http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html "I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory conditions eat more and grow bigger than their country cousins. At the National Institute on Aging, as at every major research center, the animals are grouped in plastic cages the size of large shoeboxes, topped with a wire lid and a food hopper that's never empty of pellets. This form of husbandry, known as ad libitum feeding, is cheap and convenient since animal technicians need only check the hoppers from… ]]> Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:34:32 -0700 http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as non-existent towns or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.[1] Trap streets are often nonexistent streets; but sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:10:08 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1 On June 17, 2010, Sergey Ulasen was in his office in Belarus sifting through e-mail when a report caught his eye. A computer belonging to a customer in Iran was caught in a reboot loop — shutting down and restarting repeatedly despite efforts by operators to take control of it. It appeared the machine was infected with a virus.
Ulasen heads an antivirus division of a small computer security firm in Minsk called VirusBlokAda. Once a specialized offshoot of computer science, computer security has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry over the last decade keeping pace with an explosion in… ]]> Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:09:47 -0700 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms Experiments in the Revival of Organisms is a 1940 motion picture which documents Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms. It is available from the Prelinger Archives, and it is in the public domain. The British scientist J. B. S. Haldane appears in the film's introduction and narrates the film, which contains Russian text with English applied next to, or over the top of, the Russian. The operations are credited to Doctor Sergei S. Bryukhonenko. ]]> Wed, 15 Jun 2011 09:12:52 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats Alien space bats (ASBs) is a neologism for plot devices used in alternate history to create a point of divergence that would otherwise be implausible. [edit]Definition "Alien space bats" originally was used as a sarcastic attack on poorly written alternate histories due to lack of plausibility. These attacks are usually phrased as the need for alien space bats or by saying the alternate history has gone into "ASB territory". This original definition was used by one critic to criticize Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes trilogy.[1] The term eventually evolved into a deus ex machina to create an impossible point of… ]]> Tue, 03 May 2011 15:13:35 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats Alien space bats (ASBs) is a neologism for plot devices used in alternate history to create a point of divergence that would otherwise be implausible.
[edit]Definition

"Alien space bats" originally was used as a sarcastic attack on poorly written alternate histories due to lack of plausibility. These attacks are usually phrased as the need for alien space bats or by saying the alternate history has gone into "ASB territory". This original definition was used by one critic to criticize Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes trilogy.[1] The term eventually evolved into a deus ex machina to create… ]]> Tue, 03 May 2011 12:27:43 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats http://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/10/to_have_is_to_owe We need to understand what philosophers in the Middle Ages, from Italy to India to China, already understood perfectly well: Money is not a thing, and is certainly not a scarce resource. Money is a promise. And it is a promise we keep to those we value and break to those we do not. In Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, sovereign-debt default seems ever more likely. If it occurs, then what will happen? Certain promises will be kept, and others will be broken. As we learn from politicians every day, it is rarely possible to keep all promises exactly as… ]]> Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:36:15 -0700 http://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/10/to_have_is_to_owe http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html "I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any sem- blance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physi- cal fact, but more as a way to smooth… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 07:48:11 -0700 http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html We're hard-wired to turn our lives into stories - how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating

"We are our narratives" has become a popular slogan. "We" refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. "Narratives" refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in that constant little inner voice. The full collection of one's… ]]> Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:29:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man's first baby steps into the universe -- a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there's a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.

When the surviving astronaut, Bowman,… ]]> Fri, 19 Nov 2010 03:29:00 -0700 http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_-_The_Torrent This is a collection of Geocities data downloaded by a bunch of people who call themselves ARCHIVE TEAM, who began scraping the Yahoo! Geocities site during a six month period in 2009, before Yahoo! shut down geocities.com on October 26th, 2009. This collection is compressed in a UNIX filesystem with both 7zip archives and tape archives (gtar). If you're a bit of a data tourist and just want to waft in the scent of a web era gone by, please go to one of the Geocities mirrors that were put up in the wake of the end of Geocities. As… ]]> Wed, 10 Nov 2010 03:05:00 -0700 http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_-_The_Torrent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html FOR DECADES in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s… ]]> Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:57:00 -0700 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html http://ask.metafilter.com/10490/What-concepts-do-not-exist-in-the-English-language Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow) says Canada's Baffin Island Inuit "use the same word—'uvatiarru'—to mean both 'in the distant past' and 'in the distant future.' Time, in such cultures, is always coming as well as going."

In an essay by Louise Edrich (Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart), she writes about learning Ojibwemownin and how "nouns are mainly desginated as alive or dead, animate or inanimate...once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting iteslf in my… ]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:17:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/10490/What-concepts-do-not-exist-in-the-English-language http://nplusonemag.com/cave-painting Lanchester allowed that computer games would never tell us as much about character as other forms of narrative, but pointed out two great virtues of the form: “The first is visual: the best games are already beautiful, and I can see no reason why the look of video games won’t match or surpass that of cinema. The second is to do with this sense of agency, that the game offers a world in which the player is free to act and to choose.” And both points are right. The best games do look great, and we do have a lot… ]]> Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:29:00 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/cave-painting http://www.slate.com/id/2264478/pagenum/all/ He's an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he's the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.
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History offers few examples… ]]> Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:05:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2264478/pagenum/all/ http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html So what would happen if there were none? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers.

There are 3,500 named species of mosquito, of which only a couple of hundred bite or bother humans. They live on almost every continent and habitat, and serve important functions in numerous ecosystems. "Mosquitoes have been on Earth for more than 100 million years," says Murphy, "and they have co-evolved with so many species along the way." Wiping out a species of mosquito could… ]]> Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:17:00 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127745750&ps=cprs "In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided to create a short video to let you see his story. Our narrator and animator is San Francisco artist Lev Yilmaz.

On July 31, 2001, Engel woke up, dressed, made breakfast, and then went to the front door to get his newspaper. "I wasn't aware," he says in our NPR interview, "that it was any different from any other morning."

But it was.… ]]> Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:03:00 -0700 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127745750&ps=cprs http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/8134 In the 1990s, Paul Romer revolutionized economics. In the aughts, he became rich as a software entrepreneur. Now he’s trying to help the poorest countries grow rich—by convincing them to establish foreign-run “charter cities” within their borders. Romer’s idea is unconventional, even neo-colonial—the best analogy is Britain’s historic lease of Hong Kong. And against all odds, he just might make it happen.

Halfway through the 12th century, and a long time before economists began pondering how to turn poor places into rich ones, the Germanic prince Henry the Lion set out to create a merchant’s mecca on… ]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:21:00 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/8134 http://www.slate.com/id/2255105/ In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected,… ]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:18:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2255105/ http://www.popcrunch.com/15-great-movies-that-were-never-finished/ Thousands of movies are made every year, and have been almost all the way back to when we first figured out how to make them. We love the theater experience of plopping down before the big screen with soda and some snacks, and relish in rehashing our favorite cult classics over and over at home. But what about all the great movies that never saw the light of day? Many of them were pretty far into production when filming ceased, and still deserve a viewing in their incomplete form. Here are 15 great movies that were never finished. ]]> Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:07:00 -0700 http://www.popcrunch.com/15-great-movies-that-were-never-finished/