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@@ -34,6 +34,13 @@ in [_Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine_](h
from the Greek _kybernetes_, the steersman, because the steering engine of a ship was one
of the earliest feedback mechanisms anyone built.
{{<imagesrc="images/cybernetics-cover.jpg"alt="The MIT Press cover of Cybernetics: a black and white photograph of Norbert Wiener in heavy black glasses and a goatee, standing at a blackboard">}}
The book itself was an unlikely hit. It is a monograph with real mathematics in it, and
it still went through printing after printing and turned cybernetics into a word
ordinary people used. It also put its author in the public eye: the heavy black glasses,
the goatee, and a blackboard never far behind him.
Feedback, error, signal and noise, the message as the unit of a system: that vocabulary
came out of Wiener and the [Macy conferences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences)
around him, and it is now so ordinary that nobody remembers it had to be invented.
@@ -118,6 +125,12 @@ files.
-[Norbert Wiener](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener) on Wikipedia
-[_Ex-Prodigy_ and _I Am a Mathematician_](https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/3147/Norbert-Wiener-A-Life-in-CyberneticsEx-Prodigy-My), his two volumes of autobiography, free from MIT Press
-[The Norbert Wiener papers](https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/600) at the MIT archives
-[_Out of Control_, chapter 7](https://kk.org/mt-files/outofcontrol/ch7-c.html), where
Kevin Kelly retells how a mathematics monograph became a 1948 bestseller
-[_The Charismatic Cultural Life of Cybernetics_](https://cjc.utppublishing.com/doi/10.22230/cjc.2017v42n3a3205),
a 2017 paper on Wiener as an early media-visible scientist
-[The 1965 MIT Press paperback](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9594732M/Cybernetics) of _Cybernetics_
in the Open Library catalogue
-[The original wiki page](https://wiki.hsbxl.be/NorbertWiener) this one replaces, last edited in August 2010
- Hacker News has been chewing on him for years, most usefully on
[his relationship with Russell](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619347) and on
