Recorded Monday June 20th, 2022

After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Dr Grant Scott began to work solely as a photographer for commercial and editorial clients in 2000. His images combine his experience working with some of the greatest photographers of the last century with his graphic and journalistic talents to create engaging photographic narratives from every commission.

Grant is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Coordinator for Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015) and New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019).

In the talk Grant addresses the constantly shifting sands of engagement with the photographic medium. Noting that we read books and acquire a respect for how difficult it is to write and are taught how to read the written word and appreciate its transformative power Grant will makes the case for the importance of visual literacy. He will explain how digital photography has democratised the medium, with ensuing debates between those with analogue experience and the digital natives and focus on the importance of ‘the personal’ in defining subject matter. The talk and following questions and answers are an exploration on what makes a successful visual narrative.

Today I am releasing the new AO486 DOS Shareware pack to the public. This includes an all new DOS Frontend interface developed by BBond007 (https://www.youtube.com/user/binarybond007). The pack is 100% shareware and opensource so it can be shared freely to give a great base for future packs and to show off all the new features. There are no Commercial products in this release. Over 100 games, 30 DOS shareware screensavers, MOD and MIDI Music, Music Players, and shareware DOS applications all built on the FreeDOS OS.

Shareware Pack includes: Over 100 DOS Shareware titles that have been tested and configured for the MiSTer AO486 PC Core. ANSI art and gamecards built for each game. MyMenu Features: MyMenu is a DOS frontend designed to allow you to quickly launch DOS games, applications, scripts, and music.

Launch scripts, exe, bat, or any custom extension that you configure in the MyMenu.ini configuration file. Add any game to C:\Games\My Cool Game Name\ and it will now show in MyMenu automatically. We have tested up to 10,000 games in the list!

Other Feature: DOS Long File Name support Autorun.bat -- Autorun any game Readme.ans -- ANSI Readme and gamecard for each game! ANSI and ASCII art support for browsing ANSI and creating custom game cards for the interface ANSi Terminal (COM) and (Console) support Quickly set MiSTer core speed and cache options Screensavers CGA/VGA Support Music player integration for MOD, MIDI, XM, A2M, and MP3. Terminal Support for MidiLink, Serial, and BBS connection.

Github scripts integration and updates coming!

bbond007's MidiLink: https://github.com/bbond007/MiSTer_MidiLink

Latest release located at: https://github.com/flynnsbit/DOS_Shareware_MyMenu Under Releases.

Introduction and History lesson 00:00 Pack Demonstration: 05:00 MyMenu DOS Interface: 06:00 Autorun.bat and README.ANS Demo: 10:05 Doom Demo: 11:23 Edit Autorun.bat: 12:30 Broken games moved: 12:55 MyMenu ANSi: 13:11 MyMenu Apps/Games/Music/Ansi: 14:00 MyMenu Music and MIDI Demo: 14:23 MyMenu ANSI Art examples: 15:51 MyMenu Quick feature list and readme: 16:21 MyMenu F1 Menu: 17:20 MyMenu MT32-Pi Integration Menu: 17:58 MyMenu Screensavers: 18:21 MyMenu.ini configuration options: 18:45 MyMenu Screensavers config and demo: 19:40 MyMenu Utilities and Memory Management: 22:37 Explosiv! Screensaver Setup: 24:00 MP3's and Internet Radio on MiSTer: 25:14 Download Midilink: 25:41 MP3 Music Tracks and Internet Radio in AO486: 26:00 WHAT IS THIS SONG!!? : 28:06 Mp3 songs as Music track in DOS games: 28:25 MyMenu MP3 Quicklinks: 29:15 Internet Radio Playlists as Music Track in DOS: 29:31 Internet Radio in DOS - Classic Rock: 30:38 Internet Radio in DOS - Dance: 31:48 MyMenu Color Templates and Themes: 32:20 MiSTer console control of MP3s from batch scripts in DOS: 33:56 DOS Doom w/ Doom Eternal Mp3 Soundtrack in DOS Demo scripted: 35:57 DOS Earthworm Jim w/ MP3 Music Playlist: 38:02 DOS SimCity 2000 w/ MP3 Music Playlist: 39:23 Conclusion and Download: 40:00

Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08x6fxk

Susan Rogers, by her own admission, is a rare bird. A female producer and sound engineer in an industry dominated by men, her drive and commitment would land her side by side with Prince as his star soared. She came to work with him in Paisley Park as an audio technician right before he would begin Purple Rain, and she’d stay working with him and becoming his sound engineer through his commercial peak; recording Parade, Around the World in a Day, The Black Album, and Sign O the Times. But Prince isn’t the only part of Susan Rogers’ story. In 1988 she left Minneapolis, and would go on to produce some of the biggest hits of the 90’s before taking the money from that to go back to school, and become a Professor at one of the world’s most prestigious music schools. Her name is synonymous with Prince, but the story of how Susan got there, and what she did after this legendary collaboration, is just as fascinating. From finding her musical tribe as a kid in Orange County, to recording some of the most loved songs of all time, and diving into the neuroscience of why we connect with song, this is a brilliant conversation with a curious mind, and living legend. James Brown - Papa's Got a Brand New Bag Prince - Let's Go Crazy Geggy Tah - Whoever You Are Barenaked Ladies - One Week Wilson Pickett - In the Midnight Hour

https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/take-5/susan-rogers-take-5/12421040

The cultural impact of Mark Fisher's work continues to grow years after his death in 2017....

https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-148-mark-fisher

How is technology changing the way we see? The artist James Bridle reimagines John Berger’s Ways of Seeing for the digital age and asks if we can make machines without prejudice.

https://overcast.fm/+IPJ28emBE

The World of Wakanda

Black Panther, the movie, is heading toward $1-billion at the box office on just its third weekend. Already it seems that commercial success is likely not what Black Panther will be remembered for. It is a grand coming-together of African-American cultural production. The story in it is a mix of myth and magic in the made-up African nation of Wakanda.  It’s a technologically advanced society in a land that was never got colonized; and it holds the world’s only big deposits of an all-powerful mineral element, vibranium. 

Wakanda is an immense showcase of black agency and so is the movie Black Panther, in all the arts: writers and actors working off fact and fantasy, imagination and history and tough-minded politics, too. In the stunned aftermath, not least of the marvels about this movie is realizing that Black Panther, the character—and a lot of his immense fan base—is built on the culture of comic books that lots of us have never read. So this hour’s inventory of Black Panther first impressions begins with those drawings going back even before the Marvel Comics series began in the 1960s.  

John Jennings leads the way. Prolific in comic books and illustrated novels—like Octavia Butler’s Kindred, for example—Jennings grew up drawing in Mississippi. He’s Professor of Media Studies now at the University of California, Riverside. He’s dedicated his new anthology, Black Comix Returns, “to all the little black boys and girls who never have to know what it’s like NOT to see yourself as a hero, as subject, as vital to the society you live in.”

Ytasha Womack joins us from Chicago. She is a dancer, filmmaker, and futurist, who describes herself as a “champion of humanity and imagination.” She also wrote the book on Afrofuturism—the cultural aesthetic which links T’Challa, King of Wakanda, to the great jazz eccentric from Alabama, Sun Ra.

Harvey Young is our resident theater critic as well as the new dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University.  He’s written a lot about black performance, most notably in his Chicago oral history, Black Theater is Black Life.  

Brooke Obie is a a full-time writer and novelist who’s seen Black Panther five times so far. In her review of the movie for the black cinema site Shadow & Act—she puts forward a strong defense of “Eric Killmonger and the lost children of Wakanda.”

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò grew up in the north suburbs of Cincinnati as the child of Nigerian immigrants He’s now a PhD candidate at UCLA and will soon be an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown. His family history makes him still wary of the warrior class represented by Killmonger in the film. 

