Tag Archives: Computers

The author on a blue background wearing Apple AirPods.

On Machinery

On Machinery – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, for the penultimate post of the Wednesday Blog, how machinery needs constant maintenance to keep functioning.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D Surekha Davies, “Walter Raleigh’s headless monsters and annotation as thinking,” in Strange and Wonderous: Notes from a Science Historian, (6 October 2025).[2] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.
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This week, for the penultimate post of the Wednesday Blog, how machinery needs constant maintenance to keep functioning.

I am just old enough to remember life before the ubiquity of computers. I had access to our family computer as long as I can remember, and to my grandparents’ computer at their condo when we stayed with them in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. Yet even then my computer usage was limited often to idle fascination. I did most of my schoolwork by hand through eighth grade, only switching from writing to typing most of my work when I started high school and was issued a MacBook by my school. I do think that a certain degree of whimsy and humanity has faded from daily life as we’ve so fully adopted our ever newly invented technologies. Those machines can do things that in my early childhood would’ve seemed wonderous. Recently, I thought how without knowing how powerful and far-reaching my computer is as a vehicle for my research and general curiosity, I would be happy, delighted in fact, if my computer could conduct one function, say if it had the ability to look up any street address in the United States as a device connected to the US Postal Service’s database. That alone would delight me. Yet that is the function of not just one application on my computer but merely one of many functions of several such programs I can load on this device, and not only can I look up addresses in the United States but I can look up addresses in any country on this planet.

With the right software downloaded onto this computer I can read any document printed or handwritten in all of human history and leave annotations and highlights without worrying about damaging the original source. Surekha Davies wrote warmly in favor of annotating in her newsletter this week, and I appreciated her take on the matter.[1] In high school, I was a bit of a prude when it came to annotating; I found that summer reading assignment in my freshman and sophomore English classes to be almost repulsive because I see a book as a work of art crafted by its author, editor, and publisher to be a very specific way. To annotate, I argued, was like drawing a curly-cue mustache on the Mona Lisa, a crude act at best. Because of this I process knowledge from books differently. I now often take photos of individual pages and organize them into albums on my computer which I can then consult if I’m writing about a particular book, in much the same fashion that I use when I’m in the archive or special collections room looking at a historical text.

All of these images can now not only be sorted into my computer’s photo library, now stored in the cloud and accessible on my computer and phone alike, but they can also be merged together into one common PDF file, the main file type I use for storing primary and secondary sources for my research. With advances in artificial intelligence, I can now use the common top-level search feature on my computer to look within files for specific characters, words, or phrases to varying levels of accuracy. This is something that was barely getting off the ground when I started working on my doctorate six years ago, and today it makes my job a lot easier; just my file folder containing all of the peer-reviewed articles I’ve used in my research since 2019 contains 349 files and is 887.1 MB in size.

Our computers are merely the latest iterations of machines. The first computer, Charles Babbage’s (1791–1871) counting machine worked in a fairly similar fashion to our own albeit built of mechanical levers and gears where ours have intricate electronics in their hard drives. I, like many others, was introduced to Babbage and his difference engine by seeing the original in the Science Museum in London. This difference engine was a mechanical calculator intended to compute mathematical functions. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) both developed similar mechanisms in the seventeenth century and still older the Ancient Greek 2nd century BCE Antikythera mechanism can complete some of the same functions. Yet between all of these the basic idea that a computer works in mathematical terms remains the same even today. For all the linguistic foundations of computer code, the functions of any machine burn down to the binary operations of ones and zeros. I wrote last year in this blog about my befuddlement that artificial intelligence has largely been created on verbal linguistic models and was only in 2024 being trained on mathematical ones.[2] Yet even then those mathematical models were understood by the A.I. in English, making their computations fluent only in one specific dialect of the universal language of mathematics making their functionality mostly useless for the vast majority of humanity.

Yet I wonder how true that last statement really is? After all, I a native English speaker with recent roots in Irish learned grammar like many generations of my ancestors through learning to read and write in Latin. English grammar generally made no sense to me in elementary school, it is after all very irregular in a lot of ways, and so it was only after my introduction to a very orderly language, the one for which our Roman alphabet was first adapted, that I began to understand how English works. The ways in which we understand language in a Western European and American context rely on the classical roots of our pedagogy influenced in their own time by medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment notions of the interconnectedness of the individual and society alike. I do not know how many students today in countries around the globe are learning their mathematics through English in order to compete in one of the largest linguistic job markets of our time. All of this may well be rendered moot by the latest technological leap announced by Apple several weeks ago that their new AirPods will include a live translation feature acting as a sort of Babel Fish or universal translator depending on which science fiction reference you prefer.

