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Certain cult historical figures have served as prescient avatars for the techno-visionaries of the digital age. Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have hewn closer to […] Nikola Tesla Accurately Predicted the Rise of the...

For decades we've been hearing promises about how communication technology will one day eliminate distance itself, making everyone around the globe feel as if they might as well be in the same room. Such a future would have its downside as well as its upside, but even now, approaching the third decade of the 21st […] The Virtual Choir: Watch a Choir Conductor Digitally...

Photo by Gretchen Ertl, via MIT News Unfortunate though it may be for the dreamers of the world, we're all judged not by what we imagine, but what we actually do. This goes double for those specifically tasked with creating things in the physical environment, from engineers and architects to inventors and artists. Leonardo da […] MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imagined by...

The deeper we get into the 21st century, the fewer aspects of our lives remain disconnected from the digital realm. The convenience of this arrangement is undeniable, but the increasing difficulty of getting through a day without hearing the latest version of the public argument about privacy and data security suggests an accompanying discomfort as […] 26-Year-Old Steve Jobs Debates the Utopian & Dystopian...

Every living adult has witnessed enough technological advancement in their lifetime to marvel at just how much has changed, and digital streaming and telecommunications happen to be areas where the most revolutionary change seems to have taken place. We take for granted that the present resembles the past not at all, and that the future […] The First Music Streaming Service Was Invented in...

Image courtesy of the University at Leeds In the striking image above, you can see an early experiment in making books portable--a 17th century precursor, if you will, to the modern day Kindle. According to the library at the University of Leeds, this "Jacobean Travelling Library" dates back to 1617. That's when William Hakewill, an […] Discover the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century...

Nobody uses the word computerized anymore. Its disappearance owes not to the end of computerization itself, but to the process' near-completeness. Now that we all walk around with computers in our pockets (see also the fate of the word portable), we expect every aspect of life to involve computers in one way or another. But […] Watch a Short 1967 Film That Imagines How...

Someone should really snap up the rights for a movie about The Critics, a collective of self-taught teenage filmmakers from northwestern Nigeria. The boys’ dedication, ambition, and no-budget inventiveness calls to mind other filmmaking fanatics, from the sequestered, homeschooled brothers of The Wolfpack to the fictional Sweding specialists of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Be Kind, Rewind. […] Nigerian Teenagers Are Making Slick Sci Fi Films...

When I was a little boy, I thought the greatest thing in the world would be to be able to make records. — Fred Rogers By 1972, when the above episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aired, host Fred Rogers had already cut four records, including the hit-filled A Place of Our Own. But a childlike curiosity compelled […] Mister Rogers Demonstrates How to Cut a Record...

There are apps to track the number of daily minutes you habitually fritter away on social media, but can your smartphone help you get a handle on the automotive color preferences of midday San Diego drivers? Or the number of planes landing at San Diego International Airport on the day after Thanksgiving? Or, for that matter, […] Cy Kuckenbaker’s Time Collapse Videos Let You See...

Glenn Gould made his name as a pianist with his stark, idiosyncratic interpretations of the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and especially Bach. He left behind not just a highly respected body of work in the form of recorded performances, but also a host of strong opinions about music itself and all that culturally and commercially surrounded […] Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the...

It’s hard to imagine that the space-crazed general public needed any help getting worked up about astronauts and NASA in the early 60s. Perhaps the wild popularity of space-related imagery is in part what motivated NASA administrator James Webb to create the NASA Art Program in 1962. Although the program's handpicked artists weren’t edited or censored in any way, […] NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell...

From a distance of half a century, we look back on the moon landing as a thoroughly analog affair, an old-school engineering project of the kind seldom even proposed anymore in this digital age. But the Apollo 11 mission could never have happened without computers and the people who program them, a fact that has […] How Margaret Hamilton Wrote the Computer Code That...

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, Google has created a high-tech tribute to Margaret Hamilton, the lead software engineer of the Apollo space program. Google writes: "The tribute was created by positioning over 107,000 mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the […] Moonlight Strikes 107,000 Solar Mirrors & Creates a...

Image by Olaf Tausch via Wikimedia Commons We may not see warp drives any time soon, but another piece of Star Trek tech, the universal translator, maybe become a reality in our lifetime, if it hasn’t already. Machine learning “has proven to be very competent” when it comes to translation, “so much so that the […] Can Artificial Intelligence Decipher Lost Languages? Researchers Attempt...

Some enjoy free jazz as soon as they first hear it; others think it sounds like music from an alien civilization, a listening experience fit only for a jazz fan as high as a kite. But how about as high as a space probe? Outerhelios, a 24/7 stream of artificial intelligence-generated free jazz, comes designed […] What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Listens to John...

 History seems to have settled Buckminster’s Fuller’s reputation as a man ahead of his time. He inspires short, witty popular videos like YouTuber Joe Scott’s “The Man Who Saw The Future,” and the ongoing legacy of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI), who note that “Fuller’s ideas and work continue to influence new generations of […] Buckminster Fuller Tells the World “Everything He Knows”...

Do you remember your first Walkman? If you grew up after the cassette era, of course, you might have owned a CD-playing Discman instead, or maybe — just maybe — even a Minidisc Walkman. Nowadays you probably have an iPod or iPod-like digital audio player as well as a cellphone equipped to serve the same […] The Walkman Turns 40: See Every Generation of...