i'm not sure if things still are as they were, but it used to be that many that post to the board rarely read many of the articles on the homepage
i still read many of them and find that they may even be better than before (and they were always pretty decent...with the exception of the evolutionary jazz they so often contain)
this one was not only interesting but virtually evolution free...
thanx rusty, for an interesting and well written article
There are many abstract, philosophical variations of the term, but cybernetics can be summed up neatly for our purposes as the study and development of communication feedback systems that control living organisms and machines. Important to cybernetics was the interfacing of a number of scientific fields during the 1940s; including electrical network theory, neuroscience and control systems. The man who first coined the phrase was the legendary mathematician Norbert Wiener who, unsurprisingly, saw the fracturing of science into specialized fields a somewhat limiting development in certain respects. "There are fields of scientific work... which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have become classical in the next field," Wiener observed, in his seminal work, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
this article also highlights a sidetopic that has been one of my soapboxes for years...
the specialization that has become so prevalent in today's education system...is not necessarily always a good thing
scifi goes waycool cybersci
