HIST 390 Blog Posts

What is noise? How does a conversation take place? Is information the same as meaning? These are some of the questions we reviewed in class to help us better understand the evolution of technology in the WWII/Cold War era.

To start with, exactly what is noise? A lot of us were stumped on this. Surprising? Try putting it into your own words. Go ahead and pause for a moment… … … … … Not so easy. To us, noise is just noise, something we don’t really want to hear. Like this guy –>

However, we were talking more along the lines of electrical noise, or more commonly known as white noise (why white specifically? Does noise have a color?). One of the greatest problems with telephones in the early days was white noise. Say you’re in your house in the 1940s. You call your next door neighbor, and you have a perfect connection, no noise in the background. Now try calling your parents, who live two states away. It’s a lot more difficult to hear their voices due to the electrical noise invading the signal. In the classroom, students in the back of the room have a harder time hearing the teacher because of the phenomenon known as the signal to noise ratio. Essentially, the further from the origin of the signal you are, the more noise that interferes, which makes it harder to hear.

Now for the conversation. These ideas are linked, I promise. In order to have a conversation, there has to be noise, right? (preferably not, but it’s there anyway). Have you ever heard of “The Mathematical Theory of Communication”? For those in Comm 100/101, this chart may look familiar to you.

Although this is mainly referring to telephony and computer data transferring, this also applies to plain human speech. Information travels from the speaker, through a microphone, through space (interacting with noise interference), outpouring through speakers in the room, to land upon the ears of the audience. Now the question becomes, what is information?

Claude Shannon argues that information has nothing to do with the meaning of the message. To clarify in the words of my teacher, “information has been disaggregated from meaning”, which is a fancy word for saying that we’ve taken information outside of its original context. This can be conveyed through redundancy in speech. Imagine information as the words on a page. In reading this blog post, you’ve read tons of redundancy without realizing before reaching this point. For information to be passed on, all that’s needed is a sentence like so: “U ppl dnt reed t bk”. Need a minute, or did you read over it as if the missing letters were there to begin with? “You people didn’t read the book” is the technically correct English, yet all that was needed to understand the message was those few characters. Claude Shannon knew this, and was actually able to statistically produce words that nearly created a cohesive meaning in a sentence. Our language is predictable, and redundant. Who knew?

Ever heard of Vannevar Bush? Claude Shannon? …Me neither, but it turns out they had an important role in the world we see today through a very obscure concept of the time: computer design.

First, a little backtrack. In the midst of World War 2, and following into the Cold War, the US government funded a wide variety of classified military and defense research in order to win the war. Some of these technological innovations of the time include: the atomic bomb, radar, sonar, jet engines, and rockets, just to name a few.

Then came Vannevar Bush. An inventor and engineering professor at MIT in the late 1920s and the Great Depression, Bush created a brain the size of a warehouse: the differential analyzer. 

A mess of cogs, knobs, and gears, this machine was “the computer before the digital revolution” (Soni & Goodman 31). This machine (with parts that look suspiciously like a foosball table) was built to solve puzzles that the human mind could not fully grasp: “the differential analyzer had solved, by brute force [whirring away for 30 weeks non-stop], equations so complex that even trying to attack them with human brainpower would have been pointless” (30). While not as fast as the spoon-fed answers given to us by google, this gigantic machine made of delicate knobs could actually think. That is, until Shannon made it obsolete.

Apprenticed to Bush during his graduate studies, Claude Shannon spent a long time trapped alone in a room with the brain of the differential analyzer. About a year before Shannon went to MIT, the machine had “reached its limits” (33), needing to be broken down and reconstructed for every new problem it faced. Bush, in the hopes of greater efficiency, raised money to construct a sort of brain for the brain; a collection of “electrical switches controlled by electricity” (34), which Shannon observed and commanded.

Why is this important? Because stuffed into this room came Shannon’s greatest accomplishment – binary code. After analyzing the switches and using Boolean logic, Shannon realized that he could essentially do the work of 11 switches with only 2, leading to what we know today as the binary code; the computer coding we see today made of multiple series of 1’s and 0’s. Examples that Shannon demonstrates could be made of this founding were “a calculator for adding binary numbers, [and] a five-button combination lock with electronic alarm”. This notion essentially labelled most of the differential analyzer unnecessary and ready for the downsized PC’s we see today.  Read more »

Quick explanation of the missing day. The debate between realist and Idealist.

