Feb 12, 2018:

In terms of information theory, information has nothing to do with meaning. That is the highest form of truth. The lecture example took a while to sink in: If “U” always follows “Q” with absolute certainty, then “U” has no information to provide.

Another take on information versus meaning: If a planetary rover on Mars detects a stationary rock in its path, the only information is its size, shape, and location (very little uncertainty). If the same rover detects a moving object on the surface, add velocity and heading to the previous three pieces of information, and describe location as current. There is a bit more uncertainty, but less and less as the behavior is observed over time. Even if the object is flying past the rover it only adds altitude and another axis of heading. All just information until meaning is assigned by a human operator at a ground station on Earth. Auto-complete filling in fields on a computer works in a similar way. There is no meaning other than what the operator assigns. Just information.

Not sure whether to feel insignificant or lucky to be alive in an age such as this. Who’s watching us? Are we just information, or do we have meaning?

Claude Shannon ties with Vannevar Bush when it comes to coolest people I’d never heard of before this class. The Mars planetary rover mentioned earlier is the logical extension of Shannon’s Theseus (electro-mechanical mouse in a maze). Autonomous vehicles like the Global Hawk recon aircraft are also today’s Theseus. We’re no more intelligent than those who came before us, we just have more capable technology. If Shannon were transported to the present day, he’d be up to speed on our tech within two weeks and building things he could only dream of in his day.

Feb 14, 2018:

Bumper music courtesy of The Meters.

Like an earlier lecture that dealt with WWII and the Cold War, this is one of my comfort zones. Familiar ground, especially the last years of the Cold War. We ought to thank the Soviets. Were it not for them, we wouldn’t have developed many of the technologies they went to so much trouble to buy or steal from us.

What’s the difference between signal and noise? If you look at low enough amplitudes and fast enough sample rates, it all looks like noise. In telephony, of course, signal is the desired intelligence transmitted over wire or wireless means, and noise is the deterioration over distance. The sIgnal + noise / noise ratio used to be a measure of line or channel quality. Of course, that was when “hanging up the phone,” and ‘rolling down the car window” made literal sense.

Computers: Thank you, Military-Industrial Complex. Imagine the relays, tubes, and wiring harnesses buried deep in so many landfills (Maybe not wire harnesses; people used to burn off the insulation and sell the copper for scrap), their roles in progress forgotten. Tubes. Were it not for tubes, the transistor would never have been born. Transistor-transistor logic begat IC chips with layers of transistors etched smaller than imagination. Nostalgia is nice, but I’m glad to live in the 21st century.

Even when tubes and relays were still lighting and clicking in some computers, the seeds of the internet were sewn. Networks, multiple users time-sharing mainframe computer time, all led to where we are today. Doug Englebart and Tim Berners-Lee are among the giants upon whose shoulders we stand to see farther today. Their names deserve to be better known outside the IT community.

Feb 5, 2018:

I struggle to maintain the concept of “self” long enough to apply it to anything. Like starting a campfire without matches, it’s tough. So while I have this smoldering mass of twigs in my hand, I’ll try to harness it.

If we require “two-ness” (a sense of two selves) to read silently to ourselves and I manage to read silently, then I must possess “two-ness.” If Carr is right to fear the internet threat to the “reading self,” then I’m in danger of losing something I can’t quite understand. This doesn’t mean I don’t feel the gradual erosion Carr described. Maybe writing (often) may be a way to delay this effect. If nothing can be done, is this loss just the price of progress?

One final thought on the self. In the ahistorical proposition of someone from the 18th century riding a roller coaster (properly a wooden coaster, like Goliath at Six Flags Great America), and the question of whether or not they’d enjoy it. What if they did? Would it mean that for a few seconds of controlled over-stimulation they had met their second self?

Feb 7, 2018:

Examining how previous generations solved problems using the tools available in their respective time periods is an enjoyable mental exercise. We have to step outside the way we’d approach the problem today. This may be a form of “two-ness” of self, in a way. A good example of this was the US Navy fire control computer, which mechanically performed complex applied mathematics (Note to self: buy a slide rule and learn to use it. May delay the gradual decline Carr warned about). Watching the workings of the Navy’s mechanical computer reminded me of a show I once watched on Discovery Channel. An archeologist was discussing the statues on Easter Island, and why we modern people can’t imagine how they were moved. The archeologist explained how the ancients (who moved them) weren’t handicapped by a knowledge of modern technology. Ditto the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, and dozens more ancient engineering mysteries.

Vannevar Bush is one of the most interesting people I’d never heard of before. To some of his contemporaries the Memex concept may have been a Rube Goldberg device with no value. To anyone living today it was the essence of visionary. When I read his “As We May Think” essay, I did an internet search to make sure it wasn’t a hoax, written by a present-day person.

Gen. Montgomery Meigs deserves mention here, because his skills as a logistician during the US Civil War are legendary. After the war, though, tasked with administering pension payments for veterans and their survivors, he really shined. In laying out The Pension Building in D.C., I imagine he pictured all the processes that were to be performed, how they were interrelated, and then arranged a building to accommodate it all. Gen. Meigs was an Industrial Engineer before the term was coined. Think the McDonald brothers perfecting the “Speedee Service System” in 1948, but on a far, far grander scale (see movie: The Founder).

After we see something done a certain way, we accept it as common, and rarely appreciate the thought that was involved. Example: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, the way the Apollo moon missions used separate modules: one to land on the moon’s surface, one to remain in orbit (conserving kinetic energy). Seems like the only efficient solution today, but early in the US space program, the majority of experts favored a method entailing far more expense and risk.

