Actor Luke Perry, known for roles in “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Riverdale,” died on Monday after suffering a massive stroke on Wednesday. He was 52. “[Perry] was surrounded by his children Jack and Sophie, fiancé Wendy Madison Bauer, ex-wife Minnie Sharp, mother Ann Bennett, step-father Steve Bennett, brother Tom Perry, sister Amy Coder, and other close family and friends,” his rep said in a statement. “The family appreciates the outpouring of support and prayers that have been extended to Luke from around the world, and respectfully request privacy in this time of great mourning. No further details will be released at this time.”
Month: March 2019
👓 Celebrating the Work and Life of Claude Elwood Shannon | IEEE Foundation
In 2014 IEEE Information Theory Society President, Michelle Effros, knew that something had to be done. The man who coined the very phrase, Information Theory, had largely been forgotten. Given his importance, and the growing impact that his work was having on society at large, she led the IEEE Information Theory Society on a quest to use the Centennial of Claude Shannon’s birth to right this injustice.
A series of activities were planned, including a dual IEEE Milestone dedicated at both Nokia Bell Labs and MIT. Such was his stature that both institutions were intent on honoring the work he accomplished on their respective sites. His work, after all, foresaw and paved the way for the Information Revolution that we are experiencing, making possible everything from cell phones to GPS to Bitcoin.
By the time of the Nokia Bell Labs event, the keystone project – a documentary on Shannon’s life was in the formative stages. IEEE Information Theory Society leadership had secured the services of Mark Levinson, of Particle Fever acclaim. The script was being written and preliminary plans were underway.
To make the film a reality, a coalition of individuals, foundations and corporations came together with the common objective to bring the story of Shannon to as wide an audience as possible. An effective partnership was forged with the IEEE Foundation which was undertaking its own unique project - its first ever major fundraising campaign. The combination proved to be a winning entry, and the Shannon Centennial quickly became exemplary of the impact that can occur when the power of volunteers is bolstered by effective staff support.
19 June was the World Premiere of the finished product. The Bit Player was screened to a full house on the big screen at the IEEE Information Theory Society’s meeting in Vail, CO, US. The film was met with enthusiastic acclaim. Following the screening attendees were treated to a Q&A with the film’s director and star.
Among the techniques used to tell Shannon’s story was the testimony of current luminaries in the fields he inspired. All spoke of his importance and the need for his impact to be recognized. As one contributor, Andrea Goldsmith, Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering, Stanford University, put it, “Today everyone carries Shannon around in their pocket”.
Based on this article the Claude Shannon movie The Bit Player has already had its premiere. I updated the IMDb entry, but I still have to wonder if it is ever going to get any distribution so that the rest of us might ever see it?
👓 Deep text: a catastrophic threat to the bullshit economy? | Abject
I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor. — Kenneth Goldsmith It’s a striking headline, and the Guardian…
Reply to The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic | Nautilus
Amanda Gefter (Nautilus)McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence.
Quick note of a factual and temporal error: the article indicates:
After all, it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content.
In fact, it was Claude E. Shannon, one of Wiener’s colleagues, who wrote the influential A Mathematical Theory of Communication published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948, almost 5 years after the 1943 part of the timeline the article is indicating. Not only did Wiener not write the paper, but it wouldn’t have existed yet to have been a factor in Pitts deciding to choose a school or adviser at the time. While Wiener may have been a tremendous polymath, I suspect that his mathematical area of expertise during those years would have been closer to analysis and not probability theory.
To put Pitts & McCulloch’s work into additional context, Claude Shannon’s stunning MIT master’s thesis A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits in 1940 applied Boolean algebra to electronic circuits for the first time and as a result largely allowed the digital age to blossom. It would be nice to know if Pitts & McCulloch were aware of it when they published their work three years later.
📺 “Fresh Off the Boat” Workin’ the ‘Ween | ABC
Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar. With Randall Park, Constance Wu, Hudson Yang, Forrest Wheeler. Honey and Marvin ask Jessica and Louis to be baby Maria's godparents, and Jessica offers to babysit her on Halloween night. But the Huangs are in for a spooky evening when they agree to help wean the baby off of her pacifier. Meanwhile, Eddie is hired by mattress store owner Harv for a job to make some extra money so that he can buy himself a car and ends up having to work in the creepy store all...
Felt like a sub-par episode to me…
📺 “Fresh Off the Boat” The Hand That Sits the Cradle | ABC
Directed by Michael Spiller. With Randall Park, Constance Wu, Hudson Yang, Forrest Wheeler. When Jessica offers to help out exhausted new mother Honey with Zuo Yue Zi - which means "Sitting the Month" taking care of her - Honey begins to realize that 30 days of having to abide by Jessica's strict rules and dietary regimen could leave her more harried then she already is. Meanwhile, after watching "Pumping Iron," Eddie and Emery attempt to put together a workout routine in order to buff ...
📺 “Fresh Off the Boat” Fresh Off the RV | ABC
Directed by Anya Adams. With Randall Park, Constance Wu, Hudson Yang, Forrest Wheeler. While Honey and Marvin celebrate the birth of their baby, Jessica's book is finally released.
Seems like I’ve been seeing a lot of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on television lately. I know I just saw him in an episode of The Big Bang Theory that recently floated by. He wasn’t quite as entertaining here because he’s obviously 30+ years older than he should have been for a show set in the early 90’s.
