Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

This happened a while back, but I read about it in the paper a few weeks ago and only today did I manage to dig up an obituary: Kenneth Hale, a respected and amazing linguist at MIT died on October 8 at age 67. Hale was well known for his championship and stewardship of endangered languages; tounges which were disappearing from the brains and mouths of the people of the world due to cultural changes, extinction of traditional aboriginal communities and customs, and increasing globalization. And now, we have lost their most stalwart guardian. Link Discuss

posted by Dan Moniz at 10:13:16 PM | permalink

Amusing report from a few years back of a lake drained into a mine in 1980. Only, it wasn't supposed to be drained into a mine at all. Oh, the things that can happen with drilling rigs and fluid dynamics! Link Discuss Thanks to jwz.

posted by Dan Moniz at 10:28:28 PM | permalink

This isn't normal boingboing fare, but I found it interesting: a thought-provoking review and critique of Michael Eric Dyson's book on Tupac Shakur at The New Republic. It's written by John H. McWhorter, associate linguistics professor at University of California at Berkeley and author. I'm a fan of many music genres, including hip-hop, and I found this piece to be worthwhile, regardless of what you may have heard about The New Republic. Link Discuss

posted by Dan Moniz at 8:40:48 PM | permalink

Interesting pedestrian attack using COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware on a FIPS Level 4 certified cryptographic processor. The attack shows the subtlety involved in securing systems: a FIPS Level 4 device is really tough to break into, but only from the perspective of attacking the tamper-resistant hardware or getting the processor to leak information electronically. This attack uses a flaw in a piece of software that, while not included with every such device, is included with many, especially those sold to banks. It gets around the FIPS Level 4 security by ignoring it, and leveraging an exploitable hole in the software the vendor provides. Link Discuss

posted by Dan Moniz at 1:45:52 PM | permalink

Guestbar Archives