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Player Piano (novel)
''Player Piano'' is the debut novel, first novel by American writer Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., published in 1952. The novel depicts a dystopia of automation partly inspired by the author's time working at General Electric, describing the negative impact technology can have on quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. The widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class, the engineers and managers, who keep society running, and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become hallmarks developed further in Vonnegut's later works. Plot While most Americans were fighting in the third world war, the nation's managers and engineers responded by developing ingenious automated systems that allowed factories to operate with only a few workers. Ten years after the wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the US Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He adopted his nephews after his siste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fourth Wall
The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this ''wall'', the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot. From the 16th century onward, the rise of illusionism in staging practices, which culminated in the realism and naturalism of the theatre of the 19th century, led to the development of the fourth wall concept. The metaphor suggests a relationship to the mise-en-scène behind a proscenium arch. When a scene is set indoors and three of the walls of its room are presented onstage, in what is known as a box set, the fourth of them would run along the line (technically called the proscenium) dividing the room from the auditorium. The ''fourth wall'', though, is a theatrical convention, rather than of set design. The actors ignore the audience, focus their attention exclusively on the dramatic world, and remain absorbed in its fiction, in a state that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bagombo Snuff Box
''Bagombo Snuff Box'' is a collection of 23 short stories written by Kurt Vonnegut. The stories were originally published in US periodicals between 1950 and 1963, and consisted of virtually all of Vonnegut's previously published short fiction of the 1950s and 60s that had not been collected in 1968's ''Welcome to the Monkey House''. This collection was published in 1999 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Vonnegut revised three stories for publication in this collection: "The Powder-Blue Dragon" (1954), "The Boy Who Hated Girls" (1956), and "Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp" (1957). The unrevised version of "Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp" was anthologized in ''Canary in a Cat House ''Canary in a Cat House'' is a collection of twelve short stories by American writer Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1961. Eleven of the twelve appear in the later collection ''Welcome to the Monkey House'', with "Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp" being omitte ...'' (1961). The final work in the collection, "Coda to My Career as a Writer fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ghost Shirts
Ghost shirts are shirts, or other clothing items, worn by members of the Ghost Dance religion, and thought to be imbued with spiritual powers. The religion was founded by Wovoka (Jack Wilson), a Northern Paiute Native American, in the late nineteenth century and quickly spread throughout the plains tribes. Ghost shirts, sacred to certain factions of Lakota people, were thought to guard against bullets through spiritual power. Wovoka opposed rebellion against the white settlers. He believed that through pacificism, the Lakota and the rest of the Native Americans would be delivered from white oppression in the form of earthquakes. However, two Lakota warriors and followers of Wovoka, Kicking Bear and Short Bull, thought otherwise, and believed that Ghost shirts would protect the wearer enough to actively resist U.S. military aggression. The shirts did not work as promised, and when the U.S. Army attacked, 153 Lakota died, with 50 wounded and 150 missing at the Wounded Knee Mass ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Music Synthesizer
Algorithmic composition is the technique of using algorithms to create music. Algorithms (or, at the very least, formal sets of rules) have been used to compose music for centuries; the procedures used to plot voice-leading in Western counterpoint, for example, can often be reduced to algorithmic determinacy. The term can be used to describe music-generating techniques that run without ongoing human intervention, for example through the introduction of chance procedures. However through live coding and other interactive interfaces, a fully human-centric approach to algorithmic composition is possible. Some algorithms or data that have no immediate musical relevance are used by composers as creative inspiration for their music. Algorithms such as fractals, L-systems, statistical models, and even arbitrary data (e.g. census figures, GIS coordinates, or magnetic field measurements) have been used as source materials. Models for algorithmic composition Compositional algorithms are us ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Player Piano
A player piano (also known as a pianola) is a self-playing piano containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism, that operates the piano action via programmed music recorded on perforated paper or metallic rolls, with more modern implementations using MIDI. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sales peaked in 1924, then declined, as the improvement in phonograph recordings due to electrical recording methods developed in the mid-1920s. The advent of electrical amplification in home music reproduction via radio in the same period helped cause their eventual decline in popularity, and the stock market crash of 1929 virtually wiped out production. History In 1896, Edwin S. Votey invented the first practical pneumatic piano player, called the Pianola. This mechanism came into widespread use in the 20th century, and was all-pneumatic, with foot-operated bellows providing a sour ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
We (novel)
''We'' (russian: link=no, Мы, translit=My) is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920–1921. It was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York, with the original Russian text first published in 1952. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarianism, totalitarian state. It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre. George Orwell claimed that Aldous Huxley's 1931 ''Brave New World'' must be partly derived from ''We'', but Huxley denied this. Setting ''We'' is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State,The Ginsburg and Randall translations use the phrasing "One State". Guerney uses "The One State"—each word is capitalization, capitalized. Brown uses the single word "OneState", which he calls "ugly" (p. xxv). Zilboorg uses "United State".All of these are translations of the phrase ''Yedinoye Gosudarstvo'' (Russian: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin ( rus, Евге́ний Ива́нович Замя́тин, p=jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ zɐˈmʲætʲɪn; – 10 March 1937), sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire. Despite being the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin lost his faith in Christianity at an early age and became a Bolshevik. As a member of his Party's Pre-Revolutionary underground, Zamyatin was repeatedly arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled. However, Zamyatin was just as deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the All-Union Communist Party (b) (VKP (b) following the October Revolution as he had been by the Tsarist policy of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. Due to his subsequent use of literature to both satirize and criticize the Soviet Union's enforced conformity and increasing totalitarianism, Zamyatin, whom Mirra Ginsburg has dubbed "a man of incorruptib ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brave New World
''Brave New World'' is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, ''Brave New World Revisited'' (1958), and with his final novel, ''Island'' (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared to George Orwell's ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1949). In 1999, the Modern Library ranked ''Brave New World'' at number 5 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. This ranking was by thModern Library Editorial Boardof authors. In 2003, Robert McCr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Punched Cards
A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to directly control automated machinery. Punched cards were widely used through much of the 20th century in the data processing industry, where specialized and increasingly complex unit record machines, organized into semiautomatic data processing systems, used punched cards for data input, output, and storage. The IBM 12-row/80-column punched card format came to dominate the industry. Many early digital computers used punched cards as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. While punched cards are now obsolete as a storage medium, as of 2012, some voting machines still used punched cards to record votes. They also had a significant cultural impact. History The idea of control and data storage via punched holes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gas Turbine
A gas turbine, also called a combustion turbine, is a type of continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas generator or core) and are, in the direction of flow: * a rotating gas compressor * a combustor * a compressor-driving turbine. Additional components have to be added to the gas generator to suit its application. Common to all is an air inlet but with different configurations to suit the requirements of marine use, land use or flight at speeds varying from stationary to supersonic. A propelling nozzle is added to produce thrust for flight. An extra turbine is added to drive a propeller (turboprop) or ducted fan (turbofan) to reduce fuel consumption (by increasing propulsive efficiency) at subsonic flight speeds. An extra turbine is also required to drive a helicopter rotor or land-vehicle transmission (turboshaft), marine propeller or electrical generator (power turbine). Greater ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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