Tag Archives: analog

Claude Shannon demonstrates machine learning

A system for detecting an accessible bug

We have described each of the operations on the retinal image in terms of what common factors in a large variety of stimuli cause response and what common factors have no effect. What, then, does a particular fiber in the optic nerve measure? We have considered it to be how much there is in a […]

A vision substitution system

Two illustrations of Bach y Rita’s vision substitution system, in 1969. “Four hundred solenoid stimulators are arranged in a twenty x twenty array built into a dental chair. The stimulators, spaced 12 mm apart, have 1 mm diameter “Teflon” tips which vibrate against the skin of the back (Fig. 1). Their on-off activity can be […]

Oscilloscope party

“Tennis for Two was first introduced on October 18, 1958, at one of the Lab’s annual visitors’ days. Two people played the electronic tennis game with separate controllers that connected to an analog computer and used an oscilloscope for a screen. The game’s creator, William Higinbotham, was a nuclear physicist who lobbied for nuclear nonproliferation […]

Algorithms before computers

“The only way you could formulate a complete rule (in premodern sensibility): you had to foresee the exceptions, it is both specific and supple. The habit doesn’t simply enforce the rule, it embodies it, just like this spearbearer statue embodies the canon of male beauty. More than that the habit’s discretion is not supplementary to […]

Every contact leaves a trace.

Both questioned document examination and computer forensics belong to a branch of forensic science known as “trace evidence,” which owes its existence to the work of the French investigator Edmond Locard. Locard’s famous Exchange Principle may be glossed as follows: “a cross-transfer of evidence takes place whenever a criminal comes into contact with a victim, […]

Francis Galton’s Composite Portraiture meets Wittgenstein’s camera

Galton also devised a technique called “composite portraiture” (produced by superimposing multiple photographic portraits of individuals’ faces registered on their eyes) to create an average face. In the 1990s, a hundred years after his discovery, much psychological research has examined the attractiveness of these faces, an aspect that Galton had remarked on in his original […]

Black boxing conversion

[…] Bernhard Siegert: In a way, you can describe the business of cultural techniques as the opening up of black boxes. If you think of concepts or even symbols as black boxes, when you open them up, what comes out are cultural techniques. One of the things I have been studying recently is the very […]