An interesting aspect of mathematician John von Neumann’s personality was that he was the complete opposite of his friend at the Institute for Advanced Studies, the semi-crazed nerd genius Kurt Gödel. In contrast, von Neumann threw the best parties at IAS and he was beloved by American generals. From a 2000 article in Air Force magazine about General “Bennie” Schriever, the German-born Air Force officer who built, with amazing rapidity, the American ICBM force:
Although an early advocate of missiles, Schriever, now a brigadier general, was well aware of the technical difficulties involved. He was attending a briefing of the Scientific Advisory Board at Patrick AFB, Fla., in 1953 when von Neumann and Edward Teller gave independent presentations indicating the practical possibility of building a nuclear bomb weighing no more than 1,500 pounds.
Schriever recalls, “I almost came out of my seat in excitement, realizing what this meant for the ICBM.”
The breakthrough solved one of Schriever’s most pressing problems-the weight of the nuclear warhead. The proposed ICBM-the Atlas-could now weigh in at as “little” as 220,000 pounds. The weight difference was enormous. It reduced the rocket-engine challenge to manageable proportions. Almost equally important, Teller and von Neumann estimated that the 1,500-pound bomb would yield explosive power of one megaton of TNT, greatly easing the ICBM’s accuracy requirements.
The very limited yields of previously designed warheads generated the requirement for extreme accuracy; the ICBM guidance system would have to produce a Circular Error Probable of about 1,500 feet. With the one-megaton yield, however, accuracy requirements could be relaxed to a CEP of two to three nautical miles. In consultation with others, Schriever increased the estimate of the warhead weight to 3,000 pounds, just to be conservative.
Things began to move rapidly. In May 1954, then Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Thomas White assigned the Air Force’s highest priority to the Atlas. In July, Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann briefed the Atlas program to President Eisenhower, convincing him to give top national priority to the development of the ICBM.
From Tim Rutten’s review of Neal Sheehan’s 2009 book A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon:
While Schriever is at the center of Sheehan’s history, the author surrounds him with a compelling — indeed, fascinating — cast of characters whose critical contributions to U.S. security deserve to be honorably remembered. None of these is more mesmerizing and, ultimately, tragic than the great Hungarian-born mathematician and physicist Johnny von Neumann. His formulation of “game theory” would be critical to the Cold War’s nuclear strategy (his mathematical modeling of implosion was a key to the development of the first atomic bomb). As chairman of the committee of scientists and cutting-edge technologists Schriever put together to advise him, Von Neumann would deliver most of the brilliant briefings that convinced then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower to approve the first ICBM program on terms that made its unprecedentedly rapid development possible. A little more than a year later, Von Neumann was dead of cancer. A secular Jew driven from his native land by prewar anti-Semitism, Von Neumann — terrified of oncoming mortality — converted to Catholicism on his deathbed only to be denied burial in Princeton’s Catholic cemetery because he’d divorced his first wife.
Accounts of the great cold warriors like von Neumann are especially fascinating because
- They accomplished so much.
- They were so successful – the Soviet Union collapsed without World War III.
- But you still also have to worry that, insanely brilliant as they were, maybe they got lucky.
Read my new review of the latest von Neumann biography here.
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It’s always amusing to observe uninformed hero worship.
Here are some choice quotes about the Salesman from the Future by Presper Eckert, who, along with John Mauchly, invented the ENIAC, and Jean Bartik, one of its first programmers:
[emphasis mine]
Jean Bartik in reviewing a book on the history of the ENIAC on Amazon:
They say “success has a thousand fathers” … well, in the rearing of computing, was Neumann a father? Perhaps in the sense of your mom’s fourth live-in boyfriend who stole the car and ran away with the babysitter kind of a “father.”
Now, I don’t know what you guys think, but my view is that whenever a gentile invents something the credit should be given to some “Neumann” who the press endlessly promotes and goes gaga over, and who then “selflessly and graciously” “gifts” “his” invention to the public domain in order to “promote a vibrant competitive industry.” On the other hand, whenever a “Neumann” invents something he should retain the intellectual property rights and commercialize the heck out of it. It’s only fair — because of all the pogroms and holocausts and stuff.
Source for Bartik:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802713483
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bartik
Source for Eckert:
https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275
ENIAC was pretty amazing because of its conservative engineering with vacuum tubes, something you also see with U.K. 1943-5 Colossus, essentially an ASIC for breaking the Nazi Lorenz cypher which was used for more important stuff than the Enigma cypher. But both had very limited memory, essentially today's registers and whatever was used for I/O, paper tape of a sort for the latter's input, and were programmed with patch panels which took a long time to set up, and see below for 1939 prior art in electronic computing which Mauchly was formally aware of.
And for that matter there's lots of electromechanical prior art; be it counting widgets, relays, vacuum tubed, transistors, or integrated circuits and the multiple generations of the latter two, there's a qualitative difference between computing and computers per se and the technologies used to implement them. But patents aren't my forte, are in fact very bad news in my field of software development.
It was very obvious to everyone that when we could create sufficient amounts of cheaper memory (and boy was that a mess until core memory), programs would live in it along with data, and Herman Goldstine as noted prompted the hell out of Von Neumann's thoughts, ultimately resulting in the "Von Neumann" architecture nomenclature, which is used in all but a few relatively obscure niches compared to for example earlier "Harvard" architecture where programs and data live in quite different places like PIC microcontrollers.
As for those patents, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert comprehensively lost, the list of deficiencies is much longer than I'd known or remembered. They most certainly did not invent even the electronic computer contrary to your first source (last can be found in the Wayback Machine).
That honor goes to John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry and their 1939 one which while very modest is conceptually on a par with Mauchly and Eckert's ENIAC, plus there's more limited IBM prior art of a vacuum tube multiplier. Pretty sure that was IBM's first offering in the field, while it wasn't a tremendous advance over electromechanical multipliers Watson Jr. got his father to turn it into a product to get them started in the field, and it sold a lot more units than expected. Then they added a divider to the next model....
Goldstine's dissemination of First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is just one of twelve specific items in Wikipedia's distillation of key findings of the 248 page decision, and they paint Mauchly and Eckert in a terrible light: "Sperry Rand had tried to monopolize the electronic data processing industry in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, on the basis of a cross-licensing agreement between Sperry Rand and IBM signed on August 21, 1956, but that only IBM had in fact succeeded in creating such a monopoly (Finding 15)."
That was due to IBM's general competence in everything, getting experience in doing this sort of this ASAP, and for example cross fertilization with MIT's Project Whirlwind and SAGE. IBM for example knew anything like this needed to be divided into reasonably sized units that could fit in normal elevators and doorways (the latter sealed the ultimate fate of the Atanasoff-Berry computer) that could then be hooked up by cables. I recall reading the first model of the UNIVAC requiring serious disassembly and then reassembly at the customer's site.
And I'll add due to a prior punched card antitrust settlement, IBM licensed all the computer technology it came up with on a FRAND basis, how for example the one half inch reel to reel tape drive became ubiquitous and disk drives became a general thing quickly. In addition Mauchly and Eckert filed their patent applications too long after the unveiling of ENIAC, plus what the judge saw as unproven "willful and intentional fraud on the U.S. Patent Office in filing the patent" which he wasn't in a position to criminally prosecute and was moot anyway, and OMG, the patent was so sloppy it originally wouldn't cover clock cycles greater than 1 MHz!
So, yeah, Jewish ethnic promotion, but ultimately in this case not resulting in holding back progress or profiting until you can cite how that came into play through for example cross-licensing ... with an invalid patent.
Colossus also beat ENIAC, but since Lorenz type machines were still in common use and it was only useful for the Nazi model of that so all but a couple were dismantled at the end of the war, it remained secret until the 1970s as I recall, and like in the US with some other secret computing projects people who'd worked on it then went on to do new and improved stuff a lot more openly.
Meanwhile, this iSteve article and as I recall the previous one doesn't touch on whatever contributions Von Neumann did or did not made to computing (and he died before he could finish his work on next generation stuff), you're a very small man who can only hide behind an anonymous account and try to bite the ankles of your betters, be they Jew or gentile.Replies: @Jack D, @Steve Sailer
You have to go back a little bit further to get some perspective.
Back in 1943, Goldstine, was in charge of creating ballistics tables for the Army - these are very calculation intensive. He, at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance, visited Mauchly, who had distributed a memorandum proposing that the calculations could be done thousands of times faster with an electronic computer using vacuum tubes. Mauchly wrote a proposal and in June 1943 he and Goldstine secured funding from the Army for the project. Without Goldstine and the US government's money (a lot of it) there would never have been an ENIAC.
The ENIAC was built in 30 months with 200,000 man hours. The ENIAC was huge, measuring 30 by 60 feet and weighing 30 tons with 18,000 vacuum tubes. The device could only store 20 numbers and took days to program. It was completed in late 1945 as the war was coming to an end and so did not end up contributing to the war effort despite the considerable expense. Nor was it a very practical device. "Writing a program" meant physically rewiring the machine every time. Although it was electronic and digital and a computer and so Mauchly and Eckert deserve historical credit, it was not something that had commercial use.
After the war, Mauchly and Eckert tried to commercialize their invention and profit from their patents and like a lot of inventors, they were ultimately not the ones who made big money from their invention. There were lawsuits, etc. This left them pretty bitter.
While they in fact built their (sorta) working computer without the benefit of von Neumann's conceptual work which was done afterward and after having seen their device, this does not mean that von Neumann "stole" their invention. Very often people will invent things without entirely understanding the full theoretical underpinning and framework of what it is they just invented - they just make something that works and others have to figure out WHY it works. As working inventors they were dismissive of von Neumann's conceptual theorizing. They just kept tinkering until their device worked and didn't have need of von Neumann's grand theories of computing.
The larger point is the Cold War and how it shaped US Immigration Policy over time in a Nation destroying way. America wasn’t destroyed by nukes…America was destroyed by post-1965 Legal Immigration Policy.
And the causal chain reaction goes like this:‘the Cold War….the integration of the US Military during the Korean War….followed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act…followed by the passage of the Nation destroying 1965 Immigration Reform Act. This chain reaction was way more lethal than the nuclear chain reaction of the ICBMs…..
At least ideas in physics don’t sneak off the drawing board and destroy the world on their own. Biology is now the cutting edge technology. And, unfortunately, it apparently doesn’t take a genius (evil, or otherwise) to splice some Frankenstein genetic code together if you’re feeling curious about “what would happen if . . .”
Sidenote:Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem provides the Mathematical Model for understanding the mathematical structure of computer viruses and why computer viruses are the nuisance critters that the have been…
Gödel, like von Neumann, was a genius. The entire IFAS was filled with ’em–including, of course, Einstein. Admirable for their cognitive abilities as they may have been, if the world were run by the likes of Gödel, von Neumann and Einstein…well…it’s even money we wouldn’t be here.
Though the title character (as played by Peter Sellers) at times bordered on the buffoonish, Stanley Kubrick (along with Terry Southern) were spot-on when they wrote the screenplay for “Dr. Strangelove.”
Von Neumann — terrified of oncoming mortality — converted to Catholicism on his deathbed only to be denied burial in Princeton’s Catholic cemetery because he’d divorced his first wife.
I guffawed.
In 1930, before marrying Marietta, von Neumann was baptized into the Catholic Church.[44] Von Neumann's father, Max, had died in 1929. None of the family had converted to Christianity while Max was alive, but all did afterward.[45]”
Something didn’t smell right. Marriage outside the Church that ends in divorce is a nullity.Replies: @Hibernian, @ivan
Godel and Von Neumann are buried in the same cemetery, the Princeton Cemetery in Princeton New Jersey. When visiting there, the tops of both tombstones were covered with coins from all over the world. One wonders whether there is some tradition of paying alms to the science gods.
It is also the cemetery where former president Grover Cleveland is buried whose tombstone is draped with puka shell necklaces because Cleveland opposed the annexation of Hawaii.
It is also the cemetery where former president Grover Cleveland is buried whose tombstone is draped with puka shell necklaces because Cleveland opposed the annexation of Hawaii.Replies: @Steve Sailer
I visited Mark Twain’s tomb in Elmira, NY, and his gravestone is covered with cigar butts. Apparently, Twain fans smoke a contemplative stogie while sitting on this tombstone. That would seem pretty high praise.
I repeat myself: one of the great things about John von Neumann, and why I’ll always have a high opinion of him, was he genuinely liked people getting smarter in and of itself rather than for his own ego-stroking. Probably because he could see what most people couldn’t, he understood how dumb we all are once you adjust for level.
Who gets the real credit for separable, infinite dimensional Hilbert-space? Von Neumann named it after Hilbert, but how much did Hilbert contribute to it? Anyway Von Neumann’s quantum mechanics is mathematically sound way to do QM. Maybe Von Neumann lost his creativity and started stealing. What a shame. During the WW2 he did important work in convex optimization, which helped the America to produce a lot of war material.
To follow up….If you understand why Godel’s Incompleteness theorem explains why computer viruses aways gets the upper-hand and the last say in the computer virus wars…it is just short skip and a hop why the Constitution Tards-Patriot Tards(such as the Setaucket Patriotards down the road from Renaissance Technologies…would you like to know more to the story?) will always loose the immigration debate(‘there is no debate in reality…it’s all about being open about our demographic preferences…what’s to debate therefore?)….It’s just another application of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem….
And don’t forget Godel’s argument for the existence of God(basically a Model Theory argument…and Model Theory is all-the-rage these days in Modern Mathematics)….It’s a very clever argument(although it assumes the very thing it to be proved….But that’s O.K….since Godel’s had an ET brain..and therefore he was not required to think along lines of the subspecies known as Homo Erectus….only Godel could do the Groovy ET Vibe!!..)
Your daily reminder that one of the greatest of the old Cold Warriors was in favor of dissolving NATO once the USSR joined the ash heap of history.
“I am become death….”
On a lighter note, I think Steve should pay attention to Matt Walsh’s genius trolls of the left. He began as a normie conservative but the summer of Floyd did something to him. He began trolling the left in very clever ways. He started with a “Help Abuela” crowdfund, for AOC’s poor grandmother. He followed up with a hilarious kid’s book, Johnny The Walrus.
Now this:
He’s today’s H.L. Mencken. He’s a talent.
Shouldn’t that be simply Neumann? It would be in German; the particule is detachable. This differs from Dutch and Flemish practice. Beethoven screws things up, with his Flemish surname in German-speaking territory. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe didn’t help either; everyone just calls him “Mies” anyway. He was banned by German law from adding von, so went with van. Sure fooled Americans. In his case, more is less.
Did (von) Neumann go native after coming here? What did he have to say about it?
van der Rohe was his mother's maiden name and it was Dutch and it has nothing to do with the noble von. It just means "from the ___" and is a common form of Dutch surname. Back in the early days, the would say, hey, it's Joe "from the 'Hood" , that other guy is Joe from the Farm and sometimes these names stuck and became family surnames.Replies: @Prester John
Not before it attained an advantage in ICBMs by the early 80’s. Russia’s thermonuclear arsenal remains essentially equivalent to America’s, so the main effect of the Bomb was as an equalizer whereby the US homeland was no longer safe from attack. Only Gödel was paranoid enough to worry about things like that, or whether Eisenhower’s plan to give West Germany a finger on the Nato nuclear trigger might provoke the Russians into some rash action.
Here are some choice quotes about the Salesman from the Future by Presper Eckert, who, along with John Mauchly, invented the ENIAC, and Jean Bartik, one of its first programmers:[emphasis mine]
Jean Bartik in reviewing a book on the history of the ENIAC on Amazon:They say "success has a thousand fathers" ... well, in the rearing of computing, was Neumann a father? Perhaps in the sense of your mom's fourth live-in boyfriend who stole the car and ran away with the babysitter kind of a "father."
Now, I don't know what you guys think, but my view is that whenever a gentile invents something the credit should be given to some "Neumann" who the press endlessly promotes and goes gaga over, and who then "selflessly and graciously" "gifts" "his" invention to the public domain in order to "promote a vibrant competitive industry." On the other hand, whenever a "Neumann" invents something he should retain the intellectual property rights and commercialize the heck out of it. It's only fair -- because of all the pogroms and holocausts and stuff.
Source for Bartik:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802713483
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bartik
Source for Eckert:
https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275Replies: @Paul Jolliffe, @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D
Fascinating post. Certainly should be open for discussion.
It is possible that he didn’t steal in the sense that he was from Europe. The big chiefs took the credit from his earlier work, now he was the big chief.
Schriever was one of the German-Americans, who, along with Boeing, Rentschler, Schmued, Kindelberger, Heinemann and of course Von Braun, established the unrivalled dominance of American aerospace which persists to this day.
Here are some choice quotes about the Salesman from the Future by Presper Eckert, who, along with John Mauchly, invented the ENIAC, and Jean Bartik, one of its first programmers:[emphasis mine]
Jean Bartik in reviewing a book on the history of the ENIAC on Amazon:They say "success has a thousand fathers" ... well, in the rearing of computing, was Neumann a father? Perhaps in the sense of your mom's fourth live-in boyfriend who stole the car and ran away with the babysitter kind of a "father."
Now, I don't know what you guys think, but my view is that whenever a gentile invents something the credit should be given to some "Neumann" who the press endlessly promotes and goes gaga over, and who then "selflessly and graciously" "gifts" "his" invention to the public domain in order to "promote a vibrant competitive industry." On the other hand, whenever a "Neumann" invents something he should retain the intellectual property rights and commercialize the heck out of it. It's only fair -- because of all the pogroms and holocausts and stuff.
