MachineMachine /stream - tagged with entropy http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com The Arrow of Time (Debategraph) http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nid=100641&iv=09&mac=100641- The debate about the nature of time and its passage is a long and venerable one. The issues addressed by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides about whether time 'flows' or not prefigure present day philosophical arguments. In his talk to the Blackheath Philosophy Forum Huw Price chose as his starting point the views of cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington - a prominent figure in the first half of the 20th century, but little known today. What made Eddington's view of time interesting is that he was prepared to part company with most physicists - who conceive time as it… ]]> Fri, 11 May 2012 08:12:52 -0700 http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nid=100641&iv=09&mac=100641- “The Shannon and Weaver Model” http://www.thelateageofprint.org/2012/02/20/the-shannon-and-weaver-model//the-shannon-and-weaver-model-the-late-age-of-print “The Shannon and Weaver Model” by Ted Striphas: http://t.co/e8WireZf ]]> Mon, 20 Feb 2012 07:51:16 -0700 http://www.thelateageofprint.org/2012/02/20/the-shannon-and-weaver-model//the-shannon-and-weaver-model-the-late-age-of-print #Digital Decay, 2001: by @bruces "Entropy requires no maintenance. #Entropy has its own poetry." <a href="http://t.co/A87gLDL">http://t.co/A87gLDL</a> #x http://variablemedia.net/pdf/Sterling.pdf/digital-decay-2001-by-bruces-quotentropy-requires-no-maintenance-entropy-has-its-own-poetryquot-httptcoa87gldl-x #Digital Decay, 2001: by @bruces "Entropy requires no maintenance. #Entropy has its own poetry." http://t.co/A87gLDL #x ]]> Wed, 10 Aug 2011 09:59:38 -0700 http://variablemedia.net/pdf/Sterling.pdf/digital-decay-2001-by-bruces-quotentropy-requires-no-maintenance-entropy-has-its-own-poetryquot-httptcoa87gldl-x Digital Decay (2001): by Bruce Sterling http://variablemedia.net/pdf/Sterling.pdf/digital-decay-2001-by-bruces-quotentropy-requires-no-maintenance-entropy-has-its-own-poetryquot-httptcoa87gldl-x #Digital Decay, 2001: by @bruces "Entropy requires no maintenance. #Entropy has its own poetry." http://t.co/A87gLDL #x ]]> Wed, 10 Aug 2011 09:59:32 -0700 http://variablemedia.net/pdf/Sterling.pdf/digital-decay-2001-by-bruces-quotentropy-requires-no-maintenance-entropy-has-its-own-poetryquot-httptcoa87gldl-x Michel Serres's Milieux http://www.stevenconnor.com/milieux/ There is a Yiddish expression used in London which always gives me a little jolt of pleasure whenever I hear it. ‘In mitten drinnen’ corresponds to German ‘In mitten darin’, which means ‘in the middle of it’ or ‘in the middle of things’. Actually, in common use, the phrase might be more idiomatically rendered as ‘right in the middle’: though this is a bizarre-enough phrase in itself. If it is really right in the middle, dead centre, as we also sometimes say, then why does the word used to signify this seem to have a list, in etymologically leaning to… ]]> Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:49:58 -0700 http://www.stevenconnor.com/milieux/ Kipple and Things: How to Hoard and Why Not To Mean http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/kipple-and-things

This is paper (more of an essay, really) was originally delivered at the Birkbeck/London Consortium ‘Rubbish Symposium‘, 30th July 2011

Living at the very limit of his means, Philip K. Dick, a two-bit, pulp sci-fi author, was having a hard time maintaining his livelihood. It was the 1950s and Dick was living with his second wife, Kleo, in a run-down apartment in Berkley, California, surrounded by library books Dick later claimed, “They could not afford to pay the fines on.”

In 1956, Dick had a short story published in a brand new pulp magazine: Satellite Science Fiction. Entitled, ]]> Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:28:32 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/kipple-and-things Genetic Future: How much data is a human genome? It depends how you store it. http://www.genetic-future.com/2008/06/how-much-data-is-human-genome-it.html The question is pretty simple: in the not-too-distant future you and I will have had our entire genomes sequenced (except perhaps those of you in California) - so how much hard drive space will our genomes take up?

Andrew calculates that a genome will take up about two CDs worth of data, but that's only if it's stored in one possible format (a text file storing one copy of each and every DNA letter in your sequence). There are other ways you might want to keep your genome depending on what your purpose is.

… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:33:00 -0700 http://www.genetic-future.com/2008/06/how-much-data-is-human-genome-it.html Uniformity and Variability: An Essay in the Philosophy of Matter http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors3/transcripts/Delanda.html If the planet needs us to speed up information, and slow down matter, what does this mean for the complex relationship between information and nature? There is a growing awareness of the importance of studying the behaviour of matter in its full complexity. According to Manuel DeLanda, author of A Short History of Matter, this is partly the result of experimentation with non-homogeneous materials. DeLanda explores some of the philosophical issues raised by new developments in materials science, including the significance of the idea that many different material and energetic systems may have a common source of spontaneous order. The… ]]> Mon, 03 May 2010 09:35:00 -0700 http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors3/transcripts/Delanda.html