Galleycat notes that a team at USC has nabbed a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to, as the grant states, “support production costs for a video game based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. The player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods.”

This game is going to kick some serious ass. Check out the trailer:

Right after that bass-fishing mission, there’s a killer bean-field mission where you do battle with a gang of woodchucks using a two-handed hoe as your only weapon. I also hear that – spoiler alert – the game culminates in an insane melee with the local tax collector that begins in the Concord jail and ends in the kitchen of Emerson’s house.

And, no, there’s no multiplayer option.

Ever since the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground two thousand years ago, people have yearned to rebuild it. Today, thanks to the internet, the dream of a universal library seems closer to fulfillment than ever before. But as Google’s ill-fated Book Search project has revealed, the challenges to creating a comprehensive online library remain great – and they have little to do with technology.

In the new issue of Technology Review, I report on the latest and perhaps most ambitious effort to create “the library of utopia”: the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA. Led by Harvard luminaries, the DPLA has big plans, big names, and big contributors, but it, too, faces big obstacles, not least of which is its hesitancy to define what it wants to be.

Here’s a bit from the article:

If you were looking for Larry Page’s opposite, you would be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Robert ­Darnton. A distinguished historian and prize-winning author, a former Rhodes scholar and MacArthur fellow, a Chevalier in France’s Légion d’Honneur, and a 2011 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the 72-year-old Darnton is everything that Page is not: eloquent, diplomatic, and embedded in the literary establishment. If Page is a bull in a china shop, Darnton is the china shop’s proprietor.

But Darnton has one thing in common with Page: an ardent desire to see a universal library established online, a library that would, as he puts it, “make all knowledge available to all citizens.” …

Read it all.

Ross Andersen has a superb interview with the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss at the Atlantic’s site. Krauss’s recent book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing has, by design, kicked up a controversy. Krauss argues in the book that science is now “addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing” and that, indeed, recent scientific discoveries in this area “all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem.” In his afterword to the book, Richard Dawkins writes, “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages.” In a New York Times review last month, the Columbia University philosopher David Albert begged to differ, writing that Krauss is “dead wrong.” Albert argued that what Krauss claims is “nothing” – in short, “empty space” – is actually something and that, therefore, Krauss’s explanation does not “amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.” In the Atlantic interview, Krauss calls Albert “a moronic philosopher.”

Fun stuff.

But important stuff, too. As Andersen writes, “To see two academics, both versed in theoretical physics, disagreeing so intensely on such a fundamental point is troubling. Not because scientists shouldn’t disagree with each other, but because here they’re disagreeing about a claim being disseminated to the public as a legitimate scientific discovery.” More than that, they’re arguing about whether non-scientific approaches to explaining or even contemplating the origin of the cosmos – not just theological approaches, but also philosophical ones – still have any legitimacy. Krauss has little regard for philosophy, as he makes clear at the outset of the interview:

Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.” And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; … it’s really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I’d say that this tension [between science and philosophy] occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t.

And yet – and this is testimony to Andersen’s skill as a questioner – as the interview proceeds Krauss begins to sound as much like a philosopher (a philosopher of science, even) as a scientist:

Andersen: I think the problem for me, coming at this as a layperson, is that when you’re talking about the explanatory power of science, for every stage where you have a “something” – even if it’s just a wisp of something, or even just a set of laws – there has to be a further question about the origins of that “something.” And so when I read the title of your book, I read it as “questions about origins are over.”

Krauss: Well, if that hook gets you into the book that’s great. But in all seriousness, I never make that claim. In fact, in the preface I tried to be really clear that you can keep asking “Why?” forever. At some level there might be ultimate questions that we can’t answer, but if we can answer the “How?” questions, we should, because those are the questions that matter. And it may just be an infinite set of questions, but what I point out at the end of the book is that the multiverse may resolve all of those questions. From Aristotle’s prime mover to the Catholic Church’s first cause, we’re always driven to the idea of something eternal. If the multiverse really exists, then you could have an infinite object – infinite in time and space as opposed to our universe, which is finite. That may beg the question as to where the multiverse came from, but if it’s infinite, it’s infinite. You might not be able to answer that final question, and I try to be honest about that in the book.