Source for Bartik:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802713483
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bartik
Source for Eckert:
https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275Replies: @Paul Jolliffe, @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D
I’d be surprised if you understood a single technical detail of what this was all about, plus you’ve effectively fingered the wrong Jew.
ENIAC was pretty amazing because of its conservative engineering with vacuum tubes, something you also see with U.K. 1943-5 Colossus, essentially an ASIC for breaking the Nazi Lorenz cypher which was used for more important stuff than the Enigma cypher. But both had very limited memory, essentially today’s registers and whatever was used for I/O, paper tape of a sort for the latter’s input, and were programmed with patch panels which took a long time to set up, and see below for 1939 prior art in electronic computing which Mauchly was formally aware of.
And for that matter there’s lots of electromechanical prior art; be it counting widgets, relays, vacuum tubed, transistors, or integrated circuits and the multiple generations of the latter two, there’s a qualitative difference between computing and computers per se and the technologies used to implement them. But patents aren’t my forte, are in fact very bad news in my field of software development.
It was very obvious to everyone that when we could create sufficient amounts of cheaper memory (and boy was that a mess until core memory), programs would live in it along with data, and Herman Goldstine as noted prompted the hell out of Von Neumann’s thoughts, ultimately resulting in the “Von Neumann” architecture nomenclature, which is used in all but a few relatively obscure niches compared to for example earlier “Harvard” architecture where programs and data live in quite different places like PIC microcontrollers.
As for those patents, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert comprehensively lost, the list of deficiencies is much longer than I’d known or remembered. They most certainly did not invent even the electronic computer contrary to your first source (last can be found in the Wayback Machine).
That honor goes to John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry and their 1939 one which while very modest is conceptually on a par with Mauchly and Eckert’s ENIAC, plus there’s more limited IBM prior art of a vacuum tube multiplier. Pretty sure that was IBM’s first offering in the field, while it wasn’t a tremendous advance over electromechanical multipliers Watson Jr. got his father to turn it into a product to get them started in the field, and it sold a lot more units than expected. Then they added a divider to the next model….
Goldstine’s dissemination of First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is just one of twelve specific items in Wikipedia’s distillation of key findings of the 248 page decision, and they paint Mauchly and Eckert in a terrible light: “Sperry Rand had tried to monopolize the electronic data processing industry in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, on the basis of a cross-licensing agreement between Sperry Rand and IBM signed on August 21, 1956, but that only IBM had in fact succeeded in creating such a monopoly (Finding 15).”
That was due to IBM’s general competence in everything, getting experience in doing this sort of this ASAP, and for example cross fertilization with MIT’s Project Whirlwind and SAGE. IBM for example knew anything like this needed to be divided into reasonably sized units that could fit in normal elevators and doorways (the latter sealed the ultimate fate of the Atanasoff-Berry computer) that could then be hooked up by cables. I recall reading the first model of the UNIVAC requiring serious disassembly and then reassembly at the customer’s site.
And I’ll add due to a prior punched card antitrust settlement, IBM licensed all the computer technology it came up with on a FRAND basis, how for example the one half inch reel to reel tape drive became ubiquitous and disk drives became a general thing quickly. In addition Mauchly and Eckert filed their patent applications too long after the unveiling of ENIAC, plus what the judge saw as unproven “willful and intentional fraud on the U.S. Patent Office in filing the patent” which he wasn’t in a position to criminally prosecute and was moot anyway, and OMG, the patent was so sloppy it originally wouldn’t cover clock cycles greater than 1 MHz!
So, yeah, Jewish ethnic promotion, but ultimately in this case not resulting in holding back progress or profiting until you can cite how that came into play through for example cross-licensing … with an invalid patent.
Colossus also beat ENIAC, but since Lorenz type machines were still in common use and it was only useful for the Nazi model of that so all but a couple were dismantled at the end of the war, it remained secret until the 1970s as I recall, and like in the US with some other secret computing projects people who’d worked on it then went on to do new and improved stuff a lot more openly.
Meanwhile, this iSteve article and as I recall the previous one doesn’t touch on whatever contributions Von Neumann did or did not made to computing (and he died before he could finish his work on next generation stuff), you’re a very small man who can only hide behind an anonymous account and try to bite the ankles of your betters, be they Jew or gentile.
You really have to take Eckert and Mauchly's version of history with a grain of salt. They did not end up being billionaires from "their" invention and they were very bitter about it. OTOH, they accepted government funding for ENIAC but OTOH they wanted to own the IP. They wanted to socialize the costs and privatize the gains and it didn't fully work out for them. Their loss was society's gain.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
I remember reading a book about the development of the ICBM and siding with the Air Force faction that opposed developing the ICBM on a crash basis. Strategic Air Command bombers were more than adequate to deter any Soviet attack until ICBMs and ultimately, SLBMs, could be developed on a slower and less costly timeline. The advantage of the ICBM (it’s great speed and difficulty in intercepting it) weren’t very meaningful unless one planned to attack first. That wasn’t supposed to be U.S. policy, but I wonder now if it really was.
Given the maintenance and logistics problems that the Russian is military is seeing in the Ukraine, everyone should be suspect of how operational all of the nuclear weapons and the delivery systems are in Russia.
Here are some choice quotes about the Salesman from the Future by Presper Eckert, who, along with John Mauchly, invented the ENIAC, and Jean Bartik, one of its first programmers:[emphasis mine]
Jean Bartik in reviewing a book on the history of the ENIAC on Amazon:They say "success has a thousand fathers" ... well, in the rearing of computing, was Neumann a father? Perhaps in the sense of your mom's fourth live-in boyfriend who stole the car and ran away with the babysitter kind of a "father."
Now, I don't know what you guys think, but my view is that whenever a gentile invents something the credit should be given to some "Neumann" who the press endlessly promotes and goes gaga over, and who then "selflessly and graciously" "gifts" "his" invention to the public domain in order to "promote a vibrant competitive industry." On the other hand, whenever a "Neumann" invents something he should retain the intellectual property rights and commercialize the heck out of it. It's only fair -- because of all the pogroms and holocausts and stuff.
Source for Bartik:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802713483
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bartik
Source for Eckert:
https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275Replies: @Paul Jolliffe, @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D
Life is not some Jud Suss melodrama where the clever Jew always outwits the innocent goyim.
You have to go back a little bit further to get some perspective.
Back in 1943, Goldstine, was in charge of creating ballistics tables for the Army – these are very calculation intensive. He, at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance, visited Mauchly, who had distributed a memorandum proposing that the calculations could be done thousands of times faster with an electronic computer using vacuum tubes. Mauchly wrote a proposal and in June 1943 he and Goldstine secured funding from the Army for the project. Without Goldstine and the US government’s money (a lot of it) there would never have been an ENIAC.
The ENIAC was built in 30 months with 200,000 man hours. The ENIAC was huge, measuring 30 by 60 feet and weighing 30 tons with 18,000 vacuum tubes. The device could only store 20 numbers and took days to program. It was completed in late 1945 as the war was coming to an end and so did not end up contributing to the war effort despite the considerable expense. Nor was it a very practical device. “Writing a program” meant physically rewiring the machine every time. Although it was electronic and digital and a computer and so Mauchly and Eckert deserve historical credit, it was not something that had commercial use.
After the war, Mauchly and Eckert tried to commercialize their invention and profit from their patents and like a lot of inventors, they were ultimately not the ones who made big money from their invention. There were lawsuits, etc. This left them pretty bitter.
While they in fact built their (sorta) working computer without the benefit of von Neumann’s conceptual work which was done afterward and after having seen their device, this does not mean that von Neumann “stole” their invention. Very often people will invent things without entirely understanding the full theoretical underpinning and framework of what it is they just invented – they just make something that works and others have to figure out WHY it works. As working inventors they were dismissive of von Neumann’s conceptual theorizing. They just kept tinkering until their device worked and didn’t have need of von Neumann’s grand theories of computing.
You haven’t been keeping up apparently- who has the time what with at the Pasternak, Turgenev, and Chekhov you no doubt read- the US nuclear arsenal is at a point now where it could likely win a full scale nuclear exchange with China and Russia and suffer little damage. The US’s nuclear weapon development over past decade has been truly remarkable.
Off topic:
Bruce Willis’s brain has absconded…
Just like Monty Python’s Terry Jones:Brain-has-absconded-Syndrome…
Just like the great String Theorist Joe Polchinski:Brain-has-absconded-Syndrome…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfg_vsnTRBA
Which is all the more reason for Russia to remove some of the safeties from its launch procedures.
Goedel was perhaps the greatest Logician in history ..’ Kurt Gödel’s achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental—indeed it is more than a monument, it is a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time. … The subject of logic has certainly completely changed its nature and possibilities with Gödel’s achievement.” John von Neumann
While I usually find myself in agreement with Steve calling Kurt a “crazed nerd” is sad, He was unstable and the murder of his friend Moritz Schlick sent him into a tailspin that triggered the paranoia that led to his death.
ENIAC was pretty amazing because of its conservative engineering with vacuum tubes, something you also see with U.K. 1943-5 Colossus, essentially an ASIC for breaking the Nazi Lorenz cypher which was used for more important stuff than the Enigma cypher. But both had very limited memory, essentially today's registers and whatever was used for I/O, paper tape of a sort for the latter's input, and were programmed with patch panels which took a long time to set up, and see below for 1939 prior art in electronic computing which Mauchly was formally aware of.
And for that matter there's lots of electromechanical prior art; be it counting widgets, relays, vacuum tubed, transistors, or integrated circuits and the multiple generations of the latter two, there's a qualitative difference between computing and computers per se and the technologies used to implement them. But patents aren't my forte, are in fact very bad news in my field of software development.
It was very obvious to everyone that when we could create sufficient amounts of cheaper memory (and boy was that a mess until core memory), programs would live in it along with data, and Herman Goldstine as noted prompted the hell out of Von Neumann's thoughts, ultimately resulting in the "Von Neumann" architecture nomenclature, which is used in all but a few relatively obscure niches compared to for example earlier "Harvard" architecture where programs and data live in quite different places like PIC microcontrollers.
As for those patents, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert comprehensively lost, the list of deficiencies is much longer than I'd known or remembered. They most certainly did not invent even the electronic computer contrary to your first source (last can be found in the Wayback Machine).
That honor goes to John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry and their 1939 one which while very modest is conceptually on a par with Mauchly and Eckert's ENIAC, plus there's more limited IBM prior art of a vacuum tube multiplier. Pretty sure that was IBM's first offering in the field, while it wasn't a tremendous advance over electromechanical multipliers Watson Jr. got his father to turn it into a product to get them started in the field, and it sold a lot more units than expected. Then they added a divider to the next model....
Goldstine's dissemination of First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is just one of twelve specific items in Wikipedia's distillation of key findings of the 248 page decision, and they paint Mauchly and Eckert in a terrible light: "Sperry Rand had tried to monopolize the electronic data processing industry in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, on the basis of a cross-licensing agreement between Sperry Rand and IBM signed on August 21, 1956, but that only IBM had in fact succeeded in creating such a monopoly (Finding 15)."
That was due to IBM's general competence in everything, getting experience in doing this sort of this ASAP, and for example cross fertilization with MIT's Project Whirlwind and SAGE. IBM for example knew anything like this needed to be divided into reasonably sized units that could fit in normal elevators and doorways (the latter sealed the ultimate fate of the Atanasoff-Berry computer) that could then be hooked up by cables. I recall reading the first model of the UNIVAC requiring serious disassembly and then reassembly at the customer's site.
And I'll add due to a prior punched card antitrust settlement, IBM licensed all the computer technology it came up with on a FRAND basis, how for example the one half inch reel to reel tape drive became ubiquitous and disk drives became a general thing quickly. In addition Mauchly and Eckert filed their patent applications too long after the unveiling of ENIAC, plus what the judge saw as unproven "willful and intentional fraud on the U.S. Patent Office in filing the patent" which he wasn't in a position to criminally prosecute and was moot anyway, and OMG, the patent was so sloppy it originally wouldn't cover clock cycles greater than 1 MHz!
So, yeah, Jewish ethnic promotion, but ultimately in this case not resulting in holding back progress or profiting until you can cite how that came into play through for example cross-licensing ... with an invalid patent.
Colossus also beat ENIAC, but since Lorenz type machines were still in common use and it was only useful for the Nazi model of that so all but a couple were dismantled at the end of the war, it remained secret until the 1970s as I recall, and like in the US with some other secret computing projects people who'd worked on it then went on to do new and improved stuff a lot more openly.
Meanwhile, this iSteve article and as I recall the previous one doesn't touch on whatever contributions Von Neumann did or did not made to computing (and he died before he could finish his work on next generation stuff), you're a very small man who can only hide behind an anonymous account and try to bite the ankles of your betters, be they Jew or gentile.Replies: @Jack D, @Steve Sailer
Not only were the IBM mainframes broken up into reasonably (mostly refrigerator sized) units (although you needed a forklift to move the first hard disk because it was so massive) but the innards were very modular – everything was on plug in cards, dozens and dozens of cards (never mind that all those dozens of cards today would be a single chip). That way, if something broke the technician would just quickly swap out the card with a different unit and the defective card could be repaired later at a repair depot (or not). Even today on Lenovo computers (the descendants of IBM) they have the concept of the FRU (the Field Replaceable Unit). Every part of a Lenovo that is swappable in the field is still called a FRU.
You really have to take Eckert and Mauchly’s version of history with a grain of salt. They did not end up being billionaires from “their” invention and they were very bitter about it. OTOH, they accepted government funding for ENIAC but OTOH they wanted to own the IP. They wanted to socialize the costs and privatize the gains and it didn’t fully work out for them. Their loss was society’s gain.
Konrad Zuse in Germany deserves mention if only because per Wikipedia he's credited with anticipating the concept in 1936 with "two patent applications that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data" so that's on the official record.
To reiterate and expand on a bit, the heritage of the idea and thus its official record is not completely clear because of the difficulties of reducing it to practice. The EDVAC and UNIVAC used mercury acoustic delay lines, long horizontal columns of that with an actuator at one end that created pulses and a receiver at the other that read them, with hardware in between to regenerate the memory as well as read and write values to it. Wikipedia says the general concept goes back to analog work in the 1920s, and Project Whirlwind was desperate enough to consider doing this with a (microwave?) radio links to and back from western Massachusetts.
The U.K. CRT based Williams Tube was the first DRAM, although I'm not sure how reliable it ever was (per IBM evidently enough for scientists but not businessmen). The 1932 magnetic drum was used a lot, the 1954 IBM 650 was the first mass produced computer and used that for its main memory. It wasn't until Project Whirlwind that 3D magnetic core memory was developed and reduced to practice as their version of Williams Tubes were not working out very well. That got us our first "fast," reliable and affordable enough RAM (no D for dynamic, didn't require regeneration) which despite many other efforts ruled until static and dynamic silicon chip RAM fairly slowly displaced it (the S in Cray 1S was for that model using super fast static RAM for its main memory, while IBM was using it through an internal development Intel was the first to sell it commercially, the 1103 with a whopping 1024 or a kilobit of memory).
My assumption is von Neumann wrote up an elegant description of the whole stored program computer concept which was in part based on Turing's theoretical work, but was at most formalizing it all. It wasn't by any means how he thought we should really be doing computing, I've read or been told that was based on automata although I'm not sure if it could have been easily programed by mere mortals.
Eckert and Mauchly's story is long and kinda sad, Wikipedia reminds me "new university policies that would have forced Eckert and Mauchly to sign over intellectual property rights for their inventions led to their resignation," the University of Pennsylvania went from #1 in the world to essentially nothing in the space of a year and that significantly delayed the EDVAC (that's another government project as most early computers were). On their own they almost ran out of money and their first big investor who then helped died in plane crash, Remington Rand eventually bought their company. Another thing to make Mauchly bitter was that included a ten year non-compete so he was sidelined for eight years after resigning in 1952 (that's a not so hidden secret of California's general high tech success, although it wouldn't have been for a principal like him).
Another factor would be I think IBM running a survey, don't know if they made it public but it would have been in the air, that everyone had heard of the UNIVAC and everyone thought it was made by IBM....Replies: @Jack D, @Jack D
Mies means “ugly” in German so it was not a great name to have.
van der Rohe was his mother’s maiden name and it was Dutch and it has nothing to do with the noble von. It just means “from the ___” and is a common form of Dutch surname. Back in the early days, the would say, hey, it’s Joe “from the ‘Hood” , that other guy is Joe from the Farm and sometimes these names stuck and became family surnames.
Sounds like Kurt’s cerebral cortex was sprinkled with some heaven-sent magic dust.
Accounts of the great cold warriors like von Neumann are especially fascinating
If you haven’t already read it, I can recommend the autobiography of Sam Cohen:
Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb
His inner workings may have been an enigma caused by enemas… but read the book!
van der Rohe was his mother's maiden name and it was Dutch and it has nothing to do with the noble von. It just means "from the ___" and is a common form of Dutch surname. Back in the early days, the would say, hey, it's Joe "from the 'Hood" , that other guy is Joe from the Farm and sometimes these names stuck and became family surnames.Replies: @Prester John
You’re right about the word “mies” though linguistically “von” and “van” mean the same in Dutch and German. In the latter case “von” has evolved into a word which implies nobility.
They were so successful – the Soviet Union collapsed without World War III.
Did the USSR collapse because of US policy or from its own weight regardless of what the West did?
