Hasty responses to Turing's Cathedral

A few pre-book-club reactions to Turing's Cathedral:

The book reviews the origins of the first computer built at the IAS (Institute for Advanced Study) at Princeton, and the personalities who created it.  In setting the stage for the personalities, it dives back as far as the revolutionary war, but mostly surveys fin-de-siècle Eastern Europe, the period leading up to WWII, and the and the drive for something that could do the calculations necessary for an atomic bomb.

Within this context, I found two strong themes: first, the physical engineering problems involved in creating the computer, and the abilities that distinguished it from previous computers/calculator. (I am hoping someone has an explanation if the significance of "numbers that do things as well as numbers that mean things"), and second the problems the first computers were intended to solve, and the future applications their designers envisioned.  The book concludes by looking at the way our digital universe has evolved and continues to evolve.

I was most out of my depth in the engineering area.  I don't know what distinguished the MANIAC, understand the mechanics of vacuum tubes, the difficulties of memory allocation in machine language, or have any idea how this relates to modern processors.  I did have two takeaways, though.  I'm much more sympathetic than I had been to the impressive leap between envisioning a theoretical device and the practical reality if bringing that device into existence. (Probably related to my experiments in bread making and beer brewing, which are as close as I've come to any engineering problem.)

Second, the notion of a central "clock" which is really more of a counter/incrementer, as essential to computers.  Instructions are performed at each step of this clock, which means states are allowed to change whenever the controller advances, which means finite spaces can be reused, which is really powerful.  Also means there's a giant gap between the digital, chunky, universe and the continual analog universe.

As far as the problems solved, the book mentions 5, on different timescales: atomic bomb equations, shock waves, meteorology, evolutionary biology, and stellar evolution.

It's an interesting set of problems.  The only real comment I have is how much harder meteorology seems to be than was expected.  I think (getting back to messy engineering), you need the ability to do really complicated messy calculations to scare up something like chaos theory.

I'm ... Skeptical of the attempts to analogize biological and technological evolution and suggest machines are impacting our evolution in the way that biological evolution works.  I think that the distinction between digital and analog is really big. I also think that no technological ecosystem is anywhere near as complex as our own, and I think these are huge qualitative differences between evolutionary environments.  I also think these are justifications for my knee-jerk reaction, so we'll see what I think as things settle.  The flip side is that computers are still in their infancy, are inserting themselves into our world in unimaginable ways, and are clearly highly powerful, addictive, and impact full devices.  Maybe skynet is close? Maybe whatever human-machine evolution develops will be highly unlike skynet.

I listened to this as an audiobook, which was awesome unless the book itself has pictures, because visualizing many situations would have helped.  I'm also really glad this was a book club book, because I need help understanding and processing it.

To the extent that I want to get something out of book club, it's:

I'm glad we're discussing this

Can someone clarify what pre-MANIAC calculating devices were like, and why "numbers that do things and numbers that mean things" is so important

Anything else is gravy.

May edit for clarity, links, and grammar after book club, potentially with a PS unless that turns into a new post.

Altered readings of Persuasion, and a surprising connection

Persuasion was my first read of 2014, mostly because it was the subject of my monthly book club. This marked my third book club attendance, and the first where I found my perceptions of the book very much changed.

I went into the meeting with a relatively simplistic view: Anne the clear-eyed heroine stands in for the voice of Austen who is presenting a coherent social critique of this silly class system.  The characters are set pieces and the fall in Lyme is clearly contrived, and all of this is because Austen just wants to get everyone together and contrast the productive navy with the wastrels that are the gentry.  It's pretty easy to pluck out examples that support this narrative, so I was a bit surprised that one of the first questions at book club was exactly about this: does there seem to be a coherent social critique here, or specific humorous episodes?

The more I think about this, and about the critiques that came up at book club, the more suspicious I am of my first reading that there's a single overarching critique in Persuasion. On further discussion, I found myself more drawn to a reading that sees various episodes tracking different themes including -

• The value of the Navy (and the Navy's ability to reveal true character)
• The superficial and ridiculous values of the gentry
• The disconnect between worldly fortunes and internal happiness
• The relative importance of happiness, financial security, and status in marriage
• The characteristics of an ideal wife

Smarter people than I have spent a lot more time thinking about and researching Persuasion.  I'm sure that there are other themes to be picked out of the text, and perhaps other overarching narratives I've missed.  I'd recommend reading Persuasion, and also discussing it or reading critiques.

What interested me about my initial reading of Persuasion compared to my reading after the discussion is that my reading essentially changed from an overarching single narrative with occasional tangents to a series of interrelated set pieces and characters/caricatures combining entertainment, insightful social commentary, and somewhat contrived plot elements.  So basically Americanah.  As mentioned in my first post on Americanah, I just don't know how to read this.  Individual scenes and chapters may stand or fall on their own (one of the members of book club confessed that he had a hard time with the opening of Persuasion, while I found the opening some of the most charming & delightful writing I've encountered recently), but ideally they're probably more than the sum of their parts.  (The contrast in Americanah between whites who view Africa as an interchangeable country and the the African immigrants who can both acknowledge the different countries and also find a common bond in their status on the margins of society springs to mind).  

When preparing for book club, I asked my wife what she thought was worth talking about in Persuasion.  One of her answers was "Who is a modern writer comparable to Austen?"  I hadn't expected to be answering "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie", but maybe?  (Or maybe I still don't understand the conventions of novels.  That's always the thought that springs to my mind as I stretch my reading muscles.)

There's no conclusion here.  If you've got resources to point me towards conventions of the modern literary novel, I'd certainly love to see them.  Similarly, if you've got thoughts about how to read long fiction using models other than episodic vs. overarching narrative structures, I'd love to hear those as well.