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Hitting the Books: Lessons learned from gaming with the King of Sweden
Video games have come a long way from their dim arcade origins. In his new book, The Dream Architects: Adventures in the Video Game Industry, author David Polfeldt examines both the rise of video games as a cultural and commercial force as well as his own experiences in eventually becoming the Managing Director of Massive Entertainment. In the excerpt below, Polfeldt recalls the time the King of Sweden’s staff rang up the Massive offices asking for a tour as well as the realizations His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf managed to elicit with but a simple question.
Hitting the Books: Big Tech turns your every move into profit
Conspiracy theories fly across YouTube, Facebook plays host to extremist communities — and all the while Big Tech's stock is soaring. In Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley is Destructive by Design, Dipayan Ghosh points to Silicon Valley's business models, which direct the waves of personal data that flow across the internet, as an underlying issue.
Hitting the Books: This $80 prosthetic has helped millions walk again
In her new book, What Can a Body Do, Hendren examines the challenges that people with disabilities face on a daily basis in a world that often doesn’t take their needs into account and shows that more inclusive design — from cybernetic prosthetic arms and more accessible city streets to tactile doorbells for the deaf — isn’t just possible, it’s already practical. In the excerpt below, Hendren looks at the Jaipur Foot, an unpowered, low-cost prosthetic that has helped nearly two million lower leg amputees in India and other countries regain their ability to walk. From WHAT CAN A BODY DO: How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren published on August 18, 2020 by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 Sara Hendren.
Hitting the Books: Volcanoes, mortal enemy of the mighty telescope
In The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, author Emily Levesque shines a light on today’s astronomers, a hearty breed of scientist willing to endure uncomfortable work conditions, odd hours, and some of the most remote sites on the planet for a chance to unlock the secrets of the cosmos. In the excerpt below, Levesque recalls the time a volcanic eruption in Washington state derailed a sky survey in Hawaii and led to one of the most epic log entries in scientific history. Telescopes actually have something of an interesting quirk when it comes to these tremors: they’re pointed so incredibly carefully and kept so incredibly still that even the tiniest and earliest shake of an earthquake can show up dramatically in the view of the telescope.
Hitting the Books: Why we'll never see the edge of the universe
While nothing can travel faster than light through space, there’s no rule that limits how quickly things can happen to find themselves farther apart because they are sitting still in a space that’s getting bigger between them.
Hitting the Books: Why women make better astronauts
Kate Greene knows better than most what it’s like to live on Mars. As a member of NASA’s inaugural 2013 HI-SEAS project, she spent four months in a simulated Martian environment on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa. In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Greene examines humanity’s yearning for space travel through the lens of her own experience and explores, not just the cold, technical capabilities needed to get us to Mars, but also the human element that will allow us to thrive on the Red Planet once we get there.
Hitting the Books: America needs a new public data system
In the excerpt below, Lane illustrates the challenges that government employees face when given incomplete or biased data and still expected to do their duties, as well as the enormous benefits we can reap when data is effectively and ethically leveraged for the public good. Democratizing Our Data is already available on Amazon Kindle and will be for sale in print on September 1st.
Hitting the Books: How to huck a human into low Earth orbit
Paul Dye knows a thing or two about spaceflight. His new book "Shuttle, Houston" pulls back the curtain on the incalculable efforts needed to put people in space.
Hitting the Books: What astronauts can learn from nuclear submariners
In his latest book, Spacefarers: How Humans Will Settle the Moon, Mars, and Beyond, Christopher Wanjek examines humanity’s obsession with space travel, why our dreams of living among the stars haven’t yet come to fruition and what it will take to finally get our interstellar efforts off the ground. Excerpted from SPACEFARERS: HOW HUMANS WILL SETTLE THE MOON, MARS, AND BEYOND by Christopher Wanjek, published by Harvard University Press. As hostile an environment as Antarctica is, the icy continent still has one thing that the Moon and Mars doesn’t, and that’s air.
Hitting the Books: The media's role in history's most damaging data dump
Disinformation efforts — the organized spread of lies — have proven especially effective in the modern media landscape.
Hitting the Books: Can golf evolve and survive in the 21st century
With Phillips’s background as an instructor and Rose’s scientific outlook on the body, the two were already far out in front of the trend concerning biomechanics and the golf swing. “It was like, ‘That’s it! It’s just that they didn’t know because we were never taught.
Hitting the Books: A fully-connected future means you'll never be alone
Over much of the period, networked solitude was seen as a necessary and increasingly productive companion to physical solitude.
Hitting the books: The ancient technology behind astronaut ice cream
And what orbital party would be complete without the most American of freeze-dried fare, astronaut ice cream?
Hitting the Books: The Englishman who figured out flight
Cayley’s first great insight was to break the ability to fly down into components, each of which represented a problem that needed solving. And there’s Drag, which slows the aircraft owing to oncoming air resistance.
Hitting the Books: Do we really want our robots to have consciousness?
Although I argue for self-awareness, I do not believe that we need to worry about consciousness. Let’s first try to build some interesting robots without consciousness and see how far we get.
Hitting the Books: How to be active on social media and still keep your job
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog but they can still see you’re a jerk when you shitpost like that.
Hitting the Books: Without glass, we'd have never discovered the electron
Glass is one of humanity's oldest technologies, but without it we'd have never invented television.
Hitting the Books: The story behind Instagram’s most famous filter
Systrom circled “photos.”
Hitting the Books: Disney's influence on America's first stealth planes
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
Hitting the Books: How an attempt at digital allyship fell flat
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
