Christian Jacob – författare

In The Web of Athenaeus, Christian Jacob produces a completely fresh and unique reading of Athenaeus’s Sophists at Dinner (ca. 200 CE). Jacob provides the reader with a map and a compass to navigate the unfathomable number of intersecting paths in this enormous work: the books, the quotations, the diners, the dishes served, and—above all—the wordplay, all within the simulacrum of an ancient Greek library. A text long mined merely for its testimonies to lost classical poets, the Sophists at Dinner has now received a full literary re-imagining by Jacob, who connects the world of Hellenistic erudition with its legacy among Hellenized Romans. The Web of Athenaeus simultaneously offers a literary history of the rarest and finest of Greek culture along with a creative anthropology of a Roman imperial world obsessed with the Greek past.

Your immune system is unique. It is in many waysas complex as your brain,but itisnotcentredinonelocation,likethebrain.Itisnotasingleorgan-itconsists ofmanydi?erentcelltypes,diversemethods ofintercellularcommunication,and many di?erent organs. Its functionality is blurred throughout you-we can't extract the immune system, or point to where it begins and ends. The immune system is not separablefrom the system it protects. It has integrallinks to every organ of our bodies. Thishasradicalimplicationsforthe?eldofArti?cialImmuneSystems(AIS), that we are only now beginning to comprehend. One of the ?rst insights is that modelling the immune system, or developing any kind of immune algorithm, is di?cult. The immune system is one aspect of biology that we ?nd di?cult to apply simple reductionist explanations to. We can very successfully extract s- processes of the whole and create immune algorithms based on those processes. But we are always aware that we are missing the whole story. This is leading to more holistic views of immune algorithm development: theoretical analyses of how the sub-components contribute to the whole, and identi?cation of missing elements. Arti?cial immune systems are now beginning to incorporate ideas of innate as well as adaptive immunity, more complex intercellular communication mechanisms, endocrine and neural interfaces, concepts of tissue and broader ideas of organism and environment.SoperhapsthemostexcitingimplicationforthefutureofAISisthatthese- searchersareontheforefrontofunconventionalcomputing-mergingthe bou- aries between biology and traditional computation to achieve new emergent, embodied and distributed processing capabilities.

A novel work in the history of cartography, "The Sovereign Map" argues that maps are as much about thinking as seeing, as much about the art of persuasion as the science of geography. As a classicist, Christian Jacob brings a fresh eye to his subject - which includes maps from Greek Antiquity to the twentieth century - and provides a theoretical approach to investigating the power of maps to inform, persuade, and inspire the imagination. Beginning with a historical overview of maps and their creation - from those traced in the dirt by primitive hands to the monumental Dutch atlases and ornate maps on Italian palace walls - Jacob goes on to consider the visual components of cartography: the decorative periphery, geometric grid, topographical lines, dots, details of iconographic figures, and many other aspects. Considering text on maps - titles, toponyms, legends, and keys - Jacob proposes that writing can both clarify and interfere with a map's visual presentation. Finally Jacob examines the role of the viewer in decoding a map's meaning and the role of society in defining the power of maps as authoritative depictions of space.Innovative in its philosophical motivation and its interdisciplinary approach to looking at and writing about maps, "The Sovereign Map" is eagerly awaited by scholars from many different fields.