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The Big U
''The Big U'' (1984) is a novel by American writer Neal Stephenson. His first published novel, it is a satire of campus life. Plot The story chronicles the disillusionment of a number of young intellectuals as they encounter the realities of the higher education establishment parodied in the story. Over time their lives and sanity disintegrate in different ways through a series of escalating events that culminates with a full-scale civil war raging on the campus of ''American Megaversity''. Told in the first person from the perspective of Bud, a lecturer in Remote Sensing who is new to the university, the book attacks and makes fun of just about every conceivable group at university, though its portraits of the nerds/ computer scientists/ role players tend to be more detailed than those of other factions. The events take place at a fictitious big university consisting of a single building (a central complex with eight towers containing student housing), making the univers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque. Stephenson's work explores mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as ''Wired''. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury. Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system, and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project ''The Mongoliad''. He was Magic Leap's Chief Futurist from 2014 to 2020. Early life Born on October 31, 1959, in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scient ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Silber
John Robert Silber (August 15, 1926 – September 27, 2012) was an American academician and candidate for public office. From 1971 to 1996, he was President of Boston University (BU) and, from 1996 to 2002, Chancellor. From 2002 to 2003, he again served as President (Ad Interim); and, from 2003 until his death, he held the title of President Emeritus. In 1990, he won the Democratic gubernatorial primary to become one of two major-party candidates for governor of Massachusetts in the general election of 1990. He lost that election to the Republican William Weld, who won by 38,000 votes. After receiving his PhD from Yale, Silber became professor of philosophy and served as dean of the University of Texas's College of Arts and Sciences (1967–70). He had a liberal reputation in his days at Texas, though at Boston University he was best known as a conservative spokesman in academia. Family and education Silber was born in San Antonio, Texas, the second son of Paul George Silber, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novels By Neal Stephenson
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Campus Novels
A campus is traditionally the land on which a college or university and related institutional buildings are situated. Usually a college campus includes libraries, lecture halls, residence halls, student centers or dining halls, and park-like settings. A modern campus is a collection of buildings and grounds that belong to a given institution, either academic or non-academic. Examples include the Googleplex and the Apple Campus. Etymology The word derives from a Latin word for "field" and was first used to describe the large field adjacent Nassau Hall of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1774. The field separated Princeton from the small nearby town. Some other American colleges later adopted the word to describe individual fields at their own institutions, but "campus" did not yet describe the whole university property. A school might have one space called a campus, another called a field, and still another called a yard. History The tradition of a campu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1984 Science Fiction Novels
Events January * January 1 – The Bornean Sultanate of Brunei gains full independence from the United Kingdom, having become a British protectorate in 1888. * January 7 – Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). * January 10 ** The United States and the Vatican (Holy See) restore full diplomatic relations. ** The Victoria Agreement is signed, institutionalising the Indian Ocean Commission. *January 24 – Steve Jobs launches the Macintosh personal computer in the United States. February * February 3 ** Dr. John Buster and the research team at Harbor–UCLA Medical Center announce history's first embryo transfer from one woman to another, resulting in a live birth. ** STS-41-B: Space Shuttle ''Challenger'' is launched on the 10th Space Shuttle mission. * February 7 – Astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart make the first untethered space walk. * February 8– 19 – The 1984 Winter Olympics are held in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1984 American Novels
Events January * January 1 – The Bornean Sultanate of Brunei gains full independence from the United Kingdom, having become a British protectorate in 1888. * January 7 – Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). * January 10 ** The United States and the Vatican City, Vatican (Holy See) restore full diplomatic relations. ** The Victoria, Seychelles, Victoria Agreement is signed, institutionalising the Indian Ocean Commission. *January 24 – Steve Jobs launches the Macintosh 128K, Macintosh personal computer in the United States. February * February 3 ** Dr. John Buster and the research team at Harbor–UCLA Medical Center announce history's first embryo transfer from one woman to another, resulting in a live birth. ** STS-41-B: Space Shuttle Challenger, Space Shuttle ''Challenger'' is launched on the 10th Space Shuttle mission. * February 7 – Astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart make the first untethered spac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind
''The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'' is a 1976 book by the Princeton psychologist, psychohistorian and consciousness theorist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997). The book addresses the problematic nature of consciousness – “the ability to introspect” – which in Jaynes’ view must be distinguished from sensory awareness and other processes of cognition. Jaynes presents his proposed solution: that consciousness is a “learned behavior” based more on language and culture than on biology; this solution, in turn, points to the origin of consciousness in ancient human history rather than in metaphysical or evolutionary processes; furthermore, archaeological and historical evidence indicates that prior to the “learning” of consciousness, human mentality was what Jaynes called "the bicameral mind" – a mentality based on verbal hallucination. The first edition was released in January 1977 in English. Two later editions, in 1982 and in 1990, were ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anathem
''Anathem'' is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 2008. Major themes include the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the philosophical debate between Platonic realism and nominalism. Plot summary ''Anathem'' is set on the fictional planet of Arbre. Thousands of years before the events in the novel, the planet's intellectuals entered ''concents'' (monastic communities) to protect their activities from the collapse of society. The ''avout'' (intellectuals separated from ''Sæcular'' society) are banned from possessing or operating most advanced technology and are supervised by the ''Inquisition'', which answers to the outside world. The avout are normally allowed to communicate with people outside the walls of the concent only once every year, decade, century, or millennium, depending on the particular vows they have taken. The narrator and protagonist, Fraa Erasmas, is an avout at the Concent of Saunt Edhar. His teacher, Fra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bicameral Mind
Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis in psychology and neuroscience which argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a ''bicameral mind'', and that the evolutionary breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book ''The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'', wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age. ''The Origin of Consciousness'' Jaynes uses "bicameral" (two chambers) to describe a mental state in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. The metaphor is based on the id ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julian Jaynes
Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years and best known for his 1976 book ''The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind''. His career was dedicated to the problem of consciousness, "...the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it. ... Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began." Jaynes' solution touches on many disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, archeology, history, religion and analysis of ancient texts. Life Jaynes was born and lived in West Newton, Massachusetts, son of Julian Clifford Jaynes (1854–1922), a Unitarian minister, and Clara Bullard Jaynes (1884–1980). He had an older sister, Helen, and a younger brother, Robert. The family had a summer home in Keppoch, Prince Edward Island, which was a place J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
EBay
eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. eBay is a multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 32 countries, as of 2019. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and an additional or separate fee when those items are sold. In addition to eBay's original auction-style sales, the website has evolved and expanded to include: instant "Buy It Now" shopping; shopping by Universal Product Code, ISBN, or other kind of SKU number (via Half.com, which was shut down in 2017); and othe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Snow Crash
''Snow Crash'' is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy. In his 1999 essay " In the Beginning... Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash. Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book ''The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'' was one of the main influences on ''Snow Crash''. Stephenson originally planned ''Snow Crash'' as a computer-generated graphic novel in collaboration with artist Tony Sheeder. In the author's ackn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
