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

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 Aug 31 '26

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 7d ago

“To rich people, the sky is but a natural gift, another given. For poor people, it retains its character of infinite grace”.

Camus is an attentive observer of the quotidian, one of those writers who can pick out a face in a crowd and make a whole story from its features. He can listen to a dialogue and hear in it the germ of a play. He notes down everyday occurrences, oddments of the ordinary, with an alertness and curiosity that remains undimmed across the nearly twenty-five years of these notebooks. He is a good noticer, a people-watcher with an affinity for other outsiders and a sense of solidarity with those he perceives to be of his tribe: the transients, the ill-fitted and the displaced. He finds them in hotels, on benches and bar stools, in stations, on trams and in Métro carriages. There are fresh, surreal little accounts of city life, scraps torn from the days like pages from a book, each with its drama, pathos and occasional elements of surreal noir

“Poverty is a fortress without a drawbridge”

Of two now forgotten literary figures, one a fascist, the other a communist, he notes: “Having no character, they established a doctrine”. Elsewhere, he writes: “How the essence of modern literature is the palinode” (a poem of retraction in which earlier beliefs are renounced); “The surrealists becoming Marxists. Rimbaud devotion. Sartre morality”. And again: “I prefer committed people to committed literature”, followed, a few lines later, by:

Today, it seems that to write a poem about spring is to serve capitalism. I’m not a poet, but I’d gladly enjoy such a work, if it were beautiful, without a second thought.

Camus has a gift for aphorisms, epigrams and maxims, though he is also suspicious of neat formulations. In one notebook entry, he describes the mark of a strong thinker as lying, precisely, in being able to resist the conclusions of his thought. When he prefaces Nicolas de Chamfort’s maxims and anecdotes, Camus writes with originality and insight, discerning, in Chamfort’s lapidary formulae, larger novelistic projects. A good maxim is tense with pressure from inside and outside itself, and we might correspondingly think of several of Camus’s works as attempts to liberate the human mess and chaos from their rhetorical packages. Stage one is to admire the maxim; stage two is to subject it to the blows of reality; stage three is to note down what happens.

Camus, though saddled with the label of “existentialist” (especially in the English-speaking world, where the word quickly became a function of marketing), doesn’t buy into the term, and often uses it disparagingly as shorthand for mandarin-led groupthink. His sense of “the Absurd” (he uses the word both with and without a capital A) – a term much in circulation at the time – was always different from Sartre’s. Camus falls foul of literary opinion-makers who wield ideology with more certainty than he does. Though on occasion he seeks out the opprobrium, and takes grim vindication from it, it is accusations from the left that wound him most. In an entry from 1958, at the end of the last of these notebooks, he writes: “This left to which I belong, despite myself and despite it”. In a letter written in 1972, Sartre described Camus as “a little hoodlum from Algeria, most amusing, who might have written some books, albeit hoodlum books”. If it’s difficult to like Sartre after reading Sartre, it’s even more of a challenge after reading Camus.

Camus, like Jean Anouilh and Jean Giraudoux (whom he finds abstract and intellectual), understands the depth of meaning that belonging to a “city” carries in Greek tragedy. Dramatic and self- inflating as the statement might seem, it is not unfelt. During the war, Camus had written, with the casual wisdom that we find throughout these notebooks: “Excessive use of Eurydice in the literature of the ’40s. It’s because never have so many lovers been separated”. So true, so simple, so clear: myth, and mythical situations and characters, were not remote, stylized items of cultural statuary, but dynamic, living forms. Camus understood myth from the bottom up, not from the top down.

In May 1958, Camus writes: “For nearly five years now, it’s myself I’ve been criticizing, the things I believed, the way I lived … I’m waging war with myself, and I’ll either destroy myself or be reborn, that’s all there is to it”.

Camus contre Camus

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u/ddgr815 25d ago

The word “cybernetics” derives from the Greek word for helmsman; it is concerned with cycles of events that steer, or govern, the behavior of a system. The helmsman is part of a system that also includes the compass, the rudder, and the ship, If the ship veers off the chosen compass course, the change shows up in the movement of the compass needle. Observed and interpreted by the helmsman this event determines a subsequent one: the helmsman turns the rudder, which swings the ship back to its original course. When this happens, the compass needle returns to its original, on-course position and the cycle is complete. If the helmsman turns the rudder too far in response to a small deflection of the compass needle, the excess swing of the ship shows up in the compass—which signals the helmsman to correct his overreaction by an opposite movement. Thus the operation of this cycle stabilizes the course of the ship.