MY MUMMY’S CURSE—BY VOICE MAIL YET
WHAT WITH my recent tidbits here on Akhnaten and his kin, you’d think the spirits of ancient Egypt would look kindly on SimanaitisSays. Then why have I just encountered a … Continue reading
THE HYPERSONIC ARMS RACE
IT ALL BEGAN with bigger sticks, then chemical firepower, then atomic fission, then intercontinental ballistic delivery. The new arms race, with China, Russia, and the U.S. already major players, depends … Continue reading
CELEBRATING VERA RUBIN—HERALDER OF DARK MATTER
THERE ARE PEOPLE who confuse cosmologist with cosmetologist. True, cosmology has to do with stars, but not of the Paltrow or Kardashian variety. According to Merriam-Webster, both terms trace back … Continue reading
THE EYES HAVE IT—0R D0 THℇY?
ARE THESE characters above alphabetical Os or numerical zeroes? Is that a backwards 3 or a stylized alphabetical E, or is it the Greek letter Epsilon or Euler’s constant? Here … Continue reading
ON BEING FOOTLESS AND INQUISITIVE
I GET SO MUCH more than book learning from the London Review of Books. Consider this opening line of a Katherine Rundell article: “A common swift, in its lifetime, flies … Continue reading
ROBOTS: DO WE PREFER PALS OR MACHINES? PART 2
YESTERDAY IN SIMANAITISSAYS, we encountered variations of robot design: C3-PO’s plated mechanicals are nonetheless humanlike. R2-D2’s mechanical torso, arms, and legs give him some humanoid cred. HAL 9000’s impersonal red-eye … Continue reading
ROBOTS: DO WE PREFER PALS OR MACHINES? PART 1
SCI-FI AND REALITY have given us extremes of human/robotic interaction, everything from anthropomorphic constructs to idealized machines bearing no resemblance to humans. What do we prefer? A human-shaped C-3PO? A … Continue reading
