My new issue of WIRED Magazine came in the mail today….thus reminding me that I never read last month’s issue, which is now online at the WIRED website. I found several articles particularly notable:
:: An interview with Steven Spielberg on the eve of Minority Report, his new film based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. What I found most interesting is Spielberg’s rejection of purely digital cinema. He really feels that something will be lost when celluloid is a thing of the past, and judging by the mixed reviews I’ve seen of the digital projections of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, I have to wonder if maybe he’s right.
:: This article on the upcoming LucasArts game, Star Wars Galaxies. This game will create the Star Wars universe in an online environment that could involve as many as millions of gamers whose actions will create and shape the ongoing mythology of Star Wars once the films are complete. I’m wondering: suppose one user becomes as powerful and as charismatic a figure, in the game, as the fictional Dark Lords of the Sith? Will Lucas allow the Empire to rise again in his creation, once it’s in the hands of the gamers?
:: A profile of Stephen Wolfram, the at-times megalomaniacal genius behind Mathematica and the new book, A New Kind of Science, which — according to its author — is just that, a grand new paradigm that may be the most important development in science since Einstein or Newton, or — according to its critics — merely repackages some old ideas in unscientific fashion, a sin doubly compounded by Wolfram’s decision to forego the traditional mechanism of peer review in science in favor of self-publishing and self-promoting.
