Re: [math-fun] Draft of June 17 blog post
That would be Norbert Wiener. My father thought I should make sure to get to know him when I arrived at college, but unfortunately he died about six months before my freshman year began. —Dan ----- with regard to wolves and deer, you could tell the story of the deliberate introduction of myxomatosis to control the rabbit population in Australia… I recently re-read Weiner’s Cybernetics, and found it for the most part to have aged quite well. -----
<< saw feedback loops everywhere >> --- repeated in successive paragraphs? << we scientists >> Oh dear ... There are a number of linguistic tics that reveal considerably more about the author's insecurities than might either have been intended, or (presumably) preferred. Delete "we" ! Now !! But just in case you feel tempted to ignore my advice, take time to watch a low-key masterpiece set in postwar Britain. "Not the way _we doctors_ do it!" should be sufficient to convince you for life ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Rillington_Place [ A related solecism --- even more dismally common, at any rate in Britain --- involves a title screaming "We cannot do such-and-such", when closer inspection of the content suggests that the author intended to assert "We must not do such-and-such", as opposed to inadvertantly implying the irrelevance of the entire remainder of the succeeding diatribe. ] Off you go now, and don't do it again! WFL On 6/14/20, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
That would be Norbert Wiener. My father thought I should make sure to get to know him when I arrived at college, but unfortunately he died about six months before my freshman year began.
—Dan
----- with regard to wolves and deer, you could tell the story of the deliberate introduction of myxomatosis to control the rabbit population in Australia…
I recently re-read Weiner’s Cybernetics, and found it for the most part to have aged quite well. -----
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On 14/06/2020 06:11, Fred Lunnon wrote:
<< we scientists >> Oh dear ...
There are a number of linguistic tics that reveal considerably more about the author's insecurities than might either have been intended, or (presumably) preferred. Delete "we" ! Now !!
The "we" does two things. _One_ of them is to assert the author's inclusion in the (maybe) high-status category of "scientists", and if that were the only thing then I'd agree with your advice. But the _other_, which I think is more important here, is that it makes the sentence it's embedded in have the form "_we_ haven't done what we should have" instead of "_they_ haven't done what they should have", and for that reason I think it _mustn't_ go. If you want to avoid the first implication, deleting "scientists" would be better than deleting "we". -- g
participants (3)
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Dan Asimov -
Fred Lunnon -
Gareth McCaughan