heonjoo - Tumblr blog

[heonjoo]

“Anyway, I hope they keep those barber machines out of Miami Beach for another two years, and then I’ll be ready to retire and the hell with them. They had the man who invented the damn things on television the other night, and turns out he’s a barber hisself. Said he kept worrying and worrying about somebody was going to invent a haircutting machine that’d put him out of business. And he’d have nightmares about it, and when he’d wake up from them, he’d tell hisself all the reasons why they couldn’t ever make a machine that’d do the job—you know, all the complicated motions a barber goes through. And then, in his next nightmare, he’d dream of a machine that did one of the jobs, like combing, and he’d see how it worked clear as a bell. And it was just a vicious circle. He’d dream. Then he’d tell hisself something the machine couldn’t do. Then he’d dream of a machine, and he’d see just how a machine could do what he’d said it couldn’t do. And on and on, until he’d dreamed up a whole machine that cut hair like nobody’s business. And he sold his plans for a hundred thousand bucks and royalties, and I don’t guess he has to worry about anything any more.”

[heonjoo]

"And, as ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science, without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it. However certain the facts of any science may be, and, however just the ideas we may have formed of these facts, we can only communicate false impressions to others, while we want words by which these may be properly expressed." Antoine Lavoisier

[heonjoo]

편지에서 그는 견딜 수 없는 죄책감을 느낀다고 고백했다. 무수한 사람들의 죽음에 직간접적으로 관여했기 때문이 아니라 공기중에서 질소를 뽑아내는 자신의 방법이 지구의 자연적 평형을 무지막지하게 교란하는 바람에 인류가 아니라 식물이 세계를 차지할까봐 두려웠기 때문이다.

[heonjoo]

In the Russian translation of Dirac’s book Quantum Mechanics, published as long ago as 1935, there is a preface inserted which says, “Although this book contains numerous errors and fallacies which are in contradiction with the well-known principles of dialectical materialism, nevertheless it contains so much that will be of value to the judicious student that the editors have felt themselves justified in publishing it without correction or alteration.”

[heonjoo]

Politicians may talk a lot, and utility managers may worry a lot, about how terrorists might hack into, shoot up, or bomb various bits of our grid in order to bring the United States to her knees. And yet the trees constitute a far more significant threat to the security and reliability of our national electric infrastructure. It is every utility's responsibility to keep the plants away from the electric lines… ...

Gretchen Bakke, “The Grid”

[heonjoo]

Bush disagreed that America had overdosed on technology, snapping that critics "may as well blame it [the Depression] on medical advance[s]" for increasing population.  "Would we go back to an earlier time with less sophisticated technology? he asked.  Of course not, because the standard of living has gone up, not down, due to technological advance."  Besides, humanity cannot separate itself from technology; it is us. "For better or worse," he warned, "we are destined to live in a world devoted to modern science and engineering."

[heonjoo]

Edison thrilled visitors to his laboratory in Menlo Park by giving them rides on a miniature train that he had built on the grounds. The track was about a mile long and provided power to the train through electrified rails. The train could reach speeds of forty miles (sixty-four kilometers) per hour, but it didn't have a proper motor; instead, it used a generator that was running in reverse. Although such an arrangement could work, it forced the generator to perform a task for which it hadn't been designed.

“A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations”, Robert Bryce, p.26-27 (paperback)

[heonjoo]

He ranked the engineer as first among equals, a sort of super-citizen who could master virtually every activity essential to the smooth functioning of a modern nation.  What distinguished the engineer from other experts was his breadth. Bush saw the engineer as a pragmatic polymath; the engineer, he once wrote, "was not primarily a physicist, or a businessman, or an inventor but [someone] who would acquire some of the skills and knowledge of each of these and be capable of successfully developing and applying new devices on the grand scale."

Endless Frontier by G. Pascal Zachary

[heonjoo]

Developing the display presented many problems.  Some of them were unexpected.  Already in 1978, the Wright-Patterson team reported discovering what it called "display fascination" to a DARPA conference on biocybernetics.  Extensive testing and a body of anecdotal evidence showed that "crew members often become enthralled or 'drawn into' their display," so that it becomes difficult for them to interrupt or change the focus of their attention.  The lure of the display could potentially present problems during operations.  The air force was worried that it took test pilots consistently longer to redirect their attention from the display to the real world than from the real world back to the display.  It was as if the operators would default into the machine.

Thomas Rid, “Rise of the Machines”

[heonjoo]

"창조과학자들만큼이나 내 마음을 심란하게 만드는 사람들은 환경을 아끼고 기꺼이 자기 시간과 에너지를 투자해서 환경을 지키는 운동을 하는 분들이다. 창조과학자들처럼 이들도 심성이 대체로 곱다. 그래서 더 안타깝다."

- "저도 과학은 어렵습니다만", 이정모

[heonjoo]

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

Christopher Hitchens

[heonjoo]

"Odd license plate."

Ambra eyed the car's vanity plate and chuckled.

  E-WAVE

"Well," she explained, "Edmond told me that Google and NASA recently acquired a groundbreaking supercomputer called D-Wave - one of the world's first ‘quantum' computers. He tried to explain it to me, but it was pretty complicated-something about superpositions and quantum mechanics and creating an entirely new breed of machine. Anyhow, Edmond said he wanted to build something that would blow D-Wave out of the water. He planned to call his new computer E-Wave.

"E for Edmond," Langdon mused.

And E is one step beyond D, Ambra thought, recalling Edmond's story about the famous computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, according to urban legend, had been named HAL because each letter occurred alphabetically one letter ahead of IBM.

- Dan Brown, "Origin"

[heonjoo]

[heonjoo]

"We have also here an acting cause to account for that balance so often observed in nature, - a deficiency in one set of organs always being compensated by an increased development of some others - powerful wings accompanying weak feet, or great velocity making up for the absence of defensive weapons; for it has been shown that a varieties in which an unbalanced deficiency occurred could not long continue their existence. The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident."

- Alfred Russel Wallace

[heonjoo]

"Clarke's Third Law doesn't work in reverse. Given that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, it does not follow that any magical claim that anybody may make at any time is indistinguishable from a technological advance that will come some time in the future."

- Richard Dawkins

[heonjoo]

"[this is] a total misunderstanding of what chaos is about... while the flapping of a butterfly's wings might conceivably trigger a hurricane, killing butterflies is unlikely to reduce the incidence of hurricanes"

- Robert Park

[heonjoo]

He thought the market could be justified only in light of individual virtue, and he was anxious that a society governed by nothing but transactional self-interest was no society at all. Neoliberalism is Adam Smith without the anxiety.

“Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world“ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world