Tried "Gestalt," now "von Neumann"
Discussion
i read the book "MANIAC" over the summer about von Neumann's computer... it was quite the read.
he apparently got the concept for punch cards from his mother's loom that he was fascinated with as a boy
+1 thumbs up for old name and +1 for new name.
Yrsh I think I've heard of that. Early computer stuff is wild. Like, supposedly some early computer genius was inspired by the hexagrams in the Dao de Jing
But I forgot who
probably why bytes are 8 bits apart from being handy for encoding text
you can encode the address of each bit of a byte in 3 bits, so the territory is 8 but the map only needs 3 to name the positions
up until the 90s it was still very common to use bits as compact flags, using byte AND flag NEQ 0 to detect it, 8 bits lets you create a map for the individual bits in 32 bytes
something i would do if i was designing discrete logic is use groups of binary and trinary, also, if you use a tristate and two binary you can make a single memory unit of 0-11 (base 12) which is much more amenable to precision in many general purpose arithmetic tasks, especially if you are using fractions, for common proportions you can get total precision, whereas with a pure binary coding 3, 6, 9, 12 fractions get ugly, and our base 10 number system is based on 2 and 5, the old babylonian base 60 encoding is even more precise, and this is why it's the divider for minutes and hours as well, that precision - this would involve individual units of 2 binary, 1 trinary and one pent... whatever it would be called
i think they settled on binary though because it's more efficient in terms of transistor count
there is more than a passing similarity between computer science and textile production, the obvious one is pixels, and speaking of von Neuman, a single serial process is a "thread" of execution and coroutines are an example of something that maybe you could say resembles crochet in the way that it knots back and forth even though it's only one thread
Interesting. My mom is constantly crocheting stuff. I have no idea how she comes up with am intricate 2D design from just roping things together.
We had a round window decoration with beads in the center hanging on the picture window. The neighbor called it a dream catcher but mom called it window decoration. It had to be starched sometimes.
And there were also crocheted stars on the Christmas tree.
If I remember correctly, Von Neumann in his last years went a little mad. He would go visit his beloved computer in its dedicated room and fire it up.
I think we would all go a little mad if our computers and phones had to be visited in a room somewhere, and our time was spent writing down what we would say to them when we go to visit.
In his last days, he had his wife help him making the amulets with the Torah to be worn on forehead. His wife was like "really, we are going back to this, we are so far advanced in science". But she helped him.
and there he was in his last days holed up in a room frantically writing programs that would probably never be run with the hamsa on his forehead
sounds like a beautiful madness