November 2010
3 posts
“She watched as he sank into whatever it was that he did on the Net, like a stone...”
– Zero History by William Gibson (pg. 179)
January 2010
2 posts
1 tag
“Nevertheless, psychiatrists and social scientists in the optimistic postwar...”
– FROM: Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America by Steve J Heims pg 163
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“Warren McCulloch “believed in an unrestricted sex life. His was what a...”
– From Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America by Steve J Heims pg 132
December 2009
21 posts
“In 1943 Wiener, Rosenblueth, and Bigelow published a joint article, in which...”
– From Newspeak to Cyberspeak by Slava Gerovitch pg62
Walter Pitts studied with Rudolf Carnap. Norbert Wiener studied with Bertrand Russell. Warren McCulloch, and now Gregory Bateson, read and were influenced by Bertrand Russell. Who’s next to reveal a link to anglo-american analytic philosophers?
answers on an e-postcard
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“For his [Gregory Bateson] own early notions of proto-learning, deutero-learning...”
– Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America by Steve J Heims. 1991. MIT Press. London, England
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“The conceptions of Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow related engineering and high...”
– Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America by Steve J Heims. 1991. MIT Press. London, England 97
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“The authentic scientific description was for [Leonard] Savage always...”
– Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America by Steve J Heims. 1991. MIT Press. London, England 93
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“We social scientists would do well to hold back or eagerness to control that...”
– Gregory Bateson Quoted in Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America by Steve J Heims. 1991. MIT Press. London, England 86
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In the British Library: It’s funny, and creepy, to see grown men take their laptops with them to the urinals. They all have macs, which is a little disconcerting. Is there a mac fetish I don’t know about…You know what, if there is I don’t want to know about it.
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“He [Bateson] never saw the abstract concept as equivalent to any actual concrete...”
– Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America by Steve J Heims. 1991. MIT Press. London, England pg58
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“[Warren] McCulloch as ‘chronic chairman’ of the series of...”
– Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America by Steve J Heims. 1991. MIT Press. London, England
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“[I]n 1955 McCulloch and Jerome Wiesner successfully arranged to give Pitts a PhD...”
– Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America by Steve J Heims. 1991. MIT Press. London, England
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“Where Darwin had assiduously tracked the similarities between human and animal...”
– Peter Galison The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Autumn, 1994), pp. 228-266. Pg.245
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“Wiener clearly saw the AA predictor, even before it was ready to shoot down a...”
– Peter Galison The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Autumn, 1994), pp. 228-266 Pg. 242
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“Cybernetics no longer appears as a futuristic bandwagon or as a rising worldview...”
– Peter Galison The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Autumn, 1994), pp. 228-266. Pg. 233
Watching
I’m sitting here watching a builder lug his tired body up level after level of scaffolding attached to the side of the train station he’s helping to renovate. If today continues to be so energetic and interesting I may just pass out.
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“Building on Wiener’s own usage of the term Manichean to designate
the...”
– Peter Galison The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Autumn, 1994), pp. 228-266. Pg.232
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“Wiener, the spokesman and advocate of cybernetics, in a distinction of great...”
– Peter Galison The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Autumn, 1994), pp. 228-266. Pg.231
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McCulloch and Penrose
I take the below quote to mean that Warren McCulloch, on of the fathers of Cybernetics, met Lionel Penrose, and his son Roger Penrose, who is famous for writing The Emperor’s New Mind and working with Stephen Hawking, while he was visiting Cambridge University.
I don’t have an exact date :-(
“Through him I met, at Cambridge, the son of the geneticist L. Penrose…R....”
– McCulloch, Warren, S. 1965 Where is Fancy Bred? in Embodiments of Mind MIT Press Pg: 219
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“Obviously, equivalent concepts and models are independently rediscovered...”
– Charles François: Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective in Systems Research and Behavioral Science 16, 203-219 (1999) pg: 205
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“ Fremont-Smith, at the urging of McCulloch, began planning a conference to...”
– Heims, Steve, J. Constructing a Social Science in Postwar America. MIT Press: Pg 17
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Cybernetics: Week Two in review
Week two of my Cybernetics research has seen me tackle the British Library and Cybernetics as a universal language.
November 2009
10 posts
1 tag
“We have created in our press a special language - the language of a socialist...”
– classsified report by a soviet propganda expert, 1946, quoted in Gerovitch, Slava, 2002 Newspeak to Cyberspeak. p11
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“Stalinism was a ‘specifically socialist civilisation’ with its own...”
– Slava Gerovitch. 2002. Newspeak to Cyberspeak. MIT Press: p6
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Same Phenomena difference agendas
At the March 1950 meeting:
“[D]ifferent participants brought disparate agendas concerning language: Licklider’s analysis of sound, Shannon’s concern with transfer of ‘information’ without regard to meaning, Mead’s pragmatic interest in acquiring speaking knowledge of exotic languages, Pitts’s formal and necessiarian objectives, and Bateson’s...
JCR Licklider, a father of Arpanet, attended the March 1950 cybernetics conference and gave a a paper detailing:
“the ways and the extent to which speech can be distorted and yet remain intelligible” (Heims 1991: 75)
I’d love to know whether Licklider attended any of the other meetings, and what kind of impact, if any, the conferences had on him.
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Cybernetics: My first week in review
The first of my, hopefully, weekly reviews of my cybernetics research is now up at my OtherBlog in which I say:
“I have something of a fixation for the new. This cybernetics research is new, it is interesting and, I can feel it, important.”
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“A modern-day descendant of Hall’s caveman is Gregory Bateson. He is busy inventing something, an invention so profound that once fully propounded, it will seem always to have been ‘natural’. The full impact of Bateson’s thinking is so radical that, yes, I have doubts that he fully believes in his own ideas. This is the way it has to be. He has entered no man’s...
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Announcement
Expect:
(1) a blog reboot tonight, with an aim to keep this blog updated in the style of a scrap book or research process platform.
(2) The scrapbook will mainly contain raw material from my newly started cybernetics research. some other stuff may creep in too.
See my (other) blog post for more info.
February 2009
13 posts
Vela Creations - HOME →
The Field Lab →
DOPPLR →
Hypergraphy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia →
Victorian London - Entertainment and Recreation -... →
London England through time | Local history... →
Dérive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia →
Everything you know about ARGs is WRONG →
rocket strikes i am near →
russell davies: meet the new schtick (2) →
Hackerspaces - HackerspaceWiki →
“It is unreasonable to expect that, within a corporate context, the sales,...”
– Gardner, Howard. 2007. Five Minds For the Future Harvard University Press
4 tags
“The line between science and nonscience can only be drawn on the basis of a...”
– Wylie, Alison, 2000 Questions of Evidence, Legitimacy, and the (dis)unity of science
January 2009
4 posts
2 tags
In Archaeological passing
It is interesting to note in passing that processual archaeology was influenced a great deal by analytic philosophy, while post-processual archaeology was influenced a great deal by continental philosophy. Two views of philosophy which have famously been antagonistic.