ENGAGE

Lesson Plan .......................................................................................................................... 4

Brainstorming Worksheet ............................................................................................. 7

Letter to the Royal Academy of Science ................................................................. 8

Letter to a Promising Inventor ..................................................................................... 9

EXPERIENCE

Who is Ada Lovelace? ................................................................................................... 10

The Civil War Soldier ...................................................................................................... 12

Singularity Lyrics ............................................................................................................. 14

Harper's Weekly .............................................................................................................. 16

ENRICH

The Steam Brain .............................................................................................................. 17

A Machine That Creates Peace .................................................................................. 18

A Day in the Life of a Civil War Soldier ..................................................................20

The Computer Behind the Computer ................................................................... 22

Further Reading................................................................................................................23

Discussion Questions .................................................................................................. 24

THE TOOLKITWelcome to Futurity! In this Toolkit, you will find everything you need to get ready for your trip to the A.R.T.

to the Futurity Educational Toolkit! Our mission at the A.R.T. is to connect the classroom and the stage through arts-integrated lesson planning and enriching background information. We hope this Toolkit will generate meaningful discussions around the main ideas in Futurity including the effects of war, the concept of utopia and the imagination, and the power of technology to transform our world.

Included in the Futurity Educational Toolkit is a lesson plan that focuses on critical thinking and collaboration. Through this lesson plan, students will read articles related to Futurity: A Machine that Creates Peace, an excerpt from Harper's Weekly from 1862, and a selection from This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. The culminating activity for this lesson will encourage students to invent their own machines—incorporating the power of scientific peer review, collaborative brainstorming and students' own concepts of utopia. Groups of students will create diagrams of their machines and present the funtionality to their peers..

Following the lesson plan, you will find more information about the current production of Futurity, such as background on the historical character of Ada Lovelace, analysis of the lyrics of a song in the musical, and other important background information. At the end of the Toolkit there are suggestions for further readings to reinforce the themes from the show.

The Futurity Educational Toolkit and the production at the A.R.T. work together to inspire students to forge new relationships with theater. It is our hope that you will use this Toolkit to establish a powerful connection between history, literacy, and the arts in your classroom.

Sincerely,

Welcome.

INVENTING UTOPIA: FUTURITY LESSON PLAN

Objectives

Students will aquire deeper understanding of the concepts of utopia and peace in the contemporary world.

Students will employ brainstorming and creative thinking skills to invent, through a collabo-rative process, a "machine that makes peace".

Students will gain the background knowledge to engage more fully in the theatrical experience of Futurity at the A.R.T.

Connections to Massachusetts State Standards

Theater

5.10 Give, accept, and use constructive criticism that identifies the specific steps needed to revise and refine their own or the group’s work

1.9 Use physical acting skills such as body alignment, control of isolated bodyparts, and rhythms to develop characterizations that suggest artistic choices

1.13 In rehearsal and performance situations, perform as a productive andresponsible member of an acting ensemble (i.e., demonstrate personal responsibility and commitment to a collaborative process)

English

Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficent evidence.

Comprehension and Collaboration

Prepare for and paricipate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persua-sively. Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally. Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.

Materials

Futurity Toolkit

Arab Spring Interactive Timeline www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-east-protest-interactive-time-line

Large sheets of graph paper

Extension

Ask your students to comment on how they see social media having an effect today in mak-ing the world a better place.

In general, would you say that modern technology developed over the past fifty years has made the world a better or worse place in which to live? Are people’s lives happier or un-happier as a result of modern technology?

Give students five minutes to write comments to the questions and then share with a fellow classmate in pairs. Then open the discussion to the whole class.

Discussing their remarks and on recent innovation in science and technology that are pur-ported to make the world a better place: Facebook, Twitter and the Arab Spring, and the ethical ramifications.

Procedure

1. Lead a short brainstorming session to activate students' prior knowledge of utopia in literature and society.

2. Read "A Machine That Makes Peace" in the Futurity Toolkit.

3. Conduct a class discussion based on the provided discussion questions.

4. Separate the class into groups of five.

5. Prompt each group to brainstorm their own "machine that makes peace,” an invention that, if turned on, would make the world a better place. Students may use the included Brainstorming Worksheet for this.

6. Ask students to collaborate on a drawing of their machine, labeling the individual parts.

7. Using the worksheet "Letter to the Royal Academy of Science," have each group create a letter describing their machines.

