Adactio: Links

The Secret History of Hypertext - The Atlantic

The latest excellent missive from The History Of The Web—A Brief History of Hypertext—leads back to this great article by Alex Wright on Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum.

The Computational Foundation of Life | Quanta Magazine

Philip Ball certainly has a way with words.

Front-End Developers Are Information Architects Too ◆ 24 ways

Some great thoughts here from Francis on how crafting solid HTML is information architecture.

The world-wide web (PDF) by T.J. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau and J.-F. Groff

Well, look at these fresh-faced lads presenting their little hypertext system in 1992. A fascinating time capsule.

29 Bullets

Russell wrote an article for Wired magazine all about PowerPoint, but this extended director’s cut on his own site is the real deal.

Who knew that the creator of PowerPoint was such an enthusiast for the concertina?

Is DNA the Future of Data Storage? - WSJ

It’s still many years away from being a viable storage option, but here’s the latest on using DNA to back up our collective data.

Magnetic tape may survive a few decades, and DVDs even longer, but they are by no means immortal. Data stored in DNA, provided it’s kept cold and dry, could last for thousands of years.

Can These Pornographers End ‘MILFs,’ ‘Teens,’ and ‘Thugs’? | The Nation

A fascinating look at an attempt to redefine the taxonomy of online porn.

Porn is part of the ecosystem that tells us what sex and sexuality are. Porn terms are, to use Foucault’s language, part of a network of technologies creating truths about our sexuality.

Reminds of the heady days of 2005, when it was all about tagging and folksonomies.

The project, at its most ambitious, seeks to create a new feedback loop of porn watched and made, unmoored from the vagaries of old, bad, lazy categories.

How to Make Sense of Any Mess

Did you know that Abby Covert’s book is available online in its gloriously hyperlinked entirety?

Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100 - The New Yorker

A lovely profile of Claude Shannon (concluding with an unexpected Brighton connection).

The Pain With No Name · An A List Apart Article

This rousing call-to-arms by Abby the IA makes a great companion piece to her interview on The Big Web Show.

Meet Walter Pitts, the Homeless Genius Who Revolutionized Artificial Intelligence

The fascinating story of logic, learning, and the origins of electronic computing. Russell, Shannon, Turing, Wiener, Von Neumann …they’re all in there, woven around the tragic figure of Walter Pitts.

It is a sad and beautiful world.

Thanks to their work, there was a moment in history when neuroscience, psychiatry, computer science, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence were all one thing, following an idea first glimpsed by Leibniz—that man, machine, number, and mind all use information as a universal currency. What appeared on the surface to be very different ingredients of the world—hunks of metal, lumps of gray matter, scratches of ink on a page—were profoundly interchangeable.

The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again) - Doug Hill - The Atlantic

A profile of Norbert Wiener, and how his star was eclipsed by Claude Shannon.

Guardian beta · The container model and blended content – a new approach to how we present content on the Guardian

This is what Oliver was talking about Responsive Day Out 2 — a new approach to information architecture.

Cast off your sidebars! You have nothing to lose but your grids!

The Man Who Turned Paper Into Pixels on Vimeo

A short film about Claude Shannon and Information Theory — not exactly as in-depth as James Gleick’s The Information, but it does a nice job of encapsulating the fundamental idea.

NSA: The Decision Problem by George Dyson

A really terrific piece by George Dyson taking a suitably long-zoom look at information warfare and the Entscheidungsproblem, tracing the lineage of PRISM from the Corona project of the Cold War.

What we have now is the crude equivalent of snatching snippets of film from the sky, in 1960, compared to the panopticon that was to come. The United States has established a coordinated system that links suspect individuals (only foreigners, of course, but that definition becomes fuzzy at times) to dangerous ideas, and, if the links and suspicions are strong enough, our drone fleet, deployed ever more widely, is authorized to execute a strike. This is only a primitive first step toward something else. Why kill possibly dangerous individuals (and the inevitable innocent bystanders) when it will soon become technically irresistible to exterminate the dangerous ideas themselves?

The proposed solution? That we abandon secrecy and conduct our information warfare in the open.

Tags: information

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