After all, the Chinese system was far more backward than the Soviet one but it didn’t collapse.
One could argue the US aided China in the 80s while strangling the USSR, still the enemy of Cold War.
But the collapse was hastened by Gorbachev’s rise who actually eased tensions. Europeans favored him over Reagan. Thatcher urged Reagan to make peace with that man. And tensions were reduced, and Reagan and Gorbachev even became friendly on the personal level.
Certain systems require will. Communism is a moral system and grows weak without a certain passion or fanaticism. Cuba and North Korea are still around. Good or bad, they maintained the will and control. When the will was lost in Russia, it was bound to fall apart.
The West is based on freedom, so the will and sense of righteousness are less important to keeping the system going.
But from a longer historical perspective, did the free West beat the communist East or enter into a slower collapse? Huntington worried about the Clash of Civilizations, but Europe today is like Crash of Civilizations. In peacetime and relative prosperity, London became 60% non-British. Parts of Paris no longer look French.
And whatever autonomy the Europeans had during the Cold War totally evaporated. Worse, they don’t even have much freedom left, so telling from Covid lockdowns and speech codes. In Germany, court has ruled there is no such thing as real Germans as anyone can become a German citizen.
I'm sure neither would dare speak out about diversity and immigration,but it seems the noose is tightening around Londoners,even the mega wealthy.
Yes, there was a lot to it, D.H., not as simple as then there was no WWIII. What you discuss was called the nuclear Triad, or a Triad of nuclear deterrence if you think of it that way.*
The defense against SAC air power was along the lines of the things that military types had been thinking about since the WWI days, so it was nothing new. You needed your intercepters (the really fast movers) and your comprehensive radar systems (like that old DEW line), and the many bases with long runways to allow these long-ranged planes to get deep in.
The ICBMs were new, and the only defense against these things until “Star Wars” (initially bluffing, anyway) was the idea of striking the enemy’s missile silos right away. This required much more accuracy in targeting, and I suppose different types of warheads designed to bust up huge masses of concrete rather than those that could just kill the most people and destroy the most infrastructure. There was a race there to build better silos and better warheads.
Then there were the sub-based missiles. That was a brilliant idea, if you ask me. I always wondered, during that time, how the heck these things launched. This leg of the triad required the 2 superpowers to work on quieter submarines and better detection.
There was a yin and yang for all 3 of these legs of the triad, offense and defense, with only the air power leg being one that military types and engineers had already put lots of thought and work into. For me, that was the coolest.
In general, this technology race to keep up (or get ahead) on all 3 legs of the nuclear triad was a godsend for engineers and technicians on both sides. This was REALLY cool stuff. Unlike the big mostly-peacetime technology improvements of the last 3 decades, instead of touch screens, apps, icons, clouds, gay swiping and all that stuff, this was real, mostly mechanical/aero engineering involving and increasing the knowledge of the laws of physics. You had increases in speed, massive rocket engines, new chemical fuels, nuclear-power underwater, 15 crew-member airplanes weighing 410,000 lb. with 10 engines with 100 GALLON oil tanks and 56 spark plugs for each of the piston ones with a 3,500 nm combat range, then swept wing jet bombers….
What a time to be an engineer! Yeah, maybe it was a precarious situation, but doesn’t that beat hell out of working on a new “interface”?
.
* Which is correct, IMO, as nobody here wanted to unilaterally wipe out the USSR, but we had no trust that this feeling was mutual. It was a MAD MAD MAD MAD world, but MAD was actually quite sane, and compared to ’22, it was a world of Dr. Spocks.
Multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) were part of the excuse for that, although a Spartan style intercept might have worked if it could have done it before the "bus" released all its warheads one at a time. And thus all the interest un boost phase intercept, which as mostly gone poof nowadays which is very telling about what it really driving today's efforts, protection of the population isn't even on the table unless it's a few missiles from North Korea or Iran. Well, the Russians might be more serious, see some of the S-400 missile variants, that family/class has always had an (illegal during the ABM treaty) ABM role. And PRC has been cool with depopulation until very recently as their post-Mao one child policy inevitably went bad.
The bomber third of the triad is vital because it's the only part you can launch on warning, so if your warning is a mistake you can call them back, with PALs they couldn't even fire off working warheads until they got the codes to unlock them. All three make pulling off a successful counter-force first strike nearly impossible, and even a modest ABM system and there's no way because on top of your systems' reliability issues you don't get to pick which warheads get intercepted.
The period you describe was indeed from everything I've heard a wonderful time for engineers, I came of political age a little before we generally gave up on it and everything and among other things adopted a policy of energy poverty which the West's ruling trash is so, so upset today to extend to a virtual blockade of Russian oil and gas. That resulted in an early 1970s and to this day still pretty permanent crash in aero-astro, which confirmed the wisdom of MIT's policy of not letting departments get too big in terms of tenured professors and face losing reprogramming of buildings (and that of course implicitly puts a cap on grad student populations, which then can result in high teaching loads like EECS until the dot.com bust).Replies: @GeologyAnonMk5
You really have to take Eckert and Mauchly's version of history with a grain of salt. They did not end up being billionaires from "their" invention and they were very bitter about it. OTOH, they accepted government funding for ENIAC but OTOH they wanted to own the IP. They wanted to socialize the costs and privatize the gains and it didn't fully work out for them. Their loss was society's gain.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
Contrary to your prior comment, from mostly memory I believe the Eckert and Mauchly team grasped the concept of a stored program computer computer, and the utility of it was certainly evident based on the cumbersome patch panel nature of programming their ENIAC you describe, which as I recall did at least one useful job for the Manhattan Project.
Konrad Zuse in Germany deserves mention if only because per Wikipedia he’s credited with anticipating the concept in 1936 with “two patent applications that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data” so that’s on the official record.
To reiterate and expand on a bit, the heritage of the idea and thus its official record is not completely clear because of the difficulties of reducing it to practice. The EDVAC and UNIVAC used mercury acoustic delay lines, long horizontal columns of that with an actuator at one end that created pulses and a receiver at the other that read them, with hardware in between to regenerate the memory as well as read and write values to it. Wikipedia says the general concept goes back to analog work in the 1920s, and Project Whirlwind was desperate enough to consider doing this with a (microwave?) radio links to and back from western Massachusetts.
The U.K. CRT based Williams Tube was the first DRAM, although I’m not sure how reliable it ever was (per IBM evidently enough for scientists but not businessmen). The 1932 magnetic drum was used a lot, the 1954 IBM 650 was the first mass produced computer and used that for its main memory. It wasn’t until Project Whirlwind that 3D magnetic core memory was developed and reduced to practice as their version of Williams Tubes were not working out very well. That got us our first “fast,” reliable and affordable enough RAM (no D for dynamic, didn’t require regeneration) which despite many other efforts ruled until static and dynamic silicon chip RAM fairly slowly displaced it (the S in Cray 1S was for that model using super fast static RAM for its main memory, while IBM was using it through an internal development Intel was the first to sell it commercially, the 1103 with a whopping 1024 or a kilobit of memory).
My assumption is von Neumann wrote up an elegant description of the whole stored program computer concept which was in part based on Turing’s theoretical work, but was at most formalizing it all. It wasn’t by any means how he thought we should really be doing computing, I’ve read or been told that was based on automata although I’m not sure if it could have been easily programed by mere mortals.
Eckert and Mauchly’s story is long and kinda sad, Wikipedia reminds me “new university policies that would have forced Eckert and Mauchly to sign over intellectual property rights for their inventions led to their resignation,” the University of Pennsylvania went from #1 in the world to essentially nothing in the space of a year and that significantly delayed the EDVAC (that’s another government project as most early computers were). On their own they almost ran out of money and their first big investor who then helped died in plane crash, Remington Rand eventually bought their company. Another thing to make Mauchly bitter was that included a ten year non-compete so he was sidelined for eight years after resigning in 1952 (that’s a not so hidden secret of California’s general high tech success, although it wouldn’t have been for a principal like him).
Another factor would be I think IBM running a survey, don’t know if they made it public but it would have been in the air, that everyone had heard of the UNIVAC and everyone thought it was made by IBM….
They barely had enough memory to store their data let alone the programs, but it probably was obvious to them that if you had enough memory the instructions themselves could be stored in memory and not just the data.
Again, if you read their reaction, von Neumann was this high falutin' conceptual "math" guy who flew at 50,000 feet while they were the guys who were out there dealing with the tubes and delay lines and stuff that actually did the work and all that he did was to steal their idea and convert the concrete work they had already done into an abstraction. Maybe this is true but abstracting a concrete work into a comprehensive theoretical framework is not as easy as it sounds.Replies: @Steve Sailer
The link below gives a lot of detail and shows why it is so hard to say who was "first":
https://computerhistory.org/blog/programming-the-eniac-an-example-of-why-computer-history-is-hard
But whatever the true story was, it wasn't anything like Anonymous's twisted anti-Semitic version of it or even Eckert's version which was distorted by his personal financial interest.
Bruce Willis’s brain has absconded…
Just like Monty Python’s Terry Jones:Brain-has-absconded-Syndrome…
Just like the great String Theorist Joe Polchinski:Brain-has-absconded-Syndrome…Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Emil Nikola Richard, @houston 1992
Here, von Neumann’s daughter speaks about his horror about decay of his mental capabilities & retreat into silence. It’s from 14:00 on
Nope, we built our first mid-range and terminal intercept ABM system long before, and the Democratic Congress fully on the side of the Soviets by then canceled it a day after it went operational, see the Spartan and especially the insane 100g Sprint missiles and of course all their support systems.
Multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) were part of the excuse for that, although a Spartan style intercept might have worked if it could have done it before the “bus” released all its warheads one at a time. And thus all the interest un boost phase intercept, which as mostly gone poof nowadays which is very telling about what it really driving today’s efforts, protection of the population isn’t even on the table unless it’s a few missiles from North Korea or Iran. Well, the Russians might be more serious, see some of the S-400 missile variants, that family/class has always had an (illegal during the ABM treaty) ABM role. And PRC has been cool with depopulation until very recently as their post-Mao one child policy inevitably went bad.
The bomber third of the triad is vital because it’s the only part you can launch on warning, so if your warning is a mistake you can call them back, with PALs they couldn’t even fire off working warheads until they got the codes to unlock them. All three make pulling off a successful counter-force first strike nearly impossible, and even a modest ABM system and there’s no way because on top of your systems’ reliability issues you don’t get to pick which warheads get intercepted.
The period you describe was indeed from everything I’ve heard a wonderful time for engineers, I came of political age a little before we generally gave up on it and everything and among other things adopted a policy of energy poverty which the West’s ruling trash is so, so upset today to extend to a virtual blockade of Russian oil and gas. That resulted in an early 1970s and to this day still pretty permanent crash in aero-astro, which confirmed the wisdom of MIT’s policy of not letting departments get too big in terms of tenured professors and face losing reprogramming of buildings (and that of course implicitly puts a cap on grad student populations, which then can result in high teaching loads like EECS until the dot.com bust).
Cold warriors were Big Government.
SJWs are Big Government.
Public education is Big Government.
Speaking of which, in 2018 the Park City SD (draft) board “decided” that it needed $129M for “infrastructure”, that despite voters having rejected a $56M bond in 2015. The board just completed the heist.
Back in November, district voters approved $79M in GO bonds. The sales pitch was that private deep pockets had expressed interest in donating the other $50M (i.e. matching funds). With that financial commitment to build/upgrade in place, on Tuesday the board voted to basically take out a second mortgage on its buildings (no referendum necessary). Those deep pockets vanished (gone skiing).
Crooks.
Did you visit the Ernie Davis statue?
People tend to forget the Spartan-Spring ABMs. IIRC, the program was called Safeguard. The Spartan missile had a huge warhead–five megatons–and was designed to kill its target as much by electro-magnetic pulse as by blast and heat. The difficult part about the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) is that it sought to destroy launched ballistic missiles and incoming warheads without using a nuclear warhead, so much greater precision was necessary.
Yes, I remember the Triad very well and I think it made sense until the Trident D-5 SLBM, which was sufficiently accurate to hold enemy missile silos at risk. At that point, ICBMs became rather redundant and paradoxical; why draw fire to your own homeland when you can put the missiles out to sea where they’re harder to find in the first place? Despite technological developments, the ocean is by no means transparant. Great Britain relies totally on submarines for its nuclear deterrent and France elminated its land-based missile force years ago, although they maintain aircraft capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons. Russia is a land-based power and the minor nuclear powers continue to rely on some land-based missiles. The U.S. at this point should copy the French approach but that would require strategic vision of which this government is presently incapable.
And the causal chain reaction goes like this:‘the Cold War….the integration of the US Military during the Korean War….followed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act…followed by the passage of the Nation destroying 1965 Immigration Reform Act. This chain reaction was way more lethal than the nuclear chain reaction of the ICBMs…..Replies: @Muggles
Aren’t you ignoring the increasing number of Guatemalan Nobel Prize winners?
Can these geniuses help you with your divorce? With your homelessness? With your unemployment? Can they teach you to just enjoy life, despite your poverty? Can they find you some new friends, ones who aren’t completely crazy, but only partially?
Nope? They just build weapons.
Geniuses my ass.
"I am become death...."
On a lighter note, I think Steve should pay attention to Matt Walsh's genius trolls of the left. He began as a normie conservative but the summer of Floyd did something to him. He began trolling the left in very clever ways. He started with a "Help Abuela" crowdfund, for AOC's poor grandmother. He followed up with a hilarious kid's book, Johnny The Walrus.
Now this:
https://www.amazon.com/What-Woman-Journey-Question-Generation/dp/1956007008
He's today's H.L. Mencken. He's a talent.Replies: @Muggles
The Woke Left (a/k/a White Left) is extremely vulnerable to humor and comic take-downs.
Kudos to Walsh for employing this tactic.
All bad ideologies and religions (most of them) are culturally humorless.
I can’t offhand think of any exceptions.
Jews seem to be the most predisposed to comedy. At least as comics. Moses had to tell a lot of jokes to keep the tribe entertained as he led them to lands other people already owned. Not easy…
Though there might be hilarious Hindus.
(Take my wife, please! She’s just going to burn anyway in a few months after I’m dead of cancer…) Zoroastrians might take offense however.
Lutherans seem pretty humorless too. Did any of those 96 theses contain a joke? I doubt it.
Mormons on the other hand… (Take my wife please! At least the fat ugly one…)
Walsh is a Christian.
I am not a mathmatical genius just an armchair general but, the real nuclear breakthrough, was not the ICBM. It was the solid rocket fueled Polaris missile system that could launch a nuclear warhead from under the sea.
Polaris gave John Kennedy all the cards during the Cuban missile crisis. He didn’t need no stinking liquid fueled ICBMs launched from Turkey. He had US Navy submarines that could launch city destroying nuclear warheads from a submarine 1500 miles away in international waters.
The USSR had nothing like it and struggled to catch up.
I guess we’ll have to take your word for it. Since the government rarely allows discussion of that.
Oh, and by the way, anyone see an fallout shelter lately?
Surely some of the Boomers here remember those yellow/red signs with black triangles inside. I think those were marking designated fallout shelters in the school basement, or wherever.
Since talk of nuking people seems to have come back into fashion, does the US government, God of Democracy (and the Democratic Party) have any plans for actually protecting the citizens?
Other than for high government nomenklatura types, would anyone else survive a nuclear blast in their hometown, in a fallout shelter?
The State spends billions on human extinction weapons and a few billion on protecting the monsters who run The State, but evidently zero on protecting you and me.
When push comes to shove, they have lead underwear and bottled water and caviar, the rest of us (ordinary “muggles” some might say) will glow in the dark for a few brief days in agony.
With Senile Joe as our leader, and Paranoid Putin as theirs, I’m sure my worries are just Boomer hangover from my feckless youth. Now where do I keep that 18 year old Scotch?
As for the populace, you're confusing two different threats, being too near the explosion of a nuclear warhead, and the fallout it leaves behind. Lots of Americans will survive the latter just fine without taking special actions, lots more would be OK with just a little bit of information, and more if they read and follow the directions for expedient protections, eating afterwords, etc. in a green cover printed copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills.
Which also includes blast shelters for the really serious but also improbably long to prepare, all this tested in the field with normie Americans and at least one non-nuclear massive explosion test for that and lots of other stuff, huge pile of ANFO was set off. The basic slit trench covered by doors and a foot of dirt to mitigate "sky shine" fallout shelter also performed well in that test. (Sky shine is gamma rays, high energy photons coming from fallout particles on the ground and being reflected off atoms in the air down into the trench.)Replies: @Steve Sailer
Yeah, they reckoned that the population could put a foot of earth on top of low-slope roofs in the non-blast areas and get through the fall-out radiation problem. That part didn't take into account a basic collapse of civilization (health problems aside). However, Civil Defense did not ignore that either. I think the fall-out shelters were designated with this in mind, with caches of food, maybe batteries and comm gear, etc.
We found one of the caches in a big brick church one day and helped ourselves to the Saltines. Hell, I think they get BETTER with age, like a fine wine.
BTW, I really liked your jokes about joking in that other post!Replies: @Jack D, @Anonymous
The few early large-scale exercises in the 1950s that simulated evacuations of major cities invariably ended in disaster. Civil Defence was a joke, the authorities knew it, and that was how CD measures came down either to near-pointless "fallout shelters" or people building their own private bomb shelters (the few who could afford it).The government itself would not fare all that well if the missiles were to fly. Plans for continuity of government generally boil down to having a "designated successor" of whatever office permanently stationed somewhere well out of the city. There is little to no likelihood of someone being able to evacuate in time from the middle of Washington in the middle of their daily duties.
