1.
Brownsville, Texas
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Brownsville is the county seat of Cameron County, Texas. It is the sixteenth most populous city in the state of Texas, with a population at the 2010 census of 175,023 and an estimated population in 2014 of 183,046. It is located at the southernmost tip of Texas, on the bank of the Rio Grande, directly north and across the border from Matamoros, Tamaulipas. The 2014 U. S. Census Bureau estimate placed the Brownsville-Harlingen metropolitan area population at 420,392, in addition, the international Matamoros–Brownsville Metropolitan Area was estimated to have a population of 1,136,995. Brownsville has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, the Brownsville urban area is one of the fastest growing in the United States. The citys population increased after it experienced a boom in the steel industry during the first decade of the 1900s. In recent times, the Port of Brownsville has become an economic hub for South Texas, where shipments arrive from other parts of the United States, from Mexico. In April 1846, construction of a fort on the Mexican border by was begun by American forces due to increased instability in the region on the eve of the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848. Before the completion of the construction, the Mexican Army began the Siege of Fort Texas, during the first active campaign in the Mexican–American War, the first battle of the war occurred on May 8, when General Zachary Taylor received word of the siege of the fort. Taylors forces rushed to help, but Mexican troops intercepted them, resulting in the Battle of Palo Alto, approximately 5 miles north of present-day Brownsville. The next morning the Mexican forces had retreated, and Taylors troops caught up with them, resulting in the Battle of Resaca de la Palma, which took place within the present city limits. When Taylor finally arrived at the besieged Fort Texas, it was found that two soldiers had died, one of them the commander, Major Jacob Brown. In his honor, General Taylor renamed the fort Fort Brown, an old cannon at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College marks the spot where Major Brown received his fatal wound. The city of Brownsville was originally established late in 1848 by Charles Stillman, the state originally incorporated the city on January 24,1850. This was repealed on April 1,1852, due to a dispute between Stillman and the former owners. The state reincorporated the city on February 7,1853, which remains in effect, the issue of ownership was not decided until 1879, when the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Stillman. On July 13,1859, the First Cortina War started, juan Nepomuceno Cortina became one of the most important historical figures of the area, and continued to exert a decisive influence in the local events until his arrest in 1875. The First Cortina War ended on December 27,1859, in May 1861, the brief Second Cortina War took place
2.
Fanzine
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A fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest. The term was coined in an October 1940 science fiction fanzine by Russ Chauvenet, typically, publishers, editors and contributors of articles or illustrations to fanzines receive no financial compensation. Fanzines are traditionally circulated free of charge, or for a nominal cost to defray postage or production expenses, copies are often offered in exchange for similar publications, or for contributions of art, articles, or letters of comment, which are then published. The term fanzine is sometimes confused with fan magazine, but the term most often refers to commercially produced publications for fans. P. These publications were produced first on small tabletop printing presses, often by students, as professional printing technology progressed, so did the technology of fanzines. Early fanzines were hand-drafted or typed on a typewriter and printed using primitive reproduction techniques. Only a very small number of copies could be made at a time, the use of mimeograph machines enabled greater press runs, and the photocopier increased the speed and ease of publishing once more. Today, thanks to the advent of publishing and self-publication. When Hugo Gernsback published the first scientifiction magazine, Amazing Stories in 1926, by 1927 readers, often young adults, would write to each other, bypassing the magazine. Science fiction fanzines had their beginnings in Serious & Constructive correspondence, fans finding themselves writing the same letter to several correspondents sought to save themselves a lot of typing by duplicating their letters. Early efforts included simple carbon copies but that proved insufficient, the first science fiction fanzine, The Comet, was published in 1930 by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago and edited by Raymond A. Palmer and Walter Dennis. The term fanzine was coined by Russ Chauvenet in the October 1940 edition of his fanzine Detours, fanzines were distinguished from prozines, that is, all professional magazines. Prior to that, the fan publications were known as fanmags or letterzines, Science fiction fanzines used a variety of printing methods. Typewriters, school dittos, church mimeos and multi-color letterpress or other mid-to-high level printing, some fans wanted their news spread, others reveled in the artistry and beauty of fine printing. The hectograph, introduced around 1876, was so named because it could produce up to a hundred copies, hecto used an aniline dye, transferred to a tray of gelatin, and paper would be placed on the gel, one sheet at a time, for transfer. Messy and smelly, the process could create vibrant colors for the few copies produced, the next small but significant technological step after hecto is the spirit duplicator, essentially the hectography process using a drum instead of the gelatin. Introduced by Ditto Corporation in 1923, these machines were known for the six decades as Ditto Machines and used by fans because they were cheap to use. The mimeograph machine, which forced ink through a wax paper stencil cut by the keys of a typewriter, was the standard for many decades, a second-hand mimeo could print hundreds of copies and print in color
3.
University of Texas at Austin
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Founded in 1881 as The University of Texas, its campus is in Austin, Texas—approximately 1 mile from the Texas State Capitol. The institution has the nations seventh-largest single-campus enrollment, with over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students and over 24,000 faculty, UT Austin was inducted into the American Association of Universities in 1929, becoming only the third university in the American South to be elected. It is a center for academic research, with research expenditures exceeding $550 million for the 2014–2015 school year. J. Pickle Research Campus and the McDonald Observatory, among university faculty are recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Emmy Award, the Turing Award, and the National Medal of Science, as well as many other awards. UT Austin student athletes compete as the Texas Longhorns and are members of the Big 12 Conference and its Longhorn Network is the only sports network featuring the college sports of a single university. The first mention of a university in Texas can be traced to the 1827 constitution for the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Although Title 6, Article 217 of the Constitution promised to establish education in the arts and sciences. On April 18,1838, An Act to Establish the University of Texas was referred to a committee of the Texas Congress. On January 26,1839, the Texas Congress agreed to set aside fifty leagues of land towards the establishment of a publicly funded university, in addition,40 acres in the new capital of Austin were reserved and designated College Hill. In 1845, Texas was annexed into the United States, interestingly, the states Constitution of 1845 failed to mention higher education. On February 11,1858, the Seventh Texas Legislature approved O. B,102, an act to establish the University of Texas, which set aside $100,000 in United States bonds toward construction of the states first publicly funded university. The legislature also designated land reserved for the encouragement of railroad construction toward the universitys endowment, Texas secession from the Union and the American Civil War delayed repayment of the borrowed monies. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, The University of Texas endowment was just over $16,000 in warrants, the more valuable lands reverted to the fund to support general education in the state. The legislature additionally appropriated $256,272.57 to repay the funds taken from the university in 1860 to pay for frontier defense, the 1883 grant of land increased the land in the Permanent University Fund to almost 2.2 million acres. Under the Act of 1858, the university was entitled to just over 1,000 acres of land for every mile of railroad built in the state. On March 30,1881, the legislature set forth the structure and organization. By popular election on September 6,1881, Austin was chosen as the site, galveston, having come in second in the election was designated the location of the medical department. On November 17,1882, on the original College Hill, smite the earth, smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth
4.
Science fiction
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Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a literature of ideas. Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a range of subgenres and themes. Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying science fiction is what we point to when we say it, a definition echoed by author Mark C. Glassy, who argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography, you do not know what it is, in 1970 or 1971William Atheling Jr. According to science fiction writer Robert A, rod Serlings definition is fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures. Science fiction elements include, A time setting in the future, in alternative timelines, a spatial setting or scenes in outer space, on other worlds, or on subterranean earth. Characters that include aliens, mutants, androids, or humanoid robots, futuristic or plausible technology such as ray guns, teleportation machines, and humanoid computers. Scientific principles that are new or that contradict accepted physical laws, for time travel, wormholes. New and different political or social systems, e. g. utopian, dystopian, post-scarcity, paranormal abilities such as mind control, telepathy, telekinesis Other universes or dimensions and travel between them. A product of the budding Age of Reason and the development of science itself. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Keplers work the first science fiction story and it depicts a journey to the Moon and how the Earths motion is seen from there. Later, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a flight to the moon, more examples appeared throughout the 19th century. Wells The War of the Worlds describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry and it is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth. In the late 19th century, the scientific romance was used in Britain to describe much of this fiction. This produced additional offshoots, such as the 1884 novella Flatland, the term would continue to be used into the early 20th century for writers such as Olaf Stapledon. In the early 20th century, pulp magazines helped develop a new generation of mainly American SF writers, influenced by Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine. In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his series of Barsoom novels, situated on Mars
5.
