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The Bactra Review: Occasional and eclectic book reviews by Cosma Shalizi 46 From Chaos to Order by John Holland
John Holland, Emergence
The Bactra Review: Occasional and eclectic book reviews by Cosma Shalizi 46 From Chaos to Order by John Holland Addison-Wesley, 1997
John Holland, Emergence
In a recent issue of Wired Magazine , consummate computing pioneer Bill Joy (2000) unveiled a trio of apocalyptic scenarios that he believes could be unleashed in the not-too-distant future. These unpleasantries, resulting from unrestrained, unprincipled and unregulated genetic engineering, nano-technology and robotics (GNR), can be added to the list of big nightmares of the 20th Century (such as environmental disasters, nuclear, and bacteriological warfare) which may yet plague us. Each of these technologies, according to Joy, could abruptly unleash problems on so vast and unprecedented a scale that any of humankind's responses would be completely overwhelmed. That such a notable "priest" had so seriously challenged the central teachings of the technological (and economic) church was not missed by the US media where the story was featured on the front page of the New York Times and other prominent newspapers.
Cultivating Society's Civic Intelligence
A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord (or Word for Mac?) document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart from the date added in May 1990. Provided for historical interest only. The diagrams are a bit dotty, but available in versioins linked below. The text has not been changed, even to correct errors such as misnumbered figures or unfinished references.
The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized
Ward Cunningham, Wiki Creator, Eclipse Dir. of Committer Communi
Though the term is relatively new to many mainstream IT users, wiki has been around for nearly 12 years. Ward Cunningham is credited with inventing the first wiki, called WikiWikiWeb, which he installed on his own Web site in 1995. Today, wiki usage and adoption within the enterprise are accelerating at a rapid clip. Cunningham himself is still active within the wiki community, though his day job is at the Eclipse Foundation, which he joined in October 2005 after a brief stint working for Microsoft. Internetnews.com recently caught up with Cunningham to talk about his role at Eclipse and about wiki past present and future. Q: What are you doing at Eclipse?
Coincidences that made Google successful
If you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all. – Futurama If I hadn’t gotten in the car accident that year, I wouldn’t have quit school and I might never have started Apple. It’s weird how things happen. – Steve Wozniak- I, Woz Over 25 years ago, IBM’s *accidental* visit to Microsoft ultimately ended up making Bill Gates the richest person in the world [1]. Was luck the only reason attributed to his success?My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla
Resources Menu | Coffee | Library | Gallery | Lucidcafé Home | Revised: February 3, 2013 My Inventions The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla Introduction Nikola Tesla was born in Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary) on July 9, 1856, and died January 7, 1943. He was the electrical engineer who invented the AC (alternating current) induction motor, which made the universal transmission and distribution of electricity possible. Tesla began his studies in physics and mathematics at Graz Polytechnic, and then took philosophy at the University of Prague.
G ( named gee / ˈ dʒ iː / ) [ 1 ] is the seventh letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet . [ edit ] History The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant ' c ' to distinguish voiced /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/ . The recorded originator of 'g' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga , the first Roman to open a fee-paying school who taught around 230 BC.
G
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was never directly involved with the creation or development of the Internet. He died before the creation of the World Wide Web. Yet many consider Bush to be the Godfather of our wired age often making reference to his 1945 essay, " As We May Think ." In his article, Bush described a theoretical machine he called a "memex," which was to enhance human memory by allowing the user to store and retrieve documents linked by associations. This associative linking was very similar to what is known today as hypertext.
A large, wooden calculating machine was built in 1840 by Thomas Fowler in his workshop in Great Torrington, Devon, England. In what may have been one of the first uses of lower bases for computing machinery, Fowler chose balanced ternary to represent the numbers in his machine. Very little evidence of this machine has survived.
The ternary calculating machine of Thomas
rotten > Library > Biographies > Entertainers > Radio > Tokyo Rose Much to the eventual disappointment of American GIs masturbating all over the Pacific theater, Tokyo Rose never existed. There was nobody named Tokyo Rose, nor was it anybody's nickname. There was never even a fictional character named Tokyo Rose. The name was just a placeholder used by Allied troops to refer to any of the two dozen female voices they heard regularly on Radio Tokyo. Nevertheless, after World War II an American citizen was accused of having been that nonexistent fictional character, and she wound up in a federal penitentiary serving a ten-year sentence for treason.
Tokyo Rose
amp; Blog Archive & The 25 Most
6. How Does a Word Become a Curse Word? Our parents are totally going to ground us for talking about this, but if you must know, a "curse" was originally just a bad type of prayer. Thus, the first curse word was likely "damn," as in asking God to damn someone to Hell, which was considered taboo because of the religious power it wielded.Dijkstra Archive: Home page
The Manuscripts Like most of us, Dijkstra always believed it a scientist's duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he put that conviction into practice. For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as "EWDs", to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra's writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands. Although most of Dijkstra's publications began life as EWD manuscripts, the great majority of his manuscripts remain unpublished.If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our feed , or like us on Facebook for updates. Thanks for visiting! Did you know that it would take around 6 000 floppy disks to store one DVD – or 4 500 compact cassettes, with a playback time of 280 days? Here’s a brief look into the history of data storage.