8. Distribute each group's letter and accompanying drawing to a different group. Using the worksheet "Letter to a Promising Inventor," have each group respond respectfully to the other group's machine design.

9. Return the letters and drawings to their respective groups. Ask students to discuss, within their groups, the response they received from the "Royal Academy of Science."

10. Prompt a representative of each group to present their machine to the entire class and share the feedback they received from the "Royal Academy of Science." Each presentation should end by answering the following question:

If we were to continue working on this machine, we would _________________________.

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Letter 1

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Dear Sir(s) or Madam(s)

This letter is to introduce our invention, the:____________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________

Our invention will benefit the world by:__________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________

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Some questions that remain about our invention are_____________________________________

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Sincerely,

letter 2

Who is Ada Lovelace?The daughter of Romantic poet Lord By-ron, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Love-lace (1815 – 1852) is considered by many to be the world’s first computer program-mer. Her prodigious mathematical skills and love for science led her to correspond with Charles Babbage, inventor of the first mechanical computer. Her notes on Bab-bage’s “Analytical Engine,” in which she describes the method by which the early computer could calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers, is recognized as the first computer program. Today, Ada stands as a testament to the achievements of women in technology and science—the British Computer Society awards a medal in her name, and an annual Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the achievements of wom-en in technology and science.

“Thus not only the mental and the mate-rial, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connection with each other... We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves alge-braic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves” – Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage, 1843

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Wednesday, 5 July 1843, Ockham Park

My Dear Babbage… That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other et-ceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards instead of from mortality).— Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I have not sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do. No one knows what almost awful energy & power lie yet undeveloped in that wiry little system of mine. I say awful, because you may imagine what it might be under certain circumstances. Lord L, --sometimes says “what a General you would make!” Fancy me in times of social & political trouble, (had worldly power, rule, & ambition been my line, which not it never could be). A desperate spirit truly; & with a degree of deep & fathomless prudence, which is strangely at variance with the daring & the enterprise of the character, a union that would give me unlimited sway & success, in all probability. My kingdom however is not to be a temporal one, thank Heaven!—[…] “Labor ipse voluptas” is in very deed my motto!—And, (as I hinted just now), it is perhaps well for the world that my line & ambition is over the spiritual; & that I have not taken it into my head, or lived in times & circumstances calculated to put it into my head, to deal with the sword, poison & intrigue, in the place of x, y, & z. By the way I shall set to work upon Ohm tomorrow, & continue it daily until I finish it. Your Fairy for ever…A.A.L.A

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Who is Julian Munro?

Julian is a fictional soldier in the Union Army during the American Civil War. His situation is modeled after those many soldiers who took part in Grant’s Overland Campaign (also known as the Wilderness Campaign) in the summer of 1862. The campaign, though a crucial strategic victory for the Union, was also the bloodiest in American history—over 11,000 soldiers lost their lives in just two months. Between harrowing engagements with Robert E. Lee’s army, soldiers like Julian endured harsh living conditions in the tangled, humid wilderness of Virginia.

As a soldier in the Union army, Julian would have received daily rations: 12oz of pork or bacon (or a pound of fresh or salt beef) with a pound of hardtack bread or cornmeal. The food was neither appealing nor particularly healthy; it was issued by the government to fill soldiers up, not necessarily to provide nutrients.

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Camp HamiltonAugust 30, 1862

Camp HamiltonAugust 30, 1862

My Dear Wife,

…Now Ellie, about you and myself, about coming home.

It will be an impossibility for me to think of coming home to

see you at present, for the reason you know, that the fight-

ing has just commenced and will require all of our soldiers

and officers at their post and no officer from the Army will be

granted a furlough until there will be some change in the af-

fairs of the war. You know well how things stand at home and

God only knows how this war will end and who will be the

conqueror. Fighting is so common here that we have gotten

so hardened and so used to see and hear that we care nothing

about seeing the dead and wounded laying all around us here,

although we are not upon the Battlefield, but we are exposed

to seeing this before our eyes. A soldier must have a heart like

a stone to stand all that he is compelled to go through. All my

hopes is that the war will soon be to an end, and I will live to

come home and sit by your side and then I can tell you some

hard stories. You would not believe what I have gone though

since I have been in this war.

