In a couple of months a book entitled Science Fiction and Computing, edited by David Ferro and Eric Swedin will appear. I contribute an essay about the relationship between Artificial Intelligence research and AI's portrayal in science fiction, especially "HAL" in the Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In my paper I argue that the reality of AI has lagged way behind what the Sci Fi writers have projected.

Today, January 25th 2011, marks the first anniversary of Herb Grosch's death.

The 25th anniversary of Invention & Technology (from American Heritage) is marked by a list of the “top twenty five revolutionary inventions in the United States.” At least that is how it’s reported by IT economist (and sometime historian) Shane Greenstein in his blog, Virulent Word of Mouse. (I was unable to find the article for free on the website.)

A while ago I mentioned a book I was reading called The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. Forgive me if I return to this topic, but it seems too important to ignore. With all the fuss about the products coming from Apple, and the Amazon Kindle, it is time to revisit the topic. I have resisted getting any of these devices, because they do not satisfy what  are very reasonable standards of "simple" design, which we  have a right to demand from those who would supply us with electronic gadgets.

As of this morning, the LHC is shut down again. By now you've probably heard the reason being floated: the LHC is so powerful it reaches into the future. There, some entity recognizes that generating such energies by Earthlings is dangerous, given our level of expertise.

A recent news item from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View informs us of the latest that Gordon Bell is up to. It's a project called "MyLifeBits," and is the subject of a new book, Total Recall, by Bell and Jim Gemmell.  For a description, I quote from an e-mail sent to me by Alan Weissberger, who has sent us information on the CHM several times so far:

Tuesday morning. Guardian read of the day...  And a shocking news - for me: Kodak is taking its 'Kodachrome' product range off the market. Kodak's decision is quite understandable.

A quick glance at the calendar reminded me the other day that my family birthdays' season is starting up as every year... This got me to think about the computing birthdays passed during the last decade or so... A quick stroll on-line and so we have had so far, at least, those of:

By now you have probably heard that Yahoo! is shutting down its Geocities site. There has been a lot of coverage in the press about this, usually relating to two themes. The first is that it illustrates the worst of the dot.com bubble, as Yahoo! bought Geocities for way too much money, at the height of the bubble, and then proceeded to run it into the ground.

So the verdict is in. After being indicted in February for copyright infringement and the promotion of illegal file-sharing, The Pirate Bay has finally - maybe not so surprisingly - lost its case against the Swedish government.