moon traveller herald

As a Diamond Sponsor of NeurIPS 2019, Google will have a strong presence at NeurIPS 2019 with more than 500 Googlers attending in order to contribute to, and learn from, the broader academic research community via talks, posters, workshops, competitions and tutorials. We will be presenting work that pushes the boundaries of what is possible in language understanding, translation, speech recognition and visual & audio perception, with Googlers co-authoring more than 120 accepted papers.  https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/12/google-at-neurips-2019.html

Fug You. by Ed Sanders P 300 -327 Described here are themes that relate to his musical view, as the 60s wind down. In the studio doing a whole LP side with a single flow without separations. The dread specter had a musical correlative in the form of the eerie theremins of the BeachBoy's Good Vibrations and Krysztof Komeda's Rosemary's Baby * The 60s winding down meant he was tired of public exorcisms, he was almost in Valerie (SCUM Manifesto) Solanas' cross hairs, and the poetry was to the amp in the largely humming feedback mix. The 60s winding down meant that quietude was forlorn and foreign. A change was going to come. Mainly, after a significant sojourn in the belly of the Tate-LaBianca murders, it was to expand on Investigative Poetry, but also it was to tinker with electronics for accompanying the bard. Thus the Electronic Bard System (EBS). ~~~~~~~~~ *Mia Farrow beats Mo Tucker to market by a year.

THIS IS A SATRICAL PIECE. SOME OF THE TECHNOLOGIES AND ALL OF THE STATISTICS ARE MADE UP FOR EFFECT. WHEN COMPOSED, THE AUTHOR DID NOT FORSEE THE FUTURE OF WEB STRIDING LANGUAGE MODELS. In the era of the Stasi there was an overarching NSA style apparatus. Projections  were mainly of 'grays and dour greens.' Citizen informants were networked nodes. These were the browser cookies of the time. But they were embedded not in a browser but in a physical world. This was when humans were computers, or computers were humans , have it as you will. It may have been an apex of sorts, though "the jury is still out." The platform as you might say was East Germany, or GDR  (1946-1990). Then and there was created an internet of spies, detecting on their neighbors – on each other – with fault tolerance, high availability and cyclical redundancy checking. Psychological Zesetung, or Brainwave Decomposition, was a common application type. There were 8 Stasi agents for every 5 citize...

Born in 1924 from a family of noted European mathematicians, Benoit Mandelbrot had an early interest in maps, and began early on to study nature's rough terrains - phenomena beyond traditional geometry and its straight lines and arcs. In a long research and academic career, with much help from the first commercial computers that came about after World War II, he created fractal geometry. In his memoir, "The Fractalist," partially completed before his death in 2010 (and finally compiled by family and colleagues), Mandelbrot tells the tale behind the tale - the one best remembered in his widely read "The Fractal Geometry of Nature." He shows the excitement he found in his early evolution as a scientist, one who had Kepler as an idle. He writes: "I allowed my finger to be touched by a complicated set of gears that soon grabbed my body - and never let go." (This after  Uncle Szolem gave him a reprint of a review of Zipf book.) It is amazing how m...

BLUES   |   DRBOPMOG   |   POESY   |   DERACINATION   |   ELECTRONIC BARD SYSTEM Bombe. Important gears in the machine of the history of computing are sometimes connected, sometimes disconnected. The British Government created one of the biggest disconnects by burying its own pioneering World War II work behind curtains of information classification. The Government shielded details of their war time work on the electromechanical Bombe computer and the Bombe-related programmable electronic Colossus* computer far past the time when these systems' underlying mechanisms were well known.  This resulted in a dark veil dropping over much of the work of Alan Turing, who studied at Cambridge and Princeton and who was a tremendously significant figure in Bombe and the ACE stored-program computer. People close to the story were well aware of Turing, however. Turing is the subject of "The Man Who Knew Too Much- Alan Turing...

I was reading about Alan Turing last night, after going to see some good music (Mark Schlack and his John Paine All Stars). I wanted to refer to Claude Shannon, and recalled an obit/appreciation I wrote for ITWorld when he died. It was hard to find... so I am fair using it in great part here just in case and for reference. ... Shannon was born in Petoskey, Mich., and grew up in Gaylord, Mich. He worked as a messenger for Western Union while in Gaylord High School, and attended college at MIT, where he was a member of Tau Beta Pi. Although the algebra of digital binary bits was first uncovered by mathematician George Boole in the mid-19th century, it was Shannon who saw the value of applying that form of logic to electronic communications. As a student of Vannevar Bush's at MIT in the 1930s, he worked on the differential analyzer, perhaps the greatest mechanical (analog) calculator. His paper, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," which led to a l...

On the eve of the Monarch's Marriage I watched a video. I cant recomend It Might Get Loud to any but the most in-the-wool electric guitar freak, but a few moments resonated for me. One: where Jimmy Page decribes his thrall and reacts listening to Shawnee Indian Link Wray's game changing Rumble. His eyes and movement [playing guitar on air along with Link] say most all of it. Describing Link and Rumble, Jimmy says, "Profound Attitude." The other: is Jack White making an electric diddley bow on a country cottage porch. Alsways fun to see good muscians interact, tho. Page for sure was the leader as he, White and U-2's The Edge met on the ground of the blues, is most of a handful of numbers. "Muddy had a soul with one string on the guitar." - Sunnyland Slim on Muddy Waters

Norbert Weiner [1894? -1964?] is definitely the father of cybernetics – and an influential thinker on the phenomenon of feedback. He was a brilliant mathematician, and, just like a movie math genius in his day and others, he was a little batty. A diminutive Belmont, Mass. Jew with a prince nez, Harvard grad and M.I.T. prof - he was absent of social artifice - as he would creatively and readily follow lines of thought and forgo the important social and practical niceties – unlike thus in manner to a lot of his competetive colleagues during the defining experience of World War II. Now, cybernetics - the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems - never became much of a science unto itself, except, for a while, in the Soviet Union. Some of its interests informed AI which never became much of a science either. But regulatory system study continues, and people continue to find out things, and they generally should thank Weiner for in some way setting the stage. My take...

