Machines

Just before Christmas finished George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral, The Origins of the Digital Universe, Random House. About the creation of binary language—the origins of the computer and binary code. Interesting story lines—the influence of Hungarian theoretical mathematicians, fleeing Nazi Germany (several from Budapest Jewish upper-class families). The story of Alan Turing, a brilliant who helped break the code of the Nazi enigma machine. (After the war Turing was prosecuted for his homosexuality and committed suicide.) The Turing machine is a theoretical machine based on concepts (and mechanical plans) by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz But a description of what such a machine might look like (wheels and pinballs etc. etc.—in a story set in the Roman empire) turns up in the great story “The Oracle Engine” by M.T. Anderson, in Steampunk, an Anthology…. Brilliance.

Pinker

Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, Brilliance (Check his website, stevenpinker.com. Or http://proxypantheon.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/interview-with-audiobook-reader-arthur-morey/).

Better Angels enthusiastically reviewed everywhere. Pinker’s message: humankind is less violent than ever. This is not conventional wisdom; it’s a hard sell. Pinker writes huge, overwhelming books. He works across disciplines—history, evolutionary biology, philosophy, sociology—so he persuades partly by weight of evidence. If you disagreed, where would you start?