Over the last week or so, I've found myself become increasingly fascinated by Ashby's work on what he called 'cylindrance' - which was an information theoretical analysis of constraint. Ashby's cylindrance influenced a number of people, including Klaus Krippendorff, but the person who seems to have made the most of it was George Klir, so I started checking out his work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Klir)
With cybernetics these days, the first thing one needs to check is whether the person writing is still alive. Unfortunately, Klir died three days ago.
Death is the biggest single constraint we know. Its effects in concentrating the mind are particularly powerful. So Klir's death coinciding with the beginning of my interest in this work is something which spurs me on in a strange sort of way... Perhaps at some point in the near future I'll be able to say something interesting about Klir. It is the nature of academic work that it gets passed on even after death.
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