Morlock Elloi on Fri, 29 Mar 2019 00:12:10 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> rage against the machine |
Seemingly totally unrelated:1. flight recorders are brightly colored these days. The term "black box" originates in WW2, mostly because the first flight recorders, as all other "secret" electronics, was housed in metal boxes painted matte black.
See https://web.archive.org/web/20171019110346/http://siiri.tampere.fi/displayObject.do?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.profium.com%2Farchive%2FArchivedObject-8077CE76-2B43-6FAA-D11C-77AAFD6C72E8
2. Schematic "black box", meaning circuitry/algorithm that is opaque and not supposed to be seen or understood, and only I/O is available also originates in WW2.
It's hilarious that #1 and #2 overlap again these days, as most airlines have no capability of examining their own flight recorders, so we are back to black boxes: Ethiopian Airlines refused to hand over their black boxes to Americans, as they don't trust them. Instead they gave them to the French (this really existing trust hierarchy is getting interesting.) For Ethiopian Airlines, the brightly colored flight recorders are true black boxes: the input was something their aircraft generated, and the output is something that French will generate. Ethiopian Airlines doesn't get to understand the rest.
So term "black box" is fully justified and interchangeable with "flight recorder", in true schematic sense.
On 3/28/19, 11:48, Felix Stalder wrote:
Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a "black box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each other.
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