Cyberpunk
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The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors. Much of the genres atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the often use techniques from detective fiction. Primary exponents of the field include William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Bruce Bethke, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley. Blade Runner can be seen as a example of the cyberpunk style. Video games, board games, and tabletop role-playing games, such as Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, often feature storylines that are influenced by cyberpunk writing. Beginning in the early 1990s, some trends in fashion and music were also labeled as cyberpunk, Cyberpunk writers tend to use elements from hardboiled detective fiction, film noir, and postmodernist prose to describe an often nihilistic underground side of an electronic society. The genres vision of a future is often called the antithesis of the generally utopian visions of the future popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Gibson defined cyberpunks antipathy towards utopian SF in his 1981 short story The Gernsback Continuum, in some cyberpunk writing, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace, blurring the line between actual and virtual reality. A typical trope in such work is a connection between the human brain and computer systems. Cyberpunk settings are dystopias with corruption, computers and internet connectivity, giant, multinational corporations have for the most part replaced governments as centers of political, economic, and even military power. The economic and technological state of Japan, in the 80s influenced Cyberpunk literature at the time, of Japans influence on the genre, William Gibson said, Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is often set in urbanized, artificial landscapes, and city lights, receding was used by Gibson as one of the genres first metaphors for cyberspace and virtual reality. The cityscapes of Hong Kong and Shanghai have had influences in the urban backgrounds, ambiance and settings in many cyberpunk works such as Blade Runner. Ridley Scott envisioned the landscape of cyberpunk Los Angeles in Blade Runner to be Hong Kong on a bad day. The streetscapes of Ghost in the Shell were based on Hong Kong, mamoru Oshii felt that Hong Kongs strange and chaotic streets where old and new exist in confusing relationships, fit the theme of the film well. Hong Kongs Kowloon Walled City is particularly notable for its disorganized hyper-urbanization, one of the cyberpunk genres prototype characters is Case, from Gibsons Neuromancer. Case is a cowboy, a brilliant hacker who has betrayed his organized criminal partners. These anti-heroes—criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits—call to mind the private eye of detective fiction and this emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the punk component of cyberpunk
6.
Cyberpunk derivatives
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A number of cyberpunk derivatives have become recognized as distinct subgenres in speculative fiction. Scholars have written of these subgenres stylistic place in postmodern literature, cyberpunk is nonetheless regarded as a successful genre, as it ensnared many new readers and provided the sort of movement that postmodern literary critics found alluring. Furthermore, author David Brin argues, cyberpunk made science fiction more attractive and profitable for mainstream media, biopunk emerged during the 1990s and focuses on the near-future unintended consequences of the biotechnology revolution following the discovery of recombinant DNA. Unlike cyberpunk, it not on information technology but on biorobotics. As in postcyberpunk however, individuals are usually modified and enhanced not with cyberware, nanopunk refers to an emerging subgenre of speculative science fiction still very much in its infancy in comparison to other genres like that of cyberpunk. The genre is similar to biopunk, but describes a world in which the use of biotechnology is limited or prohibited, currently the genre is more concerned with the artistic and physiological impact of nanotechnology, than of aspects of the technology itself. Still, one of the most prominent examples of nanopunk is Crysis video game series, and much lesser famous examples is Generator Rex and Transcendence. As new writers and artists began to experiment with ideas, new varieties of fiction emerged. Lawrence Person wrote in an essay he posted to the Internet forum Slashdot in 1998, Many writers who grew up reading in the 1980s are just now starting to have their stories and novels published. To them cyberpunk was not a revolution or alien philosophy invading science fiction, persons essay advocates using the term postcyberpunk to label the new works such writers produce. It is rather characteristic for postcyberpunk to portray a utopia or to blend elements of both extremes into a more mature societal vision. Rafael Miranda Huereca states, In this fictional world, the unison in the hive becomes a power mechanism which is executed in its form, not from above the social body. The body responds back to power, communicates with it, supplies the information that power requires, more importantly, power does not only control the body, but also designs, produces, creates it according to its own objectives. Thus, human body is re-formed as a result of the transformations of the relations between communication and power, the Daemon novels by Daniel Suarez could be considered postcyberpunk in that sense. In addition to themes of its ancestral genre postcyberpunk might also combine elements of nanopunk and biopunk, good examples of postcyberpunk novels are Neal Stephensons The Diamond Age and Bruce Sterlings Holy Fire. In television, Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex has been called the most interesting, in 2007, SF writers James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel published Rewired, The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. Like all categories discerned within science fiction, the boundaries of postcyberpunk are likely to be fluid or ill defined. The word steampunk was invented in 1987 as a reference to some of the novels of Tim Powers, James P. Blaylock
7.
Science fiction author
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Note that this partial list contains some authors whose works of fantastic fiction would today be called science fiction, even if they predate, or did not work in that genre. Most science fiction authors write as novelists or short story writers, though increasingly, as the genre becomes possible, deutsch Graham Diamond Philip K. Dick Gordon R. Dickson Lyuben Dilov Dougal Dixon William C. Edmondson George Alec Effinger Ivan Antonovich Efremov Greg Egan Suzette Haden Elgin E. C, High Douglas Hill Ernest Hill Christopher Hinz Morioka Hiroyuki P. C. Meluch Miguel Mendonça Richard C. Meredith Robert Merle Judith Merril A, merritt Melinda Metz, author of Roswell High series Robert A. Metzger Stephenie Meyer China Miéville P. Schuyler Miller Walter M. Miller, Jr. Jinx Magic John E. Stith J. Tanner Andrius Tapinas Howard Tayler and it also tells you whom else you might like if you like one author. Official website for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Official website for Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy
8.
William Gibson
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William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Gibson notably coined the term cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome and these early works have been credited with renovating science fiction literature after it had fallen largely into insignificance in the 1970s. In the 1990s, Gibson composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which explored the sociological developments of urban environments, postindustrial society. These works saw his name reach mainstream bestseller lists for the first time and his more recent novel, The Peripheral, returned to a more overt engagement with technology and recognizable science fiction concerns. In 1999, The Guardian described Gibson as probably the most important novelist of the past two decades, while the Sydney Morning Herald called him the prophet of cyberpunk. His work has been cited as an influence across a variety of disciplines spanning academia, design, film, literature, music, cyberculture and his family moved frequently during Gibsons youth owing to his fathers position as manager of a large construction company. In Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where the lack of encouragement for him to read was a cause of dismay for his parents. While Gibson was still a child, a little over a year into his stay at Pines Elementary. His mother, unable to tell William the bad news, had someone else inform him of the death, tom Maddox has commented that Gibson grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything J. G. Ballard ever dreamed. A few days after the death, Gibsons mother returned them from their home in Norfolk to Wytheville, at the age of 12, Gibson wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer. He spent a few years at basketball-obsessed George Wythe High School. Becoming frustrated with his academic performance, Gibsons mother threatened to send him to a boarding school, to her surprise. He resented the structure of the boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially. On the SAT exams, he scored 148 out of 150 in the section but 5 out of 150 in mathematics. In 1967, he elected to move to Canada in order to avoid the Vietnam war draft, at his draft hearing, he honestly informed interviewers that his intention in life was to sample every mind-altering substance in existence. Gibson has observed that he did not literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me, after the hearing he went home and purchased a bus ticket to Toronto, and left a week or two later. He elaborated on the topic in a 2008 interview, After weeks of nominal homelessness, Gibson was hired as the manager of Torontos first head shop, a retailer of drug paraphernalia. He found the citys community of American draft dodgers unbearable owing to the prevalence of clinical depression, suicide
9.
Rudy Rucker
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Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy. Until its closure in 2014 he edited the science fiction webzine Flurb, Rucker was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, Rucker attended St. Xavier High School before earning a B. A. in mathematics from Swarthmore College in 1967 and M. S. and PhD degrees in mathematics from Rutgers University. Rucker taught at the State University of New York at Geneseo from 1972 to 1978, thanks to a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Rucker taught math at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg from 1978 to 1980. He then taught at Randolph-Macon Womens College in Lynchburg, Virginia from 1980 to 1982, inspired by an interview with Stephen Wolfram, Rucker became a computer science professor at San José State University in 1986, from which he retired in 2004. A mathematician with philosophical interests, he has written The Fourth Dimension, Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, and Infinity and the Mind. Princeton University Press published new editions of Infinity and the Mind in 1995 and in 2005, as his own alternative to cyberpunk, Rucker developed a writing style he terms transrealism. Many of Ruckers novels and short stories apply these ideas, one example of Ruckers transrealist works is Saucer Wisdom, a novel in which the main character is abducted by aliens. Rucker and his publisher marketed the book, tongue in cheek and his earliest Transrealist novel, White Light, was written during his time at Heidelberg. This Transrealist novel is based on his experiences at SUNY Geneseo and his novels also put forward a mystical philosophy that Rucker has summarized in an essay titled, with only a bit of irony, The Central Teachings of Mysticism. Rucker attended Swarthmore College, where he was roommates with Kenneth Turan his freshman year, in 1967, Rucker married Sylvia Rucker. On July 1,2008, Rucker suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, thinking he may not be around much longer, this prompted him to write the book Nested Scrolls, his autobiography
10.
