Abstract: It is well-known that Mark Twain introduced the idea of finger-print identification to much of the world in his novella Pudd’nhead Wilson . While Twain’s prescience has often been noted, this essay explores the less-remarked-upon connections between fingerprint identification and the idea of racial typing that forms a central theme of the book. The essay argues that, in addition to foreseeing the use of fingerprint evidence in criminal trials, Twain identified a tension between individualized identification and racial typing that has pervaded the law and criminal-justice systems through the present day.

Abstract: In his memoir Ex-Prodigy, the MIT professor and cybernetics researcher Norbert Wiener once wrote: “I longed to be a naturalist as other boys longed to be policemen and locomotive engineers. I was only dimly aware of the way in which the age of the naturalist and explorer was running out, leaving the mere tasks of gleaning to the next generation.”1 Developing this theme, he would later write: “even in zoology and botany, it was diagrams of complicated structures and the problems of growth and organization which excited my interest fully as much as tales of adventure and discovery.”2 In a series of popular books and technical manifestos, Wiener would go on to interrogate this “problem” that complexity posed. Written in a reflective moment after World War II, his comments sought to mark the passing of one age to another—the end of “exploration,” and the emergence of another type of “organization.” This was no small claim. When situated within the context of Wiener’s other works about communications theory and computing, this seemingly minute comment about personal memory gestured to a fervent hope: that an epistemic transformation involving the relations between temporality, representation, and perception was in process. Wiener indicated a desire to see an older archival order, adjoined to modern interests in taxonomy and ontology, rendered obsolete by another mode of thought invested in prediction, self-referentiality, and communication.

Abstract: laboratories is a history of machines—of spatially circumscribed and temporally limited installations that connect a vast number of heterogeneous components: partial objects derived from the experimenter and the experimental subject (eyes, hands, voices, etc.), more or less isolated organs (hearts, lungs, muscles, nerves, etc.), energy sources, styli, sooted paper, tables, notes, and publications. Starting in the 1850s, the territories of physiological and (later on) psychological laboratories were increasingly populated by such installations that transitorily “machinized” mechanical and organic components and combined material with semiotic aspects. In Berlin and Paris, physiologists hooked animals up to kymographs and quicksilver manometers in order to turn bodily functions into indexical curves. In Konigsberg, nerve and muscle preparations were integrated into electromagnetic circuits, not just to produce demonstrative contractions, but also to measure the propagation speed of excitations in the still-living nerve. In the 1870s, Leipzig physiologists presented artificial circulation models to academic audiences and the general public: installations made of rubber hoses, glass tubes, and funnels, in which beating frog hearts functioned as “natural motors” pumping salt water in circles—until the organic components would irrevocably refuse to do service (for a further example, see Fig. 1). All these machines developed continually and as within a “phylum” (while single parts, such as the brass cylinder and

Abstract: The essay focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950)—the creator of Tarzan—and his contemporary and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) These historical figures are of interest as multimedia-versed shapers of collective fantasies of human evolution Both men created and drew on science and fiction to produce vraisemblance in their reconstructions of human prehistory, and thus to achieve suspension of disbelief Their main tools were arguably very different: one organized expeditions to collect fossils and installed a staff of artists and technicians at the museum to reconstruct the fossil creatures; the other turned himself into a writing-factory, producing as large an amount of words per day as possible As is shown, the two cultures nonetheless interacted on the level of structure as well as content when bringing the dinosaurs and cavemen to life in fully equipped prehistoric worlds The resulting windows into the human deep past were meant to educate the public through entertainment Osborn and Burroughs engaged in “interesting experiment[s] in the mental laboratory which we call imagination” when they made different races, sexes, and national types compete in prehistoric struggles for existence The laboratory setups were to reveal natural hierarchies, but they were also intended to transform the reader/viewer The verbal and visual reconstructions of lost worlds served Burroughs’s and Osborn’s conservatism: the true American/Anglo-Saxon type had to be preserved, if not recovered

Abstract: While some critics have sought to explain the role of disasters in entertainment media by making recourse to the concept of fantasy, we suggest a different approach. Focusing on superhero comic books, we outline what we call a “logic of the anomalous.” We argue that comic books foreshadow disasters by allowing readers to explore the consequences of anomalies that emerge from differences in the scales of an industrialized society on the one hand, and the scales of embodied experience on the other. Comic books thus act as a database, or novelty library, of extreme or novel experiences, one that allows its users to explore the potentials inherent in the complexity of industrialized societies. This approach to comic books allows us to coordinate three research traditions—political economic analysis; a phenomenologically oriented tradition of media theory; and science and technology studies—to explain the constitutive role of novelty, repetition, and fantasy in contemporary society.

Abstract: This essay examines the narratalogical presuppositions of organic and mechanistic accounts of the world. If our hypothesis about the respective alliances between organic and mechanistic explanatory modes on the one hand and the narrative poles of sjuzhet and fabula on the other is correct, and if it is true, moreover, that narrative is necessarily constituted in the field of tension between these two narrative poles, then it is no wonder that natural-historical accounts of the world must fail to remain consistently organic or mechanistic.

Abstract: This essay seeks to clarify the role played by poetic license in the triangular relationship involving mathematics, the history of mathematics, and mathematics in fiction. This relationship can be analyzed, in the first place, from the perspective offered by the well-known Aristotelian distinction between “history” and “poetry.” It can also be analyzed from the point of view of the kind of language typically used in texts produced in each of these realms, or, alternatively, from the point of view of the nature of their expected audiences. It will be seen, however, that the most illuminating perspective for this analysis is the one related to the kind of attitude that is expected from the reader in each case, whether critical or based on a suspension of disbelief. To the considerations that pertain to this latter perspective when it comes to texts of any kind, the peculiarities of mathematical texts add some unique twists.