When I was a little boy, among the gifts from my parents that I treasured most were science kits that allowed me to construct my own instrumentation and use it for various experiments and observations, e.g., microscopes, radios and other electronic circuitry, chemistry sets, ingenious language games, and so on.\u00a0 (This was in the late 40s and 50s in rural Stark County, northeast Ohio, mind you, when I was between the ages of about 5 and 15.)\u00a0 But my favorite of all was a box full of materials for computer construction.\u00a0 It consisted of a peg board, switches, wires, screws, small nuts and bolts, metal bands and clips, batteries, little light bulbs, etc.\u00a0 Please remember that this was long before personal computers were invented.<\/p>\r\n
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I mention this now because of the stimulating discussion going on over at this Language Log post:\u00a0 \"Electronic brain<\/a>\" (7\/28\/22).\u00a0 There we're wrangling over differences between calculators (machines) and brains (organic \/ neural), and which serves as a better model for computers.\u00a0 The differing importance between software and hardware is also under intense scrutiny.<\/p>\r\n The box my mom and dad gave me included an instruction manual explaining how to assemble the hardware, but there was no fixed configuration.\u00a0 There were some sample setups that showed how switches (yes-no, on-off, 0-1 — all binary in nature) could be used to solve simple problems, and there were suggestions for more complicated assemblages.\u00a0 But the most amazing, wonderful thing of all was that there were no restrictions on the arrangements that one could design and the questions that one could attempt to answer.\u00a0 I probably spent two solid weeks entranced by that beloved \"machine \/ brain\" that I built and rebuilt myself numerous times.\u00a0 Then the Yuletide vacation came to an end and I went back to school, but I think that the lessons I learned from being totally immersed in my \"machine \/ brain\" for those two weeks left an indelible impression on the way I approach problems that has lasted to this very day.<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\r\n When I was a little boy, among the gifts from my parents that I treasured most were science kits that allowed me to construct my own instrumentation and use it for various experiments and observations, e.g., microscopes, radios and other electronic circuitry, chemistry sets, ingenious language games, and so on.\u00a0 (This was in the late […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196,184,293,258],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-computers","category-language-and-education","category-language-and-psychology","category-language-and-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55476"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55490,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55476\/revisions\/55490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\r\n
\u00a0<\/pre>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"