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dateMore Than a Year Ago
subjectTheory
authorThe New Yorker
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An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.


What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?
From ACM Opinion

What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?

Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology...

Meet Terrapattern, Google Earth's Missing Search Engine
From ACM News

Meet Terrapattern, Google Earth's Missing Search Engine

"Why don't you click on the tennis court?" Golan Levin, an associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested.  

What the New Science of Touch Says About Ourselves
From ACM News

What the New Science of Touch Says About Ourselves

On a bitter, soul-shivering, damp, biting gray February day in Cleveland—that is to say, on a February day in Cleveland—a handless man is handling a nonexistent...

The Search for Our Missing Colors
From ACM News

The Search for Our Missing Colors

Each year, a group of experts at Pantone, the company best known for its exacting color-matching system, chooses and promotes a Color of the Year that aims to set...

Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100
From ACM News

Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100

Twelve years ago, Robert McEliece, a mathematician and engineer at Caltech, won the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest honor in the field of information theory...

Say What You See, Facebook
From ACM Careers

Say What You See, Facebook

When Matt King signed up for Facebook, in 2009, he had been completely blind for nearly twenty years.

A New Look at Ancient Mars
From ACM News

A New Look at Ancient Mars

Among Earth/s planetary neighbors, Mars has been the one on which humanity has most often, and most variously, projected its hopes and fears.

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them
From ACM News

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided.

The Doomsday Invention
From ACM News

The Doomsday Invention

Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment...

The Gene Hackers
From ACM News

The Gene Hackers

At thirty-four, Feng Zhang is the youngest member of the core faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T.

Hawaii's Deepest Secret
From ACM News

Hawaii's Deepest Secret

Earth's concentric layers scale remarkably well to those of a peach.

Project Exodus
From ACM Opinion

Project Exodus

On March 27th, an American astronaut named Scott Kelly blasted off from Earth and, six hours later, clambered onto the International Space Station.

What a Dinosaur's Mating Scream Sounds Like
From ACM News

What a Dinosaur's Mating Scream Sounds Like

Two years ago, Sean Murray, a video-game developer from the town of Guildford, outside London, announced an ambitious game that he had been working on in secrecy...

What Are the Colors of Alien Life?
From ACM News

What Are the Colors of Alien Life?

Just before it became the first man-made vessel to leave the solar system, in 1990, Voyager 1 took a portrait of Earth, some four billion miles away.

Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust
From ACM Opinion

Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust

Shortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of "The Second Machine Age," a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik...

What Your Tweets Say About You
From ACM News

What Your Tweets Say About You

How much can your tweets reveal about you? Judging by the last nine hundred and seventy-two words that I used on Twitter, I'm about average when it comes to feeling...

Why Everyone Was Wrong About Net Neutrality
From ACM Opinion

Why Everyone Was Wrong About Net Neutrality

Today, the Federal Communications Commission, by a vote of three to two, enacted its strongest-ever rules on net neutrality, preserving an open Internet by prohibiting...

This Is Your Avatar Speaking
From ACM News

This Is Your Avatar Speaking

Last year, in a lab at the University of Barcelona, an anonymous woman was fitted with headphones, a microphone, a head-mounted virtual-reality display, a motion...

The Shape of Things to Come
From ACM Opinion

The Shape of Things to Come

In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has...

Netflix's Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
From ACM Opinion

Netflix's Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human

On the opening night of this year's Sundance Film Festival, two films, as usual, had their premières, gaining maximum exposure to reporters and critics.
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