Idealist: believe that somewhere, there is a model of perfection. An example would be that a sunset is beautiful because it was made by God, the embodiment of perfection.

Realist: does not believe that there is an ideal somewhere; the world we see is all there is. To continue with the sunset example, it is beautiful because it is different every time: the colors, the clouds, location, etc. or it reminds us of another (happier) time.

How do you look at a sunset? Me personally, I’m a realist. I look at the cold hard facts of life and live the best I can. Congrats to idealists for their life goal of seeking perfection, but I’ll stick to what I know is there or can make myself.

This was also recapped in the beginning of class on Day 5, leading into Industrialization and the Cold War.

Max Weber: German Sociologist in the late 19th century once believed that modern life in the Industrial era would drive away ideas of the magic and supernatural, in favor of rationalization.

He wasn’t wrong. Moving away from the dark ages and witch trials, the Industrial era brought with it everything from file cabinets, computers, to weapons.

During the Cold War between the US and USSR, the government heavily funded weapons development and computer technology, creating the world we know today. Computers contributed greatly to the calculations of missile trajectories, rockets, and shells. The inclusion of data relied upon human hands to turn knobs and spin dials to input the necessary information, which resulted in human error quite a few times. Nevertheless, computers were a new instrument, often thought of as magical electrical brains. These “brains” would span an entire warehouse, rather than the petit discs we’ve come to know.

Long time no post, right? Class was cancelled last week, which gave my class and I plenty of time to read the book The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains, by Nicholas Carr. For a relatively short book, it was packed with information about technology and how it has affected our minds. Surprisingly not a completely dull read for a class textbook, although many points were reiterated a few too many times.

According to Carr, there have been many (mostly negative) affects to our brains due to technology. The earliest example given was the creation of the book. Suddenly humans could record information and read it at their leisure, rather than relying upon the testimony of other people (as information was passed orally, like playing telephone). Originally read aloud, books and scripts were meant to be spoken; yet the “invention” of silent reading changed things. Suddenly, books weren’t being read to any sort of audience. As my teacher puts it, “Who is being read to?” With the production of books coupled with silent reading, people began to split their consciousness.

Now fast forward about 500 years to our present, and we’re presented with a similar, yet still astounding, the ebook. Now books are written and released to the public through computer technology. The consequences of this? Carr argues that this has caused a fundamental struggle in close reading and short attention spans.

According to Carr, reading something on the internet is extremely different than reading it in print. The main difference, distractions. On ebooks, words throughout the text contain hyperlinks that lead to other pages about the highlighted word. These hyperlinks add so many distractions to the overall book that tests showed people have difficulty remembering what they’ve read.

This translates to to a shorter attention span through reading in print. Have you ever tried to go deep into a book, but every few minutes, your eyes skim off the page and you have to force them back on? While that can be from simple boredom or lack of interest, Carr argues that this is due to technology. We’re so used to distractions, the constant advertisements and hyperlinks of webpages, that we can hardly close read anything for a long stretch of time.

A very short summary of the book, class discussion mainly focused on the theme of the book, the medium as the message. By medium, the author means the form of communication. For example, sending a text message. Instead of the content of the message, like “happy birthday” or some other message, the medium by which the words were sent (the text itself), is the message. Rather than picking up the phone to dial a number to wish your friend happy birthday, many people resort to texts. Texting is mostly about speedy communication without overly complicated messages in an attempt to keep a connection to the social world without too much effort. We all do it.

A potentially easier example may be what my teacher discussed in class. He used a museum as a medium for historical knowledge. Whenever one views an old piece of parchment from an older era, touching it prohibited due to the fragility of the paper, so the pages are kept in a temperature controlled glass case. My teacher’s argument mainly consisted of why we can’t touch the paper. What about it is so special? People touched it all the time with greasy hands before it hid behind the glass. Of course, my classmates responded to this that the contents of the page were important, say like the Declaration of Independence. Rebuttal: there are many copies of it everywhere word for word. So, what really is special about that one piece of paper? To the museum, the paper is more valuable than those who pay the admission piece to see it, as told by the Do Not Touch signs surrounding it. The medium (the museum)’s message is that history is not for the multitude.