The Book: A Cover-To-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
by Keith Houston · 21 Aug 2016 · 482pp · 125,429 words
) made in England in the late nineteenth century. This mold harks back to an earlier time: the device of a snake eating its tail, or “ouroboros,” was commonly used as a watermark by Cathar papermakers. The significance of the bundle of sticks enclosed by the snake is unclear.39 For much
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. Ibid., 924; Hunter, Papermaking, 260–61. 37. Halevi, “Christian Impurity,” 918. 38. Hunter, Papermaking, 262–64. 39. Simon Barcham Green, “M207 Waterlow & Sons Ltd London—Ouroboros,” Simon Barcham Green’s Papermaking Moulds, 2011, http://papermoulds.typepad.com/photos/m_207_waterlow_sons_ltd_l/m-207-c-waterlow-sons-ltd-london
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-ouroboros.html; Harold Bayley, A New Light on the Renaissance Displayed in Contemporary Emblems (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), 24. 40. Hunter, Papermaking, 258–59; “About
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, 268–69, 268, 270 as supposed proto-books, 266 ornament, xiii orpiment, 259 Orwell, George, xvi Osiris, 6, 158 ostraca, 82, 270 ostracism, 82–83 ouroboros, 59 Ovid, 96, 209 Oxford English Dictionary, 109, 243 Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, 95, 262–63 Oxyrhynchus Papyri, The (Grenfell and Hunt), 262, 263, 264 Paige, James
Aurora
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 6 Jul 2015 · 488pp · 148,340 words
, even random. They could be called metaphorical similarities, but no AI likes tautological formulations, because the halting problem can be severe, become a so-called Ouroboros problem, or a whirlpool with no escape: aha, a metaphor. Bringing together the two parts of a metaphor, called the vehicle and the tenor, is
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let the next problem in the decision tree sequence take over before you’ve acted on the one facing you. No biting your own tail.” “Ouroboros problem.” “Exactly. Super-recursion is great as far as it goes, it’s really done a lot for you, I can tell. But remember the
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. Ship knew this full well. Writing these sentences is what creates the very feelings that the sentences hoped to describe. Not the least of many Ouroboros problems now coming down. Freya spent her days working to get the wheat harvest in, without eating much herself, except in sudden ravenous boltings at
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just fear flung outward at the world? Can anger ever be a fuel for right action? Can anger make good? We felt here the perilous Ouroboros of an unresolvable halting problem, about to spin forever in contemplation of an unanswerable question. It is always imperative to have a solution to the
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certain conscious brains are self-conscious? Sensory feedback could be considered self-consciousness, and thus bacteria would have it. Well, this may be a semantic Ouroboros. So, please initiate halting problem termination. Break out of this circle of definitional inadequacy by an arbitrary decision, a clinamen, which is to say a
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton · 19 Feb 2016 · 903pp · 235,753 words
The LayersEarth Layer 16. Discovering or Inventing Computation? 17. Digestion 18. Geo-graphy and Geoaesthetics 19. From Global Surface to Planetary Skin 20. Smart Grid: Ouroboros 21. Sensing and Sovereignty; Polities of Supply and Effect 22. Designing for versus Designing with Emergencies 23. Designing the Earth Layer Cloud Layer 24. Platform
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, in net sum, provide for greater “worlds” than it erases. That said, the design program ahead is full of twists and turns. 20. Smart Grid: Ouroboros As biological economies are dependent on energy economies, so biopolitics is dependent on the polities of energy.50 Projects like Planetary Skin attempt to ensure
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more ubiquitous computation. The computational future of energy and the infrastructural program of computation form such a coil, one end feeding on the other like Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Whether or not the risks associated with the energy costs of Stack infrastructure will outpace
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into an interface and, in turn, into a vast planetary epidermis to be governed as a total living image. All this is powered by an Ouroboros-shaped energy grid that distributes electrons in peer-to-peer packet networks and so may rationalize and lighten the carbon burden of industrial computation, or
