Today is the hundredth anniversary of the World War I Christmas Truce, where a hundred thousand German and Allied soldiers left trenches, ventured into no-man's-land, played football, and sang carols.

This year, one of the speakers at the university Carols Services mentioned this fact, and attendees were provided with both English and German lyrics, to sing their choice. The resulting mess didn't have much in the way of distinct words, but the tune was unmistakeable and powerful, and there was something profoundly humbling about singing it in the Memorial Church, erected in honor of the men who gave their lives in that war and the next.

(Crimson photo gallery of the service -- you can spot the back of my head in the first photo if you look hard.)

There's something otherworldly about the idea, isn't there? -- that there was a day of the year where (literally) mortal enemies could treat each other as humans. Do you think that the warriors of the right and the left could keep such a peace in the battlegrounds of Facebook and Twitter today?

I can hope, but I can't hope confidently...

And, strangely enough, we're also currently in the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War (We're 100 years from WWI and only 150 from the Civil War? What?), which drove Longfellow to write: "It was as if an earthquake rent the hearth-stones of a continent... There is no peace on earth... for hate is strong, and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men."

But of course, that's not the end of the poem, which reads in full:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their

For reasons which are pretty opaque to me, apparently today has been designated Ada Lovelace Day? Which is kinda weird, since "October 14" appears nowhere on her Wikipedia page, but well, okay. At least it makes a convenient excuse to write a blog post, since she was a pretty damn cool person.

If you've never heard of Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace before, there are much better places to read about her life than on my blog. (Like what, Ross? Well, uh, this piece on The Mary Sue? Is kinda over-excited, or maybe just adequately excited. In any case, probably go read it and come back.)

So yesterday, when a friend asked me the other day what exactly "theoretical computer science" was, if not programming, I thought a little bit and said something like:

Well, imagine that, instead of actually sitting down and telling a computer to do something, you wanted to think about what sort of things a computer could do, if you instructed it right. If you think about computation as a process, as a structural description of arithmetic, and ask what you can do with that...

I mean, look at Ada Lovelace. She wrote a lot about what you could do with a computing machine, if you had one, but she didn't, so it was a century before the things she wrote down were ever ran through an automatic computer. She wasn't a programmer--she was a mathematician. And, really, a good one, too.

And then, surprise! Today is Ada Day! That's weird.

But really, if there was someone who understood what Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" actually was (even better than he