[…]

I will close up this foolish stuff to you and ask you to not

show it to anybody, as I write confidential to you and nobody

else. And I know you don’t want to expose my good taste and

I know you will burn this. You must write me often and tell me

all the news. Give my love to all at home and my best wishes to Eliza

and the Boys.Your Affectionate,R. M. Goldwaite

Company I, 99th Regiment, New York Volunteers, Union Coast

Guard, Fortress Monroe, VirginiaP.S. I send you five cents. I expect you are hard up.

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I’ll live to see a million things that men were never meant to see my senses and my faculties are wired with machinery

auditory optical touch and taste olfactoryconverted into data streams and flooding with some binary

every piece of food you taste and every thought you cogitateevery sound that you can hear and sight you see for years and years

all stored up so conveniently on peta-bytes of memoryso you can always reference them in case you forget anything

Singularity, I don’t know

now once all that experience can fit into an easy gridthe existence is no longer something mentally projected

the wires that you have inside are very easily realizedthrough artificial imaging you duplicate 10 at a time

your consciousness can be enjoyed by anyone forever moreand you live in whatever state that you or anyone creates

you could be a Giant Squirrel, a statue or a talking catthe Goodyear blimp, an etch a sketch, an octopus or a brain in a mat

you’d have each and every memory and feeling to the oneand now you can commence your life as an uploaded extropian

Singularity, I don’t know

Singularity LyricsLyrics from the musical Futurity by The Lisps

Relating to sense of smell.

Extropians follow a philosophy called "Extropy," which rejects natural limitations on human progress. They look to science and technology for possibilities in transcending human physicality and achieving eternal life.

my mother is so horrified by this post-human fantasyshe says we’d lose that special thing that makes us human beings be

but I don’t know I’m not so sure if humans are so good and pureperhaps we’d be much better off if we took these violent bodies off

once everyone is in the cloud we’ll move beyond this earthly groundexpanding into outer space as an informational signal racematter in the solar system converts into computing mass

and the sun becomes a central orb of a brain that grows into the vastexpanse of space and emptiness for light years and light centuries

it replicates exponentially like a Russian doll in a cosmic dreamwhen every spot of the universe is filled up it will promptly burst

eradicating finally the experiment that we grew from earthas it explodes the brain will breathe into the dark impossibly

and anti-matter all around will collapse the universe back downand right away what you would see if you were a fly in the vacancy

all the light and color in the universe is collapsing

and Time would stopand from a tiny pinhead point a massive bang erupts into space

and trillions of new particles fly away at a photonic paceand once again the clock would start to tick and tock and tick and tockand Years would pass, billions or more before the tiny proteins locked

and once again in the boiling seas of a miniscule blue anomalya planet floating helplessly around a tiny ball so fiery

an extraordinary corner of the universe would cradle itthe flicker of intelligence that led us here and brought us this…

Singularity, I don’t know

Singularity is what many believe to be a time in the future when human life will be completely transformed by technology. It's hard to imagine such an advanced state of human evolution, though some scientists and authors (such as Ray Kurzweil) have envisioned a time of singularity as the ultimate utopia. Research the different ideas on singularity. Is it something humanity should be working toward? Or is it a dangerous idea?

Discussion Questions

1. In the lyrics Julian sings "my mother is so horrified by this post-human fantasy/ she says we’d lose that special thing that makes us human beings be / but I don’t know I’m not so sure if humans are so good and pure". What sets humans apart from machines? Do you think, like Julian, that machines can be superior to humans?

2. How is science used to help humanity? How is it used to harm?

3. Is the world described in the song a "utopia"?

VOL. VIII. - No. 387 NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MAY 24 1862 $1.00 FOR FOUR MONTHS. $3 PER YEAR IN ADVANCE

PARIS FASHIONS FOR MAY. The Parisian spring of the good old times has returned in 1862, with its pleasant accompaniments of early violets and lilac flow-ers. There was a general laying aside of furs and warm covering beneath the genial sunshine of the charming month of April. Simple dresses, composed of robe and mantle, and of uniform color throughout, were predominant; and light-blue, light-green, A considerable diminution in the amplitude of the skirts must be noted with satisfaction ; indeed, the employment of steel crino-lines seems to be altogether on the decrease. The suppleness and grace of the spring costumes this year could not have been ob-tained otherwise than. (cont. p.4)

THE BATTLE IN THE WILDERNESSThere is good evidence that Grant's movement across the Rapi-dan surprised General Lee, whose main purpose was to protect the town of Richmond and save the Confederacy. Lee succeed-ed in gaining a favorable position and in doing so compelled General Grant to fight him at a disadvantage. The position held by Grant was most unfavorable for an engagement. The ground was 70 miles and 30 miles long and covered with dense thickets of dwarf pines, underbrush, and brackish water. The area became an opponent for both sides, soldiers only able to move by use of compass and the sound of warning gunfire. The area was also prone to fire and much of the underbrush caught fire. Suffocations and burn wounds were a real danger. The smoky conditions made it so that soldiers began to unin-tentionally shoot those on their own side. The campaign was a bloody one that overall weakened both North and South.