John Shirley
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John Shirley is an American writer, primarily of fantasy and science fiction and songwriting. He has also written one novel, a western, about Wyatt Earp, Wyatt in Wichita. Shirley has written novels, short stories, TV scripts and screenplays, as a musician, Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. An extensive compilation of songs by John Shirley, Broken Mirror Glass was released by Black October Records, John Shirley was born in Houston, Texas and grew up largely in the vicinity of Portland, Oregon. His earliest novels were Transmaniacon and Dracula In Love for Zebra Books, and City Come A-Walkin and he also wrote the A Song Called Youth cyberpunk trilogy for Warner Books, re-released as an omnibus in 2012 by Prime Books. 2012 saw his novel of apocalypse, Everything Is Broken released by Prime Books. In 2013 PM Press released Shirleys New Taboos, Shirley has also written 18 song lyrics recorded by Blue Öyster Cult. His one nonfiction book is Gurdjieff, An Introduction to His Life and he currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife, Micky Shirley. John Shirley has three sons, twins Byron and Perry and their younger brother Julian. Byron is a captain and yacht broker, Perry is a journalist, teacher. Julian is a Bay Area-based underground rapper and producer of hip-hop, trap, chiptune and he is sometimes called as Juji or Young Bios. The A Song Called Youth cyberpunk trilogy, Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra and his tie-in novels include the best-seller Bioshock, Rapture. His best known work is the film The Crow, for which he was the initial writer. He also wrote scripts for Deep Space Nine and Poltergeist, The Legacy and he was nominated for an Emmy in the Prime Time Animation category for an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Shirley’s great subject is the ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain. The opening line of his novel “Demons” states the theme succinctly, it’s a horror story, I guess, but it’s also funny, weirdly erotic and, in a way that horror almost never is, tragic. Shirleys cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin and the A Song Called Youth trilogy, avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffery called him a postmodern Edgar Allan Poe. Bruce Sterling has cited Shirleys early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal work in itself
11.
Pat Cadigan
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Pat Cadigan is an American science fiction author, whose work is most often identified with the cyberpunk movement. Her novels and short stories all share a theme of exploring the relationship between the human mind and technology. Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Fitchburg, Cadigan met her first husband Rufus Cadigan while in college, they divorced shortly after she graduated from KU in 1975. Heinlein, while working for fantasy writer Tom Reamy at his Nickelodeon Graphics typesetting. Following Reamys death in 1977, Cadigan went to work as a writer for Kansas Citys Hallmark Cards, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she also edited the small press fantasy and science fiction magazines Chacal and later Shayol with her second husband, Arnie Fenner. Cadigan sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980, her success as an author encouraged her to become a writer in 1987. She emigrated to London in the UK with her son Rob Fenner in 1996 and she became a UK citizen in late 2014. Her second novel, Synners, expands upon the same theme, Cadigan has won a number of awards. Clarke Award both in 1992 and 1995 for her novels Synners and Fools, robert A. Heinlein in part dedicated his 1982 novel Friday to Cadigan after becoming her friend, following her being the guest liaison to him for the 34th Worldcon in Kansas City. In the 1960s Cadigan and a childhood girlfriend invented a secret life in which we were twins from the planet Venus. The Beatles came to us for advice about their songs and how to deal with fame and other important matters, Cadigan says. On occasion, they would ask us to use our highly developed shape-shifting ability to become them, the Venusian twins had other superpowers, that they would sometimes use to help out Superman, Wonder Woman and other heroes, she said. Mike Resnick, Tor 1992 Home by the Sea, A Whisper of Blood, ed. me Driving through a Cloud with Pat Cadigan at Clarkesworld Magazine, January 2014
12.
Ideology
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Ideology is a comprehensive set of normative beliefs, conscious and unconscious ideas, that an individual, group or society has. An ideology is less encompassing than the ideas expressed in such as worldview, imaginary. Political ideologies can be proposed by the dominant class of society such as the elite to all members of society as suggested in some Marxist and critical-theory accounts. In societies that distinguish between public and private life, every political or economic tendency entails ideology, whether or not it is propounded as a system of thought. In the Althusserian sense, ideology is the relation to the real conditions of existence. The term ideology was born during the Great Terror of French Revolution, the word, and the system of ideas associated with it, was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796, while he was in prison pending trial during the Terror. The coup that overthrew Maximilien Robespierre saved Tracys life and freed him to pursue his work, assembling the words idea, from Greek ἰδέα and -logy, from -λογία. Tracy reacted to the phase of the revolution by trying to work out a rational system of ideas to oppose the irrational mob impulses that had nearly destroyed him. He conceived of Ideology a liberal philosophy which provided a defense of individual liberty, property, free markets. He argues that among these aspects ideology is the most generic term, Tracy worked this out during the Napoleonic regime, and Napoleon Bonaparte came to view Ideology a term of abuse which he often hurled against his liberal foes in Tracys Institut National. Karl Marx adopted this negative sense of the term and used it in his writings, in the century after Tracy, the term ideology moved back and forth between positive and negative connotations. The term ideology has dropped some of its sting, and has become a neutral term in the analysis of differing political opinions. While Karl Marx situated the term within class struggle and domination, others believed it was a part of institutional functioning. There has been analysis of different ideological patterns. This kind of analysis has been described by some as meta-ideology – the study of the structure, form, recent analysis tends to posit that ideology is a coherent system of ideas, relying upon a few basic assumptions about reality that may or may not have any factual basis. Ideas become ideologies through the subjective ongoing choices that people make, according to most recent analysis, ideologies are neither necessarily right nor wrong. Believers in ideology range from passive acceptance through fervent advocacy to true belief, an excessive need for certitude lurks at fundamentalist levels in politics and religions. Charles Blattberg has offered an account which distinguishes political ideologies from political philosophies, for Willard A. Mullins an ideology should be contrasted with the related issues of utopia and historical myth
13.
Sycamore Hill Writer's Workshop
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Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop is a workshop for science fiction writers. Since its origin in 1985, it has held in Raleigh, North Carolina, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Currently organized by Richard Butner, Sycamore Hill was started by John Kessel and it is an invitation-only workshop for established SF, fantasy, and slipstream writers. A collection of stories from the 1994 workshop was published as the anthology Intersections, The Sycamore Hill Anthology, edited by John Kessel, Mark L. Van Name. Orson Scott Card wrote about his experience at the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop in the essay On Sycamore Hill, scholars such as Michael Collins identify Cards Sycamore Hill experience as marking a critical turning point in his career. Sycamore Hill is known to have shaped several award-winning stories, and is featured in the acknowledgment pages of books like Ted Chiangs Arrival
14.
Hugo Award
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The Hugo Awards are a set of awards given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The awards are named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. Organized and overseen by the World Science Fiction Society, the awards are given each year at the annual World Science Fiction Convention as the focus of the event. They were first given in 1953, at the 11th World Science Fiction Convention, the Hugo Awards have been termed as among the highest honors bestowed in science fiction and fantasy writing. Works that have won have been published in collections. The 2016 awards were presented at the 74th Worldcon, MidAmeriCon II, in Kansas City, United States, the 2017 Hugos will be presented at the 75th Worldcon, Worldcon 75, in Helsinki, Finland, on August 12,2017. For lists of winners and nominees for each category, see the list of categories below. The World Science Fiction Society gives out the Hugo Awards each year for the best science fiction or fantasy works, the award is named after Hugo Gernsback, who founded the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and who is considered one of the fathers of the science fiction genre. Works are eligible for an award if they were published in English in the calendar year. There are no rules as to which works qualify as science fiction or fantasy. Hugo Award nominees and winners are chosen by supporting or attending members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, the selection process is defined in the WSFS constitution as instant-runoff voting with five nominees per category, except in the case of a tie. The awards are split over more than a dozen categories, for each category of Hugo, the voter may rank No Award as one of their choices. Voters are instructed that they should do so if they feel that none of the nominees are worthy of the award, or if they feel the category should be abolished entirely. A vote for No Award other than as ones first choice signifies that the voter believes the nominee ranked higher than No Award are worthy of a Hugo in that category, while those ranked lower are not. The five works on the ballot for each category are the most-nominated by members that year, from 1953 to 1958 the awards did not include any recognition of runner-up novels, but since 1959 all of the candidates have been recorded. Worldcons are generally held near the start of September, and take place in a different city around the world each year, the idea of giving out awards at Worldcons was proposed by Harold Lynch for the 1953 convention. The idea was based on the Academy Awards, with the name Hugo being given by Robert A. Madle, the award trophy was created by Jack McKnight and Ben Jason in 1953, based on the design of hood ornaments of 1950s cars. It consisted of a rocket ship on a wooden base
15.
