken relay computer at Harvard
    Q
    weighed about as much as a triceratops and
    measured about 15 metres (50 ft) by 18 metres (60 ft).
    This early computing behemoth was controlled by COMPUTER
    pre-punched paper tape, and could do basic math, but very slowly by today’s standards. Needless to say gigantic, one-of-a-kind computers like the Mark II FIRSTS
    Aiken relay have been “extinct” for decades, yet some of the terms we use today have been around since the early days of computing.
    What was the first computer bug?
    a) moth
    b) Trojan horse
    c) virus
    d) worm
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    First Computer Bug
    What was the first computer bug?
    A
    a) moth
    b) Trojan horse
    c) virus
    COMPUTER
    d) worm
    FIRSTS
    CORRECT ANSWER:
    a) moth
    When the Mark II Aiken relay computer kept making adding mistakes, its operators began to hunt for the cause of the malfunction. The computer had 13,000
    relays, so it could have taken a long time to find the problem. But incredibly, it only took 20 minutes to figure out what was tripping up the computer — a moth trapped between the metal contact points of Relay 70 in Panel F. They removed the moth and
    taped it into their logbook with the comment, “First actual case of bug being found.” The amusing story of how the operators had found the bug and “debugged”
    the computer got around. This was in 1945, and it was probably the first time that the term “debug” was used in reference to a computer.
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    First Computer Programmers
    If you wanted to set the ENIAC computer up in your Q
    living room, it would