Evan Narcisse, the lead writer for Marvel’s “Rise of the Black Panther” series, was born in Brooklyn of Haitian parents. He grew up with the legend of Toussaint Louverture, who led a slave rebellion against French colonists and finally beat Napoleon’s Army to liberate Haiti—the only time ex-slaves defeated a great power for their freedom, for which Haitians paid a terrible price. That too is part of what Evan Narcisse brings to his work on Black Panther.

Douglas Wolk of Austin, Texax is our unofficial “dean of American comic book critics.” He has made it his life’s mission to read “all of the Marvels” and will soon write about them. This week, he gave us the short form on what they all mean.

http://radioopensource.org/the-world-of-wakanda/

Up to about 100,000 years ago, our human ancestors coexisted with Neanderthals in Europe and interbred with them for thousands of years. The Neanderthals eventually went extinct, but many of us still carry around fragments of Neanderthal DNA.

Biomimicry design, explained with 99% Invisible. Check them out here: https://99percentinvisible.org/

Subscribe to our channel here: http://goo.gl/0bsAjO

Japan’s Shinkansen doesn’t look like your typical train. With its long and pointed nose, it can reach top speeds up to 150–200 miles per hour.

It didn’t always look like this. Earlier models were rounder and louder, often suffering from the phenomenon of "tunnel boom," where deafening compressed air would rush out of a tunnel after a train rushed in. But a moment of inspiration from engineer and birdwatcher Eiji Nakatsu led the system to be redesigned based on the aerodynamics of three species of birds.

Nakatsu’s case is a fascinating example of biomimicry, the design movement pioneered by biologist and writer Janine Benyus. She's a co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit encouraging creators to discover how big challenges in design, engineering, and sustainability have often already been solved through 3.8 billion years of evolution on earth. We just have to go out and find them.

This is one of a series of videos we're launching in partnership with 99% Invisible, an awesome podcast about design. 99% Invisible is a member of http://Radiotopia.fm

Additional imagery from the Biodiversity Heritage Library: https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/

Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com to get up to speed on everything from Kurdistan to the Kim Kardashian app.

Check out our full video catalog: http://goo.gl/IZONyE Follow Vox on Twitter: http://goo.gl/XFrZ5H Or on Facebook: http://goo.gl/U2g06o

http://traffic.libsyn.com/badatsports/Bad_at_Sports_Episode_431-Murata_and_Beatty.mp3download

This week: San Francisco checks in with a great interview. Bad at Sports contributors Brian Andrews and Patricia Maloney sat down with artist Takeshi Murata and sound designer Robert Beatty on November 9, 2013, at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, to discuss Murata’s most recent digitally animated video, OM Rider(2013). OM Rider follows two animated creatures: a wizened old man that Andrews describes as “half the Curious George Man in the Yellow Suit, half like the butler from Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and a hipster wolf, which rides a moped through a barren landscape and performs other aimless tasks. The video begins with the creature playing a synthesizer that gives the video its title. Om Rider contains Murata’s characteristic absurd humor and aesthetic, which mixes highly attuned lighting and composition with more retro modeling and minimalist, almost antiseptic spaces.

Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago. In 1997, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied film, video, and animation. He currently lives and works in Saugerties, New York. Murata has exhibited at the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Sikemma Jenkins & Co., New York; Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Salon 94, New York. Murata’s work is featured in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; and The Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

FYI, AP will post an excerpted text version of this interview on Dec. 3, and the link for that conversation should be:

http://www.artpractical.com/column/interview-with-takeshi-murata/

And here is a related review Brian wrote for his previous show: http://www.artpractical.com/review/get_your_ass_to_mars_andrews/

About Latest Posts ChristopherOperations Manager at Bad at SportsChristopher Hudgens is the Operations Manager for BaS and works in various other capacities for other organizations in the Chicago Art & Culture scene. Most recently as Business Operations Manager for the Bridge Art Fair and currently an advocate for all things art & technology.

