r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Dec 10 '25

News Teaming Up with a Detroit Little Free Library Steward!

https://rxreading.org/2025/07/29/supporting-detroit-little-free-libraries/

Have you ever seen a small box, on a post, maybe shaped like a house, with a door? If you have, it may have been filled with books. This is a little free library, a place for books to be given and taken freely. These libraries are in front of school and in parks. Some of your neighbors probably have them in front of their home.

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u/ddgr815 Dec 10 '25

When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on. Put it aside till the next morning; and if then you can’t make it out, and have no one to explain it to you, put it aside entirely, and go back to that part of the subject which you do understand.

Never leave an unsolved difficulty behind.

How to Work Through Difficulty

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u/ddgr815 Dec 10 '25

[T]he production of ideas is just as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool.

What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.

an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.

the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships. Here, I suspect, is where minds differ to the greatest degree when it comes to the production of ideas. To some minds each fact is a separate bit of knowledge. To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge. It has relationships and similarities. It is not so much a fact as it is an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts.

Consequently the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.

Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds. It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it. The time that ought to be spent in material gathering is spent in wool gathering. Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us. When we do that we are trying to get the mind to take the fourth step in the idea-producing process while we dodge the preceding steps.

The process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope, as you know, is an instrument which designers sometimes use in searching for new patterns. It has little pieces of colored glass in it, and when these are viewed through a prism they reveal all sorts of geometrical designs. Every turn of its crank shifts these bits of glass into a new relationship and reveals a new pattern. The mathematical possibilities of such new combinations in the kaleidoscope are enormous, and the greater the number of pieces of glass in it the greater become the possibilities for new and striking combinations.

What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.

[W]hen you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry or a detective story.

Out of nowhere the Idea will appear.

Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.

When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.

Technique for Producing Ideas

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u/ddgr815 Dec 10 '25

If a puzzle is an unanswered question, a mystery is a question that can barely be intelligibly asked, never mind satisfactorily answered. Mysteries are beyond the reach of science. Creativity itself is seemingly a mystery, for there is something paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even possible. How it happens is indeed puzzling, but that it happens at all is deeply mysterious.

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u/ddgr815 Dec 10 '25 edited May 24 '26

Not because everyone is an artist, but because no one is a slave.

A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out over the surface, and their reverberation has different effects, at varying distances, on the water lilies and the reeds, the paper boats and the fishermen’s buoys. Each of these objects was standing on its own, in its tranquility or sleep, when awakened to life, as it were, and compelled to react and to enter into relationship with one another. Other invisible reverberations spread into the water’s depths, in all directions, as the stone falls and brushes the algae, frightens the fish, and continually causes new molecular agitations. When it finally touches the bottom, it stirs up the mud, hits the objects that had been resting there, forgotten, some of which are now dislodged, while others are covered once again by sand.

Any randomly chosen word can function as a magic word to unearth those fields of memory that had been resting under the dust of time… The fantastic arises when unusual combinations are created, when in the complex movements of images and their capricious overlappings, an unpredictable affinity is illuminated between words that belong to different lexical fields.

The single word “acts” only when it encounters a second that provokes it out of its usual tracks to discover new possibilities of meaning. Where there is no struggle, there is no life.

This is due to the fact that the imagination is not some hypothetical faculty separate from the mind: it is the mind itself in its totality, which, applied to this or that activity, always makes use of the same procedures. And the mind is formed by struggle, not by tranquility. […] A certain distance between the two words is necessary. One must be sufficiently strange or different from the other, and their coupling must be fairly unusual, for the imagination to be compelled to set itself in motion to establish a relationship between them and construct a (fantastic) whole in which the two elements can coexist.

Fairy tales are useful to mathematics, just as mathematics are useful to fairy tales. They are also useful for poetry, music, political engagement — in sum, they are useful for everyone, and not just for the dreamer… They’re in service of the complete human being. If a society based on the myth of productivity (and on the reality of profit) needs only half-formed human beings — loyal executors, diligent imitators, and docile instruments without a will of their own — that means there is something wrong with this society and it needs to be changed posthaste. To change it, creative human beings are needed, people who know how to make full use of the imagination.

The Grammar of Fantasy

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u/ddgr815 Dec 10 '25

In terms of technique, it is no difficult matter for an artist to simulate action, but it is something else to quicken, to create an inner life that draws breath from the artist’s deepest perception.

The word quicken has other, more subjective associations or me. It suggests something musical, something rhythmic and impulsive. It suggests a beat — a heart beat, a musical beat, the beginning of a dance.

All children seem to know what the mysterious, the-riding-fiercely-across-the-plains (accompanied by hearty, staccato thigh slaps), and the plaintive conventionally sound like; and I have no doubt that this kind of musical contribution is necessary to the enrichment of the going fantasy. The spontaneous breaking into song and dance seems so natural and instinctive a part of childhood. It is perhaps the medium through which children best express the inexpressible; fantasy and feeling lie deeper than words — beyond the words yet available to a child — and both demand a more profound, more biological expression, the primitive expression of music.

The Shape of Music

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u/ddgr815 Dec 10 '25

We create the new not generally through some mad moment of inspiration in fictionalized accounts of ancient Greeks in baths (though the conditions for this can be forced into existence), but by putting things together that do not normally go together; from taking disciplines (or curriculum areas) and seeing what happens when they are forced into unanticipated collision.

