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Turing's story is inspirational, even cinematic, but a lesser told tale is about the many other computer design happening around the world including the United States and Germany. It should be no surprise that the military was heavily involved with the machine's inception as Johnny von Neumann helped to build the hydrogen bomb and Conrad Zuse worked on the V1 cruise missile. And now their machines are in our pockets!

Never really expected to have a firm grasp on the story, not helped by taking a month-long vacation and leaving the novel at home, it still seems a bit late in the game to add a character as potentially narrative-altering as Clovis. All I can tell about her is that she is somehow connected to Lowbeer's (her own?) past.

Summing up their aesthetically mindful book that proposes a new method of educational research, the authors leave theory for the end, and thankfully do not attempt to answer what are the arts or what it all means. However, science is often contrasted as being able to measure and convey something about a researched reality. Arts based considers how it is one of many possible realities to generate open-ended questions,

Well aware of the journalistic habit of putting people first, Gribbin could've spared his (book) readers lengthy details of Alan Turing's boyhood bee-watching and stuck in more artificial intelligence-programming. Tom Flowers gets the top prize, along with his MBE, surpassing even Turing's OBE for most overlooked computer designer 1944-60. A replica Colossus stands still at Bletchley and Turing's test not yet beaten.

Once again, I am a little surprised that a discussion of the weakened voice in our head makes no mention of Jaynes' bicameral mind, at least a suggestion of the origin of our conscience. Instead there is another researchable author Joyce who has much to say about something, whose Artist as a Young Man portrays western society on the cusp of late modern age almost ready to go digital and Abu Ghraib infamous.

A provocation of ethical and political issues artistic research should engage with is soon followed by a list of qualities that make arts go beyond the academic equivalent of "but I know what I like." One troubling aspect, however, in the authors' attempt to define yet leave things open for imaginative interpretation is how the often-mentioned Saldaña is now a "self-described" arts based researcher, not yet a Barone?

Starting with Antonio's twenty consciousnesses speech and ending with Timon's stone soup, this chapter tells my ancestors' story of how they came to Canada by conscientiously objecting to the Russian Empire's battles. It includes civil uses of conscience with the line inching towards Hot Fuzz's "the greater good" when employers refuse to cover the medical cost of employee's birth control "because I said so!"

Is it a safe assumption that anyone who can write can be an arts based researcher without lowering the bar for struggling academics? Not really, the authors caution that a sense of craft for both writing and artistry makes the research part of the methodology readable. Sabrina Case who boldly sticks "nonfictional" to her short story writes an excellent example despite being an amalgam of creative writing much needed.

The first half of twentieth century got off to such a conscience-wringing start with the treatises of such murderous minds sampled in this chapter asking us to question our otherwise moral motives. Dissolute Dostoevsky ripped apart morality in pages-long paragraphs, then God-killing Nietzsche philosophized away inner voice in favour of übermenschery, finally patricidal Freud presents us the unconscious libidinous id.

Very dense and demanding text which lightens up after you get through the labyrinthine stage directions, British spies and Russian joes attempt to re-enact the double slit experiment in a locker room and other public places. Kerner the quantum physicist is the only one who makes any sense - no wonder he is so keen to get out of London - while the dogcatchers in Hapgood's office all seem to be chasing their own tails.

An intriguing return to form, back to the litigious Roman Republic, leaving aside the many ways Catholic and Protestant tried to wrestle conscience into their belief system. The secular view that came with the Enlightenment gave philosophers and novelists plenty room to explore the "still, small voice" as an inner dialogue with unfettered individuals in the face of (mostly male) attempts to legitimize the status quo.

Must admit that I am nonplussed by Laurel's brief write up of VR, being a cautionary tale of the 1990's decaying orbit and burn-out. Maybe it is just me not seeing that it could all be happening again, or perhaps she is missing out on designs beyond the CAVE. Asides from Trekkies cracking Renaissancian Faires, augmented and mixed reality get preference in this summary chapter so we can now Pokemon Go into the garden.

Leisurely speeding towards his conclusion about the opportunity of a Global Enlightenment, Turok sums up why science is often perceived inhuman, even Frankensteinish, and why we should be more trusting of quantum computers. If it is possible to collaborate in a way that we become part of the universe's consciousness, we will have finally evolved from the binary reality of present politics into our true analog selves.

Much to my delight, consciousness and conscience were nearly synonymous from Cicero's courtroom right up until the burning of the Globe Theatre, with the firebrand Henry VIII making twice as many references to the scrupulous loophole than all the characters in Hamlet. No surprise that early modern minds were torn up, but I didn't expect Protestants to be so up in arm over one's personal moral-maker.

As much as there is an academic sheen to Laurel's reporting of her long and successful career in game design, the heuristics are more evidence that trial and error than research as her main method - so keep making mistakes, I guess? The rapid advances in interface design slow down the reading each time we shuttle back to mid-twentieth century, just like her parenthetical running gag of age check gets old really fast.

