Rosa Parks Birthday, 2026 #BlackHistoryMonth #RosaParksDay

Happy Rosa Parks Day! There are a few different days to celebrate #RosaParksDay. December 1st commemorates the anniversary of her arrest in 1955,  and many locations observe the Monday after her birthday.  Today, though, would have marked what would have been Rosa Park’s 113 birthday.

via ABHM:

Learn more about Rosa Parks, her experiences on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and her role in the Civil Rights movement. Discover how the Montgomery Bus Boycott affected the bussing system. Several books and films offer insight to this day in history and the Civil Rights movement to follow.

• Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation by Gregory J. Reed and Rosa Parks
• Rosa Parks by Rosa Parks
• She Would Not Be Moved by Herbert R. Kohl
• Boycott (2001)
• Selma (2014)

You can also visit the Rosa Parks Museum at Troy University.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott via PBS:

This interview with civil rights activist Rosa Parks describes her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. On December 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her refusal sparked a massive bus boycott that lasted 381 days, ending on December 21, 1956, after the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation on city buses was unconstitutional.

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The TMP119 is the most precise-iest temperature sensor ever? 🌡️

New year, new proto! We’re getting our pants on (metaphorically) and here’s a first new proto to kick things off

The TMP119 has ±0.03°C (typical) accuracy from 0°C to 45°C…that’s wild precision for a little breakout board. It’s very much like our existing TMP117, so we just tweaked the PCB for this teeny DSBGA-8 footprint.

We’re going to see how hard it is to pick & place this tiny part, but it was requested and it looks pretty nifty! As always, it’s got our Stemma QT connectors on board for easy I2C daisy-chaining.

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JP’s Product Pick of the Week — 4pm Eastern TODAY! 2/3/26 @adafruit #adafruit #newproductpick

Come on by for JP’s Product Pick of The Week ! A new product pick will be revealed. The show airs at 4pm ET / 1pm PT, TODAY!

Check out the livestream right here inside this product page you won’t want to miss it because there will be a HUGE DISCOUNT during the show!

Tune in for:

• • John Park’s latest product pick
  • Learn how to use it
  • Live Demo

The live video will also be on YouTube LIVE, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook. LIVE TEXT CHAT IS HERE in the Adafruit Discord chat! Come on into the chat to participate in the conversation!!

Every Tuesday @ 4pm ET/1pm PT!

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Raytracing on the Sega Saturn #CanItDoRaytracing

XL2 (Sega Saturn homebrew) Raytracing test via YouTube

 

While modern consoles chug at the thought of raytracing, YouTuber XL2 demonstrates how they pulled it off on the Sega Saturn, a console over three decades old. More from Gizmodo:

But wait, what is raytracing, and why’s it so difficult to implement? In the most basic sense, it’s one of the ways by which a computer can work out how objects in a three-dimensional scene are lit. In real life, light bounces around a scene, with different surfaces and materials absorbing, reflecting and/or scattering different amounts of light. Raytracing works by simulating this process, with the renderer tracing the path of a number of rays emitted by the scene’s camera through a given number of bounces to see if they intersect a light source. (In real life, of course, the rays go from light source to camera, but in a renderer it’s more efficient to trace them in the opposite direction.)

XL2 (Sega Saturn homebrew) Raytracing test:

The room you see has no static light, but the raytracing could be used for adding dynamic raytraced lights on top of the static light sources. I only update 1/4 the vertices per frame. When a vertex fails the test, I smoothly darken it back to 0. When it passes, it goes full bright right away. I don’t do any fancy tests right now for the light (like using the surface’s normal or the light’s distance), so it could look better with a bit more maths. Now, for indirect lights : I do keep a per face PVS of what face affects what other faces. I just need to find a way to integrate it a reasonable speed on the Saturn.

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Until someone cracks raytracing on the Fruit Jam you can still enjoy some DOOM.

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Professor Sarah Chasins Answers Coding Questions

UC Berkeley Computer Science Professor Sarah Chasins joins WIRED to discuss coding.

UC Berkeley Computer Science Professor Sarah Chasins joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about coding. How did programmers code the first ever code? What remnants of the early World Wide Web still exist online? Can someone still learn programming if they hate math? How do new programming languages get made? Why is debugging harder than writing code? How can computer scientists contribute to CRISPR?

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Macalda di Scaletta one of the earliest female chess players

Macalda di Scaletta was a Sicilian baroness in the 13th century who played chess and historical evidence suggests that she may have been the first person in Sicily who learned how to play it the game, Via Wikipedia

Macalda’s captivity allowed another of her unexpected qualities to be revealed, that of chess player: we know in fact that, during her imprisonment in the Matagrifone castle of Messina, Macalda entertained herself at the game of chess with the Emir of Djerba, Margam ibn Sebir, who was also held in prison after being captured fleeing to Tunis while trying to escape the naval incursion on the island of Djerba by the admiral Roger of Lauria.

Also in these encounters, the haughty Macalda did not fail to astonish the bystanders and her jailers with the sensation caused by her “vivacity and the immodesty of her garments” that she flaunted.

Historical evidence suggests that she was probably the first person in Sicily who learned how to play chess.[1] It would in fact take another two and a half centuries, until the time of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Habsburg, to have the first three historical mentions by Pietro Carrera of Sicilian chess players: the Palermitans Armini and Branci, and Don Matteoli Genchi of Termine, author of some stanzas on the rules of chess play.

Famous women in chess

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RadioShack Sold You an “AI” Therapist in 1979

RS-80 Manual: Eliza (1979)(Tandy) – archive.org

Before ChatGPT, before Siri, before Clippy annoyed you about writing a letter — there was ELIZA, and you could buy her at the mall.

In 1979, RadioShack released “The Amazing Artificial Intelligence Simulation” for the TRS-80 (catalog no. 26-1908). For the price of a few cassette tapes, you got a port of Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 MIT experiment: a program that pretended to be a Rogerian psychotherapist by turning your statements into questions.

“I feel sad.” → “Why do you feel sad?”

It was a parlor trick. Weizenbaum knew it. He built ELIZA specifically to show how shallow the illusion of understanding could be. Then he watched in horror as people poured their hearts out to it anyway.

RadioShack, never ones to miss a buck, packaged that existential crisis in a three-ring binder and sold it next to the battery display. Forty-five years later, we’re still having some of the same conversations — but with better graphics and venture capital. The big difference, for some… the machine is the problem, for others, it tells them their problems, either way there is a monthly fee.

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