Yet those AirPods will break down eventually. They are physical objects, and nothing which exists in physical space is eternal. Shakespeare wrote it well in The Temepst that 

“The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.” (4.1.170-175)

For our machines to last, they must be maintained, cleaned, given breaks just like the workers who operate them lest they lose all stamina and face exhaustion most grave. Nothing lasts forever, and the more those things are allowed to rest and recuperate the more they are then able to work to their fullest. So much of our literature from the last few centuries has been about fearing the machines and the threat they pose. If we are made in the Image of God then machines, our creation, are made in the image of us. They are the products of human invention and reflect back to us ourselves yet without the emotion that makes us human. Can a machine ever feel emotion? Could HAL-9000 feel fear or sorrow, could Data feel joy or curiosity? And what of the living beings who in our science fiction retrofitted their bodies with machinery in some cases to the extent that they became more machine than human? What emotion could they then feel? One of the most tragic reveals for me in Doctor Who was that the Daleks (the Doctor’s main adversaries) are living beings who felt so afraid and threatened that they decided to encase the most vital parts of their physical bodies in wheelchair tanks, shaped like pepper shakers no less, rendering them resilient adversaries for anyone who crossed them. Yet what remained of the being inside? I urge caution with suggestions of the metaverse or other technological advances that draw us further from our lived experiences and more into the computer. These allow us to communicate yet real human emotion is difficult to express beyond living, breathing, face-to-face interactions.

After a while these machines which have our attention distract us from our lives and render us blind to the world around us. I liked to bring this up when I taught Plato’s allegory of the cave to college freshmen in my Western Civilization class. I conclude the lesson by remarking that in the twenty-first century we don’t need a cave to isolate ourselves from the real world, all we need is a smartphone and a set of headphones and nothing else will exist. I tried to make this humorous, in an admittedly dark fashion, by reminding them to at least keep the headphones on a lighter mode so they can hear their surroundings and to look up from their phone screen when crossing streets lest they find themselves flattened like the proverbial cartoon coyote on the front of a city bus. 

If we focus too much on our machines, we lose ourselves in the mechanism, we forget to care for ourselves and attend to our needs. The human body is the blueprint for all human inventions whether physical ones like the machine or abstract like society itself. As I think further about the problems our society faces, I conclude that at the core there is a deep neglect of the human at the heart of everything. I see this in the way that disasters are reported on in the press: often the financial toll is covered before the human cost, clearly demonstrating that the value of the dollar outweighs the value of the human. In abdicating ourselves to our own abstractions and social ideals we lose the potential to change our course, repair the machinery, or update the software to a better version with new security patches and fixes for glitches old and new. In spite of our immense societal wealth, ever advancing scientific threshold, and technological achievement we still haven’t gotten around to solving hunger, illiteracy, or poverty. In spite of our best intentions our worst instincts keep drawing us into wars that only a few of us want.The Mazda Rua, my car, is getting older and I expect if I keep driving it for a few years or more it’ll eventually need more and more replacement parts until it becomes a Ship of Theseus, yet is not the idea of a machine the same even if its parts are replaced? That idea is the closest I can come to imagining a machine having a soul as natural things like us have. The Mazda Rua remained the Mazda Rua even after its brakes were replaced in January and its slow leaking tire was patched in May. Yet as it moves into its second decade, that old friend of mine continues to work in spite of the long drives and all the adventures I’ve put it through. Our machinery is in desperate need of repair, yet a few of us see greater profit from disfunction than they figure they would get if they actually put in the effort, money, and time to fix things. If problems are left unattended to for long periods of time they will eventually lead to mechanical failure. The same is true for the machinery of the body and of the state. Sometimes a good repair is called for, reform to the mechanisms of power which will make the machine work better for its constituent parts. In this moment that need for reform is being met with the advice of a bad mechanic looking more at his bottom line than at the need of the mechanism he’s agreed to repair. Only on this level the consequences of mechanical failure are dire.

[1] Surekha Davies, “Walter Raleigh’s headless monsters and annotation as thinking,” in Strange and Wonderous: Notes from a Science Historian, (6 October 2025).

[2] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.

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Physical Books or Electronic Books

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Welcome to Season 2 of the Wednesday Blog Podcast!

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There’s a Thomas Jefferson quote that has stuck with me since the first time I saw it in the room at the Library of Congress that houses his first donation to that institution: “I cannot live without books.” It’s something I think of from time to time, looking around the office here in my apartment at the tall bookshelves lined with volumes covering topics from astronomy to ancient literature in Latin and Greek to Catholic theology to history, politics, and fiction. I collect books, largely to read but also because I love the potential that books hold; all the stories they have waiting to be revealed page by page.

