Monday, August 10, 2009

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] collective genius

greetings yasminers

first i think "genius" is a kind of funny self defeating term, you need propagation for a genious and thus its a social construct and not an individual.

one example i would like to explore is Margaret Hamilton who directed the team that developped the software in the saturn5 and apollo linking, for the first time in civilian evirionments, the pyrotechnics developed by the nazi engineers, with the gyroscopes, telecoms and astronomical calulations of trajectory and speed.

her work was so good that the whole softwre did not have one significant bug or glitch in 15 flights and somehow nobody has ever herd about her.

also it was arround the saturn5 team (a collective geniuas run by one discrete woman) that people learned about flowcharts and programming computers to do things

see

http://www.klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/gnc.htm

and in particular

http://www.klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/1711.pdf

p19 for the role of margaret hmilton

and also this rahter creepy


http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11Hamilton.html

so we have here a process (the intorduction of computers into civil society and the use of large scale complex planning tools) that happend arround the saturn5 apollo programe at nasa, this did play a hughe role in shaping our ways today, smart and effective, new and productive work of a genius..

but she was not available for interviews

be well
r


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