Impact crater
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An impact crater is an approximately circular depression in the surface of a planet, moon, or other solid body in the Solar System or elsewhere, formed by the hypervelocity impact of a smaller body. In contrast to volcanic craters, which result from explosion or internal collapse, impact craters typically have raised rims, Impact craters are the dominant geographic features on many solid Solar System objects including the Moon, Mercury, Callisto, Ganymede and most small moons and asteroids. Where such processes have destroyed most of the original crater topography and this indicates that there should be far more relatively young craters on the planet than have been discovered so far. Note that the rate of impact cratering in the outer Solar System could be different from the inner Solar System, although Earths active surface processes quickly destroy the impact record, about 190 terrestrial impact craters have been identified. They are also found in the stable interior regions of continents. Impact craters are not to be confused with landforms that may appear similar, including calderas, sinkholes, glacial cirques, ring dikes, salt domes, and others. Daniel Barringer was one of the first to identify an impact crater, Meteor Crater in Arizona, in the 1920s, the American geologist Walter H. Bucher studied a number of sites now recognized as impact craters in the United States. He concluded they had created by some great explosive event. However, in 1936, the geologists John D, albritton Jr. revisited Buchers studies and concluded that the craters that he studied were probably formed by impacts. The concept of impact cratering remained more or less speculative until the 1960s, armed with the knowledge of shock-metamorphic features, Carlyle S. By 1970, they had identified more than 50. Although their work was controversial, the American Apollo Moon landings, because the processes of erosion on the Moon are minimal, craters persist almost indefinitely. Since the Earth could be expected to have roughly the same cratering rate as the Moon, Impact cratering involves high velocity collisions between solid objects, typically much greater than the velocity of sound in those objects. Such hyper-velocity impacts produce physical effects such as melting and vaporization that do not occur in familiar sub-sonic collisions. On Earth, ignoring the effects of travel through the atmosphere. The fastest impacts occur at about 72 km/s in the worst case scenario in which an object in a retrograde near-parabolic orbit hits Earth, the median impact velocity on Earth is about 20 km/s. The larger the meteoroid the more of its initial cosmic velocity it preserves, while an object of 9,000 kg maintains about 6% of its original velocity, one of 900,000 kg already preserves about 70%. Extremely large bodies are not slowed by the atmosphere at all, impacts at these high speeds produce shock waves in solid materials, and both impactor and the material impacted are rapidly compressed to high density
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Ocean
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An ocean is a body of saline water that composes much of a planets hydrosphere. On Earth, an ocean is one of the major divisions of the World Ocean. These are, in descending order by area, the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, the word sea is often used interchangeably with ocean in American English but, strictly speaking, a sea is a body of saline water partly or fully enclosed by land. The ocean contains 97% of Earths water, and oceanographers have stated that less than 5% of the World Ocean has been explored, the total volume is approximately 1.35 billion cubic kilometers with an average depth of nearly 3,700 meters. As the world ocean is the component of Earths hydrosphere, it is integral to all known life, forms part of the carbon cycle. The world ocean is the habitat of 230,000 known species, but because much of it is unexplored, the origin of Earths oceans remains unknown, oceans are thought to have formed in the Hadean period and may have been the impetus for the emergence of life. Extraterrestrial oceans may be composed of water or other elements and compounds, the only confirmed large stable bodies of extraterrestrial surface liquids are the lakes of Titan, although there is evidence for the existence of oceans elsewhere in the Solar System. Early in their histories, Mars and Venus are theorized to have had large water oceans. The Mars ocean hypothesis suggests that nearly a third of the surface of Mars was once covered by water, compounds such as salts and ammonia dissolved in water lower its freezing point so that water might exist in large quantities in extraterrestrial environments as brine or convecting ice. Unconfirmed oceans are speculated beneath the surface of many planets and natural satellites, notably. The Solar Systems giant planets are thought to have liquid atmospheric layers of yet to be confirmed compositions. Oceans may also exist on exoplanets and exomoons, including surface oceans of water within a circumstellar habitable zone. Ocean planets are a type of planet with a surface completely covered with liquid. The concept of Ōkeanós has an Indo-European connection, Greek Ōkeanós has been compared to the Vedic epithet ā-śáyāna-, predicated of the dragon Vṛtra-, who captured the cows/rivers. Related to this notion, the Okeanos is represented with a dragon-tail on some early Greek vases, though generally described as several separate oceans, these waters comprise one global, interconnected body of salt water sometimes referred to as the World Ocean or global ocean. This concept of a body of water with relatively free interchange among its parts is of fundamental importance to oceanography. The major oceanic divisions – listed below in descending order of area and volume – are defined in part by the continents, various archipelagos, Oceans are fringed by smaller, adjoining bodies of water such as seas, gulfs, bays, bights, and straits. The Mid-Oceanic Ridge of the World are connected and form the Ocean Ridge, the continuous mountain range is 65,000 km long, and the total length of the oceanic ridge system is 80,000 km long
17.
Pastiche
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A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates, the word pastiche is a French cognate of the Italian noun pasticcio, which is a pâté or pie-filling mixed from diverse ingredients. Metaphorically, pastiche and pasticcio describe works that are composed by several authors. Pastiche is an example of eclecticism in art, a literary allusion may refer to another work, but it does not reiterate it. Moreover, allusion requires the audience to share in the cultural knowledge. Both allusion and pastiche are mechanisms of intertextuality, in literature usage, the term denotes a literary technique employing a generally light-hearted tongue-in-cheek imitation of anothers style, although jocular, it is usually respectful. For example, many stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, originally penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, have written as pastiches since the authors time. Ellery Queen and Nero Wolfe are other subjects of mystery parodies and pastiches. A similar example of pastiche is the posthumous continuations of the Robert E. Howard stories and this includes the Conan stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. David Lodges novel The British Museum Is Falling Down is a pastiche of works by Joyce, Kafka, in 1991 Alexandra Ripley wrote the novel Scarlett, a pastiche of Gone with the Wind, in an unsuccessful attempt to have it recognized as a canonical sequel. Charles Rosen has characterized Mozarts various works in imitation of Baroque style as pastiche, some of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovskys works, such as his Variations on a Rococo Theme and Serenade for Strings, employ a poised classical form reminiscent of 18th-century composers such as Mozart. Perhaps one of the best examples of pastiche in modern music is that of George Rochberg, Rochberg turned to pastiche from serialism after the death of his son in 1963. Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen is unusual as it is a pastiche in both senses of the word, as there are distinct styles imitated in the song. A similar earlier example is Happiness is a Warm Gun by The Beatles, one can find musical pastiches throughout the work of the American composer Frank Zappa. A pastiche Mass is a musical Mass where the constituent movements come from different Mass settings, most often this convention has been chosen for concert performances, particularly by early-music ensembles. Masses are composed of movements, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, for example, the Missa Solemnis by Beethoven and the Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut. In a pastiche Mass, the performers may choose a Kyrie from one composer, and a Gloria from another, or choose a Kyrie from one setting of a composer. In musical theater pastiche is often a tool for evoking the sounds of a particular era for which a show is set
18.
Moby-Dick
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Moby-Dick, or, The Whale is a novel by American writer Herman Melville, published in 1851 during the period of the American Renaissance. The novel was a failure and out of print at the time of the authors death in 1891. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, call me Ishmael is among world literatures most famous opening sentences. The product of a year and a half of writing, the draws on Melvilles experience at sea, on his reading in whaling literature, and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare. The white whale is modeled on the hard to catch actual albino whale Mocha Dick. In addition to prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies. Hundreds of differences, mostly slight and some important, are seen between the two editions, the London publisher censored or changed sensitive passages and Melville made revisions, as well, including the last-minute change in the title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in both editions as Moby Dick, with no hyphen, because the British edition lacked the Epilogue, which accounts for Ishmaels survival, it seemed that the story was told by someone who was supposed to have perished. Many reviewers in British magazines recognized a violation of the rules of fiction, other reviewers, however, found the book too fascinating to dismiss it for these reasons. Some of the scornful British reviews were either reprinted or quoted in American periodicals, about 3,200 copies were sold during the authors life. Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford with plans to sign up for a whaling voyage, the inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a bed with the tattooed Polynesian Queequeg, a harpooneer whose father was king of the island of Rokovoko. The next morning, Ishmael and Queequeg attend Father Mapples sermon on Jonah, Ishmael signs up with the Quaker ship-owners Bildad and Peleg for a voyage on their whaler Pequod. Peleg describes Captain Ahab, Hes a grand, ungodly, god-like man who nevertheless has his humanities and they hire Queequeg the following morning. A man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate should Ishmael and Queequeg join Ahab, while provisions are loaded, shadowy figures board the ship. On a cold Christmas Day, the Pequod leaves the harbor, Ishmael discusses cetology, and describes the crew members. Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick a doubloon, a gold coin, Starbuck objects that he has not come for vengeance but for profit. Ahabs purpose exercises a mysterious spell on Ishmael, Ahabs quenchless feud seemed mine, instead of rounding Cape Horn, Ahab heads for the equatorial Pacific Ocean via southern Africa. One afternoon, as Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat — its warp seemed necessity, his free will
19.
Herman Melville
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Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee, an account of his experiences in Polynesian life. His work was almost forgotten during his last thirty years and his writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. Born in New York City as the child of a merchant in French dry goods, Melvilles formal education ended abruptly after his father died in 1832. Melville briefly became a schoolteacher before he took to sea in 1839 as a sailor on a merchant ship. In 1840 he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet for his first whaling voyage, after further adventures, he returned to Boston in 1844. His first book, Typee, a romanticized account of his life among Polynesians, became such a best-seller that he worked up a sequel. These successes encouraged him to marry Elizabeth Shaw, of a prominent Boston family and his first novel not based on his own experiences, Mardi, is a sea narrative that develops into a philosophical allegory, but was not well received. Redburn, a story of life on a merchant ship, and his 1850 expose of harsh life aboard a Man-of-War, White-Jacket yielded warmer reviews, Moby-Dick was another commercial failure, published to mixed reviews. Melvilles career as a popular author effectively ended with the reception of Pierre. His Revolutionary War novel Israel Potter appeared in 1855, from 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, most notably Bartleby, the Scrivener, The Encantadas, and Benito Cereno. These and three stories were collected in 1856 as The Piazza Tales. In 1857, he voyaged to England, where he reunited with Hawthorne for the first time since 1852, the Confidence-Man, was the last prose work he published during his lifetime. He moved to New York to take a position as Customs Inspector, battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the Civil War. In 1867 his oldest child, Malcolm, died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot, Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, a metaphysical epic, appeared in 1876. In 1886, his son, Stanwix, died and Melville retired. Melvilles death from disease in 1891 subdued a reviving interest in his work. The 1919 centennial of his became the starting point of the Melville Revival
20.
