Reckoning with Matter is an essential book in an era obsessed with computing and rapidly losing sight of its mechanical heritage. Matthew Jones reveals the essential materiality and mechanicity of early computing machines, built by masterful craftsmen who put mathematical logic into mechanical terms as parts and linkages. Much of recent computing history has focused on computing logics and software rather than hardware. Yet materials did not, and do not, do what is logically expected of them: as Jones notes, computer chip designers cannot even now predict many characteristics of a working chip, sometimes even its heat and speed.

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76 – 77
DOI
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Issues
Also in this issue:
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Agnes Horvath, Magic and the Will to Science: A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality
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Gibson Burrell, Ronald Hartz, David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley and Friends, Shaping for Mediocrity: The Cancellation of Critical Thinking at our Universities
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Bas de Boer, How Scientific Instruments Speak: Postphenomenology and Technological Mediations in Neuroscientific Practice
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Bjørn Lomborg, False Alarm
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How does innovation arise in the bicycle sector? The users’ role and their betrayal in the case of the ‘gravel bike’
Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage, Matthew L. Jones (2016), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 336pp., cloth $35.00, ISBN: 978 0 226 41146 0
Book Review