On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play in the streets. All day.”
And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year.
http://99percentinvisible.org/post/47063460311/episode-76-the-modern-moloch
In 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler brought out a soon-famous book called “Future Shock”. It described a world in which people could no longer keep up with the pace of change.
In 2013, big thinker Douglas Rushkoff is out with a book called “Present Shock”. It describes a world in which the change has arrived. In a digital tsunami. And we are lost in it.
Tumbling in an overwhelming, almost tyrannical, “now.” A present in which we’ve lost our cultural narrative, our past, our future. We can drown or we can thrive, he says.
When the digital universe began, in 1951 in New Jersey, it was just 5 kilobytes in size. "That’s just half a second of MP3 audio now," said Dyson. The place was the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. The builder was engineer Julian Bigelow. The instigator was mathematician John von Neumann. The purpose was to design hydrogen bombs.
Bigelow had helped develop signal processing and feedback (cybernetics) with Norbert Wiener. Von Neumann was applying ideas from Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, along with his own. They were inventing and/or gates, addresses, shift registers, rapid-access memory, stored programs, a serial architecture—all the basics of the modern computer world, all without thought of patents. While recuperating from brain surgery, Stanislaw Ulam invented the Monte Carlo method of analysis as a shortcut to understanding solitaire. Shortly Von Neumann’s wife Klári was employing it to model the behavior of neutrons in a fission explosion. By 1953, Nils Barricelli was modeling life itself in the machine—virtual digital beings competed and evolved freely in their 5-kilobyte world.
"In the few years they ran that machine, from 1951 to 1957, they worked on the most difficult problems of their time, five main problems that are on very different time scales—26 orders of magnitude in time—from the lifetime of a neutron in a bomb’s chain reaction measured in billionths of a second, to the behavior of shock waves on the scale of seconds, to weather prediction on a scale of days, to biological evolution on the scale of centuries, to the evolution of stars and galaxies over billions of years. And our lives, measured in days and years, is right in the middle of the scale of time. I still haven’t figured that out."
Julian Bigelow was frustrated that the serial, address-constrained, clock-driven architecture of computers became standard because it is so inefficient. He thought that templates (recognition devices) would work better than addresses. The machine he had built for von Neumann ran on sequences rather than a clock. In 1999 Bigelow told George Dyson, "Sequence is different from time. No time is there." That’s why the digital world keeps accelerating in relation to our analog world, which is based on time, and why from the perspective of the computational world, our world keeps slowing down.
The acceleration is reflected in the self-replication of computers, Dyson noted: "By now five or six trillion transistors per second are being added to the digital universe, and they’re all connected." Dyson is a kayak builder, emulating the wood-scarce Arctic natives to work with minimum frame inside a skin craft. But in the tropics, where there is a surplus of wood, natives make dugout canoes, formed by removing wood. "We’re now surrounded by so much information," Dyson concluded, "we have to become dugout canoe builders. The buzzword of last year was ‘big data.’ Here’s my definition of the situation: Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of throwing it away."
Tagged with long now history computing technology book:author=george dyson
Did you know that the human overbite may have evolved after people began using forks and knives? In Consider the Fork, author Bee Wilson traces how kitchen tools—from knives to pots to gas stoves—have changed over time, and how they have influenced what, and how, we eat.
http://www.npr.org/2012/12/28/168203187/consider-the-fork-chronicles-evolution-of-eating
Throughout history, maps have always been as much about their creators and their worldviews as about reproducing an accurate replica of the world. Early maps were also about the unknown and how to display the borders of the known world. Monsters in illustration were often used to represent what lay beyond the edge of the world, and cartographers competed to create the best and scariest monsters on their creations.
Professor and BBC documentary presenter Jeremy Brotton has produced a study of the cultural values embodied in maps and collected them in a book called A History of the World in Twelve Maps.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/a-history-of-the-world-in-maps/4491276
Tantek Çelik talks about creating Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, doctype switching, a bit about semantic data formats, and much more.
Jen Robbins talks about the very early days of web design, O’Reilly, GNN, wrestling with the technology and more.
In 1880, years before creating Sherlock Holmes, a young Arthur Conan Doyle went to the Arctic as the surgeon aboard a whaling ship. He recorded his adventures in journals full of notes and drawings, which have been published for the first time in a book called Dangerous Work.
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/25/163392051/from-ship-to-sherlock-doyles-arctic-diary
In A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Jerry Brotton examines the construction of a dozen world maps throughout history, and argues that world maps are no more objective today than they were thousands of years ago.
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/22/165727166/the-motive-of-the-mapmaker
Tagged with npr maps cartography history book:author=jerry brotton
Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit priest, was a renaissance man in name and deed. He strove to learn about almost everything. Unfortunately, many of his inventions and theories were pure nonsense. John Glassie writes about Kircher in his new book, A Man of Misconceptions.
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/18/165232992/a-far-out-and-forgotten-renaissance-man
Tagged with npr history book:john glassie
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