June 4, 2012
Retro-futurism is a trend in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced prior to about 1960. Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned ‘retro’ styles with futuristic technology, retro-futurism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology.
Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artifacts of its parallel reality, retro-futurism has also manifested in the worlds of fashion, architecture, literature and film.
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Posted in Art, Language, Technology |
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June 4, 2012
Alternate history is a genre of fiction consisting of stories that are set in worlds in which history has diverged from the actual history of the world. It can be variously seen as a sub-genre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction.
Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has to a large extent merged with science fictional tropes involving cross-time travel between alternate histories or psychic awareness of the existence of ‘our’ universe by the people in another; or ordinary voyaging uptime (into the past) or downtime (into the future) that results in history splitting into two or more time-lines. Cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another. Continue reading →
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June 4, 2012
The Family Trade is the first book of a British writer of science fiction and fantasy writer Charles Stross’ alternate history series ‘The Merchant Princes.’
The first novel introduces us to journalist Miriam Beckstein, who finds herself in a parallel world in which her extended family holds power. Continue reading →
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June 4, 2012
‘The Theory of Interstellar Trade‘ is a paper written in 1978 by economist Paul Krugman. The paper was first published in 2010 in the journal ‘Economic Inquiry.’ He described the paper as something he wrote to cheer himself up when he was an oppressed assistant professor, caught up in the academic rat race.
Krugman analyzed the question of how interest rates on goods in transit should be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light. This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. Continue reading →
Posted in Humor, Money, Technology |
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June 4, 2012
‘Ship in a Bottle‘ is a ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ episode (season six) where a sentient holodeck character, Professor James Moriarty, puts the Enterprise in jeopardy in his quest to be freed from confines of holographic environments.
Data and La Forge are enjoying a Sherlock Holmes holodeck program when the two notice that a character programmed to be left-handed was actually right-handed. They call Lt. Barclay to repair the holodeck, but as he checks the status of the Sherlock Holmes programs, he encounters an area of protected memory. He activates it to find the artificial sentient Professor James Moriarty character projected into the Holodeck, who appears to have memory since his creation (‘Elementary, Dear Data’ in season three: Geordi asks the holodeck to make a Sherlock Holmes villain that can defeat Data, creating a foe more powerful than originally planned). Continue reading →
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June 4, 2012
An impossible bottle is a bottle that has an object inside it that does not appear to fit through the mouth of the bottle, a type of mechanical puzzle.
The ship in a bottle is a traditional type of impossible bottle. Other common objects used include matchboxes, decks of cards, tennis balls, racket balls, Rubik’s Cubes, padlocks, knots, and scissors. Continue reading →
Posted in Games |
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June 3, 2012
A wobbulator is an electronic device primarily used for the alignment of receiver or transmitter intermediate frequency strips. It is usually used in conjunction with an oscilloscope, to enable a visual representation of a receivers passband to be seen, hence, simplifying alignment; it was used to tune early consumer AM radios. The term ‘wobbulator’ is a portmanteau of wobble and oscillator. A ‘wobbulator’ (without capitalization) is a generic term a frequency-modulated RF oscillator, also called a ‘sweep generator.’
A wobulator was used in some old microwave signal generators to create what amounted to frequency modulation. When capitalized ‘Wobbulator’ refers to the trade name of a specific brand of RF/IF alignment generator. The Wobbulator was made by a company known as TIC (Tel-Instrument Company). The Wobbulator generator, designated model 1200A, when connected to an oscilloscope and television receiver under test, would display a representation of the receiver’s RF/IF response curves with ‘markers’ defining critical frequency reference points as a response curve on the oscilloscope screen. Such an amplitude-versus-frequency graph is also often referred to as a Bode (pronounced ‘bodee’) plot.
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June 3, 2012
Alva Noto is a stage name of sound artist Carsten Nicolai who uses art and music as complementary tools to create microscopic views of creative processes.
He is a member of the music groups Signal (with Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender aka Byetone) and Cyclo (with Ryoji Ikeda). Continue reading →
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June 1, 2012
Irreducible complexity is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or ‘less complete’ predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations.
The argument is central to intelligent design, and is rejected by the scientific community at large, which overwhelmingly regards intelligent design as pseudoscience. Irreducible complexity is one of two main arguments (both discredited) used by intelligent design proponents, the other being specified complexity (which singles out patterns that are both specified and complex as markers of design by an intelligent agent). Continue reading →
Posted in Philosophy, Science |
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May 31, 2012
‘Teach the Controversy‘ is the name of a campaign by the Discovery Institute (a conservative Christian think tank based in Seattle) to promote a variant of traditional creationism, intelligent design, while attempting to discredit evolution in US public high school science courses.
The central claim is that fairness and equal time requires educating students with a ‘critical analysis of evolution’ where ‘the full range of scientific views,’ evolution’s ‘unresolved issues,’ and the ‘scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory’ will be presented and evaluated alongside intelligent design concepts like irreducible complexity. The overall goal of the movement is to ‘defeat [the] materialist world view’ represented by the theory of evolution and replace it with ‘a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.’ Continue reading →
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May 31, 2012
‘Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong’ is a 1995 book by sociologist James Loewen. It critically examines twelve American history textbooks and concludes that textbook authors propagate factually false, Eurocentric, and mythologized views of history. In addition to critiquing the dominant historical themes presented in textbooks, Loewen presents a number of his own historical themes that he says are ignored by traditional history textbooks. A revised and updated edition was released in 2008.
Loewen criticizes modern American history textbooks for containing inaccurate depictions of historical figures such as Christopher Columbus. He further criticizes the texts for a tendency to avoid controversy and for their ‘bland’ and simplistic style. He proposes that when American history textbooks elevate American historical figures to the status of heroes, they unintentionally give students the impression that these figures are part of an unattainable past. In other words, the history-as-myth method teaches students that America’s greatest days have already passed. Loewen asserts that the muting of past clashes and tragedies makes history boring to students, especially groups excluded from the positive histories.
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May 30, 2012
Doritos is a brand of seasoned tortilla chips founded by Arch West and produced since 1964 by Frito-Lay (a division of PepsiCo). The original product was made at the Casa de Fritos location at Disneyland in Anaheim. Using unused tortillas, the company-owned restaurant cut them up and fried them and added basic seasoning. Arch West was the Vice President of Marketing of Frito-Lay at the time, and noticed the popularity.
He made a deal with Alex Foods in 1964, the provider of many items for Casa de Fritos at Disneyland, and produced the chips for a short time regionally, before it was overwhelmed by the volume, and Frito-Lay moved the production in-house to its Tulsa plant. ‘Doritos’ were first available in 1966, the first tortilla chip to be launched nationally in the United States.
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The Daily Omnivore 