http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/14/turner.php/cabinet-the-influencing-machine On Victor Tausk's 'The Influencing Machine' http://t.co/CBehMiY8 from #Cabinet, 2004 ]]> Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:21:41 -0700 http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/14/turner.php/cabinet-the-influencing-machine http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473133a.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yahoo%2FqUaz+%28Nature+news%29&utm_content=Twitter Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London this week to debate the validity and definition of the 'Anthropocene', a proposed new epoch characterized by human effects on the geological record.

"We are in the process of formalizing it," says Michael Ellis, head of the climate-change programme of the British Geological Survey in Nottingham, who coordinated the 11 May meeting. He and others hope that adopting the term will shift the thinking of policy-makers. "It… ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 11:27:47 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473133a.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yahoo%2FqUaz+%28Nature+news%29&utm_content=Twitter http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting. Go ahead. And this post will still be here when you return. You know you want to.
plagiarism

Caught [Digirebelle / Flickr]

Nearly every word of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and then cobbled together with a big dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole. Even the “I”s… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:01:00 -0700 http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:00:00 -0700 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387