Culture

Kevin Kelly: technology wants autonomy

To Kelly, the advance guard of the technium is to be found among the quadrillions of computer chips networked into vast electronic systems. But It may be difficult to discern whether the desires driving that process belong to technology, or are our own.

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How to paint a fireball in the sky

"Some flashes of lambent light, much like the aurora borealis, were first observed on the northern part of the heavens....as soon as the meteor emerged from behind the cloud, its light was prodigious."

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Science Fantasy

"Data envelops and surrounds a newborn in a neonatal ward, forming a protective shell/blanket/mobile�we might even think of it as bathwater. It's magical no, wait, it's science!"

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Back to the zone

I'm eager to see Monsters, Gareth Edwards' film about a man escorting a woman through a zone made deadly by the after-effects of an alien invasion. But wait�that film was made before!

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Hacking the app called the book

Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, The Tree of Codes, has a marvelous title. But the real marvel begins when you turn the cover to find that the story is literally carved out of another work�namely, The Street of Crocodiles, the 1934 cycle of short stories by martyred Polish writer Bruno Schulz. There's a gadget angle to all this, but you'll have to follow the jump for it.

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Hackers of the world, unite

�Repair is green�repair is joyful�repair injects soul and makes things unique.� Those are some of the claims of Ifixit�s "Self-Repair Manifesto," which is not a self-help tract but a hacker�s call to arms.

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E-bestsellers: Times list goes digital

The New York Times bestseller list not only measures book sales, it also sells books; millions of readers make selections based on what they find there. Starting early next year, the New York Times Company will try to bring that clout to bear on the electronic books market.

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Robothespian takes the stage

The uncanny valley is getting crowded. A female-modeled version of Geminoid, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro's creepy android, is now appearing opposite a human actor in Japan in a short play entitled Sayonara�as in, "sayonara, humans."

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