📅 RSVP to WordCamp Santa Clarita 2019
April 5-6, 2019, Santa Clarita, CA #wcscv
👓 Frans de Waal Embraces Animal Emotions in ‘Mama’s Last Hug’ | New York Times
In his new book, the renowned ethnologist argues that emotions are key to understanding both human and animal behavior.
👓 The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic | Issue 21: Information – Nautilus
Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker,…
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
McCulloch was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m. ❧
Now that is a business card title!
March 03, 2019 at 06:01PM
McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence. ❧
tl;dr
March 03, 2019 at 06:06PM
Gottfried Leibniz. The 17th-century philosopher had attempted to create an alphabet of human thought, each letter of which represented a concept and could be combined and manipulated according to a set of logical rules to compute all knowledge—a vision that promised to transform the imperfect outside world into the rational sanctuary of a library. ❧
I don’t think I’ve ever heard this quirky story…
March 03, 2019 at 06:08PM
Which got McCulloch thinking about neurons. He knew that each of the brain’s nerve cells only fires after a minimum threshold has been reached: Enough of its neighboring nerve cells must send signals across the neuron’s synapses before it will fire off its own electrical spike. It occurred to McCulloch that this set-up was binary—either the neuron fires or it doesn’t. A neuron’s signal, he realized, is a proposition, and neurons seemed to work like logic gates, taking in multiple inputs and producing a single output. By varying a neuron’s firing threshold, it could be made to perform “and,” “or,” and “not” functions. ❧
I’m curious what year this was, particularly in relation to Claude Shannon’s master’s thesis in which he applied Boolean algebra to electronics.
Based on their meeting date, it would have to be after 1940.And they published in 1943: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02478259
Based on their meeting date, it would have to be after 1940.And they published in 1943: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02478259
March 03, 2019 at 06:14PM
McCulloch and Pitts alone would pour the whiskey, hunker down, and attempt to build a computational brain from the neuron up. ❧
A nice way to pass the time to be sure. Naturally mathematicians would have been turning “coffee into theorems” instead of whiskey.
March 03, 2019 at 06:15PM
“an idea wrenched out of time.” In other words, a memory. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:17PM
McCulloch and Pitts wrote up their findings in a now-seminal paper, “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. ❧
reference at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02478259
March 03, 2019 at 06:21PM
I really like this picture here. Perhaps for a business card?
❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:23PM
it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content. ❧
Oops, I think this article is confusing Wiener with Claude Shannon?
March 03, 2019 at 06:34PM
By the fall of 1943, Pitts had moved into a Cambridge apartment, was enrolled as a special student at MIT, and was studying under one of the most influential scientists in the world. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:32PM
Thus formed the beginnings of the group who would become known as the cyberneticians, with Wiener, Pitts, McCulloch, Lettvin, and von Neumann its core. ❧
Wiener always did like cyberneticians for it’s parallelism with mathematicians….
March 03, 2019 at 06:38PM
In the entire report, he cited only a single paper: “A Logical Calculus” by McCulloch and Pitts. ❧
First Draft of a Report on EDVAC by jon von Neumann
March 03, 2019 at 06:43PM
Oliver Selfridge, an MIT student who would become “the father of machine perception”; Hyman Minsky, the future economist; and Lettvin. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:44PM
at the Second Cybernetic Conference, Pitts announced that he was writing his doctoral dissertation on probabilistic three-dimensional neural networks. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:44PM
In June 1954, Fortune magazine ran an article featuring the 20 most talented scientists under 40; Pitts was featured, next to Claude Shannon and James Watson. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:46PM
Lettvin, along with the young neuroscientist Patrick Wall, joined McCulloch and Pitts at their new headquarters in Building 20 on Vassar Street. They posted a sign on the door: Experimental Epistemology. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:47PM
“The eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted,” they reported in the now-seminal paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” published in 1959. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:50PM
There was a catch, though: This symbolic abstraction made the world transparent but the brain opaque. Once everything had been reduced to information governed by logic, the actual mechanics ceased to matter—the tradeoff for universal computation was ontology. Von Neumann was the first to see the problem. He expressed his concern to Wiener in a letter that anticipated the coming split between artificial intelligence on one side and neuroscience on the other. “After the great positive contribution of Turing-cum-Pitts-and-McCulloch is assimilated,” he wrote, “the situation is rather worse than better than before. Indeed these authors have demonstrated in absolute and hopeless generality that anything and everything … can be done by an appropriate mechanism, and specifically by a neural mechanism—and that even one, definite mechanism can be ‘universal.’ Inverting the argument: Nothing that we may know or learn about the functioning of the organism can give, without ‘microscopic,’ cytological work any clues regarding the further details of the neural mechanism.” ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:54PM
Nature had chosen the messiness of life over the austerity of logic, a choice Pitts likely could not comprehend. He had no way of knowing that while his ideas about the biological brain were not panning out, they were setting in motion the age of digital computing, the neural network approach to machine learning, and the so-called connectionist philosophy of mind. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:55PM
by stringing them together exactly as Pitts and McCulloch had discovered, you could carry out any computation. ❧
I feel like this is something more akin to what may have been already known from Boolean algebra and Whitehead/Russell by this time. Certainly Shannon would have known of it?
March 03, 2019 at 06:58PM
Acquired an OXO scraper and a matched green jar scraper and a food bush.
