{"id":1535,"date":"2009-12-17T12:28:30","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T20:28:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=1535"},"modified":"2009-12-17T12:28:30","modified_gmt":"2009-12-17T20:28:30","slug":"analog-the-landscape-not-the-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2009\/12\/17\/analog-the-landscape-not-the-map\/","title":{"rendered":"Analog: the landscape, not the map?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s another page from Seth Godin<\/a>‘s super-interesting e-book (did I mention it’s a free [PDF] download<\/a>?), What Matters Now<\/a>. This one is from George Dyson<\/a> (of the Dysons that include his father Freeman Dyson<\/a> and his sister Esther Dyson<\/a>):<\/p>\n

A N A L O G<\/p>\n

Analog computing, once believed to be as extinct as the differential analyzer, has returned.<\/p>\n

Digital computing can answer (almost) any question that can be stated precisely in language that a computer can understand. This leaves a vast range of real-world problems\u2014especially ambiguous ones\u2014 in the analog domain. In an age of all things digital, who dares mention analog by name? \u201cWeb 2.0\u201d is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital\u2014reversing how digital logic was embodied by analog components, the first time around.<\/p>\n

Complex networks\u2014of molecules, people, or ideas \u2014constitute their own simplest behavioral descriptions. They are more easily approximated by analogy than defined by algorithmic code. Facebook, for example, although running on digital computers, constitutes an analog computer whose correspondence to the underlying network of human relationships now drives those relationships, the same way Google\u2019s statistical approximation to meaning\u2014 allowing answers to find the questions, rather than the other way around\u2014is now more a landscape than a map.<\/p>\n

Pulse-frequency coding (where meaning is embodied by the statistical properties of connections between memory locations) and template-based addressing (where data structures are addressed by template rather than by precise numerical and temporal coordinates) are the means by which the analog will proliferate upon the digital.<\/p>\n

Analog is back, and here to stay.<\/p>\n

George Dyson is the author of Baidarka, Project Orion and Darwin Among the Machines, as well as a recent short story,
\n\u201cEngineers\u2019 Dreams<\/a>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"George<\/a>

George Dyson (from Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

What I love here: the reminder that analog<\/em> and analogy<\/em> share a root meaning; the idea of landscape as analogy (as opposed to a map – I was reminded of what I used to do as an art historian: trying to “map” meanings – historical, ideological – to painted landscapes…); of answers finding questions (hm, try to wrap your head around that one…!); of analogy profilerating<\/em> on the digital – I love the image that evokes, analogically-speaking!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s another page from Seth Godin‘s super-interesting e-book (did I mention it’s a free [PDF] download?), What Matters Now. This one is from George Dyson (of the Dysons that include his father Freeman Dyson and his sister Esther Dyson): A N A L O G Analog computing, once believed to be as extinct as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[678],"tags":[14208,14209,14207,14200,14201],"class_list":["post-1535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-analog","tag-digital","tag-george-dyson","tag-seth-godin","tag-what-matters-now"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1535"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1538,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535\/revisions\/1538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}