computers

Article

Don't Panic: The Infocom Drive Surfaces

Programmer Andy Baio has gotten his hands on a piece of computer gaming history: a backup of game publisher Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. What's Infocom, you ask? (At least, you ask this if you're under a certain age and/or leaned left-of-nerdy in the 80's....) Infocom is the game company behind classic text adventure like Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a little game called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- which was written with the help of Douglas Adams. A whole generation... READ ON

Article

The Most Heavily Annotated Flickr Photo

I'm not exactly a Flickr power user -- I've never left a photo note, though I've read lots of them. On Flickr, when a photo note is made, the user specifies a zone of the photo and types in a comment. The zone is then marked on the photo with a little box. Mousing over the box shows the note. Okay, simple enough. But what happens when users add 271 notes to a Flickr photo? Sheer... READ ON

Article

Ray Kurzweil's Pill Habit

Ray Kurzweil is probably best known for his 70's era reading machines -- early speech synthesizers that could optically scan printed words, recognize them (despite being in multiple typefaces), and speak them back. (We had one of these gizmos at my public library when I was a kid -- it was an amazing piece of gear.) He's also famous for inventing music synthesizers, and it's not unusual to see the name Kurzweil emblazoned on a digital piano. These days he's typically referred to as a "futurist"... READ ON

Article

How Electronic "20 Questions" Games Work

It was about four years ago when I first saw a 20Q ball. The tiny handheld device scrolled text across its meager one-line screen, inviting me to challenge it in a game of 20 Questions. I immediately thought of an object I figured it wouldn't guess ("iPod") and began to play the game. After a series of slightly odd questions -- including "Does it bring joy to people?" -- the little ball gave its guess: "MP3 player." Wow. It was right. So how does this 20Q device work? The short answer is... READ ON

Article

New Stretchy Circuits Coming to a Computer Near You!

New Scientist, easily our favorite science magazine, has a fascinating piece on how scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have come up with a genius new way of building circuits. While still built from the same old materials (plastic and silicone), these new circuits can both stretch and bend (it's like your motherboard on yoga!). In fact, they can even be folded around coins. Of course, why the scientists chose to bend them up against coins, the article refuses to reveal. What the... READ ON

Article

ELIZA: Free Compu-Therapy...Sort Of

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum died earlier this month, reminding us that his most famous creation, the computer program ELIZA, lives on. Weizenbaum created ELIZA in the mid 1960's as a model of "natural language" interaction between a human subject and a computer. ELIZA mimics a talk therapist, rephrasing statements made by the user as open-ended questions, encouraging further discussion. Weizenbaum named his program after Eliza Doolittle, the famous subject of Henry Higgins's tutelage in the... READ ON

List

5 Reasons We'll Miss Arthur C. Clarke

The late Sir Arthur C. Clarke was loved by nerds and normals alike for his contributions to literature, film, and technology. Here's a rundown of the five biggest reasons we'll miss him. 1. Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World Clarke kept extensive files on mysterious events, objects, and locations throughout the world. Starting in the early 1980's, he mined these files to bring us Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, a thirteen-part TV series covering topics ranging from UFOs to crystal skulls.... READ ON

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Hofstadter Docudrama: "Victim of the Brain"

Douglas Hofstadter is the author of GÃ¶del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, a now-classic work on how the mind arises from mechanical parts. While I'll admit I haven't gotten through the entire book, I recently enjoyed Victim of the Brain, a 1988 docudrama featuring interviews with Hofstadter. It's a strange little film, following Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos as he struggles to understand philosophical questions about consciousness through interviews as well as (slightly cheesy) adaptations... READ ON

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Apostrophe Atrophy

I'm a sucker for any hyper-specific blog about typography, grammar, even handwriting. Anything to do with words or word-nerd stuff, really. Witness: my recent post on The Lowercase L, my longtime devotion to "misused" quotation marks, and some awesomely smart signs. Today allow me expand your nerdy typographic horizons with Apostrophe Atrophy, a blog about the misuse of "dumb apostrophes" and "dumb quotes." What's dumb about an apostrophe or a quote? Well, Apostrophe Atrophy is referring to those... READ ON

Article

Nerd History: Clarus the Dogcow

What's black and white, obsolete, and goes "moof?" Clarus the Dogcow, of course! Created in 1983 by Apple designer Susan Kare, Clarus was part of the original Cairo font. A sort of hybrid Holstein cow/dog, the dogcow icon was used in Apple printer setup dialog boxes for years to show the orientation of the paper -- the user could instantly recognize when the dogcow was right-side-up. The dogcow made another appearance in Apple's "Disk Copy" application during copies -- the dogcow wagged its tail and... READ ON