Jan 29, 2018:

Technology and Culture, an examination of the period from the mid-19^th century through the first quarter of the 20^th century, paying attention to disruptive technologies. These disruptive technologies would forever shift the authority governing people’s lives from the natural world to man-made rules. I can’t imagine life without these disruptive technologies and the technologies that superseded them. No one alive in the Western world today can fully envision life without them. I’m including the Amish.

The first examples of disruptive technology were the railroad and telegraph in the mid-1800s. The two were inseparable, expanding side-by-side across the country. The railroad provided rapid, relatively comfortable travel, and the telegraph allowed instantaneous communications across great distances. Both must have seemed like magic, shrinking time and space. In addition to passenger travel, eventually the railroad would transport produce via ice-refrigerated railcars to markets not familiar with such variety year-round. Today we demand what was once seen as a miracle.

Probably the most lasting influence of the early railroads was the creation of standardized time zones around 1883. Before standard time zones, synching one’s clock or watch to the sound of a local bell or the sight of a ball dropping at noon would have been commonplace. One of the only contemporary vestiges of a time-synch ball drop now occurs at New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Some say the late Dick Clark, witnessing the demise of the time-synchronizing ball-drop in every city, vowed to preserve the tradition. Rock on, Mr. Clark.

Electricity, electric light in particular, was another disruptive technology. Electric light allowed the length of a productive working day to be gauged by the clock on the wall instead of the sun in the sky. Shortly following this newfound potential for productivity came the concept of scientific management, pioneered by F.W. Taylor. Man’s rules replaced nature’s. I can’t imagine not being ruled by time.

Photography and recorded sound were also revolutionary. Both instantaneously captured and preserved the essence of a person or event in ways no medium ever had before. Every bit as much as the railroad changed the perception of time and distance, recorded images and sound re-wired the human memory. Stop-action photography, a predecessor to motion picture technology, allowed the detailed examination of motion too fast to resolve with human senses. Today, charge-coupled devices have supplanted film, making photography instant and virtually free.

History is fascinating, especially when focused on technology. My problem is I’m not backwards-compatible. For what change (thus far) has cost in terms of generations of mental and physiological stress, I believe it was worth it on balance to arrive in the present. The more I learn of the past, the less inclined I am to desire a time machine. Satisfied to study it from here, thank you.

Jan 31, 2018:

Read The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. Thought-provoking book, chilling in many places. I don’t believe younger generations can identify with it as completely, as they’ve grown up in the information age. On an intellectual level I’m sure they grasp it, though. Maybe.

Carr’s words were like thoughts I had yet to form, but I’d like to think given time I would have. Look at how we bow and pray to the neon god we’ve made. Earbuds in, thumbs tapping away. People talkin’ without speakin’, people hearing without listening (Paul Simon, 1964). There’s no going back, I’m afraid. The stresses of constant change shall continue. No generation since the Industrial Revolution has been exempt yet. Class discussion was cut short due to illness.

Jan 22, 2018:

First day was kind of a shock. Admittedly, the GMU course catalog description was somewhat vague. I’d imagined something walking us from Guglielmo Marconi to Steve Jobs, with maybe a stopover at Bell Labs. Instead, this course looks at the progression of digital technology through the prism of popular music in the 20th century. Not just the technology of capturing, packaging, and delivering said music, but what sorts of music consumers are expected to enjoy based on age, race, and economic status.

Interesting approach, but I soon became concerned. The final project requires creating a musical composition using digital audio workstation (DAW). Disclaimer: I have a deep appreciation of music (all genres), but zero musical talent. Haven’t read sheet music since grade school. Know that feeling on the first day of a class when you get the urge to bail?

After giving an overview of the course and required texts, Professor O’Malley played a portion of a mid-20th century recording of Hank Williams, Sr., and it clicked for me. Before I was old enough for school, I was tagging along with my Dad as he loaded and maintained jukeboxes in and around my home town. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the 45 rpm records used in jukeboxes were discarded (or supposed to have been) after their time in the lineup. A sea of well-used 45 rpm records found their way to my record player. From Metal to Bluegrass, Gospel to R&B, the soundtrack of my life was something I could draw upon to learn about history. After being reassured that DAW software is nothing to worry about, I look forward to this unique approach to history.

Jan 24, 2018:

Those of us who arrived to class ahead of time were greeted by the legendary Mahalia Jackson singing the gospel. HIST 390 includes bumper music, a very nice feature.

Required reading/viewing for this class focused on audio compression, a digital manipulation of recordings that increases loudness at the expense of dynamic range. Other readings addressed additional trends in popular music that have degraded (in my opinion) its appeal in recent decades. The impossibility of the sound produced by audio compression was displayed from the conversational level of Frank Sinatra’s crooning in front of a live band to the neutered vocal amplitude swings of Adele and Katie Perry.

In discussing the “flattening” effect of audio compression, I was surprised to learn many in class didn’t view it as a negative practice. Age is only one aspect of perspective, but in this case probably the most influential. I can’t imagine Chuck Berry’s (and ELO’s cover of) “Roll Over Beethoven,” subjected to audio compression. However, I can understand some classmates’ view that music shouldn’t be obtrusive, to serve as background noise. It’s a matter of how one sees the role of music.

Insight goes both ways; there are no wrong answers, but the more answers we hear, the more we refine our own opinion. There is no substitute for the journey, the exchange of ideas. “Life is a Highway,” as Tom Cochrane wrote.