This week I was invited to participate as an expert in a Delphi study of The Future Internet, being undertaken by an EC-funded research project. One of the aims of the project is to identify multiple plausible future scenarios for the socio-economic role(s) of the Internet and related technologies, after which the project aim to reach a consensus on a small number of these scenarios. Although the documents I saw were unclear as to exactly which population this consensus was to be reached among, I presume it was intended to be a consensus of the participants in the Delphi Study.
I have a profound philosophical disagreement with this objective, and indeed with most of the EC’s many efforts in standardization. Tim Berners-Lee invented Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), for example, in order to enable physicists to publish their research documents to one another in a manner which enabled author-control of document appearance. Like most new technologies. HTTP was not invented for the many other uses to which it has since been put; indeed, many of these other applications have required hacks or fudges to HTTP in order to work. For example, because HTTP does not keep track of the state of a request, fudges such as cookies are needed. If we had all been in consensual agreement with The Greatest Living Briton about the purposes of HTTP, we would have no e-commerce, no blogging, no social networking, no easy remote access to databases, no large-scale distributed collaborations, no easy action-at-a-distance, in short no transformation of our society and life these last two decades, just the broadcast publishing of text documents.
Let us put aside this childish, warm-and-fuzzy, touchy-feely seeking after consensus. Our society benefits most from a diversity of opinions and strong disagreements, a hundred flowers blooming, a cacophony of voices in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes. This is particularly true of opinions regarding the uses and applications of innovations. Yet the EC persists, in some recalcitrant chasing after illusive certainty, in trying to force us all into straitjackets of standards and equal practice. These efforts are misguided and wrong-headed, and deserve to fail.
Author Archive for peter
Page 65 of 83
Myopic utilitarianism
What are the odds, eh? On the same day that the Guardian publishes an obituary of theoretical computer scientist, Peter Landin (1930-2009), pioneer of the use of Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus as a formal semantics for computer programs, they also report that the Government is planning only to fund research which has relevance to the real-world. This is GREAT NEWS for philosophers and pure mathematicians!
What might have seemed, for example, mere pointless musings on the correct way to undertake reasoning – by Aristotle, by Islamic and Roman Catholic medieval theologians, by numerous English, Irish and American abstract mathematicians in the 19th century, by an entire generation of Polish logicians before World War II, and by those real-world men-of-action Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alonzo Church – turned out to be EXTREMELY USEFUL for the design and engineering of electronic computers. Despite Russell’s Zen-influenced personal motto – “Just do! Don’t think!” (later adopted by IBM) – his work turned out to be useful after all. I can see the British research funding agencies right now, using their sophisticated and proven prognostication procedures to calculate the society-wide economic and social benefits we should expect to see from our current research efforts over the next 2300 years – ie, the length of time that Aristotle’s research on logic took to be implemented in technology. Thank goodness our politicians have shown no myopic utilitarianism this last couple of centuries, eh what?!
All while this man apparently received no direct state or commercial research funding for his efforts as a computer pioneer, playing with “pointless” abstractions like the lambda calculus.
And Normblog also comments.
POSTSCRIPT (2014-02-16): And along comes The Cloud and ruins everything! Because the lower layers of the Cloud – the physical infrastructure, operating system, even low-level application software – are fungible and dynamically so, then the Cloud is effectively “dark” to its users, beneath some level. Specifying and designing applications that will run over it, or systems that will access it, thus requires specification and design to be undertaken at high levels of abstraction. If all you can say about your new system is that in 10 years time it will grab some data from the NYSE, and nothing (yet) about the format of that data, then you need to speak in abstract generalities, not in specifics. It turns out the lambda calculus is just right for this task and so London’s big banks have been recruiting logicians and formal methods people to spec & design their next-gen systems. You can blame those action men, Church and Russell.
Science and poetry
The Asian scholar Arthur Waley once wrote:
All argument consists in proceeding from the known to the unknown, in persuading people that the new thing you want them to think is not essentially different from or at any rate is not inconsistent with the old things they think already. This is the method of science, just as much as it is the method of rhetoric and poetry. But, as between science and forms of appeal such as poetry, there is a great difference in the nature of the link that joins the new to the old. Science shows that the new follows from the old according to the same principles that built up the old. “If you don’t accept what I now ask you to believe,” the scientist says, “you have no right to go on believing what you believe already.” The link used by science is a logical one. Poetry and rhetoric are also concerned with bridging the gap between the new and the old; but they do not need to build a formal bridge. What they fling across the intervening space is a mere filament such as no sober foot would dare to tread. But it is not with the sober that poetry and eloquence have to deal. Their te, their essential power, consists in so intoxicating us that, endowed with the recklessness of drunken men, we dance across the chasm, hardly aware how we reached the other side.” (Waley 1934, Introduction, pp. 96-97)
Reference:
Arthur Waley [1934]: The Way and its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and its Place in Chinese Thought. London, UK: George Allen and Unwin.
