Posts Tagged ‘logic’
“The door handle is the handshake of the building”*…
Door handle and rose (1833–47), manufactured by Copeland & Garrett, Stoke-on-Trent. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
We have all become suddenly more aware of the moments when we cannot avoid touching elements of public buildings. Architecture is the most physical, most imposing and most present of the arts – you cannot avoid it yet, strangely, we touch buildings at only a very few points – the handrail, perhaps a light switch and, almost unavoidably, the door handle. This modest piece of handheld architecture is our critical interface with the structure and the material of the building. Yet it is often reduced to the most generic, cheaply made piece of bent metal which is, in its way, a potent critique of the value we place on architecture and our acceptance of its reduction to a commodified envelope rather than an expression of culture and craft.
Despite their ubiquity and pivotal role in the haptic experience of architecture, door handles remain oddly under-documented. There are no serious histories and only patchy surveys of design, mostly sponsored by manufacturers. Yet in the development of the design of the door handle we have, in microcosm, the history of architecture, a survey of making and a measure of the development of design and how it relates to manufacture, technology and the body.
For as long as there have been doors there have been door handles…
An appreciation of the apparati of accessibility: “Points of contact – a short history of door handles.”
* The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
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As we get a grip, we might send thoughtfully-wagered birthday greetings to a man whose thought open a great many (metaphorical) doors, Blaise Pascal; he was born on this date in 1623. A French mathematician, physicist, theologian, and inventor (e.g.,the first digital calculator, the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the syringe), his commitment to empiricism (“experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics”) pitted him against his contemporary René “cogito, ergo sum” Descartes…
“Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything”*…
Investing and deal-making occupy an outsized role in popular depictions of “business” like HBO’s Succession and Showtime’s Billions. They also occupy an outsized share of our elite: Over the last five years, the nation’s top business schools have sent nearly thirty percent of their graduating classes into finance.
But the buying and selling of companies, the mergers and divestments, the hedging and leveraging, are not themselves valuable activity. They invent, create, build, and provide nothing. Their claim to value is purely derivative—by improving the allocation of capital and configuration of assets, they are supposed to make everyone operating in the real economy more productive. The practitioners are rewarded richly for their effort.
Does this work, or are the efforts largely wasted? One might default to the assumption that an industry attracting so much talent and generating so much profit must be creating enormous value. But the elaborate financial engineering of the 2000s, which attempted an alchemy-like conversion of high-risk loans into rock-solid assets, and then placed highly leveraged bets against their performance, led to the collapse of some established Wall Street institutions, massive bailouts for others, and a global economic meltdown. Mergers and acquisitions, meanwhile, appear largely to be exercises in wheel-spinning: “M&A is a mug’s game,” explains Roger Martin in the Harvard Business Review, “in which typically 70%–90% of acquisitions are abysmal failures.”…
Hedge funds and venture capital funds appear to badly underperform simple public market indexes, while buyout funds have performed roughly at par over the past decade. Of course, some funds deliver outsized returns in a given timeframe; even a random distribution has a right tail. And there are managers whose strong and consistent track records suggest the creation of real value.
In other words, most fund managers are generating the results that one might expect from an elaborate game of chance—placing bets in the market with odds similar to a coin flip. With enough people playing, some will always find themselves on winning streaks and claim the Midas touch, at least until the coin’s next flip. Except under these rules of “heads I win, tails you lose,” they collect their fees regardless…
In the U.S., finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector now accounts for 20 percent of GDP– compared with only 10 percent in 1947. The thorough and thoughtful analysis– and critique– of the frothier components of that sector excerpted above is noteworthy, beyond its quality, for it’s origin; it is an early product of a new conservative think tank, American Compass.
Read it in full: “Coin-Flip Capitalism: A Primer.”
Pair with “What Kind of Country Do We Want?“, a resonant essay from the amazing Marilynne Robinson.
(image above: source)
* “Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything. There was unquestionably a power shift away from production to the world of finance… Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal.” — David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
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As we look beyond price to value, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that Alan Turing submitted his paper, “On Computable Numbers” for publication; its full title was “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” In answer to Hibert’s and Ackermann’s 1928 challenge, Turing demonstrated that some purely mathematical yes-no questions can never be answered by computation; more technically, that some decision problems are “undecidable” in the sense that there is no single algorithm that infallibly gives a correct “yes” or “no” answer to each instance of the problem. In Turing’s own words: “…what I shall prove is quite different from the well-known results of Gödel … I shall now show that there is no general method which tells whether a given formula U is provable in K.”
