Postcard From the Middle
Post Script:
Not only is the real world messy, but so are my thoughts, at times. At the very least, this was an honest - though faulted - attempt at exploring the limits of theoretical absolutism and one of its contributing causes, our philosophy of technology.
The Man Cave, it's a dangerous place, once one's thoughts are permitted to wander. Composed last week, and left to age for a few days, via Remington Ten Forty.
Oh, and I never did come up with a good replacement term for "analogue". Which is perhaps fitting.
posted by Joe V at 10:59 PM
1 Comments:
I think this is a very good, appealing bit of brainstorming!
Obama is a good example of a non-binary body and a non-binary mind. He has tried to find a common middle ground again and again, and gotten nowhere. I read his "Dreams from My Father" and found it very interesting. I'll be sure to read his presidential memoirs, whether he writes them in 2013 or 2017.
This is Norbert Wiener's explanation of the analog/digital distinction in his "The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society" (1954 ed.):
"This all-or-none machine is called a digital machine. It has great advantages for the most varied problems of communication and control. In particular, the sharpness of the decision between 'yes' and 'no' permits it to accumulate information in such a way as to allow us to discriminate very small differences in very large numbers. Besides these machines which work on a yes-and-no scale, there are other computing and control machines which measure rather than count. These are known as analogy machines, because they operate on the basis of analogous connections between the measured quantities and the numerical quantities supposed to represent them." Wiener goes on to give the example of a slide rule and its limitations.
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