The end of gun control

Via Borepatch

........the end of gun control is not politically or culturally driven, but was a historical inevitability that was written into the book of destiny by 1810, when Joseph Jacquard started using punched cards to control weaving patterns on his looms and when the practice of chucking rotary cutters into lathe headstocks was adopted en masse at water powered factories in Western Massachusetts in response to British attempts to confiscate American civilian-owned firearms.

OK, if I’m going to do an impression of James Burke, let me do it right. Hold a moment while I put on a thick set of glasses and hammer myself in the mouth with a mallet. …and…MMFGH! .. Ah, yes, now I look more like a product of British government-run dentistry. < spits teeth ; makes appointment for follow-up care with NHS sometime in late 2017 >

So, how does weaving in France tie in to British seizure of civilian owned weapons, BITNET, and the Homebrew Computer Club, and lead us to the death of gun control in the 21st century?

People ascribe the invention of punched cards to Herman Hollerith in the late 1800s, but in fact they dated back 150 years earlier, where they were created as an easier-to-file version of the ancient concept of the tally stick (Pliny the Elder documents these before the birth of Christ, but it turns out that we can push the date back 20,000 years before that).

So we’ve got people recording data on punched cards in the early 1700s, and a few decades after that we’ve got Basile Bouchon using them to half-assedly control textile mills in France, and a few decades after that Jacquard drastically improved the mechanism.

(Hint: the end of the week quiz will cover this specific point, and in your response to the essay question you could do worse than to note the parallel between ‘using stored information to create physical items’ in 17-aught-mumble and 20-aught-mumble).

So, we’ve established that information can be amplified into a nearly finished product by clever arrangements of spinning bits, moving bits, and stationary bits.

Let’s take a quick digression into metal working.

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