Intrinsitivity

E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon

Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future.

I will miss the musty smell of a good hardcover and the sound of cracking it open to flip to its table of contents. But I won’t miss the weight of trying to hold several hardcovers at once after leaving a library or of spilling coffee or bits of food on one of the pages. And I certainly won’t miss straightening bent pages and ignoring scribbles from thoughtless past borrowers.

I welcome the day when e-books will lose the hyphen. I can read fairly easily on the iPhone and have finished more than one book on it. But the iPad is better than paper in the sense that light falls uniformly on all parts of any given page, the light is exceptional for indoor use, and of course one can store hundreds, and I suppose thousands, of e-books at a time on the 1.5-lb device.

Speech Recognition’s Early Days

“There is now enough in our artificial intelligence arsenal to make reasonable inferences about context,” said Tom Gruber, a computer scientist and co-founder of Siri, whose personal assistant software is designed to listen to spoken questions, deduce the meaning, and act accordingly.

IBM Scientists Create Ultra-Fast Device Which Uses Light for Communication between Computer Chips

IBM scientists today unveiled a significant step towards replacing electrical signals that communicate via copper wires between computer chips with tiny silicon circuits that communicate using pulses of light. As reported in the recent issue of the scientific journal Nature, this is an important advancement in changing the way computer chips talk to each other.