“It was Claude Shannon who made the final synthesis, who defined the concept of information and effectively solved the problem of noise. It was Shannon who was credited with gathering the threads into a new science. But he had important predecessors at Bell Labs, two engineers who had shaped his thinking since he discovered their work as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, who were the first to consider how information might be put on a scientific footing, and whom Shannon’s landmark paper singled out as pioneers.”
Tag: 08.10.17
Not Enough Good Roles For Actresses? A New 36-Woman Theatre Company Is Addressing That
Following 12 months of workshops and training for the participants, the London-based project, called Dangerous Spaces, will commission half a dozen playwrights to write scripts for six actresses each. Those scripts will be produced, along with an all-female Shakespeare staging, in the 2018-19 season.
Karaoke, And The Technology That Makes It Possible: A History
The phenomenon dates all the way back to the 1970s and 8-track tape players, and initially people did it at home as well as at bars.
There Has Been A Surge Of Interest In Boredom…
Quietly asserting itself in books and personal essays since 2015, the “boredom boom” would seem to be a reaction to the short attention spans bred by our computers and smartphones. The words “boring” and “interesting” didn’t exist in English till the 1800s, a period when…
Andrew Russell Saves Seattle Theatre, Heads To New York
The backstory: There wouldn’t be an Intiman Theatre in 2017 if it wasn’t for Russell. For audiences, for the company and the Seattle theater community at large, Russell has been nothing less than a turn-around artist — in some ways, a controversial one — whose upfront progressive politics and improvisational style made him a real mover and shaker.
The Fierce, Independent, Imaginative Women Of Novelist Claire Messud
Messud’s protagonists, “unusually for women in fiction, tend not to be wives or mothers. More often they’re figures who might be considered unpalatable, unattractive or — indeed — angry. Her work quietly seethes at the idea that a woman needs to be ‘likable’ — or that a man should be the judge of her likability.”
You Can’t Fully Understand Virginia Woolf Without Understanding Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity
It’s especially clear in Orlando, but that’s not the only text that shows how much Woolf took and learned from what she knew of Einstein’s theories. “In Woolf’s vision of life — which echoes the ever-evolving flow of her language — the universe may remain a godless dark riddle, but some starry doors remain ajar, leading to the wonderful and terrible who-knows-where.”
There’s A Big Hole At The Center Of The Arts, And It’s Shaped Like The Working Class
That’s the case, at least, in the U.K., according to a new report: “The systematic eradication of arts education in schools, sky-high drama school audition fees, chronic low pay and a lack of diversity behind the scenes are all contributing to a diversity crisis on our stages and screens.”
Could This Technology Solve Electronic Ticketing Problems?
“As Citizen Ticket’s technology – BitTicket – is based on blockchain, it means that batches cannot be oversold and tickets cannot be copied or counterfeited, while the number of tickets in a transaction is also monitored.”
Jack Rabinovitch, 86, Had Major Impact On Canada’s Literary Scene
Mr. Rabinovitch died on Sunday at the age of 87, a few days after falling down the stairs of his Toronto home. On Wednesday he was laid to rest, with hundreds of mourners gathering at the city’s Beth Tzedec Congregation to pay their respects to the man who, through a small act of literary philanthropy, did more to alter the course of Canadian letters over the last few decades than just about anyone else in the country.