Having kicked away his own philosophical ladder, Prof. W. set up the new direction his writing will take: mostly unpublished except for notes circulated among his Cambridge students and posthumous tomes that reshape reality as language games. His style of writing can be seen as a poetic version of the Mousetrap board game, where thoughts and language connect in kinetic ways despite never really being a useful design.

These two chapter answer the question why the authors titled their book so, first addressing the "research" part and next "art" presumably leaving the "based" for further discussion. Many fields outside the art studio benefit from artistic inquiry, but when research come first (eg. research-based art) the scientistic quantization overwhelms any attempt at aesthetic. Productive theatre practices are an ideal platform.

What a way to get published, free-forming an outline of arts education research and then getting your students to complete the last half of your chapter! It doesn't quite pan out for Bresler as her museum-visiting class have a variety of observations, few of them generative. At least Irwin grounds her theory on the in-between spaces of lived art (and research/teacher) experiences before passing over to Ricketts' LUG.

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences aims to produce the next Einstein, but really at heart Turok hopes for the first Dr Abonnema Eda, a fictional Nigerian physicist who unified all theories in Sagan's Contact. Turok and his peers have come close to a theory of everything yet missing pieces of the puzzle like dark matter and gravitational waves need to be calculated. The next Eda should be a poet.

Focusing on the pleasurable aspects of human-computer interface in Laurel's theatre, she show a good sense of why people play, everything from Spacewar! to Atari to WoW, each allowing the player-persona digital catharsis. What really stands out, though, is the human interaction for Brenda's extended brag, with her team hanging out with Douglas Adams, Terry Jones, Jim Henson and no doubt David Bowie.

Quite an unsettled life for a formerly failing primary school teacher, raised to the level of Ph.D. based upon a treatise that the author himself would later abandon. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus lays out very structured proof that reality is how we picture it with words, except when it is not. How much of this "atomism" he, Russell and the Vienna Circle discussed is based on quantum theory?

A curious and dutiful student sets out to answer his teacher's question about how it all began and in the process in this chapter of explaining how two three-dimensional universes collided with each other causing one (of many) big bangs, Turok brings in quantum guns. It is generous to show how several ancient minds: Parmenides, Heraclitus and Cicero, reached similar conclusions before the Einstein/Hawking rap battle.

Tom and Elly are at it again, in an expanded guidebook format of their influential chapter in Jaeger's Complimentary Methods, yet somehow saying less in an indeterminate amount of e-book pages - forget quoting them at length when I don't even know what page their words appear on. The one shocking surprise after downloading the iBook copy is how they dropped the whole "creating a virtual reality" discription.

The end caps all, and while there is some fuzzy room for interpretation of what play is indeed the last comedy Shakespeare wrote being anything between Twelfth Night and Two Noble Kinsmen, the distinct nature of each character becomes the Schrödingerian wavefunction of roundness and flatness sometimes within an iambic line of dialogue. Once again, Ben Jonson becomes the Johnny-come-lately of comedy.

A handful of chapters to briefly introduce some qualities that make Shakespeare's comedies stand out, which range from cleverly copying older traditions and the innovative sense that playwrights don't make 'em like they used to, even as early as the plays staged at the Theatre. While van Es walks a fine line between nothing new and hard to replicate, it is clear that wit, courtly love and anachronisms equals success.

The big, bold yellow-lettered word on the front cover says exactly what I wanted to research, the "emergent" qualities of arts-based research, but as the first two chapters prove, it is more like be submerged in specifics. Projects that Sullivan, Miller and Stout give as examples all definitely have their artistic merit, and being successful examples of methodologies inspires hope but no clear picture of where to go.

Quite a notable change from the School of Athens to the Fifth Solvay Conference: the former being all playful and bright, as if the whole world was waiting to be discovered while the latter seems so stiff and sullen with a realization that one tiny issue in physics opened up a world of confusion and all the math would have to rechecked to confirm quantum probability. Some, like Turok, look forward to this new school.

More evidence that Oxford Very Short scholars will go out of their way to find the unique qualities of whatever topic they are assigned: who knew that Shakespeare's comedies had such complexity to warrant their own introduction? Even compared to his contemporary playwrights, Shakespeare's humour achieves the ideal utopia in its original sense of "no place" that becomes like a yin-yang relationship of city and forest.

The melancholic ends of both Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage; if only one of them had access to a 3D printer and could have assembled the Analytical Engine! Stubborn old coot Babbage becomes the prototypical mad doctor in a couple of Dickens' sketches while this same friendly neighbourhood novelist reads an ailing Ada towards her drawn-out death. Whenever I get around to Dombey and Son, I will think of her.

After a long (perhaps the longest) chapter of all the legal implications of cloning mind and letting bemans be, Rothblatt gets to the goods (ie. gods) by exploring how potentially cool and with-it religious leaders (though not necessarily there followers) will be with extended artificial life. It could just be that heaven and the afterlife are more of a literal final destination for the file-protected virtual humans.