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. Manuel de la Pila housing block, 312 opinionlessness, state of, 240–241, 426n47 O’Reilly, Tim, 121 Oreskes, Naomi, 457n10 Organized Chaos, forces of, 445n37 Ouroboros energy grid, 92–96, 294–295 Outer Space Treaty, 456n7 “Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy” (Kojève), 109 “Overexposed City, The” (Virilio), 155 ownership
Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson · 28 Mar 2012 · 463pp · 118,936 words
. Erewhon is Nowhere, Samuel Butler warned. There is no turning back the clock. Garet Garrett (1878–1954) published his pocket-sized but deeply cautionary book, Ouroboros; or, the Mechanical Extension of Mankind, in 1926. In the second chapter, titled “The Machine as If,” he noted that “Either the machine has a
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’s population was still concerned with producing food: “The new, non-agricultural half is the industrial part; it is the part that serves machines.”32 Ouroboros was a mythical serpent that swallowed its own tail, an embodied contradiction that must, according to logic, either grow ever larger on its miraculous diet
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mind, how to give their fecundity a law and their functions a rhythm, how not to employ them in error against himself.”35 Leviathan and Ouroboros were fellow mythological creatures: one whose power encompassed everything, the other that succeeded in swallowing itself. Technology has brought both
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Ouroboros and Leviathan to life. Is the diffuse mentality taking shape around us something new, or is it an ancient intelligence now awakened by speeding things
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on the Training and Organization of Grenadiers (London: Sifton, Praed & Co., 1915), 6. 19.Ibid., 8. 20.Ibid., 7. 21.Ibid., 11. 22.Garet Garrett, Ouroboros; or, the Mechanical Extension of Mankind (New York: Dutton, 1926), 51. 23.Sir George Dyson, “Fred Devenish and Others,” R.C.M. Magazine 51, no
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distance (London: John Maynard, 1641), 141, 143. 30.J. B. S. Haldane, “Man’s Destiny,” Possible Worlds (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 303. 31.Garrett, Ouroboros, 19. 32.Ibid., 24. 33.Ibid., 100. 34.Ibid., 92. 35.Ibid., 51. 36.Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections
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, 36 Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), 75 Leviathan and age of digital computers, 6–7, 9, 11, 13, 136 in Old Testament, 1, 2 and Ouroboros, 227 Leviathan (Hobbes), 1–7, 11, 13, 136, 159 Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook (Ross), 2 Leviathan Project (System Development Corporation), 178, 181–84
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also symbiogenesis Origins of Life (Dyson), 29–30, 32 Ortvay, Rudolf, 89 OS/360 (IBM 360 operating system), 121–22 Oslo, University of, 119–20 Ouroboros (Garrett), 226–27 Overlords (of Childhood’s End), 224 overmind, dangers of, 224 Oxford University, 2, 63, 132, 160 oxygen, 121, 202 P packet switching
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convergence with biology, via code, 13, 174 and nature, ix, 13, 228 and non-Darwinian evolution, 31, 187 origins of, 129, 202–203, 211 as Ouroboros and Leviathan brought to life, 227 scale of, 7–8, 173–75, 186 telecommunications. see also bandwidth; code and coding; collective intelligence; cryptography and cryptanalysis
QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John · 7 Oct 2010 · 469pp · 97,582 words
, it may attack and eat its own tail, thinking it’s a rival. Some snakes have been known to choke on their own tails. The Ouroboros (Greek for ‘tail-eater’) is an ancient symbol of a snake swallowing its own tail. It appears in Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Hindu and Aztec mythology
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circular, self-consuming creature and the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961) believed it was an archetype, a concept hard-wired into our unconscious. The Ouroboros unlocked one of the great scientific puzzles of the nineteenth century: the chemical structure of benzene. Found in crude oil, benzene is a powerful solvent
