http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/111586 Alan Moore and David Lloyd designed it 30 years ago. The V for Vendetta mask appropriated by Occupy protesters the world over. The Guardian recently asked Alan what he thought about the masks. Now Channel 4 news takes him into Occupy territory to face that face. But who is the true anarchist? ]]> Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:20:01 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/111586 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools/the-us-schools-with-their-own-police-world-news-the-guardian One of the most shocking stories I've ever read: the criminalisation of childhood in #Texas. http://t.co/uqiuR9Il ]]> Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:36:45 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools/the-us-schools-with-their-own-police-world-news-the-guardian http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it. ]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:46:50 -0700 http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jul/05/procrastination-al-kennedy When I began writing, distractions were all low-tech. I had to worry about typewriter ribbons and correction fluid, for God's sake. There was no possibility of spending an apparently productive day making backup files, defragmenting already tidy hard drives, emailing, watching grainy online movies of cats falling over, or playing virtual patience. (I once tried a more sophisticated computer game and, after many months, managed to advance my character by one level and put him into a loop of crouching, rocking and saying, "Oh, no.") Nevertheless, I could still burn away whole pre-Amstrad weekends in keeping busy, rather than writing.… ]]> Fri, 08 Jul 2011 01:52:34 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jul/05/procrastination-al-kennedy http://guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age Dusty vinyl records, vintage film cameras, rickety typewriters and antiquated recording equipment … these are the creative tools being used by some emerging artists. Pure nostalgia? Or a laudable refusal to escape the speed and sanitised perfection of contemporary digital culture? ]]> Sun, 24 Apr 2011 06:39:12 -0700 http://guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/03/last-stand-of-the-amazon The best way to think about the remaining tribes in 2011 is to imagine a series of concentric circles, all of which interact on each boundary. There are the tribes that stay on their own homelands in the forest (or seek to do so), but who have regular relations with the outside. These retain a strong tribal identity, but they are coming to know the world all too well; they will travel to fight legal battles for their territories and their children will leave for the cities. Then there are a good number of tribes (or parts of tribes) who… ]]> Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:07:07 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/03/last-stand-of-the-amazon http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing But what happens the rest of the time? Away from the world of freak glitches, what fate befalls the writer as his or her magnum opus enters the publishing production chain? For some years now – almost as long as people have been predicting the death of the book – there have been murmurs throughout publishing that books are simply not edited in the way they once were, either on the kind of grand scale that might see the reworking of plot, character or tone, or at the more detailed level that ensures the accuracy of, for example, minute historical… ]]> Tue, 15 Feb 2011 04:32:53 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jan/19/1?CMP=twt_fd In a clever juxtaposition of biology and technology, Stanford physicist, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team are creating paramecia-based versions of classic video games that you can play by controlling the movements of these organisms. One such game, PAC-mecium, is a paramecia-based version of the classic video game, Pacman. In this game, players cause the rapidly-moving organisms to change directions by changing the polarity of an electrical field in a fluid chamber filled with paramecia. ]]> Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:16:24 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jan/19/1?CMP=twt_fd http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/18/tom-mccarthy-lee-rourke-conversation Tom McCarthy's rise from an obscure art-house author has been quite spectacular, culminating in C, his third novel, being shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize. In something that can only be described as an amusing coincidence, my own novel The Canal was shortlisted for the Guardian's Not the Booker prize in the same week. So, with more than a nod and a wink to the three English greats who witnessed our first meeting, I thought it fitting that I should meet up with Tom to discuss this and his novel C in one of our favourite London pubs, the… ]]> Sat, 18 Sep 2010 10:48:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/18/tom-mccarthy-lee-rourke-conversation http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/11/science-david-attenborough-richard-dawkins We paired up Britain's most celebrated scientists to chat about the big issues: the unity of life, ethics, energy, Handel – and the joy of riding a snowmobile Sir David Attenborough, 84, is a naturalist and broadcaster. He studied geology and zoology at Cambridge before joining the BBC in 1952 and presenting landmark series including Life On Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984) and, recently, Life. Richard Dawkins, 69, was educated at Oxford, later lectured there and became its first professor of the public understanding of science. An evolutionary biologist, he is the author of 10 books, including The Selfish… ]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:00:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/11/science-david-attenborough-richard-dawkins http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/04/artificial-ape-technology-timothy-taylor There has been a rash of books on human evolution in recent years, claiming that it was driven by art (Denis Dutton: The Art Instinct), cooking (Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire), sexual selection (Geoffrey Miller: The Mating Mind). Now, Timothy Taylor, reader in archaeology at the University of Bradford, makes a claim for technology in general and, in particular, the invention of the baby sling – not, as you may have thought, in the 1960s but more than 2m years ago.

