http://www.jaschahoffman.com/ Writer and editor. en Copyright 2010 Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:45:50 +0000 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss The inventor and composer Tod Machover, whose group at MIT's Media Lab developed the technology behind Guitar Hero, has built instruments for musicians from Prince to Yo-Yo Ma. As Machover prepares for the world premiere of his robotic opera Death and the Powers in Monaco in September, he explains how his interactive performance techniques might lead to personalized therapies... [text] [pdf] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/07/the_future_of_opera.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/07/the_future_of_opera.html Nature Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:45:50 +0000 Brian Greene, author of best-selling books The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, is a theoretical physicist at Columbia University. As an orchestral work based on his 2008 children's book, Icarus at the Edge of Time, premieres at the World Science Festival in New York City, Greene discusses black holes and how music might portray the physics of warped space-time... [text] [pdf] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/05/icarus_the_edge_of_time.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/05/icarus_the_edge_of_time.html Nature Wed, 26 May 2010 00:16:32 +0000 Oceanographer and underwater explorer Sylvia Earle advised on Disney's recent cut of the documentary film Oceans. In anticipation of the release of the Census of Marine Life this fall, Earle explains why films are important for raising awareness of the state of our seas. [text] [pdf] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/05/sylvia_earle_on_oceans.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/05/sylvia_earle_on_oceans.html Nature Wed, 12 May 2010 23:58:05 +0000 Noise is hard to define, but we know it when we hear it. In The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want, writer Garret Keizer exposes the history of noise, its opponents and apologists, and recent efforts to measure and curb it. The result is a scattered mosaic that uses the conceit of human clamour to reveal the paradoxes of post-industrial life...[pdf] [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/05/the_omnipresent_hubbub.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/05/the_omnipresent_hubbub.html Nature Sat, 01 May 2010 00:20:14 +0000 Robert Pound, a Harvard physicist whose experiments confirmed general relativity and paved the way for magnetic resonance imaging, died on April 12 in Belmont, Mass. He was a tinkerer at heart. One student recalls finding him in the machine shop, turning a piece of metal on the lathe in his bow tie and tweeds... [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/04/robert_pound_physicist_and_tin.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/04/robert_pound_physicist_and_tin.html New York Times Tue, 20 Apr 2010 09:47:06 +0000 A lonely man flirts with madness to recover truth—or so it goes in films from Pi to Proof. But where did the figure of the tragic mathematician originate? In Duel at Dawn, historian Amir Alexander pierces the haze that has gathered around great mathematical lives to reveal gloriously complicated men... [pdf] [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/04/beyond_the_tragic_genius.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/04/beyond_the_tragic_genius.html Nature Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:41:05 +0000 While pursuing his doctorate in dynamical systems, John Sims was drawn to explore the connections between mathematics and art. Now curating a year-long series of math–art shows at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, the conceptual artist explains his work...[pdf] [text] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/04/mathart_on_the_bowery.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/04/mathart_on_the_bowery.html Nature Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:29:50 +0000 At this year's Sundance Film Festival, many of the science-related films are concerned with disaster scenarios, both real and imagined. There are documentaries about nuclear proliferation, climate-change refugees and invasive Australian toads, not to mention fiction films about vicious human-animal hybrids, post-apocalyptic Kenyan botany, and an encyclopedia of obsolete things that may eventually include the human race... [pdf] [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/01/science_at_sundance_2010.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/01/science_at_sundance_2010.html Nature Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:02:15 +0000 Frustrated by the lack of attention to everyday experiences in the field of psychology, Russell T. Hurlburt has devised an unconventional method to investigate the mental lives of his subjects. In Describing Inner Experience?, he presents the case of Melanie, a young woman who was fitted with a beeper that randomly prompted her to record everything in her awareness several times a day... [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/taking_mental_snapshots_to_plu.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/taking_mental_snapshots_to_plu.html New York Times Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:30:24 +0000 In 2002, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture, a problem that had resisted proof for a century. But soon after he gave up mathematics and retreated to his mother's apartment in St. Petersburg. Why did Perelman turn his back on the world? This question haunts Masha Gessen’s “Perfect Rigor,” a dogged portrait of an elusive man... [text] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/perfect_rigor.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/perfect_rigor.html New York Times Sun, 13 Dec 2009 07:46:02 +0000 The Gaia hypothesis states that life preserves the conditions for its own survival. But Peter Ward, a paleontologist who specializes in mass extinctions, takes a dimmer view of life on earth. Seeing a tangle of organisms that have evolved to starve their competitors and pollute their surroundings, he argues that for billions of years the biosphere has been its own worst enemy... [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/killer_earth.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/killer_earth.html New York Times New York Times Magazine Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:10:30 +0000 As his animated feature Quantum Quest — made with real footage from the Cassini spacecraft — is previewed at the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York, space exploration consultant Harry Kloor shares his thoughts on manned space flight and the use of prizes to motivate adventurous science... [text] [pdf] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/10/the_space_entrepreneur.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/10/the_space_entrepreneur.html Nature Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:47:13 +0000 Engineer Duncan Miller has spent decades reviving the lost art of acoustic recording to wax cylinders, a technique pioneered by Thomas Edison. His Vulcan Cylinder Record Company has combined sleuthing and modern chemistry to craft a new repertoire for the hand-cranked phonograph... [pdf] [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/09/the_inventor_with_an_ear_for_t.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/09/the_inventor_with_an_ear_for_t.html Nature Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:55:34 +0000 In her provocative new book, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik argues that babies are in some ways “actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring, and even more conscious than adults are.” [full text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/08/the_philosophical_baby.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/08/the_philosophical_baby.html Scientific American Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:38:09 +0000 It would be easy to mistake Guillermo Rosales' The Halfway House for a novel about the plight of Cuban immigrants struggling to adapt to life in America, or a novel about the inhumanity of mental institutions. But the book does not fit easily into either category... [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/08/on_the_rocks.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/08/on_the_rocks.html The National Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:28:18 +0000