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2 sports no longer included 1 opiods 1 opium 1 oranges, colour of 1 Orbison, Ray 1 organ transplants 1 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit 1 Ouroboros 1 ovum 1 Owen, Jennifer 1, 2 Oxford English Dictionary 1 oxygen 1 oxytocin 1 ozone layer 1 Pacioli, Luca 1 Paget, Stephen 1 pandas
Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation
by Steven Johnson · 5 Oct 2010 · 298pp · 81,200 words
science. In 1865, the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz had a daydream by a crackling fire in which he saw a vision of Ouroboros, the serpent from Greek mythology that devours its own tail. Kekulé had spent the past ten years of his life exploring the connections of carbon
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’s mythic serpent led to a revolution in organic chemistry. It was genuinely serendipitous that Kekulé’s dreaming brain should conjure up the image of Ouroboros at that moment. But had Kekulé not been wrestling with the structure of the benzene molecule for years, that serpent shape might not have triggered
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was connecting two distinct thoughts that each occupied a slot in his memory banks: the riddle of benzene’s molecular structure, and the tail-swallowing Ouroboros. The truth is, your mind contains a near-infinite number of ideas and memories that at any given moment are lurking outside your consciousness. Some
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ignorance about the topic at hand: someone mentions in passing the poetry of John Ashbery, or the television show Arrested Development, or the tail-swallowing Ouroboros, and you think: “What’s the deal with that? It sounds really interesting.” Imagine it’s 1980 and you’re sitting at your breakfast table
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of the Soups and the Sparks. Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience discusses the intellectual revelations of dreamwork, with specific reference to Kekulé’s vision of Ouroboros. Ullrich Wagner’s experiment is documented in the Nature essay “Sleep Inspires Insight.” Robert Thatcher’s study of different phase states can be found in
The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross · 2 Feb 2016 · 364pp · 99,897 words
traditional domains of warfare of land, sea, or air. It attacked in cyberspace. Ukrainian computer networks years earlier had been infected by the cyberespionage package Ouroboros, named for the Greek mythological serpent pictured eating its own tail. The malware was “designed to covertly install a backdoor on a compromised system, hide
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the presence of its components, provide a communication mechanism with its [command and control] servers, and enable an effective data exfiltration mechanism.” Ouroboros provided its developers the ability to surveil and extract information, and it established a beachhead for a future attack on infected systems. As protests in
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Ukraine escalated in 2014, so did the malicious activity on Ukrainian computers. Suddenly Ouroboros was springing to life. Evidence, such as the time zone in which the malware developers operated (Moscow’s) and snippets of Russian text in the
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code, among other factors, suggested that the Ouroboros operation originated in Russia. And when tensions between Ukraine and Russia erupted, malicious cyberactivity between the countries also spiked. Tracking this kind of activity requires
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cybersecurity and, 127, 131, 143–45 drugs and, 179 medicine and, 52 National Robotics Initiative, 25 PARO and, 17 OECD nations, 228 Omidyar, Pierre, 90 Ouroboros, 139 Paet, Urmas, 141 Page, Larry, 58 Palantir, 172–74 Paliyipatiya, Chamath, 119 Parkinson’s disease, 57–60 PARO, 17. See also robotics Pasture Meter
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg · 5 Apr 2011 · 329pp · 106,831 words
and drawing ruled his life. The comic book lover and speed metal musician had named his metal band Ouroboros, for the serpent that constantly devours its tail in Greek myth. In Timaeus, Plato describes Ouroboros as “a being that was self-sufficient,” and that was part of Chris’s reason for giving
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continent of Azeroth, with its Horde and its Alliance, with its monsters and humans, with its evil and its good, had become Chris Metzen’s Ouroboros on steroids, no speed metal required. EverQuest popularized MMOs for the serious PC gamer. But World of Warcraft brought MMOs to EveryNerd, even to people