(There isn't much allowance made for the families of government officials, either. More than one office holder has made it clear that, if the end of the world is near, they will be eschewing government shelters in favour of taking their chances with their families outside.)
There simply isn't the space, food, air, etc. in government shelters to accommodate that many people. Not to mention the logistics needed to keep government shelters habitable as they sit idle over a period of decades.
The book Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself by Garrett M. Graff tells the whole sickening story. The book is only a few years old, so the author benefited from a lot of the Cold War plans being declassified.
In essence, the "big plan" was for everyone to cross their fingers and hope that the missiles all stayed in their silos.
Konrad Zuse in Germany deserves mention if only because per Wikipedia he's credited with anticipating the concept in 1936 with "two patent applications that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data" so that's on the official record.
To reiterate and expand on a bit, the heritage of the idea and thus its official record is not completely clear because of the difficulties of reducing it to practice. The EDVAC and UNIVAC used mercury acoustic delay lines, long horizontal columns of that with an actuator at one end that created pulses and a receiver at the other that read them, with hardware in between to regenerate the memory as well as read and write values to it. Wikipedia says the general concept goes back to analog work in the 1920s, and Project Whirlwind was desperate enough to consider doing this with a (microwave?) radio links to and back from western Massachusetts.
The U.K. CRT based Williams Tube was the first DRAM, although I'm not sure how reliable it ever was (per IBM evidently enough for scientists but not businessmen). The 1932 magnetic drum was used a lot, the 1954 IBM 650 was the first mass produced computer and used that for its main memory. It wasn't until Project Whirlwind that 3D magnetic core memory was developed and reduced to practice as their version of Williams Tubes were not working out very well. That got us our first "fast," reliable and affordable enough RAM (no D for dynamic, didn't require regeneration) which despite many other efforts ruled until static and dynamic silicon chip RAM fairly slowly displaced it (the S in Cray 1S was for that model using super fast static RAM for its main memory, while IBM was using it through an internal development Intel was the first to sell it commercially, the 1103 with a whopping 1024 or a kilobit of memory).
My assumption is von Neumann wrote up an elegant description of the whole stored program computer concept which was in part based on Turing's theoretical work, but was at most formalizing it all. It wasn't by any means how he thought we should really be doing computing, I've read or been told that was based on automata although I'm not sure if it could have been easily programed by mere mortals.
Eckert and Mauchly's story is long and kinda sad, Wikipedia reminds me "new university policies that would have forced Eckert and Mauchly to sign over intellectual property rights for their inventions led to their resignation," the University of Pennsylvania went from #1 in the world to essentially nothing in the space of a year and that significantly delayed the EDVAC (that's another government project as most early computers were). On their own they almost ran out of money and their first big investor who then helped died in plane crash, Remington Rand eventually bought their company. Another thing to make Mauchly bitter was that included a ten year non-compete so he was sidelined for eight years after resigning in 1952 (that's a not so hidden secret of California's general high tech success, although it wouldn't have been for a principal like him).
Another factor would be I think IBM running a survey, don't know if they made it public but it would have been in the air, that everyone had heard of the UNIVAC and everyone thought it was made by IBM....Replies: @Jack D, @Jack D
They may have grasped it (and implemented it in their later work) but given the extremely crude architecture and limited memory of ENIAC, I’m not sure that they implemented it. As I understand ENIAC, if you wanted to add the value of register A to register B and store it in register C you would physically patch the output of A and B to the adder circuit and then take the output of that circuit and patch it to the device where register C was stored. So the arrangement of the patch cords was the “program”.
They barely had enough memory to store their data let alone the programs, but it probably was obvious to them that if you had enough memory the instructions themselves could be stored in memory and not just the data.
Again, if you read their reaction, von Neumann was this high falutin’ conceptual “math” guy who flew at 50,000 feet while they were the guys who were out there dealing with the tubes and delay lines and stuff that actually did the work and all that he did was to steal their idea and convert the concrete work they had already done into an abstraction. Maybe this is true but abstracting a concrete work into a comprehensive theoretical framework is not as easy as it sounds.
Yes, as or before the DoD Office of Civil Defense was turned into the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA!!!) the Democrats realized there would be more money for buying votes if real Civil Defense was changed into “crisis relocation.” That is, safely before cities would get nuked, their populations would be moved out into the hinterlands. Teddy Kennedy was involved in this….
As for the populace, you’re confusing two different threats, being too near the explosion of a nuclear warhead, and the fallout it leaves behind. Lots of Americans will survive the latter just fine without taking special actions, lots more would be OK with just a little bit of information, and more if they read and follow the directions for expedient protections, eating afterwords, etc. in a green cover printed copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills.
Which also includes blast shelters for the really serious but also improbably long to prepare, all this tested in the field with normie Americans and at least one non-nuclear massive explosion test for that and lots of other stuff, huge pile of ANFO was set off. The basic slit trench covered by doors and a foot of dirt to mitigate “sky shine” fallout shelter also performed well in that test. (Sky shine is gamma rays, high energy photons coming from fallout particles on the ground and being reflected off atoms in the air down into the trench.)
The ‘von’ is part of the name, hence ‘von Neumann” would be the correct name; and since it is a German name, the “v” in “von” is not capitalized, as von Neumann didn’t seem to have changed it. (One of the few exceptions in German to start a sentence with a capital letter is given by the “von”; it would not be capitalized).
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Humboldt
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_von_RibbentropReplies: @Fox
Not lately, but I do remember them. I agree with TwbT’s reply though, as I know something from way back about the Civil Defense Dept. (soon to be FEMA) plans. There were “blast areas” and “non-blast areas” designated based on the kinda-hopeful idea that both the targets were very-well known (anywhere near a military base, etc) and that there wouldn’t be many bad shots.
Yeah, they reckoned that the population could put a foot of earth on top of low-slope roofs in the non-blast areas and get through the fall-out radiation problem. That part didn’t take into account a basic collapse of civilization (health problems aside). However, Civil Defense did not ignore that either. I think the fall-out shelters were designated with this in mind, with caches of food, maybe batteries and comm gear, etc.
We found one of the caches in a big brick church one day and helped ourselves to the Saltines. Hell, I think they get BETTER with age, like a fine wine.
BTW, I really liked your jokes about joking in that other post!
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/p-4AAOSwZ5hhQTby/s-l1600.jpg
Or something else?
I ask because, if you are referring to the former, I can let you in on their secret.
The American government tested these crackers and reported a “discernible but inconsequential decrease” in flavour after fifty-two months (a tad over four years) of storage.
The problem? These revolting crackers were near-inedible to begin with.
The entire idea behind these crackers was not that they were a tasty treat the whole family would love. Rather, they were rations that most people would not willingly eat unless there was nothing else available. Which is handy in a bomb shelter because there wasn't anything else available.
(Well, that's not strictly true: there was also "carbohydrate supplement," government code for hard candy [which, of course, lasts a long time, too].)
No kidding: those ghastly biscuits and hard candy were what people were expected to live on in the shelters if Uncle Sam was doing the cooking. Six small "meals" per day of 125 calories each was the official serving suggestion.
(Helpful Hint: anyone seeking to replicate the taste of the crackers may do so by biting into a sheet of cardboard, a substance the crackers were actually compared to during testing.)
So, if you actually ate these crackers, and ate them willingly, you did better than most of the people who tested them (and who could barely choke them down).Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Achmed E. Newman, @G. Poulin
Kurt Godel looked like an ET…at least based upon all those Discovery Channel shows about Area 55 and the Grays they have pickled in some vault…
https://institucional.us.es/blogimus/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/4.12.a.3.Godel-viejo.jpg
Ha..Ha….Well, the USAF wants to have 4’2” Female Mixtecs from the Jungles of Qaxaca Mexico to the next generation of F-22 Pilots so they can napalm the last, and final generation of White Male Infants in Idaho…
I think that’s only because of the round and large eyeglasses he seems to have favored most of his life. Perhaps he had a peripheral vision problem and needed correction over all of his visual field. Here’s a picture of him in old age wearing a more commonplace style of eyeglass frame.
Von Neumann — terrified of oncoming mortality — converted to Catholicism on his deathbed
Perhaps Gödel’s version of the ontological proof for the existence of God was a factor in Von Neumann seeing the Light. Don’t laugh! Christoph Benzmuller and Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo used an ‘automated theorem prover’ to show that Gödel’s ontological argument is consistent and thus valid (not necessarily sound, though).
The math is beyond my feeble abilities to follow . . .
Did the USSR collapse because of US policy or from its own weight regardless of what the West did?
After all, the Chinese system was far more backward than the Soviet one but it didn't collapse.
One could argue the US aided China in the 80s while strangling the USSR, still the enemy of Cold War.
But the collapse was hastened by Gorbachev's rise who actually eased tensions. Europeans favored him over Reagan. Thatcher urged Reagan to make peace with that man. And tensions were reduced, and Reagan and Gorbachev even became friendly on the personal level.
Certain systems require will. Communism is a moral system and grows weak without a certain passion or fanaticism. Cuba and North Korea are still around. Good or bad, they maintained the will and control. When the will was lost in Russia, it was bound to fall apart.
The West is based on freedom, so the will and sense of righteousness are less important to keeping the system going.
But from a longer historical perspective, did the free West beat the communist East or enter into a slower collapse? Huntington worried about the Clash of Civilizations, but Europe today is like Crash of Civilizations. In peacetime and relative prosperity, London became 60% non-British. Parts of Paris no longer look French.
And whatever autonomy the Europeans had during the Cold War totally evaporated. Worse, they don't even have much freedom left, so telling from Covid lockdowns and speech codes. In Germany, court has ruled there is no such thing as real Germans as anyone can become a German citizen.Replies: @XBardon Kaldlan
It was reported that Beckham and Posh had a break in at their London home,while they were there. They only discovered it later when broken glass was found in one part of their mansion,and they saw that valuables were missing.
I’m sure neither would dare speak out about diversity and immigration,but it seems the noose is tightening around Londoners,even the mega wealthy.
Multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) were part of the excuse for that, although a Spartan style intercept might have worked if it could have done it before the "bus" released all its warheads one at a time. And thus all the interest un boost phase intercept, which as mostly gone poof nowadays which is very telling about what it really driving today's efforts, protection of the population isn't even on the table unless it's a few missiles from North Korea or Iran. Well, the Russians might be more serious, see some of the S-400 missile variants, that family/class has always had an (illegal during the ABM treaty) ABM role. And PRC has been cool with depopulation until very recently as their post-Mao one child policy inevitably went bad.
The bomber third of the triad is vital because it's the only part you can launch on warning, so if your warning is a mistake you can call them back, with PALs they couldn't even fire off working warheads until they got the codes to unlock them. All three make pulling off a successful counter-force first strike nearly impossible, and even a modest ABM system and there's no way because on top of your systems' reliability issues you don't get to pick which warheads get intercepted.
The period you describe was indeed from everything I've heard a wonderful time for engineers, I came of political age a little before we generally gave up on it and everything and among other things adopted a policy of energy poverty which the West's ruling trash is so, so upset today to extend to a virtual blockade of Russian oil and gas. That resulted in an early 1970s and to this day still pretty permanent crash in aero-astro, which confirmed the wisdom of MIT's policy of not letting departments get too big in terms of tenured professors and face losing reprogramming of buildings (and that of course implicitly puts a cap on grad student populations, which then can result in high teaching loads like EECS until the dot.com bust).Replies: @GeologyAnonMk5
The SM-3 is a boost-phase/orbital kill ABM weapon carried on every US Navy CG and many DDGs for at least a decade, and has an operational kill against a satellite, which a S-Anything has never achieved. Hundreds of these weapons are deployed at sea right now, we aren’t talking about something in prototype or low-rate initial production phases.
I think the elites general disconcern about the chattel can be seen by how short of shrift we payed to civil defense compared to the Soviets, but factually you’re off base about US boost phase ABMs, we field far more of them operationally (and close enough to launch sites to matter) than the entire rest of the planet several times over. Entire destroyer squadrons go on 12 month+ cruises pretty much exclusively in support of maintaining the boost-phase/orbital ABM blanket.
It’ll take more than jokes to bring down wokeness, but let’s have them anyway.
Walsh is a Christian.
Doesn’t seem like a ‘shortcoming’ to me.
You should read Dieudonne’s History of Functional Analysis for an account of the development of these ideas and the contributions of various mathematicians.
As for the populace, you're confusing two different threats, being too near the explosion of a nuclear warhead, and the fallout it leaves behind. Lots of Americans will survive the latter just fine without taking special actions, lots more would be OK with just a little bit of information, and more if they read and follow the directions for expedient protections, eating afterwords, etc. in a green cover printed copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills.
Which also includes blast shelters for the really serious but also improbably long to prepare, all this tested in the field with normie Americans and at least one non-nuclear massive explosion test for that and lots of other stuff, huge pile of ANFO was set off. The basic slit trench covered by doors and a foot of dirt to mitigate "sky shine" fallout shelter also performed well in that test. (Sky shine is gamma rays, high energy photons coming from fallout particles on the ground and being reflected off atoms in the air down into the trench.)Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
Perhaps Gödel's version of the ontological proof for the existence of God was a factor in Von Neumann seeing the Light. Don't laugh! Christoph Benzmuller and Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo used an 'automated theorem prover' to show that Gödel's ontological argument is consistent and thus valid (not necessarily sound, though).
The math is beyond my feeble abilities to follow . . .
https://1millionmonkeystyping.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/godels-proof.jpg?w=490&h=245Replies: @War for Blair Mountain
The late David Foster Wallace was an expert on Modal Logic…And I do not Infinite Jest…
And don’t quote me on this:Modal Logic is used in VSLI DESIGN VERIFICATION…They use a idea that can from…well who else:Modal Logic Guru Saul Kripke…..
They barely had enough memory to store their data let alone the programs, but it probably was obvious to them that if you had enough memory the instructions themselves could be stored in memory and not just the data.
Again, if you read their reaction, von Neumann was this high falutin' conceptual "math" guy who flew at 50,000 feet while they were the guys who were out there dealing with the tubes and delay lines and stuff that actually did the work and all that he did was to steal their idea and convert the concrete work they had already done into an abstraction. Maybe this is true but abstracting a concrete work into a comprehensive theoretical framework is not as easy as it sounds.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
Yeah, they reckoned that the population could put a foot of earth on top of low-slope roofs in the non-blast areas and get through the fall-out radiation problem. That part didn't take into account a basic collapse of civilization (health problems aside). However, Civil Defense did not ignore that either. I think the fall-out shelters were designated with this in mind, with caches of food, maybe batteries and comm gear, etc.
We found one of the caches in a big brick church one day and helped ourselves to the Saltines. Hell, I think they get BETTER with age, like a fine wine.
BTW, I really liked your jokes about joking in that other post!Replies: @Jack D, @Anonymous
Not just crackers but drugs. A friend bought a building in NYC that had a fallout shelter in the basement.
If you are old enough, you will remember seeing these signs posted near the basement stairs of some buildings, but chances are you never saw the shelter itself – at least I never did.
In the shelter (a storeroom in the basement), there were bottles and bottles of phenobarbital but they were decades out of date. In those days it was used as a sedative – they probably figured people would get pretty anxious after a nuclear war.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-03-05-9503050222-story.html
If things got really bad, you could use the Luminal to kill yourself, but I don’t think they went into that in the instructions. Having to depend on a podiatrist for your medical care would have been grim to start with.
Your claim that the SM-3 is a boost as well as (hit to kill mid-)orbital phase ABM weapon disagrees with everything I’ve ever heard about it, and wouldn’t even vaguely have the range required for that mission. Per Wikipedia to put figures that make sense on this, the not-developed Block IIB would have to be within 100 miles of the launch site.
That mission, and homeland defense in general given its range limitations built into the design from it being a Standard Missile that has to fit in a standard vertical launch cell envelope, doesn’t fit well with where our very expensive Aegis ships might be when an adversary launches, as well as the adversary having the option of trying to destroy the ships as part of an integrated attack plan, outside of course special cases like Japan defending itself from North Korea, also see the Obama “non-agreement capable” betrayal of Poland etc. where Iran is the danger being defended against.
It’s also Officially only good for short and intermediate range missiles, but that’s maybe a lie, or not true for Block IIA, or maybe we’ll do a new block sooner or later, and also see the SM-6 which puts a AMRAAM seeker head with a bigger antenna on the front of a Standard Missile and per Wikipedia has had a successful test against a medium range missle.
While the Air Force has or had aspirations for flying laser projectors, and maybe you can do that at distance from the ground (but probably not, plus see weather), credible boost phase interception has as far as I can remember always been in the domain of hitting a big, slow, massive thermal signature booster from high above.
Perhaps the conventional orbital laser or other type of directed energy weapon satellite or integrate that into solar power satellites including for their self protection, perhaps Smart Rocks/Brilliant Pebbles placed in orbit, perhaps based on the expectation nothing in orbit will survive an adversary’s attack nuclear explosion pumped X ray/gamma ray lasers launched as soon as we see the enemy launching, each device taking out multiple boosters at once. But not a surface lauched missile with such a limiting envelope to begin with.
For VLS cells, any mk41 VLS of sufficient cell height (so almost all but the very oldest DDGs, and All CGs) can carry the weapon. As far as the SM-6 goes, I was involved in that systems IOC testing. It's not doctrinally thought of as an ABM but it is an extremely energetic/fast accelerating missile. You might be able to successfully use it off label as an ABM, but given that every CSG or DESRON has multiple SM-3s embarked, which have proven capability to defeat even MIRV'd or penetration aid + MIRV weapons, it would be a weird situation where you have to try that out.
