Tag: computers

Special effects

  Motion pictures have always been largely illusion: artificial realities convincingly created by assorted designers, craftspeople, cinematographers and actors. But these days, what you see on screen is less “real” than ever. Today special effects rule the movies, thanks primarily to computers. That’s not to say there were no special effects before computers came along. …

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Computer memory

A while back (quite a long while, actually) I wrote a column about memory, in which I made the point that our ability to remember things is what distinguishes us from dandelions. You might also say that our ability to remember things is what distinguishes us from household appliances and other inanimate objects, but if …

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The Internet

Internet this and Internet that. Everybody talks about the Internet (approximately 127,498 journalists and their dogs have already done stories on it), but there are still lots of people who aren’t exactly sure what “The Internet” is. The Internet grew out of ARPAnet (ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency), a U.S. military project unveiled …

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Rise of the cyberbooks

Don’t look now, but here come the cyberbooks. No, cyberbooks aren’t the villains in an episode of Dr. Who, but it’s true their arrival may well signal a kind of revolution–and the first shot in that revolution has already been fired in (where else?) Japan, in the form of a new high-tech gadget called the Data …

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How Does Your Garden Grow?

Part of the Saskatchewan Science Centre’s mandate is to demonstrate that it is possible to excel in the world of science “even” in Saskatchewan. The quotation marks are intentional: it’s the attitude embodied in the use of that word we would like to dispel. The fact is, top-notch, world-class science and Saskatchewan are not mutually …

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Digitization

There are certain words these days that are being used to sell just about everything. “Light” (or, horrors, “lite”), is one of them, appearing on everything from beer to slightly-less-greasy-than-usual potato chips; “cholesterol-free” is another; “green” is a third, and afourth, and the one I want to talk about, is “digital.” Digital dashboards, digital TV, …

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Modems

There’s a rather standard science fiction situation, based loosely on some of the oddities of quantum physics (the quirks of quarks, one might say), that postulates a whole other universe co-existing with ours, sharing the same space, but unseen. Well, in a sense this “parallel” world is already accessible, though not as a science-fictional “alternate …

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