Showing posts with label weizenbaum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weizenbaum. Show all posts

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Happy landing, professor Weizenbaum!

As Miss Duvekot already pointed out, this weekend she and me are back to back ( 96, if you pardon me this tasteless pun) in NRC-Handelsblad, 'the mind's grindstone' as the paper calls itself. ( The 'Ghost's Grindstone' sounds better but I'm not sure they're talking phantoms here.)

I was asked to illustrate an interview with professor Weizenbaum, who left Germany in the 30's with his furrier-parents, stood at the cradle of computers at MIT (U.S.A.), denounces now both MIT for working with the Pentagon and his own invention of digital psycho-therapy, hates Bush, returned to Berlin to live opposite the Berlin Dom, doesn't believe his grandchildren will die a natural death, says: 'Who only has a hammer sees the whole world as a nail' and hopes to celebrate his 85th birthday soon, in spite of his doctor's alarming opinion...
When the journalist left he said: 'Wish me a happy landing' and added with a big smile that everything he'd told him had been a lie.