Threatening technology
New technology has been forecast to bring social disaster several times in the past. We seem to have avoided it; but that doesn’t mean we always will.
Disaster this time?
Articles Tagged with social media
Junk mail
Making things easy
New technology often makes a task much easier to do. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s done better.
When predictions are wrong
The role of science fiction
Today’s world doesn’t look like most science fiction stories pictured it. But accurate prediction isn’t the main point of the genre.
Business books
A different form of literature
Our consultants encounter a type of writing that seems terribly strange, until they realize what it’s for.
“Outside the proper scope”
What you can do, and what you should do
In the Five Colors Science & Technology library of photography are a number of old books that we still find interesting. Apart from details of procedures and chemistry that are hard to find elsewhere, they show the different ideas, through the years, of just what was a good photograph.
But why pictures?
A photographer explores the ubiquity of images
Fooling around with a certain bit of relatively recent technology prompted our photographer to ask the question: why are there so many pictures? Our main way of capturing reality, that great manifold of experiences, is still the two-dimensional image. Being a scientist he then sought an answer (where a philosopher might instead have fallen into existential doubt). It’s not so hard to work out, really, but does highlight something important about our memories, and how technology is changing them.
The webmaster builds character
A physical scientist encounters social media
We mentioned, some weeks ago, that our webmaster had been assigned to develop the Five Colors S&T social media presence. This wasn’t because he’s an expert already, but because he wasn’t; in fact his inclinations tend toward weekends reading eighteenth-century essays by the light of a kerosene lamp. We thought that, apart from the fact that he generally does a decent job of anything, it would be good for him to do something unfamiliar and especially to have contact with people not like him. As Calvin’s dad (from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes) would say, he’d build character.