Creative writing
The English poet T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) talking about creative writing compared it to geometrical drawing. Hulme had studied mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge, although without graduating.
The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognize how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect’s curves – flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that “approximately”. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.”
Reference:
T. E. Hulme, in the essay, “Romanticism and Classicism”, quoted in: A. Alvarez [2003]: Making it new. The New York Review of Books, 15 May 2003, Volume L, No. 8, pp. 28-30.
Nicolas Fatio de Duillier
Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664-1753) was a Genevan mathematician and polymath, who for a time in the 1680s and 1690s, was a close friend of Isaac Newton. After coming to London in 1687, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society (on 1688-05-15), as later did his brother Jean-Christophe (on 1706-04-03). He played a major part in Newton’s feud with Leibniz over who had invented the differential calculus, and was a protagonist all his life for Newton’s thought and ideas.
Continue reading ‘Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’
GTD Intelligence at Kimberly-Clark
I started talking recently about getting-things-done (GTD) intelligence. Grant McCracken, over at This Blog Sits At, has an interview with Paula Rosch, formerly of fmcg company Kimberly-Clark, which illustrates this nicely.
I spent the rest of my K-C career in advanced product development or new business identification, usually as a team leader, and sometimes as what Gifford Pinchot called an “Intrapreneur” – a corporate entrepreneur, driving new products from discovery to basis-for-interest to commercialization. It’s the nature of many companies to prematurely dismiss ideas that represent what the world might want/need 5, 10 years out and beyond in favor of near-term opportunities – the intrapreneur stays under the radar, using passion, brains, intuition, stealth, any and every other human and material resource available to keep things moving. It helps to have had some managers that often looked the other way.
Continue reading ‘GTD Intelligence at Kimberly-Clark’
Recent listening 3: Eastern European flavours
Following my post about Czech Tropicala-post-punk duo DVA, I thought I’d write about some other East European-flavoured music which I listen to a lot.
The first is the album Mnemosyne, by Ljova and the Kontraband, which I have mentioned previously for their setting of poem by Joe Stickney. Their music is a mix of East-European gypsy, klezmer and jazz, played by virtuoso performers on viola, accordian, bass and percussion (plus guests). This mix could only happen in New York City, which is where they are based.
A genuine EE gypsy sound is the painful blues of Dona Dumitru Siminica (1926-1979), who sings this gypsy Romanian parallel to Rembetika in a falsetto voice, with accordian, cymbalon and bass and sometimes violin behind him. The re-issue I am listening to comprises tracks originally recorded in Bucharest in the early 1960s.
The third album brings the accordian into the 21st-century: arrangements of various fast-moving electronica tracks for a trio of virtuoso Polish accordianistas, Motion Trio. After this album, no one can ever say again that a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordian but refrains from doing so!
Ljova and the Kontraband [2008]: Mnemosyne. Kapustnik Records, New York City.
Dona Dumitru Siminica [2006]: Sounds from a Bygone Age, Volume 3. Asphalt Tango Records GmbH, Berlin. CD-ATR 1106.
Motion Trio [2005]: Play-Station. Asphalt Tango Records GmbH, Berlin. CD-ATR 0705.
Guerrilla logic: a salute to Mervyn Pragnell
When a detailed history of computer science in Britain comes to be written, one name that should not be forgotten is Mervyn O. Pragnell. As far as I am aware, Mervyn Pragnell never held any academic post and he published no research papers. However, he introduced several of the key players in British computer science to one another, and as importantly, to the lambda calculus of Alonzo Church (Hodges 2001). At a time (the 1950s and 1960s) when logic was not held in much favour in either philosophy or pure mathematics, and before it became to be regarded highly in computer science, he studied the discipline not as a salaried academic in a university, but in a private reading-circle of his own creation, almost as a guerrilla activity.
Pragnell recruited people for his logic reading-circle by haunting London bookshops, approaching people he saw buying logic texts (Bornat 2009). Among those he recruited to the circle were later-famous computer pioneers such as Rod Burstall, Peter Landin (1930-2009) and Christopher Strachey (1916-1975). The meetings were held after hours, usually in Birkbeck College, University of London, without the knowledge or permission of the college authorities (Burstall 2000). Some were held or continued in the neighbouring pub, The Duke of Marlborough. It seems that Pragnell was employed for a time in the 1960s as a private research assistant for Strachey, working from Strachey’s house (Burstall 2000). By the 1980s, he was apparently a regular attendee at the seminars on logic programming held at the Department of Computing in Imperial College, London, then (and still) one of the great research centres for the application of formal logic in computer science.