TIMELINE OF CIVIL WAR

March 1861Lincoln elected

a

January 1861The South Secedes

a

July 1861The Battle of

Bull Runa

January 1862The War Order

a

January 1863Emancipation Proclamation

a

April 14, 1864Assassination of

President Lincolna

May 4, 1865Final Surrender of the

ConfederacyWhew! That Old Hen, JEFF DAVIS, has been try-ing to hatch a Rotten Egg.

Retailed at Wholesale Prices, Made to Measure at $20 per doz.

OR SIX FOR TEN DOLLARS,

Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, &c., Wounded, or WIDOWS and CHILDREN of those

killed in the present war, or died from wounds or sick-ness incurred from service therein, can have their Pensions, Bounties, Back Pay, &c., by calling upon or addressingSOMES & BROWN, Solici-tors for Pensioners, &c., Office No. 2 Park Place, under Broadway Bank,

Image of the Battle in the Wilderness

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THE STEAM BRAIN

An early map of the Steam Brain

The percussion sculptures and mechanical assemblages that make up the Steam Brain were built by The Lisps' drummer, Eric Farber, out of objects that he happened upon in junk yards, came across in alleyways, found in sheds and barns and the side of the street, rummaged for in dirty bins inside creepy garages, haggled over in flea markets and thrift stores and antique shops, and acquired from friends of this project. Many of the more elaborate Steam Brain machines and larger kinetic percussion sculptures were built out of a collaboration between Eric Farber, Peter Doucette, Stephen Setterlun, and the A.R.T. Scene Shop.

Try your hand at making your own instrument using materials like:

For videos and pictures of the Steam Brain, please visit http://www.kineticontology.com/

empty tissue boxes paper towel rolls empty tin cans

coat hangersempty water bottlesrice, sand, uncooked pasta

rubber bandscoffee canswood

César Alvarez, lead singer of the Lisps, describes the making of Futurity.

Futurity is a musical about a fictional Civil War soldier, Julian Munro, attempting to invent a steam-powered artificial intelligence. He realizes early on that he has neither the resources nor the technical knowledge to build his “Steam Brain,” so he reaches out to Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, a famous English mathematician. They begin a correspondence over letters that leads both to become embroiled by an idea: if this machine could become intelligent enough, it could solve all of humanity’s problems. Obviously, the biggest problem that Julian is facing at that time is the Civil War, so he and Ada set forth to

A MACHINE THAT CREATES PEACE

invent a machine that will create peace.

The piece is a musical meditation on imagination and technology. It explores the extent to which human beings create our own destruction (and also our own salvation) through our imagination. We constantly invent newer and crazier ways to kill one another, yet we also are inventing different ways of becoming connected. Looking at the current Computer Revolution through the eyes of those living in the 1860s—and, like Ada, beginning to realize the possibilities of computational technology— has been a lot of fun.

I started writing Futurity in 2007. In the last four years, technology has

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already changed so much. What the world saw in 2011 with the Arab Spring is a chain-reaction of democratic revolutions, a lot of which were made possible by the connectivity of the Internet. Social networks sometimes prevent us from getting out of our house and making real connections; but in another way, they allow us to be exponentially more aware of one another. I guess I’m a “techno-optimist,” but I feel like the plethora of information and connectivity we’ve been afforded in the age of the Internet is presenting new possibilities in terms of democratic and peaceful revolution. Maybe the Internet is a machine that creates peace. Maybe it’s a machine that creates peace, a lot of spam and other horrible things. Julian and Ada’s story makes you think about our technology and to what extent it is advancing our civilization.