Latest posts by Christopher (see all)

Episode 577: Kerry James Marshall WLPN B@SC Radio Edit - February 28, 2017

Kevin Jennings (1979-2016) - June 28, 2016

Episode 549: James Wines SITE Architect - May 24, 2016

http://badatsports.com/2013/episode-431-takeshi-murata-and-robert-beatty/

The New Observatory opened at FACT, Liverpool on Thursday 22nd of June and runs until October 1st. The exhibition, curated by Hannah Redler Hawes and Sam Skinner, in collaboration with The Open Data Institute, transforms the FACT galleries into a playground of micro-observatories, fusing art with data science in an attempt to expand the reach of both. Reflecting on the democratisation of tools which allow new ways of sensing and analysing, The New Observatory asks visitors to reconsider raw, taciturn ‘data’ through a variety of vibrant, surprising, and often ingenious artistic affects and interactions. What does it mean for us to become observers of ourselves? What role does the imagination have to play in the construction of a reality accessed via data infrastructures, algorithms, numbers, and mobile sensors? And how can the model of the observatory help us better understand how the non-human world already measures and aggregates information about itself? In its simplest form an observatory is merely an enduring location from which to view terrestrial or celestial phenomena. Stone circles, such as Stonehenge in the UK, were simple, but powerful, measuring tools, aligned to mark the arc of the sun, the moon or certain star systems as they careered across ancient skies. Today we observe the world with less monumental, but far more powerful, sensing tools. And the site of the observatory, once rooted to specific locations on an ever spinning Earth, has become as mobile and malleable as the clouds which once impeded our ancestors’ view of the summer solstice. The New Observatory considers how ubiquitous, and increasingly invisible, technologies of observation have impacted the scale at which we sense, measure, and predict. Citizen Sense, Dustbox (2016 – 2017). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. The Citizen Sense research group, led by Jennifer Gabrys, presents Dustbox as part of the show. A project started in 2016 to give residents of Deptford, South London, the chance to measure air pollution in their neighbourhoods. Residents borrowed the Dustboxes from their local library, a series of beautiful, black ceramic sensor boxes shaped like air pollutant particles blown to macro scales. By visiting citizensense.net participants could watch their personal data aggregated and streamed with others to create a real-time data map of local air particulates. The collapse of the micro and the macro lends the project a surrealist quality. As thousands of data points coalesce to produce a shared vision of the invisible pollutants all around us, the pleasing dimples, spikes and impressions of each ceramic Dustbox give that infinitesimal world a cartoonish charisma. Encased in a glass display cabinet as part of the show, my desire to stroke and caress each Dustbox was strong. Like the protagonist in Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel The Shrinking Man, once the scale of the microscopic world was given a form my human body could empathise with, I wanted nothing more than to descend into that space, becoming a pollutant myself caught on Deptford winds. Moving from the microscopic to the scale of living systems, Julie Freeman’s 2015/2016 project, A Selfless Society, transforms the patterns of a naked mole-rat colony into an abstract minimalist animation projected into the gallery. Naked mole-rats are one of only two species of ‘eusocial’ mammals, living in shared underground burrows that distantly echo the patterns of other ‘superorganism’ colonies such as ants or bees. To be eusocial is to live and work for a single Queen, whose sole responsibility it is to breed and give birth on behalf of the colony. For A Selfless Society, Freeman attached Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chips to each non-breeding mole-rat, allowing their interactions to be logged as the colony went about its slippery subterranean business. The result is a meditation on the ‘missing’ data point: the Queen, whose entire existence is bolstered and maintained by the altruistic behaviours of her wrinkly, buck-teethed family. The work is accompanied by a series of naked mole-rat profile shots, in which the eyes of each creature have been redacted with a thick black line. Freeman’s playful anonymising gesture gives each mole-rat its due, reminding us that behind every model we impel on our data there exist countless, untold subjects bound to the bodies that compel the larger story to life.