The universe is still big enough to accommodate both scientists and philosophers – and even philosophical scientists and scientific philosophers. I suspect it will remain that way for some time yet.

UPDATE: Two more perspectives:

At the Huffington Post, Victor Senger writes:

Albert is not satisfied that Krauss has answered the fundamental question: Why there is something rather than nothing, that is, being rather than nonbeing? Again, there is a simple retort: Why should nothing, no matter how defined, be the default state of existence rather than something? And, to bring religion into the picture, one could ask: Why is there God rather than nothing? Once theologians assert that there is a God (as opposed to nothing), they can’t turn around and ask a cosmologist why there is a universe (as opposed to nothing). They claim God is a necessary entity. But then, why can’t a godless multiverse be a necessary entity?

And here’s John Horgan, at Scientific American:

Science has told us so much about our world! We now understand, more or less, what reality is made of and what forces push and pull the stuff of existence to and fro. Scientists have also constructed a plausible, empirically founded narrative of the history of the cosmos and of life on Earth. But when scientists insist that they have solved, or will soon solve, all mysteries, including the biggest mystery of all, they do a disservice to science; they become the mirror images of the religious fundamentalists they despise.

And let’s not forget Wallace Stevens’s portrait of the man

… who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This morning I had cause to look at Tim Carmody’s tweetstream. Man, that cat can tweet. Anyway, it got me thinking about whether you might be able to categorize social networks according to their resemblance to recreational drugs. If a sharing site were an abusable substance, which abusable substance would it be?

Here’s my first cut:

Twitter = Black Beauties

[symptoms of abuse: hyperactivity; increased awareness of surroundings; increased interest in repetitive or normally boring activities; decreased appetite; decreased ability to sleep*]

Facebook = Pot

[symptoms of abuse: red, watery eyes; fuzzy-mindedness; inexplicable laughter; weight gain; self-absorption; suspicious changes in friendships]

Pinterest = Quaaludes

[symptoms of abuse: slowed heart rate; drowsiness; indiscriminate displays of affection; regrettable decisions; stupidity]

YouTube = Cocaine

[symptoms of abuse: dilated pupils; accelerated heart rate; public blathering; manic episodes; impotence]

MySpace = LSD

[symptoms of abuse: colorful hallucinations; bad taste in clothes; psychosis]

Google+ = Ambien

[symptoms of abuse: sleep, drooling]

Which is stronger: technology’s power to shape local culture, or local culture’s power to influence the way technology is adopted and used? If it’s the former, as I suspect it is, then technology becomes a homogenizing force, tending in time to erase cultural differences. If it’s the latter, then technology plays a subservient role; the uniformity of the tool does not impose uniformity on the tool’s use. Culture prevails.

We’re going to get some insight into this question over the next decade or so as e-readers – in the form of both devices and apps – spread and become even cheaper. As Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek reports, in two of the most prosperous Western countries – the U.S. and Germany – the adoption of electronic books has so far taken very different routes. E-books are booming in the U.S. Less than five years after the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle, e-book sales already account for about a quarter of all U.S. book sales, and that percentage continues to rise sharply. In Germany, where e-readers are also readily available, e-books still represent just 1 percent of overall book sales.

The difference is largely a cultural one. Germany, the birthplace of Gutenberg and his printing press and the home of the Frankfurt Book Fair, is very much a country of the book. Bookstores are everywhere, and readers are attentive not only to the quality of a book’s writing but to the quality of its paper and its binding. As Spiegel’s Aaron Wiener recently observed, “Books are simply more deeply ingrained in the German way of life [than in the American].” German readers continue to have a strong sense that reading from a printed page is superior to reading from a screen.

