The story sounds almost like a Hollywood plot, except it is true: A young starlet doing nude scenes as a teenager who goes on to invent a critical wartime technology that is ignored by the US Navy but ultimately forms the basis of Wi-Fi and cell phones that we use today. Of course, I am talking about the life and times of Hedy Lamarr, the subject of a new biography from Richard Rhodes.
Neal Stephenson's latest novel, "REAMDE," brings black hat hackers, MMORPG gamers, virtual gold miners, Russian organized crime figures, dope smugglers and the flotsam of post-Cold War intelligence organizations into a super freaky all-night disco dance party, evocative, in terms of its well-orchestrated spectacle and cast-of-thousands, of Cecille B. Demille (or Shakespeare).
Stephenson is well known for two rather different milieu: near-future tech-heavy worlds that could be short-handed as cyberpunk and the 16th century European and Near Eastern world of his Baroque Cycle, with the Cryptonomicon and Anathem as bridges between the two. The excellent REAMDE is different. It's about a very recognizable here and now.
The tendency to map our world with our own country or region front and center is well documented and reasonably well-understood, at least intellectually. When someone from America sees a map with, say, Peru in the middle, with south in the up position, it still creates some dissonance. But that dissonance can be useful, beyond simply disabusing ourselves of the notion of our own centrality. It can make the world, including our own homes, new again and impart us with an urge to understand how elsewhere affects here.
Cyrus Farivar has done much the same thing with his book, "The Internet of Elsewhere: The Emergent Effects of a Wired World."
Over the past week I read Kevin Kelly's latest book, What Technology Wants. It's a highly ambitious and expansive book, which looks at technology from an evolutionary perspective. Over 350 pages, Kelly outlines and explores technology as a living system, akin to humanity's biological evolution. The title alludes to this - 'What Technology Wants,' as if technology is a living, breathing thing.
Kelly's book is a must read for technologists and anybody interested in the future of the Web. In this post I'll explore a few of the main themes of the book, in particular as they relate to the evolving Web. (there won't be any spoilers, for those of you in the middle of reading it or if you haven't yet read it!) Two of the main themes are how technology will evolve and how we - humanity - can guide it and make the best use of it.
Jaron Lanier was a pioneer of "virtual reality" in the early 1980s and in his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, he makes the case for a more humanistic approach to Internet technology. Lanier rails against web 2.0, which he calls at the start of the book "a torrent of petty designs" and "freedom [...] more for machines than people."
Lanier's main issue with web 2.0 is that, in his view, it promotes the 'hive mind' over individual expression. He writes that web 2.0 presents the current generation of kids with a "reduced expectation of what a person can be."
One of the first web design books I bought was Creating Killer Web Sites, a 90s classic by David Siegel. That book was known for pushing visual style over HTML standards. It also encouraged the use of HTML hacks, for example using tables to create layouts. Siegel's techniques were basically workarounds, but they just worked in an era when building web pages was painful due to browser incompatibilities.
In Siegel's latest book, Pull, he tackles the Semantic Web. Once again, Siegel plays loosely with existing web standards.
Just when you thought the Obama lovefest was dwindling, Photographer Rick Smolan released his latest book, The Obama Time Capsule. The book includes photography, maps and election results from President Obama's road to the White House. What makes this project unique is that Smolan offers readers a chance to upload their own photographs and personalize their copies.
Tough economic times and
startups have at least one
thing in common - you need character and determination to survive.
Character is what it takes to win,
to believe and to persuade others. It's a mix of passion, determination,
sleepless hours,
hard work.
Character is about crossing the finish line, about achieving dreams and
goals.
While there are inborn traits that help to develop character, often character comes from inspiration. Ask any enterprenuer about who set the bar for them and you will hear the name of another enterprenuer, a historical figure, a writer, even a fictional character. So in this post, we look at five very different books that share a common theme - remarkable people.
From the dynamics of social networks to market bubbles, science has a lot to say about the world of technology.
One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of
how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of
a clockwork Universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled
world of Quantum Mechanics. The new world is the one where Godel forever cut hopes for
completeness in mathematics and Turing showed that computation, like the future, is
fundamentally unpredictable. Despite these unexpected setbacks, modern science
is wonderful, powerful and thought provoking - and relevant to technologists.
I'm a big fan of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
The genius of Murakami is in his discipline,
focus and determination. I see him as a virtual Zen master - an embodiment of wisdom,
passion, skills and exceptional will. The elements of his work and life story are inspirational and (here's where ReadWriteWeb comes in) particularly
applicable when you're running a startup. Therefore in this post, we take a look at what modern technology startups can
learn from this Japanese literary master.