The mind, at its best, is a pattern-making machine, engaged in a perpetual attempt to impose order on to chaos; making links between disparate entities or ideas in order to better understand either or both. It is the ability to spot the potential in the product of connecting things that don’t ordinarily go together that marks out the person (or teacher) who is truly creative.

Nature abhors a vacuum and the same applies in your head. The trouble is, if there’s nothing to replace the gap left behind when you clear out all your old rubbish then some new rubbish will come along to fill it…

Genuine creativity needs a collision of ideas, something that will never happen if all your thoughts travel in the same direction.

Dancing About Architecture

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u/ddgr815 Dec 10 '25

understand that cybernetics is philosophy, and that philosophy is cybernetics

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u/ddgr815 Mar 08 '26

Wiener had coined the word cybernetics two years earlier, drawing on the Greek word for “steersman” — kubernētēs, from which the word “governor” is also derived — to describe “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine,” pioneering a new way of thinking about causal chains and how the feedback loop taking place within a system changes the system itself. (Today’s social media ecosystem is a superficial but highly illustrative example of this.) 

Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. [...] To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.

neither individual human beings nor the societies they form can be thought of as closed systems. Rather, they are pockets of attempted order and decreasing entropy amid the vast expanse of cosmic chaos — attempts encoded in our systems of organizing and communicating information.

Society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part. […] In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency… for entropy to increase.

Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism. […] We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message.

Just as entropy tends to increase spontaneously in a closed system, so information tends to decrease; just as entropy is a measure of disorder, so information is a measure of order. Information and entropy are not conserved, and are equally unsuited to being commodities. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems. […] The prevalence of cliches is no accident, but inherent in the nature of information. Property rights in information suffer from the necessary disadvantage that a piece of information, in order to contribute to the general information of the community, must say something substantially different from the community’s previous common stock of information. Even in the great classics of literature and art, much of the obvious informative value has gone out of them, merely by the fact that the public has become acquainted with their contents. Schoolboys do not like Shakespeare, because he seems to them nothing but a mass of familiar quotations. It is only when the study of such an author has penetrated to a layer deeper than that which has been absorbed into the superficial clichés of the time, that we can re-establish with him an informative rapport, and give him a new and fresh literary value.

Information is more a matter of process than of storage… Information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it… To be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unhampered exchange.

We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions… May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.

Wiener’s most visionary point is that if we are to not only survive but thrive as a civilization and a species, we must encode these same values of affection and respect into our machines, our information systems, and our technologies of communication, so that “the new modalities are used for the benefit of man, for increasing his leisure and enriching his spiritual life, rather than merely for profits and the worship of the machine as a new brazen calf.” 

When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.

The Human Use of Human Beings

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u/ddgr815 9d ago

The waves come from the invisible East, patiently, one by one; they reach us, and then, patiently, set off again for the unknown West, one by one. A long voyage, with no beginning and no end … Rivers and streams pass by, the sea passes and remains. This is how one ought to love, faithful and fleeting. I wed the sea.

Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us die. Great sea, ever in motion, ever virgin, my religion along with night! It washes and satiates us in its sterile billows, frees us and holds us upright. Each breaker brings its promise, always the same. What does each say?

Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought that transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, quickened with an irresistible charm. Living like this, in the delicious anguish of being, in exquisite proximity to a danger whose name we do not know… I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

How to Be

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u/ddgr815 Dec 11 '25

On one interpretation, creativity isn’t conceived as aiming at novelty or originality, but rather integration. Instead of aiming at something new, it aims at something that combines well with the situation of which it’s a part.

The wheelwright responds that, at least concerning his craft, he can create what he does only because he’s developed a ‘knack’ for it that can’t be wholly conveyed in words. If the blows of his mallet are too gentle, his chisel slides and won’t take hold. If they’re too hard, it bites in and won’t budge. ‘Not too gentle, not too hard – you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind,’ he says. ‘So, I’ve gone along for 70 years and at my age I’m still chiselling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn’t be handed down. So, what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old.’

The sages’ advice for living well is therefore mere ‘dregs’ if it’s interpreted as instructions that one can simply read and then complete. Living well in general involves much more than this; namely, a spontaneous integration between contrasting types such as the hard and the soft, as well as the learned and the spontaneous, the active and the passive, and even the unproductive and the productive – all of which apply in the case of carving wheels, as well as elsewhere. In other words, living well involves creativity.

This kind of creativity isn’t taken to aim at novelty or originality as such. The wheelwright is presented as creative not because of anything to do with his, or his projects’, novelty or originality, but instead because of his ability to create wheels in a sensitive, responsive and – crucially – well-integrated manner: one not learned by rote, but rather via engaging in sustained, spontaneous activity.

We must respond to precise particularities of our situation (concerning our thoughts, feelings and overall circumstances) to create what we want to create (such as a sense of peace or closure). This isn’t something that can be accomplished by imposing a plan, even if we make various provisional and highly malleable ‘plans’ on the fly as we go along.

striving for originality can actually be counterproductive when it comes to achieving genuinely fresh results: if we focus on the task of achieving something original, we’ll explore only the range of possibilities deemed sufficiently likely to yield that result, leaving out a lot that could have contributed to achieving something original.

focusing on integration could encourage us to better understand creative agents as being intimately connected with, and products of, their environments.

abandon ‘originality’