Andrew Pickering (born 1948) is a British sociologist, philosopher and historian of science at the University of Exeter. He was a professor of sociology and a director of science and technology studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2007. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of London, and a doctorate in Science Studies from the University of Edinburgh.[1] His book Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984)[a] is a classic in the field of the sociology of science.... He authored The mangle of practice: Time, agency and science (University of Chicago Press, 1995), where he develops a performative conception of scientific practice, focusing on non-human agency and strongly contributing to the posthumanist trend of Science and Technology Studies. His most recent book, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future traces the history of British Cybernetics after the Second World War. Pickering considers Cybernetics as a type of nomad science that, instead of seeking to dominate reality as its modern counterpart (thus leading to processes of enframing, following Heidegger) rather develops an ontological theatre between humans and non-humans. In this book, Pickering explores projects that intertwine, for instance, technology, psychiatry, spirituality, education and, of course, brain sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Pickering (more)

David Rolfe Graeber (born 12 February 1961) is an American Anthropologist and Anarchist who currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.[1] He was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him,[2] and his term there ended in June 2007. Graeber has a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002, membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World, and an early role in Occupy Wall Street. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber (more)

Apple Computer Tablet, built around same platform as the IPhone. (more)

want to build Random antilibrary/ToRead-Paragraph app (more)

*Robert Works Fuller (October 26, 1936 – July 15, 2025) was an American physicist, educator and social reformer. He was president of Oberlin College 1970–1974, where he championed diversity and curricular reform.[3] He then worked for citizen diplomacy during the Cold War, helped found the Hunger Project, which worked to end world hunger, travelled and wrote widely advocating societies free from "Rankism," rank-based discrimination... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Fuller

Critical mini-bio of Edward Teller by Alan Lightman. I didn't realize he (and Hans Bethe and John Archibald Wheeler) was still alive. The SDI episode is part of a continuing pattern in Teller's career of misrepresenting scientific facts in order to get what he wanted. Unfortunately, Teller's methods have been adopted by many younger scientists and officials in the national weapons industry, which is dependent on Congress for funding.

Perceptual control theory (PCT) is a model of behavior based on the properties of negative feedback control loops. A control loop maintains a sensed variable at or near a reference value by means of the effects of its outputs upon that variable, as mediated by physical properties of the environment. In engineering control theory, reference values are set by a user outside the system. An example is a thermostat. In a living organism, reference values for controlled perceptual variables are endogenously maintained. Biological homeostasis and reflexes are simple, low-level examples. The discovery of mathematical principles of control introduced a way to model a negative feedback loop closed through the environment (circular causation), which spawned perceptual control theory. It differs fundamentally from some models in behavioral and cognitive psychology that model stimuli as causes of behavior (linear causation). PCT research is published in experimental psychology, neuroscience, ethology, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, robotics, developmental psychology, organizational psychology and management, and a number of other fields. PCT has been applied to design and administration of educational systems, and has led to a psychotherapy called the method of levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_control_theory (more)

Family of views in the philosophy of mind. Not to be confused with Theory of computation or Pancomputationalism. In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. It is closely related to functionalism, a broader theory that defines mental states by what they do rather than what they are made of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind (more)

Peter Putnam (1927-1987) was not widely known in his lifetime, but he laid the groundwork for a revolution in cognitive science. His influence is likely to spread in decades to come as the world catches up with his pioneering studies on the operation of the nervous system. With this insight of how the nervous system works, Putnam worked out its implications for virtually every branch of human knowledge, from the foundations of mathematics and physics, to psychology, the arts, social science, and the diversity of human cultures, history, religion, and philosophy. The Peter Putnam Papers (more)

I need Sticky Android Alarms and Timers. When I set timers and alarms for tasks during the day, I often don't Do them immediately. Then I forget they happened. With the Timer app, it's even worse, since I can't even label a count-down in the first place. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: o3 Turns Pro. You can now have o3 throw vastly more compute at a given problem. That’s o3-pro. Should you have o3 throw vastly more compute at a given problem, if you are paying the $200/month subscription price for ChatGPT Pro? Should you pay the $200, or the order of magnitude markup over o3 to use o3-pro in the API? (more)

Simon Willison: AI assisted search-based research actually works now. For the past two and a half years the feature I’ve most wanted from LLMs is the ability to take on search-based research tasks on my behalf. We saw the first glimpses of this back in early 2023, with Perplexity (first launched December 2022, first prompt leak in January 2023) and then the GPT-4 powered Microsoft Bing (which launched/cratered spectacularly in February 2023). Since then a whole bunch of people have taken a swing at this problem, most notably Google Gemini and ChatGPT Search. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Google Gemini 2.5 Pro: From 0506 to 0605. Google recently came out with Gemini-2.5-0605, to replace Gemini-2.5-0506, because I mean at this point it has to be the companies intentionally fucking with us, right? (more)

Amanda Gefter: Finding Peter Putnam. The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t. (more)

Bob Lefsetz: E-Book Revolution. Distribution is king. (more)

Katie Parrott: When o3 Plans Your Career Better Than You Do. I’ve always hated the question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” (more)

Microdramas are Minting New Six-Figure Careers: 'Faster You Can Get in, the Better'. I teamed up with my Ankler Media colleague Elaine Low of Series Business — where she covers the TV industry from L.A. — to dig into the booming world of microdramas, which has opened doors to fame and fortune for many creatives even as they bypass the traditional Hollywood career path. (more)

Operations Research/Systems Thinking guru (more)

Russell Ackoff on the Philosophy of W Edwards Deming. Vs the reality of A corporation says that its principle value is maximizing shareholder value. That’s non-sense. If that were the case executives wouldn’t fly around on private jets and have Philippine mahogany lined offices and the rest of it. The principle function to those executives is to provide those executives with the quality of work life that they like. And profit is merely a means which guarantees their ability to do it.

the people in a group with the real Power. In-Group, Inner Circle (more)