The title probably says it all. This is a report on Stanford doctoral student, Angela Becerra Vidergar, and her work.
Author: Bradley J. Fest
Today in Cyborgicity
The Huffington Post has two stories today on our posthuman present. The first is on “Google Glass” (Vernor Vinge‘s Rainbows End, here we come), glasses that give reality a much more user-friendly overlay (also notice the GPS in the video). The second is Cyberdyne’s (seriously) Hybird Assistive Exoskeleton. It is weird to live in the future.
New Findings in Cosmic Eschatology
Irene Klotz writes about Joseph Lykeen’s report on how the discovery of the Higgs boson has made calculations about the future of the universe quite bleak indeed (even if the time scale is so massive as to be completely inaccessible to our anthropic notions / experiences of time):
“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there’ll be a catastrophe,” Lykken said. “A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative’ universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us,” Lykken said, adding that the event will unfold at the speed of light.
[. . .]
The calculation requires knowing the mass of the Higgs to within one percent, as well as the precise mass of other related subatomic particles. “You change any of these parameters to the Standard Model (of particle physics) by a tiny bit and you get a different end of the universe,” Lyyken said.
And George Dvorsky also reports on this at io9.
Meteor Strike in Russia
North Korea Nuclear Test
As is being reported all over today, “North Korea has drawn widespread condemnation after conducting a nuclear test in defiance of international bans – a development signaled by an earthquake detected in the country and later confirmed by the regime.” This is N. Korea’s third nuclear test; the others occurred in 2006 and 2009. The Guardian Quotes Dr. Leonid Petrov as saying, “‘The world is now a much more dangerous place.'” Indeed.
And Wired discusses how N. Korea’s weapons are getting bigger based on seismic readings.
The Real Cuban Missile Crisis
Benjamin Schwartz over at The Atlantic writes that “everything you know about the Cuban Missile Crisis is Wrong,” in “The Real Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Data Mining the Literary Hyperarchive and Some Other Links
Ted Underwood, a professor of 18th and 19th century literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has an interesting post on text mining and what is being called “distant reading,” “We Don’t Already Know the Broad Outlines of Literary History.” His blog is The Stone and the Shell: Historical Questions Raised by a Quantitative Approach to Language.
Some notes on the storm hitting the Northeast.
And io9‘s George Dvorsky reports on Lee Smolin’s theory of Cosmological Natural Selection, the idea that: “gives a kind of raison d’etre to our universe and all the objects flying through it. If true, it would mean that our universe is nothing more than a black hole generator, or a means to produce as many baby universes as possible.”
Forthcoming: The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World
I just sent along my corrected proofs for a chapter, titled “Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive,” which will appear in The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World, to be published this spring by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and edited by Michael J. Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor. You can check out a description of the book here. And the book is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other booksellers. I am quite excited for this collection, which will include contributions from a number of notable scholars and nuclear critics, including Paul K. Saint-Amour, Daniel Cordle, and John Canaday.
Hold the Phone
What many people have long suspected, but science has just “proven” . . . reading difficult literature is good for you.
Hyperarchival Nothingness
When we go through the painstaking process of adding nothing to the archive, we might as well send stuff to the Journal of Universal Rejection. About the journal:
The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR:
–You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.
–There are no page-fees.
–You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).
–The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.
–You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.
–Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.
At least they’re honest. They also have a (pretty great) blog. (Thanks to Tobias for this one.)
The Hyperarchival Parallax 