Not a conventional essay, but a good place to start. Rivenburg's column in the LA Times discusses the impact of technology on one of the five senses -- sound. The world continues to evolve rapidly, and the nature of the changes evolves as well. Before you read the essay, think about the various sounds that permeate your life, how you interpret them, and how these have changed over time.

As part of Science magazine's celebration of 150 years of publication, Essays on Science and Society were published on a very wide range of subjects. The magazine continued this series by publishing new essays monthly. Peruse the extensive list of essays and pick a couple to read ...

Petroski's first collection of essays, To Engineer is Human, addressed the role of failure in engineering design. The first essay, "Being Human", deals with engineering as an explicity human endeavor, imperfect by definition, while the last essay, "The Limits of Design", addressed failure from a more technical viewpoint.

Dawkin's Son of Moore's Law draws a comparison between the well-known growth "law" of computer processing power and the rapid increase of DNA sequencing and the benfits that future can bring.

Quammen's essays from Outside magazine cover a wide range of topics. A very informing essay, Impersonating Henry Thoreau (1988), deals with "the divide between conviction and gesture, between essence and impersonation", and may change your views on Thoreau, Walden, and man as part of nature.

Gould's essays cover broad territory, often in the same piece. Cancer, baseball, and evolution come together in surprising ways. His essay on Non-overlapping Magisteria addresses his take on the science and religion debate, with a particular focus on evolution and the Church.

Birkerts' essay Into the Electronic Millenium is taken from his The Gutenberg Elegies, his take on the fate of reading in the electronic age ... sound familiar?

Postman's essay Technology is taken from his Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century.

Thomas's essay Organelles as Organisms is available on-line. Please read a few of the short essays: The Lives of a Cell, Death on the Open, To Err is Human, Essays and Gaia, and Seven Wonders.

Weissmann's essay Darwin's Audubon is available on-line. Please also read They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus.

Lightman's essays Smile and A Flash of Light (the latter a brief but humorous anecdote as to why he became a theoretical physicist and not a "tinkerer").

Gardner's essay Surprise. For something rather lighter, read the excerpt from Gardner's Annotated Alice on "Jabberwocky" (see more Jabberwocky).

Lightman's recent book Brave New Unwired World contains two essays dicussing the rapidly expanding "unwired world", The Incredible Shrinking Computer and Wearable Computers and Wireless Ubiquitous Computers.

Hofstadter has written many dialogues that, like many essays, serve as self-conversation (albeit with many voices) in contemplating the interconnectiveness of many things. Consider our essays in Engineering, Science, and Technology to be a weak parallel to Hofstadter's Godel, Echer, and Bach. We'll read his dialogue entitled "Prelude... Ant Fugue".

Florman, a practicing civil engineer, has written extensively on civil engineering: it's "existential pleasures", it's relationship to the liberal arts", and the role of technology. We'll read his essay Concrete and Kafka: A Personal Overture that describes his journey into the the field and touches on many of the elements common to the work of the other essayists that we've read. The titular essay of his first collection, The Existential Engineer, begins with reference to Sisyphus, coincidentally the icon chosen three months ago, for unclear reasons, when I started the web page for this seminar.

Sagan was better known for his promotion of science, debunking of psuedo-science, and general science books than he was for essays. His last book, Billions and Billions, however, contains his thoughts on life and death as the new millenum approached and his own life faded. The first essay is a humorous take on his famous yet apocryphal contribution to popular culture, Billions and Billions. The second essay, The Twentieth Century, is his view over his shoulder (and into the next millenium).

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