Ponderings
The Island of Knowledge: How to Live with Mystery in a Culture Obsessed with Certainty and Definitive Answers
Partway between Hannah Arendt's timeless manifesto for the unanswerable questions at the heart of meaning and Stuart Firestein's case for how not-knowing drives science, Gleiser explores our commitment to knowledge and our parallel flirtation with the mystery of the unknown.
What emerges is at once a celebration of human achievement and a gentle reminder that the appropriate reaction to scientific and technological progress is not arrogance over the knowledge conquered, which seems to be our civilizational modus operandi, but humility in the face of what remains to be known and, perhaps above all, what may always remain unknowable.
The Marginalian, 05 October 2025
Cybernetics
From Cybernetics to AI: the pioneering work of Norbert Wiener
The computers at the time weren't powerful enough to run such calculations. But Wiener had established a principle that would have implications far beyond planes: That past behavior can be used to model the future behavior of complex systems, using statistical means ...
Wiener realized that almost all complex systems are driven by feedback loops of information. That is, communication isn't linear, flowing just from a sender to a receiver. Rather, in many systems it forms a loop. A thermostat senses the temperature in a room, compares it to its setting and activates the furnace. As the room heats up, it cancels out the thermostat's alert, and the furnace deactivates. And so forth. The system becomes “intelligent” if it can retain memories of past performances and use them to improve over time ...
He also foresaw the dangers of AI. Wiener predicted that automation would eliminate many jobs, creating social tensions. And he warned that intelligent machines might not always make decisions in ways that humans would foresee - or want. For that reason, the control given to AI should be limited, Wiener advised: “The machine's danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it.”
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics , April 25, 2024
Economist
Technology Quarterly | The names are meaningless: Node names do not reflect actual transistor sizes
But banish any visions you may have of transistors just nine or ten atoms wide. The transistors in the “20A” architecture, which the troubled company has just abandoned so as to double down on the 18A, have gate lengths of around 14nm—140 angstroms, or 140Å.
Something else
One song, two versions
Cantaloupe Island by Hugh Masekela
Hugh Masekela, who has died aged 78, was one of the world's finest and most distinctive horn players, whose performing on trumpet and flugelhorn mixed jazz with South African styles and music from across the African continent and diaspora. Exiled from his country for 30 years, he was also a powerful singer and songwriter and an angry political voice, using his music and live performances to attack the apartheid regime that had banished him from his homeland. (from the Guardian obit)
And for a different take on this Herbie Hancock classic.