created 2025-04-07, & modified, =this.modified
rel: When We Cease To Understand the World by Labatut
Why I’m reading
Frequently recommended book, that has been on my backlog for years.
My reason for delaying a read, is that it seems involved, and long but also a subject matter that I would enjoy, so I want to make sure that I am ready.
I’m also changed.
I’m not sure if I even like computers even more, the same way.
There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky.
Von Neumann’s project was the physical realization of Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, a theoretical construct created in 1936. It was the first computer to make full use of a high-speed random-access storage matrix and was the first machine whose coding was the most widely replicated and whose logical architecture was the most widely reproduced.
Computers were essential to the initiation of nuclear explosions and to understanding what happened next. It is no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive human inventions appeared at the same time.
In answering the Entscheidungsproblem, Turing proved that there is no systematic way to tell, by looking at a code, what that code will do.
1953
Bit was coined by statistician John W. Tukey shortly after he joined von Neumann’s project.