moon traveller herald

 Alpha Tracks Of Radium1912 https://www.cloudylabs.fr   Reading Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics [U Cal Press;1996] by Ruth Lewin Sime.  The noble reason to read the book would be to learn the story of a woman and a Jew [secular] who accomplished great science but who was overlooked by the patriarchal and antisemitic societies of the time.   But reading it in fact because I'd like to learn something about the interaction and interdependence of experiment and theory in science. Yet, addressing the sexism and racism in her life and times is clearly i nescapable.   The life of Lise Meitner is the choice because her work was intricate to the discovery of nuclear fission and the Atomic bomb. I knew bits of her story and wanted to know more. An    In Our Times Podcast provided special impetus. That's the context for the summer research undertaking.-JV   The story of the  nuclear bomb has been told by some very capable historians and p...

I blogged this a few years ago, around the time we hunkered in place, when Marathon bombers were on the loose here. That was still a high time for Globalism, different than now. Such change since! Change in tone at Harvard Commencement last week. Anyway, I thought I'd give a whole page to Havel's brilliant commencement speech of 1995. It's on Globalism. 30 years on. - JV   [Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, on the occasion of his receiving an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, LL.D., at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, delivered the Commencement Address on June 8, 1995. We share with our readers a slightly abridged version of this address. -- ED.] One evening not long ago I was sitting in an outdoor restaurant by the water. My chair was almost identical with the chairs they have in restaurants by the Vitava River in Prague. They were playing the same rock music they play in most Czech restaurants. I saw advertisements I'm familiar with back hom...

Hopfield circuit I was pretty lucky to cover neural networks on occasions for EDN Product News in the 1990s. I'd edited articles on the topic previously for ESD. So always paid close attention  .. and more so  as machine learning increasingly concentrated on neural engines. So, when The Nobel Prize for Physics went to Hopfield and Hinton, I shifted from on project and wrote an old style tech news story. A bit of a pleasant rush, especially to complete for Miller Time for my Progressive Gauge Blog .  Here I insert some images that basically show neurals. Admit the story lacked that. JV The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced that neural network science pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2024. The two researchers are cited for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” The Nobel award is a capstone of sorts for two premier researchers in neural n...

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 ...

  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...

  The Gene begins by Siddhartha Mukherjee begins with Mendel in the monastery, where he is perceived as slow, a good guy for the garden, not smart enough to be a teacher, but they gave him every chance, and he’s sent to study. Thus, to learn under no less than Doppler. Yes, he comes to study under Christian Doppler . The brilliant mathematician and physicist - who argued that the pitch of sound or the color of light was not fixed but depended on location and velocity of the observer. An experimentalist whose work would influence Einstein ’s perceptions in the following century, he very well have noticed a train whistle changing pitch as it approached and receded, to develop his theory by way of analogy . TV histories of this may suggest he hired a band, put them on a train, and demonstrated his theory to a fin-de-siecle crowd. Mendel’s era was the tail end of Linnaean , the era when eager naturalists valiantly classified according to likeness . Naming has lost some of its pana...

i. Kicking around our pad like many others is a paperback copy of 1984. For the heck of it in the doctor’s waiting room this week I read the Afterword there, written by Erich Fromm. Fromm was a shrink who shrunk from Freud’s more strident theories on human behavior, theorizing that ‘freedom’ was a more essential part of the human complex than Siggy said. [Truth Be Told [TBT]:I confused Erich Hoffer with Eric Fromm, as they both found a spot in the same cell in my brain… Hoffer was the author of The True Believer, a look at doctrinal Soviet-era communism, and was known as the Longshoreman Philosopher. But Google set me right, and now I put Fromm and Hoffer into different brain cells. David Hofstetter was even more helpful in this.] Fromm in Afterword places 1984 as chief among Dystopian works…tho the term he uses in 1961 is ‘negative utopia’. Utopian works beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, writes Fromm, build on a trust in Progress that arose as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaiss...