And Launch on Warning is Dumb. Ohio class let's you think as long as you want, and then convert the enemies population centers into sunshine in... let's just say it would not be an awkward length of time to measure in seconds rather than minutes.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
Not saying we won’t get our hair mussed …
ENIAC was pretty amazing because of its conservative engineering with vacuum tubes, something you also see with U.K. 1943-5 Colossus, essentially an ASIC for breaking the Nazi Lorenz cypher which was used for more important stuff than the Enigma cypher. But both had very limited memory, essentially today's registers and whatever was used for I/O, paper tape of a sort for the latter's input, and were programmed with patch panels which took a long time to set up, and see below for 1939 prior art in electronic computing which Mauchly was formally aware of.
And for that matter there's lots of electromechanical prior art; be it counting widgets, relays, vacuum tubed, transistors, or integrated circuits and the multiple generations of the latter two, there's a qualitative difference between computing and computers per se and the technologies used to implement them. But patents aren't my forte, are in fact very bad news in my field of software development.
It was very obvious to everyone that when we could create sufficient amounts of cheaper memory (and boy was that a mess until core memory), programs would live in it along with data, and Herman Goldstine as noted prompted the hell out of Von Neumann's thoughts, ultimately resulting in the "Von Neumann" architecture nomenclature, which is used in all but a few relatively obscure niches compared to for example earlier "Harvard" architecture where programs and data live in quite different places like PIC microcontrollers.
As for those patents, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert comprehensively lost, the list of deficiencies is much longer than I'd known or remembered. They most certainly did not invent even the electronic computer contrary to your first source (last can be found in the Wayback Machine).
That honor goes to John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry and their 1939 one which while very modest is conceptually on a par with Mauchly and Eckert's ENIAC, plus there's more limited IBM prior art of a vacuum tube multiplier. Pretty sure that was IBM's first offering in the field, while it wasn't a tremendous advance over electromechanical multipliers Watson Jr. got his father to turn it into a product to get them started in the field, and it sold a lot more units than expected. Then they added a divider to the next model....
Goldstine's dissemination of First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is just one of twelve specific items in Wikipedia's distillation of key findings of the 248 page decision, and they paint Mauchly and Eckert in a terrible light: "Sperry Rand had tried to monopolize the electronic data processing industry in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, on the basis of a cross-licensing agreement between Sperry Rand and IBM signed on August 21, 1956, but that only IBM had in fact succeeded in creating such a monopoly (Finding 15)."
That was due to IBM's general competence in everything, getting experience in doing this sort of this ASAP, and for example cross fertilization with MIT's Project Whirlwind and SAGE. IBM for example knew anything like this needed to be divided into reasonably sized units that could fit in normal elevators and doorways (the latter sealed the ultimate fate of the Atanasoff-Berry computer) that could then be hooked up by cables. I recall reading the first model of the UNIVAC requiring serious disassembly and then reassembly at the customer's site.
And I'll add due to a prior punched card antitrust settlement, IBM licensed all the computer technology it came up with on a FRAND basis, how for example the one half inch reel to reel tape drive became ubiquitous and disk drives became a general thing quickly. In addition Mauchly and Eckert filed their patent applications too long after the unveiling of ENIAC, plus what the judge saw as unproven "willful and intentional fraud on the U.S. Patent Office in filing the patent" which he wasn't in a position to criminally prosecute and was moot anyway, and OMG, the patent was so sloppy it originally wouldn't cover clock cycles greater than 1 MHz!
So, yeah, Jewish ethnic promotion, but ultimately in this case not resulting in holding back progress or profiting until you can cite how that came into play through for example cross-licensing ... with an invalid patent.
Colossus also beat ENIAC, but since Lorenz type machines were still in common use and it was only useful for the Nazi model of that so all but a couple were dismantled at the end of the war, it remained secret until the 1970s as I recall, and like in the US with some other secret computing projects people who'd worked on it then went on to do new and improved stuff a lot more openly.
Meanwhile, this iSteve article and as I recall the previous one doesn't touch on whatever contributions Von Neumann did or did not made to computing (and he died before he could finish his work on next generation stuff), you're a very small man who can only hide behind an anonymous account and try to bite the ankles of your betters, be they Jew or gentile.Replies: @Jack D, @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
I thought I phrased it pretty well: “articulating in 1945 the von Neumann architecture that instantly became the standard way to design general-purpose computers; note that he didn’t invent the computer, but his clarity of mind and prestige helped get the American computer industry off to a quick start on the right foot”
I don’t get where you’re getting your figures from. Wikipedia lists a range of 500 miles (which is lower than actual…) Last year a SM-3 off a DDG off Hawaii killed an ICBM fired from Kwajalein. We are talking way, way greater threat radius than 100nm, no idea where you got that figure. You say we wouldn’t risk an AEGIS ship to get within engagement range of an ICBM based on this odd 100nm range figure, and 1) Again, the MEZ radius for a weapon that can literally enter orbit is, unsurprisingly, greater than 100nm, and 2) Big Navy would absolutely stand a DDG into danger if it meant even a chance the crew could prevent one or more US cities from getting a surprise suntan. We operate well within 100nm of “hostile” countries routinely as it is. Any captain or commodore would without question risk an enemy ASCM or Tacair attack if it meant even a slightly better chance of preventing a US city from being CNTL+ALT+DELETED. Not that they need too… because the range is far greater than you believe.
For VLS cells, any mk41 VLS of sufficient cell height (so almost all but the very oldest DDGs, and All CGs) can carry the weapon. As far as the SM-6 goes, I was involved in that systems IOC testing. It’s not doctrinally thought of as an ABM but it is an extremely energetic/fast accelerating missile. You might be able to successfully use it off label as an ABM, but given that every CSG or DESRON has multiple SM-3s embarked, which have proven capability to defeat even MIRV’d or penetration aid + MIRV weapons, it would be a weird situation where you have to try that out.
And Launch on Warning is Dumb. Ohio class let’s you think as long as you want, and then convert the enemies population centers into sunshine in… let’s just say it would not be an awkward length of time to measure in seconds rather than minutes.
paperPower Point design.I'm not talking about risking these ships per se, just saying it doesn't make sense to use them as essentially fixed position ABM platforms unless of course we became plenty desperate and abandon a lot of missions they normally do (unless of course they've quietly become Fatherland Defense Barges). And contrary to lots of experience in the real world, have these systems turned on and operating when a threat arises.
I can see a Kwajalein fired to off Hawaii, per Bing that's ~2,570 miles, being a boost phase intercept. But where are Russia's ICBM's located? I assume the PRC's are closer to the coastline, but being near there again as I said opens the gambit of taking out the ships before a first strike, which I gather the PRC is moving towards gaining the capability of trying.
Is there any information you can point me at that describes the flight profiles of the ICBM and SM-3 for that "Flight Test Maritime-44 (FTM-44)" (the ones I just looked up aren't useful, quote or rewrite the government's press release which is non-technical, except for an artist's conception that's bogus for a real test against an ICBM at boost range).
My point about VLS cells is that they place a firm limit on the energy/range of a missile that fits into them. Your claim about our Ohios is what we hope, but the point is that if they become vulnerable, the other legs of the triad are not likely to share the same problem; their's a point beyond which nation's survival should not be economized. And again, bombers can be launched on warning! That capability without committing yourself to warhead delivery is priceless.Replies: @GeologyAnonMk5
Bruce Willis’s brain has absconded…
Just like Monty Python’s Terry Jones:Brain-has-absconded-Syndrome…
Just like the great String Theorist Joe Polchinski:Brain-has-absconded-Syndrome…Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Emil Nikola Richard, @houston 1992
Is anybody reporting how many messenger RNA experimental gene medications he was injected with?
Nope? They just build weapons.
Geniuses my ass.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
Lionizing scientists is always an affectation; you can be sure all the people here doing it are just posturing, trying to signal to others that “this sort of thing is their bag, baby.” The scientific intellect of a man, no matter how keen it is, does not naturally excite the warm feelings of others. But the humanists and spergs need their communion of secular saints to point to, so here we are.
It's really something how people admire tax leeches whose celebrity boils down to helping the government develop weapons of awesome destructive power. Yes, we know that they were some of the smartest guys who ever lived. But, honestly. I have more respect for some poor, private sector factory floor worker who maybe couldn't even do long division.
Very scarey…for sure…
For VLS cells, any mk41 VLS of sufficient cell height (so almost all but the very oldest DDGs, and All CGs) can carry the weapon. As far as the SM-6 goes, I was involved in that systems IOC testing. It's not doctrinally thought of as an ABM but it is an extremely energetic/fast accelerating missile. You might be able to successfully use it off label as an ABM, but given that every CSG or DESRON has multiple SM-3s embarked, which have proven capability to defeat even MIRV'd or penetration aid + MIRV weapons, it would be a weird situation where you have to try that out.
And Launch on Warning is Dumb. Ohio class let's you think as long as you want, and then convert the enemies population centers into sunshine in... let's just say it would not be an awkward length of time to measure in seconds rather than minutes.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
As I said, Wikipedia for the single 100 mile one; that’s from the GAO for boost phase interception for the SM-3 Block IIB, and of course they might not be honest and IIB is an abandoned
paperPower Point design.I’m not talking about risking these ships per se, just saying it doesn’t make sense to use them as essentially fixed position ABM platforms unless of course we became plenty desperate and abandon a lot of missions they normally do (unless of course they’ve quietly become Fatherland Defense Barges). And contrary to lots of experience in the real world, have these systems turned on and operating when a threat arises.
I can see a Kwajalein fired to off Hawaii, per Bing that’s ~2,570 miles, being a boost phase intercept. But where are Russia’s ICBM’s located? I assume the PRC’s are closer to the coastline, but being near there again as I said opens the gambit of taking out the ships before a first strike, which I gather the PRC is moving towards gaining the capability of trying.
Is there any information you can point me at that describes the flight profiles of the ICBM and SM-3 for that “Flight Test Maritime-44 (FTM-44)” (the ones I just looked up aren’t useful, quote or rewrite the government’s press release which is non-technical, except for an artist’s conception that’s bogus for a real test against an ICBM at boost range).
My point about VLS cells is that they place a firm limit on the energy/range of a missile that fits into them. Your claim about our Ohios is what we hope, but the point is that if they become vulnerable, the other legs of the triad are not likely to share the same problem; their’s a point beyond which nation’s survival should not be economized. And again, bombers can be launched on warning! That capability without committing yourself to warhead delivery is priceless.
Bruce Willis’s brain has absconded…
Just like Monty Python’s Terry Jones:Brain-has-absconded-Syndrome…
Just like the great String Theorist Joe Polchinski:Brain-has-absconded-Syndrome…Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Emil Nikola Richard, @houston 1992
what causes that disease?
They never did. After the US government spent hundreds of millions in an effort to protect itself, there simply wasn’t any money left to protect citizens. Civil Defence was largely a public relations campaign and little else.
The few early large-scale exercises in the 1950s that simulated evacuations of major cities invariably ended in disaster. Civil Defence was a joke, the authorities knew it, and that was how CD measures came down either to near-pointless “fallout shelters” or people building their own private bomb shelters (the few who could afford it).
The government itself would not fare all that well if the missiles were to fly. Plans for continuity of government generally boil down to having a “designated successor” of whatever office permanently stationed somewhere well out of the city. There is little to no likelihood of someone being able to evacuate in time from the middle of Washington in the middle of their daily duties.
(There isn’t much allowance made for the families of government officials, either. More than one office holder has made it clear that, if the end of the world is near, they will be eschewing government shelters in favour of taking their chances with their families outside.)
There simply isn’t the space, food, air, etc. in government shelters to accommodate that many people. Not to mention the logistics needed to keep government shelters habitable as they sit idle over a period of decades.
The book Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself by Garrett M. Graff tells the whole sickening story. The book is only a few years old, so the author benefited from a lot of the Cold War plans being declassified.
In essence, the “big plan” was for everyone to cross their fingers and hope that the missiles all stayed in their silos.
paperPower Point design.I'm not talking about risking these ships per se, just saying it doesn't make sense to use them as essentially fixed position ABM platforms unless of course we became plenty desperate and abandon a lot of missions they normally do (unless of course they've quietly become Fatherland Defense Barges). And contrary to lots of experience in the real world, have these systems turned on and operating when a threat arises.
I can see a Kwajalein fired to off Hawaii, per Bing that's ~2,570 miles, being a boost phase intercept. But where are Russia's ICBM's located? I assume the PRC's are closer to the coastline, but being near there again as I said opens the gambit of taking out the ships before a first strike, which I gather the PRC is moving towards gaining the capability of trying.
Is there any information you can point me at that describes the flight profiles of the ICBM and SM-3 for that "Flight Test Maritime-44 (FTM-44)" (the ones I just looked up aren't useful, quote or rewrite the government's press release which is non-technical, except for an artist's conception that's bogus for a real test against an ICBM at boost range).
My point about VLS cells is that they place a firm limit on the energy/range of a missile that fits into them. Your claim about our Ohios is what we hope, but the point is that if they become vulnerable, the other legs of the triad are not likely to share the same problem; their's a point beyond which nation's survival should not be economized. And again, bombers can be launched on warning! That capability without committing yourself to warhead delivery is priceless.Replies: @GeologyAnonMk5
I don’t have an especially urgent desire to describe TS/SCI level intercept profiles to a random, severely misguided stranger off the internet. Just intern at Raytheon with your oddly pristine academic record like the rest of your ilk, dear comrade.
After writing my last reply, it occurred to me it can't possibly be boost profile because the usual suspects would be screaming bloody murder as they did in the 1980s about SDI because of how that would edge us towards the temptation of a first strike. So given those two facts, it's clear you're just making this up this claim out of whole cloth.
Yeah, they reckoned that the population could put a foot of earth on top of low-slope roofs in the non-blast areas and get through the fall-out radiation problem. That part didn't take into account a basic collapse of civilization (health problems aside). However, Civil Defense did not ignore that either. I think the fall-out shelters were designated with this in mind, with caches of food, maybe batteries and comm gear, etc.
We found one of the caches in a big brick church one day and helped ourselves to the Saltines. Hell, I think they get BETTER with age, like a fine wine.
BTW, I really liked your jokes about joking in that other post!Replies: @Jack D, @Anonymous
Sorry, are you referring to the bulgur wheat crackers found in tins as seen here?
Or something else?
I ask because, if you are referring to the former, I can let you in on their secret.
The American government tested these crackers and reported a “discernible but inconsequential decrease” in flavour after fifty-two months (a tad over four years) of storage.
The problem? These revolting crackers were near-inedible to begin with.
The entire idea behind these crackers was not that they were a tasty treat the whole family would love. Rather, they were rations that most people would not willingly eat unless there was nothing else available. Which is handy in a bomb shelter because there wasn’t anything else available.
(Well, that’s not strictly true: there was also “carbohydrate supplement,” government code for hard candy [which, of course, lasts a long time, too].)
No kidding: those ghastly biscuits and hard candy were what people were expected to live on in the shelters if Uncle Sam was doing the cooking. Six small “meals” per day of 125 calories each was the official serving suggestion.
(Helpful Hint: anyone seeking to replicate the taste of the crackers may do so by biting into a sheet of cardboard, a substance the crackers were actually compared to during testing.)
So, if you actually ate these crackers, and ate them willingly, you did better than most of the people who tested them (and who could barely choke them down).
10 Foods That Never (or Almost Never) Expire
The Germans may do this with JvN, but not with nobler nobles:
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Humboldt
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_von_Ribbentrop
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/p-4AAOSwZ5hhQTby/s-l1600.jpg
Or something else?
I ask because, if you are referring to the former, I can let you in on their secret.
The American government tested these crackers and reported a “discernible but inconsequential decrease” in flavour after fifty-two months (a tad over four years) of storage.
The problem? These revolting crackers were near-inedible to begin with.
The entire idea behind these crackers was not that they were a tasty treat the whole family would love. Rather, they were rations that most people would not willingly eat unless there was nothing else available. Which is handy in a bomb shelter because there wasn't anything else available.
(Well, that's not strictly true: there was also "carbohydrate supplement," government code for hard candy [which, of course, lasts a long time, too].)
No kidding: those ghastly biscuits and hard candy were what people were expected to live on in the shelters if Uncle Sam was doing the cooking. Six small "meals" per day of 125 calories each was the official serving suggestion.
(Helpful Hint: anyone seeking to replicate the taste of the crackers may do so by biting into a sheet of cardboard, a substance the crackers were actually compared to during testing.)
So, if you actually ate these crackers, and ate them willingly, you did better than most of the people who tested them (and who could barely choke them down).Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Achmed E. Newman, @G. Poulin
Hadn’t they heard of honey?
10 Foods That Never (or Almost Never) Expire
I’m not sure how nuclear weapons development can advance in the absence of testing. The last time that I looked at the stockpile report, it was expressing doubts about the reliability of the stockpile in light of the fact that the nuclear weapons in it were designed with 20 year service lives, and have now been in service for much longer than that. Color me skeptical!
