Category: Naming

  • Names.

    “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. This phrase – from William Shakespeare’s tragic play Romeo & Juliet – is among the most famous acknowledgements in Western culture of the power of naming to shape human perception. According to the International Union of Geological […]

  • Reading robots’ mind? Not.

    In a darkened, hangar-like space inside MIT’s Building 41, a small, Roomba-like robot is trying to make up its mind. Standing in its path is an obstacle — a human pedestrian who’s pacing back and forth. To get to the other side of the room, the robot has to first determine where the pedestrian is, […]

  • Thoreau. Naming things. Lost memories. Important things.

    A vast pyramid of talus and scree in the Sierra Nevada range, it sits between the aptly named Wonder Lakes Basin and Mount Emerson, a namesake of the great 19th-century author Ralph Waldo Emerson. It might seem only fitting that it should bear the name of Emerson’s close friend and fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. […]