moon traveller herald

http://itsthedatatalking.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-best-laid-plans-of-mice-and-man.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina-cybersyn/  Does a 1970s Utopian technology effort offer useful guides for those trying to assess the progress of new technology today? In one case, at least, yes. It is the story of Salvador Allende's attempt to build a working Socialist government in Chile with computer cybernetics. The tale is told especially well, under the able hands of author and researcher Eden Medina. Medina rolls up the takeaways in a recent article in Jacobin magazine. It is a summary of some important lessons garnered during work on her 2013 book, The Cybernetic Revolutionaries. You see, before CIA influencers sponsored Augusto Pinochet and company's junta, Allende's democratically government was trying to bring a new form of ...

Kremlin-financed media outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) is little more than a propaganda machine controlled by Russian intelligence agencies. yet...Anyone shocked by the Kremlin-funded news station RT in all of this probably never heard of Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded news service that broadcast the American response to Soviet propaganda during the Cold War.  The Ruse seem quite able actors in this field - The US seems a ready audience. This stuff is taking me back to college days. I took a class on World Press at BU led by Larry Martin - actually L awrence Martin-Bittman , a former Czech Intelligence Agent - who had a unique view on "News". Martin-Bittman later wrote a memoir The KGB and Soviet Disinformation. There he wrote "Deception is a relatively easy game, particularly against anyone willing to be deceived. " One of Martin-Bittman's acts as part of Czech intelligence was to forge a letter from Cardinal Spellman to a W,German Anti-Commun...

Mindy Silver a few blocks away bought the first record and everyone used to borrow/trade records back then. She was very Avant Garde. But I didn't like it. They played Heroin on the Underground radio. That didnt really work as well as St. Peppers, IMO at the time. The second record... White Light White Heat and Sister Ray..at 6.30 in the morning the overnight DJ would put something on and split...something long like InnaGaddaDavida...or Sister Ray... and that really got my attention.. was played repeatedly. This was on a little clock radio that woke me up for school. I bought the record. I liked it almost as much as Canned Heat. My friends who were more adventurous went to Chicago to the Electric Circus to see them on a bill with the Grateful Dead.... When the Third Record came out...that was a shock...the mildness of it was pretty unexpected. Again Milwauke underground radio..WTOS.. played it all the way through. Oddlly, late one night, they appeared on The Paul Benziquin show ou...

  I recently picked up for a summer read “The Gene” by Siddhartha Mukherjee. As I began to plow through the nearly 600-page book, it seemed to display the accidents and unforeseen circumstances that can track scientific research and technological innovation. ≠ The Gene begins with Gregor Mendel in the monastery in Brno, now a part of the Czech Republic. There the eventual founder of the science of genetics is perceived as slow, happy in the garden with his peas, not smart or articulate enough to be more than a substitute teacher. The friar abbots try and give him every chance to gain a useful education, and perhaps step up from substitute. And by some phenomenal luck, he’s sent to study in Vienna. Thus, to study under no less than Doppler. Yes, he comes to study under Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, the mathematician and physicist who proposed that the perceived pitch of sound or the color of light was not fixed but depended on the relative locations and velocities...

A technology that is to succeed in the market - overhyped or not - needs a name that can be infused with aspiration, can be a receptacle for desire. Cloud computing blithely surpassed "grid" and "utility computing" because cloud could hold anyone's dream. Today's out-of-the-box solution "AI" (which took over in the popular press from GenAI and ChatGPT) fits that bill. I had a chance to speak with a prominent politician at the city level. Let's say the matter under discussion was a problem such as graffiti on gravestones or ajar manhole covers. No matter. The word "AI" came up. Helpful to collaboration. Maybe in some instances. The politicians' problem is that they "can't hire enough people to do all that needs to be done" and are looking for AI [read: GenAI] to improve collaboration and productivity.  So naturally they are receptive to the claims of somewhat imminent AI innovation. If I talked with a VC just about be...