Turing followed this proof with two others, both of which rely on the first. And all rely on his development of type-writer-like “computing machines” that obey a simple set of rules and his subsequent development of a “universal computing machine”– the “Turing Machine,” a key inspiration (to von Neumann and others) for the development of the digital computer.
“Nothing happens until something moves”*…
What determines our fate? To the Stoic Greek philosophers, fate is the external product of divine will, ‘the thread of your destiny’. To transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, it is an inward matter of self-determination, of ‘what a man thinks of himself’. To modern cosmologists, fate is something else entirely: a sweeping, impersonal physical process that can be boiled down into a single, momentous number known as the Hubble Constant.
The Hubble Constant can be defined simply as the rate at which the Universe is expanding, a measure of how quickly the space between galaxies is stretching apart. The slightest interpretation exposes a web of complexity encased within that seeming simplicity, however. Extrapolating the expansion process backward implies that all the galaxies we can observe originated together at some point in the past – emerging from a Big Bang – and that the Universe has a finite age. Extrapolating forward presents two starkly opposed futures, either an endless era of expansion and dissipation or an eventual turnabout that will wipe out the current order and begin the process anew.
That’s a lot of emotional and intellectual weight resting on one small number…
How scientists pinned a single number on all of existence: “Fate of the Universe.”
[Readers might remember that the Big Bang wasn’t always an accepted paradigm— and that on-going research continues to surface challenges.]
* Albert Einstein
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As we center ourselves, we might spare a thought for Kurt Friedrich Gödel; he died on this date in 1978. A logician, mathematician, and philosopher, he is considered (along with Aristotle, Alfred Tarski— whose birthday this also is– and Gottlob Frege) to be one of the most important logicians in history. Gödel had an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century. He is, perhaps, best remembered for his Incompleteness Theorems, which led to (among other important results) Alan Turing’s insights into computational theory.
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
“The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God”*…
2,300 years ago, Euclid of Alexandria sat with a reed pen–a humble, sliced stalk of grass–and wrote down the foundational laws that we’ve come to call geometry. Now his beautiful work is available for the first time as an interactive website.
Euclid’s Elements was first published in 300 B.C. as a compilation of the foundational geometrical proofs established by the ancient Greek. It became the world’s oldest, continuously used mathematical textbook. Then in 1847, mathematician Oliver Byrne rereleased the text with a new, watershed use of graphics. While Euclid’s version had basic sketches, Byrne reimagined the proofs in a modernist, graphic language based upon the three primary colors to keep it all straight. Byrne’s use of color made his book expensive to reproduce and therefore scarce, but Byrne’s edition has been recognized as an important piece of data visualization history all the same…
Explore elemental beauty at “A masterpiece of ancient data viz, reinvented as a gorgeous website.”
* Euclid, Elements
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As we appreciate the angles, we might spare a thought for Kurt Friedrich Gödel; he died on this date in 1978. A logician, mathematician, and philosopher, he is considered (along with Aristotle, Alfred Tarski— whose birthday this also is– and Gottlob Frege) to be one of the most important logicians in history. Gödel had an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century. He is, perhaps, best remembered for his Incompleteness Theorems, which led to (among other important results) Alan Turing’s insights into computational theory.
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
“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four?”*…
“The teaching of Logic or Dialetics” from a collection of scientific, philosophical and poetic writings, French, 13th century; Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, Paris, France. Photo by Bridgeman
Is logical thinking a way to discover or to debate? The answers from philosophy and mathematics define human knowledge..
The history of logic should be of interest to anyone with aspirations to thinking that is correct, or at least reasonable. This story illustrates different approaches to intellectual enquiry and human cognition more generally. Reflecting on the history of logic forces us to reflect on what it means to be a reasonable cognitive agent, to think properly. Is it to engage in discussions with others? Is it to think for ourselves? Is it to perform calculations?…
The rise and fall and rise of logic: “What is logic?“
* George Orwell, 1984
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As we ruminate on reason, we might send enlightened birthday greetings to Benjamin Franklin; he was born on this date in 1706. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Franklin was a renowned polymath: a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other innovations. And as a social entrepreneur (who grasped the fact that by united effort a community could have amenities which only the wealthy few can afford for themselves), he helped establish several institutions people now take for granted: a fire company (1736), a library (1731), an insurance company (1752), an academy (the University of Pennsylvania, 1751), a hospital (1751), and the U.S. Postal Service (starting as postmaster of the Colonies in 1753, then becoming U.S. Postmaster during the Revolution). In most cases these foundations were the first of their kind in North America.
In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat.
– Henry Steele Commager
