Here’s the official synopsis of historian of science ↑George Dyson‘s latest book ‘Turing’s Cathedral’ (2012): “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s … Continue reading →
Today, most sociologists accept that communities arise, not necessarily from face-to-face interaction, but rather from shared meanings. Because they are capable of promulgating shared meanings on an unprecedented scale, new communication and media technologies (including newspapers, motion pictures, radio, television, … Continue reading →
He promised it ↵in a comment here, and made it true: The podcast ↑JetHead live with astronaut Mike Mullane is online. ↑Mike Mullane is a former NASA astronaut and author of the book ↑Riding rockets: The outrageous tales of a … Continue reading →
Paul Kent Alkon, professor emeritus of English and American literature, author of ‘Origins of futuristic fiction’ (1987), and ‘Science fiction before 1900’ (1994), in 1997 has published a ↓wonderful article on ↑Winston Churchill‘s relation to the writing and thought of … Continue reading →
There are things which are interesting again and again, forever. ↑Raymond Chandler‘s essay ‘↑The Simple Art of Murder‘ (1950 [1944]) I already have read multiple times, quoted from it in ‘↑Cyberanthropology,’ and so on. Now I just stumbled over it … Continue reading →
That’s just wonderful and remembers me of ye ole days when I was still compiling a ↑dictionary of online lingo … ABSTRACT: Lolspeak, which I characterize as an internet dialect of English that is used in conjunction with images of … Continue reading →
A picture book entitled Namennayo! (Don’t Mess Around with Me!) and commercial goods modeled on those in the book are caricatures of ↑bosozoku symbolism and display a crucial aspect of such symbols and the commercial exploitation of them. This work, … Continue reading →
The first anthology of essays by ↑William Gibson is out: ‘↑Distrust that particular flavor.’ GIBSON, WILLIAM FORD. 2012. Distrust that particular flavor. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. via ↑entry at ↑boingboing
Continue reading →Tom Wolfe’s book on the history of the U.S. Space program reads like a novel, and the film has that same fictional quality. It covers the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager to the Mercury 7 astronauts, showing … Continue reading →