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Whatever the unfortunate author of The Golden Bug had to do to earn enough for a glass or two of cognac. In 1841, in an American magazine, he published two cryptograms - puzzles for inquisitive readers. However, not only none of Poe’s contemporaries, but also none of his descendants for almost one and a half hundred years could cope with these problems. Gradually, the people became convinced that the mysterious ciphers kept a terrible secret, a fatal message from a dark genius to future generations. This summer, polyglot programmer Gil Broza finally managed to read the cryptogram. Now it remains to understand what Edgar Allan Poe wanted to say with this message.
Quote: ...To prevent those who solved the code from easily recognizing letters by their frequency, the coder used several different signs to indicate the same letter. Moreover, as Broza later established, Poe selected the largest number of symbols for more frequent letters. For example, the letter "e" in the cipher corresponded to 14 different characters, and the letter "z" - only two.
Order a full translation of an article?The Work Ethic, Redifined Virginia Postrel Reason
The working man in America today is no longer the same as before. The time has come for a “smart economy”, when diligence and diligence are no longer at such a price, and even creativity and flight of thought are required from a simple factory worker. This is all very good, the only problem is that the new situation threatens to destroy the existing system of job evaluation and work ethics in America, says Reason regular contributor Virginia Postrel (see her articles in issues 12 and 14 ).
Quote: The Smart Economy not only gives us the opportunity to connect work with independent thinking, freedom of expression, and even a sense of joy - it simply obliges us to do it. And such an approach conflicts with deeply rooted societal ideas about what work is and how it should be evaluated.
Order a full translation of an article?Fiction-Writing Software Takes On Humans Matthew Mirapaul The New York Times
The computer raised its hand to the most sacred thing we have left - creativity. Of course, attempts to develop a program that can compose texts have been made for a long time - since about the mid-1970s - but this time things took a serious turn. Five short stories were posted on the website InstantNovelist.com : four stories written by living people, and the fifth by a computer named Brutus (more precisely, Brutus.1 ). This name was given to the computer without any ulterior motive: it was simply programmed to compose texts on one single topic - betrayal. Visitors to the site were asked to determine which of the stories belonged to the “pen” of the soulless machine. The result exceeded all expectations: most readers were unable to recognize the computer text. Truly, Brutus.
Quotes: In their book, the authors of the project - Salmer Bringsjord and David Ferrucci - say that the program contains a set of specified narrative structures and certain rules for constructing a story. Based on this data, with the help of software algorithms and with the participation of a random number generator, the final product is formed - fiction.
According to Bringsjord himself, the composing program he invented has its ceiling. "So far," he says, "the only technique we have is to study texts written by people and create a system that can reproduce what a person does. We don't know how to create a truly autonomous creative engine."
PS The author complains about the secondary nature of the texts generated by his mechanical brainchild. Meanwhile, the works of living writers also do not appear out of nowhere. In any case, the computer is certainly capable of “postmodern” creativity.
Order a full translation of an article?Rights, Animal and Human David Carlin First Things
Protecting animal rights is a humiliation of humans. The king of nature, created in the image and likeness of God, cannot be compared with other earthly creatures. Loving animals is not harmful, but giving them equal rights with people means reducing people to the level of animals, the author of the article, a professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Rhode Island, is convinced. The professor condemns animal rights advocates, as well as their predecessors - from Montaigne to the Darwinists.
Quote: I am willing to admit that many members of the animal rights movement are extremely kind-hearted people who rebel against the unfair treatment of animals and have not the slightest intention of belittling people. However, history shows that social movements often have consequences that directly contradict the aspirations of the movement's supporters. (Take, for example, communism, which had its consequences of tyranny and mass murder, despite the fact that among the preachers of this idea there were many humanists and philanthropists.)
Order a full translation of an article?Quota quote Jodie Allen Reason
What lengths have people gone to in their quest to reach the very heights of political correctness! The publisher of the Los Angeles Times once told his staff that they should increase the number of quotes from ethnic and sexual minorities, and also include more references to women. Horror-stricken journalists and editors calculated that links specifying all the “politically correct” biographical details of the source would devour a good half of the newspaper pages. Programmers came to the rescue, suggesting that reporters describe the quoted object using an index system. The pamphlet of a columnist (more precisely, a columnist) of Reason magazine and an editor (or rather, editor) of the online magazine Slate indicates that the “protected” objects do not really need the disservice of political correctors.
Quotes: Who knows what tangle of nationalities, religions and migration histories might lie behind a simple name like Winchell Cross (to take one oft-quoted expert as an example)? According to the publisher's requirements, when referring to this person, a journalist would have to write something like the following: “Most banks are run by faceless business school graduates,” says Winchell Cross, director of the Center for Urban Studies, an Anglo-French-Italian-Irish heterosexual. , an evangelical Protestant with Catholic parents, white, American, yuppie, middle-aged, vegetarian, married to a Chinese woman, in whose veins also flows some Tartar and Burmese blood."
In coded form, the above excerpt from the article would look much shorter: “Most banks are run by faceless business school graduates,” says Winchell Cross, director of the Center for Urban Studies4,4,3,2,2,1,2,4. 2,7,1". At the end of the work, the program automatically calculates the total number of points scored and places it at the end of the article - so that the reader can determine its potential value from the point of view of political correctness without reading.
Order a full translation of an article?A Turn in the Shrubbery - Music, Technology and Words Nicolas Collins Leonardo Music Journal
Listen to the music of new technologies! encourages his readers - the editor-in-chief of Leonardo Music Journal . The slogan is quite revolutionary, considering how difficult it is sometimes for these very technologies to enter our world, especially those related to “cultural values.” And if at one time the mastery of plastics was given to conservative humanity through great torment, then it is a thousand times more painful for them now to encounter at every step various kinds of synthesizers and computer programs that have transformed both the process of music-making and the final product itself beyond recognition. To accept this, you need to overcome a lot of barriers - aesthetic, ethical, and even religious. But we need to be simpler, says Nicholas Collins, and not boast of our retrograde, but instead it is better to think about comprehending a new artistic experience, the existence of which is no longer possible to deny, even if someone hears confusion instead of music in it.
Quote: Starting from the 16th century, the process of creating music was invariably accompanied by its theoretical understanding, which greatly contributed to the emergence of new musical forms. However, after Schoenberg, the musical process was practically not analyzed. Today there is no adequate theory that would comprehend the musical experience of the second half of our century.
Order a full translation of an article?The Assault on Good News Andrew Sullivan The New York Times Magazine
Americans are a nation of pessimists. Every year they are doing better and better, but they feel out of their depth. The surplus is growing, the unemployment rate has reached minimum levels - senators are screaming about poverty. Crime is slowly disappearing - Hollywood shows monstrous pictures of bloody violence. This year saw a record low number of teen abortions, and moralists continue to insist that Internet pornography is corrupting young people. The reasons for this enviable immunity to good news lie in American ideology, says Andrew Sullivan.
Quote: Former junkies and drinkers leave their bad habits and successfully become presidents of the United States; however, the hysteria about drug addiction and alcoholism is only gaining momentum.
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