There are also economic differences. In Germany, publishers set book prices, and the prices don’t vary from store to store. E-book prices follow these same rules, which means that they have not undercut print prices to the same degree that they have in the U.S. But this policy, too, is rooted in culture: it is aimed at preserving the diversity of the book trade. (It must pain Eric Holder enormously to travel to Germany and see so many flourishing bookshops.) E-books are also taxed at a higher rate than print books, which enjoy a tax exemption in Germany – another manifestation of the book’s special place in the culture.

So what happens from here? In the long run, will the book markets of Germany and the U.S. continue to diverge, with the e-book becoming the dominant form of the book in America but the printed book retaining its dominance in Germany? It will be interesting, and illuminating, to watch. One small hint: Although e-books represent just 1 percent of the German book market, sales of e-books nearly doubled there last year. As Dominique Pleimling, of the Institute of Book Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, says, “everything may change very quickly.”

One of man’s greatest inventions was also one of his most modest: the wick. We don’t know who first realized, many thousands of years ago, that fire could be isolated at the tip of a twisted piece of cloth and steadily fed, through capillary action, by a reservoir of wax or oil, but the discovery was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in Disenchanted Night, “as revolutionary in the development of artificial lighting as the wheel in the history of transport.” The wick tamed fire, allowing it to be used with a precision and an efficiency far beyond what was possible with a wooden torch or a bundle of twigs. In the process, it helped domesticate us as well. It’s hard to imagine civilization progressing to where it is today by torchlight.

The wick also proved an amazingly hardy creation. It remained the dominant lighting technology all the way to the nineteenth century, when it was replaced first by the wickless gas lamp and then, more decisively, by Edison’s electricity-fueled incandescent bulb with its glowing metal filament. Cleaner, safer, and even more efficient than the flame it replaced, the light bulb was welcomed into homes and offices around the world. But along with its many practical benefits, electric light also brought subtle and unexpected changes to the way people lived. The fireplace, the candle, and the oil lamp had always been the focal point of households. Fire was, as Schivelbusch puts it, “the soul of the house.” Families would in the evening gather in a central room, drawn by the flickering flame, to chat about the day’s events or otherwise pass the time together. Electric light, together with central heat, dissolved that long tradition. Family members began to spend more time in different rooms in the evening, studying or reading or working alone. Each person gained more privacy, and a greater sense of autonomy, but the cohesion of the family weakened.

Cold and steady, electric light lacked the allure of the flame. It was not mesmerizing or soothing but strictly functional. It turned light into an industrial commodity. A German diarist in 1944, forced to use candles instead of lightbulbs during nightly air raids, was struck by the difference. “We have noticed,” he wrote, “in the ‘weaker’ light of the candle, objects have a different, a much more marked profile — it gives them a quality of ‘reality.’” This quality, he continued, “is lost in electric light: objects (seemingly) appear much more clearly, but in reality it flattens them. Electric light imparts too much brightness and thus things lose body, outline, substance — in short, their essence.”

We’re still attracted to a flame at the end of a wick. We light candles to set a romantic or a calming mood, to mark a special occasion. We buy ornamental lamps that are crafted to look like candles or candleholders with bulbs shaped as stylized flames. But we can no longer know what it was like when fire was the source of all light. The number of people who remember life before the arrival of Edison’s bulb has dwindled to just a few, and when they go they’ll take with them all remaining memory of that earlier, pre-electric world. The same will happen, sometime toward the end of this century, with the memory of the world that existed before the computer and the Internet became commonplace. We’ll be the ones who bear it away.

All technological change is generational change. The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It’s in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.

This brief essay originally appeared as the epilogue of my 2008 book The Big Switch.

Here’s an ingenious contraption:

The creator, Lior Elazary, provides a full explanation of the clock here, along with instructions for building your own. Here’s my favorite part of the instructions:

Start by creating a 12” diameter disc and attach a Flip-Flop to it. A Flip-Flop is a device that alternates its state with a given input. For example, a politician might change his stance on a specific issue based on some event, and then will change it back based on another event. In that case, we say he is a Flip-Flop, and we might be able to build a computer out of him.

[via Slashdot]