George Spencer Brown’s “Design with the NOR”


Book Description

A polymath and author of Laws of Form, George Spencer Brown, brought together mathematics, electronics, engineering and philosophy to form an unlikely bond. This book investigates Design with NOR, the title of the yet unpublished 1961 typescript by Spencer Brown.




George Spencer Brown’s “Design with the NOR”


Book Description

A polymath and author of Laws of Form, George Spencer Brown, brought together mathematics, electronics, engineering and philosophy to form an unlikely bond. This book investigates Design with NOR, the title of the yet unpublished 1961 typescript by Spencer Brown.







The United States of Absurdity


Book Description

The creators of the podcast The Dollop present illustrated profiles of the weird, outrageous, NSFW, and downright absurd tales from American history that you weren't taught in school. The United States of Absurdity presents short, informative, and hilarious stories of the most outlandish (but true) people, events, and more from United States history. Comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds cover the weird stories you didn't learn in history class, such as 10-Cent Beer Night, the Jackson Cheese, and the Kentucky Meat Shower, accompanied by full-page illustrations that bring each historical "milestone" to life in full-color.




Laws Of Form: A Fiftieth Anniversary


Book Description

Laws of Form is a seminal work in foundations of logic, mathematics and philosophy published by G Spencer-Brown in 1969. The book provides a new point of view on form and the role of distinction, markedness and the absence of distinction (the unmarked state) in the construction of any universe. A conference was held August 8-10, 2019 at the Old Library, Liverpool University, 19 Abercromby Square, L697ZN, UK to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Laws of Form and to remember George Spencer-Brown, its author. The book is a collection of papers introducing and extending Laws of Form written primarily by people who attended the conference in 2019.




Peirce and Spencer-Brown


Book Description

This special double issue of Cybernetics and Human Knowing is comprised of a collection of papers devoted to the cybernetics and mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce with a special focus on its synergies with George Spencer-Brown's thinking. Peirce was a truly original American philosopher and logician working in the late 1800s and early 1900s; Spencer-Brown is an English polymath, best known as the author of Laws of Form. The contributions reflect the extraordinary richness of Peirce's work and his relevance to present concerns in cybernetics. The similarities in the focus on some of the deep foundational subjects are astonishing, amongst those especially the concept of the void or Firstness and the continuity of mind and matter.




Segregation by Design


Book Description

Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Starting in the early twentieth century, cities have used their power of land use control to determine the location and availability of housing, amenities (such as parks), and negative land uses (such as garbage dumps). The result has been segregation - first within cities and more recently between them. Documenting changing patterns of segregation and their political mechanisms, Trounstine argues that city governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor. Contrary to leading theories of urban politics, local democracy has not functioned to represent all residents. The result is unequal access to fundamental local services - from schools, to safe neighborhoods, to clean water.




Iconic Arithmetic Volume I


Book Description

Arithmetic evolves. Iconic arithmetic is built from icons that look and feel like what they mean, rather than from strings of symbols that must be memorized. The book explores the formal structure of two types of postsymbolic boundary arithmetic. Ensemble arithmetic modernizes tallies to provide forms that add together by being placed together and multiply by being placed inside one another. James algebra defines the concepts and operations of arithmetic as different ways of arranging containers. Three simple axioms are sufficient. Features of iconic arithmetic include (1) a void with no representation and no properties instead of the symbol zero; (2) void-equivalent forms that can be freely deleted; (3) meaning based on existence of structure rather than truth or numerical value; (4) only one relation (containment) to represent all forms; and (5) construction and deletion to implement all transformations. Iconic forms and transformations can be represented as two and three dimensional structures that can be directly viewed, manipulated, and even inhabited. Many different spatial interactive dialects are described. The author explores this new kind of arithmetic from the perspectives of historical evolution, formal mathematics, computer science and mathematics education. The overall objective is to provide proof of principle that our current universal approach to the arithmetic of numbers is a design choice rather than a truth embedded in numbers themselves. Iconic Arithmetic recognizes that knowledge is embodied, multidimensional, sensual, simple. It helps us to transition into a postsymbolic world of interactive information.




The Morgans


Book Description

The House of Morgan personified economic power in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Carosso constructs an in-depth account of the evolution, operations, and management of the Morgan banks at London, New York, Philadelphia, and Paris, from the time Junius Spencer Morgan left Boston for London to the death of his son, John Pierpont Morgan.




Enthusiastic Mathematics


Book Description

Fifty years ago, a small sparse book came out under the pretentious title Laws of Form. Its author might have once fallen in with the logical philosophers of Cambridge, including Russell and Wittgenstein. But only later, while designing primitive switching circuits for British Rail, did George Spencer Brown come upon the arithmetic underlying Boolean algebra. Laws of Form flips the reduction of mathematics to logic, revealing simple laws of being and knowing that only reflect what great mystics, East and West, have been saying all along. Enthusiastic Mathematics offers the first thorough, philosophical introduction to Laws of Form. With no presumption for logic or mathematics, the reader is delivered into its philosophical vision via a colourful journey through the history of science.