Solar System
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The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system comprising the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of those objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets, with the remainder being significantly smaller objects, such as dwarf planets, of the objects that orbit the Sun indirectly, the moons, two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury. The Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the mass is in the Sun. The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, are terrestrial planets, being composed of rock. The four outer planets are giant planets, being more massive than the terrestrials. All planets have almost circular orbits that lie within a flat disc called the ecliptic. The Solar System also contains smaller objects, the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, mostly contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal. Beyond Neptunes orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of trans-Neptunian objects composed mostly of ices, within these populations are several dozen to possibly tens of thousands of objects large enough that they have been rounded by their own gravity. Such objects are categorized as dwarf planets, identified dwarf planets include the asteroid Ceres and the trans-Neptunian objects Pluto and Eris. In addition to two regions, various other small-body populations, including comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust clouds. Six of the planets, at least four of the dwarf planets, each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other small objects. The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, the heliopause is the point at which pressure from the solar wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellar medium, it extends out to the edge of the scattered disc. The Oort cloud, which is thought to be the source for long-period comets, the Solar System is located in the Orion Arm,26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. For most of history, humanity did not recognize or understand the concept of the Solar System, the invention of the telescope led to the discovery of further planets and moons. The principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a G2 main-sequence star that contains 99. 86% of the known mass. The Suns four largest orbiting bodies, the giant planets, account for 99% of the mass, with Jupiter. The remaining objects of the Solar System together comprise less than 0. 002% of the Solar Systems total mass, most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earths orbit, known as the ecliptic
21.
Genetic engineering
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Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification, is the direct manipulation of an organisms genome using biotechnology. It is a set of used to change the genetic makeup of cells, including the transfer of genes within. Genes may be removed, or knocked out, using a nuclease, gene targeting is a different technique that uses homologous recombination to change an endogenous gene, and can be used to delete a gene, remove exons, add a gene, or introduce point mutations. An organism that is generated through genetic engineering is considered to be a modified organism. The first GMOs were bacteria generated in 1973 and GM mice in 1974, insulin-producing bacteria were commercialized in 1982 and genetically modified food has been sold since 1994. GloFish, the first GMO designed as a pet, was first sold in the United States in December 2003, Genetic engineering techniques have been applied in numerous fields including research, agriculture, industrial biotechnology, and medicine. However the European Commission has also defined genetic engineering broadly as including selective breeding, cloning and stem cell research, although not considered genetic engineering, are closely related and genetic engineering can be used within them. Synthetic biology is a discipline that takes genetic engineering a step further by introducing artificially synthesized material from raw materials into an organism. If genetic material from another species is added to the host, if genetic material from the same species or a species that can naturally breed with the host is used the resulting organism is called cisgenic. Genetic engineering can also be used to remove material from the target organism. In Europe genetic modification is synonymous with genetic engineering while within the United States of America it can refer to conventional breeding methods. The Canadian regulatory system is based on whether a product has novel features regardless of method of origin, within the scientific community, the term genetic engineering is not commonly used, more specific terms such as transgenic are preferred. Plants, animals or micro organisms that have changed through genetic engineering are termed genetically modified organisms or GMOs, bacteria were the first organisms to be genetically modified. Plasmid DNA containing new genes can be inserted into the bacterial cell and these genes can code for medicines or enzymes that process food and other substrates. Plants have been modified for insect protection, herbicide resistance, virus resistance, enhanced nutrition, tolerance to environmental pressures, most commercialised GMOs are insect resistant and/or herbicide tolerant crop plants. Genetically modified animals have used for research, model animals. The genetically modified animals include animals with genes knocked out, increased susceptibility to disease, hormones for extra growth, humans have altered the genomes of species for thousands of years through selective breeding, or artificial selection as contrasted with natural selection, and more recently through mutagenesis. Genetic engineering as the manipulation of DNA by humans outside breeding
22.
Extraterrestrial life
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Extraterrestrial life, also called alien life, is life that does not originate from Earth. These hypothetical life forms may range from simple single-celled organisms to beings with civilizations far more advanced than humanity, although many scientists expect extraterrestrial life to exist in some form, there is no evidence for its existence to date. The Drake equation speculates about the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the science of extraterrestrial life in all its forms is known as exobiology. The science of astrobiology considers life on Earth as well, in 2015, remains of biotic life were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia, when the young Earth was about 400 million years old. According to one of the researchers, If life arose relatively quickly on Earth and it has also played a major role in works of science fiction. Over the years, science fiction works have increased the publics interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, some encourage aggressive methods to try for contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life, whereas others argue that it might be dangerous to actively call attention to Earth. Alien life, such as microorganisms, has been hypothesized to exist in the Solar System and this hypothesis relies on the vast size and consistent physical laws of the observable universe. The chemistry of life may have begun shortly after the Big Bang,13.8 billion years ago, Life may have emerged independently at many places throughout the universe. Alternatively, life may have formed less frequently, then spread—by meteoroids, in any case, complex organic molecules may have formed in the protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding the Sun before the formation of Earth. According to these studies, this process may occur outside Earth on several planets and moons of the Solar System, since the 1950s, scientists have argued the idea that habitable zones around stars are the most likely places to find life. The nearest such planet may be 12 light-years away, according to the scientists, astrobiologists have also considered a follow the energy view of potential habitats. Life on Earth requires water as its solvent in which biochemical reactions take place, More generally, life based on ammonia has been suggested, though this solvent appears less suitable than water. It is also conceivable that there are forms of life whose solvent is a liquid hydrocarbon, about 29 chemical elements play an active positive role in living organisms on Earth. About 95% of this matter is built upon only six elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus. These six elements form the building blocks of virtually all life on Earth. The unique characteristics of carbon make it unlikely that it could be replaced, even on another planet, the carbon atom has the unique ability to make four strong chemical bonds with other atoms, including other carbon atoms. These covalent bonds have a direction in space, so that carbon atoms can form the skeletons of complex 3-dimensional structures with definite architectures such as nucleic acids, carbon forms more compounds than all other elements combined. The great versatility of the atom makes it the element most likely to provide the bases—even exotic ones—for the chemical composition of life on other planets
23.
Civilization
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Historically, a civilization was a so-called advanced culture in contrast to more supposedly primitive cultures. As an uncountable noun, civilization also refers to the process of a society developing into a centralized, urbanized, stratified structure, Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings. The earlier neolithic technology and lifestyle was established first in the Middle East, and later in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins in China, similar pre-civilized neolithic revolutions also began independently from 7,000 BCE in such places as northwestern South America and Mesoamerica. These were among the six civilizations worldwide that arose independently, Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BCE, with civilizations developing from 6,500 years ago. Towards the end of the Neolithic period, various elitist Chalcolithic civilizations began to rise in various cradles from around 3300 BCE. Chalcolithic civilizations, as defined above, also developed in Pre-Columbian Americas and, despite an early start in Egypt, Axum and Kush, the English word civilization comes from the 16th-century French civilisé, from Latin civilis, related to civis and civitas. The fundamental treatise is Norbert Eliass The Civilizing Process, which traces social mores from medieval courtly society to the Early Modern period, in The Philosophy of Civilization, Albert Schweitzer outlines two opinions, one purely material and the other material and ethical. Adjectives like civility developed in the mid-16th century, the abstract noun civilization, meaning civilized condition, came in the 1760s, again from French. The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the pursuit of progress characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the French revolution, civilization was used in the singular, never in the plural and this is still the case in French. The use of civilizations as a noun was in occasional use in the 19th century. Only in this sense does it become possible to speak of a medieval civilization. Already in the 18th century, civilization was not always seen as an improvement, one historically important distinction between culture and civilization is from the writings of Rousseau, particularly his work about education, Emile. From this, a new approach was developed, especially in Germany, first by Johann Gottfried Herder and this sees cultures as natural organisms, not defined by conscious, rational, deliberative acts, but a kind of pre-rational folk spirit. Civilization, in contrast, though more rational and more successful in material progress, is unnatural and leads to vices of social life such as guile, hypocrisy, envy and avarice. In World War II, Leo Strauss, having fled Germany, argued in New York that this opinion of civilization was behind Nazism, Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe have named a number of traits that distinguish a civilization from other kinds of society. Andrew Nikiforuk argues that civilizations relied on shackled human muscle and it took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities and considers slavery to be a common feature of pre-modern civilizations. All civilizations have depended on agriculture for subsistence, grain farms can result in accumulated storage and a surplus of food, particularly when people use intensive agricultural techniques such as artificial fertilization, irrigation and crop rotation
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Galaxy
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A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter. The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias, literally milky, Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few billion stars to giants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxys center of mass. Galaxies are categorized according to their morphology as elliptical, spiral. Many galaxies are thought to have holes at their active centers. The Milky Ways central black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, has a four million times greater than the Sun. Recent estimates of the number of galaxies in the observable universe range from 200 billion to 2 trillion or more, most of the galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter and separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs. The space between galaxies is filled with a gas having an average density of less than one atom per cubic meter. The majority of galaxies are organized into groups, clusters. At the largest scale, these associations are generally arranged into sheets and filaments surrounded by immense voids. In Greek mythology, Zeus places his son born by a mortal woman, the infant Heracles, on Heras breast while she is asleep so that the baby will drink her divine milk and will thus become immortal. Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and then realizes she is nursing a baby, she pushes the baby away, some of her milk spills and. In the astronomical literature, the capitalized word Galaxy is often used to refer to our galaxy, the Milky Way, to distinguish it from the other galaxies in our universe. The English term Milky Way can be traced back to a story by Chaucer c. 1380, See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë Which men clepeth the Milky Wey, For hit is whyt. However, the word Universe was later understood to mean the entirety of existence, so this expression fell into disuse and the objects instead became known as galaxies. Tens of thousands of galaxies have been catalogued, but only a few have well-established names, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and the Sombrero Galaxy. Astronomers work with numbers from certain catalogues, such as the Messier catalogue, the NGC, the IC, the CGCG, all of the well-known galaxies appear in one or more of these catalogues but each time under a different number. For example, Messier 109 is a galaxy having the number 109 in the catalogue of Messier, but also codes NGC3992, UGC6937, CGCG 269-023, MCG +09-20-044. One of the arguments to do so is that these impressive objects deserve better than uninspired codes, for instance, Bodifee and Berger propose the informal, descriptive name Callimorphus Ursae Majoris for the well-formed barred galaxy Messier 109 in Ursa Major
25.
