Sweet Potato Blog

20230610 - Introduction 24 hour electronic prohibition? I like this idea. 20230705 - The medium is the metaphor Metaphor? I prefer to call it "projection". This book is more about psychology and philosophy. Photo and video give us more objective details, but making us distracted by those details. Text is with much less details, and it is easy to be distorted, but it let us to observe the subject from higher level. So, colour inversion on screen make sense: it let us skip the unnecessary details and focus on important content. Without media(projection), we cannot perceive the reality. So media is part of content. Some content, if there is no much details, then it's very hard to express it through photo or video. 20230722 - Media as epistemology The wise Solomon, we are told in First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. p25 People believed that Solomon was wise 3000 years ago because he could remember so many proverbs. Today, if someone has very good memory, or can understa...

20230520 - Preface: My Teachers Mr Sagan's parents are amazing, especially his father. Can I keep writing the numbers from 1 to 1000 so my child could take bath? Knowledge is not as important as attitude/methods. United States have normal primary schools and high schools, which are as bad as other countries. But they do have brilliant professors in amazing Universities. Carl Sagan is talented and lucky. 20230522 - The most precious thing Pseudoscience is the first step of religion, I think. Why is it so easy for people to fall into pseudoscience?  1. Because we are lazy. We don't want to spend time and energy to think it through. We just follow our gut feeling and quickly get conclusions. 2. Many people are uneducated. They don't know how to tell the difference between science and pseudoscience. When someone tells us that Earth is a huge ball and "float" in space, it sounds just as weird as we imagine that we live on the back of a giant turtle. An example: if we b...

20230515 - Introduction Chip manufacturing industry is extremely high efficent, and extremely fragile. How long will it take to turn it into distributed manufacturing mode? 5 years (2028)? 20230517 - Part I: cold war chips From steel to silicon Good to know where the word "debug" come from: vacumn tube attract moth, and moth cause problem, so it needs "debug". At the end of WW2, people realized that precise attack is much more powerful than large scale attack, but that need fast and low cost computation. The switch The breakthrough is inevitable. Why silicon has such property? Noyce, Kilby and the integrated circuit This is the low hanging fruits after the breakthrough. Liftoff Mortars and mass production "I...WANT...TO...GET...RICH" Like "Why Nations Fail" said, innovation needs many necessary factors. After WW2, USA has all of them: money, talents, fair institutions, knowledge base. 20230530 - Part II: the circuitry of the American world Soviet...