Zuse is probably the most under-appreciated thinker of the 20th century. Everybody's heard of Claude Shannon, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the rest of 'em, but Zuse's enormous contributions have received rather little attention. To summarize a couple of the highlights: In 1936 Germany, Konrad Zuse began developing the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine programmed via perforated 35mm film. By 1937, he had broadened…
The argument that the Z3 is universal "was an impressive party trick, but diverged entirely from the way the machine was designed, how it was actually used, or indeed from anything that would have made sense in the 1940s." Source: ENIAC in Action p255.
Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
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Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
#32Although Zuse definitely received too little credit in the West (for somewhat understandable political reasons), there's another Zuse museum in Hünfeld, along with exhibitions at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. So this is not as profound as it might seem. I suspect the main problem with this museum was just that it's off the beaten path.
IIRC they also have sensible documentatioin about his Nazi connections that puts this work into appropriate context.
Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
#33I first heard of Zuse when I spent a week in class in the Zuse conference room at DEC Spit Brook Road, Nashua aka ZKO1. (there were many rooms in that facility named after computing pioneers...)
There were pictures of Zuse and the Z3 in that room, but also an original Konrad Zuse oil painting. I wonder what happened to that painting...
Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
#34Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are also no physical observations that contradict the notion of God. The problem is that no such observations are even possible, or at least no test they could be put to that could disprove the theory.
The notion of god leads immediately to paradoxes and logical contradictions when thinking it through a little bit. It's fine if people have certain believes but let's not put religion on the same level as physics. No such paradoxes exist with the notion of a deterministic computable universe. I concur with the OP when they said Zuse is being waaay underappreciated. He is one of the fathers of the modern computational…
Even the deterministic part has problems, like why does quantum mechanics appear random when it's not or why we see ourselves as having free will. Science can never answer the first one and the second will always be an open question because explaining why something evolved in nature is hard.
A god is no better or worse than alien simulations, or an infinite multiverse, or the anthropic principle (aka giving up), or any other possible explanation for why the universe is the way it is.
Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Initially received funding, later in the war they turned it off as "not war worthy" You might be surprised how many UK and US scientists of that time supported eugenics, see for example https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014 and as for computers and atrocities, see IBM's history from the time or perhaps some more recent tech companies. Few of us are saints.
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Simone de Beauvoir did not have a "future is female" plan, as the modern slogan "The Future is Female" originated decades after her major works and stems from lesbian-separatist contexts in the 1970s.
"She is globally famous for writing in The Second Sex (1949) that "[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," which established that gender is a social construct rather than a fixed biological destiny." (I hazard this is really what you're butthurt about).
"Rather than advocating for female supremacy or a matriarchal "female future," Beauvoir's existentialist framework sought human liberation and radical reciprocity between sexes, arguing that both men and women need to transcend oppressive societal myths of the "Other".
The phrase "The Future is Female" was coined by Liza Cowan in 1975 at a feminist bookstore (A Woman's Place) in Washington, D.C., and later popularized as a modern pop-culture T-shirt slogan in the 2010s, completely separate from Beauvoir's 20th-century existentialism."
------ Trying to find info on a "90% male reduction plan" it looks like what you are referring to is:
The idea of reducing the male population by 90% (leaving a ratio of 10% men to 90% women) comes from the radical American feminist author and activist Sally Miller Gearhart. In her 1982 essay titled "The Future – If There Is One – Is Female,"
Gearhart argued that to achieve global peace and end patriarchal violence, the human sex ratio should be shifted over time. She explicitly clarified that this should not be achieved via violence or culling, but rather through future reproductive technologies and selective breeding ------- Please don't conflate Simone's pluralistic, humanistic, liberating form of feminism with 1970s style "Lesgbian" RadFem ideology.
Please at least get your actors straight when you make claims like this, it almost sounds like I'd be making claims like: (bot) throw234259 wants to genocide every human and especially men.
It's not even remotely true. And it stains your name, because it's easier to just take what you heard without reflecting or retaining (even if google is a search away).
Eugenics is alive in the US Government right now. "Don't get injections, only the strong survive! Drink raw milk, don't you dare have government test it... Swim in Sludge (literal things RFK Jr advises/does)" The Kennedy's were literally eugenicist and threw his aunt in an institution and lobotomized/sterilized her.
If you want a "widely supported today" why didn't you take one of the chief proponents of such ideology as your example? One who hasn't been dead in ages? One who holds power, and is joined in a union with SecDef Pete Hegseth who pushes some "ubermensch" (I'm stwong!) Might-Makes-Right/Fittest-Survives ideology that closely ties in with this ideology.
I would leave it there, too, but you didn't.
Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument that the Z3 is universal "was an impressive party trick, but diverged entirely from the way the machine was designed, how it was actually used, or indeed from anything that would have made sense in the 1940s." Source: ENIAC in Action p255.
> Nevertheless, the Z3 was Turing-complete – how to implement a universal Turing machine on the Z3 was shown in 1998 by Raúl Rojas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument that the Z3 is universal "was an impressive party trick, but diverged entirely from the way the machine was designed, how it was actually used, or indeed from anything that would have made sense in the 1940s." Source: ENIAC in Action p255.
> Nevertheless, the Z3 was Turing-complete – how to implement a universal Turing machine on the Z3 was shown in 1998 by Raúl Rojas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nevertheless, the Z3 was Turing-complete – how to implement a universal Turing machine on the Z3 was shown in 1998 by Raúl Rojas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
Yes, even Rojas says, "From a practical perspective, and in the way the Z3 was really programmed, it was not equivalent to modern computers." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3330654_How_to_make...
Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I don't know how much I can trust you on Zuse if you can't get basic facts about de Beauvoir right: Simone de Beauvoir did not have a "future is female" plan, as the modern slogan "The Future is Female" originated decades after her major works and stems from lesbian-separatist contexts in the 1970s. "She is globally famous for writing in The Second Sex (1949) that "[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," whi…