07-01-2008, 05:20 PM | #1 |
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A cybernetic objection to Footprints in the Sand
This gem is from the reknowned physicist and mathematician, Norbert Wiener:
Messages themselves are a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems. (1954, 21).
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07-01-2008, 05:25 PM | #2 |
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The negative logarithm of its probability? Nerd.
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07-01-2008, 06:13 PM | #3 |
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Wiener is the nerd. The guy is a legend at MIT.
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07-01-2008, 07:34 PM | #4 |
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Cool quote, what should I read from Wiener?
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07-01-2008, 07:53 PM | #5 |
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I'm quoting him all over the place in a project I'm working on. He wrote a really cool article in the early 1950s that was never published. It was about "atomic cities," or how U.S. cities should be arranged in a certain way so as to survive a nuclear war.
His most notable books in my field are Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. He was in a circle of very hard core researchers who explored the possibilities of human-machine interconnection (cybernetics, cyborgs and all of that). Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener--those are all top drawer thinkers.
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"Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; " 1 Thess. 5:21 (NRSV) We all trust our own unorthodoxies. |
07-03-2008, 08:05 PM | #6 | |
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Quote:
Good quote, but I disagree with the inference. The probability of the message is not in how many times it is repeated but how many times it is created independently. |
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07-11-2008, 08:30 PM | #7 | |
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Quote:
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07-11-2008, 08:49 PM | #8 | |
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A slightly more funny objection to Footprints in the Sand:
Quote:
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