Technological singularity
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Subsequent authors have echoed this viewpoint. I. J. Goods intelligence explosion, predicted that a future superintelligence would trigger a singularity, at the 2012 Singularity Summit, Stuart Armstrong did a study of artificial general intelligence predictions by experts and found a wide range of predicted dates, with a median value of 2040. Good speculated in 1965 that artificial intelligence might bring about an intelligence explosion. These iterations of recursive self-improvement accelerate, allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in, John von Neumann, Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil define the concept in terms of the technological creation of superintelligence. They argue that it is difficult or impossible for humans to predict what human beings lives would be like in a post-singularity world. Computer scientist and futurist Hans Moravec proposed in a 1998 book that the growth curve could be extended back through earlier computing technologies prior to the integrated circuit. Kurzweil reserves the term singularity for an increase in intelligence, writing for example that The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine, some singularity proponents argue its inevitability through extrapolation of past trends, especially those pertaining to shortening gaps between improvements to technology. Kurzweil claims that technological progress follows a pattern of exponential growth, whenever technology approaches a barrier, Kurzweil writes, new technologies will surmount it. He predicts paradigm shifts will become increasingly common, leading to change so rapid. Kurzweil believes that the singularity will occur by approximately 2045 and his predictions differ from Vinges in that he predicts a gradual ascent to the singularity, rather than Vinges rapidly self-improving superhuman intelligence. Oft-cited dangers include those associated with molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering. These threats are major issues for both singularity advocates and critics, and were the subject of Bill Joys Wired magazine article Why the future doesnt need us. Some critics assert that no computer or machine will ever achieve human intelligence, steven Pinker stated in 2008, There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity. The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems. University of California, Berkeley, philosophy professor John Searle writes, have, literally, no intelligence, no motivation, no autonomy and we design them to behave as if they had certain sorts of psychology, but there is no psychological reality to the corresponding processes or behavior. He machinery has no beliefs, desires, motivations and this would cause massive unemployment and plummeting consumer demand, which in turn would destroy the incentive to invest in the technologies that would be required to bring about the Singularity
26.
Vernor Vinge
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Vernor Steffen Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired educator. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University, Vinge published his first short story, Bookworm, Run. in the March 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction, then edited by John W. Campbell. The story explores the theme of artificially augmented intelligence by connecting the brain directly to computerised data sources and he became a moderately prolific contributor to SF magazines in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969, he expanded the story Grimms Story into his first novel and his second novel, The Witling, was published in 1975. These books built Vinges reputation as an author who would explore ideas to their conclusions in particularly inventive ways. Both books were nominated for the Hugo Award, but lost to novels by William Gibson and Orson Scott Card, Vinge won the Hugo Award with his 1992 novel, A Fire Upon the Deep. A Deepness in the Sky was a prequel to Fire, following competing groups of humans in The Slow Zone as they struggle over who has the rights to exploit a technologically emerging alien culture, Deepness won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2000. His novellas, Fast Times at Fairmont High and The Cookie Monster also won Hugo Awards in 2002 and 2004, Vinges 2006 novel, Rainbows End, set in a similar universe to Fast Times at Fairmont High, won the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel. His next novel was released in October 2011, the Children of the Sky is a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, set approximately 10 years later. Vinge retired in 2000 from teaching at San Diego State University, most years, since its inception in 1999, Vinge has been on the Free Software Foundations selection committee for their Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Vernor Vinge was Writer Guest of Honor at ConJosé, the 60th World Science Fiction Convention in 2002 and his former wife, Joan, is an accomplished science fiction author. Grimms World, expanded as Tatja Grimms World The Witling Rainbows End ISBN 0-312-85684-9 — Hugo and Locus SF Awards winner,2007, — Hugo Award nominee,1985 The Ungoverned —. ISBN 0-312-94295-8. and Other Dangers ISBN 0-671-65363-6 Bookworm, Run, true Names The Peddlers Apprentice The Ungoverned Long Shot Threats. -T. Vernor Vinges keynote address at the 2006 Austin Games Conference, Interview by Reason Interview by Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith Interviews on the podcast series The Future and You, April 8,2006, May 1,2006 Interview for the singularity symposium
27.
Alastair Reynolds
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Alastair Preston Reynolds is a British science fiction author. He specialises in hard science fiction and space opera. He spent his years in Cornwall, moved back to Wales before going to Newcastle. Afterwards, he earned a PhD from St Andrews, Scotland, in 1991, he moved to Noordwijk in the Netherlands where he met his wife Josette. There, he worked for the European Space Research and Technology Centre until 2004 when he left to pursue writing full-time and he returned to Wales in 2008 and lives near Cardiff. Reynolds wrote his first four published science fiction stories while still a graduate student, in 1989–1991, they appeared in 1990–1992. In 1991 Reynolds graduated and moved from Scotland to the Netherlands to work at ESA and he then started spending much of his writing time on a first novel, which eventually turned into Revelation Space, while the few short stories he submitted from 1991–1995 were rejected. This ended in 1995 when his story Byrd Land Six was published, as of 2011 he has published over forty shorter works and nine novels. Most of Reynoldss novels contain multiple storylines that originally appear to be completely unrelated, although most characters appear in more than one novel, the works set within this future timeline rarely have the same protagonists twice. Often the protagonists from one work belong to a group that is regarded with suspicion or enmity by the protagonists of another work. In this universe, extraterrestrial sentience exists but is elusive, the trilogy consisting of Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap deal with humanity coming to the attention of the Inhibitors and the resultant war between them. According to Alastair himself, no sequel will ever be made on Century Rain and it contains an alternative interpretation of the Fermi paradox, intelligent sentient life in this universe is extremely scarce. The Prefect marked a return to the Revelation Space universe, like Chasm City, it is a stand-alone novel within the Revelation Space universe. It is set prior to any of the other Revelation Space novels and it was published in the United Kingdom on 2 April 2007. House of Suns is a novel set in the same universe as his novella Thousandth Night from the One Million A. D. anthology. It was released in the UK on 17 April 2008 and in the US on 2 June 2009, Reynolds described it as Six million years in the future, starfaring clones, tensions between human and robot metacivilisations, King Crimson jokes. Terminal World, published in March 2010 was described by Reynolds as a kind of steampunk-tinged planetary romance, as with Century Rain, Reynolds has said that he does not plan any further work in the universe of Terminal World. In June 2009 Reynolds signed a new deal, worth £1 million, the first book is entitled Blue Remembered Earth
28.