James Coupe, A Machine for Living (2017). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. Natasha Caruana’s works in the exhibition centre on the human phenomena of love, as understood through social datasets related to marriage and divorce. For her work Divorce Index Caruana translated data on a series of societal ‘pressures’ that are correlated with failed marriages – access to healthcare, gambling, unemployment – into a choreographed dance routine. To watch a video of the dance, enacted by Caruana and her husband, viewers must walk or stare through another work, Curtain of Broken Dreams, an interlinked collection of 1,560 pawned or discarded wedding rings. Both the works come out of a larger project the artist undertook in the lead-up to the 1st year anniversary of her own marriage. Having discovered that divorce rates were highest in the coastal towns of the UK, Caruana toured the country staying in a series of AirBnB house shares with men who had recently gone through a divorce. Her journey was plotted on dry statistical data related to one of the most significant and personal of human experiences, a neat juxtaposition that lends the work a surreal humour, without sentimentalising the experiences of either Caruana or the divorced men she came into contact with. Jeronimo Voss, Inverted Night Sky (2016). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. The New Observatory features many screens, across which data visualisations bloom, or cameras look upwards, outwards or inwards. As part of the Libre Space Foundation artist Kei Kreutler installed an open networked satellite station on the roof of FACT, allowing visitors to the gallery a live view of the thousands of satellites that career across the heavens. For his Inverted Night Sky project, artist Jeronimo Voss presents a concave domed projection space, within which the workings of the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy teeter and glide. But perhaps the most striking, and prominent use of screens, is James Coupe’s work A Machine for Living. A four-storey wooden watchtower, dotted on all sides with widescreen displays wired into the topmost tower section, within which a bank of computer servers computes the goings on displayed to visitors. The installation is a monument to members of the public who work for Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing system run by corporate giant Amazon that connects an invisible workforce of online, human minions to individuals and businesses who can employ them to carry out their bidding. A Machine for Living is the result of James Coupe’s playful subversion of the system, in which he asked mTurk workers to observe and reflect on elements of their own daily lives. On the screens winding up the structure we watch mTurk workers narrating their dance moves as they jiggle on the sofa, we see workers stretching and labelling their yoga positions, or running through the meticulous steps that make up the algorithm of their dinner routine. The screens switch between users so regularly, and the tasks they carry out as so diverse and often surreal, that the installation acts as a miniature exhibition within an exhibition. A series of digital peepholes into the lives of a previously invisible workforce, their labour drafted into the manufacture of an observatory of observations, an artwork homage to the voyeurism that perpetuates so much of 21st century ‘online’ culture.

The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Learning Space. Photo by Gareth Jones. The New Observatory is a rich and varied exhibition that calls on its visitors to reflect on, and interact more creatively with, the data that increasingly underpins and permeates our lives. The exhibition opened at FACT, Liverpool on Thursday 22nd of June and runs until October 1st.

Spiralling rates of poverty, inequality, depression, and disenchantment are warning signs that the capitalist system as we know it is in deep trouble.

http://legalise-freedom.com/radio/doug-lain-capitalism-is-there-no-alternative/

"Sinofuturism is an invisible movement. A spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives. It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows. Flows of populations, of products, and of processes. Because Sinofuturism has arisen without conscious intention or authorship, it is often mistaken for contemporary China. But it is not. It is a science fiction that already exists. Sinofuturism is a video essay combining elements of science fiction, documentary melodrama, social realism, and Chinese cosmologies, in order to critique the present-day dilemmas of China and the people of its diaspora. With reference to Afrofuturism and Gulf Futurism, Sinofuturism presents a critical and playful approach to subverting cultural clichés. In Western media and Orientalist perceptions, China is exotic, strange, bizarre, kitsch, tacky, or cheap. In its domestic media, China portrayed as heroic, stable, historic, grand, and unified. Rather than counteract these skewed narratives, Sinofuturism proposes to push them much further. By embracing seven key stereotypes of Chinese society (Computing, Copying, Gaming, Studying, Addiction, Labour and Gambling), it shows how China's technological development can be seen as a form of Artificial Intelligence." -- Initially broadcast as part of Radio Study Day at Wysing Arts Centre, 21 August 2016. Thanks to: Joni Zhu, Steve Goodman, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Deforrest Brown, Samantha Culp, Justin Kim, Stephanie Bailey, Alvin Li, AVANT.org, After Us, Film & Video Umbrella, UCCA, Wysing Arts Centre Chinese Subtitles by Wenfei Wang for 'The New Normal', an exhibition at UCCA, Beijing.Cast: Lawrence LekTags: sinofuturism, video essay and china

The Voder was the worlds first voice electronic synthesizer. In 1939 Homer Dudley working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey began to publicly demonstrate the Voder, the first electronic device that could generate continuous human speech electronically.

