Jonathan Dunn

Looks after Bugbrooke village environment. Retired primary school teacher. Previously accountant & senior manager with Northamptonshire LEA & Social Services.

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

Dorothy Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 at her family’s NJ beach house, youngest of 4. Home was 179 West 73rd Street nr Broadway. Now a vacant lot. Rutgers Presbyterian Church, Verdi Park & Ansonia apartment block remain on block between DP’s home & ‘The Boulevard’.

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@AnneBoleynFiles No.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A 33-year-old woman at MIT wrote the code that ran inside the Apollo 11 lunar lander, and 20 seconds before Neil Armstrong touched the moon, her program made a decision the astronauts didn't know was happening that was the only reason the mission didn't crash.

Her name was Margaret Hamilton.

She led the team writing every line of code that would fly humans to the moon and back. The part almost nobody knows is that she had to fight to be allowed to do the work at all.

Code in 1965 was not treated as real work.

Rockets were serious. Circuits were serious. Writing code was something the men at NASA thought secretaries could do on the side. Hamilton was told this to her face more than once.

So she started calling what her team did "software engineering."

She used the phrase on purpose. In meetings. In memos. To force people to treat it as a discipline instead of a chore. Colleagues laughed at her the first few times she said it out loud.

That phrase is now the name of the biggest engineering profession on earth.

The story of what her code did on July 20, 1969 is the one every kid should be taught.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 3 minutes from touching down when the computer inside the lunar module started flashing an alarm.

1202.

Then again. Then 1201. Five alarms in four minutes. The computer was telling the astronauts it could not finish everything it had been asked to do.

The computer they were flying with had less memory than a modern microwave.

Someone on the checklist had left a switch in the wrong position, and a radar the astronauts did not even need right then was flooding the computer with data. It was eating around 13% of the machine's brain at the exact moment every second mattered.

In almost any other system, that overload would have frozen the machine.

A frozen machine 30,000 feet above the moon means a crash. It means two dead astronauts and a third one orbiting alone above them, waiting for a signal that would never come.

Hamilton's code did something else.

She had built the software with a rule almost nobody in her field was using at the time. When the machine ran out of room, it would not treat every task as equally important. It would look at the list of jobs it had been asked to do, throw out the ones that could wait, and keep running only the ones keeping the crew alive.

The radar was the low priority job.

The landing was the highest.

So the computer did what she had told it to do. It dumped the radar. It kept flying. The alarm was not a failure. It was the machine reporting that it was handling the overload exactly the way she had designed it to.

Down in Houston, a 24-year-old engineer named Jack Garman recognized the alarm from a test his team had run months earlier. He shouted "Go" to the flight controller. The controller shouted it up to the crew. The landing kept going.

Armstrong touched the surface with 25 seconds of fuel left.

The part that gets lost in every retelling is why Hamilton had built that safety net in the first place.

NASA had not asked for it.

She had added it on her own, years earlier, because her 4-year-old daughter Lauren had once crashed the simulator by pressing a button during a test. The button was one the astronauts had been told they would never press.

Hamilton wanted the code to survive that button press anyway.

Her bosses told her it was a waste of time. Astronauts do not make mistakes.

She insisted. The safety net went in.

Two years later, on the way to the moon, an astronaut left a switch in the wrong position. The exact class of mistake she had been told would never happen.

There is a photograph of her from that period.

She is standing next to a stack of paper as tall as she is. Every page in that stack is the code her team wrote for the mission. She is smiling at the camera like she knows something the rest of the aerospace industry has not figured out yet.

In 2016, Barack Obama put the Presidential Medal of Freedom around her neck and said the astronauts did not have much time, but thankfully, they had Margaret Hamilton.

Every autopilot in every plane you have ever flown on uses a version of what she invented. Every pacemaker. Every self driving car. Every satellite in orbit.

The idea that a machine should know which job matters most and drop the rest when it runs out of room is now the foundation of almost every safety system on the planet.

She wrote it because a 4 year old crashed a simulator and nobody else thought it was worth fixing.

The men in the room laughed at her for calling it engineering.

Then her code was the only thing in the sky that did not fail.