Augmented reality
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Augmented reality is a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a general concept called mediated reality. As a result, the functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. By contrast, virtual reality replaces the real world with a simulated one, augmentation is conventionally in real time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as sports scores on TV during a match. With the help of advanced AR technology the information about the real world of the user becomes interactive. Information about the environment and its objects is overlaid on the real world and this information can be virtual or real, e. g. seeing other real sensed or measured information such as electromagnetic radio waves overlaid in exact alignment with where they actually are in space. Augmented reality brings out the components of the world into a persons perceived real world. One example is an AR Helmet for construction workers which displays information about the construction sites, hardware components for augmented reality are, processor, display, sensors and input devices. Various technologies are used in Augmented Reality rendering including optical projection systems, monitors, hand held devices, a head-mounted display is a display device paired to the forehead such as a harness or helmet. HMDs place images of both the world and virtual objects over the users field of view. Modern HMDs often employ sensors for six degrees of freedom monitoring that allow the system to align virtual information to the physical world, HMDs can provide VR users mobile and collaborative experiences. Specific providers, such as uSens and Gestigon, are even including gesture controls for full virtual immersion, in January 2015, Meta launched a project led by Horizons Ventures, Tim Draper, Alexis Ohanian, BOE Optoelectronics and Garry Tan. On February 17,2016, Meta announced their product at TED. AR displays can be rendered on devices resembling eyeglasses, a head-up display, also known as a HUD, is a transparent display that presents data without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints. Near eye augmented reality devices can be used as portable head-up displays as they can show data, information, many definitions of augmented reality only define it as overlaying the information. CrowdOptic technology can be used by Google Glass users to learn where to look at a point in time. In January 2015, Microsoft introduced HoloLens, which is an independent smartglasses unit, First impressions and opinions have been generally that HoloLens is a superior device to the Google Glass, and manages to do several things right in which Glass failed. Contact lenses that display AR imaging are in development and these bionic contact lenses might contain the elements for display embedded into the lens including integrated circuitry, LEDs and an antenna for wireless communication
29.
DJ Spooky
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He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author. He borrowed his name from the character The Subliminal Kid in the novel Nova Express by William S. Burroughs. Having studied philosophy and French literature at Bowdoin College, he has become a Professor of Music Mediated Art at the European Graduate School and is the Executive Editor of Origin Magazine, Spooky began writing science fiction and formed a collective called Soundlab with several other artists. In the mid-1990s, Spooky began recording a series of singles and his debut LP was Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Spooky contributed to the AIDS benefit albums Offbeat, A Red Hot Soundtrip and Onda Sonora, riddim Warfare included collaborations with Kool Keith and other figures in indie rock like Sonic Youths Thurston Moore. He returned in 2002 with Modern Mantra and that same year saw the release of Optometry, a collaboration with avant-jazz players Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Guillermo E. Brown and Joe McPhee. In a classical vein, he collaborated with the ST-X Ensemble in performances of the music of Iannis Xenakis, DJ Spooky collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto on projects including The Discord Symphony. The concert and album were released as an enhanced CD containing both an audio program and multimedia computer files. It features spoken-word performances by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Patti Smith, David Sylvian, DJ Spooky, David Torn and he collaborated with Iannis Xenakis on the recording of Kraanerg, with the STX-Ensemble in 1997. 2005 saw the release of Drums of Death, DJ Spookys CD based on sessions he recorded with Dave Lombardo of Slayer, other guest artists include Chuck D. of Public Enemy and Vernon Reid of Living Colour. The record was co-produced by Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto, DJ Spooky joined the 9th and 11th annual Independent Music Awards judging panel to assist independent musicians careers. He was also a judge for the 3rd Independent Music Awards, DJ Spooky has said that much of his work deals with the notion of the encoded gesture or the encrypted psychology of how music affects the whole framework of what the essence of humaness is. In 2007 his work appeared in the Africa Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennial and this remix of music from Africa was also distributed freely online, and promoted by the blog Boing Boing. You give away an amount of your stuff, and then the cultural economy of cool kicks in. In 2006, the song Battle of Erishkigal, co-written by DJ Spooky, in 2010, Miller formed The Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation, a contemporary arts organization dedicated to exploring dialog between Oceania and the rest of the world. In 2011, Miller collaborated with Ballet Austin Artistic Director Stephen Mills on a work titled Echo Boom as part of The Mozart Project
30.
Kevin Kelly (editor)
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Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian, Kelly was born in Pennsylvania on August 14,1952, and graduated from Westfield High School, Westfield, New Jersey, in 1970. Through his father, an executive for Time who used systems analysis in his work and he attended the University of Rhode Island for one year, studying geology. Kelly traveled extensively backpacking in Asia, while travelling in the Middle East, he had a conversion experience and became a born-again Christian. Kelly lives in Pacifica, California, a coastal town just south of San Francisco. He is married to the biochemist Gia-Miin Fuh and has three children, Kaileen, Ting, and Tywen and he regrets not having a fourth child. Among Kellys personal involvements is a campaign to make an inventory of all living species on earth. He is also sequencing his genome and co-organizes the Bay Area Quantified Self Meetup Group, Kelly began contributing freelance articles to CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, while living in Athens, Georgia. Around this time he was editing his own start-up magazine called Walking Journal. He was hired in 1983 by Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand to edit some of the editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Whole Earth Review. With Brand, Kelly helped found the WELL, a virtual community. As director of the Point Foundation, he co-sponsored the first Hackers Conference in 1984, in 1992, Kelly was hired by Louis Rossetto to serve as executive editor of Wired. Kelly brought to the magazine the cybernetic social vision of the Whole Earth publications and their style of editorial work. Kelly stepped down as editor in 1999, his current job title at Wired is Senior Maverick. Partially due to his reputation as Wireds editor, he is noted as a participant in and an observer of cyberculture. Kellys writing has appeared in other national and international publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harpers Magazine, Science, Veneer Magazine, GQ. His photographs have appeared in Life and other American national magazines, Kellys book-length publication, Out of Control, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, presents a view on the mechanisms of complex organization. Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organisations, intelligent computers, Kelly was a futurist adviser on the Steven Spielberg directed movie Minority Report
31.
Wired (magazine)
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Wired is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Francisco, California, several spin-offs have been launched including, Wired UK, Wired Italia, Wired Japan and Wired Germany. In its earliest colophons, Wired credited Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan as its patron saint, from its beginning, the strongest influence on the magazines editorial outlook came from techno-utopian co-founder Stewart Brand and his associate Kevin Kelly. From 1998 to 2006, Wired magazine and Wired News had separate owners, however, Wired News remained responsible for republishing Wired magazines content online due to an agreement when Condé Nast purchased the magazine. In 2006, Condé Nast bought Wired News for $25 million, the founding designers were John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, beginning with a 1991 prototype and continuing through the first five years of publication, 1993–98. Wired, which touted itself as the Rolling Stone of technology, a great success at its launch, it was lauded for its vision, originality, innovation and cultural impact. In its first four years, the magazine won two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and one for Design. The founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, was an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Review, six authors of the first Wired issue had written for Whole Earth Review, most notably Bruce Sterling and Stewart Brand. However, the first issue did contain a few references to the Internet, including online-dating and Internet sex, the last page, a column written by Nicholas Negroponte, was written in the style of an e-mail message, but contained obviously fake, non-standard email addresses. Wired was among the first magazines to list the email address of its authors and contributors, associate publisher Kathleen Lyman was brought on board to launch Wired with an advertising base of major technology and consumer advertisers. The magazine was followed by a companion website HotWired, a book publishing division, HardWired, a Japanese edition. Wired UK was relaunched in April 2009, in 1994, John Battelle, co-founding editor, commissioned Jules Marshall to write a piece on the Zippies. The cover story broke records for being one of the most publicized stories of the year and was used to promote Wireds HotWired news service, HotWired spawned websites Webmonkey, the search engine HotBot, and a weblog, Suck. com. In June 1998, the magazine launched an index, The Wired Index. The fortune of the magazine and allied enterprises corresponded closely to that of the dot-com bubble, in 1996, Rossetto and the other participants in Wired Ventures attempted to take the company public with an IPO. The initial attempt had to be withdrawn in the face of a downturn in the stock market, the second try was also unsuccessful. Rossetto and Metcalfe lost control of Wired Ventures to financial investors Providence Equity Partners in May 1998, Wired was purchased by Advance Publications, who assigned it to Advances subsidiary, New York-based publisher Condé Nast Publications. Wired survived the bubble and found new direction under editor-in-chief Chris Anderson in 2001
32.
Inca Empire
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The Inca Empire, also known as the Incan Empire and the Inka Empire, was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America, and possibly the largest empire in the world in the early 16th century. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in Cusco in modern-day Peru, the Inca civilization arose from the highlands of Peru sometime in the early 13th century. Its last stronghold was conquered by the Spanish in 1572, from 1438 to 1533, the Incas incorporated a large portion of western South America, centered on the Andean Mountains, using conquest and peaceful assimilation, among other methods. The Incas considered their king, the Sapa Inca, to be the son of the sun, the Inca Empire was unique in that it lacked many features associated with civilization in the Old world. In the words of one scholar, The Incas lacked the use of wheeled vehicles, the Incan economy has been described as feudal, slave, socialist. The economy functioned largely without money and without markets, instead, exchange of goods and services was based on reciprocity between individuals and among individuals, groups, and Inca rulers. Taxes consisted of an obligation of a person to the Empire. The Inca rulers reciprocated by granting access to land and goods and providing food, the Inca referred to their empire as Tawantinsuyu, the four suyu. The four suyu were, Chinchaysuyu, Antisuyu, Qullasuyu and Kuntisuyu, the name Tawantinsuyu was, therefore, a descriptive term indicating a union of provinces. The Spanish transliterated the name as Tahuatinsuyo or Tahuatinsuyu, the term Inka means ruler or lord in Quechua and was used to refer to the ruling class or the ruling family. The Incas were a small percentage of the total population of the empire, probably numbering only 15,000 to 40,000. The Spanish adopted the term as a term referring to all subjects of the empire rather than simply the ruling class. As such the name Imperio inca referred to the nation that they encountered, the Inca people were a pastoral tribe in the Cusco area around the 12th century. Incan oral history tells a story of three caves. The center cave at Tampu Tuqu was named Qhapaq Tuqu, the other caves were Maras Tuqu and Sutiq Tuqu. Four brothers and four sisters stepped out of the middle cave and they were, Ayar Manco, Ayar Cachi, Ayar Awqa and Ayar Uchu, and Mama Ocllo, Mama Raua, Mama Huaco and Mama Qura. Out of the side caves came the people who were to be the ancestors of all the Inca clans, Ayar Manco carried a magic staff made of the finest gold. Where this staff landed, the people would live and they traveled for a long time
33.
