Source: americanspokenlanguage“A KIND IN GLASS AND A COUSIN, A SPECTACLE AND NOTHING STRANGE A SINGLE HURT COLOR AND AN ARRANGEMENT IN A SYSTEM TO POINTING. ALL THIS AND NOT ORDINARY, NOT UNORDERED IN NOT RESEMBLING. THE DIFFERENCE IS SPREADING.” [—gertrude stein]
Source: anneboyer1. write poems which allow me to believe I have written no poetry
2. write prose which allows me to believe I don’t know a word
3. read with a technique that convinces me I’ve read nothing
4. think in a way deniable as thought
5. sleep each night of sleep in a way of sleeping which feels as…
I recently reposted a NASA image of a woman named Melba Roy, a graduate of Howard and, at the time the photo was taken (according to the NASA archive, 1960, not 1964 as given elsewhere), the head of “computers” (mathematicians charged with calculating Echo satellite orbits) at NASA’s Goddard Space Center. Then, as anyone would, I googled her to see if there was more out there. On vanilla google and on nasa.gov, I was not successful.
Lexis-Nexis turned up a June 29, 1990 obituary in the Washington Post, however. Roy was her first married name; after her divorce from Wardell Roy, Melba Roy married a Webster Mouton; her obituary gives her name as Melba Roy Mouton. She had two children from her first marriage and one from her second. She had a bachelor’s degree from Howard University, as well as a master’s degree in mathematics, also from Howard. She seems to have been born and raised in the D.C. area (northern Virginia), and died in Silver Spring, MD of a brain tumor at only 61.
The most interesting thing about Melba Roy Mouton is of course her career.* Her obituary states,
NASA’s own gloss on the photo above reads:She had worked 18 years for the federal government before retiring in 1973, and spent the last 14 of those years with NASA. Earlier she had worked at the Census Bureau and the Army Map Service.
She had received an Apollo Achievement Award and an Exceptional Performance Award from NASA.
A 1968 NASA report on “The Goddard General Orbit Determination System” offers a little more specificity in the acknowledgments (all NASA reports cited in this post are pdfs):Melba Roy headed a group of NASA mathematicians, known as “computers,” who tracked early Echo satellites in Earth orbit. Roy’s computations helped produce the orbital element timetables by which millions saw the satellite from Earth as it passed overhead.
She is also acknowledged for “generous support” in the 1968 NASA Technical Note “Application of Hansen’s Method to the Xth Satellite of Jupiter.” In a 1968 report (this was a good year for reports, apparently) titled “Experimental Use of A Programming Language (APL) at the Goddard Space Flight Center,” Melba Roy Mouton is named as a member of “a select group” that spent a week preparing Kenneth Iverson and his colleagues to give a two-week seminar on APL at Goddard. This preparation consisted of “indoctrinating Dr. Iverson’s staff in the types and range of problems of interest to Goddard.”The Goddard General Orbit Determination System was programed by a team of Goddard staff members under the direction of Thomas P. Gorman, who served for a number of years as Head of the Data Systems Division’s Advanced Orbital Programming Branch, and Melba Mouton, who succeeded him in that position and is currently serving as Head of the Mission and Trajectory Analysis Division’s Program Systems Branch.
Source: vintageblackglamourMelba Roy, NASA Mathmetician, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1964. Ms. Roy, a 1950 graduate of Howard University, led a group of NASA mathmeticians known as “computers” who tracked the Echo satellites. The first time I shared Ms. Roy on VBG, my friend Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a former postdoc in astrophysics at NASA, helpfully explained what Ms. Roy did in the comment section. I am sharing Chanda’s comment again here: “By the way, since I am a physicist, I might as well explain a little bit about what she did: when we launch satellites into orbit, there are a lot of things to keep track of. We have to ensure that gravitational pull from other bodies, such as other satellites, the moon, etc. don’t perturb and destabilize the orbit. These are extremely hard calculations to do even today, even with a machine-computer. So, what she did was extremely intense, difficult work. The goal of the work, in addition to ensuring satellites remained in a stable orbit, was to know where everything was at all times. So they had to be able to calculate with a high level of accuracy. Anyway, that’s the story behind orbital element timetables”. Photo: NASA/Corbis.
Milton C. Winternitz, dean of the Yale University Medical School, 1935, in response to a colleague’s notification that he has neglected to pay a bill for “a druggist, one Kwang Wan Lung Hung”:
During the past few months I have reached the point where I can no longer understand bills which are submitted in good old Anglo-Saxon. How would you expect me to interpret a Chinese manuscript? I thought it was a new form of art after the fashion of Gertrude Stein’s poetry, so I guess I was further off than you were. (173)Quoted in Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 2009.
Source: books.google.comEmployee’s fingers autocorrected with mirrored text.
Throughout An Exact Narrative of Many Surprizing Matters of Fact Uncontestably Wrought By an Evil Spirit or Spirits, In the House of Master Jan Smagge (1709). Original from Oxford University. Digitized March 10, 2009.
western thought class no. 1 involves a blank map of the world and the task: “find the west”
western thought class no 2. involves the onion’s “historians admit to inventing ancient greece,” a chapter from boaz’s “a universal history of the destruction of books,” a sappho fragment, and this keat’s…
Amazing.
Source: anneboyer