[Henshi @HenshiG]

On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, Aracy de Carvalho watched Hamburg burn.

The next morning she hid a Jewish family in her apartment.

Aracy was 30 — a Brazilian clerk at the Hamburg consulate. A divorced single mother from a small town who spoke German, French, and English. Not a diplomat. Just chief of the Passport Section.

Brazil’s dictator had secretly ordered consulates to reject Jewish visas. Most obeyed. Aracy refused.

She processed Jewish applications, walked them personally to the consul, and got them approved. She worked around the Nazis’ red “J” stamps and sheltered families before they sailed.

In 1938 she partnered with João Guimarães Rosa, the assistant consul. Together they ran a quiet rescue operation for four years. Hundreds of Jews — including the Bertel-Levy, Tuch, and Kazenstein families — reached safety in Brazil.
Aracy never sought credit.

She married Rosa in 1940 and stayed in the background while he became a literary giant.

For decades almost no one knew.

Then survivors spoke.

In 1982 Yad Vashem named her Righteous Among the Nations — the only Brazilian woman ever honored, and the only woman featured in their “Visas for Life” exhibit alongside Wallenberg and Sugihara.

Aracy de Carvalho, the Angel of Hamburg, died in 2011 at 102. A small-town clerk who used a stamp, a signature, and quiet courage to save hundreds of lives and thousands of descendants.

She simply did what her heart demanded when most did not.

I wonder how many people would do the same today?

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@thespursweb Yes. No brainer. He was excellent again tonight.

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@daisychristo Many of problems with VAR, esp in British football, are product of serious flaws in the laws of the game, which need to be overhauled for TV age. Handball law, what player contact is a foul, which fouls are cautionable, taking of free kicks & corners (eg 'blocking' of keepers).

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@ShippersUnbound @patrickkmaguire Lot of absurd 'shoot the messenger' in replies, blaming (top class) journalists for reporting what they are told/observe.
The essential questions are
-Does Starmer have clear programme of government for next 3 years?
-If so, can he get it through Parliament & deliver b4 GE?

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@theobertram Surely Catherine the Kingmaker must be the first chair of Labour's 2026 committee.

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@LeN17ah Great thread.

[Dan Carden @DanCardenMP]

Rent control isn't some Soviet idea dreamed up by radicals.

Britain had it for most of the 20th century: it was mainstream; it was normal; and it worked.

It’s history is part of the story of Britain 🧵

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@SeeMeeSeeYou500 @JAHeale That's the joke. Like saying the camel that broke the straw's back.

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@JAHeale Perhaps she's a March Hare: 'The March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps because this is February she won't be raving mad, at least not as much as she is in March'. It might explain her dubious track record from probation to asylum seekers via NYC & MoJ.

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@AlasdairGold Ange is right.

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@ChrisCowlin Could be a disaster. Good centre back as player. Record as manager far from outstanding. Boss of Marseille when we beat them away under Conte. How good is his English? Can he communicate with & inspire players? How will he get fans on-side? Style of play not a good fit either.

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@JohnRentoul @VinceRuston Not sure about Scot. Royal Scot is a steam locomotive, soldier in regiment, a biscuit & a brand of (often tartan) clothing. Great Scott normally is double t supposedly after General Winfield Scott from US Civil War. (Scot-free is derived from a share of a bill, not Scotland).

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@JAHeale Darren Jones?

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@SCynic1 Hope your reading is right. Still deeply troubling that the jury didn't convict on aggravated burglary. If not in this instance, could any burglary pass aggravation test?

[Jonathan Dunn @JonathanD1962]

@dcsandbrook @TheRestHistory One of your best ever. A veritable #tourdeforce

[Kieran Maguire @KieranMaguire]

Since the Premier League started in 1992 club have lost £4.99 billion between them, and ten clubs are responsible for 90% of the losses.

[Dan Hitchens @ddhitchens]

This is big. Gordon Brown (clearly unpersuaded by Lord Falconer’s hectoring) calls on parliament to halt the AS bill:

[Calgie @christiancalgie]

Great piece by former Treasury spad @cameronbrownuk on the never-ending Budget briefings https://t.co/nJ7o8TAECZ