Urban Honking

In the early 1990s, William Gibson wrote Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a 300-line autobiographical poem saved on a 3.5″ floppy designed to erase itself after a single use. The book version accomplished the task in analogue: its pages were treated with photosensitive chemicals, which began gradually fading the words and images from the book’s first exposure […]

A villanelle is a kind of 19th-century French poem long derided by modern poets for its fusty, pompous formalism &#8212but, like many things, revived when the madness of the 20th century brought about nostalgia for structure. H.G. Wells was a prophetic writer and social critic who has gone in and out of favor since his […]

Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography? Read Rimbaud! – Phillipe Diolé   I’ve written many times, although not recently, about the ocean. When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship’s log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson, and adolescent screeds on the perils…

The original cover’s horny pronouncement: “Alien Satellites Circle the Earth–and Man’s Only Hope is a Mad Cartoonist!?” The Zap Gun is one of Philip K. Dick’s lesser “pot-boiler” novels. It was originally serialized, so it’s shitty in the way that novels always are when it’s clear a writer is being paid by the word, useless […]

This past weekend, I had the honor of participating in Art && Code 3D, a conference hosted by Golan Levin of the CMU Studio for Creative Inquiry about DIY 3D sensing. It was, much as Matt Jones predicted, “Woodstock for the robot-readable world”. I gave two talks at the conference, but those aren’t what I […]

I’m proud to announce that my book, Making Things See: 3D Vision with Kinect, Processing, and Arduino, is now available from O’Reilly. You can buy the book through O’Reilly’s Early Release program here. The Early Release program lets us get the book out to you while O’Reilly’s still editing and designing it and I’m still […]

The Book of Exogenesis: In the beginning was the word, and the word was a meteorite…

Earlier this month, a report, based on NASA studies of meteorites found on Earth, suggested that some building blocks of DNA may have been formed in space.

As i…

Our concept of time can be adjusted. In a study on the perception of time participants were exposed to flashes of light at set intervals. After being exposed to 100 flashes that lasted 150 milliseconds participants felt that flashes of 300 milliseconds were closer to 400. I’ve read about the “optimum length” for online articles […]

This world is a Haven for Extra-terrestrial Stones. The Earth Yields them, Nestled in the dirt and Thoroughly unconcerned with Humanity. Every night, They quietly Invent perfect Copies of Men. A dream is all we are, the Nightmares of a jewel.

Virtual Light is the first book of William Gibson’s “Bridge” trilogy, in which an nonfunctional, shanty-town Golden Gate bridge is a major feature. Like his previous “Sprawl” trilogy, it leans low and hard into its dystopian city-scape, positing a completely probable slumification of the modern metropolis — one which has developed laterally, growing in spontaneous […]