Category: hittingthebooks
Hitting the Books: How Bell Labs jump-started the multimedia art movement
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… Source
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Hitting the Books: How autonomous EVs could help solve climate change
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… Source
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Hitting the Books: How NYC’s iconic subway system shaped the city
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… Source
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Hitting the Books: The latest ‘Little Brother’ is a stark cybersecurity thriller
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… Source
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Hitting the Books: How colonialism unified the Western world’s clocks
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… Source
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Hitting the books: How China uses AI to influence its 1.4 billion citizens
The battle for international hegemony didn’t stop with the fall of the Reichstag in 1945, or of the Soviet Union in 1991 — it has simply moved online. Today, states and their actors are waging a digital cold war with artificial intelligence systems a… Source
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