HD Thoreau, Minnesota

TL;DR -- One persistent theme will be Native Americans and the future of the U.S. We will start a series in New England and follow its long arm across the country. Too, we look at Concord which brings up Thoreau and his friend, Emerson. The latter has appeared here more than once; let's take time to know more about HD. 

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One obvious theme that the TGS must pursue is nature versus technology. It has been a theme of increasing complexity over the past two decades. Though lots of subjects pertain to this theme, we merely touch upon a couple of major aspects in this post. One in particular will be "intelligence" as it has been associated with life (not with buckets of bits or whatever configuration we might conceive). 

Last time, we mentioned one of the native tribes (Nipmuc) of the New England region where the European culture of the U.S. got its start some 400 years ago. Although there are tribes over the entire continent, we will start in New England and learn about Native American culture with respect to the U.S., its past and its future. 

In the map shown in the prior post, the region of the Nipmuc tribe included an area called Concord where the English settled. We have several families under study who were associated with the middle and western parts of Massachusetts. We'll pick HDT who was friends with our cousin (Ralph Waldo Emerson) who spent his years after his father died in the environs of Harvard. RW Emerson has been mentioned in several posts. 

Today, we consider Henry David Thoreau (Wikipedia, WikiTree). HD was influenced by RW's little tract on Nature. Two of our favorite sources provide the full text of this RW take on matters: Transcendental web; archive[.]org   

Venturing further, we can quote a Harvard study published during the time of HD's 200th memorial. The study found this quote of HD, who BTW was a graduate of the Institution. 

Instead of helping Harvard, he said, men should consider giving money to their towns to preserve and protect a huckleberry patch.

The “commercial spirit” of the day, he said, rested on a love of wealth that made people selfish and greedy. The world would be a better place, he said, if people “made riches the means and not the end of existence.”

For the most part, HD was in New England. Later, in poor health, he ventured out to Minnesota to look for a better climate in which to live. He had struggled with TB. During his time in the St. Paul region (1861 timeframe), HDT was impressed. 

To be brief, we provide links to material on DT and his life. 

• HDT's Final Journey: Minnesota - Mayo took note of HDT. They provide this quote: “For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage.” 
• Thoreau and the Minnesota River - being a naturalist, HD would have wandered under the MN skies. 
• The Life of HDT - one bit of activity by HD was forming a school with his brother. HD had taught at Harvard and wanted to spread the good joy of learning. We will be looking at this type of thing in depth, as New England, from its start, emphasized universal education. 

Information on his supporters.

Samuel Hoar (Wikipedia, WikiTree) 

Nathan Brooks (Papers, WikiTree)

John Keyes (Autobio, WikiTree - brother George)

R. W. Emerson (our post)

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Back to Harvard, we see that they recently performed an experiment with GenAI and classwork. The topic was Physics so that provides a wonderful grounding affect due to the empirical nature of the study. Reminder, back in HD's time, this field of study would have been (actually, was) known as Natural Philosophy. 

• Professor tailors AI tutor for Physics - one encouraging result is that this effort followed the theme of increasing human insight using the tool of the artificial tutor. Test results indicate that those in the study who used the AI mode scored better. There is a lot to look at, but this work has to consider psychological and social factors with respect to the tutor experience. 

Remarks: Modified: 09/17/2024

09/17/2024 --  

The Nipmuc's influence

TL;DR -- Technology is only part of our focus. People are prime. Technology will learn that people in the loop is the key to truth maintenance. 

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We have mentioned technology as a focus a few times. In doing so, we were not forgetting people and their 400 years of  history. Of late, technocrats have run after the idea that people are not important. What John calls AIn't and its hype are an example. 2024 has found the experience with GenAI over the past two years as motivation for managers (executives) of many companies to bring AI whole-hog into their processes. 

Okay, John has been mostly silent on this for the past two years are he re-evaluated everything that he knew with respect to emerging information from the machine learning work, including the technical aspects of applying mathematics as was enabled with the advancement of computing. Too, he reviewed robotics as it has been seen as an opportunity to web sensors with smarts and thereby create some creature worthy of our attention beyond our usual reaction to technological marvels of bowing to their developers. Language has become the domain of the artificial; John's put to that is the mindless/meaningless pursuit of optimatiztion of rules never was what language was about. Tsk, on the English departments of Universities. So much to research and discuss. 