If something important fails, they stop, leaving open the question about whether their other systems might work and maintaining deterrence. If they or enough of them work, things could get very interesting especially with target nations like the US having too much friction and compromise at the very top by countries like the PRC to respond in a timely manner if at all.Replies: @Diversity Heretic
Yes, this is true. One of the things that makes Von Neumann interesting was that he was an idiosyncratic individual that did not fit very well what a math genius is supposed to be like. But then, Neumann was not really a “math” genius, but an extraordinary genius that just happened to do math as his first area of intellectual interest, probably because math at the highest level of abstraction and postulation was the only thing that gave any sort of challenge whatsoever to his abnormal cognitive processes. To Neumann, earning a degree in chemical engineering from at the time one of the World’s most difficult universities was completely trivial, something that he did as a side project and it was well known that he actually knew 10 X more physical chemistry than the PhD professors, not to mention organic chemistry.
It’s hard to define what “general intelligence” is. Experts don’t agree on definitions, and some people can do extremely well at some areas and poor on another. Think Feynman, Putnam award winner in math and Nobelist in physics, who scored an IQ just barely above 120 because he went so poorly in the verbal part of the test. Or some times, a guy does really well on all verbal, numerical and mathematical subsets of an IQ test, but then he is a weirdo who, at the age of 40, has to live with his elderly parents because he cannot survive alone in the World due to his “mind blind” autism and absolute mental inflexibility which takes away from his ability to quickly react and adapt, which is one of the most fundamerntal traits for survival in any human society. A man with an IQ score of 150 who is actually a functioning retard.
But Neumann was different. He was really, really, really intelligent in *every* way that you can define intelligence with no obvious deficiency whatsoever. He was the closest example of extremely high “general” intelligence that I can think off. For instance, the Roman statemen, Julius Caesar, was, simultaneously, one of the greatest strategists in history, one of the greatest writers of Latin language of all times, and one of the foremost lawyers and legal experts of his time. not to mention a student of astronomy who also understood engineering. Or Goethe, who is one of the greatest poets and writers ever, as well as a chemist, a zoologist andab amateur mathematician as well. But Von Neumann was perhaps the most dramatica example of a brain with polymathic superpowers.
One of the stories that I read a long time ago at a science forum that illustrates the mind of Von Neumann happened when he was visiting a high school, and they invited him there to convince kids to pursuse a career in math or the hard sciences. They asked Neumman what was the difference betweeen physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Without batting an eye, Neumann replied:
“Physics is the study of how matter interacts with itself and with energy to form what we call reality, chemistry is the study of how a particular aspect of matter, atoms, bond together to form molecules, and biology is the study of how molecules based on Caebon interact with each other to form living organisms. As for mathematics, mathematics is a purely abstract discipline based on axioms, from which logical deductions are arrived to from a process of derivation.”
So one of the boys that was listening to this replied that he actually wanted to be a lawyer. Again, without batting an eye, Neumann replied:
“Now that is completely different. Law is an entirely human pursuit, based on moral humanist philosophy and what rules of interaction humans should conduct with each other to fulfill their needs of survival, and personal and mutual fulfillment. It was created because humans are a social species, and in social species conflicts of interest are inevitable. Law was created as the moral code of conduct one must follow when conducting oneself with others as they are rules most agree with, distinguished from personal moral codes.”
The point is, Neumann wasn’t impressive just merely due to the extreme depth of his intellect, but also due to it’s extreme broadness as well. On top of all that, he could speak fluently multiple languages, including Latin and Greek.
People who claim that Nermann’s contributions to computer science are overrated are missing the point. He didn’t make huge stides in computer science, but he created perhaps one of the two most important contributions ever to computer science, namely Von Neumann’s architecture(the other being the digital circuit by Claude Shannon), which is the basis of computer programming architecture to this day.. Not bad for a guy that considered computer science a side pursuit.
Not only that, Neumman wrote what in my opinion is one of the most important books ever, “The Computer And The Brain”, where he lays out the most likely path to true A.I capable of self-recursive programming and a Theory Of Mind. According to Neumann, the fundamental problem in creating a true A.I does not lie in programming algorithms, or in processing speed, or even in the digital language used that A.I researxhers think is the problem. According to Neumann, the fundamental problem lies in the architecture. Electro-chemical organic computers do not utilize zeroes and ones or any “language” known about how chemicals fires at synapsis to produce thoughts. We need to first understand the intrinsec pathways of neuron firing to understand the nature of consciousness. But this is way beyond our understanding of biology. The sci-fi T.V show, “Stargate Atlantis” whowed what the end-game of Neumann’s theoy is, the so-called “Neumann machines”, created by an extremely powerful and advanced civilization beyond human comprehension:
You are right that the generals loved Von Neumann. And that is because, besides being a gregarious fellow that loved parties and to receive guests. Neumann had a brusque and rispid quality to his character that men of arms often admire.
The claim that Neumman was genrally uninsterested in people is not true. Neumann was way, way above average in people-reading skills and above average in social dynamism. in fact, many joked that, if it weren’t for the fact that he became the World’s greatest mathematician, he would have been a diplomat! Neumman loved to receive guests and enterain them. He was a charming man and a gracious host. He also had an Old World charm that Americans actually liked. What Neumman really hated was personal drama, which women love. He was often cold to the women in his life about their problems. But this is not necessarily a sign of an autistic trait. For instance, French general, Napoleon, would lock himself in his office when his wife started to rant and nag him. Neumman was often cold to women close to him because their women problems bored him to tears, but that’s that.
He did create problems by bringing many engineer types to help build his computer, because military men often don’t like classic engineer types(Revenge Of The Nerds type rivalry?), but the engineers Neumann brought in were not as obnoxious as nerds often are. Most nerds tend to out-smart the Big Shots they work for, and that gives them as smartass attitude. But they certainly didn’t outsmart that Big Shot. Neumann was *much* more intelligent than the nerds that worked for him. I think they realized that, and respected him for it.
The heros of the Cold War 1.0 weren’t the guys who created the weaponry and related systems. The heros were the ones who on a couple of very stressful occasions kept their cool and declined to use the weapons at hand when that use would have triggered full-blown WW3.
The intercept profile question is very simple, and is one you’ve been claiming without evidence but would be violating your TS/SCI gained secrets if indeed it was boost vs. the mid-course as we’ve always been told.
After writing my last reply, it occurred to me it can’t possibly be boost profile because the usual suspects would be screaming bloody murder as they did in the 1980s about SDI because of how that would edge us towards the temptation of a first strike. So given those two facts, it’s clear you’re just making this up this claim out of whole cloth.
It's hard to define what "general intelligence" is. Experts don't agree on definitions, and some people can do extremely well at some areas and poor on another. Think Feynman, Putnam award winner in math and Nobelist in physics, who scored an IQ just barely above 120 because he went so poorly in the verbal part of the test. Or some times, a guy does really well on all verbal, numerical and mathematical subsets of an IQ test, but then he is a weirdo who, at the age of 40, has to live with his elderly parents because he cannot survive alone in the World due to his "mind blind" autism and absolute mental inflexibility which takes away from his ability to quickly react and adapt, which is one of the most fundamerntal traits for survival in any human society. A man with an IQ score of 150 who is actually a functioning retard.
But Neumann was different. He was really, really, really intelligent in *every* way that you can define intelligence with no obvious deficiency whatsoever. He was the closest example of extremely high "general" intelligence that I can think off. For instance, the Roman statemen, Julius Caesar, was, simultaneously, one of the greatest strategists in history, one of the greatest writers of Latin language of all times, and one of the foremost lawyers and legal experts of his time. not to mention a student of astronomy who also understood engineering. Or Goethe, who is one of the greatest poets and writers ever, as well as a chemist, a zoologist andab amateur mathematician as well. But Von Neumann was perhaps the most dramatica example of a brain with polymathic superpowers.
One of the stories that I read a long time ago at a science forum that illustrates the mind of Von Neumann happened when he was visiting a high school, and they invited him there to convince kids to pursuse a career in math or the hard sciences. They asked Neumman what was the difference betweeen physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Without batting an eye, Neumann replied:
"Physics is the study of how matter interacts with itself and with energy to form what we call reality, chemistry is the study of how a particular aspect of matter, atoms, bond together to form molecules, and biology is the study of how molecules based on Caebon interact with each other to form living organisms. As for mathematics, mathematics is a purely abstract discipline based on axioms, from which logical deductions are arrived to from a process of derivation."
So one of the boys that was listening to this replied that he actually wanted to be a lawyer. Again, without batting an eye, Neumann replied:
"Now that is completely different. Law is an entirely human pursuit, based on moral humanist philosophy and what rules of interaction humans should conduct with each other to fulfill their needs of survival, and personal and mutual fulfillment. It was created because humans are a social species, and in social species conflicts of interest are inevitable. Law was created as the moral code of conduct one must follow when conducting oneself with others as they are rules most agree with, distinguished from personal moral codes."
The point is, Neumann wasn't impressive just merely due to the extreme depth of his intellect, but also due to it's extreme broadness as well. On top of all that, he could speak fluently multiple languages, including Latin and Greek.
People who claim that Nermann's contributions to computer science are overrated are missing the point. He didn't make huge stides in computer science, but he created perhaps one of the two most important contributions ever to computer science, namely Von Neumann's architecture(the other being the digital circuit by Claude Shannon), which is the basis of computer programming architecture to this day.. Not bad for a guy that considered computer science a side pursuit.
Not only that, Neumman wrote what in my opinion is one of the most important books ever, "The Computer And The Brain", where he lays out the most likely path to true A.I capable of self-recursive programming and a Theory Of Mind. According to Neumann, the fundamental problem in creating a true A.I does not lie in programming algorithms, or in processing speed, or even in the digital language used that A.I researxhers think is the problem. According to Neumann, the fundamental problem lies in the architecture. Electro-chemical organic computers do not utilize zeroes and ones or any "language" known about how chemicals fires at synapsis to produce thoughts. We need to first understand the intrinsec pathways of neuron firing to understand the nature of consciousness. But this is way beyond our understanding of biology. The sci-fi T.V show, "Stargate Atlantis" whowed what the end-game of Neumann's theoy is, the so-called "Neumann machines", created by an extremely powerful and advanced civilization beyond human comprehension:
https://youtu.be/TGI8oNcYkXg
You are right that the generals loved Von Neumann. And that is because, besides being a gregarious fellow that loved parties and to receive guests. Neumann had a brusque and rispid quality to his character that men of arms often admire.
The claim that Neumman was genrally uninsterested in people is not true. Neumann was way, way above average in people-reading skills and above average in social dynamism. in fact, many joked that, if it weren't for the fact that he became the World's greatest mathematician, he would have been a diplomat! Neumman loved to receive guests and enterain them. He was a charming man and a gracious host. He also had an Old World charm that Americans actually liked. What Neumman really hated was personal drama, which women love. He was often cold to the women in his life about their problems. But this is not necessarily a sign of an autistic trait. For instance, French general, Napoleon, would lock himself in his office when his wife started to rant and nag him. Neumman was often cold to women close to him because their women problems bored him to tears, but that's that.
He did create problems by bringing many engineer types to help build his computer, because military men often don't like classic engineer types(Revenge Of The Nerds type rivalry?), but the engineers Neumann brought in were not as obnoxious as nerds often are. Most nerds tend to out-smart the Big Shots they work for, and that gives them as smartass attitude. But they certainly didn't outsmart that Big Shot. Neumann was *much* more intelligent than the nerds that worked for him. I think they realized that, and respected him for it.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jack D
Thanks.
Testing is indeed an obvious issue with these current warheads and any iterations made on old designs, but when looking at future threats you have to consider a nation considering a first strike or the credible ability to make on breaking the currently informal Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by testing their designs, and from their viewpoint ideally the whole weapons system including the delivery part. That again emphasizes the value of a triad vs. for example putting all your eggs in one SLBM basket.
If something important fails, they stop, leaving open the question about whether their other systems might work and maintaining deterrence. If they or enough of them work, things could get very interesting especially with target nations like the US having too much friction and compromise at the very top by countries like the PRC to respond in a timely manner if at all.
I guffawed.Replies: @Busby
“ On New Year’s Day in 1930, von Neumann married Marietta Kövesi, who had studied economics at Budapest University.[41] Von Neumann and Marietta had one child, a daughter, Marina, born in 1935. As of 2021 Marina is a distinguished professor emerita of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan.[42] The couple divorced in 1937. In October 1938, von Neumann married Klara Dan, whom he had met during his last trips back to Budapest before the outbreak of World War II.[43]
In 1930, before marrying Marietta, von Neumann was baptized into the Catholic Church.[44] Von Neumann’s father, Max, had died in 1929. None of the family had converted to Christianity while Max was alive, but all did afterward.[45]”
Something didn’t smell right. Marriage outside the Church that ends in divorce is a nullity.
The story about the burial denial is apocryphal.
or
A priest was being more Catholic than the Pope.Replies: @Jack D
In My Brother's Image by Eugene Pogany.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/p-4AAOSwZ5hhQTby/s-l1600.jpg
Or something else?
I ask because, if you are referring to the former, I can let you in on their secret.
The American government tested these crackers and reported a “discernible but inconsequential decrease” in flavour after fifty-two months (a tad over four years) of storage.
The problem? These revolting crackers were near-inedible to begin with.
The entire idea behind these crackers was not that they were a tasty treat the whole family would love. Rather, they were rations that most people would not willingly eat unless there was nothing else available. Which is handy in a bomb shelter because there wasn't anything else available.
(Well, that's not strictly true: there was also "carbohydrate supplement," government code for hard candy [which, of course, lasts a long time, too].)
No kidding: those ghastly biscuits and hard candy were what people were expected to live on in the shelters if Uncle Sam was doing the cooking. Six small "meals" per day of 125 calories each was the official serving suggestion.
(Helpful Hint: anyone seeking to replicate the taste of the crackers may do so by biting into a sheet of cardboard, a substance the crackers were actually compared to during testing.)
So, if you actually ate these crackers, and ate them willingly, you did better than most of the people who tested them (and who could barely choke them down).Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Achmed E. Newman, @G. Poulin
I appreciate this lesson on America’s Cold War Preppers, #399. It was very long ago, and I remember them as being Saltines. Who knows, though? I might have liked those cardboard crackers. We didn’t get any hard candy.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/p-4AAOSwZ5hhQTby/s-l1600.jpg
Or something else?
I ask because, if you are referring to the former, I can let you in on their secret.
The American government tested these crackers and reported a “discernible but inconsequential decrease” in flavour after fifty-two months (a tad over four years) of storage.
The problem? These revolting crackers were near-inedible to begin with.
The entire idea behind these crackers was not that they were a tasty treat the whole family would love. Rather, they were rations that most people would not willingly eat unless there was nothing else available. Which is handy in a bomb shelter because there wasn't anything else available.
(Well, that's not strictly true: there was also "carbohydrate supplement," government code for hard candy [which, of course, lasts a long time, too].)
No kidding: those ghastly biscuits and hard candy were what people were expected to live on in the shelters if Uncle Sam was doing the cooking. Six small "meals" per day of 125 calories each was the official serving suggestion.
(Helpful Hint: anyone seeking to replicate the taste of the crackers may do so by biting into a sheet of cardboard, a substance the crackers were actually compared to during testing.)
So, if you actually ate these crackers, and ate them willingly, you did better than most of the people who tested them (and who could barely choke them down).Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Achmed E. Newman, @G. Poulin
I noticed that the crackers were made by Nabisco. Bet they made a mint off of that cold-war boondoggle. Why does survival food always taste so bad? If someone could come up with a survival cracker that didn’t taste like cardboard, he’d be a millionaire .
Mini stroke in that brain sector.
LordHughRDumbass, minor internet celebrity (r/xrmed, &c) died of pulmonary embolism on holiday in Greece last month. 60’s, ostensibly robust health, vaccinated enough to get through Greek entry posts. There is far more of this going around than we see reported. : (
Hugh was a fine fellow.
Konrad Zuse in Germany deserves mention if only because per Wikipedia he's credited with anticipating the concept in 1936 with "two patent applications that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data" so that's on the official record.
To reiterate and expand on a bit, the heritage of the idea and thus its official record is not completely clear because of the difficulties of reducing it to practice. The EDVAC and UNIVAC used mercury acoustic delay lines, long horizontal columns of that with an actuator at one end that created pulses and a receiver at the other that read them, with hardware in between to regenerate the memory as well as read and write values to it. Wikipedia says the general concept goes back to analog work in the 1920s, and Project Whirlwind was desperate enough to consider doing this with a (microwave?) radio links to and back from western Massachusetts.
The U.K. CRT based Williams Tube was the first DRAM, although I'm not sure how reliable it ever was (per IBM evidently enough for scientists but not businessmen). The 1932 magnetic drum was used a lot, the 1954 IBM 650 was the first mass produced computer and used that for its main memory. It wasn't until Project Whirlwind that 3D magnetic core memory was developed and reduced to practice as their version of Williams Tubes were not working out very well. That got us our first "fast," reliable and affordable enough RAM (no D for dynamic, didn't require regeneration) which despite many other efforts ruled until static and dynamic silicon chip RAM fairly slowly displaced it (the S in Cray 1S was for that model using super fast static RAM for its main memory, while IBM was using it through an internal development Intel was the first to sell it commercially, the 1103 with a whopping 1024 or a kilobit of memory).
My assumption is von Neumann wrote up an elegant description of the whole stored program computer concept which was in part based on Turing's theoretical work, but was at most formalizing it all. It wasn't by any means how he thought we should really be doing computing, I've read or been told that was based on automata although I'm not sure if it could have been easily programed by mere mortals.
