April 11, 2013
To celebrate National Autism Awareness Month, here’s a guest post from Paul H. Patterson, author of Infectious Behavior: Brain-Immune Connections in Autism, Schizophrenia, and Depression. He explains how autism research has changed since the book came out in 2011.
Today’s haiku, about the MIT Press colophon, is from a fan!
April 10, 2013
Our first post for National Robotics Week was a guest post from the author of Robot Futures, Illah Nourbakhsh. The second post is a Q & A from Working On Mars author William Clancey. This is the first of two posts.
April 8, 2013
April 6th through the 14th is National Robotics Week. The first of three posts comes from Illah Nourbakhsh, author of the recently released, Robot Futures.
April 3, 2013
Happy Wednesday! Here’s our Q&A with Vincent Katz, editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art. Unavailable for several years, this generously illustrated book documents the most successful experiment in the history of American arts education. Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and curator based in New York City.
April 1, 2013
At MIT, practical jokes aren’t reserved for April Fools’ Day–students “hack” throughout the year. A “hack” is an ingenious, benign, and anonymous prank or practical joke, usually requiring engineering or scientific expertise and often pulled under the cover of darkness. Nick Montfort, author of several books, including Twisty Little Passages and 10 PRINT, and Associate Professor of Digital Media here at MIT, comments on the recent “Pac-Man and Blinky on the Great Dome” hack.
March 29, 2013
For our final National Women’s History month blog post, we share an excerpt from Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt Beyer. Hopper left a teaching position at Vassar College to serve in the Navy during World War II. After her training, Hopper was assigned to work on the first-ever computer located at Harvard University.
March 23, 2013
With Saturday serving as “World Meteorological Day,” we are commemorating the occasion with a look at Kristine C. Harper’s Weather by the Numbers,a book that details the transformation of meteorology in the 20th century from an unrespected “guessing science” into a complex scientific discipline based on mathematical calculation and advanced computer models.
March 22, 2013
For our fourth Women’s History Month post, we interviewed Janet Abbate, author of Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. Janet Abbate is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and is also the author of Inventing the Internet.
March 21, 2013
Today is Slavoj Žižek’s birthday! We’re celebrating this famous philosopher-cultural critic by sharing a snippet from The Parallax View. This book not only expands Zizek’s Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. In this brain “tickler,” philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.