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The Coming Age Of Systems And Machines Inspired By Living Things

This is a bit of a weird one. It’s the classic publisher trick of trying to something progressive and just getting it wrong. The complete text of Robert Franay’s new book is online – but you have to get it delivered to you piece by piece by email or RSS. So basically the book is being broken up into blog sized chunks. I can’t think of anything more irritating, to be honest, but those with patience could wait til all the emails arrive and then read the book from start to finish.

Here’s how Franay describes his book:

My aim in this book is to advance a view of the world that in some ways makes our complicated lives simple again. I believe this will come not just from Arcadian machines that work like living things but also from the rise of a culture that integrates the larger dynamics of life�??a culture that evolves. How long this can last, and where it will take us, are questions for the ages. I�??d argue that if the ultimate end of life on earth is not knowable to us, one thing we can know and trust is ecological process�??if we understand it well, and if we create a world that works within it. This would free human culture to evolve toward a future that is advanced and sophisticated beyond our imagining, while becoming at the same time an entirely new expression of that bucolic ideal we see now as no more than an ancient dream.

Visit PulseTheBook.com for email and RSS downloads of the books

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“How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity”

This is the book that underpins the philosophy of why giving away your entire book for free on the Net is a good thing. The website is a model every other writer should follow to promote their own book – clean, simple, and with the book available in a variety of electronic formats.

That aside, it’s also an important book whichever way you read it, because it recognises the lockdown of our supposedly ever more free culture. Here’s the book blurb:

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can�t do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What�s at stake is our freedom�freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

Visit Lessig’s site to download Free Culture

More on Lawrence Lessig

	Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by: Lawrence Lessig price: $9.75 (new), $1.95 (used)
	The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (Vintage) by: Lawrence Lessig price: $9.75 (new), $5.20 (used)
	Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by: Lawrence Lessig price: $11.02 (new), $3.38 (used)
	Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by: Lawrence Lessig price: $6.00 (used)
	Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video by: Stefano Basilico, Lawrence Lessig, Rob Yeo price: $24.95 (new), $16.98 (used)
	Code: Version 2.0 by: Lawrence Lessig price: $10.82 (new)
	Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman by: Richard M. Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Joshua Gay price: $15.72 (new), $14.89 (used)
	Social meaning and social norms.(Symposium: Law, Economics, & Norms) : An article from: University of Pennsylvania Law Review by: Lawrence Lessig price: $5.95 (new)
	A vision of Internet openness by government fiat: An article from: Northwestern University Law Review by: James B Speta price: $20.00 (new)
	Controlling the ‘Net: How vested interests are enclosing the cybercommons and underming internet freedom.(Interview) : An article from: Multinational Monitor price: $5.95 (new)

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This is a glorious compendium of arcane computer jargon, now in its third edition in print but continually updated online.

Indeed, The Jargon File website is the real home of the Hacker Dictionary, from which the book is merely a spin off. Here’s one of my favourite entries from the Dictionary, which gives a good flavour for why anyone should go rooting around in its pages:

cargo cult programming: n.

A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare shotgun debugging, voodoo programming).

The term �??cargo cult�?? is a reference to aboriginal religions that grew up in the South Pacific after World War II. The practices of these cults center on building elaborate mockups of airplanes and military style landing strips in the hope of bringing the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war. Hackish usage probably derives from Richard Feynman’s characterization of certain practices as �??cargo cult science�?� in his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W. W. Norton & Co, New York 1985, ISBN 0-393-01921-7).

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	The New Hacker’s Dictionary – 3rd Edition by: Eric S. Raymond price: $19.04 (new), $2.19 (used)
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	Bedford Handbook 6e cloth with 2003 MLA Update and hardcover dictionary by: Diana Hacker price: $49.12 (used)
	Writer’s Reference 5e with 2003 MLA Update and St. Martin’s Guide to : Writing 7e Shorter and paperback dictionary by: Diana Hacker, Rise B. Axelrod, Charles R. Cooper price: $93.95 (new)
	Bedford Handbook 6e paper and CD-Rom Electronic Bedford Handbook 6.0 and : paperback dictionary by: Diana Hacker price: $34.19 (used)
	Convergences and Bedford Handbook 6e paper with 2003 MLA Update and paperback : dictionary by: Robert Atwan, Diana Hacker price: $101.95 (new)
	Writer’s Reference 5e with 2003 MLA Update & Encarta paperback dictionary by: Diana Hacker price: $50.95 (new)
	Bedford Handbook 7e paper & paperback dictionary by: Diana Hacker price: $55.95 (new), $53.15 (used)
	Fields of Reading 7e and Bedford Handbook 6e paper with 2003 MLA Update and : paperback dictionary by: Nancy R. Comley, David Hamilton, Carl H. Klaus, Robert Scholes, Nancy Sommers, Diana Hacker price: $104.95 (new)
	Writer’s Reference 6e & paperback dictionary by: Diana Hacker price: $37.50 (new)

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