Gelernter who, incidentally, was one of the people the Unabomber sent a bomb to, is an engineer who writes with curlicues enough to please a poet from the 18th Century. He loves beauty in design and thinks that much of our modern artifacts or machines are needlessly ugly. He likes his old 1938 Emerson radio as a work of art. He likes the MacIntosh desktop as a thing of beauty, contrasted with the ugliness of DOS. He will not go further than to once mention Microsoft's Windows. He thinks that really good software is beautiful; in fact it is good because it is beautiful. He has an idea for what he calls "Streamlines," a way of interfacing with computer and the Internet that he finds elegant. He puts a high value on elegance in technology.
Gelernter also has a sharp and incisive mind. Consider this quote on the nature of consciousness found on page 23. He is talking about computers and brains, debunking the notion that a brain is an "information processor" like a computer. He writes: "...the brain is no mere information processor, it is a meaning creator-and meaning creation is a trick no computer can accomplish. The brain is a lump of hardware artfully arranged so as to produce an I-to create the illusion that some entity inside you is observing the world that your senses conjure up. That rose over there merely triggered, when you saw it, a barrage of neuron firings in your brain. But you have the sensation that some entity-namely, you, not to put too fine a point on it-actually saw the rose. Computers, so far as we can tell, are capable of no such trick." Nicely put!
This is an original and delightful book that might be compared favorably to the work of Henry Petroski who wrote the much admired The Pencil: a History of Design and Circumstance (1990).
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