The Great Geek Manual

Our children no longer want to become physicists and astronauts. They want to invent the next Facebook instead. Short of that, they are happy to land a job at Google. They don’t talk quanta — they dream bits. They don’t see entanglement but recognize with ease nodes and links. As complexity takes a driving seat in science, engineering and business, we physicists cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.

- “The network takeover” by Albert-László Barabási.
Originally published in Nature Physics, January 2012.

1885
Gottlieb Daimler patents the first bike in Germany.

1891
Thomas Edison is granted a patent for “a means for transmitting signals electrically,” the wireless radio.

1913
The first motion picture serial to feature what will become the genre’s characteristic cliffhanger endings at the end of each installment (chapter), “The Adventures of Kathlyn,” premieres in Chicago. The thirteen episode serial was produced by the Selig Polyscope Company after William Selig was inspired by the rising sensationalism of news journalism during Chicago’s newspaper circulation war to bring serial stories to the big screen. The very first serial, What Happened to Mary was released by Edison Studios on July 26, 1912, but it was Selig’s cliffhanger endings that would popularize the format.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Transhumanist visions appear to aim at invulnerability. We are invited to fight the dragon of death and disease, to shed our old, human bodies, and to live on as invulnerable minds or cyborgs. This paper argues that even if we managed to enhance humans in one of these ways, we would remain highly vulnerable entities given the fundamentally relational and dependent nature of posthuman existence. After discussing the need for minds to be embodied, the issue of disease and death in the infosphere, and problems of psychological, social and axiological vulnerability, I conclude that transhumanist human enhancement would not erase our current vulnerabilities, but instead transform them. Although the struggle against vulnerability is typically human and would probably continue to mark posthumans, we had better recognize that we can never win that fight and that the many dragons that threaten us are part of us. As vulnerable humans and posthumans, we are at once the hero and the dragon.

- “Vulnerable Cyborgs: Learning to Live with our Dragons” by Mark Coeckelbergh, November 2011.

1612
Galileo Galilei becomes the first astronomer to observe Neptune, although he catalogs it as a fixed star, rather than a planet.

1869
William Finley Semple is granted the first patent for chewing gum. (US No. 98,304)

1895
The world’s first movie theater opens in the Salon Indien at the Grand Café in Paris, France. The theater makes use of a portable film camera and a functional projector, the Cinematographe, based on Edison’s experimental Kinetograph. Thirty-three people attend the first public showing, at the admission price of one franc each. The first film, La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière, was created especially for the occasion. It shows workers leaving the Lumières’ factory in Lyon by foot, by bicycle, and by car. The theater is owned and operated by Louis and Auguste Lumières, who will refuse all offers to purchase copies of their equipment. View the film online at the Institut Lumière.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Geography has become irrelevant. Our online phantom world has become the new us. We create complex webs of information and people who support us, and yet they are so fleeting, so tenuous. Time speeds up and then it begins to shrink. Years pass by in minutes. Life becomes that strange experience in which you’re zooming along the freeway and suddenly realize that you haven’t paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you’re still alive and didn’t crash. The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be “you.” Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing.

And this is why Marshall McLuhan is important, more so now than ever, because he saw this coming a long way off, and he saw the reasons for it.

- Marshall McLuhan, as quoted in Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland, 2011.

Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Ass-Hat Magic Spider” by Scott Westerfeld at Dunesteef.
• Listen to “A Fairy Tale of Oakland” by Tim Pratt at Drabblecast.
• Listen to “Fortitude” by David Brin at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “A Hundred Thousand Armstrongs” by Zoltán László at The World SF Blog.
• Listen to “Limits” by Donna Glee Williams at PodCastle.
• Listen to “Long Winter’s Nap” by Catherine H. Shaffer at EscapePod.
• Listen to “The Mansion” by Henry van Dyke at Journey Into…
• Listen to “One Free Go” by Michelle Ann King at Wily Writers.
• Listen to “The Star” by Arthur C. Clarke at Drabblecast.
• Listen to “Til Human Voices Take Us” by Lewis Shiner at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “Widdershins” by Robert Mammone at Pseudopod.

Read the rest of this entry » » »

1831
At age 22, Charles Darwin embarks from Plymouth harbor aboard the British Naval ship HMS Beagle on what will become a groundbreaking voyage of scientific discovery. The Captain, Robert FitzRoy, will sail to the southern coast of South America to conduct an official government survey. Just out of university, Darwin took an unpaid position as the ship’s naturalist. He plans to be at sea for two years, but the voyage will last five years, making stops in Brazil, the Galapogos Islands, and New Zealand. From the observations he will make during the voyage, Darwin will develop his theory of evolution through natural selection, which he will publish twenty-eight years after the Beagle leaves Plymouth.

1922
The Japanese aircraft carrier Hōshō becomes the first purpose-built aircraft carrier ever commissioned anywhere in the world.

1932
The world’s largest cinema Radio City Music Hall, which boasts 6,200 seats, is opened by NBC in New York. Over a hundred thousand people gather outside the cinema, waiting for admission.

1940
Universal Pictures releases the science fiction comedy The Invisible Woman, directed by A. Edward Sutherland and starring Virginia Bruce, John Barrymore, and John Howard, to US theaters. In it, an attractive model with an ulterior motive volunteers to test an experimental invisibility machine. IMDB listing

1968
The Apollo 8 returns to Earth after becoming first crewed mission to reach the Moon. Astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell Jr., and William Anders made ten orbits of the Moon on Christmas Eve before their return.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

In a way, new technologies have made us all like Baudelaire. We are intoxicated by the multitude but cannot ignore its troubling aspects. Like Baudelaire, we are trying to find our private life in the crowd while protecting our “real” selves in a public persona. Blogs and social networking sites are like diaries with broken locks. They are confessions written for an audience. They let us feel as if we can fabricate a personal world for ourselves, a world we can control. We listen to music no one else can hear and read emails while standing on a crowded bus because we are looking for privacy. Baudelaire used poetry and fashion; we use PDAs and e-readers and the Internet. With boundless access to information, we can easily observe the crowd. But we cannot escape being observed. And we wonder if we can find the private life we’re looking for, either in the public space of the real world or in the virtual one.

- “Privacy Policy” by Stefany Anne Golberg, October 13, 2011.
Originally posted to The Smart Set.