Everyonce and a while I pull something over from a former blog. Here is such an occassion..bunch of notes on Cyber. Wiener - The efforts of Norbert Wiener’s biographers always will be shadowed by I Am a Mathematician. This, his own biography, is likely to overwhelm other attempts to write his story - He was able as a writer, engaging personally, and he ably perceived threads of significance as he viewed his own life. A fair helping of subdued vanity aside, the threading never seems overstressed. This is important because, on the face of it, Wiener’s work, which ranged from estimations of Brownian motion to artillery shell trajectories and beyond may appear disparate, even topsy-turvy, in the light of history. Wiener’s life was both blessed and vexed by the fact of his prodigiousness, which he handled in greater depth in another autobiographical installment. As much as he finally was to become the iconic image of the absent minded professor, he had a grounding in real life. That, he ...

A girl named Star hit the front pages of the Boston papers not long ago. Star Simpson, an MIT student, was at the airport, going through Security, when all hell broke lose. She was wearing a PC circuit board populated by blinking LEDs connected to a 9V battery. Not too imposing, but to the TSA folks, a suspect device. Push all the alarms. Get on the walkie talkies. Close the perimeter. This is the Post 9/11 world! Shut down the airport. Chaos necessarily ensued. What would the old time Boston comedian Jack Burns say? Probably something like: ‘Katy bah the doah?’ In this age where everything has changed, you may not be aware that MIT students have also changed. Few have sheathed calculators on their belts. Some like Star, have the look of the slacker, if an achieving one, in this case with vividly dyed hair. And SocketToMe embroidered on her sweatshirt back. Artsy. But techno artsy. As in Performance Art meets Radio Shack. Thus the Hello World breadboard and Nine-Volter. We smell headli...

Mr Wizard [Don Herbert] died. He was 89. Richard Goldstein's obituary in the New York Times pointed out that success in conveying the excitement of science was based on his skill in communicating to kids. Herbert was born in Waconia, Minn., went to La Cross State Teachers College, and started out as Mr Wizard in 1951 on WMAQ-TV in Chicago. His show was on early Saturday mornings. "What really did it for us was the inclusion of a child," Herbert said. The show when it started was just him doing science at the lab table. It was like a lecture. When they cast children talking with him, the show took off. Herbert said ideally they had to be around 11 or 12. "Once they got beyond 13, they became know-it-alls." Mr Wizard helped us fight the Cold War. Respond to Sputnik. During 60s and 70s, about half the applicants to Rockefeller University in New York cited Mr Wizard when asked how they first became interested in science. Of course I remember the joy of ...

Albert Glinsky biographer of Theremin had some bits to share on Christopher Lydon’s Open Source Radio show. Show includes music, and interviews with thereminists. Dapper Christopher cannot help but break up theremenist Pamelia Kurstein into charming giggles upon giggles. Said Glinsky of the discovery .. Originally he was actually in a Soviet Laboratory about 1919. He was building a meter to measure gas density. And he put on some headphones and decided he would add a whistling tone that would change based on the density of the gas. As he brought his hand closer to the device, the effect was like that which you can have today with an old rabbit ear antennae TV where the picture reception goes in and out as you assume different positions in the room. Based on your position in an electromagnetic field. Now I'd heard that he was just listening to vaccuum tubes one day. Playing with the voltages or some similar. Then he built an instrument just to make sounds. Started with a pedal a...

John Backus, leader of the original IBM Fortran development team, has died at 82. Fortran is widely held as the first successful high-level computing language. As such, it began the evolution of mainstream software programming away from the realm of machine and assembly coders, allowing a more ‘human-readable’ approach to programming. One of his first jobs at IBM allowed him to work with famed computer scientist Wallace J. Eckert - then director of IBM’s Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory - to compute lunar orbits. Like many other engineering efforts, the drive to create Fortran was at least in part the drive of an individual to eliminate some form of tedious work. In the biography of Backus on the IBM web site he says: “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.” http://www.theserv...

Are there surprising things to discover. We all no the answer is yes, everyday. Yet consprirasists linger like Wilkes Boothes in the wings saying it can be so and here is a little germ of truth that I will blow on and conjure confusion. Had a discussion about Twin Towers on fire as hijacked planes hit with Jeff Hull. Caused me to revisit some PBS sites, and some overheard conversation with Failure Student Henry Petroski. I caught up with him in Tampa about three weeks after 911..when flying was really spooky..and heard him discuss failures of engineering [his specialty] and remember the [software] engineers around him discusing the recent great conflagaration.... Let's be base: What happened to the towers was not anticipated. Most structural engineers were surprised when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Suprise is always possible as there are always new things to learn. Structural engineers are not dealing with a completely closed systems and they are always learning new th...