Nick Montfort, “The Future” (MIT, 2017)
Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a future predicated on innovations in technology. In h...
29 Jan 201831min
Thomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017)
Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from the o...
9 Jan 20182h 15min
Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017)
When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the Internet that we use for shopping, financial transac...
21 Des 201756min
Daniel R. DeNicola, “Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know” (The MIT Press, 2017)
Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge different from lucky guessing? Can knowledge be inn...
1 Des 20171h
Kees van Deemter, “Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive Science” (MIT Press, 2016)
Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities we...
22 Jun 201753min
David Danks, “Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models” (MIT Press, 2014)
For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea ca...
15 Mai 20171h 7min
Tara H. Abraham, “Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science” (MIT Press, 2016)
Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his founda...
11 Mai 201733min
Benjamin Hale, “The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature” (MIT Press, 2016)
Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmental c...
15 Apr 20171h 6min
