moon traveller herald

[July 2026] — A recent critique from Zeynep Tufekci suggests that a clearer view on the AI evolution would emerge, if the public can grasp the technology’s reliance on probability and plausibility. Based on its read of most everything available in the digital world, it can guess pretty well at a complete sentence, and even the chain of an argument. But, beginning in 2022, Generative AI’s aha moment also provided a perfect seedbed for misunderstanding — stirring up levels of fear, uncertainty and doubt surpassing past miracle technologies, many of which stirred equal dismay... this-month-in-neurals-or-the-march-of-plausibilit y - Jack Vaughan's Medium blog

  Ran in 2008 Bo Diddley died. There are probably some competitive flamenco cats that I am not aware of - but I would rate him greatest rhythm guitar player of all time. The guitar as percussive motivator in his hands was total banshee force, but full of invention. He also had a lyrical approach that was in its turn incredibly rhythmic and original and also humorous. Mona, Who Do You Love, You Cant Judge a Book, Road Runner .. so many numbers that were part of my best days. He created a foundational style of rocknroll and he did so by reinventing the instrument called the guitar. Who would say he did not have his hand on the pulse of his time as much as the Nasa astronauts or the Beats? Say Man, Mumbles, Ride on Josephine, Cadillac, Cops and Robbers. His super session with Muddy Waters and Little Walter. An all instrumental Checker record of his I used to have. Certainly unique. Some good articles have traced his tremendous influence. Let me add a few: The Doors doing Who Do you Lo...

  INFINITE FEEDBACK LOOP OF TIME - With regenerative and frequency modulation circuits in the early and mid 20th Century, Edwin Howard Armstrong employed feedback to great effect. The improvement in fidelity between AM and FM radio being Armstrong’s greatest achievement. One could say Armstrong took a cue from mechanical and electrical thermostats that had evolved over the previous 100 years. The work on the thermostat arguably morphed into the autopilot. All these feedback-based inventions spurred scientific thought, and the birth of Cybernetics under the tutelage of Wiener, McCullough and others. Overtime, Feedback loops were understood as essential to how natural and artificial systems were regulated to maintain stability. Ultimately, with the term ‘Cybernetics’ well in the rear-view mirror, researchers followed feedback to form the basis for recurrent Neural Networks’ use in Natural language processing.  The neural nets’ ability to analyze sentences and predict the next wo...

 A rewrite My Secret Museum of Cybernetics i. Intellectual pretensions were welcome around my house growing up in Racine. I got a job at an after-school job at the library, and found  a book for every imagining I might have. At the point where Bob Dylan and Summer of Love mysticism was passing cars and rockets in my personal hit parade, I chanced upon the notion of feedback. It had a scientific aspect and a musical aspect [the latter in the hands of Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground and Canned Heat]. I was assigned to write a thesis that could serve as an essay for college admission. So I had a mind to study. With Bronski's Science and Human Values in hand I began a piece on The Humanization of Science, in part a Renaissance study. In part a look at the history of alchemy. I'd often begin at the beginning of things and hardly get any further. At the same time I found out about Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon - about cybernetics and information theory. Cybernetics, closely...

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 ...

My new major essay introduces the Santiago School of Technology as a counterpart to the Chicago School of Economics. I also suggest that Allende's greatest legacy may be his government's efforts to build a different technological world order https://t.co/1IXWE1nKz4 — Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) September 9, 2023 Miss Comet Nishimura Is Coming - Hide Your Heart, Girl https://t.co/YC2N6bKNKs — Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) September 9, 2023 Memory is terrible at remembering lists, but superb at remembering routes through space. [That's evolution.] If you want to remember something, then you create a mental route and you distribute the items on your list along the route. https://t.co/i3hvukYEBI via @YouTube — Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) September 9, 2023

Moon Herald Traveller offices (center) It took some time but the world has gradually come to awareness that the Internet is – among other things - a shroud of disinformation. For some it really hits home -- perhaps no one has experienced it at first hand as has former President Barack Obama.  Unfortunately, the spotlight dimmed quickly after his recent speech on Technology and Democracy at Stanford University. There, he outlined the problem as he saw it. His analysis of the problem was thorough, tho his suggestions for solutions mostly stumbled. “I might never have been elected president if it hadn’t been for websites like, and I’m dating myself, MySpace, MeetUp and Facebook that allowed an army of young volunteers to organize, raise money, spread our message,” he said. “That’s what elected me.” That grassroots movement, and the apparent transformation of the Arab Spring, cheered many. But social media’s “unintended consequences” later came to the fore. Today “we see that our new i...

An epic mojo of a wind blew across the country and swirled many up in it. It was 2016, the eve of the election. I was one in the swirl. I find myself picking through the debris it left now – nearly four years later, as another round begins. In the days running up to the election, oddball Tweets and frenetic Facebook posts started to gather. They’d been gnats, but then, swarms, and you could see them, as if congregating on an ancient hill, in preparation for a ballot day charge. This light brigade of social media distress would bring great agitation upon us, in the midst of the last election push. What says it more than the immortal post of the Pope? Francis took time from his papal duties to tweet his support for Donald Trump. This was reported in July of 2016 by web site WTOE 5 News. And into the twittersphere it fled. It had the pope as saying that the FBI’s inability to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her emails led him to endorse Trump. As you may have gathered, it was a pu...

