deep within me bubbles a treatise demonstrating that every foundational premise in modern computing design is actually the embodiment of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in that it’s the first thing that popped into someone’s head that got instantiated and therefore should absolutely be subject to constant re-evaluation by others.
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@djsundog George Boole, Napoleon of Crime: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/could-sherlock-holmes-s-true-nemesis-have-been-a-mathematician-1.3694917
@flyingsaceur @djsundog While both are genii, I'm dubious of Man Who Does No Crimes being the basis for Man Who Does Only Crimes & Asteroids.
Boole's book was really good, but it was a little hard going for a modern not-too-good-education boy.
@mdhughes @djsundog “hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind” i.e. the Irish are all shifty and dishonest
never underestimate the capacity of the Victorians to stereotype anyone and anything: I remember the beginning of Charles Gordon’s biography stating something to the effect of “too bad he has ancestors from Denmark, those Danes are all untrustworthy”
transistors are just reworked vacuum tubes and vacuum tubes were just one way of tackling the problems to which they were applied. other approaches have different tradeoffs that are now written off, but all approaches have tradeoffs and if we don’t re-evaluate those tradeoffs in the light of other more recent discoveries then what are we even doing but perpetuating hegemony really
“we can probably fix this with some math using binary numbers” should sound deranged to any normal person.
@djsundog Counterpoint: the primeval computer people really, really wanted to do decimal math because guys love Doing It the Hard Way
Charles Boole? just some guy really.