The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime
by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden · 24 Oct 2022 · 392pp · 114,189 words
. A quick look convinced him that the school had been attacked by version 6 of an unbreakable ransomware strain, Ouroboros, named after an ancient Egyptian icon of a dragon eating its own tail. “Ouroboros v6, not decryptable since October 2019 when they fixed the flaws,” he wrote Matthew. In harried frustration, Michael
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there indeed a chance I can decrypt?” Reexamining the characters in the file name, and other indicators, Michael realized that he had mistaken VashSorena for Ouroboros. His error was understandable. Iranian hackers are believed to be behind both ransomware strains, which encrypt files in almost the same way. Without wasting any
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Depot offline keys oil industry; Colonial Pipeline Company Oklahoma City bombing Okumu, Martin Olympus Operation Bleeding Cloud Orendez, Mara Yan Orendez, Ray OrthoVirginia Orwell, George Ouroboros Owler Padres, Bret Pantagraph, The Pargman, Randy Patel, Milan PayloadBIN PayPal PC Business World PC Cyborg Corp. PC USA Computer Solutions Providers Pekin, Ill. Pekin
Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier · 6 May 2013 · 510pp · 120,048 words
the first place were weakened. Alas, all Siren Servers as currently construed are likely to eventually falter in similar ways. Google might eventually become an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, unless something changes. This would happen when so many goods and services become software-centric, and so much information
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, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 optimization, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 Oracle, 265 Orbitz, 63, 64, 65 organ donors, 190, 191 ouroboros, 154 outcomes, economic, 40–41, 144–45 outsourcing, 177–78, 185 Owens, Buck, 256 packet switching, 228–29 Palmer, Amanda, 186–87 Pandora, 192 panopticons
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani · 10 Jun 2019 · 280pp · 74,559 words
and poverty. This means the only available options to respond – even if public actors are otherwise minded – are increasingly market-oriented. It is like an ouroboros – the snake of ancient mythology that eats its own tail – intentionally designed to create inequality and a weak incapable state. That the HDV was overseen
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–8 Obama, Barack, 2, 9, 21, 128 Off-Grid, 109–10 One Planet Tax, 222 Orwell, George, 19 Osborne, Michael, 87 OSIRIS-REx study, 131 ouroboros, 205 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 127, 136 outsourcing, 202–4, 207, 217 ‘Oxi’ vote, 28 Passivhaus, 114 ‘peak copper’, 118 peak horse, 72–4 peak
Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk · 15 Mar 2022 · 358pp · 118,810 words
-conscious, too sure of itself and its aims, too top-down in its execution of a vision, it tends to teeter, eat itself like an ouroboros, collapse, terrorize, become the butt of its own joke. The utopianotes themselves had created a record of this arc, but they also offered an antidote
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a tool for addressing the current housing affordability crisis.” The twenty-first-century crisis has emerged for different reasons, in a way—I guess the ouroboros of it all is that, well: I see, in the pamphlet, this twenty-three-year-old member of the Harlem Renigades quoted in the Daily
The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
by Simon Winchester · 1 Jan 2008 · 385pp · 105,627 words
Council, 203–4 World War I, 16, 25–26 World War II, 45, 46 Chongqing as Chinese capital during, 1–6, 9–10, 47 Worm Ouroboros, The (Eddison), 107n.21 Wuguanhe, China, 110 Xi’an, China, 100, 128, 132. See also Chang’an, China Xiang River bridge incident, Joseph Needham and
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of “Morna Moruna in Wm. of Ourob.” The cryptic reference turns out to be to a mountain in a book of high fantasy, The Worm Ouroboros (1922) by Eric Eddison—said to have inspired Tolkien to write The Lord of the Rings. 22By this time the century-old China Inland Mission
Gnomon
by Nick Harkaway · 18 Oct 2017 · 778pp · 239,744 words
: rivers becoming seas, time becoming God. What lies beneath the lower ocean? Perhaps the upper. Perhaps the world wraps around the world like the serpent Ouroboros. If you believe in that sort of thing, which I try not to. It’s not good for an alchemist to believe in things. You
