Image: Courtesy of Prestel
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What a Plant Knows
How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it actually feel an insect’s tiny, spindly legs? And how do cherry blossoms know when to bloom? Can they...
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Mummies of the World
Edited by Alfried Wieczorek and Wilfried Rosendahl. Prestel, 2010
People have been preserving bodies of the dead for millennia, from the bog bodies found in the peat wetlands of northern Europe to the embalmed and wrapped mummies recovered from Egypt’s desert sands. The companion book to a traveling exhibit of the same name that opened in California in July, this volume brings together evocative imagery of dozens of mummies—human and animal—from around the globe and explains how science is revealing who these individuals were and how their remains have survived across the ages.
What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly. Viking, 2010
Technology, contends journalist Kevin Kelly, has a life of its own, and it advances independently of humans. Here he describes what he calls the “technium,” a term that embodies the sum of all technologies, the society and culture of tools, and the self-reinforcing system of creating them.
“At some point in its evolution, our system of tools and machines and ideas became so dense in feedback loops and complex interactions that it ... began to exercise some autonomy.
“At first the notion of technological independence is very hard to grasp. We are taught to think of technology first as a pile of hardware and secondly as inert stuff that is wholly dependent on us humans. In this view, technology is only what we make. Without us, it ceases to be. It does only what we want. And that’s what I believed, too.... But the more I looked at the whole system of technological invention, the more powerful and self-generating I realized it was.
“There are many fans, as well as many foes, of technology who strongly disagree with the idea that the technium is in any way autonomous. They adhere to the creed that technology does only what we permit it to do. In this view, notions of technological autonomy are simply wishful thinking on our part. But I now embrace a contrary view: that after 10,000 years of slow evolution and 200 years of incredible intricate exfoliation, the technium is maturing into its own thing. Its sustaining network of self-reinforcing processes and parts has given it a noticeable measure of autonomy. It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.”
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