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Boston Dynamics, creators of the quadrupedal robot “BigDog,” bring you “Petman,” a robot modeled on the gait of Mr. Natural. Unlike Mr. Natural, Petman is stable when pushed. They say that the robot is designed […]
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A new Levi’s advertisement uses a wax-cylinder recording of what is believed to be Walt Whitman reciting his own poem. Of course, it’s by no means Whitman’s first trousers ad — O soul in […]
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In one version of an oft-repeated thought experiment, Douglas Hofstadter famously wondered if Albert Einstein’s brain (well, anyone’s brain, really) could be reformatted as a book, with each neuron represented by a page printed with […]
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As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, a pair of physicists have offered a novel theory to explain the troubles bedeviling the Large Hadron Collidor, the world’s most powerful — and to date, […]
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I asked you to describe the ideal book, one that would save the publishing world and the public sphere in one stroke. And with responses pouring in — nearly three dozen of them — it's […]
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THOR HEYERDAHL (1914–2002) lived a long life, but so much was left undone: he might have piloted an ice floe from Porvoo to Hokkaido to prove Finland’s nomadic Sami peopled Japan; he might have shown […]
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Electronica composer John Boswell remixes the preambles and perorations of Carl Sagan for a groovy take on the wonder-struck spiritual cosmology at the heart of the landmark PBS series Cosmos. With a guest appearance by […]
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Listening to NPR yesterday morning for the first time in a month of Sundays, I caught the puzzle segment with Will Shortz. While Will and Liane engaged in their smile-weary repartée and my wife sorted […]
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In the 1990s, the artists Komar and Melamid began polling art lovers to discover the world’s ideal painting. I’m curious to learn whether we can use similar methods to discover the ideal book. The short […]
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I can’t decide whether this is evidence of the book’s staying power, or a sign that its end is near: to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing, the art publisher Taschen has […]
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I’ve been a mere lurker at Infinite Summer, the online book club which sprang up to honor the late David Foster Wallace by exploring his magnum opus, Infinite Jest. Thousands of people have participated in […]
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Last week the New York Times’s occasional “Op-Art” column was furnished by Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty, whose handwriting manuals explain and promote the italic hand. In “Write Stuff,” they offer italic as a balm […]
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THE BOOK Terms of Service Statement of Rights and Responsibilities This statement of the terms of service of The Book is derived from principles of the public sphere, covered in the U.N. Declaration of Human […]
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Monkeys are making news across the world of science. As we discussed last week, researchers discovered that tamarin monkeys prefer music composed for them. Yesterday, Science Daily reported a study in which monkeys were found […]
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