Eckert and Mauchly's story is long and kinda sad, Wikipedia reminds me "new university policies that would have forced Eckert and Mauchly to sign over intellectual property rights for their inventions led to their resignation," the University of Pennsylvania went from #1 in the world to essentially nothing in the space of a year and that significantly delayed the EDVAC (that's another government project as most early computers were). On their own they almost ran out of money and their first big investor who then helped died in plane crash, Remington Rand eventually bought their company. Another thing to make Mauchly bitter was that included a ten year non-compete so he was sidelined for eight years after resigning in 1952 (that's a not so hidden secret of California's general high tech success, although it wouldn't have been for a principal like him).
Another factor would be I think IBM running a survey, don't know if they made it public but it would have been in the air, that everyone had heard of the UNIVAC and everyone thought it was made by IBM....Replies: @Jack D, @Jack D
A slightly later (post war) version of ENIAC ran a Monte Carlo simulation program that was written by von Neumann and his wife. Because the patch panel thing was so cumbersome, eventually they figured out that they could put programs into a form of ROM which was really a bunch of DIP switches that they had formerly used for storing constants. So “programming” was flipping a whole bunch of DIP switches with binary values, which was still pretty cumbersome but less cumbersome than moving patch cords. This is still not the same thing as putting programs into RAM but to this day computers boot up from a boot sequence that is stored in ROM.
The link below gives a lot of detail and shows why it is so hard to say who was “first”:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/programming-the-eniac-an-example-of-why-computer-history-is-hard
But whatever the true story was, it wasn’t anything like Anonymous’s twisted anti-Semitic version of it or even Eckert’s version which was distorted by his personal financial interest.
In 1930, before marrying Marietta, von Neumann was baptized into the Catholic Church.[44] Von Neumann's father, Max, had died in 1929. None of the family had converted to Christianity while Max was alive, but all did afterward.[45]”
Something didn’t smell right. Marriage outside the Church that ends in divorce is a nullity.Replies: @Hibernian, @ivan
So
The story about the burial denial is apocryphal.
or
A priest was being more Catholic than the Pope.
It's hard to define what "general intelligence" is. Experts don't agree on definitions, and some people can do extremely well at some areas and poor on another. Think Feynman, Putnam award winner in math and Nobelist in physics, who scored an IQ just barely above 120 because he went so poorly in the verbal part of the test. Or some times, a guy does really well on all verbal, numerical and mathematical subsets of an IQ test, but then he is a weirdo who, at the age of 40, has to live with his elderly parents because he cannot survive alone in the World due to his "mind blind" autism and absolute mental inflexibility which takes away from his ability to quickly react and adapt, which is one of the most fundamerntal traits for survival in any human society. A man with an IQ score of 150 who is actually a functioning retard.
But Neumann was different. He was really, really, really intelligent in *every* way that you can define intelligence with no obvious deficiency whatsoever. He was the closest example of extremely high "general" intelligence that I can think off. For instance, the Roman statemen, Julius Caesar, was, simultaneously, one of the greatest strategists in history, one of the greatest writers of Latin language of all times, and one of the foremost lawyers and legal experts of his time. not to mention a student of astronomy who also understood engineering. Or Goethe, who is one of the greatest poets and writers ever, as well as a chemist, a zoologist andab amateur mathematician as well. But Von Neumann was perhaps the most dramatica example of a brain with polymathic superpowers.
One of the stories that I read a long time ago at a science forum that illustrates the mind of Von Neumann happened when he was visiting a high school, and they invited him there to convince kids to pursuse a career in math or the hard sciences. They asked Neumman what was the difference betweeen physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Without batting an eye, Neumann replied:
"Physics is the study of how matter interacts with itself and with energy to form what we call reality, chemistry is the study of how a particular aspect of matter, atoms, bond together to form molecules, and biology is the study of how molecules based on Caebon interact with each other to form living organisms. As for mathematics, mathematics is a purely abstract discipline based on axioms, from which logical deductions are arrived to from a process of derivation."
So one of the boys that was listening to this replied that he actually wanted to be a lawyer. Again, without batting an eye, Neumann replied:
"Now that is completely different. Law is an entirely human pursuit, based on moral humanist philosophy and what rules of interaction humans should conduct with each other to fulfill their needs of survival, and personal and mutual fulfillment. It was created because humans are a social species, and in social species conflicts of interest are inevitable. Law was created as the moral code of conduct one must follow when conducting oneself with others as they are rules most agree with, distinguished from personal moral codes."
The point is, Neumann wasn't impressive just merely due to the extreme depth of his intellect, but also due to it's extreme broadness as well. On top of all that, he could speak fluently multiple languages, including Latin and Greek.
People who claim that Nermann's contributions to computer science are overrated are missing the point. He didn't make huge stides in computer science, but he created perhaps one of the two most important contributions ever to computer science, namely Von Neumann's architecture(the other being the digital circuit by Claude Shannon), which is the basis of computer programming architecture to this day.. Not bad for a guy that considered computer science a side pursuit.
Not only that, Neumman wrote what in my opinion is one of the most important books ever, "The Computer And The Brain", where he lays out the most likely path to true A.I capable of self-recursive programming and a Theory Of Mind. According to Neumann, the fundamental problem in creating a true A.I does not lie in programming algorithms, or in processing speed, or even in the digital language used that A.I researxhers think is the problem. According to Neumann, the fundamental problem lies in the architecture. Electro-chemical organic computers do not utilize zeroes and ones or any "language" known about how chemicals fires at synapsis to produce thoughts. We need to first understand the intrinsec pathways of neuron firing to understand the nature of consciousness. But this is way beyond our understanding of biology. The sci-fi T.V show, "Stargate Atlantis" whowed what the end-game of Neumann's theoy is, the so-called "Neumann machines", created by an extremely powerful and advanced civilization beyond human comprehension:
https://youtu.be/TGI8oNcYkXg
You are right that the generals loved Von Neumann. And that is because, besides being a gregarious fellow that loved parties and to receive guests. Neumann had a brusque and rispid quality to his character that men of arms often admire.
The claim that Neumman was genrally uninsterested in people is not true. Neumann was way, way above average in people-reading skills and above average in social dynamism. in fact, many joked that, if it weren't for the fact that he became the World's greatest mathematician, he would have been a diplomat! Neumman loved to receive guests and enterain them. He was a charming man and a gracious host. He also had an Old World charm that Americans actually liked. What Neumman really hated was personal drama, which women love. He was often cold to the women in his life about their problems. But this is not necessarily a sign of an autistic trait. For instance, French general, Napoleon, would lock himself in his office when his wife started to rant and nag him. Neumman was often cold to women close to him because their women problems bored him to tears, but that's that.
He did create problems by bringing many engineer types to help build his computer, because military men often don't like classic engineer types(Revenge Of The Nerds type rivalry?), but the engineers Neumann brought in were not as obnoxious as nerds often are. Most nerds tend to out-smart the Big Shots they work for, and that gives them as smartass attitude. But they certainly didn't outsmart that Big Shot. Neumann was *much* more intelligent than the nerds that worked for him. I think they realized that, and respected him for it.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jack D
As is alluded to elsewhere on this thread, there is some controversy whether he “created” this or stole it. More charitably, he heard some stuff described to him by the creators of ENIAC and he wrote it down in a clearer and more formal way than they could have from their perspective in the trenches and his name became attached to it because he was the more famous guy. Also by Goldstine rushing out and publishing von Neumann’s (unfinished) report he not only spoiled the ENIAC guys patent rights (maybe on purpose, maybe not) but also ensured that von Neumann’s name and not theirs would be attached to what they thought of as THEIR invention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC
In 1930, before marrying Marietta, von Neumann was baptized into the Catholic Church.[44] Von Neumann's father, Max, had died in 1929. None of the family had converted to Christianity while Max was alive, but all did afterward.[45]”
Something didn’t smell right. Marriage outside the Church that ends in divorce is a nullity.Replies: @Hibernian, @ivan
Hungarian Jews were quite partial towards Catholicism. They were largely free of the antipathy towards the Catholic Church that is sometimes seen in Jews from other parts of Europe. Then the Nazis came. One of the strangest and most affecting books that one can read about their experience is
In My Brother’s Image by Eugene Pogany.
The story about the burial denial is apocryphal.
or
A priest was being more Catholic than the Pope.Replies: @Jack D
The attitudes toward treatment of a convert may have hardened between the somewhat looser attitude prevalent in pre-Hitler Budapest and the “racial” view of Judaism that became more prevalent (not just in Germany but even in the US) after the rise of Hitler.
In 1920s Budapest it was common and almost expected that an upwardly mobile Jewish family (especially one that wanted to intermarry with a socially acceptable Catholic family) would at some point shed their Judaism and convert, just as you would no longer go around wearing a beard and sidelocks. Part of being a modern European was being a Christian. (Just as an upwardly mobile Ukrainian in Russia would stop speaking Ukrainian and start speaking Russian). Often this conversion was more or less nominal – the people who were converted had not been religious Jews beforehand and afterward were not religious Catholics either. Once you were converted (and if you were a person of high accomplishment) you could be well accepted in Hungarian society regardless of your racial background. There were probably always some anti-Semites around but most of the people who counted would accept you into their midst (and let you marry their daughters) once you were formally converted. The Church was always glad to have new members, especially prominent and wealthy people who might donate.
But the American priest might have had a harder time accepting that someone who was racially Jewish (and seemed to be loosey-goosey on the question of divorce and in no position to make future donations) really belonged in a Catholic cemetery.
For the Make of this What You Will Department, re. your review of ‘The Man From the Future’:
Speaking of Vladimir Nabokov: In a letter written to accompany the final MS of ‘Lolita’, the likewise Dracula-accented White-Russian-nobility exile refers to his new novel as a “time bomb”.
Hmmmm.
___________
PS. Memo — From: WKK
To: Sting
It’s pronounced “nah-BEAU-kov’, damn it!
F. Scott Fitzgerald was also denied Christian burial by a local priest. Many years later another priest made a big show of reburying him, or purporting to, on sacred ground. Of course his background was a lot different than von Neumann’s; however they shared the characteristic that they both had a Princeton connection.
Th reburial was real, and was on petition from his daughter, according to Wikipedia.
In Judaism, giving someone a decent burial is considered to be the ultimate charitable deed because there is no possibility that you are doing this in order to receive a favor in return from the person you are burying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald
Th reburial was real, and was on petition from his daughter, according to Wikipedia.
Lionizing scientists is always an affectation
It’s really something how people admire tax leeches whose celebrity boils down to helping the government develop weapons of awesome destructive power. Yes, we know that they were some of the smartest guys who ever lived. But, honestly. I have more respect for some poor, private sector factory floor worker who maybe couldn’t even do long division.
Maybe the “big show” was when he was denied burial the first time. This does not seem to me to be a very “Christian” thing to do, regardless of whether he was “practicing” or not. It seems to me you should get the benefit of the doubt in such a situation – WWJD?
In Judaism, giving someone a decent burial is considered to be the ultimate charitable deed because there is no possibility that you are doing this in order to receive a favor in return from the person you are burying.
Let’s hope we never find out.
If something important fails, they stop, leaving open the question about whether their other systems might work and maintaining deterrence. If they or enough of them work, things could get very interesting especially with target nations like the US having too much friction and compromise at the very top by countries like the PRC to respond in a timely manner if at all.Replies: @Diversity Heretic
If, when delivered, a nuclear weapon delivers a “pop” when the commanders expected a “ka-boom,” does it really matter how well the rest of the delivery system worked?
Huh? (I must be missing some deep sarc here.)
I have a very strong suspicion that this comment of yours was made out of anti-semitic spite. I mean, judging by your track record of posts.
That Von Neumann created the architecture is not even debatable. It has been called that since the 1950’s, no one has tried to claim it, and luminarties of computer science on the level of Marvin Minsky refered to it by that term. Oh, I guess that has no value because Minsky was Jewish, too, right?
Your line of argument reminds me of something that I read in a science forum I frequent years ago. There was a guy trying to argue that Einstein was not really a genius, that he stole most of his ideas. That his Theory of Special Relativity was plagiarized from Hendrik Lorentz’s Principle of Relatively, which was postulated and proven previosuly by Poincaré. This of course reveals a profound ignorance about physics, as Einstein’s Special Relatively not only elaborates on that idea far beyond what Lorentz conceived, but Einstein’s insight into the relation between matter, space and time was radically innovative, and completey his. Then, when I checked the guy’s profile, he had a link that went straight to the white nationalist website, “Stormfront”. The guy’s motivations for that comment were clearly based on visceral hatred due to Einstein being Jewish.
Also, the whole point is moot anyway. Science is a *collaborative* effort, and all scientist elaborates on the works of scientists that came before them. Like Newton said “If I could look farther, it is because I stood at the shoulder of giants”. Speaking of Newton, if you are going to deny Einstein credit for Special Relatively, or Von Neumann for his architecture, then you will also have to deny Newton’s work on orbits as it would have not been possible without Galilleo’s work, or his development of integral calculus, as it is clear that Leibniz was also working on it and there was some interexchange between the two. But I guess you wouldn’t have a problem with that since Leibniz was a gentile. Newton’s integral calculus would also not have been possible without Arabs creating algebra centuries before, too. Are you going to deny credit for Algebra to Arabs since like Jews they are Semites, or is your anti-Semitism restricted to Jews?
Also, I don’t see what is the problem here with believing that Neumann was as inhumanly smart as everything indicated that he was. I mean, he was an European Jew, and that group at less than 3% of the population make up roughly 50% of Ivy League professors. And Neumann was a one-in-a-billion Jew for intellect, so his achievements are compatible with his intellect. I guess the fact that Neumann was exchanging jokes with his dad in both Latin and Greek when he was 6 years old means nothing to you. Neumman was actually mastering calculus at the age of 8 and 9, and he could solve didderential equations mentally. He could have earned his math PhD in his teen years, honestly, if that were legal/allowed by custom and tradition.
You trying to deny his extremely prodigious feats of mental calculation is even more pathetic. There is ample evidence of it, not only by the likes of Wiener, Teller, Einstein and Fermi. He actually did it publicly quite often. What you are doing is so transparent, and so ignobile. You are pitiful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC
Many people (Eckert and Mauchly especially) felt that von Neumann and Goldstine did not give proper credit to Eckert and Mauchly. I don't doubt that von Neumann was a world historical genius but I also don't doubt that he visited the Moore School and heard many of the concepts that he formalized in his EDVAC report from others. Even world historical geniuses cannot invent that which as been invented already.
Eckert and Mauchly felt that this was outright thievery, especially on Goldstine's part. I have a more charitable view at least of von Neumann's role. He visited Moore and then wrote up what he heard, further distilled thru his great mind and wasn't trying to steal anything. Goldstine got ahold of his notes and published them and the architecture he described became associated with the name on the report.
AFAIK this had nothing to do with anyone's religion.Replies: @Zero Philosopher
Allegations that Einstein appropriated works of others w/o giving credit for it are very serious but not w/o merit. Einstein had a history of plagiarizing throughout his life: soft plagiarizing of Gibbs papers on thermodynamics before 1905, plagiarizing through ingratiation of Bose statistics in 1924 and hard plagiarizing of Klein (Kaluza - Klein) 1927 paper. In the last case he was caught and called on it. As far as his 1905 paper on Special Relativity the evidence is circumstantial only but somewhat compelling.
It is very easy to accuse critics of Einstein of anti-Semitism because it works. But anti-Semitism was never an obstacle for Einstein. Since the Dreyfus affair in Europe anti-Semitic insinuations and innuendos had actually insulating and protective value. So when few German physicists came up with the dubious dichotomy of Jewish and Arian science it only benefited Einstein as nobody wanted to be associated with those anti-Semites and thus Einstein was not scrutinized..
As far as Newton he also was subjected to inordinate lionizations and idolization in the anglophone world. But the truth about him is somewhat more prosaic though it does not take anything from his greatness but just cuts him down to the normal human size.
The reality is that science is a collaborative process where new developments and even the greatest breakthroughs are built on the past. Inordinate idolization is a rather simplistic reductionism that cater to infantile psychological needs. Freud probably would say it has something to do with father issue or penis issue. Sailer is a good example of a man-child in this respect. That idolizations are a part of political projects is another issue whether it is the genius of British Empire or the genius of Jewish people or Serbian people if you take Tesla.Replies: @Pincher Martin, @Zero Philosopher
I didn’t make this up. See again the Wikipedia page, which I didn’t write.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC
Many people (Eckert and Mauchly especially) felt that von Neumann and Goldstine did not give proper credit to Eckert and Mauchly. I don’t doubt that von Neumann was a world historical genius but I also don’t doubt that he visited the Moore School and heard many of the concepts that he formalized in his EDVAC report from others. Even world historical geniuses cannot invent that which as been invented already.
Eckert and Mauchly felt that this was outright thievery, especially on Goldstine’s part. I have a more charitable view at least of von Neumann’s role. He visited Moore and then wrote up what he heard, further distilled thru his great mind and wasn’t trying to steal anything. Goldstine got ahold of his notes and published them and the architecture he described became associated with the name on the report.
AFAIK this had nothing to do with anyone’s religion.
Whatever Jews or Nazis want to believe there is an objective truth about Neumann’s or Einstein’s accomplishments. While I can’t speak about Neumann contributions to the formation of computer architecture I did an extensive study on Einstein’s contributions to the Special and General theories of relativity. My conclusion is that while Einstein should get 50% credit for the General Theory of Relativity (GTR) his credit for the Special Theory of Relativity (STR) should be only 25% while the remaining 75% should go to Lorentz and Poincare. The remaining 50% credit for GTR should go to Marcel Grossman and David Hilbert.
