[HN Gopher] Dr. John von Neumann at the dedication of the NORD (...
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Dr. John von Neumann at the dedication of the NORD (1954)
Author : bindidwodtj
Score : 41 points
Date : 2020-03-07 23:39 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ftp.arl.army.mil)
(TXT) w3m dump (ftp.arl.army.mil)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It would be nice to have a web-friendly audio format for these
| rather than .au.
| ipnon wrote:
| These "natively" formatted HTML documents are perfect for the
| Firefox reader view, which includes text-to-audio.
| peteradio wrote:
| Good point, but unfortunately the text is a subset of the
| audio and we wouldn't hear it in von Neumann's own voice.
| andylynch wrote:
| This page looks to be from the mid-nineties, when it probably
| was- I was still pleasantly surprised the audio played just
| fine in my iPhone browser 25 years later!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Sadly it doesn't appear to work in Chrome on Android.
| ipnon wrote:
| Imagine von Neumann on a podcast like Lex Fridman's "AI Podcast"
| or Eric Weinstein's "The Portal". Would this diminish our view of
| his legacy, for him to come "down to earth"?
| ZhuanXia wrote:
| >Would this diminish our view of his legacy, for him to come
| "down to earth"?
|
| I doubt it. Consider how the greatest minds of the 20th century
| thought of him:
|
| "I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I
| knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother
| in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my
| closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too.
| But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John]
| von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of
| those men and no one ever disputed me."
|
| -- Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner
|
| "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are.
| That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me."
|
| -- Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi to his former PhD student Herb
| Anderson.
|
| "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute
| recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once
| reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover,
| he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also
| translate it at no diminution in speed from its original
| language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by
| asking him to tell me how The Tale of Two Cities started.
| Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite
| the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about
| ten or fifteen minutes."
|
| -- Herman Goldstine, mathematician and computer pioneer.
|
| "I always thought Von Neumann's brain indicated that he was
| from another species, an evolution beyond man."
|
| -- Nobel Laureate Hans A. Bethe.
|
| In his final days, Neumann tragically lost his genius to brain
| cancer. His friend Edward Teller said this about it:
|
| "I think that von Neumann suffered more when his mind would no
| longer function, than I have ever seen any human being suffer."
|
| Gwern has a funny essay about cloning Von Neumann here:
| https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequenci...
|
| As Neumann seemed to be god-like intelligent, highly
| personable, and very kind, if we were to clone any historical
| figure, he seems like a good bet!
| [deleted]
| p1esk wrote:
| He also said something like "if we can nuke them today, why
| wait till tomorrow?", referring to the Soviets.
| ZhuanXia wrote:
| The historical context for that statement is it was made
| when America had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and Stalin's
| Soviet Union, a dictatorship of incomparable
| authoritarianism and delusion, was on the cusp of
| developing such weapons. Few would have predicted that a
| nuclear war would not occur once that happened. Under these
| circumstances, a first strike followed by occupation may
| have been rational. And given the complete insanity,
| cruelty and dehumanizing brutality of Soviet policy in the
| following 50 years, it's possible American occupation of
| the Soviet union would have saved many lives on net. See
| East vs West Berlin, for example. His position on first-
| strike was not very irrational given what was known at the
| time. Even in hindsight, it is hard to say either way.
| mnyary wrote:
| ,,John von Neumann was "violent anti-communist and much
| more militaristic than the norm", according to his own
| words from one of the Senate committee hearings. He was an
| advocate of the "preventive war" strategy (against USSR),
| and was quoted in 1950: "If you say why not bomb [the
| Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today. If you say today
| at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" "
| https://www.quora.com/What-were-John-von-Neumanns-
| political-...
| tomcam wrote:
| We forget that Khrushchev had literally said "We will
| bury you", banging his shoe on the table on international
| TV. He wasn't fucking around. Von Neumann knew many, many
| people tortured, killed, or sent to the gulag by the
| Soviets.
| pinewurst wrote:
| Cut him some slack for having grown up with the Red Terror
| in Hungary.
| p1esk wrote:
| Then he must also had lived through White Terror:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Hungary)
| blfr wrote:
| There is no slack to cut. There is literally nothing
| worse in human history than communism. He was simply
| right about it.
|
| In Warsaw, after the war, when it fell under Soviet
| occupation, a popular opposition slogan was _Truman,
| Truman, spusc ta bania, bo to nie do wytrzymania_ which
| roughly translates to _Truman, Truman, drop the nukes,
| because we can 't take this any more_. Irradiated ruins
| were preferable to communism.
| p1esk wrote:
| My grandparents lived through both communism and WWII. To
| them, the war was much worse.
| Game_Ender wrote:
| I believe this machine is really the NORC [0]. Some highlights
| from the Wikipedia article: It had 2000 words of memory, each
| that stored a ~13 digit decimal number and it ran at about ~15000
| operations/second. It was considered the most powerful computer
| in the word when released, and at the dedication it set a record
| for pi @ 3089 digits, calculated in 13 minutes.
|
| 0 -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Naval_Ordnance_Research_...
| tomcam wrote:
| Thrilling if you know who he is. Also nice not to hear the awful
| (to me) mid-Atlantic accent favored by American public speakers
| until about 1995
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(page generated 2020-03-08 23:00 UTC)