Culture

Don't even think of challenging this poisoned pooch to a staring contest�or the postmen of the Great Northern Railway, who were the early 20th century's answer to the Internet.

The animated GIF may be little appreciated in the world of Web 2.0�but in the right hands, it plays with the unsettling riddle of our mechanical nature.

"Just as the shadows in the hollows of the Earth diminish in size as the Sun rises higher, so also these spots on the Moon lose their blackness as the illuminated part grows larger and larger."

The information-design authority Edward Tufte is selling his multimillion-dollar collection of rare books, which together make up a "Museum of Cognitive Art." For most of us, the slideshow will have to do.

"An idiolect is a language (or some part or aspect of a language) that can be characterized exhaustively in terms of intrinsic properties of some single person, the person whose idiolect it is."

To Kelly, the advance guard of the technium is to be found among the quadrillions of computer chips networked into vast electronic systems. But It may be difficult to discern whether the desires driving that process belong to technology, or are our own.

"Some flashes of lambent light, much like the aurora borealis, were first observed on the northern part of the heavens....as soon as the meteor emerged from behind the cloud, its light was prodigious."

"Data envelops and surrounds a newborn in a neonatal ward, forming a protective shell/blanket/mobile�we might even think of it as bathwater. It's magical no, wait, it's science!"

I'm eager to see Monsters, Gareth Edwards' film about a man escorting a woman through a zone made deadly by the after-effects of an alien invasion. But wait�that film was made before!

Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, The Tree of Codes, has a marvelous title. But the real marvel begins when you turn the cover to find that the story is literally carved out of another work�namely, The Street of Crocodiles, the 1934 cycle of short stories by martyred Polish writer Bruno Schulz. There's a gadget angle to all this, but you'll have to follow the jump for it.