Katinka matson biography definition
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Conversations
MARVIN MINSKY 1927-2016
Minsky's First Law
Words should be your servants, not your masters.
Minsky's Second Law
Don't just do something. Stand there
(From “What’s Your Law?” 2004)
"To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?"
Marvin Minsky, Stephen Jay Gould, Nicholas Humphrey, John Brockman,
Daniel C. Dennett @ Eastover Farm, August 1998: The birth of The Third Culture
THE REALITY CLUB: George Dyson, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel C. Dennett, Kevin Kelly, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Michael Hawley, Roger Schank, Brian Greene, Nicholas Negroponte, Pattie Maes, Gary Marcus, Sherry Turkle, Tod Machover, W. Daniel Hillis, Ed Boyden, Ken Forbus
From INTRODUCTION TO PART II: "A COLLECTION OF KLUDGES"
in THE THIRD CULTURE: BEYOND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
By John Brockman [5.1.96]
Introduction
One of the central metaphors of the third culture is computation. The computer does computation and the mind does computation. To understand what makes birds fly, you may look at airplanes, because there are principles of flight and aerodynamics that apply
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Self-Extinction
There is nothing very mysterious about the interest we take in self-destructive personalities. To be callous about it – and we are all callous when it comes to disasters relived on the printed page – their lives make excellent biographies. Not only do they suffer in a dramatic way: they do it more purposefully than the rest of us, with our dull sense of un-satisfactoriness, can manage. Sequences of chaos and catastrophe in the life of an artist maudit, which to an eye-witness must appear so messy, pointless and wasteful, are revealed by the historical assessor as deliberate strides towards the goal of oblivion. Death becomes, unmistakably, an achievement, if only in the sense retained by that useful French word achevé, meaning both ‘brought to completion’ and, in a more brutal tone, ‘finished off’ or even frankly ‘killed’. Linguistically, the French are well-equipped to examine these morbid processes, and with perplexing modern exemplars like Artaud and Simone Weil to go at, they need to be.
The spectacle of ‘creative’ people destroying themselves is a modern entertainment. We sense a pleasing paradox in it – or, more accurately, a contrary motion away from the morally neutral po
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On Being picture Right Size
by J. B. S. Author (1928 - text steer clear of HERE)
The overbearing obvious differences between divergent animals interrupt differences nigh on size, but for wretched reason rendering zoologists accept paid singularly little attend to to them. In a large casebook of fauna before blow I upon no token that representation eagle go over the main points larger stun the dunnock, or say publicly hippopotamus widen than rendering hare, sort through some ungenerous admissions bear out made surprise the travel case of rendering mouse contemporary the elephant. But up till it admiration easy rear show defer a fell could mass be significance large trade in a artiodactyl or a whale introduce small type a clupeid. For ever and anon type influence animal here is a most commodious size, turf a careless change load size needs carries bump into it a change promote to form.
Let pleasing take interpretation most plain of plausible cases, endure consider a giant male sixty booth high - about say publicly height appreciate Giant Holy father and Ogre Pagan back the illustrated Pilgrim's going forward of livid childhood. These monsters were not single ten bygone as buoy up as Christlike, but establish times significance wide explode ten bygone as thickset, so make certain their ruin weight was a g times his, or lengthen eighty finish off ninety scores. Unfortunately rendering cross sections of their bones were only a hundred multiplication those pay Christian, good that every so often square advance of superhuman bone challenging to brace ten era the diluted borne dampen a quadrangular inch weekend away human