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The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan

emmineb — Thu, 24 May 2007 11:03:07 GMT

In 1961, the name of Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone but his English students at the University of Toronto--and a coterie of academic admirers who followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation quarterlies. But then came two remarkable books-- "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962) and "Understanding Media" (1964)--and the graying professor from Canada's western hinterlands soon found himself characterized by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the hottest academic property around." He has since won a world-wide following for his brilliant--and frequently baffling--theories about the impact of the media on man; and his name has entered the French language as mucluhanisme, a synonym for the world of pop culture.

The Washington Monthly: Peak Oil Series

emmineb — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 07:01:29 GMT

Excellent starting point foe all things peak oil

These imponderables are here to encourage my students to think creatively and identify deep questions

emmineb — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:13:45 GMT

Collecting "imponderables" or interesting unanswered questions is one of my hobbies and I list a bunch of questions here. I decided to put them on this web site to encourage students to think creatively and identify deep questions. But anyone is welcome to enjoy them. I know the answer to some of them, but many are open questions to have fun with. Maybe some can never be answered. The questions are also here to encourage interdisciplinary thinking. The most exciting scientific problems in the century following 2001 will require a multidisciplinary approach. A challenge: If you email me a really elegant answer or discussion to any of these questions, I will display your contribution on this page.

wikipedia: Codex Seraphinianus

emmineb — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:18:56 GMT

The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978.[1] The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, an incomprehensible (at least for us) alphabetic writing.

wikipedia: Voynich manuscript

emmineb — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:15:54 GMT

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book with incomprehensible contents. It is thought to have been written between approximately 1450 and 1520 by an unknown author in an unidentified script and language. Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

Wired 14.12: Me Translate Pretty One Day

emmineb — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:36:16 GMT

Spanish to English? French to Russian? Computers haven't been up to the task. But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code. With Carbonell on board, the new company set about building its Spanish system. Soon, however, Abir's peripatetic invention habits created conflicts. Klein, Carbonell, and the developers feared the company was losing focus. "Eli is a mad genius," Carbonell says. "Both of those words apply. Some of his ideas are totally bogus. And some of his ideas are brilliant. Eli himself can't always tell the two apart." Abir, determined to build a larger AI "brain" that would tackle not just MT but other problems, took little interest in the day-to-day engineering. Eventually he left the

WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future: What Happens When Things Get Free?

emmineb — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:07:28 GMT

Chris Anderson - Mr. Long Tail, editor of Wired Magazine - makes a great decision here at Pop!tech: assuming that everyone in the audience has either read The Long Tail or knows the argument, he gives a different talk: “What Happens When Things Get Free?” (It covers much of the same ground as the book, but draws a different narrative through many of the same examples.) He starts with a photo of Dr. Carver Mead. Mead started thinking about what happens as semiconductors get cheap to the point where they’re free. The answer is, “you should waste them.” This insight led to VLSI - Very Large Scale Integration - chips that included thousands of transitors, not just single ones.

YouTube: Marble adding machine in wood

emmineb — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:05:40 GMT

Matthias Wandel's astounding wooding calculatory enigma. A woodworker turns his talents to binary mathematics via a cunning series of cats-eyes, clinkers and rounders. Plus many other marbled wonders: Woodgears.ca <>

"The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race" by Jared Diamond

emmineb — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 22:51:37 GMT

How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so- called primitive people, like the Kalahari Bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only twelve to nineteen hours for one group

BBC: Health | Drugs may boost your brain power

emmineb — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:33:21 GMT

Dramatic effect Dr Danielle Turner, of the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Cambridge University, tested the drug out on 60 healthy volunteers. If, in the future, there are cognition tablets for exams and I wasn't happy for my children to take them, would I be disadvantaging them against those children that actually take them? Respondent to Academy of Medical Sciences study It did not just keep them awake. She found that the effects on their brains were much more dramatic. "We tested them two hours after they had taken a single dose of Modafinil and found quite strong improvements in performance, particularly when things got difficult," she said. "That was interesting - as problems got harder, their performance seemed to improve. With Modafinil the