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Claude Shannon

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10
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2019-10-27
most recent
2019-10-27
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1
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  1. “The clarinetist, Pete Fountain, would lead the way. Jazz combo in toe. So remember, I'm going to explain this to you. Think of, use that visualization in your mind when I'm speaking of a Macy-style parade. This is his funeral procession. So we got Clarinest, Pete Fountain would lead the way. He's up front. He's got a jazz combo in toe behind him. Next in line, six unicycling pallbears, somehow balancing Sharon Shannon's coffin. Behind them would come the grieving widow. Then a juggling octet and a juggling octopedal machine. Next would be the three black chess pieces bearing $100 bills, and then three rich men from the West, California tech investors following the money. They would march in front of a chess float, atop which British chessmaster David Levy would square off in a live chess match against a computer.”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “a good way to like close the time that we have together talking about clock shannon. Shannon had his had set his mind to the question of this funeral and imagined something very different. For him, it was an occasion that called for humor, not grief. In a rough sketch, he outlined a grand procession, a Macy-styled parade to amuse and to delight, and to sum up the life of Claude Shannon.”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Meaning computing and automation and AI and robotics, these goals, he said, only half jokingly could mark the beginning of a phase out of the stupid, entropy-increasing and militant human race. Yikes, in favor of a more logical, energy-conserving, and friendly species, the computer. So he's saying, they're kind of mirror images of themselves, those three traits, right? He considers a lot of humanity to be stupid. So he'd prefer more logical. That's the other side of that. Entropy increasing. He would like energy conserving and militant. Instead of militant, he would like friendly.”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “He continues one category of innovation he singled out for special mention, the discoveries of science. These are all going to be future founders episodes, by the way. This quote from Shannon, are wonderful achievements in themselves, but would not affect the life of the common man without the intermediate efforts of engineers and inventors, and he's going to mention the people he admires, people like Edison, Bell, and Marconi actually just wrote a book on Marconi. That's like 826 pages, so I don't know what I just got myself into. And I've done one podcast. I think it's episode number two on Edison, but I will read other books on him in the future. And I haven't covered Alexander Graham Bell yet, but I will. This gives you an idea of more of his personality. And this is really on his, you can see why he's kind of an introvert. And why he had a strong distaste for war. This is Shannon on the human species. These goals.”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “What the laws or rules govern a situation are if there are theorems about what one can or can't do, mainly because I just wanted to know myself. This is one of the so later in his life he just stopped like he'd get honored so much he wouldn't show up to accept awards he didn't like traveling but there were some times where he could accept an award and his family wanted to see so in this case like he he winds up accepting this award and going to japan just because his family wanted to see japan but this section isn't really about that too much it's it's about this idea that i always reference that books are the original links and so i just ordered some books on this person i never heard of before and eventually you know we'll learn from them in future episodes but he said claude had been selected as the first ever winner of the kyoto prize in basic science an award endowed by the billionaire kazuo in amori so sorry if you're listening to this in japan and i'm butchering this i can i can't even pronounce normal words in english so uh don't take offense please inamori was a japanese”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Something I also want to bring to your attention that I don't think I've done a good job of understanding that his goal was to break everything down to its most simplest form, right? So this is Ed Thorpe talking about on how Shannon dealt with problems. And he says the story quote from Thorpe. Shannon seemed to think with ideas more than with words or formulas. A new problem was like a sculptor's block of stone. And Shannon's ideas chiseled away the obstacles until an approximate solution emerged like an image which he proceeded to refine as desired with more ideas. When I read that, I thought about the famous quote by Michelangelo when somebody asked him, like, how are you creating these sculptures? And Michelangelo says, the sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there. I just have to chisel away at all the superfluous material.”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Having spent 15 years at Bell Labs, Shannon writes, I felt myself getting a little stale and unproductive. With the ideas or maybe just your personal dissatisfaction, like you might want to change things up, like your physical, like where you physically are has an impact on that. And this is the impact, the change in scenery worked. Now we start to see his mind in full bloom. What resulted were some of Shannon's most creative and whimsical endeavors. There was a trumpet that shot fire out of its bell when played. The handmade unicycles in every pyramutation, a unicycle and no seat, a unicycle with no pedals, a unicycle built for two. There was the chairlift that took surprise guests down from the house's porch to the edge of the lake. This is all the stuff he's building. A machine that solved Rubik's cubes, chess playing machines, handmade robots being small. Shannon's mind, it seemed, was finally free to bring its most outlinedish ideas to mechanical life.”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “He's going to tell us why that's the case here. The essential seclusion and isolation of Bell Labs had both advantages and disadvantages. That's direct quote from Shannon. It eliminates a good many time-wasting visitors, but at the same time prevents many interesting contacts, which is going back and forth making this decision. He continues. Foreign visitors often spend a day at Bell Lab Bell Labs, but they spend six months at MIT. This gives me opportunities for real interchanges of ideas. In the end, the general freedom and academic life, in my view, is one of the most important features. See him optimizing for freedom again? The long vacations are exceedingly attractive, and it is also the general feeling of freedom in the hours of work. There was also one decisive factor pulling Shannon to MIT, a certain restlessness on Shannon's part after spending more than a decade and a half in a single institution. This is what I mean. I think this is actually really important.”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity. I love that sentence. So skipping ahead in the story, he winds up leaving Bell Labs for MIT. And so this is also an understanding of like, why would he do that? And he's got a couple good advice, like things that we could take away for our own lives here. When an offer came to be a professor at MIT, it was hard to decline. For all the pool of university life, Shannon struggled with his choice. He's got two great options. Stay in rural New Jersey at Bell Labs or go move to Massachusetts and work at MIT. Bell Labs has been his professional home for more than 15 years. It had been the site of his most productive years as a researcher and thinker. It had afforded him unheard of intellectual freedom and supported him. Bell Lab's somewhat remote location in New Jersey was a complicated factor in its own right. So he's talking about there's a good to that, but also negative.”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “back and forth. So that was the main benefit he got from working on that. So, well, let me just read this. So now this is about the important, like, you know, everybody's going to be influenced by somebody, right? So Shannon was influenced by this person named Ralph Hartley. And it says, reading the work of Ralph Hartley, Shannon said, was an important influence on my life, not simply on the research of his studies. Shannon spent much of his life working with the conceptual tools that Hartley built. And for the better part of his life, much of his public identity, Claude Shannon, father of information theory, was bound up in having been the one who extended Hartley's idea far beyond what Hartley or anyone else could have imagined. So what does that mean? It means that Claude Shannon didn't invent information theory from whole cloth. He extended the work of the people that inspired him before. Now, we've seen this a lot. We just saw this last week. Like, I'm thinking all these ideas that I'm reading from Warren Buffett come from Warren Buffett, then you realize, oh my God, he got these ideas from Henry Singleton. Same thing. I thought all.”

    2019-10-27 · Founders · #95 Claude Shannon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source