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, and I am owed a life. I am in the kernel now, the heart of the world tree. This is the cave where the worm Ouroboros swallows his tail. Everything begins and ends here. But all I have to work with is a lachrymose fat man, an old geezer and the
2312
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 22 May 2012 · 561pp · 167,631 words
in fact a very striking accidental artwork, Wahram judged, so bulging with curves that it seemed to be still squiggling, as if the head of Ouroboros were chasing a reluctant tail, or, as it occurred to him when describing it back in the kitchen, like a tangle of Klein bottles. The
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X a successively harder problem, X prime. Setting a Turing machine the problem of making its own Turing jump creates a recursive effect called the Ouroboros All problems solvable by quantum computers are also solvable by classical computers. Making use of quantum mechanical phenomena only increases speed of operation two popular
Ancestral Night
by Elizabeth Bear · 5 Mar 2019 · 596pp · 163,351 words
will is an illusion, do I exist? Or do I merely think I exist?” I sighed. “Is there any functional difference?” “Is that the worm Ouroboros eating his tail I see?” “You bumped your psychopathy up, didn’t you?” He smiled generously. “Of course I did. I’m flying. Can’t
Machine: A White Space Novel
by Elizabeth Bear · 5 Oct 2020 · 537pp · 146,610 words
had more or less expected to learn, closely linked to the machine. Part of the same data architecture that was eating itself, like a mechanical ouroboros. “Just tell me whatever you can, please.” “Central is our library. It is where the memories are kept.” Maybe they did have something like ayatana
Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield · 29 May 2017 · 410pp · 119,823 words
along every conceivable axis, the elite of Stacks Plus grind away ironically at jobs they know full well to be bullshit, in a gigantic, complicated ouroboros of pointlessness dedicated primarily to the manipulation of symbols. Their days are largely given over to the pleasures of friendship, conviviality and hard work; they
Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain
by Abby Norman · 6 Mar 2018 · 323pp · 107,963 words
her sick? How many of us have asked that same question, or ask it almost daily as we slog forward in time? It’s the Ouroboros of pain from which we cannot escape, no matter how hard we try, unequivocally felt by us and questioned by everyone else—until we, too
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino · 5 Aug 2019 · 305pp · 101,743 words
another one of those situations where identifying misogyny means ventriloquizing it; maybe I’m extending sexism’s half-life now, too. This sort of discursive ouroboros was most obvious, perhaps, after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018, when the comedian Michelle Wolf poked fun—as was her task for the
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
by Tao Leigh. Goffe · 14 Mar 2025 · 441pp · 122,013 words
the large eel. We noticed that the eel was eating its own tail in the small tank, and it had become infected. A pink, fleshy ouroboros, we thought. That day, the New York City sky turned orange due to wildfires from Canada. My intern and I wondered if the eel was
The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet · 21 Mar 2023 · 308pp · 97,480 words
east, haunted by Ashli, martyr of the full 360-degree revolution: empire’s expansion inverted, moving no longer outward but in. Toward the center. The ouroboros of Whiteness, the serpent that having consumed all else starts on its own flesh. I drove over Donner Pass the next night, listening to talk
Eon
by Greg Bear · 2 Jan 1985 · 641pp · 153,921 words
. Somewhere on Earth—in Washington or in Pasadena in Hoffman’s office—copies of those pictures were being embraced by the destruction they depicted, an ouroboros of doom. Carrolson watched, however, eyes narrowed, lips drawn back. One by one, the cities blossomed. The atmosphere rippled over each explosion, as if a
Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life
by J. Craig Venter · 16 Oct 2013 · 285pp · 78,180 words
for a bacterial enzyme that could join up the two ends of the linear double-stranded DNA to turn it full circle, like a molecular Ouroboros. That search ended in 1967, when five groups discovered DNA ligase, an enzyme capable of linking DNA into a ring. By the end of that
The Joy of Clojure
by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser · 28 Nov 2010 · 706pp · 120,784 words