My band The Lisps has always loved telling stories through music. Ever since we started playing more than six years ago, people would tell us: “You guys should write a musical.” At our live shows, we use a lot of costumes, we banter with the audience, we argue and joke amongst ourselves. In crafting Futurity, we’ve built a narrative around the way we act, the way we make music and the way we play together as a band. After the show,

more often than not, people come up to me and say, “That was crazy! Half the time I felt like I was at a concert, half the time I felt like I was in this ridiculously epic musical.” I hope that this piece reconfigures what people think of as “musical theater.”

I like the idea of taking back the word “musical” from signifying a specific genre, a specific way of singing or a specific way of playing music. We’re telling a story, and we’re using music as a major component of how we tell that story. One of the main characters is a musical instrument; the Steam Brain itself is played by Lisps drummer Eric Farber and is comprised of handmade kinetic and mechanical percussion instruments.

As a band, we’ve toured around the country for years in our minivan, playing shows for sometimes lots of people and sometimes nobody. It’s very exciting for a band to come up with this completely unreasonable idea, and then have the opportunity to bring it to life with an amazing group of artists and visionaries and technicians at the A.R.T. In a way, creating Futurity has mirrored the process that Julian goes through in the drama. Through unlikely collaboration, we strive toward utopia.

Discussion Questions

1. To what extent has technology advanced our society? Has technology created new problems in today's world?

2. What's a "techno-optimist"? Are you one, like César?

3. How does Julian Munro use imagination to escape the horrors of the Civil War?

Soldiers often described bullets whizzing by even as they sat composing their letters home.

“Dear Brother, Wife and All,” Isaac Hadden wrote to his family in New York from Virginia in June 1864, “There was a man this moment shot in the belly 20 feet from me which is nothing unusual in this country...”

To shoot a man as he defecated, or slept, or sat cooking or eating, or even as he was “sitting under a tree reading Dickens,” could not easily be rationalized as an act of self-defense. Soldiers in camp wanted to think themselves off duty as targets as well as killers, and they found the intentionality and personalism

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A CIVIL WAR SOLDIERExcerpts from "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil

War" by Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust

involved in picking out and picking off a single man highly disturbing. Union sharpshooting units customarily wore green uniforms to serve as camouflage, and Confederates came to refer to these marksmen as “snakes in the grass.”

In the aftermath of battle, when the intensity and the frenzy dissipated, when the killing at least temporarily ceased, when reason returned, soldiers confronted the devastation they had created and survived—“the unmistakable evidence,” as one soldier put it after Spotsylvania, “that death is doing its most frightful work.” William Dean Howells later wrote of the lasting impact of the Civil War on James Garfield, a Union general and later U.S. president: “at the sight of

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these dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of a lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.” Dead men whom other men had killed: there was the crux of the matter. Battle was, as a North Carolina soldier ruefully put it, “majestic murder.” The carnage was not a natural disaster but a man-made one, the product of human choice and human agency.

Faced with the Civil War’s unprecedented slaughter, soldiers tried to make sense of what they had wrought. As they surveyed the scene at battle’s end, they became different men. For a moment they were relieved of the demand to kill; other imperatives—of Christianity, of humanity, of survival rather than courage or duty—could come again to the fore. And now they had time to look at what was around them. Union colonel Luther Bradley described this transformation:

Of all the horrors the horrors of the battlefield are the worst and yet when you are in the midst of them they don’t appal one as it would seem they ought. You are engrossed with the struggle and see one and another go down and say, “there goes poor so-and-so. Will it be my turn next?” Your losses and dangers don’t oppress you ’till afterwards when you sit down quietly to look over the result or go out with details to bury the dead.

Dealing with the “afterwards” required work lest, as a Confederate soldier worried after Shiloh, the spectacle “dethrone reason or pervert the judgment.” Henry C. Taylor wrote to his parents in Wisconsin after a grim night collecting the dead and wounded from an 1863 battle in Kentucky, “I did not realize anything about the fight when we were in action, but the battlefield at midnight will bring one to a realizing sense of war. I never want to see such a sight again.

I cannot give such a description of the fight as I wish I could. My head is so full that it is all jumbled up together and I can’t get it into any kind of shape.” But he could draw one clear and revealing conclusion: “Tell Mrs Diggins not to let her boy enlist.” Soldiers struggled to communicate to those eager to know their fate at the same time that they themselves struggled to understand what they saw. Why indeed were they still alive? As one Indiana soldier wrote in his diary in 1864, his “best men” had fallen around him, yet “I am not better than they.” William Stilwell of Georgia confessed to his wife the day after Antietam, “I am in good health this morning as far as my body is concerned, but in my mind I am perplexed.”

