isaac Mao's Library tagged Book → View Popular

30 Aug 09

23 Feb 09

To read Robert Muchembled’s compelling history of violence is to understand how deeply flawed this popular narrative is – and to appreciate that the “good old days” were often far more appalling. Violent impulses have been a permanent and universal feature of our lives since the dawn of time. But what have constantly changed are the ways in which political and religious leaders have sought to inflame or restrain them.
The statistics Muchembled cites are striking. The number of murders per year is just one per 100,000 in Europe today and six in the US. In 14th-century Europe it was estimated at 130 per 100,000. Yet some aspects of violence have remained constant over seven centuries: 90 per cent of murders are committed by men, most of them younger than 30, and southern Europe has always had a higher incidence of violence than in the north, giving some credence to the popular image of a hot-blooded Latin male.

20 Dec 08

12 Nov 08

23 Sep 08

FREESOULS: Captured and Released is a new book by the entrepreneur and photographer Joi Ito, which brings to print the best of his landscape and portrait photography. The book features hundreds of superb portraits of many of the leaders in both Technology and Creative industries. The book also includes important new essays by Howard Rheingold, Lawrence Liang, Yochai Benkler, Cory Doctorow and Isaac Mao, with a foreword by Lawrence Lessig and a special interview with Joi Ito. FREESOULS marks an important new step in free culture publishing, as all of the portraits in the book will be available for re-use. The book should be of special interest to digital photographers, Internet enthusiasts and free culture theorists.

13 Aug 08

-Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge

A million years, or 40,000 generations, is a long time — but not that long on a cosmic timescale. As Broderick puts it, the number is an emblem of a remote future.
4 more annotations...
- The rest of the Year Million authors are keener to explore posthuman, extraterrestrial futures that are far removed from the cosy colonialism of Star Trek,
- Thus transformed, this smart hypothetical material will be assembled into Matrioshka brains, or M-brains. These are the current incarnation of Dyson shells, first described in detail by Freeman Dyson in 1959, which are built round a star to collect all its radiant energy.
- Earth escapes the attentions of these 'matter miners' for sentimental reasons. But nowhere else is safe. The stripped-down Darwinism shaping these essays means that more is better. The M-brains send out not starships but seeds, which are efficient and encode the ability to bootstrap new nano-manufacturing capacity on any world that happens to be suitable. Minds can then take up residence, either downloaded from the seed or transmitted through the, ahem, 'Universenet'.
- These are not futures of quiet contemplation. Rudy Rucker's engaging vision of an era when evolved intelligence will tap into the quantum computation of the cosmos to let us "commune with the souls of stones" is a startling exception.