Tomorrow is UN Day - I posted this two years ago -  I headed it Cavalcade of the World – as recognition of the news of time time passing ….. and in homage to then retiring Scott Simon of NPR. The U.N. is a source of controversy now – conservatives see it as a Martian colony that landed East of Murray Hill In NY ….  ….. When I was young … it was hopeful thing… better than the League of Nations – say this in the wrong bar today and you get an F U. 'What's the big look back and ponder?' Simon is asked. He said more or less:"I recall when I started out the world was still working to ensure the carnage of the Holocaust and WW II would not be (easily) repeated. So we had UN, NATO, Berlin Airlift, and so on.The biggest surprise today is that motivation to put humanism ahead of nationalism has unexpectedly been TURNED ON ITS HEAD." Why does he still do radio he is asked and Simon says the likes to watch the Cavalcade of the World. (Cavalcade is formal procession of people...

Long ago and far away I sat with my boss discussing the news. The news on that day in 1992 was the ouster of Digital Equipment Corp.'s co-founder Ken Olsen. His departure was an inflection point along a trail that saw DEC go from being a gutsy Maynard, Mass. mill town startup to being a serious threat to IBM's industry leadership to being a forlorn merger candidate. Read on....

[FROM 2006] - I'd been in the hardware trade press for 10 years when my boss assigned me to cover a Microsoft product rollout in Atlanta. Call it a simple twist of fate. It was 1991. Of course I'd heard of Bill Gates, but he was in the software business, and of just about no interest to us. If he'd been doing assembler, of course, that would have been of a whole lot of interest, but he was doing Basic, which "real men" didn't do, back in those hardware circles. But the company was on the rise, and the boss sent me. The product rolling out, in fact, was Visual Basic, which has just lately turned 15..... {There follow some botched predictions.} http://searchwindevelopment.techtarget.com/news/1195777/Stand-up-if-you-love-VB

From the vaults - Cathode Ray - On Crookes' demonstration that cathode rays travel in straight lines and produce phosphorescence - Ultimate realities Crookes saw in the maltese cross of mica inside a vacuum tube inside a vacuum tube and facing a silver cathode. induction coil. energized. and then, phophorescense! a light casting the shadow of the cross. the matter radiant in 1879. - Jack Vaughan, November 05, 2003

James Wolcott's memoir: Lucking Out. He is humble enough to point out his great luck. That should not cover the fact that he achieved great things as a writer in New York in the '70s and thereafter, and he saved enough brain cells to remember it pretty well for this memoir. He arrives from Maryland in the great city with a letter of reference from Norman Mailer. Coming to the city with hope of a literary life. Some hungry days, but he throws himself and is mixing with the strange New York crowd of the day. A story a tad Dickensian (with cynical urbanity all around, he remains as tender as Copperfield) , but this time with the backdrop of the Nixon era. Arriving as he does in 1972, he enters New York City at a particularly portent time. (Think of that Stevie Wonder number where the guy full of hope gets off at Port Authority, only to immediately be arrested and sent to Attica forever.) New York in 1972 - still relatively cheap, never more dangerous, (one day that year 24 people ...

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...

Theodore Roosevelt's legacy has risen and fallen several times since his death in 1919. Be that as it may, his work was great enough to get him a placed on Mount Rushmore along with our greatest presidents - being the only one from the 20th century so enthroned. Even after all these intervening ears, only cousin Franklin Roosevelt has vied with Theodore Roosevelt for confirmation in the pantheon presidential beyond Rushmore. The book at hand here considers a Roosevelt who had to leave the Republican Party that had quickly started to undo progressive measures Roosevelt had enacted after h, following the near equivalent of two terms, left the White House. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) lived a god-awful long time ago, but still is figure of interest. He is of special interest to dyed in the wool history buffs and some politically obsessed others. From wealth but a Progressive at heart, he tried to divert the Republican Party from kowtowing to big capitalist interests. It is the ...

MoonTraveller recognizes the passing of astronaut Neil Armstrong , who together with Buzz Aldrin, landed on the Moon in July of 1969. Neil is pretty busy in this landing audio, Buzz is reading-out the computer telemetry etc, and Neil is focused, but this NASA transcript includes debriefing commentary (what he was thinking) and later historical reminiscences by Neil. On touch down he says  "Engine arm is off. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." He had the Midwestern pilot drone attitude down cold. Uninterruptible, he was thinking, and going to land this thing come hell or high water. Before the moon he was a famed test pilot. His coolness when a prototype model LEM blew up [he ejected] was part of his legend. From this transcript I detect a call out that I take it as his descent engine had 30 sec of fuel left about 26 sec before he landed. The press asked questions. He'd laconically respond. Actually, he was thinking. Tom Wolfe: "You'd a...