Discussion Question

1. How did the unprecedented death toll in the Civil War change the way America looked at war?

“I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as Ishall be an Analyst (& Metaphysician), for with me the two go togetherindissolubly.” —Ada Lovelace, letter to Charles Babbage

In December 2011, writer Walter Isaacson, fresh off the success of hisbiography of Steve Jobs, announced the subject of his next study.Having previously investigated the lives of Benjamin Franklin, AlbertEinstein and Henry Kissinger, Isaacson is now tackling a lesser-knownfigure who preceded all of them: Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.

The daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, Lovelace garnered a great deal of respect and attention within a small but vibrant community during her life-time. Spurred on by her mother’s training and her husband’s encouragement, she worked tirelessly to develop her predilec-tion toward mathematics and science and to find their practical applicationsin the world.

Lovelace’s research ultimately led her to Charles Babbage, a 19th-century poly-math who proposed black box recording systems and lighthouse signaling before developing plans for the Difference En-gine, an enormous mechanical calculator. His brainstorms then led him to devise the more complicated Analytical Engine; its designs included functions for executing instructions, storing memory, and printing results. This Analytical Engine, first con-ceived in 1837, was the prototype for the world’s first computer.

It was Ada Lovelace, however, who saw beyond the complex mathematical opera-

THE COMPUTER BEHIND THE COMPUTERAda Lovelace, Charles Babbage, and the Analytical Engine

tions of the Analytical Engine and envi-sioned its potential real-world implica-tions. In 1842, Babbage asked Lovelace to translate a French scientific paper about the Engine; she supplemented the trans-lation with 40 pages of her own “Notes” and analyses. Lovelace proposed that such a machine might have the capability to incorporate graphics and even createmusic (an art form which Babbage de-tested). Also contained in her “Notes” is the world’s first recorded notion of artifi-cial intelligence, an idea she wrestled with and ultimately rejected. A machine like this one, she determined, would execute only what humans instructed it to do. It would not be capable of creativity or in-dependent thought.

Long before Steve Jobs started tinker-ing with machines in his garage, the word “computer” was used to refer to a person who computed. Now widely regarded as the world’s first programmer, Ada Love-lace was, in essence, the first computer to dream of computers as we know them. Although Babbage’s Analytical Engine proved too costly and complicated to construct in his lifetime, London’s Science Museum recently announced plans to ex-ecute his designs. Parts of the blueprints remain incomplete, and the Museum intends to solicit open online suggestions for their actualization. In this exchange, Ada Lovelace—who died of cancer in 1852, two weeks shy of her 37th birth-day—might have found an ideal balance between her passion for mathematics and her fascination with collaboration and imagination.

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Reading ListFuturity blurs the lines

between fact and fiction, past and future, and play and concert. Below are some books that explore the

themes found in Futurity: war, utopia, and the opportunity for imagination to transcend

human frailty.

The Hunger Gamesby Suzanne Collins

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Anthemby Ayn Rand

Slaughterhouse FiveKurt Vonnegut

The Time Machineby H.G. Wells

Arcadiaby Tom Stoppard

1984by George Orwell

Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

The Things They Carriedby Tim O'Brien

FACTConscription was the compulsory draft utilized in both armies during the American Civil War. Each state had a quota of soldiers to meet; if there were not enough volunteers to fill this quota, it was filled through conscription. Draftees were between 20 and 45 years old and were signed to three year terms. There was an outcry against the draft when it was revealed that men could pay $300 to buy their way out of armed service. By the summer of 1863, over 26,000 would-be soldiers had paid to avoid fighting in the war.

DEFINEWhat does "utopia" mean today? The phrase has been used to describe moments throughout history that are socially, morally and politically ideal (and often imaginary). Often, a utopia's pursuit of perfection becomes its downfall. The term utopia was coined in 1516 by Thomas More in his book, Utopia. In it, a traveler describes his visit to a perfect world of individual freedom and equality, a mythical island nation called (you guessed it) "Utopia." The opposite of a utopia, a "dystopia," is more common in contemporary literature. A dystopia is a society that's engineered to be perfect, but in reality is far from ideal (e.g.: the world of Panem in Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games).

“In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity, and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties;” – Utopia, Thomas More

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