Allegations that Einstein appropriated works of others w/o giving credit for it are very serious but not w/o merit. Einstein had a history of plagiarizing throughout his life: soft plagiarizing of Gibbs papers on thermodynamics before 1905, plagiarizing through ingratiation of Bose statistics in 1924 and hard plagiarizing of Klein (Kaluza – Klein) 1927 paper. In the last case he was caught and called on it. As far as his 1905 paper on Special Relativity the evidence is circumstantial only but somewhat compelling.
It is very easy to accuse critics of Einstein of anti-Semitism because it works. But anti-Semitism was never an obstacle for Einstein. Since the Dreyfus affair in Europe anti-Semitic insinuations and innuendos had actually insulating and protective value. So when few German physicists came up with the dubious dichotomy of Jewish and Arian science it only benefited Einstein as nobody wanted to be associated with those anti-Semites and thus Einstein was not scrutinized..
As far as Newton he also was subjected to inordinate lionizations and idolization in the anglophone world. But the truth about him is somewhat more prosaic though it does not take anything from his greatness but just cuts him down to the normal human size.
The reality is that science is a collaborative process where new developments and even the greatest breakthroughs are built on the past. Inordinate idolization is a rather simplistic reductionism that cater to infantile psychological needs. Freud probably would say it has something to do with father issue or penis issue. Sailer is a good example of a man-child in this respect. That idolizations are a part of political projects is another issue whether it is the genius of British Empire or the genius of Jewish people or Serbian people if you take Tesla.
Why are you repeating to me what I said?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC
Many people (Eckert and Mauchly especially) felt that von Neumann and Goldstine did not give proper credit to Eckert and Mauchly. I don't doubt that von Neumann was a world historical genius but I also don't doubt that he visited the Moore School and heard many of the concepts that he formalized in his EDVAC report from others. Even world historical geniuses cannot invent that which as been invented already.
Eckert and Mauchly felt that this was outright thievery, especially on Goldstine's part. I have a more charitable view at least of von Neumann's role. He visited Moore and then wrote up what he heard, further distilled thru his great mind and wasn't trying to steal anything. Goldstine got ahold of his notes and published them and the architecture he described became associated with the name on the report.
AFAIK this had nothing to do with anyone's religion.Replies: @Zero Philosopher
Trash evidence. In fact, not even evidence. You clearly don’t understand the concept that concepts can be inspired from others.
I said thanks because I think your point makes total sense, except for human factors. If we launched a (near) all-out attack on Russia from our entirely submarine-based nuclear force, do you think the Russian President/Prime Minister/Premier/Grand Gazoom would say, “well, they are destroying Mother Russia. Moskva will be a glowing crater. I will be reduced to atoms in a mushroom cloud. My children will be digging potatoes out of the cold, frozen earth with their fingernails, but America did not launch land-based missiles, so we have no reason to launch a full counterattack”? Nope, that’s the “strategic” part of “strategic missiles.” Destroying the enemy’s cities so his war-making capability is reduced. Though in our case, destroying the cities would make us a healthier, more American country. If the Russians really wanted to destroy our economy, they’d have to nuke China!
This is how Puritans talked. Newton’s ego was deservedly huge. Ask Leibniz.
Thanks for your comment! Eliminating ICBHs reduces expenses. And I wonder how popular they really are with the “wild, blue yonder” USAF. When I visited Warren AFB near Cheyenne, Wyoming in the early 1980s, we were told that most missile crews spent their time working on master’s degrees. Otherwise, the job is tedious almost beyond belief.
No, it is really true that Lorentz and Poincare had all of Special Relativity before Einstein, and more. They had published all the formulas, and theory. You can find the facts on Wikipedia.
Allegations that Einstein appropriated works of others w/o giving credit for it are very serious but not w/o merit. Einstein had a history of plagiarizing throughout his life: soft plagiarizing of Gibbs papers on thermodynamics before 1905, plagiarizing through ingratiation of Bose statistics in 1924 and hard plagiarizing of Klein (Kaluza - Klein) 1927 paper. In the last case he was caught and called on it. As far as his 1905 paper on Special Relativity the evidence is circumstantial only but somewhat compelling.
It is very easy to accuse critics of Einstein of anti-Semitism because it works. But anti-Semitism was never an obstacle for Einstein. Since the Dreyfus affair in Europe anti-Semitic insinuations and innuendos had actually insulating and protective value. So when few German physicists came up with the dubious dichotomy of Jewish and Arian science it only benefited Einstein as nobody wanted to be associated with those anti-Semites and thus Einstein was not scrutinized..
As far as Newton he also was subjected to inordinate lionizations and idolization in the anglophone world. But the truth about him is somewhat more prosaic though it does not take anything from his greatness but just cuts him down to the normal human size.
The reality is that science is a collaborative process where new developments and even the greatest breakthroughs are built on the past. Inordinate idolization is a rather simplistic reductionism that cater to infantile psychological needs. Freud probably would say it has something to do with father issue or penis issue. Sailer is a good example of a man-child in this respect. That idolizations are a part of political projects is another issue whether it is the genius of British Empire or the genius of Jewish people or Serbian people if you take Tesla.Replies: @Pincher Martin, @Zero Philosopher
I was set to agree with you until I was halfway through your last paragraph, where you cite Freud’s silly musings as evidence and then take an unnecessary swipe at Sailer.
Yes, but not just on the past. Great scientists work collaboratively with their contemporaries, whether those contemporaries are friends or rivals. They use their coevals’ work and insights to build their own. For example, Newton needed Hooke’s (and Halley’s) insights on gravity, but Newton’s mathematical work was far more important for advancing celestial mechanics than were Hooke’s insights. Hooke was a great scientist, but Newton’s Principia was a massive advance over anything Hooke had ever contemplated doing in the field. Still, Newton besmirching Hooke’s reputation when the diminutive man tried to take some credit and then, later, trying to erase Hooke from the history altogether was a mean and unnecessary act.
All knowledge is a potential political project. Rather than moan about it, just accept it. As long as the political arguments remain within in the bounds of truth, who cares? Even great scientists are inclined to use their knowledge as part of their political projects.
No, they didn’t. You clearly don’t understand that Lorentz’s Principle of Relatively and Einstein’s theory of Special Relatively are two very distinct things. I suggest you actually go read entry course level university texts on the subject, because you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. Wikipedia is hardly a specialized source of knowledge. More like a general intellectual guide for middle-brow laymen.
If you think Einstein did something original, why can't anyone explain what it was?Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard, @Gc
Allegations that Einstein appropriated works of others w/o giving credit for it are very serious but not w/o merit. Einstein had a history of plagiarizing throughout his life: soft plagiarizing of Gibbs papers on thermodynamics before 1905, plagiarizing through ingratiation of Bose statistics in 1924 and hard plagiarizing of Klein (Kaluza - Klein) 1927 paper. In the last case he was caught and called on it. As far as his 1905 paper on Special Relativity the evidence is circumstantial only but somewhat compelling.
It is very easy to accuse critics of Einstein of anti-Semitism because it works. But anti-Semitism was never an obstacle for Einstein. Since the Dreyfus affair in Europe anti-Semitic insinuations and innuendos had actually insulating and protective value. So when few German physicists came up with the dubious dichotomy of Jewish and Arian science it only benefited Einstein as nobody wanted to be associated with those anti-Semites and thus Einstein was not scrutinized..
As far as Newton he also was subjected to inordinate lionizations and idolization in the anglophone world. But the truth about him is somewhat more prosaic though it does not take anything from his greatness but just cuts him down to the normal human size.
The reality is that science is a collaborative process where new developments and even the greatest breakthroughs are built on the past. Inordinate idolization is a rather simplistic reductionism that cater to infantile psychological needs. Freud probably would say it has something to do with father issue or penis issue. Sailer is a good example of a man-child in this respect. That idolizations are a part of political projects is another issue whether it is the genius of British Empire or the genius of Jewish people or Serbian people if you take Tesla.Replies: @Pincher Martin, @Zero Philosopher
“The reality is that science is a collaborative process where new developments and even the greatest breakthroughs are built on the past.”
Why are you repeating to me what I said?
Yes, that is what Newton meant by the “shoulders of giants” quote. It was a put-down of Hooke. Newton was not generously giving credit, but denying credit to a short man.
I have read them. Lorentz discovered the Lorentz transformations, and used them to prove that Maxwell’s equations hold in different inertial frames. Poincare formulated relativity as a spacetime theory, and showed that Maxwell’s equations were covariant under Lorentz transformations. Einstein postulated that Maxwell’s equations hold in different inertial frames, following Lorentz without citing him, and showed that to be consistent with Lorentz transformations. Einstein had nothing new over Lorentz, and did not even understand what Poincare did.
If you think Einstein did something original, why can’t anyone explain what it was?
If you think Einstein did something original, why can't anyone explain what it was?Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard, @Gc
Velocity of light is always c regardless of relative motion? That wasn’t Einstein’s hypothesis? My physics textbooks were erroneous?
One may speculate that the chief reason why Einstein postulated that c is invariant was that he could then derive Lorentz transforms from it w/o mentioning Lorentz and thus pretending he never heard of him or his transforms. BTW, Lorentz transforms are Special Theory of Relativity.
After WWI when his 1905 paper was published in English a footnote was added that the transforms he derived were earlier derived by Lorentz suggesting that he did not have a prior knowledge of Lorentz work. His 1905 paper had no references. His discovery was godlike ab nihilo.
Also Einstein 1st postulatewas formulated by Poincare several years earlier. Here is his version from 1904:The only thing novel in Einstein 1905 paper was the derivation of formula for stellar aberration using Lorentz transforms.
There is a good reason why Einstein was not awarded the Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity. Physicists knew that Lorentz and Poincare had priority over Einstein so Einstein alone could not be nominated but Einstein refused to acknowledge Lorentz and Poincare and refused to share the prize with anybody.Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard
That c is invariant was Einstein 2nd postulate. But invariance of c is implied by Lorentz transforms thus Lorentz and Poincare did not have to postulat anything about c.
One may speculate that the chief reason why Einstein postulated that c is invariant was that he could then derive Lorentz transforms from it w/o mentioning Lorentz and thus pretending he never heard of him or his transforms. BTW, Lorentz transforms are Special Theory of Relativity.
After WWI when his 1905 paper was published in English a footnote was added that the transforms he derived were earlier derived by Lorentz suggesting that he did not have a prior knowledge of Lorentz work. His 1905 paper had no references. His discovery was godlike ab nihilo.
Also Einstein 1st postulate
was formulated by Poincare several years earlier. Here is his version from 1904:
The only thing novel in Einstein 1905 paper was the derivation of formula for stellar aberration using Lorentz transforms.
There is a good reason why Einstein was not awarded the Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity. Physicists knew that Lorentz and Poincare had priority over Einstein so Einstein alone could not be nominated but Einstein refused to acknowledge Lorentz and Poincare and refused to share the prize with anybody.
This smacks of conspiracy.Replies: @Roger, @utu
One may speculate that the chief reason why Einstein postulated that c is invariant was that he could then derive Lorentz transforms from it w/o mentioning Lorentz and thus pretending he never heard of him or his transforms. BTW, Lorentz transforms are Special Theory of Relativity.
After WWI when his 1905 paper was published in English a footnote was added that the transforms he derived were earlier derived by Lorentz suggesting that he did not have a prior knowledge of Lorentz work. His 1905 paper had no references. His discovery was godlike ab nihilo.
Also Einstein 1st postulatewas formulated by Poincare several years earlier. Here is his version from 1904:The only thing novel in Einstein 1905 paper was the derivation of formula for stellar aberration using Lorentz transforms.
There is a good reason why Einstein was not awarded the Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity. Physicists knew that Lorentz and Poincare had priority over Einstein so Einstein alone could not be nominated but Einstein refused to acknowledge Lorentz and Poincare and refused to share the prize with anybody.Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard
I have to wonder why Bohr and Heisenberg and everybody else deferred to him. In the Savoy Congress group photo with all the big shots he is in the middle of the first row. Did they not all acknowledge him as the biggest shot? As at least as big a shot as anybody?
This smacks of conspiracy.
"everybody else deferred to him". - I would not be so certain of that.
Scientists of that era were polite, modest and private. Confronting publicly somebody about alleged plagiarism was unthinkable besides there was no solid proof so you could give Einstein the benefit of the doubt and forget about it. They did not understand the role and status of celebrity. And for some reason Einstein became a first scientist who achieved celebrity status after WWI. So if you wonder about 'conspiracy' try to figure out what confluence of forces turned Einstein into a celebrity, why newspapers and tabloids where writing about him and his discovery?
Wilhelm Wien in 1911 nominated Lorentz and Einstein for the Nobel Prize for Relativity. Poincare died year later at the age of 58. IMO, w/o Poincare Nobel Prize for Relativity could not be awarded.
When in the end Einstein received the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect in its justification Nobel Committee added a caveat stating that the award was presented “without taking into account the value that will be accorded your relativity and gravitation theories after these are confirmed in the future”. Nevertheless Einstein in his acceptance lecture talked only about Relativity w/o mentioning the photoelectric effect once. BTW,In 1921 Einstein was still lobbying for his Relativity theory and wrote a letter to Robert Millikan who just moved to Caltech for Chicago concerning experiments of Dayton Miller conducted at at Mt. Wilson (part of Caltech) that were getting positive effect in Michelson experiment:The questions sabot Dayton Miller experiments were not resolved until after his death when Shankland reworked Miller’s data and concluded that the shift measured by Miller could be ignored. In 1954 Einstein wrote to Shankland:
Einstein later admitted that he got that postulate from Lorentz.
He also refused to acknowledge Poincare and claimed he never read his papers and only in the very end of his life after getting copies of Poincare papers from his biographer he admitted that indeed Poincare "got it". However there is Einstein correspondence from 1919 (iirc) that implies that he must have been familiar with Poincare work on Relativity then.
This smacks of conspiracy.Replies: @Roger, @utu
Einstein did have the biggest public reputation. By far. I don’t think that they did defer to him on matters of physics, as they had big disagreements about quantum mechanics.
If you think Einstein did something original, why can't anyone explain what it was?Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard, @Gc
The pop-level physics explain this that Einstein got rid of ether as an unnecessary asumption according to the principles of Machian positivism.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Humboldt
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_von_RibbentropReplies: @Fox
Thank you for the reply and I apologize for the belated reply; I didn’t become aware of your post. I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying, as all the other examples you cite (von Ribbentrop, von Bismarck, von Humboldt) use the lower-case ‘von’, never the upper case. That is the rule for writing such names in German, and I think it was begun by English speakers in order to make it clear in English writings that the ‘von’ belongs to the name, as is the wont in English for writing names.
This smacks of conspiracy.Replies: @Roger, @utu
“Savoy Congress group photo” – Photographs do not capture what people talk in private.
“everybody else deferred to him”. – I would not be so certain of that.
Scientists of that era were polite, modest and private. Confronting publicly somebody about alleged plagiarism was unthinkable besides there was no solid proof so you could give Einstein the benefit of the doubt and forget about it. They did not understand the role and status of celebrity. And for some reason Einstein became a first scientist who achieved celebrity status after WWI. So if you wonder about ‘conspiracy’ try to figure out what confluence of forces turned Einstein into a celebrity, why newspapers and tabloids where writing about him and his discovery?
Wilhelm Wien in 1911 nominated Lorentz and Einstein for the Nobel Prize for Relativity. Poincare died year later at the age of 58. IMO, w/o Poincare Nobel Prize for Relativity could not be awarded.
When in the end Einstein received the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect in its justification Nobel Committee added a caveat stating that the award was presented “without taking into account the value that will be accorded your relativity and gravitation theories after these are confirmed in the future”. Nevertheless Einstein in his acceptance lecture talked only about Relativity w/o mentioning the photoelectric effect once. BTW,
In 1921 Einstein was still lobbying for his Relativity theory and wrote a letter to Robert Millikan who just moved to Caltech for Chicago concerning experiments of Dayton Miller conducted at at Mt. Wilson (part of Caltech) that were getting positive effect in Michelson experiment:
The questions sabot Dayton Miller experiments were not resolved until after his death when Shankland reworked Miller’s data and concluded that the shift measured by Miller could be ignored. In 1954 Einstein wrote to Shankland:
“Einstein later admitted that he got that postulate from Lorentz.” – Do you have a source? Because I am not aware of it. In English version of his 1905 paper after WWI he specifically states that he was not familiar with Lorentz work. As I wrote before Enistein postulated that c is invariant to circumvent Lorentz by deriving Lorentz transforms independently.
He also refused to acknowledge Poincare and claimed he never read his papers and only in the very end of his life after getting copies of Poincare papers from his biographer he admitted that indeed Poincare “got it”. However there is Einstein correspondence from 1919 (iirc) that implies that he must have been familiar with Poincare work on Relativity then.
Einstein only claimed to have not seen Lorentz’s 1904 relativity papers. He was obviously aware of Lorentz’s earlier papers. After all, Lorentz got the 1902 Nobel Prize for related work.
Yes, Einstein refused to acknowledge Poincare. Einstein spent his whole life trying to conceal his sources. It is pretty obvious that Einstein got a lot from Poincare, such as synchronization, no aether, Lorentz transformations being a group, 4-dimensional spacetime, non-Euclidean metric on spacetime, relativistic gravity, etc.
Yes, some say that Einstein got rid of the ether. Actually what he said about the ether was essentially the same as what Lorentz said 10 years earlier.