“You mean to tell me that we have just purchased a mega-expensive computer that will build robots, drive cars, walk, talk, and probably wash windows and you want a text computer game that requires less than 640K RAM and a black and white monitor to run?” Indeed that was what he wanted, and off we…
Lau never expected to become a fortune-cookie writer. After graduating from Columbia with degrees in engineering and business, he joined Bank of America, then ran a company that exported logs from the Pacific Northwest to China. In the early eighties, he was hired by a Chinatown noodle manufacturer, which eventually expanded into fortune cookies. The…
Much like the film industry, an overemphasis on blockbusters is one of the industry’s biggest weaknesses as far as encouraging innovation and creativity, say observers. “Future titles need to offer more than wild shootouts, violent explosions, and the wholesale cheapening of life,” says game designer Howard Sherman. “We’ve been moving in the wrong direction,” says…
“Since the war has ended, all is good.” “Are the people happy?” I asked. Mr. Shukry paused for a moment, as if it were the simplest question he’d been asked in months, “Of course they are happy,” he said. “Are you Muslim?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. —Michael Yon —A Fork in the Road (Michael Yon:…
The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mighty small: one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts,…
There was one kid who always sat in the front row–let’s call him Fester–who recognized me right from the start of class because he’d read one of my short stories in a horror anthology. He was a horror fan. His story was also written from a passion, but I could tell that he truly set…
If the new consoles are built with a graphics-first mentality, how easy is it going to be to make games that stretch the boundaries of game logic and player freedom? And if so, can we at least have our damned adventure games back? But there’s another, less-obvious side of that muffin: if a machine is…
—Top 100 Speeches (American Rhetoric) Full-text of all, and audio versions of most. Part of a good collection of rhetoric links on Metafilter. Similar:NASA! Mars!! Panorama!!! Video!!!! Audio!!!!!New video from NASA’s Mars 2020 Persever…AwesomeStunning writing in this WaPost reflection on the Trump campaign's journey from a gold esc…I’m stunned by the writing. Here’s just …CultureTelevision is…
There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television’s adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all. I’m a novelist, so I’m hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is…
We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course. We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second…
In popular conception, mathematics is the ultimate resolvable discipline, immune to the epistemological murkiness that so bedevils other fields of knowledge in this relativistic age. Yet Philip Davis, emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown University, has pointed out recently that mathematics also is “a multi-semiotic enterprise” prone to ambiguity and definitional drift. Earlier this year,…
Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith. [..] What can you say about a civilization where people zip…
I therefore formulate and offer to the world the following Principles for Quotations, two for quoters and two for readers, which, if universally followed, would make an immense improvement to the reliability of the information available on the world wide web. Principle 1 (for readers) Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but…
Dripping wet and deeply disturbed, the smartly-dressed man was discovered walking along a windswept road beside the sea. Over the next few days he steadfastly refused, or was unable, to answer the most simple questions about who he was or where he had come from. It was only when someone in hospital had the bright…
Are classic essays like Swift’s still being written, or has the elegant thoughtfulness that is the essay’s legacy been winnowed away by its rapacious bastard offspring, the blog? And will the Internet generation, suffused by the blogosphere, lose the ability to write essays altogether? (The plethora of essays for sale online to students portends they…
—Ladies of Star Trek (SixtiesCity.com) Knee boots and beehive hairdos… I’m in heaven. (Thanks for the link, Scribblingwoman.) Similar:What Jonson meant by Shakespeare's "small Latin and less Greek" Jonson famously eulogized Shakespeare …CultureElmo? Yes, I do mind. I learned far more from Bert.Like plenty of people my age, I grew up …AestheticsMeridian (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season…
”You cannot overestimate the passion that engineers and scientists of that generation have for the slide rule,” said Douglas, carefully sorting these precursors to the calculator with her white curator’s gloves. —Jonathan Abel —For curator, slide rules are cutting edge (Boston.com) Similar:Elderly ballerina hears familiar music from 50 years agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owb1uWDg…AestheticsThe Big Boy GraveyardOn road trips in…
I take the view that computer languages, robot ethics, method acting, and biomechanics are the main ingredients that fused, in the 1950s, to become the cultural meme we call Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short. None of those ingredients was wholly new at that time: biomechanics and the Method – first known as the Stanislavski…
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire Crouch…
—Bad Timing In the Worst Way (BreakTheChain.org) How strange… when I catch a glimpse of the Twin Towers in the background in Sesame Street videos that we taped years ago, or on the cover of a Curious George book, I still cringe. But for this ad, I felt a pang of sympathy for the advertising designer,…