Quoted: By looking at patterns of hyperlinks, web traffic and search engine usage, Hindman shows that the hierarchies of traditional media and politics are reproduced online, even more entrenched in some ways.

looks interesting. amazon *buys*

Quoted: New details of how Britain would have been governed in the event of a nuclear war from the 1960s into the 1990s have been disclosed with the publication of the secret War Book. The document, over 16 chapters, gives precise plans and instructions for what would have been done by officialdom during the build-up to an international confrontation and after the bombs started falling.

pdfs of this groundbreaking book in its entirety. this book is out of print i believe.

Quoted: The book investigates the fundamental form-generating processes in architecture, considering architecture as a form of artificial life, and proposing a genetic representation in a form of DNA-like code-script, which can then be subject to developmental and evolutionary processes in response to the user and the environment. The aim of an evolutionary architecture is to achieve in the built environment the symbiotic behaviour and metabolic balance found in the natural environment. To do so, it operates like an organism, in a direct analogy with the underlying design process of nature.

Quoted: AUDC’s first book captures three moments in modern culture that offer glimpses into our increasingly perverse relationship to architecture, cities, and objects.

just got this from amazon, can't wait to read it tomorrow! ^_^

Quoted: Brian W. Aldiss examines literature and cinema's ongoing fascination with tales of ecological disaster and global apocalypse

Quoted: Since the 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically connected, global village, thanks to the net. So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village.

Quoted: How did the West emerge, though, out of what was once a diverse set of has-been or backwater cultures of a relatively small geographic region roughly contained in the boundaries of modern Europe? This is no mere academic question. That transformation is one of the great phenomena of world history. Alliances are still being made and wars still being fought in which ideas about the origins of the West and its powers play a central role.

Quoted: Author Jonathan Lethem was a big fan of the comic "Omega the Unknown" when he was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, and he was pretty depressed when the superhero vanished from corner store shelves. Never fear. He'll see Omega in print again soon, because Marvel Entertainment is reviving the comic after 30 years — with Lethem writing the story.

Quoted: on April 17 the first book in 30 years to be published under the name JRR Tolkien is released worldwide. The Children of Hurin, started in 1918 but abandoned, has been 'reconstructed' by the writer's son Christopher.