Deviation Actions
I gather he was a much-misunderstood individual. A great many people seem to have assumed, as I did, that he was a rock singer, though he emphatically denied it.
My excuse for assuming he was a rock singer is that I paid very little attention to him. I would guess that I heard his name perhaps a dozen times during his career, so I was aware he existed, but that is as far as it went. His singing, the little of it that I could not avoid hearing, was as dull as dishwater -- which, come to think of it, may be why some people enjoyed hearing it, and assumed it was "rock".
Just what sort of performer was he, then? Perhaps I will not be too far off the mark if I say he was a professional mimic. His stock-in-trade was the endless stream of personalities he could assume.
He was like Robin Williams that way. The difference was the rate at which they could switch "contexts" (as we say in computing). Bowie would switch every few months, while Williams could switch every few seconds.
In a way, I am like that also, but I have never aspired to "operate" myself as a "puppet" or "mask", as Williams put it. Rather, I aspire to teach a computer to behave like an arbitrarily specified avatar or "golem".
A Golem, you see, is an artificial person; the Golem is a figure in Jewish folklore. No such tale is better known than that of the Golem of Prague, created by the Rabbi Loeb. Feel free to google it. It is in honor of that, that I use the handle "golem" myself. I don't really want to be making artwork and posting it here, or writing these Journal entries, for example. I would rather be letting an application called "Golem 1.0" do it. Perhaps one day I will get up the gumption to actually write such an application; I've given it a lot of thought.
Does Trump believe in 'climate change'?
Rest in peace H. R. Giger
'North Korea accuses South and US ...
The World Wars
Modern usage outside of the Czech Republic is probably traceable to MIT mathematician Norbert Weiner, specifically his book "God and Golem, Inc." Certainly that is where I first encountered it. Weiner also coined the term "cybernetics" in its modern usage, specifically in his book "Cybernetics and Society: The Human Use of Human Beings" IIRC.
By "cybernetics" he meant a specific discipline: The study of communication and control in man and machine.
I can't do better here than to quote from Wikipedia:
Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine."[2] The word cybernetics comes from Greek κυβερνητική (kybernetike), meaning "governance", i.e., all that are pertinent to κυβερνάω (kybernao), the latter meaning "to steer, navigate or govern", hence κυβέρνησις (kybernesis), meaning "government", is the government while κυβερνήτης (kybernetes) is the governor or the captain. Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology in the 1940s, often attributed to the Macy Conferences. During the second half of the 20th century cybernetics evolved in ways that distinguish first-order cybernetics (about observed systems) from second-order cybernetics (about observing systems).[3] More recently there is talk about a third-order cybernetics (doing in ways that embraces first and second-order).[4]
It's worth noting that the modern English word "government" comes from the same Greek root.
These days the word is often shortened to "cyber" and used as either a noun or and adjective, so I won't be surprised to see it soon used as a verb. Heaven only knows what those who use it that way think it means.