LOGO-L> famous thinkers

[KERRB@Magill.UniSA.edu.au]

Here are some short biographies of some famous people. I snipped them a much 
longer list posted by edupage. For me these were the most interesting ones.
-- Bill Kerr
---------------------------------

Today's Honorary Subscriber is the great English mathematician and logician
Alan Turing (1912-1954), a pioneer of artificial intelligence.  In his
famous essay "Can a Machine Think?" he wrote:  "I propose to consider the
question, 'Can machines think?'  This should begin with definitions of the
terms 'machine' and 'think.'  The definitions might be framed so as to
reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is
dangerous.  If the meaning of the words 'machine' and 'think' are to be
found by examining the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the
question, 'Can machines think?' is to be sought in a statistical survey such
as the Gallup poll.  But this is absurd.  Instead of attempting such a
definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related
to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words."  The new form of
the question took the form of "imitation game," in which a machine attempts
to imitate human thought, and the question changes subtly from "Can a
machine think?" to "Can a machine simulate intelligent human behavior?"


Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Canadian sociologist Laurence Peter
(1920-1990), whose study of organizations led him to the formulation of the
"Peter Principle," which states that people keep getting promoted until they
reach (and remain at) the level of their incompetence.


Today's Honorary Subscriber is Mihai Nadin, who is chair of the program in
Computational Design at the University of Wuppertal, and the author of the
provocative new book, "The Civilization Of Illiteracy," in which he says:
"The overall development toward the civilization of illiteracy suggests that
the age of the book is being followed by an age of alternative media.  The
promoters of literacy are doing their best to resist this change.  Their
motto is 'Read anything, as long as you read.'  They effectively discount
any and all other means of acquiring knowledge, and totally disenfranchise
individuals who cannot read.  There are many avenues to self-constitution:
all our senses -- including common sense -- repetition and memory.  Some of
these avenues are more efficient than the medium of the book.  If they were
not, they would not be succeeding as they do.  The champions of literacy
also imply that anything acquired through reading is good.  The harm that
can be transmitted through the book medium can be recorded in volumes.  On
the collective level, it has led to persecution and violence, even mass
destruction.  On the individual level, it can lead to imbalance.  The child
who is forced to read at age three is being deprived of time for developing
other skills essential to his or her physical and mental well-being.  The
cognitive repertory of these children is being stunted by well-meaning but
misguided parents.  It is being stunted, too, by the market that sells
literacy as though there were no tomorrow despite the fact that literacy has
lost its dominant position in our lives."  (Mihai Nadin, University of
Dresden Press, 1997)

Today's Honorary Subscribers are Andy Grove, chairman and chief executive
officer of Intel Corporation, and Tim Jackson, Financial Times journalist
and author of the just-released book, "INSIDE INTEL:  Andy Grove and the
Rise of World's Most Powerful Chip Company" (Dutton, 1997).  On the book's
dust jacket John Gehl says:  "Terrific!  Written with equal parts of
history, tragedy, comedy and farce, INSIDE INTEL is competitive with the
best modern spy novels, technothrillers, soap operas, comedy sitcoms,
detective stories, and organizational jungle books."



Today's Honorary Subscriber is E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977), the German-born
British economist and businessman who advocated replacing large
organizations with small working units and communal ownership of
"alternative" technologies.  In his 1973 book "Small Is Beautiful:  A Study
of Economics As If People Mattered,"  Schumacher said that modern economists
are "used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual
consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better
off' than a man who consumes less.  A Buddhist economist would consider this
approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to
human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with
the minimum of consumption. . .   The less toil there is, the more time and
strength is left for artistic creativity.  Modern economics, on the other
hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic
activity."

Today's Honorary Subscriber is Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and author
of  the new book "Close To the Machine:  Technophilia And Its Discontents,"
which Andrei Codrescu (National Public Radio) calls "a little masterpiece,"
Steward Brand (Whole Earth Catalog) writes that "the reader vibrates between
delight and alarm on every page," and John Gehl (Educom Review and Edupage)
says:  "Ellen Ullman, a software engineer, writes with the energy of
Boswell, the clarity of Orwell, and the warmth of Montaigne.  You may
wonder:  how could a software engineer write so well?  But you shouldn't
wonder, you should read.  Ullman is a wonderful writer and 'Close To The
Machine' is a wonderful book."  Here's a passage from the book: 
      "The programmer, who needs clarity, who must talk all day to a machine
that demands declarations, hunkers down into a low-grade annoyance.  It is
here that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling
from behind Coke cans, has its origins.  The disorder of the desk, the
floor;  the yellow Post-It notes everywhere;  the whiteboards covered with
scrawl:  all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human
thought.  The messiness cannot go into the program;  it piles up around the
programmer.  
     "Soon the programmer has no choice but to retreat into some private
interior space, closer to the machine, where things can be accomplished.
The machine begins to seem friendlier than the analysts, the users, the
managers.  The real-world reflection of the program -- who cares anymore?
Guide an X-ray machine or target a missile;  print a budget or a dossier;
run a city subway or a disk-drive read/write arm:  it all begins to blur.
The system has crossed the membrane -- the great filter of logic,
instruction by instruction -- where it has been cleansed of its linkages to
actual human life.
     "The goal now is not whatever all the analysts set out to do;  the goal
becomes the creation of the system itself.  Any ethics or morals or second
thoughts, any questions or muddles or exceptions, all dissolve into a junky
Nike-mind:  Just do it.  If I just sit here and code, you think, I can make
something run.  When the humans come back to talk changes, I can just run
the program.  Show them:  Here.  Look at this.  See?  This is not just talk.
This runs.  Whatever you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have
are words and what I have is this, this thing I've built, this operational
system.  Talk all you want, but this thing here:  it works."
       (Ellen Ullman, "Close To The Machine:  Technophilia And Its
Discontents," City Lights 1997)



Today's Honorary Subscriber is Tim Paterson, who wrote the DOS operating
system when he was 24 and working for Seattle Computer, which sold DOS to
Bill Gate                    ************************************** a week
at Microsoft, is philosophical:  "When Microsoft offered to buy DOS outright
from Seattle Computer, Seattle was a hardware company, not a software
company, so it made sense to sell.  Microsoft paid $50,000.  It was a good
deal as far as I'm concerned.  DOS became big only because of Microsoft's
muscle.  It wouldn't have been anything if Seattle Computer had retained
ownership.  It's always been a matter of pride that I wrote the program that
has easily become the world's most widely used program."



Today's Honorary  Subscriber is C(harles) P(ercy) Snow (1905-1980), the
English physicist, novelist, and government bureaucrat who is perhaps best
remembered as the creator of the phrase "the two cultures" to describe the
lack of communication between the scientific and literary communities.  Here
is a sample passage from the famous "The Two Cultures" lecture he gave at
Cambridge in 1959:
     "Most scientists would claim that you cannot comprehend the world
unless you know the structure of science, in particular of physical science.
In a sense, and a perfectly genuine sense, that is true.  Not to have read
'War and Peace' and 'La Cousine Bette' and 'La Chartreuse de Parme' is not
to be educated;  but so is not have a glimmer of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics.  Yet that case ought not to be pressed too far.  It is more
justifiable to say that those without any scientific understanding miss a
whole body of experience:  they are rather like the tone deaf, from whom all
musical experience is cut off and who have to get on without it.  The
intellectual invasions of science are, however, penetrating deeper.
Psychoanalysis once looked like a deep invasion, but that was a false alarm;
cybernetics may turn out to be the real thing, driving down into the
problems of will and cause and motive.  If so, those who do not understand
the method will not understand the depths of their own cultures."


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