Pragnell’s key role in early theoretical computer science is sadly under-recognized. Donald MacKenzie’s fascinating history and sociology of automated theorem proving, for example, mentions Pragnell in the text (MacKenzie 2001, p. 273), but manages to omit his name from the index. Other than this, the only references I can find to his contributions are in the obituaries and personal recollections of other people. I welcome any other information anyone can provide.
UPDATE (2009-09-23): Today’s issue of The Guardian newspaper has an obituary for theoretical computer scientist Peter Landin (1930-2009), which mentions Mervyn Pragnell.
UPDATE (2012-01-30): MOP appears also to have been part of a production of the play The Way Out at The Little Theatre, Bristol in 1945-46, according to this web-chive of theatrical info.
UPDATE (2013-02-11): In this 2001 lecture by Peter Landin at the Science Museum, Landin mentions first meeting Mervyn Pragnell in a cafe in Sheffield, and then talks about his participation in Pragnell’s London reading group (from about minute 21:50).
UPDATE (2019-07-05): I have learnt some further information from a cousin of Mervyn Pragnell, Ms Susan Miles. From her, I understand that MOP’s mother died in the Influenza Pandemic around 1918, when he was very young, and he was subsequently raised in Cardiff in the large family of a cousin of his mother’s, the Miles family. MOP’s father’s family had a specialist paint manufacturing business in Bristol, Oliver Pragnell & Company Limited, which operated from 25-27 Broadmead. This establishment suffered serious bomb damage during WW II. MOP was married to Margaret and although they themselves had no children, they kept in close contact with their relatives. Both are remembered fondly by their family. (I am most grateful to Susan Miles, daughter of Mervyn Miles whose parents raised MOP, for sharing this information.)
References:
Richard Bornat [2009]: Peter Landin: a computer scientist who inspired a generation, 5th June 1930 – 3rd June 2009. Formal Aspects of Computing, 21 (5): 393-395.
Rod Burstall [2000]: Christopher Strachey – understanding programming languages. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, 13: 51-55.
Wilfrid Hodges [2001]: A history of British logic. Unpublished slide presentation. Available from his website.
Peter Landin [2002]: Rod Burstall: a personal note. Formal Aspects of Computing, 13: 195.
Donald MacKenzie [2001]: Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Poem: Cheyenne Mountain
Today a poem by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), a schoolmate and life-long friend of Emily Dickinson. In 1881, after moving west, she wrote an account of the US mistreatment of American Indians, “A Century of Dishonour”. On learning of her death, Emily Dickinson said: “Dear friend, can you walk, were the last words that I wrote her. Dear friend, I can fly – her immortal reply.” Today, Cheyenne Mountain hosts the underground operations center for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
Cheyenne Mountain
By easy slope to west as if it had
No thought, when first its soaring was begun,
Except to look devoutly to the sun,
It rises, and has risen, until, glad,
With light as with a garment, it is clad,
Each dawn, before the tardy plains have won
One ray; and after day has long been done
For us, the light doth cling reluctant, sad
To leave its brow.
Beloved mountain, I
Thy worshipper, as thou the sun’s, each morn,
My dawn, before the dawn, receive from thee;
And think, as thy rose-tinted peaks I see,
That thou wert great when Homer was not born,
And ere thou change all human song shall die!
Previous poems are here.
Computer science, love-child: Part 2
This post is a continuation of the story which began here.
Life for the teenager Computer Science was not entirely lonely, since he had several half-brothers, half-nephews, and lots of cousins, although he was the only one still living at home. In fact, his family would have required a William Faulkner or a Patrick White to do it justice.
The oldest of Mathematics’ children was Geometry, who CS did not know well because he did not visit very often. When he did visit, G would always bring a sketchpad and make drawings, while the others talked around him. What the boy had heard was that G had been very successful early in his life, with a high-powered job to do with astronomy at someplace like NASA and with lots of people working for him, and with business trips to Egypt and Greece and China and places. But then he’d had an illness or a nervous breakdown, and thought he was traveling through the fourth dimension. CS had once overheard Maths telling someone that G had an “identity crisis“, and could not see the point of life anymore, and he had become an alcoholic. He didn’t speak much to the rest of the family, except for Algebra, although all of them still seemed very fond of him, perhaps because he was the oldest brother.
Continue reading ‘Computer science, love-child: Part 2’