Okay, backing up, technology is how mathematics finds its game It has not been properly attuned, yet, to what humans are about. That will change. We will discuss how to pay attention. 

Aside: for the past few years, as AI can to be more known (okay?, doubt that?, let's just take IBM and Google's winning of games in a very public atmosphere - with the ultimate being Go (so what?, never played it nor most of the other games), John has watched. Quality? Declining. Mood? Becoming more mean-spirited and stupid with respect to the culture that the US has been trying to put into place with regard to justice and equity. Look around, computers driving people like the computer is the master of we humans who have to slave to its/their owners. 

Back on track. Mathematics is the key here. So, that will be an important discussion. 

Too, toys have always been a focus. Now, we have adult toys of note. I don't have any, myself, except for some computational types. Puritan? Perhaps. It fits. 

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With the 400th of Plymouth (that off-course vessel - Mayflower), there was an effort to know more of the native populations that were here prior to the arrival of the Europeans. That's today's message. 

• In conversation with Cheryll Toney Holley - she is of the Nipmuc tribe. One factor that we see with respect to taming the ill-begotten aspects of technology is to know people and their history. 
• Nipmuc - mentioned in 1631 by Dudley, this group led the efforts to establish an awareness of their existence, generally. 

Tribal territories, 

southern New England

This review starts in the northeastern regions of the U.S., but it will cover the areas of the large interior of the country over the time of the expansion. Too, we will look at the extreme west (arrived at by land and sea) and the southwest. 

Remarks: Modified: 09/17/2024

09/17/2024 --  Nipmuc cultural area included the Concord region. We stop to look at one influencer from that region: HDThoreau.  

Restart, somewhat

TL;DR -- Two events in 2023 were seminal; these carried over into 2024 which is 8 months old. The two relate to each other. And, pending changes to our material has been pending. Time to start that process. 

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In 2023, Gloucester has its 400th. Some felt that it would be 2024. We will look more into that as the closes out. 

Since early 2023, we have adapted to two things: possibly, there are two Thomases; GenAI came on the scene and changed the world in ways that can be taken positively or negatively. Let's look at these two.

• The first was the result of research that the TGS has been doing. In March of 2023, we were looking to have Margaret Fryer Gardner as a focus. But, on looking at WikiTree, we saw that in February of 2023, we saw that research had identified birth records of the children in the records of Sherborne, Dorset, England. Those who discussed the findings decided to split the Thomas Gardner profile into two with the first Thomas being here for the start of the effort by Dorchester Company while the second Thomas was the husband of Margaret and father of the kids. See the post (New not old planter). After a little more reading, we decided that we see these two as one. However, we will make the demarcation (two profiles) now, in our records and websites. Further research then will be documented. At some future point, the hope is to have sufficient information to make a decision. In the meantime, we can discuss why we think it's one guy. 
• In November of 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to extreme acclaim and got millions of people to sign on. We missed that event for several reasons that might be of interest. It was not until February of 2023 that we became aware of ChatGPT. In our first session, we told ChatGPT about Thomas Gardner and Roger Conant (at the same time, the research at WikiTree was progressing). Since then, we have interfaced with various GenAI systems (we like Bard and still are using Gemini for testing), reviewed the mathematical basis for the claims, discussed means to get maturity brought to the action, and a lot more. Basically, this goes along with our decision to focus on technology.  
  
  
  

So, now, we will restructure. Per usual, we will continue to have the FAQ which will be brought up to date. Also, we will release issues of Gardner's Beacon periodically, hopefully with more of a regularity. 

Remarks: Modified: 09/015/2024

09/15/2024 -- People will always be the focus, rather than technology. 

Shoebox and its uses

Tl;DR -- Shoebox and its uses? We start with a 1992 book. 

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At one manufacturing environment, there was a tool kit that was flat and cushy with outlines of tools needd for a job. If assembly, it would also have the parts to be put together. The machinist/assembler would take the kit(s) to the machine/workstation which included everything needed. At one time, one would go to a tool crib when a need cropped up. 