All these theories and speculations are in truth complementary facets of an emerging Grand Universal Theory of… ]]> Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:20:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/04/artificial-ape-technology-timothy-taylor http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/16/charlie-brooker-writing-deadlines/print One of the side-effects of having your work appear in a public forum such as this is that people often email me asking for advice on how to break into writing, presumably figuring that if a drooling gum-brain like me can scrape a living witlessly pawing at a keyboard, there's hope for anyone.

I rarely respond; partly because there isn't much advice I can give them (apart from "keep writing and someone might notice"), and partly because I suspect they're actually seeking encouragement rather than practical guidance. And I'm a terrible cheerleader. I can't egg you on.… ]]> Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:13:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/16/charlie-brooker-writing-deadlines/print http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/15/internet-brain-neuroscience-debate Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".

"Over the past few years," Carr wrote, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going – so far as I can tell – but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a… ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:46:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/15/internet-brain-neuroscience-debate http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/tom-mccarthy-futurists-novels-technology Writers have long been fascinated by machinery – what it gives and what it takes away. Tom McCarthy, whose experimental work has been hailed as the future of fiction, charts literature's complicated relationship with technology, at once beautiful and menacing.

For centuries, literature has been haunted by technology. When Blake shudders in fearful awe before the tiger, don't be fooled into thinking that he's contemplating nature. What the animal, a product of "hammer", "chain", "furnace" and "anvil", really represents is the industrial revolution. Blake, like Quixote, grappled with dark satanic mills. His contemporary Mary Shelley also created… ]]> Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:13:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/tom-mccarthy-futurists-novels-technology http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/29/plato-mathematical-musical-code It may sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but an academic at the University of Manchester claims to have cracked a mathematical and musical code in the works of Plato.

Jay Kennedy, a historian and philosopher of science, described his findings as "like opening a tomb and discovering new works by Plato."

Plato is revealed to be a Pythagorean who understood the basic structure of the universe to be mathematical, anticipating the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton by 2,000 years.

Kennedy's breakthrough, published in the journal Apeiron… ]]> Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:45:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/29/plato-mathematical-musical-code http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/20/internet-everything-need-to-know * News
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The internet: Everything you ever need to know

In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it's taking us

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* John Naughton
*]]> Mon, 21 Jun 2010 03:38:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/20/internet-everything-need-to-know http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/13/my-bright-idea-guy-deutscher Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world.

An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old… ]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 05:33:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/13/my-bright-idea-guy-deutscher http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/09/writing-off-last-palaeographer-university Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography. From ­September, the current holder of the chair, Professor David Ganz, will be out of a job, and the subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universities. Its survival will now depend entirely on the whim of classicists and medievalists studying in other fields.

The decision took everyone by ­surprise. "It… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 10:04:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/09/writing-off-last-palaeographer-university http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/17/christopher-hitchens-re-reads-animal-farm Animal Farm, as its author later wrote, "was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole". And indeed, its pages contain a synthesis of many of the themes that we have come to think of as "Orwellian". Among these are a hatred of tyranny, a love for animals and the English countryside, and a deep admiration for the satirical fables of Jonathan Swift. To this one might add Orwell's keen desire to see things from the viewpoint of childhood and innocence: he had… ]]> Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:49:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/17/christopher-hitchens-re-reads-animal-farm http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/apr/07/andrew-wk-juvenile-restraining-order Aged 17, I set about writing a song for a girl I was obsessed with. When she heard it, she called the police. Have a listen – you'll understand why.

I've never let anyone hear this song before. I'm deeply humiliated and embarrassed at the thought of anyone hearing it. This is probably the most intense and personal song I've ever recorded – it's called My Destiny and it was written and recorded when I was 17. I shouldn't do this.

I was in high school in the 1990s, in a town called… ]]> Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:34:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/apr/07/andrew-wk-juvenile-restraining-order