Ed Sanders lab notes on the Brain Lyre. Source: Edward Sanders The MRI- A bridge too far - working project By Jack Vaughan It is fair conjecture to say not too many among the East Side Poets subscribed in later years to The New Scientist, the highly readable British pub that flies into the headwinds of science and technology, but Sanders did. For my money, this is strong indication he was firmly in a realm known by the ancient Athenian citizen, or the Renaissance Man versed in science and art. He stood ready to inspect the world at first principle. And, if electronics were in reign, he would learn it first hand. He'd been doing such a much, mucking with diodes, soldering circuits,  in the Woodstock winter lab. However,  as time went by, it was became clear the total EBS might be a bridge too far. Would he back up MRI equipment borne in a semi to his Woodstock cottage, to extend the laboratory portfolio for exploring the next phase? Maybe not. ...

It is has been interesting to see a re-mergence in interest in new chip architectures. Just when you think it is all been done and there's nothing new. Bam! First the GPU made a comeback for machine learning. Then the Google Tensor Flow ASIC came about. GPUs have both memory usage pros and cons it seems, and as the job training AI models intrigues more people, the money to explore new coprocessors suddenly appears, according to NYTimes. J.V. https://juanignacio.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/ai-resurgent-boosting-chip-innovation/

UNDER CONSTRUCTION - What do you do at work? Young Jack asks Mr Sinclair, across the street neighbor. Turned out he was an engineer. "I make sure the  stop lights work at the proper intervals." Dont recall the exact lineage. But I wondered about the pneumatic hose they sometimes ran across the street. Ask Mr Sinclair, dad might have said. "They count the cars as they pass over." While playing ball and playing war were probably my greatest joy, I also liked staying in and watching TV in this childhood house (insert 801 Melvin pic). Very vivid recollection of waking up on Saturday morning, before anyone in house, and turning on TV, say, before 7 am, and encountering the Test signal (see above). Waiting for The Big Picture, Eddie Arnold, Gene Autry, and so on.. and instead looking out the window. While they sorted out their signal - looking out the window at the cars very few going by..at the magic hour, the street lights turning off fo...

I am not sure what is going on here, but I'd say it is unfinished. For me, in a way, technology starts with Sputnik. I can recall adults pointing to satellites moving in the sky after Sputnik. Shock and awed 1. Viet Nam and cluster bombing via my beloved B-52 was another step, more sinister. Computerized probability in action. Some coming out of the Army Math Research Center in Madison when I went there. Shocked and Awe 2. Not sure what comes next.. Jack Vaughan http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/sputnik.wav

This is about the acme of analog computers. They had one killer app (as far as I know), which was shipboard gunnery control. A lot of the stuff going on with machine learning and deep learning today has this as antecedent.

Leo Beranek, Engineer of Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Dies at 102 https://t.co/NcIHcj2F5z — Jack Vaughan at TT (@JackVaughanatTT) October 18, 2016 test

Flew this week to SF and back. Some turbulence over Rockies. How grand to watch Warriors with Dave and Jim. Yell! When I got home read the details on Egypt air crash. Cozy&safe on my porch, with no expectations to fly again soon. Watched doc on The Last Man on the Moon - Gene Cernan. There he was, at beginning, sitting in cowboy hat at rodeo, and nobody about him knowing, he was the last man on the moon: A poem. G ot to thinnin bout the 'pilot talk' best described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff... (J.Vaughan) Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself… the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because 'uh, folks, it might get a...

William Moulton Marston was a unique somewhat New Englandish character. Born in the 1890s in Saugus Mass. – educated at Harvard – he is renowned in comic book circles as creator of Wonder Woman at the outset of World War II. A recent book by Jill Lepore, The Secret Life of Wonder Woman , looks at his life. In his time he was a bit of a social revolutionary and polygamist. He studied psychology at Harvard, and did a thesis which tested World War I German prisoners on their truthfulness by measuring their blood pressure. With this and later promotions he became an individual that was a  part of the campaign of history known as feedback -  but as a  pseudo scientist rather as a great innovator. He actually was not the inventor of the lie detector – that mantle goes per Wikipedia to John August Larson of UCal Berkeley. This is worth noting as the history of feedbacks and cybernetics are both racked by misteps…and some outright shamanism. The lie detector or polygraph machi...

What's been lost: Most modern digital televisions automatically change to a blue screen or turn to standby after some time if static is present. The days of good old analog TV were far different, as many pensioners can attest. Static was the nemesis then. Sometimes we did battle with tin foil, trying to damper the dumb rabbit ears. Static you see is obtained by antennas when no transmission signal is available. Also called snow, static is the result of electronic noise and radiated electromagnetic noise accidentally picked up by the antenna. Sources of electromagnetic noise include nearby electronic or mechanical devices, as well as cosmic microwave background radiation, polka dots and moonbeams. When you look into the cosmic background dots, you look into the Big Bang. Your mortality call collect. Thanks to Wikipedia.

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...

Judith Charles Gallery is pleased to present  Odd Harmonics , a collaborative exhibition with Butterscotch Records and Moog Music featuring work by Fran ç ois Chambard, Cassandra C. Jones and Tomory Dodge. Odd Harmonics is a month-long contemporary art show and performance series curated by label head Allen Farmelo. Meanwhile, CBS :Sunday morning had a nice piece on Theremins. Their tale of Leon was different than the one I'd known..having him as a more complicit KBGer and not necessarily kidnapped back to the USSR. Web site had some good links (below) robschwimmer.com The New York Theremin Society "Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage"  by Albert Glinsky (University of Illinois Press) albertglinsky.com moogmusic.com Joe's Pub , New York City thereminworld.com