ThinkingAboutTheThinkable

The current public affairs person at Treasury has been found to have a doctoral dissertation rife with unattributed quotations etc. Several years ago, in a doctoral course, I found that the final papers were filled with unattributed quotations, paraphrases, etc.  This is cheating, violations of academic integrity, and may lead to harsh penalties. Of course, do not intentionally cheat, leave out references to sources, and quotation marks when appropriate. To be sure, ask you advisor or instructor to put your paper through TurnItIn's test for originality. Such copying is common in consulting and politics.  So for advice see a regular faculty member who has a deep research portfolio and many publications. (Our spectacular teaching faculty may not have these since research is not part of the job description.)

Seymour Cray was the premier supercomputer designer.  His firm was Cray Research, after he left CDC. John Rollwagen, his CEO,...      The real message was something I always told our people. Namely that we had exclusive access to Seymour's disruptive ability to create uniquely powerful computers from quite common elements. And that we, in turn, uniquely organized ourselves to build and sell as many of those machines as possible in competition with some of the largest companies on the planet.      We succeeded by embracing Seymour's disruptive talent and then singlemindedly organizing around it. I always reminded the Crayons that our success came from that total commitment to supercomputers and if there came a time when we became the disrupted rather than the disrupters, it would be time to move on with happy memories and great resumes.

Empirically, Marginal tenure cases lead to marginal careers, or disappointing ones. Probability is above 95%, maybe 98%. They take  much  longer than other cases to be promoted to full, if they are so promoted at all. Rarely does a tenure turndown then have a distinguished scholarly career. Surely there is a stigma to being turned down, but that seems not to be be the issue. Perhaps 1-2% of turndowns have distinguished subsequent careers.  Slow progress from associate to full is only rarely accompanied with the production of a major work when they come up for promotion. Probability is 5% at most. In general, we make many more mistaken positive decisions than mistaken negative ones, the ratio being perhaps 10:1. The basic principle is that being a faculty member of a university that is on the rise is a rare opportunity. Mistaken appointments and promotions preclude our appointing more talented scholars. And there is a agglomeration effect, more exc...

Would we be better off were we to swear off apocalyptic thinking? I have spent much of my research career thinking about  apocalyptic possibilities .  Each possibility has passed out of consideration , although the arguments have merit, and even the evidence is persuasive. The big question is when to constrain behavior, and if there is ever a time  when it is "too late" to act . Also, we are rather  weak at predicting technological developments  compared to sketching apocalypses, so the apocalypse tends to have a better argument than a more wait-and-see policy, or perhaps a deliberate research effort to develop those technologies (which may be a matter of societal arrangements rather than a material discovery). More generally,  t he prospect of apocalypse is used to  justify policies  and behavior that would otherwise seem not so prudent. The possibility of doom, if taken as a matter of  decision analysis , is fraught with uncer...

 The standout part of the Harrassment Training was the video on  microaggressions .  My version of that is when I am said to be intellectual and  smart . Often it is less a compliment than a microaggression. I first recall being told I was smart when I was an assistant professor, by a friend/colleague, and it was meant as a genuine description--I had always known really talented people since I was exposed to them from places other than my high school, and then in college. I surely was  and am not in their league, neither so smart or sophisticated. We know that "smart" or other such terms were used to describe Jewish academics, and it was generally not at all a compliment, meaning uncouth and just intelligent. The Soviet Union specialized in this as did the Third Reich, so supplying the US with some of its greatest scientists and mathematicians. In general, until about 1955-1960 the Ivies were not exact so welcoming of Jews, for which see K...

People at Work In Industrial Los Angeles or The City as a Composed Synergetic Syzygy Contents Preface I.   On Syzygy Street, The City in Mind             Analogy is Destiny                         Thinking and Analogy Thinking for a Living                                     Reading the Inscrutable; Writing to Go On in Life; Describing, …                         Existential Doubts                     ...

Galileo’s Book, The Book of Nature is Written in Language of Mathematics Martin H. Krieger      11/24/19 7:34 AM Prolog: The Ising Model and The Stability of Matter— our recurring examples Preface -- Galileo was perhaps correct that Nature speaks in the language of mathematics, but it would seem that there are many such dialects, although it may be possible to say the same thing many of the dialects . Chapter 1: Learning from Newton   .   Lessons— Mathematical physics is never so isolated from the culture of its time, nor in fact is mathematics. Chapter 2: The Philosophy of Mathematical Physics .   Lessons— That mathematics is useful for physics and may be the language of Nature is perhaps no more surprising than for most people their legs are useful for walking. Chapter 3: Legerdemain   .   Lessons— It matters if you are persistent, and you have colleagues and teachers, and sometimes nothing helps. Chapter 4:...

Submtted to Technology and Culture The Development and Character of a Tightly-Coupled Technology: The Polaroid SX-70               I wish to describe what might be called a tightly-coupled technology and indicate features that likely are more generally present. The technology of a camera and a film specifically for it, the Polaroid SX-70 , is comparatively well documented in the open and the patent literature. When going through that literature, I felt much as did d’Alembert and Diderot, as they asked workers how they did their work and then diagrammed the processes. [1] For the SX-70 , the level of detail, the revelation of less-productive directions, and the motivations were it seems ready to be observed.               I want to give a more nuanced view of tight-coupling, and to take an historical example and in analyzing it to...