Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Contemplate this post . Here is a key passage from Shannon's original paper: The method of attack on these problems may be described briefly as follows: any circuit is represented by a set of equations, the terms of the equations corresponding to the various relays and switches in the circuit. A calculus is developed for manipulating these equations by simple mathematical processes, most of which are similar to ordinary algebraic algorisms. This calculus is shown to be exactly analogous to the calculus of propositions used in the symbolic study of logic. What I want to highlight here is that Shannon was talking about existing circuitry. Was this existing circuitry really doing symbolic logic all along? Or did Shannon just realize that we could interpret that circuitry as performing logical operations? And there is no reason the "circuits" in question need be electrical: they can be plumbing , and what flows through them can be water. (Interesting...

Someone on my Facebook feed, who seems to be a fairly clever person (but not very wise), posted an essay in which she wrote, "Philosophy has now been totally subsumed by computer science." We come upon this sort of foolishness regularly: before computer science, philosophy was going to be totally subsumed by the physical sciences. It may be instructive to look at a couple of the problems with a view like this. First of all, her statement itself is quite obviously not a finding of computer science! Computer science doesn't even contain a category called "philosophy," and so also can't contain any statements about philosophy. Computer science studies algorithms, and there is no possibility that the study of algorithms, however wonderful or brilliant those algorithms are, can reveal anything about subject A being subsumed by subject B, since computer science knows nothing of "subjects" or what it might mean for one to "subsume" anothe...

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." -- Attributed to Edsger Dijstrka "[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use." -- Hal Abelson