The Voder was designed for the 1939 World Fair in New York as a showcase of the advanced work being done at Bell Laboratories. It was a manually operated system requiring training, ten finger, two foot paddles, a knee leaver and arm switch to generate sounds. The sounds quality actually was better than most voice synthesizers all the way up to the late 1990s.

This is audio from a radio program recorded live during the broadcast.

Reclaiming the Nerdiverse [NSFW audio] is a fascinating hour-long discussion about women in science fiction and fantasy on the late night edition of the venerable BBC radio show Woman's Hour (podcast link). The host is Lauren Laverne, and her guests are author and game designer Naomi Alderman, journalist Helen Lewis, sociologist Linda Woodhead, fantasy novelist Zen Cho, and cosplayer and writer Lucy Saxon. The discussion takes in everything from 70s feminist writers to alpha/beta/omega slash fiction to cosplay etiquette to geek sexism. The Late Night Woman's Hour has been the topic of some discussion in Britain.

When people think about SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, they imagine messages sent via radio—Jodie Foster tuning antennas, hoping to pick up signals from the “billions and billions” of star systems pondered by Carl Sagan.

Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change, and where did it originally come from?

It all started with "cybernetics," an obscure term popularized by a mathematician named Norbert Weiner in the 1940s. For his groundbreaking book Cybernetics, Weiner borrowed the ancient Greek word "cyber," which is related to the idea of government or governing. Indeed, the only time the word cybernetics had appeared before was in a few works of political theory about the science of governance.

In his writing, Weiner described what was at the time a pretty futuristic idea — that one day there would be a computer system that ran on feedback. Essentially, it would be a self-governing system. And for a long time, cybernetics remained the purview of information theorists like Weiner, and early computer programmers.

Science fiction author Pat Cadigan, whose novel Mindplayers is a cyberpunk classic, recalled that her first encounter with "cyber" was of a decidedly Weinerish variety. She told io9 that the first time she heard the term was when she was in high school in 1967, and somebody mentioned cybernetics. "I asked what cybernetics was. 'It has to do with computers,' was the answer. My eyes glazed over. For years, that was the only word I knew with the prefix 'cyber' in it."

Mindplayers Amazon.com: $3.50 Buy now M34 readers bought this

But all that changed a little over a decade later. Cadigan recalled:

One morning in 1979, I was getting ready for work and Gary Numan's "Cars" came on the radio. Afterwards, the DJ said, "There's some cyberpunk for you." He was making a joke; in 1979, the punk movement was in full flower but the chaotic noise of punk music was starting to evolve into electronic noise. The Bizarre Evolution of the Word "Cyber" 4 SEXPAND Still, that joke quickly became a reality. In the early 1980s, the cyberpunk movement took over science fiction, spurred by the popularity of the film Bladerunner and William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. Authors like Cadigan, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker were writing mind-blowing stories about the merging of humans and computers. Cyber became a catch-all prefix that could be added to any word to make it sound cutting-edge. Cadigan noted that cyber "sort of supplanted the term 'digital' in some ways as an indicator of something that was high tech."

The 1990s: Decade of Cyber

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Are you a cyberpunk? This early 1990s poster explains it all to you. R.U. Sirius was a founder of Mondo 2000, the definitive futurist magazine of the early 1990s. And now he's posted a ton of snippets from it over … Read… Cyberpunk was a mostly-underground artistic style in the 1980s, but suddenly in the 1990s everything was cyber. As more and more people got internet access, the alien world of cyberspace from William Gibson's work became a household consumer item.

