The Project Gutenberg eBook, On Handling the Data, by M. I. Mayfield,
Illustrated by Freas

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Title: On Handling the Data

Author: M. I. Mayfield

Release Date: November 10, 2007 [eBook #23429]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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... ON ... HANDLING THE DATA

by

M. I. MAYFIELD

Illustrated by Freas

[Illustration]

_Sometimes a story is best told by omission--!_

September 16, 1957

Dr. Robert Von Engen, Editor
Journal of the National Academy of Sciences,
Constitution Avenue, N. W.,
Washington, D. C.

Dear Sir:

I am taking the liberty of writing you this letter since I read your
published volume, "Logical Control: The Computer vs. Brain" (Silliman
Memorial Lecture Series, 1957), with the hope that you can perhaps offer
me some advice and also publish this letter in the editorial section.
Your mathematical viewpoint on the analysis between computing machines
and the living human brain, especially the conclusion that the brain
operates in part digitally and in part analogically, using its own
statistical language involving selection, conditional transfer orders,
branching, and control sequence points, et cetera, makes me feel that
only you can offer me some information with logical _arithmetic depth_.

The questions raised in this letter are designed principally to reach
the embryonic and juvenile scientists ... the _scientists-elect_, so to
speak. (I think the "mature scientists" are irretrievably lost.) For
many reasons, some of which will be explained in the following
paragraphs, I think that it is of the greatest importance that some
stimulatable audie