In April 2012, I set out to enter an international whistling competition - and make a short documentary film about it. This is what resulted.

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And as every sci-fi nerd knows, you totally need a tricked-out battleship if you're about to engage in serious battle.

To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense.

Are we moving too fast for meaning? That’s the argument put together by Franco Berardi in his essay Time, Acceleration, and Violence, published on e-flux. It’s the latest in an expanding body of “are we moving too fast for…?” thinking, with meaning-as-victim following truth-as-victim (Zygmunt Bauman), character-as-victim (Richard Sennett), and promiscuity-as-victim (Miquel Brown). But does it make any sense? From what I understand, Berardi’s argument is that among the many ills caused by capitalism’s constant acceleration is an “inflation of meaning.” The increased production of symbols – aided, one assumes, by greater productivity among symbol-creators – has had roughly the same effect that increased production of dollar bills would, giving us a system rich in symbols but bereft of value.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but my abbreviated understanding of the piece goes something like this:

When you visit the History of Computer Chess exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the first machine you see is "The Turk."

In 1770, a Hungarian engineer and diplomat named Wolfgang von Kempelen presented a remarkable invention to the court of Maria Theresa, ruler of Hungary and Austria. It consisted of a mechanical figure dressed in (what Europeans saw as) Oriental garb, presiding over a cabinet upon which a chess board sat. Full of gears ostentatiously placed in a front side drawer, The Turk was cranked up by hand, after which an opponent could sit down and play a game against the dummy.

"Even among the skeptics who insisted it was a trick, there was disagreement about how the automaton worked, leading to a series of claims and counterclaims," writes author Tom Standage. "Did it rely on mechanical trickery, magnetism, or sleight of hand? Was there a dwarf, or a small child, or a legless man hidden inside it?"

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simpl

Four times a year 3quarksdaily runs a competition for great blog writing. This month it's the Arts and Literature prize. An article of mine from October (Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion) is in the running, all I need now are some votes...

• To check out the details of the prize go here
• To see the list of nominations go here
• To vote directly go here

That should keep you busy, there's lots and lots to read. But please remember, vote for my article: Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Professor Dan Dennett, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Penne For Your Thought
2. Der Wille Zur Macht und Sprachspiele: Nietzsche's Causal Essentialism
3. Grundlegung: Philosophy as Bildung
4. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: The Fundamentals of Gelastics
5. PEA Soup: Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame
6. The Immanent Frame: Immanent Spirituality
7. Tomkow: Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics
8. Underverse: Refuting "It," Thus
9. Wide Scope: Emotions and Moral Skepticism