Wooden Half Adder | Hacker News Reader

Wooden Half Adder

propella.blogspot.com

54 pointschrislloyd11 comments

In a very similar vein, have you seen the amazing wood machines from http://woodgears.ca/ ?

He has a binary adder: http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/index.html

They started a series on Security Now! focusing on the basics of computing (starts with this podcast: http://twit.tv/sn233). I just listened to that and then saw this entry for a half adder (which they talk about implementing in the podcast) so I thought I'd link it here in case anyone was interested.

Does anyone else have some good resources about the basics of computing? We studied logic in one of my college math classes a bit, and learned how to implement the basic math functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) in binary, but I've forgotten a lot of it at this point and find it really interesting. I'm specifically interested in the EE side of things, since I don't know all that much about it (they talk briefly about how a transistor actually works in the podcast at a high level, but I'd love to get a solid reference on this stuff that went from low-level up to the higher levels).

I have pointed several people to the book 'Code' by Charles Petzold. It starts from nothing and eventually leads you to a CPU.

I have also heard about but not read 'From NAND to Tetris in 12 steps'

You should be able to find the MIT opencourseware lectures for 6.004 (the introductory computer course) online somewhere.

Video: http://propella.blogspot.com/2009/12/wooden-half-adder-video...

Funny dude!

Wow... I read that as 'Wooden Adolf Hitler'... <smacks head>

Serious question: why are RevRal and I being down voted? Is it because the comments are not additive? (I am trying to get a hang of HN.)

Yeah. A lot of people misread words as other words. Sometimes they are mildly funny but rarely are they especially interesting.

Normally, yes, these off-topics aren't very interesting, but it was to me to see that I wasn't the only one making such a gross scan-misreading of the words.

It's curious to me specifically because this misreading seems so much further from the actual letters than most normal misreadings. Is it because of the strong emotions attached to the name that we're subconsciously more "on the lookout" for it?

You're not alone, I did too.

Even worse, while scanning through I kept thinking "why is he calling this thing Adolf Hitler?"

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