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself more and more gravitating towards electronic books on Kindle, Google Play, and all the academic e-book hosting sites that I use for my research and teaching. E-books are just easier to carry. I can have an entire library right there on my phone for me to choose from when I’m having dinner alone in a restaurant here in Binghamton or when I’m tired of listening to podcasts or reading magazines on a long flight. E-books also make stories more accessible. There’s a now rare novel written by the actor Andrew Robinson about his character Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called A Stitch in Time that I often see people complaining about how hard to find it is in paperback. Yet I was able to download it in just a few minutes on Google Play and read it cover to cover in a few days. 

Kindle now even has a feature where if you have the book on their app and the recording of it on Audible you can listen to some segments of it when you’re driving and then your location in the e-book will update with your progress in the audiobook. I haven’t used it yet, there’s a biography I’m listening to now about the explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) that I could probably also be reading on the Kindle app on my phone when I have a free minute during office hours or at dinner, but I’m also enjoying just listening to it while driving around the hills here in Broome County, New York.

As an author, at least with the three books I’ve self-published to date (all available on Amazon) I usually prefer people buy the paperback versions because I’ll get more in royalties out of those than out of the e-book copies. Still, as a reader I admit I would often choose the e-book on a given day over the paperback solely for the convenience.

One thought that keeps coming to mind for me returns me to my own childhood and those wonderful mysterious days spent in the small library that my parents collected in our house in Wheaton when I was little. That same library came with us down to Kansas City and consumed our then-unfinished basement. At one point we had probably around 10,000 books in that collection of all sorts and stripes. Today, though I also picture not only my younger self but my own future children, if I’m so lucky, and ask “if I choose to go with e-books over physical ones, will my children have the same experiences I had pulling the odd book from the shelf because it looks interesting and flipping through it?” Those experiences of lounging around just flipping through books as a young child was instrumental in making me who I am today. There are so many stories that I read that way. Even now I sometimes like going into a library just to wander and see what I’ll find. 

On a recent visit to the Bartle Library at my university I had a specific book in mind that I was looking for, Gerald of Wales’s 1188 book the Topography of Ireland, which has been useful for my dissertation. Yet after I found it, I noticed another book next to it that seemed intriguing. It was bound in a blue cover, and called the Annals of Connacht, the westernmost of the four ancient provinces of Ireland, my ancestors’ home province. I pulled it off the shelf and flipped it open, quickly figuring out how to navigate its pages. Soon then, I looked up first my ancestors’ old parish, Burrishoole in County Mayo, and secondly, I looked up my own family name, Ó Catháin, to see what was in there. Both Burrishoole and Ó Catháin had entries, the former was less insightful to me than the latter, for it turned out there was a guy with my exact name who lived in Connacht in the 1520s, another Seán mac Tomás Ó Catháin. Maybe he was an ancestor of mine, it’s possible even though there are big gaps in the records during the height of the colonial period.

I could have stumbled upon that same collection of annals online and have done just that many a time with old books such as the Annals of Connacht, yet it doesn’t have quite the same feeling of accomplishment as finding that book in the flesh, holding it in my hands. I’ve joked that I deal with my primal desire as a human to hunt in two ways: firstly I hunt for food in the grocery store, and secondly I hunt for books in the library. Yeah, I know, it’s pretty corny. And while hunting for books in a library surely wouldn’t compare to hunting for a living animal in a forest, matching your wits against its own, I can say that hunting for books online can be more frustrating than hunting for books in person. When on foot in a library all you really need to worry about is that the library’s catalog system is accurate, when online you also have to figure out how to communicate with the various computer systems that are making your e-book hunt possible. 

Earlier this year when I was searching for import records and ships logs from the French port of Rouen between 1500 and 1567 for my research I found myself dealing with a third layer of complexity: a computer system that can’t actually read the original 500-year old handwritten documents, meaning you just have to hope that whoever imported the document into the system typed enough information into the computer that you can find what you’re looking for. On that one count: the easier legibility of e-books over printed ones, the easier transmission of their stories and information, and the fact that we can now share knowledge around the globe as fast as our data streams will carry that information gives me good reason to prefer e-books. But still, I want my future kids, if I’m so lucky, to have that experience of pulling books from my shelves and wandering through them, discovering that same love of reading that I’ve had all these years.

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The voice of Thomas Jefferson was provided by Michael Ashcraft, voice actor extraordinaire. You can learn more about his work by visiting his website here.

The End of Handwriting?

