I need to stop forgetting just how awesome Scott McCloud is. It might be easy to shrug him off as a cartoonist, but he’s sort of a cartoonist-philosopher. Born into a family of scientific thought, he was interested in the arts. As a result, he’s able to reflect and analyze the nature of art and life with a scientific mind. Apparently this also makes him a pretty good visionary, at least with comics in relation to media.
Before Kevin Kelly got into his deep exploration of technology, he briefly took a step back to think about science. In this talk, he was tasked to think about the next 50 years of science. He starts quite reasonably by going back, and looking at the evolution and trends of science. This alone is fascinating, as you can imagine.
Then he says something interesting: Computation is leading a third way of science. Traditionally, science has been based on a cycle of hypothesis and measurement, as he says, the two pillars of science. As he references A New Kind of Science, he talks about a third pillar of science: synthesis, or simulation.
He describes simulation as an interactive theory, allowing you to easily explore much more of the possibility space. You can then measure, make predictions, and then test them in simulation, which may be tied to real world measurement and data. Another way to frame it is that it’s based on making things. He calls it the nerd way, but I like to think of it as the hacker way. It’s about learning by building things.
Here’s a Friday treat: a 50 minute long piece talking with Richard Feynman in 1981. I strung the five 10 minute YouTube clips into a playlist and embedded it here.
You get a good sense of his character as he talks about his father, growing up, teaching, working on the bomb, and what he was working on in 1981. Feynman was a true scientist, a great teacher, and to me a prototypical hacker.
This is a transcript of a talk by Russell Ackoff given in 1993 at the Systems Thinking in Action conference. It was one of my first tastes of systems thinking and the worldview of Russell Ackoff, and it hooked me for good. I consider it life changing.
For an Ackoff talk it’s a particularly great one. It summarizes most of the content in the first half of Ackoff’s Best. However, it also gets into some ideas I haven’t found anywhere else. For example, the explanation and significance of automation, the post-Industrial equivalent of mechanization.
Those not familiar with Ackoff will still appreciate how it integrates history, philosophy, business, and science into a grand narrative of the way things are. Thinking back, it made me come away feeling like I understood everything just a little bit more.