So, optimization and savings were the goal for the change. 

Now, we're into the digital age and having the pains, growing type and other. What does it all mean? A book from the early 1990s had an interesting take on the matter. This list identifies the book and the author and points to other material. 

•  Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox... - fortunately, Google has somewhat of a preview.
• David Gelernter - the author was son of Herbert Gelernter, early AIer.  
• Wikipedia: Mirror world (on the book); Mirror Worlds (a company following the idea). 

Why is this important? Several reasons. "shoebox" itself has been used several ways. We'll trace down those related to AI, in particular.

 

Remarks: Modified: 09/07/2024

09/07/2024 --  Add image. 

von Neumann, Hopper

TL:DR -- von Neumann influenceed us all over a long period of time. Hopper was there, in the beginning, contributing to what we have now. Times have changed. Lessons learned need to be re-evaluated. Options, in the future, will have greater potenttial to be wise or not. Our choice. 

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Last year, I started to work with an associate at Sperry Univac on looking at the history of computing, from the perspective of the people involved. Of late, I have been working on a project with respect to the future of computing which took time away from that effort. 

Our notes are at the TGS site: https://tgsoc.org/papers/. Larry Walker was the Director of Sperry's Knowledge Systems Center where I worked prior to going to Boeing Computer Services, in Wichita KS. With the advent of GenAI in 2022, we both agreed that this untimely event was like referenced by Alan Kay after his intitial review: a train wreck waiting to happen. 

Larry was involved with the development of the early operating systems (Control Data, Sperry) and played a leadership role through several decades. He has written of his work at Sperry's KSC and later. 

Well, lots of topics can be discussed. This blog has many posts on the subject: machine learning; science of information; mathematics. For now, we'll be posting reading material. 

Today, we see more evidence of mature presentations coming to fore. ACM's Communications has had several articles, recently. Today, we look at the Myth of the Coder. The authors start during the time of von Neumann who was a prominent mathematican and who was influential in several fields. In computing, he left us with the model still being used. 

His thought was that there were four stages (levels) involved with computing. 1st - the mathematician was involved with the problem and solution being written in a format that emphasized the formality of the situation. In other words, the algorithm then was a real thing to behold. Heuristics and other formats were for the less formal presentation. 2nd - this level took the mathematical view and converted it into a flowchart. We all need to witness that and how it worked. 3rd - this is where the actual coding was done using the language of the computer. We'll skip over details until a later date, but every manufacture had their own notions ited to the underlying hardware (circuitry). Finally, 4th - worried about the specifics of computing (binary representation) and rescource allocations (memory, et al). 

Stopping for a moment, those who deal with C or C++ (of course, there are others at this level) is familiar with those types of choices. Coming forward to the realm of Python, lots of this type of considerations is not usually on the plate. In between, we find other approaches. And, today, a whole new realm exists at the HTML/CSS level. 

Reminder? We will emphasize domains which is where knowledge is accumulated and utilized. von Neumann was dealing a lot with Physics which has a close tie with numeric mathematics which is in vogue (way to much, as John will explain). Mathematics has many other limbs and roots, and we will look at these from one perspective to note for the future: category theory. 

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Wait, the article steps forward. By the time John got his start, FORTRAN was the focus in the type of engineering computing that he did. But, COBOL was prime in business. It wasn't long, though, that various types of offshoots appeared. Lisp, for example, which we will use as the paragon modeling. There were methods to parametrically specify requirements. Some approaches were tabular which could handle fairly sophisticated situations. 

Think of the modern spreadsheet whose presence is everywhere, it seems. 

Grace Hoppe and COBOL saw 2 levels - analytst, programmer. Those lower steps which were specific to the machine (say, IBM or Sperry or ...) were handled by the compiler and its after proceesses (a huge one was the linkedit step that created the executable. 

Now, with Python or JavaScript, that happens almost automatically. But, reminder, Lisp was doing that type of interpretative approach way back. 

There are other varieties of roles over the years. One key fact is that this article does not consider the domain requirements which will be more importantly handled now with the fiasco of GenAI. 

Considering the historical distinction
between coder and programmer.

Remarks: Modified: 09/04/2024

09/04/2024 --