I still remember my first ever school assignment. It was in March 1999, my second semester of Kindergarten. The job was to learn how to write the number “1”, which in the U.S. is normally just written like a vertical line (|). I didn’t listen to all of the instructions, and brought my work back to my teacher, who was flabbergasted to see I had written slashes (/) across the page. It was not only my first assignment, but also my first F. Now, 22 years and eight schools/universities later, it’s interesting to me to look back at the early years in my life when I was learning to write my letters, first in print, and later starting in second grade in cursive.

I grew to be fairly proud of my handwriting, for how fluid it steadily became, but especially for how much it seemed to reflect back on my own personality. Yet in the last few years I’ve found myself writing things by hand far less than ever before, and since starting my first MA in London six years ago, handwritten notes have become a hassle to transport back and forth to Kansas City.

For me, of any of the essential skills I learned in my elementary school years, cursive was the one that seemed the most validating. Everything official, proper, or grown-up that I knew about that wasn’t printed by a press or typed on a computer was written in cursive. I even tried to emulate my favorite cursive handwriting, that being Thomas Jefferson’s on the Declaration of Independence, which after seeing it on the wall in so many classrooms over the years was almost as familiar an image to me as any classic and often replicated picture, like George Washington Crossing the Delaware or the shot of Sammy Sosa hitting a home run that I had up on my bedroom wall as a kid (Go Cubs!)

As a result of my interest in emulating that older style of cursive, I quickly moved past the standard style of cursive script that we were taught at my parochial school, the D’Nealian style, with its regimented curves and extra humps on the n and m, to something that was all my own, yet still mostly legible for my teachers, except of course for when I tried reintroducing the old long s character among the double-s in my handwriting, making Congress appear as it did in the 18th century as Congreſs. I was quick to decide that it was better to keep the long-s out of homework, lest it lose me credit, and use it for fun though.

When I started my college years, now a full decade ago, my experience with handwriting seemed to undergo a sort of flowering. I quickly found that I could remember more information if I hand-wrote it, and developed a very particular style of note-taking that was entirely my own. What’s more, I insisted on taking all of my notes on a type of yellow legal paper that worked perfectly for what I was trying to do. In 2010 and 2011, at the end of my high school years, I’d expanded my writing to include the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, and often found it fun to try and write down names and other important notes in English but using those alphabets rather than the usual Latin one, just to see how things would work out.

Over the four years that I was an undergrad, and briefly during my two years working on my History MA at UMKC (2017-2019), I used this system to its fullest extent, and really grew to enjoy the process of putting the ideas being discussed at the front of the room down on paper, always imagining that someday I’d go back and look at those notes. In all honesty, I actually have done that from time to time, but usually when I’m looking for something specific in those notes.

My experiences moving across the water to do my first MA at the University of Westminster in International Relations and Democratic Politics (2015-2016) spelled the first end for my use of handwritten notes. I took my yellow legal paper with me, but as I discovered, it seemed less useful to take regular notes in my classes when I wasn’t being graded on the material covered in the lectures, and overall any documents I created while in London would have to be brought back with me to Kansas City when I finished my degree there. That simple need to conserve space, and the benefit of having a computer that’s perfectly capable of recording writing made my handwritten note taking fairly untenable.

Today, as I’m working on my doctorate, I still occasionally take notes by hand, though usually only in the form of edits to typed documents and even more specifically only when I’m in Kansas City where I have easy access to a printer. Like my experience in London, the need for the things I’m taking back and forth across the eastern half of the U.S. to fit in my Mazda means that it’s more helpful if I don’t have a big set of file folders full of handwritten notes in tow. Plus, today I have everything filed away digitally on my computer, meaning every set of notes I have on a specific book or a specific article, or on a lecture I heard is easy to find with my computer’s search tools. Today, if I can have a book or an article available for me to digitally take notes on it, then I’ll take that option a thousand times over having the physical paper document or paperback in front of me any day.

I don’t know how much I’ll use my handwriting in the future, now that I don’t use it for work. I’ve never been too fond of writing my fiction by hand either, it usually takes much longer than typing it, and my thinking through a story often happens much faster than my hands can write with pen and paper. I still try to send handwritten letters and cards to people when I can, though again when the ease and utility of computers and smartphones is brought into the discussion it quickly becomes evident that any “snail mail” is almost as much of an antique as using an old fashioned typewriter; while those older technologies work, they fall short of the efficiency of the new in many ways.

So, is this the end of handwriting for me? Maybe. I certainly think cursive should still be taught in schools, but I concede the fact that my own experience has shown that with the rise of so much still fairly new digital technology, including every device that you are reading this on, has made a fair deal of handwritten communication redundant.