Richard Holden, a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary, recently researched the history of cyber for the dictionary. He told io9 that the 1990s were a time when use of the word underwent rapid diversification:

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for the prefix cyber­- has evidence of its use going back to 1961 (in Cybertron, as it happens), but . . . it seems to have become particularly popular in the 1990s — we don’t have all that much evidence for its use before then. This seems likely to be a result of the invention of the World Wide Web, and the earliest evidence we’ve found for words like cyber-bully, cybercommunity, cybergeek, cyberlaw, cyberstalker, and, indeed, cybersex and cyberwar all comes from the early 90s. At that time you . . . seem to get a mix of positive and negative terms involving the prefix, which possibly reflects the mixed feelings people often have about the opportunities and threats a new technology can bring. Ben Zimmer, who writes about linguistics for the Wall Street Journal, agreed with Holden, noting that the seemingly-incongruous ideas of cybersex and cyberwar "grew up side by side." The earliest recorded use of the term "cybersecurity" came in 1989, the exact same year when the word "cyberporn" was coined. But neither term was dominant. In the heady days of the 1990s "information superhighway," before people got used to the idea that shopping, dating, and work could exist online, adding the prefix cyber to something made it seem like it was taking place in the gleaming, pixelated world inhabited by futuristic youth.

Had the iPhone come along in the 1990s, it's likely that we'd be calling our devices something very different. Cadigan said, "Terminology-wise, I find it interesting that we never had cyber-phones. The mobile/celluar phone became the cell and then evolved into the smart phone, not the cyber-phone." Just as today everything from buildings to phones can be "smart," in the 1990s anything could be cyber.

Including sex.

The Cybersex Moment

The Bizarre Evolution of the Word "Cyber" 56 SEXPAND Back in the days of AOL chat rooms, IRC channels, and text-only multi-user games, lots of people started having cybersex. Most of this furtive online activity involved no more than people talking dirty via text.

But cyber-pundits suggested that teledildonics and virtual reality sex were just around the corner. Soon, we would be having sex with chrome-plated dragon beasts in landscapes made of diamond flowers. And we would be stimulating our lovers 3,000 miles away with sex toys that plugged into both partners, sending the orgasmic shivers of one to the other via the internet.

Zimmer pointed out that Douglas Adams may have invented the idea of cybersex back in 1982, when he remarked in Life, the Universe and Everything that "Zaphod had spent most of his early history lessons plotting how he was going to have sex with the girl in the cybercubicle next to him." As more college age people began piling on to the internet in the mid-1990s, cybersex became trendy slang for what you did with your long-distance boyfriend using the university dial-up connection. And, like most slang, it quickly got shortened to cyber.

The Latvian psychologist Konstanins Raudive spent the summer of 1965 trying to contact the dead. Every day, with careful precision, he would take a new reel of recording tape from its box, thread the tape through the rollers of the recorder and set up the microphone next to a mistuned radio.

The persistent glitchiness of HealthCare.gov, the website implementing the Affordable Care Act, has given us much time to ponder that peculiar little word, glitch. As it happens, some new research on the word brings its origin, most likely from Yiddish, into a sharper perspective.

I've had a couple of occasions to expound on glitch lately, in my Wall Street Journal column and in a brief interview for NPR's "All Things Considered." But some recently uncovered evidence of the early development of glitch deserves a fuller airing.

Dictionaries have thus far given only a partial view of how glitch developed. The Oxford English Dictionary, in its second edition of 1989, unsatisfyingly says that its etymology is "unknown." The OED also suggests that the word's original meaning was "a surge of current or a spurious electrical signal," later extended in "astronaut's slang" to mean "a hitch or snag; a malfunction."

This reconstruction of the word's semantic history seems to be entirely based on a 1962 quote (the earliest given by the OED and other dictionaries) from John Glenn, in his contribution to Into Orbit, a book jointly written by the original seven astronauts of Project Mercury. Glenn wrote:

Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was "glitch." Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit which takes place when the circuit suddenly has a new load put on it. You have probably noticed a dimming of lights in your home when you turn a switch or start the dryer or the television set. Normally, these changes in voltage are protected by fuses. A glitch, however, is such a minute change in voltage that no fuse could protect against it.