Quipu
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Quipus, sometimes known as khipus or talking knots, were recording devices historically used in a number of cultures and particularly in the region of Andean South America. A quipu usually consisted of colored, spun, and plied thread or strings made from cotton or camelid fiber. For the Inca, the system aided in collecting data and keeping records, ranging from monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, the cords contained numeric and other values encoded by knots in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or up to 2,000 cords, the configuration of the quipus have also been compared to string mops. Archaeological evidence has shown a use of finely carved wood as a supplemental. A relatively small number have survived, objects that can be identified unambiguously as quipus first appear in the archaeological record in the first millennium AD. As the region was subsumed under the invading Spanish Empire, the use of the quipu faded from use, however, in several villages, quipu continued to be important items for the local community, albeit for ritual rather than recording use. It is unclear as to where and how many intact quipus still exist, as many have been stored away in mausoleums, quipu is the Spanish spelling and the most common spelling in English. Khipu is the word for knot in Cusco Quechua, the kh is an aspirated k, in most Quechua varieties, the term is kipu. The word khipu, meaning knot or to knot, comes from the Quechua language word, quipu,1704, most information recorded on the quipus consists of numbers in a decimal system. In the early years of the Spanish conquest of Peru, Spanish officials often relied on the quipus to settle disputes over local tribute payments or goods production, Spanish chroniclers also concluded that quipus were used primarily as mnemonic devices to communicate and record numerical information. Quipucamayocs could be summoned to court, where their bookkeeping was recognised as valid documentation of past payments, some of the knots, as well as other features, such as color, are thought to represent non-numeric information, which has not been deciphered. It is generally thought that the system did not include phonetic symbols analogous to letters of the alphabet, however Gary Urton has suggested that the quipus used a binary system which could record phonological or logographic data. To date, no link has yet been found between a quipu and Quechua, the language of the Peruvian Andes. This suggests that quipus are not a writing system and have no phonetic referent. If this conjecture is correct, quipus are the known example of a complex language recorded in a 3-D system. Marcia and Robert Ascher, after having analyzed several hundred quipus, have shown that most information on quipus is numeric, and these numbers can be read. Each cluster of knots is a digit, and there are three types of knots, simple overhand knots, long knots, consisting of an overhand knot with one or more additional turns
34.
Phenakistiscope
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The phénakisticope was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. The phenakistiscope is regarded as one of the first forms of moving media entertainment that paved the way for the motion picture. It can be compared to a GIF animation as it has a short duration, the term phénakisticope was possibly first used by the French company Alphonse Giroux et Compagnie in their application for an import license and this name was used on their box sets. Fellow Parisian publishers Junin & Lazard used the term phenakisticope without the accent, by then, he had an authorized set published first as Phantasmascope and later as Fantascope. In writings and presentations Plateau used both the terms phénakisticope and fantascope, the phénakisticope used a spinning cardboard disc attached vertically to a handle. Arrayed around the center was a series of pictures showing phases of the animation. The user would spin the disc and look through the slits at the discs reflection in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the images kept them from simply blurring together. When there is the number of images as slots, the images will animate in a fixed position. Fewer images than slots, and the images will drift in the direction to that of the spinning disc. More images than slots, and the images will drift in the direction as the spinning disc. Unlike the zoetrope and other successors, the phénakisticope could only practically be used by one person at a time, the pictures of the phénakisticope became distorted when spun fast enough to produce the illusion of movement, they appeared a bit slimmer and were slightly curved. Sometimes animators drew an opposite distortion in their pictures to compensate this, however, most animations were not intended to give a realistic representation and the distortion isnt very obvious in cartoonish pictures. The distortion and the flicker caused by the slits are not seen in most phénakisticope animations now found online. These are usually created with software and do not replicate the actual viewing experience of a phénakisticope. Some miscalculated modern re-animations also have the rotating, which would appear still when viewed through an actual phénakisticope. This also results in the figures moving across the discs where they were supposed to stand still, most commercially produced discs are lithographic prints that were colored by hand, although multicolor lithography and other printing techniques were used by some manufacturers. Many versions of the phénakisticope used smaller illustrated uncut cardboard discs that had to be placed on a slotted disc
35.
Video game
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A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device such as a TV screen or computer monitor. The word video in video game referred to a raster display device. Some theorists categorize video games as an art form, but this designation is controversial, the electronic systems used to play video games are known as platforms, examples of these are personal computers and video game consoles. These platforms range from large mainframe computers to small handheld computing devices, the input device used for games, the game controller, varies across platforms. Common controllers include gamepads, joysticks, mouse devices, keyboards, the touchscreens of mobile devices, and buttons, or even, with the Kinect sensor, a persons hands and body. Players typically view the game on a screen or television or computer monitor, or sometimes on virtual reality head-mounted display goggles. There are often game sound effects, music and, in the 2010s, some games in the 2000s include haptic, vibration-creating effects, force feedback peripherals and virtual reality headsets. In the 2010s, the game industry is of increasing commercial importance, with growth driven particularly by the emerging Asian markets and mobile games. As of 2015, video games generated sales of USD74 billion annually worldwide, early games used interactive electronic devices with various display formats. The earliest example is from 1947—a Cathode ray tube Amusement Device was filed for a patent on 25 January 1947, by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann, and issued on 14 December 1948, as U. S. Written by MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanens on a DEC PDP-1 computer in 1961, and the hit ping pong-style Pong, used the DEC PDP-1s vector display to have two spaceships battle each other. In 1971, Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was the first commercially sold and it used a black-and-white television for its display, and the computer system was made of 74 series TTL chips. The game was featured in the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green, Computer Space was followed in 1972 by the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console. Modeled after a late 1960s prototype console developed by Ralph H. Baer called the Brown Box and these were followed by two versions of Ataris Pong, an arcade version in 1972 and a home version in 1975 that dramatically increased video game popularity. The commercial success of Pong led numerous other companies to develop Pong clones and their own systems, the game inspired arcade machines to become prevalent in mainstream locations such as shopping malls, traditional storefronts, restaurants, and convenience stores. The game also became the subject of articles and stories on television and in newspapers and magazines. Space Invaders was soon licensed for the Atari VCS, becoming the first killer app, the term platform refers to the specific combination of electronic components or computer hardware which, in conjunction with software, allows a video game to operate. The term system is commonly used
36.
Jon Lebkowsky
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Jon Lebkowsky is a web consultant/developer, author, and activist who was the co-founder of FringeWare, Inc. FringeWare, an attempt at ecommerce and online community, published a popular magalog called FringeWare Review. FringeWares email list, called the FringeWare News Network, established a following for the organization. Along with Nancy White, he co-hosts the ongoing Virtual Communities Conference, the Blog Conference, and the public Inkwell Conference at the online community. His weblog can be reached at Weblogsky. com, Lebkowsky has a history of advocacy in support of a free and open Internet, and was a co-founder of EFF-Austin, an organization formed to be a chapter of the national Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF-Austin became an organization with Lebkowsky as President. Lebkowsky coined the phrase Freedom to Connect, which became the name of a conference organized by David Isenberg. Through the WELL, he became associated with Howard Rheingold and Whole Earth Review, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and boing boing. He had early associations with staff at Wired Magazine and conducted a regular and he was a subdomain editor for the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog and, in 1996, became a community host at Howard Rheingolds Electric Minds. He has been interviewed about his work for the documentary Traceroute. Lebkowsky turned to web development, and formed Polycot Consulting with Jeff Kramer and he became an advocate of Open Source systems based on PHP, and later Ruby on Rails. He was an influential social software advocate and one of the instigators of the Social Software Alliance. He was also a blogger at Weblogsky. With Clay Shirky, he created Youre It, a blog about tags and he also blogged at, and managed technology for, Worldchanging, an influential website focused on the future of sustainability that was inspired by the Viridian Design Movement. He is a friend of author Bruce Sterling, whom he has interviewed many times. Lebkowsky and Sterling have a world-readable State of the World conversation for two weeks every January on The WELL. Lebkowsky has written articles and essays, and is a writer and columnist at Worldchanging. He has been an advisor to the SXSW Interactive conference for many years and he curated SXSWi tracks on wireless in 2004, digital convergence in 2006, and journalism in 2011
