Tootfinder

"When we say monumental, you had better believe it; the 500 pages of this volume, laid out with astonishing detail (and a very small font size) summarize the history and evolution of computers from 1945 to 1990. Throughout these pages, Waldrop reveals that the backbone, the axis, the arrow, the orientation, the mastermind of all that history was none other than Lick himself: he was the incarnation of the phrase “being at the right place at the right time”."

J. C. R. Licklider & M. Mitchell Waldrop
The writings of Jorge Luis Borges twist our perception of time and space. In between articles about Shaw, Chesterton, Wilde, and Coleridge, his 1952 book "Otras Inquisiciones" included an unexpected gem: a short story called "El Tiempo y J. W. Dunne". The question is, who was this John William Dunne and what does he have to do with time? Well, his name might be forgotten by contemporary audiences, but Dunne was the author of one of the biggest bestsellers of the first half of the twentieth cent…

The idea is to provide a safe haven and a fertile ground for the next generation of scientists to work in peace and freedom to solve the most significant challenges of our time; but the geopolitical argument will prevail. As Jorge Luis Borges said in his short story “Nathaniel Hawthorne” from his book “Other Inquisitions” (1952):
“The past is indestructible; sooner or later all things return, and one of the things that return is the project to abolish the past.”

William Aspray
There was a moment in which Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, and John von Neumann were all roaming the halls of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton at the same time. Let that information sink in. Humanity experiences such gatherings of brilliant minds in a remote location of the space-time continuum only every so often; maybe the ancient Greeks and the men of the Renaissance witnessed such periods in time, as did the IAS staff at the end of World War II. How much will we have to wait f…