Tag Archives: hitting the books

Hitting the Books: How Bell Labs jump-started the multimedia art movement

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The modern world would be a pale shade of itself if not for the myriad foundational technologies developed at the Bell Telephone Labs. Its engineers invented the transistor and photovoltaic cell, charge-coupled devices, frickin’ lasers — even Unix an...

Hitting the Books: How autonomous EVs could help solve climate change

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Climate change is far and away the greatest threat of the modern human era — a crisis that will only get worse the longer we dither — with American car culture as a major contributor to the nation’s greenhouse emissions. But carbon-neutralizing energ...

Hitting the Books: How NYC’s iconic subway system shaped the city

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New York’s subway system is an intrinsic aspect of the city’s identity, as much so as the Brooklyn Bridge or Empire State Building. New York simply wouldn’t be New York without its trains, a critical connective infrastructure that moved approximately...

Hitting the Books: What really goes into your artisanal cheese

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Keep your white picket fences and 2.5 suburban-raised children, there is nothing more American that tearing into an individually-wrapped slice of hyper-processed, luminescently orange milk-derived consumption commodity. But American is not the only v...

Hitting the Books: How one of our first ‘smart’ weapons helped stop the Nazis

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At the outset of World War II, you’d have a better chance of finding a needle in a haystack with a camel stuck in its eye than you did shooting down an enemy aircraft in your first dozen or so shots. This is because anti-aircraft shells at the time u...

Hitting the Books: Widespread DNA testing could intensify American racism

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In the modern digital media landscape, we are not the customers — or even the audience — we are the product. Every time we log on, our personal data including where we go, what we search for, who we interact with and what we buy is scraped, siphoned,...

Hitting the Books: The latest ‘Little Brother’ is a stark cybersecurity thriller

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Back in 2008, New York Times best-selling author and Boing Boing alum, Cory Doctorow introduced Markus “w1n5t0n” Yallow to the world in the original Little Brother (which you can still read for free right here). The story follows the talented teenage...

Hitting the Books: How to fight gerrymandering with math

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Math is more than a bevy of equations that you learned in school and promptly forgot upon graduation — it is the language of our universe. Mathematics helps explain everything from the manner in which viruses spread to the speeds at which galaxies ro...

Hitting the Books: How colonialism unified the Western world’s clocks

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As ephemeral as space and as fundamental as gravity, time is an aspect of this universe that cannot be felt, only experienced through its cumulative passage. In his latest book, On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping, author Ken Mondschein, traces...