One might surmise from this that Glenn and his fellow astronauts took a highly technical term and "adopted" it into a more general term for any malfunction. But that overlooks the history of the term predating the space program — a history only now becoming clear.

A glimmer of this backstory emerged when William Safire discussed glitch in an "On Language" column for The New York Times back in 1980. Safire thought the term dated from the '60s in aeronautical use, but noted that it "probably originated in the German and Yiddish glitschen, meaning 'slip,' and by extension, 'error.'" Others, such as Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish, have claimed glitch as a Yiddishism. But how do we get from Yiddish lingo to Cape Canaveral mishaps?

None other than the actor Tony Randall supplied a piece of the puzzle. In a letter responding to Safire's column, reproduced in the 1982 "On Language" anthology What's the Good Word?, Randall wrote:

The first time I heard the word "glitch" was in 1941 in Worcester. I got a job there as an announcer at WTAG. When an announcer made a mistake, such as putting on the wrong record or reading the wrong commercial, anything technical, or anything concerning the sales department, that was called a "glitch" and had to be entered on the Glitch Sheet, which was a mimeographed form. The older announcers told me the term had been used as long as they could remember.

There matters stood until a few years ago, when there was a flurry of "antedating" (searching for ever-earlier citations) among the word researchers who participate in the American Dialect Society mailing list. Plumbing newspaper databases, Yale law librarian Fred Shapiro came up with the new date to beat: May 19, 1940. That was when the novelist Katharine Brush wrote about glitch in her column "Out of My Mind" (syndicated in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and other papers). Brush corroborated Tony Randall's radio recollection:

When the radio talkers make a little mistake in diction they call it a "fluff," and when they make a bad one they call it a "glitch," and I love it.

Other examples from the world of radio can be found in the 1940s. The April 11, 1943 issue of the Washington Post carried a review of Helen Sioussat's book about radio broadcasting, Mikes Don't Bite. The reviewer noted an error and wrote, "In the lingo of radio, has Miss Sioussat pulled a 'muff,' 'fluff,' 'bust,' or 'glitch'?" And in a 1948 book called The Advertising and Business Side of Radio, Ned Midgley explained how a radio station's "traffic department" was responsible for properly scheduling items in a broadcast. "Usually most 'glitches,' as on-the-air mistakes are called, can be traced to a mistake on the part of the traffic department," Midgley wrote.

Further digging reveals that in the 1950s, glitch made the transition from radio to television. In a 1953 ad in Broadcasting Magazine, RCA boasted that their TV camera has "no more a-c power line 'glitches' (horizontal-bar interference)." And Bell Telephone ran an ad in a 1955 issue of Billboard showing two technicians monitoring the TV signals that were broadcast on Bell System lines: "When he talks of 'glitch' with a fellow technician, he means a low frequency interference which appears as a narrow horizontal bar moving vertically through the picture."

A 1959 article in Sponsor, a trade magazine for television and radio advertisers, gave another technical usage in an article about editing TV commercials by splicing tape. "'Glitch' is slang for the 'momentary jiggle' that occurs at the editing point if the sync pulses don't match exactly in the splice." Sponsor also gave the earliest etymological explanation I've seen: "'Glitch' probably comes from a German or Yiddish word meaning a slide, a glide or a slip."

So, by the time that glitch entered the space program in the '60s, it had enjoyed a long life in radio and television, referring to a variety of technical problems. And when astronauts used it in a general way for any hitch or snag, it was in fact a return to how glitch was introduced into radio broadcasting circles a few decades earlier.

Though we still don't know for sure if the term was imported via Yiddish or came directly from German, a Yiddish origin certainly seems more likely. I'm not aware of any evidence of its use in historically German-speaking regions in the U.S., and its emergence in radio circa 1940 is telling, given the active role of Yiddish speakers in the world of radio at the time. So the next time you run into a glitch on HealthCare.gov or some other site, give a thought to the on-air flubs by Yiddish-slinging radio announcers of years past.