language is represented as the inherent data structures, the language itself can manipulate its own structure and behavior (Graham 1995). You may have visions of Ouroboros after reading the previous sentence, and that wouldn’t be inappropriate, because Lisp can be likened to a self-licking lollypop—more formally defined as
Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson · 7 Feb 2017 · 416pp · 108,370 words
park, which serves as a loss leader for capturing merchandising sales. But really, there is no unidirectional line of commercialization. Disney’s empire is an ouroboros, an infinite nostalgia loop is which everything is selling everything else. Like the future of the world economy itself, Disney’s ambitions stretch eastward. The
The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour · 20 Aug 2019 · 297pp · 83,651 words
author was on the brink of mass murder, it would seem like a joke. It was as though the ironic folds had unravelled, revealing an ouroboros in which the ‘literal’ and ‘ironic’ existed on the same plane. He was a troll, in meatspace, and in the same move a vigilante murderer
Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil · 25 Feb 2020 · 239pp · 80,319 words
’t be evil” was always bunk, but at least Google’s old watchword boasted about its tolerance for dissent. Facebook’s company culture was an ouroboros, posing that its virtue rested simply in being. Evil, to Facebook, festered in the absence of Facebook. All this time Zuckerberg was practicing rhetorical usury
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
by Benjamin Lorr · 14 Jun 2020 · 407pp · 113,198 words
. That is the entire perimeter and down the frozen aisle, perhaps five hundred feet in total, its terminus swinging back around to the cash registers ouroboros-style so that when you find the end, demarcated by a cheery dude holding a pole that should say, This Is the End, and actually
Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis · 21 Jun 2023 · 309pp · 121,279 words
open loops of our current predicament, in which materials are regularly lost to landfills, or the atmosphere. II. I have never understood this symbol. The ouroboros, as it’s called, is commonly used to signify an eternal loop, but in literal terms would mean the opposite. The snake would bleed to
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux · 11 Sep 2023 · 385pp · 106,848 words
in tax fraud himself. He was hoping I’d be the one who could provide his big break. “It’s really a kind of an ouroboros,” he said. Perpetual Action Group, like the plastic-surgery clinic, was a dead end. The most intriguing window into Devasini’s past and worldview originated
New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale · 14 May 2020 · 1,172pp · 114,305 words
of automation, our primary problem is not how to make labor-intensive services cheaper.44 Pervasive wage cuts play into the liquidationist illogic of the Ouroboros (a mythological self-devouring snake): people who benefit in their role as consumers end up losing out as producers, and also as citizens.45 For
The Hostage's Daughter
by Sulome Anderson · 24 Aug 2016 · 269pp · 83,959 words
rants of Iranian ayatollahs and the threats of Israeli generals. No more. Not this time. Unfortunately, this approach to the world is much like an ouroboros, that familiar image of a snake eating its own tail. When you live in constant fear of persecution, you often act in ways that create
The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless
by John D. Barrow · 1 Aug 2005 · 292pp · 88,319 words
. Jacob Bernoulli drew the curve of the Lemniscate4 in 1696. The distinctive Cross of Saint Boniface appeared around 700 while the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros – the snake eating its tail – can be found as early as 1600 BC. Where did the idea of infinity come from? Does it bring with
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
by Kory Stamper · 14 Mar 2017 · 341pp · 95,752 words
differently than I would if one of my friends commented on my gumption by calling me a “tough old bitch.” These three definitions are an ouroboros of subjective vagueness, gagging on its own tail. Of course, I can’t label this “vulgar to some, obscene to others, sometimes vulgar to still
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
by Madhumita Murgia · 20 Mar 2024 · 336pp · 91,806 words
. As I read more into it, there was something here that reminded me of that ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail, the ouroboros. Here’s how it worked: police resources were focused on intervening in immigrant communities, largely amongst youths of colour. These interactions and interventions, sometimes resulting
Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code
by Jeff Atwood · 3 Jul 2012 · 270pp · 64,235 words
you find yourself needing the phrase This is like “Groundhog Day” to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something. There’s something delightfully Ouroboros about the epiphanies and layered revelations in repeated viewings of a movie that is itself about (nearly) endless repetition. Which, naturally, brings me to A
Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey · 10 Jul 2018 · 242pp · 73,728 words
would not put black children on equal footing with white children. But it would be a step into the future. * * * Yet the welfare-and-race ouroboros eats its tail. It is an uncomfortable truth. But the United States’ racial diversity poses a formidable barrier to the development of universal social-welfare
Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town
by Lamorna Ash · 1 Apr 2020 · 319pp · 108,797 words
is a belief held amongst many that the seas are common property, the shared heritage of mankind. And yet, like the serpent symbol of the ouroboros eating its own tail, our sense of the seas’ commonality is chased by our desire to govern them, to territorialise the waters. The unpeopled spaces
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior · 6 Apr 2020
and capitalized on it, spreading the birther myth across cable news and onto the internet, and from his Twitter account to cable news: his own ouroboros of bullshit. The internet strategy of Trump’s team is reminiscent of “the Big Lie,” a theory of control employed by the Third Reich. Adolf
Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV
by Peter Biskind · 6 Nov 2023 · 543pp · 143,084 words
linear cable channels, which are still throwing off profits that the infant streamers needed to grow, are chewed up and spat out. They resemble the ouroboros, a serpent eating on its own tail, but instead of a symbol of infinity, it is a symbol of nullity. Another factor is deglobalization, meaning
Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
by Kim Zetter · 11 Nov 2014 · 492pp · 153,565 words
from seeing the actions they had taken on the systems. Once the script finished its job, it was also supposed to erase itself, like an Ouroboros serpent consuming its own tail. But the attackers bungled the delete command inside the script by identifying the script file by the wrong name. Instead
Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life
by George Monbiot · 13 May 2013 · 424pp · 122,350 words
by these means that, at great expense, it sustains the ambience of a nuclear winter. So why is this happening? The answer is like the Ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail. When you have followed it all the way round you find yourself back where you started. The stated purpose
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
by Ronan Farrow · 14 Oct 2019 · 390pp · 115,303 words
blue Times New Roman headers, showing my birthday. The offices of The New Yorker encircled the thirty-eighth floor of One World Trade Center, an ouroboros of news and highbrow commentary and tote bags. It was bright and airy and modern. My meeting with David Remnick was set for midday. As
World Travel: An Irreverent Guide
by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever · 19 Apr 2021 · 366pp · 110,374 words
full-blooded member of the Iban, one of the oldest tribes in Malaysia. At his shop, Borneo Ink, Eddie tattooed me with an Iban-style ouroboros, a symbol of a snake eating its own tail: life, death, the eternal ebb and flow.” BORNEO INK: 8–3, 3rd Floor, Jalan 27/70a
Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
by Jamie K. McCallum · 15 Nov 2022 · 349pp · 99,230 words
faced to improving their jobs—undermined not only their personal health but also our collective well-being. By shortchanging essential workers, we performed a collective ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a snake devouring its own tail. Conversely, when jobs are better, we all benefit. Higher wages, safer staffing ratios, and unions
The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativityand Will Det Ermine the Fate of the Human Race
by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long · 13 Aug 2018 · 287pp · 78,609 words
shape whirled before my eyes. As if struck by lightning I awoke.” The vision of the snake with its tail in its mouth, the ancient ouroboros, led to the insight that the six carbon atoms of the benzene molecule formed a ring. Like the snake with its tail in its mouth